Post-Civil War culture clash focus of English prof’s book

Susan Goodman, UD professor of English: “The title refers to the conflicts that the writers of this era assumed to exist. It was a conflict between the classes and the masses and between civilization and chaos.”

1:53 p.m., June 29, 2004--Although the War Between the States ended in 1865, another kind of civil war was looming on the horizon—a clash of cultures that would be fought in the boardrooms and dining rooms of middleclass-America, and would last well into the 20th century.

In “Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880-1940,” Susan Goodman, UD professor of English, examines how a select group of writers used the concept of manners to explore and explain the political, economic and racial undercurrents that helped to define and shape modern American society.

“I started with writers from the Civil War to World War II who were seen primarily as being novelists of manners,” Goodman said. “These novelists wrote about the changes in manners and how these changes reflect changes in American society.”

While the selected writers may have explored different aspects of manners, including patterns of speech, gesture, decoration and dress, Goodman said they all agreed that unlocking the secrets to any society lay in a close look at its manners.

“The title refers to the conflicts that the writers of this era assumed to exist,” Goodman said. “It was a conflict between the classes and the masses and between civilization and chaos.”

The writers featured in the book include William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow and Jessie Fauset.

Howells was a prolific writer, with more than 100 books to his credit, including 40 novels. Although he also wrote criticism, poetry and plays, it was as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, that Howells brought many of the era’s most significant novelists to the attention of the American reading public.

“Although Howells is associated with a certain kind of realism, if you look at whom he supported, you see that his own definition of realism really changed with the times,” Goodman said. “Howells also published James, and, without his support, James would have fallen by the wayside.”

In novels such as “A Hazard of New Fortunes” and “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” Howells was successful in pushing the envelope of the novel of manners to include those of the middleclass, Goodman said.

The result of this effort, Goodman notes in the chapter on Howells, is that his “focus on the middle class, its prejudices and politics, its morals and manners, allowed him to survey a changing American population from its rural and urban poor to its gilded millionaires.”

Goodman also said that in surveying this American clash of cultures, Howells came to view manners as “those thoughts and actions that make nations as well as individuals ‘humanly, spiritually,’ themselves.”

While most readers and critics of Henry James would not object to his being described as a novelist of manners, Goodman said making the same case for Willa Cather required a different approach and interpretation.

“Willa Cather is never seen as being a novelist of manners,” Goodman said. “I wanted to show that she relied on the same kind of novelistic devices that novelists of manners use.”

Goodman said that Cather saw the interaction of manners reflected in such works as “Death Comes to the Archbishop,” “One of Ours” and “The Professor’s House,” as being a definitive representation of just what it meant to be American.

Jessie Fauset, described by Langston Hughes as one of the “midwives” of the Harlem Renaissance, was known primarily as the literary editor of The Crisis, a magazine founded by her mentor W.E.B. DuBois.

Fauset used this post to recover forgotten black heroes and history and to promote the careers of writers who would later achieve recognition, including Hughes, Countee Cullen, Clause McKay, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontempts and Zora Neale Hurston, Goodman said.

“She [Fauset] thought people should use the best novelists as models,” Goodman said. “She was very interested in the history of slavery and of ‘passing’ from one race to another.

Between 1924 and 1933, Fauset explored these issues in novels such as “There is Confusion” (1924), “Plum Bun,” “The Chinaberry Tree: An American Novel” (1931) and “Comedy: American-Style” (1933).

“By focusing on interracial and intraracial relationships, Fauset not only helped to bring the black, urban, middle class into the mainstream of American literature,” Goodman said, “she also further politicized the novel of manners by focusing on the theme of passing, or the exchanging of one race for another.”

For Goodman, who teaches courses in 19th- and 20th- century American literature and English education at UD, writing “Civil Wars” allowed her to bring together much of the research that she has been doing for a number of years.

“I have been interested in the topic of manners ever since graduate school, and have written about Henry James and Ellen Glasgow,” Goodman said. “This book incorporated a lot of research that I have done and it also allowed me to bring together people from the past from a new perspective.”

Other works by Goodman include “Ellen Glasgow: A Biography” (1999), “Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle” (1994) and “Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals” (1990). Goodman also co-edited two volumes of essays “Edith Wharton: A Forward Glance” (1999) and “Femmes de Conscience: Aspects du Feminisme American, 1848-1875” (1994).

Goodman, who began teaching at UD in 1994, received her bachelor’s degree in English teaching from the University of New Hampshire. She also holds a master’s degree in counseling, a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in American Literature, all from the University of New Hampshire.

Effective Sept. 1, she will be H. Fletcher Brown Chair of Humanities at UD in recognition of her achievement as a scholar and a teacher and her outstanding service to the University.

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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