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Acknowledgments
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After the sometimes anxious and exhausting process of writing a book about messy, complicated emotions, it’s a joy to now focus on giving thanks—a simpler, if no less intense feeling.
First off, I am pleased to acknowledge Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, and Kenneth Warren for their supervision of the dissertation that became this book. I hope they will see how much it remains indebted to their guidance while also appreciating how it has evolved. An extra thank you to Lauren for ongoing feedback, advice, and inspiration.
A number of friends and colleagues generously read portions of the text over the years, served as respondents to my work in public forums, or convened panels that provided the occasion to sharpen key ideas. Those include Jason Berger, Russ Castronovo, Peter Coviello, Theo Davis, Elizabeth Freeman, Heather Keenleyside, Maurice Lee, and Hilary Strang. Thanks, especially, to Joshua Kotin who read multiple chapters over multiple years and provided much-needed camaraderie and grounding during the final stretch of work on this book.
When I was an undergraduate, Joseph Litvak provided one of my earliest models for academic life; his intellect, decency, and sense of humor continue to set the gold standard. I am honored to be his colleague and am grateful for his support. Sincere thanks, as well, to the rest of the faculty and staff in the Department of English at Tufts, some of whom deserve special mention as welcoming hosts, lunch companions, pedagogical examples, collaborators, and interlocutors, in particular: Liz Ammons, Linda Bamber, Ricky Crano, Lee Edelman, Sonia Hofkosh, Jess Keiser, Lisa Lowe, John Lurz, Modhumita Roy, Natalie Shapero, Christina Sharpe, and Ichiro Takayoshi. I am also grateful for the committed students at Tufts, especially the members of my “Political Emotion” and “O, Democracy” graduate seminars, whose challenging questions and observations made this a better book.
An early version of material that now makes up portions of Chapters 1 and 5 first appeared in ELH, Volume 81, Issue 1, Spring, 2013, pages 173–97. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 3 first appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 2014, pages 225–52. Copyright © 2014 C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. I thank the editors of these journals for their votes of confidence in my work and their permission to reprint.
Many thanks to Gordon Hutner for his faith in this project and for extending the privilege of joining the Oxford Studies in American Literary History series. Thank you, too, to the anonymous reviewers who provided generous feedback and
encouragement, to Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright at Oxford University Press for seeing the book through production, to Christine Ranft for copy-editing, and to Derek Gottlieb for preparing the index.
Although their only interest in this book was that it made me a reliable couch companion, it makes me happy to acknowledge two beloved pets. Sprout was a strange and devoted friend. I miss him very much. Clementine makes me laugh, livens up office hours, and paws my keyboard when I’ve spent too long inside.
Finally, thank you to my family. To my parents, Fred and Kathy; siblings, Jake and Genevieve; sister-in-law, Lesley; and parents-in-law, Leon and La Juana: Your confidence in me across this long haul meant and means a lot. And to Jennifer Wehunt: Your love and support deserves more acknowledgement than I have room to express. Breaks have been too few and far between, but I have cherished every adventure—whether hikes and paddles or fried clams and beers. What’s more, your careful attention to each chapter in this book, multiple times over, sharpened the prose, elevated the ideas, and made me feel that finishing was possible. I dedicate this book to you with gratitude and love.
4.
{ List of Figures }
2.1 “Queens of the Lobby.” Illustration by unknown artist accompanying an article of the same title by Didymus, The National Police Gazette 35, no. 125 (February 14, 1880): 1. This reprint is from an image which originally appeared as part of ProQuest® American Periodicals product. Reprinted with permission from digital images produced by ProQuest LLC. www.proquest.com.
59
4.1 “William Shakspere. Francis Bacon’s Mask.” Image reproduced from The Great Cryptogram’s first US edition published in Chicago by R.S. Peale & Co. (1888). Author’s personal collection. The portrait of William Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshout is from the frontispiece to the First Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays (1623). Digital images of the complete Folio are hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library, under a creative commons license, at www.folger.edu. 110
Bureaucratic Vistas
Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. . . . [T]he people become heated in the search for this good, all the more precious as it is near enough to be known, far enough not to be tasted. The chance of succeeding stirs them, the uncertainty of success irritates them; they are agitated, they are wearied, they are embittered.
