Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction253 This incisive, well-written study accomplishes an almost impossible task: it makes books that many of us know by heart seem brand-new. Romines achieves this by deftly weaving trenchant cultural criticism and textual analysis together with her own childhood memories about reading the Little House books. These autobiographical reflections deepen her analysis by acting as case studies in the enduring power ofthese texts and invite the reader to return to her own memories, newly illuminated by Romines' insights. Constructing the Little House brings the Little House books off the shelf of "children's literature " and adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the complex relationship between gender and culture in U.S. literature. Iona CollegeDeborah Lindsay Williams Salmon, Richard. Henry James and the Culture ofPublicity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997. vii + 233 pp. Cloth: $54.95. For some time now critics have argued persuasively that Henry James's antipathy to the commercialization of late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture obscured his own accomodation to—or complicity with—an emergent mass culture. Richard Salmon's Henry James and the Culture ofPublicity builds on this body of criticism and provides an acccount of how James responded to the burgeoning "culture of publicity" of his time. According to Salmon, James "explicitly and intentionally elaborated" the "pervasive forms of publicity" that he saw as "symptomatic of mass culture" (2-3). This book provides a salutary corrective to the tendency in at least some new historicist work to collapse the distance between imaginative fiction and the market or mass culture. Rather than deny any possibility of critical agency, Salmon describes James's fictional practice as a powerful (and relatively successful) form of immanent critique. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Richard Sennett, Salmon situates James's fiction within an historical transition from the bourgeois public sphere of salons and coffee houses in the eighteenth century to the "mass public" of modern print culture and media in the twentieth. Modern publicity "may be said to reconfigure the geography of cultural space" (1), he argues, and James delineated this reconfiguration in his fiction from the 1880s on. Salmon predictably stresses the importance of a well-known notebook entry of November 17, 1887, in which James outlined a realist program for representing his age: "One sketches one' s age but imperfectly, if one doesn't touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouringpublicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private" (qtd. on 14). Salmon adopts the notebook entry "as both a template and a justification for the concerns of this study," because it shows that representing publicity was one impetus for 254Reviews James's fiction, perhaps even an "urgent necessity" at this point (14). James had already begun the novelistic task ofrepresenting the culture of publicity in his 1885 novel The Bostonians. Salmon traces the "competing interpretive strategies" inscribed in the novel, with its dialogic interplay between the "counter-public sphere" offeminism, on the one hand, and the publicity of mass media, on the other (15). In Salmon's reading, The Bostonians offers an accurate fictional representation of the complex historical process by which the bourgeois public sphere was both infiltrated by the publicity of the mass media and challenged by the demands of social groups who had previously been excluded from the domain of "public opinion." Salmon productively links James's characterization of Verena Tarrant to his later novel The Tragic Muse (1890), with its similar portrait of actress Miriam Rooth. Here too a male character attempts "to persuade a woman to exchange the public stage for private life" but fails dismally (39^40). More importantly for Salmon's purposes, in both novels publicity obviously extends beyond the immediate urban spaces of the theater or public platform to include a much larger—indeed global—network of mass media forms. Salmon's most innovative and illuminating reading comes in chapter 4, "The Power of the Press, From Scandal to Hunger," which examines The Reverberator (1887) and "The Papers" (1903) from the standpoint of the new journalism of the 1880s and 1890s. Here Salmon...