The Social Construction of American Realism by Amy Kaplan (review)

Abstract

252Reviews For instance, in Dryden's interpretation of Faulkner, the "ghostly presence" of echoing voices in the text make it impossible to have an "original voice" who once and for all can tell an authoritative story (p. 148). Further, in Faulkner, what is undone is the "idea of a pater familias who initiates successive generations of offspring " (p. 153). As a result, Faulkner "also equivocates the idea of narrative or story : as the orderly unfolding of a plot from a single authoritative source" (p. 154). All the questions of generation, authority, and authorship are understandable as revisions or revolts against narrative as an originating patriarchal event. Dryden displays this genealogical language quite convincingly but seems in the end to accept it as the defining contours of "American romance" without examining how romances written by non-canonical writers might affect his generalizations about genre. In a more "enlightened" but equally decisive manner, women and minority writers are again excluded from the critical game as inferences about individual texts that rely on specific familial metaphors are presented as representative of The Form of American Romance. Can a discussion of American romance really afford to overlook the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Edith Wharton? What sense can we make of our critical vocabularies if they are presented to us as entangled with a "genealogical crisis" that refers to specific gender relationships yet limits the axes of these relationships? What would happen if a critic of American literature would dare to explore together the "genealogical crisis" of romance that privileges not only the father-son metaphor but also the mother-daughter, let alone the mother-son or father-daughter metaphor? Would critical anarchy result, or a tale of intertextuality that echoes the polyphonous voices of our literary past? Are the narratives of the past so neatly divided into separate literary traditions that they symmetrically privilege one gender over another? If they are, then the gender ghettos of American criticism do indeed become golden prisons. Washington State UniversityJoan Burbick Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction ofAmerican Realism. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988. 187 pp. Cloth: $29.95. Amy Kaplan's poststructuralist reading of William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser puts her at the forefront of critics currently redefining American Realism. Kaplan examines how Realists responded to the turbulent transformation of capitalist society between the Civil War and World War I; she assumes that language does not reflect reality but instead helps to produce and interpret it. If realistic novels written in America do not reflect society—as the traditional theory of mimesis would assert—what then, she asks, do these novels do and how do they do it? To answer these and related questions, she briefly traces the critical background to the study of Realism in America, with special attention to the influence of Lionel Trilling's politics and Richard Chase's romance thesis, then studies how social change, class difference, and mass culture affected the development of American Realism. Faced with social change, American Realists confronted "the growing sense of unreality at the heart of middle-class life" (p. 9), questioned the accessibility of a rapidly changing society to a writer, and searched for what Frederic Jameson calls a "strategy of containment" (p. 10) in their attempt to imagine and manage this society. Kaplan locates their anxiety in the conflict between two versions of reality: fragmented reality caused by class conflict and homogeneous reality caused by the rise Studies in American Fiction253 of a mass culture generated by nationally distributed newspapers, magazines, and best sellers. In treating social change as the foreground rather than as the background of a novel, American Realists struggled to contain conflicting visions of reality and to control "a process of change which seems to defy representation" (p. 10). Kaplan discusses the early professional career of the three authors as they strove to represent society. Howells develops his theory and practice of realism partly as a response to new forms of mass representation and to his anxiety over the possible . collapse of society. Realism becomes a way to constrain social differences and to control potential conflict in society; hence, Howells emphasizes character...