Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing

Afterword

Afterword False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. —adrienne rich By the turn of the century, male and female writers alike registered their distaste for the profit-driven newspaper industry.1 Along with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Edith Eaton, a spate of male realists exhibited contempt for daily newspapers, recoiling from a print public sphere that had grown too commercial at the expense of privacy, integrity, and truth. In A Modern Instance, William Dean Howells thematizes the degeneration of the press into melodrama and exposé, vaunting the “literary motive” over what he calls the “newspaper instinct.”2 Henry James likewise paints an unflattering depiction of journalism in The Bostonians, primarily through his characterization of reporter Matthias Pardon, “the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston Press,” as vulgar and opportunistic.3 And in The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt reveals the racist inner workings of a Southern newspaper office—a space in which white supremacy transforms from ideology to practice; the “big three” behind the fictional Morning Chronicle harness the newspaper’s authority to orchestrate a lynching. Far from merely unreliable or sensational, the newspaper in Chesnutt’s novel is an unregulated deadly weapon.4 In light of these literary grievances against journalism, it is not surprising that critics have long associated the rise of realism with a new attention to journalism as a relevant interlocutor. For example, Amy Kaplan argues that “Howells formulates his theory and practice of realism in an uneasy debate with the development of the mass media in the late nineteenth century,” noting that the “rise of the modern newspaper 148 / between the novel and the news is often seen as a popular counterpart to the genesis of literary realism.”5 Michael Robertson similarly claims that “the varying attitudes toward journalism displayed by novelists such as Howells, James, Dreiser, and Hemingway can be seen as part of the complex, evolving relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ realms of cultural production in the United States.”6 Such scholarly assessments hold that realism distinguishes itself, intellectually and rhetorically, from previous literary movements in its engagement with the mass media as a competing documentary medium. Robertson goes so far as to claim that earlier in the nineteenth century “the most popular literary forms of the era—poetry, romances, and domestic fiction—had little connection, in either form or subject matter, with the era’s journalism.”7 Contrary to such characterizations of the nineteenth century and of “domestic fiction,” Between the Novel and the News demonstrates that these lionized male realists were latecomers to a literary project that women had been carrying out for close to a hundred years. Since the early republic, American women’s writing has expressed skepticism about the versions of reality propagated by the press, even as journalistic conventions changed from partisan to sensational to objective over the course of the century. Women writers have long regarded the press as an ideological problem whose social and political influence had serious repercussions for lived experience. Through their long engagement with the press, they worked out questions about who is given credence to tell the truth, who is considered capable of accurately portraying reality, and why the allocation of such authority matters. Though they certainly recognized the necessity of journalism for effective democracy, women writers cautioned against its potential to subvert the aims of democracy by becoming a tyrannical force more invested in policing than in enlightening citizen-readers. Indeed, women saw the press as a “useful and public discourse,” in the Foucauldian sense, a rhetorical accomplice to oppressive institutions, such as slavery and racism, and to sexist discourses , such as medicine and the law.8 Ellen Gruber Garvey argues in her recent work on nineteenth-century scrapbooks that activists creatively and critically compiled newspaper clippings to “talk back to the press and critique it.”9 She claims that their practice of cutting and pasting nineteenth-century newspapers enabled African American and women’s rights activists to reveal the newspaper’s complicity with oppression. Interestingly, Garvey notes their reliance on the institution that they rejected: “They also needed the press to communicate their own message and build community.”10 In other words, the afterword / 149 scrapbooks of nineteenth-century activists are made possible by a physical engagement with the mainstream press. We might see scrapbooks as a visual and material counterpart to the...