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Amerikastudien / American Studies 68.4 (2023): 491-508 491
Fiction and Solidarity:
On the Representation of Mutual Support
in U.S.-American Culture
Christof Decker
Abstract
Recent scholarship has conceptualized solidarity as a human right allowing
individuals to protect themselves against social vulnerabilities. As with other
human rights, the claims they imply need to be anchored in a sense of social cohe-
sion—a common feeling of commitment and support, which ultimately has to be
produced by cultural forms and institutions. This article examines how various
types of mutual support have been imagined in the history of U.S.-American lit-
erature and culture. It distinguishes between semantic, performative, and com-
municative functions of ctional texts to explore how the idea of social cohesion
has been discussed and performed in and through ction. I focus on three modes
emerging in the nineteenth century: the sentimental, the utopian, and the post-
metaphysical. Looking closely at their narrative and rhetorical design, I argue
that they aimed to contain two major opposing forces working against the idea of
mutual support and solidaristic communities: a destructive individualism as the
cause of social vulnerabilities and a sense of distance limiting the feeling of con-
nection and interdependency.
Key Words: solidarity; ction; literature; lm; Harriet Beecher Stowe;
Rebecca Harding Davis; Stephen Crane
“Society exists in America in the way that towns exist in westerns: If
you step through one of those false fronts you’re in the desert or in the
studio, o into the wilderness or o into make-believe.” (Wood 35)
When Michael Wood, a literary scholar from England teaching in
the United States, made the above-cited remark in the 1970s, he was
writing a book on American cinema and trying to come to terms with
Christof Decker
492 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
1 These issues are not
merely academic ques-
tions on the relevance of
literature or lms. They
also touch upon intensi-
ed forms of violent be-
havior that have shocked
U.S. society in the last two
decades. To give just one
example, in 2017 a man
called Stephen Paddock
killed fty-eight people at
a music festival from the
window of his hotel room
in Las Vegas. His actions
were seen as a mystery at
the time. The New York
Times described him as
an enigma, a “numbers
guy” who spent weeks in
the gambling halls of Las
Vegas (Tavernise et al.). A
whole generation of chil-
dren has grown up with
similarly terrible shootings
at elementary and high
schools.
2 The shift of claims
of justice from economic
redistribution to a critical
theory of cultural recog-
nition was developed in a
seminal essay by Fraser.
It was taken up by Win-
fried Fluck (“Fiction”) to
argue that ction plays an
important role in struggles
over cultural recognition;
on this discussion, see
also Felski 23-50.
the question of how society was envisioned in the movies. He claimed
that they served audiences as “dossiers of instruction on our social life,
handbooks of better behavior” even if they also tended to seem over-
played and overwritten (189). His observation continued earlier novel-
related debates about the absence, in the United States, of a society in
European terms that could be represented in a realistic fashion (Camp-
bell). Yet Wood raised the point in a more dramatic fashion. What if
popular mythologies as depicted in the cinema systematically favored a
rampant individualism, claiming to champion community values on the
surface but actually subverting those values by making a self-serving in-
dividualism more attractive? According to Wood, one of these mythol-
ogies could be summarized as “nice guys nish last.” It was expressed
in success stories populated with overly ambitious people who did not
assert anything “except a voracious hunger for success” (79). If this claim
may seem like an undue simplication, it still raises important questions
about how culture and society in general, or ction and solidarity in
particular, can be related: Can we presuppose that ctional narratives
help to establish a feeling of social cohesion that is necessary for acts of
solidarity? Or do they support the contrary notion of antisocial aects
that thwart the emergence of solidarity? Solidaristic acts need to nd
a shared commitment from within the culture. How ctions may be
related to them, therefore, also needs an acknowledgment of the under-
side of solidarity, antisocial acts which prove, if nothing else, the strong
feelings of hatred at the heart of certain social groups or subcultures.1
One of the key questions thus seems to be how ctional narratives have
contributed to—or hindered—the emergence of a common cultural
ground necessary to create a sense of social cohesion as the foundation
for acts of solidarity.
Reecting on the relationship between ction and solidarity is part
of a broader process of rethinking the social signicance of literary dis-
courses in recent decades, ranging from ethical considerations to ques-
tions of race, ecology, aect, human rights, and, in particular, theories
of justice. e latter have been strongly inuenced by the shift to the
politics of recognition introduced by Nancy Fraser and others.2 Much
less theoretical work exists on the relation between ction and solidar-
ity, even if the realm of political philosophy has continuously expanded
the reach and signicance of the concept of solidarity. Dierent reasons
may exist for this imbalance, but two explanations come to mind. On
the one hand, questions of justice are closely related to the workings of
a legal discourse and system deeply embedded in American culture as
the foundation of the rule of law. Representations of injustice are there-
fore inherently linked to ethical or legal claims of recognition and well-
established narrative structures, such as court-room dramas, in which
they are made public and accessible. On the other hand, both justice and
solidarity are complex and contradictory phenomena in cultural repre-
sentations. But viewed through the lens of narrative pleasure, ghting
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 493
against injustice in the name of human rights represents a popular tradi-
tion of storytelling, while creating social cohesion by means of culture as
the precondition for acts of solidarity seems to be the more dicult task.
