6. George J. Becker, ‘Realism: An Essay in Definition’, Modern Language Quarterly, 10 (1949), 193.

7. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of American Prose Literature, abridged edition (New York, 1956), p. 13.

8. See H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (New York, 1919). Mencken’s criticism of Howells is reprinted in Howells: A Century of Criticism, edited by K. E. Eble (Dallas, 1970^. Steven Mailloux discusses the problem of irony in The Red Badge at some length in his book, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Irhaca, NY, 1982), Ch. 7. Mailloux cites this text as an example of the way in which insensitive editing and expurgation have often completely changed the meaning and interpretations of major American novels.

9. Quoted by Harold H. Kolb, jun., The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form (Charlottesville, 1969), p. 22. See Kolb’s book for a fuller account of the ‘Realism War’.

10. Michael Davitt Bell suggests that Howells’s inability to present Realism as a species of literary presentation is not the result of his theoretical naivety. But to have proclaimed an interest in such matters would have involved the admission that he was primarily an artist and therefore irrelevant to the world of men’s activities. See ‘The Sin of Art and the Problem of American Realism’, in Prospects, 9 (1984), 115-42. And in a full-length study of Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature (New York, 1982), Alfred Habegger conducts a detailed historical investigation of nineteenth-century gender in order to demonstrate the struggle waged by Howells and James to win manhood, and their effort to represent in narrative form just what it meant to grow up male in their time and place.

11. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (London, 1955), p. 82.

12. Edwin H. Cady, ‘Introduction’ to A Modern Instance (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. xvi.

13. Howells’s conversion to Critical Realism is described more fully by Edwin H. Cady in his two-volume biography, The Road to Realism and The Realist at War (Syracuse, 1956, 1957), and by Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York, 1959).

14. Harry Levin, Grounds for Comparison (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) p. 250.

15. See, for example, Marston LaFrance, ‘Stephen Crane’s Private Fleming: His Various Battles', in Patterns of Commitment in American Literature, edited by Marston LaFrance (Toronto, 1967), pp. 113-33.

16. Winterich’s edition was published in 1951 and many subsequent editions include the additional material bracketed in the text.

17. John Berryman, Stephen Crane, (New York, 1950), p. 279.

18. Warren French, Frank Norris (New York, 1962), p. 54.

19. Maxwell Geismar, Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915 (London, 1954), p. 52.

20. Vernon L. Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America:

1860-1920, Main Currents in American Thought, 3, (New York, 1958),

p. 188.

21. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondalc and Edwardsvillc, 111. 1966).

22. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (London, 1967), p. 273.

23. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York, 1968), p 131.

24. The Pennsylvania edition of Sister Carrie , edited by James L. West III Philadelphia, 1981). An identical text was published in England with an Introduction by Alfred Kazin (Harmondsworth, 1981). References are to this edition.

25. Geismar, p. 361.

26. Walter Benn Michaels has argued that this famous image is curiously inapplicable to the events of The Financier itself, which demonstrate nature’s instability rather than any organizing force. See ‘Dreiser’s Financier: The Man of Business as a Man of Letters’, in American Realism: New Essays,

pp. 278-95.

27. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 278.

Chapter 4

The Regional Novelists

If there is any truth in the contention that a writer’s ‘happiest occasions are those in which there appears to be a sustaining relation between reality and his imagination , 1 the nature of American life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century rendered it difficult for the majority of novelists to work in that situation. Those who could, like Dreiser, and (sporadically) W. D. Howells, exercised their imaginations in the main current of American history and, thereby, helped to create a National Novel. A more common reaction, as we have seen, was one involving some form of temporal or spatial escape. For the expatriate artist, Europe, or occasionally, as in the case of Lafcadio Hearn, Asia, provided the necessary remoteness both literally and figuratively. On a minor scale the various regions of the country performed a similar function for those who either could not or did not wish to uproot themselves from their native soil. It can be argued, of course, and frequently was, that the writer who focuses most closely on his own locality is more likely to produce the true novel of America than those who attempt to catch the national spirit in the artificial air of New York or Boston. In actual fact, the realism of the regionalists was most often a technique employed to create historical or even mythic fictions that bore only an oblique relation to the larger movements of history; and when a regional writer did succeed in coming to terms with the texture and structure of a contemporary locality, it was usually someone like Hamlin Garland whose ‘veritism’ was only made possible by the fact that he had first of all created the necessary perspective by removing himself to Boston from his native Midwest. For the most part, regional writers, like their expatriate counterparts, were forever looking backwards in the vain hope of resurrecting a vanishing ideal that could somehow be equated with contemporary America.

The Midwest: Eggleston, Kirkland, Howe, Garland

The problem for writers in the Midwest was to reconcile their unshakeable belief in the Adamic virtues of the pioneering farmers — a blend of Republican independence and Protestant morality - with the environmental factors that had, if Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was correct, helped to produce them. It was true that the existence of free land was rapidly becoming a myth as the western frontier was beginning to close and as thousands of small farmers overmortgaged their land and sank further into debt. But the idea of the West as a latter-day Eden might still have carried some conviction had it not been for the cruel combination of a protracted drought between 1887 and 1896 together with a steady depletion of the country’s gold reserves, culminating in the financial crash of 1893. Unlimited economic expansion, reinforced by a philosophy of the inevitability of progress, had left the farmer ill-prepared to deal with deteriorating conditions, and his only immediate response was to leave the unproductive land and return east. In political terms, however, radical problems called for equally radical solutions, both conservative and progressive, and these were reflected in various forms of romantic and Utopian literature as we have seen.

In addition to the rash of popular medieval romances that sufficiently indicated the degree of disillusionment experienced by authors and readers alike, several Midwestern novelists, writing out of a similar impulse, attempted to rediscover in their own region values comparable to those displayed by the heroes of more exotic romances. Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899) and Maurice Thompson’s Alice of Old Vincennes (1900) both assert the natural democratic virtues of inner cleanliness and outer strength in opposition to the degeneration of the Ku Klux Klan and the French respectively, but as Larzer Ziff points out, 2 the characters in the novels who embody these qualities derive them not from the society in which they function, but in one case by virtue of being high-born and in the other by way of a fancy Eastern education. In seeking to perpetuate the frontier myth, they actually help to undermine it. The same is true of the novel that was to become more popular than any of the other Midwestern romances, Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896). Written by a small-town minister in Kansas, it purports to show how a group of citizens defeat the evils surrounding them by basing their lives on that of Christ. Meanwhile, in actuality a large proportion of the state’s population, more responsive to the social realities of its situation, was

painfully back-trailing east with wagons bearing the ironic legend, ‘In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.’ The immense popularity of Sheldon's novel probably owed more to the fact that in his scheme stubborn social problems do not have to be solved, they disappear.

An unwillingness to write about life as it really was in the prairie states unites the two ends of the fictional political spectrum in the Utopian novel and the romance. The search for general panaceas blinded the majority of writers to what was near at hand, and also helped to eclipse the work of those who had persisted in trying to come to terms with the hardships of life along the Middle Border. Yet it eventually proved to be the subdued fiction of the early local colourists rather than the more lurid products of the popular authors that nourished the mainstream of American fiction. E. W. Howe, Joseph Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, and above all, Hamlin Garland, were the writers whose work laid the foundations for later regionalists such as Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis, and at the same time contributed more generally to the development of a realistic literature in America. Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) was, according to its author, an attempt to show characters as the logical products of their environment. This makes it sound more like a work of naturalism than what it really is - a genre study influenced by Hyppolite Taine’s essay on Dutch painting. Eggleston’s interest in the grotesque, the humorous, and the sentimental aspects of rural life, together with his dependence on traditional plot situations, give it a Dickensian quality, despite his attempts to describe honestly the speech and customs of the Hoosiers.

Kirkland’s novel Zury, the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887), is also derivative, in spite of the fact that it is as true as he could make it, full of literally exact incidents and characters drawn, as he said, from ‘my down-state acquaintances’. The ‘low life ... in actual contact with the soil’ is, on his own admission, an attempt to reproduce a ‘palpable mutation’ of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd , and as with Eggleston, the literary debt sometimes impedes a native spontaneity.

Between these two novels, Edgar Howe published - with some difficulty - The Story of a Country Town (1883). Unlike Eggleston and Kirkland, Howe had little education and no literary background, and though his novel is in some respects cruder than theirs, it has a bleak, flat style that creates an impressive medium for the story of John Westlock’s grim life. Written when he was the editor of a small newspaper, ‘almost entirely at night, on the kitchen table’, and printed at his own expense, the book creates an impressive picture of the blighting effect of poverty combined with repressive, fundamentalist religion. This part of the novel is autobiographical, and even though Howe weakened it by grafting on a Gothic murder mystery, his bitter

analysis of the spiritual emptiness of rural America has something in common with those of Garland and later, Sinclair Lewis. 3

What characterizes all these regional works is the attempt to free provincial literature from its ties to Eastern, and ultimately, European cultural values. In various ways, stylistic and thematic, these are works held back by a literary timidity that can be appreciated by comparing them with the one contemporary masterpiece set in the West — Huckleberry Finn. Twain achieved exactly what Garland was calling for in Crumbling Idols (1894), a series of essays dedicated to the idea that Boston and even New York could not be the centres for a new national literature, and that if American art were not to become sterile or moribund, it must root itself in local soil. In his advice to young Western artists, Garland even mentions the river life of the Mississippi as being a fine subject among dozens of others. He also calls for a manner to be developed by new realists that would involve raising simple, vivid, and unhackneyed language to a higher degree of expression. In order to find out what he had in mind by this, it is helpful to look at his own fiction. Most of Garland’s critics have concluded either that he was seduced from his true path by the promise of wealth, popularity, and the recognition of those Eastern arbiters whom he dismissed in Crumbling Idols ; or that he was always a romantic at heart, more concerned with the myth of a ‘Western Garden’ than with the bitter reality of life along the Middle Border, and that his masterpiece Main Travelled Roads (1891) was a literary sport produced by the immediate shock of returning to the family farm in South Dakota. 4 In later life Garland himself alternated between regret that he had not followed Howells’s advice to work out the seam he had made his own - by transforming local colour writing into an instrument of social realism - and relief that he had fled the prosaic plains for the ‘silver and purple summits of the Continental Divide’. He always maintained an interest in ‘sociological background’, but that is exactly what is wrong with his later work which is set in the Rockies. The problems he introduces in novels such as The Captain of the Grey Troop (1902) or Cavanagh, Forest Ranger (1910), remain in the background and are not really integrated with the romantic adventures that form the foreground of the stories. Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), which marks the turning-point of his career and has an autobiographical feel about it, identifies a moment when his heroine makes a leap analogous to that taken by Garland himself. She has been taken to hear Wagner at a Chicago concert:

When she rose to her feet the girl from the coolly staggered, and the brilliant, moving, murmuring house blurred into fluid color like a wheel of roses. The real

world was gone, the world of imagined things lay all about her. She felt the power to reach out her hand to take fame and fortune. In that one reeling instant the life of the little coolly, the lonely, gentle old father, and the days of her youth -r all her past - were pushed into immeasurable distance. The pulling of weeds in the corn, the driving of cattle to pasture were as the doings of ants in a dirt-heap. (19)

But Garland has not portrayed even Rose’s early life on the farm in this way. Her later development necessitates an inborn physical and spiritual superiority that guarantees her an immunity to environmental pressure quite different from that seen in the blighted lives he evoked in Main Travelled Roads:

Sometimes when alone she stripped off her clothes and ran amid the tall corn-stalks like a wild thing. Her slim little brown body slid among the leaves like a weasel in the grass. Some secret, strange delight, drawn from ancestral sources, bubbled over from her pounding heart, and she ran and ran until wearied and sore with the rasping corn-leaves, then she sadly put on civilised dress once more. (2)

In Garland’s earlier stories, men, women and children alike constantly struggle against the forces of nature and society, and in recreating the quality of their lives, he occasionally achieves a vernacular intensity comparable with Twain’s. In ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’, for example, the defeated farmer, Haskins, tells how he was forced out of Kansas by plagues of grasshoppers:

‘Eat! They wiped us out. They chewed everything that was green. They jest set around waiting’ f r us to die t’eat us too. My God! I ust t’drcam of ’em sittin’ ’round on the bedpost, six feet long, workin their jaws. They ect the fork-handles. They got worse ’n’ worse till they jest rolled on one another, piled up like snow in winter. Well, it ain’t no use. If I was t’talk all winter I couldn’t tell nawthin’.

But all the while I couldn’t help thinkin’ of all that land back here that nobuddy was usin’ that I ought o’ had ’stead o’ bein’ out there in that cussed country.’

What gives the story its naturalistic depth, though, is the way the grasshoppers are used as a grotesque prologue and parallel to the rapaciousness of Haskin’s new landlord. Together with help from his

neighbours and his own and his family’s ‘ferocious labour’, Haskins resurrects a derelict farm. But at the end of it all he is told by the owner that his improvements have served only to put up its price so much that far from being the ‘free man’ he thought he was, he is faced at the end of the story with the prospect of an endless struggle to pay off his debts. In a moment of murderous rage, he swings his fork at the greedy landlord before subsiding into a more characteristic posture of defeated despair.

Garland wrote this story and the others that make up Main Travelled Roads when he was still poor enough to need to work as a farmhand for his father in order to pay his fare back east. But his commitment was theoretical as well as practical. He was also a passionate disciple of Henry George and a campaigner for the single tax and other reforms that would help to ease the plight of the small farmer. Later, when his romantic adventure novels were selling by the hundred thousand, his sympathetic bitterness would lose its edge and his imagination its vital contact with the meanness of rural life. What he achieved, though, in one book helped to make possible the work of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck.

The South: Cable, Chopin

According to the historian, C. Vann Woodward, 5 one of the most significant inventions in the New South was the myth of the Old South. While this view has been contested by others, who see the myth’s origins as dating from the decline of the Tidewater economy in the 1830s, it was the traumatic experience of the Civil War and its aftermath that really led Southerners to idealize a vanishing aristocratic way of life based upon the old plantation economy. In actual fact, the core of the social structure in the ante-bellum South consisted of several million individuals who had little or no connection with the large plantations, and though this aspect of Southern life was not entirely ignored in fiction, 6 the abiding impression created by popular writers in the later nineteeth century is one of chivalric gentlemen and their ladies pursuing romantic, ritualistic pleasures and attended by contented slaves whose lives were almost as leisurely as those of their masters. The two novelists who did most to promulgate this ‘moonlight and magnolia’ myth were, as it happens, both related to the ‘first families’ of Virginia - John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page.

After serving in the Confederate Army, Cooke turned his romantic

talents to fiction about the war itself, and produced works such as Surry of Eagle’s Nest (1866), in which officers - referred to as Cavaliers - take time off from their gallant exploits to foil the designs of melodramatic villains in pursuit of the heroine. It is instructive to contrast Cooke’s view of the war with that of the Northern writer, John de Forest, in his Miss RaveneVs Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), in order to see just how far apart Southern and Northern views of the conflict were. 7

Page, whose work was first published in the 1880s, specialized in stories in which elderly Black ‘uncles’ reminisce about their idyllic lives under slavery, but he also produced in 1898 His Red Rock , which along with Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), helped to bring into being the Ku Klux Klan by portraying a heroic Southern revolt against reconstruction. His writing, whether about past or present life, is equally unrealistic and falls neatly into place in the swelling volume of contemporary anti-modernistic propaganda.

The emergence of a writer like George Washington Cable in such a literary and social atmosphere is quite remarkable. It is sometimes explained by reference to his New England ancestry which, it is argued, gave him a moral sense quite alien to that of most Southerners and led him eventually to recoil from Southern society and make his home back in New England. Whatever the reason, though, Cable succeeded in antagonizing the whole of the conservative South by the liberal views expressed in his two books of essays, The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890). Even before this, however, in his first and best-known novel, The Grandissimes (1880), he had begun to express views both on the treatment of slaves and on Southern mores in general, that led to his virtual ostracism in New Orleans, the city in which he lived and about which he wrote. The Grandissimes is set in the early years of the nineteenth century, but it is still in Cable’s words ‘as plain a protest against the times in which it was written as against the earlier times in which its scenes were set’. The effect of the Louisiana Purchase on the Creole population of what was still very much a Franco-Spanish city, can be seen as a parallel to that of the defeat of the South in the Civil War. In both cases, a proud indigenous population reacts against ‘invasion’ by an alien culture, and at the same time continues to maintain a position of ‘superiority’ in relation to the Black society in its midst. Cable’s realism in the treatment of these subjects is badly flawed by his use of a conventional romantic plot revolving around a long-standing feud between two Creole families. But within this story his treatment of such explosive topics as miscegenation and violence is hardly matched by any writer before Faulkner. He also introduces into the novel the brilliant short story of Bras-Coupe, the African Prince sold into slavery, told in a manner that

anticipates Faulkner’s many parables and digressions in his novels. The story is intended to turn into flesh and blood ‘the truth that all Slavery is maiming’, and it is not surprising that when Cable tried to publish the story separately, it was turned down by every magazine editor he approached. Apart from its metaphoric significance within the novel, its evocation of the Louisiana landscape and its exotic inhabitants makes it a fictional tour de force in its own right.

It is difficult to judge how Cable’s art might have developed beyond The Gratidissimes had he not been frustrated by the prevailing taste of editors for local-colour prose-pastorals and romances. As it was, he complied with their demands and never reproduced anything as powerful as his first novel. In later life he began to write best-selling romances about the Civil War, spiced with erotic fantasies and comparable, as Edmund Wilson remarks, with those that disfigure Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) 8 which testify to what commentators now see as the growing feminization of American culture.

Ironically, the finest novel written from and about a woman’s point of view in the nineteenth century, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), was universally condemned at the time of its appearance, though it has gradually come to be recognized as a classic, both within the canon of women’s writing and of American literature in general. It, too, deals with a woman’s erotic fantasies, but unlike Cable’s The Cavalier (1901) or The Virginian the heroine’s consciousness is here directly presented as the central theme of the novel, and the consequences of her sexual awakening create its plot.

In realizing her fantasies, Edna Pontellier raises social and moral problems of an urgent, and for many readers, a disturbing nature. Her growing determination to assert her social, economic, and sexual independence openly challenges the patriarchal society in which she is trapped, and by implication, American society in general. It can be argued that The Awakening is not really a regional novel in the sense that many of Chopin’s short stories about Cajuns, Creoles, and Blacks in Bayou Folk (1894) are. She came to believe that American art was hampered by being tied to convention and the past and, therefore, that it was unable to come to terms with ‘human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and coventional standards have draped it’. To this extent her work is part of the general modernist reaction against provincial realism, yet both Edna Pontellier’s life and the form her rebellion takes are clearly shaped by the wealthy Creole society into which she has married.

The free, flirtatious life-style of the summer colony on Grand Isle, where wives, children and a few young bachelors idle on the beaches while their menfolk make money in New Orleans, disorientates Edna,

who mistakenly equates manner with behaviour and falls disastrously in love with Robert Lebrun. Robert, warned off by one of Edna’s married friends, leaves for Mexico, but Edna, aroused now from the emotional torpor of her marriage, embarks upon a life of independent sensory and emotional gratification. She takes up painting, neglects her domestic role, and drifts into an affair with a notorious rake.

Eventually she perceives what the inevitable consequences of her revolt will be, especially when Robert returns and confesses his love for her, but refuses to act on it. The rigid conventions of Creole society will not permit her to live respectably as a free woman, so unable either to continue defiantly or to return home submissively, she returns to Grand Isle, takes off her clothes and walks naked into the sea. The description of Edna’s last moments, richly sensuous and ambiguous as they are not only show the power of Chopin’s prose but also suggest why her novel created such a controversy:

How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! How delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.

The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace. (39)

A wider context for The Awakening was provided by two influential books published at the same time, Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Women and Economics (1898), and Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Edna’s plight nicely exemplifies the contemporary shift in American society from production to consumerism. The conspicuous consumption satirized by Veblen is the visible corollary of Edna’s feelings of uselessness and futility. In order to maintain her husband’s financial credibility, her role in their marriage is reduced to that of chief ornament in his display of wealth. The rules of their stylized existence permit her to take but not to make. Her creative instincts are stifled, and the need which Perkins argues is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity - to express one’s inner thoughts in some outer form -is denied her. Ironically, Edna’s alternative quest for sensual gratification is one that capitalism and consumerism, with all their stress on material acquisition, have encouraged in her.

In exposing her heroine’s social victimization, Kate Chopin transcended the narrower preoccupations of regional fiction, and in relating

Edna’s plight to her deep biological and emotional needs, moved firmly away from nineteenth-century concerns into the twentieth century. The only contemporary American novelist to make a similar transition was Henry James.

New England: Jewett, Wharton

Writing in the middle of the Great Depression, Granville Hicks suggested in his Marxist account of American literary history that late-mneteenth-century regionalism was inevitably doomed to failure by the unwillingness of sectional authors to progress from a study of the local and familiar to an understanding of the larger issues in American society. Many regional writers, baffled or dismayed by modern developments, removed themselves physically from their chosen localities, as did Twain, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable. Others, like Eggleston, gave up writing fiction altogether, and turned to history instead. But the great majority, alienated from the world of the railroad, the telegraph, and mechanized agriculture, turned their backs on the present in order to ‘recapture the romantic past of boyhood impressions, the sectional life of the vanished era’, where they contented themselves with churning out repetitious tales full of stereotyped characters and soggy sentiments . 9 Though this is a harsh oversimplification of the situation, it is true that many of these writers did produce a good deal of sentimental fiction for children. In particular, it is unfair on those novelists who left their regions to write from a broader national or even international perspective. It is also less true of some regions than others, depending on the depth of history involved and the degree to which the ‘shock of the new’ disturbed an existing social stability.

The Midwest, and to a lesser extent, the South, experienced the traumas of the Gilded Age and Reconstruction more directly than the six New England states, and though the political, economic, and social upheavals there did lead some writers to retreat completely into a mythical or historical alternative, they also provided others with the necessary reality against which to measure their regions’ and their own traditional values. The dialectic thus created did not find wholly, satisfactory fictional expression in the South before Faulkner, though there were interesting interim attempts made by Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren for instance to test the Southern myth. The westward development of American culture has also remained a vital issue for

68 AMERICAN FICTION 1865-1940

twcnticth-ccntury novelists, but as far as fiction is concerned, New England has proved as barren a subject for modern novelists as its soil for modern farmers. Significantly, all the major twentieth-century writers in New England have been poets: Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell. To say this is not to imply that poets do not have a vital connection with the life of their region; Wallace Stevens, for one, has eloquently refuted this idea, 10 and Charles Olson's major work vividly re-creates the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to prove Stevens’s point. Yet poets are not subject to the same spatial and temporal restrictions which limit more ‘realistic’ novelists, and therefore are not as dependent for subject-matter on the tangible manifestations of change. Van Wyck Brooks has claimed that the overwhelming feeling in New England at the turn of the century was one of disappointment and chagrin, summed up by the literary critic Borrett Wendell in 1893 when he wrote ‘We are vanishing into provincial obscurity. America has swept from our grasp. The future is beyond us.’ 11 If New England was becoming the ‘deserted farm of literature’, it is not surprising that its best minds could only retain any vitality at all by developing into ‘museums of idols’. The prevalent belief that New England’s day was over inevitably led writers towards a preoccupation with lost things, and this is certainly what is most characteristic of the best New England regionalists, Mary E. Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett.

Though Mary E. Wilkins did write novels eventually, including one, The Portion of Labor (1901), that examines labour problems in a New England mill, her best work was completed earlier and is mainly contained in two volumes of stories, A Humble Romance (1887) and A New England Nun (1891). Both Howells and James admired her early work, and it is not difficult to see how it relates to theirs. She was apparently not altogether happy with her realistic manner, though, and later confessed that she had adopted it for its ‘selling qualities’. As soon as possible she, too, escaped into romance, and it is a nice double irony that in 1926 Hamlm Garland, another fugitive from realism, presented her with the Howells Medal for Fiction.

Her early stories of moral decay and human desolation have much in common with Garland’s. They present a world of squalor, poverty, and ugliness where a few ageing individuals struggle for existence in an inhospitable environment, both human and natural. In one sense, the prospect here is even bleaker than in the Midwest. Even if the process of decay could be halted and the seaports and farms revitalized, there is no one left to do it. The young men have mostly gone west, leaving behind the sick and the old, doomed to long spinsterhoods or early death. The quality of their lives is determined, moreover, by a psychological legacy from their Puritan ancestry, which in the absence

of a sustaining theological framework has formed into stiff-necked pride, eccentricity, and futile renunciation of experience and a corresponding addiction to failure.

Hayden Carruth - the New England poet - has characterized the later inversions of Puritanism in a way that, broadening the simplistic historiographical myth, illuminates very clearly the nature of literature written under its influence. It is not merely a matter of radicalism changing first to reactionary orthodoxy and then to gentility, nor of its initial revolutionary militancy turning to quietism. In addition, Puritanism’s tragic conception of existence and its accompanying heroism are reduced to comedy and irony filtered through fantasy, Utopianism, or even madness. Similarly, the early individualism and sturdy independence of the Puritan shrivels into a fanatical devotion to privacy. 12 These are exactly the features that stand out most clearly in the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett as well as forming another important element that differentiates her world from that of Mary E. Wilkins. But it is also, according to Carruth, an important residue of the Puritan inheritance: the pride in mere landscape which is a corollary of the exploitation of the land, both of them being a reversal of the earlier custodial tradition of Puritan theology.

