American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0006
E. Coit
{"title":"The Tenth Mind: Adams and the Action of the Remnant","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 shows how Henry Adams's Education intervenes in a conversation about the agency of the educated elite amongst Harvard-affiliated thinkers including William James, Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles William Eliot. Identifying Du Bois as a New England liberal, the chapter notes that both he and Eliot call 'college-bred' men to duty and advocate for liberal education in a sincere, direct mode. Adams's Education opposes such arguments partly by being ironic. Observing that its celebrated ironies are crucially constituted by sincere statements from liberal thinkers, the chapter shows that The Education takes up words and ideas that are salient in Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. Its ironic rewriting of elements from that text flamboyantly exercises (and thus consolidates) the power that belongs to its author. Disparaging action grounded in consensus, collectivity, and sincerity, which he associates derisively with Boston and Harvard, Adams advocates an alternate mode of action that inheres in irony, doubt, indirection, and individual disruptiveness. In enacting this mode, The Education demonstrates its formidable potency. But Adams's showy performance of power via inaction nevertheless becomes a key source for the twentieth-century narrative about impotently passive 'genteel' thinkers.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131026682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0003
E. Coit
{"title":"The Education of the People in James’s The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 reads Henry James's The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima in the context of their serialization in magazines later called 'genteel', showing how these novels question the practice of cultivation that those magazines facilitate and prize. Identifying that practice as a core ideal in the liberalism expressed by Bostonians like Charles Eliot Norton, the chapter shows how James questions the capacity of the broader public for such cultivation. Especially in his evocation of Reconstruction-era efforts to educate freedmen, James points to the hypocrisy and the accidental tyrannizing of liberal educators like Norton; but his novels distinguish between that accidental tyranny and the deliberate tyranny of those who would simply master and rule rather than educate. Associating such projects of mastery with Thomas Carlyle's pessimism, which he juxtaposes against an Emersonian optimism about democracy, James ambivalently endorses Carlyle's sense that 'the people' have meagre capacities, but also links the denial of education to violence. Drawing from Walter Pater, James portrays cultivations that feed on the pleasures of food and art in New York and the Continent, and suggests that this kind of cultivation fosters development much more successfully than the ascetic moralizing of democratic revolutionaries and Bostonians.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121412395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0004
E. Coit
{"title":"The Professor and the Mob in Wharton’s The Valley of Decision","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 reads Edith Wharton's Valley of Decision, 'The Vice of Reading' and 'The Descent of Man'. Considering these texts alongside Charles Eliot Norton's writing about reading and education, the chapter argues that Wharton articulates her political thought in conversation with the elderly professor. In these early texts, as in her later commentary on modernism, Wharton expresses a realist conservatism that opposes a liberal idealism committed to democracy. In its reliance on abstraction and theory, Wharton contends, such idealism fails to see clearly the people whom expansions of democracy would enfranchise. Norton imagines a democracy enhanced by broader access to culture and a richly literate electorate; Wharton derides the capacities of the actual reading public, locates the the diffusion of culture in the marketplace rather than the school, and points to the degradation of literature amongst vapid consumers. Her texts satirize and exterminate professorial types, portraying a public that misunderstands or murders the scholars who would teach them. The scholar who gives voice to Norton's liberal idealism in Valley of Decision is a woman who herself embodies an ideal; Wharton's portrayal of her sad fate uses incisive feminist analysis to bolster a conservative case against idealisms of all sorts.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115775948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0005
E. Coit