In other words, ghting for justice and recognition constitutes an estab-
lished pattern of ctional stories featuring heroic individuals, whereas
ghting for a sense of mutuality and common interest must rely on the
agency of groups and communities.
I will argue in this essay that producing this sense of commonality
has been shaped by two challenges: how to contain the consequences
of an appealing yet destructive individualism, and how to overcome a
fundamental sense of distance through stories and their ways of address-
ing audiences. I will sketch some basic conceptual considerations of sol-
idarity, relate them to a functional model of cultural communication,
and explore three modes of solidaristic representations which emerged
in the ctional literature of the nineteenth century—the sentimental,
the utopian, and the post-metaphysical mode.
On the Concept of Solidarity
e philosophical discourse on solidarity in the last thirty years has
looked at the concept as a social, civic, and political phenomenon. It
has dened the term as a sense of unity among individuals to challenge
injustice, as social or group cohesiveness within a community evoking a
feeling of moral duty, and, nally, as a right that is equal to, if not more
important than other human rights (Scholz, Political 17-50). e argu-
ment that solidarity is a human right has been put forward by, among
others, Sally Scholz, who contends that individuals living in society
need to be protected from social vulnerabilities. ese vulnerabilities
exist in social environments due to their structural dierentiation in
terms of economic, political, judicial, and other norms and values. If
rights such as security, freedom, and equality are generally accepted as
basic human rights, then the right to solidarity, according to Scholz,
should be seen as even more important since it protects against social
vulnerabilities and thereby becomes a precondition to be able to enjoy
other human rights. As Scholz puts it: “A right to solidarity protects
individuals from being excluded from civil participation on the basis
of vulnerabilities embedded in a social system to which they are sub-
ject and over which they have no control” (“Solidarity” 58). In order
to enjoy the claims of being secure, free, and equal, a “foundation of
solidarity” is needed, which Scholz understands to consist of a sense of
“social cohesion but carrying with it signicant normative import that
informs moral and legal relations” (53).
Conceptualized as a human right which becomes the precondition
for other human rights, solidarity takes on the seriousness of claims on
which individuals can draw to protect themselves against social vulner-
abilities. But how does this right translate into a sense of social cohe-
Christof Decker
494 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
sion? How does it produce a notion of unity needed to create a feeling
of commitment and support when claiming the right to solidarity, or
when struggling against the causes of social vulnerabilities? Put dif-
ferently, how can and should we connect the philosophical discourse
on solidarity as a human right with the cultural discourse of solidarity
as a phenomenon emerging from society’s “structures of feeling,” to use
a well-known term by Raymond Williams (128-35)? Can we truly as-
sume that solidarity is accepted as a human right if granting this right
means that we must feel a common purpose with someone who may be a
stranger, untrustworthy, or living in a foreign country? Indeed, feelings
of closeness and distance as crucial to solidarity were at the heart of the
communitarian discourse in the 1980s, a pivotal period for a growing
sense of polarization and social division in U.S. society. As Bellah et al.
pointed out in 1996, in their updated introduction to Habits of the Heart:
We are facing trends that threaten our basic sense of solidarity with others:
solidarity with those near to us (loyalty to neighbors, colleagues at work,
fellow townsfolk), but also solidarity with those who live far from us, those
who are economically in situations very dierent from our own, those of
other nations. Yet this solidarity—this sense of connection, shared fate,
mutual responsibility, community—is more critical now than ever. It is sol-
idarity, trust, mutual responsibility that allows human communities to deal
with threats and take advantage of opportunities. (xxx)
Bellah and his colleagues referred to solidarity in the traditional sense
of collective acts based on a feeling of commitment and community, but
the concept also served as a critical category employed to gauge the state
of a nation in decline. In other words, it functioned at the same time as a
normative political category of social relations (“mutual responsibility”)
as well as a cultural and aective category of moral attachments (“shared
fate”). One consequence of this two-fold formulation is that if we under-
stand solidarity to be a social category—even a human right, as Scholz
argues—then culture as the place where aects generate a sense of com-
munity becomes the precondition for solidarity. It is the realm which
makes or breaks the moral and cultural values that generate the foun-
dation of solidaristic acts.
Functional Models of Culture
If culture is the decisive realm to create feelings of unity, social
cohesion, connection, commitment, or shared purpose necessary to act
in solidarity, then the distinction between solidarity with those near
to us or those far from us (as introduced by Bellah et al.) seems to be
crucial. If we go back to popular culture and the movies for a moment,
the 1930s intensied Hollywood’s tendency to feature a sense of con-
nection and unity based on visions of closeness. For instance, the gang-
ster genre highlighted the idea that acts of solidarity were reserved for
those individuals close to you, such as members of an immigrant milieu,
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 495
neighborhood gang, clan, or family. In line with Michael Wood’s idea
that “nice guys nish last,” lms such as e Public Enemy (dir. William
Wellman, 1931) or Scarface (dir. Howard Hawks, 1932) told the story that
the price of success for upward social mobility was adjusting to a logic
of self-interest. While closeness and a feeling of unity were based on
the community of clan and kinship, moving up and out of the Irish
or Italian immigrant milieu into American society in these lms cre-
ated a narrative of distance and loss. Since the gangster gure used gun
violence to realize his ambitions for upward mobility, gangsterism con-
densed two crucial aspects of antisocial behavior; on the one hand the
recklessness of a destructive individualism, on the other hand the need
to create distance vis-à-vis the old immigrant or neighborhood milieu.
is cultural narrative was highly controversial at the time, closely mon-
itored by the studio’s self-censorship institutions as well as the general
public (Maltby; Black). Yet it turned out to be an attractive formula for
upward social mobility and initiation into mainstream society.
e popular mythology of gangsterism may thus serve as an am-
biguous example of a success story dependent on destructive antisocial
behavior as well as the moral and emotional estrangement from the
bonds of community and kinship. However, it obviously represents only
one narrative tradition among a great variety of other types of stories.
