ing group, he cannot hope for great sue.

this last point, Mr. Washington is espe­ s tended to make the whites, North and problem to the Negro's shoulders and imistic spectators; when in fact the bur­ and ands of none of us are clean if we bend at wrongs. did and honest criticism, to assert her race she has cruelly wronged and is still Realism and naturalism are closely related but disputed terms in American literary his­ r in guilt-cannot salve her conscience tory, used interchangeably and also as opposites. Is naturalism merely realism with an t settle this problem by diplomacy and emphasis on pessimistic determinism? Or is naturalism something separate from real­ e come to worst, can the moral fibre of ism and at odds with it, an idealistic form of romance? As cultural conditions changed g and murder of nine millions of men? rapidly in mid-nineteenth-century America, artists of all types turned to realist styles duty to perform, a duty stern and deli­ to address such new concerns as the rise of the middle class and the struggles of the )Se a part of the work of their greatest working class. , then naturalism at the start of the nev\ century, gave voice to Americans' changing a\\areness of the meaning of such concepts as caches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial "Nature"-including human nature-in such new environments as the frontier and old up his hands and strive with him, fast-growing cities. in the strength of this Joshua called of Realism as a movement in novei-\Hiting developed in early nineteenth-century ost. But so far as Mr. Washington apol­ Europe and the United States. \Vriters as seemingly different as \\'illiam Dean Hm\·­ does not rightly value the privilege and ells and Mark Twain offered objective, detached views of everyday life appropriate for ating effects of caste distinctions, and middle-class readers. Critic George J. Becker's definition of the realist nm·el as a sub­ ition of our brighter minds,-so far as stantial work in prose that offers verisimilitude of detail, a norm of experience, and an this,-we must unceasingly and firmly objective view of human nature fits not only the\\ ork of early realist authors hut also peaceful method we must strive for the that of their literary descendants. By the mid-nineteenth century, realism was simp!~ n, clinging unwaveringly to those great considered modern, and readers assumed that contemporary f-iction would aspire to offer verisimilitude. \'Ould fain forget: "\Ve hold these truths The heights of American realism were reached in the work of Howells, 1\\ a in, .reated equal; that they are endowed by Henrv James. and Edith \Vharton. Hm,ell's The Hise of Silas Laplw11z ( 18111) trans­ le rights; that among these are life, lib- formed the novel of manners into a critique of the American Dream, as a familv is nearly undone by the father's unexamined desire for high society-yet all is mostlv well 1903 in the end, lessons learned. Regarded as "the father of Americ:m Realism," llo\\clls, like Twain, rejected romanticism (if not sentiment) and its distortions. 1\lore signif-i­ cant for literary history than Howells's fiction were his editorships at prestigious mag­ azines such as Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. in v\·hich he published T\\ain. James, and other innovators, including Charles Chesnutt and naturalist Frank ;\'orris. If not for Howells in his editorial dimension, Twain's publishing career might never hav·e taken off. Though T"ain and James represented two very different instances of American real­ ism (and disliked each others' writing). Howells championed both of them. As T\\ a in pushed realism toward satirical exaggeration and den• loped the \·crnacular \Oice in his fiction, James used the voice of high culture and pushed realism toward premodern psychological realism, particularly in Ihe Portrait ofu Lud1 ( lHH2) and his other nov­ els of Americans unprepared for situations they encounter in Europe. In later nm cis, such as The Hi11gs of the Do1·e ( 1902), James de\-eloped realism into an absorbing. complex interior discourse, his narrator e\·oh-ing into an ironic blend of first- and third-person points of vie\\, a perspective described hv- critic l'ercv Luhhock as hm er­ ing somewhere on·r the shoulder of the "focal character."\ \'hart on's satiric and often tragic nm·els and stories of Gilded :\ge ;\'e\\ ){Jrk societv- c"\lend the penetrating insights of H

l) l l 7 J '- ntALI~M ANU l~ATURALISM 71:> .,.,

Realism \\as a broader movement than naturalism, and of course helped give rise WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS to naturalism. But they present sharp differences. The realist novels of the nineteenth century attacked social mores and manners but were rarely critical of the political foundations of society itself. \\'ith its clearer doctrines, more restricted time period Enormously influential as author, editor, and critic. \\'illiam Dean li

