John Henry Raleigh
S
E
X,
SOC I 0 LOG Y AND ( RIT I ( ISM
This is an interesting book,* and in many ways it is a
good one. It is ambitious and large in scope, attempting to draw
historical lines from
Clarissa
to
Marjorie Morningstar,
from
Charles Brockden Brown to William Faulkner. It is international
in scope and sees the American novel not in a vacuum but in its
European context. It attempts to tell the reader something not only
about the American novel but about American culture as well. It
is enthusiastic about its own theme and is replete with sentences,
usually at the end of chapters, or at the end of sections of chap–
ters, ending in triumphant exclamation points. And, strangely
enough, it is dogged as well: on and on for almost six hundred
pages, as inexorable as a glacier. Finally it attempts to explain an
important and complex problem: why the gothic ambiguities of
so many American novels, wherein heterosexual love is absent, and
terror, necrophilia, loneliness, perversion, incest, murder, death,
suicide, homosexuality (usually "innocent," whatever that may
mean, says Mr. Fiedler), fantasy, pursuit, and flight are the
subjects, and the blackness of night and the whiteness of the
charnel house provide the background. Mr. Fiedler's thesis is well
known. The American novel represents a "retreat to nature and
to childhood." It evidences "an obsession with violence and [an]
embarrassment before love...." It is a "gothic fiction, non–
realistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic-;" ". . . ours is a
literature of horror for boys." Mr. Fiedler's explanation for this is
biographical and cultural. Many American novelists have had
ambiguous or troubled sex lives; thus, so the argument runs, their
novels are unconscious fantasies of their own neuroses. Further-
*
Love and Death
in
the American Novel.
By
Leslie
A.
Fiedler.
Criterion. $8.50.
