1In “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson denounced those who dress uncharitable motives in the flattering garb of compassion: “I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass?” (135). Arielle Zibrak’s Writing Against Reform argues that, for a range of late-nineteenth-century authors, a cognate aversion to sham benevolence motivated an aesthetic project committed to art for art’s sake. For Zibrak, these authors’ impatience with reform writing and its false (and often boring) postures of virtue ultimately led them to better forms of politics as well as a better kind of writing. Less tied to the heavy-handed appeals of the sentimental romance or the turgid gravity of muckraking exposé, writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, and James Weldon Johnson moved from “reform realism” to “aesthetic realism,” from a compendium of suffering to a mode constituted against such moralizing. Zibrak rightly celebrates these authors’ powerful briefs for the value of reading and writing as such, and for the more complex representational capacities of the novel form. But she also raises unanswered questions about how we are meant to judge the level of political commitment proper to the novel, and how to differentiate highbrow disdain for reform from a nearly ubiquitous denigration of institutional politics in the nineteenth-century American canon.
2In Chapter One, “Rebecca Harding Davis and Celebrity Reform,” Zibrak shows how Davis—known for what may seem a quintessential reform novel, Life in the Iron Mills—strenuously resisted two aspects of reform culture that were overly focused on rigid and reductive forms of identity: the commodification of the celebrity reformer, and the constitution of the object of reform as a passive, pitiable victim. Chapter Two, “Kate Chopin’s Art Panic,” argues that The Awakening should not primarily be understood as a political novel about women’s rights but rather a protest against the aesthetic consequences of the “Social Purity” movement. For Chopin, according to Zibrak, hyper-conventional and moralistic reform literature threatened to crowd the market and cultivate a popular taste for the trite and the dull. The Awakening models a key alternative by giving readers “impressions rather than arguments” that “encourage readers to become innovative writers and thinkers that challenge existing social orders” (88).
3Chapter Three, “Political Intimacy in Henry James,” builds on Zibrak’s reading of Davis to suggest that James, too, refuses stifling conceptions of fixed identity—in this case a mode of “demographic realism” where characters stand in for groups. In this account, James refuses the distinction between “the moral posturing of reformers and the material posturing of wealthy aesthetes” (99), seeing them both as performances of disinterest that merely solidify power. In The Bostonians, for example, James reveals the truth of Olive Chancellor’s desire for Verena, which is not so much for Verena herself but the notion of “some very poor girl” she represents. Zibrak ultimately suggests that James finds an alternative to such reductive reifications by dramatizing a version of what Candace Vogler calls “depersonalizing intimacy.”
4This brings us to the book’s last—and strongest—two chapters, where Zibrak deals most directly with authors whose recoil from reform politics was coupled with direct involvement in it, offering a more subtle engagement with the pitfalls that menace a zeal for reform but also the limits of elite detachment. Chapter Four, “James Weldon Johnson’s Political Formalism,” tracks Johnson’s complex negotiations with institutional politics. Johnson’s work with the NAACP, his organizing on behalf of an anti-lynching bill, and his orchestration of the landmark 1917 Negro Silent Protest collectively reveal a lifetime of committed activism. But Johnson also remained dedicated to a vision of African American literary creativity as itself profoundly political in a more fundamental sense—establishing a claim to the cultural primacy of Black aesthetic forms, to which white artists arrived belatedly.
5Finally, Chapter Five, “Edith Wharton at War in the Land of Letters,” insists that Wharton’s supposed conservatism—sometimes presented as a damning limit on her aesthetic achievements—stems from a longstanding critique (revealed in texts like Fruit of the Tree, Twilight Sleep, and Hudson River Bracketed) of “sham political interest” as “aesthetically appalling” (162). More proactively, The Age of Innocence locates a profound political and aesthetic power in the form of the historical novel, and Custom of the Country returns us to Wharton’s core aesthetic concerns: “If Wharton’s novels uniformly lament any single social problem, it is the problem of unequal access to the Land of Letters” (176). If this could seem a toothless or self-congratulatory aestheticism, Zibrak shows how Wharton also carried these concerns into more concerted reform action, for example establishing in 1914 the “American Hostel for Refugees” and later the “Children of Flanders Rescue Committee,” all while consciously refusing to sentimentalize or romanticize the objects—or better, subjects—of her philanthropic benevolence.
6Amanda Claybaugh has argued that “the novel of purpose was understood to act on its readers—and through its readers, the world. This conception of the novel did much to elevate its status” (7). Yet Claybaugh also notes that some modes of realism specifically constituted themselves against the novel of purpose’s overt polemics. Zibrak’s welcome study expands fruitfully on this point, providing us with a nuanced and persuasive account of how thoroughly a key strain of literary aestheticism was cultivated in direct reaction to the perceived dominance of reform writing.
7As indicated in my preference for the latter two chapters, however, I craved more nuance in Zibrak’s treatment of the tension between politics and aesthetics, and more skeptical analysis of the positions she attributes to the authors studied. In her introduction, Zibrak proclaims some allegiance to Rita Felski’s project of “post-critique”: “Though this work of criticism, like most others, draws in critical backgrounds and occasionally turns to relevant theorists of the questions these writers take up, it does not do so to explain their work or say what they could not” (20). This reluctance to judge the ideological effects of her primary texts, or presume to know more than the authors themselves, suggests an admirable humility, but it leads to a tendency to present the views of her authors nearly without editorial comment, as though evaluating the merits of a political proposition was outside the bounds of literary criticism.
