Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy 0472052705, 9780472052707

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Emotional Reinventions Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy Melanie V. Dawson University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor

Page iv → Copyright В© by Melanie Dawson 2015 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America 2018 2017 2016 2015 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-472-07270-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-05270-7 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12115-1 (e-book)

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Acknowledgments Any book that has evolved over time incurs many debts. As this book took shape over many years, I enjoyed the company, the affability, and the interest of colleagues who bolstered my enthusiasm for this work at every step. Here I think particularly of supportive friends and colleagues at my home institution, The College of William and Mary, among them Deborah Morse, Adam Potkay, Monica Potkay, Suzanne Raitt, Susan Donaldson, Elsa Nettels, Simon Joyce, Rich Lowry, Bob Scholnick, Arthur Knight, Suzanne Hagedorn, Erin Minear, Brett Wilson, Kim Wheatley, Lily Panoussi, and Kara Thompson. My greatest intellectual debts, however, are to Jennifer Putzi and Liz Barnes for their sharp insights as I made my way across the various obsessions, tangents, and enthusiasms that made their way into this book (and a few that didn’t). Their astute comments and occasional tough love (compassionate skepticism, perhaps) influenced this book in more ways than they know. The most incisive reader in my life, John Nichols, has always offered his unwavering support as well as his good humor, skepticism, and interest—all in good measure. To him I owe the greatest of debts. Institutional support in the form of a semester of research leave in 2012, overseen by Deans Carl Strikwerda and Teresa Longo, propelled the work to its near-final version. In addition, because this inquiry was part of a web of interests that expanded and contracted over time, I also wish to acknowledge the ways in which inquiries that broke away from this manuscript were very useful in conceiving the shape of the book’s final form, including ideas that were published in Nineteenth-Century Studies (on the work of MarГ-a Amparo Ruiz de Burton and emotional realism) and for the suggestions Page vi →made by readers affiliated with the journal. In addition, a piece about sentimental constructions of childhood in realist writers’ memoirs appeared in Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature, edited by Monica Elbert, who, alongside readers at Routledge, provided instructive feedback. Work that was once part of this project has appeared in Darwin’s America: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture (on Norris’s McTeague and the perceived clarity attributed to anger), edited by Tina Gianquitto and Lydia Davis, whose comments, alongside those offered by readers at the University of Georgia Press, were invaluable in shaping not only that piece but the whole of this project. Anonymous readers at the University of Michigan Press offered careful and insightful feedback, which helped provide the project with its final dimensions. In all, such debts remind us that when we imagine that we work alone in our studies, in the quiet and, often, in the dark, that is precisely when we are most in the company of others, whose voices weave their way into our thoughts and then into our words.

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Introduction Emotion on the Grid According to French musician and self-styled scholar of emotional expression FranГ§ois Delsarte, convincing stage invocations of emotions demanded the careful positioning of the hand, the head, even the eyebrow. To facilitate training in the expression of emotions, Delsarte created exercises meant to engender emotional range, which various successful artists embraced, among them the French tragedienne Rachel and the American actor Steele MacKaye. After Delsarte’s death in 1871, his students assembled his teachings, producing both narrative and visual accounts of the variations in emotional expression dramatized in his exercises. In the published guides to what became known as the “Delsarte System,” distinct expressive positions of the body appeared in illustrations, organized in orderly columns and rows. In Delsarte’s “system,” emotional expression could be apprehended through principles of bodily control, and students of the method were urged to study techniques that involved isolating not only bodily parts but also specific kinds of gestures, replete with positions possessing names such as “normo-excentric,” “excentro-excentric,” and “concentronormal.” By examining and, further, practicing Delsarte’s postures of the mouth, hand, arm, head, eyes, nose, and eyebrows, his practitioners were to achieve greater control over their bodily expressions. Delsarte’s creation of an emotional grid illustrated and, perhaps what is more important, organized gestural nuances by category and gradation of intensity. The grid thus inscribed kinship across emotional expressions and, with its dividing lines, indicated the existence of varied, nuanced bodily signs. Isolated for the Page 4 →purposes of study, or in the case of performers, for emulation, emotions on the grid were set apart from one another, even as the grid’s structure charted their basic likenesses, breaking down any one “emotion” into many, seemingly complex dimensions.1 Page 2 →Figure 1. “Criterion of the Eyes,” from M. L’Abbe Delaumosne and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, Delsarte System of Oratory, 3rd ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1887). Page 3 →Figure 2. “Criterion of the Profile of the Nose,” from M. L’Abbe Delaumosne and Mme. Angelique Arnaud, Delsarte System of Oratory, 3rd ed. (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1887). Delsarte’s work might appear idiosyncratic, save for its likeness to other taxonomies of emotional expression that appeared in late-nineteenth-century print culture, particularly in 1872, the year by which emotion was definitively set on the grid with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which was an “immediate best-seller when first published.”2 The study detailed minute variations across expressions for nineteenth-century readers; it also positioned common emotional expressions as proof of evolutionary practices, for similar expressions from across cultures bolstered Darwin’s claims about common ancestries and about the innate tendencies they produced. While written for an audience that likely differed from the readers of Delsarte’s guides, The Expression, like Delsarte’s grid of gestures, relied upon schematically organized illustrations of emotions; the prose of Darwin’s work followed suit, for it considered minute differences across common emotional expressions (laughter and joy, anger and rage, for example). Like Delsarte’s grid, Darwin’s work charts relations across emotions, comparing similar expressions across ages and body types, particularly in the photographs included in the volume (many of which were borrowed from the works of earlier researchers).3 According to the grids of emotion contained within The Expression, comparable postures across cultures and even across animal species (illustrations portray the expressions of apes, horses, and cats, for example) functioned as visible proof of similar behavioral principles.4 Across these carefully arranged illustrations and photographs, the mechanism of the grid functions so as to distinguish an individual iteration of emotional expression, as distinctly as possible, from others, even within a field of comparable expressions. As it attests to the fact that expressions recur in many related variations, the grid creates a series of implied relations with orderly lines and neat columns;

the organizational paradigm of the grid thus urges viewers to understand each individual enactment of emotion as comparable to a host of others and as definable in relation to them. Dividing emotions into gradations and blends that vary as subtly as shades on a color wheel, the grid here, as in Delsarte’s work, indicates degrees of crosscategorical kinship while also setting each unique iteration of emotion aside for recognition of its separateness. Hybridized emotions might share with others Page 6 →a basic or root form (say, anger) or a level of intensity. Some emotional expressions appear comparable in their corporeal location (the lips, the hands), even as each stood isolated in its particular blend of elements and intensity, as indicated by its distinct space on the grid. Page 5 →Figure 3. Plate from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), from chapter 8, “Joy, High Spirits, Love, Tender Feelings, Devotion.” Individual images include Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s photographs of smiling girls (1 and 3); George Charles Wallich’s photograph of his daughter, Beatrice, smiling (2); and Duchenne’s photographs of an old man in a “passive” condition (4, 5, and 6), followed by two photographs of the same subject, first smiling naturally, then smiling under the influence of electrical stimulation. Darwin’s arrangement thus compares photographs of natural smiles alongside photographs of a test subject in whom the muscular origins of the smile are examined. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London. Figure 4. Plate from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), from chapter 7, “Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair.” Images 1 and 2 are reprinted photographs from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne’s MГ©canisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Г©lectro-physiologique de l’expression des passions (1862). The remaining photographs are by Oscar Rejlander. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London. While it is arresting that both a performing artist and a scientist would produce such similar approaches to emotion, what a comparison of the two thinkers reveals is their reliance on the grid’s organizational mechanism, which arranges the many and related nuances of emotional expression,Page 8 → subjecting emotional variation to a taxonomic inquiry. The practice of isolating and analyzing affective expressions within a larger field, I argue throughout this study, reveals an approach to emotion analogous to that visible in realist fiction, in which emotional expressions were treated as complex representational practices that were clarified and enriched through the type of analysis that created organized taxonomies. In this literature, each highly wrought depiction of an emotional state encouraged readers to imagine alongside it an infinitely expandable grid of interrelated and comparable states; when isolated for the purpose of interrogation, any single emotion would thus be surrounded by many other expressive possibilities, at least according to the invisible apparatus of the grid. Page 7 →Figure 5. Sixteen images arranged in an organizing grid from Duchenne’s MГ©canisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse Г©lectro-physiologique de l’expression des passions (1862), a text that influenced Darwin’s interest in emotional expression and its iconographic organization. This grid examines expressions of pain, as registered by the forehead and brows; it includes both a subject undergoing electrical stimulation and similar expressions in classical statuary, including the head of Arrotino (66–69), which Duchenne described as truthfully depicting the muscular movements of the brows; the head of Laocoon of Rome (70, 71), which Duchenne similarly praised as true to nature; the head of Laocoon of Brussels (72), to which Duchenne attributed a faulty positioning of the brows; and the head of Niobe (73), which does not exhibit pain as registered by the brows or forehead. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London. For late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, complex emotional representations were the conceptual offspring of the idea that specific forms of emotion were closely related to one another. What resulted were hybrid terms about emotion, which frequently highlight complex points of origin in back of any particular state of feeling.5 As a consequence, a character in a realist novel might feel “wrath and dismay” in combination, or “horrorВ .В .В . and shame” at once, though we understand that both “horror” and “shame” might also appear in other forms, other combinations. A character might experience a “despairing sense of his helplessness” in a scenario where a conditioning emotion acts as a monitor for another; he could experience a secondary emotion such as joy or despair as the result of feeling a different and distinct emotion.6 A narrator might comment, for example, that a protagonist “represented the angel of disdain, first cousin to that of pity, ” indicating a taxonomer’s keen awareness that such emotional expressions existed in proximity to other emotions, attesting to a basic, common kinship.7 Likewise, a character’s observable happiness might call into

question what lies beneath her faГ§ade, as when Ralph Touchett references Isabel Archer’s status as “the most visibly happy woman I know,” a phrase that indicates clear cause for alarm, given the potential separation of visible feeling and actual emotion.8 Enacting a profoundly taxonomic approach to emotion, the realist literature I discuss in Emotional Reinventions displaced broad categories of emotion (sympathy, for example, which entailed many individual emotions and various types of dynamics) with a series of interrogative gestures that subdivided emotional moments and their histories, examining expressive gestures and their underlying motivations. Realist literature’s interest in emotional gradations and a set of accompanying organizational narratives indicates its investment in a rich and varied field of emotional expression. Just as the grid of expressive gestures pointed to emotion as a subject to be Page 9 →parsed, or as a series of related gestures arranged in hierarchies of nuance or degree, so too realist representations of emotion interrogated emotional variation and participated in the work of organizing it. While realist writers did not attempt to create anything as schematic as columns and rows, their approach to emotion was both taxonomic and category driven. This analytical approach to emotion resulted in qualified, hybridized, and individuated representations, wherein any given emotional expression was rendered uniquely distinguishable from related enactments and locutions of a comparable impulse. I argue throughout this study that during the realist era there was a transition from an understanding of emotion that antedates realism to the peculiarly taxonomic approach visible in realist works during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, in Emotional Reinventions, emotion appears as a subject remade, often laboriously and self-consciously so, part of revisionist thinking about literary representation. Linked to a belief that subjects like emotion should avoid association with what the realists viewed as hackneyed tropes, clear expectations, and generic affective categories, new categories and combinations of emotions frequently appear, alongside a narrative that explores the particular and contextualized variety of emotion each text explores, moment to moment. By cataloging emotion vigorously, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fictions charted fine variations in expression, often revealing the sense that the act of parsing an emotion’s outward signs constituted as much of their interest as any particular expression in its own right. Extrapolating outward from the visual arrangement of the grid, as this study proposes to do, means recognizing that the organizational gestures attending nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century representations of emotion served as a form of implicit encouragement to understand emotions relationally and, furthermore, as mechanisms through which to isolate, identify, and label expressions so as to distinguish them from a host of others. Both the Darwinian and the Delsartean grids present emotion’s varieties as identifiable and distinct, but also as most fully comprehensible within the context of other emotional expressions, a fact that encourages viewers to imagine a vast and relational project devoted to emotional classification.

Revising Realism as a Category Realist representational practices, as I read them, constitute a movement away from the depiction of the sympathetic paradigms so influential in the decades leading into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and Page 10 →which, indeed, persisted in a healthy form alongside realist tendencies), paradigms in which there was considerable narrative certainty about the effects of affective exchanges. As the realists’ willingness to question and expand emotion’s working lexicon suggests, no single emotional state supplanted sympathy’s lexical or ideological primacy in American literature. Rather than imagining that the point of representing emotion was, as sentimental fiction posits, to highlight the need for some type of intervention—successful or not—into faulty social relations, realist fictions took up the work of emotional analysis and, with it, an interrogation of the cultural meanings bound up in that endeavor. This interrogative energy, as I read it, conveyed a hope that the work of analysis would lead to more measured and more revelatory expectations about emotion, ones responsive to a diversifying nation and its widely varying population. In part a response to a social polyglot and in part a response to the drive by realist author-critics to craft disciplined and representationally unique details, realist fiction reveals a recognition of emotional variety that necessitated attention to its phenomenological flux, but that also entailed some organizational process, if only that process did not overwhelm the subject. It was the labor of organizing variety on which so much of the energy in realist

emotional representations was spent. While, as William M. Morgan has argued, realism and sentimentalism enjoyed “shared social projects,” and while Morgan locates “an affirmative and nurturing value in civilization and domestic culture” in both literary modes, he also argues that realism “modernizes sentimentality.”9 Here, however, I contend that expressions of emotion were modernized and represented in new ways to such an extent that they were no longer visible as sentimental representations. Therefore, I consider what realist authors did to reinvent emotional representations in a literary era during which aesthetic goals were in tremendous and self-conscious flux. Because realist fiction explored emotional locutions within specific sites (often denoted by state, region, town, and type of home) and populations (the rising black middle class, aspiring professional women, isolated rural families, privileged middle-class observers), it suggested that the diversity of the US population necessitated a serious consideration of emotional variation. A recognition of affective hybridity and its location in widely differentiated personal circumstances thus served as a way to make sense of felt differences across populations. Like the specific scenarios I explore in this study, which include the stable Northeast middle-class home, rural and isolated New England, cosmopolitan Paris, and the Reconstruction South, Page 11 →the emotional concerns that emerge out of them suggest that one of realism’s motivating investments in affect lay in the recognition of the conditions that gave rise to differentiated expressions of emotion and how they emerged.10 Emotional Reinventions takes the position that realism was, at its heart, an affectively invested mode of writing, not despite its differences from sentimental paradigms but, rather, because of them. Even as realist writing eschewed sympathy’s idealism and many of its basic beliefs in emotional clarity and in bodily transparency, it was a mode of writing that took up emotional subjects obsessively, acknowledging their difficulty and transforming them into the complex foci of interpretive energy, seeking out representational strategies that reimagined emotion’s work, absent an idealism about emotion’s ability to perform transformations. Cast as challenging to invoke and interpret, emotional representations no longer indicated what Jane Tompkins defined in relation to antebellum literature as the “emotional work” of sharing and reiterating common beliefs; by the late decades of the nineteenth century, the struggles attached to emotional labor were quite different. These labors were not about transforming the world through feeling, but, rather, they were oriented to the efforts involved in analyzing and intellectualizing emotion, or the work wrapped up in defining a terminology of emotion and in depicting affective experiences as uniquely reflective of the characters who experienced it. Perhaps most paradoxically, emotionally invested realist narratives sought not to represent emotions emotionally; rather, they attempted to demonstrate that a modern approach to emotional understanding could be achieved in part through observation and categorization. Responding to precedents established by the sentimental representations of emotion (which are, in the context of my inquiry, more significant than realism’s frequently cited relation to the romance), realist author-critics engaged in the pursuit of modern emotional representations by disassembling elements of the sentimental ethos. In response to this attitude, which I link to realism’s formation, I deploy the term “realism” as a term for writing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was devoted to verisimilitude, as is well known, and particularly reactive to emotion as well as emotional constructions. Much as Nancy Glazener uses the term to denote a mode of writing that “was not a coherent entity, but was rather a term that acquired a repertory of uses as a result of its competing appropriations,” I describe works that were, at best, only loosely affiliated with one another in print culture or in terms of authorial background. Glazener, continuing, notes that “in Page 12 →the course of a reviewer’s or an author’s distinguishing realism from some other form, it is necessary to examine the construction of realism in relation to the construction of other categories of fiction.”11 In this study, the “other categories” of literature would include sentimental constructions of emotion, against which realist writers imagined alternative ways of inscribing emotional interests. Assembled here in regard to their strategic remaking of emotional representations, the fictions covered in this study can be said to partake in what Phillip Barrish has described as a “realist taste,” or “a discriminating appreciation for literary representations of the nitty-gritty вЂreal,’ including vernacular speech.”12 Realist writing’s treatment of emotion was equally an issue of taste, I argue, particularly its penchant for detailed, nonidealized portraits of emotion. Another important scholar of realism, Amy Kaplan,

writes that the aesthetics of the “real” produced an obsessive attention to detail, which was part of a set of representational practices that drew attention to realist writers’ claims “to represent faithfully ordinary life.”13 Emotional Reinventions posits that part of this faithfulness to the quotidian resulted in emotional representations that remade emotional effects by rendering each iteration of emotion uniquely contextualized and therefore the site of abundant detail about a particular individual or context. By focusing on the overt reinterpretive work that accompanied realist emotional representations, I work with an expanded realist canon that includes writings that are frequently described as “naturalist” and “sentimental” and (to varying degrees) “modern.” My point lies in claiming a continuity in terms of affective interests, for whatever else these texts explore, in terms of their portraits of emotion, they take up realist interests in that they are influenced (in whole or in part) by the literary mode’s dominance in the marketplace as well as its investment in problematizing notions of emotion’s cultural work. By privileging analysis as a natural outgrowth of emotional representation, or, perhaps, as the impetus for that representation, realist writing inscribed emotion as a site of labor. This is not to claim that the fictions I describe here look alike in their emphasis on particular types of emotions, or that they understand emotional states in the same way, or even that they depict the length and breadth and depth of emotions through similar paradigms; rather, they share a common interest in emotion as a representable and potentially elusive subject free of narrative forms that necessarily incline toward ethics or morality, nation, or familial bonds. Most of all, they resist any rendering of emotion that they understood as uncomplicated. Alike in their methodological treatment of Page 13 →emotion, these fictions jointly participate in an overtly analytical disposition that entails questions about emotion’s phenomenon and meaning. One consequence of this approach to the organizing principles that surround emotion is that I explore authors traditionally grouped under the realist canopy as well as authors who appear outside of many traditional accounts of realism. In the fictional works I explore here, however, an investment in emotion shows them to be motivated by a series of queries into emotion’s language, origins, practice, and bodily expression; they all also express anxiety about the work of representing emotion as something to interrogate and remake. This anxiety, which often accompanies any forthright attention to emotion’s work, is as significant as any particular form of affect, betraying a sign that “emotional work” was, to a large extent, representational work. These, then, are texts that embody and reproduce the reinterpretive anxiety that accompanies their attempts at reinventing emotional representations. Part of my argument, hence, is that realist writing was an emotionally invested mode—through methods that differed significantly from sentimental modes of representation—and I interrogate the ways in which emotional representations were structured so as to further an existing realist ethos indebted to observed detail and a social ethics that attended to diversity of background and opportunity. According to Glazener’s important study Reading for Realism, “the advent of realism set off an explosion of categories for fiction, perhaps because the very name вЂrealism’ posed especially grand and impossible problems about the relationship between representation and life that critics hoped to conquer through zealous subdivision.”14 By subdividing both the concept of emotion and its enactments, the realists crafted representational strategies that functioned as modern understandings of emotion, thereby recasting affectively resonant moments in ways that could be made sanguine with a developing realist sensibility. As with many reinventive processes, however, it is useful to consider what they did not include. Frequently, realist writers rejected familial bonds as a model of political and communal bonding.15 Instead, in collective novels such as The Whole Family (which I discuss in chapter 5), the point of its exploration is the splintering of family members in terms of lifestyle and ideological orientation to the world. Realist works also tend to cast doubt on the transparency of tears as expressing an unquestionable purity of expression and intent, or the kind of sentimental effect discussed by Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Karen Halttunen, for bodily signs became interpreted as acts that might or might not correspond with inner motives.16 In chapter Page 14 →4, for example, I explore the “emotional positions” that could be cultivated by training the body to assume particular types of emotion, or voluntary emotion, a portrait that constitutes an inversion of the belief in an purely, naturally expressive body.

On a broader scale, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature that reinvented emotional representations attempted to interrogate and rethink—without necessarily accepting—the idea that emotions function as interlocutors that have a potential to bring about lasting change. This is an effect that I view as a significant ideological motivator behind the revisionist strategies set in motion by realist writers. By questioning the efficacy of the sentimental enterprise, such writers implicitly claimed that they engaged in comparatively modern emotional representations by emphasizing a series of questions about emotion, including inquiries into its origin, completeness, and cohesion. Such considerations were, on one level, oriented to the types of nontransformative, complex, blended emotions the realists privileged. On another level, anxious questions about how to represent emotion self-consciously referenced realist writing’s claims to newness and modernity. While studies of affect have tied particular types of emotion to historical eras (among them works by Suzanne Clark and Aaron Ritzenberg, both of whom deal with an emergent modernity), many studies of emotion focus on sentimentalism’s persistence from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth.17 Hildegard Hoeller’s study of the intersection of realism and sentimentality in Edith Wharton’s fiction, for example, asserts that Wharton’s engagement with sentimental constructs contributed to Wharton’s popularity, even as critics privileged the realist qualities of Wharton’s texts.18 This project, while drawing on such studies, follows not sentimentality’s persistence, but realism’s efforts to fashion a new context in which to explore emotional representations. This is not to claim that sentimentality was supplanted by realism in late-nineteenth- or earlytwentieth-century American literary culture, however. As Aaron Ritzenberg has recently demonstrated, traces of sentimentality persisted into the modern era, or what Ritzenberg denotes as the age of “managerialism,” in which “personhood becomes swallowed by standardization, in which human relationships are rendered abstract.”19 In this scenario, sentimentality, while being held in “contempt” and consolidated within the mechanism of the “sentimental touch,” was also a force with “lingering power,” for it articulated meaningful values that contrasted with a managerial culture that “threatened to obscure the power of individual affect.”20 Yet my interest here intersects Page 15 →not with the types of “quickly disappearing, tiny glimpse[s] of a personal redemption” that form residual traces of sentimentality, but, rather, with emotion’s new design.21 Hence, Emotional Reinventions positions processes of division and organization, classification and nomenclature, definition and interrogation, as signs of a particular and historically bound approach to affective subjects that took shape during the realist era. By producing emotion as a subject reinflected, such that dimensions of the sentimental enterprise were divided and abstracted from their whole, and ultimately reinvented, they become visible as new methodological interests that stand apart from their affective predecessors. By focusing on the methods that allowed realist authors to imagine emotion as a vibrant, modern subject, I explore the analytical practices that resulted in an ideological remaking of strategies for representing emotional subjects, strategies resulting in an emotional form of realism. In part, the realists’ resistance to sentimental forms stems from sentimental literature’s idealized vision of human connection, which has been viewed by scholars as impossible to enact, particularly in a society already subject to stratification and inequality, as the new nation was. Asserting of literature of the early republic that “sympathetic constructions urged citizens to idealize the work of sharing emotion (primarily pain) with one another,” Elizabeth Barnes writes that these “cultural fictions” of unity were perpetuated by individuals’ capacity to project “onto the other person what would be one’s own feelings in that particular situation.”22 According to Glenn Hendler, “Sentimental culture reinforced the sense that sympathy was a purely private relation by representing the experience of sympathy in expressivist rhetoric, and it depended in part on a fantasy of sensory and sensational immediacy.”23 Concurring with these critiques of sentimentality’s fantastic elements in Sympathy in American Literature, Kristen Boudreau argues that the American social experience necessitated a “cultural fiction of a national affection alternately called sympathy, charity, and sensibility, a fiction that encouraged a belief in shared feelings.”24 Boudreau also argues that sympathy and the sentimental forms through which it operated continued to serve as a major influence in American literature through Henry James’s work. Describing sympathy as a “device for achieving consanguinity,” Boudreau notes that “fictionВ .В .В . encouraged a belief in shared feelings, even when вЂconsanguinity remained only a metaphor,’” calling attention to the strain implicit within sympathy’s enactment.25 In these related practices of projection and community, differences between individuals were minimized by the fantasy of likeness, or the belief that the sympathetic Page 16 →viewing of

another’s suffering allowed emotional positions to appear, if not alike, then at least broadly comparable. According to Mary Louise Kete, sentimental paradigms entailed “the construction of a personal subjectivity that was not at odds with, but a necessary condition of, community,” a construction “at odds with the definition of self as essentially isolated and alienated from others.”26 What realist writing shows is a vision of a modern form of selfhood that is both differentiated from and potentially in contest with others, particularly in terms of affect. Involving what Audrey Jaffe casts as spectatorial moment when “the sufferer is effectively replaced by the spectator’s image of him or herself,” thereby minimizing differences between the two, the construct of sympathy involved an experientially immediate moment, where activities are variously described through the terms of “transference,” “equivalency,” or “exchange.”27 Whether, as Jaffe puts it, sympathy “grounds the self in the dissolution of the social,” or, as I tend to read the paradigm, as demanding the dissolution of the self in the social, sympathy’s privileging of the collective was crucial.28 Gregg Camfield addresses similar problems encircling the issues of personal identity when he contends that sentimental practices in American literature obfuscated “the distinction between stereotypical and particular representations,” thus confusing “the real and the ideal” in the service of a functional democracy.29 This idealized unity, which Lauren Berlant has explored across her career, was greater than affect’s potential to confront actual disparities and their attendant circumstances, even as sentimental modes of writing exploited “suffering or painful feeling,” in an effort to engage “apparently irreducible social differences to produce a universalism” and in the service of a “fantasy scene of national feeling.”30 Because of the realists’ reactionary stance against the connective logic of the sentimental novel, realist fictions implicitly rejected the idealizing of personal connection as the principal goal of emotional representations, rebelling against what Hendler describes as sympathy’s “fantasy of experiential equivalence.”31 It was this equivalence that so disturbed the realists, who saw the invocation of likenesses as particularly disruptive to their sense of finely honed detail, in relation to context, social stratification, and characterological idiosyncracy. Described by Jane Tompkins as operating through “familiarity and typicality” or as a form of “cultural shorthand,” characters and plot elements in sentimental fictions had connoted “the power of the copy as opposed to the original.”32 While, as the scholars discussed here have shown, the iterability of the sentimental plot and its characters did not limit the complexities of either, realist authors tended Page 17 →to view sentimental narratives as overly simplistic. Hence, their emphasis on emotional particularity served for them as a sign of relative sophistication. Every scenario, every dynamic, produced a fresh opportunity for reinventing the representation of emotion through a highly detailed language tailored to each situation. As conceptual and representational separations between emotional states became more difficult to mark, fictions upset mechanisms on which sentimental plots depended: emotionally defined (and stable) characters, expectations of emotional and behavioral transformation, and, with them, the privileging of emotional equivalencies across varied personal experiences.33 As a consequence, many realist authors implicitly position their work as beyond or historically past the era in which sympathy could be held apart from other emotional states and imagined as a solution to social disunity; yet, without the ideals attached to emotional connection, these same authors feared there might be no viable emotional solution to social conflict. Disrupting the kind of equivalencies scholars attribute to the sentimental constructions in which sympathy played so large a part, realist writing intervened in the imagined equivalents linking self and other, viewing those equations as overly broad. Far more important to realist writers than the category of sympathy was a set of concerns encircling emotion as tied to physiological considerations, announced by authors such as William James, who famously believed in cultivating emotions through the body. Asserting that “emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable,” James asserted in 1884 in “What Is an Emotion?”—a query endemic of its day—that without physical expression, there was in fact no emotion.34 Arguing that “the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion,” James contended that an attempt to separate emotion from the body would mean that “we find we have nothing left behind, no вЂmind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.”35 James made a similar argument as he upheld the possibility of practicing useful forms of

emotion, an idea that was incorporated into the James-Lange theory of emotion, as it became known, which asserted that bodily actions did not reflect, but rather, generated internal feelings, thereby offering a physiologically based narrative of emotional origins. James frequently directed readers to alter their emotional states by controlling their bodily gestures, as in his directive to chase away “sullenness” and embrace “real cheerfulness”; practicing a habit, for James, meant cultivating its associated inner meanings.36 While not every scholar or doctor would agree with James, by the postв€’Civil WarPage 18 →era in US culture, there was great interest in such scientific approaches to emotion, particularly those popularized by Darwin (who most visibly attempted to connect emotional expressions and evolutionary practices in The Expression), whose reading of emotional expression constitutes one set of principles by which the expression of emotion appeared increasingly complex and hence subject to rigorous analysis. By reimagining emotional representations as taking new and characteristic forms during the era when realism came into its literary/critical dominance, this study intervenes in a question about emotional representation that has long hung over realism, or a binary debate about whether or not a text appears “sentimental” in whole or part. Such a line of thought positions sentimentality as the exemplar of emotional engagement in literature, robbing conversations of affect of a useful flexibility. As Jennifer Travis has rightly asserted, such conversations have demonstrated a “reluctanceВ .В .В . to move beyond the continued assertion of the discursive construction of emotion or affect while ignoring differentiations that surely exist within those categories,” a tendency that I read as equating many vestiges of “emotion” with “sympathy.”37 Meanwhile, critical studies of individual emotions, which are deeply compelling in their own right, often explore specific emotional states to the exclusion of studies about literary modes, the marketplace that privileged realist writing, and how multiple forms of emotion (anxiety, melancholy, and anger, for example) appeared in tandem with one another. Meanwhile, on another parallel track, studies of realism have privileged proto-modern topics such as social consciousness, consumerism, legality, masculinity, the city, and discussions of realism’s attention to issues of class, gender, and race in nineteenth-century culture. Here, I attempt to work across scholarly conversations devoted to realism, modernity, and emotion. Emotional Reinventions builds particularly upon studies that have made important in-roads into the consideration of emotion in tandem with realist writing. Jane Thrailkill (Affecting Fictions) and Jennifer Travis (Wounded Hearts) examine emotion within the realist era, exploring categories of emotion recognized by medical practices and calling attention to conditions identified by behavioral scientists and, in Travis’s case, tort law. These studies are thus heavily weighted toward fictions that explore emotion as a symptom of illness or dysfunction, from “soldier’s heart” in Travis’s case to “shell shock” and “states” of excitability and wonder in Thrailkill’s.38 While Travis studies the legal reparations that occurred in response to emotional injury, pointing to the ways in which overlapping medical and legal practices helped define nineteenth-century Page 19 →discourses of emotion, Thrailkill addresses somatic roles in the apprehension of the external world, as depicted in the fields of psychology and neurobiology. Affecting Fictions also discusses a number of realist works in relation to concerns about excessive emotion (such as hysteria), drawing from the studies of twentieth-century French physician ThГ©odule Ribot.39 Locating affective interests in subjects such as the experience of music and the belief in the occult, Affecting Fictions offers a compelling intervention into nineteenth-century understandings of emotion, particularly in relation to specific diagnostic paradigms from medical practices. By advancing the term emotive realism, Thrailkill’s work connects affective concerns and realist fiction through the issue of sensation, or the registering of a physiological stimulus that gives way to a cognitive process by which reality is apprehended. As part of her study’s investment in the mind-body duality that realist writing interrogates, Thrailkill focuses on nervous stimuli as well as physiological research, exploring the way in which bodily signs fail to register the full complexity of affective experiences, claiming, “emotion so defined [or defined through the body] was not isolated to the surface of the body, but was evident in the вЂdiffusive action over the system,’” as this action was explained by physiologist Alexander Bain; thus considered, emotion was understood as comprised of “вЂa wave of nervous influence.’” 40 Based on such arguments, Thrailkill defines “movement” or motion as part of the complex terrain of emotion (highlighting the moving element of e-“motion”), in which “a largely bodily event is translated into one that is

increasingly conscious.”41 Far more indebted to medical terminology and a physiological exploration than is my work, Thrailkill’s study positions physical signs as heralding a consciousness of emotion, such that emotion is figured as part of a series of events or “acts of apprehension” that precede “the enterprise of realization: the coming to consciousness of an experience, which entails being вЂmoved’ in the dual sense of [being] emotionally engaged and repositioned with respect to the world.”42 My work shares with Thrailkill’s an understanding of emotion as part of a complex and dynamic circuit of interactions and responses, experiences and reflections, but it additionally highlights the aesthetic quandaries attending those beliefs. Emotional Reinventions thus explores the ways in which realist authors engaged in a series of representational questions as they examined their categorical investments in labeling and typifying and subdividing their subjects, privileging the historicity of emotional subjects, such that emotional representation and an analysis of its aesthetic history Page 20 →coexisted in a self-referencing circuit. One of the terms I invoke throughout this project, “emotional realism,” is obviously akin to Thrailkill’s “emotive realism, ” but rather than emphasize expressive qualities, it connotes the realists’ concern with representational tactics—with how to render emotion in a characteristically realist (which was to them a modern) way. Following de Certeau’s sense of a set of local practices (or tactics) that ordinarily relate to a larger, more comprehensive strategy, I describe a series of specific tactical reinventions of emotional subjects that appear in realist texts, treating them as part of the realists’ investment in rethinking their aesthetic inheritances and in pushing toward a new literary mode distinguishable from both romantic and sentimental forms.43 But they are also tactics devoid of a central, directive strategy, or a comprehensive and self-aware affiliation with an organizing principle, given the looseness of realism as a literary mode and its status as something of a back-formation. As incursions into emotional representations, they were experimental and fragmentary, contributing to an emerging realist emotional sensibility. Such a view of realist writing refutes one of the major critiques directed at it, principally that it was devoted to the pedestrian pursuit of detail to such a degree that it was unaware of its own status as representational art. Yet the self-conscious anxiety attending the representation of emotion highlights realist writing’s aesthetic complexity, which scholars have not fully acknowledged. Michael Davitt Bell, for example, has famously located a “fundamental weakness” in realist writing’s supposed absence of a “theory of fictional representations,” as he contends that realists such as Howells sought to transform the “writer” into a “вЂphysician or a priest, a member of one of the вЂprofessions,’ or anything but an artist.”44 Yet realist writers’ self-conscious invocations of their work’s response to sympathy tell a somewhat different story, as do characters and narrators, who frequently debate emotional representations and their meanings. Because much of this study draws attention to realist authors’ adoption of a curiously contradictory stance toward emotional representation, both in their continuance of an earlier nineteenth-century investment in emotion and in their simultaneous attempts to distance themselves from that history by remaking strategies of emotional representation, it draws attention to a series of fraught but generative aesthetic anxieties. The strangely contradictory project of subjecting emotion to a strict accounting of its mechanisms—and also demonstrating how human feeling tends to elude this accounting—appears throughout the fiction I explore here. Enacting distinctive efforts to subdivide and qualify emotional Page 21 →representations, engaging in a set of self-styled scientific impulses, realist authors adopted a detail-driven approach to emotional inscription. Hence, these taxonomic and simultaneously boundary-breaking representational practices were often teeming with complication and fraught with anxieties about the practice of representation itself; for some fictions, at least at some moments, that anxiety threatens to overwhelm emotion’s interpersonal effects.

Complexity, Particularity, Hybridity Realist treatments of emotion frequently stressed the unique scenarios that gave rise to emotional expressions, thereby locating emotion in profoundly contextual ways and creating equally complex vocabularies about emotion. Terms such as “sympathy” have been invoked by an array of literary scholars (including those above) to describe a basic level of understanding attached to many emotional experiences —whatever the particular, individuated feeling might be, though it was often some form of pain. Likewise philosophers such as

Adam Smith imagined the term “sympathy,” as a flexible one applicable to a range of emotional dimensions. Realist authors, however, privileged the invention of multiple and hybrid terms of emotion, producing an ever-varying, qualified emotional lexicon that became characteristic of the era, as chapter 2 argues. The key distinction is that they sought to do so by drawing attention to many emotional states and variations, such that each term for emotion was rooted in a particular circumstance and a unique set of concerns. Ironically, as much as an organizational mechanism like the grid pinned down emotional states and the relations between them, the grid also suggested the teeming complexity of the affective world, wherein emotion’s particularity, alongside its vastness as a subject for contemplation, rendered it worthy of extended parsing. As my analogy of the visual grid suggests, realist authors not only engaged in a set of taxonomic acts oriented to the conceptual taming of practices that were by their nature inherently dependent upon other experiences, but also positioned a taxonomic approach to emotion as a way to instigate a broader discussion of emotional variations and degrees, contexts and instabilities, rather than certainties about emotion’s ability to provide either experiential or narrative closure. In the service of this investment in an emerging literary modernity, realist fiction treated emotion as hybrid, shifting, and situationally as well as temporally located, such that fictional representations required that emotion’sPage 22 → work be interrogated anew in every context. By asserting that many variations of emotion mattered, and that each was comprised of a specialized and situational history that included an ensemble of contributing factors, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fictions did not imagine that social change came about through connective emotional experiences, but rather, through the recognition of emotional differences and in imagining how they came to be. Thus, the attention lavished on emotional complication in realist-era fiction aligned emotional complexity with social stratification and the various factors of gender, class, region, race, and personal preference that contributed to differentiated varieties of feeling. If each iteration of feeling were truly unique, each could be compared to but not equated with others. Each emotional act or invocation, hence, warranted an individuated interrogation. Amid this attention to emotional variation, the analysis of a complex and deeply differentiated field of emotions in turn produced a belief that representations of emotional variety were key to representing emotion’s authenticity. Moreover, because emotion’s variety was linked to its unpredictable and changing phenomenology, isolating it for the purposes of scrutiny emerged as an ethical concern for those representing it. Even in his lengthy book on the subject of interpreting emotional expressions, Charles Darwin highlighted the dual instability and uniqueness of the emotional subject in his disclaimer: “The study of Expression is difficult, owing to the movements being often extremely slight, and of a fleeting nature. A difference may be clearly perceived, and yet it may be impossible, at least I have found it so, to state in what the difference consists. When we witness any deep emotion, our sympathy is so strongly excited, that close observation is forgotten or rendered almost impossible; of which fact I have had many curious proofs.”45 Not only does Darwin cast emotional expression as difficult to isolate for the purposes of study, given its temporal or “fleeting” nature, but he also notes the difficulty of distinguishing one form of expression from another.46 Moreover, a viewer of emotion may become so involved in emotion’s effects that “observation” itself becomes difficult, if not “impossible,” according to Darwin. In addition, and importantly, Darwin suggests that “sympathy, ” far from serving as the sine qua non of feeling, functions as a secondary emotion, one that taps into other, predominating categories of feeling and is determined by them. Thus this category of emotion becomes a means of negotiating an already existing variety of impulses, ones represented by realist fiction as inadequately cataloged because of sympathy’s imposing shadow. These, I suggest, are curious but Page 23 →also common disclaimers visible in the works of other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors. Without attempting to situate realist depictions of emotion as overly prescient, I note the ways in which contemporary emotion theory highlights a similar sense of emotion’s phenomenology and complexity. With a focus on the complications entailed in interpreting emotional experience, Patrick Colm Hogan, the contemporary emotion theorist, explores overlapping forms of emotion, particularly emotion about emotion. Hogan’s explanation usefully discusses the kind of complexity embedded in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature, where invocations of emotion are wrapped up in some part of an emotional dynamic and subject to

feelings about a particular scenario or even about a particular emotion.47 Hogan also argues that emotions serve as something other than an absolute index to character, disrupting expectations of a one-to-one alignment of individual and affective form. Hogan’s description of a state he terms “emotional contagion,” for example, suggests that emotions can be suggestible rather than unique, or derivative of others’ emotional expressions rather than personally generated.48 “Fear,” Hogan writes, “tends to be contagious.В .В .В . When we hear a shriek of terror, our first impulse is to feel egoistic fear,” whereas “sorrow” invites empathy.49 Linking emotional variation to representations of deep individuation, Hogan also discusses “complementary” forms of emotion, which emerge from scenarios such as the following: “When Jones feels fear, I may feel disdain. When Jones feels anger, I may feel fear. When Jones feels sorrow, I may feel delight. In many cases, my individual relation to a particular person governs whether I have a parallel or complementary emotional response.”50 Such scenarios posit an elaborate chain of events that both generate individuated enactments of emotion and link those enactments to others on either conceptual side of them. Offering insight into the ways in which emotional motivations may be far more complex than somatic signs would seem to reveal, Jenefer Robinson, who explores emotion’s function in literature, music, and art, asserts that “sometimes emotions don’t seem to have any accompanying behaviour at all: it seems as though I can be secretly in love or annoyed or afraid without there being any sign of it in my overt behaviour.”51 Further disrupting the veracity of a one-to-one relation of physiological signs to emotional motives, Robinson suggests, is the fact that somatic indicators can point to a range of motivations, not all of which are necessarily emotional in nature. For example, “When we see a man who is angry, we may notice that Page 24 →his face is getting red and his hands are trembling; that he is beginning to sweat, and his face is contorted.” But she also points out that physical signs may indicate simple physical exertions, for “a man lifting heavy weights may have a contorted, red face, and typically he will sweat and tremble. Like behavior, physiological symptoms may be an important component of emotion but they cannot be all there is to emotion.”52 Even in the case of behaviors that have emotional correlations, Robinson claims, these behaviors “may be characteristic of two different emotions.”53 Such reminders disrupt the temptation to look for straightforward correspondences between behaviors and physiological effects, just as they disrupt clear indicators of the innate and the learned. My argument is not only that Robinson’s theories apply to the complications surrounding emotional subjects in late-nineteenth-century literature but that literary representations from the period allow us to see how realist authors anticipated contemporary treatments of emotional complexity.

Modernity’s Skeptical Stance Realist authors were deeply interested in emotional subjects on the basis of a reappropriation of them, and this reappropriation resulted in a severing of various forms of emotion from the sentimental enterprise, efforts that separated sympathy from sentimentalism. While authors acknowledged sympathy’s historic and ethical primacy, they had profound doubts about its continued efficacy, as Kristen Boudreau and William Morgan, both of whose work I engage in chapter 1, have argued of Howells in particular, both because of the expectations of consanguinity implied in the sympathetic connection (as Boudreau argues) or because sympathy appeared insufficiently modern to Howells in its idealism (according to Morgan).54 What is more important for the purposes of my argument, however, is late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers’ tendency to question the presumption that comparable experiences forged sympathetic bonds capable of overcoming differences. Implicitly presenting their work as having evolved ideologically and aesthetically past the connective ideals of the sentimental novel, realist works produced portraits of emotional complication and hybridity as they frequently questioned any presumed certainties infusing acts of emotional expression and its interpretation. In doing so, they recast emotion’s presumptive “work” as bound up in contested acts of recognition and interpretation, particularity and nuance, as befitting the literature of a varied and nuanced population. Page 25 →Other scholars of affective modernity have also highlighted a series of representations that allowed for the types of doubts and reservations that heralded modernity’s expressive landscape.55 Implicitly, these studies also position modernity as skeptical of sentimentalism’s ideals. Especially when the forms of affect under scrutiny were unideal, they reflected other pervading signs of modernity’s skepticism, or “signs of strain” and a “growing sense of dis-ease” about the Progressive-era culture that T. J. Jackson Lears has

depicted.56 As Gregg Crane contends, a skepticism emerged in later-nineteenth-century American culture, challenging “Enlightenment universalism” and allowing for the recognition of complex inequities surrounding racial conditions in the system of American jurisprudence, particularly as they impinged upon the outdated ideals of a “utopian possibility of organizing society through an exchange of promises.”57 Crane thus casts Enlightenment idealism as overly generic in an age that was characterized by an increasing populationbased diversity; this project similarly stresses a departure from idealized and hopeful approaches to emotional experience (namely sympathy). Scholarship like Crane’s that addresses the later nineteenth century suggests that a move to represent unideal emotions that were beyond the realm of sympathy can be read as a step away from a sentimental ethos and as part of a larger skepticism about emotional transformation. Recent studies of affect have also attested to a historical shift away from sentimental models of connective feeling. Addressing a postв€’Civil war shift in attitudes toward emotion, Elizabeth Duquette describes the ways in which sympathy came to represent emotions that were “indulgent” and “treasonous” in the North as the “outbreak” of Civil War brought about “new negative associations for sympathy.”58 “Rather than a measure of moral excellence, sympathy became for Union partisans not merely dangerous but potentially treasonous”; as a consequence, Duquette argues, “the ideal of loyalty” became “the means of denoting what proper allegiance to the nation entailed and required,” whereas sentimental designs connoted “emotions seemingly out of control.”59 Rachel Hollander, who studies Henry James’s work in relation to British fiction, writes of a tension between “high Victorian optimism and modernist disillusionment,” as well as a search in Victorian fiction for “ethical alternatives to the ideal of sympathy” near the end of the nineteenth century, based in part on a recognition of the “risk of failing to recognize the full human complexity of others,” through the model of sympathy.60 If sympathy thus offered the possibilities of “risk” and loss of control, as well as unreasonable optimism, it also came to be associatedPage 26 → with falseness, or “fraudulent” manipulation, as Ritzenberg asserts, especially when it was associated with an absence of a moral compass.61 While the structures of sentimentality were clearly visible to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers, it was also clear that in postbellum culture they provoked indecision about whether sentimentality connoted value or falseness, ethical relations or flawed ideals. In addition, negative emotions that conveyed a sense of an affective modernity offered a view of emotional truth as running counter to sentimentality’s claims to facilitate human connection. Describing a false hopefulness that continually entraps those who experience it, or “cruel optimism,” as Lauren Berlant terms it, the negative consequences attached to modern forms of feeling, especially in the case of ostensibly hopeful ones, have been the subject of recent studies.62 Other negative emotions have similarly become aligned with modern skepticism. Justine Murison’s work on anxiety, for example, explores medical and scientific attitudes toward a specific affectively infused state of being, or “nervousness,” which emerged in nineteenth-century culture as an emblem of “an unsteady, contradictory modernity.”63 In marking the emergence of “ugly” feelings, Sianne Ngai refers to the “transnational stage of capitalism that defines our contemporary moment, ” when “our emotions no longer link up as securely as they once did with the models of social actions and transformation theorized by Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and others under the signs of relatively unambiguous emotions like anger or fear.” Arguing that “the nature of the sociopolitical itself has changed in a manner that both calls for and calls upon a new set of feelings—ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though perhaps more suited, in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still diagnostic nature, for models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past theorists of the commonwealth,” Ngai calls for an altered discourse about emotion, but one that represents the expectations of a modern affective economy, where an “anti-utopian and functionally differentiated society“ hosted “prime occasion[s] for ugly feelings.”64 Though perhaps not “ugly,” the melancholy that Greg Forter attributes to American modernity’s treatment of manhood indicated a negative set of associations, specifically as “melancholic remembrance turned out to be one that that emphasized less the difficulty of claiming a usable past for transformative projects than the impossibility of doing so.”65 Mourning for a lost form of manhood, Forter writes, helped cast “loss as irremediable” in American modernity.66 My argument is not overtly concerned with modernity’s

affective valence, but with the kind of skepticism about idealized Page 27 →emotional connections that these studies explore, or a skepticism that in turn facilitated a willingness to destabilize emotional categories, terms, and dynamics as part of a means of maintaining the vibrancy and immediacy of the emotional subject. As a consequence of this reconsideration of emotional categories, overt concerns about emotional nomenclature—and how to reinvent it—became central to realist authors’ representational practices. Encompassing a range of interpretive issues, including emotional terminology, relations with scientific interests (particularly evolutionary science), and the assessment of individuated and hybridized forms of emotion, realist fiction remade its affective subjects with every fiction, every character. The labors involved in interpreting and representing emotion—hybrid, idiosyncratic, and even impenetrable signs of emotion—granted each character and narrative the opportunity to be defined in unique emotional terms, and in terms that could vary from moment to moment.67 Accordingly, I treat the representations that infused late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature as participating in a destabilizing, proto-modern trend that stressed emotional hybridity over ideals of affective purity and emotional flux over a notion of emotional stability. This language of emotion underwent continual revision across the realist period, when the apparent lexical multiplicity surrounding emotion was less a matter of confusion than an attempt to create greater precision. At the same time, older distinctions between “emotion” and “feeling,” for example—which had previously distinguished long-recognized states of deep experience (emotion) from fleeting impressions (feelings)—broke down for many authors. In keeping with this spirit, I also use them interchangeably throughout this project. In his study of modernist melancholia, Jonathan Flatley observes that “the vocabulary of affect can be confusing, in part because there are many terms—affect, emotion, feeling, passion, mood—and a long history of debate not only about which terms are the right ones and how to distinguish between them, but about what they mean in the first place.”68 Further, he exclaims, the centrality of emotion to studies that include “literary studies, history, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, cognitive science, and neurobiology” means that no “general consensus, or even a common conversation, has emerged.”69 Such claims about a lack of consensus regarding emotional terms are borne out across the realist era, when many new terms (and combinations of terms) for emotion emerged in fictional texts. While the terms “affect” and “emotion” are understood differently across time and inflected in various ways, this project’s separation of affectivePage 28 → behavior from emotion as a source of inner motivation seeks to highlight a division between the visible world of expressed feeling and emotion’s inner truth. As those distinctions were expressed in realist fiction, expressive gestures could be separated from the inner experience of emotion so as to highlight the importance of interpretations surrounding emotional experiences—and their limits. In treating emotion as what AmГ©lie Rorty describes as a “structure ofВ .В .В . intentionality” as well as that intention’s expression, this project invokes a distinction that permeates Darwin’s work (the model for much of the thinking about emotion represented by the authors collected here) and his use of the term “emotional expression” to indicate a corporeally expressive category distinct from “emotion,” which, as the underlying impulse, required no qualifier.70 In contemporary criticism, Jonathan Flatley similarly divides emotion from affect, though he interprets the distinction in the following way: “emotion suggests something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression,” while “affect indicates something relational and transformative. One has emotions; one is affected by people or things.”71 While Flatley’s work similarly treats “affect” as “transformative” and “relational,” my work more completely divides “affective” acts from emotional tendencies toward expression by suggesting that emotion requires a transformation of some sort in order to become “affective.” As the expressive dimension of emotion, affective acts highlight the transitive properties of emotion, including the work of apprehending and expressing its variations. Because realist-era writing generated interest in unexpressed emotions and their place in the fictional plotline, its interpretive energies were directed to the lacunae between emotion and affective behavior. This interrogative space, this project goes on to argue, serves as one distinct element of realist-era fiction’s reinventive energy.

Chapters and Terms

Chapters in this study are arranged so as to explore specific methods of reinvention that clarify a realist engagement with emotion as a subject reinvented and modernized. In their effects, the revisionist representational practices characteristic of realist fiction suggested that the implied grid in back of every emotional subject supplied writers with specific and, in their view, disciplined approaches to emotional representation (an argument upheld by writer-critics such as W. D. Howells). Yet this fiction also suggested that the conceptual grid had its limitations, particularly as its lines were perpetually in the process of being erased and redrawn. Most obviously, the Page 29 →grid alluded to the presence of coexisting, closely related, deeply hybridized emotional states, which could be separated from one another by the most minute of distinctions, but then reconsidered and regrouped. As an influential author and critic who articulated the goals of realist literary practices, Howells sought to reinvent the representation of emotional meanings by parsing emotional states precisely. Meanwhile, he treated one of realism’s forerunners, sentimental fiction, as a site for addictive reading, as is well known, castigating its “innutritious” qualities, given what he viewed as its tendency to “clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds.”72 Yet somewhat paradoxically, Howells also critiqued authors who exhibited what he viewed as a reluctance to articulate feeling, which caused the resulting fiction to exhibit “a bareness in the lines of her characterization,” as if the author “is so afraid of sentimentalizing her subject that she may withhold some colors of feeling which would have helped us know him better.”73 In such cases, the tendency to eschew sympathy appears as problematic as overt emotional invocations; arrested by the question of how to evoke emotion in a manner (and proportion) that he found most believable within the realist context, Howells repeatedly negotiated the many pitfalls he associated with emotional representations, even while accepting their value. Chapter 1, “Howells, Sympathy, and the Problem of Scale,” explores Howells’s writings about emotion from the 1885–1890 years, when he attended to the question of cross-class sympathy and how its efficacy was linked to emotional representations. Of all the literature I discuss, Howells’s is most engaged with the ideal of sympathy, even as his writing is highly critical of the dynamics wrapped up in sympathy’s production. Casting sympathy as both an ethical position of the type that could contribute to greater understanding in a society that was increasingly fracturing along class lines and as an idea devoid of what he understood as a useful methodological construction, Howells treated sympathy as an impossibly broad construct that was difficult to put into practice in any satisfying way, as he searched for a model of fellow feeling that could exist on a smaller scale. As part of his investment in the reinvention of emotion, the issue of how to scale back expectations surrounding emotion’s capacity to effect meaningful transformations became a pointed one as Howells derided the iterations of sympathy visible in sentimental fiction; yet, to read Howells and his contemporaries as uninvested in emotional representation at large is to read their protestations too literally. The practices Howells associated with this smaller-scaled model of emotion—engagement with detail, tempered Page 30 →idealism, application to individuals—were difficult to interject into idealistic yet contextualized models of feeling. Howells’s work thus demonstrates that as realist authors appropriated and redrew the lines around forms of emotion, the satisfaction traceable to these smaller-scaled emotional portraits was very much a matter of continuing debate. Chapter 2, “Emotion and Representational Anxiety,” highlights a tension between analytical order and the messy experience of felt emotion, exploring realist literature’s conceptual flirtation with taxonomic approaches to emotion, even though this flirtation was met with profound ambivalence. As authors attempted to create a type of writing I define as “emotional realism,” they invoked emotion in ways they understood as supporting realist descriptive practices, if only emotion could be studied and mastered through analytic methods. This chapter also interrogates the degree to which scientifically codified approaches to emotion like those advanced by Charles Bell and Charles Darwin helped create literary taxonomies of affect. Authors such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose works are explored in this chapter, portray characters who attempt to categorize emotion and to tame emotion’s supposedly addictive and overwhelming qualities; yet as their work shows, this process was more or less doomed from its outset, for as much as an assumption of scientific methods promised control over emotion at large, the human and emotional subject eluded rigid attempts at codification.

James’s and Wharton’s interest in emotional subjects, I argue, takes the form of an investment in idiosyncratic emotional states and equally individuated analysts. Figures in their fictions suggest that emotional behaviors and their motivations elude categorization as a consequence of their complexity and because of the selfinterested obsessions on the part of observers. As the character of the would-be emotional analyst indicates, the organizing and analyzing of emotional narratives frequently underscored what scientific approaches to affective analysis could not: that human feeling at its strongest and most deeply felt necessarily eluded the analyst. It was a paradoxical narrative to attach to mechanisms of obsessive emotional parsing and a sign that while scientific methodologies brought to bear on emotion legitimated its study, its felt experience confounded claims to critical dispassion. Parallel to the realists’ interest in a particular kind of educational background, the subregional accent, the physical characteristics of person and place, the social hierarchies shaping a particular borough of a particular Page 31 →city, and the dynamics of racial and ethnic affiliations, emotion was cast in equally particular terms. Treating emotional representations as implicitly tied to specific legacies of feeling, realist fiction looked beyond the dynamics of the shifting and complex present and into the past. In particular, familial and communal pasts allowed authors to contextualize emotion in relation to heredity, environment, and personal experience. In confronting questions about how emotional states came to be, what they entailed, and how they offered a more definitive narrative than the unstable flux of the emotional present, a consideration of origins allowed for the exploration of emotion’s long and localized history. Narratives about emotional origins allowed fiction to address the ways in which individual experiences of emotional habit had developed; such narratives allowed for questions about familial, cultural, and regional pressures on the individual. Treating the concept of emotional origins as a key reinventive strategy in the representation of emotion, I explore emotional origins as organizing representational practices in a historical narrative. Part of an interest in emotions’ points of origin thus appears to be fueled by a sense of identity as rooted in familial heritages, regional influences, and formative experiences of youthful characters. In tandem with its diversification of emotion and in addition to considering both emotional nomenclature and the motivational distinctions between emotion and its expression, realist literature also took an interest in the cultivation of genuine emotion, suggesting that it could be invoked consciously through the inculcation of emotional habits. As chapter 3, “Backward Glances: The Search for Emotional Origins,” argues, narratives that attend to the story of emotion’s point(s) of origin produce a regressive plot arc that looks back in time, frequently beyond individual emotional proclivities. Just as Darwin treated emotional expression as proof of evolutionary processes, a growing consensus among various nineteenth-century thinkers (Veblen, Nietzsche, and Spencer) as well as fiction writers emerged in regard to emotion’s history: tracing emotion’s past became crucial to the exploration of cultural and personal inheritances. In associating emotion with forces beyond the personal, these fictions highlighted the effects of biological, cultural, and familial traits, which realist authors presented as combining and contributing to emotional uniqueness, though without ascribing a sense of determinism to these influences. A principal fiction explored in this chapter, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, suggests how seamlessly histories of personal, familial Page 32 →(i.e., genetic), and regional experiences combined so as to contribute to the story of one man’s emotional past. A similar trend, I argue, is also visible in Alice DunbarNelson’s passing narrative, “The Stones of the Village.” Equally challenging to the representation of emotion as easily read and deciphered was the possibility that emotion—real emotion—might be cultivated, as in the deliberate nurturing of emotional habits and pathways. The enactment of Delsarte’s expressive system, for example, promised its proponents that they could achieve greater poise through practice, both on stage and in everyday life. Such interest in cultivated emotion participated in a disruption of the idea that the expression of emotion was reliably transparent, just as it put pressure on the belief that “real” feeling was inherent or constitutional. As a consequence, realist fictions interrogate the interpretive difficulties that arise when viewers equate actions with underlying emotions. By blurring the relation between visible and felt experiences of emotion, this fiction complicated the act of witnessing, making it clear that the systematic study of bodily signs might well be futile. By extension, no amount of careful cataloging could elucidate a subject if its outward signs were not reflective of felt experience.

In chapter 4, “Cultivated Emotion: Race, the Body, and the Affectively Constituted Subject,” where I explore race-passing fiction from the century’s turn, assumptions about the intersection of race and affect often lead to complications, if not tragedies. As authors such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt stress, emotion can be read as mistakenly aligned with racially imbued expectations. Confronting the idea of supposedly “natural” feeling as it was equated with race, the fictions in this chapter reveal how emotion becomes subject to deliberate reinvention through careful cultivation. Narratives in this chapter present emotion as key in attempting to understand the complexities of racial identities at the turn of the century as they explore passing characters at the center of debates about emotional invention and reinvention. These texts assert that the complexities infusing multiracial lives can only be understood through the competing affective ties (or the ties of class, family, and community) that surround characters—and that that those ties can be altered. Texts here focus heavily on the concept of voluntary emotion, or practiced affect of the type that William James explored, which these fictions present as enabling social mobility and disrupting emotion-based stereotypes. Because the focal characters in passing fictions are subject to a matrix of emotional ties, because they do not self-identify in any singular or streamlined way, their stories underscore multiple and indivisible emotional histories and participate in disassociating facile links between body and emotion. Page 33 →If the ideal of cultivated emotion helped render emotion susceptible to self-crafting, so too did the consideration of emotional valences, or positive and negative poles of emotion. As they erased an imagined line separating emotional valences, the resulting confounding of positive and negative emotion allowed realist authors to depict states that were not placeable in either distinct category. Howells’s term “practical sympathy, ” for example, is not wholly positive, for the purpose of the “practicality” embedded in the term suggests limits on sympathetic response to another individual. Nor is an effect such as “competitive empathy” an entirely positive state; it is an odd hybrid that emerges in a novel such as The Whole Family, which I explore in chapter 5. A novel written by twelve authors and about twelve characters, the narrative contains chapters that ask readers to empathize with each of the characters but then to unravel those relations in each successive chapter and to empathize with another figure entirely. The goal of each chapter can be construed as competing for the greatest empathetic response, for winning empathy comes at the expense of other characters, turning traditional empathy on its head and asserting that too many calls for empathy, too much demand for it, create not a unified social world, but a discordant and competitive one. Chapter 5, “Competitive Feeling: Multifocal Fiction and Affective Blood Sport,” explores two fictions, Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896) and the collective novel The Whole Family (1907–1908). Both fictions feature multiple main characters and explore the ways in which successive calls for empathetic connections force readers to affiliate through the cultivation of disagreement and contest. The Whole Family recasts an ideal of empathy by situating it in a competitive arena, demonstrating how competition for empathy may lead not to bonds, but to favoritism and factionalism, all in a novel where characters come by their different approaches to emotional engagement by force of individual personality. The novel thus suggests that there is no emotional neutrality in a world characterized by difference, even when that difference is limited to one community, one family. In contrast to this nonsupportive, nonnurturing construct of empathy, In His Steps, an 1899 religious best-seller that details the perspectives of various church members, asserts the viability of strong emotional connections, while insisting that these connections depend upon emotional sameness, as made possible through lives conducted according to a single experiential model. In this model, affiliation with a specific religious experience overrides individual personalities and emotional structures. Presenting divergent ways of managing emotion within a larger society, one fiction embraces an older model of emotional collectivity (In His Steps) rooted in Page 34 →shared feeling, while the other portrays self-conscious, individuated, but nonunified emotional truths (The Whole Family). Both fictions point to a future characterized by fractured personal experiences and a modernist narrative terrain of individualism and uncertainty. When compared, the novels highlight the different ideological appeals attending their emotional constructs. By dissolving any imagined line between positive emotions such as sympathy, which have long been associated with moral imperatives to intervene in social inequity, and less idealized forms of emotion, realist writing invoked

emotional nuances that eluded easy categorization and that demanded a differentiated emotional spectrum. Difficult to place in terms of their effects, their origins, or their social value, realist renderings of emotion demanded careful scrutiny—a scrutiny devoid of a promise. In part, this was the point of realist representational complexity: to treat each emotionally rich encounter as a fresh opportunity for analysis, one that conjured an accompanying, contextualizing (invisible) grid, over and over again.

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Chapter One Howells, Sympathy, and the Problem of Scale How broad should one’s feeling for another be? How idealistic? How applicable across situations? Or, alternatively, how personal and hence linked to situational particulars? In an age when novels attended to individual lives and the interior experiences associated with them, the problem of scale was a significant one. Desiring too big a feeling could be both imprecise and, on occasion, dangerous, as in Trina’s question to her husband in Frank Norris’s McTeague, “Mac, do you truly, really, love me—love me big?”1 While, as the novel reveals, “big” love had its risks of scale and strength, so too did individuated and smaller forms of emotion, as other characters from the same novel discover when they can scarcely determine the nature and depth of one another’s less obvious emotions. Realist writing offers many interrogations of emotional scale as a means of addressing the category of sympathy, from which realists such as William Dean Howells sought to distinguish their work. Though generating an analytic on a different basis than that of the emotional grid, Howells’s similar investment in emotional scale offered an opportunity for revising emotional representations in a new literary age. In his efforts to reject “big” emotion and advocate for a limited and scaled-back representational approach to affect, Howells asserted a tendency to try to control emotional subjects by considering the degree to which the behaviors and conversations surrounding them should be local, individuated, and particular. In Howells’s understanding, which tilted in favor of the common, everyday experience rather than the extraordinary Page 36 →or transformational one, small-scaled emotion denoted feelings and experiences of a moderate degree of intensity. Howells’s concerns with emotional scale, as this chapter argues, were particularly important in light of his prominent role as a critic who announced realist principles of invention and as an author who attempted to integrate these principles into his fiction. An investment in emotional scale propelled Howells away from the broader emotional categories he associated with sympathy and toward a set of descriptives that were more discreet. These qualified treatments of emotion stressed its limited, situational, and contingent invocation. For Howells, who was deeply reactive to the language of sympathy and its association with sentimental fiction, representations of emotion were most laudable when they functioned in tandem with creative restraint and when they operated as an indicator of the measured approaches to emotion that Howells construed as part of a modern social vision. As scholars such as Amy Kaplan and Nancy Glazener have argued, realist authors’ claims to ethical representation were rooted in realism’s commitment to detailed portraiture; the same principles, I argue here, were associated with emotional representations. While an author such as Howells would value the writing that he viewed as capable of “expand[ing] the horizons ofВ .В .В . cultivated readers to more democratic vistas,” the breadth of such expansiveness was nonetheless problematic, in his view.2 If, however, the issue of broadening readers’ horizons can be separated from the question of representational breadth, what remains is an issue of scale, specifically the question of the scale of the “horizons” Howells mentions. Similarly, he attends to the question of in what language—and how vehemently—emotional concerns should be expressed. In what follows, I interrogate Howells’s sense of scale in relation to sympathy, along with his belief that realist writers most successfully engaged emotional subjects when they considered smaller-scaled, individuated emotions and the everyday scenarios into which those measured emotions fit. Among scholars of realism, literature’s associations with factual inscription have been central to discussions of realist invention. Realist writing has often been linked to presumptions regarding scientific dispassion (i.e., factual detail), based on the realists’ belief that “professional disinterestedness and mastery required the author not to bring any interpretive system to bear on the reality that was supposedly вЂobserved’ and вЂrendered,’” according to Nancy Glazener.3 As Daniel Borus describes Howells’s approach to realist invention, the author believed that realists “could transcend the divisions and fragmentations that had accompanied capitalist development,” using subdivision to organize an observably disordered Page 37

→world, even as Howells somewhat paradoxically protested against an overt organizational “design.”4 Preferences for a type of “literature [that] is by definition a form of discourse that has no designs on the world” emerged in contradistinction to sentimental fiction’s explicitly value-laden representations of emotion.5 By contrast, the expectations of disinterestedness and objectivity associated with realist writing allowed for an emergent ethos of literary professionalism, alongside the individuated representations of emotion that the realists pursued. In discussions of Howells’s work, a prevailing view focuses on the author’s position as a (perhaps the) prominent architect of American literary realism, who was invested in what he described as the “facts” visible in convincing fiction.6 This interest in realism’s factual orientation stems in part from statements like the following by Howells, in which he contends that, specifically for the realist writer, “in life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry.”7 Based on such comments, critics who have aligned the realistic and the scientific have traced an almost obstinate commitment to detail and an unswerving sense of verisimilitude to Howellsian realism. As a consequence of the fact/realism alignment, studies that trace sympathy’s enactments during the realist era do so by drawing attention to the limited degree of overlap between realism and the emotional representations associated with sentimentalism. Though the emphasis of this scholarship differs from my own, existing studies of the realist era share my sense of the uncomfortable intersection of the two literary modes. William M. Morgan, for example, writes that “realism’s critique of naГЇve sentimentalism” operated as a sign of the ways in which realist writers hoped to “modernize the cultures of sentimentality and domesticity,” even while they attempted to maintain some version of “late Victorian methods of social care and humanitarian commitment.”8 Morgan also contends that the realists invoked “democratic ethics that are both indebted to sentimentality and responsive to the widespread labor strife, the racism and imperialism, and the modernization of media and political culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”9 But just as clearly, for Morgan, in Howells’s case, the author’s affective tendencies interfered with his “modern” vision. Morgan convincingly details the realists’ skepticism regarding hopes for social change (attached to sentimental fiction), portraying realism’s relation to sentimentality as combative; ultimately, Morgan contends that the realistsPage 38 → eschewed the simplified social ideals that his study equates with sentimentalism, for, as he puts it, “sympathy at best [was] an ethical problem” in the context of realism’s “modernizing social realm.”10 Such discussions inscribe a paradox surrounding the representation of emotion, for while linking sympathy and realism, they treat emotion as a flaw (usually of the aesthetic variety) in realist writing, while equating realist and sentimental ethical objectives. This project similarly reads sentimentality’s precedent as a point of tension within realist writing as I emphasize a realist investment in new approaches to emotion’s representation; in my view, authors such as Howells attempted to reconcile the social objectives they shared with sentimentality with realist representational ethics. If sympathy was not quite modern enough, as Morgan suggests, then the question of how to modernize ethically based forms of emotion remained a question that authors like Howells attempted to explore. Other scholars who view emotion as a problem for the realists also contend that sentimentalism’s logic was difficult to integrate into realist plots. Kristin Boudreau writes, for example, that the “sympathetic enterprise” appeared “dangerous” in later nineteenth-century fiction because sympathy had the capacity to “destroy[] the strangeness that separates individualsВ .В .В . reducing all relations to sameness.”11 Thus, the larger-scaled and “allegedly natural responses of the sympathetic exchange work to compress diverse individuals into a particular, highly regimented social framework,” Boudreau writes, presenting sympathy as subordinating individuation (and the details thereof) to the broader social relations wrapped up in the act of feeling for one another.12 By “taking individual perceptions captive in order to replace them” with the types of perception that enabled imagined exchanges with others, sympathy operated most fully when the imagined “others” were least specific, according to Boudreau.13 Boudreau’s argument that sympathy impinged upon individuality suggests one of the reasons that realist representational strategies, indebted as they were to the

production of personal subjectivities, would remain in tension with a model of sympathy in which identities were more typical. One problem facing Howells was his desire to call attention to social fissures, which, in sympathy’s logic, could be repaired through a “cultural fiction of a national affectionВ .В .В . alternately called sympathy, charity, and sensibility,” which “encouraged a belief in shared feelings,” Boudreau contends.14 While Boudreau rightly notes that sentimental constructs had been established as offering an important means of launching a critique of social disparity, it was also the case that sentimental language could blur Page 39 →distinctions between individuals by imagining broad-scale change in which differences between individuals cease to matter. It thus could obfuscate “the distinction between stereotypical and particular representations, ” thus confusing two levels of representation, not only the “stereotypical and particular representations,” but the real and the ideal, according to Gregg Camfield.15 If, as Camfield suggests, sympathetic constructions urged citizens to feel pity for one another, they also necessarily encouraged individuals to gloss human relations by transcending detail and thinking broadly and comparatively, hence its subjugation of individuality to a collective, as Boudreau points out, and its dissonance with a more modern, realist imagination, as Morgan notes. For these reasons, sympathy (in which Howells remained invested) did not adequately allow him to reinvent emotional representations fully, for his commitment to realist detail made sympathy appear as an uncomfortably broad vehicle. For Howells, I would argue, the greatest difficulty with sympathy was that it was out of scale with realist commitments to particular scenes, minute situational details, and individuated characterizations, for by my reading, sympathy was not dismissable out of hand in Howells’s view, but problematic in its conceptual breadth, particularly its attempt at invoking universality. Viewing emotion as a product of scale is thus crucial to understanding the relation between realism and strategies of emotional representation in Howells’s career. The privileging of small-scale emotion, while consonant with realist detail, meant that emotional experiences became most representable when they were treated as if they were confined to a single cell on an emotional grid. Emotional effects, then, promised to be dishearteningly limited, even if the smaller scale produced deeply individuated and therefore more believable representations. The dynamic of sympathy was for Howells out of sync with the ideological underpinnings of realist invention, even while he remained invested in sympathy as an essential emotional category. But it was also one that he found nearly impossible to imagine producing. In his criticism, Howells addresses the scale on which emotion should operate in the realist model, investing in the concept of emotional realism, or emotion that was rooted in an appropriately scaled model of emotional invocation, consonant with realist detail about specific locations and constructions of character.16 In his attempts to revise the model of broadly construed sympathetic affect, Howells imagined renderings of emotion as specific to a limited scenario, or as scaled back from sympathy’s grand arc and oriented to personal detail and the specific scenarios that allowed for those details’ textual value, Page 40 →thereby overturning the belief that had fueled representations of sympathy, which were scaled so as to perform the difficult act of “overcoming difference,” as Karen Sanchez-Eppler has argued.17 Instead, Howells developed a working theory that sympathy could emerge from a direct acknowledgment of detail and, further, that its invocation entailed the work of confronting difference, not as a means of translating broadly across individual experiences. Moreover, he sought to dissociate sympathy from sentimentality, for sentimental constructs were, in his view, unsuited to the diversity of experiences that appear in an emergent modernity—experiences that realist writing could record in detail. While he remained invested in shared emotional experiences, in many ways, the scale on which Howells imagined emotional engagement was a discrete one, devoted to local incidents in which the details about emotion’s social context and relation to a private history could be depicted. While the degree to which Howells was able to enact his principles in his fiction is debatable, in his criticism he vividly portrayed the problems of broadly imagined emotion and articulated the argumentative logic by which emotional specificity could be imagined as an alternative. Where emotional representations were involved, a concern with specificity became, in essence, an argument about issues such as immediacy, particularity, and local emotion.

Principles of Scale Existing scholarship on Howells’s engagement with emotion has focused on his portrayal of affect as linked to masculine and legal concerns, or contexts that overlap with his sense of realist letters as a respectable profession tied to specific disciplinary practices indebted to observation and factual detail. As Jennifer Travis has argued, Howells’s fiction explored emotional effects, but it also typically treated emotionalism in men with a sense of defensiveness. In texts such as A Modern Instance, according to Travis, affect appears permissible in legal and defensive situations (through the invocation of emotional injury, for example), thereby consolidating emotion within masculine professional constructs. Travis’s study makes important inroads into exploring Howells’s attitudes toward emotion and, more broadly, points to emotion’s controlled and contextualized place within realist writing about men. Its suggestion of a productive overlap between Howells’s sense of realist discipline and a set of more encompassing representational practices, however, warrants further investigation. In his criticism, Howells would write that representing truth entailed Page 41 →the recognition of the “heart of human passion,” as he contended that realism should foster democratic unity by revealing that “men are more like than unlike one another,” statements that point to Howells’s investment in sympathetic feeling (ES, 65, 96). “Let us,” he exhorts, “make [men] know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity” (96). While gesturing toward a comparative understanding of individual circumstances, the statement highlights the degree to which “know[ing] one another” appears to depend upon both proximity and detail and should generate understanding, based on those details. Hence Howells’s critique of one author’s disastrous reluctance to articulate any form of feeling focused on the resulting “bareness in the lines of her characterization.” It is as if, Howells claims, the author “is so afraid of sentimentalizing her subject that she may withhold some colors of feeling which would have helped us know him better” (337). While Howells could cast an engagement with sentimentalism as either an aesthetic lapse or the impetus for an appropriate corrective gesture, here the author’s fear of sentimentality may, ironically, have contributed to an unwillingness to portray a character through emotional terms. Unlike sentimental literature’s means of “overcoming” local differences—by working on a broad scale—the realist literature Howells proposed was to look squarely at the circumstances that produce difference, in the hope that exposure to more detail would create the curious alchemy by which sympathetic feeling was evoked. For Howells, the question of how to theorize emotional representation within emerging realist literary practices occupied considerable attention. His persistent and somewhat anxious inquiries into degrees and qualities of emotional expression reveal his investment in what he envisioned as the necessary but difficult reinvention of emotional representation by realist writers. While Howells consistently articulated the goal of crafting realist renderings of emotion, how to achieve them remained somewhat mysterious; perhaps as a consequence, his approach to sympathy remained revisionist rather than reinventive. As compared to other realist-era authors who would reach beyond sympathy and toward other emotions for their representations of emotional subjects, Howells remained arrested at the problem of sympathy. Both ideologically necessary and narratively suspect, constructs of emotion were most defensible, Howells believed, if aesthetically controlled through carefully marshaled detail; he also upheld sympathy’s link to democratic idealism. Howells’s emphasis on what he described as those “motives and passions in the measure we all know” reveals the type of affective concern he debated across his critical writings Page 42 →(ES, 81). This passage, like others that appeared in his “Editor’s Study” columns, underscores Howells’s attention to the “measure” of emotion, or the precise quantity and gradations of emotional representation that could be scaled to everyday scenarios. Like other authors who had been invested in the construct of sympathy, Howells viewed emotional interests as a significant ethical dimension of a democratic society, even if the representational precedent of sentimental fiction worried him. But just as clearly, Howells sought to intervene in critiques of realism’s perceived coldness as he imagined a new model of emotional representation that was both aesthetically controlled and philosophically consanguine with fellow feeling. While Howells never quite managed to reinvent emotional invocations in the ways he imagined to be possible, his attempts—and failures—to do so are significant.

As part of his rethinking of emotional representation, Howells moved increasingly toward an indexing of emotional categories so that they overlapped with other social and economic concerns that supported his conception of realist specificity. Howells’s writing in “The Editor’s Study,” his primary critical platform during the height of his career (from1886 to 1892), appears saturated with interrogations of affect, and it explores realist strategies for both deploying and containing emotion, or achieving what Howells understood as an ideal representational balance. A rereading of his complete criticism, not the strikingly nonrepresentative yet often-quoted compilation of “Editor’s Study” columns, Criticism and Fiction, indicates a pervasive interest in worrying through emotional representations in realist writing. In 1887, in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot and subsequent executions of anarchists, which, as biographers note, concerned and saddened the author profoundly, Howells returned repeatedly to the subject of emotion’s immediate social application.18 During this period, when Howells was deeply invested in parsing affective representations in minute detail, his conception of emotion’s social efficacy was also in flux. What he produced at this juncture was a vision of an emotionally resonant mode of realism rooted in Howells’s belief that “romance then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition” (ES, 22). While Howells seems to have had doubts and vacillating thoughts about this vision of realism as inclusive of “the bounds” of sympathy, his work at this moment appears as a far cry from his pronouncements about the unwholesome “vapors” emanating from earlier literary representations (ES, 73–74). His phrasing here is also curious, for Page 43 →he presumes that a motivating feeling needs to be enlarged, even as the work of “widening the bounds of sympathy” should be balanced or scaled back in light of the realists’ claim to observation and its product, textual detail. Howells asserted, for example, that no true ideological change could emanate from literature that would not confront “certain facts of life” that are difficult or unpleasant. “Generally,” he writes, readers require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, or something like that of a physician or a priest as they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions. (ES, 198) Howells’s attention to “facts,” “proof,” and strategies comparable to a “scientific decorum” suggests the ways that disciplined methods allowed literary works to appear professionally respectable or as offering readers something more than an incidental diversion. Howells’s consideration of the scale on which realists could envision incorporating emotional representations emerged alongside and, perhaps, as a counter to critiques of realist writing as overly narrow and unfeeling. Although it is difficult to trace Howells’s Editor’s Study meditations on emotional representation to any one critique of realism, it is also difficult to read his interest in emotional representations as unrelated to latenineteenth-century critiques of realist writing, especially those that cast the realists as invested only in the surface of life and as taking on the role akin to that of unfeeling scientists. As is well known, realist writing, which was at its zenith during the 1880s, was frequently condemned as distastefully rigid. Particularly when interpreted as a fact-finding exercise, it was famously critiqued as a “harsh, loveless, colorless, blunt tool” that “stultifies itself” by noting “only the surface of things,” as Frank Norris asserted.19 Even one of Howells’s protГ©gГ©s would later rebel against realism’s zealous cataloging methods, or its “passion for distinguishing,” indicting his mentor when he claimed that Howellsian realism could appear “too coldly classical,” or invested in “how perfectly, how calmly, how composedly, he can set life before you,” and, as a consequence, is “apt to be after all icy and cold,” leaving readers longing for “the blow and fret, the noise and vehemence of life.”20 An approximation of scientific modes of observation and Page 44 →categorization, so valuable to the realists as a platform for demonstrating both their rationality and their claims to precision, could appear as a mode of representation that was too coldly and too relentlessly analytic. For Howells, as one of the principal realist critics who articulated the shape of the literary mode’s boundaries, the value of fact coexisted alongside concerns about how to convert local details into emotional effects, which

Howells approached principally through locutional style. What emerged was a compromise, albeit an uneasy one, in which Howells stressed the importance of the ways in which facts may evoke feelings and a more amorphous but no less important consideration of expectations surrounding emotion’s efficacy in characters’ lives. While he treated sentimental fiction as a site for addictive reading, castigating its “innutritious” qualities, and unfavorably viewing sentimentality’s tendency to “clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds,” Howells would attempt to resolve his distrust of broad-scaled emotion so as to counter realism’s supposedly cold and scientific qualities (ES, 73–74). While realism was associated with photographic qualities by contemporary critics, according to Howells, it should not engage in “heaping up facts merely and map life instead of picturing it.” Under such conditions, realism would become “false to itself” and perish, he claimed (ES, 22). Through such remarks, Howells attempted to negotiate between perceptions of realism’s objectionable methods and a concomitant interest in disciplined and abundant detail about the human heart, but detail that differed significantly from broad-scale modes of emotion. In September of 1887, in the wake of the Haymarket Riot, Howells would forge an explicit connection between realist writing’s commitment to “scientific decorum” and its capacity to explore a deep understanding of individual motivations. “Democracy in literature,” he writes, “wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvelous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity” (ES, 96). Like his earlier comment that “not even the Americans are emancipated” from “that brotherly responsibility, that duty of man to man” (ES, 41), this claim asserts that the “truth” of feeling is consonant with realist writing’s commitment to exact, detailed representations. While “fraternal feeling,” seemingly sympathy, could emerge from the realist text, its evocation differed from that of sentimental paradigms, in Howells’s view, for fraternal feeling in the realist text could be subjected Page 45 →to locutional limits linked to the “scientific decorum” he also praised. In Howells’s vision, Americans could nurture their sense of shared humanity only if individuals were encouraged to confront their material and cultural differences, or the details that make individuals “known to one another.” The emotional effects, or “fellow feeling,” emerging from realist writing raised the possibility that realism could call attention to the felt need for change, but only if the detailed truths of individual experiences could be conveyed in a disciplined fashion. As Howells contemplated a stark class divide in the mid-1880s and beyond, he located emotional representation at the heart of his criticism, even to the point of positioning it at the center of realist writing’s social mission. What Howells claimed for the realist enterprise was an investment in the morally cognizant and socially reparative modes of thinking discussed by scholars such as Kristen Boudreau, William Morgan, and Paul Petrie, who explore concepts such as sympathy, charity, and “social consciousness” in Howells’s work, respectively.21 Yet the broader question of Howells’s concern with emotional representation has at times been obscured by an emphasis on social effects. My interests, however, lie in untangling representational concerns about emotion from ethical ones. As Petrie asserts, Howells’s oeuvre is oriented to “a single, loosely constructed but pivotal conception: that the chief end of literature is to perform a public role of cultural mediation, enlarging the sphere of social understanding and sympathy by employing fiction as a tool for communication across the cultural boundaries dividing classes, regions, and ethnicities in the late-nineteenth-century United States.”22 Clearly, the effects of sympathy are implicated in Petrie’s investigation, even though the study’s key language emphasizes the social sphere more prominently than the terms of affect. Based on Howells’s interrogation of emotional representations in realist writing, it is possible to read his examination of realism’s “social” promise as linked to his quest to explore the ways in which the detailed elements of American realism were inadequate in light of the goal he imposed upon serious fiction: to foster an acknowledgment of emotional interests that could potentially intervene in the divisions characterizing an increasingly diverse nation. Such concerns led Howells to write insistently about the failures of business as usual in the United States and about the pointed affective failures of successful professional men in such novels as The Minister’s Charge (1885–1886), Annie Kilburn (1889), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and The

Quality of Mercy (1892). At the end of this period, in 1892, Howells left the Harper corporation, where he had worked since 1885 Page 46 →(producing a novel a year and his monthly critical column), in order to edit the markedly less elite Cosmopolitan (a connection that soon proved disastrous and lasted only four months). Throughout much of this period, Howells cast about for an exact terminology through which to address emotion as a realist concern, producing a markedly varied vocabulary and, with it, an evolving typology of emotion. Of a somewhat improbable-sounding novel about tricycling through France, Howells labors to pin down the book’s precise negotiation with emotion, contending “it is unusually sympathetic, but when it is antipathetic it is very antipathetic indeed; it is always neatly intelligent, without the slightest tendency to sentiment” (ES, 142). Curiously, the “sympathetic” qualities of the book appear more laudable than “sentiment,” while the “antipathetic” qualities remain ambiguous. Of a group of stories entitled Poverty Grass (1887), Howells writes of their “absolute and unswerving realism,” as well as their “revelation of the author’s power to deal faithfully yet not repulsively, pathetically yet not sentimentally, with one of the most awful problems of civilization,” calling attention to the details of “toil, pain, vulgarity, savagery,” which “speak out of the heart of human passion in the language of life” (ES, 64–65). Of these pieces, Howells argues, readers “cannot help being better men and women for reading them, if only in awakened pity and good-will” (64–65). Here, the realistic and the “pathetic” overlap productively, allowing for both “pity” and “good-will” as emotional effects and drawing attention to “the heart” of “human passion” that is grounded in “the language of life,” which Howells frequently equated with such features as dialect and scenic detail. Equally nuanced in their balancing of realist elements and emotional ones, in his eyes, are James’s “A Passionate Pilgrim” and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” which, Howells claims, are “at once imaginative and realistic, and for a sympathy all the deeper for the self-control in which they are written” (ES, 67). It is work that embodies a “new kind” of fiction (67). Attributing to James’s writing a reinvention of the realist mode, Howells views the work’s “sympathy” as operating in tandem with a “self-control” that allows for the disciplined approach to emotion to which he imagined realist invention could and should aspire. In such passages, Howells’s search for a nomenclature that encompassed gradations and shadings of affective locutions appears as a task as pervasive as it was self-reflective as he obsessively parses the appropriateness of emotional representation’s scale in relation to a depth of feeling. Howells frequently praised authors who exercised representational restraint, which Page 47 →was manifest in an “intuitive self-control,” which suggested to him that “the writer’s authority is kept wholly out of sight; she is not sensibly in her story any more than a painter is in his picture,” as he claimed of Sarah Orne Jewett’s work (ES, 158). Nevertheless, for Howells, Jewett’s text is infused with a “sweet and compassionate” humor (158). In their implications, such comments suggest that the restraint brought to bear on realist fiction was largely technical; through the modulation of emotional locution and the crafting of perspective, realist writing could control its representation of feeling while avoiding the formal features Howells negatively associated with sentimental effects: the authorial aside, the confidential narration, and an implausibility of plot. Howells’s belief that evoking emotion skillfully, that is, within a specific context and with locutional restraint, results from the author’s control over a limited perspective as well as the work of establishing deeply contextualized moments of feeling. For all his concern about erecting boundaries around sympathy, Howells linked “imaginative” writing with the potential for sympathy, never quite abandoning the emotional mode that he nonetheless hoped to extract from sentimental fiction’s context. Howells thus asserted “imaginative” literature’s need to cover “the whole field of human experience,” at a time when “no one writer, no one book represents [American life], for that is not possible,” as he wrote in the fall of 1887 (ES, 98). Invoking one of his recurring themes across the late 1880s, Howells asserted that realism’s propensity toward exactness, and thus its capacity to reflect experiences located in particular places, circumstances, and traditions, provokes “sympathy for the suffering and aspiration” of its characters, as it worked to “widen the bounds of sympathy” (ES, 22). At such moments, Howells voices a desire to revisit the imaginative dimension of writing that would aspire to sympathy’s evocation, even as he appears uneasy about the means by which shared emotion could be

represented. To preserve “sympathy” and to sever it from sentimental narrative expectations would thus mean connecting sympathy’s effects to realist writing’s fact-finding mission, a combination that would limit the scale of sympathy, almost to the point of making it unrecognizable as such.

Scaled-Back Sympathy While Howells would never reinvent sympathetic forms of feeling so as to view them as fully consanguine with the realist enterprise, he was tremendously attentive to the kind of scenario wherein realist detail and emotionalPage 48 → representations could be linked. In Howells’s assertion that realism could “widen the bounds of sympathy,” the scale of feeling becomes an issue, specifically, the question of how to produce a broad emotional effect in tandem with a strict adherence to local detail (ES, 22). Yet the finer points of this formula remained mysterious, for how exactly was detailed knowledge about individuals supposed to produce a broadening of feeling’s “bounds”? And which was more important—local details or fiction’s “widening” effect? These apparent paradoxes would remain visible in Howells’s late fiction. Howells’s characters, unsurprisingly, find it difficult to balance desires for broad emotional effects with specific and detailed scenarios. In the 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, the issue of emotional scale arises when a nouveau riche family attempts to infiltrate Boston society, or when sympathy’s “bounds” are tested by class distinctions. It is also the novel in which Howells attempts to scale back the concept of sympathy in order to consider its potential role in a class-based divide. Howells’s specialized term for qualified feeling, “practical sympathy,” first emerges in relation to a discussion about the construction and decoration of a home and as multiple and competing visions of the dwelling are discussed in relation to one another.23 The phrase, which remakes “sympathy” by scaling it back to an immediate and tangible level, emerges as a descriptive for Silas Lapham’s interaction with the architect who is planning the Lapham family’s new Beacon Hill home. The affectively charged phrase addresses Lapham’s ability to take on the architect’s vision, or to adapt to another’s influence, and as it does so, the term preserves a goal of fellow feeling. As it emerges in conversation, however, the descriptive, “practical sympathy,” appears as a consciously constructed goal, one that will be interrogated by characters and questioned as to its applicability—all elements that bespeak its legitimacy as a reinvented term that prompts an accompanying interrogation of emotion’s limits. The novel’s description of “practical sympathy” emerges during a dinner-party conversation involving two families, the old-money Boston Brahmins, the Coreys, and the nouveau riche family from rural Vermont, the Laphams; as the novel begins, the newcomers, the Laphams, are in the process of having a fashionable home constructed in their effort to infiltrate Boston society from a richly appointed setting. Rooted in different cultural backgrounds and possessing widely varying personal histories, the Laphams and the Coreys are unlikely associates. When the architect hired to build the Lapham house describes Lapham’s “practical sympathy” with his plan, it is in reference to the uneasily forged cooperation between client Page 49 →and professional, for Silas Lapham originally possessed an old-fashioned vision for his home. The architect, however, promotes a radically different, aesthetically sophisticated plan. In order to achieve this shared vision, the architect becomes “skillful” in “touch[ing] Colonel Lapham’s stops” so as to amend Lapham’s original and outdated vision of black-walnut finish, high-studding, and cornices.24 As a result, the Beacon Hill mansion promises to emerge as unexpectedly tasteful and modern. What promises to result is a marriage of money and taste, middle-class backwardness and professional design, as “practical sympathy” yields a shared vision, which is forged for a specific and limited purpose and produces a unified goal that satisfies all parties—that is, until the building burns, unfinished, and cannot be reconstructed. The Coreys, whose only son, Tom, has decided to go into the paint manufacturing business with Lapham (to his parents’ dismay), also come to possess a “practical sympathy” for the Lapham family, one that will lead to a limited appreciation. In the end, while education, worldly experience, taste, and demeanor separate the families, the Coreys are willing to overlook these concerns on behalf of their son, who will partner with Lapham in business and with Penelope Lapham in marriage. For his sake, they deliberately and self-consciously attempt to bridge the gulfs that divide the families. What makes their association bearable, in the end, is the abbreviated

nature of the Lapham-Corey relation, or a deliberate distancing that constitutes the “practical” nature of their particular social intercourse. After failing financially, the Laphams leave Boston and return to rural Vermont, while the offensively “pert” Penelope Lapham (now married to Tom) departs with him to Mexico.25 Anticipating the absence of their less-than-desirable daughter-in-law, the Coreys discover that their regard for her grows, or as one of Tom’s sisters puts it, “I’m glad [Penelope’s] going to Mexico. At that distance we can—correspond.”26 Interpreted in light of the “practical” model of sympathy, such statements do not indict the Coreys of insufficient feeling so much as they suggest the limits of genuine, unforced emotion. Read this way, the Corey family expends the utilitarian degree of emotional engagement that will render their relations with their in-laws genuinely felt. Precisely because the Coreys eschew conventional insincerities, their limited and situational regard lends integrity to their difficult relations. In the end, emotion’s “practicality” and veracity overlap, and any greater effort on the part of either party would appear exaggerated and, hence, affectively false. If extrapolated from this scenario and read as axiomatic, both in regardPage 50 → to Howells’s career and in relation to his influence over the realist-era publication field, “practical sympathy” attests to the value of the boundaries placed on the expression of feeling. Tellingly, Howells constructs his hybrid term for emotion with the long-idealized term “sympathy” at its base, alongside its connotations of unity and transcendence, and then adds both limits and a specific context that explains them.27 A more limited, smaller-scaled version of sympathy thus points to the possibility of creating meaningful, if less idealized personal connections.28 In contrast, there might exist a more general form of sympathy, which Howells distinguished from the specific type imbued with “practicality,” and it was this broader, more diffused form of feeling that Howells distrusted, even as he articulated a need for greater cross-class understanding in the late-nineteenth-century United States. Sympathy, writ uncomfortably large, appears in Howells’s work more as evidence of a desire to be moved than of a desire to experience any particular feeling, for as Howells imagined the emotional moments of realist writing, they could emerge only from specific scenarios, witnessed up close and represented through mechanisms of descriptive restraint. By contrast, sympathy, while a worthy goal, was out of touch with particular, individual circumstances and personalized forms of logic. Sympathy’s qualified, “practical” dimension suggested that other iterations of emotion were by default “impractical,” impulsive, or less efficacious than a scaled-back iteration of fellow feeling. While Howells would not necessarily portray “practical sympathy” as successful throughout all of Silas Lapham, where families coexist most meaningfully when they are apart, his creation of the phrase indicates Howells’s interest in small-scaled emotional dynamics evoked through qualified (and hence limited) terms about emotion. In Howells’s later fictions, characters who exhibit a desire to enact a fuller, richer form of fellow feeling, as in the case of figures such as Basil March from A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), reach similar conclusions about the veracity of small-scaled emotion. As much as characters wish to feel for the anonymous folk around them, broad and anonymous feeling ultimately becomes impossible. While wishing to intervene in the lives of the poor, and to exercise his pity and goodwill in some fashion, Basil March will confront the limitations of imaginative emotion, broadly construed. In the novel, generally recognized as Howells’s finest, Howells tackles what Kenneth Lynn has described as the “most revealing study ever made of sentimental American liberalism,” even as he hints at the need for some enacted or “practical” form of sympathy in a modern and diverse city.29 If Page 51 →Lynn is right, and the novel critiques the centrality of a sentimental posture to liberal thinking, it also reveals how approaching a complex social scene while upholding a broadly diffused emotional expectation will bring about inevitable disappointments. As in other works by Howells, sympathy in New York appears problematic because of the large-scaled expectations it evokes. Yet, as the novel’s opening makes clear, a large city rife with poverty and disparity seems to require broad-scaled emotion of its citizens, who continually confront the problems of inequity, but who also find it difficult to connect emotionally with individuals from classes and experiences other than their own. At the novel’s opening, Basil March and his family move to New York from Boston (from a smaller-scaled, homogenous city to a much larger, more diverse one) so he can take a position editing a start-up periodical; once in New York, March becomes interested in his new surroundings. Indeed, the “chief pleasure” of the

Marches’ New York experience stems from the “quality of foreignness” that March and his wife attribute to the city.30 Reveling in what is for them the exotic nature of their urban experience, the Marches enjoy their “loss of individuality” in the diverse metropolis (277) and engage “bohemianizing” in a “harmless way” (258). In his cataloging of the city, March aurally examines the tenements like the careful writer that he is, as he identifies a “pure Americanism” in locales that include Italian, Irish, and German immigrants (259). Noting the obvious differences in heritage and background, “March liked the swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in them” (259), even as he muses to his son on the “curious” way that the poor are fond “of these unpleasant thoroughfares” filled with refuse, stench, and grime (260). While March wants to feel for the less fortunate, at least in the abstract, and to respond appropriately to the poverty around him, when he becomes a fellow citizen whose contact with the New York poor is habitual, he realizes that a broad desire to experience sympathy is continually interrupted by his ignorance and repugnance. March also becomes aware that he may not know how to read individuals beyond the external factors of life in order to ascertain the emotional states of people whose circumstances differ so greatly from his own. External details, in fact, may be distracting. Hence, his broad desire to feel for the poor becomes scaled back by the unsatisfactory nature of his encounters with them. So immersed in this awareness is March that he no longer presumes that he can interpret the bodily signs of others, for he finds it impossible to imagine what an individual unlike himself would think or feel in a given situation; he simply does not possess Page 52 →the knowledgeable insights that would allow him to formulate specific suppositions and, with them, an imagination of the strangers’ feelings. It is this separation between visible behavior and imagined motive that allows him to question whether a beggar he sees is really destitute or playing “a little game” to acquire easy money. March wonders to himself, “suppose that poor fellow wasn’t personally founded on fact; nevertheless, he represented the truth, he was the ideal of the suffering which would be less effective if realistically treated” (382). Try as he might, March cannot imagine a relation to the beggar that is individuated or that departs from the broad notion of “type,” so that the “ideal” of suffering (“ideal” being a term that Howells’s criticism frequently equated with “type”) interferes with a realistic or detailed treatment of the situation. In other words, March cannot imagine an appropriately scaled emotional relation to the beggar, who both represents a wide problem (of the urban poor) and yet is an individual whom March feels the need to interrogate as to his particular circumstances, especially when, as he notes, the beggar is well dressed and speaks French. Too proximate to the beggar to bring a generic sympathy to bear on this situation and confounded by contradictory details (clothing and French versus foraging for trash), March either requires a more detailed portrait of the man’s circumstances or, paradoxically, no knowledge of them at all. Unable to resolve the amount of knowledge he possesses, he cannot imagine an appropriate scale of knowledge or response; hence skepticism and a desire for sympathy continually impede one another. Knowing how to feel, for March, depends upon facts that he cannot acquire; thus his ability to sympathize is continually in the process of recalibration. In negotiating a general, diffused desire to do good and a perceived need to know the details encircling the ostensible recipient of imagined charity, March cannot manage the gap between broad-scaled desires and local knowledge. There is the “fact” that there are many poor in New York who beg for food, but they, he reminds himself, may not all conform to the type of the genuinely poor. Some, he suspects, may be simply acting out the type of the truly needy. As he contrasts the visible facts of the beggar’s situation (which are far from revelatory, given his suspicions) with the same figure’s ability to “represent the truth” as an easily read figure, March is unable to feel any imaginative sympathy, so deeply is he invested in a potential contrast between motive and behavior, between his observation of poverty and the suspicion that underlying facts may refute it. As the editor of a contemporary periodical, March, like his creator, is likely of Page 53 →the realist persuasion, given the degree to which his insistence on the particular and the observed governs his thinking. Thus his quandary with the beggar reveals the essential problem of sympathy’s intersection with realist practices, for it produces the unresolved dilemma in which March finds himself. For him, even a little particular knowledge undercuts sympathy’s potential. Consequently, if the

form of feeling March expects of himself is sympathy, it is doomed by what March perceives as its lack of fit to a situation in which he feels the need for detailed personal information so as to weigh the degree of an individual’s conformity to “type.” Later in the novel, after witnessing a labor strike where several of the principal characters are killed, March declares that he “objects” to “this economic chance world in which we live and which we men seem to have created” (380). “It ought to be law,” he continues, that “if a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come” (380). As March continues, however, his apparent (and unfocused) sympathies for the less fortunate shift significantly as he compares their apparent poverty to his own financial concerns. Thinking about maintaining status and employment in the future, he considers: But in our state of things no one is secure of this. No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it. I may have my work taken away from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion, of a man who has not the qualification for knowing whether I do it well or ill. At my time of life—at every time of life—a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot, lying, cheating, stealing; and when we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we’ve come to a palace of our own, or the poorhouse, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother men, I don’t think the retrospect can be pleasing. (380) The problem with March’s speech is the fact that the very hint of social precariousness (in others) brings March back to a consideration of the only specifics he understands: those governing his own position. His selfknowledge,Page 54 → his familiarity with his own story, encourages him to believe that a man can “suffer in himself” but not through others and seemingly not on behalf of those he views from afar. His ability to feel, hence, remains linked to the kind of specificity he can trust only when attached to his immediate situation, rendering feeling a consequence of immediate and personal proximity. One of the important matters at stake here is the scale of one’s knowledge and how that knowledge is linked to feeling. Imagining the situation through which emotion will be evoked, for March, means facing a likely deficit in knowledge, for only knowledge that is immediately accessible will allow for the creation of real feeling, which is to say, modulated and smaller-scaled feeling of a “practical” nature. This inability to submit to the rigors of imaginative work in lieu of concrete and immediate detail forestalls sympathy’s connective capacity; moreover, March’s insistence on knowing someone before being able to feel on his or her behalf stresses the problem of attempting to rescale sympathy. Isabel March’s query to her husband about the poor, “But if we shared all we have with them and then settled down among them, what good would it do?,” reflects something of this problem of scale, for it emphasizes what Amy Kaplan has described as an imagined line that divides the anonymous and vaguely threatening underclasses from the Marches, or a line that separates “вЂus’ and вЂthem,’ .В .В . вЂreal suffering’ and natural poverty.”31 The larger element of Kaplan’s argument, that “realismВ .В .В . strives to pave a common ground for diverse social classes by extending literary representation to вЂthe other half’ while reassuring middle-class readers that social difference can be effaced in the mirror of the commonplace,” situates the ideas of the “commonplace” and “difference” in opposing lines of thought. According to Kaplan, realism “reconciles social diversity within an overarching community, assimilates disparate facts to a commonsense morality, and frames a plenitude of details within a coherent form,” a line of thought that highlights Howells’s interests in subduing difference so as to achieve greater moral purpose.32 My reading takes into account the degree to which Howells associated sympathy with a tendency to flatten out or caricature social differences (as in Kaplan’s sense of the “commonplace”), even as Howells also resisted this flatness, positioning it as doing nothing to generate a profound understanding of another’s position. An emphasis on Howells’s attention to emotional scale suggests that any attempt to “overcomeВ .В .В . otherness,” would mean acting in an absence of real knowledge, while knowledge was only the means of awakening some discreet and limited form of sympathy.33

Page 55 →Isabel March’s comments suggest that the sympathy she envisions is problematic, for even if enacted in the form of charity, it would erase social distinctions, not by lifting up the poor but by reducing the Marches’ comforts (66). As long as the poor are numerous, needy, and anonymous, then the problems attending sympathy persist. Her impossible question about giving up affluence for the teeming numbers of the poor highlights the ways in which ongoing, large-scaled demands for social equity became an argument for stasis: sympathy was too large a project to contemplate. As she confronts social problems of enormous proportions, or both the pervasiveness of poverty and, alongside it, the broad scale on which her sympathy would need to exist in order to be transformed into effective action, these difficulties prevent her from initiating the process that Howells sets up as the only viable answer. In this scenario, the desire to feel for the anonymous poor would produce a scaling back of imagined feeling to produce more practical and knowledgeable levels of emotional connection. In the end, Isabel March’s example suggests that it is easier to give up a desire to feel for the less fortunate than to modulate her sympathy and transform it into informed and focused action. Howells’s fiction at such moments raises the query of how to begin to experience emotional connections provoked by broad sympathies, then how to scale back from broad desires to feel effectively for those in need. Howells would argue that “it remained to the realist to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions to a great imaginative literature” (ES, 22). The necessity of scale that Howells imagines here hinges upon knowledge: to know someone’s story intimately means gaining access to the facts that serve as indexes to “fidelity of experience,” which in turn operate so as to increase literature’s imaginative potential. In their implications, such passages suggest the degree to which the category of emotion known as “sympathy” remained a point of tension for Howells. While some of Howells’s characters claim, as does the Reverend Sewell in The Minister’s Charge (1885–1886), “Every one of us dwells in an impenetrable solitude! We understand each other a little if our circumstances are similar, but if they are different all our words leave us dumb and unintelligible,”34 Howells’s work suggests that if individuals are unknowable to one another, if their circumstances (which we might translate into “detail” or “intimate knowledge”) remain unclear, then fellow feeling cannot result, for “intelligibility” must proceed feeling. Desiring the facts of experience and circumstance that lead to personal connections, Howells’s fiction simultaneously reveals a tendency to view the fissures in American Page 56 →society as impossibly vast and impersonal, but as best addressed through the type of emotional connection rooted in knowledgeable intimacy that is virtually impossible to acquire. Of Howells’s late work, Hamlin Garland claimed in 1890 that “he has deepened and broadened, fathering sympathy and tenderness, and as a consequence his books have deepened in insight and broadened in humanity, ” noting Howells’s investment in emotional connection but perhaps misinterpreting the scale, for a “broad” sense of humanity was precisely the inverse of what Howells outlined as desirable.35 While Howells argued for continued need for sympathy—of an unspecified type, on a yet-undiscovered scale—he continued to struggle to define how that sympathy should come about and what it should resemble. In short, while a worthy goal, sympathy remained both impossibly diffused and a potentially inauthentic form of emotion for Howells.

The Scale of Emotional Intent in Annie Kilburn Howells’s musings on the value of local and limited, or small-scaled, enactments of emotion would be demonstrated most visibly in Annie Kilburn (1889), a novel featuring a well-to-do heiress of thirty-one who returns to the United States—specifically to a small, New England mill town—after her father dies in Italy; as a woman of means, Annie takes up the question of how the wealthy can engage in good works on behalf of the less fortunate, for like the Marches, she worries about poverty in her locality more than about poverty in the abstract, even as she finds it difficult to understand the life of the poor. Upon her return to her home in Hatboro’, Massachusetts (a town Howells modeled on the mill town of Lowell), Annie encounters the Reverend Julius Peck and his young daughter, Idella. A socialist minister and former industrial worker, Peck denounces capitalism, competition, and commerce, both from the pulpit and in his daily relations. Annie’s interest in aiding the poor brings her into Peck’s sphere; as a consequence, she becomes both engaged with and troubled by Peck’s reformist ideas, especially his assertion that “those who rise above the necessity of

work for daily bread are in great danger or losing their right relation to other men,” a statement that privileges a “right relation” across classes while subtly critiquing the wealthy.36 As a do-gooder without any particular cause, Annie becomes most disturbed by Peck’s argument that benevolence “can’t create sympathy between rich and poor,” though it can “sometimes create a bond of gratitude perhaps” (684). When asked to explain himself, Peck asserts Page 57 →that “sympathy—common feeling—the sense of fraternity—can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these” (684). This “common feeling,” which Howells viewed as rooted in a knowledge of specific circumstances (as his critical work shows), appears impossible to muster across class lines and divergent backgrounds, though it remains Peck’s ideal, while “gratitude” is but a poor substitute, in Peck’s view. For Peck, all forms of altruism address the symptoms of social ills rather than their cures, for they fall short of the ideal emotional reciprocity that he associates with true egalitarianism. Peck’s pronouncement, however, will also introduce the issue of scale into the novel, for Peck presumes that there are no “like experiences, like hopes, like fears,” that naturally traverse class lines. And while Peck will advocate for large-scale reforms, which would improve the lives of many of the working poor, he also imagines that the well-to-do have no detailed knowledge of laborers’ lives. Thus he remains caught between two extremes: the belief that sympathy can only emerge from detailed personal knowledge and a surety that the only effective reforms will be sweeping in nature. His goals and his sense of sympathy’s methods, thus, are essentially at odds. In her reading of the novel, Kristin Boudreau describes it as addressing a “problem of philanthropy,” because the novel focuses on Annie’s desire to give of herself and her resources.37 Yet “philanthropy” may be too tame a word, for Peck curiously and pointedly avoids pleas for financial support, gravitating instead to a lexicon of affect, specifically “sympathy,” even though he paradoxically inspires and participates in so little of it. His demeanor is habitually stern, critical, and cold, even when he is with his young daughter.38 Focusing on the novel as announcing a debate about the nature of charity, Paul Petrie argues that Peck is motivated by a belief that “social reconciliation and constructive reform can proceed only where the emotional will exists to establish open and genuine interpersonal relations between individuals on opposite sides of the class divide.”39 Yet based on Peck’s lexicon, and on the way in which he formulates his arguments, emotion is more than an adjunct to charity; it is at the basis of Peck’s demands on behalf of the less privileged, for he doesn’t desire that those possessed of means should simply give materially. He insists that such individuals feel some unspecified measure of sympathy that in turn allows for the creation of a more egalitarian society. His goal, insistently, is not action, but the more pervasive and difficult labor of engendering and experiencing crossclass feeling, specifically sympathy. Page 58 →Ironically, however, Peck often appears as an alienating zealot, altruistic, but devoid of personal emotion, a man “lost in his own set of Tolstoyan ethical abstractions,” as Petrie notes.40 Described as embodying a “sort of frozen outВ .В .В . heard-headed cold-bloodedness,” Peck is believed to be “a man without an illusion, without an emotion” (727). Viewed by Annie as “cold” but paradoxically not “unfeeling,” Peck elicits very little emotion, even from those who find truth in his pronouncements, for he “proves an obstacle to the sort of genuine sympathy for which his own ethical system calls,” according to Petrie.41 Although Annie notes that Peck “has said things that have stirred me up and put me in a fever,” he “always seems to be cold and passive himself” (815). In conversation with Peck, she assesses a “phase of the impersonality” she associates with him, a sense of “something cold and ever hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him”; thus, in an attempt to humanize him, Annie engages in “conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for,” filling in the types of details that will allow her to generate sympathy for him personally (753). In a parallel gesture, although she “longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him”—or provide some detail about her life experiences and her hopes, which would presumably generate his understanding—his reserve prevents such revelations; indeed, when she attempts to explain herself to Peck, the exchange ends only in a broad critique of class relations, in which Annie feels herself to be implicated (753). Peck’s “coldness” appears as part of his reluctance to provide distracting personal details about his life, and his parallel disinterest in

Annie’s circumstances engenders the uncomfortable restraint that will govern their association. As a consequence, no sympathy results. Peck’s difficulty is one that he will exhibit throughout the novel as he desires cross-class sympathy, even as he shuns detailed revelations about individual experiences, thereby forestalling the very mechanism Howells associated with sympathy’s origination in detailed personal knowledge. As Annie’s associate, the alcoholic but gifted lawyer Ralph Putney, states it, Peck “doesn’t make you feel comfortable. He doesn’t flatter you up worth a cent” (727). What Annie had expected of the minister, Putney asserts, was that he would approve of Annie’s benevolent plans and “coo round, and tell her what a noble woman she was, and beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself in doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she was a moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone Age of social brutalities; and of course she hated him” (727). Annie laughinglyPage 59 → agrees. Peck, however, cares little for the critiques that encircle him, just as he disregards philanthropists’ desires to take pleasure in their efforts. His disinterest in all things personal coexists with his desire to effect sweeping social changes, which means that he cannot interrogate smaller-scale concerns in order to affect broader ones. The question raised by Peck’s methods is a considerable one, for it concerns the scale of reformist thinking. Does a social reformer who wishes to change hearts as well as social conditions begin with individuals or with large goals? Much of the novel pursues this question, in regard to both Peck’s behaviors and Annie’s, for Annie too wishes to do good but has only the vaguest, broadest social ideals in mind. Like Peck, she will struggle with individual members of the poor, who fill her with something other than pity and goodwill, even as her ideals, like Peck’s, initially incline toward sweeping reforms. But for Peck, there is no possibility of smaller-scaled feeling; his goals remain unapologetically grand, and despite his calls for the more detailed knowledge that should accompany any altruistic works, he will not supply any. Annie is motivated both by Peck and, more generally, by her combined inheritance and the disparity visible in the mill town to engage in a number of genteel reforms, nearly all of them disastrous. Her ill-fated efforts to improve the lives of the workers include her participation in an outdoor theatrical for charity (which devolves into a stark separation of working-class audience and wealthy participants) and her use of personal wealth to finance seaside vacations for families of ailing children, one of whom worsens and dies as a consequence. These forays into the situations of strangers render Annie more cautious and cause in her “a revulsion” against the kind of “beneficence which had proved so dangerous,” for it is clear that she privileged her own notions of doing good above the concerns held by the objects of her benevolence—and by their doctors (752). Annie’s ability to harm rather than help focuses light on the ways in which her forays into philanthropy are focused on subjects who are too anonymous, too little known to her. Boudreau writes that “the vagueness of Anne Kilburn’s charitable impulses suggests that she has come to see them as a necessary part of her character, not merely as specific acts that she might choose to perform.”42 As Annie discovers, attempting to do good does not count for much unless it is accompanied by understanding, which almost necessarily means that one should feel some underlying impulse in tandem with philanthropic acts; for Annie, attempts to learn about the poor are never revelatory enough. Accordingly, while Annie’s Page 60 →ambitions appear impossibly broad, sympathy appears increasingly intractable as a viable social mechanism. The question of how to generate meaningfully individuated forms of fellow feeling emerges from the novel’s portrayal of Annie’s and Peck’s parallel frustrations. The problem of Annie’s social obligation haunts her, and she attempts to individuate her impulses to feel for others. Yet when confronted with the actual poor, she withdraws in repugnance. The tramps that come to Annie’s door for aid, she acknowledges, fill her “gentlewoman’s soul with loathing”; she finds it best to keep “beyond the range of the powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them” so that she may “experience the luxury of pity for them.” In all, she “preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity” (746). Certainly, part of Annie’s difficulty lies in her failure to understand the life of want, but the details of the lives of the poor fail to generate any emotional connection with them, for their personal circumstances—their uncleanliness and their ignorance—repel her. And yet, Annie expects to feel some emotion for these individuals as an adjunct to her good works, an expectation that hints that the emotional component she expects of her interventions is the

potential to feel good about her capacity to feel for others, or put rather differently, the only personal adjunct to sympathy is bound up in an emotional satisfaction stemming from her good works. As Annie doles out aid to beggars and tramps at her door, apportioning it to those she judges most needy, she, like Basil March, invokes the idea of the “type,” thus denying the beggars any individuality and, with it, any opportunity for her to create an emotional connection with them. The “sick or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week’s beard, represented typical poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast,” the novel reveals, stressing her attribution of the “always” and “the typical” to the specific scenario (746). The problem that results is not only that Annie feels no kinship with the poor but, more significantly, that because of this lack of connection, she cannot take satisfaction in her efforts to experience sympathy. Annie’s general failures to connect with the poor and underprivileged are more than incidental; as with Basil March and his wife, her substitution of the “typical” for the specific allows her to circumvent the possibility of emotional connection with the poor. And without specific knowledge of the poor, Annie perceives herself to be “accused” of the failure of her attempted connections with them. The exception to this dynamic is one small child for whom sympathy is made real for Annie, given her knowledge of the details surrounding Page 61 →the child’s life. Indeed, her knowledge is such that it arguably ceases to be sympathy at all, for Annie adopts the child and decides to raise her as the daughter of a gentlewoman, thereby erasing all class-based differences between the two; the resulting, real affection between them then alleviates any need for imaginative forms of emotional connection. But in achieving this genuine relation in the course of her work on behalf of the less fortunate, not only does Annie propose to erase the barrier of class, but she additionally limits the potential good associated with sympathy. In fact, she abolishes sympathy and transforms her feeling into something more specific, more personal, thereby situating sympathy—or the abstract desire to feel it—as a mere desire to experience real feeling. The child in question, Idella, the Reverend Peck’s young daughter, is a figure he frequently forgets or neglects and whom he dresses “like a shabby little Irish girl,” just as he typically overlooks social niceties and offends individuals who observe them (726). His ideological zeal renders him unsuitable for raising the child, who is arguably the one individual who needs him most (for her mother has recently died). The child’s name, moreover, with its resemblance to “ideal,” is suggestive of a broad belief, which has remained problematic throughout the novel, especially in relation to the problem of putting idealism into practice. But in Idella, the ideal becomes personalized, aided by a particular personal history and a concrete form—a hint that in Idella Annie may resolve her problem of feeling’s scale, and in a way that Peck strangely cannot. As Peck gives his child to Annie to raise, his greatest concern in so doing is that Idella will be corrupted by bourgeois excess. Thus, Idella’s affection for Annie may mar her access to a true social vision, in Peck’s view, for Idella’s contact with a privileged class may obscure her ability to feel for the poor. When he eventually decides to take the child from Annie, to whom she has grown attached, his ideal remains focused on Idella’s intimate knowledge of the working classes, for he believes that she will best be raised by a mill worker’s wife, who will save her from bourgeois excess. His attempted placement of the child thus overlooks the local, intimate affection Idella and Annie have grown to share, based on the life they have lived together; instead, Peck seeks to replace it with another type of intimacy, one manufactured through proximity. Much like Howells, his characters find sympathy impossible to imagine unless it is accompanied by intimate knowledge; what occupies their attention, thus, is the instantiation of intimate knowledge and the question about how it can be controlled or directed. On the whole, Annie’s feeling for Idella, which is detailed and, in scale, miniaturized in association with Page 62 →one small girl, appears more natural than Peck’s plan to place Idella with the mill family, for while there will be proximity, it will be of a forced nature. This plan also markedly contrasts with Peck’s largely futile efforts at broad reform. As Howells establishes affective differences between Annie and Peck, the one who eventually feels for an individual and the other who advocates on behalf of an entire underclass, the problem of appropriately scaled sympathy emerges as all but impossible to invoke, for its point of initiation lies in the knowledge—detailed knowledge—about an individuated set of circumstances. Moreover, if truly individuated feelings like love depart from sympathy, then sympathy appears little more than an initial—and replaceable—ideal.

Late in the novel, Peck comes to believe that even he cannot share the poor’s experiences imaginatively; he then decides to share life literally and bodily with the poor, leaving his middle-class ministry and returning to live among the mill workers. Despite the disadvantages this move will bring to his daughter, he determines to take Idella along. Unable to part with Idella, Annie plans to go along and also live in the tenements. In Peck’s view, the problem of scale will be solved through acquainting all these characters with a life of poverty. Presumably, through their common experiences with the poor and their detailed knowledge of poverty, fellow feeling will be summoned. The curious aspect of Peck’s desire to share the lot of the poor is that it resembles aspects of sympathetic identification, or being able to imagine inhabiting the position of the other, despite the fact that the realities of poverty will be all too present for Annie and Idella. Although sharing the bodily experience of another’s misery resembles the formulation of sympathy (in which an imaginative willingness to take on another’s pain creates an emotional bond rooted in projections), Peck’s mission of living among the poor sidesteps this imaginative aspect of feeling, as he determines to focus solely on shared experience. He does not want to feel for the poor; he wants to become the poor, for Peck’s plan entails a substitution of experience for feeling. Kristin Boudreau interprets Peck as if “echoing Adam Smith,” but in fact Peck strips the theory of sympathy of its imaginative base.43 Along the way, he neglects the social ideal associated with sympathy, which should be to lift up the downtrodden, not to join them in a life of want. Annie, who is much less certain of her political beliefs (even, to an extent, at the novel’s end, when she is poised to marry the comfortable Dr. Morrell), remains dubious about adopting poverty as a way of combating it, for she associates no feeling, save apprehension, with this experiment in changed circumstances. Page 63 →Peck’s plan to have Idella experience poverty in personal detail again conjures the problem of scale, even as it raises a number of other questions. How will experiencing poverty allow for an effective intervention into it? Will it cause anyone to feel differently about inequity in a way that also allows for good works? How many individuals will be required to adopt poverty in order to effect social change? And if all potential benefactors live among the poor, who would sympathize with their collective plight? How is fellow feeling—never mind the good works—to come about? Annie is in the act of packing when these intertwined questions are rendered moot by Peck’s sudden death in a train wreck; she is later embarrassed by her proposed participation in the scheme. It is clear all along, however, that Annie has no belief in the value of living among the poor as one of them. Rather than demonstrating ideological commitment (as Peck sees it), the episode exposes a host of problems about knowledge and feeling, facts and projections. In the end, there is literally no good vantage point from which to begin feeling for the less fortunate, for an immediate proximity to poverty obviates the function of pity either by producing shared misery (as in Peck’s plan) or by converting sympathy to a form of loving companionship (as in Annie’s adoption of Idella). While Howells, as this chapter has suggested throughout, sought to place limits upon emotional engagement specifically so that emotion would not overwhelm a realistic commitment to detail, Peck serves as a reminder that a productive sense of scale is difficult to produce vis-Г -vis sympathy. As he takes up broad goals and large-scale idealism, which fail to produce the shared feelings he desires, Peck at last focuses on the minute details of everyday life, as if requiring life among the poor as an anchor for his social theories. Yet, as his plan to live among the workers also shows, the scale produced by his efforts results in an experience hemmed in by impossibly narrow restrictions, combined with large ideals about class. Peck’s solutions, as a consequence, are never “practical,” for while detailed, they remain linked to anonymous structures. Peck’s impractical attempts at creating sympathy also offer an astonishingly unsatisfactory response to the problem of cross-class feeling when, near the novel’s end, he claims “evidence of the fact that the poor have at least pity on the poor, and will no more betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall together as brothers” (804–805). In this scenario, where the underclasses unite in fellow feeling, presumably to rise up together, or perhaps to live equitably in poverty, the affluent classes’ sympathies become moot, so that sympathy remains consolidated within class lines.44 Page 64 →Peck’s paradoxical relations to the constructs of both experience and emotion are never resolved, particularly when it is revealed that the family Peck plans to join at the mill tenements, the Savor family, is the same one that lost a baby after the seaside vacation sponsored by Annie. The plan to live with them thus positions Idella as a replacement for the lost Savor child. Again here, Peck’s vision is stolidly unimaginative, for in his

expectation that Idella can simply be substituted for another child (not to mention the fact that she is his child, offered up to another family), he appears to believe that proximity alone creates change, regardless of the individual and complicated emotions involved. In a later series of complications laden with ironies, Annie reluctantly attempts to honor the now-deceased Peck’s wishes by taking Idella to live with the Savors. Yet rather than noting in the Savor home a welcoming respite, or signs of a genteel disposition to treat the child as protected and nurtured, Annie sees only want, haste, and overwork, particularly in Mrs. Savor’s lot. Although Mrs. Savor briefly ceases her housework to give the child a “motherly welcome,” Annie “did not like Mrs. Savor’s house when she came to it, nor Mrs. SavorВ .В .В . all blowzed and work-deranged” (852). Moreover, when Mrs. Savor admits she sees Idella as a “cross” to bear, brought in because of her husband’s agreement with Peck, Annie mentally revolts against the replacement of one child for another, viewing it as a product of Peck’s stolid theory of proximity rather than a true investigation of actual human feeling specific to the situation (852). Later still, when Mrs. Savor decides to leave Idella with Annie after the little girl flees to Annie’s house, Mrs. Savor admits that “the child was better off with Miss Kilburn, only she hated to say so. Her husband seemed to think it would make up to her for the one they lost, but nothing could really do that” (854). As a rebuttal to Peck’s attempted substitution of his daughter for the lost child, the moment reveals how the practice of simple replacement serves as no answer to life’s inequities; further, Peck’s scheme, like so much of his thinking, ignores deeply felt human bonds in lieu of broad principles. Having trained himself to think about emotion solely in terms of sympathy—the pitying of the downtrodden—Peck has no way of negotiating what Howells casts as real, motivating versions of feeling, specifically individuated affection. For him, sympathy remains a potential result, never a motivating construct. By contrast, Annie’s broad desires to feel for others have been converted to her affection for Idella. Notably, nowhere in the novel does sympathy appear as a sustainable form of emotion. By the novel’s end, Annie Kilburn affirms the difficulty of attempting Page 65 →to balance detailed knowledge and deep feeling when social inequities are pervasive. The only emotional connection that appears satisfying is that between Annie and Idella, who share a genuine affection, one that departs from an abstract idealism. Annie, who comes to feel deeply for Peck’s young daughter, does so in part, she notes, because she finds Idella “a little baddish” and likes having “something to forgive” in the child’s behavior (794). Moreover, Annie ironically notes, the girl does not follow her father’s Spartan ways, for Idella is acquisitive, greedy, and decidedly vain. When taken from Annie’s to the Savors’ home, Idella screams in disgust at the “ugly house” (853) and demands to be returned to Annie’s, where she takes delight in Annie’s “dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman” (794). The child’s materialism, which as SГ¤mi Ludwig notes aligns her desires with those of “everybody else in the fancy society of Hatboro,” seems to Annie natural (and, in relation to Peck’s asceticism, ironic).45 In accepting Idella’s materialism, Annie reveals how deeply her own experiences allow her to accept and naturalize these tendencies. In her explanations of her love for Idella, Annie suggests how profoundly the privileged identify with figures they understand as like themselves; Annie’s comment that “the only kind of creature that I can have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her,” reveals the ways in which she interprets Idella as possessing an innate class affiliation that resembles her own (818). As much as Howells hints that Annie’s fondness for Idella is based on a presumptive likeness between the two (projected onto the privileged at large and, moreover, onto two fatherless daughters), Annie only partially acknowledges the similarity. She simply contends that her life has changed, that “I think there is something in the air, the atmosphere, that won’t allow you to live in the old way if you’ve got a grain of conscience of humanity,” generalizing broadly about social conditions (818). In actuality, she has inverted Peck’s scheme of sharing poverty with the poor by having Idella join her in affluence, the difference being that she does so by jettisoning sympathy and embracing love instead. Annie’s efforts at reform are ultimately more successful than Peck’s, even as the only clear-cut influence she exerts is over Idella, one malleable child lifted up from poverty. In this modest success, Howells highlights the limits of real emotion’s profoundly personal yet also dishearteningly narrow results, for Annie’s affection for Idella is both practical and limited. As the “practicality” of her efforts supersedes their

potential to communicate “sympathy,” a fuller, more personal form of affection replaces Page 66 →imagined connections with unknown individuals. If, then, the natural end point of sympathy is not broad “fellow feeling” but genuine and sustained affection—not imagined connection but a more defined and intimate form of emotion—then Annie has replaced sympathy’s expectations (distance, viewing, pity) with other, more satisfying forms of interaction, ending the question of sympathy’s scale by banishing sympathy altogether. In this scenario, sympathy matters, but primarily as a placeholder for a subsequent feeling that becomes more defined, more fully realized, and more practical in much the way that Howells envisioned sympathy as requiring a conversion to a more modern and useful form of feeling. The larger, representational double bind infusing Howells’s vision of sympathy remains, however. Valuing socially conscious detail and broadly felt calls for change yields only, on occasion, an immediate proximity that produces not fellow feeling of a broad type but other, more limited and specific forms of emotion that are bound by class experiences: the poor feel for the poor and the middle-class for the comfortable. What then, is the responsibility of well-off, educated, middle-class Americans? Annie announces that “we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn’t be so good to them,” advancing a theory that substitutes ethics for personal feeling (817). The anonymous poor generate no goodwill, while known and loved individuals are absorbed upward, thereby erasing the need for negotiations across class boundaries. The scale on which to initiate socially inspired, widely effective, and sympathetic emotion hence remains all but impossible to imagine.

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Chapter Two Emotion and Representational Anxiety The peculiar affective nomenclature of the late-nineteenth-century American novel presented readers with a set of hybrid terms for emotion, including “sacred rage,” “dull irritation,” “involuntary admiration,” “the economy of pain,” “passionate humility,” “the stress of rapture,” an “agony of interest,” “the equipoise of bliss,” and “spontaneous revulsion,” to invoke but a few examples.1 Henry James’s Milly Theale, always an icon of overabundance, feels not compassion, but a “high compassion,” and not merely pity, but “a betrayal of pity,” and consequently responds with “bothВ .В .В . her tenderness” and “her conscience” in relation to another’s suffering—and all in one paragraph.2 Her complex emotionality appears as rich as her pecuniary state, for Milly’s overabundance in all of life’s facets is obvious to everyone who encounters her. The terms that encircle experiences such as Milly’s highlight the ways in which realist-era writing’s claims to specific and limited forms of experiential truth led to detailed representational practices where emotional subjects were concerned. Ironically, a quest for representational precision, or as Howells viewed it, emotional moderation, yielded descriptive abundance. Rooted in unique personal habits and equally individuated circumstances, the language of emotion in realist novels like James’s is cast as nongeneric and profoundly qualified, with terms about emotion appearing as complex and variable as the flux of affective experiences. Hybrid terms for emotion function as much more than a textual curiosity in realist writing; they reflect an approach to emotional representations that stressed particularity over broad qualities, thereby enacting a strategy that authors like Howells interpreted as aesthetic control over a potentiallyPage 68 → overwhelming subject. The resulting taxonomic language lent an organizational logic to emotional representations, even as these taxonomic approaches prompted anxieties about emotional nomenclature and about the larger issue of how best to represent emotion in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction. Caught between depicting emotion as a human and relatable sign and raising concerns about how to contain and direct emotion’s presumed volatility, realist author-critics sought to control emotional representations through specificity, even when that specificity depended upon an ever-expanding, endlessly proliferating language about emotion. Scholars of affect and of its representational practices have drawn attention to an expanding lexicon of terms for emotion, which grew in number and length, corresponding with increasingly formalized studies of emotion such as Darwin’s. AmГ©lie Rorty, for example, writes that “historically, the list of emotions has expanded.” For instance, the opponents of Hobbes, wanting to secure benevolence, sympathy, and other disinterested attitudes as counterbalances to self-interest, introduced them as sentiments with motivational power. Passions became emotions and were classified as activities. When the intentionality of emotions was discussed, the list expanded still further: ressentiment, aesthetic and religious awe, anxiety and dread were included. Emotions became affects or attitudes. As the class grew, its members became more heterogeneous; the analysis became more ambiguous; and counterexamples were explained away by charges of self-deception.3 Crucially, Rorty draws attention to the overlap between proliferating approaches to emotion and an “ambiguity” about interpreting them; a similar understanding undergirds this study of realist emotional representations, where idiosyncratic terms for emotion emerged alongside anxieties about what, precisely, those terms indicated. Drawing attention to coexisting “Victorian discourses on emotions,” Gesa Stedman explains the abundance of emotional terms in the late nineteenth century, arguing that “instead of coining new words for the feelings, they [Victorian writers] continued to use every emotion word which had come into existence by the 19th Century. Thus one finds the older вЂpassion’ alongside вЂfeeling’ or вЂemotion, ’ making the words appear to be virtually interchangeable. Only when one pays attention to the keywords in

their semantic surroundings can one detect differencesPage 69 → between them.”4 As it highlights a peculiar history infusing emotional representations, Stedman’s work suggests that a nineteenth-century lexicon of emotion allowed traces of earlier emotional representations to remain visible or to coexist alongside newer (and, I would add, more profoundly hybrid) terms.5 While Stedman reads a diverse emotional language as evidence of Victorian writers’ interest in improving their lexical resources, she also charts nineteenth-century authors’ attempts to “master” emotions through precise uses of terminology.6 This chapter’s materials similarly attest to realist authors’ attempts to tame emotional subjects through representational precision; this precision, as I read it, highlights the anxieties that encircled the inscription of emotional subjects in realist writing, in which expectations about factual and visible evidence were rife. As hybrid terms for emotion carefully denoted nuanced states of feeling, pinning down precise shades and gradations of meaning, they deviated from the classical emotions (ambition, avarice, terror, hope, fear, love, hatred, joy, grief, anger, and wonder), which depicted constitutional and often unchangeable emotional traits that were posited as endemic to constructs of character. By contrast, hybrid terms for emotion stressed temporally shifting experiences that were continually undergoing change. As a consequence, complex emotional terms could stress the play of emotion rather than describe a stable truth about emotion at large. Hybrid terms for emotion thus participated in the production of a comprehensive recording process; indeed, many of the representations of emotion in latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fictions are temporally located and idiosyncratic.7 Curiously, however, attempts to create descriptive precision paradoxically underscored the referential instability surrounding emotional subjects and the language used to invoke them. Hybrid and particular emotional terms not only stress attempts at creating representational specificity but also betray signs of a struggle to tame emotional subjects, especially among authors and critics who viewed taxonomic approaches to emotional subjects as part of a realist investment in acknowledging the stratification of a diverse society. Implicitly presenting their writing as having evolved past sentimental representations (which the era’s critics equated with predictable plot arcs and generic characterizations), realist-era writers frequently cast their interests as part of a study of emotion. As a consequence, they remade the aesthetics of emotion by adopting scientifically influenced methods rooted in observation and organization. But the completeness with which those methods reflected hybrid, changing, and humanized subjects remained an issue of debate. Page 70 →

Scientific Approaches to Emotional Inquiry The union of taxonomic methods and emotional subjects began in many ways with Charles Bell, the nineteenthcentury British physician and surgeon whose work influenced Darwin and other nineteenth-century students of emotional expression. For Bell, the dissection of emotion had been a medical as well as an aesthetic pursuit, in part because Bell argued that the arts were enhanced by their attention to the facial musculature that produced emotional expressions. Of literary works, he argued, “The novelist who has the genius to catch and to represent the feelings of men, and their motives to action, may give a truer picture of their period than the historian, even though he describes what never existed. That is to say, the incidents, the passions, the prejudices, which he describes, may never have been combined as he combines them; but they are true to nature, and to the state of society in which he lives, and are, therefore, a record of the time.”8 Viewing writers as uniquely able to register emotions in detail, Bell treated literary invocations of emotional hybridity as an ideal of verity and suggested that the visual arts could pursue similarly complex representations. Bell, who died in 1842, enjoyed a long and distinguished career, which included the publication of Essays on the Anatomy of the Expression in Painting (1806), parts of which were later printed in The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (1893). As he combined his interests in the human body—its physiognomy and nervous system—and in its expressive feelings (which he categorized), Bell advanced his study by examining corpses, focusing primarily on the musculature of the face, especially the ways that visages produced signs of terror, grief, joy, and wonder. His resulting investment in not only the mechanics of expression but also the categorizing of specific facial movements (which created expressions) depended upon the process of stripping cadavers of their facial coverings. Based on his findings, Bell codified various emotional states according to movements of the

muscles; his treatise records how a man in terror moves differently from one experiencing horror or how the muscles surrounding the human eye enables its expression of a range of feelings. Arranging emotional subjects by subdividing their associated musculature, Bell depicts how fear combined with wonder differs from fear mingled with horror, working outward from what he saw as the bodily truths attending emotional experience. Throughout his study, Bell confines his remarks to the visible (and Page 71 →largely involuntary) world, focusing on what Charles Darwin would later describe as the “expression” of emotion, or affective signs rather than emotion proper. In the following passage, for example, Bell explores the expression of terror. We can readily conceive why a man stands with eyes intently fixed on the object of his fears, the eyebrows elevated to the utmost, and the eye largely uncovered; or why, with hesitating and bewildered steps, his eyes are rapidly and wildly in search of something. In this, we only perceive the intent application of his mind to the object of his apprehensions—its direct influence on the outward organ. But observe him further: there is a spasm on his breast, he cannot breathe freely, the chest is elevated, the muscles of his neck and shoulders are in action, his breathing is short and rapid, there is a gasping and a convulsive motion of his lips, a tremor on his hollow cheek, a gulping and catching of his throat; and why does his heart knock at his ribs, while yet there is a no force of circulation?—for his lips and cheeks are ashy pale. (82) Through such a cataloging of the affective process, Bell attends to the physical realization of terror, even while his approach to emotion presumes that if the artist invokes affective signs with accuracy, then the viewer recognizes the emotional representation with little difficulty.9 Bell’s parsing of emotion becomes more complicated when he recognizes that some emotions, such as pain and fear, “are often combined,” creating a hybridity that demands a complex platform for categorization (149). In his description of “combined” emotions, Bell somewhat uncharacteristically invokes the language of conjecture and possibility, a sign that affective blends offered more questions than consensus about their meanings. There cannot be great pain without its being attended by the distractions of doubts and fears; the dread, even of death is a natural consequence of extreme pain, and so the expression of fear in the countenance is frequently mingled with that of pain. But, perhaps, there are few passions which may not be assimilated by such combinations; fear and hatred; hatred and rage; rage and vengeance and remorse. On the other hand, confining ourselves to simple bodily fear, there is much truth in the observation of this eloquent writer. Page 72 →The fear of boiling water falling on the legs, gives an expression of the anticipation of scalding, resembles the meaner expression of bodily pain. (149) As he attends to such examples of emotional hybridity, Bell observes that “mingled” feelings (fear with wonder, for example) have likely “arisen from apprehended danger still remote” (150). Additionally, there is horror, which “differs from both fear and terror, although more nearly allied to the last than to the first,” according to Bell. “It is superior to both in this, that it is less imbued with personal alarm. It is more full of sympathy with the sufferings of others, than engaged with our own,” he claims (153). What emerges from such a taxonomy is Bell’s ranking system for emotion, or an implied teleology, for he treats some feelings as more evolved and humanized than others, which is to say, they also are the most hybrid, imaginative, and unique.10 This was a model of emotion that intersected with the kinds of evolutionary principles that later scholars of emotion would also adopt, among them Darwin. While late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers also frequently approached affect through taxonomic attempts to catalog outward signs, invoking a vast array of emotional labels, they initiated that cataloging process while also remaining cautious about precisely what outward expressions of feeling could portend. My point, thus, is not to assert that these authors faithfully or consciously took up the categories created by contemporary scientists (a claim that Jane Thrailkill has made in regard to the work of French psychologist ThГ©odule Ribot, whose categories included “states” of excitability, fear, pain, agreeableness, and wonder). Interpreting the

“scientific world” through its “rhetorical and ideological force” and “its range of ideas, models, and practices pertinent to the biological human body,” Thrailkill situates realist writing as placing the human form “at the center of nineteenth-century explorations into human consciousness” and as stressing the “mindful corporeality of affective experience,” based on precedents established by Darwin, William James, and John Dewey.11 Further contending that conceptualizations of the nervous system inform realist attention to the “corporeal components of human perception,” Thrailkill situates the scientifically informed body at the center of realist-era debates about emotion.12 While fictional narratives can be read through the categorization of bodily forms (as adapted from the sorts of medical interests informing Bell’s work), I argue that realist fiction more often reveals a somewhat Page 73 →looser methodological engagement with scientific methods, primarily with the act of taxonomy. While realist writers parsed emotion with vigor, they also expressed a pronounced ambivalence about the taxonomic process, even as they paradoxically engaged in it. As I read them, representational practices rather than human bodies appear as most pressing in the terms of realist writers and critics, whose concerns about language and its capacityPage 74 → to inform divisions among and between emotional states appear at the forefront of their interests in emotion. Attending to language itself, realist fiction’s negotiation with emotional subjects, on the most basic level, reflects a concern about disciplining representation through linguistic precision, alongside questions about precision’s value. Revealing what Amy Kaplan describes as realist writing’s “multifaceted and unfinished” debate about representation’s forms, and what Nancy Glazener similarly points to as realist concerns with “especially grand and impossible problems about the relationship between representation and life,” a loose approximation of scientific taxonomies about emotion suggested that emotion’s incorporation in realist texts depended upon representational exactness.13 Helping assuage these concerns, however, was the practice of “zealous subdivision,” Glazener claims.14 Similarly, Nancy Bentley describes the “disciplinary tools of philosophy and science,” or the mechanisms she associates with pragmatism, which informed realist representational investments in “re-creating reality,” as mechanisms that pitted “analytic thought” against “the materiality of bodies and things.”15 Philip Barrish enters the debate about realist-era approaches to representation by calling attention to “realism’s correlation with a wide range of professional discourses—social-scientific, reformist, juridical, managerial, and others,” an observation that implicates various specialized discourses and professional methods in the pursuit of realist detail.16 Figure 6. An engraving created for Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), of a photograph printed in Duchenne’s MГ©canisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1862). Darwin reprinted the engraving with Duchenne’s permission; because Darwin’s publisher limited the number of photographs that were included in the original printing of The Expression, some of the photographs had been converted to engravings. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London. Though they approach the issue of realist representational parameters in different ways, such studies agree that realist writing was propelled by its investment in limited contexts and abundant detail; particularly where emotion was concerned, these parameters allowed realist writing to define itself in contrast to sentimental models of emotional representation. Realist objections to sentimentality are so well known that they require little rehearsal, except to note that one perceived antidote to sentimentality was representational specificity.17 What Jennifer Travis describes as a realist “suspicion ofВ .В .В . socially constructed sentiment,” specifically “the anxieties felt by men of letters” about “the dangers of excessive feeling,” led to iterations of complex and hybrid emotional states, where this specificity sprang up through taxonomic approaches to emotional variety.18 Elaborate methods of charting, recording, and analyzing affective signs had appeared in Charles Darwin’s work, which established emotional expressions as viable scientific subjects, a fact that provided the realists with both a legitimating method and a source of anxiety about realism’s relation to scientific dispassion, a subject to which I will return. Darwin’s work on Page 75 →emotional expression followed his earlier publications such as The Origin of the Species. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872, reprinted during the 1890s), Darwin, who invokes Charles Bell as one of his references, explores emotional expression with an eye

to its origins and enactments; he additionally forges a link between emotional expression and the possibility of universal communication rooted in a common ancestry, suggesting that emotional experiences harkened back to a common past that connected species through evolutionary processes. While Darwin seeks to codify a variety of emotional states, detailing “Jealousy, Envy, Avarice, Revenge, Suspicion, Deceit, Slyness, Guilt, Vanity, Conceit, Ambition, Pride, Humility, &c_.,” he also imagines that evolution enabled humans to respond to common stimuli in similar and visceral ways.19 Darwin’s sources, like his taxonomy, underscore his eclectic approach to emotional expression (including, strikingly, photographs and descriptions of children in tears or fits of rage as evidence of emotional purity’s extreme expressions); he also draws from Shakespeare, Mrs. Oliphant’s novels, the Bible, Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, The Odyssey, Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Seneca, accounts of various explorers, and reports focusing on the blind and deaf Englishwoman Laura Bridgman.20 Across such examples, Darwin pursues evidence of a “fixed expression, ” or one that appears across cultures (23). This comprehensive approach to expression, as Darwin presents it, yields both a rich variety of description and, at the same time, a set of core, transcultural truths traceable about common methods of emotional expression. Focusing on those behaviors that, in his view, demonstrate an inherited basis for the human capacity to share feeling, Darwin asserts:21 We have now seen that scorn, disdain, contempt, and disgust are expressed in many different ways, by movements of the features, and by various gestures; and that these are the same throughout the world. They all consist of actions representing the rejection or exclusion of some real object which we dislike or abhor, but which does not excite in us certain other strong emotions, such as rage or terror; and through the force of habit and association similar actions are performed, whenever any analogous sensation arises in our mind. (239) One of Darwin’s recurring interests, in fact, deals with the question of which emotions—of the many he catalogs—transcend cultural differences, Page 76 →the suggestion being that these are the most likely to stem from commonly inherited influences and are thereby the most likely to form sympathetic pathways capable of transcending visible differences. Promising though this particular line of thinking would seem to have been, it was one of the least compelling to writers who followed in Darwin’s wake, given their attention to the divisiveness posed by visible differences and their interest in highlighting the degree to which racial and ethical forms of difference created impediments to shared states of feeling. For Darwin, a taxonomic approach to emotion told a story wherein animal origins provided a parallel to man’s emotional expressions, particularly the more violent and less evolved forms of feeling. In literature, increasingly fine attempts to parse emotion suggested that what was perceived as “real” about realist writing’s approach to emotional representation was its implicit claim that attention to affective detail yielded a unique story line, or a narrative that would explain the varied elements that contributed to hybrid forms of emotion. At the same time, however, realist writing’s kinship to scientific methods emerged as a source of some anxiety, especially given the degree to which the science of emotion could be cast as unfeeling and, occasionally, as objectionable.

