The “American Renaissance” and the Dissociation of American Culture

While southern authors were becoming uneasily aware––or paradoxically proud––of their increasing marginalization, in the North cultural nationalism eventually culminated in a flowering of self-consciously American literary art which is usually designated as the "American Renaissance." There is uniform agreement among students of American literature and culture that the South did not participate in American culture's coming into its own. In 1962, C. Hugh Holman published a seminal article about "William Gilmore Simms and the 'American Renaissance,'" which tried to explain why during the 1840s and 1850s Simms "lost the stature which he had once had as a national literary figure." According to Holman, the transition from Simms the national celebrity to Simms the sectional celebrity was connected to the economic depression of the late thirties, which he saw as a catalyst of fundamental transformations in American literature:

"Seldom has an historical event marked a division between literary movements with as much precision as that interruption in the publication of novels marked a break in the course of American fiction." When Simms returned to the writing of "Revolutionary romances" with Katherine Walton (1851) and The Sword and the Distaff (1852; revised as Woodcraft in 1854), a new generation of writers had emerged who invented new and more adequate forms for American fiction. As Holman stressed, the ultimate reason why Simms had lost touch with the American mainstream was his devotion to a South which had isolated itself intellectually as well as politically.³⁵

However, if the development of antebellum literature is assessed from a more inclusive perspective, the notion that writers like Simms were replaced by an avant-garde of more experimental authors is only a half-truth. In terms of public success and broad cultural impact, the writers traditionally considered as belonging to the "American Renaissance" were just as marginal as Simms had become. While Hawthorne and Melville were at times quite successful, the latter's readership declined steadily just as he was writing the daring fictions that are usually regarded as key texts of the

"American Renaissance." And Emerson's Nature, which is regarded as one of the most significant statements of the period, was "addressed to a small coterie who might as

33 Calhoun; qtd in Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp 12.

34 Ziff 171–172; cf. Charvat, The Profession of Authorship 303–304.

35 Holman, "William Gilmore Simms and the 'American Renaissance'" (1962); Roots 75–86;

quotes: 78–79; 85.

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well have read the work in manuscript."³⁶

Of course, the book published at the beginning of the fifties with the most tremendous impact on American culture at large was neither Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), which exemplified a new kind of (historical?) "romance," nor Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), which explored new territories for imaginative literature, but Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851/52), which redefined the social functions and ideological potentials of fiction by putting conventional forms of narrative to new uses. While Stowe's best-seller was exceedingly inventive in its own way, its form probably had more in common with the fictions of Simms than with those of Hawthorne or Melville. In fact, Ostrander observes that Stowe's attack on slavery was "difficult for Southern literary men to cope with effectively" precisely because "it was cast in the accepted Southern literary form of the plantation novel."³⁷ As to popular success, one of the writers at mid-century who came close to Stowe was Augusta Jane Evans, a writer from Alabama who, in fact, was exceedingly devoted both to traditional narrative strategies and to southern ideologies.³⁸

However, even though Holman's interpretation is damaged by a restricted canon and an evaluative practice of criticism, it still provides significant suggestions that deserve reconsideration: firstly, that the economic crisis of the late thirties and forties brought about far-reaching changes in the American literary system (which, however, are not adequately described as a transition from Simms and Cooper to Melville and Hawthorne); secondly, that these changes became manifest in new definitions of art and new relations to "romance"; and thirdly, that they furthered the displacement of traditional southern authors like Kennedy, Caruthers and Simms.

A comparison of Holman's construction of literary history with Larzer Ziff's nationalist account of American cultural history in Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981) is revealing. While Holman perceived the depression as a dramatic incision which had dealt the death-blow to antebellum southern fiction, in Ziff's study the depression plays a very different role. Here, the year 1837 is viewed as the commencement of the United States' literary and cultural awakening: during that year Poe left Virginia for New York, Melville set out on his first sea voyage, Thoreau graduated from Harvard, Hawthorne published Twice-Told Tales

36 Charvat, The Profession of Authorship 3. Cf. Richard F. Teichgraeber, Sublime Thoughts / Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), esp. 171.

37 Ostrander 285.

38 Evans's second novel Beulah––published in 1859, when the author was only twenty-four years old––became a national best-seller, and St. Elmo, appearing immediately after the war in 1866, rivaled the sales figures of Uncle Tom's Cabin. See Drew Gilpin Faust, "A Note on Augusta Jane Evans," Macaria, by Evans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992) x.

and Emerson delivered his "American Scholar" address.³⁹ The slow evolution of an American literature that had been achieved by writers such as Irving, Cooper and Bryant (Ziff does not mention Simms in this context⁴⁰) was replaced by a literary revolution that suddenly effected America's literary and cultural independence.

According to Ziff, the financial panic actually provided ideal conditions for this revolution: "The panic of 1837 silenced the shouts of national confidence and in the hush Emerson's voice was heard."⁴¹ In a similar manner, William Charvat linked the rise of "American Romanticism" to the effects of the depression. He offered an assessment of the period which directly contradicts to Holman's claim that the economic crisis devastated the book market: "The depression lasted five years. The literary boom, on the other hand, not only continued but flourished."⁴²

The contradiction between Ziff's and Charvat's accounts, on the one hand, and Holman's, on the other, can be partly reconciled if one considers that the contradictory interpretations are concerned with very different kinds of writers. Holman deals with a professional author, who depended on writing for his living; Charvat and Ziff discuss authors who were serious writers but obtained the bulk of their income elsewhere. As Ziff observes, none of the New England "Fireside Poets" and none of the

"Transcendentalists" really depended on the income gained by their writing.⁴³ Furthermore, these authors were lucky to be located in New England, which was less severely hit by the depression than other parts of the United States, so that the income they derived from investments or extra-literary work was not seriously diminished.⁴⁴

However, Ziff points out, if writers like Emerson did not need to make a living out of their writing, this "does not argue that they were not committed, professional writers. It signifies that in the absence of a literary marketplace that could support the American writer in comfort, many a writer succeeded in the marketplace that did exist only after establishing an economic base outside it." One might argue that Ziff's confusing syntax reflects the confusing literary system and the confusing strategy of professional artistic publicity that he is describing. What he means is, firstly, that because of the absence of a market for their productions Emerson and some of his New England colleagues decided to follow their literary vocation in complete independence both of the market and of their wider social environment; secondly, that

39 Ziff x; cf. xiii.

40 Ziff offers a rather superficial discussion of Simms at the beginning of his one chapter on southern literature, "The Fool Killer: George Washington Harris and Sut Lovingood" (181–

182).

41 Ziff 17.

42 Charvat, "American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837" (1937); rpt. in The Profession of Authorship 49–67; quote: 50.

43 Ziff 56.

44 Charvat, The Profession of Authorship 58.

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they skillfully used the sources of income provided by the existing market in order to gain that very independence; and thirdly, that––by virtue of paradox––this strategy of artistic independence sometimes transformed their literary productions into a kind of commodity for which there eventually was a market. According to Ziff, when Emerson discovered that "there was no predetermined place for him in his society" he turned this situation into a boon and assumed "the literary powers of an outsider together with the economic hazards." Thus, Emerson used his "modest rentier's income" in order to "give his country a native equivalent of what magnificent fortunes had supplied in other lands in such splendid institutions as court and monastery: a place where thought and imagination could be exercised in relative freedom from immediate consequence, a center of intent both culturally revolutionary and politically powerless."⁴⁵