In order to approach the question of how ction and solidarity may be
linked, therefore, I propose to focus on functional modes established by
ction and how they may be expressive of certain cultural and historical
periods. is approach understands culture to be not just a vast reservoir
of narratives, forms, genres, rituals, and the like, but, in a more system-
atic and structural sense, as an institution. As one inuential early pub-
lication by René Wellek and Austin Warren on the theory of literature
put it: “Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language, a
social creation” (95). e authors introduced a methodology of intrinsic
analytical categories in their New Criticism, but they also championed
the idea that literature had functions based on its uses. As they wrote,
“the nature of an object follows from its use: it is what it does” (29). For
Wellek and Warren, the functions of literature continued the ancient
tradition of “pleasure” and “utility,” yet they were quick to point out that
the literary realm of aesthetic experience had a unique quality and thus
served these functions in specic ways:
e pleasure of literature, we need to maintain, is not one preference among
a long list of possible pleasures but is a ‘higher pleasure’ because pleasure in a
higher kind of activity, i. e. non-acquisitive contemplation. And the utility—
the seriousness, the instructiveness—of literature is a pleasurable serious-
ness, i. e. not the seriousness of a duty which must be done or of a lesson to be
learned but an aesthetic seriousness, a seriousness of perception. (31)
e idea of literary functions and, in more general terms, of culture as
a source of contemplation, communication, and learning resonated in
Christof Decker
496 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
3 For an overview of
different theories, see
Decker, “Historicising.”
Drawing on the early work
of the Constance School,
the history of functions
(“Funktionsgeschichte”)—
with varying conceptions
of internal and external
functions, text and con-
text, social and aesthetic
functions—has played
an important role in Ger-
man-language academic
contexts (Gymnich and
Nünning). Important
contributions to American
literary theory and history
have been made by Fluck,
“Funktionsgeschichte,”
and Zapf.
4 In lm studies, an in-
troduction to this “design
stance” has been suggest-
ed by David Bordwell. A
similar proposal has been
made in literary studies
by Caroline Levine who
borrows the term “afford-
ances” from design theory
for the latent potential
of forms, materials, and
structures. As mentioned
below, the reader-orien-
tation was also crucial for
Jane Tompkins’s focus
on the “cultural work ” of
literary texts. In reception
aesthetics, the experience
of reading establishes a
transfer between text and
reader (Fluck, “Funktions-
geschichte” 33-41).
dierent schools—among them structuralism, semiotics, formalism,
critical theory, and reception aesthetics—and developed into a variety
of theoretical approaches.3 For the relationship between ction and
solidarity, I propose to distinguish between three functional levels.
First, in literary and media narratives, solidarity may be imagined at
a semantic or thematic level as represented in the text. Secondly, it is
incorporated into the aesthetic object at a design level by creating a
certain kind of appeal and impact. At this performative level, solidar-
ity may be produced by addressing readers or viewers in a certain way.
Finally, culture teaches audiences how to communicate, informing
them about possible ways of perceiving and framing the idea of sol-
idarity. If the philosophical category of solidarity presupposes a sense
of unity, commitment, and social cohesion produced by the forms and
institutions of culture, we may thus distinguish between the semantic,
performative, and communicative functions of ctional texts in order
to explore how the idea of social cohesion has been discussed and per-
formed in and through ction. Looking at three modes emerging in
the nineteenth century—the sentimental, the utopian, and the post-
metaphysical—I argue that their main focus was an attempt to contain
a destructive individualism as a cause of social vulnerabilities and to
reduce a sense of distance in order to create the idea of solidaristic
communities.
Affective Appeals
Dierent theoretical approaches have argued that functional modes
establish the design of an aesthetic object, such as a ctional text, in a
specic way that informs its readers and viewers how it wishes to be
used.4 For the case of solidarity, the semantic function proposes a con-
ceptual idea of solidarity, the performative function addresses the read-
ers or viewers in order to aect their willingness to engage in solidaris-
tic acts, and the communicative function establishes forms of reecting
on the various ways of perceiving and discussing the phenomenon of
solidarity. In the process of reception, the three dierent functional
levels work together, and, in the end, it depends on the readers and
viewers whether they will be aected by the text (a question usually
addressed by reception studies and not to be pursued in this essay). But
the design of the object or text allows us to explore how the dierent
functions related to the idea of solidarity were constructed in a specic
historical period.
e nineteenth century saw the introduction of two crucial social
vulnerabilities into U.S.-American literature and visual culture: the re-
ality of structural racism which, in the antebellum period and beyond,
was enforced by the system of slavery; and the experience of economic
exploitation in the rapidly growing capitalist industries. Both vulner-
abilities were outcomes of the social system and systematically blocked
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 497
5 For an introduction
to the impact of Stowe’s
novel and the manifold
ways of theorizing its
signicance, see Wein-
stein; Smith; and Paul.
