SOURCE: Warren, Kenneth W. “The Persistence of Uncle Tom and the Problem of Critical Distinction.” In Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism, pp. 71-108. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Warren examines the enduring influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin on realist representations of racial inequality.]

I

Central to understanding the troubles besetting the project of realistic critical definition is an awareness of the persistent influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin during these decades. From its publication in 1852 through the end of the century, the novel remained a bestseller, inspiring admiration from common and elite readers alike. As William Veeder has put it, “what major author was not moved to tribute and tears by Uncle Tom's Cabin?”¹ The imaginative scope of Stowe's masterwork led John William De Forest to describe the novel as “the nearest approach to the desired phenomenon [of the great American novel]” yet written and prompted William Dean Howells, well into the realist era, to say that Uncle Tom's Cabin was “still perhaps our chief fiction.”² Other critics, following suit, readily measured the potential social and political effect of novels by comparing them with Stowe's work. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Century, when looking for an appropriate benchmark for Howells's achievement in A Modern Instance, pointed to Uncle Tom's Cabin. While in the opinion of the Raleigh Observer, Albion Tourgée's 1879 A Fool's Errand was “destined … to do as much harm in the world as Uncle Tom's Cabin, to which it is indeed a companion piece.”³

The host of stage shows engendered by the novel were equally influential. As far as dramatizations were concerned, “the public's craze for Uncle Tom's Cabin reached its peak just before the turn of the century.”⁴ The effect of these shows, however, began almost simultaneously with the novel's publication. Seeing Uncle Tom's Cabin on stage was an aesthetic watershed for the young Henry James, who recalls the experience in A Small Boy and Others as an “aesthetic adventure, … a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not restless.”⁵ More troublingly, however, Thomas Dixon, Jr., author of popular racist romances which included The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, also dated his birth as an author to the evening he saw a dramatization of Stowe's novel.⁶

For all of these writers the encounter with Stowe seemed both a shock of recognition and a call for repudiation. In the words of Anna Julia Cooper, Uncle Tom's Cabin had elevated its author to “the front rank of the writers of her country and age” and had established a standard for American writing. Yet for all its successes Stowe's fiction had failed to present “an authentic portrait, at once aesthetic and true to life [of] the black man as a free American citizen.”⁷ Such responses to Stowe's greatest novel were typical. She had set a standard that called for its own supersession. Assessments of her novel became attempts to go Stowe one better, or more specifically, to go Uncle Tom's Cabin one better. Efforts in this vein were central to the shaping of critical dicta and narrative strategies during this period.

Certainly Uncle Tom's Cabin was not the only popular cultural influence shaping the literary outlook of writers like James. Veeder has demonstrated that a wide range of popular materials contributed to James's art and to the art of his “high” culture contemporaries.⁸Uncle Tom's Cabin, however, stands out because it was not merely a best-seller but a work whose political and social effects were widely acknowledged. For writers like James, Howells, and Cable who believed, albeit in different ways, that fiction could count heavily in the quest for social betterment, Stowe was an inspiration and a problem. The success of her novel confirmed the belief that fiction could achieve social and political ends yet her success seemed to accommodate a deplorable aesthetic. Her characters were often sentimentalized, her plot often creaky, and her attention to craft apparently nonexistent. In light of these perceived failings, the definition of the realistic novel as an instrument for altering social relations could not include an embrace of a sentimental aesthetic. In fact, some of the central tenets of that aesthetic—a dedication to duty, the valorization of sacrifice and renunciation, and appeals to the heart rather than the head—were often held up for critique and ridicule within realistic fiction.

The question of character, however, was central. As realists sought to create characters who were, in Alfred Kazin's words, “wholly merged into their environment,”⁹ they found their attempts anticipated to a great degree by Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was praised by De Forest for its “truthful outlining of character, [and] natural speaking.” De Forest went on to note that “such Northerners, as Mrs. Stowe painted, we have seen; and we have seen such Southerners, no matter what the people south of the Mason and Dixon's line may protest; we have seen such negroes.” Yet his admiration of Stowe's delineation of character did not also prevent him from including characterization as one of the novel's most egregious faults. Little Eva was unreal, “a girl such as girls are to be, perhaps, but are not yet.” And Uncle Tom was equally idealized: “We have seen such negroes,” he observed, “barring of course, the impeccable Uncle Tom.”¹⁰

As this double-edged criticism reveals, Stowe's work was a mixed bag. Its attempt to reveal to its readers the systemic evils of slavery and the effects of such factors as geography on behavior is so compelling that one scholar has attributed to her “an awareness [of the relationship between character and environment] unmatched in American literature until Naturalism fifty years later.”¹¹ Though this may overstate the case, it is true that Uncle Tom's Cabin makes clear the connection between behavior and surroundings. Augustine St. Clare's moral lassitude, Miss Ophelia's puritanical hypocrisy, and Sambo and Quimbo's cruelty all arise from the distinct aspects of the respective environments in which these characters are embedded. In like manner, the selling and auctioning of Uncle Tom provide examples of how the larger social system can act to compromise and subvert individual actions and beliefs. Yet while living among individuals who behave in a manner that contradicts their beliefs or who tacitly condone such behavior in others, Tom and Eva remain uncompromised, their spirits and actions untouched by the moral corruption and hypocrisy that surround them, their very purity belying the notion that environment determines character.

A social world in which the primary figures function as exceptions to the laws governing those who surround them is characteristic of the sentimental “issues” novel of the mid-nineteenth century by writers like Stowe and Charles Dickens. (Dickens's work enjoyed extraordinary popularity in the United States, and like Uncle Tom's Cabin, his novels were often dramatized.) The unsullied heroes and heroines in these works stood outside the social forms that sought to enclose them. On the one hand, slavery, poverty, or prison accounted for the unsocialized status of these characters. Dickens's Little Dorritt, brought up in the Marshalsea, is not a product of larger society. As a young woman she has had “no knowledge even of the common daily tone and habits of the common members of the free community who are not shut up in prisons.” But neither is she a product of the Marshalsea. She differs greatly from her brother and her sister and her father in a manner not attributable to social forces. As Dickens explains, “It is enough that she was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by the love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!”¹² Dickens's recourse to inspiration is important. The existence of these characters must be something of an enigma; if it were otherwise the novel's social critique would be severely compromised. The virtues of the central character could then be construed as products of the social environment. Among her family members, Little Dorritt is the only one to be born in prison, and it is conceivable that some doctrinaire advocate of debtors' prisons might have claimed that Little Dorritt's admirable qualities provided justification for the practice of incarcerating debtors: not inspiration, but her early experience in prison had instilled in her the virtues of hard work, thrift, and altruism. Dickens's social critique could then be turned on its head.

But whether or not Dickens encountered such criticism, Stowe did. Some contemporary and postwar Southern critics of Uncle Tom's Cabin charged that Stowe had simply misinterpreted her own evidence.¹³ Uncle Tom's goodness, they argued, was created by the benevolent paternalism of the slave system. “He was all he was, by virtue of his condition as a slave,” Francis Shoup proclaimed in the Sewanee Review in 1893.¹⁴ Slavery had been a necessary school for benighted Africans, an institution that had begun the laborious project of civilizing the savage.

In Stowe's view, of course, Uncle Tom, like Little Dorritt, was an inspired being. Stowe, in fact, was willing to believe the entire race from which Tom sprang more likely to be inspired than was the dominant Anglo-Saxon race (although for the sake of the argument against slavery the other black characters in her novel do exhibit the scars of their servitude).¹⁵ Postbellum aesthetics, however, called for changes. In the realistic world of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, “a world without miracle, without transcendence even if the individual may have preserved a personal religious faith,”¹⁶ Uncle Tom, too, became, in the eyes of Northerner and Southerner alike, vulnerable to “his condition as a slave.”

The belief that the ex-slave remained a creature of his conditions was central to De Forest's critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion, which he published the year before his essay “The Great American Novel” appeared in The Nation. In that novel Dr. Ravenal, one of the central characters, assures a credulous minister that “Uncle Tom is a pure fiction. There never was such a slave, and there never will be. A man educated under the degrading influences of bondage must always have some taint of grossness and lowness.” In place of Tom, De Forest offers his readers the figure of Major Scott, a “tolerably exemplary black,” whose sham title, marital infidelities, and bombastic style contrast markedly with the homespun, humble faithfulness of Stowe's character.¹⁷ In contrast to the death of Uncle Tom, which evokes the redemptive potentialities of Christian sacrifice and brings into sharp focus the psychosexual undercurrents in nineteenth-century thinking about slavery, Major Scott's death seems almost incidental to De Forest's tale. The Major dies in an exchange of fire with a Texas Butternut soldier—an exchange that saves no one and that brings the war no closer to an end.

But the Major's insignificant stature when he is placed beside Uncle Tom is significant. Indelibly marked by the injustices of his past servitude, the Major embodies the notion that all doors leading beyond the influences of social institutions are to be closed, and that if any mode of being exists outside the circle of society, that mode exerts no civilizing or socializing influence. Redemption is to be sought within and not without the social framework.

As a genre, the sentimental romance assumed that the redemption of the social world lay with the individual: the inspired Little Dorritt acts “for the sake of the rest,” or in Stowe's vision, a United States senator, in order to behave morally, must forget the laws he has helped enact and become a man rather than a senator—“man” in this case being an individual in touch with his feelings. By contrast, the realistic novel, albeit with great ambivalence, asserted precisely the opposite: the redemption of the individual lay within the social world. So that even in Huckleberry Finn, which devotes so much attention to exposing the shortcomings of society, the action that both completes Huck's mission and prevents him from becoming a social pariah is the socially sanctioned deathbed manumission of Jim.¹⁸

What Stowe and Dickens accomplished in their novels was an extension of the sway of a single institution—chattel slavery or prison—over all who came into contact with it, only then to exempt central figures from the logical implications of this extension. By contrast, De Forest, Howells, Twain, and James attempted in their works to rescind the exemption—not out of despair but from a faith that to become fully merged with the social world was also somehow to ensure the triumph of the civil and the social.

