Debating the End of History: The Marketplace, Utopia, and the Fragmentation of Intellectual Life

Chapter 4: Literary Critics Become Cultural Critics

89 4 LITERARY CRITICS BECOME CULTURAL CRITICS When I started my graduate work at Wisconsin I planned to focus on American intellectual history. My adviser, Merle Curti, encouraged me to substitute courses in American literature and in America philosophy for the usual requirement of a cluster of courses in European history. Earlier, when my professors at Princeton had learned of my interest in intellectual history, they recommended that I read Vernon Louis Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, published at the end of the 1920s. Parrington was a professor of American literature, and his narrative was very similar to that presentedbytheBeardsinTheRiseofAmericanCivilization.Working from the fundamental assumptions of Bourgeois Nationalism, both books told the story of the conflict between European culture and American nature. Both books ended the conflict with the victory of American nature in the 1830s. Parrington and the Beards agreed that now an American culture segregated from the artful European past could grow out of the national landscape. Now American novels and poems could express the identity of the American people.1 Echoing the pattern of Bourgeois Nationalism that informed the histories of George Bancroft in the 1830s, Parrington defined the new people as a uniform body. Local cultures in the United States were artful, particular, irrational. The new national culture of 1830 was artless , universal, rational. A true believer in an autonomous American national culture, Parrington, in his survey of American literature from the 1830s to the 1920s, did not include the writing of women because they were irrational and focused on particulars rather than the universal national. Like the Beards, Parrington would not include African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, or Asian 90 literary critics become cultural critics Americans in his American people. They, like women, dealt with the irrational and the particular. This also was true of the writings of Jews and Catholics. Implicit in Parrington’s selection of the authors of American novels and poems was that they must be male Northern Anglo-Protestants. Male Southern Anglo-Protestants had chosen to leave the American nation. They had chosen to become irrational and particular. Their literature was timeful in content compared to the timeless literature produced by their Northern cousins. There was a series of texts, then, beginning with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, that formed a sacred canon. This canon must be segregated, and its purity protected from the variety of non-American literatures being written within the political boundaries of the United States.2 The professors who taught me American literature at Princeton and then at Wisconsin uncritically accepted the boundaries of this canon in the late 1940s. The professors of American literature with whom I worked in the Minnesota American Studies Program during the 1950s also accepted this canon as a timeless truth. It was in the 1960s, then, that this supposedly immutable canon began to be challenged.3 But when Parrington built his book on the American variation of Bourgeois Nationalism, he, of course, faced the same crises of change that caused so much anxiety among historians. Just when the supposedly eternal and immutable natural landscape had purged timeful oldworld culture from the new world, industrialism coming from Europe was creating a new urban-industrial landscape. Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx were two of my colleagues in the American Studies Program. They were in the English department and had recently completed their graduate work in the Harvard Program in American Civilization. There they had worked with F. O. Matthiessen, one of the major architects of that program in the 1930s. His book American Renaissance, published in 1941, had many parallels to that of Parrington.4 Matthiessen also was a guardian of the canon. He too defined an exclusive American people and an exclusive American literature. His pattern of inclusion and exclusion was the same as Parrington’s. And the historical change he most feared was the same as that seen by Parrington. Henry Nash Smith’s dissertation became the book Virgin Land (1950). Leo Marx’s dissertation became the book The Machine in the Garden (1964). They both shared the belief of Parrington and literary critics become cultural critics 91 Matthiessen that the American national landscape had defeated European culture in the 1830s. But they also shared their elders’ belief that a new landscape, urban-industrial, was coming from Europe by the 1830s. A European culture was raping the national landscape...