First published in Modes and Facets of the American Scene. Essays in Honor of Christina Giorcelli. Ed. Dominique Marcais. Rome: Ila Palma Press, 2014. 223-237. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 Trilling played an important role in changing critical perceptions of Henry James, “generally regarded, at the time, as a writer infatuated with the manners of the upper classes and as the practitioner of rarefied aestheticism” (Menand xi). See also Jonathan Arac: “James was for Trilling an extremely important case. American liberals judged James harshly, yet James is the kind of writer who, Trilling believed, has the most to offer liberalism” (118). 2 Trilling wrote introductions to new editions of James’s The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians. Other than that, only a few scattered references to Henry James can be found in Trilling’s writing. This is especially notable in the case of Trilling’s wideranging and philosophically most ambitious study Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), in which James does not play any role. Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature Winfried Fluck Dealing with Jane Austen in the context of an essay on American literature - and for a distinguished expert on American literature like Cristina Giorcelli - may look like a puzzling choice. It should make more sense, once we consider the role Jane Austen played in the thinking and critical practice of Lionel Trilling, one of the most respected and influential American literary critics of the post- War period. In his position-defining essay collection The Liberal Imagination, Trilling had called for a moral realism to replace the social realism of the Thirties. In the introductory essay of The Liberal Imagination, “Reality in America,” this reconceptualization is established through a contrast between Theodore Dreiser and Henry James. While Dreiser is dismissed because of his “vulgar materialism,” James is praised for his “extraordinary moral perceptiveness” (“Reality in America” 18, 9). 1 What makes James so great is that, in contrast to Dreiser and other social realists, he understands and captures the complexity of reality. In view of the programmatic contrast between Dreiser and James that stands at the beginning of The Liberal Imagination, it is surprising, however, that James did not play any notable role in Trilling’s subsequent critical work. 2 Instead, Jane Austen took the place of James. In almost every one of Trilling’s 3 See Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park” (1955); “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen” (1965); “Why We Read Jane Austen.” (1979); Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). 4 Cf. Louis Menand, who writes in his introduction to a recent re-edition of The Liberal Imagination: “The first thing to say about The Liberal Imagination is that it is a cold war book, though that is by no means the last thing to say about it. It appeared around the same time as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Vital Center, Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed, and George Orwell’s 1984 - books that belong to the case for a liberal anticommunism. Trilling was certainly a liberal anticommunist. (…) He and his wife, Diana, were members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1951; and he was prominently associated with Partisan Review, which had been, since 1937, the journalistic home of the anticommunist left. Anyone likely to pick up The Liberal Imagination in 1950 would have understood it as a warning against the dogmatism and philistinism of the fellow-traveling mentality, and, later in his life, Trilling explicitly acknowledged that he had intended the collection to be an attack on Stalinism” (vii-viii). See also Joseph Frank, who already argued in the 1960s that “the pervasive disillusionment with politics was given its most sensitive, subtle, and judiciously circumspect expression in the criticism of Lionel Trilling - and this is the real answer to the anomaly of his success” (254). essay collections, as well as in his wide-ranging study of the history of selfhood in Western culture, Sincerity and Authenticity, we encounter an essay on Jane Austen. To no other writer did he return as often during the five decades of his academic career as to the work of Jane Austen. 3 Trilling’s focus on Austen should be seen in the context of post-War debates about the politics of the intellectual Left in the Thirties. In their naive, well-intentioned but “innocent” trust in the Popular Front and the “People,” left and liberal intellectuals (that had often moved to the Left under the pressure of claims for solidarity) had not realized that they were instrumentalized by Stalin and the Communist party. It seems not exaggerated to speak of a trauma here: critical intellectuals who had criticized the American system with strong moral indignation, had been blind to the immorality of what they considered the better alternative. In his essay “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” published in his second major essay collection The Opposing Self, Trilling claims: “The extent to which Communism made use of unregenerate force was perfectly clear years ago, but many of us found it impossible to acknowledge this fact because Communism spoke boldly to our love of ideas and ideals. (…) And in the personal life what was undertaken by many good people as a moral commitment of the most disinterested kind turned out to be an engagement to an ultimate immorality” (“George Orwell” 152). In the rejection of leftist politics as naive and immature that pervades intellectual debates in the Fifties, one can sense a deep shame about how that could happen. 