R E A D I N G T H E N O V E LR E A D I N G T H E N O V E L

Reading the

American Novel 1865-1914

G. R. Thompson

“With extraordinary skill and exemplary clarity, G. R. Thompson

deftly unravels the complex definitional tangles of late nineteenth-

century American fiction to reveal how the dynamic double helix

of realism and romance fostered an artistically rich array of hybrid

literary forms resistant to simplistic labeling.”—William J. Scheick, University of Texas at Austin

G. R. ThompSon is Emeritus Professor

of English and Comparative Literature at

Purdue University. He has written widely

on the topic of American fiction and

romanticism, including books and articles

on the relation of the romance to the

realist tradition, the gothic fiction of Edgar

Allan Poe, the short stories of Nathaniel

Hawthorne, and the travel narratives of

Herman Melville. The former editor of the

journals Poe Studies and ESQ: A Journal of the

American Renaissance, he is also the editor of

various volumes, including the Norton Critical

Edition of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

He is co-editor of A Companion to American

Fiction 1865–1914.

Cover image: © George Bellows, New York, 1911.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Cover design by: Nicki Averill Design

Thompson R

eadin

g th

e Am

erican N

ovel 1865-1914

An indispensable tool for teachers and

students of American literature, Reading

the American Novel 1865–1914 provides a

comprehensive introduction to the fiction

written during a crucially important era..

Leading literary scholar G. R. Thompson

shares his insights into the fiction of one

of the most pivotal periods in American

literature, and each chapter offers both

a lucid distillation of the key conditions

of the historical and cultural contexts

and a practical guide for studying literary

works. For the beginner, Thompson offers

a foundational overview of the authors,

themes, and contexts of the field; for

teachers he provides a practical guide for

studying literary works; and for scholars,

he puts forth nuanced readings and a bold

new interpretation delineating the diversity

of historical genres, movements, and forms.

An illuminating introduction to the

literature of the period, this book

demonstrates the changing mentality of

nineteenth-century America entering the

twentieth century, framed between two

monumental wars. Demonstrating different

attitudes toward and representations of

contemporary concerns as they appeared

in literature, Thompson addresses the

relationship between the intellectual and

artistic output of the time and the turbulent

sociopolitical context. Written in clear and

accessible prose, with fresh insights and

textual analysis, this is a book for anyone

interested in nineteenth-century and early

modern fiction, American literature, and

American cultural history.

jkt_9780631234067.indd 1 14/7/11 15:29:36

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914

READING THE NOVEL

General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz

The aim of this series is to provide practical introductions to reading the novel

in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions.

Published

Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and Alison Case

Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 Daniel R. Schwarz

Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson

Forthcoming

Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel Paula R. Backscheider

Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Shirley Samuels

Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel James Phelan

Reading the AmericanNovel 1865–1914

G. R. Thompson

This edition first published 2012� 2012 G. R. Thompson

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007.Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical,and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thompson, Gary Richard, 1937–Reading the American novel 1865–1914 / G. R. Thompson. – 1st ed.

p. cm. – (Reading the novel ; 4)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-23406-7 (hardback)1. American fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. I. Title.PS377.T47 2011813’.409–dc23

2011026037

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444344240;Wiley Online Library 9781444344271; ePub 9781444344257; Mobi 9781444344264

Set in 10/12.5pt Minion Font by Thomson Digital, Noida, India

1 2012

For Elizabeth

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

1 Toward the “Great American Novel”: Romance

and Romanticism in the Age of Realism 9

2 Of Realism and Reality: Definitions and Contexts 25

3 Dramas of the Broken Teacup: American “Quiet” Realism 41

4 The Nature of Naturalism: Definitions and Backgrounds 55

5 Implacable Nature, Household Tragedy, and Epic Romance 73

6 Frank Norris: The Beast Within 91

7 The Rocking Horse Winners: Theodore Dreiser

and Urban Naturalism 109

8 Subjective Realism: Stephen Crane’s Impressionist Fictions 125

9 Impressions of War: The Interior Battlefield 141

10 Sense and Sensibility: Sentimental Domesticity

and “New Woman’s Fiction” 157

11 Domestic Feminism: The Problematic Louisa May Alcott 179

12 “All the Happy Endings”: Marriage, Insanity, and Suicide 195

13 Vulgarians at the Gate: Edith Wharton and the Collapse

of Gentility 215

14 Tea-Table as Jungle: Henry James and “The Psychopathology

of Everyday Life” 235

15 Economies of Pain: W. D. Howells 261

16 The “Gilded Age”: Genteel Critics and Militant Muckrakers 283

vii

17 What Is An American? Regionalism and Race 299

18 The Territory Ahead: Emerging African American Voices 323

19 The “Dream of a Republic”: War, Reconstruction,

and Future History 343

20 At the Modernist Margin: Mark Twain 367

Bibliographical Resources 387

Index 421

Contents

viii

Preface

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to. . . students. As for the

rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Many American students seem to think that American literature exists in

some sort of void, as if American writers knew only American history and read

only other American writers. But American writers did not write in a

parochial vacuum. They were nurtured by England, the mother country,

and by Continental brothers, sisters, and cousins. To understand specific texts

of American fiction more than superficially, it is necessary to see them in a

broader, primarily European, context of social and literary history. It is also

necessary to see them in historical contexts that often blur the boundaries of

particular time periods.

America was from the first a mix of different cultures; but British literary

culture was always the preeminent model and influence, even when Americans

were in the process of trying to reject it. Other European influences ebbed and

flowed for over two centuries. In the later eighteenth century, themajor foreign

influence in literature was French neoclassicism; in the earlier nineteenth

century, the major influence was German romanticism; in the later nineteenth

century, it was the French again, accompanied by the Russians and Scandi-

navians, who like the French providedmodels for realism andnaturalism. In the

early twentieth century, the new modernism was an international mixture of

European literatures, owing much to French impressionist painting and

literature and emerging German expressionist fiction and theater.

Other elements of an “American” literature developed closer to home.Native

American songs and creation myths in the oral tradition from the seventeenth

century forward are still being recovered. African American literature begins in

ix

the eighteenth century and reaches its first apogee by the middle of the

nineteenth. The first important appearances of Asian and Jewish immigrant

literature occur in the very late nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw

the development of a growing corpus of Hispanic American literature.

These were some of the contexts for a course in American literature from

1865 to the early 1900s that I taught at Purdue University, called “The Rise of

Realism.” However, the period from the 1860s through the 1890s and beyond

was not characterized simply by realism, but also by the persistence of romance

and romanticism, by special blends of nonrealistic regionalism and local color,

by gothic themes and fantasy, by domestic sentimentalism, by women’s

idealistic protest writings, bymuckrakingmelodrama, by intense and conflicted

polemics on race, class, and economics, and especially by a problematic

“naturalism” partaking of both realism and romanticism.

I sometimes used “Realism and the Persistence of Romance” as an alternate

title for the course, and that phrase is a sub-thesis underlying the period survey

presented here. But I wish to make clear at the outset that in noting

continuities with earlier periods and precedents in certain forms of literature,

I am not suggesting the superiority of one over the other in social value or

literary achievement. Knowledge of traditions before the American Civil War

enhances our understanding of postwar concerns. And by cross-referencing

prewar and postwar works and matters, I have sought to moderate some

historical inaccuracies.

Some texts are significant for their sociopolitical or philosophical aspects;

and there are a number of works that receive attention in the following pages for

their historical or biographical interest. But within the large contexts of cultural

and literary history, the emphasis here is on works that have enduring power to

engage readers both intellectually and emotionally: on individual works

significant for their form (their various integrating structures) and individu-

alizing functions (with particular voices, particular characters, and particular

imagery). Once the large context has been laid out, it is the individual text that is

most important – at least for what I would call literary studies. To reverse that

would be like reading about the history of music and composers without

listening to any musical compositions.

The present book reflects this approach: major text plus context. It is

intended as a general overview of the territory, suitable for introductory classes,

though not necessarily always at the most elementary level. It is aimed at the

diverse audience levels of theWiley-BlackwellACompanion to American Fiction

1865–1914 (2005; rev. 2009), which I co-edited with Robert Paul Lamb. As in

that book, the major audience for the present volume is conceived to be

threefold: advanced undergraduates interested in preparing for graduate

education; beginning graduate students; and what the Companion designates

Preface

x

as “non-specialists and general intellectuals.” It may also be of some use to

teachers preparing their own courses in the field.

Wherever it has seemed appropriate, I have referred the reader to the

discussions in the Companion volume. For one thing, each of the Companion

essays contains an up-to-date bibliography of selected major critical and

scholarly works beyond what I have included in the comprehensive

“Bibliographical Resources” for the present volume. For another, my colleague

and I planned that volume over several years in ongoing consultation with the

contributors; and, for me, the present volume is an extension of, and at times a

debate with, that one. That is, I have an individual approach, and I argue a more

defined overall thesis: I trust that readers will find the two books, although

covering the same ground, are not repetitive but complementary.

My focus is on Anglophone American novels. By novel I mean to include the

short novel form usually called the “novella” or “nouvelle”; and I also make use

of selected short stories that are especially significant for understanding such

movements as romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, feminism,

regionalism, and modernism. The discussions often counterpoint an estab-

lished canon with an emergent new canon (or canons), noting for example

redefinitions of the “sentimental” and “domestic novel,” reconceived ideas of

“women’s fiction,” and rediscovered areas like nineteenth-century African

American fiction. Others deal more centrally with political issues, the eco-

nomics of social class, the development of psychological fiction, and so on.

As part of the introduction of particular literary texts with which the general

reader or beginning student may not be familiar, the importance of narrative

structure is emphasized. In emphasizing the importance of story, I follow the

lead of critics and teachers of American literature like Darrel Abel in his three-

volume literary history, American Literature (1963), and Nina Baym in her

Woman’s Fiction: AGuide toNovels by and aboutWomen in America, 1820–1870

(1978; revised 1993). In these works, analytic plot summary is combined with

critical interpretation, revealing meanings embedded in the structure of un-

folding narration.