Jewett’s feeling for and use of the Maine coast in her fiction has nothing to do with the pathetic fallacy. Her better critics have recognized this, 13 while not necessarily seeing that in counterpointing man and nature as she so often does, she tends ironically to distance the lives she writes about. This distancing effect is compounded by her characteristic structural device of using as narrators summer visitors who bring to village life the values of the outside world. In Deephaven (1877), for example, the device leads to a pattern of rather obvious and crude contrasts, and there is still something of this in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), though by this stage in her career she had learned to incorporate perspective so as to achieve subtle complications and ambiguities. A fairly typical scene exhibiting these elements occurs in ‘Through the Schoolhouse Window’, in which the narrator, having attended a funeral service for one of the village’s widows, declines to join the procession to the graveyard and instead watches it from a distance:

The bay-sheltered islands and the great sea beyond stretched away to the far horizon southward and eastward; the little procession in the foreground looked futile and helpless on the edge of the rocky shore. It was a glorious day early in July, with a clear, high sky; there were no clouds, there was no noise of the sea. The song sparrows sang and sang, as if with joyous knowledge of

immortality, and contempt for those who could so pettily concern themselves with death. I stood watching until the funeral procession had crept round a shoulder of the slope below and disappeared from the great landscape as if it had gone into a cave. . . . Watching the funeral gave me a sort of pain. I began to wonder if I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying away at the end of the service. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but I had now made myself and my friends remember that 1 did not really belong to Dunnet Landing. (4)

Between this beginning and the narrator’s departure by sea at the end of the summer when the little town sinks from view, ‘indistinguishable from the other towns that looked as if they were crumbled on the furzy-green stoniness of the shore’, she opens up the lives of various villagers as they tell their own histories or those of their neighbours, eccentric or prosaic, pathetic or comic. The stories themselves are absorbing and give the book its deserved status, but they also confirm the view of one of her characters that ‘we’re all turned upside down, and going back year by year’. (24)

And this, of course, is the general condition that regional literature illuminates so clearly: an inability to relate to the new forces shaping American society and a consequent retreat from them into the past. This can only result in lives lacking authenticity and true social identity, lives that by being wrenched away from social and psychological norms, become grotesque, no matter how sympathetically evoked. 14

Perhaps the best example of human wastage in New England writing is Edith Wharton’s short novel Ethan Frome (1911). Edith Wharton was not herself a New Englander, and most of her novels dealt with a stratum of society very different from what she called ‘my granite outcroppings; but half-emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate’. She has been accused of having little sympathy for the characters in her novel and of writing a clever but cruel story lacking in moral reverberations, but such criticism fails to take into account her deep understanding of rural decay in New England, and the ways in which the poverty of the land, the harshness of the climate, and the economic depression are bound to be reflected in the bare, emotional lives of those who endure them.

The story is pieced together by a young engineer, temporarily trapped by a strike in a small town in western Massachusetts. It concerns the history of Ethan Frome, a gaunt, bitter ruin of a man, whose condition is the result of a momentous event that took place a quarter of a century before. Unlike the ‘smart ones’ who got away,

Ethan has stayed on his family’s barren farm with its ailing sawmill, both mortgaged to the hilt, to look after first his father, then his mother, and finally his sickly wife. The quality of life in these dying communities is brilliantly captured in Ethan’s brief account of his mother’s last years:

‘We’re kinder side-tracked here now, . . . but there was considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the Flats . . . I’ve always set down the worst of mother’s trouble to that. When she got the rheumatism so bad she couldn’t move around she used to sit up there and watch the road by the hour; and one year, when they was six months mending the Bettsbridge pike after the floods, and Harmon Gow had to bring his stage round this way, she picked up so that she used to get down to the gate most days to see him. But after the trains begun running nobody ever came by here to speak of, and mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died.’ (Prologue)

After his mother’s death, Ethan lives on with Zecnie, his ailing, shrewish wife until her young cousin Mattie comes to live with them. Mattie’s vivacity and warmth stir Ethan back to life and they begin to fall in love under the eyes of the jealous Zeenie. He contemplates the possibility of running away to the West with her and even sets out to borrow the money for the fare, but is brought up short by the realization of what his desertion would entail for his wife. Desperate and wretched, he sets off to take Mattie to the train after Zeenie tells the girl to leave. On the way they finally confess their love for each other but admit its hopelessness. Urged on by Mattie, Ethan takes a sled and they recklessly coast down a dangerous hill, ‘right into the big elm. . . . So’t we’d never have to leave each other any more.’

Ironically, Mattie’s wish is granted. She is crippled by the accident and is taken back by Zeenie into the lonely farmhouse where the three of them eke out their sour and loveless existence, described by one of the townsmen: ‘Don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.' (Epilogue)

This remark could almost be taken as a general statement about the life of the region, and Edith Wharton’s occasional widening of focus shows her to be fully aware of the ‘larger issues of civilisation' that encompass and partly account for these stunted lives. Zeenie’s debility

is only a more notable instance in a community ‘rich in pathological instances’, and Ethan’s vain desire for change and freedom is matched by the gravestones around his house, each of which seems to bear the legend ‘we never got away - how should you?’

Nineteenth-century regional fiction is often regarded as a minor tributary of the Realist movement, but I think it can more profitably be seen as a kind of distorting mirror image of the national novel. The same pressures that moulded the fiction of Dreiser and Norris, can also be discerned in the work of their lesser contemporaries. What makes the regional novelists different, and often accounts for their more limited achievements, is their inability to fuse the disparate ideological strands of contemporary life in the creation of new kinds of characters. In failing to do this, their novels remain structurally and thematically incoherent; testimony no less though to the painful and sometimes tragic upheavals that were ruthlessly obliterating long established life styles and remorselessly severing the present from the past.

Notes

1. See Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost (London, 1976), p. 104.

2. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (London, 1967), pp. 89-91.

3. In an interesting essay on the novel, John William Ward suggests that the book has a double importance in the history of American literature. It marked the moment when the myth of America as a garden gave way to the idea of a wasteland of broken dreams. And in terms of technique the novel unsuccessfully attempts to combine primitive naturalism with psychological realism. See his Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York, 1969), pp. 92-105.

4. See, for example, Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967), pp. 124-32, and Ziff, pp. 93-108.

5. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), p. 154.

6. See Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Polk of Southern Fiction (Athens, Ga., 1972).

7. The best study of the literature of the Civil War is by Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York, 1962).

8. Wilson, pp. 595—6.

9. See Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War, revised edition (New York, 1935), p. 61.

10. Wallace Stevens has written poems and prose pieces about Connecticut, and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems trace the history of Gloucester in some detail.

11. See Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (New York, 1940), Chapter 20.

12. Hayden Carruth, ‘The New England Tradition’, in Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America’s Literary Heritage , edited by John Gordon Burke (Chicago, 1973), pp. 2-47.

13. See, for example, Werner Berthoffs essay ‘The Art of Jewett’s Pointed Firs’ in New England Quarterly, 32 (1959), reprinted in his book. Fictions and Events: Essays in Criticism and Literary History (New York, 1971), pp. 243-63.

14. Julia Bader has dicussed this phenomenon and its manifestations in Jewett’s fiction. She argues that the occasional loss of solidity, moments when sense perception loses its grasp on what is ‘out there’, is quite different from similar subversions of reality in Modernist art. For Jewett and her contemporaries it is brought about by social, sexual, and psychological dislocations. See ‘The Dissolving Vision: Realism in Jewett, Freeman and Gilman’, in American Realism: New Essays, pp. 176-98.

Chapter 5

Impossible Futures and Impossible Pasts: Bellamy, Howells, Donnelly, London, Frederic

One phenomenon of the late nineteenth century in America unites the diverse interpretations of a multitude of cultural commentators. All agree that the 1880s and 1890s were marked by deep and irreconcilable divisions between those who accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution and its social, political, and moral consequences, and those who propounded alternative possibilities to capitalism, unbridled competition, and the survival of the fittest. With the benefit of a century’s hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss all those who reacted against the given realities of the situation as ‘escapists’, and it is one of the great virtues of recent cultural history that a number of scholars have illuminated the centrality and urgency of the debates which coloured every aspect of intellectual life in those decades. Whether the emphasis is primarily political, as in Peter Cann’s The Divided Mind ; economic, as in Alan Trachtenburg’s The Incorporation of America ; aesthetic, as in Jackson Lear’s No Place of Grace ; or sociological, as in Marcus Klein’s Foreigners, the picture that emerges is one of crucial struggles between modernists and anti-modernists, or between socialists and capitalists, struggles which took as their ground the village or the city, the past or the future, and the individual or the collective. Inevitably, these issues found their way into the fiction of the time, and though the great debate is often confused by writers shifting their ground or holding contradictory positions within single novels, the way in which novelists responded imaginatively to the situation is a clear indication of the extent to which the theme had pervaded the national consciousness.

Perhaps the most remarkable literary feature of the 1890s was the sudden rise to popularity of the Utopian novel. More than a hundred were published before 1900 - as many, in fact, as there had been actual Utopian communities in the preceding century. Given the circumstances and nature of America’s colonization and development, it is not at all surprising that her people have been preoccupied with creating various forms of ideal commonwealths, or as Emerson said in 1840, that there is ‘not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket’. 1 Some of these projects for social reform took

extreme or eccentric forms and were inevitably doomed to failure, but the impulses behind them lingered on into a period when their practical realization had become less and less possible. Henry James characterized the typical milieu in his realistic reform novel The Bostonians (1886) as a ‘Frogpondium’ inhabited by ‘long haired men and short haired women’, while at the same time recognizing that his main theme, the position of women in modern society, was of genuine moment. Other major writers, as we shall see, were also diverted by the notions of Utopia, though the majority of such works were produced by men who had more reforming zeal than literary skill.

Common to them all, however, was a deep dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary society. Howells spoke for a great many in 1888 when he confessed in a letter to Henry James that ‘after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilisation” and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end’. 2

Much of this discontent was reflected in hostility to industrial development, the mechanization of labour and life, and their inevitable corollary, the city. The widespread belief that unlimited development could only result in the impoverishment of life is summed up in the title of Henry George’s immensely popular critique Progress and Poverty (1879), which quickly went through 100 editions. George is best remembered for his theory of the single tax whereby wealth could be taken from the few and redistributed among the community that had created it. Like his fellow economist, Lawrence Gronlund, whose socialist Co-operative Commonwealth depended for its realization on a return to the country, George saw the American city as a poisonous tumour which, if left to grow unchecked, would suck all the wholesome juice of the country into its vortex and infect the entire nation. His central solution for the evils of overcrowding, disease, and poverty, a land tax, may or may not have been feasible in practice, but the Utopian novelists influenced by such ideas had no need to concern themselves with the practical problems of implementation. For them, the transition to the millennium could be assumed to have already occurred, as it has in the most popular of all affirmative fictions, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888).

Boston in the year 2000 - the site of Bellamy’s Utopia - has evolved by way of advances in technology and by the development of socialism, into the City Beautiful. Poverty together with money has been abolished, and the abundant wealth of the nation is freely available to all. The end of competition and unregulated profiteering has brought an end to waste so that the country’s economy is precisely geared to the needs of its citizens. Into this social paradise Bellamy projects his nineteenth-century hero, Julian West, who had been

presumed dead in 1887 when his house burned down but had actually enjoyed thirteen decades of Rip Van Winkle-like hypnotic sleep in a sealed underground vault. Bellamy was a good enough craftsman to portray Julian’s awakening to the new world as a mixed blessing. From time to time he suffers from feelings of loneliness and alienation, and Bellamy uses these emotions as the basis for a love-story involving a descendant of the girl who loved him in his former existence. Julian’s feelings of doubt about his true identity, cut off as he is from both past and future, lead him back to the womb-like suspension of his underground vault, where he sleeps again and eventually reawakens back in the Boston of 1887. Venturing out into his familiar old world, he is appalled by the ‘festering . . . wretchedness’ he encounters, and is doubly affected by the knowledge of the ideal alternative of future social felicity. It is this later experience that proves to be the dream, however, or rather the nightmare, and to his vast relief and ours, he comes back to actuality in the paradisal future. Not surprisingly, Henry George accused Bellamy of creating castles in the air, and Bellamy himself denied any more serious purpose in his novel than to build a ‘cloud-palace for an ideal humanity’. Even so, the power of Bellamy’s fiction had a profound effect, not just on the public and his fellow novelists but also on such economists as Veblen, who was to produce the most biting critique of American society in 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Looking Backward almost immediately produced a spate of imitations and refutations, but by far the most distinguished of Bellamy’s supporters was W. I). Howells (sec also Ch. 2), who wrote two Utopian novels, A Traveller from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), as well as a series of‘Letters of an Altrurian Traveller’, published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine between November 1893 and September 1894.

