Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism 9780226805764

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Women, Compulsion, Modernity

, ,  

     A Series Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson

The Moment of American Naturalism   .  

      

Chicago & London

 .  is assistant professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London ©  by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published . Printed in the United States of America                : --- (cloth) : --- (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fleissner, Jennifer (Jennifer L.) Women, compulsion, modernity : the moment of American naturalism / Jennifer Fleissner p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.  --- (cloth : alk. paper) . American fiction—th century—History and criticism. . Naturalism in literature. . Feminism and literature—United States—History—th century. . Women and literature—United States.— History—th century. . Feminist fiction, American—History and criticism. . Modernism (Literature)—United States. . Sex role in literature. . Women in literature. I. Title. .  
.—dc



oThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,  .–.

For my family and in memory of my mother, Norma Klein

  ix by Catharine R. Stimpson   xiii   The “Feminization” of American Naturalism         Naturalist Subjects, Naturalist History        Regionalism, Feminism, and Obsessional Domesticity        Fadmongering and Feminism in Henry James      &    Sentimentality and “Drift” in Dreiser and Wharton      Gender, Preservation, and Futurity in McTeague      Unmothering the Race in Chopin, Stein, and Grimké            

vii



In , Emile Zola, the great French writer, claimed, “The return to nature, the naturalistic evolution which marks the century, drives little by little all the manifestation of human intelligence into the same scientific path. . . . I have already repeated twenty times that naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but that it is the intellectual movement of the century” (“The Experimental Novel.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt, . , ). Crucially, Zola was writing during a revolutionary period for women and their capacities for work, love, and freedom, changes that the overlapping and controversial figures of the feminist and the New Woman vividly exhibit. Despite Zola’s score of repetitions, in American literary and cultural history “naturalism” has often been ignored or oversimplified. I have been guilty of these errors, at my worst crudely associating naturalism, realism’s grungier sibling, with bulked-up stories about unhappy people in the grip of the claws of heredity and the environment. Jennifer L. Fleissner, in a far more sophisticated analysis, tells us that naturalism is seen as “either fatalistic or nostalgic in the face of modern life.” When nostalgic, naturalism seeks to return “masculine power and adventure to a vitiated modernity” (). This helps to account for a belief that it is a hypermasculine genre, a defensive reaction against both the literature that praises domestic virtues and a deep anxiety that white American women were guilty of race suicide by getting jobs, earning money, becoming consumers, and going places rather than staying home and reproducing their race by having healthy children. Women, Compulsion, Modernity—a book of strength, originality, and subtlety—will now change our thinking about naturalism and its place in American cultural history. This is Fleissner’s first book, and it is a formidable, stunning accomplishment, leavened with wit. She argues that naturalism is a wide-ranging and “intellectually powerful tendency” (), doing nothing less ix

than re-imagining the intertwinings and interconnections of society and nature, including our embodied and sexual selves. These re-imaginings and reexaminings were of unprecedented urgency because of the “post-Darwinian location (of nature) within historical time” (). Nature was no longer a fixed entity that shows up in our lives but a shaping force. Moreover, Fleissner states, we must place women, femininity, and feminism at the center of naturalism if we are to understand it, and understand it we must. For we still dwell within the moment of its genesis and its momentum. She urges us not to think of naturalism as a settled genre but instead of natural-ism. This hyphenated neologism connotes a set of dialectical relations between nature and our beliefs about it. If we think dialectically, we will avoid those old binary splits between “determinism and individual will, nature and culture, and repetition and linearity” (), and gain a finer-grained knowledge about ourselves. Making the modern young woman rather than “a macho masculinity” central is but one of Fleissner’s major rereadings, although she is fresh and shrewd about masculinity and modernity, and compares texts about men with those about women to great effect. A neat act is to see naturalism’s representations of women’s domestic space as a mirror image of its representations of men’s “great outdoors,” the female “rest cure” as structurally similar to the male “west cure.” A second rereading is one of the sources of her originality. Naturalism evolved with modern psychology—William James, G. Stanley Hall, French thinkers, Sigmund Freud, himself a very complicated naturalist. Fleissner acutely uses her readings of literature, journalism, and psychology to map a different dominant plot for the modern young woman. Neither an arc of decline nor of triumph, it is rather an “on-going, nonlinear, repetitive motion. . . . seeming like a stuckness in place.” To grasp the meaning of this plot we must leave behind the old notion of naturalistic determination and replace it with that of “compulsion,” a psychological category. Gender itself is a compulsive activity, doing something over and over again, never getting it exactly right, attempting to get it right. Indeed, writing a naturalistic novel is also a compulsive activity, the writer trying again and again to amass detail after detail in the search for both scientific exactitude and an underlying order. Frustratingly, the sheer, dizzying profusion of detail renders a vision of order less and less probable. Fortunately, as the writers’ achievements prove, compulsion can lead, not to dumb repetition, but to the possibilities of creativity and critique. Although she ranges more widely, Fleissner’s focus is the s. Here, the old stories are breaking down, although worn-out narratives might be mox 

mentarily repaired with the glue of sentimentality. What new stories might prevail is unclear. With suppleness, Fleissner weaves together an exploration of the texts of naturalism, that is, the products of the writers and editors who created it, with an exploration of the texts about naturalism, that is, the products of the critics and scholars (including the feminist critics) who codified it. She is interested in canon formation and history, why we judge and evaluate culture as we do, why we establish some movements as central and others as marginal. Obviously, she is seeking to reform the canon, and I am convinced she very well might. Cleverly, Fleissner organizes the development of this dual exploration so that it replicates “the unfolding stages of the typical female bildungsroman” (). Her chapters travel from books about adolescence to those about the assumption of domestic responsibilities, to those about courtship, to those about marriage, to those about pregnancy, and finally to those about childbirth and mothering. Part of the modernity of the modern woman is to question her maternal destiny. As Fleissner states, bringing her themes together, each chapter “shows a naturalist heroine getting stuck along the way to completing her personal story, while also showing how this individual stuckness, linked in each case to a form of compulsion, is tied to a stuckness at the broader level of history as well” (). New lenses provide new visions, and Fleissner persuasively re-interprets authors who have inspired volume after volume of commentary: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Stephen Crane; the New England regionalists; Henry James, whose Bostonians she brilliantly reads as a narrative about mass culture, fads, and faddishness, thought to be a form of compulsive behavior. Studies of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Frank Norris’ McTeague precede an astonishing last chapter with a pun-filled title, “The Rhythm Method: Unmothering the Race in Chopin, Stein, and Grimké.” In part, Fleissner is wondering how natural-ism thinks through women’s embodiment “in relation to their modern quest for an enlarged sphere” (). In part, she is asking what a naturalist subjectivity might be like for an African American heroine. So doing, opening out her argument, she shows the promise of African American literature in the twentieth century for a revivified naturalism with “a new kind of human subjectivity” (). In her chapter on McTeague, that story about a murderous dentist and Trina, his hoarding wife, Fleissner reflects upon her own argument. Yes, Trina may refuse the future by not having children, but, Fleissner writes, she nevertheless reproduces the future “as both a woman’s body and a question—or a 

xi

woman’s body as the thing that asks itself as a question. Naturalist fiction, in other words, embodies women’s history as a pregnant pause.” A pregnant pause: these charged words promise that new meanings, activities, stories, and histories may emerge from the birthing and rebirthing rooms of time, even if our gaze is too obscured to realize exactly where and who we are. After reading Women, Compulsion, Modernity, I can never think of naturalism in the same tired way. It has become, thanks to Fleissner’s imagination and will and intellect, a guide to our condition as subjects of nature and history. Catharine R. Stimpson

xii 



I have been fortunate to receive the support, advice, and guidance of many remarkable people while writing this book, even if not all would necessarily agree with every one of my conclusions. The project began as a dissertation at Brown University under the masterly supervision of Nancy Armstrong, without whom, among many other things, I might never have read Lukács or thought about just how sentimental men can be. Robert Scholes, Amy Kaplan, and Jim Egan were wise and understanding readers. Carolyn Dean, Ellen Rooney, Naomi Schor, and Elizabeth Weed made palpable the pleasures of theory. One of the great surprises of this period was getting to reconnect with Lynn Wardley, whose Yale class “Women and the Representation of Reform” started it all, and who is more fun to talk to about these matters than nearly anyone else I know. Also during the graduate school years, I benefited from the companionship and conversation of a wonderful group of friends—among them Faye Halpern, Jen Jang, Nicolle Jordan, Tamar Katz, Ivan Kreilkamp, Ann Peters, Lloyd Pratt, Shelly Rosenblum, Mike Scharf, Jen Ting, and Kristen Whissel— and from my dissertation group, especially Sara Levine and Jen Ruth. If anything could be more arduous than completing a dissertation, it turns out, it might be transforming that dissertation (with the help of far too much new writing) into a book. In large and small ways, the following people helped make it possible, egged me on, and kept me excited about the project even after nearly a decade: Rachel Adams, Sara Blair, Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Freedman, Cathy Jurca, Rachel Lee, Chris Looby, Ken Reinhard, and Mark Seltzer. Tom Wortham and Pauline Yu made me feel like the best-supported (in every sense of the word) assistant professor imaginable. I received valuable suggestions from the members of the Southern California Americanist Group (SCAG), the New York Americanist Group (NAG), and the Americanist Research Colloquium at UCLA, as well as audiences at UCLA’s Center for the Study of xiii

Women, UC-Riverside, and UC-Davis. Thanks to Emory Elliott and Beth Freeman for making the latter talks possible and to Kirstie McClure and Brook Thomas for particularly useful comments at some of the others. A few even better friends than I knew deserve special mention, for having taken the time to read and painstakingly edit chapters that benefited greatly from their keen eyes: Mark Cooper, Deborah Garfield, and Garrett Sullivan. And several people very dear to me have heard me go on about naturalism, history, and compulsion for many more hours than anyone should have to bear. Fortunately, we also talked about pretty much everything else imaginable, and for that I am even more grateful: Helen Deutsch, Mark McGurl, Julie Schutzman and Bernie Rhie, and Jonah Willihnganz. This book would never have seen print without the dedicated support of Kate Stimpson, and later of Susan Bielstein at the University of Chicago Press. Two readers for the press, along with copyeditor Lois Crum, helped me in the final stages. Back at UCLA, Lars Larson and especially Molly Hiro offered meticulous and timely research aid, and the English Department, the Dean’s Office, the Academic Senate, and the University invaluably supported the project with both funding and free time. Material related to the chapters of this book has appeared in very different form in “The Work of Womanhood in American Naturalism,” differences , no.  (spring ), and “Is Feminism a Historicism?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature , no.  (spring ). I would like to thank the editors of these journals for their interest in my work. Finally, I must acknowledge some especially deep debts. First, to my loving family—my father, Erwin Fleissner; my sister, Katie Fleissner; and my stepmother, Judith Friedlander, who have made countless things both possible and pleasurable; and my dear grandmother, Sadie Klein, who helps to keep alive in my heart the memory of my mother, Norma. Second, and most of all, to Joshua Kates, who helped me to remember that the work of thought might extend beyond its circumstances, who brought inimitable insights to years of discussions and careful readings of the chapters of this book, and whose presence every day fills me with gratitude and joy.

xiv 

 The “Feminization” of American Naturalism

In , Henry Adams arrived at a startling conclusion: to talk about the forward motion of history itself, one had to ask after the movement of the average American woman’s life. Both, it turned out, had become problematic. We are considerably more familiar, however, with the first of these problems, the problem of narrating history at the end of the nineteenth century, a crisis for which The Education of Henry Adams—written primarily over the course of the s—has come to appear an emblematic case. Certainly the neurasthenic, doubt-ridden Adams can be seen as the foremost American example of the malaise that swept Western intellectuals at the fin de siècle, a twinned recoil against a post-Darwinian, thermodynamic universe of meaningless flux—or worse, spreading entropy—and the technocratic culture that rushed in to manage what was left, blithely unconcerned that the centuries-long quest for meaning in human life had devolved into a mere search for rationalized order.1 How to write history in such a climate? Far from blithe or unconcerned, Adams stands out for his decision to face the new developments squarely, to attempt an account in which natural forces and our confrontations with them receive the same weight as political events. He emerges as, in one scholar’s words, “the earliest of American naturalistic historians” (J. Martin )—although it remains far from clear that this ever became a popular option for writers of history. More obviously prescient was Adams’s protomodernist concern with his own subjective situation. The notion of mapping history’s narrative movement via the individual development or “education” of a representative individual— a son of the house of Adams—was not itself new. A book that continually attempted to carry out this narrative mission and kept coming up short, doubling back to reflect on its own process and that process’s failures, was rather less expected.2 One still might ask, however: What was the relation between this turn toward modernist form, toward subjectivity and the breakdown of narrative, 

and the introduction into history of natural forces? Further, what did either have to do with a much less remarked feature of Adams’s text, his interest in what we would now call social history, as emblematized by the figure of the ordinary American woman standing poised at the turn of the century? Typically, one locates the gendered register of Adams’s investigation in his oft-cited essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” written in . The piece exemplifies Adams’s mode, using a personal anecdote—his experience touring the Gallery of Machines at the Great Paris Exposition of —to frame a meditation on how modernity irrevocably alters the most basic forces stirring human action. For the medieval world, the Virgin Mother incarnates a natural power, the feminine constancy of sex and reproduction, shot through with sacred meaning; in the name of this “greatest and most mysterious of all energies,” cathedrals are raised, men see their place in a significant universe. The moderns, by contrast—embodied by Puritanical, technologically striving America— were seen to chastely drape woman and worship the mechanical Dynamo, the sign not of nature’s own power but of man’s ever-growing power over it. As a result, “the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam” (Education ). At one level, then, women and their bodies here simply form the symbolic site across which Henry Adams tells a prototypical story: the coming of modernity as a fall from Edenic nature and a teleological cosmos toward an emptily technologized, rationalized world. Put otherwise, it is the story of why, as Adams finds, it has become so difficult to keep telling history’s story. Yet if we delve a bit further into The Education, we find that American women play a much more literal role in Adams’s conception of this problem of the viability of historical narration. In “Vis Inertiae,” a piece written a few years later (in ), Adams begins in a political vein by considering the potential role of Russia in the world’s future and somehow winds up deciding that “[t]he task of accelerating or deflecting the movement of the American woman had interest infinitely greater than that of any race whatever, Russian or Chinese, Asiatic or African” (). The link, it turns out, lies in the titular concept of “inertia,” one of Adams’s attempts at “naturalistic history.” If slumbering Russia presently constitutes “a vast continental mass of inert motion, like a glacier” (), he writes, woman incarnates the far more radically fixed trajectory of “sex-inertia”: “Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and woman’s property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing . . . ” ().  

Or must she? This is the problem Adams sees facing the present moment, a problem unprecedented in the world’s history. The average American birthrate had declined by a startling fifty percent over the course of the nineteenth century (Kessler-Harris ). Factors crucial in abetting that shift, themselves central features of cultural modernity—such as urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of coeducational institutions—were unlikely to do other than spread in years to come. Remarkably, as Carl Degler points out, “The highest proportion of [American] women who never married for any period between  and [] were those born between  and ” (). At the same time, even married women were beginning for the first time to work outside the home in “disconcerting” numbers (Kessler-Harris ). “The woman had been set free,” Adams determines, “volatilized like Clerk Maxwell’s perfect gas,” indeed “almost brought to the point of explosion, like steam” (Education ). Yet at what cost? If female inertia, the certainty of reproduction, is what “unites history,” what happens to history when women start to leave the sphere of nature behind? For Adams, then, women’s changing stories lie at the core of his double problem: the fate of actual history and of our ability to narrate it. “The problem remained,” he concludes, “—to find out whether movement of inertia, inherent in function, could take direction except in lines of inertia. This problem needed to be solved in one generation of American women, and was the most vital of all problems of force” (). Taken in isolation, Adams’s choice of emphasis here may appear highly idiosyncratic. Yet as he himself makes clear, his concern rests quite in line with some of the most widely disseminated public speech of his time: signally, that of then president Theodore Roosevelt. In , even as Roosevelt exhorted the country’s young men to serve their newly expanding country in time of war, he made an equal case for the duty of all young female Americans to bear children for the nation—in large part because such reproductive patriotism could no longer be taken for granted. And in an introduction written for a  volume on female factory workers, The Woman Who Toils, he specifically hammered home the dangerous link between women’s growing interest in wage work for its own sake (as opposed to the much older demand of sheer necessity) and a turn away from marriage and childbearing. Should the nation fail to sever that chain, TR thundered, the result could be no less than “race suicide” (van Vorst and van Vorst vii). The word race here, of course, possessed multiple and often disturbing overtones—chief among them Roosevelt’s overt concern that it was white middle-class American women who were most visibly working more and    “           ”                    



mothering less at the time in question. (In fact, though, it is worth pointing out that the greatest decline in birthrate over the course of the nineteenth century in the United States occurred among black women.) His speeches can hardly be separated from the anti-immigrant sentiments sweeping the nation at the same moment.3 Here, then, is where The Education’s view differs; one might say that Adams at least strives to understand historically and philosophically what for Roosevelt is a purely ideological, political concern. Thus there are, to be sure, references to the “race-inertia” of the Russians at the start of his essay; but, finally, the question the American woman’s changing life patterns raise for Adams is the rather more broadly conceived one of “the extinction of the human race” itself (Education ). Certainly this can mean Adams is capable of sounding merely like a more fatalistic Roosevelt; he pronounces the family “extinct like chivalry” (Education ) and suggests that, when Dynamo has supplanted Virgin, feminism amounts to women’s doomed attempt to follow men’s lead and “marry machinery.” Pondering the options, he even briefly considers a fantasy of a new law “obliging every woman, married or not, to bear one baby—at the expense of the Treasury—before she was thirty years old, under penalty of solitary confinement for life.” Yet it is in fact the framing of this vision (as the work of an “octogenarian Senate”; as, finally, what it is not possible to do) that sets Adams decisively apart from his pragmatically interventionist president. There may be scores of men, including himself, Adams states, fulminating against these so-called New Women—“No doubt everyone in society discussed the subject, impelled by President Roosevelt if by nothing else”—and yet “the surface current of social opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent undercurrent of social action ran in the other” (). The latter, Adams sees, represents the deep movement of history. And whether or not history here might be in some unheard-of fashion moving against itself, it moves regardless, in the form of veritable “swarms” of women: travelers (he speaks of scores of “Cook’s tourists” or passengers on steamers), “myriads of new types—or type-writers” (a nod to the new technology bringing women into offices for the first time), “telephone and telegraph-girls, shop-clerks, factory-hands, running into millions on millions, and, as classes, unknown to themselves as to historians” (–). Indeed, in a truly major difference from Roosevelt, what seems to intrigue Adams most as the essay progresses is what it might look like for these New Women to “know themselves.” As he conceives it, the truth of history’s future “lay somewhere unconscious in the woman’s breast” (); thus, he finds him 

self buttonholing his women friends at parties, attempting to draw it out. For finally—as is perhaps more evident in his letters, as Martha Banta has suggested—Adams himself was something of a “feminized” subject, identifying far more with his era’s restless women than with its politics-obsessed, businessobsessed men. He saw the women again and again with nothing to do with their lives after forty, marooned with brutish or boring husbands, and he pronounced—in , the same year he wrote “Vis Inertiae”—that, had he his career to start again, “I should drop the man, except as an accessory, and study the woman of the future. The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. . . . She is still a study, she is all that is left to art.”4

The Woman of the Future This book argues that Henry Adams was in fact quite typical in seeing the complicated (and indeed sometimes expensive) “woman of the future” as the most interesting subject confronting the art of the turn of the century. For others as well, her capacity to embody the most salient feature of a post-Darwinian, technologized modernity—the changing status of “nature” in human life—made her life story a site across which to map the potential future shape of history itself. In many cases, certainly, the resulting historical narrative did appear as simply the hyperbolic plot of nature’s wholesale loss or its restoration, as conceived by “The Dynamo and the Virgin” or by Roosevelt. Yet the most powerful explorations of modernity’s meanings turned to the “woman of the future” just as Adams finally did, as a way to move beyond these extremes— predicated as they were on a notion of a known-in-advance “nature” lost or refound—toward a new understanding of nature as evolution saw it, as itself an ever-changing part of history’s story. It is in this distinct sense of coming to consider the meaning of nature as a serious question, I would argue, that we should understand the notion that Henry Adams was a “naturalistic historian.” In giving Adams this title, the critic Jay Martin joins a number of others who have drawn a link between his concerns and those of the same era’s “naturalist” novelists, such as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, a connection I now want to make as well.5 Yet I also wish to argue that the notion of “naturalism,” which has remained mostly marginal to American literary and cultural history,6 possesses heretofore unacknowledged usefulness for naming a much wider-ranging and more intellectually powerful tendency than we usually assume, if grasped in this more    “           ”                    



questioning sense: “nature” newly fashioned into an “ism,” a category to be reconceived as part of social life. This reconception affected many disciplines, from history to the burgeoning social sciences, but fiction played a key role. Like Adams’s Education, the realist novel that is so central to nineteenth-century literature has also been read as a form of plotting the broad forward movement of history through the developmental story of an individual life. And just as Adams does in the field of history, the post-Darwinian naturalist novelists add to this project “nature”— not only abstract “forces,” in their case, but the plebeian details of sex and embodiment, from which their more genteel realist predecessors tended to shy away. Aspects of life that had been thought to form a more or less unchanging backdrop for larger social-historical events, and thereby able to be taken for granted rather than scrutinized in themselves, thus come forward for the first time as significant elements of the story line. The modern woman can emblematize this shifting sense of nature’s relation to social-historical time, for, as Adams shows, she herself represents that part of life once conceived as timelessly “inert” which can now be seen stepping forth onto the stage of history. As a result, the possibility of what her still-unfolding story might look like and mean, how she might come to “know herself” (to use Adams’s words), becomes the major focus of narrative interest for the naturalist text. Now, however, I need to back up a step, for the reading I am giving here of American naturalist fiction would seem diametrically opposed to the way this mode of writing has nearly always been understood. I am placing the modern woman’s story at the center of a genre typically seen as the most hypermasculine in American literary history, and part and parcel of a broader cultural moment considered wholly its equal in clamorous “virility.”7 How can this be so? The remainder of this introduction aims to address that question, while making clearer the specificity and implications of my very different view. On the broadest level, I will be contending that our treatment of naturalism has remained limited by a tendency to reduce its meanings to the two more polarized responses to the s context we saw considered but finally rejected by Adams, above. That is, naturalism is seen as either fatalistic or nostalgic in the face of modern life. If fatalistic, it depicts modern individuals bereft of agency or vitality, dwarfed by a cityscape of soulless mechanical dynamos, spiraling steadily downward in “plots of decline”; to the extent that “nature” survives here, it does so in the distorted form of traits linked to decadence or atavism.8 If nostalgic, the reverse is true: naturalism goes along with a renewal of what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life,” returning masculine power and  

adventure to a vitiated modernity by rediscovering the freedoms and struggles associated with a still wide-open, untarnished natural landscape. (Surprisingly, the reading of naturalism as “social Darwinist” fiction can go along with the more optimistic latter story, in that nature, left to its own devices, will sort out who belongs on top.)9 In neither of these plots, then, is nature’s meaning placed in question. Rather, it appears only as a known quantity that is lost forever—a loss equivalent to the absolute loss of human agency and freedom—or magically regained, enabling “plots of triumph” again to become imaginable. One could scarcely deny that these hyperbolic historical narratives, with their hyperbolic consequences for the individual, did appear throughout the s, and indeed at times in the pages of those writers typically termed naturalists: Norris, Dreiser, Stephen Crane. Yet my point is that they appeared merely as the most extreme points on a spectrum that also involved, in these writers as well as in others, a far more nuanced and serious confrontation with the meanings of “nature”’s changing status in the modern world. In other words, our accounts rarely do justice to the period’s actual complexity around these concerns. Instead, I would argue, they say far more about the continued attachment of Americanist criticism, in the latter half of the twentieth century, to these same hyperbolic accounts of modernity’s meanings for the American individual. We are fairly familiar, by now, with the argument that American studies as a discipline founded itself on a vision of individual male freedom from a feminized “sivilization,” as Twain put it—a freedom based on escape back into an untrammeled natural realm. Yet while a more historically minded recent criticism has led to numerous critiques of this ideal of the “American Adam,” it has too often replaced it with a vision that risks keeping the ideal alive and well. This vision is simply the flip side of the coin, as expressed above: the sense of modernization as a stark “plot of decline,” on both an individual and a historical level. Thus, the most important literary and cultural histories of the s have tended to be as certain as Roosevelt or “The Dynamo and the Virgin” that modern forms of rationalization are rendering nature, and with it human agency, a relic of a storied past. Given the intervening impact of feminist criticism, however, one might imagine that recent accounts would at least differ from their s predecessors with respect to the decision to embody all modernity’s evils in the “monthlymagazine-made American female,” eschewing her maternal role. In fact, it is remarkable how tenacious this association, however pushed to the rhetorical background, has remained. It continues to be not at all uncommon for devel   “           ”                    



opments crucial to women’s changing life opportunities, from consumerism to birth control to social-scientific work, to appear in the scholarship purely as emblems of rationalization’s pernicious spread into the innermost havens of private life.10 The implication—which only occasionally emerges full-blown, as in the work of Christopher Lasch—is that feminism itself forms a key component of the historical “plot of decline.”11 Unfortunately, the set of oppositions here has remained so entrenched that feminists themselves have most often responded with their own version of the lost-Eden narrative (as in utopian readings of female regionalist writing) or by insisting that modernity’s depredations were hardest of all on women (focusing on consumers, for example, as the hapless victims of capitalism’s rise).12 Mark Seltzer’s “The Naturalist Machine” has set the tone for many feminist treatments of this period by casting male naturalist writers as obsessive technocrats out to manage and appropriate a threatening female “nature.” This reading is not wrong so much as it is limited by its assumption that the s represent merely the culmination of a century-long masculine attempt to control the woman’s body. In fact, as Henry Adams recognized, the most radical forms of rationalizing that body belonged in this era to women themselves—and, more complicatedly still, to an extension as much as a diminishment of their freedom and agency.13 Hence, rather than denying the association between feminism and a rationalized modernity, I hope to reveal it as even more widespread during the s than we have typically conceived. Bringing this link front and center, however, should ideally have the same effect on our thinking today that it did on that of Adams and the other “naturalists” at the turn of the century: it should force a move beyond the polar opposition between a lost natural freedom and a denuding, diminishing, artificial modern life.14 To acknowledge women’s expanding opportunities as a crucial part of that life is necessarily to spur a more nuanced understanding of modernity’s meanings for “nature” and for “freedom”—an understanding in which freedom and its truncation can be grasped somehow together as one. The notion Seltzer brings forth of a nature operating within the social—a nature unlike the Edenic, presocial one subject only to loss or reclamation—is crucial to this paradoxical conception. Overall, then, the rereading of the “naturalist” project that I offer depends on four major shifts away from the way the genre is still usually conceived. First, we move from a macho masculinity to the centrality of the modern young woman. Second, the notion of nature as a known quantity entering literature or history is replaced by a more true natural-ism: nature reconceived as a sub 

ject for an unprecedented theoretical reflection and reimagination, based on its post-Darwinian location within historical time. With respect to the third and fourth shifts, we saw above that the still prevalent view of naturalism’s “nature” as merely the nature we already know has produced readings based on hyperbolic “plots of decline” or “plots of triumph,” for both history and the individual’s agency within it. The determinism that is so often considered central to naturalist writing actually goes along with both of these options; the naturalist subject is either the absolute victim of merciless external forces, or we find that those forces’ very mercilessness provides an opportunity for the truly manly subject to assert his own equally outsized power. My final two points, then, are, third, that naturalism’s most characteristic plot, as in the case of the modern young woman, is marked by neither the steep arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion—back and forth, around and around, on and on—that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place. As characteristic of the s heroine, this strange stuck movement can connect works typically read as naturalist with a far greater range of the era’s fiction—in particular, the work of women writers. We might begin to think together, for example, Sister Carrie, moving back and forth in her rocking chair; the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” crawling around and around the periphery of her room; Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, going “on and on . . . on and on” into the water (Awakening ); Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Louisa Ellis, the “New England Nun,” gazing into her “long reach of future days . . . every one like the others”(Reader ); the repetitively compulsive everyday actions, very similar to Louisa’s, of Trina McTeague; the vacillating, terminally indecisive behavior of Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart or Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, an early African American embodiment of this plotline; or the final image of Wharton’s Ann Eliza Bunner in her  naturalist novella “Bunner Sisters”— a woman compared (like Trina) persistently to a ticking clock—walking on and on and on into the crowded city street. I argue, further, that we can understand this stuckness in repetitive motion, and its relation to agency and history, if we replace the notion of naturalist determinism with the more nuanced concept of compulsion. Compulsion, we will see, draws together several aspects of the “natural-ist” project. Most broadly, it has the potential to name an understanding of agency in which individual will and its subjection to rationalizing “forces” appear as more deeply intertwined. More specifically, to the extent that nature appears not as the presocial wilderness in these texts but as an important feature within human social life, various    “           ”                    



everyday rituals taking place around the fact of embodiment (sex, birth, death, illness, cleanliness, etc.) take on new interest, to these novelists just as to the era’s anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and sociologists. Dedicated to making order out of our bodily lives, these rituals appear at their most elaborated as pioneering literary representations of what we would now term “obsessive-compulsive” behavior. Such behavior is, of course, most commonly understood today as a kind of extreme attempt at rationalizing one’s daily activities; as such, its emergence as subject matter during the s might seem to confirm the bleak reading of modernization as an extension of proto-Taylorist principles of industrial organization to private life. Yet the compulsive would actually make a terrible Taylorite worker, given that her breakdown of ordinary actions into minute, exacting rituals actually produces not greater efficiency but its opposite: a seemingly endless spiral. The psychological writings of the turn of the century in fact focused more intensely than any have since on compulsive activity as a dialectical process, in which every attempt at a more perfect order leads inexorably to order’s failure (and thus to the repetition of the attempt). Pierre Janet, for example, saw the condition’s primary symptom as a “feeling of incompleteness” (sentiment d’incomplétude).15 My claim is that this model of compulsion, in which rationalization and its failure work in tandem, can characterize not only the daily stories of naturalism’s heroines but just as much the narrative mode that portrays them. For in its attempt to expand realism’s organizing gaze to include the tiniest details of daily, bodily life, naturalism, too, has been read as a mode of ordering what had been thought to lie outside the novel’s scope. (The connection between such bodily details and the inclusion of “more” in general is made in the moment when Zola has his prostitute heroine, Nana, express horror at a modern novel just like the one she inhabits, for its vulgar presumption to “show everything” [tout montrer (Rougon-Macquart )]!) As the genre’s more formally minded European critics have typically observed, however, this extension of the will to order results not so much in an even more totalizing vision of history, as in that vision’s breakdown—and, finally, the advent of modernist fragmentation.16 Ever uncertain that it has genuinely arrived at “completion” within a given case, naturalism keeps proliferating more and more details, with the result that it remains stuck at the level of description, without moving forward to the story line for which that description is meant to set the stage. And for at least one famous reading, that of Georg Lukács in his essay “Narrate or Describe?” this tendency renders naturalism a profoundly ahistorical genre.   

If we recognize, however, that naturalism’s stuckness in place gets linked to the figure of the modern woman, the sense becomes more one of a temporal suspension, a deferral of history’s meanings by a sense that they will be decided by an unknown future. As Henry Adams wrote in , “All these new women had been created since ; all were to show their meaning before ” (Education ). In sharp distinction from the periodizing gesture that, sure of modernity’s meanings, rushes either to embrace those meanings or to turn back the clock, the “new” feminine story in the texts I will be examining marks a moment when history’s very legibility has been called into question. Certainly Adams’s prediction seems overly hasty in retrospect. The critic Kenneth Lynn, writing in  about turn-of-the-century fiction, offered a quite different view of a similar slice of time: “What is this curious product of today, the American girl or woman?” asked a writer in the Atlantic Monthly in . “ . . . is it possible for any novel, within the next fifty years, truly to depict her as a finality, when she is still emerging from new conditions . . . when she does not yet understand herself . . . ?” The question was a good one and, as it turned out, a perennial one. For the American novel in this century has been, perhaps more than anything else, a continuing study of the emergent, still-changing, ever-new American woman . . . [her] various ambitions have supplied its dynamic power. (Dream –)

The sense that in  the American woman remained an “emergent” phenomenon is striking; but even more so, perhaps, is the fact that an important critic— let alone one writing decades before the advent of feminist scholarship— deemed the entire first half of the twentieth century a period dominated by novels about her emergence. This seems a wholly lost literary-historical claim.17 Yet Lynn’s work belongs to a pre-s critical corpus that we would do well to remember, one in which feminist arguments and women’s changing lives were surprisingly often presumed indispensable to any grasp of the s context (albeit rarely given extended scrutiny within it). Thus Maxwell Geismar, in , chose five novelists for his study of the period –: Norris, Crane, Dreiser, Jack London—and Ellen Glasgow, whose initial s works explicitly considered Darwinist ideas together with the day’s gender issues. Lynn himself read Dreiser, London, and Norris alongside two naturalists less recalled today, Robert Herrick and David Graham Phillips, both of whom focused their most epic works (Together [] and Susan Lenox:    “           ”                    



Her Fall and Rise [, though written earlier]) on modern women’s ambitions. In keeping with a view of naturalism as a literature of class struggle, these two writers are remembered today, if at all, for their jeremiads against industrial capitalism. Yet for Herrick, the emergence of the proletarian protagonist was no more significant than that of the women gaining ground by “being absorbed into the economic machine of our industrialism, as breadwinners, as competitors of men, and in the freer strata of society as independent creators” (“American” ).18 Seeming to echo Adams, he wrote in , “No one can stand in our city streets mornings and evenings and watch the hurrying throng of working women without feeling that a wealth of imaginative material lies here close at hand,” in the still unplumbed “inner life” of these new types of women (). These writers can recall us to a forgotten context, but their works of this era tend to sound more dated today than do either those of a Norris or a Dreiser, or those of a much larger group of turn-of-the-century women writers who were not given sustained scholarly attention until the rise of feminist criticism in the s. I am thinking here of such figures as Gilman, Wharton, Freeman, and Chopin. The problem has been that, in the wake of an explicitly feminist intervention, scholarship on the period has tended to separate the male writers and their concerns from the women and theirs more than was often the case in the pre-s work.19 An important exception, in this regard, was Walter Benn Michaels’s new-historicist The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (). Despite being mostly critiqued by feminists, Michaels’s remains the only study to treat both women’s texts and women’s stories as central to naturalism as a genre—and to do so, moreover, by arguing that the female body in the s becomes the privileged site of the endless exchanges typifying capitalist modernity.20 For Michaels, however, this link between the era’s feminism and its consumerist ethos simply worked to bankrupt the critical potential of the former. Such a perspective can help to explain a split that developed at the time between feminist and historicist approaches to the era’s fiction.21 While the historicists accused the feminists (tacitly or not) of being insufficiently attentive to cultural contextualization, feminists rejoined that historicist critics, Michaels among them, rarely considered women’s history as part of the context in question.22 On the one hand, then, part of the contribution of the present book is simply to show the deep imbrication of this particular period’s fiction with a broad range of contemporaneous shifts in women’s lives, shifts that have themselves not been considered together in one study.   

On the other hand, I would argue, there may remain something important about the feminist-historicist split. To historicize the feminine story in this period, it turns out, is at once to question the procedures of historicization itself— to ask, as a few critics at the present moment have begun to do, whether the notion of beginning and ending with a novel’s “cultural work” during its own era is sufficient to grasping its interest and meanings.23 This is, to my mind, a stronger rebuttal to a “containment” model of history such as that often associated with new historicism. And it is one that grows directly out of the era’s own sense, as exemplified in a figure like Henry Adams, that the questions its New Women posed were not ones to be answered within the historical moment itself but ones that reached forward toward our own present, and beyond. It should be emphasized, however, that to reach this conclusion, as Adams did, through a deeper historicization is a quite different move from that of turning back to embrace a purely formalist aesthetics. Indeed, I hope to show that the paradoxical arrival at history’s limits through the very attempt at a richer history, which forms the theoretical motor of my own project, can also serve as a definition of naturalism’s own practice—a practice that emerges through its attempt to narrate the modern woman’s bodily story. As a result, that story can alter our historicization of the American s in two senses: insisting both on its deeper complexities as a moment and on that moment’s continued capacity to open out onto an unknown future.

Rethinking Remasculinization as Sentimentality On one level, one could scarcely deny that the s saw a widespread “remasculinization” of culture, to employ Susan Jeffords’s useful term—one dedicated to rediscovering Roosevelt’s notion of “the strenuous life” through encounters with the still “untamed” natural world (Higham ). Outdoor activities like camping, hunting, and fishing surged in popularity, along with sports like college football. As John Higham put it in an influential essay on this cultural “reorientation,” “nature meant . . . virility. It represented that masculine hardness and power that suddenly seemed an absolutely indispensable remedy for the artificiality and effeteness of late nineteenth-century urban life” (). American naturalist writers like Norris, Dreiser, London, and Crane have most often been read as literary embodiments of this turn toward nature; veritable literary Roosevelts, they were said to be “interested most of all in depicting men under conditions of intense struggle, whether in war, in the capitalist economic system, on the frontier, or anywhere else away from the constraints    “           ”                    



of female civilization” (Habegger, Gender ). Such an account would certainly seem to accord with the published claims of a writer like Norris about the meaning of his work. In his essays, he can be heard to yearn for an American Kipling (Literary Criticism ); to call novel-writing, properly practiced, “the most virile” of all arts, meaning it “will not . . . flourish indoors” (); and to champion “the ‘Nature’ Revival in Literature” (). Arguing that Zola’s naturalism should be understood as a form of romance, he contrasts its vital largesse to the circumscribed domestic realism of William Dean Howells, said to linger girlishly over “crises involving cups of tea” (). The question to be addressed is whether the claims Norris makes in his essays really fit what his literary work is doing. Yet one thing is clear: his image of naturalism as something of a bull in a china shop, upsetting the literary tea table, has proved enduringly appealing; it neatly suggests a revolt against not only Howellsian realism but also its other most immediate predecessor, the regionalism of women writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, whose work has often been said to make much of the teacup motif. Indeed, the entire characterization of naturalism here generally depends on a view that a once-robust American literature, embodied by the adventure sagas of James Fenimore Cooper, was hijacked, for much of the nineteenth century, by a tendency best encompassed by the term New England.24 As V. L. Parrington initially argued in the s, the realist aspirations of writers like Howells and Jewett (and, in his view, James and Wharton) were fatally compromised by their Brahmin gentility, their “dainty” nostalgia for the refinements of the Old World (); as a result of these upper-crust sensibilities and dedication to what Howells notoriously dubbed life’s “smiling aspects,” they were as concerned to keep life’s “sprawling energy” at a distance as to welcome it in (). Specifically, locked into a “society” world “dominated by women” (), they drew their lace curtains against the “brutal economic reality” out in the street—the uncompromising forces that shaped most people’s daily lives ().25 By facing those forces unflinchingly, the naturalists are thought not only to allow a truly realist American fiction to emerge. Even more importantly, I would argue, the treatment of them in these terms enables a kind of “American exceptionalist” reading of what modernity looks like in a U.S. context. In writings on European literature, after all, the naturalist period itself was represented as a retreat from an earlier emphasis on full-blooded struggle with the real. Influenced by a darkly Weberian account of modernity, literary materialists such as Georg Lukács located late-nineteenth-century writing in the context of an increasingly “reified” human existence, one in which direct experience of material reality was   

replaced by the artifices of consumerism and technologization. This opposition, moreover, possessed a distinctly gendered cast. The hero of Lukács’s narrative of decline is Fenimore Cooper’s English counterpart, Walter Scott, cast as inheritor of the tradition of medieval “ballads and legends,” works said to derive their “vitality” from “the turbulent, active interaction of men” (, ). By contrast, a modern novel like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, focusing on a bored woman’s inner life, makes the Howellsian error of replacing “action” and “brave[ry]” with the quiescence of repetitive “habits,” thus “confus[ing] life with the everyday existence of the ordinary bourgeois” (, ). Read as manly adventurers, and indeed often linked by their supporters to the working class’s revolt against a genteel society, the American naturalists allow for a different narrative. The everyday tales of women at home become not what is new, but the remnants of an outmoded, timidly genteel New England Victorianism. American modernity leaves those stories behind, striding boldly forth into urban and literal jungles and thus reclaiming the tradition that Lukács thought had been lost forever. And in this sense, most significantly, naturalism can also become part of what many have seen as the central plotline of American literary criticism, as described first and still best by Leslie Fiedler: the Huck Finn story in which women represent the forces of “sivilization” as entrapment, requiring men to “light out” for a freer, wider natural world. This plot, indeed, has turned out to be more recalcitrant than its many critics could have imagined. It would certainly seem to have been decisively called into question by the s, when Americanists’ turn toward a burgeoning historicism produced multiple strong critiques of the man-in-the-wilderness approach. In these reimaginings, as if most powerfully to contradict a prior critical emphasis on “man in the open air,” writers and characters alike began to appear as entrapped within a dense web of socially determined constraints, preoccupied with self-presentation and self-promotion in a market society based on spectacle and commodification. In other words, American modernity began to look more or less like the European kind described by Lukács—and, indeed, Lukács became an important touchstone for these accounts, along with Michel Foucault.26 Despite obvious and serious differences between these theories, they were able to converge around the figure of the hyperrationalized modern subject, endlessly producing or “disciplining” himself as a kind of human commodity for mass consumption by a spectatorial culture. This darker view, then, became the dominant account of American literary naturalism. Yet was it really the opposite of what had come before? We have already seen that Lukács’s own depiction of a desiccated modernity can readily work    “           ”                    



together with a nostalgia for the stories of male struggle said to be lost. As it turns out, the same could be said of Foucault, at least as he was appropriated by Americanist criticism. In a still insufficiently heard argument, Lora Romero pointed out striking continuities between the earlier American ideal as discussed by Fiedler and others, on one hand, and Foucault-inspired critiques of disciplinary society, on the other.27 For in the United States, these latter were typically cast as a shift from an undisguised, direct form of paternal “punishment” based on “simple brute force” to an insidiously internalized maternal mode, seemingly all sweetness and light, creating “docile,” domesticated persons happy to police themselves. The danger here, as Romero suggests, lies in creating “nostalgia” for a purely external form of power that never actually existed, one that “does not compromise the autonomy of the male subject” (). Here, then, we might be back to a longing for remasculinization. And indeed, both sides of this coin—the horror at “docile bodies” and the accompanying vision of an unencumbered male individual—were already evident back in John Higham’s classic “old historicist” account of naturalism as the return to Cooper and Scott. Here is how Higham described the prior America against which the s revolted: From the middle of the nineteenth century until about  Americans on the whole had submitted docilely enough to the gathering restrictions of a highly industrialized society. They learned to live in cities, to sit in rooms cluttered with bric-a-brac, to limit the size of their families, to accept the authority of professional elites, to mask their aggressions behind a thickening facade of respectability, and to comfort themselves with a faith in automatic material progress. Above all, Americans learned to conform to the discipline of machinery. ()

Again, Higham’s point is to show the naturalists overturning all this, and thus producing a masculinized U.S. modernity. Such a move, as I have suggested, is possible only if we see the world being overturned as the lace-curtained sanctuary of New England fiction. This view goes along with the Victorian staples here: the bric-a-brac-stuffed parlors, the “thickening facade of respectability,” the comforting faith. What of the rest, however? If Higham’s manly naturalists also turn against cities, machinery, professionalism, and the limitation of family size, do they not in fact revolt against modernity itself? And, moreover, do they not revolt against a modernity specifically aligned with women’s changing lives?   

Higham himself states the opposite (and others have followed suit in this regard), treating the decade’s New Woman as herself committed to the turn away from Victorian domesticity and toward manliness and nature, given her similar enthusiasm for physical activity (as in the late-’s bicycle craze) along with other formerly male prerogatives.28 Does the New Woman really fit in here, however? As Higham also reminds us, that ultimate booster for manly culture, Teddy Roosevelt, “exhorted women to greater fecundity” even as he urged men to take up “the gladiatorial spirit” (Higham ). The fact was that the celebration of unfettered nature, while it may have looked like the usual American male rebellion against the mother’s world, really demanded that women resume their “natural” role as mothers. By contrast, and in strong contradistinction to Higham’s portrayal of cities, machinery, and family planning as expressing a conformist “submission” to the dictates of “society,” these modernizing phenomena would have been recognized at the time as enabling an expansion of opportunities and possibilities for American women in particular. It was young women, primarily, who moved to the cities in droves in the s and s in search of new forms of wage work, and it was women workers, too, who reaped the benefits of various forms of workplace industrialization that obviated the need for physical strength.29 And clearly the move toward smaller families was crucial to women’s being able to consider other kinds of life activity at all. In sum, then, American modernity may be “feminized,” but it cannot be said to be so simply in the sense of feminization as gentility and constraint. Rather, once we recognize that women experienced new freedoms through these same modern phenomena, it becomes possible to argue that the deepest repositories of sentimental, therapeutic, indeed nostalgic culture in the s may have belonged to the era’s manly men. This is my first claim, then—that to the extent we identify a sentimental nostalgia at work in the s, it should be identified not with domestic New England writing, but with remasculinization itself.30 My second claim, however, is that, although this nostalgic masculinity indeed played the major role in ’s culture that Higham and others assert, it should not be seen as taking its literary form in the genre of naturalist fiction. While naturalism certainly had its nostalgically masculinizing moments, it was finally far more committed to grasping the modernity that had rendered such an existence outmoded. Of course, such an assertion might seem simply to bring us back to the possibility that American naturalism does possess the fatalism and gloom of its European counterparts, something its native boosters have    “           ”                    



long striven to deny. Again, while this is part of the picture, it, too, is not finally the most significant or dominating part. Indeed, the scholars mentioned above were not wrong to suggest that for the American naturalists, the scene around them brimmed with an energy and intensity as much as it represented a fatal enervation. The problem is only that, because of the assumptions built into the American canon about where freedom and possibility reside, we have only been able to conceive of that energy as the result of the turn away from the urbanized, feminized modern world into “untamed nature” or masculine conflict. Instead, what is most striking about naturalism is that, for the first time in American literature, it locates that wild energy and open-ended possibility in the very story so central to lace-curtained New England fiction: the female bildungsroman.

From Remasculinization to Feminization If we examine the fiction itself, the remasculinization reading of naturalism turns out to have always been predicated on some notably idiosyncratic critical emphases. Again and again, one finds the following: () an extreme focus on the work of Jack London, often considered in tandem with that of the founder of the American Western, Owen Wister; () a treatment of Frank Norris that judges his naturalism solely through the novels Moran of the Lady Letty, Blix, and A Man’s Woman, as well as, less often, The Octopus; and () scarcely a mention of either Dreiser or Crane at all. Aside from the truly bizarre assertion that Wister is a naturalist writer—a claim crucial to Thomas Gossett’s dismissal of the genre as Anglo-Saxon propaganda in his study Race—what is most immediately striking here to anyone who has studied Norris’s work in any detail is the nearly complete absence of reference to the works that have for years been deemed his most unmistakable forays into the naturalist genre: McTeague and Vandover and the Brute. Indeed, Moran, Blix, and A Man’s Woman—much like Norris’s neomedieval prose poem Yvernelle, an equally suspect central exhibit in the account of his nostalgic “antimodernism” given by Jackson Lears— were composed by Norris very deliberately as breaks from his notoriously sordid naturalist works, being “healthy and clean and natural” (to use his own words) adventure stories and conventional romances, penned in an accessible popular style (Lynn, Dream ). Much of the confusion between the two types of books, undoubtedly, stems from Norris’s own published rhetoric concerning what writing fiction per se should be all about. The Norris who emerges from the polemical essays cited   

above surely seems a suitable match for London and Wister, promulgating the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon as fit material for an “Epic of the West” (Literary Criticism ). And yet fortunately—as a few prescient critics have pointed out when comparing Norris with London—this is scarcely the Norris of either McTeague or Vandover. In the former, our hero is physically an Anglo-Saxon superman but mentally a dope; he gets back to nature in the form of ending up handcuffed to his conquered rival in Death Valley, following a pointless skirmish over a bag of gold. In the latter, a foppish young urbanite—the epitome of the overcivilized male—degenerates into a “brute” who literally barks the word “Wolf!” while running around his room on all fours (Vandover ) and ends up cleaning houses for a living. This opposing emphasis, on naturalism as a fiction not of celebratory masculinism and the triumph of nature but of male impotence, can be heard in the other major conception of this work that marks American literary history (and which resurfaced in the s): its treatment as a mode of “pessimistic determinism,” in Malcolm Cowley’s oft-cited words ().31 Not for nothing did Cowley title his influential essay on these writers “‘Not Men’”; as another critic puts it, “Eliot’s vision of a hollow man, without conviction and without strength, was essentially the warning Norris had sounded even before the turn of the century” (Dillingham ). Here we see a complete reversal of what the remasculinization theorists find: instead of absolute male agency, naturalism is said to be marked by agency’s total evacuation. Is it possible that these can both be true of the same literature? Some scholars, like Cowley, have made the assertion that Norris, for one, is “able to combine . . . romantic pessimism about individuals with romantic optimism about the future of mankind” (). For this perspective, the ending of The Octopus is often cited; there, although the struggling ranchers have been soundly defeated by the big railroad interests, we are encouraged to take a sort of mystical solace in the fact that “the ” will continue endlessly to grow itself without need for human intervention (). At moments like this, more importantly, The Octopus reveals what it does share with the conventional potboilers Moran, Blix, and A Man’s Woman: a finally conventional view of both nature and women, which I would argue has a great deal to do with these texts’ ability to lapse into an unmitigated AngloSaxonism. To be sure, as Amy Kaplan has suggested in “Romancing the Empire,” such books share with those of London and the era’s popular adventure fiction a certain willingness to incorporate the New Woman into their otherwise antimodern tales of Anglo-Saxon glory. “Aryan Amazons” like the titular    “           ”                    



Moran thus fight right alongside their muscle-bound men (Dillingham ). Yet the extent of that acceptance of modern womanhood is crucial to recognize, as Kaplan does. A turn at boyish derring-do in imperial venues was all very well and good, provided the same rosy-cheeked young white woman then made her way home in time to bear the next generation’s Anglo-Saxon children. Proper reproduction, of course, formed the very cornerstone of racial theory, and thus, so did a depiction of a heroine like Moran as possessing “the purity of primeval glaciers” (Norris, Moran ). The question, then, is again whether this pure-as-snow, finally motherly heroine (and if she is less of an Amazon, no heroine of Norris’s displays more maternal virtues than The Octopus’s milkmaid, Hilma Tree) is really the heroine typical of naturalism. Norris’s own distinction between his naturalist texts and his “healthy, clean, and natural” popular fiction would certainly suggest otherwise. In a classic study of the genre, Lars Åhnebrink makes the salient point, distinguishing what he calls “the new woman, the modern woman,” as represented by the robust heroines of Moran, Blix, and AMW, from “the type of woman most frequently met with in naturalistic writings,” who is “often neurotic and hysterical”; types of the latter include not only Flaubert’s and Zola’s most famous heroines but also Trina, the antiheroine of Norris’s own McTeague (–, emphasis mine). Yet as much as it helps to clarify matters, Åhnebrink’s distinction also suggests why there has been considerable confusion around this particular issue, given that in his view, it is the Aryan Amazons who are the “modern” heroines here. This can only be argued, however, if women’s modernity in the s did not include at its core a burgeoning skepticism about marriage and bearing children—a skepticism often viewed as “neurotic”—and a concomitant interest in earning money on one’s own. As we have seen, these shifts in women’s life stories played an absolutely central role in their condemnation by the era’s ultimate booster for imperialist hypermasculinity, Teddy Roosevelt. For these very reasons, Trina McTeague, along with Dreiser’s famed naturalist heroine Sister Carrie, fits much more readily into the “impotent male” account of naturalism than the triumphant-maleness one. It is possible to read both McTeague and Sister Carrie as extended depictions of what a household looks like when the woman earns the money and shows little interest, to say the least, in propagating the next generation. Countless critical diagnoses of Trina as neurotic and Carrie as a cold fish cannot be separated from this refusal. Nor can the women’s attachment to the money they earn, which produces a scenario that could have been taken straight out of Roosevelt’s cautionary rhetoric in   

The Woman Who Toils. In both books, remarkably parallel (though never compared) scenes show the novels’ older men, out of a job, forced literally to beg from their female counterparts in order to stay off the streets; in return, the women respond not with nurturance but with a selfish regard for their own savings. The result is a plot that, at its most extreme, has the startling effect of turning the male hero into a version of the victimized “fallen woman” familiar from seduction fiction. The fact that the women’s monetary power gets persistently linked to the mysterious workings of luck or chance—Trina wins the lottery, a fact that tends to overshadow her wage work making toys; Carrie’s success depends on random lucky breaks throughout—merely underscores this construal of the men as, in highly traditional terms, victims of a heartless fate. Only the gender reversal, it would seem, has kept us from reading this purportedly tough-minded “determinist” plotline as the deeply conventional, even sentimental one it often threatens to resemble. One might readily wish to conclude, then, as Bram Dijkstra does, that novels like McTeague belong to a widespread fin-de-siècle literature in which modern wives rent by “hysteria and melancholy” become the “victimizer of choice of the period’s self-pityingly marginalized male,” wresting “the reins of economic selfhood” from his grasp (, ). Naturalism has indeed occasionally been subsumed under this rubric, with women acting as part of the array of pitiless natural forces threatening the men. To my mind, however, the manifest limitation with this reading lies in its assumption that the beleaguered males form the sole or even the primary focus of interest within the naturalist narrative. And while this may have been the case for many scholars, it is considerably less clear that Dreiser, for example, shares their view that Carrie’s lover Hurstwood is the important figure in Sister Carrie, or that Norris does not find Trina’s story the more compelling drama in McTeague. Rather, a perusal of the critical literature can highlight the elisions that have been required in order to downplay the amount of time and care that the books themselves in fact expend on these women’s coming-of-age stories, and on the workings of their inner lives. In the case of Norris’s last novel, The Pit, the extended focus on the marital and psychological struggles of the heroine Laura Jadwin has been harder to ignore; Norris clearly presents them as a feminine equivalent of her husband’s daring speculations in the Chicago wheat market.32 As Clare Virginia Eby has documented, however, this domestic emphasis has led mostly to The Pit’s getting sidelined within the American naturalist canon. If, however, we consider the women’s stories in these novels in tandem with the men’s, we can see that the very motor that drives the male fall actu   “           ”                    



ally helps bring forward, in the women’s case, a truly new kind of narrative, one irreducible to the alternatives of sheer triumph or absolute decline. The fall of once-powerful heroes like Hurstwood and McTeague might be said most to mimic that of the traditional seduced woman in being a kind of victimization by their own embodiment. At the same time, a woman like Carrie, despite being seduced by not one but two men, has always struck readers as notably able to skirt the physical consequences that ordinarily result.33 In fact, I would argue, both of these shifts can be understood as results of the same phenomenon: the new, postevolutionary understanding of all human beings as subject to physical forces along with social ones. For the male subject, more traditionally thought capable of transcending his embodiment through rationality, this shift can appear as simply a frightening diminution of personal agency. For the woman, however, long accustomed to the way her embodiment trumps any claims made for her rational capacities, the revelation of all persons as mutually composed of both dimensions allows her unprecedented entrée into a nonfamilial sphere no longer predicated on leaving “nature” wholly behind. Women’s new freedoms here are thus inseparable from a growing sense, linking naturalist fiction with the period’s burgeoning social-scientific work, that the traditional sense of a natural bodily life and a social public sphere must give way to a recognition of all human life, public and private, as entailing an ongoing attempt to work with and manage the facts of our existence as embodied beings. What is crucial to grasp here is the sense of the natural and the social as intertwined yet still distinct, thus calling for ongoing theorization of their interconnection; this is a very different thing from, for example, the social Darwinist view that the social world turns out to be simply equivalent to, a mirror of, an already grasped natural world of predator and prey. This is where the notion of compulsion, introduced earlier, becomes crucial. Instead of either the social determining the natural or the simple opposite, naturalism depicts, most characteristically, the ongoing negotiations between the two that become most visible (and most forcefully strange) in the elaborations of the smallest details of ordinary bodily upkeep that psychologists would later term compulsions: cleaning, eating, locking the doors. Yet unlike present-day representations of such behaviors, which tend to call forth a therapeutic narrative, the turn-of-the-century materials (both literary and psychological) remain distinctive for their interest both in the impossibility of separating these behaviors wholly from more valued accomplishments and in their broader significance for any understanding of the category of “daily life.”   

Rethinking Feminization as Compulsion Compulsion does more than provide a means of coordinating the social and the natural. Emphasizing the structural importance of compulsive activity in the naturalist text can also give us a new, and much more interesting, way of understanding the period in question as an era of “feminization.” In the traditional accounts I have just rehearsed, feminization is a principle of negation; the ascendancy of a feminine perspective bespeaks a broader sense of a “docile” culture tamed by civilization. American naturalism—and, indeed, American modernity—can thus appear as a forceful quest for freedom only if it becomes yet another story of men in the great outdoors, a revolt against all that its New England fictional predecessors purportedly shunned when they withdrew into their sheltered drawing rooms. As we have seen, however, the problem is not only that this is less a modern story than a nostalgic, even sentimental one; it also scarcely fits even those texts usually gathered under the rubric of naturalism. If the strange new energy of s writing cannot be said to result from a return to boy stories, we can look for it in only one other place. The domesticrealist tradition associated with New England does not die in the ’s, after all; the shift, rather, concerns what it means to write a young woman’s bildungsroman. A new literary history of the s might go something like this: Rather than a story of men running off from the worlds of New England fiction to rediscover the conflict and uncanniness of raw nature, we find those same qualities erupting from within the domestic mode itself, as the classic story of feminine growing up becomes a perverse tale of compulsive behaviors. In accounting for this shift, an extraliterary model presents itself, one in which the very attempt to “scientifically” codify the ordinary female trajectory leads to a revelation of that story’s irrepressible vagaries. The pre-Freudian psychological texts of such figures as G. Stanley Hall and Havelock Ellis possess striking structural similarities to the bildungsroman, focusing as they do on the very narrative so central to the realist novel: the plot of a young woman’s first blossoming, courtship, marriage, and finally maternity. Hall called his double-decker Adolescence (). At times he seemed quite aware of the literary parallel: if a woman “is not more or less finished and happy at twenty-five,” he writes, “she will never be” (: , emphasis mine). For these writers, then, the problem with the modern situation—as shown in the same broad developments adduced by Roosevelt and Henry Adams, from later marriages to fewer children to a revolt against domestic life—is that,    “           ”                    



in essence, women are failing to reach the conclusion of their story. As Hall expresses it, they veer off course, at one of the key stages mentioned above, such that they lose sight of their maternal goal and remain “drifting with no destination and no anchor aboard” (: ). These drifting women are then said to fall prey to various compulsions, attempts at pleasing themselves—or denying their need for pleasure—that can only become ever more elaborately strained (: ). At first glance, Hall would seem to be wholly in line with Roosevelt in prescribing to such women a necessary maternal “heroism” paralleling that demanded of men in both economic and military conflict (: ). Only thus will nature’s, and thus history’s, demands be met as they should. Yet what is most interesting about Adolescence—and what makes it similar to other psychological texts of the period, as well as to the era’s fiction—is that, even though Hall’s rhetoric seems bent on reasserting an unbroken “natural” trajectory against the waywardness of the modern woman, the waywardness is the aspect that keeps asserting itself when he attempts to explain how ordinary development proceeds. He echoes, for example, researchers’ views of puberty itself—a stage common to all women—as “a more efficient cause of insanity in girls than in boys” (: ); specifically, girls around this age are said to develop all sorts of compulsive symptoms (: ).34 And yet these are exactly the kinds of symptoms—fastidious rituals of self-care, for example—that Hall later links to a stuckness in place, a refusal to marry and an adoption of feminist beliefs (: ). Are such behaviors simply part and parcel of many girls’ ordinary experience of “becoming a woman,” or are they a sign of their failure to do so?35 This hesitation can be understood if we consider a formal feature that makes a psychological bildungsroman like Hall’s less a simple echo of the realist novel—the marriage plot familiar from Austen, Brontë, and others—than a mirror of the shift within realism toward naturalism that this plot’s scientization already implies. Simply put, Hall, no less than a Zola or a Frank Norris, describes too much. Writing an entire two-volume tome on the single life stage of adolescence—itself barely acknowledged to exist in previous eras—Hall could be said to bring the feminine stuckness he deplores into being, no less than the naturalist narrative said to be “constantly exposed to the possibility of its being stopped, as narrative . . . [by] a refusal to proceed further without recounting every detail of the totality” (Chevrel ). In Yves Chevrel’s words, naturalism thus begins to resemble “a kind of literary version of Zeno’s paradox . . . an endless text, a text that can never be completed” (). In the American case, then, the concern over the modern   

woman’s arrested trajectory made her the paradigmatic instance of this new kind of (anti-)story, one who modeled in her own tendency to fall into compulsions the very narrative mode that brought her story forward, a mode that could not continue until it had accounted for every last detail. Hall, too, unwittingly writes a female bildungsroman as Zeno’s paradox, affirming despite himself the modernist truism that any woman’s story, if examined closely enough, could be seen as made up of multiple everyday crises, lacking fixed resolutions, that might themselves provide material for an entire novel. For our purposes here, then, this stuck feminine story can recast the American literary s by making the link between naturalism and the New England writing that it is so often said to leave behind. Specifically, the sense of a plotline that does not move up or down but ongoingly wavers in place—back and forth, around and around, on and on—can provide a crucial connection between what might otherwise seem two very different fin-de-siècle feminine types: the confirmed spinster (Freeman’s “nun” Louisa, Wharton’s Ann Eliza Bunner, Henry James’s Olive Chancellor in his naturalist experiment The Bostonians), driven by repression and compulsion; and the strangely problematic ingenue, unable to resist her impulses and desires (Dreiser’s Carrie, Stein’s Melanctha, Wharton’s Lily Bart, James’s Verena Tarrant in the same text). (Hall, at his most weirdly overdescriptive, produces an extended portrait of the unmarried-at-twenty-five modern woman that also combines these opposed types: she is both “luxurious” and “capricious,” an inveterate “seeker,” like the difficult ingenue, and yet “nervously intense,” obsessively clean, and perhaps even man-hating, like the spinster [: , ].) Moreover, these two versions of the unmarried woman are joined in the fiction in question by a third, the woman toward whom Havelock Ellis points when he observes that compulsions also tend to arise in women “between  and ” (Man ). This is the married woman who—like Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” heroine, Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, Norris’s Trina McTeague or Laura Jadwin in The Pit, the multiple wives of Robert Herrick’s Together, or the heroines of Flaubert, Zola, and de Maupassant—“gets stuck” even after marriage has been successfully accomplished and finds herself unable to move on properly either to pregnancy or, if she has already borne a child, to the task of mothering her offspring. This character seems equally capable of appearing in the compulsive mode or the impulsive one. The connection between the two types here is particularly significant given the importance of the compulsive tendencies of the spinster characters in Freeman, Wharton, and James to the view that their texts belong to a denuded,    “           ”                    



“morbid” New England tradition with no connection to the manly vitality of the boldly forward-looking naturalist mode. Yet the problem with the confident assignment of the neurotic New England girl to the fast-fading cultural past has always been the fact that, during the s themselves, she so clearly stood for the emergent modern femininity that was causing commentators like Roosevelt and Hall so much grief. Hall and others repeatedly single out the New England girl as the worst offender with respect to the turn away from gendered conventions. Thus it is hardly an accident that when James decided in the s to write a tale of what was most up-to-date in American life at that moment, he produced The Bostonians, about the kind of ultramodern New England feminists who lived together in “Boston marriages” rather than marrying men. These were the same sorts of women that one  description of Freeman’s heroines in the journal Bookman called “the fair, delicate, nervous, independent flower of New England, the girl who ‘teaches school’” (“Mary E. Wilkins” ). In both this essay and The Bostonians, a link is made between classic New England stubbornness and the very reverse of traditionalism: a tendency to embrace the wildest of contemporary fads, or what the Bookman terms “the last ‘ism’ and spasm of modern ideas” (). Many s psychology texts considered faddishness itself to be a kind of compulsive or “spasmodic” behavior, one tied to the kind of compulsive seeking that led women to postpone marriage and maternity and to try out forms of wage work (such as schoolteaching) as alternatives. The transitional New England writing of this period clearly aims at an understanding of the compulsive sensibility in which repression and impulsiveness—here, traditionalism and modernity—represent points on a single continuum. Moreover, even to understand the matter in such terms could be considered a modern gesture. Freeman’s departure from earlier New England writing is never more clear than in her move to treat these kinds of habitual behaviors less as occasions for moral judgment than as contributions to an ongoing “study of the human will” in its “different phases” of over- and underdevelopment, as she puts it in the introduction to her  novel Pembroke (v, iii). The notion of “New England character” simply forms a bridge between the two discourses, as it does in the psychological work of William James, whose own investigations into the compulsive disorders sometimes termed “diseases of the will” used the examples of an “obstructed Yankee” and an “explosive Italian” (: ). For James, too, these two seemingly opposing types could be seen to merge into one another, as they similarly began to do in the psychological and literary work of his then Pembroke-reading student Gertrude Stein.36   

To move from Freeman through William James to Stein indeed enables an alternative genealogy of the “naturalist” moment. In place of what Mark Seltzer has nicely termed the “all-or-nothing” accounts of human agency—as either wholly lost or heroically regained—that have tended to dominate critical descriptions of both this era and its writings, one finds in the emphasis on compulsion a much more equivocal portrayal in which will and its loss, rationalization and its impossibility, go hand in hand.37 And the therapeutic desire to cover over the doubting subjectivity that results from this equivocation belongs much less to the “feminized” culture of New England writing than to its masculinist antithesis. For example, explaining why there had to be a return to manliness in s fiction, V. L. Parrington states that the terminal gentility of New England writing rendered Howells “a specialist in women’s nerves”; the result was a fiction ever “entangled in a mass of minute detail,” in “indecisions . . . repetitions. . . . whimsical descriptions.” The lesson for his inheritors was thus simple enough: “Commonplace men and neurotic women are poor materials from which to fashion an adequate realism” (–). Which would suggest that the more robust and modern naturalism might be seen, à la Teddy Roosevelt, as a fiction of supermen and “healthy” (maternal) women. I have been suggesting, however, that the naturalist works of writers like Frank Norris do not simply take up their era’s unreconstructed masculinism but place this very figure of the compulsive modern woman at center stage. As a result, to the extent that they also depict male heroes “feminized” by modernity, this feminization appears as a matter not of languid feminine weakness and inaction, but of these same sorts of compulsive behaviors. To wit, consider Van, of Norris’s semi-autobiographical Vandover and the Brute, who spends many a day enraptured, like a Louisa Ellis or a Trina McTeague, by a manifestly compulsive domesticity: lovingly cleaning and recleaning his stove, winding and rewinding his clock. Or Henry Fleming, soldier-hero of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, who finds himself repeatedly paralyzed on the battlefield by inner doubts as to the best course of manly behavior. If Henry’s story, like Van’s, looks like a kind of modern male bildungsroman, that story would appear to take its cue from the pattern of endless oscillation that—in Lily Bart, in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in Dreiser’s Carrie, in Stein’s Melanctha—seems more than anything else to characterize the compulsive feminine temporality governing naturalist fiction. While the endless hesitations and obsessions over detail are often portrayed amusedly in both Van and Henry, they are not simply mocked, perhaps in part because of their evident relation to the authors’ own strategies of repre   “           ”                    



sentation. Quirks such as “whimsical descriptions,” “repetitions,” and odd details have often been discerned in readings of Frank Norris—leading to descriptions of the author, as much as the characters, as prey to compulsions— but these are afforded greater significance in descriptions of Stephen Crane, in whom they become crucial elements of his anticipation of modernist practice.38 That such elements might in fact hark back to Mary Wilkins Freeman might sound less surprising if we recall that some early critics compared her style to that of Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and even Stein. Similarly, feminists annoyed by a certain tendency to “miniaturize” female regionalists, and thus to pronounce Freeman capable only of the short, episodic, and fragmentary, might consider that nearly identical claims have been made, both positively and negatively, about the work of Stephen Crane. Indeed, Crane’s linguistic deflations of his soldiers’ dreams of epic valor and strife utilize a tenderly bemused language of domesticity and the miniature that can sound straight out of women’s regionalism.

An Incomplete History For the bulk of American naturalism’s critical history, to focus overmuch on these elements of the text has held little appeal, for it risked admitting the genre’s defeat by, rather than its triumph over, the forces of cultural “feminization.” On the one hand, my point here has not been simply to dispute this view of things. I am insisting that this is a literature as much (if not more) about domesticity, details, and women’s inner lives as it is about a masculine return to nature and that in this sense it does share much with the genteel New England writing it is so often thought to leave behind. My larger claim, on the other hand, is that to admit naturalism’s irreducible entanglement with “feminization” can also lead us to a more complex understanding of “feminization” itself, particularly in its relation to the category of history. For this more complex account, the minute daily details emerge not as denials of a once-sweeping history of manly action and freedom but rather as the result of an attempt to extend history’s reach further, a project with especial significance for women’s changing lives. Surprisingly, this perspective turns out to be already latent in Ann Douglas’s paradigmatic account of modernity as feminization in The Feminization of American Culture. Sounding remarkably like Georg Lukács writing on naturalism, Douglas bemoans the effects of a turn from a “romantic history” focusing on “significant masculine achievement” (–) to a microhistory, written   

by ministers and female amateurs and focusing in on neglected lives, in which significance is lost amid a flurry of minute details. Once again, the perceived danger here is that historicality itself, understood as movement and change, fades from view. An increasing emphasis on the daily and even the “organic,” on domestic markers of time such as “birth, conversion, marriage, aging,” and so on (), produces a “static” text () dominated less by “events” than by “objects and emotions—which increasingly merge together—on display” (). The effect is inherently compulsive: in Douglas’s words, in a world of “ceremonious repetition,” “[t]here can be violation or preservation of order, but not genuine change” (–). Yet while Douglas’s account here shares much with other discussions of the replacement of a (masculine) history of struggle with a (feminine) “therapeutic culture” of rationalization—a move that maps onto the rise of New England fiction as a turn away from Walter Scott–style romance—she is also, as a feminist, interested in a dimension that is ignored elsewhere. In her view, the women writing this new kind of history and biography were not wrong that their story had been left out of prior accounts. “Feminine work has always been ahistorical by the definition of male historians,” Douglas writes; “raising children and keeping house have been customarily viewed as timeless routines capable of only minor variations” (). In wanting to add these domestic, bodily details to what counts as history, then, the historians she discusses—and the New England regionalist fiction writers who follow their lead—express what she considers a legitimate concern, one that, she notes, marks an early move toward what would later emerge as social history or the “psychohistory” of Braudel and the Annales school (, ).39 The problem, then, for a critic of feminization like Douglas, lies not in the addition of domestic detail to history but rather in the tendency to replace history as we knew it with a “therapeutic” valorization of the insignificant for its own sake, a cheerful insistence that “every life serves” (). The more this perspective gets insisted on, she fears, the more a “docile” sensibility does result, for it is unclear why one would ever wish to ask for more from life than what is given. This remains a fair concern, and one that might indeed be brought to bear on some of the more celebratory feminist treatments of the “sacredness . . . inherent in the everyday” that creates the “static” (rather than “wrenching and reshaping”) feel of the domestic worlds in a writer like Jewett (Donovan ). The viewpoint here indeed risks valorizing a hermetic, magically complete universe contained within the domestic space. We have been seeing, however, that in the texts I am calling naturalist—    “           ”                    



and these include the post-Jewett works of writers like Freeman and Wharton—it is the very focus on the domestic and daily that opens up a space for the representation of new perversities, new tensions and open-ended struggles within that feminine realm.40 The inclusion of more and more details of daily, bodily life within history’s text (as the individual life represents it) leads not to that feeling of more perfect completeness but rather to its opposite, to the sense of the impossibility of completion—what I have been terming the compulsive sensibility. It is certainly possible to see, in a “naturalist historian” like Henry Adams, the dream of finding the ultimate forces that lie behind and organize all of life’s details. In the actual texts that result, however, this very dream of a greater totality cannot be separated from that haunting certainty of completion’s constant failure. This, then, is the crucial possibility that I would like this book to bring forward: the fact that those same developments that led to an unprecedented potential for rationalizing even the most minute, intimate aspects of human life—to the therapeutic culture of “feminization”—were inextricable from a serious new gesture of opening and questioning associated with the fin-de-siècle feminine subject. Because of the particular slants of American canon formation, however, only Henry Adams has been allowed to add the realm of the feminine and “natural” to history while still affirming this sort of speculative, doubting perspective.41 And yet in his own account in The Education, this devotion to doubt had everything to do with a “feminized,” “nervous” New England boyhood: He was not good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys’ nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act . . . the shirking of responsibility . . . the horror of ennui . . . all these are well-known qualities of New England character. . . . ()

They were also qualities that Adams began increasingly to assign to the “revolutionary” women of his era, who “would rather be killed than be bored” (Banta, “Being” ). Never more than as he himself strained toward completing his epic nine-volume History, Adams imagined his own struggle as a version of theirs, conceiving himself metaphorically as a woman endlessly pregnant, unable to deliver (Lears ; Banta ).42 In fact, this always incomplete story becomes naturalism’s version of history, a story it tells by keeping women from reaching that maternal end.   

Finally, as I have suggested, such a recognition of history’s reformulation may enable a reconsideration of our present attachment to historicist criticism. When, on occasion, it has been acknowledged that so many fin-desiècle texts kept women stuck in time, their story typically has been historicized retroactively as that of a “transitional” moment, in which writers were struggling to conceive of new plots for women but did not quite know what it would look like to bring them into being.43 We have seen that one basic problem with this claim lies in its modesty; insufficient attention has yet been paid to the way this suspended female figure could become the “subject par excellence” for an entire era, as the case of Henry Adams implies.44 To see her in these larger terms, however, also raises a larger issue with respect to the desire to read her arrested moment through the lens of a broader history. The incompleteness of the naturalist female story arises instead as an emblem of a broader incompleteness at the level of historical narration, and this might force us to ask after the potential limitations of our standard manner of historicizing the literary work. As Walter Benjamin showed in his seminal critique of an earlier historicism, any historiographic practice aimed toward the future must paradoxically attend to those moments in the past in which time seems to become stalled in place. “Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions,” he writes, a space is open for us to form “a constellation” in which the present moment resonates directly with the unfinished struggles of a stillcontested history (–). The stuck story Henry Adams borrows from his era’s women is indeed such a “pregnant” one—a pregnancy that is not about ensuring historical continuity, but about the break caused by an unprecedented hesitation. This, then, is where our interpretation begins, when we recognize that we do not occupy a place beyond that arrested moment but in some very real sense still dwell within it. At the point of our conjuncture with history, we find ourselves beginning once more to read. * * * Each of the chapters of this book shows a naturalist heroine getting stuck along the way to completing her personal story, while also showing how this individual stuckness, linked in each case to a form of compulsion, is tied to a stuckness at the broader level of history as well. The chapters literalize this process of narrative getting stuck as it proceeds by replicating in their own motion forward the unfolding stages of the typical female bildungsroman. We thus move from adolescence and “becoming a woman” (chapter ), to the taking up of domes   “           ”                    



tic tasks (chapter ), to courtship (chapter ), to marriage (chapter ), to pregnancy (chapter ), and, finally, to childbirth and mothering (chapter ). At the same time, in each case, this stuckness at the level of the individual woman’s story is mirrored by a stuckness that threatens the larger narrative flow of history itself. Thus, the chapters are also examinations of antinarrative forms of temporality typical of naturalism—such as endless description, domestic time, the fad, drift, preservation, and the rhythmic back-and-forth of the death drive—that problematize linear historical time, thus posing questions to our familiar conceptions of historicism as an interpretive mode. Chapter , “The Compulsion to Describe: Naturalist Subjects, Naturalist History,” reads two “colorful” texts of the era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, side by side for the first time. My aim in doing so is to show how naturalism’s perennially incomplete history begins as a story of individual gendered development—“becoming a woman” or “becoming a man”—that is similarly revealed in the two texts to be an impossible, endless task. Thus, these stories offer cases in which a compulsive attempt to inhabit one’s given situation too well actually ends up revealing that situation’s untenability. Indeed, on a broader level, I argue that the turn of the century’s complex understanding of compulsive behaviors as motivated by a “feeling of incompleteness” can transform our abiding view of compulsion as the opposite of a creative and critical sensibility. This view produced a perennial suspicion of naturalist fiction until the moment of new-historicist criticism, which mirrored the naturalist text’s own tendency to produce a compulsively descriptive picture of history, riddled by minute details. I argue that what is revealed here is the tendency of all historywriting toward compulsive totalization, something that the more hyperbolic naturalist (or new historicist) aim at “completeness” only makes unusually visible. If anything, I contend, it is the appealing “realist” dream of history as forming a story, as opposed to naturalism’s stuckness in ongoing description, that has the problematic effect of making history appear a foregone conclusion. Chapter , “The Great Indoors: Regionalism, Feminism, and Obsessional Domesticity,” shows how naturalism’s obsessional relation to detail makes the domestic space into an inverted mirror image of the “great outdoors,” collapsing two realms typically treated as polar opposites in late-nineteenth-century fiction. This collapse also cuts against the grain of the female “rest cure” and what I argue might be termed the male west cure, in which men were sent off to “become men again” in the wilderness while women were encouraged to rediscover femininity via a life indoors. I argue that regionalist fiction, particu  

larly the work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, turns domestic life into a version of the impossible, obsessional male quest story in the vein of Moby-Dick, by bringing forward its compulsive dimension as a hopeless, yet constantly renewed, attempt to order a million small vertiginous details. This characterization of the domestic can then serve as a crucial dialectical other, within feminism, to the more typical historicist association of turn-of-the-century women with a rationalizing “culture of therapeutics” that attempts to remodel all human life on idealized domestic principles. Chapter , “A Mania for the Moment: Fadmongering and Feminism in Henry James,” focuses on The Bostonians, a novel by James that is sometimes deemed a naturalist experiment because of its focus on the “topical” subject of feminist agitation. Indeed, feminism in the novel is specifically associated with the modern media and, in particular, the idea of the fad. While this faddishness may seem simply to trivialize the political concerns involved, it also opens out onto a broader consideration of women’s difficult relation to recorded history. Like women themselves as described in the s periodical press, fads are said to express their individual moment fully but then to remain as yet unassimilable into any broader story of historical meaning. The mesmeric channeling in which the protagonist Verena engages becomes both a figure for the faddish woman compelled by modern media and a way to imagine a circuit whereby contemporary women and their lost historical precursors merge to form a single subject. Chapter , “The New Woman and the Old Man: Sentimentality and ‘Drift’ in Dreiser and Wharton,” argues against a tendency to read Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie such that the story of its actress heroine represents a problematic incursion of sentimentality into naturalist fiction. If anything, I suggest, nostalgic men like Carrie’s lover Hurstwood become the preeminent sites of a sentimental worldview in the naturalist novel. By contrast, Carrie’s never-ending dreams that future happiness awaits, through a turn in the road ahead that she cannot yet imagine, work against sentimental insistences made to women like her in the s that the conventional marriage plot could ensure female fulfillment. Yet Carrie’s is not simply an ironic story of tawdry hopes, something her association with modern consumerism has led many readers to assume. I show how the notion of the consumer’s guaranteed unhappiness—her ongoing, compulsive attempt to satisfy her endless desires—was often brought up during the period as an argument against the “selfishness” of the working woman “adrift.” To read Carrie as a successful actress as much as a consumer is to register the genuine shift that has taken place with respect to women’s life stories here, while still seeing the final meaning of that shift as something that remains    “           ”                    



open and unresolved at the novel’s close. At the end of the chapter, I suggest that a similarly ambivalent female plot characterizes Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, prior to Lily Bart’s transformation into a feminine version of the sentimentalized Old Man. Chapter , “Saving Herself: Gender, Preservation, and Futurity in McTeague,” recasts Frank Norris’s  novel as Wharton, one of its admirers, seems to have read it: as a woman’s marriage story. Refusing a plot whereby loss of virginity means depreciation of her body’s value, Trina McTeague engages in strange activities of hoarding, autoeroticism, fetishism, and collecting that seek to shore up a purely potential value that is never realized within the space of the text itself. This unmoored longing, I argue, can account for the discomfort, rather than nostalgic comfort, that such feminine “saving” has evoked in Norris’s readers. By contrast, men’s forms of preservation, while depicted as equally useless, tend to serve as the mechanism by which characters like McTeague are rendered reassuringly human. Yet it is crucial to see that the women’s obsessions, though they work against the conventional female plot, are described as outgrowths not of rejecting it but, characteristically for naturalism, of inhabiting it too “completely.” Chapter , “The Rhythm Method: Unmothering the Race in Stein, Chopin, and Grimké,” extends this discussion of the way naturalism makes the “unnatural” come forward out of the natural rather than in opposition to it. The back-and-forth movement that is associated with the ocean and with a mother’s rocking also comes, in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, to be linked with the death drive and with endless attempts at communication that gesture toward an opacity at the heart of the individual person. This impregnable individuality serves as a limit-case to question the meaning of the woman transformed into a mother meant to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children. In the s, as we see throughout this study, the individual woman’s motherhood also became a link to human history through the figure of the “race” being carried forward by her childbearing. Stein’s early naturalist story “Melanctha” takes up the specific relation of this linkage to African American history and, in so doing, becomes one of the first books in the American canon to grant a complexly questing subjectivity to a woman of color. While at the turn of the century, African American women writers themselves understandably shied away from a genre that would emphasize their bodily lives, this situation began to change in the early twentieth century with the publication of several works by Angelina Weld Grimké that were meant to lobby on behalf of birth control. I suggest at the close here that these works, along   

with Stein’s story, may offer us new ways into understanding the fate of naturalism in American fiction of the twentieth century. Indeed, twentieth-century naturalism has quite often been associated with African American writing, specifically the work of Richard Wright. Thus, looking forward a bit in the book’s brief conclusion, I ask whether my redefinition of naturalism’s relation to gender might shed light on some of the more “perverse” instances of early-twentieth-century African American women’s fiction as well. Like Wright, Nella Larsen considered Stein an important influence; her Quicksand ends with a strong image of pregnancy as a repetitively miring trap. Might the specifically difficult associations between black women and the category of nature help explain Zora Neale Hurston’s choice of a white heroine for her own text of “neurotic” femininity, Seraph on the Suwanee? How might the links I have drawn between naturalism and New England women’s writing shed light on Ann Petry’s authorship of both The Street, widely read as a naturalist text, and The Narrows, an explicitly New England book? I conclude, in the spirit in which I have written here, by offering these kinds of questions up to future investigations.

   “           ”                    



     Naturalist Subjects, Naturalist History

What happens when we rethink naturalism as a literature about compulsion— a literature that does not simply engage its historical moment but, in so doing, keeps getting stuck in place? Despite the more familiar Darwinist accounts of the genre’s plots of hyperbolic triumph or decline, the notion that it might offer neither does possess some critical history. Naturalism as marked by stuckness and even compulsion has typically appeared, however, as a way to dismiss the writers associated with it. In particular, this characterization has marked those scattered moments in the scholarship when someone has bothered to argue on behalf of the distinction between realism and naturalism. (Most often, the latter appears, if at all, as merely a slightly grubby subset of the broader category, realism, believed to define late-nineteenth-century thought overall.)1 Such arguments have the curiously persistent feature of always seeming to elevate realism, treating naturalism as an unfortunate fall from aesthetic, moral, or political acuity. Realism and naturalism are, of course, on the face of it wholly artificial entities. Like all genre distinctions within the study of the novel, they tend to function as an unexamined shorthand, coming forward vividly most often when there is a polemical point at stake. To take a relevant example, when Americanists first began to argue in the s that their field was founded on a forgetting of history—joining the still influential turn to history across literary studies— they did so by noting the repeated elevation of mid-nineteenth-century “romance” over late-nineteenth-century “realism and naturalism,” the latter being conceived as works whose explicit entanglement with historical change was harder to ignore. A cold war allergy to the politicization of aesthetics, it was charged, had problematically shaped such influential tracts as Lionel Trilling’s  essay “Reality in America.” The resultant desire to evade the grasp of history could explain Trilling’s valorization of the unfettered imagination, exem

plified by Henry James, over against the insistence on “material reality, hard, resistant . . . and unpleasant” (Liberal ), found in Theodore Dreiser—and the basis of the reverse judgment of the two novelists made by Trilling’s nemesis, the ’s Marxist critic V. L. Parrington.2 Yet did this familiar opposition, pitting realist history against its romantic evasion, really express what was at stake here? Especially given that James himself is nothing if not a realist writer, we might reconsider this oft-cited instance and see Trilling as perhaps concerned less with elevating ahistorical romance over historicized realism than with elevating realism (James) over naturalism (Dreiser), as representing two different approaches to the question of history. I say so because, despite his opposition to Parrington, Trilling’s choice of James over Dreiser turns out to possess uncanny similarities to the claims made on behalf of realism and against naturalism by the twentieth century’s most pioneering materialist critic, Georg Lukács. Moreover, while Lukács’s remains the strongest statement of this position, it has been shared by many other scholars of these writers over the years. For these readers, much as for Trilling, naturalism must be separated out, and faulted, not because it acknowledges history’s effects but because, in so doing, it gets stuck in place—threatening the very possibility of a human agency that might alter history’s course. Lukács conceptualized this most memorably as the difference between realism’s propensity to “narrate” dynamic activity and naturalism’s merely to “describe” fixed scenes. His instances were European ones (Balzac versus Zola), but as we will see, the case has been made in remarkably similar terms by Americanists, using James versus Dreiser or versus Frank Norris as its examples. In themselves, such fine-grained genre distinctions surely promise little excitement. Yet the generally overlooked lineage of scholars who have deemed it necessary to champion one kind of socially minded fiction, realism, over another kind, naturalism, holds greater theoretical significance than might appear. Most broadly, it can expand and recast the question of history’s relation to literature, such that we might ask more pointedly what we mean by history in the first place. For the critics who do make the generic distinction, realism stands as the term for a historicizing project (whether by a novelist or a scholar) that does not overly threaten the aesthetic, moral, or political agency of human subjects. Naturalism marks the slightly later moment in which a text’s immersion in its context seems to mire it completely, evacuating the freedom of characters and authors alike. What I wish to do here, then, is to explicate and even affirm the terms of    

this distinction, yet to come to the opposite conclusion about its two poles. I want to argue on behalf of what gets called the “naturalist” mode. This can be done if we consider a little-examined concept that has played a crucial role in that mode’s denigration over the years: compulsion. Indeed, while naturalism is more commonly grasped as a literature of determinism, the sense that both its characters and its authors alike are driven by a compulsion to repeat has produced a more drastic sense of the negation of agency. Determinism, after all, can still allow for the sense of a beleaguered soul struggling against external forces, whether social or natural; compulsion would indicate more of a participation, even an investment, in one’s own reduction from agent to automaton. The possibility of producing change and innovation thus seems to be far more decisively shut down. And yet, as we will see, critiques of naturalism have frequently stumbled over the peculiar way in which compulsion and creativity seem to merge in the naturalist text. What is needed, clearly, is a construal of compulsive behavior, available within the period itself, in which it ceases to appear in its common guise—as merely the stagnant, repetitive opposite of the will to act—and becomes inextricable from creative potentiality. Feminist criticism, it turns out, also offers distinctive resources for grasping the need to imagine a compulsive subject precisely as a way to imagine that subject’s ability to effect historical change. Hence, in the second half of this chapter, I consider Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” alongside another “colorful” text (one more commonly read as naturalist), Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Both are stories in which the compulsive repetitions that tie the characters to their fates also produce a sense of those fates as anything but natural. As such, they derive a critical and creative potential not by refusing the obsessive registering of their surroundings that has always seemed to limit the capacities of naturalist characters and authors alike, but rather, against all expectation, by radicalizing this very compulsive tendency.

