These changing fields, as they proceeded to specialize over the course of the century, stressed their dissimilarity from entrepreneurial pursuits governed by profit and loss. The new professionals came to place special emphasis on expertise in one's endeavor. They were comparatively insulated from the market — many collected a fee set by custom or the profession rather than a salary — and skillfulness assumed a value for them distinguishable from the income they received. Of course they wanted to be well paid, but what made them professionals was their sense of integrity and ability in performing a technical service, and what confirmed their professional identity was -67- the recognition of their merit by others in the field. In the egalitarian Jacksonian years, licensing laws and other attempts to restrict entry encountered popular resistance; nevertheless, the trend toward disciplinary rigor was irreversible. The professional ideal may have derived some of its prestige from the older, slowly disappearing tradition of artisanal handicrafts, which mandated a long period of apprenticeship before mastering a trade. The ideal can also be seen as a prefigurement of Thorstein Veblen's principle of workmanship, the devotion to excellence that Veblen attributed to the twentieth-century engineer and that he hoped would topple a system of production in which quality was sacrificed to profit.
But whatever its provenance and filiations — and Veblen clearly overestimated its potential to subvert — there is no doubt that for the canonical authors the professional ethic represented an alternative to the reign of commerce. An element of mystification entered into this, since the novelist, unlike the physician or lawyer, depended directly on sales for his income. But professionalism valorized extramonetary goals and conferred some of the aristocratic prestige, though little of the immediate market appeal, that "gentleman" supplied for Irving and Cooper. Melville was explicit on the disjunction between popularity and professional standards. "Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies," he exclaimed, and he interpreted audience acceptance as a sign of artistic ineptitude. "Hawthorne and His Mosses," the impassioned essay Melville wrote to celebrate his fellow craftsman, spurns the public's plaudits as "strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity." For the meritorious writer, Melville argues, what counts is not the market but the appreciation of other literary professionals, including trained readers, who can grasp the complex messages encrypted within the multilayered text. A call for "close reading" informs this tribute, one hundred years before the New Criticism revolutionized the study of literature in university English departments. Melville's correspondence with Hawthorne is similarly dominated by his sense of their being practitioners of an exacting discipline, bound together by dedication to the highest standards of art. In this spirit of appreciative collegiality, he inscribed Moby-Dick to his brother novelist "In Token of My Admiration for His Genius."
Hawthorne was made uncomfortable by the degree of Melville's -68- adulation, but he too thought of himself as a professional in an esoteric specialty demanding training and skill. For a dozen years after his graduation from college, he lived in his mother's house in Salem and applied himself to mastering the art of fiction. Reclusiveness was at work here, but so was a commitment to the kind of rigorous apprenticeship becoming less common in manual crafts and more frequent in mental occupations. Few writers from the antebellum period brooded so obsessively on the character and mechanics of their calling. Like the masculine tales of his contemporaries, Hawthorne's works abound in detailed information about an arduous task. They are primers imparting instruction on the materials, "laws," and composition of the romance. While Ruth Hall is also a how-to manual for aspiring women authors, in Fern's case the advice deals not with the process of composition but rather with the best strategies for placing one's manuscript and coping with editors and publishers.
Poe shared Hawthorne's preoccupation with technique and agreed that the making of literature was a profession as distinct as medicine or law. Finding favor with the mass public, he stated in a review of Sedgwick, "has nothing to do with literature proper." And by "literature proper," Poe meant a self-conscious art pruned of everything that was not literature, an art obedient to its own regulations and explainable on its own terms. Like Hawthorne, he invited readers into his laboratory and allowed them to glimpse the creative process. "The Philosophy of Composition" describes how he selected the topic, determined the length, and achieved the effect of his poem "The Raven" — a palpably fraudulent account that says more about the pressure to professionalize than about the text's actual preparation.
For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the writer's vocation crystallized as a counterpoise to the articulation of literary domesticity. The three men defined their callings as artists in opposition to the sentimental novelists. Hawthorne endlessly denominated the romance as a species of storytelling liberated from the close notation of domestic manners, thereby proclaiming the form's distance from the fictions of his female compatriots. In his censure of the scribbling women, he grumbled that he had no prospect of success while "their trash" monopolized the public taste, and added that he "should be ashamed of [himself] if [he] did succeed." Melville's Pierre, resolved to astound -69- the world with a tale of truth, shows his seriousness by repudiating the feminized sentimentality of his juvenilia. And Poe, in his account of "How to Write a Blackwood Article," ridicules as mindless the female authors whose contributions fill the journals of the day. To the canonical figures, the domestic novelists may have stood for the unaesthetic past, a time when native culture had not yet found its voice, or they may have symbolized the materialistic, utilitarian present; but the fact remains that the men could not have formulated their professional identity without the alternative model represented by the women. Literary professionalism as a distancing from the market, as an elevation of calling and competence over profitability, was the creation of white male fiction writers reacting against the commercial triumphs of the feminine novel.
Adam Smith had believed that men of letters were less well compensated than physicians and lawyers because the field of literature was overstocked: the more restrictive a profession, the more highly rewarded its members. Despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville failed to attain financial parity with elite practitioners of medicine and law; in fact, their forbidding standards of professionalism impaired their marketability. But in the long run, membership in a select club did reap economic benefits. Canonization transformed Hawthorne into a belated best-seller, available to the nineteenth-century reader in inexpensive school texts and imposing, clothbound editions of his collected works. Poe and Melville had a longer wait, but they too gained the ultimate in literary exclusivity: the status, and commercial longevity, of national classics.