Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

254Reviews race bodies continue to be useful stumbling blocks in African American literary traditions (both objects of fetishism and a means of interrogating the sheer hysteria ofrace). Taking Jackson's lead, we know that we cannot rush to the critique of representations of mixed-race bodies as necessarily a privileging of"lightened" blackness over darker-skinned blackness. Jackson fully confronts the critique ofthe near absence ofany tragedy or melodrama tied to dark-skinned blackness in nineteenth century American literature. She refuses, however, to make the critique the final interpretation of the significance of this interracial play. She wonders, for example, about the subversive possibilities that may have emerged when mixedrace characters were placed in conversation with each other. The larger discourse of racial categorization was shook, so she insists, by the larger conversation between these texts. A greater focus on the larger reception history of these texts and the marketing apparatus may illuminate both these acts ofsubversion and the containment ofsubversion. Jackson's readings demonstrate that the mixedrace body, at this historical moment, remained both a threat to the dominant racial order as well as the containment of subversion, a reproduction of hegemonic whiteness. Her final move to a comparison of the racial categories in an 1850, 1890, 1920, 1930, and 2000 census is a poignant meditation on the constant production and reproduction of race. Even as she thinks about the historical continuity ofthis racial classification, she warns against the conflation of nineteenth century, 1920s and 1930s, and contemporary images ofmixed-race bodies. This conflation often occurs when we allow the "tragic mulatto" paradigm to remain the troublesome starting point as opposed to the much more nuanced argument in Barriers Between Us. The complex shifts in these census reports are Jackson's grand ending point. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Invisible Man, "The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead." Margo Natalie CrawfordIndiana University, Bloomington Okker, Patricia. Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in NineteenthCentury America. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003. xii + 224 pp. Cloth: $37.50. Unlike its British counterpart, the magazine novel in America—especially in the antebellum era—has been comparatively overlooked by literary historians. Patricia Okker addresses this oversight in the present volume, examining representative magazine novels from the 1780s through the 1880s with emphasis on "the strategies Americans used and the obstacles they faced in forming and sustaining a collective sense of them- Studies in American Fiction255 selves" (3). Okker arrives at unexpected insights by placing the selected works within their print culture and socio-historical contexts. The significance of Okker's title becomes clear in her first chapter, where she claims that magazine novels were "social" in ways that conventionally published novels were not. Magazine readers consumed the novels at a uniform pace, which promoted ongoing discussion and speculation about plots and characters. Readers also collaborated in the novels' production through their letters to editors (encouraging Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, to lengthen Uncle Tom's Cabin from the originally planned three or four numbers to forty-one installments in The National Era). Moreover, the magazines themselves promoted the idea of reading as a communal activity through illustrations of readers enjoying the periodicals in a social setting. Okker profitably draws on the work of Karen V. Hansen to suggest that magazine novels occupied a social space that mediated between the individual and the larger community, a space that transcends the too-facile distinction between public and private spheres. Not all readers will be persuaded by Okker's claim that Jeremy Belknap's The Forresters, an allegory that appeared in nine installments in the Columbian Magazine in 1787-88, bears consideration as the first American novel. The work was incomplete in serialized form and shorter than most works now considered novels. Nevertheless, Okker succeeds in showing that the allegory (in which each state is represented by an individual "forester") reflects some of the same issues of states' rights vs. national unity that appeared in other articles from the Columbian Magazine as well as in ratification debates over the newly drafted Constitution. Okker's best chapter may be her analysis of the work of the popular magazine writer Ann. S. Stephens. Through close reading...