Wayward feelings

Wayward Feelings Christopher Newfield (bio) Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. By Richard H. Brodhead. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 245 pages. $15.95. This deft, accessible book describes how evolving definitions of “serious literature” enforced and intensified social division in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The cover reproduction of Winslow Homer’s The Country School expresses Brodhead’s claim that high-culture works after the Civil War did not so much represent independent heartland living as they concocted that heartland for status-conscious consumers. Sure enough, Homer’s schoolroom shows children sorted into groups, some rapt, some indifferent, some in tears. As Brodhead describes it, postbellum American culture was marked by a “hierarchical reorganization of the literary sphere” (153). This hierarchy was developed through the “conversion of literary taste into a prime sign of class difference” (103–4). Even genres that appeared to value “a way of life apart from the culturally dominant” were pulled into homogenizing consumer markets in order to become markers of access to surplus income and exclusive leisure (117). One of Brodhead’s major examples is regionalism. Though the genre “extend[ed] opportunity above all to groups traditionally distanced from literary lives” (116), it actually sold to an upper-middle class that used regionalism to reinforce its distinction from these other groups. This class wanted literature to help create a “secure sense of homogeneity” that consolidated its superiority to competing cultures in a distressingly pluralistic United States (135). The publishing [End Page 440] industry restructured the literary sphere largely in response to this class’s wishes. After discussing antebellum domestic fiction and the transitional role of Louisa May Alcott, Brodhead’s final chapters focus on two artistically ambitious victims of the late century’s publishing regime. Sarah Orne Jewett and Charles Chesnutt were restricted by their editors and publishers to native informant roles on the regionalist subjects with which they were initially identified. Chesnutt, for example, lost his publishers when he tried to move away from his earlier dialect tales into pointed considerations of racism and race relations in Jim Crow America. Fine-arts culture demanded that Chesnutt serve an “agenda not of dismantling prejudice but of feeding an appetite for consumable otherness” (206). Brodhead interweaves two aspects of the making of this stratified literary world. First, he sketches the way the middle-class domestic fiction of the 1850s gave way to upper-class notions of literature “for its own sake” that were well-established by the 1880s. Second, he describes how the growing influence of an aesthetic definition of the literary abetted rather than resisted the rise of a commercial culture devoted to offering vicarious “life” to passive consumers. “[A]pparently, aesthetic discriminations underwrite a larger social invidiousness” (171). In Cultures of Letters, these tales are wonderfully told, and I wish they were more widely known inside and outside the university. The book’s analyses, though not unprecedented, will be useful to specialists, while its lucidity suits it to both undergraduate students and the general reader. Brodhead covers his sizable ground with a precision of intent, an avoided proliferation, and an amiable clarity that lends to its argument the relief that follows a clear explanation of unpleasant facts. The book has the additional virtues of connecting the periods preceding and following the Civil War, linking aestheticism to the formation of the postbellum middlebrow, and providing valuable individual chapters on antebellum domestic fiction, women and regionalism, and African-American fiction’s entrapment in the new literary order. The impact of Brodhead’s remarkable skills is limited, however, by certain aspects of his perspective, some of which have been challenged by recent scholarship. African American writers are virtually absent until the final chapter on Charles Chesnutt. This is a serious omission, since American class dynamics are not first formed among whites and then applied to blacks, but are formed through a continuous interaction among blacks and whites and other racial and ethnic groups. [End Page 441] Furthermore, the women writers who form the book’s central subjects are cast primarily as nurturing mothers to official ideology. For Brodhead, the antebellum writers

Aesthetics · Art · Civilization · Epistemology · Feeling · Literature · Political science · Regionalism (politics · Sociology · Taste · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

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