on Writing Against Reform

Max Chapnick (MC): Could you say more about the story of the project? How did it move from a dissertation to a book? 

Arielle Zibrak (AZ): The dissertation was called “Art and Anti-Identity in the Aesthetic Sphere.” It began with a question, “why are these hyper canonical writers in the period that I work in the progressive era, for the most part considered apolitical,” especially given the fact that the period I work in, the progressive era, is such a highly politicized time. 

And as somebody who's always thought of myself as a political thinker, it seemed like something that needed to be reconciled. But the writers who I loved the most didn't seem to have a political urgency about their work. And so the more I looked into that, the more I realized that that wasn't actually true. The project wasn't so much about the reform novel as a generic structure, which is how my interest started to evolve as I actually started teaching more about this work and thinking more about this work in the context of being a professor. So the dissertation was, as all dissertations are, primarily something I wrote in order to finish my degree.

When I came to the University of Wyoming, I immediately started teaching a graduate class in the fiction of reform, and shortly after, I started teaching a graduate class in literary realism. And really, when I started thinking about literary realism in opposition to certain kinds of political formats, that's when the book started to take shape as an actual contribution to scholarly conversations instead of just me working through my own process and using the dissertation as an opportunity to educate myself. 

So, I really rethought the book in the first couple of years of this job. Then I got some reader reports back, and they demanded a pretty significant revision. I couldn't just go back to working on it. So, I wrote another book. I wrote a book called Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, which was a short, more writerly project. And I think that gave me more confidence as a writer, and it gave me a sense of what an actual book feels like writing. And when I turned back to Writing Against Reform, I really simplified my arguments, I would say, in terms of trying to make the book hang together as a whole.

After that, things went much more smoothly. So, I'm a big advocate of stepping away from a project when it feels like you can professionally. I gave up on using Writing Against Reform as my tenure book because I realized that intellectually, it was going to suffer from that pressure. So I did. At my institution, I was able to get tenure on the basis of an edited collection and some peer-reviewed articles that had already come out. And because it was an edited collection that was tied to a centenary, I knew that the press wasn't going to screw me up by making it come out later. For me, producing the book had to do with really understanding where it fell in terms of both my professional goals and my intellectual allegiances.

MC: Just a quick follow-up: maybe this is just a legacy from the dissertation, but how did you decide which authors to include in the project?

AZ: I mean, there are so many authors that I could have included. I thought about including one person who was in and out: William Dean Howells. But I felt like we don't need a chapter on Howells and realism from me. The interventions I’m interested in making on that topic have already been made, and it would've been more like a background chapter. As a dissertation, it was fully transatlantic. Every chapter had to do with both writers and the print ecology in the UK and the United States, and that just ended up feeling like too much. 

So I was interested in prioritizing women writers, and in the case of the James Weldon Johnson chapter, non-white writers, although non-white writers come up in other chapters too. But I felt like those conversations about realism were more vital and interesting than going back to the conversations that we were having about canonical white male realist writers like Howells, where I do tend to agree more with the conclusions that have been made. 

Nicole Musselman (NM): In addition to the specific authors that you center in each chapter, you identify many of their reform contemporaries. So you mentioned Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Rebecca Harding Davis chapter and Upton Sinclair in the  Edith Wharton chapter. And as you point out, these authors approach writing and reform work very differently from the authors you chose to analyze in those chapters. Do you see these vastly different approaches as beneficial to the reform movements they worked for? Or, in the case of Sinclair and Wharton, how do you see these authors connected even though they were working in different reform movements?

AZ: They're having aesthetic arguments about politics. So, it's not so much that the aesthetic writers disagreed with the specific political opinions of the reform writers. It's more so that, as Wharton says to Upton Sinclair in that scathing letter that I love, “you've basically written a political pamphlet.” So, her objections are primarily aesthetic, not political. And I think it's really interesting that what they object to across the board is this handholding of the reader. There's a part of me intellectually that really admires that because I feel like as an educator, people learn more when you don't tell them what to think. They learn more when the message is a little complicated, and they have to parse it themselves. I sought out authors who I felt relished that ambiguity. James most famously relishes that kind of ambiguity. And a lot the scholarship about his work comes back to that insight: that Jamesian politics are to be found in the interstices of the meaning of his prose. And I thought there were more writers like that. I mean, we may give James a little bit too much credit for being one of the few people who does that. 

In terms of pairing aesthetic writers with reform writers, they came up with these objections themselves. And so it was really in the paratextual material that these kinds of pairings or relationships emerge because in her letters, Edith Wharton does a lot of complaining about other writers, and so does Chopin, and so does Rebecca Harding Davis. These are figures who are both to different degrees of investment, also acting as literary critics. We get this rare opportunity to see what they do as writers measured against what they say is important to them as writers.

