Talking shop: Craft and design in Hawthorne, James, and Wharton (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edith Wharton)

Fiction, Henry James wrote, is "building and gilding, carving and coloring." Talking Shop considers the relation between literature and workmanship in the industrial age, as craft came to refer as much to a way of being as a way of working,{09}("It's more than pottery," flashes the website of a modern ceramics company; "it's a lifestyle.") Yet I differentiate my aims from academic and popular jeremiads decrying the mass-marketing of a romanticized rustic lifestyle.{09}My chapters instead propose relays between craft, identity, and commerce that are intrinsic to crafts critique in the industrial age.{09}I attempt to chart the meaning of workmanship as it evolved from Romantic notions of the artisan's unalienated life to modern accommodations of authenticity and imitation under the aegis of a crafts sensibility.; An introduction opens with Benvenuto Cellini's sixteenth-century Autobiography, a paradigmatic and problematic artisanal text for the industrial era, The following chapters turn to aesthetics---the irregularity propounded as a crafts style by the Gothic Revival (Chapter One) as well as the simplicity mass-marketed in America by Gustav Stickley (Chapter Two). Both styles, contextualized by such work as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Ashcan painting, oriented the relation between crafts and materials to the artisan's consciousness rather than to technical skills or mastery of a medium. From this historical and aesthetic foundation, I move into readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne's three major novels (Chapter Three), Henry James's Spoils of Poynton (Chapter Four), and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (Chapter Five). Throughout these chapters, I am interested in an "aura" of pre-industrial authenticity that differs from Walter Benjamin's definition, by being oriented not just to objects and their provenance (and hence to a bygone age of authentic production) but equally to subjects, sensibilities, and industrially reproduced furnishings. I close with an epilogue on Martha Stewart and the easy relations of singularity and excess, craft and commodity, that flow from the account of authenticity traced in the dissertation.