James W. Tuttleton

SOURCE: "The Sociological Matrix of the Novel of Manners," in The Novel of Manners in America, The University of North Carolina Press, 1972, pp. 7-19.

[In the excerpt below, Tuttleton recounts and refutes claims that the novel of manners is not a viable form in American literature.]

The charge that the novel is dead, so often heard in the literary criticism of the 1950s, is today a dead issue.

There is one type of novel, though, which is generally held to be deader than usual—especially in this country. And when, in our recent criticism, writers have reflected on the death of the American novel, they have usually meant a certain kind of novel—the American novel of manners. The obituaries pronounced by our critics upon this kind of novel are primarily oversimplifications of a point of view expressed by Lionel Trilling in his provocative essay "Manners, Morals, and the Novel." . . . Trilling's description of "manners" is of such interest that it deserves to be quoted in full:

What I understand by manners, then, is a culture's hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They are the things that separate them from the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it modifies them; it is generated by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.¹

I find this a brilliant observation about the content of the novels of manners considered in this study. But let me declare at the outset that I do not consider satisfactory some of the critical observations which have been inferred from it—namely, that American society has no hum and buzz; that we have never had in this country a hierarchy of social classes; that we have never had and do not now have a variety of manners and mores—those small actions, arts, gestures, emphases, and rhythms that express value; that, consequently, the novel of manners never really established itself in America; and that our best writers are therefore ideaoriented symbolic romancers. When Richard Chase claims in The American Novel and Its Tradition that American "novels" are inferior to our prose romances and that only second- or third-rate writers spend time on novels, he means that our novels of manners and their authors are inferior. Are we compelled to regard only our romances as great books? In view of the extraordinary achievement of The Portrait of a Lady, The American, The House of Mirth, and The Great Gatsby, it is remarkable that some of our critics have concluded that "we do not have the novel that touches significantly on society, on manners."²

To understand this issue of the relation of the American novel to our society—it has had a long and controversial history—requires of us assent to the proposition that, as James somewhere remarked, "kinds" are the very life of literature, and truth and strength come from the complete recognition of them. We need also to be aware of some aspects of the history of the American romance and of a special kind of American novel . . . —the American novel of manners.

Dr. Johnson once observed that one of the maxims of civil law is that definitions are hazardous. This maxim holds true in the field of literary criticism. Although no "kind" or genre of literature has been more difficult to define than the novel of manners, formulating an acceptable definition of it is the first order of business. Without a satisfactory definition, misunderstanding rather than enlightenment is the result; and along with misunderstanding usually comes irrelevant arguments about whether America is capable of producing a novel of manners.

To formulate a definition of the American novel of manners, let us regard as polarities the concept of the individual and the concept of the group, of society. Neither of these extremes can of course be the focus of the novel. Yet every novel locates itself somewhere between these extremes. If the novel deals largely with the self, personal experience, or the individual consciousness, the result will be a work which gravitates toward autobiography or "lyric or informal philosophy." If the self is refined out of existence in favor of social documentations, the result is history or chronicle. As Mark Schorer puts it: "The problem of the novel has always been to distinguish between these two, the self and society, and at the same time to find suitable structures that will present them together. . . . The novel seems to exist at a point where we can recognize the intersection of the stream of social history and the stream of the soul. This intersection gives the form its dialectical field, provides the source of those generic tensions that make it possible at all."³ Near the center of this convergence, where the streams of the self and of social history intersect, is the novel of manners. It is probably not amiss to say that the form emphasizes social history more than lyric, confessional, or autobiographical statement.

Perhaps a useful test of the definition of the novel of manners—to borrow a term from Irving Howe's definition of the political novel—is its "inclusiveness," rather than its narrowness, for narrow definitions have provoked some of the controversies which always attend a discussion of this genre. If we are inclusive, we may define the novel of manners as a novel in which the closeness of manners and character is of itself interesting enough to justify an examination of their relationship. By a novel of manners I mean a novel in which the manners, social customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, and mores of a given social group at a given time and place play a dominant role in the lives of fictional characters, exert control over their thought and behavior, and constitute a determinant upon the actions in which they are engaged, and in which these manners and customs are detailed realistically—with, in fact, a premium upon the exactness of their representation.

The representation of manners may be without authorial prejudice, in which case the novelist merely concerns himself, without comment, with his society's hum and buzz of implication. But more often the portrait of manners is put to the service of an ideological argument. The center of the novel of manners, that is, may be an idea or an issue—for example, the idea of social mobility, of class conflict, of professional ambition, of matchmaking, of divorce. But if, in the development of such "ideas," significant attention is paid to a realistic notation of the customs and conventions of the society in which these ideas arise and are acted out, then we are dealing with a novel of manners. That a novel is "about" a subject does not necessarily disqualify it as a novel of manners. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, is "about" the problem of finding suitable husbands for a household of girls; and Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is "about" the failure of the American dream. But enough attention is directed to the traditions of the early nineteenth-century English middle class, in the one, and to jazz-age manners and mores, in the other, to justify our examination of both of them as novels of manners. A useful extension of this definition, therefore, would be to say that the analysis of manners yields, from the point of view of this definition, profitable insights into the meaning of the novel without any distortion of its total significance.

Since the novel of manners inclines more toward social history than toward subjective psychologies or autobiography, it is, in a fundamental sense, sociologically oriented. That is, the novelist of manners is in some sense a "sociologist" who manipulates his data in terms of a narrative rather than a scientific or "logical" framework. This fact need not prejudice our attitude toward the novelist of manners or the genre created by his observation and notation. Many good novels survive the freight of social documentation intrinsic to the form. The influence of Comte's positivism is clearly evident in George Eliot's best studies of manners in midland England, yet we are never bothered by it. With the rise of sociology as a "science," in fact, novelists discovered a new set of tools for dissecting man in society. Many worthwhile novels have in fact major characters who are sociologists, anthropologists, or students of these disciplines—for example, Edith Wharton's Ralph Marvell of The Custom of the Country; Sinclair Lewis's Carol Kennicott of Main Street, who studied sociology at college; William Dean Howells's protagonist in The Vacation of the Kelwyns, a professor of historical sociology at Harvard; and Marquand's Malcolm Bryant, a sociologist in Point of No Return who has come to Clyde, Massachusetts, to analyze its social structure.

If we look to sociology for a systematic analysis of society, we soon find ourselves dealing with five areas of social experience which may be described as follows: "Firstly, a set of social conventions and taboos regarding relations between the sexes, between parents and children, as well as people's behavior in the company of their fellowmen. Secondly, a set of commonly, or at any rate widely accepted ethical standards. Thirdly, a set of religious and philosophical beliefs, or more often a miscellany of such beliefs, concerning the position and role of man in the universe. Fourthly, a given type of economic organization, with a greater or lesser emphasis on the importance of material possessions. Lastly, the political structure of a given community, embodying certain conceptions of government, of the individual's position in the state, and of international relations."⁴

The first category, "a set of social conventions and taboos," is of course the most important area of human experience for the novel of manners. For manners represent the expression, in positive and negative form, of the assumptions of society at a given time and place. Dramatic violations of commonly held ethical values are also endemic to the novel of manners. (Sometimes morals and manners are so inextricably mixed that we cannot tell whether characters act as they do because they think it is morally right or because it is socially proper. And in the novels of Henry James we cannot always be sure that there is any difference.) From the sociological point of view, in fact, a system of ethics merely represents the crystallization of the folkways of a society. Religious or philosophical beliefs are less important to the novel of manners, but if religious or philosophical assumptions did not subtly affect the behavior of fictional characters, the novel of manners would be other than it is. Economic considerations also play a less significant role in the development of the novel of manners, though wealth is often a particularly useful device for the freedom it provides a novelist in dramatizing certain social values. Whenever religious, philosophical, or economic "ideas" tend to be blown up out of proportion, the novel of manners becomes something else—the propaganda novel advocating religious opinions, philosophical systems, or economic dogmas. This point also applies to political considerations in the novel: if they become obtrusive, not merely a part of the fabric of the fictive social world, the novel becomes something other than a novel of manners—it becomes a radical or political novel.

To put it another way, the novel of manners is primarily concerned with social conventions as they impinge upon character. These other concerns are less central to it, but they help to define the ethos of the society portrayed, they provide a body of assumptions about experience which underlie its social code, and they affect the thought and behavior of fictional characters. To return to the analogy offered by Mark Schorer, as long as the impulse of the novelist does not push him too far toward propaganda or the extreme of chronicle or history, I see him as writing the novel of manners. . . .

"Society," as used in this study, ordinarily refers to the structure of "classes," cliques, or groups by which specific American communities are organized. More particularly, "society" may refer to whatever group is presumed by the author to constitute the class defining itself through "polite manners," such as the commercial aristocracy of Edith Wharton's Old New York or the Brahmin patriciate of Marquand's New England. In a novel of manners, the illusion of society may be generated in two ways. First, the sense of society may be created by a vast number of characters who sprawl and swarm across the printed page and who, by very mass and number, give the novel the illusion of social density, of that "substantiality" characteristic of actual society. Novelists like Balzac, Proust, Thackeray, and O'Hara develop the illusion of society by this documentary technique. On the other hand, society may be merely felt as an abstract force; that is, the novel may deal with only a few individuals who embody various social attitudes. Howells was this kind of novelist—he liked to focus on three or four characters whose conflicting manners stand for the values of the social classes to which they belong.

What is important to this genre is that there be for analysis groups with recognizable and differentiable manners and conventions. These groups need not be stable, in the sense of enduring for centuries (e.g., the English or French hereditary aristocracy). They need not even be typical of the general culture of a particular country (e.g., James's American colony in Rome). For the novel of manners it is necessary only that there be groups large enough to have developed a set of differing conventions which express their values and permanent enough for the writer's notation of their manners. Frequently the most successful novels of manners treat classes which have existed briefly or during transitional periods when one group is in the process of decay while another is rising to supplant it. Hence it need not be assumed that the novel of manners features only an aristocratic class in conflict with the bourgeoisie; any stratified groups will do. In America, Cable found such groups in New Orleans; Ellen Glasgow in Richmond; J. P. Marquand in New England; Louis Auchincloss in New York; John O'Hara in the mid-Pennsylvania coal district; and Edith Wharton in New York. To deny the reality of these distinctive groups as "social classes" is largely to miss the point of the social analysis contained in the fiction of these writers. Their fiction suggests that, once and for all, the criterion for distinguishing the novel of manners is execution—what James would have called "treatment"—rather than subject matter.

The novel of manners in America has not always been a popular genre with our writers. And any discussion of this form must deal with two objections which frequently attend it. One has to do with the alleged superiority of symbolic romances over the realistic novel. In part, this objection . . . is an extension of the old theory of a hierarchy of literary genres. The other objection is based on the claim that America lacks the social differences which are the sine qua non of the novel of manners. Can the novel of manners flourish in a democratic country which supposedly lacks adequate social density and a clearly stratified and stable class structure? A surprisingly large number of serious novelists and critics of the past century and a half have contended that American social experience is and has been too meager and limited to nourish a fiction that portrays men involved in the social world and perhaps even establishing through it their personal identities. A concomitant argument is often put this way: The absence of clear and stable class lines prohibits a meaningful portrayal of American manners—everybody has middle-class manners; without a diversity of manners based on class distinctions there can be no contrasts in the values, customs, or traditions of fictional characters; and without such contrasts, there can be no intrinsic interest, conflict, or "solidity of specification" in the portrait of American society. As W. M. Frohock has ironically phrased it: "At first glance the syllogism seems unattackable: only a firmly (but not too firmly) stratified society can furnish the materials of which novels are made; the society of the United States is not firmly stratified; therefore the novel in the United States is out of the question. And the corollary is that the best we can hope for is romances."⁵

Both of these objections, in their earliest form, appear as a general criticism of what was once called "the poverty for the artist of native American materials." This issue is no longer as relevant as it was a century ago, but if we know what some of our writers and critics have felt about American society, we may be better able to understand the dilemma they saw themselves as confronting.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first major novelist to indict America on the grounds of its cultural poverty. His observation is my point of departure because he first isolated the issue, and he articulated it so fully that most subsequent references to America's social thinness are mere repetitions, mostly thoughtless, of views Cooper presented in 1828:

The second obstacle against which American literature has to contend [the first was the pirating and copyright problem], is in the poverty of materials. There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance; no gross and hardy offences against decorum for the moralist; nor any of the rich artificial auxiliaries of poetry. The weakest hand can extract a spark from the flint, but it would baffle the strength of a giant to attempt kindling a flame with a pudding-stone. I very well know there are theorists who assume that the society and institutions of this country are, or ought to be, particularly favourable to novelties and variety. But the experience of one month, in these States, is sufficient to show any observant man the falsity of their position. The effect of a promiscuous assemblage any where, is to create a standard of deportment; and great liberty permits every one to aim its attainment. I have never seen a nation so much alike in my life, as the people of the United States, and what is more, they are not only like each other, but they are remarkably like that which common sense tells them they ought to resemble. No doubt, traits of character that are a little peculiar, without, however, being either very poetical, or very rich, are to be found in remote districts; but they are rare, and not always happy exceptions.⁶

This passage, expressing Cooper's characteristic ambivalence toward our "national conformity," is suspect in the very rhetorical extravagance of his description of our social dullness. The fact is that the example of his own fiction belies the assumptions here expressed. Home As Found and The Pioneers, for example, are rich in the depiction of native manners, national follies, and social offenses. But it cannot be escaped that Cooper believed that the character of American society prevented his writing the roman de moeurs, even though he wanted to. Under the inspiration of Scott, therefore, he took his characters out of the drawing room and trailed them into the woods. It should not be forgotten, however, that even in the Leatherstocking series, the real issues are sometimes social issues masked in the adventure of the romance genre. In The Pathfinder, for example, Cooper's real purpose is to explore the question of whether a man of the hunter class (however much a "nature's gentleman") can find settlement happiness married to a girl whose manners have been polished by real ladies—the wives of the garrison officers.

But Cooper was not alone in pointing out the deficiencies in American society for the novelist. In "Some Reflections on American Manners" in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most perceptive foreign critics of American ways, remarked in 1835 that in a new democratic society, the forms of social experience are so transitory that even if a code of good breeding were formulated no one could enforce it. "Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion, and there is always a certain incoherence in the manners of such times, because they are molded upon the feelings and notions of each individual rather than upon an ideal model proposed for general imitation." The absence of an authoritative code might make for more sincerity and openness in the American character, but Tocqueville felt that "the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all."⁷ This alleged absence of observable manners, however beneficial to the political citizen, Cooper regarded as fatal to the novelist because it deprived him of the raw material of his social portrait.

Some of their contemporaries, however, argued that it was an easier task to draw the portrait of American manners than Cooper and Tocqueville admitted. Social witnesses of the stature of William Cullen Bryant, John Neal, and William Hickling Prescott argued that American society, for all its apparent formlessness, still offered a rich field for fiction. As Bryant observed in his 1825 review of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Redwood, American social novels do not need the European class of idle aristocrats who "have leisure for that intrigue, those plottings and counter plottings, which are necessary to give a sufficient degree of action and eventfulness to the novel of real life."⁸ Though lacking a class with "polite manners," he argued, the annals of our people "are abundantly fertile in interesting occurrences, for all the purposes of the novelists." Since "distinctions of rank, and the amusements of elegant idleness, are but the surface of society," the American novelist is uniquely capable of dramatizing character through the representation of different manners. "Whoever will take the pains to pursue this subject into its particulars," Bryant observed, "will be surprised at the infinite variety of forms of character, which spring up under the institutions of our country." Bryant went on to suggest the "innumerable and diverse influences upon the manners and temper of our people": the variety of religious creeds, geographical differences (North and South, East and West, seacoast and interior, province and metropolis), diversifications in manners produced by massive immigrations, and the like. "When we consider all these innumerable differences of character, native and foreign," he concluded, "this infinite variety of pursuits and objects, this endless diversity of change of fortunes, and behold them gathered and grouped into one vast assemblage in our own country, we shall feel little pride in the sagacity or the skill of that native author, who asks for a richer or a wider field of observation."⁹

Put in this way, nineteenth-century America does seem to have been an immensely rich source of social materials for the novelist. Bryant makes us wonder seriously whether Cooper's social vision was as perspicuous as we might wish. I do not mean to say that early American novelists did not face formidable obstacles. They surely did. But the problem of the "materials" was less crucial than the artist's felt need for those "romantic associations" which these materials could not provide. By this I mean that some of our early novelists seriously resented the notion that fiction ought to deal with the actualities of American life. A strictly realistic portrait of men's ordinary lives was held inferior because it made "few demands upon the imagination." Writing novels based on everyday actualities was merely imitating, unimaginatively, what men did. And what men did in this country, in the early years of the republic, was mainly a variety of disagreeable things incident to clearing and settling the country.

More and more our writers fixated on the need for "romantic settings" to evoke aesthetic emotions. Isaac Mitchell even went to the extreme of creating a medieval castle for Long Island in his Alonzo and Melissa (1804). "Romance" and "novel" cannot be defined too precisely, but the differences between them were so important to early American writers that to understand the relation of the American novel of manners to American fiction, we would do well to consider them.

The basic differences, as they develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are loosely as follows. The novel was held to be a "truthful" representation of ordinary reality; it detailed with satisfactory realism the actualities of the social world. The romance, on the other hand, less committed to the realities of ordinary life, sought to leave "the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention."¹⁰ In the romance, in other words, invention rather than observation or description was valued. The novel emphasized character as revealed in everyday life—in the religious, business, political, moral, and social relationships of people. The romance, however, was concerned very little with the interaction of men in society; in fact, in the romance social relations were often so thinly represented that the characters seem less complex, less rounded, and therefore less credible as "real people." In the romance, the representation of character often resulted in abstractions or idealizations of social types—gentlemen, heroes, villains, soldiers, aristocrats. In the novel, extremes of characterization were avoided in favor of multidimensional or rounded characters, most of them drawn from the middle class.

The novel usually did not have a complicated plot, heroic action, or improbabilities. Plotting in the romance, however, was often elaborately worked out on the basis of coincidence or chance and was, if not incredible, often implausible. In many respects, the romance extended into prose some of the characteristics of the medieval verse romance, from which it derived not only its name but its tendency toward the "poetic," the legendary, and the highly imaginative, wonderful scenes of the distant past or the strange and faraway. Since it is "less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel," as Chase has observed, "the romance will more freely veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolic forms."¹¹

Clara Reeve's early history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance, defined what in 1785 was understood to be the nature of the novel:

The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the time in which it is written. . . . The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.¹²

This definition will not of course do any more. It stands as a generally reliable definition of the novel of manners, though, except for the claim that the novel must deal with the time in which it is written. There is no reason why a novel of manners reflecting all of these qualities may not be laid in the past, say (like Waverley) "sixty years since."

Notes

¹ Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," in his The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N. Y., 1950), pp. 200-201.

² Chase, American Novel and Its Tradition, (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), pp. 157-59; Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," p. 207.

³ Mark Schorer, "Foreword: Self and Society," in Society and Self in the Novel: English Institute Essays, 1955 (New York, 1956), pp. viii-ix.

⁴ W. Witte, "The Sociological Approach to Literature," Modern Language Review 36 (1951): 87-88.

⁵ W. M. Frohock, Strangers to This Ground, (Dallas, 1961), p. 28.

⁶ James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans, Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, ed. Robert E. Spiller, 2 vols. (New York, 1963), 2:108-9.

⁷ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), 2:229-30.

⁸ William Cullen Bryant, review of Redwood by Catherine M. Sedgwick, North American Review 20 (April 1825); reprinted in William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections, ed. Tremaine McDowell (New York, 1935), pp. 182-83.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Horace Walpole, "The Castle of Otranto," in Shorter Novels: Eighteenth Century, ed. Philip Henderson (London, 1930), p. 102.

¹¹ Chase, American Novel and Its Tradition, p. 13.

¹² Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, Facsimile Text Society, ser. 1, vol. 4 (1785; reprint ed. New York, 1930), p. 111.

Gordon Milne

SOURCE: "The Beginnings," in The Sense of Society: A History of the American Novel of Manners, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977, pp. 19-42.

[In the following essay, Milne explores the development of the American novel of manners from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War, examining the works of H. H. Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, John Pendleton Kennedy, and John Esten Cooke.]

The American novel of manners originates at the end of the eighteenth century, at the time when the novel in general began to take hold in America. H. H. Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815) stands as a replica, in a very rudimentary sense, of the work of his English contemporary, Jane Austen. This many-volumed affair, a loose imitation of Don Quixote in its detailing the adventures of its hero, Captain Farrago, and his servant Teague O'Regan, achieves its importance primarily as a vigorous satire on the customs of the America of Brackenridge's era. In his survey of both the backwoods (of Pennsylvania) and the cities (Philadelphia and Washington), Brackenridge comments frankly on a number of aspects of American society.

His targets include matters of politics (whiskey settles elections in the back countries, business interests, in the cities), the medical profession (which is filled with quack doctors), the law (which is filled with pedantic and/or corrupt lawyers), and the social swing (bogtrotter Teague O'Regan, cuts a swath at a President's levee in Washington). About these matters Brackenridge writes in a style that is for the most part witty and entertaining, intermingles classical allusion and racy diction in an easy manner, and neatly maintains his lightly scoffing stance.

Modern Chivalry does not really qualify as a novel of manners, however, for, aside from its "social scene" focus and satiric method, it lacks the components of the form. Indeed, it barely qualifies as a novel. Brackenridge is really concerned with presenting a series of essays on an assortment of topics, and his picaresque adventure pattern only partially conceals the "essayizing" and does not convert the work into a sustained piece of fiction.

A forerunner Brackenridge may be, but it seems more accurate to call his successor, James Fenimore Cooper, the first genuine—or almost genuine-—American novelist of manners. Cooper's reputation is based, to be sure, on his creation of the archetypal American romance, the Leatherstocking saga, but a number of his novels fall into the "social criticism" category and, as such, are close to the manners genre. One does well to remember that his first novel, Precaution (1820), was a story of English high society, and that later works like Homeward Bound (1838), Home As Found (1838), and the Littlepage Manuscript series stress a social thesis, the significant role of the landed gentry class. Even in the Leatherstocking tales one can observe Cooper defending the "patroon" aristocracy at the expense of a leveling democracy, assigning to them a place at the top of the social-and-political ladder as "wise" leaders. Much of his work, as a whole or in part, describes—one should really say "glamorizes"—their way of life. . . .

It is in the Littlepage trilogy—Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846)—that Cooper most precisely hews to the manners line. The three novels are intended, in the first place, as a social history, a defense of the landed gentry as representing the ideal of the gentleman, who will promote the law and order that exemplify American democracy at its best. The Littlepages and the Mordaunts, colonial gentry of English ancestry (those of Dutch descent rank a little below), are at the forefront, seen as they found an estate in the then unsettled northern New York woods. Almost immediately, however, the Littlepage-Mordaunt security is threatened by leveling demagogues, as personified by the tribe of Newcomes and by Aaron Thousandacres, a believer in "unrestrained" democracy. The issue is brought to a head in the antirent wars, which serve as the background to The Redskins; in these the "levelers" refuse to pay rent to the landowners, insisting that every man should be allowed to possess whatever land he wants or needs. Cooper, throughout the series, has taken an opposing view. The Littlepage class exhibits a democratic spirit (e.g., Mordaunt Littlepage's recognition of the poor but perceptive chainbeaer, Andries Coejemans, as a gentleman and his equal) but refuses to carry "democracy" to the free-for-all extreme. The landowners deserve, as Cooper sees it, their legitimately obtained possessions. Moreover, they deserve the highest position in the American social structure—owed to them, not on the basis of wealth and social grace, but as a reward for virtue and talent—and they will accept this position "with Christian humility and deep submission of the self to the moral laws of the universe." Cooper argues vehemently, as Donald Ringe points out, that "a social organization is after all but a reflection of the moral principles upon which it is based."¹

In the course of the trilogy Cooper instructs the reader about a number of social issues: the role of the landed proprietor, cultural differences between England and America, American class distinctions, and so on. Freely mixing the social commentary with the adventure-love story plots, he outlines a "chronicle of manners" (the label he himself applies in his preface to Satanstoe—adding that "every such has a certain value"), one filled with reference to customs and habits in various social spheres.

