Late-19th-Century Literature

Whether the issue was revising notions of regionalism and realism or looking at literature through the lenses of other narrative modes, established standards were under attack from every direction. Here and there, some of the older structures were buttressed, the better to withstand the assault, but most of this year's scholarship challenged long-held assumptions, definitions, and boundaries. A few readers found the idea of categories restrictive and proposed that no new nomenclature be devised. One journal even devoted an issue to the theme of no more separate spheres.

Though many might agree with this proposition in principle, few seem ready to transform right away. The late 19th century, more than some other periods, featured hierarchies and classes. A century later, thoughtful students of the period seem similarly inclined.

We delight in our power to name. This year's collection of terms with literary applications, some new and puzzling at first sight and some old but with curious new emphases, include regionalism, nativism, colonialism, patriotism, nationalism; local color, feminism, naturalism, romanticism, supernaturalism, realism (provincial, urban, and high); metropolitanism, cosmopolitanism, globalism, utopianism. To be sure, this large-scale project of revisioning the ordering arrangements of the period has been gaining power for at least a decade; redefining regionalism, the clearest example, goes back at least to 1990. Though only a few works approach the literature of this period from the angle of another discipline, the ones that do so over exciting possibilities. Their urgency about the primacy of literature resonates deep and wide.

In the spirit of the scholarship, this chapter also has been reconstituted. The sifting and winnowing of the year's work has made it clear that a thematic order, rather than an author-based one, is more faithful. Accordingly, familiar categories, like The Howells Generation, have given way to sections on ethnicity, in which Howells's treatment of race appears within the context of similar examinations, and on narrative explorations, in which Howells's handling of romance can be reviewed in its own literary context. Similarly, work on Sarah Orne Jewett, this year's most discussed author, will be found distributed in several sections. It has been neither possible nor desirable to describe the year's scholarship in an arrangement of mutually exclusive arenas. Wholesome overlap exists. A palpable intellectual untidiness pervades the period, one of its most enticing allurements. Years ago Werner Berthov used a fitting term—"ferment."

i Managing Ethnicity

Henry B. Wonham twice defends Charles W. Chesnutt's dialect tales by demonstrating that they were written with more intricacy and sophistication than some recent critics acknowledge, and with more consciousness of the contemporary political and social milieu as well. In "Plenty of Room for Us All? Participation and Prejudice in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Tales" (SAF 26: 131-46) Wonham effectively challenges the notion that the conjure tales are less radical and anxiety-ridden than other Chesnutt works. By exposing complicated levels of interpretation, especially in "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," Wonham reveals Julius's apparently naive storytelling to be rich in symbol and as politically subversive as The Marrow of Tradition. In a more subtle, more diffuse essay, " 'The Curious Psychological Spectacle of a Mind Enslaved': Charles W. Chesnutt and Dialect Fiction" (MissQ 51: 55-69), Wonham focuses on the limitations of the ex-slave narrator and the never-quite-explained "structural ambivalence of local-color fiction itself." To Wonham, such tales as "Dave's Neckliss" and "Hot Foot Hannibal" reveal Chesnutt carefully refusing to idealize Julius's capacity for "vernacular resistance," so attractively conspicuous in several of the tales earlier in the collection. Instead, Chesnutt "qualified" Julius's power and depicts him as suffering the dilemma of a mind still enslaved. It was an unwelcome narratorial maneuver, but given the double-bind conditions present in the United States at the time—both the Fifteenth Amendment and Jim Crow laws—it was more psychologically realistic.

Others champion Chesnutt as well. Providing a sustained attempt to address enigmatic narrational patterns in Chesnutt's fiction, Charles Duncan's literary biography The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt (Ohio) is a chronological examination of the writer's oeuvre, including pieces not published in his lifetime. Duncan documents Chesnutt's increasing authorial distance in his fiction. Located in his own racial ambivalence, Chesnutt's early narrative voice was chameleonlike, effortlessly slipping in and out of both black and white speech patterns. Duncan argues for a "narrative evolution" by studying the author's narrative positions within successive texts, shown first through the African American characters who narrate from minor positions, and then through dueling dialogics where two voices compete within a text (best represented by Julius and John in the conjure tales). Duncan includes careful analyses of other narrative strategies employed skillfully by Chesnutt—the divided narratives, an interior/exterior voice where characters mask themselves or are masked by others, and the monologic narratives, traditional third-person narrators whose use allows Chesnutt the chance to employ more humor. Despite Chesnutt's ultimate recognition of his constrained authorial place in the American literary tradition, Duncan demonstrates that his fiction amounted to a subtly subversive questioning of late-19th-century culture.

That was Chesnutt. Ruth McEnery Stuart was something else again. As Gena McKinley makes clear, Stuart was about as unsubversive as one can imagine, for the racial stereotyping in her stories promoted her personal financial gain. In " 'The Delightful Accent of the South Land': Ruth McEnery Stuart's Dialect Fiction" (SAF 26: 97-114) McKinley points out that Stuart detested dialect. Nonetheless, she not only wrote stories in dialect, but she also performed them before middle-class Northern white women who delighted in her dialect renderings of black plantation stereotypes. Thus, her livelihood was as a professional racist. Yet McKinley tries not to be too damning. Much of the reason for Stuart's escapist fiction is that she was trying to succeed in a male-dominated profession at a time when a national audience, forgetting the war and Reconstruction, wanted to return to comforting reveries about the Old South.