In dealing with structure, I have recourse to some very basic ideas: namely,

the old Freytag pattern of rising and falling actionwith a crisis somewhere a little

past center. This paradigm was developed by Gustav Freytag in the nineteenth

century in reference to the apparent five-act structure of renaissance (specif-

ically Shakespearean) drama: exposition (setting forth the basic situation and

introducing the main characters); complication (setting obstacles between

characters and their goals, knotting up the plot and complicating relation-

ships); crisis (a turning point toward one outcome or another in the narrative

and in the lives of the principal characters); climax or second crisis (usually an

emotional highpoint replicating the issues decided in the crisis); and the

Preface

xi

denouement (untying the plot knots, bringing the narrative to some sort of

resolution, even if an elliptical one).

To this pattern, I add two more. Most obvious is the nineteenth-century

practice of publishing long novels in two or three volumes, which results in the

typical American novel of any substantial length having a significant high point

or narrative “turn” at the end of the first of two volumes.When published in one

large volume, portions of the narrativemay be labeled “books” andmay ormay

not renumber the chapters within each book; sometimes very large novels have

five-act structures named and numbered as “books.” This often results in a

thematic and narratival “middle-point” at the end of a “book” or volume, taking

the form of a major iconic scene or a major turning point, often the “principal”

crisis. In earlier nineteenth-century aesthetics, as formulated by German

theorists, notably Friedrich Schlegel, this middle-point (Mittelpunkt) was

central to the idea of the “geometric” novel. Schlegel further elaborated the

middle-point to include secondary or “elliptical” middle-points – an idea that

finds an analogue in Frank Norris’s concept of a main narrative “hinge” and

related “pivot-points” (see Ch. 6).

I also have occasional reference to nineteenth-century narrative aesthetics

when calling attention to the “arabesque” quality (intricate interpenetrating

and framing patterns) of certain works and “romantic irony” (a proclivity for

seriously meaning and simultaneously mocking something). But in general I

call attention to middle-points, structural pivots, and geometrical segments

without specific reference to arcane theories. Nevertheless, I attempt in this

volume to combine traditional analytic tools for close reading of narrative texts

with newer concepts in critical theory and narratology – especially those of

M. H. Abrams, M. M. Bakhtin, Wayne Booth, G�erard Genette, Wolfgang Iser,

Frederic Jameson, Thomas Kent, Morse Peckham, and John Carlos Rowe (see

Bibliographical Resources). In addition to standard terms like plot, story, action,

and point-of-view, the reader will find concepts like focalization (the conscious-

ness through which the story is presented regardless of technical point-of-view)

and narratees (an explicit person or implied consciousness to whom the story is

addressed directly or indirectly). In this regard, the student should be familiar

with traditional point-of-view and its modes (e.g., first-person central or

peripheral; third-person omniscient or restricted; and so forth).

A few other significant terms, like dialogical, carnivalesque, and transgeneric,

are drawn in particular from the critical framework of Mikhail Mikhailovitch

Bakhtin, whose work has informed my own for the last twenty-five years. The

meaning of transgeneric is obvious; carnivalesque basically suggests the comic-

grotesque as a mode undercutting cultural norms. The dialogical indicates

historical and ideological oppositions embedded together in a text for an open-

ended, rather than a closed, thematic dialectic: the art of bringing to light

Preface

xii

contradictions and weighing their relative value. (Fuller definitions and

applications can be found in my earlier works on Poe, Hawthorne, and

“arabesque” narrative; see Bibliographical Resources.)

I have employed these terms sparingly, trying always to keep the primary

student audience in mind. I have imagined myself in the classroom, sometimes

lecturing to a group, sometimes talking to students informally. I have remem-

bered various expressions of puzzlement or sudden enlightenment – or

incomprehension at seeming digressions – or excitement about seeing the

overall picture of historical contexts and generic patterns – or, best of all,

sudden epiphanies regarding specific works. Thus, while presenting an over-

view of some complex theoretical propositions, I have tried to keep from

loading up the discussion with unfamiliar terms and jargon. Those more

technical terms and constructs that I do use I have tried to define and explain as

we go. In this regard, let me clarify the use of the word “we” in the following

discussions. It is not the “royal we” of some anointed expert, but the conver-

sational “we,” the sign of shared experience in reading. Ordinarily, personal

opinion will be obvious (for example, Howells’s The Shadow of a Dream

deserves greater recognition as a minor classic of American fiction). Occa-

sionally, however, I will try to make more explicit what may be a radical

divergence from the standard view. For example, I happen to think that Henry

James’s The Golden Bowl, which some critics think a masterpiece, is highly

overrated; and I say so as an “opinion.” For works about which there is

substantial critical disagreement, I give in addition tomy ownwhat seems tome

a central or basic interpretation in the context of what I think will be useful to a

student-oriented overview of the field.

