Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth-Century US Literature
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations (1 year embargo) 1-23-2012 On the Move: Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature Douglas Anthony Guerra Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss_1yr Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Guerra, Douglas Anthony, "On the Move: Games and Gaming Figures in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature" (2012). Dissertations (1 year embargo). 2. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss_1yr/2 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations (1 year embargo) 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 © 2012 Douglas Anthony Guerra LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO ON THE MOVE: GAMES AND GAMING FIGURES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY DOUGLAS ANTHONY GUERRA CHICAGO, IL DECEMBER 2011 Copyright by Douglas A. Guerra, 2011 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Texts, like games, are deeply social objects, and this piece of writing is no exception. While at Loyola, I have had the benefit of writing, thinking, and working with an exceptional group of people, all of whom I would like to think are reflected somehow in this work (though its faults are certainly my own). Conversations with Faith Bennett, Leif Eckstrom, Sarah Foust Vinson, Ben Keough, Bill Malcuit, Roger McNamara, and Tripthi Pillai both kept me sane and probed productive insanities throughout my graduate experience. By the same token, I am indebted to Dr. Pamela Caughie, Dr. Joseph Janangelo, and Dr. Steven Venturino—wonderful teachers who pushed me to develop both my ideas and style in early coursework at the same time as they provided models of professionalism and caring pedagogy. Further, I am grateful to Dr. Christopher Castiglia, who helped me in the earliest stages of this project to discover the beauty of antebellum U.S. writing, as well as its powerful political, philosophical, and technological legacy in our own time. My advising committee was amazing at all points in process—always available, thoughtful, and, when necessary, blunt. With a keen theoretical mind, Dr. Paul Jay consistently pushed me to contextualize the relationship between my own thought and that of other important philosophical and literary critical schools. An exemplary writer and scholar of the relationship between literature and material culture, Dr. Steven Jones iii was a model of razor-sharp prose, creative thinking, and textual attentiveness throughout. His genuine interest and conversational generosity gave me the confidence to pursue this project at a time well before game studies and digital humanities had attained the currency they now have. Similarly, my director, Dr. John (Jack) Kerkering was always willing to think through a draft, talk through a difficult argumentative snag, or generally engage with whatever philosophical flights of fancy I threw his way. His incisive eye for language and aesthetics helped me to imagine how style and logic could cooperate in fascinating and inventive ways. For that, as well as his kind mentorship, I am deeply grateful. I also want to thank the English Department and Graduate School at Loyola for their financial support during the process and completion of the project. An Advanced Doctoral Fellowship provided crucial assistance during the initial research and first chapters, while an Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation Fellowship during 2010–2011 allowed me to focus on bringing things together without added financial worry during a trying time as my wife recovered from a life-threatening illness. Additionally, I would like to recognize Amber Gravett and David Tuma, whose generous research grant allowed me to travel out to the Milton Bradley Company archives in the summer of 2011, documenting important materials that reinforced the more distant readings of the dissertation and providing an opportunity to introduce literal color into the book that this project will become. Finally, I want to express my profound appreciation to my family and friends, especially my brilliant wife, Courtney C.W. Guerra. You have been there through it all— loving, playing, laughing—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. iv In memory of Rene and Gloria Guerra: you were both magicians to me. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: FORCIBLY IMPRESSED: REFORM GAMES AND THE AVATAR FIGURE IN MILTON BRADLEY AND WALT WHITMAN 15 Bradley and the Game of Self-Representation 18 Whitman and the “Puzzle of Puzzles” 48 Conclusion 57 CHAPTER THREE: NOT EXACTLY INFINITE: SMOOTH OPERATORS AND THE DANGEROUS ALLURE OF DISCURSIVE CONSISTENCY IN MELVILLE’S THE CONFIDENCE-MAN 60 State Machines and Algorithms of the Interior 63 Conclusion 92 CHAPTER FOUR: SKILLFUL, TIMELY, AND OPPORTUNE: CONFIGURATION CULTURE IN THE AGE OF BARNUM 96 The Power to Promote: P.T. Barnum’s Life and the Configurative Work of Invention 105 “Not in among the Burning Ruins—but out on Broadway: Barnum’s Outside Show 119 Conclusion 136 CHAPTER FIVE: A LITTLE REMOVED FROM THE HIGHWAY: UTOPIAN ROMANCE AND TARGETING AS AGENCY IN NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 141 The Nail in Sisera’s Brain: Utopics and Limited Imagination 150 “A Ridiculous Piece of Romance, Undoubtedly”: Billiards, Targets, Ridicules 161 Conclusion 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY 199 VITA 208 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In his 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School, Ralph Waldo Emerson declares that “in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact” (Emerson 64). My dissertation takes Emerson’s central figure in this passage— life in the United States as a “game”—as its primary focus, analyzing the way that gameplay, considered broadly, both facilitated and informed representations of agency in the nineteenth century. In effect, games were archives of possibility made procedurally discrete, rendering modes of action and agency legible in ways that are suggested, although differently engaged, in their somewhat less ephemeral cousins: books. Understanding that both games and books emerged from within similar fields of cultural production and often marketed themselves to the same audiences, I argue that taking a technical and materially historical approach to games can help us to explore major literary works of the period to startlingly revealing effect. For instance, when Milton Bradley’s 1860 Checkered Game of Life coaxes players into defining themselves through stepwise decisions on a freeform grid containing squares like “Intemperance,” “Ruin,” and “Suicide,” it imagines an alternative agency to that of previous single-track games that left a player’s fate wholly up to the roll of a die. A procedurally attuned discussion of this agential form—which I connect to current new media discussions of the “avatar” figure in virtual environments—in turn allows fresh perspectives on Walt Whitman’s 1 2 1855 “Song of Myself.” Inclusive disjunctions (“or”s that do not preclude “both”) form a kind of algorithmic matrix from which the lyric self is constructed, as in Bradley’s game. Agency becomes a matter of use, rather than possession. This project aims to redress a critical gap between important tropological studies of nineteenth-century games and more recent material approaches to the textuality of video games and new media. In the first category, historical studies of the interaction between literature and games in the nineteenth-century United States have focused on rhetorics of game and sport, parsing the metaphorical significance of gameplay tropes, often in contrast to a discourse of “seriousness.” Ann Fabian’s Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-Century America makes effective claims about the significance of gaming rhetoric in creating models of “economic rationality” in the early age of stock market speculation (Fabian 2); while Michael Oriard’s expansive study, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, traces the use of the word “game” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the language of gaming metaphors in U.S. literature “reveals human thought processes and cultural values... [and] creates the perceived reality” (Oriard ix). Moving beyond these suggestive rhetorical ambivalences, I focus instead on the function and cross- pollination of specific structures within the available game commodities of the time. For example, a reading of Walter Aimwell’s Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York, a precursor to Mad Libs, adds nuance to Herman Melville’s notoriously fragmentary dialogue in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Like Melville’s characters, Peter Coddle falls victim to a savvy operator, drawn in by his desire for objects written on a set of cards that 3 are selected by players as the game progresses: “a stick of candy,” “a mint of gold,” or perhaps even “a quart of caterpillars.” Nested within a larger youth novel entitled, Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody (1858), Aimwell’s textual game makes an operative argument about the increasingly instrumental perspective on becoming “somebody” demonstrated in nineteenth-century reform literature; Coddle’s identity is structured as a set of social input-events bounded by a regulated but undefined grammar. Understanding this facilitates a reassessment of the similarly undefined passengers on the steamboat Fidéle (in Melville’s The Confidence-Man) who construct their own identities as if they were a kind of fill-in-the-blanks game, valuing machine-like consistency over impromptu character-making. A surrogate for the lost agency of these passengers, the Confidence- Man begins to resemble more hero than villain in Melville’s narrative because he represents an aesthetic of limited invention and tactical play that is made transparent in (and humorously reinforced by) Aimwell’s game.