alexis de tocqueville { Introduction }
Politics is What Hurts
In 1881 the neurologist George Beard offered a clinician’s take on the adverse effects of political participation, closely echoing Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 assessment, in the epigraph above, of American democracy’s affective toll.1 According to Beard, “politics and religion appeal mostly to the emotional nature of men . . . and in consequence, the whole land is at times agitated by both these influences, to a degree which . . . is most exciting to the nervous temperament.”2 Unlike Tocqueville, Beard does not observe this distress as linked to a “passion for equality”—a painful-butpraiseworthy democratic feeling. Instead, Beard sees nervous agitation as the annoying side effect of a much more grievous communal ailment: a fundamentally irrational political process. Similarly, in her 1881 novel of postbellum life in Washington, DC, Through One Administration, the writer Frances Hodgson Burnett has her protagonist offer a catalog of devastations that results from spending even one season in the capital’s atmosphere of political power-brokering and social intrigue: “She had seen so many weary faces, so many eager ones, so many stamped with care and disappointment. [S]he had read of ambitions frustrated and hopes denied, and once or twice had seen with a pang that somewhere a heart had been broken.”3 When measuring the sentiments that animate and sustain the nation’s leaders or when gauging citizens’ collective mood, one might hope to find patriotic pride, democratic fellow feeling, even idealistic enthusiasm. According to the Gilded Age observers above, however, political participation only frustrates, disappoints, agitates, and depletes.4
The late-nineteenth-century lament that democracy is wearying, upsetting, or disheartening surely isn’t novel to twenty-first-century readers, many of whom
inevitably grapple with their own bouts of political depression. Despite this striking resonance between Gilded Age and present-day discourses on the phenomenology of politics, I will argue that at least three major blind spots in American literary criticism have obscured our view of postbellum literature’s investigation into the intersection of emotion and democracy. These involve: first, an overly narrow vocabulary for conveying the full range of “political emotions” (and some confusion about what this term could mean); second, a persistent suspicion of conservatism lurking in any specifically institutional politics (given an aesthetic and political preference for radical breaks from convention or forms); and, finally, a literaryhistorical discomfort with the generic irregularities (in works fusing romance, sentimentality, and realism) and ideological eccentricity (a surprising mix of populist critique, republican nostalgia, and bureaucratic pragmatism) peculiar to the transitional postwar moment.5 These three cases of nearsightedness are deeply intertwined, as the literature’s uniquely negative tone and its discomfiting focus on institutional politics unite texts that otherwise defy easy generic taxonomies.
Hoping to correct this oversight, this book aims to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the affective-political work of the occasionally well known but consistently understudied Gilded Age political novel. “The Gilded Age”—roughly the period from the election of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 through the end of that century—is ripe for such an analysis, given that it is defined both by a phenomenon, political corruption, and a set of feelings about it. Mark Summers has argued persuasively that rapid government expansion after the Civil War did indeed produce prime conditions for political venality, but bribery, vote buying, lobbying, and profiteering were not new. Indeed, the increased intensity of the public’s focus on corruption was in many ways more consequential than the misdeeds themselves.6 Reformers zeroed in on the failings of politicians and the political process while also worrying about the widespread disgust with politics and its potential impact on civic participation. Along with other popular nicknames, such as “The Era of Good Stealings” and “The Great Barbecue,” “The Gilded Age” denotes a period of rampant greed and appetitive excess while also capturing the cynicism, bitterness, and exhaustion that attended the period’s major scandals.
The remainder of this Introduction will sketch, and the chapters will flesh out, my understanding of literature’s role in defining and exploring the emotional contours of this fraught moment. My overarching claim is that Gilded Age political satires, “Washington novels,” and reform-minded historical romances reveal the opposition of cool reason vs. warm enthusiasm to underdescribe the emotional life of postbellum US democracy. These novels dramatize and perform myriad affective strategies for modulating distance from and proximity to politics, a realm of social life that did and does provoke feelings of exhilaration and exhaustion, optimism and pessimism, passionate attachment and disgusted withdrawal. In making this claim, Not Quite Hope seeks to move beyond the threadbare opposition of emotional versus rational politics, a binary that continues to shape present-day diagnoses of our pathological public sphere. I further argue for a shift in scale from
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age
those dramatic, positive, and object-oriented emotions we might associate with the goals of reform literature (i.e., to incite strong emotions for or against a cause, or to cultivate empathy for a person or group) to a more diffuse, often negative, set of feelings that structure citizens’ relation to the political as such. But before delving further into this thesis, I offer a pair of questions that put into relief the Gilded Age novel’s unique affinity to an earlier canon of political fiction, which serves as both a model and a foil.
Which Feelings are Democratic? What Does Democracy Feel Like?