My debt to the historical scholars and literary critics who have precededme is

enormous; but I also owe a general debt to sources beyond the printed page: to

my academic colleagues. By that I mean to include former teachers, fellow

teachers, fellow readers – and students. In the course of a career that spans

nearly fifty years and five universities, I have faced some ten thousand students

in the classroom. Many of these students, in their papers, in class discussion,

and later on in publications, have given me wonderful insights, broadened my

knowledge, and enriched my understanding. To the ten thousand as whole, I

owe an incalculable debt, and I thank them for what has been a wonderful

career. I can’t think of a better life than having been able to read and talk about

books with them.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

October 2010

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

I want first to acknowledge colleagues and friends at Purdue University where I

taught for over thirty years. I want especially to thank Howard and Nancy

Mancing, who provided a room in their home duringmy last teaching semester;

this refuge allowed me to complete parts of this book in seclusion and quiet.

My time at Purdue University overlapped with that of Darrel Abel for only a

few years. I could have wished for more. Conversations with him, and his

writings on Poe and Hawthorne, were important influences on my own work.

How much so may be suggested by the Festschrift that I and another Purdue

colleague, Virgil L. Lokke, compiled for him: Ruined Eden of the Present:

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel (1981).

For some two decades, my Purdue colleagues Leonard Neufeldt and Robert

Paul Lamb generously read and critiqued nearly everything I wrote. The present

book is the lesser for Len’s having retired. Bob Lamb’s reading of my work

always improved it; and of course we collaborated on the BlackwellCompanion

to American Fiction 1865–1914. I cite Bob frequently, and his presence will be

felt by those who know him, even when he is not specifically cited.

Among the greatest pleasures ofmy Purdue years wasworkingwith a number

of talented graduate students. One of the first dissertations I directed at Purdue

was that of Thomas L. Kent, a revised version of which was later published as

Interpretation andGenre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative

Texts (1986). In this work, Tom introducedme to some newmodes of thinking

about genre by applying paradigms of “information theory” to the conventions

of dime novels and tracing their transmutations in classic texts by Mark Twain

and Stephen Crane. Stephen Frye completed his PhD dissertation at Purdue

under my direction in 1995, a revised version of which was published as

Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance (2001); his

interest in Bakhtinian theory and his work on the persistence of the romance

xv

tradition in America run in the background of several of the discussions here.

Eric Carl Link also completed his PhD dissertation under my direction in 1995,

a revised version of which was published as The Vast and Terrible Drama:

American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (2004). The

extensive notes to that book provide a useful critical-bibliographical guide to

issues in both naturalism and realism, and this work is often cited in the present

volume. Eric and I also co-authored Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and

the American Romance Controversy (1999), a book covering American theories

of fiction from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth,

cited in the opening chapters of the present volume. In 2000, Beverly J. Reed,

who had acted as my research assistant for a volume on Poe, completed a

dissertation on the interaction of “scientific racialism” and the “visual/verbal

construction” of the body in relation to the “American Woman.” I was

privileged to serve as co-chair for this dissertation with the late Cheryl Z.

Oreovicz; from this project I learned new ways of thinking about historical

issues of gender and culture. There are others I would mention if there were

enough space; but my debt to Darrel, Tom, Eric, Steve, Bev, Bob, and Len is

direct and immeasurable.

Second, I wish to acknowledge the editors and staff at Wiley-Blackwell. In

what seems now a distant time and place, the General Editor of the Blackwell

Readings series, Professor Daniel Schwartz of Cornell University, recom-

mended me as the person to write Reading the American Novel 1865–1914;

and I want to thank him for his confidence in someone who is primarily a pre-

Civil War scholar. My first experience with the Blackwell publishing group was

with Andrew McNeillie (now of Oxford University Press), whose enthusiasm

was infectious; it was his conviction of the importance of the Blackwell

American series that persuaded me to attempt A Companion to the American

Novel 1865–1914 – on condition that I could persuade Bob Lamb to join me as

co-editor.

Working with Blackwell (subsequently Wiley-Blackwell) has been one of the

more gratifying experiences I have had in book publishing (as the acknowl-

edgment in the Companion indicates). For their work on one or both projects I

want to thankKarenWilson, JennyHunt,HelenNash, Gillian Somerscales, and

others of the Blackwell and Wiley-Blackwell teams. Ben Thatcher saw the final

two condensed versions of the present book through to the production stage.

Copy-editing was carried out meticulously by Gail Ferguson, who also took

special carewith complex bibliographical cross-references; AlisonWorthington

undertook the task of producing a thorough index beyond just names and titles.

I especially want to acknowledge Felicity Marsh, who coordinated the final

production of this book from copy-editing to actual publication. Her com-

mand of all aspects of editing and production, her understanding of writers’

Acknowledgments

xvi

concerns, and her straightforward professional demeanor, combined with

friendly low-key humor, made the last stages of this project virtually free of

author-anxiety.

Most of all, I am grateful to executive editor Emma Bennett, who became the

guiding light for the present volume shortly after its initiation. She suggested

different options while the manuscript grew and shrank like Alice. When I

began more than once to lose perspective, she offered gentle encouragement to

stick with the project and made many suggestions for its improvement. She

has been central in shaping this book into the more focused work it is now.

I have had some wonderful editors in the past; and I was once again

exceedingly fortunate.

