The Outward Turn: Personality, Blankness, and Allure in American Modernism Anne Claire Diebel Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Anne Claire Diebel All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Outward Turn: Personality, Blankness, and Allure in American Modernism Anne Claire Diebel The history of personality in American literature has surprisingly little to do with the differentiating individuality we now tend to associate with the term. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture have defined personality either as the morally vacuous successor to the Protestant ideal of character or as the equivalent of mass-media celebrity. In both accounts, personality is deliberately constructed and displayed. However, hiding in American writings of the long modernist period (1880s–1940s) is a conception of personality as the innate capacity, possessed by few, to attract attention and elicit projection. Skeptical of the great American myth of self-making, such writers as Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes invented ways of representing individuals not by stable inner qualities but by their fascinating—and, often, gendered and racialized—blankness. For these writers, this sense of personality was not only an important theme and formal principle of their fiction and non-fiction writing; it was also a professional concern made especially salient by the rise of authorial celebrity. This dissertation both offers an alternative history of personality in American literature and culture and challenges the common critical assumption that modernist writers took the interior life to be their primary site of exploration and representation. Instead, it argues for a reassessment of American modernism as crucially concerned—in its literary texts and in its professional literary culture—with surface, blankness, and opacity, all barriers to seeing inside which nonetheless produce an impression of personal power. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ii Introduction: The Curious Impersonality of Personality 1 Chapter One: Henry James’s Personal Professions 35 Chapter Two: Dreiserian Personality and the Reformulation of Success 101 Chapter Three: Personality and Self-Promotion in the Literary 151 Portraiture of Dreiser and Stein Chapter Four: Double Take, Double Jive: Analogs of Passing in 214 West and Hughes Bibliography 272 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Advertisement for Personality: A Magazine of Good Cheer (1913) Figure 2. Personality: A Magazine of Biography (1928) Figure 3. “IT”: The Personality Magazine (1941) Figure 4. John Singer Sargent, Henry James (1885) Figure 5. Alvin Langdon Coburn, “Henry James, Rye, June 12th, 1906” Figure 6. Theodore Dreiser (1919) Figure 7. Fred J. Mulhaupt, “Mrs. Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie” (1903) Figure 8. Carl Van Vechten, “Theodore Dreiser” (1934) Figure 9. Carl Van Vechten, “Gertrude Stein, January 4, 1935” Figure 10. Gertrude Stein, “A Portrait of Jo Davidson” (1923) Figure 11. Pierre Bernard ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My greatest thanks goes to my brilliant and generous dissertation committee members— Ross Posnock, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Sharon Marcus—who have guided this project with care and acuity. Thanks, also, to the other academic mentors and readers I have been lucky to have along the way: Henry Turner, Amanda Claybaugh, Sarah Cole, Bruce Robbins, Katherine Biers, and Judith Brown. I am indebted to the student and faculty members of the Columbia Americanist Colloquium for their feedback on pieces of the project, as well as to the editorial staff at the Henry James Review. I am also grateful for the support of the Marjorie Hope Nicholson Fellowship and the opportunities to present my work at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association and the Futures of American Studies Institute. Friends and loved ones have provided indispensable support, intellectual and emotional; primary among them are Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Kate Stanley, Lisa Kerr, Christine Smallwood, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Sherally Munshi, Colin Webster, Ben Parker, Jared Lister, Alicia DeSantis, Saskia Cornes, Matthew Shapero, Cassie Thornton, Rose Lichter-Marck, Jon Schroeder, Sylvia Renner, Keith Gessen, Gregor Quack, and Alix Rule. This dissertation is dedicated to my dear family: Robert, Lynne, Matt, Rebecca, Greg, and James. iii 1 INTRODUCTION: THE CURIOUS IMPERSONALITY OF PERSONALITY ‘Cause you got—personality Walk, with personality Talk, with personality Smile, with personality Charm, with personality Love, with personality ‘Cause you got a great big heart Well over—and over I’ll be a fool for you. —Lloyd Price1 “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” says F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway of Jay Gatsby, “then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.”2 There is a striking ambiguity in Nick’s definition of personality, one that suggests competing models of selfhood: either Gatsby is consciously acting, presenting himself as something he is not, or he is pure surface and intention is irrelevant. The first possibility is supported by the revelation of Gatsby’s past, with his boyhood fly-leaf “SCHEDULE” serving as an emblem of a disciplined self-invention straight out of Ben Franklin: “Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it,” “Read one improving book or magazine per week,” “Bath every other day” (181, 182). The second possibility is suggested by frequent references to Gatsby’s absolute blankness: the “romantic speculation” he inspires (rumors, gossip, fantasies, longings) renders him powerless to control how his gestures are perceived (48). Fitzgerald’s emphasis on external signs taken to express the inner self can be situated within a late-nineteenth-century shift in American modes of self-presentation, usually described !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Lloyd Price, “Personality,” 1959. 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1992), 6. 2 as a shift from an ethic of character to one of personality.3 Whereas the concept of character stressed the Protestant values of an industrializing, entrepreneurial society, the concept of personality expressed the amoral ideals of a corporate, consumer society; and whereas the culture of character was founded on self-denial and sacrifice toward some greater civic or religious ideal, the culture of personality—centered on what Jackson Lears has called a “therapeutic ethos”— promised personal fulfillment through self-expression. Personality was considered to be a possession, one that could (and should) be crafted and displayed in order to impress upon others one’s distinctive individuality within the competitive environment of corporate capitalism. Personal charm was of the utmost importance, exalted by popular psychologists, advertisers, and other advocates of a therapeutic conception of selfhood. In his influential essay “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture” (1979), Warren Susman argues that this shift from ascetic self-discipline to indulgent self- fulfillment was reflected in the changing content of advice literature, the “hundreds of manuals and guides for self-improvement published between 1900 and 1920.”4 As Susman demonstrates, these manuals encouraged readers to think of themselves, and to make others think of them, as “somebodies” (277). A “good” personality consisted in being “fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful” (277). We can see the transition from character to personality, for example, in the work of Orison Swett Marden, the author of many !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 For the rise of consumer culture and the therapeutic view of the self, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); David Riesman, et al., The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); John Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); David Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper, 1966); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1976); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979). 4 Warren Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 277. Susman claims that this shift in advice literature represents a larger shift in cultural values and he gestures toward further examination of literature and film as potential “manifestations of the working out of the basic ideas central to this vision of self” (282). I take him up on this invitation. 3 motivational books and the founding editor of Success magazine. In Character: The Greatest Thing in the World (1899), Marden extolled self-reliance and urged readers to strive for the “highest and most harmonious development of one’s powers” to achieve “a complete and consistent whole.”5 But in his Masterful Personality (1921), Marden extolled instead the value of making an impression: if you have the right clothes and enough poise, “you can compel people to like you,” an idea that would find its most influential expression in Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence