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LITERATURE: STORMING THE GENTEEL

Genteel

Harvard professor George Santayan used the term Genteel Tradition in 1911 to describe the state of American literature and philosophy in the years following the turn of the century. Santayana felt that the prevailing literary mode was insipid and vague. Many others agreed with him. American literature especially poetry, seemed to be deferential to Europe and dedicated to the pursuit of the refined; it had little to do with life-as-lived but rather celebrated the romantic ideal. Mossy banks and sunlit groves proliferated in this kind of poetry; verses spilled over with "poetic diction"; themes were uplifting; serious challenge to the intellect was rare. But a new generation of writers shattered these conventions in the 1900s, exploring previously forbidden topics and new forms of expression.

Poetry

Poetry was popular with the decade's newspaper and magazine readers. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), and James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) were among the most accomplished of the popular poets. The title of one of Dunbar's best collections, Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903), suggests the type of poetry the genteel tradition inspired, while Riley is best remembered for poems such as "Little Orphan Annie" and "The Raggedy Man," both published in Book of Joyous Children in 1902. T. A. Daly (1871-1949) wrote Irish and Italian immigrant dialect poems; his first collection, Canzoni (1906), sold fifty thousand copies. Edwin Markham (1852-1940) was one of the few socially aware poets of the era; the popularity of his sympathetic portrayal of a farmer, "Man with the Hoe" (1899), allowed him the freedom to devote his full time to writing; Markham's "Lincoln, the Man of the People" (1901) praises the abolition of slavery. Much of what Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) wrote from 1900 to 1909 ("Aunt Imogen," 1902; "Miniver Cheevy," 1907) caused him to be remembered as the first important American poet of the century. Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1930), Louise Chandler Moulton (1865-1908), and Jessie Rittenhouse (1869-1948) were all poets dedicated to the genteel mode. But Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856-1935) and Anna Hempstead Branch (1875-1937), although traditional, anticipated the Imagist poets of the 1910s and 1920s with their clear, concrete descriptions. In general, however, American poetry from 1900 to 1909 was in what critic Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908) called "a twilight interval." The new age of American poetry did not arrive until after 1912, when the modernist revolution finally succeeded.

Realism

The attempt to present human life as accurately as possible through the arts began as a movement in the 1700s and was an accepted artistic concept by the mid nineteenth century, but artists' definitions of honest portrayal kept evolving. Objectivity and complex characterization coupled with rejection of the idealistic, the sentimental, and the melodramatic were the goals of literary realists. Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain were the first to be acknowledged as American realists, and all these were greats on the literary landscape of the 1900s. Though Twain's best work was behind him, he remained a popular and revered figure. James, by the 1900s an established expatriate, wrote three of his major novels during the decade: The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowls (1904), and The American (1907). Edith Wharton (1862-1937), whose style and subject matter were influenced by James, observed the rigidity and hypocrisy of her own upper class with precision and grace in The House of Mirth (1905); Jack London's early 1900s adventure novels, including The Call of the Wild (1903), were told in gritty detail. In the first decade of the twentieth century fiction writers were intent on honing their skills of observation and their understanding of social problems. Their efforts resulted in increasingly accurate portrayals of believable characters reacting to probable situations, making realism the dominant mode of American literature.

Howells

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), critic, editor, essayist, novelist, and playwright, who has been called the "Father of American Realism," was an important traditional figure in American letters. But Howells, although his work reflected everyday reality, did not begin to approach the accurate portrayals of American society that later writers achieved. Howells's novels had intrigued the reading public with their apparent truth to life in the 1890s; by the turn of the century he was an elder statesman of American literature, concentrating on editing Harper's Monthly and writing a column called "The Editor's Easy Chair." In this public forum Howells advocated absolute scientific detachment in the literary examination of life, emphasizing the notion that realistic detail was fundamental to strong writing. Howells's own fictional characters were models for his theory; their behavior was consistently determined by the natural occurrences of daily life, and they responded with the commonplace, ordinary speech that often masks complex psychological reactions. Howells, however, championed only the kind of realism that portrayed "the more smiling aspects of American life." His talent for truthful characterization was undermined by his insistence on limiting his subject matter to the life of the middle class and remaining, literarily, in a bourgeois world of dinner invitations, commuter trains, and shopping trips.