{"title":"Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James’s American Scene","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 4 reads James’s 1898 essays on American Letters, The American Scene, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and ‘Charles Eliot Norton’, alongside writing by Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot, among others. During the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard thinkers address questions about the political responsibilities and powers of the 'college-bred'; this chapter argues that James responds to this discussion about the cultivated elite (or what Matthew Arnold calls 'the remnant') by directing attention to that elite's private pleasures rather than its public responsibilities. Tracing across multiple texts James's articulation of an aesthetic that prizes difference, discrimination, delimitation, and exclusion, the chapter shows that he, like Edith Wharton, associates these desirable qualities with the social hierarchies of the Old World. Although his celebration of intricately shaded heterogeneity has been hailed as anti-nativist or progressive, his critical portrayal of white homogeneity can function to criticise not racism or nativism but rather the egalitarian democracy with which such whiteness was closely associated. In contrasting his own practice of culture against that of Norton's 'Puritan' type, James distances himself from that type's commitments to asceticism and moralizing, and also its lingering associations with radicalism, antislavery sentiment, and democracy.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"299 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114724093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0007
E. Coit
{"title":"Pure English: Wharton and the Elect","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reads Edith Wharton's writing about race and nation alongside similarly 'ambassadorial' texts by her friend Barrett Wendell. Considering Wharton's French Ways and Their Meaning, 'Amérique en Guerre' and also Backward Glance in light of the antagonism between Wendell and Charles William Eliot, the chapter observes how each thinks about inequality, education, race, and change over time. Liberal, segregationist and eugenicist, Eliot argues for an aristocracy of merit in which the winners will be white; he stands for a liberal, democratic 'Puritan' heritage. Wendell and Wharton affiliate themselves instead with a Dutch, Cavalier tradition that claims whiteness without claiming democracy, and favours warm pleasure over icy rectitude. Sharing nostalgia for an 'Old New England' of Anglo-Saxon purity, they see racial decline where Eliot hails racial development. Less sanguine than Eliot about the possibilities of education, Wharton argues for continuity rather than rapid progress, criticizing 'Puritan' tendencies towards idealism and disruption. To Wendell's students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington, Wharton and Wendell alike offer rich source material: a story of decline and extinction, a resistance to 'Puritanism', and a realist critique of idealism. Brooks and Parrington adapt these elements as they develop the narrative about the 'genteel'.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129654586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0002
E. Coit
{"title":"Slavery, Subjection and Culture in Adams’s Democracy and Esther","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 shows how Henry Adams's novels interrogate John Stuart Mill's arguments for egalitarian reciprocity in marriage and in pedagogical practice. Reading Democracy and Esther alongside Mill's Subjection of Women, with reference to his 'Inaugural Address', the chapter argues that these novels are early expressions of an apostasy from liberalism that finds fuller expression in Adams's later work. Questioning liberalism's account of the human as well as its zeal for development, Democracy and Esther play with Darwinian ideas in order to suggest that men and women are base and bestial, especially in their relations with each other. Relishing such primitive animality along with a sensuous absence of intellect, Adams locates these qualities in womanhood and Blackness; these categories of sex and race help him to articulate a rejection of liberal arguments for education and progress.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132891496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
American SnobsPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0008
E. Coit
{"title":"The Reign of the Genteel","authors":"E. Coit","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474475402.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This conclusion examines some episodes in the formation of the narrative about 'the genteel tradition'. Having shown that Henry Adams, Henry James, Edith Wharton and their friend Barrett Wendell all contribute to a realist critique of a liberal idealism, American Snobs notes here that when George Santayana makes his own influential commentary on the 'genteel', he is responding to the same liberal Harvard milieu that provokes that realist critique. Wendell's Harvard students Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon Louis Parrington adapt this critique as they develop the narrative about the genteel for their own ends. Brooks, the conclusion shows, contributes to the distortions of that narrative by conflating Charles Eliot Norton's perspective with that of the much more reactionary Wendell. The book closes by considering the unsexy femininity that frequently figures the genteel, linking it to Reconstruction-era evocations of the schoolmarm and later references to sterile Anglo-Saxon womanhood that hastens racial decline. In later iterations of the narrative about the genteel, negative representations of this unsexy white femininity tend to serve progressive ends; in earlier iterations like those surveyed in American Snobs, however, such representations tend to serve a conservatism that is sceptical about democracy and understands itself as realist.","PeriodicalId":213742,"journal":{"name":"American Snobs","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117048083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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