Public engagements: Humanitarianism and complicity in United States literary realism

This project examines the late-Victorian humanitarian conscience, its public manifestations, utopian aspirations, and pragmatic compromises, as represented by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Booker T. Washington and Edith Wharton. It shows that U.S. literary realism offers a tragicomic response to one of the core intellectual questions of its era: how might worn-out ideals about a universal moral sense he translated into a communitarian ethics for democratic citizenship? Paradoxical energies shape this study as I argue that realist pessimism emerges from an implicitly sympathetic response to sentimental ethics. In addition to delineating the attempt among realists to develop a post-idealist humanitarianism, I also find new value in realist depictions of the dilemmas of conscience occasioned by the postbellum experiences of democratic complicity. Indeed, Howells had his own doctrine of complicity; Washington was nothing if not an expert negotiator of the conditions of complicity; and both Crane and Wharton are extremely subtle thinkers about this social problematic. The deliberate project of literary realists to represent and think through the fate of ethical citizenship roles in a society which decentered subjectivity, perpetuated domestic inequalities, and justified overseas imperialism, secures their important place in a sentimental, democratic history.