Novel Resistance: Cultural Capital, Social Fiction, and American Realism, 1861-1911

Home , A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Traveler from Altruria, Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Social novel, William Dean Howells

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

______, 20 _____

I,______, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of:

______in: ______It is entitled: ______

Approved by: ______

NOVEL RESISTANCE: CULTURAL CAPITAL, SOCIAL FICTION, AND AMERICAN REALISM, 1861-1911

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2002

Jeffrey W. Miller

B.A., Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, 1994 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1996

Abstract

This study investigates how realist fiction of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries negotiates the trichotomy of rule, hegemony, and reform. It isolates

the historical issues of women in labor movements, socialism and the literary

establishment, race and the post-Reconstruction color line, and utopian thought. It

examines a broad range of texts, beginning with the novels of William Dean Howells,

Edward Bellamy, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, W. E. B. Du Bois,

and Rebecca Harding Davis. In order to effectively analyze the phenomenon of fiction’s

social consequence, this study places these writers within the periods in which they wrote

through a variety of non-fictional sources, such as newspaper and periodical articles,

personal correspondence, and other historical data, in order to delineate the dimensions of

the cultural web of social reform and to clarify the issues at stake in the discussion.

Chapter One examines the designation, “social fiction” in some detail and outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the study. Chapter Two analyzes Davis’s “Life in the

Iron-Mills and Margret Howth, concluding that Davis feels labor unsexes women, removes them from the home, and stifles their spiritual lives. Chapter Three looks at the novels that Howells published in the 1880s and 1890s and asserts that they tend to undermine and contain their radical figures within safely delineated constraints, rendering them illustrative of Howells’s own political indecision and more appropriate for mainstream consumption. Chapter Four claims that Bellamy’s Looking Backward co- opts three visions of late-nineteenth century culture that the professional and leisure classes found irresistible in order to recruit them into Nationalism, the political movement spawned by the novel. Chapter Four finds that the fiction of Tourgée,

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Chesnutt, and Du Bois engages the hegemony of southern holy honor and the violence that supported it after Reconstruction. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that fiction is unique among cultural texts because it has the ability to distill issues with which it is concerned into archetypes in ways that are more compelling than other cultural forms.

Acknowledgements

My dissertation advisor, Stan Corkin, has pulled me through this project in a

variety of ways. First, he fostered the genesis of this project without imposing his own

ideas and inclinations upon my work. Second, his criticism has always been, and continues to be, astute and concise, and my writing is better because of his input.

Although his influence is apparent in this project, I appreciate that he allowed me to

develop and grow the project on my own. I’d also like to thank Tom LeClair and Lee

Person for providing excellent suggestions as this project neared completion.

I’d like to thank Helen Schwartz and Missy Kubistcheck, two of my

undergraduate professors at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, for

encouraging an interest in literature strong enough to inspire me to attend graduate school

and for providing models for teaching that still guide and motivate me.

A writer is only as good as his editors, and several colleagues read portions of this

project and provided helpful advice. Ann McClellan, Doug Connell, Samantha Jones,

and Scott Hermanson were some of the notable personages who read when called upon.

I’d especially like to thank Ann and Scott for providing models of professionalism and

scholarship that I very much admire and respect—following their lead has helped me

immensely as I worked through this project.

A good portion of this project was written while I was a visiting instructor at the

University of Tennessee at Martin. I’d like to thank my colleagues there for allowing me the luxury of hiding in my office when needed. My office neighbors, Anna Clark and

Neil Graves, were especially careful about letting me work even as they made me feel

welcome. Todd Butler for provided professional advice and much-needed moral support,

for which I am thankful.

I would also like to thank Maxwell House for offering a fine product at a

reasonable price.

My parents, Bill and Marie Miller, never once asked what I would do with a

Ph.D. in English. They knew it was something I believed in, so they believed in it. Over

the last thirty-five years, they have supported everything I’ve ever done, and there really

isn’t any way I can thank them enough or let them know how much I love them, but I’ll

try anyway. Mom and Dad, thank you and I love you.

My heartfelt gratitude goes out to my twin boys, Adam and Ben, who came along before this project really got off the ground, and spent their toddler years wondering why

Daddy had to go to work so often. They also hold the distinction of being the only two people I know who never once asked, “how’s that dissertation coming?” For this, and for their incessant energy, unending curiosity, and undying love, I am thankful.

There is no way I can fully acknowledge how much my wife, Robbin, has supported and furthered this project. Although she probably never has been much interested in its content, she recognizes its importance in my life, and so has made room for it in hers. She knew when to give me intellectual space and when to give me words of encouragement. For every long day and late night I put in at the library or office, Robbin had an equally long day or late night, finishing jobs I never had time to start. Most importantly, she never lost sight of our real priorities, and she continues to make my life better every day.

CONTENTS

ONE: Social Fiction and American Realism………..………..…..2

TWO: “A Desolate, Shabby Home”: Rebecca Harding Davis and Domestic Ideology………..………………….17

THREE: “He Is a Red-Mouthed Labor Agitator: William Dean Howells and the Left………………………….…...57

FOUR: Classifying Utopia: Edward Bellamy, Nationalism, and Looking Backward……………….…………………97

FIVE: Redemption through Violence: White Mobs and Black Citzenship in Tourgee, Chesnutt, and Du Bois…138

CONCLUSION………………..…...………………………..…..194

WORKS CITED…………………………...……………………204

CHAPTER ONE

Social Fiction and American Realism

***

“what is man born for but to be a Reformer, a Re-Maker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life?”1

“So this is the little lady who made this big war…”2

***

Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that she was “the little lady who made this big war.” His implication, that the literary

sensation of the nineteenth century, Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had

somehow incited or provoked the American Civil War, may at first seem to be an

exercise in hyperbole or political grandstanding, but perhaps Lincoln’s remark contains

more than a grain of truth. After all, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 10,000 copies in its first

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer” Essays and Poems (146) 2 Abraham Lincoln, upon being introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863 (qtd. in Douglas 19)

week and 300,000 by the end of its first year; furthermore, it had fueled a cavalcade of

anti-slavery sentiment which didn’t do anything to ameliorate North-South relations

during the tumultuous political debates of the 1850s. When Henry Lloyd Garrison, the

fiery abolitionist leader, heard that the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law had inspired

Stowe to pen her novel, he declared, “So does a just God overrule evil for good” (Mayer

420). As the end of the nineteenth century approached and Stowe’s legend grew, a writer

in the Century was able to claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “a novel which had its

share in changing the Constitution of the United States” (Burton 699). Is it possible,

then, to attribute the thirteenth amendment to a work of fiction, even one as popular as

Uncle Tom’s Cabin? How much was Stowe reading and describing the political and

social strife which led to the War, and how much was she exacerbating it or even creating

it?3

Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a model, it is possible to transform these specific questions about the novel into a more general inquiry about the relationship of fiction to culture. In other words, what is the relationship of a novel with the society in which it was written? Are particular types of novels more closely tied to the respective cultures from which they came than others? What about novels that are written specifically in protest of a particular circumstance or institution, or novels written by political or social activists? Are they more “social” than other novels? These questions are all worthy of pursuit, and the object of this study is to begin to unpack the issues behind some of these questions through an investigation of American “social fiction” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I realize that this description prompts another series of

3 Phillip Brian Harper claims that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “crystallizes the effect of a major political development that occurred right at the midpoint of the nineteenth century… the Fugitive Slave Act” (217).

questions: what exactly is “social fiction”? Does this designation define a genre? Is

social fiction that fiction which contains political content? Is a “social novel” the same as

a “political novel”? Why study it as such? Does it profess particular ideologies, or can it

neutrally express political content? Again, the questions are worth some thought, but I

will begin with a review of the relevant criticism before I explain my own position within

it.

Studies of the American “political novel,” even recently, have tended to privilege

works that are explicitly connected to political movements or parties, such as Upton

Sinclair’s The Jungle; Barbara Foley, in her 1993 book Radical Representations, for

instance, chooses to analyze writers who were “conscious participants in a literary

movement that named itself ‘proletarian’ [and who] … viewed their work as contributing

to the arousal of class consciousness” (vii). Classic studies of the political novel, such as

those by Walter Rideout (The Radical Novel in the United States), Gordon Milne (The

American Political Novel), and Joseph Blotner (The Modern American Political Novel),

also look for explicit political connections in literature and tend to ignore texts without

those connections.

In her introduction to Redefining the Political Novel, a collection of essays about nineteenth century texts by women authors, Sharon M. Harris explains that most criticism of the American “political novel” has, by distinguishing the “political” from the “social,” sought to exclude women and minority writing from the critical discussion. She maintains that even contemporary literary criticism has “continued to accept traditional definitions of the term ‘political’ in studies of the political novel. The exclusion of women’s writings from a subgenre that is understood specifically as an engagement with

the history of ideas is once again to relegate women to the emotional, while preserving for men the rational—and the means to power” (“Literary Politics” xi). Harris goes on to offer a new definition of the political novel, claiming that the collected critics define “the political novel so as to include works that recognize the social consequences of political processes and the political consequences of social processes” (Harris xvi). Expanding upon this model, I define the social novel as to include works that encapsulate political or social processes or consequences through the dramatization of cultural forms.

***

Recent studies of American literary realism, influenced by the rise of new

historicism in the eighties and cultural studies in the nineties, though heavily informed by

history, are often focused on defining realism as genre and investigating how particular

texts fit into the genre. That is, understanding how realism works as a literary form is

their primary reason for being. June Howard (Form and History in American Literary

Naturalism), Amy Kaplan (The Social Construction of American Literary Realism),

Daniel Borus (Writing Realism), Michael Davitt Bell (The Problem of American Literary

Realism), Brook Thomas (American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of

Contract), and Nancy Glazener (Reading for Realism) have all published studies that

explicate literary realism or naturalism as form through investigation of literary and non-

literary cultural documents. This is not to say that all recent studies are focused on realism as form; in fact, a few recent books have explored other issues, such as the use of dialect (Gavin Jones, Strange Talk) and realism and the literary canon (Tom Quirk and

Gary Scharnhorst, eds., American Realism and the Canon). Still, the idea of what a

realist text looks like remains a primary concern in most of these studies.

My methodology, in contrast, deemphasizes realism as form and accentuates

realism as cultural mediation. In other words, I use the term realism as a descriptive,

rather than generic, label, and rather than investigate form, I ask how these texts interact

with culture. I realize that realism is not an unproblematic designation, but since defining

it is not my main concern, I am willing to let others do so. Many of the novels in this

study have been termed “realist” (and certainly the title of this study implicates them as

such); some, like the novels of William Dean Howells, are usually taken by critics to be

prototypical realist novels; while some, like Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, or Du

Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece, are seen outside the genre. Joseph McElrath, for

instance, in “Why Charles W. Chesnutt Is Not a Realist,” maintains that Chesnutt “merits

consideration as a remarkable romancer, insightful ‘moral realist,’ and, of course,

historically significant social critic,” but not as a “literary realist,” because the content and form of his stories and novels were closer to romance (92). Refining or deconstructing such formal designations, however, are not within the scope of this study.

Instead, I am more interested in seeing how these texts “work.”

I take the notion of a “working text” primarily from the criticism of Jane

Tompkins and Mary Poovey. In her book Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Poovey addresses how texts (of all kinds—novels, popular magazines and newspapers, medical journals, etc.) work:

I maintain that every text works; as an ensemble of specific discursive

practices and as the outgrowth of a determinate mode of production, every

text participates in a complex social activity. Part of the work that texts

perform is the reproduction of ideology; texts give the values and

structures of values that constitute ideology body—that is, they embody

them for and in the subjects who read. In this sense, reading—or more

precisely, interpretation—is a historically and culturally specific activity;

it is part of a public institution. (17)

“Working,” then, is contributing to (and feeding off) the cultural web that composes a given society. I agree with Poovey that this action is complex; in fact, in addition to reproducing ideology, texts also contest ideology, and sometimes a text does both simultaneously. Part of my project in this study is to investigate how a text completes this transaction.

Jane Tompkins, in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction,

1790-1860, claims that literary texts are “attempts to redefine the social order” that “offer

powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing

solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). Her take on

“work” is more actively reformist than Poovey: “because the function of these [novels] is

heuristic and didactic rather than mimetic, they do not attempt to transcribe in detail a

parabola of events as they ‘actually happen’ in society; rather, they provide a basis for

remaking the social and political order in which events take place” (xvii). Part of

Tompkins’s project is to rework the literary canon, and in order to do so, she seeks to

dismiss the idea that didactic texts are somehow less “artistic” than other texts. My study

looks to investigate how these texts go about “remaking the social and political order,”

and in order to do so, it is informed by the political theory of Antonio Gramsci.

Specifically, this study investigates how realist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “works” to negotiate the trichotomy of rule, hegemony, and reform. I take the notions of rule and hegemony from Gramsci—in his Prison

Notebooks, Gramsci distinguishes between the rule of government and social hegemony.

“Hegemony” is defined as the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” (12). My discussion of domestic ideology in Rebecca Harding Davis in

Chapter Two implicitly draws upon this idea of hegemony. Although the “cult of true womanhood” propagated in many cultural forms was not official government policy, the vast majority of the population subscribed to this ideology in one form or another; even as Davis sought to reform industrial capitalism, she justified her desire through the

hegemonic forces of domesticity.

According to Gramsci, “rule,” or government, is defined as “the apparatus of state coercive power which ‘legally’ enforces discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. This apparatus, is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed” (12). The line between rule and hegemony is not always so clear, however. Chapter Five of this study, for instance, looks at how the distinction between rule and hegemony in the American South during the Reconstruction era often blurred.

Since the goals of the hegemonic forces in the South were often to regain “rule,” and institute legal justification for their actions, it is not so easy to separate the two. Of

course, separation is only necessary for purposes of analysis. In their real cultural manifestations, rule and hegemony work together to assert the “supremacy of a social group” (Gramsci 57).

If rule and hegemony are the cultural strophe that moves society in a particular

direction, then reform is the cultural antistrophe that counters them. If domination is part

of human nature, then so is working against it. Indeed, if we are to believe Emerson, the

reform impulse is a natural instinct built into the human soul. Although reform has

existed in many periods of history, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wrought a number of notable reform movements in the United States; Richard Hofstader has termed the era “the age of reform.”4 The hallmark of reform is change; Raymond

Williams claims reform is “amending an existing state of affairs in the light of known or

existing principles” (263). My idea of reform in this study is a bit more expansive, as I

take it to be any attempt to counter rule or hegemony, either directly or covertly, by

snatches.

In order to investigate this trichotomy, and inspired by the methodology of Eric

Sundquist, I have isolated four “historical moments” from the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries that help give structure to my investigation, which I will detail below.

In To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Sundquist aims to

“identify the key generative issues through which each text is framed as a historical

artifact and without which, to be strict, the text does not exist with anything like clarity”

(22). In order to do so, Sundquist isolates “historical moments” that are germane to the

study of race in America, like the Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 Supreme Court decision, and

4 Hofstadter published his classic analysis of American political thought in the Gilded Age, The Age of Reform, in 1955.

investigates how literary texts, like Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, circulate around each of

those moments.

I have constructed this study in much the same way, though my controlling theme is not as narrowly focused as Sundquist’s. Where Sundquist maintains that race is “at the center of the American experience” and thus uses race as his controlling theme, I maintain that the “generative issues” of my study are unified through the concept of reform. Specifically, I isolate the issues of women in labor movements, socialism and the literary establishment, race and the post-Reconstruction color line, and utopian thought.

Explaining a little bit about how this study came together may help clarify the theoretical principles which underpin it. Rather than beginning with particular literary texts and thinking about how I might come to better understand them, I began with historical issues, and thought about what texts, literary and historical, might help me investigate them. Although each chapter is indeed focused on one or more literary figures (this is, after all, a dissertation for a degree in literature), I don’t mean to priviledge literature for literature’s sake. As a result, much of my discussion is driven by a desire to better understand the cultural network of which these writers and novels are nodes.

These novels are not merely cultural artifacts, however. A work of fiction interacts with its readers in different ways than newspapers, magazines, or political tracts.

Brook Thomas asserts that literature can be a special source of social transformation because it “creates a space in which our political beliefs can be tested and challenged by the dramatization of hypothetical events” (xi). Another way that novels can assert social impact is through sheer ubiquity—although not every critic smiled upon Uncle Tom’s

Cabin, virtually everyone owned a copy or had access to one, thus everyone could talk about it. Even those books that did not achieve large audiences could have impact, however. In his book Creating American Civilization, David Shumway argues that those texts which were deemed “literary” in the nineteenth century carried with them social influence: “those texts distinguished as ‘literary’ become class-identity markers, invested with the class-defined value of taste” (29). Since the “literary” was beginning to be narrowed through the canonization of particular writers by literary critics, the value of the

“literary” went up, and it achieved some modicum of symbolic capital: “as cultural capital, the literary could enhance or secure the status of individuals or institutions” (30).

Additionally, the literary establishment could use that secured status as a platform for critique or reform.

Among those who prescribed the forms of this capital, W. D. Howells proclaimed a negative social power to “un-moral” romances, which “help to weaken the mental fibre, and make their readers indifferent to ‘plodding perseverance and plain industry,’ and to ‘matter-of-fact poverty and common-place distress’” (Howells as Critic 99). In his editorial posts at the Atlantic, and later at Harper’s, Howells sought to formulate a critical and social vision centered on his program of “moral realism.”

In an 1887 edition of his “Editor’s Study,” his editorial platform in Harper’s,

Howells addresses the characteristics of “serious” art, which sought to reform the very nature of mankind:

neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or

obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as

serious interests; they are all lower than the rudest crafts that feed and

house and clothe, for except they do this office they are idle; and they

cannot do this except from and through the truth. (Howells as Critic 115)

Certainly, in some ways Howells was tied up with the notion of moral progress, but

concomitant with those concerns was a concern for instituting the consequence of letters,

especially of the realist variety, in the real world.

Howells was not alone in asserting that novels with overt purpose were superior

to novels without, though not everyone connected seriousness of purpose to the realist

ethic. Grant Allen, for instance, writing in the North American Review in 1896, claimed

“the most successful novels of the last half century, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Jude the

Obscure, have been novels with a purpose…. The tendency of the higher fiction, from

beginning to end, has been all in the direction of a constantly deeper and more plainly

avowed purpose” (223-24).

To the contrary, Lennard Davis has argued recently that the novel as a genre lacks

much in the way of social or political consequence, defining it as “a discourse for

reinforcing particular [dominant] ideologies” (Factual Fictions 9). He goes on to assert

that ideology and the novel share a “similar origin”: “only with the development of a

means for assembling mass consciousness and a mass-signifying system that ideology

could arise in the way we know it today” (217). He also says the ideology of the novel

inherently “preserves the status quo and defends against radical aspirations” (Resisting

Novels 225). The result is a hegemonic space carved out by the novel that confirms,

rather than questions, dominant ideologies. Davis does admit, however, that despite the

novel’s tendency to support the mainstream, at times it can oppose power and authority

(Factual Fictions 222). Davis feels this opposition is the exception, however, not the

rule, and that as a novel becomes more political, it becomes less “novel.”

To say that these books are inconsequential or “boring” because their ultimate

political effect was minimal is tantamount to saying that the socialist politician Eugene

Debs was an inconsequential part of American politics because he never received more than six percent of the vote in a presidential election. I would argue that Debs had a

tremendous effect on politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the American social novel asserted influential ideas about reform during the same period, despite America’s methodical progress towards a capitalistic plutocracy. Further, Davis

fails to make a distinction between political effect and political intention. It is my

contention that many novels are deeply intertwined with various ideologies tied to

hegemony and reform, and it is my intention to explore those ideologies and theorize the

possibilities and limitations of social consequence in fiction through an examination of

several novels from the realist era.

I examine a broad range of texts, beginning with the novels of W. D. Howells,

Edward Bellamy, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Rebecca Harding Davis. In order to effectively analyze this phenomenon of social consequence, I place these writers within the periods in which they wrote through a variety of non-fictional sources, such as newspaper and periodical articles, personal correspondence, and other historical data, in order to delineate the dimensions of the cultural web of social reform and to clarify the issues at stake in the discussion.

In the second chapter of this study, “A Desolate, Shabby Home,” I look at

Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” and Margret Howth in the context of

the increasing alienation of the woman laborer in the nineteenth century. Using a variety of primary historical and literary documents, I situate Davis within a reform discourse led by laborers and feminists who often overlooked the plight of working-class women; in an effort to give voice to these women, Davis tapped into the hegemonic discourse of domesticity, particularly its Christian ethic. In particular, she uses domestic ideology to critique the industrial system that allows women to toil endlessly at the expense of womanhood. Essentially, Davis sees labor as unsexing women, removing them from the home, and stifling their spiritual lives.

The third chapter, “He Is a Red-Mouthed Labor Agitator,” examines W. D.

Howells as an historical figure, focusing especially on his connections with socialism and his limitations as a radical figure. It was motivated almost entirely from Howells’s notion that he was a “theoretical” socialist in “a fur-lined overcoat.” I found this proclamation, and the disjunction it evoked, oddly compelling, and it drove me to investigate Howells’s novels of the 1890s in order to articulate his reform vision. Those novels, particularly A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Traveler from Altruria, Annie Kilburn, and The Minister’s Charge, reveal that he was quite conflicted about reform; in addition, his other writings of this period often contain multiple and mixed messages about the merits and drawbacks of contemporary social movements. I find that his fiction, in particular, tends to undermine and contain its radical figures within safely delineated constraints, rendering them illustrative of Howells’s own political indecision and more appropriate for mainstream consumption.

One element of the radical project has often been to offer an alternative society to the corporate capitalism in the United States. Utopian communities sprung up throughout

the country in various manifestations in the nineteenth century, including the Owenites, the Fourierists, and the Hutterites. The fourth chapter, “Classifying Utopia,” looks at how one utopian novelist, Edward Bellamy, adapts the goals of reformist socialism to the dramatic conventions of utopian writing and the fictional conventions of the nineteenth century in order to attract the leisure class to radical ideas which they may have found unpalatable in other forms. More specifically, Looking Backward co-opts three visions of late-nineteenth century culture that the professional and leisure classes found irresistible: first, the novel prescribes elite, domestic reform, rather than reform from below or, worse yet, foreign reform; second, it taps into the idea of progress through natural, historical evolution, rather than through active and dangerous agitation; and third, even as it proposes a holistic and organic model of society, it respects and upholds traditional hegemonic patriarchal familial roles.

The fifth chapter, “Redemption through Violence,” examines the phenomenon of white mob violence in the post-Reconstruction South and its appearance in three novels.

It began with the event of Plessy v. Ferguson, which I first encountered through a reading of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and a related examination of Eric Sundquist’s analysis of it. I was interested in the social structures which were codified in Plessy and the violence which emerged to enforce it. Some research led me to race riots, which led to three significant racial disturbances (Hamburg, South Carolina in 1878; Wilmington,

North Carolina in 1898; and Atlanta, Georgia in 1906) and the fictional versions of these events in Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of

Tradition, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece. I argue that all three novels depict violence as a weapon used by whites to restrict or discourage elements of

black citizenship, and further, that each novel demonstrates mob violence was not a tool of lower class whites, but instead was often incited and meticulously planned by elite whites, a hypothesis which has only recently come to be argued by contemporary historians. We will see that, in their fiction, Tourgée, Chesnutt, and Du Bois each engaged the hegemony of Southern holy honor and the violence that supported it.

***

In The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan writes, “the realists do not naturalize the social world to make it seem immutable and organic, but, like contemporary social reformers, they engage in an enormous act of construction to organize, re-form, and control the social world” (10). In a sense, this study is engaged in a similar act of construction—not to organize the social world around it, but to construct a vision of the social world as it existed in particular times and particular places. It is in no way a complete vision, but I hope it will begin to answer some of the questions with which I began this chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

“A Desolate, Shabby Home”: Rebecca Harding Davis

and Domestic Ideology

***

Upon the mantel-shelf there was a small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other two were gone, gone in pledge. This one was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond. For a moment, so empty and bitter seemed her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer with her flaunting joy mocked her,—taunted them with the slow, gray desolation that had been creeping up on them for years.1

***

The critical studies of the last half of the twentieth century that gave form to the

idea of American literary realism in the nineteenth century generally have ignored the

early social realism of Rebecca Harding Davis. Classic studies of realism as a literary- historical movement by such critics as Edwin Cady, Donald Pizer, and Werner Berthoff have been dominated by the big three: William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark

Twain. Until Tillie Olsen rediscovered and republished Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills”

1 Rebecca Harding Davis, Margret Howth (38).

in 1972, very little work was done with Davis’s version of social realism. Even the more

recent studies which historicize and problematize realism or naturalism tend to stick with

the usual suspects (see M. Bell, Howard, Kaplan, and B. Thomas). Save for a brief

mention in Louis Budd’s “The Historical Background,” The Cambridge Companion to

American Realism and Naturalism, published in 1995, ignores Davis in favor of more

traditionally “realist” authors like the “big three,” Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and

London.

Despite this critical neglect of Davis in many book-length studies of realism,

Olsen’s rediscovery of “Life” eventually spawned what might be termed her realistic

resurrection—in the last decade or so, two monographs about Davis and realism have

been published, as well as numerous critical articles.2 Jean Fagan Yellin, Harris, and

Pfaelzer have all suggested that Davis is a “precocious” realist (Harris 28). Harris goes as far to call “Life in the Iron-Mills” “clearly naturalistic” (28). Despite these assertions, these critics have had some difficulty placing Davis firmly within the realistic tradition, primarily because her gender has been an important factor in determining how she fits into the literary canon. The “sentimental tradition” and “local color” often provide labels for texts written by women that do not seem to fit the attributes of mainstream realism, but neither of these labels seem to fit “Life in the Iron-Mills,” though, and its critics have had some difficulty delineating how to place it within literary history. Olsen claims that writing was the “one profession it was possible to carry on within the sphere, the one male domain in which there was beginning to be undeniable, even conspicuous, success by women” (82). This essay is an investigation of what writing “within the sphere”

2 The two monographs are Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (1991); and Jean Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism (1996).

means, especially for Rebecca Harding Davis. How do the circumstances and characters

of her fiction reflect the woman’s sphere from which they were created?

One of the best recent treatments of Davis is Jean Pfaelzer’s Parlor Radical, the subtitle of which, “Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of Social Realism,” indicates

Pfaelzer’s investment in Davis’s ties to American realism. She maintains that Davis combines social realism with the sentimental tradition (5-6), though she claims that Davis appropriates the sentimental “form” without accepting the sentimental “ethos.” She elaborates: “Davis appropriated the subversive elements within sentimentalism to expose the pain of an ethos that repressed women’s independence, individuality, and creativity, even as her female characters embark on its conservative path from independence to subservience, from initiative to stasis” (12). Ultimately, she says that sentiment “shapes

Davis’s vision of social goals” (65). I think Pfaelzer is right to recognize that Davis was not a radical, but ultimately I find her claim that Davis rejected the sentimental ethos less convincing. Furthermore, Pfaelzer’s reading of the sentimental ethos as essentially repressive may be more reflective of Pfaelzer’s own twentieth-century feminist sensibilities rather than a nineteenth-century worldview. Although some nineteenth- century feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, shared Pfaelzer’s perception, most men and women, even those with liberal views, did not. In fact, many liberals used the iconography of domestic space as haven in order to encourage reform.

A closer look at Davis’s fiction will reveal that although she abhorred the “great

gulf” between capital and labor and detailed the ramifications of that gulf in her writing,

she accepted more of the sentimental ethos than Pfaelzer acknowledges, especially those

aspects of the ethos that concern the home and a woman’s place within it. Davis often

wrote about the working classes, and has been hailed by some critics as a true champion

of labor, especially of laboring women. Two of her works in particular, “Life in the Iron-

Mills” and Margret Howth, have been the subject of not a little criticism in this light. I would argue, though, that Davis’s critique of industrialism finds its foundations in a rather conservative picture of domesticity and the home.

Davis critiques industrialism, at least in part, because it takes women away from

the home, although this message is not unequivocal. The characters of Deb in “Life in

the Iron-Mills” and Margret Howth in Margret Howth typify Davis’s subscription to the cult of True Womanhood as described by Barbara Welter. Welter claims,

woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s

magazines, gift annuals and religious literature of the nineteenth century,

was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed

frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where

social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one

thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman,

wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with

the complex of virtues which made up True Womanhood, he was damned

immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It

was a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth

century American woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with

her frail white hand. (151-52)

I think Welter’s analysis is astute, but she doesn’t go far enough; not only did this

phenomenon exist in “women’s magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature,” but it

was perpetuated by many journals of the period, mainstream and otherwise. Certainly, women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book articulated much about the glories of domesticity, but as I will demonstrate, political journals such as the United States

Democratic Review, literary journals such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, and more general periodicals such as Putnam’s Monthly, the Continental Monthly, and

Galaxy, all published articles that propagated domestic ideology.

Domestic ideology encompassed the cult of True Womanhood, but it also emphasized that woman’s sphere was within the home. Only within the home could woman be truly pious, pure, and submissive. What I am calling domestic ideology has been variously defined by historians and literary critics as “separate spheres” and the

“cult of domesticity”; Cathy Davidson and others have cautioned against using the separate spheres as a generic paradigm for cultural and literary studies (443ff).3 Gillian

Brown points out that although the domestic ideology “helps form cultural coherence,” it does not have a “monolithic design” (8). In other words, it does not operate as a unified system, but instead works within the culture to varied effects. Despite these caveats, it seems that there exists a semi-coherent body of literature that posits the home as sacred space, that ascribes a sense of angelic nobility to the home, and that asserts woman exists on this planet in order to create and nurture the domestic space. While it is true that another body of literature arose which challenged these notions, it is my assertion that the fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis has much more in common with the former than the latter.

3 See also Lawrence Buell and Amy Kaplan for a more vigorous discussion of the historiographic efficacy of the separate spheres paradigm.

The home was a contested site in the nineteenth century; a great deal of discourse

rose around the questions of what it represented, who was responsible for its upkeep, and

how it ought to serve the greater public good. While no consensus formed in response to

these questions, the vast majority of voices making up this discourse supported what I

call domestic ideology. Supporters of this ideology delineated specific attributes,

possibilities, and limitations for women, contending that she has been created by God

specifically as “helpmeet” for man and that as helpmeet, she must assist man in setting up

a home that will provide shelter from the rigors of business and provide a nurturing

atmosphere of spirituality and care that will allow children to grow into responsible

adults and citizens (and in the case of girls, into helpmeets for the future generation of

men).

It is especially important to clarify the connection between religion and the home in the nineteenth century. The role of women as wives and mothers was quite literally given spiritual significance; often writers asserted that the gender hierarchy was heaven- sent. In The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas asserts that there existed in the nineteenth century a commonplace connection between femininity and Christianity

(45). One of the popular venues that attempted to clarify the religious aspect of domestic ideology was the conduct book, which promoted domesticity though practical advice to children and women. These conduct books, also known as “Sunday School Books,” because most were intended as indoctrination manuals for American youths (especially girls—conduct manuals for girls far outnumbered those intended for boys), promoted domesticity by appealing to its religious and civic dimensions. Often, these two terms

were conflated so that they appealed to the American ideal of republican virtue.4 Since

these books were often written by the clergy, who provided moral and civic leadership,

they brought a certain cultural capital to the issues.

The clergy who wrote these conduct books drew upon the Bible as a source, much as they did when preaching. A conduct book would generally be organized upon the same organizational principles as a sermon: around a biblical text and its application.

The Rev. Daniel Eddy, for instance, in his The Young Woman’s Friend [1859], organizes his discussion of woman’s duties via biblical archetypes, such as Rebekah, the “good mother” and Hannah, the “praying mother.” The implication, of course, is that a woman’s role in the family—and by extension, in society, has a sacred, scriptural foundation.5 He also summarizes domestic ideology quite succinctly, claiming that the

“woman’s sphere” encompasses the home, and is limited to that space:

home is woman’s throne, where she maintains her royal court, and sways

her queenly authority. It is there that man learns to appreciate her worth,

and to realize the sweet and tender influences which she casts around her;

there she exhibits the excellences of character which God had in view in

her creation; and there she fills the sphere to which divine providence has

called her…. The value of all social life, the beauty of all domestic

intercourse, depend upon the maintenance of the position of woman at

home. Uniting on their marriage day, the husband and wife have each

duties to perform—she in her household, and he in the field or workshop,

4 Linda Kerber has shown that the “republican mother” was a founding ideal of the United States, and provided a “moral base” useful for training “virtuous citizens of the republic” (203). 5 Even when these books did not have such explicit religiosity, they still attributed feminized character traits to women. The Young Lady’s Guide is typical in this regard, containing papers for “thoughtful girls” such as, “Love,” “Godliness,” and “Kindliness.”

on the forum, at the bar, or in the pulpit. Thus, and thus only, do they

fulfill the great design of God, who made a helpmeet for man, and called

her Woman. (23-24)

This passage illustrates several features of domestic ideology that are significant to this discussion. First, the “design of God” is invoked as the architect of the separate spheres:

“divine providence” has called woman to her duties, which are distinct from the duties of man. Her “sweet and tender” influences in the home are necessary to continue the “value of all social life.” In other words, in order for social life to continue as we know it, woman must stay within the home.

Rebecca Harding Davis did not articulate her views on domestic ideology with as much clarity as Daniel Eddy, perhaps because she was more conflicted about it than the good Reverend. To be sure, Davis had a complex relationship with the feminist movement. While she often attempted to extend the possibilities and circumstances of women, she evidenced a palpable disdain for feminist political activists. Sharon Harris asserts that Davis evinced a “conservative feminism” (5). While this is an accurate label,

I feel Harris misses the class dynamics at play in Davis’s particular brand of feminism.

In her article, “Men’s Rights,” for instance, she writes: “Every woman who pursues an unusual work, steadily and faithfully, and shows that she can remain as modest, gentle, and tender as when she plied the needle or cooked the home-dinner, is doing a real service for her sex, very different from vague, frenzied citations of the Bible and

Constitution to prove woman the equal of man” (359). Although here she advocates, or at least condones, the idea that women can and should seek “unusual” work—i.e., work outside the home (not surprising, since she herself was a professional writer)—she also

asserts that women need to be “modest, gentle, and tender.” She does not explain why a

woman must have these qualities, but they are typical Sunday School book sentiments.

She also sends a derogatory comment towards the organized women’s movement with

her assertion about “vague, frenzied citations of the Bible and Constitution.” According to Davis, the “real service” of gender uplift seems to come from a kinder, gentler work outside the home—middle class professions, like writing, are advocated; we will see that

Davis has an entirely different viewpoint about women in working-class and labor- intensive occupations.

