Cultural Stereotype and Literary Modernism

Book Reviews CULTURAL STEREOTYPE AND LITERARY MODERNISM Peter Edgerly Firchow. TAe Death of the German Cousin: Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890-1920. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986. $31.50 Paul Fussell's TAe Great War and Modern Memory analyzed the profound impact World War I made on British literary culture, and in doing so pointed out the "gross dichotomizing" which is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times." Among other things, Fussell had in mind the sharp, often absolute dichotomizing involved in racial and national stereotyping. The "enemy" is always monstrous, subhuman, other. Peter Firchow's study of the development of the anti-German stereotype in British writing from about 1890 through the Great War offers a useful complement to Fussell; it is perhaps particularly useful because so much has been written about German racial stereotyping—notably, of course, antiSemitism . What Firchow shows is just how virulent anti-German stereotyping was in British writing and, because he has much to say about major writers (Shaw, Lawrence, Eliot, Conrad, Forster, and so on), he shows that racist projection and dichotomizing played powerful roles in the evolution of literary modernism. The "strange death of liberal England" was, Firchow demonstrates, accompanied by the "death of the German cousin"—that is, by the demise of the idea that the English nation was fundamentally Germanic, offspring of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who (so the nineteenth-century theory ran) imported freedom and individualism to the British Isles. As Dr. Thomas Arnold put it, "Our English race is the German race; for though our Norman fathers had learnt to speak a stranger's language, yet in blood, as we know, they were the Saxons' brethren: both alike belong to the Teutonic or German stock." In its common elaborations , Anglo-Saxonism was a potent ingredient in the mix of Victorian imperialist ideology: only the Anglo-Saxon race, descended from free Teutonic barbarians , combined a genius for liberty with the ability to conquer and govern all supposedly inferior races who lacked such genius. The unconscious ironies in this behef are rife, not least because German political theorists like Treitschke also celebrated their barbarian ancestors as the founders of modern liberty and civilization, and because much of this racist/ nationalist/ imperialist ideology carried straight through World War II in both Britain and Germany, persisting in more or less muted forms to this day. It is worth recalling that Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose racist dogmas provided ideological support to both the Nazis and the British fascists, was the son of a British admiral. In a seemingly contrary direction, Benjamin Disraeli espoused both Anglo-Saxonism and a sort of proto-Zionism. According to Disraeli's alter-ego Sidonia in the 1847 novel Tancred, England's commercial and industrial success is "an affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular 77 31:1, Book Reviews position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. . . . AU is race; there is no other truth." Firchow's analyses of the "mental slums" thrown up by racial and national stereotyping in the works of H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and other early modern writers are astute, well-written, and well-researched. At times, however , he seems more concerned with interpreting individual works of literature than with analyzing how his examples fit together and what they say about literary modernism as a whole. Thus, his examination of Wagnerian elements in Howard's End seems more a standard "close reading" than a historical assessment of either Forster's representativeness or his influence on British attitudes toward Germany, and he says little about Forster's later attempts in Passage to India and elsewhere to overcome racial stereotyping. Similarly, what Firchow says about Conrad's handful of German characters, occupying an entire chapter, he could probably have said in a couple of pages: Conrad generally portrays Germans as "demonic" (his Polish background certainly helped), except for "angelic" Stein in Lord Jim, who is nevertheless simultaneously "demonic." This may be well and good, but it doesn't carry the main thesis forward very effectively. The succinct analyses of Shaw, Lawrence, Eliot, and others are, to my way of thinking, more...