Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905

Artistic Liberties

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM AND NATURALISM

SERIES EDITOR

Gary Scharnhorst

EDITORIAL BOARD

Donna Campbell

John Crowley

Robert E. Fleming

Alan Gribben

Eric Haralson

Denise D. Knight

Joseph McElrath

George Monteiro

Brenda Murphy

James Nagel

Alice Hall Petry

Donald Pizer

Tom Quirk

Jeanne Campbell Reesman

Ken Roemer

Artistic Liberties

American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880–1905

ADAM SONSTEGARD

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2014

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion and Gill Sans

Cover art: Edward Windsor Kemble's illustration of Tom Sawyer and his gang from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Cover design: Mary Elizabeth Watson

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sonstegard, Adam, 1971–

    Artistic liberties : American literary realism and graphic illustration, 1880–1905 / Adam Sonstegard.

        pages cm. — (Studies in American literary realism and naturalism)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1805-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8697-9 (e book)

    1. American fiction—Illustrations. 2. Illustration of books—United States—History—19th century. 3. Publishers and publishing—United States—History—19th century 4. United States—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. 5. United States—Race relations—History—19th century. 6. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in art. 7. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. I. Title.

    NC975.S66  2014

    741.6′40973—dc23

2013026632

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading Rivalries in Illustrated Literary Realism

1. Kemble and Twain: Sketching Truths within the Minstrel Masquerade

2. Kemble and Stowe: Taking Liberties with Slave Imagery

3. Loeb and Twain: Returning to the Illustrated Scene of the Crime

4. Newell and Crane: Keeping Close to a Personal Honesty of Vision

5. Kemble and Dunbar: Manipulating the Masks of Folks from Dixie

6. Wenzell and Wharton: Marketing The House of Mirth's Designs

Coda. Owen, Skeete, and Hopkins: Countering the Caricatures of Literary Realism

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

I.1. W. A. Rogers's frontispiece to A Hazard of New Fortunes, Harper's book edition, 1880

I.2. Du Maurier's rendering of Catherine of Washington Square in Cornhill Magazine in 1880

I.3. Du Maurier's rendering of Catherine of Washington Square in Cornhill Magazine in 1880

I.4. Du Maurier's rendering of Dr. Sloper of Washington Square in Cornhill Magazine in 1880

I.5. Du Maurier's rendering of Dr. Sloper of Washington Square in Cornhill Magazine in 1880

I.6. Morris Townsend of Washington Square at leisure in Dr. Sloper's study, as depicted by du Maurier in 1880

I.7. A Washington colored functionary in an 1894 Century Magazine article

1.1. Kemble's illustration for the first chapter of Twain's novel, with the the added to the title

1.2. Kemble's rendering of Huck for the frontispiece of Twain's novel

1.3. Kemble's image of Miss Watson shows the stiff postures of the authoritative adults in Huck's hometown

1.4. Kemble's raftsman, with his chest pumped out to show his job amounted to something

1.5. Kemble renders Tom Sawyer and his gang

1.6. Huck fruitlessly rubs a genie's lamp in an image from Kemble

1.7. Huck's Pap, as envisioned by Kemble

1.8. Emmeline Grangerfield's kitschy art, as Huck and Kemble see it

1.9. The King as a pirate

1.10. The Duke as Hamlet

1.11. Huck and Jim together in Kemble's rendering of Jim discovering the dead man in a frame-house

1.12. Kemble's illustration of Jim helping Huck into a calico gown.

1.13. Jim is consigned to the audience as a rapscallion claims by rights I am a duke

1.14. Huck, Jim, and Tom stand back and take a collective bow

1.15. Kemble's rendering of Jim in a different posture

1.16. Kemble's rendering of Jim and the doctor

2.1. Kemble's image of African Americans bamboula dancing in New Orleans's Jackson Square

2.2. Kemble's depiction of one of the types in de Graffenreid's article

2.3. Another of Kemble's images accompanying de Graffenreid's article

2.4. Frost's romanticized image of Georgia Crackers, contrasting with Kemble's depictions

2.5. One of Frost's images accompanying Brackett's The Aryan Mark

2.6. One of Frost's images accompanying Brackett's The Aryan Mark

2.7. Kemble's rendering of Eliza's celebrated escape across the ice floes on the Ohio River

2.8. Kemble's frontispiece for the 1892 edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin

2.9. Kemble's photogravure frontispiece of Uncle Tom himself

2.10. Tom rescues Eva from murky river waters

2.11. A grieving Tom supports an expiring Eva

2.12. Slaves submit to prospective dealers' demeaning inspections

2.13. The raggedest black wretch on the plantation

2.14. Kemble's individualized portrait of a seemingly interchangeable slave woman

2.15. Another of Kemble's individualized portraits of a seemingly interchangeable slave woman

2.16. A stereotypical butler figure who appears all too often

2.17. One of Kemble's renderings of white Crackers, contrasting with those rendered for de Graffenreid's article

2.18. Another of Kemble's renderings of white Crackers, contrasting with those rendered for de Graffenreid's article

2.19. One of Kemble's renderings of white Crackers, contrasting with those rendered for de Graffenreid's article

3.1. Twain, as depicted on the magazine pages that commenced Pudd'nhead Wilson's serialization in Century

3.2. Loeb's image of Roxana and the children

3.3. Loeb's image of Roxana confronting an adult Tom

3.4. Loeb's image of Judge Driscoll judging Tom as a coward in my family!

3.5. Loeb's image of a cross-dressed Roxana

3.6. Loeb's image of Puddn'head, providing the proof that brings about the novel's denouement

4.1. Newell casts doubt on Johnson's claim never to have washed a buggy

4.2. Barbershop patrons gaze in amazement as Johnson struts by

4.3. Johnson, Bella, and her chaperone enjoy an evening together

4.4. Fire-brigade volunteers demonstrate Newell's depth of field

4.5. The underappreciated John Shipley

4.6. Johnson rescues Jim in Newell's only image to depict the pivotal fire

4.7. The Judge, who inhabits a higher physical and social space than Alek Williams

4.8. Mrs. Farragut, making a spectacle of herself as she flees from Johnson

4.9. Almost every member of a family watches in terror as The Door Swung Portentously Open

4.10. Newell's illustration, rendered as a showcase for Jimmie

4.11. Newell's image attempting to depict an absence, what nobody talks of—much

4.12. Two boys of Whilomville taunt Peter Washington, who is excluded from the image

5.1. Newell's illustration for Dunbar's A Coquette Conquered in Century Magazine

5.2. Incriminating possum grease smudges the mouth of the guilty party in an image by Kemble for Dunbar's Folks from Dixie

5.3. A grinning angler recalls a pastoral Suwannee River instead of signifying the social conflict of the story Nelse Hatton's Vengeance in an image by Kemble for Dunbar's Folks from Dixie

5.4. Kemble's rendering of a mammy figure from Dunbar's The Strength of Gideon

5.5. Kemble depicts the central conflict of the main characters in the title story from Dunbar's The Strength of Gideon

5.6. Kemble depicts an African American character's face, when many such characters go unillustrated, in Dunbar's The Strength of Gideon

5.7. Kemble renders neither the most interesting character nor the most significant moment of the story Council of State from Dunbar's The Strength of Gideon

5.8. Kemble pictures Schwalliger as a self-aware racehorse tout, and not as someone wearing the mask of a gullible rube in Dunbar's The Heart of Happy Hollow

5.9. An illustration from The Voice of the Negro in 1906

6.1. An image from Wenzell's The Passing Show

6.2. An image from Wenzell's The Passing Show

6.3. Lily and Mrs. Haffen, the charwoman, as depicted by Wenzell

6.4. Lily gazes down at the bridge players below, as depicted by Wenzell

6.5. Lily and Selden in a pastoral diversion, as depicted by Wenzell

6.6. Lily, Gus, and a well-dressed third figure, as depicted by Wenzell

6.7. Lily, caught alone with Gus Trenor, as depicted by Wenzell

6.8. Lily, in the arms of her cousin Gert, as depicted by Wenzell

6.9. Lily and Selden, banished from the Sabrina, as depicted by Wenzell

6.10. Lily, thinking summers could be worse, as depicted by Wenzell

6.11. Lily and Rosedale together, as depicted by Wenzell

6.12. Lily, the failed milliner, as depicted by Wenzell

6.13. Lily and Selden say their goodbyes, as depicted by Wenzell

C.1. Owen's frontispiece to Hopkins's novel, recalling Kemble's frontispiece to Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

C.2. The frontispiece to an illustrated Uncle Tom's Cabin from the 1850s

C.3. Skeete's image for Hopkins's novel, in comparison with the image for Stowe's novel

Acknowledgments

This study is dedicated to humanities scholars of middle- and working-class origins.

