Writing against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era

Arielle Zibrak’s Writing against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era stakes a bold claim for literary analysis as a mode of critique in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in our own time. At the heart of this book is a gesture of refusal: the against of the title posits literature as an expression of opposition and negation. The title is therefore also an invitation: What does it mean to write against reform? If a whole cohort of authors is writing against the very concept that organized most social and political action during the Progressive Era, then what is it that they are writing toward?Zibrak unfurls her rich and complex answers to these questions in five chapters that collectively make a case for the primacy of aesthetic experience. The core argument of Writing Against Reform is that “reform realism” was the dominant mode of literary fiction in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and that this genre spawned an underrecognized countertradition of authors who wrote against the reformist tendencies of their age. Zibrak defines her central terms as follows: “I will suggest that realist works of fiction that argue for or against specific reforms might be designated as their own genre of ‘reform realism’ and the works that take issue with this literary genre might be considered works of aesthetic realism” (9). Novels in the reform realist camp were defined by their topicality and timeliness, and by their explicitly political storylines. They earnestly labored to persuade readers that the causes they championed were worthy of redress. But the reform realist genre struck many of the period’s most important authors as shallow, derivative, and a threat to the depth and rigor of serious literary art. What troubles Zibrak’s writers against reform are not the social causes for which reform realists advocate, per se. Instead, they quibble with the cloying “representational strategies” of reform realism, ranging from their detailed, objectifying portrayals of suffering to the moralizing and self-congratulatory narrative voice they produce, strategies that strive always to flatter and comfort rather than productively unsettle their readers (9, 16).The aesthetic realists did not fly under the radar then or now, but were, rather, some of the most celebrated authors of the era. Zibrak devotes each of her five chapters to one writer, delivering insightful readings of canonical and lesser-known texts by Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, and Edith Wharton. Zibrak’s rigorous scholarship and masterful close readings reveal that the aesthetic realists participated in wide-ranging and largely overlooked conversations about art’s capacity to produce social change. Here she issues an important corrective, reminding us that these were not apolitical writers: “[R]ealist writers often seen as indifferent to the political currents of their time actually wrote in response to them,” she contends (3). But neither does Zibrak overlook or explain away their indefensible political positions where these exist (for example, Wharton’s anti-Semitism). She argues that the aesthetic realists oriented their political sensibilities around their shared belief that fiction can “bridge the gaps between political subjects that ideology cannot” and around a profound respect for history (3). If reform realists sought to intervene in the timely conversations that were happening in their own moment, and perhaps also wished to materially shape the political contours of that moment, à la The Jungle, Zibrak’s cadre of aesthetic realists felt that literary art was all the richer when it reached backward. On the occasions when they did feature explicitly political storylines and characters in their fiction, the writers against reform maintained an ironic relation to that content. This lends to their work “a general atemporality that comes from engaging with a broad range of aesthetic influences long in scope rather than an adherence to a particular literary or thematic style that more clearly references the concerns of the present moment” (21). Zibrak does not foreground the concept of the “canon” here. However, it is possible to discern the terms and stakes of contemporary debates over the construction of a literary canon playing out in the writing of the turn-of-the-century aesthetic realists—for example, in James Weldon Johnson’s desire to see Black authors recognized as producers of timeless art and in Edith Wharton’s almost religious devotion to the concept of a deeply rooted literary tradition.Zibrak is an attentive close reader who brings to her objects of study a deep historical knowledge and scholarly breadth. Thanks to this approach, she makes a convincing case for the existence of a countertradition of aesthetic realism but also, excitingly, reveals how the authors themselves theorized aesthetics and politics in their prose (20). Zibrak’s first two chapters examine Rebecca Harding Davis and Kate Chopin, two authors who believed the reform realism of their age to be in conflict with valuable artistic production. Davis, for her part, recoiled from the emergent celebrity culture of reform realism. So-called celebrity realism, best embodied by Charles Dickens, purposely distanced readers from the beneficiaries of reform projects and, in doing so, burnished the author’s own celebrity persona. Davis revolted against this “excessively author-driven” tendency (47). She kept a low, even obscure authorial profile that forced her readers to judge her work on its artistic merits rather than as texts that advertised her own mounting reputation as an author. The many artist figures that populate Davis’s work, including, most famously, the sculptor Hugh Wolfe in “Life in the Iron-Mills,” forward the view that art itself can become “an alternative mode of social change” for authors reluctant to engage the identity mandate of reform realism (61). Zibrak also emphasizes the would-be artist figures populating Kate Chopin’s fiction, arguing that Chopin leverages a critique of mimetic realism by constructing a series of imitative, dull artist characters who “copy rather than innovate, record rather than invent” (65). Zibrak’s reading of The Awakening emphasizes Edna Pontellier’s preference for “banal representations” (68): as a lovelorn girl, Edna kisses “the representational image” of the tragedian she adores rather than the man himself, and later she carries on a sexual affair with Arobin, a man composed so entirely of surfaces that he is essentially “a photographic human, happy to be merely the simulacrum of a lawyer” (70). Zibrak shows how Chopin’s constitutional aversion to censorship and moralistic fiction took shape against the backdrop of the social purity movement, a social crusade