While her stance as a feminist is a bit murky, Davis was more transparent about

the labor problem. She seemed to have a real affinity for the troubles of the working

classes, and this affinity prompted her to write on the subject. A number of critics have

investigated the social aspects of Davis’s fiction: Walter Hesford places “Life in the Iron-

Mills” in the “tradition of the social novel” (76), Lynn Alexander claims Davis wrote

with “reformist desire” (109), Jean Fagan Yellin asserts that Davis wrought a spiritual

“program for social change” (205), and Jean Pfaelzer terms Davis’s particular brand of

pro-labor sentiments as the “emotive route to reform” (2). While I think Yellin and

Pfaelzer, especially, are on the right track in identifying Davis’s religious and sentimental

route to reform, none of these critics classify the class-based, home-centered domestic

ideology I feel Davis employs in her fiction. Furthermore, no one explains how Davis’s

domestic evangelism draws upon the cultural matrix of domesticity in order to make its

argument.

This use of the domestic ideal to fight for worker’s rights was not unique to

Davis—later in the century the Knights of Labor propagandized the issue: “the ideal of

hearth and home provided a powerful ideological symbol for the Knights’ movement”

(Levine 330). Indeed, it was not unusual for the labor movement to set aside issues of women’s rights in favor of working-class issues, but the ideal of home had deep roots in the nineteenth century. It was the one symbol that had almost universal appeal, and

Davis’s fiction is in some sense an homage to it, especially with regard to its relation to labor.

Proponents of domesticity used images of the home in a variety of other nineteenth-century reform movements. Abolitionists, for instance, often decried the negative effects of slavery upon the American home. In her book, Domestic

Individualism, Gillian Brown asserts that Uncle Tom’s Cabin uses precisely this strategy in order to condemn slavery:

In fashioning her abolitionist protest as a defense of nineteenth-century

domestic values, Stowe designates slavery as a domestic issue for

American women to adjudicate and manage. The call to the mothers of

America for the abolition of slavery is a summons to fortify the home, to

rescue domesticity from shiftlessness and slavery…. in Stowe’s politics of

the kitchen, abolishing slavery means erasing the sign and reminder of the

precariousness of the feminine sphere. (16)

As the popularity of her novel grew, Stowe was thrust into the public view as a voice for antislavery. Although some critics were quick to question her piety for airing her views

(after all, a “true woman” could not conceive of such atrocities, let alone write about them), Stowe continued to associate a woman’s moral responsibility with abolition.

During a tour of Britain, she received some criticism for an antislavery petition then

making the rounds. She responded with an assertion of the rightness that women should shoulder the moral responsibility in this matter: “there is about our sex—(perhaps its greatest fault) a sensitiveness to what exposes to ridicule which often leads us to shrink from a right cause, with undue fastidiousness—but if there is any cause under heaven that needs the support of pious womanhood it is that of the poor slave” (qtd in Hedrick 244-

45).

Anti-slavery was not the only reform movement to rally the forces of domesticity in its favor. Since the home was seen as a microcosm of a pious, orderly society, any reform issue which founded itself upon morality tended to rely on the home as its symbolic center. David Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, claims that temperance literature often employed images of the home to dramatize the dangers of inebriety. One of the most popular images, that of the drunkard’s wife, demonstrates how the home cannot be a safe, nurturing place if the evils of alcohol invade its sacred confines (357-58). Indeed, just about every published article or letter that argued in favor of temperance law cited the tendency of alcohol to cause the “rending asunder of families” in some way or another (“Temperance Outlook” 782).

Even promoters of women’s rights subscribed to various versions of domestic ideology. Fanny Fern, a vociferous proponent of the women’s movement, who “actively challenged the prevailing nineteenth-century view of ideal women” (Susan Harris, 19th-

Century 113), often viewed domestic space as sacred, though she had different ideas about how it should be maintained. She concluded that women would never achieve social independence until they had achieved financial independence (Warren 299). It is significant that the titular heroine of Fern’s popular novel Ruth Hall does not get married

at the end of the story, as the heroines of other popular novels did. Instead, she achieves financial independence through the success of her writing. Fern pioneered this idea for

Edward Bellamy, who includes the idea in his utopian novel Looking Backward, and for

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose thesis in Women and Economics (1898) asserts that the economic independence of women is the first necessary step in their emancipation from patriarchal oppression.

Certainly, this kind of financial independence was possible through writing for some women, like Fern. Despite Davis’s apparent support of middle-class professions for women, though, due to her perception that lower-class women were living in unacceptable circumstances, her fiction attacks the capitalistic system in a variety of ways. The most effective assault is her use of domestic ideology to critique a system that allows women to toil endlessly in industrial positions, keeping them from domestic spaces. Davis critiques working-class labor utilizing a threefold attack: she criticizes labor because it makes women “coarse” and therefore unsexes them—the common nineteenth-century belief that women working outside of the home would decrease their domestic value as wives and mothers; because it thwarts them from creating warm, comfortable home lives for their families; and because it stifles their higher lives of piety.

To a certain extent, these three critiques are interrelated. If a woman is unsexed, then she will be unable to provide a pious model for her family, and will thus be unable to create a proper home.

***

“Grown Coarse with Labor”

The opening images of “Life in the Iron-Mills” are filled with the smoke of

industry, “clinging in a coating of greasy soot” to everything it contacts. A sense of

dread and stagnation saturates the first few paragraphs. Even the river is sluggish, lazy,

and tired. At first, there seems to be some distance between the narrator inside the house

and the scene she describes on the street below, but after she sets the smoky scene

outside, the first images from inside the house seem to demonstrate how pervasive the

smoke really is, as it even invades the sanctity of her home. Inside the home is “a little

broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are

covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think” (430). The dominant theme here is the destructive capabilities of industry, particularly with regard to women and the home. Industry destroys dreams—the canary, dreaming of rural bliss, is caged by industrial blight.

Industry destroys the home—the blackened “angel of the house” has been quite literally grounded by the smoke of factories, its smoke-clotted wings defiled and deformed by excessive production. This angel serves as a metaphor for the idea that somehow labor would “unsex” women.

This close connection between biology and being for women was not unique to

Davis. In fact, many writers constructed similar arguments. In Harper’s New Monthly

Magazine in 1865, for instance, Catharine Beecher states “Woman, as well as man, was made to work; and her Maker has adapted her body to its appropriate labor. The tending of children and doing house-work exercise those very muscles which are most important

to womanhood” (710). The key word here is “appropriate.” Beecher articulates the

popular notion that women’s work was a biological construct—since women are constructed biologically, and therefore ontologically, as child-bearers, the work they do should physically guide them towards “womanhood”; i.e., it must be “women’s work.”

Any deviation from this norm was thought to be dangerous to woman’s physical development, and a woman’s physical development was thought to be closely related to her emotional state. Ultimately, it was believed, the danger lies in transferring this

stunted development, via maternity, to a child, resulting in “weakness, if not deformity, upon innocent offspring” (“Our Wives” 785), thus subverting woman’s ontological purpose—her reason for being.

The central symbol of “Life in the Iron-Mills,” Hugh Wolfe’s giant korl sculpture

of a woman, provides a vivid warning of the dangers of toil to a woman’s development.

It presents a sphinx-like riddle for the visitors to the mill, but only Mitchell seems to

correctly identify the figure’s hunger as a searching for something beyond the day-to-day

drudgery of the working classes. In this regard, the korl woman certainly represents the

desperate laborer, but it also carries more specific significance in terms of woman’s work. The narrator reports that the korl woman had “not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some poignant longing” (438). The feminine form of woman has been destroyed, made coarse, through too much work. Because it has not been conducting “appropriate” work, it has unsexed itself and thus stripped itself of any societal value. The inability of the visitors to the mill—Kirby, who represents capital, and Dr. May, who represents reform—to interpret this woman correctly can be read as Davis’s insistence that most

people refused to apply the ideology of domesticity to the working classes. Through their

negative examples—neither is able, or even willing, to lend a helping hand—Davis

shows her readers that a working-class home needs its angel just as much as a middle-

class home.

The korl woman, then, is an embodiment of the idea that women can harm themselves through inappropriate work. Junius Browne sums up this theory of dangerous toil in his article, “Women as Workers” published in the Galaxy in 1873; in it, he claims:

“occupation is wholesome for woman; but positive toil—that which taxes the muscles, strains the nerves, tires the brain—is hurtful, too long continued. Toil hardens, coarsens, disfigures—is hostile to aesthetic development” (676). Browne’s thesis embodies a number of layers significant in this era and important for Davis. First, he makes a distinction between “occupation” and “toil.” In fact, later in his article Browne sets forth rather liberal view on women working outside of marriage (not outside the home—his views are purely for the unmarried), as long as that occupation is appropriate for women.

Toil, on the other hand, tends to devalue women’s bodies—to render them unfit for motherhood and wifehood.

The crux of this issue is class—middle- and upper-class men like Browne don’t see the economic necessity that drives lower-class women to work, and thus they see woman’s primary goal as “aesthetic development,” clearly a bourgeois value not available to the working classes. Davis, on the other hand, is highly attuned to this distinction. She writes characters, like Deb and Lois Yare, who exemplify the idea that extreme toil disfigures a woman’s body. Deb, for instance, is described by Davis as like

Old Wolfe, “only her face was even more ghastly, her lips bluer, her eyes more watery.

She wore a faded cotton gown and a slouching bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was deformed, almost a hunchback” (432). The “helplessly crippled” Lois Yare of Margret Howth is similar (54). Both of these women have been deformed by the hard labor that has been their burden in life.

Despite Junius Browne’s ignorance about working class women, some Americans felt that the ramifications of any woman working, regardless of her class status, could be dangerous because the very order of society was at stake. In the Continental Monthly in

1864, for instance, an anonymous writer attributed the very foundations of the social order to the stability of the woman’s sphere:

anything which tends in the least to unsex, to unsphere woman, by so

much works with a reflex influence on man and on society, and produces

in both a gradual and dangerous deterioration. And self-preservation is the

first instinct of society as well as of the individual being. Man, and the

eternal and infinite order of the world, require that woman keep her proper

place, and that she demand nothing which, granted, would introduce

confusion and disorder among the social forces.

(“American Women” 417)

The writer stresses the negative consequences of letting women out of the domestic sphere. Obviously, in 1864—during the midst of the Civil War—the “eternal and infinite order of the world” did not seem as permanent as it had a few years before. The martial tone of the last sentence of this passage betrays the anxiety wrought by the war.

“Confusion and disorder,” among the “forces,” after all, could lose battles, even wars.

Despite the desperate times engendered by the conflict, however, when it ended the tenor

of this domestic rhetoric did not change appreciably. “Confusion and disorder” were as dangerous as ever because they threatened the established social order; in times of peace as well as war, traditional gender roles provided the agreeable illusion of stability amid turmoil.

As advancing technology began to change the world so rapidly in the nineteenth

century, policing gender became an increasingly important method of creating structure

amid this transformation. In “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” Amy Schrager

Lang speaks of the “displacement” of class by gender—the prominent nineteenth-century

ideal of stabilizing the chaotic world of capital and labor through the anchor of the home.

She claims

the champions of domesticity saw in the stability of gender—that is, in the

naturalizing and fixing of gender distinctions—the prospect of an even

more perfect harmony…the narrow and highly ordered space of the

middle-class home operated to contain the danger of class antagonism by

providing an image of social harmony founded not on political principles

or economic behavior but on the “natural” differentiation of the sexes.

(129)

Lang here makes a very astute observation about nineteenth-century American culture,

and her claim is certainly supported by the author of “American Women”; indeed, Lang’s

passage almost seems to analyze that article—“the eternal and infinite order of the world

require that woman keep her proper place” is the perfect expression of “naturalizing and

fixing gender distinctions.” I contend that it is precisely this formulation of domestic

stability which motivates the fiction of Rebecca Harding Davis, except that her

motivation finds form not in “contain[ing]” class antagonism, but in neutralizing it via a

demonstration of the dangers of labor to working class women. Davis assumes a

preponderance of Christian sympathy in her readers, and her argument will not be

effective without it.

In order to neutralize class antagonism, Davis often creates working-class women characters who are unable to develop aesthetically. In other words, she creates characters who are the essence of ugliness and deformity rather than beauty. This technique allows her to reach the middle-class readers whom she targets in “Life in the Iron-Mills” with her narrator’s inflammatory rhetoric.6 These readers may not have understood what it

meant to fail to put food on the table, but they recognized the dangers inherent in

aesthetic failure because they had been trained in the importance of beauty from an early

age. In many ways, Deb and Lois, and their deformities in particular, embody aesthetic

degeneration and decline brought about through the difficult and dangerous conditions of

industrial toil.

Davis places the blame for this degeneration squarely on the shoulders of too much toil. Lois, the Christian conscience of Margret Howth, attributes her physical and intellectual handicaps to the years of hard labor in the mill:

It’s a black place, th’ mill … It was a good while I was there: frum seven

year old till sixteen. ’T seemed as if I’d been there allus,—jes’ forever,

yoh know. ’Fore I went in, I had the rickets, they say: that’s what ails me.

’T hurt my head, they’ve told me,—made me different frum other folks. . .

. It was the mill…I kind o’ grew into that place in them years: seemed to

6 See Sharon Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (31-32) and Pfaelzer (24, 31) for more about the narrator’s attacks on the reader in “Life.”

me like as I was part o’ th’ engines, somehow. Th’ air used to be thick in

my mouth, black wi’ smoke ’n’ wool ’n’ smells. In them years I got dazed

in my head, I think. ’T was th’ air ’n’ th’ work. I was weak allus. ’T got

so that th’ noise o’ th’ looms went on in my head night ’n’ day,—allus

thud, thud. ’N’ hot days, when th’ hands was chaffin’ ’n’ singin’, th’

black wheels ’n’ rollers was alive, starin’ down at me, ’n’ th’ shadders o’

th’ looms was like snakes creepin’,—creepin’ anear all th’ time. (68-69)

In this short space, Lois vividly attributes her degeneration to her work in the cotton mill.

Junius Browne claims that toil “hardens, coarsens, disfigures,” and that toll is effected upon Lois: her body becomes one with the machinery, as she “grew into that place,” and became “part o’ th’ engines.” The mill completes her unsexing, not only by making her physically undesirable for any possible suitors, but also by its incessant bullying of her intellect—staring at her and conjuring images of snakes creeping around her—almost driving her to madness.

The mill also begins to threaten her spirit: “in Lois’s hopeful, warm life [the mill] was the one uncomprehended monster. Her crushed brain, her unwakened powers, resented their wrong dimly to the mass of iron and work and impure smells, unconscious of any remorseless power that wielded it. It was a monster, she thought, through the sleepy, dreading night,—a monster that kept her wakeful with a dull, mysterious terror.”

(170-71). Although Lois’s personification of the mill as a monster disassociates it from its capitalist owners, Davis’s narrator pointedly assigns blame to the “remorseless power” that runs the mill. Because Lois has been “crushed” by this monster, she is unable to achieve anything like a normal life, and she thus attains tragic status for readers of the

novel. Still, Davis feels Lois has much to offer the world as a model of Christian

behavior and sensibility. This is only possible, however, because Lois is no longer

marriageable.

In “Life in the Iron-Mills,” Deb is similarly hobbled by industry; Rosemarie

Thomson claims, “rejected and pitied in each of her efforts to gain Hugh’s love, [Deb] represents the ultimate threat to nineteenth-century female selfhood: the woman whose body precludes her from attachment to a man, women’s exclusive conduit to power and status” (572). Davis is clear that Deb’s “thwarted woman’s form” cannot possibly give her access to the world of domesticity, despite her constant efforts to connect herself to

Hugh in whatever way possible (434). Deb’s primary motivation throughout the story seems to be to ingratiate herself with Hugh, but how she goes about doing this is important—the exact nature of her obsequies tend to emphasize her performance of domesticity; much of what Deb does for Hugh enacts an ironic charade of the duties within the woman’s sphere. Since her deformed body makes her unmarriageable, however, her charade underscores the debilitating effects labor produces upon domesticity.

Since Davis has given the character of Hugh feminine qualities, Deb’s lack of femininity is particularly striking in contrast. She cannot even match the womanhood of an iron worker. Hugh is described as very like a woman: “he had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek, woman’s face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: ‘Molly Wolfe’ was his sobriquet” (435). Pfaelzer notes that Hugh’s femininity emphasizes his “inadequacy” and “signifies his status as victim” (40).

Ironically, while toil and excess labor strip Deb of her femininity, they strip Hugh of his

masculinity; industry moves them in separate directions, but the result is the same—they

end up as sexless automatons, mindlessly working for capital that they will never see and

destined to endure their abject living conditions.

Still, Deb aspires to attach herself to Hugh whenever possible; despite her exhaustion upon returning home from the mill, which is exacerbated by her disability, she is quickly energized by performing traditional spousal duties for Hugh when she discovers he has not yet had dinner: “the woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch in a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle”

(432). The dinner itself is not much, and even Janey, Hugh’s ostensible love interest, chides Deb for her willingness to go out in the heavy rain, telling her to make him wait until morning. The purpose and direction Deb otherwise lacks finds a foundation in

Hugh, or more specifically, in conducting woman’s work for Hugh; we are told this delivery is an “almost nightly” ritual (432). The performance of this ritual places Deb, although just for a moment, within the domestic sphere she desires.

Deb’s body language communicates her desire to submit to Hugh and her recognition that her physical form makes this impossible. Even after delivering Hugh’s dinner, Deb stands by her man, “patiently holding the pail, and waiting” for him to acknowledge her. Her constant attention to his needs has left her highly attuned to whether her efforts are successful. Although he eats what she brings him, Deb’s

“woman’s quick instinct” tells her that he is not really hungry and that he eats only to please her (433). Although his lack of hunger is in no way a reflection of her, but instead a reflection of the poor fare necessitated by her poverty, she reads it as a kind of failure:

after he eats, Deb lies in the ash-heap, “shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe

happened to look towards her. She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that

in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her” (434). The years of toil that

Deb has endured at the mill have taught her that her hideous form is, in essence, her

failure to be a woman. Since she fails to be a woman, she is not surprised by her failure

to successfully do woman’s work. Indeed, Deb constantly attributes her domestic

shortcomings to the ultimate failure of her body, and the readers of “Life in the Iron-

Mills” can certainly extend culpability for these defects to the mill, since it is the source

of her disfigurement.

Although she perceives this ultimate failure, this recognition does not seem to deter her from a slavish devotion to Hugh, as she continues to follow him around like a puppy: “Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master” (435). The dog-master relation is an apt description of their relationship, and it puts the depths of Deb’s abjection into perspective; Hugh “wolf” may be near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, and thus the social and economic ladders, but Deb is absolutely at its bottom. Only from the perspective of the “thwarted woman” does the feminized and inadequate Hugh look like something worthwhile.

Deb recognizes that she is unfit for wifehood and motherhood, but she yearns to have some place in Hugh’s life when she offers the stolen money to him; in fact, she is willing to negotiate almost any situation that would keep her near Hugh, even if that place is outside the home: “if I were t’ witch dwarf, if I had t’ money, wud hur thank me?

Wud hur take me out o’ this place wid hur and Janey? I wud not come into the gran’ house hur wud build, to vex hur wid t’ hunch,—only at night, when t’ shadows were

dark, stand far off to see hur” (442). She realizes that her body has the potential to

inspire revulsion in those who gaze upon it, so she is willing to enter Hugh and Janey’s hypothetical home only at night, and stand in the shadows. At this point, she is willing to

give up the domestic role she has been practicing for so long in order to get out of the

mill and achieve domesticity only vicariously through Janey. She also has no moral

qualms about stealing the money that might give her this secondary family role, which is

an indication that she has failed yet again to model the behavior of a true woman.

Ironically, she is willing to circumvent the moral responsibilities of woman in order to

become one, no matter how tentatively.

One of Deb’s most telling shortcomings is her inability to view the world with

any sense of aesthetic critique. Even though Hugh is a working class stiff, he possesses the “artist’s eye” that recognizes and appreciates the beautiful—another sign of his femininity, as appreciation of the beautiful was traditionally the purview of the angel of the house. Sadly, his eye sees nothing beautiful in Deb—in contrast with the artistic eye of the narrator, who finds that deep down Deb has the same feelings that anyone else might have. Deb, however, does not possess this “artist’s eye” that would allow her to recognize the “picturesque oddity” of the mill at night on her way to deliver Hugh’s dinner (433). She focuses so completely on the physical completion of her womanly tasks that she is unable to appreciate the aesthetic side of life so often associated at this time with things feminine, and thus she embodies Junius Browne’s pronouncement that toil is “hostile to aesthetic development.”

***

“A Desolate, Shabby Home”

Much of the literature of domestic ideology posits the home as a safe space away

from the pressures and rigors of the marketplace and the world of industry. As such, it

offers a place for men to unwind and get in touch with the feminine side of life. Margret

Howth’s home life, however, instead of offering a comfortable and cozy contrast to her

work in the mill, offers a picture in direct opposition to the ideal home:

To-morrow, when the hard daylight should jeer away the screening

shadows, it would unbare a desolate, shabby home. She knew; struck with

the white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings, the old

stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields with a pitiful

significance of loss. Upon the mantel-shelf there was a small marble

figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other two were gone, gone in

pledge. This one was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out her hands

in a dreary sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond. For a moment, so

empty and bitter seemed her home and her life, that she thought the lonely

dancer with her flaunting joy mocked her,—taunted them with the slow,

gray desolation that had been creeping up on them for years. Only for a

moment the morbid fancy hurt her. (38)

Margret’s home life has become the antithesis of home and marriage. This passage is rife with imagery that disconnects Margret’s home from the aesthetic of beauty. The

“desolate, shabby home” fails to meet two of the most important criteria of domestic

ideology: it is desolate, i.e. without children, and it is shabby because Margret does not have the time nor the wherewithal to keep it clean and orderly.

Part of the problem is the poverty she faces: giving up two of the Dancing Graces wreaks aesthetic havoc upon her home. Two of the Graces, traditional goddesses of beauty and aesthetic appreciation, are sacrificed to the pawn shop in order to pay the family’s day-to-day living expenses. The remaining Grace stretches out her arms, reminiscent of the korl woman in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” and reminds Margret how

“empty and bitter” is her home, because no one can respond to the Grace—it stretches out in a plea of unrequited love and desire. More significant, though, is the attribution of disease to the “unhomely” home. The desolation, blankness, and shabbiness Margret encounters there is tantamount to leprosy in the nineteenth century. Leprosy is an apt metaphor for Margret’s condition because of the social stigma unique to the disease—it is representative of that which is rejected by society; just as lepers gather in ostracized colonies, so do those without proper homes gather together in “colonies” not unlike the slums Margret later visits with Knowles. The remaining Grace also recalls Sandro

Botticelli’s painting, La Primavera, wherein the three Graces frolic in the fecund Spring forest amongst prolific fruit trees. Since it is no fun—nor is it productive—to frolick alone, this allusion underscores the missing Graces and the stunted, barren life of the

Howth home.

One of Margret’s ambitions as she toils is to repair the domestic bliss that once filled her home: “the fresh, hopeful glow [of] … the old home as it once was, full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother’s eyes clear shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man anything but courtesy” (43). Later, Margret thinks she

toils in order to make “the home warm again” (51). This warm, comfortable, ideal home

stands in sharp contrast to the cold, barren home in which the Howths now reside. But

the narrator asks, “was there no sullen doubt in the brave resolve? Was there no shadow just then, dark, ironical, blotting out father and mother and home, creeping nearer, less alien to your soul than these, than even your God?” (51). The answer is no—despite what Margret has gone through, her innermost desire is to submit to Holmes, her

“master,” because she still has faith in the domestic ideal.

Jean Pfaelzer notes that Margret’s home life is anything but the picture of domesticity and claims this “reflects the disempowerment of domesticity” in the novel

(66-67). Pfaelzer is right in recognizing the disfunctionality of the Howth household, but her assessment, I think, does not take Margret’s specific circumstances into account. As a result, Pfaelzer attributes to Davis a proto-feministic, anti-domestic stance that is unwarranted. Pfaelzer neglects the fact that Margret is in the somewhat unnatural position of tending to her parents because she has not married and established a home of her own. Of course, a woman as a caretaker in the home is not in itself unnatural, but when that woman is of a marriageable age and has not “completed” herself through the rites of marriage, her situation becomes unnatural. Her life as a laboring spinster, then, skews her outlook on the home: “it was an old, bare house in the midst of dreary stubble fields, in which her life was slowly to be worn out: working for those who did not comprehend her; thanked her little,—that was all. It did not matter; life was short: she could thank God for that at least” (61). Margret only misses someone who

“comprehends” and “thanks” her in order to transform the “dreary stubble fields” of her life into fertile pastures. In other words, acquiring a husband would enable her to find

completion in becoming a wife and, presumably, a mother; in fact, this is precisely the scenario with which Davis chooses to end Margret Howth.

One of the most enduring discussions in the recent critical life of Margret Howth is the question of how much its editor, James Fields, convinced Davis to alter her original manuscript and temper what was a radical novel so that it had a happy ending. Yellin,

Sharon Harris, and Pfaelzer spend almost as much time analyzing the novel that might have been as the novel which was actually published. Although Davis’s original manuscript has not been discovered, Yellin and Harris analyze the surviving letters from

Davis to Fields and reconstruct what the revision process may have been like for the novel. Davis’s letters offer to make changes based on Fields’s assertion that the original had too much “gloom” (Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis 62). Their consensus is that

Fields convinced Davis to make her novel more “cheerful”—Yellin claims that Fields

“feminized” the text (Yellin 212), and that the lost manuscript was more similar to “Life in the Iron-Mills”—in other words, it was more realistic and less sentimental.

Despite the possibility of a more sobering version of the story in manuscript, the fact remains that Davis authorized the sunnier ending, and that ending elicited a mostly favorable response by the novel’s readers and critics. Since the “full sunshine” of the ending culminates in the reunion of Margret and Holmes and points to a blissful domestic future, this should tell us that Davis’s readers and critics were sympathetic to domestic ideology. Furthermore, the novel as published perpetuates that ideology, regardless of Davis’s original drafts and or intentions. After all, had Davis felt strongly about her work, she certainly could have negotiated the changes, or refused Fields’s suggestions and taken her novel elsewhere—she was not exactly under financial pressure

to publish quickly, since she had already refused Fields’s offer of a one-hundred dollar advance for the novel. Of course, Davis was a relatively young female author looking for approval from a veteran male editor, so any scenario that may have challenged his authority was unlikely, but nonetheless, since these recent critical machinations are based upon so little textual evidence, they are not very persuasive.

Most of these critics claim the ending is not consistent with the rest of the novel, so they assume Davis added it at Fields’s suggestion. They quibble a bit about the significance of the result, but all agree it changes Davis’s original intentions for the novel. Pfaelzer puts Davis’s revisions in the context of the sentimental tradition: “by appending a sentimental resolution to a realist novel, by appending a June to her wintry tale, Davis appealed to two democratic literary traditions: the vernacular characterization of farmers and factory workers, and the sentimental discourse of female emotionality, piety, and moral commitment” (60). Sharon Harris claims that Davis “subverts” the message of “full sunshine” through ironic revisions throughout the text (Rebecca

Harding Davis 66-67). It is true that the text is often ironic, but as out-of-context as the ending might feel, it is not exactly tacked on—Margret evinces notions of submission and surrender throughout the novel, not just in the final chapters. In her article, “‘But is it

Any Good?’: Evaluating Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction,” Susan Harris claims that a heroine’s autonomy throughout a novel has a greater impact upon readers than the fact that she surrenders it upon marriage, because “she has left convincing evidence that it can be done” (50). While this may be true, it is important to note that

Margret is not exactly autonomous throughout the novel. Although she has achieved

some semblance of independence, she desires to surrender to Holmes from the beginning, though not always consciously.

When the narrator first describes Margret, much is made of her “rare sincerity” and purity: “simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and her master to conquer and understand” (22-23). It is at this point that Margret is groomed, so to speak, for her position within the woman’s sphere. The narrator stresses her innate purity and goodness, connects her to spirituality and to God, and most important, explains that she awaits her “master” to “conquer” her. The clear implication is that her pure innocence

attains its fullest form in the submissive state, both to God and to husband. Later, when

Dr. Knowles and Mr. Howth engage in a vigorous political debate, her subordinate and

silent position is underscored because she does not participate: “degrad[ed]” Margret

“never had any opinions to express” (29). She is completely removed from the

discussion. Although she has no opinions to express, it is safe to assume that even if she

did, she would not be allowed to express them, since women were not generally part of the nineteenth-century political scene.

Although a vocal minority clamored for female suffrage and other political rights, it was not unusual for women to be completely excluded from politics during this era.

The United States Democratic Review claims,

the numerous instances with which history supplies us of evils produced

by women’s traveling beyond their province induce us to hold to the belief

that the great conservative element of our government is its exclusion of

females from an active participation in the political councils of the nation.

The bane of all hereditary monarchies has ever been that, however great

their founders, however wise the regulations they may have introduced,

their work has always been destroyed by the advent of a female successor,

or of one who possessed the weaknesses, without the attractions of the

softer sex. (175-76)

The argument against women’s suffrage generally followed two models; one, to which this author subscribes, is that women lack the qualities necessary for political success.

The other, that women would be corrupted by contact with the “real” world of men’s issues, is addressed adeptly by Fanny Fern, with her customary sarcasm, in an article published in the New York Ledger: “I hold up both hands for a woman’s ballot box. It implies…nothing derogatory to the loveliest feminine traits….They may go to the coal- yard, and the wood-yard, and the butcher’s and grocer’s, without any objection being raised by the men—not they! Anywhere but to the ballot-box—that would be unfeminine and indelicate” (qtd. in Warren 236-37). The irony of the political discussion in the

Howth home is that Mr. Howth is a strong Tory, and even as he propounds the only form of government that historically has any place for women, he excludes Margret from the conversation.

More significant for Margret than her exclusion from the political sphere is her continuing exclusion from a proper role in the domestic sphere. She seems to be continuously attracted to the potential for a traditional role she lost with Holmes, and she seems to be aware of its larger spiritual significance: she recognizes that the “love she had given up…[was] the quick seed of her soul. She cried for it even now, with all the fierce strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through it she came nearest to

God” (59). In giving up her relationship with Holmes and her future as his wife, Margret

loses a piece of her spirituality, because she feels she comes closest to God only as a wife. The “seed” of her soul can be read as a metaphor for human fertility, and so giving up a potential marriage means giving up motherhood and her best chance to fulfill herself in a meaningful way. Just as Deb recognizes her inability to attain wifehood as a problem of physical inadequacy and hates herself for it, Margret turns society’s disregard for the non-wife and non-mother inward: “she loathed herself as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right,—to love and be loved” (60).

If the beginning of Margret Howth emphasizes the lack in Margret’s life without wifehood and motherhood, as the novel builds to its marital climax it puts the relationship

of Holmes and Margret into perspective. First, it clarifies how Holmes views Margret:

“there was not a morsel of her flesh that was not pure and holy in his eyes” (220). This

phrase seems a study in contrasts, as it explores the tension between flesh and spirit

within Holmes. Only in maternity is the conflict between flesh and purity in a woman’s

body resolved, so one may conclude that Holmes views Margret as a potential wife and

mother, even despite their current circumstances.

From Margret’s perspective, she seems to expect, and derive some sense of

satisfaction from, a subordinate role in the relationship: “I think she was glad to be

humbled before him” (233). Even though the narrator calls this a “strange fanc[y],”

Margret clearly accepts her role within the woman’s sphere, even when that role is only

hypothetical. The metaphorical subordination often lingers upon images of physical

abuse: “in the desperation of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again,

she would have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her life

out,—as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy smother in her throat, if

it had served his purpose, though it cost his own heart’s life to do it” (88). The potential

violence in this passage speaks to both Holmes’s current obsession with success (“he

would have done it…if it had served his purpose”) and Margret’s “desperation” to

complete herself in the domestic sphere—she would prefer death to continuing life

without the ultimate satisfaction of marriage and family.

Before Margret’s eventual acceptance of Holmes, he delineates the qualities he

feels his wife must possess:

my wife must suffer her life to flush out in gleams of colour and light: her

cheeks must hint at a glow within, as yours do now. I will have no hard

angles, no pallor, no uncertain memory of pain in her life: it shall be

perpetual summer…. I need warmth and freshness and light: my wife shall

bring them to me. She shall be no strong-willed reformer, standing alone:

a sovereign lady with kind words for the world, who gives her hand only

to that man whom she trusts, and keeps her heart and its secrets for me

alone. (242)

In effect, Holmes desires a wife who is part nurturer, part helpmeet, part confidante, and

part spiritual icon; in other words, he is looking for a True Woman to complete his

domestic ideal. He will have no wife who does not offer a “perpetual summer.” Since

she won’t be a “strong-willed reformer,” we can assume she won’t resist his plan of domesticity.

All this sums up in Holmes’s domestic dilemma: whether to choose Miss Herne or Margret for a wife. Miss Herne it should be noted, is deficient in all the characteristics normally required of a domestic partner. She is artificial, shallow, and to some extent

representative of the mill itself. Her heavy use of perfume recalls the stifling air in the

mill, and compares unfavorably to the “quiet, pure” Margret (126-27). Since Miss

Herne’s father is putting up the capital which Holmes plans to use to purchase the factory and advance to ownership, she represents the potential for him to continue in the world of business; unfortunately, she has a “callous, flabby temperament” (139). Needless to say,

Herne is the antithesis of the “True Woman,” but her high class status allows her to skirt around her responsibilities in this regard.

Davis’s picture of Miss Herne clarifies the social idea that while too much work unfits a woman for performing the roles of wife and motherhood, too little work has much the same result. Putnam’s Monthly explains that the American “ideal” woman does not shirk her responsibilities to the home, even when she is fiscally able to hire someone else to do her work:

we contend that domesticity is the honor and glory of a woman, whatever

her fortune and abilities; and that when she performs all its duties by

means of hirelings, she is untrue to herself and her birthright. Nature’s

revenge is severe enough, for, the loss of real pleasure and interest is

incalculable, and there is no computing the ennui, inanity, and ill-health

that come of the error. (“American Ideal” 531)

The author of this piece sets forth a clear progression in the process of feminine

degeneration: first boredom, then mental void, then real physical harm. It is also

important to note the continued assertion that a woman’s duties are her “birthright” and

advocated (indeed, here policed) by Nature.

Although Davis clearly illustrates the progression of Margret’s domesticity, and thus seems to posit the ending of Margret Howth as triumphal, not ironic, perhaps the ending contains a jab at another aspect of nineteenth century society—capitalism. Joel finds oil on the Howth property at the end of the novel (254), a circumstance that most critics have read as another convention of the sentimental tradition. While coming into sudden money or inheritance is indeed a hallmark of the sentimental novel, it is possible that Davis intended this particular scenario as a personal joke of sorts against the capitalistic system.

In her autobiography, Bits of Gossip, Davis writes of returning to the old farm,

only to find her neighbors had struck it rich:

my old friends had struck oil; their well was one of the largest in the State.

