Nature’s Naturalism

The spring 2005 issue of American Literary History helps explain the woeful neglect of Howard Horwitz’s book, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth Century America, published in 1991. Its dust jacket blurb does not in the least exaggerate in describing Horwitz’s examination of the nineteenth century’s heterogeneous discourse of nature as “immensely, even stunningly, learned.” Yet the book is essentially out of step with what the ALH issue indicates is the central preoccupation of American studies: the propagation of moral criticism at the explicit expense of dispassionate analysis.

The ALH issue includes three brief essays on the development and current status of American studies, one by Leo Marx and two rejoinders by George Lipsitz and Amy Kaplan. Marx starts with a familiar divisional framework through which to view the transformation of the field. The “After the Divide” scholars who came of age in the era of Vietnam repudiated their “BD” precursors’ “nationalistic, patriarchal, racialist, hegemonic ‘master narrative’” and turned their attention instead to the “sharp differences of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference” (123). Marx seeks to revise this story by arguing that the earlier generation was not so conservative and celebratory of mainstream America as AD critics often claim, nor are AD critics so detached from the Enlightenment’s master narrative as they like to presume: “Instead of renouncing [its] vital principle [of egalitarianism], they relocated it. They disconnected it from the idea of America as a whole and reattached it to the aspirations of . . . subordinated groups of Americans” (130). For their part, Lipsitz and Kaplan do not so much challenge Marx’s general framework as quarrel with its details—for instance, defending AD critics against charges of anti-Americanism, substituting the idea of social interconnectedness for the idea of national wholeness, and resisting Marx’s lament over the loss of belief in the nation’s founding ideals.

Indeed, all three critics make conciliatory gestures toward their “common ground” (Lipsitz 135), with Kaplan hopefully declaring a “truce, a cessation of hostilities, among generations of American studies scholars” (141). This common ground seems primarily to consist of the “moral passion” that Lipsitz finds in Marx’s work and that he exhibits in his own wish that American studies “be one that hears [the] cries” of those who suffer “around the globe today” from the systemic scourges of unemployment, hunger, and inadequate clothing and shelter (135, 139–40). In undertaking this mission—whether in the form of oppositional or celebratory criticism, to borrow Marx’s delineation (126)—American studies would thereby distance itself from what all three critics imply is the real threat to the discipline: criticism written “in the spirit of dispassionate analysis or quasi-scientific ‘objectivity,’” against which Marx approvingly sees his own precursors reacting (128). That neither Kaplan nor Lipsitz quarrels with Marx’s caricature of dispassionate analysis as “the fading dream of making historical research as hard a science as chemistry or physics” is telling (128). With moral passion as their common ground, they all but obliterate the value of the dispassionate alternative within American studies.

At the risk of appearing morally neutered and politically naïve, I cannot help but think that the moralistic approach, with its therapeutic and evangelical impulses, severely limits literary and cultural criticism’s scope. American studies gains immensely when it recognizes and appreciates its debt not only to Enlightenment egalitarianism, as Marx points out, but also to Enlightenment objectivity (which need hardly be absolute to be functional: virtually any argument marshalling empirical evidence to support its claims builds on objectivist assumptions). Current scholars, in other words, would do well to recognize the merits and identify the precursors of a critical practice that divides itself from both oppositional and celebratory moral criticism. To this end, specialists in the nineteenth century could do far worse than spend some long hours concentrating on the dense but tremendously rewarding chapters of Horwitz’s book.

Riding the first wave of “new historicism” (his acknowledgments page simply confirms the book’s obvious...