Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (review)

Epiphenomenal with the rise of the modern metropolis, scholarly efforts to chart the shaping influence of urban spaces on those who both inhabit and imagine them have necessitated disciplinary crossings and combinations—of sociology, geography, history, psychology, literature, and philosophy. Although Slumming in New York is firmly grounded in literary history, it is no less interdisciplinary, correcting misunderstood histories and uncovering forgotten texts by "outsiders" writing on specific districts of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century New York City from a range of moral, psychological, and ethnographic motivations. In consequence, Robert Dowling's "new ways of reading realist narratives by outsiders" elucidates "the open pattern of social transformation and moral experimentation" that characterizes narratives, in which the "gradual foregrounding of insider voices," among other things, "helped alleviate urban divisiveness."

Dowling's purpose in five neatly balanced chapters is to reexamine the textual interplay of slumming outsiders and those who represent an inside consciousness of city districts that had come to symbolize zones of morality. With clockwork symmetry each of the five chapters arranges its essential argumentative parts (major author-outsider, urban district, and little known insider) in harmony with every other: Helen Campbell and the Waterfront, Stephen Crane and the Bowery, Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson in the Tenderloin, Jacob Riis and the Lower East Side, and Carl Van Vechten and Harlem. Realist fiction thus becomes an aesthetic staging area for Dowling's insider-outsider paradigm to negotiate social crises adjunct to urbanization during "the focal years of New York realist and naturalist writing, from 1880 to 1930."

Dowling justifies his emphasis on reading the literati's foray into underclass space in terms of insiders and outsiders by mounting a careful and sustained intervention into reigning scholarly positions that see slumming, following Frederic Jameson, merely as a "strategy of containment." Revising Amy Kaplan's arguments concerning literary realism's desire to both halt and consume social threat and applying J. Gerald Kennedy's explanation of place operating as space at the level of the unconscious, Dowling specifies the ideological coordinates of slumming at the complex site of its inscription. The book is impressive in carefully drawing out the implications that "only insiders are capable of giving voice to these [cultural] advancements, and only marginalized districts, or moral regions, can transmit that voice."

Dowling introduces this argument in discussing the understudied The Problem of the Poor (1882) by Helen Campbell, who incorporates the voice of Jerry MacAuley, a waterfront convert and indisputable insider, in order to authenticate the moral suasions she enjoins upon her reader. The insider thus rescues Campbell, as it does to varying effect for all of Dowling's outsiders, from being just "one more evangelical sermon from an outsider, an ineffectual method of reform for those who presumably require salvation most." In his comparison of Crane's George's Mother (1896) and Maggie, Dowling shows how the Bowery enacts an overlooked anachronism: "Crane's Maggie does not sound a beginning for Bowery culture, but rather an ending; Bowery insiders were stifled by their own acceptance, however subconscious, of codes of behavior conceived of by outsiders." And while the following chapter's contrast of Johnson's Ex-Colored Man and Dunbar's Joe Hamilton hinges on a flat-footed binary that sees Joe beginning from the position of an uncorrupted country naïf, Dowling nevertheless correctly points to the ways that Johnson's "ghetto experience" opposes "Dunbar's and Crane's premise" that "vice and creativity are no longer mutually exclusive." The final two chapters offer more historiographic correctives: Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902) is not the "counter-ethnocentric paradigm" it seems, but an "argument for Jewish advancement"; likewise, Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926) is not simply the primitivist encomium to "Negro" creativity that sounds a death-knell for Victorian middle-class morality, but a text imbued with "an equally modernist ethos of tragic pessimism" with "little faith in...