Matthew R. Martin uses other writers who fed the national (mainly Northern), appetite for old-timey tales, and he does so by studying contrasting depictions of the South. Martin's premise in "The Two Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt" (SLJ 30, ii: 17-36) is that both Page and Chesnutt faced the same competing demands. First, they sought to be successful national writers while also being true to their (very different) political and social views. Second, they both tried to depict the tension between popular beliefs in the South and economic reality. Page did not manage these complications nearly as well as Chesnutt. Examining stories by each author chronologically, Martin shows Chesnutt's approach gaining the upper hand as he devises an increasingly complex style of subversion that demonstrates how far he is willing to go to challenge the audience's ideas about racial equity. Whether Chesnutt's first readers understood this, as Wonham maintains, has been a matter of debate ever since. Not that Martin disagrees, because he concludes that Chesnutt's stunning achievement was his considerable popularity with a white audience accustomed to Page, even as he was giving voice to African American cries for justice and truth.

Though Pauline Hopkins's motivation was much different from Page's, she too was less than successful in balancing racially diverse audiences, according to Thomas Cassidy. Cassidy asserts in "Contending Contexts: Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces " (AAR 32: 661-72) that Hopkins's desire to appease both her black and her white audiences caused her to undermine the political effectiveness of this work, her most ambitious and best-known. As a romance that seeks to be a work of activism, especially concerning the victimization of black women by white men, the success of Contending Forces is hampered because of Hopkins's self-contradictory methods—a mulatta narrator, for example, omniscient but unreliable, whose moral judgments are shaded according to the audience, whose views sometimes contradict one another, and whose opinions are sometimes refuted by her characters and her own story.

Another Hopkins romance featuring a beautiful tragic mulatta narrator, coincidental plots, and racial stereotypes receives kinder treatment from Martha H. Patterson in " 'kin' o' rough jestice fer a parson': Pauline Hopkins's Winona and the Politics of Reconstructing History" (AAR 32:445-60). Patterson's main interest is in the politics lying behind the book, which she argues excuse its many literary contradictions. That Hopkins was a woman writing for both a white and black audience accounted, in part, for those contradictions. Even more, some of her views opposed those of Booker T. Washington, who was not only a powerful public political force, but also a financier of the very magazines and publishing companies that brought out the works of Hopkins and other black writers. The result is that Winona, named for a peripheral character, suggests Hopkins's conviction that black women's moral authority entitled them to a more central influence in any black resistance movement.

Carol Allen takes up the problem of locating Hopkins and other black women writers during the period following the Atlanta Exposition (1895) when Booker T. Washington and others (men) were debating the "New Negro." Allen's Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood in the Works of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, andMarita Bonner (Garland) asks an especially good question: where were the black women and what were their thoughts? Her answer for Hopkins, the one who charted black female passage into the 20th century, is disappointingly self-evident: Hopkins's fictional and nonfictional writings display her opposition to racial classification and, indeed, to the accepted (white) definition of nationalism in general.

If these writers struggled to manage ethnicity, in the eyes of Stanley Wertheim Stephen Crane artlessly mismanaged it. Though critics have generally maintained that Crane finally resolved his ethnic and racial prejudices, Wertheim says in "Unraveling the Humanist: Stephen Crane and Ethnic Minorities" (ALR 30, iii: 65-75) that it just is not so. Crane might have been typical for his time, but nonetheless his sardonic humor and sometimes his authorial voice and best characters show his anti Semitism and unmitigated disdain for the Irish, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities. D. A. Boxwell, who also sees deep ethnic anxieties in Crane, would not disagree. Reassessing the little-known Active Service, a novel about the Greco-Turkish war generally considered to be banal, Boxwell contends in " 'Whipping the Turks': Stephen Crane's Orientalism" (ALR 31, i: 1-11) that the novel along with other writings by Crane on the war helped construct Orientalist discourse in the United States. Conflating the racial and the sexual, Crane feeds the country's (and his own) anxieties about the Orient in a male imperialist apology for the subjugation of the dark Other.

On the other hand, occasionally a reader tends to see more complexity in Crane's treatment of race. In "Disabling Fictions: Race, History, and Ideology in Crane's 'The Monster' " (SAF 26: 51-72) Price McMurray maintains that historical readings of Crane's novella have been neglected in favor of either moral readings (out of fashion now) or theoretical readings. McMurray sets about to make things right by approaching the text in the light of both Crane's literary naturalism and late-19th-century racial thinking, drawing support from contemporary events and topical references in the text, especially a reference to an engraving, "Signing the Declaration." The result, speculative and problematic but intriguing, is that the work is a political allegory: Henry triumphs over the legacy of his slave forebears, only to be destroyed by Reconstruction and the rise of segregation.

