The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature by Mary Esteve (review)

Abstract

1078 Reviews quarter of the twentieth century (Bergson, Croce, Jung), and not all of them might be thought to have worn equally well; there seemed to be a slightly suspicious reluctance here to engage with recent developments in neurology and cognitive science, of the kind David Lodge addresses in his Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) (some of which material could have offered as much support as challenge to Hague's position). The second half of the book discusses four novelists?Charlotte Bronte, James, Woolf, and Doris Lessing?chosen for the importance of intuition for their works, an importance the novelists themselves have averred. Hague rightly stresses how difficultit is to ignore the cumulative weight of James's comments about the mysteriously telepathic communion between himself and his muse, his lbon\ and the similar silent understandings between the more sensitive characters in his novels. There are persuasive pages here on Isabel Archer's 'great many theories' and her consequent reluctance to trust her inner doubts about Osmond; on the ghost at Gardencourt; and on how Milly Theale's consciousness of mortality is bound up with her relation? ship with Kate and Densher: 'The true essence of Milly's illness, James suggests, is not somatic but psychic, and this is an important reason why he avoids specifying the exact nature of her illness. To name a particular disease is physically to ground Milly's disorder in a way that limits its full meaning' (p. 182). These remarks give a brief indication of the wider concerns of Hague's study. Against them, however, one could set Michael Wood's comment, in one of his recent Empson Lectures ('What Henry Didn't Know', London Review of Books, 18 December 2003, to be published in Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)), that The Wings ofthe Dove involves a wilful blindness, a refusal to know certain facts (the nature of Milly's illness, the nature of Kate's father's disgrace, ete), and that there is an ongoing contention in the novel between intuited awarenesses and those stated openly (Wood suggests that Kate and Milly 'hit it offso well' precisely because they 'both like to name things and to know things'). In Hague's account of Strether's 'conversion' to the flexible, sympathetic, Parisian modes of interaction there also seems to be something missing: some sense of the cost of this, in the depths of the novel, the nagging element of truth in the Woollett outlook that cannot be so simply finessed away. And by the time the discussion reaches Lessing, where the novels are elaborating pre-formed ideas about consciousness rather than using stylistic resources to explore it, the fascination in Hague's book with permeating ego-boundaries comes close to issuing in a loss of interest in individuals and their differences altogether?a common reaction to later Lessing, and one that Hague mentions in passing without really pausing to address. But there is much else here to counter these misgivings; Hague's fluency and partisanship are stimulating and thought-provoking even where one feels that what is not being looked at begins to loom rather larger than what is. University of Wales Swansea N. H. Reeve The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature. By Mary Esteve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. ?45">$55- ISBN 0-521-81488x . 'The crowd?no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers', wrote Walter Benjamin in his 1939 essay 'Some Motifs in Baudelaire'. In The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature, Mary Esteve becomes the latest in a line of literaryand cultural critics who have followed Benjamin in recognizing the centrality of the crowd to the phenomenal experience of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban modernity, and in examining the sources of its abiding fascination. Esteve's focus, however, is not so much on the Benjaminian cultural MLR, 100.4, 2005 1079 phenomenology of the nineteenth-century crowd as on the ways in which the crowd impinges on the principles of the liberal-democratic public sphere in American liter? ary representations from the 1830s to the 1930s...