The Novel in the Era of Plessy

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.

A Double-Barreled Novel

This chapter explores Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the most celebrated novel of the late nineteenth century, as the most completely realized example of the perspectival realism of the Reconstruction generation. Addressing Twain’s relationship with Howells and considering the way Twain’s absorption of the categories of the “sentimental fool” and the practices of mugwump aestheticism fed into his approach as a novelist, this chapter reads Huckleberry Finn as an allegory of the irreducible complexity of emancipation. This reading overturns traditional readings of the novel that celebrate Huck’s raft as a space of utopian freedom. It also offers an alternative to the dilemmas encountered by readers who have confronted the novel’s minstrelized depiction of the escaped slave Jim. What Twain called his “double-barreled” novel must be read for the way the possibilities of emancipation are hidden in plain sight, obscured by symbols of freedom such as the raft. Written in an age of renewed federalism even as it looks back at the antebellum world, Huckleberry Finn invites the reader to consider the possibility that the multiplicity of jurisdictions and overlapping, nonunified character of the U.S. legal system might represent a route toward emancipation in a world in which, absent a uniform law, no community could represent true justice.

Introduction

The introduction argues that the reconstruction of the American novel in the post-Civil War era had its roots in a confrontation with the legal remapping of the nation under the Fourteenth Amendment. William Dean Howells’s pivotal influence on the shaping of post-Civil War American literature, this chapter suggests, was rooted in his grasp of the challenge Reconstruction posed to the epistemological and legal foundations of the novel as form. Providing an initial definition of the idea of “legal realism” in fiction as the confluence between Fourteenth-Amendment universalism and a mandate to understand modern society from a plurality of perspectives, the introduction asserts that the project of creating an “autonomous art”—an art that was not subservient to politics, journalism, philosophy, or morality—involved embracing all of these fields in relation to the new definition of citizenship and in relation to a sociological panorama of American society. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s assertion that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” cut against the novel’s universalism but also opened up new possibilities of representation, which were embraced, extended, and criticized by Albion Tourgée, in defending the rights of African-American freedmen to equality, and by Helen Hunt Jackson, in articulating the rights of Native Americans to enjoy either the rights of nations or those of citizenship. Concluding with the idea that objective exploration of nescience in relation to the suffering of others can be a source of knowledge in law as in literature, the introduction explores the connection between legal right and the novel’s frameworks of sympathetic imagination and multi-perspectival dissonance.

Imperfect Knowledge

This chapter examines William Dean Howells, the writer and editor who defined the field of American literature in the decades of Reconstruction. While Howells has long been considered the leading champion of literary realism, the way he thought about the novel’s art as a mode of “social” politics has been misunderstood. This chapter addresses the first half of Howells’s career, looking at his early antislavery politics, his cosmopolitan reading in the German and Italian traditions, his magazine writings including Venetian Life, Their Wedding Journey, Suburban Sketches, and “Police Report,” and his fiction up through A Modern Instance. Howells remained committed to emancipatory ideals rooted in the antislavery struggle. However, he articulated a strikingly new conception of the novel’s role as a form of political discourse. Howells challenged his contemporaries to expand the field of literary “politics” to imagine society as a space suffused with political power, and by doing so to confront the barriers to equal social recognition that remained in an era of de jure universal citizenship. Calling into question sentimental notions of moral universality, he insisted that the novel’s contribution rested in a perspectivalist epistemology, its capacity to confront readers with the irreducible particularities of a world shaped by incomplete emancipation. Howells urged his contemporaries to confront alterity in a double sense. While including all American “subjects” in the novel’s representation, novelists needed to ask what it meant to try to represent others’ experiences, and what Americans could not understand about each other.

Perfect Knowledge

This chapter examines Helen Hunt Jackson as an exemplary figure for the Reconstruction generation of American writers. Nurtured on the sympathetic universalism animating the antebellum realism of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jackson collided with the limits of this model at the moment of its triumph. A successful novelist and poet, Jackson became, in the 1870s, an activist for Native American rights. Working across a variety of genres—travel writing published in prestigious magazines such as The Century, the legal history A Century of Dishonor, and the novel Ramona—Jackson attempted to supplement sentimental modes of universalist appeal with legal arguments appropriate to the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment and picturesque representational strategies appealing to a generation increasingly interested in racial, regional, and gender difference. Tracing out Jackson’s affiliation with a variety of contemporary writers, including Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée, and Henry James, this chapter shows how these writings engaged her in a generational rebellion against the high political moralism of the prewar generation. The “sentimental fools,” “sentimental tourists,” and “mugwump aesthetes” of postbellum literature rejected and transformed the sentimental tradition in ways that prepared the ground for a literary field defined by the paired ideals of autonomous literary experimentalism and authentic, pluralistic cultural expression. This chapter argues that Ramona, in its attempt to compromise between sentimentalism and the new epistemological and aesthetic particularity, must be read as an allegory of public agency in an age of violent territorial expansion and divided fields of discourse.