The Columbia History of the American Novel

Introduction

As the single most severe disruption in America's political economy, the Civil War has often come to mark an important watershed in the nation's literary history as well. If, as Walt Whitman predicted in Specimen Days (1875-76), the "hell and the black infernal background" of the war would remain relatively "unwritten" for decades, its social repercussions naturally made their way into fictional representation: into the new forms of wage slavery dramatized in Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861); into Henry Adams's Democracy (1880), where postbellum Mugwump reform was satirized as washing a "donkey's head"; into William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), which bore witness to the pain and guilt of newly integrated market economies; into the bitter pages of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which burlesqued the invidiousness of Jim Crow and the color line. American commoners, often the symbol and occasionally the brunt of these social conditions, were given central "title" over national fiction: names like Lapham, Carrie, Jekl, or Maggie now appeared before the eyes of American readers. But these experiments in social "realism," and after it "naturalism" — the labels with which literary historians have usually marked the dominant conventions of this period — only loosely describe the narrative modes of the late nineteenth-century novel. At a deeper level, postbellum History pushed these traditionally individuating moral economies of the novel to new limits — evincing what Georg Lukács once called a struggle of an essentially biographical form to master the "bad infinity" of het-157- erogeneous social events. If the Gilded Age institutionalized the novel as never before in American culture, the form also became a locus of unease and dissent — simultaneously an expression of unstable centers and new challenges at the boundaries of American literary life.

At such centers of institutionalized literary culture in the North — in cities like Boston, among gentlemanly publishing houses, and at family magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, or The Century — the Reconstruction-era project of shoring up antebellum genteel culture initially meant disdaining both novelistic versimilitude and the "sensational" melodrama of cheap fiction in favor of more sedate, idealized, and usually historical romance. Fiction continued to be guarded against what Victorian critics called unhealthy "tendencies." Meanwhile, throughout the period genteel magazines would underwrite a variety of regional recovery projects — picturesque renditions of ostensibly disappearing local cultures — thus exhibiting a nostalgia that often subtly underwrote a growing political reconciliation of North and South (with disastrous consequences for African Americans). Even Howells's editorial challenge to romantic fiction from his post at the Atlantic assumed that the conventional realism customarily associated with the novel — initially modeled upon the knowable community of Jane Austen — would sustain "sanity" and balance in the American republic, provide a consensual middle-class culture by portraying "men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and passions in the measure we all know."

Yet the hegemony of such guardianship was always incomplete. Even Howells's "measure" could only be a nostalgic standard, an attempt to hold a moderate republican American center against the signs of the times: against European and Asian immigration (nearly nine million new arrivals between 1880 and 1900); against growingly bellicose expansionism, so evident in the Spanish-American War of 1898; against spasmodic class warfare and violence in the railroad strikes of 1877, the Haymarket Riot (1886), the Homestead strike (1892). In Howells's adopted home of Massachusetts, there were hundreds of strikes in the 1880s alone. Much of late Victorian literary culture dramatized whether the Howellsian center would (or should) hold. In other hands, the novel would be both formally more varied and ideologically more radical than the "Dean" envisioned: in the sociopolitical comedies of immigrant life by the Russian American -158- Abraham Cahan; in the openly discursive, spiritualized gender myths of Sarah Orne Jewett (who readapted the conventions of local color); in the political refashioning of historical romance by African American magazinist Pauline Hopkins; in the Cinderella class fables of Laura Jean Libbey.

Of course, the quarrel and the reciprocity between boundary and center, affirmation and dissent, never quite disappeared even as realism fragmented — and as the marketplace expanded. Even among the writers above, dependent as they were upon an audience created by their own professionalization, the challenge was often to work through popular forms that had received Victorian sanction. Among the seemingly naturalistic writers Howells greeted so uneasily as his logical successors — Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, or muckrakers like Jack London, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair — the sway of popular romance had hardly been forsaken. True, some measure of change can be felt in the new literary explorations of the slum, the factory, the "mysteries of the city" — subjects at which Howells had once only shuddered. The new material bounties of industrial society, however, were hardly disdained altogether. Despite the dark ruminations of a Twain or a Henry Adams, the industrial dynamo's own energy undercut many attempts at resistance. Indeed, the power and technical ingenuity of machine culture, and the mass spectacles of consumption it often created — in the hands of a Crane, a Dreiser, a Wharton, or a Henry James — became the substance of fictions that mixed their doubts with celebratory awe. In these ways, the turn-ofthe-century novel registered the war's final, yet mixed victory: a new North and a New South, a populace "unified" and allured by mass consumption — the nation's productive reach enhanced within its territories and without — yet a society still internally divided over the spoils.

Christopher P. Wilson

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Realism

"At the Station" opens with a passage that sounds familiar, perhaps because it is from a Howells or Twain story we can't quite place. "Nothing could well be more commonplace or ignoble than the corner of the world in which Miss Dilly now spent her life," the story begins. "A wayside inn, near a station on the railway which runs from Salisbury, in North Carolina, up into the great Appalachian range of mountains; two or three unpainted boxes of houses scattered along the track by the inn; not a tree nor blade of grass in the 'clarin'; a few gaunt, long-legged pigs and chickens grunting and cackling in the muddy clay yards; beyond, swampy tobacco fields stretching to the encircling pine woods." The emphasis on the commonplace, on the ignored or despised; the attention to the unpainted houses, the muddy clay yards, and the gaunt pigs and chickens — or their human equivalents; the possibility of sympathy and satire; the awareness of regions and regional differences; the sensitivity to American dialects and their class and racial implications; the conversational middle — and middle-class — style, vocabulary, and syntax; the focus on Miss Dilly, not on Captain Ahab or Leatherstocking — here is a preliminary list of the traits of American realism. Because Rebecca Harding Davis is not working at the height of her powers in At the Station (1892), the story, unlike her pioneering Life in the Iron Mills (1861), does not take us deep into the unexplored territory of America's emerging industrial capitalism or make us see the complex realities of money and power that were affecting women and men in the new America. The first generation -160- of American realists, however, writers who began publishing during or soon after the Civil War, authors as different as Davis and James, Twain and Howells, each gave distinctive individual accounts of these vital, disruptive forces. By the end of the century they and successors like Charles Chesnutt had also probed the complexities of race in post-Civil War America.

They did so as professional authors who were personally engaged in writing for the market in the new entertainment industry. Their insights, conflicts, compromises, and triumphs are inseparable from their experience in the new world of mass markets, advertising, and big money. These developments had begun before the Civil War but accelerated as the scale of production expanded, the railroad system was completed, and the need to create consumer demand intensified. The corrosive, vital power of an expanding market society undermined moral, religious, and social stabilities. No wonder that a questioning of conventions and the conventional is perhaps the central unifying convention of American realism.

In their literary criticism the writers explicitly questioned conventions and the conventional. In his Declaration of Independence, The Art of Fiction (1884), Henry James affirmed the creator's freedom to choose both subject and approach, even as James defied the "keep off the grass signs" of the guardians of official taste. Even a writer as moderate as William Dean Howells, America's minister of culture, argued against the demand for a conventional love plot and all it signified, particularly a focus on marriage as the goal of life and an avoidance of the full range of contemporary concerns. After the Haymarket Riot in 1886 Howells attempted to explore the energies that were transforming American cities and threatening the moral and religious ideals he believed American writers should celebrate. The conflict between his desire to affirm his Emersonian values as the prevailing American reality and his commitment to render honestly what was happening in the new America goes to the heart of Howells's dilemma as an American realist. Mark Twain, for his part, ridiculed James Fenimore Cooper's conventions, which in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (1895) emerge as the improbabilities, exaggerations, and stilted language of the Leatherstocking tales. Twain is in effect arguing for a new set of conventions privileging the spoken language and fidelity to ordinary experience. -161-

Although we can create a composite portrait of American realism, differences and diversity are crucial. James, for example, had serious reservations about what he saw as Rebecca Harding Davis's sentimentality and the value she attributed to ordinary characters. Twain's colloquial immediacy is far removed from James's language and upper-class social world. Unlike the Europeans centering on Balzac and later on Flaubert and later still on Zola, we did not really have a school of American realism. Both in critical theory and in literary practice, moreover, the questioning of convention and the other formal and substantive traits all have antecedents in the work of earlier American writers, in the colloquial dialogue of Melville's Redburn (1849), for example, the sensitivity to the details of place in Hawthorne, or the practical, Yankee side of Emerson. It is a matter of degree, of emphasis. Similarly, younger authors like Dreiser, Crane, and Cather built on and reacted against what often seemed to them the timidity and limitations of the first-generation realists. In nineteenth-century America "realism" is a relational term defined partly by what people in a particular generation were accustomed to accept as plausible and lifelike, partly by what they responded to as pushing toward and beyond the boundaries of middle-class acceptability.

The first-generation realists and their successors did justice to the surfaces of American life through the conventions of presentational realism — plausibly rendered speech, recognizable settings and recognizable characters facing everyday problems, all open to the interpretation of a middle-class, predominantly feminine audience. American realists also penetrated beneath the surface to engage with the underlying energies of men, women, and society in the Gilded Age. I will be examining some of the ways significant writers during and in the decades immediately after the Civil War rendered their sense of the surfaces and depths of American social and psychological life. "Conventions" has a ring of traditionalism at odds with what they were committed to. But the term usefully highlights the constructed nature of the enterprise both for the writers and for us.

For James's contemporaries, his The Portrait of a Lady (1881) was — and remains for us — an exemplary representative of American realism. Early in the book James describes the Archers' old double -162- house in Albany and the full family life connected with it. James then carries Isabel Archer into the recesses of her childhood past and into the recesses of her favorite room, "a mysterious apartment" filled with old furniture with which "she had established relations almost human." The double house, the humanized room, and the sense of an inner life establish an intimate connection between house and self. Like the house, Isabel's self is divided or at least pulled in opposing directions. The door to the mysterious room is bolted, the door's sidelights are covered with green paper, and though as a little girl Isabel knew the door opened out onto the street "she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side — a place which became to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror." Like the Emerson who celebrates the inner life of the self-sufficient individual, in this version Isabel looks inward into the depths of the imagination, creates a drama of delight or terror, and on principle avoids testing her theories against what she will find on "the vulgar street." As an adult in this same room she blithely tells her aunt, "I don't know anything about money." It is not really fair to equate Emerson, inwardness, and the imagination with the romantic and the street and money with realism. Emerson, after all, spoke for the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, and Isabel has an immense appetite for experience. In part James conceives Isabel so that he can explore a conflict between two sides of his American cultural heritage. As an American writer and realist, he is especially sensitive to the issue of the reliability of the imagination under the pressure of money and the vulgar street.

For James, the imagination and the inner self are not isolated or reified. In Isabel's case they are intimately related to her sexuality. James has Isabel encounter a series of suitors. "Deep in her soul — it was the deepest thing there — lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive." The thought causes "alarms" that become increasingly intense. She is cold toward Lord Warburton because of "a certain fear." The drama builds because James keeps the sources of the fear unspecified and the entire issue in suspension.

As a representative American, Isabel often fuses the language of American political culture with the language of Emersonian self-163- reliance. "I like my liberty too much," Isabel says to justify turning down Lord Warburton. She continues in the accents of a Fourth of July address or of the Declaration of Independence, "it's my personal independence. . my love of liberty." Or in a recognizably Emersonian mode, "I only want to see for myself." Isabel's pursuit of happiness is a central concern, as is her fear that in marrying Lord Warburton she will be escaping unhappiness, "what most people know and suffer." In rejecting Lord Warburton, Isabel is affirming the American values of independence and love of liberty as over against the security of established English wealth, landed property, and aristocratic position.

Inseparable from this drama of conflicting political cultures is the depth of Isabel's feelings, expressed in a characteristically Jamesian metaphor. Isabel resists like "some wild, caught creature in a vast cage." Although Isabel often sees Lord Warburton as kind, he can also emerge "with his hands behind him giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop." As a potent male keeper, "booted and spurred," Lord Warburton thus plays a part in a submerged drama of sexual politics, a drama that is much more open with her American suitor, Caspar Goodwood. Isabel's feelings about sexual power, her own and her suitors', animate the overt drama of mind and values. "Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?" Isabel thinks. "What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than these large, these fabulous occasions? If she wouldn't do such a thing as that then she must do great things, she must do something greater." She worries that she is "a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself."

James throws further light on the self Isabel fears after the dilettante Gilbert Osmond declares his love. "What made her dread great," James reiterates, "was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread — the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there," James stresses, "like a large sum stored in a bank — which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out." On this view the self is not a wellspring of infinitely renewable energy but a bank, a repository of -164- a finite sum of money. James reveals that the market society has infiltrated the deepest recesses of the self, even of Isabel Archer, who knows nothing about money. Her fear of "giving herself completely" is a complex fusion of her fastidiousness, her desire for independence, her unwillingness to subordinate and cage herself, her deep feelings about sexual power and powerlessness, and her mixed feelings about money and all it stands for.

Caspar Goodwood inspires the deepest fear of any of the suitors because he directly expresses his sexual passion. Throughout her last meeting with Goodwood, Isabel is "frightened" at his "violence." She feels "she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which others dropped dead. . the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, forced open her set teeth." Death and sexual love merge as James's imagery enacts the physical emotions connected with a fierce seduction or rape. Isabel "floated in fathomless waters. . in a rushing torrent." Sounds come to her "harsh and terrible. . in her own swimming head." "She panted" when she pleads with Goodwood" to go away." Instead, "he glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed." In the conventions of the period a kiss, reinforced by James's imagery, has the force of sexual intercourse. For Isabel, Goodwood's "hard manhood," his "aggressive" physical presence, culminates in an "act of possession." The possession is sexual but also involves the issues of freedom, independence, and money. Osmond sees Isabel as a commodity, as his prize possession. In returning to Osmond, a choice open to multiple interpretations, Isabel is in part fleeing from the intensities of Goodwood's passion, from the possession he threatens, although overtly he argues for their complete freedom to do what they please. Isabel, however, is also affirming her independence and rejecting her status as a possession as both Goodwood and Osmond define possession.

In a possessive market society, money is the ultimate commodity, the ultimate possession. Isabel wants to see for herself, to judge for herself, but she does not know anything about money. She is also torn between her impulse to know the world, to throw herself into it, -165- and her impulse to trust herself, to devalue worldly possessions, and to ignore the vulgar street. After she inherits a fortune, she is afraid. "A large fortune means freedom," she tells Ralph Touchett, "and I'm afraid of that." If she failed to make good use of it, she goes on, she "would be ashamed." The stakes are high because shame is intimately connected to a sense of personal identity and self-worth.

Isabel argues for a sense of self that excludes possessions. "Nothing that belongs to me," she tells Madame Merle, "is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one." Isabel is particularly indifferent to houses and dress. Madame Merle disagrees. "What shall we call our 'self?'" she asks. "Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us — and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things! One's self — for other people — is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps — these things are all expressive." James has Madame Merle give a working definition of the self appropriate to an expanding consumer and possessive market society. On this view, the self expands or contracts in relation to possessions. "There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman," Madame Merle argues; "we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances."

Until well after her marriage Isabel does not realize the extent to which Madame Merle and Osmond, two artists, two dramatists, have manipulated her. They present Osmond as a refined man indifferent to the opinion of the world, indifferent to money, indifferent to the "cluster of appurtenances." His relative poverty allows Isabel to feel generous. She is bestowing something on a worthy recipient. The power relations are the reverse of a marriage to either Lord Warburton or Caspar Goodwood. Osmond is also much less of a masculine sexual presence than either of his rivals. Isabel imagines a Gilbert Osmond and falls in love with her own creation. In the destabilizing crosscurrents of a changing market society, the imagination is both necessary and problematic. Isabel, committed to seeing for herself, is unable to see that Osmond worships money and the opinion of the vulgar society he professes to despise.

James tests and qualifies Isabel's view of the self and imagination. -166-

He probes the web of sexual and market society pressures that affect the way she sees. In a patrician green world apparently far removed from the vulgar street, James reveals that even for Isabel Archer, profit, money, and gain are at the center of her marriage, just as they have penetrated to the center of her self.

In James's version of psychological realism, he uses metaphoric language to take us deep into a character's consciousness. James repeatedly recognizes the intimate connection between houses and selves in a possessive market society, a relation that for him has moral, psychological, and sociopolitical implications. Isabel, for example, gradually becomes aware that in marrying Osmond she is being confined in a house of darkness, that she is being imprisoned in a mind that lets in no air or light, that is a dungeon. Osmond's hatred, contempt, and egotism are overwhelming. Isabel's terror builds. The imagery is dense and deep, as are Isabel's painful moral and psychological realizations. Rooted in American political culture, her concern with freedom and independence is as alive as her eventual sense that she has been turned into a commodity, another objet d'art for Osmond to add to his collection, like the antique Roman coin he meticulously copies. James does justice both to the gradual, oblique way the mind works and to Isabel's sudden flash of awareness as she watches the intimacy between the standing Madame Merle and the seated Gilbert Osmond. But for all his sensitivity to the inner workings of the mind, James's psychological probing is not privatized. James shows the relation between the inner self and the environing world of the vulgar street.

Ironically, under Osmond's fastidious surface, under the aspect of taste, he and Madame Merle come to embody money and the vulgar street. Through Madame Merle, James exposes not metaphysical evil but the socially constructed evil of a society that places money above everything. For profit Madame Merle, gifted, aware, and sensitive, nonetheless lies to and betrays her closest friends. "'I don't pretend to know what people are meant for,' said Madame Merle. 'I only know what I can do with them.'"

In a world where Osmond and Madame Merle are dominant forces, where their imagination, art, and dramatic skill are important, the world becomes a social text that may not be incomprehensible but that is also not easy to read. Osmond and Madame Merle em-167- body the deception, manipulation of appearances, and obsession with profit that many social observers regard as basic to consumer capitalism. In his way Ralph is also manipulative but, as opposed to Osmond, Ralph is generous and loving. Ralph sees clearly that Osmond is a sterile dilettante who will grind Isabel in the mill of the conventional. Although he accurately reads the social text, Ralph is unable to prevent the marriage. Isabel comes to understand but the inner and outer obstacles are formidable.

These forces are even more pronounced in the great works of James's final phase. His concerns remained remarkably consistentthe house of the mind, the role of the imagination, and the impact of money and power on the divided self in The Jolly Corner (1908), for example, or the central role of commodities, of money, and of love and betrayal in The Golden Bowl (1905) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). James's style, however, became denser and more impenetrable, the moral and social discriminations became subtler, the ambiguities more difficult to understand. In his later works James created a style adequate to render his sense of the emerging twentieth century. For James, the impact on the mind of the dominant forces of modernity impelled him beyond what we would ordinarily see as "realism."

Even William Dean Howells found the realism he himself practiced and advocated inadequate to deal with his most principled social concerns. After A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells engaged with the large forces of the new America not in realistic fiction but in the utopian novels A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

Responding to the energies of the new post-Civil War America, Mark Twain gave the period its name in a novel of the present, The Gilded Age (1873). In successive works, however, Twain moved farther into the past. He drew on his own boyhood and his years as a cub pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his masterpiece of vernacular realism. In these works he deals with contemporary concerns suggestively but indirectly, a tendency that intensifies in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), set not in the America of Twain's lifetime but in the England of a mythical past. His sense of -168- the American present seemed to make it difficult for Twain to deal with it imaginatively in anything like the mode of realism he had perfected in Huckleberry Finn. Except for Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and his essays and travel books, Twain turned increasingly to fable, s in the searing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), or dream tales, as in "The Mysterious Stranger" (published posthumously).

Early in his career, however, in Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain began to develop his characteristic version of American realism as a way of knowing, seeing, and saying. For all the differences in class, cultivation, and milieu, Isabel Archer and her epistemological situation are similar to those of Mark Twain's cub as he tries to learn the constantly changing shapes of the river. In "Old Times on the Mississippi" the river in nightmare fog and darkness, the river with its energy and shifting banks and channels, becomes a metaphor for the fluid, shifting American social world Mark Twain experienced in the years after he served his own apprenticeship as a cub. The cub must learn all 2000 miles of the river. But the banks cave, the river at night looks different from the river in daylight, and the mind itself plays tricks and turns a ripple on the surface of the water into a dangerous reef. Knowledge is based on empirical experience, on the hard work of memorizing soundings and landmarks, on courage and an artist's intuition. The epistemological dilemma is that the cub must "learn the shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes." No wonder the cub is often terrified and demoralized. He comes to the river with romantic ideas of glory and finds out about the cruel hard work and danger involved. Part of the reader's fun is watching the cub's pretensions get their comeuppance as the greenhorn repeatedly underestimates the challenge of the river and the capacity of the veteran pilots, particularly the exemplary Mr. B.

As the jokes accumulate, they elevate the pilot to the status of a demigod who can see in the dark, steer a boat through a deadly channel while he is fast asleep, and who, like the steamboat that brings the dead town to life, "if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead." The language combines the tall-tale hyperbole -169- of frontier humor with the racy, precise language of piloting as an American occupation. As a realist, Twain taps into the energy of both traditions. American realists like Mark Twain may use such conventions to render a lifelike quality but they are rarely literal or onedimensional. Twain, for example, does justice to the world of the river in the 1850s and endows it with a suggestive charge that engages with his concerns as an American writer in the Gilded Age of moneymaking and accelerating technology. As a writer in such a destabilizing period, how does he know for sure? What can he rely on? What value does his work have? How trustworthy is the imagination?

For the cub, as for the writer, the pilot is a demigod, a deathdefying, life-giving savior figure. He thrives on the changing American world of the river. "That's the very main virtue of the thing," Mr. B. explains. "If the shapes didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use." It takes a special sensibility to see the virtue in these rapid changes and an equally special person to turn them to use. "As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock. . If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights," Mr. B. concludes, "there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside a year." The cub amplifies the mythic implications when he says, "When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat in order to make a living."

"The true pilot," Twain affirms, "cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings." Encoded in this view is a revealing contradiction. The courage, intuition, and hard work of the pilot who "cares nothing about anything on earth but the river" are at odds with that same pilot who glories in his princely salary, who looks down on and runs over lowly raftsmen, and whose pride "surpasses the pride of kings." The pilot was "the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth. . His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody." This supreme American individualist, however, is also enmeshed in a system -170- of supply and demand that keeps his wages high, that supports the luxury of the pilothouse and apprentices to do the menial work, and that contributes to the "exalted respect" he commands. Against odds the pilots form a union, systematize the distribution of information, and regulate wages and entry into the profession. Insurance companies and government regulations reinforce the union. The Civil War and a new technology, the railroad, also affect piloting. A union treasurer, like his Gilded Age successors, steals the retirement fund. The contradictions within the true pilot and his rapidly changing situation deconstruct this exemplary figure.

Just before the union surfaces in Twain's narrative, he brings to life how "you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty" as you grope through "an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagesse [sugar cane] piles…. You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't…. You hope you are keeping the river, but you do not know. All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction." When Huck Finn is lost in the fog, his moral bearings are disoriented. In "Old Times" the issue is epistemological. Twain repeatedly comes back to the torment of uncertainty in a threatening, shifting, murky world. He leaves the issue unresolved, or rather he tells one more story about the demigod pilot, the savior figure who can steer a boat in his sleep and triumph over death and destruction.

After he deals with the union, the Civil War, and the railroad, however, Twain is unable to imagine the pilot as demigod. The epistemological dilemma nonetheless remains. But in place of Mr. B. and his like, who resolve the torment of uncertainty and who preside over parts I–IV of "Old Times," Twain now invokes another figure, the pilot Stephen W. Appropriately enough for a Gilded Age narrative, Stephen's identifying trait is his involvement with debt and money. The suppressed element in the figure of the true pilot is now overt. Money and debt were urgent concerns for Twain and many others in the Gilded Age. Unlike the demigod pilot, however, Stephen W. does not even temporarily resolve the issues he embodies. The jokes are -171- funny, but because money totally dominates, the tensions that impel the narrative are no longer in active play; the narrative loses force, and Twain brings "Old Times" to a close.

In "Old Times" another unresolved tension involves the lively colloquial language of the pilot as opposed to the genteel language of the landscape tradition. The narrator consciously favors "the red hue brightened into gold," the "tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal," the "leafy bough," "the unobstructed splendor," the "graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances" — all the stock language and conventional way of seeing of the nineteenth-century landscape tradition. As the cub learns the river, the stock beauty and glory fade. Instead of a charming ripple the cub who has learned his trade now sees a deadly reef, "the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats." He has also found a vital language rooted in ordinary American experience, a colloquial language Twain perfected in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This language has a beauty appropriate to a developing realism. But Twain and other realists experienced a dilemma as they attempted to render observed American life, since they associated beauty with a set of conventions they were in the process of subverting. For Twain the new language of realism is in part connected with the masculine realm of work and with an evolving professionalism that involved a use of precise measurements at odds with the hyperbole of frontier humor and the irreverent colloquialism of ordinary speech. It was also at odds with his conscious conception of beauty. Using the gendered image of the woman's body, Twain associates beauty with femininity and deceptive surfaces, with the flush of fever hiding "some deadly disease." For the professional and the realist, "are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay?" On this view the realist sees through the surface deceptions to the underlying disease, as Isabel Archer does in her way or as the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills grapples with in hers. Especially for the early Twain and the early Rebecca Harding Davis, realists in process, no wonder if they sometimes asked whether they had "gained most or lost most by learning [their] trade."

As a pioneer realist, in Life in the Iron Mills (1861) Rebecca Harding Davis probed a crucial area of American life a generation in -172- advance of successors who by the end of the century had forgotten her achievement. More pervasively than in "Old Times," the smoke that dominates the prologue to Life in the Iron Mills embodies both the material conditions of the mills and the difficulty of penetrating through "the fog and mud and foul effluvia" to a resolution of the questions this new way of life poses for all those affected by it. Partly because of the narrator's point of view, partly because of the dislocating impact of the mill world, the revelations in Life in the Iron Mills are not fixed and absolute but problematic.

Deb, malnourished and deformed, recognizes that the Welsh mill worker Hugh Wolfe has "a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure — that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity." On this view, Wolfe accepts an etherialized, middle-class aesthetics that equates "the beautiful" and "the pure," an aesthetics at odds with the powerful art Wolfe in fact creates. Even more than the narrator of "Old Times," Wolfe is divided. The narrator of "Old Times" consciously values a language of beauty quite different from the art he actually creates out of the processes of piloting. Similarly, Wolfe's achievement is to create strong, moving art from the material conditions of the industrial process. His basic material, the korl, is "the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run." His Korl Woman statue expresses the spiritual hunger, the oppression, and, depending on the observer, the protest, the warning, or the supplication of the men and women who work in the mills. Wolfe's creativity is inseparable from the working-class reality that permeates his life. Part of his tragedy is that Wolfe does not have a verbal, conceptual language that allows him to value what he has created.

Instead, his consciousness is penetrated by middle-class ideas of beauty that denigrate his own class and fit in with the narrator's view "of the disease of their class….a reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street." The statue, however, embodies strength as well as soulstarvation; a rugged, muscular beauty, not disease. The statue embodies a more complex and nuanced view of working-class men and women than either Wolfe or the narrator is able to articulate or the upper-class observers are able to comprehend. The Korl Woman statue also speaks to the unacknowledged situation of middle-class women like Rebecca Harding Davis and the narrator, who find in the overt oppression of the workers an analogue of their own position. -173-

For Wolfe the central "mystery of his life" is the question not of class conflict but of class difference. "He seized eagerly every chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life." In his art, Wolfe does not explore the difference but instead goes deep into the complex realities of his own class. "With his artist's sense," however, Wolfe "did obeisance to…the thorough-bred gentleman, Mitchell….unconscious that he did so." In light of his obeisance to the glamour of the upper class at the expense of his own class, the wonder is that Wolfe is able to produce "figures — hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful" — but not beautiful by the standards of the class he worships, standards he himself partly accepts.

Through what the narrator sees as his God-given "artist's sense," Wolfe responds not only to the sensuous glamour of the other, the genteel class, but also to the middle-class emblems of popular romanticism: "There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain." Wolfe may judge himself on these genteel standards but in his actual creative work he probes rather than avoids "this vile, slimy life" that has been forced on him. He then produces powerful masterpieces like the Korl Woman instead of images of sun-touched thistles and kindly smiles.

For all his longing, Wolfe is excluded from the life, art, and religion of the refined upper classes. In the fullest sense he does not speak or understand their language. When Mitchell, the intellectual, and Kirby, the owner's son, discuss a newspaper article, "at every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal" — a Wolfe, indeed. In church he is unable to understand the language of the supposedly universal religion the minister expounds. Does Christianity apply to a Wolfe who cannot understand the language of Christianity? "There was nothing of which he was certain," the narrator observes, "except the mill and things there. Of God and heaven he had heard so little that they were to him what fairy-land is to a child: something real but not here; far off." The matter is crucial, since Wolfe concludes "in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between [him and Mitchell and Kirby] there was a great -174- gulf never to be passed. Never!" For Wolfe the class barrier is absolute. On grounds quite different from Kirby's belief in the American system as a ladder of opportunity, the narrator, however, is unwilling to accept Wolfe's view. The narrator believes that "veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong — even the social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with madly tonight."

Searing, lurid hellfire lights the mill world, the world Wolfe knows and turns into art. Can another light penetrate the mills or have validity for Wolfe? He longs to be "other than he is." At the turning point of the story, the narrator places Wolfe in a natural setting outside the mills. "Overhead, the sun-drenched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean, — shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light." The assumption underlying this conventional language of the picturesque and sublime is that, in the midst of the beauties of nature, we gain access to the divine. In "Old Times" as this language and its ideology lose their hold, the narrator experiences an understandable sense of loss. For Hugh Wolfe, even more than in his attraction to the glamour of the refined upper class, to Janie, and to sun-drenched purple thistles, "Wolfe's artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right were the petty laws, the mine and thine of mill-owners and mill hands?" Wolfe experiences a momentary "consciousness of power" but the narrator indicates that the entire experience is a delusion. "His soul took in the mean temptation [to keep the stolen money], lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color."

Wolfe understandably wants to be free of the misery of the mills. But under the corrosive pressures of industrial capitalism, how reliable is "the artist's sense" as the narrator conceives of it? Does it give Wolfe access to "that other world" of gentility and the risen savior or does it delude Wolfe into ignoring his own insights into the American realities of oppression and class barriers? Wolfe convinces himself that "God made this money" but the narrator implies a separation between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar, between true Christianity and Mammon. The issues are tangled and commendably -175- contradictory. As disturbing as they are to her, the narrator faces up to the central role of money and class in America. As an underpaid mill worker, Wolfe can never fully realize his talent. Money would help but accepting stolen money reinforces rather than changes the system. The narrator knows that change is necessary. In showing the way Kirby's father manipulates his foreign-born workers through appeals to spectacle and patriotism, the narrator, however, has ruled out change through the electoral process. Mitchell has raised the prospect of revolutionary change led by a Cromwell or Jean-Paul of the oppressed. Wolfe has imagined himself in this role but nothing comes of it, partly because Wolfe is too thwarted, partly because the workers are too fragmented and too easily coopted. The narrator herself believes the solution is the risen savior and the redemptive power of the other world beyond, but she recognizes that nothing in Wolfe's experience justifies the belief for him. Just as she believes in the risen savior, the narrator believes that Beauty resides in kindly smiles and sun-drenched thistles but she is honest enough to present Wolfe as drunk and deluded in his response to the crimson light from the sunlit heavens.

