Realist Writers and Gothic Texts in Progressive Era America
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2013 Gothic Slumming: Realist Writers and Gothic Texts in Progressive Era America Gillian Nelson Bauer Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Bauer, Gillian Nelson, "Gothic Slumming: Realist Writers and Gothic Texts in Progressive Era America" (2013). Dissertations. 500. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/500 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2013 Gillian Nelson Bauer LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO GOTHIC SLUMMING: REALIST WRITERS AND GOTHIC TEXTS IN PROGRESSIVE ERA AMERICA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY GILLIAN NELSON BAUER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2013 Copyright by Gillian Nelson Bauer, 2013 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the assistance and inspiration of the English Department faculty at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Pamela Caughie provided me with the vocabulary I needed to discuss class in America, and challenged me to allow my dissertation to be as difficult as the subject matter warranted. Dr. Jeff Glover asked the hard questions and inspired me to think of the future implications of my project. Most importantly, I’d like to thank my director, Dr. Jack Kerkering, who has supported this dissertation since its inception in an ambitious, somewhat reckless independent study. Besides displaying unflagging faith in this project, Dr. Kerkering has helped me articulate my thoughts, brought complex issues into focus, and patiently encouraged me to find my voice. Loyola University Chicago has funded my graduate studies generously. The five years of funding I received through a Dean’s Fellowship allowed me the time and resources I needed to develop this project from a few disconnected observations made through several courses into a complex argument. The Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation graciously provided me with a Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2012-2013, which allowed me to focus exclusively on completing this dissertation. My research was enriched by three colleagues who shared their unpublished manuscripts with me; thank you to Dr. Rebecca Peters-Golden, Dr. Ann Mattis, and Dr. Julia Daniel for permission to cite your work here. I would also like to thank the research librarians and staff of the iii Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for granting me access to the Frank Norris Collection of Papers and Related Materials as I conducted research for Chapter Three. Finally, I’d like to thank the friends and family who helped me from the beginning to the end of this process. To Liz Hanson and Julia Bninski: a scholar couldn’t ask for a more supportive writing group. Your thoughtful commentary and substantive suggestions guided me through the past two years. To the members of Glottal Attack: thank you for making wonderful music with me, and for granting me an hour or so every week to unwind. My brother Sean, sister Jana, and parents John and Penny never wavered in their belief that I would succeed, and their enthusiasm convinced me, as well. Finally, I’d like to thank my husband and best friend Jerry. My love, my cheering section, and my advocate, thank you for helping me laugh through it all. iv For Jerry Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King, It TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: CLASSING THE GOTHIC/GOTHICIZING CLASS 1 CHAPTER ONE: EXPRESSING THE GOTHIC: PROGRESSIVE ERA CLASS ANXIETIES AND THE DYNAMICS OF GOTHIC REALISM 43 CHAPTER TWO: THE “INCORRUPTIBLE COSTODIANS” OF THE PAST: CLASS AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE IN EDITH WHARTON’S FICTION 112 CHAPTER THREE: “MANY OTHER KINDS OF MAN”: DOUBLES AND CROSS-CLASS EXPERIMENTATION IN FRANK NORRIS’S FICTION 189 CHAPTER FOUR: MODAL SEGREGATION AND THE CANONICAL FATE OF GOTHIC REALISM 255 BIBLIOGRAPHY 322 VITA 337 vii INTRODUCTION CLASSING THE GOTHIC/GOTHICIZING CLASS Americans have a long history of avoiding the topic of social class. Our inability to articulate clearly what we mean by “class” in a democratic republic, or the extent to which it determines or defines the American experience, is a source of confusion, even terror, that finds its way into our cultural productions. In this Introduction, I contend that the gothic mode was employed in response to a proliferation of social concerns that surfaced during the Progressive Era, the moment at which “class” became simultaneously legible and markedly confused in America. Using media coverage of two historical “events” — the alleged birth of a Devil Baby at Chicago’s Hull House in 1913, and the