2 - Howells, James, and the republic of letters

Summary

THE CIVIC USES OF HIGH CULTURE

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) gave new meaning and prominence to the word “culture.” “I shall not go so far as to say of Mr. Arnold that he invented it,” Henry James wrote of the word, “but he made it more definite than it had been before – he vivified it and lighted it up.” Surely part of what “vivified” culture in the educated vernacular was Arnold's pairing of the word with “anarchy” as its defining antonym. The red-flag urgency of “anarchy” made “culture” its cool and tranquil opposite, an antidote against social and political turmoil. Culture was conceived as a neutral or “disinterested” sphere of human experience, a sphere in which the warring interests of factions could recede in favor of a shared light for intelligent reflection on modern life. W. E. B. Du Bois had such a sphere in mind when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that African Americans wished to be “co-workers in the kingdom of culture” rather than being relegated to the role of “problem” in the sphere of politics. But Du Bois also alerts us to a certain faultline in the Arnoldian notion of culture. So long as the “kingdom of culture” is segregated – even so long as it is a solution to segregation, as Du Bois wishes – it partakes of the fractious problem of race. Even as the transcendence or resolution of politics, the sphere of culture is necessarily political.