Compulsion, Critique, and Creativity; or, The Problem of American Naturalism In his  “Narrate or Describe?” Georg Lukács sets the tone for future criticism by using the titular distinction to insist on the superiority, aesthetically as well as politically, of the realist mode. Realism describes too, of course; Balzac, the chief example here, once argued that its rich detailing of character and setting was what separated the nineteenth-century novel, beginning with Scott,    



from those of the eighteenth. Yet, according to Lukács, realism recognizes that the point of description is finally only to set the stage for what has been most important in narrative literature since the days of epic: action (–). In contrast, a naturalist like Zola becomes so preoccupied with description that he begins to forget all about the story line, or actual human activity. Thus, one finds two conjoined effects: the historical situation increasingly appears not as a moving story but as a fixed scene, and the individual persons depicted possess no agency to create narrative change—or to change and develop over time themselves—but devolve into mere objects arranged within this portrait of the social world as “still lives” ().3 As a Marxist, Lukács critiques these effects of description on primarily political grounds. That in the later nineteenth century “capitalism” appears “perfected” “does not mean . . . that everything henceforth is fixed and finished,” he states, “and that there is no more struggle or development in the life of the individual” (). Naturalism merely covers over what is “in reality a series of bitter and implacable struggles” when it presents “social problems” in descriptive terms, as mere “facts” or “results” (, ). What if we were to reconsider Lionel Trilling’s famous choice of James over Dreiser as motivated by similar concerns? After all, Trilling, too, seems resistant to the excessive fixity attributed to “hard, resistant” “material reality” in Dreiser, for the same reason, that such stasis becomes an alibi for the evacuation of human freedom. For the human struggle to appear already “finished,” to use Lukács’s term, before the book has begun—this is a very different thing from the kind of point often made about James, that his daring protagonists (Isabel Archer, Daisy Miller) wind up defeated by the social structure. Certainly, that fixed entity may still be shown to triumph, but the entire drama of the realist work demands that we conceive a serious initial gap between it and the individual desire that seeks to exceed its limits. In naturalism, by contrast, even this limited freedom—the noncoincidence of the social and the subject, as necessary to the very possibility of tragedy—has been removed. The most definitive sign of this shift, however, may be seen in the loss of another gap crucial to both Jamesian and Balzacian realism: that between the organizing narrator and the characters he portrays. In naturalism, according to these critics, not only do the characters have no existence other than as elements within a fixed historical scene, but the authors themselves, rather than serving as the empowered mind that might grasp the totality that their creations cannot, share this virtual entrapment within the moment portrayed. Whereas the Lukácsian realist “narrator” possesses the historical distance to grasp the chain    

of events the characters cannot yet see, “describing” places the naturalist authorial voice in the same place as the characters themselves, painstakingly trying to map the contours of a single moment rather than to place it retroactively in relation to others. “One describes what one sees,” Lukács writes, “and the spatial ‘present’ confers a temporal ‘present,’” creating what he deems a spurious “contemporaneity” between author and character (, ). Losing the “comprehensive vision and omniscience” that mark both epic and realism, the naturalist “sinks consciously to the level of his characters and sometimes knows only as much about situations as they do”; their “psychology” thus shapes what we are able to learn about events (). This concern, too, resonates strongly with complaints traditionally made about American naturalists like Norris and Dreiser. These men also seem to stand in the same place where their characters do, such that the narrative voice evinces oddly immediate, emotional reactions to events, as if it were itself a character embroiled in them, rather than making sense of those events after the fact. Thus, in Dreiser as Trilling portrays him, the problem is that the “dim, awkward speculation,” the “lust,” the “‘boyhood longing for crass material success,’” all appear to be emotional reactions on the part of the author as much as they belong to his untutored characters, like Sister Carrie, as they wander wide-eyed through the magical city (, ). Or one might consider the long critical back-and-forth over Norris’s bloatedly epic portrayal of his heroes’ struggles against sexual desire in such novels as McTeague and Vandover and the Brute. Did such explosions of florid “melodrama” in the naturalist text suggest that Norris himself, rather than merely his fumbling protagonists, remained hopelessly “trapped” within his era’s “Victorian” mindset (D. Graham ; McElrath )? How could a reader submit to simply reinhabiting, without any critical distance, such a truncated worldview? Faced with this concern, scholars arguing on naturalism’s behalf have asserted that we must “free ourselves from the notion of Norris as a writer trapped by melodrama” (D. Graham , emphasis mine) and recognize that Norris is in fact simply satirizing, from a cool remove, the limited modes of response available to the characters in question. Yet while there is indisputably an ironic dimension to a writer like Norris, this argument has never seemed wholly persuasive. The problem is that many of his texts’ weird outbursts clearly remain those of the author himself.4 Consider the repetitive verbal tics—the use of identical phrases to describe certain characters each time they appear—which have struck readers as “inexplicable” and “artificial” since the earliest reviews (McElrath and Knight ).5 Some more sympathetic readers have thus sug   



gested, as one writes of Dreiser, that the naturalist author’s relation to his characters amounts more to an ongoing “contest between . . . transparency and mediation” (Bell, Problem ). A more knotty difficulty, however, is that when the naturalist does seem to gain the distance necessary to critique or comment on the forms of thought his characters merely embody, he often seems to gain too much distance. Accusations are made that the naturalist’s ironic gaze reduces men and women to “objects,” poor sad beasts we might at best “pity”—this being another link between the critiques of Lukács and Trilling.6 As it turns out, their shared concern is really that naturalism is somehow both out of control and overly controlling, too close to its characters and too far away. And this doubleness is made possible via the striking implication that it is precisely when naturalism asserts greatest control, when it most attempts to order its material, that it most reveals its lack of control, its full abandonment to the same historical determinants that trap its heroes and heroines. As Trilling explains, it is at the moments when Dreiser speaks from a voice “above” Carrie’s that he sounds most given over to dated Victorian flourishes (a point Bell and others make about Norris)—while for Lukács, similarly, the naturalist’s very aloofness from his era is what marks him as a man of his era, one in which intellectuals’ disgusted withdrawal from political life created the purely descriptive (rather than actionbased or participatory) novel. In both cases, then, the naturalist’s particular modes of ordering his material speak not to a purchase he has gained on what his era offers, but to a full submission to its most characteristic forms of response. The very assertion of control, of rational organization and separation, thus becomes an indicator of the absence of control, of a blind emotional investment again akin to those displayed by the characters themselves. This connection can be made quite directly, if we consider the overt (though too rarely explored) fascination of naturalism with characters engaged in various compulsive behaviors. Obsessively counting, cleaning, structuring their lives according to a painstakingly organized set of repeated habits and routines, these figures embody the way that hyperbolic forms of control can bespeak their polar opposite, a deep anxiety about the chaos that seems ever to threaten. And one of the few scholars who has developed this issue in Norris’s work, Barbara Hochman, does suggest we might see Norris’s own more extreme forms of ordering, such as his grand philosophical claims, as paralleling the characters’ overblown reliance on organizing systems (Art ).7 (Certainly something similar might be said about those repetitive descriptive tics.) This is to say that if naturalism does repeat the activities of the characters it depicts, in    

both cases what we see is an entrapment in a “compulsion to describe,” an endless, excessive attempt to gain control over one’s surroundings that reveals one’s actual lack of control and concomitant frozenness in place. Yet Hochman raises this possibility in order to save naturalism, finally, from itself, in a rather novel way. She insists that Norris, as his career progresses, learns just as his characters must that such crutches must be given up, that to embrace “the full courage of his creative imagination” requires an abandonment of those sorts of grand “naturalist” assertions as a way of making order, in favor of a “recognition of flux as the inevitable condition of life” (Art –). Thus, she argues that we see fewer and fewer compulsions on the part of either the characters or their author in the later works of Norris’s career. Indeed, for Hochman as for others who have sought to give a positive account of naturalism, the genre can only be defended as morally humane and artistically valid to the extent that its investment in compulsions is downplayed.8 This is hardly surprising, given that Hochman echoes a familiar view—within both popular culture and the psychological literature—of the compulsive subject as “rigid” (), “narrow” (), and opposed to “spontaneous impulses,” “risk” (), “change,” “intimate contact” (): as the opposite not only of what we tend to consider “human” but, specifically, what we tend to consider “creative,” in both an artistic and a political sense ().9 There is, however, a sticking point here. As Hochman herself is forced to admit, those later works of Norris’s, such as his  The Pit, possess far less “imaginative vitality” than the earlier McTeague (Art ). How can this be so, if McTeague’s compulsions are said to block the flowering of the author’s mature “creative imagination”? One might be tempted to revert to a familiar final line of defense, whereby naturalism’s emotional investment in its characters’ responses must be recast not as a failing but as the very source of the genre’s truth and power. (“[T]here was an authentic vein of fear and panic in Norris’s writing,” Maxwell Geismar wrote, not unadmiringly, in  [].) This view would have to be somewhat modified, however, given that it typically opposes such power, as a kind of wild abandon, to a controlled artistic craftsmanship of the Jamesian sort. And as we have seen, what is most distinctively odd about naturalism is not so much that it gives up on such a controlling vision but that its own version of such control seems to feed back into the abandon it is designed to ward off, such that it is difficult to make the conventional separation between the one and the other. Again, as we see in Hochman, one might make another sort of break by opposing naturalism’s excesses of ordering and anxiety to a more modulated, “mature” artistic achievement, but we would then be    



faced again with the paradox that the mode being rejected here as insufficient to true creativity seems to produce naturalism’s most creatively successful texts. The psychological writing on obsession-compulsion in fact has a tendency to return to this same snag—to the fact that, as one researcher puts it, though the compulsive individual is said to embody “inflexibility, rigidity, a liking for fixed order,” and other qualities that seem “diametrically opposed” to “creativity,” one finds that “numerous top-flight creative artists seem to have manifested obsessional symptoms and traits,” a “puzzle” that remains unsolved (Reed ). Indeed, Freud himself remarks on this “puzzle” in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Notably for our purposes here, his example is the father of naturalism, Émile Zola. Zola may be praised as “a fanatic for the truth,” Freud writes, “and then we learn from him of the many strange obsessional habits to which he was a life-long victim” (). Somewhat like Theodore Dreiser, perhaps, who in his autobiographical An Amateur Laborer describes walking around New York with the notion “that angles or lines of everything—houses, streets, wall pictures, newspaper columns and the like, were not straight and for the life of me I could not get them to look straight” ()? Here the naturalist’s tendency to “describe” is literalized in the sense of one who “describes” a circle—tracing its basic contours over and over, remaining within a set of borders that this very practice works repeatedly to secure. The possibility that such compulsive describing need not represent naturalism’s eternal (moral, political, aesthetic) liability, but might actually speak to what was interesting and important about it as writing, thus remained the great unexplored question in the scholarship on this fiction. Unexplored, that is, until the new-historicist criticism of the s—the first approach to casually make a discourse of naturalism’s “obsessions” and “compulsions” central to an account of the genre’s functioning. Certainly, this language forms one of the strongest links between the two major accounts of naturalist fiction from this period, Walter Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines. Michaels begins by focusing on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” another text in which writing appears as a mode of literal “description,” the autobiographical narrator “marking” the walls of the room that encloses her by crawling around and around its perimeter. In that initial chapter alone, he refers to naturalism as “obsessive” or “obsessed” three times (, , ). Citing Seltzer’s account of Norris (as “the American novelist who most conspicuously and compulsively displays [naturalism’s characteristic] anxieties” [Seltzer ]), Michael Davitt Bell complains that “Norris, for the new his   

toricists, is a kind of cultural seismograph, his compulsions and anxieties nicely registering the wide variety of ideological formations and cultural practices that he shared with his era” (Problem ).10 That is, the discourse of obsessionality seems to function here very much in the way we have seen in the critical literature since Lukács: it renders the naturalist author emotional rather than rational, and this in turn makes that author, like the characters described, of his or her historical moment in an uncritical way. The key difference would appear to be that, for the new-historicist critic, this account has become not the means to condemn the naturalist writer according to a view of the creative subject conceived in opposing terms, but simply a description of what authorship means, period. Thus, in that same first chapter, Michaels makes the claim, against any sort of conception of the author as standing outside and making sense out of the situation he portrays, that “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it” (Gold Standard ). And the result, in his words, is that an author such as Dreiser could not possibly be said to “approve or disapprove of capitalism,” but only ever to manifest immediate, “affective” responses—“fears and desires” (like Seltzer’s “anxieties” and “compulsions”)— to the objects that culture proffered. A book like Sister Carrie thus allows us to affirm that “he desired pretty women in little tan jackets with mother-of-pearl buttons, and he feared becoming a bum on the streets of New York” (). At the time they were written, these arguments earned immediate notoriety, though not as claims about naturalist fiction. Instead, Michaels—whose book was the first Americanist study to appear in the series “The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics”—swiftly became something of a poster boy for the shortcomings of the new-historicist criticism. As it is easy to forget now, the new methodology was most often critiqued not for its historicizing aims, but for not being historical enough. As in the case of Michaels’s title, it was deemed too eager to reduce history’s actual complexity and unevenness of development to a single totalizing “logic”—a formal structure, capable only of repeating the same set of patterns over and over again. An author like Dreiser appeared as a mere “seismograph” only because he was depicted as formed by a monolithic “culture”; in reality, it was argued, any given moment saw a clamorous plurality of “cultures,” understood to be “uneven, changeable, and provisional associations of individuals, groups, artifacts, and institutions” (Jay ).11 Such critiques thus worked to restore the agency of the historically situated subject—in effect, making history safe for human(e) habitation. As such, they had a great deal in common with those scholars who had sought to elevate    



realism over naturalism in fiction. Indeed, an odd fact about the remarkably sustained (not to say obsessive) focus on The Gold Standard as exemplar of new historicism’s failings was the almost complete lack of interest in connecting the book’s theoretical views with the literary genre that was its stated focus. And yet the debate over new historicism in literary studies in fact played out as an uncanny repetition of the prior debate over the relation between history and agency in the naturalist text. While both debates no doubt seem part of the settled past for a literary criticism now fully willing to “historicize” without concern, seen anew side by side, they can pose crucial lingering questions to what has become our default interpretive tendency. In broadest terms, the critiques of new historicism via Michaels replicate Lukács’s worry that a history really in constant motion, filled with ongoing conflict—history as a “series of struggles” between “opposing forces”—is made to appear only as something “fixed and finished,” inappropriately frozen into place. The similarities extend considerably beyond this broad interest in nontotalization, however. Specifically, both modes are critiqued for making too much of minute details. For Lukács, naturalism’s false sense of fixity, its tendency less to narrate than to endlessly describe, results directly from its “obsession with monographic detail” (). Indebted as it is to the “thick description” of Clifford Geertz, new historicism manifests a similar inclination, with results that can help us get at its more striking duplication of the naturalist mode. In either case, details appear to threaten our ability to think historically. According to Lukács, Zola’s insistence on “exhaustive description” () means that the reader can no longer see the whole, for he “loses himself in a whirlwind of details” (). For Jean-Christophe Agnew, new historicism’s similar attention to such details “threatens the classic linear movement of historical narrative,” “open[ing] up vistas of interpretation that are almost vertiginous in their potential complexity” (quoted in Thomas, ). Yet while one sees a parallel concern here with the dizzying effect of too much detail, the greater emphasis, in both cases, rests on the way those details become an excuse for unheard-of connections and thus feed back into the overall sense of totalization.12 Lukács is accordingly appalled to see Zola make hay of the fact that his heroine Nana goes to a race featuring a horse named Nana: “An arbitrary detail, a chance similarity . . . [these] are supposed to provide direct expression of important social relationships,” he complains (). They are supposed to do the same in new historicism, for the method’s characteristic move has often been said to lie in the discovery that a tiny element in one piece of writing is mirrored in another, seemingly unrelated text, from a far-removed    

field of cultural production: “motivating the arbitrary,” as Joseph Litvak puts it (qtd. in Thomas ). As a result, a “recurrent joke” about the methodology suggests that its “motto” might be “Coincidence? Perhaps!” (Jay ). From here, it is a short step to the assertion that new historicism, rather than historicizing the aesthetic, does little more than aestheticize the historical. And again, this was Lukács’s chief point about naturalism’s fascination with detail—that it was the beginning of the move away from realism’s historical emphasis altogether, and toward modernism, or “art for art’s sake” (), art about itself. For Lukács as for critics of new historicism like Alan Liu, this aestheticist streak is best expressed by comparing the static history we see here to a visual entity, a still life (Lukács ), in which characters appear as “dabs of colour,” events as “a series of tableaux” (–). It is because what is “picturesque” is “best adapted to description” () that, as Liu writes of new historicism, “The picture of great detail . . . threatens to become a great picture of detail” and the reader a mere “entranced” spectator, who “views the perfect form of cultural agony as if from across the proscenium” (, ). Similarly, Lukács most feared that description would transform living persons into “inanimate objects,” mere bodies meant to stand as labeled exhibits (often of particular pathologies) for the text’s clinical gaze (, ). As Philippe Hamon reminds us, most people, when they hear the word naturalist, think first of taxidermy (“Naturalist” ). The naturalist text thus joins multiple other late-nineteenth-century techniques for ordering an array of purely visual information, of which “labeled” human beings often did form a part; all favorites of new-historicist criticism, these included the “world’s fair,” the “Gallery,” the “collection,” and the “department store” (). Hamon further notes that Flaubert called the world’s fair a “mania” of the day, and indeed, Naomi Schor has suggested that we might term the entire conception of naturalist representation generated here “the ‘obsessional’ model” of latenineteenth-century fiction (). For Schor, Hamon’s account can be taken as representative (): “the more [the naturalist text] becomes saturated with descriptions,” he writes, “ . . . the more it becomes organized and repetitious, thus becoming increasingly a closed system” that “constantly evokes itself” (“What” ). The crucial question, then, is whether this “eagerness—or, some would say, rage—to name, classify, fix, stabilize, dominate the external order” actually leads to such an “itemised, familiar, and reassuringly described world”— that is to say, a “naturalised” world (Baguley, Naturalist , ). Or does it, as Schor herself contends, lead equally to the opposite effect?13 Such a possibil   



ity is already implicit in the critiques of both naturalism and new historicism that we have been tracing. As we have seen, although the primary criticism always refers to an overly totalized text, one finds a persistent vacillation between this picture and one of a text that is excessively chaotic—a “whirlwind” or “thicket” of details (Liu )—and thus lacking in the order that a glance back at history from a point temporally beyond it should provide. Similarly, in Schor’s discussion of Zola’s “Story of a Madman,” it is the very attempt to account for the character Mouret’s psychic condition with absolute, quasiscientific precision that keeps the text from being able to do so. By adding excess detail, “Zola hyperbolizes a sequence, the etiology of Mouret’s madness, all the while consigning the precise moment when Mouret succumbs to psychosis to an implicit ellipse” (). Although Schor expresses her goal here as offering an alternative to the “obsessional model” of naturalism, I would argue that her work in fact moves toward a more nuanced, even dialectical account of that very obsessionality, in which it might generate possibilities—that is, be creative—through the same process by which it struggles to attain mastery over all that it surveys. To stress this side of the matter, however, is to raise the possibility that the realist mode— including the “realist” historical criticism that objects to new historicism, proliferating “cultures” in the face of a single dominating logic—is just as committed to totalization as the naturalism it critiques. One might even say it objects to naturalism’s attempts to totalize not for their hyperbolic character but for the apparently opposite reason that they fail to achieve order, thus remaining stuck in the attempt to do so. Those attempts themselves thus may appear hyperbolic precisely because they fail and, hence, stick out like a sore thumb. Realism, by contrast, may not appear obsessional about creating a complete picture of history simply because it does a neater, more successful job of it. In so doing, however, the proponents of realism may more strongly disavow their own compulsive attachment to the “dream of a ‘total history’” capable of satisfying “the historian’s own desire for mastery” over all he surveys (LaCapra, History ). Indeed, for Lukács, the point is scarcely to give up on this goal; the realist who narrates aims to grant greater agency to history’s subjects but, importantly, does so only by treating the historical moment as a completed, mastered whole. Within the field of history itself, Dominick LaCapra notes a similar double gesture: the laudably progressive move since the s toward a “social history,” more inclusive of underrepresented groups, also risks turning all historical work into a panoramic reconstruction (which he explicitly compares to Balzacian realism []) of the history of a particular by   

gone moment. And when “intellectual history” becomes simply a form of “social history,” he suggests, we get to master the past as a completed totality, instead of reinhabiting its texts as unsolved problems that remain open and serious today (). The point would not be to deny such closure in order to revel in the sheer profusion of details, as many critics of new historicism charge. In fact, one could argue that the realist mode, in refuting the openness of history, also refutes more of its genuine restrictions and the limitations it imposes on all forms of thought, including our own. With this in mind, we can make better sense of the one critique of new historicism via Michaels that thinks he is wrong about Dreiser’s mere repetition of capitalism, but not because it charges him with an inappropriately totalized view of history. For Fredric Jameson, Michaels’s insistence on the impossibility of Dreiser’s getting “outside” capitalism is The Gold Standard’s great strength. Any version of system that eschews totality, he argues, begins to resemble “the liberal view . . . that we can ameliorate it, reorganize it, and regulate it in such a way that it becomes tolerable and we thereby have the ‘best of both worlds’” (Postmodernism ). This “liberal” perspective might be seen as belonging to what I have been calling realist criticism. And yet Jameson clearly is committed to the possibility of change in a way that Michaels is not. How can this be, if he no longer denies Michaels’s claims for a “logic” constitutive of our inmost desires? Put simply, Jameson’s strategy here turns on a distinction between the positing of utopian discourse and the affirmation of its possibility. As he emphasizes, it is only by witnessing our failure to imagine a way out of a system that we are ever able to recognize that system as system, as that which places boundaries around what can presently be achieved. Michaels’s error, then, lies in his refusal to see that anything more need be said on the question of critique once we have established that a writer like Dreiser did not succeed in thinking his way out of, “freeing himself” from, capitalism. According to Jameson’s logic, this lack of success would itself be the point, the key to seeing the system as system—and, further, to deriving specific information about its ways of operating as such. This is where criticism comes in, as that which can examine naturalist novels for the insights they provide into “the specific social and historical fashion in which an outside is unattainable and we are turned back on ourselves.” Moreover, the fact that these are novels is said to be crucial here: “the priority of literary and cultural analysis over philosophical and ideological investigation in this respect lies very precisely in the concrete fullness of detail afforded by every representation as to its own failure” (Postmodernism , emphasis mine).    



Jameson’s reaffirmation of the detail at this juncture is notable, given that of all the critics mentioned, he is the only one who in previous writings explicitly put forward a Lukácsian line about naturalism as “windless closure” (Political ). In this later discussion, materialist critique looks much more like what we see in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which goes so far as to suggest that it is precisely those excess details that do not add up to a historical narrative that represent history’s greatest chance for critique and change. As in Jameson, however, this depends precisely on a gesture on our part of getting “stuck” once more in those unassimilated details, “caught in the same deadlock,” as Slavoj Zˇizˇ ek puts it in his reading of Benjamin, in order to create a repetitive “short-circuit” between present and past (Sublime , ).14 This model thus explicitly critiques the realist notion of history as forming a narrative; it is, rather, narrative that covers over the truth of history’s incompletion and thus the possibility for change. Yet that possibility here takes a form that cannot avoid the concomitant risk of merely repeating the past, for one must reinhabit it. One does not get to dwell in the external space that narrative makes available, far beyond it, looking back at a completed history—and thus achieving a completed, authoritative critical self. Indeed, as Zˇizˇek suggests, this can be seen as a model of history akin to the Freudian model of the temporality of individual development, which similarly rejects the notion of a linear therapeutic unfolding, always moving forward, in favor of the idea that change transpires only through the risk-laden reinhabiting (which may engender mere repetition) of the uncompleted, unassimilated traumas of the past.15 Clearly, then, the realist split between the agential and the will-less, merely repeating, “stuck” subject cannot hold here. Naturalism’s disturbing quality is not that it removes agency, plain and simple, but that it ties the agency we desire, that hope of mastery and completion, to repetition and failure. The move from history’s form to that of the individual subject here is not new. We saw from the very beginning that the Lukácsian realism-naturalism split tied them together. Lukács sees naturalism as repudiating agency primarily because its version of the person looks so much like its version of history, both replacing growth and development with mere chance, the random “succession of subjective impressions” () that would become characteristic of modernist writing. Again, the point is not merely to reverse Lukács’s conclusions, valorizing the fragmented, impossible-to-pin-down subject as the outgrowth of modernism’s “liberation” of literary form. Instead, the dialectical version of naturalist subjectivity I am putting forward combines the classi   

ficatory project with its own undoing in a way that calls into question both of these extremes. And Walter Michaels, if he disregards the possibility of an “internal difference” propelling the form of history he repeats from the fiction he reads,16 does define naturalist “personhood” in a way that suits this double, dialectical form. The language of obsession-compulsion emerges in his text at just these junctures, as a way to name a genre said to be obsessed with manifestations of internal difference or, what comes to the same thing, personhood. Continually imagining the possibility of identity without difference, it is provoked by its own images into ever more powerful imaginations of identity by way of difference . . . (Gold Standard , emphasis mine)

In what follows, I argue that something like this “logic” for both history and personhood can appropriately be called “obsessional” or “compulsive,” if we reconsider the presently repudiated (by psychology as much as by literary criticism) origins of this present-day terminology in the naturalist period itself. A version of obsession-compulsion emerged therein specifically out of a prior diagnosis, neurasthenia, that linked the stuckness of literal historical individuals in detail and hyperbolic ordering to a potential stagnation of history. This newer version, which referred specifically to obsession-compulsion as a “feeling of incompleteness,” refused the opposition between such stuck (naturalist) modes and the appropriate narrative trajectory of realism, noting instead, as Michaels suggests, that the former derives from a greater “commitment” to the latter. The problem, as he implies, is that for the compulsive subject or historywriter here, the possibility of completion (or achieved identity) itself “provokes” endless noncompletion in a dialectical way. Yet Michaels arrives at this account of naturalist subjectivity through a rather surprising example. As Jameson eventually must admit, “Michaels’s polemic . . . is not explicitly directed against Marxism . . . indeed, its principal occasion is rather the feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (Postmodernism ). In my view, Michaels’s repeated relocation of the naturalist problematic in the female body—evident in his readings of Dreiser, Norris, and Edith Wharton in addition to Gilman—is as innovative a move as any in his book; for a break with the existing critical discourse on the genre, it easily matches the book’s noncondemnatory expression of (and, indeed, replication of ) naturalism’s take on history and the subject. The unanswered question, then, is what the one has to do with the other. Why the female body? Why feminism? What is feminism’s relation to this issue of the incompletion of the subject’s story as a    



model for history’s, and how both might function at once to get us stuck (as readers) and to create the potential for critique?17 These questions have gone unanswered in part because of a belief that new historicism is hostile to feminist ends. For this argument, Michaels’s appropriation of Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” has served as an exemplar.18 Just as with Dreiser and capitalism, the new-historicist reading here seems to damagingly collapse the difference between the struggling individual and the system he or she might critique, implying that that subject plays a role in the system’s persistence. At the farthest reaches of this very point, however, a different kind of feminist potential might emerge. For while the subject’s failure to escape may keep us stuck in place as well, it can also, by virtue of doing so, reopen the possibility of a different reading through that very repetition. I believe a reconsideration of “The Yellow Wallpaper” can suggest as much, particularly if Gilman’s story is treated in tandem with a naturalist classic that can be positioned anew as its masculine counterpart: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. These texts develop the way that the shift from realism to naturalism— whereby the failure of the individual developmental story stalls the story of history—turns specifically on a failure to develop into a woman or a man. Thus, we confront instances when the attempt to inhabit a gendered situation too completely actually ends up revealing that situation’s impossibility. In each case, this feminist insight derives from a forgotten notion, specific to the period itself, of the creative rather than merely denuding potentials of compulsive behavior.

The Feeling of Incompleteness For legions of readers, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has offered an exemplary case of the dangers of stifling creative expression by the imposition of rigid, limiting, entrapping routines. The story’s political thrust derives from the way it links this process to the indoctrination of women into the regimes of conventional femininity. What Gilman recounts is an elaboration of her own treatment for “nervous prostration” following the birth of her first child. The “ceaselessly industrious” young author and reformer found herself suddenly paralyzed, unable to perform any of her ordinary duties, let alone her own work. Her physician, the famously imperious Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia, seemed to view the problem as one of insufficient domestication. Hence, “‘Live as domestic a life as possible,’” he advised Gilman. “‘Lie down an hour after each    

meal. . . . And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live’” (The Living ). “The Yellow Wallpaper” details the appalling result. As Gilman puts it in her autobiography, “I went home, followed those directions rigidly for months, and came perilously close to losing my mind” (). In the story, the heroine’s husband is also her doctor, making the link to ordinary domesticity more clear; he treats her with condescending indulgence throughout (“‘Bless her little heart! . . . She shall be as sick as she pleases!’” []), while making sure she follows his “schedule prescription for each hour in the day” () and absolute prohibition on “‘work,’” particularly writing (). In place of such activity, the nameless heroine is enjoined, like Gilman herself, to “rest”—meaning she spends the bulk of her time, during the vacation that the story describes, confined to a single, ornately papered upstairs room. It is a former children’s nursery (complete with barred windows and a nailed-down bed), and so we are hardly surprised when the infantilized heroine eventually ends up dropping to her knees and beginning to crawl. For feminist readers, it has been obvious that “the cure” here is “worse than the disease” (Gilbert and Gubar ). As Gilman herself found, the solution lay not in rigid self-limitation but in returning to productive work. Having been “locked away from creativity,” write Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the story’s heroine must seek the “open spaces” of female “authority” to effect a true cure (–). It is this configuration to which Michaels’s reading objects. After all, he wonders, doesn’t most of the story depict the heroine spending days on end engaged in ongoing interpretation of the wallpaper surrounding her? In fact, he states, “the narrator is not so much locked away from creativity as locked into it” (). His reading goes on to recast “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a veritable orgy of productivity, driven by “a commitment to production so complete that it requires [the narrator] to begin by producing herself” (). This self-production is described as at the same time a self-consumption, forming a kind of unbreakable, entrapping loop. Although readers quickly complained that Michaels seemed “treacherously close to blaming a victim” (C. Wilson, “Containing” ), his view of the situation as one of hyperproductivity rather than enforced quiescence resonates with Gilman’s own views. In her  treatise The Home, she envisioned the woman confined to domestic life not as “starved and stunted by the hopeless lack of expression, but . . . on the contrary, distorted by a senseless profusion of expression”—one resulting in an overdecorated home environment very similar to what we see in “The Yellow Wallpaper”:    



There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass of freakish ornament on walls, floors, chairs, and tables, on specially contrived articles of furniture, on her own body and the helpless bodies of her little ones, which marks the unhealthy riot of expression of the overfed and underworked lady of the house. ()

The middle-class woman, then, is hardly exempt in Gilman’s view from productive activity. Rather, she is possessed by something of a mania for it, a mania that results in the “mass of freakish ornament” with which she surrounds herself. Her domestic confinement does not disallow creativity so much as encourage it to strange excess—very much like the somehow overly “complete” “commitment” to production that Michaels describes. In this sense it does seem possible to be “locked into” creativity as much as locked away from it by strict, repetitive routines. One might counter that such imposed routines are still to blame for allowing creativity to “emerge only in deformed ways” (C. Wilson, “Containing” ). Yet this way of continuing to blame the doctor-husband here must confront the fact that Gilman herself, far from desiring an idealized version of creativity as pure freedom and spontaneity, quite enjoyed the idea of having a “schedule prescription for each hour in the day.” Her autobiography details a self-imposed regimen of strict personal discipline that far outstrips in rigor anything the “Yellow Wallpaper” husband dreams up (“‘At five thirty-eight I will walk around the block.’ ‘I will get out of bed at thirteen minutes to seven’”). Such exercises, very much as the rest cure was meant to do, serve in Gilman’s view as ideal training for the healthy “will” (The Living ). The fact that Gilman’s unfettered feminist self craved not “open spaces” but compulsive regimes of self-discipline has not wholly escaped critical commentary. Almost without exception, however, such readings subject her to a therapeutic scrutiny that could be straight out of S. Weir Mitchell, in both its punitive tone and its implication that Gilman’s real problem amounts to an avoidance of marriage and motherhood in favor of her overly ambitious work. As one writes, Gilman’s “descriptions of her relentless self-culture sound like a more flagellatory and self-hating Benjamin Franklin”; they attest to repression and a misguided desire “to make it absolutely on her own” (Parker ).19 Reading such accounts, it is hard not to sympathize with the typical feminist perspective, which sees any psychological approach to “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an individualizing affront to a feminist emphasis on “social and cultural situations” (Kolodny ).    

Such an emphasis, however, accords with what I call in the previous section realist criticism. Its danger, in simply rejecting the compulsive subject for the rational, freedom-loving agent struggling against external restrictions, is that it guarantees that a language of compulsion can emerge only as the sign of agency’s (and creativity’s) total failure. Any reading that does acknowledge the compulsive tendencies of someone like Gilman is thus bound to take the condemnatory, therapeutic form we see above. In contrast, Michaels’s newhistoricist treatment of Gilman as a naturalist writer at least attempts to suggest that for her, compulsion and creativity appeared as radically conjoined. I have suggested that a model for this possibility might emerge from the account of naturalist representation offered by Naomi Schor, in which the naturalist’s hyperbolic attempts at totalized ordering exist in dialectical tension with an impulse toward proliferation. These work together to create the genre’s antinarrative stuckness in its moment (“The Yellow Wallpaper” certainly being an exemplary stuck text), making that stuckness inseparable from possibilities left incomplete. As it happens, when current writings on obsessive-compulsive behavior evince a frustration with the limited scope of most present-day accounts (specifically, the split they make between compulsion and creativity), they turn back to a text from this era, which is said to offer “meticulous clinical descriptions” of this condition that “have never been bettered” (Reed xv). The book is Les obsessions et la psychasthénie (), by the French psychologist Pierre Janet.20 For our purposes here, it is particularly significant to recognize that Janet was engaged during this period, along with the young Freud, in an explicit attempt to split off obsessional symptoms from the umbrella diagnosis of neurasthenia or “nervous illness,” which was so common at the time and for which Weir Mitchell treated Charlotte Gilman. While continuing to take sufferers’ debilitation seriously, such writings, like related work by William James, also served to question a highly condemnatory public discourse about neurasthenic “ennui” by making its co-imbrication with accepted, “productive” activity more clear. As we will see, Janet’s reformulation in particular replaced notions of the neurasthenic as merely lacking the will to act, or to follow the expected steps of her life story, with a view of her as perhaps overly dedicated to this task of individual progression—slowing it down because of a belief that any given action or stage had not in fact been successfully “completed” and had to be “done better” before moving on. In essence, the shift here works like Schor’s recasting of the naturalist novel, in that it reveals a stuckness in endless description, whether on the individual or the historical level, to be merely    



the logical outcome of the completist narrative realist mode that it might otherwise seem to flout. The neurasthenic does stand, within the s, as a remarkable living instance of the formal problem naturalism poses. The condition was typically deemed a veritable result of inhabiting that particular historical moment—“the diagnosis of the day,” one writer calls the set of symptoms first brought together as “American nervousness” by George M. Beard (Rabinbach ).21 This meant not only that it resulted from the impact of phenomena unimaginable prior to the late nineteenth century: extremes of speed and sensation, from railways to modern media, to which the neurasthenic was deemed particularly sensitive, making him or her a kind of receptacle for social change. (Beard, notably, listed the modern phenomena contributing to nervous illness as “steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” [vi]). Further, to the extent that its spread formed cause for concern, this had everything to do with the sense that the neurasthenic’s totalized embodiment of a particular moment also entrapped him or her in that moment, raising doubts about the forward movement of human history itself.22 This aspect is perhaps harder to conceive now. Yet in a polemic like Max Nordau’s wildly popular Degeneration (), “the book of the ’s” (Hurley ), one unmistakably finds a real-life version of the claim that a stuckness at the level of the representative individual’s life story was threatening the same at the level of history. For if an entire generation succumbed to lassitude and inaction, to the neurasthenic’s characteristic “weakness of the will” (Rabinbach ), might modern civilization have reached a point of decadent self-destruction rather than continuing to progress? Nordau also makes the crucial link between neurasthenia as a real-life problem and its expression in the representational strategies of the era’s literature and art. And here becomes apparent the extent to which we remain within the now familiar realist-naturalist divide. Nordau’s critique of fin-de-siècle artistic production could be straight out of Lukács, as he castigates it for losing the narrative thread in a whirl of details and thus replacing a portrayal of historical reality with a meaningless aestheticism. Poets are said to luxuriate in sheer sound, painters in color; novels become products of the “purely literary mind, whose merely aesthetic culture does not enable [it] to understand the connections of things, and to seize their real meaning” (). We are subjected only to an “inane reverie,” “a boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas” linked at most by “capricious” and “purely mechanical” forms of association, such as symbol, and thus unchecked by any reference to “reality” ().    

We saw that even for Lukács, the stuckness in meaningless description of fin-de-siècle art mirrored its creators’ own disengaged spectatorship rather than participation in their time, and Nordau similarly notes these artists’ “disinclination to action,” masked as a “philosophy of renunciation and of contempt for the world and men” (). With his extreme sensitivity to life’s tiniest fluctuations, the decadent artist is “fain to despise the vulgar herd for the dullness and narrowness of their minds” (). The difference is that for Nordau (following some leads by Cesare Lombroso), this “abhorrence of activity and powerlessness to will” () marks such an artist as a sufferer from a specific physical and mental condition: “degeneration,” related to both “hysteria” and, in more everyday instances, “neurasthenia” ().23 Hence, impressionist painters are showing what they really see, as a result of retinal disorders that create dissociated “gaps” and scattered “points or spots” in a normally round and complete visual field (). With respect to naturalist fiction in particular, Nordau does acknowledge that the sprawl of disconnected details might bear some relation to a desire to achieve “so-called ‘comprehension’ of every bestiality”—that is, to achieve a greater perspectival completeness, to “show everything,” in Zola’s terms—yet this propensity is quickly dismissed, as in Lukács, as little more than an excuse to wallow in deviance for its own sake (). For a Nordau, both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Red Badge of Courage could easily have registered as exemplary American examples of degenerate fiction. Indeed, during the ’s themselves, Crane’s hero Henry Fleming struck even sympathetic readers as displaying traits that would have marked him immediately as neurasthenic; certainly he is one “fain to despise the vulgar herd” in order to compliment himself, a process that extends about as close as one could imagine to “inflict[ing his own] wounds” so as to “make [himself] talked about” (Nordau ). One of the most well-known reviews from the period, George Wyndham’s, calls Henry a “morbidly sensitive youth” who receives “impressions . . . from minute to minute” (), “a daydreamer given over to morbid self-analysis . . . super-sensitive to every pinprick of sensation,” and “a delicate meter of emotion and fancy” ().24 Yet perhaps even more damning than these texts’ focus on neurasthenic individuals would be their own protomodernist formal qualities, which reveal a participation in the protagonists’ fragmentation of reality, risking the reader’s absorption in a similar process. Crane, of course, famously referred to himself as a literary “impressionist”; his work in Red Badge has been called “prose pointillism” (Stallman, “Question” ), ‘a mass of fragments,’ and a ‘string’ or ‘series of loosely cohering incidents’ (Stallman, “Notes” ) re   



sulting from a “fascinated concern with detail” (Walcutt ). The link of Gilman’s story to fin-de-siècle aesthetics typically receives less comment, but as Rae Beth Gordon argues, the yellow wallpaper itself (which the story in effect forces us to stare at for twenty pages, as if it were itself the “text”), with its “florid arabesque” (“Yellow” ) suggests a decadent formalism; it is, after all, the color of the infamous “Yellow Book.” By century’s end, such patterns were receiving scientific consideration, precisely because of the concern that “vertiginous” decorative patterns of this kind could cause obsessional anxiety (Gordon ). I want to focus on these two texts in particular because they bring forward the connection, especially prevalent in the United States, between the neurasthenia diagnosis and issues of gender. If the neurasthenic is the individual whose stalled life trajectory threatens to stall the trajectory of history, in America in particular, this tended to mean that girls were not “becoming women” and boys were not “becoming men.” And thus loomed the prospect of a populace without a future, for history’s unfolding depended, as Teddy Roosevelt argued, on male action and female maternity. As a result, cures for neurasthenia often placed the recalcitrant individual in a hyperbolically gendered situation, whether the Gilmanesque “rest cure” for women or rugged physical activity in the great outdoors for men. (The latter was prescribed to Dreiser at the time that he was experiencing his compulsive symptoms—as it had been, earlier in the ’s, to Roosevelt himself.)25 “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Red Badge, inserting their paralyzed protagonists into standard gendered scenarios—one marital, the other martial—might thus be said to similarly test their will to overcome a stuckness in endlessly proliferating mental detail (their compulsion to describe) and achieve, on behalf of history itself, the ultimate narrative end of “becoming a woman” or “becoming a man.” As Wyndham writes in his  review of Red Badge, We know that both love and courage teach this mastery over the details of living. You can tell from the way one woman, out of all the myriads, walks down Piccadilly, that she is at last aware of love. And you can tell from the way a man enters a surgery or runs toward a firing-line that he, too, realises how wholly the justification of any one life lies in its perfect adjustment to others. The woman in love, the man in battle, may each say, for their moment, with the artist, “I was made perfect too.” (, emphasis mine)

Here the realist novel, with its classic plots of love and war, explicitly becomes a model for the individual achievement of a “completed” gender identity. In both cases, the goal is to achieve “mastery” over all the small “details.”    

Both Gilman’s and Crane’s protagonists do possess a notably generic character; Henry Fleming is most often referred to simply as “the youth,” while Gilman’s heroine remains nameless throughout her text. In a sense, their individuality can only be a liability to the extent that their purpose is to become one with a gendered collectivity that precedes their particular stories. The immediacy of this task is perhaps easier to grasp in the case of Henry, who clearly must learn over the course of the text to overcome his adolescent anxieties and take up his place in the army of men. Yet the main activity of Gilman’s heroine, that of attempting to decipher the yellow wallpaper, has also been read as a kind of schooling in what it means to be a woman, even if the point is finally to critique what one has learned.26 Initially seeing the paper’s pattern as wholly abstract, the heroine begins over time to discern in it one woman, then “a great many women” (), and eventually to decide that she herself is one of these women. Like Henry, then, she is one who has fled the group and who thus must learn to fit herself back into the yellow pattern (as she literally does at the story’s end, wrapping herself in the paper), just as Henry must merge into the “vast blue demonstration” that is the Union Army (). Despite being framed by these narrative goals, however, both Gilman’s and Crane’s stories are dominantly tales of the neurasthenic stuckness that must be overcome—expressions of the entrapment in detail, rather than of mastery over it. As such, they offer ideal opportunities for consideration of that entrapment’s meanings in the naturalist text. According to a Roosevelt or a Nordau, one could simply oppose the neurasthenic’s scurrilous selfindulgence and weakness of will to the properly manly, or womanly, taking up of one’s societal duties, an activity synonymous with agency itself. And yet, as I suggested above with respect to Gilman’s heroine’s manic reading, one does not get a sense that these are characters who are unable to act at all, so much as that they seem active in particular ways that lead, oddly, to fixity rather than forward motion. The portrayal of the neurasthenic subject in these stories can thus be seen to evince the active aspect that was beginning to take hold around the turn of the century, which eventually led to Freud’s recasting of neurasthenia as obsessional neurosis. In this reconception, compulsive symptoms appear not as a failure of willing or agency, but rather as a peculiar excess of these very qualities, in which they seem to turn back against themselves. Agency emerges as a central theme, for example, in Théodule Ribot’s  book on these symptoms, which he addresses under the heading of “maladie du volonté”—or, literally, disease of the will. Ribot cites one man who insists, “‘I have no will except not    



to will’” (), another who says of his patients, “‘they do not know how to use their will, they cannot and will not do it’” (). In instances like these, the problem begins to appear as one less of pure apathy than of a perverse form of “willing” that seems to get in the way of the “willing” we understand as agency. Ribot refers to the first man quoted as a “monomaniac,” but this broad designation began to be codified more strictly in the s as the illness of “imperative conceptions” or “fixed ideas.”27 The fixed idea—what would today be termed the obsession in obsession-compulsion—has a stranglehold on the sufferer’s thoughts, not so much negating action as guaranteeing that all action serves its one unshakable end. As aspects of neurasthenia begin to emerge as precursors of what we would now call obsession-compulsion, the symptoms begin to move away from strict “ennui” or “lack of will” and to take on a more active character. From fixed ideas, the literature moves toward the distinctive sort of idea that marks the condition called “doubting mania.” The work on this subject dates back to a slim  French study, La folie du doute (avec delire de toucher) by Legrand du Saulle. Du Saulle explained how a feeling of doubt about their own everyday actions caused sufferers from this condition to repeat those actions over and over again, making them unable to do anything else. One can detect a quite striking similarity between descriptions of neurasthenia such as that given in Weir Mitchell’s Doctor and Patient (the “nervous woman” is “doubtful and fearful” and “indecisive”; “trifles grow large to her” []) and what we hear of doubting mania from someone like Ribot (“a state of constant hesitation from the most trivial motives,” resulting in “endless precautions” rather than action []). In writers like William James, who cites du Saulle, these conditions begin to wholly blur. James’s notes for his  lectures at Harvard begin from an interest in the “obsessions and impulsions” typical of “neurasthenia”: these turn out to include both fixed ideas and doubting mania.28 In The Principles of Psychology, all the examples of “insistent ideas” fit du Saulle’s account of the feeling that some ordinary daily task has not been performed “right,” necessitating its repetition: “His hands feel dirty, they must be washed . . . Or his clothes are not ‘rightly’ put on . . . ” “Most people,” James asserts, “have the potentiality of this disease. To few has it not happened to conceive, after getting into bed, that they may have forgotten to lock the front door, or to turn out the entry gas” (: ). James refers in this section to one article on fixed ideas and another on the “insanity of doubting,” and these articles themselves use the two labels more or less interchangeably. It was left, however, to two other men to make the case that the symptoms associated with folie du doute should be severed from “neurasthenia” altogether    

and considered as a psychic structure rather than a form of weak nerves. The first was Freud, who made this suggestion with respect to doubting mania in particular as early as , arguing for the concept of “anxiety neurosis” or “obsessional neurosis” instead.29 The second was Pierre Janet, whose thoughts on the subject showed the influence of the prior work of James, Mitchell, and Ribot.30 In his massive  study Les obsessions et la psychasthénie, Janet made the case for a condition that he called “psychasthenia,” which recast prior construals of “folie du doute” or “les maladies du volonté” as instances of an overarching problem that Janet called the “sentiment d’incomplétude,” or the feeling of incompleteness. The key point here is that the doubter, who for Janet (as for du Saulle) is most often female, does not simply believe she has not done things “right”; she specifically feels they have not been done completely. The repetitive attempts at washing one’s hands, and so forth, should be understood as gestures toward achieving an ideal sense of completion, at which time it would be possible to turn one’s attention to other things. As such, they are not, strictly speaking, “repeated,” but constantly improved upon.31 Here a narrative component, if you will, gets reinserted into the account of obsessional activity, altering the strict divide separating ordinary actions from compulsive stasis, inaction, and rigidity. The obsessional is stuck not in the pure repetition—the sheer immobility—of a ritual performed the same way each time, but rather in an ongoing attempt to perform it in such a way that further actions do become possible. Not to mention the fact that new, further aspects are already becoming incorporated into the ongoing activity itself, creating a proliferative effect. The movement here, then, is not exactly repetitive so much as it is dialectical, or, to use Janet’s own term, “oscillating.” It oscillates between a sense of achieved completeness and a disarranging doubt. When compared with other accounts of compulsion, Janet’s is especially well suited to the consideration of literary texts, because its emphasis rests less on a particular content—a set of behaviors, like cleaning or counting—and more on a form of thinking potentially applicable to any content, significant or trivial.32 As such, it has the potential to characterize a text’s own dynamics as well as the motivations of its characters. We have seen that in naturalist fiction, these tend to be shared: not the characters alone, but the entire texts appear stalled in their narrative trajectory by their “compulsion to describe.” Yet while we have tended to understand this penchant in the way that Nordau does in its manifestation as neurasthenia—as pure inaction, entrancement by detail instead of engagement with life and its possibilities—Janet’s model offers tools for beginning to break down this split. If motivated by a “feeling of incom   



pleteness,” naturalist stuckness appears not as a rejection of (or inability to carry out) the realist ideal of narrative completion, but as an excessive investment in that ideal that reveals its fundamental impossibility.

Red Badge, Yellow Wallpaper Certainly this is what we see in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Red Badge of Courage. I suggested that these were texts in which the problematic nonnarratability of the neurasthenic subject appeared specifically as a breakdown of the development into manhood or womanhood—the gendered bildungsroman that, in the traditional realist novel, expresses the forward movement of history itself. In both Gilman’s and Crane’s stories, the space that should be taken up by this plotline is typically given over to oscillatory thought patterns of just the kind we see described by Janet. Indeed, one might say the chief “action” of both of these texts is wholly interior, a kind of mental gymnastics driven by an uncontrollable mania of doubting. Crane’s Henry doubts his ability to fight a war; Gilman’s heroine doubts that she has grasped the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. And what she finds, as Henry does, is that to engage this pattern entails an endless process of seeming to arrive at the desired completion only to have to do so over again. As first introduced, the wallpaper possesses two salient characteristics, which make the heroine initially consider it appalling: its sprawling pattern— “a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus” ()—is “pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study” and yet “dull enough to confuse the eye in following,” such that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide” (). In other words, it both compels one to try to “make it work,” to find the key to the pattern, and continually dashes one’s hopes of doing so. As the story progresses, however, these same two qualities begin to create for the heroine an irresistible appeal. She confides, “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper. It dwells in my mind so!” (). She develops a routine: “I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom . . . and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (). “The thousandth time”: reading the wallpaper has become an allconsuming process that is repeated over and over and over because every time, the attempt to “complete” it, to reach its “conclusion”—indeed as if it were a sort    

of story—seems inexorably to fail. “You think you have mastered it,” our narrator explains, “but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a backsomersault and there you are” (). It is for this reason, no doubt, that she speaks of its “everlastingness” as a problem (). We do begin to get some sense of why it has this character, however; as she “reads” the wallpaper, she seems constantly to discover that it possesses new elements she had not factored into the equation before. At one moment this is a “kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then” (). “There are always new shoots on the fungus,” she complains a few pages later, “and new shades of yellow all over it” (). One can scarcely fail to see here a dialectical back-and-forth between “completeness” and ongoing proliferation of the material to be completed. Janet’s diagnosis seems equally apt for Crane’s Henry Fleming, a protagonist once dubbed “one of the doubting apostles” (Stallman, “Notes” ). Henry’s most characteristic behavior throughout the book consists of mental vacillations between doubt and certainty about his own future actions. Immediately upon entering camp, he becomes obsessed with “mathematically prov[ing] to himself that he would not run from a battle” (), that he will become a living embodiment of the heroic figure he has read about in books. As a result, “For days he made ceaseless calculations, but they were all wondrously unsatisfactory” (). Yet this failure to crack the code only leads to a greater desire to do so, an almost involuntary need to return over and over to the same problem: “he was engaged with his own eternal debate. He could not hinder himself from dwelling upon it” (). When the first battle finally occurs and he does not run, Henry believes he has achieved the certainty—here cast explicitly as narrative completion—that he so desired: “So it was all over at last! . . . He went into an ecstasy of self-satisfaction” (). As it turns out, however, this sense of an ending is all a setup, as shells once more begin to fall. This time, Henry does run—with the result that the cycle of doubts begins anew; as Crane puts it, both literally and figuratively, “the youth went again into deep thickets” (). And this becomes in essence the shape of the book as a whole: returning to camp, he seems at one point to have found a way of understanding himself once more as heroic, then “hesitate[s],” then makes the same gesture toward completion again (–). “Doubts and he were struggling,” the narrator writes (). The question is what the book itself—which, recall, also proliferates details on a formal level—thinks about this doubting as a behavior pattern. Does Henry finally “become a man,” once and for all, at    



the close of the story when the string of battles does appear to be over and his doubts, thus, truly at an end? Clearly, Henry himself believes this to be the case. In the final battle, “there was no obvious questioning, nor figurings, nor diagrams . . . He had no time for dissections,” the minute mental calculations that had so consumed him before (). Instead, fulfilling his soldierly duty as he is meant to do, he emerges on the far side of the conflict filled with the sense that, at last, “He was a man” (). Many readers have concurred, seeing this as the book’s point: over the course of the narrative, the initially callow Henry learns “the meaning of freedom and responsibility,” such that he achieves “true heroic proportions” by its finale (M. Solomon ).33 Similarly, a process that had appeared in the text itself—in Crane’s own writing—as a series of “discontinuous fragments,” “meaningless events,” now achieves order and significance as part of a narrative history (Colvert ). As Henry himself puts it, finally all the “scenes” “marched before him clearly,” a “procession of memory” (). Others have been less sure that either Henry’s individual story or the history of which it forms a part achieves this level of completed meaning. In effect, they read Henry’s final declaration, “Well, it’s all over,” as yet another version of his claim after the first battle—that is to say, not the end of the prior backand-forth between certainty and doubt, closure and reopening, but simply one more moment in the dialectical chain, leaving the story terminally “openended and inconclusive” (Horsford ).34 As these same critics often point out, a similar claim can be made about the depiction of history’s narrative meaning here, given that the battle on which Crane modeled the book’s events stands as one of the least significant, potentially most “futile” single conflicts, seen on a broader scale, in the entire Civil War.35 Yet these starkly opposed options, between achieved narrative meaning (at an individual and a historical level) and a sophisticated poststructuralist refusal of the same, miss the way in which Red Badge, both formally and in its depiction of Henry’s character, rather enacts a project of attempted, necessarily failing, but continually repeated “completeness” that is itself seen as defining of history and of “becoming a man.” Surely this is how it is so easy for the same text to appear to some readers to show Henry heroically achieving a classic wartime manhood and, to others, to empty out this very ideal as a farce. If Henry is shown needing to “invent a history for himself,” so as to “guarantee the continuity of his identity” (Pease )—to develop “the illusion of possessing a self” (L. Mitchell, Determined ) in order to cover over the fact that    

that self is in fact “repeatedly improvised before the observer” (A. Kaplan, “Spectacle” )—these practices, seen as at once necessary and impossible, become for the text constitutive of a new way of understanding how the realist hero’s development into manhood models the continuity of history. Even those readers who feel that Henry does move toward manhood concede that this movement is less about gaining control over a debilitating mania than losing one’s individual power of will.36 When Henry initially does not run but takes part in the first battle, doing what he is meant to do, this process is depicted explicitly as a kind of automatism, being taken over by an anonymous group identity, a “mob” representing “iron laws of tradition” (), that defeats the specific person and turns him into a body that moves rather than a mind that rationally thinks. It is variously described as a form of forgetting (), as a kind of “sleep” (), akin to being “drunk” () or a “beast” (). To become a “member” of the corps is not only to merge with its other “members” but also to merge with one’s weapons, to become a sort of human gun: “Directly, he was working at his weapon like an automatic affair” (). The language of the book equivocates tellingly regarding to what extent this process means “becoming a man” or losing one’s manhood and becoming, momentarily, something else. (“He became not a man but a member” [].) This equivocation, however, properly represents an understanding of manhood itself as, in effect, an endless process of attempting to “become a man.” The narrative denial of this endlessness, the assertion of manhood as achieved, covers over the ongoingness of the process but also reveals it, to the extent that it is an expression of the very desire that is the process’s motor and origin. The mechanical weapons in particular become figures for both what men, in fact, are not and what “men” are supposed to be: complete, uncastrated, certain of themselves rather than caught up in endless doubt. Henry’s very experience of losing himself in battle appears simultaneously as the revelation of his “impotency” and as a ferocious attempt to overcome it: “He wished to rush forward and strangle with his fingers. He craved a power that would enable him to make a world-sweeping gesture and brush all back. His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast” (). This simultaneous desire for absolute power and certainty of its absence is displaced later in the book, during another battle, onto his rifle, which he wishes were “an engine of annihilating power” at the same time he fears it is in fact “an impotent stick.” At the same time, he is crouching behind a “little tree” that he is determined to hold “against the world” (). A few pages later, Henry finds a better nonfragmentable prosthesis, the company’s flag, which he seizes from his friend,    



becoming de facto flag bearer: “Because no harm could come to [the flag] he endowed it with power” (). In these same moments, moreover, Henry’s own fears and desperate quest for certainty are generalized to the rest of the men on the field. He even sees the lieutenant “standing mutely with his legs far apart and his sword held in the manner of a cane” (); this once-belligerent man suddenly resembles a “babe,” just as Henry did at the moment his sense of impotence produced his frantic rage (“He fought frantically . . . as a babe being smothered attacks the deadly blankets” []). Indeed, “It had begun to seem to [all of the men] that events were trying to prove that they were impotent” (). For this reason, when the battle ceases, they respond very much as Henry does, both early and late: “They gazed about them with looks of uplifted pride, feeling new trust in the grim, always confident weapons in their hands. And they were men” (). These are soldiers who, mere pages earlier, had “become men again” in the sense of lapsing back (from ferocious automatism) into fear at the realization that the fighting was not over; they stood then with “their rifles slack in their hands” (). The weapons themselves, then, stand both for the possibility of “becoming men” truly, once and for all—being “always confident,” never doubting—and for that feeling of “impotency” in alternation with ferocity and forgetting. Notably, even after their decision that they “were” men in the second of these moments, this very confidence quickly dissolves into “nervous fear”—for what if, having reached this point, they then die “in insignificant ways” by accident at the very end of the day? Once more, the fear of incompleteness at the level of the individual story merges into the fear that history will take the form not of narrative meaningfulness but of chance-wracked farce. What Crane’s story brings forward, then, are two different definitions of manhood. One is the ideal of completed masculinity that the weapons represent, the teleological end of the realist narrative of war as making boys into men. The achievement of this ideal requires a moment of “forgetting”—never more so than at the very end of the story, in which Henry’s sense of finality depends on a strikingly “literary,” fairy-tale-like erasure of the past: “He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers. It rained” (). The other perspective defines manhood precisely as the endlessness of that story: to be a man means to attempt over and over to “become” one—which is why it is also possible to say that the men are men precisely when they realize anew, after the fighting ends, that they are not their weapons.    

One important result of this vacillation is that it can make the notion of a definitively achievable manhood look more obsessional than the endless attempt. For at least one early reader, Joseph Conrad, this normalization of Henry’s doubt was the story’s key point, its argument against those who would esteem young Fleming a “morbid case.” As Conrad writes, “The abnormal cases are of the extremes; of those who crumple up at the first sight of danger, and those of whom their fellows say ‘He doesn’t know what fear is’” (). According to this reading, it is Henry’s very vacillations between doubt and certainty, fear and confidence, that mark his distance from pathology, now defined in reverse as the realist subject’s ability to inhabit one of those positions once and for all.37 Even more than in Red Badge, there is surely something disturbing in “The Yellow Wallpaper”’s portrayal of what it looks like to reach the end of doubt and, in Gilman’s case, grasp the truth of womanhood fully at last. To the extent that that truth has been thought to lie encoded in the details of the yellow wallpaper, the heroine does seem, like Henry, to grasp it in hand at the story’s end; indeed, feminist critics have often applauded her for getting “femininity” right at last, in the sense of understanding that womanhood means oppression. Realizing that the wallpaper depicts a woman trapped, like herself, behind a network of bars, the heroine tries to set her free by literally tearing the wallpaper from the wall. Yet this act of “liberation” seems curiously to entail but a further, more insidious entrapment: the heroine now evinces no desire to leave the room at all, but merely crawls around and around it, “stuck on” the sticky wallpaper in a sense that is no longer merely metaphorical but has become quite literal indeed. It is as if the full realization of the meaning of womanhood is itself what entraps her. “Can anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror?” the feminist theorist Denise Riley has written. “How could someone ‘be a woman’ through and through, make a final home in that classification without suffering claustrophobia?” (). “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to agree, deciding that the achievement of womanhood as “final home” looks not like the ideal domestic end of the realist novel as female bildungsroman but rather like its gothic underbelly, the woman entrapped by her own marriage and household. As with the similarly ambivalent cast given to “becoming a man” in Red Badge, the realist ideal of “mastery over all the details” here begins to take on a disturbingly forced quality. Its grim narrative insistence on making the pattern work once and for all, once we see the repression it entails, appears to involve the deeper fall into delusion.    



In her important defense of the uses of psychoanalytic theory for feminism, Jacqueline Rose enjoins us to remember the way its more familiar narratives of normalization coexisted with this kind of account, whereby that desired achievement of womanhood appeared as a kind of premature arrest, the proof of which lay in the symptoms that constantly erupted to disprove the seamlessness of its completion. We can see this view in Freud’s late essay “Femininity,” with its strikingly “Yellow Wallpaper”–like view of successfully attained womanhood as resembling a gothically grotesque stuckness in place: “A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability” (). Suggesting that “the difficult development to femininity” is to blame for having prematurely “exhausted the [woman’s] possibilities,” Freud recasts that developmental story as one more of loss than of gain. Hence, he begins the same essay by explaining that “psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being” (). One can narrate a woman’s story, in other words; this is possible, but it is impossible to describe her.

Rethinking Description as Critique Throughout its critical history, description has appeared as naturalist fiction’s liability: the sign of its mechanical submission to the given, its inability to conceive alternatives, its stuckness in place. Yet it has turned out to be just as plausible to understand narration as being the most stuck, the most fixed in its trajectory forward—the most compulsive, even, in its inexorable motion toward the desired goal. With this view of narration in mind, then, what happens to our conception of the purportedly anticritical “compulsion to describe”? The psychoanalytically inflected feminism of Jacqueline Rose is particularly notable for repositioning description, not as a gesture of merely laying the groundwork for a critique or theorization that will happen elsewhere,38 but as a potential act of critique in its own right. As she puts it, once “failure” (neurosis) has been placed at the heart of “normal” femininity, the mere “description of feminine sexuality” becomes “an exposure of the terms of its definition, the very opposite of a demand as to what that sexuality should be” ().39 In this final section, I consider what a perspective like this one, derived from feminist theory, might help us to see about this chapter’s broader question, that of the    

relation between description as compulsive repetition and the possibility of critique. One of the theorists most influenced by Rose’s account has been Judith Butler, who makes more of the implication that femininity itself might be seen as a kind of endless attempt to describe, or to “cite,” womanhood properly, an attempt that necessarily fails. Indeed, despite the powerful influence of Butler’s work on feminist thinking across the disciplines, few have considered the way she recasts the process of becoming a man or a woman as, structurally, a form of obsession-compulsion.40 While Butler herself does not present her theory in quite these terms, an emphasis on the recurring concepts of compulsion, repetition, and failure in her account seems more crucial to that account’s specificity (and radicality) than the more familiar emphasis on gender as “performativity,” which has occasioned some of the most persistent misprisions of her thought. Indisputably central to any précis, however, remains the chief innovation of Butler’s project: her view of gender as “a kind of becoming or activity” (Gender ), something one does (or performs) rather than something one simply is. Moreover, it is something one does over and over; this repetition is what produces “the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core” (). Even the stability of the gendered body here gets reconceived as the sedimentation of a history of actions, literally a “corporealization of time” ()—a kind of “congealing” () that belies what is actually fluid, perpetually on the move. Gender moves, Butler explains in a later essay, in the sense of being “always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself” (“Imitation” ). We can see here all the elements of the “sentiment d’incomplétude”: the drive for perfect completeness, control of every detail, that itself leads to the guarantee that completeness can never be achieved, to the endless loop of failure and compelled repetition. As Rose insists similarly, “femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete” (); rather, “normal” sexuality should be understood, in terms very amenable to the idea of obsession-compulsion, as “an ordering” (). A similar sense of gender, as not so much an achieved state but rather an ongoing, compulsive practice, can clearly be discerned in both The Red Badge of Courage and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Most feminist readers of Gilman’s story have presumed along with the story’s heroine that the meaning of womanhood lies somewhere in the wallpaper’s hidden content—and have thus read that content over and over with variations, just as she does.41 What if, in   



stead, we saw it as inhering in the reading activity itself—ours as much as hers?42 Yet rather than considering the strangely compulsive way Gilman’s heroine reads, the form of her activity, we have been much more drawn to taking up a position parallel to her own and attempting to make the pattern work, once and for all, for ourselves. We do so even though the story itself depicts the heroine’s act of finally “literalizing” or “materializing” what had previously been only a mental process (by actually tearing the hated paper off the wall) much less as a repudiation of her prior entrapment than as a radicalization of it, a total accession to its terms. Gender that has fully “congealed” seems to leave the subject frozen in amber, like the yellowing wallpaper woman. Having successfully cracked the code of womanhood, naturalism’s stuck heroine now appears even more stuck than before; for, far from discarding the obsessive-compulsive dream as merely a fantasy, she believes herself to have real-ized it at last. This finale would not surprise Butler, whose account forecloses the possibility of simply escaping the compulsive loop by “becoming woman” once and for all, if only because the very desire to escape is what fuels the loop itself. Hence, as Gilman’s story implies, to believe that gender can ever fully “materializ[e]” (Bodies ) or be “literaliz[ed]” (Gender ), that one can ever find and express the true key to what woman is, is not to transcend these dynamics but to fall more decisively prey to a radically disabling fantasy. By contrast, feminism in Butler’s deconstructive account, as in the reading I have given here of Gilman, becomes the very recognition that femininity always fails.43 The problem, however, is that if this failure makes description a potential mode of critique, it also has the effect of giving feminism the same form as femininity. That is, if a recognition of that failure is also what keeps us trying to “get woman right,” it appears that feminists keep “becoming woman” via the same process through which they become feminists.44 How, then, does feminism end up being any more than a repetition of the endless failed attempt to become woman? This is the question typically put to Butler: if we grant that feminism possesses the same structure as femininity, if we thus have no choice but to “repeat” (Gender ), how does one distinguish repetition from the “repetition with a difference” that enables change?45 Notably, Butler has responded to such critiques not by backing off from the co-imbrication of description and critique but by tying the yoke tighter than ever. The force of our “attachments” to the very structures that fix us in place is expressed, in her later Psychic Life of Power, by terming them “passionate attachments” (this sense of “attachment” being something else that Gilman’s heroine effectively literalizes by her story’s end). As Butler notes, the notion of    

“a subject . . . passionately attached to his or her own subordination” (Psychic ) raises “awkward and embarrassing” issues, “especially for those who believe that complicity and ambivalence could be rooted out once and for all” (). Certainly, as we saw at the outset, a sense of “embarrassment” has long attended discussions of naturalists’ fevered echoing of their characters’ compulsions and desires—a sense that these writers were indeed too invested in what they described to portray it from a properly critical distance. Emotional responses, in other words, replaced critique. This was no less true in a newhistoricist reading like that of Walter Michaels; the only difference was that the hope of some other kind of subjectivity that could step back was disavowed. Butler’s surprising affirmation of this disavowal, then, resembles the counterreading of new historicism offered by Fredric Jameson. In Jameson’s view, to counter Michaels in the way so many did—by insisting that “culture” is really a broader and richer field than his attribution of a governing “logic” would imply—risked yoking us more securely to an oppressive totality, by suggesting that any seeming totality could with just a little work be rendered “tolerable,” giving us “‘the best of both worlds’” (Postmodernism ).46 As we saw at the end of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” however, the risk is that a subject’s purported “escape” from obsession-compulsion likely only inscribes her more deeply within its loop. The hope of replacing the condensation of agency and subjection with a total agency and freedom may produce the very opposite, a total subjection. If attempts at salvaging the subject’s relative autonomy tend to fall short, however, how might we conceive of a form of critique that does not disavow “passionate attachments”? In an attempt to think through this issue in Butler’s work, Slavoj Zˇizˇek turns to an example quite pertinent for our concerns. As he writes, The outstanding case of such unconscious “passionate attachments” that sustain Power is precisely the inherent reflexive eroticization of regulatory power mechanisms and procedures themselves: in an obsessional ritual, the very performance of the compulsive ritual designed to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction. (Ticklish )

Zˇizˇek draws in this description on the classic Freudian account, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, of the two-stage character of the obsessional ritual. Initially, such rituals are said to come into being as the ego’s attempt to manage or repress an unruly desire. Yet, as the rituals themselves become more and more highly elaborated, they become themselves a focus of desire, charged with all the sexual energy they were intended to keep at bay.47    



In this sense, as we see in Zˇizˇek’s description, such rituals can serve as a model for the way in which the subject develops an investment in the very power structures that direct and manage that subject’s desires, because of the way in which those structures themselves become objects of desire, loci for achieving a substitute satisfaction. Yet having set up this model, Zˇizˇek’s purpose is to show how it can function in radically opposed ways—both as the way power reproduces itself, through making its restrictions appear desirable, and as the evidence of how power’s very workings in this regard necessarily generate by-products containing all the unstable excess of erotic energy. Hence, while adopting Freud’s sense of the “masochistic” nature of the obsessional subject who thrives on his own self-discipline, Zˇizˇek goes on to suggest: It is . . . this “masochistic” reflexive turn, which remains unaccounted for in the standard notion of the “internalization” of social norms into psychic prohibitions [] . . . [This “standard notion,” which he associates with Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity . . . In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause [] . . . [Yet] the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualization of the repressive measures themselves. (Ticklish )

In this depiction, the same “passionate attachments” that keep the subject “entranced” by structures of power are also what keep those structures perennially off balance, potentially unable to contain and direct the forces that are at the same time necessary to their own reproduction.48 The notion of sexualizing the symptom thus offers one potential model for how naturalism’s compulsions might promote what they have always been felt to undermine: political change and critique, human freedom, and literary creativity. These features now emerge as a result not of leaving compulsive repetition behind, but of pushing it too far, inhabiting it too passionately. We might consider Pierre Janet’s observation that his obsessional patients’ attachment to their own symptoms seemed oddly to take the form of extravagant, quasi-“literary” attempts to describe them: “‘Je suis comme un pauvre oiseau sans plumes,’” “‘je suis au milieu d’un labyrinthe avec d’innombrables couloirs obscurs,’” “‘je suis comme un sac couche par terre et l’humanité danse dessus,’” and so on (: ). This capacity of the patient to thrive on the creative elaboration of the symptoms    

themselves also influenced G. Stanley Hall’s advice to doctors confronting neurasthenic women; they risked, he warned, letting themselves in for what we might term an “analysis interminable” of her condition by the patient herself. (Hence, when Charlotte Gilman arrived at Weir Mitchell’s office with a written account of her complaints, he treated the account itself as a neurasthenic symptom.) Such a blurring of the lines between the obsessional subject and the creative one appears equally evident in descriptions of the writing habits of a Norris or a Dreiser: the naturalists “worked ahead in a delirium of production, like factories trying to set new records,” as Malcolm Cowley wrote (). In her autobiography, Gilman complains that because she was so remarkably productive as a writer and thinker, none of her friends would ever believe that she suffered all her life from the kinds of symptoms “The Yellow Wallpaper” describes (The Living ).49 This same skepticism is exhibited by well-intentioned Gilman scholars to this day. As Gail Bederman comments, “Well might her friends be incredulous—for Gilman’s output after her divorce was prodigious!” (). It is both the strangeness and the impressiveness of that “prodigious” activity that the best accounts of writers like Frank Norris have always striven to express. As William E. Cain writes of McTeague, In populating the ‘Dental Parlor’ with [metaphorical] panthers and monsters, Norris runs shocking risks; yet his writing is too commanding and intensified, and its status as sheer performance too high, to be dismissed as merely absurd. [] . . . The passage is interesting not for its overblown prose, but rather for Norris’s investment of energy in the scene he represents . . . He gives the impression of overmastering his material, and remaining in doubt—though anxious not to be—about the forms of power he evokes and works so hard to celebrate. (, emphasis mine)

“Overmastering” and yet “remaining in doubt,” “though anxious not to be,” Norris generates his most powerful work in and through his folie du doute—but this sexualization of the symptom is what gives the lines their “energy,” their almost appalling capacity to jump off the page despite the embarrassing quality of their investments. In other words, something persists here beyond those investments that is nevertheless wholly indebted to them, that represents an elaboration of them past the point at which they appear recognizably as themselves. The odd result is that naturalism ends up somewhere unaccountable precisely as a result of its repetitive circling around the same terrain, its attachment to a single sprawling project of attempting over and over to describe. Thus, cre   



ativity emerges from compulsion—not as its opposite but as its radicalization. And thus, Freud’s “fanatic for the truth,” Zola, is also a man given over to obsessional habits. We should remember the central place Zola accorded to “doubt” in his discussion, in The Experimental Novel, of a literature that would be faithful to the precepts of science. Following his muse, the great physicianwriter Claude Bernard, Zola calls doubt “the great scientific lever” () and distinguishes “the scholastic, who believes he has absolute certitude,” from “the experimenter, who is always in doubt” () and who “will not cease to doubt until the mechanism of [human] passion, taken to pieces and set up again by him, acts according to the fixed laws of nature” (). If naturalism is an obsessional literary mode, this may be less because of its aim at scientific categorizations of human behavior and more because it has such difficulty “ceasing to doubt.” Describing to the degree that the “point” of doing so gets lost, could such texts be said not simply to suspend knowledge, as the critics of new historicism feared, but to offer a particular kind of knowledge, which might not emerge if they actually did achieve the mastery they always seem not quite to grasp? The project of the present book is in part to argue for the way that a more speculative, rather than simply celebratory, mode of proliferative description emerges in the writings of the s with particular force around the figure of the modern female subject. And yet this same subject has typically appeared elsewhere in the historical and critical literature on this era as a figure for speculation’s negation—for a therapeutic, rationalizing impulse bent on bettering the human being through a containment of his darker impulses. There has been a failure to grasp the way that this therapeutic feminism emerged in response to a more descriptive version in which the problem of rationalizing nature emerged as unending. Indeed, it can be argued that this double dimension in fact inhered in the domesticity that is usually most yoked to feminism as a perniciously rationalizing project. In the chapter that follows, I demonstrate the way this double aspect can be detected in the regionalist fiction of the era, with its emphasis on women’s ordinary, everyday lives. In this recasting, regionalism’s elaborated portrayal of domesticity, usually treated as the polar opposite of naturalism’s manly struggles in a radically wide-open wilderness, becomes instead a startling mirror image of those struggles. The confrontation with a sublime landscape is echoed by the miniature sublime of confronting, daily, a vertiginous array of unorderable domestic details.

   



   Regionalism, Feminism, and Obsessional Domesticity

For Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the point of writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” was to render the story itself obsolete. For more enlightened future generations, a depiction of the “rest cure” would become only a historical document, a museum piece; after all, the writing was already on the wall. A truly rational feminism would put an end to the ceaseless attempts at “getting it right” that the story conveys. In this sense, however, Gilman in her later treatises remains within the story’s own logic: rather than abandon the obsessive will to ideal completeness, she seeks only to do away with its disturbing vertiginousness, its endless failures—in short, to truly get things right such that all doubts could be removed for good. In the story, however, it is the very attempt to escape that process once and for all, to get out at last by getting the pattern completely right, that most deeply reinscribes the heroine within the loop that has entrapped her. How to explain such a willingness on Gilman’s part to duplicate her literary creation’s most self-defeating gesture? The answer is disarmingly simple. For Gilman, the problem lies not with her heroine’s obsessive will to total mastery, which she applauds, but with the fact that she is stuck trying to master a fundamentally unmasterable environment. For this is very much how Gilman, in her polemic The Home, characterizes the horror of the ordinary domestic space circa . As in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” this book’s domestic woman, barred from most fields of human endeavor, ends up not so much unproductive as unhealthily hyperproductive: in Gilman’s words, the lady of the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having anything but houses to play with, proceeds so as to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work. (Home )



The baroque wallpaper typifies the gothic home life that results, with its “mass of freakish ornament” generating “horror” in the enlightened observer (). For Gilman, this dimension of domestic life was particularly suited to literary expression. In The Home, she singles out the fictional works of the New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (then the unmarried Mary E. Wilkins) as ideal demonstrations of her thesis that “the incessant home life” produces not tender familial bonds but “exaggerate[d]” feelings, “intense and often morbid.” “The more isolated the home,” she writes, the more cut off from the healthy movement of social progress, as in the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we find those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E. Wilkins so perfectly portrays. The main area of their mind being occupied with a few people and their affairs, a tendency to monomania appears. (Home )

Thus, it is domesticity, not modernity, that generates in women the “monomania” or “fixed ideas” typical of compulsive thinking. Indeed, Gilman’s main point is that it is precisely because the fast-evolving “modern woman” is outgrowing “this ancient coop,” the home, that we find such “widespread nervous disorders” among late-nineteenth-century wives (). To treat such cases with the rest cure’s program of hyperdomestication would naturally only magnify existing symptoms.1 The truly effective strategy would bring the home itself up to date—a process that, we will see, involved for Gilman and other latenineteenth-century feminists a subjection of that intimate realm to collective processes of scientific rationalization. I want first to place pressure, however, on Gilman’s little-discussed decision to argue for the “morbid,” “monomania”-inducing aspects of Victorian domesticity by referencing the New England fiction of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Along with the work of the Maine-born Sarah Orne Jewett, Freeman’s regionalist short stories have more recently formed a major site for feminist recoveries of a view of domestic life that honors its seriousness and relation to artistic strivings. Such arguments have very specifically targeted a sense that these female regionalists’ small, daily concerns were rendered obsolete, in the s, by the red-blooded adventure writing of the up-and-coming male naturalists, which left regionalism’s stifling drawing rooms behind for the wideopen wilderness and the urban street. Seen in retrospect through this modernizing lens, figures such as Freeman’s Louisa Ellis, heroine of her story “A New England Nun,” appeared to evince an attachment to the genteel, domestic     

virtues of order and cleanliness seen as bordering on the obsessional. It was this pathologizing view of regionalism’s housebound women to which feminism, unsurprisingly, took strong objection. One result, however, has been that the present-day feminist perspective distances itself from precisely that view of the “monomaniacal” housewife that was so crucial to Gilman’s early-twentieth-century feminist polemic. In this divide, we might say that domesticity stands in for a broader balancing act integral to any feminism: the need to revalue women’s degraded contributions to social life while at the same time insisting that their true development demands a broader sphere. With respect to scholarship in particular, this issue emerges as the question of feminism’s relation to women’s history. An explicitly evolutionary thinker like Gilman had no trouble leaving history behind like her own story’s yellowing wallpaper, but we have more doubts about such a view, preferring to affirm solidarity through a certain sense of continuity across time. Unless, of course, the strong female voices of the past present us with views we are loath to embrace. In recent years, Gilman has emerged as a primary instance of this problem, as her vision of a more rationally organized feminine sphere is revealed to extend to innovations like eugenic breeding techniques. Yet rather than raise questions about the real and ongoing entanglements of ends we consider salutary with disturbing views, such revelations have led chiefly to a string of strongly condemnatory readings of an entire host of women writers from this era, stressing that their seemingly nurturant celebrations of the communal, domestic circle mask an ethos of rigid conformity and social control. For such readings, the New England regionalist fiction of Jewett has formed a particularly well-inspected case. What is interesting here, and what this chapter explores, is the way such treatments of the unsavory side of the domestic in fact recur to the earlier sense of domestic ordering as obsessional in character—right down to the now racially inflected emphasis on the rigid maintenance of “purity” against perceived external taint. This revelation, however, typically leads to a dramatic repudiation of the entire historical entity, in the name of keeping our own perspective pure. The obsessive demarcation of boundaries thus turns out to be both the strategy of the past from which we most wish to distance ourselves and that to which, in our very act of distancing, we show ourselves to be most continually tied. It would seem that a more complex account of this very gesture is called for. Here, then, we can return to Gilman and, through her, suggest an alternate reading of New England women’s regionalism, centered finally less on Jewett   



than on Freeman. For it is in Freeman, as Gilman’s own characterization implies, that the obsessional character of domestic life most receives its due. The more truly compulsive response, however, may belong to the feminism that, like Gilman’s, seeks to achieve the ideal order that in Freeman’s fiction is always revealed to be thwarted. The key is to see this more endless, excessive domestic practice as a crucial dialectical other, within this era’s feminism, to Gilman’s own post-s therapeutic mode. Finally, what is particularly striking about this alternative version of domestic life is the extent to which it resembles the restless masculine quest story to which, in comparisons between regionalism and naturalism, it is so often opposed. In other words, the great outdoors and the “great indoors” merge. In the work of Freeman no less than in that of a naturalist like Frank Norris, the ceaseless attempt to manage nature’s incursions links the rigorous housekeeper to the male frontiersman, for in neither case can that quest’s vitality be distinguished from its appallingly obsessional excess.

From the Rest Cure to the West Cure . . . For Gilman and other turn-of-the-century domestic reformers, by contrast, the vision of a home overrun by “freakish ornament” spoke to an eminently curable pathology. Such excesses merely represented the untrained outgrowth of a senseless institution. Whereas the rest of modern life could be seen to thrive through its submission to the regulatory techniques of scientific progress— “specialization,” “organization,” “simplicity,” “restraint”—the home’s only feeble principle of order came from “iron tradition,” which could bear no relation to true excellence determined by objective means (Home , –). Clearly, Gilman would have been delighted to witness the twentieth century’s increasing reliance on expert advice in the realms of child care, cooking, and home design (though she would likely have found fault with the predominance of men in all these fields). Treated as mere individual, personal, and indeed sentimental matters, she believed, such domestic tasks could only be performed poorly, as each generation of mothers was forced to learn them over and over with no guidance higher than that of their own experience and memory. In her earlier Women and Economics (), Gilman outlines a solution to this dilemma: communal apartment houses with shared kitchens and collective techniques of cleaning and child care. “As cooking becomes dissociated from the home,” she writes, “we shall gradually cease to attach emotions to it; and we shall learn to judge it impersonally, upon a scientific and artistic basis” ().     