capture of America’s first serial killer H. H. Holmes in 1895 — as case studies, I suggest that gothic language was deployed during this period to both express and control class tensions and anxieties. I then begin to account for the uncanny absence of critical discussion surrounding the close relationship between class and the gothic.1 I outline various ways in which my project is problematized by definitional instability and by the 1 In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Freud defines the unheimlich, or uncanny, as encompassing opposites: “on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight” (375). By tracing definitive gradations of heimlich and unheimlich, Freud demonstrates that at their extremes, the two words merge into one another; that which is familiar becomes unfamiliar, and vice versa (377). The term unheimlich embodies contradiction, and as such is a useful term for describing both gothic phenomena and the contradictions of class in America. 1 2 invisibility of class to the middle class, which has generated a critical lacuna where discussions of this relationship should be. Finally, I detail why the gothic is that mode best suited to voice class anxieties in American fiction, arguing that its employment is one method by which writers could both efface class and make the reality of class in America visible. Gothicizing Class: The Hull House Devil Baby and the Crimes of H. H. Holmes Case Study 1 In the fall of 1913, a gothic drama unfolded on the steps of Hull House, a Settlement House designed to serve Chicago’s immigrant poor. A rumor began circulating that the house had taken in a “devil baby” abandoned by its immigrant parents. An onslaught of inquiries plagued Hull House, with visitor after visitor of all classes demanding to see the demon baby, rumored to be red skinned, with horns, tail, cloven feet, and a foul mouth.2 “For six weeks,” Jane Addams would later write, “the streams of visitors from every part of the city and suburbs to this mythical baby poured in 2 Although the most well known of the imps, the Hull House devil baby was certainly not the first (or last) such child allegedly to have been born to poor or immigrant parents in America. As early as May 1888 a similar rumor swept Cleveland, Ohio, where the evil child was supposedly born in Newburg, a Polish suburb. According to a report that made its way to the London, Middlesex Courier, police were called in to prevent residents from “lynching” the “family suspected of harboring the devil baby” (“A ‘Devil-Baby’” 18). According to Adam Selzer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer fabricated the story for its April Fool’s Edition in 1888 before it was picked up and reprinted as “true” in various other outlets (Chicago Unbelievable). The story found its way to many cities, including Atlanta (where a tongue-in- cheek February, 1906 item from the Constitution located the baby in “darktown”), New York, and Washington DC, before arriving on the steps of Hull House in 1913. The Hull House story bears a strong resemblance to these earlier iterations of the same myth. While the details have changed, permutations of the devil baby myth persist into the present, most obviously in the novel and film Rosemary’s Baby and, more recently, in the Spanish horror film REC (2007) (along with its American re-make Quarantine [2008]). 3 all day long, and so far into the night that the regular activities of the settlement were almost swamped” (“Devil-Baby”). The popular press eventually took notice of the story, predominately in small town Midwestern newspapers with rural or working-class readerships, like the Emporia Daily Gazette and the Burlington Hawkeye, the latter of which provides a fairly detailed early version of the story in an article titled “Chicago Said to Have Devil Child”: [T]he prospective mother said she would rather have a devil than a baby, her offspring already being seven…. The midwife showed the mother the baby. It had horns and a tail and it could talk. When the baby saw its mother it shook its finger at her and said: “You wanted a devil and you have got one. If you kill me six others will appear.” (1) While stopping short of claiming the story is true, the article does note that, “the report is credited by thousands,” and doesn’t exactly deny the child’s existence with subtitles like “City Astounded by Report that Baby is Born with Horns and Tail,” and “THE WEST SIDE IS SEARCHED,” implying an organized official search for the devil baby. Even Addams believed there might be some truth to the story; she eventually hired detectives to trace its source and to look for a real deformed child born somewhere in the vicinity of Hull House, but to no avail (Addams, “Devil-Baby”).