How American novelists after Civil War tackled the matter of manners

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CIVIL WARS: AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND MANNERS, 1880-1940

By Susan Goodman

Johns Hopkins University Press, $40, 198 pages

REVIEWED BY MERLE RUBIN

One of the chief activities of literary historians down through the ages has been the making of categories. How else would we be able to compare "traditionalism" with "modernism," tell "satire" from "burlesque," the "baroque" from the "rococo," or weigh the competing claims of "realism" and "romanticism"? But categories can be misleading, blinding us to the rich and complex qualities of any artistic enterprise.

The term, "a novel of manners," is a case in point. We may invoke it to indicate the difference between "The Portrait of a Lady" and "Moby Dick." Or "Vanity Fair" and "The Call of the Wild." Or even "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre." And yet, and yet. Although less focused on social nuances than Jane Austen, the outspoken Charlotte Bronte -- and even her still more unconventional sister Emily -- are also concerned with social codes and the ways in which their characters obey, misread, challenge, or ignore them. Thus, in some sense, it could be said that most novels are novels of manners.

This broader, more inclusive definition of manners and the novel of manners is the working premise of Susan Goodman's interesting new book, "Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880-1940." A professor of English at the University of Delaware, she begins her study of six American novelists by reminding us that one of them, Edith Wharton, refused even to "recognize a substantive distinction between novels and novelists of manners."

Ms. Goodman wants to take issue with the prevalent belief, promulgated by "Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century and Lionel Trilling in the twentieth, that the United States has neither the rich past nor the stratification of classes required to produce a novelist of manners."