The Columbia History of the American Novel

novel — initially modeled upon the knowable community of Jane Austen — would sustain 'sanity' and balance in the American republic, provide a consensual middle-class culture by portraying 'men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and passions in the measure we all know.'

Yet the hegemony of such guardianship was always incomplete. Even Howells's 'measure' could only be a nostalgic standard, an attempt to hold a moderate republican American center against the signs of the times: against European and Asian immigration (nearly nine million new arrivals between 1880 and 1900); against growingly bellicose expansionism, so evident in the Spanish-American War of 1898; against spasmodic class warfare and violence in the railroad strikes of 1877, the Haymarket Riot (1886), the Homestead strike (1892). In Howells's adopted home of Massachusetts, there were hundreds of strikes in the 1880s alone. Much of late Victorian literary culture dramatized whether the Howellsian center would (or should) hold. In other hands, the novel would be both formally more varied and ideologically more radical than the 'Dean' envisioned: in the sociopolitical comedies of immigrant life by the Russian American -158- Abraham Cahan; in the openly discursive, spiritualized gender myths of Sarah Orne Jewett (who readapted the conventions of local color); in the political refashioning of historical romance by African American magazinist Pauline Hopkins; in the Cinderella class fables of Laura Jean Libbey.

Of course, the quarrel and the reciprocity between boundary and center, affirmation and dissent, never quite disappeared even as realism fragmented — and as the marketplace expanded. Even among the writers above, dependent as they were upon an audience created by their own professionalization, the challenge was often to work through popular forms that had received Victorian sanction. Among the seemingly naturalistic writers Howells greeted so uneasily as his logical successors — Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, or muckrakers like Jack London, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair — the sway of popular romance had hardly been forsaken. True, some measure of change can be felt in the new literary explorations of the slum, the factory, the 'mysteries of the city' — subjects at which Howells had once only shuddered. The new material bounties of industrial society, however, were hardly disdained altogether. Despite the dark ruminations of a Twain or a Henry Adams, the industrial dynamo's own energy undercut many attempts at resistance. Indeed, the power and technical ingenuity of machine culture, and the mass spectacles of consumption it often created — in the hands of a Crane, a Dreiser, a Wharton, or a Henry James — became the substance of fictions that mixed their doubts with celebratory awe. In these ways, the turn-ofthe-century novel registered the war's final, yet mixed victory: a new North and a New South, a populace 'unified' and allured by mass consumption — the nation's productive reach enhanced within its territories and without — yet a society still internally divided over the spoils.

Christopher P. Wilson

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Realism

Money is the most general element of Balzac's novels; other things come and go, but money is always there.

Henry James, 'Honoré de Balzac' (1875)

'At the Station' opens with a passage that sounds familiar, perhaps because it is from a Howells or Twain story we can't quite place. 'Nothing could well be more commonplace or ignoble than the corner of the world in which Miss Dilly now spent her life,' the story begins. 'A wayside inn, near a station on the railway which runs from Salisbury, in North Carolina, up into the great Appalachian range of mountains; two or three unpainted boxes of houses scattered along the track by the inn; not a tree nor blade of grass in the 'clarin'; a few gaunt, long-legged pigs and chickens grunting and cackling in the muddy clay yards; beyond, swampy tobacco fields stretching to the encircling pine woods.' The emphasis on the commonplace, on the ignored or despised; the attention to the unpainted houses, the muddy clay yards, and the gaunt pigs and chickens — or their human equivalents; the possibility of sympathy and satire; the awareness of regions and regional differences; the sensitivity to American dialects and their class and racial implications; the conversational middle — and middle- class — style, vocabulary, and syntax; the focus on Miss Dilly, not on Captain Ahab or Leatherstocking — here is a preliminary list of the traits of American realism. Because Rebecca Harding Davis is not working at the height of her powers in At the Station (1892), the story, unlike her pioneering Life in the Iron Mills (1861), does not take us deep into the unexplored territory of America's emerging industrial capitalism or make us see the complex realities of money and power that were affecting women and men in the new America. The first generation -160- of American realists, however, writers who began publishing during or soon after the Civil War, authors as different as Davis and James, Twain and Howells, each gave distinctive individual accounts of these vital, disruptive forces. By the end of the century they and successors like Charles Chesnutt had also probed the complexities of race in post-Civil War America.

They did so as professional authors who were personally engaged in writing for the market in the new entertainment industry. Their insights, conflicts, compromises, and triumphs are inseparable from their experience in the new world of mass markets, advertising, and big money. These developments had begun before the Civil War but accelerated as the scale of production expanded, the railroad system was completed, and the need to create consumer demand intensified. The corrosive, vital power of an expanding market society undermined moral, religious, and social stabilities. No wonder that a questioning of conventions and the conventional is perhaps the central unifying convention of American realism.

In their literary criticism the writers explicitly questioned conventions and the conventional. In his Declaration of Independence, The Art of Fiction (1884), Henry James affirmed the creator's freedom to choose both subject and approach, even as James defied the 'keep off the grass signs' of the guardians of official taste. Even a writer as moderate as William Dean Howells, America's minister of culture, argued against the demand for a conventional love plot and all it signified, particularly a focus on marriage as the goal of life and an avoidance of the full range of contemporary concerns. After the Haymarket Riot in 1886 Howells attempted to explore the energies that were transforming American cities and threatening the moral and religious ideals he believed American writers should celebrate. The conflict between his desire to affirm his Emersonian values as the prevailing American reality and his commitment to render honestly what was happening in the new America goes to the heart of Howells's dilemma as an American realist. Mark Twain, for his part, ridiculed James Fenimore Cooper's conventions, which in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (1895) emerge as the improbabilities, exaggerations, and stilted language of the Leatherstocking tales. Twain is in effect arguing for a new set of conventions privileging the spoken language and fidelity to ordinary experience. -161-

Although we can create a composite portrait of American realism, differences and diversity are crucial. James, for example, had serious reservations about what he saw as Rebecca Harding Davis's sentimentality and the value she attributed to ordinary characters. Twain's colloquial immediacy is far removed from James's language and upper-class social world. Unlike the Europeans centering on Balzac and later on Flaubert and later still on Zola, we did not really have a school of American realism. Both in critical theory and in literary practice, moreover, the questioning of convention and the other formal and substantive traits all have antecedents in the work of earlier American writers, in the colloquial dialogue of Melville's Redburn (1849), for example, the sensitivity to the details of place in Hawthorne, or the practical, Yankee side of Emerson. It is a matter of degree, of emphasis. Similarly, younger authors like Dreiser, Crane, and Cather built on and reacted against what often seemed to them the timidity and limitations of the first-generation realists. In nineteenth-century America 'realism' is a relational term defined partly by what people in a particular generation were accustomed to accept as plausible and lifelike, partly by what they responded to as pushing toward and beyond the boundaries of middle-class acceptability.

The first-generation realists and their successors did justice to the surfaces of American life through the conventions of presentational realism — plausibly rendered speech, recognizable settings and recognizable characters facing everyday problems, all open to the interpretation of a middle-class, predominantly feminine audience. American realists also penetrated beneath the surface to engage with the underlying energies of men, women, and society in the Gilded Age. I will be examining some of the ways significant writers during and in the