During the television coverage of the 1984 Winter Olympics, novelist John Updike found himself riveted, not by the Games but by the high-stakes advertising that accompanied them. “I have no doubt that the aesthetic marvels of our age, for intensity and lavishness of effort and subtlety of both overt and subliminal effect, are television commercials,” he commented, adding, “except within narrow professional circles, the artists involved, like Anglo-Saxon poets and Paleocene cave-painters, are unknown by name.” Updike's observation was anticipated almost a century earlier by editors at Munsey's magazine, who noted in a July 1895 column that

The rise in the aesthetic stakes of advertising coincided with the rise in its commercial stakes: in the post-Civil War era advertising expenditures grew exponentially, from $50 million just after the war to $500 million by the century's end. Magazine editors recognized how fully implicated were their cultural activities in the business end of their enterprises. The inclusion of specific advertisements in their periodicals, for instance, served as implicit endorsements of the commodities they featured, even raising concerns about liability, as confirmed when Cyrus Curtis and Edward Bok announced that their magazines would no longer advertise patent medicines. The commercial reciprocity between editors and advertisers was clear: magazines sought to sell their space to the highest bidders, just as advertisers sought the most illustrious and widely disseminated forums. “Magazines like McClure's,” an eight-year-old-boy declared to his mother in a 1904 ad, “tell you what you want, and show you where you can get it.

By the start of the new century, fiction was as secure a cultural institution as any museum of brick and mortar. The proof was not only that the genre had earned public recognition as a high art, as when novelists were among the artists elected in 1898 to the newly founded American Academy of Arts and Letters. Beyond its new civil recognition, fiction itself was also now widely deemed a unique resource for civil society. “It is fair to assume,” Meredith Nicholson wrote in a 1902 Atlantic article, “that in the nature of things we shall rely more and more on realistic fiction for a federation of the scattered states of this decentralized and diverse land of ours in a literature which shall be our most vivid social history.” Nicholson limited this office of literary federation to “realistic” fiction, but critics in growing numbers were ready to dispute the primacy of Realism. Even so, it was largely under the watchword of Realism that this rather extraordinary notion – that the United States had a unifying meaning and history best grasped in fiction – had become by century's end an almost commonplace idea.

William Dean Howells received much of the credit for the new esteem accorded fiction. The younger novelist Frank Norris claimed that Howells had produced “the foundation for a fine, hardy literature we could call our very, very own.” But in a 1915 letter Howells described himself as “a dead cult with my statues cut down, grass growing over them in the pale moonlight.” The high literary status he had promoted for fiction endured. But in the new century the museum-like function he had helped establish for Realism – the work of supplying “exact” representations to instruct and cultivate the American public – would lose much of its authority.

This multivolume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. This History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field. Trained in the decades between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature nationally and globally, in the scope of scholarly activity, and in the polemical intensity of debate. Significantly, American texts have come to provide a major focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but perhaps their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have often turned on American books.

CULTURES OF LETTERS

Toward the end of his 1879 biography of Hawthorne, Henry James has this to say about Hawthorne's support of the presidential bid of the pro-slavery Franklin Pierce:

COLORED LINES

Realism's concern with vision is by now a kind of truism, and for no writer is it more true than for Stephen Crane, whose contemporaries frequently described his writing as a kind of “photography” and whose major works reveal an ambition to make visible not only certain things that did not seem suitable to be seen (for example, the slums) but also certain things that did not seem available to be seen (for example, mental states). Thus in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), dreams have colors (Jimmie's are “blood-red”) and “sounds” can be “seen”: one of the most striking of Maggie's realistic effects is its Bowery dialect – “Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker.” Indeed, the prestige of dialect as a mark of Realism was so great in the 1890s that Abraham Cahan, making his novelistic breakthrough from Yiddish to English, at the same time sought to overcome the fact that the English he was now writing was being required to represent Yiddish by italicizing bits of dialogue that were to be understood as really sounding like what they looked like. Thus Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), contains sentences like “But what will you say to baseball? All college boys and tony peoplesh play it,” in which, as a helpful footnote informs us, the standard English represents Yiddish and the “Italics” represent “English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the characters.” These italics mark Cahan’s ambition to transcend the novelistic conventions that substitute standard English for Yiddish and instead to present the reader with the real thing.

