“Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen:

Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies”

George Lipsitz

I’m starting to see a trend, at least with contemporary essays in American culture. So far, all of them have begun with a clever device that attempts to deviate from the devices of a typical scholarly essay. We had George Wise’s paradigms of American Studies, Jay Mechling’s “That reminds me of a story” (as well as his American culture grid), and Mary Helen Washington’s analogic examples such as the play, The Wedding Band, because it illustrates her ideas. In other words, American Studies scholars of the last ten to fifteen years ten to place a lot of importance on beginning their essays with a connection to literature, to art, before they delve into the murky ennui of theory. We can predict that the literary grounding of the introduction will be followed suddenly be a recap of some length of the history of contested issues in American studies—though that history may be of varied length, intensity, or interest. Only then can the writer move into the issue at his or her hand. Lipsitz doesn’t deviate far from this formula, though one could say that his writing on his general topic is quite good.

Lipsitz begins his essay with the story of a trumpet player who had the distinction of joining the Duke Ellington Orchestra in its heyday. The trumpet player wanted to know what to do, but Ellington would tell him only “listen,” which frustrated the young musician. Finally, Ellington had to explain to the guy “there’s listening, and then there’s listening, but what I want from you is to listen.” Lipsitz explains that the musician “had been so preoccupied with what he might contribute to the orchestra as an individual that he had not taken time to hear what the other musicians needed. He had not yet learned to hear the voices around him nor to understand the spaces and silences surrounding them” (615). So, in order to be in “harmony” with the other “voices,” one has to “listen” carefully to how they “play” “in concert.” Lipsitz applies that to “the present moment for scholarly research in American Studies.” That is, the present moment as of 1990. He calls it a time of “creative ferment and critical fragmentation.” Because the emphasis is no longer on the elite culture, new possibilities are opened by the “complex relationship between scholarly methods and popular cultures, political economies, and ideologies of America” (616). Lipsitz argues that this fragmentation and “ferment” proves that the field of American Studies is opening up, rather than ending, as many had predicted (616).

Lipsitz next takes up the issue of Cultural Studies vs. American Studies, an important distinction. European theorists like Althusser, Lacan, Irigaray, Cixous, and Bakhtin have “theorized a ‘crisis of representation’ that has called into question basic assumptions within the disciplines central to the American Studies project—literary studies, art history, anthropology, geography, history, and legal studies” (616). The debates these scholars bring up are critical because they question basic concepts such as “the utility of national boundaries as fitting limits for the study of culture” and “the reliability of categories that establish canons of great works” (617). These debates—in particular those involving national boundaries obviously call into question the very existence of American Studies. But Lipsitz goes on to say that “the threat posed to American Studies by contemporary European cultural theory is more apparent than real, more a product of our own fears than of any concrete social reality” (617). In fact, Lipsitz thinks that such a challenge to thought offers a chance to revitalize the field because the European critics have much to offer the discipline.

Derrida, for example, offers much as a theorist, because he reminds us that our “logocentrism” causes us to focus solely on written texts and “dismissal of competing systems of thought as ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’” causes us to privilege “the experiences of modern Europeans and North Americans as ‘human’ while dismissing much of the rest of the world as some kind of undifferentiated ‘other.’” Derrida’s work has been valuable to help “cultural critics to break with logocentrism, to be self-reflexive about the tools they wield” (619). It’s a useful tool to American Studies scholars because it opens up new realms of possibilities.

Foucault is another European thinker who, like Derrida, causes us to consider “how discursive categories constitute sites of oppression.” Foucault points out, for instance, the way “medicalization of sexuality or the criminalization of ‘antisocial behavior’ has constructed the body as a locus of domination and power.” In other words, power is used to constrain, contain, silence, and suppress “potential opposition” of people in “marginal social positions” (619). This is an interesting concept. I need to come back to this. By oppressing and silencing, he means shutting up—and by medicalizing, he’s saying “oh he’s crazy.”

Lipsitz says that locating the idea of power in the body “constrains, contains, silences, and suppresses potential oppositions” (619). Further, he says, when power is suppressed this way, people are marginalized. In a way I see what he’s saying. If I can apply it to students I have worked with, I can see that if students protested the way they were being treated and the system wrote them off as “conduct disorder,” then no one had to examine whether or not there was a system-wide problem that mishandled the African American boys such that they were grossly overrepresented in special education. So Foucault is another influential European cultural theorist.

Still another important cultural theorist to influence American studies is Jean-Francois Lyotard because of his work in defining post-modernism. Lyotard calls po-mo “more of a sensibility than a time period,” citing “delight in difference, self-reflexivity, detached irony, and ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’” as parts of the definition (619). Even though po-mo isn’t officially a time period, it still does “stem from the modern sense of living in a ‘pose’ period characterized by the exhaustion of modernism and Marxism as ways of understanding and interpreting experience” that includes “the rejection among deconstructionists and post-structuralists of the ‘grand master narratives’ emanating from the Enlightenment” (619).

Other European theories to play important roles are Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althursserian structuralist-Marxism, British Cultural Studies, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and post modernism. Theorists like French feminist Luce Irigaray and Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin also have helped to define American Studies (620).

Most important to know about these theorists is that they have brought about “acrimonious debates,” including “an anti-intellectual dismissal of new methods and approaches” on the one hand of “deconstruction and post-structuralism” (620) and on the other hand “a reification of theory into a ‘magic bullet’ that can by itself position scholars outside the oppressions and exploitations of history” (621). So, the result, according to Lipsitz, is both sides misunderstand each other. In his view, the solution is to define culture broadly enough that it makes sense to use the meaning of competing theories in the ways that best make sense.

Lipsitz says that “one of cultural theory’s greatest contributions has been to challenge the division between texts and experience” (621). He cites Stuart Hall’s goal of cultural criticism as “the reproduction of the concrete in thought, ‘not to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality’” (621).

Lipsitz also looks at American studies historically. He breaks with the authors I’ve read so far who discuss the contested issues in American studies in that, while he sees that the myth and symbol school of theorists “served conservative ends,” Lipsitz still thinks that they were “asking critical questions about the relationship between the social construction of cultural categories and power relations in American society” (622). So in other words they did not completely ignore the politics of power. Lipsitz cites Giles Gunn’s thought that the work of the myth and symbol scholars “was both diagnostic and corrective because they recognized the interpenetration of symbolism and semiotics with power and privilege” (622).

Lipsitz also addresses Gene Wise’s review of the field article (1979) that I already discussed (which argues “for a new American Studies”). As far as Lipsitz is concerned, European cultural theory can be useful in developing that new American Studies because it “inevitably leads it toward cultural practices beyond literature, especially to popular culture” (623). Cultural theory applies well to this inquiry because Cultural theorists are “trained to see literary texts as ‘multivocal’ and ‘dialogic’” so they “find rich objects of study within the vernacular forms and generic recombinations collectively authored within commercial culture” (623). The European cultural theorists apply especially well to popular culture because they apply well when it is “difficult to distinguish the text from its conditions of creation, distribution, and reception” (624).

Lipsitz also recommends that “For many years, American Studies has needed more explorations into popular culture grounded in political economy and guided by theoretical critique” (626). The contemporary world makes the study of popular culture all the more urgent. Indeed, “the work of artists from seemingly marginal communities calls attention to unprecedented opportunities for serious study of popular culture, for explorations into politics and economics, and for renewed theoretical inquiry. Fourteen-year-olds with digital samplers may not know Jacques Lacan from Chaka Khan, but they can access the entire inventory of recorded world music with the flick of a switch” (636-637).

Further, the boundaries are changing, much as Jay Mechling predicted they would. Lipsitz says, “The musics of Laurie Anderson and David Byrne presume that artifacts of popular culture circulate within the same universe as artifacts of ‘high’ culture, and they build their dramatic force from the juxtaposition of these seemingly in compatible discourses” (627). It doesn’t stop there, though. What’s even more interesting is the way that the artists have begun to assume our expertise in popular culture. Lipsitz gives the example of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as a popular culture production that anticipates “viewer competence in the codes of popular culture as well as the concerns of contemporary cultural criticism” (627).

One of the most interesting points Lipsitz makes has to do with the inter-connectedness of “post-modernism in literature and the visual arts” with that in the electronic mass media. He says that “one might argue that the most sophisticated cultural theorists in America are neither critics nor scholars, but rather artists—writers Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko […] or musicians Laurie Anderson, Prince, David Byrne, and Tracy Chapman” because “their work revolves around the multiple perspectives, surprising juxtapositions, subversions of language, and self-reflexivities explored within cultural theory” (627).

Lipsitz’s article is important not just because of the connections he makes between European cultural studies and the field of American studies. He also makes a case for the importance of the study of popular culture, proving that popular culture is not a frivolous topic, but rather an important way to see parts of American culture.

“The Social Construction of Reality:

Implications for Future Directions in American Studies.”

Gordon Kelly

Kelly's article is a review of Peter Bergman and Thomas Luckman’s book, which advances a sociological theory of knowledge. Kelly’s discussion of the topic is fairly unreadable. He explains that Bergman and Luckman wrote a book that is important for the future of American Studies because they deal with the idea of “social reality” or “those pancultural processes in and through which the members of any given human society construct and maintain their world” (49). Sociology of knowledge considers the question of “the subjective meaning-complex of action,” which refers to the idea of considering “social facts as things” (52).
The ideas Kelly is excited about become somewhat clearer when he brings in James Spradley’s notion that “The richest settings for discovering the rules of a society are those where novices of one sort or another are being instructed in appropriate behavior” (54). So here it’s easier to see the connection between sociology and the study of cultures.

Kelly connects the study of literature specifically with Bergman and Luckman’s book by saying that the book helps us to think of literature in its “creation, publication, distribution, consumption, evaluation, and selective transmission—as an important institution for the production of meaning and the maintenance of social reality in society” (54). So this will help us to understand literary criticism better as well as look at “the canonical figures of American literature as symbolic appropriation of ‘heroic’ lives” (54).

