The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel by Anna Pochmara (review)

Anna Pochmara’s The Nadir and the Zenith is an excellent study of melodrama and temperance in late nineteenth-century fiction. Over the course of this concise and well-structured text, Pochmara seeks to achieve five goals. The first is a historical-aesthetic reclamation of the Nadir era, “the historical moment when black people’s status reached its lowest point” (1), as a productive period for African American fiction as prolific and multi-faceted. The second is defining the political consciousness of this era and type of literature. Third, Pochmara defines the political locus of the genre of naturalism as utilized by African American authors during the Nadir era. Fourth, Pochmara argues for the affective force of naturalism in the sense that there is a deep and sometimes indivisible relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism. Finally, Pochamara closely examines how ethical temperance in literature, manifesting as self-discipline among its youthful female characters, fosters social and political community.

Pochmara draws from a compact archive of 26 primary texts published from 1876 to 1902. She also refers to an impressive bibliography of works from critics writing within the schools of neo-Marxism, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism. Pochmara’s refreshing text is emblematic of a crucial directional shift in studies in American literary naturalism over the last eighteen years: texts written by African American authors have been understudied at a substantial detriment to our field. Pochmara displays with acute attention to historical context the ways in which African American writers of this era were very much in tune with the literary— and political—conversations that evolved from the Antebellum Era into the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. In fact, these authors drove that conversation with rigor: there could be no conversation about the political health of the United States without discussion of the emancipated slave, the African American emigrant workers in the North, and the continued activism of African Americans as they fought for better economic conditions and against the growing tide of anti-Black violence.

Within this historical context Pochmara situates her compelling study of novels published in the Nadir era by Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Amelia E. Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Pochmara maps a trajectory from midcentury sentimentalism into twentieth century naturalism as evinced by these authors.

Pochmara makes three distinct interventions in the field of African American literary studies and literary history. First, she argues that the “New Negro” woman is posed in direct contrast to her antebellum-era progenitors, particularly in her assertion of control in her community (e.g., as an effective and inspiring teacher) and in her private life (e.g., in her assertion of her right to accept or reject marital suitors or decide her family members’ living situations). Pochmara’s second intervention asserts that the female “mulatta” character is central too in the texts produced by African American male writers. Pochmara’s third intervention situates her study within the field of literary history studies. She is critical of “atemporal” analyses, in particular ones that develop critical tools that could not have been adopted or understood in the era to which they are applied. Pochmara’s interest is in examining a body of work over a short period of time. She seeks specifically to enumerate and parse through the ways authors over time examined the same ideas in different ways.

Across all seven of the texts Pochmara closely examines, authors unrelentingly engaged with the genres, subjects, and social ideas of their time. Pochmara’s study serves specifically to show how these novelists utilized the “mulatta melodrama” to discuss the political, social, and economic issues of the Progressive Era. The structure of the mulatta melodrama is emblematic of a relationship between the present and the past. Embodied by the past are the father—white, paternalistic, and failing—and...