Former fellow Gavin Jones (2001-02) is associate professor of English at Stanford and an expert on 19th and 20th century American literature. His most recent publication, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2007), uncovers a complex discourse on the poor in American literature from the antebellum era through the Depression.

We got in touch with Gavin to find out how literature can help us understand this intractable social problem and discuss what his research reveals about the history of poverty in the United States.

1. You note at the beginning of American Hungers that scholars of American literature have largely overlooked poverty as a category of critical discourse. This is somewhat surprising given the prominence of minority studies in literary scholarship. In your opinion, what accounts for this omission? How did you become interested in this topic?

The distinction to understand here is between scholarship interested in representations of the poor, and scholarship interested in unpacking poverty as a category. The revolution in minority studies over the last few decades has opened up a powerfully political and social way to look at literature. Yet too often the question of poverty has remained a background issue, certainly present, though present as a passive assumption rather than a polemic at the front and center of our consciousness.

There are many other reasons for the omission, or rather the occlusion, you refer to—the tendency to view literature as reflective of a cultural identity, for example, rather than illustrative of a socioeconomic position. When we move poverty to the center of the discussion, then the way we categorize literature into minority and mainstream traditions becomes really interesting because poverty is a problem that affects individuals from all cultural groups, just as it has caught the attention of writers from many different backgrounds. This is what made me first interested in the topic: I like in my work to identify blind spots, or ways of thinking that bring issues together in surprising and often contradictory ways.

2. What specifically does literature bring to our understanding of the shape and nature of poverty in the United States?

For me, literature has the power to do three things that are not so dynamically available in other fields.

First, creative literature can illustrate processes that remain difficult to see, processes of knowledge formation and political ideology—that is, the way public assumptions about the causes of poverty become shaped and enacted. For example, in texts by James Agee and Theodore Dreiser, one can actually view the process whereby progressive, environmentally contextual approaches to poverty get overwhelmed by essentialist explanations that situate the cause of poverty in the individual.

Second, literature can parse theories and methods of analysis. This is what Herman Melville does: across a range of texts he develops a way of looking at the culture of poverty without blaming impoverishment on that culture.

And third, literature can offer a window onto the experience of being poor—the subjective patterns of suffering and alienation that often fall beneath the radar of sociological approaches.

The combination of all of these three, of course, makes literature a powerful tool indeed.

3. The key texts you analyze in American Hungers date from 1840-1945. Why did you choose this period and how did you choose your corpus? Given that poverty was undoubtedly a social issue in colonial America, is it only with the Industrial Revolution that poverty becomes a literary concern?

It’s always problematic to place beginning and ending markers around such a perennial and ongoing issue. Clearly the rise of industrial modernity, with its seemingly inherent structure of inequality, made a big difference in perceptions of the poor by diverting attention from the workings of providence to the nature of society and the individual.

My view is that, though poverty is certainly a theme in colonial and early national literature, it does not become a polemic until the early antebellum period, when writers began to explore how poverty upsets both the patterns of representation and the democratic assumptions on which American society was founded.

It’s this intertwining of ideological and representational crises that makes the literature of this period so intriguing, and reaches a kind of peak in the writing of the Great Depression when the nation itself seemed to be falling apart in face of the persistence of economic failure amid ideologies of success. In the book I focus on writers who are particularly self-conscious of the problems poverty poses for representation, and hence structure their texts as explorations of ideological contradictions.

4. You mention that historical contextualization is necessary to understand the social embeddedness of poverty as a literary form. In other words, representations of poverty change with the times. But is there a degree of literary influence in fictional representations of poverty? Are there literary topoi of poverty that get perpetuated independent of historical context?

Certainly there are literary tropes that get passed along transhistorically. Think, for example, of Richard Wright’s interest in the theme of hunger that is a racial concern of earlier black writers, or think of James Agee’s return to the ideas of the transcendentalists. But what interests me is less this kind of influence than the emergence of a certain kind of literary sensibility, a shared interest in investigating the linguistic impact of the challenges that economic inequality poses to the ideal of social equality.

I’m not sure this sensibility gets passed along in the same way as images and themes—it’s much more unreliable and historically contingent. But to say that this sensibility is historically produced does not necessarily mean that each era has a different perception of its poor. In fact, one of the surprising points of my study is the way that responses to the poor stay the same, despite historical changes.

5. As the title indicates, American Hungers focuses exclusively on American representations of poverty. Is it possible to see in this literature a national style of poverty discourse? How do depictions of poverty in, say, Melville, compare to depictions in the writings of 19th century European authors such as Dickens, Hugo, and Zola?

This is a hot question: the degree to which national distinctions still hold in the analysis of literature. Certainly there are parallels between Melville and Dickens, and between Agee and Orwell, for example. But poverty does not bring the same representational and ideological crises in the British writers as it does in the American.

I feel that the United States is peculiar, as a western, industrialized nation, in its treatment of and its attitude toward the poor. And these peculiarities—the clash, as I’ve mentioned, between widespread structural inequality and pervasive doctrines of social equality—make for a partially distinct set of themes and styles. Moreover, to focus on interconnections and parallels between different national traditions can tend to distract attention from the national domain of polity in which the reduction of poverty can be effected. My national focus has this political impact in mind too.

6. How did your research for American Hungers affect your views on poverty in America today? What can we learn from the history of poverty in America?

As I suggested earlier, I was struck by the continuity between attitudes that formed in the early part of the 19th century and attitudes that operate politically today. The welfare reforms of the mid-1990s, for example, were fuelled by beliefs that poverty was caused by cultural forces, that it had become a way of life—a view that reflects the “culture of poverty” thesis that was theorized in the 1950s and 1960s but really stretches back to attitudes that developed in reaction to the new urban poor in the industrializing America of the mid-19th century. Catastrophes, such as Hurricane Katrina, can suddenly take the lid off of the deep social and racial inequality in the United States. But when we turn to the nation’s literature, we quickly see that the lid was never really on in the first place.

LINKS:

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8511.html

Gavin Jones' homepage: http://english.stanford.edu/bio.php?name_id=70