Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (review)

Andrew Lawson traces the origins of literary realism to a fear of downward mobility that stemmed from the growing instability of material wealth and the dematerializing and destabilizing effects of the credit and market system—an instability that emerged well before the Civil War. Specifically, Lawson argues that the spectrality of commodity created a need for a realist aesthetic that would "give shape to a diffuse, opaque world . . . [and] arrest for a moment the market's chaotic flow of goods, people, and information." In a compelling analysis that seamlessly combines theories of Marxism, materialism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies with historical overviews, author biographies, and close readings, Lawson employs the realist convention of showing how larger social structures affect the individual, vividly conveying his contention that realism's true roots lie in the emergent market and class structures of antebellum America.

The elusive state of the emergent market economy and its sudden shifts in fortune inspired early- and mid-nineteenth-century writers, especially those who personally experienced downward social mobility, to focus on the concrete and the particular in their writing. Realist or mimetic literature became a refuge from the abstractions and panics of the market, and, eventually, a method of critiquing that market and the ever-growing class divisions that it created. Women of the gentry class in particular became vulnerable to downward forces, leading some to enter into the literary marketplace. In sentimental writing, readers are introduced to the details of everyday life that are intimately influenced by historical and social circumstances. Lawson asserts that a heightened awareness of class difference and sympathy for class division is fundamental in the development of literary realism. In domestic and sentimental writing, we see a clear sympathy for the marginalized and a preference for middle-class values over superficial upper-class standards. Yet not all sentimental writing meets this criterion; Lawson compares the domestic realism of Rose Terry Cooke to the overly generalized sentimental writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Focusing on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lawson contends that Stowe's romanticized depictions fail to inspire particular emotions but rather promote generic sympathy. Particulars are needed for true identification with the class other—a significant realist strategy later continued in the work of Rebecca Harding Davis. Like Cooke, Davis employs direct address to position her audience as outsiders and to position her narrator as an insider in the lower-class world. Davis had a unique vantage point in that her family had distant gentry origins, and she herself was educated despite financial disadvantages. This gave her the ability to look both upward and downward and allowed her to successfully appeal to an educated audience while also identifying with lower-class plight.

Realist authors often had personal experiences of downward mobility that enabled them to effectively incorporate mimetic detail of social class within their writing. The authors Lawson highlights issue from backgrounds that permit them to comprehend both the upper-class elite that play in the realm of the symbolic and the lower-class drudges that labor in the world of the material. For example, Lawson presents William Dean Howells's hypochondria and chronic experience of vertigo as a "psychological symptom of the economic and geographical upheavals suffered by his family in their extended downward slide." Howells's desire for solid ground becomes social, physical, and psychological—all of which come through within his writing in his frequent use of water imagery and metaphors and in his realistic depictions. Similarly, in discussing the work of Henry James, Lawson argues that James's class location requires critical adjustment when considering that the lifestyle of James's father was maintained through inheritance alone and not work, putting his family on the margins and in constant fear of depleting the "hoard." James's insecure class position influenced his writing, as did the "disjointed" imagery of impressionism, revealing the contradiction between aesthetics (floating impressions) and economics (hard facts). For James, his impressions had to be stored...