266 American Literature
Certain kind of fiction (apologues) and Hawthorne another kind (dramatic actions), we can proceed to evaluate how well each writer realized the possibilities of his or her chosen form. And once we have done that, we can then try to weigh their relative claims as writer of fiction. Let us grant that our standards and assumptions are not ordained by some higher power, critical or metaphysical; let us grant too that our own individual judgments may be culturally biased. Is this really a good argument to stop making such judgments? As critics why must we pursue “ideological codes” instead of aesthetic excellence, as Kolodny says the feminist critic wishes to do? The pursuit of ideological codes is perfectly appropriate, but so, I would argue, is the pursuit of aesthetic excellence. So long as the critic gives sufficient indication of what he or she means by such excellence, I can see no reason why we should not continue the serious critical game of assessing those human artifacts we take to be literature.
It follows, of course, that we should also continue to structure our anthologies-our canons- in the light of such assessments. We should be skeptical but not dismissive about the standards involved. Nina Baym is right, for instance, when she argues that the major American literary histories have tended to take “Americanness” as the crucial feature of an American classic while defining “Americanness” in terms of appropriate to white males but not to most of the people who are in fact Americans. But I think that Baym and others draw the wrong conclusions from her evidence. If we wish to write literary histories in which “Americanness” is the crucial criterion for selection and evaluation, then what we need are better models than those provided in the famous literary histories Baym discusses. Better yet, we might wonder whether the kind of cultural history written by Leo Marx, Henry Nash Smith, and others (no matter how skill-
For these formal distinctions as applied to English novelists, see Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964). For a booklength discussion of modern apologues, see David H. Richter, Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974). Tompkins cites neither Sacks nor Richter, but she rather unmistakably treats writers such as Warner and Stowe as apologians. For a discussion of Hawthorne as a creator of dramatic actions, see my article, “Another Look at the American Romance,” Modern Philology, 78 (1981), 379-92.
“Dancing Through the Minefield,” p. 147.
“Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” in The New Feminist Criticism, pp. 63-80