The Columbia History of the American Novel

Cooper. Melville was explicit on the disjunction between popularity and professional standards. 'Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies,' he exclaimed, and he interpreted audience acceptance as a sign of artistic ineptitude. 'Hawthorne and His Mosses,' the impassioned essay Melville wrote to celebrate his fellow craftsman, spurns the public's plaudits as 'strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity.' For the meritorious writer, Melville argues, what counts is not the market but the appreciation of other literary professionals, including trained readers, who can grasp the complex messages encrypted within the multilayered text. A call for 'close reading' informs this tribute, one hundred years before the New Criticism revolutionized the study of literature in university English departments. Melville's correspondence with Hawthorne is similarly dominated by his sense of their being practitioners of an exacting discipline, bound together by dedication to the highest standards of art. In this spirit of appreciative collegiality, he inscribed Moby-Dick to his brother novelist 'In Token of My Admiration for His Genius.'

Hawthorne was made uncomfortable by the degree of Melville's -68- adulation, but he too thought of himself as a professional in an esoteric specialty demanding training and skill. For a dozen years after his graduation from college, he lived in his mother's house in Salem and applied himself to mastering the art of fiction. Reclusiveness was at work here, but so was a commitment to the kind of rigorous apprenticeship becoming less common in manual crafts and more frequent in mental occupations. Few writers from the antebellum period brooded so obsessively on the character and mechanics of their calling. Like the masculine tales of his contemporaries, Hawthorne's works abound in detailed information about an arduous task. They are primers imparting instruction on the materials, 'laws,' and composition of the romance. While Ruth Hall is also a how-to manual for aspiring women authors, in Fern's case the advice deals not with the process of composition but rather with the best strategies for placing one's manuscript and coping with editors and publishers.

Poe shared Hawthorne's preoccupation with technique and agreed that the making of literature was a profession as distinct as medicine or law. Finding favor with the mass public, he stated in a review of Sedgwick, 'has nothing to do with literature proper.' And by 'literature proper,' Poe meant a self-conscious art pruned of everything that was not literature, an art obedient to its own regulations and explainable on its own terms. Like Hawthorne, he invited readers into his laboratory and allowed them to glimpse the creative process. 'The Philosophy of Composition' describes how he selected the topic, determined the length, and achieved the effect of his poem 'The Raven' — a palpably fraudulent account that says more about the pressure to professionalize than about the text's actual preparation.

For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the writer's vocation crystallized as a counterpoise to the articulation of literary domesticity. The three men defined their callings as artists in opposition to the sentimental novelists. Hawthorne endlessly denominated the romance as a species of storytelling liberated from the close notation of domestic manners, thereby proclaiming the form's distance from the fictions of his female compatriots. In his censure of the scribbling women, he grumbled that he had no prospect of success while 'their trash' monopolized the public taste, and added that he 'should be ashamed of [himself] if [he] did succeed.' Melville's Pierre, resolved to astound -69- the world with a tale of truth, shows his seriousness by repudiating the feminized sentimentality of his juvenilia. And Poe, in his account of 'How to Write a Blackwood Article,' ridicules as mindless the female authors whose contributions fill the journals of the day. To the canonical figures, the domestic novelists may have stood for the unaesthetic past, a time when native culture had not yet found its voice, or they may have symbolized the materialistic, utilitarian present; but the fact remains that the men could not have formulated their professional identity without the alternative model represented by the women. Literary professionalism as a distancing from the market, as an elevation of calling and competence over profitability, was the creation of white male fiction writers reacting against the commercial triumphs of the feminine novel.

Adam Smith had believed that men of letters were less well compensated than physicians and lawyers because the field of literature was overstocked: the more restrictive a profession, the more highly rewarded its members. Despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville failed to attain financial parity with elite practitioners of medicine and law; in fact, their forbidding standards of professionalism impaired their marketability. But in the long run, membership in a select club did reap economic benefits. Canonization transformed Hawthorne into a belated best-seller, available to the nineteenth-century reader in inexpensive school texts and imposing, clothbound editions of his collected works. Poe and Melville had a longer wait, but they too gained the ultimate in literary exclusivity: the status, and commercial longevity, of national classics.

A series of concluding ironies arises from this peculiarity of cultural history, final complications in the three men's shifting relation to the economics of authorship. Outsold by the more popular women while they were alive, the canonical novelists turned out to have greater staying power in the marketplace after their deaths. They owed their posthumous success not to the triumph of laissez faire but rather to the support of the emergent literary establishment. Whether or not their works possess greater artistic value, what raised Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville above their compatriots was the intervention on their behalf of fellow male professionals — the publishers, critics, and teachers who overruled the market by reprinting their books, -70- promoting their reputations, and assigning them in courses. The novelists who created the aesthetic as a discrete entity, a literary realm parallel to Smith's self-righting economy, achieved immortality through a form of cultural subvention or 'welfare.' The visible hand of professional authority was needed to rescue the self-sufficient novel from popular disfavor and to convert antebellum remainders into the enduring best-sellers of American literature.

Michael T. Gilmore

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The Romance

Perhaps no literary term has been more descried, analyzed, and debated during recent decades than the term 'Romance.' Such eminent critics of American literature as Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase have identified its characteristics, contrasted them with those of the novel, and offered a beguiling paradigm focusing our attention on the achievement of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and (especially) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. But consensus has not rested easy: although such studies as those of Joel Porte and Richard Brodhead refined our sense of romance elements in specific texts, David H. Hirsch and Nicolaus Mills — among others — have balked at the idea of an autonomous genre called the romance and at what seemed to them fuzzy distinctions between narrative forms. Aware of the confusion wrought by evolving perspectives and critical fashions, Michael Davitt Bell has surveyed 'the development of American Romance' with perceptive authority as a way of coming to see what happens in narrative when the romance sacrifices (as it does) relation to the quotidian world. And such recent assessments of American fiction as those of Edgar A. Dryden, Robert Levine, and Steven C. Sheer have inquired into the provenance and function of the romance with a fresh sense of purpose. On one thing most parties would agree: the persistent dialogue over the nature of the romance suggests its vital, albeit elusive and ambiguous, importance.

By common consent, the crucial text for discussing the nature of -72- the romance in American fiction comes from the preface to Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). 'When a writer calls his work a Romance,' Hawthorne writes, 'it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.' The novel, he goes on to say, 'is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course' of human experience; the romance, while it must adhere to the truth of the human heart, offers a greater freedom of presentation: the writer may manage the 'atmospherical medium' so as to 'bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.' The writer of romance, that is, has the latitude to adjust or refract reality, to fashion what we might call a subjunctive world of fiction different in kind from the socially structured world in which we live but implicated, I would add, in its desires and fears.

Hawthorne was not alone in making such a distinction between the romance and the novel. Nor was the distinction invented by American writers. Both William Congreve and the gothic storyteller Clara Reeve characterized the romance as dealing with the wondrous and unusual and the novel as depicting events of a familiar