The Reign of the Genteel

Abstract

This conclusion examines some episodes in the formation of the narrative about 'the genteel tradition'. Having shown that Henry Adams, Henry James, Edith Wharton and their friend Barrett Wendell all contribute to a realist critique of a liberal idealism, American Snobs notes here that when George Santayana makes his own influential commentary on the 'genteel', he is responding to the same liberal Harvard milieu that provokes that realist critique. Wendell's Harvard students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington adapt this critique as they develop the narrative about the genteel for their own ends. Brooks, the conclusion shows, contributes to the distortions of that narrative by conflating Charles Eliot Norton's perspective with that of the much more reactionary Wendell. The book closes by considering the unsexy femininity that frequently figures the genteel, linking it to Reconstruction-era evocations of the schoolmarm and later references to sterile Anglo-Saxon womanhood that hastens racial decline. In later iterations of the narrative about the genteel, negative representations of this unsexy white femininity tend to serve progressive ends; in earlier iterations like those surveyed in American Snobs, however, such representations tend to serve a conservatism that is sceptical about democracy and understands itself as realist.