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2. litlcchardctcrofJo~mc~'....IS-Sno\cii,L :t I f\MERICAN LIThHAIUH~ IOOJ-I7I"T voice of workers. But not until collective bargaining legislation was enacted of newspaper syndicates in the 1880s by lrYing Bachellor and S. S. McClure. in the 1930s did labor acquire the right to strike. As for farmers, their organ­ These syndicates, which distributed material to newspapers and magazines izing efforts involved experiments in cooperative farming and storage, which in all sections of the country, published humor, news. and noYels-Crane's usually failed-partly for lack of funds but also because of the long tradition The Red Badge of Courage, for example-in installments. of independence among agricultural people. It was exactly to own one's own Magazines became another feature of American life as early as the mid­ land that immigrants and native-born white people had moved to the prairies eighteenth century. After the Civil War, East Coast magazines such as in the first place. On the other hand, individual ownership of land parcels Harper's New Monthly Magazine ( 1850), Scribner's Monthly ( 1870). Century was forced on the Native people through the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881), the Atlantic Monthly (1857), and the fragmenting the collectively held Native land base and resulting in the loss Galaxy (1866) provided outlets for such figures as Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne of some 60 million acres from Native possession. Jewett, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Sui Sin Far, and IVIark Twain. On the West Coast, the Overland Monthly ( 1868) emerged as the leading lit­ erary periodical; designed to showcase western-themed writing, it published THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, London, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far, and Twain among others. Without the periodicals, many writers would not have been Rapid transcontinental settlement and new urban industrial conditions able to support themselves; the income and audiences these magazines pro­ were accompanied by the development of a national literature of great abun­ vided were crucial to the further formation of the complex literary tradition dance and variety. New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new of a vast nation undergoing modernization. authors, new audiences-all emerged in the literature of this half century. Periodicals also contributed to the emergence toward the end of the nine­ Inevitably, Americans new and old were drawn into more complex social and teenth century of what the critic Warner Berthoff calls "the literature of argu­ cultural engagements as citizens of a nation still largely composed of dis­ ment"-powerful works in sociology, philosophy, and psychology, many of possessed and otherwise "marginalized" people. In literature, realism, natu­ them impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform. It would be hard to exag­ ralism, and regionalism strove to express the challenges and rewards of what gerate the influence-on other writers as well as on the educated public-of President Theodore Roosevelt called-from his perspective as a wealthy and works such as Henry George's Progress and Poverty ( 1879), Henry Demarest entitled New Yorker-" the winning of the west." The notion of what makes Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (I 894 ), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's one an American was defined from diverse points of view. Fictionalized rep­ Women and Economics ( 1898). Thorstein Veblen's TI1e Theory of tl1e Leisure resentations of characters rarely encountered before the Civil War became Class (1899), and William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience familiar: industrial workers, the rural poor, ambitious business leaders and ( 1902). For many women writers, magazines provided an important public downcast vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers, as described by forum in which to explore new views of women and women's rights. Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, , and Stephen Crane. Women In short, as the United States became an international political, economic, from many social groups. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican and military power during this half century, its literary production kept pace, Americans, Asian Americans, and immigrants began to write for publication, and it welcomed (in translation) works bv the leading European figures of the and a rapidly growing market for their work helped confirm authorship as a time, such as Leo Tolstoy, Henrik lbse~,, and Emile Zola. possible career. American writers in this period, like most writers of other times and places, Literature in the sense of fine writing figured at the top of a market that wrote to earn money, gain fame, change the world, and express themselves in began with newspapers, which had been important to the political, social, a permanent art form. The nature of that form-what might be called the and cultural life of America since colonial times. After the Civil War their "realistic international art story"-was itself a product of the interplay of his­ numbers and influence grew. Joseph Pulitzer established the St. Louis Post­ torical forces and aesthetic developments apparent, in retrospect, since the Dispatch in 1878, and in 1883 he bought the New York World; both papers publication of the French writer Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovat} ( 1856). were hugely successful. William Randolph Hearst, a Californian who inher­ Among the most critically praised American writers of the period were i\ lark ited a fortune from his mining entrepreneur father, made the San Francisco Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and \Villiam Dean Howells, two of Examiner the dominant newspaper in the Far West, then bought the New York them from the Midwest and two of them easterners. whose literary styles Journal in 1895 to compete with Pulitzer's World, and gradually acquired encompassed the comic vernacular, ordinary discourse, and impressionistic newspapers across the country. In I 897 the Jewish Daily Forward, in Yiddish, subjectivity. These writers recorded life on the Yanishing frontier, in the vil­ was founded bv Abraham Cahan; its circulation eventuallv reached 2 50,000, lage, small town, and turbulent metropolis, as well as in European resorts and and it was read bv three or four times that number. 