In the year that Looking Backwards was published, Howells read and welcomed another testimony ‘against the system by which a few men with wealth and luxury, and the vast mass of men are overworked and underfed’ - Tolstoy’s What to Do ? And when in 1889 Howells left New York for Boston, he was naturally drawn into the orbit of Christian Socialists like Bellamy who was just launching his Nationalist Clubs, Edward Everett Hale who was forming a group to propound Tolstoy’s gospel, and the founders of the People’s Party, soon to become the Populist Party. All these, together with Howclls’s own exploration of Utopian ideas in The World of Chance (1893), lay behind his preliminary Altrurian novels. In his earlier work, he created a character, David Hughes, who was a former member of the Brook Farm community, a famous socialist Utopia based on equality. But rather than explore the possibility of such an ideal community, he employs Hughes to

examine the alternative of competitive life in the developing capitalist state. Indeed, Hughes is writing a book to be called The World Revisited f, intended as a criticism of modern life in all its aspects. Hughes’s critique would have found good company in the torrent of muckraking literature that was beginning to flow in the early 1890s. In the same year that A Traveller from Altruria appeared, Henry Demarest Lloyd published the bible of the muckrakers, Wealth Against Commonwealth , based on his sensational earlier study of the Standard Oil Company which Howells himself had bravely accepted for the Atlantic in 1881 when he was its editor.

One of the aspects of contemporary life that Hughes singles out is ‘the whole architectural nightmare’ of the American city, an ‘indecent exposure’ of the average tasteless man’s mind which should not be permitted. It is a subject to which Howells returns in the lectures given by Mr Homos the Altrurian. The form of Howells’s romance - and it is one that he had used before - is simply a gathering of middle-class families in a summer hotel, where they are led to expose the shortcomings of their society by the innocent questioning of the Altrurian. Mr Homos quickly sees that present-day America has much in common with the past of his own society and, therefore, must also contain the germ of a better future. He finally describes his own country and the phases of its growth from egoism (Egoria), through Accumulation to altruism (Altruria).

After a bloodless revolution achieved at the ballot-box, it was a simple matter, he says, to transfer all assets from a few monopolies to the State. All it took to initiate the redistribution of wealth and the transformation of life was a single clause in the statute. Under the new dispensation, all the evils brought by competition and greed began to disappear along with the institutions that had nourished them. The cities had been allowed to fall into ruin, and as is fitting for such sites of cruelty and suffering, are now inhabited by ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles. The citizens, meanwhile, have either returned to the villages or to one or other of the regional capitals. In their turn these have become civic and cultural centres, while manufacturing has been removed to the countryside. Here mills and shops rise like temples ‘amid leafy boscages beside the streams, which form their only power’, dedicated to ‘that sympathy between the divine and human which expresses itself in honest and exquisite workmanship’ (12).

If this reads like a vision by William Morris, Howells is well aware of it. A member of Homos’s audience, the professor, accuses him of plagiarism, and Homos freely admits the influence not only of Morris but also of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Mazzini, Campanella, and Bellamy. Altruria as an eclectic and whimsical juxtaposition of such technological marvels as the high-speed electric express and the

pastoral manufacturing idyll described above, does give the impression, as one of Homos’s hearers says, of ‘pretty soap-bubble worlds solidified’.

Like many other social critics, Howells discovered to his amazement and delight the actual ‘solidification’ of his soap bubbles at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One of the ‘Letters of an Altrurian Traveller’ which formed a kind of supplement to the novel and provided the basis for his later romance, is entirely given to a description of what he calls the ‘World’s Fair City’. To his fellow Altrurian, Cyril, Homos confides that it would ‘be useless trying to persuade most Americans that the World’s Fair City was not the effect, the fine flower, of the competition which underlies their economy, but was in fact the first fruits of the principle of emulation which animates our happy commonwealth, and gives men, as nowhere else on earth, a foretaste of heaven’. But the exposition certainly did not give Henry Adams a foretaste of heaven. Writing in r The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and looking back on the fair, he viewed it with some bitterness - along with the adoption of a single gold standard - as the final triumph of mechanization and centralization. Capitalism, with its corporations, trusts, and the consolidation of forces, had for him put paid for ever to all the eighteenth-century values he held so dear. Though Adams in his customary fashion extracts more implications from the symbol than it will legitimately yield, and though he links his abhorrence of bankers with that of other disagreeable certainties such as age, senility, and death, there can be little question that his view of the exhibition was more prescient than that of Howells. Of course, Adams was writing with the benefit of hindsight in the knowledge that the Populists had finally lost their cause at the turn of the century. Howells’s optimism was not so easily quenched, and in 1907 when he was bringing out Through the Eye of the Needle , he was encouraged by signs of a resurgence of progressivism. His buoyancy continues throughout the book and is symbolized by the love-affair and marriage of Homos to an American girl, Eveleth Strange. In the second part of the work, Eveleth elaborates on details of Altrurian life and customs in her letters home to America, and though Howells does not make any significant changes in his original Utopian vision, he docs allow Eveleth one ironic tribute to the excitement of life under the old regime. She is ‘wolfishly hungry’ for news of America, and asks her correspondent, ‘Do you still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning and burning, and mommicking and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities are, your heroism

and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion, are equal to them’ (14).

Eveleth’s questions indicate one of the inevitable shortcomings of the Utopian state as pictured by Bellamy and Howells: the eventlessness of life in such a perfect setting. The violence and destruction she half hankers after are amply provided though, in the best-known dystopian work of the period, Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890). Donnelly, a convinced Populist, does embody a vision of Utopia in his novel, set in an embryonic agrarian community in Africa where his protagonist Gabriel Welstein and his friends have taken refuge after the catastrophic debacle visited upon American civilization in 1988. Though Donnelly’s aims and values were not significantly different from Bellamy’s, he belonged to that class of millennialists who were convinced that any real improvement in society would not be brought about by gradual evolution but by revolution and an ensuing period of chaos. The scene in which Caesar Lombellini, the leader of a working-class rebellion, orders the piles of bodies in Union Square to be concreted over in layers, is more reminiscent of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee published the previous year, than of any other novel. Donnelly’s pessimism is rooted in a view of human nature that is much more like Twain’s than Bellamy’s. In the sermons, for example, that feature in both novels, the two writers manifest their very different ideas about social evolution. Bellamy’s minister tells his congregation in a telecast that the human race is gradually returning to God and that the process of evolution will be complete when the divine secret hidden in the germ is perfectly realized. Donnelly’s preacher, on the other hand, looks forward to a time when through its superior strength the ruling class will enjoy the full benefits that power confers. Given such a philosophy, it is not surprising that Donnelly can discover no better solution to social conflict than complete annihilation of the ruling plutocrats and oligarchs. This he accomplishes with a great deal of apocalyptic relish, his scenes of lurid slaughter being seasoned with the traditional biblical imagery associated with the harrowing of hell.

An even more unrelieved pessimism pervades Jack London’s dystopian novel The Iron Heel (1907), a work that was rejected even by' contemporary socialists because of its terrifying picture of the future. London uses the device of a diary written by the converted wife of a proletarian leader and discovered seven centuries later, to describe the collapse of capitalism, the rise of a tyrannical oligarchy, and a savage civil war waged over three centuries of dictatorship. The conditions he predicts are much worse than anything envisaged by either his fellow novelists or contemporary socialists, and they reflect his lifelong

belief that it is useless for the working class to fuse rather than fight, if it wishes to avoid the ruthless dehumanization and enslavement portrayed in the novel. The inhabitants of the labour ghettos, the people of the abyss, are seen as the ‘refuse and scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde’, the degraded waste of society totally abject in its conditioned servitude.

This, one should remember, is in effect London’s view of the present, and it is therefore not surprising that he preferred The Jungle to Looking Backward. He thought that Sinclair’s novel was ‘brutal with life . . . written of sweat and blood, and groans and tears. It depicts what man is compelled to be in our world, in the Twentieth Century. ’

Whereas Jack London projects his imagination back into the present from a possible future in order to illustrate the former’s deficiencies, another group of popular novelists took refuge from the same unpalatable present in an equally unreal American or even European, past. Perhaps the most distinguished example of the divided mind at the turn of the century was that of Henry Adams. The record of his own failed attempts to avoid entrapment by conflicting ideologies is most elegantly recounted in his intellectual autobiography The Education , but he had outlined part of the problem much earlier in his two novels Esther (1884), and Democracy (1889), where he had applied his ideas to religion and politics respectively. As a historian, though, he could pose the dilemma more starkly, and in an essay of 1894 entitled ‘The Tendency of History’ he laid bare the alternatives that also faced contemporary novelists. Historians, he argued, could restrict themselves to revealing the growing evils associated with unrestrained and advancing materialism, or could show the necessary consequences of this trend in the triumph of socialism. In either case, society would be likely to respond negatively, whereas if the scientific historian could prove that society must eventually revert to the Church to save itself, he would have to relinquish his beliefs in science itself, and this would be tantamount to committing suicide.

Novelists less subject to the rigours of scientific proof but equally concerned to direct society towards a better mode of existence, embraced not only religion but all forms of non-rational experience as an antidote to the iron laws of determinism. The more bleak the present and future of industrial society seemed, the more inviting the temporal, spatial, or ideological alternatives to it appeared. For the drabness of life in a mechanized modern city where the individual will had been subsumed by the machine, and man’s selfhood subjugated by impersonal forces, the novelist could and did provide an imaginative escape into the colour, heroism, and authenticity of alternative milieux in the past. At its simplest level, this need was satisfied by the

immense number of historical romances produced in the last years of the century, and writers such as Winston Churchill, F. Marion Crawford, and Clarence Major were so popular that Howells began to fear for the brutalization of the popular mind and the ruin of taste. He either failed to see or refused to recognize that the phenomenon he so despised was part of a much larger movement which embraced more than just middle-brow pulp literature. It manifested itself, for example, in England in the popularity of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and The Yellow Book. The fin de siecle ethos on both sides of the Atlantic possessed a number of seemingly disparate elements that had in common a rejection of the realities of the present and a glorification of the past. The activism propounded by Theodore Roosevelt may have had connections with America’s imperialist ambitions, but it was also expressed by men like Henry Adams’s brother, Brooks, in his The Law of Civilisation and Decay (1895), intended as a polemic against the modern merchant class and a plea for the reinstatemant of the medieval warrior ideal. The growth of Vitalism as a philosophy can be linked to a new desire for authenticity and selfhood in a world that seemed to deny them, but it also pointed back to a pre-industrial simple life and often beyond it, to medieval mysticism. And in reacting against the banality and ugliness of late Victorian taste, the aesthetes identified vulgarity with the products of the machine, so that the proliferating Arts and Crafts movement often boasted of the complete lack of any modernity in its work. 3

In such an atmosphere very few writers were able to maintain their commitment to realism and social reform. Even Hamlin Garland, who never ceased to proclaim that his prime aim was to promote truth rather than beauty, and to extend the reign of justice, turned to romantic novels about Indians in the Far West after the commercial failure of Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), a realistic precursor of Sister Carrie. Others, among them Henry Harland and Henry Fuller, found it easier to repudiate their realism. For his part Harland had two quite distinct careers as a novelist. In the 1880s he wrote novels about Jewish immigrant life in New York, then after moving to England and founding The Yellow Book with Aubrey Beardsley, he began to produce witty, lightweight romances such as The Cardinal’s Snuff Box (1900). Fuller, in contrast, vacillated between writing realistic novels of Chicago life such as The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), both of which influenced Dreiser, and romantic excursions into the more exotic aspects of European society in The Chevalier o f Pensieri-Vani (1890), and The Chatelaine of La Trinite (1892). In the earlier book Fuller comes closest to stating his own and many other Americans’ Jamesian predicament, when he describes the feelings of Mr Occident, an American visitor to Italy: ‘Birth and habit drew him in one direc-

tion; culture and aspiration, in another; but he had never been a good American, and he feared he should never make a good European.’

By far the best example of this whole movement, outside the work of Henry James himself, is, as one might expect, a novel in which the issues themselves are foregrounded as the dramatic embodiment of the theme: Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). Though Frederic eventually went the way of most American expatriates and ended his career by writing three English romances, The Damnation remains one of the best novels dealing with the social, cultural, and psychological conflicts of the late nineteenth century. It is a more complex treatment of the theme dealt with in James’s Roderick Hudson (1878) 4 and a more interesting dramatization of the subject than that in Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), the novel on which it is reputed to be based. 5 The fact that it was used as ammunition by supporters of both sides in the ‘Realism War’ testifies to the fairness with which Frederic dealt with the issues involved. Significantly, the novel was published in England under the quite different title, Illuminations , a word that suggests an alternative interpretation.