For the last thirty years or so, the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies has pursued several variations on the first question. Does Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous call for her readers to “feel right” about slavery mobilize a denigrated “feminine” emotionalism for radical democratic ends, or does it privatize a properly political problem?7 Does Walt Whitman’s vision of “adhesive love” offer an intimate counterpoint to the failures of official politics, or does it reproduce the sleight of hand by which the white male body claims exclusive right as the (paradoxically specific) embodiment of abstract, democratic citizenship?8 In other words, sympathy and adhesiveness may describe an affective tool for political work, but is this work “democratic”? Studies that take up these and related questions about sentiment, sympathy, compassion, and intimacy have clustered around binding and cathartic feelings (largely focused on “positive” emotions, but also including grief, anger, and mourning), the power and pitfalls of which lie in the ethical relationships they foster or erode between people, especially across racial, gender, and economic boundaries.9 Work in this vein has made emotion and affect fundamental components of how we understand literature’s cultural impact. But it has also tended to subsume the topic of “political emotion” under the heading of “sympathy” or sentimentality, when “political emotion” writ large seems the more properly capacious category.10
This book thus proposes that we shift the discursive terrain by posing a related question: “What does democracy feel like?” Initially, this question might seem to invite only subjective accounts of political life. The Pew Research Center, for example, often plots the citizenry’s mood along a political-affective spectrum characterized by the key benchmarks of “Content,” “Angry,” and “Frustrated,” with the majority of respondents reliably choosing from among the two flavors of irritation.11 On the other hand, the question, “Which feelings are democratic?” points to a particular strain of nineteenth-century literary criticism in which sentimentality, once denigrated as feminine and commercial, came to be seen as a complex set of aesthetic and affective strategies for shaping readers’ democratic sensibilities. Yet the gap between these two sets of affects—negative, unsociable, and exhausting on the one hand; positive, binding, even therapeutic on the other—also presents potential
problems for nineteenth-century American literary history and criticism. First, how did we decide that the emotions we associate with formal politics are, oxymoronically, not democratic? Second, when we explore affect in literature, what do we leave out if we see “political emotion” as roughly synonymous with “sympathy”?
Taken at face value, the first of these two questions is relatively easy to answer, although tracing its repercussions will be a major project of this book. The avoidance of negative emotions, or those seen as not properly democratic, has everything to do with the more fundamental irony that, for much of US history, politics itself has been seen as antidemocratic (and antipathetic). That is, if the nation was founded on a principle of popular sovereignty understood as the amalgamated opinion of free and equal individuals, then any form or institution for representing that popular will is potentially artificial, distasteful, and, to some degree, illegitimate.12 We view this denigration of the political in at least three major strains of nineteenth-century literature and thought: in transcendentalism, where expressions of individual conscience (uncontaminated by formal participation in parties, elections, or reform movements) are praised as the pinnacle of intellectual courage and creativity; second, in the sentimental novel, where the failure of official politics to remedy the question of slavery demands a shift in moral authority to women, the domestic sphere, sentiment, and, just as importantly, to an affective public that will coalesce through reading the same literature, a form of commodity consumption; and finally in the romance, where the construction of an airy space of imagination and creativity requires distance from official politics. This last dynamic figures most memorably in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its author’s prefatory “decapitation” and ejection from the custom house; but also in Moby-Dick’s (1851) mariners, renegades, and castaways, whose short-lived homosocial utopia thrives in its distance from shore; and in Whitman’s ideal democracy to come, explored throughout Leaves of Grass (1855) and its many iterations, which could begin to take poetic form only after his departure from the attorney general’s office.13
This strain of antebellum literature is rightly prized for its call to challenge the inequities fossilized in political institutions. And critics have built on this canon’s anti-institutional critique to stress that democracy and citizenship must be seen as encompassing a range of activity beyond the ballot box, as well as to underscore literature’s role in exploring conceptions of morality or ethics that put into relief the injustices inherent to existing political structures. But the wholesale embrace of an anti-institutional politics has had some distorting effects on our literary historiography. In his essay “Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics,” Eric Slauter notes that “everywhere, it seems, studies of institutional and electoral politics are back in style, necessarily transformed by those revolutions in social and cultural analysis that were designed to shift attention away from politics.”14 And yet a sharp divide between early and postbellum American studies shapes this renewed interest in politics: “Early Americanists concentrate on the culture of politics, whereas later Americanists concentrate on the politics of culture.”15 Reviewing the tables of contents of two relevant anthologies, Slauter notes, “one might surmise that
American literature before 1865 was a political literature; and that after 1865, it was not.”16 To be sure, this pattern of scholarly output reveals real archival differences. Early American literature courses and anthologies routinely include texts that bear a close relation to political and social institutions: sermons, speeches, pamphlets, overtly political poetry, and polemical essays. “Literature” in this context is understood to encompass the whole of the early republic’s print public sphere and as much of its oral culture as we can reliably access. By midcentury, a variety of literary and cultural movements had begun to emphasize the contributions of a distinctly literary mode of writing, and later criticism on this period naturally attends to this body of work’s claims to aesthetic specificity and autonomy.