1\lanv\niters" who went capitals. They established the literary identity of distinctively American pro­ on to become ''<;uthors" started as ne\\Spaper journali~ts:Ambrose Bierce, tagonists, specifically the vernacular boy hero and the "American Girl," the Abraham Cahan, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sui Sin baffled and strained middle-class family. the businessman, the psychologi­ Far, Joel Chandler Harris. \Villiam Dean Howells. Frank Norris, and Mark cally complicated citizens of a new international culture. They set the exam­ Twain among them. Perhaps of equal importance to the deYelopment of lit­ ple and charted the future course for the subjects. themes, techniques, and erary careers and literature as an American institution was the establishment styles of fiction we still call modern. U f O.IVICI1.1\....f\.l''ll Lll.tl1.l\JU11..t JOUJ-J71"T INTRODUCTION I 7 FORMS OF REALISM read him only for his jokes and do not sense the pessimism about humankind The term realism labels a movement in English, European, and American lit­ that lies not far beneath the surface.) He was. as a western writer, ambigu­ erature that gathered force from the I 830s to the end of the century. Real­ ously attached to an oral tradition of vernacular speech. At the other extreme, ists attempted to record life as it was lived rather than life as it ought to be Henry James (1843-1916) worked his way from recognizably realistic fiction, lived (the term used for this at the time was idealism) or had been lived in with a large cast of socially specified (typically upper-class) characters times past (the term used for this at the time was romance). As defined by described by an all-knowing narrator, as in The American ( 1876), toward William Dean Howells ( 183 7-1920). the magazine editor who was for some increasingly subtle metaphorical representations of the flow of a character's decades the chief American advocate of realist aesthetics as well as author of inner thought, as in The Golden Bowl ( 1904 ). All strong realist writers over thirty novels, realism "is nothing more and nothing less than the truth­ believed in the power of language to represent reality in ways that were aes­ ful treatment of material.·· Henry James spoke of the "documentary'' value of thetically satisfying and thus demanded the skill of a literary artist as well as Howells's work. thereby calling attention to realism's preoccupation with the the observational precision of a journalist. physical surfaces, the particularities of the sensate world in which fictional Naturalism is understood by some as an extension or intensification of real­ characters lived. Characters in Howell's novels were "representative" or ordi­ ism; it introduces characters from the fringes and depths of society whose nary characters-people much like the readers themselves, without fame or fates are determined by degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and/or a huge fortunes, without startling accomplishments or immense abilities. Real­ good deal of bad luck. Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and ism, as practiced by Howells, particularly in The Rise of Silas Lapham ( 188 5), Frank Norris are usually identified as the leading American naturalists of this the novel many literary historians have identified as the epitome of American period, but before we turn to their work, the philosophic and scientific back­ realism, seeks to convince readers that the life in the book's pages is true to grounds of naturalism require some attention. ordinary people in familiar surroundings. One of the most far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the nine­ Edith Wharton's realism, like Henry James's, is less about middle-class teenth century was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of people than about characters' psychological and moral interiors. \Vharton Species. This book. together with his Descent of Man ( 1870). hypothesized on ( 1862-193 7) holds a mirror up to New York high society. especially as its dra­ the basis of massive physical evidence that over the millennia humans had mas of human consciousness out; the achievement of what might be evolved from "lower" forms of life. Humans were special. not-as the Bible called upper-class realism is to convince readers that the inner lives of these taught-because God had created them in his image. but because as a wealthy people accord with the truth of human nature. In novels such as Dw species they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions House ofiVIirth (1905), Dte Custom ofthe Country (1913). and The Age of and had passed on their survival-making characteristics. Indigenous 1\iative Innocence ( 1920), \\fharton's primarv concerns are with the intangible­ traditions were consistent with Darwinism in their sense that humans were, thwarted desire, self-betrayal. murderous