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The Syntax of Class
Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America Introduction
CLASS, CLASSIFICATION, AND CONFLICT IN 1851, the North American Review published a series of articles on political economy written by its editor, Francis Bowen, a man who would later assume the post of professor of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civic polity at Harvard. "There is a danger," Bowen wrote, "from which no civilized community is entirely free, lest the several classes of its society should nourish mutual jealousy and hatred, which may finally break out into open hostilities, under the mistaken opinion that their interests are opposite, and that one or more of them possess an undue advantage, which they are always ready to exercise by oppressing the others." In Europe, as the revolutions of 1848 had amply demonstrated, the danger of rising class consciousness was a clear and present one. But not so, according to Bowen, in the United States, where the "mistaken opinion" that classes stood opposed to one another could only be held by those who failed to appreciate the "peculiar mobility" of American society, the continuous displacement of master by man which tended, in Bowen's view, to blur, if not altogether obliterate, the boundaries separating theinterests of the "several classes" of society.
Properly considered-considered, that is, not in the light of Old World histories but of New World teleology-the existence of class divisions in America need not, Bowen insisted, signal antagonism, much less open hostility. In the absence of social distinctions sanctified by law or custom that "nothing short of a miracle" could change, the language of class was merely descriptive, identifying the broad social groupings natural to "civilized" communities. These groupings might be hierarchical in their arrangement, but in the American context they were entirely fluid in their composition. As Bowen used it, the language of class did not define a field of conflict where opposed interests would inevitably find expression in the political arena, or in the streets; on the contrary, he uneasily claimed, class provided neutral terms of official social description: it mapped the way stations along the route from pauperism to wealth open to each white, male American. Far from being irreconcilable, the interests of owner and laborer, master and man, like those of present and future, necessarily coincided as the latter lived in anticipation of the day when they would replenish the ranks of the former. The mobility of individual men would, in short, guarantee the harmony of interests of labor and capital and, by all rights, render the United States immune to the class warfare that wracked midcentury Europe.
Bowen was neither the first nor, certainly, the last proponent of what has come to be known as the doctrine of the harmony of interests, nor was his the only effort to deny the political saliency of a language of class. In the context of an emerging taxonomy of class that newly acknowledged the existence in America of broadly homogeneous social categories, his appeal to individual mobility in the interest of excising the prospect of class conflict was, in fact, reiterated by influential elites throughout the nineteenth century. But the tenacity of Bowen's argument was matched by the tenacity of the fears it sought to allay, fears that were greatly exacerbated by what appeared to members of the newly consolidating middle class to be growing evidence of class antagonism. By the time of the 1849 Astor Place riot, the sarcasm of Francis Grund's 1839 Aristocracy in America-"Why sir, this is a republican country; we have no public distinction of classes"-had already given way to portentousness. Reporting on the bloody confrontation between the "aristocracy" and the "people" outside New York's lavish opera house, the Philadelphia Public Ledger announced that "There is now in our country . . . what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny-a high class and a low class." Interpreted in many quarters as a manifestation of the rising "hatred of wealth and privilege" provoked by the "unjust distribution of the avails of industry," the Astor Place riot made clear the civic danger that might attend a classed society. The language of class, as even Bowen's anxious insistence on harmony suggested, was no neutral taxonomic tool. To publicly admit the reality of class in America was to open the nation to the threat of class conflict.
That an unjust distribution of the "avails" of industry had, in fact, divided their world into a "high" and a "low" class could hardly have escaped the notice of urban Americans. The enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of a few-by some estimates, more than half of the nation's wealth was held by 5 percent of the population by 1860-and the concomitant impoverishment of the many was a conspicuous feature not only of the older urban centers of the Northeast but of the new cities that proliferated along the transportation routes opening the Midwest to a flood of immigrants and young native-born men seeking employment. By 1850, the journalist-flaneur George Foster, famous for his voyeuristic glimpses of New York "by gaslight," not only knew that the "wicked and wretched classes" existed but regarded it as the "duty of the present age" to "discover the real facts of [their] actual condition ... so that Philanthropy and Justice may plant their blows aright."
