Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds

Abstract

REVIEWS Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 625 pp. Cloth: $35.00. David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance is a bold, wide ranging work of scholarship, based on extraordinary research in the popular writings of the period, and powered by a strenuous imaginative attempt to relate this literature to the writings of seven accepted “canonical” authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickin­ son. Reynolds is an overreacher, and in some respectshis study seems seriously flawed. Never­ theless, he has succeeded in opening up a range of questions that ought to engage students of mid-nineteenth-century American literature for years to come. Reynolds sees the chiefwriters of the American Renaissance not as alienated from their culture, as is commonly supposed, but as emerging out of its popular preoccupations and as nurtured by its common texts. He shows that all seven of these writers in their different ways were stimulated by the rhetoric of reform, by the sensational press and the fiction it sponsored, by the literature of women’s rights and women’s wrongs, and by popular humor writings. Alongside the “conventional” popular literature written in conformity with the ruling platitudes ofante-bellum American culture (pastoralist novels, domestic fiction, fireside poetry), he uncovers a “subversive” literature that he characterizes as bizarre, sensational, politically radical, and theologically skeptical. He describes a host ofrelatively unknown texts that make up this subversive literature, among them crime pamphlets, frontier adventure stories, novels of sensual, wronged women, city mysteries, and humorous pieces in urban magazines. One of the most valuable features of Reynolds’ work is his rediscovery of neglected nineteenthcentury authors like John Neal, George Lippard, and Laura Curtis Ballard, who together with many others created a far more pugnacious and chaotic popular literature than we have been aware of. Reynolds argues that the major writers of the period reconstructed the popular subversive imagination by reconceiving and fusingpopular stereotypes, exploiting thelanguage of reform, and transfiguring the sensational artistically. While Reynolds teaches us something about each of his seven major writers, his treat­ ment of them is uneven. He is best on Whitman and Poe, both of whom clearly grappled with popular literature in the course of finding the means to express themselves. Reynolds has an intuitive sympathy for Whitman’s poetry, for “the seaminess and moral breadth” of Leaves of Crass (p. 104). He presents Whitman convincingly in relation to forerunners and contemporaries who shared his culture, his tastes, and his political views. The study is also effective in its account of texts like The Confidence-Man, “The Black Cat,” and parts of MobyDick that are grounded in popular culture. Reynolds’ literary criticism of Dickinson’s poems and Hawthorne’s tales and novels seems to me perfunctory or misguided, but he does establish a valuable context for Dickinson by displaying the writing of other women who shared her religious skepticism and her outrage concerning human misery, and he reminds us effectively of Hawthorne’s interest early and late in crime novels and in melodramatic incidents he found in the sensational press. Reynolds seems weakest on Emerson and Thoreau, whose impas­ sioned commitment to their own New England religious idealism does not fit his framework. While Reynolds’ work is deeply grounded in social history, it is vague in its representa­ tions of intellectual history. He does not deal effectively with Thoreau’s or Emerson’s ideas, or Hawthorne’s use of Puritanism, or with the intellectual character of periods or figures outside his central focus. The literary theory on which Reynolds bases his judgments also seems rough and ready, casually eclectic in its principles and mechanical in operation. Still, because he is persistent in his approach and consistently daring in his ambition, his critical method at times yields impressive insights into the texts he explores. Overall, Reynolds’ study gives us a detailed new perspective on the whole period. This perspective raises more questions than it resolves, but it is a significant achievement to have nudged scholars to reconsider their shibboleths from his new angle of vision. Some key questions Reynolds has raised ought now be the...