Tompkins began the
process of reappraising
the novel in the 1980s
by shifting the critical
discourse from the tenets
of modernism to the
“cultural work” of ction
based on the ways of
addressing its readership.
As Tompkins remarks
about Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
the “novel reaches out into
the reader’s world and
colonizes it for its own
eschatology” (139).
6 The sentimental
mode as one of the major
representational traditions
in nineteenth-century
American literature has
been discussed by Barnes;
Williamson; and Gerund
and Paul. A related re-
visionist discourse has
developed around the
cultural signicance of the
melodrama. Its affective
economy and political
dynamic have been
established as a crucial
inuence on body-related
performance traditions on
the stage and the screen
as well as media culture
in general; see Brooks;
Williams, “Melodrama
Revised”; Williams, Playing
the Race Card; Decker,
“Unusually Compas-
sionate.”
7 One challenge for
the sentimental mode in
this regard was how to
avoid using stereotypes
to establish the sense of
unjustied victimization,
not just by drawing on
Christian typology but
also by using well-
established and often
clichéd characterizations
that were rooted in a long
history of racism. Stowe’s
novel established sol-
idarity as a moral duty but
the sentimental attach-
ments still depended on a
derogatory representation
of the victimized other. In
the mid-1980s, Tompkins
argued that stereotypes
served “to operate as
claims to the basic human right of equality. It is fair to say that from
the 1830s to the 1890s, many, if not most engagements with the notion
of solidarity were based on the twin impression that the most pressing
experiences of injustice and inequality were caused by the institution
of slavery and the rifts between capital and labor. e seminal novel
on the question of slavery was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin from 1852.5 It condensed the moral outrage against the system
of slavery shared by many European visitors to the United States who
were shocked to see what Charles Dickens described in the early 1840s
in harrowing details as a system inviting “the abuse of irresponsible
power” (302). Stowe perfected the sentimental mode, creating on the
one hand a sense of community through the depiction of motherhood,
family life, and the idealized attachment of the faithful slave, and on
the other the social vulnerabilities inherent in the ubiquitous experience
of loss, separation, physical abuse, and cruelty. Conceptually, her novel
was anchored in a Christian belief system that informed its moral values
as well as characterizations, yet Stowe designed the text to engage in
a constant dialogue with her readers to aect them as strongly as pos-
sible. is included the depiction of terrible, deadly beatings familiar
from slave narratives as well as the coming-together of the community
through the sharing of tears at pivotal moments throughout the novel.
Stowe thus employed the hard-hitting and often hyperbolic techniques
of the sentimental and melodramatic mode in order to change the read-
ership.6 As the narrator states about the question of what can be done
about the system of slavery: “ere is one thing that every individual
can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympa-
thetic inuence encircles every human being; and the man or woman
who feels strongly, healthily, and justly, on the great interests of human-
ity, is a constant benefactor to the human race” (Stowe 442; emphasis
in original). Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus aimed to build a sense of solidarity
by combining the moral condemnation of the brutal slave owner driven
by self-interest with sentimental attachments the readers should create
with the main characters. e novel’s direct appeal to White readers
implied that feeling right would be a rst step to solidaristic actions, and
it based its sense of attachment—its attempt to reduce distance—on a
feeling of pity for and with the oppressed African American individu-
als. As the address to the readers and many other passages in the novel
make clear, Stowe built her case for solidarity on the universal claims of
human rights.7
Workers and Machines
e sentimental mode of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated
how powerful the performative function of literature could be, aim-
ing to establish a sense of community to motivate solidaristic acts by
appealing to readers in a way designed to initiate a conversion. In this
Christof Decker
498 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
instruments of cultural
self-denition” (xvi).
However, as Paul shows
in her overview of theo-
retical approaches (291-
95), the novel’s legacy of
racist depictions has been
at the center of critical
interventions.
8 For a study fore-
grounding the ambiguous
combination of compas-
sion and vengeance, or
love and fear, in early
nineteenth-century
sentimentalism steeped
in Christian beliefs, see
Pelletier.