Gross Analysis While the work of Darwin and Bell helped establish precedents for taxonomic approaches to emotional subjects, late-nineteenth-century writers struggled with the degree to which emotion could best be evoked so as to expose the individual subject and to confront the potentially messy disorder of that exposure. Given what critics have portrayed as realism’s adoption of scientific methods, it is perhaps unsurprising that nineteenth-century critiques of realist writing situated this scientific influence as a flaw, for in its methods, realist inquiry could be seen as overly invasive.22 As Alan Trachtenberg has noted, realistic paintings of the later nineteenth century purported to represent “honesty of report, faithfulness to the act of seeing, refusal to idealize, disciplined accuracy,” or features that rendered representation visceral as well as problematic.23 Trachtenberg also contends that realist painters’ canvases appeared as a “threat” to the idealizing art of the previous era

and a presumptive “corrective to faulty vision,” much in the way that realist writing was perceived as both combative and ugly.24 One painting mentioned by Trachtenberg, Thomas Eakins’s 1875 The Gross Clinic, depicts a subject understood as “distasteful” in its clinical Page 77 →disclosures. Understood as a metacommentary on the realist project, the painting takes as its subject Dr. Samuel Gross’s operating theater, where surgeons performed their work in the presence of other doctors and students. The painting, which depicts physicians cutting into a body before a range of spectators, one of whom appears overwhelmed by her disgust, was subject to a host of critiques because of its graphic nature.25 Initially, it was Page 78 →excluded from finearts exhibitions on the basis of its shocking revelation of the bodily invasions occasioned by public surgery. Figure 7. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875). In much the same way, literary explorations of emotion, which explained the human heart in figurative terms, could be cast as similarly distasteful, or as forays into a messy subject, rendered with shocking detachment. And if a painting like Eakins’s was perceived as distasteful in its invasion of a subject’s limbs, realist writing could be accused of heartlessly invading the site associated with human feeling, the heart. Moreover, if understood as existing in a theater of operation similar to that of Dr. Gross’s clinic, realist writing’s detailed interrogation of emotion reveals a deep ambivalence about representing private affective experiences. What resulted was an uncomfortable union of deep feeling and representational dispassion, a discomfort that remains visible in many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century representations of affect. Devoid of a humanizing narrative, or feared to be, investigations into the human heart attested to an invasiveness that could be interpreted as absent a hopeful logic, especially in the eyes of those readers who had been trained by sentimental expectations to expect emotionally transformative scenarios indebted to a reciprocity of feeling. This impression of distasteful invasiveness was pointedly associated with realism as an interarts movement; realism’s connection with subjects that were difficult to envision (poverty, squalor, strife, for example) had long been visible in nineteenth-century writing. But what was additionally layered onto the realist subject was the depiction of the artist as engaged in acts of dispassionate incision. As Henry B. Wonham notes, both Howells and James were lampooned in the popular press as heartless surgeons motivated by a perverse academic passion to analyze the human organism.26 Particularly when interpreted as a fact-finding exercise, realist writing was famously satirized by critics such as H. L. Mencken, who cast it as a clinical postmortem revealing “no more deep and contagious feeling than so many reports of autopsies, and no more glow and gusto than so many tables of bond prices.”27 As this attitude suggests, systematic approaches to detail, even detail about emotion, could too closely resemble the dispassionate exhumation that, for critics of the movement, could make the realists appear more like undertakers than artists. Realist writing was thus caught between perceptions of its objectionably invasive methods and a concomitant interest in detail about the human heart. Given the precedents offered by sentimentalism, which Howells rejected as representationally undisciplined, realist writing’s engagement with emotion seemed to writer-critics Page 79 →to require greater control and deeper discipline, even if the effects were distasteful and unsympathetic. In what I describe throughout this project as an era of profound ambivalence about the literary adoption of methods that were akin to scientific processes, it is significant that even one of the most influential scientists of the era wondered aloud whether “science made too wide a claim” for itself, as did William James.28 James also hinted at the price of overly stringent approaches to categorization; his phrase, the “passion for distinguishing, ” hinted at his concern that “the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole” could result from scientific models of analysis.29 “Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, ” he warned, could produce negative responses, which could become so forceful that individuals might prefer “any amount of incoherence, abruptness and fragmentariness (so long as the literal details of the separate facts are saved),” resulting in a “fallacious unity which swamps things rather than claims them.”30 James’s sense that “separate facts” and “literal details” could be overwhelming predicts some of the reservations that late-nineteenth-century authors would encounter in their portrayal of the scientific-minded characters they would create, for as much as literary works of the later nineteenth century engaged with scientific methods, they also pushed back against the inflexibility they associated with rigid scientificism, specifically with a tyranny of “facts” and “details.” Henry James, too, remarked with some disdain on what he termed

the “laboratory-brain” and sought to distinguish his own creativity (which he described as “speculative and imaginative”) from so stark a process.31 In this sense, both Henry James and William James attested (similarly, for once) to a profound ambivalence about scientific methods; while scientific discipline was clearly of interest to realist authors, its imbrication in unnaturally restrictive, categorical thinking constituted a risk. Especially when realist writing negotiated between perceptions of its objectionable methods and a concomitant interest in disciplined and abundant detail about the human heart, it confronted as many problems as solutions through a scientific approach to emotion. For fictional characters who labor to define emotional meanings and who struggle to make sense of observable affective states, “scientific” attitudes toward emotional subjects were as problematic as undisciplined emotion. While a disciplined approach to emotion helped lend credibility to its representation, as Howells suggested, the figure who observes emotion becomes the focus of considerable anxiety over scientific methods and what they said about the “scientist.” At roughly the same time that Page 80 →critiques of realism as overly scientific appeared in print, there appeared in late-nineteenth-century fiction the figure of the scientificminded character who embodies the debate over scientific methods, specifically in the depiction of a figure who becomes susceptible to critique (and at times, caricature) because of his narrow reliance on fact-finding and cataloging methods. Such figures, who assert confidently that emotional depths can be assessed through affective behaviors, can be read as a buffer between realist authors and the most negative interpretation of realist methods as cold and heartless. Signaling a self-conscious response to unsettled concerns about realist methods, such figures simultaneously bring analytic rigor to the interrogation of emotion and, often, fail to understand emotion fully, proving the limits of dispassionate analysis. In Henry Adams’s 1884 novel Esther, for example, the observer figure is an artist. Alongside the novel’s main story line of tormented emotional suasion, which melds religious fervor and romantic love, Esther includes the background story of a painter and interior designer, a Mr. Wharton, who is a deeply enigmatic character; both arrogant and gifted, Wharton takes on the role of an aesthetic dictator who assesses the work of his apprentice painter, a young woman named Esther Dudley, who creates a mural under his direction at a Boson cathedral. As his callousness toward Esther demonstrates, he is incapable of understanding the full effects of his criticisms. Upholding his reputation for exhibiting a demanding and precise artistic sensibility, Wharton forces Esther to create and recreate under his direction, announcing his continued dissatisfaction with her work. And yet, despite his apparent insensitivity, he has been deeply invested in varieties of human emotion and has studied them carefully. As the narrative reveals, Wharton pursued a comprehensive study of emotion in his early adulthood, when he first devoted himself to art. As Wharton relates the narrative of his early career, he confesses: I studied nothing but the most extravagant subjects. For a time nothing would satisfy me but to draw from models at moments of intense suffering and at the instant of death. Models of that kind do not offer themselves and are not to be bought. I made friends with the surgeons and got myself admitted to one of the great hospitals. I happened to be there one day when a woman was brought in suffering from an overdose of arsenic. This was the kind of subject I wanted. She was fierce, splendid, a priestess of the oracle! Tortured by agony and clinging to it as though it were a delight! The next day I came back to look for her; she was then exhausted and half dead. She was a superb model.32 Page 81 →The painter’s recollection includes the fact that he eventually married the suicidal woman, primarily out of the excitement of watching her expressions, this woman possessed of “the temper of a fury, and all the vices of Paris.”33 His rush into an ill-fated marriage to his model, moreover, was based on a markedly self-centered belief that he must gain access to “moments of intense suffering” in order to create, a theory into which the “tortured” and expressive woman conveniently fit. Operating under the theory that his acquaintance with a broad emotional range would serve his artistic development, Wharton becomes not only a student but also a collector of affect, as he seeks out those expressions available outside of most social and ethical contexts. Wharton’s artistic pursuit of accurate affective representation, which overwhelms any personal and participatory understanding of emotion, appears distasteful and self-serving, though it was not unusual in historical terms—at least not among late-nineteenth-century visual artists, who were drawn to suffering subjects,

particularly dying women, whom they endowed with a near-cult status.34 So widespread was this trend that FranГ§ois Delsarte, the French instructor of affective expression in the performing arts, took his “scientific” pursuit of emotion to the dying. He conducted his research, “observing people in all kinds of situations, even in death or during the process of dying,” he explains, noting that he sought to explore the comprehensive “realities” of human nature through such subjects.35 This research, in Delsarte’s view, helped to create a codification of emotional expressions so that they could be subjected to systematic study, then practiced by performing artists. Delsarte’s students, in fact, commonly referred to him as a learned researcher, including one who described Delsarte as “a skilled scientist in his practical knowledge of the meaning and value of each agent of expression.”36 One of his students, Samuel Silas Curry, went on to become a leading academic—a sign of the degree to which the fields of physiognomy, performance, oratory, and even theology were then linked—a set of interconnections that sheds light on the ways that the era’s literature could be seen as connected to science, performance, and aesthetics simultaneously—all through emotional subjects. Delsarte promoted his “system” of expression for more than twenty years (beginning in 1839 in France), and although he never published his theories, his approach and its accompanying philosophy were inscribed by various disciples, who were prolific on his behalf, often including in their books parts of essays by their “master,” letters supplied by Delsarte’s widow, and notes transcribed from their training sessions.37 Among some viewers, the Delsarteans produced exhibitions of emotion described as “revelatory,” Page 82 →as Delsarte’s singing and oration reportedly had been. Steele MacKaye, Delsarte’s first American enthusiast, exhibited his “gamut’s of expression” on the stage in Boston in 1871, an exhibition made possible by his customary drill sessions of over two hours a day.38 One newspaper reviewer describes MacKaye as “running through satisfaction, pleasure, tenderness and love to adoration, and having retraced his steps,” producing facial expressions of “disgust, envy, and hate to furyВ .В .В . transitions from repose to jollity, silliness and prostration, to utter drunkenness.” From there, the exhibition passed “through all the grades of mental disturbance to insanity, and down all the stairs of mental weakness to utter idiocy.” This range of feeling (described as including “all” the possible “stairs” in the transition across emotions) struck the reviewer as “very likely and profound.”39 Strongly influenced by Mackaye, Genevieve Stebbins, the bestknown American promoter of Delsarte’s teaching, took these techniques into the realm of “statue poses” or tableaux vivants, arranged in a rhythmic dance, where the performer’s body flowed “gracefully onward from the simple to the complex” in a “natural evolution of beauty” with a “slow, rhythmic motion of every portion of the body, until it stands before you as the most perfect representation of art,” according to a reviewer in 1893.40 As Delsarte set out to subdue emotion to a system of exploration, which would lead to its accurate representation, he asserted the value of taxonomic efforts to isolate and study minute differences across expressions. But as the Wharton episode from Adams’s novel suggests of its artist’s interests, studying emotion for the purposes of categorization, or subjecting it to a scientific sensibility, could mean approaching emotion with the eye of an artist, but an artist who might be suspected of having no heart. In his attempt to achieve a comprehensive understanding of affect, Wharton is revealed as someone who has little meaningful connection to his subjects. His attempts to achieve a careful record of emotional expression reveal a story of intense scrutiny in which the observer is implicated in his efforts to make use of a human—and feeling—subject’s torments. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fiction, a nuanced approach to emotional subjects both served narrative interests in hybrid, individuated emotional contexts and, paradoxically, also indicted those who produced those studies, for those who examine emotion frequently subject others to stringent forms of affective analysis. For Wharton (Adams’s artist figure), for example, a pronounced and perverse investment in what could be gained artistically from watching the dying or analyzing the suffering means that he does not attempt to feel for or with the subjects of suffering; Page 83 →there is no emotional recognition here. Rather, he sets out to locate a subject whose torment can render his art more effective, more “real.” At such moments, the realist privileging of subjects hereto considered distasteful (poverty, squalor, strife, nonproductive suffering, for example) is clear, including the overlap with equally distasteful observers. Much of the language surrounding realist writing sought to elevate its methods and treat them as more healthful

for readers than sentimental modes of writing, despite an ongoing critique of the heartlessness of realist representational strategies. As Nancy Glazener writes in her study of realism’s class affiliations, the realist mode emerged as an elite cultural commodity during the second half of the nineteenth century, in part because it was positioned as an alternative to sentimental fictions that were understood as “too immediate, too raw,” or aesthetically unskilled. While in Glazener’s view, realist writing “echoed the Common Sense tradition’s precepts about how imaginative reading could help discipline and refine the moral sense,” it upheld moral interests by insisting that detail alone evoked readers’ responses.41 Specifically, the realists sought to counter the effects of emotionally overpowering fictions “that were like alcohol and drugs,” in their view.42 As early as 1860, reviewers characterized sentimental works as “вЂmental opiates or stimulants’ that produce[d] вЂintellectual impotence or intellectual inebriety,’” whereas realist writing emerged as “the literature of вЂveracity and reality’” and as a “healthy alternative,” even an “antidote” to emotionally overt fiction.43 Additionally, as Philip Barrish contends, the cultural prestige associated first with science, then gathered under the canopy of realist interests, helped legitimate letters as a masculine and professional enterprise, specifically through a language of disinterested observation, which realist critics adopted. Howells, for example, insisted upon the value of abundant detail, which would position the realist author as akin to an etymologist studying a grasshopper in a natural setting.44 Only by reliance on direct and uncompromised observation, Howells intoned, should the literary artist create, breaking the mold of conventional literary representational patterns. I recite these accounts of realist writing’s claims to principled aesthetic reinvention in order to suggest how thoroughly realism’s methods were under scrutiny by the late nineteenth century, when its supposed heartlessness was in full view. During the era of realism’s hegemonic dominance, the emotional subject appears at the apex of debates about the movement’s perceived humanity, for emotion offered the movement a potentially humanizing interest and a subject that overlapped (at times uncomfortably) Page 84 →with scientific methodologies. Efforts to achieve a balance between subject and representational method resulted in the odd marriage of analysis and passion, or passionate analysis, producing a strangely anxious literature that lent the structures of disinterested observation to narratives that took up emotional subjects (and, with them, affective terms) with great (and often) surgical vigor. Resulting anxieties about an ideal balance between scientific methods of organization and emotional experiences were generative, however. Important as these dual methods of thinking about representation were, they were also potentially destructive to the perpetuity of the realist movement if either scientific taxonomies or emotional subjects overpowered the other. While the topic of sentiment was perceived as inclining toward the supposedly sloppy and retrograde writing against which Howells and James, among others, defined realist literary values, the stringent analysis of emotion appeared too rigidly analytic to be understood as aesthetically humanized. But in combination and in continually negotiated balances, these interests promised to shape realist-era writing as a principled endeavor, complete with a humanist (and emotional) apology for its vigorous pursuit of detail. While scientists such as Bell and Darwin engaged in the difficult work of attempting to tame emotional subjects through the subdivision of physical and behavioral markers, the question of how some version of these interests would affect literary works remains, especially in regard to a literary world devoted to depictions of interiority. Some literary texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to emotional subjects by portraying experiences that eluded any analytical grid, in what can be characterized as a skeptical attitude toward taxonomic principles, as they were applied to emotion. These texts resist the idea that emotional cataloging produces lasting insight, instead highlighting the degree to which emotional experiences are inherently unstable because of their status as fluctuating phenomenon. Depictions of whirling, shifting environs often underscore the resistance to the type of fixity that classification implies; they also suggest that, by its very nature, emotional experiences are unclassifiable in any satisfactory way. When characters parse emotion in great detail, even as emotional experiences continue to shift, they perceive what Darwin described as expressions “of a fleeting nature.”45 In such cases, it was not so much an account of emotional types that the descriptive machinery of the late-nineteenth-century novel pursued, but an emotional morphology, or a view of a process that necessitated the ongoing work of apprehending and representing

changingPage 85 → varieties of affect. Through these emotional representations, affective hybridity appears as the result of unfinished emotional work, often in regard to a character who has very little control over his or her immediate circumstances. Howells’s Dan Mavering (April Hopes, 1887) will “suffer,” we are informed, but “not solidly,” for “his suffering was short, and crossed with many gleams of respite and even joy. His disappointment made him really unhappy, but not wholly so; it was a genuine sorrow, but a sorrow to which he began to resign himself.”46 The qualification and revision of Howells’s emotional narrative, which underscores emotional flux, and not a constitutional state, suggests not only the character’s unfinished emotional experience but also his nearly complete lack of self-knowledge. His analysis incomplete, his knowledge of himself unfinished, Dan will (as the narrative hints) make the wrong choice in affairs of the heart. Other texts also associate textual markers of emotional flux with a character’s absence of self-control, as in the case of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Aunt Ri, who will become “a ludicrous study of mingled terror, defiance, and contempt,” or Pauline Hopkins’s lecherous character John Langley, who reveals “such a look! —love—hatred—tenderness—the gamut of passion,” all in a single glance.47 Other narratives cast doubt on taxonomic accounts of emotion when they fail to produce any definitive knowledge. In such fictions, attempts to create an organizational index to emotional behaviors fail miserably. Gesa Stedman has noted that Victorian-era representations of emotion involve conceptually rich metaphors that “impl[y] that control of [these emotions] is as difficult to achieve as the management of nature.”48 In addition to natural metaphors of storms, there are frequent allusions to emotions as like a “pressure cooker” or as full of “energy and heat,” Stedman notes.49 The metaphor that emerges as most emblematic for writers such as Wharton and James, however, is the “metaphor of movement,” which Stedman describes in the following way: The third most important metaphor of the emotion which sees feelings a movement, an agitation (of the mind), results in the third set of expressions.В .В .В . One finds phrases such as “agitated by feeling,” emotion defined as “an internal motion” or the “affections of the mind,” as well as the passions being explained as “motions and agitations of the soul” or appearing as the “surging unrest of a passionate spirit.” The emphasis on movement is not only related to the concept of feeling as energy requiring an outlet, but also to the body as the expressive medium of emotion.50 Page 86 →The motion described here, which produces the sense of a body engaged in perpetual expressive work, suggests ongoing internal agitation and, as a consequence, unclear or fluctuating motivations. Highlighting the kind of overwhelming emotional confusion that could be counterbalanced by analysis, at least in theory, James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1896) depicts protagonist Fleda Vetch as experiencing such a pronounced sense of agitation that she finds it impossible to engage in a sustained analytical exercise. She has become involved with a warring mother and son and attempts to help them reach a resolution to the family crisis, for though the son is to inherit all of the family’s property upon his marriage, the mother objects to the fiancГ©e’s taste, withholding the family’s “spoils” from the couple; as a young and idealistic young woman, however, Fleda, who falls in love with the son (despite her loyalties to the mother), is, as Deborah Wynne has observed, “ill prepared for survival in the modern world” and attempts to resolve the situation by rejecting her involvement in the scenario through a series of delicate scruples and nonmaterialist stances.51 A key passage from the novel describes Fleda as a figure who experiences a confusion of emotional states, wherein various components are too complex to be labeled with precision. Her excitement was composed of pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she supposed she was going round, but went round so fast that she couldn’t even feel herself move. Her trouble occupied some quarter of her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a cold still chamber from which she could look out in quite another direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she couldn’t have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the terms of a forgotten tongue.52

While the character’s emotional state is clearly in flux, the narrative follows suit, foreclosing the possibility of codifying Fleda’s feelings. According to the novel’s language, no analytic categories—even those listed (“indifference, resignation, despair”)—provide satisfying conclusions about the character’s state of being, for it is not a state at all, but many. As a consequence, through the terms of a “forgotten tongue, ” the novel’s language of affect dissipates. As the language of something “forgotten,” it is rejected as Page 87 →representationally insufficient or as too distant from the present to serve as an accurate descriptor. To pursue emotional representation is to attempt to inscribe a subject that becomes obsolete at the moment when it is recognized, even if analysis had the potential to decelerate the movement, the agitation, of a particular moment. A larger point to take from such an example is that when language fails to pinpoint the nature of emotional experience with any exactness, when a codification falls apart, there can be no larger narrative of emotional knowledge, no story of transformation or unification. Depictions of whirling, unfinished emotional experience underscore realist depictions of the difficulty inherent in attempting to tame emotional experience through analysis. In Edith Wharton’s The Reef (1912), for example, George Darrow finds that his affair with a younger woman, Sophy Viner, is about to be exposed to his future wife, Anna. Anxious that his affianced may be discovering what was for him a casual affair with a much younger woman, he reveals his “obtuseness, a fatal inability to grasp the reality of another person—of two other people—and of himself,” David Holbrook claims.53 Darrow meanwhile recognizes that he must “think the complex horror out, slowly, systematically, bit by bit; but for the moment it was whirling him about so fast that he could just clutch at its sharp spikes and be tossed off again.”54 In its inscription of an emotional experience that begs to be subjected to systematic inquiry, such a passage depicts centripetal forces; in the midst of uncontrollable events (which Darrow registers as outwardly spiraling), Darrow’s analytic work inclines inward. As Robin Peel notes of similar passages in The Reef, Wharton emphasizes the “seething emotions and whirling of thoughts that a secret sexual history can generate when that history threatens to surface in a way that would prove disastrous.”55 In such cases, the function of affective representations both suggests a tremendous flux in felt experience and highlights the essential inadequacy of any method of analysis when it is brought to bear on a subject in flux. As the novel goes on to suggest, Darrow can never quite master his emotions, nor can Anna subdue her reactions to the affair so as to determine her own future in any logical way. For them, logic fails and emotion continues its march over them, leaving both deeply reactive, deeply immersed in analytical acts that prolong rather than tame their tumultuous experience. Such failed taxonomies of emotion attest to the belief that the point of realist detail was not only to tackle the peculiar qualities of emotional flux, but also to render their elusiveness equally compelling. Meanwhile, detail Page 88 →about an individual psyche, a personal history, the particular borough of the particular city, a specific class, educational background, or professional standing suggested that detail about emotion was the most convincing approach to emotional representation. Thus, emotion appears most relatable, most real, when it is presented as individually and temporally situated as well as potentially unclassifiable and essentially nonproductive (for it often provides no closure). Howells, for example, associated calls to action with generic ideas that led to predictable plots inclining toward sentimentality, for he linked most literary conventions (including affective ones) with writing that “would have sorrow end well, that [the readers’] sensibilities may be tickled and pampered.”56 But the lack of a definitive ending did not necessarily mean ongoing “sorrow”; it meant, I have been suggesting, recognizing the morphology as well as the hybridity of emotional experiences and, with them, a need for ongoing analytic acts. In these tales of unfinished emotional business, the analysis becomes an essential response to the narrative of feeling, for analysis serves as a way of indicating the intertwined struggle to make sense of emotion on a characterological level and efforts to tame it on the aesthetic. By producing hybrid and shifting narratives of emotional processes, many realist fictions undermine the certainty of identifying distinct emotional states; as a consequence, emotional analysis appears ongoing. In the aftermath to its famous forty-second chapter, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady portrays Isabel Archer Osmond as immersed in thoughtful analysis of herself, her husband, their reasons for marriage, the state of their relation, and their connections with a host of associates. While parts of her thinking are unavailable to readers, we nonetheless glimpse the effect of her introspection, along with Isabel’s desire to cease her struggles, to rest, as if

entombed, in “a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.”57 Such moments can be read as comments on the difficulty of sustaining analytical pursuits, for by the ending of Portrait, both the state of Isabel’s marriage and her ability to act as a free agent are uncertain, despite her prolonged meditations. While Isabel’s self-analysis serves as an indicator of personal integrity, its effects upon the character’s behavior—if any—remain unclear, and so its end result is not clear. As Jill Kress has observed in her reading of James’s “figures of consciousness” in Portrait, “the intersection between consciousness and knowledge” is key. “The split between metaphors of enclosure and expansion,” Kress continues, “inside and outside, reveals something about this connection; for Isabel’s journey toward self-discovery is often imagined in terms Page 89 →of these opposing metaphors.”58 Highlighting the ways in which the pattern of Isabel’s represented thought suggests first openness, then restriction, Kress points to the pattern of the character’s thinking; in the example above, Isabel’s moment of rest is also one of extreme restriction and enclosure. Drawing attention to the novel’s “structures of the self,” Kress suggests that metaphors of restricted consciousness begin with “the bolted chamber in the Albany house where Isabel reads,” which suggests “the bolted chamber of her imagination.”59 But later in the novel, when Isabel desires her cool “tank” of rest, her desire for isolation appears as what Kress describes as “an evasion of both consciousness and of knowledge.В .В .В . The belabored вЂvision’ of the вЂcool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land,’ paradoxically offers what seems like limitless extension, but what is actually a series of images closing in on one another.”60 My interpretation of Isabel’s desire is that it participates in a longing for the kind of “restriction” Kress mentions, but it can also be read as a consequence of Isabel’s immersion in her analytical thinking. Isabel’s longing for shelter in a controlled environment is linked to the exhausting nature of her analysis regarding her marriage, for emotional parsing constitutes a particularly demanding type of affective work, a labor as isolating as a tomb and, perhaps, as cold. As in so much other realist-era literature, feeling something appears as entirely natural, but recognizing how one feels or identifying what allows one to feel as one does or imagining one’s feelings as reactive to another’s—this is the realm of realist emotional labor. For a relatively unanalytic young person, as Isabel Archer is initially, competing ties to husband, stepdaughter, close friend (turned enemy), cousin, and former suitor (now her stepdaughter’s would-be suitor) combine to create a taxing scenario for any beginning analyst. For a member of a culture that produced Darwin, William James, and Spencer, the analysis of emotion is revealed as a process that leads, nearly inevitably, to further analysis instead of closure. Imagined in such a way, the study of affect initiated an unending cycle, with the analytical character often situated as longing for a still point in a world of ongoing flux. A desire for shelter in a sepulchral bath in a forbidding land, thus, can be read as a longing for relief from constant emotional stimulation and the resulting contemplation necessary to confront and parse coexisting emotional ties. When emotional analysis is ongoing and potentially overwhelming, there can be no satisfactory narrative closure. Hence, the emotional parsing of the realist text exists as an uneasy compromise, both raising the possibilitiesPage 90 → of and delaying full emotional meanings. In James’s Wings of the Dove, for example, characters can only observe the flux of emotion before them. By the novel’s end, as Kate Cory observes Merton Densher, she faces not only the knowledge that he has discovered her willingness to expose their dying friend, Milly Theale, to the difficult truth that Densher did not love her, but also his unresolved state, which is evident after she burns Milly’s last, unread letter to Densher. As she notes, his emotions “made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to something else and was like a new dim dawn.”61 So changeable are Densher’s impulses that it is difficult to classify them as emotional “states.” They may be “cold thought” or “something else,” which remains unnamed. In any case, because they remain unknowable, Densher’s responses are not states of feeling that are available to a viewer’s analysis, and thus they suggest the degree to which Densher is unable to resolve his affection for Milly in light of his previous passion for Kate. There can be no satisfactory ending, in part because of the logic infusing shifting emotional representations: Densher’s involvements are unnameable because they are unresolved and, hence, exhausting for him and for readers alike. Like Isabel Osmond’s attempts at

emotional analysis and Anna Leath’s affective parsing, emotional work is especially difficult when no organizational method appears equal to emotion’s overwhelming experience.

The Self-Conscious Analyst Demonstrating the temptation to don a disinterested pose and treat emotional concerns in an analytical manner, a peculiar type of character emerges in the realist text, one who is compelled to analyze his or her companions, but who also experiences a profound personal anxiety (even a self-disgust) about his methods of affective investigation. It may be this disgust, in fact, that results in the unfulfilled and unfulfilling analyses these texts record. For characters who are self-conscious about emotional analysis in the way that Howells, for example, was and Henry Adams’s Wharton figure was not, these figures fully embody the anxieties that surrounded emotional representations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these figures, hence, register an ambivalence that hints at their internalized critique of themselves as figurative surgeons who engage in an unseemly penetration of others; as they resist association with the scientific methods they deploy, they occupy a contradictory position as Page 91 →they simultaneously engage in affective analysis and question the personal, felt consequences of having done so, revealing how completely analysts are implicated in the very subjects about which they seek objectivity. James’s narrator in The Portrait of a Lady, for example, evinces such an awareness when he confesses that he can too easily cast Isabel Archer as “an easy victim of scientific criticism,” even while seeking to assure the reader that she is nonetheless “intended to awakenВ .В .В . an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (54) than the narrator’s point-by-point analysis would imply. This double gesture is characteristic of literary texts by both Wharton and James, which engage with an ideal of scientific accuracy, even as they depict the ways in which negative reactions against its methods are but human responses. Isabel, the perpetual subject of excited analysis on the part of other characters, becomes the locus of “scientific” study, and it is clear that this analytic posture allows for a rigorous scrutiny of her emotional interests, even as it also invites criticism when the analyst is deemed insufficiently dispassionate. Ultimately, the novel suggests that there is no position from which to examine emotion that is sufficiently neutral and that the adoption of systematic study may announce merely the presumption of defensive objectivity. Near the middle of the novel’s plot, the problem of “scientific” analysis recurs as Ralph Touchett launches into a critique of Gilbert Osmond. As readers of the novel recognize, Ralph is far from disinterested in Isabel’s romantic life; having been urged to propose to Isabel, he has instead allowed her to share in his inheritance, in part to watch the course of her life. It is with a combination of affection and voyeuristic pleasure, then, that Ralph prefers Isabel free and untethered to a woman’s usual lot. When Isabel becomes engaged to Gilbert Osmond, the American dilettante living in Italy, Ralph announces his reservations about her choice. As he makes his first comments about the engagement, Ralph is deeply uncertain about his stance, for in addition to his investment in Isabel’s freedom, he is a relative stranger in the most literal of ways, having known Isabel a short period and having as yet assumed few liberties about her choices. In objecting to Osmond and to the engagement, Ralph attempts to don the most disinterested pose he can muster, though it will emerge as double edged. Cutting through Ralph’s disinterested posture, Isabel announces, “I see you’ve some special idea; I should like very much to hear it.” She adds, perhaps disingenuously, “I’m sure it’s disinterested; I feel that,” as if only this type of criticism will afford her cousin a hearing (290). Invoking an air of “the most respectful deliberation” in response, Ralph replies, “thinking Page 92 →hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond’s sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically” (290в€’292). Yet such a pose invites scrutiny, as is the case with other scientifically minded analysts. By the end of their conversation, Isabel will believe that Ralph’s “talk about having great views for her was surely but a whimsical cover for a personal disappointment,” along with her belief that Ralph’s “disappointment” overshadows any potential for objectivity on his part (295). Another complication infusing Ralph’s analytical pose is the nature of his critique of Osmond, specifically that Osmond is too cold, too rational, too aloof to love another. If Ralph’s scientific posture allows him a

hearing, his critique of another’s cold rationality appears, on one level, deeply ironic. As Ralph sees it, his exposition of Osmond’s character remains separate from his own analytical stance, motivated as it is by an affection that also and somewhat paradoxically fuels his adoption of a disinterested stance. Isabel, however, will blur the distinctions between the unfeeling and feeling men, engaging in a degree of sophistry as she highlights the rationality of her affection for Osmond while condemning Ralph for having too much heart to be objective. It is a curious inversion that underscores a powerful ambivalence surrounding analytical methods of emotional analysis. Ralph’s point is that Osmond will be unable to satisfy Isabel emotionally. To this end, he argues that Osmond “judges and measures, approves and condemns,” according to his taste alone, suggesting that he merely uses others to suit his interests and that he has “selected” Isabel in order to gratify his worldly concerns and not her emotional ones (292). While Ralph’s assumption of dispassion compels Isabel to listen, she objects to his analysis of Osmond as “a sterile dilettante” who would employ Isabel in the work of “guard[ing]” his “sensibilities” (292) That Osmond is heartless, that he cannot love another, will be confirmed later in the plot.62 And it will not be until chapter 42 that Isabel makes an attempt to analyze Osmond’s emotional capacity and its effects on her. Ralph’s similar findings, however, forestall her own efforts at analysis. As such an incident illustrates, the difficulties surrounding scientific analysis are multiple: an objective stance allows the observer to be critiqued as merely assuming a disinterested pose to cover profoundly personal motivations. Meanwhile, those involved in the romance (Isabel here) resist any type of analysis in the name of affection. Osmond, meanwhile, in a further complication of the scenario, presents himself as an uncalculating romantic. It is not only that scientific analysis appears distasteful to Isabel, Page 93 →but that the slightest hint of Ralph’s analysis causes a reaction so extreme that it threatens any truth that might be revealed. Hence, it is difficult for any character to embody an appropriate degree of analytical acumen, given the degree to which the overt analysis of emotion is so easily indicted. In this novel, in this romantic triangle, there is simply no acceptable stance from which to analyze and categorize the workings of the human heart. In its problematic position in Portrait, the dispassionate analysis of emotional interests can be read as a self-conscious problem infusing the realist project, for its vexed embodiment suggests something of the difficulty authors such as James and Wharton faced in rendering emotion in analytic terms. While they sought to value emotion’s presence in their fictions, they also explored the potential and pitfalls attending its analysis. One problem, as Portrait reveals, is that the methods of analysis could be equated with a character flaw on the part of the analyst. In a later fiction, Wings of the Dove, which was published in 1902 (twenty-two years after Portrait appeared serially), analytical assessments of emotion continue to emerge as a problematic issue in James’s work, but here the reaction against analysis is internalized by a character who is uncomfortable with her thinking process. Thus, analytic anxiety functions as part of a set of a delicacies and inhibitions. Early in the novel, Susan Stringham, companion to the American heiress Milly Theale, speculates about Milly’s happiness, her tragic life, and her hopes for the future. But given Milly’s reticence on these important matters, Susan considers herself reluctantly “reduced” to locating emotional “proof.” Announced in these terms, “proof” about the heart becomes the locus of mounting tension. Accordingly, Susan’s search for information about Milly develops a disturbingly scientific dimension as she is reduced to reading somatic signs, or visible indicators of Milly’s desires. When she considers her own inquisitiveness, Stringham cannot help but view herself as a predator. Thus, she “knew she shouldn’t pounce, she hadn’t come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly know what was the matter; and to watch was after all, meanwhile, a way of clinging to the girl not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in itself” (130). While knowledge about another may provide some “satisfaction, ” such a passage suggests that the means by which it is gained may appear heartlessly inhuman, even to the viewer, who sees herself as a large cat, a scientist, a spy—in short, an unsympathetic invader of another’s secrets. There is for Susan no model of Page 94 →someone who is sympathetically motivated as she searches for concrete information about the workings of another human heart; acting as an analytical observer of emotion, even when that act is lovingly inspired, appears as an activity surrounded by profound ambivalence, if not outright distaste.

The compulsion to analyze emotional gestures and their underlying meanings also appears in a novel such as Edith Wharton’s The Reef (1912), where again a character wonders what her analytic tendencies mean and questions the degree to which they are part of her personality structure, resisting that association all the while. Here Anna Leath intuits that her fiancГ©, George Darrow, has had a sexual affair in the recent past.63 Darrow’s ten days with a younger woman named Sophy Viner cast a pall over the Darrow-Anna relationship (though Anna never knew precisely what affected Darrow’s apparent desire for her). Sophy takes a position as the governess to Anna’s daughter and then becomes engaged to Anna’s adult stepson. Hence, when Darrow attempts to rekindle his relationship with Anna (months later), both his behavior and Sophy’s hint at some mysterious problem. As Anna begins to apprehend the secret of Darrow’s affair with Sophy, her attempts at divination appear to her as ruthless and inhuman, as well as an impediment to her deepening passion for Darrow, for she, like Susan Stringham, reacts against her attempts at affective analysis, for they seem to violate an unwritten law of natural affection. Despite the fact that Anna desires to distance herself from the insights that her analytic tendencies yield, as she watches her associates with reluctant fascination, “it seemed to her that she had been suddenly endowed with the fatal gift of reading the secret sense of every seemingly spontaneous look and movement, and that in [Darrow’s] least gesture of affection she would detect a cold design.”64 As Anna assesses her insights, her sense of her “fatal gift” and her “cold design” signals her discomfort, as in her assertion that “I must find out yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done” (258). And yet, like a surgeon’s scalpel, Anna’s sensitive insights expose the affair as she cuts, figuratively, into a set of human hearts. Part of Anna’s distaste for her analysis of Darrow stems from her hereto-sheltered emotional life. Her first marriage was to a fairly superficial and unsatisfying partner, one who prompted no questions about emotional motivation.65 But upon her second opportunity at romance with Darrow, Anna finds it necessary to scrutinize him, even though the act of analysis may imperil her hopes for happiness. At her introduction in the text, Anna appears in the garden of her home, in the “light of the October afternoon,” before “an old high-roofed house” (87). In this picturesque and sheltered Page 95 →setting, shaded with a parasol, she contemplates her home and second courtship, reflecting on the narrowness of her experience, for “she is aware that as a young girl she was cold and a prude, and sensed that she was missing something,” as David Holbrook notes.66 Upon reexamining the “narrowness and monotony” of her married life, along with her recognition of “the shell of a life” she has led, filled with “one’s duties, one’s habits and one’s books,” but with no great romance and certainly no passion, Anna longs for a new emotional experience filled with unusual depths (88). Yet this possibility is also imbued with the danger of the sexual and emotional unknown. With this recognition, Anna considers that “she was not used to strong or full emotions; but she had always known that she should not be afraid of them. She was not afraid now; but she felt a deep inward stillness” (89). As Anna’s emotional history is laid out in the text, it becomes clear that she has always suspected the presence of “some vital secret,” even in her restrained youth, and becomes “persuaded that the sublime passions” supply “the key to the enigma” (91). Reacting against a passionless life, longing still for an initiation into a satisfying adult relation, Anna is nonetheless reluctant to think analytically about emotion, a task that she initially and self-consciously avoids, for she finds that the thought of a possible future with Darrow leaves her possessed of “feelings [that] were unlike any she had ever known: richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from head to foot, seemed to be feeding the same full current of sensation” (123). In light of this personal history, Anna’s gradual transition from expectant lover to analytic observer appears as an unwelcome complication in her romantic life, one in tension with her desire for a “richer, deeper, more complete” experience. Though both lonely and cautious to greater degrees than Isabel Archer, who is just beginning to acquire these qualities, Anna is motivated by caution to pursue the otherwise objectionable analysis of a lover she longs to marry. Her experience suggests that the pain of life experience brings about painful bouts of emotional incision (a suggestion particularly pointed in Wharton’s novel); the more salient point for the purposes of my argument lies in the continued ambivalence surrounding affective analysis. Anna’s perspective, like that of other emotional analysts, betrays concerns about where the ability to perform analysis comes from or, more pointedly here, how a sympathetic character acquires an ability to balance her potential happiness alongside the unhappiness

that an insightful analysis might bring. There is also the implication that emotional analysis becomes a necessity in a complex, modern world, especially for sheltered women who Page 96 →find themselves in the company of more experienced men. The implied feminist message infusing both Wharton’s novel and Portrait suggests that women like Isabel and Anna have been trained against the full embrasure of their analytical capabilities, with the result being that they, more than most, envision affective parsing as pointedly distasteful, and when they pursue it, they find it a painful initiation. And yet, their happiness depends upon both self-scrutiny and the careful analysis of prospective marriage partners. Endlessly suggestive, yet not quite self-indulgent, emotional examination constitutes a narrative compromise between the lure of affect-based discussions and the perceived need to subject the emotional subject to the stringent discipline of analytical thinking. Yet, unlike a narrative rooted in the observation of somatic suffering, narratives of concealed and, perhaps, unrecognized emotion have no natural end, especially when realist authors frequently rejected both tragedy and transformation as mechanisms of narrative closure. As Cynthia Davis has observed: For realism, narrative closure typically produces as many problems as it resolves. Stories must end, even realist ones, but those endings connote a finality rarely sensed in the reality the realists sought to depict as accurately and transparently as possible. It is in the final pages of realist fiction that the struggle for mimesis often appears most intense and most doomed. Indeed, two frequently interwoven aims of American literary realism—verisimilitude and proportion—often work at cross-purposes when it comes time for the narrative to close.67 Similarly, Amy Kaplan has argued that “realistic novels have trouble ending because they pose problems they cannot solve, problems that stem from their attempt to imagine and contain social change.”68 As both Kaplan and Davis suggest, the mimetic representation of realist subjects and the mechanisms of narrative closure had the potential to work against one another, resulting in what Kaplan describes as “unrealistic” endings that “posit an alternative reality that cannot be fully contained in the novels’ construction of the real” and what Davis terms the “cross-purposes” infiltrating closure.69 Realist novels about emotional affiliations—and characters’ efforts to analyze those affiliations—lead to a similar type of inconclusiveness, for they mirror characters’ unfinished emotional work. If the interjection of affective analysis into such plots represents a meaningful way of simultaneously engaging with emotional scrutiny and Page 97 →problematizing the work associated with it, characters’ ambivalence about analytical processes also suggests that analytic passion was capable of producing inquisitive violence. Yet, as the ambivalence encircling affective examination demonstrates, this area of representation, anxious and uneasy as it was portrayed, serves as a sign that the aesthetic goal of charting emotional truth was nuanced as well as contradictory. For authors such as Wharton and James, human and affective concerns were complex in ways that problematized the realist claim to represent simple and observable truths. By revealing and assessing emotion as a project in its own right rather than an affirmation of a particular value system or a pointed investment in one form of emotion over others, realist fiction highlights the ways in which humanist and representational questions were continually entangled; to depict a character as fully human, as affectively driven, necessarily meant embracing inhuman methods of invasive research.

The Analyst’s Involvement Projecting considerable anxiety onto analysts of emotion, especially when those figures who appear least able to gain from those insights pursue analysis vigorously, realist fiction reveals its ambivalence about the work of understanding emotion through processes of rigorous codification. While in many scientific contexts the point of an emotional taxonomy had been to categorize visible expressions of emotion (as in Darwin’s work), or to consider the potential for therapeutic processes (as with physicians such as William James), realist writers sought both to control emotional subjects and to signal a pervading self-consciousness, ranging into self-doubt, about attempting to analyze and codify emotion. As a consequence, the literature of emotional realism upholds impulses that are essentially contradictory: the pursuit of scientific methods that legitimate the emotional subject that, if

living and breathing, if lifelike enough, continually eludes them. Thus a taxonomic approach to emotion results in valiant attempts at control, the parameters of which establish a method for the narrative then to rebel against. Of the characters in late-nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century fiction who parse the affective world anxiously, or those who attempt to come to terms with emotional turmoil through intellectual effort, many labor to subject emotional experiences to the conceptual equivalent of a grid: watching, sorting, and typifying emotional impulses. Like the literature that purported to be free from “the dangerousness of emotionally intense Page 98 →reading, ” analysts of emotional subjects often substitute emotionally intense analysis for feeling and, in so doing, reveal a rigidity of mind.70 Providing something other than a transparent window onto the human heart, the fiction of affective analysis features characters who become immersed in scenes of emotional complication, but who imagine themselves as agents of detection, or as instruments of measurement, and as such, they become worthy of attention in an era when, as we have seen, ambivalence about scientifically modeled emotional analysis was rife. Such characters adopt a posture much like the one visible in The Education of Henry Adams, where in the chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Adams imagines himself as a branley coherer, a specialized instrument designed to detect radio waves; in his case, he positions himself as able to detect perceptions about power and force in American culture. Evincing a bit of scientific-minded anxiety in his own right (for he is, after all, writing a chapter about the impact of scientific discovery upon American culture), Adams conceives of himself as a specialized human instrument. Other figures who act as branley coherers of emotion, or instruments of emotional detection, also seek to position themselves as slightly removed from the meanings they detect, or so they believe.71 As they adapt an analytic model, these characters embody a self-conscious tension that infuses their attempt to detect and measure affect.72 And yet, these are among the most flawed of characters, for their approach to emotion allows for a narrative push-back against detachment, measurement, and overt organizational devices. As Jonathan Smith has written, the methodology of science pervaded nineteenth-century culture, often subtly, including a “debate over scientific method,” as it came to constitute part of the “discourse” of nineteenth-century intellectual discovery.73 Additionally, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison write, the concept of objectivity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and “in a matter of decades became established not only as a scientific norm but also as a set of practices” that governed both images and concepts about “trained judgment.”74 As cultural expectations of the late nineteenth century deviated from Enlightenment idealism, literature’s skepticism about a strict application of scientific paradigms could appear pronounced. Reservations about human observation, not only in regard to the scientific method and its presumed objectivity but also more broadly, constitute an important infusion into accounts of vision in the nineteenth century, according to Jonathan Crary, who argues that experiments oriented to the capacity of the human eye resulted in an attention to the subjective nature of human vision. As the human eye became understood as Page 99 →“nonnormative, ” as compared to scientific instruments’ measurements, the individual observer’s inability to see clearly became aligned with “the temporality of subjective vision” and the effects of “eye fatigue.”75 Describing how “the individual as observer became an object of investigation and a locus of knowledge,” Crary argues that the subjective viewer was empowered by scientific interests in mapping the human eye.76 While Crary views this new understanding as casting human vision in a positive light, the realist novel conveyed deep skepticism about the powers of the human eye, especially in the case of its focus on emotional subjects.77 Whereas realism at large has been understood as an intervention into the faulty vision of earlier fictive modes, there was another, more nuanced narrative that depicted scientifically minded viewers as far more human than they realized.78 The conceptual grounding for this narrative espoused faith in analytical processes, but only on an abstract level, apart from emotional subjects. Thus emotional detection in realist fiction, which involves removed figures who view themselves as uniquely qualified to engage in scientific methods of analysis, typically involves several components, the most obvious of them a precipitating crisis brought about by an obfuscation or mystery about personal motivation. If detector figures are drawn to the challenges of emotional discovery, they also tend to deny any personal affective involvement in their subjects. This is where their failures typically begin, for it is precisely because such figures imagine that they can act as neutral instruments that they appear ludicrously naГЇve about the nature of the emotion they attempt to detect and analyze. A zealous, scientifically minded approach to emotion, in the end, constitutes a refutation of detachment, measurement, and the emotional grid of scientific

approaches to emotion. When, for example, Lambert Strether engages in a “remorseless analysis” of his associates, he announces the term “sacred rage” in The Ambassadors (1903) as he attempts to assert his distance from his American friend, Mr. Waymarsh, early in the novel.79 On legal business in England, and about to follow Strether to Paris, Waymarsh reveals his American opposition to all things European though his “rage.” Expressing a puritanical fear of Europeanized corruption as part of his rebellion against any experience that challenges an American, bourgeois ideology, Waymarsh’s “sacred rage” operates so as to insulate the traveler from cultural contamination, to preserve him, untouched, for New England America. As if to suggest the veracity of Strether’s term for his friend’s ferocity, the narrative outlines the nature of Strether’s descriptive, “rage,” directed as it is toward “something Page 100 →or other—Strether was never to make out exactly what” —that encourages Waymarsh to engage in strange and precipitous actions as he travels (42). What emerges as more crucial than Waymarsh’s motivation is Strether’s indexing of his friend’s behavior, and the novel underscores the delight infusing Strether’s coinage of the term “sacred rage.” The term appears near the end of the novel’s first book, as Strether’s habits of affective indexing begin. Soon after Waymarsh’s arrival, on a walking tour of the English city Chester, Strether and his companion, Maria Gostrey, discuss Waymarsh, who is at this point “adher[ing] to an ambiguous dumbness” (39) and who presents an “exceptionally mute and distant” demeanor while the others enjoy the excursion (42). But just as clearly, Waymarsh provides a type of amusement as well, the kind of amusement only an outraged American abroad can, James suggests. Explaining some of Waymarsh’s history, Strether somewhat gleefully remarks to Maria, “He thinks us sophisticated, he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us all sorts of queer things,” because of their appreciation of things un-American (42). Then, witnessing “a sudden grim dash taken by Waymarsh” to the opposite side of the street, Strether and Gostrey gape: This movement was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to have espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next made out, however, that an open door had instantly received him, and they then recognized him as engulfed in the establishment of a jeweler, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view. The fact had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others to show a face almost of fear. But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh. “What’s the matter with him?” “Well,” said Strether, “he can’t stand it.” “But can’t stand what?” “Anything. Europe.” “Then how will that jeweler help him?” Strether seemed to make it out, from their position, between the interstices of arrayed watches, of close-hung, dangling gewgaws. “You’ll see.” “Ah that’s just what—if he buys anything—I’m afraid of: that I shall see something rather dreadful.” Strether studied the finer appearances. “He may buy everything.” “Then don’t you think we ought to follow him?” “Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralysed. We exchange Page 101 →a long scared look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we вЂrealise.’ He has struck for freedom.”

She wondered but she laughed. “Ah what a price to pay.” (42) In addition to providing a humorous diversion, Waymarsh allows an opportunity for affective parsing on Strether’s part, an activity in which Strether habitually participates across the novel, though not particularly well. As the above passage stresses, Strether’s attempts at categorizing emotional motivations are based on outward signs (or behaviors), not necessarily emotions. It is also worth recalling that Strether, who has been sent on a difficult errand by the background figure Mrs. Newsome (to whom he is conditionally engaged) to retrieve her adult son, Chad, tends to deal with individuals whom he knows only slightly, so extrapolating motivations from behaviors will prove challenging. In his account of the labors and benefits of observation in James’s career, Ross Possnock has argued that James’s writing typically reveals an anxiety about observing the world. Tracing this attitude to James’s childhood, Possnock writes that in contrast to his older brother William’s energetic activities and claims to action, Henry’s characteristic watching and loafing took on the characteristics of what the younger James perceived as nonproductivity. The marked contrast between the brothers’ claims to productivity, as Possnock writes, resulted in a “fierce rivalry on both sides that left Henry deformed by feelings of inferiority and repressed rage toward William.”80 Invoking a vision of pragmatists (like William) as constitutionally unable to engage in “idle” curiosity, Possnock recovers the concept of “idleness” as a key principle of Henry’s creative process, but a process that was fraught with concerns about “passive contemplation and aesthetic reverie.”81 Yet Strether claims a type of analysis indebted to systematic analysis rather than passive idleness. While such rigor had the potential to suggest the benefits of systematic categorization, it is also later positioned as faulty and overly confident. Strether’s attempts at rigorous emotional cataloging could be viewed as an effort to take control over the perceived passivity of watching, for emotional cataloging lends a rigor to the act of observation. In the context of Strether’s specific mission, these nuances are especially significant. Charged with ushering Chad safely back to the United States, Strether must make sense of the mysterious forces that inexplicably detain Chad in Europe, even as he comes to act the role of the appreciative tourist, for whom wandering and observing are naturalized. Based in part on his readiness to parse Waymarsh’s emotionally suggestivePage 102 → behaviors, Strether appears poised to engage in the more significant work of emotional detection in relation to Chad, whose recent past appears to hold some clues, particularly because it seems suggestive of a romantic entanglement of some type. Is Chad in love? And if so, with whom? (This is, of course, the question that will occupy a considerable part of Strether’s time and energy.) Or has he too little affection for his native country, or perhaps too little for his mother, or for the lifestyle of his hometown of Wollett, Massachusetts? Is his extended stay abroad some part of a personal evolution, or perhaps, as the Americans seem to fear, is Chad involved in an indulgence or regression of some unnamed kind? Having suggested his capacity for taking up such questions, Strether will embrace the opportunity to act as an emotional detector, in the hope of bringing about a satisfying conclusion, which in this case would send Chad home and Strether into the arms of Chad’s grateful mother, Mrs. Newsome. But all positive outcomes depend upon the rigor and accuracy of his analysis. It becomes clear, however, that Strether cannot read Chad, nor placate Mrs. Newsome, nor defend himself from Waymarsh’s disapproval, nor, indeed, determine much of his own course of action, even as he clings to a pseudo-scientific and thus dignified platform for observation. He thus continues to envision himself as an instrumentlike detector of human feeling, one who not only senses strong emotional motivations, but is also capable of typifying them. Strether’s understanding of Waymarsh’s “rage,” for example, indicts Waymarsh as a crass example of the American who, when surrounded by the foreign world, retreats into a consumeristic defense, controlling a jeweler’s attention rather than connecting fully with anyone he encounters. Waymarsh returns from the jeweler’s “somber” and “glowering grandly,” leaving his purchase (and his mad dash) unexplained. Yet if understood as “one of [Waymarsh’s] periodical necessities,” his actions, fueled by “rage,” convey his rejection of the appreciative traveler’s guise (46).

Through his analysis of Waymarsh, Strether enacts a desire to organize the world through a system of affective accounting that affords him narrative control over such moments. Thus Strether occupies a position he comes to find nominally comfortable: that of a man straddling competing and complex alliances. He is also, as Kevin Ohi notes, in the midst of realizing his “queer potential” late in life. As Ohi reads the style of James’s late work (which he identifies as infused with a series of “belated” qualities), the text hints at the “potentiality” of a life out of the ordinary for Strether.82 In order to counter the seductive qualities of European living, which please Strether tremendously, he retreats into analysis.83 As Strether attempts to Page 103 →function as an anxious barometer of emotional meanings and representations, he becomes drawn deeper into attempts to categorize the affective world. Yet his pose of the disinterested observer/measurer will fail, in part because emotional measurement devoid of personal history yields little. Without knowing either the exquisite Parisian Madame de Vionnet or her adolescent daughter, Jeanne, Strether attempts to determine whether Chad is in love with the elder or the younger. He attempts to parse exactly how Chad’s accomplished and indignant sister feels about Chad’s Parisian life. He reads the bland, youthful face of the young woman the family has chosen for Chad, Mamie Pocock, for clues as to her desires. Most of all, Strether attempts to pin down Chad himself. Initially convinced that Chad is “awful” and therefore corrupted (123), Strether goes on to interpret the young man as “frank” and “friendly” looking (138), as greatly “improved” (149), as “made over” with a “new quantity” (150) that leaves him remarkably “smooth” (152). Like “the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand,” he is a youth too lovely and too poised and too inscrutable to quarrel with, in short (152). Smooth, unruffled, and unresentful, Chad accepts all criticism with an affability that frustrates Strether, for Chad’s “smoothness” also functions as a sign of his impenetrability, along with a suspected resistance to Strether’s divinations. Apparently rising above all interrogations, Chad finally becomes “wonderful” in Strether’s eyes, a label as vague in aesthetic terms as it is about the desires fueling Chad’s behavior (209). In such a moment, Strether has abandoned his analytical task. Just as Strether temporarily abandons his parsing of Chad’s life, he also overlooks his own complicated alliances, and for this reason his affective parsing is ultimately unsatisfying.84 Like any scientifically compartmentalized approach to the human world, Strether’s is doomed to failure, for his tendency to typify affective habits, to provide a definitive terminology—a tendency that reappears throughout the text—not only suggests a fascination with nomenclature, but it also and more problematically highlights Strether’s penchant for parsing emotional life instead of experiencing it. This is another sign of realist emotional anxiety: that an individual engaged in emotional quandaries can find himself overwhelmed by a recognition of his own personal alliances. Reticent and cautious by nature, reflective and often somewhat obtuse, Strether is comfortable adopting the stance that he is “to have a life only for other people” (269). Although seemingly consonant with his role as an unofficial “ambassador” for the Newsome family—a role predicated upon addressing others’ emotional messiness rather than his own—Strether’s self-exile from a rich and fulfilling emotional life Page 104 →embodies what literary critics have viewed as a sign of his embrasure of extranormative socio-sexual roles.85 While Strether’s interrogation of emotion highlights some of the narrative compromises surrounding the representation of emotional anxieties in the realist novel, my primary interest in the novel’s rendering of affect deals with Strether’s attempts to tame emotion through his classification of all things affective. His discovery of a term for Waymarsh’s behavior doesn’t render Waymarsh more manageable. Rather, as Strether will discover, Waymarsh has been corresponding with Mrs. Newsome, reporting on Strether’s activities. As Strether luxuriates in the bohemian possibilities of European city life, focusing on Waymarsh’s oddities, he utterly misses the point that Waymarsh’s latent rage has been transformed into action, into virtual espionage, as Waymarsh, with direction from Mrs. Newsome, attempts to reclaim Chad for the United States, bypassing Strether altogether. As Strether attempts to read both Waymarsh and Chad, Waymarsh cannily analyzes Strether in return—and finds him wanting, viewing him as compromised in terms of his mission. Some deeper truths are visible to Strether, however. No distracting effort at emotional organization will shield him from tacitly acknowledging the pain that Madame de Vionnet (discovered to be Chad’s older lover) must feel as Chad returns to the United States and to an obtuse younger woman, although Strether sidesteps any direct acknowledgment of this situation, just as he sidesteps Maria Gostrey’s romantic overtures. He is unable to act

on these gestures, in part because of the complex and uncomfortable alliances that shift before he has yet determined what they were. The activities of sorting, arranging, typifying his world in emotional terms, or translating it into an emotional rubric become for Strether a substitute for engaging fully with the world, rendering the search for affective analysis an impediment to the experience of living. The novel makes this point as Strether repeatedly demonstrates his talent for sublimating life to emotional analysis. When faced with the fact that Chad Newsome is involved with an older woman, Strether latches onto the convenient term “virtuous attachment” (180). A descriptive applied by Chad’s close friend, the “little artist-man” (107) John Little Bilham, “virtuous attachment” is supplied as a convenient if utterly inaccurate term to placate Strether, who finds it a descriptive that “settled the question so effectually for the time—that is for the next few days—that it had given Strether almost a new lease of life” (180). Hereto, Strether has been concerned that Chad is involved with a woman who is “very bad,” which is to say, “base, venal—out of the streets” Page 105 →(55). But this interpretation holds only as long as the woman remains an abstraction rather than an imposing marvel of sophisticated femininity, which Madame de Vionnet later becomes in his eyes. Emotional analysis initially appears to satisfy like nothing else in its capacity to supply order, however fictitious, in Strether’s perceptions. Yet for the characters who find themselves not only aloof, but often alone, as is Strether at the end of The Ambassadors, terminology about emotion is no substitute for living a rich emotional life. It is also clear that the mechanisms of analysis are always subject to someone’s desires, even the observer’s. Strether’s attempts to operate as an instrument of detection, in the end, expose the difficult realities he wishes not to see: that Chad loves an older married Parisian, that he will give her up lightly nevertheless, and that Strether finds the United States and its women vaguely distasteful. He also, clearly, is not ready to reciprocate any desires directed toward him by any of the women he meets. His recognition of these facts, however, is arrested by questions about who seeks to analyze and why. As Martha Nussbaum reads Strether, she understands him as a “distant watcher, pitying judge,” or an individual possessed of a “sharp eye [that] will not turn aside” for the emotional interests that affect him.86 Strether’s supposedly disinterested observation, which, as Nussbaum notes, constitutes a “curious” form of detachment, helps remind us that before a work of art we are detached perceivers, free to explore all fine perceptions, but liberated (or cut off) from the tumultuous perceptions of personal passion.”87 It is also true that the guise of the analyst allows Strether to conceal a lack of personal development and, with it, emotional stasis, through the guise of scientific observer. There is also the most problematic aspect of affective parsing; those who rely purely on visual proof for emotional meanings are often wrong. As Audrey Jaffe has noted in Scenes of Sympathy, an examination of sympathetic feeling in Victorian fiction, nineteenth-century literature draws from “feeling’s presumed self-evidence.” In Jaffe’s view, the ocular basis for reading emotion remained in play during the Victorian era, for “emotion is subject to interpretation only insofar as it manifests itself visibly.”88 Yet authors such as Wharton and James increasingly questioned the visibility of emotion as an indicator of personal truth, for both drew attention to the disjunction between visible acts and private meanings, thereby engaging the concept of ocular proof, only to exploit it by suggesting its inadequacy when dealing with matters of the heart. A movement away from somatic proof of emotional motivation seems in part rooted in their interest in representing emotions beyond those that required transparent bodily signs Page 106 →(like sympathy). Such a reaction against bodily proof appears motivated by an investment in the interiority so important to realist fiction; on another level, skepticism about visible emotion suggests that a willingness to treat human feeling as an occasion for scientific analysis could function as far too stark a strategy to apply to a complex interaction of motive and sign. My interpretation of the caution realist writers (but not necessarily their characters) associated with visible proof, particularly proof about emotional behaviors, is echoed by Rebecca Mitchell. Arguing that while “the realist must aspire to comprehensiveness while acknowledging that there are real limits to what is knowable, and thus what is representable,” Mitchell presents a complex portrait of Victorian authors’ claims to represent truth, even the supposedly visible truths before them.89 Mitchell thus highlights the errors of “characters who recognize on some level the ultimate unknowability of another character,” but contends that the narrative of presumed knowledge appears more commonly, for authors “more oftenВ .В .В . depict those who plot ahead,

assuming (erroneously) that in fact they do know exactly what the other is thinking and who the other is.”90 As these insights suggest, such an erroneous character, who cannot quite realize what he does not know, frequently claims to have mastered scientific methods of inquiry, particularly when those methods involve an analysis of emotional behaviors. Similarly relying on “truths” that are entirely too convenient, the would-be emotional detectors of realist literature approach affective meanings with false confidence in their methodologies, believing (at least initially) that bodies and behaviors equate with motivations. When characters attempt to interpret complex, deeply individuated human behavior in a straightforward fashion, this approach cannot help but appear as anything other than perilously reductive. For Wharton, as for James, the figure of the presumptive emotional detector allowed for a critique of realist-era codifications of emotional subjects, even while the text engaged in similar processes, but ones about which the proponents of realist writing remained ambivalent. The focal character in Edith Wharton’s novella The Touchstone (1900), for example, has avoided emotional entanglements in his past (as so many of her pusillanimous male characters do), though in the novel’s present, he plans to marry a young woman named Alexa Trent. As the novel begins, the man, Stephen Glannard, finds ample occasion for studying emotion in others and in himself, for during his courtship, his previous, ambiguous entanglement with the famous novelist Margaret Aubyn emerges as a conflict. Glennard, who has been the recipient of many detailed, personal letters from the now-deceased and famous novelist,Page 107 → sells the correspondence so that he will have funds sufficient for marrying Alexa. While the “Aubyn Letters,” as they become known once they are published, contain evidence of Margaret Aubyn’s long-held and seemingly passionate affection for Glennard, both his regard and his correspondence seem to have been lackluster in return, as Glennard tardily realizes. The novel then charts his gradual attempt to account for his emotional incapacity once he confronts the publication of the collected letters, which present the woman’s side of their unequal relationship’s history. As Julie Olin-Ammentorp notes, Glennard’s inabilities are key to the narrative, for “Aubyn’s brilliance is indeed her emotional undoing, for she makes Glennard feel inferior.”91 Glennard’s intellectual inferiority, however, is only part of the difficulty he faces during his self-assessment. Glennard’s inability to love Margaret Aubyn has long been a point of embarrassment for him, but after the sale—and printing—of her letters to him, additional complications arise. Not only does Glennard fear that his wife will discover that he is the man who sold the documents (she already knows of his friendship with the author), but he also fears that she will measure his emotional capacity and find it wanting. He also begins to realize, for the first time, the depth of Margaret Aubyn’s affection for him, the rarity of her person, and the wrong done to her in exposing her unrequited sentiments, which he never quite recognized as romantic. This recognition, however, comes only after others interpret her letters as evidence about the relationship between writer and her anonymous recipient. As he considers the past, Glennard faces the fact that he recognized in Margaret Aubyn’s presence a daunting “intellectual independence,” while having felt the corresponding “inferiority” of his own mind.92 As a consequence, Glennard became a mere recipient of letters rather than a full participant in an emotional circuit. The letters, as a consequence, serve as proof of the relationship’s strains, and they bear the weight of a forestalled relationship based on unequal intellectual as well as emotional investments. Although even Margaret Aubyn seems to have been aware of Glennard’s limited interest in her, as evidenced by the “affectionately impersonal” tone of her correspondence (56) and his impatience with her literary art, Margaret, as Glennard attempts to tell himself, “simply fed on her own funded passion, and the luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy” (57). When Glennard fancies, without rereading her letters, that he can sell the missives because of the platonic relationship they shared, he attempts to believe that it hardly mattered to whom Aubyn wrote. Page 108 →It nonetheless becomes clear that he failed Aubyn during the years when she was alive, the years when he “stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his heart. He was tired of her already—he was always tired of her” (58). Glennard’s sense of emotional and intellectual inadequacy was reinforced with every new letter, which arrived, as he recalls, “with the same tender punctuality” (58), each a “dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity” (59), for the letters functioned as signs of “her persistence in forcing the superabundance of thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy” (59). Despite

Glennard’s argument that the world deserves the letters, their sale is “descriptively sexualized from the beginning,” according to Denise Witzig, bound up as the letters are in marriage prospects (primarily Glennard’s to Alexa) and in various levels of negotiated intimacies.93 With Margaret Aubyn’s death and his desire to marry, the letters take on a value that (Glennard claims) is purely monetary as he suppresses any recognition of the writer’s affection for him with an insistence that the letters can serve as a source of ready cash. He thus engages with a strangely hybrid language of feeling as he considers them as not only proof of “the obligation of her love” but also, somewhat facetiously, of “this gift of her imagination” (59) as “her rarest vintage” (59), interpreting the letters as “wonderful” expressions of self (59). For Glennard, the letters become an instrument of emotional measurement as he comes to believe that his wife, Alexa, watches his behavior, as if suspecting his relation to the published work. Likewise, a close friend has determined the secret of the letters’ sale, or so Glennard believes, for by focusing on others’ emotional investments, he can avoid facing Margaret Aubyn’s unrequited love for him. Ultimately, however, he must take account of both her emotional expectations and his inability to take interest in her, asserting that “To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, derisive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity” (44). That is, Margaret Aubyn’s affections cause him to measure himself by her romantic expectations, which highlight his limited “emotional capacity” in relief to her abundant affection (44). Along the way, Glennard longs for his wife’s, Alexa’s, understanding, recalls Margaret Aubyn vividly, laments her death, feels closer to her than ever before, and experiences remorse for both selling her letters and marrying with the profits from their sale. Throughout this process, despite Glennard’s analytical postures, his experiencePage 109 → is punctuated by a series of hybrid emotions, for he feels “potential pity” (137), “passionate self disgust” (143), a desire for “sentimental reparation” (133), “intolerable pain” (129), “renovating anguish” (129), “retrospective remorse” (137), “simple satisfaction” (112), and perhaps most auspiciously, “high courage” (111). As he engages in the analysis of emotions already spent and unrecoverable, he begins to qualify his claims to emotional understanding. At the same time, he is plunged into a world of emotional complexity: he has emotions about emotion, and he fails to separate present forms of emotion from those in the past. In short, his emotion and analysis continually intertwine, forestalling one another, overlapping and impeding narrative resolution. According to Jenefer Robinson, emotions such as “shame and embarrassment are both typically associated with withdrawal and hiding behaviours,” such as the behaviors Glennard exhibits. Illustrating the concept, Robinson notes, “When I am ashamed, I seem to be judging (in part) that I have been degraded in some way that casts doubt on my sense of self-worth, whereas when I am merely embarrassed, I judge that I am in a socially awkward situation but not one that is necessarily degrading to me or that impugns my sense of self-worth.”94 Addressing a similar concept, Robert Solomon contends that “as adult, language-using, reflective human beings, we do not just have emotions. We have thoughts about our emotions, and we have further emotions about our emotions. We approve of them or disapprove of them. We are proud of them or embarrassed about them.” In regard to this cycle of emotion about emotion (or secondary emotion), Solomon adds, “We can be angry at ourselves for having an emotion (say, getting jealous) or for getting emotional when we had resolved not to. And even before we gain our full linguistic-reflective abilities, before we form thoughts about our emotions or evaluate them, we learn to recognize that we have them. We name them, even publicly.”95 In Glennard’s case, his responses indicate not only judgments about his emotions, but his emotions about his feelings, including his shame at his heartlessness. Thus, feeling emotion about his inability to love Margaret Aubyn, which in turn inspires a strange and tardy affection for her, Glennard becomes lost in a cycle of emotional analysis. In the end, Glennard judges himself in regard to not only the emotions he does feel but also those he was unable to muster. Once the letters are published, Glennard experiences “a dull angerВ .В .В . at his heart” and seeks to determine its source. Like a relentless measuring device, he interrogates his anger, asking: “Anger against whom? Against his wife? .В .В .В Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly Page 110 →given a voice of accusation?” (84). He eventually decides that his “punishment” for his anger as well

as his tardy recognition of Margaret’s unrequited love lies in “the unescapable presence of the woman he had so persistently evaded” (84). It is not only that Glennard sees himself as capable of what he comes to recognize as the “intrinsic baseness of making the letters known,” but also that the letters trouble others, allowing him—through other readers’ judgments—to perceive the essential inadequacy of his emotional constitution (43). As others analyze the letters in his presence, Glennard is jolted from his pleasant fiction of Margaret Aubyn’s indiscriminate literary passions, which would enable her to write anyone about virtually anything. While the novel does not include Aubyn’s reactions to Glennard, other characters suggest that the letters’ author must have felt anguish, that she must have grieved over her correspondent’s inability or unwillingness to return her affection. Described not as “love letters,” but as “unloved letters” because they were never fully answered and then published so heartlessly by their recipient (91), Aubyn’s missives are termed “harrowing” when read aloud (114), for they reveal “the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots—her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care,” as one woman describes them (90). Through the voices of these interpreters, Wharton is able to have these voices ventriloquize what they imagine Aubyn to have felt, but she dulls the potential sentimentality here, for there is no direct vision of Aubyn’s emotional suffering, for the author lies dead, and the letters are never quoted, reprinted, or described in any detail. Thus the effect of emotional discovery, as understood by a party who identifies himself as removed from it, remains the narrative’s focus, not the pathetic figure of an unloved woman in pain. Eventually, Glennard’s “lucidity of retrospection” teaches him the loss of “all that he had missed” during Margaret Aubyn’s lifetime, which he can begin to embrace only in the abstract and posthumously (129). And yet, there are no satisfactory moments of closure when an individual begins to appreciate and perhaps, retroactively, to feel affection for a dead woman whom he could not love in life. Feeling himself “face to face with” Aubyn, and “laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness by his shame,” Glennard chooses to conceal his emotional conflict (129). Eventually he reveals the secret of the letters (and his sale of them) to his friend and to his wife, who announces her shame at the remuneration they have received from the letters’ sale. When Alexa provides superficial closure by acknowledging Glennard’s embarrassment and by announcing that Margaret Aubyn made Glennard Page 111 →into the man she had wanted him to be during her lifetime, the platitude rings as far too convenient. The emotional truth, which runs much deeper, leads to something other than narrative tidiness, for it suggests that emotional retrospection, particularly of the analytic sort, affords an individual very little happiness. Moreover, the tendency to replace action with reflection yields for Glennard a series of perverse inversions: the dead authoress, valued above the living wife; a tardy recognition of Aubyn’s worth rather than active affection during her lifetime; anger over others’ condemnation of the letters’ sale in place of personal shame (at least initially); an investment in affective analysis rather than reparation or participation. As a result of this turmoil, Glennard seems emotionally unreachable in the present. And yet, his emotional experience appears impossible to shape or control, for Glennard could not have forced himself to feel any differently at any point in the narrative. While he wishes he had felt and acted differently in the past, the novella treats motivating emotion as a collection of wayward impulses, possible to describe, but not to direct, and certainly not retrospectively. Ironically, such a fiction refutes any belief that analytical control leads to behavioral control, for emotional experience can only be comprehended in the past. The emotional present remains as resistant to understanding, as it is impossible to control fully. Such depictions of affective analysis and the individuals who pursue it offer an implied response to sentimental fictions, where tardy recognitions lead to satisfying conclusions. Instead of the matched emotions of the sentimental novel (lover for lover, brother for sister, parent for child, owner for object, God-head for penitent), here the complications of affective analysis suggest emotional inequality and, eventually, isolation, as in Glennard’s situation. He has the time and the energy for analysis because of his situation as stranded between two women, the one who loved him (and to whom he feels connected only in her death) and the living one (for whom he wronged the first by selling the letters). A posthumous and regretful appreciation for Margaret Aubyn solves nothing, for Glennard remains enmeshed in the tangle of emotion and its representation in

print. As with Stephen Glennard, who acknowledges the importance of feelings he cannot quite experience and emotions about emotions he has not been able to conjure, the role of affective analysis in generating feelings about both analysis and individuals instills in realist fiction an eerie awareness that an analysis of emotion may produce unexpected results in lieu of closure. Foremost, it highlights the aspects of human emotion that cannot Page 112 →be contained, for the act of studying emotion frequently generates rather than abates emotional complication. Paradoxically then, the strange and self-perpetuating futility of the analytic process bespeaks the value of the elusive subject of human experience, even as the articulation, verity, and representation of emotion remained concerns that realist authors explored. Ironically, the best accounting of meaningful emotion may be the fact that it eludes all attempts to classify its exercise.

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Chapter Three Backward Glances The Search for Emotional Origins Madame Merle, a central motivating agent in The Portrait of a Lady, possesses an emotional history that, when exposed, elucidates the events leading up to Isabel Archer’s present quandary about her unhappy married state. Revealed late in the novel, insight into Madame Merle’s private, amorous past serves as explosive information that reorients the affective motives of all the novel’s major characters, especially because the revelations of her past involve other central characters in the novel, namely Gilbert and Pansy Osmond. If the novel looks backward to formative pasts through its discussions of the characters’ emotional histories, it also involves one of late-nineteenth-century literature’s central reflective moments as Isabel Archer, too, examines her choices and her decisions, her perceptions and misperceptions, in the novel’s forty-second chapter. To describe this and other fictions as glancing backward through their representations of personal histories and the possibilities linked to them is to suggest how the creation of realist interiority depended upon an interrogation of emotion’s individuated past. Such fiction shares a common interest in tracing characters’ beliefs, familial environments, regions, and personal experiences back to their generative points, specifically their emotional origins. It also takes pointed interest in creating emotional histories for characters who demonstrate little obvious personal feeling, like Madame Merle, for their backgrounds offer greater insights into personal emotion than do current actions. Focusing on the experiences or influences that afford characters a capacity for Page 114 →deep feeling and, with it, a lifelong attachment to a particular wellspring of emotion, realist fiction avoids suggestions of strict determinism; instead, it highlights the degree to which narratives about emotion’s past provide a way to explain characters’ differentiation from any other character, thereby implicating emotional histories in individuated subjectivities. Suggesting that significant residue from formative emotional events existed as trace elements in the present, the history of an individual’s emotional experience appears as part of a composite and stratified construct of self, under which lie layers of personal feeling, including older patterns, behavioral experiments, and formative events. A plot that glanced backward allowed for the revisiting of an individual’s history, which would necessarily differ for each character and each set of experiences. An individual’s emotional history, studded with artifacts, could provide the immediate context for an individual’s present-day experience. What emerged from these possibilities was a multifaceted sense of the past as it had been shaped by genetic, cultural, habitual, and/or familial forces—or forces that could coalesce to create a truly individuated history. By this logic, to know or to represent a character meant investigating that individual’s customary pathways of feeling and considering how they came to be and, further, how they affected the present. In an origins-obsessed culture where the long history of human beginnings had become broadly accepted as a viable scientific theory, the concept of emotional origins suggested that there was another level to the story of the formative past and, further, that historicizing personal experience involved a range of factors, from the broadly humanistic to the immediately experiential. Shaped by what Thorstein Veblen has defined as a post-Darwinian sensibility characterized by an “interval of instability and transition between initial cause and definitive effect, ” origins-invested fiction probed the dynamic of cause and effect by considering processes from the past that were tied to emotional effects in the present.1 The resulting narrative of emotional origins presented an individual’s past as a way to fill the gap between cause and effect by excavating the long accumulation of a particular history, which was important in the case of relatively inexpressive characters who habitually reveal little of their inner motivations. Realist narratives arranged around such figures thus took up what AmГ©lie Rorty, writing in the context of psychological study, has described as the “full causal story” of emotion’s enactment, which entails “more than locating initial conditions or identifying immediate causes: it requires

analyzing the magnetizing effects of the formation of our emotional dispositions, habits Page 115 →of thought, as well as habits of action and response.”2 As I go on to suggest, among realist authors such as Edith Wharton and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a consideration of long causes and effects—both those “immediate” and unseen—multiplied the importance of emotion’s narrative work as authors considered the basis of emotional habit in the inexpressive figures who are their protagonists, Ethan Frome and Victor Grabert.3 Taking evolutionary science’s conceptual lead, realist fiction suggested that there was a concealed narrative of emotional formation behind every individual’s expressions and habits, constructing emotion in much the way Veblen describes the concept of the past: as the link between a mysterious, invisible cause and a present-day effect. This mode of reading suggested, too, that not only taciturn figures but virtually any socialized individual concealed a formative past, rich in long-held habits and learned inhibitions. Reading for an emotional past meant that present-day behaviors could be understood in relation to the traces of earlier influences; here and there lay the trace imprints of a discarded behavior or a habit linked to a personal history or, alternatively, a fragment of the collective past’s modes of expression. In allowing for the excavation of an individual past, the realist novel posed an array of implied questions, including: Where do emotional predispositions come from? How does a specific past enlighten an understanding of a character’s emotional habits or compulsions? To what extent are behaviors indicative of past events, and not only present, emotional experiences? By advancing such questions, narratives glanced backward to formative patterns and their ongoing influences. As the previous chapter endeavored to demonstrate, by the turn of the century, a widespread ambivalence about scientific methods encircled the topic of emotion for realist authors, particularly among observers who considered themselves to be invasive and potentially heartless analysts of others. By contrast, narratives of nondemonstrative figures almost demanded emotional interrogation under the belief that taciturn or habitually inexpressive figures required a formative history, given the absence of clear information about these characters in the present day. Thus, in the case of such figures, narrative arcs devoted to the history of an individual’s emotional past emerged as a comparatively less problematic engagement with emotional inquiry, for within a plot arc that situated emotion as shaped through a series of prior events, the resulting “backward-glancing” strategy emerged as a way to explore emotional formations in relation to environment, heredity, and habit. These concerns, moreover, were also ones that had occupied nineteenth-century scientists such as Lamarck and Page 116 →Darwin, whose investment in the past created new narrative arcs for late-nineteenth-century writers. In addition, Herbert Spencer, whose sense of origins was oriented to social contexts and communal pressures, alluded to the likely existence of narratives of the past when he wrote in 1897 that “every moment we pass instantly from men’s perceived actions to the motives implied by them.” However, he added, “Undeniable as it is that another’s behaviour to us is made up of movements of his body and limbs, of his facial muscles, and of his vocal apparatus; it yet seems paradoxical to say that these are the only elements of conduct really known by us, while the elements of conduct which we exclusively think of as constituting it, are not known but inferred.”4 Pinpointing the flaws in an approach to emotion that would allow viewers to presume emotional meanings based only on emotionally resonant behaviors, Spencer exploits a disjunction between inferred and known motivations. Further, his observation highlights the observer’s temptation to “pass instantly” or perceive a link between “actions” to “the motives implied by them,” as he notes that the ensuing attributions of motives may be too easily conflated with observed actions. What results, then, is a potential obliviousness to “the truth” underlying conduct. Spencer implies, in part, that an affective behavior could not stand alone as an indicator of emotion, for it could simply exist as a moment of outward response to some stimulus. Emotion, as a richer subject, required an examination of motivation and past meaning(s). Whereas the era’s evolutionists explored emotion as a key to broad truths about human behavior and how to understand its animal origins, literary authors invested in emotion’s past exploited possible disjunctions between expressive behaviors and inner motives as part of an individuated emotional past. Part of the difficulty lay in privileging expressions alone, without a human and individuated context. Hence this fiction relied on “sociobiological” viewpoints (as Paul Ohler has termed Edith Wharton’s interests), even as realist authors and scientists alike voiced skepticism about explaining fully the emotional expressions that their works explored.5 In the introduction to The Expression, startlingly, Darwin openly acknowledges that affective

expressions might be “slight” and “fleeting” and sets forth the disclaimer that “it may be impossible” to determine an exact understanding of emotional expression or to claim the ways in which one expression differs from another.6 In so doing, Darwin raises a point very much in line with literary treatments of emotion, which highlight a distinction between affect and emotion, the outer and the inner dimensions of feeling. For literary authors who exploited the distance between Page 117 →behavior and feeling, there was no easy answer to the question of how action and motivation could be reconciled with one another; realist narratives continually exploited this lacuna. What the past (specifically the past implicated in an individual’s emotional development) contributed to a narrative was a sense of motivation, which could be considered alongside observations about affective behaviors, constituted as they were by visible signs. Thus, the origins narrative stretched not only from present to past, from the visible to the imaginable. As Friedrich Nietzsche would write in 1882, “All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, or avarice, of envy, of conscience, of pity, of cruelty?”7 In some measure, realist-era literature acknowledged this lacuna and attempted to fill in a missing or invisible “history” of emotion, over and over again, character by character, or as Nietzsche suggests, passion by passion, through an individual’s unique emotional origins and, with them, habits of expression. This history also suggested that feeling had been shaped over time and across circumstances, including accidents of environment and inheritance, so that emotional habits were best explored in immediate and individuated ways. While the type of narrative that addresses the past (specifically the genetic past) has been associated with naturalistic writing, and while any narrative of inherited tendencies could overlap with naturalist interests, the realists’ investment in an emotional past differs from a naturalistic arc in that it sidesteps pure determinism in order to stress adaptive processes, which were subject to degrees of reconstitution. Drawing on an individual’s complex interaction with an environment, including conscious changes and the development of personal habits, the treatment of the past I explore here takes a nuanced and diffused interest in emotion’s capacity to be expressed in ways that were subject to change or adaptable to new influences. Without engaging what Lee Clark Mitchell describes as naturalistic fiction’s “plot of predestination,” nondeterministic, backward-glancing realist fiction took great interest in where emotions came from, a concern that also occupied both Charles Bell (with his explanation of the generation of emotional expression through the musculature of the face) and Charles Darwin (who saw emotional expression as linked to evolutionary processes).8 While such scientists envisioned emotional expression as a broad tendency linked to uses of facial muscles or to an inherited tendency, Page 118 →realist authors imagined histories that were deeply individuated. Stories of emotional adaptation to an individual environment thus conjured immediate contexts and personal habits. By interrogating an individual’s learned (and potentially relearned) tendencies, realist fiction glances backward, paradoxically, in ways that point to new narrative possibilities. As June Howard observes in her study of naturalism, Marxist literary theorist Georg LukГЎcs distinguishes realism from naturalism by assigning a historicizing impulse to realist writing, including a form of narration that “recounts the past.”9 Howard writes that for LukГЎcs, “the reader of the realist narrative enjoys a privileged access to the dialectical causality of historical processes and gains insights into the true nature of society.”10 Yet it is clear from Howard’s account that the “causality of historical processes” she attributes to realism differs from a sense of determinism that could be linked with ancestors or with restrictive environments.11 When, for example, LukГЎcs asserts that “every new style is socially and historically determined and is the product of a social development,”12 he attributes to the realist novel a “historical dialectic,” which can be extended to include the narrative’s tendency to contextualize the individual experience within a historicized social context.13 Thus, for LukГЎcs, “the true cultivation of realism must ever be rediscovered and reclarified within the concrete historical situation.”14 Of necessity, then, the individual story is best developed through what LukГЎcs describes as a character’s personal relation to the whole of a “historical situation,” including the “major contradictions, motive forces and tendencies of an era.”15

While backward-glancing narratives rewrote emotion’s social significance by alluding to formative experiences, they did so without subscribing to naturalism’s emphasis on inheritances through bloodlines. As part of her investigation of naturalism’s characteristic narrative forms, Howard discusses the plot arc of the naturalistic text as encompassing a fascination with atavism. As Howard writes, naturalism’s concern with atavism became manifested in characters who experience the awakening of the “dormant brutes within them.”16 The plot arc of a realist-era (and nondeterministic) origins-based fiction, I would argue, settles into no such pattern or polemic. A plot that glances backward does not assert that an atavistic brutality underlies evolutionary processes; rather, it figures “inheritance” in a flexible and varied way, involving ancient and recent ancestors, adaptive behavioral habits, and formative events, or the past both far and near. Inclining toward socioeconomic and personal histories, the affective pasts visible in Wharton’s Ethan Frome and in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of Page 119 →the Village” (discussed in the second half of this chapter) stem from specific “historical situations” that shaped an individual’s emotional habits.