I sought special help from Grace Farrell, Rebecca Clifton Reade Professor of

English at Butler University. I asked Grace to read what was then a very long

central section (almost a small book in itself) on women authors and woman’s

fiction, checking for gross errors as well as editing for length. It was a lot to ask.

To my great delight, she set to work cutting and condensing; page after page of

unnecessary material dropped out; and, with a few deft transitions, she made

them disappear pretty much seamlessly. Bob Lamb also helped me cut the first

part of the overly long manuscript, with analyses and summaries shortened,

with some paragraphs of garrulous transition omitted, and the notes curtailed. I

am grateful for all such advice; but of course any abrupt shifts of subject or

overly truncated discussions are my sole responsibility.

My deepest debt is to my wife, Elizabeth Boyd Thompson, who is herself the

best editor I know. Elizabeth listened tomenatter formore than five years about

this book, offered sensible advice, and, as she has done so many times before,

skillfully edited the final manuscript. She reduced the repetitions, weed-

whacked the underbrush, generally cleaned up the style, and pointed out when

things didn’t quite cohere. When further reductions were requested, she did all

this again. Without her indispensable help, I could not have finished this book.

And so, once more, I dedicate my work to my beloved life’s companion.

Acknowledgments

xvii

Introduction

From 1865 to about 1910, literary circles in America debated the relative value

of the novel and the romance with increasing intensity. On the surface, such a

mattermay not sound terribly significant, but the ongoing debate about realism

and romance was central to the quest for cultural unity after the Civil War: it

became a major issue in the reemerging concern for a “national” American

literature, embodied in the idea of the “Great American Novel.”1 This debate is

also central to the interpretation of the texts to be examined in this volume.

Genre is a lens, and we need to be aware of the lens and its prismatic properties.

Genre conceptions – and their departures and de-formations – are central to the

accurate understanding of individual works of literature.

Over time we find an ever-changing hierarchy of genres reflecting compli-

cated (and not always consistent) value systems of cultural suppositions and

fashions. Taxonomies like novel or romance, realism or romanticism, are tied

to some angle of vision, whether generally conceptual or specifically literary. It

is important to remember that, however privileged any one literary formmay be

in any given era, genres are always in contentionwith one another. It will be well

to remember this caveat when trying recover an accurate idea of the post-Civil

War era and its literature.

America Singing: The Varied Voices of Realism

Just before the Civil War, in 1860, and then again in 1867, the romantic-realist

poetWaltWhitman included in the “Inscriptions” section of Leaves of Grass the

poem“IHearAmerica Singing.” In it, he catalogues the “varied carols” he hears:

from mechanics, carpenters, boatmen, shoemakers, hatters, woodcutters,

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson.� 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1

ploughboys, wives, mothers, girls sewing or washing, young men singing

together at night. Historical paradigms are dependent on which “voices” from

the past we actually allow ourselves to hear. The following are some classic

examples of these varied voices.

Realist fiction: 1860s and 1870s

Important realist works that focused on the actual and specific problems of

particular regions, events, and occupations include: John William De Forest’s

Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867); Mark Twain’s The

Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day (1873) and the quasi-fictionalized Life on the

Mississippi (1873); Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873);

Albion W. Tourg�ee’s A Fool’s Errand: A Narrative of the South during Recon-

struction (1879).

Realist fiction: 1880s and 1890s

The next decade produced works of social and economic realism as different as

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and William Dean

Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), both of which make use of dialect

and vernacular in an attempt to reproduce the actual sounds of regional

American and immigrant English. A newer form of domestic realism also

reached a zenith in the 1880s and 1890s with such works as: Henry James’s

Washington Square (1881),The Portrait of a Lady (1881),TheBostonians (1886),

The Spoils of Poynton (1896–97), andWhat Maisie Knew (1897); William Dean

Howells’s A Modern Instance (1881) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885); and

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).

The last decade of the century also produced not only gentler-seeming works

of pastoral regional realism, like Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed

Firs (1896), but also grimmer works focused on regions or specific areas like

Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Stephen Crane’s The Red

Badge of Courage (1895).

Realist fiction: early 1900s

These realist breakthroughs were followed in the new century by Charles W.

Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905),

James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903), Edith

Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913).

The term naturalism refers to the pessimistic late-century aesthetic ideology

competing with realism. But readers familiar with some of the works just

Introduction

2

mentioned will be aware of how blurred the line between naturalism and

realism can be.

Naturalist fiction: 1890s and early 1900s

Representative titles of naturalist fiction include: Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of

Soldiers and Civilians (1891), Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

(1893, 1896) and George’s Mother (1896, 1898), Frank Norris’s McTeague

(1899) and The Octopus (1901), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods

(1902), Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904),

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911),

James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912),

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and The Financier (1912).2

What underlay the appearance of these works, which are supposed to be a

reaction to the illusions of romance and romanticism? The usual answer is

political and sociological rather than literary: the grim realities of the Civil War

and its economic aftermath. But this seemingly simple and direct proposition is

actually rather complicated, involving several quite different ideological per-

spectives and genre conceptions.