Though Howells's racial and ethnic ideology is well-known for being more liberal than Crane's, his An Imperative Duty presents a clear indication of his own racist fears, according to Sarah B. Daugherty's "An Imperative Duty: Howells and White Male Anxiety" (ALR 30, iii: 53-64). The truth is, Howells was essentially ignorant about race in the United States, so by his own creed of realism he had no business attempting the subject. He was (passively) a supporter of black assimilation, but he believed that the growth of federalism was more crucial to human progress than the emancipation of the Negro. Yet, Daugherty concludes, give Howells some credit; despite its flaws, the novel's willingness to confront moral uncertainty, which for Howells implied nihilism, suggests that he could on occasion be the "dangerous thinker" he wanted to be. Another reader of this novel comes to essentially the same conclusion. For Jeffory A. Clymer in "Race and the Protocol of American Citizenship in William Dean Howells' An Imperative Duty" (ALR 30, iii: 31-52), the novel's relentless interrogation of post-Civil War U.S. national identity makes it fertile ground for a Marxist close reading. The result uncovers an economic and racist definition of what it takes to belong to collective America long after the war and the Fourteenth Amendment had presumably settled the issue of race and citizenship.

Such ethnic exclusivity has dominated the United States, but ethnic diversity has been insistently pervasive nonetheless, and the linguistic expression of that diversity is the thematic center of Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (NYU), ed. Werner Sollors. Sollors brings together 28 essays challenging modern America's obsession with monolingualism in celebration of the nation's multilingual past and present. In " 'The Quintessence of the Jew': Polemics of Nationalism and Peoplehood in Turn-of-the-Century Yiddish Fiction" (pp. 103-11) Matthew Frye Jacobson dramatizes the debate among New York Yiddish writers like Abraham Cahan, Leon Kobrin, and Jacob Gordin about whether cosmopolitanism or nationalism served Jewish ethnicity better.

Similar conflicts of ethnicity engage Guy Szuberla in " 'Carl Carlsen's Progress' and Henry Blake Fuller's Silences" (ALR 31, i: 12-24), as he points to the title character's Horatio Alger rise to wealth in this brief, unpublished sketch. Unlike immigrant writers such as Cahan, Fuller did not represent the conflict and suppression that immigrants actually encountered. Rather, by maintaining a silence about Carlsen's painful loss of his native tongue and the melting away of his Old World values, Fuller assures his Anglo-American readers that immigrants like Carlsen were little different from themselves.

Ironically, this same kind of silence and assumption underlies Jennifer Campbell's study. The way scholars have managed ethnicity in our thinking and writing is her starting point when she raises interesting possibilities by observing that literary scholarship itself is segregated. Though her investigation comes to disappointingly self-evident results regarding late-19th-century women writers, her idea is perceptive and overs necessary caution. Since, as Campbell points out, studies have always been conducted along segregated racial lines, in " 'The Great Something Else': Women's Search for Meaningful Work in Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph" (ClQ 34: 83-97), she compares black and white. Jewett's restricted, realist feminist protagonist obeys a patriarchal God while denying herself family and domesticity for a career as a country doctor within a predominantly female community. But Harper's romantic protagonist, a teacher also succeeding in her public life, is blessed by a benevolent Christianity that she associates with both men and women, and thus she may enjoy a full private life as wife and mother too. Campbell, assuming both works to be racially representative, explains the difference by saying simplistically that black women were decades behind white women in getting professional work and that Jewett wrote from extreme privilege.

ii Redefining Regionalism

For this year's readers Sarah Orne Jewett was the regionalist of choice in the reconsideration of literary boundaries. More dismayed than anyone at recent trends regarding Jewett is Marjorie Pryse. Aggrieved that much recent historicist, neofeminist criticism has labeled Jewett racist, classist, imperialist, and sexist (summed up by Elizabeth Ammons's "protofascist"), not to mention merely a minor local colorist, Pryse leaps into the breach. In "Sex, Class, and 'Category Crisis': Reading Jewett's Transitivity" (AL 70: 517-49) she struggles to demonstrate that such labeling does a disservice to Jewett, who, she feels, more than any other writer does not readily fit into any category. Without batting an eyelash, she declares that this disagreement creates a "crisis" in American literary criticism. The resolution lies in Eve Sedgwick's term "transitivity"—"between genders"—an idea especially useful in understanding Jewett's treatment of sex (lesbianism, transvestism), but also more broadly of class ("cross-class relationships"). Regionalism itself becomes not a real category but an area between categories and an "alternative cultural vision."

Like Pryse, Jacqueline Shea Murphy favors making necessary adjustments to save Jewett. In "Replacing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and 'Jewett's' Coastal Maine" (AmLH 10: 664-90) Murphy delves into Jewett's reputed imperialism regarding local native culture. Jewett's stories have been interpreted by white women feminists with a typical white hegemonic assumption—that the local native culture, and in particular its oral storytelling and its achronistic sense of place (Maine coast), was dead. But it was not dead when Jewett wrote, just as it is not dead now. Approached with this fact in mind, Jewett's stories—Murphy uses "The Queen's Twin" as representative—display oral native elements that cause us to rethink Jewett and her relationship to regionalism and nationalism.

Amid such controversy about region and nation, Sandra A. Zagarell in "Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Jewett's Deephaven " (AmLH 10: 639-63) locates a hedge in the city. She seeks a rapprochement between the Pryse camp (regionalism as a woman-centered literature resisting postbellum capitalism) and the Richard Brodhead camp (tourism made regionalism capitalist and hardly genderized at all). To Zagarell, even for regionalism's foremost writer, regionalism was self-divided. Jewett's first book, written at a time of cultural transition, embraces the dual allegiances to the rural life and the cosmopolitan scene, setting up Jewett's "changing practice of regionalism." According to Zagarell, no longer is regionalism seen as only a memorial to rural life, but as both that and a signal recognition of commodity capitalism. Regionalism is presented to an outside, cosmopolitan consumer audience.

Hence, perhaps Jewett is more difficult to categorize than most writers. Cynthia J. Goheen's "Editorial Misinterpretation and the Unmaking of a Perfectly Good Story: The Publication History of TheCountry of the Pointed Firs " (ALR 30, ii: 28-42) supports the idea. Goheen uncovers a textual "misinterpretation" in the work's publication history that has led to errors in critical judgment about it. More than gender or subject, this textual problem is to blame for keeping Jewett "in her place" as a local-color writer of slight pieces. Actually, she was an experimentalist, the first one in American literature, in fact. Her earliest editors, however, Horace Scudder and Willa Cather, not thinking of Pointed Firs as experimental, unmade a perfectly good story by rewriting it so as to encase its experimentalism in the recognizable form of a conventional "sketch." Melanie Kisthardt's "Reading Lives, Writing to Transgress: Sarah Orne Jewett's 'Unwritable Things' " (ClQ 34: 133-49) agrees that Jewett was an experimentalist, adding that she transgressed literary boundaries by eschewing masculine realism in order to write "unwritable things" and explore "the tacit bond between women."

Furthering this realism and regionalism debate, the rich collection that Karen L. Kilcup has edited, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader (Blackwell), contributes ten new essays and reprints two others on the broad topic of what it means to be a woman writer and how women diver as writers from men. Soon enough, this means that one way or another each essay redefines regionalism along gender lines. Melody Graulich's "Western Biodiversity: Rereading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing" (pp. 47-61), for example, considers the masculine mythic American West and its promise of freedom from the varying perspectives of women who were there, thus calling into question the traditional concept of the West.

Addressing women's side of this westward travel, and of migration and mobility more generally, is Women, America, and Movement. Peter Caccavari's essay on a little-studied writer makes a major contribution toward reshaping ideas about categories—regional, national, and international; local and global; private and public. "Exile, Depatriation, and Constance Fenimore Woolson's Traveling Regionalism" (pp. 19-37) attributes to Woolson a unique "mutable" form of regionalism, which Caccavari dubs "traveling regionalism." For Woolson, who was "exiled" to many locales during her life, expatriation meant not loneliness but freedom. In stories like "A Transplanted Boy" and "A Pink Villa," she enjoys the freedom to write about a variety of places and ultimately to recreate herself as a woman through intellectual depatriation, forsaking fatherlands and exploring borderlands.

But if westering threatened exile, what about immigrating? Though it is ingenuously argued, Dalia Kandiyoti's "Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunov " (MFS 44: 77-122) tackles fascinating possibilities by examining immigrant diaspora narratives by two Russian Jews. In his novella Yekl, Cahan depicts placement (or "displacement") from the perspective not of the insiders who feel they belong but of the outsiders who feel they do not. To establish a mark by which to measure what Cahan putatively encountered and modified, however, Kandiyoti glosses all local-color writers by summarizing only two essays by Hamlin Garland and none of his fiction. The result, predictably, misses much of the variety in local color, the better for Kandiyoti to pose Cahan's supposed genre innovations. Unconvincing for this reason, the essay does not account for differences between local color and a national perspective, nor does it explain the ethnic, linguistic, economic, or social variations among local colorists.

In a year of debate about categories and nomenclature, it is restorative to recall that last year Nancy Glazener anticipated this talk about regionalism and realism, claiming in Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910 (Duke, 1997) that such categorization is always ideological, inconsistent, and sometimes even sinister. To avoid "memorializ[ing] the values of the canon makers," Glazener turns her attention to the public discourse produced by such opposing literary magazines as the mainstream Atlantic Monthly and the more subversive Arena. According to Glazener, the dialogue carried on among a privileged hub of literary magazines, what she calls "the Atlantic Group," binds readers and writers in a community of class, ultimately profiting and reifying capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Taking up this locus, and eschewing race, gender, and ethnicity for social and political interrogation, Glazener concentrates her study on how the literati read realist texts for bourgeois values. She includes interwoven discussions on numerous authors, Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Jewett among them. In a significant move, Glazener challenges the intrinsic bourgeois ideology within realist texts, counterarguing that radical populist magazines like the Arena construct alternative ways of reading, so that, for instance, the regionalism of Garland or Mary Wilkins Freeman presents rural space and communities that do not reify cultural authority but articulate social protest. It is all in how one reads, notes Glazener, and by shifting her study to the literary discourse outside the covers of the texts, she overs compelling insights into literature as a social and cultural tool.