emotion, repressed voices. In this indeed. the last creatures to de\elop. but ;\lative traditions also sa\\ the last sense, her depiction of the struggles of indi,·iduals such as Lily Bart of Dw formed as handicapped by their belatedness. needing the \\ isdom derived House of i\!Iirth to sun·ive in a seemingly pleasant but actually hostile society from their \vinged and four-legged brothers and sisters, beings that had been goes beyond realism to reflect an almost Darwinian vie\\ of upper-class life. on this earth for a great deal longer. In the I 8 70s, the English philosopher In fact, it proved impossible for any realist to represent things exactly as Herbert Spencer's application of Damin's theory of e\·olution to social rela­ they were. Present-day literary theorists are probably more aware of what may tions, applying the concept of "survival of the fittest" to human groups. was be called "the crisis of representation "-the difference between the repre­ enthusiastically welcomed by many leading American businessmen. Andrew sentation and the thing represented-than \\ere these realists of the late Carnegie was only one of the successful industrialists\\ ho argued that unre­ nineteenth and early t\\entieth centuries. But whether they could actually strained competition was the equi\·alent of a Ia\\ of nature designed to elim­ duplicate "reality" or not, these \Hiters insisted that their work called atten­ inate those unfit for the ne\\ economic order. tion to areas of experience that literature had not dealt \\ith before and made Another response to Dan\in \\as to accept the deterministic implications such areas legitimate subjects for serious \Hiting. The two most acclaimed of e\olutionary theory and to use them to explain the behavior of characters artists of the era-i\lark T\\ain and Henry James-understood that language in literary works. As Emile Zola ( 1840-1902). the influential French theorist was an interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself. Twain's \\ork and nmelist. put the matter in his essay "The Experimental Nmel" ( 1880): was realistic in its use of colloquial and \ernacular speech and its parade of [\\'je must operate \\ith characters, passions. human and social data as characters from ordinary walks of life. For manv later writers, the simple lan­ the chemist and the phvsicist \\ork on inert bodies. as the physiologist guage of AdFentures of H ucklebern Fimz ( 1884) signified the beginning of a \\orks on li\ing bodies. Determinism gon-rns everything. It is scientific trul} American style. But T,,ain ( 183'i-191 ()) is also a comic genius'' hose irwestigation ... and \\ill replace nmels of pure imagination bv nmcls of language goes \\ell bevond the demands of realism. The author of 1/uclde­ obsenation and n:periment. berry Fimz is funny in\\ ays that Huck could ne\ er be-Twain's \\Tiling resem­ bles performance art, and. indeed. he achic,ed enormous success as a public A number of .\merican \\ riters adopted aspects of this form of naturalism. reader of his 0\\ n \\ ork. (At the same time, readers misinterpret T,, a in if the\ though each brought naturalism into his or her \\ork in indi,idual \\avs. For Frank ~orris.naturalism \\as not a "realistic" genre or "an inner circle of 8 I AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1914 INTRODUCTION I 9 realism." To be a naturalist, Norris believed, was to enter the zone of is not Dreiser's beliefs that make him significant in American letters: it is what romance: his imagination and literary technique do with a rich set of ideas, experiences, and emotions to create the "color of life" in his fiction. If Crane gave Ameri­ [\V]e must leave the rank and file ... [and] separate ourselves; we must can readers a new sense of human consciousness under conditions of become individual, unique. The naturalist takes no note of common peo­ extreme pressure, Dreiser gave them in novels such as Sister Carrie ( 1900) ple, common as far as their interests, their lives, and the things that occur and Jennie Gerhardt ( 1911) a sense of the fumbling, yearning, confused in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the response to the simultaneously enchanting, exciting, ugly, and dangerous characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordi­ metropolis that had become home to such large numbers of Americans by the nary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, turn of the century. and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible that works itself out Jack London (1876-1916) is also far from a "pure" naturalist or deter­ in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death. minist; a powerful current of myth and romance underlies his most success­ Characters may be "common," but what happens to them cannot be: "These ful works, such as ( 1903) and The Sea-Wolf ( 1904 ), and great, terrible no longer happen among the personnel of a feudal and most of his nearly two hundred short stories. London is a writer notorious for Renaissance nobility ... but among the lower-almost the lowest-classes; his contradictions, at once a socialist and an individualist, a believer in Anglo­ those who have been thrust or wrenched from the ranks who are falling by Saxon superiority who attacked white racism and colonialism. As the critic the roadway." Certainly the slum families in Norris's "Fantaisie Printaniere" Earle Labor has noted, "[T]he essential creative tension for [London's]liter­ and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets ( 1893) experience "terrible ary artistry is the opposition of materialism versus spiritualism-that is, the things" and react in predictable "terrible" ways. Though American naturalists tension between the logical and the scientific on the one hand and the irra­ were concerned on the one hand to explore the new territories opened up by tional and mystical on the other." In "The Law of Life" ( 190 I) Old Darwin, Spencer, and Zola-the pressures of biology, environment, and Koskoosh-an imagined not a realistic representation of an indigenous per­ other material forces-in depicting people, particularly lower-class people, son-when about to be left to die by his tribe, thinks: "Nature did not care. they allowed in different degrees for the value of human beings, for their To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its potential to make some sense out of their experience, and for their capacity law is death." This thought suggests a deterministic view of life-that noth­ to act compassionately-even altruistically-under the most adverse cir­ ing individuals do is of real significance. Yet the bulk of the story is given over cumstances. Even though these writers were challenging conventional wis­ to Old Koskoosh's memories, particularly to the re-creation of a formative dom about human motivation and causality in the natural world, the moment from his youth when he and a companion came upon an old moose bleakness and pessimism sometimes found in their fiction are not the same struggling against the wolves that have wounded and will soon devour him. as despair and cynicism. In re-creating this extraordinary moment in all of its vivid, dramatic power, Stephen Crane ( 1871-1 900) believed, as he said of his pitiful protagonist and in identifying with the totemic figure of the moose, Koskoosh, it might in Maggie, that environments such as slums count for a great deal in deter­ be argued, has erased his earlier generalization about evolutionary necessity mining human fate. In the wild, nature is not hostile, he observes in "The and the meaninglessness of the individual. Open Boat," only "indifferent, flatly indifferent." Crane, like most naturalists, In sum, despite a residual insistence on humanity's elevated place in the is ambiguous, accepting of paradoxes. In his Red Badge of Courage ( 1895), universe and a middle-class readership that disliked ugliness and "immoral­ the soldier Henry Fleming responds to the chaos and violence that surround ity," urban America and the sparsely populated hinterlands offered much him with alternating surges of panic and self-congratulation, never fully material for realistic and naturalistic literary techniques and ideas. The "Real­ understanding himself and his place in the world. After granting an appar­ ism and Naturalism" cluster in this volume brings together diverse voices to ently naturalistic perspective to Crane, we arc left with his distinctiveness, debate these important terms oflate-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century especially his usc of impressionistic literary techniques to present incomplete American literature. characters in a broken world-a world more random than scientifically pre­ dictable. We arc also left, however, with the hardly pessimistic implication of "The Open Boat": that precisely because human beings arc exposed to a REGI0;\1/\L \VIUTI\IG \\orld of chance where death is always imminent, they \\ould do well to learn the arts of sympathetic identification and solidarity, arts often learned at the Regional writing, another expression of the realist impulse, resulted from the price of death. Jack London's "" ( 1908) illustrates the fate of desire both to preserve a record of distinctive ways of life before industrial­ those \\ho decide to do \\·ithout trail mates. ization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh Theodore Drciser ( 1871-1945) did not share Crane's tendency to use realities that seemed to be replacing these earlv and allegedly happier times. \\ords and images as if he \\·ere a composer or a painter: his sense of the solid­ At a more practical level, much of the regional writing \\as a response to the ity of the real \\orld called out a heavily solid prose. But he did share, at least rapid growth of magazines, \\ hich created a 11l'\\, largelv female market for earlv in his career, Crane's skepticism: like Crane, he was inclined to see men short fiction along with opportunities for \\omen \\Titers. Bv the end of the and\\ omen as moths dra\\ n to flame rather than as lords of creation. Still, it nineteenth century, drtually e\·en region of the country, from i\Iaine to Cal- 10 I AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1914 INTRODUCTION I II ifornia, from the northern plains to the Louisiana bayous, had a "local col­ Travelled Roads ( 1891 ), local color is not nostalgia but realism deployed for orist" (the implied comparison is to painters of so-called genre scenes) to social protest-another way in which realism could never be only "realistic" immortalize its natural, social, and linguistic features. Though often suffused but was always something more. with nostalgia, the best work of the regionalists both renders a convincing Regional writers created not only places but also themes that assumed surface of a particular time and location and investigates psychological char­ increasing importance