Mapping the Territory: Realism, Romance,and the Civil War

One of the most repeated generalizations about the 1865 to 1914 period

in literature used to be that “realism” overtook and essentially buried

“romanticism.” In the conflict between romanticism and realism, the novel

supposedly achieved dominance over the earlier romance – so that one of the

carcasses left on the battlefield after 1865 was the emaciated body of the latter.

Most of the great realist works, however, have various forms of romanticism

and romance embedded deep within their realist fabric. Moreover, naturalist

writers of the same era, particularly Jack London and Frank Norris, whose

works are sometimes said to represent an extreme form of realism, acknowl-

edged the strong influence of the romance tradition.

The preconception that post-Civil War realism did away with romance and

romanticism for the next half century continues to be popular in part because it

is reified by the very names for the period in literary histories, textbooks, and

course descriptions. For decades, the most common names for the era in

American literary history between the Civil War andWorldWar I were the Age

of Realism and the Rise of Realism, or more aggressively the Triumph of Realism.

Introduction

3

This idea that the shocking realities of the Civil War and its aftermath were

responsible for the “triumph” of realism was conventional for a century or

more, beginning at least by the 1880s.

For example, in theDial forMay 1887, SamuelM.Clark commented that “the

present generation of readers do not take readily to romance.” The following

year, in an essay on “The Romantic and the Realistic Novel,” the critic and

novelist H. H. Boyesen remarked that, in his “devotion to realistic art,” he “was

inclined to believe some years ago that romanticism was dead.” Earlier in the

decade, in 1883, James Herbert Morse, equating the novel with realism, had

written in the Centurymagazine that – after the war – “all the conditions of the

times forced the romancer out of the field and pushed the novelist in.”3 It is clear

from Morse’s and Boyesen’s pairing of the words romanticism–romance and

realism–novel that they equated genre and genre expectations with a worldview,

with literary movements, and with historical eras.

W. D. Howells in an 1899 lecture on “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading”

called the realistic novel the “supreme form of fiction,” a form greater than the

romance (NGd, 143). In an essay remarking the rise of “The New Historical

Romances” in theNorth American Review for December 1900, Howells claimed

that the “natural tendency” of American fiction of the 1870s and 1880s was

realistic and that the new romances were, happily, more realistic than the older

ones before the war.

Theory of the American romance-novel

Half a century later, when a new generation of American scholars was

reevaluating its national literary history, Richard Chase offered the classic

statement of both the demise and persistence of romance. In The American

Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Chase wrote: “It used to be thought that the

element of romance in American fiction was destined to disappear,” and that

“perhaps had to all intents and purposes already disappeared, as a result of the

rise of modern realism,” which “set in after the Civil War.” Moreover, it “used

to be thought, also, that this was a good thing, romance being regarded as a

backward tendency of the comparatively unenlightened youth of our culture.”4

A year or so before, in The Cycle of American Literature (1955, 1956), Robert

E. Spiller, the editor of the celebratedLiteraryHistory of theUnited States (1948),

had insisted on the idea that romance and romanticism had been supplanted by

realism and the novel. The new realistic novelist was represented by W. D.

Howells, who, Spiller said, had opened the door to “a moremeaningful fiction”

through “his advocacy of realism” (116–19; my italics). Not only had the realist

novel “superseded” the older forms of literature (including drama and poetry),

Introduction

4

but also a more precise regionalism and realism “took the place” of the

“imagination and idealism” of romanticism (113). It was, he said, sometime

between 1910 and 1920 that America finally “came of age.” The “actualmoment

of maturity” might be located in events in 1912 or 1916, as the “symbol for the

putting away” of “nineteenth-century forms, ideas, and habits” (162).

But Chase pointed out theways in which realism and romance coexisted. The

actual “cycle” of American literature was the interaction of novel–romance,

romanticism–realism. The “history of the American novel,” Chase wrote, is

“not only the history of the rise of realism but also of the repeated rediscovery of

the use of romance . . .” Chase’s interpretation of the native tradition became

known as the “Romance Theory” of American fiction.

Nearly another half a century later,Michael Davitt Bell inCulture, Genre, and

Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature (2001) analyzed his

career as a development from an initial interest in romanticism vis-�a-vis

realism. His earliest concern was “a question about the generic bases of

nineteenth-century American fiction.” He had undertaken “the project of

interrogating two literary historical assertions that had become commonplace

by the 1960s.” These were the interrelated ideas that “the tradition of our fiction

before the Civil War had been one of ‘romance’ (as distinguished from the

supposedly ‘novelistic’ tradition of nineteenth-century British fiction); and that

following the Civil War the characteristic mode of American fiction had shifted

from ‘romance’ to ‘realism’.5

Without abandoning his interest in romance and realism as aesthetic

phenomena, Bell shifted his focus to what he came to call the “sociology of

literary vocation.” His “ultimate aim,” he wrote, “was to use sociology to try to