Yet this predominant storyline renders invisible a body of postbellum nineteenth-century literature that continued to imagine itself as intimately tied, for better or worse, to formal politics. Readers after the Civil War not only had a wide range of political literature from which to choose; they felt inundated by it. In August of 1883, a reader of the journal The Literary World shared his estimation of Madeleine Dahlgren’s recent novel, A Washington Winter: “Oh dear, another Washington novel, and of the same type!”17 This letter is dated only three years after the publication of Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880), which the aggrieved reader goes on to charge with intensifying the worst features of a genre inaugurated by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873) and currently saturating the market with scandalous novels of life in the capital. For this frustrated reader, the Washington novel was to be dismissed on patriotic grounds due to the “essential falsity” of its negative view of democracy and the dangers of such cynicism. Henry James, in a review of William DeForest’s 1875 novel, Honest John Vane, similarly worried that DeForest put the reader in a grotesque intimacy with democracy’s underbelly. “[DeForest] has wished to overwhelm the reader with the evil odor of lobbyism. But the reader, duly overwhelmed . . . may be excused for wondering whether, if this were a logical symbol of American civilization, it would not be well to let that phenomenon be submerged in the tide of corruption.”18
If Gilded Age literature joins its antebellum antecedents in denouncing the corruption of politics, its extended treatments of the sites, sights, and smells of official democracy clearly express an ambivalent investment in and attraction to political institutions. Authors working in the mode of the Washington novel adapted the comedy of manners, the roman-à-clef, and strains of regionalism and muckraking realism to explore the capital city’s social spaces as a complex metonym for the workings of the federal government.19 Simultaneously drawing on and denouncing the taste for political gossip, in particular, these novels suggest the public’s affective relation to the democratic process was marked by attraction and repulsion, a conflicted fascination with what Frances Hodgson Burnett called the “romance” of scandal, “the magnitude of it . . . the social position of the principle schemers, all [of which] endeared it to the public heart.”20 The human heart—that seat of moral sentiments—figures here as the source of prurient curiosity.
The political literature of the 1870s and 1880s, then, inherits a profound distrust of democratic institutions from an earlier literary canon. Now, however, anxiety becomes the driving force for a nervous attachment to politics, not simply a renunciation of it. Underlying works such as Honest John Vane and Through One Administration is the question of how, precisely, these books’ authors were to articulate a critique without abandoning the project of democracy all together.21 A similar dynamic can be seen in other genres of Gilded Age political literature. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), the anchor of my first chapter, is part Washington novel and part political satire, even as its subtitle announces the text as a historical novel of the unfolding present. For all of its many modes, it is, fundamentally, a critique of corrupt political and legal institutions, even as its most famous characters (namely, Laura Hawkins and “Colonel” Beriah Sellers) loom so large because they dramatize the allure of the capital as a field for idealistic, egalitarian visions—and an arena for brutal ambition and self-interested scheming. Likewise, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), which I examine in Chapter 3, is a historical romance modeled on antebellum sentimental literature; it often strives to bypass a corrupt political system by appealing directly to readers’ feelings. But Jackson developed other affective strategies beyond “sympathy,” reflecting an engagement with journalism, political pamphleteering, and the norms governing official correspondence to fight for a more just federal Indian policy. In other words, she explored diverse modes of political writing and activism within and to the side of formal politics, even as her experience with the Department of the Interior provided ample evidence that government bureaucracy was unlikely to be anything but a tool for nepotism, greed, and routinized violence.
One could view these examples of the Gilded Age novel as reviving an earlier approach to political literature that, Nancy Glazener has argued, was mostly subsumed by emerging eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century norms regarding literary autonomy. For Glazener, the career of the writer Charles Brockden Brown offers an especially illustrative case. His “conspiracy-filled novels of the [17]’90s . . . played out forms of fear, paranoia, and aggression” with explicitly “political dimensions.”22 But, Glazener argues, American authors increasingly deployed claims of autonomy as a defense against censorship, a promise of aesthetic distance that “would insulate readers from any very strong or direct promptings to action.”23 Brown’s later works respond to this valorization of apolitical writing by “promote[ing] prudence and conventional ideas of personal responsibility.”24
Glazener offers a crucial frame for understanding the fate of political literature in the early republic, but I would propose a slight revision of Brown’s place in order to clarify his relevance to the Gilded Age novel. It is worth noting, for example, the necessarily abstract contention that Brown’s earlier novels “played out” paranoia and fear. Critics have struggled to abstract a program of action from Brown’s political writing, in part because he dramatizes the anxious undercurrents of American democracy from all angles. In Wieland (1798), readers are put on guard
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age against religious enthusiasm, but also against Enlightenment hubris. In Edgar Huntly (1799), indigenous people are rendered as a threat, but so too are the descendants of Europeans who surpass the Indians in “savagery.” Brown delicately balances an overt interest in political themes (often resonant with the Jacobin writings of his intellectual mentor, William Godwin) with a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis parties and platforms. His novels are deeply interested in the affective atmosphere of his political moment, but not exactly in the mode of “promptings” to action.
This is to say that Brown’s fiction is broadly anxious in a way that, as I will show, the literature of the Gilded Age is, as well. The later literature’s delicate balance of universal aspirations and specific reform impulses was facilitated by developments in the political press. The Gilded Age saw the emergence of independent newspapers alongside the continued power of party organs. Less partisan organizations were instrumental in reinforcing the picture of postbellum America as uniquely corrupt, since they staked their value on investigative reports into congressional misdeeds— reports that no partisan editor would bankroll.25 In this context, literature could appear both autonomous and political as long as it wasn’t overtly partisan. At its worst, this literature thereby adopts a nonpartisan posture that levels meaningful distinctions between parties and contributes to the notion that “all” politics is corrupt. On the other hand, the Gilded Age novel could further distinguish itself from both the partisan and independent press by exploring the crises of democratic faith provoked by journalistic coverage of political malfeasance.
With these contours of the Gilded Age and its literature in view, we can now return to the question of democracy and affect unresolved at the beginning of this section: What do we miss—historically, conceptually, and aesthetically—if we equate “political emotion” with “sympathy”? Literature making a direct appeal to readers’ sentiments foregrounds the cultivation of empathy as an important political strategy, circumventing rigid institutions in favor of malleable cultural sensibilities. At the same time, however, political feelings of frustration, apathy, or cynicism can only be seen as the expected, even deserved, fallout from any debilitating attachment to degraded institutions or forms. My outline of the antebellum period’s anti-institutional imaginary, and the anxious postbellum political literature that followed in its wake, already hints at how these negative emotions have an interest and a power of their own. After all, for many of the authors I study, it was the absence of any intense political feelings that was most disturbing and most threatening to the vision of a more just political system. Take, for example, the much-publicized Crédit Mobilier bribery scandal of 1872, which seemed to offer crystal-clear evidence of the deleterious effects of corporate finance on the political process but resulted merely in voter apathy—at least according to nearly every major political novel of the period.26 Narratives of political cynicism, exhaustion, agitation, and depression might provoke a disaffected readership to recoil from fallen democracy. But some of this literature also pushes back against the lack of interest and attenuated attention diagnosed by “apathy.” Tracking this tension, “political emotion” in the
context of this book refers not only to those grander emotions targeted by classical rhetoric (anger, compassion, etc.) that spur actions and forge alliances, but also to the almost-always-negative feelings associated with everyday political activity, attentiveness, or involvement.
I thus position the works studied in this book—by Twain and Jackson, along with Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ignatius Donnelly, among others—as part of a nineteenth-century story about literature, politics, and emotion that includes, but does not end with, sentiment and sympathy. Indeed, as I will show, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an implicit and explicit model for these authors—the exemplar of literature’s capacity to yoke individual feeling to public concerns.27 Yet Stowe’s novel was also an object of suspicion. I hope to show that many of the political novels of this period must be understood as both “countersentimental,” or critical of the insufficiencies of an intimate public structured by putatively universal feelings, and deeply affective.28 These novels suggest, in one form or another, that emotion cannot be expunged from political life and that political emotions require representational forms for delineating their puzzling capacity to alternate between energizing new social imaginaries and fueling a retreat from politics.
A political public sphere that both attracts and repels, and a cast of characters starring seductive lobbyists, corrupt senators, heartless bureaucrats, and an apathetic electorate: These are the core ingredients of Gilded Age political literature. They are also early indicators of persistent similarities with our current political moment. Many recent commentators have declared ours to be a “second Gilded Age,” noting the déjà vu character of our political and social ills: “Crony capitalism, inequality, extravagance, social Darwinian self-justification, blame-the-victim callousness, free-market hypocrisy: Thus it was, thus it is again!”29 I borrow from contemporary political criticism and theory to see what those areas of study reveal of the first Gilded Age, even as I intend these historical novels to put pressure on what we think we know about our own political moment. This dialogue works both ways: Our contemporary experiences of twenty-first-century democracy may allow us to see the literature of the Gilded Age in a new light. While the anxiety-producing energies of American society at the end of the nineteenth century are largely familiar to historians (detailed, for example, in Beard’s 1881 volume, American Nervousness, from which I quote in the first section above, and in critic and historian Tom Lutz’s 1991 volume of the same name), this nationwide case of the nerves largely has been attributed to a single source: the intensity of the American moneymaking impulse.30 Yet twenty-first-century readers—perpetually rediscovering the shocking intensity of partisan disagreement, the unseemly appetites of the politically ambitious, and the surprising emotional toll of the election season—are well poised to question if economic activity was truly the only source of this national anxiety. While the link between industrial capitalism and nineteenth-century neurasthenia is revealing and persuasive, I argue that critics and historians have paid insufficient attention to how the ambitions,
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age passions, and rampant energies of nineteenth-century political life inspired its own dictionary of nervous disorders—and, as I will show, its own literature.31 Washington after the Civil War was notorious for lacking any business other than politics. Some for-profit industry, however manic, could have provided a welcome reprieve from what Washingtonians of the day saw, but many critics have since overlooked, as a monomaniacal fixation on the institutional workings of democracy.32
My project, thus, has a direct connection to the current moment’s second Gilded Age of widening inequality and crony capitalism, as well as its persistent anxieties about the intensity of political disagreement. The literature I study here details the everyday negotiations with political emotion that define times of ongoing crisis, when a cluster of wearying, anxious emotional states comes to seem like both a grave threat to citizens’ agency and the primary way people feel political.33 At the heart of Not Quite Hope is the claim that, even as these works articulate an often-cynical view of American democracy that threatened to provoke an anxious retreat from politics, they also sought to cultivate an affective attachment to the institutions they criticized. This pattern of recoil and return, which continues to define our ambivalent relationship to the political process, is what I call an aversive attachment to institutional democracy.34
You Know, Politics Politics
This, then, is a book about literature, emotion, and politics. The Gilded Age political novel builds on and responds to anti-institutional strains in antebellum literature; it explores an important cluster of ambivalent and negative emotions; and it cultivates a melancholy yet critical posture toward corrupt democracy. The word “emotion” surely requires fuller attention and explanation, and in the next section I clarify how I situate this book within the expanding “affective turn” in the humanities. Yet one further note remains to be said about the seemingly more straightforward term, “politics.” As I have described this project over the years, I have often invoked the awkward iteration “politics politics” to emphasize its concern with institutional politics and to distance it from an understanding of all literature as political in the wider discursive context of power relations—a field that bumps up against and indirectly impacts the “political” in its narrower meanings. This is also to say that I examine authors’ engagement with the state, not just the nation.35 Most of the works considered here take on an especially complicated relationship to formal politics, thanks to their having been written by authors who had political careers. I have already suggested that this approach offers a crucial corrective to a literary historiography that shifts from the culture of politics to the politics of culture, resisting the impulse of the romance, the sentimental novel, and transcendentalism to seek real art and real politics far from degraded institutions.36
But it may be letting literary criticism off the hook to suggest that the field’s turn away from politics is simply an effect of too thoroughly internalizing the lessons of our antebellum literary archives. In a polemical essay addressing this question, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay offer a critique of why critical accounts of American literature through the present day consistently eschew formal politics. They lambast what they call the academic left’s “magical” thinking: a fantasy that literature, theory, and academic critique are at their most powerful when they strongly express a fundamental irrationality or unspeakability, seeing intuition and imagination as crucial, radical counterparts to the constraints of bureaucratic rationality. McCann and Szalay contend that such a notion is little more than a self-serving conception of political agency prized by an intellectual class that wields little political or economic power and thus has embraced theorists, Foucault chief among them, who lend credibility to a conception of culture as a higher order of politics, over and against formal institutions.37
In McCann and Szalay’s account, to refocus on institutional democracy is to get real about politics and to wean oneself from the left’s mystified fantasies of cultural radicalism.38 From this perspective, the Gilded Age political novel’s institutional obsessions might look like an important resource. Their account meets some trouble, however, in the authors I study here—nearly all of whom turned to literature to remedy the disappointments of direct political participation, reinforcing the idea that culture offers a better kind of politics. Henry Adams, frustrated over the failures of his many campaigns for reform, determined that “literature offers higher prizes than politics,” and—in his retrospectively inaccurate account, anyway—abandoned politics in favor of writing histories and novels.39 Twain remained steadily involved in political life, from delivering speeches for President Hayes to famously publishing Grant’s biography, all the while upholding the oft-repeated truism that he “detested” the subject of politics.40 Caught in the mire of party politics, Ignatius Donnelly yearned to escape to the realm of literature symbolized most powerfully for him, as for W.E.B. Du Bois, by Shakespeare. Finally, Helen Hunt Jackson, serving as an unpaid agent of the Indian Agency, famously tried writing nonfiction, and then a romance, to offset her failure to enact change in her official bureaucratic capacity.
The temptation to celebrate these novels’ turn “back” toward institutional politics is further complicated by the perspective of recent political theory, which suggests that to focus on formal politics is a sure way to guarantee one is not thinking about “politics” at all. Indeed, “institutional politics” appears closer to what Jacques Rancière has recently designated as the opposite of a properly aesthetic politics. “[P]olitics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution.”41 In his account, this so-called politics is more like bureaucratic administration, and so he “propose[s] to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police.”42
Rancière thus critiques a conception of the public sphere as an administrative mechanism for producing consent, consensus, and minimizing disagreement. For Rancière, the desire for conflict-free consensus is antidemocratic and incompatible with the genuinely political act of reconfiguring the political-aesthetic field, such that those who are excluded from its workings—those who “have no part”—appear as political actors. Such an aesthetic redistribution is a necessarily antagonistic act, an act of disagreement, leading Rancière to propose we “reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration—that of the part of those who have no part.”43 If “consensus,” in its etymological meaning, refers to a shared feeling or a sense in common, then to engage in the work of democratic politics necessarily is to have a commitment to dissensus, to interrupting the state of anesthetic repose in which current configurations of power appear stable and self-evident.44
How, then, do we proceed, given that the Gilded Age’s overtly political literature could be seen as an important occasion to refocus on “real,” institutional politics— politics politics—or, from another perspective, could dramatize the very turn away from politics that McCann and Szalay lament? Is it possible to heed a warning about the too-easy celebration of cultural politics while simultaneously attending to Rancière’s caution that what passes for politics in formal settings may be its opposite: an administrative mechanism for minimizing the very antagonism and disagreement that define true democracy? Throughout, I argue that Gilded Age literature may be most valuable in disordering our critical desire to consistently map real versus magical politics, or politics versus the police, according to how a text highlights its proximity to or distance from institutions.
One step toward resisting such reductive schematizations is to develop a more flexible definition of institutions as such. As Lisi Schoenbach notes:
It is difficult enough merely to define “institutions”: the term combines conceptual complexity with seemingly limitless linguistic flexibility. Here is a word whose verb form, “institutionalize,” evokes punishment, repression, and coercion, while its nominal form is equally likely to describe a beloved hamburger joint, a prison, a mental hospital, or a widely accepted social convention.45
Schoenbach thus “define[s] institutions broadly as structures that govern and codify collective behavior.”46 Note, however, that even this clear, if expansive, definition is an odd fit for one of her examples: a beloved burger joint. Does that kind of institution “govern and codify”? Such difficulties may motivate Lauren Berlant’s much broader account, defining an institution as “a thing with resources to which we return to anchor our world as we move through it.”47 For Berlant, an institution is anything that persists with sufficient stability to seem like the same thing across time, thereby grounding some aspect of social life. To say a restaurant or a bar
“governs” behavior may imply too intentional an implantation of norms, but it is easy to see how such a “joint” might suture various aspects of a community’s idea of itself and the behaviors that stem from it.
While risking imprecision, this expanded sense of institutions prepares us to take seriously Fredric Jameson’s use of the word in thinking about literary form: “Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his readers; or rather . . . they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social life are based on tacit agreements or contracts.”48 The unstated “contract” is simply an expectation that the genre will have recognizable features and seem, in some recognizable way, like other books that are similarly categorized. For Jameson, this recognizability derives from the relation among texts. He argues we should not think in terms of a “traditional logic in which a given item is ranged in the class appropriate to it” but rather of a “generic system . . . [as] a constellation of ideal relationships” in relation to the “work itself [as] a concrete verbal composition. We must then understand the former as constituting something like an environment for the latter.”49 If we return to institutions because they offer resources for organizing social life, and if they are defined relationally, then late-nineteenth-century reform literature can be seen to take its shape from a complex web of both literary and nonliterary institutions. Marriage, the sentimental novel, and the US Congress are all examples of “institutions” that constitute the greater relational environment of the Gilded Age political novel, from which the genre gains an institutional stability of its own.
Formal politics and literary form thus meet in the Gilded Age novel. But as much as this literature differs from earlier democratic fictions by its relation with, rather than its rejection of, official politics, this “relation” is deeply ambivalent. The political romances encountered here often set out to structure their current-affairs analyses along legible partisan lines, fantasizing ontological solutions of merit or virtue, and bureaucratic solutions of order and stability, to “solve” the contingency at the heart of democratic politics. Thus, when at their most institutional, they can appear at their most anti- or post-political, in Rancière’s sense.50 At other moments, it is these texts’ disgusted recoil from the grubby work of politics that is most likely to fuel post-political fantasies of transcending or escaping the realm of democratic disagreement. Ambivalence is rarely seen as an aesthetic or political virtue, but, as I explain, this literature’s tonal qualities of pessimism, cynicism, and disgust stem from the novelists’ fraught efforts to narrate the competing allures of post-political administration and democratic dissensus. In narrating the full spectrum of emotions experienced by those who plunge into politics, or even those affected by its margins, this literature illuminates the “plurality of antagonisms and points of rupture” that Rancière considers “political” in its proper meaning. Much as I hope to challenge the reason/emotion binary by exploring a more complex continuum of affective relations that includes (rather than defined in opposition to) cool detachment, so too the Gilded Age novel refuses to be either
for or against formal politics.51 This literature drifts uncomfortably close to the police-like mechanisms of institutional politics, but in so doing it reveals surprising scenes of negotiation, bargaining, risk-taking, and world-making that persist within and alongside the political public sphere.52
The Turn to Affect
I have sketched how Gilded Age Washington novels, satires, and reform romances require thinking about the role of emotion in politics. Rather than focusing only on those positive emotions that forge imagined communities, I have proposed that we attend more closely to the negativity and ambivalence these novels link to too-close-for-comfort contact with existing political institutions. Of course, even as nineteenth-century American literary history retains a strong focus on sympathy as the most important moral sentiment, there has been a wider range of studies outside this context, exploring in great detail the complex range of bodily intensities that theorists have placed under the headings of emotion and affect.