Elaine Tyler May’s 1995 Address

to the American Studies Association

May's speech about the organization’s “radical roots” is important because she debunks the misconception that the founders of the field were a bunch of stodgy old white men with conservative views. She approaches the misconception itself from a myth and symbol perspective, saying that the “creation myth” of the American Studies field is based on the Oedipal story, that those mythical 1960s graduate students had to kill off their “alleged fathers to create a new, oppositional scholarship” (179). May found out by attending a reunion of some of the 1940s and 1950s University of Minnesota American Studies scholars that the prevailing stereotypes about the field were wrong.

In fact, some of the founders were anarchists, communists, and radicals in ways we didn’t know about. As a result, May decided to organize her speech around the “powerful Marxist tradition” in American studies. It wasn’t “a typical Marxism,” but instead, “derived from three distinct schools […]: Karl Marx, Leo Marx, and Groucho Marx” (181). The first two are obvious, but she added the third because American studies people study fun things like sex and humor.

She said that the Karl Marx “school” described radical scholars of the 1930s and 1940s who were attentive to “the struggle between capital and labor” as well as “the tradition of politically engaged scholarship that motivated many in the field to pursue their craft” (182). These scholars were sensitive to “class divisions,” as well as “the ill effects of industrial class divisions.” Though they might not have said so publicly, they were political activists. May includes F.O. Matthiesen among the Marxists, admitting that his inclusion might be a surprise to those who wrote him off as someone who selected only white, protestant New England men to represent the American canon. In fact, though, Matthiesen was politically radical, and his interest in Moby Dick arose from his perception that the novel had anti-capitalist leanings (182).

May says it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that to be an American studies scholar at all at the time was a radical act, since universities viewed American literature as not worthy of study. So Matthiesen’s brave work, to use a cliché, put American literature on the map.

Other scholars of this era contributed to our knowledge in ways that don’t necessarily fit with the Oedipal myth we’ve subscribed to of late. I was especially interested to read about historian Mary Beard, who I knew nothing about. Her most “famous classic,” according to May, is the 1946 Women as Force in History. But in the 1930s she wrote Laughing Their Way: Women’s Humor in America. I don’t have that book on any bibliography—and it needs to be! Another writer of the time was C.L.R. James was a scholar from Trinidad, a black man who wrote about American culture, though his work was only recently published. Very interesting. May also mentions DuBois and Constance Rourke as writers from this period. All these people, she says, “understood culture not as something manufactured by elites, but as emanating from the people in the form of songs, jokes, stories, movies, and radio shows, catering to a diverse audience” (185). All this is against the assumption about the thinkers of this time.

About the “Consensus Critics of the 1950s,” or “Leo Marxism,” Mary says these are the myth and symbol scholars. She explains that one of the key influences on the thinking of the time was the cold war. The only safe critical stance for American Studies scholars was New Criticism, because discussing theory or texts in historical context ran the risk of inciting “the postwar frenzy of homophobia and anticommunism” (188). It was difficult for these left-leaning scholars—especially F.O. Matthiesen and Newton Arvin, both of whom were gay (188). May’s point is that avoiding the topics of gender, sexuality, and any sort of activism was a political and professional necessity. While they accepted “the consensus view,” they “identified the national cultural and political paralysis but saw no way out of it” (188). May goes on to argue about this group’s “myopia” and its inability to recognize its own creativity. I think that she was expecting an awful lot for people who had to protect their lives.

Finally, about the field since the 1960s, “Groucho Marxism.” This refers to “the recognition of popular culture as a major force in American life, a force created largely by marginalized Americans who used it not only to express, but also to create, resistance to the dominant culture” (189). I like the way she expressed that—I haven’t heard it said that way, in terms of the subversive part.

Anyway, May says that after the political upheaval of the 1960s, scholars started to pay more attention to the lives of people who had been marginalized before. So of course women, blacks, gays, and others began to be included. But also social class started to be a concern. Even the definition of culture changed “from a set of unifying myths, values, and beliefs to a contested terrain involving struggles over power” (191).


The newest challenge is “what holds American society together” (191). In other words, is there a common America that we all share? Is there such a thing as “national unity” (191)? There’s a tension between “cohesion” and “fragmentation” (191). So these questions are now guiding the discipline—rather than the ones of the original group.

Anyway, May ends with the argument that these new questions make the discipline even more important. People are afraid of the fragmentation. There’s great comfort in the conservatism of a single, definable unit we can call America. It’s alarming to people who grew up here—especially those my parents’ age (or ones who have lived all their lives in culturally homogenous places) to think that their America is no longer cohesive. We sound so cynical as teachers when we tell them that it was never cohesive.

Jay Mechling's Grid for the Study of Culture
Realms of Culture:	Elite	Popular	Folk
Rhetorical Form:
Landscape	Natural history museum	Yosemite tour	Front yards Back yards
Built Environment (private)	Frank Lloyd Wright house	Tract house`	Log cabin
Cuisine	Haute cuisine	Fast food	Family foodways
Clothing	Haute couture	Levi's	Folk costume
Photography	Alfred Stieglitz	Look magazine	Family snapshot album
Visual art	Georgia O’Keefe exhibit	Advertising billboard	Quilts
Narrative	Willa Cather Novel	Harlequin romance	Tales and urban legend
Dramatic production	David Mamet play	Soap opera	Campfire skits
Music	Charles Ives, symphony No. 2	Bruce Springsteen	Fraternity and sorority songs
Game	Polo	Professional Baseball	Boy Scout Games

Jay Mechling’s essay, “An American Culture Grid, with Texts,” doesn’t sound like a page-turner, but to American literature teachers and American studies scholars like me, it certainly is. The title brings to mind a story in The Chronicle I read a few years back about the trouble scholars have with titling their scholarly works. The more artful titles sound better because they’re catchier, but the problem is that if the titles aren’t descriptive, they’re hard for researchers to locate (and for librarians to catalog, presumably). So, I guess Jay Mechling wasn’t taking any chances. Don’t let the title fool you.

He begins with a wonderful anecdote he brings in from Gregory Bateson’s 1979 essay, “The Patterns Which Connect.” Bateson tells of the time the computer programmer is at the end of his rope in trying to calculate whether a computer could ever possibly think like a human. Finally, the programmer poses the question to the computer itself and after hours of processing, the computer finally returns the result: “That reminds me of a story…” The allegory is meant to remind us “to think like a human being is to think in terms of stories.” That reminds me of Elie Wiesel’s statement, one of my favorite of all time: “God created man because he loved the stories.” People think narrative-ly. This happens with students a lot—they can’t make an argument. It always turns into a story.

And…but…so…Mechling wants to point out that culture isn’t so difficult to understand because t’s just a collection of stories. No “fancy definitions” are required when we think in terms of stories. So though this idea may seem simple, it really isn’t. Mechling’s “working definition of culture” emphasizes putting “the social act of interpretation at the center of knowledge.”

Mechling’s wanting to have a less formal definition of culture is important because it reflected a trend of the “intellectual paradigm” of the time (the late 1980s), where theorists in many disciplines agreed that “meanings emerge only through the act of interpretation, a collective act ‘determined’ contextually, rhetorically, institutionally, generically, politically, and historically” (this idea came from ethnologist James Clifford).

So Mechling’s less formal idea of culture as a collection of stories is important, he says, because it “directs our attention towards those theorists and critics who put human narration at the center of their study of culture.” Here, he refers to Geertz and Clifford in anthropology, Richard Bauman in folklore, and Yi-fu Tuan in geography.

Another reason Mechling thinks of culture as a collection of stories is critical is that doing so expands our idea of what can be a story. Bateson says “stories must have relevance and context […] they must cohere internally […] and with each other.” Mechling agrees and agrues that if we use stories in the study of culture, then we “approach any behavior or artifacts of behavior and ask ‘what is the story which this small text is a part? A handshake is a text to be located within its story” just as any other artifact. It’s interesting to think it of this way, and he’s right. The idea isn’t over simplified at all. From the handshake we move to the larger elements of culture to the more expected elements.

The study of culture through its stories also works because “location” is important in stories. This is important to my work! Anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace “distinguishes between two models of culture, one that sees culture as a mechanism for ‘the replication of uniformity’ and another that sees culture as a mechanism for ‘the organization of diversity.’” Wallace prefers the idea of the “organization of diversity, since he sees the way culture is an organization of people with “private cultures” (or what Mechling calls “their own ‘stories’”) brought together in the “public culture.” So what is interesting is that Mechling says “this means people need not ‘believe’ the public stories so long as they are able to act ‘as if’ they believe those stories. This is where “we find the ‘mythologies’ of the civilization, the grand, relatively enduring, public stories that seem to provide the largest ‘symbolic canopies’ for events within the culture.” To exemplify, Mechling cites Ronald Reagan’s reference to the “western pioneer myth” when he spoke to the country after the space shuttle exploded—Mechling calls that “an example of American mythology used to repair damage to our ‘sacred canopy’ by the failure of our technology.”

What’s interesting here, I think, is the idea that we don’t necessarily have to believe the myths of the public culture. It’s a poignant idea at the time that I’m reading and writing about Mechling, when it was bittersweet to learn that the majority of my countrymen and women seem to want to persist in bombing the shit out of Mideastern countries that our president profits from, making laws based on fundamentalist Christian dogma, and (specifically) flocking to the polls to prevent gay people from marrying each other. The majority of people accept voting for a president who can’t form a coherent sentence, who can’t define a simple term that he must use in making decisions that affect our lives and potentially our deaths. Apparently, the public culture is one I completely do not understand. What Mechling says is that one may be more an adherent of one of the private cultures and not even believe in those public culture myths … as long as we go along acting as though we do. I guess acting as though we do means just continuing to live in the U.S. and forgetting that a monkey runs the free world. Hmmm….(writing this will test the hypothesis that his second presidency will eradicate free speech: friends, if I disappear, or if my $2 in assets disappear in the next days, you’ll know why.)

