of the relation between whites and blacks. In Waiting for the Verdict, Rebecca Harding Davis anticipated Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars in exploring the dilemmas of passing and of interracial love relations. Mark Twain opened up these and other dimensions of American racial practices and their impact on identity in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. In Huckleberry Finn Twain had earlier imagined the escaping slave, Jim, as humane and knowledgeable, in touch with the mysteries of the natural world and close to his family even as he is separated from them. But at the end Twain also allowed Tom Sawyer to turn Jim into an object, a stage figure in Tom's romantic fantasy world. These contrasting views of Jim have implications within and beyond the novel. At the turn of the century Twain wrote 'The United States of Lyncherdom' (1901). The concluding image of a mile of torches —187- kerosene-lighted bodies — throws a terrible light on the grimmest side of American racism. The fact that Twain was compelled to write 'The United States of Lyncherdom' but decided not to publish it during his lifetime — he feared loss of sales in the South — highlights the situation of the realistic writer engaging with market pressures and with perhaps the deepest fault line in American culture.
To shift to another highly charged concern, from the vantage point of later generations, say of Dreiser or later Hemingway or, later still, Updike, the first-generation American realists are circumspect or relatively indirect in their treatment of sexuality, one of the touchstone interests of the realistic novel from Balzac to the present. Money in all its implications is the other major preoccupation of nineteenthand twentieth-century realism. On this count the post — Civil War American writers are as full and perceptive as we can ask for. Their sense of reality is open and varied, responsive to the surfaces and recesses of American selves and society. Stimulated and sometimes thwarted by the energies of the Gilded Age, James, Twain, Davis, Chesnutt, and Howells, representative post — Civil War realists, help us map the emerging new America whose construction is no more certain than the shifting shores of Mark Twain's fog-shrouded Mississippi.
Robert Shulman
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Fiction and the Science of Society
In The Incorporation of America (1982), Alan Trachtenberg describes the significance of the White City as symbol, its ability to transform the diverse and conflicted America of 1893 into an image of national unity. White City was a study in managed pluralism: organized into twenty departments and two hundred twenty-five divisions, contained within one overarching 'symmetrical order. . each building and each vista serving as an image of the whole.' The choice of White City as the main design for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was suggestive at the most fundamental level. As Herman Melville knew, the color white is a negation of the various rays of the color spectrum. It reflects but it does not absorb. One indication of White City's strategy for managing diversity was its presentation of certain cultures. Instead of being invited (like other constituencies) to portray their experiences in the nation's history, African Americans and Native Americans were presumed to be represented by an exhibit on primitive populations throughout the world. This ambition — unity without absorption, harmony through denial — is no doubt one reason why Frederick Douglass renamed the fair 'white sepulchre.'
It seems appropriate in retrospect that just one year earlier the city's foremost educational facility, the University of Chicago, had instituted one of the country's first sociology departments. Of all the social science disciplines developing at this time, sociology was most driven by the vision of social interdependence and unity that inspired the architects of White City. For the early sociologists, knowing so-189- ciety meant knowing the social whole. Other social scientists — economists, psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists — saw social reality piecemeal, through the narrow lens of their specialization. Sociology was unique in its aim to combine these disparate specialties into one integral discipline. This methodological imperative was matched by a theory that saw an unprecedented affinity of human consciousness and interests throughout modern life. In the landmark essay in which he declares 'the scope of sociology' to be the organization of the 'human sciences into a system of reciprocally reinforcing reports,' Albion Small characterizes society as a 'realm of circuits of reciprocal influence between individuals and groups.' In keeping with the strategies of White City, Small's image is achieved at the cost of an evolutionary sleight of hand. What Small calls at one point, for example, that 'serious scientific problem, the status of the coloured race in the United States,' is subsumed in the image of 'the last native of Central Africa. . whom we inoculate with a desire for whiskey add[ing] an increment to the demand for our distillery products and effect[ing] the internal revenue of the United States.'
Small's vision of human reciprocity, his description of alien populations that can be 'innoculated' into a worldwide web of social and economic interest, was framed in a society fragmented by a bewildering heterogeneity of interests. This late nineteenth-century landscape of social change included: unprecedented immigration rates, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe; escalating capital-labor conflict; challenges to traditional women's roles that brought increasing numbers of women into an embattled labor force; rapid urbanization and industrialization; the rise of trusts; and the ever-intensifying problem of race relations. Like any discursive field, sociology was an attempt to tell a certain kind of story about a particular historical reality. The burden of American sociology at its moment of origin was to reinscribe a conflicted and potentially explosive social reality as a terrain of consensus and integration.
The dedication to knowing the social whole that gripped an emerging sociological discipline is readily seen as consistent with the ambitions of contemporaneous American novelists. What is less often recognized are their various involvements (direct and indirect) with the anxieties, premises, and methods of this new science of society. The response of writers such as Herman Melville, Henry James, Ger-190- trude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, to the formulation of a science that professionalized the main business of novelists-social observation, description of human types and types of interaction, the classification of these types-is an untold story whose narration provides a critical index to the social engagement of American novels. At the same time, to explore the rise of sociology in terms of contemporary novels is to enhance our understanding of the imaginative aspects of this new science.
The most vivid link between sociological and novelistic writings of the period is their shared interest in a language of social types. From Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (1905) to Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), from W. E. B. Du Bois's Philadelphia Negro (1899) to Henry James's American Heiress (1903), sociologists and novelists sought uniform types for mediating a vast and heterogeneous modern society. While literary authors have always been drawn to type categories, the typological methods employed by American novelists of this period have a particular historical resonance. They were formulated in response to the same pressing social landscape that gave rise to a modern discipline based on typological method. Type categories invested individuals and social phenomena with the semblance of predictability and control. They were key tools in turn-of-the-century efforts to circumscribe an ever-expanding society-to clarify, order, and label the social world. Types also served to promote and exclude different forms of social being. As Ian Hacking suggests in the essay 'Making Up People,' 'numerous kinds of human beings and human acts came into being hand in hand with our invention of the categories labelling them.' This interest in the varieties and limits of human action points to another central concern of the era: the question of individualism. American sociologists and novelists were at the forefront of changing conceptions of the individual. Their use of type categories was part of their struggle to mediate the divide between social determination and individuality in support of an ideal that was basic to American values, as well as essential to capitalist development.
What did it mean to know society for the first formulators of social science? For Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is generally recognized as a key forerunner of -191- sociological analysis, knowing society involved viewing it as a totality: describing its interrelated institutions, classifying its various parts, identifying its stages of development. Ferguson stressed empirical method; social study must be based on scientific observation, rather than on speculation. If sociological beginnings are detectible in the work of Ferguson, it was late eighteenth-century France that gave the emerging field a sense of urgency and purpose. Vitalized and christened in an era of revolution, sociology pointed toward a permanent condition of post-revolution. The Enlightenment values that had inspired revolution were now rechanneled into the shaping of a stabilizing social science.
