Reconstituting Authority: American Fiction in the Province of the Law, 1880-1920 (review)

Abstract

Moddelmog, William E. 2000. Reconstituting Authority: American Fiction in Province of 1880-1920. Iowa City. University of Iowa Press, 2000. $32.95 hc. 276 pp. Alice Hall Petry Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville Caught up as we are in current of century, it is not surprising that scholars are taking hard look at period (roughly 1880-1920) which previously enjoyed that label. It was time, argues William E. Moddelmog, which witnessed the rise of professionalism (4) in both and law, phenomenon characterized by conscious renegotiation of relationships between such tangibles as codes and formal rules and such intangibles as experience, emotion, and creativity. That rethinking led Oliver Wendell Holmes,Jr., for example, argue that we must understand how read law. If we read it for its formal properties, it becomes ossified, nostalgic, unable respond change circumstances and standards.... If we read it as `story,' however, it possesses both formal integrity and responsiveness change and revision (9). Thus, Holmes's decision to practice law rather than follow in his father's literary footsteps was less a rejection of literature than simply way of doing different kind of literary work (9). Much of Reconstituting Authority is meditation on this fin de siecle legal/literary renegotiation; and unless one happens harbor deep passion for legalese, it unfortunately does not make for particularly entertaining reading. On other hand, Moddelmog's analyses of texts by six authors of period-William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser-against backdrop of legal issues of day can be astute and revealing. nexus of law and literature, argues Moddelmog, impacted both dramatically at turn of century. Part I of his study, entitled The (Mis)Rule of Law, posits Howells, Jackson, and Hopkins as using their texts to reconceptualize law and suggest that authors, as literary professionals, can relate stories that operate in legal manner (23). In Chapter 1, for example, Moddelmog focuses on tensions that exist between Squire Gaylord (an old-style lawyer) and Bartley Hubbard (a cutting-edge newspaperman) in Howells's A Modern Instance. Howells saw attorneys at turn of century being replaced by journalists; but by killing off Hubbard, he betrays his discomfort at seeing newspapermen (who aren't always responsible, community-sensitive professionals) replace attorneys and judges as figures of power (54). In Chapter 2, Moddelmog looks at Helen Hunt Jackson's ambivalence over legal status of Native Americans in her novel Ramona (original title: In Name of Law). Arguing that her book essentially constitutes kind of extended legal (66), Moddelmog explores how Jackson struggled reconcile her commitment tribal sovereignty with her commitment civilizing Native Americans-an ambivalence traceable Chief Justice John Marshall's confusing 1831 declaration that Indian tribes were domestic dependent nations (65). Positing Ramona herself as symbol of simple, honest, virtuous Native American tribes, and Ramona's guardian Senora Moreno as symbol of legalistic, cold, uncaring US. government, Jackson used her novel argue that legal guardians often create more problems than they solve. Even so, Jackson could not abandon her faith in guardian/ward paradigm. As result, Ramona turned out have an impact on American conceptions of Indians, but not one had anticipated. Rather than becoming new Uncle Tom's Cabin by awakening moral outrage over current state of law and national policy, it would operate more like legal brief intent on asserting law's authority and its claim respect. But in locating sources of that authority, Jackson exposed division that lies at heart of any conception of national unity or an integral American people. …