Both the broad goal here, of rationalizing domestic activity, and the particular solutions offered link Gilman to the home economics movement of the period, itself a subset of the burgeoning discipline of social science, an arena in which female reformers (notably Jane Addams of Chicago’s Hull House) played central roles.2 The notion of public kitchens intrigued enough observers to merit a popular exhibit at the  Columbia Exposition in Chicago, notorious for its displays of technologies of the future alongside exhibited representatives of Western man’s “uncivilized” past. Dolores Hayden’s important study The Grand Domestic Revolution documents experiments with the idea from New England (under the guidance of Ellen Swallow Richards, instructor in sanitary chemistry at MIT) to England itself, where a former German military officer, Captain M. P. Wolff, lobbied vigorously behind the proto-McDonald’s idea of “food for the million” (Hayden ). From the German military model it was perhaps a short step to the movement’s eventual culmination in an attempt, early in the twentieth century, to apply Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management to private household work. The Taylorist ideal of finding the “one best way” to perform any task certainly seems in keeping with Gilman’s hope that “The Yellow Wallpaper”’s dream of getting the home environment “right” once and for all might yet be realized, if only the home itself were brought in line with scientific advances. And the form that doing so took, in a book like Christine Frederick’s Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (), essentially replicates that story’s (and Gilman’s own) obsessional ideal of the minutely scheduled day punctuated by “regular rest periods” (Strasser ). Perhaps more unexpected is the extent to which the story’s “profusion of expression,” and specifically its bizarrely decorated walls, are also repeated by some of Taylorism’s more “surrealistic” procedures (Hayden ), which may have hastened its downfall; as the historian Susan Strasser comments, “Probably few American women painted grids on their floors and walls so that they could conduct time-motion studies of dishwashing” (). Yet this curious result of the most thoroughgoing of attempts to rationalize the home gets at the central problem with attempting to do so: the very individualism Gilman decried. Regulating tasks in office or factory was one thing; aside from the rather large stumbling block of lack of financial incentives to rationalize, the home also stood—certainly in an era only gradually becoming invested in consumer goods—as a powerfully resistant mass of individual tastes and forms of life. These preferences persistently challenged reformers certain of the “one best way”—never more so, Dolores Hayden suggests, than   



when women involved in cooperative experiments across small-town America moved beyond personal taste but then made collective choices about how to live that bore no relation to the wisdom of science (she cites one Illinois “dining club” in which the young women happily “gave their time to art and music” [] but showed no interest in learning about nutrition, a fact that grieved Jane Addams no end).3 In The Home, Gilman’s approach to this dilemma of personal taste is a quasi-literary one; she paints a vivid portrait of the domestic woman left to her own devices, a picture designed to make visible the grotesque results of her near-hysterical indulgence in every fancy: She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk, soft muslin and sheer lawn; she loves the delicate fantasy of lace, the alluring richness of fur . . . and, in her savage crudity of taste, she slaps together any and every combination of these things and wears them happily . . . Only the soul which spends its life . . . in a group of industries connected merely by iron tradition, could bear a combination like that, to say nothing of enjoying it. (Home –)

Such a “patchwork life” is the inevitable result of indulging too many randomly chosen tastes and styles (). When idiosyncrasy triumphs, all overarching principles of order—scientific and aesthetic—can only fall by the wayside. Gilman thus models, in her own redescription of such an existence through a rational lens, the outcome she suggests is inevitable once her ideas have taken wider hold; of course, she writes, “some persons” will persist in “having peculiar tastes; but these will know that they are peculiar, and so will their neighbors” (Women ). Gilman’s reference to the housewife’s aesthetics as “savage” is an important detail, for The Home views domesticity not merely as out of step with progress but as a veritable last holdout from primitive times. “It is our very oldest thing,” she writes (). (Perhaps we might thus wish to consider the yellow wallpaper’s color in the most straightforward terms, as merely a sign of age.) Here, then, “savagery” does not denote simply a “state of nature” that gives way to culture or a rudimentary mode of existence that gives way to a more complex one. Accounts like these would not yield the streamlined modernity Gilman supports. Instead, Gilman’s is the sort of savage who is said to delight in ornament, whose tattoos, piercings, feathers, and self-paintings “distor[t] the human body” and thus leave natural simplicity behind (). Such a bedecked creature can be compared readily enough to the overcivilized, decadent modern woman sati    

rized in Gilman’s story “If I Were a Man,” her tottering hats and corsets signaling the excessive “sex-distinction” of modern life (Women ). Truly civilized women, she argues, would stand in a more restrained relation of equal, respectful partnership with their mates, one that had discarded such an “over-sexed” condition as yet another relic of primitive self-indulgence ().4 In short, then, the domestic environment not only represents all that Gilman finds atavistic in modern life; its atavism, at every turn, expresses itself as an explosion of unneeded excess. Too many individual styles and tastes, too much sexedness, too much of both in women’s ever more ornate modes of self-decoration. One begins to see how the yellow wallpaper functions as a perfect condensation of what is maddening about the home, for it, too, is highly decadent, flouting all aesthetic restraint with its manic, twisting arabesques. No wonder one cannot “get it right,” that to imagine one has is to have gone crazy: like the home, it is but meaninglessness incarnate, doomed by its very structure to fail endlessly. The project of social and self-ordering that Gilman proposes, then, need not require one to give up on the compulsive dream of total order; all it calls for is better—which is to say, orderable—raw material with which to work. And of course, what must thus be discarded, or at least reined in to the point of invisibility, is telling: extremes of idiosyncrasy, hysterical femininity, “savagery,” and sex. Need we add that these are what realism is typically thought to leave out—that they are emblematic of naturalism’s more hyperbolic will to totalization and its resultant failures in its parallel ordering task? In a  essay, “Masculine Literature,” Gilman gives her view of what novels should be about, and the resemblance to a realist manifesto is striking. As found in the average “Purplish Magazine,” she writes, most fiction boils down to two kinds: “the Story of Adventure, and the Love Story” (). While these might easily be cast as opposites—geared toward male and female audiences, respectively—Gilman’s interest lies more in their similarities, in what she sees as the fundamentally “masculine” emphasis underlying each. That emphasis follows the apparent “dictum” that “‘Life has no interests except conflict and love!’” (). And indeed, “love” as it is understood in these stories might well be deemed but a subset of “conflict,” of male action-adventure—reduced as it is to the “pre-marital struggle,” or “the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her—and it stops when he gets her!” (). What, then, of the rest of the marriage, or times of peace—of, that is, the vast bulk of human experience? “Here is a Human Being, a life, covering some seventy years,” Gilman points out (), and yet fiction confines its gaze to only the narrowest portion of that   



time—those rare moments charged with the “predatory excitement” that represents real “life” for a masculine sensibility. In contrast, Gilman joins the era’s social thinkers in arguing, women’s role is to preside over the constancy of daily processes, in keeping with their status as the “race type” (in contrast to man as the “active variant,” more often genius and criminal both).5 With respect to literature, these beliefs translate into an approving view of mid-nineteenth-century realist fiction, seen to enable a more “feminine” perspective by taking an interest in all the ordinary aspects of everyday existence, as opposed to merely the highs and lows. Writes Gilman, “That was the power of Balzac—he took in more than this one field. That was the universal appeal of Dickens; he wrote of people, all kinds of people, doing all kinds of things” (“Masculine” ). And, she might well have added, that was the thrust of Howells—for the remarks here bear a remarkable resemblance to his own complaints about the work of naturalists such as Zola. It is fine, argues realism’s greatest American champion, to insist that the sordid side of life be represented in fiction, but why imply, in his view, that life as a whole reduces to nothing but? Indeed, from a certain perspective, one can readily see why one scholar decides that Gilman’s essay constitutes an attack on naturalist fiction.6 Admittedly, the only specific writers she mentions are the romancers Kipling and Stevenson (); yet Frank Norris was, of course, a huge Kipling fan, and he did publish “potboiler” adventure sagas alongside his more well-known naturalist works. According to Jackson Lears, when naturalists like Norris dismissed historical romance as the kind of outmoded conventional fiction they aimed to replace, they “overlooked the fundamental tie” between themselves and its practitioners: the anti-Gilmanian “conviction that domestic realism was not realistic enough, because it failed to embrace the reality of life as a struggle.” In fact, Lears writes, “[b]oth groups contributed to a resurgent ‘literature of action’” (), expressing Norris’s oft-quoted dictum “We don’t want literature, we want life” (F. Walker ). Such a shift in literary modes was often understood as part of a much-needed “therapeutic” response to a male America gone soft as a result of modern living. As Tom Lutz explains in his cultural history of “American nervousness” circa , while female neurasthenics found their unfeminine ambitions subdued through Weir Mitchell’s rest cure, their male counterparts were prescribed a regimen of “rugged outdoor sports and other public activity” geared toward reawakening their lost masculine vitality (). Thus, a not yet big-stick-wielding Theodore Roosevelt was sent out to the Dakotas for shaping up; Theodore Dreiser engaged     

in the manual work he describes in his book An Amateur Laborer; Norris headed overseas as a war correspondent, and, in his novel The Octopus, he autobiographically depicted a “nervous, introspective” young male aesthete, Presley, who heads out to the wilds of California after having been “threatened with consumption” as a result of his brooding ways (). Given the locales it tends to favor (not to mention its frequent link to imperialist ambitions), we might consider calling this remasculinizing therapy “the west cure.” Clearly, it functions as the flip side of the rest cure for women, seeking to free feminized men from domestic entrapment as opposed to redomesticating their recalcitrant female partners. And naturalist fiction, if understood in Norris’s terms as a male flight from Howells’s realist drawing-rooms back to real “life,” could easily enough be seen as the literary equivalent of this therapeutic response. Thus, we get such readings as Don Graham’s of McTeague, whereby the entire point of the novel is for the giantlike titular hero, with his Zola-esque “aesthetic of space,” to break free at last of his compulsive wife’s claustrophobic home and head out for the grand heroic spaces of, yes, eastern California ().7 If naturalism constitutes a kind of literary west cure, however, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s relation to that fiction might then become less clear, since she in fact held views quite in common with many of those cited above. In her view, too, the domestic realm was but an enervating trap, and the women who inhabited it indeed did not experience “life” but rather dwelled in a perverse fantasy world, the meaninglessly ornate home that led to obsession-compulsion as an equally meaningless, endless elaboration of details. “This is what has been denied to the lady of the house—merely all human life!” she exclaims in The Home ()—a sentiment well-nigh echoing Norris’s view that “women are shut away from . . . real life” (“Why Women” ). Norris and Gilman also shared a female ideal: the Gibson Girl, a fin-de-siècle vision of the modern woman as an athletic Diana who, in adventure stories like Norris’s, fought right alongside the revitalized men. That Gilman, who delighted in athletics in her youth, would champion such a figure was hardly surprising. Yet if Gilman can also sound like a partisan of the west cure, how then to account for her critique in “Masculine Literature” of what seems the parallel literary mode? Here we need to reintroduce some key distinctions between naturalism and historical romance. Norris himself, after all, did so by distinguishing his “healthy and clean and natural” adventure tales from the unhealthy, sordid, and unnatural worlds of stories like McTeague. And as Maxwell Geismar notes, the former books do display a “purity and complete sexlessness” that could   



scarcely be said to characterize their naturalist counterparts (). Wouldn’t one imagine that such tales would involve rugged conquerors forcibly carrying women off? In fact, their not doing so is hardly accidental. Descriptions of neurasthenic men often ascribed their condition to an imbalance of bodily energies, based on the theory of the body as a “closed energy system,” the vital powers of which could be sapped by indulgent sexual practices that improvidently scattered male seed. The truly manly man was thus the one who could master his own urges, becoming a paragon of chivalrous self-control. In doing so, he both saved his strength for imperial warfare and testified in his own person to a key principle on which the civilized man’s superiority to those he conquered was based. Clearly, Gilman would not have found fault with these views of sexual economy, which in many respects recall her own. What her own work suggests, rather, is that she would have held considerable doubts as to whether the westcure approach to masculinity, with its language of subjugation and battle, could in fact maintain such an honorable level of self-control. For Gilman, such scenarios suggested not restraint but the classic male tendency to give in to perverse, excessive urges to dominate and destroy, urges that could in principle never be satisfied, meaning that if unchecked they would lead only to an endless, manic imperialist expansion leaving chaos in its wake. In this imperialist guise, civilization displayed anything but manly self-control; it became a grotesque vision of men giving in to their basest impulses. The story it told would not be one of progress but rather one of numbing repetition—the life, indeed, of beast rather than man. What is most striking about Gilman’s perspective, however, is its suggestion that in so doing, the male primitivism of the west cure would end up reproducing what she saw as the “savagery” of the domestic world it fled. Moreover, Norris’s most unequivocally naturalist novels—McTeague and Vandover and the Brute—offer a perspective that begins to approach Gilman’s in this regard. Critics such as Don Graham suggest that McTeague, allegorically standing in for naturalism as a genre, liberates himself from feminization when he exchanges a static, entrapping, compulsive domestic world—a world, indeed, much like that of “The Yellow Wallpaper”—for a wide-open natural realm that promises possibility and transformation. Yet where does McTeague end up? Trapped in Death Valley, “locked to the body” (McTeague )—ostensibly that of his adversary Marcus, who handcuffs himself to his rival in his last moments of life, yet clearly also, always, McTeague’s own. For Norris, more than for his critical champions, the body or nature never functions simply as es    

cape hatch, as a site where value can be reconstituted. Instead, Death Valley’s monotonous open space threatens a terrifying limitlessness; Norris repeats such words as “uncounted” and “immeasurable” in a fruitless attempt to communicate its static yawn, its appallingly ungraspable sublimity (, ). Far from evincing the mere victory of masculine freedom over feminine entrapment, this vision of the Wild West would seem to turn it into nothing so much as the outsized mirror of naturalism’s vertiginous interior detail. The improbable, yet deeply Gilman-like connection between an equally abyssal wilderness and home, an equally “monomaniacal” hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity, receives its most thoroughgoing affirmation, however, in Norris’s first novel, Vandover and the Brute (written in  but not published until after his death, in ). The callow Vandover would seem, as many have remarked, to be one of Norris’s more autobiographical protagonists—not the rough-hewn, McTeague-like hero usually associated with naturalism, but rather a well-heeled, even dandyish would-be artist growing up, as Norris himself did, in San Francisco. The text goes out of its way to “feminize” Vandover, whether showing him reacting from a sexual indiscretion with “a sense of shame and dishonour that were almost feminine in their bitterness and intensity” () or explaining his inability to keep financial accounts as the result of “a veritable feminine horror of figures” (–). Yet if a “horror of figures” is “feminine,” “femininity” must be understood, as Gilman saw it, as a kind of obsessional relation to the world of minute details. It would be something like Gilman’s own inability, following the “Yellow Wallpaper” period, to look at the index of a book (The Living ). The many tiny entries in an index, the proliferation of figures running down a page: such mundane phenomena can be understood as provoking “horror” only if we think of them in the light of the Gothic nightmare that inheres in the yellow wallpaper, which similarly threatens an unmasterable excess of closely entwined details. It is crucial to see that Vandover, if he hates figures, nonetheless loves counting. Counting is a form of ordering, and making order is what Vandover, in a particularly obsessivecompulsive depiction of happy domesticity, loves best in his “charming bachelor’s apartments” to do: Vandover took his greatest pleasure while in his new quarters, delighted to be pottering about his sitting-room by the hour, setting it to rights, rearranging the smaller ornaments, adjusting the calendar, winding the clock and, above all, tending the famous tiled stove . . . The winding of his clock was quite an occurrence in the course of the day, something to be looked forward to. . . . It

  



became a fad with him to do without matches, using as a substitute “lights,” tapers of twisted paper . . . He found amusement for two days in twisting and rolling these “lights” . . . When he had done he counted them. He had made two hundred exactly. What a coincidence! (–)

As in Gilman’s depiction of domestic life, however, all is not well in paradise. As the pleasure in counting seems to shade inexorably into the horror of figures, so Vandover’s admirable investment in his household objects is also a love of “bric-a-brac” (Vandover ), so that he also resembles the domestic woman as one who indulges in order’s opposite, diseased excess and clutter. No wonder he can be found lounging in the bathtub, reading novels and eating chocolates—the very image of the self-pampering leisure-class wife, “living” through the sensations of fiction rather than confronting real life. One imagines that Vandover, too, left to his own devices, would end up not in a beautifully ordered home but in one covered with the “mass of freakish ornament” that Gilman describes. And this is exactly what happens: Vandover ends up turning into the heroine of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” He moves precipitously through a succession of rented rooms, finally landing in a cheap hotel: The room was small, and at some long-forgotten, almost prehistoric period had been covered with a yellowish paper, stamped with a huge pattern of flowers that looked like the flora of a carboniferous strata, a pattern repeated to infinity wherever the eye turned. (–)

The effect of this uncannily familiar space on its inhabitant is equally recognizable: he begins crawling around and around the room.8 Returned to “prehistory”—to the kind of domestic space Gilman called “our very oldest thing”—he too regresses to both infancy and savagery. Indeed, the two become one in the turn-of-the-century West’s typical representations of tribal peoples as links back to the evolutionary “childhood” of civilized man. Like Gilman, then, Norris sees a resurgent primitivism at the core of civilization’s most apparently exquisite achievement, domestic femininity—a connection made possible by the revelation of compulsive excess in the self-creation of both. He renders this link, however, in much more recognizably “naturalist” terms: a feminized young man “degenerates,” via the mysterious mechanisms of lycanthropy, into “the brute,” or, more specifically, a human wolf (albeit one who, running about on all fours, rather literally cries, “Wolf! Wolf!” as he does so []). Vandover’s return to a state of nature, then, seems even more clearly than     

McTeague’s less to escape a vertiginously hypercivilized domesticity than to mirror it. This was all very much as Gilman foresaw. While others might have responded to her portrait of the overcivilized “lady” by suggesting as therapy the simpler existence of the traditional farm wife—as some reviewers suggested that Trina McTeague would have gone less crazy living in a small town—Gilman dismissed that form of nostalgia out of hand. In fact, she wrote in Women and Economics, farm wives were even more likely to go insane than their urban counterparts. “On wide Western prairies, or anywhere in lonely farm houses,” she writes, “the women of today, confined absolutely to this strangling cradle of the race, go mad by scores and hundreds” (). This was not freedom; this hyperbolic “outside,” as in McTeague, offered but another form of entrapment. What sort of space could offer an alternative?

. . . And to the Garden In  Gilman published a feminist utopia called Herland, imagining an ideal all-female world in which women might flourish. Herland, interestingly, is a nation that looks like a garden. I say “interestingly” because of the role played by the garden in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The ancestral halls of that story are surrounded by one; from her window, the heroine can look out into it. It is a liminal space, neither home nor wilderness. Seen from the open road, it is comfortingly bounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock” (); at the same time, from the window of the too well-bounded upstairs room, it can appear “mysterious . . . riotous,” filled with “bushes and gnarly trees” (). In effect, the garden solves the problem of the too-natural “outside” and the too-cultural “inside.” It also resembles the version of the west cure that actually seemed to work for Gilman herself: relocation to suburban California (specifically, Pasadena), with its “calm sublimity” and “steady peace of its climate” (The Living ). This California represents, as it were, nature under perfect control, as if by “will.” And in choosing it, Gilman might be said to end up all but agreeing with her former nemesis, Weir Mitchell, who in fact felt the neurasthenia of American girls could be adduced not so much to overwork, coeducation, or any supposed social ills as to this continent’s excessive “peculiarities of climate” (Wear ). In The Octopus, his own  story of the west cure, Norris describes a farm wife who, similarly appalled by the “sheer bigness” of the San Joaquin Valley, also finds respite in a garden (). For this woman, he writes, to whom “there was something inordinate . . . unnatural,” even “vaguely indecent,” in the sight of “so much wheat” (),   



the quiet, the repose, the isolation of the little cloister garden was infinitely delicious . . . Outside there, far off, the great grim world went crashing through its grooves, but in here never an echo of the grinding of its wheels entered to jar upon the subdued modulation of the fountain’s uninterrupted murmur. ()

In a difference from McTeague, however, the inability to come to grips with nature’s vertiginousness here gets “localized” in the figure of a timid woman, whose “shr[inking] from” the “great grim” forces of life seems merely a sign of feminine conventionality (, ).9 One might say The Octopus itself shrinks from the earlier novel’s perhaps more disturbing view of those forces’ equalopportunity potential for horror. In fact, I would argue that The Octopus has much in common with Herland in this regard—that both texts can be read as turning away from what the authors’ earlier naturalist work (that is, McTeague, Vandover, and “The Yellow Wallpaper”) had begun to suggest. In the naturalist texts, “nature” (whether the vast open spaces of McTeague, the animal in man in Vandover, or motherhood in Gilman’s story) began to take on an “unnatural,” perverse cast, related directly to its disorderliness, its vast unknowability and vertiginous expanse. In Herland and The Octopus, in contrast, if nature is unknowably vast, this fact becomes appealing in a mystical kind of way: what had been a distressing tendency on nature’s part to go on regardless of human desires has become merely a source of comfort, of reassurance and stability in a conflicted world. Thus, in The Octopus, while the railroad magnates may have won this round, Norris assures us that “the  remained”—a “nourisher of nations” depicted as able to grow itself (). And in Gilman’s text, the miracle of parthenogenesis enables the women in her all-female land to mother children; here, too, the potential threat of social strife is subordinated to nature’s mystical powers to ensure both continuity and growth. The women of Herland live in harmony with a natural world whose nurturing powers (“Mother Earth, bearing fruit,” ) parallel their own. “When the mother of the race is free,” Gilman had concluded in Women and Economics, affirming her belief in the Lamarckian transfer of acquired characteristics to offspring, “we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of social evolution” (). In The Octopus, too, an idealized vision of motherhood helps to link the social to the natural; clasping husband and child in her “milky arms,” the dairymaid Hilma Tree appears by far Norris’s most conventionally maternal hero    

ine. And the motherly Hilma’s major role in the text—far from suggesting, as McTeague and “The Yellow Wallpaper” do, that there might be anything compulsive about domestic womanhood itself—lies in the explicitly therapeutic task of transforming an obsessive-compulsive man into a properly manly one. In his bachelorhood, the anxious Annixter undoubtedly qualifies as one of Norris’s most marvelously compulsive creations. His own “Yellow Wallpaper”–like moment of glory involves studying for his bar exam by pasting all his notes on the walls of his room: [T]hen, in his shirt-sleeves, a cheap cigar in his teeth, his hands in his pockets, he walked around and around the room, scowling fiercely at his notes, memorizing, devouring, digesting. At intervals, he drank great cupfuls of unsweetened black coffee. When the bar examinations were held, he was admitted at the very head of the applicants, and was complimented by the judge. Immediately afterwards, he collapsed with nervous prostration; his stomach “got out of whack” . . . [and he refused] to have anything to do with doctors, whom he vituperated as a rabble of quacks, dosing himself with a patent medicine and stuffing himself almost to bursting with liver pills and dried prunes. ()

Thereafter, his friend Presley notes Annixter spending each day in identical fashion, lying in his hammock, “reading ‘David Copperfield’ and stuffing himself with dried prunes” (). This ceaseless consumption finally comes to a halt only after marriage to Hilma; as Annixter puts it, “‘she’s made a man of me. I was a machine before’” (). A machine, clearly, in the sense of Pierre Janet’s compulsive patients, who often commented of their hyperbolic attempts at “completeness,” their lack of will (volonté): “‘je ne suis qu’une machine’” (: ). Yet a linkage between The Octopus and Herland can underscore the way the therapeutic triumph over naturalist obsessionality appears here not so much as an escape from the compulsive mode but rather as a radicalization of—and, hence, absolute concession to—the will to perfect order that it represents. In his bachelor days, Annixter evinces a horror of his body’s eruptions of which his insubordinate stomach is only the beginning; the sticky stuff that soils his virgin sheets during the night demands that he vociferously reiterate his loathing of what he calls “feemales” (). Yet if the appearance of the sticky stuff suggests other feelings toward them, the repudiation of “feemales” also surely implies, as Mark Seltzer has suggested, the risk of affirmed commonality with that embodied, “sticky” realm seen as the woman’s domain.   



For Seltzer, the repudiation of that stickiness demands a masculinization of reproduction itself, in the form of heavy industry. Yet the nineteenthcentury woman’s sphere was also itself predicated on an ongoing repudiation of nature’s “mess” and “stickiness”—the two words that Rachel Bowlby nicely points out are contained within the idea of “domestication”—both in her own person and in the ideally ordered environment around her (“Domestication” ). This domestic ideal was in Gilman’s view a perfectly salutary one; it only required for its success the death of the fundamentally unmasterable nineteenth-century household. Indeed, to the extent that the women of Herland have achieved Gilman’s dream in The Home of a fully collectivized domestic life, what we find is that that the nation itself resembles nothing so much as a perfectly tidy, wonderfully inviting home.10 “Everything was beauty, order, perfect cleanness, and the pleasantest sense of home over it all,” marvels one of the three male explorers who has stumbled across the undiscovered world—hidden deep in a tropical forest—as he surveys its rose and white buildings (). Awakening the next day, he finds himself in “a beautiful room, in proportion, in color, in smooth simplicity” ()—everything, in short, that “The Yellow Wallpaper”’s haunted, jaundiced chamber could not be. The garments offered, identical for women and men, similarly avoid decadent excess; they are “simple in the extreme” (), privileging comfort above all. “Physiology, hygiene, sanitation, physical culture—all that line of work had been perfected,” our narrator sums up (). Indeed, Herland clearly realizes not only Gilman’s but many other nineteenth-century feminists’ obsessional vision of the perfectly ordered future society as, in a very literal way, the metonymic expression of the perfectly ordered bodies of its members—a society based, as Augusta Cooper Bristol explained in “Enlightened Motherhood,” on “the equilibration of forces” (qtd. in Leach ). Thus, just as the forest around Herland appears “petted” and literally “trained” to meet the society’s alimentary needs, so the women themselves can control when they will and will not have children, merely by choosing whether or not to focus their mental and physical energies in a properly maternal direction (). Nature has become no more than a tool of culture— but a culture that itself exists to express, through the exaltation of motherhood and “the race,” what are said to be nature’s own great goals. As we saw registered in Gilman’s distaste for idiosyncratic expressions of taste in The Home, such a perfect balance depends crucially on the near-total subsumption of the individual in the collective. Such is easy enough for Gilman to imagine, however, given that the intense expressions of individual variance     

in the nonutopian world could themselves, according to her theory, be considered merely an outgrowth of that world’s excessive masculinization. In the all-female Herland, by contrast, one finds no literature of wild adventure and romance, no criminality, no competition, no private ownership or desire to bequeath one’s name to one’s children—but rather “the evenest tempers, the most perfect patience and good nature,” and overall a complete “absence of irritability” (). The women express shock that anyone back in the other world would require some form of “stimulus” in order to wish to do the necessary work of society; after all, isn’t the impetus to work merely a natural result of a woman’s desire to care for her children? Such a perfect meshing of individual desire and the fulfillment of social duty enables a belated fulfillment of Gilman’s childhood game of “‘having my wishes,’” in which “with sagacity I avoided all those foolish mistakes made by the misguided persons in the fairy-tales, who had their wishes and made a mess of them. My first one was: ‘I wish that everything I wish may be Right!’ To be Right was the main thing in life” (The Living ). Overall, Herland has received a good deal less critical attention than “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the readings that do exist often downplay its obsessional will to total rationalization of human life. One exception can be found in the work of Thomas Peyser. The strong argument of his study Utopia and Cosmopolis is that realism and utopia, two seemingly opposed modes of fiction that were both popular during the late nineteenth century, may in fact have shared more than it appears; both, he contends, showed ties to the same ambitious new social-scientific writing that influenced Gilman. In the most famous of the era’s utopian works, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, –, the “industrial army” that makes up the future society is said to be managed as if “by a general up in a balloon, with perfect survey of the field”—in contrast to the impossible task, in the world as we know it, of trying to “mana[ge] a platoon in a thicket” (). Such a description cannot help but recall the famed omniscient gaze of realist fiction, as compared to Gilman’s poor naturalist heroine trying to navigate the tangled thicket of the yellow wallpaper. As Peyser notes, however, many of Herland’s feminist fans would want to distinguish Gilman’s “gentler, more humane” utopian vision from Bellamy’s technocratic, overtly militaristic one. Consider that when the women of Herland wish to detain the male interlopers, in order to learn more about them and their culture (and to educate them in Herland’s), they do not exactly imprison them, so much as treat them like naughty children who need to stay put until they have done their homework. When the men attempt escape, the narrator   



explains, “Of course we looked for punishment . . . but nothing of the kind happened. They treated us as truants only, and as if they quite understood our truancy” (). Yet one might certainly argue that this “kinder, gentler” mode, like the Foucauldian “discipline” that replaces “punishment,” works to regulate subjects at a much deeper level by disabling all potential conflict in advance (through “understanding” the truant, for example) and taking an attitude of “calm cheerfulness” (Peyser, Utopia ) suggesting a well-meaning parent’s “Don’t worry, we know best—you’ll come around.” This is Peyser’s own cautionary view. What might appear to be empathy for one and all, he suggests, in fact depends on the careful repression of conflicting views that might get in that empathy’s way. Similarly, he points out, while the equally “gentle” gardenlike setting might also seem far more appealing than Bellamy’s barely described city, it can be seen as crucial to the presentation of Herland as a lost Eden, a place “immune from history” where an “allegedly timeless beauty,” along with universally accepted truth, derived from nature, can endlessly reign (, ). Herland, he suggests, approaches a “museumification of reality”; not only does its own culture seem to exist “in an antiseptic space behind plate glass” (), but its inhabitants share with sociologists the appraising eye that turns everything human into an artifact. Thus, when one of the explorers presents jewels to the Herlanders, the recipients “discussed not ownership, but which museum to put them in.” . . . The jewels become unintentional signs of the anthropological view of all cultures that alienates people even from their own. ()

The main thrust of Peyser’s argument is that feminist critics viewing Herland through rose-and-white spectacles, as merely a charming romp through classic male foibles, remove the text from history just as the text removes Herland from history. And in doing so, he further asserts, they risk inadvertently reproducing Gilman’s own less than salutary motives for wanting to leave history behind. Here Peyser turns to the groundbreaking work of Susan Lanser, who relocates Gilman’s obsessions historically “in a culture obsessively preoccupied with race as the foundation of character, a culture desperate to maintain Aryan superiority in the face of massive immigrations from Southern and Eastern Europe” and in which, in California in particular, “mass anxiety about the ‘Yellow Peril’ had already yielded such legislation as the Chinese Exclusion Act of ” (). For Lanser, the “Yellow Peril,” together with strong antiimmigrant sentiments in Gilman’s own writings, might help us reread “The Yellow Wallpaper” in such a way that the wallpaper’s appalling chaos, its “un    

clean,” “sickly” tint (“Yellow” ), and its persistent smell are linked to a nightmare vision of an America overrun by “primitive,” “colored” others. And in Herland, Peyser notes, the narrator assures us, “[T]here is no doubt in my mind that [the Herlanders] were of Aryan stock” (Herland ), which helps to explain the vast divide between their highly civilized land and that of the neighboring “savages,” who look upon the queenly women with the awe and fear characteristic of high imperialist genre fiction. At the same time, we learn, not even all the Herland women are encouraged to have children; ever mindful of improving “the race,” the women state that they “‘made it [their] first business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types’” (Herland ). Such eugenicism can serve as a particularly condensed expression of Gilman’s, and her era’s, investments in naturalized racial hierarchy, rationalized (and yet exalted) motherhood, a totalized view of the social in which the individual is subsumed, and a vision of humanity’s ideal future. And as Herland maintains its racial purity by weeding out undesirables, so, Peyser asserts, have Gilman’s feminist supporters maintained their equally idealized notion of the novel as a “purely negating, playful deconstruction of patriarchal thought” by weeding out its creator’s racism from the mainstream of her thinking, treating the feminism and what appear as unfortunate racist lapses as wholly separate phenomena (Utopia ). These are important claims; moreover, making them, at the time Susan Lanser’s article first appeared, required considerable scholarly courage. One could easily have envisioned an outraged backlash against Lanser’s unflinching exposure of the dark side of a feminist icon. This is far from what has happened. Indeed, Peyser’s work is indicative of just how willing—even eager—criticism has been not only to accept this reading of Gilman, but to extend it. We now routinely see not only far broader denunciations of Gilman’s work than Lanser herself implied, but also similar reappraisals of the other latenineteenth-century white American women writers—Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin—whom feminists had spent years recovering from critical marginalization. These readings bear a number of quite striking resemblances to Peyser’s. Notably, they tend to cast themselves as historicist correctives to the earlier feminist criticism, which is said to have colluded with the literary works in an “escape from history” that enables a guilt-free enjoyment of a historically tainted text. The question I wish to pose to this apparent consensus, then, after a brief rehearsal of these reappraisals, is the extent to which they themselves may risk an escape from a broader, more mutually implicating construal of the category of history.   



To take but the most talked-about example, Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs had been read by its feminist champions as evoking a literal Herland here on earth, in the form of a Maine town after the region’s postwar economic decline and male flight to the rapidly expanding West. Left in the hands of aging women, it was argued, such towns did not merely fade; they were able briefly to realize the dreams of nineteenth-century feminism, becoming places governed by those values associated with women’s maternal capacities, such as community and harmony with the natural world. And as such, they were felt to offer a critique of the masculine individualism typifying urban, capitalist society at the time. As Richard Brodhead was the first to point out, however, Jewett’s fiction in fact appeared in urban elite magazines alongside articles touting upper New England’s potential, because of its return to more of a state of nature, for a “second-growth industry of aesthetic appreciation” as a tourist site (). Specifically, its “therapeutic” value for weary city dwellers depended on its resemblance to an idealized national past. “Over against the historical facts of the more ‘foreign’ immigration from southern and eastern Europe,” Brodhead writes, Country “projects a counterworld of magical social homogeneity, a society of old-stock families descended from Northern European roots” (). This projection required whitewashing over the kinds of changes industrial capitalism had already begun to wreak in Jewett’s hometown of South Berwick, Maine. In the pages of Country, time had stopped, and a “pristine authentic space immune to historical changes” was preserved (Kaplan “Region” ). One of the most striking features of the critical trajectory of Jewett’s text was the fact that the most enthusiastic of the historicist repudiations of the initial feminist reading came from some of the initial feminists themselves. Whereas Brodhead merely hinted at the role of race in creating Country’s dehistoricized appeal, readings by Elizabeth Ammons, Sandra Zagarell, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Susan Gillman (who make up three-fourths of the collection New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs) render it central. The Bowden family reunion at the end of the book, which Ammons admits she once read lovingly as “a naive, joyful, old-fashioned rural festival,” expressing the values of “sainted motherhood” and “benevolent accord with nature,” now stands revealed as a celebration of “racial purity and white cultural dominance” with “subtle but clear protofascist implications” (“Material” , )—such that we might consider the Bowden family akin to the Ku Klux Klan (Gillman ). This reinterpretation is now being extended to the period’s other white women writers, notably Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin.11 Why is it that Susan Lanser’s critique, which seemed so radical when it first     

appeared, has so rapidly become, in effect, hegemonic? In the work of feminist critics, this development seems indisputably part of an ongoing mea culpa for the earlier exclusion of race as an issue. Yet this intrafeminist concern cannot explain the appeal of such arguments for historicist literary critics who, by their own admission, see their work as a turn away from the limitations of feminist criticism. I would argue that while the specific race angle is new, the larger framework into which it fits is not. These arguments are able to powerfully and quickly “make sense,” I hope to show, because of a long-standing historical argument that reads nineteenth-century American feminism—specifically, the feminism of white middle-class women—as a major motivating force behind the turn-of-the-century move toward a “therapeutic culture,” and a culture of consumption, characterized as masking newly wide-reaching forms of social control behind a rhetoric of empathy and community. My aim is not at all to deny this connection; clearly, as my own readings affirm, Herland combines feminist aims with an obsessional desire for total order that is only made to appear sweetly benign. Yet these strategies in Herland cannot be understood, I maintain, unless we read them as a “realist” response on Gilman’s part to the troubling “naturalist” vision of the attempt at order manifested in her own earlier story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In effect, Gilman herself took a historicist view of these matters, seeing Herland as the utopian social vision that would render the earlier story an obsolete relic. Yet, clearly, the many readers who have continued to reinhabit that haunting tale have not seen it in Gilman’s limiting light. “The Yellow Wallpaper” simply possesses a complexity that resists mere reduction to the didacticism of Herland—and which is crucial to understanding a vital strand of late-nineteenth-century feminism that also goes beyond cheerful therapeutics. In what follows, then, I bring forward the more long-standing argument about feminism’s relation to therapeutics that these racial readings unwittingly replicate, with the aim of showing how we might develop a more dialectical perspective. Crucial to this dialectic is the potential for a serious debate over the status of “nature,” one central to the “natural-ist” mode. This potential has been obscured by historicist readings for which any reference to nature immediately entails a recourse to an “ahistorical” and thus suspect, often racist perspective. Not only is the possibility of genuine and indeed historical debate over nature’s meanings thus erased; further, I would argue, historicist criticism may overlook its own “essentialist” deployment of the category of history. In contrast, a richer view of both history and “nature” can enable a perspective on the work of Jewett and, more importantly, Mary Wilkins Freeman—whose fiction,   



we should recall, epitomized for Gilman the dark view of domesticity seen in “The Yellow Wallpaper”—that can bring this more dialectical, less strictly historically bounded view of this period’s feminism to bear.

Feminism, Therapeutics, and “Museumification” A distinct strain within cultural histories of the late-nineteenth-century United States remains clearly central to the recent readings of Gilman, Jewett, and others, a strain often termed the culture of consumption or the therapeutic worldview. These concepts share a founding notion: that human happiness can be arrived at through rational means. Desires can be codified, they can then be met, and meeting them is good for you, because self-fulfillment has become one of the noblest human goals. As we see in Herland, this vision narrows if not eliminates the potential gap between individual desires and social demands. And here, too, it is the goal of reorganizing sex and the body, those aspects of human life that might seem to lie most outside society’s reach, that signals just how total a rationalization of humanity we face. As William Leach argues, this particular aspect of the rise of therapeutic culture—the extension of methods of ordering to the body and sex—can be traced specifically to the influence of the feminist movement, making Herland’s meshing of the two eminently understandable: Social science perspectives colored every facet of the feminist movement and tended to unify the vast array of feminist organizations that appeared after the Civil War. The principal ideological signatures of the feminist movement were these: rejection of individualism, of “excess” and “selfishness,” in favor of symmetrical order and group action; adherence to “nonpartisan,” “scientific” social organization as the means to cope with the changes going on in an otherwise “sound” political and economic system; and a preoccupation with the body—with physical and social organisms—as the road to social order and advancement. ()

Derived from the secular, yet “strong[ly] perfectionis[t]” health reform that had begun to break from organized religion as early as the s ands, the feminist call for “hygienic symmetry” was, Leach notes, “perhaps the first American reformist effort to demystify the body and to rationalize sexuality” (, ). These “would thus be freed from associations with sin, depravity, guilt, and evil” () as everyone learned to practice clean habits and bodily selfcontrol. Thus we see the motivation behind the “revulsion for dirt and disor    

der, and of contempt for smells, the smell of the body and of mortality—the tradition that has often been called ‘Victorian’” () but which, as Leach points out, has clearly been influential on our own far more hygienically minded world. As he notes, we might be said still to believe that “what one [does] with one’s body [sets] the course, for better or worse, of one’s life”—the only change being that “sexual fulfillment has replaced sexual purity . . . as the major proof to ourselves that we have lived and found happiness” (). Either way, what is conspicuously missing, for Leach, from this vision of a “rational or sentimental love” leading naturally to perfect wholeness is an older, Romantic notion of both love and the selves entering into it as by definition wracked by “conflict, tension, resistance, or, broadly speaking, ‘evil’” (): Unrelenting nondialectical rationalism denied passion, conflict, and “evil” their right to exist. It stole the power from love and looked at the world without compassion. What D. H. Lawrence said of Benjamin Franklin applies with equal truth to American reformers: they took away the “illimitable background” of the self and thus the true foundation for freedom . . . rational love did away with the dynamic element necessary for genuine organic growth and development and implied the interlocked, fully compartmentalized human being. Even more darkly, by attempting to muzzle sexual myths, it [and here he cites one of Gilman’s key mentors, Lester Ward] left the “faculties of the imagination” to the “incoherence of purposeless activity.” ()

Jackson Lears strongly echoes this critique, writing that “therapists and social engineers actually accelerated the devaluation of emotional life. Their exaltation of unconscious impulses depended on the insistence that those impulses were benign. . . . human emotions lost their power to exhilarate as well as their power to strike fear” (). And Ann Douglas has of course made a very similar set of claims the cornerstone of her attack on the fall from Calvinist seriousness into “the feminization of American culture.” More recently, as Lora Romero has pointed out, the same set of issues appears, albeit with less of the accompanying longing for a dark Romantic self, in the work of literary historicists influenced by Foucault. In their work, the issue concerns the triumph of “discipline” over punishment; yet as several feminist critics have noted, these categories also often receive a gendered valence, as in Brodhead’s influential work on nineteenth-century women novelists, Jewett among them.12 Associated with maternal rather than paternal authority, discipline “spares the rod”   



only to inaugurate an apparently far more insidious, more psychically invasive mode of “humane” coercion that depends on the subject’s ability eventually to police himself. In all of these cases, then, the sign of the unacceptably totalizing reach of social order lies in its extension to the innermost reaches of the body and the psyche. Yet this description, which in historical work on the late nineteenth century describes feminism, would in literary studies of the same period describe naturalism. As I have been arguing, naturalism and realism can both be understood as literary forms that seek to provide a God’s-eye picture of the social field; yet whereas realism sticks to the social as such, naturalism includes the body and sex in what it seeks to order and classify. In the historical accounts above, this results only in an even more hyperbolic and disturbing ordering grasp, but in the fiction the results are not quite so simple. As we have seen, naturalism’s more hyperbolic attempts at order cannot be separated in the texts themselves from a vertiginous doubt, in which the ever-greater number of elements to be ordered threatens to dissolve into a mass of unorderable details. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as the previous chapter argues, provides a clear instance of this naturalist story, and the attempt at truly “getting it right” in Herland—leaving the vertiginous doubt behind—can be read as Gilman’s “realist” response to what the earlier text threatened to suggest. What that was— what the naturalist text gets at, and the historical texts of feminist politics do not—is the other side of a dialectically understood late-nineteenth-century feminism. This other feminism, far from simply upholding a cheerful, communal, maternity-based world, views women’s tie to the body and nature as perversely oppressive in its substitution of “race being” for the potential idiosyncrasy of individual desires. These desires thus cannot be subsumed into the ones corporate capitalism deems itself eminently able to meet; they are far closer to Leach’s sense of a dark, dialectical self that comes into being through what constantly thwarts its aims. While this feminism is not absent from historical accounts, its inseparability from women’s less “ownable” rage, desire, and confusion guarantees that it will find a more congenial home in gothic-tinged naturalist fiction such as Gilman’s story. A clue to its simmering force, however, can be detected in the feminist reaction to Teddy Roosevelt’s infamous “race suicide” scare. Roosevelt’s arguments, as made in his  speech on the subject, would seem to be a key source for any argument that the eugenicism on display in Herland expresses the core vision of a broader turn-of-the-century imperialist feminism that celebrated white women’s maternity at the expense of “unfit” women’s     

right to mother at all. By “race suicide,” after all, Roosevelt meant the threat to the nation itself posed by immigrant women having too many children and white, middle-class native women having too few. Yet the latter development frequently got linked at century’s end to women’s involvement in activities newly open to them, such as higher education and wage work, which were believed to have an adverse effect on fertility rates. Hence, while it may have upheld the glory of white women’s maternity, Roosevelt’s campaign was not in line with many feminist arguments in the period. The historian Linda Gordon’s explanation gets at the root of the matter: Eugenic thought had always contained the assumption that reproduction was not just a function but the purpose, in some teleological sense, of women’s life. Furthermore, as eugenics moved toward greater emphasis on heredity as opposed to environment, it moved away from an emphasis on woman’s labor and skill as a mother, and back toward a view of her as a breeder, of her motherly function as part of nature. It was not just that the cult of motherhood was itself limiting, but also that feminist attempts to make it more prestigious and to qualify it as skilled labor failed; as an ideology motherhood was becoming more animal-like and less human. . . . The idea that the human “race” was in genetic decline reversed a humanist tradition that had measured human achievement in terms of learned culture. That was the tradition that had given birth to feminism, and feminism could not survive without it. ()

Gordon’s assessment here is crucial for understanding why Gilman describes Herland’s mothers as “Conscious Makers of People” (). The intense valuation of motherhood in Herland, the insistence upon it as a “conscious” activity, can only be understood as a response to Gilman’s view that in the real world, motherhood was seen not as a skill that women “consciously” performed but rather as simply the natural outgrowth of having a female body. Raising “nature” as an issue in Herland, in other words, Gilman seeks not to confirm biological facts but to alter our understanding of “nature”’s meaning. She wants it to be “natural” for women not to mother blindly, like animals, but to carry out this quintessentially female activity with all the rationality and seriousness ascribed to any male-dominated profession. And she does this by making it “natural” in Herland for women to bear children without men, and to do so, or not do so, whenever they desire. Of course, one could read this as a radical extension of social ordering and rationalization into the realm of the body and sex, but to read Herland histori  

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cally—as a response to “The Yellow Wallpaper”—is to understand this gesture a bit better, in light of the alternatives. As “The Yellow Wallpaper” makes clear, Gilman’s own experience of maternity evinced a powerful ambivalence about something that seemed to come upon her without her control or her understanding, simply because she was a woman, and being a woman meant—as Roosevelt’s rhetoric makes clear—that her social duty boiled down to being a body. Simply to castigate the ordering strategies in Herland as such ignores the way in which nineteenth-century “social purity” feminists’ support for a rationalized body and psyche grew specifically out of the view that existing understandings of sexuality as a realm of unrationalizable impulses worked to women’s particular detriment. As Sheila Jeffreys writes in a fine history of late-nineteenth-century feminism, “Historians, whose vision has been blinkered by the ideology of the ‘sexual revolution,’ have tended to see social purity as simply an evangelical, anti-sex, repressive movement” (). In fact, she explains, feminists’ view that sexuality needed reforming and ordering stemmed from the way claims of men’s uncontrollable innate animality served to maintain the double standard that made marital rape acceptable, coercive “seductions” of young girls excusable, and women’s own sexual adventuring cause for immediate condemnation. As Leach notes, feminist dismissals of male sexuality’s inevitable darker side were instrumental in helping to promote as perfectly healthy and sound such twentiethcentury staples as sex education and coeducational learning. Without the insistence that sexual urges might come under one’s conscious control, it would be impossible to make rational arguments against date rape or sexual harassment as necessary evils plaguing institutions in which men and women worked side by side—or indeed, even to promote such possibilities for women’s work and education in the same spaces as men at all. In sum, the mere condemnation of rational-sentimental maternalism risks literally “romanticizing” (and naturalizing) a view of the body’s sheer uncontrollability that, in practice, led to the rampant control of women’s bodies by men. The point, then, is not to deny feminism’s investments in racial maternity, bodily ordering, or other social policies based on a hyperbolized domestic ideal, nor simply to excuse these on historicist grounds. Quite otherwise: my hope is that we might begin to consider the need for grounds not reducible to historicist ones. The broad questions raised here about the management of “nature” may be readily caricatured, but they remain central ones for feminism, living concerns adduced but not exhausted when they are examined within this particular historical frame. The immediate insistence that they be read as irre    

deemably grounded in this era’s most repugnant views on race, however, has the necessary effect of rendering them unable to be considered in any noncondemnatory terms. It is worth asking whether a historically informed reading of a writer like Gilman or Sarah Orne Jewett must lead inexorably to this structure of repudiation. This very question began to be asked by feminist critics in the wake of some of the initial historicist reorientations of Jewett in particular, even by some of those who had previously been involved in recanting their earlier readings and joining the historicist revision. Why, they began to wonder, did relating Jewett’s work to “history” seem to necessitate disavowing all that feminism had once found meaningful about her work? Whereas feminists had heard “a vital voice from the past,” June Howard writes, historicism reduces that living Jewett to “embalmed evidence” (“Unraveling” ), to “‘a single historical exhibit,’” as Richard Brodhead himself had put it (Brodhead ); Howard’s critique of his work draws on that of Judith Fetterley, who was the first to express concern that Brodhead’s reading seemed to write “‘case closed’ over Jewett’s name” ().13 Thomas Peyser’s reading of Gilman, I would suggest, inadvertently provides a useful term for the problem that begins to emerge here concerning historicism’s recasting of these women writers as embalmed “exhibits”: museumification. Recall that Herland’s dehistoricizing “museumification of reality” (Peyser, Utopia ) is said to indicate the “appraising eye” it shares with the era’s sociological work: the gaze that “turns everything human into an artifact,” that asks first of every cultural product “which museum to put [it] in” and thus promotes “the anthropological view of all cultures that alienates people even from their own” (). And then note Peyser’s own responses to feminist assertions of the potential critical force of Herland and Gilman’s work overall. “Perhaps,” he writes, Gilman biographer Ann J. Lane “overestimates Gilman’s originality in part because she does not attend to the fact that ‘scope,’ ‘vision,’ and ‘soaring imagination’ were the stock-in-trade of sociologically minded intellectuals in Gilman’s time: such qualities were among the marks by which sociology was recognized as a distinctive commodity on the intellectual market” (). In an earlier article on the same subject, he similarly comments that readings of Herland’s radicality forget that “in Gilman’s America . . . the espousal of radical causes had become a therapeutic diversion for many members of the middle class” (“Reproducing” ). The gesture in both of these instances is the same one, exemplified by Peyser’s dismissal of Lane’s claim that Gilman’s work “heroically ‘does not fit into any category’” (Utopia ). The point, clearly   



enough, of his own study of Gilman is very much to fit her into a category, to show at every turn that what might seem to be powerful, thought-provoking, or in any way distinctive features of her work amount to no more than standard “representative” qualities of her historical moment. Critiquing Herland for its repression of all individuality, he ends up finding nothing individual about the text itself. And thus, it is Peyser who could be said to “museumify” Gilman; it is he who turns her work into an “artifact,” in the literal sense that what appeared to be living questions in that work are instead “appraised,” labeled, and placed “under plate glass,” as history’s done deals. Hence, although Peyser describes these strategies in Gilman as evidence of her will to escape from history (into “nature”), I would argue that they are among the most typical strategies of historicism itself. As Dominick LaCapra suggests about similar trends in the field of history, we see a tendency “to reduce the exceptional or the problematic” in history to “the unexceptional and readily categorized dimensions of a collective discourse” and as a result to risk generating a “markedly anti-intellectual intellectual history” (History , ). The real loss here, in other words, may be any sense that our work with “history” might have serious consequences for our own thought. Peyser’s dismissals of Gilman strike a familiar note in their desire not simply to confine her rigidly to her historical moment but, in doing so, to repeatedly demonstrate her bad faith. The descriptions above suggest that Gilman’s primary goals came down to producing an effective “commodity on the intellectual market” and espousing radical causes as a “therapeutic diversion.” Might such accusations not speak far more to the anxieties of present-day literary criticism? Yet I am actually hesitant to make such a suggestion, since assertions that particular critical practices might stem in part from critics’ own anxieties tend to reinstate the familiar and reductive model whereby one is either anxious, a victim of a particular historical moment, or a perfectly self-aware agent whose highly rational claims possess no such unwitting motivations. LaCapra’s investigations into these matters offer a much more helpful, if perhaps more potentially troubling, model; he suggests that all scholars would do well to consider the effects of what might be called “transference” (to borrow the analytic term for the patient’s projections onto the analyst) on their work—that is, “the manner in which the problems at issue in the object of study reappear (or are repeated with variations) in the work of the historian” (Soundings ). The crucial point, for LaCapra, is that this repetition is unavoidable, as the sign of one’s genuine investment in a project; one cannot hope to eradicate it but can only try for that very reason to be as self-aware and responsible     

about it as possible. The potential for danger arises when the clear threat posed by transference—by one’s unavoidable entanglement with one’s object of study, causing “fear of possession by the past and loss of control over both it and oneself”—leads instead to elaborate forms of disavowal: “the temptation,” LaCapra writes, “to assert full control over the ‘object’ of study,” to achieve a “self-regarding ‘purity’” by temporally externalizing or “exorcis[ing]” an “‘other’ that is always to some extent within” (History ). Indeed, historicism’s own investment in “purity,” the longing for which it is so quick to condemn in both the late-nineteenth-century texts and their contemporary feminist champions, might be placed under some pressure here. The vehemence of some of these revisionary readings is quite striking—suggesting that, once the link to racial classification has been established, a text as seemingly diffuse as Jewett’s must be reinterpreted as being absolutely the opposite of diffuse, loose, open in any way. In one case, for example, this requires that we treat the clearly rather comic attempts at military strutting of old Sant’ Bowden, whom our informant Mrs. Todd dismisses as not a “sound man” (Jewett ), as rigid, deadly serious goose-stepping, such that Jewett’s picnic scene might reemerge as “all those white people marching around in military formation ritualistically affirming their racial purity, global dominance,” and so forth (Ammons “Material” ). This sort of reading is no less “purist” than the overturned one that would describe Jewett’s text (or Gilman’s) as an example of sheer, unmitigated openness and goodness: community, love of nature, maternalist values. Either the text questions all modes of ordering, or it stands revealed as the most rigidly, fiercely ordering apparatus imaginable. Historicist criticism’s strategies of disavowal, then, fit the modes I have been calling “obsessional” ones, in that they aim for an ideal “purity” or absolute “control.”14 As these are the very goals that historicism repeatedly condemns in writers such as Gilman and Jewett, we might say that we have here a particularly condensed instance of what LaCapra describes. That is, the very means employed to distance oneself from the object of study are what confirm one’s actual similarity to it—the similar desire to purify oneself through the assertion of an absolute difference. Yet the alternative cannot be for criticism to try harder to really avoid all taint of obsessional ordering in the future; indeed, the very truth that comes forward here is the way in which this very will to disclaim all resemblance to the other, intended to free one from its haunting grasp, turns out to have exactly the opposite effect. As Leo Bersani puts it, “[i]n denying a desire, we condemn ourselves to finding it everywhere” (). In other words, it is precisely by denying any and all repetition that we guarantee we will   



merely repeat, as opposed to trying to find some way of repeating with a difference—a theoretical notion that gains a particularly concrete resonance as an expression of the scholar’s relation to the historical text. Such insights might be termed deconstructive ones, challenging us to consider the limits of our own self-knowledge through the workings of internal difference. One of our favorite critical narratives of progress, of course, involves the way historicism takes over from a failed deconstructive criticism, which, along with psychoanalysis and other forms of so-called “high theory,” gets saddled with the label “ahistorical.” Specifically, deconstruction and feminism are frequently paired in the way we see in Peyser, who repeatedly dismisses those ahistorical feminists who would read Gilman merely as “an openended instance of negating, literary play” (Utopia ), “a playground of literary production” (“Reproducing” ). The message is clear: deconstructive feminism is about goofing off, as opposed to having the will to confront hard historical realities. In many of the less intellectually notable adaptations of deconstructive techniques, this may well be the case. Yet the repetition and the force of the epithets are again striking, and perhaps unsurprisingly so. Like all the modes of disavowal above, they both deflect attention from, and yet call attention to, the possibility that historicism itself might be revealed as equally chary of confronting the particular “hard reality” that deconstruction uncovers: not the clear lines separating “us” from “them,” or “then” from “now,” but the internal difference from aspects of one’s own deepest motivations that produces the transferential effects we see at work here. While feminist criticism has not always been deconstructive, it has gained much of its particular force from an empathetic rather than a distancing response to the texts it reads. The initial recovery of Jewett, for example, speaks to a powerful and continuingly relevant desire to value women’s work, to insist by canonizing a woman writer that her texts are worth inhabiting over and over again, rather than being consigned to historical oblivion. Feminism thus thrives on the very insistence that gets lost in more recent scholarship, the claim that historical texts do still speak passionately to the critic—that regarding them with a cool disdain, from a safe remove, is simply not a meaningful option. In their initial revival of Jewett, feminists lauded women’s regionalism for displaying the same quality felt to lie behind the revival itself: empathy. As one early piece asserted, Country of the Pointed Firs could be read as placing preeminent value on the possibility of “entering mentally into the feelings of someone else,” of “appreciative perception of another person or object” (Folsom ). When feminists began to express concern about the historicist muse    

umification of Jewett, it was this empathetic quality that they worried had fallen by the wayside. And yet empathy, of course, is not without its own dangers—the very sorts of dangers that historicists pointed out in the apparently empathetic texts feminists preferred. Built on recognizing another as like oneself, empathy can express the same “narcissism,” to use LaCapra’s term (History ), at work in historicism’s total distancing: hence, the way the results so often reduce to a “pure” goodness (in the writers whom we understand as like ourselves) or a “pure” badness (in those we see as unlike).15 The possibility of serious empathy—as the very basis of judgment—toward some features that we also find irredeemably disturbing or distressing remains elusive. In the remainder of this chapter, however, I want to argue that this possibility itself formed one of the most significant projects of regionalist fiction, one that, if examined in detail, might recast our sense of its relation to history and feminism alike. For Jewett and, even more, Mary Wilkins Freeman turn out to have been intrigued by a distinct conception of domesticity, in which its potential to grant seriousness to women’s lives is inextricable from its obsessional dimension.

Regionalism’s Castaways As it turns out, the more the initial wave of feminist critics expressed their bond with a writer like Jewett as the result of a female worldview rooted in maternal nurturing, caring, and openness, the more likely they were either to condemn or to view as “sick”—specifically, as obsessional—those characters in the books who seemed to express an alternate perspective. For the most part, these characters were men: Captain Littlepage, his very name suggesting the pathetic limitedness of his “bleak frozen tradition” (Ammons, Conflicting ), or Elijah Tilley, the sad fisherman “who cannot move forward from the death of his wife” (M. Graham ); “obsessive” and objectifying, he “rejects the processoriented fluidity of female culture” (Romines ). As exemplars of a worldview defined repeatedly as “masculine,” “linear,” “solitary,” and “obsessive,” these men could be counterposed to strong female role models like Almira Todd, who “flourish” and become communal guiding spirits “by embracing cyclical time” (M. Graham ). The nonlinear structure of The Country of the Pointed Firs expresses this feminine aspect of things: it is seen not as formless because nonnarrative, but as “cyclical,” like women’s embodied lives. In contrast to the male quest story, “the housewife’s time was closer to the sacred time of myth . . . It is the ‘timeless’ time of cyclic ritual . . . The woman’s experience appears,   



therefore, static, and in a mode of waiting . . . of time frozen into stasis” (Donovan ). While this might seem a truncated existence, these feminist rereadings imbue it with the positive quality of rootedness and concomitant “respec[t for] the environmental context,” as opposed to the masculine mode of selfassertion, given to “wrenching and reshaping that environment” to suit individual goals and push ever forward, alienating itself from nature and woman both (). Key paradoxes begin to emerge in these readings, however, around the central question of narrative temporality—of male “linear questing” versus female “circularity,” “waiting,” or “time frozen into stasis.” As instances of “women’s time,” the latter qualities receive positive valences from the critics who describe them. The problem is that these same qualities then seem to pop up in descriptions of the negatively cast men. Littlepage’s male tradition is also called “frozen” (Ammons, Conflicting ); he and Elijah Tilley are both said to respond neurotically to loss by attempting to “freeze time,” leaving them in an eternal state of “waiting” (M. Graham –). This waiting, frozen state receives a negative valence because it “suspend[s] growth,” meaning that the men cannot learn the lesson the narrator learns about the limits of repetitive, solitary obsessing (). Yet in this very example, “women’s time” and “men’s time” seem to have changed places. Suddenly it is the men who represent repetitive movement that stays in one place (i.e., is circular) and the women who are able to “grow”—the very essence of linear movement. I believe, however, that these very paradoxes can help us arrive at a reading of women’s regionalism that retains the possibility of empathy without the necessity of idealization, one in which the obsessionality of women’s lives can be seriously read. In fact, both the insistence on obsessionality as both masculine and feminine and the particular delineation in regionalism of its relation to women’s lives can be glimpsed in Jewett’s book in the specific way that it depicts the stories of young women. New England regionalism is often described as a literature devoted to women over sixty, and this is indeed not infrequently its focus. In Country, however, we do receive two windows into the lives of younger women: one being “Poor Joanna,” in the chapter of the same name, and the other being the young Mrs. Todd herself, as described in her reminiscences to the narrator. Joanna, interestingly, stands as the only female character to appear on the “masculine” side of Margaret Baker Graham’s division of the book into seven sections that alternate in a cyclic fashion between “women’s” and “men’s” time (but begin and end with women’s). Spurned by her lover, Joanna took up a soli    

tary existence on an otherwise abandoned island, where she lived out her days ascetically as “‘a sort of a nun or hermit person,’” according to Mrs. Todd’s voluble visitor, Mrs. Fosdick (Jewett ). Again, then, we have a case of someone who, in Graham’s words, “deliberately arrested her life”—she points out the lack of clocks on Joanna’s island—so as to dwell in a “frozen present” that is the melancholy result of an unassimilated loss (M. Graham ). Yet this therapeutic view, which places Joanna among the “stunted” characters who should have learned to move on and “embrac[e] life” like Mrs. Todd (), actually gets critiqued in the book by Mrs. Todd herself. Mrs. Fosdick states the view: “‘I expect nowadays, if such a thing happened,’” she says, referring to Joanna’s loss, “‘she’d have gone out West to her uncle’s folks or up to Massachusetts and had a change, an’ come home good as new. The world’s bigger an’ freer than it used to be.’” “‘No,’” Mrs. Todd responds. “‘Tis like bad eyesight, the mind of such a person: if your eyes don’t see right there may be a remedy, but there’s no kind of glasses to remedy the mind. No, Joanna was Joanna, and there she lays . . . ’” (). The position Mrs. Fosdick states here was echoed by one female reviewer of the short stories of Jewett’s sister New England regionalist, Mary Wilkins Freeman, in . The reviewer, Mary E. Wardwell, laments the fact that Miss Wilkins (herself not yet married) did not see fit to make room in her fiction for the decade’s “New Woman.” Although Wardwell admits that periodicals like the one in which she writes have not always been kind to this figure, she insists that a dose of regionalist fiction would convince anyone that “her mission is heaven-born”: To the remotest nook of farthest Vermont and New Hampshire will she penetrate with her clubs and her fashion-books and her scientific housekeeping. There will be no more old maids . . . living alone with a cat and a poor little memory of some faithless swain . . . but a busy, cheerful set of women, welldressed, well-fed, and perfectly happy though single. It would be less quaint, less picturesque . . . but most interesting if Miss Wilkins would take us back amongst some of her plain-song people after they have been stirred by the broad and vivifying influences of the time. (qtd. in Reichardt )

It is not surprising that, in Jewett’s Country, Mrs. Fosdick would appear as a proponent of such “broad and vivifying influences,” for she is depicted as having been a New Woman before the fact, accompanying men on sea voyages throughout her life. This modern refusal to confine herself to domestic life no   



doubt accounts for her claim that the world is “freer” now, that Joanna could have done all kinds of things once reserved primarily for men. Tellingly, the first one she mentions is going West—a move that neatly combines the masculine privilege of movement and expansion with therapeutics in the form of the west cure. For Mrs. Fosdick—as for that major proponent of “scientific housekeeping,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman—anyone can be set aright if he or she is introduced to the sound principles of a fully realized life, principles that modernity has come to recognize as best for all. As we saw, however, Gilman’s own Pasadena west cure avoided what she saw as the excesses of both women’s domesticity and men’s imperialist adventuring, settling instead on the kind of protosuburban middle ground depicted in Herland. In Mrs. Fosdick’s account of modernity, the world of Gilman’s dreams has indeed begun to emerge, such that neither “‘them strange straying creatur’s that used to rove the country’” nor their feminine opposites, “‘the ones that used to hive away in their own houses with some strange notion or other’” (Jewett ), are as commonly to be found. It is at this moment, however, that Mrs. Fosdick tempers her own support for modernity, for she makes this point in order to contrast the present Dunnet Landing unfavorably with that of the past. As she states to Mrs. Todd, “‘What a lot o’ queer folks there used to be about here, anyway, when we was young, Almiry. Everybody’s just like everybody else, now; nobody to laugh about, and nobody to cry about’” (). Mrs. Todd agrees: “‘Yes . . . there was certain a good many curiosities of human natur’ in this neighborhood years ago. There was more energy then, and in some the energy took a singular turn. In these days the young folks is all copy-cats, ’fraid to death they won’t be all just alike . . . ’” (Jewett ). It is at this point that the subject of Joanna comes up, as an example of the sort of willful eccentric the two women believe to be dying out. At first, Mrs. Todd is hesitant to talk about the hermit, her own late husband’s cousin: “‘I never want to hear Joanna laughed about,’ she said anxiously” (). Mrs. Fosdick reassures her she will not laugh, and they go on to discuss Joanna’s case at length, yet Mrs. Todd’s concerns never fully abate. “‘Poor Joanna!’” she sighs at one point, “as if there were things one could not speak about” (). Her refusal to endorse Mrs. Fosdick’s therapeutic response to Joanna seems to arise from this kind of feeling, this sense that to assert that one could merely “cure” Joanna is to claim to understand her fully and thus to dismiss her own perspective (of her condition’s incurability) as woefully misguided, merely outdated—the same response that, taken a step further, would lead to her being made an object of laughter. An alternate response to a story like Joanna’s would read her more in the     

way that Joanna read herself—not only in the sense of taking her perspective seriously, but in the sense of understanding the past not simply as past but as possessing a complex hold on the present. Joanna’s is clearly an extreme case in this regard, her entire life determined by a single early event, yet we glimpse another instance of such a survival in the very brief memories we receive of another younger woman, the maidenly Mrs. Todd. Twice in the book Mrs. Todd speaks to the narrator of her unmarried days: first, one night, she tells of a man she loved before meeting her husband, and then later, as they stand together in a field of pennyroyal, she speaks in an oddly veiled way of the way this herb has always reminded her of “‘the other one’” and of what her husband would have “‘had to know if we’d lived long together’” before he died (Jewett ). One critic has suggested that, given the use of pennyroyal to induce abortion (which the accomplished herbalist would no doubt have known), the fact that it reminds Mrs. Todd of her premarital love might suggest she had once been pregnant by this man, who was deemed off-limits to her because of his higher class position (Welburn –). Though speculative, it is a fascinating suggestion, for abortion offers a much more complex, ambivalent instance of women’s relation to maternity and to nature than is typically given by feminist readings of Jewett’s book. It helps to remind us that Mrs. Todd, the book’s most frequently cited ur-instance of female maternal powers, has not herself mothered actual children. And as a past event that still haunts her, abortion cuts against the cheerful therapeutic narrative that presents her simply as a model of flourishing growth and complete ease with herself, an ease said to be linked to her closeness to the earth through her knowledge of herbs. A lost love suggests a past event inducing only longing for what might have been; abortion, like Joanna’s decision to move to Shellheap Island in the bloom of her youth, both involves more of a woman’s own choice and more of an ambivalent relation to the life possibility that was cordoned off. A psychoanalytic model would suggest that this very ambivalence ensures the inability to simply put the past away. And this ensures that the past’s survival into the present also possesses an ambivalent cast. It can indeed be reassuringly nostalgic, like the Bowden Reunion, but it can also appear to “freeze time” in a more disturbing way, as in the cases of Joanna, Littlepage, and Elijah Tilley. As Mrs. Todd’s concerns about Joanna suggest, however, the book does not simply react against the hovering presence of an uneasy past by championing therapeutic progress, as Mrs. Fosdick initially does. Mrs. Todd wants to honor Joanna’s recalcitrant specificity in such a way that she is neither merely rendered distant (as part of the past) nor identified with fully (and thus brought   



into the present). Both of these gestures depend on narrative, and narrative is what Joanna’s story suspends. Her arresting story, then, begins to break down the split in feminist Jewett criticism between female nurturing domestic empathy and male solitary obsessiveness. For the entire point of the exchange between Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Fosdick, a point central to regionalist fiction, is to extend empathy to a figure who is solitary and obsessive, one who could otherwise easily become the object of the kind of amused contempt or therapeutic concern that feminist criticism indeed heaps on similar male figures like Captain Littlepage. In fact, Joanna’s clear similarity to the seamen Littlepage and Tilley confirms Gilman’s and Mrs. Fosdick’s sense that the people who “roved” constantly and those who “hived away in their own houses”—the ur-instances of masculine movement and feminine stasis—might be seen as two sides of the same coin, more like one another than either resembles the therapeutic happy medium preferred in modern life. Here domesticity is not the opposite of masculine restlessness but its mirror. This is to say, it takes the form we saw in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the naturalism of Frank Norris, in which the ultradomestic characters and the restless adventurers appear equally given over to an endless, excessive, impossible struggle against nature itself. And yet at the same time, Jewett does clearly endorse the nurturing, healing version of domesticity upon which feminist criticism has preferred to cast its gaze—a model predicated on the same idealized merger between nature and culture that governs Herland. We can see it clearly at work in the “female” sections of the book devoted to the gradually extending “family” of Mrs. Todd, her mother and brother, and eventually the Bowden Reunion. Given that the book alternates between the two views of domesticity (as the opposite of “male” obsessiveness and as its pair), might we not understand its back-and-forth, “cyclical” structure as a kind of feminized dialectics? It would be a dialectics between the two feminist views of domesticity and maternity that I described above—one that seeks to give worth to these undervalued feminine activities, and the other that rages against their perversity. More than Jewett’s does, however, the work of another New England woman regionalist, Mary Wilkins Freeman, places at center stage this more obsessional view of domesticity, as the mirror image of male wild adventuring, and grants women’s lives power and meaning through this antisentimental, naturalist view, rather than by overturning it.16 As Charlotte Perkins Gilman recognized in The Home, there may be no more powerful and sustained literary account extant of the way women’s purportedly affection-laden sphere can devolve into a nest of maniacal ferocity. What makes Freeman’s vision distinct     

from these feminist accounts (including Gilman’s theoretical ones), and closer to what we see in naturalism, is that her gothic portrayal of domesticity is not intended simply to demonstrate the need for a more healthfully organized home life, the lurid details of which could finally be mastered. Instead, like Jewett at those brief moments in Country, she is often as suspicious of the claims of modern therapeutics as she is of the blind regard for tradition. Her own brand of feminism depends crucially on a refusal to finally decide about the meaning of “nature”’s imperious demands on women’s (and men’s) lives.

Obsessional Domesticity For feminist readers of Mary Wilkins Freeman, the view of her female characters as obsessional has always, understandably, seemed a blight to be overcome. Indeed, the entire feminist recovery of Freeman’s work may be said to date from outrage at David Hirsch’s  assessment of her most famous heroine, Louisa Ellis, as “almost a case study of an obsessive neurosis” (). This clinical diagnosis of Freeman’s “New England Nun” appeared to many as but the final, most egregious affront in a long scholarly tradition of dismissing her strong female characters through a combination of historical and psychological modes of classification.17 As a genre, regionalist writing had long been felt to derive what significance it contained from its quasi-anthropological scrutiny of a crumbling society—here, the “vestigial” remains of New England Puritanism, once the culture had lost to a modernizing world both its moral authority and its ablebodied men (Westbrook ). In Freeman’s case in particular, however, this sense of historical decay was often thought to manifest itself through stories of individual decline. The “distorted fragments” of a once-meaningful religious dedication could be glimpsed in tale after tale of women, often aging spinsters, minding their households with a severity all out of proportion to the tasks’ actual significance.18 Such behaviors had been deemed “unbalanced and neurotic” before Hirsch’s piece (Pattee, History ); but his reading, perhaps because it focused on a younger heroine, took a stronger therapeutic line—implying that a cure for Louisa Ellis’s obsessional attachment to her home lay in the very marital path the young “nun” opts, over the course of the story, to forgo. How so? For Hirsch, we must investigate the deeper meaning, for Louisa, both of her exceedingly well-ordered home and of its potential invasion by her fiancé, Joe Dagget, an event nearing as the story begins. Following a visit in which he causes what Louisa deems all manner of chaotic upset—overturning her work basket, putting her books back on the table in the wrong order, and   



tracking dirt across her carpet—she begins to admit to uneasiness about the upcoming marriage, an uneasiness Freeman describes thus: Louisa had almost the enthusiasm of an artist over the mere order and cleanliness of her solitary home. She had throbs of genuine triumph at the sight of the window-panes which she had polished until they shone like jewels. She gloated gently over her orderly bureau-drawers, with their exquisitely folded contents redolent with lavender and sweet clover and very purity. Could she be sure of the endurance of even this? (Reader )

The real fear here, Hirsch suggests, is of the disorder and dirtiness of sexual passion. When Louisa decides to give Joe up to the “blooming” Lily Dyer, leaving them at story’s end outside her tended walls amid “the busy harvest of men and birds and bees” (), she turns her back on sexuality, fertility, and finally “life” itself. Choosing a “spiritual death” instead—an existence made up of pure repetition, or what Freeman calls “a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent” ()—she is said to speak darkly to Emerson’s sense of nineteenth-century man’s growing separation from nature. Hence, Hirsch writes, while Freeman may call her heroine a “nun,” “the irony of Louisa’s calling is that it is the very opposite of spiritual fulfillment,” for it depends on an obsessional investment in household things, mere objects, rather than in real values, either human or divine. The sense here of Louisa’s morbidity thus depends on a particular understanding of the meaning of the meticulous domestic activities that, as Freeman depicts her, do make up the life she prefers. Long stretches of the story are given over to careful descriptions of the way Louisa carries out particular mundane tasks, passages that often mimic in their painstaking level of detail Louisa’s own mode: Louisa tied a green apron round her waist, and got out a flat straw hat with a green ribbon. Then she went into the garden with a little blue crockery bowl, to pick some currants for her tea. After the currants were picked she sat on the back doorstep and stemmed them, collecting the stems carefully in her apron, and afterwards throwing them into the hen-coop. She looked sharply at the grass beside the step to see if any had fallen there. (Reader )

Yet the consonance here between the techniques of writer and character works to affirm what feminists have emphasized in their protests against what one calls     

the “nearly annihilating” claims made by Hirsch, Fred Pattee, and others—implying that if anyone has left Louisa Ellis for dead, it is those critics who can see her only as a pathetic relic (Marchalonis ). When Freeman states that Louisa approaches her domestic chores like an “artist,” Marjorie Pryse suggests, we should take this comparison seriously. The very lack of “usefulness” of many of her labors—her distillation of herbal essences “for the mere pleasure of it,” for example—may in fact attest to a potentially more significant aesthetic worth (Reader ). Just these sorts of activities would fall by the wayside, Louisa knows, had she a family of her own to contend with; that family, as Joe’s mother has “hinted” already, would surely “laugh and frown down all these pretty but senseless old maiden ways” (–). As Pryse makes clear, the larger feminist point here concerns the possibility of taking women’s housebound lives as seriously as Americanists have traditionally taken the masculine plots of manifest destiny or the concomitant flight away from the domestic realm. Louisa Ellis emerges anew as someone we might “admire or emulate,” rather than a “pathetic” creature we are “invite[d] . . . to shun” as hopelessly “lacking in desire or ambition” (“Uncloistered” ). In other words, these critics work against a sense of Louisa as the pathetic victim of forces, either historical or psychological, beyond her control, treating her instead as someone making a conscious choice of an unconventional path. After all, as Pryse points out, it is the presumed marriage plot that Freeman’s language actually depicts as the ultimate in unthinking passivity: . . . gently acquiescing with and falling into the natural drift of girlhood, [Louisa] had seen marriage ahead as a reasonable feature and a probable desirability of life. She had listened with calm docility to her mother’s views upon the subject . . . [and] when Joe Dagget presented himself . . . Louisa accepted him with no hesitation. He was the first lover she had ever had . . . and their marriage [appeared] as the inevitable conclusion of things. (Reader )

Hence, it now appears that when Louisa rejects Joe she “exercises her will” (Pennell ); indeed, she expresses in doing so a “genuine ‘freedom of the will,’” enabling the achievement of “wholeness and identity” (). “A New England Nun” thus moves all the way from a “case study of obsessional neurosis” to a tale of “self-fulfillment” (Reichardt )—a therapeutic triumph, in feminist terms. Louisa’s will emerges as a crucial point of debate here because Freeman’s work has long been thought to center around “the issue of the will,” a subject   



seen as central to her New England inheritance of Puritan doctrine. The feminist aim lies in moving from a discussion of will in Calvinist terms—as pertaining only to “submission” to “a larger [divine] will outside the self”—to the more modern, liberatory notion of Freeman’s work as being about an “individual will” (Pennell ), and specifically a woman’s, that chooses its own “path” in a salutary way (). The problem, then, is that the understanding of Freeman as a recorder of a denuded Calvinism has most often conceived of her characters as excessively, indeed “perversely” given over to just this sort of expression of individual will. Moreover, this conception derives from Freeman herself. In the introduction to her  novel Pembroke, she explains that for her, to write about “a typical New England village”—that is, to write regionalist fiction—means to create “a study of the human will . . . in different phases of disease and abnormal development” (v, iii). This sense of “abnormally developed”—that is, overdeveloped—will has been crucial to both the sense of Freeman characters as “vestigial” cases of Puritan “stubbornness” (Thompson ) and the notion of them as obsessional neurotics; Perry Westbrook’s account, another that feminism has deplored, makes the link by using the turn-of-the-century term for these kinds of symptoms, “disease of the will” (). There is something “morbid,” he remarks, about the very force of the will driving a character like Martha Patch, heroine of Freeman’s early story “An Honest Soul” (Westbrook ); in her own rigorous dedication to her “housewifely” activity of quilt-making (Freeman, Reader ), she evinces “a volition so terrific that it defied starvation itself” (Westbrook ). Martha Patch seems indeed a useful figure for beginning to ask whether feminists are right, or even whether their aims are best served, in insisting that Freeman depicts domestic labor not as obsession-compulsion but as a mode of feminine “self-fulfillment.” It is not hard to see that the more hyperbolic manifestations of Louisa Ellis’s attachment to her home—most notably, her extreme disquiet when Joe Dagget replaces her books on the table in the “wrong” order—must be downplayed so that readings like Pryse’s may succeed. In Martha, however, these moments of fierce dedication to a totalized “completeness” are far more extreme, much harder to ignore. In her attempt to finish two quilts for her neighbors, she enters into a spiral remarkably akin to that of “The Yellow Wallpaper”: she keeps completing them, only to discover that she has gotten one small detail wrong and has to tear them up and start all over again. In the meantime, she gazes occasionally out her small rear window, obsessing about “‘whether that ’ere spot is greener than the rest because the sun shines brightly thar, or because somethin’s buried thar’” (Reader ). Finally, she does     

at last get the quilts finished properly—only to collapse, “so faint and dizzy that she hardly knew herself”: “She did not feel ill, only absolutely too weak and helpless to move.” “‘I’m mad!’” cries Martha Patch, driving home her resemblance to Gilman’s unhappy heroine (). In doing so, however, she also helps to remind us that for Gilman herself, the somewhat less than fulfilling portrayal of domestic labor that we get here was the entire feminist point of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s stories. Indeed, it is striking to note the extent to which the repudiated prefeminist readings of characters like Louisa and Martha as cases of “diseased will” echo Gilman, who also saw these stories as providing evidence of the way a purely domestic existence, set apart from the main currents of “human life,” could drive any woman to a “morbid” state of “monomania,” or obsessionally overdeveloped will (Home ).19 A recognition of this similarity can remind us that feminism has not always sought simply to restore value and beauty to women’s unsung activities; another strain within it has done the precise opposite, recognizing that the case for a broader female sphere must at least acknowledge the deep inadequacy of the existing one. Simone de Beauvoir’s classic description in The Second Sex of the dramatic results of women’s confinement to housebound “immanence” comes even closer than Gilman does to agreeing with the purportedly antifeminist “case studies” of Freeman’s female characters as denying life itself: . . . very often the housekeeper submits to [her fate] in a kind of madness that may verge on perversion, a kind of sado-masochism. The maniac housekeeper wages her furious war against dirt, blaming life itself for all the rubbish all living growth entails. When any living being enters her house, her eye gleams with a wicked light: “Wipe your feet, don’t tear the place apart, leave that alone!” . . . She becomes bitter and disagreeable and hostile to all that lives: the end is sometimes murder. ()

For Beauvoir, this maniacal fervor was only a logical response to the Sisyphuslike repetition that made all domestic work inherently obsessional in form. “Such work has a negative basis,” she writes, “cleaning is getting rid of dirt, tidying up is eliminating disorder. . . . no satisfaction is possible [for] the victory is never final” (). Of course, to the extent that these feminist critiques see domesticity itself as the problem here, they would hardly endorse Hirsch’s notion of a marital cure for someone like Freeman’s Louisa. It is not at all clear, though, that many of the earlier scholars who read these as stories of “morbid” frustration did not   



implicitly move in the direction of a feminist perspective like that of Beauvoir or Gilman, by ascribing these women’s symptoms to their lack of a sufficiently broad stage. When F. O. Matthiessen, writing in the s, states that these characters have simply been trapped in environments that “did not provide enough elements for the full normal development of any personality” (), he sounds remarkably like Gilman herself; yet he is only one of a number of readers who did see in just these obsessive behaviors the potential for “passionate commitments,” even a “heroism,” that lacked only a “purpose worthy of commitment” (J. Martin ). Probably the strongest of these early treatments appears in Van Wyck Brooks’s New England: Indian Summer, in an unfairly discounted reading that may be the most powerful account of Freeman’s work extant. On the one hand, Brooks hardly stints on the obsessional dimension of the domestic lives Freeman portrays; he may well provide the most stringent recording of this aspect. Remarking on women who “spent the whole spring cleaning house,” who “tucked pieces of camphor under the wings of stuffed canaries” and “had the boards of the parlour floor arranged so that they could be lifted and cleaned on the under-side,” he asserts that, plainly, “[m]uch of this was morbid, and a boarder needed the help of heaven to survive amid these terrible exactions.” Yet for Brooks, the question remains: “what did these exactions mean?” (, emphasis mine). And remarkably, without once denying that there is morbidity here, that there is rigidity and reduction, Brooks tells us that simply to see these features is not enough. The gestures he proceeds to make are twofold: one “historicist,” one not. The historicist gesture looks like this: . . . these habits spoke of a thirst for perfection that could not command its field of action, or, rather, could command no larger field. The temperament that cleaned the under-side of floorboards would have cleaned the under-side of a government also, if it had had the government instead of the parlour; and in any larger sphere,—the running of a homestead,—these habits would have had their normal sweep. . . . The situation, not the persons, produced the morbid symptoms . . . ()

Here the morbidity is not denied, but it is historically accounted for; were the goals of a Gilman or a Beauvoir to be attained, these lives might take a very different form. Brooks’s next and more elaborated move, however, actually creates a complexity that moves beyond this familiar dyad.

    

As they could not alter conditions, they lived within them; and, living within the conditions, they mastered the conditions and kept a margin for their souls to grow in. Well, then, what a triumph to pay off the mortgage . . . or, if they could not do this, to have a black silk dress or a bonnet with black-thread lace and a tuft of jet. This was really living, and they lived with zest. . . . those for whom these aging women seemed to be creating nothing might have changed their minds if they had seen what lay behind the bush or the oleander. . . . They were all symbols of life for people who were filled with a passion for life that was very seldom shared by city-dwellers; for those who prefer to starve rather than say they are hungry are living as the well-fed seldom live. All these villagers lived with a vengeance . . . (–)

“All these villagers lived with a vengeance.” We need to pause, I think, and let the remarkable aspects of this claim, applied to the stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman in , to sink in appropriately. For the one thing these women are always said not to be doing is participating in “life,” in “real life,” in what the hypermasculine vitality of the new naturalism was said to provide. The sign of their lack of life was their engagement in the sorts of “morbid,” trivial exactions that Brooks describes. Somehow those very exactions have themselves led Brooks to determine just how much these aging, dismissed New England women in fact do live. How? This same question had long been asked about Freeman herself. As Matthiessen puts it, “How did a girl in her early twenties who had had little experience that could be measured in external events, and who had been shut in upon herself by delicate health, how did she contrive to know so much about life . . . ?” (, emphasis mine). The question is asked, similar cases (Emily Brontë, Zola [!]) are raised, and yet the end is always simple wonderment.20 Herself constrained physically, economically, regionally, and by her feminine upbringing, Freeman is in many ways very close to the obsessive women she portrays, and yet, even more definitively than they do, she finds “life” in the suffocating parlor where no real life, according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, should flourish. Or rather, if there is life, it should be the bareness of mere existence, the poor woman’s meager attempt to “get by,” the domestic woman’s ceaseless immersion in the dailiness of embodiment—feeding, clothing, and so forth. Yet this is not what Brooks describes. “All these villagers lived with a vengeance” hardly reduces to the fact that they stayed alive; the entire point of their stories is that, against all odds, they did more. They lived. And they did so

  



through that very “diseased will,” that “volition so terrific that it defied starvation itself.” The result, however, is that what is powerful about their lives cannot be separated from its obsessional excess. The point could hardly be to deny that, in the hands of a Hirsch or a Fred Pattee, that very obsessional dimension offered a rationale for distancing Freeman’s women through twinned historicist and therapeutic means. Yet Brooks’s remarks are proof that it need not do so, and thus they offer a challenge to feminism to scrutinize its own tendencies toward a retrofitted brand of therapeutic interpretation. Freeman might well have agreed with critics of her own era like Mary Wardwell, who saw the New Woman’s feminist agitations as a salutary means of bringing more of life’s richness to her obsessive domestic women— yet her writerly balancing act, as Brooks recognizes, lies in acknowledging that need for change without denying a certain specific seriousness to the lives that lack it, an element that is indeed crucial to her feminism in its ability to give those degraded lives grandeur. As we saw in the discussion between Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Fosdick in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, the sense of a strangeness, even a monstrosity, in the “curiosities of human natur’” who populated New England villages at an earlier moment may not be separable from a sense of those figures’ singular “energy”—in marked contrast to today’s “young folks,” “’fraid to death they won’t be all just alike” (Jewett ). The depiction here is nearly echoed by Freeman’s own Pembroke introduction, which justifies that book’s focus on cases of diseased will by discussing one real-life village of sixty years past in which “every one [of the inhabitants] had some incredibly marked physical or mental characteristic” (v).21 Freeman hardly aims to sentimentalize such characters. Yet her stories show her to be clearly intrigued by their ferocity.22 And her sense of its potential meanings is also in keeping with Mrs. Todd’s striking conflation of “them strange straying creatur’s that used to rove the country” and “the ones that used to hive away in their own houses with some strange notion or another” (Jewett ).23 That is, here as we saw in both Gilman and Frank Norris, domesticity as “monomania” can be compared to men’s thirst for restless questing—that “monomania” often attributed to larger-than-life New England literary male figures such as a Captain Ahab. Freeman’s portrayal of Pembroke’s Deborah Thayer is typical: Deborah’s face, as she beat the eggs and made cake, looked as full of stern desperation as a soldier’s on the battlefield. Deborah never yielded to any of the vicissitudes of life; she met them in fair fight like enemies and vanquished

    

them, not with trumpet and spear, but with daily duties. It was a village story how Deborah Thayer cleaned all the windows in the house one afternoon when her first child had died in the morning. Today she was in a tumult of wrath and misery over her son; her mouth was so full of the gall of bitterness that no sweet on earth could overcome it; but she made sweet cake. (–)

Domesticity here finds its irascible force in resembling masculine adventuring— indeed particularly in the way feminist critics have redescribed it, as a displacement of otherwise violent emotional conflicts. Yet when the same “stern” domesticity, frightening in its rigor, appears in someone like the celebrated Sarah Penn of “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” it becomes clearer that what is disturbing about it and what appears admirable cannot be so readily separated. Sarah, too, is a warrior, but one who triumphs over an obstinate husband; in defeat, he “was like a fortress whose walls had no active resistance, and went down the instant the right besieging tools were used” (Freeman, Reader ). As in the case of Deborah Thayer, however, this female bellicosity emerges not as a revolt against domesticity but as an extension of its prerogatives. Sarah battles for the right to move into the new, larger structure her husband has built as a barn, so as to better wage an ongoing battle against domestic disorder that is depicted as every bit as hyperbolic as Deborah’s. Battling in the name of a more fully realized domestic life, she resembles Ann Romines’s description of the housekeeper as “both victor and victim—for in beating back nature, she is also subduing an aspect of herself” ().24 Indeed, Freeman makes this explicit by showing us that even Sarah Penn’s “meek” aspect prior to her “revolt” resulted from a powerfully exerted “will”: “her eyes, fixed upon the old man,” make clear that “the meekness had been the result of her own will, never the will of another” (Reader ). Finally, with the return of this issue of will, we can revisit the original perspective on Freeman’s regionalism as a mapping of Calvinism in decline, along with the feminist sense that granting serious value and power to her female characters required that we leave such a reading behind. Need we do so? Not if Freeman’s project entails as much an account of the transformation and even revitalization of Calvinist structures in modernity as a charting of their necessary demise.