The narrator believes that "the artist's sense" comes from God. If so, it is a God suspiciously aligned with her own class. If "the artist's sense" does not come from God, could the phrase be a sign that the middle class, the dominant class, has penetrated and warped Wolfe's consciousness? The narrator does not say so explicitly but her usage is open to that interpretation. When Wolfe functions as a creator he shapes grotesque, powerful, working-class figures. The narrator is honest enough never to connect these figures with "the artist's sense," a term she reserves for the kind of art, beauty, and religion she herself values. But when Wolfe acts on the perceptions of what the narrator calls "his artist's sense" or his "artist's eye," he steals money, denies his own best perceptions, reinforces the prevailing system, and ends up committing suicide in prison. As in works like Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the prison and suicide are signs of impasse, of a dead end, of a situation the writer wants to expose but can imagine no way out of. In Life in the Iron Mills an emerging realism, the power of class, and the hellfire energies of industrial capitalism undercut established canons of beauty and re-176- ligion. The dilemma is even more extreme than in "Old Times on the Mississippi." Like Isabel Archer and the cub, moreover, Hugh Wolfe's imagination both creates and falsifies under the pressures of the new American world the realist artist struggles to explore.

At the end of Life in the Iron Mills the narrator cannot forget Hugh Wolfe and the statue of the Korl Woman, which call into question all of her affirmations. No wonder she keeps the statue behind a veil. On her interpretation, the arm of the statue is stretched out "imploringly," whereas for Mitchell the arm is a "wild gesture of warning." What she sees as the statue's "thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work" is deeply threatening to the narrator, partly because they challenge her religious and artistic commitments, partly because they express the situation of many middle-class white women like the narrator and Rebecca Harding Davis. "Molly" Wolfe has created "the white figure of a woman" that faces both Mitchell and the narrator "in the darkness, — a woman white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out" in a gesture Mitchell interprets in his way and the narrator in hers. The powerful image of the white woman is open to interpretation like any image that emerges from and speaks to the deepest recesses of the self and society. The narrator's concluding hope is that her redemptive solution is universal but she knows that even behind the veil Wolfe's statue continues to express its recalcitrant and subversive realities.

We must be grateful to a narrator who gives us compelling insights into class barriers, into the hegemonic infiltration of working-class consciousness, and into the thwarting and spiritual hunger of middleclass women as well as of foreign-born workers. Part of what is missing from the narrator's story, however, is any sense of the kind of working-class consciousness and cohesion Herbert Gutman finds among actual nineteenth-century American workers. The story also negates the prospect of radical change. In these respects Rebecca Harding Davis and her narrator are at one with almost every other writer in the American canon. A decade ago Life in the Iron Mills was practically unknown. We now recognize that, in the words of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, "the story affords one of the most overwhelming reading experiences in all American literature." Now that works like Life in the Iron Mills are at last receiving the attention they deserve, however, we must ask why some works -177- are and other works are not entering the canon. In the early 1990s is it a condition for entry into the canon that a work should be open to subversive interpretation and at the same time reinforce the sense both of the need for and the near impossibility of fundamental change?

The statue of the Korl Woman prefigures the turn-of-the-century work of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz — the same muscular intensity, sensitivity to darkness, and insight into working-class and feminine oppression — but in Kollwitz the raised arm is never imploring. She gives us instead figures of angry, cohesive protest. Even as we value the statue of the Korl Woman and all it embodies, perhaps we also need to keep our eyes open for American literary equivalents of Käthe Kollwitz. This is one question for readers to pose as they examine Rebecca Harding Davis's still-neglected novels, Margret Howth (1862) and Waiting for the Verdict (1867).

Charles Chesnutt is another talented but relatively unknown realist. As a black writer white enough to pass, Chesnutt was a fluent speaker of America's main social dialects. From the frame tales in the collection The Conjure Woman (1899) through the facades of his subtly ironic novel of passing, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), to The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt presents a surface as impeccable as any in the Atlantic Monthly of his period. Playing off against the genteel prose, however, are underlying revelations, sometimes in black vernacular, sometimes the result of conflicting voices that expose the racial contradictions of the era of "separate but equal."

In The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt unpolemically uses a series of double relations to test basic American views and practices about blacks and whites and the power relations between the races. Tom Delamere and Sandy look like "twin brothers." The degenerate son of a distinguished North Carolina family, Tom applies blackface and puts on the clothes of the family servant, Sandy, takes over Sandy's identity, and wins the cakewalk contest. He borrows money from Sandy and frames him after robbing and murdering his aunt. Chesnutt perceptively connects the white theft of black identity with the white theft of property. Elsewhere in nineteenth-century American literature divided selves are intimately connected with the underlying -178- dynamics of the market society, as in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." In The Marrow of Tradition, the formal device of the double has the added force of encoding and judging America's racial divisions.

Chesnutt is equally good at revealing a range of white racial views and the way they are used to further another theft, of the government. In the language of his patrician class, Major Carteret argues that the entire black race "was morally undeveloped, and only held within bounds by the restraining influence of the white people." Sandy's "murder" and "assault…upon our race in the person of its womanhood, its crown and flower," is, according to the Major, "the logical and inevitable result of the conditions which have prevailed in this town for the last year." As in the Wilmington, North Carolina, Riot of 1898, the historical basis for The Marrow of Tradition, the Major, General Belmont, and Captain McBane are committed to a revolutionary ouster of the elected Fusion Party, which includes blacks. Chesnutt acutely unmasks the contrast between the Major's language of the "logical" and "reasonable" and his race- and classbiased views and practices. Chesnutt also consistently uses the plebian Captain McBane to expose the underlying realities Major Carteret's genteel language obscures. "'Burn the nigger,' reiterated McBane. 'We seem to have the right nigger, but whether we have or not, burn a nigger.'"

According to the prevailing white view of blacks, "no one could tell at what moment the thin veneer of civilization might peel off and reveal the underlying savage." Through characters like Tom Delamere and Captain McBane, Chesnutt effectively turns this argument around. At the end the whites turn the town into a hell-on-earth in the name of "civilization." Chesnutt realizes that, in white eyes, the blacks who are defending themselves are not heroes; instead, "a negro's courage would be mere desperation; his love of liberty, a mere animal dislike of restraint. Every finer human instinct would be interpreted in terms of savagery."

Deepening these concerns are the contrasts between Josh and McBane and Josh and Doctor Miller, two other double relations. McBane, the son of an overseer, has made his money exploiting convict labor. He is driven by a sense of social exclusion that intensifies his racial hatred. Chesnutt illuminates the class antagonisms within -179- the ruling group as well as its use of the press to manipulate the opinion of ordinary white people. The implications for American democracy are sobering. McBane is blunt, violent, forceful. He has lost an eye in a fight with a convict and "his single eye glowed ominously." Before the end of slavery he has also killed a slave, Josh's father. Josh's desire for retribution motivates him as powerfully as race hatred drives his antagonist.

The spectacle of Josh, a looming "great black figure," also plays off against the moderation of the light-skinned Doctor Miller. Miller believes "the meek shall inherit the earth" and that armed "resistance will only make the matter worse — the odds against you are too strong." Josh, in contrast, affirms, "I don' call no man 'marster.'…I'd ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog!" When Miller refuses to assume leadership, Josh takes over. "A gun is mo' dange'ous ter de man in front of it dan ter de man behin' it…. We'd ruther die fightin' dan be stuck like pigs in a pen!" Although he is killed at the end, he takes McBane with him. "A pistol-flame flashed in his face, but he went on, and raising his powerful right arm, buried the knife to the hilt in the heart of his enemy." In imagining and doing justice to Josh, Chesnutt had to overcome his own personal preference for the beliefs of Doctor Miller. In creating Josh he also taps into imagery and energies deeply threatening to the white readers of his period. The symbols of the gun, the knife, and the defiant refusal to accept injustice contribute to make Josh the most sustained instance of black militancy between Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas.

The final double relation involves the two half-sisters, Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller, on opposite sides of the color line. Their father, Mr. Merkell, had secretly married, freed, and willed his property to Julia, his black mistress. In a story that gradually unfolds as the novel progresses, we learn that Polly Ochiltree has destroyed the will and marriage license that would have established Julia and Janet's claims to legitimacy and half the estate, the money that is now financing Major Carteret's newspaper. "I saved the property for you and your son!" Polly tells Olivia. "You've got the land, the houses, and the money." Mrs. Ochiltree charges Julia with pollution but the pollution the novel dramatizes is the moral blight of whites whose entire material edifice is built on what they have stolen from blacks. -180- No wonder Olivia Carteret's son is sickly and nearly dies in the presence of Janet Miller.

Chesnutt further complicates the material of domestic fiction by probing the deepest sources of Olivia Carteret's "nervous condition," which dates from the time of Aunt Polly's revelations. As the custodian of conscience, white women like Olivia were basic to the moral structure of the South. Olivia comes to "dimly perceive" that the crime Aunt Polly has revealed epitomizes the larger crime of slavery, "which, if the law of compensation be a law of nature, must some time, somewhere, in some way, be atoned for." Her troubled conscience is her share of the larger dilemma.

Mrs. Carteret "could, of course, remain silent," but what then of her "cultivated conscience, . her mentor and infallible guide?" In a quiet, deadly exposure of the moral confusion of an entire people, under the influence of her conscience Mrs. Carteret finally decides that to tell is to bring on bankruptcy and ruin, that she cannot even acknowledge Janet as her sister, but that "sometime in the future" she would contribute to Doctor Miller's hospital. In examining Olivia's conscience, her ability — or inability — to deal with the basic moral issue of her family, region, and race, Chesnutt has undermined the inner sanctum of white legitimacy.

Between Josh at one extreme and Mrs. Carteret at the other, William Dean Howells understandably felt that for all its power of "justice without mercy," finally The Marrow of Tradition was "bitter, bitter, bitter." The judgment, however, says more about the sensitivity of Howells and his audience than it does about Chesnutt's novel. As Robert M. Farnsworth observes, in The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt "stepped over the bounds of racial decency and. . shook his white audience's faith in him." Chestnutt published one more book and then gave up professional authorship for a successful career as the head of a firm of legal stenographers. For reasons quite different from those of James, Twain, and Howells, Chesnutt, too, finally found that the pressures of the period were inimical to the practice of realism.

Howells had earlier written an encouraging review of Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, a ratification that counted, since Howells was the most influential middleman of culture in the post-181- Civil War period. As a critic and editor he introduced advanced European realists like Zola, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and George Eliot to an American audience. He similarly made the case for contemporary American realists as diverse as John De Forrest and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. He supported both Henry James and Mark Twain, "supported" as a friend, as a critic, and as an editor who published and paid for stories and novels. He also mediated between the American West and East, between Twain's vernacular world and the Boston of Emerson and the Atlantic Monthly. Deeply encoded in his career and fiction is Howells's complex involvement in the worlds of literary art and the publishing business. This is a particular instance of the larger tension facing all of those realists who were compelled to render both the surfaces and the underlying energies of the new America.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) Howells deals explicitly with the issues of realism and the morally threatening power of big money. He intertwines a series of stories centering on the ideal of selfsacrifice as this value emerges in the fictional sentimental novel Tears, Idle Tears, as it emerges in a love story within the novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, as it emerges in the story of the self-made millionaire, Silas Lapham, and as it emerges in the theory of realism of the minister, Mr. Sewall. Self-sacrifice is the cornerstone virtue of the nineteenth-century true woman. Howells exposes a false version of this ideal through Tears, Idle Tears, or Slop, Silly Slop. In this book the heroine sacrifices herself by giving up the man she loves because someone else has cared for him first. The details are realistic but the feelings and characters are "colossal" and of flattering "supernatural proportions." In contrast, the realistic novel championed by Howells and Mr. Sewall paints "life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportions and relation." One test, then, is empirical, so that Howells looks at the world of experience, which in his practice is the world of middle-class America. Another test is metaphysical, since Howells assumes that finally ordinary American life will confirm ideals of beauty, decency, and truth. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells tests and illustrates his theory partly through the love plot, which sets up precisely the situation of Tears, Idle Tears.

Irene Lapham, beautiful but culturally limited, falls in love with the patrician Tom Corey. Everyone assumes Corey is interested in Irene, whereas he has fallen in love with the older sister, Penelope. -182- Penelope has a lively wit, a gift for mimicry, and an independent way of seeing and storytelling. She is described as "dark," not because she is sultry but because in contrast to her sister's lovely color she is not beautiful. At first Penelope epitomizes the realistic novelist, sensible, acute at social observation, and intelligent about character and values. But the sentimental ethos of self-sacrifice retains considerable power; it infiltrates the consciousness of a character as sensible as the appropriately named Penelope. She succumbs, decides it would be wrong to accept Corey, but finally comes to her senses, marries him, and vindicates Howells's version of realism. Irene does, too. She suffers, matures, and, instead of either pining away or marrying, remains single, with the author's full approval.

But however much Howells seems assured in his view that finally everyone agrees on what is true and lifelike, in practice he recognizes important strains and qualifications. It is significant that the women in the novel collaborate in constructing the conventional love story of the beautiful but limited Irene and the handsome patrician, Tom Corey, as if Corey could not be interested in the lively realist, Penelope, the "dark," unglamorous one. By exposing their susceptibility to a false, sentimental way of seeing, Howells is illuminating an important crack in the edifice of the middle-class true woman, since in this ideology women are the guardians of moral value and conscience. Mrs. Lapham plays a central role in misperceiving and constructing the love story. Howells is particularly astute in showing that Mrs. Lapham has suffered a serious decline. In the early days of her marriage she was actively involved in Lapham's affairs, but as they become more prosperous she loses touch. She simultaneously sees less clearly than she did in the early, hard working years.

Displaced from the world of affairs, Mrs. Lapham at one point becomes insanely jealous of the attractive "typewriter" or secretary who is at home in Lapham's office. Mrs. Lapham's hysteria is driven by her sense that she no longer has a useful economic function. Instead, her main function in life is to be a moral guide and her confidence in her judgment has been seriously weakened. For Howells the situation of prosperous middle-class women is both enviable and precarious. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), it becomes even more extreme. Mrs. Dryfoos, Mrs. Lapham's successor, is separated by her husband's wealth from her original rural home and religious -183- tradition. She is an invalid with no connection to the confusing urban world her children must negotiate. Howells shows that the old republican virtues of simplicity, hard work, and suspicion of luxury are not easy to sustain in the new America of stock gambling, capital expansion, and the self-made millionaire. Howells is particularly sensitive to the dilemmas of prosperity for women caught in the crosscurrents of republicanism and capitalism or in the conflicts internal to the republican tradition.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Mrs. Lapham contributes to the dilemmas centering on money, business, and success. At the outset of Lapham's career, Mrs. Lapham is the one who realizes that to convert Lapham's paint mine into a gold mine, capital is required. She persuades him to take a partner, Rogers, to supply the capital necessary for full development and expansion. Partly because Rogers is not competent, partly because Lapham wants sole control of what he worships, the paint, Lapham forces Rogers out of the business. He does it legally, fairly, and precisely as any reaonable capitalist would but Mrs. Lapham's conscience is troubled because Lapham has taken advantage of Rogers in favor of his own self-interest. A kind of original sin is involved, since Lapham's prosperity is inseparable from his use of Rogers's capital. Rogers and his capital plus Lapham's hard work and good judgment lead to growth, wealth, and the ambiguous morality connected with ambition and big money.

The ambiguity is grounded in the agrarian, republican values that animate Mrs. Lapham's conscience. The paint in its original condition is associated with the old rural, republican world: it is rooted in the land itself, vividly symbolized by the ore clinging to the exposed roots of a great tree. The paint comes from the old farm, associated with Lapham's father and the graves of the family. Once Mrs. Lapham introduces Rogers and his capital, financial success follows but the earlier virtues are tainted. Mrs. Lapham cannot accept that to succeed as a capitalist, Lapham must behave impersonally. Her conscience keeps alive what she sees as the wrong Lapham committed. In this paradigm of the move from the old republican, agrarian America to the new America of large fortunes and capital expansion, Howells taps into conflicts deeply encoded in the republican's relation to capitalism. For Howells, Mrs. Lapham's conscience is both a strength and a nagging, punitive weakness. -184-

As for Lapham, his wife accuses him of making the paint his God and worshiping it. Under the pressure of Rogers's capital and the dynamics of capitalistic growth, the worship of paint begins to merge with the worship of money as God. Howells handles this change circumspectly, not overtly, in that Lapham continues to value primarily the tangible, earth-grounded product. But Lapham knows that "you wouldn't want my life without my money," and when he is with the patrician Coreys he brags incessantly about his money as well as his paint. Under his no-nonsense surface, Lapham has also been infected with the virus of social ambition, not so much for himself as for his daughters. He has bought a prize piece of property on the Back Bay and he decides to build an impressive house so that his family can be in society.

All of Lapham's underlying social longings and feelings about money and class difference come to a focus in the house. At the outset Mrs. Lapham also connects the house and all it stands for with Rogers and with Lapham's success. "You can sell it for all me," Mrs. Lapham says. "I shan't live in it. There's blood on it."

Lapham may not worship money but he does worship the house. The house is the beautiful embodiment of the new self as distinct from the old Jeffersonian, republican self of Lapham's origins. The republicans had a deep suspicion of luxury and of wealth gained through financial speculation. Lapham is infatuated with the lovely, luxurious improvements his architect suggests. Lapham also finances the house partly from money he has recently made as a stock gambler. Republicans, moreover, valued a general equality of conditions, not the economic, social, and class differences the house symbolizes. In Howells's recognizable version, republicans stress restraint, selfcontrol, discipline, moderation, and a life lived close to the land, symbolically in the old house on the patriarchal farm.

To satisfy his wife and perhaps his own sense of right and wrong, Lapham lends Rogers money and accepts stock in return. To save his original investment, Lapham becomes more deeply entangled with Rogers, he gambles on the market, and he suffers serious losses. The market for paint is glutted and a competitor has a product that undersells Lapham's. At a key moment in this gradually developing scenario, Lapham realizes that to save his business he must sell the unfinished house. Although his pride is deeply wounded, he decides -185- to go ahead. But instead he accidentally burns the house to the ground. The usually careful Lapham, moreover, has neglected to renew the insurance, so that the house is a total loss.

The result is that Lapham begins to purge or expiate the wrongs of a violated republicanism through what amounts to a valued act of self-sacrifice, a sacrifice of the possession that embodies the new self Lapham has achieved as a self-made man. Lapham's self-sacrifice contrasts and develops in counterpoint with Penelope's Tears, Idle Tears version. Also in contrast to Tears, Idle Tears and in accord with his own views about realism, Howells does not have Lapham make a conscious decision to behave virtuously and heroically. Instead, Howells has a sure sense of unconscious motivation rooted in the morally charged conflicts of a possessive market society and the American republican tradition.

In the sequel, Lapham, a secular Job or Christ, faces up to a series of temptations Rogers poses. Lapham consciously chooses to sacrifice his own self-interest — his business and fortune — rather than to take advantage of a legal but morally shady scheme to defraud a group of idealistic English investors. As the Satan-figure in this drama, Rogers is a plausibly rendered businessman who manipulates his appearance of "bland and beneficent caution," just as he turns to his own advantage his republican surface as "a man of just, sober, and prudent views, fixed purposes, and the good citizenship that avoids debt and hazard of every kind." His arguments are as specious and plausible as his appearance. Lapham and the reader, however, easily see through the mask. In this important respect Howells contrasts with those contemporaries, predecessors, and successors for whom the deceptions and acquisitive impulses make for irreducible epistemological uncertainty.

At the end Howells arranges it so that Lapham returns to his origins on the patriarchal, republican farm. He moves back into the old home and runs a scaled-down version of his business. He regains both the good sense and the moral virtue he lost under Rogers's influence. His fall in fortune corresponds with a rise in virtue. In illustrating the success of failure, Lapham thus validates Howells's belief in the agrarian, republican tradition. Lapham also exposes a weakness in Howells's theory of realism, since the pastoral ending highlights the contrast between Howells's deepest values and the un-186- derlying realities of an increasingly urban, industrialized market society. The metaphysical and empirical sides of Howells's theory do not really coincide in the emerging America of the 1880s and 1890s.

Far from being literal and artless, Howells's practice of realism is full of revealing contradictions, nuances, and a suggestive interplay between surface and depth. The same holds for the other realists of the post-Civil War era, although the precise content and intensity vary from writer to writer and novel to novel. Art and imagination, moreover, are central concerns of the American realists. Cumulatively, they give us a complex sense of the fate of the imagination and its creations in the context of a vital, changing America. They often represent the epistemological consequences of the new America through images of impenetrable fog and darkness, from Twain's river through the house of darkness at the highest reaches of the class system in Portrait of a Lady to the dark cellar and fog in Life in the Iron Mills. Sometimes sensitive to the moral and ideological conflicts, as in Howells, sometimes to the moral, epistemological, and sociopolitical implications, as in James, American realists explored the intimate connection between houses and selves, between possessions and character in the new America. They were also unusually alert to the situation of women, as in the suggestive ambiguities of Davis's Korl Woman, Howells's insights into the consequences of prosperity, and James's awareness of Isabel's fear and freedom.

Of all the American realists, Charles Chesnutt in a series of novels gave the subtlest, most probing treatment of the relation between whites and blacks. In Waiting for the Verdict, Rebecca Harding Davis anticipated Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars in exploring the dilemmas of passing and of interracial love relations. Mark Twain opened up these and other dimensions of American racial practices and their impact on identity in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. In Huckleberry Finn Twain had earlier imagined the escaping slave, Jim, as humane and knowledgeable, in touch with the mysteries of the natural world and close to his family even as he is separated from them. But at the end Twain also allowed Tom Sawyer to turn Jim into an object, a stage figure in Tom's romantic fantasy world. These contrasting views of Jim have implications within and beyond the novel. At the turn of the century Twain wrote "The United States of Lyncherdom" (1901). The concluding image of a mile of torches —187- kerosene-lighted bodies — throws a terrible light on the grimmest side of American racism. The fact that Twain was compelled to write "The United States of Lyncherdom" but decided not to publish it during his lifetime — he feared loss of sales in the South — highlights the situation of the realistic writer engaging with market pressures and with perhaps the deepest fault line in American culture.

To shift to another highly charged concern, from the vantage point of later generations, say of Dreiser or later Hemingway or, later still, Updike, the first-generation American realists are circumspect or relatively indirect in their treatment of sexuality, one of the touchstone interests of the realistic novel from Balzac to the present. Money in all its implications is the other major preoccupation of nineteenthand twentieth-century realism. On this count the post — Civil War American writers are as full and perceptive as we can ask for. Their sense of reality is open and varied, responsive to the surfaces and recesses of American selves and society. Stimulated and sometimes thwarted by the energies of the Gilded Age, James, Twain, Davis, Chesnutt, and Howells, representative post — Civil War realists, help us map the emerging new America whose construction is no more certain than the shifting shores of Mark Twain's fog-shrouded Mississippi.

Robert Shulman

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Fiction and the Science of Society

In The Incorporation of America (1982), Alan Trachtenberg describes the significance of the White City as symbol, its ability to transform the diverse and conflicted America of 1893 into an image of national unity. White City was a study in managed pluralism: organized into twenty departments and two hundred twenty-five divisions, contained within one overarching "symmetrical order. . each building and each vista serving as an image of the whole." The choice of White City as the main design for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was suggestive at the most fundamental level. As Herman Melville knew, the color white is a negation of the various rays of the color spectrum. It reflects but it does not absorb. One indication of White City's strategy for managing diversity was its presentation of certain cultures. Instead of being invited (like other constituencies) to portray their experiences in the nation's history, African Americans and Native Americans were presumed to be represented by an exhibit on primitive populations throughout the world. This ambition — unity without absorption, harmony through denial — is no doubt one reason why Frederick Douglass renamed the fair "white sepulchre."

It seems appropriate in retrospect that just one year earlier the city's foremost educational facility, the University of Chicago, had instituted one of the country's first sociology departments. Of all the social science disciplines developing at this time, sociology was most driven by the vision of social interdependence and unity that inspired the architects of White City. For the early sociologists, knowing so-189- ciety meant knowing the social whole. Other social scientists — economists, psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists — saw social reality piecemeal, through the narrow lens of their specialization. Sociology was unique in its aim to combine these disparate specialties into one integral discipline. This methodological imperative was matched by a theory that saw an unprecedented affinity of human consciousness and interests throughout modern life. In the landmark essay in which he declares "the scope of sociology" to be the organization of the "human sciences into a system of reciprocally reinforcing reports," Albion Small characterizes society as a "realm of circuits of reciprocal influence between individuals and groups." In keeping with the strategies of White City, Small's image is achieved at the cost of an evolutionary sleight of hand. What Small calls at one point, for example, that "serious scientific problem, the status of the coloured race in the United States," is subsumed in the image of "the last native of Central Africa. . whom we inoculate with a desire for whiskey add[ing] an increment to the demand for our distillery products and effect[ing] the internal revenue of the United States."

Small's vision of human reciprocity, his description of alien populations that can be "innoculated" into a worldwide web of social and economic interest, was framed in a society fragmented by a bewildering heterogeneity of interests. This late nineteenth-century landscape of social change included: unprecedented immigration rates, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe; escalating capital-labor conflict; challenges to traditional women's roles that brought increasing numbers of women into an embattled labor force; rapid urbanization and industrialization; the rise of trusts; and the ever-intensifying problem of race relations. Like any discursive field, sociology was an attempt to tell a certain kind of story about a particular historical reality. The burden of American sociology at its moment of origin was to reinscribe a conflicted and potentially explosive social reality as a terrain of consensus and integration.

The dedication to knowing the social whole that gripped an emerging sociological discipline is readily seen as consistent with the ambitions of contemporaneous American novelists. What is less often recognized are their various involvements (direct and indirect) with the anxieties, premises, and methods of this new science of society. The response of writers such as Herman Melville, Henry James, Ger-190- trude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, to the formulation of a science that professionalized the main business of novelists-social observation, description of human types and types of interaction, the classification of these types-is an untold story whose narration provides a critical index to the social engagement of American novels. At the same time, to explore the rise of sociology in terms of contemporary novels is to enhance our understanding of the imaginative aspects of this new science.

The most vivid link between sociological and novelistic writings of the period is their shared interest in a language of social types. From Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (1905) to Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), from W. E. B. Du Bois's Philadelphia Negro (1899) to Henry James's American Heiress (1903), sociologists and novelists sought uniform types for mediating a vast and heterogeneous modern society. While literary authors have always been drawn to type categories, the typological methods employed by American novelists of this period have a particular historical resonance. They were formulated in response to the same pressing social landscape that gave rise to a modern discipline based on typological method. Type categories invested individuals and social phenomena with the semblance of predictability and control. They were key tools in turn-of-the-century efforts to circumscribe an ever-expanding society-to clarify, order, and label the social world. Types also served to promote and exclude different forms of social being. As Ian Hacking suggests in the essay "Making Up People," "numerous kinds of human beings and human acts came into being hand in hand with our invention of the categories labelling them." This interest in the varieties and limits of human action points to another central concern of the era: the question of individualism. American sociologists and novelists were at the forefront of changing conceptions of the individual. Their use of type categories was part of their struggle to mediate the divide between social determination and individuality in support of an ideal that was basic to American values, as well as essential to capitalist development.

What did it mean to know society for the first formulators of social science? For Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is generally recognized as a key forerunner of -191- sociological analysis, knowing society involved viewing it as a totality: describing its interrelated institutions, classifying its various parts, identifying its stages of development. Ferguson stressed empirical method; social study must be based on scientific observation, rather than on speculation. If sociological beginnings are detectible in the work of Ferguson, it was late eighteenth-century France that gave the emerging field a sense of urgency and purpose. Vitalized and christened in an era of revolution, sociology pointed toward a permanent condition of post-revolution. The Enlightenment values that had inspired revolution were now rechanneled into the shaping of a stabilizing social science.

The institutional origins of American sociology lie in the 1850 founding of a Board of Aliens Commission by the State of Massachusetts, whose charge was "to superintend the execution of all laws in relation to the introduction of aliens in the Commonwealth." From the ranks of this organization, the American Social Science Association was founded in 1865. The motto of the association, "Ne Quid Nimis" (Everything in Moderation), and a representative sample of papers from the association's journal ("Pauperism in New York City"; "The Emmigration of Colored Citizens from the Southern States"; "Immigration and Nervous Diseases"; "Immigration and Crime") suggest its anxiety about immigrants and internal marginals.

American sociology was shaped by specific social and political pressures, as well as by strong international influences. At the point of its emergence it was also substantially supported by Christian reform organizations, as evidenced by the abundance of articles on Christian sociology in the early years of The American Journal of Sociology. The links between sociology and Christianity are consistent with the fact that many of the first American sociologists had close ties to the ministry.

American sociology in this period was often broken down into three interrelated clusters of inquiry: (1) attention to society's static dimensions, which addressed the question of social stability: how does society manage to preserve the status quo? (2) attention to society's evolutionary dimensions, which addressed the question of change: how did society come to be as it is and what might we predict about its future? (3) attention to society's technologic dimen-192- sions, which addressed the question of control: what actions can be taken to improve society and ensure a better future? Running through each of these lines of exploration was the ongoing struggle with the subject of individualism. As Albion Small observed, "Today's sociology is still struggling with the preposterous initial fact of the individual. He is the only possible social unit, and he is no longer a thinkable possibility. He is the only real presence, and he is never present." Sociology's emphasis on social determination, its insistence that human consciousness was formed and existed in interaction alone, seemed to undermine an American tradition of individualism. But in fact the task of "reconstructing individualism" was a continuing preoccupation. Thus, for static analyses the question was: how could individuals be fit into the existing social system? For evolutionary analyses the question was: how do individual differences come about; are they products of inheritance or environment? For technologic analyses the question was: can education and scientific knowledge equip certain individuals with special powers for social betterment? In what follows I will discuss these three clusters of sociological analysis by way of specific American novels. I consider in turn Herman Melville and realism, Henry James and naturalism, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and experimentalism. This genealogy moves from writers whose major concerns coincided with those of social science, to writers who absorbed social science into their very techniques. The works of Stein and Du Bois, I argue, were overburdened with social scientific methods, which compromised their aesthetic power but made them ideal registers of the ties between sociology and literature in this period.

The overriding concern of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor (written from 1886 to 1891) is social transformation: how to channel the revolutionary energies of the late eighteenth century into the industrial work of the nineteenth century. As a work written in the turbulent closing decades of nineteenth-century America, and set in a climactic moment of revolution and consolidation at the beginning of the "modern" era, Billy Budd parallels the situation of late nineteenth-century sociology, a discipline that draws upon founding principles framed in the same revolutionary Europe. -193-

Riding the nervous British seas of 1797, haunted by British Jacobinism, Revolutionary France, and mutinies that year at Nore and Spithead, authorities aboard the Bellipotent are consumed with the problem of social order. Like the early European sociologists who were fresh from the experience of social revolt, Captain Vere and his officers fear lower-class uprising. Described as one whose "settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days," Captain Vere knows the reparative powers of a careful and consistent empiricism. The Bellipotent operates through an elaborate network of watching and cataloging: methods of social description and typecasting that keep everyone on board, especially potentially disruptive elements of the sea commonalty, identified and ordered. The power to label and interpret the world around him is critical to Captain Vere's rule.