Money poured in on them in streams, in floods. It ceased to mean to them

education or comfort or the service of God. It was power, glory. They

grew drunk with the thought of it. The old people hoarded it with sudden

terror lest it should vanish. Their only son came to the East with his share,

and his idiotic excesses made him the laughing stock of all New York. He

was known as Coal-Oil Jimmy, and drove every day on Broadway in a

four-in-hand with white horses and a band of music. He died, I believe, in

an almshouse. (103-04)

Though it may be unclear if Davis intended a similar fate for the Howth family, perhaps this correlation does not bode well for Mr. Howth, the most obvious candidate for an analogue of “Coal-Oil Jimmy.” It may also be important to note that Davis allows this development only after Holmes and Margret have rekindled their love and appear headed

for domestic bliss, indicating that Holmes loves Margret before she becomes a rich

heiress.

Although most critics have argued that this happy ending diverges from the

conventions of social realism, I would instead claim that it may make Margret Howth

more like later realist texts, rather than less, especially if one uses William Dean

Howells’s definition of moral realism as a realistic paradigm. Howells claims that

realism displays only the “smiling aspects of life” (94). In that sense, then, the happy ending of Margret Howth predicts the moral focus of later realists, or at least that of

Howells.

***

“Heaven Far-Off”

For Davis, one of these smiling aspects is the “promise of the Dawn” with which

she ends “Life in the Iron-Mills.” Clearly, as others have argued persuasively, Davis felt

Christian evangelism was the appropriate antidote to the “great gulf” between the classes.

The critical moment of Hugh Wolfe’s life takes place in a church, where, unfortunately, the elevated prose of the preacher reaches only the middle- and upper-class parishioners and thus fails to reach Wolfe. Margret Howth is also a novel with explicit religious overtones, and I feel Davis uses these overtones to support domestic ideology in the novel.

Early in Margret Howth, Davis gives us a glimpse into the religious feelings of the characters via an incident reminiscent of the “Doubloon” chapter of Moby Dick. In

that chapter, Ahab and the crew of the Pequod read the face of a Spanish coin as extensions of themselves and their values: Ahab sees himself, Starbuck sees God, and so on. In Margret Howth, the Gospel serves as a similar window into the values of its characters (430-35). Each character hears the same gospel, but each reacts according to his or her own values and experience: old Howth sees Jesus as an aristocrat and a knight,

Joel separates the lessons of the gospel from his practical world of business, and Dr.

Knowles sees Jesus as a reformer (48-49). Margret, though, reflects upon how the mill has changed her spirituality.

Margret’s experience in the mill has defeated her and stifled her religious sentiment: “[n]ow, struggle as she would for warmth or healthy hopes, the world was gray and silent. Her defeated woman’s nature called it so, bitterly. Christ a dim, ideal power, heaven far-off. She doubted if it held anything as real as that which she had lost”

(52). According to domestic ideology, this is the danger of women working outside the home—they are subject to dangers of the soul that perhaps they are not strong enough to ward off. Such work starves the “higher life” of spirituality: “what had she to do with this gulf of pain and wrong? Her own higher life was starved, thwarted” (71). Because

Margret has not realized her dream of being wife and mother, she is unable to cultivate her spirituality.

Amidst Margret’s mill work and domestic sufferings over the course of the novel,

Dr. Knowles attempts to make her life’s work the work of reform, rather than the work of the wife and mother. He calls Margret to give up her hopes of domestic bliss in exchange for helping “these people”: “give up love, and the petty hopes of women” (154).

Knowles sees Margret as having a higher purpose, and he sees her work in reform as a

valid, even noble, spiritual outcome: “this woman had been planned and kept by God for

higher uses than daughter or wife or mother” (20). Although he is well-intentioned and

has some degree of love for Margret, Davis makes it clear that this particular reform path

is not the path to True Womanhood. Domestic ideology requires that a nubile woman

become a wife and mother—only the unmarriageable woman can find fulfillment through reform.

In his young woman’s conduct book, revealingly titled, The Young Lady’s

Counselor; or, Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, the Duties, and the Dangers of

Young Women, Reverend Daniel Wise claims,

Maternal Influence, acting on the infant mind in its first stage of

impressibility, stamps an almost ineffaceable image of good or evil upon

it, long before it can be made to feel the power of the teacher or the

minister. Hence the necessity of multiplied, earnest endeavors to promote

the growth of the loftiest and holiest traits of mind and heart, in the young

women who are destined to be the mothers of a succeeding generation,

and, consequently, to exert that fearful influence, which, more than all

others, will determine its character. (5-6)

Wise articulates the belief that the home—more specifically, the maternal figure within

the home—is the gateway to domestic ideology; as such, any nubile young woman must

fulfill her domestic destiny if she is to become a functioning member of society—it is

seen as a failure of society or a waste of feminine potential for her to teach these values

outside the context of a home.

In contrast, the Quaker woman who rescues Deb at the end of “Life in the Iron-

Mills” is allowed to function in this role because she is not young and marriageable. She is described as “a homely body, coarsely dressed in gray and white” (449). Had Margret been more like Lois Ware, she could have performed this type of role in Margret Howth.

The Quaker woman is able to fuse reform and Christianity, but because Margret is nubile, reform would push her away from God despite Knowles’s intentions. Even Holmes recognizes that the nubile woman is useless if she gives herself up to reform. He tells

Margret, “when you try to fill your heart with this work, you serve neither your God nor your fellow man” (233). Ultimately, every woman had her specific role to fill in society—the best case scenario for any young woman was to perform the role of wife and mother, and only after the flower of womanhood has degenerated into spinsterhood could she take the alternative as teacher or reformer.

In this reading, Knowles is something of the villain of the novel, despite his good

intentions, because he conspires to keep Margret out of the home. In many ways, the

reform that he advocates represents the anti-home. At one point, Margret encounters the

lower classes in a very intense visit to the slums: “the room was swarming with human

life. Women, idle trampers, whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep, or smoking, on the

floor, and set up a chorus of whining begging when they entered. Half-naked children

crawled about in rags” (150-51). These images represent the domestic lost cause—the

dregs of society that perpetuate an endless cycle of squalor and poverty. Even the anti-

home confirms domestic ideology through inversion—the “mothers” in the slums are

“idle,” alcoholics, and smokers, and are therefore responsible for the cycle of poverty

since they are not conveying purity and piety to their children. Margret cannot save the

children from these mothers as a reformer, but she can displace, if only theoretically,

these mothers by becoming a wife and mother in her own right and beginning a new

generation to replace this lost generation.

Lois is allowed this type of reform work, though her work is not as overtly

transforming as the work of Knowles. She is the typical Christian model, and everyone

in the book is awed by her faith and devotion despite her difficult circumstances: “all the

slow years of ruin that had eaten into her brain rising before her, all the tainted blood in

her veins of centuries of slavery and heathenism struggling to drag her down. But above

all, the Hope rose clear, simple: the trust in the Master: and shone in her scarred face,—

through her marred senses” (69). It is interesting that where endless toil squelches

spirituality in the nubile woman, in the outcast toil enhances spiritual devotion, precisely

because she does not figure into the domestic picture, except as a model of piety in the

face of hardship.

Lois does not survive the novel, but she does indeed serve as a model of piety for

Margret: “something of Lois’s live, universal sympathy has come into [Margret’s] narrow, intenser nature” (266). Exactly what form that sympathy takes is not clear, but certainly it will assist her on the pathway to domestic excellence. The angel of the novel prepares Margret to be the angel of the house. In creating this scenario, and others like it in her fiction, Davis taps into the hegemonic discourse of domesticity, particularly its

Christian ethic. She uses domestic ideology to critique the industrial system that allows women to toil endlessly at the expense of their womanhood. Essentially, Davis sees labor as unsexing women, removing them from the home, and stifling their spiritual lives. Her response is radical in the sense that it is trying to change the economic system, but it is

also conservative because it embraces domestic ideology and advocates traditional women’s roles as a means to repair the great gulf between capital and labor.

CHAPTER THREE

“He Is a Red-Mouthed Labor Agitator”: William Dean

Howells and the Left

***

“I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas…. Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy”1

***

William Dean Howells has long been considered the father of American realism,

and despite the vagueness of this claim, one cannot dispute his influence in fostering and

developing the realist literary scene of the late nineteenth century through his fiction and

his criticism.2 Howells was not as widely disseminated as Charles Dickens, nor did he

have the intellectual cachet of William James, but there is no doubt that he was an

important figure in middle-class literary culture. The last two decades of the nineteenth

century in the United States, in which Howells experienced his widest influence and did

1 William Dean Howells, letter to Henry James (Selected Letters 3: 231). 2 See John Crowley, The Dean of American Letters, for a fuller account of the making and the unmaking of the “Dean’s” reputation.

his best work, were years of great social unrest, as illustrated by the deteriorating

relationship between labor and capital. As a leading intellectual figure, Howells often contributed his thoughts about current social issues in his letters, columns, novels, and other writings. Of the critics who have examined this social thought, most have determined that his social concerns were considerable, and that they resulted directly from his readings of Tolstoy and the ugly legal aftermath of the Haymarket bombing.3

This claim has become the standard formula of Howells criticism, but it does not describe the complete picture. I believe this conclusion is reductive; this argument overemphasizes Howells’s commitment to Tolstoy and his reaction to Haymarket while marginalizing (or even ignoring) the radical political voices of the day and the rising tide of socialism. I fear this simple cause-effect analysis may misrepresent the cultural forces at work in and around Howells’s writings. In this chapter, I will rehistoricize Howells and embed his social thought, especially as it is revealed in his fiction, in a context of nineteenth-century socialist, proto-socialist, anarchist, and labor philosophy.

Although Howells was deeply sympathetic to some liberal issues during this era—he wrote editorials that criticize poverty and American imperialism, for instance— he never fully accepted radicalism, instead subscribing to a rather tentative theoretical and democratic Christian socialism that was informed by other social movements.4 His

novels of the eighties and nineties, particularly The Minister’s Charge (1886), Annie

3 James Woodress, for instance, concludes, “Howells’ conversion to Tolstoy’s Christian socialism underlies his social criticism of the 1890’s” (19). As for the influence of Haymarket, Timothy Parrish asserts, “Howells wrote [A Hazard of New Fortunes] to explore the consequences of his bitterness and alienation as a result of his Haymarket protest” (23). In addition, Cady, Crider, Crowley, Hough, Lynn, Kirk, and others have asserted similar claims. 4 A private remark about the Spanish-American War, a conflict almost universally supported in the U.S., is telling about his liberalism: “it makes me burn with shame to think that it is America which is leading the nations back into the darkness. We are not the greatest people on earth; we are almost the meanest and the wickedest, for we had no need to do what we have done” (qtd. in Woodress 23). The fact that the remark is in a private letter rather than an editorial speaks to his reservations about radicalism.

Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and A Traveler from Altruria (1894),

reflect this somewhat protean socialism. Each novel touches on social issues—some

issues are marginal to the plot, and some operate as central themes, but the common

thread in each of these novels is Howells’s somewhat ambivalent stance towards

socialism, especially socialism expressed through activism.

Other critics have been too quick to credit Howells as a member of the vanguard of socialist tradition. John Crowley, for instance, tends to exaggerate Howells’s commitment to socialism because he does not examine it within the context of radical history. Although Crowley properly qualifies Howells’s early socialism as more of an

“altruism,”5 he also suggests that writing A Hazard of New Fortunes allowed Howells to

express a more unified plea for Christian socialism (17), a claim shared by Timothy

Parrish in his analysis of the novel (23). Both Crowley and Parrish neglect, however, to contrast Howells with other radical thinkers of the day, comparing him only to other literary figures. Parrish, for instance, notes that Howells’s protest against the Haymarket trial was “against the opinion of the American literary establishment [and] against the opinion of his own magazine, Harper’s” (24). Since the literary establishment catered to the middle- and upper-class readers who formed the audience for literary magazines and novels, its politics were generally on the side of capital, often ignoring the class strife and labor upheaval of the Gilded Age. David Shumway writes, “the issue was so touchy that the Century insisted Howells remove a reference to dynamite from The Rise of Silas

Lapham, which it was serializing” (34). As a result, if one positions the reform-minded

Howells in relation to his literary colleagues, as Crowley and Parrish do, he appears to be

5 Crowley claims Howells’s socialism was not “political,” but rather “educational” and “synthetic,” designed to assimilate rather than polarize (13).

a more committed radical than he really was. His novels, however, when analyzed within

a network of contemporary social thought which includes labor leaders, Nationalists,

single-taxers, anarchists, socialists, and other reformers, reveal him to be much less

committed to the cause of labor.

Furthermore, Crowley and Parrish seem to have an “always-already” definition of

socialism at their disposal that assumes a fairly static and stable political movement.

Such a ready definition misrepresents the state of socialism in the United States in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which socialism was in constant

upheaval. Historian Daniel Bell notes that the Socialist Party “has never, even for a

single year, been without some issue which threatened to split the party and which forced

it to spend much of its time on the problem of reconciliation or rupture” (9-10).

Although Bell here discusses a specific political party, his assessment is valid for the broader socialist movement of the Gilded Age. Assessments of the state of socialism during this period were quite varied, ranging from Richard T. Ely’s proclamation that it was alive and well to Werner Sombart’s death sentence in his 1906 book, Why Is There

No Socialism in the United States? (D. Bell 3-4). Ely’s expansive assessment of socialism may have been overly optimistic, and Sombart’s reports of the death of socialism may have been greatly exaggerated. After all, six years after Sombart’s book,

Eugene Debs garnered six percent of the national vote in his run for President, a feat which some analysts claim as the high-water mark of American socialism (Salvatore

264), and which is more than double Ralph Nader’s take in the 2000 election.

One of the most fundamental ideological divisions that grew between factions of

radicals in the late nineteenth century is the question of reform versus revolution. Daniel

De Leon, the “undisputed leader and master” of the Socialist Labor Party, was a vocal and strident radical who decried gradualist reforms in favor of “doctrinal purity and

sectarian isolation” (D. Bell 32-36). His uncompromising attitude and concern with

ideological purity had two related consequences—the party’s inability to “build a viable

electoral base” and the desertion of the gradualists to the Socialist Party at the turn of the

century (Lipset 168). De Leon summarized the difference in philosophy in his 1896 speech, “Reform or Revolution”: “reform means a change of externals; revolution—

peaceful or bloody, the peacefulness or the bloodiness of it cuts no figure in the essence

of the question—means a change from within” (32). In other words, those who sought to

work within the capitalist system for specific changes sought reform, those who sought to

overturn the capitalist order sought revolution. This chapter will argue that Howells’s

social novels occupy a more complicated place within the fabric of American socialism

than other literary critics suggest. Certainly, his politics never ventured outside the

capitalist system, so he sought reform rather than revolution, but even his idea of reform

was often muddled and conflicted.

Other critics, such as Robert Hough, have exaggerated the coherence and stability

of Howells’s social ideas. Certainly, Howells came from a reformist background. His

father, William Cooper Howells, was a fervent abolitionist, and the younger Howells’s

first editing job in the 1850’s was with the antislavery paper the Ashtabula Sentinel,

where he enthusiastically supported the Republican antislavery faction (R. Olsen 95).

His regular column for the Nation from 1865 to 1866, “Minor Topics,” revealed him to

be in step with E. L. Godkin’s free labor ideology.6 If his subsequent work at the Atlantic

and his novels of the seventies and early eighties mark a departure from his liberalism,

certainly by the mid-eighties Howells returned to the social in his writing. Hough paints

a picture, though, of a man who steadily and methodically moves to the left in the

eighties and nineties, but a closer inspection of Howells’s writings leaves this thesis in

jeopardy. There is no doubt that by the middle eighties, Howells began to see problems

in American society, problems which began to creep into his writing, but his reaction to

these problems was more conflicted and unstable than Hough and others suggest.

Howells’s social novels reveal that he was quite conflicted about reform; his writings of

this period often contain multiple and mixed messages about the merits and drawbacks of

contemporary social movements.

From a professional standpoint, the late eighties and early nineties were quite lucrative for Howells--in 1885 he signed a contract with Harper for $10,000 per year, an amount roughly equivalent to $180,000 in purchasing power at the turn of the twenty-first century, virtually all of which was unencumbered by taxes. In exchange for this sum, he agreed to write one novel per year to be serially published (he would receive an additional 12.5 percent royalty upon the book publication) and to write the “Editor’s

Study” column for Harper’s Monthly (Cady, Realist at War 2). This income allowed him to increase his personal fortune from almost sixty thousand dollars in 1889 to more than ninety thousand dollars by 1897. He was not against using his wealth for personal comforts and luxuries; he traveled frequently and enjoyed a very high standard of living

(Crider 412).

6 Kenneth Lynn explains that while Howells found no “discernible difference” between black and white men in their “capacity for improvement,” he also “applauded” Herbert Spencer’s dictum of the “free competition” of labor (131).

He often had a hard time balancing this material success with his liberal ideals. In a letter to his father, he approaches the subject with a light touch, claiming, “we

[Howells, Mark Twain, and their wives] are theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats” (Selected Letters 271). At times, though, he felt the disjunction was more troublesome; a well-known letter to Henry James indicates some anxiety with the space between his life and his ideas; in it he writes, “I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas. . . . Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy” (Selected Letters 3: 231). In another context,

Carrie Tirado Bramen describes his encounter with a beggar and calls him the

“personification of liberal guilt,” (93), an assessment which applies here as well.

His guilt stems from his notion that, ideally, art ought to be separate from commercial concerns. In an article penned for Scribner’s Magazine in 1893, Howells speaks to his reservations about associating money with art:

I do not think that any man ought to live by an art. A man’s art should be

his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has

otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all.

There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque

confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something

profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a

statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. (“Man of Letters” 429)

While Howells recognizes that a writer must work within the literary marketplace, he feels an almost instinctual disdain for the necessity of doing so. His claim that art should be “a privilege” glosses over the implicit class dynamics of the issue; if art becomes a

leisure activity, then only those who have the luxury of leisure time—the middle and

upper classes—would be able to produce it. This passage also underscores Howells’s

guilt about his success; in fact, the guilt has escalated into shame, perhaps because the

disjunction between his lifestyle and his politics has become more pronounced.

This disjunction was not entirely unrecognized by others; an unsigned review of A

Traveler from Altruria in the Literary World, after a brief indictment of Howells’s “very

amateur socialism,” asks when our novelists will “practice what they preach” and give

“the proceeds of the copyright of their novels to pay for socialistic propaganda” (201).

The disdain of this critic for things communal is not unusual—many literary journals had

similar politics. I’ll look more in depth later at one such journal, the Critic. Despite the

criticism, however, Howells continued to embrace many ideas of social reform while

increasing his net worth with his formidable business sense. Much has been made of this

fundamental contradiction between his life and his art; most critics have focused on his

non-fiction and found its “theoretical” socialism contrary to his “aristocratic” lifestyle.7

I’d like to suggest that his fiction is a better site for analysis, because it is a site where this

contradiction tends to fade; it does not fade because he began to live a life of rustic

simplicity, but because his fiction tends to undermine and contain its radical figures

within safely delineated constraints, rendering them illustrative of Howells’s own

political indecision and more fit for mainstream consumption.

The idea of literary consumption was paramount in the mind of Howells—the literary trends of the late nineteenth century demonstrated that the dime novel and books like Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur were not only displacing the sales of his novels, but also unquestionably influencing American culture, and not necessarily for the better (Kaplan,

7 See, for example, Cady, Realist at War 147-54, Crowley 11, and Crider passim.

Social Construction 17-18). Aesthetically and commercially threatened by these texts,

Howells compared them to other pleasures of “low” culture: “these amusements have their place, as the circus has, and the burlesque, and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but we had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is hardly an intellectual delight”

(Howells as Critic 113-14). Notwithstanding Howells’s reservations, this “low” art

remained popular—Ben Hur, for instance, nearly toppled Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best

selling book of the nineteenth century. Still, Howells maintained that popularity did not

necessarily denote value. Daniel Borus claims that realists held a philosophy “in which

art was simultaneously in the world but not of it,” where the “valuable novel” could

successfully negotiate the marketplace and maintain realistic authenticity: “the valuable

novel had to walk the line between rejecting outmoded conceptions and capitulating to

the ways of the world, between hewing to outmoded conceptions and accepting the

contaminations that the marketplace introduced” (61).

In writing books that successfully walked this line, Howells managed to make a

comfortable living while commanding high literary status. David Shumway claims that

Howells was still indisputably “the most influential person in American literary culture”

at this time, at least in comparison to university scholars who were conceiving the very

idea of American literature as a discipline (49). Certainly, the literary world recognized

Howells’s achievements; he ranked first in an 1899 Literature magazine “important

authors” poll of its readers (Borus 126). Furthermore, the literary culture that Howells

heavily influenced defined what was “literary,” and that which was deemed literary

acquired valuable cultural capital (Shumway 29-30). This cultural capital imbued the

literary with a kind of social authority that Howells recognized and sought to control. He

garnered some degree of control through his criticism; books which threatened the realist

ethos, like Ben Hur or George DuMaurier’s Trilby received Howells’s most “scathing

reviews” (Kaplan, Social Construction 17), while books which, in Howells’s eyes,

subscribed to or furthered the ethos, like Charles Chesnutt’s collections of short stories,

received lavish praise.8

In his criticism, Howells also makes strong comments about the power of fiction.

In April, 1887, Howells used the platform of “The Editor’s Study” to rail against “un-

moral romances,” which, he writes, “are deadly poison” to American morality,

suggesting that fiction has the power to alter the fundamental values of its readers

(Howells as Critic 99). In fact, in 1885 (before the contract was signed with Harper and

Brothers) Roswell Smith, the editor of the Century, wrote Howells and suggested that he

should use his fiction to “postpone if not prevent the great impending struggle between

labor and capital.” Smith felt that fiction, in addition to being immune to libel, also

expressed the great divide in a more effective and interesting way than non-fiction (qtd. in W. Alexander 72-73).

Of course, the consequences of fiction were not universally agreed upon, but other

journalists joined Howells and Smith in attributing great power and responsibility to

fiction. Benjamin O. Flower, editor and publisher of the Arena, a reformist Boston journal, maintained that the work of the novelist was beyond mere entertainment; in fact, he claimed that “such a position is not only untenable, it is criminal. It is not enough that the philosopher and the essayist exclaim against the wrongs and evils that are even now

8 In a review of Chesnutt for the Atlantic, Howells compares Chesnutt favorably to other realists, claiming Chesnutt writes with “an art of kindred quiet and force” and belongs to “the good school, the only school” (Howells as Critic 297).

crying so loudly for redress, the novelist, the poet, and the dramatist must come to the rescue” (“Highest Function” 630). It is not hard to recognize that Howells’s novels increasingly turned to social themes and issues after the middle eighties.

Even by 1884, when he began to serialize The Rise of Silas Lapham in the

Century, Howells’s social conscience began to creep into his fiction. The main action of that book concerns the Lapham family’s endeavors to be accepted into the upper crust of

Boston, but the subplot of Silas’s business ventures characterizes the business corruption so prevalent in the Gilded Age. It is no accident that railroad land figures prominently in

Lapham’s transactions, since the previous decade saw one of the greatest scandals of the nineteenth century in Crédit Mobilier. Howells’s answer to the perceived immorality of business in Silas Lapham is the “economy of pain,” a kind of moral utilitarianism that

“might have salvaged Lapham’s fortune and defined him as a modern entrepreneur.” In short, the economy of pain is the “doctrinal center of the novel” (Corkin 47). At this stage, Howells associated the problems in society (like business corruption) with immorality. Thus, a moral philosophy applied to business practices could work wonders in the world. Howells’s new sense of moral awareness was not restricted to his fiction— beginning in 1886 Howells reviewed many more books “of social significance” in

Harper’s than he reviewed for the Atlantic, beginning to focus on “the work of political theorists, economists, and sociologists” (Lynn 279-83).

To suggest, as other critics have done, that Howells’s awakening social conscience came primarily from Haymarket and Tolstoy is to grossly simplify the facts.

Although Haymarket and Tolstoy played a part in Howells’s intellectual and social development, his ideas about reform were also influenced by more general economic

concerns. The uneven business cycle since the Panic of 1873 and its resulting depression,

for instance, wrought frequent class conflict upon the United States. This unpredictable,

and often cruel, economic manifestation of the “survival of the fittest” philosophy led

directly to widespread discontent and labor upheaval in the years after the Panic, typified

by the railroad strike of 1877, the 10,000 strikes of 1886, the Homestead strike of 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894. This “labor crisis” prompted an avalanche of public discussion about its causes and consequences. Although a few labor-friendly periodicals backed the working class, the vast majority of the mainstream press derided the labor movement because it defied the prevailing laissez-faire principles of business.

A writer in the June 1886 Century, for example, cautions workers that their

actions affect the entire nation:

there is also a great multitude of ignorant and undisciplined men who are

likely to use their new power recklessly and destructively. The danger is

that these rash spirits will often rule in the workingman’s assemblies….

The labor unions will do well to remember that this warfare that they are

waging concerns not merely themselves and their employers, but the

whole community. The comfort, the safety, the welfare of the entire

population are seriously affected by those violent interruptions of the

industrial order which they are able to bring about. (“Topics” 319-20)

Indeed, when violence occurs, occasionally the public welfare is in danger. Even though

Howells felt some degree of sympathy for the working classes, he reiterates the inherent

danger of striking in the ending of A Hazard of New Fortunes, as Conrad Dryfoos, a

relatively innocent and liberal bystander, is shot during a labor riot.

In an 1894 letter to the Century, James Weir attributes the actions of strikers to the biological degeneration of the working classes; he writes that occasionally “the degenerate element bursts through the restraining bonds of social laws and customs, and makes its savage nature apparent in the strike or the boycott, accompanied, as they always are, by riots and lawlessness” (952). Ultimately, Weir claims, the source of this degeneration is the immigration of “a degenerate class” from Europe, who bring their philosophies of anarchy with them (953). The association of immigration with social ills was a widespread assumption in the Gilded Age, and later in this chapter I will look at

Howells’s treatment of this phenomenon in A Hazard of New Fortunes through the figure of Lindau.

One of the most regular opponents of the working class was the Nation, which railed regularly against labor in its reportage of these and other labor disputes and offered consistent and vociferous argument against these strikes and boycotting in general, mostly due to the influence of E. L. Godkin and his determined Republican ideology of free labor (Mott 3: 342). In 1867, Godkin wrote, “when a man agrees to sell his labor, he agrees by implication to sell his moral and social independence,” a philosophy that became editorial doctrine at the Nation (qtd. in Montgomery 19-20). Shortly after the

Haymarket bombing, the editors of the Nation claimed that there was essentially “no difference” in the “popular apprehension” between boycotting and bomb throwing (“The

Week” 391). As we shall see, unfortunately, the sequence of events following

Haymarket made this pronouncement a prophecy.

***

Haymarket and the Appeal for Democracy

Since the Haymarket affair and its aftermath generated a multitude of

contemporary responses ranging from immediate calls for rounding up and executing (or

at the very least deporting)9 all dissidents to the infrequent voices of reason calling for

justice (of which Howells was part), it has been something of a touchstone for critics

investigating Howells’s social thought; so much so that perhaps a brief review of the

event and Howells’s involvement is appropriate here. On May 4, 1886, a group of

Chicago anarchists held a protest meeting about the previous evening’s police action at

the McCormick Reaper Works, where the police had shot and killed several strikers. As

the meeting was breaking up, the police appeared and ordered the meeting to be closed.

A bomb was thrown into the police group, killing one officer and mortally wounding

seven others. The bomb thrower was never found, but eight anarchists were apprehended

and convicted of murder, despite ironclad alibis and no real evidence. Four were

executed the following year, one committed suicide, and three were eventually pardoned

in 1893 (Avrich).

Howells wrote privately and publicly about this miscarriage of justice, voicing a public plea for justice and circulating a petition for clemency, acts which went against the majority’s cry for vengeance; this majority included the various periodicals published by

Harper and Brothers, which was writing Howells’s ten-thousand dollar check every year.

Certainly Howells demonstrated some degree of mettle with his public defense of the

9 Rufus Hatch, for instance, calls for the police to round up and “dispose of” all “Anarchists, Nihilists, Socialists, and Communists” in the June 1886 North American Review (Clews, Hatch, and Elkins 606).

anarchists,10 but I think it is a mistake to overestimate his radical politics because of these actions. It is important to recognize that he acted in defense of the convicted men not because he sympathized with the anarchic cause, but because he thought the American legal system was being subverted by demagoguery, claiming that “fear and hatred…seem to have debauched this nation” (Avrich 302). For Howells, one who made his living with words, the freedom of speech promised by the Constitution was a paramount concern, and this freedom was clearly challenged by the Haymarket verdict. In a letter to his

father, he writes, “the historical perspective is that this free Republic has killed five men

for their opinions” (qtd. in Wagenknecht 269). Howells’s defense, then, should not be

interpreted as an acceptance of anarchism; rather, he desired to protect the republican

ideal of the United States. This republican ideal was, in some sense, connected to his

realist aesthetic—Howells envisioned his literary school as reflective of American

democracy. In his review of U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, for instance, Howells

claims:

there is not a moment wasted in preening and prettifying, after the fashion

of literary men; there is no thought of style, and so the style is good as it is

in the Book of Chronicles, as it is in the Pilgrim’s Progress, or in a novel

of De Foe’s, with a peculiar, almost plebian, plainness at times….

throughout he prefers to wear the uniform of a private, with nothing of the

general about him but the shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets.

(Howells as Critic 79)

10 John Crowley points out that he alone among “prominent literary figures” publicly supported the anarchists (8).

Howells had a vision of realism that offered an unmediated look into the commonplace

world, and Grant seems to epitomize that vision. Furthermore, that vision of the

commonplace world—the world of “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper”

(Howells as Critic 125)—seemed to mirror, even to validate, the republican ideals of the

United States. As a consequence, even though Howells felt something was wrong with

the American social and economic hierarchy, he found solutions to the problem within

the capitalistic system rather than outside of it. In De Leon’s language, then, Howells

sought reform rather than revolution. Specifically, he sought a reform guided by

republican values.

In doing so, Howells was not unique. An attachment to the republican ideal was

common in all sorts of reform rhetoric during this era. Benjamin Flower, for example,

filled the pages of the Arena with frequent and varied appeals to democracy. In his

retrospective book about progressive reform during his tenure at the Arena, he wrote that many of the discussions in the magazine were supposed to instill the importance of democracy: “if we could make the people see the basic difference between democracy or popular government and all forms of class-rule, and then show them a practical way to restore the government to the people without the shock of revolution, we would be far on the road to a peaceful solution of our gravest immediate political, social, and economic problems” (Progressive 62).

This idea of a peaceful, democratic reform greatly appealed to Howells. In fact, it

was common for the intellectual community to blame the working classes, at least in part,

for the current conditions because they did not choose to change those conditions through

the vote. In a sense, though, the working classes faced a real dilemma in this regard.

Samuel Gompers, the leader of the American Federation of Labor, focused his efforts on

practical gains in the workplace and labor market, “relegating political action to the

future. Unions, in Gompers’ view, should avoid ‘all controversial questions upon which

we might encounter a fatal rock of dissension. Rather let us postpone such measures,

though many see the justice of them, until a greater degree of unanimity is achieved’”

(Lipset 170). On the other hand, Daniel De Leon claimed that reforms such as the eight-

hour day or the abolishment of child labor were not socialism, but merely “patches on the

worn-out garment of industrial servitude” (qtd. in Coleman 56-57).

In apparent disregard for these ideological divisions amongst the working class and instead assuming it to be a united body, Howells published an article in the North

American Review in 1894 entitled, “Are We a Plutocracy?” in which he declares that the

United States has changed from a democracy to a plutocracy and if the lower classes desire, they could change it back:

If the poor American does not like it, or if he does not prefer a plutocracy

to a democracy, he has the affair in his own hands, for he has an

overwhelming majority of the votes. At the end, as in the beginning, it is

he who is responsible, and if he thinks himself unfairly used, it is quite for

him to see that he is used fairly; for slowly or swiftly, it is he who

ultimately makes and unmakes the laws, by political methods which, if

still somewhat clumsy, he can promptly improve. It is time, in fine, that

he should leave off railing at the rich, who are no more to blame than he,

who are perhaps not so much to blame, since they are infinitely fewer than

the poor, and have but a vote apiece, unless the poor sell them more. If we

have a plutocracy, it may be partly because the rich want it, but it is

infinitely more because the poor choose it or allow it. (196)

This logic reprimands the poor for their inaction (or their incorrect action realized as agitation) while it diminishes the complicity of the leisure class. Howells’s argument has two outcomes: first, it allows a fur-wearing, “practical aristocrat” to assuage some guilt about the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots; second, it helps preserve the political hierarchy of the capitalist class, because the vote is not as powerful as it may appear.

Due to the nature of our Constitution, the American political system tends to collapse towards the center. If national parties seek any kind of electoral success, their platforms must be watered down for the acceptance of mainstream America. Consider the Socialist Party as an example. Its formation in 1901 was a movement to the center from the policies of the Socialist Labor Party. Those who defected from the Socialist

Labor Party left because, according to De Leon’s biographer, “De Leon and his party were revolutionaries who sought to abolish the wages system, and [those who defected] were reformists who would not see beyond the effort to squeeze concessions out of the capitalist system and perhaps one day to manage it” (Coleman 48). After merging with

Eugene Debs and the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Party, these

“reformists” found much more electoral success. In 1912, the Socialist Party purged

“proponents of extralegal methods, including supporters of the Industrial Workers of the

World,” who favored more “revolutionary rhetoric,” resulting in another movement to the center, and more votes (Lipset 192-93).

The Knights of Labor also turned to democratic rhetoric in order to achieve their

ends. Terence Powderly wrote that the Knights organization “teaches its members that

the evils they complain of are brought about by bad legislation, and that the remedy must

come through wise, judicious legislation” (125). The Knights believed in educating the

working man in order to bring about this kind of legislation: “necessity has taught [the

working men] that, in order to compel politicians to perform their duty faithfully, the people must be educated up to a standard high enough to enable them to judge for themselves whether a law be passed in the interests of a class or for the public good”

(126). Powderly found the Declaration of Independence to be a fundamental American text, and used it as such in his speeches and writings, sometimes to provoke and sometimes to inspire.11

Pauline Maier has shown that the increasing sacralization of the Declaration over the course of the nineteenth century caused the leaders of practically any movement (or counter-movement) to claim its authority as the authority of choice (197). Indeed, the general appeal to republicanism was de rigueur for any social discussion, regardless of the interlocutor’s position on the issue at hand. This democratic (albeit somewhat artificial) zeitgeist prompted even the opponents of labor and social reform to cling tightly to the republican ideal. In an 1886 North American Review article critical of the working class, for instance, Rufus Hatch asserts that the leaders of the Knights of Labor

“should make the order and its members amenable to the laws as they exist, and, as

General Grant said, ‘if there are bad laws, enforce them and have them repealed’”

(Clews, Hatch, and Elkins 606).

