Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by Jennifer L. Fleissner (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem by Jennifer L. Fleissner
• Justine S. Murison

FLEISSNER, JENNIFER L. Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 504 pp. $105.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $34.99 e-book.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s 1995 Critical Inquiry essay “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins Now” brashly opened with a list of “a few things theory today knows,” and the first was that the distance of “any account of human beings or cultures” from “a biological basis is assumed to correlate almost precisely with its potential for doing justice to difference, to contingency, to performative force, and to the possibility of change.” What they were describing was a field predominated by explanations via cultural and linguistic construction, and what they initiated was a turn back to the material: human biology, affects over “feelings” and “emotions,” nonhuman animals, things, enmeshments and entanglements with the material world, and so on. Indeed, since their essay “entanglement” has become a privileged word in literary criticism, signaling a determination not to hierarchize cause and effect, actor and actant, human over the nonhuman and material world.

Jennifer Fleissner’s Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem challenges these theoretical and methodological assumptions tied to the new materialisms. Fleissner’s main contention is that the struggle with and over the human will—that is, the capacity to make decisions, initiate action, and control impulses—is the central concern of the novel form and what drives modernity itself. As such, Maladies of the Will is at once an intellectual history, a new history of the novel, and a much-needed intervention for the general field of literary studies.

Fleissner’s first step is to widen the historical perspective of scholars of the American novel. Her history, in fact, begins with Augustine. She argues that scholars of the novel tend to position the eighteenth century’s relationship to the will in a way that occludes rather than explains what the novel does. Here’s her main point: since Augustine (and through such Protestant steady sellers as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) internal struggles of the will have been the main feature of the first-person introspective narratives that influenced the novel form. And, as a reader of Augustine, Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, or Mary Rowlandson would recognize, these struggles were about how to make sense of the peculiar phenomenon of knowing what is morally right but still doing the opposite. Edgar Allan Poe famously dubbed this the “imp of the perverse.” [End Page 208]

As Fleissner contends, eighteenth-century Anglo-American thinkers and authors developed two related ways to manage this imp. The first was to idealize the liberal subject—self-owning and rationally choosing. The second was through sentiment—the valorization of the feeling, sympathetic subject. In Fleissner’s argument these do not constitute the invention of modern subjectivity so much as two modes for managing what would be the modern predicament of the will: that in a secular world we are faced with feeling at once as if we have all the freedom and power to self-make and are yet utterly circumscribed by structures beyond our control.

Fleissner delves into German philosophy and transatlantic medical theories to explain how maladies of the will—its illnesses and imps—constituted the sign of this emerging sense of modernity. Her chapters are anchored by major texts or authors from the American canon, renarrated and reinterpreted through this intellectual history: Chapter 1 focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Chapter 2 Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; Chapter 3 Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons; Chapter 4 the James brothers; Chapter 5 Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and other naturalist writers; and Chapter 6 on Black writing at the turn of the twentieth century with a special focus on Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. As this outline suggests, Fleissner is concerned in large part with exceptional cases and with understanding the relation of novels traditionally classified as “romances” (The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick) to those...