instance, the need for solidarity evolved from empathizing with victim-
ized and oppressed groups, while the sense of urgency and commitment
came from the perceived lack of basic democratic and human rights,
such as equality, which needed to be fought for as a moral and Chris-
tian duty. During the age of reform movements, this was a common
pattern.8 It began to change in the transitional phase to the newly
emerging forms of realism in literature and photography as well as the
intensied experience of industrialization. One example is the 1861
story “Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis, mixing the
realist setting of an iron mill with an aective appeal to readers for the
value and dignity of immigrant workers (Harris 1-19). e story shifts
the focus from social vulnerabilities caused by the system of slavery to
the miserable working and living conditions of immigrant labor within
the capitalist economy and a social hierarchy based on class. If Stowe’s
narrator was clearly, and sometimes explicitly, addressing the White
women of the North, Davis introduced a more ambiguous narrative
perspective. e performative function of her story has a similar aim to
claim compassion for her main character. Hugh Wolfe is a Welsh fur-
nace-tender in an iron mill who sculpts gures from slab (the remains
of the production process) in his spare time, in particular the gure of
the Korl woman. Yet the narrative situation is dierent; Davis’s nar-
rator appears to be a woman, though this is never explicitly stated, who
at various points addresses an upper-class male reader, someone who
seems to be more dicult to reach and win over for the claims of sol-
idarity with a worker of the underclass. e new realities to be experi-
enced will not be pleasant, and they seem to go against the expectations
of a class-based sense of decency and decor, as the narrator makes clear:
“I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes,
and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and
mud and foul euvia. I want you to hear this story” (Davis 52). e
narrator goes on to tell Hugh Wolfe’s story of endless toil, terrible
living conditions, and eventual suicide. His cousin Deborah, who ac-
companies him to the iron mill, will be reformed by a Quaker woman
at the end of the story, a seemingly conventional ending of converting
the young woman according to Christian values. Yet, as writer Tillie
Olsen suggests in her interpretation of the story, it was “not written
out of compassion or condescending pity” but rather out of “absolute
identication” with wasted lives and “imperfect, self-tutored art” (69).
e story depicted the horric situation of immigrant workers and the
social vulnerabilities caused by the capitalist system, but it also refer-
enced a social hierarchy based on education, wealth, and gender that
Olsen saw as a clear reference to the place and structural disadvantages
of women, even if Davis herself belonged to the privileged class. e
peculiar mixture of aective appeals, realist descriptions of everyday
life, and Christian values as the moral foundation of the social fabric
in the story results in a transitional functional mode. e performative
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 499
function in “Life in the Iron Mills” creates empathy with Hugh Wolfe,
the exploited worker and self-taught artist groping for self-expression,
but the communicative function makes clear that there are dierent
ways of looking at the causes and consequences of social vulnerabilities
in the process of industrialization as well as the American promise of
freedom and equality. Moreover, as Olsen suggests, the victimization
of Wolfe is complicated by the fact that he can be seen as a stand-in for
the disadvantaged position of women in the mid-nineteenth century
who feel equally thwarted by society.
is superimposition of feelings of injustice is shown in the story
when a group of men from dierent realms of society visit the iron mill
and come across the Korl woman—the rough gure sculpted by Wolfe
from slag—crouching with arms raised in a gesture of silent protest.
Asked what she means, Wolfe, unable to nd words tting for his edu-
cated and cultured but “blasé” guests, explains: “She be hungry” (Davis
62). is metaphorical hunger includes a yearning for a better life, not
necessarily in material but in spiritual and aesthetic terms, and brings
together the main character Wolfe and the strong identication of the
narrative voice with his fate. Yet, as the story makes clear, simply “feel-
ing right” will not create the kind of community or social cohesion nec-
essary for solidaristic acts. Indeed, the discussions of the men visiting
the iron mill indicate that the structural inequalities will be dicult,
if not impossible, to overcome. Kirby, a son of the mill’s owner, sug-
gests that the subhuman status of the workers, which connects them
to Stowe’s literary discourse on the system of slavery, and the logic of
industrialization will permanently keep them in an inferior position: “‘I
tell you, there’s something wrong that no talk of “Liberté ” or “Égalité”
will do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest
part of the world’s work should be machines,— nothing more,—hands.
It would be kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to crea-
tures who must live such lives as that?’” (66). is is the dilemma at
the heart of the story. Universal human rights can easily be held at bay
in a system which is working according to the industrial logic of ef-
ciency and maximized prots. While the ending arms a religious
framework of “slow, patient Christ-love” (84) by a Quaker woman as
the precondition for a lasting conversion of Wolfe’s cousin Deborah, the
story as a whole makes clear that traditional ways to acts of solidarity
are no longer viable. Upward social mobility and self-reliance, concepts
mentioned by the men upon encountering the Korl woman, are myths,
it seems. ey are overshadowed by a relentless industrial system that
ultimately favors machines over human beings before facing the social
vulnerabilities produced by the workings of its industrial logic. If Davis’s
story strongly participates in the sentimental mode to evoke a feeling of
solidarity, the turn to realism at the same time complicates the ability to
create a sense of community and social cohesion in a society driven by
self-interest and social hierarchies.
Christof Decker
500 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
9 For an introduction
to the novel and its impact
on various theoretical and
historical discussions,
see Patai; and Decker,
“Edward Bellamy.”
Solidarity as Mutual Support
e sentimental mode and its transition to realism thus combine
a strong performative function aiming to convince the readers to feel
with and for victimized groups with a communicative function that
engages in dierent ways of looking at the causes and consequences of
social vulnerabilities. Both texts, however, are anchored so rmly in a
religious discourse that equates moral with Christian values that the
semantic function, i. e., the discussion of what the concept of solidarity
might mean, does not seem to be a category in need of clarication.