work out the relationship between works of American literature and general-

izations about ‘culture.’” Although focused on a literary form, his 1980 study,

The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation was already

merging formalist with cultural concerns. Thirteen years later, inThe Problem of

American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (1993), he

was examining “realism” primarily as a political-cultural event.6

The sociological interpretation of realismwas not new in the 1980s and 1990s

when Bell moved from aesthetic interests to more broadly cultural ones. It had

been quite common for mid-twentieth century surveys and anthologies to toss

off casual statements about the overly aesthetic inclination of romanticism and

how the “romantic element was vanishing from our national life.”7 A somewhat

more temperate statement is found in the introduction to “The Triumph of

Realism” section in a standard reference book for students, the College Outline

Series volume, American Literature. Here we read that the Civil War brought

mass “industrialization of the United States,” which brought about “the

twilight of romanticism and the dawn of realism.”8

Introduction

5

Sociology and literary history

It is easy to see the appeal of the CivilWar as themajor pivotal point not only in

American political history, but also in American cultural history. For one thing,

the bloody realities of war seem to contrast with the romantic optimism of the

dominant American philosophy known as Transcendentalism. For another, the

war brought into sharp focus, not the overarching idealismof a unified land, but

a recognition of its disparate regions and peoples. And yet the romantic idea of

the Great American Novel as something mythic – an archetypal representation

of the nation as a whole – grew and persisted after the war.

In 1960, C. Hugh Holman reemphasized the idea of “industrialism” as a

primary cause and a principal trait of American realism – attributing its rise to

the CivilWar.He asserted that thewar had been a struggle between the concepts

of agrarian democracy and industrial democracy. The Northern victory

brought the “triumphant emergence” of industrialism, which generated me-

chanical and material advances but also caused labor disputes, economic

depression, unionism, violent strikes, and reciprocal repression by the Robber

Barons. There was, Holman wrote, a realistic “disillusionment with American

life never before widespread in the nation.”9 How “widespread” is uncertain;

but among pre-war intellectuals and artists, disillusionment with the dream of

an ideal republic was certainly amajor theme.Holman also pointed to the rise of

science – or at least a rising consciousness of scientific thought among the

general public. The impact of Darwin, Marx, Comte, Spencer, and others who

were advancing “a scientific view of man,” was sharply at odds with “the older

religious view” and was undercutting the old romantic “certainty” about

“perfectibility” and the “inevitability of progress.”

JayMartin opens his densely detailedHarvests of Change: American Literature

1865–1914with the following: “The changes that took place inAmerica between

the Civil War and the First World War were remarkable both for their

completeness and for their rapidity”; the “whole scene of human endeavor

and thought” that had “existed since the Middle Ages” in the short period of a

half-century “passed away.” Chief among the “forces” effecting change in

“literary production between the wars” was the fact that the “continuity of

literary taste” was “shattered by the Civil War.”10

These generalizations are not entirely wrong; it is the sweeping and absolutist

quality of them that is problematic. Like many another critical study of the

period, Harvests of Change focuses on post-war historical, political, and

socioeconomic pivotal points: the Rise of Wealth, the Growth of the City,

Immigration, Reform, Education, the Growth of Science and what he calls “a

Naturalistic Test of Truth” (specifically Darwinism), Technology, and Mass

6

Introduction

Literature. In literary criticism since then, the shift toward sociological context

and cultural critique has continued apace.

Sociological concerns are paramount in the fourth edition of the popular

Heath Anthology of American Literature (2002). Much of the long introduction,

the “Late Nineteenth Century: 1865–1910,” is focused on the social and

technological implications of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. About a third

of the way into the introductory essay, the editors say that literary realismmay

be defined on its “simplest level” as a “matter of faithfulness to the surfaces of

American life.”11 The introduction goes on to place a number of later American

writers in socioeconomic contexts, with the history of literary tradition

relegated to the background.

Inmy view, for the study of literature per se, we need first to deal with several

large aesthetic idea-complexes barelymentioned in theHeath introduction: the

historical-cultural terms, romanticism, realism, naturalism; and the more

specifically literary terms romance and novel. For one thing, these concepts

are central to the whole debate over literary realism. For another, they are key

concepts in the idea of the “Great American Novel.”

Notes

1. The “Great American Novel” is discussed in the next chapter. “Literary

nationalism” was a major aspect of the preceding romantic period, but it was

less generic. Anyone reading the reviews and literary debates of the last quarter

of the nineteenth century in America can hardly fail to be struck by the intensity

of the concern for genre – especially the novel versus romance as representing

value systems and worldviews. Students often think of the romance as merely a

love story instead of its broader definition of going beyond (or eschewing)

everyday reality; see the historical definitions throughout this chapter and the

next. The terms and documents of the national debate are set forth in detail

from ante-1810 to post-1910 in Thompson and Link (1999), hereafter cited as

NGd (see Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works, p. 391), including a

comprehensive chronological bibliography.

2. For a complementary list, see Cowley, “Naturalism in American Literature”

(1950), 329.

3. Quotations fromHjalmarHjyorth Boyesen and SamuelM. Clark will be found,

contextualized, in NGnd, 157 and 141. For James Herbert Morse, see “The

Native Element in American Fiction” (Century Magazine), NGd, 141.

