Volume 25, Number 13 · August 17, 1978
Democratic Vistas
By Willie Lee Rose
The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison
by H. Bruce Franklin
Oxford University Press, 337 pp., $13.95
The most familiar tradition of literary criticism in America assigns the special features of our writing to the experience of abundance, individualism, and Adam's release from complicity in past history. Professor Bruce Franklin's new book challenges this tradition on all points, by concentrating exclusively on oppression in America and its victims, as individuals and collectively. Franklin's only Adam of Innocence is Billy Budd, who would be hard to miss, and the Handsome Sailor here is seen as a symbolic sacrifice to the massed power of the capitalist state in the person of Captain Vere, 'the bland advocate and moral philosopher whose own hands remain spotlessly white while he sanctions the killing of the most innocent among the oppressed.' The illusions of innocence of other American authors' heroes are out on the periphery of Franklin's concern, for the heroes of the underside of American history are presumed to have no illusions.
Review, 4281 words
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