Such a strategy was a precise inversion of Simms's. Confronted with the same problem of establishing himself as an artist in a transforming market society, the Charlestonian actually tried to use the modern market in order to gain the traditional place of the artist within society. Instead of postulating the dissociation of art and politics, he insisted on the immediate social and political significance of art. Of course, Simms was forced to realize that his initial commercial success did not earn him his desired place in society. Nor, assuming the role of a southern artist who spoke from the midst of a supposedly distinct southern society, was he able to keep the place that he had earned himself in the northern market. Emerson, on the other hand, seems to have been more successful. Ostentatiously freeing himself from dependence on the market, defining thinking and writing as activities that were to be pursued in heroic isolation both from the market and from society, he carved out a more consistent role for himself and eventually managed to gain access to the market on his own terms, which were those of art writ large. The strategy of Emerson depended upon an ideology according to which art was marketable and had to be marketed in order to support the artist but was supposedly produced not for the market but in independence of it. ⁴⁶

The new dogma of the economic and social integrity of art was an important reason for Simms's apparent difficulties in defining his place in the new literary and cultural system emerging during the forties. While the Charlestonian was a passionate critic of economic utilitarianism, he never bothered to pretend that he produced his writings in splendid isolation from the market and from society. The rapidity with which Simms dashed out one volume after another indicates his belief that art was both a vocation and a profession. Simms conceived of his writing as a dynamic process of

45 Ziff; quotes: 56, 262, 15.

46 Cf. Teichgraeber, esp. x. On the role of sophisticated business strategies in the creation of a market for the sophisticated art produced by New England writers towards mid-century, see Charvat, "James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion, 1840–1855" (1944); rpt. in

work which was interrelated with the dynamic pace of the world around him. Ironically, it was his desperate determination to keep abreast of things by which he wrote himself out of the sanctuary of American art as it was being defined towards the middle of the nineteenth century.

By his hectic literary activity, Simms was able to support his large family and his cumbersome plantation. In terms of total revenues, the prolific author probably did not fare worse than Emerson (including the latter's income from his extensive lecturing), let alone Thoreau. However, Simms's writing did not earn him the cultural authority (the symbolic capital) which Emerson and Thoreau were able to realize and for which the Charlestonian was so eager. At the same time, Simms clearly was not able to profit from his books in the way in which fictionists like George Lippard, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth or Harriet Beecher Stowe profited from theirs. Simms's problem was not only that he pretended to be both a champion of a distinct southern culture and a driving force of American cultural nationalism at a time when increasing intersectional animosities made such a dual position untenable; his problem was also that he was trying to be both an artist and a popular author at a time when the transformation of the publishing system and the ideological redefinition of art implied the dissociation of these roles.

The transformation of American society and culture that had gained momentum during the depression comprised both: the definition of a realm where American artists could proclaim the nation's cultural independence, and––separate from this––the establishment of a sphere in which cultural commodities for a wider audience were produced. This process of dissociation had material as well as ideological dimensions.

Among its material dimensions were not only the widening and the stratification of the reading public but also the technological modernization of the print industry which made large-scale production feasible in the first place.⁴⁷ Even though it should not be supposed that the antebellum era saw the emergence of a regular mass market for print matter, and especially for books, sales figures nevertheless rose dramatically.⁴⁸ While, according to one estimate, an average of 52 books had been published annually

The Profession of Authorship 168–189.

47 The cylinder press was introduced in 1847.

48 On the development of the literary marketplace, see Teichgraeber, "'A Vast Cultural Bazaar':

The Antebellum Literary Marketplace," Sublime Thoughts / Penny Wisdom 155–174.

According to Teichgraeber, "there is as yet no comprehensive history of the development of the antebellum literary marketplace," so that William Charvat's publications––which have been referred to above––remain the "cornerstones for study of the subject" (157, note 4).

Even though he registers a dramatic expansion of the book market, Teichgraeber draws on recent scholarship to point out that the tendency to view the antebellum literary marketplace

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between 1830 and 1842, by 1853 the number had rocketed to 733. If there had been fewer than 125 American magazines in 1825, there were about 600 in 1860. The number of daily and weekly newspapers rose accordingly, and during the 1840s a new generation of “penny press” newspapers was being sold in increasing numbers. The market for print media was not only becoming busier, it was also becoming more nationally integrated.⁴⁹ This enlarged and unified market was able to generate a new phenomenon: the best-seller. While in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans had been a best-selling novel with 5,750 copies in circulation, George Lippard's Quaker City sold 210,000 copies between 1845 and 1851 and Uncle Tom's Cabin, according to more daring estimates, may have sold as many as five million copies between its appearance as a book in 1852 and the beginning of the Civil War.⁵⁰

