In the last decades of the 20th century, authors touting academic credentials made their way into the public discourse on alien abduction. In the process, these academics have manufactured a rhetorical space in which to speak from professional expertise while at the same time enacting rhetorical conventions of contemporary public discourse in the United States that limit the validity of expertise. The authors accomplish this by appealing to the contemporary American taste for democratic discourse. By democratic, I mean discourse that privileges knowledge derived from personal experience rather than from objective reasoning — a way of knowing that requires no credentials but the ability to render oneself a speaking subject.

Since its publication in 1852, The Blithedale Romance has gained a measure of notoriety for its widely perceived use of Margaret Fuller as a model for the character of Zenobia. Contemporary admirers of the pioneering feminist, woman of letters, and social reformer were dismayed by Hawthorne's evident appropriation of Fuller's life in a romance obviously based on the Brook Farm community of the early 1840s in which Hawthorne participated and Fuller was a regular visitor. In his post-Civil War “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” for example, Emerson lodged a vigorous protest: “No friend who knew Margaret Fuller could recognize her rich and brilliant genius under the dismal mask which the public fancied was meant for her in that disagreeable story” (Lectures, 342). The potential insult to Fuller's memory in Blithedale was compounded by overt injury when, three decades after the novel's publication, in an 1884 biography of his parents, Julian Hawthorne included a suppressed passage on Fuller from his father's French and Italian Notebooks — an outspoken attack on Fuller as an intellectual humbug and fallen woman that conceivably threw a lurid light back on the portrait of Zenobia.

William Gilmore Simms's “The Arm-chair of Tustenuggee: A Legend of the Catawba” (1840) frames the lives of colonial Catawba Indians in a naturalistic environment extending from the wild to the domestic; nonetheless, Simms also manages to incorporate elements of realism and romanticism in the tale to provide a blend of perspectives that complement one another. Perhaps most importantly in the context of 19th-century Native American literary studies, the story humanizes the native, providing a tale that realistically and humorously points out aspects of human conflict to which all people are susceptible. This work, among others by Simms dealing with the Native American that are discussed in this essay, effectively counters the generalization that colonial works invariably stereotype the native as noble savage.

The extent to which American men, during most of the 19th century, could feel and openly express an unashamed, unself-conscious, all-consuming love for members of their own sex is a phenomenon that has not yet been adequately studied or explained. Although extensive work has been done on the “female world of love and ritual,” we know comparatively little of the corresponding male world of love and ritual. We are only beginning to rediscover the extent, the significance, and the varieties of love between men in the 19th-century United States.

Several art historians have discerned a gendered division of subject matter between male and female artists of the late 19th century. Griselda Pollock's landmark text, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” serves as both the first and fullest discussion of this issue from a feminist perspective. Pollock argues that women Impressionists should not be viewed as outside the development and rhetoric of modernity because of their failure to depict its most representative sites (cafés, bars, and other public spaces where bourgeois women dared not enter); rather, we should note their restricted, chiefly domestic realm as another space of modernity that these women were particularly adept at analyzing. According to Robert Herbert, works by women Impressionists are “easily distinguished” from those of their male counterparts, who tend to highlight the figures over their surroundings and fail to note the expressive capabilities of household furnishings. There is much to recommend the approaches of both Pollock and Herbert; in particular, they have given critical and aesthetic value to the paintings of women Impressionists in their analyses. But, paradoxically, their analyses also have the effect of reinforcing the same gendered distinctions of paintings once used to devalue those works by women.

The Painter's Triumph, created by William Sidney Mount in 1838, has long been interpreted as an icon of the democratization of American art (Figure 1). Nearly every scholarly analysis of the painting frames it in the context of Mount's well-known charge to himself, “Paint pictures that will take with the public, in other words, never paint for the few, but for the many.” The farmer's enthusiastic involvement in the artist's work is viewed as emblematic of Mount's commitment to promoting the visual arts among ordinary folk. The painter's “triumph,” most assert, is his ability to reach the common man. This is certainly an appealing message and consistent with the desire to see mid-19th-century American artists as resolute democrats in tune with Jacksonian cultural reforms. Yet, Mount never called it The Painter's Triumph, referring to it only as “artist showing his work,” and there is no evidence that viewers in the late 1830s and early 1840s recognized a particularly democratic message. The current title first appeared in a catalogue in 1847, long after Mount sold the painting and two years after the death of Edward L. Carey, the man who commissioned it. Despite the 1847 title change, in his later autobiographical sketch Mount referred to the painting as “Artist showing his own work.”

