The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (review)

The recent election of Henry James as “the next Jane Austen” at the box office has left many readers of James (and Austen) skeptical, for good reason. Hollywood, after all, is deeply and profitably invested in morality plays—slick villains, plucky heroines, poetic justice—and Austen’s novels of manners could just as accurately be termed novels of morals. As soon as Darcy becomes a true gentleman and Emma a true gentlewoman, as soon as Sensibility learns some Sense, each can be rewarded with a perfectly compatible spouse before the credits roll. But in James’s fiction, particularly the late novels, manners no longer correspond to a basic moral logic. In an extreme case like The Sacred Fount, trying to tell which characters, if any, are “good” by the way that they behave is a thankless task and palpably beside the point. As a result, contemporary critics charged James with amorality and decadence, and his work, along with that of Edith Wharton, has often been characterized as the exhausted last gasp of the novel of manners. Nancy Bentley, however, convincingly argues that the idea of manners itself, transformed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by “the otherness of an anthropological discourse” (144), came to signify something radically different from the manners of Austen’s era. In the hands of James and Wharton, the novel of manners adapted to meet its new subject.

The cultural redefinition of manners gave rise to a new critical sensibility, that of Wharton’s “drawing-room naturalist,” who could see beneath the surface of cultivated manners to a primitive “subtext of crime, surveillance, and punishment” (111). Bentley shows how the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Edith Wharton confronts the challenge of the “savage” in the drawing room and at the writing desk. The chapter on Hawthorne, while compelling, is tangential, in part because his work predates, often by half a century, the anthropological texts central to Bentley’s larger argument and in part because he simply does not share the documentary interest in manners that distinguishes the writing of James and Wharton. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Fetish of Race” introduces us to the racial and cultural preoccupations of nineteenth century primitivism, as Bentley argues that the double plot of The Marble Faun, much like the double-natured faun himself, represents the desire to spiritualize (and neutralize) what Hawthorne termed the “lower orders of creation.” Donatello’s imperfect transformation then calls into question the extent to which those lower orders, over time, could be expected to spiritualize themselves.

Bentley’s fascinating third chapter, “The Discipline of Manners,” examines the contradictory energies at work within the nineteenth-century “culture idea” (5): a literate (and literary) Arnoldian ideal of high culture on the one hand, and a scientific, putatively value-neutral definition of culture, applicable to any human society, on the other. These two senses of culture translate into two senses of manners: a traditional sense of an inherently valuable and moral code of civilized behavior and a relativistic sense of manners as a key to the deep structures of power which order all human relations. As colonial expansion and the rise of anthropology put the “civilized” into ever greater juxtaposition with the “savage,” the boundaries between genteel culture and tribal culture, between privileged manners and political manners, became more difficult to fix. Bentley notes that in order “to present tribes as complex, full-bodied societies, anthropologists turned to the domain of Western taste, etiquette, and civility, creating an ironic register of cross-cultural manners” (102–03). If the rites of cannibals could be explained in terms of Victorian table manners, who was to say that those polite diners didn’t themselves have something to hide? This critical framework makes visible, in new and striking ways, the sacrificial rites of The Awkward Age and The Golden Bowl.

Bentley’s fourth chapter, “Henry James and Magical Property,” is devoted to the modern kinship crisis at the center of The Spoils of Poynton. Bentley...