The works discussed in this chapter include classic novellas (e.g. Jack London's The Call of the Wild), immigrant novels and letters (e.g. Abraham Cahan's Yekl and A Bintel Brief), social scientific studies of immigration and religious extremism (by Edward A. Ross and William James), autobiographies (Alice James's Diary, Helen Keller's The Story of My Life), biographies (of Mary Baker Eddy), and major American novels (e.g. McTeague, The House of Mirth, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove). These works will be examined as narratives that draw their chief inspiration from some of the most important changes of the late nineteenth century: the human displacements issuing from urbanization, migration, and immigration. Much of the literature is set in urban locales: San Francisco, Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute and McTeague; London and Venice, Henry James's Wings of the Dove; New Orleans, Chopin's The Awakening; New York, Cahan's Yekl and Wharton's House of Mirth; Boston, which provided a perfect environment for the flowering of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. But some of it is centered in the dilapidated regions left behind (Wharton's Ethan Frome) or the wilderness conceived as ideal alternatives (London's The Call of the Wild). And some of it is located in worlds that are, for different reasons, boundless: the infinite white darkness of Helen Keller; the hyper-consciousness of Henry James's “life after death”; the heavens of Mark Twain and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The human characters introduced in these works are memorable, usually for their peculiarity, excessiveness, or frailty.

NATIVE AMERICAN LETTERS AND GERONIMO'S BOOK

The birth of an American mass-culture industry in the decades 1850–90 coincided with the “Long Death” of free Native-American peoples in the trans-Mississippi West. There was no strict causal connection; mass culture was predicated on explosive population growth and new technologies, yet even with these advantages there was nothing fated about the US dispossession of “Indian Country,” which commenced soon after the Great Plains were promised to indigenous peoples at mid-century. But the conjunction in time created a certain reciprocity between the two events: the rise of mass culture is also a fitful record of the subjugation of free Native-American cultures. Mass portrayals of Native Americans form an erratic archive that is less self-serious but no less revealing than the ideological arguments or “metaphysics of Indian hating” Herman Melville sardonically identified as a national creed. Alongside demonstrations of contempt and enmity for Native Americans, mass culture enacts strains of awe, guilt, compassion, and envy never reflected in US military campaigns and policies. As regards Native Americans – and conflicted race questions broadly in the period – mass culture is the troubled unconscious mind of the white body politic, harboring desires and fears that take public shape through routes of contradiction and denial. In its new spaces of virtual existence, from photographs, dime novels, and Wild West shows to its apotheosis in the cinema, mass culture creates an expanding iconic life for Native Americans as they are steadily dispossessed of their lands and free lives.

MODERN VELOCITIES AND THE “POSSIBLE CRASH”

Edith Wharton loved the sensation of speed. In The Custom of the Country (1913), when Wharton writes of the “rush of physical joy” that comes from flying in an open car at twilight through the wintry boulevards of Central Park, the passage bespeaks her own infatuation with motor cars and their mechanical power. For Wharton, local motor-flights and transatlantic travel were fundamental conditions of living. Henry James always pictured her “wound up and going”; in alarm and bemusement his letters define her through “her dazzling, her incessant braveries of far excursionism.” Edith Wharton loved speed almost as much as she loved stillness – the contemplative space of gardens, the quiet stimulation of indoor conversation, the nearly motionless concentration necessary for the work of writing. These contraries – mobility and reflective stillness – inform Wharton's complex stance as an observer of modern life. Her taste for speed and travel on one hand, and the rooted critical focus she achieved in her writing on the other, reflect Wharton's divided attitude towards the kind of world she saw emerging in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Critics generally agree that Wharton possessed an “anti-modernist” outlook, a skeptical and largely disapproving perspective on the changing mores of her time. In Wharton's eyes, the erosion of traditional social orders and the rise of mass culture threatened to damage beyond repair the kind of rich interior life she prized most. But whereas some scholars see these sentiments as the fears of an entrenched conservative, others see Wharton’s anti-modernism as part of her forward-looking analysis of misogynist and totalitarian impulses that came to fruition in the 1930s.

“IMPUDENT NOVELTIES”: WOMEN AND PUBLICITY

In his Atlantic essay on the 1869 Boston theater season, “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Howells described the actresses impersonating men in the popular comic plays called burlesques. Although “they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.” For Howells, these cross-dressing performers were vivid proof of popular entertainment's ability to deform even the most fundamental of human categories, the identity of sex. By creating the illusion of an “alien sex,” neither woman nor man, the burlesque impersonations stood out as one of the “monstrous and artificial” inventions that Howells found everywhere conspicuous in commercial culture. Yet, as Howells surely knew, the burlesque shows told a truth, even if it was the skewed truth of a visual pun. The “unreal” creatures on stage, that is, bespoke a new social reality: the striking presence of women in public life. As the male-costumed actresses moved and spoke on stage, they evoked the recent entry of women into what had been male roles and traditionally male social spaces outside of the home.

The increasing participation of middle-class women in public life was one of the most striking features of post-Civil War American culture. Observers of this phenomenon stressed the changed look of American society, its transformed countenance. In the workplace, one journalist writes, there is “scarcely an occupation once confined almost exclusively to men in which women are not now conspicuous.” Commercial consumption, too, had a female face.

THE CIVIC USES OF HIGH CULTURE

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) gave new meaning and prominence to the word “culture.” “I shall not go so far as to say of Mr. Arnold that he invented it,” Henry James wrote of the word, “but he made it more definite than it had been before – he vivified it and lighted it up.” Surely part of what “vivified” culture in the educated vernacular was Arnold's pairing of the word with “anarchy” as its defining antonym. The red-flag urgency of “anarchy” made “culture” its cool and tranquil opposite, an antidote against social and political turmoil. Culture was conceived as a neutral or “disinterested” sphere of human experience, a sphere in which the warring interests of factions could recede in favor of a shared light for intelligent reflection on modern life. W. E. B. Du Bois had such a sphere in mind when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that African Americans wished to be “co-workers in the kingdom of culture” rather than being relegated to the role of “problem” in the sphere of politics. But Du Bois also alerts us to a certain faultline in the Arnoldian notion of culture. So long as the “kingdom of culture” is segregated – even so long as it is a solution to segregation, as Du Bois wishes – it partakes of the fractious problem of race. Even as the transcendence or resolution of politics, the sphere of culture is necessarily political.

The title of my narrative registers the novel's grounding in a broad spectrum of cultural and economic developments. These include: the end of slavery; the intensification of foreign immigration; the labor unrest catalyzed by the expansion of industrial capitalism; the revolution in transportation and communication; the rise of mass production and distribution; the process of standardization and professionalization; the emergence of the corporation and with it of “corporate culture”; and the dramatic extension of media forms, among them, newspapers, magazines, and advertising. Of these historical developments, none is more significant than the growing awareness of American multiculturalism. This country has “always already” been multicultural. Yet not until the second half of the nineteenth century were the specific stakes of this diversity widely conceptualized and debated. Novels of the time provided a critical forum for these conceptualizations and debates. Sometimes they did so through a focus on the death industries of slavery and war; sometimes through a concern with the work of mourning for a lost culture; sometimes through descriptions of the inner workings of new business enterprises such as magazines or clothing manufacture, or through pleas for industrial reform. Cross-cultural comparison was a mainstay of social observation not only in notoriously heterogeneous urban settings, but in towns and rural areas as well. This was the era of America's self-consciousness about its extraordinary diversity – the era, that is, of its multicultural becoming – and rising rates of immigration and growing perceptions of the world's interconnectedness served as a daily assault on the forces of parochialism.