4 One can also sense a strong determination to not let it happen again. For Trilling, literature played a key role in this project. Only literature, he argued, could truly cope with the complexity of reality and help to transcend 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 72 Winfried Fluck 5 Trilling is lavish in his praise indeed. He calls Huckleberry Finn “one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture” (“Huckleberry Finn” 101). In support of his claim, Trilling refers to an introduction to Huckleberry Finn by T.S. Eliot that had appeared two years earlier and also played an important part in the reevaluation of the novel. simple dualisms. But only a special kind of literature has this potential. For interesting reasons, Jane Austen turned out to be more useful than Henry James for defining this potential. In order to understand these reasons, one has to take a detour to an interpre‐ tation that, apart from his introduction to The Princess Casamassima, must be considered Trilling’s most important contribution to American literary studies: his introduction to a new edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1948). Trilling’s essay contributed to a post-War reassessment of the American canon by focusing on a text that, until then, had not played any notable role in the canon. The transformation of Twain’s beloved boy’s book into, not only a “quintessentially American” novel, but also into one of the masterpieces of world literature, can be traced to the end of the 1940s. Jonathan Arac argues convincingly that Trilling’s introduction to the Rinehart College Edition of Huckleberry Finn played a key role in this reevaluation. The essay “is widely recognized as marking a decisive turn in discussion of Twain’s novel” and launched the novel into “academic hypercanonization” (108). 5 In his introduction Trilling touches on a variety of aspects, but, for him, the main significance of the novel lies in Huck’s moral struggle and, especially, in the scene in chapt. 31 in which Huck, despite his internalization of Southern slave-holder morality, decides not to betray Jim, even if it means that he will have to “go to hell.” With this moral choice, Huck transcends the popular bad boy genre and becomes a character who has outgrown the stereotype. From the perspective of Trilling’s critique of liberalism, the usefulness of the scene is obvious: it does not so much lie in an innate moral sense of Huck (which would be another naive assumption) but in his courage to go against the grain and to be willing to face the consequences, even if it means to be damned. As Trilling puts it: “(…) yet in point of fact Huckleberry Finn is indeed a subversive book - no one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck’s great moral crisis will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives, nor will ever again be certain that what he considers the clear dictates of moral reason are not merely the engrained customary beliefs of his time and place” (“Huckleberry Finn” 108). In a fascinating chapter of his study Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target, Arac 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 73 6 Cf. Arac’s apt characterization of the political function of this argument: “To locate the force of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ within Trilling’s own oeuvre, we must determine what ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ has to do with anti-Stalinism. For Trilling identified his deepest concern in this period as combating ‘the commitment that a large segment of the intelligentsia of the West gave to the degraded version of Marxism known as Stalinism’” (124). has shown how this interpretation was ideally suited for Trilling’s revisionist, anti-Stalinist agenda. 6 Trilling’s reading did not go unchallenged. However, the issue here is not how convincing Trilling’s interpretation was, but why he made certain interpretive choices in the first place. This leads us back to the question of what attitudes are needed to resist the lure (and the pressures) of political and social orthodoxies. The answer. is obvious: in order to be able to resist, a certain inner strength is needed, one that makes the right moral choice, even in the face of adversity. Huck Finn provides an example, but for a wider ranging cultural project he is perhaps not the best possible choice, because, even if taken seriously, Huck’s choice takes place in a sudden act of conversion that is based on his moral intuition after all. As a bad boy character that gains a moral dimension in one chapter of the book (only to give it up again in the following chapters), he does not really possess any psychological depth or complex interiority. Huck’s usefulness for Trilling thus remained limited, and Trilling turned to Jane Austen as a better alternative. What is it that made Jane Austen so useful for Trilling? In what way do her novels exemplify and clarify his concept of moral realism? One possible starting point is to focus on the conflict between social and moral order that posed a central challenge for Trilling and his critique of American liberalism. In Austen’s social worlds, we regularly encounter characters who disturb the social order by their personality flaws or moral weaknesses. In a way, her novels are long-drawn scenarios on how to eliminate these sources of disturbance and to restitute a balance that has been temporarily lost. However, as every reader of her novels knows, this balance can only be regained, if the central characters have managed to establish a certain degree of control over their own, still unbalanced selves. In exemplary learning processes, Austen’s heroines are engaged in ongoing dialogues about the right balance between sense and sensibility, pride and vanity or prejudice and firmness, until in the end they have learned to overcome their own character flaws, and social and moral order can become congruent again. This rebalancing becomes possible because the weaknesses and flaws that disturb the social order do not yet threaten the social fabric; in the final analysis, they remain on the level of follies and eccentricities. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 74 Winfried Fluck 7 See also the following comments on Mansfield Park: “Perhaps no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness. No other great novel has so anxiously asserted the need to find security, to establish, in fixity and enclosure, a refuge from the dangers of openness and chance” (“Mansfield Park” 210). “Almost the opposite can be said of Mansfield Park. Its impulse is not to forgive but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life” (211). 8 Cf. Trilling: “But there is one novel of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which the characteristic irony seems not to be at work. Indeed, one might say of this novel that it undertakes to discredit irony and to affirm literalness, that it demonstrates that there are no two ways about anything. And Mansfield Park is for this reason held by many to be the novel that is least representative of Jane Austen’s peculiar attractiveness. For those who admire her it is likely to make an occasion for embarrassment. By the same Trilling can therefore describe Pride and Prejudice as a novel that celebrates spirited social interaction and offers happy endings as a form of communal renewal. Only one year after Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen published Mansfield Park - a fact that has often astonished critics. In many of its features, Mansfield Park looks like a countermodel to the harmonious rebalancing act of Pride and Prejudice. In contrast to Austen’s other heroines, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, is unattractive, inhibited and mostly passive in her responses to the challenges of the social world (Trilling, “Jane Austen” 35). 7 At the same time, the narrative voice of Mansfield Park shows little of the ironic sparkle of other novels by Austen, and the unwavering principles of Fanny Price provide a rigid counter model to the model of communicative interaction presented in Pride and Prejudice and other novels. Thus, it is surprising indeed that Mansfield Park is the novel by Jane Austen that Trilling is most interested in. He wrote a lengthy introduction to a new edition of the novel, referred to the novel repeatedly in his other essays on Austen, and returned to Mansfield Park at greater length in his final critical study Sincerity and Authenticity. In making a case for Mansfield Park, Trilling by no means ignores the prob‐ lems many readers have had with the novel and acknowledges that Mansfield Park may be the one novel by Austen that may alienate modem readers: “Greatly admired in its own day - far more than Emma - Mansfield Park is now disliked by many more readers who like everything else that Jane Austen wrote. They are repelled by its heroine and by all that she seems to imply of the author’s moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life, for Fanny Price consciously devotes herself to virtue and piety, which she achieves by a willing submissiveness that goes against the modem grain” (“Emma” 31). 8 However, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 75 token, it is the novel which the depreciators of Jane Austen may cite most tellingly in justification of their antagonism” (“Mansfield Park” 208). although “the imputed philistinism of its particular moral judgments” may be seen as bad enough, Trilling focuses on another aspect that “constitutes the chief offense of Mansfield Park” in his view: “our commitment to the dialectical mode of apprehending reality is outraged by the militant categorical certitude with which Mansfield Park discriminates between right and wrong. (…) A work of art, notable for its complexity, devotes its energies, which we cannot doubt are of a very brilliant kind, to doing exactly the opposite of what we have learned to believe art ideally does and what we must love it for doing, which is to confirm the dialectical mode and mitigate the constraints of the categorical” (Sincerity and Authenticity 79). And yet, it is precisely this difficulty that makes the novel interesting for him: “Yet Mansfield Park is a great novel, its greatness being commensurate with its power to offend” (“Mansfield Park” 211). As we have seen, Trilling’s critical work is directed against the unquestioned authority of a dominant but unexamined social consensus, and thus a novel must be of special value to him in which the heroine resists joining that consensus. In Fanny’s firm, unflinching determination to adhere to her principles, the novel depicts a character who has the courage to say no, even if it means to become unpopular. The main illusion that Mansfield Park resists by its, as Trilling calls it, “uncompromising honesty” is an illusion that Trilling also sees at the center of liberal thought, namely the conviction, “that right action is typically to be performed without any pain to the self ” (“Mansfield Park” 216). What links Huck and Fanny Price, then, is their courage to resist group conformity. But in contrast to Huck, whose resistance to conformity is described in terms of a rather sudden conversion, albeit humorously framed, Fanny’s resistance is based on principle. Not only is her joyless insistence on principle old-fashioned in view of a new flexible personality type exemplified by the Crawfords and their theatricals; the principles themselves are good old-fash‐ ioned middle-class values. In that sense, the novel appears as a step back from Jane Austen’s vision of a social interaction that transforms its participants and ultimately makes them more balanced