Back to Mechling’s definitions of culture: Keeping in mind this “narrative approach to culture,” we are reminded that “there is a contest of stories in the public sphere.” So this follows naturally from what I said above. Mechling stresses that “Culture is not a matter of consensus but of conflict.” That’s an important idea. No collection of white men gathers in a room every year to define American culture. Instead, “the dynamic of culture lies in the contest of narratives in the public realm. And because it is a contest, power matters. Some people’s stories have a better chance of becoming the official public stories than do others.” Mechling goes on to discuss practical applications of this idea. So whenever we see conflict around us, we can think of it as a quarrel between two stories. Mechling says, “Battles over the architectural redevelopment of a neighborhood, for example, are contests between two or more stories the neighborhood wants to tell about itself.”

Another idea Mechling brings in is Levi-Strauss’s notion that “a myth (any story for our purposes) derives its meanings from both its diachronic and synchronic structures).” What? I have read and defined these words 100 times, but I never can distinguish them. One means structurally and the other means over time….but which is which? Mechling uses the analogy of a piece of music. If we discuss the melody, he says, then we refer to the “diachronic structure” because it’s “the temporal sequence of the notes,” and that’s where the meaning of the song lies. Similarly, in literature diachronic would refer to plot and character. On the other hand, a diachronic structure of a song involves its lyrics—or the part of a story where we see actions by the characters.
Moving right along, though, Mechling finally takes his grid out and shows it to the world. His point by organizing literature in terms of elite, popular, and folk status is to show that determinations about the status of its elements change, depending on the tides of the culture.

Mechling spends some time distinguishing among elite, popular, and folk cultures. Elite culture is what most people think of when they think of university study. In this case, “stories […] are told by people enjoying relatively higher levels of income, status, power, and education” for audiences like themselves. These are the people with “the resources to create institutions” like schools, libraries, museums, ballets, orchestras, so that these elite art forms can be shared. When people describe elite art forms, they use the terms “excellence” and “quality.” “Authorship” in this form is extremely important, so copyright is an issue, and “a text in elite culture can lose all its ‘value’ if proven to be a forgery.” Value has to do with the “culture’s judgment of creativity.”

In contrast, popular culture is the entertainment of the masses, the middle-class. Mechling says in “this realm, relatively anonymous makers produce stories mass-produced and conveyed hrough public media for consumption by mass audiences.” Rather than valuing originality, in this form, “convention and formula [… make] authorship rather irrelevant, and many makers of mass-mediated culture work under pseudonyms.” The terms used in elite culture, “excellence” and “quality,” don’t apply here, though I would argue that Mechling is too judgmental in this case. The quality and excellence of products for the masses may be different. He goes on to say that the emphasis instead is on valuing each product as “new,” improved,” and “advanced.” That sounds like consumer culture!
Now, folk cultures appear “in the relatively small, face-to-face groups in American society.” hese are the more traditional art forms, “forms and contents that define the meaning of life” for whatever group is at hand. Authorship here is not important at all because it is unidentifiable—or as Mechling says, “we might say that the ‘author’ of a tradition is the folk community itself.” The productions might be “jokes, legends quilts,” and “the contents and values of the stories tend to be traditional and conservative.” Unlike in the elite and popular cultures, the value lies in “the process of creation,” rather than in the product.

The interesting part comes when we try to add other American texts (with the definition of texts opened to include any American cultural artifact). When we do, we see that the texts move across the grid, between and back-and-forth between columns over time. Mechling explains, “The examples multiply. Elite culture ‘borrows’ constantly from both the popular and folk realms, as in Andy Warhol’s painting […]. Popular culture has a voracious appetite for materials it can convert to marketable commodities, borrowing elite art to mass produce ‘art-prints’ in poster form for every person’s wall, or borrowing adolescent urban legends to make teenage horror films.” Also, “children’s folk culture […] is filled with parodies of adult popular and elite culture.” When we see how these texts might move in the grid, we can see “the interconnectedness and dynamism of culture.”

The way Mechling sees it, the grid really ought to have four dimensions. The third dimension "introduces the notion of pluralism, of many cultures participating in the public contest between stories.” Here he’s talking about “gender, ethnicity (and race), social class, region, and age.” So it may not be enough to put “soap operas” on the grid under popular culture. We may have to ask questions in terms of that notion of pluralism before we can understand how the text fits in the grid.
The fourth dimension is “mythologies, the relatively enduring stories that run through the grid, connecting disparate cells into one coherent story.” This dimension allows students and teachers of American studies to make connections among cells by using “basic myths in American civilization.”

The grid is useful, as I mentioned before, because a whole course, a project, class session, or just the interpretation of a single text can be based on the grid. In the latter case, “The student begins with a single text, a sort of cultural puzzle, and the assignment is to interpret the text in all its contexts. The grid helps locate the text as a form of discourse within a certain realm of culture, but the grid also leads the student to consider if and how the text moves. How is the text ‘determined’ by certain conventions, and where does it appear in the contest of interpretations? What have gender, race, class, region, and age have to do with this text? In short, what ‘story’ makes the best sense of this text and how is that story related to other stories?” Mechling ends with the point that the grid “encourages comparative cultural studies” because it would be easy to compare documents “from other cultural contexts” as well, given the open nature of the structure.

I found Mechling’s article to be incredibly useful. It made me rethink what I’ll be doing in class Tuesday in American literature. The grid makes so much sense. Talking about what onstitutes elements of the culture is so arcane, most students simple glaze over at the most basic of conversations (a suspicion I confirmed with the midterm). Maybe this will concretize the information!

Love & Death in the American Novel (350-450)

We’re back to Leslie Fiedler. This partis where it gets interesting, or at least where he starts making some comments I can appreciate—and which were extremely bold for 1960. In this section on “Achievement & Frustration,” he takes up a number of themes and examines them in the context of a number of important American novels.

One theme Fiedler examines is “the irreparable breach between black and white” which we’re supposed to believe is “healed by love” in America (353). Fiedler explains it so wonderfully cynically when he says it “is the Southerner’s dream, the American dream of guilt remitted by the abused Negro, who, like the abused mother, opens his arms crying, ‘Lawsy, I’s might glad to git you back agin, honey’” when we come running back (353). So true. We noted that same hypocrisy in my American literature class in reading Olaudah Equiano’s account as well, that horrific love of the abuser on the part of the slave—though in his book it’s all the more horrific because we know for sure that Equiano is sincere in his writing since at the time he’s a free man. As I write this, though, I wonder. Frederick Douglass says he never once gave a straight answer about whether he was well treated as a slave because he knew it was never safe to trust a white person. Maybe Equiano was just conditioned the same way and it came out sounding like an abused person. What am I thinking? That’s exactly what an abused person sounds like.

Fiedler talks about life for Huck and Jim on the raft, that Huck’s statement is so important: “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft” (353). The only freedom—for Jim at least—can be in this imaginary free space, “a gift from the non-Christian powers of nature” (353).

Another way Fiedler analyzes Huckleberry Finn, though, is to consider the symbolic elements of Jim & Huck’s relationship; Fiedler argues that it is less like father and son than it is like spouses: “Only marriage is a relationship complicated enough to stand for so complicated and ambiguous a cluster of meanings” (354). They understand each other so deeply that father and son just won’t do.

This relationship is termed “hierogamos,” which I just learned is defined as a sacred union or marriage of sorts. Apparently (from the internet hits I got on the word) it’s a religious term. Anyway, according to Fiedler, three conditions must be met in order for there to be true hierogamos: “the longed-for spouse, the questing lover, and the sacred setting” (354). By the time he’s reached this detail, we’re past the discussion of Twain, but we can easily gather the sacred setting of the river and the raft for Huck and Jim, though I’m not precisely sure how to categorize the longed-for spouse and the questing lover in Huck Finn. Fiedler’s example is to speak generally of the “American earthly paradise” as the West, whether it is in movie Westerns, or in Hemingway’s western frontier of Africa.

Fiedler uses this discussion of the West to move into a closer analysis of Hemingway’s work. He’s actually considered some of Hemingway before, but in this case, he is talking about the exclusion of women, about the love of men for each other. He touches on the cleverness of Hemingway’s story, “Big Two-hearted River,” which really is interesting because of its “double-barreled” (as Fiedler calls it) quality. There’s the evident text about the fishing and then the subtext about his choosing between fishing and prayer. But it’s incidental statements Fiedler makes that truly charm me: “What Hemingway’s emphasis on the ritual murder of fish conceals is that it is not so much the sport as the occasion for immersion which is essential to the holy marriage of males. Water is the symbol of the barrier between everywhere in our fiction” (357). I love it that Fiedler makes fun of the fishing (in a serous and true way) and calls the stories for the homoerotic, testosterone-soaked events that they are.

Fiedler’s real point, though, obviously is that in “Big Two-hearted River” as well as in several other American stories Huck Finn and Moby Dick, we see strong imagery of “baptism and transfiguration” (358). I guess that shouldn’t be especially surprising in our protestant society.

A little later, Fiedler talks about one kind of love that does appear in an American novel. In this case it’s a love triangle, but it’s an “unnatural love triangle,” found in Saul Bellow’s 1947 novel, The Victim, “where it assumes a peculiarly American mutilated form, being, in effect, a triangle without an apex or with only a hypothetical one, which is to say a triangle without a woman!” (364). Fiedler goes on to say that not much of Bellow’s work has female characters, other than fantasies; instead “his world is a world of men in boarding houses, men whose wives are ill, or have left them, or have gone off on vacation” (364). So that’s one form of love in the American novel.

Anyway, back to the black-white issue, Fiedler mentions that psychological research proves (supposedly) that “in dreams of white men […] the forbidden erotic object tends to be represented by a colored [sic] man” (365). We have racial tension that isn’t evident in European literature. The dynamic between European sidekicks and rivals is different. We have Leporello and Don Juan and Caliban vs. Prospero. But Fiedler says Americans are a bunch of “Calibans […] fugitive slaves” (368). Our relationships are confused, he says, because our country didn’t begin with automatic hierarchical and aristocratic social distinctions. This lack of social distinction has made relationships in novels confusing, even with slaves. The result has been the distinction of the blonde, blue-eyed Nordic people taking de facto, Nordic hegemonic, mythical social control (368).

