Seduction and the Class Struggle-I

...Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared...

...A literature which does not work practically, for the advancement of social reform, or which is too dignified or too good to picture the great wrongs of the great mas of humanity, is just good for nothing at all...

...It was in the '90s...

...is surely not uncongenial to the great bleeding heart of sentimental America...

...but it is a religious fantasy as well as a political one, a poor man's apocalypse...

...says the title-page illustration of Lippard's novel...

...His fallen woman, Roxana, is a Negress, about whose seduction by a white man (accomplished before the action proper of the book begins) Twain himself refuses to be incensed...

...This is the populist vision of upper-class life and the economic system which maintains it translated directly from private fantasy to fiction, without emendation or expurgation...

...the readers of Pamela had cried: and Lippard's readers echo more crudely...

...Gangster and banker, clergyman and bawd, lawyer and doctor—these are presumably the real rulers of society caught off guard...

...Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson provides even fewer archetypal satisfactions...

...and in 1899, Theodore Dreiser, at the summer hume of his closest friend Arthur Henry ("If he had been a girl...

...A much lesser novelist, Albion W. Tourgee, had in his first novel, 'Toinette (1876), pictured the revolt of a slave girl, who after the Civil War demands marriage of the Southern gentleman who has been her lover and is the father of her child...

...Maggie is a good book neither in the critics' nor the audience's sense...

...Psychologically, of course, popular radicalism has always taken advantage of the tendency of relatively naive and uneducated people to project on the upper classes which they despise the erotic and sadist fantasies of which they are ashamed, thus providing themselves with the luxury of at once indulging and disavowing their own most shamefully masturbatory dreams...

...I would have married him...

...WRITERS and WRITING Seduction and the Class Struggle — I By Leslie A. Fiedler SURELY ONE OF the most difficult modern novelists to assess is Theodore Dreiser, whose reputation a half-century after Sister Carrie remains moot—and whose meanings continue to baffle us...

...all is offered as a true revelation of what really goes on inside...

...it is only the book of a good writer...

...In plot...

...Her cheeks were all aglow, her blue eyes swam in a hazy dimness...

...In 1893, a twenty-one-year-old writer called Stephen Crane published Maggie—A Girl of the Streets...

...No, no, but still it is music—that gushing of the Wronger's Blood...

...Brighter grew the glow on her cheek, close pressed the hand on her bosom, warmer and higher arose that bosom in the light...

...Closer and more close, the hand of Lorimer pressed against the heaving bosom, with but the slight folds of the night-robe between...

...The violent, drunken mother acting out her expected indignation over the fall of her daughter, and the stupid, brutalized brother going through the standard motions of vengeance are travesties...

...what moral indignation he feels is directly against slavery as an institution and especially against sons who betray their mothers, rather than against Virginia gentlemen who betray slave girls...

...It is by all odds the most false and forced passage in a novel not seldom false and forced, Lippard's amends for having lingered so lasciviously over the details of the rape, and for having encouraged the reader to relish those details with him...

...This issue Twain scarcely seems to know exists...

...He thought of his novels, stories and pamphlets (he published in some 12 years 23 books) as weapons in the holy war of labor...

...no respectable publisher could be persuaded to issue it, and the privately printed edition signed "Johnston Smith" remained unsold, despite Crane's attempt to promote it by having four men sit in front of the El all day reading it...

...Yes, Yes, I would dance over the Corse...

...At the end of the main action of the book, editorial is translated into dithyramb, a song of triumph sung by a brother who has just avenged, with "the life current of Libertine," the seduction of his sister: "Is that the murmur of a brook . . . is that the song of a bird...

...We'll be seduced no more...

...about whom he wrote a touching magazine piece and to whom he dedicated The Quaker City...

...Like the very earliest American novelists, he boasts that he has torn the veils of delicacy aside in the interests of exposing the seducer...

...Unfaithful wives are poisoned, the skulls of old women bashed in, the virginity of sobbing young girls violated...

...but the last and greatest of the 19th century sentimentalists, linked not forward to Sherwood Anderson but backward to George Lippard...

...and he is not averse to exploiting it for sales...

...Lippard cites the accusation against his morals proudly, taking it as a testimony to the truth and social efficacy of his novel...