Philip Joseph undertakes a similar investigation of regionalism in "Landed and Literary: Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Production of Regional Literatures" (SAF 26: 147-70). Joseph does not go as far as Glazener since he does not object to regionalism as a category, but he comes close, stressing that it is characterized as much by "inconsistencies" and ideological conflicts as by coherence. His analysis, astute on Garland, draws on contemporaries Henry George, Jacob Riis, and Josiah Royce to delineate Garland's best work, published in the Arena, as aiming at an alliance of populists and fictionalists—the landed and the literary—who would contest nationalization as it was being engineered by industrialists, speculators, politicians, and genteel editors. On the other hand, Jewett's Country, published in the Atlantic Monthly, implies that stratification poses no obstacle to a national destiny.

iii Renegotiating Realism and Naturalism

One of the major forces provoking recent literary renegotiations along intellectual, political, and economic lines has elicited an edition of old guns. Donald Pizer's Documents of American Realism and Naturalism (So. Ill.) brings together writings by 38 authors and critics that cumulatively have formed the basis for the study of this period. Section one, "The Critical Debate, 1874-1950," includes essays by Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, Garland, and others, as well as by such critics as Stuart P. Sherman, Vernon L. Parrington, Alfred Kazin, and Lionel Trilling; section two, "Modern Academic Criticism, 1951-1995," includes excerpts by Everett Carter, Charles C. Walcutt, Edwin H. Cady, and Pizer himself. Pizer has written introductions for the major divisions. The usefulness of the volume is in having these pieces brought together in one place, though none is difficult to find and many are ubiquitously reprinted. But with its emphasis on the familiar past, the volume seems anachronistic. It slights the present—less than 10 percent is allowed for writings from the past 15 years. A separate essay by Pizer, "Bad Critical Writing" (P&L 22: 69-82), makes clear why. He takes to task several recent writers in this field, Walter Benn Michaels in particular (not represented in his Documents collection, to no one's surprise), for what he thinks is pretentious writing that covers weak arguments.

Christophe Den Tandt's The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Illinois), in line with recent scholarly reappraisals focusing on economics, population movement, gender, and race, seeks to overthrow older critical methods like Pizer's, which value aesthetic cohesiveness and purity. He calls on such theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson, and Georg Lukács who see great potential when heterogeneous elements like realism (the documentary, the "seen") and naturalism (the fantastic, the "unseen") interact meaningfully within a text. With this in mind, Den Tandt focuses on the city, which he believes was sublime (Edmund Burke's sublime; so much for throwing out the old) in the imagination of late-19th-century Americans since it gave rise to terror and wonder. Amid all this talk of theory, Den Tandt's discussions of literature from 1890 to 1920 are of uneven freshness and illumination. In chapters on Howells and Norris, he points out rather obviously that A Hazard of New Fortunes employs realist techniques (Den Tandt does not consider Howells's discussion of Burke's sublime in his 1887-88 Harper's "Editor's Study" columns), whereas The Pit and The Octopus portray the social scene largely through the discourse of romance. Robert Herrick, H. B. Fuller, and others, in an attempt to manage the crisis of urbanization, simply rewrite sentimental plots along pessimistic lines.

The city also marks the point of departure for Bruce Levy in "The Country of Corner Lots: The Mystery of Metropolisville, the Single Tax, and the Logic of Provincial Realism" (ALR 30, ii: 77-94). Provincial realism, such as is found in Edward Eggleston's A Hoosier Schoolmaster, did not years later lead directly to the urban realism of Howells and James. Instead, by insisting on a nation of small, localized societies whose financial stability was assured by the single tax, provincial realism actually resisted the development of metropolitan capitalistic realism, as Eggleston's third novel explicitly shows.

If a hierarchy of realism is being established, surely the globe must be the limit. In another provocative study aimed at overcoming old thinking, Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Duke), Thomas Peyser doubts that an assumed consistent impulse toward cultural unity has existed in American literary history. To probe the concept, he applies the modern idea of "globalization" to four realists who, he maintains with some straining, are also utopians. For Peyser, utopian writers in the age were already thinking beyond the nation to the globe. He links Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edward Bellamy, suggesting that both writers desire to uphold a traditionally cohesive social order. They over, then, opposing yet complementary views of unity; whereas Bellamy envisions an assault on the local, Gilman aims to thwart the intrusion of the global upon the local. Peyser likewise links Howells and James under the auspices of multiplicity, asserting that both authors have given up on the idea of a traditionally unified culture, acknowledging that social order can never again have the appearance of being grounded in nature. One wonders why Mark Twain, albeit a dystopian, does not receive a word.

Utopianism and realism from a gender viewpoint in Gilman and Bellamy draw attention in a volume of essays proceeding from a 1995 international conference at the University of Liverpool. A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Liverpool), includes 11 essays delving into her fiction and biography. Chris Ferns's "Rewriting Male Myths: Herland and the Utopian Tradition" (pp. 24-37) is noteworthy for its investigation of Gilman's attempt as a feminist writer to rewrite utopian narrative from a gendered perspective different from that usually used. Ruth Levitas's "Utopian Fictions and Political Theories: Domestic Labour in the Work of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and William Morris" (pp. 81-99) concludes that Gilman's thinking about the gender division of labor was no different from what was commonly thought.

iv Literature and Legal Narratives

Brook Thomas acutely parallels literature and law in American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Calif., 1997). The Age of Realism in literature was the Age of Contracts in law. Following the Civil War, the court established the personal contract as the basis for an individual's identity within society, counting on a stable future that promised individual democratic self-realization. Yet time and again in race, in gender, in domestic and national economics, that promise failed because the future is not predictable. If contracts failed in the Age of Contracts, however, realism in the Age of Realism did well. Realist texts do not assume foreknowledge; in them, life is fraught with limitation, and they teach us that what must replace contract to achieve a just social balance is experimentation and new beginnings (here Thomas owes much to Hannah Arendt). Late-19th-century realists show us what is wrong with American society and demonstrate that literary study supersedes every other kind of inquiry.

