It is no secret that the American Studies movement finds itself methodologically fragmented and that definitions of its uniqueness and its relationship to other disciplines are a matter of debate within the profession. It is also no secret that attempts to move beyond the “nationalcharacter” and “myth-symbol-image” approaches have fallen short of consensus. Innovations and new directions in other disciplines include approaches and methods we have considered our province and frequently seem to move us in new directions that further fragment our movement.

To a degree incomprehensible today, when we have been surfeited by holocausts and are haunted by the notion of entropy, the first generation of transcendentalists – that of Emerson and Ripley, as opposed to that of Thoreau and Whitman – grew up in the certainty that progress was consubstantial with history and shared in the untroubled sureness of history's course. In 1823 Emerson noted in his journal:

The lively fancy of some men has induced them to entertain fanciful anticipations of the progress of Mankind, and of radical revolutions in their manners, passions and pursuits … But the quiet wisdom of History as she winds along her way through sixty centuries, speaks of no wonders, and of little glory … The most rapid progress of civilization in a community is so gradual that it is unmarked.

In “the american scholar” Emerson defines the problem of his vocation: The “duties” of the scholar are such as become Man Lecturing. His “office” is an explicitly rhetorical one: “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men.” The most requisite virtue for this task is “self-trust”; yet as Emerson elaborates on his public role, it turns out that he really means trust in the possibility of communion with his audience:

For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, – his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, – until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; – that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment, – to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.

It was something of an accident that Hawthorne's masterpiece appeared in bifurcated form: an adultery novel — that ancient female form — preceded by a long political introduction, as masculine in tone as anything Hawthorne ever wrote, called “The Custom-House.” This introduction deals with Hawthorne's three-year tenure as surveyor of the Salem Custom House, a post he was given as a Democratic Party stalwart, and which he took on solely for its salary. He describes his fellow officials (mostly Whigs) as stupid, sluggish, lazy, animal-like, senile, and gluttonous, and himself as little better than the rest:

a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions … And here, some six months ago, - pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eye wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, —you might have recognized … the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study … on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go hither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The bosom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

Toward the end of The Blithedale Romance, Miles Coverdale tells the A reader that he has borne the spectacle of Zenobia's death in his memory “for more than twelve long years” (p. 235). If, fancifully, we posit that his stay at Blithedale coincides in historical time with Hawthorne's stay at Brook Farm, this makes the year of the action of the novel 1841, and the year of its narration 1853, or later. Because the book was published in 1852, I would suggest that Hawthorne was projecting in his narrative not merely a contemporary state of mind but an ominously prophetic one. For I shall argue that Coverdale's mind is afflicted with a malaise closely related to the social disintegration he sees around him; that The Blithedale Romance is a willfully present-minded book; and that in it Hawthorne is preoccupied not just with Brook Farm but also with the inner afflictions of a newly fragmented New England society and, beyond that, with what Coverdale calls the “whole chaos of human struggle” (p. 246).

Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”

This essay represents an effort to understand how members of the middle class adjusted to the emergent urban-industrial order in the nineteenth century. In particular, I wish to inquire into what changes in social behavior, in emotional regulation, ultimately in identity this order entailed. I shall pursue these issues through the study of what may at first appear an unlikely source: the multitude of American etiquette manuals published between 1830 and 1910. Such materials can substantially enlarge our understanding of how behavior and identity were shaped and the cultural and social orders adjusted and maintained, as middle-class Americans encountered the momentous changes of a new urban-industrial society. This essay will concentrate on urban experience because here the problems of adjustment were most intense; but I would argue that as the process of capitalist development and modernization advanced, the styles of life and modes of consciousness first developed in cities came to a large extent to dominate the nation as a whole.

By the time oscar wilde made his American tour in 1882, the honeymoon tradition at Niagara was firmly established. Perhaps we are as cynical about honeymoons at the Falls as Wilde; by now the idea is a thorough cliche. Yet the custom has had a remarkably long life, reaching its widest vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, and even today it is not completely defunct: Young couples still “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and the Falls. In the late nineteenth century the association of the Falls with the wedding journey was promoted by hotel advertisements and railroad excursion pitches – a product of commercial “hype” much like the modern Poconos honeymoon. But the origin of the Niagara honeymoon seems to antedate such promotion by several decades, although it is difficult to pinpoint. Both its elusive origins and its remarkable persistence suggest a deep-seated imaginative attraction that Niagara has held for newlyweds.

Thomas pynchon's oedipa maas sees in the Varo triptych echoes of her own Rapunzel-like state, her world a tower from which Pierce Inverariety has ineffectually tried to rescue her. Pynchon does not comment on the other two panels of the triptych. In the first, the young women (more slender than frail) file away on bicycles from their conventlike towers – out for exercise or a trip to town; in the last, one of the maidens departs with her knight of deliverance. Nor does Pynchon observe that in the middle panel the young women, embroidering the tapestry of the world in their communal solitude, create the world. In which panel, one might ask, are the young women most free?

The work of Remedios Varo is filled with women in towers; spinning, weaving, writing poetry, composing music – creating the world. All of the women are the same woman. She frightens Pynchon. “Such a captive maiden,” he writes, “soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant.”