Even though Davis writes about the dire situation of immigrant labor,
the story does not mention the word solidarity, which is rather presented
implicitly as an unquestionable moral obligation to help and ultimately
to convert the various victimized groups. At the same time, the realis-
tic depiction of “Life in the Iron Mills” acknowledges that the hold of
Christian values as the dominant normative force is waning, superseded
by philosophical, sociological, and cultural considerations that create a
more complex image of the social formations and a more contradictory
discourse on their values. Moreover, the urgency of social vulnerabil-
ities caused by economic and industrial conditions is intensifying. is
double vision of the need to address the concept of solidarity explicitly
and to face the growing intensity of social inequalities becomes a press-
ing issue for the period of realism, but it moves even more strongly to
the center of utopian discourse, in particular in Edward Bellamy’s novel
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 from 1888 and its sequel Equality from
1897. Looking Backward tells the story of Julian West who falls asleep
in the late nineteenth century and awakes in the year 2000 when a new
social order has been established and all causes of social vulnerabilities
have been overcome. West is introduced to this new order through the
guardian gure of Dr. Leete who patiently explains to the young man
how and why the problems of capitalism, racism, and inequality were
abolished. e basic structure of the novel combining West’s aston-
ishment and curiosity with Dr. Leete’s explanations is less dialogic and
performative than the sentimental mode, yet the vision of the new order
developed in Bellamy’s novel was apparently so attractive that the book
had a lasting impact on the political and cultural discourse.9
e core idea guiding Bellamy’s utopia was the promise that the uni-
versal human right of equality had nally been realized in the United
States, bringing all citizens together in a community of mutual coopera-
tion and support as well as happiness and prosperity. Stressing the claim
to equality as the supreme value of the new social order was in line with
other reform movements, but Bellamy’s utopia was built on the idea that
individualism per se was responsible for many of the problems in the old
order and needed to be overcome. As a young man, Bellamy had written
an essay titled “e Religion of Solidarity,” in which he developed this
idea. Distinguishing between the “lesser self ” of the individual and
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 501
10 Bellamy’s early
spiritualism is usually
seen to be related to
pantheistic movements
and evangelical beliefs
but even though he
referenced the concept
of religion repeatedly, his
moral outlook has been
described as “gnostic,”
rejecting Christianity
(Tumber) and “anthropo-
centric” due to his ction’s
focus on the “human
community” (Hall 27).
the “greater self ” of the universal and innite, Bellamy claimed that
the idea of solidarity was intimately connected with a sense of losing
one’s lesser self and fusing or combining with other individuals in the
greater self. He wrote: “is passion for losing ourselves in others or
for absorbing them into ourselves, which rebels against individuality as
an impediment, is then the expression of the greatest law of solidarity”
(“e Religion” 18). To be sure, Bellamy’s essay was not engaging in an
analysis of political issues, but his early concept of solidarity was built
on the idea of overcoming individualism and striving for a higher form
of spiritual union.10 His sense of social cohesion simply did away with
the “impediment” of a destructive individualism and reduced distance
by promoting the “passion” of fusion and unication.
If the visionary and utopian quality of Bellamy’s “religion” of sol-
idarity is evident in his early writings, the notion of equality at the heart
of his utopian novels—as a way of eradicating individual dierences and
social hierarchies built on self-interest—proved to be highly attractive
for his late nineteenth-century readers. Compared with the strong emo-
tions generated in and through Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the utopian mode of
Looking Backward was less thrilling but envisioned a liberating jump into
a better future that left behind the misery of the old order. In contrast
to the sentimental argument that solidaristic communities may be built
by feeling right, Looking Backward analyzes a social formation that has
grown in complexity and has intensied the level of inequality through
the accumulation of individual fortunes. Since inequality precludes sol-
idarity, West’s companion Dr. Leete explains that the idea of mutual
support, crucial to the new order and its practice of solidarity, follows
from the fact that modern societies are shaped by mutual dependencies:
Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a member of a
vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. e
necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of
mutual support; and that it did not in your day constituted the essential
cruelty and unreason of your system. (Bellamy, Looking 99)
Needless to say, the civilized and rational new order of the twenty-rst cen-
tury has internalized this duty of mutual support and as Dr. Leete points
out, the dierent concepts of solidarity following from this understanding
of mutuality, are the crucial dierence between the two civilizations:
If I were to give you, in one sentence, a key to what may seem the mysteries
of our civilization as compared with that of your age, I should say that it is
the fact that the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to
you were but ne phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and
as vital as physical fraternity. (100)
If the sentimental mode aimed for an aective conversion of its readers
to revitalize the Christian duty of solidarity, Bellamy’s utopian mode is
less explicit in its references to religion but clearly shaped by his earlier
work on shedding individualism to reach a state of spiritual fusion. He
Christof Decker
502 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
secularizes the idea of solidarity in Looking Backward in the concept of
mutual support but returns to a spiritual framing of the social order in
Equality. Indeed, his sequel imagines the utopian society to have ushered
in the era of a “modern religion,” bringing together civic, political, and
spiritual needs, or as Dr. Leete explains, “a religion of life and conduct
dominated by an impassioned sense of the solidarity of humanity and of
man with God” (Equality 344-45). Bellamy’s utopian mode thus draws
on religion to symbolize the need for a spiritual way of life, a vision of
mutual support which has nally been realized—if only in an alternative
and idealized future world.