Women’s Work Is Never Done Crucial to this point would be an admission of a certain obsessional dimension—a ferociously repeated failure, and hence a kind of productive impo  



tence—to Calvinism itself. Yet this is exactly the main thesis of a standard account like Austin Warren’s The New England Conscience, which begins with the first American Puritans and moves through Thoreau and Hawthorne to late chapters on Freeman, Henry Adams, and Henry James. As his title would suggest, for Warren these authors’ expression of a specifically New England sensibility, their legacy from the Puritan fathers, takes the form of a sense of bad conscience that can never be purged. The Puritan’s attempt to come to grips with the brutal finality of predestination produces “a perpetual self-scrutiny, such a concern about details of conduct and purity of intention as leaves the penitent always uncertain whether he has confessed all his sins and whether his absolution is valid” (). Existence becomes a struggle against “doubts” and “anxiety” (Weber ), a never-ending quest for absolute “certainty” ()— the dream of total control over what Weber, in his related discussion of the Protestant ethic, called the “planless and unsystematic character” of human life in a “state of nature” (–).25 Once cast in this fashion, however—as an “interminable dialectic” that continually comes up against “nature’s protest” (Pattee, Side-Lights )—the Calvinist’s moral struggle starts to resemble domestic labor, which in fact forms the final example in Warren’s discussion of New England conscience: the glorification of self-discipline produces the lauded New England housekeeper whose “gift of ‘faculty’ enables [her] to have all her housework done by noon” (). In recasting Calvinism’s great religious dialectic as a way to talk about everyday behavior and individual character, Freeman might seem to anticipate Freud’s interest in “the resemblance between what are called obsessive actions in sufferers from nervous affections and the observances by which believers give expression to their piety,” which he discusses in his  essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (). Freud discusses much of what we have seen here: “the qualms of conscience brought on by [the rituals’] neglect . . . the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.” He goes on to suggest that, of course, “while the minutiae of religious ceremonial are full of significance and have a symbolic meaning, those of neurotics seem foolish and senseless. In this respect an obsessional neurosis presents a travesty, half comic and half tragic, of a private religion” (). With these remarks, we would seem to be back in the territory of the original readings of “A New England Nun” against which feminist criticism protested—Louisa Ellis’s irreligious ritual as a sign of pathos or at most of comedy, a marker of an entire region’s historical diminution. Freud, however, does not end matters here. As he hastens to insist, obsessive rituals around everyday     

objects and behaviors are in fact “perfectly significant in every detail,” if understood properly as symbols or forms of representation (). And in this regard, they are not even so clearly different from religious practices, for “the ordinary pious individual, too, performs a ceremonial without concerning himself with its significance,” which is in any case “mostly symbolic” even to the priest who grasps it (); as a result, “there is a similar tendency to a displacement of psychical values, so that the petty ceremonials of religious practice gradually become the essential thing and push aside the underlying thoughts” (). Where obsessional actions do differ, Freud further suggests, is in their “greater individual variability” compared to “the stereotyped character of ritual” and in “their private nature as opposed to the public and communal character of religious observances” (). As these kinds of behaviors lose their importance for the formation of a community, that is, they perhaps become of greater interest as ways of talking about individuality and even creativity—a “ritual of one’s own” rather than conformity to a generalized “stereotype.” One might protest that the individual here is not just any individual, but a neurotic one. Yet the interest of Freeman’s fiction, I would argue, which is also the interest of the “naturalist moment” more broadly, lies more in its suspension between the older moral discourse of Calvinism and the “modern” psychological alternative that Freud represents. This in-between place, yoking the two, is expressed by her language of both “will” and “New England character”—which is to say, by her status as a “regionalist” writer in the s. According to Fred Pattee, what distinguishes Freeman from her New England literary predecessors, such as Jewett and Howells, is the way she combines their investigation of the region with what he calls “the new focus, to seek for the strange, the unique in background and character.” “The times demanded” eccentrics, he asserts, and in New England this meant investigating the remains of Puritan conscience, which in Freeman’s stories specifically are found to have “resulted in a type of womanhood often so individual and so peculiar in its tragic problems as to be classifiable as unique” (Pattee, Side-Lights ). Pattee’s description here is striking, because he seems to make Freeman’s very interest in her region’s leftovers something that is modern or “new” about her fiction. It would seem to be a thread linking her work to the other literary movement of the ’s, naturalism, which surely also depicts characters with a near-allegorical kind of “grotesque impossibility,” to employ a phrase used by one contemporary periodical to critique Freeman’s (qtd. in Pattee, Side-Lights ). Certainly Freeman’s form of regionalism shares with naturalism a belief that these sorts of figures can stand at fiction’s center stage, rather than being   



relegated to marginal comic relief, a gesture that often goes hand in hand with a greater attention to the lower class. To place them there, however, is to implicitly already contest the modern therapeutic belief that these are merely vestigial types; it is to suggest that they perhaps can pose a particular kind of challenge to modernity itself. This recognition would seem to go along with feminism’s sense that these women represent the stirrings of something new as much as they hark back to an older time. The emergence they represent, however, could not be merely the therapeutic, hygienically organized feminism we see championed in Herland, for this is exactly the conformist ideal against which Freeman and Jewett pitch their unreconstructed eccentric types. Instead, where new and old come together is in the very dialectic we have been tracing, whereby that desire for an absolute triumph over nature’s chaos—the housekeeper’s, and Gilman’s, obsessional ideal—is not given up on so much as its perversity is allowed to come forward alongside the legitimacy of its claims. In , a year before the publication of Freeman’s first book, Henry James also anticipated the decade that followed by deciding to write a “naturalist” novel along the lines of Émile Zola. What has not been noted, however, is that doing so seemed to look very much like writing a regionalist work. Henry James’s naturalist experiment took the form of a study of a particular group of people from a particular place, and that place—as his title, The Bostonians, indicated—was New England. James’s antiheroine, Olive Chancellor, in fact appears as one of the final and most obsessional examples in Austin Warren’s study of the New England conscience; she is, as another critic opines, a figure much like Freeman’s Louisa Ellis, and yet far more “brilliant and sinister and tragic” (Foster ). This is not an unfair description; Olive is at once an activist and a figure who seems strangely “morbid,” as James himself puts it (Bostonians ), in that her feminist beliefs cannot be separated from a dark view of the unlikelihood of any significant change. Here is a feminist with little or none of Charlotte Gilman’s rosy view of a feminized future; she is far closer to the gnarled specimens of Freeman’s fiction. Yet what she brings forward, ineluctably, is those figures’ potential relation to the future that their willfulness would seem to be pitched against. What she might help us to see is how a certain sense of futurity could come forward through that very willfulness, that persistent turn back against the self’s own demands. She suggests, in distinction from a feminism that would treat them as opposed, that such might indeed be the twinned work of s regionalist and naturalist fiction.     



     Fadmongering and Feminism in Henry James

It is not possible to ride a road or rail, to read a review, a magazine or newspaper, without continually being reminded of the subject which lady-writers love to call the Woman Question. . . . Woman at the present epoch has persuaded herself that she is the salt of the earth as well as the sweet, that her intelligence, her faculties, her fads and crazes are greater and of more importance than they have ever been, and, mentally, she adds, greater than anything else in the evolvements of the fin-de-siècle. . . . Women’s pictures, women’s plays, women’s books. What is it that makes them temporarily so successful, and eternally so wanting? —A. G. P. Sykes, “The Evolution of the Sex” What does it look like to write a novel about the feminist movement? In the nineteenth-century American canon, Henry James’s The Bostonians () furnishes a rare example. The many scholars who have probed what may be James’s most controversial book tend to make two claims about the text’s “broader” concerns. To write about feminism, it appears, means either to write about the relation of personal to public life, with the latter defined as exerting excessive pressures upon individual self-determination, or to write about history, and specifically the historical moment of the novel’s composition.1 Both of these readings come into play when The Bostonians is identified, along with The Princess Casamassima (also ), as one of James’s rare forays into the genre of naturalism. As we have seen, if naturalism depicts persons less as selfdetermining agents than as embodiments of the particular environment in which they dwell, that environment may be understood as a temporal as much as a spatial one, locating persons amid the exigencies of a particular moment in historical time. In this chapter, I argue that in order to bring these strands of thought about The Bostonians together, and specifically together with its focus on feminism, we 

need to grasp the workings of what I will call fad culture. The fad is that embodiment of historicity that most pressures the self-determining individual, producing instead a subject that is fully public and fully historical. What I mean is simply this: if we ascribe someone’s interests or actions to a fad for that activity, we imply that those actions derive purely from inhabiting a particular moment in time. That moment was “the time when everyone was doing x”; we might indeed say that any given moment becomes legible as a moment through the category of the fad. This is not to suggest, however, that the fad’s relation to the writing of history is a straightforward one. In fact, I claim the opposite, that the fad often operates as the limit of historical knowledge. This chapter demonstrates how this might be so and theorizes the significance of the fad’s alignment with feminism in James’s novel. That alignment, I argue, opens up a set of questions that become central to American naturalist fiction in the s: questions about how the figure of the New Woman, the late nineteenth century’s recognizably public feminist, might alter our usual understandings of historical narration.

The Fad for Feminism The Bostonians narrates the struggle between two people, the New England feminist Olive Chancellor and her conservative southern cousin, Basil Ransom, for the loyalties of Verena Tarrant, a beautiful young woman who has achieved prominence as a speaker for women’s rights. For Olive, such fame forms Verena’s intended end; for Basil, it desecrates a personage meant—as he believes all women are—“‘to be agreeable to men’” (), and in this case specifically himself, in marriage. Most frequently, the disagreement turns on the source and meaning of Verena’s allegiance to feminism. Olive admits no gap between Verena’s public persona and the woman offstage; for her, the movement simply defines Verena, being the “work . . . with which her very heart-strings were interlaced” (). The veteran reformer Miss Birdseye puts it similarly: “‘Those views are just her life’” (). From this perspective, it appears perfectly reasonable for Miss Birdseye to inquire of Basil how he can so admire Verena yet so deplore the spinsterish Olive, for “‘their opinions are just the same’” (). Basil finds this logic incomprehensible. “‘My dear madam,’” he responds, “‘does a woman consist of nothing but her opinions? I like Miss Tarrant’s lovely face better, to begin with’” (). This view decisively rejects that of Olive and Miss Birdseye; one’s public declarations no longer serve as a sign of who one is but have become merely    

things one produces. As such, they can more legitimately be ignored. Such a perspective marks Verena’s approach to Basil as well; she tells Olive, “‘I don’t loathe him—I only dislike his opinions’” (). The difficulty lies in the inevitability that, once severed altogether from the self, a person’s “opinions” can easily begin to seem merely disposable. And this is, in fact, the logic that Basil actually applies to Verena. He goes on to inform Miss Birdseye, “‘I don’t believe that at bottom they are Miss Tarrant’s opinions’” (). Miss Birdseye is shocked, but this reasoning will sound very familiar to the reader, who has witnessed its shaping role in Basil’s response to Verena from the first. Hearing her give an oration at a party honoring the celebrated feminist Mrs. Farrinder, to which Olive has reluctantly brought her curious visiting cousin, he decides that “she didn’t mean it, she didn’t know what she meant, she had been stuffed with this trash by her father, and she was neither more nor less willing to say it than to say anything else” (). Later, he offers this same interpretation, quite unvarnished, to Verena herself: . . . you ought to know that your connexion with all these rantings and ravings is the most unreal, accidental, illusory thing in the world. You think you care about them, but you don’t at all. They were imposed upon you by circumstances, by unfortunate associations . . . It isn’t you, the least in the world, but an inflated little figure (very remarkable in its way too), whom you have invented and set on its feet, pulling strings, behind it, to make it move and speak, while you try to conceal and efface yourself there. ()

This image of Verena as “stuffed” and “inflated” with feminist ideology certainly accords with Basil’s own hope to separate the desirable woman from her uncongenial beliefs. Yet it is also understandable given the way Verena has been presented to him from that first occasion, in which her speech is explicitly explained as the result of mesmerism. Passive as a “moving statue” (), she waits in Miss Birdseye’s parlor as her father, the mystic healer Selah Tarrant, “rest[s] his long, lean hands upon her head” () in preparation for voices from “outside” to “flow through her” (). When her mother expresses concern that Verena may disappoint the assembled, the subject of her fears remains unfazed: “‘It isn’t me, mother’” (). While Verena dispenses with her father’s aid as the book progresses, she continues to be described as responding to the influence of Olive’s will (“Verena was completely under the charm” []), as she explains to Basil: “‘She tells me what to say—the real things, the strong things. It’s Miss Chancellor as much as me!’” (). In sum, Verena never ceases to explain herself as the result of forces outside her.     



Does this fact tell us something about feminism, however, or merely about Verena? After all, James’s narrator informs us that the girl’s very “essence” lies in her desire to please others (). In this respect, we might well accord with Howard Kerr’s comment that, in ultimately assenting to Basil’s construal of her as made “for privacy, for him, for love” (Bostonians ), Verena “had simply responded to a more personal and sexual ‘magnetism’ than either her father or Olive Chancellor possessed” (Kerr ). James’s language certainly accords with this interpretation; Basil’s hold over Verena is described three times as a “spell” cast over her as she listens to his voice (, , ). (The metaphor would seem to place his desire to “take possession of Verena Tarrant” in rather a new light [].) Perhaps, then, this should really be seen, as Kerr argues, as a novel about “mediumistic personality,” one in which the fashionable trappings of feminism and spiritualism are secondary to, or mere tropes for, a plot that turns on the kind of psychological investigation for which James’s fiction is more commonly lauded. Martha Banta has suggested similarly that, given James’s known skepticism regarding matters of the occult, we might account for The Bostonians’s focus as the result of a realization that “[t]erms used by empirical realists were inadequate to reveal that other, inner reality of acute psychic sensitivity” (Henry James ). Yet to treat the topical concerns of The Bostonians as mostly window dressing for a story of less time-bound human relations may be too hasty. James himself, after all, cast the project in his notebooks very much as an attempt to get at the contours of a particular social moment: I wished to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions, and I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf. (Notebooks )

In fact, even those readings that treat the novel as essentially a series of psychological portraits have tended to marshal their claims about the characters’ interiorities on behalf of implicit claims about their political commitments. Sallie J. Hall is typical in this regard, stressing not only Verena’s “extreme malleability”—and thus her moral flimsiness, the most damning attribute in a Jamesian world—but also Olive’s “extreme inflexibility,” her “monomania” (, , ). If Verena’s initial attraction to feminism can be explained by her natural susceptibility to influence, Olive’s unwavering devotion may be seen to grow just as clearly out of what Hall calls her “personal aberrations” ()—    

chief among them, for Hall as for many early critics, being her repressed lesbian desire. While the two women might appear opposites, then, their feminist commitments allow us to detect an underlying similarity. In both cases, Hall implies, the lack of self-determination, the guidance by forces (whether internal or external) beyond one’s conscious control, creates a fertile ground for the feminist movement. Thus, here, as well as elsewhere in the criticism, a “psychological” reading can scarcely be distinguished from a “social” one. Olive is dubbed “the compulsive feminist” (Kerr ), one whose “constant theme,” or idée fixe, is “the image of the unhappiness of women” (A. Warren ). We can begin to understand this nexus of topicality and compulsion with greater specificity if we consider the idea that feminism in The Bostonians tends to take the form of a fad. Although it offers no etymology of fad, the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term’s initial broad usage to the mass media of the late nineteenth century. The definitions provided from that era suggest a shift in meaning from one now nearly obsolete (“a crotchety rule of action” or “a fussy, over-particular person”) to a second that edges closer to present-day usage (“a pet project, especially of social or political reform, to which exaggerated importance is attributed; in wider sense, a crotchet, hobby, craze”). One might note first the somewhat surprising emphasis even in the latter case on “social or political reform,” in contrast to the notion of “hobby,” which fits more closely our contemporary sense that fads have to do chiefly with such consumer pleasures as popular music, food, or clothes. In addition, one may detect a shift from a notion of individual idiosyncrasy to the more familiar sense of a collective, group delirium. By the time of the  Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, for example, fads were specifically said to “occur in widely different areas of group life” (qtd. in Hoffmann and Bailey, xv). As a strictly individual tendency, however, faddishness appears quite commonly in the psychological literature of the turn-of-the-century period to describe compulsive individuals driven to return to the same set of concerns over and over again. In his The Pathology of Mind, the British physician Henry Maudsley mentions a patient “tormented by what he called ‘fads’: something came into his mind to be said or done . . . and he had thereupon an irresistible impulse to go on repeating the act over and over again” (). Théodule Ribot suggests similarly that the less extreme cases of “fixed ideas with obsession” often appear as “a sort of whim, a crotchet, a mania, using this last word in its usual and vulgar sense” (). Thus, individuals manifesting more or less extreme compulsive tendencies may be said to develop a “mania” or a “fad” for a     



certain idea or activity, a usage we see both in James (Olive’s “mania for ‘reform’” []) and frequently in the naturalist novels of Frank Norris: “Trina still had her mania for family picnics” (McTeague ); “This service of plate had come to be Zerkow’s mania” (); “It became a fad with him to do without matches, using as a substitute ‘lights,’ tapers of twisted paper . . . He found amusement for two days in twisting and rolling these ‘lights’” (Vandover and the Brute –). In these kinds of instances, the narrowed focus and excess of attention lavished on a behavior with little or no generalizable human significance marks a given individual’s movement toward “eccentricity,” both in the colloquial sense of becoming an “eccentric” and in the more literal one of moving in a singular orbit peripheral to common life.2 Yet this is precisely where things become interesting, given that these same notions of fad and mania can also appear as ways of describing widely shared behaviors or beliefs—ones indeed defined by their being widely shared, at least during the window of a given moment in time. If, as Havelock Ellis writes, the “crank” individual or “mattoid” is someone “whose whole life pursues an eccentric and futile orbit of its own” (Man ), something odd would seem to be happening when an entire era decides to join in. For his part, it should be noted, Ellis believes that such extreme cases of individualism are rarely women, although, he states, “that very mild mattoid, the ‘faddist,’” may well be, given women’s “general affectability” by “minor stimuli” (). By contrast, William James argues that committed reformers such as John Brown or, notably, the suffragette and WCTU leader Frances Willard might be viewed as “mattoids” (Taylor ); only history, and sometimes a far-flung history, can hope to distinguish a “martyr” from a “fanatic” (H. Campbell ). As a result, however, a “mania” considered during its own moment can appear both hard to interpret and unsettling in its provocative potential, and perhaps never more than when it clearly moves beyond one individual’s obsession to grip a wider public. A writer for The Living Age observed in the s about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her followers that they were “contemptible . . . in their own persons, but formidable and almost appalling if considered as signs of the times” (“Fin-deSiècle Woman,” ). I would say it is precisely as “signs of the times” that Basil Ransom excoriates the feminists he encounters in The Bostonians. More commonly, he is thought to position himself simply against a culture of publicity, which the book’s feminists would seem literally to embody: in Miss Birdseye’s “faded face,” one glimpses “a kind of reflection of ugly lecture-lamps” (Bostonians ), while Mrs. Farrinder, with her “lithographic smoothness,” boasts “some   

thing public in her eye” (). Because the narrator’s perspective seems at one here with Basil’s, readings stressing such quotes neatly enable Basil to act as a stand-in for James himself, disgusted by modern America’s “culture of triumphant vulgarity and intrusiveness” (Habegger, Henry James ). A number of more recent studies, however, have emphasized that James’s relation to mass culture was more ambivalent than he tended to let on. I would say that the notion of the fad condenses this ambivalence. As we will see, it acts, more than anything else, as the motor behind Basil’s opposition to Olive and the other feminists, and yet James’s own decision to write about feminism as a sign of the times makes clear his own vexed participation in fad culture. Certainly it is fad culture, as a particular form assumed by a generalized culture of publicity, that both Basil and James’s narrator appear to mock most savagely throughout The Bostonians. Its most shameless progenitor, the “celebrated magazinist” Matthias Pardon (), is pleased to be a “thoroughly modern young man,” one in whose mind “the newest thing . . . came nearest exciting . . . the sentiment of respect” (). Although Olive disdains him, he sees her and himself as combatants for the same glory, that of playing the “great card” that is Verena while she is young and fresh (): “it had not hitherto befallen him to be made to feel that he was not—and could not be—a factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed to keep that favourable setting for herself” (). And certainly Olive, too, enjoys championing what she calls the “new ideas” () or “the new truths” (to which Basil ripostes, “‘I have never yet encountered in the world any but old truths—as old as the sun and moon’” []). She admits to caring little whether Verena’s charm amounts to no more than a “mass of fluent catch-words” (). In this respect, she too is at one with what the narrator calls a “slangy age” ()—or, as Basil suggests more sarcastically, “‘everything is remarkable nowadays; we live in an age of wonders!’” (). This world of slang (trendy coinages) and constantly replenished wonder is that of the fad, in which the latest rage is bound to be superseded by the very logic of the “newest thing” that conferred its legitimacy in the first place. The inability of the masses to recognize this signal fact earns them endless contempt from Basil, an “immense admirer of the late Thomas Carlyle” (), as he scorns “the stupid, gregarious, gullible public, the enlightened democracy of his native land,” which “could swallow unlimited draughts” of the “perfected humbug” dished out by Verena in her speeches (). That Verena’s humbug holds particular gustatory appeal is important; for the feminist movement, what he calls “this pernicious craze” (), appears     



the most faddish entity in this age of fads. As Basil puts it, the age is not merely faddish; it is a “womanised” age (), and what we find is that these amount to the same thing. Descriptions of the novel’s feminist avatars thus emphasize their tendency to embrace a dizzying spectrum of reform trends: Mrs. Farrinder aims “to give the ballot to every woman in the country and to take the flowing bowl from every man” (), while the flitting Miss Birdseye “belonged to the Short-Skirts League, as a matter of course; for she belonged to any and every league that had been founded for almost any purpose whatever” (). Again, the narrator’s perspective at such moments colludes with that of Basil, for whom the assembled group of women at Mrs. Farrinder’s appears but one of a motley assortment of newly created collectives vying for attention on the grounds of their newness alone. Surveying the crowd upon their arrival, he “wondered who they all were; he had a general idea they were mediums, communists, vegetarians” (). The reference to mediumship in particular is worth dwelling on, for The Bostonians persistently links feminism to spiritual concerns, even before Verena’s hypnotism at the party. “‘Well, I have heard at Miss Birdseye’s some inspirational speaking,’” Olive solemnly informs her cousin, who has inquired as to whether he should expect a “‘spiritual séance’” as part of the women’s gathering (). Indeed, spiritualism occupies a privileged position in the novel’s jumble of trendy movements, because it is not only a signal example of such a craze; further, it provides the tropes for describing how such crazes spread. (This is also true of the psychological literature on individuals captivated by “fads”; one compulsive patient of Pierre Janet’s thus feels it is as if “[u]ne force irrésistible me pousse . . . Je suis comme fasciné” [: ].)3 Verena is not alone, it turns out, in being mesmerized at Miss Birdseye’s gathering. Rather, the trancelike state her father induces creates a kind of spiraling trance, a chain of hypnosis in which Verena’s voice gradually brings even the most skeptical audience members “under the charm” (); as Basil notes, even the haughty Mrs. Farrinder “felt the universal contagion” (). Later in the novel, Miss Birdseye describes this as Verena’s usual effect: “‘She has acted on so many,’” she states, as if the girl were some sort of strong drug (). At the end, Olive identifies herself as having supplied the hypnotic force behind Verena’s, reflecting that her protégée’s loyalty had been no more than “the mere contagion of example” (). Yet the recurrent language of epidemic acts to remind us that feminism here has become a matter no longer simply of one person’s influence over another, but of a chain of influence, in which one mesmerized subject immediately begets ten more. It is hard not to recall here Basil’s description of the    

“gullible public” eager to “swallow unlimited draughts” of Verena’s discourse, “an article for which there was more and more demand” (). The media here are indeed mediums, themselves transfixed by fads and transfixing their audiences as a result. This sense of mass culture as an irresistible, shamanic force tends to accord with a general image of the fad-follower as female, an image that comes into its own in the late nineteenth century. A large body of scholarship has traced how the construal of the modern female consumer readily “seduced” by passing fancies begins in this era to parallel that of the woman at the mercy of her “organic needs” (Williams, Dream ).4 With its powerfully recurring “cycles,” the temporality of fashion seems to mimic that of a woman’s own body, and the feminized masses are thus swept off their feet interchangeably by those two supposed opposites: nature and history, to both of which they seem uniquely susceptible. Yet if the association between women and nature plays a traditional role in keeping women on the periphery of history, what happens when women begin to look like barometers responding instinctively to what is “in the air” at any given moment? Do women become then the most historically “emblematic” subjects?5 The spiritualist movement may in fact mark the first moment when such a question was posed in the United States; a pseudonymous book published during the craze’s heyday in the s thus bore the title Lucy Boston; or, Women’s Rights and Spiritualism, Illustrating the Follies and Delusions of the Nineteenth Century. Like James’s Bostonians, this Miss Boston could serve as a useful stand-in for her entire era. One might think such premature historicization would ease the task of the historian down the line; after all, we have already been told what it looks like to “illustrate the follies and delusions of the nineteenth century.” If anything, however, the opposite has been the case—an observation that can begin to demonstrate why the most faddish developments, particularly those in which women become privileged emblems, may actually mark the limits of what can be accounted for in historical terms. As the few who have written on spiritualism in the nineteenth-century United States note, the subject has most often been dismissed by historians of the period, a dismissal that has much to do with gender and the culture of the fad. Laurence Moore cites a typical reminiscence by one famous medium, Cora Maynard, who recalled how she, “‘an unlettered girl,’” had as a result of her fame “‘become the honored guest of the Ruler of our Great Nation, during the most memorable events in its histories’” (). Many of the most engaged and trusted spiritualists were in fact ordinary women, even teenage girls (such as the Fox Sisters, said to have kicked off the     



entire craze with their reports of spirit-rapping in ). William Dean Howells recalled that “in the Ohio town of his youth spiritualism was ‘rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations . . . through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one met in the dances and sleigh-rides’” (qtd. in Kerr ). These girl-next-door proponents of spiritualism did not possess, then or now, any existing cultural authority that might enable history to sanction their claims; instead, their possession by spirits granted them an authority in their era that bypassed that of the church fathers. Moreover, as Ann Braude emphasizes, “mediums often lectured on women’s rights while in trance” (). Such “trance lecturing”—similar to Verena Tarrant’s—played a crucial role in the rapid spread of spiritualism across the United States during the s. Spiritualism differed in this regard from the historically earlier phenomenon of mesmerism, in which the passive medium merely obeyed the commands of the man who hypnotized her; in later manifestations, the spirit medium’s passivity was less fully clear. Historians of the subject concur that the appearance of docility helped (to some degree) to blunt criticism of a woman’s otherwise outré presence on a public stage. Yet one also finds general agreement among these writers that beneath this language of female passivity lay unheard-of opportunities for nineteenth-century women to discourse learnedly in public, swear like sailors, and otherwise lay claim to male prerogatives under the aegis of spirit control. The most intriguing account to date—and the one most suggestive for my purposes here—of what it might mean to reassess the significance of nineteenth-century spiritualism belongs to Daniel Cottom, in his book Abyss of Reason. Cottom, too, emphasizes that the trivialization of spiritualism, both in its own day and in ours, may serve to mask the threatening aspects of the authority it bequeathed to such “vulgar” commoners as Cora Maynard—or, in The Bostonians, Selah and Verena Tarrant. To dismiss spiritualism simply as an affront to any reasonable person, Cottom argues, one must ignore the fact that a burgeoning professional class in the nineteenth century needed to secure control over what and who might legitimately constitute “reason.” To recognize this fact is to see how “the motivating ideal of reason founders upon the demonstrable historicity of reason” (). Spiritualism thus moves in Cottom’s hands from a phenomenon readily dismissed, on grounds of reason, to one eminently worthy of study, on grounds of history. What interests me is the fact that, in making this claim for spiritualism as a “cultural movement” deserving of historical investigation (), Cottom seems driven more than once to grapple with the apparently opposing notion that spir   

itualism is “a mere fad.” He writes in a chapter (“On the Dignity of Tables”) concerning the remarkable behavior demonstrated by the common household table in spirit manifestations from the s to the s: This change in the table as an object of discourse might be insignificant if it concerned only an odd digression in cultural history called “modern spiritualism,” a movement that could be regarded as a mere fad, something like the popular pastime of playing with hula hoops of the s. However, this nineteenth-century table speaks of more than an old-fashioned “other world” historically distant from the beliefs that most of those reading this book will hold. This table is also a fable, a story of culture and its contending forces. . . . Unlike the hula hoop, the nineteenth-century table was an extraordinarily provocative object . . . ()

In this passage, “history” emerges as a matter of distinguishing movements from fads, or objects that are really stories (“This table is also a fable”) from objects that are just objects and, hence, historically mute. The hula hoop, perhaps the quintessential fad, is such a voiceless object. Or, rather, we might say that it speaks a single word loud and clear: “history.” The history that the hula hoop speaks, though, is history as over and done, absolutely past: “an old-fashioned ‘other world’ historically distant.” Why would being “a mere fad” mean having such a distancing effect? Perhaps because a fad defines a moment, just as a moment defines a fad: it is “here today and gone tomorrow,” as Frank W. Hoffmann and William G. Bailey write in their study of the subject (xiii). Its meaning lies not in why it defines its moment, but in the mere fact that it does so. As soon as the moment is past, the fad is said to become meaningless, illegible. What were we thinking? we wonder, about those bell-bottoms stashed in the back of the closet. There can be no satisfactory response to such a question, other than, perhaps, the purely tautological: “That was then; this is now.” Hence, I would venture that Cottom’s distinction between spiritualism as “fad” and as “movement,” a distinction meant to mark the difference between the turn to reason and the turn to history, actually functions to show how similar the latter two moves are. “History” stands revealed in this passage as an explanatory apparatus very like “reason,” in that it, too, depends for its own legibility on an outer limit that it must understand as illegible: here, the fad. The fad indeed operates here with respect to history’s narrative rather in the mode of the detail, that famously problematic feature of the naturalist text—a stubborn material marker of the limits of generating meaning. As such, we might     



say the fad as a category becomes almost something Cottom needs in order for spiritualism to show up readably as “history.” This might explain why he himself retains it even though its very existence seems persistently to threaten his own ends, to give an opening to those doubters “who would mock any movement critical of the dominant culture by portraying those involved in it as being blown about by whatever -isms or -ologies happen to be popular at the moment” (). Here we see fad culture appear very much along the lines we saw sketched in The Bostonians: as a realm populated by passive subjects, persons whose sole motivation is to embody completely and utterly the epoch in which they dwell. Yet might it be possible to conceptualize this absolute devotion to the moment in terms that reopen rather than shut down the question of its relation to “history”? At the outset, I suggested we might see the fad as the unspoken link tying together the two most common readings of James’s novel: those that treat it as about a culture of publicity and those that treat it as about history. It is to the latter set of interpretations that I now, briefly, turn. No doubt because of the novel’s naturalist investment in such “topical” subjects as feminism and spiritualism, critics have often expended considerable energies attempting to locate the book in historical time. Most commonly, it is said to be about an era that was already past at the time James wrote. The role of spiritualism, which reached its peak in the United States in the s, here becomes crucial, for spiritualism is assumed readily identifiable with an epoch now gone. A figure like Selah Tarrant is thus said to suggest “much less about the Gilded Age than about the decades preceding the Civil War,” and specifically “the antebellum fascination with magnetic influence” (Habegger, Henry James ). Hence, The Bostonians “had a double historical focus. Written in the ’s it was set in the previous decade. But its image of the early ’s reflected the ’s as well” (Kerr ). Howard Kerr argues that “James regarded spiritualism, along with temperance, vegetarianism, communal utopianism, and free love, as raveled strands in the tattered fabric of antebellum reform-enthusiasm from which, as he saw it, the feminist movement took its example” (). I am less interested in the historicization of spiritualism per se here than in the effects it has on the historicization of feminism. Seen as twin fads of the mid-nineteenth century, they can both function as signs that James’s novel limns a past that was already past when it was written and thus looks trivial (illegible or merely legible) to the modern reader. For the modern reader, of course, even a book about the s or s could look so, and this view comes through in several other readings of James’s    

text. Oscar Cargill, for example, makes the case that The Bostonians is a naturalist novel by stating that “Olive is as much a product of post–Civil War Boston as Gervaise and her husband in [Zola’s] L’Assommoir are a product of the Paris of their day” (). Sallie Hall concurs, calling “masterful” the “pictures of Boston and New York . . . as they passed into the age of industrialization . . . James captures and satirizes the very sights, sounds, and smells of the musty, dimly lit meeting-rooms of the reformers, the vulgar lecture-hall flickering with gaslights and bustling with self-important women . . . ” (). For these critics, too, the mastery of a novel like The Bostonians lies in the wealth of sheer information—sensual as much as factual—that it provides about “the past.” Specifically, this is the version of pastness made available by the notion of the fad: history as perfectly legible, hence containable and charming, because of its absolute distance from our present. For these readers, the feminism that James depicts was a fad of the nineteenth century; thus, to write about it is by definition to write about a “moment,” one now long gone. Unsurprisingly, I wish to resist this approach, an approach that produces The Bostonians’s feminism as “history” by taking the fad for granted rather than subjecting its deployment to scrutiny. What I would like to do, rather than read James’s novel in the context of is own past or present, is to place it amid its future: its immediate future, the s.6 Of course, this future is still past to us, even though it was the future for James. It is still history, but a history, I think, that makes more difficult the move to produce a simple distance from the past through the notion of the fad.7 As we will see, the ’s have formed a particularly vexed topos for feminist history in particular. In their ambiguity on the subject, Sara deSaussure Davis’s comments are typical: she historicizes James by noting that the novel appeared [in ] just after the [feminist] movement in the United States and England had momentarily peaked. The inactivity lasted from  to ; as Ray Strachey states, ‘the press and public were tired of hearing of [woman suffrage] . . . a regular press boycott set in, and the dead period of the movement came on.’ The public surfeit of women’s rights issues which is evident from  to  contributed in a large measure to the poor reception of The Bostonians. ()

So, one statement here depicts the ’s as a decade devoted to ignoring feminism; the other makes  the moment of feminism’s public reemergence. Did the press ignore “women’s rights issues” in the ’s or not? What about the     

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figure of the rule-breaking New Woman, who is usually tied so closely to the decade? In fact, examining the New Woman can help us to see how both sides of Davis’s contradictory claim about the ’s might simultaneously be true. Note her initial emphasis on “the feminist movement,” and on suffrage in particular. It is possible to agree that organized feminist agitation did receive less media coverage in the ’s and ’s than in the decades previous (and after). Yet this does not cancel out the flood of articles in the ’s in particular that focused on the figure called the New Woman. The problem lies with what relation the New Woman bears to what we can more readily identify as feminist politics. And as I will demonstrate, she has been found to represent a trivialization of “real politics” as often as she has been hailed an important figure for contemporary feminist concerns. Central to this accusation of triviality is an association that is said to inhere between the New Woman and the cultural fad. Indeed, my argument for believing that the ’s can get us out of the impasse that the fad has posed for readings of The Bostonians does not depend on any sense that the’ s were a less faddish decade than those that preceded it. Quite the contrary: the ’s, as we will see, were a decade frequently defined by onlookers as a seething cauldron of faddishness, in which all the signs of fad culture that Basil Ransom detects and loathes in an earlier era became as ubiquitous as he fears they already are. Further, in the ’s context of the New Woman—a virtual invention of the burgeoning mass magazine—the association between faddishness and modern young women in public took on a cultural force and specificity beyond Basil’s wildest imaginings. This association was never more apparent than in the amazing case of the novel Trilby, in many ways a ’s rewrite of The Bostonians (I address Trilby briefly in the section that follows, before returning in the final part of the chapter to James’s text). It is, however, the very ubiquity of fad culture in the s that makes it a fruitful ground for actually theorizing the fad, rather than simply taking it for granted along the way to producing “history.” In other words, rather than just looking for people and phenomena that we can claim somehow emblematize their historical moment—perhaps the defining move of present-day literary historicism—we become able to think about the logic of “emblematization” itself, which is in fact central to the logic of the fad. What does it mean to embody a moment in time? Naturalist literature wants us to consider this question, but not, I would say, as a question made possible by our distance from “the past.” Instead, naturalism demands that we, as much as its characters, inhabit the moment that it describes, in order to find there the questions about history’s    

constitution that we have assumed spoke to the fact that that story was already over and done. Reading The Bostonians in the s finally allows us, then, to read Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant as twinned prototypes of a naturalist heroine whose story, in its refusal of any clear future, serves to indicate the limits of what can be historically narrated. Far from entrapping them in a bygone era, their association with fad culture is thus the very thing that keeps their stories from ending on that final page.

“The Newest Thing”: The New Woman Modernity in general has often been defined through what we might call the temporality of fad culture; one speaks of fleetingness, of the brilliant, sudden explosion that passes and is gone. Such an association clearly predates the s. Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” for example, written three decades earlier, presents Constantin Guys, whose sketches capture scenes of urban life on the fly, as the quintessentially modern artist, explaining, “By modernity I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (). In the United States, however, the last decade of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a cultural forum uniquely suited to display and codify the ephemeral sketch (in both word and image) as the privileged marker of modern culture. As Ellen Gruber Garvey states, “The big change in magazine economics has usually been pinned to , the year that three monthlies—Munsey’s, McClure’s, and The Cosmopolitan—dropped their prices to ten cents, shifted the basis of their enterprise from sales to advertising, and began to achieve circulations in the hundreds of thousands” (). These new ad-driven periodicals both drew on and superseded the format of an older triumvirate of genteel journals that had dominated the previous decade. Spearheaded by such influential editors as William Dean Howells, the Atlantic, the Century, and Harper’s had all helped to render the magazine short story emblematic of American literary production in the s. In the ’s, their successors also championed fiction, but in new terms that blurred the lines between the short story, the ad, the news item, and the magazine itself, making clear that all four might depend on a construal of modernity very similar to Baudelaire’s. As the editors of Munsey’s opined in , We do more than our ancestors, we see more and hear more, and very probably we read more, too, but we do not read books. We have plenty of odd minutes for the daily newspapers and the magazines, but we have no leisure hours

    

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for the long drawn out romance or the volume of philosophical speculations. We seek the most timely, the most novel, and the most practically useful reading matter, and we demand it in the briefest and crispest form—the form in which a modern periodical sets it before us. (–)

This impressive bit of self-congratulation, pitting the brisk modern magazine against the antiquated loquacity of both philosophy and romance, neatly summarizes what a Munsey’s has to offer to an increasingly fast-paced world: the twin satisfactions of “timeliness” and “novelty.”8 To be timely does not connote here a negative sense of being disposable and finally trivial because tied to a particular date; rather, the timeliest sources draw praise for enabling their readership to make the most of each moment, rendering them “practically useful” in a way that more “timeless” materials presumably are not. Quintessential Munsey’s columns such as the Guys-like “Impressions by the Way” thus spend their time minutely detailing and commenting upon the very latest, most up-to-date of cultural fads. The references given in the OED suggest that the term fad, while dating from earlier in the century, gains momentum in the ’s and ’s, culminating in one particularly telling instance marking the turn into the century’s final decade: “‘Fadmongery’ or ‘faddism’ is . . . becoming . . . a rampant and ridiculous craze’” (Guardian, October ). In other words, it seems, the ’s usher in a fad for fads themselves—which certainly appears to have been the case, if Munsey’s and its compatriots furnish any indication. Of particular interest for our purposes here are a number of items that ponder the possibilities raised by viewing literary production through the lens of the fad. Writes one E. F. Andrews in the Cosmopolitan, also : Last summer, while in Boston, I had occasion to make certain literary investigations which carried me into the leading libraries and publishing houses of that city. . . . I was often struck with the manner in which they called attention to certain books on their shelves, by remarking that such and such a work is very popular just now, or that such an author is going to be much read this season—in precisely the same tone and almost the same words as are used by our fashionable milliners when recommending the latest new fad in ribbons or laces. This set me to thinking: have we really fashions in books as in bonnets, and do writers wax and wane like other passing fancies . . . ? ()

Asserting that classic texts rarely wear well over time, Andrews concludes that this is indeed the case and thus strikes a blow for the timely and against the time   

less in the literary realm. A month later in the same publication, J. H. Bridges makes an identical argument with respect to intellectual trends, claiming that just as “[a]bsolute taste in dress does not exist,” so “[h]abits of thought, like habiliments of body, are now banished with ignominy to the limbo of obsoleteness” (). Commentaries on literary faddishness in s periodicals tend to focus on novels, which as their name suggests are readily identified with the timely and the new. Throughout the s, Munsey’s delights in charting the progress of various novelistic fads—or what in  it calls “Literary Epidemics”: No careful observer can have failed to notice that in recent years our literary preferences have been of the nature of epidemics. Thus, fifteen years ago, there was an outbreak of the mild and harmless Howells . . . Five—or was it six?—years later we were shaken, all of us, by the Kipling fever. Then we read “Sherlock Holmes” and had the detective delirium. Next we went wild about Du Maurier, whose name is now almost forgotten. From hypnotism we passed easily into the mania for problem novels on themes about which no one knows anything. Just now the swashbuckler has us in his grasp. (“Literary Epidemics” )

One of the odder references here concerns “the mania for problem novels on themes about which no one knows anything.” It is hard not to wonder whether Munsey’s has in mind the mid-’s fascination with New Woman books, particularly given its own  critique of these in an article intriguingly titled “Evolutionary Novels”: By a judicious use of the woman problem, the modern novel writer can save himself the trouble of plot, situation, action, minor characters, and all the furniture that was once thought indispensable to a well fitted out book. So long as the central character is a woman who is developing with each chapter, nothing else needs to happen. She may progress from A to Z, or begin at Z and retrograde to primitive A, or she may show that the woman’s era is dawning, or is over, or is a psychological impossibility; she may prove anything or nothing . . . The self-consciousness of women is a serious blemish, but one that the world may be slow to give up. ()

This description—along with the very title “Evolutionary Novels” for books featuring New Women—demonstrates how closely discussions of New Woman    



hood in the ’s were tied to representations of history, particularly the view of history made possible by evolutionary discourse, in which nature itself became a potential historical agent, rather than merely history’s static “other.” Having listed the various temporal options for the New Woman heroine, the article seems compelled, as were many others, to weigh in on her relation to a broader historical timeline. In this instance, interestingly, the New Woman, while a nuisance, is deemed unlikely to go away anytime soon. Such a view contrasts radically with the breezy assertion three years later in “Literary Epidemics” that her reign has passed as quickly as that of any other fad. Indeed, there seems to be something particularly faddish about the New Woman novel, for rather than being understood as representing a kind of fad, a fad with a particular content, as the others are, New Woman novels on subjects “about which no one knows anything” incarnate faddishness itself, or sheer unaccountability.9 This claim, moreover, is helped along by yoking the New Woman fad to the craze for George du Maurier—that is, for his  bestseller Trilby. “From hypnotism,” Trilby’s subject, “we passed easily” into the fad for problem novels. Why might this be? Perhaps, it is implied, “no one knows anything” about such books in the sense that their brief heyday can be chalked up to a kind of mass hypnosis—that sense of the fad as mesmeric chain that we saw at work in The Bostonians. Certainly Trilby makes this connection in a particularly condensed way. A book itself often said to represent the first case of the modern mass-media sensation (its features being reproduced dramatically across multiple cultural venues from theater to clothing to food),10 Trilby can also be read as telling the story of the very sort of fad it went on to engender. The plot is simple and has become enshrined in today’s lexicon by the continued popularity of the term Svengali for an older man who domineeringly manages an ingenue’s artistic career. In Du Maurier’s tale, Svengali is a sinister Semitic impresario who literally mesmerizes a charming young artist’s model, who under ordinary conditions possesses a remarkable vocal apparatus but a tin ear. Under Svengali’s hypnotic influence, she becomes La Svengali, an internationally renowned singing star. And just as Munsey’s states of the novel in  that America has been “Svengalized by ‘Trilby,’” so does the book itself depict La Svengali’s songs as boiling down to a single entrancing message: “It was as if she said . . . ‘I am Svengali; and you shall hear nothing, see nothing, think of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!’” (). Clearly, here, we are back to The Bostonians’s sense of a mesmerized performer whose self-referential performance, akin to the mass media’s, only lengthens the mesmerizing chain.    

Du Maurier was also a companion of James’s, and he famously offered Trilby’s plot to his friend during a walk in the late s, when Du Maurier was not yet a writer but an artist for Britain’s Punch. Urging the artist to pen the book himself, James ended up startled and clearly a bit irritated by its phenomenal success with the “gross Anglo-Saxon public,” a mass audience that “the poor James,” as he put it, stood little chance of reaching to such a degree. Yet “is it just possible,” Nina Auerbach has wondered, “that the success of Trilby stung him so much not because he had refused the idea of a beautiful mesmerized girl who is a mere ‘subject’ for the ‘sacred fire’ of others, but because he had already taken and transplanted it from music to politics in a novel of his country that no one liked?” (–). Trilby and The Bostonians’s Verena share more in common still. Both are spontaneous, innocent ingenues whose status as public figures simultaneously suggests a troubling worldliness. These two sides merge in a sexualized sense of the naïf as open to suggestion. In this sense, the pre-“Svengalized” Trilby, with her “easy, unembarrassed grace,” “healthy young face,” and “mass of freckles” (Du Maurier ), only seems the total opposite of her later incarnation as the morbid La Svengali, who displays a “haggard expression, in spite of [the] artificial freshness” () lent by rouge, powder, and kohl (). For the very qualities that characterize the unmesmerized Trilby—her “childlike simplicity” and “transparent forgetfulness of self” ()—are the ones that render her susceptible to Svengali’s influence; thus, under his hypnosis, she is also said to “forget herself” (). The link here can remind us that even the initial Trilby troubled many readers with her artist’s-model sense of morality; Du Maurier lightly compares her as lover to an “amateur” artist “too proud to sell his pictures, but [who] willingly gives one away now and then to some highly-valued and much-admiring friend. Sheer gaiety of heart and earnest good-fellowship” are at work here, he explains—just the “bonne fille”’s “difficulty of saying no to earnest pleading” (). The easily swayed Verena, similarly, appears to Basil Ransom as a bizarre melding of innocence and jaded theatricality (Bostonians ). Of course, in Verena’s case, we have been conceiving this mesmerized type particularly in relation to feminism. Yet Thomas Beer’s chronicle The Mauve Decade explicitly links the Trilby craze to women readers and asserts that, in the ’s, there was a sense that “Trilby had something to do with women’s independence” (). If this was so, it could not have been in the sense of explicitly political agitation. Instead, as the above quotes suggest, the issue that Trilby raises, in common with The Bostonians, is more the meaning of the modern young     



woman in public, conceived as both an embodiment and a proliferator of the latest fads. In the ’s in particular, fad-addled journals like Munsey’s begin quite explicitly to align “up-to-dateness” itself with these kinds of girls, and to display exactly the same hesitation between their healthy spontaneity and their unnatural susceptibility, their impulsiveness and compulsiveness, that we see in the two sides of both Verena and Trilby. Thus, one incarnation of the decade’s New Woman was a swaggering, outdoorsy figure, about whom one could feel, as with Trilby, that “it was a real pity she wasn’t a boy, for she would have made such a jolly one” (Du Maurier ). Associated in particular with one of the reigning fads of the ’s, the bicycle,11 this free spirit spent more time exercising her body than did her overworked male compatriots, leading one Munsey’s column to label American women the newly crowned “Stronger Sex”—they were the ones “enjoying every benefit of civilization to the full,” while their husbands were “slaving feverishly at their desks and counters” (“Stronger Sex” ). Another issue’s “Literary Chat” column featured a typical paean to “The Athletic Girl”: “She can ride like any jockey, she has beaten men at hockey . . . All her lovers she has jilted and forsworn . . . ” (“Athletic Girl” ). Especially given her association with the bicycle (a craze to which Munsey’s devoted an entire issue, “The World Awheel,” in May ), the figure of the athletic girl was frequently considered an appealing emblem of the fin-desiècle culture of the fad. Yet the faddish woman of the s did not uniformly assume the aspect of the bounding athlete. She was often described as precisely the opposite of the healthy free spirit: instead, her body was the tragic victim of her fashionable caprices. Debates over the bicycle itself often took this form: Would bicycle riding make young women healthier, or less so? Relaxed, or even more weak and nervous, due to excessive stimulation?12 I would argue that the point of these debates lies less with the relation between young women and any particular fad (such as the bicycle), and more with what it might mean to yoke femininity to faddishness in general. “The Stronger Sex” thus implies that the bicycle riders’ “up-to-dateness” renders them more representative of the fruits of modernity than are their husbands. By contrast, there is something disturbing about the “artistic girl” who, we are told, “alarmingly resembles a Beardsley poster. . . . She is one vast fad. . . . Of all fads, the living fad is undoubtedly the least agreeable” (Munsey’s June : ). This woman gets her own poem too, titled “My Artistic Wife”: “ . . . at art she’s a beginner, and she’s daily growing thinner; it’s impossible to win her from her hobby to her dinner/She is starv   

ing, she is carving, till it’s dark!” (). As a creature of modernity, the artistic wife appears the very opposite of the athletic girl; her hobbies are constantly at war with her physical needs.13 The complexity evinced here with respect to the meaning of the woman as “living fad” can begin to lend greater nuance to our understanding of the New Woman as a particularly ’s embodiment of feminism as faddish. The past two decades have seen a considerable amount of scholarship concerning the meaning of the New Woman for a feminist history, by such scholars as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Patricia Marks, Ann Ardis, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Rosemary Hennessy. Although none thematize it explicitly, all of their arguments turn on the problematic association of the New Woman in the s with fad culture. Each seeks to account for the twinned facts of the New Woman’s ubiquity as a cultural signpost in the s and her rapid descent from view after the turn of the century—the very “skyrocket” trajectory that would seem most clearly to define her as a fad (Hoffmann and Bailey xv). Yet the possibility that the New Woman is a fad threatens each writer’s desire to produce a feminist history. The apparent discrepancy between the temporality of the fad and that of history once again rises to the fore. As Hennessy points out, contemporary feminism seems drawn to the figure of the turn-of-the-century New Woman in order to explain itself. She is brought back to life in order to function as a crucial “foremother,” the first step in a century-long story of feminist progress that ends with our present moment. One can readily see, then, why her status as no more than a fad of the s could present serious difficulties. Both Smith-Rosenberg and Louise Newman (editor of Men’s Ideas/Women’s Realities, a collection of magazine articles from the turn of the century) emphasize that by the early s, the New Woman had developed “such connotations that one woman writer felt that she could not use the phrase and have her arguments taken seriously” (Newman, Men’s ). The feminist historian’s interest in her must thus take the form of a resurrection. How, though, can we explain her historical demise in the first place? It is here that the discourse of fad culture begins to inflect the arguments of many of these writers. For Ardis, while the New Woman in her early years “was implicated for all manner of ‘social ills,’” in the later ’s “the New Woman novel, not real New Women, became the center of controversy . . . this shift . . . [functioned as] a means of denying the New Woman’s reality” (). Garvey, focusing on the bicycle, explains how the new mass magazines of the ’s “recast or read out of the discourse the possibility that bicycling might send women riding off alone, outside of, or away from marriage . . . advertising and fiction     



made a seemingly threatening new product attractive to potential users . . . subsuming the potential conflict within a discourse of consumption” (). Marks writes that, as opposed to the idea that the New Woman advocated “a real change in life-style,” “the New Woman as a figure who simply followed a new dress fad was ultimately acceptable” and easily forgotten once fashion again shifted gears (). And Hennessy’s entire essay explores capitalism’s consumerist investment in nonthreatening invocations of “the new.” In each of these instances, the New Woman’s historical fleetingness is explained by way of her transformation from a “real” political threat into a trivial cultural fad. That is, once the focus shifts to such cultural “crazes” as bloomer outfits, the bicycle (“over” by ), or the New Woman novel (“over” by ), it is easy for the New Woman herself, fatally aligned with such consumer ephemera, to end up on the scrap heap of history. Here the temporality of the fad is simply the monotonous rhythm of consumerism, an endless parade of novelties about which there is nothing really new. Again, then, as in Daniel Cottom’s discussion of spiritualism, the desire to rescue the maligned “movement” from trivialization founders on the persistent dichotomy between the fad and serious history. I believe that the s New Woman will constantly reemerge as a feminist bugbear until we theorize in more depth what, precisely, it means to become aligned historically with the fad. To this end I think it is useful to retain the sense of the New Woman as a fad, at least to some degree, and thus to insist on the problem she posed and poses for such historical legibility. To reinhabit her own fleeting moment—as when we reread magazines of the s, the supposedly empty purveyors of fad culture—is to reopen a broad debate over how to historicize the feminine overall. In this debate, it turns out, the relation repeatedly drawn between femininity and faddishness does not always result in an immediate dismissal of modern women’s desires as frivolous. Indeed, to the degree that the New Woman is characterized as a fad, this is not necessarily the result of her link to consumer objects; sometimes it has everything to do with the historical implications of her politics. In general, those elements that conspire to associate the New Woman with faddishness—the suddenness of her rise; the tendency to view her as an emblem of her historical epoch; her ability to get everyone talking about her; her association with rapidity; her impatient, capricious eye for what lies around the next bend in the road—serve to inspire discussion of how the notion of New Womanhood affects our understanding of the historicity of woman herself. In other words, the category of the fad is implicitly recognized in ’s popular debate as having results for the writing of his   

tory—as being not merely history’s trivial opposite but an element of its very constitution. Writing about the bicycle craze, for example, Munsey’s makes clear that its real underlying subject is the temporality of womanhood. Perhaps surprisingly, it concludes that there is nothing faddish about the New Woman. One article insists that she is not even “new.” “The fact is,” it states reassuringly, “that women never more truly showed themselves in the character they started out to maintain in the Garden of Eden than in the present [bicycle] craze. It is one that need alarm nobody” (“The ‘New Woman’ Is Not New” ). Similarly, in “The World Awheel,” the female cyclist is compared to “the ‘eternal feminine,’ who has taken on wings” (). Yet such assertions of femininity’s timelessness coexist alongside suggestions, in the very same articles, that we might write a history of womanhood after all. An entire magazine issue titled “The World Awheel,” after all, has to make some case for the significance of the bicycle, the aspects that make it new and exciting; and this sense of its importance ends up turning largely on a gender distinction: “To men, the bicycle . . . was merely a new toy . . . To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world” (). Such a claim suggests that there is something “new” going on here, rather than merely another manifestation of timeless femininity. Munsey’s responds to the dilemma it has created here with two distinct strategies designed to make this “newness” compatible with what we already know. First, it argues that if the s New Woman appears radical in contrast to her “submissive and untaught” Victorian grandmother (“The ‘New Woman’ Is Not New” ), she would have been right at home with that woman’s own grandmother, a colonial American woman who spent far more time in the outdoors engaged in “healthy” physical activity (“The World Awheel” ). The history of womanhood here allows for change in the form of “cycles” that continually recur; today’s cyclist represents just another turn of this larger wheel. Second, even her arrival takes the form not of a sudden craze but of a slow, steady movement: “If she has ridden her bicycle into new fields, becoming in the process a new creature, it has been gradually and unconsciously. She did not have to be born again in some mysterious fashion, becoming a strange creature, a ‘new woman’” (). And here is where we are told that this rider is no more than the “eternal feminine,” outfitted with wings. We are even assured that, contrary to popular belief, most bicycle riders are not throwing away their corsets at all (so Victorianism isn’t so bad, apparently?): “[T]here is no reason why a woman should change every habit of her life in the twinkling of an eye” ().     



Despite taking as their occasion the “bicycle craze,” then, all of Munsey’s’ narrativizations of the New Woman work against the construal of her as a sudden, unaccountable fad. Instead, they emphasize gradual change, change that we have seen before, change that is not really change at all. It is not her faddishness that here enables the New Woman’s assimilation to a knowable history—one in which gender means what we think it does—but rather the fact that she is not a fad at all, meaning in this case that she is nothing really very new. By contrast, articles inveighing against the New Woman in the s tend to align her firmly with the fad. This does not mean, however, that she is always portrayed as a frivolous consumer. It is rather the more serious fact that the New Woman clashes so completely with the alternate vision of historical progress put forward in an article such as “Are Womanly Women Doomed?” (printed in the Independent in ) that compels its author, Henry T. Finck, in the vein of James’s Basil Ransom, to deem her a “temporary anomaly,” a historical blip (). If, for Munsey’s, it is more natural for a woman to ride a bicycle than to eschew physical activity (provided she doesn’t throw away her corset too fast), for Finck, New Women’s unnaturalness may be evidenced by the fact that their desires run counter to the dictates of evolution. Only primitive cultures put women to work; sexual differentiation is a sign of progress; were women to vote as men do, “thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effects of untimely political excitement on their mothers” (). For all these reasons, feminism should be seen not as the wave of the future but as a regressive tendency; it is thus necessarily doomed, because it goes against the natural forward movement of time itself. A specific version of “natural” history, rather than the antihistorical “timelessness” of nature, here accounts for existing gender roles. Thus, Finck writes that the situation he describes “will not continue. Signs are multiplying that a strong reaction has already set in” ().14 Writing before , other writers equally as eager as Finck to defuse the force of New Womanhood seem less clearly able to do so by asserting that the faddish woman’s reign is already evidently passing. They write from within the moment of the New Woman fad and are thus forced to come to grips with it, to explain the New Woman’s present provenance if it is so clear that she will someday pass. What one thus finds are articles that make a remarkable assertion: that there is something constitutively faddish about womanhood itself. Whereas Munsey’s needed to deny that the New Woman was a fad in order to view her as a proper, nonthreatening woman, and Finck conversely denied her woman   

hood by labeling her a fad, for these writers, to be faddish means to incarnate the “eternal feminine.” As Ellen Olney Kirk writes in an  article provocatively titled “Woman: A Phase of Modernity,” “to be a woman in the first or last century is to be a woman: that is, to abound in receptivity, in flexibility, in adaptability to the needs of her epoch” (). Recognizing this eternal tendency of woman to emblematize her moment, we can see that “[t]his modern woman, with her ethics, her ambitions, her fads, her dogmatic beliefs, is not, after all, an absolutely fresh thing of the dawn in the world’s history” (). Precursors can thus duly be trotted out: eighteenth-century salon women, for example. For Kirk, this tendency on woman’s part, perhaps because of its ready predictability, is really quite charming, nothing we need be concerned about. A. G. P. Sykes, in his article “The Evolution of the Sex” a few years earlier, displays more irritation, although in the service of a very similar set of claims: Women’s pictures, women’s plays, women’s books. What is it that makes them temporarily so successful, and eternally so wanting? If a woman produces something which is constructed on lines of her own, she straightway believes it to be a work of genius, and declares that the mortals who hold to beaten tracks are not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with her. . . . A strong tide of emotion, with a dash of piquancy to redeem it from commonplace, a command of detail rarely possessed by men, a fund of loquacious discourse, a love of the unnatural and of depicting ludicrously inhuman characters incapable of natural or lasting affection—in each and all of these phases a woman is in her element. . . . And these apologies for literature become “popular novels.” ()

The mode of historicization here is complex, since Sykes begins his piece clearly writing about the s—an era in which, he states, “it is not possible to ride by road or rail, to read a review, a magazine or newspaper, without continually being reminded of the subject which lady-writers love to call the Woman Question” (). Yet the claim that we know women’s artistic productions to be “eternally” wanting opens up Sykes’s remarks to the broadest reaches of human history. As in Kirk’s piece, it seems that we can historicize woman in any epoch as history’s other. Ever faddish, she defines the pleasures of the moment (being gifted, it seems, in producing the kinds of sensations that demand immediate attention), yet for this very reason, she has no place in a broader timeline. What Sykes’s manifest tone of annoyance suggests, however, is that the relation between male history and female faddishness may also be an     

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“eternally” unquiet one, in which the two chafe up against one another rather than existing in mutual harmony in their respective realms. And this makes some sense, given that “the moment” is not simply an other to history but must also somehow be understood to be part of it, even if it is a disavowed part. Sykes’s condemnations recall Samuel Johnson’s famous comparison of women writing to dogs standing on their hind legs, clearly a case in which the sensation value of the performance (one’s amazement “that it is done at all”) results from women’s exclusion from “history” writ large. For Sykes, however, the “greatest danger of the ‘Woman Question’” () lies in the potential for sexual looseness; as another pundit wonders of the “modern woman” in , “Has this new-found liberty spoilt her? Has she grown ‘fast’ simultaneously with the pace of her development?” (Jamieson ). The frequent emphasis on the New Woman’s personal and historical rapidity indeed seems to tie her to not only the faddish girl but also the fast girl, themselves so often—as in the Trilby fad—depicted as one and the same. Certainly their similarities lie at the core of The Bostonians, which explores the temporality of womanhood through two paralleled lenses: the question of how to historicize feminism and the question of how to tell the story of the modern young woman’s life. The figure of Verena Tarrant stands at the center of both of these projects, in that the typical subject of her lectures (and the subject Olive Chancellor encourages her to explore) is women’s relation to history, while at the same time, she herself incarnates the feminine subject of history within the space of the novel, to the degree that Olive reads her young protégée’s life story as an allegory of the history of women as a whole. As Basil begins to win Verena over, for example, Olive decides that “after all, Verena . . . was appointed only to show how women had from the beginning of time been the sport of men’s selfishness and avidity . . . ” (Bostonians ). This conflation of the individual modern woman’s trajectory with the temporality of womanhood itself was clearly typical of s writings on the subject of the New Woman. In most readings of The Bostonians, that association with public life serves to empty out the novel’s feminists as individuals, to render them only emblems or “types.” I have been arguing, however, that this perspective stems from a limited grasp of the complexity of emblematization itself—the mode in which the individual person becomes the witting or unwitting repository of fad culture. Notably, readings of The Bostonians that treat the novels’ feminists merely as representatives of an absurd fad now long past must focus on the older female characters—Miss Birdseye, Mrs. Farrinder—who are the targets of James’s most obvious caricature. Yet feminism    

in the novel is not wholly the province of these women; it is also associated with Olive and Verena, both younger women, and both, I will argue, figures who thus raise the question of feminism’s relation to the future of womanhood as well as to the past. What is unexpected is that this capacity to bring forward a significant futurity might derive from these figures’ very association with the culture of the fad. Here our detour into the novel’s own s future can conjoin with a reexamination of The Bostonians itself, for the ’s debates have made clear that a more thoroughgoing inhabiting of the logic of fad culture may bring forward ways in which it is anything but a mode of historical reduction. Indeed, what James’s novel most shares with the decade that followed it is a remarkable dissemination of the fad concept that allows it to register on multiple levels simultaneously: often as a mere shallow bid for trendy status, to be sure, but also at times as a resistance to the forms of historicizing for which that deeply inhabited present becomes no more than a moment gone by. To move from the first of these to the less familiar second, however, we should first recognize the prescient way in which The Bostonians sets up fad culture as a far more widespread phenomenon than its usual link to the novel’s feminists alone can enable. To begin with, it stands revealed as structuring the trajectory of their most strident opponent as well.

The Ingenue and the Spinster Like the magazine writers of the s who considered feminism to be the most passing of delusions, Basil Ransom views Olive Chancellor and her compatriots as a historical blip. With his Carlylean suspicion of modern democracy, however, this blip appears in Basil’s case to be a rather capacious one; we might term it “the Enlightenment,” or modernity itself. For this reason, unlike his real-life alter egos—such as Henry T. Finck—he experiences considerable difficulty in seeing his ideas reach print. As one editor puts it in a rejection, “his doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print them” (Bostonians –). To Basil’s mind, “[t]he disagreeable editor was right . . . only he had got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old, but too new” (). This comment sums up a view of history capable of treating entire centuries as signs of a thoughtless, excessive fad from which humanity must recover; history here is stubbornly cyclic, always returning at last to timeless realities, to those truths that are never “new” but are rather “as     



old as the sun and moon” (). Holding pride of place among such truths, for the chivalrous Basil, is the love between men and women. Thus, Verena Tarrant’s enchanting voice conjures for him the great potential continuity between ancient times and his own domestic future: hers is “the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age” (). Such views suggest that the most logical move on Basil’s part might well be a complete withdrawal from public life, in favor of a patient certainty that things will turn out as they should regardless of one’s activity on behalf of the good and right. On the subject of his recently chastened native South, Basil’s approach is thus simply “[t]o be quiet . . . not prating in the market-place either of her troubles or her hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow process, the sensible beneficence, of time . . . ” (). Such confident, “manly” patience hardly characterizes his heated pursuit of Verena, however. Indeed, Basil appears much like many others we have seen who view feminism as an aberrant fad; he vacillates between an assurance that, being so unnatural, it will simply fade away of its own accord and a desire to quash it actively, lest its pernicious influence spread any further. Hence, while Basil styles himself as the sort who takes life easy—unlike Olive, who “took things hard,” and unlike the sensation-driven media he deplores ()—he grows quite heated in expressing his views on the era’s foibles to the wide-eyed Verena. The narrator sums him up as “addicted to judging his age” (), a characterization that neatly renders the seemingly laid-back Basil as much of a compulsive as Olive herself. Certainly it is possible to argue that the more strenuously one opposes one’s age, the more dependent on it one becomes. Even Basil’s breezy side resonates, in the context of the novel’s depiction of fad culture, as a faddish, modern mode. It is clearly as much a characteristic posture of Matthias Pardon, the “celebrated magazinist,” as is any dedication to excess and hyperbole. Speaking with Olive, Pardon finds her overly intense in much the same way that Basil does in the novel’s opening scene, yet all she has done is ask his opinion on the feminism he claims to support: “The question appeared to strike the young man as abrupt and irrelevant, to come down on him from a height with which he was not accustomed to hold intercourse” (). Later, Pardon trumpets his view that female emancipation is “the great modern question” (), but what James’s satirical characterization of the journalist helps us see is that this hyperbolic, quasi-revolutionary rhetoric on the part of the mass media is never far from a relaxed breeziness that is always wondering idly about the next revolution.    

This latter tendency provokes Olive’s own opposition to the faddishness she sees around her, as embodied in such figures as Pardon, whom she deems “very inferior.” As many have noted, her deprecations of the age sound remarkably similar to Basil’s, despite his persistent conflation of feminism with faddishness itself: “Olive had a standing quarrel with the levity, the goodnature, of the judgments of the day; many of them seemed weak to imbecility, losing sight of all measures and standards, lavishing superlatives, delighted to be fooled” (). More than anything else, she fears that Verena will be written off as no more than a cute, trivial fad, mere grist for the gossipy tendencies of men like Pardon—and, indeed, Basil. She envisions with fury the way her pretty friend’s young male callers “would laugh about her as they went away, lighting their cigars . . . for many days afterward their discourse would be enlivened with quotations from the ‘women’s rights girl’ []. . . . They were treating her as a show, as a social resource” (). In another similarity with Basil, Olive’s response to this offensively faddish levity takes the form of a desire to remove Verena from the vagaries of the present day altogether, to submerge both of them in the grand sweep of history. An interest in the Woman Question as a historical one binds the two young Bostonians together from their initial meeting, when Verena gives her speech at Miss Birdseye’s party; her stated topic is “‘[t]he past history, the present conditions, and the future prospects of our sex’” (). Once she and Olive have become inseparable companions, they increasingly present a united front of historically based feminism, pitted against the position of Mrs. Farrinder: . . . evidently Mrs. Farrinder wanted to keep the movement in her own hands—viewed with suspicion certain romantic, aesthetic elements which Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce into it. They insisted so much, for instance, on the historic unhappiness of women; but Mrs. Farrinder didn’t appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know much about history at all. She seemed to begin just to-day, and she demanded their rights for them whether they were unhappy or not. (–)

Olive’s resistance to living in the present moment takes shape as a resistance both to faddishness and to pragmatism, the two bulwarks of the “timely” modern magazine. In their cloistered studies together, she and Verena sketch a sentimental, monolithic history strewn with “bullied wives . . . stricken mothers . . . dishonored, deserted maidens,” “‘women . . . slaughtered like sheep!’” (, ). In sum, “history seemed to them in every way horrible” ().     



This sense of confronting history as a solid bloc of vast injustice renders Olive distinct not only from a Mrs. Farrinder but from an earlier generation of midnineteenth-century reformers more generally; as Selah Tarrant, Verena’s oldschool mesmerist father, muses, Miss Chancellor’s “longing for the new day had such perversities of pessimism”—in contrast to his own tendency toward “rose-coloured views of progress, of the march of truth” (). With her “morbid” aspect (), her “spectral face” (), Olive does cut a curiously doomy figure for a supposedly avid supporter of reform; there is a claustrophobic aspect to her worldview, one based in her conviction of history’s unrelenting cruelty to her kind. Again like Basil, however, Olive vacillates between a rejection of faddishness in favor of timeless certainty and a desire to participate actively in the culture of publicity as perhaps its most “novel” creature: the only one who can see through all of its lies. As she admits to herself upon presenting Verena to a group of admirers in a nearby city, “she was not insensible to the pleasure of appearing in a distinguished New York circle as a representative woman, an important Bostonian, the prompter, colleague, associate of one of the most original girls of the time . . . ” (–). Olive’s sister, the fashionable Adeline Luna, makes some of the book’s most cutting observations with regard to what we might call Olive’s faddish rejection of faddishness: “‘Have you seen my delightful sister yet? The way she does arrange herself when she wants to protest against frills!’” (). Miss Birdseye is described in similar terms, her house possessing “a peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shopworn” (). Again, the most decisive proof of the ubiquity of fad culture would seem to lie in the fact that the most determined stance against it becomes, perhaps more than anything else, its sign. Olive and Basil, then, while apparently at war, would seem to share deep similarities. Both desire recognition from an age they claim to detest. In doing so, they affirm their tie to that age’s fad culture, even as they hurl invective at the culture’s fickleness from their respective refuges in an unchanging, sentimental history. Certainly many of James’s readers have drawn parallels between the two antagonists, often pointing out the way each seeks to impose an obsessively strict worldview upon the impressionable Verena.15 My affirmation of this parallelism here is crucial to my own insistence that The Bostonians tells the story not simply of feminism as a fad (which would imply that we already know what a fad is and what it means) but of a broader fad culture through which feminism’s distinctive critique of history takes its shape. Basil and Olive    

are clearly both tied to that culture not in spite of, but in and through, their rejections of it. To my mind, however, a recognition of this similarity also enables us to highlight some less obvious, but deeply important, differences between the two with respect to the fad and history, differences that emerge decisively in their different relationships to Verena. The Bostonians ends with Basil’s final “victory” over Olive in the contest for Miss Tarrant. At the moment when Verena is supposed to give her greatest oration (titled “Woman’s Reason”) to a packed audience at the Boston Music Hall, he whisks her away, disguised under the hood of her cloak, to begin a private, domestic life as his betrothed. And then we come upon James’s infamous final lines: “Ah, now I am glad!” said Verena, when they reached the street. But though she was glad, he presently discovered that, beneath her hood, she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed. (–)

It has not been hard for feminists to read here decisive proof that the novel is less than supportive of Basil’s conquest.16 As Alfred Habegger enjoins us to recall, however, “When Philip Rahv and Lionel Trilling in  brought The Bostonians back into print and official critical approval, they rested their case to a great extent on some large claims for Basil Ransom as a conservative hero challenging a culture of triumphant vulgarity and intrusiveness” (Henry James ). Further, in Habegger’s view, these men were not wrong about the book, even if they may have been wrong in celebrating what they found there. James does present Basil as a “desperate challenger” to a “feminized age,” he writes— yet this depiction fails if we recognize “that law, politics, industry, commerce, and finance were run almost exclusively by . . . men.” Thus, Habegger concludes, “except in relation to the South’s defeat,” James’s man “does not deserve a minority outsider’s pathos” (). If Basil is not a figure of pathos, how is it that he gets to look like one? What Habegger does not suggest, but I would argue, is that Basil differs importantly from Olive in his relation to the sentimental as such. Indeed, the word pathos becomes surprisingly apt when applied to this foe of modern democracy.17 Verena seems drawn to Basil, not because of any manly qualities that Olive might lack, but because she pities him, a response he encourages: “‘Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing—my ambition is another! . . . Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my days; and in that case     



no one but myself will know the visions of greatness I have stifled and buried’” (Bostonians ). Olive, of course, often pities herself, and women generally, in similarly florid terms, but somehow she has never inspired pity in readers— perhaps because, as Basil himself puts it, it seems impossible to see Olive as a “dear old thing,” to use her sister’s facile words (): “Least of all was she a ‘thing’; she was intensely, fearfully, a person” (). Whereas both within the novel and outside it, Basil’s self-sentimentalization can be shown (at least some of the time) to work, Olive’s always seems a bit grotesque, making her hard to champion as a heroine, even for a feminist reading grounded in those final lines. Indeed, it is the very grotesqueness of the novel’s feminists, along with the pathos accorded Basil, that for Habegger makes any feminist reading a wishful one. My own view, however, is that Basil’s sentimentality, even as it helps him to appear sympathetic to some readers, can at the same time most convincingly account for James’s denunciation of his marriage to Verena, while those elements that render Olive grotesque also mark her strongest similarities with the very aspects of Verena that Basil disavows. Both of these perhaps surprising claims require that we distinguish between the way Basil and Olive each refuse and embrace the lure of fad culture. We have seen that they both inhabit simultaneously a faddish present and a timeless history. In Basil’s case, however, these two discrete temporal locations have no effect on one another. He is interested in present-day recognition solely in order to publicize his theory of history, just as Verena’s faddish speeches matter to him only insofar as they instantiate timeless realities of sexual attraction. Thus, as when he wrests Verena away from the Music Hall by “muscular force” (), he seems determined to demonstrate the immutable facts of gender difference through his intervention in the present conflict. Fad culture simply provides an opportunity for its opposite—in the same way, we might say, that Basil treats women with greatest chivalry when he finds them least impressive. Indeed, to the degree that Basil is a sentimental hero, he is one whose sentimentality, examined closely, is revealed quite decisively by James to be an act.18 Like fad culture, it functions as merely an opportunistic means for him to deny his principles—or to reveal them, insofar as those principles, like chivalry, are themselves constructed as ideological means of smoothing over what would otherwise stand revealed as fatally competing claims. Hence, if both Basil and Olive turn Verena into a mirror of themselves, in Basil’s case this means a falsely coherent Verena, whose participation in the fad that is feminism need not trouble what is pronounced to be her essentially do   

mestic nature, her incarnation of timeless feminine charms. Thus, far from contesting her potential wifehood, her speeches only make it apparent. By contrast, Olive’s relations both to history and to Verena (and the two turn out to be entwined) are far less coherent and sure. Where Basil only uses fad culture to espouse its opposite, Olive is genuinely torn between her pessimistic view of a never-changing, cruel history and her desire for and conviction concerning a possibility of “the new.” To the extent that she, too, reads her own compulsions in Verena, then, she reads not a coherent picture but a radically split one. Olive herself sees this split as proof that Verena will betray her—that she will follow Basil—but in fact, it functions in the novel to show how misguided Basil’s falsely coherent view of Verena’s relation to history actually is. Let me be more specific about the apparent split that Olive sees in Verena. Throughout the book, Olive’s greatest fear is that feminism will appear merely faddish and frivolous, and this fear grows localized around the idea that Verena will be misread, particularly by men, in just these terms. And certainly it is clear enough that the enthusiasm of men like Matthias Pardon and Henry Burrage for Verena’s speechmaking lies as much in a smitten delight in her “charm” and “girlhood” (the words are Pardon’s [, ]) as in a reverence for anything she has to say. Basil’s enjoyment of the pure sound of Verena’s voice, which he separates completely from the words it utters, makes this point even more decisively. As in the case of Du Maurier’s Trilby, the fact that Verena’s great resource is her voice complicates the question of whether her widespread appeal is merely superficial or is the mark of an impressive personage. The two blur when Olive attempts historically to “account for” Verena herself: “her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite whim of the creative force . . . It was notorious that great beauties, great geniuses, great characters take their own times and places for coming into the world, leaving the gaping spectators to make them ‘fit in’ . . . They were incalculable phenomena, anyway, as Selah would have said” (–). Verena’s incalculability, too, might mark either her genius or her status as a fad; what we find is that it most persuasively marks the inability of Olive ever finally to determine the difference. Perhaps Verena’s most notable characteristic is her “want of continuity,” upon which both Basil and Olive remark (). For Olive, the girl appears “passionately serious at times, and then perversely, even if innocently, trivial”; whereas, in Olive’s own view, she herself is “all of one piece,” “Verena was of many pieces, which had, where they fitted together, little capricious chinks, through which mocking inner lights seemed sometimes to gleam” (–). In many respects, it would seem as if Verena’s dalliance with Basil proves     



all of Olive’s fears true: he appeals to her “trivial,” faddish side, the side that turns feminist argument into a mode of flirtation. The book does go to some lengths to explore Verena’s guilty tendencies toward the most immediate forms of gratification—forms associated with, though not limited to, conspicuous consumption, of such items as feathered hats and ice cream. In her strolls with Basil through Boston, Verena “forgot about Olive, enjoyed the sense of wandering in the great city . . . it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing incident and opportunity” (). After all, James reiterates, “There was enough of the epicurean in Verena’s composition to make it easy for her in certain circumstances to live only for the hour” (). Contrast this with Olive, who, wandering through town herself, notes that “[i]t was a long time since she had done anything so vague, so wasteful” (). For Olive, then, it is Verena’s hedonistic side, as much as her flirtatious manner with men, that appears to threaten her allegiance to the feminist cause. “‘You were not made to suffer— you were made to enjoy,’” she accuses her friend, and Verena was unable to rebut the charge; she felt this, as she looked out the window of the carriage at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her pulses. (–)

Does the novel, however, support Olive’s (and indeed Verena’s own) sense that in giving in to Basil, Verena is choosing this side of herself—this consumerist, city-loving, curious, sensual side—over the side that speaks of feminist history? In fact, Verena’s status as flirt, like Trilby’s, seems more complex than this opposition would allow. She is indeed very similar to Trilby, and also to another quintessential “American girl” who precedes them both, James’s Daisy Miller, in her inexplicability, her odd balancing act between a “preternatural” innocence and a flirtatiousness so generalized that it shows up as a form of generosity: [Olive] reflected that Verena was not in the smallest degree a flirt . . . that nature had given her a beautiful smile, which fell impartially on every one, man and woman, alike. Olive may have been right, but it shall be confided to the reader that in reality she never knew, by any sense of her own, whether Verena were a flirt or not. This young lady could not possibly have told her . . . ()

   

What a reading of “Daisy Miller” can help us to see about Verena is that her flirtatiousness is the truth about her. Whereas both “innocence” and “corruption” presuppose a narrative, Verena and the modern girls she represents are defined by a relation to their moment alone, which they emblematize as “the very newest thing.” In that moment, there is no other story. Thus, we can explain one of the odder glimpses into Verena’s rather opaque psyche that James provides: when Olive begs her not to marry, Verena gains “a sudden glimpse of futurity. That was rather awful, even if it represented the fate one would like” (). What Verena objects to may not be any particular future, then, but the future itself. And what we learn from this is that flirtation is not for her a means to an end—marriage with Basil—but rather, the end she seeks. James’s final words are enough to convince us that he views Basil’s suit as the death knell of Verena’s flirtatious essence, rather than (as Olive might believe) its ultimate triumph. I would go even further and suggest that, far from linking her to Basil, Verena’s essence as thus revealed is what renders her similar to Olive, despite the latter’s claim to oppose it. Olive, who “was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry” (), is also, considered on a personal level, opposed to the future as such; as she tells Verena, “forebodings were a peculiarity of her organization” (). What the novel does is to draw a parallel between the convinced spinster, embodying sexual entrapment and refusal, and the inveterate flirt, embodying a pure feminine potentiality that is never realized. Even more fascinatingly, by the end of the book, the two have in a sense switched places. Basil wrenches Verena out of the Music Hall just as she is to give her greatest lecture, in effect “winning” his battle with Olive. Enfolded in Basil’s cloak, Verena thus becomes the entrapped one; depicting marriage not as the public woman’s salvation but as another form of compulsion, James rejects the logic of much mid-nineteenth-century American fiction.19 Olive then rushes onto the stage to appease the audience, certain she is “‘to be hissed and hooted and insulted!’” (). Yet what actually greets her appearance is a “quick, complete, tremendous silence . . . the hush was respectful, the great public waited, and whatever she should say to them . . . it was not apparent that they were likely to hurl the benches at her” (). Nina Auerbach, in an important feminist reading of the novel, reads this vision of Olive’s future as one of pure potentiality, “a majestic question mark. . . . Whatever the value of such an invasion,” she writes, “it is an irrevocable emergence” ().

    



Traces of the Flames It is this sense of an “emergence” that I would like to stress at the end of this, my own reading of James’s novel in the context of its immediate future, the American s. I am interested in “the emergent” because of its ability to mark the ongoing presence of an as yet unrealized future within the confines of the historical instance. Raymond Williams’s writings on the subject are pertinent here, for in his depiction, the “emergent” appears as what drives the work of history itself, standing as it does for that newness which the dominant culture of any era must work to incorporate. And yet, he writes, even as this process is bound in some form to take place, one may still identify spheres of practice and meaning which . . . the dominant culture is unable in any real terms to recognize. Elements of emergence may indeed be incorporated, but just as often the incorporated forms are merely facsimiles of the genuinely emergent cultural practice. ()

In “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man writes in different but related terms of the radical impulse that stands behind all genuine modernity when it is not merely a descriptive synonym for the contemporaneous or for a passing fashion. Fashion (mode) can sometimes be only what remains of modernity after the impulse has subsided, as soon—and this can be almost at once—as it has changed from being an incandescent point in time into a reproducible cliché, all that remains of an invention that has lost the desire that produced it. Fashion is like the ashes left behind the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place. ()

I have tried to emphasize that the fad or fashion as it is registered in the text of history functions with all of the complexity suggested by de Man’s final sentence here: the conversion of the moment into the fad stands more clearly than any other activity for the work of history itself, yet we can then make this work evident (and thus question its legitimacy) to the degree that we reproblematize the taken-for-grantedness of the category of the fad. I have suggested, further, that both the unincorporated emergence and its incorporation are gendered through their association in the texts of modern culture with the unaccountable faddishness of the modern young girl.    

In the magazines of the s, the most intriguing of the various attempts to historicize the New Woman suggests that the most “timeless” aspect of femininity lies in women’s capacity in all epochs to emblematize their fleeting moment. It is in this sense that they remain perennially yoked to the logic of the fad: trapped in the era it defined, illegible to the history that comes after. In The Bostonians, however—in the image of the mesmerized feminist speaker, Verena, mesmerizing everyone around her—we glimpse a version of history that might leapfrog back to stand literally in the same place as those women from the past, inhabited by their voices, disregarding the story line that leaves them stuck in their meaningless moment. Like de Staël’s Corinne, to whom she is compared, Verena “stars in a series of tableaux vivants” that “re-membe[r] . . . the fragments of the dead” into a “genealogically cast persona [dependent] on a train of performing women geniuses for her identity” (Smith –). As Bonnie Smith writes in The Gender of History, de Staël’s sense of history as the product of a direct emotional connection to the past—one shared in the nineteenth century by many women amateur historians—flew in the face of a narrativizing professional model of historical work (). With respect to literary history, further, such a recasting of the fad might allow us to reconceive the faddish genre of naturalism, which supposedly denies a timeless humanity in its obsession with mapping the ephemera of its moment. Associated in the United States mostly with former “magazinists” and newspapermen, naturalism, too, has stood for a dead end, for the achieved outer limits of nineteenth-century realist narrative. The Bostonians stands as one of the earliest American novels to lay out what I argue are the chief character types of the genre (discussed at greater length in the next two chapters), and I would contend that it is no accident these characters emerge in order to tell the story of modern feminism. Olive, Verena, and Basil: here we see the antisentimental, compulsive woman alone; the charming ingenue rendered oddly disturbing, unreadable; and the older man clinging stubbornly to an ethos of sentimental romance. We also see how the first two types constantly blur into one another, as two forms of women’s resistance to the future allotted them. This female resistance to futurity, I would argue, constitutes the specificity of naturalist fiction suggested above, its alliance with the temporality of the topical, or the fad. The argument for this alliance itself is not new: Fredric Jameson, for example, writes of “the naturalist paradigm” as “a kind of specialized division of official ‘subjects,’ such as feminism or freelance journalism”—which are then ideally transcended, in those writers whose best work leaves naturalism behind (his example being Gissing), through a return to the “great subjects of marriage     



and literary production” (Political ). What I want us to see—what Jameson’s language makes more than clear—is that the distinction between real history and the fad takes shape in this era as a gendered one: the distinction between two trajectories for womanhood, one knowable (marriage) and one seemingly at odds with futurity itself. And if Jameson’s dictum to “Always historicize!” has formed the battle cry for over two decades of literary scholarship eager to disclaim all timeless truths, we need to recognize how “history” here, pitched against the destabilizing illegibility of the fad, begins to look not so different from timelessness. Affirming marriage, sidelining feminism, dismissing naturalism, Jameson risks blurring into Basil Ransom, the historian of the future as sentimental man.

