The Novel in the Era of Plessy

Abstract

Abstract The transformation of literary realism in the late nineteenth century took place within the context of a categorical shift in American social epistemologies. The first chapter presents an interdisciplinary, generational portrait of this shift by examining a set of key texts from the years 1896–98 as summaries of the reconstruction of law, literature, and philosophy since the Civil War. Two important works by the James brothers, philosopher William James’s “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, demonstrate how the relationship between “sentiment” and “rationality” had been transformed. By attacking the nineteenth century’s trust in the emotions alongside its belief in a transcendent concept of reason, William and Henry James made a case for a new kind of moral imagination grounded in the uncertainty of the emotions and the unknowability of other selves. While the James brothers greeted the collapse of the sentimental paradigm as an emancipatory moment for individuals and for the novel itself, the lawyer and novelist Albion Tourgée saw it as imperiling the ability of Americans to speak, write, or think about freedom. Best known as Homer Plessy’s lawyer in Plessy v. Ferguson, Tourgée was also the most passionate defender of the emancipatory role of the sentimental novel. Exploring Tourgée’s opposition to pluralistic relativism in his brief on behalf of Homer Plessy and his literary analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this chapter explores the opposition between the Jameses’ celebratory vision of epistemological perspectivalism and Tourgée’s defense of sentimental reason.