'Once I thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity, but I was wrong. Why should an old slave use such a phrase as, “This and this or this has made me more human,” as I did in my arena speech? Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity - that was left to his “free” offspring. He accepted his humanity.' (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man) These ruminations by the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are paradoxical. Chattel slavery in the United States was a system calculated to impress on black and white alike the inferiority and brutishness of black people, and yet in the memory of Ellison's narrator, his enslaved grandfather could emerge as more human than a young, intelligent black man of the twentieth century. Certainly it is true that the horrors of slavery were not felt uniformly and unceasingly by the enslaved, and that black resistance to the physical and psychological dimensions of bondage was endemic. In the words of Lawrence Levine, “Slave music, slave religion, slave folk beliefs - the entire sacred world of the black slaves - created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners and were the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery” (80). But however effectively blacks managed to nurture their sense of humanity while in bondage, it seems curious that these same people and their descendants would experience that humanity more tenuously under freedom than they had under slavery.

Although realism and naturalism could have sprung up independently in the United States, the historical fact is that they flourished earlier in the European countries all the way eastward to Russia and that American writers were especially stimulated by British and French models. On the other hand, though a still provincial, moralizing culture might have rejected realism and naturalism as alien or profane or harmful, nevertheless they did become established in the postbellum United States. Even Richard Chase, whose The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) had argued that the romance was the quintessential mode of fiction in the United States, felt compelled to declare: 'After all, realism, although it was there from the beginning, did “rise,” or at least became conscious of itself as a significant, liberalizing and forwardlooking literary program. Whole areas of the American novel, both classic and modern, are closed to any reader who . . . thinks that it contains no meaningful element of realism.'

“Must not worry about George, for I hope the worst is over - must keep up a stout heart.”This jotting from Whitman's notebooks early in 1863 is a vivid reminder of the person around whom, for Whitman and his family, the whole of the Civil War seemed to revolve for the full four years of its duration. A great deal of attention has by now been paid to everyone and everything else that was of central concern to Whitman at this time. His fierce commitment to the Union cause; his boundless admiration for Lincoln; above all, his tender yet invigorating care for the sick soldiers in general and the complex passion of his attachment to a few individuals in particular - all these matters have been extensively studied, not only for the insights they offer into Whitman's character but also for the light they throw on his poetry. By contrast, Whitman's wartime connection with his younger brother George (who was thirty-two when he entered the army, to the poet's forty-two) has been treated as at best a relatively minor matter of merely biographical interest. On closer examination, however, this fraternal relationship begins to assume much greater significance. Indeed, it could be argued that it was at least partly through George that Whitman was led to an intimate understanding of the real, hidden nature of the war, and that it was around George that Whitman was able (perhaps unconsciously) to arrange several of those imaginative configurations that articulated his hopes and anxieties and that supplied the deep structure of his war poetry.

Edith Wharton was present at the famous 1913 debut of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps when the Parisian ballet patrons erupted in protest at the work's cacophonous sounds and sacrificial themes. She therefore witnessed two ongoing dramas of early modernism: the absorption of primitivism into the high arts, and the outrage it could provoke among the arts establishment. It is not surprising that the cosmopolitan Wharton, by this time a famous expatriate, was on hand for one of the signal events of European art history. But her reputation as a cultural conservative distrustful of avant-garde experimentation offers little to account for her deep admiration of the ballet: her notebook records that she found it “extraordinary”. The gap between reputation and reality here is provocative, for it hints at the complexity of Wharton's relation to her cultural context - and to the changing concept of culture itself, the subject at the heart of her fiction.

Of particular interest is the historical turn to primitivism reflected in both Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography, for this contemporary trend can also provide an illumination of Wharton's own art. Her intellectual interest in the subject of tribal or “primitive” culture is well known; R. W. B. Lewis writes that she was “passionately addicted” to anthropology from an early age, and it is easy to speculate that her ethnographic knowledge provided much of the pleasure she took in the ballet's harsh ritualism. Like many contemporary artists Wharton had a taste for the exotic. At first glance, though, it may appear that ethnographic themes appear in Wharton's fiction merely as a marker of taste, only one among the hundreds that she records in her novels. Newland

Anyone seeking, as are the contributors to this volume, to write about American literature between the Civil War and World War I in relation to the literary movements known as realism and naturalism faces a twofold initial difficulty. First, there exists a traditional suspicion, often arising from the very attempt to write literary history, of large-scale classifying rubrics. Is there any advantage, one might ask, in conceptualizing the richly diverse expression of this period in terms of such inherent simplification as realism and naturalism? A second problem derives from the recent theorizing of literary study. The attraction, for many theorists, of a deconstructive stance has bred skepticism toward interpretive enterprises that posit such communities of belief and expression as those subsumed under the headings of realism and naturalism. And, from a somewhat different theoretical viewpoint, recent scholars of a New Historicist bent have tended to discount traditional historical divisions in the study of American literature on the ground that they obscure underlying ideological similarities present in all American writing since the Civil War.

