American Love Stories: Narrative Ethics and the Novel from Stowe to James

American Love Stories: Narrative Ethics and the Novel from Stowe to James By Ashley Carson Barnes A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Dorothy Hale, Chair Professor Samuel Otter Professor Dorri Beam Professor Robert Alter Fall 2012 1 Abstract American Love Stories: Narrative Ethics and the Novel from Stowe to James by Ashley Carson Barnes Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Dorothy Hale, Chair “American Love Stories” argues for the continuity between two traditions often taken to be antagonistic: the sentimental novel of the mid-nineteenth century and the high modernism of Henry James. This continuity emerges in the love stories tracked here, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Herman Melville’s Pierre, to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and James’s The Golden Bowl. In these love stories—the other side of the gothic tradition described by Leslie Fiedler—desire is performed rather than repressed, and the self is less a private container than a public exhibit. This literary-historical claim works in tandem with the dissertation’s argument for revising narrative ethics. The recent ethical turn in literary criticism understands literature as practically engaging the emotions, especially varieties of love, that shape our social lives. It figures reading as a love story in its own right: an encounter with a text that might grant us intimacy with an authorial persona or else spurn our desire to grasp its alterity. Narrative ethics thereby enables literary criticism to speak to moral and political questions about how reading fiction might shape our lived experience of self and other. And narrative ethics offers an antidote to methodologies that would reduce a text to a cultural symptom, giving literary critics, instead, theoretical tools to evaluate the sense of otherness and intimacy that reading can evoke. But in imagining the text-as-other, narrative ethics relies on a deep model of subjectivity that isolates the text from its cultural moment. Historicist methods offer an instructive supplement by reading selves and texts alike as flatter entities embedded in discursive networks. Maintaining narrative ethics’ notion of the text as the other, this dissertation employs historicist techniques to read novels as thoroughly engaged with their cultural milieu. The dissertation tracks the novels’ preoccupations, which direct attention toward surrounding discourses like religious devotional guides, art criticism, and interior decoration. One payoff of this hybrid methodology is to put into conversation texts that have often been divorced from each other in the criticism and thus to bring to light overlooked aspects of each. Read as a starting point for Jamesian psychological realism, sentimental love looks less like an ideological smokescreen, as it can in historicist criticism, and more like a viable description of self-other relations. When James is read as an inheritor of the sentimental mode, his self-conscious difficulty, highlighted in narrative ethics, gets complicated by his relish for the scenic and the melodramatic. Further, by recapturing the historical antecedents of the American love story, this dissertation provides an intellectual history of narrative ethics’ commitment to an ideal of reading that is deep and emotional. The dissertation finds sources for this ideal in mid-nineteenth century Protestant guides urging believers to read the Bible deeply, as a love letter from God. 2 Finally, this hybrid methodology tracks in the love stories themselves the persistence of a version of selfhood in the American tradition that is no less lovable for being more surface than depth. This model of subjectivity, and the methodology it sponsors, enables narrative ethics to account for a fuller range of self-other encounters. The text emerges as an other which is at once culturally determined and emotionally compelling. i Acknowledgements I want to thank a few people who have helped push this project forward as I’ve worked on it, beginning with the four big wheels of my committee (not one of whom is a Jamesian ficelle). Above all, I’m grateful for Dori Hale’s x-ray vision, tirelessly applied to my writing. Any and all pieces of the argument herein that stand up to logical scrutiny are the direct results of her intervention. I have relied on the example of her rigorous and inventive engagements with some of the same questions that interest me, and on her warmth and encouragement as an adviser, to keep me going. Dorri Beam has been a mentor and confidante to me, both an inspired reader and an inspiring critic who taught me how to think creatively about the sentimental form. Sam Otter, who is as humane and perspicuous in his treatment of literature as he is in his treatment of his students, has been both incisive and gentle in his response to my work. Bob Alter has been an invaluable interlocutor, a challenge and a joy to talk with every time I have sat down with him to explain what I mean to do by connecting The Golden Bowl to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. C. Namwali Serpell was in on the ground floor of this project, and her precision and generosity in commenting on early drafts helped me sort out my thinking about how narrative ethics proceeds. Mitch Breitwieser, Julia Bader, and Katie Snyder all helped me, through their teaching and their support, arrive at the point where I could begin to formulate this argument. If I had never had the chance to take Charles Altieri’s course on aesthetics and Carolyn Porter’s seminar on Faulkner in the same semester, if I had missed their quite different models of what it means to be passionate about reading, my graduate career would have been sadly stunted. Without the aid of the administrative genius of Lee Parsons in the graduate office, I suspect I would accidentally have flunked out sometime after my second year. I’m also indebted to the Winterthur Research Fellowship Program, which generously supported my research on collecting and decorating. Rosemary Krill, as head of academic programs there, and the library staffers were all unfailingly helpful to a neophyte in archival research, and their curiosity about my subject kept me interested in it myself. Finally, I thank my husband, Jon Malesic, for his unstinting patience and loving support, and my parents, who have reminded me at crucial moments that one doesn’t get a PhD for the money, but for the love. 1 Chapter 1 Reading as a Love Story: The Text as Significant Other The narrator of Henry James’s story “The Figure in the Carpet” wonders if marriage offers a key to unlocking textual secrets: was his favorite author’s literary design “traceable or describable only for husbands and wives—for lovers supremely united?” (265). His hunch that being in love enhances interpretive vision suggests how easily reading and loving work as analogues for one another. We speak of falling in love with a book as we would with a person, and of reading a person as we would a book. These analogies shape the methodology of narrative ethics: reading is like falling in love, and a text is like a person, an “other.” Narrative ethics can thus stake its claim for the good of reading fiction by claiming that reading is like getting to know someone—by imagining, I will argue, a kind of love story between a reader and a text, one that unfolds in a private and timeless scene of reading. My project maintains these analogies, but revises this reader-text love story by way of two interdependent claims. First I make the case that American literature offers a different version of the love story, one that views selves as essentially interconnected with their worlds. This continuity emerges in the love stories I track from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Herman Melville’s Pierre, to Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons and James’s The Golden Bowl. In these love stories—the other side of the gothic tradition described by Leslie Fiedler—desire is performed rather than repressed, and the self is less a private container than a public exhibit. This happier love story underwrites my effort to revise narrative ethics’ methodology by allying it with new historicism. Rather than imagine the reader-text love story as a private and timeless one-on-one relationship, I read the fictional love stories themselves in conversation with contemporaneous discourses. Maintaining narrative ethics’ notion of the text as the other, I employ historicist techniques to read novels as thoroughly engaged with their cultural milieu, letting the texts’ preoccupations direct my attention toward surrounding discourses like religious devotional guides, art criticism, and interior decoration. Thus my account enacts the hybrid methodology for which it argues. This hybrid methodology maintains the guiding concerns of narrative ethics with the scene of reading and the sense of otherness we feel when we read, but it addresses those concerns by approaching texts as others fundamentally embedded in history. It tries to revise, but not to abandon, the model of the love story between the reader and the text. If the other is inseparable from the world around it, then the acts of attention that make up reading and loving the other must likewise spread out into the world. This revised love story construes falling in love as a process of looking carefully at, but not necessarily into, the other.

Load more