Jorden Sanders (JS): I really appreciate you bringing up the paratextual frame because one of the things I really admired but was also a little daunted by was just how much archival work had to go into producing chapters that were, to some extent, literary analysis but leaned heavily on personal papers and correspondence. So, my question has two parts:  first, given the kind of sweeping parameters of a book about the progressive era with its multiple reform movements, what do you see as the benefit of approaching this argument through authors as opposed to through reform movements and, second, given your choice to focus on authors, can you talk about the kind of archival practice you had to adopt in order to create chapters about such canonical authors who, I’m sure, have boxes and boxes of material without losing the heart of your argument?

AZ: Jorden, it is editing. So, I mean, a lot of this stuff was much, much longer, and then I had to take out the stuff that didn't feel relevant, sort of carve out an argument.  You hit on what was a central conflict of the book, which is that I didn't want to write a book that was organized by authors.  When I advise my grad students, I often advise them against that. 

There could have been a version of this book where one chapter was about women's rights, one chapter was about temperance, and one chapter was about child labor or whatever. But the reason why I didn't do that is because I think it's really good advice to listen to the misunderstandings of your book when it's in the early process, and the primary misunderstanding that I faced was that I wasn't communicating myself clearly enough. And what I wasn't communicating clearly enough is that this is not a book about politics. This is a book about different writers' aesthetic theories of how they approach the relationship between literature and politics. 

And there wasn't really content there because it's not like Edith Wharton has a whole thing about why she doesn't support women's rights. It's more so that she is trying to draw attention to a certain set of issues by employing her own aesthetic theory of how we communicate political concerns within the context of the novel. And so part of the reason why I went back to a single author model was for the clarity of looking at each particular writer's specific objection to the aesthetics of reform realism as opposed to the political content of the arguments that the writers that they're criticizing are making. 

JS: So that kind of narrowing and focus came after you'd done the archival work?

AZ: When you're in the archive, I feel like you don't know. I mean, sometimes you do know. Sometimes you're like, “Whoa, this is a really good find,” but that is much rarer than taking a bunch of notes, and you're like, “I don't know if I'm going to use this or not.” And I take pictures of everything I look at in the archive. I take notes also, but I take pictures of everything because oftentimes, I have to go back because I didn't think something was that important at the time, but it was actually very important. In terms of practicality, I really lucked out that a lot of my authors’ archives were adjacent to each other.

I spent almost a whole summer at the Beinecke, which has almost all of both James Weldon Johnson's and Edith Wharton’s papers. So, I was really able to spend a significant amount of time with those things because that was all under one grant. Where archival research becomes really untenable is when you have small amounts of archival material at a lot of different places. It was easier to do because they're such canonical authors that their archives are really concentrated.

I also think if you have a very archival project, it makes sense to expect that your first archive trip is going to just be like, what's there? And then your next archive trip is like, look at the stuff that's important to my project specifically after I can do more research based on what's there.

MC: This is sort of a corollary to Jorden's last question, and I guess also an editing question, but how did you go through that giant amount? How do you decide what to include and what not to include?

AZ: You have to include the stuff that serves your argument. I mean, obviously not at the exclusion of comprehensive understanding. You can't cherry-pick the things that agree with what you're trying to say, but there's tons of stuff that James says about aesthetics that I don't include because you're exactly right. It's all available to me. I could write a whole book about James's view, many have. 

I think, for me, at least, drafting is like that, too. I have colleagues and friends who are that kind of writer where every sentence is great, and they build a thing very methodically and slowly. I will write 150 pages and end up with twenty from that. So, I write a lot, and my writing process is that I don't cite things while I'm writing. Once I decide what I'm keeping, I go back and check all of my citations. So I do a lot of stuff just from my memory, and then I go back to check the citations and add the citations because I find that if I go from notes in such a methodical way, I tend to lose the plot. To me, it's the big huge draft that has a lot of stuff in it that's not going to end up in it. Then, the tighter draft, which is much shorter than the final draft, where I add back in all of the research. I know that's not great news, but this book I wrote over the course of 12 years.

JS: Speaking of the draft where you figured out the story that you wanted to tell, it might be useful for us to talk about that story, particularly in relation to the constellation of terms, two of which appear right in the title—“reform” and “aesthetics.” But I'm also interested in talking through how you came to settle on “form” as the third term. Can you talk to us about how you triangulate those terms —“aesthetic realism,” “form,” and “reform”— and maybe tease out for us the significance of giving attention to form as opposed to genre?

AZ: As is the case with most people, other scholars were super generative in terms of helping me with terms and thinking about what I wanted to say in the book. The book I read that first inspired this shape of the project was Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose, and immediately, I had such strong feelings about that book. I thought it was brilliant. I learned so much from it. I also disagreed on a lot of topics. You're so lucky if you get a book in your hands like that. I mean, when do you have so many strong feelings about a work of scholarship?

