A Study in Ubban Fiction

THE i m i YOKE ITOVEL: A STUDY IN UBBAN FICTION -DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Eugene Arden, B.A., A.M. The Ohio State University 1953 Approved by: Adviser / The New York Novel; A Study in Urban Fiction Eugene Arden A 164S Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter 1 ‘Two New Yorks l\. Chapter 2 The hvll City 25 Chapter 3 A Pomantic View 80 Chapter The Islands of Manhattan 100 Chapter 5 Form and Content 161 Notes 223 Bibliography 2^6 Autobiography 259 LL Preface The initial motivation for choosing this topic was personal; through a study of the New York novel, I felt that I could return to the roots of my experience. Born and brought up in New York, I sought to learn something of the city'8 history and influence, and to discover what dis tinctive part it had played in the nation's literary growth. But since New York was a capital city of the western world, of the same rank as London and Paris, I imagined that such a study as I ad in mind had already been done, I found, however, that no such study existed. The few buoks whose titles suggested an interest similar to mine had entirely different objectives, Arthur B. Maurice's New York in Fiction (1901), Charles Hemstreat's Literary New York (1903), and Rufus and Gtili© Wilson's New York in Literature: the Story Told in Landmarks of Town and Country (19^7 ) are all concerned with literary associations; here is where Poe lived and there is where Bryant revised "Thanatopsis". George A. Dunlap's 1931). dissertation. The City in the American Novel 1789 - 1900, worked over virgin territory, but its coverage of thj.-ee eastern seaboard cities -- Boston, New York, and Philadelphia -- neither fulfilled the title nor allowed extended s tudy of a single complex of circumstances. There was certainly no scarcity of material for me to .1- -2- work with; the real problem was to find a plan of organ ization which would not fall into such mechanical headings as politics, finance, theatre, and so on. The plan which finally emerged was one which considered the novels accord ing to their intention and cultural meaning. I found two chief types of New York novels: in one, romance and optimism were the keynoted, and the city represented a a battleground where intrepid heroes overcame obstacles and achieved success. This kind of novel became an easy addition to the whole mythology in America which taught that virtue is ultimately rewarded, that honesty is the best policy, and that by manly perseverance any messenger boy can grow up to become the president of the United States, or even better, the president of a great railroad. But the nay-aayers, I found, had a more pervasive influence on fiction than did the optimists. It has been pointed out that the moat conspicuous failure of industrial democracy is to be found in the great modern cities. Wealth and squalor live there cheek by jowl, the life of one in startling contrast to the other. New York, though famous for its fabulous wealth, was even more infamous for its incredible slums. The materials for realistic and occasionally embittered novels were abundant, and with Dickens as a model, something new started to appear in the IBRD's and l830*s. New York vice, intemperance, and -3- poverty were first exploited in cheap, sensational fiction, but led to what I believe was one of the earliest schools of American realism, crude and t entative as that realism may have been. It was a literature of protest, and though expressed in melodramatic terms, was based on a surge of real compassion for New Yorkers who were victimized by the conditions of their own city. The nature of my study demanded that I pay some atten tion to the forgotten novels wnich were once very popular. I attempted, however, to dwell at length only on novels of some literary merit. I also paused frequently to correlate the novels with their historical background. If the tone of my writing suggests that I am quarreling with the city, it may be only a lover’s quarrel; but it is a real one nevertheless• I would like to express gratitude for the guidance of brofessor Claude Simpson, who read the entire manuscript in its several stages of composition, and Professor William Gharvat, who helped me formulate the plan for this disser tation. Chapter One: Two New Yorks The clearest Impression we get from novels of New York life is that they deal not with one but with two cities — contradictory in their natures, yet existing side by side with equal vigor. For well over a century, American novelists have designated New York as a place-name symbol for new o^/portunity, wealth, and power; yet at the same time other novelists have pictured New ôrk as a gathering place for all the depraved and frustrating in fluences in American life, ^'iriters could invoke either image of the metropolis, playing at will on the rural American* s yearning for wider horizons and a more exciting tempo of life, or on his fear and distrust of the great evil city waiting to corrupt his innocence. This **split vision" of the city pervades and dominates the New York novel. We find it at play in so sensitive and experimental a writer as John Dos Passos, and we find it too in such hack writers of pulp fiction as Osgood Bradbury and Ned Buntline, who fashioned "good" and "bad" New Yorks according to the preconceptions of their readers* Tnis self-contradictory set of values, informing virtually all of New York fiction, congealed into an urban raythôf enormous influence. We can best understand these New fork novels if we stop first to exairiine the historical circumstances from which -5- they emerged, A close relationship exists between the facts of Iffe about New York and the fiction portraying New York life. Indeed, the antithetical Images of two New Yorks are supported by empirical fact, for congressed into the city are both the best and worst of modern life. New York, like every metropolis, has simultaneously been considered a Babylon and a New Jerusalem. The coeval existence of slum and splendor, virtue and debauchery, promise and frustration repeatedly arrested the attention of observors; Henry George, on a business trip to New York in I666, was much struck by the "shocking contrast between monstrous wealth and debasing want. James P. Muirhead, the Englishman who compiled Baedeker*s Handbook to the United States, characterized New York in 1902 as "a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at the boots, The basis for the New York of romance and achievement is easily understood. Throughout the nineteenth century New York was a dynamic center of growth and activity un paralleled in the New World, establishing a pattern of supremacy which reaches unbroken into our own century. Leading and typifying the urban movement in America, New York contributed spectacularly to a new structure of Industry, trade, and all the impulses of aavanced civil ization, "Education, literature, science. Invention, the —6— fine arts, social reform, public hygiene, the use of leisure, the * good life' — all these were given lift and direction” by the activities which abounded in New ôrk as well as in other urban centersWhatever may have been the theoretical advantages of the simplicity of rural existence, "the ostentatious luxury of the newly rich in the growing cities was paraded in the press with a kind of prurient fascination as evidence of what a free society might achieve by way of the good life." We can well imagine what effects must have been achieved by descriptions of the Vanderbilt fancy dress ball of March 26, 1883, "the most sumptuous entertainment that had yet been given in America," or by Delmonico dinner parties costing almost a hundred and fifty dollars per person*' While the village parsons preached against such waste and materialism, the more ambitious village lads dreamed of conquest in the great city world. The particular prosperity and influence of New York derived originally from geographical advantages. Situated right at the ocean front. New York's harbor was "the best on the North Atlantic coast for a combination of trans- ft atlantic, coastal, and inland trade." Though the Hudson Hiver sometimes froze, those waters fared better on the average than the colder ports of New England or Canada to the north, and they fogged up less frequently than the -7- quieter waters of Philadelphia and Baltimore to the south. Furthermore, the New York harbor’s natural configuration offered the largest wharfage space in the most compact area, a matter which was to prove vital in later periods of expansion. New York’s history has always been identified with commerce, the Dutch having originally founded the city for trading purposes. The city’s first heraldic design actually included representations of fur and flour, the first staples of New World trade. New ôrk also became a kind of county seat for the neighboring agricultural area, and early assumed its cosmopolitan character. A Jesuit missionary who visited the infant Dutch colony in 161^3 was struck by the wide variety of sects and nations represented among the inhabitants, and quoted the Direct or General as saying that the community included men of no less than eighteen different languagesBy the time of the Revolution, New xork was a prospering little 10 metropolis of 20,000 people, and shortly became the new nation’s capital.

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