American Realism "After" the New Historicism

Although literary realism is itself among what Riffaterre called the “descriptive genres,” Americanists tend to define it by refusing to describe it, or to describe it as a genre eluding description. ¹ Nancy Glazener aims not to “attribute consistent features or effects” to realist fictions but to recover the “historical contingency of [realism’s] social reproduction” (271). Brook Thomas declines to “use realism as the writers of the time used the term,” making room for a literary history that “defines realism in terms of the promise of contract” (11). Big differences distinguish their significant books. But these studies also intersect—perhaps nowhere more provocatively than at the place where reading realism becomes a process through which critical practice itself gets assessed, and each reads realism to displace the recent realism of American New Historicism.

In American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, Brook Thomas argues that although realist novels dramatize the “failure of contract to deliver on its promise of a more equitable society,” they also work towards an order based on human exchanges lacking the regulation of transcendental guarantees (52). They do so by representing contract’s link with promising and by implying that to “promise is a performative act,” a “moral act itself” (287). In realist novels individuals exert agency not through transactions involving alienable property or on the grounds of self-sovereignty but in the “truly interpersonal exchanges” (his emphasis) in which two parties perform (5, 8, xx, 70). As examples he isolates not only the speech acts (promises, vows of forgiveness) but also the handshakes and kisses (who knew there were so many?) in realist fictions.

Thomas interweaves works by canonical and lesser-discussed realists (such as David Graham Phillips, John Hay and Francis Lynde), Fourteenth Amendment cases, spiritualism, and nineteenth-century sociology. In an especially striking chapter on Tourgée and Twain, he explores hereditarian science, social thought and the law. Only rarely examining in detail cases in contract law, Thomas exposes the “importance that legal thinkers gave to contract as a way of understanding social relations” in light of the novelists’ “subtle sense of human agency” (x). Comparing novels as responses to similar issues and to each other (for example, The Bread-Winners and The Silent Partner; Pudd’nhead Wilson and Patoclus Prime), he both organizes his many players and complements his observation of the realist text’s dynamic of double/open interactions. This dynamic structures the realist self as a “space of vacancy,” a space itself constructed through the “intersubjective exchanges” that, by “establishing a ‘space between’ selves,” make “free agency possible” (70, 281). This is hard to picture but enacted, when in Chapter 25 of The Bostonians Basil and Verena shake hands. From such textual illustrations of “contracting parties . . . bound together, suspended in the act of promising,” Thomas elaborates a critical theory of an “intersubjective” (but individual) synchronic (but “future-oriented”) free agency in his last chapter (288). While the bulk of his book instructs us to locate the realists’ construction of the subject in the “Age of Contract,” the upshot is here, in Thomas’s attempt to jettison various influential accounts of a realist self “based on simple oppositions between two types of subjectivity,” accounts that have produced “narratives of transformation that are far too simple” (1, 18). ²

In Reading for Realism: The Rise of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910, Nancy Glazener reads not for “realism,” but for high realism’s “reading formation,” a term borrowed from critic Tony Bennett to define “not a body of texts and textual features,” but the “composition and functioning of generic systems” (268). High realism was the product of the Atlantic-Monthly-circle of magazines, whose editors and critics educated readers in the “indefinably subtle process” of reading for realism and in...