It's not the most common thing. So I was really, really grateful to Amanda for writing that book. And then, I had an opportunity to talk to her about that work. That was really the book that made me think about reform as a key term in this project because originally, as I said, it was much more so about aesthetics, and my original investment was in aesthetic theory. When I started to talk to Amanda and look at the reform scholarship that appeared in that book and the scholarship that came after — María Carla  Sánchez's book Reforming the World and Laura Fisher's book, Reading for Reform were really, really central — I felt like they had fleshed out a lot of the things that I was interested in in terms of reform writers in the period. And so I felt like I didn't have to do that work because their work existed, and I was really happy to gesture towards that scholarship and have people go to that work. 

And my argument really started to make sense to me when I started thinking about Caroline Levine's book Forms. In looking at Levine's work, I started to think about how you could express a political opinion about literature that wasn't about the political content of the work.  That was a real shift for me when I started thinking about how the way you go about writing a realist novel, specifically, is also an assertion of your political allegiances, even if you're not talking about specific issues in the work, because realism is an attempt to encapsulate your understanding of reality. So, when you read a realist writer on realism, what you learn about is not just their views of how literary representation works but also what they think reality is, and that becomes a much more complex proposition. 

But the term that I felt was the most necessary to create (besides the central term of the book, which is the idea of this aesthetic counter tradition) was the idea of “reform realism,” because I do think there's sometimes a conflation in terms of the way we understand literary realism, that all realism is reform realism or reform realism is the most predominant form of realism. I think that I understand my intervention as being that there's a significant realist tradition that is not modernism but that takes objection to the specific representational strategies of reform realism.

MC: I'm generally convinced by the overall argument of the book that high literary aesthetic writers are making a formal intervention against reform writing and, in so doing, are making a political gesture. In this frame, the aesthetic writers are saying that there are problems with reform writing; that reform writing flattens and has other negative impacts. But (and this is a problem I'm struggling with in my own research) the dialectical counter is that you're then making a claim that some of these aesthetic writers, who we know are somewhat conservative in their tendencies, like Wharton and James, are actually progressive, or, at the very least,  their aesthetic arguments have value for progressive or radical ends. At the very end of the last chapter, you place Wharton next to the scholar Dylan Rodríguez. I would like to believe that that's true. I would like to believe that the satire of the problems of reform in The Bostonians is actually itself a tool for radicalism, but it's hard for me to get there. So, I'm just wondering if you could say more about that. 

AZ: Wharton isn’t ideologically equivalent to Dylan Rodríguez. Let me be clear. I'm very sympathetic to any problems you would have with such an assertion. What I'm saying is, for me, the investment is in trying to destabilize this binary between progressive and conservative when we're looking at writers and, in particular, realist writers. This issue, for me, came out of the study of 19th-century American women writers, where so much of scholarship was historically about determining whether or not we understand a writer to be politically progressive.

I think the way that that field is developing is really exciting because we're moving away from initial questions attendant to the projects of recovery where we recovered writers whose politics are good because they would be really good to teach, and that's not wrong. Nobody wants to teach women writers who didn't believe that women should get the vote or who felt that not marrying was a huge problem. There are all sorts of writers who are really interesting, who have political allegiances that we don't identify with. Part of what I'm saying in the book is that, with this set of writers, I don't think what they thought politically is necessarily as important as how their work offers us a chance to think about how, through the art of literature, people with different politics might have really productive conversations where they find they agree more than they think they do.

So, a part of the book that might be boring but that felt really important to me is all of those disagreements that  Emerson had with Carlyle in James Senior's recounting because I just found it really hopeful to read the Emerson-Carlyle letters. They were really good friends, even though they disagreed fundamentally on a lot of political issues, but they were still able to have conversations about politics that were really helpful to both of them in building their thinking. So,  how do we teach? How do we bring the very complex political ideas that these writers are addressing, though not necessarily advocating, in their fictions? How do we recreate those conversations in the classroom? I think that if you teach The Jungle, you don't have as much of an interesting conversation about, well, what did he think? You know what he thought. This is not to say that I don't think that Sinclair is important because I do. I think that when you teach all these things together, you really have to parse what you think the writer is saying, regardless of whether you agree with the conversation. So, what I'm advocating, Max, is understanding that you can teach Dylan Rodriguez via Edith Wharton, not that they necessarily agree with each other. 

MC: I like that a lot. The thing that I'm struggling with is if we agree with James and Davis and Wharton and all these figures that the aesthetic object ought to, in some cases, remain apolitical and that keeping the aesthetic apolitical is itself a sort of politics, do we then lose something?

