Following the Money: New Scholarship on American Realism

After putting down two powerful new assessments of US realism—Andrew Lawson’s Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (2012) and Nathaniel Cadle’s The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State (2014)—it is hard not to be reminded of James Carville’s 1992 campaign motto, a linchpin of the Clinton ascendancy: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Many smart Americanists of the last 30 years have insisted that American realism is essentially a meditation on the meaning of life under the regime of US-style capitalism, but the appearance of Lawson’s and Cadle’s books signals a new era in the field’s maturing appreciation that it really is “all about the Benjamins”—to borrow another hackneyed pop-culture slogan. Together, these two books suggest what is possible when wellinformed literary and economic analysis meet to reassess the print culture of an era punctuated by seismic financial transformations. In their vastly different outlooks, however, these two studies also demonstrate the need for theoretical resources beyond those offered by Marx, who continues to loom, sometimes unproductively, over accounts of economic experience among scholars of US realism. Lawson demonstrates that Marx can still teach us something about the mimetic urge that grows up in reaction to the dematerializing tendencies of a money economy, but Cadle’s study takes us someplace genuinely new in aligning the major practitioners of realism with a broad cultural “reorientation toward the state as a means of empowering Americans to harness emerging modes of transnational circulation” (7). Giovanni Arrighi has a larger role to play than Marx in this conversation about the role of print media in the ascendancy of the US economic system and “the transfer of global hegemony from Europe to North America,” and thinkers such as Louis Brandeis, Randolph Bourne, and W.E.B. Du Bois help Cadle link major writers of the period to a Progressive spirit that Marx would have found deeply problematic (7). Cadle may not go far enough in exploring the literary implications of the transnational turn in US realism, but his book is a provocation that scholars interested in the economic underpinnings of the field should carefully consider.

At first take, it would be hard to imagine two more divergent accounts than those under consideration here. For Lawson, “realism’s origins lie in an antebellum cultural formation which privileges the local, the concrete, and the particular in response to the destabilizing and dematerializing effects of the market” (15). Those destabilizing effects were most acutely felt by writers who experienced “at least some degree of downward social mobility,” and so Lawson’s realism is an “aesthetics of scarcity,” a byproduct of traumatic belt-tightening by the victims of a dauntingly abstract new economic order (15, 17). Cadle’s realism, by almost uncanny contrast, grows out of Progressive aspirations to carry this same new economic order to the farthest reaches of the globe, a project neatly summarized by Woodrow Wilson in 1915: “We shall some day have to assist in reconstructing the processes of peace [because] we are more and more becoming by force of circumstances the mediating Nation of the world in respect to its finance” (qtd. in Cadle 1). American neutrality was necessary, Wilson argued—paradoxically—because the US was poised to adopt the new role of global mediator, capable of overseeing “worldwide financial transactions,” “international disputes,” and the peaceful integration of diverse populations (3). Realism, for Cadle, is the literary manifestation of this transnational turn in US thinking about “the increasingly global currents of U.S. society and culture” (4). Without exaggerating the argumentative claims at stake, the contrast between these two intelligent studies might be framed as a question: was realism a cry of fiscal anguish over the emergence of destabilizing market conditions, or was it the expression of a Progressive hope that US wealth and culture might spread across the globe, preparing...