Manhood and the American Renaissance by David Leverenz (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 Gabler-Hover knows what she is up against in presenting her thesis. She is fully aware of the current assault on employing the methods of contextual scholarship, on recovering (partially) authorial intention, and on defending the referential features of language. She goes against the grain of this assault and courageously reminds us of the viability of all three of these concerns and, as well, of the significance throughout time, including our own, of reading cultural expressions and human behavior with an eye to their ethical implications. She recognizes the difficulties and contingencies informing any specific ethical position; yet she also harkens, with admirable conviction , to this humanistic concern as a profound feature of transactions between people. Her interest in certain nineteenth-century authors' preoccupation with the ethical dimension of language provides one cogent response to Wayne Booth's pertinent reminder (in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction) oí the critical need "to restore the full intellectual legitimacy of our common-sense inclination to talk about stories in ethical terms." Gabler-Hover builds her original and thoughtful argument steadily, and her book takes on an incremental persuasiveness. She admirably eschews the narcissistic acts of aggression against the audience that too often characterize the manner of fashionable academic discourse today. She presents her case in lucid prose, itself a model of eloquent rhetoric expressing a keen regard for communion with a knowledgeable and open-minded audience. Truth in American Fiction is an important book, one that has an excellent chance of encouraging related investigations of other substantial nineteenth-century works. University of Texas at AustinWilliam J. Scheick Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989. 372 pp. Cloth: $32.50. David Leverenz' "most basic thesis" is "that any intensified ideology of manhood is a compensatory response to fears of humiliation." Along with this, Leverenz feels that "male rivalry," not fears about women and sexuality, are at the heart of male anxiety in the nineteenth century (p. 4). As he expresses this, when "class dynamics became subsumed in gender ideologies," the "male workplace became quite separate from the home, competition intensified, and men defined manhood much more exclusively through their work" (p. 72). Also of concern is the decline of the patrician class at the hands of the Jacksonian democrats and the rise of a marketplace economy . As a result, the works of male writers show a "self-conscious resistance to the growing middle-class and female market for fiction and to authorship as a feminized profession" (p. 14). Leverenz attempts to demonstrate these ideas in major extended discussions of Emerson, Douglass, Sarah Hale, Caroline Kirkland, Susan Warner, Stowe, Dana, Parkman, Hawthorne, and Melville, with passing discussions of Thoreau and Whitman. To Leverenz, Emerson used three strategies to "reconceive power as thinking": what Gay Wilson Allen calls his "self-protecting frivolous streak"; his perception of his father as "a member of a class losing power"; and his disengagement of "his anxious , competitive self by splitting mind from feelings" (p. 54). In the revisions of his autobiography, Douglass "plays down his original representation of his anxiety and desperation" to emphasize "his self-control and Covey's humiliation" and his own mastery of "his white Christian audience's cultured language" (p. 109). Both Hale and Kirkland view men as "basically money making animals," but Kirkland "mocks 250Reviews the money making" and Hale "mocks the animals" (p. 136). Warner "preaches patriarchal submission and dramatizes solitude," while Stowe "preaches and dramatizes how women can triumph over marketplace manhood" (p. 171). Both Dana and Parkman "invoke class status while embarking on rites of initiation into more adventurous and physically dangerous modes of manhood" (p. 206). Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman all "ostentatiously" adopt "a posture of meditative laziness, not hard-working ambition" (p. 21). As this brief summary suggests, Leverenz blends gender and economic studies with a psychoanalytic approach to arrive at his conclusions, a number of which are forceful. Concerning gender and class, he says: "Men use their gender superiority to transcend class conflict, while genteel women use class superiority to transcend gender conflict" (p. 165). He argues that the modernist open structures of works by Hawthorne...