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dualism, and thus may be construed as a major reinterpretation of the American Dream and a literary agenda that derives from the earlier Renaissance; (4) that naturalism, as the extremity of realism, is pervaded by a perceived contradiction between “optimism and pessimism, freedom and determination, will and fate, social reformism and mechanistic despair”; thus it is one manifestation of the “divided stream of transcendentalism” because it fails to reinstate the original “transcendentalist union of reason and instinct” (12, 15). Although Walcutt’s subsequent readings of naturalist novels are not as provocative and insightful as this introductory argument, the book seems to me a brilliant success because it illuminates the cultural context within which the intellectual extremity of the naturalist literary agenda begins to make sense. My only criticism of Walcutt is that he does not take his own insights seriously enough. For example, on p. 22 he notes that “naturalism involved a continual search for form.” If he is correct — and I think he is — it becomes necessary to explain and defend, not merely mention in passing, Frank Norris’s seemingly bizarre claim to the effect that Romance is the necessary formal antidote to Realism under modern conditions (see Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1901; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1928], pp. 163–8).
5. See my Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), Part 2, for a more detailed discussion of Hegel’s role in the intellectual innovation of the turn of the century.
6. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 101–2. These remarks appeared originally in Harper’s Monthly of November 1895, as ‘‘Literary Boston Thirty Years Ago.” On Howells’s prolonged struggle against romance, see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Chap. 1.
7. E. H. Cady, ed. W. D. Howells as Critic (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 100.
8. A Modern Instance [1882] (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 361.
9. Halleck’s positions on the relation between extension in space or time and the intelligibility of morality are essentially Kantian. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 125, and Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 313, 464–79 (A 318–19, 533–57).
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10. Cady, Howells as Critic, pp. 310–11; cf. p. 102.
11. Again see my Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, Part 2.
12. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 304, 105–6, 136–43, and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 47–53; Jameson, Political Unconscious, pp. 112–3; and Howells as Critic, pp. 81–3, 97–103, 299–313.
13. See Frye, Anatomy, p. 193, and Scripture, pp. 53–4; cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, pp. 41–83.
14. Julian Markels, “Theodore Dreiser and the Plotting of Inarticulate Experience,” Massachusetts Review 2 (1961): 431–48, reprinted in Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 527–41. Cf. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, p. 191: “The movement of the novel does not depend upon acts of will by the central figures.” I am using the Bantam paperback edition of Sister Carrie (New York, 1972), and will hereafter cite page numbers in the text.
15. Markels, “Inarticulate Experience,’’ pp. 531–2.
16. Walter Benn Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 373–90. Cf. Cohen, “Locating One’s Self,” p. 366: “The material world becomes the mirror of Carrie’s personality.”
17. See Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” and Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), esp. Chap. 2.
18. See Jameson, Political Unconscious, pp. 113–9, for discussion of the ethical binary at the core of romance.
19. See Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84–258.
20. See Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), Chaps. 1–2; David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), Chap. 6; and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), Chaps. 5–6.
21. See Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 27–40, 45–50, 110–233.
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22. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man [1857] (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 75, 190.
23. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance [1852] (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 27–8, 116; on Coverdale’s direction of the play, see pp. 143, 146, 170–3, 176, 178, 206, 208, 236.
24. Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance, pp. 249–50.
25. Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” pp. 384–6.
26. On Hawthorne’s attempt “to locate a point of intersection between home and marketplace,” see Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 191–2. Dreiser’s commentary from “Haunts of Nathaniel Hawthorne,’’ Truth 17 (September 21–28, 1898), reprinted in Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), pp. 57–66. (Quotation, p. 58.)
27. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1906), 1: 141–2, and Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), pp. 141–74, 196–236; Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 5, 19, 105–111, and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), Chaps. 1–3; Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), Chaps. 1–4, 10.
28. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of 18th Century Sociology,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 103–24; cf. William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chaps. 3–4; and Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 223–6.
29. See my Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), Chaps. 3–5, esp. pp. 90–4, and Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (New York: New American Library, 1960), Chap. 22, to which I was led by Howard Horwitz’s brilliant essay, “To Find the Value of X: The Pit as Renunciation of Romance,” in Sundquist, ed., American Realism, pp. 215–37. The quoted remark is attributed to Doctor Leete, the character who acts as the novel’s interlocutor. He is Bellamy’s witness at the birth of what Jean Baudrillard calls the “political economy of the sign,” or the “third phase” of po-
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litical economy, which not incidentally coincides with the rise of “monopolistic capitalism” or “finance capital.” See The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), pp. 119–29.
30. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Norton, 1977), esp. Chap. 2.
31. Jean-Christophe Agnew, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in Fox & Lears, eds., Culture of Consumption, pp. 65–100 and endnotes at pp. 221–5, esp. note 9, p. 222, where, having cited William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), Agnew states: “The following analysis is deeply indebted to Leiss’s work.” My quotations are from Leiss, Limits, pp. 25, 90.
32. I am quoting from the Airmont edition of Father Goriot (New York: Airmont, 1966), pp. 166, 21, 133, 91–3, except at this last passage (94), where I have substituted my own translation from Honoré de Balzac, Oeuvres Completes: La Comédie Humaine, Etudes de Moeurs: Scènes de la vie privée, Vol. VI (Paris: L. Conrad, 1912–1940), p. 338; page references to the Airmont edition are hereafter cited in text.
33. Dreiser, quoted in Richard Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser. At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907 (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1986), p. 235.
34. Cf. MacIntyre, “The Relationship of Philosophy to Its Past,’’ in Philosophy in History, eds. Rorty et al., pp. 31–48.
35. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 98; cf. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 221–36. I am adopting and adapting the ambitious argument of Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, pp. 126–50.
36. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 81, 98–9; the last passage quoted according to the translation by Shell in Money, Language, and Thought, p. 149.
37. See Sandy Petrey, “The Language of Realism, the Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie,” Novel 10 (1977): 101–13; cf. Cathy N. and Arnold E. Davidson, “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser’s Heroine,” Modern Fiction Studies 23 (1977): 395–407, esp. 404 ff.
38. Michaels, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” 384–6.
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Works Consulted
Ahnebrink, Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris with Special References to Some European Influences, 1891–1903. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.