It came as no surprise to John Sloan when in 1910 the National Academy of Design refused to exhibit his painting 3 a.m. (Fig. 1). Its subject matter must have appeared to the academy jury, as Sloan later said, rather “like a pair of men's drawers slipped into an old maid's laundry.” It is apparent that the critics of the day, who deemed the work “too frank and vulgar,” could hardly have overlooked the fact that the seated woman, sipping a cup of tea, is a prostitute. Indeed, the other woman, who is busily engaged in cooking her a meal, would appear to be one also. During the Progressive Era, it was common for prostitutes to share tenement flats like the one in 3 a.m., as numerous muckraking newspaper articles and tracts on the social evil were beginning to make plain. The reformist zeal for which the period is presently noted may have succeeded in closing down a number of brothels; but the world's “oldest profession” continued to flourish, as journalists were constantly reminding an apprehensive but nevertheless titillated American public. In 1910 prostitutes were more visible than ever. Operating independently out of tenements like the one in 3 a.m., they worked on the streets and out of dance halls, saloons, and cheap restaurants.

Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.

On the Phil Donahue show in early December 1981, Janet Dailey, the most successful romance writer in America today, explained, in answer to a question, why actual parents are usually absent in romance fiction. The form is short, it places a premium on excitement – and parents are not “interesting.” For a moment, Ms. Dailey almost lost her largely middle-aged audience. No one present thought to remind Janet Dailey that a contemporary genre of popular “thrillers” (which, by definition, aim to excite the reader) centers on parenthood. “Thriller” authors include Ira Levin, Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Lawrence Sanders, Mary Higgins Clark, Lawrence Block, V. C. Andrews, John Saul, and hundreds of lesser-known and -talented figures. It is logical, in fact, that no one mentioned in Dailey's presence what I call “family horror.” Romances and family thrillers are widely dissimilar, yet closely connected; the proverbial opposite sides of the same coin.

In older downtowns the casual observer's eye can still be arrested by spectral presences from the commercial past. Where space is available on brick or stone, ancient advertising murals preside over parking lots, littered playgrounds, construction projects. Often only faintly discernible amid banks and fast-food franchises, some announce products – Uneeda Biscuit, Wilson's Whiskey; some are populated by fading fantastic characters – the Gold Dust twins, the White Rock girl. Once-banal adjuncts of everyday life, they exert more fascination as they recede from view.

Myth and Genre are essential terms in the vocabulary of cultural historians. They refer us to the apparent continuities we perceive in the development of culture and of the various arts, professions, disciplines, and institutions that give culture its form. Myth has to do with the continuity of meanings: the transmission from generation to generation of a characteristic system of beliefs and values, embodied in a continuously evolving language of symbols, fables, images, and fictions. Genre has to do with the continuity of forms: the persistence from generation to generation of particular ways of telling stories, making symbols, structuring systems of representation. Each concept offers a special insight into the workings of cultural systems. Myth directs our attention toward the ways in which our material and social history shape our culture, and is in turn shaped by it. It highlights the aspects of our ceremonies and fictions that represent and preserve bits of history, deploying them as metaphors to interpret the present for us, enabling culture to serve as a kind of collective memory. It emphasizes the connection between cultural productions and ideology (in the broadest sense of that term), and it emphasizes the ways in which the historical development of our fictions reflects and justifies the social order as it changes over time. It suggests that the logic of ideology, in dialectic with the recalcitrant materials of the real world, is the informing logic of cultural history.

Originally the paper on which this article is based was entitled “The Cultural Politics of Southern and Jewish Writers” — which is a fine title and subject but, of course, much too broad, requiring book-length treatment for adequate development. If I were to write such a book, I would be concerned with the energies and strategies used by key writers representative of these groups (concerns I would consider paradigmatic for regional, ethnic, and other “marginal” phenomena in American culture) as they launched an assault on, infiltrated, charmed, or recast the mold and idea of the national literature.

In 1785 a writer who used the pen name “Celadon” (singer) tried to clarify the meaning of regions in America by making them one with ethnic groups. The author of the small pamphlet The Golden Age; or, Future Glory of North-America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon in Several Entertaining Visions contemplated the future of America from a mountain overlooking the whole continent. He describes himself in a state of rapture when

the Angel recalled my attention by a gentle touch on my side, and pointing his finger a little to the south-west, Celadon, says he, do you see yonder long valley. … That whole region you may call Savagenia: It being designed for the future habitation of your now troublesome Indians. — And that other valley. … It lies toward the north-west … This you may call Nigrania: It being allotted for the Negroes to dwell there, when the term of their vassalage is come to a period. — And in all those vast spaces westward to the great ocean, there may be seats hereafter for sundry foreign nations. — There may be a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, an English, &c. yea, a Jewish State here in process of time. — And all of them united in brotherly affection, will at last form the most potent empire on the face of the earth (pp. 11–12).

All the essays in this group are studies in American identity. They argue persuasively that regionalism and ethnicity are integral parts of what I can at this point only hesitantly call “mainstream” American self-definitions, be they literary, academic, intellectual, or popular. Werner Sollors' essay, really a phenomenological analysis of American thought about regionalism and ethnicity, exposes the structural analogues among intellectual, academic, and popular thought on these subjects. In his analysis of Styron, Jules Chametzky, on the other hand, suggests that the strategy of exchanging and appropriating regional and ethnic identities allows writers such as Styron both to legitimize marginal identities and to enter the mainstream. By implication, Chametzky's paper, like Sollors', is also concerned with structural relationships or exchanges between European high cultural forms and the popular domain.

The essays by chametzky and sollors present a sufficient challenge to one barely initiated into the mysteries of regionalism and ethnicity, who spends his time with the standard texts of American literature. So it goes in American Studies. What I may do by way of contribution is not to present some alternate ideas, which would be foolish, but to explicate for purposes of possible clarification and debate those presented in the two essays. As the two concern themselves with quite different aspects of the general topic, each will be given separate treatment.