This realistic faith in the social order, according to Howells, provided “the key-note of the best modern writing in all kinds, and … characterized the real literary endeavor of an epoch serious, sympathetic, and conscientious beyond those that have gone before it.” In support of his sentiments, Howells quoted approvingly from Josiah Royce's History of California, which proclaimed:

It is the State, the Social Order that is divine. We are all but dust, save as the social order gives us life. When we think it our instrument, our plaything, and make our private fortunes the one object, then this social order rapidly becomes vile to us; we call it sordid, degraded, corrupt, unspiritual, and ask how we may escape from it forever. But if we turn again and serve the social order, and not merely ourselves, we soon find that what we are serving is simply our own highest spiritual destiny in bodily form. It is never truly sordid or corrupt or unspiritual; it is only we that are so when we neglect our duty.¹⁹

Although it is not quite clear whether the social order referred to here is the existing state or some future version of human society, the almost messianic nature of this order is unmistakable. As Howells proclaims on a latter occasion, polite society is “an image of a righteous state on earth.”²⁰ To be outside of society is to be in the realm of the corrupt and the unspiritual.

In Howells's estimation, the qualifications for membership in good society were far from fixed. Society was rapidly expanding to include more and more people who had previously been excluded. The barriers preventing admittance were tumbling, and no longer did admission require esteemed parentage. In fact, “all that society now asks of people is that they shall behave civilly, and join the rest in doing and saying pleasant things to one another.”²¹ And as he declared the doors of “good society” open to former outcasts, Howells also acknowledged that many of the seemingly civilized were anything but. Although many members of middle-class nineteenth-century America were only too willing to identify savagery and barbarism with ethnic immigrants and blacks,²² Howellsian realism made a concerted effort to unfix the barbaric from ethnic identification and set it floating throughout the social body—a notion expressed by Bromfield Corey in Silas Lapham:

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilisation. … We think it is an affair of epochs and of nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilised and the other a barbarian. I've occasionally met young girls who were so brutally, insolently, wilfully indifferent to the arts which make civilisation that they ought to have been clothed in the skins of wild beasts and gone about barefoot with clubs over their shoulders. Yet they were of polite origin, and their parents were at least respectful of the things that these young animals despised.”²³

Instead of an overarching force exerting its power evenly upon the whole of the social body, civilization seems almost capricious, affecting one family member while missing another. Howells even goes on to say elsewhere that civilization also operates only intermittently upon single individuals: “No man can be said to be thoroughly civilized nor always civilized … the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism.”²⁴ Although the representation of civilization as a sort of piecemeal process seems to contradict the faith in the social order alluded to earlier, it must be seen in the context of Howells's argument that civilization comes through literature, specifically realistic literature. What one reads shapes one's tastes and determines the degree to which one is civilized.

Although the main engine driving this argument was Howells's effort to create a market for the kind of fiction he was writing, another factor was his attempt to democratize American civilization. As Amy Kaplan has observed, Howellsian realism asserted that there could be a meeting ground for the multifarious members of the American social scene.²⁵ The partial barbarization of high society and indeed of the self was accompanied inversely by a “genteelization” of the outsider. If one was already consorting with people “who ought to have been clothed in the skins of wild beasts,” it was no large step to begin consorting with someone, who though of a different race and class, was at least somewhat well read and respectably clothed.

Turning the critical lens on those white Americans assumed to be members of society while calling into question their claims to membership became a favored tactic of civil rights progressives in their assault on racial barriers. George Washington Cable maintained that “distinctions on the line of color are really made not from any necessity, but simply for their own sake—to preserve the old arbitrary supremacy of the master class over the menial without regard to the decency or indecency of appearance or manners in either the white individual or the colored.” Racial discrimination prevented the Southerner from “making and enforcing that intelligent and approximately just assortment of persons in public places and conveyances on the merits of exterior decency that is made in all other enlightened lands.”²⁶

Arguments like Cable's against discrimination became common to the attack on legal discrimination. Du Bois, for example, produced a similar complaint against the color line, nothing that “segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering of social grades common to all communities.” Naturalizing class distinctions, Du Bois elaborated by saying that the unnatural assortment of individuals based solely on race was contributing to the worsening of racial relations, because “in nearly every Southern town and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other”.²⁷ Similarly in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Dr. William Miller, a fair-skinned, educated black man, after being forced to sit in a Jim Crow car, looks upon his fellow blacks and observes that “personally, and apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy, these people were just as offensive to him as to the whites in the other end of the train. Surely, if a classification of passengers on trains was at all desirable, it might be made upon some more logical and considerate basis than a mere arbitrary, tactless, and, by the very nature of things, brutal drawing of a color line.”²⁸

The limitation of this aspect of antisegregation arguments is obvious. These critics accepted too readily a view of class distinctions as a natural division among human beings. In many respects, the efforts to emphasize class distinctions rather than racial ones differed little from tactics of conservative Southerners in the immediate postwar period who sought to maintain their position atop the social order by attempting “to distinguish between classes of the [black] race, to encourage the ‘better’ element, and to draw it into a white alliance.”²⁹ On the other hand, one should not miss the fact that these desegregation arguments did attempt to define admittance into the social order as an active, voluntary process, rather than as a passive, involuntary one. The project of reunifying the nation following the Civil War had foregrounded the question of what constituted citizenship. What were to be the requirements for individuals and states to be readmitted to the Union? What principles must individuals profess before becoming citizens once again?

As a result of disunion, citizenship emerged in outline not as something already there, but as something that needed to be worked out. From the standpoint of those who saw the war as a vindication of democratic principles and abolitionist idealism, the best solution was a definition of citizenship as an assent to egalitarian principles. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly shortly after the Civil War, Charles Sumner had urged that “pardons issue only on satisfactory assurance that the applicant, who has been engaged in murdering our fellow-citizens, shall sustain the Equal Rights, civil and political, of all men, according to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that he shall pledge himself to the support of the national debt; and, that if he be among the large holders of land, that he shall set apart homesteads for all his freedmen.”³⁰ Citizenship required consent to the principles of equal political and economic rights for all men, especially the former slaves. Of course, the actual conditions for readmission did not approach Sumner's plan, and readmission did not come close to being an endorsement of black equal rights. Nonetheless, the question of what made these diverse regions and societies a nation was not laid to rest, and in fact became a key problem for the American novel. How was one to write “the great American novel?”

For Howells the question was to be answered by first acknowledging that “men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.”³¹ Realism as an investigation of social manners sought to interpret behavior and manners, especially the reading of good fiction, as evidence of a consent to basic equality. In this respect the implicit and explicit politics of realistic fiction differed little from Du Bois's recommendation that the American Negro Academy push for “such a social equilibrium as would, throughout all the complicated relations of life, give due and just consideration to culture, ability, and moral worth, whether they be found under white or black skins.”³² Howells's essay “Good Society as the Basis of Equality,” while admitting that the presence of good society implied differences between classes, also asserted that individuals within the best social classes always treated each other as equals, regardless of differences in ability, refinement, or wealth. And in his novels he investigated again and again the social footing upon which such meetings could take place in ways that approached democratic ideals.³³

Repeatedly, however, as with the dinner parties in Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes and the attempts to establish the social union in Annie Kilburn, these efforts to bring together individuals from various walks of life fall short of success. Upper and lowerclass characters are discomfited in their endeavors to get along. Though the failure is often attributed to the condescending attitudes of the more fortunate, those less fortunate bear their share of the burden as well. Drunkenness, sentimentality, lack of self-restraint, and other “vices” make these characters somehow responsible for their failure to enter society on an equal footing. Their intellectual tastes also made them suspect. If reading the proper novels was to be a prerequisite for social entry, admitting the “lower” orders would remain a problem. Howells's faith in realism notwithstanding, he was forced to admit that “inferior romanticists are still incomparably the most popular novelists.”³⁴

Given their condition as products of their environments, how could lower-class individuals exhibit the behaviors and tastes that would exhibit their assent to the principle of equality that undergirded good society? In Silas Lapham an answer to this question is suggested by the relationship between Silas and the architect Seymour, who is in charge of the design and construction of Lapham's ill-fated Back Bay house. As Silas and Seymour discuss the plans for the house, something of a transformation begins to occur in Silas. His coarse ideas about beauty are gradually refined, and he discovers that he can derive some joy from the artistic realm:

Aesthetic ideas had never been intelligibly presented to him before, and he found a delight in apprehending them that was very grateful to his imaginative architect. At the beginning, the architect had foreboded a series of mortifying defeats and disastrous victories in his encounters with his client; but he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required but to understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he was ready to pay for it. His bull-headed pride was concerned in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it. In some measure the architect seemed to share his delusion, and freely said that Lapham was very suggestive.³⁵

The opening portion of the passage points out the educable nature of Lapham, a quality necessary for the fulfillment of the realist agenda which emphasized the role of criticism in communicating artistic principles. The two men share an almost ideal relationship. Silas's willingness to learn foreshadows his openness to the teachings of the Reverend Sewell, who, towards the book's conclusion, uses the wisdom derived from realistic fiction to help Silas choose the proper path out of his dilemma.

Yet midway through the passage the qualities associated with Silas's new knowledge begin to grow more and more ominous. Silas's receptiveness to artistic ideas becomes the catalyst for his pouring more and more money into the ill-fated structure, and his “bull-headed pride” is the reason for his adhering to the artist's design. Then, in both the concluding portions of the passage and in the paragraphs that follow, a number of suspicious words—delusion, extravagant, novelties, and reckless—begin to crop up. Finally, the discussion of the expenditures for the house modulates into a discussion between Silas and his wife, Persis, about Lapham's involvement in the stock market which ultimately contributes to his financial collapse.

