Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age 1876–1893 (review)

Part of what Ben Railton proposes as a "larger critical project" aiming at a "poetics of historical literature," Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation looks at a series of literary texts written between 1876 and the end of the nineteenth century that complicate the "monological national historical narrative." His bookends are the national expositions, the Centennial in 1876 and the Columbian in 1893. These expositions reveal in their displays, publications, and speeches an understanding of the nation as politically progressive and materially abundant. The texts Railton discusses reveal complexities and fissures in that celebratory narrative.

Railton acknowledges that other scholars have looked at the expositions as rich cultural texts, and likewise acknowledges that in the hands of those commentators the expositions appear as strenuous efforts to assert consensus in the face of extraordinary conflict and diversity, ranging from the just-ended Reconstruction era and the defeat of George Custer in the Montana outback as discordant counterpoint to the Centennial Exposition to the intense conflict over labor and industrialization that hovered over the depression-era Columbian Exposition. Proposing that the literary texts he considers do not simply replicate the ideological positions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Railton echoes Phillip Barrish's observation that readers should resist lining up texts with "what we already know," but rather attend to the often-surprising complexities hidden in their "wrinkles and folds." Hence Railton's emphasis on analysis of form and voice.

The expositions provide Railton with another structural principle in organizing his study besides the chronological; they suggest the main themes around which he has organized his chapters: the race question, the woman question, the Indian question, and the South question. Some of the material and issues he explores are familiar: questions of dialect in Harris' Uncle Remus tales and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; portrayals of race and ethnicity in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona; "conversion" tales of Northern sympathy for the Southern lost cause in Henry Adams' Democracy and Henry James' The Bostonians. But the most stimulating and original sections of this study are devoted to less-often taught and studied works, like Chesnutt's Southern stories set in the Reconstruction era; Woolson's stories "Miss Grief" and "Rodman the Keeper;" and Sarah Piatt's dramatic monologue "A Pique at Parting." Cable's The Grandissimes is given a fresh and lively reading here, to close the study.

Railton has much to offer in this volume; it is unfortunate that he too often apologizes for his argument and his materials. Railton correctly reminds readers and critics to attend to the literary qualities of writing, their textures and diction and rhetorical choices, rather than hastening to ideological and reductionist conclusions. As for the central argument, Railton's summary—that these texts offer glimpses into much greater cultural dialogue on crucial issues than the official rhetoric would indicate—echoes what social historians have been saying for years regarding the post-Reconstruction era. But then for Railton the point all along has been not so much social or cultural history, but plainly and frankly the pleasures of the text.