In Section 49 of “Song of Myself,” the Whitman persona marvels at a body that can know the acute sensory experience of giving birth, pain merging into the pleasure of expulsion, the ultimate orgasm, as the persona watches a childbirth. He lies next to the woman, close, in a way like present-day practice in which the male shares in the birthing experience as much as he can. The persona speaks:

To a reader familiar with Whitman's images and the valorization of the concepts that these images inscribe, the terms “doors,” “sills,” and “flexible” signal concepts and characteristics that coalesce into primary motifs in his work - the possibility of beginning anew and the strength gained through an inclusive or expansive point of view. Here, female genitalia image these concepts, the phrase “sills of the exquisite flexible doors” possessing an evocative power that critics have not usually associated with Whitman's images of female sexuality. The word “vulva,” if traced back far enough, has as one of its derivations “the leaf of a door” (the leaf-door, i.e., the flexibility of a folding door).

When we say American realism, two immediate questions are: Whose reality? And: Whose America? To suggest those questions, I have opened with statements written by four of my students. Also, I begin with my students' words to anticipate two other core ideas. First, the whole issue of canonicity is at heart an issue of the classroom; what is at stake is which books get taught and which do not, which voices get heard. Second, I will be arguing in favor of a reconceptualization of American realism that holds at its center the principle of multiculturalism.

“There is nothing very good to tell you of the people here, no books, no poets, no artists; nothing but their incessant activity as pioneers &geographers, ” Emerson wrote an English friend in May 1849. Despite his usual complaint that the “material problem ” of opening up new territories engrossed so much of the energy of Americans, Emerson expressed a hope that his country would nonetheless soon produce a major writer, adding: “I ought to say, however, that my friend Thoreau is shortly to print a book called 'A Week on the Concord &Merrimack Rivers,' which, I think, will win the best readers abroad &at home. ”' As that afterthought indicates, Emerson clearly did not believe that his young friend was the “great one ” he prophesied. Even his tepid prediction that A Week would attract “the best readers ” proved to be overly optimistic, for Thoreau’s first book was read by very few people in either England or the United States. Now that Thoreau is widely viewed as one of the “classic ” American authors, A Week has gained a larger audience. Yet it is probably his least familiar book, one that is almost completely overshadowed by Walden.

The relative neglect of A Week is not terribly surprising. For one thing, it is a very long book, nearly four hundred pages in the Princeton edition of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. What Dr. Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost, that "none ever wished it longer than it is," is perhaps equally true of A Week. Moreover, although it initially seems to be a fairly straightforward travel book, much of the text of A Week is devoted to a series of essays or "digressions" on subjects ranging from the Christian church and books ("Sunday"), through Hindu scripture ("Monday") and friendship ("Wednesday"), to writers like the Greek lyricist Anacreon ("Tuesday"), the Roman satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus ("Thursday"), and the British poets Ossian and Chaucer ("Friday").

“As for Whitman,” confessed the young Ezra Pound in England in 1909, “I read him (in many parts) with acute pain, but when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms.” In the same essay, “What I feel about Walt Whitman,” Pound pronounced a judgment already shared by his generation about the redoubtable figure who had died just seventeen years earlier: “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. . . . I honour him for he prophesied me while I can only recognize him as a forebear of whom I ought to be proud.” And he added, “Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both).”

Whitman had his own ideas about collars and dress shirts. “Undrape,” hecries in “Song of Myself,”

As if taunted by the call, Pound called back, naming and renaming Whitman “our American keynote” in 1913 in Patria Mia (123)the, “pig-headed father” in the poem “A Pact” of 1915 and, in the 1909 essay, the American “genius”:

Despite apparent similarities, Edith Wharton's hyper-moral female characters differ in important ways from the domestic angels of sentimental fiction. That tradition, basically religious in origin, exalted woman as the finer sensibility and moral conscience of her family, an idealization that persisted well into the era of literary realism. It was still alive by the early twentieth century, when Edith Wharton was emerging as a novelist of manners - manners, that is, as indices of moral codes. Although Wharton retained the guardian role for wives, she did so for other than sentimental reasons. Indeed, the fanatically moral female characters that we examine here (primarily in Sanctuary, The Touchstone, “Bewitched,” and “Afterward”) seem more demonic than angelic. Wharton's representation of women as moral arbiters was doubtless supported by literary convention, but her tyrannical female consciences stem from a personal psychological source - the internalized voice of her own mother.

