The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea

“It is as difficult,” Henry James wrote in his preface to The American, “to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south.” His readers have almost universally applied this judgment to James’s own work, branding him a failed realist, a novelist of insufficient sociality, or a cunning manipulator of realist données toward variously suspect romance ends. Michael Davitt Bell’s alertly intelligent, lucidly written study of American realism productively counters this tradition, revising James’s relation—along with that of other, differently canonized writers—to the realist moment. Defining realism not in generic or even broadly representational terms, but as a divergent and shifting set of cultural strategies with varying cultural effects, Bell excavates the shared interests of its warring practitioners in negotiating the conditions of authorship and cultural agency in late nineteenth-century America.

If William Dean Howells forms the radiant center of Bell’s study, the originator of a cultural politics that becomes, in effect, a negative touchstone for other realists, James proves to be one of its most productively eccentric figures. What Bell identifies as a Howellsian aesthetic of anti-aestheticism—a fundamental suppression of artistry for its own sake, and of the lineaments of “style”—has “almost completely unfortunate” effects in the works of Twain and others. But James’s negotiations of Howellsian doctrine in the 1880s are, Bell implies, more central to an unfolding vocational design. Those negotiations take the form of artist fables through which James reworks both the contest between realism and romance and the meaning of his own family romance. While the terms of Bell’s account here are familiar (with brother William, for example, cast in the role of guardian and goad), its payoffs are significant nonetheless; unlike Howells, who distances himself from the lures of art in favor of “the will to be a man,” Bell’s James pursues the project of “becoming as ‘literary’ as I might be” via a calculated distance from normative masculinity, claiming for the very alienation from manliness of aesthesis a more highly charged, “very un-Howellsian” real.

In this reading, Bell joins a recent revisionary interest in James’s cultural criticism. Along the way he conducts a focused survey of James’s criticism of the 1870s and 1880s, from the much remarked review of Alcott’s Moods to more magisterial essays on Eliot, Trollope, and Hawthorne. Richly mining this ore, Bell suggests how unstably, contextually, and pointedly the notions of the “real,” “reality,” and “realism” actually mean in James’s prose. Bell’s own reader might wish for more attention to the way such deployments of a realist vocabulary and realist institutional gestures serve other salient cultural interests than those expressly generated by Howells’s doctrine. What, for example, of the nation-bound and nationalized ends framed in the interplay between the French texts James addresses and the pages of the Nation and Atlantic Monthly in which he does so, in pursuit of what Bell himself calls a “Euro-American” literary vocation that is ultimately quite distinct from the matter of “American” realism at large?

Such considerations are arguably crucial to Bell’s argument, insofar as it turns on American cultural figurations and configurations of culture itself and of the author or artist; in the fin de siècle decades, the latter is increasingly understood under the sign of degeneration, regression, and other biocultural processes linked with racial and national identities and fates. If Bell wishes to avoid the problem he rightly identifies as inherent in New Historicist readings of realism—that is, their failure to account for the ways in which American cultural formations of the late nineteenth century inform and are informed by the specific interests of realism in social reality—his own account might make a more pointed case for the urgency of anti-aestheticism in the realist moment. Newly...