American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller PDF
Preview American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE American Literature and Social Change William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller Michael Spindler © Michael Spindler 1983 Softeoverreprintofthe hardcover1stedition 1983 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission Firstpublished 1983 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTO London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN978-1-349-06400-7 ISBN 978-1-349-06398-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06398-7 ForJean Contents Acknowledgements Vlll Introduction: ProductiontoConsumption 1 PART I THE PRODUCTION·ORIENTED PHASE 1 Hardware: the Economy, Society and 11 Ideologies of Production 2 The Literary Response (i) 33 3 The Rise of the Entrepreneur in the 48 Work of Howells, Norris and Dreiser 4 The Condition of the Poor in the Work 74 of Howells, Dreiser and Sinclair PART II THE CONSUMPTION·ORIENTED PHASE 5 Software: the Economy, Society and 97 Ideologies of Consumption 6 The Literary Response (z'i) 121 7 Class and the Consumption Ethic: 135 Dreiser's An American Tragedy 8 The Rich are Different: Scott Fitzgerald 150 and the Leisure Class 9 Satire and Sentiment:Sinclair Lewis and 168 the Middle Class 10 Undemocratic Vistas: Dos Passos, Mass 183 Society and Monopoly Capital 11 Consumer Man in Crisis: Arthur Miller's 202 Death ofa Salesman Notes andReferences 214 SelectBibliography 230 Index 232 VB Acknowledgements I should especially like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr Robert Young (formerly of King's College, Cambridge) who first introduced me to the value of interdisciplinary study, and to Dr David Craig (of Lancaster University) who acted as friendly mentor and critical reader during the research which forms the basis of this book. My gratitude is also due to the editors of the Journal ofAmerican Studies, Professors Howard Temperley and Arnold Goldman, whose constructive criticism and publicationof my submitted work have been of considerable benefit and en couragement to me. Chapter 7 of this book first appeared in that journal. Professor Dennis Welland and Dr Alison Easton read an earlierversion of this study and made valuable commentswhich I gratefully bore in mind later. Whatever qualities there may be in the following pages lowe to the influence of these various people; the defects, unfortunately, are all my own. Finally, I must thank my wife for her patience and untiring moral support, without which this project would never have been completed. viii Introduction: Production to Consumption Nothing, it seems, could be more foreign to the modern American mind than the idea of a societyin stasis. 'Standingstill' on a social scale (as on the individual scale) has come to carry unfair implications of failure, decay, a radical lossof energy and direction. 'Change', 'transformation', 'development', 'progress', 'renewal', these are the affirmative terms that pepper debates, magazine reports, political pronouncements. Ofcourse, the rhet oric and vocabulary of change are often used to mystify, to hold out the promise of a better tomorrow while cloaking a deeply conservative inertia within the social structure, but they also inculcate a potentially liberating conception - albeit a unidirec tional and insufficiently dialectical conception - of America in a permanent process of becoming. At one level then, the immedi atelevel of occupational and geographicalmobility, of new towns in the Sun Belt, dying towns in Appalachia, technical and pro duct innovation, the idea of social change as applied to the United States is a truism, a cliche. But at a deeper level, in the identification of the secular trends and powerful forces underly ing the surface phenomena, it can provide a focus for cultural analysis of a very rewarding kind. We all know the continuities that exist in the national culture. The eighteenth-century political framework remains; Puritanism and the frontier haveleft theirresidues;andslaverytoo has leftits bitter legacy. Yet, if there are unifying strands running through American history, there is also a high degree of fracture and dis continuity and, paradoxically, it is one of those unifying strands which has been the effective agent of much of the discontinuity. For the early settlers brought not only Puritanism to the New World but capitalism (the New England Company was both a commercial, trading venture and a Puritan scheme) and there, afterinitial difficulties, it found a rich soil and a healthy climate. Untrammelled by feudal relations and restrictions and bolstered by the ideologies of individualism and Protestantism, capitalism 1 2 American Literature and Social Change easily yoked America's development to its own dynamic. Obeying its imperative of accumulation, the settlers and their descend ants, expanding ever westwards in pursuit of that major capital resource-land- transformed an untapped wildernessinto both a massive agricultural producer and an industrial powerhouse. From 1870 to 1950 in particular the United States underwent an extraordinarily dynamic economic development. In the last quarter ofthe nineteenth century the process of industrialisation and capital accumulation transformed a largely petty-bourgeois, handicraft and agrarian mode of production into one that was highly mechanised and centralised. The relatively homogeneous society that existed in the North before the Civil War became polarisedinto richand poor, millionaireentrepreneurson theone hand and impoverished immigrants on the other, and much of the working population become concentrated in the urban-in dustrial centres. Although the frontier was not officially closed until 1890, it was the densely populated manufacturing city with its factories andslums and not the open prairiewith itsfarms and homesteads that increasingly represented the centre of gravity of American social life. After half a century of rapid industrialisation America by the 1920s had achieved the highest standard ofliving any people had ever known. It was then that the features of consumerism we are familiar with today first came into prominence. There was a J marked growth in the marketing and distribution of personal goods and services, and the institutions ofadvertising and instal ment credit came into being in order to increase demand for consumer goods such as automobiles, clothes, refrigerators, radios and phonographs. In order to man theexpandedsectors of distribution and sales the white-collar middle class increased significantly in numbers and stamped its mark upon the American scene in its distinctive work-accommodation - tall office-blocks, and living accommodation - suburbia. How did the writers of imaginative literature respond to these complex social transformations? Unfortunately, there has been a conspicuous lack of criticism which seeks to relate literary developments in America to econo mic and social change. The pre-war literary histories of Vernon Parrington and Granville Hicks now appear simplistic and un systematic, and the dominant critical approach during the war and post-war years - the New Criticism - disengaged literature Introduction 3 from its socio-historical context and emphasised its status as a self-contained aesthetic activity. The 'cultural' criticism practised by LionelTrilling, Marius Bewley and otherswhich drew onsuch broadnotions asthe'AmericanDream', acknowledgedthatlitera ture expressed deep issues in American culture, but that criticism suffers from a dissatisfying vagueness which has its origin in the inadequate attentionpaid to socialreality. Suchcriticism,though it often purports to be about the writer and his society, displays a patrician aloofness in regard to social fact, resulting in a polished insensitivity to those sociological features ofclass and ideological conflict which make their appearance in the literature and even, from time to time, constitute its central concerns. Ignorance ofa work's social milieu can lead us into two kinds oferror: either we remain blind to the possibly oblique commentary the poem, play or novel is making on the contemporary world and concentrate entirely on form, or we ignore form altogether and read imagin ative literature as if it were a transcript of actualsocialsituations. We need to understand the economic, social and political devel opments to which a writer has responded and which he has helped to define before we can judge the degree to which he has exploited or distorted those developments for his own aesthetic or tendentious purposes. FredricJameson has writtenofthe needfor an historicist and sociological criticism which will restore litera ture to its concrete context." This interdisciplinary study was written in response to that need and to remedy, partially at least, the lack alluded to above. Its conceptual framework is supplied by that key element in Marxist cultural analysis- the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure: 'The economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis,starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstruc ture of juridical and political institutions as well as of the re ligious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.' This was a restatement by Engels of Marx's view in his 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that: 'The mode of production of material life con ditions thesocial, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, theirsocial beingthat determines theircon sciousness. The effect ofmaterial life upon cultural life may be '3 delayed, attenuated or qualified, and there may be reciprocal
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