Two significant problems face the student who wishes to read beyond Whitman's stunning achievements in “Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” The first problem concerns the clear changes in Whitman's voice and style in the post-Civil War poems. Where Emerson rather quizzically praised the 1855 Leaves of Grass as a “strange mixture of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald,” most twentieth-century critics remark disapprovingly of the abstract, archaic vocabulary and conventional poetic form of the late poetry. Though Whitman is often considered America's greatest poet, he is accorded greatness on the strength of the first ten years of his career.

The second problem is perhaps even more critical and relates to the shape of Whitman's career. If the prewar style represents Whitman at his best, then the twenty-seven years of his postwar writing should be read as a story of decline and failure. But this tragic narrative in fact mixes two plots - one concerning Whitman's life of illness and depression, particularly in the 1870s; the other concerning the majority of his public years as a writer, including the three postwar editions of Leaves, the so-called Deathbed Edition of 1891-2, and the voluminous prose of Democratic Vistas, Specimen Daysc, and Prose Works 1892.

In the entire range of American literature there is no stronger tie between a writer and a place than the tie between Henry Thoreau and Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there, on July 12, 1817. He grew up in Concord, returned there after college and, except for the brief time he boarded on Staten Island, New York, lived in Concord all his life. Concord was his only home; it provided him with much of his education and most of his literary subjects. Concord was his world, the pivot of his emotional, intellectual, and physical life. His attachment to Concord gave his writing a sense of place unsurpassed in American writing. Even Thoreau’s characteristic form, the excursion, derives in part from the powerful centripetal pull of Concord on Thoreau, on his need to return home after every outing. Almost every important aspect of his life and work is bound up, in one way or another, with Concord.

HIS NATIVE CONCORD

Of the writers who have made Concord, Massachusetts, a special precinct of the American imagination, only Henry Thoreau was born there. His paternal grandfather, Jean Thoreau, was a privateersman - not quite a pirate - born at St. Helier on the Isle of Jersey. Jean came to America involuntarily when he was nineteen, after being shipwrecked and rescued. Jean became John, married Jane Burns, the daughter of old Boston Quakers, and moved to Concord in 1800, where he bought what is now the north end of the Colonial Inn. He died in 1801, aged forty-seven, of tuberculosis aggravated by a cold caught while patrolling the streets of Boston against an anti-Catholic riot. A Mrs. Munroe of Concord told Thoreau she remembered his grandfather "calling one day and inquiring where blue vervain grew, which he wanted to make a syrup for his cough." The same tuberculosis would later kill Jean’s grandson. Jean’s son, John, was thirteen when the family moved to Concord. He became a storekeeper, a trader, a pencil-maker, and the father of Henry.

In 1921, excited by news of a plan to stage The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton responded immediately with proprietarial advice about getting the 1870s right - the moustaches (”not tooth brush ones, but curved & slightly twisted at the ends”), the clothes and the buttonhole flowers (violets by day, gardenias by night), the manners and the language (no slang, no Americanisms - “English was then the language spoken by American ladies & gentlemen”). Since she had insisted that she did not want the novel taken as a “costume piece” (Letters, 433), this punctiliousness might seem surprising. But in The Age of Innocence, social details matter: “As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference: not in itself but by its manifold implications” (1276). Reconstructing knowledge of half a century earlier, Wharton writes as if she has forgotten nothing. Social forms, her letters explain, are imprinted young and are impossible to erase. Her story, she tells one friend, was about “two people trying to live up to something . . . still 'felt in the blood'” (Letters, 433); anxious about the dramatization, she exclaims, “I could do every stick of furniture & every rag of clothing myself, for every detail of that far-off scene was indelibly stamped on my infant brain” (Letters, 439).

Edith Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision, is one of her most important and distinguished novels, yet it has received relatively little (and mostly superficial) attention, in spite of its initial popularity. Set in northern Italy in the late eighteenth century, it concerns the decisions that must be made by Odo Valsecca, a young man of liberal ideas who inherits a dukedom during the years of the French Revolution. Forced to choose between conflicting loyalties - those to the forces of social reform with which he allied himself before he came to power, or those of the feudal tradition to which he belongs by blood - Odo must define himself. Readers familiar with the life of Edith Wharton or the themes of her better-known New York books immediately realize the personal investment Wharton had in her hero's ambivalence and self-definition. Through him she was able to speculate about personal commitments and choices behind the mask of a different time, a different place, and a different gender. Adopting experimental poses, assuming various attitudes, and entertaining contradictory ideas, in fiction she could leave nothing resolved except the fact of the book: it existed, it was hers, it was being widely read. In becoming a writer of novels, she had assumed her rightful identity. Working in the medium of politics rather than literature, her hero was not so lucky.

