"Manners": An Addition to a Vocabulary for American Studies

15 "MANNERS": AN ADDITION TO A VOCABULARY FOR AMERICAN STUDIES Morton L. Ross Morton L. Ross (B.A., Cornell College; M.A. and Ph.D., State University of Iowa) is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Wyoming. This paper was first read at the spring 1967 meeting of the American Studies Association at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In his well-known essay, Henry Nash Smith has insisted "that the development of a method for American Studies is bound up with the effort to resolve the dilemma posed by the dualism which separates social facts from aesthetic values."1 Taking Smith's statement of the problem as my measure, I wish to go one step back, and propose not a method for American Studies, but rather an addition to the vocabulary which must, I believe , undergird a new method. I want to propose that the term "manners ," properly understood and properly applied, can be extremely useful in resolving Smith's dilemma—extremely useful in thinking of a novel as both an historical document and an aesthetic construction. The Third New International lists six definitions of "manners," labeling three of them archaic. And perhaps this archaic flavor of the term accounts for the difficulties encountered by those who have recently used the term to discuss the modern novel. Lionel Trilling's essay, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," illustrates recent struggles to define the term. Trilling begins by calling manners "a nearly indefinable subject," and then adduces a lengthy definition which first makes the term synonymous with "a culture 's hum and buzz of implication." He then goes on to say that ... It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered, or unuttered, or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress and decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by words that are used with special frequency or special meaning. . . . They make the part of culture that is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it modifies them; it is generated by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.2 Others, like Partisan Review critic John Aldridge, or biographer Blake Nevius , have shared Trilling's difficulties,3 yet these writers agree that whatever else manners are, they are at least the distinguishing mark of a particular culture or subculture—the shared forms or patterns of behavior that give specificity to the group life of a particular time and place. They disagree about the breadth of the term in covering items from the catalogue of human conduct, but it is interesting that they all seek wide application for the term, largely because the alternative makes "manners" synonymous 16RM-MLA BulletinMarch 1968 with "etiquette." Another critic, Delmore Schwartz, has rather irascibly insisted on this restriction: Good manners are very pleasant and literary criticism is often very inneresting [sic], to be colloquial. When, however, manners become a major concept in literary criticism, that is something else again: it is an inneruption, to be colloquial again. Just before manners came to the fore, the big word in literary criticism was myth.* This equation of manners with self-conscious codes of formal etiquette is also what leads Alfred Kazin to deny that manners were a factor in the American novel before William Dean Howells.5 In seeking to free the term from the kind of limitation Schwartz invokes , Trilling, Aldridge, and Nevius encounter the opposite risk of dissipating the term's force through generality. Their definitions crowd those offered by sociologists and anthropologists for the word "culture" itself. Such broad outlines are virtually useless for discriminating among novels, a point made by Richard Chase when he writes: "In a sense, the novel . . . is the novel of manners. In other words all novels, committed as they are to 'render reality closely and in comprehensive detail,' must report the manners of the characters. . . ."e Still other critics have solved the difficult problem of explicit definition by...