Naturalism

The early-twentieth-century naturalist writers were the most uncompromising of the realists. For them, truly realistic writing excluded everything but the physical world; the only valid perception was sense perception. Naturalist writers subscribed to a philosophy of determinism, insisting that moral choices are nonexistent in a universe ruled by the physical factors of heredity and environment. Trapped in the physical world, the characters in a naturalist tale live more-sordid, more-urgent lives. The smiling aspects of life are overshadowed by the grimmest of realities. Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Frank Norris (1870-1902) and Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) were the first American writers to adopt the naturalistic style, but Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), whose Sister Carrie (1900) was not actively supported by its publisher because of its shockingly naturalistic content, is considered by many the century's best exemplar of the genre.

Norris

Frank Norris (1870-1902) lived the literary life he believed in: he said that the novelist should "sacrifice money, fashion, and popularity for the greater reward of realizing that he has told the truth." Norris's naturalism was influenced by French writer Emile Zola, whose works Norris studied at the University of California: like Zola, Norris suggested that both nature and human behavior should be defined without regard to current Victorian notions of good and evil, and that the question of what it means to be human in an amoral universe should be foremost in the the artist's mind. Norris began a trilogy, three novels on the American West and the growth and distribution of wheat, in 1900. The Octopus (1901), which dealt with the stranglehold the railroads had on American wheat farmers, was immediately successful; then followed The Pit (1903), another best-seller, which went far to expose the corruption in the American wheat market. A third novel, The Wolf about European wheat consumption, was left unfinished when Norris—whose reputation as a writer was growing rapidly—died at the age of thirty-two of a ruptured appendix.

Socialism and the Novel

Many writers in the early years of the century, particularly those who embraced the tenets of naturalism, also looked upon socialism as a valid means of reform. Their fictional works criticized social and political imbalance in the American way of life; many of their works were not only popular and critical successes but also inspired the public outcries that brought major changes in the American workplace. Jack London (1876-1916) was one of America's best-known adventure writers and socialists in the 1900s. A former manual laborer, seafarer, and vagrant, he seized upon writing as an avenue to middle-class stability. His adventure novels, as he admitted, came from the desire to make money through writing. But his socialist novels {The War of the Classes, 1904; The Human Drift, 1907) exhibited his loyalty to his working-class origins and demonstrated his profound desire to right the wrongs of American life. Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a reform writer whose influence on popular opinion had positive political repercussions. The Jungle (1906), his realistic account of working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, won him wide recognition and led to the passage of the country's first pure food laws. In 1908 Sinclair attacked capitalism and urban life in The Metropolis.

Women

Regionalists Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) did their best work in the late 1800s, although Freeman's By the Light of the Soul (1906) was well received and in 1908 her novel The Shoulders of Atlas won a transatlantic writing contest. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) enjoyed an international reputation as a sociologist and champion of women's rights in the early 1900s; The Home and Human Work (both 1904) were thoughtful analyses of societal roles. One contemporary of these three well-known writers was Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose Old Madame and Other Stories and Old Washington appeared in 1900 and 1906, respectively. Although sometimes overlooked in literature courses and anthologies, Spofford published eight books and 374 articles during her long career. The decade also saw the beginning of the writing careers of Mary Austin (1868-1934) and Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945). Austin's Land of Little Rain (1903), set in the arid Southwest, was her first and most famous novel; she followed with Lost Borders in 1909 and wrote on into the 1930s, frequently taking a strong feminist stance in her fiction. Glasgow, a southerner, was told by the first publisher she approached to go home and get married. Glasgow's realistic novels of life in Virginia often dealt with women's roles in southern society. The Voice of the People (1900) and The Deliverance (1904) were among Glasgow's early novels. (She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1942.)