AZ: That was the issue I was wrestling with in grad school where I felt guilty about being a grad student when I thought I should be a political activist. We don't go to literature to find a fully formed political opinion. I feel like we go to political theory for that. We go to literature to think through, to help us think through. And I feel like that's what the art of literature is good at doing, which is not to say that I don't love a polemic. I've often said screed is my favorite genre, but I think they do different things. And the way that Caroline Levine in Forms started to adopt that term of “affordances,” I felt like was really useful to my thinking because once it started to become a question of what are the various affordances of the realist novel, the reform realist novel has a very different set of affordances than the aesthetic realist novel. And I think that they're both useful. The only thing that I feel really strongly about in this conversation, besides the fact that discourse is important, is that we shouldn't dismiss writers that we feel guilty about liking. We should talk about them.

JS: In some ways, this shifts the pressure from explicitly politicized speech, so when I think about James Weldon Johnson and particularly the reading you give us of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, it was interesting to sit with that reading and still think about some of his more explicitly political pieces. There are authors who are capable of making a polemic but choose to do so in other literary forms. Can you talk about how you balance that tension in your chapters? How did you wrestle with the other kinds of writing that these authors produced that had more explicit political heft to them?

AZ: So even in the case of writers who were very political, like Johnson, I spent a lot of time talking about his explosive political engagements. I do think that Johnson's primary orientation towards politics is aesthetic because he understands that his political goals, and the achievement of his political goals, are contingent upon finding the right form. I think he sees political protest as a genre that has its own specific aesthetic dimensions. This is not to undermine the political urgency of his project or anyone else's project. It's just to say that I think that in this period, there started to be a really sophisticated sense of formalism for some of these writers in terms of how they wanted to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

And so I became very interested in looking at unsuccessful iterations of political forms like The Fruit of the Tree, the Wharton novel where she tries to write a problem novel and it kind of falls apart. Or I love Kate Chopin's critiques of the social purity movement. So, to answer your question of how do you negotiate it when it's a very specific movement, the social purity movement is pretty specific, and Kate Chopin is very clearly engaging with it. Still, the way that she's engaging with it is that she's satirizing their strategies of representation. She's not really criticizing anything that they are saying politically. And so even when they're very specifically engaged on a political issue, I think that the terms of their engagement are aesthetic in so far as they understand the aesthetic to be an essential part of any political project.

MC: This goes back to Nicole's question about which authors you picked, but I was just thinking about your discussion of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which is very much about form. Then you mentioned Du Bois in that chapter, but you could have picked Dark Princess or another Du Bois novel, but he doesn't really do realism in the same way.

AZ: And it's tricky because, especially in that moment of the NAACP thinking about aesthetics and what they want their intervention in aesthetic criticism and the production of art to be, how much they want the goal of the agency to be monitoring that or engaging with that. And I think a lot of people have set that moment up as debates between two specific actors—  for example,  W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke — but I think that it's more complicated. Everybody had their own unique idea about what the role of the organization should be in aesthetic production and even censorship. So, I could have gone many different ways on that one. The question of the NAACP's engagement with the aesthetic could be a whole other book that I hope someone else writes.

MC: Just to drill down on the teaching a little bit, you mentioned you teach a realism seminar and a reform novel seminar. Do you mix them? Do you teach The Jungle in the realism seminar or Edith Wharton’s reform novel?

AZ: I don't teach Edith Wharton’s reform novel just because it's very hard when you're putting together a graduate seminar, and you want to do coverage. And so, I always want to teach my students a field when I teach a graduate seminar. What served me the best as a graduate student was having a handle on a field and understanding how a field works. I don't want to teach my question so much as I want to teach the fields that the question engages. I mean, I don't set my course up as an argument. I set my course up as a conversation. 

I don't put all the sources of my book in one class together and hope that they come to the same conclusion. That's why I teach it in two distinct classes. I don't even think that the relationship between those two topics is something that everybody wants to engage with. Maybe they want to engage with realism in a completely different way, and that's cool. 

NM: Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned the next project and the archive issues you might face. Do you plan to expand this particular scholarship, or are you just moving on to something totally different?

AZ: My next project grew out of the social purity chapter. When I was reading stuff about the social purity movement, I became really interested in social purity insofar as it overlapped with the power of positive thinking movements in the period. I started researching the early gynecology performed by women in the United States, which has a lot of overlap with mental healing movements that grew out of Christian science and spiritualism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My new project is about New Thought and its fiction.

New Thought is a power-positive thinking movement that holds that if you can manifest something in your mind, you can make it real in the real world. And it was a really, really powerful discourse among white women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My argument is that it shaped the way that we understand contemporary feminist wellness movements. Right now, I'm working on an essay for a volume edited by two scholars whose work I really respect, Anna Mae Duane and Beth Marshall, that describes the connections between New Thought and Eugenics in the post-pandemic moment of the twentieth century and contemporary crypto-fascism in feminist wellness spaces.