   



   &    Sentimentality and “Drift” in Dreiser and Wharton

Consider a sentimental scene that lies at the heart of the naturalist novel. Why do both Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie () and Frank Norris’s McTeague () depict humble, downtrodden older men forced to beg from brisk young women? In Carrie, George Hurstwood confronts his former lover as she walks to the theater where she is becoming a rising star: He was waiting, more gaunt than ever, determined to see her, if he had to send in word. At first she did not recognise the shabby, baggy figure. He frightened her, edging so close, a seemingly hungry stranger. “Carrie,” he half-whispered, “can I have a few words with you?” She turned and recognised him on the instant. If there ever had lurked any feeling in her heart against him, it deserted her now. Still, she remembered what Drouet had said about his having stolen the money. “Why, George,” she said; “what’s the matter with you?” “I’ve been sick,” he answered. “I’ve just got out of the hospital. For God’s sake, let me have a little money, will you?” ()

In McTeague, Trina McTeague sleeps in the kindergarten where she works, so her estranged husband comes and knocks on her window: He was wearing a pair of blue overalls; a navy-blue flannel shirt without a cravat; an old coat, faded, rain-washed, and ripped at the seams; and his woollen cap. “Say, Trina,” he exclaimed, his heavy bass voice pitched just above a whisper, “let me in, will you, huh? . . . I’m regularly starving, and I haven’t slept in a Christian bed for two weeks.” . . . Once in her room he could not help but smell out her five thousand dollars. Her indignation rose. . . .



“No,” she whispered back at him. . . . “But you can’t see me starve, Trina. . . . Give me a little money, then.” “I’ll see you starve before you get any more of my money.” ()

Although important differences otherwise distinguish the two books, their narratives merge at this key moment. The male characters have lost out decisively in a modern world that seems disposed economically to favor the women they once loved. The women thus dwell in comparative comfort while the men scrape haplessly by. In Sister Carrie, this difference in living standards is established even while Carrie and Hurstwood still inhabit the same apartment, for Carrie, like Trina McTeague, begins to withhold from her partner full knowledge of her earnings. The result is a man who must beg to keep from starving in his own home, even as his more successful housemate reacts with barely repressed frustration to his demands: “Would you mind helping me out until [I find work]?” he said appealingly. . . . “No,” said Carrie, feeling sadly handicapped by fate . . . quite hardhearted at thus forcing him to humbly appeal, and yet her desire for the benefit of her earnings wrung a faint protest from her. [] . . . “You couldn’t have tried so very hard,” said Carrie. “I got something.” . . . “I’ll come up all right.” He tried to speak steadily, but his voice trembled a little. [] . . . There was something sad in realising that, after all, all that he wanted of her was something to eat. . . . Maybe he would get something yet. He had no vices. ()

Hurstwood does not, however, “get something.” Instead, he turns more and more toward the past, dreaming of the wealth he once possessed and becoming a sadder figure by the day. Carrie’s eventual response is to leave him; her career is taking off, and the abject Hurstwood is only dragging her down. The woman in these scenes, then, is cold, pragmatic, rational; the man, pitiful and hopeless. If she momentarily softens toward her former lover, this seems designed to say more about his absolute pathos (“all that he wanted of her was something to eat. . . . He had no vices”) than about the capacity for charity of a woman who, after all, decides finally that her own desires matter far more. We might say she is a “realist” character, while he—steeped in a passive    

nostalgia, pleading only for an ounce of sympathy from both her and us— could be called a “sentimental” one. Dreiser’s combination of realist and sentimental narrative techniques has in fact posed an ongoing puzzle for critics, who often view them as fundamentally at odds. Yet Sister Carrie’s use of the two modes is typically portrayed as the opposite of the one I have just described. That is, the realist character is taken to be Hurstwood and the sentimental one to be Carrie. This assumption has remained solidly in place even though the valence ascribed to each side has oscillated. In a  essay, Sandy Petrey called the prose describing Carrie’s glittering rise to fame and financial independence “the language of false consciousness,” suggesting that the realist writing of the sections on Hurstwood’s decline served to unmask it as ideological deceit. A decade later, in The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan turned Petrey around to argue that the Carrie narrative, in which dreams of success come true, might just as easily function to critique realism’s politically quietist view that “the real” must entail stagnation and deprivation. These examples should begin to indicate how, with respect to Sister Carrie, the debate over such broader questions as the relation between fiction and history, and the political meaning of narrative, tends to appear as the question of whether realism or sentimentalism can better explain what the world offers. Yet whether sentimentalism unveils realism or vice versa, the gendered representatives of each mode remain stable: Carrie’s story is the sentimental one, and Hurstwood’s the epitome of realism. If this version of events is correct, however, what do we do with the scene of the selfish woman and the begging man? The critical consensus on where realism and sentimentalism are located in naturalist fiction has rendered this moment all but invisible.1 My task in this chapter is twofold: to figure out the grounds of this invisibility—that is, the reasons for its persistence—and to see how our understanding of American naturalism changes when this scene comes back into view. Overall, I argue, it is the older man’s story that best fits prevailing views of naturalism as a “plot of decline”; the young woman’s plot, by contrast, moves in a nonlinear fashion epitomized by a language of “drift.”

Sentimentality and Naturalism What do critics like Kaplan and Petrey mean when they call Carrie’s story sentimental? And why is sentimentality presumed to be antithetical to naturalist writing? Two reasons stand out: one, an issue of narrative, and the other, a re   &   

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lated issue of tone. First, and most important, is the understanding of naturalism as based in plots of decline, such that characters’ fortunes grow ever bleaker as the books progress. In Carrie, however, this narrative suits only one of the two protagonists, for while Hurstwood declines to beggary and eventual death in a flophouse, Carrie rises to fame and fortune as a Broadway star. She has spent most of the book dreaming about her future in ecstatic terms, which in itself would not constitute an antirealist gesture on Dreiser’s part: Stephen Crane limns his heroine’s naive psyche similarly in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (), an important precursor to Carrie. It is crucial to the popular construal of realism, however, that those girlish hopes eventually be unmasked as illusions, so that the boy Maggie imagined as a knight in shining armor must abandon her to a life of prostitution and, ultimately, death.2 Narrative trajectory is the issue here: sentimental desires can be “real” enough, provided they do not flower into actual sentimental denouements. In the case of Carrie, however, they would seem to do just that. Thus, for a critic like Petrey to maintain against such evidence that Dreiser is still a realist, he must downplay Carrie’s success, treating her theatrical milieu as so trashy and third-rate that it gives the lie to her prior notions of the grandeur stage success would entail.3 The plot of decline, in other words, requires that Carrie be a failure after all. Petrey’s argument is persuasive to a point. That point is the second major dimension to Dreiser’s sentimentalism, the fact that he does not distance himself sufficiently—with Crane-like irony—from his characters’ wide-eyed dreams. Rather, as a number of readers have pointed out, it is difficult to tell where Carrie’s views of the world end and Dreiser’s begin.4 As a result, it does seem necessary to consider Dreiser as not finally a realist or a sentimentalist but as genuinely engaged with both idioms, an option considered most convincingly by Kaplan.5 In her view, sentimental moments should not be explained away as unfortunate lapses on the part of the realist writer. Instead, she argues, they function within realism to mark those elements that are thought to lie outside the real but are necessary to constitute its borders. Because it serves as a utopian counter-discourse to a grimly fixed “real,” Carrie’s perennial quest for change can be expressed only through a language of sentimentality. Not only the language is sentimental, however. So are the activities, the approach to life, through which we see Carrie seeking to fulfill her dreams. Chief among these is her enthusiastic acquisition of consumer goods. Consumption is a sentimental pursuit, Kaplan writes, because it “effaces any difference between dressing and parading like an equal and actually being one,” covering over rather than addressing a widening “gap between desire and social    

power” in the turn-of-the century United States (Social , ). In this respect, Carrie’s longings to “grieve upon a gilded chair” onstage can be seen as the logical extension of her desires to emulate the elegance of the women she sees walking down Fifth Avenue (Dreiser, Carrie ). As both actress and consumer, she desires not power itself but the accoutrements that seem to be power’s synecdoche. In Kaplan’s argument, this very desire ensures the inaccessibility of power, to Carrie as well as the many others who crave it, by perpetuating the myth that the “look” of success is an adequate substitute for the real thing. In the end, then, Kaplan both agrees and disagrees with Petrey. She disagrees that Carrie’s fantasies are no more than empty shams awaiting “unmasking” by a more cynical realist viewpoint, stressing that the longings behind them are real indeed and that they thus call into question whether realism must mean cynicism. At the same time, she concurs, real life in the latenineteenth-century world of Sister Carrie does look grim, because those longings for change are being “channeled” into sentimental distractions like consumer culture, which leave real-world power relations untouched. Both of these readings thus imply that any rosy view of Carrie’s success—indeed, any view that Carrie has attained success in any real, meaningful way—belongs to the world of fantasy. And yet Carrie could easily be viewed as achieving significant economic power—enough to allow her finally, for the first time, to live on her own. What does it mean that we explain this story of a woman’s rise to economic independence over and over as a dream story? With this question in mind, I would like to alter Kaplan’s paradigm slightly and suggest that it is women’s work, such as Carrie’s, that comes to occupy the space of unreality she so importantly delineates as integral to realist fiction. Scholars’ insistence on reading Carrie, and indeed the late-nineteenthcentury woman of means generally, as almost exclusively a consumer rather than a wage earner might be taken to indicate this fact but not yet to theorize it. In failing to do so, however, we risk merely repeating rather than subjecting to scrutiny the alignment of women’s economic independence in this era with a form of fantasy. In particular, we are unable to determine the role this fantasy plays in constituting naturalism as a genre. As Kaplan notes, Carrie’s big break as an actress takes the form of a textbook case of “the fantasy of being discovered” (Social ): she happens to frown in frustration one day onstage, and the audience finds her irritation adorable. Trina McTeague earns her famous gold pieces through an even more outlandish lucky break, by winning five thousand dol   &   



lars in the lottery. Chance events are frequently said to characterize naturalism,6 yet what we find in these novels is that such events serve a very specific narrative end, that of explaining how women succeed economically and men fail. Following Georg Lukács’s lead, we might inquire whether naturalism’s interest in chance events thus works to cover over, or render sentimentally “unreal,” the actual historical movement in the s toward greater educational and employment opportunities for women. Rather than simply restoring the economically independent woman of the s to the world of historical realism, however, I want to think through the implications of her historical positioning as history’s other—as a figure of fantasy. It is my contention that the narrative of women’s work is in fact the most antisentimental, but not the most realist, element in the naturalist text, for the specific reason that it serves as a marker for the future, for what has yet to take place. Here I want to begin to distinguish between two forms of the ostensibly unreal: the sentimental, which looks backward nostalgically to the past—a position I see as occupied by the men in these novels—and what I am calling fantasy, which is oriented toward the future and associated in these texts with the working woman. Why has it been so difficult to understand naturalism’s men, rather than its women, as sentimental figures? We should note that, its recent critical recovery aside, the term sentimentality in common parlance tends to function much like ideology. That is to say, its identification as such depends at least in some measure on its perceived failure to carry out its ends. (This is why consumer culture, to take one relevant example, is so often explained to be sentimental in form: it guarantees the buyer’s endless desire by making inflated promises of total happiness that it can necessarily never fulfill.) By contrast, if the sentimental text did simply carry out its ends—if one were deeply moved by it, period—one would not use the word sentimental to characterize it; the use of the word automatically implies some distance from the sentimental effect.7 What is it that gives sentimentalism this structure, whereby a feeling of being deeply moved can slide so readily into a feeling that one is being duped? It would seem that the very strategies employed to create an absolutely unquestioned sense of well-being—specifically, a sense of human feeling as the most powerful force in the world—can, by virtue of the very absoluteness that is key to their success, result in a feeling of manipulation and constraint. For this reason, the most effectively sentimental objects, the ones that succeed most completely in producing a sentimental response, tend to be those that are never themselves identified as sentimental. As we will see, such objects include naturalism’s men.    

One of the very few critics to discern a lurking sentimentality in a story like Hurstwood’s has been Leslie Fiedler, who in Love and Death in the American Novel assimilates Dreiser’s text to the tradition of bathetic seduction fiction beginning in America with Susanna Rowson’s  Charlotte Temple. As others have noted, Sister Carrie might be said to demand comparison to such popular women’s writing from its very first page, where “the half-equipped little knight” Carrie bids farewell to her family in order to take up residence in “the great city,” Chicago (, ). Very much in the vein of Rowson or her latenineteenth-century dime-novel successor, Laura Jean Libbey, Dreiser sets his unworldly heroine loose in a mysterious new world of rakes and temptations, and he lays out her prospects in classically polarized terms: “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” ().8 Yet despite the warning, Carrie’s story does not exactly conform to either of these options, as her surrender to not one but two successive seducers, Drouet and Hurstwood, leaves her not in the usual state of groveling abjection but on top of the world. What of the sad fate of Hurstwood himself, however? As Fiedler reminds us, the seducer in the sentimental tradition must always receive punishment—hence, in his view, the need for Hurstwood’s downward slide—even though the point of such seems to be less to enforce male responsibility to remove it, as the man tearfully confesses all his sins with a “Devil made me do it!” lack of self-comprehension. Thus, in Fiedler’s scathing words, “even [Dreiser’s] famous determinism is essentially sentimental at root, amounting effectively to little more than the sob of exculpation: ‘Nobody’s fault! Nobody’s fault!’” (). Determinism, of course, is precisely that aspect of naturalism that for most readers would constitute proof of its antisentimental worldview. More than anything else, sentimentalism would seem to demand an insistence on the ability of good-hearted individuals to make a difference, to “achieve their dreams” (as Carrie does). In other words, sentimentality makes power appealing by depicting it as humane, and humanity appealing by depicting it as powerful. Isn’t such a faith virtually neutralized by the naturalist belief in random, uncaring external forces? Not necessarily, it turns out. Consider Crane’s version of this story in Maggie. While the book makes a mockery of Maggie’s dreams of romantic salvation, it nonetheless depicts her as an idealized figure who, in a better world, would achieve such an end, for all the forces that conspire to drag her into a life of prostitution are seen as antithetical to her true, modest, feminine nature. Sentimentality’s alternative to the text of absolute triumph, after all, is    &   

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the text of absolute victimization, which similarly affirms the power of the human by implying, through our own unmitigated compassion for the victim in question, that no one will ever truly be left beyond the reach of empathy’s power. Yet absolute victimization is a tricky thing to pull off, even with a deterministic universe on one’s side. The Charlotte Temple–style seduction novel requires a degree of unworldliness on the part of its heroine so extreme that she can appear prepubescent. It is this quality that most persists in Crane’s Maggie, and with the conventional result: Maggie’s trajectory toward prostitution begins as she learns to link her innocent romantic hopes to adult economic considerations, to wonder at the cost of the “adornments” that seem to be “allies of such vast importance to women,” to see the very “bloom upon her cheeks as something of value” (). While quite a few readers have noticed the way sentimentality and determinism conjoin in a sad tale like Maggie’s, however, none but Fiedler have suggested we might see the same conjuncture at work in the depiction of Dreiser’s begging Hurstwood—or, I would add, Norris’s begging McTeague. The problem here would seem to lie in the relationship between sentimental victimization and gender norms. Yet this is also where Fiedler’s analysis remains incomplete. By turning Sister Carrie into no more than an update of the seduction novel of a century earlier, he misses an opportunity to comment on the shift that takes place in the economic register, whereby the seducer of  is reduced to begging not merely for forgiveness but for hard cash. There is a change in the woman’s role here, that is, that itself begs for analysis; Carrie, after all, is clearly no doomed, perennially weeping Charlotte Temple, or even a Maggie; she is, rather, ultimately the most antisentimental figure in Dreiser’s novel, a fact that has everything to do with her job success. We can understand this shift if we examine more closely a striking fact about Sister Carrie: Dreiser describes the majority of encounters between men and women as instances of begging, to the degree that love itself begins to appear as a subset of charity. That is, if naturalism is often characterized as rendering human sentiments in economic terms (so that Carrie does not desire men but rather the things they can buy her), we need to see that it can also render economics in sentimental ones.

Begging for Money, Begging for Love The first beggar we meet in the novel turns out to be Carrie herself, who elicits a charitable response from the flirtatious “drummer” Drouet. Their chance    

second meeting in Chicago ends famously with the young salesman’s gift of “two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills” () to the struggling Carrie, who has been unable to gain employment as a shop girl. Carrie’s “appeal” to Drouet, which results in his generous gift, is both romantic and economic; the two simply cannot, in her case, be separated. As Dreiser’s narrator comments, He [Drouet] would not have given the same amount to a poor young man, but we must not forget that a poor young man could not, in the nature of things, have appealed to him like a poor young girl. Femininity affected his feelings. He was the creature of an inborn desire. Yet no beggar could have caught his eye and said, “My God, mister, I’m starving,” but he would gladly have handed out what was considered the proper portion to give beggars and thought no more about it. ()

The equivalence drawn between begging and simply being a pretty young girl here serves to remind us that both “activities” seek the same outcome. In each case, the hope is that someone of greater resources (in the girl’s case, a male suitor) will respond to the “appeal” and provide the solace of remuneration. Yet men also beg for love in Sister Carrie; indeed, Hurstwood’s is a classic story of the seducer as supplicant. That is, he wins Carrie over, not through outright flattery, intimidation, or self-aggrandizement, but rather by depicting himself as a lost soul in need of succor. Telling her that she is the only important thing in his world, he “really imagined that his state was pitiful” (), with the result that “[t]he old illusion that here was some one who needed her aid began to grow in Carrie’s mind. She truly pitied this sad, lonely figure” (). (The link between begging for love and potentially begging for money becomes explicit when, in the very next chapter, the narrator carefully notes the reactions of each figure in the book’s love triangle to the pleas of a homeless man in the street.) Romance is thus depicted as essentially a matter of pity: Carrie begins her affair with Hurstwood because “she was getting into that frame of mind when, out of sympathy, a woman yields” (). She is neither smitten, nor overpowered, nor even confused, but motivated by sympathy for a poor creature in need of her “aid.” Yet is Hurstwood really such a sentimental object, and what would it mean for him to be one? The point is not that real men do not beg for love, for in sentimental novels they do so all the time. More important is how their romantic begging differs from women’s. In a man, begging for love cannot be confused with begging for cash, for this would indicate an unmanly weakness that ro   &   



mantic begging alone need not imply. Indeed, it should imply the opposite: a man strong enough to admit his need of a woman’s affectionate ministrations is, in theory, a man who will never have to beg for money, one who is willing and able to provide. This circuit is broken by the villainous rake, who begs for love without any intention of building a home for the woman whose attentions he solicits. For this, as Leslie Fiedler notes, he must be punished. If he is an unredeemable enough scoundrel, like Charlotte Temple’s Belcour, he must die. More commonly, like the same novel’s Montraville, he can be made to see the light and hence made to beg once more, this time for forgiveness. What we do not see in classic sentimental fiction is a man, no matter how rakish, forced by the narrative to beg for cash. The gender distinction that structures sentimentalism, whereby only women beg for both money and love, forbids this possibility. By breaking this cardinal rule and making the same man, Hurstwood, beg first for love and then for cash, Sister Carrie allows us to theorize the problem that the begging man poses for sentimental narrative. Put simply, sentimentalism’s reassurance that power and virtue are the same thing depends on the following logic of ends: men will not only take care of themselves; they will take care of women, and all will be well. When a rake like Montraville acknowledges his crimes against Charlotte Temple, he reaffirms the power of womanly virtue; yet at the same time, he reaffirms his own masculine power by providing manfully for the woman he does marry, right up until the close of the story. By contrast, Dreiser’s Hurstwood seems far too genuinely pathetic to merit classification as a rake. The rake may play upon a woman’s sympathy to get her into bed, but Hurstwood really does pity himself, and increasingly so as the novel progresses. Self-pity entails imagining oneself to be a hapless victim of external forces, and from the moment that Hurstwood’s affair with Carrie begins to disrupt his former life, he makes sense of that disruption in just such terms. “It seemed a monstrous, unnatural, unwarranted condition which had suddenly descended upon him without his let or hindrance,” he thinks, after his wife demands a divorce (). Then, once he and Carrie have arrived in New York, he laments, “It seemed only yesterday . . . he was comfortable and well-to-do. But now it was all wrested from him” (). At first, we as readers are likely to dismiss such claims out of hand. Men are supposed to have control over their lives; such a whiner just needs to pull up those bootstraps and get on with things. A decent man who really seems to have lost control, though—as Hurstwood increasingly does—poses a more serious threat to the sentimental worldview. We cannot just respond to him as a sentimental victim—letting our instincts to protect and nurture him secure our    

sense that all is right with the universe—because, to the degree that the male protector has failed to protect himself, all is emphatically not right with the universe. Sentimentalism’s founding logic of male protectiveness has gone terribly awry. Seeming in a stroke to tear the world apart, male desperation thus becomes the province of tragedy, which is how most of Dreiser’s readers have responded to Hurstwood’s story. Yet the sentimental man is not simply a structural impossibility. What makes the begging man fail as a sentimental figure is only the assumption that men should be providers. If a man can be perceived as himself in need of protection—if, that is, the traditional roles of male and female can be reversed— then he can assume the female position and call forth our feelings of warmth and the desire to protect. To occupy this position, he must simply be a small child, an old man, an idiot, or in some other way “legitimately” unable to fulfill his masculine role. What is fascinating—moving, even—is the clear yearning within naturalist fiction for such a possibility. Neither Hurstwood nor Frank Norris’s McTeague is actually old (McTeague is close to thirty!), and yet their respective novels represent them increasingly as washed-up, haggard, and shuffling about sadly, as we see them in the scenes where they beg from Carrie and Trina. To this, Norris appends McTeague’s utter stupidity. Nor is this the first time that a Norris novel has turned a man into a moron to ensure his sentimental effect; in Vandover and the Brute, the hero—also reduced by the end to begging from a former friend—suddenly begins to speak ungrammatically for the first time in the book before bursting into tears. To render him effectively sentimental, the author reconfigures this heretofore well-spoken young artist as a double of the doltish, stammering McTeague. It is fair to say that Norris’s work overall displays a greater willingness than Dreiser’s to sentimentalize his male characters. He readily plays either side of the sentimental card, creating blameless, victimized men in some books, while reasserting a Teddy Roosevelt–style brand of pure male agency in others. Indeed, in his most oft-quoted remark, Norris places naturalist authorship in the pantheon of turn-of-the-century hypermasculine self-sufficiency by describing his novelistic practice precisely as a refusal ever to beg. “‘I never truckled,’” he proclaims. “‘I never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth’” (Literary Criticism ). We like this quote because it sums up why the naturalist gets to be in the American canon: he is an outsider. Marginalized. A poor marginalized thing . . . no, no, that won’t do for the emphatically manly Norris. But as we have seen, the pure agent who stands    &   



defiantly with his face in the wind is always threatening to shade into the poor shlub getting windburned, because they are two sides of the same sentimental coin. It is for this reason that they must be kept carefully separate. It seems telling that the readers who celebrate Norris tend to be those who respond positively to his sentimentalization of maleness—a response that, as I have argued, entails not naming one’s own response as sentimental. Yet naturalist men are rarely accused of sentimentality, even by those readers who find their pleas for sympathy less than moving. To call them sentimental would require a sense that something is being put over on us, and these men seem not duplicitous but embarrassingly sincere. Critical battles over Dreiser’s reputation have thus centered on depictions of Dreiser himself as either a man of great feeling or a lumbering, goofy, almost McTeague-like creature, as Lionel Trilling scathingly portrays him in “Reality in America.” Such responses illustrate the perennial problem of the sentimental man, who always risks being laughed at to ward off the threat his helplessness might otherwise evoke. Dreiser thus makes this response itself a part of the world that victimizes Hurstwood. It is a world of carefree young women who mock and discard older men, as when Carrie’s friend Lola sees a man stumble in the winter street: “‘How sheepish men look when they fall, don’t they?’” (). We are clearly meant to read this as a commentary on Hurstwood, who has just made his final, unsuccessful attempt to beg from Carrie, even as she sits comfortably indoors sighing over the fate of Balzac’s Père Goriot. It is at moments like these that Hurstwood functions most effectively as a sentimental figure, suggesting the crucial role of the New Woman in producing the Old Man. As Carrie moves toward supporting herself, she becomes less and less imaginable as a sentimental type, and Hurstwood, left behind, grows more so. Indeed, in her increasing difficulty functioning as a sentimental character, Carrie brings forward contradictions structuring sentimental femininity more generally. We might think of the victimized woman as merely the opposite of the victimized man—the very quintessence of sentimental narrative. It is no surprise that Drouet reacts to the trembly-lipped Carrie in an almost automatic way: the pretty young girl calls forth a sentimental response simply by virtue of being a pretty young girl. To say that this makes her the perfect sentimental object, however, is not to suggest that she can make any man’s heart swell automatically with feeling. As I argue above, the very “automatic” quality of the most powerful sentimental responses—to pretty young girls as to kittens, babies, and so on—is the very thing likely to make one suspicious of those responses: to suspect them, that is, of being sentimental ones, if we understand    

sentimentality as a term employed only in the recognition of its failure. Indeed, women are perhaps the most suspect of sentimental victims in this regard. They are suspect in a way that the other passive types are not because when women’s sentimentality is revealed to be a sham (revealed as sentimentality), they are presumed to have been the force behind this sham. We see them as agents rather than victims all along. It is too simple, then, to say that the sentimental woman is simply the woman who tugs with automatic success at our heartstrings. Yet it is not accurate to say, either, with the sense of sentimentality as failure in mind, that she is a woman who tries to tug at our heartstrings but is, sooner or later, revealed as a fraud. Rather, I would submit, the sentimental woman is defined as such precisely by her tendency to generate an ongoing vacillation between these opposed reactions. Not only the “automatic” nature of her sentimental effect creates this vacillation, however; her accompanying narrative also makes it unusually difficult to unmask her as a schemer once and for all. Unlike the male rake, who is revealed as such the moment he abandons the woman he has seduced, the female gold digger is likely to desire exactly the same ending that the good woman does, that of male financial protection. The only difference is that she wants it for the wrong reasons. So how can we tell the difference? This is the dilemma faced by Sister Carrie, and the sense in which Carrie can be understood as a sentimental heroine not despite, but because of, the fact that readers are perennially suspicious of her motives. Not only the reader but the novel itself swings back and forth, unable to determine whether her sweet passivity is genuine or a ploy. Is this woman innocent as a lamb or a gold digger extraordinaire? Pamela, or Shamela?9 We keep being told both things. On the one hand, she is sympathy incarnate. On the other, she is a little block of ice. Hurstwood tells us that “[i]n the mild light of Carrie’s eye was nothing of the calculation of the mistress” (), and the narrator concurs: “Here was neither guile nor rapacity” (). Yet she quickly grows “cold” to Hurstwood; “Love was not blazing in her heart,” the narrator admits (), which is not surprising, in view of the fact that we are warned early on, “It was not for her to see the wellspring of human passion” (). Or witness Carrie confronting begging men in the street. We are told that she barely notices one indigent while Drouet “hand[s] over a dime with an upwelling feeling of pity in his heart” (). Yet a mere four pages later, Dreiser seems disturbed by the implications of this description and quickly recants. “On her spiritual side . . . she was rich in feeling . . . ,” he insists. “She was constantly pained by the sight of the whitefaced, ragged men who slopped desperately by her in a sort of wretched men   &   



tal stupor” (). The book’s own lack of decision as to whether Carrie is guileless or calculating, sensitive or cold, thus mimics that of the suitor trying to determine if his mistress’s heart can be trusted. Yet, again, this essential nebulousness does not detract from so much as it produces her as a feminine “type.”10 The fact that she achieves fame as an actress might seem to tip the scales against Carrie’s innocence, branding her the fraud who plays the supplicant in order to get what she wants from men. Instead, I would argue, by literalizing the relation between acting and femininity, Dreiser creates a space wherein the question of femininity’s relation to “the real” can be explicitly opened and considered anew. As a performer, it turns out, Carrie raises a set of questions very similar to those she raises as an object of romantic affection: is she naively sweet or completely on top of things? Does she catch the manager’s eye because of her “natural manner and total lack of self-consciousness” () or, a few pages later, because of her “chic way of tossing her head” ()? Here Dreiser is forced to come up with his most clever solution to the dual responses elicited by the sentimental heroine. He collapses the poles of sincerity and artifice into one, by defining Carrie’s chief skill as her “nature,” which is described as “passive and receptive” (). This enables her to take in what she sees around her and make it into part of herself. Thus, when the fashionconscious Drouet points out an elegant woman passing by as a “fine stepper,” Carrie feels a “desire to imitate” her motions that is “instinctive”: “Surely she could do that too” (). From this perspective, we can allow Carrie to be both “natural” and “chic,” in that she naturally picks up on others’ more calculated attempts at “chic,” without herself necessarily resorting to anything that looks like scheming. Neither her naturalness nor her chic, but her natural ability to pick up on chic, makes her a born actress. According to a number of late-nineteenth-century theoreticians of the feminine, she could be termed in this respect prototypical of her sex. “Imitation” marked the female temperament, creating a kinship between womanhood and the artistic impulse that led a  Cosmopolitan article to explain “Why Women Are Better Actors Than Men.” The author, Alan Dale, argues that “acting is innate in the woman,” a fact explicable if we recognize that “woman’s career on the globe has been a long series of simulations” (). “The woman acts because she has to,” he concludes; “it is her nature, and she has acquired it after eons of struggle” (). What is especially curious about his view of this “nature,” like Dreiser’s of Carrie’s, is its desire to root the natural in the most artificial: it is when women in general (and Carrie in particular) play at being    

someone else that they are most themselves. By the same token, because men are in charge of “the realities of life,” they make terrible actors. It is women who make the medium their own, exuding nothing but “sweet, feminine sincerity” when they are playing a role (). Of course, it is this very fact—that women in particular seem sincere when they are faking it—that produces the threat of the sentimental woman merely playing at weakness and thus luring tender-hearted men to serve her will. With even more finesse than Dreiser, Dale attempts to ward off this threat by explaining woman’s performance of weakness as the natural outgrowth of her actual weakness. Thus, he tellingly writes, “The real woman, a pulpy weakness of nerves, non-reason, and impulse, will make the finest actress” (). According to this logic, even the scheming seductress who fancies herself playing a role when she flutters helplessly in fact attests to a genuine helplessness, that which forced her to play such a game in the first place. This fact reassures us that there is no gap after all between the “real” woman and the “sentimental” one. Sentimentalism cannot be unmasked as a hoax if what lies beneath the stagy exterior only affirms the surface. Understood in these terms, sentimental femininity becomes again indistinguishable from realism. This is the very logic Carrie’s two suitors put into play, as they watch her onstage and respond to her as if she were alone with them in their drawingrooms. It can easily be argued that Carrie succeeds onstage primarily through sentimental techniques—by making (male) audience members want to reach out and comfort her, as if she were a helpless creature lost in the world. This is true from her first stage appearance, in the Elks Club production of Under the Gaslight, where she rallies after a weak first act to take the house by storm as the wronged heroine Laura. Dreiser demonstrates Carrie’s dramatic power through its effect on her suitors, Hurstwood and Drouet. Feeling “a scratch in his throat” as he watches, the normally carefree Drouet resolves to “marry her, by George! She was worth it” (). Hurstwood, meanwhile, “could hardly restrain the tears for sorrow” (). For him, “Carrie had the air of one who was weary and in need of protection, and under the fascinating make-believe of the moment, he rose in feeling until he was ready in spirit to go to her and ease her out of her misery by adding to his own delight” (). Both men thus blur the distinction between the real and the sentimental Carrie—viewing her both onstage and off as a poor thing—as do, later in the novel, the male audience members who witness Carrie playing a silent Quaker maid. Upset about the insignificance of her role, Carrie unintentionally pouts onstage, and the audience is charmed. Sniffing success, the director instantly    &   



converts her frown into a permanent part of the show, with the result that it eventually becomes “the chief feature of the play” (). The newspapers herald her achievement: “‘If you wish to be merry, see Carrie frown’” (). Just as Hurstwood’s vision of comforting Carrie-as-Laura afforded him “delight,” the frowning Carrie attracts the “portly gentlemen in the front rows,” who “began to feel that she was a delicious little morsel. It was the kind of frown they would have loved to force away with kisses” (). The result of projecting this sentimental vision of herself as a poor thing in need of male comfort and protection is an ever-increasing stream of marriage proposals sent to Carrie by members of the audience. Carrie’s ability to succeed in this sentimental role—both onstage and off—is codified in the novel by the young man Ames, who thinks she is squandering her abilities playing comic rather than dramatic (or, rather, “comedydrama”) parts: “That’s your field. . . . I don’t suppose you’re aware of it, but there is something about your eyes and mouth which fits you for that sort of work. . . . I remember thinking, the first time I saw you, that there was something peculiar about your mouth. I thought you were about to cry. . . . Then I noticed that that was your natural look. . . . That puts a burden of duty on you. It so happens that you have this thing. It is no credit to you—that is, I mean, you might not have had it. You paid nothing to get it. But now that you have it, you must do something with it.” (–)

Ames’s assessment of Carrie here might be termed the very opposite of a sentimental response, since he is able to speak in analytical terms about her sentimental power. In doing so, he implies that sentimental power has nothing to do with being a truly good person. It is, rather, a matter of absolute happenstance, of the physical qualities with which one has been randomly gifted. From this it follows that the person who creates a sentimental effect, exuding the “poor little thing” quality that makes portly gentlemen sigh with longing, need not be a poor little thing at all. As Ames explains to Carrie, “‘You ought not to be melancholy’” (), because, as he also tells her, she will always look as though she is. The very fact that she looks melancholy should keep her from ever actually having to be so. The results of Carrie’s initial success in Under the Gaslight seem to confirm Ames’s indication of an ontological divide between Carrie’s stage persona as

   

sentimental heroine and the Carrie who acts the part. Recall that Hurstwood, watching her, shifts from feeling sorry for himself to viewing Carrie as the one who is “weary and in need of protection” (). Romance is still coded here as a relation of charity, but in responding to Carrie’s performance, Hurstwood puts himself back into the position of a benefactor reaching out to a supplicant. Still more interesting, however, is what happens when Carrie steps offstage. The tables turn yet again, as she listens to her lovers’ protestations of desire: She felt Hurstwood’s passion as a delightful background to her own achievement. . . . She was sorry for him, too, with that peculiar sorrow which finds something complimentary to itself in the misery of another. She was now experiencing the first shades of feeling of that subtle change which removes one out of the ranks of the supplicants into the lines of the dispensers of charity. She was, all in all, exceedingly happy. ()

It is important to note that the relationship between a begging Hurstwood and a charitable Carrie here is described as being a new one. After all, Hurstwood had framed their entire courtship as a situation in which he begged for Carrie’s sympathy. If this moment is different, the reason has to be that Hurstwood’s passivity is no longer a ploy that masks his agency. Instead, it is all too real, signaling the first step toward Hurstwood’s ultimate end of begging from Carrie in the street. This shift is made possible by Carrie’s dawning awareness of her acting talents. She begins to understand that her own begging might be a form of agency, that looking like a helpless creature might allow her not to be one. This gap between a sentimental surface and a tough interior might seem to return Carrie to the familiar role of the scheming gold digger who plays at sentimentality to gain her ends. Yet this stereotype can no longer hold, for the ends themselves have changed. The gold digger is finally inseparable from the properly sentimental woman because both implicitly beg for financial support each time they beg for love. As a self-supporting actress, Carrie could also be said to earn her keep by begging for devotion from her audience, but the meaning of this activity is different. Success as a sentimental object now marks not the end of her story—the happily-ever-after of marriage to a protective man—but rather its endlessness. Unlike the wife, the actress begs for love and money not to bring her need to do so to an end but to ensure that she will be able to beg for both all over again in her next production.

   &   

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Women’s Work as Fantasy The story of work is hard to sentimentalize for this very reason, that it goes on and on, refusing the reassuring closure of the sentimental romance. While the first page of Dreiser’s novel implied that Carrie would either rise or fall, depending on whether she kept her virtue intact, her actual plotline possesses much more of this sense of endless, wavelike motion in place—the motion, as many readers have pointed out, of her favored rocking chair, where we find her once again at the novel’s close. Perhaps, however, this positioning is truer to the initial prediction than it might seem, given that the seducer with “cunning wiles” that first page posits is in fact the city itself (). And unlike those of a man, the city’s seductions are marked by their ability to appear endless, ever new—more akin to the seductive voices of the ever-changing consumer goods that whisper at Carrie from department store displays.11 Whereas the seductions of any one individual wear thin, whereas other pleasures like drinking and gambling eventually wear out one’s own body and purse, those of “the modern city and its commodity culture” constitute an ever-rechargeable “addiction,” in Tim Armstrong’s term, for as long as one remains “‘plugged in’ to its energies, desires, and rewards” (). We know by the end of the book that fame as an actress has not produced the ultimate fulfillment Carrie once imagined but has instead left her still an “addict” in this sense, still captivated by the siren call of future “rewards,” rocking and dreaming on. In retrospect, her prior dreams of ideal contentment through such a job seem to many readers the mistaken hopes of a sentimentalist, a dazzled theatergoer who “makes no distinction between the conditions of her role as worker and the luxurious atmosphere of the playhouse which is designed for the audience’s consumption”; work thus gets misapprehended as its opposite, as “a form of leisure” (A. Kaplan, Social ). The fact that Dreiser himself never fully debunks this idea of the theater’s “magical” qualities has much to do with the sense for many that he, too, and not merely his heroine, cannot keep from falling victim to sentimental fancies. Yet what of the particular “mistake” Carrie is said to make here, of letting herself be seduced by the wiles of these urban spaces, seeing a world of delight in places of toil? As it happens, in making this particular error in “August, ” (), Carrie reveals herself to be one among a quite visible historical cohort of young women. As a number of women’s labor histories have documented, the post–Civil War period, and particularly the s and s, saw a dramatic rise in the rate of rural female migration to the “great cities” in search of work. In   

deed, “the drift of population from the farms to the cities in the eighties and nineties was termed by one contemporary male ‘largely a woman movement’” (Lynn, Dream ), and statistics back this observation, showing that men tended to migrate later and in smaller numbers. What drove these “women adrift,” as they were often called, to leave their homes behind? Like Carrie, they were not generally indigent, forced into work to support their families, but rather saw the late-nineteenth-century city as a world of new possibilities for women, ones far outstripping what they could expect back on the farm. The hoped-for jobs were themselves products of the rapidly modernizing metropolis of the period; they included office work using new gender-neutral technologies like the typewriter and the telephone, and sales work in the burgeoning department stores.12 The latter of these forms the career path first envisioned for Carrie, whom the narrator oddly persists in referring to as “the shop-girl” long after she has failed to find employment in the “vast retail combinations” whose “show place[s]” of trinkets so captivate her (). Here, again, the quasi-theatrical displays of the department store would seem to lead Carrie to blur production and consumption, imagining that working amid such objects is equivalent to owning them. Carrie’s failure to land the job she desires in this early section of the book, and her depressing experience working instead in a shoe factory, can be seen as the properly “realist” rebuke to such an error. Yet with respect to the theater, it then appears that Carrie makes the same sentimental mistake all over again. The theater, indeed, has supplied generations of Carrie scholars with an ideal metaphor for our heroine’s tendency to be lured by a glittering show with no reality behind it and her own participation, as an actress, in producing that show for others. Understanding Carrie’s acting strictly in such figural terms, however, can have the problematic effect of keeping her story within the bounds of sentimental femininity as we have seen it above, where a woman’s “acting” can only signify a doomed attempt to cover over her essential vulnerability. Our own continued allegiance to sentimental categories may be inadvertently demonstrated by criticism’s dramatic lack of interest in considering the meaning of acting as an actual career choice for young women at the turn of the century. During an era when many women were coming to the city in order to explore significant new opportunities, this seems an odd, if telling, omission in the scholarly record. The number of actresses employed in the United States in fact soared between  and , from  to , according to the national census. As    &   



the historian Albert Auster comments, it is difficult not to read these numbers as an outgrowth of a burgeoning leisure economy (). And newspaper stories did tie young middle-class women’s increasing visibility in theater audiences to a massive national rush of girls into the profession of acting. “The surge of young girls to the stage [at the turn of the century] was estimated by one leading New York agent to be at a ratio of  girls to one man,” Auster writes (). These girls saw the theater much as Carrie does; their enjoyment of it as consumers seemed to irresistibly call forth visions of a similar world of enjoyment behind the scenes, one that would welcome their participation as readily as had the ticket-taker at the door. Was this vision of theatrical life no more than a consumer’s fantasy? In many important respects, it was not. Claudia Johnson paints a picture of the theater as a haven of opportunity for women throughout the nineteenth century: While factory girls were making $. a day in the s, supernumeraries, at the very bottom of the theatrical salary scale, were paid from $. to $. a night for relatively light work and few hours and . . . they might expect to move up to better roles and better salaries after several months if they were talented and interested. . . . Even more unusual was the theater’s custom of paying women salaries equal to those of men. . . . This unusual economic position of women in the nineteenth-century theater resulted in an extraordinary domestic situation for a number of them: they were the principal or only breadwinners in their families. (–)

I cite this history to establish that Carrie’s striking professional mobility and earning power in Dreiser’s novel might not be the stuff of sheer make-believe, but that the combination of financial and artistic reward characterizing the nineteenth-century actress’s life offered a real-world model for the “sentimental” notion that wage work could fulfill a young women’s deepest desires.13 In the s, with more and more young women clamoring to realize that dream on the stage, discourse around women and acting did seek to clarify the line distinguishing fantasy from reality. Yet even this line worked both ways: as a profession for women in particular, the theater was described both as less appealing in reality than fantasy images of it would suggest, and as more so. When in  Clement Scott of the British Daily Telegraph opined in print that “‘it is nearly impossible for a woman who adopts the stage as a profession to remain pure’” (qtd. in Auster ), an eruption of outrage—much of it from American    

actresses—forced his resignation from the paper. The remark’s offhandedness, coupled with the outrage it inspired, characterizes this era as one that fostered two contrary and intensely held opinions of women who went into acting: “Actresses may profess their purity, but really . . . ” and “Actresses are maligned as impure, but those who really know . . . ” Both of these positions claim to speak for what is “real.” In one case, however, the grim reality that we must face operates along sentimentalist lines (women in public are whores), whereas the opposing view attempts to separate the real from the logic of sentimentalism. In her history of American actresses, Johnson characterizes the turn of the century as the period during which the actress’s image began to undergo a shift from “harlot” to “breadwinner.” It is eye-opening to read Sister Carrie through the lens of this shift, for Carrie’s career, too, seems designed to demonstrate that the theater is not necessarily the den of iniquity for young women that Dreiser’s readership might have assumed. To be sure, when Hurstwood hears Carrie ponder, “I think I’ll try some of the [theatrical] managers” and yet is “dead to the horror” of such a suggestion (), we are clearly meant to view this a signal of his own moral and spiritual decline. Yet the fact is that no manager does make any moves on Carrie; her entry into theatrical circles actually brings her previously hopping sex life to a screeching halt. Her increased romantic options as a successful actress only make her more selective about choosing one. It would hardly be novel, at this point, to assert merely that Dreiser attempts in Sister Carrie to replace sentimental notions about women with realist ones. This is the familiar understanding of Dreiserian realism, and the one that has inclined those readers who find Carrie’s story unrealistic to charge that her author falls prey to sentimentality after all. Yet the meaning of these options themselves can shift, I would contend, if we reconsider them in relation to broader turn-of-the-century debates over how best to narrate the story of the working woman. It is important to see that, as in the quarrels over actresses, the war here concerned two different versions of realism. Those who subscribed to sentimental understandings of femininity were as insistent as their opponents that they held privileged access to “the real.” The strategy of these sentimental realists, as we might term them, was thus to unmask feminist narratives as a form of fantasy, a pie-in-the-sky blindness to the fact that work for women offered no consumer’s dreamworld but a relentless submission to toil and sexual degradation. What is striking is the extent to which these kinds of stark oppositions continue to inform our thinking about Dreiser’s text to this day. To be sure, it has been some time since any critic writing on Carrie has condemned its heroine for her sexual license. It remains quite common, however,    &   



to express chagrin at Carrie’s lust for consumer goods, thought to furnish the motor behind her entire career. The problem is that in the period itself, these were scarcely separable charges. By the time large numbers of young American women were coming to the city in search of work, the fear that women seeking to support themselves in urban environments would eventually “fall” into prostitution, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, already possessed a long history. Yet late-nineteenth-century expressions of this worry tended to envision such girls falling prey less to sexual hungers than to “appetites for luxury” that drove them to sell their bodies in the quest for a better wage. In particular, women’s “love of finery and frivolity” was deemed prone to stimulation by the “sumptuous atmosphere” of the new department stores.14 For this reason, saleswomen or “shop-girls” constituted a group thought to be in especial danger of selling themselves, as their “constant exposure to middle-class lifestyles,” coupled with their own “ambiguous class status,” “helped to encourage envy and dissatisfaction” with their present state (Felski ). All of this may help us to parse Dreiser’s otherwise odd tendency to refer to Carrie as a “shop-girl,” given that this seems to function more as a metaphorical or generic tag than anything else. If the shop girl is the working woman who is stimulated to “dissatisfaction” and aspiration by being surrounded by beautiful things, things she hopes to own rather than merely to move among, then she is very much like the actress, and finally not unlike any girl coming to the city in the s and s, if she is a farm girl suddenly brought into contact with a world of possibilities she could never have conceived of before. Carrie’s acting resembles her everyday imitation of better-dressed women on the street, and both suggest the shop girl taking mental notes on the dress and habits of her upperclass women customers. The shop girl does occupy an “ambiguous” new position in between the female factory worker and the new possibility of women’s white-collar work. While clear class associations still adhered to each of these jobs, the unprecedented flux in female employment meant there was also, during the period, real potential for movement among them, making the shop girl’s characteristic aspirations—like those of the actress—a bit more than mere fantasy. Indeed, we should recognize that when commentators at the time used the language of fantasy to describe such aspirations, they did so to condemn ambitious working girls for wanting to “occupy a false position”—false, that is, in relation to their “true” class status. Joanne Meyerowitz shows how, in a debate carried out in letters in the Chicago Daily Tribune, this critical belief that the urban “women adrift” of the era possessed mistakenly “exalted notions of themselves” warred with a sympathetic view casting them as “innocent children”    

struggling against “a fate they were powerless to control” (–). Here, unmistakably, we are back to the two options for sentimental femininity, one true, one false: the appealingly helpless waif, or the duplicitous, greedy gold digger. The gold digger’s rapaciousness, however, now expends itself not on the hunt for a man but on the hunt for a job. In making this shift, characterizations of the working girl as the one who wants too much, who will sell her body if need be to get the luxuries she craves, play a crucial role. So do depictions of her as a home-wrecker of sorts, wresting jobs away from truly needy male providers, thanks to her craven willingness to work for a lower wage. What is most important to see, however, is the extent to which all of these implications about the meaning of a woman’s work turn on her assimilation to the figure of the consumer, the representative of an artificially created desire that can be opposed to irreducible physical need. Women were in fact routinely criticized for working merely in order to consume, to support their cravings for “dress or pleasure,” meaning to “decorate themselves beyond their needs and station” (Kessler-Harris ).15 As I have suggested, it is this aspect of the working woman’s depiction that remains most alive and well in present-day perspectives on Sister Carrie. Although the possibility of considering acting as an actual job seems well-nigh erased by criticism on the novel, this erasure may well result less from a lack of interest in late-nineteenth-century women’s burgeoning participation in wage work than from a tendency to see that work itself most immediately in relation to consumption. Consider the sole mention of changes in women’s work opportunities in Alan Trachtenberg’s important study of the post–Civil War era, The Incorporation of America: Increasingly the realm of women workers, the category of “clerical” in the  census showed a threefold increase in size since , embracing a range of jobs such as bookkeepers, cashiers, bill collectors, stenographers, typists, secretaries, telephone operators. And as “clerical” came to imply an aspiration to remain permanently above the rank of industrial worker, the department store and its magical world of goods found in the same development a mass of new consumers . . . ()

Such descriptions surely do not intend to imply that women began seeking new forms of work chiefly in order to buy themselves goodies. And yet this implication is as present in these sorts of cultural histories—which often elide women’s work history altogether, associating the female sex in this crucial period only with a new impetus to consume16—as it is in readings of the fictional    &   



representation of late-nineteenth-century feminine desire in Sister Carrie. The point could scarcely be to deny Carrie’s fascination with the offerings of the department stores. Yet what is happening when every last one of her ambitions gets routed through her interest in consumer goods? I have suggested that this tendency has been crucial to the critique of the novel’s sentimentalism, for if we call something sentimental when we want to unmask its sunny promises as opportunistic lies, consumer culture—ads, store displays, show windows—has served as a veritable modern-day emblem of the phenomenon. I have also argued, however, that there is another kind of sentimentalism—the kind that never gets unmasked as a sham because its insistences are simply taken for the truth. We saw this more successful form of sentimentalism at work in the depiction of naturalism’s Old Men. Ordinarily, of course, Hurstwood’s sad story is viewed as the realist rebuke to the sentimental strains within Sister Carrie, the bleak underside to the glittering surfaces of capitalist culture. What happens to this familiar reading, then, when the sentimental elements at work in the Old Man’s story come to light? In fact, they may turn out to be largely responsible for the entire sense of Carrie’s story as merely a set of consumerist mistakes. We appear to remain quite susceptible to what I have called sentimental realism, cast as an alternative to sentimentality but really being only “sentimentality that works.” Carrie’s story, as fantasy, might in fact take another shape altogether, one that the never-revealed sentimentality of Hurstwood’s has kept us unable to see.

Women Adrift: The Consumer as Compulsive One of the more influential arguments linking women workers to consumer desire was made very close to Sister Carrie’s publication, by Mrs. John van Vorst and Marie van Vorst in their  exposé The Woman Who Toils—featuring a special preface by Theodore Roosevelt: Women have become autocrats . . . A phrase which I heard often repeated at the factory speaks by itself for a condition: “She must be married, because she don’t work.” And another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the younger girls: “I don’t have to work; my father gives me all the money I need; but not all the money I want. I like to be independent and spend my money as I please.” What are the conclusions to be drawn? The American-born girl is an egoist. . . . I can think of no better way to present this love of luxury, this triumph of individualism, this passion for independence . . . ()

   

In the van Vorsts’ argument, the girl who works even though she doesn’t “have to” do so from dire need reveals a consumerist “love of luxury,” but this is only a symptom of a much broader will to narcissistic indulgence, to placing her own desires over the needs of others, and in particular those of the community at large and the family that is its privileged microcosm. Like the link to consumerist greed, this was an argument against women’s work with a considerable history. It had long been feared that labor might threaten women’s future maternal capacities by weakening their bodies through strain, and such arguments seemed scarcely separable from worries that they would simply lose interest in domestic duties once having been exposed to the life of a wageearning “individualist.”17 Rather than focus on children, such women might begin to see “self-gratification” as an end in itself (Felski ). With respect to Sister Carrie in particular, we might note that the Clark University psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who shared many of Roosevelt’s views on these subjects, saw modern women’s use of “rocking-chairs” as one sign of a masturbatory tendency (: )! By linking the working woman’s consumerist motives to her rejection of family and home, writers like these are able to recast the debate over women’s work along the lines of traditional sentimental opposition between the golddigging whore and the virtuous, self-sacrificing wife and mother. The sentimental ideal that collapses one’s personal desires into the good of all concerned makes any other kind of desire look like pure selfishness and, indeed, like the ruin of others’ needs. In particular, the modern woman’s neglected children appear as the innocent victims of her self-involvement, but at the turn of the century in particular it is startling to note how often the most abject sufferers take the form of the put-upon husbands struggling to cope with their wives’ rampant desires. Bram Dijkstra’s is one of the strongest discussions of this fin-desiècle figuration of victimized masculinity, as it appeared in such texts as The Sexes Compared (): The goods-consuming middle-class wife who spent her husband’s hardearned money and the life-consuming prostitute who took what he had left . . . blended in the fin-de-siècle male’s fantasies to form the primal woman, incessantly voracious in her hunger for gold. [] . . . She had come to be seen as the secret force which had taken the reins of economic selfhood out of the hands of many whose fathers had still appeared comfortably in control of their own financial futures. . . . Woman became the victimizer of choice of the period’s self-pityingly marginalized male. ()

   &   



Thus Dreiser’s Hurstwood: “‘They want a girl, probably, at ten a week,’” he grumbles, regarding a job at a furniture company (). Yet what Dijkstra’s discussion helps make clear is that the financially strapped fin-de-siècle man is much more effectively viewed as victimized by women consumers, specifically the female family members whose “needs” he is heroically bound to meet. This is how we see the situation appear in Henry James, for whom the nation’s turnof-the-century male breadwinners could be seen desperately trying to meet the demands of “the wives and daughters who float, who splash on the surface and ride the waves . . . while, like a diver for shipwrecked treasure, he gasps in the depths and breathes through an air-tube” (qtd. in Lynn, Dream ). Not only the heartlessly consuming wives and daughters, but also the nautical images here find an echo in Sister Carrie, which persistently figures the modern city as a kind of “ocean,” in which Carrie does seem able to “drift” with the currents while Hurstwood finds himself “rolling and floundering without sail,” even as his own selfish wife and daughter bob up (, , ). As an even stronger fictional expression of James’s perspective, Kenneth Lynn suggests the lesser naturalist Robert Herrick’s novel Together, a project deliberately conceived as a quasi-epic exploration of the American female circa . In Lynn’s view, the result is an unmitigated antifeminist tract, in which the wives of the era appear as “predatory beasts of prey who stop at nothing to achieve their goals” (Lynn, Dream ). Early in the book, the heroine Isabelle, newly married, evinces disgust at the sight of an impoverished woodsman’s wife who, at “not yet thirty,” already has eight children, with another on the way: What joy, what life for herself could such a creature have? Isabelle, her imagination full of comfortable houses with little dinner parties, pretty furniture, books, theatres, charity committees,—all that she conceived made up a properly married young woman’s life,—could not understand the existence of the guide’s wife. She was merely the man’s woman, a creature to give him children, to cook the food, to keep the fire going. . . . Well, civilization had put a few milestones between herself and Molly Sewall! ()

Indeed, Isabelle conceives that she will have a “large, full life” (), and many of the book’s other married women also oppose that possibility to mere wifehood and motherhood in similar terms. Yet as the contents of Isabelle’s imagination in the quote above suggest, Together frequently mocks such aims as the pettiest of bourgeois consumerist fantasies.    

Taken as an ensemble, however, Together’s heroines form not the “composite portrait” of a rapacious, neurotic narcissist that Lynn suggests, but rather a portrayal far more typical of its era in its deep ambivalence, even incoherence, about how to judge the modern woman’s yearnings. For every Bessie Falkner, Isabelle’s hopelessly narcissistic friend, there is a Stacia Conry, whose serious ambitions to become a singer run into the wall of her thuglike husband; hitting her in the street, he is said to go unnoticed, just another man “exerting his ancient, impregnable rights of domination over the woman, who was his” (). Isabelle—perhaps a Jamesian reference?—is at times treated with similar sympathy, at others not. It would seem, though, that both the mocking of her ambitions and the lack of a clear line about what they mean are made possible by the same overall feature of Herrick’s diagnosis: his depiction of a vagueness, a kind of empty category, at the core of modern feminine desire: Just what [Isabelle] meant by a “large, full life,” she had never stopped to set down . . . there was inserted in the nether layers of her consciousness the belief that the world was changing its ideas about women and marriage, “and all that” . . . “I must do something!” That phrase was often on her lips these days. In her restlessness nothing seemed just right—she was ever trying to find something beyond the horizon. (, , )

Here we recur to a certain nautical metaphor, as first sighted in James and then in Sister Carrie; like Dreiser, Herrick casts New York City in aquatic terms, though more grimly as a “whirlpool,” in which Isabelle must somehow try to “put out her tentacles, and grasp an anchorage. But where? What?” (). The use of this language to describe the modern woman’s dilemma is in keeping with the psychological literature of the period, where it recurred to express her lack of direction and failure to move steadily along a course set by prior generations. For G. Stanley Hall, for example, the choice of male role models by the era’s girls offers evidence that “modern woman has cut loose from all old moorings and is drifting with no destination and no anchor aboard” (: ). Imagining a questing, “overcivilized” woman very much like those depicted in Together, Hall echoes Herrick’s sense of her vagueness of purpose through this discourse of drift: “She craves something different and afar, and drags her anchor and perhaps slips adrift” (: ); she feels “a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life,” “a slight general malaise,” and “the resolution to be happy”; in her attempt to reach that goal, she may have “already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again” (: ).    &   



In both Herrick and Hall, the key feature of these descriptions lies in the glaring conflict between the modern woman’s certainty that she is headed for a hitherto unimaginable fulfillment—a “large, full life,” the thing that is “just right”—and the actual lack of fulfillment made clear by her ongoing, drifting, directionless motion. Both in her embodiment of this conflict and in her dogged refusal to face its consequences, the modern woman as we see her here has much in common with Dreiser’s Carrie as she has most often been conceived. That is, although we as readers are said to know that Carrie’s rocking chair will move ever back and forth, like the waves, an emblem of “motion without progress . . . a hypnotic dream without content” (R. P. Warren ), she herself continues to rock as if aboard a speeding steamer, seeking, like Isabelle, after some magic potentiality lying always “just beyond the horizon” (Lynn, “Sister Carrie” ). If the commodity is the fetish that Marx suggested, imbued with wondrous powers that we at a deeper level know it cannot possess, then these women’s stories can easily stand as emblematizations of the consumer’s desire. As Rita Felski writes, consumerism has been defined through the structure of compulsion, as “an unfocused and insatiable longing which latches onto a succession of objects in a potentially endless sequence”; the objects can never satisfy because “there is no objective need that is being addressed; rather, the commodity comes to stand for an imaginary fulfillment that remains necessarily unattainable” (). In this depiction, the language of consumerism functions nearly identically to that of “drift,” and both were equally able to dissolve distinctions between the period’s feminists, its urban working women—themselves, we should recall, typically termed “women adrift” in the popular press—and the hyperconsuming leisure-class wife. Turn-of-the-century women wanted something, but they had no idea what it was, and so they would never get it. For this reason, perhaps the best representative of the entire phenomenon was the middleclass female “kleptomaniac,” a major development of the time, who was a version in the sphere of consumption of the woman who worked to make money she did not really need. The bourgeois kleptomaniac, similarly, shoplifted for things she did not need and, in any case, could easily have paid for. As with all the other drifting women cited above, the lack of explanation was part of the point; such women suffered from a kind of compulsion akin to other female “manias” and best explained, like the rest, as a neurotic disorder. “‘I was compelled to take the objects,’” one such woman stated. “‘I had to take them, I had no peace until I did’” (Abelson ).18 Yet such peace, of course, was shortlived, ever ready to give way to another fruitless attempt at its achievement.    

Thus neurasthenia, defined most commonly as a weakness of the will, created a modern woman who, in the words of one of Hall’s fellow psychologists, “allows herself to be impelled hither and thither . . . tossed now in this direction, now in that, like a bark upon stormy waters; while the woman of strong will, keeping steadily before her the end which she has resolved on, finds herself by and by in the haven where she would be” (H. Campbell ). A quote like this is important because it makes clear that the modern woman’s critics here operate from the position of what I have been calling sentimental realism. Their point, that is, is not that one should cease to seek an idealized “haven,” a place of “peace” as the kleptomaniac above states; the point concerns only how to go about successfully doing so. The modern woman should be faulted not for the grandiosity of her dreams but for her foolish failure to recognize how best to achieve them. One  article of particular relevance to Sister Carrie decries “the modern fad of amateur acting” by women (). According to the author, Fannie Aymar Matthews, the amateur actress has shrieked the same weary, rending cry that all the other women . . . seem in these days to have shrieked . . . crying out: “I will be heard! I will be seen! I will be pointed at, talked about, written of, commented on, criticized, cavilled at even, if needs be, but I must be something, do something, other than lead the life of a womanly, sweet and serious woman. That will kill me!” ()

Here the increasing desperation of the woman who believes that new avenues of self-expression will cure her malaise could not be more apparent. Nor could the true palliative that stares such a woman in the face: the familiar, cozy domestic life she finds so impossible to bear. That goal possesses here a weight, a reality missing from all of her contentless conceptions of the “large, full life” she might derive from other means. The amateur actress, in other words, acts because she wants to fantasize that she inhabits a world other than the one she really does. Her shrieking self-involvement in doing so is telling, for, as in the case of the woman who works to consume, her fantasies here risk devastating effects on others’ realities. As Elizabeth Bisland puts it in “The Modern Woman and Marriage,” one of many antifeminist polemics written over the course of the decade for the North American Review: However the modern woman may swagger about her individuality, may talk of her “spiritual needs” and deplore the stupid tyranny of men who demand

   &   

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sacrifices from her in return for [their] tenderness, protection, and support, the fact is not changed, that however much she may be man’s intellectual equal, or spiritual superior, the exigencies of motherhood put her at his mercy. She cannot be entirely self-dependent except at the cost of the welfare of her offspring. ()

The core “fact” the fantasizing modern woman fails to acknowledge, that is, is her own maternal body, the most unbudging limit-case of her limitless desires. That body in effect returns her with a stroke to the realm of need even as it propagates those who most represent that realm: her helpless children. To lead a domestic life, to care for such children along with their father, is thus to inhabit a world at once sentimental and real; to ignore its existence is to flounder amid the will-o’-the-wisps of disembodied fantasy. In other words, it is to be Sister Carrie. Yet as we have seen, the problem for those readers who call Carrie’s story sentimental lies less with her own flimsy fantasies than with Dreiser’s peculiar tendency to fantasize along with her throughout the book. For at least one modern reader, this participation specifically entails allowing Carrie, unlike traditional heroines, to “carr[y] on extended affairs with Drouet and Hurstwood without apparent concern about pregnancy, as though she can control what happens to her body by will alone” (Minter ). A curious claim, this, to the extent that it seems unable to conceive of a female relation to the body that does not take the form either of total determinism—the sentimental plot of fallenness—or total fantasy. Yet Carrie’s body has often been conceived in such fantasy terms, as cyborglike in its ability to replicate itself over and over in a new form (and with a new name).19 As in Norris’s McTeague, it is this capacity for turning herself into an image that seems most to separate the successful woman worker from the doomed, residual, hyperembodied Old Man.20 For indeed, the shift here seems to be one less from embodiment to disembodiment than from a situation in which women are seen as particularly limited by their bodies to one in which, post-Darwinism, embodiment comes to be seen as a necessary but also fluctuating limitcondition on all human endeavor—a realization that appears gloomy to the previously body-free masculine subject even as it appears to possess a liberating capacity for the modern woman. It is crucial to see, however, that, as in the case of the woman who may well have learned to use birth control but who could scarcely control her body’s functioning “by will alone,” this liberation need not be seen in the implied terms of outright fantasy. To see it as such simply sets it up to be unmasked as the gold    

digger’s absurd dream of total power, of necessity bound to fail. The sentimental realist critique of feminism, that is, depends on an insistence that feminism shares an investment in sentimentality’s happily-ever-after story, only with the means changed, so that ultimate fulfillment derives not from traditional domesticity but from work or self-expression of some kind. One could scarcely deny that feminism has often taken, and can still take, such a sentimental form. Yet what about the possibility that, in the s materials I have been examining, and specifically in Sister Carrie, it also takes another shape altogether? I suggested that the word for such a shape might well be fantasy, conceived not as another word for sentimentalism, but as an open-ended orientation toward the future that sentimental realism finds itself wholly unable to conceive. There is a reason, however, that this possibility has been so hard for us to see. When the Old Man appears simply as the sign of realism, modernity necessarily appears in cultural history as a bleak and victimizing phenomenon, and the corollary is that those s figures who believed they were facing new kinds of opportunities and possibilities must necessarily be treated as hopeless fantasizers failing to come to grips with a tragic reality. Thus, we borrow from the s themselves a tendency to subsume the working woman, the woman exploring new possibilities for her life’s shape, into the figure of the deluded consumer, chasing after manufactured dreams of ideal happiness that she will never attain. Turn-of-the-century consumerism is read as part of the broader phenomenon of “therapeutic culture,” in which, in the words of one commentator in a symposium on divorce, concerns with nurturing one’s “growing personality” replace adherence to traditional ways of life (Lears ). Yet if one looks at women’s labor histories, the biggest rhetorical shift that took place during the first two decades of the twentieth century had to do with the emergence of a discourse of “self-development,” “personality,” and “expression” as acceptable legitimations for women’s work, ones that made it newly possible to conceive of a middle ground between abject need and mere frivolous desire.21 Again, this discourse was and remains hardly immune to a therapeutic sentimentalism imagining that women might “complete” themselves through such an independent life trajectory, just as the women of Together therapeutically seek after the most “full” life, their “perfect development,” “the most complete presentation of personality,” and so on (Herrick, Together , , ). It is precisely this “completeness,” however, that the compulsive modern female subject persistently fails to attain, as she keeps getting stuck in place, fixating on a new desire in response to the inability of the last one to realize her dreams. To the extent that we respond by claiming that she is simply chasing after the    &   



wrong thing, it is we who continue to promulgate the logic of sentimentality, by implying that those dreams could be realized “completely” if they just took some other, less excessive form. “Tradition,” say—or rather traditional domesticity. With respect to Carrie, however, the one thing Dreiser seems to be clearest about is that such a solution is in fact no solution at all. The sad decline of Carrie and Hurstwood’s pseudo-“marriage” is not the result of its sham nature; rather, their relationship reproduces the emotional emptiness of the properly wedded Hurstwoods’ “‘perfectly appointed house’” (). Domesticity is, we can be certain, the one thing that is decidedly wrong for Carrie, who joins her sister in Chicago not at Minnie’s urging or because of any clear necessity but because she was “dissatisfied at home” ().22 This dissatisfaction recurs when she lives with Hurstwood, whom the narrator all but mocks for “imagin[ing]” Carrie to be “of the thoroughly domestic type of mind”: He really thought, after a year, that her chief expression in life was finding its natural channel in household duties. Notwithstanding the fact that he had observed her act in Chicago, and that during the past year he had only seen her limited to her relations to her flat and him by conditions he had made, and that she had not gained any friends or associates, he drew this peculiar conclusion. With it came a feeling of satisfaction in having a wife who could thus be content. . . . ()

This is, surely, Dreiser at his most overtly critical of Victorian notions of gender—a Dreiser whose voice well-nigh echoes that of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman, appalled at the thought that the limitations of women’s lives might be mistaken for the limitations of women themselves. Reading Sister Carrie, we tend to focus in on that opening quote of the narrator’s, the homily that would allow a story such as Carrie’s, that of the young girl entering the city, to come to a recognizable end one way or the other: a plot of triumph or a plot of decline. The novel goes on to refuse these absolute alternatives, yet we seem doomed to repeat them, understanding Carrie’s story over and over as one or the other of these sentimental plotlines. We might be better served if we moved slightly farther into the book, to another version of the “girl in the city” story that appears about ten pages after Dreiser’s famous initial lines. Here, in this much less remarked passage, we are in the head of Carrie’s sister Minnie, as she wonders about the future of her young sibling, newly arrived in Chicago:    

A shop-girl was the destiny prefigured for the newcomer. She would get in one of the great shops and do well enough until—well, until something happened. Neither of them knew exactly what. They did not figure on promotion. They did not exactly count on marriage. Things would go on, though, in a dim kind of way until the better thing would eventuate, and Carrie would be rewarded for coming and toiling in the city. . . . In  Chicago had the peculiar qualifications of growth which made such adventuresome pilgrimages even on the part of young girls plausible. ()

As we have seen, such “pilgrimages” may, in fact, have been more the province of young girls than anyone else. Yet what Minnie’s musings here reveal is at once the taken-for-grantedness of this historical “movement” and the absence of any well-defined narrative through which to make sense of that history. For Carrie, as a girl of eighteen in , to seek urban employment thus appears natural enough, able to be fitted into available slots (“a shop-girl”), and yet the sense of a whole, of a clear-cut purpose or end to her choice, is lacking. Minnie’s narrative tacks on the sentimental ending—“the better thing would eventuate”—but it rings hollow, because there is no longer any clear sense of how this end would be arrived at or what it would entail. “She went to the city/’Twas all they would say,” went one of the popular songs written by Dreiser’s brother, Paul Dresser. Such tunes, it has been pointed out, provide the cadences for Sister Carrie’s flowery chapter titles, which are often seen as another sentimental flaw marring the novel. Yet if the songwriter’s lyric implies that “She went to the city” is all we need to know— that the rest, the fall, is obvious—Dreiser retains the sense of wistfulness without the certainty about its meaning. Finally, “She went to the city” is simply all Dreiser can say. He leaves Hurstwood for dead, his “nameless body” borne out of the heartless city by barge to the Potter’s Field, but leaves Carrie still rocking, rocking—a woman “adrift” on the waves of history.

Coda: “Julia Hurst” I have been arguing that naturalism’s men, like Hurstwood, have always been better suited to the prevailing view of the genre as exposing modernity’s plots of decline, when compared with ambiguously mobile female figures like Sister Carrie. It is unsurprising, then, that the woman-authored text most often admitted into the canon of American naturalism has been Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (), because it is a novel that appears to cast a woman in the    &   



role of the naturalist Old Man, the victim of deterministic forces that age her before her time. Yet while Lily Bart may come closer to offering a female counterpart of Dreiser’s Hurstwood than any other woman in American fiction, I would argue that she also ends up demonstrating how difficult it was to apply this downward-spiraling plot to a dynamic female character at the turn of the century. At first blush, the evidence for the doomed Lily’s having more in common with Hurstwood than with Carrie would seem considerable.23 (Intriguingly, Wharton’s original name for the character was Julia Hurst.) Luck certainly works against her from the book’s first chapter with a mercilessness that echoes the determinist slide of the naturalist hero. Like Hurstwood, too, she participates in the tendency to give herself over to luck in a familiarly punishable fashion, through gambling. It is when Lily’s bridge debts are revealed that her aunt, Mrs. Peniston, makes the fatal decision to cut her off, and here Lily decidedly takes up the position of the naturalist begging man confronting the cold woman, in language that could be straight out of Norris’s McTeague—the purse-lipped Peniston “shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar” (). Lily’s assignation to the typically male naturalist role here may be less surprising if we recall her childhood identification with her father, a textbook Old Man if ever there was one: Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags . . . but Lily could not recall the time when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her mother. Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was “down town” . . . ()

One could scarcely conceive a more emblematic portrait of the pathetic masculine wage-earner of the turn of the century, graying before his time in a doomed effort to satisfy his socialite wife’s wild desires. When this same man, unsurprisingly, comes home one day financially “ruined,” he finds himself quite literally cast by that same forward-looking woman onto the dustheap of history: “To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfill his purpose.” By contrast, “Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him . . . ” ().    

Yet if Lily is like Carrie in finding pity in her heart for the Old Man deprived of his provider’s role, she also resembles the man himself in entertaining “ambitions” that seem to derive less from an imagined future than from a bygone past. While Mrs. Bart found only “grievance” in the fact that her husband “wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as ‘reading poetry,’” Lily herself possesses “a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source,” which makes her “think of her beauty as a power for good” and favor “sentimental fiction” (). Importantly, the particular fiction she prefers involves imagining her own wedding to an “English nobleman” or an “Italian prince,” for the reason that “[l]ost causes had a romantic charm for her . . . she liked to picture herself as standing aloof from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to the claims of an immemorial tradition” (–). The bachelor Lawrence Selden thus appeals to Lily in no small part because of his quality of “carrying the impress of a concentrated past” (). Indeed, we could say that Selden might fulfill her sentimental fantasies most perfectly by his famous failure to arrive in time to forestall her death from an overdose of the sleeping drug chloral. Only thanks to his belatedness, after all, does Lily get to achieve her last wish before increasing the dose: “If only life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world!” (). The aspect of this ending that fulfills Lily’s own sentimental ideal, in other words, is not really the vision of herself and Selden fully connected at last—as he bends over her dead body, and speaks “the word which made all clear” ()—but rather the affirmation of such a moment’s necessary impossibility. Lily’s demise possesses all the inevitability of Hurstwood’s, and for a very similar set of reasons: the book seems bent on depicting her as ever more of a “suffering victim,” a creature of pure “passivity and helplessness,” as it proceeds (Lidoff ; Beaty ). The sentimentalizing consequences of this victimization have been a bit clearer to readers in Lily’s case, however, no doubt because of the inseparability of Lily’s passivity from her development of “a moral fineness so pure” that it makes “taking practical action on her own behalf,” even to save her own life, impossible (Beaty ; Lidoff ). As Wai Chee Dimock writes, the “nobility” of her unseen act of burning her enemy Bertha Dorset’s letters rather than using them as blackmail “surely lies in its fruitlessness,” its “erasure from history” (“Debasing” ). Lily’s particular mode of escape from historical time entails a retreat into the realm of “immemorial tradition” that she imagined as a child, albeit with a twist: the noble aristocrat is reconceived as a redeemed working girl.    &   



Specifically, Lily arrives at her “vision of lost possibilities” through a chance visit to the kitchen of Nettie Struther, whom she has previously known as one of the “victims of over-work and anemic parentage” receiving help at a club for women workers. Nettie, against all odds, has returned to vibrancy, and Lily has no trouble identifying the source. “Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal possible,” she thinks—most importantly, it seems, by giving her a child, symbol of “the continuity of life,” “the central truth of existence” (). And as Lily eases into her final sleep, she achieves a sense of peace by conceiving that she is holding Nettie Struther’s child. Readers objecting to a lurking sentimentality in House of Mirth have, unsurprisingly, zeroed in on this beatific moment, which Lily clearly makes emblematic of all that is good—a sense of place, of “grave endearing traditions” and “real relation to life” ()—in contrast to the fallen world in which she herself was raised. And if Nettie’s kitchen might be a vision out of the “poetry” into which Lily’s father once escaped from the quest for Mammon, the fallen world is home to hundreds of Mrs. Hudson Barts in their ragged ball dresses, “whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance” (), “blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion” (). If Nettie stands for tradition and place, these others stand unmasked as “rootless and ephemeral, mere spindrift of the whirling surface of existence” ()—as rootless as the “Lilies” that drift along with the shifting currents (Lily herself having been described as a “water-plant in the flux of the tides” []). Lily’s death, then, not only stops historical time; it arrests Lily’s own anxious participation in this whirling motion, fixing her in the permanence of tradition recalled. In effect, then, Lily is “saved whole” from a world that saves nothing, a world of waste and terminal ephemerality (House ). As in the case of Hurstwood, it can easily seem better to be so, better no longer to degrade oneself to such a world’s demands. Yet though these final scenes appear to fit Lily neatly enough into the male naturalist plot of decline, I would argue otherwise. Rather, we might say that Lily gets hastily handed a baby, a kitchen, and a repudiation of drifting rootlessness (and wild dancing) precisely because, in the book’s first half, she might otherwise seem as ideally suited as any other urban “woman adrift” to embody the very malaises of modernity that she comes in her final revelation to diagnose. This was how she was generally read at the time— less as the sacrificial lamb Wharton (along with many later feminist critics) seems to have imagined than as an emblem of the problem. For the Saturday Review, House offered “a masterly study of the modern American woman with her coldly corrupt nature and unhealthy charm.” For the Independent, even the di   

agnosis formed part of the disease, with Wharton’s book manifesting “a fashion of the times for interpreting decadent symptoms in human nature”; as a result, it “will not last, because it is simply the fashionable drawing of ephemeral types and still more ephemeral sentiments” (qtd. in Benstock –). Yet despite its own eventual attempt to counter the rootless and ephemeral modern woman with Nettie Struther’s domestic utopia, The House of Mirth seems in its first half to be engaged in the more complex project that I have tried to trace in Sister Carrie. That is, it seems primed to understand Lily’s drifting— which appears as an oscillating motion very similar to Carrie’s—not as the mere desiccated fruit of a heartless capitalist system reducing all human relations to relations of exchange, thus the clear counterpoint to an ideal domestic stability, but rather as a serious form of seeking, to which an older ideal of feminine fulfillment can no longer offer an adequate response. Not only Lily’s rootlessness but her own “indefatigable” dancing (House ) and, indeed, her oscillatory movement through life form the bequest of Mrs. Hudson Bart. Brought up amid “grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of expense” (), Lily finds herself mimicking this ceaseless back-andforth in her own adulthood, where her financial and social dependence on others leads to an existence “in which moments of seeming brilliancy and freedom alternated with long hours of subjection” (). And yet Lily also oscillates, unmistakably, because of a genuine lack of decisiveness about what she is after. As her friend Carry Fisher puts it, with respect to Lily’s primary problem of failing to secure a suitable husband: “‘That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (). And for her as for many of House of Mirth’s readers, it is our own resultant “difficulty of deciding” about the meaning of Lily’s actions “that makes her such an interesting study” (). The wavering Lily can serve as a “study” in part because, again like Carrie in her rocking chair, her oscillation appears at its most intensely characteristic as a suspendedness in place. At the book’s opening, where she hesitates “in the act of transition” between trains (); in her unplanned escape into the woods with Selden at Bellomont; and, perhaps most memorably, in the “tableau vivant” exhibition where she achieves a Carrie-like theatrical success by imitating a painting, Lily’s indecisiveness suspends narrative motion at the same time that it is itself most fascinating (productive, indeed, of an answering pause []) for those beholding her. Yet when Lily’s oscillations are acknowledged to be more than just the unfortunate outcome of her material situation, they are most often dismissed by    &   



critics in the same terms we have seen applied to Carrie, as the result of living in a fantasy world. Lily is deemed terminally unable to achieve fulfillment because her “fairy-tale” desires for a “paradise” of “unrestrained gratification” fly in the face of “social reality.”24 By yoking such an ideal to the abandoned “Eden” of infancy, a reading like Joan Lidoff’s is able to connect what she calls Lily’s “stock sentimental” ending, which seems to suspend her forever in time in the world of lost possibilities, to her quest for suspended moments throughout the book (). I would argue, however, that what is needed here is the same thing needed with respect to Dreiser: a way of distinguishing sentimentalism from fantasy. Lily’s ending indeed possesses the sentimental qualities of the naturalist plot of decline in positing its heroine as the hapless victim of the modern city, yearning toward a lost, better past. In other words, it has arrived at precisely the certainty about modernity’s meanings—and specifically the meaning (or the meaninglessness) of the modern woman’s life—that Lily’s earlier moments of hesitation held at bay. Where the conventional tableau mort of the woman “too good for this world” smoothes out all complications like the sleeping drug, the tableau vivant vibrates with the tension of liveliness without story line. Its fantasy is not one of a recovered past, but of a future configuration it can scarcely imagine. It is finally most revealing that the same readers who feel that Lily needs to wake up and live in reality specifically critique her fantasizing (and oscillating) in the familiar terms of the sentimental realists of the s. For Lidoff, Lily’s problem lies in the selfish woman’s “narcissism” (); to C. J. Wershoven, without any direct reference to G. Stanley Hall, it appears sad to see such a woman “adrift,” “without direction,” who will remain “forever dissatisfied, forever drifting,” unable to reach “the safe shores of human connection” (, , ). Coupling, indeed, is what is finally at issue for these critics, as childbearing is for another, Barbara Hochman; in her words, it is no surprise that Lily ends by turning toward a baby, for “[p]regnancy and birth constitute a kind of natural trope for the notion of time running out,” which should remind our heroine she cannot indulge forever in “the delight of make-believe” (“Awakening” , ). Like the claim that Carrie should not be able to forestall pregnancy “by will alone,” such arguments risk using the modern woman’s material body against her as an irredeemable sign of the “reality” that her self-indulgent seeking can only put off for so long. Yet even to see the seeking in these terms is to trivialize it as a trifling fantasy rather than take its claims seriously. It is, finally, to insist that the only two options are the sentimental ones we confront at House’s end, between meaningless rootlessness and hearth and home, when in fact Lily’s earlier oscillations were predicated on the attempt to imagine a possibility not reducible to either side.    

And it is in her attempt to do so, crucially, that Lily most resembles Wharton herself, for whom “Lily” was a childhood nickname. As R.W.B. Lewis describes the young Edith, “She was clothes-conscious and money-conscious, but she was also addicted to books and ideas and the world of the imagination,” which “deepened her sense of loneliness and gave her an air of unpredictability” (). Wharton’s “unpredictability,” in other words, resulted from her own Lily-like mixed commitments to both money’s pleasures and those of the mind, tradition’s appeal and its deadly effects. Admittedly, when she wrote about a woman more obviously “modern” than Lily, The Custom of the Country’s compulsively divorcing Undine Spragg, she herself made the “new American female” seem a rapacious, empty-headed materialist destroying sweet-souled men. Yet as Lewis points out, Undine might have been Wharton’s own “antiself,” given the way the author’s own “long yearning for psychological freedom is queerly reflected in Undine’s discovery that each of her marriages is no more than another mode of imprisonment” (). According to Lewis, Wharton experienced marriage as a condition “obscurely frustrating” because “static” (); she refused, that is, the prevailing logic whereby it is the woman resisting marrying, like Lily, who remains problematically stuck in place, recognizing that the inexorability of the “strict pattern” marriage imposed on a woman’s life could render it a far deeper form of stuckness (). Whereas Lily might seem just to need a supportive husband and a baby, Wharton’s own view of children, as Lewis documents, was ambivalent at best (she never had any of her own)—and often “scathin[g]” (). Most significantly, though, Wharton’s own divorce was instrumental in enabling her to live the eminently mobile life she preferred, one that combined writing, traveling, and social activity in what appears by all accounts to have been a remarkably frenzied whirl: During the fifteen months that followed the divorce Edith Wharton traveled farther and more constantly than ever before in her life: traveled, almost compulsively, in seven countries and on three continents . . . she felt propelled out of her metaphorical prison and really had begun to exercise what Henry James had called a fantastic freedom. Her new sense of herself as both a liberated and a divorced woman gave her a more than customary restlessness. (Lewis )

Lewis further comments that James, although “fond of” his friend, was also “disturbed by the rush and movement of Edith’s existence, her plunge from one great    &   

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house party to another . . . ‘The arrangement of [Edith’s] life,’ he wrote [Gaillard] Lapsley, ‘is to me one of the prodigies of time.’” Other letters of James’s apply a more extreme rhetoric to the same phenomenon, referring to Wharton’s “ravaging, burning, and destroying energy,” her “frame of steel,” and calling her the “Angel of Devastation” (Lewis ). Portrayed as such, Wharton resembles the “turbulent” Mrs. Hudson Bart, defiantly continuing to “dance her ball-dresses to rags” in an effort to preserve her flagging youth (House ). In the person of Mrs. Bart’s daughter, Lily, by contrast, that same “indefatigable dancing” is linked right away to time’s punishment, to the necessary loss of the “girlish smoothness, the purity of tint” that she must retain in order to land a husband (); worrying that she may have “played too long for her own good,” the twenty-nine-year-old Lily is “frightened” to discover “two little lines near her mouth,” which seem only to deepen as she frets about them (, ). The readings of House of Mirth that would scold Lily for attempting to stop time in its tracks with her “hesitations” treat her physical body very much as the bearer of “time-bound realities” (Hochman, “Awakening” ); ending by giving Lily a baby, the novel almost seems in such interpretations to act on behalf of the “biological clock.” It is telling, then, that Wharton’s own postdivorce “rush and movement,” her attempt in James’s view to bend time to her own will, appears as the act of a steel-framed cyborg, a creature who has seemingly left behind nature and the body, the traditional instruments for refuting the turn-of-thecentury woman’s “fantasy” of freedom. As a result, Wharton really did appear to have achieved that “fantastic freedom”; James’s reactions attest at once to its compulsiveness and its impressiveness as a fin-de-siècle phenomenon. In the end, Wharton may speak to these issues most fully in a lesser-known work that has sometimes been deemed her most thoroughgoingly naturalist effort, the early novella (written in the s but not published until ) titled “Bunner Sisters.” This story is deliberately engaged in working through the metaphor of the woman’s body as a clock—a mechanical trope that, as we now well know, has most frequently been employed as an even more inexorable manifestation of bodily time. Wharton’s use of it is different; particularly placed up against the older, more clearly linear notion of woman as a “lily” that blooms and fades, the clock figure holds the capacity to “denaturalize the natural” in a way that renders this shorter Wharton effort a surprising precursor to our other key naturalist text of the New Woman and the Old Man, Frank Norris’s  McTeague. Hence, it is to this latter novel, a particular favorite of Wharton’s, that our own hands now turn.