FICTITIOUS DEALING

“What will she do?” is a question Henry James asks twice about Isabel Archer in his Preface to the New York Edition (1908) of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The answer is marry, a conventional enough response for the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, but one also that echoes inversely a concern of James's: “I shall not marry,” he wrote Grace Norton while he was writing and she was reading Portrait, and, several months earlier, enclosing a copy of the first chapters of Portrait, he wrote William Dean Howells, “The only important things that can happen to me are to die and to marry, and as yet I do neither.” What he was doing was writing; his letters of 1880 are filled with the sense of confidence and achievement that seem to have accompanied the production of Portrait. “I must try and seek a larger success than I have yet obtained in doing something on a larger scale than I have yet done,” he had written Howells the year before, and by the time he wrote Grace Norton announcing his intention never to marry, he was able also to characterize Portrait as “much the best thing I have done,” just the “success” he had been looking for. Thus the question of what Isabel will do arises as an answer to the question of what Henry will do, and The Portrait of a Lady, by answering the first question, becomes the answer to the second.

In his widely influential Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (1939), Joseph Schumpeter observed, “It was not enough to produce satisfactory soap, it was also necessary to induce people to wash.” During the post-Civil War era Americans were induced to wash. The rise of big business and the extraordinary expansion of the American economy between 1860 and 1920 were facilitated by several factors. Between 1860 and 1900, 676, 000 patents were granted by the US Patent Office, spurred in part by the development of steel production and the application of electricity to industry. The dramatic influx of new inventions supplied techniques for converting the nation's vast natural resources into manufactured products. Long before Standard Oil, there was the American railroad; organized in the 1830s and 1840s, by the 1890s there were over 200,000 miles of track throughout the country. The national railroad educated employees, Andrew Carnegie as well as unionized workers, in the methods of big business, while transporting people and products to growing domestic and foreign markets. America's economy could not have developed as it did in the nineteenth century without the continual renewal of the American labor supply by immigrants who came for economic opportunity and helped to perpetuate economic growth. From 1800 to 1900 America was transformed into a mass society (its population increasing from 5.3 million to 76 million) distinguished by its astonishing diversity unequalled by any other nation in the world.

The nature of work changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. All the advanced capitalist countries experienced the rise of the factory system, the intensification of machine production, the massing of wage laborers, and the subdivision of labor. While the beginnings of industrialization in the United States are typically marked by the 1820 founding of the first mill town in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1850–1900 there was dramatic expansion in every industry, from locomotives, reapers, and Winchester rifles to textiles, cigars, and glassmaking. In the years between 1860 and 1920 the volume of manufactured products grew fourteenfold. The post-Civil War era ushered in what labor historian David Montgomery has called a “cult of productivity,” characterized by ever increasing rates of output and scientific methods of management, imposed by a professional managerial class. While workers of the late nineteenth century were fully habituated to an industrial time sense (a transformation in the culture at large symbolized by mass-produced pocket watches from the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts) they were also aware of the power they wielded, as a deliberate collectivity, over production processes. As one efficiency consultant observed, every factory has “a fashion, a habit of work, and the new worker follows that fashion, for it isn't respectable not to.” Employers could be equally tenacious: in 1885 managers at the McCormick reaper plant responded to a conflict with unionized iron molders by firing them all. Moreover, the harmony of working-class interests was subject to constraints peculiar to the American context.

CIRCULATING PORTRAITS

“They all knew each other and felt like one large family,” Kate Chopin writes of the “society of Creoles” Edna Pontellier marries into in The Awakening (1899). Edna is not quite a member of this family and is in some degree scandalized by its behavior, which is to say, by the general “absence of prudery” that characterizes Creole conversation and by the particular profusion of “intimate detail” in the “harrowing story” of the “mother woman,” Madame Ratignolle's “accouchements.” When a sexually explicit book makes the rounds of the pension, she is “moved to read [it] in secret and in solitude, though none of the others had done so” and when Madame Ratignolle tells about the accouchements, she blushes. But Edna's blush does not exactly express a prudery about sex, any more than her desire to read the novel in private expresses disapproval of it. It is to the public – the familial – discussion of such topics that she objects, and this on grounds that The Awakening only gradually makes clear.

For “solitude” is not only the condition in which Edna reads, it is the name she gives to a piece of piano music she particularly likes, a piece that evokes in her imagination the figure of a naked man “standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore … His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him.”