American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 Carol Loranger (bio) American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945, by Gavin Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xvi + 228 pp. Cloth, $38.50, Paper, $24.95. Class has, in some fashion, been a concern (for some) among all the branches of literary studies for as long as this reviewer can remember, and rightly so. But whether approached as a social by-product of racial or gender or colonial or sexual or national politics, or whether approached straightforwardly as the primary outcome of the base relations of production within a ruling economic order, class has usually been conceived in terms of economic or other power relationships among groups possessed of different levels of power. You have your upper, middle, and lower classes—the latter group figured more commonly these days as the "working class" of so much studious interest to the composition and rhetoric cadre. You have your rentiers and haute-bourgeoisie, your petit-bourgeois tradesmen, bureaucrats and teachers, your struggling proletariat in fiction as in life. What you do not have, says Gavin Jones in this fascinating study, is much attention given to poverty, a "distinct form of socioeconomic suffering," or to the impoverished as such who form a distinct and abject class marked by dispossession—the "materiality of need"—rather than by any [End Page 180] differential of power in their relations to other classes. Not that poverty is not represented in American literature; Jones offers nuanced readings of whole works or portions of works depicting destitution by Henry David Thoreau, Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Richard Wright, and James Agee as well as giving more than glancing attention to a welter of period writings about and from poverty by the likes of—to name a few—Charles Burroughs, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Loring Brace in the nineteenth century; and Hamlin Garland, Meridel LeSueur, and Mike Gold in the twentieth century. Rather, literary representations of and authorial discourses on poverty are frequently "warped in the United States by ideological forces that work to internalize indigence as shame or blame." At the same time, critical discourse on class in America and American literature—and here Jones has likewise assembled and thoroughly digested an impressive menu of recent and contemporary theorizers on class, among them (to name a very few) Lawrence Buell, Wai-Chi Dimock, Michael Denning, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Barbara Foley, Walter Benn Michaels, John Guillory, Rita Felski, and Peter Hitchcock—has tended either to lump the absolute poverty of the impoverished in with the comparative poverty of the worker, letting the working class stand for both; or to focus primarily on relations of production and consumption, omitting to examine individuals and groups excluded from those relations; or, if tied to an affirmative praxis of identification and recovery as in "working class studies," to limit the extent of the study to examples of competing or alternative cultural production that can be celebrated as complex, active and oppositional. Poverty is, to be sure, always partly a relative condition: there are different stages of lack which exist in a complex historical and social web of relations to different stages of possession. But the farthest reach of poverty must always include absolute deprivation of goods and services combined with a struggle for mere subsistence and a level of situationally fostered ignorance and passivity that goes a long way toward preventing the production of an alternative culture—at least one that anyone has yet figured out how to affirm as complex, oppositional, and arguably valuable. Perhaps if sufficient members of the impoverished class somehow obtain Ph.D.s and begin to consider how they fit into the academic class or if sufficient Ph.D.s find themselves unemployed and haunting breadlines in the new economy like so many Hurstwoods and begin to consider how they fit into the destitute class, that culture will finally be found, described, and celebrated. But I doubt it. I joke, but as Jones makes clear, discourse about poverty in the United [End Page 181] States has suffered from the absence of the truly poor...