Although it is tempting to see the outcome of Silas's foray into architectural sensibility as an implicit condemnation of Seymour's ideas, the comments which the latter makes in chapter 14 regarding houses at the dinner party imply the rightness of his taste. There seems rather to be a suspicion inherent in this particular novel that complete transformations in individuals are somehow unrealistic and that to transform a man who sees no impropriety in painting garish advertisements on rock outcrops into a gentleman who can discern the aesthetic advantages to be gained by using a particular type of wood in the construction of his dining room would be to strain the limits of credibility.

Having created Lapham as the representative of a certain “type,” Howells's novel finds it difficult to imagine him in any other way, and tends to prefer him as a Boston outsider. After financial ruin has forced Silas and his family to return to the Vermont town of Lapham, the narrator remarks of the failed millionaire, “The Colonel … was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay.”³⁶ It appears that the very coherence of the Colonel's self is threatened by the fulfillment of his desires. This is where Leo Bersani's criticism of realism is most on target. Forced to choose between a character who remains true to himself and a character whose self-refashioning would alter both his character and his relationship to the social order, the novel chooses the former.³⁷

If sentimentalism depended on characters who could transcend their environments, then realism would by definition highlight the obstacles to transcendence. While the marriage between Silas's daughter, Penelope, and Tom Corey might represent an alliance across class lines that could underscore the sameness of humanity, the acknowledgement of intransigent social difference would be necessary for the project of generic distinction: “It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope's character which finally reconciled all her husband's family and endeared her to them. These things continually happen in novels; … But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between the Coreys and Tom Corey's wife.”³⁸

Complete effacement of social differences might happen in the world of sentimental fiction, but not in the world of the real. That the differences Howells notes are “not uneffaceable” reveals the guarded optimism of his social vision, which did see social conditions as contingent and not permanent. But even this guarded optimism was sorely tested as Howells surveyed more minutely the fate of the huddled masses. In the mid-1890s Howells found himself prey to the following gloomy sentiments after a walk through New York's most densely populated slums: “I could not see that in itself or in its conditions it held the promise or the hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, it must endure, if it is intolerable, still it must endure. Here and there one will release himself from it, and doubtless numbers are always doing this, as in the days of slavery there were always fugitives, but for the great mass the captivity remains.”³⁹ Howells's recourse to the images of slavery and fugitives, images which in an earlier “Editor's Study” he declared phantoms of a bygone age and inappropriate to the world of realism, reveals the depth of his despair. The gradual melioration of conditions implied by the realistic formula is belied by the metaphor of slavery, whose dissolution required not simply time but a cataclysm.

The pessimistic outlook on social conditions placed the realistic politics of good society at an impasse, especially with regard to race. Poverty and illiteracy remained facts of life for large numbers of black Americans, and crime among the freedmen was a real if exaggerated part of post-Reconstruction America. While Howells could imagine, through the person of Dr. Olney in An Imperative Duty, that most black Americans evinced an almost natural gentility that placed them above the level of recent ethnic immigrants, and that this gentility was augmented by a desire “to be like ladies and gentlemen,” even staunch black civil rights advocates were often less optimistic. Frederick Douglass in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass charged that black emigration from the South might fail because “the careless and improvident habits of the South cannot be set aside in a generation.”⁴⁰ W. E. B. Du Bois in his address to the American Negro Academy stated that “the Negro Academy ought to sound a note of warning that would echo in every black cabin in the land: Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us; we are diseased, we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure. … The Academy should seek to gather about it the talented, unselfish men, the pure and noble-minded women, to fight an army of devils that disgraces our manhood and our womanhood.⁴¹ Whatever the intent of remarks such as these, they could be construed as endorsing caution regarding equality for black Americans.⁴² To the extent that Cable was right in claiming that “neither race, or in other words nobody, wants to see the civil rewards of decency in dress and behavior usurped by the common herd of clowns and ragamuffins,”⁴³ then the exclusion of impoverished and uneducated black Americans from civil society seemed warranted.

Certainly, a fair enforcement of standards of decency would have excluded many whites, as most civil rights advocates were quick to point out, but for Cable and Du Bois the real emphasis lay in the possibility of inclusion. Those blacks and whites outside the circle of society were not permanently excluded; education, civil rights, and economic opportunity could effect real and swift changes in individuals.

If realistic novels provide any indication, however, it was becoming harder to imagine the reality of such changes. Howells's dilemma with Silas and Penelope Lapham illustrates that for a novel to invest itself too fully in changing individuals was to risk a return to romantic and sentimental notions of fiction. Although social differences between classes were “not uneffaceable,” the realistic novel had to stress the persistence of such differences, leaving its readers to mediate upon the “fine and impassable differentiations” that constitute “the price we pay for civilization.”⁴⁴

Part of that price was redefining the social world from that which could be changed to that which marked individuals, thus rendering them impervious to change. In Silas Lapham, Penelope (who is white) illustrates the barriers between her and the Brahmin Coreys by becoming, figuratively, dark, vernacular, and poor. As she puts the matter to her fiancé, Tom Corey, “I am not at all what they would like—your family; I felt that. I am little, and black, and homely, and they don't understand my way of talking, and now that we've lost everything. …”⁴⁵ To be sure, Penelope is not imagining herself as black; she is, however, registering her social difference from the Boston elites in terms of physical appearance and voice. Her representation of her “uneffaced, if not uneffaceable,” differences from the Coreys as blackness suggests the easy availability of blackness as a symbol of the unassimilable, even when race itself is not a marker of difference.⁴⁶

As the realistic novel sharpened its critique of social discriminations, it began to depend more heavily on the distinctions it challenged—especially with regard to matters of race. Even when the realistic text proffered the gentility of “free men of color” as a sufficient claim for their social inclusion, it also acknowledged a “blackness most dark” lying beyond the reach of redemption, as demonstrated by George Washington Cable's description of Clemence, the superstitious relic of the past in The Grandissimes:

To Clemence the order of society was nothing. No upheaval could reach to the depth to which she was sunk. It is true, she was one of the population. She had certain affections toward people and places; but they were not of a consuming sort.

As for us, our feelings, our sentiments, affections, etc., are fine and keen, delicate and many; what we call refined. Why? Because we get them as we get our old swords and gems and laces—from our grandsires, mothers, and all. Refined they are—after centuries of refining. But the feelings handed down to Clemence had come through ages of African savagery; through fires that do not refine, but that blunt and blast and blacken and char; starvation, gluttony, drunkenness, thirst, drowning, nakedness, dirt, fetichism, debauchery, slaughter, pestilence and the rest—she was their heiress; they left her the cinders of human feeling.⁴⁷

Cable's first sentence says it all. Slavery has prevented most blacks from entering the order of society. Like Stowe's Topsy, who represents “unredeemed African nature,” Clemence proves that slavery was not a true system of socialization. Topsy's behavior springs directly from her African nature. Her presence in Stowe's narrative is something of a supplementary argument to the central critique of the enforced separation of families and the systematic subversion of individual goodwill by the workings of the slave order, both of which point to the system itself as the great corrupter. The lesser argument concerning the natural disposition of the African American is somewhat more slippery. The idea that slavery had halted the civilizing of slaves, leaving them heirs of African heritage, points to a singularly negative view of Africanness.⁴⁸ The list of Africanisms in Cable's genealogy of Clemence is a litany of humanity's worst ills, the source of which is not slavery but Africa itself. Slavery is a defective social system because it has failed to socialize the African into progressive society. Thus what was begun as an attack on slavery and caste threatened to metamorphose into an attack on the idea of African-American culture.

One can see this confusion about the proper target of realistic social criticism in the thinking of De Forest as well. His novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion is ostensibly a Civil War novel, but it might be more properly viewed as a reminder to the nation of “‘the great elementary duty of man in life—that of working for his own subsistence.’” Approximately midway through the novel, Doctor Ravenel, who utters these words, sets about the task of impressing this lesson on a group of freed blacks in Louisiana, with positive but inconclusive results. Then, by the end of the tale, he sermonizes on a similar note to Captain Colburne, his new son-in-law, asserting that “‘in working for our own living we are obeying the teachings of this war, the triumphant spirit of our country and age.’”⁴⁹

This admonition is egalitarian in nature, directed towards blacks as well as whites, Northerners as well as Southerners, collegians as well as illiterates. But the learning of a trade or business, which might bring the genteel young man into association with classes of individuals he might not otherwise encounter, proves an ineffective means of reconciling white and black. As the novel heads towards its conclusion, Doctor Ravenel's efforts to rehabilitate black labor fade into the somber-hued past, and he and his daughter's family express little desire to return to Louisiana and pick up the experiment in free black labor which a Confederate counterattack had forced them to abandon. After having emphasized, time and time again, the monumental effort and human patience required to redeem black labor from its slave heritage, and after having affirmed that “‘Our consciences, the conscience of the nation, will not be cleared when we have merely freed the negroes. We must civilize and Christianize them,’” the Doctor decides somewhat inconsequently to redeem only himself by setting up a medical practice in New Boston.⁵⁰

The Doctor's decision not to work on behalf of black labor unveils one of the major ambivalences that run throughout De Forest's novel. (Earlier, Captain Colburne, the novel's hero, allows himself to be dissuaded from taking command of a black regiment.) Free labor is white labor and bound labor is racially or ethnically other. The goal of the novel, indeed the war, is to make labor free and white. Moreover, it seems that this can be best accomplished if those whites in leisure pursuits recognize the need to work. Ravenel declares: “‘The young man who is now idle now belongs to bygone and semi-barbarous centuries; he is more of an old fogy than the narrowest minded farm-laborer or ditch-digging emigrant,’” suggesting that somehow idleness rather than labor brings the white man closer to the “semi-barbarous” world of the laboring ethnic.⁵¹

