Race, Canon, and Kenneth Warren’s So Black and Blue

Today, not too many people read [Henry] James. . . . [O]ne minor test of this is the fact that I don’t know of too many Negro youngsters who are named Henry James Jones. There were, and are, a number named Waldo.

Ralph Ellison, “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy”

“Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?”

H. G. Wells, Boon, The Mind of the Race

Although Kenneth W. Warren was certainly on the ground before 1993, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993) put him on the map. This study takes up Toni Morrison’s mandate that our discipline acknowledge the “thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy” in white-authored canonical texts (13), or, in Warren’s even broader terms, the “myriad roles that the idea of race has played in creating and deforming [our] imaginative literature . . . and indeed in shaping and deforming the whole of America” (Black and White 16).¹ Through judicious, rigorous readings of William Dean Howells, George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, John De Forest, and especially Henry James—often paired with the likes of Frances E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and W.E.B. Du Bois—Warren demonstrates how realism’s ethical program, class biases, racial blind-spots, and internal contradictions as cultural work helped to foster “a climate of opinion that undermined the North’s capacity to resist Southern arguments against political equality” for blacks in the turbulent post-Reconstruction era (13). Warren probes the illustrative case of Century magazine, under the gate-keeping of editor Richard Watson Gilder, to show how northern liberals and southern apostates had their hearts in the right place, but blunted their reformist thrust with precepts of citizenship and preferment (the Gilded Age codex of “decency”) that infiltrated the racial politics of their writings. The realist novel, striving for an efficacy to match Harriet Beecher Stowe’s powerful fiction while eschewing its sentimental-fantastic mode, was hoisted by its own petard. Committed to a belief in American society’s corrigibility, but impelled by its objects of address toward a quasi-naturalist pessimism, the mainstream novel could not conjure up a black figure whose potentialities were not utterly blighted by slavery. Crudely stated (although Warren himself is consistently elegant), the peculiar institution’s failure to pluck Africa out of the “savage” simply did not bode well for the project of steering the slave’s “natural” loving-kindness (read proleptic Christianity) into the approved channels of white gentility. With all due sympathy, freedmen and-women were depicted as “embodiments of the undeniable effects” of a cruel history—“the contingent . . . become the permanent”—thus precluding any “sentimental claptrap” about their flourishing into a fuller humanity; in a word, realism “inadvertently placed its aesthetic athwart its politics” (89). This body of fiction also abetted Jim Crow by casting a depreciative glance at New England’s abolitionist tradition, stigmatizing its female standard-bearers in the process.² Implicitly or explicitly (as in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty [1867]), the realists played footsie with a resurgent southern racism by objecting not to race prejudice as such, but rather to an “indiscriminating prejudice,” to borrow H. G. Wells’s formula for keying social treatment to differences in behavior or appearance, which boiled down to class discrimination across races (Future 147, emphasis added). As Warren points out, pre-eminent black writers of the period were hardly immune to the dangerous, divisive logic of the “better class of Negro.” Yet it was clearly Howells and Company who had the bigger stick of moral authority to wield during the descent toward constitutionally sanctioned segregation and the gutting of black representation, if only they had grounded their ideas for a greater social justice in something more compelling than “fine distinctions of deportment, demeanor, and taste” (Black and White 108).

But the claim of Warren’s that struck the deepest chord concerns James’s “exquisitely ambiguous critiques of capitalism and racism” (“Still Reading” 284), above all The...