8For example, when Zibrak argues that “[Davis’s] work encourages readers to care about the plight of workers not through pity for the horrors of their circumstance, but by encouraging appreciation for their art” (60), I wondered if that is, in fact, a productive distinction. Why is it necessarily compelling to make artistic production a precondition for sympathy? Is this smarter, or more just, than representative modes that make shared structural conditions the grounds for compassion and action? If so, why? When Zibrak makes the claim that James does not contrast but rather equates the moral posturing of reformers and aesthetes as similar “sets of behaviors” (99), I wondered if that is a compelling insight on James’s part. How do we distinguish between authentic reform and empty self-importance? Are there modes of reform that one might value even if they are also tinged with a sense of aesthetic satisfaction? If not, why?
9One problem with a posture of neutral observation is that it is hard to sustain. Despite the book’s post-critical disposition, Zibrak does expose the ideological shortcomings of sentimentality, citing Lauren Berlant to back up a claim about “reform realist sympathy or sentimentality, which can [in its reliance on cliché] artificially level experiences of suffering through comparisons drawn along the lines of sociocultural identity” (107). But much as Zibrak’s praise (for aesthetic realism) might fruitfully be tempered with more skepticism, this critique (of sentimentalism) needed an extra dash of dialectics. To be sure, The Female Complaint (2008) turned a scathing eye on sentimentality’s propensity to privatize political problems and provide cheap occasions for consumption to masquerade as activism. But for Berlant the sentimental also always marks a desire for social transformation; the commodity-mediated ties of women’s culture improvise modes of intimacy which organize fantasies of a better life. Sentimentality also poses a problem for Zibrak’s contention that novels of reform produce an “emergent notion that the explicitly political itself was a marker of literary value” (3). After all, for someone like Harriet Beecher Stowe, denigrating the whole domain of the political was a precondition for addressing it via sentiment and gendered domestic influence: the right-feeling mother is moved to address slavery but “wouldn’t give a fip for all your politics, generally” (142).
10Things get even more complicated on the sentiment front when Zibrak argues that, working against the flattening effects of sentimental cliché, “The Jamesian mode of generating political feeling relies upon the generation of affect rather than ideology” (109). This is said to unfold specifically in The Bostonians via the discomfort and disruption occasioned by Verena’s seemingly unhappy pairing with Ransom, which in Zibrak’s telling reveals the profound “jouissance” of being “intimate with someone with whom one disagrees so wholly” (120). The association here between feeling and a transcendent shattering of ideological structures echoes and reinforces the earlier claim about Chopin’s “impressions” being superior to “arguments,” but also potentially conflicts with the proposed link between sentiment and the domineering simplifications of melodramatic cliché.
11One has the sense that Zibrak is approaching, but intentionally retreating from, a major conversation in affect and emotion studies about whether affect is in fact “autonomous” or pre-ideological (see, for example, the debate between Ruth Leys and Brian Massumi). To engage this directly would threaten Zibrak’s project of “imagining a different critical relationship to literature and the assertion of its value beyond determining whether it is liberatory or oppressive, reflective of progressive or conservative ideologies […] [and] to avoid using extra-disciplinary sources as test cases for the values of the literature itself” (20). But can’t engagement with theoretical texts, which help us think about the terms put into play by literary works, enhance, rather than merely diminish, our sense that literature is a domain of thought and expression with conceptual and aesthetic power?
12Another way to sum up my misgivings about the book’s political claims, despite the frequent brilliance of many of its readings, is that Zibrak may be too quick to accept the premises of her authors. For example, she presents the work of the authors she cites as novel for its focus on styles of politics that are better and higher than institutional forms. But as Sean McCann and Michael Szalay have argued, literary critics have long read the literary archive as offering models for eschewing official politics, expressing a preference for radical breaks from institutions. Along these lines, I have argued elsewhere that what is most surprising about a key strain of Gilded Age political fiction is its aversive attachment to institutional politics, which is nearly illegible in the context of nineteenth-century literature’s, and nineteenth-century literary criticism’s, predominant strain of anti-institutional romanticism. In works by authors like Mark Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Henry Adams, this attachment takes shape as a passionate disgust with grift and graft but also a recognition that any “politics” that fully abandons the terrain of the state and related institutions is likely to cede power entirely. Likewise, critiques of the hypocritical appetites of political actors are important and necessary but also slip easily into impatience with politics as such, which, like any human interaction, is marked by complex motivations, antagonisms, emotions, and unfolds in the domain of language where representation is always imperfect. Some engagement with this line of thinking, or with authors from the period who dramatize an ambivalent relation to electoral democracy, might have clarified the stakes of Zibrak’s argument about the value of works that evince a more thoroughgoing distaste for politics.
13Zibrak concludes her excellent chapter on Johnson by noting that “By the end of his life, Johnson had become more convinced that governmental politics would not be an efficacious route to ending racial violence” (154). I think Zibrak undersells her own reading here, which reveals a far more anxious and ongoing struggle on Johnson’s part to balance competing demands—to meet the forces of white supremacy with every organizational tool available, while not allowing that struggle to fully set the terms of Black artistic expression. One might wish to choose decisively between politics and aesthetics, between argument and feeling, between existing institutional forms and a fully liberated political imagination, but the complex negotiations with literary expression and social change that Zibrak tracks across five engaging chapters show that to do so risks becoming “against reform” in a more paralyzing sense—against the very possibility of political, or artistic, transformation.