Parlor Pianos, Homespun, and Ahab’s Leyden Jar: The Arts and American Life

ParlorPianos, Homespun, and Ahab'sLeyden Jar: TheArts and American Life Stuart Levine Whatfollows are informal notes on the general subject of how works of art maybe shown to connect to social and cultural issues large enough to affect "plainfolk."My emphasis is on works which do not obviously contain social orculturalinformation; I have chosen examples mainly from the last century inliterature, painting, music and architecture. I plan to pay only limited attentionto the interesting essay in which Henry Nash Smith asked whether thefield of American Studies could develop a method. 1 Smith, I think, just wantedlicense to go on studying and teaching good novels and poems; he wasafraidscholars would come to concentrate only on the most commercially popularpieces. He had in mind an American Studies which dealt mainly withliterature. But since no two American Studies programs in the United Statesor in other countries do the same thing to begin with-some do not dealwith literature at all, while others are essentially enriched American literature majors-since there is comparable variety in scholarly goals and interests,Smith's question might be more distracting than useful. I agreewith him that first-rate authors are very valuable to us for more than estheticreasons, but I am also happy that there are some in the fieldwho want toteach and study other writers as well. Arts other than literature are also richin meaning for Americanists. And I would hate to see us develop "a" method. Lots of methods work spendidly, providing that they are used intelligentlyand with conscience. Look: good "methodology" is automatic for Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 4, Winter 1983,361-82 362 StuartLevine bright and honest scholars. It amounts to saying frankly what are the scope and limits of your study, what you are examining and what you feel youmust pass by, what you are sure of, what you think could explain the case, or what might possibly be true. Beyond that, methodology is for people who finish second, who come along behind to show how the front-runners did it, sothat others can imitate their work or apply it to other artifacts, fields, evidence or documents. To save space, I'll try to treat whatever generalizations, suggestions and cautionary avisos I can muster more or less simultaneously with analysesand illustrations. These are numbered because, to tell the truth, providing fully developed transitions would mean writing a book, not an essay. The shiftsin topic are less abrupt than they seem: the subject is always art and lifewhich art works yield what sort of social information? how can one "use"art which is not representational? how reliable is evidence from the arts? My examples are drawn mainly from the early nineteenth century because that is the period of United States history in which the texture of life was most radically transformed, and when those of our artists one might legitimately have expected to represent aspects of our society complained of the difficulties of doing so. It is by repute a tough era to study through the arts. I shall look first to literature, and then turn to other arts. For literary artists, part of the trouble was the change itself-American life was reshaping itself volcanically; it was hard for the writer to find steady footing. Turning to Great Britain or the Continent for models did not always help, for American conditions, social structure and traditions were radically unlike those of western Europe. Hence the famous complaints from several writers about the absence of a lengthy historic past or of romantic ruins,as well as the sporadic bitching by European visitors about one or another aspect of American social behavior which rubbed them the wrong way, generally because it was-praise be-different from what they were accustomed to.I assume that if a literature which was not designed to reflect contemporary reality, and which, indeed, sometimes complained of the difficulty of doing so, still did so, then there must exist methods broad enough to work in times and places less difficult to study. Selecting authors not noted as recorders of the everydayshould help make the point: how about Poe and Emerson, with some attention to Hawthorne as well? (Hawthorne...