Truth in American fiction: the legacy of rhetorical idealism

Abstract

Unlike current deconstruction readings of early American literature that assert the relativity of language and of moral vision. Janet Gabler-Hover's Truth in American Fiction contends that most of the major novelists of 19th-century American consciously discriminated in their works between the moral and immoral use of language. They could be confident that their reading public understood this moral discrimination largely because of the widespread belief in rhetorical idealism, particularly the truth-telling power of language. No movement influencing early American thought so engaged the American public as did the study of rhetoric. This hybrid form of rhetoric which originated in the religious centers of great universities in Scotland flourished in the emerging educational and cultural centres of America but filtered down into popular culture as well; it even became a part of the public school curriculum. Rhetorical study directly influenced may of the century's great authors-notably. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charles Brockden Brown, and Henry James - and provided them a common ground of moral reference with their audiences. There was, for example, a community-based concept of truth as both knowable and morally necessary-a concept that grew out of the study of rhetoric. In her close readings of Brown's Wieland, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's The Confidence-Man, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James's The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, Gabler-Hover argues that with the exception of The Cofidence-Man, major works of 19th-century fiction confirm the legitimacy of this rhetorical conception of truth. Challenging the deconstructionist readings that insist on the open-endedness of texts, she argues that these novels invite, rather than merely tolerate, readings that offer closure.