A Jaundiced View of America: Robert W. Chambers and the King in Yellow

Officially, in America during the 1890s, "culture" was supposed to "mind her own business." The phrase is Larzer Ziff's, and in The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation, he writes that by the nineteenth century's last decade "a wholesale commercialization of life" had forced literature to become part of the business of beauty; the business of idealizing daily actualities to make the American scene one with the court of Arthur and the Palestine of Jesus; the business of adding "est" to verbs in poetry so as to render American speech poetic; the business of elevating the American landscape to a distinction equal to that of the Alps and the Nile--the business of decoration. (14) If not simply decorative, literature was nonetheless charged with upholding the moral and the ideal. William Dean Howells in his 1891 treatise Criticism and Fiction calls for a wholesome realism, a type of fiction superior to the romance and its dubious morality. Although Howells requires fiction to depict the contemporary world in quotidian detail, he is careful to establish a higher calling for literature: the maintenance of a Truth that is direct league with the Moral.1 In the early 1890s, Howells operates from the supreme assumption of the age: the confidence that progress is the definition of civilization. Howells sees the march of civilization in the supposed aesthetic and moral advances that realism, particularly of the American variety, had made over romance. As an influential cultural spokesman, the Dean of American Letters participated in the official national ideology by bearing witness to literature's improvement.2 American writers in the first half of the 1890s confronted "a literary gulf, [an] immense canyon that yawned in American culture between private experience and public admission" (Ziff 10). The most commercially successful writers of the day did not attempt to bridge this gulf, instead using fiction to reflect moral standards. Richard Harding Davis provides an excellent example of this type of author. In stories about plucky newsboys and dashing yet principled gentlemen, Davis reassured American readers that energy and style were not deleterious to ethical standards. But an almost pervasive optimism did not go unchallenged in American literature. In the early to mid 1890s, the fiction of certain gothic writers revealed skepticism about America's future. One of the more prominent naysayers was Ambrose Bierce. Though disparaged as "bitter," Bierce ignored his critics and hammered away at the sunny optimism of the age, most obviously in his journalism, but as well in his gothic and war fiction, which characterized human endeavor and aspiration as vain and meaningless. Certain stories by the lesser known Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) are just as skeptical. That many of the stories collected in his The King in Yellow (1895) were gothic should not be a surprise because, traditionally, gothic literature in America has challenged dominant ideologies. In fact, it might be argued that gothic literature is uniquely situated in American culture because of its power to contradict national narratives too blithe in their acceptance of progressivism. Following Richard Chase, who argued that the romance and not the realistic novel is the primary fictional mode in America, and taking a cue from Leslie A. Fiedler, who contended that "the American novel... is essentially a gothic one" (142), recent critics have granted the gothic romance, in the words of Louis S. Gross, a "more central position...in American fiction than any other national literature" (2). Teresa A. Goddu argues that, far from being merely escapist, gothic literature grapples with the nation's chief social concerns: "Instead of fleeing reality, the gothic registers its culture's contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged, version of reality" (2-3). Fiedler (131) traces the gothic's interest in social critique to Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), and the ability of gothic literature "to probe matters of concern to the society in which [it] exists" (181) is the guiding principle of David Punter's The Literature of Terror. …