Abstract
For a range of historical commentators (Christopher Lasch, Philip Reiff and T. J. Jackson Lears) much that is distinctive, and distinctively regrettable, about American life can be summed up by the word ‘therapy’ These historians argued that the waning of Victorianism saw a shift from a culture of morality towards a world where feeling good and feeling better became the signals of worth. Newspapers and journals at the end of the nineteenth century were filled with articles regretting the collapse of American self-confidence and warning of a ‘psychic crisis’. Prominent fin-de-siècle intellectuals — William James, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton — suffered from the recently identified mental crisis ‘neurasthenia’. For T. J. Jackson Lears this crisis in the American personality grew out of fundamental social and cultural shifts. The advent of consumer society meant that consumption and leisure began to constitute a way of life; Americans moved away from a ‘bourgeois ethos’ that ‘enjoined perpetual work, compulsive saving, civic responsibility, and a rigid morality of self-denial’. The development of psychology, the advent of advertising and a consumer economy, the establishment of the guru of health (mental and physical), a general and pervasive emphasis on the need to feel vibrant and well: these symptoms indicated the shift from a Victorian world of individual moral choice towards a more therapeutic world.
Susan Sontag, Alice in Bed (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p. 40.
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Notes
Susan Sontag, Alice in Bed (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), p. 40.
T. J. Jackson Lears, in Richard Wightman Fox and Lears (eds), The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 3–4.
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 47–58
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978)
Ernest Hemingway to Edmund Wilson, 25 November 1923, Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), p. 105.
Hemingway’s response to Cather in my Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 4–5.
Toni Morrison, interview with Tom Le Clair, in Le Clair and Larry McCaffery (eds), Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 252–61
Rosa Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Kristin Boudreau, ‘“A Barnum Monstrosity”: Alice James and the Spectacle of Sympathy’, American Literature, 65 (1993), pp. 53–67
Mary Cappello, ‘Alice James: “Neither Dead nor Alive”’, American Imago, 45 (1988), pp. 127–62.
Julie Bates Dock, ‘“But one Expects That”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship’, PMLA, 111 (1996), pp. 52–63
William Davitt Bell (citing Henry James and William Dean Howells), The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 175–6.
Recently, however, critics have offset Gilman’s radicalism by arguing that her politics of colour and race were reactionary. Elizabeth Ammons in Contending Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 34–43
Susan S. Lanser makes the depressing suggestion that the horror of ‘yellow wallpaper’ is largely produced by end-of-century racial typecasting: ‘Feminist Criticism, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the Politics of Color in America’, Feminist Studies, 15 (1989), pp. 415–41.
Willa Cather, ‘Preface’ to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), reprinted in The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 11.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 124.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America’, Signs, 1 (1975), pp. 1–29.
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 92.
‘Jewett is both more “modern” (in her concern with circuits and exchange) and more “nineteenth-century” (in her religious belief and didacticism) than any turn-of-the-century local colorist is conceived to be’ (June Howard, ‘Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History’, American Literature, 68 (1996), pp. 365–84 at p. 379).
Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
Ann Douglas, ‘The Literature of Impoverishment: the Women Local Colorists in America, 1865–1914’, Women’s Studies, 1 (1972), 2–40.
Elaine Showalter, ‘The Awakening: Tradition and the American Female Talent’, in Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 67.
Helen Taylor, ‘Walking through New Orleans: Kate Chopin and the Female Flâneur’, Symbiosis, 1 (1997), pp. 69–85
Rod Edmond, Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (London: Routledge, 1988).
Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969) pp. 25–6
Jonathan Little, ‘Nella Larsen’s Passing: Irony and the Critics’, African American Review, 26 (1992), pp. 173–82
Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 13.
Siobhan Somerville also contends that there is a subtextual theme of ‘female homoeroticism’ (see her ‘Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces’, American Literature, 69 (1997), pp. 139–66).
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 440–621.
Susan Gillman, ‘Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African—American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences’, American Literary History, 8 (1996), 57–82
Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (London: X Press, 1997), p. 40.
John Ernest, ‘From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy’, American Literature, 64 (1992), pp. 497–518
Elizabeth Young, ‘Warring Fictions: lola Leroy and the Color of Gender’, American Literature, 64 (1992). pp. 273–97
The subject of the mother in American women’s fiction remains relatively unexplored; work so far concentrates on psychoanalytical rather than cultural—historical readings. See the ‘Introduction’ to Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 1–18.
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© 1999 Guy Reynolds
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Reynolds, G. (1999). ‘Sickbed Deathbed Birthbed’. In: Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27794-0_2
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