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5: Call and Response: The Politics of Literary Utopianism and Realism
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chapter five call and response: the politics of literary utopianism and realism The chapters of Part I have canvassed the writing of Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois broadly considered—published work, ‹ction and non‹ction, speeches in the case of Gilman, personal letters and other unpublished work. We have examined this writing with particular attention to what it says about American socialism of the 1890s and the two decades following: the period of the Second Internationale, and also the decades when the writers ‹rst declared themselves socialists and made their ‹rst efforts to leave their marks within the movement. Having established the shared commitment of these writers to economic egalitarianism and social democratic transformation, even within quite different political contexts, I shall now focus more narrowly on their literary work and, at the same time, extend the historical scope of the analysis more fully through the second and third decades of the twentieth century. This process will help to isolate a speci‹c relationship between literature and politics: a poetics or aesthetics of American socialist literature during a twenty-year period that also happens to be associated with the rise of literary modernism in American literature. Because for the triptych writers this process will continue to demonstrate correspondences between literary work and political action, we can also continue to trace the development of social-democratic politics as it confronted the series of challenges presented by the collapse of the Second Internationale in 1914, the rise of the Comintern in 1919, and the hegemony of capitalism in the 1920s. In spite of the signi‹cant differences between Populism, Nationalism, syndicalism, communist-anarchism, the Social Gospel, and social democracy, all were tolerated and even encouraged under the Second Internationale. How did writers and activists schooled in the polymorphous 161 socialism of this earlier time come to terms with the changes initiated by the Great War and its repercussions? The question of the fate of American social democracy after the collapse of the Socialist Internationale can be addressed by studying the uses to which Gilman, Sinclair, and Du Bois put the realist and utopian literary modes, largely because those uses refracted debates over socialism, scienti‹c and utopian, that had been staples of the movement for decades. To establish the literary and political foundation for these questions, this chapter considers the way that the modes were brought together late in the ‹rst decade and in the second decade of the century in the ‹ction of all three of the triptych writers, at the very cultural moment that the social democratic movement in the United States reached its greatest popularity and just a few years before the Socialist Internationale would come to an unceremonious end. Even while realist and utopian literary modes, like scienti‹c and utopian socialism, are de‹ned by separate histories and by formal and ideological antinomies , their histories and conceptions are both intertwined and overlapping . Not only, for example, did Marx and Engels acknowledge the educational value of the French and English socialists that Marx also dismissed as idealists and Engels labeled “utopian,” but Marxism along with other variants of socialism has gained authority by a utopian vision of a better world, a classless society de‹ned by a higher code of ethics, as well as by a correct, scienti ‹c analysis of material and historical conditions. In nineteenth-century American literary history we may observe a parallel phenomenon. Alongside realism, subsequently considered the preeminent literary development in the later nineteenth century, American writers of the very same period were obsessed with utopian literature. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, far from being an anomaly, merely fueled a trend within the ‹ctional genre, as approximately twenty utopian ‹ctions preceding Bellamy’s novel were succeeded by some two hundred titles between 1888 and 1900, prompting one scholar to suggest that in the 1890s the utopian mode was the most popular of all American literary genres.1 Although their procedures are almost diametrically opposed —the utopian form, by its very de‹nition, describing a situation outside of social reality; the realist ‹ction describing social reality with the highest degree of verisimilitude possible—their cultural aims may be practically the same, for, as Thomas Peyser notes, realism and utopianism represent two facets of the same critical motive: “Both aim to displace social arrangements by revealing their self-contradictions and genealogy.”2 Certainly not all uses of realist or utopian modes comprised social democratic critiques of and alternatives to nineteenth-century society (in fact many of...