American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

Cindy Weinstein, Christopher Looby

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231520775
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rethinking the category of aesthetics in light of recent developments in literary theory and social criticism, the contributors to this volume showcase the interpretive possibilities available to those who bring politics, culture, ideology, and conceptions of identity into their critiques. Essays combine close readings of individual works and authors with more theoretical discussions of aesthetic theory and its relation to American literature. In their introduction, Weinstein and Looby argue that aesthetics never left American literary critique. Instead, the essay casts the current "return to aesthetics" as the natural consequence of shortcomings in deconstruction and new historicism, which led to a reconfiguration of aesthetics.

Subsequent essays demonstrate the value and versatility of aesthetic considerations in literature, from eighteenth-century poetry to twentieth-century popular music. Organized into four groups—politics, form, gender, and theory—contributors revisit the canonical works of Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen Crane, introduce the overlooked texts of Constance Fenimore Woolson and Earl Lind, and unpack the complexities of the music of The Carpenters. Deeply rooted in an American context, these essays explore literature's aesthetic dimensions in connection to American liberty and the formation of political selfhood.

Contributors include Edward Cahill, Ivy G. Wilson, June Ellison, Dorri Beam, Christopher Castiglia, Christopher Looby, Wendy Steiner, Cindy Weinstein, Trish Loughran, Jonathan Freedman, Elisa New, Dorothy Hale, Mary Esteve, Eric Lott, Sianne Ngai

[ PART 1 ]

Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom

[ 1 ]

Liberty of the Imagination in Revolutionary America

EDWARD CAHILL

John Trumbull’s Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts (1770), read at the “Public Commencement in New-Haven,” makes one of the earliest American arguments for the moral efficacy of aesthetic pleasure. Borrowing liberally from Henry Home, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), Trumbull declares that the “elegant entertainments of polite literature … ennoble the soul, purify the passions” and give “delicacy and refinement to our manners.” Although he laments that the fine arts are “too much undervalued by the [American] public … neglected by the youth in our seminaries of science [and] … considered as mere matters of trifling amusement,” he counters that they are in fact basic to “the common purposes of life” and necessary to the cultivation of virtue. Indeed, he insists that the experience of art and imagination functions as a kind of moral bellwether in a free society: “I appeal to all persons of judgment whether they can rise from reading a fine Poem, viewing any masterly work of Genius, or hearing a harmonious concert of Music, without feeling an openness of heart, and an elevation of mind, without being more sensible of the dignity of human nature, and despising whatever tends to debase and degrade it.” There is much to be said about these prospective scenes of aesthetic experience and their purported effects. Although Trumbull takes for granted his audience’s experience with a range of artistic forms, his “appeal” suggests that their moral significance comes as a kind of revelation—of something always implicitly known but somehow never before acknowledged. His correlation of aesthetic experience with “openness of heart,” “elevation,” and “dignity” implies that the nature of virtue is discovered as much in human feelings as in rational discourse. Yet we also hear in the corresponding threat of debasement and degradation the urgency of the present colonial conflict and the stakes of political action. Only six months after the Boston Massacre and at the outset of the crisis that would result five years later in the War for Independence, Trumbull suggests that in aesthetic experience we become “sensible” to the meaning of liberty.¹

The eighteenth-century correlation of liberty and the fine arts was popularized by Longinus’s On the Sublime but reiterated by such writers as the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Richard Price. “Liberty,” writes Longinus, “produces fine Sentiments in Men of Genius, it invigorates their Hopes, excites an honourable Emulation … [it is] that copious and fertile Source of all that is beautiful and of all that is great.” Trumbull likewise asserts that an “unconquered spirit of freedom” is a necessary condition for the advancement of aesthetic culture; but his claims are also specific to the colonial world he inhabits. America is particularly susceptible to literary achievement, he argues, not only because its citizens “very much excel in the force of natural genius” but also because here education is “diffused through all ranks of people.” This invocation of the broad dissemination of learning to a freedom-loving people thus suits the essay’s dominant theme of translatio studii, the western movement of learning and the fine arts. As Trumbull traces the cyclical achievements of literature and the shifting forces of freedom from the Ancient Greece and Rome of Homer and Virgil across the early modern Britain of Shakespeare and Swift to revolutionary America’s “fair prospect” of literary fame, he describes a society whose literary ambitions are bound up in its “late struggles for liberty.” Conversely, he argues, “Polite letters at present are much on the decline in Britain,” where freedom has been debased and degraded by an oppressive Parliament. Not only are modern British writers “followers in the path of servile imitation” who “fetter the fancy with the rules of method, and damp all the ardour of aspiring invention,” but, at the same time, their “men of Genius … in contempt of the critic chains, throw off all appearance of order and connection, sport in the wildest sallies of imagination, and adopt the greatest extravagance of humour.” In other words, British writers are both too restrained and too free, both devoted to arbitrary rules and unregulated by any rule at all.²

