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The Social Tradition and the American Novel
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16492 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
2,192 Words |
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Audrey Foote
Audrey Foote is a writer and reviewer who lives in Washington,
D.C. |
Americans have always struggled to escape the authority of the Old World, in our prose as well as in our politics; we want to make it new, says James Tuttleton. He considers the argument that the characteristic American novel is really a romance, not as concerned with social relations as with the adventures of the single self. As he notes, many critics and novelists believe that our distinction in literature has been to replace derivative realism, class consciousness, and civilization with naïve romanticism, action, and individualism.
But has this really been generally true of our fiction? One could say that two equally authentic American patterns have arisen, deriving from the cultures of the colonies and of the frontier. Forty years ago, the critic Philip Rahv grouped American writers into two such types, which he labeled Palefaces and Redskins. It does seem a fact, as Rahv then remarked and as Tuttleton here documents, that for some decades the Redskins have been dominant. But for much of our history, the Palefaces prevailed. One has only to consider the novelists from about 1875--after Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville--until at least the Depression to see how many have been intensely concerned not with the Promethean individual but with men and women in relation to society.
Certainly, here was an opportunity for innovation by delineating our fresh, free, open American society and contrasting it with the rigid social structures of Europe. Until quite recently, most European novelists not merely took such stratification for granted, but counseled that it be accepted with good grace, even with relief for its stability and security. Such worthy artisans as George Eliot's Adam Bede were praised for being content with their modest place, while dairymaids, like Hetty Sorel, were punished if they presumed. Ambitious individuals such as Thackeray's Becky Sharp, Stendhal's Julien Sorel, and Balzac's Eugene de Rastignac usually encountered disaster or death. Or if they did succeed, as adventurers and arrivistes, it was at the price of honor and their authors' approval.
Therefore, what could be more original and exciting than to use the traditional social novel to repudiate the old conventions and restrictions, to show our democracy at work, to depict social mobility permitting the energetic and gifted to rise from the log cabin to the White House? Denying a belief in castes, though even now acknowledging classes, we should have expected our literature to convey a new message in celebrating the ascension of the uncommon common man, especially after the Civil War. The sudden industrial expansion that followed
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