But the conflict with races persists. Fiedler says that when we are faced with deep conflicts, we’re inclined to turn to legend for the answers. If we do that, we might falsely believe that “our dark-skinned beloved will rescue us from the confusion and limitations of a society which excludes him” (390). And if we listen to the writers we’ve been talking about, it’s easy to see how we might be convinced, “honey.” We erroneously think it will be as if our black friend “knew our offense against him were only symbolic” (391). Wisely, Fiedler ends this chapter with a quotation from Jim: “It’s too good for true, honey. Too good for true” (391).

Chapter XII. “The Blackness of Darkness: Edgar Allan Poe and the Development of the Gothic.” Here we learn more about Poe, who I knew has much confused information written about him—but I didn’t know that he was party to the disinformation. It turns out that he enjoyed spreading incorrect information about himself and seemingly hired a twisted executor for his will on purpose—and true to expectation that executor fouled things up so that it took a few generations of scholars to figure out what really happened.

We’ve already read that in the gothic novel especially, incest is a recurring theme. In Poe’s stories and his novel, Gordon Pym, we should find it perhaps more disturbing than usual, though, since Poe married his thirteen year-old cousin and apparently watched her waste away from some unnamed disease. He appeared to have a taste for young family members. Fiedler refers to “the gothic mode” in the context of Poe as a “form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness” (424). That is one form of grotesqueness that he didn’t have to parody, apparently.

The reasons for this chapter title are very interesting, though, and they relate in several ways to the material. Obviously, the gothic material is dark by definition. In addition, though, because Gordon Pym and Melville’s “Benito Cereno” were among the first literary efforts to include black characters, these works have been marginalized, or kept in the dark for some time (400).

Another book that takes up race very directly is Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which the slave bears the child of her master, and nurses both her own baby as well as the mistress’s baby. Since both are so blonde, they are hard to distinguish between, and when the slave learns her baby is to be sold, she exchanges the two. Fiedler’s analysis here is extremely interesting. He says, “Twain makes clear that there is in the South no absolute distinction of black and white, merely an imaginary line—crossed and recrossed by the white man’s lust” (406). Ultimately, Twain suggests “that all sons of the South, whether counted in the census as black or white are symbolically the offspring of black mothers and white fathers, products of a spiritual miscegenation at the very least, with compounds the evil of slavery with an additional evil” (407). That’s powerful rhetoric.

I’m struck again and again at how original these ideas were when Fiedler wrote them. It’s becoming clearer as I get towards the end of the book how much he influenced thought of the second half of the twentieth century.

Love & Death in the American Novel, continued

It wasn’t until Henry James, says Fiedler, that we had a different kind of American woman in the novel. James wrote of the “Dark Lady-Fair Girl archetype,” mixing that together with “the myth of the American in Europe” (300).

Fiedler points out that actually both Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne tended to mix up that innocent, sentimental blonde heroine with characteristics of women they really knew (301). He gives evidence throughout the chapter—in fact, it’s kind of perverse stuff.

James also mixed that sentimental heroin with “the necrophiliac titillation” of “identifying the immaculate virgin with the girl dying or dead,” for example in Daisy Miller and The Wings of a Dove (301). But it’s interesting to note that James tends to confuse the heroine with the Dark Lady in his work, resulting in “ambiguous undertones” (302).

Nonetheless, Fiedler says that James essentially views women as innocent, which is different from Mellville, who implies that once a woman is sexually involved, she turns into a “Dark Lady” (306). Here Fiedler discusses Melville’s 1849 book, Mardi, which I know nothing about, but I should probably learn of, since he calls it a “mock-documentary,” saying that Fiedler had written it that way in response to criticism of the supposed truth of Typee and Omoo (306). So, whatever the origin, it would be an interesting interlude in my dissertation chapter on Christopher Guest!

Anyway, Mardi is the only one of Melville’s books where a woman comes in, floating in literally on a raft and “disrupting utterly its probability and coherence” (307). Fiedler also notes that Mardi is a honeymoon book, since Melville wrote it on his own honeymoon. In a very kind tribute to his wife, he pictures the groom in the novel “with a millstone attached to his neck, so disguised with flowers that he can scarcely recognize it” (308). She must have been thrilled.

So it began to happen in the 19th century that the “cult of the pure Woman” started to fall apart (309). The Good Good girl stereotype starts to be challenged. Henry James’s Daisy is “unequivocally innocent,” Fiedler says (310). But she is also “the Good Bad girl, only the Good Bad Girl…an improbably sister to the hard-riding, hard-shooting sometimes cigar-smoking, heroines of the dime novel…the Good Bad Girl, with her heart of truest gold beneath the roughest of exteriors….a living embodiment of the American faith that evil is appearance only” (310).

However, it takes another, later Daisy to lead the transition into a more modern character, the “first notable anti-virgin of our fiction, the prototype of the Fair Goddess as bitch in which our twentieth century fiction abounds” (311). It is interesting to note that by the time Fitzgerald writes this character, he is free to transpose “the mythic roles and values of male and female,” which, I infer from what Fiedler goes on to say, the only reason Daisy can go on to be such a powerful person (312).

Fitzgerald got a lot of notice for writing sex scenes in his novels, but really, for him, “love was essentially yearning and frustration,” and really none of it was “consummated genital love….though he identified himself with that sexual revolution which in the ‘20s thought of as their special subject” (314).

Hemingway’s another story entirely. I knew I never liked him. According to Fiedler, he’s “addicted to describing the sex act” because it’s “the symbolic center of his work” (315). But although he seems to want to describe sex a lot, it’s pretty hard to effect, since there are “no women in his books.” Furthermore, especially in the first few books, the way he depicts the act is “intentionally brutal” and “in the later ones unintentionally comic” (315). Fiedler thinks it’s because Hemingway never can quite “succeed in making his females human” (315). Fiedler goes so far as to say that in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “Hemingway has written the most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel” (315), apparently because “it is a give-away—a moment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his fiction” (315).

Specifically, women for him are a problem. As characters, they fall into a few types. The Dark Lady types, who are Indians or Latinas with dark eyes and skin and are “neither wife nor mother,” he treats as “mindless, soft, subservient; painless devices for extracting seed without human engagement” (317). By comparison, the “Fair Lady” types have blonde hair and blue eyes. A Fair Lady “gets pregnant and wants a wedding, or uses her sexual allure to assert her power…[she] is a destroyer of men” (317).

Hemingway has “American bitches” too, “symbols of Home and Mother, as remembered by the boy who could never forgive Mama” (317). He was such an angry bastard! Interestingly, Fiedler says, he was fonder of an androgynous woman, “women who seem as much boy as girl” (318). He describes Brett’s complaint about her lover wanting her to grow her hair out: “To yield up her cropped head would be to yield up her emancipation from female servitude, to become feminine…and this Brett cannot do” (318).

Faulkner is another member of the he-man woman hater’s club. His is the “fear of the castrating woman and the dis-ease with sexuality.” Fiedler captures Faulkner’s sentiments so perfectly that it justifies a lengthy quote:

he reminds us (again and again!) that men are helpless in the hands of their mothers, wives, and sisters; that females do not think but proceed from evidence to conclusions by paths too devious for males to follow; that they possess neither morality nor honor; that they are capable, therefore, of betrayal without qualm or quiver of guilt but also of inexplicable loyalty; that they enjoy an occasional beating at the hands of their men; that they are unforgiving and without charity to members of their own sex…that they use their sexuality with cold calculation to achieve their inscrutable ends, etc. (319).

These last several pages, I have to say, are the ones that converted me to a Fiedler-fanhood. Earlier I took issue with his assessment of the romantic sentimental women writers. But now I respect his opinion. They had to be ghastly, because he’s dead-on about Faulkner and Hemingway. I particularly dislike Faulkner because his characters seem so flat—the women, I guess are the ones I would be likeliest to relate to. They’re subhuman. It’s so insulting; it’s horrible. Fiedler discusses Salinger later, and Salinger does his own objectification and has his own disconnect with women. But Faulkner is a palpable hatred. Hemingway’s is subtler, not so easily observed, but it is there. So I respect Fiedler for being so observant in 1960 and naming that.

Anyway, we see these types begin to blend and become more complicated when “the archetype of the snow maiden as gold-digger, the bad blonde takes over” in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Anita Loos). Really, what happens is the Dark Lady takes over and becomes a platinum blonde (324). They’re good girls and bad girls all mixed together, Good Bad Girls.

The evolution continues. Fiedler claims that “the most memorable and terrible woman in an American novel of the 1930s is a portrait of the blonde movie actress, a kind of ersatz Jean Harlow,” meaning Faye Greener from Day of the Locust. We’ll see. I’ll be reading that later. He says even West’s more docile women characters tend to enrage him. It’s rather humbling to read this—humbling to be female.

Really, once American literature undoes the sentimental heroine, it’s a cynical spiral down from there. We hear about the “enjoyment” sentimental heroine Scarlett O’Hara gets from committing murder (326) and the “anti-mother,” Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, who takes pleasure in beating her children (330).

Fiedler says that the only place the true Good Good girl remains is in the young girl—like in Salinger’s Sibyl Carpenter or Esme (332). Carson McCullers “takes advantage” of the “homosexual implications” of the tomboyish Good Good girl; then again she’s allowed (333). It takes William Faulkner, though, to truly pervert the good girl. It’s not even the Good Bad Girl so much as the Good Good girl who in actuality is bad—like Judith in Absalom! Absalom! (333).

Next is Chapter XI, “The Failure of Sentiment and the Evasion of Love.”

I love Fiedler’s sweeping statements. Here’s a good one: “The failure of the Sentimental Love Religion and the rejection of the Protestant Virgin are the two most critical and baffling facts of the history of the novel in America” (336). In other words, sentimentalism existed and created an expectation that women would always be pure and innocent…but of course women can never remain that way if they are to marry and bear children (and become human!). So, ultimately, says Fiedler, “marriage dismays the American writer” (336). And sex outside of marriage is treated “like an offense against the mother” (338).