Solidarity in a Post-Metaphysical World
e nal literary mode to be discussed in this essay is what I call the
post-metaphysical mode. It should be clear by now that the relationship
between ction and solidarity or, more generally, between culture and
social cohesion or mutual support is fragile, dicult to compress neatly
into a functional and eective textual design. Yet both previous modes,
the sentimental and the utopian, rely on the idea of human agency as a
necessary and viable force in the desire to initiate solidaristic acts. is
changes with the post-metaphysical mode, where acts of solidarity are not
the outcome of collective commitments from within the community but
rather necessitated by contingent emergencies and the ght for survival.
ey are, therefore, less concerned with the idea that solidarity needs to
be established to ensure basic human rights such as equality, security, or
recognition than with the often-heroic vision of solidarity as self-preser-
vation in the face of disaster. is constellation is at the heart of Stephen
Crane’s 1897 story “e Open Boat,” which recounts the experience of
four men trying to survive in a small boat after a shipwreck. If Davis’s
text relies strongly on the performative function in its appeal to the reader
and Bellamy stresses the semantic function in the details of his utopian
fantasy, Crane’s story foregrounds the communicative function of lit-
erature through various ways of reecting on the protagonists’ subjective
perceptions of reality. Usually classied as a writer belonging to the peri-
od of naturalism, Crane’s writing also features proto-modernist elements
(Conder 22-68). For the question of solidarity, this concerns the religious
framework of Christian values, crucial for Davis and Bellamy but evapo-
rated in Crane’s universe, as well as the rift between direct and mediated
experience—the feeling of unbridgeable distances—which seems to have
become a basic condition of modern life. Still, Crane’s story begins with a
strong image of social cohesion and closeness, presenting four men row-
ing for their lives in the cramped space of a small lifeboat. As the narrative
voice, which focalizes the interior space of the four individuals, remarks:
It would be dicult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here
established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 503
it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. ey were a captain, an
oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more
curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. (Crane 471)
As the story progresses, the oiler, the cook, and the correspondent will
take turns at the oars, while the wounded captain gives orders where to
go. e brotherhood is genuine as they all do what needs to be done, yet
in contrast to the emotional education of the sentimental mode or a uto-
pian world built on reason and cooperation, acting in solidarity in “e
Open Boat” is forced upon the men through a shared predicament that
leaves them no choice but to form an “iron-bound degree” of friendship.
Told as an adventure story full of suspense and danger, the basic de-
sign of Crane’s story creates the paradoxical impression that acts of co-
operation and heroism happen in reaction to a shared fate. Since this fate
is based on contingent circumstances, the solidarity of the men has no
higher metaphysical meaning. e emergency teaches them that survival
is based on cohesion and closeness as well as solidaristic acts of a “subtle
brotherhood,” but the story makes clear that solidarity does not prevent
the experience of contingency, nor does it help to create a larger meaning
about the emergency at hand or the reality of death. To describe the
futility of nding meaning in the contingency of disasters, Crane uses
the technique of free indirect discourse as a rened way of representing
subjectivity and personal thoughts. In one passage of the story, taken up
in subsequent sections, the focalization shifts to the correspondent:
If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to
be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was
I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought
here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the
sacred cheese of life? (477)
e brotherhood of men in the boat does not explain why they nd them-
selves in this situation, which, as the historical backdrop to the story,
was caused by the actual sinking of the steamboat Commodore in 1897 en
route to Cuba and thus a failure of technology. A dierent passage, again
focusing on the correspondent, reects on a related issue of the proto-
modern consciousness expressed in the story: the perception of distance
as an impediment to feelings of empathy. As a boy, the correspondent
had heard a poem about a soldier of the Legion who was dying in Al-
giers and desperate because he would not see his native land again, yet
the correspondent had always felt “indierent” to his predicament (481).
Now, facing his own possible death and shifting from the narrative of the
soldier to his immediate experience, he realizes that his feelings change,
even if this does not make death more meaningful: “e correspondent,
plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the
lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal
comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying
in Algiers” (481). If this passage makes clear that immediate experience
Christof Decker
504 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
is a precondition for empathy, the fact that this insight comes to the cor-
respondent—a newspaper man—reinforces the feeling that modern life
lacks forms of direct experience and increasingly relies on mediated ex-
periences which may overcome distance by means of technology but do
not create the same feeling of cohesion as physical closeness. Solidarity,
in this view, does not seem to work at a distance. It is forced upon the
four men—representatives of dierent occupations and classes—in the
cramped space of the boat as they are struggling to survive. In contrast
to the sentimental appeals for empathy or the utopian vision of mutual
support, it is based on self-preservation rather than altruism or self-ab-
negation, a local phenomenon rather than a universal aspiration.
e ctional design of the story and the foregrounding of its com-
municative function with an emphasis on subjectivity and the fragility
of perception thus allow the readers to follow the experimental set-up
as a reection on life and death. Solidarity is a necessity to ensure group
survival, but it only exists in temporary and highly specic constella-
tions which seem to have lost the framework of the earlier modes based
on Christian values or human rights. In a crucial passage of the story,
the correspondent notices the chasm between the calmness of the sea
and the desperate struggle of the men rowing for their lives. Although
they are overpowered by nature and the correspondent repeatedly has
the urge to curse the birds and the sea, he ultimately realizes that all
attempts at personifying nature as a human-like force are futile: “She
did not seem cruel to him then, nor benecent, nor treacherous, nor
wise. But she was indierent, atly indierent” (483). At the heart of
the post-metaphysical mode, therefore, lies the realization of the “un-
concern of the universe” (483), which changes the basic parameters for
the relationship between ction and solidarity. In a world dominated
by contingency and the larger forces of technology and nature, human
agency is reduced to a reactive concept that is only capable of creating a
sense of social cohesion and solidarity in limited and temporary circum-
stances. In the seemingly cruel, yet neither tragic nor melodramatic but
merely contingent conclusion to Crane’s story, the only member of the
crew who does not survive is the oiler, who had been the most com-
mitted and dependable in the men’s ght for their lives.
