Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather by Diana Hope Polley (review)

The aural metaphor "echoes" in the title of Diana Hope Polley's book is a paragon of polysemy. It indicates not only (slanted) historical analogies within American culture but, in addition, both (dis)continuities within the oeuvres of individual authors and also the puzzling resurgence of ideas and turns of phrase from author to author and age to age. The study has all the characteristics of a good textbook: it clearly outlines its aims and methodological underpinnings in the introduction and in the analytical chapters offers careful discussions of four major authors, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, and their respective magna opera. The four, whose works Polley views through the lens of their "literary inheritance" (9) of Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy, represent different stages of American realism, as well as a fair distribution of quota on the gender continuum. There are many others whose fiction would also be suited for this study, from Louisa May Alcott to Sherwood Anderson (11), but Polley explains in particular the conspicuous absence of William Dean Howells (11–12).

For all the neatness and predictability of literary rhetoric, echoes are by their very nature disembodied, distorted, and hence disorienting and spooky. This is the effect of the parallel Polley draws in the first pages of her study between the "watershed moment" of 9/11 and the American Civil War (1–3). While the analogy still resonates emotionally with today's audiences, the youngest of those for whom 9/11 is "history" may require a refined intellectual distinction between the two American traumas. The idea of the Civil War as the "disruption of a solidified romantic vision" (3) does not apply to the circumstances of 9/11, though both exemplify "epic events" (13), or turning points in history, and a change of perspective, which, as Polley rightly points out, is not necessarily immediate, uniform, or widespread. Her study shows that one [End Page E-1] can indeed hear "conflicting voices" (4) while exploring "the dialogic relationship between residual, dominant, and emergent cultures within the realist novel" (5). Emerson with his antebellum transcendental philosophy and allegiance to "romantic ideas of nature, self-reliance, and spiritual individualism" (5) figures as the residual voice to which Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather respond, retaining in part his "seemingly ahistorical philosophies" while also reaffirming their "commitment to the socio-historical realities of postbellum America" (6).

The structure of the chapters is reassuringly consistent. Each chapter begins with a relevant epigram from Emerson's rich repertoire. A discussion of cultural and autobiographical contexts is followed by a close reading of the respective novel. In chapter 1, the episode of Mark Twain's faux pas on December 17, 1877, during a dinner celebration commemorating John Greenleaf Whittier's seventieth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the Atlantic Monthly appears in the context of Twain's obsessively anti-romantic knight-errantry. Twain may have intended to stab at Emerson, as well as Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, but, as Polley proves, his real conflict was an inner one. She consequently reads Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as "the story of an Emersonian character who sets out to confront the empirical world" (19) and "the celebration of one boy's attempt to live outside of plot" (39). Huck is a romantic, but as Polley rightly adds, "not a romantic in the sense of Tom Sawyer" (25). His case demonstrates the instability of the "Emersonian possibility" (27). It is not a surprise then that Huck can find no home in the Gilded Age, as represented by the Duke, the King, and Tom, and a realistic ending is out of the question for Twain.

Unlike Twain, who satirized romantics (and could not help self-mockery in the process), Henry James patronized Hawthorne, Emerson, and the antebellum America they represented. Polley revives the discussion of James's divided loyalties and cultural contradictions, which, as she argues, dominate...