But what’s really interesting is that Fiedler says there’s “finally no heterosexual solution which the American psyche finds completely satisfactory, no imagined or real consummation between man and woman found worthy of standing in our fiction for the healing of the breach between consciousness and unconsciousness, reason and impulse, society and nature” (338). What is he saying, then? “Heterosexual” is an interesting adjective there. Is it acting as a qualifier for the whole statement? In other words, is he saying that the only remedy for this breach, the only consummation the American psyche will find satisfactory will be Homosexual? That simply can’t be. Leslie Fiedler surely wasn’t around for this week’s elections to see the anti-gay laws passed in many states (I say sarcastically). Seriously, though, I’m not sure what he’s getting at here.

Ah, but it becomes clear a little later when he describes a certain pattern in our fiction, “an archetype at work, a model story,” evident in works such as Leatherstocking Tales, The Sun Also Rises, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, and the like. Fiedler argues gently of the “implications of the homoerotic fable” these stories typify, which ironically is so “opposed…to almost everything in which middle-class society pretends to believe” (349). The only way we can understand this phenomenon is “by assuming an unconscious marginal rejection of the values of that society on the part of all or most of its members” (349). So our writers unconsciously reject our deepest values.

If you think about it, that’s a profound split—and one with some interesting cultural implications. Fiedler describes this curious values rejection, but it’s one—like most subtexts—that’s obvious only to an educated few. The rest of the world reads the stories for Huck’s escapades or for Natty Bumppo’s adventures. The literati or the intelligentsia gets that and that “marginal rejection of values.” Maybe that’s where we become that East Coast liberal detached media, the part of America that’s become so detached from America we don’t even feel like we speak the same language anymore. Could this be part of it?

Nonetheless, one thing is for sure and that is that the homoerotic tone is most decidedly and undercurrent, emphasis on the under, because, as Fiedler says, “for a man to love death is not nearly so suspect in bourgeois America as for him to love another man” (349).

Fiedler, Little Eva, and Sentimentalism

Fiedler writes about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character, Little Eva, saying that a sentimental, pure little girl like Eva is destined to be dishonored, since in our Protestant society she doesn’t have the option of the convent and the “role of the old maid in our culture is hopelessly comic—wife, mother, or widow, tinged no matter how slightly with the stain of sexuality, suffered perhaps rather than sought, but, in any case, there!” (265). That’s the state of female sexuality in Stowe’s novels.

Another consideration Fiedler gives is the distinction between the “Good Good Boy” and the “Good Bad Boy” in Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Fiedler says the “Good Good Boy does what his mother must pretend that she wants him to do: obey, conform” (265). On the other hand, the “Good Bad Boy does what she really wants him to do: deceive, break her heart a little, be forgiven” (266). We see Becky Thatcher (as a “Good Good Girl”) chastise Tom, but Fiedler reminds us that she really means it “as an endearment” (266). Women like Becky are fated to suffer because they “love boys precisely because they play hooky, cuss, steal in a mild sort of a way, dream of violence” (266). How true! We complain because this behavior (real life) strikes as us something new at the turn of the NEXT century. Could it be that the literature of the turn of the LAST century somehow influences us, that the way love and death are portrayed in the American novel really makes a difference on the way we act now?

Anyway, Fiedler says that because Twain seems too be writing “as a boy,” he seems to try to avoid scenes of “physical passion, refusing the Don Juan role traditional for European writers” (267). He relaxes other archetypal characters as well, so the “diabolic outcast” character of the European Faustian story becomes in Twain’s hands a “little devil” (267).
Fiedler says it’s hard to trace the origins of the “fear of sex” in the American novel. It may be “fear of sex” itself, the immaturity of the country, the fact that the topic was forbidden, or whatever. The point is that indeed it did become a forbidden topic, and that sense of the illicit traveled to the novel.

A lengthy discussion of Huckleberry Finn follows, where Fiedler talks about Twain’s purposes. Interestingly, he mentions that HF is not a sequel to Tom Sawyer, but rather an “alternative version of the same theme” (276). In both books, death surprises the child characters. Both require the characters to “escape to an island,” though the results of the time spent on the island vary (276). Also, in both “there is a terrorized flight from a threatening Satantic figure, who also stands outside the community”” (277).

Both books also have an archetypal character who acts as a savior or angel to rescue them, like Becky in Tom Sawyer and Jim in HF (278). Fiedler also says that Tom Sawyer is the first of a long line “of books intended to be read by a boy with his father” (281). In other words, it’s a good cultural marker.

Fiedler says, the “reign of sentimentalism in the American novel not only made it exceedingly difficult for our writers to portray sexual passion, but presented them as well from drawing convincing portraits of women” (288).

Fiedler, Cooper, The Cloying and the False

This is some more about Leslie Fiedler. I left off at the end of the section on Prototypes and Early Adaptations. Fiedler is still talking here about Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo. He explains that Bumppo becomes a problem for Cooper as soon as Bumpoo is moved to hero status because “what can one do with the hero who, in essence and by definition, cannot get the girl?” (200).

Natty can’t be the hero because he “is the deliverer, the rescuer, the man who arrives in the nick of time” (200). Fiedler calls him a “Moral hermaphrodite” (201) because he’s always too busy rescuing the girl. One might choose an Indian wife for him because he’s a proponent of nature and the land, but Natty is “a fanatical exponent of racial purity” (201), so that won’t work.

In the next chapter, VIII, “Clarissa in America: Toward Marjorie Morningstar,” Fiedler talks about the sentimental novels as one way the way novels of seduction persisted in America. For one thing, he points out, the whole idea of the seduction drama did persist in the “sub-form of the lowbrow Western” (film) where “the black-hatted villain manages to violate the rancher’s blood daughter” (209).

Fiedler also notices that the villain of these “latter day sentimental” stories are made by “splitting the Lovelace figure […] into two components, whatever is truly masculine and attractive being identified with the ‘good,’ and whatever is grossly phallic and unduly polished being identified with the bad” (210)

So the upper class ladies could accept that lower class women could be promiscuous, but they could not accept that same truth about their own class. Yet, they could fully understand it if lower class characters were (211).

Now if love and death in the American novel are crippled or nonexistent, then Hawthorne’s books would quickly come to mind as exceptions. The Scarlet Letter, for instance is all about sex, but, according to Fiedler, the sex is “shadowy and sterilized” (221).

Really, it wasn’t until the turn of the (nineteenth) century that “the fatal consequences of seduction” started to be the focus of the American novel, rather than when “gentility triumphed over passion” as it did in the eighteenth century (241). Fiedler says that the novels that marked this change were Stephen Crane’s 1894 Maggie—a Girl of the Streets, Mark Twain’s 1894 Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Theodore Dreiser’s 1899 Sister Carrie (241).

The next chapter, IX, is “Good Good Girls and Good Bad Boys: Clarissa as a Juvenile.” This chapter covers the “period of thirty years or more (from the end of the ‘50s until the ‘90s had begun) when the seduction story was excluded from female middlebrow fiction” (254). So this is the time when westerns, like Own Wister’s The Virginian, became popular. Fiedler calls the story “a fable, cloying and false, which projects at once the self-hatred of the genteel eastern sophisticate confronted with the primitive and his dream world where ‘men are men,’ i.e., walk with smoking guns into the arms of women who cheerfully abdicate their roles as guardians of morality” (254-255). So here’s a setup of a cultural norm.

The problem was, Fiedler says, this kind of a story wasn’t especially appealing to women readers, who actually enjoyed the long-suffering heroines of sentimental fiction (255). While that sort of sentimental female—or western—novel might seem out of date, consider writers like Irwin Shaw and James Michener. Fiedler uses them as examples of writers of “the sentimental novel of protest” because they always are “searching for new examples among the abused ‘little people’ to set in the position of the Persecuted Maiden” (258).

From here, Fiedler looks carefully at some nineteenth century novels. Specifically, he examines Uncle Tom’s Cabin, discussing that the only two marriages in the book are between “a morally lax husband and an enduring Christian wife; [and] another between a hypochondriacal, self-pitying shrew” (260). So no real love exists there. Further, the “erotic episodes” aren’t worthy of our memory in this book, either, “neither Legree’s passionate relationship with the half-mad slave girl, Casey, not his breathless, ultimately frustrated attempt to violate the fifteen-year-old-quadroon” (260).

So we are left with “the fact of brutality, the hope of forgiveness […] twin images of guilt and reconciliation that represent for the popular mind of America the truth of safety” (261).

Fiedler mentions a little later that “to murder […] the preadolescent Virgo is to be granted the supreme pleasures of assaulting innocence, appeasing the hatred of virtue, which must surely have stirred uneasily before such atrociously immaculate examples” (264).

Janice Radway & Reader Response Theory

I don’t have a whole-whole lot to say about Janice Radway’s article. It isn’t that I disagree with reader-response theory but more that it seems so much like a given that I’m not sure why people have to write about it. She begins with a quotation from Robart Escarpit: “A book is not a thing like other things. When we hold it in our hands all we hold is the paper: The book is elsewhere.” Well, no kidding. It doesn’t help to hold a book or own it if a person doesn’t read it. It also seems to me a given that different readers make different interpretations of the text, dependent on their life experiences and their cultural beliefs and expectations.

Nevertheless, Radway says that if Escarpit’s proposition is “ever taken seriously, it has the potential to alter virtually all forms of literary study” (30). Now is that hyperbole? It seems like it. But she points out that for American Studies people, the “location” of criticism is “with texts alone” rather than with “questions of social process” (30). This question, though will change that.

Radway goes on to say that she isn’t saying we should do away with interpreting the text completely, even though some scholars (like Jane Tompkins and Jonathan Culler) have. But she is saying that for American Studies scholars who want to reconstruct and explain American culture literary interpretation will have to remain one of our “forms of evidence” (30). In addition, though, she thinks we should apply reader response theory to go beyond that interpretation.

In order to explain how we got where we are, Radway gives a summary of the development of American Studies, from Henry Nash Smith and the myth and symbol school to the ideas of “the country’s ‘leading’ thinkers,” and “the ‘great’ works of American literature.” She explains that the practice was based on certain “assumptions” that we might not agree with anymore (31).

