| In this captivating work, Carmen Trammell Skaggs examines
the discourse of opera—both the art form and the social
institution—in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
American literature. Through the lens of opera, she maintains,
major American writers—including Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan
Poe, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Henry James,
and Edith Wharton—captured the transformations of a rapidly
changing American literary landscape. Although they turned to
opera for different reasons, they all saw a twofold function
in the art form: a means of expressing a private aesthetic experience
and a space in which to perform highly ritualized social functions.
Skaggs opens with an exploration of Whitman, who believed
that the opera singer infuses ordinary speech with an element
of the divine. Through his poetry, he sought to transform
these sacred intonations into vehicles of an artistic transcendence
that could be experienced by his audience. Skaggs then turns
to Poe and Alcott, who frequently imitated the excesses of
opera in their fiction, flamboyantly enjoying the element
of the absurd. Using opera as a setting in their work allowed
them to explore the fallibility of human sensibility, especially
our susceptibility to deception.
Chopin and Cather, Skaggs shows, empowered their heroines
with a voice, a medium for artistic transcendence, but they
were also influenced by the growing popularity of Wagnerian
opera—and of the idea that only through a sublimation
of life can transfiguration of the soul occur. The true artist,
they believed, inevitably lived a solitary life, sacrificing
all for art. In the diva, for instance, Cather saw the ideal
embodiment of the female artist. On the other hand, James
and Wharton, Skaggs explains, recognized the opera box as
the ideal setting for social considerations of class, codes,
and customs in many of their stories and novels.
In the past, literary critics have employed musical terminology
to evoke what opera historian Herbert Lindenberger describes
as a “nonverbal dimension beyond what we ordinarily
take to be the realm of literature,” but many of these
same scholars warily embraced an operatic approach. After
all, the “operatic” often suggests artificiality
and extravagance—qualities usually seen as negative
in writing. Despite the undisputed canonical status of many
of the works Skaggs explores, at least a few of them might
also be described in similarly operatic (and disparaging)
terms. The critical discourse of opera, however, offers an
ideal vehicle for opening these texts in a new way.
Unveiling a heretofore seldom-noticed connection between
the rise of opera in America and the flowering of American
literature, Skaggs’s noteworthy study will inform and
enlighten literary scholars, musicologists, and lovers of
both opera and literature.
Carmen Trammell Skaggs is assistant professor
of English at Columbus State University in Georgia. |
