The Columbia History of the American Novel

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 Linda (1850). Hentz had no hesitation about carrying out such alchemy after her husband was incapacitated by illness. Stowe and Warner became entrepreneurs of the pen because of similar circumstances: the real or imaginary invalidism of Stowe's husband, and the worsening economic situation of Warner's father, who had a history of bad investments. Authorship, it should be remembered, was one of the few professions open to middle-class women in the antebellum period. Little wonder that so many embraced the literary marketplace: it offered prestige, good money, and unmatched range of influence, rewards far beyond those afforded by needlework and schoolteaching.

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 Godey's Lady's Book. 'Let us keep our women and children from the contagion as long as possible.' Legal statute seconded popular thought in quarantining women, especially married women, from financial matters. Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband Calvin signed the royalty agreement for Uncle Tom's Cabin because married women couldn't sign contracts and didn't possess control over their earnings. Stowe was one of several female novelists who felt uneasy about the time and energy demanded by authorship. That composing fiction took place in the home merely exacerbated the distress such activity could cause. Wasn't the home the place where one cared for one's husband and children, and didn't the work in progress steal time from more urgent duties?

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 Uncle Tom's Cabin, protesting on numerous occasions, 'I did not write that book,' and 'the story made itself.' Other women took more credit for their accomplishments, but the instinct to repress personal goals and deny unique capabilities was widely shared. All appealed to higher purposes, whether responsibility to humanity or service to God. The pleasure of exercising one's talent and basking in applause had to be coupled with the duty of instruction; the novel shared this trust with nonliterary utterances. Even Fern voiced the wish, in a didactic note to the reader, that her book would 'fan into a flame, in some tired heart, the fading embers of hope.' Sedgwick, like Irving and Cooper born in the eighteenth century, voiced traditional fastidiousness about the self-exposure of print. What emboldened her to write, she told a correspondent, was 'the consciousness of a moral purpose.' In Warner's case, the religious motive was so strong that she alternated works of fiction with homiletic tales and glosses on the Scriptures.

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 Uncle Tom's Cabin exceeded $10,000 in the first nine months of sales -65- alone. But the catalyst for writing was moral outrage at the Fugitive Slave Act; Stowe conceived of her novel as a pulpit from which to rouse readers and convert them to antislavery. She deplored the evil of trafficking in human beings, but about the benefits of selling a book 'favorable to the development…of Christian brotherhood' she had no qualms. The goal of succeeding for monetary reasons intersected with the desire to better the lives of others: the more books in circulation, the more people influenced for good.

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 The House of the Seven Gables problematizes the injunction that the work of literature should inculcate a moral. Questioning whether romances teach anything, Hawthorne says that the truth of fiction 'is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.' Renunciation of advocacy pervades The Blithedale Romance. Published in the same year as Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book, in its prefatory disclaimer, underscores the divergence between the canon and a sentimental literature resolved to better society. The utopian community at Brook Farm, Hawthorne insists, is 'altogether incidental' — a mere backdrop — to the action, and the story has not 'the slightest pretensions to…elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism.'

Poe and Melville were evolving toward the same position of disinterestedness. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), Poe imagines the artist as a hypersensitive being isolated from everyday reality, a creator of imageless pictures and self-reflexive songs. Poe's critical ruminations champion autonomous literature, and his appeal to Baudelaire was as a precocious proponent of art pour l'art. His essay on 'The Poetic Principle' inveighs against 'the heresy of The Didactic' and extols the 'poem written solely for the poem's sake.' -66-

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