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Title: World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature by Richard Poirer, Richard Poirier ISBN: 0-299-09934-2 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: January, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: A Classic, but Somewhat Outdated, Study of American Lit
Comment: In this classic work of American literary criticism, Poirier analyzes American writers' attempts, through style and language, to free their main characters from the constraints of American social and economic forces. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser and the heroes of their works are attempting to conjure "at least the illusion of a world elsewhere," away from the inhibiting effects of American society.

Emerson is the central figure of Poirier's study, as his works "constitute a compendium of iconographies that have gotten into American writers who may never have liked or even read him"; he is "nearly always a hovering presence in American writing." Poirier skillfully traces Emerson's influence through twentieth-century works, finding strong Emersonian undercurrents in certain passages from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. In Emerson's essay "Nature" and The Great Gatsby, the "relation to landscape is established by gazing at it, by an 'aesthetic contemplation' rather than by more palpable and profitable claims to ownership." The speaker in Emerson's essay and Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, look at landscape and imaginatively alter it, removing houses or farms and restoring it to its pristine condition before the arrival of European explorers, thus taking "visionary possession" of the landscape and creating a new environment-a world elsewhere-devoid of the influence of American society.

In his biography of Hawthorne, James asserts that "no serious fiction could have been written" in pre-Civil War America because of "the bareness of American life"; this is reflected in what James perceives as a major weakness in Hawthorne's works: an inability to portray social relationships with complexity. Poirier believes that James undervalues Hawthorne by not recognizing that "far from feeling deprived by what James thinks is lacking in his society, Hawthorne was usually anxious to escape from what it did offer." This quest for escape is reflected in The Blithedale Romance, in which Hawthorne's main character, Miles Coverdale, retreats to a transcendentalist Utopian community. According to Poirier, "tasteless literariness" is Hawthorne's greatest weakness; the author cannot overcome a tendency toward conventional literary constructs and language.

In the book's most intriguing chapter, Poirier examines the similarities and differences in the literary philosophies of nineteenth-century American and English writers. American writers of the period were critical of their English counterparts, who, to them, seemed to view the novel simply as entertainment or a vehicle for addressing social ills. Emerson sees Jane Austen as "imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society"; Twain and James are also highly critical of her works. Poirier convincingly argues that Emerson, Twain, and James "are unable to see, so alien to them is her positive vision of the social experience, that she is fully aware of the dangers in society which for them are dangers of it." Like the heroes of American fiction, the title character of Austen's Emma manipulates her social environment through imagination; her failed attempts to arrange a match between her low-born friend Harriet Smith and men above her social station demonstrate a will to transcend the societal constraints of early nineteenth-century England. However, unlike American fiction, the movement in Austen's novels is not toward isolation or escape but instead toward marriage; the couple, not the individual or the group, is the "best society."

Dreiser and Wharton, like Fitzgerald and other later American writers, create heroes who "are often anxious to surrender themselves to the powers that destroy them." For these novelists, like their nineteenth-century precursors, "society. . .becomes an expression of impersonal power, even when that power is being manipulated by some of its victims." Emerson is still a prominent figure in the American literature of the early part of the twentieth century, as Poirier traces his concept of individuality-"non-conformism, social protest, and a sense of human destiny not satisfied by the opportunities available within the structure of society"- through Dreiser, Wharton, and Thoreau.

Ultimately, for Poirier, the undercurrent in American literature in regards to issues of self and environment is not a progression but a stasis. Twentieth-century American writers create characters who attempt to construct environments uncontaminated by "modern democratic America" in the same manner as that of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

One must keep in mind that Poirier was writing in the mid-1960s, and his arguments may or may not apply to the American post-modern novel; however, A World Elsewhere is a readable, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking look at one of the central themes in American literature: the desire to escape societal constraints

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