Wharton’s Sense of Origins Across the final decades of the nineteenth century, during the rise of realism’s literary hegemony, the exploration of human origins operated as an important point of interest in relation to the study of biology, genetics, physiology, and ritual. For some sense of the ways in which a general investment in origins (habits among them) played into the intellectual development of one individual, we might look to Edith Wharton’s youthful program of reading. Although she became unusually well informed about the intellectual arguments of her day, Wharton was not a specialist in biology (for as a woman of a privileged class, she had no specialized education). Her serious scientific reading began in the early 1880s, when she had just entered her twenties, the period during which she instituted her practice of reading widely in the sciences and social history. In her autobiography, Wharton describes her entree into the “wonder-world of nineteenth-century science” during this period of her life, listing Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Romanes, Haeckel, Westermarck, and other “popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement” as major interests.17 Wharton scholars have been particularly attentive to the impact of such readings on Wharton’s work. Claire Preston writes, for example, that Wharton “recognized her reading of Darwin at the age of 22 as the most important intellectual experience of her life. It was вЂa new vision’ which replaced any religious belief she had held.”18 Carol Singley contends that Wharton’s investment in science meant that she worked with “Darwinian principles” and adapted them “to upper-class settings and customs. Wealth, prestige, and tradition became the external forces with which her characters—especially her women—contend.”19 Both scholars craft readings of Wharton’s attention to tribalism and primitive behaviors in high-society contexts in response to these insights. In studies that explore Wharton’s investment in Darwinian ideals, Paul Ohler and Judith Saunders have focused on the way in which Wharton explored Darwinism’s means of offering “a context within which to fictionally analyze the indwellers of established New York society as organisms whose mores had a biological basis,” as Ohler describes the influence. In Saunders’s view, Darwinian science helped Wharton define the intricacies of mate selection, even for characters in elite social scenarios.20 Both studiesPage 120 → pinpoint specific ideas about heredity, group behavior, and “the idea of interconnectedness between human culture and natural realms,” as Ohler puts it.21 Saunders, focusing on mate selection, argues that “direct and indirect references to evolution and related topics, such as inherited traits and differential survival,” appear throughout Wharton’s work.22 My goal here, however, is to consider the ways in which a range of scientific conversations point to emotional inheritances on scales that were more personal than those Darwin’s work imagined. Wharton’s indebtedness to a “biological basis” consequently appears, but as part of Wharton’s consideration of emotion’s multidimensional history, as her reading across biological science, sociology, and early psychology suggests.23 Wharton’s close friend Paul Bourget asserted that the author’s scientific readings were comprehensive, going so far as to state that she “has read everything, understood everything, not superficially, but really, with an energy of culture that could put to shame the whole Parisian fraternity of letters.В .В .В . There is not a book of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Renan, Taine, which she has not studied.”24 Many of the works by prominent scientific thinkers were suggested by Egerton Winthrop, but Wharton’s biological interests persisted across

her life. In support of her argument that Wharton “read herself out of” the culture of “old New York” and into the role of formidable intellectual, Hermione Lee points to Wharton’s investment in such authors as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Von Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, Max Weber, Paul Topinard, Edvard Westermarck, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen. Reading such authors during an impressionable period in life, Wharton developed what would appear as the crucial ability to analyze “the world she grew up in” with detachment, according to Lee.25 Wharton’s manner of reading, moreover, involved underlining key passages, annotating them, creating common-place book quotations, and composing a set of questions about each text.26 Both Wharton’s biographers and the scholars who interpret her works frequently note her rigorous selfeducation or the fact, as Sheri Benstock succinctly puts it, that there were “no gifts from chance” in the author’s voraciously well-read life.27 According to Robin Peel, who explores Wharton’s supposed rejection of modernism (though, notably, through Wharton’s pre-1914 fictions), Wharton’s interest in the sciences appears “consistent with her belief in the need for laws, order, and form in art.”28 While Peel implies that scientific order overlapped with Wharton’s aesthetically conservative concerns, I read Wharton’s scientific interests as signs that she digested the intellectual consequences of evolutionary theories as they emerged in biology, anthropology, and sociology. Page 121 →As I go on to suggest, Wharton explored both behavior and emotion (and frequently, the disjunctions between the two); for Wharton, as for others who were her contemporaries, origins, specifically the origins of emotion, would become points of interrogation, for they promised to address a gap between inner meanings and behavior that was accessible only through personal history. In the literary arena, an investment in the origins of emotion did not necessitate a formal degree, a laboratory, or a research apprenticeship so much as a willingness to consider the details that could suggest predecessors both visible and imagined, looming and concealed. As a consequence, the story of origins had the potential to generate compelling, excavation-oriented narratives, transforming observation into a mystery of motivation, or a set of questions about influences and their effects.29 Moreover, because the topic of origins encompassed evolutionary development, familial genetics, and adaptive behaviors, the origins narrative offered numerous narrative possibilities, in which different types of origins might intersect. The nature of such questions arose in part from fictions that allowed characters to observe and wonder, to gather evidence (in The Ambassadors, for example). Narratives about emotional origins instead conjured a past that contrasted with the evidence collected by characters and narrators who observe the present. In contrast to those characters and narrators who observe and collect evidence, but who also may have feelings about evidence, who become wrapped up emotionally in emotional subjects (as in chapter 2), origins-based narratives historicize emotional trajectories, attempting to imagine which parts of the past have been most influential in creating present-day emotional possibilities—and limits. Realist literature’s attention to emotional origins often meant an inquiry into the past’s continued visibility in the present within a historicizing project analogous to that visible in the biological sciences. Whether that past was construed as a peculiar genetic predisposition, or as a result of the pressures posed by a local community, household, or relationship, realist writing was far less interested in a singular source of influence than in examining coexisting possible sources of potentially destructive emotional behaviors. Fictions such as Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) provide the sense that there was a set of fraught emotional conflicts in back of every individual’s inscrutable behavior. Posing such questions as “Where do emotional predispositions come from?” “Which types of origins overlap or intersect with one another?” and “How does a specific past enlighten a character’s emotional habits?” the realist novel’s sensitivity to emotional histories set the stage for overlapping fields of inquiry into their origins. Page 122 →

Exploring the Silence Ethan Frome features an inquisitive narrator at its opening, but one who remains significantly removed from the

connections binding the major characters; he is merely a visitor spending a season in a New England town who attempts to ascertain the story of Ethan’s past, including those aspects of the past that have rendered him a silent, damaged individual. An innocuous observer in the realist tradition, he is no spectator of anticipated violence, as in John Dudley’s account of naturalist literature.30 And while he is fascinated with Ethan’s life, he is not drawn into the mode of spectatorship common in naturalist fiction, with its “rules-bound brutality“ on display.31 Instead, by the beginning of Wharton’s novel, the cataclysmic event in Ethan’s life is long past, for the accident that ruined the lives of Ethan and Mattie Silver took place decades earlier, though its dreary, ghastly consequences linger. In addition, although the narrator watches Ethan Frome, given the titular character’s characteristic repression of emotion, what he witnesses is far from revelatory. Featuring a young man trapped by his current circumstances, the novel explores the state of the young New Englander’s life as he attempts to eke out a living on his family’s stony farm while his hypochondriac wife, Zeena (also his cousin), spends much of the family income on tonics and doctor visits. The single bright spot in Ethan’s life is the company of his wife’s younger cousin, Mattie Silver, who lives with the Fromes and performs household chores in exchange for room and board. Sensing Ethan’s growing attachment to Mattie, Zeena announces that her doctor has advised her to secure the services of a trained hired girl and proposes to send Mattie away immediately. Unwilling to lose Mattie, Ethan contemplates borrowing money and escaping to the West with her, but decides against the flight. Meanwhile, Mattie ascertains Ethan’s feelings for her and reciprocates them. On the evening when Ethan is charged with driving Mattie away, she proposes sledding down a deadly hill into a tree rather than face a life apart. At the end of the novel, readers discover that this plan and its consequences, now twenty-four years past, resulted in the maiming of Ethan and Mattie, both of whom survived the crash, though in greatly altered states. Implicit in the story are various questions about emotional origins, including what drove three people to such an impasse, a major part of which is an inquiry into Ethan’s habitual silence, for behind Ethan Frome’s depiction of the events that have led to Mattie’s broken body and Ethan’s Page 123 →horrific entrapment in his home with a terribly transformed Mattie (and a somewhat altered Zeena) lies Ethan’s habitual tendency toward emotional repression. Intensified by the accident, Ethan’s taciturn habits appear as contributors to his current misery, perhaps even as precipitating factors in the crash. To take up this question of Ethan’s habit and how far-reaching it is would mean considering how silence came to be a dominant personal trait and whether this habit is linked to evolutionary factors, familial inheritances, local and personal forms of adaptation, or some combination of these influences. As a novel that has been read as embodying a set of anxieties “about health, history, and social decline as well as concerns about intellectual, emotional, and national paralysis,” or issues that Robin Peel attributes to Wharton’s composition of the novel in prewar Paris, Ethan Frome combines many of those interests in Ethan’s emotional habits.32 Steeped in allusions to possible origins that promise to elucidate emotionally resonant behaviors, the novel operates on the basic premise that Ethan’s taciturnity is so pronounced that it could only have been inspired through mutually reinforcing influences. In alluding to these possibilities, the novel sheds the ambivalent approach to scientific methods visible in The Touchstone and instead embraces the consequences of scientific theory to a much greater extent, invoking various aspects of later nineteenth-century scientific thinking. It is not just Ethan’s behavior, but his entire affective constitution—the elements that make up his expressive habits and the pressures that maintain them—that becomes key in the novel’s explorations of Ethan’s family history and the history of his rural community. Read in light of backwardglancing questions about the evolution of emotional habits, the novel’s details about Ethan’s affective life stress the peculiar repression of his expressive capacity, which raises the question of what, precisely, constrains the character. We learn, for example, that Ethan is “by nature grave and inarticulate” and that he feels a “dumb melancholy” in his heart, a state that seems as much constitutional as situational.33 The language of “nature,” important throughout the plot, enters the text at such decisive junctures, for here the description suggests that Ethan’s taciturn mien is constitutional, though in what way remains unclear. Particularly striking is the fact that during those moments when Ethan would like to express himself, he finds that although “he groped for a dazzling phrase,” he is able to express only “a growl of rapture,” which

includes the rough command, to Mattie Silver, “Come along” (23).34 Shortly thereafter, he repeats the same invocation after “he struggled for the all-expressive word” and comes up short, Page 124 →somewhat predictably by now (25). At other moments, Ethan “forgot what else he had meant to say” though in reality he is “suffusedВ .В .В . with joy,” however inarticulate (26). Intertwined with such allusions to inarticulate behavior is Ethan’s acknowledgment that “he had no right to show his feelings, and thus provoke the expression of hers,” an insight that suggests the self-censoring dimension of his silence; at such moments, Ethan’s inability to express himself appears as much constitutional as it is situational (24). Far from looking to one determining feature (brutishness, for example) as the cause of Ethan’s troubles, the novel suggests that Ethan’s inability to express his underlying motivations has contributed to his current condition as a maimed, scarred, and nearly silent man, as he is at the novel’s end. Ethan’s struggles with inexpressiveness, including his difficulty in locating an “all-expressive word,” point to a considerable gap between motive and expression of emotion. Countering the image of Ethan’s inexpressiveness, the novel hints that the depth of his emotion may be much greater than his affective behavior suggests, as in the detail that while he has a definite “inclination” for Mattie, “he had never learned to say such things” (85). Such details point out that speech may be “learned” and, hence, that expressive habits may be altered, a point that the novel also explores during an extraordinary two days when Zeena is absent and Ethan is alone with Mattie. Here, Ethan leaves the house with an inscrutable “So long, MattВ .В .В . and that was all,” affirming his long history of inexpressive self-presentation (36). Upon perceiving himself to be near “the brink of eloquence,” he becomes “paralysed” by the mention of his wife and subsequently gives in to the “contagion ofВ .В .В . embarrassment” as the pattern persists (44). Late in the novel, near the crisis of Mattie’s forced departure from the Frome household, “Twice he opened his lips to speak to Mattie and found no breath” (81). On such occasions, Ethan’s forestalled speech raises a number of questions, primarily because his desires to behave differently exist, even if his habits impede their expression. Among the implied questions attending such moments is the question of how Ethan’s behavior comes to be. How is it possible for an individual to recognize his emotional desires and attempt to reveal them, only to find himself unable to express them? How can his emotions and behaviors lie so far apart? This gap between emotion and expression functions as proof of a deeply ingrained pattern of repressed emotion, such that Ethan’s behaviors and motives remain far apart. As Maria Farland has argued, in Ethan Frome Wharton resisted grand emotional gestures of sentimental forms. As Farland writes, a sentimental ending for the novel might have featured Zeena’s Page 125 →early death or, perhaps, the tragic story of Ethan’s “suicide in the arms of his forbidden love.”35 In exploring the consequences attending Wharton’s resistance to sentimentalism, Farland suggests that the author’s readings in the “new biology,” particularly theories that involved the topic of sexual identity in relation to heredity, influenced her vision. Based on Wharton’s reading of studies such as Sex and Character, by Otto Weininger (a “neo-Lamarckian”), which Wharton read and discussed with friends while composing the novel, Farland contends that Ethan Frome “is concerned with the origin and genesis of characteristics like masculinity.”36 My sense of Ethan Frome’s investment in “genesis” is somewhat broader, ranging across a variety of scientific discourses about origins, including interests in genetics and local cultural customs alike, which inform Ethan’s emotional repression. Focusing on the novel’s allusions to pain and suffering, Jennifer Travis interrogates the novel’s portrait of emotion with an emphasis on its links to sympathy, describing Ethan Frome as a “total assault upon our emotions,” waged during a period when readers and critics were becoming “scientists of affect,” though Travis, somewhat paradoxically, views scientificism as operating in support of sympathy’s association with suffering.37 Thus, as Travis reads it, the novel analyzes suffering at a time when many worried through the issue of humankind’s “capacity for feeling in an evermore anonymous and impersonal world” of encroaching modernity.38 While I read the novel’s emphasis on affect as pointing not to suffering, but to interrogations of emotional origins, Travis’s point about the “science of affect” holds, for Wharton’s novel exercises its epistemological investments by presenting a set of hypotheses specifically oriented to emotion’s genesis and, hence, to the tragic gap between emotion and expression in Ethan’s life.39

Environmental Adaptations As the novel invokes multiple possibilities for examining emotional origins, adaptation emerges as a principle that binds Ethan to the pressures of the bleak and chilled New England environment, one Wharton famously described as a “grim” place that she equated with the possibilities of “insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation,” that bind individuals to the land.40 As one of the villages of rural Massachusetts where cousins intermarry, literal starvation is possible, and mental health is as illusive as any other form of stability, Starkfield replicates its “grimness” within the human population.41 Page 126 →Discussions of environment had their role in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century attitudes toward evolutionary processes. Writing of Victorian understandings of scientific thought, Christopher Herbert contends that “according to the interpretive paradigm of Darwinian biology, to describe an organism in evolutionary terms is thus to describe it wholly and exhaustively in its relations to every other element in its ecosystem, which ultimately includes nothing less than вЂthe whole economy of nature.’”42 By hinting at the importance of Ethan’s adaptation to his environment, through both inherited adaptations and adaptations made during his lifetime, Ethan Frome indeed attempts “wholly and exhaustively” to cover its titular character’s relations “to every other element in the ecosystem.” In Wharton’s novel, Starkfield is described as indelibly part of Ethan’s “whole economy,” or part of the puzzle represented by his reticence and repression. The town is, foremost, a desolate place, particularly in winter, when much of the action occurs. During an era when there was still considerable wrangling about how adaptation operated, naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s idea that “species become modified through the action of the external conditions to which they were exposed,” or that organisms could adapt to environments within a generation and then pass on those adaptations, suggests the degree to which the environment of Starkfield had the potential to affect human behavior in immediate ways and in ways that could be passed on within a generation.43 Thus not only could Ethan adapt, but in addition, Mrs. Frome’s adaptation to the bleak landscape could affect her son, through both inheritance and model. While the novel takes great interest in “contrasting the rural poor, who are the late nineteenth-century inheritors of the land peopled by the Pilgrim Fathers, with the modern American world that has left them behind, ” as Peel argues, it also suggests that there is specificity in the lives of the Starkfield poor.44 Portrayed throughout the novel as within the grip of winter at all the crisis moments of the young man’s life, a bleak New England serves as an overwhelming force in Ethan’s life, particularly in tandem with the harsh economic circumstances that keep the Fromes in a state of perpetual poverty. A town named for the unwelcoming nature of the habitat, Starkfield in the past was extremely isolated in the view of the visiting narrator, who asserts that modernity has lessened the town’s separation from the rest of the world in the years since the Frome tragedy: Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and Page 127 →rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, but as Bettsbridge and Shad’s Falls, had libraries, theatres, and Y.M.C.A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield and the village lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale skies, I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood. (3) Key in this description is the fact that communication was far from “easy” in the days of Ethan’s youth, that winter “shut down” most sociable intercourse. Yet even in the relatively “easier” and more sociable present, the narrator can perceive only the “grim satisfaction” of life in such a place.45 According to Elizabeth Ammons, the novel’s debts to the concept of “place” allow us to recognize it as part of the landscape in which “poverty was forcing rural whites, especially throughout the northeastern United States, to abandon small farms that could no longer produce a living.”46 In addition, local color writing offered readers what Ammons describes as an “emotional hedge against all of the change” that technology brought to the landscape, alongside “the uncertainties caused by international imperialism; against the anonymity and alienation caused by modern, urban, industrial life.”47 It is possible, based on such

explanations, to envision regionalist impulses as underscoring the degree to which local adaptations stabilized rural life, making it resistant to modernity. The primitive environmental conditions and spare lifestyle of the Fromes also suggest something of Herbert Spencer’s observation about extreme dependence upon the environment. Writing that “where life is low there is passive dependence on the accidents of the environment; and this entails great irregularities in the vital processes,” Spencer calls attention to the environment’s immediate impact on those most connected to the land; here the lowest classes, possessed of the least mobility, are the most vulnerable to the habitat’s influence.48 That Starkfield is a place that affects Ethan in the extreme, given his economic vulnerability, is clear. So, too, is its ability to instill emotional inhibition, as in the narrator’s claim that “he seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface,” a description in which Ethan appears as an iced-over pond of a man, devoid of all possible warmth; if possessed of an emotional capacity, he has buried it deep within himself. It is also likely, the narrator believes, that Ethan will Page 128 →never become personally expressive because of the “profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters” (7). Insistent as it is on the power of the landscape to temper emotional expression, the novel advances an adaptationbased logic that matches genetic predisposition with the effects of “a life linked with the soil” in an oppressively chilling environment (10). As Ethan continues to live in such a place, “the silence had deepened about him year after year,” for Starkfield’s terrain has produced a taciturn man, despite the impulses that might exist beneath a frozen surface (37). Starkfield in winter is also explicitly linked to a series of desperate measures, not the least of which was Ethan’s decision to propose to Zeena after his mother died. Mrs. Frome’s death prompted Ethan’s rash proposal, the narration suggests, because it occurred during the winter, and “he had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in the spring instead of winter” (38). Possessed of “an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm,” Ethan proposes to his cousin “before he knew what he was doing” (38). The land’s effect cannot be resisted, and all inhabitants eventually succumb to its influence. Habituated to the land and to winter and to their ancestors’ adaptations to the same elements, not only Ethan but also his wife (and, much later, Mattie Silver) become less warm, less sociable, less open in every sense as all adapt to the bleakness of the landscape. The effects of the environment are clear, for on the few occasions when Ethan leaves it, he becomes “warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse,” just as he responds positively to a brief venture at a school in Worcester and an even briefer trip to Florida (37). The hopeful effects of Florida, however, are long past, for as Ethan recalls, his sense of gentler climate has been “all snowed under” (7).49 While an environmental logic for emotional habit is laid out across the novel, a complicating factor arises in a competing sociological explanation from the narrator, a visitor who attempts to break through the habitual reticence of the village in order to ascertain something of Ethan Frome’s past. This narrator’s presence suggests scientific scrutiny of the type Herbert Spencer described, when he noted that “the individual man has to carry on his life with due regard to the lives of others belonging to the same society” in any “ethical system.”50 According to this culturally oriented belief, social pressures may instill similar habits among those dwelling in the same terrain. Noting upon his arrival in Starkfield that Ethan Frome speaks in “so low a tone that his words never reached me,” the narrator finds that not only is Ethan’s “taciturnityВ .В .В . respected,” but it is echoed (quietly) by the village’s other inhabitants (2). The cultural norm of reticence is so entrenched,Page 129 → the narrator discovers, that he can determine little about Ethan Frome’s past, apart from vague allusions. One villager notes, “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away” (2–3). The narrator also discovers that a neighbor, Ruth Hale, becomes “unexpectedly reticent.” Yet, he believes, “There was no hint of disapproval in her reserve: I merely felt in her an insurmountable reluctance to speak of him or his affairs” (4–5). Reluctance, reserve, and reticence characterize most of Starkfield’s inhabitants, so that these qualities become uncontested social norms, reinforced through habitual interaction, even if, as also seems possible, they were instilled by the land and then intensified through habit. One of the consequences attending this unwillingness to speak (as distinct from an inability to feel) is the question of underlying motive. Specifically, the narrator wonders if the villagers are

indifferent to one another’s troubles. All the dwellers in Starkfield, as in more notable communities, had had troubles enough of their own to make them comparatively indifferent to those of their neighbours; and though all conceded that Ethan Frome’s had been beyond the common measure, no one gave me an explanation of the look in his face, which, as I persisted in thinking, neither poverty nor physical suffering could have put there. (5) Though the passage avoids a direct attribution of causality, it implies one: that personal “troubles” in an unwelcoming place demand so much attention that indifference to others results. Inverting a theory of empathetic relations, the passage further suggests that far from prompting identification with others, adversities provide a negative conditioning for Starkfield’s inhabitants, dulling their capacity to feel on behalf of one another. Trouble—seemingly born from such difficult living conditions—thus becomes an inhibitor to satisfying human intercourse for all in the region.

Familial and Evolutionary Inheritances As suggested above, by orienting the novel’s emotional work to issues of epistemology, Wharton drew on her familiarity with Darwin, Spencer, and a host of psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, all of whom can be imagined as influencing her interest in affective origins and adaptations. In specific, during the period when Ethan Frome was in its draft forms, Page 130 →Wharton read and annotated studies by prominent biologists, studying Robert Heath Lock’s Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution (1906), Charles Deperet’s The Transformations of the Animal World (1909), and Yves Delage’s L’HГ©rГ©ditГ© et les grandes problГЁmes de la biologie gГ©nГ©rale (1903).51 As texts that explore genetic heritage, they highlight Wharton’s intellectual interest in tracing habits, abilities, and tendencies back to familial contexts, an interest that I apply to the question of emotional expression, which since 1872 had been linked to hereditary questions (via evolution) by Darwin. Alongside the novel’s portrait of ingrained and adaptive habit, the question of genetic inheritance—and its effect on Ethan’s emotional life—makes an appearance in Ethan Frome. Cementing the narrative of familial heredity, one of Starkfield’s inhabitants notes that there is little “difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard” (99).52 Ethan, nearly as silent as his dead ancestors, is further linked to them when it is announced that “his mother got queer and dragged along for years,” a statement that could apply equally to Ethan (6). His taciturn behavior is also traceable to his mother, who was reportedly so worn down by the silence of the lonely New England winters that she missed the local stage when it ceased to drive by the gate to the Frome property, its absence counting as something she “never could getВ .В .В . through her headВ .В .В . and it preyed on her right along to the end” (10–11). We also learn that although Ethan’s mother “had been a talker in her day,” “after her вЂtrouble’ the sound of her voice was seldom heard, though she had not lost the power of speech” (37). The model of his mother’s behavior, we also learn, preys upon Ethan’s mind, for as a young man, Ethan fears “that he might have вЂgone like his mother’ if the sound of a new voice had not come to steady him,” and so he proposes to Zeena, who nursed his mother during her final illness, largely so he will not be alone (37). Exhibiting what geneticist Robert Heath Lock (whom Wharton read during this period) termed the “Law of Ancestral Heredity,” Ethan’s near-silence provides evidence for the theory that psychological states have a genetic basis, for as Lock asserts, they are “probably inherited at a rate not greatly different from that at which physical characters are inherited, ” and “the resemblance between parents and their offspring is of much the same kind and amount in the case of mental as it is the case of bodily characteristics.”53 By emphasizing the possibility of heritable acquired characteristics that extend beyond the body, Lock allows for the question of emotional formation. Ethan’s relative silence in the narrative is surpassed only by that of Page 131 →his kin, including “his cousin Zenobia Pierce,” who becomes his wife and whose behavior further underscores heredity’s potential sway over emotional expression (37). Zenobia, called Zeena, has a disquieting habit of “letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all

along taken her notes and drawn her inferences,” her taciturn habits affirming the family legacy of silent brooding (20). Moreover, she is a woman whose “fault-finding was of the silent kind, but not the less penetrating for that” (32). When Ethan, who witnesses his wife’s growing tendency toward silence, wonders if she “were also turning вЂqueer’” like his mother, the genetic narrative is by now fully visible. He also comes to believe that “her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments impossible to guess,” projecting darker motives onto her reticence (39). Zeena’s likeness to Ethan’s relatives is reasserted near the novel’s end when neighbor Ruth Hale claims, “I never knew myself what Zeena thought—I don’t to this day. Nobody knows Zeena’s thoughts” (98). A significant part of what “nobody knows” is not only what Zeena thinks, but how she feels, a set of facts about which there is simply insufficient evidence. As with Ethan, behaviors, particularly reticent ones, pose crucial questions about emotional motivations, which the narrative raises without supplying answers. Both multiplied through repetition across family members and concentrated through their proximity to one another, taciturn traits suggest one of the problematic aspects of genetic consolidation through marriage. Here, a Lamarckian paradigm of inheritance of acquired attributes would suggest that acquired adaptations are passed on to successive offspring, one potential reason for the concentration of taciturn habits among the Fromes. The consolidation of like (and potentially repressive) emotional tendencies in a marriage that involves kinfolk further heightens the capacity for inherited adaptations to intensify. The issue of emotional inheritance thus reverses what Jennie Kassanoff has identified as Wharton’s eugenics-based politics of race as well as a conservative approach to literary form as the author resisted the “menacing possibilities of democratic pluralism.”54 Arguing that “Wharton responded to the possibilities of racial and ethic hybridity by forging a racial aesthetic—a theory of language and literature that encoded a deeply conservative, and indeed essentialist, model of American citizenship,” Kassanoff highlights the dangers Wharton perceived in a polyglot America.55 Such a concern, if applied to Ethan Frome, could conceivably have driven Wharton to uphold the type of intrafamilial union experienced Page 132 →by Ethan and Zeena. But in the context of similarly repressive emotional habits, the marital and genetic consolidation of taciturn traits appears as a significant problem. In such instances, something other than the familial consolidation of expressive traits would have been ideal, for then a greater (and promising) expressive openness could have resulted. Ranging beyond genetic influences, the novel also considers heredity more broadly, engaging an evolutionary paradigm, for Ethan, at first glance, seems to embody a mode of atavistic behavior, or a category of being that drew tremendous interest in the late nineteenth century. According to this theory of Ethan as an exemplar of atavism, his behavior would suggest a collective, basic, and nonevolved human past. Highlighting the lure of the atavistic subject, Nietzsche, for example, discusses the “late ghost(s) of past culture and their powers” in 1887. These beings from the remote past, as he describes them (and as, indeed, naturalistic texts would depict them) possess a quality that “now seems strange, rare, extraordinary, and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honor and cultivate them against another world that resists them; and so he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one, unless he perishes too soon.”56 Such qualities, which were once “common,” can now produce the “danger of becoming mad and lonely through them.”57 According to such a description, less evolved emotional behaviors take on a “rare” power and, with it, a value. A reading of Wharton’s novel according to Nietzsche’s definition would stress not only Ethan’s atavistic rarity, and with it his value as artifact, but also his potential to become “mad and lonely” in adherence to his customary lifestyle. In such a context, Ethan’s ties to his deep and familial past would appear insurmountable. Among the readings of Wharton’s novel that stress Ethan’s atavistic qualities is Patricia Antrece Stevenson’s interpretation of Ethan as a “noble savage,” an interpretation that emphasizes Ethan’s nobility and unspoiled nature. Citing reviews’ focus on the “blank despair” and Ethan’s wasted life, Stevenson interrogates the novel’s final “vision of banal misery which is so repulsive it barely elicits our sympathy.”58 Linking Ethan’s suffering at the end of Ethan Frome to Charity Royall’s “unusually malevolent fate” at the end of Summer, Stevenson links the two “most tortured” of

Wharton’s characters to their American identities.59 Arguing that Wharton consigns these national representatives to “a terrible kind of primordial chaos,” Stevenson traces Wharton’s understanding of atavism to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s formulation of the “noble savage” as a sympathetically atavistic type.60 Linking such a representation to Wharton’s interest in primitivism (via a ballet Page 133 →such as Le Sacre du printemps) and to Darwin, Stevenson treats Wharton’s interest in primitivism as an almost inevitable consequence of Wharton’s privileged class position. Reading Summer’s Lucius Harney as a privileged “outsider with a penchant for the primitive,” and much like the narrator of Ethan Frome, Stevenson sees in both portraits signs of Wharton’s “depiction of the vapidity, the pathological flatness of New England life.”61 While as Stevenson implies, Wharton’s personal distance from poverty-stricken New England cannot be discounted, Ethan Frome’s titular character may not be as atavistic as he appears. A careful examination of Darwin’s study of emotional expression suggests that the less expressive the animal, the more evolved is the underlying consciousness. Consequently, taking Darwin’s lead would mean interpreting Ethan as highly evolved. In The Expression, for example, Darwin positions recurring habits of expression as proof of the deepest reaches of evolutionary processes. A sneer, for example, could be linked to animalistic expressions of anger and intimidation, for Darwin viewed man’s instinctual facial expressions as proof of universal expressions across the animal kingdom. Filled with descriptions and drawings of the facial expressions of humans and dogs, horses, and apes, The Expression argues that “the simple fact that the anthropoid apes possess the same facial muscles as we do” allows for the linkage of emotional expression to evolutionary processes, thereby indelibly tying emotion with distant origins in the late nineteenth-century consciousness.62 Darwin’s work thus suggests that the more obviously physical the expression of anger, the more primitive the impulse behind it.63 A figure in the throes of anger, Darwin claims, “would reveal an вЂaccelerated’ heart rate, a reddened face, dilated nostrils that quiver,” and “teeth clenched or ground together,” as “the muscular system is commonly stimulated to violent, almost frantic action” (78). In addition, this legibly angry body is “commonly held erect ready for instant action, but sometimes it is bent forward towards the offending person, with the limbs more or less rigid. The mouth is generally closed with firmness, showing fixed determination, and the teeth are clenched or ground together” (219). Moreover, “the gestures of a man in this state usuallyВ .В .В . represent more or less plainly the act of striking or fighting with an enemy” (78). Of all the emotional states he records, Darwin situates violent passions in the deepest reaches of the evolutionary past, considering anger as one of the “first exciting emotions,” of the type that “naturally leadВ .В .В . to energetic movements, which react on the heart andВ .В .В . again on the brain” (81). In Darwin’s estimation, “most of our emotions are so closely connected with their [physical] expression, Page 134 →that they hardly exist if the body remains passive” (217). The body, then, becomes the register of affective experiences, leaving the mind less profoundly engaged. The apes, as well as humans who are insane, incapacitated, blind, and extremely young, make up Darwin’s subjects in his study of expressions, for these subjects are associated with particularly overt expressions. He is additionally interested in isolated tribes from around the world, including the Maoris of New Zealand and the Dyaks of Borneo (though whether out of geographical isolation or race-based interest, it is difficult to determine). As evidence of evolution’s existence, Darwin privileges clear and expressive behaviors of the sort he illustrates: the snarling, sneering, agonized, and ecstatic gestures he associates with unambiguous emotional expressions (anger, contempt, grief, joy). His connection between unambiguous emotional expressions and prehuman ancestors is clear in an observation such as the following: “We may further suspect, notwithstanding that we have no support from analogy, that our semi-human progenitors uncovered their canine teeth when prepared for battle, as we still do when feeling ferocious, or when merely sneering at or defying some one, without any intention of making a real attack with our teeth” (230). Positioned in the chapter entitled “Hatred and Anger,” such comments link human expressions of rage to ancient teeth-baring behaviors of the apes and the other “semi-human progenitors.” Repressed emotion, by contrast, holds little place in Darwin’s study. As a consequence, Darwin never mentions an inexpressive ape, an omission that suggests that inexpressive behavior is far from unevolved;

inexpressive behavior, in fact, separates man from his links with the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwin’s sole allusion to expressive subtlety appears in his discussion of blushing, which he reads as a highly evolved and, hence, exclusively human tendency. Unlike other forms of emotion in which Darwin locates evidence of evolutionary processes, the blush reveals uniquely human concerns with social interaction, specifically a state of “self-attention.” Defining the blush as “the reddening of the face” because of the effects of “mental agitation,” Darwin views it as the body’s response to “a sense of shame,” which “gorge[s]” the face with blood (286). An involuntary effect, the blush can be neither invoked nor suppressed, for “the wish to restrain it, by leading to self-attention, actually increases the tendency” (286). The blush thus becomes indeterminate as an object of analysis, for while Darwin delineates the kind of social dynamic that facilitates scenarios of blushing, the underlying and more precise emotional motivations may not be clear.64 As Darwin suggests, individuals may blush for a variety of reasons. Page 135 →Some may blush from feelings of shame (291), or if not wholly shame, then “in part fear” (291), moral motivations (299), modesty, shyness (299), “disapprobation or ridicule” (303), guilt (305), or both the actuality and the fear of being misunderstood (306). Thus, to witness a blush means that although there is a set of likely motivations, the exact origins and meaning(s) of bodily signs remain private. Such open-ended inquiry, with its awareness of a gap between expression and meaning, signals something other than straightforward or primitive impulses. According to Darwin’s view of emotional evolution, Ethan Frome’s subtle and at times nearly unfathomable inexpressiveness supports an interpretation of Ethan as more specialized than many readers have yet acknowledged. This habitual inexpressiveness, far from linking him to the atavistic, prehuman ancestors of the race, characterizes his behavior as like that of his inexpressive ancestors whose isolation strengthened their specialized patterns of subtle expression. More reactive and specialized than many naturalist characters, Ethan has no “internal nemesis” that will propel him toward a plot characterized by “decline” or brutishness into an awaiting form of fatality.65 He is locked in a mode of stasis, to be sure, but because of the flashback qualities of the plot, there is no future event that predicts deeper decline.66 The tragedy of his life, in fact, took place long ago. And yet, the adaptation Ethan exhibits in his affective behavior is far from progressive; as Paul Ohler reads Wharton’s investment in evolution, there was very little of a “a positive valuation of the ideology of progress” in her writing.67 Indeed in Ethan’s case, adaptation may be simultaneously profoundly specialized and nonteleologic. In addition, the combination of similar types of repression under one roof has had volatile effects, for the concentration of Ethan and Zeena’s familial past (presumably through his maternal line) suggests how intensely emotional repression could be concentrated within a family and a household.68 In contexts where repressive traits could be distilled and strengthened, a habit such as taciturnity becomes pronounced through repetition and social concentration. Moreover, because all share similar emotional habits—all save Mattie Silver—these habits seem intractable, at least until Mattie’s arrival, as her proximity brings a “wave of warmth” over Ethan (26).

The Force of Habit While Ethan Frome’s usual behaviors are influenced by both environment and familial precedents, the introduction of Mattie Silver into the Frome household offers another perspective on Ethan’s emotional life, specifically Page 136 →through the lens of adaptive habit, for what Mattie brings into the narrative is a new model of behavior, or the sunny, good-natured lightness that Ethan will admire. Whereas the mere mention of Zeena “benumbed” and “paralysed” Ethan, just as he “felt himself on the brink of eloquence” (45), Mattie offers a “bit of hopeful young life” that is “like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth” (16) or reminiscent of “spring rills in a thaw” (23). A complementary force, Mattie diffuses warmth into the “snowed under” world Ethan inhabits, and he is “never gay but in her presence” (17). Mattie’s comments, in fact, supply the “words [that] had at last been found to utter his secret soul” (17). Elaborating Ethan’s feelings in a way that he finds impossible, Mattie’s presence grants Ethan the sense that “he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feelings that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he would wake at will” (16–17). More than a sounding board for Ethan’s emotions, Mattie affirms that Ethan has feelings and that they have the capacity to create perceptible effects in the world; moreover, in Mattie’s presence, Ethan imagines emotional control, or the ability to “wake” his emotions “at

will.” In every way, Mattie is unlike Zeena, whose self-absorption, “queer looks,” and whining complaints cause Ethan to channel his emotions inward (18), as in his observation that in her presence he had a “tendency to impatient retort” that he has attempted to “check” by “form[ing] the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked” (39). By contrast, Mattie allows Ethan to express himself more liberally and to foresee that his emotions may effect willful change. In this capacity will lie the opportunity to imagine Ethan’s emotional life as shaped by something other than repressive habits. Immediately upon Mattie’s arrival, Ethan perceives that, unlike Zeena, Mattie “ain’t a fretter,” and her habits, perhaps as a consequence, are endearing (16). Her characteristic gestures (some of which Ethan imagines as “kept for him”) include “a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her” (18). In particular, it is this gesture of the eyes, of “let[ting] her lids sink slowly” that “he loved” (50). A careful analyst who is in no way objective about his subject, Ethan treasures even the anticipation of Mattie’s “laughing and talking in that funny way she had, which was always as new to him as if he had never heard her before” (36). Part of Mattie’s appeal lies in her novel deviation from the Frome mold of behavior, and her habits, in turn, allow for the possibility of new adaptations in Ethan. Alone with Mattie, Ethan, “who was usually so silent,” finds it possible to whistle and sing aloud as he works, breaking Page 137 →through his taciturn mien (36). The accompanying explanation makes clear that Mattie’s presence allows Ethan the opportunity to note that “there was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse” of the type she provides (36-7). Mattie’s power to counteract Ethan’s habits thus raises a new question about the new environment that she creates with her very presence. More explicitly stated, her effect on his everyday behaviors is one that, because of her “quicker, finer, more expressive” ways, “instead of crushing him by the contrast, had given him something of her own ease and freedom” (21). Under Mattie’s influence, Ethan begins to see the benefits of behaviors unlike his usual habits, and the novel repeatedly opposes his inexpressiveness with her warmth, his taciturn habits with her volubility, his gravity with her gaiety. A second type of effect is more meaningful in its potential, for in Mattie’s company, Ethan understands himself as capable of agency in a way that he does not when in Zeena’s presence or on his family’s property. Whether linked to the question of oppositional natures or to Ethan’s erotic investment in Mattie (as in his handing her a phallic candlestick, or in his “thrilling sense of mastery” in her presence), the effect is a sense that both his behaviors and his emotional habits can be consciously controlled (47).69 As both Darwin and Lamarck suggest in their studies of habit as a product of adaptations, Mattie’s presence appears to offer Ethan a rare opportunity to consider change, or change based on his adaptations to her. It is also through Mattie’s introduction into Ethan’s life (and the impetus for the novel’s crisis) that the text raises the possibility that Ethan may gain greater control over his expressions and that they may more perfectly match his inner life, his emotional life. Discussions of habit tended to be nuanced among the scientists who explored the concept, for habit meant a way of negotiating with an environment. As a consequence, changes in any individual organism’s behaviors could be attributed to adaptive habits. Habit, in short, meant increasing (or decreasing) possibilities of survival for any individual organism. While Darwin’s work was vividly in the consciousness of writers at the century’s turn, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s earlier writings (including the pivotal Philosophie zoologique, 1809) presented “habit” as a term that helped explain the emergence of adaptive behaviors, which, for Lamarck, could be altered across an animal’s lifetime. While much has been made about the differences between Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of evolution, both were Page 138 →invested in the concept of habit for similar reasons encircling adaptation. Both were interested in the ways in which habit helped distinguish one organism from another, affecting its chances of survival. For Lamarck, ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics offered a theory that gave “more weight to the organism’s responses to its environment: habit and transmission,” according to Sharon Kim.70 Such a theory also presented change as immediately possible during a generation, whereas Darwin’s theory of

natural selection highlighted incremental changes over nearly unimaginable periods of time. Because Lamarck’s “starting-point” was “nature as a whole,” according to L. J. Jordanova, the context of environment played a prominent part in his understanding of adaptive habits.71 In Lamarck’s view, “there existed a dialectical relationship between organism and environment,” such that in the resulting “harmonious systemВ .В .В . its constituent parts manifested different, contrary forces.”72 As a result of this understanding, the pressure of the environment could affect the “organs” of a given animal, such that the “development of organs” corresponded directly with their use.73 According to Jordanova, Lamarck treated animals as taking up “active adaptive responses to their biological needs,” or “habits.”74 Further, writes Jordanova: “Habit” (in French, habitude) was a technical term in Lamarck’s vocabulary; it provided a physiological explanation of adaptation to prevailing circumstances which, while demonstrating the impact of the environment on animals, also showed their active response to it. It followed that habits played a crucial role in the development of the animal series for, as the fourth law stated, modifications acquired as a result of them were passed on through reproduction, and persisted as long as there was adaptive value in them. Habit was a biological mechanism whereby simple organs became more complex and new organs developed.75 Distinctive here is the way in which “habit” became a way to describe individuated reactions to a given environment. So crucial was the concept of habit to Lamarckian science, contends Richard W. Burkhardt, that it formed the basis of an organism’s response to the environment. Lamarck’s “discussions of the close correlations between the structures of living things, their habits, and the conditions of their existence” led him to focus on environment and corresponding habits as the basis of his theory of biological change.76 Page 139 →In the course of connecting Lamarck’s work to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Kim asserts that Lamarck’s understanding of biological adaptation was popular, for “by the late nineteenth century, LamarckismВ .В .В . was taken to explain not only physical diversity and basic instinct but even traits like the religious disposition, the artistic faculty, monogamy, Catholicism, conscience, taste in foods, paying taxes, and democratic government.”77 My sense of the usefulness associated with habit, however, is rooted in its narrative potential. For writers who were particularly invested in emotional subjects and who were admittedly less focused on physical change than were scientists, aspects of Lamarck’s ideas about the immediacy of response to an environment overlapped with emotional habit, which could take shape during one individual’s lifetime or even during brief periods of time and in response to new stimuli.78 What “habit” offered authors of fiction was a way to think about emotional patterns and their effect on an individual’s survival. Some habits of emotion could help a being to flourish, while others might lead to peril of one sort or another. Narratively, too, habit offered a way to individuate a being’s history, one that was visible in behaviors. Hence, the concept’s literary appeal was striking. The understanding of habit that realist writers brought to their texts thus allowed them to hone their sense of an individuated past so as to include the ways in which competing familial influences, environmental pressures, and individually formative events shaped behaviors in ways that either benefited a character—or did not. Emotional habits, when narrativized, pointed to behaviors that were also mutable and subject to individual will (as William James would later assert). James famously promoted the idea that the body produced emotions based on the psychological effects of its actions, as in his 1884 query in “What Is an Emotion?”: “Can one fancy the state of rage and picture not ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in the stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot.”79 “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” he concludes.80 James typically directed readers to alter their emotional states by controlling their bodies, as in his directive to chase away “sullenness” and embrace “real cheerfulness”: “Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it does not gradually thaw!” he exhorted, emphasizing the production of voluntary emotion, which James connected Page 140 →with productivity, manliness, and self-

control.81 For him, to change one’s emotional habits (via bodily control) was a means of offering one a chance at a more enhanced life. In a novel like Ethan Frome, the question of emotional habit is directly linked to both happiness and, ultimately, survival. On the most basic level, Ethan might flourish by adopting new affective habits, and it is Mattie Silver’s arrival in his life that makes this possibility manifest. Whether Mattie supplies Ethan with a welcoming environment to which he can adapt, or whether her presence offers him an opportunity to sense his own agency so that he can then reconstitute his emotional life, the construct of habit in Wharton’s novel is by far the most positive rendering of emotion in regard to Ethan’s existence. This, in short, is what Mattie Silver’s presence dramatizes, for Mattie serves as a challenge to Ethan’s customs and stirs in him new desires, not only of the sexual sort, but desires to behave and function differently. These are also desires that allow him to imagine that he might feel differently—and on a daily basis. Mattie’s presence and the desires linked to her challenge a number of influences, including Ethan’s adaptation to the land and the precedent of his genetic history. One of the novel’s terrible ironies, then, will be the fact that it is not Ethan who adapts to Mattie, but Mattie who adapts to Zeena and, through her, to the precedent of the Frome lineage. Never quite hopeful enough to leave Starkfield, Ethan and Mattie experience their terrible crash, after which Mattie becomes increasingly Frome-like in her behaviors; tended by Zeena, she is transformed from a blooming and vivacious girl to a fretful and complaining paralytic, possessed of a “faceВ .В .В . bloodless and shriveled” and “dark eyes [that] had the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives” (95). In addition, her “huddled” body, her gray hair, her “amber-tinted” face, “with swarthy shadows sharpening her nose and hollowing the temples” (95), and her “high thin voice” devoted to complaint all contrast tragically with the healthy good-heartedness attributed to young Mattie and are reminiscent of Zeena Frome, as least as she was before the accident (for she also transforms her habits, and somewhat positively) (96). As Mrs. Hale, a Starkfield neighbor, asserts, Mattie was an “easy” person “before the accident; I never knew a sweeter nature. But she’s suffered too much—that’s what I always say when folks tell me how she’s soured” (98). Focusing attention on the origins of Mattie’s altered nature, or her turn to “sour” expressions instead of light-hearted ones, the novel points to one particular model for Mattie’s adaptations in Zeena. Of her changed habits Page 141 →after the crash, the greatest is Mattie’s inclination to complain, with her “querulous droning” (12) and “complaininglyВ .В .В . high thin voice” (96), reminiscent of both Zeena’s “flat whine” (18) and the “querulous lines from her thin nose to the corners of her mouth” (34). An injured, paralytic Mattie, with “her faceВ .В .В . bloodless and shriveled,” a sharp nose and hollow temples (95), also resembles “drawn and bloodless” Zeena, who appeared an “old woman” at “only” twenty-eight, earlier in the novel (34). In form as well, Mattie appears “huddled” on cushions in a “limp immobility” (95), resembling an apparently formless Zeena, who previously appeared lying “indistinctly outlined under the dark calico quilt, her high-boned face taking a grayish tinge from the whiteness of the pillow” (18–19). Whereas Zeena was once “wholly absorbed in her health” (33), so by the novel’s end is Mattie, whose accident remains the subject of conversation through the final pages. A Zeena who was once “too mean” to sleep has become the model for the complaining invalid, Mattie, as she drones on, morning and night, about her comfort (33). Other than the difficulty of accepting Zeena as any type of model, there is the additional impossibility of Mattie’s adaptation to any other behavioral models, for as Mrs. Hale notes, “There was nowhere else for her to go” (98). According to other theories of emotional management, too, there appears to be little possibility of change. For Mattie, the connection between body and mind, as in William James’s theory that the body creates and controls emotional states, leaves no room for future improvements, for Mattie’s altered personality—after the sled’s crash—appears traceable to her now shrunken and “shriveled” form. If the capacity for emotion is linked to the body and can be controlled by the body, then it would also follow that the body’s deviation from control would mean a loss of emotional direction as well, or radically changed, “shriveled” emotional habits. Thus, while cheerfulness could be cultivated, as the early parts of the novel seem to promise in regard to Ethan, it is also the case that debilitating conditions of the mind could be caused by a damaged body, or

the scenario that we see at the novel’s end in the vision of a witchlike, immobile Mattie. According to Justine Murison, who explores the phenomenon of anxiety in nineteenth-century literature, discourses surrounding the ailment attempted to locate its exact cause, or to “ascertain the first cause, the first domino in the chain of sympathy: brain or stomach,” with the idea that identifying anxiety’s point of origin meant alleviating the condition.82 While locating bodily origins of emotional states offered clear therapeutic possibilities, the conditions in Wharton’s novel are more complex. While the effects of the accidentPage 142 → have contributed to Mattie’s souring in the present, no future intervention is possible, for in the time frame of the novel, the sledding incident that maimed Mattie and Ethan took place decades earlier. Over the past twenty-four years, without hope of either a new environment or a new adaptation, Mattie’s habits appear unchangeable. She has become someone entirely different from her former self, now devoid of the hope that new and voluntary bodily habits might offer. By the novel’s end, the physical and psychological conditions of immobility mirror one another, making it clear that any intervention into the physical would matter little if it did not additionally address noncorporeal factors. While for Wharton, Mattie’s damaged spine, the location of a human body’s mobility, is a clear contributor to her changed personality, Mattie’s situation in the Frome household also matters, for it constrains her psychologically, both before and after the crash. Such factors position emotion’s history in relation to an entire environment, suggesting that influences on the individual are multitiered as well as mutually coinciding; they are no mere matter of will. Rather, Mattie’s emotional adaptations appear to involve many intersecting influences. Mattie was habituated to the Frome household’s demands, seemingly made compliant by the force of poverty and by her need to please Zeena in order to maintain her home in Starkfield, then injured and rendered still more dependent upon Zeena. Thus, while Mattie’s injured body appears as the most obvious sign of her immobility, her paralysis has in fact been long predicted, for the physical restriction but formalizes the economic and gendered limitations that bind Mattie to the Frome household from the novel’s outset. If they cannot be changed, then the “soured” habits of the present have no remedy.

The Tragic Influence of Sympathy As the novel lays bare the logic of adaptation as a way through which to assess both Ethan’s and Mattie’s emotional habits, it implicitly positions origins-based concerns as a response to theories of sympathetic connection through shared emotion. By writing a new type of narrative—one invested in the origins of emotional tendencies and in their persistence—Ethan Frome self-consciously engages in a new treatment of emotion, one that firmly situates it as a modern and informed topic shaped by scientific thinking and by various ways of examining the question of origins. By exploring emotion through such a modern lens, the novel deviates from sympathetic precedents, which would point to the hopeful possibilities of common understanding.Page 143 → In the process, Ethan Frome also underscores sympathy’s antiquated and dangerous effects. In the context of Ethan’s life, his neighbor’s sympathy becomes one of the most deleterious influences in his life. A sympathetic encounter between Ethan and his neighbor, Mrs. Hale, which took place some twenty-four years before the narrative’s present day, is recalled over the course of the plot in relation to its pivotal place in cementing Ethan’s tragic stasis. At this point in the past, Ethan has learned of Zeena’s plan to replace Mattie with a hired girl, who will not only take over Mattie’s chores but, more significantly for Ethan, send Mattie away. For a man who believes that “every yard of the road was alive with Mattie’s presence” (76–77), who uncharacteristically feels that his “glow of passion [for her]В .В .В . had melted to an aching tenderness,” the thought of her departure is unendurable (66). Overtaken by “confused emotions of rebellion” (72), adamant that his affection for Mattie should not be sacrificed to the whims of the “bitter querulous woman” who is his wife, Ethan thinks of “a case of a man over the mountain—a young fellow of about his own age—who had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West with the girl he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had married the girl and prospered” (72). Based on this model, Ethan determines that he will leave the next day for a new life with Mattie. It is at this juncture that sympathy enters the text, but it will function in inverse to its hopeful possibilities; rather, sympathy in Starkfield functions so as to forestall Ethan’s hope for a healthy future, just as some combination

of habit and acclimation has forestalled Ethan’s speech. Intending to borrow money from Andrew Hale (ostensibly an advance on a load of lumber), Ethan approaches his neighbors. Believing that “if he could get Mrs. Hale’s ear he felt certain of success, and with fifty dollars in his pocket nothing could keep him from Mattie,” Ethan views the money as key to a new and emotionally rewarding life (77).83 Yet the plan backfires as the conversation begins with a discussion of Zeena’s poor health, when Mrs. Hale unexpectedly praises Ethan, noting his mother’s illness and observing that it has been his lot to look after both mother and wife. “You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,” she remarks (78). As she gives him “a last nod of sympathy,” Ethan stands in the “middle of the road,” contemplating her brief speech, considering the following: It was a long time since anyone had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs. Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have Page 144 →carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs. Hale had said, “You’ve had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,” and he felt less alone with his misery. If the Hales were sorry for him they would surely respond to his appeal.В .В .В . He started down the road toward their house, but at the end of a few yards he pulled up sharply, the blood in his face. For the first time, in the light of the words he had just heard, he saw what he was about to do. He was planning to take advantage of the Hales’ sympathy to obtain money from them on false pretences. That was a plain statement of the cloudy purpose which had driven him in headlong to Starkfield. (78) Mrs. Hale’s sympathy for Ethan awakens in him a moment of imagination wherein he envisions the Hales’ financial situation, as his “feel[ing] less alone” takes shape. As a consequence, Ethan reconsiders the morality of his action, or borrowing the money “on false pretenses,” thereby causing potential injury to the nearly impoverished couple. Moreover, he considers that his “desertion” would leave Zeena “alone and destitute.” His plan to leave Starkfield, thus considered, looks like “madness,” and he determines to stay (78). The moment of sympathy initiated by Mrs. Hale and so kindly meant, in effect, leads not to supportive understanding but to entrapment; unable to consider the logistical and financial effects of leaving, Ethan will remain in Starkfield, only to crash a sled headlong into a tree. What brings Ethan to such a literal blow is his one foray into sympathy’s dynamic, which becomes the instrument of his prison-house. In its implicit opposition to a sentimental paradigm, Ethan Frome positions Ethan’s imaginative exploration of another’s experience, not atavism or brutishness, as key to what limits him. As a testament to its modernity, the novel presents sympathy as an emotion of the past, unsuited to life in the more complex and multifaceted present. While, as Jennifer Travis argues, Ethan Frome “owes some debt to the emotive landscape of the sentimental novel, ” I would add that it reverses the energies of sentimentalism, ironically redirecting imagined reciprocity to the fueling of misery.84 While I want to suggest the possibility that any fiction—written in virtually any period—could return to the sympathetic logic established by scholars such as Elizabeth Barnes, Julia Stern, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Glen Hendler, and Kristin Boudreau, to name but a few, Wharton’s novel might be positioned in a historical arc somewhere between the hopeful expressions of the sentimental novel (in Page 145 →which, as Kristin Boudreau contends, “a belief in shared feelings” and a desire to inspire “imaginary leaps across spaces of difference” reigned) and the affective alienation characteristic of literary modernity.85 According to sympathy’s logic, fellow feeling should enlighten viewers, allowing them to gain from their experience of another’s suffering. Witnesses to suffering should, as Adam Smith asserted, produce “imaginative transport,” resulting in a moment of emotional identification that is instructional, both for the individual viewer (in the text) and for the reader of the text.86 In Ethan Frome, however, it is not suffering per se but Ethan’s longsuffering that is most visible, including his torturous existence alongside Zeena and Mattie in the cramped Frome kitchen. And it is the object of ostensible pity, Ethan, not the viewer of his suffering, who is motivated to enact a situational reciprocity that, rather than prompting a reparative act, turns into tragic entrapment, first in Ethan’s decision not to borrow money and begin a new life and subsequently in his

attempt at suicide with Mattie. Living with the physical and mental consequences of nearly losing his own life and of seeing Mattie’s youth and body destroyed becomes a peculiar kind of hell. In Ethan’s acknowledgment of the “kindly people who had pitied him,” no one benefits. One of the details in this scenario—the imagined borrowing of money—reveals the only moment in the novel when we can identify with certainty the cause of Ethan’s decision-making. We know of his reciprocal feeling for the Hales, and we know how fully that moment is implicated in the longsuffering to follow. Hence, the question arises: What good is sympathy, if it entraps individuals in lives of misery? There are aesthetic answers, of course, or answers that might address such issues as “closure” or even, perhaps, the sine qua non of twentieth-century fiction, “irony.” Yet it is inescapable that sympathy does not operate here as it ought. Rather than creating avenues of understanding, it isolates Ethan from his desires. Rather than uniting individuals in emotional terms, it joins three injured and reciprocally tormented individuals in a small, cramped, smoky space for the rest of their natural lives. This horrific unity thus serves as an ultimate form of torment. If taken as a model of how late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors recast emotional representations, Ethan Frome suggests more than the sum total of its Darwinist, Lamarckian, physiological, and sociological approaches to affective origins and emotional habits. With its final emphasis on querulous patients and “indifferent” townspeople burdened with their own troubles, the novel’s ending repeatedly demonstrates a departurePage 146 → from sympathy’s cohesive sense of citizenry; it suggests that no solace comes from attempts to engender understanding. Instead, emotions remain the subject of inquiry. As Mrs. Hale attests, no one “could never rightly tell” what Ethan and Mattie had attempted the night of the crash, and the story has remained mysterious ever since—the narrative of the unknowable thus concluding the novel (98). That a 1911 novel would sidestep a deeper investment in sympathy so as to raise questions about emotion’s origin may also stem from an understanding of the literary past. In Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen describes a scenario in which “people experiencing empathetic overarousal may react with aversion to the source of the negative feelings, as studies of personal distress indicate.”87 In the case of “too much empathy,” Keen writes, aversion to the victims or to the source of information” is a result.88 If the condition of “too much empathy” can be understood as a historical condition, or as a response to the dominance of the sentimental novel, then Ethan Frome’s undermining of an overtly expressive emotional paradigm—primarily through its relentless questioning of coexisting forms of emotional origins—suggests one way in which realist-era texts could be crafted so as to counter their literary predecessors, even while claiming affective concerns as their own. Readers’ responses to the novel suggest that it was interpreted as advancing modern literature’s emphasis on jarring and noncomforting emotions over reparative feelings, for Ethan Frome was read by its initial reviewers as “too cruel, too awful,” “hard to forgive,” and “an infinite refinement of torture” based on the novel’s deviation from a sympathetic exchange.89 What such reviews voice is an expectation that there could be a reciprocal relationship in which someone gains understanding from another’s suffering, whereas in Wharton’s novel the affective habits and proclivities of the major character suggest that few problems will be solved through affect. Rather, with its backward glances, the novel highlights the longstanding and multiply reinforced emotional habits implicated in the Frome tragedy. In its insistence on affective complexity, the realist-era novel’s approach to emotional representation produced a set of fraught yet generative problems for late-nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century authors, who, despite their attention to processes of emotional classification, resisted affective resolutions. I have been suggesting that realist-era depictions of emotion operated in several ways: they pointed to a long history of personal origins (upbringing, unfinished emotional business, relative maturity, exposure to the world), as well as a much broader and less personal history connectedPage 147 → to the human race’s evolutionary past. One consequence of looking backward to emotional origins was that narratives frequently remained inconclusive, and because such fictions rarely predicted futures for their characters, they dwelt on the unfinished business of emotional experience. Characters might sit on a train and think about their emotional life, the journey unfinished. Or they might, like Ethan Frome, remain locked in a space where emotional habits live on, creating

transformations into shadowy and twisted beings who cannot break existing patterns of behavior or feeling. As a somewhat loose approximation of scientific thought, the origins narrative offered a flexible model for analytically inclined representations of emotion. In its invocation of emotional origins, a text such as Ethan Frome partially assuages an ambivalence about scientific approaches to affect by engaging their possibilities fully. As one example of a new discourse of and about affect, Ethan Frome considers the degree to which the search for emotional history, whether immediate or ancient, becomes the story.

Dunbar-Nelson’s Sense of Origins For Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the past was a fraught subject, particularly in its potential to delineate racial and ethnic categories that constrained individuals of color in the Deep South. An enigmatic fiction, “The Stones of the Village” raises questions about the genesis of emotional habits in its protagonist’s complicated, careful life.90 According to the University of Delaware index to Dunbar-Nelson’s work, the story was composed around 1900, and it remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime. What made “Stones” unpublishable at the fin de siГЁcle, we might speculate, is precisely the element that makes the story so compelling today, its portrait of complex, untamable, but suppressed feeling, for which strategies of containment are never quite sufficient. Focused on the idiosyncrasies of heritage and adaptation that affect Victor Grabert, a light-skinned young man of mixed race in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, the narrative traces the emotional consequences of his racial passing, including the affective habits he has developed over time.91 Because the story features a man who is passing, it has been grouped with fictions other than Wharton’s, primarily alongside race-passing fictions set in the postwar South. And yet “Stones,” like Ethan Frome, confronts the creation and maintenance of emotional habits, especially among individuals who fail to express their inner emotions, or the type of characterPage 148 → who occasioned a realist analysis of his emotional origins and habits. From its beginning, “Stones” focuses on the intersection of unexpressed motivations and the behavioral as well as emotional consequences of complex forms of racial affiliation. In so doing, it suggests that the tangle of racial belonging propels the creation and recreation of various emotional habits. Despite the ways in which Victor Grabert reimagines his life as he begins passing for white, his emotional constitution, formed over a long period during his youth, remains reflective not only of his new patterns in life but also of the secretive, fearful, and isolated habits adopted by the young Victor even before he began passing.92 According to Gloria Hull, the story exhibits Dunbar-Nelson’s exploration of “complexities she never touched any place else” in her work as she confronts “the popular Afro-American literary themes of the вЂcolor line’—that is, passing—and the вЂtragic mulatto’ from the unique vantage of the Louisiana black Creole.’”93 As it suggests that the formative emotional experiences of childhood were powerful enough to shape a character for life, the story begins with Victor’s youth. Victor, who was born and raised in the New Orleans slums by his West Indian grandmother, was taunted by young playmates, who called him a “white nigger” after his grandmother refused to allow him to play with other children of color.94 Though miserable as a result of this directive and the children’s taunts, he obeys, somewhat fearfully. Later, he finds himself unwittingly passing based on the presumption of an early benefactor. The pattern of accidental passing recurs throughout the story after Victor’s initial employer, a bookseller, dies and leaves him a small fortune. The estate’s legal guardian then takes charge, and he plans for Victor to attend Tulane University, thereby helping to assure Victor’s assumption of a white, professional identity after he graduates from law school. It is a moment, according to Jordan Stouck, that reveals the power of masculinity in the South as much as it stresses the importance of being “reborn into a patriarchially defined space through the father figures of the bookseller and his lawyer.”95 Exploring the complexities of both “racial taxonomies” and modulated “tonal registers” in relation to race, the story dwells on Victor Grabert’s emotional responses to key life events; his affective habits thus appear as key not only to his adaptations but to his ability to thrive.96 As the story also reveals, his journey across racial lines is an emotionally fraught one, for he has adapted to life in both black and white communities, though with feelings of isolation in each. Considerable dangers attend any obvious enactment of deep feeling that might

align him with the poor and disenfranchisedPage 149 → (and black), even while he also retains deep ties to the satisfied and successful (and white), though he is conflicted about the society’s casual racism; consequently, he constrains his behavior considerably. Later in life, when Victor is passing as white, his sympathies for the black population, he fears, may reveal his racial heritage. Hence his secret sympathies, alongside a host of other emotions, remain severed from his expressive tendencies. His habits thus become repressive rather than demonstrative, and moreover, they fail to reflect his emotional preferences. One critique of Dunbar-Nelson’s work is that it fails to register fully the complexity of racial prejudice; Gloria Hull, for example, introduces Dunbar-Nelson’s work as motivated by a “driving desire to pull together the multiple strands of her complex personality and poetics,” but as more completely driven by “an opposing—and perhaps ultimately more powerful—ambivalence” about that unity.97 While my argument here does not address the range of work comprising Dunbar-Nelson’s career, it highlights not ambivalence, but a considerable gap between affective appearances and possible motives, which “The Stones of the Village” explores as two separate strands of Victor’s life. Because of Victor Grabert’s changed environments and multiple levels of education, his emotional habits can be traced to many sources, leaving him with competing motivations, many of which will not appear in his behaviors. While theories of emotional adaptation like William James’s suggest that Victor could potentially feel accepted as a white man as a consequence of his actions in the white community and his affiliations with other white citizens, the story does not depict this possibility. Instead, it registers Victor’s meditations on his distance from what he understands as unselfconscious whiteness and his sense of participating in what he considers to be deceit as he passes. At the same time, he lives the life of a white man, to the extent of not only appearing publicly as white (as phenotype allows) but also adopting the behaviors, ambitions, and prejudices (at least outwardly) of the turn-of-the-century South’s law-making race. Yet Victor’s links to the white South are never casual, never allowed to appear superficial, for his white wife and phenotypically white child (a son) are omnipresent in his mind, along with the imperative that their privileged status in the world remain unchallenged. The story’s title refers to the stones hurled at young Victor by neighborhood boys, with whom he was not allowed to play and who taunted him and subjected him to a formative sense of humiliation. These stones (and the epithets that accompanied them) thus become experiences that Page 150 →shaped Victor’s life, rendering him anxious, resentful, and defensive, despite his professional successes. When Victor’s grandmother prevented him from associating with racially mixed children, the prohibition created in him a “throbbing” response and “bitterness and anger,” as well as a “spirit” characterized by “dull, sullen, resentment, flaming out now and then into almost murderous vindictiveness,” setting in motion a tendency to conceal strong emotional reactions against forbidden desires (481). Later in life, as Victor adapts to the opportunities that emerge in white society, this tendency to submerge his emotional motivations serves him well. As Grabert ponders “the good fortune” of his rise from the slums to college, then law school and onward, he recognizes that he had made friends, at first, with the boys he met and they, in turn, had taken him into their homes. Now and then, the Buckleys asked him to dinner, and he was seen occasionally in their box at the opera. He was rapidly becoming a social favorite, and girls vied with each other to dance with him.В .В .В . Grabert’s personality was pleasing, without being aggressive, so he had passed through the portals of the social world and was in the inner circle. (486) Stressing the young man’s lack of personal agency, along with an apparent absence of passion, the narrative links Victor’s emotionally temperate behavior to his personal isolation, projecting all motivating impulses onto the figures surrounding Victor and leaving him to stand as a figure for whom “passion” is too vivid a term. In part a sign that strong emotion may have posed too many associations with violence (and racist assumptions about African American atavism) for Dunbar-Nelson to depict Victor as anything other than outwardly passive, Victor’s lack of outward passion stems from impressions based on his behaviors, not his

motives, which are unknown to others. “Pleasant,” “friendly,” and nonaggressive, Victor will nonetheless experience a set of unalterable anxieties, all traceable to his early social alienation. Once he becomes a successful lawyer, then judge, these anxieties reemerge as Victor finds himself unwillingly identifying with the oppression experienced by the black members of the community, even though he is able to conceal most signs of that identification. Deep and repressed emotion, however, has long been his lot. As Jordan Stouck argues of the story, Victor’s experience reveals “consciously displayed” contradictions surrounding race and ethnicity, which draw attention to the complexities and Page 151 →discontinuities of “creole society.”98 As he contemplates racially inflected legal cases, Victor enacts those contradictions, for he is aware of “a subtle undercurrent of annoyance: a sort of mental reservation that placed itself on every pleasant memory” (487). Unable to join either the black or the white community, he nonetheless responds inwardly, as at a moment when a court recorder chastises a black defendant for appearing with a flower in his buttonhole. When the recorder growls, “вЂYou niggers are putting yourselves up too much for me,” Victor reacts to this “forbidden word,” for “the blood rushed to Victor’s face, and he started from his seat angrily” (487). Immediately, he recovers by burying his face in a paper, “tingling with rage and indignation, although the affront had not been given him” (487). In such instances, the narrative stresses Victor’s repression of his physical responses, along with his tendency to tell himself he is a “sentimental fool” for reacting (487). He also recalls his loyalties to his white wife and family, ties significant enough to force self-restraint upon him. At such moments, Victor’s suppressed identification with the black defendant serves as no solution to his cultural dilemma, for the gap between emotion and behavior remains. The story does not suggest that Victor possesses any “natural” or inherited affinity with blackness, but rather, points to the formative experiences in his past that link young Victor’s humiliation with that of black defendants in the courtroom. By contrast, the white population is characterized by an absence of anxiety of various sorts (an absence of concern over the begetting of children, for example), alongside claims to social exclusivity and unquestioned privilege, for the white South appears assured that justice is on its side (and from views of the courtroom, this appears to be the case). Victor’s self-restraint has not become a complete or unquestioned habit, however, or at least it is not as strong as is the habit of anxiety. Seeking to override any impulse that would allow him to feel empathetic identification with black laborers, including the man who cleans his office, Victor distances himself from the entire black population in order to rid himself of this unbidden identificatory pathway. In light of his recognition of his “growing sympathy” for an oppressed race, he becomes “morbidly nervous lest a thing in his manner would betray him” (487–488). Later, when Grabert jokingly defends a black man’s right to order food in a restaurant, a friend mocks him for apparently “losing his mind” (491). Grabert asks himself, “What will I do next?” as he considers that “his outburst of indignationВ .В .В . had come from his lips almost before he knew it, and he was frightened, frightened at his own unguarded behavior. He did not know Page 152 →what had come over him” (491). This type of highly charged incident—which unites motive and expression—leaves him feeling the disjunction between his public and professional victories, which ring “hollow,” and his complex personal passions, which, in his view, must be suppressed (487). Victor presumes that any hint of sympathy for the black population poses the risk of personal exposure, particularly as he considers the ways in which African Americans appear at the mercy of a discriminatory legal system. While the story assumes that one must have experienced the difficulties of disenfranchisement in order to empathize with similarly marginalized individuals, it gains greater complexity in its recognition that one’s capacity for inconvenient sympathy may lead, perversely, to further wrongs against an oppressed population. As a consequence of the unwelcome unity of feeling and action that he seeks to suppress, Victor pursues a defensive campaign against his own sympathies. He not only fires domestic servants of black heritage but, more problematically, pronounces obviously prejudiced decisions in the courtroom. Despite Victor’s emotional responses to the plight of black Americans, his controlled and prejudicial behaviors contradict his unarticulated emotions (his shock and outrage in response to prejudice). The resulting, unresolved tensions permeate his postures, including his eventual adoption of redirective racism in the courtroom, even as he comes to respect a

combative lawyer who becomes an advocate for black defendants. For a man who is personally enmeshed in both sides of the social and physical enactment of race, emotional and affective impartiality become impossible, for as Victor’s deepest emotional habits demand, his motives and affective behaviors must remain severed from one another. Given the complexities of enacting racial prejudice while feeling sympathy for black Americans, there can be no hope for a unified ending, for Victor’s body and heart function at odds with one another. Moreover, both his behaviors and his habitual emotional pathways are too fully developed for either to disappear, so they coexist in a state of unabated tension. The affective dissonance in Victor’s life never fades, in part because his anxieties never abate. Whereas transcendence through shared feeling may have offered a narrative solution in a plot where bodies echo hearts, for Victor, emotion (either felt or expressed) presents no solution to the world where everyday action is governed by a habit as strong as any motivating feeling. The story ends without affective resolution, but with Victor’s death, which directly follows his desire to reveal his mixed racial identity to a professional crowd assembled to honor his accomplishments. Tempted “to end the whole miserable farce” by announcing the secret of his racial identity, Page 153 →he longs to witness the consternation of his audience and to experience the pleasure of linking his accomplishments to an uncelebrated racial heritage (499). Yet the mere anticipation of this disburdening moment silences Victor forever, for he has a heart attack just as he is about to give the speech he has planned. At such a moment, formative emotion and acquired affect refuse to operate independently any longer. While neither aspect of identity—the outer or the inner—is false, neither dominates. As this narrative highlights the social and economic rewards of a torturous process of emotional concealment, it also asserts the strength of submerged emotional habits among even the most visibly pragmatic of men. That Victor’s body is ultimately overwhelmed by emotional conflict seems clear, but we are uncertain as to why, a point that adds another layer of complication to the story. In the broadest sense, overabundant feeling provides an answer. But is it anxiety that finally pushes Victor beyond his limitations? The exaltation of an anticipated release? Anxiety? Relief? Fear? Imagined revenge upon the taunting boys from the New Orleans streets of his youth, whom he recalls as he nears death? Freedom from them, at last? If Victor’s body responds to one particular emotional possibility above others, there is no way to determine what it is. Rather, the tension between inner emotion and outer constraint appears to end his life just as he is tempted to dispel that tension with his revelation. Yet this tension has in many ways defined him, for it constituted his life as a complex and restrained individual. To lose that complexity and to adopt new habits would mean, in essence, losing himself. In attempting to break down the separation between act and feeling and reveal himself in all of his complexity, Victor learns both that old habits limit his ability to flourish and that they will not die. In the contest between habit and intent, habit wins, even at the expense of the individual. In depicting emotions that differ from affective behavioral patterns, realist fiction by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Edith Wharton asserts the presence of both sociological and biological bases for emotional individuation. Emotional uniqueness, as they cast it, stems from no single source, but from multiple and overlapping ones. In their depictions of emotional inheritances, including both how those inheritances shape lives and how individuals resist that shaping, fictions such as Ethan Frome and “The Stones of the Village” point to the complexities of emotional pasts and the habits of emotion connected to them. But rather than figuring one element of inheritance as formative, their fictions invoke circumstance, environment, Page 154 →and potential adaptations, all of which affect individuals profoundly; out of these interwoven possibilities, they highlight a resulting dynamic between emotion and an expression so complex that it creates emotional habits, which, once established early in an individual’s life, are difficult to alter, despite new circumstances and despite desires to change. When William James claimed, “As emotions are described in novels they interest us, for we are made to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects and emergencies which call them forth,” he imagined a scenario in which the stimuli for emotions were external and visible and hence traceable by interested observers.99 It was a theory that both Wharton and Dunbar-Nelson rejected, however, as each explored the emotional habits that emerged from multiple dimensions of a personal past. In attributing complexity to emotional

habits and the lifestyles constructed around them, backward-glancing realist-era fictions voice an implicit refutation of the idea that emotional lives are dominated by a single “true” quality or feeling. Rather, these fictions suggest that narratives of emotional subjects involved a detailed understanding of repressed emotion as comprised of complex histories and interwoven possibilities. Suggesting that emotionally resonant behaviors encompassed more than an identifiable motive that could be traced to a single type of behavior, this fiction insistently interrogates the gap between affect and emotion as a means of complicating essentialist ideas about emotion’s origins. Where emotion came from and how it operated thus remained a complex and perhaps an invisible history, one that could be queried and explored in any number of individuated circumstances and in regard to any number of potential influences.