4. Chase, xi–xii. This influential book was considered a somewhat controversial

work for many years; for fuller discussion, see NGd, 33–43.

5. Adding “end of the century ‘naturalism’” as a form of realism (x–xii).

7

Introduction

6. Bell’s struggles with aesthetics versus sociology are representative of an entire

generation of scholars, including myself.

7. This hyperbole is from a classroom guide of the mid-twentieth century, Guy E.

Smith’sAmerican Literature: A Complete Survey (1957), 123–4. In the preface to

Nation and Region 1860–1900, the third volume of the Viking Portable Library

American Literature Survey (1968), Howard Mumford Jones maintains that by

the end of the Civil War “Romanticism had run its course” (III, xviii). Also see

Howard Jones’s The Theory of American Literature (1965 [1948]) for further

historical context outside of the romance/novel controversy, esp. Chs 4 and 5on

literary nationalism.

8. Crawford, Kern, and Needleman (1945[1953]), 158.

9. See Holman, “Realistic Period in American Literature, 1865–1900” (HBL,

1992), 400–2. The Robber Barons were ruthless “moneyedmen” who practiced

“bossism” and were largely responsible for the growing poverty level in what

Lincoln Steffens in 1904 called “the shame of the cities.” See Chs 4 and 16 of the

present volume.

10. Jay Martin (1967), 1, 16.

11. Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th edn, II, 10, col. B.

See also

Abrams (GLT); Barrish (1995); Cady (1971); Cowie (RAN); Hoffman (1972); Kent

(1986); Link (2004); Parrington (1930); Perosa (1983 [1978]); Pizer (1984 [1966]);

Ridgley (REAmL 1963); Rowe (1982); Scheick (ACAF 2009); Walcutt (1956). Also

see references at the end of the next chapter.

8

Introduction

Chapter 1

Toward the“Great American Novel”

Romance and Romanticismin the Age of Realism

The idea of the Great American Novel was implicit in the quest for “literary

nationalism” well before the Civil War of 1861–5; and it became a call for

national unity and national cultural achievement after thewar. The idea and the

phrase were crystallized in an essay titled “The Great American Novel” by John

W. De Forest in The Nation in 1868. De Forest speculated that this mythical

entity would be both a great epic poem of the people and the story of their

everyday lives. But for the rest of the nineteenth century the most persistent

question about this hypothetical construct was whether it would be a romance

of idealism and great, out-of-the-ordinary happenings or a novel of ordinary

everyday life.

Romance and novel are the two literary forms or genres at the center of the

debate between realists and romanticists at end of the century. The term

romance has a long pedigree, going back more than three centuries in English,

but we’ll begin with a nineteenth-century American definition. The first edition

(1828) of NoahWebster’sAnAmericanDictionary of the English Language reads

in part: “ROMANCE . . . A fabulous relation or story of adventures and

incidents, designed for the entertainment of readers; a tale of extraordinary

adventures, fictitious and often extravagant, usually a tale of love or war,

subjects interesting to the sensibilities of the heart, or the passions of wonder

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson.� 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

9

and curiosity.”1 To clarify the definition of romance, Webster compares it with

the novel: “Romance differs from the novel, as it treats of great actions and

extraordinary adventures” and “soars beyond the limits of fact and real life, and

often of probability.” It will be useful to keep this original distinction inmind as

we explore their coalescences and diversions in the American “romance

tradition.”

A “Library of Romance” in the Age of Realism

One of the popular series of fiction prior to the CivilWarwas called the “Library

of Romance,” published by Samuel Coleman of New York. What about

romances after the war? In an essay on the “Romance Tradition” in American

fiction (ACAF, 2009), William J. Scheick provides an extensive list of romances

in the period between the Civil War and World War I – along with an

illuminating examination of types and subtypes. He begins with a comment

on the ambiguity of terms and the interconnection between romance and

novel.2 Beginning with the historical shifts inmeaning from theMiddle Ages to

the Renaissance, Scheick comments:

...............................................................................................The definition of romance did not get any clearer with the rise of the novel during

the eighteenth century, when romance was generally understood to refer to

improbable, imaginative, and symbolic stories distinctly different from the novel.

Such a broad distinction, critically impressionist at best, was complicated by early

nineteenth-century authors, especially Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne,

whose hybrid fictions combined the factual properties of the novel and the

imaginative reach of romance. By the end of the nineteenth century this hybrid

form was very popular, despite the fact that some critics – fervid apologists for

literary realism such as William Dean Howells – struggled in vain to distinguish

between romance and the novel. (35)...............................................................................................

By the 1890s, as Scheick makes abundantly clear, the body of Anglo-

American romances was characterized by remarkable popularity and bewil-

dering variety, which Scheick has schematized under three large categories:

eventuary romance, which emphasizes plot and action; aesthetic romance, which

emphasizes a somewhat more passive aspect of “aesthetic appreciation”; and

ethical romance, which breaks down boundaries between fact and fiction and

generates a variety of forms that balance the “ethos of storytelling” with “life” or

“realism.” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914) would be an

example of event-centered romance; some of the romance forms that

Toward the “Great American Novel”

10