A key instance of typecasting is the parable of the black sailor at Liverpool that opens the novella. Transformed kaleidoscopically from an ideal to a sacrificial type, the black sailor foreshadows the experiences of Billy Budd. As a handsome cynosure, the black sailor elicits the "spontaneous homage" of his fellow sailors, a moment of collective tribute that is threatening in its ability to "arrest" the normal affairs of the Liverpool wharf. In keeping with this threat, another type, which casts the sailor as the sculptured bull of the Assyrian priests, emerges with a kind of grim necessity at the close of the passage. Now an object of sacrifice within an order of nature and ritual, the black sailor is neutralized. This double echo from the past (a mid-eighteenth-century moment that recalls an ancient rite) points to a simpler era when societies cohered by means of a common conscience reinforced by violence. It also registers the traces of primitivism still lurking in modern forms of social control.

Like the black sailor, Billy Budd is marked early on as an outstanding specimen, capable of inspiring his fellow sailors in unpredictable ways. Had Billy not killed Claggart, Captain Vere would have had to find some other reason for his demise. The necessity of his sacrifice, in other words, seems built into the situation from the beginning: a nervous ship in a time of mutiny and revolution, a handsome sailor who inspires collective pride, his execution. Typing Billy as the "Angel of God" who "must hang," Vere transforms Billy into -194- a visual emblem of his power. Billy's execution is a spectacle that confirms Vere's ability to contain collective sentiments.

The link between typecasting and social control brings us to contemporary sociological theories on social types. In Social Control (1901), E. A. Ross argued that a heterogeneous mass society like modern America required deliberate strategies for ensuring social obedience. He advocated the promotion of social models, ideal types, which society "induces its members to adopt as their guide." Based on the principle of self-regulation, what Ross called "bind[ing] from within," Ross's types left the individual "with the illusion of selfdirection even at the moment he martyrizes himself for the ideal we have sedulously impressed upon him." "The fact of control," Ross continues, "is in good sooth, no gospel to be preached abroad. . the wise sociologist. . will not tell the street Arab, or the Elmira inmate how he is managed." Ross's use of types for the purposes of social control had its analogue in various disciplines of this era. According to philosopher Josiah Royce, the value of an ideal type lay in its ability to instill a feeling of subordination to a unified whole. The loyal individual, he suggested in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), embodied the ideal union of individual identity and social commitment. "You can be loyal," he wrote, "only to a tie that binds you and others into some sort of unity. . the cause to which loyalty devotes itself has always this union of the personal and the seemingly superindividual about it." For the William James of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as well, the sign of the healthy religious type is his or her "sense of integration" in a benevolent social whole.

Like these social philosophers, Captain Vere seeks more than Billy's compliance; he needs Billy to believe in his sacrifice, as socially necessary and beneficial. After typing him "fated boy," Vere takes various measures (their "closeted interview," for example) to ensure that Billy embrace his fate. Billy's declaration at the point of execution, "God bless Captain Vere," signals the success of Vere's methods.

Perhaps an even deeper threat to Captain Vere's methods of social control is his master-at-arms, John Claggart. As one who eludes classification, described at one point as an "uncatalogued creature of the deep," Claggart seems uniquely resistant to Vere's authority. Yet Claggart is ultimately as tied to Vere's system as Billy through his -195- burning desire to rise in the ship's hierarchy. Both Billy and Claggart represent to authorities like Captain Vere the hope that the dream of vertical mobility, through success in Claggart's case or martyrdom in Billy's, can be counted on to offset lateral threats of collective identification. It is this hope that underlies sociological reconceptions of individuality. In an exemplary formulation, Albion Small moves from the observation that "individuals are different," to the claim that "the associated state [Small's phrase for society] is a process of making them different." As he explains further in adopting what he calls "the genetic view," the social process is "a progressive production of more and more dissimilar men." Though he intends another meaning of "genetic," Small's use of the term here foregrounds the sense that the modern liberal state has become an active producer of human types. For Small, social processes conspire to produce uniformly related selves, whose functional attributes can be neatly fit into the social system. Unsolicited differences-of race, ethnicity, political or religious belief-that threaten the status quo are subsumed by produced differences that support it. In the creation of type categories that provided model individuals capable of succeeding in modern society, sociologists were responding to contemporary anxieties about the erosion of individual initiative. At the same time they were controlling perceptions of human possibility.

An assumption governing the sociological use of types, which Captain Vere shares, is that the maker of these classifying terms is himself a neutral analyst. For Captain Vere, neutrality is part of being a professional. Off duty, Vere "never garnished unprofessional talk with nautical terms," a sign of the strict division in his mind between public office and private life. Vere's personal discretion is matched by a professional objectivity that brings him to substitute an "imperial code" for the claims of "private conscience." Vere's call for the suppression of instinct confirms a late nineteenth-century ethic of professionalism. Like its other key tropes, this professional ethic aligns the novella with a literary realist movement that coincided with Melville's final decade: the years when he was working in the New York Custom House and writing Billy Budd.

The novels of William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Mark Twain, the paintings of Thomas Eakins, picture the frozen status quo worlds dreamed of by the rulers of the Bellipotent. -196-

In realism, social conflict is shifted to the borders of scenes or swiftly quelled. The worlds of realism are controlled by vigilance: the vulnerable visibility of the poor, the empowered visibility of professional elites, the invisibility of the rich. In an analysis of publicity in this period, Philip Fisher considers Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic as an instance of professional transcendence: the modern expert as God. Eakins's representation of the master surgeon at work presupposes the surgeon's power to select the moments when he is publicly seen. This moment is balanced by access to a privileged invisibility, which Fisher locates in the self-enclosed homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, homes that ensure the absolute immunity of their inhabitants from outward detection. While the public images of professional elites were carefully circumscribed, society's most powerful were invisible altogether. Eric Hobsbawm describes the increasing obscurity of governing elites in the late nineteenth-century era of mass democratization: "When the men who governed really wanted to say what they meant, they had henceforth to do so in the obscurity of the corridors of power." This is corroborated by Henry James's analysis of that pivotal political figure, "the boss," who operates in a shell of oblivion, his "political role" at once "so effaced, but so universal."

In the case of the lower classes, this situation was inverted: their lives, at work and at home, were increasingly exposed to public scrutiny in this period. The introduction of production methods systematizing industrial work led to greater vigilance in the factories. The activity of social reformers, increasingly devoted to the domestic lives of the poor and the immigrant, led to greater surveillance at home. The impact of these reformers was mixed: while their obvious goal was improvement, they also participated in a more ominous campaign to know and manage a potentially dangerous underclass. Social scientists adopted a more remote attitude, but their relationships to the impoverished lives they cataloged from a greater remove were equally ambiguous. Liberal sociology mainly identified with the sober middle class, and kept the poor and the wealthy (whose interests they nevertheless implicitly supported) at a distance. The main concern of realist literature as well was the conventional and the middle class. A notable example of realism's occasional forays into the world of the poor is Henry James's In the Cage, his only work narrated from the perspective of a lower-class character. -197-

The protagonist of this 1895 novella is a featureless telegraph operator, whose one distinctive trait is a classically overactive Jamesian imagination. The telegraph operator spends her days serving the wealthy who have grown addicted to a new technology that facilitates the rapid conduct of their (usually extramarital) affairs. To her customers, she is no more significant than the machine that relays their messages. Indeed, the novella ingeniously inverts its titular metaphor that casts the telegraph operator as a caged zoo animal. While she does work in a cage, it is her customers rather than she who are exposed to view. "It had occurred to her early," the novella begins, "that in her position-that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-she should know a great many persons without their recognizing the acquaintance." The story's plot centers on her effort to exploit this circumstance of being hidden but ever vigilant. Scrutinizing their faces like a detective, she assumes a fantastic intimacy with her customers, a knowledge of their every desire and scheme. Thus the predictable lower classes become the predictors of the upper class. By investing his telegraph operator with the story's main imaginative value, James identifies her as an artist of sorts. And through this character, James presents the Jamesian artist as a predatory dissector of the wealthy. Ultimately, however, James foils the visual powers of the telegraph operator, restoring realism's usual hierarchy of vigilance. The telegraph operator is foiled because she attempts to enter into the lives of her subjects. By trying to realize her visual intimacy, she violates the boundary of vigilance. Empirical control over others requires distance.

As one of the gentile poor, James's telegraph operator fulfills Emile Durkheim's theory of anomie. Defined in his classic study Suicide, anomie (literally, "without norms") is a condition of rootlessness bordering on self-annihilation that occurs when human desires are raised beyond their realistic life expectations. According to this theory, hopeless poverty is a protection against suicide. But unqualified desire leads to disorientation and worse. It is appropriate, therefore, that the novella's final scene pictures the telegraph operator standing before a bridge while a policeman eyes her suspiciously. The policeman is an externalization of the control the telegraph operator no longer exercises over herself. -198-

The telegraph operator is an anomaly in James's realist canon, not only because she is poor, but also because she doesn't police herself. Rather than an internal plane for the individual's struggle and eventual reconciliation with social law (as in the case of a typical Jamesian heroine like Isabel Archer), the imagination of the telegraph operator is a plane of transgression. The task of regulating one's imagination, of internalizing external forms of vigilance, is a key activity of realist fiction. Realism emphasizes selective incorporation, its primary reflex is establishing borders. This is reflected in the claustrophobic atmospheres of realist works, which feel uniformly cramped whether depicting the interior spaces of Henry James or the battlefields of Stephen Crane. The scene of Stephen Crane's The Open Boat (1897) can be taken as paradigmatic. The challenge for the story's characters is maintaining the integrity of their craft ("no bigger than a bathtub," the narrator snaps with characteristic cruelty) against an encroaching ocean. The homely similes, which seem to crowd the characters as much as the ocean (the captain is like a father "soothing his children," the seaweed is like "carpets"), are there not only to taunt the characters by reminding them of the habitual protections they lack but to represent their inevitable restitution. Moreover, these similes are products of the characters' imaginations; the narrator is merely miming their familiarization of the threatening landscape. Like the wobbling boat that serves as its controlling metaphor, the story is concerned with what can be taken in, and what must be kept out, in order to ensure sanity and social stability. No matter how vast and wild its territory, realism concentrates on the most local mechanisms for stabilizing the social world-human perceptions and categories.

The central features of realism-the trope of vigilance, the emphasis on internalization, and the focus on individual over collective experience-come together in the most distinctive aspect of realist fiction-its view of character as type. The type supplies an immediately identifiable public persona, a boundary around the self. But it also acknowledges some residual aspects of personality that are inexpressible to others and perhaps even unknown to the individual. In the essay "How Is Society Possible?" Georg Simmel refers to the "non-social imponderables"-temperament, fate, etc.-those features that lend "a certain nuance" to an individual but do not fundamentally change his "relevant social category." This makes the self po-199- tentially limitless in idiosyncratic terms, but poses a limit on what individuals can be in social terms. In keeping with this, Stephen Crane's "Oiler," "Westerner," "Cook," and "Gambler," as well as Henry James's "Heiress" and "Dilettante," are individuals limited by function. But the idiosyncratic freedoms allotted James's more central characters are finally inconsequential in terms of plot. They are not allowed to stand in the way of their social function. Thus, Isabel Archer, the "intelligent but presumptuous girl. . affronting [her] destiny," for all her expansiveness, is fundamentally a type, and is so conceived by her fellow characters.

The typing of realist characters counters a threat that continually pressures the realist text: the threat of collective identification. The concept of type provides a view of self-sufficient, uniformly related individuals, whose collective existence is a matter not of choice or identity but of interdependence. Society promotes differences among its members so that they may be profitably related. This ideology of interdependence was set against the forms of spontaneous association that from the late eighteenth-century era of revolution to the late nineteenth-century era of expansion social observers most feared.

The novels of Henry James may appear to have little in common with naturalism. But in fact the issue of social evolution is a dominant concern of James's fiction, especially the fiction of the major phase. Poised on the edge of a new century, imposing its titular category of adolescence on society as well as on women, The Awkward Age (1899) is an exemplary case of this deepening concern. What are the differences among cultural rites for socializing women? how do those of modern society compare to those of primitive society? are there elements of barbarism in modern culture? — these are the questions the novel addresses. Like Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (published the same year), which ruthlessly cataloged the primitive offenses of modern elites, James's satire on the British ruling class focuses on their treatment of women. The marriage market of James's modern London looks suprisingly like the barter systems of primitive societies described by contemporary social theorists such as Herbert Spencer and J. F. McLennan (whose Primitive Marriage James owned and almost certainly read).

In her essay "The Traffic in Women," Gayle Rubin discusses the -200- ominous constancy of women's treatment from primitive to modern times. "Women are given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold. Far from being confined to the 'primitive' world, these practices seem only to become more pronounced and commercialized in more 'civilized' societies." From its opening pages, The Awkward Age is explicit about the commodification of women in the modern era. It seems to go out of its way to press the similarities between primitive and modern societies. For the novel's upper class shares a critical affinity with the primitive populations described by the era's sociologists: their demise is at hand. The novel's elite offers little hope for generational continuity. Its female protagonist, Nanda Brookenham, is described at one point as just the kind to preside over "a fine old English family" of "halfa-dozen." The projected size of Nanda's family is statistically precise: four was the minimum number of offspring specified by population experts of this era for a stock to maintain itself. The novel's end, however, pictures Nanda's retreat to the country as the ward of a man three times her age, her prospects for marriage and family ruined. James's portrait of an upper class in decline, stripped of its reproductive powers, is consistent with the perceptions of other social observers of his day.

James's seedy upper class helps to shed light on social taxonomies of the era, where elites appeared in catalogs of "special classes" requiring scientific scrutiny. In a 1900 essay on social types published simultaneously in Durkheim's L'Année Sociologique and excerpted in The American Journal of Sociology, S. R. Steinmetz cites the variety of social characters about whom too little is known. "There are great entomological studies for the study of insects," he observes, "but we do not give ourselves any trouble to know the people around us." Among these unknowns, he cites the "primitive populations" "rapidly disappearing." He includes as well what he calls "special classes of the population": "prostitutes, the criminal and dangerous classes. . wandering artists, nobles, millionaires." The obvious mystery on this list is social elites ("nobles, millionaires"). Why would its members require scientific attention? What does it share with these other groups? Each of these groups is marginal to the interdependent community of socialized selves described by Albion Small. At the same time, each helps to define the boundaries of that functional society by -201- its very marginal relationship to it. As our observations so far have suggested, James's social circle has most in common with the "disappearing" "primitive peoples."

Yet why would primitives and nobles require scientific scrutiny? Primitives and nobles need to be managed intellectually because they contradict the narrative of evolutionary progress favored by social analysts of the era. Primitives threaten the thesis of evolutionary uniformity that ascribes a fundamental similarity to the development of all peoples. Primitives are defined as vestiges of a previous evolutionary stage, with little promise of meeting the demands of evolutionary progress, and their rapid decline is predicted. As a supposedly superior class that is regressing, nobles are living contradictions of the evolutionary thesis. Degenerate rather than vital, incapable of transmitting their valuable traits, they are defined as a social excrescence, a class that has been living off the fruits of others' labor for too long.

James's attentions to the place of his bourgeois and aristocratic characters on the evolutionary scale goes to the heart of a fictional enterprise usually considered alien to his fiction, naturalism. By exposing the barbaric propensities of civilized society, James revises the dominant nineteenth-century narrative of evolutionary progress. If James pictures a reservoir of social superiority that cannot sustain itself, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser explore a self-destructive sphere of social difference, the world of the lower class and the immigrant.

Naturalist literature provided an analytical yet voyeuristic view into the low life. Both senses of this perspective-the detached and the compulsive-are important. Even when naturalist narrators betray overt hostility (a naturalist trademark) toward their precivilized characters, there is still room for identification with them. For turnof-the-century readers, immersed in ideas of progress, naturalism provided the experience of looking into an evolutionary mirror. Readers could see themselves at an earlier historical moment: barbaric, unconscious, twisted. Thus naturalist characters incited an antagonism that might easily be internalized, illuminating one's own carefully hidden savagery. The difference of naturalist characters, then, was a difference that had to be reckoned with. As Michel Foucault has observed, prior to the seventeenth century every species was identified in and of itself, by a certain mark that it bore independent of all other species. But from the seventeenth century onward, identity was es-202- tablished in relation to all other possible identities. By the nineteenth century, difference was understood in terms of a larger conviction about the cohesiveness and unity of the social organism. Naturalist literature solved the problem of how to accommodate the alien and brutal with a normative reading of human progress in accordance with that of Herbert Spencer. At its most extreme, naturalist characters threw into relief the progress of "normal" Americans.

The worlds of Frank Norris, in Vandover and the Brute (1914) and McTeague (1899) in particular, are worlds of extreme naturalism. McTeague features inbred, sterile, and insane characters-the wasted undesirables who are better left to die out. Immobilized oddities (Old Grannis and Miss Baker), distorted gold worshipers (Maria Macapa, Zerkow, and Trina McTeague), brutes (McTeague and Marcus Schouler), these are human types who fail at everything: love, business, mere survival. Nor is it accidental that these characters have strange-sounding names. McTeague's abnormals were the immigrant and worker populations, whose features when seen up close justified their domination. Norris's fundamental contempt for his characters is exemplified by the novel's ending, where McTeague survives a monumental desert struggle against Marcus Schouler only to find himself handcuffed to the dead body. What the perverse underworld of McTeague shares with the hypercivilized community of The Awkward Age is the incapacity for self-generation.

The works of Theodore Dreiser offer a different perspective on naturalism by highlighting a modern capitalist social order that has subsumed the natural. In contrast to Norris's degenerate (and eminently expendable) social types, Dreiser's fiction features functional types who become dysfunctional. A register of the differences between Norris's and Dreiser's naturalism is their metaphorical use of newspapers. Norris's characters don't read newspapers (it's not clear that they can even read); rather they are the stuff of newspapers. Dreiser's characters, in contrast, are guided by them. Far from Norris's sites of extremity, newspapers in Dreiser are repositories of human possibility to be imitated. In Dreiser newspapers are a paradoxical medium both craved and feared. To be an object of publicity is an ideal state. Yet publicity can also mean that one is a victim or a casualty. Dreiser's fictions are themselves like newspapers, representing the unlikely but accessible circumstances that elude the majority. Consider, for example, Clyde Griffiths, the everyman who becomes -203- the dastardly object of awed crowds as he enters prison, or Hurstwood, who begins Sister Carrie (1900) as a generic businessman and ends as a pathetic object of urban voyeurs in a panhandler's line. Publicity is also the lot of Sister Carrie in her acting stardom, but it is the nature of a "star" to fall as well as rise. As they fall, Dreiser's characters become spectacles, illustrating the potential decline of anyone in the risk-driven society of capitalism. The vicissitudes of modern capitalism as portrayed in Dreiser's works put barbarism always within our reach.

Thus, where Norris's naturalism tends to corroborate a social evolutionary scheme, Dreiser's naturalism, by showing how such a scheme justifies and entrenches a man-made social system, tends to challenge it. Dreiser is interested in social science and capitalism as interpenetrating ideologies. He is at once more committed to and reflective about social scientific analysis. Like contemporary social scientists, he is drawn to the situations and individuals that repeat in modern life: the social fall or rise, the sexual conquest, the doubledealing, the "American Tragedy," the ambitious youth, the coquette, the female innocent, the fast-talking city slicker. This cataloging impulse, however, defines the limit of Dreiser's fascination with American capitalism. Likewise, Dreiser parts ways with the passive vision of Social Darwinism, including its instrumental version. In shadow types like the Captain of Sister Carrie, who opposes the sentimental idealism of the supposed hero, Ames, in portraits of immobile worlds dominated by rhetorics of social mobility (An American Tragedy [1925]), Dreiser reveals the prevailing social theory of his era to be the ideological handmaid to a basically unjust capitalist system. Dreiser's resistance to the naturalist assumptions embedded in liberal social theory brings us to the final set of literary examples to be considered: two writers who first embraced the practical potential of social science, and ended up more critical of its assumptions than any of the authors so far discussed. Yet however critical they became, W. E. B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein remained attached to social science in ways that informed the works that are of concern to the history of the novel-The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Making of Americans (1906-8).

W. E. B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein share the position of social marginals, as well as the experience of social scientific training. Both -204- were also self-exiles from American society: Du Bois settled in Ghana at the end of his life, Stein moved to Paris before she was thirty. Perhaps the most significant similarity is that both studied with William James and were heavily influenced by his pragmatist social science.

For Du Bois and Stein, typecasting was not an inevitable process but a political activity. Both saw the damaging effects of typecasting on their respective social groups and believed that greater control over their group's representation would extend its social possibility. They sought out the role of the expert cataloger of modern social life as a means of remedy and instruction.

As two writers who were personally implicated in questions of social difference and drawn to the promise of liberal social science, Du Bois and Stein represent powerful confrontations with the central intellectual concerns of their era: the seductive potential of categories and types, the social scientific conflation of knowledge and uniformity, individualism versus collectivism as competing ideals, the role of literature in relation to social science. They are distinctive, and crucial to our exploration, in having recognized the pivotal role that social science played in the modern era. While they were critical of this role, they also pursued it. This ambivalence toward the posture of social scientific expertise is built into the narrative personae of their two major novelistic works.

Of all the literary authors discussed so far, Du Bois is unique in actively combining sociological and literary methods. As a student of history and sociology at Harvard in the 1890s (with two years of study in Germany), Du Bois was drawn to the potential of this new discipline for arbitrating the problem of race in America. He more often found, however, that sociology was a symptom of the problem rather than a solution to it. Even the most enlightened of sociologists, W. I. Thomas, in a 1904 article, "The Psychology of Race-Prejudice" (American Journal of Sociology), came perilously close to calling racial prejudice inherent. And F. H. Giddings's concept of "the consciousness of kind," which held that the sense of community inevitably diminished with the increase of racial and ethnic differences, was used to justify turn-of-the century schemes for the deportation of African Americans.

Du Bois's earliest training was in history and economics, culmi-205- nating in his dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade 1638–1870 (1896). The book's bias is historicist, that is, Du Bois focuses on the historical genesis of slavery in order to redress the condition of African Americans in his contemporary society. Like Billy Budd, Suppression is most drawn to the closing decades of the eighteenth century: Melville's post-Revolutionary era of consolidation matches Du Bois's post-Revolutionary America, the moment of enlightenment that managed to entrench the most oppressive of slave systems. "There never was a time in the history of America," wrote Du Bois, "when the system had a slighter economic, political, and moral justification than in 1787, and yet with this real, existent, growing evil before their eyes, a bargain largely of dollars and cents was allowed to open the highway that led straight to the Civil War." By delineating the economic considerations that consistently overshadowed the moral question of slavery, Suppression embodies the weight of historical memory that tempered Du Bois's faith in social instrumentalism. Any program of social action had to contend with the historical process that had created and still informed African American possibility.

Given Du Bois's career-long interest in the theoretical problem of racial difference and its relationship to conceptions of social evolution, it seems appropriate that his entry into social science was through history. Du Bois's historical approach is consistent with the methods of the era's classic sociological theorists, for whom sociological analysis required a broad command of different cultures as well as historical periods. Like Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber, Du Bois is interested in the transformation of societies, as well as in the persistence of certain ideas and habits over time. Du Bois differs from these analysts in attending to the ways in which social evolution occurs and also fails to occur as a consequence of deliberate social policy. Du Bois likewise departs from an essentially static evolutionary script (favored by Spencer and Durkheim) that projects a normative pattern of development and evaluates all populations according to that pattern. The culmination of Du Bois's training as a social scientist was his classic anatomy of African American society in Philadelphia.

The central drama of The Philadelphia Negro (1899) lies in Du Bois's effort to strike a balance between assessing the collective con-206- dition of Philadelphia's African Americans and distinguishing the various strata of that community, with their different relationships to American norms and values. His study contains the seeds of his growing dissatisfaction with social science while it lays the groundwork for the problem that would plague his career: how could a commitment to a collective African American destiny be accommodated to the promise of individual assimilation and progress dividing that collectivity? Sociological theories of stratification together with his continuing absorption in Spencerian ideas formed the unsettling core of Du Bois's method. His turn away from sociology following The Philadelphia Negro may have had as much to do with the ways in which it magnified an emerging contradiction in his own thought as with the limitations he saw in the discipline itself. In practicing sociology, he adopted the dominant sociological trajectory of his era: the supplanting of basically conservative, essentialist notions about human potential with a liberal ideal that emphasized assimilation and training. This new ideal, however, retained a fundamental tie to the essentialist view, in upholding a belief in "the survival of the fittest." The superior elements of any social group, went the argument, would inevitably rise and prosper. Given this sociological climate, it is not surprising that an outgrowth of Du Bois's Philadelphia study was his first conceptualization of "the talented tenth," an attempt to distinguish the best "strata" of the African American race.

Du Bois's adaptation of these sociological principles for African American Philadelphia was timely, given a prevailing racial ideology of two nations, one white, one black, that relentlessly homogenized African Americans. Against this biological fiat of racial homogeneity, Du Bois set another biological fiat implicitly condoned by social science, which emphasized inherent differences of talent within each group. Du Bois thus used Social Darwinist ideas to challenge a prevailing racial ideology.

The irony is that his struggle against a white conspiracy that intentionally muffles African American achievements was mirrored by the response to his book. Through the reception (or more accurately, nonreception) of The Philadelphia Negro by the sociological profession-which took over half a century to confer its "classic" status-Du Bois experienced firsthand the limits upon all African Americans. Du Bois's failure to gain a hearing as a sociologist sig-207- naled the failed promise of the discipline's liberal assumptions. In declaring his next major study, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a work of "faith and passion," he seemed to be deliberately distancing himself from the rational agenda of The Philadelphia Negro.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois undertakes the imaginative reconstruction of the territory he covered in his sociological classic. His desire to gain control over the representation of African Americans will not be accomplished through the straitjacket of sociological method, he implies, but requires a more literary technique. If Philadelphia undertakes the work of social description, Souls undertakes the work of social change. Philadelphia selects among preexisting African American types assigned by the dominant society, while Souls surveys all the available African American types and, finding them wanting, begins to recover the powers of self-identification for African Americans themselves.

The two books are best seen as companion pieces, which need to be read together in order to understand their deepest implications. The striving Philadelphian bent on self-improvement joins the collectivity of African American souls. The insistence of Souls on plurality suggests Du Bois's new attitude toward the liberal individualism of sociology-it has never represented a true possibility for African Americans. Souls dismisses the claim that African Americans are individuals, the "fittest" capable of assimilating and rising like any "immigrant" group. What was deplored in Philadelphia, the "tendency on the part of the community to consider the Negroes as comprising one practically homogeneous mass," is embraced in Souls. The homogenizing of African Americans is transformed into an enabling device; African Americans become a self-identified and therefore empowered collectivity. Souls explodes some other powerful sociological myths as well. The trajectory of Philadelphia is from South to North, as the book charts the making of a modern African American populace, a narrative of liberal progress that pictures the race's "fittest" rising to the top. Souls, however, moves from North to South, thus implying that African Americans must come to terms with the roots of their experience in America, by returning to "the scene of the crime," as it were. The static evolutionary reading of African American history in Philadelphia-history in the sociological vein as a grand narrative that explains the present via the past-is -208- replaced by history as bricolage. Souls is annales history: an amalgam of tales, songs, mythologies, critiques, autobiography, elegy. Its concern is not progress measured in terms of the dominant society but the shaping of collective identity.

Souls seems in every way opposed to its social scientific predecessor, yet in fact Du Bois never strays very far from an implicitly sociological agenda. His achievement is that he manages at once to criticize and to revitalize the new science of society. Souls is filled with critical references to "the cold statistician," the "sociologists who gleefully count" African American "bastards" and "prostitutes," "the car window sociologist. . who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries."

Du Bois's answer to these limitations is the aestheticizing of sociology. The sociological method of typecasting becomes exploratory, experimental. Far from merely typologizing, Souls elaborates a theory of types. For what is the color line but the penultimate type or boundary demarcating the limit of African American possibility? The book is a sustained effort to extend the boundary around the African American self. Du Bois devotes each chapter to elaborating a different unrealized potential: the African American as failed transmitter of a generational legacy (chapter 11, on the death of his son); the African American as failed educator (chapter 4, on his teaching career in Tennessee); the African American as failed spiritual leader (chapter 12, on Alexander Crummel). These promising but unfulfilled types are played off against the degraded types of the dominant society. The book is thus a dialectic of typological categories, and Du Bois's major insight is that the African American self internalizes them all. Thus the "warring" within that derives from this "doubleconsciousness": "looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." The African American self is alienated from both versions of self: the type of the white society, and the inner soul with which it conflicts.

But as Du Bois suggests, this condition of double-consciousness is also basic to the practice of sociology. As a discipline that enacts the dilemma of being subject and object simultaneously, whose practitioners are inevitably the objects of their own investigations, sociol-209- ogy epitomizes the circumstances of the African American soul. Because contemporary sociology failed to come to terms with this paradox, it could not realize the promise it held out to Du Bois.

By conceptualizing a different kind of social science founded upon a critique of capitalism, as well as an awareness of its own perilous objectivity, Du Bois pointed the way toward a critical social theory that would not be fully articulated until the rise of the Frankfurt School thirty years later. This perspective, formulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others, rejected orthodox social science, the American version in particular, as an apology for capitalism. They adopted in its place a theory based on the method of negative dialectics, critical of all reigning forms of analysis, and directed toward fundamental social change. For W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as for Adorno and Horkheimer, a social theory without this commitment was unworthy of the name.

Du Bois's ventures in literature after Souls had limited results. His first full-fledged novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), has all the trappings of socialist realism, with its cast of dark and light characters: the idealized African American hero and heroine, Bles and Zora; the weak and selfish whites, most of them monstrous vessels of capitalist greed; the weak African Americans who succumb to the evil temptations of capitalism. It is telling that however ambivalent Du Bois was toward the sociology of his day, he never equaled the powerful blend of literary and sociological imaginings he achieved in Souls.

"Mostly no one knowing me can like it that I love it that everyone is a kind of men and women, that always I am looking and comparing and classifying them, always I am seeing their repeating." So writes Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans, expressing her era's simultaneous attraction and resistance to social categorization. Her own most obvious response is parody. The lists of human types that pervade Stein's "great American novel" are often absurd. One such list runs to: "being one liking swimming, being one tired of ocean bathing before they have really been in more than twice in a season." But despite such parodic attitudes, she was deeply committed to the enterprise of knowing human kinds. How did Stein come to be a maker of lists? What brought her to desire a unified knowl-210- edge of America? A clue to these questions lies in her pursuit of social science.

Stein's advanced education began at Harvard in the 1890s, where she studied mainly psychology, and ended at Johns Hopkins at the turn of the century, where she studied brain anatomy. Both of these educational experiences suggest provocative sources for The Making of Americans. Stein's Harvard research (which was published as "Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention," in The Psychological Review, 1898) was based on experiments with Harvard and Radcliffe students. It addressed the question of how automatic behavior can be cultivated in human subjects; how can subjects be made to internalize suggested actions as their own habits? Among the issues that Stein's experiment takes up is the question of gender difference: is there a consistent opposition between male and female responses to suggested action? Another is the problem of change: once learned, how can subjects be induced to abandon old actions and adopt new ones? Stein's research produced its own catalog of human types. Type I, "girls. . found naturally in literature courses" and men bound for law, is "nervous, high-strung, very imaginative." Type II, "blond and pale," is "distinctly phlegmatic," a general "New England" type that is repressed and selfconscious. The parallels between Stein's research and the ideas of William James are revealing. James describes habit, in the famous essay of that name, as "the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. . It also prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein." With this observation, James links the intricate psychology of habit to larger mechanisms of organization and control. And this points to the larger arena Stein will create for her psychological studies in The Making of Americans.

At Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she went on the advice of James, Stein sought even more objective knowledge of human minds. Garland Allen, a historian of biology, has characterized the dominant tradition at Hopkins during this period as "descriptive naturalist." This involved an emphasis on morphology — the study and classification of form — which assumed the underlying unity of diverse organisms. Among the techniques taught was the construction of -211- family trees and phylogenies, which identified a single common ancestor as the progenitor of modern lines.

Stein's developing interest in typology culminated in her preoccupation with the work of Otto Weininger, the German psychologist, whose book Sex and Character (1906) inspired her during her writing of The Making of Americans. A precursor to Nazi ideology, Weininger's book offered a system of characterology, whose main purpose seemed to be the identification of human types that threatened the deterioration of nations. However rigidly schematic Weininger's ideas, he was willing to accept ambiguity, by admitting that some despised characteristics were present to varying degrees in all human types. Significantly, in light of Stein's Jewish-lesbian identity, the two main sources of degeneracy in Weininger's system were Jews and women. The extent of feminine possibility for Weininger was prostitute, mother, servant, saint, and masculine woman. Jews occupied a unique position in Weininger's typology since Jewish traits were confined to the race alone. They therefore provide an opportunity for the in-depth study of degeneracy.

What is so obviously startling about Stein's adoption of Weininger's ideas, which she claimed expressed "her own thoughts exactly," was that it required the complete suppression of her own identity. Indeed, she seems to have identified so fully with Weininger that she sometimes referred to his system as her own. As she wrote in her notebook, "That thing of mine of sex and mind and character all coming together seems to work absolutely." Stein's engagement with Weininger points to an important feature of The Making of Americans. Stein's representation of her own subjective processes, her use of herself as an object of study, was a means of self-distancing. Stein's spectacular detachment fulfills Georg Simmel's sociological prescription for aesthetics, from The Philosophy of Money: "The basic principle of art was to bring us closer to things by placing them at a distance from us." It also reveals what is perhaps the most elitist aspect of Stein's vision: that other human beings are to her objects, with readily identifiable "bottom beings," while Stein's own identity is endlessly elusive and revisable.

The Making of Americans is an effort to bring us closer to the various mythologies of American culture, by analytically detaching ourselves from them. American minds, the book's narrative suggests, -212- are thickets of repetition: filled with a finite set of stories, plans, opinions. Stay with one for a certain length of time and you begin to hear the repetitions, to note patterns, which hold the clue to that individual's "bottom being." This white noise exists in our minds apart from the practical thoughts that impel our action. When we sit back to reflect on ourselves, or to present ourselves to others, we become aware of the fog of repetition in which we are always enveloped. If this is true on an individual level, it is also true of nations. Perhaps more than any other American writer, Stein is devoted to the idea of a national mind. For Stein this national mind, like the repetitions that reveal individual being, comes alive through cliché, parable, all the little stories that form the mental tissue of American life. Another name for this mental tissue is ideology, and Stein aims to crack the enormous web of images and ideals that go into the making of Americans.

The central creation of Stein's novel is the great American writer. Stein claims supreme authority for writers. Stories are powerful. They exploit, indeed they create, the appetite for fantasy that is essential to any successful nation.

Yet how are we to take Stein's emphasis, starting with the title, on the production side of American culture? As a catalog of the seemingly infinite number of American types, Stein's book can be understood as celebrating the sheer activity of production. This is consistent with the spirit of her gargantuan 925-page book. It seems to contradict, however, her continual undermining of human reproduction and hereditary transmission. What Stein is suggesting is that this patriarchal model is becoming obsolete, the concept of fathering is losing ground to another kind of manufacture. Progress, as Stein defines it, involves the displacement of traditional forms of production by a modern capitalist ideal of production, with which the monumentally productive writer implicitly identifies. At the same time, Stein's American writer has become an active producer of selves, in the sociological vein. To this end, the novel begins with a sputtering, fantastically abbreviated patriarchal plea for the maintenance of tradition. And the remainder of the book can be read as a rebuttal of this two-line dictum.

The patriarchal figure who threatens to dominate the book is David Hersland, who closely resembles Stein's own father Daniel. In -213- contrast to the other fathers, this immigrant who made good fulfills a very liberal, very modern American pattern. He had "gone west to make his fortune. . he was big and abundant and full of new ways of thinking." An Emersonian type, "he was as big as all the world about him. . the world was all him, and there was no difference in it in him. . there were no separations of him or from him, and the whole world he lived in always lived inside him." David Hersland is the representative of the misguided dream of human transparency and uniformity. And in a sense Stein's whole book is an assault on this dream. The world, Stein argues, does not conform to the domineering unities of this patriarch. And yet the real action of her book involves not so much his discrediting as his rebirth in the form of the great American novelist. Stein's own penchant for knowing the social world, for cataloging its various parts, derives from this figure. Every restriction of this desire, every assertion that society resists knowledge and codification, is balanced by a reaffirmation of the desire to know. Though Stein readily admits that any such effort is bound to be a process of self-codification, she also recognizes this as a truth too dark to accept.

In one of the book's most brilliant passages, Stein records our stubborn inability to accept this darkness. She describes "being with someone who has always been walking with you, and you always have been feeling that one was seeing everything with you and you feel then that they are seeing that thing the way you are seeing it and then you go sometime with that one to a doctor to have that one have their eyes examined and then you find that things you are seeing, you are writing completely only for one and that is yourself then and to every other one it is a different thing. . You know it then yes but you do not really know it as a continuous knowing in you for then in living always you are feeling that someone else is understanding, feeling seeing something the way you are feeling, seeing, understanding that thing."

This passage is paradigmatic of Stein's vision. It reflects her preoccupation with the very processes by which human beings process knowledge, a subject as visceral as the function of the retina. Harking back to her interest in anatomy and automatic action, the passage reveals her conviction that predispositions, ideas, myths, once absorbed, are as stubborn as biology. This does not make Stein a bi-214- ological determinist. Rather she imaged ideology in physical terms as a reminder of its power. The passage is most striking in its awareness of the limits of awareness. You can know this "truth," about the limits of knowing, she says, you can look it square in the face, but it won't change your fundamental need to know. It won't alter the presumptuous habits that form the basis of American liberalism-that society and its members are transparent, that they are just like us.

The Making of Americans brings us full circle in our analysis, back to Ian Hacking's sense of "Making Up People." For Stein, as for Hacking, to classify is to invent; describing is a creative activity. Typological description involves not only the invention of human beings but the invention of language. "So I found myself getting deeper and deeper into the idea of describing really describing every individual that could exist," Stein writes in The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans (1934-35), "while I was doing all this all unconsciously at the same time a matter of tenses and sentences came to fascinate me." Stein's experimental language, this passage suggests, comes directly out of her addiction to social scientific methods of description. Her understanding of social scientific method reveals its fundamentally aesthetic aspects. While it locks others into typological schemes, it frees the typologist for acts of invention.

Stein's America, a turn-of-the-century scene of immigration, scientific discovery, economic expansion, looming sexual liberation, offers an open field for the making of Americans. The typological thinking of this era reveals a moment when the concerns of American novelists were vividly aligned with those of more scientific social analysts. In keeping with the other novelists we have discussed, Stein's sustained meditations on typological thinking remind us that literature tends to absorb contemporary ideologies. But they also remind us that literature can give us insight into social categories-the historical pressures that shape them, the human beings they affect-and, in so doing, may provide a source of resistance as well as a source of understanding and critique.

Susan Mizruchi

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Fiction and Reform II

The second half of the nineteenth century in the United States was characterized by an enormous number of social reform movements. Indeed, roughly the last twenty years of the century have been designated by some historians as the Age of Protest and Reform. This period began around 1878, when the nation was racked by postwar financial panic and depression, and ended in 1898 with a return to "prosperity" occasioned by the discovery of gold and by inflation related to the Spanish-American War. But even before the onset of this officially recognized period of social protest, authors were using the novel form to lodge criticisms about social injustices they felt marred American life. Among the issues that were foremost in national debate during the period are abolitionism, feminism, agrarian protest, and industrial labor conditions. Each of these issues is treated directly and explicitly in at least one of the novels under consideration in this chapter. At the same time, as will become clear, it is possible to trace relations between these works and other less obviously "political" works of the era, and in doing so we will be able to identify the interest in social reform as not merely the discrete characteristic of a few writers and activists but rather as constitutive of an entire culture in which these persons performed their work.

If we are to understand that work fully, we must first understand what sort of undertaking is designated by "reform." The term is commonly used to refer to an improvement in social and political conditions that is brought about without a radical change in existent -216- social and political structures. Of course, the question of what constitutes "radical change" is a very difficult one to answer. We may be aided here by recourse to what are currently taken as the three dominant modes of social categorization-gender, race, and class. Contemporary social theory and cultural criticism are developing an everincreasing sense of the fundamental interrelation of these categories in the constitution of our society. Thus, to the extent that any given movement fails to recognize that interrelation, it then falls short of envisioning a really revolutionary social transformation-it is properly reformist. The movements characteristic of the late nineteenth century (like most of those current today) were constituted in precisely this way. Moreover, even when activists proposed social changes that would no doubt have brought about developments that most people would have experienced as radically new — the socialization of the economy, for instance, or the admission of women into all spheres of public life-the means by which they sought to incorporate these changes were by and large characterized by moderation, gradualism, and/or work through established social and political mechanisms, as opposed to sudden revolutionary transformation. Having posited this definition of reform culture during the latter half of the nineteenth century, we are now well prepared to be confronted with the many exceptions to it that any survey of the period will undoubtedly uncover. And yet, any modifications we must make in our understanding of the reform impulse should be seen not as invalidating this initial conception but rather as indicating the great difficulty of painting with broad strokes a national history whose import will lie largely in the fine, specific details of the individual experiences that constitute it.

Any history of the reform novel in the latter half of the nineteenth century would have to begin with a consideration of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This novel-an abolitionist narrative that advocated the ultimate repatriation of African Americans from the United States to colonies in West Africa-crystallizes the effect of a major political development that occurred right at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. The year 1850 saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated the return of fugitive slaves even from the nonslaveholding Northern states into which they might have escaped. By legislating the North's complicity in slavery, -217- the law merely exposed the fact that the entire nation had been implicated in the horrors of the system from the beginning, and indicated that the ramifications of the institution were not peculiar to the South. The act was an element in the Compromise of 1850, the other major aspect of which allowed for the admission of Western territories into the Union as nonslave states. Its passage marked a moral watershed for many Northerners, who were finally brought face to face with the full significance of the slave system; and the fact that the law was signed in 1850 provides us with a means of neatly bifurcating the century so that we can consider the reform culture of the latter half as a relatively contained phenomenon. Stowe, like many other citizens who harbored antislavery sentiments, was indignant with President Millard Fillmore and, especially, with New Hampshire Senator Daniel Webster-the bulwark of New England liberalism-for supporting the bill. She turned that indignation to the writing of her abolitionist novel, which was published in 1852, and which launched her on a long public career. As Uncle Tom's Cabin provides us with a means by which to understand the strategies incorporated in all of the rest of the works we will consider, it will be necessary to give it substantial attention here.

As numerous commentators have suggested, Uncle Tom's Cabin stands not only as a testament to Stowe's strong antislavery sentiment but also as an indication of the degree to which abolitionist rhetoric was forged in the crucible of feminine-and feminist-sensibility. Organized American feminism itself had strong roots in the antislavery movement, emerging from the women's auxiliaries to maledominated abolitionist groups of the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, it was in response to the barring of women delegates from the floor of the 1840 World's Antislavery Convention in London that Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the organizing for the first women's rights convention, held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Thus the two movements-for women's rights, including, but not limited to, suffrage, and for equality between African Americans and whites, beginning with the abolition of slavery-have long been intertwined. They have also frequently been set at odds with each other in a political context that plays different disenfranchised groups against one another. Despite the historically vexed relationship between feminism and abolition-218- ism, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in its particular stylistic treatment of its peculiar subject matter, actually synthesizes the two social movements in one triumphant political work.

Since at least the mid- 1970s, scholars have been engaged in a reassessment of the function of the sentimental novel in the nineteenthcentury United States. This reassessment has led to an understanding of the form's potential for effecting progressive social change through its adaptation of narrative conventions that actually seem to reflect women's passivity and subservience to men. The stereotypically feminine traits that are associated with the Victorian-era "cult of true womanhood"-piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity-combine to make women the guardians of society's moral standards. This has provided for two primary types of plot in the sentimental novel: the plot of romantic seduction, whereby a woman's virtue is tested by the insistent overtures made to her by a relatively less scrupulous man; and the plot of moral improvement, whereby the superior virtue that is considered to characterize women actually empowers them to sway the actions of the men who come under their domestic care. It has been argued that Uncle Tom's Cabin suppresses the former sentimental structure and emphasizes the latter, depicting women as the primary agents of the antislavery activity in the novel. Stowe's work thus actually loosens the sentimental novel from its associations with the apparently profoundly private concerns of the domestic sphere and transforms it into a forum for public agitation for social reform. This mode of politicizing the domestic sphere by introducing into it the consideration of public events will be central to much reform fiction through the 1880s-and it will also provide the context within which we can understand the development of the reform novel in the final decade of the century-so it is worth emphasizing here the role Stowe's novel plays in originating the strategy.

To understand this strategy fully requires that we examine exactly how Uncle Tom's Cabin makes its argument. Obviously, there are any number of aspects of Stowe's presentation on which we might focus. It will be instructive, though, to take a cue from the author herself, whose novel, when originally published in two volumes in 1852, was subtitled "The Man That Was a Thing." For Stowe's purpose, evident in much of her rhetoric in the novel, was to impress -219- upon her readers the dehumanizing effects of slavery upon African Americans held in its thrall. This was not a new undertaking; abolitionist orators and writers had been broadcasting a very similar message throughout the 1830s and 1840s. To be sure, that most influential abolitionist tract, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, which was published in 1845, based its polemical effect on precisely the fact that the institution of slavery rendered its victims (both African American slave and white master) less than human. The difference between Douglass's treatment and Stowe's, however, lies in the specific type of dehumanization that each sees at work in slavery. Douglass repeatedly emphasizes slavery's effect of imbuing human beings with an array of animalistic traits-"behold," he says, as he describes his own downward trajectory, just before the climactic turn of the narrative, "a man transformed into a brute!" Stowe, on the other hand, specifies again and again the intended effect of slavery to transform humans not into some lower order of animal but rather into inanimate objects, traded and held as property. In the very first chapter of her novel, Stowe, having presented the slaveowner, Arthur Shelby, reflecting on his need to sell his faithful hand, Tom, and the young son of his wife's maid, makes the following pronouncement:

This statement is only a prelude to numerous other references to the status of slaves as things throughout the first eight chapters of the book.

We might well ask what is accomplished by Stowe's positing of the matter as she does. It is possible to argue that, by emphasizing a desired inanimate status for African American slaves, Stowe actually allows for the question of slavery itself to be brought within the compass of domestic, feminine concerns, and thus to be commented on through the mechanism of sentimental fiction. In order to under-220- stand how this works, we need first to recognize the complicated relation between the realms, mentioned earlier, of the public and the private. Let us remember that, even if Uncle Tom — and the other slaves, too, for that matter — is legally a thing, a piece of property, he is a particular kind of property: specifically, as a plantation laborer, he is a form of capital — a fund of wealth managed specifically with the aim of producing more wealth. To the extent that capital presupposes a marketplace in which different persons' wealth can be exchanged in the form of various commodities, then its function is calculated as a relatively "public" one. On the other hand, distinguished from the category of capital, there exists that set of commodities whose implication in the larger system of exchange is relatively veiled, or mystified, through their fairly infrequent circulation in it. I am thinking of property that is not only "private" but emphatically "personal," and I have in mind one particular example of such personal property from Uncle Tom's Cabin itself.

In chapter 5 of the novel, when Mr. Shelby informs his wife, Emily, of the necessity of selling Tom and the young boy, Harry, she is first horrified, and then attempts to rally to the call of economic necessity by offering a substitute bargain for the sale of the two slaves. When Mr. Shelby hopes aloud that he has convinced his wife of the necessity for his action, she responds emphatically:

Mrs. Shelby's insight into the nature of her family's economic straits allows her to effect the transmutation of her watch — the private possession that, for all its practical use, is still primarily a personal adornment — into an item for exchange in the public marketplace. Simultaneously, and conversely, as the personal item is being offered as a substitute for the slave in the proposed exchange, an equivalency is established whereby the status of the slave must be recognized as related to the personal, private life of, in this case, the slave mistress. Once slave status is clearly demonstrated to fall within -221- the realm of the private, the personal, the domestic, then the questions pertaining to slavery may logically be considered by women, whose stereotypical realm, after all, is the actual and metaphorical private, domestic space of the nation. In short, Uncle Tom's Cabin depends for its power on a demonstration of the fundamental interrelatedness of the private and public spheres — on showing that the private is the public or, to put it in the terms of second-wave feminism, that the personal is political.

The confusion between private and public in the matter of slavery is explicitly manifested in the novel in a scene between Senator and Mrs. Bird, who assist the runaway slave, Eliza, as she makes her way toward the North. Just before Eliza's arrival at the Birds' home, Mrs. Bird remonstrates with her husband for his support, in the Ohio state legislature, of a fugitive slave act: "Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can't give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!" Her husband responds with what he considers to be typically masculine rationality:

On the contrary, however, it is precisely by filtering public events through private feelings that the reform impulse is developed in the historical context under consideration, and this strategy certainly accounts for Stowe's ability to mount an abolitionist protest through the feminized form of sentimental fiction.

In its narrative treatment of the public/private relationship, Uncle Tom's Cabin prefigures much other reform fiction from the latter half of the nineteenth century. Nine years after the publication of Stowe's novel, just at the outbreak of the Civil War, Rebecca Harding Davis published her remarkable Life in the Iron Mills in the April 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. This piece of fiction, which has been seen as representing the first step in American literature's transition from romanticism to realism, depicts the fate of two immigrant workers in the mills of a Midwestern industrial town. Hugh Wolfe rolls -222- iron in the vast works that, by the time of Harding's writing, are operating around the clock; his cousin, Deborah, is a "picker" in a cotton mill. The structure of Harding's narrative is such that it demonstrates the oppressive conditions of life in the factories both as they are experienced by Hugh and Deb themselves and as they are viewed from the vantage of a middle-class observer, represented in the narrator.

The opening of Harding's tale has become famous since its reprinting by the Feminist Press in 1972:

And, three paragraphs later:

From this point, the tale is related of the Welsh-born industrial workers who are the focus of Harding's story. But these opening lines are crucial, for they posit the grim reality of the mill workers' lives as an irruption into the narrator's apparently comfortable middle-class existence. After all, we do learn, at the end of the narrative, that the storyteller is ensconced in her domestic library, which is scattered with a number of objects of distinction: "A half-moulded child's head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty." It is striking then that, as she meditates in her insulation, the narrator should remark about the air of the mill town, "It stifles me." The personal effect that the stifling atmosphere of the mills has on the narrator indicates the degree to which the private, middle-class domestic space is penetrated by the machinery of industrial capital. The inevitable implication of the industrial world in the domestic realm is underscored, as well, by the fact that the story of Hugh and Deb -223- Wolfe, which the narrator relates, is the story, too, "of this old house," which the narrator presently occupies, and which is also "the one where the Wolfes lived."

The plot of Life in the Iron Mills is relatively simple. Hugh Wolfe, oddly independent and standoffish from the other millhands, is visited by two parties one evening as he labors overtime at the ironworks. One is his cousin Deb, a young, hunchbacked woman who ardently loves Hugh, and who this night, as on other evenings when he works the night shift, brings him a dinner pail; the other is a group of men from the upper classes come to take a tour of the mill while Deb is there. They include a Mr. Kirby, son of one of the millowners, the factory overseer, a town physician, a newspaper reporter, and a relative of Kirby's from out of town, named Mitchell. While at the mill, they marvel not only at the roar and bustle of the works themselves but also at a strange female figure that Hugh has carved out of korl, the refuse from the iron ore (the subtitle of Life in the Iron Mills is "The Korl Woman"). She has a strained and anguished-looking countenance, but is so muscular — in clear contrast to the Victorian "true woman" — that the gentlemen cannot understand when Hugh explains her pained expression by saying "She be hungry." Obviously, her hunger is a spiritual one, born of the stifling existence that her class endures as laborers in the industrial machine, which is evidently Davis's point; and this fact is clarified when Hugh specifies to his inquisitors that she is hungry for "Summat to make her live, I think, — like you." This statement provokes a debate amongst the visitors about exactly who is responsible for the social welfare of the factory workers.

While this exchange is going on, though, Deb makes her own grab at "summat to make her live" by stealing from Mitchell's pocket a wallet that contains a little cash and a check for a substantial amount of money. Following some persuasion on her part after she and Hugh leave the mill, he decides to keep the wallet, and is arrested the next day for theft. He is quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to nineteen years in prison (literally half his life, as is pointed out in the Feminist Press notes to the book: the life expectancy at the time for men in his position was thirty-seven years; Hugh is nineteen when he is incarcerated). Deb gets a three-year jail sentence for acting as his accomplice. Rather than waste away in prison, Hugh kills himself by -224- slicing his veins with a piece of sharpened tin. Deb is befriended by a helpful Quaker woman, and lives a pious life among the community of Friends after her release.

What remains, however, is the figure of the korl woman itself, which stands, hidden behind a curtain, in the narrator's library. Its position there suggests the status of the story of Hugh and Deb, which, it has been proposed, is a realist narrative set in the romantic frame of the narrator's rhetoric. The korl figure represents unsettling questions about social inequities within the newly developing system of industrial capitalism, and its position in the narrator's library represents the introduction of those questions into the private realm of the domestic space, in which context they become fodder for a reform movement that is both represented in and occasioned by such works as Life in the Iron Mills.

In terms of literary history, Life in the Iron Mills is a remarkably prescient indicator of the characteristics of later works of United States literature. Observers have drawn links between its motifs and those of such disparate naturalist novels as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1894), Frank Norris's McTeague (1899), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). Davis's exposure of the millhands' lives has been likened to the exploration of turn-of-the-century urban ghettos represented in Jacob Riis's text-cum-photo essay, How the Other Half Lives (1890). The dramatic theatricality that characterizes the behaviors of her fictional personages has been seen as prefiguring a similar strain in Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Norris's The Pit (1902), and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905). These associations are all traceable through the narrative techniques that Davis utilizes, many of which appear repeatedly in the later works. But Life in the Iron Mills is not merely a precursor of American literary realism and naturalism; it is also a powerful instance of reform fiction — a status to which most later naturalism was prevented from acceding, however graphic its depiction of social inequality and the squalor of the poor, owing to its equally strong sense of the immutably determined and deterministic nature of those very conditions. Davis's work is deterministic, without a doubt — suggesting that Hugh and Deborah have inherited the conditions of their parents before them, just as does the wealthy Kirby; and that the future may be beyond their -225- ability to control — but it also suggests the possibility of transcendence of these conditions through Deb's association with the Quaker community, well known during the period for its interest and activity in effecting social reform through individual action. Consequently, Davis's work can illuminatingly be aligned with later realist works of social criticism, such as Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), both of which will be taken up here. Critics have also considered it to be centrally positioned amongst a trio of social reform works that establish the conventions for the later material: Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Davis work, and The Silent Partner (1871), by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Phelps's novel incorporates a number of aspects of literary naturalism, including grimly realistic depictions of the life of Sip Garth and other workers in the cotton mills of Five Falls, Massachusetts. Moreover, Phelps utilizes what critics have identified as a key symbolic structure of naturalism, whereby one particular entity is early on associated with the main character of the story and its significance evolves along with the fate of that character. In Norris's McTeague, gold is such an emblem; in Dreiser's Sister Carrie, it is the rocking chair; in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, it is Henry's wound; in Life in the Iron Mills, it is the iron itself. In The Silent Partner, this naturalistic emblem is the hand of Perley Kelso, the daughter of one of the owners of the factory where Sip works. At the beginning of the novel that hand is beautiful and beringed, for Perley is to be married to Maverick Hayle, her father's junior partner. After she meets Sip in the street one evening, though, subsequent to which news of her father's sudden death is rapidly conveyed to her, Perley decides to test the limits of her new status as a silent partner in the firm (the only status that her fiancé and his father will allow the young woman with respect to the business) by trying to reform the condition of the millhands. Her insistence on this course of action — along with her growing realization that it is through the agency of the firm's partners and other members of her own class that the workers are kept downalienates her from Maverick, and she terminates her engagement to him. By this point in the story her ring has already been broken, as she has forcefully brought down her hand on a table in a fit of passionate frustration over the plight of Sip and the other mill work-226- ers, and the resultant bruise on her finger is a constant portent throughout the rest of the novel.

We mustn't forget, however, what the ring has signified: betrothal, marriage, domesticity — in short, precisely the type of insulated existence characteristic of high-bred ladies such as Perley, who would normally be ignorant of the goings-on at the factories their husbands and fathers control. Perley's mission, however, becomes precisely to incorporate the world of the mills into her own private sphere; or, rather, she comes to recognize that the factory has always been implicated in her own life of luxury and opulence. For, while it is true that, after her father's death, Perley leaves her comfortable home in Boston to live permanently in the family house at Five Falls and, thus, in closer proximity to the activity at the mills, the interrelation of her life and that of the mill workers is actually pointed out to her through a much less dramatic incident.

Having become acquainted with the squalor that characterizes the lives of the mill workers, Perley insists to Maverick that a number of improvements must be made at the factories, including the establishment of a library, reading rooms, lectures, schools, relief societies, and tenement housing, all for the benefit of the laborers. Maverick protests that Hayle and Kelso cannot afford to provide such amenities, but Perley makes a cogent rejoinder based on her own knowledge not just of the resources of the company but of the manner in which they are distributed, with the employees continually stinted in their share: "I think, if I may judge from my own income, that a library and a reading-room would not bankrupt us, at least this year." Thus, Perley's impulse to reform is developed through her growing sense of the relation between the condition of the mill workers and her own rather more comfortable existence, which she actually comes to use as an index of the wrongs suffered by the workers. The consciousness that she thus develops (though it seems to slip in a way that betrays the entrenchedness of her class conditioning during her effort to mollify the workers when they consider striking over a cut in wages) influences her to eschew marriage altogether and devote her life to personal efforts at reform within the mills, which she undertakes as a means to realize her rather naive utopian vision of social equality among the classes. -227-

But The Silent Partner is not merely a utopian vision; it is also a political tract, an attempt to convince its readers, through the example of Perley Kelso, of the necessity of bettering the lot of factory workers. Consequently, it is characterized by a fair amount of didacticism in its presentation. Indeed, throughout the novel Phelps cites extensively from the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor in order to support her claims about the laborers' existence. In this respect she shares much with other reform novelists of the era, particularly those writing about slavery, such as the African American writers William Wells Brown (Clotel [1853]) and, especially, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Iola Leroy [1892]), whose characters themselves give direct voice to Harper's appeals for social justice. The combination of utopian vision and the moral exhortation that characterizes The Silent Partner is seen, as well, in the central utopian fiction of the late nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888).

Bellamy's novel is the first one treated here to fall squarely within the era that has been termed the age of protest and reform. While the period lasted, it spawned numerous movements of dissent within the United States, and saw the publication of nearly 500 social gospel and utopian novels, among which Bellamy's is the foremost. But if Looking Backward gives us the most fully developed depiction of a utopian community, it nevertheless does not suggest that this ideal social order is a "nowhere" land the attainment of which is impossible. On the contrary, Bellamy suggests that a full socialist "Nationalism," as he called it, is not only possible but inevitable, and that, to paraphrase from the contemporary artist Laurie Anderson, "paradise is exactly like where you are right now — only much better." For, indeed, Bellamy's hero, Julian West, never leaves his Boston home. He merely goes to sleep in it — or, rather, in a soundproof chamber beneath it, which he has built as a haven from the bustle of the city that prevents him from sleeping — with the aid of a mesmerist who helps him treat his insomnia. The profound power of hypnotism keeps him in a sort of state of suspended animation until he awakes, Rip Van Winkle-like, 113 years later, in the year 2000, not a day older than when he first dozed. He soon learns that Boston, and, indeed, the entire society, has been fully socialized, and he is familiarized with this brave new world under the aegis of a Dr. Leete, who -228- discovers him, and Dr. Leete's daughter, Edith. Julian spends some time becoming oriented to the fact that his new life in the future is not really a dream, and even once he assimilates this fact he actually does dream that he is back in the year 1887, bemoaning the myriad social ills attendant to the full-scale industrial capitalism of the era. He is awakened from this nightmare by Edith Leete, learns that she is actually the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, who had been his fiancée in 1887, becomes engaged to her, and is installed in a university position as a lecturer in history so that they might live happily ever after into the twenty-first century.

It is the nightmare of Julian's reentrance into the nineteenth century that actually provides for the novel's transcendence of the standard representation of utopian bliss as a social impossibility, and transforms it into a novel of reform. By the time that Julian has this horrific vision, he — and the reader — has been thoroughly convinced of the superiority of twentieth-century society, so much so that, given the choice, he — and, again, the nineteenth-century reader — would clearly opt for the socialist state. It is this presentation of choice that characterizes Bellamy's novel as a reformist work, in that it implies that United States citizens must take the initiative if they hope to bring about the Edenic society Looking Backward depicts. This choice is made clear in an excerpt from a speech Bellamy gave on "Nationalism — Principles and Purposes," in Boston in 1889. As Caroline Ticknor, daughter of Bellamy's publisher remembered it, Bellamy addressed the issues of "'Plutocracy and Nationalism,' expressing his belief that one, or the other, must be the choice of the American people at the end of ten years' time." As commentators have noted, however, Looking Backward is prevented from being a call for revolution through an aspect of Bellamy's philosophy that actually runs counter to this notion of choice — that is, his sense that his brand of socialism will be an inevitable evolutionary outcome of the capitalist development characteristic of the late nineteenth century. There is a contradiction here, then, but the two elements that constitute the paradox might alternately be seen as the means by which Bellamy's novel is made to fit the bounds of reform fiction.

It is worth noting, however, what happens to the conventions of the reform novel as identified thus far once Bellamy takes up the genre. Structurally, Bellamy's framing of his tale within the conven-229- tional plot of romantic marriage seems to recapitulate the strategy already identified as operative in the other works under discussion, whereby reform is constituted through the introduction of the consideration of the public good into the context of the private, domestic sphere. Thematically, however, this public/private dynamic is not played out nearly so forcefully as it is in the earlier works. Indeed, if it is true that Julian comes to a realization of the correctness of socialist principles right in his own home, it is equally true that his never stepping out of that home indicates a striking passivity in his relation to social reform — he, personally, never has to do anything, inside his home or out of it, in order to bring about social transformation. Thus Looking Backward, while using the domestic locale as a structural device in the narrative, actually evacuates that locale of any real political significance, and, consequently, reduces the significance of the feminist impulse that is implicit in the works by Stowe, Davis, and Phelps. Looking Backward actually effectively contains its feminism by dislocating it from a domestic space that is the primary stage for the novel's action, and in which concrete reformist activity takes place, and resituating it in the relatively more limited scope of a particular character in the story: the federal government of Bellamy's twentieth-century United States provides for one female elected official who works in the federal government — an official who has the authority to veto any legislation that concerns the well-being of women.