...Just such sadist visions taken as fact are what have compelled the grass-roots followers of rabble-rousing reformers from Bryant to McCarthy...

...any more than he could forgive the literary pretensions of the novel: the tight form and the poetic language of the descriptive passages, which pull away from, when they do not condescend to, the characters described...

...and in him...

...or to credit completely the claim of the 1845 edition to represent a 27th printing...

...Neither in his respectable nor in his bootleg fiction is Twain really interested in the traditional meanings of the seduction theme...

...In the smalltown Protestant mind, the Big City is Sodom: and "Woe unto Sodom...

...In a moment, Mary raised her glowing countenance from his breast...

...Crane's intention, described in an inscription in a gift copy as making "room in heaven for all sorts of souls, notably an occasional street girl, who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people...

...Yet his book was a commercial failure...

...Long before the Communist theory of art as a weapon had been developed, Lippard had anticipated it: "LITERATURE merely considered as an art is a despicable thing...

...Such parody of the "vengeance of a Brother" no ordinary reader could forgive...

...I would dance...

...Understandably enough, it is seduction, the seduction of a poor girl by a pampered gentleman, which furnishes Lippard the key image for satisfying both the social and sexual demands of his audience...

...in 1894...

...His program was unequivocally revolutionary...

...but nothing is presented as gratuitous horror, the staple of the less pretentious dime novels...

...of course"), wrote down on a blank page the words "Sister Carrie"—and wondered what they were intended to mean...

...And just such a boy was George Lippard, near enough culturally to his readers to share their darkest fantasies, but far enough from them to articulate what they could only feel...

...In his pornographic fiction 1601, the only frank piece of erotica by a notable American author, Twain treats the pursuit of a girl by an old lecher too high in rank to be refused...

...Lippard, now almost forgotten, published in 1844 The Quaker City...

...Her breath came thick and gaspingly...

...The fall of the seduction theme from gentility had freed it from the old restraints and reticences that had hedged it in: and Lippard profited to the full from this new freedom...

...after a half-century in which gentility had apparently triumphed over passion, that the "fatal consequences of seduction" began once more to assert themselves as a compelling theme of serious literature...

...It is not even a Lady whom Crane has portrayed, but—in unconscious submission to bourgeois taboos—a girl of the people, an operator in a sweatshop, who lives on the Bowery...

...neither the prophet of naturalism nor the pioneer of sexual freedom we have taken him to be...

...The book provided no titillation at all—the physical seduction going undescribed— only a great, gray brutality of language (no "dirty" words, to be sure, though much profanity) and a constant play or irony, sometimes subtle, more often obvious...

...Crane's book is the most faithful of all to the stereotypes of the theme: An innocent girl is seduced, made pregnant, cast out by her family, and ends committing suicide, while her seducer is being victimized by the evil woman for whom he has left her...

...for the first time in America, perhaps, the Richardsonian theme takes on a fully conscious significance as a symbol of class war...

...but unlike his predecessors, he lets us look our fill at the scandals behind the veil: "The left hand of Lorimer, gently stealing round her form, rested with a faint pressure upon the folds of her night-robe, over her bosom, which now came heaving tremulously into light...

...Lippard himself was a pre-Marxian socialist, always armed under his Byronic cloak against the possibility of an attack by a hired assassin of the masters of society, and the founder of a secret order to fight back against them: the "Brotherhood of the Union," of which he was "Supreme Washington...

...This, this is the vengeance of a Brother...

...Lippard provided, too—though on a slap-dash literary level con-siderably below that of his predecessor...

...Perhaps the trouble we have is rooted in the fact that he is not a "modern" novelist at all...

...In his preface to one of the later editions, he writes, "I determined to write a book founded upon the following idea: that the seduction of a poor and innocent girl, is a deed altogether as criminal as murder . . . the assassin oj chastity and maidenhood is worthy oj death by the hands oj any man, and in any place...

...but certainly their books, making due allowance for changes in taste, are strikingly similar —parallel manifestations of a need in the non-genteel sub-audience for a revival of the seduction archetype, a hunger that even the endless reprintings of Charlotte Temple could not assuage...