   

   Gender, Preservation, and Futurity in McTeague

Sentimental Value “It isn’t hard to follow a man who carries a bird cage with him wherever he goes.” Frank Norris, McTeague In Frank Norris’s McTeague, men keep things around that they don’t need, and as a result we learn to sympathize with them as human beings. When the dentist McTeague refuses to let his wife, Trina, put his stone pug dog up for sale, and his neighbor Old Grannis similarly clings to the broken pitcher that the housemaid Maria wants to sell as junk, they refer us to a form of value that says more about the possessor than it does about the object possessed. As Susan Stewart puts it, the treasured personal object attests to “the self’s capacity to generate worthiness” () by attributing a singular value to an otherwise worthless item. Such items cannot be exchanged; yet they do not refuse commodification by way of the familiar alternative of use value, for they resist use as well.1 This is how we know the difference between Old Grannis’s attachment to his pitcher (“true, he never used it now, but he had kept it a long time, and somehow he held to it” [McTeague ]) and Trina’s to her kitchen things (“How she had worked over them! How clean she had kept them!” []). Trina sells her pots and pans in spite of her feelings about them, but in doing so she really only converts use value into exchange value. Unlike Old Grannis, she never cared for the object beyond its period of use to her household. The paradigmatic example McTeague offers of such useless caring is the case of McTeague’s canary. We never hear where it came from, but as McTeague worked mining ore as a youth, Erich von Stroheim’s film version Greed offers a plausible enough scenario, in which the young McTeague discovers and nurses the ailing bird outside the mine.2 Canaries are, of course, supposed to die in mines; their use is to be expendable (to warn the miners, by perishing, of inadequate air underground), meaning that to value them at all in such a context is 

to value them sentimentally. And indeed, to the extent that McTeague keeps the canary alive, he threatens his own life, making himself all too identifiable to the law by toting the bird about. “Better break its neck an’ chuck it,” advises his prospecting “pardner,” Cribbens, a harder-hearted sort (); similarly, Trina wants her husband to sell the pet nearly from the first. On this one issue, he successfully resists; yet as Trina’s stinginess forces the McTeagues into greater and greater poverty, they do begin to use McTeague’s treasured huge gold tooth, his first gift from Trina, “as a sort of substitute for a table” (). The conversion of all objects, and especially sentimental ones, into objects for use if not exchange is a sign both of true desperation and of Trina’s difference from McTeague. As Don Graham puts it, McTeague’s “attachment to aesthetic objects testifies to a humanity that his wife lacks. . . . McTeague plays on his concertina for pleasure and self-expression. Trina easily gives up her melodeon and carves her wooden animals only for money” (). The sentimental and the aesthetic merge comfortably in this vision of McTeague as protomodernist man: to do something for yourself alone is artistic, to be contrasted with the inevitable corruption of all forms of production that keep the wider world in mind. For the women of Norris’s novel, the sentimental valuation of objects that humanizes the men appears to be a meaningless nuisance. Or does it? In fact, the women do save things for personal reasons themselves. What Trina saves is money, gold coins to which her relation is as personal as can be: she sleeps with them. As in the case of her wedding bouquet, though—which gets “preserved by some unknown and fearful process” () and is the only thing left behind after the McTeagues’ moving sale—Trina’s preservation of her gold, her investment of it with a value exceeding its potential use in exchange, signals not a reassuring continuity with the past but a more gothic sense of that past’s dismal grip. Like the housemaid Maria’s memory of the gold service her family owned in Central America, that which has been carefully preserved here dooms the future; all Maria can do is repeat her story over and over, all Trina can do is count her coins. Why is preservation sweet in the one case and scary in the other? We can see this as a variation on the question of what Barbara Hochman has called “[p]erhaps the greatest critical problem of McTeague . . . that of Trina’s transformation from a trim, orderly housekeeper to a driven, ravaged, obsessive miser” (Art ). Trina the housekeeper honors and looks after her husband’s most worthless objects; Trina the miser sells them, pitting her own hoard against McTeague’s and thus destroying any vision the novel might have presented of a sentimentally preserved domesticity. In this commonplace under    

standing of the novel’s progression, the money-making woman becomes the agent of decline. McTeague himself liked things as they were—like any simple “pastoral hero,” his ideal would be a nostalgic “stasis” (D. Graham )—and thus it is no surprise to find that after leaving Trina, his profession, and city life behind, he reverts to the miner’s world of his childhood, making a kind of circle in time. Doing so, however, requires first murdering his wife. And yet Trina’s striking last moments after being attacked by her husband, in which she is memorably and disturbingly compared to “a piece of clockwork running down,” have for years been one of the scenes in Norris’s book both most remarked upon and least interpreted. Charles Crow and Don Cook have noted that those scholars most averse to the term naturalism have also been the least inclined to grant attention to this moment, perhaps because it seems to reintroduce all the antihumanist implications that the avoidance of the term—and the sentimental rehabilitation of the murderous, “ape-like” McTeague as a “sympathetic bottom dog” (D. Graham )—is meant to ward off. What would those implications be? The assault itself, occurring in the cloakroom of the kindergarten where Trina works, is both troubling and “naturalist” in a familiar enough way; husband and wife devolve into animals (if McTeague is “ape-like,” Trina is a “harassed cat” [McTeague ]), fighting it out over a bag of gold and thus sealing their mutual doom, for McTeague’s appropriation of the booty leads just as inexorably to his own demise. Yet there is a particular chilliness to the subsequent description of Trina’s actual death, and greater perversity still in what ends the chapter: the arrival of a group of little girls, ready to hang up their coats for a day at school. It is these features that most test the sense of this work as a compellingly human tragedy, although their disturbing quality is inseparable from the same feature that makes the more humane reading possible: the exit of McTeague himself from the scene, enabling all its appalling character to be “localized” in the figure of Trina as a worn-out machine.3 Not just any machine, however; Trina runs down like a clock. And this means that her death speaks not only to a generalized sense of naturalist persons as objectlike, mere collections of mechanical habits (something Norris underscores from the opening pages of McTeague). Further, it makes her an embodiment of naturalism’s strange relation to temporality in all its forms. By the standard account, naturalism shows through characters whose time runs out that human history itself may be ticking toward its end, an apocalyptic reading confirmable equally by the reduction of persons to animals (in an antievolutionary backward trajectory) or to machines (implying that modern  

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“progress” itself harbors seeds of decline).4 Also significant here would be the notable failure of naturalist characters to reproduce. Indeed, in Trina’s case, the absence of offspring—which the kindergarteners’ arrival only bitterly underscores—is directly related to her work making toy Noah’s Arks (for which she can make everything except the two little people) and to her excessive attachment to her own earnings, such that when McTeague first steals money from her, she laments the emptied bag “as other women weep over a dead baby’s shoe” (). The book clearly implies that the decline of the McTeagues’ domestic life cannot be separated from Trina’s transformation of the home into a kind of factory or from her refusal to share her savings, which, we shall see, gets figured throughout as a form of sexual withholding. In the s, both of these behaviors of Trina’s—her wage work after marriage and her related investment in what late-nineteenth-century feminists called sexual “self-ownership” (Stange )—would have made her appear “modern,” yet in a very particular sense of modernity itself as linked to decline. As we have already seen, the turn-of-the-century American woman bore a complex relation to the question of the future. On the one hand, her growing participation in wage work was often linked directly to the most up-to-date mechanical contrivances, such as the typewriter—and to mechanization generally, which was felt to render physical differences between male and female workers obsolete. On the other hand, insofar as it was feared that working women were responsible for a decline in national birthrates, the mechanized “woman of the future” seemed at the same time to be the woman whose life choices placed future generations in question. Given all this, it may seem no surprise that Trina is figured at the last not as a dying woman but as a failing machine. That is, if she is machinelike, it would appear to confirm her status as “unnatural force” (McTeague ), which makes her fight her husband rather than give him what he wants. What is potentially curious, however, about Trina in those final moments being conceived not simply as a machine, but as a clock, is that, certainly in our own era, the clock serves as an emblem not of women’s turn away from nature, but of their relentless subordination to it: they experience their own bodies, that is, as an inexorably ticking “biological clock.” And as just mentioned in the previous chapter, while this might seem a notably late-twentieth-century form of thinking about female embodiment, we can date its nascent use at least as far back as Edith Wharton’s novella “Bunner Sisters,” a work first drafted in the s as well. The clock as a way of expressing not a mechanized turn away from nature     

but rather nature’s own logic seems to illustrate strongly what Mark Seltzer has termed “the unnatural nature of naturalism” (). In this single figure, the transformation of the natural body into a machine becomes indistinguishable from the uncanniness of nature itself. One might suppose, given Trina’s violent fate, that McTeague’s lesson will thus concern the male naturalist author’s horror at the female body so construed or his attempt to “manage” it. Such impulses can easily enough be located in the wildly compulsive Norris, yet to focus on them to a fault can risk covering over a different perspective, one that his novel’s portrayal of the clock-woman in fact shares with Edith Wharton’s. As Elizabeth Ammons notes, Wharton in her autobiography mentions “the best of Frank Norris”—along with Howells’s A Modern Instance, Robert Grant’s Unleavened Bread, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and David Graham Phillips’s Susan Lenox—when listing the American novels she had most admired over the past half century. In her essay “The Great American Novel,” Wharton was more specific about what she considered Norris’s “best,” citing McTeague in particular, once again in the company of Lewis, Phillips, and Grant. Ammons comments that these latter three novels “have in common a focus on the marriage question from a young woman’s point of view,” a focus echoing Wharton’s own (Edith Wharton’s Argument ). What if we were to read the fourth, McTeague, in the same terms? Doing so would not only bring forward the book’s strong interest in Trina McTeague’s own experience of her transition from daughter to wife, a focus that prefigures Norris’s more full-blown exploration of the same subject in his last work, The Pit (). Further, I would contend, rereading McTeague as in part a woman’s marriage story can counter most attempts to “humanize” Norris’s texts, which transform McTeague into a sentimental victim by condemning, if not demonizing, the compulsively hoarding Trina. The question becomes what Norris himself seemed to consider significant about Trina’s compulsive behaviors. And if we read the way they actually develop over the course of the novel, we can see how they work together with the figure of the woman as clock, as a way to explore a young woman’s own relation to her body’s changing meanings as a function of time. For this concern, the question of self-preservation or “saving herself” becomes crucial—an issue that returns us to the opposition between men’s and women’s saving with which we began. The way Trina’s hoarding turns out to duplicate, only in negative terms, the same logic of senseless preservation that humanizes McTeague can point our way to a reading less predicated on simply opposing them as modes of relation to the object world. Specifically, Trina’s  

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compulsions turn out to be themselves posited as the logical result of the valuation of feminine purity as the ultimate sentimental preservation, something the book cannot thus be said simply to uphold. To recognize this, however, requires considerably greater attention than has yet been paid to Trina’s distinctive status within the novel’s network of object relations.

What Is a Domesticated Woman? One might paraphrase [Marx]: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations. Torn from these relationships, she is no more the helpmate of man than gold in itself is money . . . Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” The first object we see sentimentally saved in McTeague is a little piece of Trina. Having extracted her injured tooth, McTeague keeps it “wrapped in a bit of newspaper in his vest pocket. Often he took it out and held it in the palm of his immense, horny hand, seized with some strange elephantine sentiment, wagging his head at it, heaving tremendous sighs” (). The moment is a perfect encapsulation of the humanity that salvages McTeague as hero; his buffoonish actions are moving precisely because of their inevitable failure to achieve anything like grace. Yet it is also significant for its assimilation of Trina, through the logic of fetishism, to the status of preserved object. Trina is, in fact, “traded” to McTeague by his friend Marcus Schouler, just as the stone pug dog had been. (“‘Why . . . a fellow gave me that stone pug dog,’” McTeague cries, protesting its sale. “‘We traded’” [].) Marcus and McTeague are “pals,” a male-male relation defined by the disguise of economic transactions as friendly ones, with no money changing hands. “What a fine thing was this friendship between men!” McTeague muses. “The dentist treats his friend for an ulcerated tooth and refuses payment; the friend reciprocates by giving up his girl” (). If the surrender of Trina, Marcus’s cousin and potential fiancée, does not appear at first to involve a financial loss, it soon reveals itself otherwise. Once Trina wins five thousand dollars in the lottery, Marcus interprets his gift differently: “‘Oh, “pals” is all right—but five thousand dollars—to have played it right into his hands . . . ’” (). The result is that the next time he does a favor for McTeague, he demands its equivalent in cash. This is the sign that the two men are no longer “pals.” The catalyst of this change, however, is the revelation of     

the very thing that ensured they were pals to begin with: the understanding of Trina as an object with a cash value. “He had won her,” McTeague thinks once he and his wife-to-be have kissed (). Yet does winning Trina’s heart entail winning Trina’s winnings? As it happens, one thing that remains constant in her exchange between Marcus and McTeague is a tendency for Trina’s suitor to lack the cash to pay her way. Trina thus purchases her own lucky lottery ticket (Marcus is left “much embarrassed and disturbed because he had not bought the ticket” for her [].) From this purchase follows the major conundrum structuring the rest of the book: whose five thousand dollars is it, anyway? The question turns out to be quite complex. Trina’s winnings are explicitly converted into a dowry for her upcoming marriage to McTeague, yet one that does not require any outlay on her father’s part (“Mr. Sieppe no longer saw the necessity of dowering her further” []). Unlike bridewealth, wherein a given sum is understood to function simply as a bride’s cash equivalent, dowry attaches the money to the bride herself and thus raises a different set of issues about whether it constitutes her personal property or part of the “conjugal estate”—as well as whether the latter is understood as managed by the man of the household.5 Precisely these kinds of concerns had been receiving considerable legal attention in the United States since the Civil War. By , Susan B. Anthony and Ida H. Harper wrote in their History of Woman Suffrage, a married woman was permitted to “own and control her separate property in threefourths of the states. . . . In about two-thirds of the states she possesses her earnings. In the great majority she may make contracts and bring suit.”6 We should read McTeague v. McTeague struggling over the right to Trina’s winnings in light of this historical context, in which matters of female autonomy were being explicitly addressed through legal changes. “‘Who’s the boss, you or I?’” McTeague demands, to which Trina responds, “‘Who’s got the money, I’d like to know?’” (). Walter Michaels, without noting these historical developments with respect to women’s economic status, thus describes the book’s “contradiction” as the fact that “Trina belongs to McTeague but her money doesn’t”; in other words, Trina paradoxically wishes both “to own and to be owned” (Gold Standard ). This position is paradoxical, however, for reasons much more specific than simply the aim at two opposing goals at once. As Carole Pateman discusses in The Sexual Contract, the most radical nineteenth-century critiques of marriage compared the wife’s position to slavery for what they saw as the linked reasons that married women “receive only subsistence (protection) in  

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return for their labours,” as opposed to earnings of their own, and they are denied “bodily integrity” through legal injunctions ordering their submission to their husbands’ desires (–). Critics of the institution like William Thompson thus denied that marriage was actually a contract, arguing that women’s lack of access to alternative economic options forced their hand. The hope, then, lay in the possibility that increasing those options would simultaneously loosen men’s sexual control over their wives—all of which might lead us to wonder in what sense, if Trina McTeague’s money is construed as her own, she still “belongs” to McTeague at all. As Michaels points out, it is Trina herself who understands her positioning in these terms. “She loved him because she had given herself to him,” Norris writes; “ . . . she belonged to him . . . ” (). Indeed, Trina “gives herself” over to McTeague quite extravagantly, submitting to and even deriving pleasure from his most brutal treatment of her. In this sense, Trina embodies a problem endemic to the psychological literature on female masochism, which is forced to admit that a perverse “love of submission” seems in women’s case hard to distinguish from normal understandings of feminine sexuality. This particular way in which the natural shades into the unnatural seems to endlessly trouble the narrative voice of McTeague. Trina’s feminine desire to “surrender” herself, along with McTeague’s to conquer her, is on the one hand described repeatedly as a fact of nature, of the fixed relation between woman and man which Norris calls “the changeless order of things” (). And yet on the other hand, that same desire, once hyperbolized later in the book to the extent that it makes Trina welcome her husband’s abuse, gets cast as the very opposite of what we might normally expect: it is “strange, inexplicable,” “morbid, unwholesome”—even “unnatural” (). Is nature unnatural? Norris evinces some interest in this question even in those earlier moments, for he seems unable to refer to “the changeless order of things” without tacking on a barrage of questions: “But why should it be so?” (); “Why did it please her?” (); “Why should it all be?” (). (As a compulsive poser of such questions concerning why things are as they are, McTeague’s narrative voice may be second only to that of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha.”) Yet if a core mystery remains concerning the provenance of such arrangements, Norris does go some way toward delineating the workings of this “changeless order,” initially by characterizing it as a particular kind of economy: “the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him” (). The language here points us more specifically toward the value that Trina herself pos    

sesses in addition to the money she owns, the value attached to her body that enables her to be passed between men: that is, her virginity. “Trina knew that she was a pure girl,” Norris writes (). Thus he is able to affirm that, perhaps, her sexual response when McTeague first compels her “surrender” to his kiss in a train yard is no more than the “natural, clean, spontaneous” reaction of any human adolescent, male or female (, ). Yet the book appears equivocal on this point, if we consider the earliest sex scene between the two, a drama that takes place in a dental chair. McTeague is filling a cavity in Trina. “‘Don’t hurt her too much, Mac,’” Marcus calls upon first leaving his cousin in the dentist’s care (). Yet problems arise not from McTeague’s hurting Trina, but from the opposite: his numbing her with anesthesia. From that act follows sexual awakening: “For some time he stood watching her as she lay there, unconscious and helpless . . . Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke . . . ” (). Eventually, he is driven to lean over and kiss the sleeping girl. It is easy enough to wonder about the text’s need to render Trina literally unconscious here in order to get her kissed for the first time. In making this choice, Norris appears to sidestep the vexed issue of female sexual agency altogether. Yet this is not quite the case; there are two forces at work in this scene, one of which is definitely feminine. We witness a struggle between McTeague’s will and Trina’s body. In this contest, the agent is the latter: “No, by God! No, by God!” Dimly he seemed to realize that should he yield now he would never be able to care for Trina again. . . . “No, by God! No, by God!” He turned to his work, as if seeking a refuge in it. But as he drew near to her again, the charm of her innocence and helplessness came over him afresh. It was a final protest against his resolution. Suddenly he leaned over and kissed her . . . Terrified at his weakness at the very moment he believed himself strong, he threw himself once more into his work with desperate energy. ()

This passage is remarkable for its use of the language of the seduction novel to characterize a man’s feelings in response to an unconscious woman.7 In effect, McTeague here becomes the beleaguered sentimental heroine. It is he, not Trina, who cries “No!” repeatedly, who struggles not to “yield,” then gives in to “protest,” only to be appalled by his “weakness” in doing so. Norris directs us to view McTeague’s opponent as the “animal” inside himself, but in fact, the  

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curious effect of Trina’s “absence” from the scene (“‘I never felt a thing,’” she announces smilingly, on waking []) is to endow her body with a will of its own, one seen here as acting on McTeague.8 It is her charm that “protests” his resistance, her hair that emits an “enervating” perfume, such that “a veritable sensation of faintness” comes over McTeague whenever he nears it (). In this latter respect Trina resembles the housemaid Maria Macapa, who similarly renders McTeague “benumbed,” in her case with a “torrent of words.” Maria’s intent is to make the dentist “believe that he had no right to withhold” from her some broken dental instruments she wants to sell (). Both women, then, force McTeague into yielding up what he withholds by “benumbing” him, an articulation that forces us to read McTeague’s “benumbing” of Trina before the operation somewhat differently. The anesthetic numbs her pain, of course, but in doing so it also disables her—keeps her, for one thing, from biting McTeague, as a dental patient under duress otherwise might. This is important given that, in a novel filled with various acts of biting (McTeague bites himself; Marcus bites McTeague; McTeague, most famously, bites Trina), Trina is the only one who never bites, yet the images of a mousetrap springing shut after she and her mother talk about sex, and later of Trina’s “teeth clicking like the snap of a closing purse” (), make clear that the figure of vagina dentata presides over everyone else’s biting activity.9 Mary Poovey has written about the anesthetized woman as a flashpoint for the nineteenth-century dilemma of the relation (or nonrelation) between “natural” and “social” womanhood. The concern, she explains, was that “under ether, women would regress to brute animals” (): the body purified of consciousness would turn out not to be a pure body. Like Trina’s body, though, even the properly innocent female body always signifies both possibilities simultaneously: as a pure body, what it properly demands is its own defilement. This is because virginity—the value of young women—only exists as a possession to be taken away, only makes sense in such terms: as the “thing” that the man must remove as surely as the woman must cling to it. What the dental chair scene does is to present, as the ontological script of the female body itself, the logic of virginity as a value constituted through its future dissolution. Put another way, to be a woman is to decline in value. What I would suggest, then, is that Norris is actually a good deal more interested in the meanings of this positionality for women than the dental chair scene alone might suggest. Readings of the novel’s characters based on this scene have had the effect of producing a familiar gendered plotline, in which the happy-go-lucky bachelor is caught in a feminine marital “snare” evoked by     

that image of the snapping mousetrap (McElrath ). Yet, following Poovey’s lead, we might reread even this scene as an attempt to pose the specific question of the meanings of the female body (as object)—meanings that resonate for the man and the woman alike. If McTeague’s title might encourage us to read it from the dentist’s point of view, the book’s own emphases, particularly around the early period of the couple’s marriage, lie much more with the experiences and inner reactions of Trina. It is these that might have especially interested Edith Wharton, whose own typically Victorian sheltering from sexual knowledge in the name of feminine purity led to initial sexual experiences in marriage that her biographer describes as a “disaster” (Lewis ). The book’s depiction of Trina McTeague’s considerable anxieties around her parting from her mother and her initial realizations of what it means to “belong” to McTeague—that “she was bound to this man for life” (), to someone toward whom she feels “fear” (), if not “revulsion” ()—can read like material out of Freud, on the one hand, or Simone de Beauvoir, on the other, with respect to their recognition of and serious interest in the potentially devastating meanings of marriage for the ultra-“pure” Victorian girl. Others at the time noticed that the result was sometimes “frigidity” or female sexual withholding, requiring such interventions as forcing open the legs, described in relevant terms by William Gilmore Sims: “The patient will exhibit signs of alarm and agitation,—not that we hurt her, but she feels an indescribable dread of being hurt. She is like a timid, nervous person who has once had a pointed instrument thrust into the exposed pulp of an inflamed tooth” (BarkerBenfield ). In contrast, Freud, like Norris, would later appear more open to the possibility that the same demand for female purity that undergirded “civilization” could also produce “perverse” effects: while ideally creating “a state of bondage in the woman which guarantees that possession of her shall continue undisturbed” (“Taboo” ), “it also unleashes an archaic reaction of hostility” toward the husband, “which can assume pathological forms” (). Specifically, along with Pierre Janet, Freud saw marriage as a common precipitator of obsessional neurosis in young Victorian women. This is, of course, Norris’s main interest, one that he carries through in terms worthy of standing alone as a case study of the “unnaturalness” constituting female embodiment as such.

Saving Herself If being a woman entails a decline in value, a parallel can be established in McTeague between Trina’s body and the dazzling service of pure gold that  

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the maid Maria repetitively recalls. The effect of Maria’s story on the miser Zerkow is to convince him that the “virgin metal, the pure, unalloyed ore” she describes as her family’s possession exists to this day, “entire, intact. . . . It was somewhere, somebody had it, locked away in that leather trunk” (, ). When Zerkow marries Maria in order to hear her tell her story every day, it is easy to treat this as a perverse desire whereby “‘I want Maria’” () has come to mean “I want what Maria represents.” Yet what Norris’s novel really does is to make clear the role played by this logic of substitution in structuring all desire. After all, for McTeague to want the charming Trina is also an issue of wanting the purity she represents, even though to possess her is, by definition, to guarantee one’s disappointment in ever relocating that purity “entire, intact.” In McTeague, though, the above logic does not simply describe men’s relation to women’s bodies, as Luce Irigaray’s description of the virgin as “the sign of relations among men” () suggests. More intriguingly, it also serves as a way to depict women’s relation to their own bodies, and hence to themselves. Thus, if we wish to understand Trina as “worshipping [McTeague] for that which she yields up to him,” this most “natural” of female responses looks less like an acquiescence in the inevitable loss of female value and more like a desire that is founded, as is Zerkow’s for Maria, on the possibility of recovering that value “entire, intact.” This is the difference between worshipping McTeague for having yielded that value up to him and worshipping him for that value, yielded up to him. In one case, the action itself is celebrated; in the other, the action is secondary to its object. This reading seems necessary given the way in which Trina’s secret hoard of money comes to substitute for the perfectly whole and untouched gold service—its very existence dependent on its remaining safe from the grasp of the spendthrift McTeague. As Barbara Hochman succinctly puts it, “After her first kiss, Trina feels she has been robbed. She thus begins to save another treasure” (Art ). That the treasure may be taken as a stand-in for her “economical little body” () is made more than clear: hidden, like Maria’s family’s gold, at the bottom of Trina’s “trunk,” it rests “under her bridal dress,” with the extra pieces in a sack “she had made from an old chest protector” (). “[S]he regarded it,” Norris explains, “as something almost sacred and inviolable” (). Depicting Trina facing off with McTeague, he is even more blunt, telling us that Trina “put her lips together. . . . ‘That money’s never, never to be touched. . . . It’s mine! It’s mine! It’s mine!’” (, ). The immediate problem here would appear to be one of the McTeagues’ postmarital sexual relations, yet this quickly     

points us toward the broader issue raised by Trina’s “saving herself” after the fact: the issue of offspring. This is really the question. Childbearing is the sanctioned way for women emptied of the value their bodies once signified to regain it in another form; indeed, the point of virginity as value (the value that must be lost) is that it stabilizes paternity (value regained). Maternity, of course, is not quite the same kind of value; it consists in value in another, the child. Thus Mama McTeague at the novel’s opening, an “overworked drudge . . . filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession” (). But the woman is “filled” here again nonetheless—as McTeague, “fill[ing]” Trina’s cavity “with gold” during that first sex scene in the dental chair, mimics fertilization as the replacement of value lost with value gained (). Trina, though, refuses this alternative. As she keeps her money out of circulation, so does she “hoard” her reproductive powers; the gold remains “a nest egg, a monstrous, roc-like nest egg, not so large, however, but that it could be made larger” (). Contemplating giving some to McTeague, she is appalled by the change in “the appearance and weight of the little chamois bag,” which becomes “shrunken and withered, long wrinkles . . . running downward” (). Walter Michaels has read this image as that of a depleted scrotum (Gold Standard ), but, given the source of the bag in “an old chest protector,” it seems more to the point to imagine here breasts depleted of milk and, again, to insist on the relation of Trina’s obsessions less to McTeague’s body than to the signifiers of her own. Trina’s solitary habits have proved notoriously difficult for criticism to assimilate; William Dillingham offers the most common reading in stating that she “sleeps with gold pieces in a symbolic sexual union,” the money standing in for her husband’s body (). There seems to be an ongoing resistance here to discussing Trina’s pleasures as masturbatory rather than as some sort of grotesque reframing of marital consummation. When Trina plays with what she saves, she occupies a space neither quite virginal nor maternal. It is the same space occupied by Laura Jadwin in Norris’s final novel, The Pit, who treats flirting the way her husband treats financial speculation; neither understands why marriage should preempt such “selfish” behavior. In the women’s case, however, there is a stronger sense that this “selfishness” is the only way they can retain any sense of value in themselves, as opposed to in the children they are meant to produce. What McTeague begins to do in response to Trina’s hoarding, of course, is to bite her—either to “extor[t] money from her by this means,” or “for his own satisfaction” (). Given the sexualizing of the hoarding, though, these  



scarcely seem like distinct possibilities. What is clear is that McTeague, biting Trina, treats her as she has learned to treat herself, like a gold piece; the question his bite poses, over and over, is, Does she possess value? Real gold, though, attests to its value by yielding, as Maria reminds us of her family’s service (“‘It was soft gold . . . you could bite into it, and leave the dent of your teeth’” []). Structurally in opposition to the hymen of the virgin, it affirms rather than loses its value by getting bitten into. And here we begin to see why biting plays the role that it does in McTeague; unlike consuming, it figures as an activity that leaves the boundary between self and other present despite its violation. It should begin to appear less surprising, then, that Trina not only yields to her husband’s bite but boasts about it to her friend Maria Macapa. The scene in which the two women compete over who has sustained the worst abuse is surely among McTeague’s most notorious, despite Norris’s having cribbed it largely from a similar moment in Zola’s Nana.10 Again, the stories of violence seem meant to reveal less about the strength of the husbands than about the ability of the women to withstand that strength; this is how we need to understand the otherwise incomplete assertion that they seem able to derive worth only through the men in question. And this makes a great deal of sense given the difference between biting and deflowering: it is precisely by getting bitten and bitten again that Trina can tell that this time around, she remains “intact.” A disturbing narrative of loss has been replaced by the repetitive reassurance of obsession-compulsion. What of McTeague, though—of his frustration with Trina’s miserliness, the frustration that makes him drink and bite? Although Norris clearly aims to compare the couple’s spending habits along conventionally naturalized gender lines, he ends up reversing them. Mark Seltzer has called our attention to the late-nineteenth-century understanding of male and female organisms as “katabolic” and “anabolic,” respectively. According to this theory, males naturally spend and scatter, while females save: this is what links the latter to the conservative project of home-building. Yet if this appears confirmed by McTeague’s initial impulse to spend the lottery winnings “in some lavish fashion,” countered at once by Trina’s rejoinder, “We mustn’t let it turn our heads, Mac, dear” (, ), things grow less clear from that point on. Indeed, Norris has remarkable difficulty, despite his clear intentions, in convincing us that Trina’s heart finally lies in traditional domesticity. The way in which her household economy slides inexorably into her hoarding is not the only sign of this; witness, again more importantly, the issue of children. It is ostensibly from Trina that McTeague derives a dream of “a house of their     

own. . . . A little home all to themselves”—yet, in fact, a house is the very first thing on which McTeague imagines spending the lottery money. Even more saliently, McTeague’s dream of a domestic space quickly grows embroidered into a vision of an enormous family: “Then there would be children. . . . The dentist saw himself as a venerable patriarch surrounded by children and grandchildren” (). We are told that “Trina had talked so much about having a little house of their own at some future day that McTeague had at length come to regard the affair as the end and object of all their labors” (). Yet despite this claim, Norris never actually depicts Trina engaging in anything like such talk, and indeed, it is singularly difficult to imagine her doing so. The main reason, which has everything to do with Trina’s unspent and unspendable hoard, is that Trina seems to have no relation to any “future day” at all. She saved, Norris explains, “without any idea of consequence” (); saving, in this case, takes place not for the future but against it.11 As a result, Trina’s hoarding is often understood as a case where the human capacity for representation becomes a menace rather than a gift, stalling the McTeagues’ marital story instead of allowing it to move forward. As William Dillingham expresses it, gold’s “rarity and untarnishable purity make it the symbol of fulfillment” (); in itself, this claim merely demonstrates the imaginative substitution that characterizes all aesthetic activity. The obsessive individual, however, begins to mistakenly desire the symbol itself rather than “what lies behind it.” For Dillingham, “[t]his is precisely the pattern Norris depicts in Trina” (). Yet I wonder how this reading, which seems to me entirely apt in its elucidation of how obsession operates, shifts when we recognize the way in which the gold and Trina’s body also become interchangeable objects in Norris’s text. Like the gold piece, the virginal body can also be said to possess a “purity” that allows it to stand for an eventual “fulfillment,” for the moment when the woman’s defiled body is “refilled” in order to produce the desired offspring. Yet as Dillingham notes, this movement from purity to fulfillment is thus a movement away from the valued object itself to the narrative it more properly represents. In Trina’s case, this movement, with its final divestiture of the value that had belonged to her body, seems untenable. She thus remains stuck at the initial moment of seeking value in the object itself— the gold, her body—rather than moving forward into the story that object is meant to imply.12 Along with her accumulation of gold, Trina’s work of toy-making functions in the novel both literally and figuratively to produce a future that is radically compromised. What Trina makes are miniature Noah’s Arks, objects  



similar to her hoard in their dream of perfect completeness. Susan Stewart calls the Noah’s Ark the “archetypal collection, a world which is representative . . . a world not of nostalgia but of anticipation. While the point of the souvenir may be remembering . . . the point of the collection is forgetting—starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create . . . an infinite reverie” (, emphasis mine). It is not hard to assimilate Trina’s perfectly intact hoard to this notion of “starting again,” and toy Noah’s Arks do share some of that hoard’s perversity, in that the future reproductive force they represent is infinitely forestalled at the moment of its gathered potential. In fact, the two collections mutually support one another: as Trina plays with money, so does she work with toys. (When the McTeagues marry, Trina’s uncle, for whose store she makes the arks, sends them a box of toys, at which the naive McTeague is perplexed: “‘But . . . Why should he send us toys? We have no need of toys’” []. Trina blushes wildly, but, of course, McTeague turns out to be perfectly right.) Trina’s arks also have distinctive characteristics of their own. “[A]ll windows and no door,” they are almost little naturalist novels (). (Might Sister Carrie find a home inside one?) The items placed inside, however, form not quite the complete collection to which Stewart refers, as Trina only makes the animals, not the people. Due to the reproductive incapacity all these failings imply, naturalism has often been described as a genre without a future. Its own refusal to grant one to its characters, its tendency to leave them stalled in place, leaves the novels themselves in a kind of critical limbo, with readers uncertain of how to enter into this universe without getting similarly trapped. In scholarly tussles over whether or not this work is worth reading, a set of questions emerges, similar to those laid out in the work itself: what is getting preserved here, and what does that preservation mean? Such concerns lie at the root of the various attempts to “leave behind” naturalism or, alternatively, to “save” it for future consumption. The latter project has tended to require seeing an “end” or a future as present in naturalism (and hence present for naturalism) by omission. Barbara Hochman, for example, intelligently analyzes naturalist characters like Trina as possessed by compulsions that destroy them—but the point of this reading ends up being that naturalism has a lesson, the lesson that such compulsions are wrongheaded, based as they are on incorrect assumptions about human life (“To Trina sexuality means inner chaos and dependency, while greed appears to promise control and selfsufficiency” [Art ]). In a reading like this, it is precisely naturalism’s refusal to posit a future that tells us all we need to know about how to make the fu    

ture happen: we need only to know what the characters do not know, to avoid doing what they do. McTeague has tended to inspire such readings from the very first: an early review in the Washington Times also sees the point of the book as resting in what it is not. It is hence phrased largely in the conditional: “McTeague was not fit to be a dentist, but . . . his son might have been . . . Had [Trina] lived in a small village, where her husband might have used his muscles . . . where she had social life of her own instead of the sham society of the lodging-house; had she possessed three or four children to break up her tendency toward miserliness . . . that couple might have been happy to the end of their days”(McElrath and Knight ). The writer here parallels Hochman in implying that McTeague itself posits, by negation, the untried “solution” to its characters’ problems, a solution that here takes the form of rural domesticity and a passel of children. Since the future that is offered, however, looks much more like the past—like the rural, child-filled life that late-nineteenth-century Americans were leaving behind in droves—we find ourselves back where we started: with the future as problem rather than as solution. This is the space inhabited by naturalist fiction, and it is a space we need to think about on its own terms, rather than rushing too quickly into a more reassuring alternative. Norris’s novel looks out onto an era in which the old stories— of cozy villages where all are friends, of women who have four children as a matter of course, of men who succeed through bodily strength alone—are breaking down, but it is far from clear what sorts of narratives are replacing them. The new possibilities can seem scary, grotesque, but part of their horror lies in their ability to turn the old stories into ghost stories, so that sentimentalism’s preservation of the past suddenly appears gothic and disturbing. Hence, so does domesticity itself. Indeed, we might say that the problem Hochman sees at the core of McTeague, that of Trina’s transformation from happy housewife to obsessive miser, points to a tendency linking Norris to Mary Wilkins Freeman, in which housekeeping appears as yet another form of feminine striving for ideal “completeness” that is revealed to be compulsive.13 Although Norris’s essays and his more popular adventure novels frequently wallow in the period’s romantic racialism, his ambivalent depiction, through Trina’s bodily narrative, of the idealized maternal trajectory and logics of preservation on which racial ideologies were based can suggest ways that his fiction has not died out with its era’s most retrograde sets of “anxieties” and solutions. Instead, in the window provided by Trina’s story, McTeague opens a way to think of that feminine narrative as moving not in the direction of an answer but toward a set of still living questions.  



The Question of the Future Such potentialities only emerge, certainly, within a broader rhetoric of futurity readable in more sedimented terms. In McTeague, however, those terms tend over and over to give way. According to a familiar reading of naturalism as evolutionary fiction, for example, McTeague’s triumph over Trina in purely physical combat might be taken to imply the survival of the fittest. After all, we are regaled from the beginning with repeated descriptions of the dentist’s nearly superhuman strength, his “huge hands—the hands of the old-time car boy” (), in Norris’s preferred phrase. Yet it is not simply McTeague’s own demise at the novel’s end that calls into question this interpretation of its events. More importantly, as Norris’s qualifier begins to suggest, McTeague’s very physical strength unfits him for life in the twentieth century. This is why we see the professionalized McTeague enjoying his leisurely Sunday afternoon, in the novel’s opening pages, by thinking back fondly to his days as a car boy. Those days are gone, but this does not keep McTeague from trying to turn dentistry into a form of heavy labor: “Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger” (). His crowning moment occurs during the family picnic, when he triumphs over Marcus Schouler in a wrestling match; earlier that day, he wows the assembled party with the story of having killed a calf with his bare hands. “[C]ow-killer!” is the muttered response of the embittered Marcus ()—a response that only emphasizes the image of McTeague as a throwback to an earlier time, when survival really was a matter of physical strength. In , however, the story is a different one. This is brought home to McTeague in a stroke when he receives notice that he must cease his practice of dentistry, owing to his lack of a diploma. McTeague is not a modern professional after all; he cannot compete with the dentist down the street, “a poser, a rider of bicycles” whom the younger women prefer and who holds a college degree (). And the scene that leads up to this discovery is remarkable in its foreshadowing transformation of the McTeagues’ everyday life into a nostalgic souvenir of days now gone. Trina is heard singing as she washes the dishes in a kitchen drenched with sun, the room “clean as a new whistle,” the sentimental lithographs on the wall described in loving rather than satirical language for the sole time in the book. Especially striking is the vision of this housewifely Trina, who appears maternal here for the only time as well. “Never had she looked so pretty. . . . nothing could have been more delicious than the sight of her small round arms, white as milk, moving back and forth as she sponged . . . one could     

catch a glint of gold in the fillings of her upper teeth” (). This is a Trina who has been “refilled” decisively with the value of maternity, whose milky arms compare with those of Norris’s most conventionally maternal heroine, The Octopus’s dairymaid, Hilma Tree. And we find that this is all a setup, that these signifiers of domestic bliss appear in the novel only to demonstrate what has been made impossible by the dictates of modernity. The “bridge of golden mist” overlaying the “little kitchen” () is our cue to realize that we are looking at the McTeagues’ home through the unreliable lenses of nostalgia, which miniaturize and blur. Two possibilities are instantly located in the unrecoverable past: McTeague as worker, and Trina as potential mother. McTeague’s inability to use his body is thus paralleled with Trina’s apparent inability to use hers. The household breaks down from this moment on, its dissolution culminating in the murder by husband of wife. The question is whether Norris’s position on Trina here—that is, on the woman who works instead of mothering—is as clear is his position on McTeague. As stated, Trina’s inability to reproduce is linked directly to her work making Noah’s Arks. She makes only the animals because, we are told, she “could not whittle [the people] fast enough and cheap enough to compete with the turning lathe, that could throw off whole tribes and peoples of manikins while she was fashioning one family” (). In one sense, Trina thus is handicapped by the increasing industrialization of the U.S. economy at century’s end. In another sense, however, the machine that competes with her might be seen not simply as history’s product but as history itself, its reproductions far exceeding those of any single household. Norris’s language here taps into turnof-the-century rhetoric that explicitly pitted the reproductive power of individual American families against the “tribes and peoples” suddenly surging into the country from elsewhere. Yet the image of Trina producing animals instead of people simultaneously links her to the threat thought posed by this “alien” immigrant force, embodied most clearly in McTeague by the Hispanic housemaid Maria.14 Maria, having married the relentlessly stereotyped Jew Zerkow,15 gives birth to “a strange, hybrid little being . . . combining in its puny little body the blood of the Hebrew, the Pole, and the Spaniard” (). The child dies within days of its birth, seeming to make more than clear Norris’s position on “racial” mixing—particularly the mixing of certain races.16 In fact, though, McTeague’s characters embody many of the characteristic contradictions embedded in such turn-of-the-century eugenic discourses. Maria’s ability to bear a child, yet only to bear one very nearly stillborn, condenses uncertainties about whether “degenerates” would be sterile—a condi 



tion attesting to their unfitness for survival—or not, which latter possibility would serve as a clearer indication of the need for societal vigilance against them. This tension is strong in a book like Max Nordau’s popular Degeneration, published in the United States in . Nordau works simultaneously to frighten his audience into action against “degenerates” who might corrupt their unsuspecting young (whether through sexual or other contact, a blurring made possible by the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics) and to reassure them of their absolute difference from this group, by insisting that degenerates are bound to die out in the end. This is accomplished through a remarkable biological narrative, whereby the degenerate can transmit “its peculiarities” to offspring “but, fortunately, is soon rendered sterile, and after a few generations often dies out” (). (Familiarly, racially mixed persons were prime candidates for this reading.) This sterility only “after a few generations” neatly justifies both concern and confidence about the effects of degeneracy on the populace. Yet in quickening the time span considerably in Maria Macapa’s case—fertility turns into sterility after a matter of days—Norris would seem to have chosen the path of confidence about the inability of “lesser types” to survive. In fact, though, McTeague is more complex than this reading would suggest, as evidenced in its representation of another conundrum central to the discourse of degeneracy: the question of its broader (i.e., not simply biological) relation to modernity and, hence, to future civilization. As Daniel Pick puts it, “The shared problematic of degeneration across the period could perhaps be summarised as follows: was degeneration separable from the history of progress (to be coded as ‘regression,’ ‘atavism,’ or ‘primitivism’), or did it reveal that the city, progress, civilisation and modernity were, paradoxically, the very agents of decline?” (). In the case of McTeague himself, Norris clearly opts for the former explanation; this simple soul, barely more than a body, is out of his depth in the modern world. Trina presents a less clear-cut case, yet her toy-making does align her with a similar atavism, whereby artisanal European objects increasingly falter in competition with mass-produced American ones. As Bill Brown has noted, artisanal toy-making was associated in this period with Germany; it flourished there, but on their native grounds American methods prevailed. Trina’s woodcarving (described by Norris as a “distorted” inheritance from “some long-legged forefather of the sixteenth century, some worsted-leggined wood-carver of the Tyrol” []) is the work of a German-American woman, yet one who labels each of her products “Made in France.” At one point, a seemingly crucial distinction is made in the     

novel between French and German products, on grounds of authenticity and purity: when Trina gives McTeague his giant gold tooth as a present, he is delighted to find that it is made of French gilt, not the “cheap” German kind, which, being merely painted on, would turn “black with the weather” (). In fact, though, the gold tooth ends up unwanted, a symbol of an era now gone; when it is offered to him for sale, the Other Dentist down the block informs McTeague that present fashion now dictates “a quiet little signboard, nothing pretentious” (). What we find, then, is that the supposed difference between French and German gilt has become no difference at all, its significance based on a category (authenticity or purity) now unintelligible. Indeed, France turns out to be merely another country associated with ancient traditions now worthless: witness Norris’s grotesque description of the “decayed French laundress” whom Trina hires as a cook, her head bobbing “like [that] of a toy donkey,” “her trade long since ruined by Chinese competition” (). In this depiction, it is the European old-worlders who cannot regenerate themselves, and non-Europeans who take their places in the U.S. market. Certainly this seems the only way to understand the otherwise anomalous detail, in McTeague’s description of the newest generation in a kindergarten classroom, that one of the assembled group was “a little colored girl” ().17 It might seem easy enough to conclude that Norris, if not sanguine (in a Spencerian way) about non-Anglo-Saxons’ inability to survive, is busy giving his readers a horrific portrait of a world taken over by “the other.” The only problem is that such portraits usually depended on a nostalgic affirmation of the glories being lost—something closer to what we see in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. Certainly the point would be for a Teutonic woman like Trina McTeague to reenter that idealized maternal narrative that critics at the time urged for her. Here, then, is where Norris’s gothic rather than sentimental discourse of preservation becomes crucial. Indeed, he reveals a commonality with the alternate mode of New England regionalist fiction we saw in chapter —not the sometimes problematic nostalgia of Jewett, but the obsessional world of Mary Wilkins Freeman. Consider a story of Freeman’s that can usefully be read beside McTeague, the  “Old Woman Magoun,” which is equally concerned with the question of degeneration. In Freeman’s story, however, social decay clearly results not from opening one’s borders to outsiders but from keeping them too tightly closed. Barry’s Ford, the name of the town in question, signals both the problem (the decline of the once-great Barry family) and the potential solution  



(“just at the beginning of the hamlet the little turbulent Barry’s River is fordable” [Reader ]). The first act we see performed by the aggressive Old Woman Magoun is to shame the village men into building a rough bridge across this part of the river. As a potential escape out of Barry’s Ford, the bridge is crucial to the narrative; Magoun brings her granddaughter, Lily, across it in the hopes of giving her away to a prosperous family in the neighboring town. Herself a Barry, Lily is strenuously guarded by Magoun from the clutches of her father, Nelson, “the fairly dangerous degenerate of a good old family” (). Nelson, however, meets Lily and soon after, McTeague-like, trades her to another man to pay off a gambling debt, at which point Magoun makes her pilgrimage across the bridge. Unfortunately, the members of the well-to-do family on the other side themselves fear taint from beyond their borders and reject Lily on the grounds of the Barry clan’s contaminated line. As they walk back toward the town, Magoun stands by—acting by not acting, in naturalist fashion—as Lily eats berries from a deadly nightshade bush. And so the girl dies, saved from the only future available to her. In the story’s final sentence, Magoun is glimpsed carrying, “as one might have carried an infant, Lily’s old rag doll” (). The point is not simply a replacement of Lily with the doll, for the doll already functioned as a replacement of a child for Lily herself, who carried it around as a teenager, barely younger than her own mother at the time of her birth. When we see Lily early in the story with the doll “carried over her shoulder like a baby,” the “absurd travesty of a face peep[ing] forth from Lily’s yellow curls” (), the assimilation of Lily to Lily’s child to doll is fully performed, and the threat that emerges is one of a future generation of grotesque dolls. We have thus returned to the image of Trina’s Noah’s Arks filled only with animals—and to the choice of sterility (killing Lily, ending the line) or contamination—but for Freeman, this situation clearly arises from the preservation of intact borders, not their violation. Julia Bader has suggested that this understanding of the carefully preserved town as a horror marks Freeman’s decisive difference from her sister regionalist, Jewett: Barry’s Ford is objectively perceived but its fixity has a terrifying changelessness, not a reassuring rootedness. The beloved solidity of Jewett’s Green Island has become a horror of unmoving and fatally poised landscape. . . . Barry’s Ford repels access . . . it is not a realist text. In this setting . . . [r]igidity and horror unhinge the ability to perceive. ()

    

Here again, we are faced with the difference between preservation as charming and preservation as chilling, described in this case as a difference between Jewett and Freeman. The workings of this split within a naturalist novel like McTeague are thus able to be made clearer through an examination of the regionalist fiction published in the same era. Indeed, Freeman not only chooses to represent as grotesque or “distorted” a set of subjects that for other women writers epitomize the sentimental: here, both the town and the individual home as “safe havens” fiercely guarded against any incursions from the world beyond. Further, like Norris in McTeague, she does so via stories in which a young woman’s attempts to maintain her “purity” are depicted as a kind of obsession-compulsion, an activity that, in repetitively refusing the conventional future of marriage and childbearing, seems to refuse the possibility of any future at all. Yet Freeman’s distinctive articulation of this problem helps us to see that, even in Norris, such a case study of female compulsion might actually reopen the question of women’s relation to their own futures, rather than shutting it down. The understanding of naturalism as coldly antihuman has more often made it seem the polar opposite of regionalism, as when Elaine Sargent Apthorp distinguishes the work of Freeman from that of Norris by directing our attention to Freeman’s empathy for characters like her eccentric “New England Nun,” Louisa Ellis. As we have seen, a humanizing view of naturalism has been extended, if at all, to the books’ men at the expense of their women. It is McTeague whose Louisa-like daily habits (concertina-playing, stone-pugdog-saving) are granted both sentimental and, indeed, aesthetic value. Yet might an attention to the more ambivalent portrayals of sentimental value in both Norris and Freeman help us question our critical attachment to these very ideals? In Trina McTeague’s case in particular, Norris’s painstaking inquiry into the symbolic trajectory of the female body makes clear the way the shift to maternity might be said to remove value from the woman herself in order to relocate it in the children she bears. Can we sympathize with Trina’s, or Louisa’s, resistance to this narrative, yet still recognize why their obsessional responses might be depicted as grotesque? As I suggest in chapter , Charlotte Perkins Gilman thought so; what she found salutary (and feminist) about the work of Freeman was its recognition that the representation of domesticity required a form more gothic than sentimental. The “monomania” of Freeman’s women, in her view, had everything to do with their devotion to that atavistic structure, the home, a devotion that could lead only to equally stunted artistic productions—awful concatenations  



of household junk, “crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck together, made of wax; made—of all awful things—of the hair of the dead!” (Home ). This sad state of things could change, Gilman felt, if wives left the home; engaged in productive labor for the world at large, “more developed” women would “outgrow the magpie taste that hoards all manner of gay baubles” (, emphasis mine). If we follow the logic here, all housewives are hoarders; Louisa Ellis and Trina McTeague thus become not anomalies but exemplars of a gendered problem. Such a claim decisively refuses the reasoning that might link aesthetic value with sentimental value; for Gilman, the domestic woman’s productions are artistically worthless precisely because all they possess is the latter. Such women’s own families might find their creations charming, but no one else is likely to do so; for no higher principle of order, only personal whim, lies behind this magpie’s nest of trinkets. It is significant that Gilman uses the figure of the magpie to make her point here, for this creature seems often to function as a kind of border figure between the natural (or instinctive) and the cultural (or rationally planned); its predilection for collecting bright and shiny objects and hiding them in its nest has been described as “an early germ of the aesthetic impulse” (Huxley ). For this reason, William James used the magpie to draw the distinction between the miser’s obsessive hoarding and the aesthetic act of collection.18 Susan Stewart elaborates on this distinction: whereas the magpie is like the miser, creating a collection “for its own sake” without asking why, “the ‘proper’ collection will always take part in an anticipation of redemption: for example, the eventual coining-in of objects or the eventual acquisition of object status by coins themselves” (). In this account, aesthetic value appears as similar to exchange value, in that both rely on the “eventuality” of redemption; both can be distinguished from sentimental value, which in its futurelessness resembles the irrational collecting of the miser or the magpie. While sentimental value depends on there being no relation between what one saves and any future activity, in the collector’s case, saving exists for the sake of “cashing in,” whether by literally divesting oneself of the objects or by achieving value through them. One might argue, however, that it is paradoxically possible to “cash in” on sentimental value, on uselessness itself. Indeed, this is the logic behind many revisionist readings of regionalist fiction, in which the “regions” depicted are said to call forth feelings of nostalgia and attachment precisely to the degree that they stand as economically moribund relics in relation to the mainstream of American life.19 The genre of regionalism itself, then, achieves a “sentimen    

tal value” often considered suspect. Here, though, the sentimentally preserved object is not that which resists the future (by resisting use or exchange); instead, it is assimilated into the future. The deeply personal qualities that imbue an object with sentimental value are culturally generalized, as the worthless curio becomes marketed into the tourist souvenir.20 And thus local color’s repudiation of futurity can be all too easily folded into the designs of the industrial-capitalist future, which welcome a space (like a national park) designed to represent the salvaged past. I argued earlier, however, that if any space approximates this vision in Norris’s naturalism, it is the “great outdoors” associated with men, with McTeague on his own. Whereas male preservation in McTeague achieves sentimental value, that of Trina, like that of Freeman’s Louisa, does not. And yet the very grotesqueness of the women’s saving should be highlighted in this context rather than disavowed, because it alerts us to the fact that, rather than simply denying the future or acceding to it (which in the above reading become the same thing), these women’s stories posit the need for an alternate future. The grotesqueness is merely a function of saving with no end presently in sight. Yet in saving themselves from the future designated for them (where female value is a function of childbearing), they might be said to save themselves for a future that their texts cannot yet imagine.21

The Future of the Question Norris’s clearest statement on the relation of women’s productions to the future appears in his essay “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels—and Why They Don’t.” This piece attempts to explain why, even though they frequently have more extensive leisure time, and even though they are naturally “impressionable, emotional, and communicative” (“three very important qualities of mind that make for novel writing”), women do not, in fact, write the best novels (). Norris outlines two categories of causes for this phenomenon: “exterior,” or social, and interior, or natural, ones. The exterior causes involve women’s consignment to the home, such that they lack the sufficient breadth of life experience required for fiction writing. The interior causes—which Norris hastens to state are far less “potent” and “important”—preoccupy the final paragraph of the essay. A distinction is made between men’s working habits and women’s: A man may grind on steadily for an almost indefinite period, when a woman at the same task would begin, after a certain point, to “feel her nerves,” to

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

chafe, to fret, to try to do too much, to polish too highly, to develop more perfectly. Then come fatigue, harassing doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occasionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete discouragement and a final abandonment of the enterprise: and who shall say how many good, even great, novels have remained half written, to be burned in the end, because their women authors mistook lack of physical strength for lack of genuine ability? ()

Norris’s position here, in its incoherence, is mirrored in the understanding of working women in McTeague. For in the novel, Trina much more than McTeague “grinds on steadily,” setting up her work of toy-making each morning after breakfast with the regularity of a time clock. The chapter that begins “Then the grind began” () refers to their poverty after McTeague loses his job, but just as much to Trina’s increased workload as a result. She makes the home into a factory; as a result, it decays as a home. What Norris’s two pieces of writing make clear, though, is that you cannot make both the argument that women are somehow constitutionally unable to work and the argument that their work will destroy the home, because it is only work as most stringently practiced that blocks out all other activity. If anything, what McTeague suggests is that it is the “grinding on” that produces the worst effects on the body, not the stop-start hysteria that he attributes to the woman writer. In this respect, Trina’s devotion to her toy-making is uneasily foreshadowed by the descriptions of all the other women in the book who work, each of whom is described as overworking herself (in each case, by work centered on her hands) into ill health. Selina, Trina’s replacement in Marcus Schouler’s affections, is “a slender, unhealthy-looking girl who overworked herself giving lessons in hand-painting at twenty-five cents an hour” (). Trina tells McTeague of a friend in Sacramento: “She’s a forewoman in a glove store, and she’s got consumption” (). Finally, both the French cook Trina hires and the McTeagues’ friend Mrs. Heise are described as “decayed” (“Mrs. Heise was a decayed writing-teacher” []), a description once more linking the childless woman’s lack of value to that of a decayed tooth unfilled with gold. And Trina’s work of toy-making does ravage her physically: “Her charming little figure grew coarse, stunted, and dumpy. She who had once been of a cat-like neatness, now slovened all day . . . ” (). She is finally forced to abandon her craft when the supposedly “non-poisonous” paint she uses infects her bitten hands. Yet if these descriptions, and particularly that of Trina’s transformation, imply a clear disjunction between work and femininity, Norris’s novel is not always so clear. For Trina’s work is also associated with her femininity, as when     

the unemployed McTeague gloomily watches her: “She turned the little figures in her fingers with a wonderful lightness and deftness. . . . She annoyed him because she was so small, so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise. Her avarice incessantly harassed him. Her industry was a constant reproach to him. She seemed to flaunt her work defiantly in his face” (, ). In this description, a “feminine” approach to work is associated with modernity, with those skills that flourish in the job market that has rejected McTeague. As Havelock Ellis states, in a prevalent late-nineteenth-century argument for changing gender norms, “modern civilisation is becoming industrial, that is to say feminine, in character, for the industries belonged primitively to women . . . ” (Man ). By this reasoning, Trina’s competition with the turning lathe marks her not so much as that which the machine displaces but more as a kind of machine herself. Charlotte Perkins Gilman might well have agreed, given her response to the outrage that greeted college education for women: “Natural enough, that cry. The threshers with flails stoned the first threshing-machines in England, remember” (qtd. in The Living, xxvi). What emerges here is a picture of the working woman, like the “Chinese competition” that displaces Trina’s cook in the laundry business, as the face of the future, as that which will prevail. Norris’s adoption of the rhetoric of degeneration as a function of modernity itself can only partially compensate for the implications of this vision for his beliefs in masculine and Aryan superiority. His characterization of the issue in “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels” is more salient, for what is fascinating in that essay’s depiction of the “causes to be found in the make-up of the woman herself” is the way they function in that final sentence, where the problem becomes one of women who “[mistake] lack of physical strength for lack of genuine ability” (). What is striking about this final twist is that the problem of women’s nature turns out to be a problem of how they interpret their nature. To be a woman, then, is less to decline in value than to constantly question one’s value. Certainly this is what is implied in Norris’s first novel, Vandover and the Brute, where the character Bessie, one of two precursors to Trina, is mocked by the narrator for her own vague fears about painting: “she had ‘taken it up’ at one time and had abandoned it, only because the oil or turpentine or something was unhealthy for her” (). On the one hand, the language here suggests that Bessie’s problem is more one of a typically “feminine” timidity about what she can withstand than anything else—the timidity that keeps femininity fragile and untouched. Yet on the other hand, Norris clearly wants to have it both ways, given that in McTeague, the paint does turn out to be the source of Trina’s  



ill health. Even this is complicated, though. On the one hand, the paint would not have infected Trina had her hands not been lacerated from McTeague’s abuse. On the other hand, the book depicts her as welcoming that abuse. At the same time, according to the reading I have given, this welcome itself stems from the gender system that understands women as possessing a value inevitably to be lost. The “natural” does not disappear in this example, so much as it is constantly displaced. Norris’s stroke in “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels” lies in making this constant displacement itself into the definition of the natural: the “interior cause” that holds women back is itself their attitude toward that interior cause. It is this that would seem to place women constantly in the location of the potential or conditional, as the essay’s title (“Why Women Should . . . ”) suggests. This is what becoming female means, as we see in Vandover and the Brute, which provides a more extended analysis of puberty: “It was a distressing, uncanny period. Had Vandover been a girl he would at this time have been subject to all sorts of abnormal vagaries, such as eating his slate pencil, nibbling bits of chalk, wishing he were dead, and drifting into states of unreasoned melancholy” (). Here the woman in “Why Women . . . ” who consumes her own productions (throwing them into the fire) becomes the pubescent girl who, taking things one step further, eats her own writing implements. This condition itself can only be known, however, through another displacement into the conditional: “Had Vandover been a girl he would have” eaten his pencils and chalk, which is to say that he would have hoarded them like a magpie. I say this because of the name that has historically been attached to the desire to eat inedible objects: pica, derived from the Latin for magpie (pica pica). As the magpie hoards “a diversity of things” for reasons that remain mysterious, so does the practitioner of pica ingest “diverse, strange substances as food” (Cooper ). For centuries, the practice has been associated most commonly with pregnant women. Stories dating back to sixteenth-century Europe tell of expectant mothers possessed by intense cravings for all manner of things, most startlingly the flesh of their husbands and other men. (One woman, in a case tailormade for Frank Norris, is said to have begged a frightened baker to allow her three bites from his shoulder [see Cooper ].) In such extreme form, Havelock Ellis wrote in the early twentieth century, such yearnings might “properly be considered as neurasthenic obsessions”; yet they had also to be recognized as, in many cases, “normal and healthy” (Studies )—not only in pregnant women but, notably, in adolescents, particularly girls (). In his  study Adolescence, G. Stanley Hall concurred:     

There is [in adolescence] a new tendency to experiment, not only with new dishes, but often with things strange and even offensive. . . . fasting and feasting perhaps alternate, strange whims or picae arise with sometimes extreme dislike of some one and passionate fondness for other kinds of foods. Taste seems to acquire a more inward and independent quality of its own . . . Girls in particular become squeamish, fastidious, and lickerish, and perhaps develop a sweet tooth of disproportionate dimensions. (: )22

Particularly relevant to the example of Vandover, the  guidebook Eve’s Daughters warns against young female diners whose “vitiated cravings” include “a relish for chalk” and “slate-pencils,” among other unexpected treats (Harland ).23 Most broadly, the term pica can refer, as it still does today, to any person’s desire to consume items deemed “absurd” or “perverse”; or, in a more scientific rendering, any “compulsion for persistent ingestion of unsuitable substances having little or no nutritional value” (Lackey ). The attempt to provide a more precise definition points up the problem at hand, however. For just as many of the substances we currently label “food” clearly possess “little or no nutritional value,” many of those cravings historically viewed as pica would today appear perfectly sound, such as cravings for raw vegetables. Like the magpie’s hoarding, then, pica functions less as a clear-cut example of the utterly inexplicable than as a border zone where the question of how to distinguish “natural” from “unnatural” behaviors, or legitimate physical needs from perverse desires, gets continuously worked out. This is because, as with the hoarding, we are dealing here with a compulsion, the fulfillment of which will seem absolutely necessary and unquestionable to the desirer in question, which is of course one definition of need itself. Certainly many cases of pica have been revealed to be expressions of genuine physical “needs”: poor people who eat clay, for example, are now known to be driven by an actual nutritional deficiency that is met by the clay. This does not, however, make their cravings “healthy,” for, like many an acceptable foodstuff, the dirt ends up being as bad for their bodies as it is good. In this sense, there is a less clear distinction to be drawn between such cases and instances in which pica results from a purely psychological compulsion, as in the case of one woman who compulsively ate paper and “the wood on pencils” to stave off a feeling of “vulnerability to dissolution” (Shisslak , ). Norris, as we have seen, describes not only girls who consume their pencils but women who consume their written work in flames; the problem he  



poses is one of why women tend to sabotage or hold back their own productions, taking in rather than giving out. In McTeague, he develops this problem to the fullest degree. For Trina’s seems a most pica-resque tale, if we bear the original root of pica, the mystery of the magpie’s hoarding, in mind. In the reading I have given, Trina hoards in an attempt to regain the sense of unspoiled, intact “purity” that guaranteed her body’s value prior to her marriage. Rather than move on to childbirth, and accept that her only value will lie outside herself, in the children she produces, Trina achieves what seems like an endless state of pregnancy, creating a “nest egg” that can always be made just a little bit larger. Like the pregnant woman eating and eating, Trina keeps feeding her trunk, and it grows fuller and fuller. In her introduction to On Longing, Susan Stewart gives as one definition of longing “the fanciful cravings incident to women during pregnancy” (ix), or pica. More broadly, however, Webster’s dictionary defines longing as “a strong desire, esp. for something unattainable.” Perhaps, then, the magpielike pregnant women are indeed like Trina, consuming to attain what remains forever out of reach. Perhaps, in feeding their growing bodies, they strive for an endless pregnancy that will keep those bodies ever in a state of potential, their value bound up securely in themselves, not yet lost to the world. In “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels,” Norris describes women writers who “try to do too much, to polish too highly, to develop too perfectly” and break down in the process, finally setting their work afire. Is this drive for perfection a fruitless attempt to mimic the achievements of men, to deny one’s “lack of physical strength” and its inevitable consequences? In fact, Norris’s description of male work habits as a kind of “grinding on” gives little indication that this is so. The women strive not for men’s solid steadiness but for perfection, for absolute polish—for, in essence, purity. And the reason, Trina McTeague’s story helps us see, is that purity is the only value that nineteenthcentury women understood to belong, even if fleetingly, to themselves alone. From this vantage, it is easier to comprehend why turn-of-the-century feminists so often drew on female “purity” as a justification for increasing women’s influence in the world. The stumbling block, of course, was that, for Trina as for Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Louisa, purity depended on the opposite: on one’s enclosure from the world. Naturalist fiction thus renders this search for purity in antisentimental terms, as grotesquely compulsive. Yet at the same time, a novel such as McTeague provides the genealogy of the female body that makes the overvaluation of purity understandable. Freeman’s “New England Nun” goes even further: Louisa does remain a “pure” body in the conventional sense,     

but the preservation of this state requires the same obsessive vigilance as Trina’s hopeless attempt to create the absolutely secure collection. The obsessiveness is what lets us know that the search for purity is doomed to be endless, and Freeman shows this to be clear even in the case of the woman whose purity seems most indisputable, the eternal virgin. As Norris’s “Why Women Should . . . ” finally makes clear, the issue is one of the “interior cause” that makes women what they are. And as his fictional works describe it, womanhood is defined by a “natural” trajectory (from virginity to motherhood) that produces an “unnatural” activity: the pica, or hoarding, practiced by pregnant women and pubescent girls. Indeed, Vandover and the Brute suggests that those girls become girls in the moment that they begin to eat their pencils and bits of chalk, as Trina “becomes a woman” by realizing that she has something to lose. Viewed in these lights, McTeague is a novel of the girl standard as much as of the gold standard, asking in both cases after the meaning and effects of “naturally” derived value. In the women’s case, however, what is most natural is the very act of asking this question: this is why we get the sense, in “Why Women Should . . . ,” that to be a woman is to embody an absolute, unrealized potential. The hoarding, the eating, the selfconsuming all serve to render a future endlessly possible because endlessly deferred, as for the compulsively saving Trina, who is always expecting because she never delivers. And I have argued that if she and the genre that produces her thus refuse the future, they accomplish in doing so the reproduction of that future as both a woman’s body and a question—or a woman’s body as the thing that asks itself as a question. Naturalist fiction, in other words, embodies women’s history as a pregnant pause.

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

               Unmothering the Race in Chopin, Stein, and Grimké

Free womanhood, out of the depths of its rich experiences, will observe and comply with the inner demands of its being. . . . To achieve this [woman] must have a knowledge of birth control. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race “Think of the children; think of them.” She meant to think of them; that determination had driven into her soul like a death wound—but not to-night. Tomorrow would be time to think of everything. Kate Chopin, The Awakening Can there be a naturalist motherhood? In the more familiar understanding of the genre that this book has sought to question, of course there can: as men become primitive warriors, women achieve their own glory as “mothers of the race.” The turn-of-the-century female story we have been tracing, however, tends to work against this very imperative, becoming arrested in its compulsive motion considerably prior to the moment in which childbearing might emerge as a real possibility. G. Stanley Hall feared at the time that modern feminine tendencies toward “luxury” and “overindulgence”—in which category he included “excessive intellectualism”—had the effect of producing a distaste for what highly civilized women had come to view as “‘brute maternity’” (Hall : ). Such women’s disregard for those bodily rhythms that were meant to keep them “in mysterious rapport with moon, tides, reproduction, race, climate, and all the environment” (: ) placed the entire race in danger of extinction. To put matters this way, of course, is simply to reinstate the familiar split between unreconstructed “natural” demands and an “unnatural” modern womanhood, doomed to compulsive behaviors. What then of the alternative that I have been arguing “natural-ism” represents, the possibility whereby 

redescribing the natural ends up bringing forward its own compulsive character? In this final chapter, I propose Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as a case in which maternity is recast in these terms, before moving on to two writers less often discussed in conjunction with the others in this book: Gertrude Stein and Angelina Weld Grimké. Published in , the same year as McTeague, Chopin’s book has stood second only to Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth as the female-authored text of this era most nominated as an instance of naturalist fiction.1 As I discuss in chapter  in the case of House’s Lily Bart, however, this suggestion may have most to do with the way in which Chopin’s New Woman heroine, Edna Pontellier, can appear to take up the sympathetic position usually reserved for the naturalist Old Man, such as McTeague or Dreiser’s Hurstwood. That is, to the extent that familiarly deterministic elements mark Edna’s story, they can in her case work to produce an image of a tragic figure defeated—indeed, driven to a Hurstwood-like suicide, though with the more ambiguous overtones of Lily Bart’s—by forces beyond her control. If Lily appears in death as something of a sentimental heroine, the concomitant tendency to overidealize Edna results from a language of romantic individualism, which at its most elaborated can transform her final swim out into the Gulf of Mexico into the transcendent rebirth-through-death of a latter-day Aphrodite.2 As with the sentimentalizing of Lily, however, this romanticizing strain in Chopin’s novel has spurred detractors as well as converts. While Edna sees her children as “antagonists” seeking “to drag her into the soul’s slavery,” it is pointed out that the day-to-day work of caring for those children is mostly given over to the nameless hired “quadroon,” who receives scoldings from Edna for her pains (Awakening ). Indeed, this figure is typical of a text featuring an elaborately taxonomized supporting cast of “Griffes,” “mulatresses,” and so on. For these readers, then, Edna’s cherished individualism amounts to no more than a privileged woman’s “solipsistic” void—apolitical, immature, and utterly unable to connect with the far more oppressed women of color whose labor makes her own liberation possible.3 On the one hand, this argument seems a crucial counter to tendencies both in Chopin’s text and among its feminist readers to idealize Edna’s perspective, a gesture that, as I have suggested, often goes along with a view of her as a blameless victim. Yet the danger of these revisionary readings, on the other hand, lies in their imposition of a false and simplistic coherence both on the text itself and on its prior feminist readership. It is simply not true to state, as Michele Birnbaum does, that the “regal” Edna’s “sovereignty has gone unim   

peached” (), in either the novel or the earlier Chopin criticism. To say so— to stress only those moments and readings that present Edna as some sort of full-blown feminist heroine—is to cover over not only an entire swath of outright condemnations of her “selfishness” (which stretch considerably beyond the earliest  reviews) but also an ongoing voicing of concern that her revolt, as Chopin presents it, seems irreducibly tied to an insistence on rhythmic natural forces and on Edna’s own lack of will, indeed at just those moments when she might otherwise seem to be asserting her independence.4 These moments are what interest me most about The Awakening, since they seem to present the strongest potentials for a reading of its naturalism that would go beyond determinism and victimization. Instead, they enable an understanding of Edna’s “freedom” and her impregnable individuality in which these emerge, in nonidealized terms, through as well as against her involvement in the repetitive time of maternity.5 Thus, they offer a still powerful set of possibilities for thinking through the meaning of women’s embodiment in relation to their modern quest for an enlarged sphere—an issue as salient today as ever; simply splitting the difference between these goals risks returning us to G. Stanley Hall. Perhaps a more serious risk of the extant race-centered readings lies in their historicist implication that all the doubleness and difficulty evidenced by Edna Pontellier’s situation results from her specific location in space and time—that the “unbearable contradiction of being both a free agent and yet acted upon” merely marks her status as an occupant of “the colonizer’s position” in turn-of-the-century New Orleans (Birnbaum ). One might point out that this particular “unbearable contradiction” may be a fact of existence not so readily overcome. More pertinently, it is unclear whether such a perspective is even most obviously desirable for the women of color in whose interests it hopes to speak. Claudia Tate, in her defense of psychoanalytic as opposed to strictly historicist readings of African American fiction, wonders why black texts have so often been reduced to expressions of “collective social arguments,” with the result that only white readers have gotten to enjoy the “highly individualistic portraits of desire” as “eroticized passive resistance” offered, in her view, by writers like Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin (Psychoanalysis ). The suggestion here that there might be something important about insisting on the perversity rather than the idealization of an Edna Pontellier, not to dismiss her as a racist but to affirm precisely what remains serious in her portrayal, goes hand in hand with the recognition that it is just such a perverse feminine subjectivity that has perhaps been denied to women of color more than any other sort. This chapter,   

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then, moves from Chopin to Stein and Grimké, stopping briefly along the way with Pauline Hopkins and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, in order to explore the possibility of a “naturalist” subjectivity, in my sense of the term, for an African American heroine. That this study has not yet seen such a heroine is in no way accidental. As Tate, Hazel Carby, and others have documented, African American women writers were burdened enough by popular representations of “bestial” black sexuality during the s; further detailing the nuances of their bodily life could scarcely hold the interest it did for white women straining against the ideal of Victorian “passionlessness.” Equally important, Hall-like calls for a proud racial motherhood often resonated in progressive terms among African Americans eager to dispute claims of postslavery “degeneration.” For these reasons, the territory opened up by Kate Chopin has usually been considered unexplored until the s and s, with the works of Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset. Yet in fact, the less studied work of Dunbar-Nelson and Grimké preceded them in this regard. In particular, Grimké’s play Rachel and her fiction, which appeared in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, combines racially specific political concerns with a complex, nonidealized exploration of maternity’s meanings. Such works can help remind us that a little later in the twentieth century, African American writers such as Richard Wright and Ann Petry were among those most engaged in further developing the naturalist mode.

What Do Mothers Want? Often touted as a bold exploration of female sexuality, The Awakening may remain more enduringly provocative in its unflinching consideration of ambivalences about motherhood. In the book’s penultimate scene, Edna Pontellier stumbles out of the birthing room of her friend, Adele Ratignolle, in a stunned daze. The conversation that follows, as she walks slowly together with the attending doctor, Mandelet, finds Edna beginning to formulate the thoughts that will lead her, the following morning, to swim too far out into the Gulf to imagine returning to shore. Responding to the doctor’s query about whether she will join her family on a trip abroad, Edna states, “‘Perhaps—no, I am not going. I’m not going to be forced into doing things. . . . I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—except children, perhaps—and even then, it seems to me—or it did seem—’” (). A moment later, she tries again: “‘There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don’t want any   

thing but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others—but no matter—still, I shouldn’t want to trample upon the little lives. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, Doctor.’” This feeling recurs, for in the first moment, she “stop[s] abruptly” out of a sense that “her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thoughts” (). For a good many readers, these thoughts—which are repeated and finally spur Edna’s decision to walk “on and on . . . on and on” out into the sea, wishing her family had not striven to “possess her, body and soul” ()—indeed risk incoherence, based as they are on an untenable notion of the wholly unencumbered individual, free simply to follow her “own way.” Why, after all, should the highly privileged Edna view herself as so constrained by family life?6 Throughout the book, she has hardly appeared to be literally bound by her maternal responsibilities, as these are largely taken up by the “quadroon” nurse seen trailing the two boys from the book’s first scene. Is there a way to make better sense of the relation of Edna’s crisis to her status as a mother, as it emerges in those final chapters? In attempting to do so, it seems the form as well as the content of Edna’s remarks to Mandelet must be considered. Why do her attempts to explain herself to the doctor appear so fragmentary, recursive, and self-contradictory as to lead her at last into a sudden silence? Communicative difficulties, and especially difficulties explaining one’s motives, keep surfacing throughout the novel, I would assert, for the distinct reason that motherhood appears within it as a form of absolute feminine self-explicability. This understanding can be demonstrated if we consider the way maternity emerges at the start of the book, just as it does at the finish: through the contrast of Edna with her friend Adele Ratignolle. Adele, we hear upon first encountering her, is one of the “mother-women,” a category that “seemed to prevail” at Grand Isle, where Edna is spending the summer with her family. We learn right away, then, to recognize a difference between “women” and “motherwomen”—that the two are not immediately synonymous—and, furthermore, that “Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman” (). This does not mean she does not love her little boys, and indeed her husband has trouble trying to “define to his own satisfaction or any one else’s wherein his wife failed in her duty toward their children” (); if anything, the boys seem to have learned to stand up for themselves in playground battles rather than running tearfully to Mother’s side. In what sense, then, is she not a “mother-woman”? Here it helps to have the contrast of Adele, who is one. Adele, we should note, appears no   



less privileged an individual than Edna; she too retains a nurse, who spends the bulk of the time with Adele’s several children. Yet one might argue that it is this very lack of need to spend all her days rapt in concern for the young ones’ welfare that actually makes Adele’s insistence on doing so border on the perverse. When we first meet her, she is busily using her summer leisure hours to sew her children’s winter clothes—in particular, an “impervious” pair of nightdrawers “fashioned to enclose a baby’s body so effectually that only two small eyes might look out . . . ” By contrast, we hear that “Mrs. Pontellier’s mind was quite at rest concerning the present material needs of her children . . . ” (). Familiarly, then, the “holy privilege” of the mother-women is said to lie in their will “to efface themselves as individuals” and become “ministering angels” instead (). And yet at the same time, a significant difference clearly separates this ethereal Victorian archetype from the highly embodied Adele Ratignolle. If Adele were merely demure and quiet, the way to Edna’s revolt from maternal dictates would be straightforward: speaking her mind, asserting her sexuality, and otherwise breaking loose from the constraints of convention. The problem, however, is that Adele already does all these things. “There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms,” we are told about Mme. Ratignolle; “her beauty was all there, flaming and apparent” ()—a beauty Chopin goes on to discuss in the exaggerated language of a fairy tale. This “flaming and apparent” aspect of Adele turns out to be crucially related to her status as a Creole, one she shares with most of the others present at Grand Isle, including Edna’s husband Leonce, but not Edna herself. What characterizes the Creole society is precisely their “freedom of expression” (): Adele speaks to an old man in frank terms of her accouchements, “withholding no intimate detail”; later a book, likely a French naturalist novel (the Goncourts are mentioned at another point), gets passed around, and while Edna feels compelled to read the shocking text “in secret,” it too is “freely discussed at table” by the rest (). As Edna herself recognizes, however, Adele’s free-and-easy sexual talk needs to be seen not in opposition to, but as part and parcel of, the “lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable” (). That is, Adele’s careless expression of what seems most private is itself a convention that, if anything, affirms that she possesses no private self that it would be a problem to expose—in the same way that her “motherwomanhood” entails thinking about her children even when she has no need of doing so. The fairy-tale aspect of Adele is perhaps most apparent in the description of her marriage as a model of wholly transparent communication:    

“The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union. . . . [Adele] was keenly interested in everything he said . . . chiming in, taking the words out of his mouth” (). By contrast, Edna’s relation to Leonce Pontellier is presented to us in a series of scenes designed to underscore their communication breakdown; the two moments when they understand one another perfectly without speech concern, first, that she will put her rings back on after a swim, and second, that he will come home late again after playing billiards (–). While we might assume, then, that The Awakening’s point is for Edna to find her voice, to express her innermost thoughts at last, the text itself questions that goal, by aligning the utopian ideal of perfect communicability with the possession of a self so steeped in the category it inhabits (mother-woman) that speaking it aloud poses no threat. We might say that, instead, Edna learns what cannot be expressed. “Ah, si tu savais!” goes her favorite song, the one that reminds her later on of her Grand Isle lover Robert (). If you knew . . . but you can’t, you can’t ever know, this lyric’s repetition implies. Again this possibility, that there might be some inner self not merely unexpressed but also inexpressible, is presented by the text as having something to do with not being a motherwoman, which might be one reason why Edna, in her final swim, thinks both of her children and of the fact that Robert “did not understand. He would never understand” (). The inability to communicate her inmost thoughts leaves Edna in a place like the Gulf long before she actually swims out, “wander[ing] in abysses of solitude” (); and it seems to get in the way of a feminist plot that moves toward the triumph of self-assertion (Seyersted, “Kate Chopin” ). Chopin herself tried to mark the distance between her work and that of the decade’s more outspokenly feminist New Woman writers, calling that “certain class” of female novelists “a lot of clever women gone wrong” (Seyersted, Miscellany ). Yet while Chopin here classifies her contemporaries with the hope of eluding such a classification herself, reviews nonetheless chalked her up as “another clever woman,” one whose “bald realism” “fairly out Zolas Zola”; as America’s entry in the race to conceive of “Women Who Did”; and as the latest entrant into “the overworked field of sex fiction.”7 Grouping together Zola and the New Women in an  interview, she seems to view them as a bit like Adele Ratignolle cheerily passing around the Goncourt; the very blatancy of their revolt—perhaps the naturalist claim to “show everything”—is what guarantees that it cannot possess the radicality of Edna’s, which strains at the very possibility of communication.8   

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What present-day condemnations of Edna’s racism share, then, with the very earliest reviews is not simply a skepticism about her claims to an impregnable individuality; more problematically, in producing the real key to Edna’s worldview, they insist on the very nameability of it that the novel itself holds so strenuously at bay. The early write-ups that saw the book as a taxonomizing case study—“the biography of one individual out of that large section of femininity that may be classified as ‘fool women,’” or Willa Cather’s unsigned claim that “Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are studies in the same feminine type”—are updated first in the form of psychoanalytic diagnoses of Edna as a narcissist and then as historicist delimitations of her dilemma: as Elizabeth Ammons puts it, The Awakening “is the story of a woman of one race and class who is able to dream of total personal freedom because an important part of that highly individualistic ideal . . . has already been bought for her” (Conflicting ).9 The most eloquent and fully developed of the race-oriented readings belongs to Michele Birnbaum, who argues that Edna’s liberation depends not on remaining oblivious to the women of color around her but rather on appropriating the image of an uncomplicated “natural” sexuality that they culturally represent. This interpretation, in many ways powerful, remains limited chiefly by its lack of interest in the complexity of the way the category of nature functions in Chopin’s book. For many readers, after all, the alignment of Edna’s awakening with natural forces has seemed to diminish it, making it appear less an agent’s act of self-assertion than a mere passive drifting. For someone said to be “awakening,” Edna does quite a bit of sleeping throughout the book. Her refusal to remain at home, preferring instead to “wander” amid the city as Chopin herself liked to do, itself resembles not only an aimless drifting (“‘unthinking and unguided’” []) but a drifting off, for the point is to end up in some “sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in” (). Sleeping, eating, and taking lovers, Edna might well appear to be realizing “her sensual nature, not . . . her equality or freedom as an individual,” as the essay most curious about Chopin’s relation to naturalist fiction has put it (N. Walker, “Feminist” ). But what does this mean for Chopin’s feminism? Must she be either a “feminist or naturalist” but not both?10 Chopin herself, when critiquing the New Women writers around her, mentioned in particular that “a well-directed course of scientific study might make clearer their vision; might, anyhow, bring them a little closer to Nature” (Seyersted, Miscellany ); to the same interviewer, she had given evidence of her own fondness for the works of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer (). One in   

triguing reading by Elizabeth B. House has suggested that Chopin’s modern evolutionism and her romanticism might be said to merge if we consider Edna’s final swim as indicative of her participation in a “recurring human cycle of eros, birth, and death,” a cycle evoked by “the ‘endlessly rocking,’ repeated motion of the ocean,” which ties Chopin’s imagery to Darwin and Whitman alike (–).11 The sea is a place of death and maternity at once, blurring the two like the repeated motif of the two lovers walking on the beach in Chopin’s story, trailed at every turn by the “lady in black” ceaselessly counting her rosary beads. Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of House’s reading lies in her discernment of a repetitive, rhythmic, back-and-forth movement that recurs throughout Chopin’s text, pushing against the more familiar notion of Edna’s trajectory as a linear individual “evolution” toward independence (or, alternatively, a downward, Hurstwood-like decline). As she notes, characters throughout the book “repeat their motions as one does when rocking”: Madame Lebrun “bustling in and out” of the boarding-house, the lady in black “walking up and down” the beach, Mademoiselle Reisz “dragging a chair in and out of her room,” Madame Antoine walking “back and forth,” Edna walking “to and fro,” the “sound of people going and coming” (House ). This ceaseless back-and-forth might be said to be set in motion by the parrot and the mockingbird in the novel’s opening lines, natural entities that do nothing but repeat. Nature sets the pattern here for human endeavors: Edna, at , learning on August  to swim for the first time (another Whitman reference), affirms her “connection to the menstrual cycle and phases of the moon,” just as in her final swim, recalling the odor of the pinks that grew in her mother’s garden, she dies “smell[ing] a scent which leads to new life and begins again the evolutionary chain” (House , ). House calls this a “perfect and inevitable ending” for a book governed from start to finish not by the upward push of individual human endeavor, but by the collective animal reality of nature’s endless rhythms, of which we form but one small part (). House is not alone in detecting a rhythmic rather than a striving element in Chopin’s text, for all its language of liberation; this element, moreover, has nearly always been seen as affiliated with the role of nature in the book: “the rhythm of [Edna’s] basic needs” to eat and sleep, “nature’s cycles and rhythms” as aligned with “the needs of the body as Edna becomes increasingly aware of her erotic impulses” (Wolff, “Thanatos” ; W. Martin ). And yet simply to assert that Edna’s final swim places her back into nature’s cycle in a “perfect and inevitable ending”—one more ideal “completion”—seems a strange elision of   

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the events that bring Edna there. In the childbirth scene with Adele, after all, witnessing the “scene of torture,” she is said to experience a “flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature” (Awakening )—a reaction in keeping with Chopin’s own decision in labor, like Edna but unlike Adele, to resort to the use of chloroform.12 Chloroform makes it difficult to “think of the children” even at the moment when one’s body is most wholly given over to involvement with them; of her own deliveries, Edna remembers only “a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go” (). In this quote, the evolutionary perspective on history as something like the ocean’s endless rolling waves, less any sort of story than an awful series in which “unnumbered” beings “come and go,” promises no “perfect and inevitable” surrender to nature’s cycles; it evokes more a sense of the appalling character of existence. Notably, rather than making her a mother-woman, Edna’s experience of maternity grants her this view of life. Her “awakening,” then, appears much less as an ideal self-realization than as the terrible question of how to understand selfhood at all in the face of its radical negation. At its most powerful, The Awakening’s romanticism takes the form not of a blissful transcendence but rather of freedom construed as the encounter with “the unlimited” from which it is impossible to reemerge whole or satisfied.13 All the most serious rhythms at work in Chopin’s text—the contentless voice of the sea as Edna learns to swim, Mademoiselle Reisz’s piano-playing, Edna’s “uneven, impulsive” affections for her children ()—work neither to collapse humanity into nature nor to allow their differentiation; rather, they define being a person as the pitched confrontation with nature’s meaningless endlessness, a sea that we enter and against which we can only pit our own peculiar rhythms. Witness, for example, the way Chopin casts Edna’s new, defiant habit of leaving her home as a movement of “going and coming as it suited her fancy” (). It is this possibility, that the book may raise “nature” as an issue at least in part in order to rethink its meanings, that is disallowed if we say only that the book’s women of color stand in for a familiarly solid “nature” that Edna can then appropriate—an appropriation that seems easiest to imagine in relation to sexuality, harder with respect to maternity. This is not at all to deny that The Awakening’s mixed-race women often do appear disturbingly yoked to the text’s more conventionalized portrayals of nature. Yet the much-discussed quadroon, surprisingly, turns out to represent a limit-case for this particular interpretation. Whereas the text’s other women of color comfortably make room    

for Edna or, if they do not, pout and dissemble like the “sly” Mariequita, the quadroon is neither particularly accommodating nor particularly threatening. According to Wai Chee Dimock, this is because she is given no subjectivity at all: instead, she appears, “[l]ike the lady in black and the pair of young lovers,” as “a kind of human stage prop” for the real internal drama of interest here— that is, Edna’s (Residues ). This is what is said to make it so easy for the selfabsorbed Edna, “[f]loating along in her ‘mazes of inward contemplation,’” to ignore the quadroon and the “little black girl” who works for Mme. Lebrun, so that she “never makes connections between her lot and theirs” (Showalter, “The Awakening” ). The opposition here between privileged individualism and a desired feminist collectivity, however, is actually called into question by the quadroon herself. The point is not that being labeled as “the quadroon” does not set her up as a surface rather than an interiority, “part of a compositional tableau,” as Dimock puts it (Residues ), someone to be seen—and her precise racial mixture registered—rather than heard. All of this could easily imply that her thoughts are of no consequence, were it not for the particular status the text repeatedly gives to the very notion of an impenetrable interiority, one that never can be communicated. The point of our involvement with Edna, after all, seems arguably a good deal less about learning what exactly troubles her than about learning that we can never know (“Ah! si tu savais . . . ”). And it is in this withholding of a private self, a self that is gestured toward without ever being revealed, that the quadroon and the little black girl alike are portrayed as resembling Edna.14 They are not really human stage props, it turns out; the text points several times to the discrepancy between the actions they are seen to perform and where they are in their own heads while doing them, a gesture that insistently distinguishes their embodiment from who they are. Thus from the very first scene, the quadroon is said to follow the children about “with a far-away, meditative air” (); the little black girl sweeps “with long, absent-minded strokes of the broom” (); and later, as Edna walks dreamily “with a selfabsorbed expression on her face,” the quadroon evinces a similar lack of interest in the scene by putting on a kind of show of doing so: she walks “with little quick steps, having assumed a fictitious animation and alacrity for the occasion” (). Again, all of these instances might read differently, as mere laziness or inattention, were their insistence on a private self that lies affirmedly “elsewhere” not exactly what Edna’s story seems intended to bring forward. Though Birnbaum notes the similarity between the quadroon’s “fictitious animation” and   



Edna’s own distance from what is expected of her, she wavers with respect to what this means about Chopin’s positioning, as opposed to Edna’s. If, after all, “[t]here is no suggestion that [Edna] sympathizes with the vague dissatisfaction of the nannies on Grand Isle” (Birnbaum ), what should we say of the author who has brought that dissatisfaction to our attention in the first place? And even if we decide that Edna “appropriates” this subjectivity from the quadroon, the subjectivity thus borrowed would seem quite different from the conventionally exoticized sexuality attributable to the rest of the book’s women of color. Like Edna’s own distance from the familiar revolts of the “Woman Who Did,” the quadroon’s impermeable selfhood would seem the very opposite of that sort of familiar taxonomization.