Satanstoe, in particular, is given over to a portrayal of the way of life of New York's colonial aristocracy, providing, along with this, comparisons among the colonies (e.g., New York vs. New England) and among people of different racial strains (English vs. Dutch), and affording glimpses of other classes and of special types (the Negro, the Indian) as well. The opening sequences of the novel establish this sort of picture, as the narrator, Corny Littlepage, carefully "places" himself for the reader: "We happened to be in a part of Westchester in which were none of the very large estates." The Littlepages, one learns, belong to the "haute bourgeoisie," located between the aristocracy and the higher classes of yeomanry; they have a very adequate establishment at Satanstoe, not to mention the 40,000 acres in the North that will become the estate of "Ravensnest," and the male members of the family have served in the Assembly and the militia and are "well connected." Corny Littlepage has been brought up in a genteel and comfortable environment, first tutored by the Reverend Thomas Worden, rector of St. Jude's—and the American version of the English hunting parson type—then attending Nassau Hall. A sociable atmosphere prevails at Satanstoe, witnessed on the occasions of the visits of Colonel Van Valkenburgh, when hot flip facilitates the conversation, encouraging talk about cockfights and horse racing, and even about religion (when a man is really good, religion only does him harm, says the Colonel). Contrasts are made between the solid but stolid Dutch and the more graceful English-descended Americans, who are less averse to "education" and therefore more informed and polished.

The jolly country living is paralleled in New York City, as Corny Littlepage and Dirck Van Valkenburgh find out as they pay a visit to relatives there. Stopping en route at a country inn, they partake of a lavish dinner of ham, potatoes, boiled eggs, beefsteak, pickles, cole slaw, apple pie, and cider, hearty and appetizing fare, if less elaborate than the turtle soup and oysters they will have at urban banquets to come. In New York the provincials take note of town and country differences, of how, for example, Aunt Legge sups at half past eight, a little later "than my mother, as being more fashionable and genteel." Aunt Legge always dresses for dinner, too, even though she may dine on a cold dumpling. Dinner at the Mordaunts' is even more formal, involving many courses, a removal of the cloth, a series of toasts, and a separation of the ladies and the gentlemen, and we are made aware of "that peculiar air of metropolitan superiority" that strikes the "provincial ignorance" of Corny.

Cooper obviously enjoys describing "old New York," still a relatively small town, where people walk rather than ride, and where everyone participates in the "Pinkster," the "great Saturnalia" of the blacks, featuring sideshows and the drinking of "white wine" (buttermilk). Various social usages are noted: the servant-companion relationship among the upper classes, the vogue for "things French among us," the habit of addressing the British soldiers quartered in the city as "Mr." rather than by their titles ("such things never occurring in the better circles"), and the interest in the drama, spurred on by the garrison of British soldiers, who perform Addison's Cato and Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem.

Cooper then turns his attention to the "inland" city of Albany, its inhabitants and their customs. A more relaxed and informal pattern prevails in Albany, partly because of the town's location in the "interior," says the author, and partly because most of the people are of Dutch rather than English descent and thus more free and easy, perfectly willing to condone a twenty-year-old "man" indulging in the sport of sledding on the town's hills, or robbing, as a prank, a family of its supper. Rector Worden one observes, looks down on the Albany Dutch "in a very natural, metropolitan sort of way," preferring the company of the English officers, a more sophisticated group. They—and the English Americans—would not be inclined to patronize the fortune teller Mother Doortje, as do the less worldly Dutch. If Jason Newcome proves an exception, he, it must be remembered, is a New Englander rather than a New Yorker, and indeed of the lower middle class, and, as such, one who "had not much notion of the fitness of things in matters of taste."

When the novel's scene shifts for a final time, to the remote northern settlements, a strong sense of "locale" is imparted to the reader again. As the group of principals depart from Albany for the backwoods, the girls assume veils of green (as protective coloring), and the men put on buckskin (with the exceptions of Jason Newcome and Mr. Worden, the latter keeping to his clerical garb). Now, too, the cast of characters includes surveyors, chainbearers, and Indian guides, and the manner of living begins to verge on the primitive. To be sure, the loghouse dwelling into which the principals settle has "five apartments," and is a forerunner of the one-day-to-be provincial Littlepage "estate" of Ravensnest.

The author's handling of setting does much to authenticate the social background of Satanstoe. The pleasant pictures of the comfortable but not lavish country home of the Littlepages and of the more elegant town house of the Mordaunts suggest their class and role. A strong feeling of local color permeates the New York City scenes, with landmarks like Wall Street, Trinity Church, and the Battery appearing, and hilly Albany, dotted with neat Dutch edifices characterized by stoops and gables, is vividly drawn as well. The familiar Cooper "big nature" backdrops crop up, too, in the later stages of the book—for example the breaking up of the ice on the Hudson, and the forest clearings in the area of Lake George.

The book's social commentary contributes to the authentication process, particularly Cooper's discussion of American types, from the intelligent and firmly upright "English" Corny Littlepage, to the physically attractive but less bright "Dutch" Dirck Van Valkenburgh, to the narrow and greedy New Englander Jason Newcome, to the Negro Jaap, to the Indian Susquesus. Cooper also formulates a number of English-American contrasts, and it is worth noting that, though depicting the titled Englishman Bulstrode flatteringly, he bestows the hand of the American "heiress" Anneke Mordaunt on Littlepage rather than on Bulstrode. The latter, as Anneke says at one point, will function better at the head of his officers' mess than in the snug Dutch parlor of her cousin Mrs. Van der Hayden, where the "colony hospitality, colony good-will, colony plainness" are more suited to Corny Littlepage. Americans, according to Cooper, need not "ape" the British; their culture, even their language, is their own.