After a five-month sojourn in Rome, the author Henry James departed with “an acquired passion for the place.” The year was 1873, and he wrote eloquently of his ardor, expressing appreciation for the beauty in the “solemn vistas” of the Vatican, the “gorgeous” Gesù church, and the “wondrous” Villa Madama. Such were the impressions of a Bostonian who spent much of his adult life in Europe. By contrast, in June of 1885, the young Boston architect Herbert Langford Warren wrote to his brother about how he was “glad to be out of Italy.” He had just concluded a four-month tour there. He had also visited England and France, and he was convinced that the architecture and sculpture of those countries were superior to what he had seen in Italy, although he admired Italian Renaissance painting. When still in Rome, he told his brother how disagreeable he found the “Renaissance architecture in Italy contemporary with Michael Angelo and later under Palladio and Vignola,” preferring the work of English architects Inigo Jones and Wren. Warren appreciated some aspects of the Italian buildings of the 15th and early 16th centuries, but he considered the grandeur and opulence of later Renaissance architecture especially distasteful.

Over the last decade, scholars of American cultural studies have taken as one of its central tasks identification of the ways in which Anglo-American writing is bound up in the African American tradition against which it had historically tended to distinguish itself. This project has involved, on the one hand, deconstructing distinctions between Afro-American and Anglo-American literary traditions and, on the other, affirming the distinctiveness of an Afro-American literary tradition by reclaiming lesser-known African American literary texts, such as Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self. Indeed, the wealth of recent critical analyses of Pauline Hopkins's now almost canonical 1902 serial novel has engaged these two distinct lines of inquiry. By using the second half of her title as a way of understanding the first — that is, by assessing how William James's popular 1892 essay for Scribner's Monthly, entitled “The Hidden Self,” operates as an organizing principle for Hopkins's fictional account of bloodlines — scholars have charted a series of interconnections between Afro-American and Anglo-American traditions even as they have made a case for the value of Hopkins's sensation novel. Familiar with James's contention that there is a “hidden self” within the individual, Hopkins, in these accounts, appropriates James's term to express the social condition of the African American after Reconstruction. Just as James's student, W. E. B. DuBois, declares in an 1897 essay for the Atlantic Monthly that the African American experiences an inevitable “double-consciousness” proceeding from “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” so too does Pauline Hopkins, in these accounts, use James's description of a “consciousness split into parts which coexist” as a way of expressing the psychosocial condition of late-19th-century African Americans.

Aven Nelson (1859–1952) was a botanist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. His second wife, Ruth Elizabeth Ashton (1896–1987), much his junior, was his partner in the field and companion in the last twenty years of his life. Separately and in each other's company, these naturalists brought work, play, learning, and companionship together fairly seamlessly in their lives. This is an enviable accomplishment in a world where most of us compartmentalize all things — work separate from play, indoors from outdoors, emotional experience from professional effort — and few people ask seriously how any of these aspects of a life in progress might inform one another over time. But, like many different kinds of professionals, neither of the Nelsons wrote about the specific conditions of their work — in their case, what it was like to work outdoors, what the plants they collected made them think about, or what it was like to work together, though it is clear enough they enjoyed themselves, and both of them sustained long productive lives in close communication with colleagues and the natural world.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: so wrote Duchess, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. So, too, might we say today, at the 21st century's beginning, and not simply of beauty, or ugliness, or of justice or injustice, or of wisdom or folly, as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had it a generation before her, but of truth, even scientific truth. The 20th century has not been kind to many 19th-century notions, ideals, and practices. Among those it has treated the most harshly is that of objective, scientific truth. In Hungerford's day, most educated people in the Western world spoke and acted as if truth was attainable. Positive truth was available to those trained in the special knowledge and methods of the professional expert. In Western Europe and North America, the educated classes regarded such special knowledge — expertise, that is — the natural and inevitable consequence of academic and scientific institutions there. And the professionalization of American science, thanks to the faculty of American private and public graduate universities in the half-century following 1870, set the intellectual and ideological horizons of science, scholarship, and the professions. The professional ideal crystallized, with its concomitant notions of the expert with special training and knowledge and a desire to serve the general public, not greedy commercial interests. Truth was not diluted. For the professionals and their client populations, it was absolute, unchanging, timeless. The professional scientist could verify it with his expert methods.

