The Columbia History of the American Novel

James tests and qualifies Isabel's view of the self and imagination. -166-

He probes the web of sexual and market society pressures that affect the way she sees. In a patrician green world apparently far removed from the vulgar street, James reveals that even for Isabel Archer, profit, money, and gain are at the center of her marriage, just as they have penetrated to the center of her self.

In James's version of psychological realism, he uses metaphoric language to take us deep into a character's consciousness. James repeatedly recognizes the intimate connection between houses and selves in a possessive market society, a relation that for him has moral, psychological, and sociopolitical implications. Isabel, for example, gradually becomes aware that in marrying Osmond she is being confined in a house of darkness, that she is being imprisoned in a mind that lets in no air or light, that is a dungeon. Osmond's hatred, contempt, and egotism are overwhelming. Isabel's terror builds. The imagery is dense and deep, as are Isabel's painful moral and psychological realizations. Rooted in American political culture, her concern with freedom and independence is as alive as her eventual sense that she has been turned into a commodity, another objet d'art for Osmond to add to his collection, like the antique Roman coin he meticulously copies. James does justice both to the gradual, oblique way the mind works and to Isabel's sudden flash of awareness as she watches the intimacy between the standing Madame Merle and the seated Gilbert Osmond. But for all his sensitivity to the inner workings of the mind, James's psychological probing is not privatized. James shows the relation between the inner self and the environing world of the vulgar street.

Ironically, under Osmond's fastidious surface, under the aspect of taste, he and Madame Merle come to embody money and the vulgar street. Through Madame Merle, James exposes not metaphysical evil but the socially constructed evil of a society that places money above everything. For profit Madame Merle, gifted, aware, and sensitive, nonetheless lies to and betrays her closest friends. ''I don't pretend to know what people are meant for,' said Madame Merle. 'I only know what I can do with them.''

In a world where Osmond and Madame Merle are dominant forces, where their imagination, art, and dramatic skill are important, the world becomes a social text that may not be incomprehensible but that is also not easy to read. Osmond and Madame Merle em-167- body the deception, manipulation of appearances, and obsession with profit that many social observers regard as basic to consumer capitalism. In his way Ralph is also manipulative but, as opposed to Osmond, Ralph is generous and loving. Ralph sees clearly that Osmond is a sterile dilettante who will grind Isabel in the mill of the conventional. Although he accurately reads the social text, Ralph is unable to prevent the marriage. Isabel comes to understand but the inner and outer obstacles are formidable.

These forces are even more pronounced in the great works of James's final phase. His concerns remained remarkably consistentthe house of the mind, the role of the imagination, and the impact of money and power on the divided self in The Jolly Corner (1908), for example, or the central role of commodities, of money, and of love and betrayal in The Golden Bowl (1905) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). James's style, however, became denser and more impenetrable, the moral and social discriminations became subtler, the ambiguities more difficult to understand. In his later works James created a style adequate to render his sense of the emerging twentieth century. For James, the impact on the mind of the dominant forces of modernity impelled him beyond what we would ordinarily see as 'realism.'

Even William Dean Howells found the realism he himself practiced and advocated inadequate to deal with his most principled social concerns. After A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells engaged with the large forces of the new America not in realistic fiction but in the utopian novels A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

Responding to the energies of the new post-Civil War America, Mark Twain gave the period its name in a novel of the present, The Gilded Age (1873). In successive works, however, Twain moved farther into the past. He drew on his own boyhood and his years as a cub pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his masterpiece of vernacular realism. In these works he deals with contemporary concerns suggestively but indirectly, a tendency that intensifies in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), set not in the America of Twain's lifetime but in the England of a mythical past. His sense of -168- the American present seemed to make it difficult for Twain to deal with it imaginatively in anything like the mode of realism he had perfected in Huckleberry Finn. Except for Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and his essays and travel books, Twain turned increasingly to fable, s in the searing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), or dream tales, as in 'The Mysterious Stranger' (published posthumously).

Early in his career, however, in Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain began to develop his characteristic version of American realism as a way of knowing, seeing, and saying. For all the differences in class, cultivation, and milieu, Isabel Archer and her epistemological situation are similar to those of Mark Twain's cub as he tries to learn the constantly changing shapes of the river. In 'Old Times on the Mississippi' the river in nightmare fog and darkness, the river with its energy and shifting banks and channels, becomes a metaphor for the fluid, shifting American social world Mark Twain experienced in the years after he served his own apprenticeship as a cub. The cub must learn all 2000 miles of the river. But the banks cave, the river at night looks different from the river in daylight, and the mind itself plays tricks and turns a ripple on the surface of the water into a dangerous reef. Knowledge is based on empirical experience, on the hard work of memorizing soundings and landmarks, on courage and an artist's intuition. The epistemological dilemma is that the cub must 'learn the shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.' No wonder the cub is often terrified and demoralized. He comes to the river with romantic ideas of glory and finds out about the cruel hard work and danger involved. Part of the reader's fun is watching the cub's pretensions get their comeuppance as the greenhorn repeatedly underestimates the challenge of the river and the capacity of the veteran pilots, particularly the exemplary Mr. B.

As the jokes accumulate, they elevate the pilot to the status of a demigod who can see in the dark, steer a boat through a deadly channel while he is fast asleep, and who, like the steamboat that brings the dead town to life, 'if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead.' The language combines the tall-tale hyperbole -169- of frontier humor with the racy, precise language of piloting as an American occupation. As a realist, Twain taps into the energy of both traditions. American realists like Mark Twain may use such conventions to render a lifelike quality but they are rarely literal or onedimensional. Twain, for example, does justice to the world of the river in the 1850s and endows it with a suggestive charge that engages with his concerns as an American writer in the Gilded Age of moneymaking and accelerating technology. As a writer in such a destabilizing period, how does he know for sure? What can he rely on? What value does his work have? How trustworthy is the imagination?

For the cub, as for the writer, the pilot is a demigod, a deathdefying, life-giving savior figure. He thrives on the changing American world of the river. 'That's the very main virtue of the thing,' Mr. B. explains. 'If the shapes didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use.' It takes a special sensibility to see the virtue in these rapid changes and an equally special person to turn them to use. 'As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock. . If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights,' Mr. B. concludes, 'there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside a year.' The cub amplifies the mythic implications when he says, 'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat in order to make a living.'

'The true pilot,' Twain affirms, 'cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.' Encoded in this view is a revealing contradiction. The courage, intuition, and hard work of the pilot who 'cares nothing about anything on earth but the river' are at odds with that same pilot who glories in his princely salary, who looks down on and runs over lowly raftsmen, and whose pride 'surpasses the pride of kings.' The pilot was 'the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on earth. . His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody.' This supreme American individualist, however, is also enmeshed in a system -170- of supply and demand that keeps his wages high, that supports the luxury of the pilothouse and apprentices to do the menial work, and that contributes to the 'exalted respect' he commands. Against odds the pilots form a union, systematize the distribution of information, and