The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (review)

This wide-ranging book argues that the discourse of social reform played a crucial but underappreciated role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel in both Britain and the United States. To reveal the extent and complexity of this role, Amanda Claybaugh focuses on novels by what she terms "reluctant reformist writers"—that is, writers who "take up reformist subject matter without feeling any reformist commitment or without intending any reformist effect" (7). These writers range from early Charles Dickens to late Thomas Hardy, and include Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Stoddard, George Eliot, Henry James, and Mark Twain. According to Claybaugh, some of these novelists found in reformist writings formal resources, such as particular plot structures, that allowed them to tell the kinds of stories they wanted to tell, while others—especially the later figures—introduced reformist topics to demonstrate the purposefulness of their work.

In Claybaugh's account, authors felt it necessary to make such a demonstration because a sense of purpose—defined broadly as the intention "to intervene in the contemporary world" (34)—governed almost all nineteenth-century novelists' understanding of their chosen genre and served as the main source of its respectability and prestige. Moreover, novelists turned to reformist subject matter to display their purposefulness because their very understanding of the purposefulness of writing derived from the writings of social reform. It was reformist writing on such topics as temperance, marriage law, and slavery that taught novelists "how texts can act on readers—and through their readers, the world" (41).

In moving between British and American authors, Claybaugh shows the transatlantic reach of the novel of purpose. She also argues for the genre's transatlantic origins and essence. The novel of purpose is Anglo-American not merely because it was written by both British and American novelists but also because it emerged out of two interconnected forms of transatlantic interconnectedness: "the circulation of texts and the collaborations of social reform" (1). As important as transnational commonalities to Claybaugh, then, are the ways in which any given novelist, British or American, wrote within—or, at times, against—a transnational frame of reference. This transnationality has been obscured, she argues, by both longstanding disciplinary boundaries and the more recent critical consensus that the novel as a genre, as well as reform as a discourse or institutional practice, contributes importantly to nation formation. Rather than rejecting this view, Claybaugh seeks to qualify and nuance it by insisting on the transnational nature of nation formation itself: the United States and Great Britain, she argues, each "came to conceive of itself as a nation with, through, and against the other" (16).

Claybaugh presents her arguments with welcome clarity and vigor, and the results are often challenging and illuminating. The Novel of Purpose, however, succeeds only partially in accomplishing the ambitious goals Claybaugh sets herself. Given her claims that novelists took "their conception of [writing's] performativity from the writings of social reform," and that the novel of purpose or the realist novel "emerg[ed] . . . out of the reformist novel" (36), she devotes surprisingly little attention to explicitly reformist novels and less attention than warranted to reformist writing in general. At the most basic level, the category of "the novel of purpose" itself seems both overly familiar and overly broad. Claybaugh claims that this category "recovers something crucial about the self-understanding of nineteenth-century novelists," but surely critics have never lost sight of the fact that novelists and reviewers frequently "thought of novels not as self-contained aesthetic objects but rather as active interventions into social and political life" (36). At the same time, now-canonical novelists tended to distinguish their work from overtly didactic or partisan fiction—one thinks of Eliot's famous statement in a letter to Frederic Harrison that if "aesthetic teaching . . . ceases to be purely aesthetic, if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram...