Volume 17, Number 4 · September 23, 1971
It's Your Fault, Henry James
By Mark L. Krupnick
The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History
by Quentin Anderson
Knopf, 320 pp., $7.95
Ever since D. H. Lawrence published his Studies in Classic American Literature in 1922, books on nineteenth-century American literature have been an ambitious form. Two generations of critics have read the classic American texts—Emerson's essays, Poe's stories, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick—as if they were a pathologist's slides revealing a national sickness, and have variously diagnosed them as a regressive yearning for pastoral simplicity, an incapacity for mature sexual relationships, a separation of morals from social manners, etc. Quentin Anderson, a professor of English at Columbia, has drawn on all of these ideas but seems more inspired by Lawrence himself. Lawrence argued that the American consciousness is characterized by its rejection of the European faith in the legitimacy of authority. 'Henceforth be masterless' is the message that ought to have been written at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Anderson's book attacks this anarchical, antinomian strain in the American sensibility and affirms the necessity of fathers and of the law.
Review, 2990 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |