Entanglement of reformist impulses with literary realism

Sunday, April 15, 2007 Amanda Claybaugh, Part 1: The Fiction of the Thing Posted by Joseph Kugelmass on 04/15/07 at 04:27 AM Those of you interested in the social and political functions of literature should seek out Amanda Claybaugh’s new study, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Welcome to The Valve Comments

The Constructivist (and PG), I think that transnational progressivism is a very productive way of thinking about the United States in the twentieth century, but I think that in the nineteenth century the more useful category is the more specific one of Anglo-American reform. In the nineteenth century, both Britain and the United States understood social reform to be the one thing that distinguished them from Europe: it was reform, they believed, that had saved the two nations from the revolutions that were convulsing the continent. We may agree or disagree with this account of the nineteenth century (and we can certainly wonder where the US Civil War fits into it), but I think we shouldn’t ignore this felt sense of Anglo-American distinctiveness in our eagerness to connect the United States and Britain to broader trajectories of social change.

But I sense that you both, The Constructivist and PG, have more to say about this. Am I right to presume that you’re both working in the twentieth century? I’d be eager to hear how you think things change in that period (or what you think about the Bender and Rodgers). And Luther, am I right to sense that you are dissenting not only from the suggestion that Stowe might be transnational, but also from a too-quick embrace of the transnational more generally? (If so, I think I may be joining your dissent). By Amanda Claybaugh on 04/15/07 at 05:45 PM Permanent link

Ah, Luther, I was right: we *are* suspicious of the same things. In another thread, you had argued that the “cultural flows” between Great Britain and the United States were crucially determined by “materialist frameworks,” such as trade. A similar claim is the starting point for my book. I argue that trans-Atlantic scholarship has so far fallen into two categories:

1) studies that focus on the US-Britain relation and ask how the two nations imagined one another (I’m thinking here of Robert Weisbuch, Lawrence Buell, and much of Paul Giles) and

2) studies that focus on the Atlantic world more generally and seek to uncover the material networks that constituted this world (Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, and Brent Edwards).

My book tries to bring the insights of the second set of scholars to bear on the questions asked by the first. More simply, I argue that the United States and Great Britain imagined one another in ways that were determined by the material relations already existing between them.

The relations I focus on are the ones created by social reform movements: nineteenth-century reformers crossed the Atlantic to visit one another; they went on trans-Atlantic lecture tours and attended Anglo-American conferences for reformist causes of all kinds; they exchanged letters, petitions, and “friendly addresses”; they raised money for one another through reformist bazaars and penny drives; and they offered one another tactical advice and moral support, as well. It was within the context of these concrete exchanges that reformers in both nations imagined the other—and, in imagining the other nation, sought to transform their own.

And so we have Chartists hoping that the US President would intervene on their behalf with the Queen, and we have black anti-slavery activists thinking of England as their true ancestral home (Elisa Tamarkin has a fantastic article on this). But, of course, not all of these fantasies led to real change—and not all of these fantasies were ones that we would now identify as libratory or progressive. The politics of nineteenth-century reform are simply too complicated for that.

And then there’s Luther’s crucial point, that these reformist exchanges (whatever their own politics might be) were made possible by the existence of other networks of exchange, which continue on unaltered by reform. Luther shows this through his elegant reading of “Flight to America.” I try to show it in my discussion of Elizabeth Stoddard’s *The Morgesons,* which borrows narratives from temperance and anti-slavery reform even while acknowledging that the protagonist’s family’s money comes from the trade in slaves and rum. By Amanda Claybaugh on 04/16/07 at 11:06 AM Permanent link

The Constructivist: Why, yes, I do indeed write a bit about Hawthorne. I can explain what I say about him more easily if I first sketch my argument more generally. The nineteenth-century novel got caught up, I argue, in the Anglo-American culture of reform, and the result was a conception of the novel best captured in the contemporary critical phrase, “novel of purpose.” Nineteenth-century novels were written, published, read, and reviewed in a literary world that was entirely structured by the expectation that novels would seek to act on their readers—and, through their readers, the world. And it is the purposefulness of the Anglo-American novel that distinguishes continental realism (which seeks to represent the world as it is) from what I call Anglo-American realism (which represents the world in the hope of changing it).

My main interest lies, however, with those novelists who had some reservations about the literary consensus I’ve just described. For some, the reservations were primarily political:

• Charles Dickens believed that temperance reform was a distraction from the real needs of the poor, while
• Thomas Hardy believed that marriage law reform would make no difference at all, and
• George Eliot became increasingly skeptical of universal manhood suffrage. For others, the reservations were primarily literary:
• Henry James showed the ways in which reformist impulses deformed the realist project, and
• Mark Twain showed how the sentimentalism of reformist writing had become a way of flattering readers (and presenting oneself as an important writer) rather than a sincere effort to change the world.

For me, then, Hawthorne is one of the most insightful observers of the phenomena I’ve seeking to describe. I read *The Blithedale Romance* as not only identifying (and satirizing) the culture of reform that interests me, but also as identifying (and parodying) the entanglement of reformist impulses with literary realism that I’m seeking to trace. And now I wonder whether this accords with your sense of Hawthorne? By Amanda Claybaugh on 04/16/07 at 04:53 PM Permanent link

I apologize for my delay in responding to the substance of this post: it was so dazzling that at first I could only marvel and admire. Joseph Kugelmass is exactly right that my own historical approach is not intended to be anti-theoretical; my thinking is deeply shaped by the theorists he discusses, although I don’t think I could give nearly so elegant an account of them. But I do want to re-insert history into Kugelmass’s theoretical account at one point. Where he says that “a unity is an arbitrary construction,” I’d say, “arbitrary, but historically-determined.”

I’ve spent a lot of time puzzling over the various arbitrary constructions that seemed very real to my novelists and reformers, asking why a given mode of representation (realism) came to be associated with a given body of subject matter (the workers, the poor) and why movements that seem to us to have quite different politics (anti-slavery activism and temperance reform) were once seen as allied.

And I try, in my book, to show how these associations and alliances took shape over time. This is why I’m so taken with Peter Demetz’s idea of the syndrome: it suggests that seemingly arbitrary constructions are best understood as the record of all prior—and often haphazard—choices. Novelists imitate novelists and reformers imitate reformers, modifying one another all the while, until something we can call “reform” or “realism” begins to take shape. By Amanda Claybaugh on 04/20/07 at 06:36 PM Permanent link