The tension between conflicting philosophies is brought to life in the story of a young Methodist minister whose ambitions are initially thwarted by his appointment to a poor primitive church in Octavius, instead of to the rich, progressive church in Tecumseh for which he and his wife had hoped. Once there, he is driven partly by his own predilections and partly by the bigotry of the local Methodists into the orbit of the three people who will assist in bringing about his damnation (or illumination): Father Forbes, an Irish Catholic priest, Dr Ledsmer, an amateur Germanic scientist, and Celia Madden, a beautiful if somewhat overblown Pre-Raphaelite aesthete. As well as being sexually dazzled by Celia’s hedonism, Theron is overwhelmed by the glimpses he is given into undreamed-of worlds which force him to reexamine his own narrow prejudices. The quality of Frederic’s work is clearly shown by the way he does this - not as the Utopian novelists might, in a series of dry debates but by animating Theron’s consciousness with its luridly sensational images of corruption:

The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself were ignorance, squalor, brutality, and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast’s and Keppler’s cartoons, and out of these sprang into the

vague upper gloom, on the one side, lamp-posts from which Negroes hung by the neck, and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires; and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some black-robed, tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools. (5)

Lacking firm moral or spiritual foundations of his own, Theron is utterly unable to resist or evaluate the glamour and false sophistication of his new friends. The final stage in his metamorphosis takes place in a scene of rich comedy as he lolls on an oriental couch in Celia’s ‘inner sanctum,’ dizzy with cigar smoke, drinking Benedictine, and breathing in the air of pagan decadence around him. Celia is playing Chopin to him - ‘The Greekiest of the Greeks’ - and Theron responds characteristically ‘I am interested in Shopang. . . . He lived with -what’s his name - George something.’ From this moment he is lost, and his fall is ensured when he later kisses Celia in a scene which owes more to Hawthorne than to any realist writer. 6 He mistakenly believes that the whole bewildering world of wealth and beauty, spiritual exaltation and love, is being offered him on a silver salver. He has only to strip off his miserable ecclesiastical bandages and reveal his manliness by pursuing Celia to New York, and his transformation will be complete.

When he does finally confront her with a declaration of love, Celia strips away his illusions about himself in a remorseless analysis of his character and behaviour that also serves as an analysis of her own superficiality. Associating herself with Father Forbes and Dr Ledsmer, she admits that what had appealed to them in Theron was his natural and unsophisticated freshness, and that in attempting to improve himself he had, in fact, degenerated into a bore, a ‘donkey trying to play lap-dog’. Rejecting his impulse to murder his tormentress, Theron opts for the traditional alternative, a drunken binge in the city, from which he is rescued by a couple of pragmatic Methodist fund-raisers who, despite their dubious methods and shady background, prove to have more genuine humanity than his erstwhile friends. Theron, unlike the tragic heroes of romance, picks himself up and at the end of the novel is preparing to leave for Seattle and a new career in politics.

The tone of The Damnation of Theron Ware is often closer to that of a novel like James’s The Europeans (1878), even though the plotting is reminiscent of Roderick Hudson , but in any case, the comparison with James is certainly appropriate. In dramatizing the central social, intellectual, and cultural debates of the late nineteenth century, Frederic adds an interesting dimension to the International Novel, though James himself would eventually develop the form in even more remarkable ways. 7

Discussion of Harold Frederic has taken us beyond the limits of the Utopian novel and back towards the mainstream of American fiction. The Utopians, whether more enamoured of the past or the future, have one thing in common: a revulsion from the actual and an inability to deal with it in their novels. Motivated more by political idealism than by the stirrings of imagination they inevitably fail in their attempts to flesh out their alien worlds. It is not surprising that most of their readers end up like Evelcth Strange, ‘wolfishly hungry’ for more news of the real America.

Notes

1. Letter to Thomas Carlyle in 1840. This letter is quoted in Mark Holloway’s excellent history of Utopian communities in America from 1680 to 1880, Heavens on Earth, second edition (New York, 1966), p. 19.

2. See Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, edited by Mildred Howells, 2 vols (New York, 1968), i, 416-18.

3. For a detailed study of chivalric values in American romantic fiction see John Fraser, America and the Pattern of Chivalry (Cambridge, 1982).

4. John Henry Raleigh suggests some points of comparison between the two novels in ‘ The Damnation of Theron Ware’, in American Literature, 30 (1958), 210-27.

5. For a brief study of Frederic’s sources see Robert H. Woodward, ‘Some Sources for Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware’, American Literature, 33 (1961), 46-51.

6. George W. Johnson traces some of the novelist’s debts to Hawthorne in ‘Harold Frederic’s Young Goodman Ware: The Ambiguities of a Realistic Romance’, Modern Fiction Studies, 8 (1962), 361-74.

7. Frederic despised James and called him ‘an effeminate old donkey’ whose ‘literary admirations serve me generally as warnings what to avoid’. In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Damnation of Theron Ware (Harmondsworth, 1986), Scott Donaldson discusses the influence of other writers on Frederic.

Chapter 6

Henry James

In 1879, twelve years after writing his famous declaration of spiritual independence to T. S. Perry, 1 James, now in his mid-thirties and more committed both to his career as a novelist and to permanent exile from his native country, once again took stock of what he considered the more important national characteristics of his countrymen. In doing so, he was also tacitly setting out his own qualifications as a critic of the culture he had left behind, and contrasting them with those of his most famous predecessor, Hawthorne:

. . . the Civil War marks an era in the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. 2

America itself was certainly becoming a far more complex society as we have seen, and some of the irreconcilable interests of different sections and classes had begun to be defined by the war between the states. James’s own sense of relation and proportion, though, was immeasurably extended by his deepening acquaintance with European society and culture. This innate understanding of America was brought into much clearer focus in the Parisian salons of Madame Viardot and Madame de Blocqueville, where he met Flaubert, Daudet, Maupassant, Zola, the Goncourts, and Turgenev, and was, as he says, admitted to the ‘aristocracy of the fine’. But even such a mundane event as breakfast at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool nourished not just his body but also his grasping imagination with the kind of images that he loved to probe for significance by comparing them with their American

counterparts. For him Europe, from the very beginning, was an inexhaustible ‘tree of knowledge’:

the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep, black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the British ‘sea-coal’ fire, much more confident of its function, I thought, than the fires I had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded and refolded Times , the incomparable truth to type of the waiter, truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to Dickens, to Thackeray, positively to Smollett and to Hogarth, to every connection that could help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a revelation. 4

As an American, however, James experienced the need to fight against this feeling if he were to avoid making ‘a superstitious valuation’ of Europe, and in the earlier part of his career he did so well enough to convince another American expatriate, Ezra Pound, that he had ‘a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian Prayer Meeting’. 4

Pound is wrong, of course, to attribute this kind of moralism even to James’s early fiction set in America - The Europeans (1879), Washington Square (1881), and The Bostonians (1886) - in which he was trying to chart the national consciousness and fix it in relation to its environment. The scope of his critical irony in the shorter novels and the subtle exploration of the submerged energies and passions of the central characters in The Bostonians are the product of a talent untrammelled by the provincialism that marked even the best of his American contemporaries.

The Europeans was James’s first considerable attempt to dramatize conflicting cultural values in a story of Old-World sophisticates coming to visit their American relatives. He had already achieved considerable success with Daisy Miller (1879) and would return again and again to the formula in which complex relationships are engendered by the introduction of American innocents to the dangerous world of Europe. His later, horrified protest at the shape taken by his native culture in his travel book The American Scene (1907) and in the unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower (1917) was made long after he had won his reputation as an international novelist. In 1879, though, he was more concerned to explore the limitations and comic possibilities of the Puritan conscience in characters like Mr Wentworth:

If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. A sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations, required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture. To consider an event crudely and baldly in the light of the pleasure it might bring them, was an intellectual exercise with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued by any such human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues. (4)

The advent of the Europeans, as far as the Americans are concerned, is in every way beneficial inasmuch as it helps to bring about several very important changes in their lives. But apart from Gertrude, who is never in sympathy with the Puritan ethos anyway, it is doubtful if any of them are made to extend their tolerance to any alien form of life.

The definition of a Puritan as one who renounces the life of the flesh in favour of the life of the spirit fails to do justice to the extremism of Mr Wentworth. His renunciation is more complete, so that he habitually withdraws from the possibility of any new experience. The resulting isolation is not an uncommon phenomenon in nineteenth-century America and it is associated both with New England Puritanism and also with the ‘Genteel Tradition’ which it favoured. Here Wentworth is expressing typical caution in the face of ‘peculiar’ influences: ‘You must be careful’, he said, ‘you must keep watch. Indeed we must all be careful. This is a great change - we are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don’t say they are bad; I don’t judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It will be a different tone’ (4). Yet in spite of the old man’s shortcomings, James’s treatment of Mr Wentworth is more sympathetic than some of the above illustrations may indicate. The New England brand of Puritanism may not be conducive to much pleasure (‘amuse ourselves? - we are not chil-

dren’), yet when one considers their obvious virtues: their goodness, honesty, nobility, their own particular refinement, one is made aware that in any product of James’s civilization these are the basic American characteristics which may be supplemented but not superseded.

They are also the virtues that James fondly cherished even as he described their disappearance from the New York of Washington Square. It is instructive to compare James’s treatment of the society with that in Edith Wharton’s New York novel The Age of Innocence (1920) not merely to demonstrate James’s superiority as a writer but also his deeper knowledge of, and warmer affection for, that city.

The Age of Innocence describes the pressures brought to bear by society on two of its members having an illicit affair. In the name of good taste the lovers are forced to separate and return to their drab, empty lives. Edith Wharton’s satire of that society is superb. Operas, balls, engagement rites, the ceremonies of dining - all are observed with keenly ironic detachment, thus creating the atmosphere in which a small, ingrown, artificial community once had its being - ‘a small slippery pyramid, in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained’. (6) It is as if a tiny fragment of the European aristocracy had been transplanted and allowed to continue its ritualistic way of living, completely divorced from the environment in which it had evolved. But as such it does not provide any kind of answer to James’s complaint about the lack of manners and customs in American life. The society described in The Age of Innocence may have been a feature of the American scene but it was scarcely an American phenomenon. The distinctly native flavour of Washington Square , on the other hand, is powerfully created in the first paragraphs of the novel. The naive vigour and parochialism of mid-century New York is present in every line James writes. In exploring these qualities, he is led to examine fundamental characteristics of American civilization that are quite beyond the reach of Edith Wharton. For him, surfaces are only important inasmuch as they represent life, so that whereas in The Age of Innocence manners are an index to nothing beyond themselves, in Washington Square they are always tied to the moral climate in which they have their origins.

As well as shifting the location of his story from London where he had first heard it told by Fanny Kemble, the actress, James moved its action back in time to the 1850s, so giving himself a thirty-year perspective on events. The distance obtained in this way allowed him to manipulate the angle of his narrative vision and give an added dimension to his picture of American society poised on the brink of a major upheaval, enjoying the last years of its pre-war, provincial innocence before it was swept into the maelstrom of expansion, immigration, industrialization, finance capitalism, and all the devel-

opments that James later came to abhor. The entire novel is pervaded by the sense of an irrecoverable past, a menacing future, and the human and social implications of imminent change.

In 1850 James was a child of seven. His father had recently brought his family back to New York from Albany and purchased a house on West Fourteenth Street. It was here that James spent several years of his childhood, a period that he finally wrote about at length in the first volume of his autobiography, A Small Boy and Others. 5 He tenderly recalls the ‘small warm dusky homogeneous world’ of mid-century New York by weaving together a dazzling skein of sensory impressions. The limits of his childhood world were naturally close ones: Broadway from Union Square to Barnum's great American Museum by the City Hall, and a few blocks east and west. Within this small compass, only extended by visits to the circus, the World’s Fair and the more rural reaches of Manhattan, he discovered the normal pleasures of city life. He visited theatres and ice-cream parlours, rode on the new streetcars, and obtained some kind of formal education in various schools, but a much more extensive informal one in casual encounters with his father’s broad circle of artistic friends and relations.

James’s sense of the compactness of New York society was not just the product of an infant perspective. It was still a small town with a population of only 200,000, though even at this stage the pattern of social history was being laid, enabling him later to make nice discriminations with almost archaeological exactness. The age of ‘brown stone’ building was just beginning, and he contrasts this ‘danger signal’ with the quieter harmonies of the earlier time, represented by Washington Square ‘so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious’. This air of established repose and modest luxury is confidently recreated in the early chapters of the novel. James even relaxes his narrative angle to the extent of including an autobiographical digression in his description. Such intrusions are rare in his fiction; they signify his easy familiarity with the material and act as a guarantee of its authenticity.

He is no less aware, in looking back, of the portents of doom. The ‘long, shrill city’ of the future was rapidly taking shape in the wake of the relentless tide of commercial development rolling inexorably up Manhattan Island. There were occasional setbacks such as the economic depression of 1856, but the unruly riots of that year only strengthened the determination of the State Legislature to create a more efficient city. Order was quickly restored, progress resumed, and, by the time Washington Square came to be written, the Gilded Age had obliterated nearly every vestige of James’s comfortable childhood world.

