PARTISAN REVIEW
How far should these men be regarded as having given a valid
portrayal of the American personality structure, and what sociological
inferences should be drawn from their writings? Presumably they were
concerned with the problem of isolation because they lived in a society
which was violently competitive. Based on a capitalistic economy and
composed predominantly of individuals who were on the make and
whose values were acquisitive and pecuniary, American society as a
whole was lacking in the sense of continuity and tradition and of
human solidarity. The ultimate relationship between human beings,
as defined by the principles of the economy, was conceived in terms
of conflict rather than of cooperation. Consciously and explicitly,
however, the individualism of American society, and its belief in
open rather than closed systems, both politically and metaphysically,
were generally regarded as its major virtues, not only by the average
citizen but by its leading philosophic spokesmen. Emerson glorified
self-reliance and tried to elevate
it
from an economic to a spiritual
truth. The work of William James, in the following generation, had
a similar tendency. But imaginative literature is concerned not with
what men ought to feel but with what they actually do feel; and in the
imaginative literature of the pre-Civil War period we find a state–
ment of the psychological costs of individualism, which can be re–
garded as a destructive analysis of the principle of self-reliance and
of American ideals in general.
The themes which these three writers initiated have, moreover,
continued to be characteristic of American literature, although
in
the twentieth century they have been presented with more conscious
awareness of their sociological implications. Twentieth-century novel–
ists have continued to present the individual as isolated and as com–
pelled to do battle with his environment; stated in different forms
by such various writers as Dreiser, Anderson, Dos Passos and Wolfe,
this has continued to be perhaps the most distinctive note of Amer–
ican literature. And although (beginning with Dreiser's
Sister Carrie)
men and women in American novels have found it easier to achieve
sexual union, the successful performance of this enterprise has still
been fraught with psychological hazards. In particular, there has
been a recurrent suggestion, made most explicitly in certain writings
of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, of feminine dominance and
masculine resentment against it.
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