Professionally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Vivian Pollak. I also thank Wayne Fields, Amy Joyce Pawl, Matthew Devoll, Charles Sweetman, Noel Sloboda, Jennifer Cays Raymond, and Angelica Zeller-Michaelson of Washington University, St. Louis; Gary Sue Goodman, Pamela Demory, Michael Borgstrom, Kathy Cunningham, Laurie Glover, David Van Leer, Karl Zender, and Clarence Walker of the University of California, Davis; Wendy Graham, Susan Griffin, Kendall Johnson, David McWhirter, Elaine Pigeon, Tessa Hadley, Shawn Michelle Smith, Miranda Green-Barteet, Elsa Nettles, Adam Seth Loewenstein, Joy Bracewell, Sarah Wadsworth, and Kevin Hayes from varied panels, seminars, and conferences; my colleagues David Larson, Rachel Carnell, Stella Singer, Jeff Karem, James J. Marino, Gary Dyer, Louis Barbato, John Gerlach, and Adrienne Gosselin of Cleveland State University, as well as Cleveland State's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and its dean, Gregory Sadlek. I would also like to thank Gary Scharnhorst, Daniel Waterman, and the anonymous reader reviewers of the University of Alabama Press. Many of those acknowledged here were not aware they were being helpful when they were aiding me greatly.

More personally, I would like to thank Marie Grimm and David Grimm, Arvid Sonstegard and Cathy Landry-Sonstegard. Thanks to Tony W., Tony C., Tom, Rob E., Richard, Ray, Brad, Chris, Rob G., Ken, Nathan, Eddie, and Dan. Most of all, thanks to Jackie LaPlante, whose support has enabled every step of this endeavor and to whose love I devote as much attention and care as I devote to my work.

Permissions

An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as Artistic Liberty and Slave Imagery: ‘Mark Twain's Illustrator,’ E. W. Kemble, Turns to Harriet Beecher Stowe in Nineteenth Century Literature in 2009. Copyright © 2009 by the University of California Press. Reprinted with permission.

An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as Kemble's Figures and Dunbar's Folks: Picturing the Work of Illustration in Dunbar's Short Fiction in We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality. Copyright © 2010 by The Kent State University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Images appearing in the introduction and chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are reproduced with permission from Cleveland State University Libraries, Cleveland, Ohio, and labeled accordingly in the image captions.

Images and quotations appearing in chapter 2 are reproduced with permission from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, with Illustrations by E. W. Kemble (New York: Riverside Press, 1891), courtesy of Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia, and are labeled accordingly in the image captions.

Correspondence and newspaper clippings in chapter 5 are quoted with permission from the Paul L. Dunbar Papers at the Ohio Historical Society and are credited accordingly in the chapter notes.

Correspondence and letter books are quoted in chapter 6 from the Archives of Charles Scribner and Sons, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Manuscript Division, Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University Library. This correspondence is reprinted with permission, and its subseries, folders, and documentation are identified in the notes to chapter 6.

My thanks to all of these institutions for their permission to reprint this material. Images that are not attributed to libraries or collections in the image captions or in the chapter notes are reproduced from the author's own copies of these literary works.

Introduction

Reading Rivalries in Illustrated Literary Realism

If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable people live

March, here, if he had his own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all, claims Mr. Fulkerson. Basil March, the protagonist of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) and the literary editor of the fictitious magazine Every Other Week,¹ clarifies his position on illustrations: Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beaton—the magazine's art editor—but because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy that's the case with most other people. You've got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take our minds off.

Every Other Week's financial manager Mr. Fulkerson then draws a comparison: Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so much that they don't know what the play is. But the box-office gets there all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants, Fulkerson says of the magazine's chief financial backer, who smiled deprecatingly in response. It was different, March went on, when the illustrations used to be bad. Then the text had some chance (Howells, Hazard of New Fortunes 139–40).