...It was not easy, certainly, to earn $3-4.000 a year by writing in Lippard's time: but this he managed to do, appealing to the lower middlebrow audience, which otherwise would have had to subsist on such imported fare as the novels of Eugene Sue, whose compound of gothicism and sentimental eroticism gave him the sweet-selling savor of "dirtiness...

...In such a novel as The Quaker City, the archetypal bugaboos of the popular mind— malicious hunchbacks, sinister Jews, hulking deaf-and-dumb Negroes, corrupt clergymen, and bloated bankers —murder, rape, carouse, and collapse finally into drunken stupors inside or beneath a gothic whorehouse, whose lowest level is a stagnant sewer...

...This is the first of several installments from a chapter of his Love and Death in the American Novel, to be published by Criterion on March 18...

...Whether or not Dreiser himself read Lippard's brutal expose of Life in the Great City is hard to know...

...He thought of himself as the inheritor of the tradition of Charles Brockden Brown, his fellow Philadelphian...

...A song— huzza—a song...

...The sentimental popular acclaim that followed the release of the murderer led to the writing of the novel, which itself apparently helped swell an upsurge of public opinion that resulted in the passage of an anti-seduction law in the state of New York in 1849...

...You can't screw us...

...At the level of Melville's Pierre, a charge of immorality meant the loss of sales and a blow to his quest for popularity: but at the level of The Quaker City, to be charged with having produced "the most immoral work of the age" meant to be even more widely read...

...She is mine!' " Fifty years before Sister Carrie, Lippard had worked out a combination of sex and social protest in a style very like Dreiser's compound of conventional sentimental diction and colloquial speech...

...Lippard is eager to leave no doubt that seduction is the central theme of his crowded and complex "Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime...

...She urges her attacker to pass water and, having urinated, he loses his erection, cannot rise again to assault her...

...When Labor has tried all other means in vain— . . . then we advise Labor to go to War . . . War with the Rifle, Sword and Knife...

...Though she has only the slightest trace of Negro blood, her lover refuses in horror, and she leaves him...

...but even in his grossest jests, he is faithful enough to the sentimental happy ending to spare her from violation...

...It is not, however, literature in general that Lippard has to justify as a social weapon, but horror pornography in particular...

...but one must take seriously the report of a Philadelphia newspaper at the time of Lippard's death that "He was the author of a number of novels, which have been read probably as extensively as those of any other writer in the country...

...It is not necessary to believe the author's boast on the title page of The Quaker City that "No American novel has ever commanded so widespread an interest as this work...

...her bosom rose no longer quick and gaspingly, but in long pulsations, that urged the full Globes in all their virgin beauty, softly and slowly into view . . . and her parted lips deepened into a rich vermillion tint...

...or The Monks of Monk Hall, a book which sold 60,000 copies the first year and was, apparently, being bought at the rate of 30.000 a year when Lippard died in 1854, not yet quite 32 years old...

...The immediate occasion for The Monks of Monk Hall was an actual incident in which a Philadelphian who had killed the seducer of his sister, aboard the Camden ferry, was held in a New Jersey prison, tried in a New Jersey court, and then— to the relief and joy of his fellow citizens—acquitted by New Jersey justice...

...In Lippard...

...pornography is justified as muckraking...

...and the nightmarish evocations of the book, a literal description of how the rich and their henchmen amuse themselves with the money they have sweated from the laboring man...

...It is hard to know exactly what the nature of Lippard's audience was or precisely what satisfactions they sought in his books...

...She felt as though she was about to fall swooning on the floor . . . the languor came deeper and more mellow over her limbs...

...The combination of sex, horror, and advanced social thought that had once been the specialty of Brown...

...An ambitious, half-starved orphan boy just past 20, knowing nothing of political reality except what his fancy suggests, makes an admirable spokesman for such a group...

...it is postulated in the book as a fact of life or an act of God, something that just happens to black wenches, useful for beginning a plot...

...He had, however, Brown's capacity for yielding up the imagination to a frenetic vision, out of which the author makes a book LESLIE A. FIEDLER is professor of English at Montana-State University...

...not so much by composing a fiction as by recording an uncensored nightmare...

...in sight of God and his angels, I would dance over the corse, while a wild song of joy filled the heavens...