11 See Fink, In Search of the Working Class (89) for one particularly enigmatic example.

As should now be apparent, the profound flexibility of the Constitution and the

Declaration of Independence made them adaptable to practically any cause. Because they were so flexible rhetorically, they may not have had an identifiable essential identity. They did, however, allow nineteenth-century rhetoricians to “seize the moral high ground in public debate” (Maier 197). Radicals could evoke the American

Revolution to justify their support of violent action, while moderates and conservatives could evoke the Constitution to advocate peaceful, democratic reform or to justify the status quo.

Just as Howells displaced the radicalism of the Haymarket anarchists with an appeal to democratic principles, he often dilutes the radicals in his novels so that they adhere to the spirit of democracy and push for reform legally and without agitation, just as he suggests in “Are We a Plutocracy?” Perhaps A Traveler from Altruria, the utopian novel often cited as Howells’s most radical book, captures this idea best. Mr. Homos, a traveler to America from a utopian socialist nation, is quite clear that democratic principles, not violent agitation, built a socialist paradise in his country. Before we discover any specifics about the politics and way of life in Altruria, Mr. Homos claims that although he knows very little about the U. S., every Altrurian has read the

Declaration of Independence, as he terms it, “your glorious Declaration.” His American host, embarrassed that Homos has helped the waitress carry dishes to the table, however, warns him that “we don’t take that in its closest literality” since “our ranks and classes…are what I may call voluntary” (35-36).

In this episode, Howells implicitly suggests that Altruria is a better “America” than the United States because Altruria lives by the principles of the Declaration, while

the U. S. too often separates the political from the social and condones a social hierarchy.

After learning as much as he can about American culture, Homos delivers a speech that

explains the history and culture of Altruria; in the speech, he clearly delineates how it

became a socialistic heaven: he suggests that once the proletariat began to cease stirring

up “strikes and tumults,” and began to use the ballot, then concessions were won slowly

but surely, and gradually the “Accumulation” gave way to the “Evolution” (145). The

lesson for radical Americans, of course, is to avoid agitation, vote, and be patient.

Reuben Camp, a young working-class activist, is at first unwilling to be patient,

because he is skeptical of the power of democracy; he claims, “the Declaration is all

right, as far as it goes, but it don’t help us to compete with the Western farm operations”

(96). Here, he seems to recognize the unfair conditions under which the proletariat

cannot succeed. Camp acknowledges that the “Western farm operations” contain great

force and influence in their accumulated capital; they are so overwhelming that Camp and his limited purchasing power cannot compete. Later, inspired by Mr. Homos’s speech, he calls for “Altruria right here and right now,” implying that he intends to push for democratic reform despite the immediate economic strife inherent in small farming operations. Camp’s original feeling, that democracy offers no help with the problems inherent in the capitalistic system, is converted to a more immediate democratic goal. It is not immediately clear what prompts Camp’s transformation, but Howells implies that

Camp has been convinced that the way of Altruria should be the way for America. His only motivation for change seems to be his increased contact with Homos and his ideas, so Homos is emphasized as a model for peaceful reform, because he wins converts through rhetoric and logic rather than agitation.

The banker, although he is one of the confirmed capitalists at odds with Mr.

Homos’s ideas, agrees with his logic, claiming that as long as the working classes continue to fight (i.e., strike and/or agitate) rather than vote, the capitalist classes will always beat them:

they have been beaten in every quarrel, but still they always want to begin

by fighting. That is all right. When they have learned enough to begin by

voting, then we shall have to look out. But if they keep on fighting, and

always putting themselves in the wrong and getting the worst of it,

perhaps we can fix the voting so we needn’t be any more afraid of that

than we are of the fighting. It’s astonishing how shortsighted they are.

They have no conception of any cure for their grievances, except more

wages and fewer hours. (125)

In this speech, the banker’s ideas appear remarkably similar to Howells’s contentions at the end of “Are We a Plutocracy?”: in order for the proletariat to achieve any degree of success, it must stop all agitation and boycotts and use the democratic system which is already in existence.

Daniel De Leon was also a believer in the political organization of the working class, and consistently urged laborers to use the ballot. Unlike Howells and his banker, though, he also believed fervently in what he called the “industrial organization” of the worker, which would be manifested in strikes and other agitation. He wrote in 1905 that

“the ballot is a weapon of civilization,” and “is the emblem of right,” but it has no power

“unless it is backed by the might to enforce it” (236). Unlike Howells and the banker, De

Leon appreciates the limits of the franchise and seeks whatever means of change are most

effective.

Despite Howells’s insistence on peaceful and democratic reform in A Traveler

from Altruria, not every reader agreed that reform was even necessary, so the novel

managed to ruffle the feathers of not a few contemporary reviewers. For instance, the

Critic, in a review that is more a polemic against socialism than a response to the novel, notes that

the mob does not wish to live in peace with its superiors; it looks forward

to their humiliation, and is resolved, when the time shall come, to drag

them below its own level, and to rule in their stead. . . . Socialism is a

dream, and not even a beautiful dream—as Moltke said of universal peace.

Far better is it for mankind and its progress towards its unknown destiny,

that it should struggle and suffer, and that each man should take his

chances and test his mettle, his brain and his brawn in that bubbling

cauldron of evolution, which is called the struggle for existence. (434)

In his history of American magazines, Frank Mott claims the Critic had a “tendency to be conservative” (3:549), a quality not unusual amongst literary journals, but this review also reveals a commitment to the social Darwinism typical of the period.

The writer’s position is a natural extension of the Spenserian competitive spirit that had come to serve as justification for the widening gap between capital and labor in the Gilded Age. The evolutionary model was so ingrained that many could not imagine a world like the one Howells creates in Altruria; the distinction between capital and labor

was a given, and the only question was which group would be the “fittest.”12 Richard

Hofstadter writes, “Darwin was seized upon as a welcome addition, perhaps the most

powerful of all, to the store of ideas to which solid and conservative men appealed when they wished to reconcile their fellows to some of the hardships of life and to prevail upon

them not to support hasty and ill-considered reforms” (5). Socialism, of course, was seen

by these men as the epitome of “ill-considered reforms,” and socialists were seen as

“meddlers” and “quacks” who were tampering with the natural progress of civilization

(Hofstadter 61). To some extent then, A Traveler from Altruria is a radical novel—at least in comparison to these conservative voices, many of whom controlled the literary publishing industry, Howells’s utopian vision contains some of his most liberal ideas.

These ideas, however, were continually couched in terms of the republican ideal.

A Traveler from Altruria is not the only Howells novel to posit democracy as the answer; this kind of unshaken faith in the democratic process is ubiquitous in his other novels as well. Ralph Putney, for example, the alcoholic but good-hearted lawyer of

Annie Kilburn, expresses similar sentiment, recalling that he told some strikers he was defending, “‘you fools,’ said I, ‘what do you want to boycott for, when you can vote?

What do you want to break the laws for, when you can make ‘em?’” (703). Evidently schooling in the democratic spirit begins early; even young Tom, the son of Basil March in A Hazard of New Fortunes, chimes in, “I always thought we could vote anything we wanted” (392). Despite the rhetoric, however, the events in these novels do not support these assertions; voting as a process that is able to achieve results simply doesn’t exist in

12 In response to the socialist movement, periodicals of the period are loaded with articles that claim some version of Spenserian or individualist doctrine; see, for example, “Is Socialism Desirable?” (Arena May 1891:753-64), W. G. Sumner, “Sociological Fallacies,” (North American Review June 1884: 574-79), and Clews, Hatch, and Elkins.

Howells’s fictional world. It merely functions as the trope of promise, the perpetual carrot-on-a-stick thrust out in front of the working class that, with appropriate prompting, they will pursue diligently.

Howells’s zeal for the republican ideal at the expense of more radical principles aligned him with the vast majority of labor leaders. Much of the labor rhetoric of the period reaches back to the founding fathers and to a “variety of appeals to an extended republican heritage.” (Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy 4-5). George McNeill writes in the Arena in 1889 that labor organization agitation is a direct descendant of the political agitation of our “patriot fathers,” and that the captains of industry are the “Tories of today” (69).

Then again, most labor leaders were not exactly looking for radical reforms. As

Leon Fink puts it, “Gilded Age labor radicals did not self-consciously place themselves in opposition to a prevailing economic system but displayed a sincere ideological ambivalence toward the capitalist marketplace” (Workingmen’s Democracy 6). Instead, they were engaged in a practical struggle for specific concessions from capital—an eight- hour day and higher wages, for instance. Samuel Gompers, much to the chagrin of more radical socialists like De Leon, was fond of saying that the cure for wage-slavery was higher wages.

This penchant for democracy doesn’t necessarily temper Howells’s ideas about reform; after all, the issue here is the means and not the ends, but it does help to emphasize his aversion to extremes and his tendency towards the mainstream, even in the expression of the “audacity of his social ideas.” It also helps contrast his thought with many of the anarchists he was defending (and those he wasn’t). It is not really possible to

construct a coherent vision of socialism in the late nineteenth century, because the

movement consisted of a number of highly contentious factions. In spite of this, in a widely read and influential article published in the North American Review in 1886,

Richard T. Ely, prominent Christian socialist and lecturer in political economy at Johns

Hopkins, attempts to define socialism in its present context.13 He claims at the outset that

socialism is a “vague expression, used to group together a multiplicity of ideas” which all

seek to introduce “radical and thorough-going social reforms” (519). Rather than to find

a focus amongst this “multiplicity of ideas,” Howells tended to find some merit in

practically every faction. Known to be wary of extremes and to tend to pacifism,

Howells still found some appeal in the “unthinkable” anarchist position. Although this

open-mindedness is admirable, it contributed to his own confusion and inability to present a unified message in his social novels.

Theoretically, socialism and anarchism are polar opposites; one calls for more

government, the other for less. Despite this disjunction, participants in political debate,

especially conservatives, had a tendency to conflate the terms into synonyms and to

connect them to violence and foreignness. James Weir, for instance, provides a pseudo-

medical commentary associating the criminal, the communist, and the anarchist: “the

congenital criminal and the anarchist, both victims of degeneration, differ very little….

Of the two individuals, I consider the communist by far the more dangerous to society”

(954). As I have shown, it is precisely this kind of ignorance which led to the indictment

and conviction of the Haymarket anarchists.

13 Ely wrote quite frequently on the subject; his books include The Labor Movement in America (1886), Social Aspects of Christianity (1889), and Socialism and Social Reform (1894).

Despite the ostracization of the Haymarket anarchists from most quarters, their views sometimes correlated with the mainstream, as seen in their appeals to the

Declaration of Independence. At trial, August Spies quoted the Declaration in his address to the court, focusing on its assertion that the people have a right to throw off a despotic government (Parsons 65). Most anarchists, though, were against change through democracy. Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist paper, Liberty, published out of Boston from

1881 to 1908, suggested in an article entitled “The Foolishness of Voting” that voting merely allows slaves to choose a new master, and so should be avoided at all costs.14

In a different statement typical of anarchist thought, Albert Parsons, another convicted Haymarket anarchist, said, “Anarchism or anarchists neither advise, abet nor encourage the working people to the use of force or a resort to violence. We do not say to the wage slaves: ‘You ought, you should use force.’ No. Why say this when we know they must—they will be driven to use it in self defense, in self-preservation, against those who are degrading, enslaving and destroying them” (Fried 228-29). Parsons and Howells both expressed their ideas through writing rather than more direct agitation; Howells, through his many articles and novels, and Parsons, through his anarchist monthly the

Alarm, clearly advocated different means to social reform.

The extreme views of Parsons and Spies were, for Howells, “to plain common sense, unthinkable” (Avrich 302). Despite his aversion to their extremes, however, in

December 1887, just one month after the execution of Parsons and three other anarchists,

Howells wrote to William Salter, “If you think a course of the Alarm will profit me by all means subscribe for me [after Parson’s incarceration, the editing duties of the Alarm

14 Although Liberty had a small circulation, Charles Madison claims its influence traveled far beyond its relatively small printing (“Benjamin R. Tucker: Individualist and Anarchist” New England Quarterly 16 [1943]: 444-67).

had been picked up by his wife Lucy]. Hitherto I must own I haven’t found Anarchy very thinkable, as a political system, though yesterday it suggested itself as something of a general consent, like etiquette or social usage” (Selected Letters 3: 212). This kind of indecision is typical in this period; Howells continued to be unhappy with the current system and the consequent social inequities it brought about, but he was unsure about the kind of system that should replace it.

One of those systems in competition for Howells’s endorsement was Henry

George’s Single Tax plan. Hamlin Garland was a proponent of this reform, and wrote several articles in support of it in the Arena.15 Howells wrote to Garland in January of

1888 telling him why he did not support the Single Tax, but his language betrays a sense of uncertainty:

understand, I don’t argue against you; I don’t know yet what is best; but I

am reading and thinking about questions that carry me beyond myself and

my miserable literary idolatries of the past; perhaps you’ll find that I’ve

been writing about them. I am still the slave of selfishness, but I no longer

am content to be so. That’s as far as I can honestly say I’ve got.

(Selected Letters 3:215)

The “writing” he mentions is, in fact, his current project, Annie Kilburn, originally entitled The Upper and Nether Millstones, which he wrote from early 1887 to August

1888 (Cady, Realist at War 64, 82). If one judges by its original title, the novel may have been originally conceived as a vigorous attack upon the poor working conditions in the mills. In February of 1887, just before Howells began writing the novel, he visited the

15 See, for instance, “A New Declaration of Rights” (Arena, Jan. 1891: 157-84) and “The Land Question, and Its Relation to Art and Literature” (Arena Jan. 1894: 165-75).

mills in Lowell, Massachusetts with his wife, an experience he related to his father in a

letter: “the sight of the cotton and carpet mills. . . made us feel that civilization was all

wrong in regard to the labor that suffers in them. . . . it is slavery” (Selected Letters 3:

182). Despite this strong reaction to the poor conditions in Lowell, the novel displays evidence of the uncertainty he felt when he wrote to Garland.

Originally conceived after a visit to the Lowell mills and written during the height of the Haymarket trial and executions, Annie Kilburn certainly presents some radical ideas. The novel’s titular heroine, after the death of her father, decides to return to her hometown, Hatboro’, Massachusetts, from Europe, in order to “do some good” amongst the less fortunate. She immediately associates herself with the plans to put on a play in order to raise money for a social union. Along the way, she encounters the Reverend

Peck, an itinerant socialist minister, and his daughter Idella, and is caught up in the reverend’s passion for reform, at times confusing her love for Idella (who stays with

Annie and quickly captures her heart) with a passion for reform. Peck plans a working class commune near the mills, where “others who are without homes of their own join us in paying the expenses and doing the work, so that all may share its comfort without gain to any one upon their necessity of food and shelter” (837-38). When the reverend proposes this commune, Annie conflates her desire to “do some good” with the potential loss of Idella and intends to join the commune, despite nearly everyone’s counsel to the contrary. Howells gives Annie an easy out when Peck is killed by a train, and she eventually starts the “Peck Social Union” in his honor.

These and other radical ideas in the novel carry enough impact that one reviewer

in the Athenaeum termed the novel “a description of some unsuccessful essays in

philanthropy” (848), and another in the Literary World to declare that “its atmosphere is

on the whole sad and depressing. We should call it a painful rather than a pleasant

personal history” (35). But the overall significance such events might carry are again

tempered by Howells’s uncertainty. For instance, Howells transforms his trip to Lowell

into Annie’s visit to the mills owned by Mr. Wilmington; this event could have presented

a picture of the desperate conditions in the mills in the spirit of Melville’s “Tartarus of

Maids,” but instead “the labor that suffers” is overshadowed by Annie’s fascination with

the factory machinery:

The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the

men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted

when they made off with broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from

them to their stations again…. In the room where the stockings were

knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to

live before her eyes…. “Here’s where I used to work,” said Lyra

[Wilmington, the owner’s wife], “and here’s where I first met Mr.

Wilmington. The place is full of romantic associations.” (740-41)

Rather than depict the “slavery” or the “labor that suffers,” as he does in his original letter, Howells chooses to paint a romantic picture of the working conditions. Not only are the machines personified as “tireless” and “seem[ing] to live before her eyes,” but

Howells depicts fluid class divisions. Any of the girls tirelessly “counting and stamping” the stockings could theoretically marry across class lines, as did Lyra Wilmington.

Further, the working women look upon Lyra and Annie with “easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking” (741). Any semblance of class conflict that Howells noted upon his

initial visit to Lowell has been erased and replaced with a comfortable air of sororal

kinship.

Howells’s simultaneous attraction to and revulsion for the technology of labor

were typical for the intellectual classes of the Gilded Age, and is perhaps representative

of his relationship with socialism. Alan Trachtenberg suggests that the rapid pace of

industrialization in the late nineteenth century led to an “intense . . . response to

mechanization,” and Americans were “especially obsessed with alternating images of

mechanical plenitude and devastation” (52). Two great fairs, the Centennial Exposition

in Philadelphia in 1876 and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, canonized the

progress of industrial technology in their exhibits. Trachtenberg asserts, “the fairs were

pedagogies, teaching the prominence of machines as instruments of a distinctively

American progress” (41). Not everyone bought into these pedagogies, however. Henry

George paints a very different picture in Social Problems, published in 1883: “we are

reducing the cost of production; but in doing so, are stunting children, and unfitting

women for the duties of maternity, and degrading men into the position of mere feeders

of machines” (193). Just as Howells mitigates the suffering labor in Annie’s scene at the

mills with a fascination with technology, throughout the rest of the novel Howells

mitigates his own liberal ideas in other ways, especially through the mixed sentiments of

Annie and Dr. Morrell and through Reverend Peck’s failings as a human being and

father.

Clearly, the middle class readers of Annie Kilburn are much more likely to identify with Annie or Doctor Morrell than with Reverend Peck. Edwin Cady claims that

Annie and Morrell are calculated to placate Howells’s middle class readers without

tempering his politics (Realist at War 82). This is partly true; Annie and Morrell placate

the middle class, but only by tempering the radical ideas in the novel. Although Annie is

determined to “do some good” and doesn’t take long to fall for Peck’s ideas, when she

does so she is treated as the “hysterical woman” whose heart has overtaken her senses, rather than a thinking being who has come to the conclusion that Peck’s ideas have some validity and ought to be applied in Hatboro’. A more thorough analysis of the trope of

the emotional woman as moral compass in the Gilded Age is out of the scope of this

study, but suffice to say that Howells has given us the “angel of the heart” before: Persis

Lapham provides the moral backbone for her husband Silas in the Rise of Silas Lapham, and Mrs. Sewell provides a similar service for Reverend Sewell in The Minister’s

Charge. Unlike the others, though, Annie is portrayed as aimless, without a real direction for her vague liberal notions.

Morrell (read as “moral”), while exercising a certain amount of humanitarianism in the novel, remains rather skeptical of the liberal plans and schemes that surround him.

He calls Peck a “dreamer” and ridicules his ideas with analogies to his own line of work: he claims that Peck said

that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay in the world,

he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well say that as long as

there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I must share them. . . .

Mr. Peck needn’t go to [the working classes] for his ideal. But their

conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they don’t see

them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in hopes of

treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently. (843)

Even though the narrator provides a very brief statement that these analogies “rang false,” their existence in the text, particularly since they run without rebuttal, provides an argument for the middle classes to embrace. Also, although it is merely hinted at the ending of the novel, it is clear that Morrell provides a better match for Annie than

Reverend Peck. Not a few readers came to that conclusion on their own; for instance, the reviewer for the Critic does not even mention Peck, but devotes an entire paragraph (of a

three paragraph review!) to the “skillfully and subtly sketched” relationship between

Annie and Morrell, emphasizing in particular “her growing dependence on his advice and

sympathy” (63). That reader, at least, is likely to share Morrell’s skepticism about Peck’s

lifestyle.

Peck’s commitment to socialism is delineated with quite a bit of detail in the novel, but it is also diminished by his cold failure as a father. In his first exchange with

Annie he presents his liberal views quite persuasively, but leaves without his daughter, excusing his oversight with a simple, “I forgot Idella,” as if he had neglected to gather his topcoat. But his paternal failings do not end there. At every turn, Howells demonstrates that Idella is not a priority in Peck’s life—as Annie says, he is “always ready to sacrifice the happiness and comfort of any one to the general good” (686). Even in death, Peck fails his daughter, choosing to put her with the working class Savor family, where she would be an extra hardship, rather than with Annie. Howells fixes that mistake easily enough and puts Annie and Idella together by the end of the novel despite Peck’s wishes, but by this point, the damage has already been done to Peck’s paternal reputation. The social type of the “family man,” or perfect father, was ingrained in the cultural mythology of the middle classes to such an extent in the nineteenth century that Peck’s behavior

would have been decidedly unacceptable (Frank 4, 175). Furthermore, since Annie

Kilburn was written in the depths of his daughter Winifred’s illness (just before she died

in 1889), one could imagine that for Howells, paternal failure was quite a serious offense.

His failings in this regard alone may not belittle his ideas, but paired with Annie and

Morrell’s attitudes, Peck’s coldness places him outside the lines of society, a place where

his social ideas are easy to dismiss.

***

Tolstoy’s Christian Socialism

After Haymarket, a second critical touchstone in studies of Howells’s social thought is his relation to the works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy occupies the Howellsian literary summit first of all because amongst the literary community, only Tolstoy seems “wholly without” literary consciousness, and thus is closer to the “real” as Howells idealized it

(Howells as Critic 133). Howells came to view Tolstoy’s writings as something which generated a very personal spiritual epiphany: “his literature both in its ethics and aesthetics, or its union of them, was an experience for me somewhat comparable to the old-fashioned religious experience of people converted at revivals” (Howells as Critic

461).

Tolstoy took these ethics rather seriously, devoting his later years to a self- imposed Christ-like “poverty,” even though his wife remained in control of a considerable fortune. Despite Howells’s glowing approval of Tolstoy’s “ethics and aesthetics,” he eventually came to be suspicious of Tolstoy’s real-life experiments,

writing that they were “a failure so utter, so abject, that the heart sickens in considering

it” (Howells as Critic 453). He based this assessment on Tolstoy’s lack of real need, even going as far as claiming that Tolstoy’s labor takes bread out of the mouths of real workers. Kenneth Lynn feels that Reverend Peck and his vow of poverty in Annie

Kilburn offer a rebuttal of sorts to Tolstoy’s rustic life because Peck shows the

repercussions of “making his private life correspond to his egalitarian social philosophy”

(Lynn 293).16 He goes on to claim that Peck’s death associates “self-destruction with

schemes for introducing middle-class intellectuals to poverty” (Lynn 293). So if giving

up the farm to work on it was not an option for Howells, the question of “what is to be

done” has not been answered for those who have material success yet feel an element of

liberal guilt.

Howells fills his fiction with those who, like him, are well off socially and

financially, and feel a need to do something for those less fortunate, yet who are unable

or unwilling to find the proper actions. This is readily apparent in The Minister’s

Charge. The novel begins as Reverend Sewell thoughtlessly encourages a young Lemuel

Barker with his poetry, which causes him to move to Boston to further his writing career.

Sewell eventually clears up the confusion, but is unable to dissuade Barker from trying to

succeed in Boston. Barker then goes through a series of jobs, all the while bettering

himself intellectually. Meanwhile Sewell feels entirely responsible for Barker’s well

being, since his flattery encouraged him to move to Boston at the outset. This sense of

obligation forms a major theme in the novel. After a number of more direct offers for

help fail to produce the desired effect, Sewell initiates a more indirect push for reform,

the “Complicity” speech suggested by his friend Evans. The sermon points out that “if a

16 Many other critics, including Cady, have connected Peck to Tolstoy.

community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the

virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators” (309). The sermon is printed in

pamphlet form and meets with “great favor,” both in Boston and beyond. Throughout the novel, Sewell prefers theoretical elucidation to practical application; most of his sermons are based on his failure in some practical matter of humanitarianism.

Annie Kilburn has a similar problem; her mantra, “I must try to be of some use in

the world—try to do some good,” drives her throughout the novel. Through most of it,

however, she isn’t quite sure what that “good” should be. Ultimately, after a hastily

conceived plan to join Peck at the mill-workers commune is aborted, she is instrumental

in creating and running the Peck Social Union. Her involvement is minimal though, and

she rejects the Tolstoyan example of Peck and continues to manage her considerable

fortune and to mingle with society’s upper crust. The narrator claims, “while her life

remained the same outwardly, it was inwardly all changed.” (864). This question of

inward versus outward change illustrates precisely the issue with which Howells

consistently wrestled—the connection between theory and activism.

In an effort to solidify this connection and urge his listeners to activism, Daniel

De Leon claims in “Reform and Revolution” that organization is the key to revolution,

that the revolutionist knows that “in order to accomplish results or promote principle,

there must be unity of action” (52): he says, “the reformer spurns organization; his

symbol is “Five Sore Fingers on a Hand”—far apart from one another” (51). I would

argue that much of Howells’s social fiction operates under precisely this handicap—the

liberal and humanitarian impulses are isolated as individual fingers on a hand and often

succumb to the conservative mainstream impulses of the hand itself. For every radical character, there is a limitation of his consequence.

Lindau, the “red-mouthed labor agitator” (as Conrad Dryfoos terms him) of A

Hazard of New Fortunes, is typical case of this constraint. Herr Lindau is hired as a freelance writer by March and Fulkerson for their magazine Every Other Week. He is a fiery German radical who espouses extreme views that get him into trouble with the publisher of the magazine, Conrad Dryfoos. Although Lindau is the epitome of radicalism, he is contained by the novel is such a way that defuses his incendiary nature.

First of all, his thick German dialect is rendered by Howells as to make him rather comic at times, even when his message is serious. Elsa Nettels claims that this dialect (which she terms “mutilated English”) subverts the radical ideas it conveys. And it does in a sense; at times the dialect is so thick as to require translation by the reader—not always an easy task. Also, Fulkerson openly and consistently mocks the accent and undermines

Lindau’s authority.

The accent also serves to emphasize Lindau’s foreignness, which in turn associates him with criminality and extremism. It was quite common in Howells’s day to blame all or part of society’s ills on the new wave of immigration. All of the Haymarket defendants, for instance, were of foreign birth, a fact not lost on their detractors or their prosecutors. Julius Grinnell, the State’s Attorney prosecuting the case, referred to them at trial as “godless foreigners” (Avrich 268). Edward Self came up with a logical explanation for the “Evils Incident to Immigration” in the North American Review: he hypothesizes that the lower rates of passage favored the

migration of the thriftless and good-for-nothing. Hence, it may be

expected that successive emigrations from the same country will show

lower averages of pecuniary means and character, and thus the evils of

crime and pauperism, which come to us from abroad, will become more

and more potent with the deterioration of the moral and pecuniary

resources of the immigrants. (78)

John Weir concurs, adding a component of biological degeneration: “instead of

advancing toward a higher civilization, the peasantry of most of the European nations

have dropped back” (953). Lindau, then, is part of the “degenerate class” that many

Americans marked as dangerous extremists.

Rufus Hatch calls for an end to the labor crisis by rounding up all of the

“Anarchists, Nihilists, Socialists, and Communists” and throwing them in jail, since this

country has “no room for the criminal classes of Europe, and will not tolerate them”

(606). Even Laurence Gronlund, a man often given credit for introducing Howells to

socialism through his Co-Operative Commonwealth, singles out the Germans for

breeding a dangerous version of socialism, which preaches “hatred and contempt against

the upper classes,” a tactic which Gronlund finds “philosophically and morally wrong”

(157). Gronlund separates socialism into “a good sort and a bad sort” (156); the good

turns out to be that cultivated by the intellectual classes of America (like Edward

Bellamy’s Nationalism), and the bad is that preached to the working classes by dangerous

foreigners like Lindau. Socialist politicians struggled with these xenophobic attitudes as

they attempted to build a viable political base in the United States. The formation of the

Socialist Party in 1901 was, in some ways, an attempt to Americanize the movement,

since De Leon and the other members of the Socialist Labor Party were unmitigated

Marxists closely associated with European socialism (D. Bell 32-34).

Despite Howells’s claim in a preface to A Hazard of New Fortunes that he feels a

“tenderness for [Lindau]” which is unmatched by any other character in the book,

apparently this tenderness does not preclude allowing Lindau to operate as a negative

influence. John Crowley calls Lindau’s radicalism a “diabolical force in the novel”

claiming he unleashes “social and moral chaos” as he agitates for change (19). Certainly,

Lindau is responsible for a good deal of chaos in the novel, and in the moral world of

Howells where Bartley Hubbard gets his comeuppance in Arizona at the end of A Modern

Instance and Silas Lapham loses his paint business in The Rise of Silas Lapham, this type

of karmic consequence usually results from some kind of flaw in the character. For

Bartley, the tragic flaw is wanton selfishness, and for Lapham, it is an early lapse of

morality in his business dealings. Lindau’s sin is undoubtedly his extremism, perhaps a

consequence of his foreignness. Basil March tells his son that Lindau died in a “bad

cause” because “he died in the cause of disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law” (392).

Mrs. March perhaps sums up the moral law of Howells best: “these two old men have

been terribly punished. They have both been violent and willful, and they have both been

punished. No one need ever tell me there is not a moral government of the universe!”

(392).

It does seem a little odd that this “moral government of the universe” brings so many of the radicals in Howells’s novels to violent ends. Reverend Peck of Annie

Kilburn is run over by a train on his way to set up a commune among the mill workers,

Lindau is clubbed by a policeman and indirectly causes Conrad Dryfoos to be shot in the

confusion. Certainly Howells was averse to the “revolution” recommended by Daniel De

Leon, and he was even more disinclined to the use of violence to achieve social ends.

Perhaps the violent ends to these characters indicate the danger Howells felt was inherent

in radical extremism. Evidently, though, too much radicalism even without violence can

be dangerous, as Peck is very much a pacifist, yet he meets a violent end.

Ultimately, then, Howells was something of a confused egalitarian, and hoped for

a social equality akin to Booker T. Washington’s view on racial equality so famously

outlined at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895: “in all things that are purely social we can be

as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress”

(221-22). Howells found much to dislike about the capitalist system and strove to communicate this discontent in his writings; unfortunately, because he had no clue as to

how to begin to solve the problems he so aptly recognized, his social novels tend to

present somewhat muddled and confused messages of reform: radical in some ways, yet

conservative in others. Although he felt a strong impulse in favor of reform, he remained

rather lost in the marketplace of social ideas.

CHAPTER FOUR

Classifying Utopia: Edward Bellamy, Nationalism,

and Looking Backward

***

“…the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we deserve it by our faith and by our works.”1

***

The literary event of the nineteenth century may have been Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Looking Backward, a concise utopian novel written by the relatively unknown author

Edward Bellamy, made quite a splash on the literary and cultural landscape. Published in

January 1888, Looking Backward crystallized a number of reform ideals prominent in the

1880s into a utopian novel, rapidly becoming a bestseller and the catalyst for the creation of a number of “Nationalist” political clubs, the members of which took the novel as a manifesto for social change. Exactly how this novel, one of dozens of utopian novels published in the 1880s and 1890s, came to achieve such a dizzying level of popularity

1 Edward Bellamy, “Postscript” to Looking Backward (196).

and influence is worth some investigation. What sorts of ideas did Looking Backward

present to American society, who became the audience for this novel, and what kinds of

people joined Nationalist clubs?

After all, Bellamy’s novel was not originally intended to serve as a social

manifesto, although it quickly took that shape during its creation. In “How and Why I

Wrote Looking Backward,” the author claims that it began as an exercise in “mere

literary fancy,” but that it quickly became “the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial

reorganization” (22-24). The book rapidly assumed a life of its own after it was

published. Not long after the novel appeared, the Boston Nationalist Club was formed and eventually boasted 200 members, including William Dean Howells and Thomas

Wentworth Higginson. In the next two years, over 150 local Nationalist Clubs appeared in the United States (Spann 191-94). Despite its overwhelming popularity, however, it received a mixed critical reception. Arthur Morgan, Bellamy’s biographer, writes that the reviewers generally judged the book not on its own fictional merits, but on whether it mirrored or contradicted their own political beliefs—conservatives fervently panned it, and reformists enthusiastically endorsed it (245-47). A reviewer in Catholic World, for

instance, calls the novel “hazy,” “extremely short-sighted,” and “most unreal,”

concluding that Bellamy “contributes no very much of value to current discussion of the

theme he essays” (856). In contrast, the reviewer for Overland Monthly claims the novel

is “ingenious” and “intensely interesting,” saying “it is impossible to read it without a stir

of the blood” (214). Both reviewers, however, tend to focus on Bellamy’s scheme for

industrial organization, rather than his presentation of it.

Despite the novel’s ambiguous critical reaction, the public loved it; it sold

200,000 copies in its first two years of publication and 400,000 in its first decade (Spann

190-91). Two years after it was published, Laurence Gronlund, the author of The

Cooperative Commonwealth, claimed that 200,000 copies sold meant more than just high profits: “counting five readers to each copy we thus have a million Americans of the educated classes—mark that point—who are so dissatisfied with the established order that they hail a socialist regime with ardor, and who are in spiritual communion round a book” (153). Obviously, Gronlund was enthusiastic that ideas with which he was in

“spiritual communion” were growing so popular, but his hyperbole neglects the fact that many who read it did not agree with it at any level, let alone experience spiritual communion with it. Despite the flaws in his logic, Gronlund’s assertion of the book’s influence cannot be completely disregarded. It should, however, be contextualized.

Gronlund emphasizes that the “educated classes” are the book’s primary audience, which is a safe assumption for any book published in the nineteenth century, but perhaps the audience of Looking Backward was restricted in other ways besides education. The novel and the related Nationalism movement were popular amongst people who had the leisure time and inclination for pleasure reading—the middle and upper classes, and Bellamy’s vision appealed to those classes for reasons I will explore in this chapter. Ultimately, though, because Nationalism appealed to such a narrow class, it failed to achieve the mass support necessary for long-term political success.

Furthermore, because so much of the discussion took place in journals read only by the upper classes, even ideas which may have been cross-culturally attractive probably would not have been widely disseminated. As Christopher Wilson has shown in his study of

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literary professionalism in this era, The Labor of Words, popular “aristocratic” journals of

the Gilded Age, like Harper’s and the Century, often were available only by subscription and catered to upper-class readers (43-44).

Wilson also notes that the editors of these magazines tended to “emphasize the

literary [rather than commercial] side of their work” (43). Furthermore, he claims they saw the publishing world in elitist terms, and they expected their readers to mirror that hierarchy:

“The ideal magazine-reading mood,” [Bliss] Perry [of the Atlantic] once

remarked, “is that of well-bred people listening to after-dinner

conversation in public…the speakers are tolerably short, and represent a

wide range of opinion and are cleverly phrased.” Harper’s claimed that

its principle of selection was to “intellectual curiosity on its highest

plane”; Henry Mills Alden [the editor of Harper’s for twenty-eight years]

liked to compare the spirit to that of a liberal arts college…. All these

notions reflected a pace born of paternalism: benevolent but firm guidance

was applied both to writers and readers. (44-45)

As we will see, Bellamy’s paternalist attitude towards the working classes, both in

Looking Backward and in his machinations in support of Nationalism, reflected a more general cultural trend exemplified by the paternalist attitude of Perry, Alden, and other

Gilded Age editors.