The Race Woman’s Vagaries Of course, The Awakening is not the quadroon’s story, and this is hardly insignificant. It seems worth registering the glimmerings of an unheard (and perhaps not simply “hearable”) story that she represents, however, particularly given the other options into which she has thus far been subsumed. For Chopin writes in an era in which any “quadroon” who was not merely a stage prop or a madwoman, a “tragic mulatta” doomed by her fatal mixture of blood, seemed only to have one representational possibility that would afford her the dignity the other options disallowed: that of the salvaged “race woman,” the proud equivalent of the white domestic heroine, a mixed-race Adele Ratignolle. This conundrum, with its options of an entrapping “nature” or a simply embraced one leaving little room for ambivalences around maternity, constrained African American women’s writing as well, making their own explorations of an individualized inner life for a more fully developed mixed-race heroine scarcely less tentative, in this era, than Chopin’s. Consider Pauline Hopkins’s  novel Contending Forces. Like other African American women’s writings of the period, this text works vigorously against the “tragic mulatta” archetype, showing us a mixed heroine with a hidden sexual past who nonetheless, by the end of the book, can serve as an exemplar for a proud racial future. Sold into prostitution as a child in New Orleans, Sappho Clark appears in the first half of Forces as a sad, withdrawn figure who believes that her tainted history necessarily renders her unfit to marry a striving young race man like Will Smith. When he tries to probe the unspoken thoughts that throw “shadows” across her face, she shies away, insisting, “‘You would not understand my vagaries’” (). The novel’s point, however, would    

seem to be that Will not only can understand but can “purify” Sappho anew with his love, enabling her to acknowledge and care for the child born of her repudiated youth. The damaging stereotype of the hypersexualized black woman is thus here decisively countered—yet with the risk, it would seem, of turning a oncecomplex character into little more than a silenced, hypermaternal “vessel” of the race’s future by the book’s end (McCann ). For years, indeed, these racial-uplift novels of the ’s were dismissed as the conservative antithesis of the era’s groundbreaking naturalist works. As Gloria Naylor commented in , while writers like Dreiser and Crane were busily exploring sex and other taboo subjects for the first time, African American women writers like Hopkins and Frances E. W. Harper were producing texts in which “black female sexuality” was “whitened and deadened to the point of invisibility” (qtd. in DuCille ). And yet did this really tell the whole story? As literary criticism grew more historically oriented, treatments of these novels began to shift in tone, even as descriptions of their content remained more or less the same. In pioneering studies by Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate, far greater emphasis was placed on the political exigencies governing the decision to produce idealized African American domestic heroines, and concomitantly on the possibility that what had looked like a conservative bow to convention might be reconsidered as a powerful strategy of resistance to racist norms.15 Carby in particular focused on the way the mixed-race heroine, seen previously as a sop to garner white readers’ sympathy for a figure who resembled themselves, could also be shown to question the barriers between races and allow readers simultaneous access to two otherwise separated worlds. Tate explored these novels’ African American version of the domestic plot, arguing that for women of color, a story ending in the long-denied civil right of marriage could be as liberatory as the white New Woman’s story of freedom therefrom—that these books tended to portray marriage and maternity not as the opposite of political struggle for women, but as a way of creating a partnership between husband and wife in the service of racial uplift for the future generation. Such readings crucially granted a complexity and deliberation to representational choices that had earlier appeared as mere kowtowing to a conservative ideal. Yet the danger lay in simply moving from absolute denigration to an equally absolute celebration.16 Merely to suggest that marriage plots fulfilled African American female desires offers no indication of why black women might also have wanted a different kind of story, which was nascently the case even in the era under discussion—albeit, in comparison to the white New   



Woman’s struggle, as a necessarily minoritized view. Fleetingly, however, in the writings of activist essayist Anna Julia Cooper and the Boston-based black feminist journal Woman’s Era—which took its name from novelist Frances E. W. Harper’s belief that women of color, too, stood in the ‘s “on the threshold of woman’s era”—one can glimpse a different potential trajectory for the “uplifted” African American woman (Carby, “Threshold” ). In  the Woman’s Era observed that “[n]ot all women are intended as mothers. Some of us have not the temperament for family life.” Participation in the black women’s club movement, the author suggested, would open to young women a range of possible avenues for their “future lives” extending beyond the presumed goal of marriage.17 Statements of just this kind, however, made higher education for women as volatile an issue in the black community as white feminists had found it to be: it was similarly believed that women’s exposure to intellectual life would “unsex” them and render them “unfit” for marriage and childbearing. The black woman “must not be educated away from being a mother,” Thomas Baker wrote in . “The race is dependent on her giving her best to her children” (qtd. in Gaines ). In statements like these, the parallels between black uplift ideology and Theodore Roosevelt’s prescriptions for white racemotherhood (against a similar threat of “race suicide”) become evident; both raised specters of the “race”’s degradation through women’s self-exploration and espoused an ideal of sheltered feminine “purity” in order to ensure a racially “pure” future. The point of noting this link between black and white ideologies of racial motherhood would not, of course, be simply to equate the two, for their political implications as a whole were strongly divergent. Neither, however, can they merely be opposed; their political meanings for the women in each case are too related. Indeed, what is finally most intriguing about a book like Contending Forces is how it tentatively reaches beyond the polar alternatives of both tragic mulatta and solid race woman. The potential constraints of the marriagematernity plot emerge in Hopkins’s novel just as they do in The Awakening, around the issue of communicating interiority—that is, the extent to which the heroine Sappho Clark can simply unburden herself of all that lies deepest within her. Certainly the book can appear simply to affirm the public admission of Sappho’s story, as a way of defusing its threat as buried shame. This entails rejecting the advice of the political speaker Mrs. Willis, who strongly suggests to Sappho that a would-be race woman of less than virtuous past would do well simply to keep such information from her husband-to-be (). “Your duty,”    

she tells Sappho, “is not to be morbid, thinking these thoughts that have puzzled older heads than yours. Your duty is . . . to be happy and bright for the good of those about you. Just blossom like the flowers . . . ” (). Yet while Will Smith’s acceptance of Sappho’s history would seem to work directly against Mrs. Willis’s model of a calculatedly sunny race mother, telling men only as much as they need to know, the book elsewhere implies this self-silencing to be more the norm. Will’s sister Dora, depicted initially as a figure of strongly expressed personal desires (“I just enjoy my life . . . and I want my share” []), winds up “a contented young matron, her own individuality swallowed up in love for her husband and child” (). Early in the book, by contrast, this very trajectory for Dora—that “[t]he girl’s life should be lost in that of the wife and mother”—is presented as an “old-fashioned notion” on her mother’s part, in an era when young women like Sappho are beginning to earn their own way as typists (). Yet Dora ends up marrying Arthur Lewis, the young race man who “thinks that women should be seen and not heard, where politics is under discussion”—a view to which Sappho responds immediately “with snapping eyes”: “Insufferable prig!” (). Throughout the book, Lewis’s positions echo Booker T. Washington’s program of conciliation and industrial education— “‘holding it better and wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the window’” ()—against which are pitched Sappho’s and Will’s allegiance to a Du Boisian intellectualism, a quality Will is said to find as appealing in Sappho as her “moral” virtues (). Yet at the same time, it is unmistakably the case, as a number of readers have commented, that Sappho’s own political discourse grows distinctly muted as the book progresses, seemingly replaced by her silenced maternal role (McCann ). In many ways, for all Will’s progressivism, Sappho’s specificity ends up as subsumed into the anti-individualist doctrines of racial uplift as Dora’s does. The question remaining, then, would be how we should understand the way the book presents this process. As Siobhan Somerville and others have suggested, Hopkins does leave us traces of plots unfollowed— Somerville’s example being the sexual currents running between Dora and the rather intriguingly named Sappho. Hence, she provides us with a sense of what remains hard to say, yet is not merely unsaid, in turn-of-the-century black women’s fiction.18 Paradoxically, however, what may remain hardest to say is that not all of a woman’s desires might ever be able simply to be expressed. A similar emphasis might be brought to bear on the work of Alice DunbarNelson. Largely overshadowed by her more celebrated husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson turned to writing about nonracialized women   



in an effort to explore not only more directly feminist concerns but also issues about women’s perversities and ambivalences, most notably in her manuscript stories from this same period. As a New Orleans native whose best-known work consisted of Creole local-color short stories, Dunbar-Nelson almost surely knew of Kate Chopin’s well-disseminated writing in the same vein. Her short fiction from the early years of the twentieth century, however, suggests an acquaintance with the more taboo-breaking The Awakening as well. DunbarNelson originally intended her story “Ellen Fenton” to be part of a collection titled Women and Men. Like Chopin’s Edna, Ellen is a successful wife and mother who one morning finds herself seized by an unfamiliar “feeling of discontent,” a sense that “something had eluded her” (: ). Dunbar-Nelson not only refers to this new sensation as an “awakening” (: ); she describes its effects in ways that recall Chopin at every turn. Ellen, too, ignores “the laws of her household” in order to remain in a dreamy, questing state—“gazing out of windows” for hours, going on long walks, sitting in “Bohemian” cafés reading the “modern, forbidden poetry” that she once found shocking (: –). It is in such a café that her husband, Herbert, finds her in the story’s final scene, in which the story decisively shifts gears away from a feminist perspective on the inner self. Telling him mournfully, “I wish you knew and understood” (: ), Ellen reiterates a language of privacy and incommunicable feeling that has been at work since the start of the story (“She could not tell what was the trouble . . . she knew not why” [: ]; “Something was whirling within her, an indefinable feeling . . . ” (: ); “locked away safe in the innermost recesses of her heart there was a secret joy . . . ” [: ]). Yet the purpose of this scene is for Herbert to respond, startlingly, “Perhaps I do understand, dear . . . perhaps Ellen isn’t the only member of our household who is ‘finding herself’” (: ). It turns out that he, too, has grown sick of the life that confines him— in his case, the life of business—and has decided to retire in order to better serve his own unspoken needs. Ellen’s now shared “awakening,” then, is recast as less a matter of what her husband jokingly calls “the women’s rights idea” and more about two souls who have “become really one,” who now “know and understand.” Ellen ends the story “happy, supremely so, for in finding herself, she had also found Herbert” (: ). Gloria Hull, in her introduction to The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, comments that this story represents an instance of “modern feminist realism” that is then “wrenched into submission and never fully realized” (DunbarNelson : xxxviii). Yet in its final emphasis on this nonracialized woman’s role as wife and mother (Ellen’s son, too, joins the familial “awakening,” in that he    

decides to study art in Europe rather than attend college) and in its implicit critique of a language of female self-development as self-involved, “Ellen Fenton” seems to accord with Dunbar-Nelson’s published views on the place of African American women in the struggle for racial uplift. In “Woman’s Most Serious Problem,” written over two decades later during a period of much greater opportunity for young black women, Dunbar-Nelson argues that these women’s use of “birth control” as a means to “preserve their new economic independence” means courting race suicide (: ): “Perhaps they may turn their attention, these race-loving slips of girls and slim ardent youths who make hot-eyed speeches about the freedom of the individual and the rights of the Negro, to the fact that at the rate we are going the Negro will become more and more negligible in the life of the nation” (: ). And yet in her longer story “A Modern Undine,” written around the same time and also never published during her lifetime, Dunbar-Nelson’s treatment of the same set of issues, despite a similar attempt at resolving them, ends up much more speculative about the possibility of a truly recalcitrant young wife. To a far greater degree than “Ellen Fenton,” moreover, the story focuses on motherhood—not as a source for women’s racial salvation from their personal woes, but as a means of bringing a certain irreducible perversity forward. What makes the exploration of these possibilities in “Undine” particularly interesting to consider beside Chopin’s is the way they are emblematized throughout the story by the figure of the voicelessly speaking sea. As the story opens, its married-couple-to-be meet “in the still quiet of a summer night,” broken only by sounds of nature, and particularly that of the sea, the rising and falling “cadence[s]” of which murmur “in a low monotone of life and death” (: ). We hear that “Marion was absorbed in the sea and Howard was absorbed in Marion” (: ). Even after the two are married, this absorption in the sea recurs as a way to mark Marion’s distance from her husband: she hears it “roaring” (: ) when she believes he is having an affair (and she falls, with the result that their only child is born crippled) and again at the end of the tale when the child dies and Marion feels bereft of the only being she has ever really loved. Gloria Hull’s introductory remarks to The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson remind us that “[i]n folklore, an undine is a ‘female water sprite who could acquire a soul by marrying a human being. But if her lover proved unfaithful, she would have to return to the sea’” (Dunbar-Nelson : xliv). The myth accords with the moment in “A Modern Undine” that most recalls “Ellen Fenton”: when Marion asserts that her husband “misunderstand[s] her,” he shoots back, “do you understand me? Have you ever tried to? . . . Have you not shut your  



self up like a tortoise in a shell . . . You have never given yourself up to me. . . . I do not understand you? Great God, who could?” (: –). The scene is structured near-hyperbolically to attest to Marion’s blind selfishness, as one by one the truths are revealed: George Howard’s failing business, his potential arrest for embezzlement, and most damningly, that the girl with whom Marion had believed him to be unfaithful is a poor consumptive whose family he has been trying to save from ruin. At the chapter’s end, accepting his judgment and offering her help, Marion, we are told, “was a human soul at last” (: ). Yet what is most striking about “A Modern Undine” is finally less its reiteration of the condemnation of the woman who does not “give herself up” to husband and family and more the way that Marion’s “obsessive mothering” of her damaged child unexpectedly works to link her “introverted, prickly-sensitive” persona and her fulfillment of familial duties (Hull ). Marion loves the child with a passion we never see her give to George—one that seems to accord with the “Venuses” and other “nude figures” that adorn this purportedly repressed woman’s drawing-room walls, shocking the local ladies (Dunbar-Nelson : ). And this maternal passion gets embodied once more at the story’s end by the sea; for Marion to fight for her child’s life with “all the mother animal in her keenly awake” (: ) takes the form of requesting that he be buried by the water: “perhaps it will sing to him the same songs it has sung to me, and he won’t be so lonely . . . ” Tantalizingly, the extant manuscript ends with Marion’s sister’s surprise at this request: “It was the first time she had ever heard her sister express a love for the sea. ‘I wonder what George would think of that?’ she murmured to herself” (: ). This love of the sea mirrored Dunbar-Nelson’s own; as Hull notes, her diary records the sentiment, “Weeks I dreamed of it . . . No inconvenience too great for the love of it . . . Lovely, luxurious, voluptuous water” (Dunbar-Nelson : xlv). Both in her introduction and in her discussion of Dunbar-Nelson alongside two contemporaries in Color, Sex, and Poetry, Hull wonders why this black woman writer wrote so infrequently about women of her own race and speculates whether, had she done so, her sometimes abortive fiction (“A Modern Undine,” which received various stylistic criticisms upon an initial circulation, was subsequently shelved) might have been more successfully realized. It seems possible to argue nearly the exact opposite as well, however—that DunbarNelson was able to write a not simply condemnatory story of female “incompleteness” like “A Modern Undine” precisely because she wrote it as the story of an unraced woman. In her groundbreaking study The Coupling Convention, Ann DuCille makes a fascinating link between “A Modern Undine” and Zora    

Neale Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, which centers controversially on a white heroine whose similar introversion, as well as very similar obsessive mothering of a crippled son who later dies, tests her husband’s patience throughout the book. DuCille suggests that, even in the s, a non–African American setting may have seemed helpful to Hurston as a way to explore blunt and intimate marital dynamics that, among black characters, might have appeared to affirm stereotypes about black sexuality. Earlier in her study, DuCille argues that not until the s and s work of writers like Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset did African American women writers even begin to feel it was possible to follow up on the open exploration of female eroticism first evidenced in American literature by The Awakening (). In doing so, moreover, both Larsen and Fauset created heroines who openly challenged the restrictions on feminine individuality and self-exploration often imposed by the goals of racial uplift. Mocking the restrictive dictates of Washington’s Tuskegee in her “Naxos” college in Quicksand, and ending with a heroine whose return to the South leaves her nearly dead of compulsive maternity, Larsen seems to cash out the link between Bookerism and a race-motherhood that sinisterly subsumes Dora’s individualism in Hopkins’s Contending Forces. Larsen herself, however, cited, as a turn-of-the-century precursor to her exploration of a flamboyantly individual black womanhood, not the writers we have thus far been examining but a white author, Gertrude Stein. In a fan letter written in the ’s, she exclaimed of Stein’s story about an African American woman, “Melanctha” (one of the stories in her  Three Lives), “I never cease to wonder how you came to write it and just why you and not some one of us should so accurately have caught the spirit of this race of mine” (qtd. in Brinnin ). Larsen’s praise for Stein, along with that of James Weldon Johnson (who saw her as “the first . . . white writer to write a story of love between a Negro man and woman and deal with them as normal members of the human family”) and Richard Wright (who picked “Melanctha” as his choice for an essay in a collection titled I Wish I’d Written That), has created a conundrum for later readers who see Stein’s story as a particularly egregious example of racial taxonomizing and, in particular, object to its primitivist “fixation on the sexual lives of its subjects, as if African American characters are to be understood primarily in sensual terms” (North ).19 I would like to argue, however, that these very aspects of “Melanctha” can be grasped in different and more complex terms if its relation to naturalist fiction, as this book has conceived it, is brought to center stage. Indeed, doing so might help flesh out Stein’s role in the development of naturalism in Ameri  

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can fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, in which African American novelists—certainly Wright and Ann Petry, but I would also suggest Larsen— have long been considered to play a crucial role.20 For a text written in the earliest years of the s, Three Lives has remarkably rarely been considered alongside the era’s naturalist works; it is as if literary criticism accepted unthinkingly Stein’s self-promoting assertion (made quite a few years later) that “Melanctha” marked “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature” (Autobiography ). Even the indisputable fact that Stein began Three Lives while attempting a translation of Flaubert’s similarly themed Trois Contes has been cited most often in order to dramatize the difference between naturalism’s presumed emphasis on “document[ing]” its subjects “from a great distance” and Stein’s greater interest in the “inner workings of the mind” (E. Wilson ; Bridgman ).21 By contrast, I would argue that to read Stein’s work in the company of her fellow American naturalists in particular can highlight her similar interest in the compulsive sensibility that breaks down this divide between self and circumstance, as well as in the turn-of-the-century female bildungsroman as privileged site for exploring this set of concerns. An entire group of aspects of Stein’s work that have seemed “shock[ing]” from a modernist vantage, such as “the blithe reversal by which the woman ‘wanders’ while the man fidgets at home” (North ), can, when resituated in a turn-of-the-century context, read easily as logical extensions of the naturalist ethos we have been tracing throughout this study, from The Bostonians all the way through Sister Carrie and The Awakening. Indeed, Melanctha Herbert’s characteristic “wandering” can help bring forward a complex understanding of the meanings of a nonlinear trajectory for a female character that is only latent in the peregrinations of Edna Pontellier—a sense that literal wandering through the city can be tied to sexual and intellectual exploration both, a connection that begins to break down the divide between complacent racialized representatives of nature and white women discovering their inner selves.22 Overall, I would claim that rereading “Melanctha” alongside Chopin can help to develop some of the complex feminist “natural-ism” left unresolved in our reading of The Awakening as well as in “A Modern Undine”— particularly the roles played by maternity, the ocean, and “nature’s rhythms” in paradoxically creating the potential for being something other than a motherwoman. What is radical about “Melanctha” is that whereas Chopin only hints at the possibility of extending that sort of subjectivity to her “quadroon,” Stein does the seemingly unthinkable for a white writer of her time, creating a heroine of color who takes up the position of privileged individual subject.    

Saying so is not meant to discount the passages scattered throughout “Melanctha” that seem to indulge in the most blatant of racial stereotypes. In an attempt to salvage an otherwise troubling text, the conflict between the daring, exploratory Melanctha and the conservative Jeff Campbell has most often been read as a displaced rewriting of Stein’s thwarted relationship with her schoolmate May Bookstaver as chronicled in the pre-text for “Melanctha,” ’s Q. E. D.23 In this account, Stein’s portrayal of African American characters debating proper behavior in the black community appears as no more than a “mask” for her interest in debating issues of sexual preference among white women. As such, however, her choice of a black setting to discuss such issues can easily imply merely a familiar white view of African Americans as repositories of “nature” and sexuality. The reading offered below is not meant to dismiss this possibility, only to complicate its potential meanings by suggesting that sex in “Melanctha” rarely reduces to a simple matter of earthbound embodiment. Rather, like all the other texts under discussion, Stein’s story seems finally most interested neither in affirming nature’s sovereignty nor in refuting it in favor of a transcendent individual agency, but instead in displacing the question through a novel understanding of nature itself. To take Nella Larsen’s enthusiastic response seriously, after all, might allow us to see what remains powerful in Stein’s choice, just after the turn of the century, to tell an African American woman’s story governed neither by the biologized decline of the tragic mulatta nor by its perhaps only apparent opposite, the passionless, deindividualized triumph of the maternal race woman, but by the compulsive temporality and relatedly complex depiction of feminine “will” characteristic of naturalist fiction.24

Beyond the Pleasure Principle Nearly all attempts to come to grips with the racial and gender politics of “Melanctha,” whether these end in condemnation or affirmation of Stein’s project, have run aground on the familiar splits between determinism and individual will, nature and culture, and repetition and linearity that the present study’s conception of naturalist womanhood and compulsion has sought to break down. If the story is condemned, there is an emphasis on its rigid racial taxonomizing and production of “types” and, relatedly, on Melanctha as fixed in place by her “nature,” unable to go anywhere but in fatal circles that end in her death.25 If it is pointed out that the story hardly seems necessarily antiMelanctha and pro–Jeff Campbell, then Melanctha’s interest as a heroine is   



equally problematically said to lie in her protomodernist ability to slip all determining yokes and explore the radical fringes of feminine sexuality, in concordance with Stein’s own experiments in a nonnarrativized language.26 The strongest readings have been those willing to acknowledge that both of these aspects are present in Stein’s text with respect both to its narrative claims and to Melanctha’s character, but there has been little attempt to theorize concretely how this can be so.27 It is certainly possible, however, to see both Three Lives and Stein’s more ambitious narrative experiment from the same period, The Making of Americans, as representing the culmination and final transformation of the naturalist problematic of the “compulsion to describe,” continually coming up against the “feeling of incompleteness.” Originally titled Three Histories, Three Lives presents stories that, focusing in naturalist fashion on underrepresented characters (black and immigrant women), read like case studies out of the hyperbolic narrative project that The Making of Americans embodies, which Stein expresses in her own lecture about the book as the attempt to “describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living” (“Gradual” –). It is this interest in writing “the history of every one” (), the goal of absolute completeness or “universal inclusion” (Sutherland ), that for several readers has marked these early Stein texts’ relation to naturalism, and to the particular influence of evolutionary theory.28 Stein herself spoke of her immersion in evolutionary thinking during her youth: The world was full of evolution, with music as a background for emotion and books as a reality and a great deal of fresh air as a necessity, and a great deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy. Evolution opened up a new world and at the same time closed the circle, there was no longer any beyond. Evolution . . . opened up the history of all animals vegetables and minerals, and man, and at the same time it made them all confined, confined within a circle, no excitement of creation any more. . . . this was my childhood and youth and beginning of existence. (qtd. in Brinnin –)

We might note here the Chopin-like invocations of music, fresh air, and eating, as well as the rather surprising conjuncture of confinement with the “beginning of existence.” Overall, evolution for Stein seems to produce precisely the paradox of the naturalist “compulsion to describe,” an opening of what “history” means (to include the world of nature) that at once gestures disturbingly, if also attractively, toward the closure of a perfectly totalized story,    

posing the question of where “creation”—including artistic creation—now can be said to lie. The mammoth Making of Americans, however, in its unprecedented attempt to literalize naturalism’s completist goal, also has the effect of once and for all rendering it parodic and untenable as a literary ideal. In “The Gradual Making of ‘The Making of Americans,’” Stein seems to affirm her own move from one model of describing to another when she mentions that the ideal of a “complete description” first emerged for her out of the scientific work that she did as a student under the guidance of William James. Science, she explains, “is continuously busy with the complete description of something, with ultimately the complete description of anything with ultimately the complete description of everything.” The point is not that the very notion of complete description is simply impossible; rather, she puts it somewhat cheekily, “as it is a possible thing one can stop continuing” to do it (). “That is where philosophy comes in,” she concludes, “it begins when one stops continuing describing everything” (). Certainly it might be argued that Stein’s investment in elaborate, often racialized taxonomic descriptions throughout “Melanctha” begins to place the possibility of typing and “complete description” in question precisely through the serious attempt to carry it out. Her use of repetitive “tags” attached to individual characters whenever they are mentioned recalls both Frank Norris and, more broadly, Zola. And again like that of the manically typing Norris, Stein’s narrative voice has a tendency to wonder aloud about the meaning or necessity of the very fixed formulations just put forward; as he asks, “Why should it be?” her text returns over and over to its opening question about the mystery of Melanctha’s motivations.29 Stein actually attended Radcliffe, and worked with William James, at the same time that Norris was studying at Harvard in the mid-s; if we may speculate, as Donna Campbell has, that Norris may have heard James’s lectures at that time about the degeneration diagnosis and “doubting mania,” it is even likelier that Stein did as well.30 Michael North has suggested that Stein’s very reiterations and insistences on things being “really” or “certainly” true in “Melanctha” can have the opposite effect from fixing types, implying instead “that there is some reason for doubt” (). I would extend this point: a similar sense that hyperbolic repetition, designed to quell doubt, might equally have the effect of inflating it can describe not only Stein’s narrative mode in “Melanctha” but also the major activity in which its two central lovers, Melanctha and Jeff, are ongoingly involved—that of trying over and over to “really understand” one another and   

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to quell the other’s doubts about loyalty and love. In this sense, the particular effect of Melanctha’s wayward feminine subjectivity recalls what we have seen in all of the other texts discussed here; that is, it hooks up to the problem of Stein’s narration in being, at root, an issue of whether or not her specific kind of desires can be communicated. To suggest that they might finally not be speakable at all would of course cut against every taxonomizing impulse of the book’s narrative voice; at a structural level, however, Melanctha’s repetitive attempts to explain herself are at one with the narrator’s, both working against and engendering ceaseless doubt. Hence, both work to develop the idea of a risky productiveness or creativity conceived through repetition, rather than opposed to it. This aspect of Stein’s text, I want to argue, can be understood through the concept of rhythm. Rhythm, of course, first surfaced in our analysis in relation to the meaning of “nature” (and, relatedly, motherhood) in The Awakening. Recall that in Chopin’s book, rhythm has always seemed to pull against any sense of Edna Pontellier’s struggle as an “awakening” toward self-assertion and independence; aligned throughout with nature, and particularly with the sea, into which all her hopes vanish at the end, it seems to portend a problematically static sense of time at odds with the book’s feminist perspective. Yet one can also detect in Chopin a sense that rhythm might operate differently, not as the voice of nature dragging against any individual striving, but as the movement of Edna’s own “unnatural nature” from start to end. It is this possibility that Stein goes a good deal further toward developing, for the simple reason that rhythm has always been understood to play a much more central part in her work.31 As in the case of Chopin, however, there remains as yet too often a tendency to assume that the rhythmic element of Stein’s text connotes a sense of mere repetition, one again often linked with the sheerly repetitive rhythms thought to characterize nature and the body. Marianne DeKoven’s reading even enables a strong link to Chopin’s maternal ocean by calling the rhythms of “Melanctha” a “wavelike cadence” (). This sense of Stein’s writing as linked more to body than to mind can lead in equal measure to feminist celebrations of it and to readings of a text like “Melanctha” as naturalist in the familiarly fatalistic sense. For at least one early reader, Katherine Anne Porter, however, to grasp Stein’s rhythms in their relation to nature enabled one to see the very opposite, the way they exceeded mere repetition and stasis. In carefully reading Three Lives, she writes, one discovers that “the spiral does open and widen, it is repetition only in the sense that one wave follows upon another. The emotion pro   

gresses with the effort of a giant parturition” (). Here the maternal rocking of the ocean and the spasms of giving birth are adduced not to give a sense of a steady natural pulse but rather to remind us of the way that rhythm can also make palpable what differs slightly with every iteration. Hence, Porter suggests, Stein’s rhythmic dialogues, her “endless repetition of pattern in us only a little changed each time,” are nonetheless “changed enough to make an endless mystery of each individual man or woman”; as with “living persons,” one feels of the characters “always [that] you know them, and always they present a new bit of themselves” (–). Stein herself was quite explicit in this conception of character itself as a kind of rhythm—what she called “the rhythm of anybody’s personality” (“Gradual” )—that was continually revealed through an individual’s mode of communication. What intrigued her, as she puts it in “The Gradual Making of ‘The Making of Americans,’” was the way everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. ()

The rhythm or “rise and fall” here emerges less from either the mind’s thoughts or the body’s movements alone than from the act of speaking, the moment when thought becomes embodied as vocal language. As people speak, they reveal, in the kinds of things they like to repeat, what Stein called their “bottom nature” (), yet what each person repeats does not itself emerge identically each time but recurs in a form both “endlessly the same and endlessly different”—as it surely does in the dialogues between Jeff Campbell and Melanctha. The result is a new focus on the connection between two lovers as the result of “timing”— the ability of their respective rhythms to work together in some form of harmony.32 The dance of talk between Melanctha and Jeff reveals this ongoing effort in such a way that the borders between the sexual and the intellectual begin to blur. Richard Wright, in explaining what was powerful to him in Stein’s mode of writing, stated famously that, reading Three Lives, “I heard English as Negroes spoke it: . . . melodious, tolling, rough, infectious, subjective, laughing, cutting . . . And not only the words, but the winding psychological patterns that lay back of them!” (qtd. in Weiss ). Given the artificial quality of the speech pat  

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terns in “Melanctha,” and certainly their lack of resemblance to anything like African American speech, critics have long found this a rather puzzling claim. Eugene Miller suggests that Wright may have admired the way Stein explored language as “music or incantation” as much as meaning (Voice ), something his own writing took up as “cadences” most of all (“Richard” ), and Wright’s own words do accord with this view; he emphasizes less Stein’s content than “the intonation of her voice, the rhythm of her simple, vivid sentences” (qtd. in Weiss ). What Wright heard in “Melanctha,” M. Lynn Weiss suggests, was perhaps simply “the repetitions that are intrinsic to the African-American folkloric tradition” (). What are the implications of such a suggestion? Certainly it would seem problematic, to say the least, to discuss “Melanctha”’s engagement with race under a rubric of “rhythm” associated with nature, pure and simple. Yet the emphasis here on rhythm not as a direct expression of embodiment and nature, but rather, distinctly as culture—as speech or music—offers the potential for a different approach. In his article “On Repetition in Black Culture,” James Snead argues that one key vector of literary modernism, along with the philosophical materialisms of Nietzsche and Freud, should be understood as lying in a century-long rapprochement between Western culture and its repressed African antecedents. That is, the sense of time as repetition and circularity that, for an earlier thinker like Hegel, marked Africa’s position outside historical time was incorporated into Western theories of linear history and individual upward striving. With respect to literature in particular, Snead maps the shift from repression of repetition to acknowledgment of its necessity onto the turn from realism’s dream of historical completeness to the emphasis, beginning in naturalism and culminating in modernism, on “repeated descriptions” of the same moment or detail—a practice dependent on Stein’s recognition of the way repetitions rarely exactly repeat. For Snead, it is this possibility of willing repetition—recalling Kierkegaard: “He who wills repetition is matured in seriousness” ()—that places black culture at the core of Western modernism, as opposed to some sort of sheer abandonment of individuality and will to the dictates of cyclic nature. He takes as his example the black musician’s practice of the “cut”; as he explains, a form like jazz “continually ‘cuts’ back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break . . . with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (). The “cut” thus “draws attention to its own repetitions . . . ” (). Similarly, one of the earliest reviews of Three Lives suggested that its repetitions seemed at first to function “as a refrain is    

used in poetry” but that upon closer examination they appeared as “something more subtle still, something involved, something turning back, for a new beginning, for a lost strand in the spinning” (Hoffman ). In this account, Stein’s use of repetition, too, involves a deliberate return as if to something “lost,” in order to start again; and we can thus begin to see the way in which the reformulation of rhythm that Snead gives us can dovetail with the reformulation of compulsion in relation to creativity and change that is central to this book as a whole. The conceptualization of compulsion not as rigid repetition but as “folie du doute” or the “sentiment d’incomplétude” has the same effect of transforming a repetitive sequence into one that keeps turning back to begin once more. Snead himself suggests that one site within European thought where something like the “cut” has played an explicit role is in Freud’s theorization of Wiederholungszwang or “repetition-compulsion” (). By acknowledging a constant “cut” back to an unresolved past event that drags against the individual’s sense of forward motion, the compulsion to repeat reintroduces nonlinear time into the Western subject’s self-conception. Repetition-compulsion in this sense is not, it should be noted, an identical concept in Freud to the repeated rituals of the obsessive-compulsive subject; yet Freud’s most famous elaboration of the compulsion to repeat, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, brings forward issues of mastery and satisfaction that to my mind make it more possible than is usually assumed to draw links between the two. Beyond, we should recall, has also achieved notoriety as the text in which Freud considers the possibility that human beings may be motivated not only by a pleasure principle but by a “death drive” (Triebhaft). Emerging initially as a possible explanation for why persons might be driven to repeat what seems unpleasurable, the death drive moves in the essay’s more “speculative” later sections to become the chief target of Freud’s inquiry. My contention is that, to the extent that a repetitive rhythm that is not simply “natural” works to constitute radically individual feminine selfhood in both “Melanctha” and The Awakening (as well as, perhaps, Dunbar-Nelson’s “A Modern Undine”), we might wish to understand this rhythmic movement along the lines of Freud’s death drive.33 As it stands, the sudden deaths of the questing Melanctha and Edna at the ends of these texts have appeared deeply problematic for many readers. They seem to clash with the sense of a strongwilled character “determin[ed] to go her own way” (Spangler ) and to punish a sexually adventurous heroine in a way that seems particularly disturbing in Melanctha’s case; is she, then, merely a conventionally “degenerate” tragic mulatta? Edna Pontellier’s self-willed plunge into the ocean can, of course,   

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be far more readily recuperated as part and parcel of her romantic revolt, though this seems often to require recasting the act itself as one not of self-destruction but of self-mothering, a kind of giving birth to oneself. Elizabeth House’s reading of Edna as surrendering to nature’s cycle whereby each death begets another birth both affirms this possibility and marks its problematic ability, in returning Edna to “nature,” to place under erasure her desire, while watching Adele’s accouchement, to revolt against its dictates. Melanctha’s death, of course, is not a suicide at all, or so most readers have assumed; she is said to die of “consumption,” quite abruptly, with none of the potential for romanticization afforded by Edna’s final swim. The possibility that Melanctha might be said to have “consumed” herself is explored most fully by Lisa Ruddick, who describes Stein’s heroine straightforwardly as “succumb[ing] to [a] social and bodily suicide” and suggests that in giving her this end, Stein affirms her own training by William James in the view that an “unselective” individual like Melanctha will necessarily work fatally against her own Darwinian instincts for “self-preservation” (–). By “unselective,” she means not only that Melanctha willfully refuses the female evolutionary role of “selecting” the proper mate, choosing instead one wrong man (or woman) after another. More complexly, Melanctha lives according to something like the principle of the naturalist narrator, who is open to taking in “everything” and refuses to establish the perceptual boundaries that make a stable life story possible. In a formulation quite provocative for our consideration of Melanctha alongside Edna Pontellier, Ruddick writes that Stein’s heroine “virtually drowns in the continuum of the world” ().34 Stein’s language does leave the door open to such an interpretation, in that the yearning Melanctha, feeling “so blue,” is shown to talk about killing herself or “want[ing] someone should come and kill her” (Three Lives ) from the story’s earliest pages. “I expect some day Melanctha kill herself,” her friend Rose remarks near the story’s close, and the narrator’s response to this is quite strikingly (if typically) equivocal: “But Melanctha Herbert never really killed herself . . . ” (). Instead, she only gets sick, and even recovers for awhile, before finally languishing once more and living out her final days in a “home for poor consumptives” (). “Melanctha Herbert never really killed herself.” But did Edna Pontellier? Clearly, an ambiguity rests at the core of both women’s endings, one that might help to reopen the questions about their willing versus surrendering, the meaning of nature in what happens to them, and how to think about the role played by their rebellious “wandering” at both a sexual and a mental level. It is in re   

lation to all these concerns, as well as to our governing trope of rhythm, that Freud’s discussion of the death drive can offer greatest interest. Recall that the death drive only emerges as a way for Freud to think “beyond the pleasure principle”; how to conceptualize the relation between the two—what it looks like to seek pleasure, as well as pleasure’s seeming undoing—remains a salient issue throughout the essay, and even beyond it, as Freud takes up the same question again in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Masochism is indeed a crucial issue here, for part of the difficulties lie in the fact that it is possible to derive pleasure from what would seem definable only as pleasure’s antithesis. In the drawn-out disputes between Melanctha and Jeff Campbell that form the bulk of “Melanctha,” the conflict between two understandings of pleasure is precisely what is at issue—initially in a broad philosophical sense, one that then gets mapped onto the more intimate question of their own relationship. Jeff is introduced as a character with a strong commitment to racial uplift (“he always liked to help all his own colored people” [])—a “serious, earnest” young doctor () who preaches the virtues of “living regular” against the tendency on the part of some of the colored people he sees to “just keep running around and . . . doing everything bad they can ever think of” (). Importantly, he states that such people do not really “like all those bad things that they are always doing” but do them “only just because they want to get excited.” It is the notion of “doing things just to get excited” to which Jeff objects (). Melanctha, however, interprets this somewhat differently: “you mean you don’t believe it’s right to love anybody” (). Protesting, Jeff tries to draw a distinction: “One kind of loving seems to me, is like one has a good quiet feeling in a family when one does his work, and is always living good and being regular, and then the other way of loving is just like having it like any animal that’s low in the streets together . . . ” (). To the extent that Jeff’s relationship with Melanctha will grow directly out of this initial debate, one can see it as predicated on asking the question of what it might look like, and whether it is indeed possible, to combine these two models of living and love. Although Stein underscores Jeff’s ability to grow and change as a result of Melanctha’s influence, a sticking point that arises in this first conversation does remain. “I certainly don’t think,” Jeff responds to Melanctha’s accusation, “I can’t feel things very deep in me . . . but I don’t see harm in keeping out of danger Miss Melanctha, when a man knows he certainly don’t want to get killed in it . . . ” (). This perhaps surprisingly hyperbolic way of drawing the line between seeking out “excitements” and “living regular” recurs in a later conversation about the nature of courage, which Melanctha defines as “always to be   

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game in any kind of trouble” (). Once again, this argument ends with Jeff’s insistence on the limit placed by the vulnerable body: “perhaps,” he concludes sarcastically, “when somebody cuts into you real hard, with a brick he is throwing, perhaps you never will do any hollering then, Melanctha” (). The purpose of these extravagant examples—getting killed, getting hit by a brick— seems twofold: they affirm Jeff’s basic sense that the search for excitement for its own sake should be differentiated from what a person could actually “like,” in that such questing means at bottom to risk death; and they begin to work to oppose Melanctha’s own questing behavior to family and particularly motherly life. As Jeff puts it, when a man is “running around and being game” in Melanctha’s sense, his “wife and children are the ones do all the starving and they don’t ever get a name for being brave” (). To which Melanctha replies, “You ain’t got no way to understand right, how it depends what way somebody goes to look for new things, the way it makes it right for them to get excited” (). What is this “way”? Here Freud can offer a footing, for, as stated, the entire conundrum of Beyond the Pleasure Principle lies in why persons might be driven to repeat experiences that seem unpleasurable, to do things that, as Jeff asserts, they could not possibly really “like.” Freud’s approach to this problem unfolds easily as circuitously as Melanctha’s and Jeff’s debates; as a number of commentators, notably Derrida in The Post Card, have pointed out, his own text, in its ebbing and flowing motion, seems to recapitulate the libidinal economies it seeks to describe.35 Most ceaselessly mobile, as it proceeds, are the definitions of its key terms—the pleasure principle, the life instincts, the reality principle, the death drive—as well as their relation to each other. One key result of this confusion among the different forces motivating the individual is the emergence of an anti-Darwinian notion of the human being, for whom selfpreservation may not always be the most pressing aim. Already from the start of Freud’s inquiry, the pleasure principle is presented as posing a problem for “the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world.” Defined by an interest in mitigating the experience of unpleasurable tension, the pleasure principle on its own can be “inefficient and even highly dangerous”; hence, the organism’s survival requires the intervention of the “reality principle,” which works on behalf of “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.” As Freud notes, however, “The pleasure principle long persists . . . as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate . . . ’” (Beyond ). The death drive, then, emerges out of the famous “fort-da” example—the    

small child, Freud’s grandson, who repeatedly throws a spool away from him in response to his mother’s departure—to explain why an organism might not simply seek to postpone pleasure but might actively seek out (repeat) what appears to be unpleasure. Here Freud suggests that a force might be at work acting in apparently total contradistinction to the Darwinian ideal of “selfpreservati[on]” (Beyond ), and indeed to the progressive narrative of Darwinism in a broader sense: “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (), to move toward quiescence or “inorganic existence” (). In order to explain how this movement toward dissolution is countered, he introduces the notion that “the life of the organism move[s] with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (). This other group, Freud explains, are the sexual or “life” instincts. Here, then, we return to a sense of rhythm and, specifically, the logic of the “cut”: the “jerk back” “to make a fresh start” again. Yet what is curious about this example, coming on the heels of the initial discussion of the pleasure and reality principles, is that the death drive here seems to function very much along the lines of the pleasure principle—aiming to undo tension, to reach the end (satisfaction) as quickly as possible, an aim in which it is constantly thwarted, but here, it would seem, by something Freud is calling the “sexual instincts.” Are the sexual instincts then to be understood as opposed to the pleasure principle? This peculiar possibility is affirmed at the very end of the essay, where Freud acknowledges that, in his formulation thus far, “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” (). At the same time, however, he admits that we often also understand certain kinds of “tension” as themselves “pleasurable.” Rhythm later becomes one way to try to get at how these factors conjoin: “Perhaps it is the rhythm, the temporal sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus. We do not know” (“Economic” ). One effect of all these movements back and forth is to render radically unstable the question of whether it is Melanctha’s quest for “excitement” for its own sake, or Jeff’s insistence on “stability” (or merely a “regular” rhythm, perhaps?), that most reveals the living person’s paradoxical investment in moving toward death. This aspect seems quite dramatically brought into question by Freud’s formulation. As we have discussed it so far, however, these issues have all appeared, particularly in relation to the oddly biologized language of Be  



yond, as unrelated to the individual’s specificity—as expressing instead our generalized participation in a species movement, only one that looks like the opposite of the Darwinian construal of adaptation and self-preservation. Around this very issue, however—the way the death drive seems to give the lie to our cherished principles not only of self-preservation but of any sort of “selfassertion” or “mastery”—Freud does reintroduce a radical individuality, precisely as a way to reconcile these two sides. As he expresses it, the organism asserts itself and strives for mastery, but in order “to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent” to itself. That is, “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion” (Beyond –). Both Melanctha’s and Edna Pontellier’s deaths, then, could be said to honor this desire and hence, at that final moment, indeed to insist on their irreducibly individual selfhood. Not in a romanticized way, however, but in one that recaptures the riskiness, perhaps even the madness, of the move toward a serious freedom. It is easy enough to see both of them as insisting on a right to “excitement” over against the familial, race-mothering alternative represented by Adele Ratignolle and by Jeff (and is it mere coincidence that in Stein’s blueprint for “Melanctha,” Q. E. D., the Jeff Campbell character was a woman named Adele?).36 Perhaps most striking in Freud’s account, however, is the way in which the radical insistence on behaviors that might risk death—what Jeff fears in Melanctha, and what Edna confronts when she is swimming—appears, in the death drive, as an expression of “the conservative instincts,” “the inertia inherent in organic life” (Beyond , ). These are the qualities, associated with women, that ordinarily tie them to motherhood and a repetitive temporality outside the historical; we saw this from the first in period writers like Henry Adams and G. Stanley Hall. The distinctive gesture of the naturalist moment, throughout, has lain in the possibility not exactly of women’s mere step outside this static cycle onto the stage of history, but of the strange gesture of being overly inert, or stopping the story too soon—of a nature that opens out onto “unnaturalness” through the wayward rhythms of compulsion. When the death drive, expression of the same “race-characteristics” thought to tie women to motherhood, also produces the insistence on “dying in one’s own fashion,” it becomes impossible to distinguish mothering itself from the radical refusal of it that we see in Edna’s “flaming revolt against the ways of nature” at Adele’s accouchement—or, indeed, in the brief scenes in “Melanctha” that surround the central dialogues between Melanctha and Jeff. As Lisa Ruddick points out, “Melanctha is close to the upheavals of birth, death, and puberty” throughout the text (); she is characteristically “stationed at the    

crises of the body” (). Jeff comes into her life during the death of her own mother; at the start and finish of the book, we see her helping with the childbirth of her friend Rose.37 Melanctha’s own self-negating activity turns out to encompass not only her risky “wandering” but what might otherwise appear its absolute opposite—her tendency to give herself over to caring for others, her maternal capacity. To the extent that Rose’s rejection of her at the story’s end seems most directly to lead to her death, we can readily see this in terms of a mother’s heartache over an ungrateful child. Giving oneself wholly to maternity—to living as a mother-woman, again perhaps most perversely when one is not literally caring for children all day long—thus itself manifests a kind of death drive. A similar feminine denouement linked more directly to maternity can be found in “The Gentle Lena,” the story in Three Lives that follows “Melanctha.” The married Lena grows “more and more lifeless” until, giving birth to her fourth child, a stillborn, “Lena . . . died too, and nobody knew just how it had happened to her” (). To the extent that marriage and motherhood carry with them their own death-risks, it is easier to see the will to die otherwise as one form of resistance against them. Again, however, part of the power of Freud’s account derives from its suggestion that this resistance may be a “natural” component of the feminine position (perhaps like the ordinary feminine position of masochism?). One of the more curious details in “Melanctha” concerns Rose’s relation to her own child. The text’s first sentence reads, “Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth”—as if, oddly, a woman could attempt to resist the very process of birth itself. Yet what may be oddest about this moment is its conjunction with the narrator’s notorious description of the “sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie,” who later appears so “selfish” and “negligent” that her child dies, as acting in this moment “like a simple beast” (). Paul Peppis suggests that this portrayal is typical of “the stereotype of the bestial black” who is “incapable of familial devotion” ()—but surely the one thing a woman as “simple beast” would be able to do would be to mother a child? Or, at the very least, to give birth to a child? Rose’s resistance not only to mothering but to the very act of birth itself seems rather to suggest the perverse conclusion that the most “natural” of acts here is “unnatural” at its core—transforming the very possibility of imagining a merely “primitivist” racial subject through recourse to mothering or its problematization. Nella Larsen, the African American woman writer most influenced by Stein, depicted the other side of the coin in her Quicksand, the final scene of which parallels “The Gentle Lena” in conceiving a virtual death by maternity   



for a Melanctha-like heroine. As we have seen, Larsen’s work in the s and s has often been thought to represent the first stirrings of a sexually exploratory, antisentimental black women’s fiction. As in Stein’s own case, however, the leap from nineteenth-century domestic realism to a liberated urban modernism can overshadow the transitional moment naturalism represents. This moment, I would contend, might be represented in African American women’s writing by the little-read “transitional” works, written during the teens, of Angelina Weld Grimké (Tate, Domestic ).38 A writer who made maternal disturbances her central narrative theme, Grimké brings forward an issue that has hovered in the background of our discussion thus far: birth control. It is a subject that enables a commentary on racial politics to emerge in tandem with the complex discourse on female embodiment that we have been tracing, pointing toward the direction naturalist writing would take in the twentieth century.

The Rhythm Method The daughter of famous abolitionists, Angelina Weld Grimké has been studied only occasionally by literary scholars, appearing if at all as a “minor” figure known chiefly for her Harlem Renaissance–era poetry (Tate, Domestic ). At the same time, scholars agree that her play Rachel, first performed in  and then published as a book in , represents, if not the very first, then one of the first “successful drama[s] written by a Negro and interpreted by Negro actors” (Storm ). In her introduction to the Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, Carolivia Herron explains why Rachel as well as Grimké’s short stories, written around the same period, may have been “too politically and emotionally threatening for African Americans and others to receive and accept”; she cites Toni Morrison’s line from Beloved, that “‘This is not a story to pass on’” (). Herron does decide to “assist in passing [Grimké’s oeuvre] on,” though, and it seems worth confronting what is at stake in doing so. More strongly upon Rachel’s  publication than when it was initially performed, the drama was critiqued for being “morbid,” for “pictur[ing] the negro’s life as sad and unavailing” (Hull ), and, most sensationally, for advocating “racial self-genocide” (Herron ). The last of these assertions appeared sufficiently alarmist to incite Grimké to offer an explanation of her play that was published in the journal The Competitor, also in . In Grimké’s words, “Since it has been understood that ‘Rachel’ preaches race suicide, I would emphasize that this was not my intention. To the contrary, the appeal is    

not primarily to the colored people, but to the whites.” By showing how an allpervasive racism perverts and destroys even a young girl’s “instinct” to become a mother, she explains, she hoped to touch the hearts of otherwise conservative white women in particular, by appealing to them at their most sensitive point (Grimké ). At the end of the play, we see Rachel Loving spurn her suitor, John, once and for all, as a way to keep all the children that she might have borne with him forever “safe” from the hands of lynchers—who, as she learns from her own mother, killed her half-brother George at the age of seventeen. It is undoubtedly Rachel’s decision not to fight the world’s racism outright, but to let lynchings keep her from her own fervent dream of maternity, that produced the sense that the play advocated race suicide; as Claudia Tate comments in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, quite a gap separates Grimké’s own activist background from her characters’ replacement of struggle with despair. Yet, paradoxically, a close reading of Rachel suggests that it is precisely Rachel’s energetically hyperbolic participation in the destruction of her own deepest hopes that makes it impossible to respond with a sense of quiet fatalism; her portrayal lingers as far too vividly perverse. Herron compares Grimké’s work in this respect to the blues, “that musical and poetic cultural form which is the repository for African-American heroic anguish over love, lost love, and political disenfranchisement” (). The blues as a mode of “heroic anguish” does seem exactly right for Rachel, in that Rachel’s long, fragmentary monologues circle obsessively back to repeated refrains of sheer dread and woe, but with an incantatory power that lends her what Houston Baker has termed “blues force,” rather than diminishing her strength of will by showing her self-surrender to the external forces of racism. As nearly every commentator on her work has acknowledged, the theme of lynching and “tormented black maternity” was one to which Grimké herself “obsessi[vely]” returned (Tate, Domestic ). In addition to Rachel, she wrote several short stories addressing these subjects; in one, “The Closing Door,” the nascent horror of Rachel emerges full-blown, as the increasingly disturbed heroine Agnes Milton smothers her living child in order to save him, she imagines, from lynchers’ hands. One of the more complicated aspects of Grimké’s authorial history lies in the fact that “The Closing Door,” along with another related story, “Goldie,” first appeared in the pages of Margaret Sanger’s journal The Birth Control Review. As Gloria Hull has quite reasonably commented, “It seems somehow wrong that this tale of madness and infanticide would appear in such a journal and even more peculiar that the killing social reasons for   



Agnes’s misfortune should be used as an argument for birth control among black people” (). Indeed. Particularly given Sanger’s, as well as her journal’s, increasing ties during these same years to the often racially inflected eugenics movement, it is hard not to wonder whether “The Closing Door,” even more than Rachel, merits the charge of seeming to sanction genocide. What makes addressing this issue so complex is the fact that Grimké herself submitted these stories to Sanger’s journal, presumably in full awareness of the potentially charged context in which they would appear. A deeper understanding of the meanings at work in African Americans’ participation in the growing birth control movement during these years seems necessary in order to try to make sense of the complexities of Grimké’s works. On the one hand, both Sanger’s sympathies with eugenics and the horrific history of enforced sterilization in the United States have understandably led to suspicion of birth control as less an element of blacks’ own agenda than a program imposed upon the African American community for dubious ends.39 On the other hand, Jessie Rodrique’s essay “The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement” offers an important counterweight to this side of the story. Rodrique strives to demonstrate that blacks in the early years of the twentieth century could and did “endorse a program of birth control but reject the extreme views of eugenicists, whose programs for birth control and sterilization often did not distinguish between the two” (). To do so—to distinguish between the two—means emphasizing the possibility of birth control as a deliberate choice on the part of black women, rather than merely something forced upon them by early-twentieth-century followers of Roosevelt’s doctrine of preventing white “race suicide.” It has long been recognized that African American fertility fell even more sharply in the period between  and  than did the white birthrate (Tone ), yet demographers for many years—as late as the ’s—dismissed the drop, asserting that it was not the result of active contraceptive activity among black women but the unintended effect of poor health, particularly the venereal disease thought to go hand in hand with blacks’ promiscuous sexuality (Rodrique ). Part of what is powerful in Rodrique’s argument is her recognition that these racist views hold in common with progressive suspicions of eugenicist agendas the refusal to imagine an African American woman freely choosing to practice birth control. Both Rodrique and others, however, have shown that black women clearly did do so (and had done so as slaves as well), making the question more one of why that choice has been so difficult to talk about. The fact is that, with the rise of an active birth control movement in the first    

decades of the twentieth century, the concerns about both white and black “race suicide” that had been raised beginning in the s found a new focus on which to dwell. Of course, it must be stressed once more that the political significance of these arguments differed strongly; as Kevin Gaines writes, white men were fighting to retain a masculine authority that for their African American counterparts constituted a dream too rarely realized. At the same time, simply to distinguish the two can risk covering over their similar fear of women’s moving too far beyond the sphere of their “nature,” defined as maternity. This sense of an antifeminist dimension to arguments made against birth control on behalf of racial uplift was central to debates on the subject within the African American press, such as that between journalist J. A. Rogers and Dean Kelly Miller of Howard University in a  issue of the Messenger (the same journal, it should be noted, in which Alice Dunbar-Nelson published her own denunciation of independent black women’s revolt against motherhood in ). Against Miller’s statement that “[t]he liberalization of women must always be kept within the boundary fixed by nature,” Rogers asserted, “I give the Negro woman credit if she endeavors to be something other than a mere breeding machine. Having children is by no means the sole reason for being” (qtd. in Rodrique ). This feminist perspective was also taken up by W. E. B. Du Bois, who in his  “The Damnation of Women” (part of his Darkwater) stated that “the future woman must have a life work and economic independence” and “must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion” (). Writing his own piece for the Birth Control Review in , however, he acknowledged that such views were quite often dismissed on grounds of “want[ing] the black race to survive” (qtd. in Tone ). For Du Bois, the support for women’s “independence” over and against the merely bodily and racial demand of maternity went hand in hand with an insistence that human life had to be seen as composed both of natural law (as emphasized by social Darwinists like Spencer) and of the incalculable forces of will. In his recently rediscovered essay “Sociology Hesitant,” he expresses the interaction of these two as the interplay between two different “rhythms” and, intriguingly, gives as an instance of the secondary, nonnaturally determined “rhythm” “the operation of a woman’s club” (). Portraying this instance of women’s movement toward independence and will as another kind of rhythm—perhaps, as in both birth control and in the jazz musician’s willed “cut” back, rhythm reexpressed as “method”—Du Bois performs the same simultaneous bringing together and separation of the natural and the unnatural (as will) that we have seen at work in the mediations between individual femi  



nine selfhood and maternity throughout this chapter. In closing, I would like to suggest that a particularly radical instance of this nearly impossible mediation might be seen to structure the perverse maternal texts of Angelina Weld Grimké as well. What, after all, can we make of Grimké’s seemingly bizarre decision to link her haunting stories, in which black women protest against bearing bodies for the mobs to lynch, to the advocacy of birth control? In fact, this way of making the argument has more of a history than one might suspect. Prior to her conversion to the eugenicist model, Margaret Sanger had often espoused the need for birth control in Marxist terms, citing Rosa Luxemburg on women’s right not to “produce children who will become slaves to feed, fight, and toil for the enemy—Capitalism” (qtd. in Kennedy ). In the United States, a similar argument had already resonated among African American slaves, who, Andrea Tone notes, “proved extremely adept at using birth control and abortion to thwart their masters’ plans to increase slave ranks through procreation” (). One might argue, then, that Angelina Grimké’s dramatization of this strategy in Rachel constitutes less a cry for “racial self-genocide” and more a way of demonstrating the similar attitude toward the African American body at work in slavery and the license to lynch. By refusing to yield up such a body through maternity, Grimké’s heroine Rachel in effect underscores Freud’s imperative that the individual be allowed to “die in his own fashion,” the imperative that lynching most renders impossible. At the same time, both Grimké’s Birth Control Review stories and her similarly themed Rachel have proved particularly difficult to assess because of a sense that this horrified response to lynching, while genuine, cannot alone be held responsible for the works’ portrayal of “devastated motherhood” (Tate, Domestic ). In Rachel in particular, the link between Rachel Loving’s repudiation of maternity and her refusal of her suitor, John Strong, has led both Gloria Hull and Carolivia Herron to argue that the motivating force here may have as much to do with Grimké’s particular psychic dilemmas as with racial politics. Like Rachel, Hull notes, Grimké “made an early decision not to marry and have children,” as recorded in a diary entry from ; she was then reeling from the aftereffects of a “disastrous love affair” with another woman (). Hence, Herron suggests, “Although Grimké attempts to justify [Rachel’s] attitude in terms of the cruelties that African Americans are forced to endure . . . it is probable that in this plot she is using a psychic energy that repudiates heterosexuality on a personal level to accentuate her passion for annihilating the marital and familial expectations in African-American culture” ().    

Herron’s way of putting the matter here helps get at what is so disturbing about Rachel. Not only is there something odd about the apparent hesitation between personal and political motivation that her remarks suggest, but these do seem to combine, particularly in Rachel’s character, in a strange “passion” for “annihilating” the kindly, upstanding perspective embodied by John Strong.40 While this passionate negativity may well have had its roots in Grimké’s own sense of sexual marginalization, in the play itself, it appears as a particularly savage mockery of the expectations of sunniness and refusal of interiority governing conventional feminine adolescence and courtship.41 Like Pauline Hopkins’s Sappho, Rachel is a young woman counseled to enjoy herself and not be “morbid,” giving in to any sort of death drive. “‘If you see things as they are, you’re either pessimistic or morbid,’” Rachel concludes (Grimké ); coming from her suitor, John Strong, however, the urgings that she cheer up rouse her to anger: “‘Why, you talk as if my will counts for nothing. It’s as if you’re trying to master me. I think a domineering man is detestable’” (). Yet Strong, despite his name, is not exactly domineering so much as he acts in the service of a romantic norm defined by the dictum that not only should young girls be cheery and bright, but certain sorts of lighthearted conversation should follow. It is these conventions Rachel most unrelentingly mocks. “‘Now, let’s see,’” she muses, emerging into the parlor to greet her suitor, “‘in the books of etiquette, I believe, the properly reared young lady always asks the young gentleman caller . . . sweetly something about the weather” (). Yet this can only last so long. “‘Soon,’” she admits, “‘my ingenuity for introducing interesting subjects will be exhausted, and then will follow what, I believe, the story books call, “an uncomfortable silence”’” (). Rachel’s prediction is correct. Yet the “uncomfortable” quality of the silence that falls between them derives from a distinct source: John’s feeling that Rachel, when silent, ceases to “remember I’m here,” to “forget you’re not alone,” forcing him to “[look] into her soul,” which he decidedly “do[es]n’t like” (). His attempt to get her to open up again—“‘Wouldn’t it be easier for you, little girl, if you could tell—some one?’” ()—has the distressing effect, however, of breaking down the difference once and for all between the politely conversational Rachel and the Rachel of the bared soul. Over the play’s last pages, attempting to explain why she dashed the roses he brought her to the ground and crushed them, Rachel gradually moves into a rambling, fragmented monologue in which she tries over and over, and just as repeatedly fails, to promise herself to John for life as a way to still the disturbances she feels growing within her.   



Those disturbances concern her deepening fear that the motherhood for which she so longs will turn out to be a means of providing bodies for bloodthirsty mobs. Yet the play’s sense of the meanings of Rachel’s “tormented maternity” emerges as, if anything, even more ambivalent than its portrayal of her relations with John Strong. Grimké seems to want to present Rachel right away as a girl deeply drawn to motherhood, and yet from the play’s opening scene, this yearning toward maternity displays an obsessive undertone. Thus, we hear her ask her own mother, “‘Ma dear, wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep all the babies in the world—always little babies? . . . I’m so sorry for mothers, whose little babies—grow up—and—and—are bad’” (). To which Mrs. Loving, surprised, responds, “‘Come, Rachel, what experience have you had with mothers whose babies have grown up to be bad? You—you talk like an old woman’” (). Here, then, Rachel’s vision of living solely for the sake of maternity—of aspiring, we might say, to become the ultimate mother-woman—appears not simply as a social ideal that is then dashed by the realities of racism. For Rachel to want to play all day long with little Jimmy downstairs, a concern that later extends to “hardly let[ting] Jimmy out of her sight,” trying ceaselessly to comfort him, till she “come[s] out like a rag, and her face is like a dead woman’s” (–), marks a disturbing, self-annihilating hyperbolization of the mother’s drive to keep her child safe and encircled by love, even before specific threats to that safety emerge.42 Yet if the play seems to go out of its way to render Rachel’s relation to the marriage-maternity plot both individual and troubled prior to her realization of the racist horror visited on her own family, how then can we understand its political dimension? This particular way of expressing a doubleness around maternity’s meanings is not isolated to Grimké’s work; it appears in very similar form, a decade later, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Larsen’s antiheroine Helga Crane, too, has a revelation in which childbirth appears as merely the production of “[m]ore dark bodies for mobs to lynch” (). By the novel’s end, however, the protest against maternity has become much more clearly gender-based, as the once powerfully independent Helga, now married to a southern Reverend, succumbs to a succession of births that appear, like those of Stein’s Gentle Lena, terminal: “hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain,” the book concludes, “ . . . when she began to have her fifth child” (). What has made Quicksand’s protest hard to read, Claudia Tate argues, is that Helga Crane, too, is a character whose own intriguingly powerful desires are entangled throughout with what appears as a “death drive” (Psychoanalysis    

). Hence, if we might wish to consider Quicksand, like The Awakening, as a feminist naturalist text in which “nature” in the form of maternity can appear as appallingly perverse, its depredations could not simply be pitched against an ideal of disembodied, liberated womanhood that slips necessity’s yoke. Helga, Edna, Melanctha—these are heroines drawn to bodily pleasures, to the sun’s warmth, to food, to music, to sex. Their question, a far riskier one for an African American heroine at the turn of the century, dug deeply into what I have called naturalism’s central concern: how to think a new kind of human subjectivity in which the tie to embodiment works not to subsume the individual but to produce her (or his) specificity and indeed—to use a Du Boisian term—striving. Here, as in the emergent arguments made by figures like Du Bois on behalf of birth control, the racial protest on behalf of a meaningful motherhood, and the feminist one that will not close its eyes to maternity’s deeper perversities, might come forward together, creating a burgeoning new fiction for which, against all odds, asserting “the bodies of black folk” could become a strategy for a complex freedom.43 A striving heroine understood in such terms will always chafe against her own strange rhythms as well as against those external obstacles she encounters, much like the haunted Zora in Du Bois’s own Norris-like experiment The Quest of the Silver Fleece (). The achievement of the best such novels lies in the fact that the one does not negate the other but works to underscore the serious individuality of a figure like Zora—“this new and inexplicable woman,” in Du Bois’s words ().

  





If naturalism characterizes a particular moment in literary history—the turn of the century—it also changes the way we think about what makes up history as such. The body’s cycles, birth, death, illness, sex, all become no longer the unchanging, unmentionable bedrock on which meaningful actions are founded; they emerge themselves, in the wake of evolutionism, as shifting currents within human history’s tides. As James Snead argues, this progressive widening of history also constitutes a return—a recognition, on the part of the modern Western subject, that those irrational, material forces, dark fatalisms and repetitions he thought he had left behind, still linger as traces in his own self-constitution. Hence, the rise of the “human sciences”; hence, not only the materialism of Darwin, but those of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. And in the sphere of the novel, I have argued, the interest of a subject emerging both against and through a complex embodiment produces a new kind of heroine, what Henry Adams called “the woman of the future” (Letters ). Woman, after all, had so long stood for the earthbound, unchanging facts of reproductive life. In the s, her growing will to move beyond that sphere made her unfolding story a living emblem, both disturbing and enthralling, of the question of what a fully embodied human striving might mean. As Snead helps remind us, however, the same double positioning could also newly privilege the African American subject, both female and male. We might read history’s movement into the twentieth century, he suggests, both through and beyond Hegel’s assertion that the African stood as yet on the threshold of history; “Africa,” with its significations of natural, rhythmic time, did indeed merge into “history,” but not by leaving that rhythmic temporality behind. Rather, history itself, the West’s history, learned no longer to narrate itself as an unbroken linearity but recurred to something far older even while attempting to retain its modern movement forward. That fitful, dialectical motion forward and back 

Snead, too, names as the rhythm of compulsion. Hence, the question with which I here conclude: How does a “naturalist moment” based around compulsion rather than determinism—one for which unexpected figures like Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha and Angelina Grimké’s Rachel become central—change our understanding of what happens to naturalist writing in the twentieth century? It is a curious fact of American literary history that, while African American novels like Wright’s Native Son and Ann Petry’s The Street have been among the twentieth-century works most often discussed in relation to naturalism, this linkage has had little effect on broader theorizations either of naturalism or of African American literature. As a result, the version of naturalism brought to bear on such texts has typically been the crudest deterministic model, one repeatedly found wanting as a way to grasp their complexities. Thus, Michel Fabre, one of Wright’s most important interpreters, titles his discussion of the subject “Beyond Naturalism?” and concludes by suggesting that, while Wright may have taken his admiration for Dreiser and Crane (famously mentioned in Black Boy) as a “starting point,” in the end, in a work like Native Son, he “overstepped [the genre’s] boundaries” once and for all. How so? As Fabre puts it, Wright’s attraction to the fanciful, the mysterious, the irrational always proved too strong for him to remain attached to his self-declared rationalism and deliberate objectivity. His heavy reliance upon visceral and violent emotions may account for this inability. Far from being a limitation, it turns out to be one of the major resources of his narrative power . . . (World )

Naturalism, in other words, with its purportedly scientific objectivity, cannot get at the “intensity of feeling” in Wright’s work, his “insistence on the forceful poetry of commonplace lives” (). Yet as soon as Fabre asserts as much, he reverses himself, for after all, as he reminds us, did not Frank Norris, too, view the naturalism of Zola as a form of romanticism ()? And “does not the power and beauty of Sister Carrie derive less from Dreiser’s objective presentation . . . than from its weird and emotionally laden images,” something equally true of “Nana or . . . Madame Bovary” ()? What is odd in Fabre, then, is that he actually considers that Wright’s work might lead us to “a larger definition of naturalism” than the hoary reduction to clinical observation, and yet then he seems to reject this possibility, claiming—just as supporters of Norris and Dreiser have themselves often claimed—that the writer is, rather, too large to be contained by the genre (). Nearly identically, Michael Davitt Bell spends an entire essay arguing that Wright’s identification with Bigger   

Thomas—and specifically his sense that writing Native Son was “an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience” (Culture )—shows how he could not be trapped by naturalism’s purported “hierarchical division between the ‘brute’ other and the omniscient, scientific narrator” (), before finally, on the last page, admitting that this version of the genre does not really work for Dreiser or Crane either (). In this book’s first chapter, I argued that compulsion, rather than determinism, can offer a way into thinking this continually problematic slippage between naturalism’s scientific ordering and its wild abandon, its distance from its subjects and its excessive closeness to them, at one and the same time—particularly if we adopt the more complex understanding of compulsion, as “feeling of incompleteness” or “doubting mania,” at work during the period itself. Certainly Wright’s debt to Freud (as well as to Marx) has been if anything more often remarked upon than Stein’s, or Norris’s, to an earlier theorist of such states like William James. And “compulsion” has long made sense to Wright’s readers as a component of his project, albeit often with the negative connotation of James Baldwin’s famous critique of Wright’s “gratuitous and compulsive” tendencies to violence.1 As so often in discussions of earlier writers like Norris, but with a stronger sense of their political liabilities, Wright’s “compulsions” are wielded against a sense of his creative agency, the sign of rampant emotional eruptions rather than a controlling mind. In her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, however, Claudia Tate affirms the significance of such compulsive texts within the African American canon, arguing that the very extravagance and excess of the desires they inscribe—what she calls their “surplus”—makes clear the inability of the “commonplace scripts of social oppression” to exhaust the plenitude and potentiality of the black subject (, ). The enormous risk of making a Bigger Thomas your hero lies, clearly, in confirming a whole set of suspicions about the brutish black male. Wright’s gamble entails giving the “brute” an equally ferocious mind—and thus refusing either to reduce him to a raging body or, owing to the brutal familiarity of that reduction, insisting instead on only portraying nobly striving heroes of color not rent by such outsized upheavals. This very insistence on inhabiting the degraded position of embodied subject too deeply, bringing forth its awful necessity and impossibility in the same gesture, is what Wright’s heroes share less with a fairly one-dimensional “brute” like Norris’s McTeague than with the naturalist women who have dominated this study, from Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” protagonist to McTeague’s wife Trina. Indeed, in taking the mode of these most extreme natu



ralist texts a step further, Wright brings forward a gothic dimension always latent in any construal of naturalism as compulsion—one that becomes absolutely crucial to the genre’s transformations across the twentieth century. The history of black embodiment possesses a horror distinctly its own, a radical reduction to flesh hammered home by the Middle Passage, by whippings, lynchings, decades of deepest poverty. And yet what is shared with a feminist project is an attempt not to discard the body as a result but, against all odds, to try to make it mean differently—to make it that space of “surplus” that Tate names. While a book like Native Son shows that this endeavor has not necessarily been gendered female in African American writing, women in their relation to modernity still occupy central positions in a number of texts that might be reread through the lens provided here. Wright’s own “Long Black Song” riffs around the idea of the clock in relation to the rhythms of female sexuality, deepening and complicating an image already seen at work in Norris and Wharton. More clearly in both Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Larsen’s Quicksand (which Du Bois admired), an emergent young African American woman embodies the possibility of a reclaimed “primitivist” sensibility that would not rule out modernity, striving, or politics. One might compare these glimpses of a new sort of “race woman” to the much more conservative portrayal in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods, in which the Sister Carrie–like success of good girl Kit Hamilton on the New York stage serves as the book’s set piece for the deepest corruption of the rural African American soul. It should be noted, however, that, as in the case of Trina, Carrie, or Edna Pontellier, a figure like Larsen’s Helga Crane only very complicatedly takes up a position that feminism can affirm. As a number of critics have pointed out, her waywardness, strangeness, and determined self-negations have tended to place her at the margins of an African American women’s canon defined by uplifting connections among women—by heroines like Alice Walker’s Celie or Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie, who triumph over oppression by affirming their place in a feminine community. “There are no women in this tradition hibernating in dark holes contemplating their invisibility,” Mary Helen Washington once asserted; “there are no women dismembering the bodies or crushing the skulls of either women or men . . . ” (xxi). What then not only of Helga, but of Ann Petry’s Lutie in The Street, who does kill a man and escape into the night, where we leave her on a still-moving train? In an important piece on the complexities of tradition-building with respect to African American women’s writing, Hortense Spillers groups together the work of Larsen, Petry, and Jessie Fauset as expressive of a “determinism”   

that threatens to close off the desired end of change and agency for the black heroine (as we see it in, for example, Hurston and Walker). Here again we might ask what happens when determinism as governing principle in the naturalist text gives way to compulsion. What is especially disturbing about the idea of compulsion is the way it breaks down the split between the self-governing subject and the governed one, insisting that some of the trap is built from within. For Grimké’s Rachel to choose to repudiate her own desire to bear children, and to take in the disturbing implication that this repudiation might speak to another facet of her own desire, produces a discomfort far exceeding what might have derived from a sense of her actions as determined from without. And yet, as Claudia Tate notes, it is this psychic excess that perhaps attests most radically to such characters’ refusal to be determined; in trying to govern themselves, they make clear the impossibility of that process. Such a lens might place the emphasis, in reading a writer like Petry, less on her characters as sheer expressions of an entrapping environment—The Street, The Narrows—and, again both more disturbingly and less so, as subjects attempting over and over to make themselves a home within those confines, a process the books describe as unending. The Narrows, often overshadowed in the critical literature by The Street, is particularly fascinating for enabling the same linkages between naturalism and nineteenth-century New England writing that we have seen in a writer like Mary Wilkins Freeman.2 Despite her association with The Street’s urban setting, Petry herself grew up and lived for decades in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. And The Narrows’s Abbie Crunch is a strenuously proper New England matron, one whose tendencies toward controlling her surroundings through compulsive habits are emphasized from the first, not only in her fastidious housekeeping but, more clearly, in the way she walks around repeating little nonsense rhymes to herself. Abbie’s compulsions can remind us of a remark made by Deborah McDowell concerning more recent African American women’s writing: In Alice Walker and Toni Morrison . . . the theme of the thwarted artist figures prominently. Pauline Breedlove in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, for example, is obsessed with ordering things. Jars on shelves at canning, peach pits on the step. Sticks, stones, leaves. . . . whatever portable plurality she found, she organized into neat lines, according to their size, shape or gradations of color. . . . She missed without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons.





Similarly, Eva Peace in Sula is forever ordering the pleats in her dress. And Sula’s strange and destructive behavior is explained as “the consequence of an idle imagination . . . like any artist with no form, she became dangerous.” ()

In these figures, in other words, compulsions clearly become a way to point toward a creative potential not realized in the space of the text itself. Indeed, what is striking in Abbie Crunch’s repetitive rhyming is that it makes her similar to Mamie Powther, the text’s deeply embodied “loose woman” (herself married to a man consumed by more compulsive habits). Although Abbie sees Mamie as the embodiment of all she cannot stand about the broken-down community around her—the “prim” confronting the “primitive,” in one reader’s words (M. Wilson )—the two women are joined by a habit of repetitive song-making, which in Mamie’s case takes the form of singing, over and over, the same blues passage. “Same train be back tomorrer,” she sings, hanging the laundry, inhabiting her home (which is also Abbie’s). “Same train, same train” (Petry ). The blues here mark the space where the meaningful repetitions that this book has traced become inseparable from an African American cultural specificity, and thus they lead to the possibility of seeing what we have been calling naturalism as a mode both affirmed and necessarily transformed by these twentieth-century writings. Such a rereading might shed new light on the significance within African American fiction of what Michele Wallace—also confronting Sula and The Bluest Eye—called “variations on negation” (). Like Grimké’s Rachel, like Larsen’s Helga, like Petry’s heroines, a figure like Sula derives her own power from something that is also more than a little scary, from a willed repetition, a blues played across a set of destructive “forces” if anything more vividly intractable than any in the literature of the s, the conjuncture that made Dunbar decide that being black in a racist society was something akin to a “sport of the gods.” We need to remember that, as Claudia Tate puts it, “While desire is constitutive of a loss, desire also generates by-products” (Psychoanalysis )—it reaches out past the moment that produces it to a formation it cannot conceive. This should be the meaning of our “historical” work as well—not to confirm the story of history but, with these compulsively questing subjects, “obsess[ed] with freedom” as Tate says about Wright (Psychoanalysis ), to return to it one more time, by recognizing we have not escaped it any more than they have, that that obsession remains our own.

  



Introduction .

.

. . .

.

.

.

One of the best discussions of this widespread “moral crisis” appears in Jameson’s discussion of Weber in “The Vanishing Mediator” (). On the related rise of the “neurasthenia” diagnosis among American writers in particular, see Lears, Lutz, and Gosling. Adams’s distinctive mode of “address[ing] the crisis of historicism by making himself its subject” (Jay ) has received considerable attention from literary critics as well as historians; one of the most pertinent accounts appears in Gregory Jay’s America the Scrivener. On Roosevelt’s role in the “race suicide” scare, see Linda Gordon and Bederman. Adams, Letters . See Banta’s “Being a ‘Begonia’” for a discussion of this point. Adams’s letter about the woman of the future in fact begins with a discussion of naturalism as the purported literature of the future; he mentions having read and being unimpressed by Norris’s novel The Pit. One wonders, however, whether his abrupt turn from The Pit to the subject of modern women’s changing character has anything to do with that novel’s own tendency to dwell on its heroine’s complex psychological reactions to her marriage, despite the work’s apparent focus on male business culture. Studies that make Adams central to American naturalism as a formation include, along with Jay Martin’s, Harold Kaplan’s and Ronald Martin’s. I discuss this marginal status at greater length in chapter . In American literary history, “naturalism” has typically appeared, if at all, as a minor, slightly weird subset of the larger tendency, “realism,” thought to dominate late-nineteenth-century literature and culture. My own claim would be that, if anything, naturalism should be seen as the broader category. Examples of this view of naturalism are legion, and they are not confined to the genre’s American expressions; David Baguley, for example, calls the naturalists in Europe an “allmale club,” “dominated by masculine power and systems of explanation” (Naturalist ). In the United States, Barbara Hochman states that “it would be difficult to find a late nineteenth-century fictional model more clearly associated with male authorship and ‘virile’ fiction than the naturalist plot of decline” (“Awakening” ). This manly version of naturalism usually gets aligned with a broad cultural reaction against the “feminization” of American literature and culture; see Douglas; Habegger, Gender; Higham; and Lears. On the “plot of decline,” see Fisher, as well as Howard’s Form and History.



. .

.

. .

.

.

.

On the optimistic (Spencerian) slant of social Darwinism in the United States generally, see Hofstadter. See, for example, Lears on cities, machines, and declining birthrates as signs of cultural enervation and feminization () and on divorce as a symptom of therapeutic culture (), and Leach on the twinned rise of feminism and social science as a nexus of rationalization and sentimentality pitched against “all speculative, imaginative and introspective thought” (, ), and even Sundquist’s important and sympathetic discussion of “the breakdown of traditional sexual roles” and “the sacrifice of intimacy to public life” in the s, where these appear as aspects of a general “systematization” or rationalization of selfhood in accordance with market demands (). For a different account of the relation between feminism and the rise of social science, see Rosenberg. An important discussion of Lasch that links his work to the critique of “momism” in Philip Wylie’s A Generation of Vipers appears in Mari Jo Buhle’s Feminism and Its Discontents. In particular, Buhle discusses how Lasch’s alignment of feminism with the rationalization of family life by “outside experts” (social scientists, psychologists, educators, etc.) dovetails with a strain in Marxist thinking for which “the advancement of women into civil society” has seemed fated to “appear as part of the problem rather than as a hopeful sign of transcendence,” thereby “exclud[ing women] from the dialectic of history” (). (A similar critique of both Lasch and Marxism appears with respect to the demonization of the fin-desiècle female consumer in Lawrence Birken’s Consuming Desire [–].) Lasch forms an important touchstone for such disparate accounts as Sundquist’s discussion in “The Country of the Blue” and Lears’s description of the rise of the culture of experts in No Place of Grace. See, for example, Rachel Bowlby’s discussion of Sister Carrie in Just Looking. See Bodies and Machines, ch. . At the same time, it should be emphasized that Seltzer’s focus on the managed body rather than the rugged wilderness clearly effects a sea change in our understanding of naturalism’s “nature,” in which it appears as inextricable from social life (thus his compelling phrase “the unnatural Nature of naturalism” [])—a shift to which the present project is indebted. His own stated attempt to move past the hyperbolic accounts of agency and its loss that dominate naturalist criticism is perhaps hampered only by the continued assumption that this is an “emphatically ‘male’” genre ()—a view that, I would argue, has kept most criticism wedded to the opposed extremes he works to eschew. One of the few Americanists who has made a similar point is Bill Brown, who argues that the turn-of-the-century girl’s association with “a threatening modernity” (consumer culture, mechanization, etc.) allows her to mark “the perpetual presence of an alternative futurity” within the fin-de-siècle text (). I would add only that, as Brown’s own point implies, this modernity was not always viewed as threatening by writers in the period itself (it also held excitement and promise), even if we have tended to see it as such in retrospect. Janet’s major statements on this subject appear in his still untranslated Les obsessions et la psychasthénie, which I discuss at greater length (along with American texts influenced by his thinking) in chapter . See, for example, Baguley’s Naturalist Fiction and Schor’s Reading in Detail. I discuss this

      ‒

.

.

.

.

.

Europeanist view of naturalism further in chapter . Although we tend, as with Darwininfluenced naturalism, to associate evolutionism with massively teleological plot-making, Gillian Beer argues in her landmark study Darwin’s Plots that it in fact encourages just this mode of hyperbolic, endless description that will always be modified again in a future we do not know. Beer herself links this deferral to both compulsion and dread, and to the changing nineteenth-century female story as embodied by Daniel Deronda’s Gwendolen Harleth, whose maternal feelings are replaced by a negativity that is creative in the sense that it makes a future life possible beyond the book’s closure—a “freedom” that is about not idealized therapeutic liberation but vertiginous speculation. This is not to say that feminist critics, notably Elizabeth Ammons in Edith Wharton’s Argument with America and Elaine Showalter in her work on Wharton and Chopin in Sister’s Choice, have not made claims about the importance of the new kind of heroine Lynn describes to American fiction at the turn of the century. Yet these claims have remained consigned to explicitly feminist studies of women writers, with the result that they have as yet had too little impact on our understanding of the period as a whole. Geismar thus writes that “in the final judgment of this period perhaps the sexual revolution that occurred in the national letters during those years was quite as important as the class one” (). Indeed, as James Livingston has argued, the New Woman had the potential to embody a “broader range of possibility” than the laborer because of the “cross-class” nature of her emergence during this period, which lent her “representative capacities” for a wide range of novelists and social scientists alike (–). Of the women writers I mention here, Wharton has most often been considered as a potential naturalist, largely because of the amenability of The House of Mirth to the view of naturalism as a fiction of “plots of decline.” (See chapter .) That view may be found, for example, in Benstock, Beaty, Michaels, Pizer (“Naturalism”), Hochman (“Awakening”), Nevius, and Jay Martin. Per Seyersted suggested in his critical reclamation of Chopin that she should be read alongside Crane, Garland, Norris, and Dreiser rather than the female “local colorists” (“Kate Chopin”), but few have taken up this suggestion, despite one period review claiming that The Awakening “fairly out-Zolas Zola” (Culley ). An exception is Nancy Walker, who has made the case for reading Wharton, Chopin, and Ellen Glasgow all within the naturalist tradition. Freeman is usually read as belonging to a group of women writers the naturalists repudiated; one reading that suggests she might be considered a naturalist herself is Foster’s. And to my knowledge, the only critic who has treated Gilman as part of the naturalist group is Walter Michaels in The Gold Standard. Thus, for Michaels, in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” “the feminine body” serves as “the very site of exchange” (Gold Standard ); Sister Carrie is the appropriate heroine for Dreiser’s novel of that name because she shows how “[f]eminine sexuality . . . turns out to be a kind of biological equivalent to capitalism” (); Norris’s Trina McTeague “embodies in an extraordinarily literal way the normal workings of the self in contract” (); and the “outline” of the body of Lily Bart in Wharton’s House of Mirth “is sexy—and the display of that body is risky—in the same way that modern theory makes writing out to be” (). This split formed part of a broad initial tug-of-war between the new historicism of the s

   ‒



.

.

. .

. .

.

.