It is a mark of his genius that he can so effortlessly create the human concomitants of all this social history. The agent of the Slopers' moral

and emotional destruction is, of course, the aptly named Morris Townsend. He is both an outsider and a threat to the solidarity of the complacent bourgeois community, and his difference from the young men of Catherine’s social circle, as well as his beauty, are what first fascinate her: ,

He was very amusing. He asked her about the people that were near them; he tried to guess who some of them were, and he made the most laughable mistakes. He criticised them very freely, in a positive, off-hand way. Catherine had never heard any one - especially any young man - talk just like that. It was the way a young man might talk in a novel; or, better still, in a play, on the stage, close before the foot-lights, looking at the audience, and with every one looking at him, so that you wondered at his presence of mind. And yet Mr. Townsend was not like an actor; he seemed so sincere, so natural. (4)

It does not take Catherine’s father, or the reader, very long to see that Morris Townsend does not have the soul of a gentleman but is a ‘plausible coxcomb’ in search of an easy fortune. Yet the criticisms he makes of Catherine’s family and friends are not undeserved either. James is not blinded to the vacuity and hypocrisy of this society by his nostalgia, and Dr Sloper’s ironic view of Morris is always finally subject to the author’s own. After all, Dr Sloper also married into money, if not for it, and the manner in which he pursues his medical career does not set him so far apart from Morris:

It was an element in Doctor Sloper’s reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly balanced; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies - he always ordered you to take something. Though he was felt to be extremely thorough, he was not uncomfortably theoretic; and if he sometimes explained matters rather more minutely than might seem of use to the patient, he never went so far (like some practitioners one had heard of) as to trust to the explanation alone, but always left behind him an inscrutable prescription. There were some doctors that left the prescription without offering any explanation at all; and he did not belong to that class either, which was after all the most vulgar. It will be seen that I am describing a clever man; and this is really the reason why Doctor Sloper had become a local celebrity. (1)

If Morris Townsend is playing a part, so too is Dr Sloper, and the brilliant comedy in the first half of the novel is produced out of their ironic detachment from the emotional situation they are creating. Throughout the complication of the plot Catherine is seen as a plain, passive pawn in their amusing game, and Aunt Penniman’s melodramatic misreadings of character and situation only serve further to obscure our view of her. In her attempts simultaneously to create mystery and high drama, she is, as Dr Sloper comments, ‘like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!’

James himself deliberately does little to illuminate the object of all their attention in the early chapters, being content to provide at first a largely negative description of Catherine:

She was not ugly . . . was decidedly not clever; she was not quick with her book, nor, indeed, with anything else.

She was not abnormally deficient. . . . Doctor Sloper would have liked to be proud of his daughter; but there was nothing to be proud of in poor Catherine. (2)

Her total lack of positive characteristics gives little scope for sympathetic identification even to the most determinedly romantic reader at this stage, who is directed instead to enjoy the manoeuvres of her father and lover as they play out their scenes with polished urbanity and wit. Beneath the restrained hostility James allows us to see the joy of conflict and the respect each feels for the other’s ability. But above all, what each admires in the other is the display of style.

So, too, does the reader at first. But ultimately Washington Square is much more than a social comedy. The points of view maintained throughout the first half of the novel are eventually superseded by that of Catherine herself as she is finally brought to life by ‘the clairvoyance of her passion’. It is she who exposes the sorry inadequacies of the players as, one by one, she forces them to step out of their roles, relinquish their masks and reveal their true motives. Like the girl in Fanny Kemble’s original story, Catherine is the kind of person who is permanently affected by her impressions. The depth of her poorly articulated emotion in contrast to the superficial, malicious, or merely silly attitudes of her loved ones is what finally moves the reader and enlists his sympathy.

The turning-point for her father occurs some time during their extended trip to Europe. Before their departure he confides to his other sister, Mrs Almond, that Catherine’s obstinacy in sticking to Morris Townsend positively excites him, but that he believes he understands her and, having taken the measure of her resistance, is confident of his

ultimate triumph. However, when it eventually becomes clear to him after six months of their Grand Tour, that Catherine has not budged an inch, his urbanity completely deserts him, and as genuine anger takes the place of excitement, he attempts to frighten and subdue her by a crude display of passion:

He stopped in front of her, and stood looking at her with eyes that had kept the light of the flushing snow-summits on which they had just been fixed. Then, abruptly, in a low tone, he asked her an unexpected question,

‘Have you given him up?’

The question was unexpected, but Catherine was only superficially unprepared.

‘No, father,’ she answered.

He looked at her again for some moments without speaking.

‘Does he write to you?’ he asked.

‘Yes, about twice a month.’

The Doctor looked up and down the valley, swinging his stick; then he said to her, in the same low tone,

‘I am very angry.’

She wondered what he meant - whether he wished to frighten her. If he did, the place was well chosen: this hard, melancholy dell, abandoned by the summer light, made her feel her loneliness. She looked around her, and her heart grew cold; for a moment her fear was great. But she could think of nothing to say, save to murmur, gently, ‘I am sorry.’ (24)

Sloper continues to show this hardness to her throughout the remainder of his life and eventually alters his will when he realizes that she will never allow him to enjoy the triumph of an empty victory over her. She will neither promise not to marry Morris after her father’s death, nor gratify Sloper during his lifetime by marrying a more eligible suitor. The old man dies in the knowledge that he has broken the springs of Catherine’s affection for him but not the power of her resistance.

As for Morris, he too gives vent to his anger and cruelty when he sees that he has lost the game and great prize that would have been his. His heartlessness at their parting enables Catherine to see him for the first time without his mask of polished civility, and the scene between them provokes in her the only outburst of visible grief in the novel. It is quickly over and, in a wonderfully economical paragraph, James creates a chilling image of the desolation that follows it:

When it had grown dark, Catherine went to the window, and looked out; she stood there for half an hour, on the mere chance that he would come up the steps. At last she turned away, for she saw her father come in. He had seen her at the window looking out, and he stopped a moment at the bottom of the white steps, and gravely, with an air of exaggerated courtesy, lifted his hat to her. The gesture was so incongruous to the condition she was in, this stately tribute of respect to a poor girl despised and forsaken was so out of place, that the thing gave her a kind of horror, and she hurried away to her room. It seemed to her that she had given Morris up. (30)

Aunt Penniman does not remain unscathed either. She is also subjected to Catherine’s revaluation and judgement; one that is final and without appeal. Her manipulation of Catherine’s emotions, if less conscious than the others’, is hardly less cruel, conducted as it is for her own amusement and gain. When the unhappy girl exposes the casual wickedness behind the old woman’s meddlesome folly and demands to be left alone, many readers, I imagine, experience a twinge of conscience brought by their earlier relish of the comedy inherent in the situation.

Nor does James attempt to mitigate his picture of Catherine’s isolation. Our last view of her after she has rejected Morris’s pathetic attempt to renew his suit years later is one that stays in the memory. She returns to the parlour of the empty Washington Square house, takes up her morsel of embroidery and sits down with it ‘for life, as it were’.

It is a stern and sombre note on which to end a novel. But James’s consciousness of the amount of life he had had to sacrifice in order to preserve his necessary disinterested spectatorship at least guarantees his sympathy for the succession of characters in his novels who, for whatever reasons, make similar renunciations.

One of James’s most penetrating studies of renunciation and self-immolation is that of Olive Chancellor, the crypto-Lesbian feminist in The Bostonians. Wanting to write ‘a very American tale’, he asked himself what was the most salient and peculiar feature of social life in the mid-1880s. His answer was ‘the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf. 6 It is misleading, however, to read The Bostonians merely as a social novel exposing the more bizarre aspects of Boston’s Frogpondium. James was well qualified to deal with what he called ‘long haired men and short haired women . . . [the ] great irregular army of nostrum-mongers, domiciled in humamtary Bohemia’. His own father had been at various times a

Fouerierite and a Swcdcnborgian, and his portrait of Miss Birdseye -one of the novel's minor characters - was widely recognized as a satiric, if affectionate portrait of Hawthorne’s well-known reforming sister-in-law. But at the heart of the novel lies an understanding of the psychological basis of action that goes far beyond the requirements of social realism.

James begins to probe the psychological basis of Olive’s puritanism early in the book. We are told that: ‘The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature, was that some day she might have such a change, she might be a martyr and die for something.’ We are thus prepared for the fulfilment of her desires in her relationship with Verena Tarrant. Verena’s response to the plea that they should ‘renounce, refrain, abstain’ was to wonder ‘what could be the need of this scheme of renunciation’. She is the typical Jamesian innocent, ruthlessly cultivated as a vehicle for the feminist movement, and her connection with it is ‘the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world’. Her fickleness towards the cause, and the final rupture between the two women bring Olive a great deal of suffering, but ‘The prospect of suffering was always, spiritually speaking, so much cash in her pocket’, and she freely avails herself of this supply in the closing scenes of the book. Typically enough, she spares herself no degradation and goes off to face the hisses and boos of the disappointed audience in the Boston lecture hall like ‘some feminine firebrand of Paris revolutions erect on a barricade, or even the sacrificial figure of Hypatia whirled through the furious mob of Alexandria’ (42).

By the very skilful way in which he juxtaposes private and public themes, James contrives to lay bare the relationship between the feminist movement and the psychology of its members - demonstrating truths which strike us as commonplace today but which were considered startling, if not ridiculous, in a world that had not experienced the Freudian revolution. On other aspects of the problem - for instance on the effect of democratic institutions upon the equality of the sexes - he is not so explicit. De Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America , (1835, 1840) had been quite clear in his view that the great social changes would eventually make women the equal of men, but not, he adds, in the way that some people have understood equality. Women, he says, must never be allowed into business or politics but must fulfil their own particular nature in the best possible manner. Nothing could be worse, he believes, than giving men and women the same functions, imposing on both the same duties, and granting to both the same rights. The only result that this could have would be to produce weak men and disorderly women. Nevertheless, he states that if he were asked to what factor the singular prosperity and

growing strength of Americans ought mainly to be attributed, he would reply: ‘To the superiority of their women.’

These views are just those of Basil Ransome, the hero of The Bostonians, and we are not at all surprised to discover that de Tocque-ville is his favourite author. Even Ransome’s smugness and complacency are a reflection of the Frenchman’s, and James seems fully aware of a petty conservative aestheticism that constantly contaminates his hero’s moral position.

The dichotomy between the social or the aesthetic on the one hand and the moral or political on the other, reaches right to the heart of the Jamesian dialectic. His imagination ranges continually between these terms, and any civilization, he intimates, must assess correctly the relative weight due to moral and aesthetic considerations. It is a minor theme of The Bostonians, but it occupies the forefront of his English novels of the middle period, The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Tragic Muse (1890), but above all, The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Everything James wrote before Tha Portrait of a Lady seems to lead up to and be included in that work, but it is not only included, for everything is ‘placed’ with unerring rightness. The values he has been weighing against one another in the earlier novels are done full justice here, and though he still tips the scales in the same direction as before, one has the feeling that now he knows better why he does so. He has taken the measure not only of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, but also of Lord Warburton and the English aristocracy; and what is perhaps more important still, he has come to grips with the Americans, Mrs Touchett, Henrietta Stackpole, and Caspar Goodwood.

The centre of James’s drama, however, is located in Isabel Archer’s consciousness, and it is with her that criticism must begin. Isabel is something more than merely another ‘American Girl’ - a more finely realized Daisy Miller. Here James is staking a real claim for the superiority of American values, and he does so far more successfully than in any other of his early novels. So confident is he of Isabel’s chances of attaining a ‘completed consciousness’, a state which in her is largely bound up with images of a moral nature, that he makes no more attempt to minimize her deficiencies than George Eliot did with her prototype Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch :

Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be if possible even better, her determination to see, to try, to know, her

combination of the delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit and the eager and personal creature of conditions: she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism it she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more pdrely expectant. (6)

Her determination to see, to try, and to know, attracts her to European civilization, yet her moral integrity guarantees her immunity from it. We recognize James’s own dilemma here, and in Isabel’s rejection of Warburton, his implicit recognition of the impossibility of reconciling his conflicting attitudes towards Europe. If Isobel is to pursue her policy of ‘expansion’, she can only satisfactorily do so in Europe. Gardencourt, the symbol of country-house civilization with its rich perfection:

at once revealed a world and gratified a need. The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on dark polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a ‘property’ - a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where the tread was muffled by the earth itself and in the thick mild air all friction dropped out of contact and all shrillness out of talk - these things were much to the taste of our young lady. (6)

Yet she has been made aware of the ugliness and misery upon which this social system is based, and also of Warburton’s incongruous radicalism:

Their radical views are a kind of amusement; they’ve got to have some amusement, and they might have coarser taste than that. You see they’re very luxurious, and these progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel moral and yet don’t damage their position.

