Poverty and the Limits of Literary Criticism

According to the official figures of the Census Bureau, 32.9 million people in the US were living in poverty in 2001, an increase of 1.3 million on the previous year. This means that almost 12% of the population was subsisting below income thresholds deemed minimal according to family size and composition—just over $14,000 per year for a family of three. Such official measures of poverty draw criticism for their outdated and inflexible ways of evaluating need, yet few social analysts would deny that significant numbers of people in the US lack sufficient material resources for a theoretically "adequate" or "normal" standard of living. ¹ The problems associated with poverty—illness, illiteracy, and homelessness, for example—become more alarming still in the context of tremendous and widening economic inequality, what Paul Krugman has described as a tectonic shift in wealth and income distribution over the last three decades, away from the middle and lower classes toward the wealthiest fraction.

"This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times," wrote the American social reformer Henry George in 1879, "the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world" (10). For George, these difficulties seemed especially pronounced in an American context, where political institutions of theoretical equality were based on a state of glaring social inequality. Recognition of unacceptably low living standards among US persons has always unsettled beliefs in the nation's "special conditions" of class mobility, its absence of social stratification. Yet two centuries of legislative, moral, and social debates over the persistence of material need have registered the enduring power of ideological assumptions about the fluidity of American social structure, and opportunities for individuals within it, against which the detection of poverty could become a subversive act, spinning observers into fear, disbelief, and existential shock, into explanations based on "race" or "culture," into desires to yank welfare from the spreaders of moral failure.

Always a crisis issue socially, poverty has occupied innumerable American writers as a literary theme, ranging from melodramatic plays and sentimental novels of the antebellum era through the social realism of the Gilded Age to recent portrayals of rural whites and urban blacks. It would be difficult to know where to end a list of writers who have been concerned, at some point in their careers, with the eVects and the causes of socioeconomic inequality, writers for whom something called "poverty" has been an explicit object of social inquiry and literary representation. Yet poverty has rarely been isolated as a fundamental category of critical discourse by literary critics or cultural theorists, despite the appearance of studies dealing with class, despite the engagement of English departments with questions of social and cultural marginalization, and despite the importance of poverty as a keyword in the social sciences. ² There may no longer be the "poverty of theory" in American studies scholarship that Robert Sklar noted in 1975 (qtd. in Denning, "'Special'" 356). But is there a theory of poverty, a critical and theoretical framework to help us interpret modes of literary production that have grappled integrally with the ethical, cultural, and linguistic difficulties of defining poverty as a substantive category of social being?

1

In their analysis of the breadth of articles that have appeared in American Quarterly since its inception in 1949, Larry Griffin and Maria Tempenis conclude that there is a long-standing bias in American studies toward the multicultural questions of gender, race, and ethnicity at the expense of analyses of social class, an emphasis on questions of identity and representation rather than on those of social structural position (91-93). Such trends may be an inevitable reflection of historical forces, part of what the sociologist Michael Katz describes as pervasive political pressures that have always moved issues of exploitation and inequality into the realms of identity, morality, and race (Undeserving 8). Griffin and Tempenis point to a composite form of critical analysis that...