By entering the world of work, the literary- or scientific-minded white youth was not entering a multiethnic world of fellow workers but fleeing from such associations and the hidden dangers they implied. De Forest's praise of labor did not necessarily include the laborers. Despite the fact that they worked for their living, unskilled laborers were, in De Forest's reckoning, equivalent to idlers and best avoided. When explaining to his daughter the peculiarly American practice of setting up housekeeping in hotels, Doctor Ravenel cites a desire to escape encounters with ethnic and enslaved domestics as the chief motive. Living in hotels, Ravenel says, “is a social necessity of American society. So long as we have entrained servants—black barbarians at the South and mutinous foreigners at the North—many American housekeepers will throw down their keys in despair and rush for refuge to the hotels.” The dangers of domestic association with bound labor are only too evident to the Doctor. His daughter, Lily, as he reminds us and her throughout the novel, is subtly Africanized. She speaks “Ashantee English,” and “Gold Coast dialects.” Her common Southern colloquialisms, “poky” and “right nice,” are viewed by her father as Africanized speech. Lily herself concurs, saying that “‘I must be allowed to use those Ashantee phrases once in a while. … We learn them from our old mammies; that is, you know, our old black nurses.’”⁵²

While the Doctor's observations and Lily's admission make evident what proponents of black inferiority were only too willing to suppress—that the transplanted Africans had, despite the dislocations of being stolen into slavery, a culture strong enough to influence that of the supposedly superior white race—these same observations horribly confuse the target of the Doctor's disdain. When condemning the Southerners for starting the war, the good doctor conflates both victim and victimizer, calling the war “‘this stupid, barbarous Ashantee rebellion.’” Similarly, when describing Southern intransigence he calls the rebels “‘ill-informed as Hotentots’” and explains his dissidence from the Southern slave culture by boasting, “‘I have had no plantations, no patrimony of human flesh; very few temptations, in short, to bow down to the divinity of Ashantee,’” suggesting that slavery was somehow a metaphysical property of the Africans themselves.⁵³

Of course, from one angle the doctor's phobias about slave labor can be seen as a version of the stock abolitionist argument that the institution of slavery corrupted the slave owners as much as it did the slaves themselves. In this case, however, the vices associated with Southern society arise not so much from a system that gives one person absolute authority over another, but from a situation in which the “non-Christian” elements of African society have not been properly transformed by the virtues of free labor and upright Christianity. “‘Justice, honesty, mercy, and nearly the whole list of Christian virtues,’” Doctor Ravenel affirms, “‘have hitherto been empty names to [the ex-slaves].’”⁵⁴ And it is difficult to determine whether Doctor Ravenel and De Forest are more disturbed by the failure of the ruling class to transmit to their bondsmen Christian values or by the “barbaric” culture of the slaves themselves.

Thus the central intrigue of the novel, Lily Ravenel's ill-fated marriage to Colonel Carter and his subsequent liaison with Mrs. Larue, functions as an object lesson in how the thievery, lying, and lack of respect for the sanctity of the marriage bond endemic to the “slave-grown breed” have infected the whole of Southern society. At times the novel suggests that redeeming this society will require something close to total destruction. The Doctor, for example, affirms that “‘their slaveholding Sodom will perish for the lack of five just men, or a single just idea. It must be razed and got out of the way, like any other obstacle to the progress of humanity. It must make room for something more consonant with the railroad, electric-telegraph, printing-press, inductive philosophy, and practical Christianity.’”⁵⁵ The new industrial, scientific order that the novel foresees will lack the failings of the slaveholding South, and it is not clear whether those failings include the presence of the ex-slaves themselves. One thing is certain: by the end of the novel the freedmen are nowhere in evidence in the new order. There is, however, an Irish nurse to help Lily take care of Little Ravvie. Without any appreciable fanfare, the novel chooses white over black.

The choice that De Forest makes in Miss Ravenel's Conversion was perhaps dictated as much by his association with the Free Soil party prior to the war and by his endorsement of a brand of social Darwinism as much as by his critique of Stowe's sentimental characterizations. Whatever the relative weight of these factors, it is clear that they all worked together to suggest that a rapid and radical transformation of uncouth former outcasts into genteel and devout insiders was merely sentimental fiction. Even a novel like Harper's Iola Leroy, which was not as vexed as De Forest's by its relationship with Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still insisting in 1892 that a national vulnerability to the “heathenism of Africa” had been one of slavery's legacies: “The young colonies could not take into their early civilization a stream of barbaric blood without being affected by its influence.”⁵⁶

By insisting that a belief in a black figure “untainted” by its history of servitude was so much sentimental claptrap, realistic criticism had again inadvertently placed its aesthetics athwart its politics. Moving away from Uncle Tom's Cabin aesthetically also seemed to entail moving away from the belief that a “previous condition of servitude” should play no role in determining the freedmen's place in the postbellum social order. Rather than endorse the liberation of African Americans from their slave past, realist critical aesthetics tended to view black figures in a troubling manner. They were embodiments of the undeniable effects of the social order on the individual—of the way that the contingent could become permanent. They were also an index of what had gone wrong in the South and of what had gone wrong with the literary aesthetics of the past.

II

Had realistic criticism merely distanced itself from the strategies of characterization that created an Uncle Tom, the political implications of its critique of sentimentalism might not be worth remarking. A belief that the ex-slaves had been shaped by their history of enslavement may not have allowed for saintly ex-bondsmen, but it was not inconsistent with an argument that the United States still bore the responsibility of putting the freedmen on an equal educational and economic footing with their former oppressors. Accordingly, although De Forest's Dr. Ravenel forgets his “responsibility” to reform Southern labor, he never explicitly discredits the enterprise.

The scope of realism's quarrel with Stowe, however, was broader than a dissatisfaction over matters of African-American characterization. Also at issue was the identification of sentimentalism with the figure of the New England female reformer. To be sure, Uncle Tom's Cabin had subjected New England idealism to severe criticism by introducing the character of Aunt Ophelia. Nonetheless, the novel and its author provided a point of critique at which the aesthetics of fiction and the political beliefs represented in that fiction seemed inextricable—and it was at this point that realistic novels and criticism often seemed self-contradictory. Despite attempts to separate politics from aesthetics and attempts merely to prune the excesses of their social commitments, realist texts often appeared to condemn the values and traditions their authors otherwise seemed to endorse.

Specifically, from the 1880s onward, the label of sentimentalism could be applied not only to human feelings and a set of literary strategies, but also to any apparently unrealistic political project. Richard Watson Gilder, for example, defended his effort to reunite North and South by saying, “This is truth, and not sentimentalism.”⁵⁷ And the Century went full steam ahead with its project of sectional reconciliation. In the meantime, the failure of Reconstruction had cast ideas of racial egalitarianism in the light of pure folly. In 1893 Owen Wister criticized the Reconstruction period as an “over-sentimental” attempt to change the racial/social order. He then went on to advocate racial separation on public railways.⁵⁸ W. A. Dunning concurred, arguing that “the enfranchisement of the freedmen and their enthronement in political power was as reckless a species of statecraft as that which marked ‘the blind hysterics of the Celt’ in 1789-95.” Such recklessness, said Dunning, was a result of the public's following those whose hearts ruled their heads, the “emotionalists” like “Garrison and Summer and Phillips and Chase [who believed] that abolition and negro suffrage would remove the drag from our national progress.”⁵⁹ Then, less than two decades into the twentieth century, Madison Grant, in his racist polemic The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (1916), linked the entirety of egalitarian ideals with “sentimentalism.” He lamented that

There exists today a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past, and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do much more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun, and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period, and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes, and going to school and to church, does not transform a negro into a white man.⁶⁰

In Grant's view the egalitarian ideals that Howells would have endorsed were indistinguishable from a viewpoint that was at its base sentimental. At the same time, however, many of the racist novels which would have supported Grant's criticisms were unabashedly sentimental in form and content, further confusing the relationship between sentimentality as a literary form and sentimentality as a political critique.

Recently Philip Fisher has argued “that from roughly 1740 to 1860 sentimentality was a crucial tactic of politically radical representation throughout western culture.” As a representational strategy, sentimentalism effected an “extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom it has been socially withheld.” Fisher goes on to argue that realism was at best an ineffectual political heir to novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Rather than participating in a radical revision of its own age, the realistic novel retreated into the status of a “high art form” for which an opposition to the popular and “the elimination of sentimentality [were] central goals.”⁶¹

Curious here is the possibility of reading realism's opposition to popular sentimentality in two somewhat contradictory ways. If one assumes, along with Fisher, that sentimental aesthetics entailed a liberal humanistic politics, then the realists' literary critiques of sentimentalism could have had an ironic political charge. Despite Howells's humanistic wish to “widen the bounds of sympathy,”⁶² his hostility to sentimentality would have inadvertently undermined the very values he sought to underwrite. Alternately, however, the postbellum career of sentimentalism permits a different reading of the political meaning of realistic antisentimentalism. As Leslie Fiedler's The Inadvertent Epic illustrates, sentimentalism, in the years after the Civil War was as ready a tool in the hands of white Southern conservatives and racists as it had been in the hands of Northern abolitionists. In tracing a tradition that includes Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dixon's The Clansman, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Fiedler proposes that the most radical revision of the post-Reconstruction period was the massive sentimentalization of the South, which transformed the former rebellious states into sympathetic victims.⁶³

Available without its liberal humanist “content,” sentimentalism's literary apparatus could then be harnessed to any cause that could speak persuasively of its disfranchisement and of having been unjustly despoiled by a stronger force. Sentimentalism, which scholars have credited with “the creation of the negro for the popular mind” in ways that made emancipation possible,⁶⁴ can also be said to have created for that same popular mind the “lost cause” that contributed to undermining the political and social gains made by black Americans during the post-Civil War period.

