provide for one's family justified commercialism. 'I am compelled to turn my brains to gold and to sell them to the highest bidder,' said Caroline Lee Hentz, author of several best-sellers including
But aiming for, and achieving, material success did not produce liberal individualists. Commercial groundbreakers, the women remained troubled by conflicts over commercialism peculiar to their gender. Women were supposed to preserve their purity by refraining from the struggles of the marketplace, and Ruth Hall, for all her business acumen, turns over the management of her affairs to the editor John Walter, a gentleman-protector who addresses her fraternally as 'Sister Ruth.' What Hall did in fiction, Catharine Maria Sedgwick did in fact: she let her brothers handle all negotiations with -64- her publishers. 'Our men are sufficiently moneymaking,' asserted Sarah Hale, novelist and influential editor of
Carrying the requirement to be useful into the novel, women writers rejected the commercial age's tendency toward categorical differentiation and affirmation of the self. Stowe, who had no peer in either sales or profits, disavowed the authorship of
The background to Stowe's great book dramatizes some of the paradoxes common to domestic fiction. Her motives were at once familial, economic, and selfless. The financially straitened Stowes badly needed income from literature, and the royalties from
Against this notion of literature as socially constructive, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville turned the novel into a proto-modernist art form, self-contained and increasingly self-referential. Undoubtedly pushed in this direction by lack of sales, the men were already moving toward aesthetic disentanglement, encoding in their narratives and theoretical pronouncements the impulse to specialize ascendant elsewhere in market culture. Hawthorne, perhaps the best-known spokesman for the canonical viewpoint, termed his fictions 'romances' and defined them, in contradistinction to the novel, as taking place in 'a Neutral Territory' removed from the actual world. His preface to
Poe and Melville were evolving toward the same position of disinterestedness. In
Melville's work engages more directly with the issues of his time — among other topics, he wrote on slavery, class, imperialism, and the destruction of the Native American — but the ever-present ironies and ambiguities dissipate external purpose. Melville's fictions awaken awareness of social injustice but leave the reader with no thought of changing things. (In this regard, he is Stowe's opposite, more so even than Hawthorne.) For Melville, the writer was a teller of Truth (invariably capitalized) who had privileged access to perceptions too terrible for common consumption; he had to smuggle his meaning to the select few while concealing it from the multitude.
If the movement toward literary autonomy shared a structure of thought with free-market economics, that movement also generated values opposed to the regimen of capitalism. The canonical writers' modernist orientation espoused a version of professionalism that located itself outside the commercial world. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville developed occupational ideals different in significant ways from the practical vocational outlook of the domestic novelists, for whom the confirmation of the common reader in sales was a relatively unambiguous gauge of success. The canonical ethic took the form it did as a deliberate act of self-definition against the contrary example of the women. The three male writers simultaneously wanted to demarcate themselves from their female rivals and to associate their practice of authorship with other professions that were emerging or undergoing rationalization during this era. Medicine, law, and teaching, occupations from which women were usually barred (except at the lower levels of teaching), were establishing more stringent requirements to enter the field and stricter standards of practice within it.
These changing fields, as they proceeded to specialize over the course of the century, stressed their dissimilarity from entrepreneurial pursuits governed by profit and loss. The new professionals came to place special emphasis on expertise in one's endeavor. They were comparatively insulated from the market — many collected a fee set by custom or the profession rather than a salary — and skillfulness assumed a value for them distinguishable from the income they received. Of course they wanted to be well paid, but what made them professionals was their sense of integrity and ability in performing a technical service, and what confirmed their professional identity was - 67- the recognition of their merit by others in the field. In the egalitarian Jacksonian years, licensing laws and other attempts to restrict entry encountered popular resistance; nevertheless, the trend toward disciplinary rigor was irreversible. The professional ideal may have derived some of its prestige from the older, slowly disappearing tradition of artisanal handicrafts, which mandated a long period of apprenticeship before mastering a trade. The ideal can also be seen as a prefigurement of Thorstein Veblen's principle of workmanship, the devotion to excellence that Veblen attributed to the twentieth-century engineer and that he hoped would topple a system of production in which quality was sacrificed to profit.
But whatever its provenance and filiations — and Veblen clearly overestimated its potential to subvert — there is no doubt that for the canonical authors the professional ethic represented an alternative to the reign of commerce. An element of mystification entered into this, since the novelist, unlike the physician or lawyer, depended directly on sales for his income. But professionalism valorized extramonetary goals and conferred some of the aristocratic prestige, though little of the immediate market appeal, that 'gentleman' supplied for Irving and