1 Andrew Lawson DOWNWARDLY MOBILE: THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF AMERICAN REALISM (Oxford, 2012) ix + 191 pp. Reviewed by Elizabeth Duquette American literary realism has traumatic origins. Critics sometimes link its development to the Civil War, or more precisely, the devastating destruction and broad social change caused by the war. Other scholars, however, point to the extraordinary dislocation attendant upon advanced industrial capitalism, suggesting that its advent explains the new focus on truth and fact in postbellum American fiction. Lawson now offers yet another traumatic source for American realism: the Panic of 1837. He contends that the emergence of American literary realism is best explained by the impact of economic uncertainty on the lives of individual authors. Scarred by their families' declining fortunes, he argues, the authors studied here wrote fiction that would make the world seem less uncertain. For Lawson, then, realism is a therapeutic genre that responds to the trauma of pervasive economic anxiety. To explain how the Panic of 1837 shaped the evolution of American fiction from the 1860s through the 1880s, Lawson turns to economic and social history as well as biographical and psychological sources. "The lesson of the Panic," he explains, "was that all fortunes, and indeed all things, are in essence fungible" (4). The Panic created "a preference for what is local, particular, and concrete rather than what is universal, unbounded, and abstract" (9). The
2 "structure of feeling I am calling realism," Lawson writes, "develops in response to the dematerializing and destabilizing effects of the market revolution" (9). Like Raymond Williams, on whose work he profitably draws, Lawson stresses both the material conditions underwriting social experience and the "structure of feeling" they caused. But this is only half of Lawson's argument. He also insists on observing more carefully how individual authors "tether themselves" to "psychic anchoring points through phantasmatic identifications with social others" (18). In other words, he aims to correlate material conditions with both affects and effects, most notably the ties and texts they generate. Across five chapters, Lawson provides detailed readings of canonical realists (Henry James, William Dean Howells) as well as authors he argues should be recognized as realists (Rose Terry Cooke, Rebecca Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland). All of these authors experienced economic uncertainty early in their lives and, as a result, suffered later from anxieties about class position and financial stability. After providing the necessary biographical context, Lawson shows how fiction can convey the aftermath of psychic instability. The novelty of Lawson's stress on class may not be immediately obvious, for American realism has long been linked to economic conditions. But by stressing the authors' experience of financial panic, Lawson seeks to make class freshly visible in their work. This move raises important, if sometimes problematic, questions for scholars seeking new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the material conditions of their environments. Rather than showing how novels or stories use class as a thematic element, Lawson argues
3 that to appreciate fully the literary works of American realists, we must understand their childhood experiences. "The economically insecure and socially vulnerable self," Lawson explains, seeks "a psychic mooring" expressed in "realism's search for the tangible"; this "mooring" is, at the same time, a "search for a secure point of identification" (37). At its core, Lawson's argument hinges on rethinking identification, specifically by transporting Freud's model to the nineteenth century. Comparing the narrative strategy of Rose Terry Cooke to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lawson argues that a new distinction is necessary: "Stowe actually offers her readers a scene of sympathy, of two hearts vibrating as one to a common theme, rather than a scene of identification, the process 'whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides' " (34; J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis trans. Donald Nicholson [London: Hogarth, 1973], 205). Stowe's novel, he adds, effaces specific detail and class difference in order to reach a consensus based on "feelings...held so transparently in common" (34). He admits that a kind of identification is associated with the mechanisms of sympathy as defined by Adam Smith, but maintains that what realist authors seek to accomplish in and with their texts is identification in "the established Freudian sense" which he defines, via Carla Kaplan, as "involv[ing] a longing for 'merger, fusion, and contact' [37; Kaplan,The Erotics of Talk [New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 44).