She goes on to point out that, for instance, Marx says that the meaning of the text is “inherent,” and that he doesn’t notice that “different readers might be affected differently by particular rhetorical strategies” (32). She’s right. I hate to sound like a total male basher, but Marx definitely falls in to a male fallacy here, when he assumes that the viewpoint he takes on a text is inherent, is so obvious that anyone who picks it up will agree with him. That seems to be dangerous. Marx isn’t totally absolutely, though, because he admits that there may at times be conflicting interpretations, but event then “a reliable scholarly consensus” will come about” (32). Radway says, though, that his assumption here still shows that the conflicting interpretations come about from faulty perceptions and not correctly divergent viewpoints.

But when we start to view a text as a product as a “social process of communication between identifiable groups of people,” then it can’t be a document that can “testify to the state of American culture as a whole” (34). I don’t know. Can it? Let’s see. So say a guy in the barrio writes a story. Will it be evidence of how all of American culture affected him? Well, I guess the rich people of Kennebunkport won’t really have touched him—he may not even know who they are: they may not even know who he is or that his barrio exists. I guess this makes sense. So, what she says is true: “Its historical meaning and significance, then, are intimately bound up with the social and material context within which it appeared, was used, and was understood” (34).

Radway cites the methodological suggestions of Murray Murphey, who says that “the principal goal of any cultural historian is the formulation of an answer to the question, ‘Why is it as it is?’ where ‘it’ refers to some sort of data pertaining to the past but surviving to the present” (34).

A little later Radway takes up Stanley Fish’s consideration of the reader-response argument, saying that she thinks that since Fish says he no longer thinks of “communication as a simple process of transmission and reception,” he, “in effect [is] no longer a reader response critic” (37). She believes he is more of a semiotician, since he “conceives of the text instead as a collection of material signifiers (37).

So Fish’s theory states that the meanings, or significations, of a text are determined by the nature of the reader. Any and all literary critics start with “assumptions about what a text is, what its relation to them might be, how it should be read, and what it could possibly mean” (39). In effect, then, “texts are actually written by readers” because the readers expectations create so much of the interpretation (39).

The implications of this kind of interpretation are important when one wants to determine the meaning of a text “as a historical or cultural document,” since cultural critics cannot make the “subject of their search…the simple object of the text” (40). The important lesson to take from reader-response theory for American Studies scholars is that no single, hegemonic reading of any text exists (40).

In addition to historical and cultural issues to study, it is important to study textual meaning by examining the life of the author. To “reconstruct authorial assumptions and intentions” may help scholars to understand intentions that aren’t otherwise obvious (41). For example, the biography of an author might tell readers who he or she wanted the reader to see a certain character or situation (42). Radway warns against placing too much stock in biographical data about authors, though, because doing so can distort readers’ understanding of meaning. It’s also hard to look at these historical documents and establish the way people from the past interpreted them at the time they came out (43).

Radway advises that “literary critics…working with contemporary texts…have…two options” (45). They can try to figure out what the author meant for us as readers to get from it, in which case it becomes a sort of historical text in view of what life was like for the author. Or else, they can try to decide how the people who have been reading it will interpret it. The problem with this approach is that not much research has been done to show how to do it, other than educational research regarding literacy.

Anyway, as far as Radway is concerned, Fish’s most important point has to do with that “text-reader conjunction” because it will cause us to “relinquish our old subject, the literary text, in order to take on a new one, the socially and culturally determined activity of reading” (47).

Radway is using Fish’s reader-response theory as her own means to get beyond the single, hegemonic approach of American Studies. There is no single view of a text. A text has as many interpretations as there are readers. I always tell my students that a plot does exist. We have to be able to agree that a series of events happened. I think of that time a student in my literature class read a story, I forget which, and shouted, in an epiphany, “So the main character is blind!” I felt terrible explaining to her that that was utterly and completely wrong—she wasn’t speaking figuratively. I had to ask her to agree with me on the plot. However, she, a woman from another culture, with a very different style of interpreting the world, could have many other interpretations than me. Hmmm…maybe blindness was one of them?

Fiedler, 100-200

I wasn’t sure why Fiedler kept talking at such length in the first 100 pages about English authors. In the first 100 pages he spokes at such great length about Richardson. This time he talks a lot about Charles Brockden Browning, the great gothic writer, as well as Fielding and Sir Walter Scott—Finally! One I think I’ve read! It becomes clearer here, though (finally!) that he spends so much time analyzing the work of these writers because he wants to show that their stories are mature treatments of love or of male-female relationships, in contrast to American novels, which—like Cooper’s for example—are just children’s novels.

So in the chapter “Prototypes and Early Adaptations,” Fiedler is still talking about Richardson and European novels, but he’s discussing what began to happen when the bourgeois novels began to be written anti-bourgeois writers. Then, “seduction and adultery […] turn into symbols not of a struggle between established and rising classes, but between the exceptional individual and conventional society” (100). That’s a sort of romantic [my word] struggle. So this “artist of the new age” (101) has become a self-conscious type who has “betrayed his father” to become writers.

Fiedler moves from this idea to the next, that in 1789, William Hill Brown published the first American novel anonymously—titled The Triumph of Sympathy or The Power of Nature. The title page said its purpose was to “win the mind to Sentiment and to Truth” as well as “to represent the specious CAUSES, and to expose the fatal CONSEQUENCE, of seduction” for young women (102). But, as Fiedler says, he must not have been confident about the book’s ability to do so if he published it anonymously.

It turns out to be a sentimental, schlocky book, with characters like Mrs. Holmes, who is a “serious sentimentalist.” Fiedler uses this to make some generalizations, citing Geoffrey Dorer: “They idiosyncratic feature of the American conscience” he says, “is that it is predominantly feminine…Duty and Right Conduct become feminine figures” (104). This is an interesting observation because I think in some cases it might still be true. Dorer also says “the fact that the rules for moral conduct are felt to emanate from a feminine source is a source of considerable confusion to American men. They tend to resent such interference in their own behavior, and yet are unable to ignore it, since the insistent maternal conscience is a part of their personality…A second result is that modesty, politeness, neatness, cleanliness—come to be regarded as concessions to feminine demands, and…as such they are sloughed off—with relief but not without guilt” (104).

Actually, I think what he is saying is true—particularly for the time, and particularly for now, in some relationships. But why should it be so? Why would men resent interference in their behavior? Why should men resent feminine interference in their behavior? Why isn’t it the opposite?

Next is Chapter VI, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic.” Fiedler starts by talking about the first Gothic novelist, Horace Walpole, who wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764 (112). Although Walpole’s novel had the “major themes,” it wasn’t until Anne Radcliffe, termed a “female scribbler” that gothic fiction became successful. Radcliffe, who was known as the “Shakespeare of the Romance writers,” read Walpole’s book and wrote “variations on the archetypal theme” to develop a gothic novel of her own (113).

Fiedler contrasts the Richardsonian and Radcliffean “treatments of the pursuit of the maiden,” which is to say, I believe, the difference between the early sentimental and gothic novels (114). First, they differ in setting. The sentimental novel takes place in the real world, whereas the gothic novel takes place in the “dark region of make-believe” where there may be castles, ghosts, or other supernatural elements. Also, the “tone and emphasis” differ. The sentimental novel may be “melodramatic or even tragic,” but “its intent is to reveal the power of light and redemption, to insist that virtue if not invariably successful is at least always triumphant” (114). By contrast, the gothic novel portrays “the power of darkness.” The focus is not on the heroine, but instead on the villain—Fiedler calls him the “villain hero.” So were are to focus on his “temptation and suffering,” as well as “the beauty and terror of his bondage to evil” (115).

But Radcliffe is called “polite” in comparison to “enfant terrible” Matthew Gregory Lewis, who wrote The Monk (400 pages) in three weeks. Wow! He was an English novelist. Henry James, though, was an American novelist influenced by these gothic tones (118).

Another popular influence of these gothic novels was the ghost story. An interesting point Fiedler makes about these stories is that they seem to be “parodies of the immortal soul in which men had begun to lose faith” (118). In other words, the ghosts were a symbol of the dying embers of Christian faith. Interesting, he notes that “the Devil lived on in the imagination after the death of God” (118).

One of the most common of the gothic symbols is “the shadow” (119). This is the person who imprisons the maiden—a “devious Inquisitor, corrupt nobleman…” or some other type. Fiedler also goes on to discuss the other archetype of this kind of story, the “hero-villain,” which is the Faust type. This is a person who “seeks not to taste life without restraint but to control it fully; and his essential crime…is, therefore, not seduction but the Satanic bargain” (120). So it substitutes terror for love. So, he says, “some would say…that the whole tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom rather than a literary movement, a reversion to the childish game of scaring oneself in the dark, or a plunge into sadist fantasy” (121). Fiedler compares the gothics to the retreating Beatnik writers as well as movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art (122).

In fact, he says, “the gothic is an avant-garde genre, perhaps the first avant-garde art in the modern sense of the term” (122). Fiedler says that the gothicists weren’t just avant-garde ”in their literary aspirations, but radical in their politics” because they were “anti-aristocratic, anti-Catholic, anti-nostalgic” (124).

It was hard to translate the gothic novel to America because the gothic novel represented some purely European concerns. For one, “a gothic country house on Long Island … remains not merely unconvincing but meaningless” (132).

Charles Brockden Brown solved many of the problems of adaptation of the gothic novel to America. For example, for the “corrupt Inquisitor and lustful nobleman” archetypes, “he substituted the Indian” (148). For the “haunted castle and the dungeon, Brown substitutes the haunted forest.” Fiedler notes these “ancient, almost instinctive symbols” connecting the selva oscura back to Dante.

No wonder Fiedler hasn’t got much hope for the American novel. The next chapter is VII: “James Fenimore Cooper and the Historical Romance.” Ugh. Fiedler compares this genre to the gothic, saying it shares “a concern with the past and desire to restore to prose fiction ‘the improbable and marvelous,’ which the sentimental novel of contemporary life had disavowed” (150).