( 8 )

There is more to Isabel’s relationship with Warburton than this, though. Marriage with him would represent an escape, a separation from the ‘usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer’. Such a marriage, with its case and comfort, would necessitate a renunciation of her ultimate moral responsibilities. When she finally rejects Lord Warburton after meeting him again in Rome, she

explains to Ralph Touchett that Gilbert Osmond’s overriding advantage lies in his appeal to her ‘one ambition - to be free to follow a good feeling’. Lord Warburton’s strength and power would deny her the exercise of that freedom, as would Caspar Goodwood’s. Osmond’s ‘very poverties, dressed out as honours’, constitute a large part of his attraction for Isabel. This problem can be seen as part of a larger one which occupies James’s attention throughout the book - the possibility of freeing moral choice from the pressure of one’s conditioning. Isabel Archer believes in an inescapable destiny which is predetermined by her particular upbringing and environment, yet she insists on accepting full responsibility for the consequences of her actions.

F. R. Leavis, discussing Daniel Deronda in The Great Tradition, finds The Portrait of a Lady lacking in moral substance by comparison. He finds fault with James for freeing Isabel Archer from the economic and social pressures which force Gwendolen Harleth’s choice, and then demanding uncritical homage and admiration for her when all the time we ought to be blaming her for ignoring the advice of Mr Touchett, Ralph Touchett, and Lord Warburton. On the contrary, the admiration and homage James tries to exact are entirely her due; more so, indeed, than in Gwendolen Harleth’s case, where the economic and social pressures do, despite what Leavis says, mitigate our critical response. By freeing Isabel from these external pressures, James makes her final choice even more praiseworthy, especially since she has every excuse for evading this responsibility, as Caspar Goodwood points out in his last interview with her:

Why shouldn’t we be happy - when it’s here before us, when it’s so easy? I’m yours for ever - for ever and ever.

Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. What have you to care about? You’ve no children; that perhaps would be an obstacle. As it is, you’ve nothing to consider. You must save what you can of your life; you mustn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part ... I swear, as I stand here, that a woman deliberately made to suffer is justified in anything in life - in going down into the streets if that will help her! I know how you suffer, and that’s why I’m here. We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this? (55)

This appeal, which she resists only by making the supreme effort of her life, clarifies her decision: ‘She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.' Surely Isabel’s integ-

rity, preserved in the face of such great provocation, does not, if we are making the correct responses, make for moral incoherence in the book. It can be argued that the actual choice she makes is wrong - that she has the wrong conception of where her duty lies - but even this argument is really untenable.

This discussion has taken us too far ahead, and we must now return to Isabel’s attempts to come to terms with European civilization, something she achieves only by what seems like an act of rationalization. It is not that her moral sensibility is submerged by an aestheticism like Osmond’s, but that the ‘moral retreat’ she has hitherto needed when confronted by declarations of love from Warburton and Osmond is no longer necessary, given her changed ideals: ‘The desire for unlimited expansion had been succeeded in her soul by the sense that life was vacant without some private duty that might gather one’s energies to a point . . . she could surrender to[Osmond]with a kind of humility, she could marry him with a kind of pride; she was not only taking, she was giving’ (35). It may be thought that this decision denotes a puritanism far more deeply rooted than that displayed by any of James’s conventional puritans in the novel, and that eventually it is detrimental to the ‘personal life’ and ‘completed consciousness’ Isabel wishes to cultivate. But what must be insisted on here is her reaction to the European’s preoccupation with the ‘world’ and with ‘things’. This comes out best in one of her conversations with Madame Merle. Madame Merle speaks first:

‘When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see that every human being has his shell and you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? Where does it begin, where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and than it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things] One’s self - for other people - is one’s expression of oneself; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive. . . .’

‘I don’t agree with you. I think just the other way. I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one.’

(19)

What we are presented with by Madame Merle represents the real sterility of European civilization; it is sterile because the moral sensibility abdicates in favour of the aesthetic, and, paradoxically, because of a morbid preoccupation with ‘self’, totally unlike Isabel’s healthy introversion. These defects show themselves most clearly in Gilbert Osmond, who lives exclusively for the aesthetic value of‘forms’ while having no conception of the values underlying them. This is the basic situation behind much egotism, where the egotist must depend entirely on the people and things which he so despises. In analysing Osmond’s egotism, James writes what is, in his own words, ‘obviously the best thing in the book’. 7 At this point he is most closely engaged with his subject, for he is also defining the limitations and shortcomings of a whole society.

It remains only to discuss James’s concern with what he calls ‘the dusky old-world expedient’ of renunciation, and this brings us back to my earlier remarks about the significance of Isabel’s choice in returning to Osmond. It is plain that her moral integrity at least must be acknowledged, but James insists that the reader be prepared to go beyond this and accept that her decision implies neither renunciation nor defeat. Isabel herself realizes that: ‘Deep in her soul - deeper than any appetite for renunciation - was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come’ (53). And the realization is made even more explicit in her last conversation with Ralph Touchett. He has asked her whether or not she will return to Osmond:

‘Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That’s not the deepest thing; there’s something deeper.’ ... ‘It passes, after all; it’s passing now. But love remains. I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out. There are many things in life. You’re very young.’

‘I feel very old’ said Isabel.

You’ll grow young again. That’s how I see you ... I don’t believe that such a generous mistake as yours can hurt you for more than a little.’ (54)

Such is Ralph Touchett’s view. And we can be certain that it is the one we are meant to endorse.

If we compare this to the ending of The Wings of the Dove (1902), where the dying Millie Thcale symbolically turns her ‘face to the wall’ there can be no doubt about the moral cohesion and artistic integrity of The Portrait o f a Lady.

James had hoped that his two realistic novels of the mid-1880s, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima , with their overtly social and

political subjects, would rekindle his popularity and capture for him a larger share of the market. When this did not happen, he turned to other projects and experiments in the 1890s, producing stories about artists for The Yellow Book , ghost stories including his masterpiece in the genre, The Turn of the'Screw (1898), unsuccessful plays, and novels in which he experimented brilliantly with technique such as What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1898). What characterizes most of his writing at this time is a growing preoccupation with the problem of dramatizing the individual consciousness. In his efforts to give more immediate inner life to his characters - efforts which incidentally were being made simultaneously by other Europeans such as Eduard Dujardin who was experimenting with primitive stream-of-consciousness techniques - James temporarily let his larger themes fall into abeyance. But in the early years of the new century, having discovered how to make the vital connections between inner and outer worlds, he created - ten years before Joyce and Proust - the first major modernist masterpieces, The Wings oj the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Critical opinion remains sharply divided by these late, strange novels. There are those opposed to the whole modernist enterprise, who see them as a betrayal of realism, some detect in their author a sentimental surrender to European decadence and thus an even worse betrayal of America itself; others, looking through the texts rather than at them, have discovered archaic religious allegories hidden in them; and for some readers they represent the final consummation, if not of nineteenth-century American fiction, then certainly of James’s own extensive life’s work.

A desire to tease from the artist’s work a coherent and rounded philosophy - the extracted essence of a lifetime’s experience or the painstaking translation into art of another’s philosophical system -must be counted as one of the major temptations for the literary critic. The temptation is almost irresistible in the case of James’s The Ambassadors, The Wings oj the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Quentin Anderson’s interpretation is only one of many that make the mistake of looking through James’s text rather than at it. 8 What such criticisms usually have in common is an insistence that James intends the opposite of what he appears to be saying, or that his words can be made to mean anything at all. Caroline Gordon provides a nice example of the latter fault in her essay tracing archetypal patterns of Christianity in the late novels:

‘It is significant, I think, that James turns Mr. Verver into a hero with the same gesture he uses to turn Chad into a villain; the characteristic gesture of hands thrust into the pockets.’ 9

James himself provides the best answer to these critics and the best introduction to the real themes of the novels in his working notes. Though he is writing about The Ambassadors , his remarks are true of the others, too. He sees the novel not as a secret history of the Church or as a condemnation of self-righteousness, but rather as a demonstration ot one man’s moral expansion as he is brought to an awareness that the values entrenched in American puritanism and provincialism are inadequate for full appreciation ol the subtle and various qualities of life in a civilized community.

Lambert Strether, a middle-aged American, is sent to Paris from Woollett, Mass., by Mrs Newsome in order to rescue her son Chad from the immoral life they are both sure he must be leading. Success in this enterprise will enable Strether to marry Mrs Newsome and attain the ‘consideration and comfort of security’ which his life has so far lacked. Thus James creates once more the familiar pattern of the submission of New World innocence to European experience. Strether proceeds by way of a number of crises to a ‘total’ view of life - which makes it possible for him finally to ‘see’ Mrs Newsome and evaluate his own experience. His growing awareness of the ‘emptiness’ of Woollett and all it stands for is concretely rendered at each stage of his initiation into the life of Paris. The first intimation that there may exist a finer, more intuitive existence than he had hitherto imagined is obliquely introduced by way of an architectural image. James juxtaposes the secondary hotel in which Strether is installed - ‘all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase’ - with Chad’s home:

High, broad, clear — he was expert enough to make out in a moment that it was admirably built - it fairly embarrassed our friend by the quality that, as he would have said, it ‘sprang’ on him . . . the quality produced by measure and balance, the fine relation of part to part and space to space, was probably - aided by the presence of ornament as positive as it was discreet, and by the complexion of the stone, a cold, fair grey, warmed and polished a little by life - neither more nor less than a case of distinction, such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort of delivered challenge?(5)

James has come a long way in such passages from his early attempts to relate man to his created environment. In all his fiction he tries to avoid using setting as mere backdrop for action. Even as early as Roderick Hudson (1876), he does not introduce the ‘clear white houses’ of New England just for local colour as Rebecca West maintained, but as a reminder of the ‘kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect absence of temptation’; in short, of the things his

young artist would have to sacrifice in Europe. Lambert Strether is in many ways an older version of Roderick, but now James has learned how to create the moral conflict within his character’s consciousness rather than impose it from outside.

Strether’s first real revelation in the novel is also partly a product of his situation, and the effect upon him of his civilized surroundings. He uses the occasion for a speech based on an anecdote concerning W. D. Howells which, as James reminds us in his Preface, contains the ‘whole case’ of the novel: ‘Never can a composition of this sort have sprung straighter from a dropped grain of suggestion.’ The essence of The Ambassadors is, he says, contained in the following exhortation:

‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? . . .

I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before - and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see.’ (11)

This is the vision to which Strether eventually comes. It is the ‘precious moral’ of everything, and the interest lies largely in Strether’s attempts to retain that vision in the face of any shock that might win him back to ‘the principles of Woollett’. This shock comes when he discovers by accident that Chad and Madame de Vionnet are lovers, and they act out for him the lie ‘in the charming affair’. However, his experience has fitted him now to approach such facts in a new way, and his vision remains essentially unimpaired. He has participated in and contributed to ‘life’ by becoming ‘with his perceptions and his mistakes, his concessions and his reserves, the droll mixture, as it must seem to them, of his braveries and his fears, the general spectacle of his art and his innocence ... a common priceless ground for them to meet upon.’(32) If one’s moral vibrations are the test of life, then Strether has lived, and the fact of his having done so and the importance James attaches to the point make nonsense of Anderson’s contention that ‘Strether is the worst of us all’.

So it is that Lambert Strether is on the side of ‘life’, and the novel is, in Philip Rahv’s words, ‘a veritable declaration of the rights of man - not to be sure, of the rights of the public or the social man, but of the rights of the private man, of the rights of personality, whose openness to experience provides the sole effective guaranty of its development’. 10 what remains to be examined is the actual quality of the experience to which Strether submits himself, and the role of the individual consciousness which become in the late novels the touchstone for the testing of all values. These considerations are forced on us by the subtleties of the late manner, which for some critics at least

represents a ‘doing’ disproportionate to the issues - ‘to any issues that are concretely held and presented’. There are no objective sanctions for such judgements, which depend upon individual taste and a sense of proportion. But it at least helps to clarify the importance of the issues involved if James’s concept of consciousness is historically sited. This will serve the dual purpose of clarifying his relation to the civilization coming into being during his lifetime, and free him from the artificial ties with which Anderson seeks to bind him to his father . 11 It may also throw a little light on the way in which, as James becomes more immersed in the presentation of individual consciousness, he relies increasingly on the power of symbol and myth.

Emerson, in his essay ‘The Transcendentalist’, affirms the overriding importance of consciousness:

The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance . . . [he] has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history are only subjective phenomena.

(. Miscellanies )

This last view Emerson illustrates at some length in his essay ‘History’:

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty site where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike.

And Thoreau, who retired to the woods in order to ‘suck out all the marrow of life’, claimed in Walden that: ‘if I am overflowing with

life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable and every natural phenomenon be a myth’. And as he says elsewhere, ‘A fact truly and absolutely stated . . . acquires a mythological or universal significance.’ The world as appearance'- the poetic and symbolic content of historical fact - and the impressionistic use of these facts all suggest the late novels; the James who, at the very end of his life, became obsessed by the figure of Napoleon, and who images states of consciousness in the language of great public events:

Strether had all along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connection with such matters as these - odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and divinations with no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper - or perhaps simply the smell of blood. (32)

But even when James appears to be disagreeing with the Transcen-dentalists’ view of the world, he does so in imagery curiously akin to theirs. Consider, for example, these two passages, one taken from The Ambassadors and the other from Emerson’s essay, ‘The Transcendentalist’:

The affair - I mean the affair of life - couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted or embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, the helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured - so that one ‘takes’ the form, as the great cook says. (11)

I - this thought which is called I - is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.