Legal and literary narratives are also at the heart of Nan Goodman's engagingly written and argued Shifting the Blame. Goodman employs intertextual readings to demonstrate the different ways in which legal and literary narratives treat a particular kind of social conflict increasingly endemic in industrial, "democratic," capitalist America: the attribution of blame in an accident. This illuminating approach begins by examining legal texts, which, beginning in midcentury, fixed blame for an accident only on the person taking action and left blameless anyone not taking action, the "innocent bystander." Goodman then probes literary texts that critiqued the legal texts and exposed its undesirable legal effect. Crane's The Monster and Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream dramatized the injustice, shown in the judgments of hundreds of cases, that the racial underclass of the post Reconstruction nation was taxed in favor of the well-to-do.

Fictional narrative and trial strategy occupy Laura Hanft Korobkin's Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (Columbia), an engaging and dexterously conducted inquiry. Her argument is that sentimental fiction from the early part of the 19th century had far-reaching effects on legal strategies in the second half, particularly regarding domestic disputes involving women. First in fiction, then in real life. The "heart's truth" of the sentimental story, associated with female authors and female readers and concerning the often painful realities of women's domestic lives, conquered the seeming rationality of patriarchal law. The fulcrum of Korobkin's argument is one of the century's most famous adultery trials, Tilton v. Beecher (1875), though many others are cited. On the one side, this case shows the influence of the emotional logic of sentimental fictions from earlier in the century. On the other, it points to an inquiry, not engaged in this book but hopefully in a sequel, about the influence of real-life trials on literature (Howells and James, who are mentioned in this context, are logical possibilities).

Lisa A. Long turns to prison reform documents to historicize productively in "Imprisoned In/At Home: Criminal Culture in Rebecca Harding Davis' Margret Howth: A Story of To-day " (ArQ 54, ii: 65-98). Long reads Davis's 1862 melodrama in the context of the period's most influential argument in behalf of penological reform (1867) and its leading treatise on domestic law (1870), all three texts bearing witness to the maturing Christianized capitalism of midcentury. The novel's happy ending, to no one's surprise, depicts for the future a home life and a national life that would be attractive to Davis's middle-class white readers, including racial stereotyping. But beneath the surface the text can be read as a preemptive strike against the coming effects of prison reform and domestic law that would make the home a prison in service of industrial capitalism.

v Exploring Narratives

Caroline Field Levander investigates the orality of women's speech narratives as she seeks to overcome the attitude that the century's political life was given voice exclusively by men. In Voices of the Nation her concept is intriguing; what others said about women's voices should be assessed rather than what women said whose voices were heard publicly (and she means "voices" literally—their sound, tone, volume). Discourses about women's voices far outweighed discourses by women, to be sure, but Levander draws a conclusion too grand for her concept. Her study of historical texts and of fictions—mainly female-authored ones like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner, Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life, and Constance Woolson's "The Lady of Little Fishing," but James's The Bostonians too—shows that "great significance" was attached to the female voice during a period of social upheaval by a powerful, emerging middle class for whom fiction influenced cultural reshaping.

An analysis of another Phelps narrative points to a kind of resource that would have strengthened Levander's argument. In "From the Seminary to the Parlor: The Popularization of Hermeneutics in The Gates Ajar " (ArQ 54, ii: 99-133) Gail K. Smith digs into contemporaneous writings—theology, in this case—as she challenges the prevailing view that Phelps's best-selling evangelical novel is mere anti-intellectual sentimentalism. Smith suspects that popular culture of the 19th century possessed much more rhetorical and theological sophistication than the 20th century has realized. Since for Phelps rational theology needed the emotional language of faith to speak to the heart, her novel, by carefully distinguishing between literal and figurative, translated dead stereotypes into symbols and so carried intellectual developments of her time to the masses.

One woman's distinctive language, as revealed in metanarratives, receives linguistic examination in Martha J. Cutter's "Of Metatexts, Metalanguages, and Possible Worlds: The Transformative Power of Metanarrative in C. P. Gilman's Later Short Fiction" (ALR 31, i: 41-59). Cutter employs the metalinguistics of Umberto Eco's Role of the Reader (1979) and the ideology of Gilman's The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911) to anatomize a feminist critique of language. Some of Gilman's metanarratives—stories about language that she wrote after the turn of the century—undermine or, more radically, deconstruct the repressive androcentric world, freeing women from the oppressive grammatical structures of patriarchal language. Several of these narratives reconfigure linguistic and social authority so that both men and women become empowered within language and culture.

The language of romance in Howells's best-known narrative, specifically Penelope's back-of-the-hand-to-the-forehead talk, is the subject of "Complications of Heroinism: Gender, Power, and the Romance of Self Sacrifice in The Rise of Silas Lapham" (ALR, 30, iii: 14-30) by Dawn Henwood. Henwood inverts attitudes long held by many, beginning with Howells, and the result is the sense that disparagement of the old chivalric idea of self-sacrifice is wrong; behavior in the novel that today we term codependence is really a virtue; and, taken all-in-all, as a narrative Lapham is badly skewed. The villain is Reverend Sewell, whose famous "economy of pain" postulation is actually aimed at thwarting female martyrdom. Contrary to what has been thought for a century now, martyr-heroinism is sneakily salutary for, though it adheres to traditional notions of female submissiveness, it masks an attempt at willful self-assertion. That verb, "masks," is the tricky part. Henwood's proposition, more than the evidence will sustain, is that Pen's turn to blatant emotional excess is to live the fantasy of controlling her own destiny, even if it is passive-aggressive and self-destructive. Henwood does not account for the fact that Pen takes this turn only temporarily, or for why Pen later laughs at herself for having acted like a romantic heroine.