When Joseph Freeman celebrated the standard 1930s' version of heroic worker-writers at the American Writers' Congress, he didn't seem to notice that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a conflicted category. His vision assumed that the WPA empowered writers by aligning them with laborers, folding them into the celebration of physical labor promoted by the New Deal, an assumption that reverberated widely both at that political moment and in more recent discussions (Figure 1). This essay argues that bringing together the categories of worker and writer under New Deal sponsorship was a much less seamless, less heroic, and less masculinist operation than is generally asserted. It reconstructs the experiences of WPA writers with a local specificity heretofore missing from the discussion: in this case, the assortment of employees – the white-collar destitute, widows, impoverished gentility – on the New Bedford District Office of the Massachusetts Writers' Project. From this perspective, the experience of WPA employment was more in tension than in solidarity with working-class practices. The dynamics of government bureaucracy most often left project employees stranded between the categories of worker and writer, attempting (with limited success) to negotiate a resolution in both their social and their narrative positions.

Occupying part of a single paragraph in the published autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the Polish-Belgian novelist, journalist, and revolutionary, Victor Serge, almost casually speaks of his escape in 1941 to Mexico from Marseille in Vichy France:

Some of us whose lives were in danger eventually made our exit. The Battle of the Visas which their friends have had to wage for their sake would stand some description: a single escape would provide material for a book of Balzacian proportions, packed with unexpected incidents and dark happenings behind the scenes.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was all but absent from public life between November 1920, when he was defeated as the Democratic candidate for vice president, and his successful campaign for governor of New York in fall 1928. Throughout most of this period (which one might call FDR's “wilderness years,” borrowing Martin Gilbert's term for Winston Churchill's hiatus from power), Roosevelt struggled to overcome the physical paralysis that resulted from an attack of polio in August 1921, as well as the boredom and depression that accompanied his enforced inactivity. He spent much of his time pursuing treatments for his crippled legs (a process that culminated in his purchase and development of Warm Springs, Georgia, as a treatment center), kept up what he could of his law practice and business interests, and planned with his chief advisor Louis Howe for an eventual return to political life. Meanwhile, to help keep the Roosevelt name in the public eye, Howe encouraged Eleanor Roosevelt to begin her independent career of public speaking and political activism.

One of the most significant gaps in our historical understanding of the expulsion and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II is a knowledge of how Japanese Americans themselves perceived events as they occurred. Former camp inmates have produced an enormous corpus of literature, particularly in the last thirty years, dealing with their wartime experience, including oral histories, memoirs, essays, plays, poetry, and fiction. These have provided valuable insight as to how the government's policy played out in the lives of its victims, and have included a store of information useful in reconstructing the overall camp experience. Still, memoirs are by their nature products of hindsight and recollection, formed of material drawn from the untidy storehouse of human memory. They inevitably give an incomplete and less than trustworthy accounting of past sensations, especially the traumatic emotions and painful human relations that characterized the wartime Japanese American experience. In contrast, the contemporary written record of the wartime Japanese American experience is both relatively sparse and uneven. Surviving letters, essays, and journals stress the experience of the Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, who comprised the majority of camp inmates. Members of the immigrant Issei generation, less long-lived and fluent in English than their children, have produced little material despite various efforts to create Issei archival and oral history collections. Such documents by the Issei as do exist are generally in Japanese and are thereby impenetrable to the vast majority of scholars in the United States.

In the winter of 1942, only a year removed from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and nearly seven months into his internment at the Gila River Relocation Project in Arizona, a young Japanese American named Charles Kikuchi recounts an afternoon's passing conversation in his diary. “I was walking over by the Butte this afternoon and I stopped to talk about the camp with a Negro workman who was digging postholes for the fence which is going around the place,” writes Kikuchi. The young African American asks the young Nisei (that is, second-generation Japanese American) about the loyalty of other Japanese Americans and is disappointed to discover Nisei allegiance to the United States. The workman responds, “Boy, you are making a mistake. Why should you be loyal to a country that don't want you? … This is a white man's country and all the colored peoples of this world has got to change this so that I can get a good job just like a white man and I don't have to dig post holes to lock you Japanese up who are born in California. You help this country out and they will turn around and give you a kick in the pants afterwards.”