There is, I think, ample evidence to establish James’s dependence not on his father’s unique Swedenborgian system but on the native intellectual climate of which they both partook.

There is, of course, another side to James’s preoccupation with what he called ‘the essence of life’. In an important sense he is a product of the trend discussed elsewhere - the trend in a mass society towards isolation of the individual. R. P. Blackmur has discussed the plight of this individual whose consciousness, he says, we burden beyond our previous measure: ‘We make him in our art, especially the art of litera-

ture, assume the whole weight of the cultural establishment. . . . There is only the succession of creative consciousness - each of which is an attempt to incorporate, to give body to, to incarnate, as much as it is possible to experience, to feel it, the life of the times.’ 12

Blackmur’s point also suggests some of the ways in which modern criticism has attempted to go beyond the formalist interpretations made by the New Critics who rehabilitated James in the 1940s and 1950s. It has done so either by exploring the social complications James anticipated in 1879, and discovering new contexts for his fiction, or, as John Carlos Rowe does, by actually probing the formal aspects of James’s art to uncover their underlying significance. 13

Rowe attempts to combat the narrowness of traditional formalist criticism by using an approach developed by Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious. This is based upon the idea that a culture’s power or ideology is the consequence of a dynamic interrelation of different forces which are given expression in typical forms. It is the ‘ideology of form’ that thus becomes the ultimate aim of critical understanding. Rowe illustrates this approach in a subtle analysis of The Princess Casamassima , but he also explores the limits of Feminist and Psychoanalytic criticism in essays on The Bostonians, The Spoils o/Poynton, ‘The Aspern Papers’, and ‘The Turn of the Screw’. 14 He also makes use of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety oj Influence to suggest a more complex relationship between James and Hawthorne on the one hand, and a reinterpretation of Trollope’s influence on the other. Rowe argues that James’s defence against his fears of being associated with the ‘scribbling tribe’ of popular women authors who dominated the literary scene prior to his own emergence, was to transpose his ‘femininity’ or androgyny into an aesthetic quality which he then identified as the most salient feature of the ‘modern author’.

Another recent attempt to relate Henry James to ‘American masculinity, its violent rites of passage, the Civil War, the rough and tumble of primitive capitalism, and female culture in the 1860s and 1870s’ occupies a major part of Alfred Habegger’s book, Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature. Habegger maintains that the day-dreams embodied in domestic novels written by popular women authors presented an ideological challenge to American men that was taken up in the 1870s and 1880s by James and more particularly by Howells. Together they succeeded in pushing back ‘the borders of fantasyland’ by giving new features to standard character types, and by exhibiting characters in their true relations with one another.

The source of those forces or fantasies that combine to create a culture’s dominant ideology, will necessarily be located differently by individual critics according to a variety of factors that condition their particular judgements. Elizabeth Allen, for example, whose book on

James resembles Habegger’s methodologically, in that it explores the development of a conflict in the fiction between woman as sign and woman as self, uncovers different sources for the myth of ‘true womanhood’, against which James’s heroines struggle to redefine themselves. 15 Moreover,’as she, and other Feminist critics point out, the difficulty of reading or ‘decoding’James is further compounded by contemporary myths which continue to distort the vision of ‘phallic critics’. 16

Despite these difficulties the revision of James’s fiction and discussion of its place within the canon of American literature, has been given fresh impetus by the proliferation of new critical theories in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the entire map of nineteenth-century fiction, confidently drawn in the post-war period by such critics as Richard Chase, Lionel Trilling, R. W. B. Lewis, and Leo Marx, is beginning to lose authority as new explorers give their accounts of another terrain with quite different features occupying the same historical space. As the Modernist movement itself recedes into the past, it is gradually getting easier to discern more clearly its outlines and dimensions. These will determine the shape and scope of the second part of this study.

Notes

1. Henry James Letters, vol 1, 1843-1875, edited by Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), p. 77.

2. Henry James, Hawthorne (London, 1879), see ch. 5.

3. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years, edited by Frederick W. Dupee (London, 1956), p. 549.

4. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), p. 299.

5. See Autobiography, Ch. 8.

6. James discussed his own fiction at great length in his notebooks and in the Prefaces to the New York edition of his work. These writings have been published in separate volumes: The Notebooks of Henry James, edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1947), and The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, edited by R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934).

7. Art of the Novel, p. 57.

8. Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, NJ, 1957).

9. Caroline Gordon, ‘Adam Verver, our National Hero’, Sewanee Review, 63 (1955). p. 44.

10. Philip Rahv, Image and Idea, (London, 1957), p. 8.

11. In a later essay, ‘Henry James’s Cultural Office’, Prospects, 8 (1983), 197-210, Quentin Anderson extends his thesis and discusses James’s Emersonian subversion of the nineteenth-century social world.

12. R. P. Blackmur, ‘The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James’, Studies in Henry James, edited with an introduction by Veronica A. Makowsky (New York, 1983). p. 144.

13. John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions oj Henry James (London, 1985). For a broader application of theory see his earlier book, Through the Custom-House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore and London, 1982).

14. For an example of a psychoanalytic reading of James that uses modern (Lacaman) theories see Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 94-207.

15. Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James (London, 1984).

16. See, for example, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1978).

*

Part Two:

‘The American

Century’,

1900-1940

Chapter 7

Introduction

Attempts to reassert traditional American social ideals, particularly those of freedom, equality, and individualism, or their abandonment under pressure from ideologies spawned by the later developments of industrial capitalism and a consumer-orientated society, must feature among the more significant strands of American intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth century. These struggles, sometimes conducted in the abstract and at others given body by political acts and movements, provide particularly illuminating contexts for the study of the novel, making taxonomic sense of a multitude of seemingly diverse, even meaningless, literary events. The map of the second half of this history is designed to show the various streams of realism continuing to flow throughout the modern period and being replenished and revitalized by new tributaries, while at the same time a major literary counterforce develops out of all the minor ‘anti-modern’ reactions to realism in the 1890s to form a part of the international movement which is paradoxically called Modernism.

The justification for such a name lies in the fact that the writers who embraced its ideals found intellectual support for their world-view in the new ideas propounded by scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers who were themselves reacting against the accelerating mechanization of life and the progressive dehumanization of the individual. American realists, on the other hand, equally troubled by new social developments, were less willing to abandon traditional values and ideas and sought initially to redefine such concepts as liberty and individualism in the interests of the very real material benefits brought by machine technology and collectivization. The political orientations of such writers, though important, are from our point of view relative, not primary. As Lincoln Steffens noted early in the century, ‘big business was producing what the Socialists held up as their goal: food, shelter and clothing for all'. In the 1930s, after the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing economic depression, it became a different matter, and like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, many realists came to place their art in the service of revolutionary politics.

The major social and economic phenomenon, then, determining these responses was the continuation and consolidation of the processes set in motion much earlier by the founding of trusts and corporations; organizations devised to maximize the efficiency of the production, distribution, and sale of goods on an unprecedentedly large scale. Such causal connections are notoriously complex and difficult to establish with any certainty, but it would be futile to deny the close relations obtaining between these large-scale business organizations and almost every significant aspect of American life in the period. Immigration, urbanization, imperialism, consumerism, technological development, the mass media - in short all the features that help to define the distinctive quality of life in modern America - are affected by the demands of capitalism. The history of these various manifestations has been painstakingly described and needs no rehearsal here, but one example will help to establish the kind of connection that 1 wish to emphasize between society and the products of the individual imagination.

In the winter of 1866-67, when Mark Twain made his momentous decision to quit the west coast, it took him twenty-eight days to travel from San Francisco to New York. In 1870 America was an emptier country than it was to become by the outbreak of the First World War, and despite the existence of the transcontinental railroad, Americans were still living in communities very much isolated both from each other and from the rest of the world. The general conquest of American space, as opposed to the tenuous links set up by the railroad, was made possible first by the invention and then the mass production of the automobile, together with the construction of a huge network of roads. The existence by 1915 of two and a half million cars and thousands of miles of good roads radically changed the individual’s perception of his environment and his relation to it, something reinforced even more by the simultaneous development of powered flight which culminated in Lindbergh’s historic crossing of the Atlantic in 1927. Even more significant in some respects were the accompanying developments in radio and telephone communication. When New York was connected to San Francisco in 1913, it could be claimed that American technology had conquered both space and time. A month had become a moment, and the conditions now obtained which were to take the world into Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’.

To determine whether these changes came about in order to satisfy the needs of a rapidly expanding business civilization or were consequent upon it, is less important for our purposes than to place them in relation to their effect upon individual consciousnesses. This is not as simple as it may seem and will certainly not result in any neat demarcation between modernists and realists, for example. The best

one can hope for is that a few general trends may be discerned which, taken together with many other factors, will help to map the chart of literary history.

The most fundamental aspect of nineteenth-century realism and its essential defining characteristic is the belief in a dynamic relation between man and his environment. The various disputes about realism considered in Chapter 3 do not impinge upon this axiom so much as other different ways of demonstrating the relationship. Empirical philosophy, Newtonian physics, Darwinism, whether biological or social, and Marxist economics, are all indicative of a world-view in which space and time are assumed to have absolute, independent validity. Man’s individuality is a product of his social context, and the proper task of literature is to show how changes in one produce changes in the other. For such writers and their successors, the changes brought by scientific and technological advances at the end of the century did not necessarily entail a radical reappraisal of basic philosophy, even though they may have been forced to consider the social effects of man’s enhanced ability to manipulate his spatial and temporal context.

When Frederick Winslow Taylor conducted his famous shovelling experiment - an early time and motion study in the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania in the 1890s - he not only saved the company a great deal of money by reorganizing the shape of the plant and the movements of workers within it, but also laid the foundation for a new social ethic. ‘In the past’, he said, ‘the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.’ The acceptance of this doctrine and its implementation by industrialists who immediately understood that time and space really did mean money, has changed the nature of our world and therefore of human nature, too. Behaviourism in psychology, no less than shifts in population or even changes in architectural styles, can only be properly understood in relation to such ideas.

It will be obvious, for example, that the ideals of freedom and individualism referred to above could only survive with great difficulty in this new intellectual ethos. Taylor himself, reluctant to abandon such cherished concepts, was fully aware of the implications of his work. In his book The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) he tried desperately to yoke them to the concept of co-operation, arguing that though the stop-watch and the flow chart demand of each man that he perform ‘that function for which he is best suited’, nevertheless ‘each man at the same time loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men’. 1

The ways in which these issues are dealt with, different degrees of

emphasis being given to the human, social, or political dimensions, lie behind the organization and specialization at all levels of man’s life, behind internal migrations whether forced or voluntary, behind continued immigration, the rise of totalitarian states, Fascist or Communist, war, strikes 1 , and poverty; these are the themes that give body to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Henry Roth, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. What is truly distinctive in their work is not its subject-matter, though; many modernist writers treat the same problems in their fiction. It is rather the common attempt to preserve humane, rational values in opposition to all the forces bent on extinguishing them, and the structural and stylistic strategies adopted to achieve this end. The essentially mimetic art of the realists is the primary evidence for their belief in an objective, independent reality that obeys certain rational laws. It is this belief which distinguishes them from their modernist contemporaries, and as the century wears on, begins to make them appear rather old-fashioned and slightly alien to the main aesthetic and intellectual developments.

The deeper intellectual currents which began to gather strength at the turn of the century and were eventually to erode nearly all the certainties of the past, had many different sources and tributaries. It would be inappropriate to attempt here a description of the intellectual revolution that gave birth to Modernism, but a few examples may serve to indicate how thoroughly nineteenth-century thought was being undermined by physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychologists, who were thus laying the foundations for something new in literature.

At about the same time that Frederick Winslow Taylor was applying the strict laws of causality to time and movement in Pennsylvania, a French philosopher, Henri Bergson, was just as busily rejecting them in an effort to provide a solution to the kind of paradoxes to which they gave rise. His flash of intuition in Clermont-Ferrand helped him to solve Zeno’s paradox which states that no matter how fast Achilles runs in an attempt to catch and overtake the tortoise, he cannot succeed because for every unit of space he covers, the tortoise will, in turn, continue to cover a further unit, however small, and will, therefore, always remain ahead. Bergson’s solution, which eventually came to involve a sustained attack on mechanistic thinking in general and formed the basis for his life’s work, lay in a refusal to express time and motion in terms of space or distance. Instead of binding these concepts inextricably together as Taylor did, for example, he saw that time as experienced in the individual consciousness - duration - was not a feature of the physical world at