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Chapter Four Cultivated Emotion Race, the Body, and the Affectively Constituted Subject In literature of the early US national period, Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments influenced authors who wished to explore idealized cohesion in a new nation anxious about its propensity to govern fairly. In line with his Enlightenment-era worldview, Smith imagined the body as a universal leveler, which, he argued, becomes the interlocutor when one is attempting to understand another’s experience. If bodily suffering (torture on the rack, for example) could be imagined as if located in the observer’s corporeal form, in Smith’s contention, “we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations” by “changing places in fancy” and experiencing an “analogous emotion.”1 Sympathetic connection thus relied upon the concept of an interchangeable body, one that allowed viewers to “conceiv[e] what they themselves would suffer” if in the same position.2 With the body poised as the instrument through which fellow feeling could be imagined, Smith posited that all individuals could feel, if not the same degree of emotion, then the same affective quality, for the viewer should “feel something, which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike” the sufferer’s experience.3 Smith’s invocation of the body’s universality is crucial, for the body becomes the gateway to shared assumptions about sympathy as rooted in corporality, through which pain is expressed. Thus the witness to suffering imagines (and fears) the possibility of her own pain, thereby linkingPage 156 → her imagined, potential suffering with the actual suffering of another. Throughout this process, the body’s vulnerability becomes a way for all to understand pain’s effects. By the turn into the twentieth century, however, some 140 years after Smith’s essay appeared in print, this understanding of the body as a locus of commonality appeared problematic in an increasingly polyglot nation where the experiences of women, immigrants, and African Americans made their way into the nation’s diversifying literature. Realist literature’s insistence that bodies with different phenotypes, different histories, different legal rights could not, in fact, be equated challenged the idea of the body as universal interlocutor. As Charles Chesnutt posited in his passing novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), the body of John Warwick (a mixed-race character who constructs a white identity for himself) is subject to expectations and privileges different from those accorded to John Walden (who is limited by his black heritage in postbellum North Carolina). Though both names refer to the same man, who is possessed of dual names and different racial identities, and though Walden and Warwick occupy the same corporeal space and are nourished by the same blood, their experiences in the postwar South are unequal. Sharing a body, for them, fails to bring about equivalencies in experience. Chesnutt’s novel thus serves as a reminder that treating bodies as sites of universal exchange would mean imagining not only a color-blind society but one devoid of prejudice about the unseen factors that contribute to constructions of race. For authors of earlier eras, sympathy had functioned as a way “to secure public order in a new and fragile nation, to temper private and regional interests during the chronically unstable 1850s, to urge American citizens to accept blacks as full human beings and citizens,” as Kristin Boudreau explains the dynamic.4 As she portrays it, sympathy continued to possess the potential “to forge tighter bonds of consanguinity among select individuals in order to defend against a hostile world” in the antebellum United States.5 But in the wake of war and Reconstruction, ideals of “consanguinity,” literally, of common blood, came under tremendous strain, particularly in literature by African American authors, for whom blood relations could not function solely as a metaphor, so closely was genetic heritage tied to differentiated circumstances. Given realist literature’s attention to signs of difference in terms of class, education, well-being, and phenotype, the idealized notion of universal exchange, body for body, experience for experience, became pointedly untenable and, with it, Smith’s vision of sympathy. One complicating factor in the depiction of emotion was racial passing and the fiction that explores it, where the

complexity of the body as a site Page 157 →of identity becomes the main narrative focus. As Ezra F. Tawil notes, “Contemporary culture accustoms us to thinking of race in visual terms, that is, as something we can see. Yet the assumption that race can be reduced, in the last analysis, to an external mark on the body is the first thing we ought to call into question in order to understand how early nineteenth-century American culture understood race.”6 Passing literature, in particular, complicates the external signs of race, as Tawil notes, destabilizing the body’s potential meanings. As part of this effort to destabilize racially encoded meanings, passing literature’s attention to affective patterns also depends upon flexible and changing forms of self-definition. While affective patterns could be stereotyped and mapped onto racial identities, this literature asserts that patterns of feeling may be capable of reinvention, such that emotional habits may be remade entirely. Particularly because passing characters experience many situations, this literature inscribed emotional experiences as wide-ranging, and crucially, it depicted many such experiences as equal in terms of their authenticity. As a consequence, according to the late nineteenth century’s passing fiction, emotional flexibility is part of what marks the passing character, for adaptability allows a character not only to survive but also to thrive in new environments. From the late 1880s through the century’s turn, one particularly rich concept contributive to the idea of emotional flexibility was habit, which included the emotions an individual had experienced and, in potential, could experience. Emotional habit was not a truism about personality or a comment on constitutional selfhood; rather, habit simply implied a pattern of feeling linked to behaviors. In application to the passing scenario, habit meant that emotional lives could adjust to circumstances or even become available to manipulation. Moreover, through the cultivation of desired emotional habits, individuals could refashion their affective lives and, with them, their sense of belonging. Capable of reflecting both old and new, unconscious and deliberate forms of feeling, habit accounted for radical changes in personal experience based on changed circumstances at a point when realist literature about race relations narrated “the story ofВ .В .В . social intolerance and violent suppression of difference,” according to Kenneth Warren.7 This literature took up the issue of emotional habit as way to think through inner responses to intolerance at a period when outward differences meant volatile reactions, but only when they were detected, as they often were not in passing fictions. Looking to passing’s effect on the felt experience of the world, turnof-the-century authors such as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Page 158 →Charles Chesnutt highlight the importance of emotional experiences as a key to personal identity, but it was a key that could be reconfigured.8 Working away from a single category of affect (sympathy, for example) and toward a logic that stresses ways in which emotional experiences were subject to tailoring, the remaking of emotion positioned affective habits as a product of labor. Differing from the relatively straightforward mechanism of behavioral self-control, reshaping one’s affective identity meant the possibility of feeling differently about one’s experience. If understood as both self-directed and genuine, moreover, cultivated emotional habits promised to remake individual lives, allowing fictional characters (and readers) to imagine that it was possible to see oneself as affectively malleable and, above all, as authentically engaged in the world on a number of different levels. In literary studies devoted to passing literature, the language of performance has highlighted the degree to which all identities are in essence performative, thereby highlighting the degree to which passing heightens and complicates existing tropes of social belonging.9 Here, however, I attempt to deconstruct the opposite side of this argument—authenticity—by instead exploring multiple forms of authentic feeling and realist literature’s attention to their formation. Imagining multidimensional scenarios through which to access genuine emotion, I argue, allows for a leveling of experiential states, such that none appear inherently superior to others. One influential intervention into expectations about performance appears in Randall Knoper’s study of Mark Twain’s late career, where Knoper interrogates the idea of genuine acting. Arguing that the “realism of the вЂgenuine’” came under pressure as the previously oxymoronic idea of genuine acting (later described as “method acting”) developed, Knoper explores the concept of an experience that was both consciously invoked and genuine; this, he argues, newly allowed for “resemblance” rather than firsthand experience to play a role in the “reality” of art, writing that “newly subtle ideas of self and expressionВ .В .В . eroded distinctions between durable and transformed selves,” such that actors could “physically perform the signs

of an emotion in order to generate it inside.”10 Intersecting with prevalent beliefs about physical expression as generative of emotion, such theories held that practicing an expressive position enabled one to create new ways of relating to and, ultimately, naturalizing that habitual work. In the context of fraught concepts of race and identity, the idea of practiced emotion destabilized expectations of static, authentic emotional identity, particularly if that stability had been mapped onto racial variables (i.e., the expectation Page 159 →that black men feel anger, for example, or that the tragic mulatta is inherently and constitutionally sorrowful). An interest in the means by which one’s emotional register is established through circumstance (not hereditarily determined), then subsequently adjusted in relation to an evolving, multidimensional identity, leads turn-of-the-century authors to interrogate a set of emotional experiences, including long-held or formative emotions, newly acquired ones, and ones yet to be cultivated. By asserting that emotions emerge from different scenarios, and moreover, that those scenarios could change, the emotional investments of passing literature allow for narratives that embrace the authentic, genuine remaking of emotional experience—one consonant with a realist interest in depicting particular scenarios, limited situations, and individual circumstances in detail. Flexible approaches to emotional truth help to displace judgments oriented to “real” and “false” identities. Based on concepts of emotional adaptation, changes in habit appear as part of a personal evolution, or a necessary element of human survival in what was for many the most desirable environment in the postbellum United States: the one occupied by white America. As Gayle Wald has argued of twentieth-century passing narratives, fictions that explore variable racial affiliations “demonstrate the failure of race to impose stable definitions of identity, or to manifest itself in a reliable, permanent, and/or visible manner.”11 These same narratives, I would argue, highlight the ways in which the emotionally constituted racial subject was not in fact stable across one’s entire life. Incorporating elements of realism and melodrama as well as anticipating the subgenres of the forensic and courtroom dramas, turn-of-the-century passing fictions cross many boundaries. Assessments of the literature’s melodramatic elements, however, have treated overt emotion as deleterious to fiction’s artistic integrity.12 Such analysis, however, has missed the greater, more resonant point about emotion’s generation: that emotions both overt and subtle suggested that emotion could originate from a number of circumstances. Alongside such matters as emotional maturity, dispassion, vulnerability, and vituperation and its dangers, realist-era authors consider where emotion sprang from and under what conditions it could be encouraged.

Voluntary Emotion Arguing that emotion is neither public nor private but both, and hence “a social phenomenon, though not one separable from bodily response,” Julie Ellison has highlighted the complex role of the body in relation to Page 160 →emotional experience.13 By the late nineteenth century, narratives of emotional complexity often invoked the body’s role in emotional production. By asserting that emotion could be cultivated and also authentic, fiction that traced emotional habits imagined a controlled self that could operate confidently in a potentially hostile and volatile world. It also imagined that emotion, like identity itself, could be produced through dedicated work. The key to remaking emotion was bodily control, or the ability to enact a particular form of affect, not for outward show, but because the enactment of emotion preceded the experience of the emotion. Influential writers and scholars such as William James believed that the desire to experience a particular emotion (fearlessness, for example) necessitated one’s pursuit of its physiognomic manifestations. Referring to habits of the mind as “mental hygiene,” James invokes the James-Lange “theory of the emotions,” which holds that “our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation.”14 As James explains the theory, “An emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object’s presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly excites.”15 Moreover, without the body, James observes, we “should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was indeed astonishing,” a distinction that suggests that without the body there is no emotion, but rather, an abstract mental process (“Physical Basis of Emotion,” 262). As part of this theory of physical generation, James asserts that “when we feel sorry it is because we weep” (262); thus he believes that “by regulating the actionВ .В .В . we can indirectly regulate the feeling” (262). Through such arguments, James establishes the

necessary labors involved in emotional control, complete with the belief that one needs to “wrestle with a bad feeling” (262), for emotions, as he views them, are tamable through “voluntary pathways” (262). His theory extends into creating a pathway of emotion, or “a state of mind which .В .В .В . вЂhas the power of intensifying itself’” (347). What James’s work suggests is that there is a way to rewrite emotion’s dynamic by (re)training the body, which makes possible a range of potential relations between motivation and expression. Yet complexities attend the cultivation of emotion that James imagines, for if one engages in skiing to become less fearful, for example, or if one practices mirth to alleviate melancholy, the body will function as a marker of emotion, but in no straightforward way, particularly for viewers. The mirthful individual may not laugh simply because she is happy; perhaps she exhibits laughter Page 161 →because she is unhappy, and upon realizing a need to alter her life, she has taken steps to claim the physical signs of happiness. She might in actuality feel withdrawn, anxious, or solitary. For James, whatever one’s motive, the most visible source of emotion was physiognomy, which meant that emotion was traceable to muscular repetitions, breathing habits, and patterns of exercise and relaxation. To cultivate an emotion, consequently, became, through analogy, as conceivable as developing a capacity to lift a heavy object or to run a rapid mile. To flex one’s emotional pathways, to “act as if from some better feeling,” meant encouraging oneself to repeat an emotional experience that would enable one to continue to experience that emotion, perhaps in intensified and clarified ways.16 Such an attitude meant investing emotional training with the ethos of self-improvement that was endemic to the larger culture of the century’s turn. Realist passing fiction took up interests in personal uplift through the question of emotional generation, largely because it imagined complicated boundaries between emotions rooted in the body and socially provoked forms of affect expressed by the body. In the complex motivation-based imagination at play in the turn-of-the-century novel, deliberate modifications of behavior often bespoke a desire to change one’s life on an emotional level—and authentically so. One of the most popular nineteenth-century theories that allowed for the production of genuine forms of emotion was FranГ§ois Delsarte’s. His approach to emotion, like James’s, disrupted an older (namely sentimental) ideal of singular and “true” emotional experience with ideals of control and cultivation. Guidebooks based on Delsarte’s work recommended to readers a series of exercises that would allow performing artists to create convincing approximations of emotional behaviors by isolating discrete gestures and by promising the exercise of specific bodily positions. Delsarte’s proponents cast subdivision as a key to bodily control, recording minute subdivisions of body and gesture (the position of an eyebrow or curl of the lip, the attitude of the head or the pose of the elbow). By 1890, writes Nancy Ruyter in her study of Americanized Delsarte culture, Delsarte’s visibility in the United States was at its peak, in no small part because of the work of his most ardent American promoter, Genevieve Stebbins, who lectured, instructed, exhibited, and wrote about Delsarte’s system for over seventeen years. Her influential, five-hundred-page tome, Delsarte System of Expression (1885), presented Delsarte’s work through the language of grace and harmony, which in turn allowed for its adoption in etiquette books. “In America,” Stebbins writes, “there is an option prevalent among actors, managers and the public at large to the effectPage 162 → that all work done on the stage should be the result of temperament rather than study: that if any study is given, it should be entirely personal, and should come from the actor’s observation of his own emotions.”17 By contrast, what Delsarte offered, in Stebbins’s eyes, was an approach to “technique,” which would allow for convincing expressions of emotionally saturated behaviors. In the truest version of Delsarte’s system, an inner experience was unnecessary, for the laws of his “system” should lead to a deeper understanding of the ability to replicate emotion. As Delsarte’s movement “therapy” circulated throughout middle-class women’s clubs, aesthetic groups, and etiquette manuals during the late nineteenth century, its practice overlapped with William James’s theories. As a consequence, the Delsarte “system” of movement took on a bourgeois ethos of uplift through self-control, offering the seductive promise that the body and its emotions could be controlled absolutely, allowing for no performative veneer, but rather a “cultivation” of inner feeling.18 Therein, the practice of specific “gestures” or “attitudes” allowed for a corresponding fearlessness, a quality etiquette books cast as desirable, since it allowed practitioners of Delsarte’s techniques to feel invulnerable to

inquisitive eyes. One such etiquette guide, Maud Cooke’s Social Life (1896), describes the “freeing” aspects of Delsarte’s exercises, which would “give harmonious, restful, wave movements to all portions of the anatomy” and thus create graceful movements, as self-control afforded individuals a measure of social assurance.19 “If one would control others,” she writes, “one must first control himself, possess himself.” Alluding to ungraceful and ungracious acts that might inaccurately express an individual’s intent, Cooke asserts that “the real self, gracious and beautiful, may strive to express itself through a set of faculties that are hardened and narrowed by decades of self-constraint on the part of himself and his ancestors.”20 Hence, the “real self” could be expressed, if only existing habits could be unraveled and affective retraining could take their place. Alongside claims that bodily control could allow for emotional self-crafting, passing fiction raised expectations that bodily gestures were key to creating new and adaptive behaviors. The idea of laboriously practiced emotional positions, which then generate the emotions they represent, was particularly attractive to authors of passing fiction. There the possibility of cultivated emotional habits challenged a divide between “real” and “performed” emotion, for to imagine a new emotion and practice it was also, through the logic of both William James and the Delsarteans, to make it both voluntary and genuine. Page 163 →

The Consequences of Emotional Cultivation In Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, a central character’s introduction to the life of passing suggests that this figure, Rena Walden/Warwick, would benefit from cultivating her emotional life in ways necessary to ensure her survival. In the white South Carolina community where she, like her brother, John, is passing, Rena would benefit from the voluntary cultivation of new emotional pathways, according to James’s and the Deslarteans’ beliefs, for these new pathways would allow her to feel authentically a part of the new community she joins. Though she will in fact develop new emotional habits across the novel, Rena also appears at the apex of emotional violence, in part because of the separation between old and new habits. The novel begins with an emphasis on a man of mixed race, born as John Walden, now known as a white lawyer by the name of John Warwick, who ushers his sister into a life of passing. Initially controlling “Rowena Warwick’s” introduction into an affluent white social world and encouraging her engagement to his friend and client George Tryon, John fades from the text soon after George and Rena become engaged. At this point, the novel focuses on the lovers’ courtship, including Rena’s desire to share her full history with her beloved. Before she does so, however, Tryon accidentally discovers Rena’s heritage, bringing about an affectively heightened aftermath, in which Rena’s capacity for emotional cultivation becomes crucial to her happiness. The novelвЂs attention to the possibilities of remade emotional habit extends beyond Rena’s flight, however, for it suggests a solution to the larger quandary of race relations, but only if emotion is understood as subject to voluntary cultivation. As Rena adapts to her brother’s affluent life, she has few models who exhibit changed emotional habits, especially because John has shown himself to be a disciplined and practical thinker, one who has learned to eschew personal bonds so as to maintain his new life. Thus, he exhibits practical thinking rather than emotional investment. He is also, as William L. Andrews contends, a means for Chesnutt to treat “the questions of passing and intermarriage in a detached manner as they related to larger sociopolitical considerations.”21 When John visits his mother, whose world he left years earlier, he appears as a calculated thinker; despite knowing that his sister’s departure will sever the close bond shared by the two women and leave their elderly mother alone in her old age, John nonetheless argues forcefully for Rena to join him in passing. Later in the plot, in regard to Page 164 →Rena’s desire to reveal her heritage to her fiancГ©, John relies upon legal logic, surveying his world in terms of rights and possibilities, viewing the fact that the “United States has failed to live up to its promise to provide equality for its black citizens” as motivation to pursue equality on a personal basis.22 When the more cautious Rena voices her fears that Tryon would regret their marriage, should he learn her secret, Warwick responds with a characteristic detachment, claiming:

My dear childВ .В .В . you take too tragic a view of life. Marriage is a reciprocal arrangement, by which the contracting parties give love for love, caring for keeping, faith for faith. It is a matter of the future, not of the past.В .В .В . We are under no moral obligation to inflict upon others the history of our past mistakes, or wayward thoughts, or secret sins, our desperate hopes, or our heart-breaking disappointments. Still less are we bound to bring out from this secret chamber the dusty record of our ancestry. (54) Distancing himself from past tragedies (and the emotions attached to them), John comes close to arguing for emotional redirection as the path to the future, specifically the redirection of “contracting partners,” yet his terms are far from affective. In response to Rena’s claims that Tryon would be “unhappy” should he discover her secret, John sarcastically responds, “Well, thenВ .В .В . suppose we should tell him our secret and put ourselves in his power, and that he should then conclude that he couldn’t marry you?,” again opposing practicality to emotional concerns (55). But it is a false distinction, even by John’s logic, for he asks Rena to recognize that her secret is also his and his child’s, thus implicitly privileging familial bonds, despite his legalistic discourse. Whereas John’s thinking highlights his conformity to the world of business contracts, or his adaptation to a nonemotional environment, Rena remains closely bound by her affections. Rena also possesses emotions that “touched a deeper note” than her brother’s, a fact that renders her unpredictable in her brother’s view but also more open to emotional adaptation in a new environment (54). As Rena contemplates marriage, she positions it as home to a new set of habits equal to those of her childhood. But unlike the Delsarteans, she will not practice signs of social assurance in order to feel it; at this juncture in the plot, she needs Tryon’s explicit acquiescence to her passing in order to view her bond with him as sufficiently deep. Accordingly, Rena is less than satisfied with her brother’s report that, by Page 165 →way of appeasing Rena, he has hinted at something vague and anonymous in the family’s past while conversing with Tryon. Rena, however, understands that “Warwick’s statement had not been specific, he had not told Tryon the thing” (58). Despite her brother’s reservations, Rena insists that her new connection with Tryon should spring from the same model of openness as did her previous familial bonds. While Rena’s propensity for uncomplicated, internally motivated, and unpracticed emotion appears as a significant complication in her brother’s plan of adapting to social and legal concerns, it suggests her limited experience in cultivating emotion. In addition, Rena’s lover, George Tryon, is equally untutored in emotional self-direction. He will emerge as the most passionately motivated and affectively untutored of all the novel’s figures, a combination that renders him a dangerously volatile figure. And it is Tyron, in his emotional immaturity, who comes to the work of consciously calibrated emotion far too late. Rena does not tell Tryon her secret before he discovers it accidentally, a development that plunges him into a quandary for which he is utterly unprepared, in emotional terms. Once Tryon discovers Rena’s secret and rejects her, as his training and privilege demand, Rena’s capacity for cultivating emotion emerges, for she turns to the black community for the first time in her life, exercising affection for the population before actually experiencing it. As a light-skinned mulatta, she has been taught by her mother “to despise” members of the black community; it is only now that she begins “to view them at once with the mental eye of an outsider and the sympathy of a sister,” thus remaking her affiliations (130). Determined to serve as well as love the needy community, thereby choosing to generate bonds of affection for a population she has never loved, Rena becomes a schoolteacher, someone whose “reserve was respected” at home and at her schoolhouse, yet whose affection for her students and their plight operates in tandem with her dignity (143). Rena’s health and future in fact depend upon her newly acquired affect and its cultivation, which appears as mature, useful, and worthy of respect, especially after her disastrous romance (which, in itself, warns about the difficulties of privileging uncomplicated forms of emotion). When Rena happens to think of Tryon on one occasion, she invokes “immense effort” to “keep her emotions under control” (149). Eventually she finds an equilibrium that the novel upholds as admirable, even as it hints that any individual’s affective reorientation may be insufficient in fully determining her future. Yet Chesnutt’s novel is mindful that some emotional bonds may be altered through habit (as is Rena’s

relation to the black community). Others,Page 166 → however, may merely be subject to behavioral control, and that behavioral control may be misconstrued. Late in the plot, as Rena fights for self-control after her break with Tryon, he journeys to her hometown, planning to find Rena. He also imagines that he will comfort the young woman, whom he fondly imagines to be grieving for his lost love. Not knowing that Rena has been persuaded to participate in a local fГЄte against her personal inclinations, he glimpses her in the midst of the merrymaking and mistakes her outward participation for proof of emotional shallowness. His anger also demonstrates his inability to imagine that actions and emotions may differ from one another, for in his view Rena must act simply as a consequence of feeling. In the midst of attributing simplistic emotions to Rena, Tryon also invokes a stark racial stereotype of Rena as affectively primitive, as he equates falsity with blackness, a projection that obliterates the equally stark scenario of grieving, lovelorn whiteness he had previously attributed to the young woman. Rena now appears to him with “the mask thrown off, a true daughter of a race in which the sensuous enjoyment of the moment took precedence of taste or sentiment or any of the higher emotions” (150). More pejoratively still, Tryon attributes Rena’s supposed performative qualities to a supposed emotional primitivism, for he sees in Rena a host of primitive qualities, including the “monkey-like imitativeness of the negro,” for he is certain that she had “copied the manners of white people while she lived among them, and had dropped them with equal facility when they ceased to serve a purpose” (150). Paradoxically insisting on outward behaviors as signs of racial identity—and with a woman whose passing he did not detect—Tryon is unable to imagine her emotional control, insisting that because Rena does not grieve outwardly (and continually), she never truly loved him. Having little restraint of his own, he cannot imagine it in others. Thus, he assures himself that Rena’s behaviors are utterly transparent, or socially as well as biologically uncomplicated. Because Tryon insists on understanding emotion as utterly straightforward, Rena’s hard-won cultivation of affection for the black community is threatened. She is also harassed by a new and disreputable admirer who is prominent in her new milieu; in addition, a vacillating Tryon attempts to reenter her life. These advances affect her profoundly, as the novel notes when it claims that Rena is “caughtВ .В .В . between two emotional fires” and “subjected to a physical and mental strain that only youth and health could have resisted, and then only for a short time” (167). As her irresolution predicts, Rena, feeling “miserably unable to cope” with dual pursuants, dies Page 167 →a sudden death as a result of the emergence of various coincidences, including a pursuit through the woods by both Tryon and her other admirer, Jeff Wain, in a storm, followed by exposure and, at last, a fatal brain fever (180). Her state throughout this ordeal remains largely unnarrated, but Chesnutt’s language of “two” emotional fires hints at emotion’s doubleness, not only Rena’s revulsion for Wain and love for Tryon but also the duality of competing forms of emotion born of different origins, both untutored love and cultivated affection for a community. Tryon’s inner state, which occupies much of the romance narrative, is depicted as far from controlled. Attesting to the dangers of entrenched and singular forms of feeling, Tryon’s affective self-dramatizing brings about much of the trouble in Rena’s life. Given the tradition of invoking melodrama in tandem with the figure of the tragic mulatto (a convention first made popular on the stage), it is notable that Chesnutt reverses this expectation and creates in Tryon his most overtly emotional and least flexible character. While unpredictable and overwhelming events can emerge in any character’s life, those like Tryon, who struggle with privilege and the desired maintenance of it, exhibit extreme emotions.23 He veers between seeing himself as the victim and as the agent of the action, as an upholder of his race and as a lovelorn youth, as affected by blood and as swayed by behavior, ever assuring himself that he is in the right. He is therefore unwilling to relinquish his ties to his cultural heritage and to give up his love for Rena. On all accounts, he is unable to adapt to divergent models of emotional experience. Like other white men of privilege in Chesnutt’s fiction, Tryon exemplifies passionate, self-interested emotion, for he attributes both importance and uniqueness to his experience, situated as it is at the center of a paternalistic, ex-plantation community. Initially under the influence of “anger and disgust” at his discovery of Rena’s secret, Tryon becomes subject to “varied and stormy” if somewhat unformed emotions, which spring from his sense of perceived victimization (96). As Tryon views it: A negro girl had been foisted upon him for a white woman, and then [he] had almost committed the

unpardonable sin against his race of marrying her. Such a step, he felt, would have been criminal at any time; it would have been the most odious treachery at this epoch, when his people had been subjugated and humiliated by the Northern invaders, who had preached negro equality and abolished the wholesome laws decreeing the separation of the races. (96)

Page 168 →Part of Tyron’s volatility, the novel suggests, stems from the habit of inflamed responses to the perceived unfairness engendered by life in the postwar South. His rage at Rena’s passing is predicated upon a culturally imbued sense of being required to readjust circumstance and feeling alike. But unlike disenfranchised populations who never inhabit hegemonic security, he reacts against his perceived victimization without seeing any need to present a cautious and reasoned self so as to be a credit to his race; rather, his habits of group and regional identification fuel his desire to continue the practices of the privileged past. In part, Tryon’s lack of experience in altering his emotional habits means that his affective immaturity and inexperience combine so as to heighten his unpredictability. His “bitter tears,” the novel reveals, stem from the fact that “he was only a youth. She was his first love.В .В .В . She was worse than dead to him; for if he had seen her lying in her shroud before him, he could at least have cherished her memory; now, even that consolation was denied him” (96–97). Oddly prescient of the novel’s ending—wherein his maudlin desire is met, in part because of his unrestrained pursuit of Rena—this passage underscores the dangers of Tryon’s unquestioned emotional entitlements. And yet, the text also points to a latent ability to feel for others in a way that presents Tryon as more appealing. When “he tried to be angry” with Rena, he finds this “impossible,” for “he was a man of too much imagination not to be able to put himself, in some measure at least, in her place—to perceive that for her the step which had placed her in Tryon’s world was the working out of nature’s great law of self-preservation, for which he could not blame her” (97). Here, a connection between empathy and emotional identification begins to emerge: imagination must precede emotion and help an individual break away from long-held and self-interested emotional patterns. Yet that model, so reminiscent of sympathy, fails, for Tryon’s youth and training predict that an insistence on unnegotiated emotion will triumph over a imaginative and cultivated capacity for identification, which would be born of emotional labor that is both controlled and voluntary. Tryon’s vacillation between romantic and cultivated forms of emotion first emerges in a letter to John in which he renounces his claim upon Rena and reproaches the two for “trifling with the most sacred feelings of a man’s heart” (102). In the same sentence, however, Tryon reveals himself as partially capable of imagining the position of another, as in his claim that “I realize the hardship of your position and hers, and can make allowances” (102). Most conflicted of all is Tryon’s proclamation that “I shall keep your Page 169 →secret as though it were my own. Personally, I shall never be able to think of you as other than a white man” (103). Tryon’s assertions thus reveal two contradictory beliefs—that emotional bonds follow ideological/racial lines that cannot be crossed and, paradoxically, that emotional bonds create new and challenging ways of thinking not entirely bound to identity. Here his ability to claim John as a friend and, as a consequence, to “think of you as a white man,” the highest compliment Tryon can imagine, encourages him to “make allowances,” even as it simultaneously places Tryon in the role of powerful social arbiter (one who allows the desideratum of whiteness to remain in place). It is also clear that his personal view involves a deviation from the habits of his race and class, which demand an unalterable approach to affection as rooted in easily discerned bodies and actions. Tryon’s position thus involves both the emotional habit of uncontrolled outrage marshaled in defense of his white, southern honor and his new affection for the Warwicks, which has not quite hardened to habit, as the novel suggests the ways in which ingrained affective experiences impede an individual’s capacity to feel for anyone outside that model. Contemporary affect theory has addressed this problem by triangulating affective stances, or as Rei Terada describes emotional connection, it “demands virtual self-difference—an extra вЂyou.’”24 Alluding to Jacques Derrida and terming this extra “you” a type of affective theatricality, Terada describes the benefits of conceptual triangulation as offering affective cognition “with none of the disadvantages” of personal emotion.25 Working with a similarly multidimensional concept, reading

theorist Wolfgang Iser focuses on the imagination as the root of empathetic identification and, in doing so, avoids a reference to performed emotion. Iser’s understanding of the imagination is notably specialized, for he both keeps readers tethered to the “limits” of a given text and simultaneously insists that readers need to enact particular kinds of work in order to step outside of their customary views. In doing so, Iser inserts an extra identity into the observer-subject model, for his scenario suggests an extra and interpretive alter ego, the creation of which requires significant labor. Iser poses as ideal “the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself—a familiar ground on which we were able to experience the unfamiliar.”26 This “unfamiliarity” allows readers (and other interpreters) access to a new “attitude” or subject position. Such an identity, which lies somewhere between an interpreter’s actual life and his imagination of a different experience, is made possible by two levels of reaction, which Iser defines as the “alien вЂme’” and the “real, virtual вЂme,’” which are never completely severed from each other (293). Page 170 →This design of a dual interpretive personality should allow for a range of responses, or emotions that extend beyond the ordinary assumptions and experiences of the “real, virtual вЂme.’” Contending that the “virtual me” restricts a reader in unproductive ways, Iser argues that “every text we read draws a different boundary within our personality, so that the virtual background (the real вЂme’) will take on a different form according to the theme of the text concerned” (293). This process is described in the following way: In the act of reading, having to think something that we have not yet experienced does not mean only being in a position to conceive or even understand it; it also means that such acts of conception are possible and successful to the degree that they lead to something being formulated in us. For someone else’s thoughts can only take a form in our consciousness if, in the process, our unformulated faculty for deciphering those things is brought into play—a faculty which, in the act of deciphering, also formulates itself. (294) Particularly applicable to Chesnutt’s text is Iser’s suggestion of interpretive habit, or a mechanism that may be altered through practice, where the introduction of new ways of thinking enhances one’s ability to “decipher” “alien” concepts. By this logic, imaginative identification is a cognitive act that allows for the creation of new pathways, for the identificatory moment is at first tentative, or “alien,” until it creates a pattern of thought and affection. In the case of The House Behind the Cedars, this notion of a third or “alien” self applies to the concept of emotional habit as well as interpretive habit, for because Tryon can imagine a desire for upward mobility (i.e., that Rena and John pursue a position comparable to his own), he understands a mixed-race individual best when that individual attempts to inhabit whiteness. But despite some level of understanding, he has little experience with the work of conjuring an “alien” self. Later, however, Tryon (described as “a man of lively imagination”) “soon found himself putting all sorts of hypothetical questions about a matter which he had already definitely determined” (127). According to Iser’s formulation, Tryon is at last beginning to practice new forms of thinking and feeling, for he is beginning to find the “alien” in his sympathetic imagination. Yet, as becomes clear, this learning curve occurs far too late. He continues his internal debate, “trying on” the idea of the identificatory “alien me,” as his name suggests he might. PossessedPage 171 → of “reason, common-sense, the instinctive ready-made judgments of his training and environment, the deep-seated prejudices of race and caste,” Tryon becomes subject to a “stubborn heart” that clings to the idea of Rena (129). Emotional work of the sort that the practitioners of Delsarte’s or of William James’s theories imagined, or the labor of disengaging from “instinct” and “ready-made judgments,” however, takes time. Tryon’s “wild desire” to see Rena again (138), along with his sense of “courage and ambition, inspired by love,” which, in his view, would “make her white,” all bespeak a return to immediate (and uncultivated) emotional habit (140). While the “heart” seems to generate private desires—relating to courtship, to instantaneous attraction, to erotic attachment—Tryon contemplates the transformation of Rena, but based on his idea of what would be most convenient for him, which would mean putting her in a position where he would not have to adapt to the idea of his love for a mixed-race woman. Thus, seemingly on the verge of an affective transformation, Tryon turns back to his old, inflexible notions of affection

as originating, without mediation, in the heart. Chesnutt’s interrogation of the varied levels of emotional meaning, including the ways in which characters experience complex and shifting personal ties, points to a broad and nearly insurmountable problem: that the necessary work of feeling in new ways—of training oneself to feel across racial lines—is made exponentially more difficult by the emotional habits to which any individual is subject. Where a socially powerful but affectively immature individual is concerned, existing patterns only partially allow for affective retraining. For most individuals in Chesnutt’s fiction, imagining another’s emotional position, learning new emotional habits, may be too laborious: satisfyingly imagining an “alien” life composed of a series of challenging new thoughts, desires, reactions, and repositionings—that is the work of fiction.

“Without Vituperation” In describing his work as evoking profoundly emotional effects, Chesnutt proposed to elevate black and white races by deploying fiction that would “storm” or “assault” a “feeling of repulsion toward the negro,” while simultaneously preparing the negro for “social recognition and equality.” 27 He also imagined a new type of audience, claiming, “It seems to me that there is a growing demand for literature dealing with the NegroВ .В .В . and that the time is propitious for it; and it seems to me a field in which a writer who Page 172 →was connected with these people by ties of blood and still stronger ties of sympathy .В .В .В . could at least earn a livelihood,” hinting at a theory of emotional adaptation in which the author helps the reader to develop his sympathies.28 Yet, within a year of making such pronouncements, Chesnutt would voice his doubts about this new market, claiming, “I fear the public, as represented by the editors of the leading magazines, is not absolutely yearning for an opportunity to read the utterances of obscure colored writers upon the subject of the Negro’s rights.”29 As a reviwer, William Dean Howells, initially a supporter of Chesnutt’s career, labeled his 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, “bitter, bitter.”30 In so doing, he invoked an unspoken rule for minority writers: not to express obvious emotions of the negative valence. As Chesnutt attested, “I am beginning to suspect that the public as a rule does not care for books in which the principal characters are colored people, or with a striking sympathy with that race as contrasted with the white race. I find a number of my friends advise me to break away from this theme for a while and write something which is entirely disassociated from it.”31 What Chesnutt perceived as the principal difficulty was not only the topic of race but the more important question of how to craft the emotional range (the “striking sympathy”) of any work that addressed it. Like other authors of turn-of-the-century, racially invested fiction, Chesnutt confronted an affective paradox wherein fictions about emotional connection must appear impartial to the point of seeming virtually emotionless in order to garner sympathizing readers. Moreover, narratives about race should appear to be unshaped by the negative experiences attending the racial prejudice to which African Americans had been subjected. Chesnutt, who would critique the affective inequity inherent in such expectations more fully than any other writer among his peers, explored a pervasive belief that among socially and economically disenfranchised populations, a radical politics of affective self-crafting was necessary, and in ways that it was not among the more privileged populations. When Chesnutt described the work of writing as affectively divisive, he echoed the minority opinion in the most important race-related court case of the late century, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan’s response to the federally sanctioned segregation established by the case hinted at the emotional inequities sustained by the court’s ruling when he claimed that “the present decision, it may well be apprehended, willВ .В .В . stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens.”32 Like Justice Harlan, Page 173 →Chesnutt imagined the inflamed emotions that would give rise to future decades of “aggressive” enactments of white prejudice—and at a moment when, he suggests, African Americans were attending to the careful cultivation of emotional habits that would help them achieve their goals. Locating the impetus for violence in “the inflammable Southern heart,” which led to the belief that “loyalty to one’s race is aВ .В .В . sacred principle” that justified any excessive emotion on its behalf, Chesnutt highlighted the white population’s exercise of its unbound, unmodulated emotions. By contrast, his fiction explores the reshaping of emotion, which appeared as a pointed and particular type of labor

expected of the African American population. For Chesnutt, expressions of passion within the white community sharply contrasted with a perceived need for black citizens to envision themselves as affectively controlled and flexible.33 In Chesnutt’s view, white southerners had developed few habits that involved the cultivation of emotion; rather, their exercise of personal emotion, largely devoid of self-control, led to the observation, as a character from The Marrow of Tradition (1901) attests, that “our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passions,” as the emotions cultivated by a resentful white society emerge in a deadly riot that aims to suppress the black vote.34 Thus, when members of the white population encourage the ferment of violent resentment against the black population, indulging in passions that are described as “primal” and unconstrained, it becomes clear that the enactment of unrestrained emotion perpetuates violence and that, absent the affective work of controlling emotional habit, violence will overwhelm a society. Because they attend to violent mob scenes, shocked onlookers, reunited families, and innocent victims, a number of race-based turn-of-the-century fictions have been described as melodramatic in tone, a label largely based on the plot trajectories of fictions such as The House Behind the Cedars, Iola Leroy, and Contending Forces. The claim, however, is overly broad in application to fiction that so vigorously indexes emotional complexity and that upholds a correlation between degrees of social success and varying forms of consciously exercised affective behavior. While consciously crafted emotions and self-control clearly overlapped, the distinction between the two was that emotional cultivation allowed for the creation of new and genuine emotions, not just the suppression of old ones. As Claudia Tate has argued, authors and advice-givers of the century’s turn exhorted black women to deport themselves in ways befitting a cultured middle class as a means of improving their lives, for “deportment Page 174 →could be acquired, whereas physical appearance was only an arbitrary genetic consequence.”35 Cultivated emotional patterns, however, allowed for a more significant linkage between behavior and emotional control, not just outward appearance. Emotional training required laborious practice so that it both felt and appeared believable. With an eye toward the cultivation of impartiality, turn-of-the-century fictions about race authored by African American authors and directed to African American readers uphold characters’ engagement with a practiced equilibrium and with moderated forms of emotional expression.36 As these fictions make reference to the injustices of the chattel past within the context of legal and social disenfranchisements in the present, they highlight the need for continued activism that was voiced in controlled ways. As part of a larger teleological trajectory in the development and social standing of the race, characters’ ability to set aside bitterness and practice beneficial emotional habits mattered tremendously. In such narratives of emotional reinvention, those figures who have experienced personal devastation and have adopted new emotional habits are frequently depicted as separate from their own stories of difficulty or abuse—a separation that lends emotional dispassion to their present-day experience. Sappho Clark, a young rape survivor in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), for example, maintains her dignity by remaining reticent about her past in tandem with her new habits, even when that past becomes the subject of public debate. At a meeting of the American Colored League, the story of Sappho’s abduction, rape, and abandonment in a brothel at the hands of her white uncle is narrated by a family friend, Luke Sawyer, who does not know that the young woman survived and changed her name. Known initially as Mabelle Beaubean, Sappho was taken to a New Orleans nunnery once her father was murdered by his white half-brother, Mabelle’s ravisher. This aspect of “Mabelle’s” history addresses a stark disparity in the management and control of emotional habit, for characters of the white population in the antebellum South appear indulgent of their violent and unrestrained impulses, as in Chesnutt’s work. Just as Sappho is abducted and raped by her uncle, a man of position and authority, in a separate plot line another group of characters, the Montfort family, experiences brutality at the hands of a plantation overseer and his cohort, a previously friendly neighbor who begins to harbor a “ruling passion” of “covetousness” for Mrs. Montfort and unleashes his urges.37 Together, the neighbor and the property’s overseer join forces so as to murder Mr. Monfort and claim his wife and children. While attesting to the dangers Page 175 →of unregulated emotional impulses in the white population, these histories suggest that unbound emotion put the black population at pointed risk and instilled within it the need to acquire compensatory

habits of controlling and redirecting emotion. So dangerous is unregulated emotion that Hopkins effectively severs Sappho from the violence of her history. Interrogating the “politics of self-representation” in regard to Contending Forces, Lois Lamphere Brown has noted that Sappho’s story, which combines “racially motivated sexual abuse, incest, and illegitimacy, as well as mob violence and lynching, is in principle the master text to the very groups in which she moves.”38 While Sawyer and his listeners are overcome by the emotions occasioned by the story’s narration, Sappho exits the room and will not repeat it. While the tale initially appears that she has repressed her violent past, it is later revealed that the greater, more restorative aspect of her life involves the work of emotional reinvention. Sappho’s cultivation of an emotional equilibrium depends on her distance from the past’s narrative, so much so that she has refused to recognize her rape-born child. As Hazel Carby notes, “In order to function, to work and survive, Mabelle Beaubean, a product of miscegenation and the subject of rape, had to bury her violated womanhood and deny her progeny.”39 Later, when the story is known only as Mabelle’s, Sappho is able to navigate around the affect the story might be presumed to create. By reorienting her life, changing her name, and acquiring skills such as typing (which allows her to support herself), Sappho recognizes her past only rarely and when she chooses. Writing to her beloved, Will Smith, and making reference to the story told by Luke Sawyer and claiming simply, “I am the unfortunate Mabelle Beaubean!,” Sappho refuses to participate in the reiteration of her violation (328). Here Hopkins’s decision to insulate one of her most modern characters from a pathetic recitation of past events suggests the value of disengaging from violent feeling. And yet, the novel does not point to that reticence as the ultimate solution, but rather, it suggests that a temporary refusal to engage the past may function as one step in emotional redirection, for when Sappho discovers love with Will Smith, despite the many complications involved (and after she reveals her identity as Mabelle), she simultaneously embraces the potential of both romantic love (which will be forestalled for a while yet in the plot) and maternal love. Later in the novel, she attests to the success of her multistepped emotional restoration by reuniting with Will and taking up the role of loving and nurturing mother. Thus, the healing potential of cultivated emotion—to transform pain to dispassion and then to loving Page 176 →maternity—appears greatest when impulses of feeling are directed away from the negative emotions Sappho could be expected to feel (anger, resentment, shame) and toward various modes of affection and the attendant pride and hopefulness they enable. When she described the need for black authors to engage in uplift through disciplined engagements with emotion, Hopkins articulated similar beliefs. Rather than create narratives of overwhelming feeling, she notes in the novel’s preface, “I have tried to tell an impartial story, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. I have tried to portray our hard struggles here in the North to obtain a respectable living and a partial education. I have presented both sides of the dark picture—lynching and concubinage—truthfully and without vituperation, pleading for that justice of heart and mind for my people which the Anglo-Saxon in America never withholds from suffering humanity.”40 As Richard Yarborough writes in his introduction to the Schomburg edition of the text, Hopkins makes her appeal directly to the white reader, who she imagines might object to the novel’s fictionalizing of cruelty against the African American population.41 Yet the claim to “impartial” observation, so familiar in the realist tradition, also underscores something visible in Sappho Clark’s story, namely that violent deeds require an affective balancing act crucial to Hopkins’s concept of her art, which unites “impartial” stories, told “without vituperation,” that, through a strange alchemy, “plead” for justice in readers’ hearts and minds. Moreover, that “fire and romance” should coexist with impartiality appears contradictory, but it is a contradiction central to the formulation of emotion’s role in race fiction at the century’s turn, where both representational dispassion and deep emotional engagement are simultaneously desirable and, moreover, made possible through characters’ cultivation of specific emotional habits that modulate emotions of a negative valence and allow for the positive to develop. Dispassion, it appears, can be an acquired product of self-control, just as Delsartean “discipline” suggested. Further, it could lead to other forms of habitually practiced emotion. And as William James argued of any emotional state, it could become second nature, such that alternative forms of feeling could emerge as equal in

legitimacy to other, preexisting forms of emotion. Indeed, the expectation that one could possess deep passion and then transform it into productive and cultivated pathways of emotion suggested the fullness of the individual experience during a tumultuous and potentially dangerous period for African Americans. A similar investment in redirected emotion occurs in relation to Iola Leroy (Frances Harper’s Page 177 →heroine of the 1892 novel by the same name), when Mrs. Leroy’s African American heritage is made known, the revelation of which causes her and her adolescent children to be sold into slavery. Blue eyed and phenotypically white, Iola responds with an “expression of horror and anguish” as well as hysterical laughter.42 But there the narrative of her reaction ends. Only later, after time and reflection (and a narrative gap), does Iola recount the reversal of fortune and status she experienced, as in her claim that: I was sold from State to State as an article of merchandise. I had outrages heaped on me which might well crimson the cheek of honest womanhood with shame, but I never fell into the clutches of an owner for whom I did not feel the utmost loathing and intensest horror. I have heard men talk glibly of the degradation of the negro, but there is a vast difference between abasement of condition and degradation of character. I was abased, but the men who trampled on me were the degraded ones. (115) In this narrative that begins with privilege and proceeds to outrage, Iola claims the experience of the wronged slave woman, casting it through the language of offended femininity. But the more powerful aspect of her response is analytical, as in her interrogation of the division between “abasement” and “degradation” as she divides effects from affect, thereby severing her experience from the inflamed emotion of her abusers. Even Iola’s experiences of “outrage” and “shame” are cast in impersonal terms, or as affecting her just as they “might” affect other women. As this analytical subdivision attests, Iola’s past becomes a public story rather than a marker of private shame because she has trained herself to disassociate her present emotions from those past; as the novel attests, in emotional terms, she lives in the present, redirecting her life toward affiliation with and service to the race she comes to embrace as her own.

The Appeal of Logic While topically similar to turn-of-the-century passing fictions by Harper, Chesnutt, and Hopkins, William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty (1892) and Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) imagine the significance of their emotional subjects in radically different ways, for they treat emotion as an inherently unstable force, one that is most appropriately tamed not by emotional redirection, but by minimization in relation Page 178 →to intellectual scrutiny. Thus, rather than engaging emotion as a narrative solution, they stress the importance of logic as a counteraffective force. Notably, both privilege the perspectives of white, scientifically minded characters who function as the locus of intellectual approaches to racial conflict and the passions associated with it. By relying on white men of science, Howells and Twain also attempt to unify their texts, largely avoiding distress, outrage, and anxiety, thus minimizing extreme forms of affect. While, as Randall Knoper has argued, “science complicated and changed [realist era] authors’ ideas about the representation of reality, ultimately making вЂnaГЇve realism’ impossible,” scientific thinking also posed a risk by upholding dispassionate logic as the appropriate response to complex social problems.43 Ultimately, these fictions are devoted to a logic that views overt emotionalism (which they associate with blackness) as a quality to be mediated and assessed and then absorbed into a less volatile white America (that being the supposedly scientific view of amalgamation). Meanwhile, by projecting logic onto one race and the propensity for passionate excess onto the other, this fiction inverts claims implicitly made by Chesnutt, Hopkins, and Harper about the white population’s propensity for unbound emotionalism. As the first half of this chapter stresses, the concept of voluntary emotion suggested that individuals could cultivate new emotional pathways, with these pathways appearing capable of altering an individual’s felt position within a racially divided society. Further, cultivated emotion implicitly promised to enable individuals to intervene in a stark experiential divide attributed to racial inheritances and racially specific patterns of behavior. In many ways, the complexity of emotional subjects appears dependent upon the individual’s potential to experience emotion on a conscious basis, for learned emotion hints at a willingness to think past prior experiences

and instead to consider a set of relations that promise to be more productive, both individually and collectively. In contrast to this view of emotion as malleable and capable of mutation, Howells and Twain imagine emotion, like race, as rooted in blood-based identities (with the meaning of inheritance requiring the aid of the explaining scientist). Both authors infrequently stray from the perspectives of their focal white characters; one important consequence of this strategy is the short shrift allotted to passing figures, whose emotional experiences are profoundly attenuated. While racial passing interests Howells and Twain to a degree, they spend little time on its emotional components. As Howells announced in his correspondence about his novella An Imperative Duty, in which a young Page 179 →woman is told of her biracial heritage only when she is on the verge of an engagement to marry, “I had a man marry a woman with a faint trace of black blood. It was for a psychological not a scientific purpose, and I merely argued that a man who really loved a woman would find his love settling any вЂrace question’ involved.”44 While Howells disavows “science,” he also dismisses the text’s “mere” confrontation with racial identity, upholding the power of love instead. And yet, the doctor’s logic would dominate the novel’s discourse. According to the plot of “An Imperative Duty,” a young woman named Rhoda Aldgate, the niece of a wealthy American woman named Mrs. Meredith, discovers that her mother was an octoroon; this news is announced by Mrs. Meredith when it appears that Rhoda is on the brink of marriage, for Mrs. Meredith takes it as her “imperative duty” to explain Rhoda’s genetic past to the suitor, ostensibly out of a feeling of solidarity with the white race. Once revealed, Rhoda’s past affects a small group of characters, including her aunt’s physician, Dr. Olney, whose perspective frames all but roughly ten pages of the narrative, and those ten feature Rhoda’s consciousness. Rhoda never speaks from a self-identified position as a black woman, nor does the narrative voice explore the affective change that could result from such an orientation. When Mrs. Meredith tells Rhoda that her grandmother had been a slave, she “perceived thatВ .В .В . the girl has somehow instantly realized the whole affair” and that “the main bases of [experience] were laid in our consciousness” early in life.45 Thus, in the aunt’s view, Rhoda’s upbringing in an elite white world allows her to comprehend the full scope of the “social tragedy of which she was the victim” (53). While suggesting that Rhoda’s prior experiences have provided her with the inalterable perspective of a white woman, Mrs. Meredith insists that Rhoda “is” nonetheless black; more paradoxically still, she has raised Rhoda as white so as to help her ascertain the full meaning of her blackness, presumably by privileging education and logic over emotionalism (53). Immediately after this focus on the aunt’s vantage point, a strangely disembodied, collective voice asserts itself, universalizing in regard to the aunt’s decision. We suppose, when we are experienced, that knowledge comes solely from experience; but knowledge, or if not knowledge, then truth, comes largely from perception, from instinct, from divination, from the intelligence of our mere potentialities. A man can be anything along the vast range from angel to devil; without living either the Page 180 →good thing or the bad thing in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can perceive it. (54) The terrain covered by this discourse is pointedly strange, ranging from experience to perception to intelligence—though all fall within the realm of cognition and not emotion; it moreover suggests that truths of identity are determined by one’s access to “knowledge” or “truth” or something that Howells appears unable or unwilling to name. The subsequent description of Rhoda’s reaction makes clear that she refuses to imagine any affiliative adaptations because she actively resists emotional retraining. Casting her octoroon grandmother as a “sad fact of evil,” Rhoda immediately “understoodВ .В .В . and felt all scathed within” as a consequence (54). After stressing Rhoda’s intellectual acuity, the novella returns to the omniscient perspective as the narrative voice notes only that “the swiftness of these mental processes no words can suggest; we can portray life, not living” (54). Rhoda’s perspective reappears briefly in the following chapter, when she wanders into Boston’s black community and attends a church service that is completely foreign to her; perhaps that is what she intends, consciously or not, for in working-class black Boston, she cannot imagine the adjustments necessary to thrive among the citizens dwelling there. It is also clear at this moment that what Rhoda perceives in the church

stems from her projected fears. The language of the passage, in fact, highlights her “horror” and “agony,” her shame, and her inability to locate a new self in light of a newly revealed genetic history. Along the way, the description equates Rhoda’s emotional reactions with unreasoned excess, for in a “turmoil of horror,” Rhoda makes her way into the African American section of the city, meeting the inhabitants with a “new agony of interest in them” (57–58). Rather than experiencing her former professed fondness for the black race, which she has confessed to wanting to own as property, Rhoda responds with violent repulsion, fearing that the inhabitants will “creep nearer and nearer and possess her in that latefound solidarity of race” (58). Rhoda sees “how hideous they were, with their flat wide-nostriled noses, their out-rolled thick lips, their mobile, bulging eyes set near together, their retreating chins and foreheads, and their smooth, shining skin: they seemed burlesques of humanity, worse than apes, because they were more like” (58). Notably, Rhoda’s sense of the grotesque stems from her insistence on the phenotypical differences that separate her from the crowd (which she, like Chesnutt’s Tryon, casts as primitive), a division that allows her to insulate herself, at least until she sees “one girlВ .В .В . who Page 181 →was as white as herself, and she wondered if she were of the same dilution of negro blood,” a sight that arrests Rhoda because of the young woman’s apparent self-identification as black (58). As Julie Cary Nerad argues, the novel fails to “expos[e] the absurdity of the one-drop rule,” as it allows Rhoda’s identity to revolve around her definitive, newfound African American ancestry.46 Yet in the African American church, Rhoda attempts to self-identify as entirely white by equating blackness with unevolved behaviors, specifically with African cannibalism and jungle living. Broadly caricaturing the imagined African past, Rhoda envisions “palm-tree roofs and grass huts,” captives, and “one black naked woman, fallen out from weakness, kneelingВ .В .В . and the Arab slaver’s knife at her throat” (59). Crucially here, the African American population—present and past—is positioned as “other” and, hence, as alien to Rhoda’s experience, as she attributes violence to the black community’s ancestors. In such a context, there is no suggestion of cultivating new emotional habits in relation to the contemporary black community (as with Chesnutt’s Rena Walden), for Rhoda refuses “to accept the loss of her former self: like that of the mutilated man who looks where his arm was, and cannot believe it gone” (59). In order to retain that sense of self—a sense of white selfhood—Rhoda clings to her preexisting habits as she longs to “rid herself of this shame that was not hers” (59). Most dangerous to her existing emotional habit, however, is her perception of an undesired doubleness. There seemed two selves of her, one that had lived before that awful knowledge, and one that had lived as long since, and again a third that knew and pitied them both. She wondered at the same time if this were what people meant by saying one’s brain was turned; and she recalled the longing with which her aunt said, “If I were only crazy!” But she knew that her own exaltation was not madness, and she did not wish for escape that way. (60) The text goes on to describe this feeling as a “double consciousness of trouble,” a term reminiscent of Du Bois’s term “double consciousness,” but that is invoked here to indicate a multiplied white self, now burdened by Rhoda’s knowledge of a mixed racial ancestry.47 The complex and internally conflicted sense of racial duality suggested by Du Bois’s concept, however, never materializes for Rhoda, for she continues to project her pity onto herself, the consequence of which is, as M. Giulia Fabi argues, that Rhoda’s understanding of blackness as a “mark of inferiority” never changes.48 Page 182 →Rhoda also rejects the possibility of recalibrating her habits of feeling, demonstrating an inability to adapt to a new sense of an altered self. While in church, Rhoda rejects the crowd’s pious humility; in the faces around her, Rhoda sees only “sad repulsive visages of a frog-like ugliness” and “poor peopleВ .В .В . so hideous by the standards of all his other creatures” (64). Her sense of “cruel loathing” becomes a “frantic refusal of their claim upon her” and produces a corresponding belief that she is more akin to an imperious slave holder than to a dutiful slave (64). Rhoda’s only means of reconciling herself to the worshippers comes in a gesture of outdated paternalism, for she finally concedes that she “can endure them if I can love them” (65). This imagined beneficence, moreover, can only emerge if Rhoda shuts her eyes, visually denying the position of the other. By rejecting the possibility of reimagined emotional affiliations, Rhoda

clings to her “pity” and her “loathing,” only partially assuaging her anxiety by also imagining “love.” Yet this vague notion of affection will not materialize, for Rhoda cannot alter her emotional habits, namely because there are no incentives to align herself with the black community, no ties of experience or sympathy. She takes only a cursory glance at a scene far removed from her understanding and clings to her existing sense of self, a self associated with what Elsa Nettels describes as Howells’s vision of “white feeling” as equating with “human unity.”49 Though she cannot shut her eyes forever, Rhoda will distance herself from the black community out of an unwillingness to self-identify in relation to it. Having consolidated the question of Rhoda’s identity via her rejection of a starkly caricatured African American culture, the narrative returns to Olney’s perspective, settling back into the professional consciousness with which the novel began, one that marks him as “an almost idealized embodiment of rationality and compassion.50 Like Rhoda, the doctor will attempt to obliterate all references to Rhoda’s black heritage. He also becomes the unwitting instrument by which Rhoda’s secret is protected; by prescribing a powerful drug for Mrs. Meredith, he provides the older woman with the means of ending her life (through a conscious overdose or a mistake attributable to emotional distress) and, with it, her insistence on patrolling the young woman’s contact with white society. Olney proposes marrying and living in Europe, where there will be little race prejudice, should Rhoda ever decide to reveal her secret. Thus, the novella refuses to “treat the question of racial prejudice and miscegenation as a sociological problem,” but instead treats Rhoda’s genetic past as a private and individuated one.51 Page 183 →As both Rhoda and Olney deny that her heritage matters, they also deny that affections and affiliations change. An 1891 reviewer for the Critic surmised, based on the novel’s portrayal of race, that Howells was not knowledgeable about his topic, having drawn his “knowledge of the [race] questionВ .В .В . from books, newspapers, and magazines,” for, she claims, “of actual experience with it he has had none, or he would not write of it as he does. He likes the race he has chosen to treat in this equivocal manner as the Princess Napraxine likes the wolves in Russia—in theory and at a distance.”52 Author Anna Julia Cooper focused on the novel’s representation of the black experience, noting the text’s portrait of a “horrified young prig” who encounters “nothing but the frog-like countenances and cat-fish mouths, the musky exhalations and the вЂbress de Lawd, Honey,’ of an uncultivated people,” and as such, she argued, it presented only a “half truth, and that a partisan half truth. One feels that [Howells] had no business to attempt a subject of which he knew so little, or for which he cared so little.”53 The vantage point of Howells’s novel, Cooper argues, could only have been created by a writer who “sees colored people at long range or only in certain capacities,” highlighting Howells’s association of black characters with menial positions and with the “bowing and curtseying for the extra tips,” as well as the “promenading and sparking” that takes place in public locations (206). What Howells has omitted, according to Cooper, is the representation of a “quiet, self-respecting, dignified class of easy life and mannersВ .В .В . of cultivated tastes and habits,” or “the best colored society”—one in which Rhoda Aldgate would not have felt it necessary to shut her eyes (207). Cooper’s assessments highlight the ways that the novel records barriers to cross-racial identification, a portrayal that causes Cooper to classify Howells as a writer who composes fiction “for art’s sake,” but with no particular interest in advancing the position of the black race. In her view, An Imperative Duty constitutes part of a broader pattern in which white authors write about race and create “models and subjects” from what is, for them, a relatively unexplored subject (179). She continues: The art of “thinking one’s self imaginatively into the experiences of others” is not given to all, and it is impossible to acquire it without a background and a substratum of sympathetic knowledge. Without this power our portraits are but death’s heads or caricatures and no amount of cudgeling can put into them the movement and reality of life. (185–186) Page 184 →According to Cooper’s logic, Howells’s novel offers no way of engaging with African American culture seriously or with feeling, for it is absent a “sympathetic knowledge.” Quoting Howells’s admission that “I have sometimes fanciedВ .В .В . that perhaps the negroes thought black, and

felt black; that they were racially so utterly alien and distinct from ourselves that there never could be common intellectual and emotional ground between us,” Henry B. Wonham makes the point that black characters in Howells’s fiction “either adopt вЂwhite thinking and white feeling,’ .В .В . or they simply do not feel in any profound and individual way at all.”54 In the case of An Imperative Duty, Howells’s decision to foreground Dr. Olney’s role (and not that of Rhoda) denotes his greater comfort with Olney’s experience and, perhaps, his perception of Rhoda’s mind as unavailable for complete individuation. The decision also speaks to a greater comfort with a man of medicine, removed from the immediate crisis, than with a woman in the throes of it. What, then, can be made of a race novel that deemphasizes emotional responses to passing? That treats emotion as a product not of habit, but of constitutional irrationality? In part, Howells’s construction of Dr. Olney’s perspective serves as an answer. Rather than shifting across narrators, time periods, or regional settings, Howells’s novel rarely deviates from its omniscient narrator, who traces Olney’s mental calculations. As a physician who has recently returned to Boston after living in Italy for a number of years, Olney is aloof from American culture and its race prejudice. But based on his worldliness and his relative independence in the larger world, Olney embodies what the novel casts as rational scientific views. Hence, in the novella, emotion is bound by reason or engulfed by narratives of the doctor’s scientific thinking. While Howells’s oeuvre appears invested in a number of emotional valences and in the terms and conditions surrounding emotional engagements in his fiction and criticism, Howells was most comfortable with the subject of race when it was treated with “sweet, brave humor,” as William L. Andrews notes of Howells’s attitude toward Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, hinting at a consolidation of emotional subjects where race was concerned.55 Howells also approved of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ability to “stand outside his race, and report on it objectively but knowledgeably,” according to Andrews; eventually Howells embraced the work of Chesnutt and Frederick Douglass, provided it exhibited a “вЂcool patience,’ a certain emotional вЂcalm,’ and an ability вЂto use reason and the nimbler weapons of irony,’” all of which would “sav[e] them from bitterness.”56 Such commentsPage 185 → stress Howells’s unwillingness to allow emotional qualities to enter a discussion of racial subjects under the assumption that the emotion would necessarily be off-putting. According to Howells’s plan for An Imperative Duty, Olney’s prominence was always clear, beginning with his early notes about a story he originally described as “The Letters of Olney.”57 Andrews has argued that Howells equates ideas of “human unity” with whiteness, based on his assessment of black authors’ potential to contribute to race reconciliation. At stake for Howells, Andrews contends, was a vision of race relations that entailed the “accommodationist” stance of Booker T. Washington, or a belief that black society should adjust to the beliefs and practices of the white, which represented the unified ideal to which black citizens could be admitted.58 If whiteness suggests a form of stability that affects all characters, then the affective structures associated with white society—assembled around Olney—promise to bring about unity through a type of dispassion that closely resembles a lack of emotion. Further highlighting the importance of this perspective is the fact that Howells conceived of the narrative as taking what Martha Banta describes as an “autobiographic form” in relation to Olney. As Banta argues, “Olney’s reactions to Rhoda Aldgate before and after he learns of her racial antecedents are kept simply to those of a white man with certain quick mental adjustments to make.”59 A spectator who guides his readers with his presumably advanced opinions, Olney explores his existing race prejudices, weighing them against a more objective approach to race-based evolution. As the novella’s dominant perspective, his is the one that suggests a sublimation of emotion to reason as the most appropriate way of assessing difficult subjects, a view consistent with his position as a “white patriarch fully vested in the system of white domination that confers cultural and physical power over black female bodies.”60 Olney’s long dissertation on racial and cultural amalgamation near the text’s opening exposes his belief in the primacy of logic and his ameliorist view of race relations. The novel outlines his beliefs before the moment of crisis, or before the issue becomes freighted with emotional potential through personalization. While Olney’s separation from American cultural prejudices would seem to mirror Rhoda’s perceived

separation from her former identity, the potential of this parallel is limited, for Olney immediately begins to characterize the “types” of peoples before him, noting “a common type” among the workers, or the “proletarian type,” represented primarily by the Irish workers of Boston.61 In his typological assessment of the population, Olney waxes scientific as the narrative charts his attitude Page 186 →toward human evolution, which is tinged with more than a passing interest in eugenics. Looking at them scientifically, Olney thought that if they survived to be mothers they might give us, with better conditions, a race as hale and handsome as the elder American race; but the transition from the Old World to the New, as represented in them, was painful. Their voices were at once coarse and weak; their walk was uncertain, now awkward and now graceful, an undeveloped gait; he found their bearing apt to be aggressive, as if from a wish to ascertain the full limits of their social freedom. (4) With its references to Olney’s “scientific” attitude, such a passage asserts an interest in the “coarse, ” “undeveloped,” and “awkward” Irish immigrants, which Olney contrasts with the pleasing African American waiters he encounters (4), whom he depicts as more acceptable because of their “smiling courtesy” and “childish simpleheartedness” (5). In addition to chronicling such “inoffensive” behaviors, Olney ruminates on the separateness of the city’s black community as a way of suggesting how profoundly this segregation appeals to privileged white citizens like himself, as he recognizes that “they could have walked up and down, they could have lounged upon the grass, and no one would have molested them, though the whites would have keep apart from them. But he found very few of them there” (6). Part of what emerges here is Olney’s belief that the black community, in its isolation, appears motivated in only the most pleasant ways (in contrast to the aggressive, discontented Irish population). The novel never positions Olney within the black neighborhood of Boston, shows him conversing with a figure from the black community, or depicts a debate about the “race question” with anyone who has been socialized outside of the white middle-class world in which he dwells. While in Olney’s estimation, Mrs. Meredith is “one of those womenВ .В .В . to whom lifeВ .В .В . remains a sealed book, and who are always trying to unlock its mysteries with the keys furnished them by fiction,” his attitudes toward race are equally vague (24). He appears to possess only the thinnest veneer of knowledge, noting that “you hear of instances in which the parent of mixed race could not be known from a white person, and yet the child reverts to the negro type in color and feature and character. I should doubt it very much” (27). While such a statement is meant to calm fears surrounding miscegenation, Olney views race and evolution as intertwined, believing Page 187 →that “our race must absorb the colored race; and I believe that it will obliterate not only its color, but its qualities” (27). He continues, claiming, “The tame man, the civilized man, is stronger than the wild one; and I believe that in those cases within any one race where there are very strong ancestral proclivitiesВ .В .В . toward evil, they will die out before the good tendencies on the other side” (27). In this representation of a long “scientific” view, there will be no race problem in the future, primarily because the black race will have ceased to exist, but without causing significant changes in the absorbing white population. When Olney is told of Rhoda’s black ancestry, his scientific objectivity temporarily fails him, and it is here that overt emotion enters the main plot, but the emotion will be absorbed—ostensibly like the race with which it is associated—by dispassionate reflection. Reacting with “a turmoil of emotion for which there is no term but disgust,” Olney wonders about “the poor child herself” (31). Instead of assuming a professional stance, he finds himself “personally disliking the notion of her having negro blood in her veins; before he felt pity he felt repulsion; his own race instinct expressed itself in a merciless rejection of her beauty, her innocence, her helplessness” (31). The next time Olney speaks in reference to Rhoda’s secret, however, his “dislike” and “pity” have dissipated, and he is merely a lover who chooses to disregard her past. How Olney negotiates between professional and personal interests remains suggested by his final actions rather than narrated by the text. While Mrs. Meredith reacts with horror when Rhoda mentions her fondness for a particular black waiter, exclaiming, “It’s her race calling her!,” Olney responds by invoking a different view of this supposed

affinity (37). Noting that he sees “the other-race instinctВ .В .В . asserting itself sooner,” Olney draws attention to Rhoda’s condescending comments about a black waiter, for Rhoda has announced, “I should like to own him, and keep him as long as he lived. Isn’t it a shame that we can’t buy them, Dr. Olney, as we used to do?” (39). Echoing what Jeffory Clymer terms the “nostalgic dehumanization of blacks,” Rhoda echoes vestiges of antebellum thought in a way that Olney finds a comforting sign of her white acculturation.62 When Olney next encounters Rhoda, instead of seeing her as a young woman characterized by “personal gayety” and “flashing, childlike smiles,” or possessed of the superficial habits Mrs. Meredith linked to her black ancestry, he sees Rhoda as sober and chastened, with a face that is a “tragic mask, the inherited woe, unlit by a gleam of the brightness which had sometimes seemed Heaven’s direct gift to the girl on whom that burden of ancestral Page 188 →sin and sorrow had descended” (14, 13, 69). This new, somber attitude, associated with highbrow, ancient culture, countermands views of Rhoda as “easy” and irresponsible, or as a caricature of the easygoing African. Given the context of her aunt’s death, it is difficult to determine the cause of her changed demeanor, except to note that she has not altered her sense of racial affiliation. In Olney’s eyes, thus, her behavior intensifies her claims to whiteness. The supposed transformation of Rhoda—from white and thoughtless to black and emotional and then back to white and classically philosophical—suggests a comforting trajectory to Olney in its demarcation of a more somber, more worldly woman who emerges as an enhanced white subject. Boasting a “rich complexion of olive, with a sort of under-stain of red” and hair of “inky blackness,” Rhoda, appears to Olney reminiscent of the “Clytie head,” or the (white) marble bust of the famous water nymph (13); yet at the same time, she seems to reveal to Olney a hint of “savagery,” in contrast to a blond beauty, as Rhoda, dressed in mourning, is physically enhanced by the black of her clothing. Olney asserts that this is the color best suited to “Southern beauty; like the inky shadow cast by the effulgence of tropical skies, it is the counterpart of the glisten and flash of hair and eyes which no other hue could set off so well” (89).63 By contrast, the blond woman reveals the “tameness of the Northern type,” while Rhoda exotically represents “the elder world, the beauty of antiquity,” even as “the remote taint of her servile and savage origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses to let itself be put in words” (89–90). While Olney believes that the “tame” races will absorb the “wild,” darker ones, he nevertheless revels in the “savage” qualities he attributes to Rhoda’s beauty (90). With Olney’s “illicit desires” linked to what Henry Wonham describes as the immaterial and subconscious, or elements that Howells associates with the black race’s animality, Olney experiences an increased attraction to Rhoda (719–720).64 With his pseudo-scientific view of race ranging into erotic fascination, Olney responds to Rhoda’s ancestry in a way that sequesters the exotic into the privacy of marital relations. Having situated Rhoda as socially white, the narrative suggests that the residual (and imagined) markers of Rhoda’s black ancestry exist solely for Olney’s pleasure. Limiting Rhoda’s “savage” ways to her erotic nature, Olney again figures Rhoda as undeniably white in her emotional habits. Describing Rhoda as descended from a race of “slave-holders,” thereby “belong[ing] incomparably more to the oppressors than to the oppressed,” Olney tells Rhoda that the greater part of her ancestry is rooted in a disregard for others. As Page 189 →a consequence of this perverse identificatory claim, Olney sees that claims to Rhoda’s aloofness are effective, for “it did flatter herВ .В .В . to be treated as the daughter of slave-holders; she who could not reconcile herself to her servile origin” (98). Olney and Rhoda later decide to leave the United States to marry and live in Italy, where, as he articulates matters when he proposes, if her secret should ever become known (presumably through the phenotypical appearance of any children they might produce), there will be no corresponding prejudice. In addition, in Europe there is little opportunity to encounter a black population, no visible reminders of her racially mixed heritage and, with it, emotional crisis. Rhoda’s secret will be obliterated, along with any temptation to develop new habits of thinking and feeling, for she will live the life of a “somber” white woman married to a professional man possessed of scientific views on race relations.

