Truth in American Fiction: The Legacy of Rhetorical Idealism (review)

Book Reviews 109 shaped by intersecting contemporary theories about language, gender, and society. But what finaUy emerges is a view of James that, while admitting differences, may perhaps identify him too closely—or reductively—with his protagonists. Just as his economic images are part of a complex "web of words," so, too, James's central characters seem more like hybrid imaginative constructs than an ideological-minded McCormack is probably wiUing to grant. But she has produced a stimulating book. And as Mitchy says in The Awkward Age, "It's everyone's fate to be, in one way or another, die subject of ideas." Gloria G. Fromm University of IUinois at Chicago Janet Gabler-Hover. Truth in American Fiction: The Legacy of Rhetorical Idealism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 289 pp. $35.00. By the 1850s and 1860s, the American middle classes were learning to distinguish between an evangelical Christian trust based on heartfelt sincerity, and bourgeois social confidence based on proper social forms; and diey were deciding to rely upon die latter. They were learning to place confidence not in die sincere countenance but in the social mask; to trust not in simple dress but in elaborate disguise. FinaUy, they could rest secure in the knowledge that heart cannot meet heart in a world of strangers, and in the recognition that the uncloaked heart is the most dangerous of aU. This is from one of the most important books on American social manners and mores to have appeared in the last decade—Karen Halttunen's Confidence Men & Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven & London: Yale U P, 1982). At the heart of Janet Gabler-Hover's inquiry into the ethical status of language in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction lies an opposing impulse—the Quintilian principle of moral redemption dirough rhetorical truth and virtue: "The Quintilian principle in its nineteendi-century form urged betief in the intrinsic morality of rhetorical eloquence, suggesting that only a virtuous speaker could be sufficientiy eloquent to be beüeved." The following, from an essay in the New England Magazine of 1834, positions her stance: Why are we required, in all our communications with anodier, to speak the truth? Why is this so positively enjoined in die Scriptures? and why is it urged with so much zeal by those who do not avail themselves of the autiiority of Divine inspiration? To questions like these, we answer—Because of the vital interests, because the very being of society depends upon it. Society could no more Uve and prosper without mutual trudi, tiian material bodies could exist without the principle of cohesive attraction. Though liars may associate for temporary purposes, there must be some truth between diem; some ground amid the general ruins of falsehood for diem to stand upon, or diey can maintain no 110 The Henry James Review friendly intercourse whatever. Professor Gabler-Hover has not read Professor Halttunen. This is a pity, because their respective arguments sketch one of the great epistemological, and fictional, issues of die nineteenth century—die shape of die self and the imperatives informing its transformations. Gabler-Hover's analysis fails to do historical justice to mis issue because she has another battle to fight, a battle against that aspect of deconstructionist criticism that, she claims, "is on die whole predisposed to view die Uterary text as indeterminant and to view language in the literary text as obdurately, defiantly (and morally) nonreferential." It is slightly surprising—given the influence of die new historicism and die fresh engagement with materiaUst readings that have so strongly encoded die more sophisticated critical discourses of recent years—to find that such a battle needs to be fought. Nevertheless, Gabler-Hover provides strong documentation for her belief in American fiction's engagement with "die metaphysics of referentiality," an engagement that, because of its concomitant faith in the transcendental, truth-teUing power of language, actively invites readings that offer closure and "a distinctive moral/ethical program." Gabler-Hover is convinced of the "immorality" of any case for the indeterminacy of language, and she illustrates from the widespread study of rhetoric during the nineteenth century how the...