that was also a quasi-artistic program dedicated to eliminating representations of sex in print.One of Zibrak’s greatest contributions in Writing against Reform is the set of keywords she develops for understanding late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US literature. Her third chapter, on Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians, introduces a term that is sure to have broad scholarly purchase. “Demographic realism” describes “a political and an aesthetic style that relies on the flattening of individual subjects into representatives of larger groups or types,” a style that turns a particular population into “a cartoonish character” (93, 100). Zibrak reads James’s two midcareer realist novels as repudiations of demographic realism that engender an alternative political style, one that operates not through content but rather through a kind of uncomfortable, even pained, form of intimacy. In this way, James’s resistance to reform realism, his chafing against fiction that tries to convince its readers, becomes the foundation of a literary style that tries to make its readers feel. Zibrak further develops her vivid analysis of Progressive Era literary formalism in her fourth chapter on James Weldon Johnson. Of all the authors featured in Writing against Reform, Johnson was the most politically active in his lifetime. Zibrak shows how Johnson’s deep historical thinking, his formal ingenuity as an artist, and his important work as an organizer with the NAACP are inextricably linked by the author’s commitment to restoring a historical understanding of Black formal innovation across historical periods. For Johnson, working in the cultural realm was a way of reclaiming the past and creating a better future for Black people in the United States. Zibrak’s argument that Johnson did not think about African American culture in terms of recognizable themes or content, but rather through the historical distribution of formal interventions across time, is a model of literary criticism that is essentially formalist in its methods while also being historically and theoretically astute (138).Zibrak’s final chapter will be of particular interest to readers of the Edith Wharton Review. “Edith Wharton at War in the Land of Letters” begins by touching on a perennial theme of Wharton scholarship over the past several decades—what were Wharton’s politics; where and how do they play out in her work; and what are the stakes of that representation. It is a well-established truism that Wharton had little time for American-style social reform. Her fiction is filled with portraits of trite, shallow, self-important people (mostly women) involved in reform projects that they believe, foolishly, will change the world—or at least shore up their social standing. Wharton’s critique of reform realism hinges on the genre’s obsession with seeming topical and timely—qualities that she felt made this fiction unlikely to stand the test of time. Given Wharton’s treatment of the reform theme in her work, the author’s decision to throw herself into relief work during the First World War, and particularly the time-sensitive literary anthology she commissioned to fund her various charitable endeavors, has important consequences for our understanding of Wharton as a writer against reform.Zibrak untangles this seeming contradiction in Wharton’s thought by pointing to an important spatial metaphor that originates in her memoir, A Backward Glance. Wharton recalls the moment after the publication of The House of Mirth when she felt that she was, at last, a citizen of the vaunted “Land of Letters”—in other words, a successful, widely respected author. Zibrak argues that belonging to the Land of Letters represented a form of “global citizenship” for Wharton that trumped her American birth and her longtime residence in France (181). Zibrak asks us to take this “chosen nationality . . . seriously as a political orientation” and suggests that the priority Wharton placed on reading deeply and respecting history, both in her own life and in the characters she delineated, should be understood as expressions of enthusiastic patriotism (167–68). Wharton’s distaste for any insincerity or self-promotion in the political expression of others was a guiding doctrine of the Land of Letters, which explains her critique of writers who she felt only championed social causes for crass, careerist reasons. If literature represents the horizon of Wharton’s political philosophy, then the greatest crimes committed by characters such as Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Percy Gryce in The House of Mirth are their utter disregard for the citizenship rites of the Land of Letters.Given Wharton’s sense that the First World War was a fatal attack on the monuments of history, not to mention her well documented Francophilia, it stands to reason that she threw herself so wholeheartedly into war relief work in Europe. Building on the scholarship of Dale Bauer, Alice Kelly, Susan Goodman, and Myrto Drizou, Zibrak shows how Wharton drew on her vast network of moneyed New Yorkers and members of the literary and artistic elite to support her charitable endeavors, which included the American Hostels for Refugees, the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, support for a hospital for tubercular soldiers, and volunteering for the Red Cross. She tapped her network for financial and artistic contributions when she was putting together the 1916 anthology The Book of the Homeless (180). Unlike Wharton’s other publications, The Book of the Homeless was “a document explicitly of its own moment—unintended to be a timeless work to which later writers will turn time and time again.” Zibrak argues that Wharton was established enough in her career by 1916, certain enough that her belonging in the Land of Letters was beyond question, that she no longer worried that the explicitly political and presentist aims of her anthology would compromise her artistic integrity. At the end of this chapter, Zibrak’s thoughtful analysis of how the metaphor of the house operates to destabilize hierarchies across Wharton’s oeuvre reveals the novelist’s political thinking at its most compassionate and astute.Arielle Zibrak’s Writing against Reform will swiftly become required reading for scholars of American realism and of US literary studies more broadly. The book also offers exciting avenues of inquiry for students and scholars beyond these fields in the way it models a critical orientation to literature that goes beyond easy binary oppositions that see art as either “liberatory or oppressive” or “reflective of progressive or conservative ideologies” (20). Through her insightful and sustained close readings and careful attentiveness to the politics of history, Zibrak models how to make literature itself a resource for thinking.