The Romance of Literary Labor and the Work of Gilded Age Authorship

Abstract

Several literary historians have discussed how literary authorship became a profession in America. The act of imaginative writing evolved, by the middle of the nineteenth century, from an amateur pursuit into a big business. The rapid commercial growth of letters after the Civil War meant that American writers could realize themselves precisely as literary professionals who often performed no other sorts of work and who were publically respected for their “writerly” work. However, our historiography glosses over the widespread cultural confusion and skepticism in Gilded Age America over the legitimacy of literary work and the rightful status of literary authors as workers in the nineteenth century’s newly emergent social hierarchy of labor. Scholars have not accounted for one of the central tensions of late-nineteenth century American literature: as fiction writing evolved into a professional, commercial activity, and, thus, a potentially viable way to earn a living, many of America’s most successful and otherwise significant writers struggled against pervasive public assumptions that challenged the notion of writing as “real” work. My dissertation is essentially a study of ideas about the work of writing in America from the Civil War to World War I, when American authors were thinking about literary authorship increasingly in vocational terms. In particular, my study explores how professional writers understood the nature and meaning of their literary endeavors in a culture that often refused to recognize those endeavors as work. I demonstrate how Gilded Age authors, operating within a fully professionalized business of letters, conceived of the nature of their work and its relation to the work performed by others. My project responds to the gap outlined above by offering a new account of postbellum authorship, one that foregrounds the influence of what might be called “vocational anxieties” on the careers of three representative Gilded Age writers: William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Jack London. The term “vocational anxieties” describes the acute sense of worry shared by countless American writers who faced the cultural assumption that writing was not work and, therefore, writers were not actual workers. My dissertation also looks at the inherent conflicts created for professional writers by the mass literary marketplace, the commercial conditions of which thrust literary artists into the new and, often times, uneasy role of literary businessmen and businesswomen. My project explores the nature of these problems and, in particular, the ways in which Howells, Chesnutt, and London responded to them. The heart of my argument is that cultural suspicions about the literary enterprise caused a transition of authorial consciousness, whereby an array of American authors tried to define themselves, foremost, as laborers, and the act of imaginative writing as an authentic form of work. Each chapter in my dissertation explores the respective attempts made by Howells, Chesnutt, and London to rhetorically reconstruct his own literary work by linking it to and, in some cases, mediating it through various modes of socially, ethically purposive work or, in other cases, often simultaneously, through physically strenuous labor, such as industrial work, artisanal work, craft production, factory work, and agricultural work. Ultimately, my account of Gilded Age authorship suggests that the story of American letters from the Civil War to the First World War amounts to a romance with literary labor. My project is both a work of literary history and a limited cultural history of ideas about authorship, as practiced by Howells, Chesnutt, and London. Much of my study features a sustained analysis of “non-literary” and some literary sources, many of which have previously gone unexamined, usually composed by the authors themselves. Combining historicist and new historicist insights, I make my case with the help of source materials, including private letters, public speeches, journal entries, newspaper and magazine articles, theoretical tracts, and travel accounts. Chapter One, “Introduction,” foregrounds the essential questions sketched above. I contextualize my dissertation within the existing field of authorship studies. Furthermore, I explain my methodologies before providing a brief history of ideas about work and the work ethic in American culture prior to the Civil War. Chapter Two, “’Merely a Working Man’: William Dean Howells and the Aesthetics of Vocational Anxiety,” redirects our attention to the ways in which Howells’s development as a novelist and critic was shaped by cultural and personal doubts about the work of writing. His longstanding image as a complaisant literary aristocrat ignores the fact that he was tormented throughout his life by deeply rooted vocational anxieties. The chapter argues that Howellsian Realism was a response to and an expression of these doubts. It traces the key strategies underlying Howells’s career-long campaign to revalorize the vocation of literary authorship, strategies which included recasting writers and literary texts along socially purposive lines. Redefining himself and other writers as laborers, and the writing process as strenuous work, was the other part of that campaign. In Chapter Three, “’I would gladly devote my life to the work’: Charles Waddell Chesnutt and the Limits of Literary Reform,” I argue that his artistic aspirations diverged from his political concerns shortly after the press deemed him one of America’s most promising black authors. Chesnutt desired recognition as a literary artist untethered from his reputation as a famous Race Man. As his authorial career advanced, he found it increasingly difficult to square his artistic ambitions with the social expectations placed on him as a public black intellectual. Chesnutt strove to release himself from the entrenched literary expectations and cultural designations imposed on fin de siècle black authors. Put another way, he fought to create an artistic identify--for he and other black writers--beyond the boundaries of the African American literary tradition he inherited. African American writers would take up his dilemma, which amounted to the question of whether to write “for his race” and for his own artistic ambitions, in every subsequent generation. Chapter Four, “’Not afraid to work, work, work’”: Labor, Craft, and the Literary Career of Jack London, reframes London as a disciple of Howells, insofar as he adopted the Howellsian writing as labor ideology, recasting postbellum writers at once as laborers and skilled artisans. But unlike Howells, whose genteel image and lifestyle separated him from the workaday world, London used his personal life to collapse the boundaries between the distinct worlds of art and labor. He created the model for the man of letters as a man of action. Throughout his literary career, London played up his “anti-literary” public persona, posing as an adventuresome man of the world who chanced to earn his living by his pen. The chapter highlights the unresolved tension between London’s evolving notions of literary artistry and craft and his vocational and masculine anxieties, which compelled him to publicly endorse the notion of writing as industrial labor long after he considered himself a careful literary craftsman. Chapter Five, “Epilogue: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Problems of Modern Authorship” reiterates the study’s main claims and articulates it’s broader significance within the fields of literary and work studies.