Also, here Fiedler begins to distinguish between white romanticism and black romanticism, as “gothic subtraditions” (150). Fiedler explains, “the white or philistine variety is based on a belief in the superiority of feeling to intellect, the heart to the head; though for it the heart is carefully distinguished from the viscera or the genitals, whose existence is scarcely admitted at all” (150). The white Romantic writer may get material from sources such as folk tales or ballads because “the primitive remains something clean and heroic, immune to the darkness and demonic” (150) because “the cheerful and hopeful note” is necessary for his work to be truly romantic, and “melancholy is treason” (151). If you think this is close to basic sentimentalism, you’re right. It is. Fiedler says it is “not merely a ‘male’ counterpart to the Richardsonian ladies’ novel, it is also a predestined best-seller” (151). The people who wrote them, too, he says were, like the “female-scribblers,” a new kind of “merchant authors.”

Now one interesting factor of these books is the landscapes. Fiedler says that one of the chief interests in the books was “vicarious tourism.” This kind of novel “represents the sight-seeing of the middle classes before cheap and speedy transportation had made it possible to do it in the flesh” (151). So, in many cases, the readers were not as much interested in penetrating the character’s mind as they were in penetrating, say, the landscape of Africa. In fact, he says, it “is precise Africa they want, mapped, documented, and in detail; and it is Africa they get” (152). So setting was a critical factor of these white romances.

A little later Fiedler discusses Fielding as a comic novelist, one who took a “more masculine comic view of life” (156). And though he may have been melodramatic, he was far different from the later Romantics.

Apparently, it was a trend at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries to term people “Shakespearean novelists.” But the name never really stuck until Sir Walter Scott came along. The “pseudo-Shakespearean novel,” says Fiedler, is “not merely middlebrow; it is also theatrical” (157). It shifts “the center of interest from character to plot, from analysis to section” (157).

Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) was the first successful historical novel. Others existed before then, but his was the true mark of the genre (159). Interestingly, Fiedler calls him a “middle-aged novelist” because he did not publish his first novel until he was 43 (160)!

Scott, of course, was English, as was Fielding. But Fiedler writes about them to generate a comparison to Cooper. Cooper’s books, are clearly for children, he says (170). They’re books with “boyish” themes and no real plots that deal with love, because “love always threatens to develop into sexuality and sexuality would turn the pure anti-female romance into the travesty of inversion and would frighten off the child reader” (171).

Nonetheless, Fiedler sees this “boyish” theme repeated in Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn as well as in many other important authors. So he says “Cooper…first dreams the American version of this theme, converting a peripheral European archetype into the central myth of our children” (171).

Fiedler has to state the obvious about Cooper: He stayed within the theoretical in his books. “Cooper had, alas, all the qualifications for a great American writer except the simple ability to write” (181-182).

Fiedler discusses The Last of the Mohicans, the popular favorite of Cooper’s books. It contains elements of romances like “the good Indian and the bad, the dark Maiden and the fair, the comic tenderfoot and the noble red patriarch; these elements are presented in their pure essences” (191). So although the other characters seem to be types and the scenery is wooden, the archetypal romance elements are there and strong.

"What Happens to American Studies

if you Put African American Studies at the Center?”

Mary Helen Washington

This essay is about the growth in interest about marginalized groups in the American studies association. Washington claims it took a surprisingly (?) long time for the ASA to recognize minorities like Blacks, Latinos, etc.

She begins to show the parallel growth of the ASA and Black Studies scholarship, in which scholars were studying “the triangular slave trade, the underground railroad, and the Great Migration,” rather than “the pioneer trail from East to West.”

Black Studies scholars didn’t have it easy in the 1970s and 1980s. Washington tells of working as a literature professor but having her course being considered as an elective because her colleagues believed “eventually this ‘black stuff’ would all blow over.” In addition, she was “expected to be the race relations expert,” and one time was asked to mediate “a conflict resolution meeting between the black and white women in the dorms.” When she published articles for Black World magazine, she was being judged by “black cultural nationalists,” but at the same time she was publishing in Feminist Press and being judged by “white feminist” standards. So when she describes that period as “political minefields,” it’s not exaggeration.

Surprisingly, though, neither she nor any of the politically active African Americans at the time were involved in the restructuring of the American studies community. She says “the loosening of disciplinary boundaries, opening of the traditional disciplines to fields like folklore, music, and art as part of a synthesis of disciplines; the historicizing issues of race, its multicultural perspective; and its critique of nationhood (so critical to the American studies project) – should have been made, but did not make, African American studies and American studies natural collaborators, fraternal, if not identical, twins.”

So, since the 1980s, what were once marginal topics have become commonplace. Washington uses three examples of the way issues of marginalization and borders have come to the forefront, not just in the scholarly community but also in culture. Her examples are Wedding Band, a play about an interracial couple, which she says is important because “it centers our attention on race politics and demands that we develop that ‘second-sight’ necessary to critique our institutional lives.”

If you think this stuff isn’t important in the larger culture, she says, consider the example of California: “In the last twenty years, California has built 21 prisons and one university. The share of the state budget for the university system in California has fallen from 12.5 percent to 8 percent, while the proportion for corrections has risen to 9.4 percent, up from 4.5 percent, an amount identical to the loss of university funds. In this twenty-year period, California universities have had to lay off 10,000 employees, many of them professors; in that same period, the number of state prison guards has increased by that exact same number: 10,000.” Her point here is that the inequities for marginalized groups begin at the institutional level and that we have to start by fighting them at the institutional level!

She also talks about the film, Lone Star, which deals throughout with the metaphor of borders and boundaries. Finally, she deals with a CD by Laura Love, Octoroon, which in its lyrics deals with issues of borders and boundaries. All these demonstrate that organizations and institutions need to change to reflect the true population.

Love & Death in the American Novel, first 100 pages

Love & Death in the American Novel really is a tome, a thick doorstop of 513 pages. How does Fiedler know all this? It’s stunning!

Leslie Fiedler sees a difference between American fiction and European fiction. He says, “our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile.” In fact, it seems, our greatest works are so juvenile that they could be “notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library” since “their level of sentimentality [is] precisely that of a pre-adolescent.” Fiedler blames that sentimentality, or “the incapacity of the American novelist to develop” on a tendency to revisit childhood. That makes the novelist write “the same book over and over again until” the writer finally either gives up or lapses into “self-parody” (4). These are strong words.

Another problem, he says in his opening gambit, is that since the American writer has no tradition of language to draw from, “no conventions of conversation, no special class idioms and no dialogue between classes, non continuing literary language,” he (or she) is “forever beginning, saying for the first time” (4). In other words, the traditional symbols do not yet exist.

Fiedler acknowledges that not every work of art must rely on love. He mentions the Iliad, for example, as a heroic poem that is an epic of war rather than love, but he goes on to say that the novel is more the province of love than the epic. It was, “the product of the sentimentalizing taste of the eighteenth century.” Further, the “subject par excellence of the novel is love, or more precisely—in its beginnings at least—seduction and marriage.” Still more interesting is that in Europe—specifically France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and England, Fiedler says, “love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme,” whereas the American “anti-novel, is the womanless Moby Dick” (5). He goes on to compare—While Europeans have Madame Bovary and Pride and Prejudice, we have The Scarlet Letter, where “all the passion is burned away before the novel proper begins” (6). He cites also Huckleberry Finn, Last of the Mohicans, Red Badge of Courage, Poe’s short stories, calling them “books that turn from society to nature or nightmare out of a desperate need to avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child-bearing” (6). Wow. What does that say about us as people? Would that predict that we’d be people who would watch Jerry Springer and Rikki Lake?

Rip Van Winkle supposedly “presides over the birth of the American imagination.” But as Fiedler would have it, since then, “the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility” (6). More strong words! Is it any wonder contemporary men have commitment issues?!

But outside in the big, bad natural world, there’s usually a “substitute for wife or mother […] waiting in the green heart of nature: the natural man, the good companion, pagan and unashamed—Queequeg or Chingachgook or Nigger Jim” (6). Watch out, though, because, that “Black Man” is another name, says Fiedler, for “the Devil himself” (6).

What Fiedler says about humor is interesting, but I’m not always sure I understand it. I do understand what he means about Twain’s humor, though, in that it really isn’t funny in many places. He points out that “American literature likes to pretend […] its bugaboos are all finally jokes: the headless horseman’s a hoax, ever manifestation of the supernatural capable of rational explanation on the last page—but we are never quite convinced” (6-7). He cites as examples when in Huckleberry Finn Huck’s father has D.T.’s in the beginning, or the horrific incident of soaking the dog in kerosene and lighting it, or the other deaths in the book. Fiedler says, “But it is all ‘humor,’ of course, a last desperate attempt to convince us of the innocence of violence, the good clean fun of horror. Our literature as a whole at times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park “fun house,” where we pay to play at terror” (7).

Later, though, Fiedler says that “since the decline of orthodox Puritanism, optimism has become the chief effective religion” (8).

A little later, Fiedler talks about what led up to the invention of the novel. This is something I talked about with Bill H. who is taking a seminar on Jung and who mentioned that really the novel wasn’t possible until people had the concept of the personality. Until there was a sense of the inner workings of a person, there wouldn’t be an impetus for a novel. Interesting. Fiedler calls it “the Break-through,” discussing it in the context of the events that included the “American and the French Revolutions,” as well as “the rise of modern psychology, and the triumph of the lyric in poetry” (I guess that sweeping statement includes Jung). Those events were what led up to the invention of the novel and the romantic period. So this “Break-through,” according to Fiedler, was “characterized not only by the separation of psychology from philosophy, the displacement of the traditional leading genres by the personal lyric and analytical prose fiction (with the consequent subordination of plot to character; it is also marked by the promulgation of a theory of revolution as a good in itself” (13). Fiedler doesn’t mention this in the same context, but maybe the revolution and novel had an effect on religion, since “Institutionalized Christianity […] began to crumble when its mythology no longer proved capable of controlling and revivifying the imagination of Europe” (16).

In the second chapter, “Prototypes and Early Adaptations,” Fiedler spends the whole time looking at the way Richardson’s Pamela influenced early novels in America. The problem I have is that since I haven’t read any of these early novels, I have no idea what he’s talking about. He mentions Richardson and Fielding, English novelists (I understand Fielding is very funny…but how funny can an 18th century novelist be?). And then he talks about the early American novelists like Brown.

