Nineteenth-Century American Romance: Genre And The Construction Of Democratic Culture. - Review - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by A. James Wohlpart

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ROMANCE: GENRE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE by Emily Miller Budick. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. xiii 186 pages. $24.95.

After tracing the origin and development of the romance as a genre, Emily Miller Budick suggests that any attempt to adequately define the romance form must be grounded in the sociopolitical and economic concerns that coexist with the manifestation of a particular group of romance texts. Consequently, Budick grounds her reading of the American romance in the context of the sociopolitical order of the nineteenth century:

   American romance fiction, I suggest, was an effort by a group of writers to
   produce what Noah Webster called an "American tongue." It was the attempt
   to encode within language itself the specifically American features of the
   new sociopolitical and economic reality known as the United States.

Budick defines the nature of this reality through a contrast with European aristocracy and hierarchy, suggesting that American romance writers, including especially Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James,

   glimpsed (each in his own way) a relationship between a certain way of
   telling stories and authoritarianism. Therefore, they each set out to
   create a new mode of storytelling that would work to further the expression
   of pluralism and democracy.

Budick suggests that, in reaction to this sociopolitical context, the nineteenth-century American romance rejected the existence of a transcendent truth and, "like democracy itself,"

   would have to permit the play of conflict and controversy. It would have to
   accommodate multiple and even contradictory systems of belief, to produce a
   text that, poised on a question, would demand the interpretative skills and
   active involvement of the reader. Only such a text, in the views of the
   romance writers, could contribute to creating a culture hospitable to,
   supportive of, and capable of realizing the values of democracy and
   pluralism.

According to Budick, the "democratic poetics" evinced in these works is founded on a "philosophical skepticism" that questions not only whether the world exists, but also whether we can know if the world exists; such a position of inquiry forces individual characters, and thus the reader, to posit a solution not only to the question of the phenomenological existence of the world, but also to the question of how he or she will exist in a world shrouded in doubt. Budick shows, ultimately, that the American romance of the nineteenth century responds to the belief that "the world is a place not of transcendent truths (religious, philosophical, moral, or otherwise) but of human manufacture, in which human beings must take responsibility for a world that they alone create and validate."

Budick's analysis begins with Cooper's The Prairie, a precursor text that begins to ask the questions of the romance genre, demonstrating a self-consciousness about storytelling and, thus, about knowledge. Yet The Prairie, as an early work, does not ultimately take a philosophically skeptical position; rather, the novel allows the realms of myth and history to interrogate each other, demonstrating that both are human creations that afford meaning. The heart of her analysis considers Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and several of Hawthorne's short stories, and Melville's Moby-Dick in order to demonstrate the philosophically skeptical position of these romances. Poe, who is the most suspicious of humans' ability to know the world, demonstrates that humans, because they cannot maintain a certainty of transcendent reality, need to create narratives about the world in order to affirm their existence. Hawthorne, on the other hand, while accepting the dictum that we can have "no knowledge of reality except what the mind produces," insists that we do not have to relinquish our belief that the world exists. Melville, finally, incorporates the concerns of both writers, recognizing with Hawthorne "that without sustained philosophical doubt ... the world (physical, social, and cultural) quickly dwindles to a monomaniacal self-conception of self, endlessly repeating," and, with Poe, the grave dangers of "too great an infatuation with doubt." The conclusion of Budick's Nineteenth-Century American Romance turns to an analysis of James's works--including his short stories and The Portrait of a Lady--in order to describe the turn from romanticism to realism, that is, "from certainty to doubt to commitment to an unrelentingly solid and `real' world that no amount of philosophical reflection will soften." Budick concludes that the romance genre

   makes the point that the universe is unknowable except through the
   subjectivity of our private perceptions, but it [also] provides the equally
   important countermove, which requires that individuals nonetheless (and
   with a full consciousness of the partiality of their judgments) assume
   responsibility for the world that they collectively create.