The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture Vs. Democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana (Cultural Studies of the United States)

461 Pages·1992·1.11 MB·English

by  Robert Dawidoff

The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage :
High Culture Vs. Democracy in Adams,
title:
James, & Santayana Cultural Studies of the
United States
author: Dawidoff, Robert.
publisher: University of North Carolina Press
isbn10 | asin: 0807820172
print isbn13: 9780807820179
ebook isbn13: 9780807861004
language: English
Santayana, George,--1863-1952--
Knowledge--America, Tocqueville, Alexis
de,--1805-1859--Influence, James, Henry,-
subject -1843-1916.--Ambassadors, Adams, Henry,-
-1838-1918.--Democracy, American prose
literature--History and criticism, National
characteristics, Ame
publication date: 1992
lcc: PS362.D38 1992eb
ddc: 818/.40809/358
Santayana, George,--1863-1952--
Knowledge--America, Tocqueville, Alexis
de,--1805-1859--Influence, James, Henry,-
subject: -1843-1916.--Ambassadors, Adams, Henry,-
-1838-1918.--Democracy, American prose
literature--History and criticism, National
characteristics, Ame
Page i
The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage
Page ii
CULTURAL STUDIES
OF THE
UNITED STATES
ALAN TRACHTENBERG
EDITOR
Page iii
The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage
High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, &
Santayana
Robert Dawidoff
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
CHAPEL HILL & LONDON
Page iv
(c) 1992 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
Manufactured in the United States of America
96 95 94 93 92 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawidoff, Robert.
The genteel tradition and the sacred rage : high culture vs.
democracy in Adams, James, and Santayana/Robert Dawidoff.
p. cm.(Cultural studies of the United States)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2017-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. American prose literatureHistory and criticism.
2. National characteristics, American, in literature.
3. Santayana, George, 1863-1952KnowledgeAmerica.
4. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859Influence.
5. Literature and societyUnited States. 6. James, Henry,
1843-1916. Ambassadors. 7. Adams, Henry, 1838-1918.
Democracy. 8. United StatesCivilization. 9. Democracy
in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PS362.D38 1992
818'.40809'358dc20 91-30746
CIP
Page v
For my friend Richard Rouilard
Page vii
Contents
Foreword ix
by Alan Trachtenberg
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction xv
Chapter One. Tocqueville and the American Mind 1
Chapter Two. Henry Adams: The First American
Tocquevillian 31
Chapter Three. Henry James and the Sacred Rage 75
Chapter Four. George Santayana and the Genteel 142
Tradition
Conclusion 194
Notes 201
Bibliography 209
Index 215
Page ix
Foreword
Something of a taboo seems to have fallen over the word democracy.
It is rarely encountered anymore in humanistic studies, snubbed in
favor of gender, class, race, region. The particularist emphasis of these
terms may represent a deliberate refusal of the universalist
implications of grand concepts like democracy. Of course, reasons
abound for suspicion of the word, its unsavory nationalist resonances,
countless betrayals undertaken in its name. But its dropping out of
serious use among cultural historians and critics may signify
something more fundamental and significant, an unease and
embarrassment with a term so charged with challenges to the very
enterprise of studying the culture in which we participate. The posture
of the cultural critic implies detachment, a certain degree of apartness.
Doesn't the idea of a democratic order, of social and political equality,
put the serious critic at risk of estrangement, of seeming superior,
ungrateful, ungenerous? To think of yourself as cultured, as detached
enough to make judgments, isn't this already to think of oneself as
unequal, superior, set apart from the mass? Criticism demands
distance, it asserts difference, it enacts discrimination. Democracy
seems to impose compliance, acceptance of common norms and
collective opinion, all that Tocqueville meant by the "tyranny of the
majority." Disenchantment with the system of popular government in
America, a defining aspect of cultural criticism at least since Emerson,
has only driven the word democracy further into the background.
Seeming irreconcilable, the antinomies of culture and democracy have
receded from the foreground of attention they once commanded, say,
in the works of Whitman and of the generation of Van Wyck Brooks,
Constance Rourke, and John Dewey.
Robert Dawidoff's book restores the question of culture and
democracy to the prominence it once had. It revives the relevance of
the word democracy to cultural studies, indeed to cultural change and
reconstruction. The book does so by exploring sources of the trouble
the word continues to make for students of American culture, for the
field of American Studies itself.