Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris ed. by Florence S. Boos and Carole G. Silver (review)

Book Reviews87 FLORENCE S. BOOS and CAROLE G. SILVER, eds. Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. 171 p. In past years Morris scholars often used a rhetorical strategy of opposition to establish the exigence for their criticism. How many articles have we read, for instance, which purported to defend Morris from the supposed escapism ofhis prose romances? Never mind that the voices ofdefamation were relatively few and brief—more likely to occur in a period survey than in a close analysis by an expert. Never mind also that the attacks on Morris were no longer current. Long after the false view had been corrected, scholars continued to use the plea ofapologetics to justify their work. Now, however, Morris criticism seems to have evolved into a new mature phase, wherein the legitimacy of the subject is a given, and consequently the discussion is freer to take original approaches. For the most part, the articles in Socialism and the Literary Artistry of William Morris have the confidence to approach their subjects directly, without the exigence of apologetics. In the anchor article, Lawrence Lutchmansingh uses the concept of "archeological socialism" to describe Morris' "conflation" of art, history, and labor. Morris thought that capitalism, in the voracious appetite of its consumerism, continually destroyed the historical evidence of a more socially cohesive past, when the commonest worker produced goods of true and even artistic value. In Lutchmansingh's words, there occurred "the systematic occlusion of the worker from the archeological and historical record of modern times" (14). Morris' socialist utopias seek to counteract the waste and oppression wrought by this forgetfulness, depicting instead societies based on his "own ideals of aesthetic pleasure and meaningful simplicity" (22). The next several essays concern themselves, some more closely than others, with News from Nowhere, the centennial ofwhich the volume celebrates. These essays are worthwhile, provided one allows the oversimplifications which inevitably occur when genre labels are used frequently. Laura Donaldson shows how Morris reverses Dickens' Boffin, the miserly dustman from Our Mutual Friend. Using this comparison as an introduction, Donaldson then turns to a study of genre: the "experimental engagement ofrealism and romance" (31) in the Utopian tale. Morris uses the movement from realism to romance in a dialectical fashion; he first subverts the reader's confidence in the validity of realism, then provides romance to fill the void left in the reader's consciousness, thus creating "a disillusioned perspective allowing the vision of socialism to take root" (33). Norman Talbot's essay also addresses the question of audience in News from Nowhere. In Talbot's view, the original readers ofthe tale, which appeared in the socialist organ Commonweal, knew a good deal about Morris and the issues which prompted the story. When those readers identify the tale's narrator-protagonist with their familiar Morris, they become encoded into the text, and consequently the story's affective value is enhanced. The danger ofthis line ofreader-response criticism is that it makes large assumptions about the nature of Morris' audience, and, especially, that it may delimit the universality of the work, and therefore its stature. 88Rocky Mountain Review Of the remaining essays in this section, two form a set of bookends, they contain discussions ofsocial-political theory to both the left and right ofMorris' socialism. Lyman Tower Sargent's essay on "William Morris and the Anarchist Tradition" suffers from an overly broad definition of anarchism, based on primarily modern sources: "Anarchism, then, can be characterized as a social theory opposing coercion and advocating a community-centered life with great amounts of personal liberty" (64). This seems an agreeable philosophy, yet Morris publicly disavowed any connection with anarchism and one suspects that he had a different definition in mind. What we need is a nineteenth-century definition of anarchism, drawn from documents ofthe time. Political philosophy to the right of Morris is discussed in Alexander Macdonald's "Bellamy, Morris, and the Great Victorian Debate." Though comparisons between the aesthetic Morris and the utilitarian Bellamy are common in Morris criticism (there is one in Talbot's piece), this is a solid addition to the discussion. Macdonald nicely demonstrates, for example, the matrix of...