Autobiography and American Characters

Autobiography and American Characters Bnan M.Barbour,ed. Benjamin Franklin: ACollection of CriticalEssaY_S, Englewood Cliffs,NJ.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979.179 pp. Estelle E.Jelinek,ed. Womens Azaobiography: Essaysin Criticism. Bloomington, London: University of Illinois Press,1980.274+ xii pp. J.A.LeoLemayand P.M. Zall, eds. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. AGenetic Text.Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. lb8 +xivpp. Albert E.Stone.Autobiographical Occaswns andOriginal Acts: Versions ofIdentity from Henty Adams to Nate Shaw. Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 349+ xvipp. Shirley Neuman Sogreat is the power of the Franklin persona that, until recently, readers of hisAutobiography have far more frequently judged the character than they have the work. Seen by his admirers as a personification of the entrepreneurialshrewdness , honest responsibility and self-reliance that emancipated the New World from the Old, he becomes, when limned by his detractors, the grubbilymaterialistic ancestor of all the Babbitts of America. Where his admirersremark the philanthropist, the diplomat, the experimenter, and reconstructthe spirit of eighteenth-century science and reason, his detractors remarkthe uninformed heart, the exteriorization of the self, the disdain for thespiritual life, and reconstruct a "prototypical" American business mentality crushing the emotional and reflective life of the country. In the debate, Franklin's character becomes America's character, and the transubstantiation necessitatesendless efforts to situate Franklin in the American scene. BrianBarbour's collection, Benjamin Franklin, recapitulates some of these efforts.Reprinting previously published material, it offers nothing new to scholarsof either Franklin or autobiography but is aimed at undergraduates seekinga context and some specific comments to supplement their lectures andround off a term paper. The collection is exemplary within the ''TwentiethCentury Views" series for the various and representative voices included andfor the fact that considerations of literary style have played their part mBarbour's choices- his selections are both telling and readable. Most of Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,421-431 422 Shirley Neuman the essays he reprints treat some aspect of Franklin as either individuallyor prototypically "American," for, as his concise introduction points out about the centrality of Franklin in American life, "he seemed to incarnate the secularization of American ideals and to have deliberately fostered thisoutlook in his writing" (p. 3). Even edited, the selections represent solid contributions to this strain of Franklin criticism. Carl. L. Becker's assessmentof the character of Franklin opens the collection and is expanded by Max Webds consideration of his contributions to "The Spirit of Capitalism'' and John William Ward's analysis of his "many different characters" (p. 51)allof which contribute to "The Making of an American Character." This last,and Michael T. Gilmore's more recent "Franklin and the Shaping of American Ideology," show the happy confluence of recent attention to the literaryconventions of autobiography with the more generalized approach of American Studies to Franklin. Both are able to account for some of the formal and thematic discontinuities and reticences of the Autobiography by assessingits stated aims with reference to the actual facts of Franklin's private life:the father of the illegitimate William and the witty philanderer in France haveno place in the exemplum by which Franklin hoped to teach his Puritan countrv· men to convert their religious ideology into the spirit of free enterpris~. Perry Miller briefly situates Franklin in the tradition of his Puritan forebears while LewisP.Simpson sees him as the first force of American literary democracy , moving the man of letters out of the university and into the print-shop and anticipating the "third realm's" technique of establishing "identity of author and reader" (p. 38). Brian Barbour discusses the opposition of Emerson's "self-reliance" to Franklin's; Louis B. Wright chronicles the vul· garization and perversion of the Franklin "legacy" in the Gilded Age; while D. H. Lawrence i~allowed to voice his own savage opposition and his alterna· tive to AmericaL materialism. Other articles deal with particular works. including the satires, the Almanac and the Dogood letters. Two address the Autobiography in more specifically literary terms. Daniel B. Shea examines it in relation to the tradition of Puritan spiritual autobiography, an approach that connects Franklin with the English literar) tradition he so self-reliantly...