persons. Fanny Price also seems to stand for a surprising regression in those characters who have the courage to say no and are ready to accept the consequences: “Even those who are of Jane Austen’s party and absolute in their allegiance must make a special effort to come to terms with this novel. Those who are less fully pledged to its author are commonly alienated and angered by what they take to be its impercipient and restrictive moralism, its partisanship with duty and dullness, its crass 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 76 Winfried Fluck 9 See also Trilling’s comment on the role and significance of Sir Thomas: “The bluff, unimaginative single-mindedness of Sir Thomas is not in every way admirable (…) yet it is the principle on which Mansfield Park is founded and by which it endures and holds out its promise of order, peace, honour, and beauty” (Sincerity and Authenticity 75-76). 10 Cf. Krupnick: “The second half of the book is concerned with Trilling’s struggle to find a new basis for his criticism, and for his role as a cultural critic, from the early fifties on. By that time the theme of ‘the liberal imagination’ had ceased to be sufficient to anchor a general criticism of culture” (17). respectability” (Sincerity and Authenticity 79). The basis of Fanny’s behavior is a permanence of the self that is grounded in notions of duty, principle, and fortitude in virtue: “The sanctions upon which it relies are not those of culture, of quality of being, of personality, but precisely those which the new conception of the moral life minimizes, the sanctions of principle, and it discovers in principle the path to the wholeness of the self which is peace. When we have exhausted our anger at the offense which Mansfield Park offers to our conscious pieties, we find it possible to perceive how intimately it speaks to our secret inexpressible hopes” (“Mansfield Park” 230). 9 In order to understand the surprising turn to Fanny Price in Trilling’s literary and cultural criticism one has to put it in the larger context of the development of Trilling’s thought. Key parts of “Reality in America” had been written in the early Forties, The Opposing Self was published in the mid-Fifties. By that time, the resistance to leftist conformity was no longer the pressing issue it used to be for Trilling and his wife Diana Trilling. 10 This does not mean, however, that Trilling gave up his focus on how the self can resist conformity and assert a certain degree of independence and self-determination. By the mid-Fifties, his intellectual and philosophical ambitions had grown, and references to a (self-knit) Hegelian philosophy of history become more frequent: “In the late sixties Trilling was no longer the same kind of critic that he had been in the forties. If the younger Trilling had imitated the manner of Victorian men of letters like Arnold, the older man was moving toward a Central European mode of cultural criticism, a philosophical history of consciousness in the Hegelian mode” (Krupnick 150). This widening of his intellectual scope allowed Trilling to now reconsider the matter of the self in the context of a theory of modernity that was expanded in following essays and essay collections and reached its most consistent expression in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). In this development, Jane Austen and Mansfield Park remain important and recurring reference points. To discuss the problematic of the non-conforming self no longer as a problem of Stalinism, but of modernity, also means that the problem is no longer 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 77 restricted to the Left. Instead, it is seen in more general terms as the problem of a particular social configuration, the class of intellectuals. Trilling’s reformulation of the problem can be traced in exemplary fashion in his essay “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth” in The Opposing Self. For a committed anti-Stalinist like Trilling, Orwell was an obvious hero. But books like Animal Farm only play a minor role in the essay; somewhat surprisingly, Trilling calls the book over-rated. Orwell is of interest to him, not primarily as a critic of Soviet-style communism but as an unwavering voice for seemingly “old-fashioned” middleclass values, because, for Trilling, these values made his resistance to Stalinism possible. This “old-fashionedness of Orwell’s temperament” reveals itself “when Orwell speaks in praise of such things as responsibility, and orderliness in the personal life, and fair play, and physical courage - even of snobbery and hypocrisy because they sometimes help to shore up the crumbling ramparts of the moral life” (“George Orwell” 158-59). At another point, Trilling refers to “the love of personal privacy, of order, of manners, the ideal of fairness and responsibility” as exemplary manifestations of the simple but genuine virtues Orwell held. The leftist intelligentsia has forgotten what the real values of life are. Accordingly, Trilling stresses an unexpected source as reason for Orwell’s ability to resist left orthodoxies: “We may say that it was on his affirmation of the middle-class virtues that Orwell based his criticism of the liberal intelligentsia” (“Orwell” 162-63). Trilling still uses the term “liberal” intelligentsia here, but the target is now really the intellectual class as a whole. Leftists have only done what intellectuals do all the time: “The characteristic error of the middle-class intellectual of modem times is his tendency to abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance to connect ideas with fact, especially with personal fact.” This is the reason why intellectuals, despite their often strong moral claims, can be so inhuman at times: they have lost, or rather cut, their ties to everyday life and, more specifically, to the middle-class from which most of them come: “the prototypical act of the modem intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of his family.” This abstraction is tempting but costly: “By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things” (“Orwell” 163). Seen in this larger context, we may be in a better position to understand how a sophisticated gentleman-critic like Trilling could discover unexpected merits in a mousy character like Fanny Price. Fanny has no intellectual or artistic pretensions, she is a family person, and she has no problem to stick to old-fashioned middle-class 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 78 Winfried Fluck 11 As Cornel West claims, “since Trilling can no longer view the political arena as a credible sphere for self-development, he moves toward the quotidian, the family, the domestic sphere. Keats’s penchant for small-scale sociality will give way to the glories of William Dean Howells’ ‘family piety’ and Jane Austen’s fixities of personal relations” (174). 12 As Chace points out, “Trilling sees intellectuals and the ever-developing awareness of self they provide as the cause, the germ, of modernity” (157). virtues like responsibility, orderliness, and privacy. 11 (Clearly, Huck Finn did not fit that bill). Even her shortcomings may be seen in a different light when we consider what Trilling writes about Orwell: “Toward the end of his life Orwell discovered another reason for his admiration of the old middle-class virtues and his criticism of the intelligentsia. (…) Orwell, it may be said, came to respect the old bourgeois values because they were stupid - that is, because they resisted the power of abstract ideas” (“Orwell” 166). Mansfield Park became a key text for a critique of modernity for Trilling, because the novel has the courage to take the side of middle-class values that have come under siege by modernity. Huck may resist the slave-holding society of the South, but Fanny resists modernity. Or to be more precise: a certain unfortunate tendency of modernity. This can explain the growing significance of Jane Austen for Trilling, for as he claims: “It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and the culture in which it had its being” (“Mansfield Park” 228). At the beginning of modernity stands the vision of an autonomous self. For Trilling, it was Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew that “asks us to consider the awesome force of society as it encroach es upon the individual.” And the book inaugurates, at least for Trilling, a process to be traced throughout Western literary culture at its highest level: the movement of the individual beyond the strictures of morality and into a ‘freedom’ allowing him “an elaboration of his personality, an invigoration of his self-consciousness, and the chance to put on display the full potential of his being” (Chace 154). 12 However, in the modern pursuit of this “free” selfhood, the idea began to take on a life of its own and was severed from its social base; in consequence, intellectuals could extend their calls for autonomy and liberation to the class from which they came, namely the middle-class: “The middle class, which had given to the ‘adversary culture’ its writers, and then its audience, had become in time the central object of its hostility” (Chace 182). As a result of this liberation from their own roots, intellectuals have become irresponsible, at times. A search for authenticity in self-expression has replaced values like sincerity, a development that stands at the center of Mansfield Park and its critique of the “theatricals.” Acting means to impersonate somebody else, impersonation is 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 79 13 As Trilling puts it: “What is decisive is a traditional, almost primitive, feeling about dramatic impersonation. (…) It is the fear that the impersonation of a bad or inferior character will have a harmful effect upon the impersonator, that indeed, the imperso‐ nation of any other self will diminish the integrity of the real self ” (“Mansfield Park” 218). Thus, impersonation is “dangerous to the integrity of the self as a moral agent” (ibid. 219). 14 Cf. Trilling: “How right, then, that Mansfield Park should contain its own ‘Letter on the Theatre’” (75). “The objection to the histrionic art is exactly Rousseau’s: impersonation leads to the negation of self, thence to the weakening of the social fabric” (75). therefore insincere. 13 It may open up entirely new and tempting possibilities for “diversifying” the self, but, as events at Mansfield Park show, it has adverse social consequences and may eventually lead to social disintegration. 14 Sincerity and Authenticity, in which Mansfield Park has an important place, was the philosophically most ambitious of Trilling’s publications: a history of Western philosophy and literature based on a theory of modernity in the mode of a Hegelian philosophy of history. This theory of modernity has a decidedly critical thrust: “In Sincerity and Authenticity Trilling was arguing against the excessive willfulness revealed in the modernist rage for an ultimate freedom transcending the conditions of human existence” (Krupnick 181). The “modernist rage for ultimate freedom” must have negative consequences for literature. As long as the problem was how to muster the courage to resist widely held social expectations, literature could provide a model, as in the case of Huck’s courageous decision to go to hell. When the problem was redefined as a problem of modernity in which the challenge was to resist the lure of unlimited self-expression, Fanny Price could become a model, but now a model of selfrestraint, accepting unpopularity as a price one may have to pay for standing up for principles. However, Fanny