Twain and a Cohesive Narrative of Race Relations Just as Howells’s Dr. Olney claimed a scientific mode of cultural authority that was cast as capable of defeating emotion’s irrationality, Twain, too, would undercut emotion’s power to affect change through

his portrayal of scientific interests in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In part, the invocation of scientific logic as a means of confronting racial difference in both authors’ fiction can be traced to their expectation of a mainstream white readership. Howells’s An Imperative Duty, published near the end of his once-secure relationship with the Harper company, appeared serially in Harper’s Monthly in 1891. The readers of Harper’s can be described as a cultured, middle-to-upper-class audience and largely though not exclusively white; it is an audience that overlaps with Howells’s positioning of race in relation to the topic of the amalgamation of races. Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, which appeared in the Century of 1893–1894, was situated within a literary vehicle where there was visible nostalgia for the antebellum South and the war years, which fueled the sale of plantation fictions as well as book and periodical publications during the 1880s and 1890s.65 In addition, Twain’s publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, had published the memoirs of both Grant and Sherman, contracting Grant’s writings in 1885 and Sherman’s in 1891, both with success. In this context, the scientific (and unemotional) thinking attributed to Twain’s titular character could be read as an effective counter to any expectations regarding southern nostalgia. The importance of the scientific perspective in Pudd’nhead Wilson is Page 190 →immediately clear in Twain’s main character and in his treatment by the antebellum community of Dawson’s Landing in 1830s Missouri, where he becomes the town eccentric. Much of Twain’s treatment of race depends upon what Susan Gillman describes as Wilson’s debts to “the dispassionate man of science” and upon his “ostensibly neutral, value-free variables of science and the syllogistic structure of logical reasoning.”66 Functioning much like Dr. Olney in An Imperative Duty, Wilson embodies an objective, scientifically invested perspective that has the potential to complicate racial boundaries and the hierarchies associated with them. Based on his status as a cultural outsider, Twain’s protagonist, David Wilson, is ridiculed largely because of his ironic comments. The novel begins with his arrival in Dawson’s Landing, and it ends with his successful prosecution of a changeling murderer. In the meanwhile, the plot encompasses the switching of two children, one the slave (Chambers) and the other the master (Tom Driscoll), and their contrasted upbringings; a visit by twin Italian noblemen; Tom’s discovery that he is actually a slave by birth; and the hobby of fingerprinting as pursued by Wilson, who eventually discovers the changelings’ history while investigating a murder attributed to the Italians. Initially, Wilson’s views differ from these of his southern compatriots. As an educated New Yorker of Scottish descent, Wilson stands aloof from a slave-holding ideology, a fact supported by his refusal to utter the racial epithet “nigger,” which is invoked liberally by other figures. Having been socialized in the North, Wilson has no visible race prejudice, and his Scottish ancestry would seem to promise a link to Scottish moral philosophy and its upholding of sympathetic exchange. But Wilson is guided primarily by his training as a lawyer and by his recreational interest in science, particularly the new science of fingerprinting. Yet as a figure of dispassion, Wilson initially alienates the people of Dawson’s Landing. With no amorous or familial bonds, he exhibits no visible affect. Without vices, he engages in no subterfuge or criminal activity. Thus, from the novel’s opening, Wilson appears curiously exempt from human emotion. One of the most significant moments in Wilson’s social alienation occurs early in his life at Dawson’s Landing, when he tells a joke about a yelping, snarling dog. Commenting that “I wish I owned half of that dog,” and that “I would kill my half,” Wilson commits a social error that Twain’s narrative spells out clearly, in that he engages in a kind of logical play that the inhabitants of the small town find incomprehensible, and in response they give Wilson his nickname.67 Significantly, Wilson shows “no expression that they could read” when making his comment, committing a remark that illustrates his Page 191 →elevation of wit over all gesture (5). While much has been made of Wilson’s irony and its obscurity in view of the town’s stolid citizens, it is also clear that Wilson’s habit of announcing his observations through an impersonal, flat affect creates part of the difficulty. Without the slightest invocation of emotional inflexion to guide them, the citizens are left without an interpretive axis. In many ways, Twain’s novel functions much like David Wilson in that it, on a much broader scale, avoids affective explanations, jettisoning references to personal relationships in lieu of wit.68 As such, it constitutes a very different type of passing novel than so many of the others published at the century’s turn. Specifically,

the text illustrates what narratives look like when they deal with potentially explosive topics like race passing without substantive regard to emotional bonds, the result of which is to create a mechanism of closure without delving deeply into complex personal motivations or individual subjectivities. It is also a novel that has been described by Forest G. Robinson as wanting “to have it both ways” in regard to race; in addition, it stands as “an incongruous combination of fads, vocabularies, and concepts, all of which were then part of the debates over whether and how biological differences determine the natural capacities of racial groups,” according to Susan Gillman.69 As a result of this superabundance in all avenues except for affective ones, an unemotional perspective dominates the novel through a free and indirect discourse. In his aloofness from personal connections and his scientific orientation toward the world, Wilson resembles Howells’s Dr. Olney, who infuses emotionally polarizing topics such as race with a guiding scientific logic. But unlike Olney, Wilson remains alone throughout the plot. He is not romantically linked to any character, nor does he appear to develop bonds that exceed the boundaries of polite friendship; seconding Judge Driscoll in a duel is as far as his affection guides his behavior. According to Gregg Camfield, Wilson’s isolation serves as evidence that “rather than emphasize the importance of race, Clemens concentrates on the common experience of ostracism. What he comes to notice here is the strange interplay between the way those on the margins are perceived and the ways in which they are categorized.”70 The implication of this reading, which situates Twain as attempting to cloak the seriousness of his topic with his characteristic lightness of tone, points to the author’s need for a unifying tool. Deploying what Everett Emerson describes as a “consistently ironic vision of life,” the novel relies on irony at moments where the text threatens to splinter under the weight of its various interests in the changeling, the race-passing plot, Page 192 →fingerprinting, legal strategy, xenophobia, personal identity, the collective problem of race, and insular small-town life.71 Wilson’s irony, one of the novel’s most cohesive elements, appears indissolubly linked to his personal isolation, a stance that also allows him to act in the manner of a typological scientist, categorizing a society from which he remains aloof. Eric Sundquist has described the effect of the irony deployed by Twain, noting that the novel’s opening “rhetoric of ironic distanceВ .В .В . must be taken as [Twain’s] defense against direct implication in the emotional pain of the tale, a disguise, like Tom’s color, that covers a latent and incriminating truth that will be revealed at the end of the tale.”72 Based on what is known of Twain’s composing process, he added the ironic voice to the text as he decided to make David Wilson a focal character, thus using both irony and Wilson to unify a narrative that threatened to spiral out of control, as Twain admitted in the preface, commenting that the book “created no end of confusion and annoyance” (119).73 In December of 1892, Twain wrote to Fred J. Hall, his publishing partner, that he had completed a “60–80,000” word manuscript of “Those Extraordinary Twins,” a text that he had decided to “entirely re-cast,” while rewriting “the first two-thirds,” the result of which was that two minor characters became “very prominent,” while one major character was all but dropped, and the “twins [were] subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.” Twain also noted that “the minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the story after him—“Pudd’nhead Wilson.”74 According to Hershel Parker, once it became clear to Twain during the summer of 1893 that the massive, six-hundred-page manuscript he had completed the previous December was not publishable in its current form, he decided to “separate and minimize the Twins” and to have them interact with new central figures.75 It was at this point that Twain again wrote to Hall, noting that “this” time, “Pudd’nhead Wilson” was a success, for he had “sunk” the twins “out of sight,” leaving them as “mere flitting shadows” in the new text. “The whole story,” he wrote, “is centered on the murder and the trial; from the first chapter the movement is straight ahead without divergence or side-play to the murder and the trial,” with three central characters taking center stage, “Pudd’nhead, вЂTom’ Driscoll and his nigger mother, Roxana.”76 Just as Wilson functions as a mechanism of closure in the final version of the novel, so too does the voice associated with him in the epigraphs to each chapter, which are presented as passages from “Wilson’s Calendar,” a document that Wilson, the character, intended for a larger public but that remained unpublished because of Dawson’s Landing’s failure to embrace Page 193 →his sense of irony. As readers learn, Judge Driscoll, who has read Wilson’s “whimsical almanac,” approves of it thoroughly, but even he

encounters resistance when he attempts to circulate it, for “ironyВ .В .В . was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest, and decided without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd’nhead—which there hadn’t—this revelation removed that doubt for good and all” (25). While refuting the town’s judgment, the epigraphs emphasize Wilson’s dispassionate insights and suggest his cultural and affective isolation in Dawson’s Landing. Among the novel’s readers, Wilson’s calendar was interpreted as an extension of Twain’s characteristic voice. As Emerson notes, “many of Wilson’s calendar entries sound suspiciously like Mark Twain,” contributing to the “caustic tone of the book without outright authorial intrusion.”77 Period reviewers of the novel also emphasized the ironic voice, positioning it as a sign of Twain’s characteristic brand of humor. The American Hebrew of 1895, for example, celebrated the novel as Twain’s “most coherent story” in years, terming the chapter headings “gems of wit and philosophy,” while the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette described Wilson as “one of the wittiest and most original characters Twain has produced” and noted that the novel is “full of the characteristic humor of Twain.”78 Various reviewers quoted liberally from the calendar excerpts, among them Cosmopolitan, which termed it “inimitably droll and witty”; both the Hartford Times and the Springfield Republican included excerpts from the calendar, with the former devoting more than a third of the review to quotes from the calendar and the latter noting that these sayings are “in the familiar whimsical vein of humor and keep wit intermingled which have delighted so many hundred of thousands of readers,” linking the ironies of the text to Twain’s voice and career.79 The extended “author function” invoked in these reviews helped establish the text as the product of a recognizable oeuvre. Just as significantly, the reviews attest to the widespread recognition of the novel as limited in its emotional approach to a potentially divisive topic, perhaps seeing this limitation as a selling point. Unsurprisingly, within the novel, Wilson functions as a mechanism of order, of categorization, and of strict boundaries of various sorts, as his perspective suggests in its shaping of each chapter, epigraph by epigraph. Ultimately, because of Wilson, the unruly, passing characters will be returned to their places, a murder will be solved, and the institution of slavery will assert its illogic by condemning a murderer to slavery rather than death. Page 194 →Whereas in other passing fictions from this era, emotional representations function so as to blur racial distinctions, here a stark divide remains, for a different logic of origins is upheld, as the science of fingerprinting points to an appropriate world order unaffected by nurture or socialization or emotional habit. It is, by contrast, rooted in dispassionate scientific clarity.

The Absent “Alien” Self Like Rhoda Algate in An Imperative Duty, the youth known as Tom Driscoll has been socialized as white, and because (unlike Frances Harper’s protagonist, Iola Leroy) he has no incentive to affiliate with the black community, whiteness emerges as an unquestioned desideratum for him. The reader’s knowledge of the changeling plot constitutes one of the more problematic aspects of the novel, as interpreters have long pointed out, for while the town’s inhabitants view Tom as objectionable because of his selfish personality, the reader is invited to connect social deviance with Tom’s secret slave heritage. As Tom, ostensibly heir to the Driscoll fortune, grows up to be a spoiled, self-absorbed young man, his defects of character, whether attributable to nature (i.e., to race) or nurture (including the preferential treatment of white children), prevent any empathy with the character. Notably, too, Tom’s actions are frequently treated with a narrative seriousness that places him outside the text’s lighter moments of irony. Neither appreciative of wit nor invested in forging emotional bonds, even with his closest associates, Tom appears as an undisciplined youth with a vicious streak. As the narrative stresses the seriousness of Tom’s conduct—his viciousness and jealousy, primarily—it reserves its strongest critiques for his flawed caretakers. His mother, Roxy, for example, is described as “doting fool” who allows her “mock reverence” for her son to be transformed into “real reverence” for his elevated social position after she switches the babies, thereby widening the “abyss” between the two and permitting Tom any manner of behavior that occurs to him (19).80 Percy Driscoll, who is in actuality the father of the child known as the slave Chambers, is shown as equally

flawed, for he unwittingly reinforces the false Tom’s privileges, caning the boy who is his genetic son for any movement against the imposter. While these caretakers create havoc with the truth, it is clear that Tom becomes a much more serious problem, for he begins to exhibit a “native viciousness” that asserts itself when he tries to drown the young, athletic Chambers and, upon failing, attempts to stab him with a pocketknife. With Roxy, his slave caretaker, Tom exhibits extremePage 195 → callousness, having learned not to accept affection from a “nigger” (23). As a consequence, “she saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the somber depths of unmodified slavery. The abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete. She was merely his chattel now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing and helpless slave, the humble and unresisting victim of his capricious temper and vicious nature” (21). Tom’s interiority, under his “capricious” and “vicious” exterior, is explored so infrequently that his experience of entering into the knowledge of his heritage is detailed only in a few brief paragraphs and is then immediately dropped. Presented in this way, his experience offers little by way of an appeal to the emotions. In effect, the reader is directed to assess the ludicrousness of the changeling situation rather than to imagine embodying such a predicament, for the text consistently denies the presence of Iser’s “alien me,” or an imagined alternative identity (here a black identity), as constructed by the imagination of the youth known as Tom Driscoll. Thus, the notion of the “alien” but imaginable self becomes less important to Twain’s novel than an emphasis on the conditions of social belonging and how Tom deviates from moral and social conventions. Even before he learns of his mixed heritage, Tom appears as a coward and a manipulator, characteristics that will bring about his ruin. As he confronts the revelation that his heritage situates him as black and therefore a slave, Tom assesses the situation with an unaccustomed seriousness, appearing as if on the verge of an emotional revelation, wherein he might be expected to feel differently, or to launch an investigation of the “alien” self, philosophizing about an alternative identity, or to alter his habits. The morning after the secret is told, he questions: Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference made between white and black? .В .В .В How hard the nigger’s fate seems, this morning!—yet until last night such a thought never entered my head. (44) Curiously here, Tom describes the condition of the black race impersonally, as though the terms of the debate do not apply to him, even as he experiences a “changed moral landscape,” but only briefly. His behavior is altered for a few days while he perceives the slights attributable to the “nigger in him,” as the text describes it. Exhibiting embarrassment, “shrinking,” and “skulking,” Tom finds that he does not “know himself” any longer Page 196 →(45). Yet this alienated response is cast through the terms of behavior, not emotion; moreover, it is short-lived, for, as the narrative asserts, “the main structure of his character was not changed, and could not be changed,” and its consistency allows him to revert to his boastful and self-centered behaviors (45). What is missing from the episode is any internal recognition that “Tom” is involved in this debate as an emotional subject. Given the narrative launched above, it is somewhat startling to see Tom’s response to his heritage attenuated so soon, a fact highlighted by the revelation that Twain, in drafting the novel, composed a more lengthy portrait of Tom’s internal response to his black heritage. In the chapter that was originally meant to follow the revelation of Tom’s parentage, as Everett Emerson reports, Twain wrote an extended discussion of “Tom’s recognition that because he is partly black he can be sold like a dog.”81 Beginning with the introduction, “In his broodings in the solitudes, he searched himself for the reasons of certain things & in toil & pain he worked out the answers,” this passage stresses not only fate, but also the “toil” and “pain” wrapped up in such questions.82 These “answers” include note of the “decades & generations of insult & outrage” that form the basis of race relations. The passage also goes on to query whether Tom’s baseness of character can be attributed to the “brutalizing effects of a long-drawn heredity of slaveowning, with the habit of abuse which the possession of irresponsible power always creates & perpetuates, by a law of human nature.”83 Unlike the few pages devoted to Tom in the final version of the novel, this extended passage would have represented Tom as a character capable of emotional engagement, and it would have allowed the novel a deeper exploration of the ways in which privilege affects emotional habit.

In the published version of the novel, rather than inhabit a new role, and with it newly considered emotional responses to it, Tom’s brief consideration of racial identity fades quickly.84 After that point, and rejecting interiority for activity, Tom dons multiple disguises, emphasizing his claims upon the external world, the most obvious of which is his appearance as a woman, which he adopts so as to steal from various households in the area. While Tom plays at a woman’s role, there is no indication that he perceives himself as playing at whiteness, which he continues to inhabit without any further consideration of his complicated racial heritage. As Randall Knoper notes, it is curious that a character “could momentarily undergo a radical transformation, long enough for absolutely convincing performances, and yet return to his old identity.”85 Further proof of Tom’s resistance to an Page 197 →extended affective understanding comes with his sale of Roxy—down the river—and his murder of the man who raised him, his ostensible uncle, Judge Driscoll, the description of which reveals an unrepentant Tom who is entirely focused on the money he stands to gain (both from stealing and from protecting his inheritance), not on the death of his would-be kinsman. The description of the murder notes that Tom wakes the sleeping judge and, with “his eyes fastened upon his benefactor’s face,” proceeds to stab Driscoll as he wakes (94). At the moment when the old man releases Tom, “some of the notes escaped from his left hand and fell in the blood on the floor,” causing Tom to drop the knife and reach for the bills (94). The ensuing omniscient narration draws attention to Tom’s subsequent acts: cleaning his bloody hands and burning his disguise. There is no account of Tom’s thoughts or feelings, except for his gloating statement to himself that “all the detectives on earth couldn’t trace me now; there’s not a vestige of a clew left in the world; that homicide will take its place with the permanent mysteries, and people won’t get done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years,” a comment that focuses solely on the competency of the crime investigation (95). The narrative’s failure to account for any emotional involvement, both here and after the revelation of Tom’s ancestry, clearly prevents an empathetic response to the character, just as it avoids attributing any emotion to Tom. Tom’s interest in maintaining his social standing and inheritance takes precedence over any acknowledgment of the ways in which his racial identity could affect his sense of self or his affective habits.86 Further, the scenario of slavery, which gives rise to the changeling plot, combined with the paternalism that gives rise to the murder plot and the revelation of Tom’s racial identity (which precedes the sale of Roxy), figures Tom as resistant to emotional bonds of various sorts, but particularly positive ones. Gregg Camfield, for example, describes the ways in which only a select few of the novel’s relationships are rooted in “positive emotional value,” including the friendships between the twins and Wilson, whereas “almost all of the powerful connectionsВ .В .В . are connections of fear, suspicion, hatred, and pain.87 While Camfield thus reads the novel as more emotionally engaged than this analysis does, it is notable that he, too, views Tom as outside the novel’s central emotional circuits. As a consequence, unchallenged by an emotional appeal, the prejudices of the town survive the novel’s events intact. The changelings are switched back, Wilson uses fingerprinting to prove that Tom is a murderer and a slave, and thus Wilson is elevated in the eyes of his neighbors—for being logical rather than an ironist. For all Page 198 →its attention to an “ironist’s superiority,” all the traditional hierarchies and boundaries in Dawson’s Landing are allowed to stand, unchallenged by any form of emotional complication.88

Ironic Implications If the ironic voice that permeates Twain’s novel functions as a mechanism that supplies cohesion in a splintering text while subduing emotional engagements in order to stress social order, not emotional flux, then it required an organ. That organ and the mechanism of this unity, Wilson, is at last integrated into the community (which now applauds him), and the novel asserts that either Tom or Chambers must be the master and that the other must be sold into slavery, that identity is “true” and fixed and, furthermore, traceable through blood.89 In other words, despite the fact that slavery is indicted early in the text, the novel ends by casting its characters with a black heritage as figures whose actions are most reprehensible, based on their actions of child switching, theft, bribery, and murder. In Tom’s case, he is also largely devoid of emotional depth. The elevation of the long-maligned Wilson, who, incidentally, supplies the empirical proof that allows the town to continue to justify racial categories, suggests something of the ideological difficulty that ensues when emotional

ties become secondary interests. By the novel’s end the forces of logic, scientific inquiry, and irony dominate the text, foreclosing the development of emotional narratives. Irony returns full force in the final pages (after an earnest courtroom episode), reemerging as the dominant textual mode. And, like other rigid systems of order, it creates a semblance of cohesion. Whatever the impetus for Twain’s and Howells’s creation of figures such as David Wilson and Dr. Olney, there is one notable result: the structuring of logic as a device of closure in race-passing literature. But it is also a device that appears profoundly limited, for these texts attest to the fact that logic doesn’t make the texts more straightforward or less erratic than affectively infused narratives were deemed to be. Rather, logic’s dominance, ironically, heightens the potential for melodrama, particularly where endings are concerned, filled as they are with revelations of theft and murder, baby switching, and public trials with rapt audiences. Logic, in the end, doesn’t banish excess from these texts and the racially charged contexts they depict; rather, it may be said to use excess as a justification for reorganizing the world in ways that extend privilege and power, further reinforcing the hegemony of the existing social order. Page 199 →As the fiction discussed earlier in this chapter suggests, in turn-of-the-century race fiction, affective nuance overlapped with the concept of cultivated emotion, or with the idea that individuals could nurture emotional pathways that could result in real but controlled affective experiences. Such a rendering of emotion implicitly promised to right a number of wrongs: to bridge the fissures that engender prejudice, to cultivate behavioral patterns that would allow the disenfranchised to position themselves as assured and, hence, worthy of high regard—in short, to create new emotional possibilities rather than affirm existing ones. Overcoming anger, sidestepping frustration and vituperation, this literature suggests, would help mend a racial divide that, in the aftermath of Plessy, must have seemed tremendous. The cultural promises attached to emotional nuance and to cultivated affect appeared poised to broaden the boundaries of emotional representations, even as other fictions, Pudd’nhead Wilson among them, remind us that the very idea of learning new affective positions required a break from an existing social logic and the supposed order it promised to reveal and affirm.

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Chapter Five Competitive Feeling Multifocal Fiction and Affective Blood Sport When speaking of his crafting of individual perspectives within a fiction composed of multiple, coexisting viewpoints, Henry James invoked the metaphor of the window. In this now-famous passage, he claimed that a viewer could look out of any given window onto the world of the text’s action, one window at a time, thereby gaining an awareness of “the difference of the individual relation to its general subject-matter.”1 These comments prepare James’s extended metaphor, which explores the importance of understanding an array of character-based perspectives in all their nuance and effectiveness, including his assertion that the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other.2 Page 201 →While it is read as crucial to James’s sense of perspective, the window metaphor also sheds light on reading as a process of cognitively and emotionally identifying with a given character’s perspective. As read in its 1908 context, this passage, which appeared in the New York Edition preface to Portrait of a Lady, was composed not after the writing of Portrait, which had appeared nearly thirty years earlier, but during the period of James’s participation in the collective novel The Whole Family, which was published serially in Harper’s Bazar from December 1907 to November 1908.3 In the context of this novel, for which twelve authors composed chapters about twelve major characters, with each author adopting the interests and (in all but one case) the perspective of the character in question, James’s description underscores the ways in which many “unique instrument[s]” lead to “distinct” and differentiated “impressions” rather than a cohesive whole. At least theoretically, according to James’s description, a multiperspective, multiauthored fiction presents a series of windows, and our peering, tiptoeing, or squinting out of them depends on our ability to fit our view to the shape of the aperture. But as James’s metaphor also suggests, a profound connection between viewer and aperture is not automatic, for the “fit” between a reader and any given lens upon the world may not be ideal. In other words, every window may not suit every reader. While James acknowledges the sophisticated reader who is aware of the fact that each character (or each “window”) is idiosyncratic, that none sees “straight upon life,” his description also suggests the way in which aligning oneself with any one aperture becomes an exclusive act, one that privileges the existence of one view as distinct from any other. At some point, James asserts, the reader recognizes that each individual and “his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on” (7). James’s metaphor of the multiapertured, many-storied view onto an imagined courtyard of action is especially applicable to multiperspective novels, for as the “window” passage suggests, competing perspectives bring about the necessity of privileging one viewpoint over others and, with it, one set of emotionally imbued concerns. Because chapters depict the basic plot or characters in dissimilar ways, the novel’s central arc magnifies disagreements as character relationships descend into pointed strife. In addition, family members

reveal radical differences among their views, their attitudes, and their subjectivities, as the novel invites empathy for each figure, one by one. This particular invocation of fellow feeling, however, ultimatelyPage 202 → casts doubt on emotion’s capacity to create understanding, even in the context of individuals who are united by nation, region, and gene pool. By instead implicating empathy in a competitive bout for understanding, the novel calls into question the basic poles of emotional valence: positive and negative emotion. Whereas emotional experiences that include sympathy, benevolence, love, affection, and respect, for example, could be positioned as positively structured social relations, emotions such as anxiety, hatred, rage, jealousy, and envy could be understood as negative. But in an era when the language of emotion, like the experience, was multiply inflected, it became possible for emotions like empathy to take on unusual values and, with them, new questions. It is a reading experience that raises the question of what happens when empathy turns ugly. While depictions of emotional hybridity, historicized emotion, and cultivated emotion constitute innovations in the representation of emotion, as this project has argued throughout, the revision of empathy’s emotional valence is perhaps the most modern of all of realist-era interventions into emotional representation. In her book on empathy in novelistic fiction, Suzanne Keen defines empathy as meaning “I feel what you feel” and “I feel your pain,” defining it as a prime example of “emotional contagion,” or the sharing of any emotions, but most often those of a painful sort.4 While empathy (a relatively modern revision of sympathy) could be linked to its earlier relative, sympathy (which means “I feel a supportive emotion about your feelings” or “I feel pity for your pain”), with which it is often elided, The Whole Family positions empathy as less than ideal and as more prone to manipulation.5 Thus, the act of vying for empathy meant charging it with an aggressive dimension and underscoring the ways in which empathizing with one character necessitates the rejection of equally visible competitors and, with them, attention to their experiences and beliefs. In reversing a traditional understanding of empathy—or an interpretation of empathy as a socially oriented act capable of uniting dissimilar individuals—and by stressing its inherent negative potential, the novel inverts one of the major tenets of sentimental emotion by suggesting that even within one family, empathy fails to create unity, either imagined or actual. Moreover, by depicting empathy’s negative capacity, The Whole Family implies that positive empathy is in fact an illusion, one exposed by the revelation of noncooperative relations charted by the novel. The Whole Family’s assault on the unifying capacity of empathy is attached to a fairly unremarkable plot, which revolves around Peggy Talbert’s return home from college with the news that she has become engaged. The novel is set primarily in the small northeastern town of Eastridge, where the large and Page 203 →contentious Talbert family lives. The family’s complicated reactions then dominate the plot. Peggy’s father, the patriarch, is somewhat pleased with the engagement, though he laments Peggy’s conventionality and hopes for her happiness. Peggy’s “old-maid” aunt then complicates the general felicity by revealing herself to be a sexualized New Woman, who envisions herself as in competition with Peggy; “Aunt Elizabeth,” moreover, recognizes Peggy’s intended, Harry Goward, as a former flame and begins communicating with him privately, mostly, she claims, to convince him of the impropriety of meeting with her. Subsequently, Peggy’s two sisters and two brothers chime in, as do a mother, grandmother, brother-inlaw, sister-in-law, and friend of the family. Over the course of the chapters, Peggy’s intended becomes confused, his relationship with the aunt is discovered, Aunt Elizabeth becomes otherwise engaged (at least for a time), and the possibility is raised that Peggy has had feelings for other men (and they for her). The by now increasingly unfortunate fiancГ©, Harry Goward, becomes lost after a train wreck and is then hospitalized; meanwhile, Peggy is believed to be in love with the town doctor (who is attached by rumor to Aunt Elizabeth). Still another potential lover is revealed, a psychology professor by the name of Stillman Dane. Various family members take an interest in pairing Peggy up with one of the available men (or in securing one of the men for herself) before they flit away to New York and are inexplicably separated in the city, and, still more inexplicably, they proceed to search for one another while Peggy and Dane elope with the help of a family friend. Yet, one might argue, the plot hardly matters, for the novel’s energies encircle the concerns that pit each individual against the collective. Transforming what James portrayed as the ordinary process of weeding through various perspectives and turning that process into an overtly competitive arena of empathetic hyperidentification, The Whole Family attests that it is

important to recognize that the reader’s inability to accept the narrative of any one character does not necessarily mean that textual integrity is in peril. Refusing to embrace one chapter, even (as one is invited to do) to believe that one is a hoax, does not threaten the novel’s hermeneutic stability. Rather, the novel deploys what John Crowley describes as a “pre-modernist discourse that highlights the modernist experiments with narrative perspective.”6 The novel thus presents truths that are, in some measure, relative, but it additionally suggests that some relatives are inherently more suspect than others as the novel offers up a surface-level coherence by inviting readers to sacrifice some chapters and characters for the sake of the whole. Page 204 →Some chapters, for example, invalidate a predecessor’s careful plotting, and some ignore heretoimportant plot points and reimagine other scenarios (and characters) entirely. If one believes Charles Edward’s story, one must also believe Loraine, but dismiss the Talbert parents. And if Peggy’s chapter reveals Billy’s to be a hoax, then Alice Brown renders Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews’s plot developments (and characterizations) invalid. Similarly, Phelps dismisses James’s plot in its entirety, just as Alice Brown rewrites Mary Wilkins Freeman’s character, Aunt Elizabeth, presenting her as an ardent spiritualist rather than a man-crazy flirt and a self-actualized New Woman, as she is in Freeman’s chapter. If one privileges Maria’s account of the family interaction, then one must discount both Charles Edward and Lorraine, along with their aunt. Basic understandings of characters also differ; there is, for example, the question of whether Charles Edward is really the dutiful but inwardly rebelling son known as Charles Edward, or the rebellious “Peter” (as Lorraine, his wife, refers to him), or the ironic college chum “Charlie Ned,” as he is called in Peggy’s chapter. If Grandmother Evarts seems to offer the most profound truth, then the entire young generation is a set of mindless ninnies, except perhaps for Peggy, the generational throwback, whom everyone else regards as a dull-witted young creature unable to make an independent decision. Precisely because one is invited to choose favorites, to create allegiances that mimic those of the characters, the novel forces readers to envision their allegiances to characters as finite—and as combatively won. As the character Tom Price (the “Married Son-in-law”) snarkily describes the situation, the negotiations among the competing factions characterizing the family are akin to negotiations among contentious nations. Speaking from the complications of the middle plot, Price highlights the self-protective nature of this factionalism. On the whole I am glad our family is no larger than it is. It is a very excellent family as families go, but the infinite capacity of each individual in it for making trouble, and adding to complications already sufficiently complex, surpasses anything that has ever before come into my personal or professional experience. If I handle my end of this miserable affair without making a break of some kind or other, I shall apply to the Secretary of State for a high place in the diplomatic service.7 As the character notes, the world appears dauntingly large—a virtual global village requiring a secretary of state. While this statement is usually interpretedPage 205 → as a meta-commentary on the author’s (John Kendrick Bangs’s) association with the other participants in the novel, it also functions as an observation about the perspective-based diversity that realist-era authors simultaneously pursued and found disconcerting. Because they developed the shaped perspectives that individuated characters through their subjectivities, the text reveals “complications” that, like nations, could benefit from serious interventions, based on the potential for profound factionalism. Ranging beyond traditional boundaries of authorship, including one author’s control of a plotline, the novel examines multiple lives from the viewpoint of twelve character narrators; in doing so The Whole Family highlights the importance of emotional connection by multiplying the call to identify successively, as twelve equally weighted perspectives compete. Readers are presented with a scenario in which each family member has been overlooked or misunderstood within the tenuous (and at times hostile) collective of the family, and each feels that she or he deserves greater understanding.8 Characters are explored in depth only once, for a chapter’s length. The patriarch’s chapter is followed by that of his sister, “The Old-Maid Aunt,” and on through his wife, his younger children, his live-in mother-in-law, a married son and his wife, a married daughter and her husband, and a family friend. In its extended examination of each individual, the novel highlights the ways in which each figure desires a hereto-unreached plane of emotional satisfaction. With an emphasis on elaborate

scenarios of miscommunication, such fictions invoke a Darwinian-type struggle for emotional ascendancy in a crowded environment. This struggle, this survival of the most invitingly empathetic, involves what Elizabeth Freeman has described as “circuits of identification and belonging,” which, she notes, suggest “templates for subjectivity.”9 The novel’s “circuits” and “templates,” I would argue, not only exist alongside one another, but also host the potential for affective combat as the text presents repeated calls for readers to accept and reject chapters, as well as the characters attached to them. Given the hyperbolic nature of The Whole Family, where there are not a handful of perspectives but twelve equally weighted ones, the issue of choice becomes exaggerated, yielding a contentious arena where it is impossible for a reader to share in all characters’ emotional states equally or to empathize with all figures—at least not simultaneously. The novel’s basic platform of equal chapters thus encourages a dynamic wherein coexisting types of difference do not create equality but, rather, work to reinstate types of privilege. While June Howard interprets the paradigm that creates cohesion in The Whole Family as indebted to a sentimental construction, it is nonethelessPage 206 → difficult to characterize the text’s successive calls for empathy as entirely rooted in bonds of affection. As I read it, the novel’s combative approach to empathy highlights a dynamic that presumes that bonds rooted in apparent “authenticity,” or “the spontaneity, the sincerity, and the legitimacy of an emotion,” as Howard defines the structures of sentimentality, exist only on the surface, or in parodic forms.10 In the novel, emotional connection solves few difficulties, as, for example, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse argue of regionalist literature, where empathy forms “a solution for survival in a world of difference.”11 Nor is empathy, as Julie Ellison has argued, a construction of emotion designed to address “scenarios of inequality.”12 In the Talbert family, emotional survival means actively rejecting one’s place in the family, dispersing from hearth and home, and stepping beyond the domestic sphere of this patriarchal family. Instead of attaching reparative possibilities to emotional constructions or encouraging the proliferation of feeling, the novel suggests that empathetic bonds are essentially finite and that when multiple calls for empathy coexist, there is simply not enough emotional capital for everyone. In this family, difference is not overcome through emotional engagements, but instead, emotional engagements set difference squarely in the foreground. There is, additionally, no suffering that is made to look immediately recognizable through bodily pain, no unified call for pity or other universalizing emblems of sentimentality, in part because each individuated set of emotional appeals occurs independently and successively. This splintering of the novel’s emotional dynamic allows it to explore the ways in which constraint, worry, curiosity, and vexation isolate characters and set them against one another. While some realist-era fictions explored in this project enacted a search for emotional origins, construing the concept of origins in a variety of ways across texts and characters, in the case of one family—in which members clearly lack understanding of one another—the concept of genetic origins accounts for very little of the family’s dynamic. Instead, individuated emotional constitutions emerge as the products of unique subjectivities and individuated experiences, a confluence that renders all histories personal. That nine genetically similar individuals (plus two spouses and one friend of the family) vary tremendously suggests not only that they fail to experience life in similar ways, but that they have become habituated to vastly different types of feeling based on those experiences. The novel’s emphasis on the experiential origins of emotion suggests not only what Michael Bell describes as modernism’s “hostility” to a “commonPage 207 → language of feeling” but “a new set of feelings—ones less powerful than the classical political passions, though perhaps more suited, in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still diagnostic nature, for models of subjectivity, collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen by past theorists of the commonwealth,” according to Sianne Ngai.13 Focusing on the function of emotion in the modern era, Ngai suggests that if the personalized passions of the early twentieth century appear somewhat diluted, they functioned so as to refute the collective possibilities attached to fellow feeling; in the case of The Whole Family, the production of competitive approaches to empathy renders any vision of emotion’s capacity to generate unity merely a naГЇve fiction. And while there is no deep hatred visible in the novel, a festering, widely dispersed resentment toward others prevails.

Amid this scenario of simmering hostility, there are few visible hopes for unity of feeling. There is no sympathizing spectator (for each chapter constitutes a soliloquizing moment); in addition, each individual’s regard for the family ranges into what Ngai describes as the “ugly” feelings coincident with modernity, which are “вЂsyntactically’ negative in the sense that they are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction, by phobic strivings вЂaway from’ rather than philic strivings вЂtoward.’”14 Dominating the connective tissue of The Whole Family, the dynamics of competition function as a source of negatively charged feeling. Highlighting profound individuation, character by character, chapter by chapter, what the novel produces is not a vision of a unified family bound by connective tissues, but case studies of “the narrow chamber of the individual mind,” or the psychology of combative (and narrow) individualism.15 While chapters challenge each other implicitly, characters locate their individuation through the explicit nurturing of “ugly feelings” for others, as in Charles Edward’s comment about his brother-in-law, Tom, for whom he registers “such deep diversity of feeling [that] we simply loathe each other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the true joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other” (154). Stressing the “awful” and “abysmal” nature of their “eternal” intercourse, this narrative of mutual “loathing” stresses Ngai’s construct of “negative syntax.” According to daughter-in-law Lorraine’s hostile view of all objects and attitudes connected to her in-laws, “You have to make your mind a blank if you don’t want to be driven raving crazy by that dining-room. It has a hideous black-walnut sideboard, an вЂoil-painting’ of pale, bloated fruit on one side, Page 208 →and pale, bloated fish on the other, and a strip of black-and-white marbled oil-cloth below” (89). Focusing on his hostility to the lot of the family’s offspring, the elder friend of the family, whose favorites are the parents, Ada and Cyrus, makes a similarly misanthropic statement when he claims: As a matter of fact the whole family, including Talbert’s preposterous old-maid sister Elizabeth (the biggest child of the lot), absolutely depend on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife, and would have been helpless without them. But as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. (296–297) Viewing the family’s youth as falling far short of the individuality they claim, as vainly engaging in egotistical competition, this acquaintance indicts all family members except the parents; at the novel’s end, he banishes all offspring so that he can dine comfortably with his contemporaries, noting that he and the elders “don’t want the whole family” (316). In addition to these constitutional difficulties hindering the cultivation of friendly feeling, individual cases of pettiness and jealousy abound. Aunt Elizabeth terms Peggy a “’pink-cheeked little fool!’” (271), Lorraine refers to Aunt Elizabeth as “a howling swell” (92), Maria considers Peggy a “blubbering” idiot (190), and Charles Edward claims that Aunt Elizabeth’s hat “made her look like a coster’s bride” (267). Elizabeth, habitually competitive with all other women, has harsh words for most of the domestic wives around her: Mrs. Temple (the neighbor’s wife) is “pathetic” in her housekeeping zeal (35), possessed of a “rather large, flabby body” (53), and looks old enough to be Temple’s mother (36). “You might load that poor soul with crown jewels,” Elizabeth declares, “and she would make them look as if she had bought them at a department store for ninety-eight cents” (35). Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, Ada, reaps her share of criticism too, as Elizabeth maliciously contemplates, “I wondered what Ada would say if she knew what I knew, if she would continue to chew her cud, that Cyrus had been simply mad over another girl, and only married her because he could not get the other one” (40). Lorraine, too, is viewed by Elizabeth as “just like Ada, pretty, but always with her shirt-waist hunching in the back, sitting wrong, and standing lopsided, and not worrying enough to give her character salt and pepper” (44). With few exceptions, Peggy is considered a Page 209 →nitwit and is described by her older brother as a virtual bird-brain: “Peggy hasn’t more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a small swelling dove on a window-sill; but she’s extremely pretty and absolutely nice, a little rounded pink-billed presence that pecks up gratefully any grain of

appreciation” (161). Suggesting that long-standing feuds and habitually internalized resentments breed such negative feelings, the novel shows no one to be immune from the ugliness of expecting empathy from others in a competitive arena. For all her criticism of others, Elizabeth, too, reaps her share of critique, even from those who remain silent, among them Ada’s mother, Grandmother Everts, who believes that “Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women who live on a false basis. She is a case of arrested development. She enjoys the same amusements that she did fifteen years ago. She is like a young fruit that has been put in a preserving fluid and gives the illusion of youth; the preserving fluid in her case is the disappointment she suffered as a girl.” She concludes decisively, “I like useful women” (68). The married daughter, Maria, similarly critiques Aunt Elizabeth, asserting, “She always has had, she always must have, she always will have the admiration of some man or men to engross her attention. She is an attractive woman; she knows it; women admit it; and men feel it. I don’t think Aunt Elizabeth is a heartless person; nor an irresponsible one, only an idle and unhappy one. She lives on this intoxicant as other women might live on tea or gossip, as a man would take his dram or his tobacco“ (194–195). At the discovery that Harry Goward, the target of Elizabeth’s interest, is but twenty-one, Tom Price, too, indulges his distaste for Elizabeth and begins to nurture “a feeling of wrath against Aunt Elizabeth” as he blames her for the romantic difficulties facing Peggy and Harry (132). The latent hostilities that structure familial feeling attest to the fact that profound differences can infiltrate any group, even one bound by genetics, family history, and proximity. There is here no natural compulsion for family members to agree or to share viewpoints with one another; instead, it is clear that patriarchs approach emotional bonds differently than do their college-aged daughters and young sons. Bonds of affection mean something different to unmarried women of questionable age than to ambitious young teens or aging parents. Hence, in the multifocal novel of the century’s turn, to engage affectively is to contend squarely with difference, not to transcend it. Further, the novel implies that attempts to negotiate difference lead only to long-term, unresolvable discontent. Interpreting The Whole Family’s disunity as a metaphor for diversity and Page 210 →its resulting discontinuity within turn-of-the-century American society, that is, reading it as broadly registering the concerns of its era of production, means encountering a landscape where the differences among citizens breed discontent. Among the Talbert family members featured in the novel, varieties of outlook and tendency are so profound that they cannot be overcome, a fact that highlights the novel’s role as a metonymic stand-in for a larger, diversified social sphere. In this sense, the novel reflects a modern skepticism about the unifying potential of emotion in a new century that was characterized by profound forms of diversity visible in relation to national origin, ethnicity, race, class, and religious creed. In this context, noncohesive multifocal fiction predicts the ways in which emotional vantage points could only be understood successively. If the integrity of each viewpoint was to be honored, then there could be no idealized attachment to shared feeling or universal understanding. Although the novel represents a notably consolidated landscape of characters, all of whom share educational as well as socioeconomic privileges, these likenesses matter much less than the characters’ divergent viewpoints and formative emotional tendencies. The resulting emphasis on disunity is somewhat remarkable within a novel that features no extended inquiry into the life of a domestic laborer, say, a cook. Likewise, there is no clerk, no Irish American maid, no chauffeur, no neighbor born of a postbellum black southern family, no figure who presents an alternative value system based on nation, class, race, or education. All central characters are powerfully entitled, at least in their potential, and all have a voice. In this sense, the novel looks toward a day when there need be no such emotion as pity for the downtrodden or socially marginalized. And yet, such a measure of equality, the novel predicts, will produce factionalism and contest because of the individuated subjectivities expressed through separate and combative ambitions. As each chapter attempts to vanquish competing narratives and obliterate any residual empathy for previously explored characters, it sets each successive chapter in contest with all those that precede it and in potential conflict with all that follow. In this sense the novel’s chapters enact a strangely pugilistic relation to one another. It is perhaps useful, if only on a metaphoric level, to consider the ways in which a competition for empathy

resembled no activity so much as boxing. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, when pugilism represented the ultimate outlet for the “manly art of self defense,” its display of hand-to-hand competition was understood as a reflection of nature’s code, writes Gail Bederman, as an “eat or be eaten” mentality that linked Page 211 →a Darwinist mode of thinking with a masculine investment in sport.16 Yet despite the sport’s popularity, a host of perceived dangers and difficulties surrounded it. Considered by some to be subtly “improper” as well as “low” and “base,” boxing, as John Dudley points out, involved many participants through spectatorship rather than firsthand participation.17 As Thorstein Veblen noted, attendance at popular sporting events attested to an “addiction to athletic sports, not only in the way of direct participation, but also in the way of sentiment and moral support.”18 If spectator sports pointed to an “addiction,” as Veblen suggests they did, this craving was also fed by such trends as intercollegiate football, which was in its infancy, and boxing matches, which evolved from bare-knuckle fighting to gloved contests in public arenas.19 Emerging during an era when journalists (many of whom also worked as sports reporters) stressed the brutality of sports, particularly writers such as Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, those contests highlighted the individuated nature of combat. As Dudley asserts of spectator sports, “The role of the reporter in presenting the brutality of sports to the newspaper’s readership offered a rare opportunity for the writer to share, however vicariously, in the manliness of the participants.”20 If the sport of boxing allowed for spectacles of masculine dominance in a public arena, thereby addressing concerns about the effeminacy of overcivilization and white-collar living, it also intervened in what scholars have presented as an overwhelming sense of lost personal agency within the larger marketplace. Both June Howard and Eric Link, for example, have argued that the turn into the twentieth century brought Americans into confrontation with larger, broader forces that limited their agency and political power; by contrast, boxing was a sport of close personal proximity, wherein contests were both physical and individuated.21 By limiting the number of antagonists, by turning contest into a hand-to-hand blood-letting, pugilism allowed individual combatants to triumph. If the act of reading multifocal fiction can be viewed as the process of encountering the perspectives of numerous characters who are in competition for readerly empathy, then, as in sport, the personalizing of a character-based contest suggests something of the interpretive discomforts attached to the model of competitive, multifocal fiction. Further, if we imagine that the point of competitive empathy in the novel was to showcase drawn blood, then while the sense of contest infusing the match nonetheless remains intact, a traditional, sportbased model of winner and loser is inverted. Characters, unlike boxers, do not compete for dominance through invulnerability, but instead appear in a contest to claim feelings of woundedness, vulnerability, Page 212 →or unresolved hostility. In revealing the wounds accumulated over time, in previous bouts of contest, the novel’s approaches to the winning of empathy are established. In the hyperbolic world of the multifocal novel, despite the presence of many characters, the work of connecting emotionally with any one of them was to be performed singly, with one emergent victor at any given moment. These experiences tended to be presented through what scholars term “antiomniscience,” based on the prevalence of character-based (as opposed to narrator-based) perspectives. According to Barbara Hochman and Harold Kolb, among others, the antiomniscient novel emerged as an important emblem of literary modernity, especially in its capacity to destabilize and decentralize novelistic authority. Multifocal fictions such as The Whole Family operated by presenting only character-based perspectives, with no mediation between them. If such a novel stands as an exercise in competitive empathy, it was also an event without a referee.22

Empathy and the Question of “Type” By 1907, the question uppermost in realist representation was no longer arranged around realism as a new and distinctive literary mode, but a concern about its representativeness in relation to a diversifying world characterized by competing realities. In such a context, late realist fiction voices a concern that emotion’s capacity for mediating difference was questionable, in part because different perspectives could lead to radically distinct interpretations of the same events or characters, as in The Whole Family. We might consider the example of the figure who eventually emerges as a suitable spouse for Peggy Talbert, a psychology professor by the name of Stillman Dane, who by turns sounds dashing and dull. Is he the handsome young professor and star athlete (for Andrews’s chapter proposes the somewhat alarming compatibility of these traits), dependably

professionalized and prototypically heroic? Or is he Still Mundane, a steady if clichГ©d protector? The pun embedded in the name suggests the extent to which the text explores the tension between typicality and individuation that each chapter confronts in its own particular way, for the focal character has his say only once, after which he becomes predictable and, hence, relegated to the periphery of the action so that another figure may shine as unique and relatable. In part, because each chapter was attached to a fairly well-known author, it was subject to careful scrutiny, both in regard to the collective novel Page 213 →and in relation to the author’s career trajectory. Authors were invited to contribute their chapters by editor Elizabeth Jordan of Harper’s Bazar, where the novel appeared (and, through her, by Howells, who had come up with the scheme), based on the topics of their previous works. Contributors included Howells, Edith Wyatt, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stuart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Elizabeth Jordan, Alice Brown, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Henry Van Dyke, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. Jordan, known primarily as a journalist who covered the Lizzie Borden trial, wrote the “school-girl’s” chapter about an aspiring young writer with an overly active imagination. Mary Wilkins Freeman, unmarried until the age of forty-nine and best known for portraits of New England women (some unmarried), was asked to write the “old maid’s” chapter just a few years after her nuptials.23 Howells took the chapter of the respected, successful, and benevolent patriarch. John Kendrick Bangs (a humorist and limerick writer) wrote the character of the family jokester and ironic son-in-law, Tom Price. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, known for her portraits of long-suffering women and explorations of modern marriage, contributed the chapter featuring the married daughter. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, an author of stories about boys’ adventures, wrote the “school-boy” chapter. Mary Heaton Vorse, who was beginning to be known for her stories about older women, and who would go on to write Autobiography of an Elderly Woman in 1911, was assigned the grandmother’s chapter.24 Henry Van Dyke, author and preacher (and friend of Howells), composed the chapter of the respected friend of the family. Henry James’s chapter continued his well-known interests in art and artists by making the married son figure into a serious scholar of aesthetics with plans to rebel against his conventional life at the family’s silver foundry and escape to Bohemian Paris. Logical as these alignments of author and subject were, they remained unannounced in the serial publication of the novel, where chapters appeared anonymously. Scholars such as Alfred Bendixen, June Howard, and Susanna Ashton have noted that the serial publication of The Whole Family presented the text as an interpretive game that invited readers to participate in the “play” of it. With the appearance of each installment, the publisher produced a list of all twelve contributors, along with an announcement that read, “Each chapter of this novel was written by one of the twelve authors whose names appear above. The intelligent reader will experience no difficulty in determining which author wrote each chapter—perhaps.”25 As Ashton notes, “By the third month, Harper’s was regularly publishing Page 214 →letters from readers venturing preliminary guesses, although they received neither denial nor confirmation from the editors.”26 The game scenario also served as a means of highlighting the degree to which authorial contributions were individuated in the competitive arena of the contest. An important underlying expectation encircled the specific “types” of figures with which each author was associated. While the novel offered some measure of individuation via idiosyncrasies of expression, deportment, and alliances, the characters in The Whole Family also presented the emotional truths on which the novel was based as coincident with gender, age, politics, and ideology, thereby producing a socially contextualized, readily typed approach to emotion. The novel also raised the question of not only who but what readers identified with: the individuated subjectivity or the pattern. Complicating its attention to individuals’ emotional histories and backgrounds, its attention to the compression of character meant calling for empathy in a remarkably consolidated time frame. In this structuring of emotional compression, we see references to the representational shorthand known as the “type,” or a figure that exists in obvious contradiction to individuation. The novel relies upon both “type” and individuation as ways to think about emotional connections and to suggest a complex web of emotional inscriptions endemic to the late realist era. The era’s tendency toward compressed characterizations has been explored most fully by Henry B. Wonham,

who argues that realism and caricature were intricately connected, specifically in the case of “ethnic caricature,” which, he argues, “performs an integral function within the political and aesthetic program of American realism.”27 Wonham notes that although caricature was widely accepted as a vehicle of “truth, ” the category that realism purported to uphold at all costs; he also claims that “the age of realism in American art and letters is simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature,” explaining the interdependence of these two forms, which he recognizes as “two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractionsВ .В .В . both of which received full play within the period’s most demanding literary and graphic works.”28 As Wonham positions it, caricature formed a pointed contrast to deeply individuated characters, although both types of representation appeared within the same texts, as both forms “claim[ed] a unique capacity to lay bare the вЂessence’ of the human subject.”29 Wonham’s approach to caricature is useful in considering the representational complications inherent in multiperspective fictions, especially Page 215 →in light of the ways that characters may be arranged in the foreground or background of a text. In Wonham’s view, caricature “annihilated the individuality of the subject, exaggerating facial or bodily characteristics to reveal the individual as nothing but an expression of abstract tendencies,” whereas, he contends, “American realism worked to extend the authority of the self in an atmosphere of increasing uncertainty.”30 If, as Wonham contends, emotional possibilities were enabled by only one style of figure, or the individual imbued with interiority, then the concept of “type,” as it appears in The Whole Family, likely prevented such connections (especially given “type’s” likeness to caricature). The typing of a character worked against the possibilities of individuation, but whereas caricature (as Wonham contends) attested to some essential quality that was exaggerated in the extreme, “type” in The Whole Family functions as a representational shorthand. Rather than absolutely “annihilating” the individual as a concept, “type” suggests the individual’s conformity to a recognizable pattern and, hence, the subject’s availability for narrative compression. Like a caricature, the concept of “type” stresses a character’s surface qualities, but without necessarily attesting to the limited ontological nature of the subject; rather, “type” serves as a form of representational brevity that limited the exploration of individuation, including the tacit recognition that a figure’s uniqueness might matter less in a specific literary context than her broad outlines. And yet the effect of compressing a subject was marginalization, as Wonham suggests of caricature. “Typed” figures thus appear less fully formed, less worthy of immediate attention than their subjectivity-laden counterparts. Prolonged explorations of interior truths, while formative for realist-era authors, were not the only recognizable truths, as Wonham’s work suggests. The value of “type” rested on the immediately recognizable dimension of a character who stands in for a known subject position, rendering that character immediately accessible. The Whole Family both takes up and interrogates this representational practice more overtly than many realist-era fictions, as it exposes difficulties inherent in the concept of the “type,” or problems visible in the interplay between individuation and “type.” One problem is that “typing” renders a figure less empathetic than individuated characters laden with interiority, even as the “type” grants individuation its significance through contrast. A significant tension also surrounds the question of how to constitute and maintain a character’s appeal. In this novel, it all depends upon which chapter one is reading, for the “type” of each character appears eleven times, but the individuation occurs just once. Page 216 →In some measure, the representational tensions between “type” and individuation had been implicit throughout realist writing; The Whole Family made them particularly visible by raising the thorny question not only of how to confront deeply individuated truth, but of which type of representation of a perceived truth rang truer. If we return to early formulations of realism, such as Howells’s frequently cited description of a represented grasshopper, we see that it reveals some hint of these conflicts. Drawing upon the subject of a grasshopper in the field in his “Editor’s Study” column from December of 1887, Howells exhorts young writers to describe what they observe rather than repeat conventional paradigms of representation. Howells’s claim—that the realist’s grasshopper is unique based on the author’s relation to a real subject—does not mean that the author is claiming to represent a unique subject—that is, in relation to all

grasshoppers—which may be presumed to resemble one another.31 Howells does not even address what a unique grasshopper would be, for he glosses over the representativeness of the grasshopper in order to emphasize the uniqueness of its representation. Thus, the passage neatly collapses the real with the unique, which is an argument that may have worked well at the onset of realist writing, when those subjects Howells viewed as realistic appeared unique in contradistinction to romantic and sentimental modes. As a result, realists’ claims to uniqueness and type had long coexisted, hinting at dual concepts of truth—the familiar, readily observable subject and the representationally unique mode of writing—or approaches that, by the century’s turn, would appear in combative relationships with respect to one another. Howells’s opening chapter in The Whole Family, “The Father,” vividly illustrates a contest between type and individuation and suggests how both functioned as pathways through which readers connected with a character. Howells’s chapter outlines a series of patriarchal ideals, many of which are punctuated by suggestions of forward thinking on the part of Cyrus Talbert. In his portrayal of Talbert, Howells—alone among all the novel’s contributors—elected to explore his character slowly and obliquely, as if to allow the character’s complexities to unfold at some later point in the narrative. Although it had been Howells who set forth the plan for the novel, which stated that “each [author] should try seriously to put himself or herself really into the personage’s place,” what Howells contributed, ironically, was the only chapter not focused on the consciousness of the character in question, but one in which Howells redirects his “personage’s place” by focusing on someone who is not a member of the family.32 Instead, HowellsPage 217 → focalized the chapter through the eyes of Talbert’s next-door neighbor, Ned Temple, whose palpable admiration for the elder, more successful man infuses the chapter with the adulation of his economic and social success. As in other fictions by Howells in which emotionally overt episodes occur only after a character has been established through habits, speech, clothing, interests, conversation, and alliances, the novel mimics a relationship where individuals grow to understand one another over time. Howells’s oblique presentation of Talbert stresses the observational strains of realism, for his chapter is narrated by a reporter, or a knowledgeable observer outside the family. Featuring a casual exchange across a fence, the narrative invokes an ordinary scene and would seem to require later episodes of psychological development (catastrophes, scenes of revelation or self-recognition, or other physical or affective crises) so as to create a scenario of extended or perhaps even delayed affective development. Howard describes the gradual method involved in Howells’s fiction when she notes that, “like the rest of Howells’s fiction, [the novel’s first chapter] implies that no point of view is adequate in isolation, that both characters and readers can approach (without ever arriving at) an understanding of вЂreality’ only by accumulating partial perspectives and simultaneously entertaining multiple interpretations.”33 Hence, the “unexpected” side of Cyrus Talbert, the side that would make him appear most empathetic, would be dependent upon other authors’ adherence to the Howellsian formula of delayed connection, or eventual empathy after deeper individuation. Despite this plan, however, the father figure would be ignored—and strikingly so—for there was no other writer who took a serious interest in Talbert. It would be Mary Wilkins Freeman’s character, Elizabeth Talbert (Cyrus’s sister), who would emerge as the much-debated, multiply interpreted character around whom the action of the plot would revolve, to Howells’s dismay. Freeman’s was the chapter, wrote Jordan, that created the virtual “explosion of a bomb-shell” and resulted in an “epoch-making row” among contributors.34 Not only was Freeman’s chapter about a modern, self-actualized woman, but it exemplified the success of a very different stylistic approach to empathy: that contributors make the emotional lives of their characters immediately accessible. Unlike Howells’s chapter, which relies so heavily on acquaintance through type, then a gradual complication of it through emotional individuation, the “old-maid aunt’s” appears as a first-person, gossipy contribution, focused on “Lily’s” desires for excitement and romance and functioning as a testament to her sense of herself as powerfully attractive, intellectually capable, and socially brazen. Page 218 →By this reading, part of the reception-based controversy encircling the “Father” / “OldMaid Aunt” chapters revolved around the question of how to evoke empathy in a competitive scenario. Because Howells’s plan appears rooted in the initial evocation of his figure’s “type,” it depended

upon every subsequent author’s participation in a subtle complication of that same character. Freeman, however, deviated from this plan as she opted for the immediate and profoundly individuated portrayal of her character. Contributor Alice Brown (who authored the “Peggy” chapter) sided with Howells’s plan (beginning with “type”) as well as Howells’s character in general when she confessed to appreciating the familiar outline of Howells’s father figure, contending that his chapter struck her as a “clear” depiction of “one of his dear entirely natural families of вЂfolks’ we should all delight in living with. I understood them at once.”35 What Brown underscores is the character’s similarity to other characters in Howells’s fiction—and, perhaps, in life—but certainly the familiarity of the economically successful, socially reticent family man as a representational norm. As Howells invokes Talbert’s neighbor’s perspective, we learn that Talbert, a reticent man, is best explored through his property and choices, not his conversation. Talbert, as we learn, decided not to involve himself in politics and fought to “keep himself off the board of education” (11). His realm is notably consolidated, for he has “guarded his interests” carefully (12–13). In assessing Talbert, Temple reads the man through his house, which conveys his conservatism, unchanging tastes, and personal habits. The house itself, detailed from Temple’s view, a product of the “taste of 1875,” is as “old-fashioned” as its owner and appears impervious to change (9–11). The home also attests to privilege, with Talbert’s success confirmed by his claim that “it was considered the best house at the time of its construction in Eastridge, and I guess it was” (10). And although we later learn that Lily Talbert considers it a house composed of rooms that are “miracles not only of ugliness, but discomfort” (30), Temple, much in sympathy with Talbert and hoping to model his life similarly, views the house as a “handsome” edifice (9), one “so simple-hearted in its out-dated pretentiousness” that it strikes him as endearing, like Talbert himself (10). Invoking a trifecta of masculine success (capital, commerce, and character), the house cements the bond between the two male neighbors, who move from a discussion of it to a consideration of Peggy Talbert’s impending wedding. Along the way, both allude to “women’s foibles,” as June Howard notes, and both profess admiration for soft-spoken women, joking about their wives’ taste and domesticity; they agree on the character of Page 219 →Talbert’s recently engaged daughter, Peggy, condescendingly described as a “good” girl.36 Talbert also portrays his sister, Elizabeth, as an older woman who “passes her life” by making extended visits to various family members. “Miss Talbert” is meanwhile presented as “not without the disappointment which endears maiden ladies to the imagination”—the suggestion being that it is her predictability that is endearing and that any empathy readers might have for her would be constructed upon her reliance on her memories of romantic longings, gathered from some irretrievably distant past (19). Later, Talbert intimates that, had his sister been brought up differently, she would be happier, and he then suggests that the very person to “bring her up” is an elderly local physician by the name of Denbigh (a suggestion imbued with the hint that a doctor offers a special form of happiness for an older woman likely possessed of hypochondriacal tendencies). Certainly the ideological outline of Howells’s chapter is conservative, even by turn-of-the-century standards; moreover, it suggests that a satisfying encounter with all characters, including Cyrus Talbert, depends upon their nominal adherence to their assigned roles. Mary Wilkins Freeman, who would challenge both Talbert and, through him, Howells, wrote a letter of mixed response to Jordan once she read Howells’s contribution, which her “Old-Maid Aunt” chapter would follow. Although she claimed to admire Howells’s work and cited feelings of “honor” and fears of “incompetence” at the task of having her chapter follow his, she also pointedly referred to Howells as “that Past Master of his Art.”37 Freeman’s reaction thus places Howells firmly in the social and aesthetic past. Her character, who calls herself “Lily,” would take the lead in dismissing Talbert, as she describes her elder brother as “singularly unsophisticated” as well as ponderously naГЇve, having populated the world with addle-minded children and ugly architecture alike (31). In short, she casts him as so easy to “type” that he becomes unindividuated from that moment onward. After Freeman was finished with Cyrus Talbert, no other contributor (save Bangs) would find him compelling in any way. Freeman’s profoundly individuated portrait of Lily Talbert, by contrast, stresses the degree to which Lily’s subjectivity is indebted to her hostility toward the rest of the family and to the generic role in which

they place her; in thus distinguishing her character by her resistance to the whole family and as hostile to its patriarch, her brother, Freeman refuses to take up Howells’s implicit invitation to infuse Cyrus Talbert with endearing idiosyncrasies and encroaching dilemmas that would reveal his complexity over time. In so doing, Freeman (and with her, Lily) embraced the pugilisticPage 220 → potential inherent in the collective novel’s form, especially in her chapter’s refusal to modify or qualify a call to empathize exclusively with her character. As Howells hints, his character was to be gently nuanced, particularly in regard to Talbert’s investment in an unconventional education for his daughter, Peggy, a theory that suggests his forward-thinking ideas about young women’s education—so different from his ideas about “bringing up” old maids. He chose a coeducational college for Peggy—against his wife’s wishes. “I said to my wife,” he notes, “that I didn’t see how, if a girl was going to get married, she could have better basis than knowing the fellow through three or four years’ hard work together” (6). This joint enterprise, moreover, should prevent what he describes as “those hit-or-miss affairs most marriages are that young people make after a few parties and picnics,” as he upholds the ideal of companionate marriage (6). Talbert also professes a belief that Peggy possesses hidden depths of radicalism and that she is not only good but also intelligent (a view that every subsequent chapter will refute). Later, for example, Charles Edward will describe Peggy as a “perfect little decorative person” (162) “who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman” (168). Treating Peggy as a New Woman prototype, however, Talbert recalls that the moment “when I saw this one’s sorrel-topВ .В .В . I made up my mind to begin my new system with her” (24). Yet he goes on to assert that his wife made Peggy into a conventional girl, for “I was always too busy,” he laments (25). Through the father’s commingled pride and regret, his delight in Peggy’s beauty and virtue and his sense of her insufficient independence, Howells highlights Talbert’s sense that there are important revisions of the gender paradigm yet to occur. The chapter predicts that Peggy’s engagement may yet provoke the free thinking that her father desires. With these details, Howells hints at the poignancy of a father whose “new” plan for his daughter has failed, yet without fully exploring Talbert’s emotional responses. In the novel’s first two chapters, the Howells-Freeman conflict exposes a problem inherent within realist literature in general and exacerbated by multiperspective fiction—specifically that there is room for a limited degree of individuation in any given plot and, with it, a limited potential for emotional identification (beyond the odd embrasure of “type,” as with Alice Brown). While Howells planted the seeds for Cyrus Talbert’s gradual individuation (or his subtle deviations from the patriarchal “type”), Mary Wilkins Freeman created a boldly sexualized older woman who refuses to occupy an identifiable category and whose chapter is pointedly dismissive of Cyrus’s conservative predictability. Freeman’s chapter even holds up the Page 221 →very category (her brother’s category) of the “old-maid” “type” (and all who believe in it) for gleeful ridicule, suggesting meanwhile that Howells set up a limiting novel of types, from which Freeman’s chapter will be liberated by instead creating a romp through the unpredictable land of deep individuation—along with the empathy it could solicit. In essence, she redefined the project of the novel as one of immediate emotional connection, effected at the expense of all other characters. When the figure initially set up for the most obvious caricature (the “old-maid aunt”) was imbued with a pointed subjectivity, Cyrus Talbert looked blander almost inevitably, his would-be radicalism wilted, for Freeman propelled the concept of “type” back onto Talbert, now rendered a small-town fuddy-duddy rather than a closet feminist ready to infuse revolution into his collegiate daughter’s life. In fact, most authors’ responses to the developing novel, which Jordan dispersed to all the authors as chapters were drafted (a decision she came to regret), suggest that the writers understood that the evocation of empathetic bonds depended upon the degree to which a character complicated “type,” or could be understood as unique, embattled, and engaged in the unexpected. Each author, that is, expected his or her character to shine as evocatively individuated enough for other authors to explore in their respective chapters. According to editor Elizabeth Jordan, the authors behaved “very much like members of a theatrical cast listening to the reading of a new play. Each judged it from the viewpoint of his or her own part and each had grave doubts about the abilities of his or her associates.”38 As they worked from part to the whole, from character into plot, their investment in intellectual and emotional

individuation—in how to craft its relation to empathetic bonds—became the source of the novel’s concentrated combativeness. In the novel’s enactment of emotional pugilism, eleven figures would be relegated to the margins so that one could shine; it is also clear that however handy the concept of the “type” was, the central contest became the wielding of individuation most spectacularly. Howells and Freeman engaged in a duel to liberate their characters from “type” and to cast the concept of type onto other figures in the novel. Freeman’s portrayal of Elizabeth Talbert (a.k.a. “Lily,” a.k.a. “the deadly Eliza”) also reflects negatively on any expectation that she should accept someone else’s conception of “type,” exposing the convenience of this representational shorthand (176). Of Howells’s vision of “Aunt Elizabeth,” Freeman argued to Jordan, “The old conception of her was so hackneyed and I did think some plot ought to be started, and I could see no other way.”39 She continued, “I can think Page 222 →of a score of women who fifty years ago would have carried out Mr. Howells’s idea of the old maid aunt. Today they look as pretty and as up-to-date as their young nieces.”40 On another level, too, Freeman’s character deviates from the figure that Freeman was assigned, or the retiring figure visible in her short story “The New England Nun,” where a woman gives up her long-absent affianced upon his return home, either because she can sense that they no longer suit one another or, perhaps, because she prefers the orderliness of a highly controlled, solitary life. By contrast, with her narcissistic first-person narrative, Lily Talbert demands attention. With a tongue-in-cheek style, Lily dismantles the old maid as a construction of the unsophisticated who dwell “here in Eastridge” (30). Not only does Lily Talbert refute her relation to the old-maid “type,” but she also indicts the Talbert household (here again doubling for Cyrus) as having no attic, “like a man without brains,” and critiques Peggy, Cyrus’s favorite, for her remarkable absence of good sense (32). We soon discover that, in her estimation, Peggy’s engagement will fail, for Lily knows Peggy’s affianced, Harry Goward, intimately. The two have even been secretly engaged, and Lily suspects that “he is mad as ever about me” (41). Her commentary interlaced with sarcasm about the old-maid role she is expected to play and with barbs directed at the supposedly sacred relation the family imagines between Peggy and Goward, Lily undercuts nearly all of her brother’s visions. Mrs. Talbert (Cyrus’s wife, Ada) is a “cud-chewing creature” devoted to drudgery and mindless order (40); the placid neighbor Mrs. Temple is a tigress out of jealousy over Ned (who, Lily reveals, once proposed to her). Depicting herself as youthful, sexualized, and flamboyantly dressed in pink, as comparable to Lady Godiva and the Sabine women, she is free from all conventional expectations of marriage. “On the whole,” Lily announces, “I like the harem idea better than the single wife” (47). Though breezily self-assured, Lily Talbert nonetheless possesses a complex interiority, which reveals that she is not the uniformly progressively feminist figure many critics have taken her to be, hereby eluding yet another adherence to “type.”41 While Lily asserts her femininity and independence, she is nonetheless deeply conflicted, bearing the signs of a nascent and internally thwarted feminism. For her, a life devoid of romance appears unimaginable, despite her claims to a complete independence of mind. Yet the internal contradictions shaping the character uphold Freeman’s sense of the individual as someone who remains in constant and selfconscious dialogue with standard expectations. One of the most visible invitationsPage 223 → to identify emotionally with Lily comes when she recognizes and responds to her own construction of femininity. But I am worried over Peggy. I wish I could consult with somebody with sense. What a woman I am! I mean, how feminine I am! I wish I could cure myself of the habit of being feminine. It is a horrible nuance; this wishing to consult with somebody when I am worried is so disgustingly feminine. (47–48) It is this self-conscious sense of internal complication that forms the basis of the character’s deviation from a flat “type.” When combined with Aunt Elizabeth’s self-assurance, such an insight suggests the degree to which a combination of self-knowledge and self-doubt generates conflict; furthermore, it suggests that a balance between assurance and vulnerability is configured differently for characters whose positions vary economically, socially, professionally, and via gender. Such moments serve as a reminder that the psychological makeup of the empathetic character could not be abstracted or universalized, but was rendered in concert with a

complex and socially negotiated sense of self. In his response to Freeman’s chapter, Howells viewed Aunt Elizabeth as “ruining” the story, based largely on the character’s deviation from her assigned role; Henry Van Dyke also objected to Freeman’s portrayal, contending that the “old-maid aunt” had gone “mad,” the implication being that she was not realistically rendered.42 Alice Brown, who had enthusiastically embraced Howells’s chapter, pejoratively described Freeman’s as a “facer” and wrote that because of it, she almost resigned from her planned chapter. “When I met Aunt Elizabeth, powder-puff to powder-puff, face to face, IВ .В .В . frankly didn’t see any un-farcical way out,” Brown protested.43 Such comments suggest that the individuation of Lily Talbert was read as an affront to realism’s claims to truth. We can compare these assessments to the approval James bestowed upon Jordan for her portrait of Alice Talbert (the “school-girl”), described as “your big little Girl: full of nature and truth!”44 Nothing less than truth—traditionally central to claims about realist representation—seems to have been at stake in the eyes of James and Howells, or truth as related to “type” versus individuation. James’s response to Freeman’s chapter makes such a point when he argued to Jordan that the old-maid aunt was “the person, in the whole thing, to have been, objectively, Page 224 →done,” thereby suggesting that she wasn’t conceived in any such way.45 Given Howells’s and James’s objections to “Lily,” their insistence that for her, adherence to “type” should be a sacred principle, we may assume that they envisioned Elizabeth Talbert as an appropriate background figure, as if imagining that her marginalization would allow their characters to exhibit great depth and sensitivity. In such a scenario, we sense something of the pernicious dimension of typing, which lies not in the marginality of a figure per se, but in the accompanying suggestion that a character’s conscious self-relegation to the margins of life is appropriate, that the “truth” of the whole venture depends upon a given character’s resignation to a limited lot in life. In the most generous light, realist fiction could be interpreted as attempting to replicate the emotional experience of feeling oneself to be on the periphery of any given context, and as a result, it could call for empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden. Yet it is this literature’s equally visible suggestion that it was perceived to be “real” or appropriate for some individuals to accept, then ensure their own marginalization and for authors to recognize, through some mysterious means, that a select group of figures should be viewed as possessing unusual depth. Such a suggestion sheds light on one of the significant problems in realist literary production: the degree to which constructions of psychological interiority could be indebted to limited notions of social placeholding, if push came to shove in a scenario of contest. If we consider the “social” fiction of the realist era—the fiction featuring immigrants; the portraits of the struggling urban poor, as well as the backward provincials; newly extended portrayals of middle-class African American protagonists, many of whom were represented in depth for the first time in realist writing—then we sense something of the scope of the problem of individuation in relation to social hierarchy. Tellingly, authors such as Howells and James registered their surety that for their characters, emotional experiences should matter most and, moreover, that their characters’ perceived doubts and difficulties should be registered more fully than those of other figures. When Howells begged Jordan not to allow Freeman to ruin “our beautiful story, ” he sought, in essence, to privilege the relative beauty of Cyrus Talbert’s experience over Lily’s.46 And when James found the whole of the novel insufficiently plotted and offered to Jordan to write the rest of it himself (meanwhile contributing a chapter twice the length of every other writer’s), he too attempted to coopt the emotional trajectory of the text and, with it, the power to individuate where he chose, Page 225 →thereby claiming victory in all competitive bouts arranged around calls for empathy.47