This “affective turn” is vast and diverse; any account of its philosophical lineage and later disciplinary inflections will be necessarily incomplete. Studies of affect generally are seen as building on a theoretical tradition that began with thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza and, later, William James and Henri Bergson—a tradition then revitalized by Gilles Deleuze.53 This work attends to the body, its receptivity, and its capacity to affect and be affected by a world of people and things with which one is engaged in constant sensorial transactions. The stakes of this focus on the body’s affects can be framed in different ways, but for nearly all of these philosophers and their followers, the corporeal rubric poses a challenge to Cartesian conceptions of the self, to Enlightenment valorizations of abstract reason, to liberalism’s celebration of individual autonomy and self-containment, and to misogynist and racist denigrations of embodiment.54 While affect’s intensities are almost always linked to thinking and judgment, these theories usually emphasize components of bodily experience that are pre-, sub-, or quasi- cognitive, bearing both directly and obliquely on agency and action without equating to a fully rational thought or decision. In their most utopian register, such affects help describe the possibilities of a body politic that is fundamentally intersubjective and social.55 Yet a language of affect also draws attention to the ways in which politicians, the media, and others manipulate the body’s feeling faculties.56
Even the most basic shared assumptions about affect pose challenges for placing this “turn” in the context of other critical genealogies. “Affect” might be seen as a departure from Marxism (because a language of the body and its feelings privatizes properly political problems) or its supplement (because, in Raymond Williams’s hands, “structures of feeling” provide a way to analyze emerging structural and historical transformations in the arrangement of society under capitalism).57 Affect may seem to pose an alternative to psychoanalysis (because it shifts focus
from a “subject” of language or discourse to an embodied intersubjectivity), or it may look like a complement to it (because affect extends a theory of libidinal drives and attachments to account for aspects of social life beyond the individual’s familial, psychosexual dramas). Many influential works within queer theory and critical race studies, for example, have drawn on a powerful mix of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and affect theory to highlight feelings of melancholia, depression, and shame as indexes of structural inequalities and institutional violence. These pressures register affectively on marginalized bodies, producing forms of othered subjectivity.58
Needless to say, this book cannot sustain an engagement with all of these strands while also undertaking a detailed literary history of the Gilded Age political novel. Yet it is equally true that these ongoing critical conversations have fundamentally shaped this project. It is worthwhile, then, to highlight those facets of the affective turn with which I attend most directly, and to explain those aspects of its terminology and methodology from which I do and do not draw. Most obviously, I am interested in work that emphasizes an interest in social affect but de-emphasizes the taxonomic intricacies of the affect/emotion debate by speaking in terms of “political emotion.” This body of work pays “close attention to the microdynamics of the everyday and the ordinary,” seeking to attend to the “richness of emotional experience,” including being “honest about moments of boredom or exhaustion or depression but also alert to what makes us feel energized or hopeful.”59 One central claim of Not Quite Hope is that a concern with everyday political emotion was very much present in the period after the Civil War, although I specify the crucial distinction that this concern frequently found articulation in a largely phobic rhetoric. I share with Sianne Ngai an interest in feelings beyond the canonical emotions (sympathy, fear, anger), although these “ugly feelings” (being underwhelmed, overwhelmed, cynical, tired, agitated, and embittered) emerge as uncomfortable states in late-nineteenth-century novels that, in their polemical focus and reformist zeal, seem reluctant to recognize improvisation or uncertainty.60
As my citation of critics employing discourses of affect, emotion, feelings, and sentiments indicates, I do not insist on a strict distinction between “affect” (understood generally as impersonal bodily intensities not fully captured by an emotional lexicon) and what Fredric Jameson calls simply “named emotions” (feelings, however intense, with a relatively clear subject and object, and a relatively stable linguistic referent within a historical period and cultural location).61 In part, this is because speaking of both affect and emotion puts the critical energy of the affective turn in dialogue with nineteenth-century American studies’ longstanding interest in sympathy, sentiment, and feeling.
For example, thinking in terms of affect and emotion together offers an occasion to revisit some of literary criticism’s own suspicions about the political effects of affects in nineteenth-century America. Christopher Castiglia has argued that a range of antebellum authors and political theorists described the self-management of one’s emotional inner life as a kind of civic responsibility, thereby displacing