Though generally a charming book, Satanstoe suffers from a number of technical flaws. The author, as usual, structures his work loosely, mixing adventure with love story, genre painting with political debate, and, in this case, adding many a description of manners. Though his flair for storytelling makes itself evident in a number of gripping episodes, his tendency toward the prolix slows the book down as a whole. His "beau idéal" concept of characterization—Anneke Mordaunt and Mary Wallace are "lovely and delicate girls" even on an ice floe in a rampaging river—also seems a deterrent feature. Exceptions do exist, like the virile, fun-loving, but unstable Guert Ten Eyck or the sociable "Loping Dominie" Worden, but as a rule Cooper glamorizes his leading characters. Conversely, he paints his villains too darkly. Jason Newcome should not be quite so sneaky, materialistic, narrow, hypocritical, and lacking in taste. The Cooper stylistic habits of confused syntax, periphrasis, and stilted dialogue do not, needless to say, serve him well, either. If he writes less clumsily and with less "giftbook flossiness" in Satanstoe than elsewhere, he still does not often approximate the sparkling phrasing of later novelists of manners.

The remaining two novels in the Littlepage trilogy, The Chainbearer and The Redskins, reveal less concern with summoning up the way of life of the landed class and ignore, for the most part, details of dress, food and drink, deportment, and custom. Cooper continues to theorize, to be sure, about the function of the landed proprietor and indeed devotes himself increasingly to the antirent issue. In The Chainbearer much is said about the "gentleman," as about leveling democracy and majority rule, and there are passing comments on American-European distinctions. In regard to the latter, Cooper distributes praise and blame on both sides, attacking "Yankee" provinciality that can lead to mock-refinement (e.g., the Littlepage neighbors object to the name Satanstoe as undignified), but defending the naturalness of the American girl, as opposed to her artificial European counterpart.

He has more to say on this topic in The Redskins (mostly because his protagonist, Hugh Littlepage, has traveled in Europe for a number of years and thus has a "vantagepoint"), tending, in this latter novel, to favor the Europeans. "New world" inhabitants should visit the "Old," says Cooper firmly, for travel acts as a decided corrective to narrow self-adulation. The traveler would recognize, he feels, that society in America "in its ordinary meaning" is not as well ordered, tasteful, well mannered, agreeable, instructive, and useful as that in almost any European country. The American watering places, for example, seem to Hugh Littlepage "very much inferior" to most of those abroad, and Americans would do well, he suggests, to adopt many of the trans-atlantic customs, especially those of the British. America, he admits, has at least one or two advantages, such as the absence of a peasant class, and even of the "mercenary" spirit (that is, "two men might be bought in any European country for one here").

The Chainbearer discusses on a number of occasions what Cooper means by the terms lady and gentleman. Dismissing birth and wealth ("the vulgar, almost invariably, in this country, reduce the standard of distinction to mere money") as proper claims,² he stresses the following characteristics: taste, manners, opinions that are based on intelligence and cultivation, a refusal to stoop to meanness, generosity, superiority to scandal, and a truthfulness that stems from self-respect. People like his protagonist, Mordaunt Littlepage, clearly encompass the list, as does the young lady, Ursula Malbone, whom Mordaunt marries. Though very poor, even reduced to helping her uncle as a surveyor, Ursula was born and educated as a lady. Education is central in Cooper's scheme of things ("the wife of an educated man," he notes, "should be an educated woman"), and, because of the lack of it, the chainbearer, Andries Coejemans, "is and is not a gentleman." Coejemans "is" because he possesses what is even more central, a belief in and ability to recognize principles. He contrasts sharply in this respect with someone like Aaron Thousandacres, for whom all sense of right was concentrated in selfishness. Wherever firm moral fiber appears—in the yeoman, in the servant, in the Indian—a "good specimen" of man will be found. Only among the "gentry," however, do all the characteristics of the gentleman appear, and thus it is that Mordaunt's father can state that "nothing contributes so much to the civilization of a country as to dot it with a gentry," the effect produced by "one gentleman's family in a neighborhood, in the way of manners, tastes, general intelligence and civilization at large," being of substantial proportions.

While echoing this thesis ("the aristocrat means, in the parlance of the country, no other than a man of gentlemanlike tastes, habits, opinions and associations"), The Redskins defines less and describes more, supplying more information than The Chainbearer about the practices and habits of the aristocracy. One hears of its cultural interests, like the theater (though it is "pretty much all farces"), of its church (Episcopalian—and with a canopy over the Littlepage pew), of its clothes (Hugh and his uncle keep "a supply of country attire at the 'Nest"; no man, Cooper has declared in The Chainbearer, assumes the "wardrobe of a gentleman without having certain pretensions to the character"), of its dinners (good habits at the table are "conventionalities that belong to the fundamental principles of civilized society"), and of its homes (e.g., Ravensnest, "a respectable New York country dwelling"). Such are the links that "connect cultivated society together"—and separate it from the "Heirs of New York merchants getting rid of their portion in riotous living," as also from the covetous antirenters, and from the "demagogues and editors." Cooper contentedly places on the top rung of the "social ladder" the "Patroon" contingent, those who are "equal" in "social position, connections, education and similarity of habits, thoughts, and, if you will, prejudices."

Since he employs the genre of manners only as a secondary focus³—after the adventure, after the love story, after the sociopolitical criticism—and since he lacks some of the necessary attributes of the novelist of manners, most notably, a smooth and suave style and a tone of reasonably detached irony, Cooper initiates the genre imperfectly. One can appreciate, however, his providing the impetus, a much stronger one than that which stemmed from Brackenridge.

Among his contemporaries, a few writers also attempted to kindle the spark—the New Englander, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, for one, and the two Southerners, John Pendleton Kennedy and John Esten Cooke. If making but partial and not very adequate contributions, still, they lent assistance in keeping the tradition alive.

Kennedy and Cooke, like so many other later Southern novelists, relied upon the historical romance as their formula, a type into which might be easily inserted, however, some manners embellishments, especially in the form of local-color touches. Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) illustrates this in its reproduction of life on a Virginia plantation, the Meriwether estate of Swallow Barn. Although pursuing two lines of plot, a litigation issue and a love affair, Kennedy seems more preoccupied with summoning up a vision of the feudal South, of graceful living in the hunting country. The vision certainly has its charms, yet these are gently minimized by the vein of satire that runs throughout the book. Kennedy mocks the chivalric ideal in his account of the courting of romantic Bel Tracy by down-to-earth Ned Hazard, and he lightly undercuts some Southern types and traditions, such as the landed gentleman model, Frank Meriwether; the "girlish" Prudence Meriwether who is so devoted to "good works"; Chub, the dogmatic schoolmaster; and the generally provincial (Richmond is the center of the universe) and stultified Virginians. In its nimble mockery Swallow Barn anticipates, to a degree, the subsequent more severe indictment of nostalgic regionalism to be found in the work of Ellen Glasgow.