The ideal of moderate political liberty implicit in Trumbull’s critique derives variously from British traditions of common law, natural law, and Protestant theology. Forged in the violence of seventeenth-century political struggles, “British Liberty” functioned as both a description of the nation’s constitutional and representative government and a potent ideological myth that distinguished Britons from less free and enlightened peoples. Central to its conception, however, was the notion that liberty was always bounded by and exercised within authoritative limits. It watched jealously for the abuses of tyranny and the humiliations of “servility,” but it also assumed the possibility of its own transgressions in the form of license or “extravagance.” Often opposed to the liberty of man in his natural state, British liberty was understood as a creature of society, born of essential human freedom but sustained by a necessary adjustment to the demands of political community. Not only were its limitations rooted in law and thus never arbitrary, they were also consensual, accepted as legitimate by the very persons whose freedom they circumscribed. In the wake of the American Revolution, the idea of liberty evolved into a more abstract and broadly conceived notion of self-determination whose meanings subjected all forms of hierarchy and exclusion to scrutiny. But this challenge to British liberty was soon countered in the 1780s and 1790s by a conservative return to the discourse of authority and constraint. If such an idea of liberty failed to include Africans, Indians, women, or men without property, this is because liberty was understood as a kind of property itself, granted only to individuals thought capable of consenting to its complex and often contradictory demands.³

During the revolutionary era, liberty was celebrated, explained, and explored by Anglo-American writers in a variety of literary genres, from poetry and sermons to periodical essays and treatises of political theory. But it also found expression in works of aesthetic theory, including those ideas that informed Trumbull’s Essay. Such texts as Kames’s Elements, Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759), Thomas Reid’s Inquiry Into the Human Mind (1764), and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) were collected in American libraries, taught in American colleges, and redacted or reviewed in American magazines because they offered authoritative discussions of pleasure, association, genius, and taste and taught a rising generation of readers about the virtues of mental gratification and the harmonious order of the imagination.⁴ But, as I will argue in this essay, they also offered a nuanced language for articulating and negotiating the problem of liberty. Debates about aesthetic perception cast the liberating fulfillment of mental pleasures against the dissipating slavery of bodily ones. Ideas of imagination, association, genius, and taste turn on distinctions between the autonomous, inventive, individualizing power of the creative mind and restrictions implied by logical relation, the rules of criticism, and the claims of judgment. American writers were particularly sensitive to this homology of aesthetic and political liberty and its implications for both the pleasures of the imagination and matters of national polity.⁵ As we shall see, in their critical engagements with aesthetic theory, and in literary texts informed by it, they aimed to delineate the difficult relationship between citizenship and subjectivity and to chart the modes of perception, imagination, and judgment that made liberty in a republic possible.⁶

The language of liberty is most immediately apparent in aesthetic theory’s consistent protest against arbitrary and inflexible rules. Joseph Addison introduces his widely read 1712 Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” by distinguishing sharply between “Mechanical Rules” and “the very Spirit and soul of fine Writing.” Likewise, Kames scoffs at the idea that the classical poets “were entitled to give [the] law to mankind; and that nothing now remains but blind obedience to their arbitrary will.” These writers object to what they saw as the sanctity and unthinking quality of such rules, turning instead to aesthetic ideas whose meanings were defined by experience rather than laws of another’s making. According to Blair’s Lectures, extracted in the 1783 Boston Magazine, “The rules of criticism are not formed by an induction, a priori … [or] a train of abstract reasoning independent of facts and observations.” An “Essay on Genius” in Matthew Carey’s 1789 Columbian Magazine similarly holds that “whoever is, in any degree, possessed of original powers, ought not to cramp and trammel them, by servile imitation, or the rules of mechanical criticism” (347). Throughout this period, all forms of “servility,” “slavish imitation,” and “blind,” “mechanical” pedantry are contrasted against the powerful, dynamic, and autonomous liberty of the imagination. The rejection of rules thus sweeps away the philosophical dogma of the past and, in doing so, invests the empiricism that replaces it with a language of liberty that would define eighteenth-century aesthetic theory’s most important claims.⁷

As with most revolutions, however, British aesthetics substitutes one form of authority for another, rejecting arbitrary rules for those derived from experience, nature, or the “universal principles” of the human mind. Addison’s project, for example, is precisely “to lay down Rules for the acquirement” of taste; and James Beattie holds that, while to “depart from a mechanical rule, may be consistent with the soundest judgment,” the “violation of an essential rule discovers want of sense.” If such writers rebuffed both Aristotelian rules and “mechanical critics,” that is, they were equally determined to avoid the kind of relativism or subjectivism that deprived society of ordered relations and let loose the unpredictable forces of passion and desire. Thus, although Kames has “taken arms to rescue modern poets from the despotism of modern critics,” he assures us that he “would not be understood to justify liberty without any reserve” or endorse an “unbounded license with relation to place and time” (416). Such “liberty” and “license,” he warns, would not only result in “faulty” art but also alienated artists and audiences. As David Hume writes, although “to check the sallies of imagination” would likewise lead to “insipid” poetry, poets must nonetheless be “confined by rules of art, discovered to the author, either by genius or observation.” In short, aesthetics, like politics, demands both liberty and its constraint.⁸

Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of the moral question of pleasure. A 1775 Royal American Magazine essay, “On Pleasure,” for example, warns that, while “it is essential to human nature to be delighted,” yet “there should be boundaries fixed beyond which limits [we] should never venture.” Likewise, the 1789 American Moral and Sentimental Magazine holds that pleasure, in its “boundless fields of licentiousness,” exercises an “extravagant dominion” over both men and states. In countless texts of the period, pleasure either confirmed one’s essential liberty or led to some form of moral or physical enslavement. Its effects, however, typically depended on whether such pleasure ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Aesthetics and the Politics of Freedom
• Part 2: Aesthetics and the Representation of Sexuality
• Part 3: Aesthetics and the Reading of Form
• Part 4: Aesthetics and the Question of Theory
• Afterword: Are Aesthetic Models the Best Way to Talk About the Artfulness of Literary Texts?
• List of Contributors
• Index