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

In Power Lines, Jennifer Lieberman bridges the worlds of literary criticism and history of technology to explore how Americans have thought about and written about electrification over the turn of the last century and into the 1950s. Lieberman notes that "incompatible conceptions of electricity paradoxically coexisted in the American cultural imagination" and argues that electricity worked as a metonym for the tensions of modernization because it was both an elusive natural phenomenon and a central technology of a changing society (p. 4). She analyzes how specific authors wrote about electricity and electrical technology, and she studies carefully not only what they say, but how they say it. Her focus is on works that are not necessarily emblematic or exemplary, but rather "exceptionally thought provoking" (p. 16). Lieberman's study reveals how different Americans, often outside the mainstream, contended with the social and technological changes of their day, and how they imagined their electrical futures.

Other scholars, notably David Nye and Leo Marx, have used a variety of cultural artifacts and events—from works of fiction, to paintings and photography, to expositions and fairs—to interrogate how Americans adopted and adapted to new technologies. Lieberman not only cites these studies but also uses them to provide context for her arguments and findings, particularly those directed to literary scholars. For example, to explain the ways selected writers experimented with ideas of interconnectedness as opposed to individuality, she references Nye's suggestion that electrical metaphors emphasize integration precisely because power lines link producers and consumers across networks (p. 7).

Lieberman offers a carefully constructed and complex argument. She approaches her task by examining several literary works in conjunction with contemporaneous advances in electrification and broader social trends. Through five chapters, Lieberman introduces books, short stories, and essays by Mark Twain (chapter 2); William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Atherton, and Theodore Dreiser (chapter 3); Charlotte Perkins Gilman (chapter 4); Jack London (chapter 5); and Lewis Mumford and Ralph Ellison (chapter 6). She discusses each writer's work in conversation with other literary, technical, and popular publications, as well as later critical reviews. The chapters highlight several themes, including individuality and systems thinking, electrocution and the social distance between state-sponsored murder and its instruments, electrical utopias, autonomy and interconnection, and the reproduction of social inequalities through electrification. Her familiarity with the techniques of both literary criticism and historical research strengthen her work.

In the book's brief concluding chapter, Lieberman invites the reader to focus on how electricity became a stand-in for larger issues of modernization, technical advance, networking, and interdependence. She offers a compelling 1923 poem by Jen Toomer, "Her Lips Are Copper Wire," in which electricity is an ambiguous metaphor for modernity. In this poem it is difficult to pinpoint what, exactly, is electric and what, or who, is being electrified. Lieberman explains that this uncertainty is precisely what made electrification such a valuable touchpoint for novelists and social critics. As with this poem, Lieberman persuades the reader to look to literature for interpretations of both the natural and physical phenomena of electrification, and of technical innovation more generally.

Lieberman offers a fine addition to a growing body of investigations into the cultural meanings of electrification across time. In addition to publications by Nye and Marx, recent works by Donald C. Jackson (Pastoral and Monumental, 2013) and Anthony F. Arrigo (Imaging Hoover Dam, 2014), for example, examine how images and advertising of electrical projects shape social conceptions of the technology; while Daniel Wuebben (Power-Lined, 2019) has studied power lines as cultural objects. By linking both a history of literary critique and a study of literary works, Lieberman adds a new dimension to this endeavor. While the thrust of her argument may be intended for students of literature, Lieberman is speaking to historians as well. She brings useful specificity and sophistication to the study of each author within their era, and for historians of technology, [End Page...