The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (review)

Abstract

246Reviews reads the concluding destructiveness of The Connecticut Yankee as Twain's own vicarious attempt to blast his way clear even from the constraints of his own fiction. Michelson suggests that in failing to do so, however, Twain yokes his desire for absolute freedom with an existential quest for interior knowledge. Thus, like modernist narratives to follow, Twain's late dream tales exhibit "larger, indefinite contemplations, conditions lonely" and, to a certain degree, "free" (p. 223). Michelson, Stahl, and Camfield all offer fresh vantage points from which to renew our acquaintance with the intricate mind and work of Mark Twain. Weaving the strange and surprising into the larger fabric of the familiar, they significantly contribute to our understanding of one of America's important and endearing writers. University ofNorthern ColoradoJason G. Horn Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995. 242 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Nancy Bentley's study offers an illuminating exploration of two professional discourses—the ethnography and the novel—that are informed by expert observation of what the anthropologist Branislaw Malinowski called "the living 'documents' of culture" (p. 14). Bentley distinguishes her aim from that of a source study, explaining that she will be examining "relations not of logic or positive historical contact but mutually transforming affinities between proximate narrative bodies . . . linked through an indeterminate exchange of images, narrative energies, and structures of feeling" (p. 19). Her readings of particular texts by Hawthorne, James, and Wharton demonstrate how "ethnographic tropes and practices allowed a fiction of the drawing room to play host to alien features of modernity" (p. 21). These analyses emphasize both the political nature of manners as well as the socially engaged nature of fiction by the subjects of her study. In questioning the "inherent social conservatism" that has been attributed to fiction by these authors (p. 7), Bentley juxtaposes their texts with excerpts from the writings of anthropologists and social theorists such as Matthew Arnold, James Frazer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James, Branislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, John McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan , Georg Simmel, William Graham Sumner, Edward B. Tylor, Thorstein Veblen, James Weir, and E. A. Westermarck. The wide range of texts upon which Bentley draws as she analyzes fictional engagements with unfamiliar aspects of a changing world helps make her arguments particularly convincing . The author effectively presents The Marble Faun as a text informed by contemporary discourses about race, The Spoils of Poynton as a revision of Studies in American Fiction247 the domestic novel that deals with the emergence of commodity consumption —a turn-of-the-century "mania for possessions" (p. 115), and The Custom of the Country as a text that addresses anxieties aroused by the emergent , threatening figure of the American divorcée. Bentley does not take a strictly chronological approach, nor does she devote equal attention to each of the three subjects of her study. Four of the five chapters in the book concern primarily James and/or Wharton. The Sacred Fount is "paradigmatic" since it articulates "the uncertain, shifting relations between language and the cultural objects that language names and calls into existence" (p. 20). The Age of Innocence is similarly important since it "provides for a heightened 'culture consciousness'" by illuminating "a clash between two versions of culture . . . between manners as inherent values of propriety and manners as local forms of human society" (p. 107). The attention Bentley pays to the tribal discourse in The Age ofInnocence, going so far as to show parallels between the dinner at which Ellen Olenska is expelled and Malinowski's accounts of Trobriander ritual spells, is not particularly new. More significant are her claims about the transforming impact that ethnographic discourse had on the realist novel as a genre: "Once manners are recast as performative ritual rather than a measurable propriety, the novel has transformed an analysis of moral meaning into an anatomy of social power" (p. 112). "The complex discourse of sacrifice" in the novels of James and Wharton (p. 85), often noted by other critics, is explained by Bentley as "part of an institutionalized, a disciplined, crisis of cultural authority . The 'discovery' of occult power in manners, that is, was most overtly the...