Among the other circumstances compromising the humanistic politics of realistic aesthetics was the recognition by writers like Howells and James that women figured largely in the audience for sentimental and romantic fictions. Like Flaubert's Madame Bovary, women were those readers most likely to have been misled into adopting false ideals on the basis of having read unhealthy fiction. While some male readers, particularly Southerners, according to Twain, had been similarly deluded by the fiction they read, realistic novels invested themselves heavily in questioning the source and the effects of the ideals that moved women to act both within and without their fictional worlds. Those women engaged in philanthropic enterprises were especial targets, and important here is the convergence of Northern realistic and Southern racist critiques of the female reformer, who as abolitionist, critic, author, New England school marm, or feminist suffragist endeavoured, sometimes hypocritically, to impose upon society a set of “impractical” moral values.

Enabled by Stowe's Miss Ophelia, a “tall square-formed, and angular” parody of probity whom Stowe described as “the absolute bond-slave of the “ought,”⁶⁵ male writers throughout this era sketched particularly unflattering portraits of those New England women driven by principle. Though Miss Ophelia learns and grows over the course of the narrative, it is the initial picture of her that stuck with readers, giving rise to a host of similar types. In her wake are Miss Whitewood from De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion, a “hermaphrodite soul [of] lean body and cadaverous countenance”; James's Olive Chancellor from The Bostonians, whose moral morbidity was signified by a smile “which might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison”; Howells's Mrs. Meredith from An Imperative Duty, who “would consider herself an exemplary person for having done her duty at any cost of suffering to herself and others”; and Dixon's Susan Walker of Boston, whose dubious morality emerged in her face which, “in spite of evident culture and refinement, [had] the expression of a feminine bull dog.”⁶⁶ Taken together these figures compose a portrait of New England idealism that exposes its morbidity, selfishness, and sexual repression.

At the same time that novelists were composing their critiques of the tradition of New England reform, sweeping economic and demographic changes began to dictate that New England yield some of its intellectual and moral preeminence. The rise of New York City as a literary center, as illustrated by Howells's move from the Atlantic Monthly to Harper's in the 1880s, and the concurrent success of New York's Century magazine were indications of the change in cultural power. That James's critique of New England in The Bostonians (1885) was a critical and popular failure while Dixon's more damning 1902 attack was a best-seller may have had as much to do with the changing literary marketplace as with the nature of these narratives. Mid-1880s Boston was still enough of a cultural force and James's selling power was still too much tied to a New England market to make an unsparing critique of Boston the popular success for which James had hoped. By the 1900s, however, success in New England was no longer a prerequisite for national prominence.

The fictional rendering of these changes in a novel like James's The Bostonians is a revealing one. James criticizes his Southern hero, Basil Ransom, yet by suggesting that the moral forces opposing Ransom were as bankrupt and suspect as Ransom's own views, The Bostonians underscores the weakening of those political and moral restraints that had kept Southern racism in check in the 1860s and early 1870s. In allowing Ransom to triumph as a result both of his own masculine force and the disarray and tactical miscues of his feminist opposition rather than as a result of superior reasoning and moral judgment, The Bostonians proved to be a devastatingly accurate reading of the period. Simultaneously, the novel's inability to locate a viable alternative to New England's spent moral tradition illustrates the inability or unwillingness of Northern intellectuals to achieve the clarity of vision and confidence of voice necessary to combat the wholesale destruction of human rights during this period.

The voice which comes to speak for New England moral idealism in The Bostonians is that of Verena Tarrant, the young red-headed woman from the West whose power of speech is almost mesmerizing. Her success is readily identified with Stowe's through Miss Birdseye's exclamation that “I have seen nothing like it since I last listened to Eliza P. Moseley.” Ms. Moseley, as Basil Ransom makes clear in referring to her as “the cause of the biggest war of which history preserves the record”⁶⁷—paraphrasing Lincoln's “So this is the little lady who made this big war”⁶⁸—is the novel's representative of Harriet Beecher Stowe. And James appears to cement the relationship by giving his fictional author the name of the runaway slave Eliza, who is involved in one of the most theatrical and touching escapes of Stowe's novel.

Though reminiscent of Stowe in speaking on behalf of feminism and egalitarian principles, the qualities of Verena's voice are only obliquely related to any political content. Self-serving as it is, Ransom's belief that Verena “had been stuffed with this trash by her father, and [that] she was neither more nor less willing to say it than to say anything else” (59), is shared to varying degrees by most of the principles in the novel and is borne out by Verena's eventual abandonment of the feminist cause. Her power can be harnessed to any message whatsoever—a portability so noteworthy that Jennifer Wicke has described Verena as “a pure token of publicity, a figure to be used in an infinity of promotions.”⁶⁹

But the number of possible promotions available in The Bostonians is not infinite. The novel awards the prize of Verena to Basil Ransom, whom Wicke labels a “romantic and atavistic Southerner … representative of a defeated cultural style … hopelessly quaint and reactionary.”⁷⁰ By allowing an “atavistic” Southerner to triumph James's novel charts the inability of the New England tradition to resist and repel those other forces with which it was in competition while also participating in the undermining of that resistance. More specifically, in The Bostonians James, like Ransom, lays the blame for New England's failure to resist corruption at the door of “feminization.” Ransom's most formidable rival for Verena is Olive Chancellor, a Boston feminist who fails to hang on to Verena when the latter is wooed by Ransom.

As one seeks to account for Olive's failure, it is instructive to keep James's aesthetic concerns in mind. Typically, the social and political ramifications of “the feminine” have their formal correlatives. The Bostonians is a satire, and in one of his more lengthy comments on satire, James addresses its use in starkly gendered terms. While discussing Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country in his essay “The New Novel,” James writes:

The Custom of the Country is at any rate consistently, almost scientifically satiric, as indeed the satiric light was doubtless the only one in which the elements engaged could at all be focussed together. But this happens directly to the profit of something that, as we read, becomes more and more one with the principle of authority at work; the light that gathers is a dry light, of great intensity, and the effect, if not rather the very essence, of its dryness is a particular fine asperity. The usual ‘creative’ conditions and associations, as we have elsewhere languished among them, are thanks to this ever so sensibly altered; the general authoritative relation attested becomes clear—we move in an air purged at a stroke of the old sentimental and romantic values, the perversions with the maximum of waste of perversions, and we shall not here attempt to state what this makes for in the way of esthetic refreshment and relief; the waste having kept us so dangling on the dark esthetic abyss. A shade of asperity may be in such fashion a security against waste, and in the dearth of displayed securities we should welcome it on that ground alone. It helps at any rate to constitute for the talent manifest in The Custom a rare identity, so far should we have to go to seek another instance of the dry, or call it perhaps even the hard, intellectual touch in the soft, or call it perhaps even the humid, temperamental air; in other words of the masculine conclusion tending so to crown the feminine observation.

The oppositions are clearly and invidiously drawn. The qualities ranged in the territory of the masculine—dryness, hardness, illumination, and intellect—are obviously regarded as superior to those under the feminine banner—humidity, softness, darkness, and sentiment. This is not to say that the latter qualities are unnecessary; the essay itself gives due praise to the quality of “saturation,” the state of being “ideally immersed in his [the author's] own body of reference.” The word itself, however, along with James's use of the term immersion clearly places this quality in the realm of the moist, the feminine. And as James goes on to make clear, saturation is by itself insufficient. The “other half,” James continues, “is represented by the application.”⁷¹ He goes on to decry the lack of this quality in the fictions of a number of the new novelists.

James also insists that bringing together the elements of the work into a tight focus is an act of authority—a principle. As if taking a hint from the tenor of the word, he goes on to develop “authority” along martial and monarchical lines. It “purges at a stroke” until the masculine “crowns” the feminine, fusing his martial and gendered metaphors. Finally, James's metaphorical language points up a conservational property within the masculine. The feminine and the saturated tend to waste; the masculine eliminates waste—it conserves, and therefore puts a premium on boundaries and containment. The metaphorical implications of the passage suggest that the fluid capacities of the feminine have a somewhat corrosive, destructive quality, tending to wash away boundaries. The metaphors also resonate in the political sphere where social demarcations or boundaries constitute a central plank of conservatism and the corrosion of those boundaries indicates the leveling powers of democracy.

The metaphorical resonances of James's observations reveal how much the narrative stance presupposes a subject matter. Within the compass of a paragraph dealing ostensibly with questions of artistic form, James has re-represented what in his own novel is the battle for Verena: the battle to give form to the fluidity of her expression. If Verena's speech is to receive any form at all, the battle would favor the masculine because, in the terms given above, feminine form is an impossibility or a monstrosity.

Thus, as The Bostonians unfolds, James depicts the principles of the sentimental, abolitionist heritage as self-destructive. Miss Birdseye, whose “displaced spectacles” reflect the “entire history of New England reform” (31), wanders across James's stage as a sad reminder of the glorious past of Bostonian social action. At one point the narrator utters with shocking impiety that “it would have been a nice question whether, in her heart of hearts, for the sake of this excitement, she did not wish the blacks back in bondage” (27). Surrounded by charlatans and panderers to the public taste, she seems incapable of feeling a genuine commitment to anyone or a personal interest in those around her. In inquiring how she reached this state, we find that her somewhat disturbing inability to be personal and truly committed is not a lack of sympathy but the culmination of a process of excess sympathy:

She had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details.

(25)

Again, feminism and abolitionism are conveyed in terms of liquid metaphors washing away all solid form and all distinction. The process of erosion and dissolution seems the inevitable result of the success of sympathetic power. Then, almost as if to make sure that the reader connects the feminist spirit with a lack of all critical ability, James comments that Miss Birdseye “had not the faintest sense of the scenic or plastic side of life” (28).

To recall Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, abolitionist spirit depends on an insistence that the personal sphere should come first despite the calls to sacrifice the personal to the public. Senator Bird in Stowe's novel discovers his duty in regard to the Fugitive Slave Law by placing his personal feelings above his public duties as a senator. In James's exaggerated formulation, however, the insistence upon responding to the suffering of others in a personal way—as if they were members of one's own family—often entails the sacrifice of the needs and feelings of the immediate family in favor of those of the larger human family. The boundaries of the home are pushed so far outward that they have no meaning. Like the senator's wife, Mrs. Bird, who judges everything as a homemaker, Miss Birdseye's “charity began at home” (26). But unlike Mrs. Bird, “whose husband and children were her entire world,” Miss Birdseye's concerns “ended nowhere” (26). James's portrait of his relic of abolitionist heritage offers a scenario in which Mrs. Bird, Stowe's avatar of personal sympathy who gives away her dead son's clothes to Eliza, might quite easily become Miss Birdseye, who “had given herself away so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left of her for the supreme surrender” (376).

