The Columbia History of the American Novel

provided model individuals capable of succeeding in modern society, sociologists were responding to contemporary anxieties about the erosion of individual initiative. At the same time they were controlling perceptions of human possibility.

An assumption governing the sociological use of types, which Captain Vere shares, is that the maker of these classifying terms is himself a neutral analyst. For Captain Vere, neutrality is part of being a professional. Off duty, Vere 'never garnished unprofessional talk with nautical terms,' a sign of the strict division in his mind between public office and private life. Vere's personal discretion is matched by a professional objectivity that brings him to substitute an 'imperial code' for the claims of 'private conscience.' Vere's call for the suppression of instinct confirms a late nineteenth-century ethic of professionalism. Like its other key tropes, this professional ethic aligns the novella with a literary realist movement that coincided with Melville's final decade: the years when he was working in the New York Custom House and writing Billy Budd.

The novels of William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Mark Twain, the paintings of Thomas Eakins, picture the frozen status quo worlds dreamed of by the rulers of the Bellipotent. -196-

In realism, social conflict is shifted to the borders of scenes or swiftly quelled. The worlds of realism are controlled by vigilance: the vulnerable visibility of the poor, the empowered visibility of professional elites, the invisibility of the rich. In an analysis of publicity in this period, Philip Fisher considers Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic as an instance of professional transcendence: the modern expert as God. Eakins's representation of the master surgeon at work presupposes the surgeon's power to select the moments when he is publicly seen. This moment is balanced by access to a privileged invisibility, which Fisher locates in the self-enclosed homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, homes that ensure the absolute immunity of their inhabitants from outward detection. While the public images of professional elites were carefully circumscribed, society's most powerful were invisible altogether. Eric Hobsbawm describes the increasing obscurity of governing elites in the late nineteenth-century era of mass democratization: 'When the men who governed really wanted to say what they meant, they had henceforth to do so in the obscurity of the corridors of power.' This is corroborated by Henry James's analysis of that pivotal political figure, 'the boss,' who operates in a shell of oblivion, his 'political role' at once 'so effaced, but so universal.'

In the case of the lower classes, this situation was inverted: their lives, at work and at home, were increasingly exposed to public scrutiny in this period. The introduction of production methods systematizing industrial work led to greater vigilance in the factories. The activity of social reformers, increasingly devoted to the domestic lives of the poor and the immigrant, led to greater surveillance at home. The impact of these reformers was mixed: while their obvious goal was improvement, they also participated in a more ominous campaign to know and manage a potentially dangerous underclass. Social scientists adopted a more remote attitude, but their relationships to the impoverished lives they cataloged from a greater remove were equally ambiguous. Liberal sociology mainly identified with the sober middle class, and kept the poor and the wealthy (whose interests they nevertheless implicitly supported) at a distance. The main concern of realist literature as well was the conventional and the middle class. A notable example of realism's occasional forays into the world of the poor is Henry James's In the Cage, his only work narrated from the perspective of a lower-class character. -197 -

The protagonist of this 1895 novella is a featureless telegraph operator, whose one distinctive trait is a classically overactive Jamesian imagination. The telegraph operator spends her days serving the wealthy who have grown addicted to a new technology that facilitates the rapid conduct of their (usually extramarital) affairs. To her customers, she is no more significant than the machine that relays their messages. Indeed, the novella ingeniously inverts its titular metaphor that casts the telegraph operator as a caged zoo animal. While she does work in a cage, it is her customers rather than she who are exposed to view. 'It had occurred to her early,' the novella begins, 'that in her position-that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-she should know a great many persons without their recognizing the acquaintance.' The story's plot centers on her effort to exploit this circumstance of being hidden but ever vigilant. Scrutinizing their faces like a detective, she assumes a fantastic intimacy with her customers, a knowledge of their every desire and scheme. Thus the predictable lower classes become the predictors of the upper class. By investing his telegraph operator with the story's main imaginative value, James identifies her as an artist of sorts. And through this character, James presents the Jamesian artist as a predatory dissector of the wealthy. Ultimately, however, James foils the visual powers of the telegraph operator, restoring realism's usual hierarchy of vigilance. The telegraph operator is foiled because she attempts to enter into the lives of her subjects. By trying to realize her visual intimacy, she violates the boundary of vigilance. Empirical control over others requires distance.