Cooke's Virginia Comedians (1854) also depends on an ancestral home for its background, this being Effingham Hall, a "stately edifice near Williamsburg." In the vicinity of the Hall events like governors' balls and fox hunts take place, and there are also festal days devoted to wrestling and running matches, ballad singing and fiddler contests, as well as formal picnics and regimental musters. The book's cast of characters includes conventional types, too, like the worldly clergyman and the class-conscious gentleman. Less conventional figures are present as well, actors and theater managers (Mr. Hallam of the Virginia Company of Comedians), and yeoman farmers, and the book contains some derogatory remarks about the "Influential classes," "aristocracy" and "feudalism," together with frequent defenses of the acting profession and of the unfairly maligned "poor playing girl." Despite the presence of some fresh types and of some refreshing commentary, however, Virginia Comedians does not really veer very far away from a standard tale of entertainment, filled with the customary elements of sentimental romance, low comedy, and suspense.

More in keeping with the manners format—perhaps because it was written thirty years later, and thus in the James-Howells era—is Cooke's Fanchette (1883). Shifting his locale slightly northward, to Washington and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and eschewing a historical setting in favor of the contemporary period, Cooke turns his book into something less characteristically "southern" than Virginia Comedians. Issues of politics, journalism, the theater, religion, and economics now interest him, and these are discussed against the background of a fairly cosmopolitan society. Some sense of the Washington social scene is established—"Vanity Fair in full blast"—with contrasts drawn between the old-rich like the Delanceys and the new-rich like the Ordmores. The former can produce "good company seated at a good dinner," whereas the latter stage less selective receptions, in a drawing room that was "as magnificent as great wealth and questionable taste could make it." Those attending such dinners and receptions may vary from journalists like Waring ("a flâneur . . . but under the trifler is the honest gentleman"), to cultivated men of leisure like Armyn, to the "gentleman adventurer," Prince Seminoff, determined to marry a rich American girl. Many members of the "best society" of Washington have country houses in Maryland in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay, Armyn owning "Montrose," an imposing dwelling with "every mark of age," and the Delanceys inhabiting "Bayside," a "handsome country house" nearby. A "very social and affectionate society" exists on the Eastern Shore, so Cooke reports, the "best features of the old regime" lingering there and making "life attractive."

Fanchette devotes itself for the most part to a suspenseful plot involving the titular character, a young actress with a mysterious background. After a rather inordinate amount of intrigue, the book ends happily with Fanchette—who, actress or no, is a "perfect lady"—being permitted to make a proper marriage. Indeed, four weddings take place before the close of the book. As this suggests, the element of romance is uppermost in the novel, and the treatment of it, one has to say, is conventional and uninspiring. The book is enlivened, however, by the sprightliness of the heroine and by the author's sense of humor, and the authorial reflections on materialism (and its effect on politics in Washington in particular) and on the drama command the interest of the present-day reader.

The author most readily matched with Cooper as an incipient novelist of manners is Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Born into the upper class, she chose to describe it in her novels and indeed to defend it, provided that it exemplified an aristocracy of talent and virtue rather than one simply of birth or wealth. Though Miss Sedgwick could envision an approaching "American Utopia endowed with unlimited social grace,"⁴ if such an aristocracy prevailed, she entertained serious doubts about the possibility, as her often tart thrusts at the higher social spheres in novels like Clarence (1830) and Married or Single? (1857) suggest.

Clarence is based on a town-and-country contrast, the rural gentry, Mr. Clarence and his daughter Gertrude, juxtaposed with New York City society, personified chiefly by Mrs. Layton. The former are well-read and well traveled individuals (in addition to being well supplied with money), who possess moderation and humility and thus act with delicacy in social situations. The latter, her graceful manners, spirited conversation, and engaging ways notwithstanding, is prone to self-indulgence and needless expenditure and to decided carelessness about principles. Miss Sedgwick says again and again that money corrupts (the "perils of a fortune") and presents numerous examples besides that of Mrs. Layton: the Browns, with their "nouveau riche immense parlor" and "costly, ill-assorted and cumbrous furniture"; Mrs. Stanley, "a rich, motherless, uneducated, unintellectual woman" and therefore "very pitiable"; Mr. Morley, obsequious to the affluent and fashionable and determined to marry among them; Major Daisy, a shallow social arbiter ("an Areopagite in the female fashionable world"); and Miss Patty Sprague, the "walking, talking chronicle of the floating events of the day," who is quick to associate with those on the way up, quick to forget those on the way down. Exceptions, apart from the Clarences, do exist, notably Mrs. Roscoe and her son Gerald, and the Marion family. The latter, one notes, have a Southern bucolic background; the rural gentry has the edge again.⁵

Miss Sedgwick fires away from the first page to the last: at the belles and dandies ("living personifications of their prototypes in the tailor's window, dignified, self-complacent morons"), the gossiping and too-dress-conscious matrons, the gambling and speculating husbands operating in their "bank-note world," the businesslike pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of intellectual interests,⁶ and the purely mercenary view of marriage. In the words of Mr. Clarence, the New York social scene is marked by vacuity, flippancy, superficial accomplishments, idle competitions, and useless and wasteful expenditure. Such, he adds, are the sins and follies of every commercial city, and, though he (and his creator) would not wish to "condemn en masse the class of fashionable society," he makes it clear that this "polite world" does not represent "the most elevated and virtuous class."

Clarence touches on other issues of manners, such as the role of women (the author declaring, for one thing, that talent is demanded in "housewifery" just as in other "departments of life"), the rites of hospitality, and the importance of setting (the air of luxury and refinement in Mrs. Layton's establishment is commended as going "beyond that usually produced by the union of fortune and fashion"). The book also contains a passage caricaturing the impercipient British traveler in America, one who draws inane and often faulty English-American parallels. Captain Edmund Stuart, the example in this instance, labels Benjamin West an English painter and even remarks that his name may not have reached America yet, "owing probably to the ignorance of the fine arts here."

