Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

How does the history of the American novel change when we place at its core not realism but truth? This is ostensibly the question asked by María Carla Sánchez in her book, Reforming the World. Sánchez's subject is the relation between literature and social reform in the antebellum United States: the efforts of myriad writers to reform the social problems of intemperance, slavery, poverty, and prostitution that plagued the developing nation, questioning its fundamental moral ideals. Rather than tackling the interest in reform that runs, in a skeptical vein, through the canonized writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Sánchez tackles instead the minor writers who sought, virtually hands-on, the moral uplift of disadvantaged classes and individuals. They did so by exploring the power of literature to embody "the truth"—at once morally right and deeply perceptive of everyday experience—about social ills, and to change history as a result.

Sánchez focuses on three main areas of reformist response: to the Panic of 1837, to prostitution, and to the abolition of slavery, with a side interest in the question of intemperance. Inevitably, Sánchez travels over some well-trodden ground, though with genuine insight throughout. Her chapter on anti-prostitution writing, for example, engages the cooling debate over the power of sentimentalism as a tool of reform. Sánchez supplements this debate with a careful, historical account of neglected reform newspapers, the Friend of Virtue and Advocate of Moral Reform and Female Guardian, as well as the writings of the reformist doctor and historian of prostitution, William Sanger. Sánchez uses these texts to unearth a cultural mindset that reveals the complexity of efforts to inscribe "fallen" women with social worth. What Sánchez adds to the debate over sentimentalism is balance, as she recognizes both the dominant and the subversive energies at work in this literary discourse. This chapter ends with a reading of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which brings nuance to a text in which racial dynamics usually predominate for critics, and hence establishes the multicultural reach of the reformist impulse. The following chapter, on abolitionist writing, focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's other slavery novel, Dred, and Lydia Maria Childs's story "The Black Saxons," amidst a rich collection of contextual anti-slavery writings. Returning to questions that occupied Jane Tompkins in her masterful work of literary criticism, Sensational Designs, Sánchez highlights with special insight Stowe's effort to get beyond the limits of mere fiction by merging romance and history.

This, indeed, is the main thesis that runs through Sánchez's careful attention to historical detail: reformist literature is complex and interesting because it engages in a fraught desire to transcend the very fictionality of which it is comprised. We see this again in the chapter on anti-prostitution writing, which is founded on the effort to enhance the reader's true perception of the conditions assailing the fallen woman—an effort that depends on a fundamental mistrust of fictionality itself. And we see this thesis wonderfully developed in Sánchez's strongest chapter, on literary responses to the 1837 panic.

There has been some attention to the literary responses to the devastating and pervasive collapse of the banking system, and subsequent economic downturn of the late 1830s, most recently by scholars such as Ann Fabian, Mary Templin, and Joseph Fichtelberg (the latter critic Sánchez neglects to mention). Sánchez covers here some familiar arguments, especially when she turns her attention to the didactic moralism of writers such as Hannah Lee, who sought in fiction to teach readers how to survive the ills of economic collapse and to correct the sins of financial speculation. But Sánchez's work stands out because it resists the "containment thesis" found in most studies of Panic...