112 American Literature
Unity is propitiated, simply cannot be understood without reference to contemporary popular women’s fiction and a model of the interdependence of “the classic” and “the popular novel” that pictures the first not merely as distancing itself from the second but as drawing nourishment from it. Likewise, the contrast between (say) Thoreau’s zealous craftsmanly dedication to rewriting Walden and the literary professionalism that mid-nineteenth-century American women writers manifest much more abashedly than do the canonical male writers should not be taken as a mark of caste difference (The hack versus the artist with a conscience) so much as a relationship of complements notwithstanding difference in which the male writers evince a displaced form of the scribbling women’s entrepreneurialism, while the latter exhibit a version of the former’s sententious high-mindedness.
Fourth, and related to the previous point, feminist revisionism will force us to complicate our notion of an American literary mainstream. As noted above, the wilderness tradition in American narrative will have to be redescribed as essentially a male tradition. The already tottering romance hypothesis (British writers write novels, Americans write romances) may have been given its death blow by feminist studies demonstrating the essentially novelistic character of mid-nineteenth-century popular women’s fiction, which thus ironically looks much more avant-garde than most of the work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.
Fifth, feminist studies force one to ponder in new ways the ideology of genre. What are we to make of the fact that the first foundations of local colorism are laid by male-dominated genres like topographical poetry of the late eighteenth century and the essay-sketch tradition exemplified by Irving, but in its mature
The basis for the greater pragmatic forthrightness of mid-nineteenth century women writer’s accounts of their literary objectives, as against the comparatively idealized accounts of most male canonical figures, is worthy of more intensive study. For further comment, see Buell, New England Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 378, 381, 414, as well as Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 164-79 (on women’s literary professionalism); and Michael Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985) (for the male canonical figures).
Baym, Woman’s Fiction, pp. 36-37, points out the novelistic character of the works she surveys; Philip Fisher, Hard Fact (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), extends this insight in a different key by visualizing sentimentalist ideology as in some respects a backrop to the realist-naturalist tradition.