Its well-directed satire aside, Clarence represents hard going for the present-day reader, for much of its author's energy is expended in unfolding a highly melodramatic and sentimental plot; the characters are carelessly motivated and/or dull; structural arrangements seem slipshod (letters are thrown in at random to convey necessary exposition); and the style is marred by epithets on the "crown matrimonial," "manly bosom" order.

In her later novel, Married or Single?, Miss Sedgwick spends most of her time discussing the question posed in her title, whether a married or a single life is preferable for a woman. After a sterling defense of the latter position, she allows her heroine to marry at the novel's end—once she has found the "right" man. Developing this discussion against a New York aristocracy background once again, Miss Sedgwick also satirizes once again, but more incidentally than she had in Clarence. So occupied is she in riding her thesis, that a woman's single life can be useful and dignified and is certainly preferable to a "bankrupt marriage," that she rarely delivers a satiric shaft.

When she does so, her targets recall those found in Clarence—the frivolous belle who thinks of feathers, lace, and fringe, but never of books; the Anglophile "lauding anything English";⁷ and the arriviste Adeline Clapp, ignorant of conventions and with no proper instincts, the "fashionable" lady assiduously pursuing an empty social round, from morning reception to evening ball. As in Clarence, too, she utilizes foil characters, Grace Herbert contra Anne Carlton, corresponding to Gertrude Clarence contra Mrs. Layton. Anne Carlton epitomizes the socialite, pretty to look at and perfectly dressed, but flippant and shallow, materialistic and loosely principled. Grace, on the other hand, though too impetuous and more than a little worldly ("At twenty-two one can't turn hermit," she says, "and parties and receptions and their edifying accessories make up our social life, you know"), is intelligent, sensitive, and firmly principled. Eventually she is rewarded for possessing these more positive traits; she escapes the clutches of the wealthy but corrupt man-about-town, Horace Copley, and attaches herself to the sturdy lawyer, Archibald Lisle, her equal in morals and—after his experiencing a European sojourn of a year or two—in manners as well. He has moved from his "narrow social sphere" into her world of "high breeding." Of course, Grace is still defending the single life even as she ventures upon marriage.

Married or Single? gives the reader a good deal of information about the "fashionable quarter" of New York, its materialism, coldness (e.g., Madam Copley), vanity and levity, and its easy morality. The benefits to be found—good dinners, tolerable operas, "practiced manners"—do not compensate. At one stage of the novel, Miss Sedgwick permits herself a severe tirade:

A creature of Grace's rare gifts is about as well adapted to the fashionable world of New York as a first-rate ship would be to the artificial lake of a pleasure-ground. In other civilized countries, where a privileged class is sustained by rank, individuality of character is cultivated and developed in brilliant accomplishments that enamel society. But. . . who hopes to meet our poets, artists, historians at the "most brilliant party of the season"? Our society is characterized by monotony, infinite tediousness of mediocrity, a vulgar and childish struggle for insipid celebrities, celebrity for fine dress, palatial house, costly furniture and showy equipage. [p. 159]

Citing the recently published Potiphar Papers, Miss Sedgwick echoes the indictment of its author, George William Curtis, against New York society, with its parvenu emphasis on luxury at the expense of taste.

No more than Clarence is Married or Single? an artistic triumph, unfortunately. An exhausting two-volume affair; it piles intrigue upon intrigue, provides not one but two pathetic deaths of young ladies and one of a child as well, employs coincidence with abandon, idealizes its principal characters and caricatures others, and relies heavily on pompous dialogue. The presence of one or two interesting characters like Mrs. Tallis, an occasional witty remark ("persons of Grace's temperament are apt to mistake impulses for inspirations"), and the appropriately directed satiric attacks only partially redress the balance.

One has to conclude that the American novel of manners in the pre-Civil War era does not reach artistic heights. The polish and skill of a Thackeray, whom Miss Sedgwick speaks, in Married or Single?, of wishing to call to her aid, are generally lacking. Happily, they were soon to be supplied by James and Howells.

The question of artistry aside, the Coopers and Sedgwicks, Kennedys and Cookes, can still be praised for recognizing the value of social satire as novelistic material and for, in this and other ways, utilizing the genre of manners, thus keeping the tradition alive.⁸

Notes

¹ Donald A. Ringe, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962), p. 121.

² The reader would be inclined to argue that Cooper does not really dismiss the claim of "birth." One remembers that Ursula Malbone is a lady "by birth," as is Mary Warren, the heroine of The Redskins. Mary, like Ursula, is, though poor, rewarded with the hand of the protagonist, Hugh Littlepage, for she is educated as well as well born, refined as well as principled. Like many another Cooper heroine, she has everything!

³Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief is the one exception.

⁴ Edward H. Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974), p. 99.

⁵ Vulgar little ladies like Mrs. Upton can be found in the country, however, and, as Mr. Clarence says, with wry amusement, to his daughter, six distinct social ranks exist in the village of Clarenceville.

⁶ Mrs. Layton, for example, attends lectures and the opera merely to be seen, and Gerald Roscoe's mind, "enriched with elegant acquisitions," is regarded as an embellishment but hardly a necessity. Miss Sedgwick anticipates later novelists of manners in her assignment of antiintellectualism to "society."

⁷ Unlike the Anglophile, Walter Herbert does not want his niece, Grace, to marry an Englishman, for she would be received on sufferance in England, whereas in America she is a "queen in her own right."

⁸ One observes the comment of Edward H. Foster that, "aside from various works by Cooper and Miss Sedgwick, very few good works of fiction were explicitly devoted to a study of manners in pre-Civil War America." He goes on to say that "there are women who industriously wrote domestic novels in which much attention was given to manners. . . . but few authors of distinction attempted this particular kind of fiction. Perhaps the very lack of a class, or at least a highly influential class, which based its principles upon a life of manners precluded the possible development of a tradition of novels of manners in the half-century before the Civil War" (Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 104.).