This dislocation of feminist politics within Bellamy's novel signals" a parallel reconception of the reform fiction genre during the time of Bellamy's writing. Specifically, the domestic setting itself — which in the earlier fiction had been the locus within which any number of social concerns might be considered and acted upon, and thus implicitly linked with feminist politics — is by the 1880s reconceived as the locus specifically for the treatment of particular issues pertaining to women's social status. Thus feminism, rather than continuing to function as a fundamental guiding principle with respect to the reform activities depicted in social protest fiction, became instead merely one more issue among others, to be treated in individual works that focused on women's status in the domestic sphere. Works such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and, especially, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) — which -230- were not necessarily even considered as reform fiction at all, but rather as stories of personal complaint, until their resurrection in the late twentieth century — exemplify this emergent genre beautifully.

The Awakening provides what commentators have identified as a Whitmanesque portrayal of the evolution of a woman's sensual life and her concomitant rebellion against the restrictions of marriage through her abandonment of her husband and children and her attachment to a charming but licentious rogue. "The Yellow Wallpaper" depicts the plight of another young married woman whose physician husband has diagnosed her as suffering from hysterical nervousness and has prescribed a cure of complete inactivity and bedrest that frustrates her energetic character. Both Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Gilman's unnamed protagonist come to tragic ends: the former, overcome by the constraints of social convention, finally opts for release from her stifling situation by walking into the sea, which act represents both her death and her giving herself over to the sensuality for which she has developed such a passionate craving; the latter, baffled by the patriarchal rule that keeps her confined to her chamber and suppresses her creative impulses, becomes obsessed with decoding the pattern on the wallpaper that covers her room. She begins to see that pattern as representing a hunched, deformed, "creeping" woman struggling to escape from behind a series of bars that entraps her. As time goes on, she determines to get the woman free, and the story ends in a frenzied climax in which she maniacally strips large portions of the paper from the wall with her bare hands while her alarmed husband and sister-in-law try to reach her through the bedroom door, which she has locked. When they finally enter the room, the woman has gone completely mad, envisioning herself as the one who had been trapped in the yellow wallpaper, and who now "creeps" freely around the room, refusing ever to be put back into her prison.

These works are reformist insofar as they imply the need for change in the social conditions that constrain women to the detriment of their psychic well-being. Indeed, Gilman's work is a very specific indictment of the practices of Dr. S. Weir Mitchel l, a Philadelphia physician (and novelist) of the time who became famous for developing the cure of enforced rest for "neurotic females," and under whose care Gilman herself was once placed by her well-meaning but -231- paternalistic husband. At the same time, while the works by Gilman and Chopin graphically illustrate the difficulties women faced within the society about which they wrote, they do not explicitly outline programs for change that might be taken up by social reformers. This omission undoubtedly prevented these works from being perceived as serious reform fiction for decades, and facilitated their rejection by readers as the private idiosyncratic (and shocking) visions of their authors. But if the florescence of a vital feminist scholarship during the 1970s provoked readers to reassess the genre of sentimental fiction as a primary means by which the most pressing social and political issues of the day were taken under consideration, so too has it provided for a new conception of these two works as classics of political fiction, crucial to a full understanding of the turn-of-thecentury literary depiction of United States social life.

In the meantime, female protagonists continued to represent the moral center of much reform fiction "proper" through the turn of the century. Just as Perley Kelso seeks a way, in The Silent Partner, to ameliorate the lives of the millhands of Five Falls, so too does Annie Kilburn, in the novel of that title by William Dean Howells (1889), seek the most effective way to uplift the masses from their degraded social level. Annie is the daughter of the late Judge Kilburn, with whom she had lived for eleven years in Rome, far from her home in the Massachusetts manufacturing town of Hatboro'. When she returns to New England, she is faced with a newly ascendant merchant class whose social agenda conflicts with the old aristocracy of which she is a member. This new bourgeoisie is represented by the shopkeeper, Mr. Gerrish, who clashes with the Reverend Mr. Peck about the latter's refusal to espouse a Christianity that conforms to capitalist ideology. When Peck's plan to leave Hatboro' for a ministry among the working classes in Fall River is thwarted by his sudden death in a train accident, Annie takes up his moral standard and works to establish the Peck Social Union. Even in this context, however, Annie's contributions amount to little, as she occupies herself with keeping the books for the organization rather than actually ministering directly to the needs of the working classes, a point that the narrative makes clear in a bitingly satirical reference to Annie's dwelling "in a vicious circle" in which she "mostly forgets, and is mostly happy." -232-

The cul-de-sac in which Annie finds herself at novel's end typifies the irresolvable moral questions that Howells raises about the privileged individual's responsibility for the general social welfare. The reformist nature of Howells's work lies not in its clear depiction of what is to be done to remedy social inequalities but rather in its guiding assumption that such inequities are indeed the central moral problem of the era. This is clear in the majority of Howells's vast body of work, and certainly in the seven or so works of economic fiction he produced from 1885 through 1894, of which Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) are the most striking examples.

While Howells's fictions might themselves demur at providing specific prescriptions for the social ills they depict, they nonetheless emerge from very specific social and political contexts that shape their general themes. Just before beginning Annie Kilburn, Howells had announced his intention of bringing attention to the injustice of the hanging of four anarchist laborers after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. While the novel has little to do with the actual historical occurrence or the specific issues related to it, in depicting Annie's haplessness at finding the proper means of exercising her conscience it does nonetheless underscore Howells's belief that what is at stake in the struggle of the workers is not charity, but justice. This conviction is laid out much more elaborately in the more complex A Hazard of New Fortunes, written right after Annie Kilburn.

Simply stated, Hazard expands on the ideological conflict represented in Annie Kilburn in the tension between Mr. Gerrish and the Reverend Mr. Peck. That conflict is centered, in the later novel, on the characters of Mr. Dryfoos, an Indiana farmer who has become a millionaire when natural gas is discovered on his land, and his son, Conrad, who wants to minister on behalf of industrial workers. Their conflict is played out through Mr. Dryfoos's founding of a new magazine, Every Other Week, for which he wants Conrad to become the publisher; at the same time, his two daughters desire to become situated within New York society after Dryfoos, his wife, and his children move there upon the founding of the journal. The actual dayto-day management of the magazine is undertaken by Basil March (who, with his wife Isabel, is actually the central character in the story) — who serves as its editor after having left an unsuccessful ca-233- reer in insurance in Boston — and the promoter, Fulkerson. The catalyst for the explicit eruption of the social tensions that underlie the relations among these characters is provided by the elderly Henry Lindau, a German socialist who is an old friend of Basil March's and who handles foreign correspondence for the magazine. At a dinner party Dryfoos holds to celebrate the success of the new journalistic venture, he and Lindau clash over politics with the result that Lindau is disassociated from the magazine. This scene prefigures the explicit break between the elder Dryfoos and his son, who forsakes the business of the magazine to work on behalf of the striking streetcar workers. During a riot between the strikers and the police, Conrad sees Mr. Lindau being beaten by an officer, and is killed by a stray bullet as he runs to the old man's aid. Lindau himself dies as a result of his injuries, unable to appreciate the elder Dryfoos's change of heart after his son's death. Broken by his loss, Dryfoos sells the magazine to March and Fulkerson, who foresee prosperous future, and moves his family to France, where they settle in fairly well among Parisian society. This removal of the upwardly mobile family from the American context — and the accession of apparently more moderate parties to the position that they vacate — indicates the degree to which, by this time in the history of the reform novel, the domestic locus has ceased to serve as the prime site in which the transformation of social consciousness can occur, and has become, rather, the source of new converts to bourgeois ideology in the capitalist context.

This transition in the novelistic function of the family may well be linked to the rather less obviously didactic strategy that characterizes the work of Howells as opposed to that of, say, Stowe or Phelps. Howells's treatment of social division amongst the urban classes in A Hazard of New Fortunes was admired by the younger writer Hamlin Garland, who noted that "the author nowhere speaks in his own person, nowhere preaches, and yet the lesson is there for all who will read." In a novel that followed on the heels of Howells's Hazard, Garland attempted to do for the Midwestern farmer and the cause of agrarian reform what Howells had done for the rights of industrial workers.

From 1870 until the end of the century, United States farmers of the West and South were caught in a struggle with the industrial and -234- financial centers of the East as the country's economic base shifted from agriculture to manufacture: the mechanization of farming produced glutted markets and low crop prices; the development of railroad monopolies provided for high transportation costs that farmers were hard pressed to meet; high interest rates and an inflated money market added to the farmers' financial burden; a series of natural disasters made the welfare of rural families uncertain from one moment to the next; immigration and the opening of public lands in the West to homesteading increased the size and diversity of the rural population to such an extent that it was difficult for them to meet on common social territory to address their concerns. These problems that United States farmers faced were taken up through a number of burgeoning mechanisms for protest, including the National Grange, the Greenback movement, and the Populist Revolt. It was the complicated interrelation of these various developments that Garland attempted to treat in A Spoil of Office (1892), which illustrates the intense interest in social reform that characterized his early career.

The plot of the novel is bifurcated into an early section (developed from an unfinished novel on the Grange movement) that traces the development of Bradley Talcott's career first as an Iowa farmhand, then as a farmers' advocate and state legislator; and a later section that portrays his life as a politician in Des Moines and Washington. The central moral issue in the story involves Bradley's temptation, once elected to political office, to surrender the populist ideals on which his career had been based and succumb to the relative comfort of his position, a fate from which he is saved by the energetic Ida Wilbur, a Grange lecturer whose commitment to and understanding of the reform movement are much deeper than his own. Their union in the story results in the symbolic birth of a newly energized populist movement that will continue its vital work at the end of the novel.

What is notable about A Spoil of Office, beyond what most critics agree is a flawed structure and a nonetheless extremely accurate historical depiction of agrarian revolt, is its explicit treatment of women's subjection as a primarily economic problem. In a church lecture that Ida gives on "The Real Woman-question," she emphasizes that feminism -235- "is not a question of suffrage merely — suffrage is the smaller part of the woman-question — it is a question of equal rights. It is a question of whether the law of liberty applies to humanity or to men only. . The woman question is not a political one merely, it is an economic one. The real problem is the wage problem, the industrial problem. The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. As long as that dependence exists there will be weakness."

This position, which resembles orthodox Marxism's subsumption of all social inequality under the problem of class division within capitalism, characterized Garland's treatment of women's status in much of his early work, and the importance of his recognition of economics as a major factor in women's oppressed condition cannot be overlooked. At the same time, in works from 1894 and 1895, such as "The Land of the Straddle-Bug" and Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, Garland focused specifically on women's rights as a social as well as economic issue, thus broadening his treatment of that social movement — feminism — which had largely laid the framework for the development of reform fiction as we have come to know it since the turn of the century.

Throughout the period under consideration, much of the work of social reform continued to be performed by women of the likes of I da Wilbur. During the 1860s and early 1870s, Anna Dickinson was extremely popular on the Lyceum lecture circuit, speaking on numerous topics, including feminism, the rights of immigrants, and union organizing. Carry Nation and Frances Willard led the temperance movement through the 1870s. During the 1890s, Ida B. Wells produced explicitly detailed articles and addresses outlining the atrocities of lynch law in the South. And Ida Tarbell raised before the reading public questions about the integrity of the leading capitalist institutions of the day; her "History of the Standard Oil Company," published in McClure's Magazine in 1902, exposed the corrupt practices of the Rockefeller empire, and launched "muckraking" journalism. The great specificity of Tarbell's piece was duplicated in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, which detailed the degraded life of immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards and meatpacking houses. Influenced largely by Jack London's 1903 attack on capitalism and the class system, People of the Abyss (London would go on to write a further indictment of this system in his 1906 novel, The-236- Iron Heel), and by the techniques of Tarbell and fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens, The Jungle represents the culmination of the social protest novel before its impulses became dispersed in the global developments leading to World War I and in the various strains of American literary modernism.

The central figure in The Jungle is Jurgis Rudkus, a Chicago stockyard worker originally from Lithuania. Along with his wife, Ona, whom he marries after they both arrive in Chicago, his father, and several members of Ona's family, Jurgis ekes out a living in the meatpacking industry. Their lives are a continual struggle to make ends meet, as they all have only the most tenuous hold on their jobs — which are themselves extremely dangerous — owing to their age or youth, their uncertain health, personal injury, and the vicissitudes of industrial management. Jurgis's father, Antanas, dies of consumption, which he develops in the cold dampness of the meatpacking plant. Ona's cousin, Marija, loses her stockyard job and the family income significantly diminishes. At this point, Jurgis, who is taking nightschool classes in English, becomes an active member of the workers' union. The constant strain on the family resources takes a toll on Jurgis, however, and, with Ona having given birth to one child and pregnant with another, he takes to drink. Ona hopes to make money by prostituting herself to her plant supervisor, whom Jurgis assaults upon learning of the arrangement. The narrative moves rapidly through Jurgis's month in jail, the family's loss of their house, Ona's death in childbirth, and the death by drowning of their first son, culminating in Jurgis's stint as a migrant farmworker in the agricultural fields of the West. Upon returning to Chicago, he progresses through another succession of misfortunes, losing a job as a tunnel digger owing to an injury, begging for money on the street, returning to jail for attacking a saloonkeeper who tries to swindle him, working as a holdup man in Chicago's underworld, and, finally, returning to work as a scab in the meatpacking plant during a general strike. While there, he once again attacks Ona's former boss and, while subsequently fleeing the law, he comes upon Marija who is herself working as a prostitute. They are both thoroughly degraded now, until Jurgis hears a speech by a socialist organizer, after which he finds work in a hotel with a socialist manager, and begins a new and, finally, hopeful life. -237-

This expectant ending, coming as it does at the end of a long string of personal calamities for Jurgis, suggests Sinclair's primary intention in writing The Jungle: he wanted to call public attention to the conditions in which Midwestern industrial workers lived, and to urge social activism as a means of ameliorating those conditions. Indeed, the graphic manner in which he depicts the meatpackers' experiences leaves no doubt as to the unjust conditions under which they labored. At the same time, though, what caught public attention about Sinclair's book was not so much the degraded condition of the workers' lives but rather the appalling practices of the meatpacking industry in its preparation of foods for market. Concern about sanitation in the industry led to the passage of the Pure Food Bill of 1907, which President Theodore Roosevel t signed into law; but The Jungle had little effect in raising public outcry about the treatment of the workers in the meatpacking industry.

There is an irony here, in addition to the obvious one about the unintended effect that Sinclair's effort had in the public arena. The age of the protest novel began with an effort by Harriet Beecher Stowe to introduce issues of public concern into the realm of private, domestic life so that the push for reform might be born at home. By and large, that strategy worked in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it was further developed by writers such as Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps through the 1870s. When the domestic setting itself became displaced as the site in which novels depicted social transformation as originating, however, and when it became reconceived as the realm in which only certain issues pertaining to women were to be negotiated, the connection between private life and public concern became reformulated as well. Consequently, by the time that Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, in 1906, its effect was bound to be not that readers would come to understand the treatment of others in the realm of labor as a public disgrace that ought to become their private concern, but rather that they would become aware that the sanctity of their private domains, their very families, homes, kitchens, and dinner tables, ought to be protected through the mechanisms of public policy. The development of such regulation is, of course, itself a type of reform; and the logic of the reform novel over the course of the historical period under consideration demonstrates that the primary site of reform, like char-238- ity, is the home. The question that the age raises and leaves unanswered, however, is whether the home marks the beginning of any real social reform, or merely its end, and what is at stake in the difference.

Phillip Brian Harper

-239-

Nation, Region, and Empire

The Civil War, noted Henry James in his 1879 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, represented to many Americans a collective national fall into reality. No wonder a novel about that war, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) by John William De Forest, has long been considered one of the first works of American realism. Praised for its starkly accurate battle scenes, the novel, however, has been damned for its excessively romantic frame. Yet both plots — of war and of love — work to the same end of national reunification, the cultural project that would inform a diversity of American fiction for the following three decades.

The novel rejects the romance of the Old South in the Louisianan heroine's misguided marriage to an older Virginian "gentleman," who though he fights for the Union, also drinks, spends, and loves too hard and too much. At his death, however, and with the heroine's final marriage to a young New Englander who has been toughened by battle, the novel reinscribes a new romance of national restoration. In the conversion of the title, the heroine does more than simply change sides and husbands; she weans herself from a fiercely local attachment to home — a quality identified as female — to a broader national allegiance. Finally, her Southern Loyalist father characterizes his home, with condescension and fondness, as barbaric, primitive, and childlike, and compares its inhabitants to Ashantees, Hottentots, Seminoles, Pawnees, Chinese, and cannibals. As a mineralogist, he -240- maps the South as a peripheral undeveloped "region" or colony and views reunion as a matter of natural evolution.

De Forest also initiated the search for the "Great American Novelin 1868, for which he nominated Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as the only work with sufficient "national breadth" to link a wide spectrum of characters from different regions, races, and classes. (Not surprisingly, many post-Civil War novels, including his own, aspired to correct, negate, or expand upon Stowe, including works by Charles Chesnutt, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sutton Griggs, and Thomas Dixon.) Less sanguine about a post-Civil War novel achieving such broad dimensions, he saw two factors working against it: the sectional divisiveness that made the United States a "nation of provinces," and the rapid rate of social change. "Can a society which is changing so rapidly," he asked, "be painted except in the daily newspapers?" From a different angle, De Forest's obstacles to a national imagination have been viewed recently by Benedict Anderson as its building blocks. Anderson's useful understanding of nations as "imagined communities" posits their foundations on print culture, on the circulation of both newspapers and novels that unite diverse members, otherwise unknown to one another, through a shared sense of a present and of simultaneous participation in historical change. (It is well known that many authors of the late nineteenth century served their apprenticeship in journalism and continued to write in both modes.) De Forest and his contemporaries, however, found the shared present of their imagined community radically challenged by the immediate past that had nearly destroyed the nation, and that set the agenda for novelists of reimagining a community and rebuilding a nation.

To do so meant reimagining the past. "Forgetting," claimed the French philologist Ernest Renan in 1882, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." He went on to state that "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things," largely the foundation of the nation in violent conflicts, invasions, or massacres. Yet Renan does not imply that nations therefore have no past and inhabit an eternal present, a misconception often applied to the United States, but that present collectivity depends on "possession in common of a rich leg-241- acy of memories," particularly of noble deeds and shared sacrifice. His reflections are particularly relevant to the pervasive memory of the Civil War, which writers and politicians actively "forgot" as mutual slaughter and rewrote as a shared sacrifice for reunion. Also forgotten and reinvented was the legacy of slavery and the questions it posed of a contested relation between national and racial identity.

In a period known for discovering contemporary social reality, writers were equally obsessed with the past, or with multiple pasts, largely of their own invention, whether the pre-Civil War South of Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, and others; the romanticized Revolutionary past; a mythologized medieval past of popular historical romances; island communities of regionalists, such as Jewett, Freeman, and Garland, that seemed to elude historical change; or the primitive past of the race imagined by naturalists, such as London and Norris. Much of this fiction expresses a Janus-faced nostalgia in which desire generated by a modern industrial society longingly projects alternatives onto the screen of the past, which refracts multiple images of the present back to itself. Novels traditionally identified with such different genres all enact a willed amnesia about founding conflicts, while they reinvent multiple and contested pasts to claim as the shared origin of national identity.

Another axis for late nineteenth-century novels lay in reimagining the shifting spatial contours of the nation, for the Civil War not only restored a familiar map but also opened new territory for expansion. History was inseparable from geography as well in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous address "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, an icon of nationalization. In a period in which the United States was in the process of securing the continental borders that now define it, through a series of "forgotten" Indian wars, his speech voiced nostalgia for a past as well as anxiety about the bounded space of the future, and his argument was deployed on behalf of further United States expansion abroad. Turner defined the center of American "civilization" through its edges, its confrontations with the "primitive," at a time when new "Indians" were sought, at home and abroad, as "others" against which to imagine American nationhood. Many novels of the period explore past and present borders and -242- frontiers to imagine a community through exclusion as much as inclusion.

What De Forest called "conversion," implying only one tenable resolution to the conflict, writers of the post-Reconstruction period called reconciliation or reunion, implying the transcendence of conflict. (Even in De Forest's novel, Southerner and Northerner fight on the same side.) This erasure of conflict from the legacy of the Civil War was performed by fraternal meetings of Union and Confederate veterans to commemorate former battle sites, and by publications such as The Century's series, "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," recounting the same battles from both sides to foster mutual respect. In addition to the war itself, the past of slavery needed reinterpretation as a shared legacy of North and South, rather than a history of violent contention spilling over into race relations in the present. To this end, in the 1880s and 1890s, the region De Forest called barbaric (which means foreign tongue) prolifically spoke for itself to the North in its major publications. Curiosity about Southern "local color" was inseparable from understanding its past, which often recast "the peculiar institution" of slavery in a romantic light. Yet this nostalgia that invented a palatable past for North and South was often doubleedged and could turn against the present, exploring racism as a major legacy of the Civil War.

George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) directly addresses the issues of national and racial identity in the past and indirectly in the present in its epic story of an extended Creole family, whose white hero, Honoré, has a free mulatto half-brother of the same name. Set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), at the frontier of shifting national boundaries, the novel represents "America" as a foreign power speaking a foreign tongue. The native-born son of German immigrants, Frowenfeld, plays an interesting central role as outsider to the local community but representative of the nation. The Grandissimes undergo a conversion of sorts, by splitting into old and new. The die-hard slaveholding, dueling citoyen dies off (along with his part-Indian blood), and the white Honoré defies his aristocratic past by going into business with his mulatto half-brother, adopting English and allegiance to the nation, and marrying the vic-243- tim of a former family feud. The novel rejects the explicit statement of an old era that "we the people" always means white, but makes that concept implicit in the new era. While business unites white and black, the love triangles of the novel demarcate the limits of imagining an interracial community: the mulatto Honoré is hopelessly in love with the beautiful and powerful ex-slave Palmyre, who loves his white brother; she was once married to an enslaved African king, Bras-Coupé, who she had hoped would lead an insurrection but who died imagining his return to Africa rather than be broken by slavery. The novel ends with the double marriages of two generations of white Creoles (the younger to Frowenfeld), and the exile of Honoré and Palmyre to Bordeaux, France (an echo of the exile of free African Americans in Stowe's novel). This end to the story of slavery mirrors the post-Reconstruction imagined community, where Cable, among others, argued for political equity for freed African Americans and social separateness. Palmyre remains outside the boundaries, however, unassimilated and threatening as the repository of "forgotten" memory and desire, tying the 1880s to 1803, in a palimpsest of earlier histories of massacres, Indian origins, and slave ships.

Reviewers tried to limit Cable to "local color" writing in order to separate geography from history and its resonance in the present, and they linked him unfairly with Thomas Nelson Page's invention of the "plantation tradition," which overtly romanticized slavery in In Ole Virginia (1887), a collection of dialect stories narrated by a faithful ex-slave who reminisces nostalgically about "dem good ole times." With Page, critics also joined Joel Chandler Harris's famous collections of Uncle Remus stories, which have a more double-edged effect. They participate in the nostalgic recuperation by framing slave stories in the voice of an elderly black "uncle" entertaining a white boy, but the stories themselves often speak in the subversive voice of a popular oral tradition that provided a cultural source of resistance to slavery and racism in the past and the present.

Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) most fully exploits the multivocal potential of the dialect tale to turn the plantation tradition against itself. He frames stories told by ex-slave Uncle Julius with two conventions: the white Northern narrator and his wife who have bought an old plantation for both economic development and a bucolic retreat, and a marriage at the end between a -244- Northern and Southern young couple, whose reconciliation Julius's story facilitates. His stories, however, subtly subvert the plantation tradition to reinscribe its willfully "forgotten" history of slavery's brutal violence and slave resistance. As conjuring becomes a rich metaphor for storytelling as historical memory, Julius links the deromanticized past with the present reenslavement of blacks. The first tale, "The Goophered Grapevine" (which launched Chesnutt's career in the Atlantic Monthly), undoes the Northern romance of the Southern garden by exposing natural cycles under the institution of slavery as inseparable from economic exploitation and dehumanization. In the second story, "Po' Sandy," the history of severed slave bodies is inscribed in the haunted houses of the present, in the very wood that the Northern family wishes to use for a new kitchen. Chesnutt recharts the projection of an exotic and romantic Southern landscape as a palimpsest of destruction linking the past to the present. The final story reconciles the white lovers through the narration of slavery's destruction of a black couple, which exposes the broader national allegory of reconciliation through marriage that is founded on the expulsion of blacks from the national family in the Jim Crow laws of the New South.

Like Cable and Chesnutt, Mark Twain reinvents the prewar South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) to interrogate the present. By shifting Huck Finn's narrative journey from Northbound to Southbound, from freedom to further enslavement, from Jim's agency as an escaped slave to Tom's antics to set a free man free, Twain is doubling past and present, North and South, to question the meaning of freedom for African Americans and the nation at large in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Twain's devastating satire of all levels of Southern society "debunks" the romantic fictions the South tells about itself (though even his famous attack on the Sir Walter Scott disease as a cause of war here and in Life on the Mississippi [1883] tends to externalize an internal conflict as one between real Americans and pseudo-Europeans, thus contributing to the drama of reunion).

Huckleberry Finn is best remembered by readers for imagining an interracial community between Huck and Jim on the raft in the middle of the Mississippi — a subject of multiple interpretations and criticisms. The powerful appeal of this vision far outstrips its fragile and -245- fleeting appearance in the text, for the raft is continually threatened, run over, and invaded by the world of the shore it aims to escape. The problematic ending of the novel has a nightmarish logic in culminating the journey toward reenslavement. Jim, the legally free man, is enslaved in Tom's romantic novels and the town's racist fears, and Huck, after choosing to "go to hell" against his community and help Jim escape, is reborn as Tom Sawyer. The ending could be seen as a macabre parody of Reconstruction with Jim happily accepting forty dollars from Tom for his "trouble" (instead of forty acres and a mule?), and Huck lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest, to the "forgotten" history of white settlement and Native American displacement.

The dependence of racism and slavery on the power of social fictions at the end of Huckleberry Finn sets the starting point for the nightmarish playacting of Pudd'nhead Wilson, which interestingly echoes Cable's novel. Cable's doubling of the Honorés as the visible genealogy of slavery turns into Twain's switch of the white and black babies who are visibly indistinguishable. The imperial figure of Palmyre turns into the devilish mother-trickster, Roxana, who threatens the social hierarchy with her switching of babies, but who obeys her own son as her master and endorses the "fact and fiction of law" that declares one baby black and the other white according to an invisible "drop of blood." While in Cable the immigrant represents "America," he is split in Twain into the real American, Wilson, and the more alien Italian twins, reflecting the nativist fear of immigrants in this period. A ridiculed outsider at first, Wilson becomes an insider at the end, when he uses fingerprints — which he compares revealingly to a map — to uncover the "facts" of racial identity and to right the hierarchy that Roxana threatened. Wilson's legal and professional authority has been likened to the role of the Supreme Court in endorsing the imposition by states of the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. Although set in the prewar South, Twain's plot of national restoration imagines Wilson's incorporation into the community as a reunion between North and South at the expense of selling African American rights down the river, back into slavery. Even the problematic invisibility of race resonates with post-Civil War — rather than antebellum — anxiety about the threat of an interracial community as American nationality. -246-

Registering the same hysteria about racial intermixing, Thomas Dixon resolves Twain's unsettling ambivalence about race as a "fiction of law or custom" in his unabashedly racist and popular novels, The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the basis for D. W. Griffith's landmark movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's historical romances reinvent the Civil War and the downfall of Reconstruction as the story of the reunification of a white nation. His first novel plots the end of Reconstruction as a second Revolutionary war (in the town Independence) of whites against black dominance. The novel is punctuated by the repeated anxious refrain: "Shall the future American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto." The obvious answer is offered by the eruption of two events: the threatened rape of a white girl by a black man and the Spanish-American War. The war does for the nation what the rape does for the small town, fusing former secessionists and unionists, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, into one "homogeneous white mass." The connection between domestic racial conflict and international imperialism is made clear by the subtitle, "A Romance of the White Man's Burden."

Dixon's next novel carries this burden back in time to the Civil War and widens its national scope to imagine the birth of a nation from the rape of a white woman by a black man that spawns the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Dixon's racist caricatures rescue the romance of the white South by a kind of splitting that projects the negative stereotypes of Southern shiftlessness, barbarism, superstition, childishness, and violence (seen in De Forest) onto African Americans. This splitting allows for the national reunion in a double marriage of white couples from the North and the South. As in the The Grandissimes and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the fate of the most threatening character, Lydia, the politically and sexually domineering mulatto mistress of the evil Reconstructionist (who himself is reconstructed as white at the end), remains unresolved. These mulatto figures exiled to the border of the imagined community — but not killed off — represent the "forgotten" history of slavery founded in the white rape of the black woman that cannot be totally erased from the national plot of reunion.

While the Spanish-American War sews up Dixon's plot of national restoration by bringing together the Gray and the Blue on distant -247- shores, the war has the opposite effect in the plot of black national unification in Sutton Griggs's less well known Imperium in Imperio (1899). Here the presence of the mulatto as the visible history of slavery is as threatening to the romance of black nationalism as it is to Dixon's white supremacism. The novel depicts the organization of an underground black nation, founded to fill the constitutional gaps and to protect and enfranchise African Americans. When the war breaks out, concurrent with heinous cases of lynching, the Imperium is destroyed by discord between those who wish to join the United States in supporting Cuba's "largely Negro" revolution and those who wish to bring the revolution home. The radical voice of the founder (the son of a white senator) prevails and convinces the Imperium to launch a new Civil War by siding with America's foreign enemies and then claiming Texas as a separate state. The more moderate President of the Imperium, of humble black roots, urges that they remain in the Union to fight for full citizenship with the pen rather than the sword. Overruled, he willingly submits to execution, pledging his double allegiance to the laws of the Imperium and those of the United States and is buried with an American flag. The marriage plots as vehicle to national unity are also thwarted in the novel, as the lover of the radical founder commits suicide rather than marry a mulatto and contribute to the degeneration of the race, while the moderate President leaves his wife when his newborn baby appears to be white, only to discover just before his execution that the baby darkened as he grew. Narrated by a traitor to the Imperium in the interest of averting the violence of a race war, Griggs's novel leaves African Americans in a no-man's-land of national identity between patriotism and treason.

Though both Griggs and Dixon create extreme political fantasies, they highlight an important intersection in the 1890s between domestic racial strife and the acquisition of an overseas empire in Cuba and the Philippines. Dixon voiced a common welcome of the SpanishAmerican War as a final destination on the road to reunion between North and South at the expense of African Americans. In the new frontier of the empire, the nation could be reimagined as AngloSaxon in contrast to the inferior races of Cubans and Filipinos, who were identified with African Americans at home and considered equally incapable of self-government. This identification supported -248- contradictory positions: the imperialist acceptance of Rudyard Kipling's position in his poem "A White Man's Burden" (which was written to urge the United States annexation of the Philippines); the Southern opposition to imperialism in order to keep nonwhites out of the republic; and African American identification of revolutionary anticolonial struggles abroad. W. E. B. Du Bois linked domestic and colonial racial oppression in his prescient declaration in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), originally written for the first Pan-African Congress: "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Theodore Roosevelt, whose The Strenuous Life (1900) bequeathed a title for the decade, subordinated race to manliness as the common bond of national restoration. Proven on the battlefield and tried in the assumption of colonial rule, American manhood forges the bond that transcends social conflict and turns a former divided nation into a reunited global power.

Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) links the cultural interpretation of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War as two stages in the plot of national reunion. This might seem strange to say of a novel by a twenty-three-year-old written thirty years after the first war and three years before the next war, which he would report at first hand. Crane's novel is also considered less ideological than iconoclastic, one of "enormous repudiations," as H. G. Wells said, which would lead many to agree with Ernest Hemingway that it was "the only real literature of our Civil War." Yet Crane is a master of forgetting: the novel radically divorces the Civil War from its historical context by parodying the conventional reinterpretations of the war through the frameworks of reunion, slavery, or romance. Yet this parody of convention does not merely open up the reality of the battlefield but revises the Civil War through the framework of the heightened militarization of the 1890s. The novel looks back at the Civil War to map a new arena in which modern forms of international warfare can be imaginatively projected. Divorced from a prior political context, the novel focuses on the construction of manhood in war, and while it parodies the romance Bildungsroman in which the private, Henry Fleming, reads himself, it reconstitutes manhood on the battlefield as a theatrical performance separate from confrontation with a largely invisible enemy but dependent on the eyes of the spectator. Crane's representation of war as a spectacle both adopts -249- and subverts Roosevelt's interpretation of the battlefield as a crucible for redeeming primal virility; Fleming's constant need for an audience destabilizes the identity of the "real man" by exposing it as a social construction. The transformation of the representation of war from the narration of conflict into an exotic spectacle was to provide Crane with a lens for reporting real battles in Cuba. It is not surprising that a headline in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World reporting the first major battle of the Spanish-American War read: THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE WAS HIS WIG-WAG. The mass circulation journalism of the 1890s not only created a shared domestic present chronicling the sensations of everyday life (as De Forest and Benedict Anderson would have it) but also made possible the projection of larger-than-life images of a renewed American manhood fighting "Indian" wars on remote frontiers of what Brooks Adams dubbed the "New Empire."

At the end of an annual picnic for the extended family around Dunnet's Landing, in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), the narrator comments: "Perhaps it is the great national anniversaries which our country has lately kept, and the soldiers' meetings that take place everywhere, which have made reunions of every sort the fashion." Jewett here links two public arenas often considered separate or even antagonistic, the national and the local. Indeed, it might be difficult to imagine a fictional space more distant from the national drama of men on the battlefield than the isolated, largely female-dominated rural communities of Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland. Just as these communities appear prenational, they take fictional forms that seem prenovelistic, consisting mostly of collections of short stories often incorporating vernacular storytelling and lacking overarching linear narratives. Yet the provincialism De Forest lamented as blocking a national novel, William Dean Howells celebrated thirty years later as "our decentralized literature." Paradoxically, this profusion of literature known as regionalism or local color contributed to the process of centralization or nationalization, as Jewett recognized by linking family and national reunions in the same passage as forms of "Clanishness," which she calls "an instinct, or a custom; and lesser rights were forgotten in the claim to a common inheritance." The decentralization -250- of literature contributes to solidifying national centrality by reimagining a distended industrial nation as an extended clan sharing a "common inheritance" in its imagined rural origins.

The celebration of regional difference has several contradictory functions in the national agenda of reunion. On the one hand, regionalist fiction expands the boundaries of the imagined community and democratizes access to literary representation, which can be heard in the multivocal introduction of the vernacular through the dialect of different regions. On the other hand, regionalism contained the threatening conflicts of social difference, just as dialect itself bracketed the speaker as uneducated and inferior to the urban narrator with his standard English. This hierarchy structured the conditions of literary production for regionalist writers as well, who were published by a highly centralized industry located in Boston and New York that appealed to an urban middle-class readership; this readership was solidified as an imagined community by consuming images of rural "others" as both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development. By rendering social difference in terms of region, anchored and bound by separate spaces, more explosive social conflicts of class, race, and gender made contiguous by urban life could be effaced. The native inhabitants of regional fiction could be rendered, on the one hand, as "the folk," the common heritage from which urban dwellers had simply moved, always available for return. Even regionalists like Garland, known for depicting the punishing conditions of a squalid Midwestern farm life, still excavated this folkish figure from the social rubble when, for example, he identifies a veteran returning to his farm as Walt Whitman's "common American soldier." Ironically, the commonality of the folk here is mediated through literature. In contrast to this rooted national identity, regional inhabitants could also be rendered as exotically other, with the quaint and strange customs and speech of New Orleans Creoles, for example, painted with the luster of empire. Their exoticism makes them more familiar and less threatening than the feared flood of immigrants whose foreignness lay too close for comfort in an urban context.

At the World's Columbian Exposition where Turner identified the frontier as the fundamental Americanizing influence, Garland, in his lecture "Local Color in Fiction," propounded regionalism as an in-251- digenous movement, undefiled by artificial foreign influence, as though Turner's receding frontier could be dispersed and frozen in timeless island communities. Although Garland claimed that "the tourist could not write the local novel," tourists did and could read local color fiction, which, after all, could not be read by the people it depicted. Like the subjects of anthropological fieldwork (developing as a scientific discipline in this period), native inhabitants possessed primitive qualities that made them worthy of study also and left them in need of interpretation by outsiders. Regionalism performs a kind of literary tourism in a period that saw the tourist abroad and at home as a growing middle-class phenomenon; tourism was no longer limited to the grand tours of the upper class. Regionalists share with tourists and anthropologists the perspective of the modern urban outsider who projects onto the native a pristine authentic space immune to historical changes shaping their own lives. If historical novels invent pasts, regionalists invent places as allegories of desire generated by urban centers. Yet the reader of regionalism often finds less the nostalgic escape desired than a contested terrain with a complex history that ties it inseparably to the urban center.

America's best-known regionalist, Mark Twain, started his career with an immensely popular parody of the American tourist in Europe and the Middle East, The Innocents Abroad (1869). One of the multiple meanings of "innocence" is the tendency of tourists to sever a place from its historical context by literally ripping off specimens and souvenirs as fetishes. Yet their violent innocence makes them vulnerable to the social context they efface. This double "innocence" of the tourist is dramatized within regional fiction by the figure of the outsider: in Jewett's unnamed urban narrator in search of a quiet retreat where she can meet her publishing deadline; in Mary Murfree's amateur archaeologist of In the "Stranger People's" Country (1891); in Hamlin Garland's young men returning home from the city or the war in Main-Travelled Roads (1891); and most often in the narrator who comments on, interprets, and translates the life of the natives to an urban audience.

In many cases the "region" first appears as the projection of a desire for a space outside of history, untouched by change, but this projection is always challenged by a counter story and a prior history. Jewett's narrator is disappointed to find her hoped-for retreat at Mrs. -252- Todd's too noisy, too cluttered with a complex society and social intercourse, so she retreats farther to the isolated schoolhouse to write. But she ends up abandoning her writing in order to adopt the role of listener and participant, which cedes to the local the authority to define itself through its vernacular history, conversation, natural rhythms. Yet this movement from outsider to insider oversimplifies Jewett's complex narrative, which charts a struggle between the inhabitants, who have a highly particularized cosmopolitan view of their own history based on international trade, and the narrator, whose desire it is to turn Dunnet's Landing into a place both outside history and at the origin of human history. She sees eternal childhood in the aging inhabitants, in whose lives she finds vestiges of ancient Greek myths and Norman conquerors. In these premodern analogies she can posit a common inheritance, more ennobling than the alternative view of the countryside she momentarily grasps as "a narrow set of circumstances [that] had caged a fine able character and held it captive." Yet to view the rural life as entrapping, as do Garland and Freeman, is not simply more realistic than idealizing it; such a response could also be seen as the projection of the outsider's desire to view his or her life as less confining, more sophisticated and "adult." Tourists, after all, do go home.

Most regional fiction that posits a still timeless island community is characterized paradoxically by restlessness and motion, by the repeated acts of escape and return that frame many of Garland's stories and that produce the sense of a settled space. In "God's Ravens," an overworked and underpaid city newspaperman moves to the country in search of regeneration, only to find an oppressively narrow small town. When he falls sick, the community rallies to his side, and he comes to appreciate its truly human generosity beyond his own caricature. Only his illness and delirium, however, can conjure this idealized image.

In response to the complexity of place, which never remains outside historical time, the regionalist often projects a more distant remote retreat. Twain dramatizes this dynamic in Roughing It (1872), which starts with an escape to the West, to the "new and strange," and repeats this movement again from the West to the farther West of Hawaii, which appears at first as a kind of Eden, defined simply in terms of the absence of San Francisco's complexity. But very soon -253- the Edenic landscape of the most remote islands is shown to be inscribed by the history of colonial conquest, a history itself subject to prior political struggle over interpretation, as the monument to Captain Cook demonstrates.

Other texts in less extreme ways enact this movement of receding retreat to the more remote primitive spaces. Jewett's narrator not only looks farther back in time for analogies in which to cast the native inhabitants but also restlessly seeks more remote islands to explore, as though Dunnet's Landing has become a stifling center with its own periphery, whether in the folksy domestic Green Island, or the more exotic island of Joanna, who is compared to a medieval nun. Lafcadio Hearn also depicts this infinite regression in Chita (1889), where he moves from Grand Isle to more isolated islands, only to show that none could escape either the devastating storm or the historical devastation of the Civil War, and that the reunion with the past, in the father's longing for his missing daughter, is tantalizingly close but never achieved. Hearn's career enacted this restless motion structuring regionalism, as he moved from writing of the Gulf of Mexico coast to the French Caribbean of colonial times, and finally to Japan, where he could imagine time and space meeting in his discovery of "fairy-folk" of childlike charm and simplicity, the subject that made his career as the best-known popularizer of Japanese culture. Domestic regions are often doubled with more remote colonial spaces.

Kate Chopin has rightfully been removed by feminist critics from the confines of local color in which she made her career. Yet even The Awakening (1899) uses local color tradition against itself. Edna Pontellier, as the outsider to Creole culture, projects onto this highly hierarchical confining culture her own desire for sensuality and freedom, and she seeks more remote exotic retreats from Grand Isle to the fairy-tale-like acadian island, and ultimately to the sea. Yet her novel was so scandalous to reviewers because of its sexual frankness and also, as with later work of Chesnutt and Cable, because it deployed the local periphery to cast a critical eye on the national center in a critique of the social oppression that linked region and nation.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, in her stories and in her novel Pembroke (1894), stayed within domestic regional boundaries while subverting them as centers of social protest. Deromanticizing small-town -254- New England, she exposes its oppressive denial of mobility and independence to women in its class stratification that controls even the remote village through its elders, its church, and collective gossip. Women protest their confining conditions and assert their independence, often paradoxically by denying desire and transforming their denial into creative power, as in "A New England Nun," or by turning traditionally confining spaces into centers of power, as in "The Revolt of 'Mother'" and "A Church Mouse." In Pembroke, a young man and woman defy their parents and their oppressive community by denying and deferring their desire for one another; while their final reunion seems to attest to the redemptive power of love, it is unleashed, ironically, by their capitulation to communal disapproval.

Eliding the inescapable social tensions that structure the growth from childhood to adulthood in Freeman's communities, Jewett's narrator recovers in Dunnet's Landing the common "instincts of a far forgotten childhood," thus linking the New England family picnic to the rites of ancient Greeks. This sense of the region as a space where a collective childhood can be recovered pervades literature of the West as well. Forerunners of Garland, such as Edward Eggleston in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), Edgar Watson Howe in The Story of a Country Town (1884), and Joseph Kirkland in Zury (1887), are known for contrasting the idealized vision of the West, as a site that develops rugged individual virtues, with the more squalid reality of violence, economic oppression, and narrow provincialism. Most of them, including Garland in his Boy Life on the Prairie (1899), seek another more romantic retreat from this West in their depiction of the life of boys. In contrast to the exploitation of child labor that Garland calls attention to in "The Lion's Paw," novels and autobiographies were popular that represented the West as an arena of perpetual boyhood, where gangs of boys do little but play cowboys and Indians. Nostalgia for pre-Civil War innocence comes together with a scientific view of childhood as an earlier stage of evolutionary development; as G. Stanley Hall put it, "the child revels in savagery."

In this formulation, the boyhood of white settlers comes to displace the history of Indian settlement, a story that underlies Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). There Tom's famous stunt where he turns the work of whitewashing into boy's play might symbolize this dynamic of rendering the whitewashing of a community founded -255- on racial conflict as child's play. For Twain's complex vision of children makes them both innocent of social ideology and repositories of it. Like the island communities outside urban centers, childhood is colonized by adult desire for a pristine past prior to social indoctrination, which is exposed as impossible. Tom's childish desire for heroism takes concrete social form in a court of law where he exposes Injun Joe as the real murderer of the doctor (much like Pudd'nhead's final revelation of racial identity). Escaping the courts, Joe meets a natural punishment, suffocated by the same cave where Tom finds money and flirts with his male sexuality. The earth that swallows the Indian turns the white boy into a man, while allowing him to remain perpetually a youth by rendering his entry into the economic system as the discovery of buried treasure.

Thus regionalism in its many forms both fosters and thwarts the desire for a retreat from modern urban society to a timeless rural origin, the "common inheritance" of the clan. The regions painted with "local color" are traversed by the forgotten history of racial conflict with prior regional inhabitants, and are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy that generates the desire for retreat.

Both the desire for and the impossibility of escaping the changes wrought by modern industrial capitalism propel the narrative of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). The richness and the contradictions of the novel open the text to a multivalent allegory of almost every aspect of late nineteenth-century American society. The novel can be read as an allegory of reconstruction and colonialism, as it conflates the genres of regionalism and the historical novel (which Twain contributes to without irony in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc [1896]). Connecticut Yankee plays out its double meaning in the drama of national reunion: in relation to internal regions, it refers to Hank Morgan's Northern background and makes him a kind of carpetbagger, eradicating the last vestiges of slavery and modernizing King Arthur's "southernized" England. But Connecticut Yankee also represented a collective national identity to those outside America's borders and subject to its power. An island at once outside of time and at the origins of history, King Arthur's England appears as the ultimate primitive col-256- ony, or region, with inhabitants who are compared to children, Indians, barbarians, bound by superstition, violence, and laziness. Knocked over the head as a foreman in an industrial dispute at home, Morgan, by becoming "Boss" of Camelot, gains the power he lacked at home. Like other colonists, he imagines the island as a backward blank slate on which he can create a utopian image of nineteenthcentury capitalism, freed of its threatening conflicts. Like other imagined timeless islands, this one, however, clings tenaciously to its own history and culture in order to resist or assimilate his projections of development. The tension informing Morgan's project of reform, between modernization as social change and modernization as social control, leads to the violent confrontation of cultures, both the source of humor in this diabolically funny book and the source of the final massacre. Whether resonant of the Civil War, Indian wars, or class conflict, or prescient of mass twentieth-century destruction (all seen by critics), the final massacre of the knights, paradoxically both Hank's victory and his defeat, represents the foundational violence that must be "forgotten" in order to imagine a nation, sixth-century England's natural evolution into America. Hank's destruction of Camelot tellingly spawns his nostalgia for the "lost land" he has destroyed. Connecticut Yankee sounds Twain's death knell for expanding United States frontiers abroad, which end up reproducing or magnifying the social conflicts at home they sought to alleviate.

Yankees abroad conquering lands remote both in time and in space were not unusual in fiction of the 1880s and 1890s; in fact, these heroes were the staple of the popular historical romance, from Ben-Hur (1880) to The Virginian (1902). Dismissed by literary historians as escapist, these narratives of escape echo the political argument for overseas expansion in this period. Leaving his overcivilized surroundings for adventure in a primitive arena, the hero (an overt or thinly disguised American) fights theatrical swashbuckling battles to liberate a backward realm from its threatening barbaric enemies, subdues and wins the love of an aristocratic heroine, rejuvenates his own masculinity, and finally returns home to the corporate commercial world he escaped. This formula is strikingly pliable to vastly different settings, from imperial Rome, to Latin American republics, to European history, to mythological medieval kingdoms, to colonial America, and finally to the West. In the national project -257- of reinventing origins, these works colonize the past as allegories that turn national reunification into empire building.

Vying with Uncle Tom's Cabin as the all-time best-seller of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, which reached the height of its popularity on stage and in print in the 1890s (a text in need of the kind of critical attention recently paid to Stowe's novel in its cultural context). The novel appealed to the fascination with origins, and it reinvented a most important originary moment, the birth of Christian civilization out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. Yet rather than focus on the saintly life of Christ, the novel spends most of its time on a hero who is confused about whether he is fighting a material battle for a new earthly kingdom of the Jews or a spiritual one for an unknown messiah. Fortunately, he does not have to decide until the end of the novel after he wins the climactic chariot race (as well known in the 1890s from its repeated staging in lavish outdoor spectacles as it is today from the film versions). What does this have to do with American culture in the period? The New Kingdom of Christ — anti-imperial in its origins — might allegorize and spiritualize the imagined New American Empire, which was propounded by ideologues such as A. T. Mahan and the Reverend Josiah Strong at least a decade before the Spanish-American War. They imagined American global power as anti-imperial in nature and not territorially based, but depending instead on international commerce and the spread of United States cultural institutions. Popular at a time of heightened militarism and the movement of "muscular Christianity," Ben-Hur highlights virile body-building in the service of a spiritual global empire. The book also would have appealed to interest in the origins of slavery, as well as to curiosity about the exotic distant ancestors of more recent Italian and Jewish immigrants, ancestors who were superseded by the Christian civilization to which Ben-Hur finally converts as an apostle. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican W ar, a Union general in the Civil War, and governor of the territory of New Mexico, lived a career that followed the Westward Course of Empire. His first popular historical novel, The Fair God (1873), treated the Spanish conquest of Mexico (á la Prescott), a lens through which he would view the Christian conquest of Rome. No wonder President James Garfield appointed him minister to Turkey as an expert on "the East." -258-

In the courts of Constantinople, Lew Wallace lived the life a younger writer, Richard Harding Davis, was famous for writing about in his novels of high society and colonial adventures. While Ben-Hur conquered Rome, Davis's hero of Soldiers of Fortune (1897), a dashing American mercenary and civil engineer, triumphed over the decaying British and Spanish Empires to save a fictional Latin American republic from dictatorship and revolution, and to marry an athletic "New Woman" whose father owns the mines there. In the abundance of best-selling romances around the time of the Spanish-American War, Davis's backward but alluring republic of Olancho was easily interchangeable with Tudor England, in Charles Majors's When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), or with the mythical medieval principality of George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark (1901), all sites where playful physical virility represents aggressive national muscle-flexing abroad. In all of these fantasies, the hero can rejuvenate an authentic American self only outside United States borders in the new frontiers abroad.

The revival of the historical romance culminated in the proliferation of best-sellers about the colonial period and the American Revolution, such as Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel (1899), S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897), Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith (1899), Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold (1900). These novels participate in the mass cultural invention of national traditions along with the writing of the pledge of allegiance, the establishment of flag ceremonies in schools, and the rise of genealogical societies such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. These novels rewrite the American Revolution to underplay political conflict with Britain and to unite the two countries in a uniquely Anglo-Saxon heritage of manliness. The novels whitewash the Revolution as an exclusive inheritance against both the influx of immigrants aspiring to national identity and the claims of colonial subjects, such as the Cubans and Filipinos, to revolution and selfgovernment.

Owen Wister's popular novel The Virginian takes its immediate genealogy from the popular historical novel of the 1890s and its romance of empire. Wister sees the cowpuncher as the direct linear descendant of the Anglo-Saxon knight, and by imagining contemporary American imperialism as the return to an original virile past the -259- historical romance reopens the closed frontier and reinvents the West as a space for fictional representation. The West, furthermore, becomes the site for uniting South and North, in the courtship and marriage of the unnamed Virginian to the Vermont schoolteacher (herself with a Revolutionary genealogy). Wister's West expunges traces of Native Americans, while the Virginian takes on characteristics of the noble savage without tinting his essential Anglo-Saxon identity. The West also rejuvenates the overcivilized East, as one of the most erotically charged relationships in the novel is the narrator's attraction to the Virginian's natural virility. Like a regionalist narrator, he escapes from the overheated clubs of New York City and projects his desire onto the "handsome ungrammatical son of the soil." Yet the Virginian does grow up, a fact lamented by many readers, including Henry James. He combines not only natural aristocratic civility with democratic violence but also rugged individualism with obedience to his employer, a large landowner. The Virginian protects his property by controlling his unruly workers with a tall tale, leading a vigilante lynching of his friend (a figure for his younger self), and shooting the villain Trampas. The romance of lawless frontier violence is ironically a means of forgetting the history of the West as a political conflict over the land among Indians, homesteaders, and large ranchers, and of reinventing it as a place for the righteous punishment of criminals. The Virginian grows up at the end to become a prosperous landowner and a domesticated husband, but the novel projects for readers the counter-homoerotic plot of reunion, where the West remains as a perpetual melting pot of boys from farms and cities of all regions: "the romance of American adventure had drawn them all alike to this great playground of young men," where they never grow up.

Wister's romance renders Native Americans invisible except for their traces in the white bodies they leave wounded. Fifteen years earlier Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) employed the plot of romance to make visible the forgotten plight of Indians in the American Southwest. Set right after the Mexican War, the novel presents the American nation, as it is in Cable's book, as a foreign occupier in California, where Spanish landowners and native Indians are equally dispossessed by aggressive American settlement. Indians, represented by the hero Alessandro, occupy either a natural primitive -260- innocence outside of history or a culture completely absorbed by the exotic Spanish mission. Alessandro marries Ramona, who is halfIndian and half-Scot, and who was raised by a Spanish family whose imperious mother detested her and whose timid son ineffectually adored her. When she elopes with Alessandro, she returns to the roots she never knew and follows Alessandro's inevitable decline and banishment from the town of his father and every subsequent home, until in a state of insanity he accidentally takes the wrong horse of a white man and is shot as a horse thief. Like Stowe, to whom she was positively compared, Jackson effectively chronicles the abuse of Indians at the hands of the Spanish, the American settlers, and government bureaucracy, but she cannot imagine Native American agency except as insanity. Ramona is redeemed by the motherly love of Aunt Ri, a folksy dialect figure from the passages of local color, a real American, and by her final marriage to her adopted brother, Felippe, who takes her and Alessandro's daughter to Mexico City. As in Cable's novel, the love triangle sets the limits of the imagined community, whose interracial contours — Spanish, Anglo, and Indian — can only be projected over the border, where the woman of mixed race preserves the forgotten history of the nation's westward expansion.

In his historical novel about California, The Octopus (1901), Frank Norris deromanticizes the West of Jackson and Wister. In place of freewheeling cowpunchers, we find sophisticated wheat ranchers (most of them college men) out to exploit, not merge with, the land. In place of Jackson's victimized exotic Spanish past, we find the Spanish mission as a site of violence from within, where a young girl is raped by a mysterious "Other." The novel opens with a familiar Eastern outsider, Presley, who has come West to recuperate his health and who desires to write a romantic "Epic of the West." The first chapter exposes this desire as fantasy, through his disgust at the presence of German immigrants (not "The People" he expected), and more violently through the slaughter of sheep by the railroad, foreshadowing the climactic slaughter of the ranchers. In his depiction of the violent confrontation between the ranchers and the corporate railroad, Norris makes visible the capitalist economic structure that undergirds the mythical space of the West. Yet like the urban nar-261- rators of Wister, Jewett, and Garland, Presley (and the novel) do not simply travel from naive romance to more trenchant realism. Instead, they continually try to recuperate in the West a desire for prehistorical origins or a utopian vision of national unity.

What better symbol of national unity and what better subject for a national novel than the railroad, a complex economic and industrial phenomenon that physically transformed part of a continent into a nation by linking commerce and communication among widely dispersed local communities? The novel exposes the contradictions of this nation building as the railroad destroys the settlements and livelihoods of the same communities it brings into being. Against the overarching force of the railroad, which controls the means of representation in the press, as well as the government through the militia, the novel explores alternative definitions and symbols of the national public sphere. At an assembly of the farmers' league after the massacre, Presley proposes the model of a nation unified by conflict, by the struggle of people against trusts. But the novel diffuses this threat of class conflict, in part by making the original confrontation one within the family (the Derricks) and within the capitalist class, and in part by having Presley — the intellectual — engage in a desperate act of anarchism by ineffectually throwing a bomb, without political or narrative consequence. Countering the threat of class conflict is a nostalgic view of the folk as an Anglo-Saxon clan, represented by the marriage of Annixter and Hilma — ultimately doomed — and embodied in a barbecue, where we see "pure Americans at the starting point of civilization, coarse, vital, real sane." Another symbol of unity that appears to transcend social conflict is the natural cycle of the wheat, which recurs as a powerful symbol of the earth's female-identified fecundity. Yet the wheat is never "natural" to start with, as the mechanical planting and reaping appear throughout in images of military conquest or sexual violation echoing the rape by "The Other." Furthermore, the capitalist, Shelgrim, merges nature and the machine as an ahistorical apotheosis of "force." If, as he claims, the railroads make themselves as the wheat grows itself, neither is subject to contest by human agency.

The conclusion of The Octopus abandons the depiction of class contrast between an elite dinner party and a starving immigrant mother for a ship about to carry wheat to India with Presley on -262- board. Not yet cured of his overcivilized consumption by his sojourn out West, he plans to light out for a more distant territory. His spiritual passage to India complements the manifest destiny voiced by the owner of the ship, who has given up domestic industry and the class conflicts it spawns to fulfill America's global mission of feeding the world while opening it up to commerce. His overt imperialism rounding the globe finds echo in Presley's Nirvana, the "full round of a circle whose segment only he beheld." On board the same ship and buried under tons of wheat is Behrman, the agent of the railroad. The wheat, which takes its natural revenge on Behrman, represents a revitalization of the American economy, as a spiritual and natural course of empire. Despite his ironic critique of America feeding the world while immigrants starve on the streets of San Francisco, Norris can turn imperial expansion from a history of violent conquest to one of global and spiritual nourishment.

The ending of The Octopus suggests an important but overlooked historical context for American literary naturalism: America's shift from continental expansion to an overseas empire at the turn of the century. Frank Norris and Jack London were deeply influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and themselves spent time in contested colonial arenas of Europe and the United States (Norris in the Transvaal and Cuba, London in the Pacific, the Klondike, Japan, and Korea). More important, they took up Kipling's "white man's burden," not simply in overt racism against Asians, Mexicans, and all nonwhites, but by reconstructing American identity as a biological category of AngloSaxon masculinity. They also projected imperial adventures onto imaginary open frontiers of the "Wilds," the open seas, arctic exploration, and the primordial beast within modern man. Norris hardily endorsed American imperialism as he equated the Anglo-Saxon inclination to dominate the world (in his essay "The Frontier Gone at Last" [1902]) with the definition of masculinity: in McTeague (1899), as the desire to dominate women. If regionalists seek primal origins of American nationality in prenational communities and clans, naturalists invent more distant yet immanent origins in biological conceptions of race and gender. Yet their fiction not only celebrates the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon male hero but also permits us to view him less as a biological fact than as a social construction built out of anxieties about the claims of women and im-263- migrants at home and colonized people abroad, who threaten this primacy and against whom he is defined. Anglo-Saxon becomes synonymous with American as both the height of civilized development and a form of primitive regeneration that "forgets" history and social conflict as the basis of nation building.

Norris's and London's fascination with the primordial power within civilized man must be understood in relation to the imposition of civilizing power over people defined as primitive by the developing social sciences. Obsession with the primitive takes two opposing narrative trajectories of degeneration and regeneration. The same process of shedding the veneer of modern civilization can reveal the debased criminal within (McTeague, Vandover, Wolf Larsen), or can reawaken the ennobling heroic Anglo-Saxon warrior (Ross Wilbur, Van Weyden, Scott Weedon). This doubleness in primitive identity turns social difference into inherited biological fact. Yet the atavistic primitive within is also exposed as a projection of the violence of modern society onto an internalized "other." The ambiguity of the "primitive" as a site of either regeneration or degeneration can reflect critically upon the meaning of the civilized, which its boundary is meant to protect.

London's The Call of the Wild (1903) may seem as far away from a national novel, as De Forest imagined it, as the Yukon is from United States borders, and as dogs are from men. But the novel and its companion piece, White Fang (1906), enact an allegory of national development that unites the double trajectory of the primitive as degeneration and regeneration. The debasing bestiality in Vandover and the Brute (1914), where the hero literally acts like a wolf in his insanity, can be celebrated in real animals, who enact a primal violence that regenerates virility. The romance of dogs and men allows the exclusion of women, so intrusive in the narrative of The Sea-Wolf (1904) where the castaway woman mediates and deflects the powerful homoerotic desire between men as a symbol of national unity.

Buck in the primordial wilderness is homesick not for California but for a deeper memory of a hairy wild man, which posits a Social Darwinian origin of the race. In this primal world of violence and the hunt, the dog can nobly cross the boundary between civilization and the wilderness to become a wolf (so debasing to Vandover). Here is a version of Turner's frontier, an originary space producing real -264- Americans. Projected onto nature is a nationalist fantasy. The first dogBuckkills to assume the position of leader of the pack is the German Spitz, from a nation increasingly threatening to America at the time. As the Yukon becomes crowded and domesticated, Buck is tortured by the incursion of a bourgeois family, dominated by a hysterical woman, who receive their natural justice by falling through the ice, "the inexorable elimination of the superfluous." Buck is then rescued by the ideal frontiersman, Thornton, with whom he reconstitutes the perfect American family along with an Irish terrier who mothers him and a huge black dog named "Nig," of boundless good nature. Thornton embodies the feminine virtue of tenderness along with his unquestioned virility. After Buck proves his love for Thornton by turning work into play in a sled-pulling contest, they light out for the territory before the rest — this time eastward, in search of a fabled gold mine (the dream of wealth as natural rather than social). While Thornton lives like an Indian, Buck lives a similar frontier idyll by running and hunting with a pack of wolves while returning for perfect civility to the man he loves. The end of the novel reinvents the conquest of America — this time as the invasion of Indians who destroy the primal unity between man and beast in the wilderness. Thornton and Buck are not seen as intruding into the Yeehats' prior history, marked only by an arrow in the body of a moose hunted by Buck. When Buck attacks the Indians for revenge, they shoot one another in confusion. Yet their presence serves the purpose of both cutting Buck's ties to civilization and preserving his memory in their myths, while he represents a "younger world," prior to civilization.

White Fang is a more overt allegory of evolutionary origins as the wolf-dog moves up the human developmental scale from brutal Indians only bent on survival who domesticate him through terror, to lower-class whites who exploit him for gratuitous violent entertainment, to the upper-class Scott Weedon, who tames and civilizes White Fang with love, and who, like Thornton, incorporates the civilizing qualities shunned in women. Brought back to California, the wolf reaches the height of his civilized career when he recognizes a criminal intruder about to kill a judge, and when he unleashes his primitive killer instinct to tear out the throat of this lower-class criminal, a degenerate beast. The lower-class degenerate threatens the national class structure, which the primordial beast from the wilderness -265- has been trained to protect. More laborious and less compelling than the immensely popular Call of the Wild, White Fang, through its frame that starts with a search party to recover the body of an aristocrat and ends by leashing primordial violence to protect a judge, exposes the deeply seductive call of "the wild" as the projection of "civilized" desire.

Amy Kaplan

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Gender and Fiction

In The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1902) Frank Norris explains in "Why Women Should Write the Best Novels" that women are much better suited to writing great novels than men. First, "writing is a feminine — not accomplishment merely — but gift." Moreover, women have the leisure, the right kind of education, and the temperament for novel writing. So they should surpass men at the task.

