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Tuesday, December 09, 2008
“If you liked Annie, you’ll love Rags to Riches."*
Today I learned that as often as I throw around the phrase “Horatio Alger novels,” I’d be hard-pressed to list many works that fit the bill. There are, of course, novels written by Horatio Alger, but even they only qualify on a technicality. (Plus, not all of Alger’s novels rely on pluck and luck to drive the narrative.) Not that his novels weren’t enormously popular, as over 17,000,000 million copies were sold in the 1860s through 1880s. Nor was their uplifting ideology incidental, as the popularity of C. B. Seymour’s Self-Made Man (1858) and Freeman Hunt’s Lives of American Merchants (1858) attest.
But as pervasive as Alger’s rags-to-riches ethos is assumed to be, I can’t think of many novels which present—much less endorse—it. Literary scholars prefer to toss off references to humble bootstrappers as if hundreds upon thousands of novels described their ascent up the social ladder. Maybe there are, but most encounters with the phrase “Horatio Alger novels” are purely contrary. We have the first fifteen chapters of every Jack London novel. We have Robert Penn Warren calling Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier an attempt to modernize the Horatio Alger myth (Homage 56). We have Richard Wright identifying it as the locus classicus of capitalist mystification in Black Boy:
I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote.” (161)
What we have isn’t a robust literary tradition of Horatio Alger-type novels so much as a steady stream of anti-Horatio Alger-type novels beginning with the last chapter of every London novel and Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire (about Frank Algernon Cowperwood) and continuing through naturalist eviscerations of pat moral didacticism in Wright and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Whither the tradition they counter? Wright’s autobiography and Bellow’s autobiographical novel clearly respond to the narrative form of Alger’s novels, but that brings us back to Alger as the only author proper to his category.
I’m tempted to say that this is yet another case of savvy critics trying to account for the popularity of atrocious novels by appealing to a grand ideology that predisposed a given audience to swallow shallow tripe—but then my student, the one who humbled me this afternoon, wouldn’t know the names of any earnest iterations of the Horatio Alger narrative. Any suggestions?
*Being the tagline of NBC’s ill-fated attempt to hijack Annie‘s bandwagon.
Comments
Here’s what I posted back at Scott’s blog:
“I always thought that “Horatio Alger story” referred mainly to real-life tales spun in the Alger vein. I never thought there was a long tradition of writers who followed in footsteps of Alger, in part because it’s so obvious that the backlash followed close upon the heels of Alger’s popularity.
“Still, the rags to riches narrative predates Alger by, uh, 1000s of years. “Cinderella” is among the most popular, *Les Miserables* among the most interesting, Moses the most Jewish ("My son, he’s a prophet. How’s yours?"), Sir Gareth and Robin Hood the most medieval, Ben Franklin’s autobiography the most autobiographical, Abe Lincoln’s biography the most biographical (and one written by Alger himself). Jesus’s story isn’t bad either.
“And then there are the neo-Alger novels, which aren’t quite backlashes but rather more like meditations and complications of: *Gatsby*, or Doctorow’s *Billy Bathgate*, or *The Godfather*.
“It’s interesting to me how the ideology shifts, though. The “self-made man” trope might be more modern, more an effect of Romanticism. Jean Valjean recreates himself, but he can never leave the taint of his crime behind him. Frankenstein cannot make a man without reintroducing sin into his world. It’s a sort of post-Romantic, progressive optimism that allows for self-fashioning without the classical opposition between reality and artifice, or the Christian idea of original sin or marks of Cain, or even the Romantic terrible sublimity of human creation. The Alger ideology is one in which you leave the past behind for good when you become good. Protestantism without anything dangerous.
“But overall, the idea here is metalepsis: after Alger, they are all called “Alger stories,” even if they predate Alger.”
I seem to remember “Horatio Alger” as a type of novel is an actual coinage by a specific person at a specific time, but I can’t remember who or when.
"17,000,000 million copies were sold in the 1860s through 1880s.”
Now that’s a bestselling author. At least ten copies for every person on earth, from the looks of it . . . .