Bliss Perry: Nineteenth Century Reality
The Plated City by Bliss Perry was published in 1895 and brought back into print by Rvive Press this year. I loved this book: it is a great read, a solid addition to the tradition of the nineteenth century novel, with its characters fully realized for themselves and for what they symbolize; its marvelous coincidences of birthright and historical placement (being in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time), and of disaster striking just when needed (or precisely when not needed); its use of death to provoke lurking mystery, solve problems, and provide answers; and its deeply embedded romanticism of love overcoming all, class and status be damned. As I neared the end of this marvelously fun and engaging book I realized what it reminded me of: The Plated City is an American version of a Wilkie Collins novel, mysterious on certain levels, straightforward on others, rich with period details, and wonderfully melodramatic. It held me tightly in its grip from start to finish, much as a Collins novel does, and left me satisfied and exhausted, and ready to start reading it all over again.
What makes The Plated City undeniably American — and still very relevant, 114 years after its publication — is not only its starting scene of an edge-of-seat exciting baseball game, but also its themes of racism, place-ism (knowing where one’s place is in society and not stepping up or down from it), anti-intellectualism (and censorship), distrust of worldliness, an underlying, undying optimism that everything can be fixed, made right, made better, and a very uneasy recognition of the power of money.
The late nineteenth century was a miserable time for people of color and Perry was bold to base what he hoped would be a popular novel on a very unpopular theme. Segregation, including the “color line” in baseball, went largely unchallenged in most communities. Perry demonstrates through his characters of Esther and Tom Beaulieu the perniciousness of a system where any pride in a black self was crushed down; there was little concept of “Black Power” or identity when the only advantages accrued to whites, and there was little or no opportunity for a black man to rise above his station as a mindless, toiling worker. The white folks — specifically the Anglo-Saxons — had the advantages and meant to keep the good life and the upper hand firmly within their own camp. Perry throws into his Connecticut town of upright white people some free-thinking souls, like the lawyer with a big heart, closed mouth, and always working brain, and the owner of the biggest of the plating factories who is decent enough to protect his library from censorship, his workers from bullying, and can admit when he’s been wrong, but even these two paragons of independent manhood only finally get past the color line when two conditions are met: the possibility that a person may actually be white after all, and the sudden windfall of money (the first through ingenuity and the second through disaster).
The dangers of money (manna) is one of the recurring themes of the novel but it is the surfeit of money that finally allows a slight leveling of the playing field, at least for one of the characters. Money provides the silver-plating that hides the person underneath: in the case of the rich residents of the Hill, the silver plating hides their grossness, pettiness, and small-mindedness; in the case of Esther, money will hide the question of whether she is black or white. Money is either damning, as in the case of Dr. Atwood where pursuit of his business kept him from searching for his nephew, or saving, as when Dr. Atwood uses money to atone, but there is no question that money cannot be disavowed (look what happens to the poor missionary parents of Sally Thayer). It is this assessment of the power of money that is the truly American aspect of this novel, and what makes it genius. Money may damn you but it is the only way to save yourself, the only venue for transcendence of class and opening up of opportunities: a bold statement for the late 1800s and a still relevant observation today.