Racial Focus

One reason so many writers of the early 1900s—women, African Americans, and Asian Americans in particular—have not been studied in the latter part of the century is that publishing houses were reluctant to risk taking on writers whose subject matter might not appeal to a wide readership. Many talented literary artists were forced to serialize their works in magazines; only recently have reprints of novels by writers such as Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins been made available. Hopkins (1859-1930) was the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life, North and South in 1900; the novel was melodramatic in style but conveyed Hopkins's fierce anger at the victimization of African American women. Hopkins wrote four novels, a play, and numerous short stories during her literary career. Much of her work was published in the Colored American Magazine, established in 1900. Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was fortunate in convincing Houghton Mifflin to publish his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, in 1900; The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream followed in 1901 and 1905, respectively; although The Marrow of Tradition impressed William Dean Howells, neither book sold well. In the past twenty-five years, however, Chesnutt has become recognized for his contributions to the African American literary tradition.

Native Americans and the West

The West still held a fascination for Americans, possibly because of a national awareness of the now-vanished frontier. Owen Wister and Zane Grey became best-selling authors with their stories of the "Wild West," and Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) wrote sympathetically about Native Americans in The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop (1902). Native Americans themselves, however, were writing prolifically during the first decade of the century, and many whose work has recently been "rediscovered" achieved wide readership and critical acclaim during their lives. Alexander Lawrence Posey's (1873-1908) career as a journalist gained him national recognition; he was the first Native American to establish a daily newspaper, the Indian Journal. Taking the pen name Fus Fixico (Heartless Bird), Posey satirized tribal politics in a series of "letters to the editor" from 1902 to 1908. John Milton Oskison (1874-1947), a Cherokee, was a popular regionalist writer who brought scenes of territory life to a national audience during the early 1900s. He worked as an editor for both The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's Weekly from 1903 to 1910. Oskison's The Problem of Old Harjo (1907) is an ironic comment on the good intentions of whites toward Indians. Gertrude Bonnin (1876-1938), a Lakota Sioux also known as Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), was both a writer and an Indian rights activist. "Impressions of an Indian Childhood," "The School Days of an Indian Girl," and "An Indian Teacher Among Indians" were all published in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in 1900. Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) lived in both the white and Indian worlds and throughout his life was conflicted in his loyalties. Also called Ohiyesa, Eastman was the son of a Sioux father and a white mother who led a traditional Sioux life until his newly Christianized father removed him from the reservation. Ohiyesa set down his recollections in Indian Boyhood (1902), Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1907), and Wigwam Evenings (with Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1909). In 1902 Ohiyesa wrote "The Indian no longer exists as a free man. Those remnants that dwell upon the reservations present only a sort of tableau—a fictional copy of the past."

Cultural Variety

American Jewish writer Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a novelist, journalist, editor (he headed the Jewish Daily Forward from 1903 until 1946), and pragmatic socialist. He examined the American Dream of Success in later works, but in 1905 his historical novel about revolutionary Russia, The White Terror and the Red, was praised for its vivid realism. Asian American writer Edith Maude Eaton signed her Chinese name, Sui Sin Far, to her popular short stories that appeared in many magazines during the early 1900s. She and her sister, novelist Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), were the first known Asian American writers of fiction. Sui Sin Far's short stories, collected as Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), and her autobiographical essay, "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1909), express the sense of injustice felt by marginalized Americans.

Dusk or Dawn?

Much of the literature written from 1900 to 1909 has been forgotten, but not because it is forgettable literature. Much of what was written during the decade was robust and clear. Social problems were addressed—sometimes with subtle irony, often with forceful statement. Writers of different ethnic and racial backgrounds who held a variety of philosophies contributed generously to the national literary output. The term twilight, used by E. C. Stedman to refer to the literary atmosphere of the early 1900s, is as ambiguous as the intermediate state it defines. Twilight can be that period of day between sunset and full night or between sunrise and full day—the question presentday readers will answer for themselves is whether the literary twilight at the turn of the century was a dusk or a dawn.