That they did not surpass men was an obvious source of relief to Norris. Women may have been writing more novels than men, he conjectured, but they were not writing better, or even equally accomplished, ones. Their lives were too sheltered to allow them the kind of engagement with experience — with "life itself, the crude, the raw, the vulgar" — that Norris considered essential to the production of great novels. Further, Norris believed that women lacked the physical and psychological strength necessary for the creation of great art. The mental strain of writing quickly debilitated them, resulting in "fatigue, harassing doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occasionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete discouragement and a final abandonment of the enterprise."

Norris's wishful thinking about women not being able to write great novels and his construction of literary creativity as a virile activity illustrate how entangled the subjects of gender and novel writing had become by the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, even as Norris argued that women could not write great, or even good, novels, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Pauline Hopkins, and Kate -267- were doing just that; and they would be followed by writers such as Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston. But in 1902 Frank Norris needed to claim that women could not be great novelists. He, along with many of his white male colleagues, felt extremely nervous about two things. First, the accomplishments of women novelists as artists were becoming increasingly difficult to deny. Second and related, the long-standing anxiety among many white men in the United States about novel writing as an effeminate occupation was, if anything, intensifying rather than abating.

For both men and women in nineteenth-century America, gendered ideas about novel writing grew out of and reflected larger political realities. Even before the Civil War, white women and people of color had embarked irreversibly on asserting their right to define themselves for themselves; and in the decades following the war, they continued, despite setbacks, to make dramatic inroads into social, intellectual, economic, and political territory previously staked out by white men as theirs alone. Change and upheaval were ubiquitous by the turn of the century. Immigrants arrived in large numbers from Italy, Ireland, Eastern Europe, and, before quotas, China. African Americans began moving North in significant numbers, as did Mexicans in the West. Native Americans waged desperate, defiant battles against United States imperialism.

The struggles of women to achieve change took many forms. By the end of the nineteenth century, many middle-class young white women, rebelling against the unwritten rule that they must not support themselves, sought to enter the ranks of paid employment, while growing numbers of African American women, most of them expecting to work throughout adulthood, fought to enter occupations from which they had been barred by discrimination. Across the nation, women's clubs devoted to self-improvement and civic involvement sprang up; African American clubs actively campaigned against lynching, the convict lease system, and institutionalized racial segregation, while all of the clubs lobbied for such social reforms as kindergartens, women matrons in women's prisons, and an end to child labor. Marking a major change in childbearing for many women, the average number of children for a woman of forty dropped from seven or eight in 1800 to three or four in 1900. Individuals such as Mary Cassatt, Emily Putnam, Maggie Walker, and Emma Goldman -268- achieved fame as artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and activists, while others such as Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams became well known as advocates for specific political and social reforms. Female enrollment in colleges and universities increased during the first two decades of the twentieth century by 1000 percent in public institutions and 482 percent in private ones. The campaign for women's suffrage intensified and ended successfully in 1920 in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

It is important not to overstate women's gains during the Progressive Era — nor should divisions and inequalities be ignored. Most women who worked for pay held low-paying, unprestigious jobs. Those who worked in the home for no pay typically faced unending cycles of hard physical labor combined, frequently, with killing monotony. Birth control and divorce did not exist for huge numbers of women, who continued to have to bear more children than they wished and to endure oppressive, often violent, marriages. Most important, the life-situations of immigrant women and of women of color often differed radically from those of native-born white women, who in many cases were their exploiters and oppressors every bit as much as white men were. As a result, deep divisions existed. Often displaying itself in magnanimous attempts to "lift up" one's inferiors, the social reformist activities of privileged women frequently provoked resentment in poor and working-class women, even as circumstances forced them to accept the aid rendered. And racism more often than not made talk of "sisterhood" ludicrous. As Charlotte Hawkins Brown, one of four African American women invited to speak at an interracial conference in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1920, bluntly told the white women listening to her: "We have begun to feel that you are not, after all, interested in us and I am going still further. The negro women of the South lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. . We feel that so far as lynching is concerned, that, if the white women would take hold of the situation, lynching would be stopped."

However, important as the differences and conflicts among women were they should not obscure the fact that from the white, male, dominant-culture point of view at the turn of the century — as well as from the point of view of many women at the time — major, fundamental change in the status and position of women was taking place. -269-

In fact, by the turn of the century feminist ideas and activities, referred to at the time simply as the Woman Movement, had become so widespread and powerful that a strong reactionary counterattack had settled in. No less a spokesman than Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, denounced the fight for suffrage, for example, as "a thousandth or a millionth part as important as the question of keeping, and where necessary reviving, among the women of this country, the realization that their great work must be done in the home."

All of this determination of women to change their economic, social, and political situations found clear expression in their relationship to the novel, the most popular but also, it was becoming more and more evident, the most prestigious literary form in the United States. During the second half of the nineteenth century and then early in the twentieth, women writers increasingly set out to write their way into the national literature not simply as money-making professionals but as artists — as the equals of great international figures such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, or Balzac, or their rare female counterpart such as George Eliot or George Sand. Alice Dunbar-Nelson declared at the turn of the century that she wished to write the best novel ever written. Edith Wharton (for a while) enjoyed being compared to Henry James. Kate Chopin named as her favorite author and primary model Guy de Maupassant. Willa Cather began her career by denouncing feminine writing and aligning herself instead with men. By the turn of the century the battle over white male ownership of the high-art novel in the United States had come to a head. Even more important, it was a battle that took place within a context of more women from various backgrounds being able to become authors than ever before in the nation's history. African American women published more novels between 1892 and 1902 than in all previous decades of United States history combined. White women, in the opinion of many turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers, virtually owned the form. Women previously unrepresented among American writers launched careers. The sisters Edith and Winnifred Eaton, whose mother was Chinese and who wrote under the names Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, respectively, began publishing at the end of the nineteenth century. The Native American authors Zitkala-Ša (sometimes known as Gertrude Bonnin) and Hum-ishu-ma (also -270- known as Mourning Dove) began writing for publication. Similarly, the short-story writer María Cristina Mena, thought to be the first woman of Mexican descent to publish in English in the United States, began her career at the turn of the century.

Debate about gender and novel writing was not new in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Fierce rivalry had emerged as early as the 1850s. Inspiring Hawthorne's much-quoted complaint about that "damned mob of scribbling women" supposedly stealing his audience, popular white novelists such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Maria Susanna Cummins, and Susan Warner dominated the midcentury novel market. Indeed, their best-sellers about and for women shaped the domestic novel to such an extent that their work affected not only the next generation of white male novelists such as Henry James and William Dean Howells but even their successors such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, all of whom had to deal (comfortably or not) with the predominance of women among their readership. To be sure, most popular mid-nineteenth-century women novelists did not define themselves as artists. Typically, they protested that they were writing merely to make a living; they emphasized that they were not attempting to lay claim to the traditionally male province of high art. Nevertheless, their extraordinary popularity forced subsequent generations of novelists, male and female, to take into account the audience served by them — and for women novelists, the public image of the woman novelist that they created as well.

A case in point is the influence of popular mid- nineteenth-century novels by and for women on the two best-known male authors of realistic fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century, William Dean Howells and Henry James. As Alfred Habegger explains, the two men came of age during a period when women wrote almost all of the major novels in the United States. It is therefore not surprising that pleasing an overwhelmingly female readership accustomed to narratives about women and women's concerns created a basic — if not the basic — challenge for both men. Howells himself theorized in "Mr. James's Later Work" that his colleague's male readers were "of a more feminine fineness, probably, in their perceptions and intuitions, than those other men who do not read him." Raising the issue many decades later in Henry James (1951), F. W. Dupee summarized -271- critical opinion by calling his subject "the great feminine novelist of a feminine age of letters." Similarly, Howells was routinely identified with women. As Habegger relates, the author Charles Dudley Warner wrote to his friend at one point: "You must have been a woman yourself in some previous state, to so know how it is yourself. You are a dangerous person. Heaven grant you no such insight into us men folk." Less charmed, one irritated male reviewer said: "Mr. Howells is never exciting; the most nervous old lady can read him without fear."

If the label "feminine" was complicated for male novelists such as Howells and James (it could be either a compliment or an insult, depending on who used it, why, and when), the issue of gender and novel writing was even more tangled for women writers. For those who wished to continue in the popular-novel tradition of their midcentury, white, domestic-novel predecessors, identification as a woman writer posed little problem. Traditional Victorian codes of femininity emphasizing modesty, intellectual conformity, and primary commitment to home and family dovetailed with the occupation of producing ostensibly formulaic novels that did not claim to be "art" — by which in the modern West is meant work that is original and idiosyncratic, individualistic, and frequently challenging or even upsetting. However, for many women late in the nineteenth and then early in the twentieth century, the mid-nineteenth-century mainstream American image of the domestic novelist no longer applied, if it ever had in the first place. Increasingly, women writers as a group were determined to assert their right to write not simply to make a living but for the same reasons that ambitious men (and a few women) had always turned to novel writing: to create original works of art.

Perfectly reflecting the period is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's argument in her essay "Men and Art" in The Man-Made World (1911). She points to a major difference between "art" and "Art," the former being what women had been allowed to do according to Gilman, the latter what men had reserved for themselves. Consequently Gilman declares of the "primitive arts" of women such as "pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needlework, weaving," and the like: "Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past." Such creations are "not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom -272- are so few women of note." What women in the modern world need to do, Gilman argues, is invade and then redefine and adapt for themselves the territory of high art traditionally denied them, including and especially literature.

By the time Gilman's book saw print, there were many women in the United States already asserting their right to be, in her shorthand, Artists. For a number of native-born white women such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, Ellen Glasgow, Gilman herself, or Willa Cather, it is probably accurate to say that the most pressing issue was finding a way to reconcile the conflict embodied for them in the terms "woman" and "artist." For other equally ambitious women who were women of color or immigrants (or both), authors such as Frances Ellen Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Winnifred Eaton, Sui Sin Far, Hum-ishuma, and Anzia Yezierska, the challenge was even more complex. It involved combating racist, cultural, and entrenched class biases as well as gender issues.

One way of understanding the range and complexity of the issues dealt with by women novelists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is through brief consideration of a few representative careers. Useful for the purpose here, although many different choices could be made, are the following five writers: Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930), Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954), Willa Cather (1873–1947), and Humishu-ma (1888–1936).

A biographical sketch published in The Colored American Magazine in 1901 (and no doubt written by the author herself) outlines Pauline Hopkins's ambition as a novelist. The piece announces that she aims to write fiction about racism that will reach all classes of readers and explains that "Contending Forces [1900] is her first published work." It was also her last separately published novel. As the sketch bluntly observes: "Pauline Hopkins has struggled to the position which she now holds in the same fashion that all Northern colored women have to struggle — through hardships, disappointments, and with very little encouragement. What she has accomplished has been done by a grim determination to 'stick at it,' even though failure might await her in the end." After Contending Forces, Hopkins was able to bring out three more novels serially in The-273- Colored American Magazine, where she served as literary editor from 1900 to 1904: Hagar's Daughter (1901), Winona (1902), and Of One Blood (1902). But she was not able to publish those novels as individual volumes nor to follow Contending Forces with any other separately issued novel. The difficulties announced in the 1901 sketch proved all too real.

Hopkins's resolve as an African American woman writer to create her own kind of art and to speak her mind pitted her against tremendous obstacles of racial, sexual, and therefore economic discrimination. Like that of any writer, her life as a publishing artist depended on having a publisher. But as an African American woman committed to writing honestly about race issues and needing to support herself financially, finding an outlet for her work was extremely difficult. During the few years that she worked at the Colored American while it was published in Boston, she was indefatigable and prolific. However, when the magazine changed direction and moved to New York following its secret purchase by Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist policies Hopkins opposed, she lost her outlet. She tried to place work elsewhere and even created her own publishing company. But her efforts failed. Though she lived until 1930, she was not able to continue to publish novels after the four that appeared in the unbelievably short span of 1900 to 1902.

All four of Hopkins's novels focus on African American people's battles with racism in the United States, three of them giving preeminence to women's stories; and each shows her testing and expanding the form of the novel to make it serve her purposes. Interweaving stories of familial rupture and reunion, violation and restoration, Contending Forces links past and present to expose late nineteenthcentury, white, rape-lynch mythology as the modern reincarnation of the ethos underlying slavery. Similarly, Hagar's Daughter and Winona deal with the institution of slavery and connect it to the modern African American woman's struggle to define herself against powerful forces of erasure. Most experimental formally is Hopkins's last novel, Of One Blood, which mixes realism, melodrama, journalism, dime novel techniques, and dream prophecy to create a parable about racism, healing, the African American woman artist, and pan-African wholeness. -274-

Hopkins's images of the African American woman artist in Contending Forces and Of One Blood clearly signal her anger about her own situation as an African American woman writer. The woman artist in her first novel is shadowy. Significantly named Sappho, she reveals her creative potential only in hints: her name, the beauty she creates around herself, the passion she feels for her child, the occupation of stenography (Hopkins's own occupation) by which she supports herself. This character is important yet vague — purposefully hard to see and know. In Contending Forces, the African American woman artist's fate in the United States is to have been raped by her white uncle, and her story is one of painful reclamation of identity.

Much less optimistic in its conclusion is Hopkins's account of the woman artist in her last novel. In Of One Blood, the soprano Dianthe Lusk is deceived, sexually violated, silenced, and finally murdered by the book's principal white male character. In this book Hopkins openly celebrates the African American woman artist, connecting her to a long, ancient line of foremothers in Africa. She then shows her violent silencing in the modern United States. Rendered doubly vulnerable by race and gender, Hopkins's woman artist has a rich, glorious past. What she does not have, in this story, is a future. Violent racism kills her.

Born to privilege in a wealthy, white, Old New York family, Edith Wharton enjoyed a career that contrasts sharply with Hopkins's. Inherited income, leisure, freedom from domestic labor, and the security of an excellent private education positioned Wharton for success. Her impressive production of close to twenty novels, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous essays and articles from the late 1890s to the early 1930s cannot be separated from the advantages of her race and class.

Edith Wharton did have to struggle to turn herself into an artist. Totally leisure-class in their expectation that she would devote herself to nothing but marriage, motherhood, and a life of constant hostessing and visiting, her parents were drawn neither to the arts nor to the life of the mind; and the marriage that she made in 1885 turned out to be deadly. Acutely depressed, she involved herself, on her doctor's advice, in fiction writing in earnest; but as she grew stronger, her husband grew severely depressed. Finally Edith Wharton sued for -275- divorce — against the Wharton family's wishes — in 1913. Although she had an affair early in the twentieth century, she never remarried; and she lived most of her life after the turn of the century in France.

Wharton's rebellion against her class's, her family's, and her husband's expectations reflected the historical moment. Although highly conservative and elitist in many ways, she was nevertheless part of a new generation of women at the end of the nineteenth century who believed in their right to realize their own creativity and ambitions much as privileged men, at least in theory, always had. Indeed, a central issue for Wharton, many scholars argue, was the intensity of her male identification as an artist. If the production of high art, historically, was reserved for men, then how was one as a woman to pursue that goal? Was it possible to be both an artist and a woman? Wharton's most direct answer appears in her first novel, The Touchstone (1900), which has at its center the novelist Margaret Aubyn. She is brilliant, critically acclaimed, and prolific. She is also ugly, unrequited in love, and, by the time the novel opens, dead. The fears embodied in this early representation of the woman artist are clear; desexualization, rejection, and an early death are her fate.

After The Touchstone Wharton's novels return only covertly to the subject of the woman artist. She included the figure obliquely in The Age of Innocence (1920) in the character of Ellen Olenska, but frequently Wharton made her artists and artist-figures male. Looked at one way, this disappearance of the woman artist after The Touchstone suggests resolution. The author acknowledged her fears in her first novel and exorcised them. Looked at another way, however, Wharton's fiction suggests lifelong, unresolved conflict about her own identity as a woman writer. Critics have commented on the almost too-perfect precision and distancing of narrative technique in her work — her fear of admitting feeling and emotion — and Wharton has been charged with hostility toward her women characters. Both practices can be interpreted as manifestations of conflict. They can be read as the author's self-defensive attempt to secure her status as an artist in a male-dominated world by separating herself from "feminine" fiction — that is, allegedly soft, second-rate work — and from other women.

Edith Wharton succeeded brilliantly at writing her way into the tradition of the high-art novel in the United States. Her work enjoyed -276- critical acclaim and a popular readership; given her presence, it was difficult to doubt women's abilities as literary artists. Indeed, one reason that the next generation of young white male authors such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner needed so desperately to assert the masculinity of novel writing was that their youth had been dominated not by great male novelists but by great female ones. Attacking writers such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather as old-fashioned, prudish, and boring was one way of making room for themselves.

In contrast to Edith Wharton and her ambition to create elite art, Winnifred Eaton aimed directly for popular commercial success. Born in Canada the daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, she was one of fourteen children and the family was poor. As an adult, she wrote most often under the Japanese-sounding pseudonym Onoto Watanna, supporting herself and her four children, particularly after her divorce, by writing popular romances, most of them set in Japan and almost all of them love stories. That is, she capitalized upon rather than rejected the well-established tradition of popular women's fiction in the United States; and she was extremely successful. The first woman of Chinese ancestry to publish novels in the United States, Winnifred Eaton brought out fourteen novels between the late 1890s and the mid-1920 s.

Unlike her sister who published short fiction under the name Sui Sin Far and thereby openly acknowledged her Chinese ancestry, Winnifred Eaton responded to virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States at the turn of the century by suppressing her own heritage and assuming, instead, a Japanese identity. Her strategy, as Amy Ling argues, was one of adaptation, subterfuge, and subversion rather than open confrontation. By reinventing her background, she could cater to the reading public's fascination with Japan and thus exploit Asian subject matter in a positive, albeit stereotypic, way without churning up the racism — or at least the same kind or the amount of racism — that Chinese subject matter would produce.

The full meaning and the cost of Eaton's successful disguise are not easy to measure. She brilliantly participated in a strategy of deliberately assumed false identity and infiltration that women artists, defined as outsiders, have made use of from George Eliot (and earlier) on. At the same time, as Onoto Watanna she centered her creative life -277- in an act of denial that clearly seems to have created pain as well as a degree of freedom. Her autobiography, Me(1915), in which she calls herself "Nora Ascough" and identifies her mother simply as "foreign," reflects bitterly at one point: "My success was founded upon a cheap and popular device. . Oh, I had sold my birthright for a mess of potage [sic]." In alluding here to the biblical story of Esau and, even more immediately and tellingly, to the famous reference to it at the end of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Eaton suggests how hard it was for her, at least at times, to pretend to be someone she was not. The rampant anti-Chinese bigotry of her era placed her in an untenable position. As she saw it, and certainly she was not imagining things, to survive and thrive as a novelist she had to deny a basic part of herself.

This confusion and guilt about hiding one's identity appears clearly in Onoto Watanna's early novel about a woman artist, A Japanese Nightingale (1901). In order to secure enough money to help her brother come home to Japan, the heroine, a teahouse dancer who is half Japanese and half Caucasian, sells herself in marriage to a white American. In keeping her economic motive a secret, she keeps from her husband her full story as a human being and her pain and isolation at having to live a lie. As a "real" story about a woman artist in Japan, the book is frequently thin and farfetched. As a disguised story about its author's own disguise as an artist, however, it is revealing. It says that economic necessity, secrecy and isolation, and flattery of whites consume the major part of a Eurasian woman artist's life.

Willa Cather's ambition as a novelist, like Wharton's, was to distinguish herself as an artist. As Sharon O'Brien has argued, Cather's long apprenticeship as a novelist was dominated by the conflict she felt as a middle-class white woman between the identities of "woman" and "artist," the former associated for her with domesticity, nurture, and relationality; the latter with public accomplishment, daring intellect, and rule-breaking. Publishing her first short story in 1892, she did not write her first novel until 1912; and during that twenty-year period, as well as occasionally thereafter, Cather outspokenly denigrated women writers. It was a way of separating her-278- self from public accomplishment that was "feminine." By attacking women writers she could identify herself with real artists — that is, men. Then in large part through the friendship and example of Sarah Orne Jewett, as O'Brien explains, Cather gradually arrived at a way of integrating her identity as a woman and her ambitions as an artist. Although that integration was always shaky, she was nevertheless able to produce nine novels in about twenty years, as well as many short stories, essays, articles, and autobiographical writings.

Where Cather's story differed radically from Wharton's was in her struggle against homophobia. Profoundly complicating Cather's public career as an artist was her primary, private identification with women, romantically and emotionally, at precisely the time historically that such same-sex relationships were being defined as pathological. Because Victorian ideology assumed that respectable women were asexual, a woman of the previous generation such as Jewett might write with considerable freedom about love between women. But with the breakdown of Victorian ideology toward the end of the nineteenth century came a redefinition of all women (not just "bad" women) as sexual. Consequently, deep intimate bonds between women no longer qualified as "innocent." They became, instead, potentially and even inherently sexual — and, given their rejection of men, clearly "deviant." This invention of lesbianism as deviance by the mainstream culture occurred at the same time that Cather was trying to find her voice as an artist. As might be expected, these changes in cultural attitudes toward same-sex emotional and romantic identification among women generated tremendous creative tension for Cather — both inhibiting and fruitful.

Cather wrote most openly about the woman artist in her third novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), and it is significant that the singer Thea Kronborg has her most complete and transforming creative experience in a moment of solitary, magical communion with the earth itself, which Cather clearly depicts as female and simultaneously erotic and maternal. Deep in Panther Canyon, which is described as "a gentler cañon within a wilder one," a secret protected place "hollow (like a great fold in the rock)," Cather's artist, standing naked in a still pool in the sunlight, experiences an epiphany. Embraced by the earth, Thea understands in a flash the utter intercon-279- nectedness of earth, flesh, womb, female sexuality, and artistic form. As a consequence of this powerful, symbolic, same-sex experience deep in the earth she finds herself reborn and renewed as an artist.

Similar covert exploration of same-sex love and of its relationship to artistic creativity exists throughout Cather's fiction. Most obvious probably are the loving relationships between men in The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927). But even in My Ántonia (1918), many critics argue, the central love relationship between Jim and "Tony" (Antonia) makes most sense if it is read not simply as a heterosexual attraction but also as a camouflaged same-sex one.

Existing in tension with such subversive energies in Cather's novels, however, is her racism. Writing during a period of mounting homophobia, Willa Cather struggled against powerful biases, which she could circumvent only surreptitiously. It is therefore an irony of her work, as must also be said of many other white women's writing at the time, that it is deeply racist and ethnocentric. Even as Cather wrote about white women's struggles against discrimination, including those of immigrants, she ignored living Native Americans in favor of celebrating dead ones, rendered Mexican women invisible, and caricatured African Americans. Like most privileged white women at the time, she did not use her own situation to understand the situations of people of color in the United States.

In sharp contrast to a career such as Cather's, Hum-ishu-ma, also known as Mourning Dove, published one novel, Cogewea, the HalfBlood. Written around 1912, it did not come out until 1927; and the story of its revision and publication forms a critical chapter in United States literary history.

A member of the Okanogan people of the American Northwest, Hum-ishu-ma is usually cited as the first Native American woman novelist. She grew up in what is now Washington state and then on the Flathead Reservation. Although she had little formal schooling, she had impressive talent and determination and around 1912 wrote the first draft of Cogewea. In 1914 she shared her manuscript with Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a white man actively involved in championing Native American rights. McWhorter added some notes and quotations, did some editing, and tried to place the book for Humishu-ma. He did not succeed, perhaps because of World War I; and -280- then after the war he continued to make changes in the manuscript — but this time without telling Hum-ishu-ma. The book, as Alanna Kathleen Brown explains, now became the work of two people with two separate objectives. When the novel finally came out in 1927 McWhorter had so altered it that Hum-ishu-ma wrote to him: "I feel like it was someone elses book and not mine at all. In fact the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it."

Hum-ishu-ma wrote Cogewea at night after exhausting labor all day as a migrant farmworker; she trusted McWhorter with her manuscript; and her reward was a book she could barely recognize as her own. As Dexter Fisher points out, McWhorter no doubt meant well. He wanted to revise Cogewea to make it more timely, impressive, and therefore marketable. Nevertheless what he did was to appropriate and rewrite Hum-ishu-ma — transform her work into his image of what it should be. He repeated on the personal level precisely the process of colonization and erasure that he claimed as an advocate of Native American issues to be fighting against in white culture.

Despite the manuscript's violation, it seems possible to identify the basic plot and design of Cogewea as Hum-ishu-ma's. The book has in its foreground a simple if tangled love-plot. Rejecting a young man who, like herself, comes from a mixed Okanogan and Anglo background and is therefore at home in both the Native American and the white world, Cogewea runs away with a white man who turns out to be a racist liar. When he abandons her, it is actually a good thing. Cogewea returns to her people and, most important, to new respect for her grandmother, her Stemteema, who had warned her against the white man. Quite overtly, Cogewea is a cautionary tale about the dangers of trusting white men and leaving the world of one's grandmother. It is, ironically, almost uncannily prophetic about Hum-ishuma's experience as a writer.

It may be that Hum-ishu-ma's struggle as a writer against colonial domination and particularly white sexism shows up most powerfully in Cogewea's form. Three times she inserts the Stemteema's traditional, cautionary tales into her conventional Western plot design. These tales, either remembered by Hum-ishu-ma or gathered by her for the novel, thus interject into the book a traditional, oral narrative that both opposes and interacts with the love-plot. Consequently the -281- form of Hum-ishu-ma's book, probably even more than its content, articulates what was obviously a fundamental issue for her as a woman writer, at least in this work. How does one fuse the modern Western novel — whether popular or high-art — and the traditional art of generations of Native American foremothers? Is it possible, or even desirable? Can the two meet, interact, coexist, or connect in the same text?

After Cogewea Hum-ishu-ma published Coyote Stories (1933), a collection of traditional Okanogan tales. Also, it is reported that she was determined to write another novel, this time without anyone's "help." Whether she did so is uncertain, however, as no manuscript has been found.

Certainly the careers of Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Onoto Watanna, Willa Cather, and Hum-ishu-ma suggest no unitary story or pattern. Rather, what a sketch of representative women novelists' ambitions and fates at the turn of the century indicates is both how feasible and how very difficult it was for different women to become novelists in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

They all had behind them a strong tradition. By the end of the nineteenth century American women had been publishing novels for well over fifty years. Led by writers such as E. D. E. N. Southworth and Susan Warner, a number of them had succeeded so phenomenally that the popular novel in the 1850s was dominated by white women. Following the Civil War, other white women such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Sarah Orne Jewett published novels that significantly altered the earlier pattern. They wrote books that simultaneously sold well and attracted praise as "art," thus preparing the way, it can be said, for the explosion of talent and achievement among women novelists at the end of the century. Earlier there had been isolated women such as Elizabeth Stoddard or Harriet E. Wilson who had attempted novels substantially or even completely different from those produced by the popular white domestic novelists. But it was not until the third quarter of the nineteenth century that such experimentation and individuality became the norm rather than the exception.

Empowered by various, vigorous women's movements, as well as by various literary traditions that included autobiographies, poetry, -282- slave narratives, travel literature, and a number of oral forms in addition to the novel, women writers from many backgrounds turned with increasing ambition and confidence at the end of the nineteenth century to the novel, whether as high art or as popular fiction. African American women such as Frances Ellen Harper, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amelia Johnson, and Pauline Hopkins brought out novels in the 1890s and the first years of the new century. Onoto Watanna and Hum-ishu-ma likewise began novel-writing careers at the turn of the century. Many white women such as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton, Ellen Glasgow, Zona Gale, and Mary Roberts Rinehart began their careers as novelists at the end of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, as a group white women novelists were so successful that their work clearly threatened white men at the time. Theodore Dreiser's beginning his own career with two novels about women, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1912), or Sinclair Lewis's debut with Main Street (1919) suggests how aware they were of the feminine market. Even more telling, the exaggeratedly muscular novels of men such as Richard Harding Davis, Frank Norris, Winston Churchill, and Harold Bell Wright point at least in part to their anxiety not simply about virility in general but specifically about gender and the novel — who should be shaping it and what it should look like.

A second and equally if not more important conclusion to draw from any overview of women novelists at the turn into the twentieth century is that gender cannot be separated out from race, ethnicity, and class when thinking about the struggles and accomplishments of women writers in the United States. As women, all of the writers I have mentioned shared the challenge of having to combat sexism and misogyny in order to write and publish. Also all, in one way or another, benefited from changing attitudes toward women in the broader social and political context. However, the differences among and for women created by racism, colonialism, cultural bigotry, and class discrimination often reduced to insignificance the similarities produced by gender. Edith Wharton's publication of seventeen novels and Hum-ishu-ma's publication of one — which she could barely recognize as her own by the time her benevolent white "friend" got through with it — indicate how inextricable the issues of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and culture are in United States literary history. The -283- subject of gender empowerment and the American novel does not exist independent of questions of race, class, and culture.

Elizabeth Ammons

-284-

Popular Forms I

When Frederick Whittaker mounted his defense of cheap fiction in the late nineteenth century, he was reacting against criticism of it as a degenerate, corrupt, and corrupting form. His tactic was to legitimize the processes of authorship and reception (or literary production and consumption) within the marketplace. The argument and counterargument nicely gesture to the warring definitions, theories, and assumptions that inform discourse of the "popular" in the industrial age. Disentangling the terms of that discourse is crucial, because each leads to a different construction of the literature. I will argue in this chapter that popular or mass literature of the nineteenth century made available to authors and readers a negotiated response to historical, ideological, and commercial developments of the period.

Critics of popular culture in the industrialized era have theorized alternative models of the relationship between popular forms and society, or specifically the effect of the commodification of culture on literary production. At one end of the spectrum, the Frankfurt School condemned the "culture industry" as a capitalist operation manipulating and deceiving a passive public. That reading of mass culture is one that echoes through many avowedly untheorized attitudes: Ralph Ellison is not unusual in perceiving the debasement of African American culture in its appropriation by mass forms of entertainment. The opposite response is epitomized by some of Leslie Fiedler's work, -285- which celebrates mass literature as the spontaneous expression of modern folk culture. These diverse connotations are represented in the multiple definitions of the term "popular," itemized by Raymond Williams in Keywords (1983):

In more recent years an intermediate position has developed, one that is compelling in its recognition of both the trivializing and the empowering potential of popular forms, and that acknowledges the manipulations of the mass media while arguing that the needs and desires of the reading public can act as a counterforce in the collective production of meaning. This perspective is partly a response to the perceived disjunction between critics' and audiences' explanations of the stories that popular forms tell. Privileging the critics' readings assumes and perhaps encourages the passivity of "untrained" readers, implicitly characterizing them as gulls to the ruses of the manifest content of popular works. The theory of "negotiation" answers this assumption by ascribing agency to the material institutions of production, distribution, and consumption, to the publishers, authors, and readers of mass literature, all of them being understood to invest the text with their own agendas, vocabularies, ideologies. Michael Denning provides one of the most succinct articulations of the dynamic of negotiation when he says of cheap books that

The later nineteenth-century explosion of American cheap fiction grew out of major innovations in antebellum popular publishing. This chapter sketches in the early period by tracing the rise of story papers, dime novels, and nickel series, all of which flourished in the -286- latter half of the century. It pays attention to the material circumstances of these works' production and consumption, their textual inscriptions, their authors, and their readers, as the collective coordinates of the "contested terrain" of popular literature. Such grounding facilitates our understanding of how these popular works spoke to their age — as well as how they speak to our age about the imaginative life of the past — and how they offered to authors and readers models of accommodation, qualified resistance, and negotiation.