in the twentieth century. The work of Harriet Beecher acter traits from a more universal perspective. This melange may be seen in Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. \Vilkins Freeman, Sui Sin Far, Charlotte such an early example of regional writing as Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roar­ Perkins Gilman, Winnemucca, and others may be seen as considering the ing Camp," which, when it was published in 1868, made Harte a national world from the perspective of women awakening to, protesting against, and celebrity. The story is locally specific as well as entertaining, and it created offering alternatives to a world dominated by men and male interests and val­ mythic types as well as offered realistic depictions of frontier characters, ues. Mary Austin was a feminist, and much of her writing, including her clas­ though these depictions were later called into question by Ambrose Bierce, sic Land of Little Rain (1903), invites readers to see the world from a among others. woman's perspective. But Austin's larger claim on literary history is to have One school of regionalist writing that developed quickly, once the "West" made the deserts of southern California palpable for the first time in litera­ was "won," was the "\Vestern." Although the origins of this type go back to ture, as in "The Walking Woman" and other sketches. The marginal charac­ James Fenimore Cooper's tales of the frontier when it was located in western ters that people this inhospitable terrain cannot be imagined as existing New York State, the addition of gold mines and cowboys to the formula iden­ anywhere else. Stowe, Jewett, and Freeman do more than lament the post­ tified the genre with the Far \Vest. Dh'Crse writers such as Owen \Vister, war economic and spiritual decline of New England; their female characters author of the popular novel The Virginian ( 1902), Mark Twain, Bret Harte, suggest the capacity of human beings to live independently and with dignity Ambrose Bierce, l\1ary Austin, and Jack London all contributed to the work in the face of community pressures, patriarchal power over women, includ­ of depicting the ~bt as a legendary region-or (as in the case of Twain and ing women artists and writers, and material deprivation. Bierce) to the work of debunking the legends. Native Americans also Kate Chopin (1850-1904) may be thought of as a regional writer inter­ described their lives and traditions-especially as these were imperiled by ested in the customs, language, and landscapes of the northern Louisiana white advances into their territories. Navajo chants and Chippewa songs; the countryside and, downriver, New Orleans. But in addition to preserving local native oratorv of Cochise, Charlot, and \Vovoka; and the writings of Zitkala­ color, Chopin wrote probing psychological fiction. Edna Pontellier of The Sa, Sarah \Vi.nnemucca, and Charles Alexander Eastman ( Ohiyesa) have not Awakening ( 1899) looks back to Flaubert's l\1adame Bovary and forward to only been increasingly added to the discourse of the \Vest but ha\e challenged Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Chopin began her writing career only after the Euro-American identification of the \Vest with the moving line of the she returned to her native St. Louis from a long sojourn in Louisiana, and in frontier as it incorporated territory for that particular ethnic group. One of her narratives she memorializes the relaxed and sensuous way of life of the the great themes of i\ativc American literary work is the land and the peo­ Creole population. As an urban outsider, Chopin was perhaps all the more ple's relation to it, whether in oratorical performances that dramatize this sensitive to the nuances of Louisiana country life. Perhaps, too, as a woman, relation or in chants and tales about its sacredness. But Native American con­ she was attracted to a way of life that centered on families and small com­ ceptions about land were radically at odds with the profit-oriented concep­ munities. In any case, her treatment of New Orleans and of Natchitoches tions of the settlers and the railroads. "~'ithbeauty all around me, may I Parish provides a fine example of the literary portrayal of a distinctive \mlk" is the prayer of the Navajo i\ight Chant, but though these traditional region-one less severe and less repressed than the towns and villages por­ songs and other communal and artistic practices are kept alive today, a new trayed by the New England regionalists. Yet Chopin, especially in The Awak­ theme emerged in Native American cultures in general: loss of the beloved ening, with its portrayal of the interior life of a Protestant woman in a land. Zitkala-Sa writes as a citizen of the modern age, educated in eastern conservative Catholic community, gives the ugly side as well. That The Awak­ schools by missionaries. but she still laments the vision of "my mother far ening has served to crystallize many women's issues of the turn of the nine­ cmay on the \\'estern plains." Similarh. the \·oices of t\lexican Americans, as teenth century, and since, shows that regional realism, even if its settings and in the "corridos," or border ballads of the :\1exican Ren>lution, arc now characters are marginal to modern life, is by no means a marginal genre. understood as important to an enlarged understanding of the U.S. literary \\'est. Hamlin Carland ( l H60-l Y-+0). rather than creating a m\th, set out to REA Ll