Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880–1905 by Adam Sonstegard (review)

The title of Adam Sonstegard's excellent new book hints at what distinguishes this study from earlier explorations of graphic illustration in American fiction. Whereas other scholars have theorized (sometimes luminously) about the synergies of text and image, Sonstegard is more interested in the sort of friction that occurs when a visual artist takes "artistic liberties" with a written text. In one sense this seems like a fairly humdrum affair. Mark Twain's contemporaries knew right from the start that Dan Beard's illustrations for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court inserted literally unauthorized content into the novel, and Twain even conceded, with priceless humility, that "the illustrations are better than the book—which is a good deal for me to say, I reckon." Illustrators necessarily take "liberties" in interpreting a novelist's intentions, and yet the friction Sonstegard seeks is more subtle and more suggestive than this example suggests. A better case in point for his analysis is the conversation about illustration in A Hazard of New Fortunes, in which Basil March complains that modern illustrations have become so "pretty" that they distract readers from the literary text. "It was different when the pictures were bad," March insists, because "then the text had some chance." Howells dramatizes the rivalry between text and image in this scene by taking us into the editorial rooms of the fictional Every Other Week, where writers and artists compete for magazine space, and Sonstegard takes us even further into the issue by returning us to the actual pages of Harper's Weekly, where Hazard's original readers "could readily compare the seven-page, biweekly, illustrated periodical they were reading about with the twenty-page, weekly, illustrated periodical they were reading." What emerges from this careful staging of the "rivalry" between text and image is a complicated dance between writers and artists, such that Howells' readers could "have no idea where the artist's authority begins and where the writer's authority ends." American literary realism originates for Sonstegard not in the sorting out of this representational mash-up, but in the very tensions that animate multi-media narratives like the serial version of Hazard. As he puts it, realism comes into being "when authors and artists are literally but not necessarily figuratively 'on the same page.'"

Sonstegard develops this account of American literary realism by pairing the opposed intentions of several major writers and illustrators, such as James and DuMaurier (Washington Square), Twain and Kemble (Huckleberry Finn), Stowe and Kemble (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1892 edition), Twain and Loeb (Pudd'nhead Wilson), Crane and newell ("The Monster"), Dunbar and Kemble (Folks from Dixie), Wharton and Wenzell (The House of Mirth), and Hopkins and Skeete (Contending Forces). Each pair introduces a new set of complexities, as authors and illustrators haggle over representational nuances that are usually lost on text-centered criticism. Through his deft treatment of periodicals and first editions, Sonstegard alerts us to ironies that disappear when we forget that graphic artists were "co-authors" in the production of realist texts. The writers Sonstegard considers, for their part, knew perfectly well that their texts would be illustrated, and a surprising number of them followed Howells' example by anticipating the effects of visual imagery on the reading experience, building consideration of the graphic image into the fabric of the narrative. According to Sonstegard, such fraught collaboration characterizes the period we loosely identify with the rise of realism in American literature. As he explains, "[b]etween the days of prose-only serials that reached readers without any visual aids and the eras in which cinematography began to adapt the written word to motion pictures, American realism often responded to graphic art's presence, even its anticipated presence, on the illustrated page." This fine scholarly study encourages us to make that original illustrated page the object of our critical attention, instead of imagining that text alone can capture realism...