Whether or not they embraced the duty of their age, middle-class Americans were appalled at the circumstances of the poor and were frightened, too, by accounts of an urban underclass among whom, according to the American Bible Society, "crimes against society are plotted, and the most savage passions stimulated to action." Prompted to ameliorative action, middle-class volunteers, many of them women, went into the slums to distribute tracts and Bibles, enroll children in Sunday schools, and minister to the destitute. Professionals and businessmen formed organizations to address the moral depravity and the looming social threat they ascribed to the poor. These organizations, like others of their kind, claimed that "A class more dangerous to the community ... can hardly be imagined" than the "wretched" and "degraded" population of slum dwellers. Even the sympathetic Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children's Aid Society, was unambiguous about the danger that lay incipient in the urban poor, imagining the inevitable "herding together" of street boys whose eventual consciousness of their power would lead them to lay waste to the city.
In a social world routinely, if sensationally, represented as divided between "millions" and "mills," "fashion" and "famine," or, in Lydia Maria Child's words, "magnificence and mud, finery and filth, diamonds and dirt," the failure of traditional modes of social description to accommodate new social and economic relationships heightened public awareness of class differences. But so too did the ranging of those differences across terrain already marked out by ideologies of race, gender, and ethnicity greatly complicate the rendering of these new relationships. The language of poverty and wealth did not address the new self-consciousness that prompted chattel slaves to forecast their liberation by laying claim to the titles of "man" and "woman," or encouraged feminists to recast women as "citizens," or disposed angry white workers to describe themselves, however reluctantly, as "slaves." As the spread of a market economy and the shift to industrial modes of production proletarianized the trades, as the "slavery of wages" confounded categories of labor and race alike, as abolitionists and women's rights advocates claimed new social and political identities for slaves and women, as traditional customs of deference fell away, and as urban disorder of all sorts increased, middle-class fears of conflict called both the nature and the saliency of longstanding vocabularies of social difference into question.
The emphasis on social taxonomy in the treatises of political economists like Bowen, the strategic deployment of moral vocabularies in the reform tracts of Brace and his allies, and George Foster's effort to disag-gregate the poor into the "wretched" and the "wicked" all reflect both the new awareness of class distinctions among Americans at midcentury and the increasingly problematic nature of social classification. In the quarter century following the revolutions of 1848, legislators, journalists, ministers, labor leaders, political radicals and fledgling political scientists, playwrights, and novelists would struggle to find a social vocabulary adequate to the task of naming, ordering, interpreting, and containing the effects of class difference in a period that saw not only the emergence of new social groupings and new kinds of people but one in which new class formations challenged the ideals of traditional republicanism and political democracy.
Not only Bowen's North American Review but other such influential journals as Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review and Southern Quarterly devoted their pages to articles on "Abuses of Classification," "The True Theory of Labor and Capital," and "The Distribution of Wealth," while the Democratic Review printed titles like "Poverty and Misery, versus Reform and Progress." Elsewhere, in sketches like Harper's "The Factory Boy" or Fanny Fern's New York Ledger tale "Cash" and in illustrated papers featuring bootblacks, street toughs, Bowery b'hoys and their brazen g'hals, Broadway Brummels and black dandies, journalists and artists labored to delineate new social types. Reformers like Brace wrote tracts urging the employment or, in the case of girls, the domestication of the "dangerous classes," while sensationalists like P. H. Skinner detailed their violence in novels like The Little Ragged Ten Thousand (1853). In the increasingly class-segregated theater, "Mose," the volunteer fireman, brought working-class audiences to their feet, and pageants of city life like "The Seamstress of New York" (1851), "Katy, the Hot Corn Girl" (1854), and "The Rag-Picker of New York" (1858) joined the most famous and long-lived of the working-girl melodramas, Francis S. Smith's "Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl, or Death at the Wheel" (1871). Minstrel shows, in the meantime, used blackface and transvestism to negotiate the complexities of class and ethnicity for the entertainment of white workingmen.
Likewise, from the faded aristocracy of the house of the seven gables to the orphan girls of domestic fiction, from the exploited factory operatives and domestic servants to the street "arabs" and the beleaguered free blacks who take center stage in midcentury novels, the fiction of this period recorded the deep unease that attended the naming of class in the United States. It is with these last that this book is concerned.
The Syntax of Class explores the literary expression of the crisis of classification that occupied public discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. It focuses on a group of novels written, like most novels, by middle-class city dwellers, in this case by American women and men living, almost without exception, in the urban Northeast. Their particularity lies in the fact that they tell stories of people who are not-or are not yet, or are never to be-themselves members of the middle class. Explicitly, as an element of the narrative itself, or implicitly, as a condition of their production-or both-these novels entail a definitive encounter between members of different classes.