S \I AS S 0 C L\ L :\ R G U MEN T destroy one. Like mam \\Titers of the time, Garland \\as encouraged by \Villiam Dean llo\\ells to \Hite about \\hat he kne\\ best-in his case the Between the end of the Civil \Var and the outbreak of \Vorld War I. a vast farmers of the upper i\lid\\est. As he later said. his purpose in his earh sto­ body of nonfiction prose \\as devoted to the description, analysis, and critique ries \\·as to shm\ that the "mvstic qual it\· connected\\ ith free land ... \\aS a of social, economic, and political institutions and to the unsolved social prob­ m\ th." Carland's farmers are not the \ igorous. sensuous, and thoughtful lems that were one consequence of rapid growth and change. Women's rights, yeomen of Cre\ecoeur's Letters from an Americmz Fimner ( 1782) but bent. political corruption, the degradation of the natural world, economic inequity. drab figures. ln Carland's "Cndcr the Lion's Pa\\," from the collection .\lai11- business deceptions. the exploitation of labor-these became the subjects of INTRODUCTION I I j 12 I AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1914 articles and books by numerous journalists, historians, social critics, and drama, and swashbuckling historical novels. The more enduring fictional and economists. Much of this writing had literary ambitions, survives as litera­ nonfictional prose forms of the era, however, try to come to terms imagina­ ture, and continues to have genuine power. In his ambitious work of moral tively with the individual and collective dislocations and discontinuities asso­ exhortation, The Education of Henry Adams ( 1918), Henry Adams registers ciated with the closing of the frontier, urbanization, unprecedented through a literary sensibility a historian's sense of the disorientation that immigration, the surge of national wealth unequally distributed, revised con­ accompanies rapid and continuous change. Among the most significant and ceptions of human nature and destiny, the increasing assertion of the full influential voices of the period were those of African Americans speaking out rights of humanity and citizenship by marginalized minorities, the reordering against racism, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. of family and civil life, and the pervasive spread of mechanical and organiza­ Wells-Barnett, and Anna Julia Cooper. tional technologies. Several selections in this volume address the long, shameful history of white injustices against black Americans, as the shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow laws and the "separate but equal" decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) defined and redefined racial inequalities in America. Two works by black writers and leaders from the turn of the century have a special claim on our attention: the widely admired autobiography of Washington, Up from Slavery (1900) and the richly imagined The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by Du Bois, with its brilliantly argued rejection of Washington's philosophy. The Washington-Du Bois controversy set the major terms of the continuing debate between black leaders and in the black community: which strategies \viii most effectively hasten equality for blacks educationally, socially, politi­ cally, and economically? It is fair to say that in very different ways Up from Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk-admirable literary achievements in themselves-carried forward the antebellum traditions of such writers as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and helped encourage other African American writers of the era such as Wells-Barnett and Cooper, leading even­ tually to the powerful statements of Harlem Renaissance . In fic­ tion, characters in Pauline Hopkins's novel Contending Forces take opposite sides of this argument, while its various implications are also addressed by Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson in their work. In poetry, authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar gave voice to African American iden­ tities. Their interrelated perspectives on race and national identity are among those in our cluster on "Americanization."

This volume begins with perhaps the two most fundamental American writ­ ers of their time and subsequent decades, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickin­ son. These poets, whose roots are in the antebellum period, continued their work into the 1880s. Though their influence would be felt most strongly after \\brld War I l, in hindsight they can be seen as the fountainheads of two major strains in modern poetry: the expansive, gregarious open form of the self­ celebratory \Vhitman and the concise, compact idiosyncratic verse of the rad­ ically private Dickinson. \Vhitman especially, with his interest in the city, prefigures realism and naturalism in surprising ways, while Dickinson focuses on the inner life of the psyche. In the half century from 1865 to 1914, material, intellectual, social, and psychological changes in the lives of many Americans went forward at such extreme speed and on such a massive scale that the diverse writing of the time registers, at its core, shocked recognition of the human consequences of these radical transformations. Sometimes the shock is expressed in recoil and denial-thus the persistence, in the face of the apparent triumph of realism, of the literature of diversion: nostalgic poetry, sentimental and melodramatic