Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880-1940 by Susan Goodman (review)

MLR, ioo.i, 2005 207 Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, i88o-ig40. By Susan Goodman. Baltimore , MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. xvii +198 pp. ?29.50. ISBN 0-8018-6824-6. When Henry James was touring parts of the United States gathering material for what would become The American Scene (1906), he visited George Vanderbilt's per? sonal Versailles. The gargantuan Biltmore, on a mountain top in North Carolina surrounded by 203 square miles of estate lands, not surprisingly astonished and dismayed the impressionable, elderly novelist, who had been absent from his native country for many years. Where others had marvelled at its interiors, its grounds, its library of a quarter of a million volumes, James saw a cultural anomaly: although it had the vaulting ambition and command associated with its great French and English aristocratic models, it was stranded in the desert of American democracy, 'it carried with it no social sequence, no application', it wanted the consecration of 'a great court function' which was unimaginable in the United States. For him, Biltmore was meaningless without the social superstructure that requires and generates a Blois or a Badminton. James was not so unobservant, of course, as to think that America, because nominally without caste, was classless. Yet he was alive, as Susan Goodman points out, less to the consequently subtle nuances of American class and manners than to the apparent blankness of American social behaviour and understanding in confrontation with its European counterpart. James's Isabel Archer is 'heroically obtuse ' to the subtleties of French manners, and it is fromthis that her tragedy develops. Goodman argues that manners are in fact a 'defining quality in [American] litera? ture', and her book offers a series of six author-specific essays which range from the Gilded Age through the inter-war period. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Jessie Fauset are each considered as novelists of manners, itself a contested category. Goodman sees the American novel of manners as constituted by (and sometimes constituting) what she describes as 'the persistent recomposition of American classes', and she shows how her writers ap? proach the problem of manners and class in ways specific to their backgrounds, their period and locality, and their expectations, which are economically, racially, sexually, and geographically determined. Thus James, thirtyyears afterDaisy Miller, is look? ing forstructures in American social lifecognate with those of England and France, or of his American youth, and fails to findthem; Edith Wharton, by contrast, becomes,in The Decoration ofHouses and The House ofMirth, the arbiter of fashionable manners forcertain readers. Howells, in some ways the most interesting case because he repre? sents the proverbial American success story of getting ahead (poor midwestern boy made good in literature, a Horatio Alger hero for aesthetes), understands etiquette and social mores as having an economy of their own, and Goodman rightly extends our understanding of The Rise of Silas Lapham by relating, as Wai-Chee Dimock has recently done, the commercial basis of the Lapham fortune to the social-credit system in which he becomes bankrupt. Together with the chapters on Cather's eti? quette of space, on Glasgow's depiction of oppression by manners (or, more broadly, by tradition), especially the oppression of southern women white and black, and on Fauset's personal analysis of 'passing' (light-skinned African-Americans successfully being taken for white), these essays support the case for the existence, vitality, and centrality of an American genre of manners. The book differs from much recent work in this field by avoiding, for the most part, material culture. The novel as upholstery, 'overfurnished', as Willa Cather complained , has offereda fascinating critical entry into the realist novels ofthis period (in? deed, itis difficultto ignore domestic and sartorial appointments in Howells, Wharton, and James, and even Cather cannot resist ekphrastic renditions of interiors in The Pro? fessor}s House); but Goodman is more interested in the mental habits and social ges- 208 Reviews tures that constitute manners and etiquette ofthe period. These seemed, in their time, almost chaotic, with the Hobbesian imperative of social control as a barricade against the natural incivility of human nature almost...

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