The bestsellers of the 1850s often were the work of a new generation of female authors who used the opportunity offered by the expanding book market of making an independent living. Among them was Maria Cummins, whose novel The Lamplighter proved the decade's biggest public success after Uncle Tom's Cabin, selling 40,000 copies within the first two months and 100,000 up to the Civil War. It was the success of The Lamplighter which provoked Hawthorne's famous complaint about the "d––d mob of scribbling women." This invective not only betrays the envy excited among distinguished male literati by the sales figures achieved by some of their female colleagues, it also testifies to the strategy according to which writers like Hawthorne redefined their role in a restructuring literary system. Writing off the best-sellers produced by Cummins, Warner, Fern and Stowe as carelessly produced commodities dashed out by a "mob of scribbling women," Hawthorne implied that his own fiction was the result of a long process of careful reflection, only reluctantly put on the market afterwards. It is revealing that in expressing his indignation Hawthorne comes up with the word "mob." It may be assumed that in using this word, he thought not only of his rivals for the attention of the public but also of that public itself, designating it as an undistinguished crowd of hasty and sensation-hungry readers which was to be distinguished from the select audience he was addressing. When Melville discovered that in pursuing his vision he had left his readership behind, he reacted in a similar manner by declaring: "So far as I am individually concerned & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to 'fail.'"⁵¹ Finding themselves unable to compete with fictions that used highly conventional or

as a mass market is misleading.

49 Teichgraeber 158–161.

50 Michael T. Gilmore, "The Book Marketplace I," The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 54.

51 Herman Melville, letter to Lemuel Shaw, 6 Oct. 1849; The Letters of Herman Melville, ed.

Merrell R. Davis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1960) 92.

unashamedly sensational narrative strategies, authors like Hawthorne and Melville emphasized the exceptional character of their writing and defined isolation from the market as a virtue. Redefining not only the quality and the function of their writing but also their intended reader, they thus participated in the institution of a more rigidly defined aesthetic hierarchy.

That this aesthetic hierarchy was also a social hierarchy was most strikingly revealed by the Astor Place Riot of 1849, in which the different manners of performing and receiving Shakespeare's plays were used to stage the growing antagonism between elitist and populist cultural spheres. The British tragedian William Charles Macready had upset many Americans by refusing to accept that his eminently popular American rival Edwin Forrest was an artist. The anti-elitist and fiercely nationalist adherents of Forrest, many of them working-class "roughs," responded by disturbing Macready's opening performance of Macbeth in the Astor Place Opera House. If envy of his more successful rivals led Hawthorne to set himself and his art apart from a

"mob" constituted not only by popular women writers but implicitly also by their avid readers, Macready's ostentatiously artistic and elitist version of Shakespeare actually evoked the physical resistance of such a "mob." Three days after the first incident, the militia, which was called in to protect the second performance of the British actor, faced more than ten thousand populist rioters. The confrontation resulted in brutal violence when the militia fired into the rioting crowd, killing twenty-two demonstrators and wounding many more.⁵²

Though, generally speaking, they were devoted democrats with a nationalist bent, the writers singled out by Matthiessen as the major protagonists of the "American Renaissance" tended to side with the cultural and social elite when they found themselves faced with an uncontrollable, iconoclastic populace. Thus, Melville joined Irving and a number of leading New York citizens in signing a public document that expressed disapproval of the Astor Place rioters, and Reynolds assumes that Whitman, in spite of his self-proclaimed role as the poet of the "En-Masse," would probably also have signed if he had been asked.⁵³ Simms did not have much sympathy for New York

"roughs," but it may be argued that in the cultural war between elitist and populist

"roughs," but it may be argued that in the cultural war between elitist and populist