Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882–1952 by Jennifer L. Lieberman (review)

Power Lines, Jennifer Lieberman's first book, studies references to electricity in American Literature from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources, Lieberman diligently reads through and compares instances where electricity is evoked in works by Mark Twain (chapter 1), William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Gertrude Atherton (chapter 2), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (chapter 3), Jack London (chapter 4), and Ralph Ellison (chapter 5). The works discussed in the first and last chapters, respectively—Twain's Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) and Ellison's Invisible Man (1952)—may be obvious choices for this project; but most of Lieberman's other primary texts are not as well known. The third chapter focuses not only on Gilman's Concerning Children (1903) and Herland (1915), but also on her little-read Human Work (1904); the fourth chapter reads two originally best-selling but now virtually forgotten novels by London, Burning Daylight (1910) and The Valley of the Moon (1913); and the fifth chapter discusses Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day (1926) as an important precursor text that Ellison's novel quarrels with. Lieberman also gives ample attention to cultural, nonliterary texts, such as advertisements and newspaper and magazine articles, as well as letters and autobiographies. She draws heavily on such texts, especially in the second chapter, in order to outline the contemporary events and public discourses surrounding the introduction of the electric chair in America to which Atherton and Dreiser responded in their respective novels Patience Sparhawk (1888) and An American Tragedy (1925).

The most compelling summary of the overall project can be found on the dust jacket: the study seeks to show how authors "grappled with the idea of electricity as both life force (illumination) and death spark (electrocution)" and how, through this very ambivalence, "electricity became a common (if multifarious) symbol of modern life." For instance, the author examines the rhetorical multivalence of electricity as "an organizing metaphor" in Twain's The Connecticut Yankee (p. 13): in guises such as lightning, shocks, buttons, electrical tools and appliances (advertised as "electrical slaves" in Twain's time), circuit system, or weapon of mass destruction, electricity embodies the text's, and its author's, well-known ambivalence toward modernity, a teetering stance between romantic humanistic hope and despairing social realism. Similarly, according to Lieberman, the two novels by Atherton and Dreiser respond to early public debates about the electric chair—focused on whether the crucial moment of electric shock really delivered death instantaneously and humanely—by representing the last moments before and on the electric chair with a realism that succumbs to "unreality and fragmentation," revealing "multifarious" viewpoints (p. 75). Lieberman also shows how the Darwinian utopianism of Gilman's writings was inspired by the electrical revolution when Gilman "describes individuals as 'human storage batteries' to assert that they are most energized when they are interlinked" (p. 14). London, in turn, treats electricity as the "material manifestation of America's natural sublime" (p. 142) that every individual can access by building a generator, thus undermining "the industry's insistence that privately owned long-distance power transmission was the most rational and efficient way to harness electricity" (p. 15). Finally, Lieberman demonstrates how Ellison "explicitly and implicitly" engages with Mumford's idea "that electricity represents the coming of the new technological order" to expose both its "oppressive and progressive potentialities" (p. 15). Ellison diverges from Mumford, Lieberman concludes, in that his interpretation of electrified America focuses on racial injustice. Thus Lieberman shows how all her authors drew on aspects of electricity to describe emergent societal systems and critique their constructed "power lines."

The book's overall "lines of inquiry" are partly historical, partly rhetorical (p. 12). The historical parameter, 1882 to 1952, spans both the publication of the discussed texts and crucial developments in the electricity industry: "[the opening of] Thomas...