The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum

by Keith Gandal

In this compelling work, Keith Gandal reveals how the slum in nineteenth-century America, long a topic for sober moral analysis, became in the 1890s an unprecedented source of spectacle, captured in novels, newspapers, documentary accounts, and photographs. Reflecting a change in the middle-class vision of the poor, the slum no longer drew attention simply as a problem of social conditions and vice but emerged as a subject for aesthetic, ethnographic, and psychological description. From this period dates the fascination with the "colorful" alternative customs and ethics of slum residents, and an emphasis on nurturing their self-esteem. Middle-class portrayals of slum life as "strange and dangerous" formed part of a broad turn-of-the-century quest for masculinity, Gandal argues, a response to a sentimental Victorian respectability perceived as stifling. These changes in middle-class styles for representing the urban poor signalled a transformation in middle- class ethics and a
reconception of subjectivity.

Developing a broad cultural context for the 1890s interest in the poor, Gandal also offers close, groundbreaking analysis of two of the period's crucial texts. Looking at Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), Gandal documents how Riis's use of ethnographic and psychological details challenged traditional moralist accounts and helped to invent a spectacular style of documentation that still frames our approach as well as our solutions to urban problems. Stephen Crane's A Girl of the Streets (1893) pushed ethnographic and psychological analysis even farther, representing a human interiority centered around self-image as opposed to character and exploring not only different customs but a radically different ethics in New York's Bowery--what we would call today a "culture of poverty." Gandal meanwhile demonstrates how both Riis's innovative "touristic" approach and Crane's "bohemianism" bespeak a romanticization of slum life and an emerging middle-class unease with its own
values and virility.

With framing discussion that relates slum representations of the 1890s to those of today, and featuring a new account of the Progressive Era response to slum life, The Virtues of the Vicious makes fresh, provocative reading for Americanists and those interested in the 1890s, issues of urban representation and reform, and the history of New York City.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Dusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the 1890s, Jacob A. Riis and Stephen Crane inaugurated a shift in American culture, shepherding us from the Protestant morality of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne to a new ethics of individuality, consumption, and spectacle. That's the argument at the heart of Keith Gandal's Virtues of the Vicious, but since he circles back to it so many times, layering it with historical context, offering counter-arguments, and highlighting its nuances, I don't think my one-sentence summary does him justice. He accomplishes quite a lot in not so many pages.

The book bases its rather bold reformulation of morality and ethics at the turn of the last century in interpretations of just a few texts by two authors, and the approach has its strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, the argument is easy to follow, and How the Other Half Lives and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets are analyzed so thoroughly that I can't imagine ever teaching or writing about either without returning here for some guidance. Moreover, Gandal's historical claims are general enough that I can already imagine applying them to contemporary works. On the other hand, however, I can't help but feel I've been handed a postcard instead of a tour book. Like Gandal, both Riis and Crane are white males, and while the critic does a fine job exposing the writers' racist and sexist blind-spots, ultimately what he writes is more an analysis of the culture of young-ish white, male, middle-class adventure-seekers than a panoramic analysis of fin-de-siècle United States culture. I'm not sure that Gandal intended to do otherwise, but it's important to recognize the limitation nonetheless.