Free Will and Determinism in American Literature (review)

REVIEWS Westbrook, Perry D. Free Will and Determinism in American Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1979. 275 pp. Cloth: $18.50. Professor Westbrook's study is marked by an unusual concern for classification. His method is to review the theological, scientific, and philosophical arguments for or against free will and determinism and then to determine the degree of acceptance or rejection of these doctrines in representative works of American literature. Thus he shows that Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather, in their rejection of determinism and their "insistence on the individual's ability to shape his own destiny," are to be identified as humanists rather than as naturalists. The main purpose of critical analysis here and throughout the study is to justify such classification by marshalling evidence of the ability or inability of man to choose and act with some degree of freedom. Since Professor Westbrook examines all of the major philosophies and intellectual movements that contributed ideas about free will and determinism to American literature, his book embraces huge expanses of intellectual and literary history. He traces Calvin's doctrine of predestination from its origins in St. Augustine to Jonathan Edwards and shows how its premises and arguments are revealed in Wigglesworth, Taylor, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. He unfolds the familiar history of scientific determinism from Malthus to Freud and notes how, in its various transmutations as social and political theory, it affected the novels of Crane, Norris, London , and Dreiser. He examines Glasgow and Faulkner to show how their strongly deterministic works reflect a combination of vestigial Calvinism and scientific naturalism. As a prelude to his discussions of the humanistic novelists (Howells, James, Wharton, Cather, and Hemingway), he reviews briefly premises and arguments of half a dozen libertarian intellectual movements: Arminianism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Philosophic Idealism, Pragmatism, and Humanism. Professor Westbrook is a skillful writer, and the order and clarity he brings to this huge and complex subject makes Free Will and Determinism a useful book for readers who need to know or to review the rudiments of these "isms." Experienced students of American literature, however, will likely feel that these summaries, and especially the critical analyses of literary works, are too often both predictable and reductive. The argument , for example, that Isabel Archer and Christopher Newman are endowed to some extent with freedom of will and that James is on the whole not a determinist, despite his representation of Daisy Miller as a helpless victim of her American cultural conditioning, adds nothing to our knowledge or understanding of these fictions or of James. The commentary on Sister Carrie, based largely on the much-quoted paragraph at the beginning of Chapter VIII ("Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind"), argues simply that Carrie is a creature of instinct devoid of free will, certainly not a point in contention. The criticism of the works of a score or more other writers seldom rises above this elementary level, and in some instances , as in the classification of Crane as a determinist on the evidence of The Red Badge of Courage (where he finds that Fleming's sense of being trapped in a "moving box" is also Crane's), Professor Westbrook rehearses once-held views many critics find no longer acceptable . But the fault is not generally in the author's lack of authority: it is in his method. The plan of the book calls for accounts of all the "isms" which have contributed to the issue of free will and determinism and demonstrations of their influence on American writers from the seventeenth century through the nineteen thirties. The sheer comprehensiveness of this 278Reviews plan forces the discussion over well-worn ways, obliges the author to go over well-known plots, situations, actions, and characterizations, all to the critical purpose of measuring the degrees of their commitment to libertarian or deterministic principles. Thus despite its technical competency, orderliness, and clarity, the book seems to often to repeat mere commonplaces of literary history and criticism. University of GeorgiaJames B. Colvert Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Female Romantic Friendship from the Renaissance to the Present. New York...