was a figure of nineteenth-century literature, a century to which Trilling felt the strongest affinities. For him, the novel, particularly the nineteenthcentury novel, “could best acknowledge the necessity of constraints” (Chace 180). The novel of manners was not only valued by Trilling because it presents social reality in a more complex manner but because its message is that the self has to accept constraints. Modernist literature, on the contrary, had gone in the other direction and become a powerful voice for unlimited freedom and a self-expression without constraints. Instead of resisting problematic tendencies of modernity, “modernist literature portrays and at times promotes” them. Trilling thus “found himself pitted against most of modernist literature” (West 178, 172). During the development of Trilling’s work, the call to resist the claims of well-established orthodoxies, even if they appear “progressive,” is gradually transformed into the call to resist a modem obsession with unconditional 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 80 Winfried Fluck 15 Trilling never became a neoconservative, however: “Although Trilling’s major themes, like that of the adversary culture, were easily appropriated for neoconservative ends, he never assented to the political program of the neoconservatives. On cultural issues he was clearly conservative, but politically he remained an old-fashioned liberal, closer in freedom. The project of opposing a shallow liberalism now turns into the argument to stay true to the self and to accept the price we have to pay for civilization. Trilling’s model of the self comes to resemble that of an innerdirected character who acknowledges the necessity of putting constraints on the unbounded freedom of the modem self. Although Trilling likes to refer to Hegel in his later writings, the underlying model on which his cultural criticism is now based as an explanatory frame, is Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. This became a problem in the 1960’s, because major intellectual voices in the counter-culture, foremost among them Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, were critics of the Freudian claim that self-control and selfdetermination are not possible without self-denial. Trilling “tries to secure his advantage over Marcuse by noting that, whatever Marcuse’s arguments embody, they do not uphold character. And the will, on Trilling’s part, for people to have character is the high cause he has served all his life” (Chace 171). Much like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Georg Lukacs’s The Destruction of Reason (1954), Sincerity and Authenticity “traces the decline of reason and the rise of irrationality; that is, the slide of the Western self, down the slippery slope from the ‘sincere’ Horatio to the ‘authentic’ Kurtz, from the heights of Shakespeare to the depths of Conrad, reaching rock bottom with the id-applauding polymorphous self in Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Ronald Laing, and Michel Foucault” (West 177). In view of Trilling’s critical view of modernity, it can hardly be an open question how he responded to the counter-culture of the Sixties. “Once again the cruder aspects of liberalism were asserting themselves” (Chace 150). Worse, what was happening now was a “socialization of the anti-social,…the accultur‐ ation of the anti-cultural,…the legitimation of the subversive” (Krupnick 145). In literature, a vulgar parody-modernism had taken over. A key phrase in Trilling’s critique of the counter-culture is the formulation ‘acting out,’ “a term used by psychoanalysts to describe activity in which patients externalize their conflicts instead of remembering and analyzing them” (Krupnick 146). More than ever before, Lionel Trilling became Fanny Price, insisting on principles that the counter-culture threatened to discard. As in the case of many of his peers at Partisan Review, his revision of liberalism had finally moved him to an outspoken conservatism. 15 Complexity was one of the casualties and the excuses he made 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 Lionel Trilling, Jane Austen, and American Literature 81 sensibility, say, to nineteenth-century English liberals like Arnold than to contemporaries like Irving Howe” (Krupnick 147-48). for Fanny’s rigidity were ultimately also justifications of the direction in which his own thinking had gone. Works Cited Arac, Johnathan. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Chace, William. Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980. Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Bruns‐ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism. Evanston, IL: North‐ western University Press, 1986. Menand, Louis. “Introduction.” Lionel Trilling. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008. 1-5. Trilling, Lionel. “Reality in America.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. 18-31. ---. “Huckleberry Finn.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950. 92-101. ---. “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Press, 1955. 151-172. ---. “Mansfield Park.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking Press, 1955. 206-232. ---. “Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen.” Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. New York: Viking, 1965. 31-56. ---. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972. ---. “Why We Read Jane Austen.” The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965-75. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. 204-225. West, Cornel. “Lionel Trilling: The Pragmatist as Arnoldian Literary Critic.” The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 164-181. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0005 82 Winfried Fluck