SOURCE: “The Syntax of Class in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore, Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 267-85.

In the following essay, Lang uses The Silent Partner to examine the difficulty for nineteenth-century writers to discuss class and gender issues.

When literature was a thing apart and organic wholeness the sign of its value, the task of the literary critic was, if not simple, at least clear. As we begin to restore literature to history, however, we confront the problem not only of the discursive complexity of texts and of scholarly colloquy but the problem of coherence itself. Even as we acknowledge the contingency of texts, the impulse toward unity has been displaced onto the critical endeavor. The system of homologies that characterize much of the new historical criticism in this sense...