The novels under consideration here are not offered as representative of the mass of fiction of this period, although in many respects they typify, as a group, the genres, narrative formulae, and social concerns that held the attention of the genteel reader. Reformist in their impulse and protorealist in their form, however, these novels are, for the most part, familiar ones, recently "recovered" from historical oblivion of one sort or another and much taught. Commonly understood to belong in one or another of the "alternative" canons structured along the axes of race or gender, they are read accordingly: the plight of the female artist, the problem of marriage, or the tragedy of the mulatto supplanting wage slavery, cross-class community, economic mobility, or "proletarianization" as the subjects of scholarly consideration. Class, that is, is rendered the largely invisible third term in critical discussions that claim race, class, and gender as their heuristic terms. The unevenness of these readings is no accident, nor does it represent a critical failure. On the contrary, as I hope to demonstrate, it mirrors the representational quandary confronted by midcentury writers of "social fiction."
The title of this study comes from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner, at the end of which the middle-class narrator observes a "syntax" in the "brown face and bent hands and poor dress and awkward motions" of Sip, the mill girl. An orderly arrangement of terms indicating mutual relationship, a syntax is, on the one hand, contentless, and on the other, essential to the making of meaning. What follows is a series of experiments in reading, in parsing the syntax of class in midcentury fictions. These experiments are framed on one side by the uneasy attention of midcentury authors to class, and on the other by the equally uneasy elision of class from current critical discourse. My object is not to capture the full range of novelistic expression at midcentury, but rather to explore in close detail the formal negotiation of the complexities of class difference in particular novels written in a period in which the adequacy of social taxonomies and the implications of new class formations were sharply at issue. My aim, that is, is to think about how, precisely, distinctions of class are rendered in midcentury novels, and how, in turn, those renderings circulate in and through a larger cultural discourse about the dangers of class conflict.
I begin from the assumption that social taxonomies and novelistic representation are intimately connected and, moreover, that the instability of the former inflects the latter. Insofar as the conventional characters of a society inhabit its narratives and comprise a body of representations variously embraced, repudiated, debated, and deployed in the actual struggles of historical actors, that body of representations has itself to be made and has, moreover, to be made, if not out of, at least with reference to, the available discourses of social identity. This is, in one sense, only to suggest the obvious constraints within which the novelist works-even the eccentric must be recognizable as such. It is not, however, to assume that writer and reader are in prior agreement about which of the available social vocabularies is appropriate to the representation of social difference, much less that reader and writer share a set of "common social properties." Rather, like Gareth Stedman-Jones's political actors, writer and reader are together engaged in constructing a representation both of those shared social properties and of the social identities of others. To say, then, that The Syntax of Class concerns the negotiation of class in a set of historically specific narratives that hinge on cross-class encounters is to say two quite different things. First, it is to assert that the contests over the meaning of class I have sketched above-over both the anterior social reality the language of class seeks to capture and the social prospect to which it points-frame the novelistic representation of class difference. But beyond this, it is to argue that the body of representations produced in the novels under discussion here not only shape and are shaped by the experience of class but actively participate in the process of articulating, mediating, and displacing class difference and managing class conflict.
A number of difficulties attend a project of this kind. Perhaps the most obvious one concerns the status of the language of class itself in the culture of the United States. It has been argued that, however "real" the structure of class in America, Americans have no "native discourse" of class in which to render their experience of that structure. Lacking a vocabulary, as it were, in which to express the experience of class-its complacencies as well as its injuries and its struggles-and deeply committed, moreover, to liberal individualism and the promise of open mobility, Americans displace the reality of class into discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and other similarly "locked-in" categories of individual identity. This displacement, in turn, distorts sexual and racial relationships by redistributing conflicts of class across these other domains. Whether or not the language of class is "native" to Americans-and certainly, elite theorists like Francis Bowen expressed considerable anxiety about the appropriateness of its use in reference to the republican United States, while other midcentury Americans emphatically laid claim to class identities-such patterns of displacement and their concomitant distortions are evident in the construction of social identities and the representation of cross-class engagement in the midcentury novels under discussion here.
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Excerpted from The Syntax of Class by Amy Schrager Lang Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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