Though at first glance Miss Birdseye's plight does not seem characteristic of that of the other women in The Bostonians the adjectives used to describe her resurface, almost improbably, in connection with other female figures.⁷² Doctor Prance, who evokes “masculine” terms from the narrator—“spare, dry, hard” (39)—and seems quite different from Miss Birdseye, is nonetheless like the old crusader in that she too has “no features to speak of” (39). Similarly, Olive Chancellor, who possesses an ability to discriminate and “sharp and irregular” features is somewhat formless below the face—“she had absolutely no figure” (8). And like their mentor, these two younger women are intensely unmarried except to a profession or a cause. Even the grand Mrs. Farrinder shares with Miss Birdseye an inability to make proper social distinctions, and Olive accords to her the same provinciality that she attributes to Miss Birdseye.

James reinforces the links between Miss Birdseye on the one hand and Olive and Doctor Prance on the other in two ways. First, he orders his plot so that Doctor Prance and Miss Birdseye perform parallel functions in Ransom's quest for Verena. They both withhold from Olive information about Ransom's presence and his intentions. They both listen to the Southerner. On Ransom's second visit to Boston he encounters Miss Birdseye on the street, and while accompanying her in a streetcar extracts from her the whereabouts of Verena and her promise not to tell Olive of their meeting. Under the delusion that Ransom may become a convert, she tells him upon boarding a second streetcar, “I won't say anything” (211). Her silence is the first in a chain leading to Verena's silence about her own walk to Harvard's Memorial Hall with Ransom, and to Doctor Prance's silence when Ransom comes to Marmion in search of Verena.

During his conversation with Doctor Prance, Ransom is explicitly reminded of the first incident with Miss Birdseye and makes a comparison between the two: “it would be no easier for Doctor Prance to subscribe to a deception than it had been for her venerable patient” (337). Miss Birdseye is, however, deceived, and Doctor Prance, through solicitude for her patient, allows the deception to continue. The final link in this chain of silences is Verena's aborted speech at the Music Hall—the location of which is first divulged to Ransom by Doctor Prance.

James also connects Miss Birdseye to Olive Chancellor in his descriptions of their homes. Olive's parlor, filled with “so many objects that spoke of habits and tastes” (16), is shaped “exactly” like Miss Birdseye's enormous streetcar—the place where the first betrayal of Olive occurs. The social forms that Olive erects are shown in this linkage to be quite vulnerable to those things she abhors most—her own parlor is where she first extends to Ransom an invitation to visit Miss Birdseye's parlor where the Southerner meets Verena. In fact, the betrayals perpetrated by the other women have at their source the self-betrayal Olive commits by bringing Ransom in contact with the Boston radicals.

All told, the women hold their tongues, while listening to what Ransom has to say, but Ransom, when confronted with Verena's eloquence, listens without listening. For example, he observes that Verena's address in Miss Birdseye's parlor

was full of schoolgirl phrases, of patches of remembered eloquence, of childish lapses of logic, of flights of fancy which might indeed have had success at Topeka; but Ransom thought that if it had been much worse it would have been quite as good, for the argument, the doctrine, had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was simply an intensely personal exhibition, and the person making it happened to be fascinating.

(58)

In his ability to put aside the doctrine of Verena's address, Ransom demonstrates an agile critical faculty. The Southerner is able to make fine discriminations while at the same time extracting an enjoyment from the spectacle. In fact, the descriptions of Ransom are strikingly similar to James's description of himself in attendance at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin. James recalls that he noticed quite clearly the “audible creak of carpentry” but was also able to mark “where the absurd … ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be legitimately and tastefully held to begin.”⁷³ It is perhaps here that James's affinity for the character of Ransom is most evident. One might argue that this critical ability is what gives Ransom the final victory in the battle for Verena.

But the book's ending signals that the victory is less than glorious. Despite Ransom's powers of discrimination, he makes a failure of distinction similar to that made by Olive Chancellor when she attributes all that is base about Verena to her parents. He views Verena's sentiments as opinions “she was neither more nor less willing to say … than to say anything else” (59). The narrator immediately condemns this aspect of Ransom's thinking, remarking that “I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness of character” (58). In making this criticism the text drives home the comparison between Ransom and Olive. If Olive blames Verena's vulgarities on her parents, Ransom “contented himself with believing [Verena] was as innocent as she was lovely” (59). Ransom is also fired by a desire to save Verena from the “raving rabble” (422).

The extent to which Ransom reflects Olive accounts in part for the Southerner's tarnished victory. He is forced to abandon the chivalric ideals he espouses. By the final scene, as Verena gives up her pretence of “loyalty to her cause,” Ransom, too, ignores the chivalric/romantic aspects of his position and seeks only to further his own ends. Verena asks him “to go away just as any plighted maiden might have asked any favor of her lover” (422), but Ransom, unlike the chivalric hero, is not included to honor the pleas of a maiden.

Nonetheless, Ransom does win the girl, thrusting a hood over her head as he does so. The conclusion may be attributed in part to James's propensity to see the form/content issue in gender related terms, “the masculine tending so to crown the feminine observation.” The ending may have also been suggested by James's association of Verena with the undeniable but seemingly wayward power of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe, of course, disclaimed responsibility for her novel, attributing the composition of the book to the supernatural agency of God. Similarly, Verena denies her role as the originator of her speech, saying, “It isn't me mother” (52). The disclaimers are an invocation of higher authority, placing the credit for authorship outside the particular individual.

The danger of such disclaimers was that they allowed verbal expression to be appropriated by whoever might stake a claim. Verena eloquently parrots the opinions of those closest to her. She strikes up alliances with those who are most willing to exert their power over her, and her ability suffers little in the translation. So portable is her power that in the end she and her rehearsed speech are carried off by a man whose opinions are diametrically opposed to Olive's. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, which James viewed as being carried further, carried even violently furtherest” by its dramatizations, Verena, too, was an expression without any particular allegiance to cause or author.⁷⁴

The theatrical performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin were staged without Stowe's permission. As Charles Dudley Warner points out, “Mrs. Stowe had neglected to secure the dramatic rights, and she derived no benefit from the great popularity of a drama which still holds the stage.”⁷⁵ These Uncle Tom shows, which fed upon the melodrama of Stowe's work, were comfortably oblivious to the animus of the original. But even the novel itself was so at home during the period of reaction that Francis Shoup wrote in the Sewanee Review some seven years after the publication The Bostonians that Uncle Tom's Cabin was “a great book—great as a work of art, losing nothing by the total disappearance of the factitious environment which was the sole motive of its production.”⁷⁶ Before Shoup, Joel Chandler Harris, writing in 1880, blithely referred to Stowe's opus as a “defence of slavery.”⁷⁷ The unreconstructed Southerner, in fiction and in fact, found it possible to appropriate the ostensibly abolitionist voice for his own ends.

Moreover James, though insisting in “The Art of Fiction” that the “deepest quality of a work lies in the quality of the mind of the producer,”⁷⁸ employs in The Bostonians a narrator who at key points denies responsibility for the views being expressed. When relating to the reader Ransom's philosophy on women and reform, the narrator feels compelled to remind the reader that “I am but the reporter of his angry formulae” (48), reducing himself to a journalist. This realist text is Ransom's mouthpiece. No doubt, James has his own sentiments about his hero, the nature of which scholars and readers of The Bostonians have expended considerable labor attempting to discover, with many concluding that James is Ransom.⁷⁹ In truth, various aspects of the novel argue against such a conclusion, but the fact that such observations have been made is important in itself. His narrator's disclaimers notwithstanding, James, like his heroine in The Bostonians, finds his voice in these interpretations carried away or stifled by an unreconstructed Southerner.

At the turn of the century, critiques of New England's moral heritage proved extremely useful to Southern voices. The purported warping effects of the reform tradition on femininity was picked up by Thomas Dixon, Jr., in The Leopard's Spots in the person of “Susan Walker of Boston, whose liberality had built the new Negro school house and whose life and fortune was devoted to the education and elevation of the Negro race.”⁸⁰ She is another example of the New England reformer, and as is the case in James's novel, the reader is encouraged to question or discount the femininity of such women. “‘Lay aside your Don Quixote Southern Chivalry this morning,’” Susan Walker tells the Reverend John Durham, “‘and talk to me in plain English. It doesn't matter whether I am a woman or a man.’” And the Reverend, perhaps a little more eager than James's Ransom in his dealings with Olive, responds with some relish: “‘You ask me for plain English. I will give it to you’” (46). He then tells her that her mission to educate the black freedmen is misguided, self-righteous, and so dangerous that he would like to “‘box you up in a glass cage, such as are used for rattlesnakes, and ship you back to Boston’” (47). The modulation from treating a woman like a man to treating a woman like an animal is meant to underscore the perceived threat that these New England women posed to the social order. Like Howells's Miss Meredith in An Imperative Duty, such women were ruthlessly virtuous and “would be capable of an atrocious cruelty in speaking or acting the truth,”⁸¹ which is to say, their version of the truth.

Not one for understatement, Dixon goes on to make sure that the reader connects the “unnatural” leadership of the South during Reconstruction with the “damned feminization” of the postwar period by presenting the reader with the unlikely picture of a Simon Legree who has survived the war by dressing as a woman. “He shaved clean, and dressed as a German emigrant woman. He wore dresses for two years, did house work, milked the cows, and cut wood for a good natured old German. He paid for his board, and passed for a sister just from the old country” (85). The conjunction of false femininity, working-class immigrant status, and a New England pedigree in the person of the resurrected Legree, who then goes on to become Speaker of the House in the North Carolina legislature, also predetermines the terms in which the redemption of the South will be couched: masculine, professional, and Southern.