September 1945 saw comic-strip star “Orphan Annie” engaged in a debate over popular media with “Professor Pollyanna.” The Professor and his spouse, known to Annie as “Uncle George” and “Aunt Sonja,” were one of many adult couples that took the eleven-year-old orphan into their home throughout the history of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. Temporary guardians like Uncle George and Aunt Sonja moved in and out of the strip on a regular basis, functioning as a foil for young Annie, the spokeschild of her creator Harold Gray, to express her opinions about the world. In this episode, Annie was puzzled by Uncle George's distaste for the tabloid-style newspaper fare she herself devotedly consumed daily. He “never reads th' funnies — or anything 'bout crime or sin or war horrors!” Annie observes incredulously. Professor Pollyanna, it seemed, only read editorials and, in Annie's mocking terms, “sweetness and light stories.” Annie later mulls over the matter with a sympathetic Aunt Sonja in an attempt to understand his views further. But Aunt Sonja could muster only the lamest of analyses: “Oh, probably George lives in a sort of dream world … but he's happy” (see Figure 1).

Of all the disturbing scenes to appear in The Ugly American (1958), William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick's fictional account of U.S. foreign policy in Asia, none is more unnerving than the depiction of two French Foreign Legionnaires — one African American, one Vietnamese — returning from an ill-fated attempt to scout the Communist Vietnamese position:

Davis was leading Apache. From fifty yards they could see that there was a gout of blood on Davis's cheek. At twenty-five yards they could see the mangled remains of his left eye, hanging in a cluster of tiny glistening cords and muscles…. “They caught us, Major,” Davis said. “There has to be a first time for everything and this time they caught us.” …Davis reached over and pulled Apache's hand away from his throat. Squarely in the center of his throat there was a twisted hole. Far back in the hole the muscles and cords of his neck glistened. (130–31)

The anti-Communist bonding of the African-American Davis and the Vietnamese “Apache” — the only such interracial union depicted in The Ugly American — ends with the physical mutilation and symbolic castration of each man, one denuded of his voice, the other of his eye. In part, the horrific results of Apache and Davis's capture reveal the Communists' brutal refusal to allow locals to ally themselves with foreigners of any color. As Davis puts it, “They left my right eye so that we could find our way back and show ourselves as a lesson to others” (131).

In “A Crown of Feathers” (1972), Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of an orphan named Akhsa Holishitzer, doted upon by her Polish grandparents who manage the estate of a local gentile Prince inside the Pale. Akhsa grows into a young woman so attached to her grandparents that she cannot settle upon a mate, and thereby suffers a crisis of faith when they die. Longing for their return from the dead, haunted by conflicting dreams of their life plan for her, in her misery she finds herself drawn to the prohibited Book of Job, and from there to the New Testament stories of Jesus's resurrection. She converts to Christianity and gentile luxury, and thereby launches herself on a lifelong pilgrimage of ostracism, exile, and return to her own community. She begins her journey of self-doubt, however, by inaugurating a black mass that conjures up the very figure of Satan himself. Right to her deathbed, in fact, she will be haunted by words Satan tells her when she agonizes over the truths about death and the afterlife she is seeking. “‘The truth,’ Satan tells her, ‘is that there is no truth.’”

Is racial passing passé? Not according to contemporary book sales. The theme remains central to at least three recent best sellers: Danzy Senna's Caucasia, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, and Philip Roth's The Human Stain. Roth's novel made it to the big screen this fall, just as Devil in a Blues Dress, the adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel starring Denzel Washington, did in 1995. Renewed academic attention is being paid, of late, to “classic” passing narratives; once-ignored ones, including Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, are being revived; and still others being reread in the context of passing.

In Discussing the humor of William Styron's humor-filled novel Sophie's Choice, I am particularly interested in focusing upon the nature of the joke that fills a huge portion of the novel, the Leslie Lapidus affair. Rarely (if ever) in the history of the written word, I'd be willing to venture, has a joke of the outrageous length of this one been set down. The Leslie Lapidus affair, from start to finish, actually takes up about a full fifth of a long novel. The reader first hears of Leslie as a “hot dish” promised to Stingo, the main character and the narrator, on page 82 of the 1992 Vintage edition, but the punch line doesn't come until page 193, followed by a few pages of denouement. What a buildup! That's a startlingly long joke. The over-length of the Leslie Lapidus affair, as well as its late-in-the-novel resurrection in the briefer “coda” that is the Mary Alice Grimball encounter, should be enough to make the reader take pause. What in the world is a joke of this size doing in a novel about the Holocaust? How does it relate to the major ideas of the novel? At 100+ pages, it's practically a major theme of its own.