I have to say that when I read this part of the book, my head begins to spin. I’ve never read any of these. When will I even have time to read them? I stopped to seriously ponder reading Feilding, but there’s no time in the life of a graduate student. Or let me say it differently: I could easily be waylaid and try to read every book in the library to prepare for this Ph.D. It would just take me the rest of my life. I have to remember to save some books for my old age.

Moving right along, Fielder says that Richardson’s novel is basically in the Protestant genre, and that it’s more “puritan” than it is “realistic.” He adds that “beyond its representing the marvelous as the ordinary and passionate impulse as Christian piety, it also represents entertainment pretending to be a sermon (or alternately, a sermon pretending to be entertainment)” (26).

When Fiedler discusses the idea of endings, I was surprised. I didn’t realize that they are a modern invention, that ancient authors like Dante or Augustine wouldn’t know what “they lived happily ever after” means. Fiedler says, “Plato would not even have identified the ‘they’ as male and female; while neither he nor Augustine would have conceived ultimate bliss as a joining of flesh with flesh, no matter how fully sanctified the ritual and custom” (28). The troubadours, after all, look at marriage as an “enemy.” They want the woman to be married, but to someone else, so that she isn’t attainable (34). So really, Fiedler says, this modern idea of “sentimental love” is “part of a continuous process whose end is not yet in sight. It stands between the codes of courtly love, on the one hand, and the recent Romantic defenses of passion as the end of life, on the other” (28). As I understand what he’s saying, we don’t know where it’s heading.

In the early novels, the seduction theme was critical. Fiedler discusses the fine points of this at length, mentioning that at least part of the appeal in the English novel at least was of the “conflict of aristocracy and bourgeoisie” in the bedroom (53-54).

At the end of that chapter, Fiedler mentions parody in an interesting way, saying “Parody destroys nothing; it is only a reluctant and shamefaced way of honoring an example on is ashamed to acknowledge, and, for one too proud to attempt so popular a form as the novel without tongue in cheek, a way of becoming a novelist” (56).

Chapter IV is “The Bourgeois Sentimental Novel and the Female Audience.” I haven’t read any criticism of Fiedler yet, but there has to be plenty of this chapter. I know he is writing about some of the worst, cloying fiction in the world, but the way he talks about women in this chapter is degrading. The feminists had to have a field day with Fiedler.

Fiedler talks here about the “blight” of the sentimental novel (58). One explanation for the sterile novel in the U.S., he says, is that “no real tradition of gallantry [exists] in America, no debased aristocratic codes of love against which the bourgeois belief can define itself” (59). Most novels, he points out, with the chaste example of Richardson’s, have some adultery, or at least a hint of seduction. Fiedler quotes Denis de Rougement’s comment that “society requires that women have husbands…but in novels it is found necessary that they have lovers” (59-60). But not in America, “in its classical period.” None but Hawthorne even gets close to the topic until Henry James, whereas in Europe even pornographic novels like Justine came about, defining “a delicate line between obscenity and art, inconceivable to the American mind” (60). YET, at least.

The American novel had to “justify its existence on moral grounds—declaring itself the servant of religion and especially the keeper of the consciences and the virginity and young girls” (61). No wonder they were no good. Interestingly, though, “By the time of Mark Twain, however, even the claims of the old faith are asserted only by women; it is woman who has become the guardian of morality and the embodiment of conscience” (61). Another interesting connection that Fiedler makes is that America as a nation has denied so many fathers. We denied our fatherland (though why it isn’t a motherland as one is usually called, I don’t know). The pope and bishops have been rejected, as well as the king of England. So Fiedler says, “only the mother remained as symbol of authority that was one with love” (62). He uses that reasoning to justify the way the American novel evolved into the “Sentimental Love Religion” that “simultaneously disowns sex and glorifies women” (62).

Women were the writers of these sentimental novels. Hawthorn called them a “d____d mob of scribblers” (66). These were the true bestsellers, the books everyone was reading. They weren’t reading Melville or Hawthorne, and probably because the people couldn’t understand either one of them any better than anyone can today!

But…the interesting thing here, Fiedler mentions, is that there hadn’t before “been an art form whose production women played so predominant a part” (66). In other words—they could actually support themselves by writing novels, whether or not Nate Hawthorne approved. Fiedler calls it “a critical moment in the emancipation of woman” (66). That’s exciting…but then think about that sentence. Isn’t there something disturbing about the words he chose? Emancipation seems to imply enslavement. Hell, maybe he’s right.

Anyway, here are the numbers: “before the publication of Cooper’s Precaution in 1820, one-third of all our novels had been written by women—and within that third were to be found nearly all the best sellers” (66). That’s amazing.

Nonetheless, Fiedler offers harsh criticism of their work, which seems to be the precursor to today’s Harlequin romances: “Neither inwardness nor character, however, interested the scribbling ladies at all. They sought, however unconsciously, the mythical beneath the psychological—and rendered the myth in sub-literary or pre-literary form, degraded it to the stereotype” (67). I thought this was so cruel last night when I read it, but now that I see it in the light of day, I agree that he probably was right, particularly when I think of these novels, which granted I have not read, in comparison with Harlequin romances.

So, these sentimental novelists were “lady Richardsonians” in their sentimentality (68). But it began to happen that these American novelists started to try to find “sentimental substitutes for the struggle with the seducer” and by the end of the 18th century, “the treatment of seduction had been surrendered to literary radicals and semi-pornographers” read by “young girls in search of literary titillation” much like the romance novels of today (69).

The most interesting part of the argument to me is that Fiedler observes that “the thrill of seduction [is] expurgated from popular fiction and the threat of rape removed,” and as a result death becomes the focus. Rather than the prurient pleasure at the seduction, we take voyeuristic pleasure at the deathbed scene. As Fiedler says it, “melancholy becomes contraband in the polite world of woman’s books, permitted when bootlegged in small amounts, but frowned on as ‘morbid’ when overwhelmingly present” (71). “Cheerfulness,” he says, “became obligatory,” but only when it didn’t succumb to “melodrama” (71). He mentions as example here Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All these nineteenth century novels are really nauseating examples of this disgusting trend.

Eventually there was a move from simple seduction to a consideration of “relations between rich and poor,” says Fiedler, “but it was a long time […] before socialism penetrated deep enough into the American mind to make a modern version of the class-struggle novel possible” (73). In the meantime, Fiedler says, the recurring drama of the bestseller was of the good colonial girl remaining chaste against some intruding male of one kind or another. Related to humor, he says, “the farmer’s daughter and the traveling salesman of a thousand dirty jokes represent a last degradation (though a strange persistence, too) of the archetypal figures of Clarissa and Lovelace” (73).

Anyway, Fiedler chooses to make this point about these women writers: “In popular fiction produced in American by and for females, the seduction fable comes chiefly to stand for the war between the sexes and the defeat of the seducer […] as a symbol of the emasculation of American men” (73). That’s a pretty strong influence for scribbling women to have, isn’t it? But he goes on to say that no matter what it is, the sentimental drama “must end with the downfall of the male, “ whether it is in “Charlotte Temple [or] the latest daytime serial on radio or TV.” Fiedler even argues that “In this country the only class war is between the sexes!” (74).

So in these books, the “female is portrayed as pure sentiment, the male as naked phallus” and “though the male is allowed still to spout ‘ideas,’ those ideas are revealed as irrelevant to life and good sense, the babble of a bookish child” (74). The hilarious comment he makes is “What is baffling is why men […] should have accepted this travesty on their nature and role in life” (74). It’s a mystery, isn’t it Leslie? You ought to be asking how women put up with your bullshit for centuries without complaint!

Now when Fiedler does stoop to discuss these novels in actual detail, he refers to the women writers as Mrs. Rowson. He even says that women have “kidnapped” the form of the sentimental novel (77)! Who wanted it in the first place, for crying out loud!? Anyway, Mrs. Rowson writes the “first popular American image of the Seducer” (74), but she renders him fairly powerless. He tends to have “fits of insanity” (74) and she punishes him by being “forced to watch his children on the verge of an incestuous catastrophe bred by his sin and cowardice” (75). Incidentally, Fiedler says “The theme of brother-sister incest haunts the early American novel on lower levels of literacy as well as on the higher” (82). Even Fiedler acknowledges that Hawthorne borrowed from some of these melodramatic devices in the Scarlet Letter.

One interesting melodramatic device Mrs. Rowson used was in her novel, The Coquette, which was to fictionalize “a contemporary scandal (which may have involved Aaron Burr or, at least, the son of Jonathan Edwards) with only the most perfunctory attempt at disguise” (83). Now THAT’s American!

Anyway, Fiedler thinks that the sentimental, “women’s” novel’s rise so early in the country’s history had the effect of drawing a divide in the country’s reading, causing there to be a sort of division in the reading—an “intellectual” person’s reading and “the unlettered” person’s, which is interesting, given that the idea of starting the colonies was to move away from the sharp class divisions of Europe (77). Fiedler ends the argument by saying, “For better or for worse, the bestseller was invented in America (the flagrantly bad best seller) before the serious successful novel” (78).

Fiedler also talks about the first American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, who he says “lacked the wit and irony as well as the talent for structure of Jane Austen—so that, aiming at modesty, he created dullness; and avoiding the spectacular, he fell into the inane” (84). No wonder we don’t know his work. He wrote one called Ormond; Fiedler says it is “surely the most passionate […] but there is little erotic passion displayed” (87). Bummer.

So, in sum of this chapter, Fiedler says, no novelists could write about love without falling into sentimentality. He says, “only by bypassing normal heterosexual love as a subject could such writers preserve themselves from sentimentality and falsehood” (89). Is that why they called it the gay 90s?

Okay, so Chapter V is “The Beginnings of the Anti-Bourgeois Sentimental Novel in America.”

This is where we start to see novels “which asked the reader to identify not with the female victim but with her male betrayer—thus introducing a note of moral ambiguity baffling to the simple-minded sentimentalist” (90). Later, Fiedler calls it “the anti-type, the mirror image of the bourgeois sentimental novel” (96). So, while for the bourgeois, death or suicide on purpose would be shocking, to Werther (the hero of a novel), it is “the noblest of all actions” (98).