Emotional Exclusivity One of the major conceits infusing the novel is that each individual can be embraced only by the reader, for the reader alone can appreciate each character’s uniqueness (primarily because there is no personal competition that arises), a point that situates empathy as all but impossible to navigate in relation to individuated differences.48 Because difference leads to competition, because competition interferes with fellow feeling, there can be no felt

experience of cooperation. Another of the novel’s points in regard to emotion is that affection is essentially exclusive, even within a larger group. As the novel reveals in detail, characters are too self-involved, too competitive, or too narrowly constructed to know one another in any nonthreatening way; the failed relations among family members thus attest to the absence of sufficient fellow feeling within this modern, dysfunctional family.49 Rather than fellow feeling, individuated as well as combative forms of emotion dominate the text. Indebted as it is to individuated perspectives, The Whole Family functions as a veritable contest over which emotional positions among the many represented in the novel are most compelling, ranging well beyond the affective platforms that stood in for imaginative responsiveness to others’ needs.50 Here, by contrast, each figure is immersed in her private anxieties and desires and, because of them, is motivated to bond with a discrete set of other characters. Pointed and specialized rather than imaginative and connective, pairs of dueling chapters confront one another on affective as well as ideological grounds, dramatizing the question of whose personal uniqueness appears most compelling. Maria and Charles Edward, for example, disagree on a basic understanding of how to interact with the family. They also take oppositional views on the degree to which family feeling contributes to an individual’s subjectivity. Charles Edward, “The Married Son,” was portrayed by Henry James, whose chapter might well have been entitled “The Disaffected, Contemplative, Alienated Artist’s Chapter,” for Charles Edward’s overwhelming desire for an escape from his family forms the basis of the chapter. Not only does Charles Edward dream of pursuing artistic training in Europe—and of leaving the family silver business—but he has convinced himself that he can better love his family from afar, once he is allowed to engage his ambitions fully. As the Page 226 →chapter explores themes of art vis-Г -vis commerce and of masculinity as relating to aesthetics, it dwells at length on the emotional alienation that stems from personal repression. Upholding the experience of his long-suffering mother, Ada, Charles Edward views himself as wracked by “fearsВ .В .В . of difficult dangers” and admits that he has never “either said or done a bold thing in my life” and has sublimated his artistry to the family’s foundry (145). Threatened by his brother-in-law Tom’s success and economically oriented masculinity, Charles Edward describes the burden of a subjectivity that sets him at odds with a trajectory of masculine economic accomplishment; in doing so, he adopts a curious first-person plural (148). It is in this privately exalted way that we bear in short the burden of our obloquy, or failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We’re not really meek a bit—we’re secretly quite ferocious; but we’re held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for out lack of first-rate artistic power as well. (149) Stressing the value of the private emotions that define him in relief to the family, Charles Edward evinces true affection for the only other individual whom he views as being similarly at odds with her familial role, his wife, Lorraine, though he appears undecided if she is one of the “ferocious” artists or an object of sacrifice. Charles Edward’s affections for his wife appear rooted in Lorraine’s hostility to conventional femininity; when he first met her, he reveals (rather disturbingly), she was but a “little bleating stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell” (168), and she is currently a “dear quaint thing” tethered to Eastridge (155). Riddled with every possible form of doubt about his artistic future, Charles Edward claims that he sees himself as psychologically akin to other artists (not family members), those “children of despair—a certain divine despair” (168). Whether it was the narrative of disaffected modernity that irritated fellow contributors or the length of the chapter or the dense style typical of James’s late works, other writers (Phelps in particular) critiqued the chapter as idiosyncratic, dull, and unnecessarily complicated, clearly choosing not to empathize with the tender artist in Charles Edward.51 Although Maria (“The Married Daughter”), represented by Elizabeth Page 227 →Stuart Phelps, feels that she, too, is bound by the family, her narrative doesn’t present the collective as a source of alienation; rather, it stresses the perverse delight Maria takes in her obligations and her self-entitlements in relation to others. Her

characteristic worry and anxiety also indicate the degree to which her emotional structures are rooted in familial roles; her character is so completely tied to her bourgeois, maternal, nosey sense of self that the chapter reads as a satire of a domestic woman.52 As a consequence, this portrait stands in contradistinction to James’s disaffected, despairing Charles Edward, whose emotional selfhood is located in some private, inaccessible space; because Maria’s identity is construed as at the heart of family life, she is convinced she needs to manage the Talberts in public and with infinite energy, protesting of exhaustion all the while. She is so obviously disingenuous and so profoundly needy of external validation that her subjectivity, bound as it is to her abrasive qualities, stands as ready to do battle with Charles Edward’s subject position. Maria admits, “Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows so well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually.В .В .В . One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety” (186). With her existence rooted in her parents, siblings, aunt, and spouse, Maria describes herself at one moment as “torn between filial duty and sisterly affection” and suggests that these fetters have left her unable to attend college or see the larger world (217). Portraying the limits of Maria’s existence, Phelps’s narrative engages a sentimental rhetoric of home, hearth, and domestic unity; the language of affect here serves as an ironic reminder of the ways Maria would like to be perceived as a sentimental woman, even as she often appears blatantly power hungry, manipulative, needy, and occasionally cowed by her boldness. Whether interrogating her younger siblings or bullying Peggy or sparring with Tom, Maria engages in continual combat. Denied power by the very self-construction she uses to shield her most decisive actions, she is a fraught figure, as in the claim, “I foresee, I provide, I plan, it is my вЂnature’ to” (187), even as she also defines herself as “the burden-bearer, the caretaker, the worrier” (187). Reuniting dramatically with her husband after a day out of the household (and after leaving an obscurely placed note for him) that causes a brief separation, she cries out, “Oh, Tom! Tom! Tom! You dear old precious Tom!” in an ecstasy of staged reunion (207). At the end of the chapter, after this inconsequential misunderstanding, Maria happily intones that she “whirled away upon [her] husband’s big forgiving Page 228 →arm,” reveling in the security of her marriage (208). Believing that Harry Goward will reconcile with Peggy and that Aunt Elizabeth just needs a man, Maria upholds domestic felicity, even though various other chapters hint at Peggy’s growing distrust of Goward, as well as Aunt Elizabeth’s extreme unpredictability. As needy as Charles Edward, Maria is more perverse, for her performance of self is what ultimately entraps her as her perceived power and her gendered vulnerability are knitted together. If James’s chapter asserts that repressed desire operates most powerfully, Phelps suggests that only the things one embraces truly entrap one and, further, that they make rebellion a constitutional impossibility. As these characters jockey for subject positions associated with repression, sublimation, and other forms of entrapment, the two chapters are locked in a contest for the position of the most downtrodden, the most used, the least fully understood within the family. Another of the novel’s pugilistic pairings emerges in Lorraine (“The Daughter-in-Law”) and Grandmother Evarts. Featuring women who are two generations apart, these chapters attest to competing views of women’s work, domestic caretaking, and familial loyalty. The New Woman artist, Lorraine (whose chapter was composed by Mary Stewart Cutting), emerges as a free spirit, disengaged from ideals of domestic management and invested in artistic ambitions, as is her husband. Although Cutting’s chapter is entitled visГЎ-vis Lorraine’s position in the family (“The Daughter-In-Law”), she resists familial definition, as in her early claim, “I have never identified myself with my husband’s family, and Charles Edward, who is the best sort ever, doesn’t expect me to” (80). Like Lily Talbert’s chapter, Lorraine’s portrays a woman who remains in perpetual combat with her family’s expectations, for the family is cast as preoccupied with “little, petty, cast-iron rules and regulations, and the stupid family meals” (87), and Ada, at the helm of the domestic arrangement, appears as an emblem of “a period when a woman always expected some man to face any crisis for her” (97). Rather than take on the role as Charles Edward’s caretaker (or that of the woman whose main duty is to “sit down and mould” her husband), Lorraine views herself as an aesthete who plans to see the world with her husband (83). Renaming her husband “Peter,” Lorraine contends that he “perfectly detests the business, and will never be interested in it, and never make anything out of it,”

setting up the potential to sever Charles Edward from the enclave of the Talbert family (84). Unlike either Maria or Grandmother Evarts, Lorraine possesses an emotional structure that is relatively stable, with few hints of selfpity or performative self-entrapment. Her Page 229 →ideal remains her childhood home, where “you can say or do anything you please without caring what anybody thinks,” alongside parents who “believed in not restricting individuality, and that girls have just as much right to live their own lives as boys” (85). In other words, her emotional structures are rooted in anything but conventional behavior, and her ideal of self-expression largely entails a refutation of the expected, especially in terms of gender roles. Taking no interest in “pickling, preserving, or cleaning” (88), Lorraine contends, “I couldn’t give up being an artist for anybody, no matter who starved” (85). Yet she knows that the Talberts pity Charles Edward for “living in a house that’s all at sixes and sevens,” below Ada’s housekeeping standards (86). Although Freeman’s chapter has been touted as the novel’s primary articulation of feminist interests, Cutting’s is more profoundly combative in its portrayal of a woman’s possibilities; unlike chapters featuring other women, it engages the world outside of intimate relationships by presenting a professionally informed model of women’s interests and by imagining a life that revolves around such interests as Italy, artistic friendships, teaching mentors, and exhibition celebrations. Because Lorraine refuses to take on the roles of nurturer, domestic caretaker, or even lover (for her relation to Charles Edward seems limited to aesthetics), the chapter refuses to consider women’s empathy for others as an absolute necessity. Too much empathy on Lorraine’s part would add up to a loss of self, the chapter suggests; as a consequence, she remains somewhat hostile to the larger group and its bonds. In sharp relief, “The Grandmother,” by Mary Heaton Vorse, presents a female subject who has all but abandoned a sense of individual definition. In it, the speaker, Grandmother Evarts (Ada’s mother), details a deep affection for her daughter, alongside an accounting of the marginalization experienced by the aging. Concerned primarily about Ada’s difficulties, Grandmother Evarts contends that one of the hardest of life’s lessons is to “sit still while our children hurt themselves or, what is worse, to sit still while other people hurt our children” (61). When Grandmother Evarts notes, “I do not want to see my Ada having to bear the unhappiness of seeing Peggy unhappy,” she positions her role as the observer, as one thrice removed from the action (65). From her role as the distant sympathizer devoid of all power, she contends, “I follow the lights and shadows of my daughter’s life, as if I were living a second existence together with my own” (60). Yet her vicarious emotional existence (a life lived through imaginative means rather than action) has profound limitations, as she recognizes: Page 230 →I fancy that older people have the same experience often that I have had lately. All at once you are aware something is wrong. You can’t tell why you feel this; you only know that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness. You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just the same. Why? You don’t know, and no one thinks of telling you. It is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot make out what has happened. I have sometimes leaned out of a window and have seen down the street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was too far off to know whether some one was hurt or whether it was only people gathered around a man seeing something. When I see such things my heart beats, for I am always afraid it is an accident, and so with the things I don’t know in my own household. I always fancy them worse than they are. (69–70) Sympathizing in the dark, as it were, Grandmother Evarts feels for everyone, her one possession being her affective imagination, along with a sense of self almost entirely constituted in relation to others. But her seclusion also suggests that her sympathy is based on little aside from her imagination. When read in relation to Lorraine’s chapter, Grandmother Evarts’s suggests, in part, that these are two characters who would require significant mediation, if they were to carry on a meaningful conversation, so different are their interests, so antithetical are their notions of selfhood, femininity, and, not least of all, their vision of family life. In this family, as Grandmother Evarts and Lorraine reveal, there is no universal understanding, for each character participates in the emotional world in vastly different ways, or ways that render other emotional positions invisible

to them. And as the chapters featuring women characters stress, engaging in too much or indiscriminate empathy imperils one’s independence; the conflicts arranged around emotional understanding are necessary if individuals are to be able to stand alone. Here it is not only that some characters gravitate toward defined emotional states, but also that the world of the family is too diverse for anyone to speak for all in a satisfying way. This deeply heteroglossic text represents a world that is ideologically chaotic, in part because of its emotional splintering. To extrapolate from this multifocal fiction, empathy becomes an exercise in exclusion, especially because it is attached to highly individuated, emotionally complex characters. Consequently, empathy appears as a prize to be won through contest, through a continual play of favorites. In the diverse familial world Page 231 →the novel covers, there is the problem of a disproportionate equation arranged around empathy: in the end, there is more diversity than there is empathy to accompany it. Thus, with every new articulation of personal interest, every new strategy of individuation, the limits of affective understanding become more visible.

Empathy and Unity through Christian Redemption The diversity of multifocal fiction, as The Whole Family demonstrates, led to narrative combat, or to an ideological and aesthetic splintering that resists easy resolution—except in novels such as In His Steps, which directs all emotional energy toward one idealized, common emotional identity. Whereas realist-era texts devoted to the exploration of diversity reveal competitive approaches to the emotional state, In His Steps, by Charles M. Sheldon (1896), marshals a much more consolidated approach to empathy that is rooted in ideological cohesion, despite the novel’s exploration of many characters’ experiences. Instead of suggesting that individuals evolve on their own and that their life choices are determined by unique personalities, it suggests that one can adapt to an insular environment when it is composed of identical emotional habits. Ideally, in the end, such choices help solidify a population’s ideological future through a continual reinforcement of the same emotional pathway. The novel attaches this unity to a Christian ideology that permeates the characters’ lives. Because all the novel’s characters see identifying with Jesus as their goal (as in their continual question, “What would Jesus do?”), they seek to sublimate individualism to the experience of the Christian who models his or her life after Jesus; because all major characters engage in this struggle, they are able to view their affective challenges as interchangeable. Sheldon’s novel, a best-seller that has remained in print, takes as its central axis the seriousness of the characters’ struggles to adopt a religiously infused perspective, which in effect sublimates all forms of individual emotion to what the novel portrays as an inclusive and sustaining emotional life rooted in religious conviction and fellow feeling. In the service of promoting a common ideology, the novel minimizes all experiences that fail to lead to a sense of communal unity arranged around empathy for fellow Christians struggling to profess their faith. While invested in individual scenarios that lead characters to the church, or states of frustration, anger, envy, and disappointment, the novel charts an idealized emotional trajectory, which begins with psychological suffering and ends with benevolent Page 232 →understanding, a trajectory in which Christ serves as the focal model. But, as with The Whole Family, empathy is constructed around characters who are relatively comfortable in life; all are middle-class citizens of means. They do not ask for pity; instead they seek a level of understanding directed toward their emotional life, specifically to a perceived sense of emotional isolation. In part because of its immersion in the Social Gospel Movement, which attempted to render religious ideals practical, or make them applicable to everyday practices and, hence, accessible to many believers, In His Steps takes an interest in its characters’ day-to-day challenges. Supporting the idea that religious solutions could address modern social dilemmas, especially those that affected large numbers of individuals, the novel was written as a sermon-story to be read aloud at vesper services on Sunday evenings. It addresses such issues as poverty, modern industry, crime, and labor-based inequities, viewing them as the primary challenges facing turn-of-thecentury American society. Characters may not achieve (or pursue) worldly success, but they will lead affectively fulfilled lives, the novel posits, specifically lives that are pleasingly intertwined with similar lives. The novel begins with an itinerant laborer, Jack Manning, who arrives in the fictional midwestern city of Raymond in search of work; he

subsequently collapses in the First Church at the end of a Sunday-morning service. Before his collapse, he speaks to the congregation of his comfortless wandering across the town, his isolation beyond the boundaries of middleclass comfort, and the decimation of his career as a printer because of the invention of a new linotype machine, all the while advancing a critique of the apparent hypocrisy of churchgoers’ claims to suffer like Jesus. During his speech, Manning notes that in his three days in the city, he experienced various deprivations but had “not had a word of sympathy or comfort” from anyone other than the First Church’s pastor, Reverend Maxwell, who offered no actual assistance.53 After Manning collapses and dies, Maxwell initiates a movement for parishioners to follow in Jesus’s steps “as closely and as literally as we believe He taught His disciples to do” for one year (24). As various characters take this pledge, the formal organization of the novel, which initially apportions one character (or several related characters) to a chapter, seems poised to highlight the importance of individuated subjectivities and the conflicts that shape them. The situations of the heiress, the middle-class singer, and the socialite-turned-social-settlement-baker stand alone—at least early in the novel—where the novel is charactercentered.Page 233 → These early chapters gain momentum from the specificity of individual experiences, and they promise to attend to the talents, romances, career paths, and economic challenges that face the novel’s twelve major characters, all of whom will cast themselves as modern-day disciples. All will vow to walk “in His steps” as part of Reverend Maxwell’s experiment in Christ-centered living, and this is when their individuation largely ends, for Sheldon’s use of a one- (or even two- or three) -to-one relationship of character to chapter breaks down after the initial six chapters, at which point individualism ceases to function as a sustained concern. Whereas The Whole Family posits that differently situated characters perceive the world in different terms, here, although we see the distinct experiences of the heiress and the industrial supervisor, the urbane novelist and the Chicago bishop, the university-president-turned-political-candidate and the conscientious railroad executive, each (except the novelist) will affirm the value of Christian fellow feeling, defined in the novel as the only defensible, unselfish form of feeling. With this master narrative, the novel undercuts experiential uniqueness as it steadily moves toward the polemic that differences matter only to the extent that they underscore common and religiously infused experiences. While In His Steps incorporates various distinct voices as it devotes lengthy passages to the quoting of newspaper editorials as well as sermons, initially offering a heteroglossic text, it dwells on personal frustrations only to suggest that, when overcome, they are transformed into benevolent fellow feeling. It thus offers its trajectory of Christian feeling as an antidote to the divisive difficulties of bourgeois living. One character, Felicia, debates whether or not to abandon her worldly mother and sister after her wealthy father’s bankruptcy and subsequent suicide. Once she sees that her immediate family members do not share her interest in social settlement work and that they cling to their elite social niche, she opens a bakery school for the poor, with the goal of training domestic servants. Yet another figure (an urban slumlord) agonizes over explaining his profession to his young daughter; after deciding to reform, he then worries over the loss of rental income from his former (and lucrative) tenement, which is positioned near a saloon. Negotiating between personal anxieties and the threat of narrative discontinuity, In His Steps will eventually cast emotional unity as possible only under a religious canopy where ideal forms of emotion are modeled by Christ and where worldly concerns fade away. Individual figures, however, set up the importance of the emotional satisfaction to be found in a Christian community, as in chapter 3’s examinationPage 234 → of Edward Norman, who takes his pledge to walk in Jesus’s steps, then considers how that pledge will affect his business as a newspaper owner and editor. At his office the next day, Norman decides not to run the story of a prize fight and, as a consequence, faces the consternation of his staff, one of whom declares of the new policy, “I think it will simply ruin the paper.В .В .В . It isn’t feasible to run a paper nowadays on any such basis. It’s too ideal. The world isn’t ready for it. You can’t make it pay” (31). Another employee is “astonished, bewildered, excited and considerably enraged,” his “rising indignation” checked only by a “great respect” for Norman and what Sheldon terms “a feeling of growing wonder” (33) as Norman vows that the paper will represent “the right standard” (32). After charting the responses of the office staff, the novel recounts that the paper fails to sell without the account of the fight; in the coming days, it loses subscriptions, particularly after

Norman also declines to run advertisements for liquor and tobacco, and then decides not to publish a Sunday edition, claiming, “From a Christian point of view, more harm than good has been done by our Sunday morning paper. I do not believe that Jesus would be responsible for it if He were in my place today” (43). Such experiences typify the initial week during which Maxwell’s followers begin to follow their pledge and as they encounter resistance and disbelief. At the end of the week, they convene at a church service where the singer, Rachel Winslow, promotes the “deepest spiritual feeling,” her voice now devoid of “the vanity” that has previously marred her work; in its place are “elementsВ .В .В . of humility and purity” instead (46). Later, Norman’s story will reappear as his paper steadily loses money, as he receives resignations from his staff, and as the town heiress decides to endow the paper so that it will continue to operate based on Christian principles. Across the novel, characters frequently offer each other advice based on their common experiences of interacting with disbelieving family members and anxious coworkers, extemporizing, moralizing, and advancing common themes. What results is a rhetorical and ideological circuit that loops back upon itself, reinforced through repetition and multiple iterations from different characters. It is the sort of narrative reinforcement reminiscent of the sentimental novel, particularly as this model is described by Jane Tompkins, who explores a similar effect in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where “expressions of a highly schematic intent” reinforce one another.54 As characters express what Tompkins describes as “a totalizing effect,” here, too, “every character in the novel, every scene, and every incident, comes to be apprehended in terms of every other character, scene, and incident: all are Page 235 →caught up in a system of endless cross-references in which it is impossible to refer to one without referring to all the rest.”55 As with Stowe’s characters, Sheldon’s “are linked to each otherВ .В .В . with reference to a third term that is the source of their identity,” the term being “the figure of Christ.”56 Tompkins describes such repetition as a way of allowing a novel to suggest that “every character and event in the novel has a place.”57 In Sheldon’s schema, if this “place” is not preordained, then at least it appears contributive to the effect of a heterogeneous and otherworldly experience in which individuals have their places in an overarching design. Hence, the same set of emotional experiences permeates the lives of all the novel’s characters. Here, however, there is no orientation to the home, the hearth, or the woman’s sphere, but instead, a continual referencing of a heavenly realm, brought into view by congregations of the like-minded, whose relations to their church and pastor eventually overpower all familial concerns. An earthly experience matters only in terms of the common questions and concerns it raises. The power of like-mindedness appears throughout the text, not only in the heiress’s funding of the local newspaper, or in the case of Rachel Winslow’s engagement to the heiress’s brother, but also in a narration that describes emotional unity in terms of otherworldly power. Praying with the twelve congregation members who also vow to walk in Jesus’s steps, or his twelve disciples, Maxwell feels “a distinct presence of the Spirit” that grows “in powerВ .В .В . as plainly as if it had been visible” (26). He feels bolstered by a “new force” in his preaching (46) and even imagines “a strange but vivid change of setting, back to the first century, when the disciples had all things in common and a powerful spirit of fellowship flowed freely between them.” Based on a newfound likeness among his congregants, Maxell feels “the development of unspoken comradeship such as they had never known before” (123). That this “comradeship” is dependent upon having “all things in common” is as telling as it appears impossible, for comradeship reflects the novel’s continual circumventing of the deep individuation of experience. In Sheldon’s autobiography as well, his investment in individualism appears as but an introduction to a more significant form of collective of identity. Even in the narrative of his life experience, Sheldon makes the unusual decision to sidestep the personal in the chapter devoted to the writing of In His Steps, which was Sheldon’s most famous publication. In the autobiography, Sheldon temporarily abandons the first-person narration he deploys throughout the remainder of the book in order to advance an Page 236 →oblique, third-person perspective—but only for the chapter that relates to the creation of the novel.58 In it, he makes explicit his desire that the story should appear to have “no connection with the author at all” and situates himself as “standing outside the narrative and looking in with the readers at a chapter in life which it seems as if the

Divine Power took a very weak bit of human composition and molded it into his own gracious purpose“ (96). While such an assertion does not range into a Beecher-styled claim that God composed the novel, Sheldon attempts to obscure his decision-making to the point of disavowing any personal or intellectual investment in the book; instead, he asserts an ideological point: affirming the religious work done by the novel, which he presents as taking on a life of its own, a preordained life of sorts. In its outline, Sheldon’s autobiography accords with the ideology of the novel, wherein all differences rooted in individualism and competition resolve into common understanding. In his personal efforts to understand the role that individuated experiences played in his ministry, Sheldon also engaged in a variety of experiments in what has been termed “practical sociology.”59 These were the experiences that he, as a young pastor, viewed as a necessary part of his relationship with his congregation. In both Waterbury, Vermont (his first pastorate), and Topeka, Kansas (where Sheldon spent the majority of his professional life), he “boarded around,” or spent all the social hours of the day with a different church family each week, living with them to better understand their lives. In 1890, too, Sheldon spent a week as a laborer, seeking employment, a week that he described as frustrating and futile, for at its end, he took a nonpaying job shoveling snow in order to gain the opportunity to work the following week.60 Sheldon continued to consider the difficulties of the labor question in the early 1890s by going to work with the men in his community, one profession per week; he planned an eight-week-long experiment, during which he was to spend his days with “doctors, lawyers, businessmen, railroad men, street car men, college students, newspaper men, and Negroes,” as he described this series of experiments (88). In His Steps echoes Sheldon’s sociological interests through his adoption of an indirect perspective, which shifts into the experiences of many figures, but the sociological context also suggests the degree to which Sheldon would divide external circumstances of difference from inner experiences. While the novel enacts the colloquial truism that Sheldon made famous—that to know someone, one must walk a mile in his steps—it also assumes that all experiences lead to one type of emotional formulation, or aligning Page 237 →oneself with a model of sympathy with suffering, as each figure experiences a religious awakening and all (save one) are portrayed as echoing Christ’s life. As both Harold Kolb and Barbara Hochman have noted of realist-era fictions, the privileging of individual subjectivities resulted in texts that uncomfortably challenged the seamless qualities of earlier nineteenth-century fictions, at least in the eyes of readers. As Hochman notes, “The lack of an authoritative point of view—the very thing that was increasingly valorized by literary studies in the course of the twentieth century—was anathema to many readers (and writers) of the period for whom the вЂobjectivity’ of realism was simply a withholding of authorial presence. As one of the prime pleasures of reading seemed about to disappear, many readers resisted.”61 As Hochman notes, critiques of realist writing stressed a profound sense of disorientation, as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s remark that “the trouble with most realism is that it isn’t seen from any point of view at all and so its shadows fall in every direction.”62 When Hochman describes the narrative innovations of realistic fiction as challenging readers, many of whom had been trained to prefer omniscient authority and the practices of “friendly,” guiding voices, she suggests that cohesive narratives could be viewed as antithetical to difference. In the case of Sheldon’s novel, the sheer number of perspectives engaged by the novel underscores a desire to present the chaotic effects of individualism, at least initially, and then to supply corrective (“friendly”) interventionist guidance later in the novel. The novel’s efforts to collapse its initial heteroglossia and to position a Christian ideology as both cohesive and “friendly”—particularly in an age of more visible multiculturalism in American mainstream publishing—signal an investment in asserting a cohesive value system, one asserted at the expense of narrative difference. Throughout, In His Steps struggles to situate the individual as worthy of notice and to identify an estimable form of personal emotion. Often, chapters feature one character or are split between two closely related characters (two friends, a brother and sister) but end with a public scene, such as a church service or prayer meeting. Characters’ lives become increasingly intertwined through their pledge of Christian stewardship, and this change is reflected structurally: later chapters work with as many as four major characters and recount the effects of elections and musical services that involve many figures (in chapter 10, for example). Likewise, chapter 20 charts the paths of five major figures and recounts a robbery perpetrated by several anonymous thieves. Some chapters, such as chapter 15, are only five pages long and spend little time on individual figures. Near the

novel’s end, too, individuals (the Reverend Page 238 →Bruce, for example) spend little time thinking about themselves and their choices, but advance broad-reaching communal plans. Contributing to the novel’s investment in the power of repetition is the way that individuals speak with an allknowing capacity that one might expect of an omniscient narrator. In the following passages, the Reverend Maxwell’s voice (which appears first) sounds nearly identical to that of the bishop and the Reverend Bruce (represented in the subsequent passages), for all clergymen experience the same contemplative insights. Why, he cried in his heart as he listened, had the world’s great treasure in song so often been held far from the poor, because the personal possessor of voices or fingers capable of stirring inspirational melody had so often regarded the gift as something with which to make money? Would there be no martyrs among the gifted ones of the earth? Would there be no giving of this great gift, as well as of others? (240) The Bishop was appalled to discover how few of his wealthy friends would really suffer any genuine inconvenience for the sake of humanity. Is charity the giving of worn-out garments? Is the gift really a gift when simply turned over to a paid solicitor or secretary of some benevolent organization? Shall the man never go and give his gift himself? Shall the woman never deny herself her reception or party or musicale and go personally and actually touch humanity as it festers in the great metropolis? (223) “I have lived in luxury,” continued Dr. Bruce. “I do not know what it means to want. I also have had my leisure for travel. I have been surrounded by the soft, easy comforts of civilization. The sin and misery of this great city has beat like waves against the stone wall of my church and of this house in which I live, and I have hardly heeded them, the walls have been so thick. I have reached a point where I cannot endure this any longer. (200) Attempting to translate Jesus into an emotional construct that would allow middle-class lives to fit into an identifiable pattern, characters speak broadly, historically, even majestically as they invoke a reciprocal universe, where equivalent emotional positions help individuals recognize their experiences in the lives of others. What results from this loop of sameness is Page 239 →a curiously unimaginative circuit of feeling, where there is no intellectual labor at stake: one need not imagine a life that differs from one’s own. Indeed, those lives don’t exist here, for what is depicted is a continuous cycle of middle-class sympathy for middle-class desires for suffering. The novel will achieve its unifying gestures as all aristocrats will be leveled to the middle class, and all articulate, educated, but penniless characters find or are given work, thereby rising socially. The social stratum that includes these figures becomes broad and level, making it inconceivable that they would fail to feel their common motivations, with ideological consolidation trumping literary efforts to inscribe individuation. In the end, Sheldon’s characters appear to share one socially conscious mind, endlessly identifying with one another, all the while insisting on their day-to-day combat with the population the novel positions as non-Christian. Of all their likenesses, the most immediate appears in a set of anxieties encircling economic security, anxieties all the major characters share. The acknowledgment of this pecuniary obsession forms the characters’ constant subject, for it is on this basis that they “suffer.” So invested is the novel in emotional sameness that its characters even abandon biblical models in order to focus on lifestyle models rooted in their own time, their own social position. Although Christ supplies the spiritual backdrop for the fellow feeling described by the novel, it will be modern-day, middle-class Christian living that takes precedence. As various critics have pointed out, the pledge to consider “What would Jesus do?” leads not to an examination of Christian theology, but to a series of incongruous attempts to translate first-century living into turn-of-the-century bourgeois lives.63 Despite various transhistorical, transcultural difficulties, the novel raises a set of unabashedly impossible questions about Jesus’s perspective on modern vocal training (and of a talented young woman’s opportunities to sing comic opera), on advertising in the local newspaper, on receiving a marriage proposal from an unbeliever (also a literary man), on exposing a railroad company’s

violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.64 At such moments, the novel portrays modern life as unnecessarily categorized, but it also suggests that life’s trivialities constitute the modern Christian’s greatest trials. Whereas Sheldon’s experiences of working as a carpenter, a bricklayer, and a doctor all suggested that physically inhabiting the position of another led to greater understanding, the novel by contrast posits that Jesus serves as the universal interlocutor and that only through identification with an imagined and fairly generic model of Jesus is any common understandingPage 240 → achieved. But because Jesus took no stand on the local problems facing Raymond’s individuals, because, that is, Jesus said nothing about liquor and cigarette advertisements or social settlements or how best to use one’s musical talents, the novel founders. Often Jesus appears too far removed from the present to serve as an emotional locus, given the difficulties of historical translation between a first-century man and the late-nineteenth-century citizens of a small, midwestern American city. As characters struggle to imagine how Jesus would translate into the dawn of the twentieth century, they notice, as does the heiress, Virginia Page, that Jesus fails to fit. “Our Lord never owned any property nor had much money. There is nothing in His example to guide me in the use of mine,” she laments (47). Or, as Jasper Chase (the novelist) asserts, “I have been puzzled several times during the week to know just what He would do” (47). The problems inherent in projecting oneself onto the model of Jesus stem from a stark separation of class interests and social norms. Even Bishop Hampton contemplates his distance from the historical past as he confides to his friend, the Reverend Calvin Bruce, his fantasy “of late to lash myself with a scourge,” even as he recognizes the lack of fit between this impulse and his civilized, urban modernity (200). “If I had lived in Martin Luther’s time,” he asserts, “I should have bared my back to a self-inflicted torture” (200). Shocked, the Reverend Bruce is silent in the face of the bishop’s longing for the physical expression of religious conviction, but the comment is nonetheless instructive in regard to Sheldon’s insistence on shared affect. Shared feelings of fellowship rooted in psychological suffering must be viewed as the modern equivalent of the scourge of the early Christians, and only through the articulation of suffering can universal empathy be achieved.

Middle-Class Suffering By obsessively raising the question of what Jesus would do at any given juncture, the novel raises the possibility that Jesus would have had opinions about baking muffins or doughnuts for the poor or about whether operatic selections sung in a chamber concert are more moral than those sung on stage. Herein lies a central anachronism that the novel struggles not to confront, namely that neither the historical nor the class differences between a first–century man and the members of the First Church of Raymond can be taken into account because they are overwhelming. In the stead of innumerable differences, a rhetoric of Christian suffering emerges as a bridge spanning all chasms of lifestyle and experience. In other words, Page 241 →because Jesus was never known to preferred either muffins or doughnuts, the reformers must instead turn to Jesus’s pain, invoking an emotional template rather than an experiential or behavioral model. The common denominator among experiences becomes suffering, but suffering as translated into a middle-class paradigm. Discussions of suffering thus bring Jesus into the scope of congregational unity, with pain serving as the presumptive basis for a model of collective feeling, as in singer Rachel Winslow’s assertion that she is “hungry” to “suffer something for Jesus” (100). Yet, with its middle-class characters in view, the novel casts Jesus’s suffering as a moral quandary that leads to material self-restraint rather than physical torment (as in the bishop’s fantasy) or even psychological dislocation from a loving patriarch. Jesus’s suffering, in the end, becomes collapsed into discussions of economic self-denial, or the primary form of morally inspired deprivation on which the novel proceeds. As Stacy Margolis writes in her study of middle-class individualism, a sentimental culture privileged pain, specifically “individual stories of pain over questions about structural inequality and injustice.”65 As Margolis posits, making reference to Lauren Berlant’s critique of sentimentalism, if “liberal individualism, in its sentimental mode, deflates the вЂimperative toward social transformation’ .В .В . by convincing people that вЂempathy’ alone counts as viable political action,” then it rested on the “universalism” of pain and the “redemptiveness of personal suffering.”66 Figuring this redemption more literally than most novels, In His Steps adjusts an existing sentimental paradigm as it asserts that pain must be made public through rhetorical claims. Indeed, if pain is not

articulated and recognized by many individuals, there can be no exercise of empathy, for the public discourse of pain—from the pulpit; in song; in testimonials to one another about economic privation, anxiety, and selfconsciousness—emerges as the only experience worthy of a public avowal.67 In this sense, suffering has no impact if not rendered “intelligible” before a crowd, not only of witnesses but of fellow sufferers who have experienced the same feelings.68 Only through their common willingness to describe their trials and to deny themselves materially will the middleclass churchgoers of Raymond recognize their full affective capacity, Sheldon posits, primarily out of their struggles with their pecuniary losses and in confrontation with their material habits, or through what Reverend Calvin Bruce describes as “the complete change of very many habits. It [walking “in His steps”] will mean,” he claims, “possible, social loss. It will mean, in some cases, loss of money,” as well as “suffering, hardship, separation from everything non-Christian” Page 242 →(184). According to this model of suffering, churchgoers should reject luxury and give to the poor, even to the extent of giving over their fortunes; yet through it all, they should manage to feel deeply for others. Specifically, they voice the greatest concern for others who also forego material indulgences, or who make the same choices. Before it settles on a pecuniary-based approach to middle-class discomfort, however, the novel labors to identify a viable, modern-day form of suffering. Jack Manning, the unemployed printer who died at the opening of the novel, first interrogated the existence of middle-class suffering when he queried the assembled First Church of Raymond, “Do you mean that you are suffering and denying yourselves and trying to save lost, suffering humanity just as I understand Jesus did? What do you mean by it? .В .В .В I am puzzled when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing, вЂJesus, I my cross have taken’” (17). The problem of Christians living in luxury is repeated when the wealthy heiress Virginia Page confesses to her friend, the singer Rachel Winslow, “Like you, I’ve been educated in one of the most expensive schools in America, launched into society as an heiressВ .В .В . I can gratify almost any want or desire, and yetВ .В .В . when I honestly try to imagine Jesus living the life I have lived and am expected to liveВ .В .В . I am under condemnation for being one of the most selfish, useless creatures in all the world” (56). Eventually, Virginia gives nearly 90 percent of her fortune to support a Christian daily paper; she also funds outreach efforts in the slums of Raymond. Based in part on her relationship with Virginia, Rachel, the musician, questions her own “personal ease and pleasure” (68) as she too searches for a “sacrifice” and decides to forego a career in operatic music in order to devote her life to singing at religious services and teaching music in the slums (100). Like Virginia’s redistribution of her fortune, this decision is cast as voluntary, as an instance of self-inflected privation, which, because of the “suffering” involved, yields profound and communal pleasure. Choosing his own path of “self-denial and sacrifice” (73), the Reverend Maxwell vows to live more simply, deciding not to take his family on a vacation to Europe and to send various poor families out of town instead. As narrated by a visitor, the Reverend Calvin Bruce, the “suffering” that Maxwell promotes as a means of following in Jesus’s steps is “a suffering that does not eliminate, but does appear to intensify a positive and practical joy,” or a form of suffering that characters eagerly discuss (165). And yet, it is clear that there is little actual deprivation here, but rather, there is a reallocation of funds among still-comfortable individuals, who remind one another that they have decided to forego material and experiential delights Page 243 →in order to participate in benevolent acts, or acts defined through the rhetoric of emotional pain, a pain that paradoxically brings about greater “joy.” The novel’s emphasis on commonly articulated forms of suffering suggests the fear raised by what Heinz Ickstadt describes as the novel’s vision of the middle class as typified by an “emotional atrophy and the inadequacy of social relationships.”69 To overcome this fear, the novel attributes an idealized moral and emotional unity to its Christian characters, a unity, as Paul Boyer argues, that forms around the novel’s projection of a fear that the middle class “is losing its sense of cohesion and common purpose and is seriously threatened with disintegration.”70 According to the novel’s logic, emotional revitalization must be achieved through the process of determining to suffer so as to achieve joy. In contrast to the vision of the middle class as engaged in a curiously “joyful” component of suffering, one announced publicly and cast in a sympathetic light among fellow “sufferers,” the novel does not, in fact, place great emphasis on the suffering of the poor, who remain on the novel’s margins, reflecting what John P.

FerrГ© describes as the novel’s separate messages for different classes.71 For the poor, the novel suggests that it is the temptation to drink—not economic privation—that is most at issue (as in the text’s depictions of an alcoholic thief, Burns, who attempts to rob Bishop Hampton, and the drunken prostitute, Loreen). An anonymous, horrifying population, the inebriated poor live largely out of sight, even as their lives are represented as miserable in the extreme. Because they have not submitted to reform, they are severed from the circle of joyful suffering, available only to those who have both economic reserves and the ability to speak eloquently about struggles, including professional ones. “I have found my cross,” announces Donald Marsh, president of the local college, “and it is a heavy one; but I shall never be satisfied until I take it up and carry it,” as he confides his plan to enter the public sphere of governance, although, he notes, “all these years I, with nearly every teacher in the college, have been satisfied to let other men run the municipality and live in a little world of my own, out of touch and sympathy with the real world of people” (102). But he, like many other characters, studiously avoids as many of the actual poor as possible. While this awakening to a supposed “reality” infuses middle-class professionals, the poor appear to feel little more than a dull stupor and live in a crime-ridden slum called the “Rectangle,” its name signaling its geographical and ideological containment. The affective role of the poor, then, revolves around pity, not emotional exchange. When dealing with them, Page 244 →the novel inscribes the response of feeling for rather than with the poor as most appropriate. As she encounters the dirty, drunken prostitute Loreen, Virginia Page views her “with sensations she was afraid would grow into disgust” and, to combat these feelings, takes the girl home with her, pursuing the James-Lange theory of creating emotion through action or, here, proximity (114). Yet the two never achieve any equality. During a riot at the Rectangle on Election Day, Loreen saves Virginia from a deathblow coming from a drunken, infuriated crowd and dies a short time later. In this example, as in other interactions with the poor, the central characters register a sense of “contamination” and yet a “horrible fascination,” as Felicia Sterling discovers, at any encounter with lower-class life (179).72 Even after repeated interventions, the Rectangle retains its reputation as a “brutal, coarse, impure” place (70) populated by a “dirty, drunken impure besotted mass of humanity” (77). Only when Rachel Winslow sings at the Rectangle church services is the “wild beast” of the population subdued with the substitution of addictive music for alcohol. Through it all, the novel insists that if turn-of-the-century, middle-class Christians identify with Jesus, their questions about how to effect positive change will be answered, or at least echoed by the equivalent emotional experiences of others. But those figures who give in to alcoholism and suicidal depression are peripheral characters who descend into drunken stupors after the loss of loved ones. A wealthy businessman also takes his life after his financial collapse. Prostitutes, orphaned children, and unfeeling aristocrats further suggest a society engaged in the process of unraveling. Although Maxwell will experience a fleeting feeling of “love” for the lower-class population, the novel finalizes its view of right feeling for the poor through Bishop Hampton of Chicago, who extends Maxwell’s “What would Jesus do?” movement into the city (78). When struck violently by a recovering alcoholic, the bishop responds with a “look of majestic sorrow,” then carries the offending man, bodily, away from the temptation to drink, all the while “moved with unspeakable pity” (217). Elevated by his majestic silence, the bishop models the production of a lofty, pity-infused sympathy (rather than an egalitarian empathy) that underscores differences in class and education. Yet, despite their likely suffering and their considerable deprivations, the poor are never allowed to claim their kinship with Jesus (especially not through physical suffering), so threatening is that model to the class-based insularity of the novel. Like much realist writing, which sidestepped references to bodily suffering so as to engage a variety of emotional responses, In His Steps consolidatesPage 245 → affect under a canopy of emotional satisfaction through the rhetorical invocation of pain, primarily as a way to connect with the example of Christ. In allocating all communicable emotion to the category of suffering and all genuine suffering (which alcohol presumably dulls) as linked to some degree of economic privation, the novel underscores the satisfaction to be had in sharing like experiences. The novel’s identificatory logic is thus circular: similar emotions create peers, even as equivalent lives create similar emotional experiences. The total effect is one of the middle class endlessly feeling for itself. In earlier nineteenth-century literature, Christian sympathy had figured in relation to subjects such as

slavery, where affect was engaged to motivate social action for a specific cause. In the more diffused context of the late century, Christ supplies an affective backdrop for endless circuits of middle-class empathy. In this respect, the novel appears to adopt sentimental strategies, but without negotiating differences of any sort. If the novel models a set of consolidated scenarios of empathy rooted in class-based subjectivities, then those subjectivities stem both from a diffused sense of social intervention and from a greater empathy for peers than for anyone whose life experiences cannot be fit within the novel’s emotional template. Not only is the capacity for feeling cast as a privilege, but the novel imagines a world in which everyone is expected to possess the capacity to feel for others, to experience economic anxiety, and to merge those two by mysterious means. In upholding this possibility, the novel makes abundantly clear the problem endemic to late-century articulations of emotion: that fellow feeling becomes deeply suspect based on its failure to engage difference effectively. As Glenn Hendler has argued, “the limits” of “a politics of affect become apparent when it comes up against any significant cultural or experiential differences between the subject and object of its paradigmatic act of sympathetic identification.”73 At worst, Hendler concludes, “sentimentalism can respond to difference by attempting to negate or suppress it.”74 While characters in Sheldon’s novel wish to exhibit themselves as possessed of a meaningful affective depth, they address the subject of the poor, but retain a full sense of feeling only for those subject positions like their own. And yet individuals cannot feel for one another deeply without reference to Jesus as a common unifier; indeed, the visage commonly understood as Christ’s adorns Sheldon’s novel to this day. The impulse fueling Sheldon’s emphasis on an imagined face, an imagined life (in which the minute details of turn-the-century life are interwoven), which will create Page 246 →unity among individuals who have trouble locating commonalities across their experiences, also appears in a famous passage from Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie. There, too, a single charismatic figure allows individuals to unite and focus on the commonalities underlying their emotional experiences. As one of Dreiser’s characters attests as part of the novel’s exploration of a dawning consumerist society fractured by competition and selfishness, there is a need for a source of common emotion that is “valuable to others.”75 Having defined an affective goal, the character argues that “the world is always struggling to express itself” and that “most people are not capable of voicing their feelings. They depend upon others. That is what genius is for. One man expresses their desires for them in music; another one in poetry; another one in a play. Sometimes nature does it in a face—it makes the face representative of all desire. That’s what has happened in your case,” he tells Carrie, who is becoming a famous actress (356). Dreiser’s novel will end with an emphasis on hypothetical feeling, or with the narrator’s prediction that Carrie will sit alone, “dream[ing] such happiness as you may never feel” (369). More significant than this drive to feel a specific emotion is Dreiser’s sense of a common desire to recognize in another the capacity for feeling, especially in the face of one whom the narrator depicts as unlikely to experience happiness. Casting an individual’s ability to claim emotional depth as a struggle, the novel underscores an emergent modernity’s efforts to locate a concrete emotional center in the midst of fractured worldly experiences. As In His Steps similarly reveals, identifying a locus of common feeling required a visage that would represent all emotion, even that never felt. Whereas in Dreiser’s novel, the winsome Carrie Meeber (Wheeler) is described as possessing a face that expresses the feelings that the common man cannot articulate, a face, that is, that satisfies a widespread desire to prove the existence of an underlying, yet largely invisible human capacity to feel, Sheldon supplies the ideal of Jesus. Such a focus on inviting images (and the emotions presumed to exist behind them) reflects the curious state of late-century emotional invocation, which at first appears little more than a repetition of sentimental paradigms. But in Sheldon’s novel, the capacity for deep feeling, the potential for emotional bonds, emerges as more significant than enacted emotion. Likewise, by the late century, the actual experience of pain matters less than the willingness to imagine and narrate pain. Witnessing somatic suffering is firmly in the past of Sheldon’s 1896 novel: the only physical suffering is ascribed to Jesus, a suffering removed from Page 247 →the present by thousands of years and never represented in the text. It is a novel marked by the belief that corporeal pain belongs in the historical past and that its modern equivalent is psychological distress; nonetheless, language steeped in the metaphor of somatic suffering serves as the basis for any description of modern emotion.

As a result, imagined pain, incidental economic concerns, and a rhetoric of suffering reverberate throughout the text, adding gravitas to the experiences of characters who worry incessantly about the minutiae of publishing, and about social, and career choices. Insisting that “the standard of Christian action cannot vary in most of our acts” (27), the Reverend Maxwell affirms the essential “standard,” or likeness, of all characters. Sublimating individual differences to presumed emotional likenesses, the novel affirms that deepest feeling is reserved for individuals who recognize and abide by the principles underpinning their essential likeness to one another. Accordingly, the novel’s blueprint for fellow feeling emerges as the ability to moderate one’s affluence and never to exceed a moderate plane of a socioeconomic hierarchy, as well as to speak invitingly of one’s self-imposed “suffering.” If the novel’s goal was to assure readers that the middle class still possessed an ability to experience emotional unity in a material, individualized, industrial age, it pursued that goal by asserting that connective emotion, in its best form, entailed profoundly consolidated, narrowly conceived work, which was neither transhistorical nor transcultural in nature. The affective message that emerges, hence, is the directive to identify most fully, most satisfyingly with those most like oneself, who reflect one’s beliefs. The ability to experience affect emerges, in the end, as proof of life everlasting—not necessarily through Heaven, but instead through endless circuits of self-identification. While vastly different in message, both In His Steps and The Whole Family reflect the belief that feeling for those most like oneself is pleasing and that this act is in no way laborious. If In His Steps reflects the difficulty of identifying emotionally outside of a sphere of likeness, then The Whole Family attests to the ways in which emotional connections require not only empathy but also bouts of affectively rooted competition. The bonds that are rooted in sameness appear different in strength from those associated with earlier forms of sympathy, for here there is no corporeal suffering, no negotiation of dissimilarity, no change of outlook or behavior brought about because of witnessing. According to these late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts, empathizing with any experience perceived as different—in ideology, religious outlook, or personality—appears challenging, Page 248 → unsatisfying, and ultimately impossible. But when lifestyles and ideologies are shared, empathy can occur, though rarely outside of willing engagements with the like-minded; when, however, empathy becomes the material of struggle, fiction on the edge of modernity underscores the impossibility of achieving any substantive understanding through imaginative effort, or the type of effort once understood as at the very heart of empathetic bonds and, through those bonds, as the promise of a shared future.

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Epilogue The Work of Reinvention There are several conclusions that can be drawn from this study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century realist literature. The first of these is the recognition that new forms of labor were valued in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century culture, including new approaches to emotional work. Although I did not begin this project by envisioning emotion as a site of labor, it became clear at a certain point in the project’s evolution that the labor involved in understanding and representing emotion anew, and in meticulous and interrogative ways, was profound. From the careful parsing of terms about emotion, to extended descriptions of affective behaviors, to their transformations into other behaviors, to the anxieties about emotion’s representation, the work of depicting emotion appears motivated by an endlessly proliferating set of concerns. At times this complicated form of interrogative and representational labor appears as a justification unto itself for a text’s emotional engagements; at others, the laborious aspect of emotion emerges as a distinctly modern approach in light of the perceived fact that emotion was an effect to be engaged, reconsidered, and redirected. To engage in emotional work was to imagine it as a scientifically informed, studiously analyzed, carefully reproduced subject that transected everyday and philosophical experiences. Another conclusion that can be drawn from realist renderings of emotion is that emotion individuates. Scientific models (most visible in the evolutionists) suggest that adaptations individuate an organism within a surrounding group and allow for its survival. In fiction, it is emotion that Page 250 →makes a character unique, both in terms of emotional habits and in the ways in which those habits do or do not change under pressure. Thus, emotional constructions and their manipulation help imbue a character with a unique subjectivity that emerges from realist detail about emotional experience. In line with scientific contexts, however, it also appears that emotional adaptability is key to any individual’s survival in a given environment. A character’s idiosyncrasies and unique adaptations make him or her capable of existing as a viable and sustained subject, possessed of a unique history and, with it, habits that may be affected by environmental changes. A third conclusion deals with the qualities of emotion visible in realist literature, for they tend to be more expressive than connective, whereas sentimental paradigms stress unity, understanding, and kinship. Thus, the forms of emotion that are depicted during the decades of realism’s dominance are less idealistic in nature and less visibly oriented to socially reparative forms of action. Holding together family or nation, in other words, appears less important than accurately expressing shades of meaning and, with them, idiosyncratic emotional histories. In addition to producing individuated forms of feeling, these modern iterations of emotion allow for a greater range of valence (particularly by admitting the presence and value of negative emotions) than do the more idealized inscriptions of emotion. This approach to emotion further suggests that individual subjectivities emerge from scenarios of emotional conflict that are both specialized and nuanced. When combined, these trends helped establish modern emotion as idiosyncratic as well as expressive. Moreover, because these trends were understood as contributing to a more “true” (i.e., complex and nuanced) portrait of emotion as emerging from a modern environment and as expressive of the individual, they also pose the question of how emotional representations will develop from there. To portray the emotional life of the collective, even in terms of social ideals, would be a challenge, given the detail that was embedded within the realist enterprise. While contemporary culture, broadly speaking, can be described as having continued to move away from idealized forms of emotion, postrealist emotional representations also appear to have reached the point of lamenting this trajectory, depicting the loss of connective feeling as a significant absence. As I go on to suggest here, a corrective impulse in depictions of emotion has arisen in contemporary culture, for those depictions seek to counter individuated, expressive forms of feeling with a greater emphasis on the collective—a trend that reverses the tendencies of the realists and which places empathy at the forefront of these conversations. If this partial Page 251 →reversion of feeling so as to emphasize collectivity holds, then it suggests that postrealist emotion exists as a revisionist impulse in its own right.

Many contemporary writers, particularly those who explore popular subgenres of dystopian literature, take the diminution of shared feeling as cause for alarm. Similar calls to address emotion’s place in contemporary life confront the perception that connective emotion, specifically empathy (which functions as a type of default position that stands in for many other emotions), is on the decline—and in alarming ways. On a number of fronts this story is visible in the media, and it includes fears about: teen bullying (especially cyberbullying), the effects of videogames and other role-playing pursuits on everyday emotional bonds, the casual and uncertain bonds forged through social media outlets, and the medical fact of children born with a limited ability to manage social cues. Based on such concerns, emotional atrophy is in continual view, and its consequences are predicted with alarming frequency. In many fictional narratives, it appears as an inevitable form of decline, or as one of the legacies of emotion’s lost capacity for forging connections, however idealized they may have become. Any number of fictions that fall into the dystopian category begin by positing a world where governmental and corporate power structures practice and perpetuate unemotional, unfeeling behaviors that filter through a highly stratified society. Hordes of unfeeling humanity populate these texts and the films connected to them, from the poor, abused, desperate populations to the militarized groups that represent unfeeling governments. Consequently, societies engage in the viewing of violent, predatory spectacles that set youth against one another (as in Suzanne Collins’s work) or against adult criminals (in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy). Octavia Butler’s fiction also consistently pits the powerful unfeeling (whether they are dangerously powerful immortals, as in Wild Seed, or the fire-worshipping mobs of the Parable series) against the empathetic few, who may be affected by medical conditions such as hyperempathy in a violent world that both imperils them and offers hope for a future of human feeling—in contrast to the dangerous and unfeeling masses. So devoid of emotion that they appear posthuman in affective terms, the populations visible in dystopian fictions are far too traumatized to demonstrate feeling for one another in a sustained or coherent fashion, for their worlds consist of continual combat and a dangerous, resulting individuation. As Atwood writes in MaddAddam, the third novel in her ecodystopic series, those members of the society that have been subject to the most brutality have been “reduced to the reptilian brain.” Warned that Page 252 →“they’d whack you in the kidneys, blam you on the skull with anything handy, squeeze your neck till your eyes popped out of your ears,” the novel’s main characters avoid those with the least empathic qualities.1 How to recognize them? The facial scars. The blank expressions: some of their human mirror neurons had gone missing, along with big chunks of the empathy module: show a normal person a child in pain and they’d wince, whereas these guys would smirk. According to Zeb you had to get quick at reading the signs because if you were dealing with a psycho you needed to know it.2 In Atwood’s fiction, as in Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, violent contests to the death provide popular entertainment for the masses. Broadcast on television, Atwood’s combatants are convicts who not only engage in televised combat but also take pleasure in the pain they inflict, inventing tortuous forms of death, often extracting and eating their victims’ kidneys. If they survive and return to society, the “Painballers” (named for their participation in a vicious arena game to the death) become predictably brutal fighters, rapists, and killers. Hence, even among characters who describe empathy as part of a “module”—a sign of their computational approach to human qualities—the Painballers serve as the apex of human resistance to others’ emotions. As combative survivors, they exist as a sign of what the future might breed, if affective forms of violence are allowed to persist. Survival in such scenarios depends not only upon avoiding those who are the most violent and the most unfeeling, but equally upon society’s ability to cultivate the capacity to feel. In such scenarios, not only is the propensity toward emotional engagement portrayed as a form of work, but it is also a dangerous form of work, given the risks of exposure and assault that it involves. And yet, consistently, the labors attending emotion are proven valuable, while the emotion is depicted as capable of spreading outward as a balm for a traumatized society recovering from violence. Precisely how to engender the ability to feel, and then to reward the labors of emotional connection, however, remains a real-world concern. In their recent book Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered, Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry suggest that contemporary young people imaginatively connect with others’ emotions less often and less vigorously than did youth in previous generations. What results is not only a loss of feeling but an erosion of

connective forms of feeling like empathy, even if empathy can mean identification with an array of emotional Page 253 →states, not just painful ones. The authors also present what they describe as the “Intense World” theory as part of the study’s examination of empathy in relation to autism-spectrum conditions, specifically observing that “sensory problems, usually oversensitivities,” lead to inabilities to process full, rich emotional nuances.3 In some cases, the authors argue, there is an “overload” of empathetic stimuli that impedes emotional connections.4 It is a scenario, the authors claim, analogous to that of children who “became less empathetic when other people’s pain caused them too much distress,” a situation also visible in “young nurses who avoided the dying because their empathy toward them was too upsetting.”5 According to this theory, pervasive demands for empathy lead to empathetic impulses so frequent and so pressing that they foreclose empathetic pathways altogether. Like the condition known as “compassionate numbness,” where exposure to abundant distress may imperil empathy’s full and continuous development, traumatic scenarios in which urgency surrounds expectations of empathy’s expression may overpower an individual’s ability to express any form of fellow feeling.6 Many of these fears focus on empathy, as do attempts to intervene in a potential unfeeling contemporary populace. One recent news story described an old-age empathy suit, which would enable those who are younger to better appreciate the state of the aged body. Another study of “fearless” children, who are described as having little empathy for others, suggested that children who engage in daring behaviors had “no trouble recognizing facial expressions of anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness in other children,” but could not identify fear or distress in others.7 Like a host of similar articles, this piece suggests that any unsocial, unempathetic set of behaviors should be considered “severe” in their potential consequences. One solution offered by the study points to training young people to engage in emotional work—either interpretive or expressive—a set of activities that could have positive effects on young people’s capacity to feel and to discuss those feelings. Another behavioral science study that found its way into the news suggested that today’s college students are “40 percent less empathetic than those of 30 years ago, with the numbers plunging primarily after 2000.”8 Although the work’s definition of empathy appears quite broad, measuring emotion remains something that interests researchers nonetheless, alongside dogged questions about defining emotion, such as: “Is it a cognitive mechanism through which we imagine how another person feels? A manifestation of sympathy? Do we empathize with others purely to reduce our own levels of stress?”9 And yet the measurements continue, under the Page 254 →assumption that empathy is essential and, perhaps, that subjecting it to a scientific process will bring about a definition that helps to ensure its future. Researchers examining college-aged students reportedly interrogated “empathetic concernВ .В .В . over the misfortunes of others; perspective taking, an intellectual capacity to imagine other people’s points of view; fantasy or people’s tendency to identify imaginatively with fictional characters in books or movies; and personal distress, which refers to the anguish one feels during others’ misfortunes.”10 Despite the continued problem of not knowing how to define precisely what is being measured when empathy is at stake, and, in some cases, the parallel problem of how to define an adequate instrument of measure, debates about emotion’s perceived decline and probable end continue. The very fact that emotion continues to be measured and assessed and parsed, however, suggests that concerns about its presence keep it alive as a subject of analysis and of cultural anxiety. In this respect, we see the continuation of realist trends in depicting emotion—anxiously, uncertainly, and with an eye to its likely future. What such transhistorical concerns share is a commitment to encouraging young people to participate in some form of emotional labor that restores a capacity for emotion—a trend that suggests the degree to which emotion continues to present itself as a form of work—comparable to the ways in which late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century authors treated an emotional habit as a form of class-conscious labor. Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Toronto, and the University of California at Berkeley have recently explored class divisions in order to examine empathy.11 When students were asked to interpret facial expressions and assess which emotions were being broadcast, the higher up the economic scale the students were, the greater their difficulty in interpreting expressions. As a result, the authors conclude that “upper-class people in spite of all their advantages, suffer empathy deficits.” Because of their lack of reliance on others for personal favors, everyday help, and the like, the study’s authors assert, a privileged class composed of

business managers, executives, and company owners (who are accustomed to asserting their wills and unaccustomed to requiring assistance) have not exercised a capacity for empathetic connections. Given the increasing distance between the wealthy and the poor, given the demographic shrinkage of the “middling sorts, ” such studies will likely continue. The question of emotion’s origin still appears as a pressing one, nonetheless. What makes one person capable of feeling more emotion or perhaps more generous forms of feeling than another? How can we encourage Page 255 →the less affectively inclined to become more so? What is an ideal compromise between too much individual emotion (such that it becomes solipsistic and self-interested) and its inverse, or communal emotion (in an accurate and believable form)? There are still studies that suggest that emotion stems from the bodily production of meaningful movements, which in turn generate feelings (as William James believed), and there are also those that posit that habit can generate pathways for the deliberate inculcation of specific forms of emotion, as a number of authors (Chesnutt, Harper, Hopkins) asserted. And as the very appearance of studies about emotion suggests, they appear to assume that the work of analyzing emotion and promoting its recognition helps to preserve and further its value in a society where diversity and discord too often appear to accompany one another. Discussions of emotional literacy suggest similar solutions. I invoke such studies—versions of which one can find in contemporary reporting about emotional subjects, particularly in regard to emotional measurement—in order to highlight the realists’ interests in the types of emotional concerns that continue to appear in contemporary culture; it is also notable that these interests continue to invite scrutiny and, with it, cycles of representation and analysis. But that representation will necessarily take new forms, as with the realists’ reinventive approach to emotional subjects. As they sought out ways to locate modern forms of emotion, the analysis of which resonated with the analytic methods of their era, so too can we expect new representations, alongside new means of reinventing emotion in the twenty-first century.

Page 257 →Page 256 →

Notes Introduction 1. The nine positions relate to Delsarte’s belief in the “trinity” as a principle of truth, here multiplied by three. 2. Lucy Hartley, “Universal Expressions: Darwin and the Naturalization of Emotion,” Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 142. 3. For information about Darwin’s photographs, see Phillip Prodger, An Annotated Catalogue of the Illustrations of Human and Animal Expression from the Collection of Charles Darwin (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1998). The photographs Darwin reprinted in The Expression were taken by several different photographers (from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, a French neurologist who published his own study of facial expressions in 1862, to Oscar Gustave Rejlander, who had a studio in London and whose work Darwin commissioned). Darwin particularly studied Duchenne’s grids of emotion, which include faces showing electrical stimulation as well as naturally occurring expressions that achieve similar effects. He also arranged photographs from different sources in similar grids, as in figure 3. See Hartley, “Universal Expressions,” 155–156, for a discussion of Darwin’s reliance on Duchenne’s photographs. 4. See Joe Cain, “Introduction,” in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Penguin, 2009), xi–xxxiv, for a discussion of Darwin’s reproduction of images of facial galvanization, as photographed by French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne (xxvii). 5. The term “feeling,” in play throughout this study, is hardly distinguishable from “emotion,” save to note the onset of an experience that may not yet be fully defined. Put rather differently, what a character “feels” may be an emotion, once sufficient analytical time and energy are devoted to it, and the character may or may not be aware of what, precisely, that emotion is, even as the flux of the moment may alter that motivation, even during the process of analysis. 6. Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Penguin, 2005), 61, 64. Page 258 → 7. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 402. 8. H. James, Portrait of a Lady, 416. 9. William M. Morgan, Questionable Charity: Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in U.S. Literary Realism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New Hampshire, 2004), 6, 2. 10. See Melanie V. Dawson, “Ruiz de Burton’s Emotional Landscape: Property and Feeling in The Squatter and the Don,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.1 (Spring 2008): 41–72. As I have argued elsewhere about MarГ-a Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s representations of the Californio community in the wake of the Mexican-American War, her work provides a context for emotion that was at once culturally located (at the intersection of Mexican and American traditions) and affectively engaged, but without appearing sentimental. Part of Ruiz de Burton’s point is that sentimentality operates as a sign of privilege, and those who are not socially or financially secure may not be able to afford sentimental positions. 11. Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 13. 12. Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17. Also see Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), who writes that “moral force was inherent in the realist vision, as Howells conceived it.В .В .В . Only realism signified вЂdemocracy in literature’ because, rather than pandering to a mГ©lange of popular tastes, it promised вЂthe unity of taste in the future’” (92). 13. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 20.

14. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 1. 15. For a discussion of sympathy’s affiliation with the bonds of family, see Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 16. For discussions of the sentimental body’s transparency in regard to emotion, see Karen SanchezEppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of MiddleClass Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 17. See Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Aaron Ritzenberg, The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Clark writes that in modern American writing “sentimentality was both a past to be outgrown and a present tendency to be despised” (2), while Ritzenberg traces sentimental literary precedents to moments of communicative touch in literature from the midв€’nineteenth century through 1940. 18. Hildegard Hoeller, Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 102. 19. Ritzenberg, Sentimental Touch, 3. Page 259 → 20. Ritzenberg, Sentimental Touch, 3. 21. Ritzenberg, Sentimental Touch, 15. 22. Barnes, States of Sympathy, 5. 23. Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 11–12. 24. Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), x. 25. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, xvi. 26. Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in NineteenthCentury America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 7, 149. 27. Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2. 28. Boudreau argues that “because it projects individual judgments onto the larger society, one might suspect that sympathy subordinates social order to individuality. But the reverse is true. Since, according to Smith and Hume, we all crave the sympathetic understanding of those around us, we learn to judge our own actions through the eyes of our spectators and consequently moderate our behavior to earn that sympathy. Thus, while one might understand sympathy as a benevolent and private gesture between two individuals, moral philosophy paints a different picture: the allegedly natural response of the sympathetic exchange works to compress diverse individuals into a particular, highly regimented social framework” (Sympathy in American Literature, 6). 29. Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 12–13. 30. Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 641, 646. Also see Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), for a critique of the concept of an intimate public, which comprises a “central fantasy” of “generality through emotional likeness in the domain of pain” (6). Operating through “fantasies of the common, the everyday, and a sense of ordinariness, a space where the social world is rich with anonymity and local recognitions, and where challenging and banal conditions of life take place in proximity to the attentions of power,” sentimental tropes remain appealing, Berlant contends (10). 31. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 7. 32. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xvi. 33. See Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Sympathy, as Samuels argues, worked to elide familial and national identities, fusing nationhood and ideals of blood relation.

34. William James, “What Is an Emotion?” in Collected Essays and Reviews by William James (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1920), 255. 35. W. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 247, 253. 36. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 332. Page 260 → 37. Jennifer Travis, Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 9. 38. See Travis, who argues that “at a time when psychologists and neurologists were making house calls to the emotionally injured, and law courts were hearing cases of irreconcilable emotional wounds, literary realists as well as the male literary scholars who began to interpret their work annexed the emotive and the psychological” (Wounded Hearts, 21). 39. See Jane F. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Ribot’s paradigm includes pity, fear, nervousness, pleasure, and wonder, or specific states of being that, according to Thrailkill, realist writing also exhibits. 40. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 40. 41. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 40. 42. Jane F. Thrailkill, “Emotive Realism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.2 (2006): 364–388, 366. 43. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix. De Certeau defines a strategy as a “calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an вЂenvironment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, вЂclientГЁles,’ вЂtargets,’ or вЂobjects’ of research)” (xix). 44. Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 21, 33. 45. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Penguin, 2009), 23. 46. Joe Cain writes that Darwin occasionally experienced difficulties in knowing what expression a particular photograph was said to capture: “Using photographs from Duchenne’s galvanizing experiments, for instance, he tested the consistency with which people interpreted expressions. Showing them to dozens of family members, friends and visitors to Down House, he noted much variability—only a few expressions were described consistently by his viewers. Darwin also found that if he hid the description, even from himself, he might not always accurately identity the expression on display” (“Introduction,” xxxiв€’xxxii). 47. Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14. 48. Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us, 64. 49. Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us, 64. 50. Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us, 65. 51. Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 52. J. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 7. 53. J. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 8. 54. See Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Keen observes, sympathy has remained as an affective touchstone, for even “modernist reactions against it never eliminated empathy from the novel Page 261 →as a part of a composition or a goal of representation: modern novelists considered it part of their craft and an ingredient in their relationships to both their inventions and their readers” (60). 55. See, for example, Justine S. Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), for discussions of modern affective states. 56. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 25–26.

57. Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 190, 188. Also see Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), who argues that late-nineteenth-century diversity (and with it a social leveling) challenged the model of connection based on the vertical and transcendent models of interaction rooted in sentimental culture. 58. Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 6, 4. 59. Duquette, Loyal Subjects, 4, 5. 60. Rachel Hollander, Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2, 3. 61. Ritzenberg, Sentimental Touch, 13. 62. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 63. Murison, Politics of Anxiety, 10. 64. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5, 3. 65. Greg Forter, Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5. 66. Forter, Gender, Race, and Mourning, 6. 67. We might usefully contrast this sense of representational ethics with the moral imperatives associated with sympathy, particularly in recent works like those by Martha Nussbaum. See, for example, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 68. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 11. 69. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 11. 70. AmГ©lie Oksenberg Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. AmГ©lie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 103–126, 103. Also see Paul Ekman, “Biological and Cultural Contributions to the Body and Facial Movement in the Expression of Emotions., in Rorty, Explaining Emotions, 73–101, who writes that “emotion is complex, entailing a number of different response systems. Only some of them can be directly observed,” a statement that, like Darwin’s, implies that some emotions cannot be viewed by observers (81). Also see J. Robinson, who observes that emotions do not necessarily have to be expressed, for “sometimes emotions don’t seem to have any accompanying behaviour at all: It seems as though I can be secretly in love or annoyed or afraid without there being Page 262 →any sign of it in my overt behaviour” (Deeper Than Reason, 6). Robinson notes, “Like behavior, physiological symptoms may be an important component of emotion but they cannot be all there is to emotion” (7). 71. Flatley, Affective Mapping, 12. 72. William Dean Howells, Editor’s Study, ed. James W. Simpson (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 1983), 73–74. 73. Howells, Editor’s Study, 337.

Chapter One 1. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 106. 2. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 18. 3. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 114. 4. Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 4. As Borus notes, the realists “violated their theoretical premises as often as they observed them” (17). While, as Borus suggests, there are clear and inevitable discrepancies between the theory and the practice of realism (and perhaps thankfully so), my concern lies with an underrecognized aspect of realism’s attention to detail or its investment in affect as an index to social and economic life. 5. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 125. 6. See Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Fetterley and Pryse describe regionalism in

terms of its capacity to invoke empathy and, in doing so, mark regionalism’s distinction from realist writing, which they position as unempathetic. 7. Howells, Editor’s Study, 22 (this edition hereafter cited in the text as ES). 8. Morgan, Questionable Charity, 6, 5, 5. 9. Morgan, Questionable Charity, 2–3. 10. Morgan, Questionable Charity, 12. 11. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, xiv. 12. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature 6. 13. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 9., 14. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, x. 15. Camfield, Sentimental Twain, 12–13. 16. Camfield, Sentimental Twain, xi, x. 17. Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 134. 18. See Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), who write that in the Haymarket aftermath, “the theoretical socialist became a practicing radical, not by arming himself or declaiming to crowds but by using the skill he knew best” as an author (280). 19. Frank Norris, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 76. 20. Jack Tager, The Intellectual as Urban Reformer: Brand Whitlock and the Progressive Movement (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University, 1968), 43. Page 263 → 21. Boudreau explores Howells’s concerns with “sympathy” and “philanthropy” (Sympathy in American Literature, 142) as well as “charity” (160), while Morgan alludes to “social care and humanitarian commitment” (5) in relation to “moral reasoning,” “compassion” (Questionable Charity, 7), and “cultural citizenship” (15). Also see Paul R. Petrie, Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005) for attention to the “social conscience” and moral obligation in Howells’s work. 22. Petrie, Conscience and Purpose, x. 23. For a reading of other Howells’s other term for emotion, “the economy of pain,” see WaiChee Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). While Dimock provides the most sensitive reading of Howell’s phrase, her essay nonetheless underscores a dominant belief that overt emotionalism was aligned with behavioral as well as aesthetic peril. Dimock’s analysis thus treats unguarded emotion as inherently suspect, highlighting the novel’s “calibrating, distributing, and legitimizing [of] suffering,” which produces a convergence of moral and economic values that conjoin “economy” and restraint; thus the novel engages with the language of pain, only to overwrite it with an emphasis on “morality” and “economy” (68). 24. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 191. 25. Howells, Rise of Silas Lapham, 169. 26. Howells, Rise of Silas Lapham, 40. 27. See Daniel T. O’Hara, “Smiling through the Pain: The Practice of Self in The Rise of Silas Lapham,” in Pease, New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” 91–105; and John Cyril Barton, “Howells’s Rhetoric of Realism: The Economy of Pain(t) and Social Complicity in The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Minster’s Charge,” Studies in American Fiction 29.2 (2001): 159–187. Both pieces allude to the role of affect in the novel, and both invoke pain as part of a focus on economic concerns. 28. My reading of Sewell’s theory as deeply flawed accords with recent interpretations of the minister (who reappears in The Minister’s Charge) as limited by his class consciousness. See Melissa McFarland Pennell, “The Mentor’s Charge: Literary Mentoring in Howells’s Criticism and Fiction,” in American Literary Mentors, ed. Melissa McFarland Pennell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 34–46, for a reading of Sewell as a failed mentor because of his preoccupation with

“his own reputation as a man of refined taste and good judgment” (39); and John Graham, “Struggling Upward: The Minister’s Charge and A Cool Million,” Canadian Review of American Studies 4.2 (1973): 184–196, who critiques Sewell’s authority and decision making on the basis of his presumptions about class and education. Such critiques underscore my criticisms of Sewell’s ungenerous formulation of “the economy of pain” and caution against reading Sewell as an index to Howells’s aesthetic. Interpreters who have viewed emotionalism as corruptive in Howells’s aesthetic include Alfred Habegger, “From Painful Cult to Painful Realism: Annie Ogle’s A Lost Love and W. D. Howells’s Ben Halleck and Penelope Lapham,” in American Realism and the Canon, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press), 170–189. Habegger treats Pen Lapham’s sense Page 264 →of self-sacrifice as “a crazy artifact of popular culture [that] takes on an insidious life of its own” (185). 29. Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 53. 30. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, intro. Everett Carter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 255–256 (this edition hereafter cited in the text).. 31. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 52. 32. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 46. 33. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 47. Later, Kaplan notes that Howellsian realism “rejects an older representation of class difference through the genteel extension of вЂsympathy,’ and replaces it with the language of common ownership based on control and modern management” (54). 34. William Dean Howells, The Minister’s Charge; or, The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker, ed. David J. Nordloh and David Kleinman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 29–30 (hereafter cited in the text). 35. Edwin H. Cady and Norma W. Cady, eds., Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, 1866–1920 (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1983), 104. Also see Goodman and Dawson, William Dean Howells, for a discussion of Olivia Clemens, who made a similar response when she approved of The Rise of Silas Lapham, viewing it as “more complex, more shaded, more humane” (256). 36. William Dean Howells, Annie Kilburn, Novels, 1886–1888 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 799 (hereafter cited in the text). 37. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 142. 38. See George N. Bennett, The Realism of William Dean Howells, 1889–1920 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973). This lexicon seems to reflect Howells’s description of the novel as addressing “justice, not alms” (31). 39. Petrie, Conscience and Purpose, 49. 40. Petrie, Conscience and Purpose, 49. 41. Petrie, Conscience and Purpose, 50. 42. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 160. 43. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 163. 44. During his sermon, Peck asserts socialist logic as he argues, “We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast organizations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are taking the lesson and uniting in trusts” (804). While some of Peck’s theories are suspect in their extremism, his sermon carries a weight that makes it impossible to overlook, in part because no other character demonstrates a comparably complete philosophy. 45. SГ¤mi Ludwig, Pragmatist Realism: The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 126.

Chapter Two 1. See Henry James, The Ambassadors, vol. I (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), for “sacred rage” (46); Edith Wharton, The Touchstone (New York: Harper Collins, Page 265 →1991), for “potential

pity” (137); Norris, McTeague, for “perpetual irritation” (234); Howells, Rise of Silas Lapham, , for “the economy of pain” (241); H. James, Portrait of a Lady, for “passionate humility” (53); William Dean Howells, April Hopes (New York: Library of America, 1978), for “the stress of rapture” (453); H. James, Portrait of a Lady, for “probable suffering” (456); William Dean Howells, “The Shadow of a Dream” and “An Imperative Duty” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), for an “agony of interest” (57–58); Edith Wharton, The Reef (New York: Scribner, 1993), for the “equipoise of bliss” (89), and Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (New York: Penguin, 1993), for “spontaneous revulsion” (33). Citations hereafter refer to these editions. 2. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Penguin, 1986), 313. 3. See Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” 104–105. 4. Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent: Expressions and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotions, 1830–1872 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 30–31. Stedman also writes that metaphors about emotion tend to be more meaningful than “emotion words” (32). 5. See William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Perhaps because of such intersecting histories, as Reddy observes, “efforts to uncover the hidden order among emotion words” often fail, “even within “a given language” (5). 6. Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 30, 41. 7. David Punter, Writing the Passions (New York: Pearson, 2001), 19. 8. Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), 61 (this edition hereafter cited in the text). 9. I am borrowing a term used to describe the physical performances of activities such as tableaux vivants and figured bass, or the physical enactment of a schematic plan. 10. Whereas the “animal,” “brute,” or “mean” emotions correspond with those in dogs and horses (which C. Bell also explores), there are emotions that are distinctly human; those that emerge as most superior are not necessarily felt in bodily terms, but are subject to the workings of the mind and leave only fleeting bodily traces (Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 153). As Bell’s study continues, however, it becomes clear that the categorization of emotional expression demanded a continuing series of subdivisions, until the parsing of the affective world threatens to become something of a self-perpetuating process. 11. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 6, 7. 12. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 9–10. 13. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 15; Glazener, Reading for Realism, 1. 14. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 1. 15. Bentley, Frantic Panoramas, 18. 16. Barrish, American Literary Realism, 1. 17. See, for example, Edwin H. Cady, Realist at War: The Mature Years of 1885–1920 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958). Cady notes Howells’s bitter objections to being called a sentimentalist in 1888, noting that it was for Howells “the dirtiest word of all” and that Howells responded Page 266 →to the characterization by asking, “From which of my books do you infer that I am a sentimentalist? .В .В .В If my trade has taught me anything it has taught me to abhor sentimentality” (147). 18. Travis, Wounded Hearts, 43. 19. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 240 (hereafter cited in the text). 20. According to Lucy Hartley, Darwin stated that he observed children because “there is no trace of consciousness in very young children—they do not think, whether the person, they are looking at, is thinking of them” (“Universal Expressions,” 147). 21. Darwin continues, “When Shakespeare speaks of Envy as _lean-faced_, or _black_, or _pale_, and Jealousy as “_the green-eyed monster_:” and when Spenser describes Suspicion as “_foul, illfavored, and grim _” they must have felt this difficulty” (Expression of the Emotions, 240). 22. See, for example, Daniel Borus’s claim that those “who have tried to answer the question of why realism emerged in the late nineteenth century have often pointed to the prevailing cachet of science

and its stress on observation and exactness” (Writing Realism, 27). 23. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 184. 24. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 182, 185. 25. See Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 183–184. 26. Henry B. Wonham, Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10. 27. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 114. The second quote here, by H. L. Mencken, appears in Cady and Cady, Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, 260. 28. William James, “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” in Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America), 77–117, quotation on 116. 29. See Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). According to Smith, ambivalence about scientific methods was rife throughout nineteenth-century culture. In his study of Baconian science’s influence on nineteenth-century thought, Smith asserts the following: “The nineteenth-century debate over scientific method included much more than a discussion of the logical processes of scientific discovery. It could not avoid basic epistemological questions about reality and the relationship between observer and observed; it evaluated the nature and value of scientific knowledge vis-Г -vis other forms of knowledge, including supposedly more intuitive forms like religion and poetry; it contributed to the rewriting of the history of science and of philosophy; it touched on the place of science within society, its roles in education, in industry, and in social policy” (5). 30. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in Writings, 92. 31. Angela Hague, Fiction, Intuition, and Creativity: Studies in BrontГ«, James, Woolf, and Lessing (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 164. Hague writes that “it is certainly true that James understands that emotion must fuel both the novelist’s conception of his project and the existences of his characters within the world. The emotional capacity of the novelist and his creations is the impetus for the enlarged consciousness of both” (163). Page 267 → 32. Henry Adams, Esther (New York: Penguin, 1999), 74–75. 33. Adams, Esther, 75. 34. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil and Fin-de-siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially chapter 2, “The Cult of Invalidism; Ophelia and Folly; Dead Ladies and the Fetish of Sleep.” Also see Emily Orlando, Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), particularly chapter 1. 35. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 76. 36. Qtd. in Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 28. Also see Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6th ed. (New York: Dance Horizons, 1977). It is notable that Curry studied theology, and Delaumosne was a priest. Delsarte is reported to have proclaimed, “I pride myself upon having devoted to science and art thirty-five years of research, crowned by important discoveries” (Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 56). 37. Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 8. Chief among them was Genevieve Stebbins, who authored the popular Delsarte System of Expression, first published in 1885. 38. Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 18. 39. Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 20. By contrast, one of Delsarte’s daughters, Marie GГ©raldy, in pursuit of such vigorous subdivision, was disparaged for producing “eighty-one expressions of the eyes, one after the other” during a particular exhibition (Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 12). Yet on other occasions, Delsarteans reaped praise for their systematic study, which could produce performances of various stylized “attitudes.” Described through vaguely complimentary terms, including “harmonic gymnastics,” “esthetic gymnastics,” and “harmonic poise,” the Delsarte technique was as detailed as it was rigorous. 40. Ruyter, Cultivation of Body and Mind, 117. 41. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 103. 42. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 96.

43. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 95. Glazener writes, furthermore, that some descriptions of realism linked it to the temperance movement, for “both required subscribers to forego certain powerful but dangerous experiences and embrace self-control and quieter pleasures instead” (97). 44. Howells, Editor’s Study, 111–112. 45. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 23. 46. Howells, April Hopes, 432. 47. Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (New York: Signet, 1988), 338–339; and Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 304. 48. Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 42. 49. Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 42. 50. Stedman, Stemming the Torrent, 43. 51. Deborah Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 149. 52. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (New York: Penguin, 1987), 193. Page 268 → 53. David Holbrook, Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 55. 54. Wharton, Reef, 142. 55. Robin Peel, Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction before World War I (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 182. 56. Howells, Editor’s Study, 64–65. Realist representation, for Howells, provided a vision of life removed from the “lies” of sentimental fiction, for, he claimed, it was “actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know,” supplanting stock representations of feeling (Editor’s Study, 81). See Cady, Realist at War. Howells also argued against other generic forms that depended upon emotional reduction, as in tragedy. Similarly contrasting realism with tragedy, Howells argued (of tragedy), “It rather stuns all the faculties, all the emotions except a single one—defiance, perhaps, or fear, or despair. At such moments the interaction of life and human character ceases; there is no play as of sunlight upon the facets of a diamond. Life—fate, if you please—crushes the individual; the situation becomes supreme, character is passive under the weight it cannot lift or shift or move” (qtd. in Cady, Realist at War, 136–137). This sublimation of character to fate, however, was precisely the effect he strove to avoid in the realist text, where characters’ emotional lives should appear irreducible to a single emotional form. 57. H. James, Portrait of a Lady, 465 (hereafter cited in the text). 58. Jill M. Kress, The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75. 59. Kress, Figure of Consciousness, 76. 60. Kress, Figure of Consciousness, 84. 61. H. James, Wings of the Dove, 473 (hereafter cited in the text). 62. See H. James, Portrait of a Lady, for an account of Osmond’s self-stated preference for Isabel because of her “polished, elegant surface,” which, he believes, will reflect his views and render them all the more decorative (296). 63. See Robin Peel, “Vulgarity, Bohemia, and Edith Wharton’s The Reef,” American Literary Realism 37.3 (2005): 187–201, for a discussion of Sophy Viner as a representative of bohemian living, an association that, coupled with her youth and poverty, renders her far below Darrow on any social scale. 64. Wharton, Reef, 232 (hereafter cited in the text). 65. See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), where Wolff writes that the novel’s ending highlights “the immensely convoluted, many-sided problem of sexuality” in an inconclusive fashion (219) as Anna’s suspicions are unrevealed, and Darrow’s moral compass is uncertain, while Sophy’s nature remains a question (218). 66. Holbrook, Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man, 52. 67. Cynthia J. Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 98.

68. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 160. 69. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 160; Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms, 98. 70. Glazener, Reading for Realism, 101. Page 269 → 71. As Adams opens the essay, he details the invention of various instruments created by turnof-the-century scientists, the branley coherer (invented in 1890 by Edouard Branley) among them. The instrument served a function similar to that of the bolometer, invented by Samuel Pierpont Langley, which measured the intensities of the infrared spectrum, and Roentgen rays, or X-rays, produced and measured after their discovery by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. With the possibilities of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, electricity, the infrared spectrum, and radio waves opened up for discernment through such new devices, the late-nineteenth-century scientific community hosted many opportunities to explore systematic evaluation. 72. See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). My language here recalls Ellison’s claim that sentiment was “always sophisticated, reflective, and complex” (6). 73. J. Smith, Fact and Feeling, 5. Also see George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). As Levine has also argued, scientific-minded commitments infused late-nineteenth-century culture. 74. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 27–28. 75. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 16, 98, 104. 76. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 16. This understanding of the observer also granted him a “new perceptual autonomy,” according to Crary (79). 77. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 79, 150. 78. See Trachtenberg’s account of realism, for example. 79. H. James, Ambassadors, 43, 46 (hereafter cited in the text). 80. Ross Possnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 28. 81. Possnock, Trial of Curiosity, 36, 52. According to Possnock, “What makes Henry’s curiosity вЂrare’ is that it is simultaneously autotelic, purposeless, and profitable—in short, a blending of classical and Baconian attitudes that refuses the oppositions that define both stances. Curiosity, as Henry embodies it, is neither theoretic nor instrumental but rather, in his words, a вЂdeeply dissimulative process’” (43). 82. Kevin Ohi, Henry James and the Queerness of Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 169–170. 83. See, for example, Eric Haralson, “Lambert Strether’s Excellent Adventure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169–186. 84. A similar reading of Strether appears in Robert Dawidoff, The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James and Santayana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 85. See Scott Derrick, Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in NineteenthCentury U.S. Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). Scholars have addressed Strether’s liminal place in the libidinal pairings traced by the plot via vastly different theories (as in the wide application of Eve Sedgwick’s idea of “homosexual panic” visible in Strether’s behavior), as well as what Derrick Page 270 →describes as the novel’s portrait of the paralyzing effects of confronting “the complicated sexualities located just beyond its borders, which is to say, just beyond the borders of Strether’s heterosexualizing consciousness” (108–109). 86. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1900), 187. 87. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 187, 188.

88. Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy, 14, 16. 89. Rebecca N. Mitchell, Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 18. 90. R. Mitchell, Victorian Lessons, x–xi. 91. Julie Olin-Ammentorp, “Edith Wharton, Margaret Aubyn, and the Woman Novelist,” Women’s Studies 29 (1992): 135. 92. Wharton, Touchstone, 54. 93. Denise Witzig, “Letter(s) from an Unknown Woman: Edith Wharton’s Correspondence with Authority,” Women’s Studies 20 (1991): 172. 94. J. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 8. 95. Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 218.

Chapter Three 1. Thorstein Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), 37. 2. Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” 106. 3. Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” 120. 4. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, vol. 1, intro. Tibor R. Machan (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978), 99. 5. Paul J. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (New York: Routledge, 2006), 90. 6. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 23. 7. Frederic Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34. 8. Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 26. 9. June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 22. 10. Howard, Form and History, 24–25. 11. Howard, Form and History, 24. 12. Georg LukГЎcs, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild BackinPrint, 1970), 119. 13. LukГЎcs, Writer and Critic, 55. For this reason, LukГЎcs writes that “the classics of realism again fulfilled the requirements of epic art” (139) by contextualizing individual stories within the story of their effects upon other individuals. See his discussion of comparative and parallel character developments in fiction by Maxim Gorki, for example (180–181). Page 271 → 14. LukГЎcs, Writer and Critic, 179. 15. LukГЎcs, Writer and Critic, 158. 16. Howard, Form and History, 93. 17. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 94. 18. Claire Preston, Edith Wharton’s Social Register (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 55. 19. Carol Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Sprit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65. 20. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception,” xiv. See Judith P. Saunders, Reading Edith Wharton through a Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues in Her Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009), for a reading of adaptive issues in regard to mate selection. 21. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception,” 19. 22. Saunders, Reading Edith Wharton, 2, 184. 23. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception,” 20. 24. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 69.

25. Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 23. 26. Lee, Edith Wharton, 70–71. 27. See Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994). 28. Peel, Apart from Modernism, 133–134. 29. This gesture, of mystery wrapped up in personal origins, differs from the kind of compulsion Jennifer Fleissner attributes to naturalist narratives, in my view, though there is a kinship between the two ways of presenting influences on present-day behaviors. See Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 30. See John Dudley, A Man’s Game: Masculinity and the Anti-Aesthetics of American Literary Naturalism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 28. 31. Dudley, Man’s Game, 22. Also see Howard, Form and History, 93, on atavism. 32. Peel, Apart from Modernism, 123. 33. Wharton, Ethan Frome, 37, 84 (hereafter cited in the text). 34. See Tracy Wendt, “Body as Mentality in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome,” Atenea 25.2 (2005): 155. While Wendt sees in Ethan a “restrained emotion” and an inability to experience emotion in ways other than through “the language of the body,” my reading of the affective qualities of the characters’ experience differs, particularly in working against the idea that Wharton creates in Ethan “a psychologically simple yet intense character who personifies his mute landscape” (155). Given the repeated narrative contrast between Ethan’s intent and its execution, it is clear that Ethan is unable to express his true feelings (which both he and the narrative recognize as such) and that his locutions, not the quality of his sentiments, fail him. 35. Maria Magdalena Farland, “Ethan Frome and the вЂSprings’ of Masculinity,” Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (1996): 707–729, 708. Page 272 → 36. Farland, “Ethan Frome and the вЂSprings’ of Masculinity,” 710–711. 37. Jennifer Travis, “Pain and Recompense: The Trouble with Ethan Frome.” Arizona Quarterly 53.3 (1997): 37, 39, 41. 38. Travis, “Pain and Recompense,” 56. 39. Wharton’s prose is attuned to anthropological language across Wharton’s career, as scholars such as Preston and Bentley have demonstrated. On this topic, also see Maureen Montgomery, Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (New York: Routledge, 1998). 40. Wharton, Backward Glance, 294. 41. Wharton, Backward Glance, 294. 42. Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 58. 43. Robert Heath Lock, Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1911), 36. 44. Peel, Apart from Modernism, 131. 45. Elizabeth Ammons, “Introduction,” in Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), vii–xxi. 46. Ammons, “Introduction,” xii. 47. Ammons, “Introduction,” xiii–xiv. 48. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 106. 49. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). Such actions—unreasoned and impulsive—would seem to fall under a contemporary category of emotion that is noncognitivist, or antithetical to the work of judgment. According to Ahmed, a functionalist model of emotion, rooted in evolutionary possibilities, might suggest that “instinctual” reactions “allow survival” and have “enhanced successful adaptation and thus selection” (7). 50. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 167–168. 51. Farland, “Ethan Frome and the вЂSprings’ of Masculinity,” 710. Meanwhile, in her private life, Wharton witnessed her husband, Teddy, display increasingly obvious signs of a hereditary mental disorder, now described by biographers as likely a bipolar condition. Teddy’s father had been confined to a mental asylum where he later committed suicide; before her marriage, Wharton had been assured that

the illness could not be inherited (Lee, Edith Wharton, 73). As Teddy approached middle age, however, his difficult behaviors grew more obvious. As an individual well read in scientific theory, Wharton was not likely to disregard the degree to which heredity had contributed to the course of Teddy’s illness. See Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), as signs of Teddy’s illness infiltrate Wharton’s letters from 1910 to 1914. As Sheri Benstock describes this period, “Edith felt as tied to Teddy as Ethan Frome was to his bedridden wife, Zeena,” drawing an explicit parallel between the two declining relationships (No Gifts from Chance, 247). Such a context makes it possible to speculate that at such a juncture, the specific entrapments posed by heredity had a pointed power in influencing Wharton’s aesthetic. Wharton returned to her draft of the narrative just after Teddy was settled into the Kuranstalt Bellevue Clinic at Kreuzlingen, a mental institution (Lee, Edith Wharton, 377–378). 52. The statement becomes gendered in its implication that the women of the Page 273 →current day, Zeena and Mattie, talk too much, for in the graveyard, “the women have got to hold their tongues” (99). 53. Lock, Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, 112–113. 54. Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5. 55. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, 5. 56. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 36. 57. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 36. 58. Patricia Antrece Stevenson, “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall: Edith Wharton’s Noble Savages, ” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32.4 (2003): 422–429, 411. 59. Stevenson, “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall,” 412. 60. Stevenson, “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall,” 412. 61. Stevenson, “Ethan Frome and Charity Royall,” 414. 62. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 21. 63. See Lewis Petrinovich, “Darwin and the Representative Expression of Reality,” in Darwin and Racial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, ed. Paul Ekman (New York: Academic Press, 1973). According to Petrinovich, “Darwin had originally intended The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) to be a chapter in The Descent, but the length became so extensive as he compiled his notes that he published The Expression as a separate volume the year following the publication of The Descent” (228). 64. Darwin’s discussion genders the act of blushing as feminine, for many of his examples focus on young women’s admissions of their blushing tendencies, alongside accounts of women’s blushes from doctors and painters (Expression of the Emotions, 290). 65. Howard, Form and History, 64, 142. 66. This form of stasis is reminiscent of Jennifer Fleissner’s account of Naturalism as depicting a “stuckness in place,” for women characters; according to Fleissner’s argument, the argument about biological stasis would not apply as fully to male characters. See Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity, 9. 67. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception,” 9. 68. This emphasis on bloodline may constitute a response to what Kassanoff describes as a sense of nationalism in which the origins of identity were, at best, “fallible” and as the United States represented to Wharton a land devoid of tradition and filled with chaos (Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, 10). 69. See 53 (candlestick) and 47 (his sense of “mastery”). 70. Sharon Kim, “Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House of Mirth,” Studies in the Novel 38.2 (2006): 187–210, 191. 71. L. J. Jordanova, Lamarck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 36. 72. Jordanova, Lamarck, 53. 73. Jordanova, Lamarck, 54. 74. Jordanova, Lamarck, 55. 75. Jordanova, Lamarck, 55.

76. Richard W. Burkhardt Jr. The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 174. 77. Kim, “Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence,” 191. Page 274 → 78. According to Burkhardt, “Lamarck did believe in the idea for which he is most famous: the idea that somatic modifications resulting from an organism’s development of particular habits may be passed on to that organism’s offspring under the appropriate conditions. This is the idea that has come be known as the вЂinheritance of acquired characters.’ But this idea was neither one which Lamarck originated nor one for which he claimed special credit. What is more, in his own day, he was not criticized for holding it” (Spirit of System, 1). 79. W. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 254–255. 80. W. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 255. 81. W. James, Psychology, 332. Also see William James, “The Energies of Men,” in Writings. As part of an interest in enabling modern men to recognize their passions and to manage them carefully, James promoted what he described as a “discipline to keep the deeper levels [of emotion] constantly in reach” or a means of both managing and protecting “emotions and excitements” (“Energies of Men,” 1225, 1231), whereas a modern individual’s tendency to live “within his [emotional] limits” would produce “inferiority” (“Energies of Men,” 1239). James advised the individual to strike a balance between the man who feels too little and the one who allows himself to experience a great rush of emotion, contending, “Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater” (“Energies of Men,” 1224–1225). 82. Murison, Politics of Anxiety, 24. 83. This Mrs. Hale is the mother-in-law of the current-day narrator’s informant, Mrs. Ruth Hale. 84. Travis, “Pain and Recompense,” 42. 85. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, x. 86. J. Smith, Fact and Feeling, 43. 87. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 19. 88. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 19. 89. Ammons, “Introduction,” vii. 90. See Michael Tritt, “вЂThe Force, the Fire and the Artistic Touch’ of Alice DunbarNelson’s вЂThe Stones of the Village,’” Journal of the Short Story in English 43 (2012): 17–31, 17. Tritt reads the story as highlighting Victor’s “childhood turmoil” and his “tormented—and lifelong—struggle to control his emotions and to fit into society,” whereas my analysis reads the story’s emotional elements much less prescriptively (17). 91. See Eleanor Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Born in 1875 to parents who are believed to have been a “former mulatto slave and native of Opalousas, Louisiana” on her mother’s side and a light-complexioned father who may have been white, Alice Moore situated herself as an elite woman of color in her native New Orleans (52). Her education, accomplishments, and, according to biographers, her appearance allowed her to position herself prominently. She would become “a belle in the sometimes pretentious world of African American high society” and an “educated, refined, cultured вЂlady,’” according to Alexander (57). Page 275 → 92. Like Wharton’s husband, Teddy, Paul Laurence Dunbar was reported to experience pronounced “mood swings,” and it is possible, biographers believe, that he suffered from manic tendencies (Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 95). Whatever the cause, Dunbar drank heavily and behaved abusively toward Alice. In 1897, when the two were engaged, he arranged to meet Alice in a mutual friend’s home and raped her while intoxicated. Her confession of internal injuries prompted his remorse, and they married in 1898 (Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 130–131). Four years later, Dunbar beat his wife—in view of family members—so severely that she left him. They never reconciled before his death the following year. The escalation of Dunbar’s violent behaviors immediately preceded the author’s exploration of emotional formation in “The Stones of the Village.” 93. Gloria T. Hull, “Introduction,” in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, vol. I (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1988), xxxv. 94. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “The Stones of the Village,” in American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910, ed. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 481–499, 483. This edition hereafter cited in the text. 95. Jordan Stouck, “Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans Fiction,” Canadian Review of American Studies 34.3 (2004): 280, 282. 96. Thomas Strychacz, “вЂYouВ .В .В . Could Never Be Mistaken’ Reading Alice DunbarNelson’s Rhetorical Diversions in The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories,” Studies in American Fiction 36.1 (2008): 88, 78. 97. Hull, “Introduction,” xxix. 98. Stouck, “Identities in Crisis,” 272. 99. W. James, Psychology, 325.

Chapter Four 1. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. See Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge. Nussbaum attributes to Smith “a tendency to blur the distinction between empathy and sympathy; a tendency to confuse propriety in feeling with propriety in the public expression of feeling” (141). In other words, Smith’s thinking, which has been central to literary formulations of affect, elides concepts that affect theorists have since defined more narrowly. 2. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12. 3. A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12. 4. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 206. 5. Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 206. 6. Ezra F. Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12. 7. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3. 8. Warren argues that “the definition of the realistic novel as an instrument for altering social relations could not include an embrace of a sentimental aesthetic. In fact, some of the central tenets of that aesthetic—a dedication to duty, the valorization of sacrifice and renunciation, and appeals of the heart rather than the head—werePage 276 → often held up for critique and ridicule within realistic fiction” (Black and White Strangers, 72). 9. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Wonham, Playing the Races. Public performances of race in America have had a long and complex history, according to scholarly examinations of slave auctions as public theater (Roach), minstrelsy traditions (Lott), and spectacles such as the turn-of-the-century cakewalk (Sundquist). As Roach argues, performances of racial difference were both everyday and extravagantly extraordinary events, deeply interwoven into the fabric of American life (213). In his study of dialect, Jones points to the prevalence of “Negro” dialect in late-nineteenth-century fiction, a development that coincided with the prevalence of “ethnic dialect jokes” in vaudeville routines (1). 10. Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 86, 88. 11. Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), ix. Also see Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), which similarly connects passing and performance

(4). 12. For critical readings that seek to understand a controlled deployment of melodramatic conventions, see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Sean McCann, “’Bonds of Brotherhood’: Pauline Hopkins and the Work of Melodrama,” ELH 64 (1997): 789–822, which describes the “extraordinary usefulness of melodrama for Hopkins’s political thought” (791). 13. Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 5. 14. William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader, ed. Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 261–273, quotation at 261. 15. William James, “The Physical Basis of Emotion,” in Collected Essays and Reviews, 261–262 (hereafter cited in the text). 17. Stebbins, Delsarte System of Expression, 6. 18. Maud Cooke, Social Life: The Manners and Customs of Polite Society (Buffalo, NY: MatthewsNorthrup Co.: 1896), 379. 19. Cooke, Social Life, 381. 20. Cooke, Social Life, 379. 21. William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 161. 22. Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (New York: Penguin, 1993), 162. Page 277 → 23. See Stephen P. Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness,” ALH 8.3 (1996): 426–48, for a discussion of the ways Chesnutt inverts the tragic mulatto paradigm. 24. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 31. 25. Terada, Feeling in Theory, 31. 26. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 291 (hereafter cited in the text). 27. Charles Chesnutt, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 140. 28. Charles Chesnutt, “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, ed. Joseph, R. McElrath Jr. and Robert C. Leitz III (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 36. 29. Chesnutt, Letters, 40. 30. For a reprint of the review see Joseph R. McElrath Jr., “W. D. Howells and Race: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.4 (1997): 497. 31. Chesnutt, Letters, 171. 32. Brook Thomas, ed., Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), 57–58. 33. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 243, 235. 34. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, 310. 35. Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 60. 36. See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Carby contends that white and black audiences need not be seen as mutually exclusive of one another in the work of Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, for the mulatto functions as a “narrative device of mediation” (89). 37. Hopkins, Contending Forces, 49 (hereafter cited in the text). 38. Lois Lamphere Brown, “вЂTo Allow No Tragic End’: Defensive Postures in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces,” in The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, ed. John Cullen Gruesser (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 52. 39. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 142. 40. Pauline E. Hopkins, preface to Contending Forces: A Romance Ilustrative of Negro Life North and South, ed. Richard Yarborough (New York: Oxford University Press 1988): 13–16, 15.

41. Richard Yarborough, “Introduction,” in Hopkins, Contending Forces, xxxi. 42. Frances Harper, Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 105–6 (hereafter cited in the text). 43. Randall Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous вЂReflexion.’” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 716. 44. William Dean Howells, Selected Letters of W. D. Howells, vol. 5, 1902–1911, ed. William C. Fischer, with Christoph K. Lohmann (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 65. Page 278 → 45. Howells, Imperative Duty, 53–54 (hereafter cited in the text). 46. Julie Cary Nerad, “Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper,” American Literature 75.4 (2003): 825. 47. See Henry B. Wonham, “Howells, Du Bois, and the Effect of вЂCommon-Sense’: Race, Realism, and Nervousness in An Imperative Duty and The Souls of Black Folk,” in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 126–139. As Wonham argues, this part of Howells’s novel is reminiscent of Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.” 48. M. Giulia Fabi, “Reconstructing Literary Genealogies: Frances E. W. Harper’s and William Dean Howells’s Race Novels,” in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 53. 49. Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 81. 50. Bennett, Realism of William Dean Howells, 99. 51. Bennett, Realism of William Dean Howells, 98–99. 52. “An Imperative Duty,” Critic 20 (January 16, 1892): 34–35. 53. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 202–203 (hereafter cited in the text). 54. Henry B. Wonham, “Writing Realism, Policing Consciousness: Howells and the Black Body,” American Literature 67.4 (1995): 701–724, 708. 55. William L. Andrews, “William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt: Criticism and Race Fiction in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” American Literature 48 (1976): 334. 56. Andrews, “William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt,” 334. 57. Martha Banta, “Introduction,” in Howells, “The Shadow of a Dream” and “An Imperative Duty” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), vii. 58. Andrews, “William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt,” 333. 59. Banta, “Introduction,” vii, viii. 60. Nerad, “Slippery Language and False Dilemmas,” 825. 61. Howells, Shadow of a Dream, 4. See Jeffory A. Clymer, “Race and the Protocol of American Citizenship in William Dean Howells’ An Imperative Duty,” American Literary Realism 30.3 (1998), who contends that the term suggests a way for Olney to draw “exclusionary distinctions” between those who embody “American” values and those who do not (34). 62. Clymer, “Race and the Protocol of American Citizenship,” 45. 63. Howells refers here to the classical bust owned by Charles Towneley, which was replicated frequently during the nineteenth century. Made of marble, the bust depicts a nymph who was loved and scorned by Apollo and who stares serenely into the scorching heat of the sun. 64. See Wonham, “Writing Realism,” 719–720. This trend is linked to what Wonham describes as Howells’s portrayal of an “unreal” black body (709–710). 65. See Janet Gabler-Hover, “The North-South Reconciliation Theme and the вЂShadow of the Negro’ in Century Illustrated Magazine,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (Charlottesville:Page 279 → University of Virginia Press, 1995). Gabler-Hover has argued that the reconciliation of the North and South emerged as a popular theme during Century’s focus (during 1884 through 1887). 66. Gillman, Blood Talk, 99. 67. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, ed. Sidney E. Berger (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1980), 5–6 (this edition hereafter cited in the text).

68. See Hoeller, Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism, for a discussion of the ways in which reviewers and critics of Wharton’s work have opposed irony to sentiment. Hoeller’s point, that Wharton was allowed into the canon because of a tendency to privilege her texts’ ironic voices rather than their emotional ones, echoes my sense that irony and emotion operate (and are perceived as operating) in very different venues and confer different literary values. 69. Forrest G. Robinson, “The Sense of Disorder in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture, ed. Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 28; Susan Gillman, “вЂSure Identifiers’: Race, Science, and the Law in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Gillman and Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, 87. 70. Camfield, Sentimental Twain, 192. 71. Everett Emerson, Mark Twain: A Literary Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 198. 72. Eric J. Sundquist, “Mark Twain and Homer Plessy,” in Gillman and Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, 69. 73. See Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1984). Parker surmises that the chapter headings from Wilson’s calendar were among the last pieces of writing added to the final revised manuscript (127). 74. [Samuel Clemens], Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867–1984, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 328. 75. Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, 130. 76. [Clemens], Mark Twain’s Letters, 354. 77. Emerson, Mark Twain, 198. 78. American Hebrew 57 (May 24, 1895): 66; and Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Feb. 3, 1895, 23. 79. Cosmopolitan Magazine 19 (Jan. 1895): 378–379; Hartford Times, Feb. 19, 1895, 8; Springfield Republican, Feb. 3, 1895, 11. 80. For interpreters who describe Tom’s behavior as related to the trickster tradition, see Susan V. Donaldson, Competing Voices: The American Novel, 1865–1914 (New York: Twayne, 1998); and Henry B. Wonham, “вЂI Want a Real Coon’: Mark Twain and Late-Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Caricature.” American Literature 72.1 (2000): 117–52. 81. Emerson, Mark Twain, 197. 82. Qtd. in Emerson, Mark Twain, 197. 83. Emerson, Mark Twain, 197. 84. According to Parker, Twain composed the story of Tom’s black heritage after he had written the elements of the plot that detail Tom’s thievery and inserted the Page 280 →story of race into an existing plot about thievery (Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons, 125–127). 85. Knoper, Acting Naturally, 94, 92. 86. See Myra Jehlen, “The Ties that Bind: Race and Sex in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Gillman and Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, 106. 87. Camfield, Sentimental Twain, 194. 88. Camfield, Sentimental Twain, 199. 89. Sundquist, “Mark Twain and Homer Plessy,” 64.

Chapter Five 1. H. James, Portrait of a Lady, 7. 2. H. James, Portrait of a Lady, 7 (hereafter cited in the text). 3. James’s correspondence about his chapter, primarily to Jordan, dates from January to October of 1907. See Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James, the Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 443, which places James’s work on the collective novel as “in the midst of all his frenetic activity” on the New York Edition. Novick also writes that “a reader quickly discovered that the preface held no enriching or elucidating commentary on the novel that followed but was part of a vast metawork,

James’s artistic autobiography, from which personalities and anything of a вЂprivate’ character were omitted” (442). 4. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 5. 5. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 5. 6. John W. Crowley, “The Whole Famdamnily,” New England Quarterly 60.1 (1987): 113. 7. Alfred Bendixen, ed., The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1986), 124 (this edition hereafter cited in the text). 8. See June Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). As Howard notes, the chapters “show over and over that each member of the family feels misunderstood by the others. Thus the format of the novel turns out to lend itself to exactly the sort of fragmentation that Howells feared” (129). 9. Elizabeth Freeman, “The Whole(y) Family: Economies of Kinship in the Progressive Era,” American Literary History 16.4 (2004): 622, 634. 10. Howard, Publishing the Family, 218. 11. Fetterley and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 133–134. 12. Ellison, Cato’s Tears, 6. 13. Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 160. Writing that “early twentieth-century modernism was an apparently decisive break with the eighteenthcentury tradition of sentiment,” Bell asserts that this break was “often tinged with snobbery and implicitly gendered,” as he explores the works of Joyce and Brecht (160). While participating in a willingness to rethink emotional possibilities through both caricature and inversion, The Whole Family reveals less “snobbery” than Bell imagines, but nonetheless shows signs of its modernity. See Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5. 14. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 11. Ugly forms of affect also appear as “dysphoric or Page 281 →experientially negative in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure” and as “saturated with socially stigmatizing meanings and values (such as the вЂpettiness’ one traditionally associates with envy)” (11). 15. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 151. 16. Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 214; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 173. 17. William A. Gleason, The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 228. 18. Qtd. in Dudley, Man’s Game, 28. 19. Pugilism, however, allowed professionalized, middle-class men to claim some participation with the world of “rough, working-class masculinity” by enacting their investment in “physical prowess, pugnacity, and sexuality” (Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 17). In particular, claims John Dudley, “for the elite members of society, boxers represented manly force in its most basic form” (Man’s Game, 30). 20. Dudley, Man’s Game, 93. 21. See Howard, Form and History; and Eric Carl Link, A Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). 22. See Barbara Hochman, Getting at the Reader: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); and Harold H. Kolb, The Illusion of Life: American Realism as Literary Form (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969). 23. Alfred Bendixen. “Introduction: The Whole Story Behind The Whole Family,” in Bendixen, Whole Family, xxii. 24. Howard, Publishing the Family, 136. Howard also writes that Vorse’s “writing about elderly women is driven by her sympathy for their disenfranchisement; thus it links quite directly with her late, more explicitly political journalism and fiction” (136). 25. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxxv. 26. Susanna Ashton, “Veribly a Purple Cow: The Whole Family and the Collaborative Search for Coherence,” Studies in the Novel 33.1 (2001), 55.

27. Wonham, Playing the Races, 8. 28. Wonham, Playing the Races, 8. 29. Wonham, Playing the Races, 8. 30. Wonham, Playing the Races, 9. 31. Wonham also examines this passage, which is famous in Howells’s criticism. Of it, Wonham writes that Howells attends to “the character of grasshoppers. If his research is successful, he will draw conclusions about the grasshopper in general, conclusions that different from the pedant’s in that they are based on careful observation, but that are reached by a similar process of inherence. Howells employs this process of inference himself when he speculates that the essence of character, Page 282 →the proper object of realist analysis in fiction, is the same in everyone, regardless of superficial economic, cultural, or physiognomic qualities that ostensibly differentiate the types of mankind” (Playing the Races, 41). 32. Howells, Selected Letters, 180. 33. Howard, Publishing the Family,118. 34. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxiii; Howard, 15. 35. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxix. 36. Howard, Publishing the Family, 128. 37. Ashton, “Veribly a Purple Cow,” 58. 38. Elizabeth Jordan, Three Rousing Cheers (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1938), 279–280. 39. Ashton, “Veribly a Purple Cow,” 53. 40. Howard, Publishing the Family,168. 41. As Howard notes, Lily obsesses over men and fashion and “reports in detail the compliments paid to her by gentlemen, including even her small nephew,”(Publishing the Family, 169). 42. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxiii. 43. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxix. 44. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxvii. 45. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxxi. 46. Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxiii. 47. James wrote that he hated to see the novel “so hopelessly muddledВ .В .В . when, oh, one could one’s selfВ .В .В . have made them mean something, given them sense, direction, and form” (Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxx). 48. Howard makes a similar observation when she notes that “each family member of the family feels misunderstood by the others,” (Publishing the Family, 129). 49. Crowley, “Whole Famdamnily,” 113. 50. The two exceptions are Ada’s and Peggy’s chapters. Imbued with little privacy or interiority, both Ada Talbert and Peggy present a series of minute events rather than introspective analyses. Having experienced trouble placing Ada at the center of her narrative, Wyatt argued that a “monologue would be inappropriate for Mrs. Talbert” and composed an epistolary chapter instead, which Jordan immediately rejected (Bendixen, “Introduction,” xxviii). 51. Howells alone appears to have considered the chapter “delicate” and full of “perfect intelligence, and ironical ease,” overlooking its emotional strains (Selected Letters, 207). 52. The chapter’s ideological divergence from Phelps’s self-consciously feminist novels (The Story of Avis, Dr. Zay, and The Silent Partner, to a name a few) supports such a reading. 53. Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps (New York: Spire Books, 1995) (hereafter cited in the text). 54. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 136. 55. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 136. 56. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 138. 57. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 138. 58. Charles M. Sheldon, Charles M. Sheldon—His Life Story (New York: George Doran, 1925) (hereafter cited in the text). Sheldon was notoriously private when it Page 283 →came to representing his life; before his death he destroyed all his correspondence regarding In His Steps and went to considerable lengths to obscure the earnings he gleaned from the novel. Because of a botched copyright, however, he received much less than he might have. 59. Timothy Miller, Following in His Steps: A Biography of Charles M. Sheldon (Knoxville: University of

Tennessee Press, 1987), 24. 60. See Sheldon, Charles M. Sheldon, chapter 3. 61. Hochman, Getting at the Reader, 4. 62. Qtd. in Hochman, Getting at the Reader, 4. 63. See Paul S. Boyer, “In His Steps: A Reappraisal,” American Quarterly 23.1 (1971): 60–78, e.g., 62; and Susan Gates, “Rediscovering the Heart of Public Administration: The Normative Theory of вЂIn His Steps’” (PhD diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institution, 1998), 5. 64. See Wayne Elzey, “вЂWhat Would Jesus Do?’ In His Steps and the Moral Codes of the Middle Class,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 58 (1975): 463–489. Elzey takes such questions to the extreme, stressing the patent absurdity of quandaries such as: “вЂWhat would Jesus do’ if He were an idle socialite living in a Midwestern city in the 1890s? .В .В .В Would Jesus devote three and a half columns of His newspaper to a prize fight? Would He publish a Sunday edition? Would He blow the whistle on violators of Interstate Commerce Laws? Would He sing comic opera? Would He bake doughnuts for the poor?” (466). 65. Stacey Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 12. In these passages, Margolis makes reference to Lauren Berlant’s work. 66. Margolis, Public Life of Privacy, 12. 67. See Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). 68. My reading overlaps with Margolis’s argument that private life must be rendered in some public dimension in order to be made “intelligible.” See Margolis, Public Life of Privacy, 12–14. 69. Heinz Ickstadt, “The Novel and the People: Aspects of Democratic Fiction in Late 19th Century American Literature,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on American Literature: Seria Filologia Angielska 12, ed. Marta Sienicka (Poznan: Uniw. Im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1979), 67. 70. Boyer, “In His Steps: A Reappraisal,” 63. 71. See John Patrick FerrГ©, A Social Gospel for Millions: The Religious Bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1988), 25. According to FerrГ©, the affluent are to guard against self-satisfaction, while the poor are to fight anger and sensuality, including a desire for liquor (25). 72. Boyer examines the novel’s fascination with the lower classes, or the characters’ “intense curiosity” with the bodies of the working class laborers (“In His Steps: A Reappraisal,” 72). 73. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 8. 74. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 8. 75. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Norton, 1970), 356 (hereafter cited in the text).

Page 284 →Epilogue 1. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 9, 297. 2. Atwood, MaddAddam, 297. 3. Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, Born to Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered (New York: William Morrow, 2010), 73. 4. Svalavitz and Perry, Born to Love, 84. 5. Svalavitz and Perry, Born to Love, 84. 6. See Benedict Carey, “Becoming Compassionately Numb,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2011. In the face of disasters, particularly those reported in the news and those that require long-term interventions, a condition termed “compassionate numbness” can develop in regard to “problems like mass joblessness and starvation,” which “can seem so daunting that we stop trying to help,” writes Carey. 7. Pamela Paul, “Fearless Preschoolers Lack Empathy?” New York Times, Nov. 21, 2010. 8. Pamela Paul, “From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers?” New York Times, June 27, 2010.

9. Paul, “From Students.” 10. Paul, “From Students,” 5. 11. Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and Dacher Keltner, “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathetic Accuracy,” Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society 21.11 (Nov. 2010): 1716–1723.

Page 285 →

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Page 297 →

Index Adams, Henry, 269n71 The Education of Henry Adams, 97 Esther, 80–81 study of emotion in art in, 80 aesthetics of emotion in, 80–83, 90 affect and affective behavior, 12, 14–15, 16, 249 affect and emotion, 13, 26. See also emotions distinction between affect and emotion, 27–28, 116–18 affective analysis (parsing), 30, 82, 90, 91, 94, 95–97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 111 affective bloodsport, 33–34, 200–248 affective expressions and experiences, 8, 11, 19, 67, 72, 78, 81, 116, 134, 169, 199 affective hybridity, 10, 85 affectively constituted subject, 32–33, 155–99 affective modernity, 25, 26 affective patterns and habits, 103, 140, 146, 157, 158, 197 affective world, 21, 97, 102–3, 265n10 Chesnutt on, 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173 Howells on, 35–36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46–47, 62, 88, 178, 179, 185, 263n27 and realist literature, 9–10, 11, 16, 27, 67, 72, 80, 97–98, 104, 106, 146, 161 studies of, 14, 15, 16, 18–19, 25, 30, 68, 71, 74, 79–80, 84, 89, 116–17, 134, 138, 145, 169 ugly forms of, 207, 280n14 African-American characters in realist literature, 155–99, 277n36 Chesnutt and, 171–74 Contending Forces (Hopkins), 173, 174–76 The House Behind the Cedars (Chesnutt), 156, 163–71, 173 An Imperative Duty (Howells), 177–83, 278n61 Iola Leroy (Harper), 173, 176–77

The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt), 172, 173 “Negro” dialect, 276n9 performance of race in America, 276n9 “The Stones of the Village” (Dunbar-Nelson), 32, 118–19, 147–53, 274n90, 275n92 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 177–78, 189–98, 279nn73–84 See also race-passing fiction “agony of interest,” 67, 264n1 Ahmed, Sara, 272n49 Page 298 →“alien me,” 169, 170, 194–98 American Hebrew (newspaper), 193 Ammons, Elizabeth, 127 Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman chapter in The Whole Family, 204, 212, 213 Andrews, William L., 163, 184–85 antebellum period, 11, 156, 174, 187, 189, 190 anxiety, 13, 18, 21, 26, 90, 141, 151, 178, 254 emotion and representational anxiety, 20, 30–31, 67–112 in In His Steps (Sheldon), 241 in “An Imperative Duty” (Howells), 182 in “The Married Daughter” (Phelps), 227 in “The Stones of the Village” (Dunbar-Nelson), 151, 153 in The Whole Family (James chapter), 202 Aristotle, 26 art reflecting emotions, 76–78 Ashton, Susanna, 213 Atwood, Margaret MaddAddam trilogy, 251–52 Bain, Alexander, 19 Bangs, John Kendrick

chapter in The Whole Family, 205, 213, 219 Banta, Martha, 185 Barnes, Elizabeth, 15, 144 Barrish, Phillip, 12, 74, 83 Bell, Charles, 30, 70–72, 83, 117, 265n10 The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts, 70 Essays of the Anatomy of the Expression in Painting, 70 Bell, Michael, 206–7, 280n13 Bell, Michael Davitt, 20 Bendixen, Alfred, 213 See also The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors (Bendixen, ed.) Benstock, Sheri, 120, 272n51 Bentley, Nancy, 74, 258n12, 272n39 Berlant, Lauren, 16, 26, 241, 259n30 Bible, 75 Bordon, Lizzie, 213 Borus, Daniel, 36, 262n4, 266n22 Boudreau, Kristen, 24, 38–39, 45, 57, 59, 62, 144–45, 156, 259n28, 263n21 Sympathy in American Literature, 15 Bourget, Paul, 120 boxing as metaphor for a competition for empathy, 210–12, 281n19 Boyer, Paul S., 243, 283n72 Branley, Edouard and the branley coherer, 269n71 Bridgman, Laura, 75 Brown, Alice chapter in The Whole Family, 204, 213, 218, 220, 223 Brown, Lois Lamphere, 175 Burkhardt, Richard W., 139, 274n78 Butler, Octavia

Parable series, 251 Wild Seed, 251 cake-walks, 276n9 Camfield, Gregg, 16, 39, 191, 197 Carby, Hazel, 175, 277n36 Carey, Benedict, 284n6 caricature, 54, 80, 182, 183, 188, 214–15, 221, 280n13 Century (magazine), 189, 278n65 Certeau, Michel de, 20, 260n43 Charles L. Webster and Company, 189 Chesnutt, Charles, 32, 158, 171–73, 174, 177, 178, 184, 255 The House Behind the Cedars, 156, 163, 170–71, 173 alien self, 169–71 emotional cultivation, 163–69 emotional habit, 163–69 emotional immaturity, 165–66 extreme emotion, 167–69 unpracticed emotion, 165–66 voluntary emotional pathways, 163–69 Page 299 →The Marrow of Tradition, 172, 173 “spontaneous revulsion,” 264n1 Christian theology and In His Steps (Sheldon), 231–48, 283n64 Cincinnati Commercial Gazette (newspaper), 193 Clark, Suzanne, 14, 258n17 class issues, 254, 283n71 in realist literature, 10, 18, 22, 32, 54, 83, 156, 173 as seen by Howells, 29, 45, 48, 49–55, 56–63, 66, 88, 173, 180, 186, 263n28, 264nn33,44 as seen by Sheldon, 232, 238–39, 240–41, 243–44, 245, 254, 283n72 Clymer, Jeffory, 187, 278n61

Collins, Suzanne, 251 Hunger Games trilogy, 252 “compassionate numbness,” 253, 284n6 competition in The Whole Family, 200–231 Cooke, Maude Social Life, 162 Cooper, Julia, 183–84 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 46 Crane, Gregg, 25 Crane, Stephen, 211 Crary, Jonathan, 98–99, 269n76 Critic (journal), 183 Crowley, John, 203 Curry, Samuel Silas, 81, 267n36 Cutting, Mary Stuart chapter in The Whole Family, 213, 228, 229 Darwin, Charles, 89, 120, 137–38 on emotions and expressions, 4–8, 5 fig., 6 fig., 9, 18, 22, 30, 31, 68, 71, 73 fig., 74–76, 83, 97, 116, 117, 133–35, 257n3, 260n46, 261n70, 266nn20–21, 273nn63–64 adopting Bell’s work on, 72, 75 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 4, 18, 75, 119–20, 134, 273nn63–64 The Origin of the Species, 75 Wharton’s interest in, 129 Daston, Lorraine, 98 Davis, Cynthia, 96 Dawson, Carl, 262n18 Dawson, Melanie V., 258n10 Delage, Yves L’Hérédité et les grandes problèmes de la biologie générale, 130 Delaumosne, M. L’Abbe, 267n36

Delsarte, FranГ§ois, 1, 2 fig., 3 fig., 4, 9, 32, 81–82, 161–62, 171, 257n1, 267n36, 267nn36,39 practitioners of Delsarte system, 164, 171, 176, 267nn37–38 democracy and realist literature, 16, 36, 37, 41–42, 44, 131, 139, 258n12 Deperet, Charles The Transformations of the Animal World, 130 Derrick, Scott, 269n85 Derrida, Jacques, 169 Dewey, John, 72 Dimock, Wai-Chee, 263n23 diversity, 10, 25, 40, 139, 255, 261n57 and realist literature, 13, 54, 205, 231 in The Whole Family, 205, 209–10, 231 “double consciousness,” 181, 278n47 Douglass, Frederick, 184 Dreiser, Theodore Sister Carrie, 246 Dubar, Laurence, 275n92 Du Bois, W. E. B., 181, 278n47 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume-Benjamin, 5 fig., 6 fig., 7 fig., 73 fig., 257nn3-4, 260n46 Dudley, John, 122, 211, 281n19 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 184, 275n92 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 32, 115, 118–19, 147–48, 149, 153, 153–54, 154, 274n91 marriage of, 275n92 “The Stones of the Village,” 32, 118–19, 147–53, 274n90, 274n90, 275n92 absence of passion, 150 Page 300 →Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (continued) cultivation of emotional pathways, 152 emotional adaptation, 149 emotional constitution, 148

emotional habit in, 147–53 emotional origins in, 115–19 secret sympathies 149, 151–52 suppressed feeling, 147, 150–51, 274n90 Duquette, Elizabeth, 25 dystopian literature, 251–52 anti-utopian society, 26 Eakin, Thomas, 76, 77 fig., 78 Ellison, Julie, 159–60, 206, 269n72 Elzey, Wayne, 283n64 Emerson, Everett, 191, 193, 196 emotional realism, 30, 39, 97 similarity to Thailkill’s “emotive realism,” 20 emotions, 280n14 authenticity of, 22, 157, 206 collectivity and connectivity of, 22, 33–34, 241, 247, 250, 250–51 complementary forms of, 23 complexity of, 19, 21–24, 109, 146, 154, 160, 173, 178, 261n70 conveyed in dystopian literature, 251–52 cultivated emotions, 14, 32–33, 141, 155–99, 202 distinction between affect and emotion, 116–18 divergent ways of managing emotions, 33–34 in In His Steps, 231–48 in The Whole Family, 200–231 “economy of pain” as term for emotion, 67, 264n1 emotional analysis, 10, 30, 88, 89–90, 92, 95–96, 98, 104, 109 ambivalence about, 90–97 analyst’s involvement in, 97–112 self-consciousness about, 90–97

emotional contagion, 23, 124, 202 emotional exclusivity, 225–31 emotional expression, 8–9, 21, 23, 24, 116, 128, 131, 174. See also taxonomies of emotional expression Bell on, 70, 72, 75, 117, 265n10 Darwin on, 4–7, 5 fig., 6 fig., 7 fig., 9, 18, 22, 28, 31, 70, 73 fig., 74–76, 117, 130, 133–34, 260n46 Delsarte on, 1–4, 2 fig., 3 fig, 9, 81, 82 Duchenne on, 5 fig., 6 fig., 7 fig., 73 fig., 257nn3–4, 260n46 Howells on, 41 emotional identification, 145, 168, 220 emotional identity, 158, 231 emotional inquiry realistic paintings, 70–73 scientific approaches to, 70–76, 83. See also taxonomies of emotional expression emotional investments, 13, 20, 29, 30, 35–36, 41, 56, 97, 107, 108, 117, 121, 159, 163, 176 emotional morphology, 84–85, 88 emotional motivations, 23–24, 28, 30, 31, 94, 101, 102, 105, 131, 134–35, 149, 150, 160, 257n5 emotional origins, 14, 17, 31, 113–54, 206, 254–55 emotional pasts, 31–32, 109, 111, 115, 116, 117, 153, 164, 175, 177 emotional positions, 16, 162, 171, 225, 230, 238 emotional scale, Howells on, 29–30, 35–66 e-”motion” and movement, 19 emotions about emotion, 23 “emotion words,” 265nn4–5 equating with sympathy, 18, 21. See also sympathy and feelings, 8, 68, 257n5 functionalist model of, 272n49 Page 301 →generality through emotional likeness, 16, 259n30 Howells on race and emotions, 177–89, 278n61, 278n64 hybrid emotions and terms to describe, 8, 9, 21–22, 27, 29, 50, 67, 69, 70, 71–72, 76, 85, 108–9

individuated forms of emotion, 31, 34, 35–36, 37, 60, 62, 64, 82, 88, 113–14, 116, 117–18, 138, 153, 157, 178, 250 James-Lange theory of emotion, 17, 160, 244 language of emotions, 27–28, 67, 202 making fictional characters unique, 249–50 metaphors about, 85, 265n4 physical realization of emotions, 71, 265n9 positive and negative emotions, 33, 176, 202 negative emotions, 25–26, 146, 172, 207, 209, 250, 280n14 positive emotions, 34, 140, 197, 242 and representational anxiety, 30–31, 67–112 seen as a flaw, 38 separate from affective behavior, 27–28, 116–18. See also affect and affective behavior social applications of, 42 ugly forms of, 26, 202, 207, 280n14 and understanding racial identities, 32–33, 155–99 “What Is an Emotion?” (James), 17, 139 See also affect and affective behavior; empathy; sympathy emotive realism, 19, 20 empathy, 23, 146, 201–3, 206, 250, 250–51, 260n54, 262n6 competitive empathy, 33–34, 202–3, 207, 209, 210, 211–12, 218, 225, 230–31, 247 boxing as metaphor for, 210–12 conveyed in dystopian literature, 251–52 in In His Steps (Sheldon), 244, 248, 252 and unity through Christian redemption, 231–40, 245 and individuation, 202, 214, 217, 221, 225 sorrow inviting empathy, 5 studies of decline in empathy, 252–54 too much empathy, 146, 229, 230 “compassionate numbness,” 253, 284n6

in The Whole Family, 200–231 and the question of “type,” 212–25 See also sympathy “equipoise of bliss,” 67, 264n1 ethics, 12, 66 and realist literature, 13, 37 representational ethics, 38, 261n67 eyes, Delsarte System for portraying, 2 fig. Fabi, M. Giulia, 181 Farland, Maria, 124–25 fear, contagiousness of, 23 feelings and emotions, 8, 68, 257n5 ugly forms of, 26, 202, 207, 280n14 See also emotions felt experience, 30 feminism feminism in The Portrait of a Lady, 96 Freeman and Cutting’s chapters in The Whole Family, 229 novels by Phelps, 282n52 See also gender Ferré, John P., 243, 283n71 Fetterley, Judith, 206, 262n6 figured bass, 265n9 Flatley, Jonathan, 27 Fleissner, Jennifer, 271n29, 273n66 Forter, Greg, 26 Frazer, James, 120 Freeman, Elizabeth, 205 Freeman, Mary Wilkins

Page 302 →chapter in The Whole Family, 204, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220–22, 223, 224, 229 other authors’ reactions to, 220–22, 223–24 “The New England Nun,” 222 Gabler-Hover, Janet, 278n65 Galison, Peter, 98 Garland, Hamlin, 56 gender Darwin seeing blushing as feminine, 273n64 gendered implication in Ethan Frome, 272n52 implicit gendering, 280n13 treatment of manhood, 26 See also feminism GГ©raldy, Marie, 267n37 Gillman, Susan, 190, 191 Glazener, Nancy, 11–12, 13, 36, 74, 83, 267n43 Goodman, Susan, 262n18 Grant, Ulysses S., 189 grief, 6 fig. The Gross Clinic (Eakin), 76–78, 77 fig. Haeckel, Ernst Von, 119, 120 Hague, Angela, 266n31 Hall, Fred J., 192 Halttunen, Karen, 13 Harlan, John Marshall, 172 Harper, Frances, 32, 157, 176, 177, 178, 194, 255, 277n36 Iola Leroy, 176–77, 194 Harper’s Bazar (magazine), 201, 213–14 Harper’s Monthly (magazine), 189 Hartford Times (newspaper), 193

Hartley, Lucy, 266n20 Haymarket Riot, 42, 44, 262n18 Hendler, Glenn, 15, 16, 144, 245 Herbert, Christopher, 126 Hobbes, Thomas, 26, 68 Hochman, Barbara, 212, 237 Hoeller, Hildegard, 14, 279n68 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 23 Holbrook, David, 87, 95 Hollander, Rachel, 25 Hopkins, Pauline, 32, 157, 176, 177, 178, 255, 276n12, 277n36 Contending Forces, 174–76 emotional cultivation, 175 emotional management, 174–76 modulated emotion, 176 shame, 177 unregulated emotion, 175 horror and agony, 73 fig. Howard, June, 118, 205–6, 213, 217, 218–19, 280n8, 281n24, 282nn41,48 Howells, William Dean, 20, 24, 28–29, 33, 78, 79, 83, 88, 278n63 Annie Kilburn, 45, 56–66 deficit of feeling, 58 emotional scale, 57–66 sympathy cross-class, 54–66 idealization of, 62 imagination and, 62–54 knowledge and, 57, 61 measurement of, 57

socialism and, 56–59, 62 transformation of, 61–65 April Hopes emotional flux, 85 chapter in The Whole Family, 213, 216–19, 220–21, 280n8, 282n51 Howells-Freeman conflict on characters, 220–22, 223, 224 Criticism and Fiction, 42 “economy of pain” as term for emotion, 67, 263nn23,27,28 “Editor’s Study” (Howells), 42, 43, 216, 268n56 and emotional moderation, 67, 90 at the Harper corporation, 45–46 A Hazard of New Fortunes, 45, 50–55 cross-class understanding, 50–56 sympathy, 51–53 authenticity of, 56 Page 303 →scale of, 50–51, 54–55 practicality of, 50 An Imperative Duty, 177–83 dispassion, 185 emotional excess, 180 emotional habit, 181–82 and racial identification, 181 race and identification, 179, 183–84 scientific rationality, 185–89 racial solidarity, 179–80 on The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt), 172 The Minister’s Charge, 45, 55, 263n28 A Modern Instance, 40 and the problem of emotional scale, 29–30, 35–66, 263n23

The Quality of Mercy, 45 on race and emotions, 177–89, 278n61, 278n64 on realist writings, 268n56 and a represented grasshopper, 216, 281n31 The Rise of Silas Lapham, 48–50, 263n28 “economy of pain,” 264n1 on sentimentalism, 29, 36–37, 38, 40, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 78, 88, 216, 265n17, 268n56 “The Shadow of a Dream” and “An Imperative Duty” “agony of interest,” 264n1 on sympathy, 29–30, 33, 35–66, 78, 216, 268n56 Hull, Gloria, 148, 149 Hume, David, 259n28 Huxley, T. H., 119, 120 hybridity, 4, 6, 10, 21–24, 33, 74, 82, 88, 202 hybrid emotions and terms to describe, 8, 9, 21–22, 27, 29, 50, 67, 69, 70, 71–72, 76, 85, 108–9 Ickstadt, Heinz, 243 idealism, 11, 24, 25, 30, 41, 61, 63, 65 Enlightenment idealism, 25, 98 idealized unity, 16 individuality and individuation, 215–16, 241 adaptations individuate an organism, 249–50 and empathy, 202, 214, 217, 221, 225 individuated forms of emotion, 27, 30, 31, 34, 35–36, 37, 60, 62, 64, 82, 88, 113–14, 116, 117–18, 138, 153, 157, 178, 250 individuated perspectives in The Whole Family, 200–231 sublimation of individualism, 231, 247 and sympathy, 16, 38, 250, 259n28 in The Whole Family, 200–231 “Intense World” theory, 253 intimate public, 259n30

Iser, Wolfgang, 169–70, 195 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 85 Jaffe, Audrey, 16 Scenes of Sympathy, 105 James, Henry, 15, 25, 30, 78, 79, 85, 266n31, 279n80 The Ambassadors, 121 emotional analysis in, 99–105 emotional detector, 102 observation, 101 “sacred rage,” 102–3, 264n1 chapter in The Whole Family, 201, 204, 213, 223, 225, 227, 228, 280n3 critiques of other chapters, 223–24 James and the novel’s plan, 224–25, 282n47 childhood of, 101 curiosity of, 101, 269n81 and the metaphor of the window, 200–201, 203 A Passionate Pilgrim, 46 The Portrait of a Lady, 8, 91, 96, 113, 201, 264n62, 268n62 Page 304 →James, Henry (continued) difficulty of sustained analysis, 88–89 scientific analysis in, 91–93, 105 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” 46 The Spoils of Poynton emotional complexity, 86 The Wings of the Dove emotional overabundance, 67 emotional proof, 93 scientific analysis of emotion, 93–94 unclassified emotions, 90

James, William, 32, 72, 79, 89, 101 on emotions, 97, 139–40, 141, 154, 160–61, 162, 171, 176, 244, 255, 274n81 James-Lange theory of emotion, 17, 149, 160, 244 “What Is an Emotion?,” 17, 139 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 47, 237 Jones, Gavin, 276n9 Jordan, Elizabeth The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors, 223 editor of, 221, 282n50 correspondence while editing, 217, 219, 223–24, 280n3 writing chapter in, 213 Jordanova, L. J., 138 Kaplan, Amy, 12, 36, 54, 74, 96, 264n33 Kassanoff, Jennie, 131, 273n68 Keen, Suzanne, 146, 202, 260n54 Empathy and the Novel, 146 Kete, Mary Louis, 16 Kim, Sharon, 138, 139 Knoper, Randall, 158, 178, 196 Kolb, Harold, 212, 237 Kress, Jill, 88–89 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 115, 126, 137–39, 140, 274n78 Philosophie zoologique, 137 Langley, Samuel Pierpont, 269n71 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 25 Leonardo da Vinci, 75 Levine, George, 269n73 Link, Eric Carl, 211 Lock, Robert Heath

Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 130 Ludwig, Sämi, 65 Lukács, Georg, 118, 270n13 Lynn, Kenneth, 50–51 MacKaye, Steele, 1, 82 “managerialism,” age of, 14 Margolis, Stacy, 241, 283n68 Mencken, H. L., 78 metaphors, 265n4 Mexican-American War, 258n10 minstrelsy traditions, 276n9 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 117 Mitchell, Rebecca, 106 “modern” writings (literary modernity), 12, 14, 21, 40, 126, 127, 144, 145, 212, 226, 246, 248, 280n13 antiomniscient novel, 212 dealing with emotions, 24–28 pre-modernist and narrative perspective, 203 and skepticism, 24–28, 37–38 Morgan, William M., 10, 24, 37–38, 39, 45, 263n21 movement and emotion, 19 multifocal fiction, 33–34, 200–248 Murison, Justine, 26, 141 naturalist literature, 118, 271n29, 273n66 “naturalist” writings, 12 “negative syntax,” 207 Nerad, Julie Cary, 181 New Woman, 203, 204, 220, 228 Ngai, Sianne, 26, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 117, 120, 132

Norris, Frank, 43, 211 McTeague, 35 “perpetual irritation,” 264n1 Page 305 →nose, Delsarte System for portraying, 3 fig. Novick, Sheldon M., 280n3 Nussbaum, Martha, 105, 275n1 The Odyssey (Homer), 75 Ohi, Kevin, 101 Ohler, Paul, 116, 119–20, 135 Olin-Ammentorp, Julie, 107 Oliphant, Mrs., 75 pain made public, 241, 283n68 Parker, Hershel, 192, 279nn73,84 passing fiction. See race-passing fiction “passionate humility,” 67, 264n1 Peel, Robin, 87, 120, 123, 126 performance, language of, 158 “perpetual irritation,” 264n1 Perry, Bruce Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, 252–53 Petrie, Paul, 45, 57, 58 Petrinovich, Lewis, 273n63 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 213 chapter in The Whole Family, 204, 226–27, 228, 282n52 Dr. Zay, 282n52 The Silent Partner, 282n52 The Story of Avis, 282n52 physiognomy, 70, 81, 160, 281n31 Plessy v. Ferguson, 172, 199

Possnock, Ross, 101, 269n81 “potential pity,” 264n1 Poverty Grass (Wyman), 46 practical sympathy, 33, 48–49, 50 Preston, Claire, 119, 272n39 primitivism and Edith Wharton, 132–33 “probable suffering,” 264n1 Pryse, Marjorie, 206, 262n6 pugilism. See boxing as metaphor for a competition for empathy race-passing fiction, 32–33, 148, 155–99 See also African-American characters in realist literature Rachel, Mademoiselle [Elisabeth “Eliza/Élisa” Rachel Félix (also Elizabeth-Rachel Félix)], 1 Reading for Realism (Glazener), 13 realist literature, 20 attention to authenticity, 158 contextualizing individual stories, 118, 270n13 defining realism in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 11 and emotional gradations, 8–9, 12–13, 21–24, 109 anxieties experienced trying to precisely describe emotions, 67–112 attention to emotional origins, 113–54 emotional analysis, 10, 27, 30, 88, 89–90, 92, 95–96, 98, 104, 109 and the problem of emotional scale, 29–30, 35–66 questioning tears as expression of, 13 fostering democratic unity, 41, 258n12 as instrument for altering social relations, 275n8 narrative innovations, 237 qualities of emotions in, 250 and regionalism, 206, 262n6 exploring emotions through location and populations, 10–11

and science, 20–21, 27, 36, 36–37, 43–44, 69, 76, 79–80, 83–84, 98–99, 106, 115–18, 121, 178, 266n22 and sentimental forms of literature, 8, 9–10, 11, 15–17, 24, 26 Howells on, 29, 36–37, 38, 40, 41–42, 44–45, 47–56, 78, 88, 216, 265n17, 268n56 Page 306 →realist literature (continued) skepticism about social change and sentimentality, 37–38 “social” fiction, 224 and temperance movement, 267n43 theory and practice of realism, 36–37, 262n4 realist painting, 76–78 Reddy, William, 265n5 regionalist literature, 206, 262n6 Rejlander, Oscar Gustave, 5 fig., 6 fig., 257n3 Ribot, ThГ©odule, 19, 72, 260n39 Ritzenberg, Aaron, 14, 26, 258n17 Roach, Joseph, 276n9 Robinson, Forest G., 191 Robinson, Jenefer, 23–24, 109, 261n70 Roentgen, Wilhelm and X-rays, 269n71 Romanes, George, 119, 120 Rorty, AmГ©lie, 28, 68, 114, 261n70 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 132 Ruiz de Burton, MarГ-a Amparo,258n10 Ruyter, Nancy, 161 “sacred rage,” 67, 102–3, 264n1 Samuels, Shirley, 259n33 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 13, 40 Wharton’s strong interest in, 144 Saunders, Judith, 119–20 science and scientific analysis, 98, 106, 115, 126, 137, 138, 139, 178–79, 249–50, 253–54

and Adams, 98, 269n71 ambivalence about in nineteenth century culture, 79, 266n29, 269n73 and Henry James, 79, 91, 92–93, 103, 105 and Howells, 30, 37, 43, 44–45, 179, 184, 185–86, 187, 189, 190, 191 and Mark Twain, 189–92, 194, 198 and realist literature, 20–21, 27, 36, 43–44, 69, 76, 79–80, 83–84, 98–99, 106, 115–18, 121, 178, 266n22 studies of emotions and their origins, 6, 17–18, 26, 27, 30, 31, 70–76, 81, 84, 97, 98, 113–54, 206. See also taxonomies of emotional expression study of the eye and vision, 98–99 and Wharton, 30, 91, 116, 119–20, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129–30, 131, 139, 142, 145, 147, 272n39 Sedgwick, Eve, 269n85 Seneca, 75 sentimentalism and sentimentality, 10, 12, 13, 14–16, 18, 25–26, 38–39, 75, 241, 258n10, 258n17, 259n30, 261n57 and connectivity, 16, 24, 25 in In His Steps (Sheldon), 234, 245, 246 Howells on, 29, 36–37, 38, 40, 41–42, 44–45, 47, 47–56, 78, 88, 216, 265n17, 268n56 realist literature and resistance to, 11, 14–17, 24–25, 29, 37–38, 69, 74, 83, 216, 250, 275n8 sentimental aesthetics, 275n8 sentimental writings, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 18, 20, 44, 47, 51, 88, 258n17 sympathy and sentimentality, 40, 47–56. See also sympathy and Wharton’s writings, 14, 109, 110, 111, 124–25, 144–45, 146 in The Whole Family, 202, 205–6, 227 Shakespeare, William, 266n21 Sheldon, Charles M., 33–34, 282n52 Charles M. Sheldon—His Life Story, 282n58 use of third-person perspective in, 235–36 In His Steps, 33–34, 231–48, 282n58 class, 239–48 empathy and likeness, 231–48

point of view, 235–38 Page 307 →practical sociology, 236 suffering, 231, 237, 240–48 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 189 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 239 slave auctions, 177, 198, 276n9 Smith, Adam, 21, 62, 145, 155–56, 259n28, 275n1 Smith, Jonathan, 97, 266n29, 269n73 Social Gospel Movement, 232 Spencer, Herbert, 31, 75, 89, 116, 119, 120, 127, 128, 129 Principles of Psychology, 75 Spenser, Edmund, 266n21 “spontaneous revulsion,” 67, 264n1 Springfield Republican (newspaper), 193 Stebbins, Genevieve, 82, 161–62, 267n37 Stedman, Gesa, 68–69, 85, 265n4 Stern, Julia, 144 Stevenson, Patricia Antrece, 132–33 Stouck, Jordan, 148, 150–51 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 234–35, 236 “stress of rapture,” 67, 264n1 Sundquist, Eric, 192 sympathy, 25, 259n33 equating with emotions, 18, 21. See also emotions Howells on, 29–30, 33, 35–66, 78, 216, 268n56 and individuality, 16, 38, 250, 259n28 in modern novels, 260n54 and moral imperatives, 34, 261n67

practical sympathy, 33, 48–49, 50 realist literature displacing sympathetic paradigms, 8, 9–10, 11, 15–17, 20, 25–26 sentimentality and sympathy, 40, 47–56. See also sentimentalism and sentimentality “sympathetic enterprise” as dangerous, 38 See also empathy Szalavitz, Maia Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, 252–53 tableaux vivants, 265n9 Tate, Claudia, 173–74 Tawil, Ezra F., 157 taxonomies of emotional expression, 28–29, 70–76 applying to realist literature, 8–9, 21, 30, 87 Bell’s work on, 70–72 Darwin’s grids of emotion, 4–8, 5 fig., 6 fig., 9, 18, 74–76, 257n3, 260n46 Delsarte System for portraying, 1–4, 2 fig., 3 fig., 6, 9, 32, 81–82, 171, 257n1, 267n37 therapies based on, 161–62 Duchenne’s grids of emotion, 7 fig., 257n3, 260n46 racial taxonomies, 148 See also emotions Terada, Rei, 169 terror, expression of, 71–72 “theory of fictional representations,” 20 Thomas, Brook, 261n57 Thrailkill, Jane, 18–20, 72, 260n39 Affecting Fictions, 18, 19 Tompkins, Jane, 11, 16, 234–35 Topinard, Paul, 120 Towneley, Charles, 278n63 Trachtenberg, Alan, 76

Travis, Jennifer, 18–19, 40, 74, 125, 144, 260n38 Wounded Hearts, 18 Tritt, Michael, 274n90 Twain, Mark, 158, 199 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 177–78, 189–98, 279nn73,80, 84 alien self, 195–96 irony, 190–93, 198 science, role of, 189, 191, 198 wit, 192–93 Page 308 →“type,” 52–53, 60, 185, 253 and empathy, 212–25 Van Dyke, Henry chapter in The Whole Family, 213 on Mary Wilkins Freeman’s chapter, 223 Veblen, Thorstein, 31, 114, 115, 120, 211 “virtual me,” 169–70 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 281n24 Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, 213 chapter in The Whole Family, 213, 229 Wald, Gayle, 159 Warren, Kenneth, 157, 275n8 Washington, Booker T., 185 Weber, Max, 120 Weininger, Otto Sex and Character, 125 Wendt, Tracy, 271n34 Westermarck, Edvard, 119, 120 Wharton, Edith, 14, 30, 31–32, 85, 116, 119–21, 153–54 Ethan Frome, 31–32, 115, 118, 121, 122–47, 271n34, 272nn51-52, 273n68

affective habit, 115, 123–24, 130–42 biological study 119, 120, 139, 133–35, 137–39 Darwin, 199 emotional adaptation, 125–29 emotional origins, 121, 125 psychological origins, 141–42, 139–40 sympathy, 143–47 The House of Mirth, 139 impact of husband’s illness on, 272n51, 275n92 interest in primitivism, 132–33 irony in, 279n68 The Reef, 87, 90, 94–95, 268nn63, 65 emotional analysis, 94–96 emotional flux, 87 compulsion to analyze, 94 “equipoise of bliss,” 264n1 feminist dimensions of, 96 and scientific analysis, 91, 119–20, 123, 125, 126, 129–30, 131, 139, 142, 145, 272n39 Summer, 132–33 The Touchstone, 106–12, 123 emotional analysis, 106–12 emotional capacity, 108 hybrid language of emotion, 108–10 “potential pity,” 264n1 shame, 109 Wharton, Teddy, 272n51 “What Is an Emotion?” (James), 17, 139 “What would Jesus do?,” 231, 239, 244, 283n64 The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors (Bendixen, ed.), 13, 33, 34, 200–231, 203, 280nn3,8,13

Ada Talbert in, 208, 209, 222, 226, 228, 229, 282n50 Alice Talbert in, 223 Aunt Elizabeth (a.k.a. “Lily,” a.k.a. “the deadly Eliza”) in, 203, 204, 208, 209, 217, 219, 220–21, 223, 228 known as Lily, 217, 219, 222–23, 224, 282n41 Billy in, 204 Charles Edward “Charles Ned” (aka “Peter”) in, 204, 207, 208, 220, 222, 225–29 comparison with In His Steps (Sheldon), 231, 232, 233, 247–48 competitive empathy, 202–11, 226, 231 diversity in, 209–10 Darwin and, 211 emotional contagion, 202 empathy, negative version of, 202 perspective in, 201–5, 211, 212, 225 publication history, 201, 212–14 Page 309 →pugilism and, 210–11, 221 type, 212–25 See also Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman; Bangs, John Kendrick; Brown, Alice; Cutting, Mary Stuart; Freeman, Mary Wilkins; Howells, William Dean; James, Henry; Jordan, Elizabeth; Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart; Van Dyke, Henry; Vorse, Mary Heaton; Wyatt, Edith window as metaphor for fiction, 200–201, 203 Winthrop, Egerton, 120 Witzig, Denise, 108 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 268n65 Wonham, Henry B., 78, 184, 188, 214–15, 278n47, 278n64, 281n31 Wyatt, Edith chapter in The Whole Family, 213, 282n50 X-rays, 269n71 Yarborough, Richard, 176