Joseph Church takes a psychoanalytic approach to the narrative of a woman's quest for greater autonomy in a patrilineally restrictive society in "The Healing Arts of Jewett's Country Doctor " (ClQ 34: 99-122). A daughter's Oedipal complex can be seen in the protagonist's aggressive relationship with her parental figures—she strives with surrogates of the mother and is libidinally assertive with her foster father. Taking it one step further, the work reproduces Jewett's own experience following the death of her father and the establishment of her lifelong companionship with Annie Fields. Also emphasizing the psychological underpinning of narrative is Joseph Csicsila's "Louisa Ellis and the Unpardonable Sin: Alienation from the Community of Human Experience as Theme in Mary Wilkins Freeman's 'A New England Nun' " (ALR 30, iii: 1-13). Csicsila, without a twinge at the gender implications inherent in his view, declares that in electing to remain unmarried Louisa is not merely choosing spinsterhood; she is committing herself to spiritual isolation from the community of human experience. Here and in other fictions as well, Freeman portrays this withdrawal as a spiritual and psychological malady akin to Hawthorne's unpardonable sin.

Exploring the intricate interweavings of narrative and life in "Stephen Crane's Struggle with Romance in The Third Violet " (AL 70: 265-91), Paul Sorrentino sees the little-known novel (1897), usually dismissed as merely a potboiler, as an over-the-top parody of romance that fictionalizes Crane's struggles with his own identity and his profession of authorship. Sorrentino delineates a set of parallels between the novel, an imaginary play, and a hypothetical play embedded in it on one side and elements of Crane's own life on the other. In the aggregate, this remarkable "nesting" of realities shows Crane going beyond Howells's comparatively simple idea that art should transparently imitate life, revealing instead a fascination with the indeterminate junctures of life, implying that all worlds are fictional.

vi Books as Commodity

Paul J. Erickson's "Judging Books by their Covers: Format, the Implied Reader, and the 'Degeneration' of the Dime Novel" (ATQ 12: 247-63), makes a good case for believing that when it came to dime novels, people really did judge the book by its cover. Doubting the usual suspect for the demise of the dime novel—increasingly pernicious content—Erickson examines the publication history of two Ned Buntline titles to show that in a bourgeois society, marketplace forces like cost and the appearance of the covers literally made the difference. The true sequence of events, Erickson clearly shows, is the reverse of what has been thought. The lower cost and cheaper appearance led many to believe that the content had indeed become trashier; so, price and looks, not content, ultimately killed the popular genre.

Perhaps the cost and the covers were not so important, but if any place considered books to be consumables for a growing public appetite it would be a mercantile library. Thomas Augst traces the increase in book reading by examining the records of one such library in "The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America: The New York Mercantile Library" (AQ 50: 267-305). Established in 1820 with a few hundred books as a reading library to afford young businessmen "useful knowledge," the library flourished after the Civil War because it began to regard reading as a commodity. Books, particularly novels, were purchased to be read, then were discarded. So the library became a business catering to young would-be businessmen who wanted to develop "character" by becoming literate in their spare time. Responding to the business practices of a new culture of consumption by adhering to the law of supply and demand, the library remade itself into a circulating library featuring novels, which were the least expensive books and the ones most in demand, and became at its height the fourth-largest library and the largest circulating library in the United States. The effect of the library on the appreciation and sale of fiction was great. In 1869 it purchased 250 copies of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and 115 of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad and still did not meet demand.

vii Textual Studies

The meaning of "private" gets stretched a bit in Kate Chopin's Private Papers (Indiana), ed. Emily Toth and Per Seyersted, since Chopin herself published a number of items and since several of the short stories were first published some years ago. Nevertheless, most of this volume's contents—a lengthy commonplace book from 1867-70, for example, and account books—are private and are newly published, supplying raw material for Chopin biography and criticism.

This year Paul Sorrentino also brought out valuable collateral writings that he put to immediate use in his analysis of the interweaving of fictional narrative and life in The Third Violet. "Nelson Greene's Reminiscences of Stephen Crane" (RALS 24: 49-83) presents two lengthy pieces that Greene, an artist and illustrator who knew Crane from 1893 until 1895, wrote in 1947 about Crane while he was writing The Red Badge of Courage and The Black Riders and Other Lines. Greene's detailed recollections contribute to Crane's biography as well as to Crane's views of art and life.

Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley continue the timely production of their edition (to be completed in 12 volumes) of The Correspondence of William James (Virginia) with volume 6: 1885-1889. As with volumes 4 (1995) and 5 (1997) reported on last year (AmLS 1997, pp. 256-57), this volume contains correspondence with family (letters to his wife, Alice, dominate these years), friends, and colleagues. Linda Simon's highly readable, tightly focused introduction surveys the main topics, both professional and biographical, in these letters. Simon highlights such diverse subjects as James's "crises of vocation and identity" amid his continued work on The Principles of Psychology, his racialist opposition to the Haymarket protesters ("the work of a lot of pathological germans & poles"), and his exchanges with fellow Harvard philosophers, particularly Josiah Royce. Through it all, Simon observes the "warmth and stability" of his home life that saw the birth of his only daughter in 1887. Included here are 374 letters by James bearing on his biography and his intellectual development (approximately 70 percent of the total extant from these years; the remaining 30 percent are not transcribed but are briefly summarized at the back of the book). A selection of 67 letters to him is included.