4 The chapter on Cooke provides a fine example. Singling out her "careful description of the low, the concrete, and the particular," he argues that it makes "tangible the sense of connection and relationship identification involves" (34). Critics are wrong, he writes, to assume that Cooke's descriptions are part of the work of sympathy. Instead, he contends that she uses identification in the Freudian sense while maintaining the fundamental differences between middleclass readers and lower-class characters as a way to encourage social change: "Cooke identifies with the poor, rural woman in order to say to the refined, upper-middle-class woman: we are both being dragged down, while you rise; we are--identically--excrescences in the social system, but we, at least are not like you" (37). But why, one may wonder, should Freud's concept of identification be used to explain nineteenth-century American realism? If models beyond Smith are needed, why not turn to more local options, like the psychology of William James, who also suffered from the economic uncertainty that influenced his novelist brother? Further, how might the historical specificity of Freud's own theories, as outlined by Diana Fuss in Identification Papers(1995), complicate their use in other historical periods and national cultures? To link individual literary works to the psychology of individual authors and the identifications they do (or do not) establish, Lawson relies on close causal relationships that could well be imaginary. Consider his discussion of Henry James's Roderick Hudson, which includes a reference to "the Irish people at home who live in different corners of a room, and take boarders":
5 When he wrote these lines, James must have been thinking at some level of barely conscious shame and dread, of the Irish women in Henry Senior's household: of the five servants living with the Jameses in 1850... (102) Here, as elsewhere, Lawson relies on the rhetoric of necessity; to link a passage from a literary work with the emotional life of its author, he assumes that the former must have sprung almost unmediated ("at some level," "barely conscious") from the latter. Similarly, a moment of "frustrating hesitation" in A Modern Instance "derives from Howells's own contradictory class identity" (83); from two pieces by Rose Terry Cooke can be inferred "the psychological and emotional effects of her father's downward mobility" upon her (31); and in order to have written "Life in the Iron Mills," Rebecca Harding Davis must have been intimidated by a wealthy neighbor. While the combination of materialist history and psychoanalysis yields some insightful readings, Lawson's method also reveals the challenges faced by those who seek to read literature through the lenses of biography and individual psychology. How do we explain why the same economic conditions prompt some authors--such as Cooke or Garland--to embrace realism while leading others--like Louisa May Alcott, for example--to take up sensationalism or reform writing? Indeed, to see how similar conditions can yield different kinds of narrative, one might recall The Rites of Assent(1993), where Sacvan Bercovitch argues that a pervasive uncertainty about class position underwrites many American gestures at consensus. But the larger question is certainly worth asking: what relationship can or should critics posit between an author's experiences and the works he or she
6 produces? How might we arrive at more nuanced positions on the life -- and death -- of the author? What new models of creativity and the material or psychological conditions that limit it would enable a better balance in the vexed relationship between intent and chance? In the more local context that Lawson explores, we might even ask how the social construction of American realism--to borrow Amy Kaplan's title--might be made to accommodate the agency or action of the author as a specific individual rather than as the voice of his or her generation or culture. Although Lawson does not raise these questions, they circle around the edges of his book and help to determine its contribution to the field's ongoing discussions. Equally valuable is Lawson's way of resisting the standard narrative that locates the "rise of realism" in the 1880s. By reminding us that signature features of realism--such as its emphasis on detail-- were part of American fiction before the Civil War, he usefully expands the reach of realism to include the 1850s as well as the too-often-overlooked decades of the 1860s and 1870s. This is a welcome, if overdue, correction of critical assumptions that have long relegated women writers to the margins of postbellum literary history. Thirty years ago, Eric Sundquist wrote that "[n]o genre--if it can be called a genre--is more difficult to define than realism, and this is particularly true of American realism" (Sundquist, ed. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press [1982] vii). Confirming this point, Lawson's book reminds us of the crucial and fundamental questions that must to be asked whenever we talk about realism: What is American realism? Is it, as Lawson
7 suggests, a "structure of feeling," a genre, a narrative form, an element of prose fiction, or a period in American literary history? And, finally, what do we gain by rooting American realism in trauma? Why do we believe that the "truth" about the world--or the American experience of it--must derive from financial devastation or civil war? What would realism look like if we could divorce it from trauma? Elizabeth Duquette is Associate Professor of English at Gettysburg College.