Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather by Diana Hope Polley (review)

In an illuminating exploration of the porous boundary between American literary realism and its romantic predecessor, Diana Hope Polley has found the most romantic of the romantics, Emerson, lurking within four significant realist novels. Polley is aware that the enterprise of periodization is under theoretical scrutiny and she employs M. M. Bakhtin's concept of a "double-voiced discourse" to account for the residual romanticism she finds in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, James' The Portrait of a Lady, Wharton's The House of Mirth, and Cather's My Ántonia. Her readings elicit this "double-voiced" or dialogical discourse effectively, and connect it to an Emersonian imprint that thematically shapes each novel.

Polley's bridge to dialogical realism is James' 1879 Hawthorne, a critical study marked by its attack on American provincialism. Noting the elements of nostalgia for antebellum New England in the book, Polley argues that it also signals "James's struggle to negotiate the binaries of romance and realism." James published Hawthorne the year he began The Portrait of a Lady, the novel in which he expressed his lingering romanticism through his protagonist, Isabel Archer. While many critics have seen Isabel as "an Emersonian character" and thus read the novel as a lesson in the failures of romanticism, Polley instead emphasizes "Isabel's continued loyalty to her Emersonian persona." Focusing on Isabel's contemplative visit to the Roman ruins late in the novel, Polley describes Isabel's recovering strength as the historical ruins merge with the honeysuckle covered fields around her. Here Isabel received "her most intense spiritual visitation," opening her eyes more fully to the blunder of her "naive and blind embrace of experience." This carelessness had actually violated her earlier Emersonian self-possession. The healed Isabel, now able to protect herself from the consuming aggression of Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, is a woman who again owns herself.

While Isabel stands as Polley's clearest embodiment of Emersonian integrity, she also reads Lily Bart in Wharton's The House of Mirth as "a full-fledged romantic figure attempting to forge an individual identity in a society that privileges material and conformity." Lily's struggle for self-culture and her tragic death gain a new significance when Polley contrasts her with Lawrence Selden, a fabricated romantic who "adapts Emerson's philosophy to Gilded Age culture: ideas of personal freedom now work to validate self-interest and emotional detachment." Rather than see Lily in deterministic terms, a fated victim of the enormity of social forces, Polley finds her Emersonian to the end, her tragic demise not inevitable but the product of "her own strong will and Selden's corresponding weakness." Polley finds a similar contrast in Cather's My Ántonia, focusing on Jim Burden as a man whose pastoral childhood was "a living embodiment of transcendental philosophy" but whose later life was an insincere espousal of principles that he had actually abandoned. Even so, Emersonian truths live on in Ántonia, the woman he had admired but evaded, whose courage and truth remained whole. "Ántonia never seems to lose her commitment to Emersonian philosophy," Polley writes. "In her natural vitality, her connection to the land, and her spiritual integrity, she manages to preserve the transcendental essence of her character." Polley's fresh and elucidating readings, and her astute sense of the romantic imperatives within key realist novels, make Echoes of Emerson a welcome addition to nineteenth century literary scholarship.