Thus at the key election when the conservative ticket soundly defeats the “carpet-bagger” ticket led by Legree, the Klan takes matters into its own hand, ordering its members to

visit every negro in the county, and warn every one as he values his life not to approach the polls at this election. Those who come, will be allowed to vote without molestation. All cowards will stay at home. Any man, black or white, who can be scared out of his ballot is not fit to have one. Back of every ballot is the red blood of the man that votes. The ballot is force. This is simply a test of manhood. It will be enough to show who is fit to rule the state.

(160)

“Simply a test of manhood” are the words used by Major Decameron, who is seconded in his efforts by preachers, doctors, and other community leaders. Never mind that the white populace is not put under similar threat of violence, the test is one of manhood, and the freedmen who have reigned in an era marked by the prominence of “unnatural” Northern femininity stand no chance. The racial issue is subsumed by the question of gender, which in turn is used to “naturalize” the new social order.

Here one might point to how widespread was this notion of the ordering power of the masculine in late-nineteenth century fiction, generic differences notwithstanding. From De Forest's Captain Colburne to Howells's Silas Lapham to James's Basil Ransom to Dixon's Charlie Gaston, the heroes of the nineteenth-century novel continually rediscover the virtues of their natural “manhood.” Even in a text so marked by subtleties as James's The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether's surpassing of Maria Gostrey as an intelligent observer provides yet another instance of the “masculine conclusion tending to crown the feminine observation.” More importantly, Strether's growth is a process of breaking the ties that link him to Mrs. Newsome.

In response to this assault on the New England tradition of feminist reform, many liberal and progressive voices on race felt a need to include in their various agendas defenses and praise of the New England tradition and the feminist reformers who embraced it. Tourgée's A Fool's Errand and Bricks without Straw spoke favorably on behalf of the “pure-hearted Northern girls [who] taught … the race which had just now its first chance at the tree of knowledge.”⁸² In one of her essays, Pauline Hopkins, African-American novelist and activist, proclaimed melodramatically, “May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning when I forget the benefits bestowed upon my persecuted race by noble-hearted New England.”⁸³ And W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, called the New England effort to educate the freedmen “the finest thing in American history.” In his view, “the crusade of the New England school ma'am” was a tale waiting to be told:

The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written,—the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more.⁸⁴

The nation, however, was more ready to be moved by the story of a South unfairly beset by corrupt Reconstruction governments and the venal depredations of black men than by the trials of reform-minded women. A sweeping reassessment of that period would have to wait until 1935 when Du Bois published his Black Reconstruction. In regard to the spirit of abolition and equality, the fin de siècle was a period of critique.

As noted earlier, both James and Dixon made their experience of viewing dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin central to their aesthetic development. In his autobiographical A Small Boy and Others, James locates the “brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not restless,” on the evening of his attending a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin at the National Theatre.⁸⁵ He recalled with particular vividness the staging of Eliza's dramatic escape across the ice floes of the Ohio River. Correspondingly, when James came to assess his success in writing The Ambassadors, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin came to be a standard of measure. In the preface to the novel he claimed that “no dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the rag of association can ever, for ‘excitement,’ I judge, have bettered it at its best.”⁸⁶ By assuming the role of slave catcher in his pursuit of his subject, James seemingly signals his triumph over Stowe's compositional methods.

Likewise Dixon figured the scene of Eliza's escape as a scene of capture rather than one of freedom. In Dixon's novel, George Harris, Jr., a recreation of Eliza's Little Harry, finds himself on “the spot where his mother had climbed up the banks of the Ohio River into the promised land of liberty, and followed the track of the old Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves a few miles. He came to a village which was once a station of this system. Here strangest of all, he found one of these ash-heaps in the public square” (403). The “ash-heap” is the residue of a lynching where a black man has been burned to death. In the strange odyssey of George Harris, Jr., the freedom won during the Civil War has proved a cruel illusion. Hugh Halliday, a scion of the Quaker Household that helped Eliza and Harry escape the slave catchers, finds himself, too, within the power of Legree.

The reversal of Stowe's central image of pursuit, of despoiler and despoiled, is perhaps Dixon's single most powerful tropological inversion of Stowe. The rape or threatened rape of slave women is transformed into that of white women by lustful free black men. The attempt by the black majority leader, Tim Shelby, to force Mollie Graham to kiss him is the event that conjures, “like magic in a night,” the Ku Klux Klan, which saves civilization. Similarly, Dick's rape of Flora is the event that catalyzes the radical defeat of populism in book 3. And if James as a critic of his The Ambassadors could say that no pursuit of slave by bloodhounds could have bettered “for excitement” his quest for his story, so many a critic agreed that Dixon's transformation of the trope of pursuit had gone quite beyond Stowe.

Despite their obvious differences, Southern romancer and Northern realist could cite similar concerns and interests. Like James, Dixon compared his work as a novelist to the office of historian, proclaiming that in The Leopard's Spots “the only serious liberty I have taken with history is to tone down the facts to make them credible in fiction.”⁸⁷ Additionally, according to Dixon's biographer, the novel was originally called “The Rise of Simon Legree,” a title suggested by Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham.⁸⁸ Dixon was also not the only Southerner to evoke Howells. Even Thomas Nelson Page could declare Howells a kindred spirit,⁸⁹ further illustrating that the rhetoric of realism could be deemed applicable to a host of works whose spirit was not in accord with that of Howells or James.

James attributed such problems of critical distinction to an overabundance of literary criticism. In his opinion the proliferation of periodical magazines had so stimulated the production of uninformed criticism that the first act of discrimination—simply refusing to notice a work's existence—was never made. The British and American world had failed to learn from the French literary scene where “they publish hundreds of books which are never noticed at all” because “it is recognized that such volumes have nothing to say to the critical sense, that they do not belong to literature, and that the possession of the critical sense is exactly that which makes it impossible to read them and dreary to discuss them—places them, as a part of critical experience, out of the question.” But the demands of the periodical marketplace on the Anglo-American critical scene made it impossible to rule a body of texts “out of the question.” Periodical literature, James complains, “is like a regular train which starts at an advertised hour, but which is free to start only if every seat be occupied. The seats are many, the train is ponderously long, and hence the manufacture of dummies for the seasons when there are not passengers enough. A stuffed mannikin is thrust into the empty seat, where it makes a creditable figure till the end of the journey.” The train as a figure for public vulgarity and production for the market is obvious enough. The trope of the mannikin, however, is somewhat misleading as regards James's ultimate point. Though a passenger might be disconcerted upon discovering at the end of his journey that some of his fellows are not real people, one would also expect that the psychic effects of this discovery on such a passenger would be temporary—a momentary discomfort. But as we read James's remonstrance we find that the threat is indeed quite sinister and potentially long-lasting. The proliferation of criticism “may be as fatal as an infectious disease” because “literature … like other sensitive organisms, … is highly susceptible of demoralization … and the consequence of its keeping bad company is that it loses all heart.”⁹⁰

The “case,” to use James's word, is not simply that of a brief, perhaps unpleasant surprise at finding out a fellow passenger is a non-person—of having been in the presence of no company at all. Rather, the passenger/reader discovers that he has been in the presence of bad company that both disheartens and demoralizes. The false body of the mannikin, sitting rather innocuously in its seat, is reinterpreted by James as a diseased body that threatens to spread contagion to the real passengers.

As we have seen in reference to the various arguments surrounding Jim Crow legislation, the fear of suffering harmful effects from forced association with unworthy others plays a central role in the writings about race. In both social and literary criticism these fears found a common ground in American railroad trains and stations. According to Cable, American conveyances were more uncomfortable than their European counterparts because they were segregated by race rather than by class. In his turn, James launched what was for him a serious indictment of Anglo-American criticism by lamenting, “We blunder in and out of the affair as if it were a railway station—the easiest and most public of the arts.”⁹¹

To push the analogy a little further, what such fears made necessary was the presence of a discerning conductor empowered to decide who should gain entrance into the railway car and who should be excluded—what was needed was person able to decide which people were real and which were mannikins. It is precisely such a conductor that we find in James's critical prefaces where many a “naive” reader has discovered to his dismay that some of James's personages are not indeed real creatures—that “Maria Gostrey and Miss Stackpole … may run beside the coach ‘for all they are worth,’ they may cling to it till they are out of breath (as poor Miss Stackpole all so visibly does), but neither all the while, so much as gets her foot on the dusty step, neither ceases for a moment to tread the dusty road.”⁹²

The conductor has done his work assiduously. Of course James has made his job easier by transforming the railroad car to a personal coach, but such a switch of vehicles was indicative of the way that ostensibly private prejudices during this period were coming to define public space. When responding to the charge that the separate car law violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Justice Joseph Bradley made a similar switch, arguing that “it would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car.”⁹³

What James and Howells wanted their fellow citizens to see was that the quality of their society depended on the willingness of Americans to become discriminating critics. For James there was the desire to persuade his audience that popular tastes could be reconfigured and reshaped for different aesthetic ends; for Howells there was the hope that Americans would bring to bear the truths of realistic literary practice against the antiegalitarian fictions of the past. But if it were possible to rework conventions, then couldn't the supposedly outmoded conventions of the past be reworked for the present? Could not “the knightly warrior type, … not the flashy traveling salesman, not the jaded aesthete, not the agonized, overcivilized intellectual … [be] the stuff of which the nation was made”?⁹⁴ If James measured himself against the thrill of romantic and sentimental conventions, then why could not the nation as a whole—although not for the purpose of critique but for emulation?