.

and feminist criticism. The most important piece on this debate’s Americanist instances was Wai Chee Dimock’s “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader”; key salvos within it include Michaels’s The Gold Standard and Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters, on the historicist side, and, along with Dimock, Fetterley’s “Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery,” on the feminist one. It seems striking in retrospect that the only two essays in the key new-historicist collection American Realism: New Essays to deal with women writers, those by Julia Bader and Joan Lidoff, were also the least converted to historicist methods of reading. An important early instance of this critique appeared in Judith Lowder Newton’s “History As Usual?” A good example to back up her claims from within late-nineteenth-century American studies would be the list of naturalism’s contexts that appears in the introductory endnotes to Lee Clark Mitchell’s important study Determined Fictions (); not a single study of women’s changing lives during the period appears among them. I discuss this move to question historicist practice at greater length in chapter . See, for example, Dimock in Residues of Justice; Altieri in “Can We Be Historical Ever?”; Copjec in Supposing the Subject; and LaCapra in History and Criticism. This characterization appears in Parrington, Lears, and Douglas, though Douglas has less sympathy for the naturalist intervention. In more recent criticism, note the Parrington-like formulations in Lears (for whom naturalism overthrows a “female” realism [] in which the middle-class parlor offers a “portal of escape from the economic realm of strife and struggle” []) and Trachtenberg (for whom the entire notion of “culture” flows from a “sphere of women” [] that had “sealed itself off” from the disturbing “realities” of modern life [], notably the existence of laboring men, whose struggles could infuse a physicalized “masculinity” back into the disembodied, “predominantly feminine precincts of refinement” []). See, for example, Bowlby (Just Looking), Fisher, Howard (Form and History), A. Kaplan (Social), Michaels (Gold Standard), Seltzer, and Trachtenberg. I say “insufficiently heard” in part because recent work on American women writers of this era in relation to race seems to risk repeating the same association of women with the most insidious forms of ideological inculcation, an issue I discuss at greater length in chapter . In “The Vanishing Mediator,” Jameson similarly writes that “Victorianism in sexual matters” and the “authoritarian patriarchal family” constitute part of what the doubt-ridden fin-de-siècle intellectual revolts against, along with Darwinism and the rise of consumer capitalism (). While this depiction allows feminism to be part of the revolt, it does not address the way feminism became aligned with these other developments within modernity, thus acting as something else to be revolted against. I discuss this phenomenon of the “woman adrift” at greater length in chapter . On the relation between industrialism and women’s work, see Kessler-Harris –, as well as studies of the feminization of clerical work such as Davies’s. The sense that remasculinization itself represents the most escapist sentimentality within s culture has not simply escaped notice. According to several early studies, the manly strain of the era’s fiction expressed merely a mode of “hothouse barbarism” aimed at a

      ‒

.

. . .

.

. .

. .

“sheltered middle-class audience” (Geismar ). It was thus best embodied by a host of popular novels set in a medieval world when men were men—tales of Anglo-Saxon glory, dovetailing with the imperialist forays and anti-immigrant sentiments of the s. Clearly, these sorts of charged racial fantasies colored the cries for a manly literature by naturalists like Norris as well. Yet while some more recent scholars have hence read naturalism as something of a protofascist genre, these tend to overlook an ironic, even parodic streak within the naturalists’ particular take on remasculinization. One would not wish, of course, to deny the serious implications of these kinds of racist narratives whenever they emerge. Yet what strikes me about the earlier critics such as Maxwell Geismar and Alfred Kazin is their clear desire to do so—far more than many others were doing at the time—while still seeming more able than scholars today to see these elements as part of a larger and (certainly compared to neomedieval best-sellers like When Knighthood Was in Flower) less onenote whole. Indeed, given Norris’s studied self-creation as a literary version of Teddy Roosevelt, we tend to forget that both he and Roosevelt started out as downright dandyish young men. Kenneth Lynn is particularly merciless—if a tad uncritical of the martial male ideal—in his account in The Dream of Success of Norris as a “Mama’s Boy” who spent his entire life trying fruitlessly to be a tough guy (as an outdoorsman, a war correspondent, etc.) and constantly collapsing into illness both physical and “nervous” as a result. (Like Stephen Crane, Norris died very young, from peritonitis at thirty-one.) Howard Horwitz has written nicely on the conjunction of the two. On the elision of the women’s stories more generally, see my “The Work of Womanhood in American Naturalism.” See, for example, Minter. On this subject, Hall cites both Janet and Legrand du Saulle, author of Folie du doute (avec delire de toucher), a groundbreaking exploration of the pre-compulsion diagnosis of “doubting mania,” which I discuss in greater detail in chapter . A similar claim also appears in Ellis’s Man and Woman (). Lawrence Birken’s discussion of turn-of-the-century sexology in his study Consuming Desire is helpful here. Drawing links between psychologists like Hall and “marginalist” economists who focused on consumption, Birken explains how both wound up emphasizing the idiosyncrasy—what we might call the narrative waywardness—of individual desire. The hyperbolic insistence on a normalized trajectory itself only came into being in response to the sense of a proliferation of potentials for subjective affiliation—a proliferation Birken, too, sees as being especially consequent for women. See R. Miller . It would be important, however, to distinguish the equivocation here from claims traditionally made about American naturalism’s more flexible portrayal of agency, such as Donald Pizer’s; these tend to wind up simply looking like humanism, whereas the perspective on agency I address here is one in which its hyperbolic loss and equally hyperbolic recovery come together in the compulsive subject. See, for example, Dillingham , . Within the critical literature on naturalist fiction, Naomi Schor’s Reading in Detail is prob-

   ‒



.

.

.

. .

ably the only account that considers naturalism’s famed detail as a feminized tendency, referring to the detail’s double gendering in its association both with dailiness and with ornamentation. This depiction accords with Donald Pizer’s classic definition of the naturalist as discovering within “the dull round of daily existence” “those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous” (Realism ). Yet despite this provocative suggestion, most readers have seen the defining “naturalist” moment as involving the escape from domesticity into a “larger” natural world (see, for example, D. Graham ; and D. Campbell, “Norris’s ‘Drama’” –). Eric Sundquist’s useful discussion of naturalism’s gothic tendencies (inseparable from the “intensification of detail”) would fit right into a treatment of it as a domestic genre, although he focuses on its wide-open spaces as well (). In her fascinating study The Gender of History, Bonnie Smith makes the connection I would want to make here, arguing that nineteenth-century women’s amateur history of the kind that Douglas describes, with its turn away from “full panoramization (which often omitted the small detail)” (Smith ) to “minute descriptions” () and “attention to the small events of everyday life” (), “provided the basis for changes in professional history” () leading to the “modernist sensibility” () embodied by a figure like Adams. Her discussion of the listlike, repetitious, even “Steinian” histories of women like Lucy Maynard Salmon and Mary Beard further cements the link to literary naturalism (). G. Stanley Hall, it might be noted, shares Adams’s “Maryolatry” and as a result goes so far as to suggest something like a women’s studies curriculum for modern women who were then making the mistake of seeing all history as the history of men. As Rosalind Rosenberg argues, writers like these “who celebrated feminine attributes and denigrated male achievements in the s” can be seen as “lay[ing] the foundation for a new generation of scholars to think of feminine and masculine traits as alternative human characteristics . . . ” (). See, for example, Showalter on Chopin (“The Awakening”) and Ammons’s Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. This term comes from Slavoj Zˇizˇek, who is writing on the “male dread of woman, which so deeply branded the Zeitgeist at the turn of the century,” a dread that in his view derives from the hysterical woman’s embodiment of a form of will that could survive the evacuation of rationality (Metastases ). One of the few accounts of this period that does make women central is Rita Felski’s important The Gender of Modernity, though, as with Zizek, the United States is not the focus.

Chapter . The Compulsion to Describe .

.

Indeed, realism (but never naturalism) is often understood as an umbrella term organizing not only this period’s literature but also its art, philosophy, science, and so forth. The founding study here is Parrington’s The Beginning of Critical Realism in America. Examples of scholars making the argument in these terms include Amy Kaplan in The Social Construction of American Realism and Donald Pease in Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon.

       ‒

.

.

. .

. . .

.

. . . .

. . .

This account has remained fairly standard within the scholarship on European naturalism. See Hamon’s “What Is a Description?” Baguley’s “The Nature of Naturalism,” and Chevrel. This is the interesting problem with Lee Clark Mitchell’s otherwise impressive account, in Determined Fictions, of the way naturalist style works to create a sense of deterministic character. By suggesting that naturalism’s foregrounding of determinism is itself deliberate, he engages a traditional sense of authorial control in order to argue for a perspective on all human beings as lacking such control. For a discussion of this tendency in Zola, see Calvin Brown’s Repetition in Zola’s Novels, where he refers to it as the “tag” (). Dillingham discusses the tendency in Norris (). Lukács writes that naturalist “[d]escription debases characters to the level of inanimate objects” (); Zola’s “protest against the bestiality of capitalism” devolves into “an obsession with the bestial” in the characters, thus a denial of their “humanity” (). And as Amy Kaplan suggests, Trilling, later in The Liberal Imagination, makes clearer what is at stake in his rejection of Dreiser’s “great brooding pity” in “Reality in America”: “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion” (Trilling ). Donna Campbell expands on this point in Resisting Regionalism. The strongest example of this tendency would be the work of Donald Pizer, which I discuss at greater length in my article “The Work of Womanhood in American Naturalism.” For classic descriptions in the psychological literature, see Emmelkamp and Tallis. An account that affirms the compulsive dimension of McTeague’s characters—if not its author— by treating the novel as a case study that psychologists might find useful (crucially making no distinction between compulsion as understood in the period and the present-day understanding of it) appears in Karen Jacobson’s “Who’s the Boss?” This already is not a fair account of Seltzer, who makes clear his aim of opposing Michaels’s and other new historicists’ emphasis on a cultural “logic” with a more mobile “logistics,” given that, as he puts it, “practices and discourses are never simply reducible or simply irreducible to anything else” (). See also Graff  and similar claims made by Brook Thomas and Bill Brown. See Liu –. An ongoing vacillation between minute details and “overall theor[ies]” (Ziff ) has also been noted by the readers of American naturalists like Norris. Baguley makes a similar claim in Naturalist Fiction. As Zˇizˇek writes in his gloss on Benjamin, “Here we have the first surprise: what specifies historical materialism—in contrast to the Marxist doxa according to which we must grasp events in the totality of their interconnection and in their dialectical movement—is its capacity to arrest, to immobilize historical movement and to isolate the detail from its historical totality” (Sublime ). See Zˇizˇek, Sublime . LaCapra makes a similar point in Soundings –. On internal difference, see Thomas . One intriguing answer lies in Joan Copjec’s discussion of the Lacanian “male” and “fe-

    ‒



. . .

. . .

.

. . .

.

.

.

male” universes, which might be mapped onto our theorizations of realism and naturalism, respectively: the male defined by “a prohibition: do not include everything in your all!” () and the female by “no limit interven[ing] to inhibit the progressive unfolding of signifiers,” meaning that “everything can be and is said about [woman], but that none of it is subject to ‘reality testing’” (Read ). See, for example, Dimock’s “Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader.” See, for example, Schopp-Schilling and MacPike. Contemporary discussions of obsessive-compulsive behavior that cite Janet as an overlooked resource include Pitman and Reed, both of whom are interested in “opening up” perspectives on compulsion as rigid repetition to a more dialectical approach. Important studies of Beard and the neurasthenia diagnosis include Gosling, Lears, and Lutz. Rabinbach’s The Human Motor is one of the most thorough accounts of the spread of this perspective across Europe during the s and s. “Hysteria,” of course, is the more familiar late-nineteenth-century psychological fascination, particularly with respect to recalcitrant women. Both Janet and Freud did their earliest work on hysteria, but they turned subsequently to the problem of obsessional neurosis. Zˇizˇek’s discussion in The Sublime Object of Ideology of the way that obsessional neurosis appears as a “dialect of hysteria” in Freud can help conceptualize these as two sides of a coin (–). Similarly, Eric Solomon calls him a “sensitive, highly imaginative youth” who displays a “neurotic fright” (–). And Michael Davitt Bell notes that to Howells, Crane himself, “inspired by ‘impulses vivid and keen’ . . . and beset by ‘electrical nerves,’” appears as “something like a female hysteric” (Problem ). On the gendered dimensions of neurasthenia and its cures, see Bederman, Lears, and Lutz. See, for example, the classic readings of Gilbert and Gubar; Kolodny; and Treichler, “Escaping.” Discussing “obsessions or ‘fixed ideas,’” Gosling cites an  article titled “Imperative Conceptions as a Symptom of Neurasthenia.” Cowles () credits Tamburini () with the earliest full development of the notion of “imperative conceptions” (Zwangvorstellungen, a term credited to Krafft-Ebing), which in his account includes doubting mania and various phobias. See Taylor –. Donna Campbell makes the intriguing suggestion in Resisting Regionalism that Frank Norris may have heard these particular lectures by James, given that he was at Harvard at the time they were offered. See Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’” (). Both Freud and William James saw themselves as explicitly countering the claims of Nordau-style degeneration theory by making clear the way obsessional habits could be thought as related to, rather than simply in stark opposition to, productive and creative work. See Freud, Introductory Lectures , and, on James, Taylor . See the brief discussion of Janet in Rabinbach’s Human Motor.

      ‒ 

. “Ils veulent essayer de faire mieux des choses, de se satisfaire eux-mêmes . . . mais ils ne sont pas plus satisfaits la seconde fois que la première et alors ils recommencent indéfiniment: nous arrivons aux manies de la répétition” (Janet : ). For this reason, the precise rituals we more typically associate with obsession-compulsion—washing the hands exactly five times each time, no more, no less—must be construed as a second-order formation, one designed to ward off what would otherwise be an interminable operation. “D’autres pour ne pas recommencer indéfiniment se fixent une limite, une nombre de fois déterminé,” Janet writes (: ), an observation echoed in the contemporary literature on compulsive behavior by Reed () and Tallis. . This is the chief point made by contemporary Janet supporters like Reed and Pitman. With respect to the literary dimension, it is notable that Cowles, in his  essay “Insistent and Fixed Ideas,” offers as one example Howells’s Penelope Lapham. In his view, “Penelope’s case” of uncertainty as to the best course of action regarding her proposal of marriage may be seen as “distinctly one of the ‘insanity of doubting’ in one of its more common and milder forms” (). . Significantly, for M. Solomon this achievement entails a “break with naturalism” on Crane’s part (). . See, for example, Bell and Pease, in addition to Horsford. Bell writes that “it is Henry who feels compelled to . . . provide his experience with a large meaning . . . and it is on this compulsion, rather than Henry’s experience in battle, that [the end of the book] seems to comment” (Problem ). As Mitchell notes in his introduction, the original published text gives a clearer-cut “maturation” ending compared with the alternative unexpurgated text that has been more recently made available. . As Mitchell writes of the battle of Chancellorsville, which was Crane’s inspiration (his brother, a Civil War enthusiast, was an expert on the event), “, men died in a conflict whose immediate consequences seemed nil at best and at worst senseless . . . after two days both sides were left almost exactly where they had been” (introduction ). . See Stallman (“when he becomes . . . reduced to anonymity he is then most a man” [“Notes” ]) and Eric Solomon, who believes Henry achieves true heroism and freedom, even though he admits that Crane shows war making men into “animals or machines,” demonstrating how it entails “the loss of individual initiative and motivation” (). . This would go along with a reading arguing that Henry does grow in the sense that he begins to grasp the notion of a “quiet manhood” associated in the second half of the book with his chastened friend Wilson. Yet to the extent that this nonbombastic version of masculinity demands that one learn to act in the face of the recognition of one’s radical insignificance, it seems not so much a finally achievable state as a practice for which repetition and failure must form a necessary part. . See, for example, Althusser’s discussion of “descriptive theory” in his essay on ideology. While description is cast here as the necessary starting point of all theoretical engagement, Althusser finally retains the idea that description limits critique, arguing that genuinely scientific analysis requires “a development of the theory which goes beyond the form of ‘description’” ().

   ‒ 



. One might go even further and say, along with Diane Elam, that “woman”’s failure to cohere thus only becomes more and more evident the harder one tries to “get her right,” the more details one brings to the project of her description. Elam here puns on deconstruction’s vertiginous “mise en abyme” as a “Ms. en abyme” to explain the paradox that the more we know about woman, the less we might be said fully to know her (). . Lauren Berlant’s powerful article “The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity” comes closest to doing so. As its title suggests, her concern lies more with linking Butler’s theory to “repetition compulsion” as Freud explores it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—a connection Butler herself makes in Bodies That Matter (). . Thus, for Kolodny, Treichler, and Veeder, respectively, it signifies patriarchal discourse (trapping a female figure behind layers of bars); it is women’s writing (confusing, unreadable, marginalized); and it speaks to postpartum depression, with its images of strangled children. . Susan Lanser’s treatment of the story is closer to my own here. . For a late-nineteenth-century discussion of “doubting mania” in which it resembles a form of feminist questioning, see Knapp, who cites the case of “a lady who constantly questioned herself as to the why and wherefore of everything. ‘Why do I sit here? Why do men go about? . . . Why do men come into being? Why are there men?’ and similar questions” (). It has been shown, he explains, “that this morbid questioning is always purposeless and about useless things” (). . For Teresa de Lauretis, this paradox explains why feminism can never amount simply to a form of ideology critique in Althusser’s sense, in which the theorist stands outside what he critiques, thanks to the purview of science. As she puts it, the feminist researcher is always “at the same time inside and outside the ideology of gender, and conscious of . . . that twofold pull”; what this means is that “women continu[ing] to become Woman” is feminism’s contradictory “condition of possibility” (). . This is, for example, Linda Nicholson’s complaint at the beginning of the series of debates in Feminist Contentions (). . In The Ticklish Subject, Zˇizˇek expresses nicely a feminist equivalent of Jameson’s “liberal” positioning: “the ultimate form of [feminine] servitude is to (mis)perceive herself, when she acts in a ‘feminine’ submissive-compassionate way, as an autonomous agent. . . . An interpellation succeeds precisely when I perceive myself as ‘not only that’ but ‘a complex person who, among other things, is also that’ . . . ” (). . See Freud, Inhibitions –. . Zˇizˇek’s remarks here echo an argument made earlier by Suzanne Gearhart about historicist literary criticism; she suggests similarly that Freud’s work on “moral masochism” and the sexualized symptom might allow us to understand history’s subjects as reaching ambivalently past the historical formations that bring them into being and that set in motion, without finally governing, the trajectory of their desires (). . Or consider Kate Chopin: “I write in the morning, when not too strongly drawn to struggle with the intricacies of a pattern, and in the afternoon, if the temptation to try a new furniture polish on an old table leg is not too powerful to be denied” (Complete ).

       ‒

Chapter . The Great Indoors .

. . .

. .

.

. . .

.

. . .

.

More recent work on obsession-compulsion cautions against prolonged rest for just these reasons: “it actively encourages the patient to engage in pointless ratiocination and rumination” (Reed ). This was a danger Weir Mitchell himself recognized: “I am often asked,” he wrote, “how I can expect by such a system to rest the organs of mind. No act of will can force them to be at rest” (Fat ). On feminism and social science, see Rosenberg. For a more extensive discussion of Taylorism in relation to the writing of this period, see Banta’s Taylored Lives. Here she writes against many theorists of the era, such as Henry T. Finck, who followed Darwin in viewing civilization as marked by increasing differentiation of the sexes, making feminism the atavism to be resisted. See, for example, Hall’s Adolescence. “Although the era’s ‘naturalism’ posed as scientific realism, to Gilman it was brutal and misogynist. . . . The two main branches, she said, were ‘the Story of Adventure’ and ‘the Story of Romance’” (C. P. Wilson, “Charlotte” ). Donna Campbell’s “Frank Norris’s ‘Drama of a Broken Teacup’” makes a similar claim, although her later Resisting Regionalism is more skeptical of naturalism’s claims to have broken from the female regionalist mode. After first developing this parallel in the dissertation on which this book is based, I later discovered that Christophe den Tandt had arrived at the same connection in his book. For the concepts of “localization” and “unnatural nature,” I am indebted to Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines. Herland here achieves the ideal put forth by Women’s Christian Temperance Union leader Frances Willard to “‘make the world more homelike’”; Dolores Hayden points out how this goal typically dovetailed with “campaigns for broad social reforms in the areas of sanitation, housing, health, temperance, and social purity”—that is, arenas in which bodily discipline could be generalized into a public good (). On Wharton, see Ammons, “Edith Wharton and the Issue of Race,” and Kassanoff; on Chopin, see Birnbaum and Gunning. Further discussions of Gilman’s racist views (which were unquestionably much more appalling than anything evident in these other writers, making one worry a bit about their dilution by association) appear in Bederman, Weinbaum, and Newman’s White Women’s Rights. See Fetterley’s critique of Brodhead in “Commentary.” See also Pryse’s “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’” and Zagarell’s “Crosscurrents.” There is a telling moment at the end of Louise Newman’s White Women’s Rights in which Newman expresses the difficulties faced by postcolonialists by stating that “colonialisms have so insinuated themselves into their ‘host’ cultures that to purify the latter of the former is a herculean task” (, emphasis mine). These options are harder to overcome than it might seem; they threaten to reappear in the work of those feminists who evince concern about historicism’s distancing approach, even when the aim of that work is to present a “mixed,” impure account of texts like Country as

    ‒



.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

an alternative. The problem is that this mixture is recognizable as such only by virtue of the clear separability of its component parts; Jewett is thus deemed to have held “good” views here (making it all right to empathize), but “bad” ones there (demanding that we censure her). I discuss the limitations of this well-intentioned approach further in my essay “Is Feminism a Historicism?” It is surprising how little attention has been paid to the connections between Freeman and naturalism. Several early critics, however, did suggest that she might be termed a naturalist. See Foster  and Hirsch . This suggestion is made by Reichardt (). Critical discussions of the prefeminist scholarship on Freeman also appear in Marchalonis, Romines, and S. Toth. In Toth, the “view of Freeman as a pessimistic recorder of New England’s decline” is linked to Austin Warren’s having “clinically classified her morbid cases of New England conscience” (); she is notable, however, in exempting Van Wyck Brooks from her critique (). Pattee, Side-Lights . In The Home Plot, Ann Romines dates such accounts back at least as far as Paul Elmer More, who wrote in  that what had been “‘telling matters of will and morality’” in precursors like Hawthorne had become in Freeman “only a ‘sad’ matter of ‘palsied nerves’” (qtd. in Romines ). In Ribot’s Les maladies du volonté (Diseases of the will), published in , he discusses “monomania” interchangeably with both obsessional idées fixes and overdeveloped will. See also William James in Principles –, and in Taylor –. Pattee brings up Brontë twice in an attempt to come to grips with Freeman’s capacities; he also mentions, along with Zola, Balzac (Side-Lights , ). His phrasing is nearly identical to Matthiessen’s: “How did this young girl of twenty-five know of all this human tragedy, of all these grim and desolate lives, of all these curious abnormalities of soul?” (Side-Lights ). See also Thompson. Freeman is agnostic on the time period here. While Pembroke is “intended to portray a typical New England village of some sixty years ago,” she states, these sorts of “characters” still “exist today in a very considerable degree” (v). A few readers have tried to emphasize this paradoxical dimension of Freeman’s feminism. Donna Campbell writes that “[m]uch of what masquerades as a negative form of self-denial in . . . Freeman’s work is actually the sheerest self-indulgence,” the manifestation of a “perversely excessive will” (Resisting ). Earlier, Foster said something similar about Freeman’s position: “She was at once within and outside the spirit of the culture from which she drew her themes and characters; she loved—and almost hated the people of whom she wrote. Out of this partially neurotic ambivalence comes much of her intensity and her deepest insight into her characters” (). One could argue that Freeman does fear a certain kind of “museumified” passionlessness in the purity and repetition characterizing Louisa Ellis’s domestic ideal in “A New England Nun” and that she does find more vitality and force, not in the marital ideal Hirsch proposes for Louisa, but in a more pitched, ongoing battle against nature than Louisa can allow herself. In other words, there would be a genuine similarity linking Louisa’s idealized world of purity and passionlessness to the obsessional world of Herland.

       ‒

. Given this sense of Sarah Penn as almost a precursor of the movement toward feminist redesigns of the home space, it is intriguing to note that one of that movement’s major figures, Ethel Puffer Howes, in  published a manifesto in Ladies’ Home Journal on the subject titled “The Revolt of Mother.” (See Hayden .) The problems with a simple endorsement of Sarah’s ferocious dedication to a better domestic life may be encapsulated by Theodore Roosevelt’s recommendation of the story to “a gathering of mothers” “for its strong moral lesson,” a plug that for at least one writer could account for its early popularity (B. C. Williams ). . A relevant footnote in Weber’s discussion of Puritan self-discipline concerns the apparent relation between the kind of “hygienic sex-rationalism” inaugurated by Franklin and “the first breaches in patriarchal ideas” concerning “the emancipation of women”—which, it might be noted, he fears may be undone by “modern sex hygiene” as the logical inheritor of these Victorian views (–).

Chapter . A Mania for the Moment .

.

.

. .

.

Criticism since the s has delineated with specificity James’s relation to the modern “culture of publicity”—a formation that an earlier generation typically opposed on more generalized terms to the ideal of the enclosed, private self. Important examples include Freedman, M. Jacobson, and Wardley. Readers seeking to “locate” the novel historically, vis-à-vis the decade in which it was written, include Auerbach, Cargill, Davis, Habegger, S. J. Hall, M. Jacobson, and Kerr. The psychologist Harry Campbell thus writes in an  treatise of a “young professor” who “attracted, when first appointed, a large and enthusiastic class by his liberal and suggestive teaching; gradually, however, the attendance diminished, and after a few years became very sparse. Asking the cause, I found he had become ‘faddy.’ Two or three ‘fads’ had, as it were, enthralled his thoughts, and these he aired on every occasion” (). Similarly, Théodule Ribot discusses a man who feels it is “as if another person had taken possession of his will” (). According to Dr. Edward Cowles, author of an  article titled “Insistent and Fixed Ideas,” such descriptions are not inaccurate; the power of the fixed idea over the attention can indeed be compared to that produced by the “hypnotic state” (). Ribot, however, makes the clearest link between such descriptions and the phenomenon of mass interest in mesmerism, for the citation he gives is from a book called The Mesmeric Mania of . See also Bowlby, Just Looking; and Felski. One might consider here Mark Seltzer’s remarks concerning the tendency of the initial “new historicist” criticism to read “women’s disorders” (hysteria, anorexia, agoraphobia) as exemplary markers of particular historical moments (). Both Gillian Brown and Marcia Jacobson have suggested that The Bostonians predicts narrative developments that became more common in the novels of the ‘s (cast alternately as naturalist and as feminist), looking forward rather than backward. Nina Auerbach writes suggestively that in The Bostonians “the might of collective American womanhood steps

   ‒



.

.

.

. .

.

.

.

forth as history’s irony and its promise” (). Yet she also links the novel’s feminists to the s. Susan Mizruchi, in a piece very usefully addressing temporality as a political issue in The Bostonians, stresses the distinct “politics of temporality” of each of the novel’s characters but concludes that all are finally subsumed and contained by the narrator’s perspective: that of the “critical historian who can look upon the past with a discerning eye . . . ” (“Politics” ). I find Mizruchi’s readings of each of the novel’s characters compelling, but I would differ from this conclusion, which seems unsettled if we read the novel as less about “the past” and more about its own unfinished future. The mission statement printed in the premier issue of McClure’s makes a similar claim: “In General: the magazine will not only furnish the best literature, but will make a serious attempt to report the marvelous activities and developments of modern civilization, and especially the United States” (June , ). Garvey’s study makes clear how much this sense of “up-to-dateness” depended on consumer culture: “Because one selling point of the new monthly magazines’ fiction and columns was their timeliness and responsiveness to current trends and their ability to provide readers with a sense of being in the know, echoes of current advertising slogans were particularly attractive. Such a reference could create an instant air of up-to-date breeziness . . . ” (). Ann Ardis writes that “the fact that this fiction sold so well offered proof to its most hostile reviewers that it was a commodity. It did not have value as Art; it was simply faddishly upto-date in its portrayal of women . . . ” She goes on to give a fascinating quote from Elizabeth Linton (in the Fortnightly Review, ): “In this age of universal disintegration and the supremacy of fads, there are so many who would sacrifice the good of the country—the integrity of the empire—to some impracticable theory that looks like godly justice on paper and would be cruelly wrong in practice” (qtd. in Ardis ). Here the fad appears to be the opposite of the “pragmatic”; it stands, curiously enough, for “theory.” On “Trilby-mania,” see Purcell. Garvey’s is one of the most useful discussions of the bicycle craze of the s, particularly in relation to the New Woman. She writes that the decade’s new “safety bicycle” enabled female ridership, since its predecessor had been “impossible to ride in skirts” (). Manufacturers picked up on the burgeoning female market for bicycles and developed techniques designed specifically to appeal to that market. Her claim is that the craze ended around . Garvey extensively documents this debate, which centered around fears that the narrow bicycle saddle could generate erotic sensations, particularly when combined with fast, bentover riding (“scorching”). Munsey’s seems most disturbed by fads that impinge upon the body itself, as when it reports that the latest craze is for red hair (“A Hirsute Fad” ): “Strange it is when fads have to do with physical beauty. It may yet be the craze to have small hands or gray eyes. All things are possible, and most things are probable, at the close of this nineteenth century.” Finck’s chief examples for this assertion come from various sectors of the industrial economy, said to be backing off from its initial embrace of female employees. Perhaps the most

       ‒

. . .

. .

damaging such example offered, with respect to Finck’s historical perspicuity, is the field of stenography. For a typical example, see S. J. Hall. See, e.g., Auerbach and Schreiber. It is worth noting that their respective views on romantic love are said to constitute the only significant difference of opinion between Basil and James’s little female “doctress,” Dr. Prance: “The only thing our young man didn’t like about Doctor Prance was the impression she gave him . . . that she thought Verena rather slim” (–). As we are told later, she “appeared to deprecate a sentimental tendency” (). Others have made a similar claim about Basil: for example, Schreiber and Wardley. I refer here to the fact that in mid-nineteenth-century American fiction, compulsion usually emerges as a way to talk about woman at work, or women in public: see, for example, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills,” or Melville’s “Tartarus of Maids.” A comment at the end of Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism inspired my own sense that The Bostonians marks a shift to the depiction of private life itself as possessing a compulsive dimension, a shift I associate with naturalist fiction; Brown’s reference is to the “terrain of marital discord” () that James’s novel shares with a wide range of turnof-the-century texts. (An interesting example of such a text would be one of the new mass magazines, the Cosmopolitan, which in November and December  printed a forum on the subject “Is Marriage a Failure?”)

Chapter . The New Woman and the Old Man .

.

. .

. .

Norris is well known to have discovered Sister Carrie as a reader for Doubleday, Page, and Company, but as Myers puts it, no “strong echoes” of McTeague have been “detected” in Dreiser’s novel (). Warner Berthoff’s The Ferment of Realism is a classic statement of the position that realism’s value lies in its daring attempt to cut through the superficial affectations of genteel culture (which Maggie pathetically tries to apply to her rough urban milieu). This is a standard strategy for explaining away Carrie’s rise, one that makes her “success . . . as empty as Hurstwood’s failure is painful” (Shulman ). See also Gelfant and Minter. Michael Davitt Bell’s is an elegant discussion of this slippage: “Dreiser begins, again and again, on the outside, but he always moves inward—even and maybe especially when he seems to mean to keep his distance—toward an affective stylistic identification with the sensibilities of his characters” (Problem ). For Bell, this empathy keeps Dreiser from exhibiting the condescension (and, I would add, the potential for misogyny) created by a Crane-like distance and irony from a feminized sentimental worldview. In her reading, Amy Kaplan stresses an aspect of Dreiser’s career that has often seemed simply too embarrassing to mention: his work as an editor for the Butterick women’s magazines. This was true as far back as Lukács’s “Narrate or Describe?”; for more recent discussions of naturalism and chance, see Michaels’s The Gold Standard and Lee Mitchell’s Determined Fictions.

   ‒



.

. .

. . .

.

. . .

I do not mean to suggest an absolute distance. One is often simultaneously moved and disgusted by what one identifies as a sentimental text. The logic of fetishism seems relevant here (with its structure of “I know very well, but all the same . . . ”), particularly given sentimentality’s association with the fetishized commodity. Discussions of Carrie in relation to popular sentimental fiction include Davidson and Davidson; and Dance. Alan Price calls this question a “divisive crux” for the novel’s critics, as many feel that Carrie’s “innocence and vulnerability do not hold up on examination” (). A few have been more up-front; Kenneth Lynn cites psychologists’ characterizations of the “golddigger” mentality in order to understand Carrie’s “singular coldness of temperament” (Dream , ). While “Carrie has caused two generations of critics to melt into tears at the thought of her,” he writes, they should have “saved their grief, for Carrie herself never wastes any tears on anyone” (). As an early reviewer wrote, “The woman, Carrie, is a reality throughout the book, as real, to be paradoxical, as she is, to a certain extent, shadowy” (Reedy ). As Rita Felski reminds us, “Seduction is a recurring term used in the writings of male intellectuals to describe the manipulation of the individual by marketing techniques” (). On the typewriter, see Davies and my own “Dictation Anxiety.” Alice Kessler-Harris explains in her invaluable overview Out to Work that “new machinery constituted the most typical reason to substitute women for men” in the turn-of-the-century workplace (). On department store work, see Benson, who writes that “the number of saleswomen jumped from under  to over , between  and ” (). On the discourse of “women adrift” in both newspaper write-ups and government reports, see Kessler-Harris, Weiner, and especially Meyerowitz’s Women Adrift. Meyerowitz, who writes specifically about Chicago and mentions Carrie as an example, writes that “[f]rom  to , the female labor force in Chicago increased . . . over , percent,” a rate “over three times as great” as in the nation overall; the number of female wage earners in that city living “apart from family and relatives”—that is, “adrift”—grew from , in  to approximately , by  (). Meyerowitz discusses the example of the Floradora girls, who in  “showed the chorus line as ‘a potential stepping-stone to happiness and self-advancement’” (). Her own historical work dismisses Carrie as atypical of working women overall because of her success, but I would say that the particular fantasy space that Carrie’s ambivalent but nonetheless significant success represents affirms the theoretical possibility that Meyerowitz herself wants to entertain (xxii): a middle ground between treating women workers as mere hapless victims and seeing them as harbingers of an idealized liberation. See Felski ; Kessler-Harris ; and Benson . See also Weiner . As Rita Felski puts it in a summary of the scholarly literature, “the category of consumption situated femininity at the heart of the modern in a way that the discourses of production and rationalization . . . did not” (). I would argue that this is as much a product of looking backward at this era from a perspective like Trachtenberg’s as it is a reflection of the era’s own developments.

       ‒

. On work-weakened bodies and their threat to maternity, see Kessler-Harris – and Weiner . . Abelson’s When Ladies Go A-Thieving offers a comprehensive account of the rise of the kleptomania diagnosis during this period. . Both in his reading of Carrie in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and in his article “The Contracted Heart,” Walter Michaels writes that Carrie has the power to “embody the infinite” (which he links specifically to the capacity to “shop forever”) (“Contracted” ). . The work of both Carrie and Trina McTeague resembles consumption in that it involves turning oneself into a commodity or an image: as Carrie acts roles, so Trina, too, makes little images that turn out to “stand for” herself, the Noah’s Ark animals she whittles and decorates with paint. As the women acquire this power to objectify themselves, however, their male partners appear to lose it. Hurstwood is forced out of his job at the bar, where “for the most part he lounged about, dressed in excellent tailored suits” (Dreiser, Carrie ). Similarly, McTeague loses the giant gold tooth that symbolized his success as a dentist to the snappy, feminized competitor down the block (“a poser, a rider of bicycles” [Norris, McTeague ]), who has what McTeague does not, a college diploma. . My critique of Lears, Trachtenberg, and others here shares commonalities with the important work of Lawrence Birken and James Livingston, both of whom offer a more complex reading of the shift to a “consumerist” ethos (as represented by the writers Lears attacks, such as Simon Nelson Patten), one that allows it to encompass women’s broadening desires in the realm of work as well. Unsurprisingly, Livingston’s is also one of the only readings of Carrie that sees her not as either succumbing to or seeing through a “false,” “theatrical” self at the book’s end but as standing for a new understanding of selfhood not defined by the sentimental poles of absolute sincerity and theatricality, marketability, and so on. . In this respect she resembles other working women cited in a  Harper’s Bazaar forum titled “The Girl Who Comes to the City.” As Lynn Weiner explains, “Among the motivations for employment cited in these firsthand accounts were boredom at home and the ‘unendurable’ life in the country” (). . This is not to say Lily has not been often compared to Carrie, given their similar situations as women “adrift” from financial or familial support, relying on their personal charms to float them. Yet given Lily’s bleak denouement, those readers wishing to retain her connection to Carrie are forced to offer the familiarly grim assessment of Carrie’s success, deeming the actress “little better off, we feel, than the dead Lily” (Price ). . Hochman, “Awakening” ; Lidoff ; Hochman .

Chapter . Saving Herself .

.

I regret not being able to contend in this chapter with Bill Brown’s intriguing discussion of objects and their value in McTeague in his A Sense of Things, which appeared after I had already completed work on this book. The tender moment in Greed in which McTeague rescues the little canary forms a more

    ‒



plausible piece of evidence than any in the novel itself for the sentimentalization of McTeague so crucial to the case for Norris as a humanist writer. . See Pizer, Theory –, for a reading of McTeague in which its saving humanism depends on cutting Trina out of the text; I discuss this problem further in “The Work of Womanhood in American Naturalism.” The helpful concept of “localization” as I use it here comes from Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines. . For a useful rehearsal of this account, see Susan Mizruchi’s brief section on McTeague in The Science of Sacrifice. Mizruchi also comes closer than any other reading extant to offering something like my own sense of Trina McTeague. . This description of the difference between dowry and bridewealth is S. J. Tambiah’s. In a reading of these practices in India and Ceylon, Tambiah concludes that dowry “stresses the notion of female property and female rights to property in a way that is not true of bridewealth situations” (Goody and Tambiah ). . Qtd. in Degler . Contracts drawn up between husbands and wives remained a point of greater contention (see Leach –). . As Ellen Rooney notes, “phallocentric discourses on rape” see “the raped woman as seductive,” indeed “as a kind of rapist.” Moreover, “the seductive woman/temptress/rapist . . . does not so much act her desire as embody it. It is in the nature of the Circe-figure to provoke, a state rather than an act” (–). . This, too, is brought forward more definitively in Greed, where we see Trina’s lips moving as McTeague operates on her: the unconscious body speaks. . Norris references another turn-of-the-century text in which biting played such a role when he describes McTeague’s worries about the effect his kiss might have on Trina: “Across her forehead . . . he would surely see the smudge of a foul ordure, the footprint of the monster” (). In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (), the beleaguered heroine Mina—whose very name predicts “Trina”—receives just such a mark on her forehead as the result of her liaisons with the vampire. . Zola allows the women more leverage in their responses to their husbands’ abuse than Norris does: Nana’s friend Satin remarks at one point that “for her part, she always ducked, a move which sent the gentleman sprawling” (). Norris gives the subject of the women competing over their bruises a more extended treatment in his story “Fantaisie Printanière,” which was written later than McTeague, although published (in the San Francisco newspaper Wave) several years earlier. This story, which deserves greater scholarly attention, embellishes the material from McTeague considerably by structuring the narrative around the fleeting possibility of the women’s awareness of their oppression, an awareness that the competition between them then renders obsolete. Significantly, in “Fantaisie,” the phrase “the existing order of things” is explicitly unmasked as ideological; it describes “the leak from the gas-works and the collector’s visits” as well as, at the story’s opening, the quarrel between the two husbands and, at the story’s end, the quarrel between the two wives (Frank Norris ). The one thing that does remain constant in the two households is the wife-abuse; how we should read this abuse in relation to the “existing order of things” is thus the story’s open question.

       ‒

.

.

. .

.

.

.

.

Michaels explains Trina’s chief obsessions by noting that both “the miser and the masochist take their pleasure in mistaking means for ends” (Gold Standard ). We might add that any sexual activity not resulting in reproduction also “mistakes means for ends” according to Victorian morality. Dillingham discusses the problem of “the symbol becom[ing] what it earlier stood for” without noting the way in which this argument shores up the thing stood for (here, “purity”) as a bedrock attribute “naturally” possessed by gold as by the virgin’s body, rather than a value itself socially conferred (). While Dillingham considers gold’s ubiquity in the novel, as in the case of “much discussion of the relative advantages of French and German gilt,” to be a sign of Norris’s lack of “subtlety and delicacy of treatment” of his symbol, it seems more that he is vexed by the epistemological crisis that its proliferation implies (). What his reading inadvertently suggests, for example, is that it is precisely gold’s difference from paper money, its ability to signify “rarity and untarnishable purity,” that allows it to stand for what it is not (). For the definitive reading of this aspect of McTeague, see Michaels’s essay “The Gold Standard.” See McTeague , , –. Maria originates as Judy in Norris’s  story “Judy’s Service of Gold Plate,” from which the Maria-Zerkow subplot of McTeague is drawn. Donald Pizer has drawn our attention to Norris’s interchangeable identifications of Maria in McTeague as “Mexican” and “Central American” (see McTeague , , , and ), which would suggest an indiscriminate lumping together of foreign “types”; in the short story, however, Norris seems to poke fun at this very tendency, stating of his heroine, “She was a native of Guatemala, and so, of course, was said to be Mexican . . . ”(Frank Norris ). In Zerkow, Norris explicitly connects anti-Semitic understandings of Jewish “character traits” with physical characteristics of atavism to produce what an earlier short story called “A Case for Lombroso”: the junk dealer has “claw-like, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know that greed—inordinate, insatiable greed—was the dominant passion of the man” (Frank Norris ). On the subject of a “national literature,” Norris wrote that the necessary patriotism first required “centuries of race specialization, when a given people by virtue of independent government, hard and fast localization of physical boundaries . . . have been . . . welded together to form a single, distinct, homogeneous unit different from all others. Then under such conditions comes the national literature” (Literary Criticism ). This detail is preserved intact from a conversation between Vandover and Ida Wade, who is one of two precursors to Trina (she substitutes in a kindergarten), in Vandover and the Brute (). Michaels brings up James’s use of the magpie in making his argument that naturalism is about the human desire for natural things that look like representations. For Michaels, the magpie’s hoarding is important precisely in its ignorance of this desire; “[m]agpies snatch rags . . . because they think they look nice or because they can use them for something” (Gold Standard ). In fact, though, what is striking about the magpie is that it itself so of-

    ‒



. . .

.

.

ten functions as an example of the natural thing that mimics representation, as when it models the “aesthetic impulse,” or when it mimics human speech, something it does better than any other bird, even a parrot (see Wilson and Bonaparte ). See Kaplan’s “Nation, Region, and Empire” and Richard Brodhead’s chapter on Jewett in Cultures of Letters for an elaboration of this argument. Susan Stewart contrasts the mass-produced souvenir with the personal memento in terms similar to those I use here. This is also the difference between the women’s saving here, particularly Trina’s with its use of money to signify sex (and vice versa), and the more widespread Victorian understanding of male “saving” of semen as laudable self-control, which necessarily carried with it the understanding of a later moment of “reinvestment” (see Barker-Benfield). In Ellis’s view, however, all this might simply characterize feminine eating habits throughout life: “women,” he writes, “are friandes rather than gourmandes, loving special foods, chiefly sweets” (Man ). The author, Marion Harland, dates these “depraved pointings of appetite” at least back to a Spectator dated , in which a letter writer demands that “some name” be attached to “these craving damsels, whether dignified under some or all of the following denominations (to wit): Trash-eaters, oatmeal-chewers, pipe-champers, chalk-lickers, wax-nibblers, coalscranchers, wall-peelers, or gravel-diggers” ().

Chapter . The Rhythm Method .

. . .

.

. . .

This hardly means that Chopin has routinely been read alongside Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, though Per Seyersted, who first excavated her works in the s, argued that she should be. Others who have considered The Awakening in relation to these writers, though usually in order to distance her from them, include E. Toth; N. Walker, “Feminist”; Skaggs; and Hochman, “Awakening.” The famous comparison of Edna to Aphrodite is Sandra Gilbert’s. Showalter (“The Awakening”) and Ammons (Conflicting) were the first to make this argument, one developed more fully by Dimock in Residues and Birnbaum. Less than fully affirming views of Edna appear in Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros”; Sullivan and Smith; Wolkenfeld; Showalter, “The Awakening”; and Hochman, “The Awakening” (to cite only a sampling of criticism written after the initial feminist revival). Lynn Wardley’s wonderful reading of The Awakening, “‘Splendid Animal,’” goes even further than my own in arguing for a complete transformation of maternity’s meanings by Chopin, one that aligns Edna’s questing with Adele’s childbearing and Reisz’s pianoplaying as forms of Nietzschean “self-overcoming.” See Ammons, Conflicting . For one of the strongest skeptical treatments of Edna’s individualism, see Dimock’s Residues. These quotes from early reviews and discussions of Chopin’s work appear in Culley –, , . As the interviewer, William Schuyler, explains it, “Zola, in [Chopin’s] opinion . . . takes life

       ‒

.

. . . .

.

. .

. .

.

.

too clumsily and seriously, which is the fault she also finds with Ibsen. . . . She treats rather condescendingly a certain class of contemporary English women writers, whose novels are now the vogue . . . She has great respect for Mrs. Humphry Ward’s achievements; but Mrs. Ward is, au fond, a reformer, and such tendency in a novelist she considers a crime against good taste” (Seyersted, Miscellany ). In her own review of Zola’s “Lourdes,” Chopin complains, “Not for an instant . . . do we lose sight of the author and his note-book and of the disagreeable fact that his design is to instruct us” (Complete ). The early reviews quoted here appear in Culley , . Along with Wolff’s “Thanatos and Eros” (which treats the Ratignolles’ marriage as the “rewarding adult” relationship that Edna cannot achieve []), psychoanalytic classifications appear in Sullivan and Smith and in Wolkenfeld. Similarly to Ammons, Birnbaum recategorizes Chopin’s novel as merely the story of “a nineteenth-century white woman’s sexual liberation” (). The title “Feminist or Naturalist?” is Nancy Walker’s. Bert Bender similarly terms Edna a “post-Darwinian woman-animal who had evolved from the sea” (). See Toth in Culley . See Ringe, who compares Chopin to Melville (she “allows her character no limitless expansion of the self” but rather emphasizes “the price [the self] must pay for insisting upon its absolute freedom” []), and Barbara Claire Freeman, who similarly distinguishes the darkness of Chopin’s romanticism from the transcendent, redemptive model of Sandra Gilbert’s vision of Edna as Aphrodite. We should remember in this regard Chopin’s startlingly “objectifying” descriptions of Edna herself as a body rather than a mind, moments that support a sense that she judges the character from a distance rather than simply inhabits her perspective from within. See Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood and Tate’s Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. Deborah McDowell cautions against this outcome in “The Changing Same” (), noting the irony by which historicism becomes a means to render these writers’ intents identical to our own desires for them. Qtd. in Gaines –. In his useful study Uplifting the Race, Gaines emphasizes that “this statement, and Cooper’s views, were exceptional” during the period (). Similarly, Lois Lamphere Brown invites us to consider Sappho’s plot as a means of exposing the “insidious utopian bent” of African American sentimental narrative, given that “progress and uplift often can be enacted only at the cost of certain personal repression” (). Johnson qtd. in Brinnin . On the admiration of Johnson and Wright as well as Larsen, see Brinnin; Eugene Miller, “Richard”; and Weiss. By contrast, Claude McKay asserted that Stein’s characters scarcely seemed racialized: “Melanctha . . . might have been a Jewess,” while her lover Jeff “reminds me more of a type of white lover described by a colored woman” (qtd. in Brinnin ). Following up on a suggestion by Deborah McDowell, Stacy Alaimo reads Quicksand together with Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds, contending that all might be treated as instances of feminist naturalism. Alaimo’s powerful reading

    ‒



.

.

. .

.

.

.

.

.

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is limited only by her assumption, based on prior criticism, that s naturalism simply aligned women themselves with nature as a threat to human rationality. Relatedly, Sutherland suggests that Stein’s preference for the Russian realists over Zola (as expressed in Paris France) makes sense given their emphasis on “the incommensurability between the inner and the outer life” (). The connection to naturalism is made in more affirmative terms by Brinnin, for whom the book “can still be placed comfortably” side by side with Norris and Crane (). In respect to the latter, Bridgman notes that the original title for the third “life,” “The Gentle Lena,” was “Maggie” () An important early discussion of Stein’s work in relation to these issues of how to reconsider “nature” was Catharine Stimpson’s “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein,” which noted that Stein belonged to a rising generation of college-educated women for whom “consciousness was more liberated than the flesh” (). As Stimpson notes, Stein turned to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s writings in the s in an attempt to address this concern. The most sustained discussion of the relation between these two texts appears in Blackmer. An article that does discuss “Melanctha” in relation to Quicksand is Debra Silverman’s. Yet Silverman seems to work too hard to distinguish Melanctha as a determinist character (whose “wandering,” like Edna Pontellier’s, “could be talked about as sleepwalking”) from an “empowering” reading of Larsen’s Helga as making “conscious choices” ()—a distinction that leaves us with no way to grasp the complex interplay of these aspects in both texts, which would for me represent the significance of their naturalism. On types, see Cohen, Saldivar-Hull, and Peppis. Discussions of Melanctha as a fatally determined, static character appear in Silverman and Rosalind Miller, who discusses all of the Three Lives as presenting characters whose stories are “like a stationary wheel . . . never going anywhere” (). Critiques of “Melanctha” often assume that Stein’s sympathies lie with Jeff; see, for example, Saldivar-Hull (who calls him “a mouthpiece for Stein” []) and Silverman. Readings that acknowledge the power of Melanctha’s explorations tend to swing far in the other direction and see Jeff as simply an annoying impediment; see Chessman and Blackmer. Ruddick and North come closest in this regard. Yet both finally tend to privilege a semiotic slipperiness that, to my mind, risks losing sight of Stein’s interest in refiguring the meaning of the most apparently rigid taxonomization and repetition from within. Sutherland writes that Stein’s early attachment to “universal inclusion” stemmed from “naturalistic or evolutionary science” (). Jennifer Ashton offers a superb discussion of the shift in Stein’s work from these early works’ intent on describing everything to her later mode. This questioning clearly poses a problem for readings like Saldivar-Hull’s that want to emphasize Stein’s insistence on taxonomization; she ends up frustrated that “[e]ven Stein cannot decide how ultimately to place the black people in her story. She wants them all to conform to her vision of this foreign race, but she keeps undermining her own project by making exceptions” (). It seems odd that these “exceptions” are not considered part of Stein’s “own project” here. See Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism. Some of the best discussions of the complexity of

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.

. .

. .

.

.

.

.

.

Stein’s relation to taxonomization have been those focusing on her work with James and Hugo Münsterberg in the psychological laboratory; see, for example, Ruddick and Armstrong. Discussions of the role of rhythm in Stein include DeKoven, Bridgman, and Skinner, who notes infamously (though provocatively for our emphasis on problems of communication) that rhythm is one of the “aspects of prose writing . . . not particularly dependent on intelligibility” (). In Oscar Cargill’s words, Stein “has discovered, with the help of her medical science, that the element of ‘timing’ is an important one in passion” (qtd. in R. Miller ). The importance of rhythmic motion to Beyond is discussed in greater detail below. Yet rhythm also emerges in the Introductory Lectures as crucial to Freud’s understanding of obsession-compulsion, as a backdrop against which the compulsive’s particular preferred repetitions can emerge in all their singularity: “all these obsessional patients have a tendency to repeat, to make their performances rhythmical and to keep them isolated from other actions. . . . On this similar background, however, different patients nevertheless display their individual requirements—whims, one is inclined to say—which in some cases contradict one another directly” (). In James’s Principles, Melanctha’s and Jeff’s different degrees of openness to the stimuli around them appear as two modes of attention, the child’s and the adult’s. An important discussion of Beyond from a feminist perspective, to which I am indebted for its lucidity around the difficult issue of its conception of “nature,” also appears in Joan Copjec’s “Cutting Up,” in Read My Desire. The connection might help to bring forward the erotic dimension of Edna’s relation to the alluring Adele. As Chopin describes the “link” between them, “Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love” (). Indeed, intriguingly in relation to my focus here, Stein’s own greatest exposure to the African American community came through her experience as a medical student helping to deliver babies in a hospital in Baltimore. I focus on Grimké’s fiction about young African American women and motherhood, but she also, in her story “The Drudge,” about a poor white housewife, produced a rare work by a turn-of-the-century black woman writer that could be read comfortably alongside Crane or Norris. Sanger’s movement from socialist to eugenicist arguments for birth control is well documented in David Kennedy’s biography. Kennedy does note that Sanger usually, though not always, “strove to avoid an ethnic definition of ‘unfit’” but that the same could not be said of many eugenicist sympathizers who rallied to her cause (). He emphasizes, however, the eventual recognition on eugenicists’ part that the birth control movement did not best suit their agenda (). Originally titled The Pervert by Grimké herself, the play has been treated at least as often as a psychological exploration of Rachel’s inner doubts as any sort of political treatise. William Storm’s “Reactions of a ‘Highly-Strung Girl’” states bluntly that “[t]he play’s cen-

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tral conflict . . . is not between its people, or even between Rachel and the outside world of racial prejudice”; it concerns, rather, Rachel’s “arguments with God” (). . Discussing Grimké’s work in relation to the domestic racial-uplift novels of the s, Claudia Tate brings forward a crucial tension around this very point. At first, she suggests, we see in the shift to Grimké the way “post–Civil War optimism” yielded to the “chronic entrenchment of institutionalized racism,” and thus to a sense of “futility” and “AfricanAmerican cultural grief.” Yet she then adds, “In addition, by the early twentieth century, the myth of the happy marriage was becoming more and more contested as newer generations of women challenged the patriarchal family” (Domestic ). How can we make sense of this “In addition”? It is heard once again as heroines like Rachel are described first in negative terms, as “meek, juvenile, and miniature mutations” of their strong s predecessors, and then as “early projections of new methods of characterization” that could incorporate modern alienation and, specifically, “a woman’s choice to reject passion” (, ). In fact, I would argue, these competing alternatives are not mere waffling; they appear as standard responses within the literature on naturalist fiction, in which less than uplifting portrayals of household life can look either like harbingers of social apocalypse or feminist acknowledgments of domestic complexity. See, for example, June Howard’s discussion of naturalist domesticity in her Form and History. . This, too, might have had some resonance with Grimké’s personal situation, as her own mother left home and “was confined in some manner for mental aberration or physical incapacity” shortly after her birth (Herron ). . David Farrell Krell’s “The Bodies of Black Folk” is an important step toward opening this question, which he himself admits sounds like an “impertinence.” After all, he states, “[i]t ought to be a matter of the souls of black folk . . . Yet have not these peoples also been denied their bodies, their multifarious bodies—bodies of the Earth and the world, bodies of nature, culture, and history?” ().

Conclusion . .

See also Fabre’s “‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’: A Study in Compulsion,” in The World of Richard Wright. See Sybil Weir’s “The Narrows: A Black New England Novel” and Mark K. Wilson’s MELUS interview, “Ann Petry—The New England Connection.”

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

Adams, Henry, ; The Education of Henry Adams, –, , –; on women and modernity, –, –, , ,  Addams, Jane, – agency: and compulsion, , , , –, –, , , –; men and, , –, , , ; and naturalist fiction, –, –, –, –, , –, , , , ; and nature, , ; and realism, –, –, –; and repetition, , , , , –, –, , , ; women and, , , ,  Åhnebrink, Lars,  Americanist criticism: and historicism, , –, –, ; on modernity, , –; on naturalist fiction, , –, –, ; on women’s stories,  Ammons, Elizabeth, , ,  Anderson, Sherwood,  Andrews, E. F.,  Anglo-Saxonism, –,  animality: in Crane, ; Gilman on, ; in Norris, , , , , –, , ; in Stein, ; in Wright,  Annales school,  Anthony, Susan B.,  Apthorp, Elaine Sargent,  Ardis, Ann,  Armstrong, Tim, 

Atlantic (magazine),  Auerbach, Nina, ,  Austen, Jane,  Auster, Albert,  Bader, Julia,  Bailey, William G.,  Baker, Houston,  Baker, Thomas,  Baldwin, James,  Balzac, Honoré de, –, , ; Père Goriot,  Banta, Martha, ,  Baudelaire, Charles,  Beard, George M.,  Beauvoir, Simone de, – Bederman, Gail,  Beer, Thomas,  Bell, Michael Davitt, , –, – Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, –, – Benjamin, Walter, ,  Bernard, Claude,  Bersani, Leo,  bicycle, , – bildungsroman, , , ; gendered, , , , . See also female bildungsroman; male bildungsroman Birnbaum, Michele, , ,  birth, , , , , , –, 

birth control, , ; and African American women, , –; Du Bois on, , ; Grimké and, , –, ; and modernity, , – Birth Control Review, , – Bisland, Elizabeth, – body: African American, , , , , , –; in Chopin, , , ; and compulsion, , ; female, , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, –, , , , –, , , , ; and history, –, ; as machine, –, , , –, ; male, , , , , –; in modernity, , , ; in naturalist fiction, , , , , , , ; in Norris, –, , –, –, , , –; rationalization of, , , –; in Stein, , , , ; and work, ,  Boston marriages,  Bowlby, Rachel,  Braude, Ann,  Braudel, Ferdinand,  Bridges, J. H.,  Bristol, Augusta Cooper,  Brodhead, Richard, , ,  Brontë, Charlotte,  Brontë, Emily,  Brooks, Van Wyck, – Brown, Bill,  Brown, John,  Butler, Judith, – Cain, William E.,  Calvinism, , , – Campbell, Donna,  capitalism, , , ; and Dreiser, , , , ; and modernity, , ; and naturalist fiction, , , ; and women, , , 

 

Carby, Hazel, ,  Cargill, Oscar,  Cather, Willa,  Century (magazine),  chance, , –, , , – Chevrel, Yves,  Chopin, Kate, , –; The Awakening, , , , –, , –, –, , , –, , , ; and compulsion, ; on Darwinism, –; and naturalist fiction, –, –, ; on Zola,  class, , ,  coeducation, , , –,  compulsion(s): in African American women’s writing, ; and agency, , , , –, –, , , –; and the body, , ; in Chopin, ; cleaning, , , –, , , –, , , –; and consumerism, , –; counting, , , ; in Crane, , , –; and creativity, , , –, –, , , ; and description, , , , , –, –, ; and details, , , –, , , , ; vs. determinism, , , –, ; in Dreiser, , , , , ; and domesticity, , , –, –, –, –, , –, –, –, , , –; and doubt, , –, , –, , , ; and eating, , –; and fads, , –, , ; as feeling of incompleteness, , –, , , –, , , , , , ; and female naturalist plot, , –, , –, , , , , –, , , ; femininity as, , –, , , ; feminism and, , , , , –; in Freeman, , , , –, , –, , –, –; Freud on, , , , , , –, ; gender as, –; in Gilman, , , , , –, –, –, , ; habits, , , , , ;

and historicist criticism, , –, , , ; and history, –, , , , , –, ; hoarding, , , –, , ; and impulsiveness, –, ; in James, , –, , , ; Janet on, , , –, , , , ; in Jewett, –; and marriage, , , ; and masculinity, , , , –, ; in Morrison, ; and motherhood, , , , –, ; and naturalist fiction, –, –, , –, –, , , –, –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –; and nature, –, –, –, –, , , ; and neurasthenia, , –; in Norris, , –, –, , –, , , , –, –, –, –, –, ; ordering, , , , –, –, , , , , , –, –, , –, ; in Petry, –; and pregnancy, –; in psychology, contemporary, , –, ; in psychology, late nineteenth-century, , , –, –, , –, , –; and purity, , , , –; and racism, –; and rationalization, –, , –, , ; and reading, , ; and religion, –; and repetition, –, –, , –, –, , , –; rituals, , , , , –; in Stein, , , –; and stuckness, , –, –, , , –, –, –, –, ; in Wharton, , , –; and will, , –, –, –, , ; and women, –, , –, , , , , ; in Wright, , ; and writing,  Conrad, Joseph,  consumerism, –, ; and compulsion, , –; in Dreiser, , –, –, ; in James, ; and modernity, , , , , ; women and, ,

, , , , , –, –,  Cook, Don,  Cooper, Anna Julia,  Cooper, James Fenimore, – Cosmopolitan (magazine), –,  Cottom, Daniel, –,  Cowley, Malcolm, ,  Crane, Stephen: and compulsion, –; and Freeman, ; and naturalist fiction, , , , , , ; Wright on, . Works: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, , –, ; The Red Badge of Courage, , , , , –, , –,  criticism. See Americanist criticism; feminist criticism; historicist criticism Crow, Charles,  Dale, Alan, – Darwin, Charles, –, . See also Darwinism Darwinism, , ; Chopin on, –; Du Bois on, ; Freud on, –; and history, –, , , ; and modernity, , , ; in naturalist fiction, –, , , ; social, , ; Stein on, , ; and women,  Davis, Sara deSaussure, – De Man, Paul,  De Staël, Germaine, Corinne,  decline, plot of. See plots of decline degeneration, , –, , , –, , ,  Degler, Carl,  DeKoven, Marianne,  Derrida, Jacques,  description: compulsive, , , , , –, –, ; and feminism, –, ; and history, –, , –, ; and naturalist fiction, , , –, , –, –, , , , , –, ; and psychological texts, –





details: and compulsion, , , –, , , , , ; in Crane, –, –, ; in Freeman, , –; in Gilman, , , ; and history, , , –, ; and naturalist fiction, , , –, –, , –, , –, , , ; in Norris, –, ; and realism, ,  determinism: in African American women’s writing, ; in Chopin, –; in naturalist fiction, , , –, , , , –, –, ; in Stein, ; in Wharton,  Dickens, Charles,  Dijkstra, Bram, ,  Dillingham, William, ,  Dimock, Wai Chee, ,  domesticity: compulsive, , , –, –, , –, –, –, –, , , –; in Crane, –; domestication, , , ; domestic fiction, , –, , , , , ; in Dreiser, ; feminism on, , , ; in Freeman, , , –, , , –, , ; in Gilman, –, , , , –, –, , –; and history, ; in Jewett, –, ; male, –, –, ; and naturalist fiction, , , , , , , –, , –; and nature, , , , –, , , –; in Norris, , –, , , –, –, ; rationalization of, , –, , , –; in Wharton, ; women’s revolt against, , –, – doubt, , , , –; doubting mania, –, , –, , ,  Douglas, Ann, –,  Dreiser, Theodore, , , –; and compulsion, , , , , , ; and naturalist fiction, , , –, , –, , –, , –; and Wharton,

 

–, –; and women, –, –, –; Wright on, . Works: An Amateur Laborer, , ; An American Tragedy, ; Sister Carrie, , –, , , , –, , –, –, , , ,  Dresser, Paul,  Du Bois, W. E. B., ; and Larsen, ; and Norris, . Works: “The Damnation of Women,” ; The Quest of the Silver Fleece, , ; “Sociology Hesitant,”  Du Maurier, George, Trilby, , –,  Du Saulle, Legrand, – DuCille, Ann, – Dunbar, Paul Laurence, ; Sport of the Gods, ,  Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, ; on birth control, , . Works: “Ellen Fenton,” –; “A Modern Undine,” –, ,  Eby, Clare Virginia,  Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns),  Ellis, Havelock, , , , – eugenics, , , –, , ,  evolutionism. See Darwinism Fabre, Michel,  Fauset, Jessie, , ,  feeling of incompleteness, , –, , , –, , , , , ,  Felski, Rita,  female bildungsroman, –, , , , , ; and compulsion, , –, , –, , , , , –, , ,  feminism, ; in Americanist criticism, , –, ; and the body, , ; feminist theory, , –, –; and history, , , , . See also feminism, late nineteenth-century; feminist criticism

feminism, late nineteenth-century: Chopin and, –; and compulsion, , , , –; as fantasy, , –; and the future, , , , ; and history, , , –, –, –; in James, , , , –, –, –, ; and motherhood, , –, ; and nature, –, –, ; and the New Woman, , –; and race, –, –; and spiritualism, , , , ; and therapeutic rationalization, , , , –, , –,  feminist criticism: on the s, –, ; on Chopin, –; and compulsion, ; on Freeman, –, –; on Gilman, –, , –, , –; and historicist criticism, –, , , , , –; on Jewett, , , –, , –; on Larsen, ; and race, –; on Stein, ; on Wharton, ; on women writers, , ,  feminization, , , , , –, , ,  Fetterley, Judith,  Fiedler, Leslie, , –,  Fielding, Henry, Shamela,  Finck, Henry T., ,  Flaubert, Gustave, . Works: Madame Bovary, , , , , ; Trois Contes,  folie du doute. See doubt Foucault, Michel, –, ,  Fox sisters,  Franklin, Benjamin, ,  Frederick, Christine,  Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, , , , ; and compulsion, , , , –, , –, , –, –; and Crane, ; Gilman on, , , , ; and James, ; and Jewett, –; and naturalist fiction, , , , –, –; and New Woman, , ; and

Norris, , –, –; and Petry, ; and Zola, . Works: “An Honest Soul,” –; “A New England Nun,” , , , –, –, , , –, –; “Old Woman Magoun,” –; Pembroke, , , –; “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’”  Freud, Sigmund, , , , ; on obsessional neurosis, , , , , , –, ; on women, , ; and Wright, ; on Zola, , . Works: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, , –, ; “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” ; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, ; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ; “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” – future, the: Adams on, –, ; feminists on, , , , ; in Freeman, ; and history, , , ; in James, , –, , –; in naturalist fiction, , , –, ; in Norris, , , –, ; and women’s life stories, –, , , , –, , , , , –, ,  Gaines, Kevin,  Garvey, Ellen Gruber, , – Geertz, Clifford,  Geismar, Maxwell, , ,  Gibson Girl,  Gilbert, Sandra,  Gillman, Susan,  Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, , , , , , ; and compulsion, , , , –, –, –, , ; on domesticity, –, , , , –, –, , –; on Freeman, , , , , ; and naturalist fiction, , , –; and neurasthenia, , –, , , . Works: Herland,





Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, (continued ) –, –, , –, ; The Home: Its Work and Influences, , –, , , , ; “If I Were a Man,” ; The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, , , ; “Masculine Literature,” –; Women and Economics, , , ; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” , , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, , –, –, , , , –,  Gissing, George,  Glasgow, Ellen,  Gordon, Linda,  Gordon, Rae Beth,  Gossett, Thomas,  gothic, –, , , , –,  Graham, Don, –,  Graham, Margaret Baker,  Grant, Robert, Unleavened Bread,  Grimké, Angelina Weld, , , ; and naturalist fiction, . Works: “The Closing Door,” –; “Goldie,” ; Rachel, , –, –, – Gubar, Susan,  Guys, Constantin, – Habegger, Alfred, – Hall, G. Stanley, ; Adolescence, –, , –, , –, , ,  Hall, Sallie J., –,  Hamon, Philippe,  Harlem Renaissance, ,  Harper, Frances E. Watkins, – Harper, Ida,  Harper’s,  Hawthorne, Nathaniel,  Hayden, Dolores,  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ,  Hemingway, Ernest,  Hennessy, Rosemary, –

 

Herrick, Robert, ; Together, , , –,  Herron, Carolivia, –, – Higham, John, , – Hirsch, David, –, ,  historicist criticism: on African American women writers, ; Americanist turn toward, , –, –, ; on Chopin, , ; and compulsion, , –, , , ; critique of, –, , , , –, ; and feminist criticism, –, , , , , –; on Freeman, , ; on Gilman, –, , –; on Jewett, , –, , , –; new historicism, –, , –, ,  history: Adams on, –, ; Benjamin on, ; and bildungsroman, , , , , , ; body in, –, ; and chance, , –, , , –; and compulsion, –, , , , , –, ; and Darwinism, –, , , ; description in, –, , –, ; details in, –, , –, ; and the emergent, , –; and fads, , , , – , –; and feminism, , , , , , –, –, –; and the future, , , ; in historicist criticism, as category, –, –, ; incomplete, , –, , ; in James, , , , –; naturalist, –, , –, –, –, , –, ; and nature, , , –, , , –, , , ; in new historicism, –, , –, , ; and New Woman, , , –, ; problem of narrating, in modernity, –, , –; realist, , –, –, –, –, , ; and regionalism, , , ; and repetition, , , , –, , , , ; social, , , , –; Stein on, ; stuck, , , –, –, ;

women’s, , –, , , ; women’s relation to the category of, –, –, –, , –, , –, –, , . See also historicist criticism Hochman, Barbara, –, , , , – Hoffmann, Frank,  Hopkins, Pauline, ; Contending Forces, –, ,  House, Elizabeth Balkman, ,  Howard, June,  Howells, William Dean, –, –, , , ; A Modern Instance,  Hull, Gloria, –, ,  Hurston, Zora Neale, Seraph on the Suwanee, , –; Their Eyes Were Watching God, – Huxley, Thomas,  hysteria, –,  immigration, , , , ,  imperialism, –, , , ,  incompleteness. See feeling of incompleteness industrialization, , , , –, ,  Irigaray, Luce,  James, Henry, , , , , ; and compulsion, , –, , , ; on feminism, , –, –, –, ; and naturalist fiction, , –, ; on Wharton, –. Works: The Bostonians, –, , –, –, –, –, ; “Daisy Miller,” , –; The Portrait of a Lady, , ; The Princess Casamassima,  James, William, , , , ; on compulsion, , ; and naturalist fiction, ; and Norris, , ; and Stein, , , ,  Jameson, Fredric, , –, , –

Janet, Pierre: on compulsion, , , –, , , , ; Les obsessions et la psychasthénie, ,  Jeffords, Susan,  Jeffreys, Sheila,  Jewett, Sarah Orne, , , –, , , –; and compulsion, –; The Country of the Pointed Firs, , –, ; and Freeman, – Johnson, Claudia, – Johnson, James Weldon,  Johnson, Samuel,  Kaplan, Amy, –, – Kerr, Howard, ,  Kierkegaard, Søren,  Kipling, Rudyard, ,  Kirk, Ellen Olney,  LaCapra, Dominick, –, –,  Lamarckianism, ,  Lane, Ann J.,  Lanser, Susan, – Lapsley, Gaillard,  Larsen, Nella, , ; and naturalist fiction, , ; Quicksand, , , , –, , ; on Stein, , , ,  Lasch, Christopher,  Lawrence, D. H.,  Leach, William, –,  Lears, T. J. Jackson, , ,  Lewis, R. W. B.,  Lewis, Sinclair, Main Street,  Libbey, Laura Jean,  Lidoff, Joan,  Litvak, Joseph,  Liu, Alan,  Lombroso, Cesare,  London, Jack, , , – Lukács, Georg, ; “Narrate or Describe?”, , , , –, –, , –, 





Lutz, Tom,  Luxemburg, Rosa,  Lynn, Kenneth, , – machines, , ; Adams on, , ; bodies as, –, , , –, ; and compulsion, ; and masculinity, –; and women, , –, , , –, ,  male bildungsroman: and compulsion, , , , , ; in Crane, , , , –; quest story, , –, , ,  Marks, Patricia, – marriage: and African American women, –, ; in Chopin, –; and compulsion, , , ; and divorce, , –; in Dreiser, ; in Freeman, , ; in Gilman, –, ; in Grimké, –; in Herrick, ; and history, , –; in naturalist fiction, –, , ; in Norris, , , , –, –; plot, , , , , ; reform, , –; as stuckness, , , ; in Wharton, –; women’s rejection of, , –, , ,  Martin, Jay,  Marx, Karl, , ,  masculinity: in s American culture, , –, , ; and agency, , –, , , , ; and the body, , , , , –; and compulsion, , , , –, ; in Crane, –; in Dreiser, –, –, , –, ; Gilman on, –, ; and imperialism, , , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , –, , –, –, –, , ; and nature, –, , , –, –, , , –, , , ; in Norris, –, , –, , –, –, , –, , ; sentimental, , , –, –, –, –, , –, –,

 

–, , , ; and therapeutics, , , –,  masochism, , ; female, ,  mass media, , , , , , , , –,  maternity. See motherhood Matthews, Fannie Aymar,  Matthiessen, F. O., – Maudsley, Henry,  Maupassant, Guy de,  Maynard, Cora, – McClure’s, – McDowell, Deborah,  Messenger (journal),  Meyerowitz, Joanne,  Michaels, Walter Benn, , –, , –, ,  Miller, Eugene,  Miller, Kelly,  Mitchell, Silas Weir, –, –, , ,  modernism: Adams and, ; naturalism and, , , , , , , , ; Stein and, , , ; and women’s stories, ,  modernity: Adams on, –; and agency, –, –, ; in Americanist criticism, , –; and the body, , , ; and fads, –, ; as feminization, , , , , ; Gilman on, ; naturalist fiction and, –, –, –, ; nature in, –, –, , , , ; in Norris, , –; as plot of decline, –, , , , , , ; as plot of triumph, –, ; problem of narrating history in, –, , –; and rationalization, –, –, , , , ; and regionalism, , –; and technology, , , , –, –, ; and therapeutics, , ; women and, –, , , –, , –, –, –, , –, –, –, –, , , , , 

Moore, Laurence,  Morrison, Toni: Beloved, ; The Bluest Eye, –; Sula,  motherhood: Adams on, –; and African American women, –, , ; in Chopin, , –, , , , ; and compulsion, , , , –, ; and discipline, , –; Du Bois on, ; in Dunbar-Nelson, –; and feminism, , –, ; in Freeman, , ; in Gilman, , , , –; in Grimké, , –, , , ; in Herrick, ; and history, , , , , ; in Hopkins, , ; in Jewett, , , ; in Larsen, , , –; and naturalist fiction, , , , , , , ; and nature, , , , , , , , , –, ; in Norris, –, –, , , ; racial, , , , –, , , –, , , , , , ; rationalization of, –, , –; Roosevelt on, , , , , –, ; in Stein, , , –; in Wharton, , –; women’s rejection of, –, , , , –, , , –, , , –. See also reproduction Munsey’s, –, , – naturalism, , . See also naturalist fiction naturalist fiction: Adams and, –; and adventure fiction, , –, , , –; and African American writers, –, , , , –; agency in, –, –, –, –, , –, , , , ; Americanist criticism on, , –, –, ; the body in, , , , , , , ; and chance, , –, , –; characters, , , –, , –, ; Chopin and, –, –, ; compulsion as

subject in, –, –, , , , –, , , , , , , –; as compulsive, , –, , , , –, –, , , , , –, , , , ; Darwinism in, –, , , ; descriptive mode of, , , , –, –, , , , , –; details in, , , –, , , –, , –, , , ; determinism in, , , –, , , , –, –, ; as fatalistic, , , , ; female plot in, –, , –, –, , , , , , , –, , , , ; Freeman and, , , , –, –; the future in, , , –, ; Gilman and, , , –; Grimké and, ; history in, –, , –, –, –, –, ; incompleteness of, , , –, , –, , ; James and, , , ; Larsen and, ; marriage in, –, , ; masculinity in, , , , –, , –, –, –, –; mechanization in, , –; modernism and, , , , , , , , ; modernity and, –, –, –, ; motherhood in, , , , , , , , ; narrative mode of, , –, –, –, , , , ; natural forces in, , , , ; as “natural-ism,” –, , , , ; nature in, –, –, –, , , , , –, –, , , –, –, ; and New England fiction, –, , –, , –, , , ; new-historicist reading of, , , –, ; Petry and, , , ; plot of decline in, –, , , , , –, , , ; plot of triumph in, –, , , , ; and race, ; vs. realism, , , , –, –, –, , –, , , –, , ; and regionalism, , , , ,





naturalist fiction (continued ) , , , –, –; repetition in, , –, ; and sentimentality, , , , , –, , , –, ; sex in, , , , , ; and social sciences, , , ; Stein and, –, –, ; stuckness in, –, , –, –, –, , , , ; twentieth-century, , –, , , , ; urbanization in, , –, ; Wharton and, –, ; women in, , –, –, , –, –, , –, –, , , –; women writers and, , , , ; Wright and, , –; writing habits, . See also individual writers nature: Adams on, –, , ; and African American women, , , , , –, ; and agency, , ; in Chopin, –, –, ; and compulsion, –, –, –, –, , , ; and domesticity, , , , –, , , –; Du Bois on, ; in Dunbar-Nelson, –, ; evolutionary view of, –, –, ; and feminism, , –, –, ; in Freeman, , –, –, ; in Gilman, , , ; and history, , , , , , , –, , , , ; in Jewett, , , ; in Larsen, ; and masculinity, –, , , –, –, , , –, , , ; in modernity, –, –, , , , ; and motherhood, , , , , , , , , –, ; in naturalist fiction, –, –, –, , , , , –, –, , , –, –, ; in Norris, –, –, –, , , ; and regionalism, , , ; in Stein, –, , –; unnatural, , –, , , , , , –, ; and women, , ,

 

–, , , –, , , , , , ,  Naylor, Gloria,  neurasthenia, , , –, , , –, ,  New England: conscience, ; feminism, , ; fiction, –, , –, , –, , –, ,  New Woman, , –, –; Adams on, , ; Chopin on, , –; as fad, , –, –; and feminism, , –; Freeman and, ; and history, , , –, ; in Jewett, ; novels, –, ; and Old Man, , ,  Newman, Louise,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, ,  Nordau, Max, –, , ,  Norris, Frank, , , , , , ; and compulsion, , –, –, , –, , , , –, –, –, –, –, ; and Du Bois, ; essays, , –, ; and Freeman, , –, –; on Howells, , ; and William James, , ; and naturalist fiction, , , –, –, , , –, , , , ; and Stein, , ; and Wharton, , –, ; and women, –, , –, –, –, –, –; and Wright, ; and Zola, , , , . Works: Blix, –; A Man’s Woman, –; McTeague, , –, , , , , , , –, , –, , –, –, –, , , –, –, , –; Moran and the Lady Letty, –; The Octopus, –, , –; The Pit, , , , , ; Vandover and the Brute, –, , , –, , , , –, ; “Why Women Should Write the Best Novels—and Why They Don’t,” –; Yvernelle, 

North, Michael,  nostalgia: Gilman on, ; in Jewett, , ; and naturalist fiction, –, , –, ; in Norris, , –; and preservation, , , , –, –, –, –, –; and remasculinization, –, 

Punch,  purity: and feminist criticism, ; in Freeman, , –; in Gilman, ; and historicist criticism, , ; in Hopkins, –; in Jewett, ; in Norris, , , , –, , –; social, , 

objects, , –, –, , ; objectification, ,  obsession-compulsion. See compulsion(s)

race: in Chopin, –, , –; in Dunbar-Nelson, ; and feminism, –, –; and Gilman, , –; in Grimké, –, –; in Hopkins, –; in Hurston, ; in Jewett, , ; lynching, , , , ; and naturalist fiction, ; in Norris, , , , ; race women, , , , ; and reproduction, , , , –, , , ; in Stein, –, , . See also race suicide; racial uplift race suicide, , –, , , – racial uplift, –, , , ,  Rahv, Philip,  rationalization: of the body, , –, , –; and compulsion, –, , –, , ; and feminism, , , , –, –, ; of the home, –, , , –; and modernity, –, , , , , –; of motherhood, –, , – realism: and agency, –, –, –; and female bildungsroman, –, , , , ; Gilman and, –, ; and history, , –, –, –, –, , ; and male bildungsroman, , –; vs. naturalism, , , , –, –, –, , –, , , –, , , ; vs. sentimentalism, –, , , , ,  regionalism: and compulsion, , ; and domesticity, –, –, –, , , ; feminist criticism on, , ,

Parrington, V. L. (Vernon Louis), , ,  Pateman, Carole,  Pattee, Fred, , ,  Peppis, Paul,  Petrey, Sandy, – Petry, Ann, , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , . Works: The Narrows, , –; The Street, , , – Peyser, Thomas Galt, –, –,  Phillips, David Graham, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, –,  Pick, Daniel,  plots of decline, –, , , ; in Dreiser, ; in Norris, ; in Wharton, –, ,  plots of triumph, –, , , ,  Poovey, Mary,  Porter, Katherine Anne, – pregnancy, –, , , –; and abortion, ,  primitivism, –, , , ; in Du Bois, ; in Larsen, ; in Petry, ; in Stein, , ; in Norris,  professionalism, ,  Pryse, Marjorie,  psychology: contemporary, , –, ; late nineteenth-century, , –, –, , –, , , –, . See also individual psychologists





regionalism (continued ) –, –, –; and history, , , ; and modernity, , –; and naturalist fiction, , , , , , , , , –, – repetition: and agency, , , , , –, –, , , ; in Chopin, , ; and compulsion, –, –, , –, –, , , –; in Crane, ; and death drive, , –, –; and difference, , –, , ; and female naturalist plot, , , ; and history, , , , –, , , , ; and naturalist fiction, ; in Norris, , –; in Stein, , – reproduction: African American women and, , –; in Freeman, ; and naturalist fiction, , ; in Norris, , , ; problem of, in modernity, –, , , ; and race, , , , –, , , . See also motherhood Ribot, Théodule, –,  Richards, Ellen Swallow,  Richardson, Samuel, Pamela,  Riley, Denise,  Rodrique, Jessie,  Rogers, J. A.,  romance (genre), and feminization, , , ; and Chopin, , –; and naturalist fiction, , , , –, , –; and realism, –, , , – Romero, Lora, ,  Romines, Ann,  Roosevelt, Theodore, –, , , ; Adams on, ; on modern women, , , –, –, –, –, –; on race suicide, , –, ,  Rose, Jacqueline, –

 

Rowson, Susanna, Charlotte Temple, –,  Rubin, Gayle,  Ruddick, Lisa, ,  Sanger, Margaret, , , –,  Schor, Naomi, –,  Scott, Clement,  Scott, Walter, –, ,  Seltzer, Mark, , , , –, ,  sentiment d’incomplétude. See feeling of incompleteness sentimentality: and African American women’s writing, ; in Crane, , –; in Dreiser, , –, , , –; in James, –, ; and men, , , –, –, –, –, , –, –, –, , , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , , –, , , –, ; in Norris, –, –, –, –, , –, , , ; and rationalization, , ; and regionalism, –; “sentimental realism,” , –, ; in Wharton, , –, , ; and women, –, , –, , – sex/sexuality: and African American women, , , , –, , –, , ; in Chopin, , –, , –, ; in Freeman, ; Freud on, , –; in Gilman, , ; and history, ; and modern girls, , , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , , ; in Norris, , , , , –; rationalization of, –, –; sex education, ; in Stein, –, , –, ; and Wharton, ; in Wright,  Sims, William Gilmore,  Smith, Bonnie, 

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll,  Snead, James, –,  social sciences, , , , , –, , ,  Somerville, Siobhan,  Spencer, Herbert,  Spillers, Hortense,  Stanton, Elizabeth Cady,  Stein, Gertrude, , ; and compulsion, , , –; and Darwinism, , ; and Freeman, ; and William James, , , , ; Johnson on, ; Larsen on, , , ; and naturalist fiction, , –, , ; and Norris, , ; Wright on, , , –. Works: “The Gentle Lena,” , ; The Making of Americans, –, ; “Melanctha,” , , , , , –, ; Q. E. D., , ; Three Lives, , –, , –,  Stevenson, Robert Louis,  Stewart, Susan, , , ,  Strasser, Susan,  Stroheim, Erich von, Greed (film),  stuckness: and agency, , –, , –; and compulsion, , –, –, , , –, –, –, –, ; and description, , , –, , –; and history, , , –, –, ; in naturalist fiction, –, , –, –, –, , , –, , ; and repetition, , , , , –; of turn-of-the-century women, –, – Sykes, A. G. P., , – Tate, Claudia, –, , , , , – Taylor, Frederick Winslow, . See also Taylorism Taylorism, ,  temporality: of fads, , ; and naturalist

fiction, , , –, ; and rhythm, –; suspended, , , ; women and, , , –, ,  therapeutic culture, and compulsion, , , ; and feminism, , –, , ; and feminization, –, ; and regionalism, , –, ; and remasculinization, , , , –; rest cure, , –, , –,  Thomas, Brook,  Thompson, William,  Thoreau, Henry David,  Tone, Andrea,  Trachtenberg, Alan,  Trilling, Lionel, –, –, ,  Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens),  urbanization: in Dreiser, ; and modernity, , –, , , , ; and women, , , , , –, , –, ,  Van Vorst, Mrs. John, and Marie van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils, , – wage work (women’s), –, , , –, , –, , –, , –, , –, , –, –, , , –, ; actresses, –; factory work, –, , ; offiice work, , –; schoolteaching, ; shop girls, , , ,  Walker, Alice, ; The Color Purple, – Wallace, Michele,  Ward, Lester,  Wardwell, Mary E., ,  Warren, Austin, ,  Washington, Booker T., ,  Washington, Mary Helen,  Weber, Max, ,  Weiss, M. Lynn, 





Wershoven, C. J.,  Westbrook, Perry,  Wharton, Edith, , , , , –, ; and compulsion, , , –; and Dreiser, –, –; James on, –; and naturalist fiction, ; and Norris, , , , ; and Wright, . Works: “Bunner Sisters,” , , , ; The Custom of the Country, ; The House of Mirth, , , , , –,  Whitman, Walt,  will: in Chopin, , ; and compulsion, , –, –, –, , ; in Crane, ; in Dreiser, ; in Freeman, –; in Gilman, ; in Grimké, ; neurasthenia and, , –, ; and repetition, , ; in Stein, ,  Willard, Frances,  Williams, Raymond,  Wister, Owen, – Wolff, Captain M. P.,  Woman’s Era,  women: Adams on, –, ; adrift, , , , , ; African American, , , , –, , –, ; and agency, , , , ; Anglo-Saxon, , –; bodies of, , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, –, , , , –, , , , ; and compulsion, –, , –, , , , , ; in Dreiser, –, –, –; history, relation to the category of, –, –, –, , –, , –, –, , ; life stories of, –, , , , –, , , , , , –, , ; and modernity, –, , , –, , –, –, , –, , –, –, –, –, , , , , ; and naturalist

 

fiction, , –, , –, , –, –, , –, –, , , –; and nature, , , , –, , , , , , , ; in Norris, –, , –, –, –, –, –; and property, –; as stuck, –, –; urban, , , , , –, , –, , . See also female bildungsroman; New Woman; wage work (women’s); women writers women writers: African American, , , , , , –; feminist criticism on, , , ; historicist criticism on, , –, , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , ; New Woman, –; Norris on, –; and race, –; and regionalism, , , –, –, ; turn-of-the-century, , –. See also individual writers Wright, Richard: and compulsion, , ; on Crane, ; on Dreiser, ; on Freud, ; on Marx, ; and naturalist fiction, , , , –; and Norris, ; on Stein, , , –; and Wharton, . Works: Black Boy, ; “Long Black Song,” ; Native Son, – Wyndham, George, – Zagarell, Sandra,  Zeno’s paradox, – Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, , – Zola, Émile, , ; Chopin on, ; and compulsion, , ; and Freeman, ; Freud on, , ; Howells on, ; and James, , ; and naturalist fiction, , , , , ; and Norris, , , , ; Schor on, ; and women, , . Works: The Experimental Novel, ; Nana, , , , , ; “Story of a Madman,” 