The controversy over the text of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" might not be put entirely to rest. Julie Bates Dock, who first called attention to the errors of the infamous 1973 Feminist Press version (see AmLS 1996, p. 252), has brought out an authoritative edition with textual apparatus, accompanied by detailed information about the writing of the piece and transcriptions of supplemental informing documents. Following Greg-Bowers's "final authorial intention" theory, the text in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper" and the History of Its Publication and Reception (Penn. State) is based on the first edition (1892) as emended against the manuscript, taking into consideration such ancillary matters as Gilman's authorial practice and her attitude toward editorial alteration of her works. The result is a truly eclectic text; with its supplements, the volume is a trove of contemporaneous information and documentation about Gilman and her story. Complementing Dock is a collection of documents historicizing the writing and first reading of Gilman's story. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper (Bedford), editor Dale M. Bauer does not wait for Dock's scholarly text but simply reprints the first edition of the story along with more than 30 excerpts from contemporaneous motherhood manuals, medical tracts on invalid women (including three by S. Weir Mitchell), and scientific and political writings on sexuality and race.

Keith Newlin and Joseph B. McCullough's amply annotated edition of Selected Letters of Hamlin Garland (Nebraska) presents more than 400 letters by Garland (from among the 5,300 extant) to a wide variety of correspondents—literary historians and critics, political figures, publishers, and other writers. Most of the letters are personally revealing, but several also over insights about Garland's career, contemporary cultural events, and the causes and movements that he supported. Quentin E. Martin argues in " 'This Spreading Radicalism': Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office and the Creation of True Populism" (SAF 26: 29-50) that, contrary to Garland's own views, the original 1892 version of the novel is superior to the 1897 revision. The earlier text is by far the best depiction and analysis available anywhere of the Populist movement and of the social activities of the Grange in the years surrounding 1880. In the later edition Garland minimized these political elements in order to accentuate the love interest.

viii Biography, Humor, and Social Thought

Linda H. Davis's biography of Crane, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Houghton Mifflin) has its strengths. It is marked by the author's affection for her subject and, because it has no ideological ax to grind, it is the first full-length, straightforward biography of Crane since that of R. W. Stallman 30 years ago. In the period since, bogus documents have been exposed and large amounts of Crane material have been brought to light, much of it published by Sorrentino and Wertheim. Regrettably, Davis relies on these to illuminate Crane's writings more than on unpublished materials, for although she visited manuscript collections, it is not clear just what she found that was truly new. Perhaps most conspicuously, she does not satisfactorily address some major uncertainties, like the role of the publisher in shaping the ending to A Red Badge of Courage.

Critical attention to Ruth McEnery Stuart is sparked by Judy Sneller's " 'Old Maids' and Wily 'Widders': The Humor of Ruth McEnery Stuart," pp. 118-28 in New Directions in American Humor. For Sneller the paradox of Stuart's humor lies in the conflicts in her attitudes. She was a "Southern Lady" whose loyalty to the defeated South never flagged, yet she proclaimed herself to be a feminist and never seemed to comprehend the inherent contradiction of upholding slavery while supporting greater rights for white women. Her humor fails of being truly feminist, for her depictions of strong and independent white women cannot be reconciled with the demeaning stereotypes of black women that dominate her work.

David Partenheimer's "Henry Adams's 'Primitive Rights of Women': An Offense Against Church, the Patriarchal State, Progressive Evolution, and the Women's Liberation Movement" (NEQ 71: 635-42) suggests that Adams early on denied the century's ideal of progress. As Adams's earliest public statement on women's rights (1876), the speech identified in Partenheimer's title refuted the dominant cultural-evolution theory of the day by denying that patriarchy was an advance over the preceding matriarchal period. Adams also bluntly declared that Christianity marked the diminution of women's social and legal rights, and he added, though more equivocally, that the contemporary women's movement was undesirable because it upset a healthy social equilibrium. But then, to put it simply, in about every way Adams was a man out of his time. In Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (Basic Books) Alex Zwerdling considers why Adams (and Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot) lost faith in his native culture and like the others spent his adult life abroad, mostly in London. At least to our eyes, the answers are repugnant, though Zwerdling tries hard to see things as his subjects did. The problem is that these writers continued to maintain cultural dependence and deference more than a century after governmental ties had been cut. For Adams—he was the most sarcastic about this paradox and his attitudes toward England and the United States were the most convoluted and conflicted—the reason was that in England class distinctions were fixed, men were in firm control, and the Anglo-Saxon legacy was not threatened by other races and religions. As revealed in the Education and other works, his expatriate attitude stemmed from a resentment of the new immigrant and the insurgence of the plutocrat, both of which made him feel that his homeland had left him and his class behind. This is not fresh information, but Zwerdling's careful exposition cast in clean prose reminds us anew of the ferment that characterized the period.