Conclusion
is essay has explored the relationship between ction and solidarity
as a complex history. Cultural institutions and forms are needed to estab-
lish a sense of community, social cohesion, and commitment necessary to
engage in acts of solidarity. Yet, how we can assess the signicance of c-
tional narratives in this regard is methodologically challenging and needs
to be historically specic. One way of approaching this relationship is by
assuming that ctional texts are designed to be used in a way that draws
on dierent functional levels. I have looked at the semantic, performative,
Fiction and Solidarity
Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508 505
and communicative functions in this essay. ey help us to understand
the dierent concepts of solidarity, how the texts address their readers
to aect change, and how they establish a sense of communication as
a way of looking at or thinking about solidaristic acts. My analysis has
explored three particularly signicant functional designs. e sentimen-
tal mode of Stowe and Davis attempts to change the readers’ aects, to
make them feel right as a precondition for acting in solidarity. e desire
to change feelings by emphasizing the performative function of literature
is not just framed as a Christian duty in the nineteenth century, it is also
often justied as realizing American but ultimately universal claims to
human rights. e utopian mode, on the other hand, imagines a better
social order, in particular an order which ensures solidarity by a rational
and ecient social system built on the twin ideals of mutual support
and equality. e pleasure and ultimate crux of Bellamy’s text lies in the
fantasy that we can jump into this new order with ease, in eect sleeping
through the period of revolutionary change. His utopian vision imagines
a “religion” of solidarity, a fusion with others that obliterates the self-
interested individual, if not the whole category of individualism. Finally,
the post-metaphysical mode of Crane’s naturalism presents a constellation
of individuals forced into solidarity through an accident or a catastrophe.
e ght for survival has no higher meaning than to save one’s life and
transforms the need to cooperate from a Christian duty or the realization
of human rights to an act of self-preservation. On the surface, the post-
metaphysical mode, in this case, does not discuss the question of social
vulnerabilities which, as instances of injustice or inequality, are created
by the social system and fuel the texts by Stowe, Davis, and Bellamy. But
in its proto-modern sense, Crane’s story shifts the idea of agency from
human beings to nature and technology as forces beyond the control of
individuals or the social order. In this view, solidarity is not a concept
based on the values of community and social cohesion but on the idea
of local and temporary actions aiming to ensure the survival of human
life. One thing the three modes make clear is that attempts to imagine
and initiate solidarity are an integral part of U.S.-American literature
and culture. However, ctional narratives are complex, and the historical
progression sketched in this essay leads to the ever more rened forms of
modernism and postmodernism which often complicate and undermine
rather than establish a sense of community. Moreover, as suggested at the
beginning of this essay, the imagination of social cohesion and solidarity
is as much an outcome of cultural institutions as the imaginary pleasures
of destructive antisocial behavior which was condensed in the image of
gangsterism in the 1920s and 1930s.
Still, this essay has argued that ctional narratives, in various and
often complicated ways, have played a central role in creating a cultural
environment conducive to a sense of community and social cohesion
needed to enable acts of solidarity. Two nal examples may serve to
indicate the ambiguous trajectory of this relationship in the twentieth
Christof Decker
506 Amst 68.4 (2023): 491-508
century. In 1953, Flannery O’Connor introduced the archetype of anti-
social behavior called “e Mist” in her story “A Good Man is Hard to
Find.” Convinced that there is “no pleasure but meanness” (152), neither
religion nor compassion, remorse or pity serve as redeeming qualities
for “e Mist,” who feels treated unjustly by the legal system and kills
without hesitation. On the other hand, James Baldwin wrote a dev-
astating critique of both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
Richard Wright’s Native Son in his 1940s essay “Everybody’s Protest
Novel.” He suggested that Stowe’s novel was supercial and dishonest
while Wright’s novel was still caught in the emotional logic of oppres-
sion. But Baldwin’s conclusion was not that protest ction or ction
dealing with social issues was impossible. Rather, he argued for a renew-
ed eort at acknowledging and representing the complexity of human
beings. He wrote, “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this
hunger, danger, darkness can we nd at once ourselves and the power
that will free us from ourselves” (15). Baldwin’s plea may thus be seen as
a tting reminder that ctions need to feel authentic and real to move
contemporary audiences and readers. And as the previous discussion has
shown, the challenge for the ctional envisioning and enactment of sol-
idarity in the past as well as the future has been how to create narratives
of mutual support—multivoiced stories by and about supportive groups
as well as stories that reinforce the agency of communities rather than
the actions of heroic individuals.
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