Neither were strictly aesthetic criteria F. O. Matthiessen's principle for selection when he introduced the concept of the American Renaissance in 1941 — the same year in which the United States entered World War II and democracy both at home and abroad seemed so imperiled. In his American Renaissance (which for almost half a century helped determine which mid-nineteenth-century writers were read), Matthiessen asserts that the best authors "all wrote literature for democracy," and he notes excluding Edgar Allan Poe from his study because Poe "was bitterly hostile to democracy."
Both Melville's and Matthiesen's comments suggest that political -128- considerations have for a long time and quite explicitly informed our sense of literary value. Introducing novels by women into the canon may not entail a drastic change in our concept of literary merit, after all. Instead it may require something far more radical — a change in our politics.
Lora Romero
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Fiction and Reform I
"In the history of the world," Emerson proclaimed in Man the Reformer (1841), "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." Indeed, as he surveyed the cultural scene, he sensed a "new spirit" and "new ideas" pervading Northeast reform activity. But whereas many of his acquaintances became involved in group efforts at social reformation, such as the communitarian experiment at Brook Farm, or abolitionism, Emerson insisted on the primacy of individual reformation. All desires for reform, he argued, emerged from "the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man" and an "impediment" standing between individuals and their essentially divine nature. As he insisted even more strenuously in New England Reformers (1844): "society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him." That same year, however, Emerson began to read widely in the history of slavery, and in a pivotal lecture, Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844), he called on the "great masses of men" to take a larger role in changing laws and affecting social policy. Seven years later, in a lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law, he advised his auditors that civil disobedience would be an appropriate response to the government's efforts to enforce "the most detestable law that was ever enacted by a civilized state." Abolitionism, the most pressing social reform movement of his time, had taken hold of Emerson, and during the 1850s the champion of selfculture addressed numerous abolitionist meetings and even campaigned for Gorham Palfrey on the Free Soil Ticket. Slavery was by -130- no means the only reform movement to capture his attention; in addition to offering occasional remarks on temperance, in 1855 he spoke to a women's rights convention in favor of women's suffrage, arguing that "if in your city [Boston] the uneducated emigrant vote numbers thousands, representing a brutal ignorance and mere animal wants, it is to be corrected by an educated and religious vote, representing the wants and desires of honest and refined persons." Nevertheless, despite his various reform commitments of the 1840s and 1850s, in his journals of the period he continued to muse skeptically on the value of group efforts at social renovation.
Emerson's ambivalent but increasingly engaged response to social reform suggests that he wrestled with some of the large questions his more individualistic philosophy of the 1830s and early 1840s tended to avoid: Can self-reformation proceed in a social vacuum somehow apart from the debates, institutions, and laws of antebellum culture? To what extent is group reformation dependent on individual reformation, and vice versa? Fearing that the "civilized state" was falling into barbarism, he also began to address different sorts of questions, as his unattractive remarks on the "brutal ignorance" of the emigrants suggest, about the state of the union: Who should lead the nation, and to what end? What constitutes legitimate authority? How achieve civilized harmony and progress during a time of heightening sectional, ethnic, and class conflict?
As the literary genre most responsive to social debates and discourses, and, at least traditionally, the genre most attentive to situating the individual in society, the novel is naturally suited to address all of these large (and representative) questions from a variety of perspectives. Given the enormous social impact of reform movements during the 1825-60 period, both in England and in America, and given not only the increasingly dominant place of the slavery debate in antebellum culture but also the increasingly tense ethnic, class, and gender relations of the period, it should not be surprising, then, that a conflict between individual and social action, a questioning of authority, a fear of social breakdown, and a utopian desire for social regeneration are some of the key issues and concerns informing and energizing the antebellum novel.
Of course the starting point of American reform is problematic. Historians have argued for the primacy of evangelicalism to the rise -131- of reform, pointing to the mid- 1790s — the beginnings of the "Second Great Awakening" — as the point of origin for subsequent reforms. However, because of the centrality of secular Enlightenment thought to some of the great reformist crusaders, we might argue for the primacy of Jefferson's authoring of the Declaration of Independence. Or, taking an even longer view, the Protestant Reformation itself — with its affirming of the individual over the traditional and institutional — could be viewed as the beginning of "American" reform. For the reform movements of the antebellum period, however, which drew on all of these sources, the revivals and religious debates of the 1820s and 1830s had the greatest immediate impact, channeling energies toward antislavery, feminism, temperance, hydropathy, penology, spiritualism, phrenology, peace crusades, and numerous other related causes. Dubbed "the Sisterhood of Reforms" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, these various movements sometimes contradicted or were at odds with one another, but they shared in a set of fundamental beliefs: a rejection of Calvinist determinism; an insistence on the individual's ability to shape his or her own fate (even though, paradoxically, many reformers would endorse the use of institutions to achieve this end); a millennialist conviction of the nation's potentially glorious destiny.
The social and religious dimensions of these beliefs were developed in the perfectionist theology of the itinerant minister Charles Grandison Finney, who began his career in the West but had a major impact on the Protestant revivals of upstate New York's "burnedover district" during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Preaching that "God has made man a moral free agent," Finney insisted that, in tandem with God's love and grace, individuals could achieve an immediate and saving conversion. The regeneration and perfection of individuals, he argued, would ultimately serve to regenerate and perfect the nation. In more complex ways, Emerson, influenced by his former teacher William Ellery Channing and various Continental Romantics, argued for the importance of intuition and self-culture, rather than Unitarian institutional and historical authority, in encouraging individuals to discover their own miraculous divinity. A wave of such self-discoveries of the "Divine Soul" within, the utopian conclusion of The American Scholar (1837) implied, would ensure the renovation and reformation of American society. -132-