Chapter 2 reads Henry James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in the context of their serialization in magazines later called 'genteel', showing how these novels question the practice of cultivation that those magazines facilitate and prize. Identifying that practice as a core ideal in the liberalism expressed by Bostonians like Charles Eliot Norton, the chapter shows how James questions the capacity of the broader public for such cultivation. Especially in his evocation of Reconstruction-era efforts to educate freedmen, James points to the hypocrisy and the accidental tyrannizing of liberal educators like Norton; but his novels distinguish between that accidental tyranny and the deliberate tyranny of those who would simply master and rule rather than educate. Associating such projects of mastery with Thomas Carlyle's pessimism, which he juxtaposes against an Emersonian optimism about democracy, James ambivalently endorses Carlyle's sense that 'the people' have meagre capacities, but also links the denial of education to violence. Drawing from Walter Pater, James portrays cultivations that feed on the pleasures of food and art in New York and the Continent, and suggests that this kind of cultivation fosters development much more successfully than the ascetic moralizing of democratic revolutionaries and Bostonians.
This essay attempts to better our understanding of George Eliot's conservatism by examining a body of ideas about consumption and moral obligation that she and John Ruskin share. I use a discussion of consumer ethics to explore the moral logic of their conservatism by examining the role of the aesthetic within it. Economic consumption and the aesthetic are subjects inextricably connected, not just because the discourses of political economy and aesthetics have a shared origin in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also because the discourse of aesthetics has long served to legitimize select modes and acts of consumption. By marking out a limit where one may reasonably cease to sympathize and instead devote energy (and money) to personal gratification, the treatment of consumption in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) offers an important articulation of moral thought. Eliot suggests that aesthetic pleasure can make consumption morally defensible, but she also anticipates Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the aesthetic: her novel represents both the display of cultural capital and the exercise of the aesthetic disposition as ways of maintaining social and economic hierarchies. She thus at once critiques and participates in the system within which the aesthetic functions to preserve social and political stasis. Using John Ruskin's economic writings to expose Middlemarch as a novel of consumer ethics, this essay examines Eliot's representation of personal economic consumption as an emergent mode of social and political agency that might operate productively within that stasis.
Parallel structures in Henry James's anomalously political novels of 1886 have remained curiously unaddressed. Both The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima feature a wealthy woman whose ascetic rejection of the pleasures of art is part of her devotion to a revolutionary political cause. Both of these women more or less adopt a young, politically marginal person. As the plots play out, each of these young people undergoes a kind of education. Both books are, in this sense, dramas of cultivation. As such, they engage critically with a body of political thought that pervaded both James's intellectual milieu and the pages of the periodicals in which these novels were first serialized in 1885, the Century and the Atlantic Monthly. Because that body of thought has been disregarded and misrecognized, this engagement has gone unnoticed.These periodicals and the men who produced them-men such as Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, and Richard Watson Gilderhave been associated with a "genteel tradition" that used culture to consolidate elite power, pursuing a project of social control. Recent scholarship, however, studies these men as active participants in the discourse of transatlantic Victorian liberalism and argues that their liberalism prized an ideal of broadly diffused culture that was distinctly democratic. Here "culture," or "cultivation," refers to an inclusive process rather than an elitist criterion for exclusion. It is not a possession that confers distinction but an ongoing, autonomous practice of learning undertaken through the experience of art and literature, among other means.
Arguing that Henry Adams, Henry James and Edith Wharton articulated their political thought in response to the liberalism that reigned in Boston and, more specifically, at Harvard University, American Snobs shows how each of these authors interrogated that liberalism's arguments for education, democracy and the political duties of the cultivated elite. Coit shows that the works of these authors contributed to a realist critique of a liberal New England idealism that fed into the narrative about 'the genteel tradition', which shaped the study of US literature during the twentieth century.
This chapter revisits a site of foundational feminist scholarship to ask new questions about gender, class, race, health and motherhood. Examining two iconic fin-de-siècle female writers, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Gilman, it highlights an age-old tension in their work, articulated via contemporary eugenics, between the portrayal of the female body and that of the female intellect. It shows that both writers held antiquated views about female agency that sit uncomfortably with their common association with feminism and modernity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.