Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Jack London: A Private Correspondence

We can scarcely imagine a time when there did not exist a necessity, or at least a desire, of transmitting information from one individual to another, in such manner as to elude general comprehension.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “A Few Words on Secret Writing”

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Everywhere one turns today in academic journals, it is politics as usual: All texts are subject to political short-arm inspections. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, that there’s anything wrong with that. Who wants to return to the closet silences and claustrophobias enforced by prejudices of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and/or sexual orientation(s)? Who wants to discourage those still in the grip of oppressive, dominant discourses and their endorsements of ignoble forms of behavior from breaking silence; from joining enclaves to air old and present social wounds; in short, from going public and thereby introducing discursive cacophony into what passes for the prevailing public sphere of the “humanities” profession? If no consensus exists about its particulars, this politicization—for example, of literary studies—surely stands for one in general. To be sure, I may choose not to regard literary works in terms of their political emissions or the cultural work they purportedly do, but in the present academic environment, this choice, too, will perforce appear political. The fact that this observation has itself become a cliché simply proves the point.

So it is no surprise that a familiar type of critical practice opts for more exposé, more “outings,” when it comes to, among other things, the culturally influential issue of canon formation: for example, debunking Edgar Allan Poe for his alleged racist sentiments (albeit based on scattered evidence) or his oft-proclaimed aesthetic ideology; Nathaniel Hawthorne for his misogyny or literary politicking regarding The Scarlet Letter; or Mark Twain for his use of the word nigger in Huckleberry Finn.¹ Other critics, conversely, focus on recovering works and writers excluded for political reasons from the recommended, American literary canon, if only to show the political reasons why they should now be included. No doubt some of these critics underplay inconvenient facts—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s notion of Liberian colonization for freed slaves, for example. But few expect such facts or canonical configurations to go uncontested. Indeed, these contestations help fuel more political conversation,² leaving uncontested only the issue of canonical thinking itself.

Strangely enough, however, from one perspective, this critical zeitgeist, or foregrounding of criticism as a performative activity, exists in the historical mainstream of American social practices, the effect of which has been to dilute private considerations of all things, including literary texts. Notwithstanding the value accorded the privatization of everything from business enterprises to personal life, the public-private binary in U.S. culture has almost always meant the obeisance of the private to the public life. This was so for early Republican leaders, who felt that public duty superseded inclinations toward the private life, as well as for those whose sociogeographical circumstances lent privacy the negative connotation it had assumed in Western antiquity, specifically the sense of “isolation, deprivation, and separation.”³ And so it was for many nineteenth-century, American middle-class women, relegated as they were to domestic households, which arguably comprised a reactionary refuge from a dominant and increasingly more impersonal, competitive marketplace.

One need not agree, then, with Richard Hixson’s contention that because of geo-demographic options, especially the frontier, Americans throughout much of the nineteenth century could take privacy “for granted” or feel it “was not seriously threatened.”⁴ On the contrary, the infrastructural linkages of cities and rural communities, sponsored by the U.S. government during this period, already posed such a threat: “The process of building public thruways, bridges, wharfs, and even parks involved the public expropriation and extinguishment of preexisting rights, usages, and expectations. The invention of public space was contested terrain in the early nineteenth century, requiring a full...