The Columbia History of the American Novel

Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), the first African American novel published in America, which, like Clotel, takes on the related issue of gender oppression as well. The poor white and African American women of Wilson's novel find it next to impossible to find decent work; though not actually enslaved, they suffer from the ravages of 'wage slavery.' In this respect, Wilson addresses the exploitation of women in ways that parallel and develop the treatment of the same issue in the fiction of white women writers — Fern's Ruth Hall and Ann Sophia Stephens's The Old Homestead (1855) depicted the desperate plight of New York's working women, and Rebecca Harding Davis, in her short novel Life in the Iron Mills (1860) and her first novel, Margret Howth (1862), explored the spiritual impoverishment and exploitation of women working in Northern factories. Frado, the 'Nig' of Our Nig, is the daughter of a poor white working woman who, as she falls deeper into poverty, marries 'a kind-hearted African,' by whom she has two children. Unable to support them, she abandons one, Frado, with the rich and respected Bellmonts. Emphasizing the intersecting issues of class and race, Wilson presents as the most brutal character of the novel the 'haughty, undisciplined, arbitrary, and severe' Mrs. Bellmont, whose privilege and cruelty link her to Stowe's Marie St. Clare of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Intent on exploiting and humiliating Frado, whom she raises as a servant, Mrs. Bellmont beats, chokes, and otherwise degrades and brutalizes her. When she leaves the Bellmonts at age eighteen, Frado, impoverished and the mother of a sickly son in Massachusetts, eventually has no one to turn to for help. The narrator refers scornfully to 'professed abolitionists, who didn't want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North,' and, as fictional and real worlds collapse — Wilson herself was the mother of a sick child who eventually died —152- the author offers the novel to 'my colored brethren' with the hope that their willingness to purchase it would provide her with funds to help her ailing son.

Harriet A. Jacobs casts an equally jaundiced eye on the problems of race, class, and gender in antebellum America in her novelized autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). An account of Linda Brent's amazingly resourceful escape from slavery by hiding for seven years in her grandmother's attic space, the book exposes from an African American woman's point of view the sexual brutality inherent in slavery. As Jacobs remarks about the situation of the typical slave woman: 'Women are considered of no value, unless they continually increase their owner's stock. They are put on a par with animals.' The most 'animalistic' character of the narrative, however, is Brent's slave master Dr. Flint, consumed by his desire to possess Linda sexually: 'No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than he watched me.' As in Stowe and other antislavery and feminist writers, in Jacobs the patriarchal will to sexual mastery is presented as a form of intoxication. And like the scourge of alcohol in T. S. Arthur's fiction, slavery, in Jacobs's narrative, 'makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched.' Indeed, because the plantation mistress and the slave mistress are portrayed as victims of the male enslaver's lust for power, sexual and otherwise, there are intimations that Jacobs, like Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is invoking a sisterhood of white and African American women, especially mothers, as the best possible reformatory solution to the problem of slavery. Yet Jacobs is clear-sighted about the gulf between the races and the classes, as Dr. Flint's wife, Brent's fellow 'victim,' absolutely fails to see any analogy in their respective situations. Though the privileged New Yorker Mrs. Bruce, following Brent's escape to the North, helps Linda to escape from her pursuers and eventually purchases her freedom, she stands as a rare exception to the racism rampant in the North, where segregated boats, trains, and hotels, and wandering fugitive slave hunters, remain the order of the day. As is true for George and Mary in Clotel, or the African American sailor in Melville's Redburn unselfconsciously walking the streets of Liverpool, Linda experiences her greatest sense of freedom when she visits England. -153-

By emphasizing the intractability of racism in America, particularly as it 'invisibly' undergirded the nation's social, religious, and economic institutions, African American writers made clear what Emerson only occasionally faced up to: just how difficult it would have been for any American to achieve 'transcendental' individual reform within a social system countenancing slavery. In this respect, African American writers presented a fundamental challenge to white reformers who, in advocating various specific programs, could lose sight of the need for larger structural and ideological reorientations. Reading African American novelists therefore presses us to reread white middle-class novels of social reform with a skeptical eye, alert to the ways in which, despite their authors' reformist intentions, they participated in the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Yet to engage in a thoroughgoing demonization (or deconstruction) of these novels as complicitous in, rather than subversive of, the reigning order — the interpretive thrust of recent New Historicist approaches to the Anglo-American novel of reform — may be anachronistic. Such a critical perspective, in affiliating white reform novelists in particular with the disciplinary and institutional practices of the state, and thus with the persistence of racial, gender, and class inequities in America, may even be self-righteous. More productively, we could regard novelists of reform, African American and white, as dialogical writers, alternately pragmatic and visionary, who, even as they were inevitably inscribed by their culture, found much in it to critique as they sought to imagine and hopefully thus to create a better America.

Robert S. Levine

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The Late Nineteenth Century

Introduction

As the single most severe disruption in America's political economy, the Civil War has often come to mark an important watershed in the nation's literary history as well. If, as Walt Whitman predicted in Specimen Days (1875-76), the 'hell and the black infernal background' of the war would remain relatively 'unwritten' for decades, its social repercussions naturally made their way into fictional representation: into the new forms of wage slavery dramatized in Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861); into Henry Adams's Democracy (1880), where postbellum Mugwump reform was satirized as washing a 'donkey's head'; into William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), which bore witness to the pain and guilt of newly integrated market economies; into the bitter pages of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which burlesqued the invidiousness of Jim Crow and the color line. American commoners, often the symbol and occasionally the brunt of these social conditions, were given central 'title' over national fiction: names like Lapham, Carrie, Jekl, or Maggie now appeared before the eyes of American readers. But these experiments in social 'realism,' and after it 'naturalism' — the labels with which literary historians have usually marked the dominant conventions of this period — only loosely describe the narrative modes of the late nineteenth-century novel. At a deeper level, postbellum History pushed these traditionally individuating moral economies of the novel to new limits — evincing what Georg Lukács once called a struggle of an essentially biographical form to master the 'bad infinity' of het-157- erogeneous social events. If the Gilded Age institutionalized the novel as never before in American culture, the form also became a locus of unease and dissent — simultaneously an expression of unstable centers and new challenges at the boundaries of American literary life.

At such centers of institutionalized literary culture in the North — in cities like Boston, among gentlemanly publishing houses, and at family magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, or The Century — the Reconstruction-era project of shoring up antebellum genteel culture initially meant disdaining both novelistic versimilitude and the 'sensational' melodrama of cheap fiction in favor of more sedate, idealized, and usually historical romance. Fiction continued to be guarded against what Victorian critics called unhealthy 'tendencies.' Meanwhile, throughout the period genteel magazines would underwrite a variety of regional recovery projects — picturesque renditions of ostensibly disappearing local cultures — thus exhibiting a nostalgia that often subtly underwrote a growing political reconciliation of North and South (with disastrous consequences for African Americans). Even Howells's editorial challenge to romantic fiction from his post at the Atlantic assumed that the conventional realism customarily associated with the