After the publication of Looking Backward, and as the Nationalism movement gained support, Bellamy often found himself articulating the party’s principles and ideals for mainstream audiences. In these writings, Bellamy explained that much of the culture

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was already united in various ways which contributed to the movement towards

Nationalism. He refers to these instances as “fragmentary anticipations of Nationalism,”

and details them in the hopes of demonstrating how deep “the roots of Nationalism run”

in American history (“Progress” 745-46). He further argues that Nationalism is “but the

outcome of forces long in operation, which, by no means as yet wholly coalescing with

strict Nationalism, continue to work consciously or unconsciously towards the same

inevitable result” (747). Among the forces he mentions are the rise of trades-unionism

and the Knights of Labor, the growing farmer’s alliances, the greenback movement, and

Henry George’s single-tax party.

Indeed, the 1880s brought unprecedented calls for reform and social change.

Often, those calls were answered with political results: Henry George’s run for mayor of

New York City in 1886 garnered nearly a third of the ballots cast in a three-way race.

George lost to Abram Hewitt, but he managed more votes than Theodore Roosevelt, and

his success motivated him to establish the Anti-Poverty Society and to launch a

newsweekly, the Standard, which he published from 1887 to 1892 (Bell 29, Nicklason

658). Still, these “roots of Nationalism” did not grow into fully-realized flowers until

Bellamy transformed them into Looking Backward.

In achieving this transformation, Bellamy adapts the goals of reformist socialism

to the dramatic conventions of utopian writing and the fictional conventions of the

nineteenth century in order to attract the leisure class to radical ideas which they may have found unpalatable in other forms. More specifically, Looking Backward co-opts

three visions of late-nineteenth century culture that the professional and leisure classes

found irresistible: first, the novel prescribes elite, domestic reform, rather than reform

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from below or, worse yet, foreign reform; second, it taps into the idea of technocratic

progress through natural, historical evolution, rather than through active and dangerous

agitation; and third, even as it proposes a holistic and organic model of society, it respects

and upholds traditional patriarchal familial roles.

Looking Backward tells the story of Julian West, a man living in Boston in 1887.

West has trouble with insomnia, so he has constructed an underground sleeping chamber

and often needs the assistance of a mesmerist, Dr. Pillsbury, to fall asleep. He falls into a

deep trance one night, and his house burns down above him. It is presumed that he

perishes in the fire, since his mesmerist has left town and his servant dies in the fire. He survives in a state of suspended animation for 113 years and is resuscitated in the year

2000 by Dr. Leete, who discovers the sleeping chamber while renovating his own home.

West finds that the individualistic, capitalist industrial system of the late nineteenth century has been replaced, in a peaceful and natural process of evolution, with a collective socialist system, referred to as the “Great Trust.” True to the tradition of the utopian novel, much of the narrative is devoted to an explanation of the merits of this

new world, here by Dr. Leete. The society is modeled on the organization of a military

force, but this army has industrial, rather than martial, objectives and has achieved exact

economic equality for all of its citizens—all receive the same compensation for approximately the same service.

Most of the novel is devoted to West’s gradual enlightenment about the merits of this utopia, but while he is trying to fit into a new world, he falls in love with his host’s

daughter, Edith, who turns out to be the great-granddaughter of West’s 1887 fiancée,

Edith Bartlett. As it happens, Edith Leete has been acquainted with West through her

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great-grandmother’s letters, and she has already fallen in love with the idea of her great-

grandmother’s long lost love, if not the man himself. As West gradually becomes

accustomed to his new world, he gradually falls in love with Edith. The novel ends after

West has a nightmare about returning to the chaos of 1887 and awakens to the salvation of Edith.

***

Trickle-Down Reform

Much has been made of the fundamental contrasts between Nationalism and

Marxian socialism, and it is interesting to note that Marx’s Capital was first published in

English just two years before Looking Backward. Despite their comparable appeals for a

new economic system, however, Bellamy’s novel and Marx’s seminal work have very

different ideas about the genesis of reform. Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-

Mills” provides an excellent example of a Marxist vision of reform through the voice of

Mitchell, a visitor to the mills. Mitchell is no Marxist, but his comments encapsulate the

essence of Marxism—he claims that “no vital movement of the people’s has worked

down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass. Think

back through history, and you will know it. What will this lowest deep—thieves,

Magdalens, negroes—do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds,

Baconian theories, Goethe schemes?” (437).2 Mitchell presents a sort of proto-Marxist

2 Rebecca Harding Davis does not subscribe to Mitchell’s views, however. In the context of “Life in the Iron-Mills,” Mitchell does not offer the solution to the “great gulf” between capital and labor. Instead, Davis offers a Christian domestic ideology as the answer. See my discussion in Chapter Two for more details.

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theory: the idea that reform must come from the lower classes, since they represent the

people most directly involved.

In contrast, Bellamy advocates the reverse idea: reform can, indeed should, filter

down to the lower classes from the “cultured” classes. In a letter to Cyrus Willard,

secretary of the Boston Nationalist club, Bellamy wrote, “I thoroughly approve what you

say as to directing your efforts more particularly to the conversion of the cultured and conservative classes. That was precisely the special end for which Looking Backward was written” (qtd. in Morgan 249). It seems that Bellamy designed much of his writing, within and without Looking Backward, in order to meet this “special end” and convert the

“cultured classes” to Nationalism.

At its heart, Nationalism was an evangelical movement, and Bellamy organized it as if he were on a mission. Indeed, Bellamy formulated his philosophy of society and religion at a very early age; when he was twenty-four, he wrote “The Religion of

Solidarity,” a document which explains this philosophy. The thesis of this essay asserts the basic rightness of a society ordered by the moral principles of solidarity, and the essay also illuminates Bellamy’s “top-down” approach to conversion:

Potentially, indeed, the universal life [Bellamy’s term for the spiritual

appreciation of the brotherhood of man, something akin to an Emersonian

Over-Soul] is manifesting itself within us by countless unmistakable signs,

but it is the mind of Shakespeare as in the cave-dweller’s. It remains for

us, by culture of our spiritual cognitions, by education, drawing forth of

our partially latent universal instincts, to develop into a consciousness as

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coherent, definite, and indefeasible as that of our individual life, the all-

identical life of the universe within us. (Religion 11)

Although Bellamy claims the universal life is potentially in the “cave-dweller’s” mind as

well as “the mind of Shakespeare,” his emphasis on “education” and grooming the

“culture of our spiritual cognitions” belies an association with the educated and cultured classes. Though the cave-dweller might have the potential of universal life within him, according to Bellamy the best manner of his awakening is through the careful tutelage of

the wise and well-endowed.

Although Bellamy could not reach everyone, much of the success of the

movement did indeed come from the cultured classes. The Overland Monthly reported in

1890 that Nationalism drew its supporters from the middle and upper ranks of society:

“the class of the people from which the strength of the nationalist movement has been drawn is its most striking feature. Socialistic movements heretofore have found their supporters among the manual laborers and the professional agitators, but the strength of

this movement is among the middle classes. For the most part, they are people connected with literature and the professions” (Vassault 660). Connecting Nationalism with the nineteenth-century ideal of “culture” was an ingenious way to add value to it in the

marketplace of ideas. In the Gilded Age, Americans had a “particular idea of culture as a privileged domain of refinement, aesthetic sensibility, and higher learning” (Trachtenberg

143). In fact, according to Alan Trachtenberg, culture often symbolized the “antidote” to rebellion:

Culture was represented increasingly as the antidote to unruly feeling, to

rebellious impulses, and especially to such impulses showing themselves

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with more frequency, as the years went on, among the lower orders. The

conjunction of culture with wealth and property on one hand, with

surrender, self-denial, and subordination to something larger on the other,

gave it a cardinal place among instruments of social control and reform.

Moreover, by offering a middle ground presumably secure from

aggressions of the marketplace, culture would offer an alternative to class

hostility. It would disarm potential revolution, and embrace all classes.

(147)

In a sense, labeling a movement as “cultured” meant that it had a kind of purity—a

mitigation of “class hostility” in a time of tremendous animosity between the classes.

European Socialism, on the other hand, was usually associated with class conflict and

revolution. This is really a key point, as the success of Nationalism was in many ways

tied to its ability to distinguish itself from European socialism and anarchism. As I have shown elsewhere, the 1880s were rife with political and social xenophobia.3

Apparently, Bellamy went out of his way to avoid connecting the term

“socialism” to his efforts. In an 1888 letter to William Dean Howells, Bellamy clarifies

why he made a concerted effort to do so: “in the first place it is a foreign word in itself

and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of

petroleum, suggests the red flag, with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone

about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with decent respect” (qtd.

in Kasson 201). This letter exemplifies the Victorian sensibilities with which Bellamy

crafted his utopia. Notwithstanding his aversion to sex and blasphemy, the key element

here is his aversion to a particular label. The word “socialism” never appears in Looking

3 See my discussion of the figure of Lindau in Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes in Chapter Three.

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Backward, and “socialist” appears only once, in a negative context; Julian West’s future

mother-in-law (had he remained in 1887), Mrs. Bartlett, comments, “the working classes

all over the world seem to be going crazy at once. In Europe it is far worse even than

here. I’m sure I should not dare to live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other day

where we should emigrate to if all the terrible things took place which those socialists threaten” (39). Even though the Bartletts turn out to be rather cold upon West’s return dream to 1887, Mrs. Bartlett is precisely the type of person that Bellamy wished to reach with his message. “Those socialists” represent dynamite and danger to the typical

American of the middle and upper classes, and Bellamy hoped Nationalism would present a viable alternative.

Nationalism’s success within Bellamy’s novel is also attributed in some measure to its ability to avoid the taint of European Marxism. When Leete describes the creation of the “Great Trust” to West, he asserts that anarchists, and others who subscribe to violent methods of revolution, do not assist the process of reform, but instead subvert it:

“they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms” (153). Leete’s assessment also echoes West’s characterization of the anarchists of 1887, whom he claims “proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas by threats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put down a rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its political system, were likely to adopt a new social system out of fear” (38). One way to read Leete’s insistence here is that

Bellamy is discouraging any active social agitation à la Howells. While this may be part

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of his motivation, more likely he is trying to distance Nationalism from anarchism, much

in the way he attempted to remove it from socialism.

Arthur Morgan claims that Bellamy inserted Leete’s feelings into the novel as a response to the frequent negative press towards anarchy engendered by the Haymarket affair (372). It is possible, however, that Morgan overemphasizes the impact of

Haymarket on Bellamy’s manuscript. While it is true that Haymarket spurred frequent

and voluble attacks upon anarchism, such feelings already were present in mainstream

American culture before the debacle in Chicago. Two months before the bomb went off,

the Century printed an article entitled, “The Strength and Weakness of Socialism,” which

asserts that anarchists and nihilists, influenced by European Marxism, “propose to wipe

out the present civilization, to raze it, even to its foundations. They want to blow the whole social fabric into fragments.” It goes on to identify the “reasonless and reckless hate” which characterizes such men as the “fatal weakness” of socialism (Gladden 741).

This is not an isolated opinion—scores of articles and editorials during this period associated anarchism and socialism with violent agitation and associated violent agitation with foreignness. Part of the appeal of Nationalism, then, especially during the

Haymarket era, is its perceived Americanism. The American ideals of material progress and plutocracy seem foundational to its very being, and this was not incidental to its rampant popularity.

Although Bellamy engineered Nationalism as an upper-class movement, he ostensibly characterized it as a movement for the working classes. In his paternalist formulation, however, Nationalism would be spoon-fed to the masses by the cultured classes. One of the forums in which he did this spoon-feeding was the New Nation.

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When Bellamy sought a more consistent mouthpiece for Nationalism in 1891, he established the New Nation, a news weekly which he edited and for which he wrote extensively during its tenure, from 1891 to 1894 (Morgan 66-67). A regular series published in the New Nation entitled “Talks on Nationalism” sought to explain

Nationalism’s appeal to a variety of walks of life. With subtitles like, “To a Farmer,”

“To a Collegian,” “To a Banker,” and “To a Pastor,” the series was designed to justify

Nationalism to just about anyone who ought to be interested in it.

In the article “To a Workingman,” Bellamy sought to defend the movement’s position on labor; he claims that Nationalism is “a plan for helping men to keep their jobs” (Talks 86). Although the essay claims that Nationalism would be of great practical value to the workingman, at the end of the article Bellamy offers an explanation for why most working class men did not join Nationalist clubs, even though according to his characterization the movement had their best interests at heart: “I don’t know about joining your club, for you see I have a night run and could not be at the meetings, but maybe I can help a little by spreading the news among the boys” (90). It is not clear what

“spreading the news among the boys” would accomplish, since none of them are likely to join the club either, but the implication is that workers are valued only as long as they spread the gospel of Nationalism, though they are not expected or encouraged to become members. While it is not likely that the membership of any movement would represent the full range of those interested in it, since Bellamy encouraged the cultured classes to join—and thus lead and formulate the ideals of the party—and encouraged the working- classes only to support without joining, he made Nationalism even more attractive to the upper-class converts he sought.

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In her article, “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia,” Sylvia Strauss claims that

Bellamy did not see the working class as an important faction of society, at least in terms

of reform; she writes that Bellamy “rejected the notion that the working class had any

constructive role to play in renewing American society” (70). While it is true that

Bellamy did not have a clearly formulated vision of how the working class could effect

social change, it may be unfair to characterize his imprecision as outright rejection.

Instead, it may be more accurate to characterize Bellamy’s lack of connection to the

working classes as arising from circumstance rather than theory. Since he was focused so

strongly on recruiting the professional and leisure classes, he felt the working classes

would play a more supportive role, but he did not successfully articulate exactly what that

role might be.

This disjunction continues in Looking Backward; the working classes do not have a prominent role in the Boston of 2000, and their role in the Boston of 1887 is primarily negative. Before West takes his Rip-Van-Winklesque nap, he has trouble building his new home due to a series of strikes by the workers engaged in constructing it. Evidently this is not an isolated circumstance, as West claims that strikes “had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873” (37). He goes on to characterize the workers as discontented, but without the knowledge or leadership required in order to take progressive steps to combat that discontent:

The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally become

infected with a profound discontent with their condition, and an idea that it

could be greatly bettered if they only know how to go about it…. Though

they knew something of what they wanted, they knew nothing of how to

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accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which they thronged about

any one who seemed likely to give them any light on the subject lent

sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some of whom had little

enough light to give. However chimerical the aspirations of the laboring

classes might be deemed, the devotion with which they supported one

another in the strikes, which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices

which they underwent to carry them out left no doubt of their dead

earnestness. (37)

Although West concedes that the workers comprehend the injustice inherent in their

economic position, he emphasizes their inability to lead themselves and to recognize

effective leaders. As it turns out, this paternal attitude towards the working class has

survived the “evolution.” Since they cannot recognize effective leaders, and since their

class interests may not represent the “common good” as outlined by Bellamy, he does not

allow them the franchise.

Despite his contention that voting is the most powerful avenue towards reform, he removes the ballot from the hands of his fictional workers. Leete explains to West that the industrial army is not eligible to vote until they have been discharged from its service; in contrast, the “liberal professions, the doctors and teachers, as well as the artists and men of letters” do have the right to vote while they are in their working years (122-24).

The working classes are not denied representation—those who are retired from the industrial army can vote, but Bellamy’s distinction seems unnecessary, and it gives the impression that subtle class distinctions remain in this purportedly classless utopia.

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The characters within the novel seem to enjoy the comforts and lifestyle

traditionally associated with the professional and leisure classes. In his classic analysis of

the leisure class, Thorstein Veblen writes, “abstention from labor is the conventional

evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this

insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on

leisure” (18). In Looking Backward, although advancing technology has given Boston a

much higher rate of industrial production, exactly how that technology has effected

change in the workplace remains rather murky, because the novel does not describe the

workplace of 2000 at all. It appears that Bellamy feels, in the words of one critic,

“uncomfortable with the proletariat and the spaces they occupy” (Mullin 60). How

technology has changed the life of the leisure class, however, is described in voluminous

and meticulous detail: live music, “suited to every mood,” travels across Boston through the telephone wires twenty-four hours a day, meals are catered and delivered to private

dining rooms, and shopping is simplified through central warehouses and the use of credit

cards.

Despite the massive popularity of Nationalism in the early 1890s, it faded from

the national scene by mid-decade, prompting Bellamy to write in 1896, “while we are left

practically without a party, it is good riddance, seeing that the organization has fallen in

bad hands” (qtd. in Morgan 295). Perhaps the eventual erosion of support for

Nationalism can be attributed to the factionalism so prevalent in reform in the late

nineteenth century. While many agreed that the economic system needed modification,

reformists gathered support for a variety of conflicting ideas, and no one theory came to

the fore. Nationalism, single-taxation, socialism, and Populism all had their adherents,

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but eventually each failed to win the mass appeal so crucial to long-term success. Since

the captains of industry and other defenders of capitalism ruthlessly attacked any

proposed reforms, it was difficult for these fractured movements to gain any ground.

William Graham Sumner, the staunch social Darwinist and plutocrat, for instance, in a

published attack upon socialism, claims “the triumph of civilization is that all of us are above that stage [of misery and squalor], and that some of us are emancipated from poverty” (574). He goes on to assert that “the achievements of the human race have been accomplished by the elite of the race. There is no ground at all in history for the notion that the masses of mankind have provided the wisdom and done the work…. Hence the dogma that all men are created equal is the most flagrant falsehood and the most immoral doctrine which men have ever believed” (578). Perhaps Bellamy could have built a more powerful movement (had he been inclined to do so) had he been willing to encourage more active participation from the working classes. After all, the 1880s saw a large rise in working-class activism, especially in organized labor. Just as Bellamy was writing and publishing Looking Backward, organized labor was achieving widespread success at the polls for the first time (Fink 30). In the public mind, however, the working classes and organized labor were associated with socialism, and Bellamy wanted to avoid this connection, real or perceived, at all costs.

***

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Evolution and Technocracy

In order to separate Nationalism from socialism, especially the European variety,

Bellamy emphasizes that it resulted from natural processes of history, rather than dangerous agitation from the foreign working class. Dr. Leete explains to West that the great national trust came about through the natural evolution of business into larger and larger monopolies, eventually resulting in “the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation” (56). He goes on to say that although these large conglomerations of capital once had opposition, as the evolution progressed, the opposition learned to accept them:

the popular sentiment toward the great corporations and those identified

with them had ceased to be one of bitterness, as they came to realize their

necessity as a link, a transition phase, in the evolution of the true industrial

system. The most violent foes of the great private monopolies were now

forced to recognize how invaluable and indispensable had been their office

in educating the people up to the point of assuming control of their own

business. (57)

The overwhelming sentiments in this passage are that of conciliation and the reparation of feelings between the classes. Bellamy transforms the violent clashes of European socialism into peaceful and sanitary forms of mutual progress. In this way, he assuaged the fear of many middle- and upper-class would-be reformists who were squeamish about the violence so often associated with socialism.

The cultural milieu which produced Looking Backward contained some concrete ideas about the character of American progress and how it was achieved through natural, almost biological processes. Many contemporary reviews of Looking Backward,

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especially the favorable ones, agree with Bellamy’s contention that the process of

conglomeration towards the “great trust” depicted in Looking Backward mirrors the

natural progression of American society. Mason Green, for example, writes in the New

Englander and Yale Review, “the drift of legislation toward ‘nationalism’ is stronger with

us now than at any time in our history” (99).4 Four years before Looking Backward was

published, Laurence Gronlund published The Cooperative Commonwealth, a book with

many striking similarities to Bellamy’s novel. Arthur Morgan insists that Bellamy was

unfamiliar with The Cooperative Commonwealth until after Looking Backward was

published, when Cyrus Willard, a charter member of the first Nationalist club in Boston,

brought it to his attention (242). Although The Cooperative Commonwealth may not

have been a direct source for Bellamy’s work, Gronlund certainly proposes a model of

economic progress similar to Bellamy’s vision in Looking Backward, at least in terms of

the evolution of the great trust: “just as the teething process [in infants] runs its course, so

the centralization of all social activities goes on according to laws indwelling in our

social organism, and to stop it, if we could, would be turning back the wheels of

progress” (62). Indeed, Bellamy’s novel subscribes quite seriously to the idea that the

“social organism” operates outside of human purview, and therefore it evolves at its own

rate.

Connecting social progress to biological processes was not unique to Bellamy and

Nationalism. Henry George, for example, proposed a similar idea in his Progress and

Poverty:

4 J. B. Clark and Solomon Schindler agree; Schindler writes, “Nationalism is not alone the possibility, it is the reality, of the future, the logical consequence of the inventions of the nineteenth century” (53).

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the development of society is, in relation to its component individuals, the

passing from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent

heterogeneity. The lower the stage of social development, the more

society resembles one of those lowest of animal organisms which are

without organs or limbs, and from which a part may be cut and yet live.

The higher the stage of social development, the more society resembles

those higher organisms in which functions and powers are specialized, and

each member is vitally dependent on the others. (514)

George associates higher rates of social interdependency with higher stages of biological

development. He goes on to associate this development, and the growth of civilization in

general, with the rise of Christianity. Bellamy found this theory quite attractive and built

it into his utopian novel.

Specifically, the idea of Christian progress is manifested in Looking Backward mostly through Julian West’s spiritual development. Some of the novel’s contemporary critics, however, found Bellamy’s infatuation with material progress inconsistent with the theme of spiritual progress. Geraldine Meyrick, for instance, in an otherwise favorable discussion of Looking Backward and Nationalism, claims that despite Reverend Barton’s insistence that “spiritual development” in the twentieth century has reached new heights, the characters depicted by Bellamy in his novel “show a decrease, rather than an increase, in spirituality over the present generation” (566). Meyrick contends that while Bellamy depicts a kind of spirituality, it is false because it comes through the environment rather than from within the characters.

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Certainly, Barton alludes to the environmental impact upon spirituality in his

lengthy sermon. His condemnation of the nineteenth century includes the charge that the

capitalistic industrial environment was not healthy enough to nurture any sense of

spirituality:

Despising themselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general

decay of religious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly

veiled by doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men

should doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that

moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must

remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish

fears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to believe in

the fatherhood of God in twentieth century. (168)

Barton attributes the religious belief of the twentieth century almost entirely to the utopian conditions under which men live. In his estimation, the noxious conditions of the nineteenth century were antithetical to spirituality.

Although Meyrick finds this kind of environmental impetus to change distasteful, it is the foundation for evolutionary theory, especially as that theory appears in cultural forms of the era and, specifically, in Looking Backward. The typical image presenting this ideal is the social organism as biological entity. As I have shown, Laurence

Gronlund utilizes this image in The Cooperative Commonwealth; he later refines his theory and puts a great deal of faith into the power of environment to produce evolution:

Modern Socialists do not pretend to be architects of the New Order. That

is to say; they do not propose to demolish the present order of things, as

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we tear down and old building, and then compel humanity to rear a new

edifice according to any plan that they have drawn. They have no such

absurd idea, just because they know that Society is not an edifice at all, but

an organism; and men are not in the habit of “planning” the development

of a dog or a rosebush…. The Cooperative Commonwealth is not to be

regarded as a personal conceit, but as an historical product, as a product in

which our whole people are unconscious partakers. When the times are

ripe for Social Cooperation, it will be just as expedient, as Feudalism was,

or as Private Enterprise was, when each, respectively, made its own

superior fitness. (89-90)

Two prominent ideas in this passage are essential for Bellamy’s project, as well. First,

Bellamy agrees that the “great trust” is “an historical product” in that it will occur through the natural process of increasing conglomeration. As a matter of fact, the process does not seem to be under human control at all.

Second, Bellamy also uses the image of a rosebush as a metaphor for the social organism during Reverend Barton’s sermon in Looking Backward. In order to emphasize the spiritual growth of people as a result of the rise of the Great Trust, he says:

let me compare humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a

swamp, watered with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day,

and chilled with poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of

gardeners had done their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional

half-opened bud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been

unsuccessful…. So it came about that the rosebush of humanity was

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transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sun bathed it,

the stars wooed it, and the south wind caressed it. Then it appeared that it

was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildew disappeared, and the

bush was covered with most beautiful red roses, whose fragrance filled the

world. (171)

While Gronlund focuses on the idea that the development of the rosebush is an historical product, Bellamy focuses on what a difference an environment conducive to growth can make to a single rosebush—taking it from something almost unrecognizable to a platonic rosebush of model proportions.

Just as the rosebush has two settings, a swamp and the sweet, warm, dry earth,

Looking Backward has two settings—Boston in 1887 and Boston in 2000. It is not difficult to determine which setting is the bog and which the sweet earth, but one of the persistent critiques of the book, at least as social manifesto, is that while it details the causes (in 1887) and the results (in 2000) of the “evolution” of the Great Trust, it glosses over the nature of the evolutionary process itself. Despite this “missing link,” Bellamy provides a series of doubles in the novel that provide additional evidence that the evolutionary process is productive of greatness.

The most prominent double in the text is that of Julian West himself—his transition to the year 2000 leaves his psyche in a somewhat fragile and fragmented state.

His “cure,” if it can be termed as such, effects healing through a recognition in the duality of his experience; since he cannot reconcile the 1887 Julian West with the 2000 Julian

West, he rationalizes two versions of himself—one in 1887 and one in 2000. The novel itself is filled with other doubles—for instance, there are two Ediths, two Doctors

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(Pillsbury and Leete), and two experts on society who dissertate about its condition

(Reverend Barton in 2000 and Professor Brown in 1887).

Each of these doubles is quite different from its counterpart. Specifically, the

2000 versions are much superior to the 1887 models. Where Dr. Pillsbury, the mesmerist

who puts West into his deep sleep, seems the epitome of quackery, Dr. Leete is an

effective, knowledgeable physician. Where Boston in 1887 is a chaotic, fractured mess,

Boston in 2000 is a peaceful, quiet community. Both Reverend Barton and Professor

Brown extol the greatness of their respective eras, but Brown does so in a context of irony; after all, the announcement for his speech is in a newspaper filled with descriptions of war, suffering, strikes, fraud, thefts, corruption, and destitution, yet the newspaper announces that Brown’s speech will delineate the “moral grandeur of nineteenth century civilization” (181). Barton, on the other hand, describes a perfect world that seems perfect upon further inspection, at least to West. All the doubling in the novel demonstrates that the process of change has indeed been progress. Even Edith Leete has improved upon the beautiful Edith Bartlett. When West returns to 1887 in his dream, he notices that Edith Bartlett has no compassion for humanity, while Edith Leete’s strongest suit is compassion.

This process of evolutionary progress is symbolized in the novel through repeated

images of sleep and awakening, and West’s century-long sleep, which results in his

transition to the year 2000, operates as the anchor point of this motif. His home contains

a curious addition which makes his lengthy coma possible, the subterranean “sleeping

chamber” which is his private retreat: “I could not have slept in the city at all, with its

never ceasing nightly noises, if I had been obliged to use an upstairs chamber. But to this

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subterranean room no murmur from the upper world ever penetrated. When I had entered it and closed the door, I was surrounded by the silence of the tomb” (40). It is also possible to read this chamber as representative of West’s psyche or subconscious—it marks his transition to the year 2000, and it prompts his dream of return to 1887 at the end of the novel.

In addition, the sleeping chamber is something of a psychological touchstone for

West—he returns to it periodically throughout the novel. The chamber is the only remnant of his house, which simultaneously represents West’s gentlemanly heritage and the disarray of Boston in 1887. Tom Towers claims that the house, “built by the honest merchant who established the family fortune, becomes a metaphor for both the proud decency of Julian’s heritage and the embattled state of that heritage in the 1880s” (53-

54). His trance is clearly symbolic of death itself: he relishes “the silence of the tomb” in the chamber, and there is apparently some risk involved with mesmerism—it may

“become too profound and pass into a trance beyond the mesmerizer’s power to break, ending in death (41). The dominant associations in West’s description, however, are those of quiet and peace—“no murmur from the upper world” is heard in the “silence” of the chamber.

To a society filled with violent instances of class warfare like Haymarket, the peaceful and painless evolution to a classless society must have seemed quite appealing.

What better than sleep to symbolize such an easy transformation? Not only is there no bloody coup d’état in Bellamy’s vision, there is not even an awkward changing of the guard. When West awakens to this new world, the social and political structure is fully

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entrenched. His only task, it seems, is to become acclimated to his new surroundings and

find a place within them.

This trope of the “bloodless revolution” was quite common in utopian novels of

the period, including William Dean Howells’s own, A Traveler from Altruria, which I

discuss more in depth in Chapter Three. As Mr. Homos, the titular traveler, puts it in that

novel, “our Evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political brotherhood, the Commonwealth of Altruria, was founded” (147). Many

Christian socialists subscribed to this idea of peaceful evolution because they did not see reform as class warfare, but instead saw their vision of socialism as the epitome of “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Moxom 21).5 The radical leader Daniel De Leon, in contrast,

calls for revolution, a change in the “mechanism of society,” and claims “the peacefulness or the bloodiness of it cut no figure whatever” (32). Clearly, the pacifist philosophy expressed in Bellamy’s novel is closer to Moxom than to De Leon.

In Looking Backward, the process by which West awakens to this great change is

somewhat akin to the evolutionary process, as he proceeds by fits and starts. West has

“moments when [his] personal identity seems an open question” (114). Later in the

novel, he claims to feel “uncertain of [himself]” (181). His identity problems are most

troubling early in the novel; upon waking up after his first real night’s sleep in the year

2000, he suffers a panic attack that results from his inability to find an individual anchor

point for his personality:

I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those

moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has

5 Expressing a similar sentiment in Harper’s, J. M. Buckly claims that any plan of social reformation must, at its heart, be “a philanthropy springing from human brotherhood resting upon God’s fatherhood” before it can succeed (190).

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received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a

person. . . . there are no words for the mental torture I endured during this

helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other

experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute

intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of

thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration of the sense

of one’s identity. (66-67)

The source of West’s panic is based entirely upon his reaction to Dr. Leete’s first day of

descriptions of the collective society in which West now finds himself. He fears, at least

subconsciously in this state of half-waking, that this collective society will rob him of the

“ear-marks” of individuality that define a person. This individuality serves for West as a

psychological and metaphysical “fulcrum, a starting point of thought,” which acts as a

foundation for identity itself. Even though West has been physically transported to a new

world, he has not yet made the necessary psychological and spiritual transformation that

will enable him to live in an evolved state.

During his panic attack, West runs through the city of Boston for two hours. As

he runs about town, his mind conflates his memories of the city in 1887 with what he sees

in 2000: “the mental image of the old city was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of the actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then the other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which was not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph” (68). Here West finds chaos in combination—the individual images are lost in a confused jumble of impression. Just as his confusion grows so intense that it produces physical nausea, West looks up to see

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Edith Leete, “her beautiful face. . . full of the most poignant sympathy” (68). Her image

offers the assistance he needs to overcome this psychic episode. West describes Edith’s

face as one might describe a beautiful and striking portrait—it certainly stands in stark

contrast to the blurry composite photograph from which he fled. Edith’s constant and

solitary face represents the order, logic, and individuality which are the result of progress

and evolution, and which oppose the barbarism and savagery depicted in the Boston of

1887.

Despite his early troubles fitting into this new era, ultimately West becomes more refined, adapting himself to his new identity as citizen of 2000, and he develops “a new sense of human values”—in a sense, he becomes “an altruistic man” (Schiffman 202).

His relative obliviousness to suffering before his transition to the year 2000 and his heartfelt despair to suffering when he dreams of a return to 1887 provide perfect snapshots of “before” and “after” his transformation. In 1887, West is only troubled by class strife as far as it affects his lifestyle—he loses sleep because of the “tenement houses” that have made his neighborhood undesirable, for instance. The constant strikes and work stoppages are only bothersome because they postpone the construction of his new home. When he dreams of a return to 1887, however, he is acutely aware of the economic problems that were so prevalent in the nineteenth century:

scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of another century. No

more did I look upon the woeful dwellers in this Inferno with a callous

curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and

sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now

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my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could not

repress sighs and groans. I not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.

(188-89)

The religious implication here is threefold—first, West compares his awakening to Saul’s conversion and baptism, where Saul regains his sight and becomes baptized (Acts 9.17-

18). Second, for the first time he realizes and appreciates the common origins of the entire human family: “flesh of my flesh,” he writes, echoing Adam’s words about Eve upon her creation from his rib (Gen 2.23). Finally, his allusion to Dante’s Inferno makes clear the status of 1887 Boston as hell and its 2000 counterpart as paradise. John Thomas calls this dream experience West’s “final ordeal of faith” (240). Indeed, it is an ordeal which seems to seal his conversion to the faith of Nationalism.

Bellamy’s frequent references to scripture in Looking Backward are not restricted to West’s return trip to 1887. In addition, there is something of a religious aspect to

West’s transformation into a new man—it is a resurrection of sorts, a rebirth, just as Saul became Paul in Acts, or as Christ rose from the dead in the Gospels. Indeed, West’s character has a number of parallels with that of Christ in the New Testament. First, West is born one day after Christmas, which makes him something of a pseudo-Christ figure.

Wilfred McClay, in his study of the tension between individualism and collectivism in modern society, The Masterless, points out West’s Christ-like experiences, especially those related to his dream of returning to 1887 late in the novel. He notes that West associates his 1887 dream-trip with the site of Christ’s crucifixion. Upon his return, West claims he has been to “Golgotha . . . I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross” (190). In his dream, West begins to agitate his upper-class friends and relatives at a dinner

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gathering at the home of his fiancée, because he makes a case for the inherent inequity of

capitalism and pleads for their assistance in effecting social change. Eventually, he is

thrown out of the house, an event which McClay views as a crucifixion of sorts, followed

by his “resurrection” in 2000 (99). Despite his parallels with Christ, ultimately West recognizes his failure to transform the world—“what had I done?” he asks at the end of the book. In a sense, he enacts the dilemma posed by Geraldine Meyrick in her analysis of the book’s spirituality—West realizes that he has changed, but attributes that change entirely to his new environment rather than to his own volition, and he feels guilty about his good fortune. Through his experience, West becomes the physical proof of Barton’s

“rosebush” theory—now that he is in good soil, his potential is fulfilled.

