4.0 out of 5 stars
The Novel of Purpose and British Imperialism, December 22, 2009
This review is from: The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Hardcover)
"The Novel of Purpose" makes a case for the imbricated relationship between Anglo-American realism---the "dominant narrative mode of the nineteenth century"---and social reform movements. Claybaugh lays out the main premises of the book in clear prose. The first premise touches on material culture and print capitalism. Claybaugh posits that social reform movements would not be the same without print culture: textual representations were how reformist ideas entered homes and spread throughout the public sphere. Her second premise or claim delimits the geo-historical scope of both the texts under analysis and the social reform movements they engaged: the reform projects for which Claybaugh provides textual or literary history were "crucially Anglo-American in scope"--that is, these reformist texts circulated transatlantically between Britain and America---and reformers in either place worked together on what were essentially national projects of progress and improvement. Her third claim contributes to the body of scholarship that constructs the category of literary realism. She contends that literary realism, as practiced in "Anglo-America" in contrast with its continental iterations, is indebted to reformist writings for representing things "as they really are" with higher purposes than mere aesthetics or entertainment.
I find Claybaugh's framework somewhat limited by geography, language, and genre. Arguably, these are not limits but together form a particularized and strategic focus. But rather than acknowledging her exclusions as a strategy to illuminate certain things about the relationship between Britain and America, Claybaugh manages to portray the field of English-language literature as coterminous with the transatlantic (13-14) and the scope of social reform as coterminous with a "transatlantic" comprised solely of England and America: "What the history of the antislavery campaign suggests, and the history of other nineteenth-century reform movements confirms, is that the most fundamental questions of national identity were asked and answered in the context of the Anglo-American world" (29). She does not address here the basic ideological contradiction of nineteenth-century western (liberal) political modernities, that England (and America) could passionately argue the abolition of slavery while maintaining a vast empire and denying colonized subjects basic human rights such as self-determination. She also does not describe ways that the colonies participated in the exchange of ideas, texts, and reformist figures (I am thinking of Pandita Ramabai's tour through America, of the reformist agendas shared between late nineteenth-century British feminists and Indian subjects, and so on).
Some of the big questions I entertained while reading this book were as follows:
1. Is social reform, at some fundamental level, always a national concern? Claybaugh's answer is along the lines of "yes, and": reform is constitutive of nationhood but is also a transnational phenomenon (25-8 and 58). If social reform is essentially a concern of the nations England and America (taken together or separately), a preoccupation of the imagined community, then can it be said that her emphasis on transatlantic circulation of reformist texts, reformer's bodies and discourse enacts a reification of a racial-power configuration? That is, is the Anglo-American public sphere also a racially privileged social formation---one that coheres not only linguistically but also on the basis of certain shared imperialist fantasies of superiority and domination? Does social reform appear to be uniquely Anglo-American (26) only because of the particular reforms that Claybaugh takes up? What if her purview had included the "problem" of prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts that the British implemented in various parts of their empire?
2. What is useful about a transatlantic framework? Claybaugh's book does not adequately answer this basic question. I offer P. J. Marshall's recent (2005) book on the historically triangulated relationship among Britain, America, and India as one example of my "Eurasian" methodological preference (and my tendency to want always to "provincialize Europe" where possible). In "
The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750-1783," Marshall links Britain's loss of the thirteen American colonies to the conquest of Bengal and the establishment of empire in the subcontinent.
3. What is the relationship between social reform and empire? I see at least three possible ways to approach this question. First, there is the Mrs. Jellyby critique of the way that work in the empire is a mis-allocation of labor and resources that ought to be directed at reforms in the "domestic" space (metropole/home). Second, there is the argument that the civilizing mission is reform writ large via spreading the virtues of western-style domesticity in the colonies (see Comaroff and Comaroff). Third, there is the co-existence of indigenous reform projects in the colonies with proto-nationalist longings.
4. Does the functionalism (or didacticism, "purposefulness") of the novel of purpose preclude aesthetic value? In "
Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Oxford India Paperbacks)," Meenakshi Mukherjee sketches the emergence of the novel in India, pointing out that the European colonial enterprise shaped Indian prose by material and ideological means. The establishment of printing presses (early 19th century) in India was spearheaded by missionaries (to publish translations of the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress) and continued by the East India Company in order to train its officers in Indian languages. Some of the earliest texts produced by these presses were "novels of purpose" written by missionaries or native Christian converts. Surprisingly, the "purpose" of these novels was not primarily conversion, but rather the civilizing mission. In other words, these early Christian novels sought to disseminate western ideals of civilization, such as less exploitative treatment of landless laborers, individual spousal choice and marital compatibility. However, early novels written by non-Christians also made reformist arguments, tentatively and through (rudimentary) realistic representations of character, event, and setting, for widow remarriage, women's education, and even reform of religious customs. Many of these topics were precisely those being taken up by Indian reformers at the same time---in reformist pamphlets and non-narrative verse---in the later nineteenth century. Mukherjee dismisses these early novels of purpose as propaganda not "worth serious literary attention" (23). It is only when the novels transcend their didactic purpose, their "reformist zeal," that they take on any literary value (26, 30). Mukherjee writes, "using fiction primarily as propaganda---be it for Christian, Muslim, or Hindu values---has its own built-in problems" (36). She sees the novel of purpose as a contradiction in terms: the realist novel must endow its characters with freedom-of-choice, whereas the propagandistic novel necessarily dictates its characters' lives in order to make its arguments.
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