As one of the gentile poor, James's telegraph operator fulfills Emile Durkheim's theory of anomie. Defined in his classic study Suicide, anomie (literally, 'without norms') is a condition of rootlessness bordering on self-annihilation that occurs when human desires are raised beyond their realistic life expectations. According to this theory, hopeless poverty is a protection against suicide. But unqualified desire leads to disorientation and worse. It is appropriate, therefore, that the novella's final scene pictures the telegraph operator standing before a bridge while a policeman eyes her suspiciously. The policeman is an externalization of the control the telegraph operator no longer exercises over herself. -198-

The telegraph operator is an anomaly in James's realist canon, not only because she is poor, but also because she doesn't police herself. Rather than an internal plane for the individual's struggle and eventual reconciliation with social law (as in the case of a typical Jamesian heroine like Isabel Archer), the imagination of the telegraph operator is a plane of transgression. The task of regulating one's imagination, of internalizing external forms of vigilance, is a key activity of realist fiction. Realism emphasizes selective incorporation, its primary reflex is establishing borders. This is reflected in the claustrophobic atmospheres of realist works, which feel uniformly cramped whether depicting the interior spaces of Henry James or the battlefields of Stephen Crane. The scene of Stephen Crane's The Open Boat (1897) can be taken as paradigmatic. The challenge for the story's characters is maintaining the integrity of their craft ('no bigger than a bathtub,' the narrator snaps with characteristic cruelty) against an encroaching ocean. The homely similes, which seem to crowd the characters as much as the ocean (the captain is like a father 'soothing his children,' the seaweed is like 'carpets'), are there not only to taunt the characters by reminding them of the habitual protections they lack but to represent their inevitable restitution. Moreover, these similes are products of the characters' imaginations; the narrator is merely miming their familiarization of the threatening landscape. Like the wobbling boat that serves as its controlling metaphor, the story is concerned with what can be taken in, and what must be kept out, in order to ensure sanity and social stability. No matter how vast and wild its territory, realism concentrates on the most local mechanisms for stabilizing the social world-human perceptions and categories.

The central features of realism-the trope of vigilance, the emphasis on internalization, and the focus on individual over collective experience-come together in the most distinctive aspect of realist fiction-its view of character as type. The type supplies an immediately identifiable public persona, a boundary around the self. But it also acknowledges some residual aspects of personality that are inexpressible to others and perhaps even unknown to the individual. In the essay 'How Is Society Possible?' Georg Simmel refers to the 'non-social imponderables'-temperament, fate, etc.-those features that lend 'a certain nuance' to an individual but do not fundamentally change his 'relevant social category.' This makes the self po-199- tentially limitless in idiosyncratic terms, but poses a limit on what individuals can be in social terms. In keeping with this, Stephen Crane's 'Oiler,' 'Westerner,' 'Cook,' and 'Gambler,' as well as Henry James's 'Heiress' and 'Dilettante,' are individuals limited by function. But the idiosyncratic freedoms allotted James's more central characters are finally inconsequential in terms of plot. They are not allowed to stand in the way of their social function. Thus, Isabel Archer, the 'intelligent but presumptuous girl. . affronting [her] destiny,' for all her expansiveness, is fundamentally a type, and is so conceived by her fellow characters.

The typing of realist characters counters a threat that continually pressures the realist text: the threat of collective identification. The concept of type provides a view of self-sufficient, uniformly related individuals, whose collective existence is a matter not of choice or identity but of interdependence. Society promotes differences among its members so that they may be profitably related. This ideology of interdependence was set against the forms of spontaneous association that from the late eighteenth-century era of revolution to the late nineteenth- century era of expansion social observers most feared.

The novels of Henry James may appear to have little in common with naturalism. But in fact the issue of