In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

REVIEWS Horwitz, Howard. By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991. 336 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Moving through a series of case studies from Emerson to Willa Cather, this book examines homologies between American aesthetics and economic policy. Its most fundamental aim is embedded in the title and unfolded in the Introduction: to review the multiple ways the concept of nature has been pressed into service as a term of value, thereby pointing to the multiple and conflicting forms into which "liberal premises about the self and its relation to social structures" have been cast (p. 16). More specifically, the liberal (in other words, Lockean) conception of personhood as emerging through the appropriation of nature is traced through a series of case studies. These include American landscape painting, seen in relation to westward expansion (Chapter 1), Emerson's transpersonal theory of the individual, seen in relation to trade protectionism (Chapter 2) and the structure of the business trust (Chapter 6), Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and the transformation of midwestern enterprise during the era it spans (Chapter 3), Howells' economic critique vis-a-vis the imagination of the relation between character and social world in A Hazard of New Fortunes (Chapter 4), speculation and romance in Norris' The Pit (Chapter 5), deindividualization in the paired cases of Dreiser's Cowperwood and Eugene Debs (Chapter 7), and the ambiguity of natural rights versus property rights in Cather's O Pioneers! and agrarian thought (Chapter 8). This list gestures only vaguely at the richness of this book, which is one of the most sophisticated new historicist readings of nineteenth-century American literary culture yet to appear: densely written, intricately conceptual, sometimes overly anxious in its bibliographic base-touching, but withal much more admirable in its resolute avoidance of easy argument than objectionable on the score of convolution. No chapter leaves the status quo ante untouched, not even the least original, the chapter on landscape painting, where Horwitz complicates a predictable argument (art as expression of "the appropriative impulse that Locke had called the law of human nature," p. 23) by eventually interrogating it as well, inferring quite different ideological valences for different practitioners. This result is a microcosm of Horwitz's laudable desire, realized more imaginatively in later chapters, to present his basic vision of American thinking gravitating around the vision of Lockean personhood as focused, shaped, bent, and struggled with in as many ways as can be conceived. Perhaps Horwitz is too inclined to pursue the angle opposite the common one: that the transcendentalist model of personhood (as realized through sublimation of individualism) correlates with protectionism rather than free trade and with the form of the trust rather than with the form of the rugged entrepreneur, that the ostensible decline of Howell's plot into a tissue of coincidences actually fulfills his economic vision. But such tours-de-force are always reasoned through, not set down as formulae . "I hope my characterizations are provocative," Horwitz concludes (p. 245). Indeed they are. The Cather chapter is a representative example of Horwitz's accomplishment. He begins by noting a duplicity in the figure of Alexandra Bergson: she likes to see herself as having succeeded by deferring to the way of nature, which actually she has cannily appropriated and managed. In her quarrel with her disgruntled brothers, she appeals directly to the authority of the law, while they invoke natural rights. Horwitz then relates this family division to the outcome of homesteading legislation, conceived 116Reviews as an effort to base property in labor but implemented in such a way as to empower land speculators. Concurrently, thrusting in an entirely different direction, he uses Alexandra's case to question what he takes to be the idealization of women as opposed to male pioneers in frontier discourse scholarship of the post-Annette Kolodny era. After this, Horwitz pulls back from what might have become a simple (albeit two-pathed) démystification exercise in order to give more sympathetic recognition to Alexandra's self-restraint. She is hardly the stereotypical land baron, but practices instead what Horwitz calls a "minimalist capitalism" (p. 236), a mode...

pdf

Share