Egalitarianism, too, seemed to fly in the face of the need to discriminate. W. A. Dunning argued that “slavery had been a modus vivendi through which social life was possible; and that, after its disappearance, its place must be taken by some set of conditions which, if more humane and beneficent in accidents, must in essence express the same fact of racial inequality.”⁹⁵ Racial segregation of American public space provided this new set of conditions. Like the slavery apologists before them, segregationists had at hand a variety of sources—religious, scientific, and historical—to draw upon for arguments, strategies, and rationales for dividing the nation along racial lines. What also aided segregationists in the post-Reconstruction era, however, was that progressive voices, including the realistic novel, not only helped discredit the abolitionist legacy, but also conceded the central conservative argument that social discrimination was unavoidable. All that remained was to determine the criteria for making discriminations. Without powerful Northern voices willing to challenge American racism, the fine distinctions of deportment, demeanor, and taste put forward by realists and civil rights activists stood little chance of prevailing. For the majority of white Americans, black and white racial difference appeared to be the most sensible way to bring order to an unruly social scene.

Notes

1. William Veeder, Henry James—The Lesson of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 7. More recently New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin ed. [Eric J.] Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) further investigates the continuing influence of Stowe on American letters. See especially Richard Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” pp. 45-84.

2. John William De Forest, “The Great American Novel,” The Nation 6 (9 Jan. 1868), p. 27; Howells, My Literary Passions (1891; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), p. 50. Later, in a speech published in the North American Review (Apr. 1912), Howells called Uncle Tom's Cabin “that most essentially American novel” (rpt. as “Mr. Howells's Speech” in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1959), pp. 366-74).

3. Quoted in John Hope Franklin, introduction to A Fool's Errand [(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961)], p. xx.

4. George L. Aiken, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909, ed. Richard Moody (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1966), p. 349.

5. [Henry] James, A Small Boy and Others [in Autobiography, edited by Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Criterion Books, 1956)], p. 95.

6. See Raymond A. Cook, Thomas Dixon (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), p. 66, and [Joel A.] Williamson, The Crucible of Race[: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)], p. 157.

7. Cooper, A Voice from the South [(Xenia, Ohio: The Aldine Printing House, 1892)] pp. 180, 222.

8. Veeder, The Lesson of the Master, p. 15.

9. Alfred Kazin, “Grandeur and Misery of Realism,” in Impressions of a Gilded Age: The American Fin de Siècle, ed. Marc Chenetier and Rob Kroes, European Contributions to American Studies 6 (Amsterdam: Amerika Instituut, University of Amsterdam, 1983), p. 133.

10. De Forest, “The Great American Novel,” p. 27.

11. [Philip] Fisher, Hard Facts[: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)], p. 126.

12. Charles Dickens, Little Dorritt, ed. Peter Sucksmith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 70.

13. Yarborough provides an excellent summary of these charges against Stowe; see “Strategies of Black Characterization,” pp. 45-50).

14. Francis A. Shoup, “Uncle Tom's Cabin: Forty Years After,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 50.

15. See [George M.] Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind[: The Debate of Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)], pp. 101-2 on Stowe's romantic racism.

16. René Wellek, “Realism in Literary Scholarship,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 226.

17. [John William] De Forest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1867] p. 237, 236.

18. See Laurence Holland, “A Raft of Trouble,” in American Realism[: New Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)], pp. 75-78, and Everett Carter, “The Modernist Ordeal of Huckleberry Finn,” Studies in American Fiction 13 (Autumn 1985): 170.

19. [William Dean] Howells, Editor's Study [ed. James W. Simpson (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing Co., 1983)], p. 38.

20. Howells, “Equality as the Basis of Good Society” [Century, 51 (Nov. 1895)], p. 63.

21. Ibid.

22. On the fear of savagery during this period see [Richard] Slotkin, Fatal Environment[: The Idea of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985)], and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

23. Howells, Silas Lapham [ed. Don L. Cook (1885; New York: W. W. Norton, 1982)], p. 103.

24. Howells, Editor's Study, p. 95.

25. [Amy] Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism [(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)], p. 21.

26. [George Washington] Cable, “The Freedman's Case in Equity,” [in The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. Arlin Turner (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1958)], p. 64.

27. [W. E. B.] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986)], p. 477.

28. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), p. 61.

29. [C. Vann] Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow [rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 107.

30. Charles Sumner, “Clemency and Common Sense: A Curiousity of Literature with a Moral,” Atlantic Monthly 17 (Dec. 1865), p. 759.

31. Howells, Editor's Study, p. 96.

32. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in Writings, p. 825.

33. See Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, pp. 21-25.

34. Howells, “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 2d ed., ed. Nina Baym, et al., 2. vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 2:293.

35. Howells, Silas Lapham, pp. 112-13.

36. Ibid., p. 319.

37. June Howard who observes that in realistic novels “the depiction of profound social change, which would propel us from the present into utopian or science fiction, is generically proscribed. The choices that remain to the characters may be imbued with personal or metaphysical meaning, but they can never be adequate to the central social themes of the novel” (Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, p. 145).

38. Howells, Silas Lapham, p. 315.

39. Howells, “An East-Side Ramble,” Impressions and Experiences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), p. 110.

40. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 438.

41. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” p. 824.

42. In assessing Du Bois's writings from the 1890s, [Charles A.] Lofgren's The Plessy Case[: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)] argues that “taken selectively his comments provided confirmation for the position that Negroes constituted a distinctive group, too often with debilitating characteristics and needing segregated institutions” (p. 114).

43. Cable, “The Silent South” [in The Negro Question], p. 89.

44. Howells, Silas Lapham, p. 317.

45. Ibid., p. 314.

46. On blackness as a mark of the unassimilable, see James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 151-81.

47. Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), p. 331.

48. For more detailed discussions of the ways in which this view dovetailed with contemporary scientific and legalistic thinking, see Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind; John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); and Lofgren, The Plessy Case.

49. De Forest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion, pp. 220, 448.

50. Ibid., pp. 219-20.

51. Ibid., p. 448.

52. Ibid., pp. 51, 10.

53. Ibid., pp. 4, 3, 50.

54. Ibid., p. 219.

55. Ibid., p. 48.

56. [Frances E. W.] Harper, Iola Leroy, [or Shadows Uplifted (Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1892)] p. 217.

57. Gilder, letter to W. C. P. Breckinridge, 24 June 1885, in Letters [of Richard Watson Gilder, ed. Rosamond Gilder (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916)], p. 131.

58. Quoted in Lofgren, The Plessy Case, p. 145.

59. Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (1897; New York: Peter Smith, 1931), pp. 251, 384.

60. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), p. 14.

61. Fisher, Hard Facts, pp. 92, 99, 93.

62. Howells, “Criticism and Fiction,” p. 15.

63. Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic: From “Uncle Tom's Cabin” to “Roots” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 26.

64. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 26.

65. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852; New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 160.

66. De Forest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, p. 19; Henry James, The Bostonians [ed. Alfred Habegger (1886; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976)], p. 10; Howells, An Imperative Duty [vol. 17 of A Selected Edition of William Dean Howells, ed. Robert Gottesman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970)], p. 24; Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903), p. 45.

67. James, The Bostonians, p. 87; subsequent citations to this novel will appear in the body of the text.

68. Quoted in [Edmund] Wilson, Patriotic Gore[: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962)], p. 3.

69. [Jennifer] Wicke, Advertising Fictions[: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)], p. 99.

70. Ibid., p. 100.

71. James, “The New Novel,” in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays [(New York: Oxford University Press, 1948)], pp. 210, 187, 187.

72. Judith Fetterly, in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), also notices crucial similarities between Miss Birdseye and Dr. Prance, but she sees Olive as differing from these two: “Indeed, the ultimate similarity between Miss Birdseye and Dr. Prance … is the degree to which each has given up her sexuality in order to accomplish her goals. Olive's potential effectuality can be measured by the fact that she is not so willing to do so” (p. 141).

73. James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 95.

74. Ibid., p. 93.

75. Charles Dudley Warner, “The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 67. See also Aiken, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” pp. 349-50.

76. Shoup, “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” p. 50.

77. Quoted in Thomas P. Riggio, “Uncle Tom Reconstructed: A Neglected Chapter in the History of a Book,” in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 142. Riggio provides a perceptive reading of the relationship between Stowe and Southern racist writers, arguing that more than the “Tom Shows” the work of Dixon, Thomas Nelson Page, and others contributed to the transformation of Uncle Tom from a symbol of black hope to a symbol of black repression.

78. James, “The Art of Fiction” [in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays], p. 21.

79. See for example [Maxwell] Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites [(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963)], p. 64; Clinton Oliver, “Henry James as a Social Critic,” Antioch Review 7 (1947): 243-58; and Lionel Trilling, “The Bostonians,” in The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), pp. 100-103.

80. Dixon, The Leopard's Spots, p. 45; subsequent citations to this novel will appear in the body of the text. Though Riggio fails to take up the issue of sentimentalism as a genre and does not expand his question of Stowe's influence beyond Southern writers, my reading of The Leopard's Spots against Uncle Tom' Cabin is indebted to Riggio's study. See note 77 above.

81. Howells, An Imperative Duty, p. 24.

82. [Albion Winegar] Tourgée, A Fool's Errand [(New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880)], p. 119.

83. Quoted in [Hazel V.] Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood [: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)], p. 130.

84. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 380.

85. James, A Small Boy and Others, p. 95.

86. James, preface to The Ambassadors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 4.

87. Dixon, preface to The Leopard's Spots, n.p.

88. Cook, Thomas Dixon, p. 65.

89. See [Edwin] Cady, The Realist at War [(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958)], pp. 208-9.

90. James, “Criticism” [in The Art of Fiction and Other Essays], pp. 217, 215, 215.

91. Ibid., p. 217.

92. James, preface to The Portrait of a Lady [ed. Robert D. Bamberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975)], p. 13.

93. Quoted in The Thin Disguise: Turning Point in Negro History, Plessy v. Ferguson, A Documentary Presentation (1864-1896), ed. Otto H. Olsen (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), p. 111.

94. [Larzer] Ziff, The American 1890s [: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966)], p. 227.

95. Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 384.