At first glance, Summer (1917) does not seem to fit the mold of the novel of manners, the genre usually associated with Edith Wharton. This short novel primarily involves people of a lower class than is typical of the genre: there are no salons, grand balls, vast estates, sparkling wordplay, no meddling mother trying to marry off her daughter, no comic relief. Still, the story does involve a marriageable yet resistant young woman who must come to terms with the symbolic order (which can be thought of as the sociocultural matrix by which things and actions are interpreted) through courtship, social ritual, and, finally, marriage. But the foregrounding of Charity Royall's resistance to this incorporation on the one hand, and her apparent final capitulation to it on the other, has led readers of Summer down two different interpretive paths.

In brief, the plot of Summer revolves around Charity Royall, a young woman of obscure parentage who has been reared by two foster parents, Lawyer and Mrs. Royall. Mrs. Royall has been dead a few years when the narrative begins. Charity still lives with Lawyer Royall in a small Massachusetts town called North Dormer; although she yearns to escape, we learn that she has recently turned down a chance to attend boarding school because she feels obligated to Lawyer Royall, who would be “too lonesome” without her. However, Royall eventually tries to seduce his foster daughter, then twice asks her to be his wife: Charity is revolted. She instead falls in love with a visitor to North Dormer, an urbane young architect named Lucius Harney.

The works considered in this chapter comprise the published late natural history writings of Henry Thoreau, exclusive of material associated with The Maine Woods. This sounds simple enough, but explanation is required. Of the eight titles here discussed, six were published posthumously: “Walking, ” “Autumnal Tints, ” and “Wild Apples ” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, shortly after Thoreau’s death; “Huckleberries ” was published in 1970; and not until 1993 were “The Dispersion of Seeds ” and a selection from his “Wild Fruits ” manuscripts published for the first time in Faith in a Seed. Thoreau himself saw in print only a truncated version of “A Yankee in Canada, ” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853, and “The Succession of Forest Trees, ” in both the New York Tribune and Transactions of the Middlesex Agricultural Society in 1860. Because the publication dates do not reflect the order of composition, the latter order is followed here: “Walking ” (1851), “A Yankee in Canada ” (1851), “Autumnal Tints ” (1858-9), “Wild Apples ” (1859-Go), “Huckleberries ” (1860-11, “Wild Fruits ” (1860-1), “The Succession of Forest Trees ” (1860), and “The Dispersion of Seeds ” (1860-1).

While these published titles represent Thoreau’s most advanced work with their texts, the published versions of "Night and Moonlight" (1863) and The Moon (1927) have been shown to be nonauthorial editions and therefore are not discussed here. However, the surviving manuscripts of what apparently was once an intended book on the moon would be a welcome addition to the Thoreau canon, if someone can assemble and edit them. The same is true for the rest of the "Wild Fruits" manuscripts and for other late writings as well, including "The Fall of the Leaf." We should not, though, expect to read either Thoreau’s so-called Indian Book or his so-called Kalendar, because neither of these projects developed beyond the accumulation of raw materials, much of which was shifted to other works.

Thoreau is today considered the first major interpreter of nature in American literary history, and the first American environmentalist saint. This position did not come easily to him, however. Until almost a half-century after his death, he remained a rather obscure figure; and during his life and career - our main interest here - Thoreau had to struggle to arrive at the deep understanding of nature for which he is remembered today. He started adult life from a less advantageous position than we sometimes realize, as a village businessman’s son of classical education rather than as someone versed in nature through systematic botanical study, agriculture, or more than a very ordinary sort of experiential contact with it. Unlike William Bartram, Thoreau had no man of science for a father; unlike Thomas Jefferson, he had no agrarian roots. His first intellectual promptings to study and write about nature were from books, school, and literary mentors like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though he celebrated wildness, his was not the wildness of the moose but of the imported, cultivated escapee from the orchard that he celebrated in his late essay, "Wild Apples."' Thoreau’s career in pursuit of nature thus became one of fitful, irregular, experimental, although increasingly purposeful, self-education in reading landscape and pondering the significance of what he found there.