The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace

Abstract

Literary history can be reduced to two paradigms. The first, which conceived literature as a discourse designed “to delight and instruct,” held firm from ancient Roman times, when Horace first coined the phrase, through the eighteenth century. The second, which espoused “art for art's sake,” emerged in the nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe coined the earliest formulation of this second idea in an 1844 Graham's essay, in which he emphasizes the “poem written solely for the poem's sake.” Poe's concept was absolutely radical. What he said, in essence, was that a literary work need not have a didactic purpose. It need not instruct at all: it need only exist as a beautiful piece of art. While offering an alternative approach to literature, Poe's paradigm did not supplant Horace's. As Susan M. Ryan reminds us in her new book, The Moral Economies of American Authorship, American readers in the middle third of the nineteenth century accepted and insisted upon literature's didactic component. A “good” book should be good both aesthetically and morally. The moral character of nineteenth-century authors, Ryan argues persuasively, functioned as literary capital that shaped the promotion and reception of writers and their works.Oxford Studies in American Literary History, the series in which Ryan's Moral Economies appears, is the brainchild of editor Gordon Hutner. This series is an outgrowth of American Literary History, the Oxford journal Hutner founded in 1989 and the first major journal published in the wake of New Historicism, the critical approach that emerged in the eighties as an effort to rehistoricize the study of American literature after New Criticism had dehistoricized it. However, therein lay a problem: New Criticism had been so successful for so long that the philosophy and methodology of literary history had largely been lost by the time New Historicism emerged. Trained by New Critics, New Historicists have had difficulty doing the kind of hardnosed historical research that defined the field before New Criticism. Furthermore, the critical approach of the New Historicists, informed by a political agenda reflecting the dual influence of the Civil Rights movement and the Women's Movement, came to center on issues of race, class, and gender. Essentially they took historically inflected topics and applied a New Critical methodology, interpreting the literature of the past through a modern moral viewpoint. Consequently many of their so-called historical interpretations paradoxically proved to be anachronistic.In light of those developments, Ryan's Moral Economies is a breath of fresh air. Instead of imposing a modern moral viewpoint onto her subject, she avoids anachronism, seeking to recapture the moral judgments through which nineteenth-century American literature was interpreted when it was published. In her introduction Ryan explains that many current English professors have overemphasized modern political and ideological issues as factors in the production and reception of American literature in the nineteenth century. In recent decades academic critics have attributed to the debate over slavery “a controlling influence that the era's primary documents do not fully support” (12). Ryan's challenge to the dominant critical hegemony in and of itself makes Moral Economies worth reading.Though we can admire Ryan's willingness to boldly go against the critical practices established by New Historicism, the fact that she attended graduate school since the New Historicism became the dominant approach to the study of American literature means that her work inevitably reflects some of its shortcomings. Though appearing in a series supposedly devoted to “literary history,” Moral Economies, like some of the other works in the series, shows little sense of story. The French use the same word for both “history” and “story”; those of us who write in English must continually remind ourselves that when writing history we must never forget the story. Once Ryan defines her period of study—the middle third of the nineteenth century—she ranges freely from one decade to another, showing little sense of story or chronology.The gaps in Ryan's knowledge of reference materials reflect some of the finer points that have been lost since the heyday of traditional historical criticism. Citing an anonymous notice of Poe's posthumous works that appeared in North American Review, for example, Ryan seems unaware of William Cushing's Index to the North American Review (1878), which indicates that Mrs. E. Vale Smith wrote the essay. Alternatively Ryan could have consulted S. Austin Allibone's Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1874) to learn the authorship of this anonymous review. Had Ryan consulted Cushing's Initials and Pseudonyms (1885), she could have learned further that Mrs. E. Vale Smith also wrote for the Christian Examiner, a religious periodical published in Boston. Smith's authorship of the review and her staunch Christian viewpoint seem vital for understanding her interpretation of Poe's life and works, but Ryan's unawareness of these useful references prevents her from identifying the article's author and thus developing her argument further.Perhaps it would not be too hard for Ryan and her contemporaries to brush up their bibliography, but something else that has been lost since the rise of New Historicism seems more difficult to recover. The expansion of the canon of American literature to include many formerly neglected authors may be New Historicism's most important accomplishment, but it has come at a significant cost. Because every American novel, great or otherwise, now seems worthy of critical explication, expanding the canon has inadvertently impaired our powers of discrimination and damaged our ability to discern literary quality.Despite her fresh approach to the study of American literary reception, Ryan's choice of examples may make her study easy to ignore in the coming years. Take for example her discussion of prefaces. She cites such insignificant works as T. S. Arthur's Sparing to Spend (1853), F. Colburn Adams's Justice in the By-Ways (1856), and Mary Denison's Nobody's Child (1857). The prefaces of all three books portray their authors as teachers of morality. Ryan might have briefly mentioned Mark Twain. Though Twain is beyond Ryan's scope, her quotations from the prefaces of these obscure works reveal, in contrast, the originality of the notice that prefaces The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Poe, whose works do fall with Ryan's scope, represents a greater omission. Ryan ignores what may be the single most important preface in nineteenth-century American literature, Poe's “Letter to Mr. ———,” which prefaces Poems (1831).Though Poe did not coin the poem-for-poem's-sake phrase until 1844, the idea was part of his aesthetic almost since he started writing for publication. In “Letters to Mr. ———,” Poe writes: “He who pleases is of more importance to his fellow men than he who instructs, since utility is happiness, and pleasure is the end already obtained which instruction is merely the means of obtaining.” Read in contrast to Poe, the prefaces of Arthur and Adams and Denison sound reactionary. Their didactic emphasis on literary morality may be typical of the times, but for the period's most forward-thinking authors, it was already passé. Ryan does an impressive job of reconstructing nineteenth-century attitudes that shaped the contemporary literary reception, but her analysis does not address writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, whose works have transcended the times in which they wrote.

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