Reconstituting Authority: American Fiction in the Province
of the Law, 1880-1920 (review)
Alice Hall Petry
College Literature, 30.1, Winter 2003, pp. 184-187 (Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 30 May 2022 09:57 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2003.0020
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39035
Reed and Ernest Gaines, Harris also maintains her status as perhaps the
African American critic most committed to resisting the tendency to sepa-
rate male- and female-authored texts into critically autonomous and puta-
tively opposing camps. In fact, it is the relational range of Harris’s concerns
that most distinguishes her work.This book, like her previous text The Power
of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and
Randall Kenan (1996), makes a strong case for the usefulness of recognizing
the dialogically responsive relationship between the traditions of male and
female African-American writing.
Moddelmog, William E. 2000. Reconstituting Authority:
American Fiction in the Province of the Law, 1880-1920.
Iowa City. University of Iowa Press, 2000. $32.95 hc.
276 pp.
Alice Hall Petry
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
Caught up as we are in the current “turn of the century,” it is not surprising
that scholars are taking a hard look at the period (roughly 1880-1920) which
previously enjoyed that label. It was a time, argues William E. Moddelmog,
which witnessed “the rise of professionalism” (4) in both literature and the
law, a phenomenon characterized by a conscious renegotiation of the rela-
tionships between such tangibles as codes and formal rules and such intangi-
bles as experience, emotion, and creativity. That rethinking led Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr., for example, to argue that we must “understand how to
read the law. If we read it for its formal properties, it becomes ossified, nos-
talgic, unable to respond to change circumstances and standards. ...If we read
it as a ‘story,’ however, it possesses both a formal integrity and a responsive-
ness to change and revision” (9). Thus, Holmes’s decision “to practice law
rather than follow in his father’s literary footsteps” was less “a rejection of lit-
erature” than “simply a way of doing a different kind of literary work” (9).
Much of Reconstituting Authority is a meditation on this fin de siècle legal/lit-
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erary renegotiation; and unless one happens to harbor a deep passion for
legalese, it unfortunately does not make for particularly entertaining reading.
On the other hand, Moddelmog’s analyses of texts by six authors of the
period—William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Pauline Hopkins,
Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser—against the back-
drop of legal issues of the day can be astute and revealing.The nexus of law
and literature, argues Moddelmog, impacted both dramatically at the turn of
the century.
Part I of his study, entitled “The (Mis)Rule of Law,” posits Howells,
Jackson, and Hopkins as using their texts “to reconceptualize the law and to
suggest that authors, as literary professionals, can relate stories that operate in
a legal manner” (23). In Chapter 1, for example, Moddelmog focuses on the
tensions that exist between Squire Gaylord (an old-style lawyer) and Bartley
Hubbard (a cutting-edge newspaperman) in Howells’s A Modern Instance.
Howells saw attorneys at the turn of the century being replaced by journal-
ists; but by killing off Hubbard, he betrays his discomfort at seeing newspa-
permen (who aren’t always responsible, community-sensitive professionals)
replace attorneys and judges as “figures of power” (54).
In Chapter 2, Moddelmog looks at Helen Hunt Jackson’s ambivalence
over the legal status of Native Americans in her novel Ramona (original title:
In the Name of the Law).Arguing that her book “essentially constitutes a kind
of extended legal brief” (66), Moddelmog explores how Jackson struggled to
reconcile her commitment to “tribal sovereignty” with her commitment to
“civilizing” Native Americans—an ambivalence traceable to Chief Justice
John Marshall’s confusing 1831 declaration that Indian tribes were “domes-
tic dependent nations” (65). Positing Ramona herself as the symbol of sim-
ple, honest, virtuous Native American tribes, and Ramona’s guardian Señora
Moreno as the symbol of the legalistic, cold, uncaring U.S. government,
Jackson used her novel to argue that legal guardians often create more prob-
lems than they solve. Even so, Jackson could not abandon her faith in the
guardian/ward paradigm.As a result, Ramona
turned out to have an impact on American conceptions of Indians, but not
the one [Jackson] had anticipated. Rather than becoming the new Uncle
Tom’s Cabin by awakening a moral outrage over the current state of law
and national policy, it would operate more like a legal brief intent on assert-
ing the law’s authority and its claim to respect. But in locating the sources
of that authority, Jackson exposed the division that lies at the heart of any
conception of national unity or an integral American “people.”
(Moddelmog 2000, 97)
Not as popular as Jackson, Pauline Hopkins, the subject of Chapter 3,
was less ambivalent about her own indictment of the American legal sys-
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tem—and in particular, that system’s characterization of African Americans as
“an ahistorical entity of pure desire” (105) that consequently did not deserve
protection under the law.Without that protection, lynching was perceived as
quasi-legal, a private matter condoned, or at least ignored, by the law.
Presenting herself as what Moddelmog terms a “professional attorney and
historian” (115), Hopkins wrote her novel Contending Forces in a deliberate-
ly “restrained—even genteel” style (116) so as to present her case that African
Americans were thoughtful, articulate, and unquestionably moral citizens
even in private.Though her novel did not have the immediate impact Hopkins
had hoped, Moddelmog observes that “it nonetheless hinted at the poten-
tially powerful strategy of using the law’s own ideals to identify the short-
comings of its actual practices—a strategy that would soon underwrite the
founding of the NAACP” and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s (125).
Part II of Moddelmog’s study,“The Authority of Property,” zeroes in on
a single aspect of the legal system, the idea of “property” (real estate, money,
bonds, personal/familial privacy, even one’s reputation) and the legal mech-
anisms intended to protect it. In Chapter 4, arguably the most insightful in
his study, Moddelmog explores these issues in Charles W. Chesnutt’s novel,
The House Behind the Cedars, as well as in his stories, “The Sway-Backed
House,”“Uncle Wellington’s Wives,”“The Web of Circumstance,” and “The
Partners.” Chesnutt, an African-American lawyer light enough to “pass” for
white but who chose to identify with blacks, used his fiction “as a kind of
legal history” (131) that examined his era’s continuing confusion over race
vis-à-vis ownership. Moddelmog notes that the “unfinished” quality of
Chesnutt’s writings points to “the dilemma in which African-American pro-
fessionals such as Chesnutt found themselves at the turn of the century.
Unwilling to view racial distinctions in terms of class conflict by embracing
socialism, but equally averse to affirming a system in which whiteness con-
stituted a legitimate form of capital, they sought to find and promote the
measurable ‘value’ in blackness” (158). Hence Chesnutt’s texts “sag precari-
ously beneath the weight of the racialized forms of title they compellingly
bring to light” (159).
In Chapter 5, Moddelmog argues that the conflicts in Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth (1905)—conflicts “organized around terms that are both
domestic (‘home,’ ‘marriage’) and legal (‘rights,’ ‘ownership,’ ‘personality’)—
closely resemble those at the heart of legal debates over privacy at the turn
of the century” (165). Lacking a husband (and hence the social and legal
security enjoyed by white males and their spouses), Lily Bart’s property con-
sists of only one thing: her vulnerable reputation. The disparate endings of
The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence (1920), asserts Moddelmog,reflect
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the degree to which Wharton felt the legal climate as it concerned women
had shifted during the 15 years between the novels.“If [The Age of Innocence]
had been written fifteen years earlier, would anything have remained after
Ellen Olenska’s renunciation? Would we not be left, as in The House of Mirth,
with a form of female privacy representable only by death?” (188-89).
Perhaps because Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan have
been examined for decades as examples of the American business novel,
Moddelmog’s sixth and final chapter seems anticlimactic. He argues that
“perhaps more strongly than any other author in this study, Dreiser fulfills
Howells’s vision of the author’s simultaneously legal and literary role in
American public life. By suggesting that a self-regulating economy ground-
ed in individual ownership no longer exists, The Financier and The Titan
incorporate a professional ethic that justifies the emergence of the ‘official’
regulator and the financial expert—those progressive figures charged with
creating the rules and codes that would do the work ‘nature’ could no longer
do.And these novels also open a space for the progressive author in this now
denaturalized economic arena” (194). According to Moddelmog’s reading,
this explains why Frank Cowperwood “is more effective at defeating
monopolistic tendencies than in promoting them”—a quality that renders
him “both a progressive hero and a throwback to the past” (203).
In his too-brief “Postscript,” Moddelmog argues that his approach to
these six authors (which he identifies as “interdisciplinary”) has potentially
more to offer than does “contemporary critical theory” (218). He invites the
reader to use it to study “American literature written between the Civil War
and World War I”—a body of work that “often plays second or third fiddle
to . . . American romanticism and literary modernism” (219). That seems
overstated; and it raises the question of why he discussed so few of those sec-
ond- and third-fiddle authors active between 1880 and 1920. Certainly Kate
Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whom he mentions briefly) were
interested in the interplay of law and literature, as were George W. Cable and
Hamlin Garland (whom he doesn’t). Perhaps indeed the primary value of
Reconstituting Authority is its capacity to encourage other scholars to look at
other writers who used fiction to grapple with the legal and literary issues of
their day.
Book Reviews
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