His dreams in the book are not always nightmares, however. In fact, at times they

offer him power that is unavailable to him in life. An early dream paints him as the king

of the Moors: “I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Abencerrages in the banqueting

hall of the Alhambra, feasting my lords and generals, who next day were to follow the

crescent against the Christian dogs of Spain” (97). West attributes this experience to his

musical alarm clock, which is playing “Turkish Reveille” as he awakens, but its import

remains clear. West sits “on the throne” of the rulers of Spain for over 700 years—an

outsider with a great deal of significance and power, which contrasts to the

“depersonalized” alienation he feels in the year 2000 (Williams 27). His later dream of a

return to 1887 builds upon the first dream; once again he is an outsider, even at his

fianceé’s home, though, as I have noted, the later dream posits his power as coming from

an altruistic awakening. Bellamy once wrote, “all nationalists are religious men.

Nationalism is a religion. To fully realize and accept its principles of the brotherhood of

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men and the responsibility of each to all and all for each, is to be converted, and

thenceforth to see all things in a new light” (Talks 68).

Bellamy’s vision was shaped by a powerful millennial outlook. In an article

published in the New Nation entitled “To a Believer in the Bible,” Bellamy outlines the

philosophy which serves as the foundation for Nationalism:

I believe that the world is upon the verge of the realization of the visions

of universal peace, love, and justice, which the seers and poets of all ages

have more or less dimly foreseen and testified of. Of course I do not

expect that humanity is to be perfected in a day; but I believe it is about to

enter upon an era of progress wholly different from any previous one, not

only in the immediate actual improvement and ennobling of human

conditions, but still more in the full recognition of the illimitable

possibilities of human nature, and the impassioned pursuit of them. No

longer, as in previous ages, groping blindly through the night, humanity

will be like an army marching swiftly and steadily forward by the light of

the day. (67)

Bellamy’s vision of progress is distinctly millennial and martial. Millennialism, by the mid-nineteenth century a “‘commonly received doctrine’ among American Protestants,” claimed that “history would spiral upward by the orderly continuation of the same forces that had promoted revivals, made America the model republic, and increased material prosperity” (Moorhead 525). In Bellamy’s vision, this upward spiral should, and would, culminate in Nationalism.

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Although millennial thought has a long history, in the mid-nineteenth century

United States, especially among Protestants, a distinct vision of the “end” took shape that

saw American democracy and industrial progress as themes for this evolutionary narrative, a vision that Jean Quandt has termed, “the convergence of eschatological hopes

with the celebration of civil institutions and technological advances as agents for the

coming kingdom” (392). Christian Socialists saw the spheres of politics and religion as

inseparable. One contemporary proponent of Christian Socialism explained the symbiotic relationship between religion and politics this way:

The alpha and omega of Christian Socialism is the realization of the

brotherhood of man through the application of the principles of Christ to

industry, trade, and politics. That these two are not antagonistic but

strictly harmonious becomes apparent when one seriously reflects on the

necessary relation between prevailing human sentiment and human action.

(Moxom 21)

Only by applying Christianity to every aspect of the social world—by manifesting

Christ’s work in the world (if not Christ himself), could the millennial vision of progress take place. Thus the technical and industrial progress of the United States, if it could be immersed in a socialistic context, signified the ultimate end of society foretold in

Revelation.

At one point in the novel, after Leete tells him that lying is “despised among us,”

West quotes the Second Epistle of Peter, declaring, “if lying has gone out of fashion, this is indeed the ‘new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness,’ which the prophet foretold.” Leete responds, “such is, in fact, the belief of some persons

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nowadays… they hold that we have entered upon the millennium, and the theory from their point of view does not lack plausibility” (129). George Connor points out that

Bellamy’s vision is millennial, but not apocalyptic, because it works within the confines of “plain history” (40). Connor may be making too fine a distinction here—for Bellamy, the vision would have been apocalyptic in the sense that it combined plain history with an evolutionary process that culminated in spiritual renewal. Although West quotes the

Second Epistle of Peter, his comment could very well have come from Revelation, where

John sees “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21.1). In this sense, then, the Boston of

2000 is the New Jerusalem, arrived on earth.

Obviously, evolutionary theory was not the exclusive purview of Bellamy and the millennialists. In fact, Bellamy and the proponents of competitive capitalism would both rely a good deal on the theory of evolution as justification and explanation for their beliefs. Both agreed that social progress was historical fact, though they disagreed about the probable results. In an indictment of Looking Backward in the Atlantic Monthly of

February 1890, Francis A. Walker, a prominent economist and the president of MIT, takes issue with Bellamy’s criticism of competitive capitalism. Walker maintains that while it is possible to construct a society “without care, without struggle, without pains,” such a society would not rise “above the intellectual and physical stature of Polynesian savages” because it lacks the competition necessary to drive intellectual improvement

(258). Walker goes on to claim that any form of collectivism, including Bellamy’s industrial army, in which pay is equal despite unequal production is tantamount to

“palpable robbery” and would necessarily lead to “a speedy end of all intellectual and social progress, to be followed, at no late day, by retrogression and relapse.” In Walker’s

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view, “absolute equality of conditions” necessarily creates a society of “miserable

embruted savages” (259). At the heart of Walker’s criticism is the belief that individualism is the necessary foundation of progress and evolution. His concern is that such a collective organization would strip the individual of initiative and freedom of

choice, and thus thwart all industrial and social progress.

Bellamy refutes most of Walker’s argument in an article the following month in

the North American Review. He suggests, first of all, that Walker overemphasizes the

oppressive nature of Nationalism; Bellamy suggests that current military personnel and

government workers accept similar discipline without complaint. Ultimately, thoug, he

does not disagree that Nationalism envisions a radical change in an individual’s

relationship to society:

Nationalism contemplates society, both economically and morally, not as

an accidental conglomeration of mutually independent and unconnected

molecules, but as an organism, not complete in its molecules, but in its

totality only. It refuses to recognize the individual as standing alone, or as

living or working to or for himself alone, but insists upon regarding as an

inseparable member of humanity, with an allegiance and a duty to his

fellows which he could not, if he would, cast off, and with claims upon his

fellows which are equally obligatory upon them. (“Progress” 360)

Bellamy’s point of contention with Walker is not that Nationalism required a different

standard of individualism than capitalism—this is not in dispute; rather, Bellamy

disagrees that such a standard would be detrimental to progress and evolution. He calls

for citizens to “unite our efforts, and by combined and concerted action command success

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for all” (358). In Looking Backward, Dr. Leete puts it this way: “the excessive

individualism which then prevailed [in the nineteenth century] was inconsistent with

much public spirit” (50).

Leete goes further, suggesting that an individual owes an indelible debt to society

because of the constant evolution of civilization; he claims that the inventions and

successes of today which might seem to be individual accomplishments actually owe a

substantial debt to the accomplishments of past generations: he explains to West that

workers are able to achieve more “on account of the heritage of the past knowledge and

achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of years in contriving,

found by you ready-made to your hand” (95). Bellamy offers a particularly technological

vision of progress in Looking Backward; he has envisioned automation on a grand scale,

so much so that Howard Segal terms Bellamy’s creation a “technological utopia” (91).

As I mentioned earlier, his vision of technology is specifically tied to its efficacy in

increasing utility of leisure for the leisure classes.

Other critics have noted that Bellamy’s technological vision tends to enlarge the

private sphere at the expense of the public sphere and is accompanied by a degree of

social alienation. Jonathan Auerbach remarks that much of the technology in Bellamy’s

novel allows his characters to “methodically avoid social encounters in the utopia” and

that the Boston of 2000 seems to be oddly depopulated (28-29).6 Even when the Leetes

go out to dinner at a public dining hall, they are ushered into a private room. Although

public spaces are depopulated in the novel, the family unit remains intact. In fact, despite

6 John Mullin, for instance, calls Bellamy’s 2000 Boston “a cold place,” and observes that West does not encounter any people except under “arranged circumstances” (54).

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the fact that it proposes an organic model of society, Looking Backward promotes and

upholds the traditional patriarchal family unit and the typical gender roles therein.

***

Utopian Patriarchy

Bellamy always maintained that Nationalism was a great proponent of woman’s rights. In an article published in the New Nation entitled, “To a Woman’s Rights

Advocate,” he writes:

A woman who is not in sympathy with nationalism either does not know

what her rights are or does not care for them. Unfortunately, one or the

other is true of most women as yet. But a woman who advocates the

rights of her sex and is not a nationalist is, pardon me, a very inconsistent

and slightly absurd person. We are the only real woman’s rights party in

the world. We alone demand the real equality of women with men.

(Talks 80)

For Bellamy, this “real equality” lies solely in economic power. In Looking Backward,

as long as women receive equal allotments on their credit cards each month—and they

do—they are perceived as equals by Leete and by West.

Leete explains that, in the new economy, women have been freed from the

burdens of housework and are members of the industrial army, though they compose an

“allied force” composed of only their sex. Although they receive equal compensation, certain qualifications are in effect:

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Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment

not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex.

Moreover, the hours of women’s work are considerably shorter than those

of men’s, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful

provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well

appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest

of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to

work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular

requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body

and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. (155)

As is readily apparent, once Bellamy moves beyond economic equality, he is

unconcerned with other differences that segregate the sexes. In fact, at one point Leete

suggests that one of the problems in the nineteenth century was that society did not

recognize enough difference between the sexes. It is also significant that in this passage

Bellamy emphasizes the role of women as models of “beauty and grace.”

In order to achieve the maximum level of beauty and grace, a key issue seems to be releasing women of the leisure class from the “burden” of running a household, with all its associated headaches. So much so, that Bellamy penned an article in his “Talks on

Nationalism” series devoted entirely to the “servant question,” entitled, “To Mrs. A.”

Laudably, Bellamy seems intent on removing the social stigma attached to household service. He maintains that because Nationalism would “professionalize” housework, it would also purify it, in a way:

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The notion that servility and obsequiousness on the part of the employee

to the employer, which in these days is seen in no other department of

industry should for some mysterious reason be indispensable when it

comes to making beds and sweeping rooms, is utter nonsense. It is this

studious effort to preserve the traditions of feudalism in the kitchen long

after they have been supplanted by democracy and at least nominal

equality in the workshop and the field, that accounts for the demoralized

state of household work. The conditions of household service today are an

anachronism. Modernize it, democratize it, and it may possibly last until

nationalism comes, instead of breaking down midway, as it now seems

liable to. (Talks 173)

While Bellamy’s rhetoric seems democratic, its sole purpose is to relieve the woman of leisure the hardship of finding good help; making housework a reasonable means of supporting an individual worker is only an ancillary result. Notice that the final sentence in the quoted passage focuses on keeping the institution of household service alive, rather than freeing its workers from oppression and servility.

Bellamy was not alone in this analysis. An article which appeared in 1892 in the

North American Review addressing the servant question purports to present the “Servant-

Girl’s Point of View,” but merely regurgitates Bellamy’s argument: “just as soon as domestic service is authoritatively and publicly made a commercial bargain, and all other ideas eliminated from it, service will attract a much higher grade of women. The independent, fairly well-read American girl will not sell her labor to women who insist on her giving any part of her personality but the work of her hands” (Barr 730). This

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message is essentially the same as Bellamy’s: the master-servant relationship is an

economic, rather than social, relation, and society’s treatment of it and of those involved

in it should reflect that fact.

The simplicity with which some middle-class commentators approached the working classes matches the one-sided reporting of Bellamy and Barr. In a letter to the

Century published in 1892, Lillian Betts writes that the “true cause” of all the “misery, suffering, poverty, and crime” in the tenements is “the utter ignorance of the wife and mother. Her ignorance prevents her from doing those things that would make her home a place of rest, a refuge, for her husband and children” (315). In her mind, educating the working classes in the proper keeping of households would eradicate the gulf between the

classes.

Although Looking Backward and Nationalism purport to free women from idleness and oppression, neither Mrs. Leete nor Edith appear to be doing anything with their freedom. Neither woman seems to have any occupation at all, for that matter. Edith is clearly in her prime “industrial army” years, yet her only occupations are working in the garden and shopping (Strauss 79-80). Furthermore, Edith fulfills other stereotypes of women. Dr. Leete says that Edith “is an indefatigable shopper, and can tell you more about the stores than I can” (77), and Edith takes West upon a shopping excursion that demonstrates she is indeed an adept consumer.

West’s love affair with Edith Leete also calls attention to her status as a typical romantic heroine. West recognizes that Edith finds him interesting: “it was evident I excited her interest to an extraordinary degree” (51). In fact, Edith tells her parents “she would never marry till she found a lover like Julian West, and there were none such

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nowadays” (177). This significance of this statement is two-fold; it indicates that Edith

Leete is invested in the romantic individualist notions of the nineteenth century, and it

emphasizes West’s distinctiveness, especially in regard to the men of Boston in the year

2000. When West confesses that although he loved Edith Bartlett in his “other life,” he

has closed that chapter on his life, he ends with this caveat: “none can have had an

experience sufficiently like mine to enable them to judge me” (135). Now he seems to

resort to a moral individualism, relishing his unique position. This moment is echoed at

the end of the novel, when West doubts his worthiness to live in an age that allows him to

reap what he did not sow—but here, Edith is the “merciful” judge, who, though she has

not had a similar experience to West, is still allowed to judge him:

when at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the window,

Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering

flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her, with my face

in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my worth to breathe the

air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to wear upon my breast

its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case so desperate as

mine, finds a judge so merciful. (193)

The climax of the novel focuses not on some aspect of politics or government in the year

2000, but on the culmination of West’s courtship of Edith Leete. As it does so, it touches

on one of the typical conventions of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Edith is gathering flowers in the garden; this action is indicative of her leisure class status and symbolic of her fertility; West prostrates himself in the dirt before her, in essence

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subjecting himself to the ideal of womanhood, the “consummate flower” of the twentieth century.

Just before Edith offers this romantic resolution for West, the novel reaches what might be termed its political climax, when West dreams that he has returned to the turmoil of 1887. As he awakens and realizes he is still living in the utopian Boston of

2000, he hears a “voice within” his head that paraphrases Deuteronomy and Matthew:

“better your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned”

(193). The first part of his exclamation makes some sense in that he feels guilt for partaking of the bounty which he had no part of creating, but if so, he still misunderstands the idea of social progress as it is conceived by Nationalists. According to Leete, the very idea of progress entails the social inheritance of previous generations. Perhaps this indicates that West has not been fully converted until he prostrates himself before the domestic ideal in the person of Edith.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Redemption through Violence: White Mobs and Black Citizenship in

Tourgée, Chesnutt, and Du Bois

***

the modern prince...can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.1

***

In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci discusses how the Communist Party, which he terms the “modern prince,” must go about organizing its base of power in order to be successful. I believe his analysis also serves as an apt description of how the

“modern prince” of white mob violence expressed a collective will in the South after

Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century. Gramsci provides an appropriate epigraph, because I find no better example of hegemony, defined by Gramsci as “the

‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” (12), than the

1 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (129)

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coercive power of white vigilante violence in the post-Reconstruction South. The

hegemonic power of white culture combined vigilante justice with legalized prejudice

and segregation in order to dictate local qualifications for citizenship that superceded the

federal Constitution.2

Historians have long noted the persistence and power of the white mob in the

post-Reconstruction South. Davis Godshalk claims that the mob formed a collective will

that had specific methods and goals: “In addition to its symbolic function in reaffirming

the power and dominance of white men, mob violence played a powerful role in

intimidating blacks, controlling black behavior, discouraging open black resistance

against racial injustice, and preventing black economic competition” (147). Certainly,

the southern landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was riddled

with racially motivated violence, manifested by numerous riots and lynchings. Three of

these disturbances, Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876; Wilmington, North Carolina, in

1898; and Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906; provide a vision of the evolution of the race

question in the United States because they vividly depict the racial conflict central to this

violence. I will analyze these conflicts and fictionalized versions of race violence as it

appears in three post-Reconstruction novels of the color line: Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s

Errand (1879), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), W. E. B. Du Bois’s

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). 3

2 See Chapter 1 for a more detailed analysis of how Gramsci informs my reading of social fiction. 3 As even a casual glance at the publication dates of these novels will indicate, I am using the term post- Reconstruction differently from its usual historical-chronological context. I intend the term to signify a thematic, rather than chronological, coherence. The post-Reconstruction novel, for my purposes, is a novel that addresses the issues of black citizenship and white resistance spawned by the failure of federal Reconstruction. These issues were hotly contested through the era of Jim Crow and well into the twentieth century.

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All three of these novels depict violence as a weapon used by southern whites to

restrict or discourage elements of black citizenship; further, each novel argues that mob

violence was not exclusively a tool of lower class whites, but instead was often incited

and even meticulously planned by elite whites, a hypothesis which has only recently

come to be argued by contemporary historians. We can view the process of eliminating black citizenship through mob violence as something akin to the “regeneration through

violence” posited by Richard Slotkin in his seminal study of the American frontier.

Slotkin claims that the first Europeans in America regenerated “their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation” through the violent conquest of native

peoples (5). Slotkin asserts that this “myth of regeneration through violence became the

structuring metaphor of the American experience” (5). By extension, it also became the

structuring metaphor of the southern experience after the Civil War, as southern whites

regenerated the power of the Confederacy through the violent oppression of African

Americans.

Slotkin details how that process was couched explicitly in religious terms: the

explorers and settlers of the Americas were endowed with “a sense of shared mission—a

belief that their presence in the New World was decreed from above with definite ends in

view and that deviation from those ends was equivalent to mortal sin” (37). That sense of

shared mission evolved into the Christian evangelism so prevalent in the southern states

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Beginning with the Civil War, many

southerners were swept by a furious religious revivalism (Faust 63). While the old cliché

that “there are no atheists in foxholes,” or in this case, in battle ranks, may have some

4 Samuel S. Hill and others have argued for the centrality of religion in southern culture. See Hill, Samuel S., ed., Varieties of Southern Religious Experience. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988.

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validity, even after the war ended religious feeling in the South continued to grow. In

fact, the losing effort of the Confederacy may have spurred that growth. After their

political cause was lost, southerners transformed the religious revivalism sweeping the

South into what Charles Reagan Wilson calls the “southern civil religion,” a culture

steeped in ritual that saw the southern way of life as a Christian imperative for virtue and

order (219ff.).

The root of this religion was honor, or what Edward Crowther has termed “holy

honor,” a mixture of “evangelical and martial traditions” that often justified and

promoted violence in the South from the days of John Smith well into the twentieth

century (620).5 In the early nineteenth century, the violent ritual most often invoked was

the duel, but after the Civil War, the tenor of that violence changed as the duel faded

from prominence and was replaced with mob violence against African Americans. The

most significant element of this evolution is the fact that the object of southern violence was transferred from a social equal to a perceived social inferior. As it did so, the ritual aspect became almost archetypal in its repetition (Charles Wilson 238). The ritual was seen as a way to exorcise the shame associated with martial loss. Bertram Wyatt-Brown sees an integral connection between the southern sense of honor and its obsessive fear of

shame (Shaping 84). The sting of the recent devastation of the Civil War and its

attendant shame was paramount, and the white-on-black mob violence that virulently

spread through the South was a ritualistic reenactment of the Civil War, except with better odds and a much better defined enemy. We will see that, in their fiction, Tourgée,

Chesnutt, and Du Bois each engaged the idea of holy honor and the violence that

5 A number of historians have commented on the connection between honor and violence in the Old (and New) South. See Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor.

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supported it. Furthermore, each writer addressed different aspects of the phenomenon—

Tourgée focuses on the white unwillingness to condone black citizenship, Chesnutt on

the white fear of miscegenation and its political ramifications, and Du Bois on the black

reversal of the structure of holy honor.

Amy Kaplan has theorized how the “reassuring order of the domestic color line”

provided a comfortable touchstone for soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War in

1898 (“Black and Blue” 222). She contends that the Rough Riders “have been

understood as a unifying cultural symbol” that healed the conflicts of the Civil War and

Reconstruction (232). As Americans “remembered” the Maine, the War effort certainly

unified the country against a common enemy. No small part in this endeavor was played

by the news media; as one historian reports, “for a week [after the Maine exploded in

Havana Harbor], the New York Journal devoted an average of eight and a half pages of

news, editorials, and pictures to the Maine,” the consequence of which incited the public

to near unanimous support for a war with Spain (Musicant 143).

I would suggest, however, that as the Spanish-American War healed the rift between North and South, an even more powerful unifying force, the southern civil religion and its attendant holy honor, operated as a method for solidifying the culture of the American South after Reconstruction. It offered a regeneration for southern whites brought about by the oppression and suppression of the Others who lived amongst them—Unionists, carpetbaggers and Negroes. Even as it crushed the citizenship, the hope, and even the lives of African Americans, it affirmed a sense of the South as the

“city on a hill,” a culture that would serve as a shining model of humanity for white

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Christians everywhere, and it brought a fractured society together against a common

enemy.

After the Reconstruction Acts allowed for the readmission of the Confederate

States to the Union under fairly stringent requirements, such as universal manhood suffrage, the South began to speak and act in opposition to the new laws. Francis P.

Blair, running on the Democratic ticket in 1868, declared that the Acts were “usurpations

and unconstitutional, revolutionary and void” (qtd. in Perman 4). Phillip Friese, writing

in DeBow’s Review, goes much further; he claims that the Acts are

treasonable to the people of the United States mentioned in the

Constitution, the white people, by way of adhering to their enemies and

giving them aid and comfort; inasmuch as these acts commit political

power to those who have ever been for four thousand years, wherever they

have had power, in both hemispheres, in every way, as a race, enemies of

the whites. (293)

Friese envisions the United States as a state founded upon the purity of the Anglo-Saxon

race and established in competition with the lesser races, and he uses his vision to declare

the Acts treasonous.

As the southern rhetoric against the Act became more frenetic, the connection

between the political cause of white southerners and religion became more overt.

Stained-glass windows that combined Biblical iconography with images of the

Confederacy went up in churches across the South. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,

Jefferson Davis, and others were placed in scenes from the Old Testament and installed

next to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary (Wilson 224). As the southern sense of spiritual and

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cultural self-righteousness grew, so did the intensity with which southern whites defended their civil religion. When that defense became violent, and that violence began to move political control of the South back into the hands of white Democrats, southern whites viewed the results as a kind of salvation for the race, so they aptly referred to the process of regaining power as “redemption.”

In this chapter, I will look at how the novels of Tourgée, Chesnutt, and Du Bois

formed part of the counter-redemption, not because they inverted the power structure or

reversed redemption, but because they performed ideological work that agitated against

it. I take the notion of “ideological work” from Mary Poovey, who indicates in Uneven

Developments that cultural ideologies are “both contested and always under construction”

(3), and that fiction takes part in formulating and constructing those ideologies.6 I

contend that the redemption of southern politics was a dominant cultural ideology in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South, and that this redemption was enforced by mob violence. Furthermore, the African American and American social novel formed part of the counter-redemption. The novels of Tourgée, Chesnutt, and Du Bois, in particular, dramatized the historical phenomena of redemption and mob violence on the

fictional stage in such a way as to protest the annihilation of black citizenship. These

three writers also represent the evolution of the counter-redemption. All of them decry

the violence, but as it changes from a desperate attempt to recapture the past just after the

Civil War—replaying the War as victors rather than victims—to a fully realized system

for black oppression in the twentieth century, the nature of the counter-redemption

changes. Tourgée is satisfied in merely pointing out the agency of the violence, Chesnutt

6 See Chapter 1 for more detail about Poovey’s influence on this study.

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reveals the motivation behind it, and Du Bois inverts the structure of the honor and shame that feeds it.

***

The Hamburg Massacre and A Fool’s Errand

On July 4, 1876, a black militia unit led by Dock Adams, a Republican politician from Georgia, was marching through the streets of Hamburg, South Carolina, when it encountered a buggy containing two white planters. Both groups claimed right of way, and after a brief but heated exchange the militia yielded to the buggy. The issue was turned over to the local courts and began to arouse local interest. Fearing for their safety, the militia chose not to attend the hearing four days later when a number of armed whites organized a protest and gathered a mob of citizens around the courthouse. When the militia did not appear, the mob became upset because it expected an apology. Soon, the mob took matters into its own hands and hunted down the militia members at their barracks and executed at least seven of them, shooting at others as they fled (Kantrowitz,

Tillman 64-71).

At the heart of this violence was what Stephen Kantrowitz has termed the

“underlying conflict over race and citizenship” in the Reconstruction South (“Mob” 73).

In other words, southern white citizens were outraged by the independence and authority the United States government granted to black men in its Reconstruction policies. In the case of Hamburg, the local whites did not recognize the authority of the militia. Matthew

Butler, the lawyer for the whites (and a future U.S. Senator), demanded that the black

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militia surrender their guns as part of an apology. The New York Times account of the massacre summarizes local white attitudes towards blacks and the second amendment:

“the whites have always assumed that the blacks had no right to bear arms; have persisted in regarding the colored militia as a standing menace to themselves and their families, and have never failed to disarm them when a favorable opportunity presented itself”

(“Old Rebel” 1). The militia, and black gun ownership in general, did not pose any actual threat to the white citizens, but the symbolism of power and independence wrought by the marching militia on the day traditionally reserved for celebration of white cultural and political heritage was perceived as an outrage. In order for the whites to maintain a sense of power and control, this assertion of black independence needed to be countered with a ritual of submission and compliance in the act of surrendering their arms to the white citizenry—in effect, symbolically and publicly surrendering their “inalienable” rights as citizens.

Despite its censure of the massacre itself, the New York Times account perpetuates the pervasive myth of elite virtuousness: “the killing of the prisoners is severely condemned by the better class of the community” (1). Although the idea that white on black violence was perpetrated by lower-class whites and condemned by the “better sort” was a common perception well into the twentieth century, it is not an accurate description. In the case of Hamburg, not only did the upper classes participate in the mob, but some of its most prominent citizens led it. Henry Getzen, one of the original buggy riders and a prominent local citizen, handpicked the men who were executed, and

Ben Tillman, another prominent leader and future governor of South Carolina and U.S.

Senator, was a proud member of the mob (Kantrowitz, Tillman 69). Such men viewed

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their active participation as a badge of honor because they felt they were participating in an event that upheld the basic rights of whites to rule the South—in effect, inverting the outcome of the Civil War. As I have shown, their citizenship in the South required full participation in the advocacy of holy honor.

The following summer, Albion Tourgée, a Michigan attorney and veteran of the

Union Army, now a North Carolina carpetbagger, began to write a fictionalized account of his sojourn in the South called A Fool’s Errand. The novel, published in 1879, recounts the trials of Comfort Servosse (also known as the Fool), a Michigan attorney and veteran of the Union Army, after he returns from the War. Since his clients have found other attorneys and his doctor recommends a genial climate for his war wounds,

Servosse moves his wife, Metta, and his child, Lily, to North Carolina, where he purchases an estate named Warrington. Servosse’s radical views engender a good deal of hostility amongst his neighbors, who view him as a carpetbagger and a “fanatical abolitionist.”

Previous scholarship on A Fool’s Errand can be divided into two categories—that which explores the novel’s autobiographical elements and reads Tourgée primarily as historian of the Reconstruction era, and that which reads Tourgée as literary antecedent of later novelists. In the early to mid 1960s there was a brief flurry of critical activity with the intention to carve out a space for Tourgée in the historiography of Reconstruction.

Ted Weissbuch, Monte Olenick and Theodore Gross wrote articles that spoke of Tourgée as a “propagandist,” “reporter,” and “spokesman” for the southern unionist during this period who served to “modify” the picture of the period written by Joel Chandler Harris,

Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon (Gross, “Reporter” 111). In his excellent

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biography of Tourgée, Otto Olsen reads the novel for its autobiographical import and its

historical accuracy, but also fails to account for Tourgée’s literary techniques. More

recently, Richard Lewis and Peter Caccavari have investigated Tourgée’s influence on

Charles Chesnutt. In both cases, Tourgée’s work is not examined in depth, and neither article delves into the nature of Tourgée’s fiction. What is missing from all this scholarship, I think, is an analysis of the novel that suggests Tourgée carefully employed conventions of the novel form in order to express his point of view. Although these critics bring Tourgée’s work some needed attention, none of them attempts to read A

Fool’s Errand as a literary document.

Tourgée’s first novel was highly successful; sales of A Fool’s Errand ultimately approached 200,000, almost half of which came in the first year (Franklin xxi). The reviews of the novel were generally positive, both in northern and southern journals, and

A Fool’s Errand quickly became the “best-seller of the day” and led to a follow-up novel,

Bricks Without Straw (O. Olsen 224-25). Assuming four or five readers per copy, A

Fool’s Errand reached almost one million readers and probably accounted for informing more northern readers about Reconstruction than any other source, at least until Thomas

Dixon came along.

The Hamburg massacre does not serve as an exact parallel to the violent events in

Tourgée’s novel; instead of depicting a single riot, A Fool’s Errand focuses on serialized

Klan violence that took place in the early days of Reconstruction. Although it is possible that the conflict in Hamburg and its aftermath contributed to his motivation in writing the

novel, Tourgée did not make an explicit statement to that effect. The Hamburg massacre

does, however, carry symbolic significance important for an informed reading of

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Tourgée. The underlying issues that caused the events of Hamburg—white discomfort

over black citizenship and elite white complicity—are significant themes in the novel.

Tourgée underscores the unwillingness of whites to attribute elements of citizenship to

blacks and emphasizes aristocratic complicity in mob violence. Furthermore, Tourgée

crafts these issues into a narrative that was compelling enough to sell 200,000 copies, no

small feat in the late nineteenth century. Four elements of the novel combine to assert its role in the counter-redemption: the explicit description of threats and violent mob activities, the appeal to the power of logic and reasoning, the symbolic linkage of violence to government and redemption, and the example of Lily Servosse as a model daughter and citizen.

The years between Appomattox and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 were marked by widespread racial violence, but the nature of that violence shifted upon the passing of the Act. Eric Foner contends that most of this pre-Act violence “stemmed from disputes arising from black efforts to assert their freedom from control by their former masters”

(121). Since the Reconstruction Act contained requirements to institute Negro suffrage, the violence began to focus on citizenship issues rather than freedom issues. Thus,

Servosse’s actions which seem to condone educating freedmen, such as socializing with

Negro teachers, are somewhat displeasing to whites, but once they recognize his efforts are making citizens out of slaves, the white response escalates from personal insults to bodily threats.

Immediately upon Servosse’s arrival in North Carolina, he is ostracized and threatened because of his beliefs. At first, his association with the Negro schoolteachers merely keeps his family out of the best society. Although he is deemed not “of much

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account” and a “fanatical abolitionist” (52-53), he suffers no serious consequences due to his beliefs. After he endorses Negro suffrage at a public meeting, however, things get more serious. On his way home from the meeting, he is given a cryptic warning from a local, who tells him, “I don’t want tu ‘larm ye; but it’s my notion it would be jest as well fer ye not to go home by the direct road, arter makin’ that speech ye did to-day. . . . there was a crowd of rough fellers thar that was powerful mad at what ye said. . . an’ thar’s a parcel of towns-folks hez been eggin’ ‘em on tu stop ye somewhar on the road home, an’ they by make ye trouble” (68-69). While the Negro schoolteachers with which Servosse has associated himself are looked down upon, they are seen as relatively harmless.

Endorsing Negro suffrage, however, promotes black citizenship, and this offense was not taken lightly in the days of Reconstruction. Eric Foner claims that after the war,

“southerners who publicly advocated any form of black voting found themselves subject to tremendous abuse” (192). Voting rights are the most basic building blocks in the foundation of citizenship (think taxation without representation), and the white planters in

A Fool’s Errand want no part of granting such privileges to freedmen. This night

Servosse outsmarts his attackers with the help of some specific intelligence from Uncle

Jerry, but he remains under suspicion for the rest of the novel and is subject to further threats of violence.

Despite the threats against him, Servosse begins to supplement his radical rhetoric with radical actions, such as helping freedmen become landowners. When these humanitarian efforts begin to have salutary effects upon the quality of black life and citizenship, the white “mob” takes notice: “little attention had been paid to the manner in which he had chosen to build houses and sell lands to the colored people, [but when] the

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crops were harvested, and some of these men became owners of horses and houses in

their own right, it seemed all at once to awaken general attention” (98). The key

distinction is that between sharecropping and land ownership. The roles of freedpeople

in sharecropping were virtually identical to the roles of slaves on a plantation, save they were now responsible for their own subsistence. When they began to own land, however, they crossed the line into an area previously dominated by the white aristocracy, and thus into a privilege closely associated with citizenship.

In his influential address at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Frederick Jackson

Turner asserts that since the United States was settled on the “hither edge of free land”

(3), the “striking characteristics” of the “American intellect” are due to the “existence of

the frontier” (37). In other words, the act of hewing homesteads out of the wilderness was productive of Americanism. This idea of opportunity through land ownership was a widely accepted truism in the nineteenth century, and that avenue to opportunity was closely guarded by southern whites. In consequence, when freedpeople in A Fool’s

Errand climb the ladder of capitalism through land ownership and begin to assert their rights as Americans, in every sense of the word, the white mob strikes back: a “gang of disguised ruffians” attacks a black settlement, beats a few men, steals a few horses, and mutilates a few others. Since Servosse is seen as the instigator of black property ownership, he finds a warning note from the “Regulators,” warning him to “git away” from the area and return North, or he’ll have to “size a coffin” (98).

These conflicts take place within an incendiary political context. As the nation

struggled with how to reunite the nation after the war, politicians became entrenched in

vigorous political contests. The election of 1866, in particular, was pivotal because it

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shifted the balance of power in Congress and helped the Republicans push through more

radical reform than otherwise may have been possible. The radical Republicans gained enough congressional seats in this election to gain a two-thirds majority in both houses, thanks in part to Andrew Johnson’s infamous “swing around the circle” speaking tour, in which he attempted to persuade northern audiences that southern whites should be able to govern themselves. His tour proved to be very unpopular in the North, and it provoked voters into sending more radical Republicans to Washington (Foner 264-66). The additional seats allowed congress to override Andrew Johnson’s constant vetoes and marked the transition from Presidential Reconstruction to Congressional Reconstruction.

Congress now had no trouble passing the fourteenth amendment and the Reconstruction

Act, both of which were criticized and vetoed by Johnson —though the vetoes were overridden by Congress.

The Reconstruction Act provided for the readmission of confederate states to the union, requiring that they write new state constitutions and ratify the fourteenth amendment (Foner 267-77). Despite the protests of white southern leaders, black suffrage was, as Comfort Servosse claimed, written “in the book of fate” (66). Tourgée describes the ramifications of the Act as follows:

it seems impossible that the wise men of that day should have been so

blind as not to have seen that they were doing the utmost possible injury to

the colored race, the country, and themselves, by propounding a plan of

re-organization which depended for its success upon the effective and

prosperous administration of state governments by this class [of blacks], in

connection with the few of the dominant race, who, from whatever

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motives, might be willing to put themselves on the same level with them

in the estimation of their white neighbors. (134)

As he does elsewhere in the novel, Tourgée infuses the didactic passages with some

degree of sarcasm—the “wise men” are anything but, and the “few of the dominant race”

are very few, indeed. Despite Servosse’s endorsement of black suffrage, he recognizes

that enforcing such a condition upon the South would lead to “intense bitterness”

amongst the whites. In his report to President Johnson upon visiting the South in 1865,

Carl Schurz claimed, “the masses are strongly opposed to colored suffrage; anybody that

dares to advocate it is stigmatized as a dangerous fanatic” (44). It didn’t help that by

1868 only half of the sixteen Northern states allowed blacks to vote; despite this fact,

however, Congress required manhood suffrage as a condition for readmittance to the

union. Since Servosse continues to agitate for black suffrage throughout the novel, even

for black equality, he continues to be labeled as a “dangerous fanatic” by his neighbors

and continues to live under the threat of violence.

Servosse continues to agitate in a calm and reasoned manner because he believes

that his plainspoken logic will win out over the somewhat hysterical southern ideology of

redemption, at least as that ideology is represented in A Fool’s Errand. This subtext of

enlightenment thinking weaves throughout the book. Servosse, true to his Gallic

ancestry, always believes in the power of logic and reasoning. In fact, Tourgée

constructs a dialectic in his novel between his cool, educated reason and the scattered

ignorance of the South. He does so in part with the inclusion of a number of textual documents, ranging from warning notes to newspaper editorials. The warning note he receives from the “Regulators” indicates that its writer is barely literate, though the

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sentiment is clear: “you hev got to leeve this country, and the quicker you do it the better; fer you ain’t safe here, nor enny other miserable Yankee! You come here to put niggers

over white folks, sayin ez how they should vote and set on juries and sware away white

folks rites as much as they damm please” (98). The writer offers no visible support for

his assertions other than to claim the racial hierarchy as his natural heritage.

Servosse’s public response to this private attack, printed in the local paper,

contains a “short, sturdy answer” that claims he was “minding his own business, and

expected other people to mind theirs” (99). Aside from the implication that ignorance

abounds in the Regulators, this exchange emphasizes the importance of public debate in

A Fool’s Errand—Servosse takes the higher road here, unashamed of his controversial

views and publishing them for all to see. In a fictional world where public words have

the power to transform the political landscape, those who are not literate or who do not

engage in public debate—or worse yet, both—are doomed to failure.

Servosse and his liberal books have quite an effect on his neighbor’s son, Jesse

Hyman, who becomes a Republican in his own right after reading the persuasive

arguments contained within Servosse’s library. As a result, he is beaten for being a

“nigger-loving Radical” (197-98). This is a case of guilt by association, as Hyman’s

father tells Servosse that Hyman is being punished for being friendly with him as much

as for his own radical beliefs. Ultimately, though, the southern whites see the radical

world-view as completely at odds with Democratic redemption, and anyone or anything

who gets in the way of that redemption will suffer the consequences. More important,

this incident indicates that in A Fool’s Errand, language carries immense power to alter

the world. Although the nature of Servosse’s library is only hinted at, clearly it has the

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ability to enlighten and transform as well as inform. Perhaps the tremendous efficacy of

Servosse’s library is indicative of what Tourgée wished his novel would accomplish.

Jesse Hyman seems to represent the potential for education of the younger generation of southern whites in the Gilded Age who did not have the heavy stake in the Civil War and its legacy that their fathers did.

The second edition of A Fool’s Errand was published in 1880 in tandem with The

Invisible Empire, a non-fictional account of the Klan’s activities while Tourgée was in

North Carolina. In this added material, Tourgée claims that “the best and highest classes of the South did participate in, aid, and abet the [Ku Klux Klan]” (407). His depiction of the Klan in A Fool’s Errand supports this assertion, putting planters, lawmen, ministers, and other folk into the movement, including Melville Gurney and John Burleson. The

Fool, though, is distressed at the revelation: “he could not understand how men of the highest Christian character, of the most exalted probity, and of the keenest sense of honor, could be the perpetrators, encouragers, or excusers of such acts” (316). Another man is surprised to find out that a Klan member was “a very active member of the church, and was a superintendent of a sabbath school” (195). Their elite status, rather than being an unexplained anomaly, is exactly the point.

The irony here is that it is precisely their sense of honor and Christian character that provides for the entirety of their existence. The religion of the Lost Cause has been transformed into an evangelical religion of death which justifies such acts in the name of the redemption of the South. It also recalls the Christian justifications of slavery so prominent in antebellum debates. Bertram Wyatt-Brown points out that these justifications, such as claiming Abraham was a slaveholder or invoking the curse of Ham,

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are possible because Christianity is a tradition in which “the precepts of honor have prominence along with the familiar doctrines of love and God-centeredness” (Shaping

145). As a result, before emancipation many southern clergy supported slavery, and after

emancipation many southern clergy supported the redemption of white politics.

When he is nominated for the state Constitutional convention, Servosse calls for

“equal civil and political rights to all men” (159). The convention coincides with the

development of a “new institution,” the Ku Klux Klan. Before the Klan appeared,

racially-motivated violence was perpetrated by “regulators” or other groups, who joined

the Klan after its inception. One of the first victims of the Klan in A Fool’s Errand, at

least under that name, is Bob Martin, a blacksmith known for his economic success and

political outspokenness. His contention that colored people were free, and should vote

any way they like, was, according to Bob, “bad doctrine up in our country. De white

folks don’t like ter hear it, and ‘specially don’t like ter hear a nigger say it.” As a result

of Bob’s statements, about thirty Klansmen break into his house, tie him to a tree and

whip him, abuse his wife and daughter, and inadvertently kill his baby (186-88). Tourgée

recounts other various lynchings and attacks wrought by the Klan. Although some seem

without cause, most are in response to black strivings for independence or political

autonomy. One man is whipped for acquiring property; another is hanged because his

literacy was “troublesome on election-day” (193).

The political climax of the novel culminates in the murder of John Walters and

the lynching of Uncle Jerry, events which play upon the conscience of Klan members

until a few confessions bring about the downfall of the entire order. John Walters is

hated and feared by other whites because he is, as one account labels him, the “infamous

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scalawag leader of the nigger Radicals (207). Southern white Republicans were labeled

“scalawags” by the populace, and were generally regarded with more disgust than blacks.

One former governor of North Carolina claimed, “we can appreciate a man who lived north, and. . . even fought against us, but a traitor to his own home cannot be trusted or respected” (Foner 297). These “race traitors” were often victims of violence before blacks. Obviously, ideology rather than skin color was the prime concern of the agitators

(Kantrowitz, “Mob” 72).

The local populace also viewed political organization by white leadership as potentially more threatening due to their racist attitudes—they felt a white man was more capable, and therefore more dangerous as an enemy. Thus the actions of John Walters— helping blacks to mobilize politically—are particularly menacing. At a time when southern whites wished to regain control of government, any Republican overture, particularly one which organized the black populace, was viewed with a great deal of trepidation because of its potential to divert or, worse yet, derail the train of political redemption.

In his history of the Klan, White Terror, John Trelease contends that political motivation was the primary impetus for Klan violence in its early days: “the Klan movement reached its fullest dimensions only with the advent of Negro suffrage. . . .

Moreover, the testimony of its victims points to the intimidation and punishment of

Republican voters and officeholders as its central purpose.” The Klan also made a

“special target” of Republican leaders, both black and white (xlvii). In A Fool’s Errand,

Walters is murdered in the courthouse, a location that suggests the symbolic death of

Negro representation in government. After an initial uproar by his supporters, there is

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very little backlash to his murder, primarily because his black supporters fear retribution from the local whites. Tourgée comments that Walters “had met the doom which he might reasonably have expected when he presumed to organize the colored voters of that county in opposition to the wish and desire of its white inhabitants” (216). It is appropriate that Walters is murdered and entombed in the courthouse, since he has become the embodiment of black citizenship. Part of the impetus for Hamburg was also symbolic; the idea that freedmen were asserting their right to bear arms on Independence

Day was unconscionable to most whites, so they took action to assure such a display would not happen again.

In addition to being heavily symbolic, the disposal of Walters also had the effect upon the political machinations of freedmen desired by the forces of redemption— freedmen were effectively disenfranchised:

After . . . John Walters was so mysteriously but effectually disposed of,

the hearts of these innocent and misguided Africans underwent a

marvelous change. They still continued to vote, as appeared from the poll-

books and returns of election, with the most persistent regularity; but they

ceased to vote for those to whom they had once been so warmly attached,

and ceased to demand and elect persons of their own color or formerly

universal sentiment for places of trust and emolument. It was a very

strange coincidence; and there were not wanting those who pointed to it as

undeniable evidence of fraud, or, as it was sometimes termed,

‘intimidation.’ Some of the Wise Men who dwelt at a distance tried to

raise a clamor over it; but they were easily put to rout by silver-tongued

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orators who painted wonderful pictures of the millennial life and Edenic

peace which had prevailed in Rockford since the hour when the

pestiferous Walters departed from its coasts. (327-28)

Such circumstances are precisely what the forces of redemption envisioned—freedmen removed from the political milieu. Even though they vote, they do so mechanically and without a personal investment in the outcome. Note that in outlining these events,

Tourgée employs language invocative of the Bible: “wise men,” “Edenic,” and

“pestiferous” are words calculated to undermine the missionary zeal of the redeemers through ironic hyperbole.

Uncle Jerry, as well, is a victim of the Klan because of his political ideas; although he represents less of a threat to the established order than Walters, he still must be disposed of:

for once, Uncle Jerry forgot his accustomed prudence, and moved by a

very unreasonable anger at the impotence of the law, which could not

punish those who could not be clearly identified, he openly and boldly

declared the monstrous doctrine that the colored people ought to defend

themselves and each other. That he should entertain such ideas was in

itself a misfortune; that he should give expression to such incendiary

notions was a fatal error. (192)

Jerry is lynched just outside of the courthouse in the culmination of the Klan’s activities in the novel. Because Walters is more of a threat to the racial hierarchy, he is entombed inside the courthouse; because Jerry is meant to serve as an example to those blacks who might yearn for citizenship, he is put on display outside. As it turns out, some of the

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Klansmen are not able to stomach the murders of Walters and Jerry, and their confessions lead to the eventual downfall of the Klan, bringing the main plot of A Fool’s Errand to a tidy conclusion.

Though critics have often overlooked the romantic moments in the plot of the book in favor of its political discussion, Tourgée achieves a clever victory in his portrait of Lily, Servosse’s courageous and principled daughter. Though she is not overtly radical, her actions in the novel symbolically oppose her to the men of the elite South.

She trumps the holy honor of the South with her own version of romantic and secular virtue. Once she comes of age, she takes over the novel in an exciting ride to save her father’s life. She learns of a plot against her father’s life while he is out of town, and she rides to beat her father’s train to his destination and warn him of the danger. By this action, Lily demonstrates what one motivated and courageous individual can do, and stands in contrast to the cowardly group of Klansmen who await her father in darkness.

This turn of events would be especially galling to southerners because holy honor was so closely associated with masculinity, and, as we shall see, with the protection of white womanhood. If Lily, the epitome of femininity—even her name evokes images of the fair, delicate, maiden—is able to outsmart, outwit, even outride the supposed best men of the South, what does it say about the true nature of those men?

Later, Gurney goes to Servosse to ask permission to court Lily, despite his parents’s objections, and the Colonel agrees. Unfortunately, Lily recognizes Gurney’s horse as the horse which carried the messenger who warned her of her father’s predicament, and thus deduces that Gurney’s father gave the warning. Because she feels the elder Gurney saved her father’s life, she denies the younger Gurney’s suit as long as

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his father is against it, but she declines to explain this to him. Thus Tourgée deconstructs the notion of southern honor as it is manifested in the actions of the redeemers. Here he gives two models of real honor that emphasize the superficiality of holy honor: that of the elder Gurney, who values life above principle and sends the warning, and that of Lily, who risks her own life to save her father’s life.

It is not clear exactly what motivated Tourgée to include The Invisible Empire with the second edition of A Fool’s Errand. Otto Olsen indicates that Tourgée was inspired, at least in part, by the key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that proved to be so popular after the publication of that novel (225). Although both books contain similar events and personalities, The Invisible Empire is not nearly as compelling as A Fool’s Errand. It reads more like a catalogue of offenses than a continuous narrative, while the fictional space of the novel allows Tourgée to shape these events into a political counter-attack to the cultural ideology of redemption. The motivation behind both versions, though, was to reveal the atrocities committed in the name of redemption, and as the twentieth century approached, the nature of and reasons for those atrocities changed. Since the political climate became so different by 1901, Charles Chesnutt sought a different sort of counter- redemption.

***

Wilmington, The Marrow of Tradition, and White Sexual Hysteria

If the Klan activities of the Reconstruction era were distressing, the decades following the end of Reconstruction were no less dark for southern people of color. The

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“redemption” of white politics—termed by Joel Williamson as the “depoliticalization of

the Negro” (225)—was systematically supplemented with the restriction of black social

opportunities during these years. Since the black population had been disenfranchised

and muted politically by the 1890s, white fear was centered on the possible social

equality of blacks, not their political equality (Williamson 183-84). This fear most often

focused on the perceived threat of miscegenation, since it had the potential to erase the

racial differences without which segregation could not exist.

One of the major shifts in the political and social landscape of the Gilded Age occurred with the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” accommodations for white and black races.

The decision was a constitutional landmark because it provided federal justification for a collection of southern state laws that codified racial difference, at least in terms of social opportunity. Writing the majority opinion of the court, Justice Henry Billings Brown claimed,

the object of the [Fourteenth] [A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce

the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of

things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon

color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a

commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. (44)

Thus the Supreme Court legalized racial distinctions for the purposes of social inequality.

The case also marked a complete shift from de facto to de jure segregation. C. Vann

Woodward explains that before 1890, there was little segregation in the South, and what existed was “erratic and inconsistent,” but by the time Plessy came before the Supreme

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Court, most southern states had established Jim Crow laws of one kind or another (52).

Even after the Supreme Court validated the practices of Jim Crow, social equality continued to be worrisome for southern whites because of the pervasive fear of miscegenation.

By the time Plessy went before the Supreme Court, blacks had been removed from most southern political offices and many had been disenfranchised. Because the cultural necessity of political redemption had been mostly fulfilled, southern whites began to shift their ritual energy into an assault on the socially constructed “black beast.”

Joel Williamson suggests that this ritual provided “compensation” for the eroding economic circumstances of southern white men: “the rage against the black beast rapist was a kind of psychic compensation. If white men could not provide for their women materially as they had done before, they could certainly protect them from a much more awful threat—the outrage of their purity, and hence their piety, by black men” (115). In addition, the southern chivalric code of “holy honor” dictated that white women were inviolable standards of purity. Because white women were envisioned as “inaccessible sexual property,” they became “potent symbol[s] of white male supremacy” (Hall 155-

56). In other words, the perceived assault of a white woman became a perceived threat to white supremacy, and thus could not be tolerated in any form. Although the Civil War was long over by this time, the pain of its loss, the lasting cultural memory of the white

South as victim, continued. As a result, allowing white women to perpetuate the idea of

South as victim intensified that loss, unless it could be exorcised through the ritual destruction of African Americans.

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Even though most blacks had been disenfranchised, the fact that some continued to assert political rights was a thorn in the side of many southern whites, who worried that political equality necessarily led to social equality. Reverend John Durham, for instance, a character in Thomas Dixon’s racist novel The Leopard’s Spots, puts it this way: “when the white race begin to hobnob with the Negro and seek his favor, they must grant him absolute equality. That means ultimately social as well as political equality.

You can’t ask a man to vote for you and kick him down your front doorstep and tell him to come around the back way” (124). This point of view is in no way restricted to the conservative element in the novel; even Everett Lowell, a radical Republican politician, succumbs to the sexual hysteria. He first appears to welcome George Harris, his young

Negro political protégé, into the family, often letting him dine with the family and join other family rituals. As it turns out, though, when Harris has designs on Lowell’s daughter, Lowell’s true feelings are revealed:

the question you broach is a question of taste, and the deeper social

instincts of racial purity and self preservation. I care not what your

culture, or your genius, or your position, I do not desire, and will not

permit, a mixture of Negro blood in my family. The idea is nauseating,

and to my daughter it would be repulsive beyond the power of words to

express it! (202)

Lowell’s response illustrates two of Dixon’s key points in The Leopard’s Spots. First, he feels that racial purity is above politics. Even Lowell, the radical Republican, knows that the instinctual preservation of the race—an essential fact of nature—cannot be trumped by the earthly machinations of men. Second, the feelings that Lowell expresses are

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“repulsive beyond the power of words to express.” In other words, they do not need to be supported or justified with rhetoric—they are justified in and of themselves because they are so natural and instinctual.

Dixon was not an isolated racial extremist, either. The Leopard’s Spots, and the rest of his “Reconstruction Trilogy”—The Clansman and The Traitor—were bestselling books and led to a popular stage play, The Clansman, and a critically acclaimed motion picture, Birth of a Nation. These types of racist attitudes, then, were quite popular at the turn of the twentieth century and led to the justification of lynching as the protection of southern white women. The vast majority of lynchings were committed purportedly to protect southern purity, but this justification did not claim wide sway until the 1890s, when Governor Ben Tillman of South Carolina admitted publicly that if a black man were accused of raping a white woman, he would personally lead the lynch mob

(Kantrowitz, Tillman 156).

As this white sexual hysteria gained ground in the nineties, a fusion of white

Populist farmers and mostly black Republicans had some success battling the Democrats in North Carolina. By 1894, this fusion had taken control of the General Assembly. The historian William Prather describes the reaction of the Democrats: “alarmed by the rise of the Republican-Populist Fusion coalition, the Democratic leaders of North Carolina resolved that the political campaign of 1898 would be one of ‘redemption.’ They called for the restoration of what they considered good government and white supremacy” (55).

A group of aggressive Democratic editors continually portrayed blacks as disrespectful towards whites, and they warned that black men were out to get black women (Whites

149). The newspapers of Wilmington and Raleigh were leaders of this agenda, running

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article after article lambasting black leaders and printing the racist cartoons of Norman

Jennett, which portrayed black leaders as huge animals towering over whites (Sundquist

415).

During a long campaign that featured many such racist diatribes and images,

Rebecca Felton, a leader of southern women’s rights, gave a speech in August in which she claimed that if lynching is required “to protect woman’s dearest possession [i.e., virtue] from the ravening human beasts—then I say lynch, a thousand times a week, if necessary” (qtd. in Whites 149). Felton’s perpetuation of the “black beast” trope was repeated often by the white press, and eventually Alexander Manley, the editor of the

Negro daily the Wilmington Record, published an editorial response entitled “Mrs.

Felton’s Speech.” He took the bold step of suggesting that not all liaisons between black men and white women were cases of rape, but instead were often cases of love. The southern Democratic press seized upon the editorial and reprinted this most controversial statement under headlines like “Infamous Attack on White Women,” “Negro Editor

Slanders White Women,” and “A Horrid Slander of White Women” (Prather 72-73, 68).

The general public gobbled up these stories as soon as they were published because they served to validate the popular conception that black men were sexually obsessed with white women. In the eyes of the white public, Manley was encouraging black men to attack white women because no self-respecting white woman could possibly love a black beast, thus the only way these beasts could fulfill their unnatural urges was through violence and rape.

In Wilmington, Manley began to receive threatening letters calling for him to cease publication and leave town. Meanwhile, the “Secret Nine,” a group of nine

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influential Democrats determined to take control of Wilmington politics, drafted the

“Wilmington Declaration of Independence.” This document, presented to a mass meeting of white men on Election Day, called for the expulsion of all black men from local government. It also included a special resolution ordering that the Wilmington

Record “cease to be published, and that its editor be banished from this community”

(Prather 108-09). This call for exile can be seen as an excommunication of sorts from the civil religion of the South. Although technically African Americans were not part of the civil religious body, they were allowed a sort of allied membership if they accepted their status as second-class residents—not citizens, of course, but residents. Since Manley refused to fall in line and celebrate the “Edenic” peace created by submissive Negroes, he needed to be eliminated from the cultural scene.

Despite an attempt by black leaders to appease the Secret Nine and their

followers, two days later, on November 10, 1898, a mob of at least 500 white men armed

itself and marched into the heart of the black community in Wilmington. They began by

demolishing Manley’s office and printing press (Manley had already left town), then

burned the building which contained it. Evidently, excommunication was not enough—

in order to appease the redeemers’s thirst for ritual destruction of the Other, the mob needed to take further action. About twenty-five black men gathered to protect themselves, and soon a full-fledged gun battle broke out. Soon the mob was joined by

Benjamin Tillman’s Red Shirts, some Rough Riders fresh from San Juan, and the

Wilmington Light Infantry. What had been a one-sided battle became a massacre, and what had been a local dispute became a regional cause with national implications; furthermore, this cause was validated by the government through the participation of

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official military groups. Although there has been some dispute about the number of

blacks killed, most estimates put the number between fifteen and twenty, though some

oral traditions claim over one hundred were killed (Prather 133-34).7 In the aftermath of

the riot, which included rounding up and exiling white Republicans, the white Democrats

took control of city government and proved to be an inspiration to the rest of the state and

the entire South. As its legend grew, the events in Wilmington came to be viewed as a

textbook plan for white political redemption.

Three years later, Charles Chesnutt fictionalized the riot as part of his novel, The

Marrow of Tradition. The novel revolves around a black doctor, William Miller, and his

search for racial justice. At the beginning of the novel, Miller is turned away from the

home of Major Carteret, the white editor of the local paper, because of his race, despite

his ability to help Carteret’s infant son, Dodie. To complicate matters, Carteret’s wife,

Olivia, and Miller’s wife, Janet, are half sisters, but Olivia refuses to acknowledge their

bond because she maintains the liaison their father, Sam Merkle, had with his

housekeeper, Julia Brown (Janet’s mother), was not a legitimate relation. As it turns out,

her father was legally married to Julia, but Aunt Polly hid the marriage certificate and the

will bequeathing part of his property to Janet Miller, so no proof of their union is found,

and Janet does not receive her share of the estate.

Carteret and his cronies, Belmont and McBane, the “Big Three,” plot to take back

the government from the fusionists who are currently in power. A local Negro editor

writes an article fashioned after Manley’s anti-lynching editorial, and the big three decide

to use it to stir up the whites and “win the state for white supremacy” (89). Their plan is

7 See June Nash, “The Cost of Violence” Journal of Black Studies 4 (1973): 153-83, for a collection of oral accounts about the violence in Wilmington.

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a smashing success, as the town is enmeshed in an Election Day riot that destroys

Miller’s hospital and nursing school and kills his son. The novel ends with Miller

crossing the color line to help save Dodie’s life, entering the home where he was turned

away a few weeks before.

The Marrow of Tradition has been the subject of a naissance of critical activity in

the past twenty years. One faction of critics in this activity sees William Miller as the

spokesman for Chesnutt and thus derides Chesnutt for supporting an accomodationist

response to the white politics of violence. In other words, they see Chesnutt as an

advocate of Miller’s pronouncement that blacks should “be peaceable and endure a little

injustice” because it is the safest plan of action (110).8 Such a reading certainly provides

accurate insights about Miller’s character, but it fails to fully account for the whole novel

and thus unfairly saddles Chesnutt with the accomodationist label. It neglects the

character of Josh Green, and it ignores the significance of the novel’s subplot, instead

focusing exclusively on the main political action.

Another group of critics maintains that Chesnutt was highly cognizant of the cultural construction of race, and that his novel seeks to deconstruct such notions.9 Along

similar lines, Eric Sundquist claims that Chesnutt sought to “preserve African American

cultural forms,” using them to critique the concept of “pure blood” (296, 408). Central to

his discussion is The Marrow of Tradition’s depiction of a cakewalk, where Tom

Delamere, a dissipated young white aristocrat, impersonates Sandy, Carteret’s Negro

office boy, and wins first prize, and the later incident when Tom impersonates Sandy and

8 See Andrews (198), Gleason (34), and Ferguson (117) for versions of this claim. 9 For instance, Stephen P. Knadler claims that Chesnutt sought to expose white identity as a cultural formation rather than biological superiority (427), Samina Najmi claims Chesnutt exposes the societal constructions that alienate African Americans from white women (2), and Bryan Wagner claims Chesnutt responds to the “crisis of white identity” inspired by the rise of the African American middle class (312).

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kills Polly Ochiltree. Sundquist maintains that Tom portrays Sandy as “the minstrel darky” and as “the black criminal” in these two instances, and thus deconstructs the two primary cultural constructions of the Negro at the turn of the twentieth century (433).

I would agree with Sundquist and the others who assert that Chesnutt uses his novel to critique strict biological notions of racial identity, but I contend that these critics have misread the techniques by which Chesnutt develops this critique. Except for

Samina Najmi, these critics focus almost exclusively on the political plot of the novel and, as a result, misjudge how the romantic subplot figures into Chesnutt’s project.

Chesnutt employs the dynamic of family relationships, which often mirror political relationships in the novel, in order to deconstruct biological notions of race and replace them with a more complex, caste-oriented hierarchy. This caste system is not entirely unaffected by genetics—some characters, like McBane and Green, seem locked into behavioral patterns predetermined by their heritage—but it offers a departure from the dangerous and reductive darky/criminal dichotomy. Even as Chesnutt deconstructs contemporary ideas of race, he subverts the project of social redemption for the white race through a careful consideration of the obsessive fear of shame implicit in the holy honor of the South. Though that shame had many sources, Chesnutt focuses upon the shame and fear of miscegenation and the resulting ritual destruction of Negroes endorsed by adherents of the southern civil religion.

It is no accident that the romantic subplot of the book, the legitimacy and inheritance predicament of Olivia and Janet, revolves around the offspring of miscegenation and her desire to be recognized. This subplot conflates the idea of sexual integration with the legal and political issues so prevalent at the time, since the missing

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will and marriage certificate grant authority to the union of Samuel Merkell and Julia

Brown, thus making Janet Miller a legitimate heiress—in effect, legalizing miscegenation. Just as Major Carteret is willing to destroy (human lives) in order to maintain political segregation in Wellington, his wife Olivia is willing to destroy the documents that grant legitimacy upon her sister Janet, burning them in the fireplace. Just as the real Wilmington riot began with the sexual hysteria prompted by Manley’s editorial and moved into political calculation, The Marrow of Tradition’s romantic subplot shifts into the political intrigue of the main plot, which culminates in the Election

Day riot.

As it does so, the novel clearly implicates the elite whites in mob violence, though in a different way than Tourgée. Where Tourgée emphasized that the actual violence was wrought by all classes of whites and that the Klan members were often elite members of the best families, Chesnutt offers a more complex picture of accountability. Clearly, the

“Big Three” are most responsible for the genesis of the riot. Modeled on the Wilmington

“Secret Nine,” the Big Three represent three distinct classes of white southerner.

Belmont is the southern aristocrat, Carteret is the business-oriented man of the New

South, and McBane is the common rabble—even their military designations denote the hierarchy: “General” Belmont, “Major” Carteret, and “Captain” McBane, though it seems that Major Carteret knows more about leadership and asserts that knowledge more than

General Belmont. Additionally, Chesnutt attributes different aspects of culpability to the different classes of whites, and the most obvious dichotomy in this regard is that of

Carteret and McBane.

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Although Carteret’s failed attempt to restrain the mob during the riot expresses his

discontent with the extent of murder and mayhem in the riot, his displeasure develops not

because he disagrees with violence, but because the disorderly mob has not distinguished

between “good” and “bad” Negroes as subjects of attack. He complains that “good old

Mammy Jane” had been killed (304), and that “I meant to keep them in their places,—I did not intend wholesale murder and arson” (305). Despite this sentiment, however, his

editorial upon the murder of Mrs. Ochiltree encourages violent action against blackness:

If an outraged people, justly infuriated, and impatient of the slow

processes of the courts, should assert their inherent sovereignty, which the

law after all was merely intended to embody, and should choose, in

obedience to the higher law, to set aside, temporarily, the ordinary judicial

procedure, it would serve as a warning and an example to the vicious

elements of the community, of the swift and terrible punishment which

would fall, like the judgement of God, upon any one who laid sacrilegious

hands upon white womanhood. (185-86)

Carteret’s editorial advocates violent action as a means “to keep them in their places,” but

his paternal attitude sees some accomodationist blacks, like Mammy Jane and Sandy, as

worthy of protection because they appear to consent to the racial hierarchy, and more

important, because they fall within the purview of his extended “family” and are thus

associate members of the southern civil religion. In Carteret’s mind, Negroes are either

“plantation darkeys,” like Mammy Jane, or “black beasts” outside the civil religion, like

Jerry after he is framed, and therefore targeted for ritual destruction. He is further

frustrated during the riot because the mob no longer follows his instruction, so his civic

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leadership becomes suspect. Ultimately, then, the motivation behind Carteret’s

displeasure lies not in his concern for all humanity, but in his selective paternalism and

his inability to control the mob he so carefully assembled and incited. He also advocates

the ritual destruction of those who lie outside the civil religion.

McBane, however, makes no such distinction amongst the black population. He

has no personal relationships with blacks, paternal or otherwise, and views them all with

equal scorn. When Sandy is arrested for the attack on Mrs. Ochiltree, he recommends

violence as the answer, regardless of whether the right man has been implicated:

“Burn the nigger,” reiterated McBane. “We seem to have the right nigger,

but whether we have or not, burn a nigger. It is an assault upon the white

race, in the person of old Mrs. Ochiltree, committed by the black race, in

the person of some nigger. It would justify the white people in burning

any nigger. The example would be all the more powerful if we got the

wrong one. It would serve notice on the niggers that we shall hold the

whole race responsible for the misdeeds of each individual.” (182)

The irony of course, is that McBane is advocating holding the whole black race

responsible for the misdeeds of one white man, Tom Delamere. His theory, though, does

not elicit a great deal of contention from either Carteret or Belmont. In fact, the general

wholeheartedly agrees, and Carteret accepts their decision, as long as it does not need his

participation: “I, for one, would prefer that any violence, however justifiable, should take

place without my active intervention” (183). Ultimately, McBane’s penchant for

violence results in his own violent death at the hands of Josh Green, the working-class militant leader of the last stand at the hospital.

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The doubling of Miller and Josh Green mirrors the pairing of Carteret and

McBane from the other side of the racial divide. In a series of dialogues, Miller’s accommodationist views contrast with Green’s militant independence. The two cross paths several times during the novel, each time exchanging philosophies about the social stature of blacks and the race question. Each time, Miller preaches patience and accommodation, while Green advocates rebellion and violent revolt. Green sees valor and principle in death, where Miller sees only death. Miller tells Green, “you’d better be peaceable and endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death” (110). Green, however, sees a life of injustice as a life not worth living: “I’d ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog!” (284). Green’s statement echoes

Miller’s experience at the beginning of the novel, when, after being kicked out of the white train car, Miller identifies with a dog that has been relegated to traveling in the baggage car.

Chesnutt claimed that The Marrow of Tradition was a “purpose novel,” in that it sought to “throw light upon the vexed moral and sociological problems” which grew out of the race question (“Chesnutt’s Own View” 169). It certainly does so, but despite his effort to “throw light” with his fictional treatment of Wilmington, Thomas Dixon provided a more influential picture of the massacre in his immensely popular novel, The

Leopard’s Spots. Where Chesnutt’s hero, William Miller, is a victim of the revolt,

Dixon’s hero, Charles Gaston, leads the revolt, which Dixon describes as a victorious redemption. Dixon’s version of events clearly indicates that Manley provoked the violence by threatening the honor of the pure white southern woman: “the incendiary organ of the Negroes, a newspaper that had been noted for its virulent spirit of race

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hatred, had published an editorial defaming the virtue of the white women of the

community” (212). In order to protect southern womanhood and “overthrow … the

criminal and semi-barbarian regime,” Gaston and his colleagues issue a declaration of

independence in order to retake the city.

Dixon sees the whites as clearly on morally superior ground; although Gaston and

the mob burn the editor’s office, the editor is paid its cash value and placed on a “north-

bound train” (213). Only after “a mob of a thousand armed Negroes” ambush the orderly group does it deliberately and effectively return fire. Dixon is ecstatic about this turn of

events, and sounds a triumphant note upon his fictional redemption of the South: “the

Anglo-Saxon race had been reunited. The Negro was no longer the ward of the Republic.

Henceforth, he must stand or fall on his own worth and pass under the law of the survival

of the fittest” (214). Unfortunately, the white passion against miscegenation, and the

wake of black death which followed it, gave this “survival of the fittest” quite literal

implications for the twentieth century.

***

Atlanta, Du Bois, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece

If, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “the problem of the

Twentieth Century [was] the problem of the color line” (3), then surely Du Bois was one

of the most articulate explicators of that problem. In nearly one hundred years of life, Du

Bois left behind a litany of writings on race. His publications in the genres of history,

sociology, journalism, and fiction regularly cogitated on the problems inherent “within

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and without the Veil” (Souls 3). At the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois was entrenched at Atlanta University, churning out books like The Philadelphia Negro, The

Souls of Black Folk, and his biography of John Brown.

Shortly after the Atlanta riot of 1906, Du Bois began to turn his attention to

writing a manuscript that would become The Quest of the Silver Fleece, a novel that was

eventually published in 1911. In this novel, Du Bois addresses the phenomenon of holy

honor and white mob violence, especially as it is used to counter the potential of an

integrated proletariat response to white capitalistic oppression. Perhaps because the

novel was published after the Niagara Movement and the advent of the NAACP—

organizations that began to place black men in positions of power and influence—Du

Bois focuses more upon positive black action than Tourgée or Chesnutt. Tourgée’s black

characters seem little more than pawns in a perilous political game, and Chesnutt offers

only two possibilities for response in Miller and Green’s approaches, neither of which

ultimately seems effective. In contrast, Du Bois offers strong, intelligent black characters

who work to invert the structure of holy honor that fuels the mob violence which enforces

their oppression. Although some of these people become victims of white violence, as a

rule they are more proactive and motivated than the black characters depicted in A Fool’s

Errand and The Marrow of Tradition.

The early twentieth century did not provide solace from the culture of mob

violence or the industry of lynching; Du Bois reported in the Crisis in 1915 that “the

standard American industry of lynching colored men has flourished” in recent years

(“Lynching Industry” 196). Indeed, lynchings continued apace and white on black mob

violence continued in American cities, both North and South. After Wilmington in 1898,

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major riots occurred in New York in 1900; Evansville, Indiana in 1903; Atlanta in 1906;

and Springfield, Illinois in 1908. Although the exact number of lynchings cannot be

verified, most estimates indicate that the number between 1900 and 1910 was slightly lower than between 1890 and 1900.10 Despite the slight downturn in numbers, though, by the turn of the century the white justification of the practice, which contended that it

protected southern white womanhood, had achieved widespread acceptance. Indeed, this

justification was used to provoke and condone other instances of mob violence as well,

even when the violence resulted from the fear of black citizenship and had no concrete

relation to white women. Because the ideology of holy honor held white women to such

high standards of purity, lynchings often were perceived as a ritualistic exorcism of the

shame associated with miscegenation.