In the antebellum period key moments facilitated the onset of cheap fiction: the explosion in America's market economy, the huge increase in its population, the spread of literacy, and the rapid advances in transportation, industrialization, and print technology made possible the production and continental distribution of lowpriced literature to a mass audience for the first time. The first entrepreneurs to take advantage of these material conditions were the publishers of story papers: cheap, weekly compilations of serialized melodramas, didactic sketches, and news digests. The composition and contents of story papers were a direct result of marketing calculations. The large folio sheets with their cramped columns of diminutive typeface, the paucity of illustrations, and the very low price -3 cents to 6 cents per issue — were the result of a narrow calculation about how to attract the largest audience as cheaply as possible. Snippets of commentary and international gossip were added to make the story papers look like newspapers, since only newspapers were eligible for the cheapest, third-class postage. The first story papers were Brother Jonathan and New World, both founded by Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold in 1839; the most popular and longlasting were Robert Bonner's New York Ledger (1855-98) and Street and Smith's New York Weekly (1855-89), each claiming at different times to sell 350,000–400,000 copies a week. These titles and others appeared up to the end of the century, but the form was distinctively forged in its early years: as enthusiasm for the dime novel escalated after the Civil War, later story papers could claim only one-half to one-quarter of the earlier versions' circulation; in 1877, Publishers Weekly said of weekly story papers: "These have not been pushed of late years as they used to be, and their readers perhaps are ready for something new." -287-

The political climate also had a palpable effect on story papers. The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny provided a nationalistic discourse within which publisher-editors could legitimize merchandising calculations of scale and popularity, translating commercial practices into patriotic principles in the apparatus that surrounded and spoke to the fictional contents. In the years when America was battling with Mexico and Britain in its efforts to expand its Western territories, nationalist sentiment was stirred by iconic story-paper titles such as The Flag of Our Union, The True Flag, The Flag of the Free, Uncle Sam, The Yankee Nation, The Star-Spangled Banner, all accompanied by flamboyant heads of eagles, flags, and cameos of the founding fathers. The democratic ethos was invoked in editorial columns and publicity announcements that accommodated readers to the upheavals of industrializing America, by explaining the technology of storypaper production as a process entirely at the service of the public, making "a paper that shall please the million."

Story-paper authors also functioned as icons of emergent nationalism. The first story-paper publishers pirated European material, but once that source ran dry, they stimulated American production, first with cash prizes for published stories, then with fees — anywhere from $100 for a novelette to $1600 for a novel. The need to fill pages, then, turned American writing into a paying profession for the first time. Mining that commercial calculation for all its nationalistic potential, publishers vied to boast about the Americanness of their authors and the size of fees paid to certain stellar names (stressing output and price more than genius of production), again emphasizing that these measures were adopted for the public's delectation.

The array of fictional formulas perpetrated by the story papers included some residual forms unchanged from the European tradition: for example, aristocratic costume romances. The most distinctive narratives, however, adapted inherited patterns of sensational action, multiple plot-lines, and stereotyped figures to American settings and the current political climate. The genre "mysteries of the city," for example, adapted by George Lippard and, later, Ned Buntline from Eugène Sue, was marked by the peculiarities of the American city in the 1840s as well as by the displacement of rural dwellers after the Panic of 1837.

Melodramas of two types predominated. Stories of masculine ad-288- venture on the sea, in the wilderness, or in historical and contemporary wars with Britain, Mexico, and Native American tribes justified the nationalist cause in specifically democratic terms. Typically, Charles Averill's The Secret Service Ship; or, The Fall of San Juan D'Ulloa, first published in The Flag of Our Union in 1849, focuses its sensationalized propaganda about the contemporaneous Mexican War on the heroic spy, Midshipman Rogers. In his complicated tangle of plot lines, character disguises, false deaths, and indigestible coincidences, Averill entirely sacrificed the convention of secrecy to the allegorical imperative. Far from camouflaging himself in the dress of his Mexican surroundings, Midshipman Rogers accouters himself as follows:

At a climactic moment in the plot, Rogers unfurls the United States flag and drapes himself in it. Simultaneously boosting both the nationalistic cause and the paper's title, Averill insists that what has infiltrated and vanquished Mexico is the type of America, the democracy where the common man (the midshipman) is hero.

The other prominent formula was a sensationalized version of the domestic, sentimental novel, which sold so successfully at midcentury and which Jane Tompkins has read as an expression of the revival movement. Women's narratives in the story papers also told of female trials and fortitude in the face of sudden poverty, orphanhood, abusive guardians, and evil suitors, but their florid, feverish action was more "high wrought," in Nina Baym's term, than that of Susan B. Warner and Maria Cummins. The most lavishly touted author of this melodramatic genre was Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, who was published in the New York Ledger from 1855 and whose writings still attracted a large audience in the 1880s and 1890s, when they appeared alongside the dime novels. Southworth's successful formula involved mistaken identities, vicious love triangles, and horrific bouts of insanity, all of which are represented as distortions of the domestic propriety at which the heroine aims. The heroines typically -289- earn their happiness by being chaste and Christian, but that virtue does not inhibit them from undertaking some sensational crossdressing adventures. While clearly speaking to the religious enthusiasm and women's topics of the age, these melodramas also offered illicit thrills.

Some of these melodramas were delivered, textually, by strong authorial voices that translated the commodity status of the literature into a highly metaphorical process of commodity exchange between authors and implied audiences. These authorial gestures seem a more characteristic dimension of male than female narratives; this difference may well be historically specific, in that the first identifiable voice was a male one that emerged from the patriarchal system of the publishing industry. Maturin Murray Ballou was one of the first entrepreneurs to take advantage of the new print technology, most successfully with The Flag of Our Union (1846-70). He also seems to have been the first story-paper author to incorporate the businessman's perspective into his authorial voice, when he turned author himself in the face of dwindling indigenous materials to fill his pages. In adopting his new role, Ballou never renounced his old one; in the midst of his melodramatic storytelling, he pauses to inform the reader how much time and money the process of writing has cost; and he extends the public accountability of the author from the editorial rhetoric to the fiction itself, by explaining and justifying his decisions about the composition of his tale, in, for example, Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain and Red Rupert, the American Bucanier [sic], both published in The Flag of Our Union in 1845. The most prolific author to follow Ballou's practice was E. Z. C. Judson, best known under one of his many pseudonyms, "Ned Buntline."

Buntline's voice was more politicized than Ballou's, because he carried into his fiction the perspectives of both publisher-editor (Judson produced his own story papers intermittently) and tribune of the people (at one time heading the Know-Nothing Party, he was a prominent participant in the Astor Place Riot of 1849). He also used the serialized format more aggressively, to respond to his critics and comment on his political and legal adventures beyond the pages of his fiction. Peter Buckley has elucidated the strategies by which Buntline carried the rhetoric of mass meetings from the streets of New York City into the story papers and back again, breaking the bounds of -290- novelistic form to argue political, legal, commercial, and personal cases to his audience. This whole ongoing commentary was intertwined within stirring tales of the American Revolution — such as Saul Sabberday, the Idiot Spy; or, Luliona, the Seminole (1858) — or of urban vice — for example, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York City (issued in parts between December 1847 and April 1848). In Buckley's words: "Practicing the serial form…appears to have brought writers into new relations with the audiences assembled, so to speak, by the texts themselves"; in Buntline's: "I hope you feel as if you had got your money's worth."

The sum of these authorial, narrative, and publishing strategies is that story papers did much more than flood American society with cheap, sensational adventure stories. Their editorial and authorial rhetoric acknowledged the operation of the market on the contract between author and reader, and inscribed that contract into the nationalist history of America, implicating commercial practice just as much as martial pursuits into the democratic ethos of the new Republic. At the same time, their fictional narratives positioned American women and men in heroic roles. While the editorial apparatus communicated reassuring messages about the technology and scale of industrialization, it also mediated the sensational fiction in such a way that the adventures read not simply as dissociated escapism but as displaced allegories of American life. The effect was that story papers offered readers accommodation to the speed, change, and growth of modern America.

The popular form central to the post-Civil War period was the dime novel, which flourished from 1860 to about 1900. Dime novels were introduced by Beadle and Adams, who were soon joined by a host of imitators, the most successful being Frank Tousey, George Munro, Norman Munro, and Street and Smith (the last transferring from the story paper to the dime novel late, in 1889, but immediately becoming Beadle and Adams's main rival and surviving as pulp magazine publishers until 1950). Beadle shifted the emphasis in cheap publishing away from serials to uniformly packaged series: each consisted of complete, predominantly American novels presented as compact pamphlets priced at 10 cents or 5 cents, with illustrated covers, which became increasingly lurid and vividly colored through time. -291-

Pamphlet novels had been issued, irregularly, in the antebellum period, but usually in installments for 25 cents each. Beadle and Adams's major innovation was the marketing of their line: the portable format was an important selling point in an age of escalating rail travel; the recognizable, appealing format took effect with the onset of the newsstand as a major outlet for cheap fiction; and the very low price ("A DOLLAR BOOK FOR A DIME!!" as the publicity blared) opened up the market to readers of all income levels. The dime novel publishers also pared away most of the editorial paraphernalia characteristic of story papers; in time, they tapped the audience loyalty bred by serialization in the earlier format by organizing titles into "libraries," a device that also facilitated the frequent reprinting of novels. The results were massively successful; Beadle and Adams published 3158 separate titles and sold copies in the millions. In the words of W. H. Bishop, in 1879, dime novel literature was "the greatest literary movement, in bulk, of the age, and worthy of very serious consideration for its character, the phenomenon of its existence cannot be overlooked."

The authors of dime novels were implicated in the industrial processes more directly than their story-paper predecessors, primarily because dime novel publishers attempted to rationalize (and thereby deskill) writing as well as production, advertising, and distribution. At first, with Beadle and Adams, editors regimented authors' production mainly in terms of quantity, speed, length, and fixed payment rates, supplying only general instructions on content. With the advent of Street and Smith, however, the principle of systematization penetrated much more deeply into relationships among publisher, editor, author, and audience. They supervised their writers closely, taking over more and more authorial decisions, until, by 1896, Ormond Smith dictated character, plots, and scenes to the author who was ostensibly "inventing" Frank Merriwell. Increasingly, too, all dime publishers shunted authors around from one house pseudonym to another; in the case of Street and Smith, multiply authored series under one trademark name came to be the rule.

Fitting writing to production-line techniques inevitably shaped both the public's and the writers' conception of authorship. From the statements that have survived, it is clear that many authors came to absorb the values of commercial publishing, willingly subscribing to -292- the conditions of labor in the fiction factories. William Wallace Cook, for example, who wrote for Street and Smith between 1893 and 1928, off and on, described authorship:

Laura Jean Libbey, who won a massive readership through the Munroes' story papers, wrote plays in later life according to the method she had learned as a dime novelist. Eschewing outline or notes, she dictated two or three plays a week, 120 in eighteen months, then produced a list of 120 titles, to which she matched the plays as they came to hand. The more complex inscriptions of authorial accents in the fiction itself are part of the textual story told below.

Sizes and types of audience are notoriously difficult to establish, the more so in the case of historical publishers of ephemeral literature. Nevertheless, informed hypotheses are important, because we read this literature now partly through our construction of how it was received contemporaneously. Certain clues point to a large and diverse audience for dime novels, but with a majority of this readership belonging to the working class toward the end of the nineteenth century. Beadle and Adams themselves explicitly announced in 1860: "it is hoped to reach all classes, old and young, male and female"; they advertised books in the nationally influential New York Tribune; and some of their publications were reviewed (favorably) in the highbrow North American Review. The Civil War produced a captive audience of soldiers, who were highly responsive to the sensational adventure that some publishers became adept at producing. Later, industrialization, urbanization, and economic calculations seem to have delivered the working classes as the main audience for cheap fiction. Frederick Whittaker specifically enumerated: "The readers of the dimes are farmers, mechanics, workwomen, drummers, boys in shops and factories"; extrapolating from this and other evidence, Michael Denning has averred that "the bulk of the audience of dime novels were workers — craftworkers, factory operatives, domestic servants and domestic workers." At least once formulaic fan-293- tasies were adapted to quasi-realist urban settings, Street and Smith appeared to believe that they had a proletarian audience (and potential, unpaid sales force) reflecting their proletarian protagonists. The editorial apparatus of an 1871 New York Weekly reads, in part:

Given that it was Francis Smith, coeditor, who had written Bertha Bascomb, this rhetoric can be read as not just addressing but actively constituting a working-class following. Retrospectively, commentators tended to style dime novels "part of the youth of many of us" (this from an editorial in the New York Sun in 1900). In fact, however, it was only toward the end of Beadle and Adams's life and throughout Street and Smith's dime career that a specifically juvenile audience was targeted.

The characteristic dime novel narratives aimed at this shifting audience were action-packed melodramas that told, again, stories of nationalism and commerce. Several formulas are familiar from the story papers — tales of heroic, patriotic wars and of the frontier — but others developed in response to historical circumstances: the fictionalizing of outlaws, detectives, male factory operatives, and working girls, for example, was particular to the newer form, as it developed in the 1880s and 1890s. All of these fictions were quick to exploit the topical, from scientific and technological inventions to industrial strife to Teddy Roosevelt's triumphs in the Spanish-American War.

The formula most actively promoted by Beadle and Adams and their imitators in the early years was the Western. While there had been individual best-selling frontier romances — each of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales (1823-41) was a best-seller, as was Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay (1837) — the genre as a mass phenomenon took off with the advent of the dime novel. The historical context was clearly a factor: accompanying the human migrations from East to West before the Civil War and the cattle trails from West to East after was a vibrant, optimistic political rhetoric that characterized the Far West as site of -294- national, economic, and personal regeneration. Also bearing upon the response to the dime Western was the general shift in popular trends, as women's fiction waned and men's gained ascendancy, as Nina Baym and others have shown. Finally, the specific story of Beadle's first Westerns suggests that commercial calculations also had a bearing.

Beadle and Adams opened their publishing venture with a tale set on the early frontier: Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, which was Number One of Beadle's Dime Novels in June 1860. It sold at least half a million copies, yet turned out to be an unusual dime novel. Its structure was untypical: though its melodrama was vivid, its plot entanglements and subplots and coincidences were considerably more restrained than in later dimes, and it ended tragically. The subject matter was handled equally unusually: Malaeska traces the fate of a Native American woman, who is left widowed by her white soldier-husband, robbed of their son by her aristocratic in-laws in New York City, forced to witness his suicide when his Indian heritage is revealed to him years later, and finally killed by her own grief on her boy's grave. That this is a distinctively female, as well as native, experience is suggested by the narrator's comment on Malaeska's self-sacrifice: "It was her woman's destiny, not the more certain because of her savage origin. Civilization does not always reverse this mournful picture of womanly self-abnegation." When Irwin Beadle chose this story, reprinting it from serialization in The Ladies' Companion of 1839, he seems to have made an astute commercial calculation, grafting an example of the provenly popular sentimental fiction onto a new format and new publicity that emphasized the frontier adventure more than the prominent religiosity.

Malaeska's failure to articulate the West in topically optimistic, patriarchal terms may well have doomed it in the long run as the forerunner of a genre of women's Westerns. More immediately, happenstance worked against its institution as a formulaic model. Later in 1860, Edward S. Ellis, a young schoolmaster, brought to Beadle and Adams a wilderness adventure with clear sales potential. Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier took plot, character, and setting from Fenimore Cooper. But Ellis transformed Cooper's Natty Bumppo — the backwoodsman isolated between two races — and -295- Bird's Nick — the schizophrenic Indian killer — into a backwoodsman who harmonizes savagery and civilization. Seth Jones is the avuncular, Indian-slaying hunter who, after saving various captives from the Mohawks, turns out, beneath his disguise, to be a young, aristocratic Easterner suited to marry the white heroine. Ellis produced a sunny, optimistic ending that erased the tension between East and West evident in Cooper's and Bird's divided endings: an important symbolic function in a time of national strife. Beadle mounted a massive advertising campaign for Seth Jones for several days before the novel's publication, running newspaper advertisements, billboards, and handbills with their tantalizing question "Who is Seth Jones?" followed by lithographs of a coonskin-capped hunter declaring "I am Seth Jones." The response was even more massive than to Malaeska. Ellis was a new, twenty-year-old author willing to join the Beadle stable and turn out endless imitations of his model for the next thirty years, whereas by 1860 Ann Stephens was almost fifty years old, an established author and editor whose production was more wedded to middle-class magazines than to Beadle and Adams's dime novels (though she continued to write for them intermittently). For various reasons, from the historical to the commercial to the personal, Ellis's version of the frontier adventure, a version that appropriated the wilderness for the glorification of white men rescuing white women and killing Indians, held sway in the Beadle production line.

This model was also perpetrated by the dime authors who brought the Western into the modern era. Ned Buntline introduced Buffalo Bill as a Western hero — both in dime fiction and on the New York stage. Then Prentiss Ingraham hammered home the point that this violent plainsman could fill the romantic role because his gentlemanly demeanor and exotic appearance brought together the savage and the civilized. Edward Wheeler created the Western outlaw when he introduced Deadwood Dick, another Easterner, disguised this time in a black costume and mask, in Beadle's Half-Dime Library of 1877. In the twentieth century, partly in response to the strictures of the Postmaster General, dime publishers turned to moralistic adventure stories about clean-cut boys; the most popular Western version of this formula was Wild West Weekly, a series about a gang of boys in the West led again by a displaced Easterner, which Frank Tousey began in 1902. In 1904 Street and Smith produced a close imitation, Young-296- Rough Rider Weekly, which played on associations with Teddy Roosevelt and carried Western adventure into the modern age, with battles revolving around commerce, property, and sport, not the killing of Native Americans. The characteristic line that survived through these decades of ritualized adventure was the imperative to marry frontiersman and gentleman, or West and East.

In terms of publishers, writers, and fictional formulas, dime novels were a male-dominated genre. However, from the beginning, publishers were interested in catching women readers, too, and made efforts to develop a distinct women's formula. As well as beginning the dime novel with Ann Stephens, Beadle published a number of women authors. One steady contributor was Metta V. Victor: her work is interesting not only because she was married to Beadle's chief editor but also because her Maum Guinea and Her Plantation "Children"; or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana Estate, a Slave Romance (1861) is an imitation of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin that can stand alongside Seth Jones in literary historical significance; and her detective novel The Dead Letter(which appeared in Beadle's Monthly in 1866) is the first known detective story by a woman. Street and Smith also worked to produce an identifiably female genre with their "Bertha M. Clay" stories, first in the late 1870s, when New York Weekly pirated stories of Charlotte M. Braeme, a European author, under that name, and then in their dime series as a house pseudonym. In fact, Street and Smith used their regular stable of male authors — including William Wallace Cook — to produce these stories. There was no doubt, however, that they were designed to appropriate female ideology: Cook understood that he had been directed to write "a bit of sentimental fiction for young women."

This attempt to imitate the success of domestic women's fiction of the 1850s reaped massive rewards only once the formula was fitted to the changing social patterns of urbanizing America, toward the end of the century. Laura Jean Libbey became the stellar author of sensationalized stories set in the city, revolving around the trials, temptations, and romances of young working women. These novels were serialized in the Munroes' Fireside Companion and Family Story Paper in the 1880s and 1890s before being reprinted innumerable times by cheap publishers up to the 1920s. Accumulatively, they garnered such a huge audience that they won trademark status: in 1910, -297- The Bookman labeled the genre of working-girl romances "Laura Jean Libbeys." Libbey's formulaic plot revolved around a poor factory operative, shopgirl, or mill worker who manages to resist the unwelcome advances of the wealthy, upper-class villain, yet is often forced — unwittingly — into an illegal marriage with him, and finally ends the novel marrying an upper-class hero who admires her for her personal virtues that transcend her humble background. Although this formula privileges sentimentalism and romanticism, it is distinctly different from the mid-century domestic novel and from the post-Civil War novel of female religious zeal (for example, Augusta Jane Evans's St. Elmo [1868], the sine qua non of the type). Libbey sloughs off religiosity and focuses away from the middle-class domestic sphere, to follow the romantic dramas of the proletarian heroine in paid employment. (Her tales are also different from those by Horatio Alger, the other prolific formulist of the city in that period, partly because sexual passion rather than juvenile adventure is central to her treatment.)

In many ways, these novels are celebrations of working women, though that impression is complicated by the heroine's removal at the end of the novel to a wealthy domestic sphere and by the frequent revelation that the working girl was, unbeknownst to herself, a lost heiress. Critics have read these plots to different allegorical effect, some arguing that they told working-class readers that they could be both workers and heroines, others arguing that the endings betray and trivialize workers. In general, however, these plots clearly speak to the changes in women's status between about 1870 and 1920. More and more women were joining the work force, often with lowpaying factory jobs, and considerable concern was being voiced about the effect of public employment on young women's virtue; in such a climate, the very figuring of the working girl as democratic heroine, her entry into a popular pantheon that included such nationalistically approved types as the hunter, the detective, and the honest mechanic, signaled some level of legitimacy. Fiction that heroized women outside the domestic sphere offered working-class women some kind of accommodation and justification, some means of negotiating the transition from private to public.

The messages of all these dime narratives are complicated not only -298- by the relationship between formula and social agency but by the inscriptions of authorial voices in the texts. The Beadle and Adams authors forged a facsimile of a storyteller's relationship with their audience by talking to their readers about the commercial paraphernalia of the dime novel. In their earliest form, these tactics are familiar though exaggerated versions of inscriptions in the antebellum story papers. Buntline, for example, mounted a running commentary on his place in the production line, within his repetitive dime tales of captivity, chase, and rescue on the frontier, acknowledging the competitive commercialism of his task as author. Prentiss Ingraham and Edward Ellis implicated authors, characters, and readers in codes, conventions, and sign-systems, thus moving the fiction closer to an acknowledgment of its status in the publishing field. Edward Wheeler's characters completed the last refinement, by becoming independent of their author to the extent that they wrote their own plots, devised their own identities, and fought their own publishing battles. For example, just at the time that Street and Smith marketed an imitation of the Deadwood Dick series, Wheeler had his hero declare: "I see that counterfeits are being shoved on the market — that is, sham Deadwood Dicks. We have one here in Eureka…. I wish to meet this chap and learn where he obtained the right to use my copyrighted handle?" The voice that recognizes the rules of the marketplace and the systematic interchange between producer and the consumer now belonged to the characters. The shift in rhetorical power is a textual illustration of the diminution of authorial power, just around the time when authors were losing more of their autonomy in the publishing hierarchy. Libbey's tactic was rather different: she too recognized her readers, partly by representing them and constructing their responses in her fiction. In Leonie Locke; or, The Romance of a Beautiful New York Working-Girl (1884), for example, she wrote:

Libbey also maintained a strong authorial voice, but one reserved to the prefaces and advice columns that accompanied her fiction. Speaking in her own voice, she tempered her fantasies with comments on the harsh realities of urban life and contemporary gender relations, warning her young female readers about advances by men above them in social status. In different ways, these male and female narratives sustain a double vision, constructing formulaic fantasies accompanied by a demonstration of the realities, commercial and otherwise, supporting and implicitly critiquing these fictions.

Under the heavy hand of Street and Smith, these authorial gestures disappear, usurped by the publishers, who talk directly to the audience themselves. In juvenile nickel series, an editorial voice at the end of the story comments on the construction of the fiction, encourages readers to distribute it for financial rewards, and, in time, invites the audience to participate in its composition. The most emphatic example of this process occurred in the letters pages of Rough Rider Weekly; in response to conflicting advice from readers about whether Ted Strong, the hero, should or should not marry Stella, the heroine, the editor threw open the author's study and invited all the readers in: "So you think Ted and Stella should marry? What do the rest of our readers think about it?…There are two sides to this question, and we should like to have it decided by our readers." The fiction has become an overt bargaining tool between publisher and public; the only role left to the author was to carry out the audience's demands. It is the logical conclusion of the rhetoric initiated by the early story papers.

Reconstructing readers' responses to these authorial and narrative signs is even more problematic than classifying audience demographics. Some hypotheses have been constructed about the extent to which authorial resistance to the production line was matched by readers' responses, by scholars piecing together evidence from a patchwork of autobiographies, diaries, and reports by social reformers. The evidence suggests that male and female workers, at least, read dime fictions in ideologically charged ways. Denning argues that workers read cheap novels allegorically or typologically, interpreting a range of scenarios as microcosms of their social world. Thus, especially at times of industrial agitation and strikes in the late nineteenth century, workers could read the triumph of labor in stories of -300- Western outlaws — such as Edward Wheeler's Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877) — as much as in those of honest mechanics exposing corrupt capitalists — in, for example, Frederick Whittaker's Larry Locke, the Man of Iron; or, A Fight for Fortune. A Story of Labor and Capital (1883-84). Similarly, working girls seem to have fashioned their fantasies toward self-empowerment. Dorothy Richardson's 1905 autobiography, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, along with Joyce Shaw Peterson's analysis of it, suggests that women workers read Libbey as encoding their public situations, by dignifying labor and acknowledging the harshness of their city lives, yet also offering them visions of survival and transcendence that gave them private sustenance. It can also be argued that the ways in which these women shared and constructed community around their reading signal their appropriation of these commercial productions into their own culture. (The potentially empowering effects of such a communal response have been charted for our contemporary period by Janice Radway's account of women revisioning Harlequin romances.) Even beyond the consciously political environment of the adult world, in young audiences' responses, there is evidence that popular reading involves an active shaping of narrative, an expression of choice. Reflecting on his son's response to 1950s comics, Robert Warshow speculated that the boy's fascination with the publishing house, the staff, and the drafting processes indicated a specific strategy on the part of the juvenile reader:

In the dime novels and nickel series of the later nineteenth century, publishers, authors, and readers staked their claims to self-301- empowerment and prominence. Reading these opposing moves — which are both productive of and expressed by the formulaic narratives — as "negotiation" is not to ignore the dangers of social control. After all, the culture industry ultimately circumscribed authors and readers by implicating them in the mass production process. Nor is the intent to represent these melodramas as seriously argued discourses on the political situation. However, fantasizing, as much as reading and writing, is a socially constructed activity with ideological implications; and collective fantasies accent the meanings of popular literature quite as much as individual authorial gestures do.

Some of that delicate balance may have been lost, at least at the textual level, in the imitators of dime novels spawned later in the twentieth century. Partly because of the postal restrictions on series of complete novels, pulp magazines took over from dime novels after World War I, bringing with them a new format and different editorial methods. These weekly and monthly magazines were miscellanies of short and long fiction with various features like quizzes, letters pages, and factual articles, printed on cheap pulp paper and selling for 10 cents or 15 cents. Pulps were invented in 1896, but they reached the height of their popularity only once they began to specialize after 1919: Street and Smith were first with this innovation, with their all-Western Western Story Magazine. The pulps died as a popular form around 1950.

By and large, pulp magazines offered the same formulaic narratives as the dime and nickel novels, dispensing with the juvenile emphasis and adding some violence and sex to the action. Perhaps because these formulas were so entrenched, pulp editors did not direct their authors very closely. Instead, they switched their most intense surveillance to the audience, trying to gauge and manipulate audience response through letters pages and editorial columns. Readers' contributions became formularized in departments — such as the Wranglers' Corner in Wild West — where characters respond to readers' letters in a facsimile of direct contact between readers and fictional figures, orchestrated by the editor. By this point, the authors often disappeared as personalities. In a final sign of mechanization, when the latter-day pulp Far West was launched in 1978, the readers' re-302- sponses were limited to a multiple-choice questionnaire. Even the most commercial individuation was ultimately denied, in what reads as a logical process in the rationalization of labor.

By design, I have concentrated on the distinctive forms of popular production from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, in an effort to understand the central machinery driving the cheap fiction of the age. Complicating the narrative, however, are best-sellers that were not produced within mechanisms described above, yet clearly signaled significant ideologies. Running parallel to story-paper and dime-novel production, for example, were the monthly middleclass, middlebrow magazines aimed at a female audience. Periodicals such as Godey's Lady's Book (1830-98) and Peterson's Magazine (1841-98) made a significant impact on women's popular culture, though their sales were much smaller than those of the story papers and the dime novels: Godey's, the most popular magazine of this class, claimed to sell 150,000 copies a month. These publications encoded more genteel formulas and constructed a more middle-class audience: they carried sentimental, moralistic miscellanies of verse, sketches, and domestic stories, abundantly illustrated with engravings and full-color fashion plates; and they cost around $3 per year. Significantly, however, their editorial gestures are marked by the same commercialism as the cheaper publications. Although the intimate address developed by the first publisher-editor stressed gallantry and advice to the "fair Ladies," it also paid considerable attention to the annual expenditures and authorial fees involved in production.

Also significant among periodicals was the fiction serialized and reviewed in Harper's Monthly (1850-), Harper's Weekly (18571916), and The Century (formerly Scribner's Monthly; 1870–1930). Frank Luther Mott has styled the nineteenth-century Harper's Monthly as "the great successful middle-class magazine"; Harper's Weekly was subtitled "A Journal of Civilization": essentially, these periodicals sought to address "the plain people" in uplifting accents. To that end, they promoted lavish illustration, a predominance of British fiction, and a miscellany of essays of topical and educational interest. At the times of its very greatest popularity, Harper's Monthly sold around 200,000 copies (for $3, later $4 per annum). Where these magazines dovetail significantly with dime novels of -303- Western adventure, however, is in their publishing of Owen Wister's, Frederic Remington's, and Theodore Roosevelt's Western tales and illustrations in the late nineteenth century. The gentrification of the Western at the hands of these Ivy League authors, particularly as directed at a middle-class audience, brought the popular genre into the "mainstream" culture of the East and helped to deliver both the massive sales and the favorable reviews of Wister's The Virginian in 1902. This success also fed back into dime production in its influence on juvenile dime series of the early twentieth century.

Finally, another category of novels proved popular by consumption, and they appear in the standard bibliographies as "best-sellers" of the period. Such works are Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), clearly works of a different order from the sensational narratives of dime novels and story papers. While these works lie beyond the scope of this chapter, even here it should be recognized that mass techniques left their imprint on novelistic rhetoric and reception. Twain, for example, borrowed the strategies of popular literature to parodic effect in his handling of dime novel blood-and-thunder stories voraciously devoured by Tom Sawyer and piously sentimental, female narratives hilariously misread by Huck Finn.

Story papers and dime novels were the most visible fictional forms of nineteenth-century America; explicitly conjoining the market economy with literary production, they set an agenda that could not be ignored. In literary historical terms, the cheap publications affected the larger climate of conventions and expectations governing literary production and consumption. Culturally, their mixture of commercial rhetoric, fictionalized history, and democratized sensationalism created stories that could be appropriated and accented by quite opposite groups. By this point, it is clear that Raymond Williams's definition of "popular" describes not discrete possibilities but the force field of conflicting interest groups, classes, individuals, and discourses activated by and in popular fiction. These stories were spoken by the people, inasmuch as story papers and dime novels fostered a massive new reading public, especially from the working classes, and those readers collectively and individually "authored" meanings in their -304- own interests. At the same time, some authorial voices attempted to speak to the people, to fashion a direct address that sustained an impression of intimacy and individual relationship within the homogenizing effects of mass production. And the publishers sought to speak for the people. Developing marketing strategies to demarcate their audience by gender and generation, they produced several distinct formats for cheap fiction, each with its own ideology, agenda, and vocabulary. Fastening on historically and politically charged moments, the formulaic narratives and editorial mediations worked to incorporate both audience and authors into the economically driven "juggernaut" of the culture industry. Understanding both the "cultural work" and the rhetorical presence of popular literature in America involves reading this contest of resistant, assumed, and dominant voices.

Christine Bold

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