On one level, Howells's characters in this scene openly discuss this study's central issues. Authors and editors of several works we now refer to as literary realism reckon the relative power of compelling prose and attractive imagery. They realize that a share of the readers respond to the pictures and seldom bother to read the prose. They play out a story line that not only enacts its own realism as a novel but also dramatizes the management of a magazine of realist visual and verbal art. They explore whether either medium, pictorial or textual, had some chance against the other. They face rivalries between illustrators and writers on the published page.

On a deeper level, these characters not only discuss but also demonstrate this study's main concerns. When the novel ran in Harper's Weekly in 1889, each installment began with illustrations. As its action was allotted into weekly installments, it chronicled Every Other Week's editorial decisions as it ran every week in Harper's. As its characters matched a verbal serial with artists' images within the story's magazine, Harper's editors and artists did so within an actual magazine. When Howells's narrator determines the initial issue of Every Other Week had seven papers in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and that Beaton, as art editor, had found some graphic comment for each, readers could readily compare the seven-page, biweekly, illustrated periodical they were reading about with the twenty-page, weekly, illustrated periodical they were reading (Hazard of New Fortunes 195). When a transportation strike breaks out and a booster at Every Other Week urges March to cover the ensuing riots—With your descriptions and Beaton's sketches—well, it would just be the greatest card! (Hazard of New Fortunes 409)—the move mirrors Harper's decisions to cover urban strife by its own journalistic, graphic, and photographic means. Within one illustrated serial, the saga of an illustrated serial unfolds. Every Other Week's realism implicitly comes to contrast with, even rival, Harper's own.

When Lindau, a German immigrant, Civil War soldier and amputee, and eventual translator for Every Other Week, first hears about the magazine's goals, he says, If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems to me that the only trouble is that we don't know one another well enough; and that the first thing is to do this (Howells, Hazard of New Fortunes 146). Howells's character, who will soon contribute to the kind of magazine Howells contributes to and edits, thereby defines a realist magazine's mission. W. A. Rogers's accompanying illustration, which is also the first book edition's frontispiece, thereby represents this realist credo: make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable people live (figure I.1). Rogers depicts Lindau's partial amputation, makes March move to shake his hand, and implies the uncomfortable will indeed meet the comfortable, even before the first words of the text. Realism glimpses the lives of the uncomfortable, who experience economic, discriminatory, and industrial-labor injustices, without alienating the comfortable, who could choose not to buy unpleasant books or magazines. Graphic arts depict their lives on the same pages as this socially conscious prose without rivaling it in ways that overshadow or undermine the social mission the prose has undertaken. In Howells's serial as well as Harper's venue, in Howells's characters' words as well as Rogers's engraved images, realism keeps the comfortable informed about the uncomfortable in mediums that are commensurate but never overly graphic. Ideally, imagery amplifies prose while ensuring the text had some chance with realism's readers.

This study recuperates such rivalries between realism's authors, illustrators, and readers. The artists of Harper's images act as advance readers, receiving the story in their studios, much as ordinary readers eventually receive it, ensconced in parlor rooms at home. Artists also function as coauthors, shaping the final appearance of the prose narrative for editors and readers. Meanings arise not solely of harmonious conjunctions but also of misreadings, dissonance, and elements lost in intertextual translation. In writing for the prospective reader, authors could still anticipate the artist, who can inflect the story's interpretation. In shaping the text's appearance as coauthors, artists could still misconstrue or distort plot or character elements. In perusing an illustrated story line, readers could still have no idea where the artist's authority begins and the writer's authority ends. In returning to these original rivalries, this study does not seek somehow to resolve them but to posit that American literary realism can take root in rivalries and play out in ever-opposed artistic modes. A fecund realism can originate when authors and artists are literally but not necessarily figuratively on the same page.

This book also suggests that when we choose to republish these realist works without illustrations, we obscure essential components of canonical works and erase original, historical arrangements that had governed authors, illustrators, readers, and editors. We discuss the adaptation of literary works to modern film without realizing that artists, authors, and literary agents had already adapted their arts to one another's mediums when literary realism first debuted. We categorize a work as solely a woman's novel (or a mainstream work or a minority fiction), when in fact it takes shape in publishing negotiations between men and women, mainstream publishers and minority authors, or aspiring writers and visual artists. We may read a work as feminist or chauvinist, racist or antiracist, humanizing its subjects or objectifying them when the published, illustrated work already makes dialectical concessions, and fosters gradual syntheses, between artists who work in different mediums, who do not share an ideology, even as they depict the same subjects. If literary realism can only recount uncomfortable lives in ways comfortable readers would still accept, its authors and artists can only complement one another in ways their competing artistic modes would still permit. Within the limitations of mediums and with respect to rivalries between arts, authors and artists give rise to a realism, Artistic Liberties posits, that is already an adaptation: it is literary realism's effort to cope with the increasingly illustrated page.²

Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes, about the launching of an illustrated magazine, and his novel about the training and career of a landscape painter, The Landlord at Lion's Head (1908), were amply illustrated. Both works added visual meta-commentary to narratives that were already concerned with rendering visual arts. Howells had Howard Pyle, who would become known for Robin Hood and King Arthur illustrations, render designs for his volume of poetry Stops from Various Quills (1895). He even trusted Pyle to render visual commemorations for his deceased daughter Winifred. Howells, like his protagonist Basil March, had his way, as author and editor, and he chose illustrations. He was aware, as was Basil March, that illustration potentially rivaled his words. Text had to be finessed if it had some chance against illustration.

I feel as if I ought to write it very small

Henry James, for his part, had his way somewhat less often with his publishers, but of his more than twenty full-length novels, only Washington Square (1880) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) originally appeared with illustrations.³ To commence this critical study in 1880, and to take a set of examples through their paces, I begin with several illustrations that the caricaturist and author-artist George du Maurier rendered for Washington Square as it appeared in Britain's Cornhill Magazine in 1880.⁴ The examples demonstrate how du Maurier's images could complement but also undercut the authority of James's written word.

First, James's narrator has a halting means of introducing Catherine Sloper, reflecting an author who is self-conscious that she is not the best heroine for an illustrated venue. Catherine was excellently, imperturbably good; affectionate, docile, obedient, and much addicted to speaking the truth. We are told that "in her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry; but she devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of cream-cakes" (James, Washington Square 8; emphasis added). The passage goes on to develop her level of cleverness and goodness, but this awkward confession seems arresting: it is one of two moments at which the narrator is least certain about his characterization. When it had been duly impressed upon her that she was a young lady, we are told in a second such moment, "she suddenly developed a lively taste for dress: a lively taste is quite the expression to use. I feel as if I ought to write it very small, her judgment in this matter was by no means infallible; it was liable to confusions and embarrassments" (Washington Square 11; emphasis added). The narrator hesitates most in saying how inappropriate Catherine is for the heroine du Maurier expected to render. James's narrator blushes most when he must reveal Catherine is no slender beauty—but du Maurier makes her lithe in the images (figure I.2). The narrator shies away from saying her dress is gaudy and gauche—but du Maurier shows her attire to be no less appropriate than others' (figure I.3). The artist seems to take the greatest liberties in representing a conventionally thin heroine, undercutting the narrator who lends her an unconventionally generous figure. Viewers can see Catherine as graceful and not dumpy, slender and not corpulent. They can glimpse her lithe grace in the illustrator's art. They can think of her awkwardness as merely the narrator's hesitations about her.

Second, a pair of images for a single monthly installment dramatically foreshortens the following chapters' key events (figures I.4 and I.5). A doctor stands at a threshold, as if just arriving or departing in both images. In the frontispiece, Morris's sister, Mrs. Montgomery, has said, Don't let her marry him. Nothing here suggests the power play, calculation, and sheer manipulation with which the doctor prompts her, eventually, to say these words. If we judge from the image, she grants this concession immediately; if we judge from the magazine layout, viewers learn the outcome first and have their reading experience spoiled by du Maurier's anticipation. In the initial letter, a doctor with his hand on a doorknob prompts a pleading woman's passage. In the installment, the doctor is standing there with this hand on the door, saying to Catherine, I have told you what I think. If you see him [Morris], you will be an ungrateful, cruel child. You will have given your father the greatest pain of your life (James, Washington Square 101). Here, nothing in the initial letter suggests he manipulatively attributes the cruelty to Catherine. Nothing validates his wild claim that his daughter's marriage would injure him so severely. Merely showing him conducting women in and out of doors, the images foreshorten his mind games and minimize his manipulations. Choosing these moments to illustrate and placing them first in the installment, Cornhills layout in effect expresses artists' and editors' impatience with James's protracted dialogues to come.