The brutal execution and disfigurement of Sam Hose in Atlanta serves as a chilling example of the ritual aspects of lynching at the dawn of the twentieth century. In

1899, Hose killed his white employer, Alfred Cranford, in self-defense over a dispute about wages; Hose fled the scene, and in a few days newspapers erroneously reported that he brutally killed Cranford in cold blood, then assaulted and repeatedly raped Mrs.

Cranford. Hose was captured a few days later, and around two thousand people witnessed his lynching, many of whom collected parts of his burned and dismembered body as souvenir-pieces: “before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs, and the ‘more fortunate possessors’ made some handsome profits on the sales” (Litwack 280-83). Since the defilement of a “pure”

10 Du Bois reported slightly lower figures in “The Lynching Industry” (198) than did Ray Stannard Baker in Following the Color Line (175).

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woman was attributed to Hose, the shame (that the community had allowed this to happen) had to be exorcised through his ritual destruction. Du Bois later saw Hose’s charred knuckles on display in a storefront in Atlanta, and began to question the significance and consequence of his life’s work (D. Lewis 226). Although it would be more than a decade before Du Bois exchanged activism for academia, perhaps the unsettling circumstances surrounding Sam Hose’s lynching started him down the path that would lead towards a more assertive role in the uplift of his people.

The Hose lynching caused an uproar in the black community, as Ida B. Wells and others claimed it was the epitome of injustice.11 A few years later, Atlanta was again an epicenter of mob violence; in September of 1906, thousands of white rioters killed and wounded nearly two hundred black men, women, and children over the course of five days. The Atlanta riot, as it came to be called, received far more coverage in the print media than the earlier conflicts at Hamburg and Wilmington. Exactly why this is so is not clear, but perhaps it is because Atlanta was a larger urban area than either of the other two cities, and the disturbance was much larger and involved more casualties. In addition, the race question was more prominent by 1906 than it had been in previous years. The 1906 Georgia gubernatorial campaign, for instance, featured extended and vitriolic rhetoric about the current condition of race relations in the state and throughout the South.

This contest matched Hoke Smith, a reformer and white supremacist, against

Clark Howell, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution. The focal point of Smith’s

11 Wells published an account correcting the newspaper depictions of Hose’s “criminal” actions, and later cited the events of April, 1899, in Atlanta as indicative of the “awful barbarism” of mob violence (159).

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campaign was his pledge to “purify” the suffrage by excluding the “corrupt” Negro vote

(Crowe, “Violence” 237-38). According to one historian, during the campaign Smith

repeatedly asserted that “the white men who made this country” did not

mean to have the Negro “interfere” or take any part except that of passive

submission to the will of white people. . . . Smith brought crowds to their

feet cheering by concluding with the question, “shall it be ballots now or

bullets later?” On several occasions in the heat of motion he shouted his

willingness to “imitate” Wilmington. (Crowe, “Violence” 243)

Smith used Wilmington as a rallying cry because he, like most southern whites, understood the legacy of Wilmington much in the same fashion as it was described by

Thomas Dixon in The Leopard’s Spots: as the reunion and redemption of the Anglo-

Saxon race. That this redemption came at the expense of southern blacks was added incentive. Smith crafted his political rhetoric based on the assumption that his listeners subscribed to the notion that violence (“bullets”) was the accepted response to any perceived encroachment upon southern honor. As we shall see, Du Bois dramatizes this southern white propensity for violence in The Quest of the Silver Fleece, and he uses the novel to convey a depiction of positive black action countering that white violence.

As this campaign brought the endangerment of white politics, and thus the peril of the principle of holy honor, to the forefront of southern minds, the news media continued to whip Atlantans into a frenzy by exaggerating the threat of Negro violence, especially sexual violence against the flower of white womanhood: “during August and September of 1906 Atlantans began to believe that a new and dangerously ‘torrid wave of black lust and fiendishness’ placed them ‘in a state of siege’” (Crowe, “Violence” 249). The

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newspapers of Atlanta, particularly the News, struggling for circulation in competition

with the Journal, began to publish extras with huge headlines that described various

Negro assaults. On September 22, the News published five extras, all of which carried

headlines counting Negro assaults. Not surprisingly, these reports turned out to be

greatly exaggerated.

The journalist Ray Stannard Baker, investigating these assaults after the riot,

found that of the four assaults reported in such a flagrant fashion on September 22, two

“may have been attempts at assaults,” and two were nothing more than white women

“overreacting to seeing a black man in their neighborhood.” He continues, “crime had

been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it

expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man,

woman, or boy it saw who had a black face” (9-10). Baker makes an important

distinction here—quite often these rioters, though purported to be motivated by

vengeance and justice, did not attempt to distinguish between criminals and innocent

bystanders. One explanation for this phenomenon, the explanation fixed upon by Baker,

is that blind race prejudice fueled the rioters. While racism certainly played a

fundamental role in the riot, the rioters were motivated by much the same sentiment as

that which motivated McBane in The Marrow of Tradition: the purported protection of

the Anglo-Saxon race. It did not matter who perpetrated the specific crimes upon

particular victims; what mattered was that racial purity was at stake, and holy honor

required that it be protected with violence. Whether that violence was relatively random

or focused mattered less than that it acted swiftly and severely.

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After the riot, various sources attributed a range of causes to the violence. Most

mainstream news sources, though, followed the lead of the Atlanta papers: the New York

Times, for instance, reported that white Atlanta had been stirred up by assaults by black men on white women: “the Atlanta whites have been wildly incensed against the negroes because of nine assaults committed in the last two months on white women by negroes, and the three assaults last night were sufficient to put the mob spirit in action” (“Atlanta”

1). In contrast, African American news media tended to put the burden of responsibility

upon racism. J. Max Barber, editor of the Voice of the Negro, who fled to Chicago

because of the riot, reported that Thomas Dixon’s staged production of The Clansman

played in Atlanta the previous winter and fanned the flames of racism (“Atlanta Tragedy”

474), which led to the conflagration of racial violence, a charge echoed by Walter White

many years later in his memoir A Man Called White (8).

The violence began on the evening of September 22, 1906. By 10:30 that evening, more than ten thousand armed rioters, stirred up by the flagrant headlines of the

News extras, began to hunt down and attack unarmed blacks. The violence continued over several more days, and by September 27 twenty-five black men were murdered and one hundred fifty were wounded. The effects of the riot on the culture of Atlanta went deeper than the body count, however. The ensuing months saw a mass exodus of more than one thousand blacks from Atlanta (Crowe, “Massacre” 167-68). Eventually, this number would include Du Bois himself; in 1910 he left Atlanta University and moved to

New York to found the Crisis and focus his energies more fully on the project of racial uplift.

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By 1906, Du Bois had been teaching at Atlanta University for nine years and lived with his wife and daughter on the campus. When the violence struck that

September, he was traveling in Alabama, so he hurried back to Atlanta to ascertain the situation and ensure the safety of his family, standing guard with a shotgun as the riot wound down (D. Lewis 333-37). On the way back to Alabama, he wrote “A Litany of

Atlanta,” a rambling and emotional poem that captures his distressed state of mind. He later characterized the poem as “a bit hysterical” (qtd. in D. Lewis 335), but there is no doubt it characterizes his emotions in a way not captured by his other writings on the riot:

“A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black

Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and

trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this

was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!” (442). Du

Bois rightly attaches the violence to what he terms the “veil of vengeance” in this poem,

and he exposes the façade of holy honor which accepts, even encourages, vengeance as a

moral virtue. He implicates the church as well, which remains “silent” despite the “death

and fury” around it. Obviously, Du Bois means to incriminate the institution of southern

religion, especially its tendency to condone or even support conservative racial positions,

even violence.

Aside from the obvious emotion in this brief poem, it is difficult to gauge how much the riot affected Du Bois, except that perhaps it sparked the period of disillusionment that led to his leaving Atlanta University and prompted his transition from scholar to journalist. Domenic Capeci and Jack Knight feel that Du Bois was greatly moved by the riot: “his writings of this period reveal a race leader unsettled by

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tragedy, found wanting in the riot, and shamed by his own withdrawal of public action”

(728). One of most significant of these writings, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, is a

sweeping epic partially modeled after Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus in that both

novels look at the circumstances of production of an American staple crop. Where Norris

produced the epic of the wheat, Du Bois produced the epic of the cotton. In The Octopus,

Norris provides a symbol of capitalistic excess in the figure of the railroad—the octopus

whose tentacles infiltrate every aspect of agriculture and business. Du Bois also sees

capitalistic excess as a problem in the production of cotton, but this overindulgence is seen at a more personal level in The Quest of the Silver Fleece—in the figure of the southern aristocrat. Norris’s train is a bundle of mechanized, deterministic destruction,

and Du Bois’s southern aristocracy wreaks similar havoc, but it is embodied in the figure of the Cresswells, who operate a sharecropped cotton empire.

Despite Du Bois’s iconic status in African American letters and culture, scholarship on The Quest of the Silver Fleece has been surprisingly sparse. While discussion about Du Bois’s other writings, especially The Souls of Black Folk, has been

voluminous, criticism of his fiction has been rather infrequent, and it generally falls into

two camps. One group of critics looks at his fiction only in relation to Du Bois as an

historical figure. In other words, the fiction is seen as an avenue for insight about the man and his times. David Levering Lewis, Dominic Capeci and Jack Knight place The

Quest of the Silver Fleece in this kind of biographical context, but do not offer developed readings of it. The other group of critics treats the fiction on its own merits or places it within established literary-historical traditions. Arnold Rampersand has attempted to put

Du Bois’s fiction in the context of the African American literary tradition, for instance.

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More recently, Keith Byerman claims that The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a utopian

narrative, and posits it as one element in Du Bois’s continuing “master narrative” of self-

sacrifice. Since Du Bois has written so much insightful and influential non-fiction, perhaps critics have been reluctant to investigate his fiction. What most of these critics fail to note, however, is that his fiction, or at least The Quest of the Silver Fleece, provides a corrective social vision quite similar to that offered in a book like The Souls of

Black Folk.

The Quest of the Silver Fleece tells the story of Bles Alwyn, a young man who attends a small Negro school in the south and works his way to Washington, D.C., where he becomes disillusioned and returns home to work at uplifting his people, who are mostly sharecroppers on the land of the Creswell family. Unlike A Fool’s Errand and

The Marrow of Tradition, however, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is not primarily a record of white mob violence. The climax of the novel, though, revolves around a white mob attack on a black school which culminates in the lynching of two men. Du Bois continues the tradition of counter-redemption initiated by Tourgée and continued by

Chesnutt; his novel depicts violence as a tool for depoliticizing the Negro, and it argues elite complicity in that violence. The depiction of violence in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece, however, complicates the picture painted by Tourgée and Chesnutt for two reasons: first, Du Bois’s interpretation of reconstruction history is primarily economic, and second, he offers a more practical version of resistance. Furthermore, the novel presents a black inversion of white holy honor through Zora’s commitment to socialism and Bles’s carefully considered reaction to white mob violence.

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Du Bois’s incipient socialism is evident throughout this novel. The inherent

inequities in the sharecropper system that Du Bois outlines in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece counter Booker T. Washington’s program of economic equality through the

vocational education that Du Bois so eloquently condemns in The Souls of Black Folk.

Where Washington fully accepts the capitalist system and seeks to elevate the position of

blacks within it, Zora, Alwyn’s love interest, rejects the system and seeks collective

solutions to the economic problems of sharecropping. In Up from Slavery, Washington

extols the “spirit of industry, thrift, and economy” through the value of industrial

education (126). Where Washington taps into the trope of the American work ethic, Zora

tends to look for communal solutions to economic problems. Others have pointed out

that she has socialist tendencies manifested by her assertion that “folks ain’t got no right

to things they don’t need” (79) and her willingness to “borrow” tools she needs to plant

and cultivate a cotton crop. Her communalism rubs off on Alwyn: before violence strikes

at the end of the novel, Alwyn and Zora are planning a cooperative farming venture. In

questioning the rights of elite whites and asserting the need for blacks to work together

towards common goals, Zora reverses the conditions of violence so often attached to the

southern ideal of holy honor. The accepted dichotomy of holy honor dictated that all

actions undertaken by elite whites, especially violent actions, were honorable by nature

and inalienable rights handed down from heaven. Du Bois’s treatment of this mob

violence signals even more significantly that he believes the economic gulf between the

classes is an underlying cause of the violence.

I don’t mean to suggest that The Quest of the Silver Fleece is socialistic propaganda. In fact, Du Bois had a problematic relationship with organized socialism.

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The Social Democratic Party intrigued him while he studied in Germany in the 1890s, and though he declined to call himself a socialist, he claimed to hold “many socialistic beliefs” (D. Lewis 313). At times he supported the Socialist Party, but eventually he grew tired of its tendency to subordinate racial questions in favor of more general class issues. Despite his reservations with organized socialism, though, by the time Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 he was convinced that “unjust & dangerous economic conditions” were at least partly responsible for the “Negro problem”

(Correspondence 82).

By the time Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, his economic interpretation of the problem of the color line had been fully realized. He felt that labor was at the heart of the so-called “Negro problem”:

It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South

which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black

labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and

build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro

worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of

bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of

discrimination. This program had to be carried out in open defiance of the

clear letter of the law. (670)

He later describes redemption as an “economic revolution” (673), a description which bears out in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Although the sexual hysteria that prompted the Atlanta riot appears in Du Bois’s novel, the violence that consumes its penultimate chapter is prompted by a combination of social and economic fears.

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In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, it is clear that the primary fear of black

citizenship is its economic element. John Taylor, the Northern businessman working

with the Cresswells, establishes a cotton mill in town after he corners the cotton market,

where he employs lower class whites and blacks. After both races have been mistreated

by the upper class whites, one woman says, “these white slaves and black slaves had

ought ter git together” (395), voicing a call to the proletariat to throw off its chains and

unite. The elite whites, however, are clever enough to split the lower classes along the

racial divide because they realize that even the working-class whites recognize the shame

of being associated with blacks, and desire the honor associated with the elite whites of

the Old South. Although the “scalawag” label that carried so much authority in early

Reconstruction and A Fool’s Errand had become less frequent, the concept of “race

traitor” had intensified as African Americans became more independent.

After hearing from John Taylor that black suffrage “might be a good thing,”

Sheriff Colton becomes nervous and takes steps to ensure that black voting rights

continue to be restricted:

the sheriff was angry and mistrustful. He believed he had discovered a

deep-laid scheme of the aristocrats to cultivate friendliness between whites

and blacks, and then use black voters to crush the whites. Such a course

was, in Colton’s mind, dangerous, monstrous, and unnatural; it must be

stopped at all hazards. He began to whisper among his friends. One or

two meetings were held, and the flame of racial prejudice was studiously

fanned. (415)

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The atmosphere of the town assumes a racial charge, and residents begin to gather along racial lines. The key word in this passage may be “unnatural”—just as the miscegenation depicted in Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots had the capability to turn radical Republicans against blacks, the “unnatural” political relation between poor whites and blacks has the potential to provoke violence.

Meanwhile, John Taylor’s cotton mill starts to have a spate of injuries to some of the child laborers, and he sends them to Zora’s hospital for care. When Colton sees white children playing with black children, he becomes upset by the breach of Jim Crow. A few hours later he has organized the mob that will ride against the school. He deliberately stirs up “the worst elements” and pits the poor whites against the poor blacks. The easiest way to do this, of course, is by implying that blacks are bridging the social gap. In other words, Colton transforms the conflict into a question of honor.

When he agrees with Colonel Cresswell to put down the blacks, he says, “I’m a

Southerner, and I honor the old aristocracy you represent. I’m going to join with you to crush this Yankee and put the niggers in their places. They are getting impudent around here; they need a lesson and, by gad! they’ll get one they’ll remember” (416). By couching the situation in these terms, Colton makes it impossible for any white male to oppose the coming violence without calling his honor and masculinity into question and bringing shame upon himself and his family. In essence, his call to action invokes the hierarchical and martial aspects of holy honor, and does so while recognizing that the code originated with the southern aristocracy. Despite Colton’s status outside the elite, he respects the implied power inherent in the rituals of the Old South, and he adeptly uses it to his advantage.

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Just as it does in Tourgée and Chesnutt, the violence in The Quest of the Silver

Fleece begins at the top, within the aristocracy invoked by Colton. Although Cresswell

does not participate himself in these acts of violence, he is active in instigating them with

the Sheriff:

“Candidly, Colton,” [Cresswell] concluded, “I believe in aristocracy. I

can’t think it right or wise to replace the old aristocracy by new and

untried blood.” And in a sudden outburst—“But by God, sir! I’m a white

man, and I place the lowest white man ever created above the highest

darkey ever thought of. This Yankee, Taylor, is a nigger-lover. He’s

secretly encouraging and helping them.” (416).

Cresswell affirms his faith in hierarchical rule, and reveals his fear of the political combination of blacks and whites, especially when an educated white man is

“encouraging and helping them.”

When the Sheriff responds with a call to action, Cresswell at first shirks at the thought, but then gives in to the need for change: “now, see here, Colton,—nothing rash. .

. . Don’t stir up needless trouble; but—well, things must change” (416). This episode is remarkably similar to the scene in The Marrow of Tradition when Carteret balks at the violence he has wreaked, but claims, “I meant to keep them in their places, but…” (305).

Unlike Carteret, though, Cresswell recognizes his sin and attempts to atone for his mistakes with a bequest to the Negro school from his will. His penitence does not mitigate his transgression, however; it only emphasizes the tentative and constructed nature of holy honor, since the most faithful adherent of the code of holy honor seems to posthumously repudiate it after it inflicts so much damage.

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In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois began to formulate a response to the

accommodationism of Booker T. Washington. After criticizing Washington’s “gospel of

Work and Money” that overshadows “the higher aims of life” (42), Du Bois outlines the

two classes of African Americans who disagree with that position. One, descending from

Toussaint, Vesey, and Turner, represents “the attitude of revolt and revenge” (43). The

other, descending from Grimke, Miller, and Bowen, represents the “thinking classes,”

and forms the nexus of Du Bois’s “talented tenth.” This group, though it resists the policies of adjustment and submission advocated by Washington and strives for the higher aims of life, falls short of blind revolt and revenge. In other words, it offers (or at least Du Bois feels it ought to offer) a qualified, thinking man’s revolt, which stands in stark contrast to the romantic, sentimental ideal of holy honor. Keith Byerman asserts that the major black characters in The Quest of the Silver Fleece are romantic figures

(Seizing the Word 120), but I believe the opposite, especially in regard to Alwyn, whose logical and calculated nature seems deliberately created to counter the emotional and romantic ideals implicit in holy honor.

In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, we see an example of the thinking man’s revolt in Bles Alwyn’s reaction to the threat of white violence. Although two men are lynched,

Alwyn takes measures to be certain that the mob wreaks no more havoc. His answer is a kind of fusion between the ideology of William Miller and that of Josh Green found in

The Marrow of Tradition. Like Green, he advocates resistance, but it is a shadowy and qualified resistance in the dark of the night, when he feels he can turn the mob against itself. Where Green resisted in an heroic but futile last stand, Alwyn’s clever machinations in the darkness allow him to continue the fight. More significantly, his

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actions invert the structure of holy honor because they represent covert resistance. The

roots of honor, especially its martial aspects, are immersed in the idea of public

resistance. The antebellum duel, for instance, was a public event designed to display the

honor of those who participated in it. Mark Twain dispelled the illusion of honor

attached to dueling in the Boggs-Sherburn episode of The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn, but the implications of the public ritual remained steeped in southern culture well

into the twentieth century. Most often, as we have seen, the public ritual expanded its

purview from individual white combatants to communal white-on-black mob action. At

any rate, Alwyn subverts the false ideal of violence as a public ritual through his plan of

clandestine opposition.

This is not to say that Alwyn totally rejects the principle of publicity implicit in holy honor. After all, Alwyn wishes to mount direct opposition to the white mob, but unlike Josh Green, he understands the consequences of such action in light of the unbalanced power structure and decides against overt conflict:

if he could but let go the elemental passions that were leaping and

gathering and burning in the eyes of yonder caged and desperate black

men. But his hands were tied—manacled. The white operator in yonder

town had but to flash the news, “Negroes killing whites,” to bring all the

country, all the State, all the nation, to red vengeance. It mattered not

what the provocation, what the desperate cause. (421-22)

In addition to offering a fair description of the events leading up the Atlanta riot, this passage demonstrates that Alwyn realizes blind vengeance will only lead to more misery and suffering for his people. He understands that whites control the mainstream media

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and that the media have the power to shape public perception, a formula which so often ended in dead African Americans.

When daylight comes, Alwyn does not repudiate his aggressive nightime actions,

but he becomes more like Miller because he realizes that the odds have shifted and the

appearance of accommodation would be more prudent. He understands that the consequence of resistance would be swift, direct punishment, so he advises his brethren

to hide their guns. Unfortunately, not everyone heeds Alwyn’s instruction, so the mob

takes action against those who ignore his suggestion. One of the men lynched, Johnson,

has been one of the most conciliatory and submissive amongst them, but his possession

of a firearm outweighs his previous compliance. In other words, the conditions of

masculine southern honor for white men are dangerous, even felonious, characteristics

for black men. Further, any black man who assumes these conditions is perceived as a

shameful failure in the ability of whites to police the hierarchy, and so must be eliminated

from southern society. This logic has an amazing endurance: it provides the justification

for the Hamburg massacre in 1876, and it validates the lynching of Johnson in The Quest

of the Silver Fleece, published thirty-five years later.

Although the novel ends on a hopeful note of uplift, as Zora and Bles get together,

Du Bois counters this sentiment with a postscript message to the reader that offers a sense

of foreboding: “O God . . . lift up thine eyes upon the Horror in this land;—the maiming

and mocking and murdering of my people and the prisonment of their souls. Let my people go, O Infinite One, lest the world shudder at” (434). The postscript breaks off here, leaving an empty space, perhaps indicative of the coming plague. This alliterative

refrain emphasizes the violent climax of the novel, and it recalls the “Sorrow Songs”

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chapter of The Souls of Black Folk: His postscript also subverts the racial hierarchy normally invoked by the southern civil religion and the southern code of honor and chivalry. His brief prayer places the southern whites in the role of the Pharaoh, and sees

African Americans as the “chosen” people, an interesting reversal from the cultural formation of the southern redeemers. In a similar fashion, The Quest of the Silver Fleece inverts the structure of holy honor, and completes the evolution of the fictional counter- redemption begun in 1879 with the publication of A Fool’s Errand.

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CONCLUSION

***

“In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist, and, if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his art…. Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort with. The prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh the accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has been divinely planted in the human soul.”1

***

I began this study with a series of questions about the efficacy of fiction as a tool for reform. More specifically, I wanted to investigate how realist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “works” to negotiate the trichotomy of rule, hegemony, and reform. I explained in Chapter One that, according to Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is the spontaneous consent of the masses “to the general direction of social life imposed by the dominant fundamental group” and rule is the coercive power of the state;

I define reform as any attempt to counter rule or hegemony. Through an analysis of the

1 William Dean Howells, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” (445).

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writings of Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Albion

Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I found that the social

novel works as one piece of a complex cultural puzzle. In other words, the social novel is

a textual production that acts as an avenue towards historical understanding. As I stated

in Chapter One, focused by the four “historical moments” of women and labor, socialism

and the literary mainstream, utopian thought, and race and the post-Reconstruction color

line, I did not begin with particular literary texts hoping to better understand them, but

instead I began with the historical issues and chose texts that might help my investigation

of the history. I did not begin looking to understand the fiction of Rebecca Harding

Davis, for instance, but instead I began researching women and labor in the nineteenth

century, which led me to Rebecca Harding Davis.

Does such a methodology risk making the discipline of literary studies obsolete?

How is my process of understanding different from that of an historian, for instance, and

how do our conclusions differ? At the risk of making a broad generalization, I would

assert that what I do is not radically different from what an historian might do—we both

look at primary and secondary texts and interpret events, circumstances, and ideas from

them. The key difference, I think, the difference that will keep literary studies, at least

the way I practice it, on the academic map, is that I believe literature offers a special

window to understanding cultural forms, while an historian may not.2

Literature, and fiction in particular, is unique among cultural texts, because as it

fictionalizes the world around it—or imagines a new fictional world, as does Bellamy—it

2 I’ve grossly oversimplified the designations of “historian” and “literary studies” here in order to make my point. I realize that the rise of postmodern theory, which decenters the very idea of what constitutes a text and the rise of interdisciplinary studies, which blurs the distinctions between the traditional purviews of these disciplines, have in many ways made this argument old-fashioned. Nevertheless, using this distinction helps illustrate how fiction is a unique node in the cultural network.

196

has the ability to distill issues with which it is concerned into archetypes in ways that are often very compelling to its readers. Lois Yare in Margret Howth, Lindau in A Hazard of

New Fortunes, and Josh Green in The Marrow of Tradition are archetypes of the unsexed woman, the dangerous immigrant socialist, and the militant Negro, respectively. These types are able to illuminate like nothing else, concisely and compellingly, the cultures from which they came.

In Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins explains how cultural stereotypes operate

so effectively. She asserts that in order for a novel to have “impact on the culture at

large,” it must connect to

a storehouse of commonly held assumptions, reproducing what is already

there in a typical and familiar form…. [stereotypes] convey enormous

amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form. As the

telegraphic expression of complex clusters of value, stereotyped characters

are essential to popularly successful narrative. Figures like Stowe’s little

Eva, Cooper’s Magua, and Warner’s Ellen Montgomery operate as

cultural shorthand, and because of their multilayered representative

function are the carriers of strong emotional associations. (xvi)

Tompkins makes this argument in order to defend sentimental novels against claims that

they are not important because they lack literary value, but it also effectively illustrates

how this “cultural shorthand” might drive the success of a novel in the literary

marketplace, or how it might go about giving fiction, and the novel in particular, such

dynamic cultural impact.

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An historian like Eric Foner, for instance, can tell his readers that scalawags in the

South during Reconstruction were considered “race traitors” and were reviled through the region, but the murder of John Walters in Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand encapsulates the idea in a “cultural shorthand” that is compelling and fraught with interesting connotations. For a reader of Tourgée’s novel, John Walters simultaneously represents the symbolic death of Negro citizenship through the location of his murder— the courthouse—and embodies how incredibly threatened southern whites felt by scalawags because they feared the organizing capabilities of other white men more than those of Negroes. It is obvious symbolism, to be sure, but in Tompkins’s formulation all the more valuable because it taps into the shared cultural storehouse much more effectively than a news report or an historical account.

This is not to say that the social novel works, in the Poovey and Tompkins sense,

exclusively through the use of cultural archetypes. Sometimes it contains more overt

attempts to proselytize the unconverted, which will occasionally lapse into what might be

described as sermonizing. Such sermonizing, however, is often much less compelling

than the cultural shorthand of these archetypes. The trial scene in Richard Wright’s

Native Son, for instance, which contains long monologues of socialist theory in the guise

of statements by Bigger’s lawyer, is much less interesting and less invocative than the

scenes of Bigger’s fight with the rat at the beginning of the novel, though they

communicate similar ideas. Perhaps this overt sermonizing is what Lennard Davis has in

mind when he asserts that as a novel becomes more political, it becomes less “novel”

(Resisting Novels 225). It seems to me, though, that Davis has a very narrow definition

of the genre. It is precisely because the novel can lapse into didactic monologues that it

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is novel, even if they are less compelling. The best attribute of a novel is that it is a

protean entity with endless possibilities. At its best, the social novel is a site of synthesis for various textual cultural forms; narratives, character sketches, dialogues, sermons, all can find a place within the novel, and combine to negotiate a place within social debate.

***

In this study, I’ve shown that different novels negotiate the trichotomy of rule,

hegemony, and reform in different ways. Some novels, like those of William Dean

Howells, though reforming the social world to some extent, tend to mitigate that reform

by replicating the hegemonic forces around them. Howells manifested this tendency in

his work by writing radical characters who attempt reform, but who are undermined by

negative characteristics—thus the socialism of Reverend Peck in Annie Kilburn is

diminished by his poor social skills and, especially, by his bad fathering. Also, the

socialism of Lindau in A Hazard of New Fortunes is tempered by his extremism and his

foreignness. The end result for Howells, a lukewarm reformist, is that his novels reflect a

somewhat ambiguous synthesis of hegemony and reform and are illustrative of Howells’s

own political indecision.

Other novels, like Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, use the

hegemonic forces of the novel form, in this case a typical nineteenth-century romantic

subplot of unrecognized illegitimacy, in order to subvert larger hegemonic forces of

racial hierarchy that are closely tied to forms of rule, or governmental oppression via Jim

Crow and the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling. Specifically, since Olivia

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Carteret and Janet Miller are half-sisters, one legitimate, and one the product of

miscegenation looking for validation, their subplot conflates the idea of sexual integration

with the legal and political issues surrounding the racial hierarchy. Thomas Dixon, in

contrast, although dealing with some of the same subject matter as Chesnutt, writes novels that support the authority and power of the ruling class, both at the level of rule and hegemony, through an almost hysterical desire for racial purity and white political redemption. Both of these novelists, as well as Albion Tourgée and W. E. B. Du Bois, engage the hegemony of Southern holy honor and the violence that supported it. The novels of Tourgée, Chesnutt, and Du Bois try to expose the spuriousness of holy honor and to reform it, while Dixon vigorously champions it.

Rebecca Harding Davis offers two powerful critiques of the industrial state in

“Life in the Iron-Mills” and Margret Howth. She depicts the harsh conditions of working class life forty years before such pictures became common in the work of the American naturalists like Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. In doing so, however, she grounds her critique of industrialism in a rather conservative picture of domesticity and the home, adhering to the hegemonic forces of domestic ideology and the cult of the true woman.

Davis writes women in her fiction, notably Deb in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” and Lois Yare and Margret Howth in Margret Howth, who draw upon the cultural matrix of domesticity in order to demonstrate that labor can unsex women, disrupt their lives as angel of the house, and interfere with their relationship with God.

Edward Bellamy offers an interesting case because his novel, Looking Backward, had such overt ties to society in the Nationalism movement. Consciously courting the professional classes for Nationalism, Bellamy writes a utopian world that clearly subverts

200

the hegemonic forces of capitalism and individualism, but as he does so, he taps into

middle-class hegemonies, like top-down reform and building industrial progress through

technocracy, in order to attract the leisure class to radical ideas which they may have

found unpalatable in other forms.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term “double- consciousness” to explain the notion that African Americans find themselves struggling between dual identities—as Americans and as Negroes. It is possible to adapt his term to the dilemma of the social novel, which often struggles between the dual identities of hegemonic support and reform. Though this struggle may seem to weaken the efficacy of the novel as reform, it also gives the novel much of its ability to move its readers.

***

As I’ve researched and written this study, much of the research done on the

Internet and all of the writing done on a computer, I’ve wondered about the novel’s

cultural impact (or lack thereof) at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Certainly, as

Lennard Davis has argued, due to the advent and proliferation of electronic mass media,

novels do not hold the cultural impact they once had (Resisting Novels 234). Still, when

one can input “Harry Potter” into an Internet search engine and turn up nearly two

million web pages with references to the little magician and the series of books that

spawned him, it is fair to refine Davis’s assertion and claim that novels have cultural

impact, but the nature of that impact has been altered drastically.3 After all, many of the

3 A Google.com search conducted on 28 May 2002 turned up 1,930,000 hits for “Harry Potter.”

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hits in the “Harry Potter” search turned up references to the hit film and other

merchandising links.

To be sure, the way books are created, published, and received has changed

radically in the past few years. In his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts asserts, somewhat nostalgically, “the formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and reader at the other end—is slowly being bent into a pretzel. What the writer writes, how he writes and gets edited, printed, and sold, and then read—all of the old assumptions are under siege” (5). Birkerts sees this transformation as a siege against the pleasures of reading, and deeply engaging, text on the printed page. He reads the cultural history of the United States in the last thirty years as an assault upon literary culture.

Birkerts bemoans that our society tends to simplify things ad nauseam, “turning

everything into entertainment” (143), and becoming less interested in reading as a

vertical activity—in other words, an activity that requires rapt attention and “intensified

focus” (72). During a course I taught last semester on the American novel, my students

staged a mini-revolt against the syllabus, complaining about how much they disliked

Moby Dick. One student asked, “why should we read this? It’s so hard to get through; it

doesn’t encourage a love of literature or of reading.” She wasn’t just being difficult—as

an English Education major, she looks forward to a day when she, too, will choose books

for students to read and, perhaps, have to justify that choice to her students or their

parents. She obviously had some preconceptions about what literature—in this case a

novel—is supposed to do. Although I must disagree with her assertion that a book

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necessarily ought to “encourage a love of literature,” I find her initial inquiry, “why should we read this?” to be a valid question that is not so easy to answer.

One answer is because others read it. Popularity continues to be a determining

factor in what we read, and certainly has something to do with a book’s impact. This is

nothing new, though. Howells claimed in 1893 that in order to be successful, a novelist

must realize that “in the United States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women”

because as primary literary consumers, women drove the literary marketplace (“Man of

Letters” 438). Now, though, the fate of a book is in the hands of the bestseller lists.

Consider the literary market in the last decade of the twentieth century. According to

CNN Online, John Grisham sold over sixty million copies of his novels during the 1990s,

thus making him the best selling author of that decade. In fact, five of his novels rank in

the top ten best sellers for the decade (“Grisham”). Grisham seems to be a case of being

successful because he is successful. Perhaps it is precisely that economic potential which

translates into cultural capital in these days of late capitalism. Money equals authority

now more than ever; witness the power of bestseller lists in the publishing industry and box office rankings in the film industry.

Despite the hegemonic power of capitalism, some recent authors have attempted

to work in small ways to counter its ideology. Don DeLillo, for instance, claims in his

article “The Power of History,” that his 1997 novel Underworld, a sprawling book that

briefly appeared on the bestseller lists before being relegated to bookseller remainder

piles, that the “primary clash” in his novel is “the tendency of the language to work in

opposition to the enormous technology of war that dominated the era and shaped the

book’s themes.” He suggests that the small case letters for trademarked terms (like

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styrofoam, velcro, and plexiglass) help to “unincorporate these words, [to] subvert their official status.” He admits such maneuvers are “small tactics,” but nevertheless submits them as examples of his book’s reformist ideals.

Even DeLillo’s apparent counter-hegemonic gesture, however, illustrates the difficulty of escaping these forces entirely. The trademarked terms that DeLillo cites as examples have all, like kleenex and xerox, become generic terms because of their pervasive ubiquity. The fact that DeLillo strips these words of their name-brand status may actually support the hegemony of corporate capitalism rather than subvert it. In effect, without DeLillo’s explanation, Underworld acts to infiltrate the terms further into the social fabric, which sounds remarkably similar to the way the fiction of the Gilded

Age seemed to work within its own culture—resisting, reforming, and conforming in novel ways.

204

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