Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
“We are living not only in the age of america but also in the Age of the Novel, at a moment when the literature of a country without a first-rate verse epic or a memorable verse tragedy has become the model of half the world.” So begins Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler’s 1960 work of literary criticism—now being republished by New York Review Books—in which he sets out to explain a few home truths about American culture through his Freudian analysis of the American novel. From that perspective, Fiedler begins, “our novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent…almost juvenile.” “Why?” the reader might ask, and the answer is not long in coming: because “our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”
Throughout much of the Western world, at least since the 18th century, Fiedler elaborates, love has remained the novel’s central theme, much like “battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama.” In American fiction, however, for the female protagonist, love means getting married, while for the male protagonist, it means flight. The typical male hero is “a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman.” In short, “the moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick.”
Fiedler had already begun to develop this thesis in his 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” in which he posited that, in direct relation to the American novelist’s fear of mature heterosexual relations, we have an enormous concentration on homoerotic relations between boys who never become men—a practice that Fiedler labels an “innocent homosexuality” and attributes to America’s ever-recurrent “dream of an escape from culture” into a permanent “renewal of youth.” This insight causes Fiedler to write many spectacular pages on some of our most legendary novelists, among them Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.
Love and Death appeared at a time when, due to a serious depletion of spirit throughout postwar Europe, US literature was riding high in the Western world. Everywhere, people who read, wrote, or reviewed books—and they were legion!—welcomed the infusion of literary energy alive in every kind of American writing. The 1950s alone had seen, among many other memorable titles, the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Lolita, Invisible Man, and On the Road, as well as Fahrenheit 451, Charlotte’s Web, and Strangers on a Train.
Fiedler’s book landed like a bombshell in the place where opinion on culture and literature meet, which at the time felt significant. Everyone under the sun—those who read and those who didn’t—seemed to have a response to it. Although, in the main, those responses were negative—Fiedler was seen as an intellectual vulgarian possessed by an idée fixe, someone whose Freudian takes knew no bounds, and who was writing to shock, not to illuminate—Love and Death was nonetheless impossible to dismiss. For starters, the depth and breadth of its erudition—it seemed to trace the development of novels from the beginning of time—was in itself a marvel; and then there was its sheer readability. Throughout his career, Fiedler was at (often pugnacious) pains to insist that although he’d been teaching for a good 40 years, he was a writer, not an academic; and indeed, although Love and Death is wildly overwritten—the book weighs in at 500-odd pages—and its tone is uniformly aggressive, most of its sentences, unlike those in academic writing, go down like ice cream. These two elements alone brought on a fury of critical challenge.
By 1960, the authority of the independent literary critic—typified by writers like Edmund Wilson—was in severe decline, as everyone in literature seemed to be working in academia. Yet it was still a time of high book culture, and critics of every kind, whether they damned him or applauded him, were at pains to prove themselves as erudite as Fiedler. One of the most interesting of these critiques appeared in Commentary magazine. In an immensely long pair of reviews, one critic, Paul Levine, reviled Fiedler’s book as an assassination of the American imagination, unforgivably reductive, and in the end “boring rather than shocking,” while another, Benjamin DeMott, agreed with many of these complaints—he referred to Fiedler’s Huck Finn essay as an example of “muckraking irreverence”—but concluded that Love and Death was filled with literary glories. Even if the “general bent” of Fiedler’s criticism tempted many readers to regard him as “a Freudian exhibitionist capable of amusing or shocking but unworthy of respect,” DeMott argued, such a conclusion was simply wrong. Fiedler’s main subject was not the “fear of sex” in American literature but the “fear of the loss of [one’s] humanity, the self—wholeness.” At the heart of the myth Fiedler was describing was “a human figure afraid of losing either his right or his capacity to speak out of the center of his being.” (Get the uniform use of he?) The book, DeMott concludes, has “major achievements to its credit…. It offers an imaginative, unified view of our literature and history which defines qualities of American character that even the novelist himself has had difficulty naming.” Reviews like this established Fiedler as a major figure in the growing discipline of psychoanalytic lit crit.
I was in graduate school, majoring in British and American literature, when Love and Death was published; for me and my friends, the book spoke a language we welcomed with open arms.
These were years when I was constantly being told that I talked about characters in books as though they were real people, and now we were in the presence of a literary interpretation that was giving us back the world as many of us were beginning to suspect it really was: a world of women and men with a long history of making instrumental use of one another. Certainly the book revealed our own intimate relations as attachments compromised by sexual fear, social conflict, and massive self-deception.
With the publication of Love and Death, we foresaw a different future for literary culture in particular and social history in general. After this book, many of us thought, who would dare either blush or bristle at the mention of Freud or object vociferously to a Freudian interpretation of a literary text? We hoped as well that Fiedler’s jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturity would influence writers for generations to come, as alas it has not. (Philip Roth, anyone?)
The world in which Love and Death was written is long gone. The book’s intellectual structure is now less than electrifying, and liberationist movements have brought about a revolution in novel writing. Even the move away from the novel of conventional realism to modernist interiority could not have predicted the further development of the transgressive novels being written today by gay, feminist, and Black writers. Certainly the traditional novel of heterosexual seduction “from Clarissa to Marjorie Morningstar” no longer signifies, and many of Fiedler’s analytic interpretations have become the conventional wisdom. Still, rereading the book today, some 60 years after its publication, has given me a nasty jolt, recollecting as it does an insight I’ve felt pierced by many times before and now found myself feeling pained by anew. In essence, it was the way literature can illuminate, even embody, the historical gap between a culture’s recognition of a social injustice and its active deployment of the will to correct it. Revisiting Love and Death reminds me of one of the first moments when I experienced this insight viscerally while reading a book. The book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I read for the first time as a grown woman, and the insight came when I realized that the New Orleans slaver Augustine St. Clare was the key figure in the story.
St. Claire is the Ashley Wilkes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Intelligent, wealthy, and educated, he knows that slavery condemns Southern culture to hell everlasting yet cannot bring himself to endorse abolition. St. Claire is a man whose sensibility is undone by a crucial absence of will. He sees clearly the existential horror of one man owning another, but at the same time he dreads the disruption of life that is sure to follow abolition. In the end, he’d rather live with slavery than risk social chaos. Through Stowe’s powerful rendering of this character, we see clearly why it can—and usually does—take centuries to bridge the gap between a society’s knowing that a thing is evil and acquiring the urgency necessary to fight it. This realization struck me anew while rereading Love and Death.
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Throughout the book, with novelist after novelist, Fiedler—in nailing his thesis about American literature’s infantilism—makes repeated use of the fact that our writers struggle to put a living, breathing woman on the page. In fact, he tracks their misogyny up to the 1940s and ’50s, when the proletarian thriller—as written by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane—displayed a hatred of women so raw that Fiedler describes the genre as “undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber.”
It’s not that Fiedler is something of a feminist himself; he is not. There are next to no female writers in sight in Love and Death, no Edith Wharton or Flannery O’Connor or Shirley Jackson—no one. Instead, he sees the absence of real-life women in our fiction for the literary retardant it is and makes critical use of its fallout. In this regard, Fiedler’s work is somewhat companionate with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer to whom he pays his most brilliant attention.
The women in many of Hawthorne’s novels, Fiedler tells us, are divided between the Fair Maiden and the Dark Lady, with the Fair Maiden serving as the respectable female protagonist, while the Dark Lady is the bold outlier whose transgression provides the story with its necessary conflict. Together, the Maiden and the Lady work to embody and dramatize Hawthorne’s central intention: to explore the fractured human psyche up against life as we live it as opposed to life as it feels.
The darkest of Hawthorne’s Dark Ladies is Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. She is beautiful, intelligent, independently wealthy, and a driven feminist, outspoken in her resentment of the devastating inequality under which women labor. “Did you ever see a happy woman?” Zenobia asks at one point. “How can she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?” Hawthorne lets Zenobia speak so vividly for herself that it’s hard to believe she won’t prevail. But alas, she has thwarted Hawthorne’s moral code too dangerously—that is, she’s no longer a virgin—and thus, as Fiedler writes, “For having sinned in the flesh” without repenting, “Zenobia must…die, the victim of her own despair.”
On the basis of the speeches that Hawthorne puts in Zenobia’s mouth, one would think he was sympathetic to the cause of women’s liberation. But no—he’s only using Zenobia to illuminate, in Fiedler’s words, “a mind which has been condemned to live outside the law and society itself.” He’s actually repelled by the “emancipated ladies of his own time” and intent only on their predicament as an embodiment of humanity’s treacherous self-division. But here’s his saving grace for Fiedler: While “punishing and mocking” the feminists, Hawthorne—and this is most important—“still sees the situation clearly.” Ah, I thought, I want more on this, but there was no more. He “sees the situation clearly”: That was enough for Hawthorne and, I couldn’t help thinking, enough for Fiedler, too. It was then that I recalled St. Claire and identified my own growing unease with Love and Death itself. From here on in, the reader is free to challenge my every sentence. What follows is based not on anything I know, only on something I feel.
Love and Death is a book that aimed to throw a strong light on the self-deceptions of American culture then in evidence, with a special emphasis placed on the depth of its misogyny. Since that misogyny was abundantly available in everyday life in 1960, there was no need, Fiedler’s tone of voice seemed to be saying, to get unduly excited about it. After all, he wasn’t here to militate on behalf of women’s emancipation; he was here to show the reader how sexism worked in American fiction. And, in fact, I found that tone of Fiedler’s—its surprising neutrality—rather pleasing on this score. He was giving the plight of women its due, no more, no less, and that was fine with me.
In time, however, as the 500-odd pages of Love and Death made their stately way forward, and the sexism was repeatedly made use of and examined in an evenhanded way, Fiedler’s neutral tone began to lose its charm for me, became in fact wearisome. I began to want something more than neutrality, some exasperation actually; without exasperation, there could be no urgency, and suddenly I wanted urgency on behalf of the women being made literary use of. All in a moment, Love and Death began to feel oppressive.
In 1960, countless men and women knew that sexism was an evil, but at the same time, everyone could still live with it. Apparently, Fiedler—nothing if not a man of his time, just as St. Claire was a man of his—could also live with it. Therein lies the strength and the limitation of this famous, still exciting book, whose author stopped at seeing the situation clearly. Love and Death in the American Novel was definitely at one with its moment—a moment that had much to recommend it but was one many of us, wanted—and still want—to see pass.
Vivian GornickVivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, Taking a Long Look.