PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY NATURALIST NOVELS ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English ____________ by Jacob Thomas Boone Summer 2011 PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY NATURALIST NOVELS A Thesis by Jacob Thomas Boone Summer 2011 APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND VICE PROVOST FOR RESEARCH: _________________________________ Eun K. Park, Ph.D. APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE: _________________________________ Tracy Butts, Ph.D., Chair _________________________________ Teresa Traver, Ph.D. DEDICATION To my Mother and Grandmothers. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Tracy Butts for her selfless attention in helping me complete this thesis, for guiding me to expand my own thinking, and for pushing me to create work that I am proud of. Her devotion to students at this university is exceptional and I have greatly benefited from her tutelage. I would also like to thank Dr. Teresa Traver for her wonderful help as well. Her scholarly attention to the mechanics of my writing helped me tremendously. I feel blessed at having such a wonderful committee, especially during the summer. I would also like to thank the English professors at Chico State who have helped me greatly through the years, specifically Dr. Lynn Houston, Dr. Geoff Baker, Dr. John Traver, Dr. Thia Wolf, Dr. Andrea Lerner, and Dr. Rob Davidson. It is because of all of you that I feel I’ve grown as a scholar. Thank you for fostering and expanding my love of literature. I want to especially thank my family for their love and support. You are the best! I’d also like to thank all my friends who helped me through this process, specifically Mike Giuffrida, Kelly Candelaria, Jeremy Gerrard, Linda Rogers, and Christina Kraker. You are all wonderful people and I am grateful for our long talks and for being able to bounce ideas off you. Cheers! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Dedication.................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements.................................................................................................... iv Abstract...................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. Theoretical Introduction and Overview......................................................... 1 II. The Reinscribed Narrative in Chopin’s The Awakening................................ 20 Guides/Models ....................................................................................... 24 Performances.......................................................................................... 34 III. Fulfilling the Nature of Prescribed Narrative in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie................................................................................................... 49 “Guides” and Patriarchal Expectations as Precursors to Action/Performance..................................................................... 57 Performances of Patriarchal Expectations and Lack Thereof............................................................................................. 73 Results/Effects ....................................................................................... 83 IV. The Proscribed Narrative in Wharton’s The House of Mirth......................... 89 Lily’s Understanding of the World around Her..................................... 98 Lily’s Influences for being a “Proper” Woman ..................................... 103 Prompts for Action and Performance/Resulting Inaction Non-Performance............................................................................. 117 Results.................................................................................................... 125 Endnotes..................................................................................................................... 129 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 134 v ABSTRACT PERFORMATIVE PATRIARCHY IN THREE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY NATURALIST NOVELS by Jacob Thomas Boone Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Summer 2011 This thesis examines protagonists’ paths to “failure” (and “success”) in three naturalistic novels that appear near the turn of the twentieth century: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). Regarding the naturalistic elements within each text, I seek to introduce an alternative to the conventionally recognized forces (biological, environmental, sexual, etc.) which propel characters to the fates awaiting them at the novel’s end. I complicate the requirement of literary determinism in naturalist texts by appropriating the works of three theorists in order to demonstrate the ways in which characters’ forced “performances” of cultural values creates the determinism necessary to produce the tragedies inherent in these novels. In my analysis of the narrative courses of essentially three female and one male protagonist(s), I argue that the abiding social vi ideology—that of patriarchy—determines characters’ fates. Louis Althusser provides the theory of pervasive ideology that works in humans to commit them to accepting the established social order. Teresa de Lauretis provides the theory of the ideology of gender which works to give “meaning” to humans through establishing them as “men” and “women.” Finally, Judith Butler provides the theory of gender’s performativity which, through dominant society, both compels and oftentimes limits or destroys humans in their ability to represent themselves as individuals. In effect, I suggest that these authors demonstrated a world that coerces people to exist in the “accepted” way and how that world is intolerant of “other” modes of being. vii CHAPTER I THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW As a subgenre of the ubiquitous and well-liked literary realism, naturalism has sufficiently generated intense discussion of what it is and what it does (or is supposed to do). Indeed, there appears to be a lack of a concrete definition of what exactly naturalism is. I provide a few varying definitions of “naturalism” to tease out what it is or may do. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, “naturalism” is briefly defined as, . a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environments. Naturalist fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society. (146-147) The definition also includes some of the key players of the movement—in fiction: Émile Zola (naturalism’s vocal proponent), Guy de Maupassant, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris—but the definition isn’t expansive by any means. One of the leading scholars in American naturalism, Donald Pizer, discusses the predominating view of it (what he was told in his graduate studies) that American naturalist authors took from Emile Zola his literarily experimental notion that “all experience [i]s determined by heredity and environment” (Theory and Practice 2). The school of authors in America who transformed his ideas into intelligible texts—the most well-known of these being Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris—created 1 2 characters who are “shaped, conditioned, and usually destroyed by social and biological forces beyond their control” (3). Pizer points out that he was told as a graduate student that . the early naturalists had not only falsely degraded the human condition because of their commitment to materialistic precepts but had also been hopelessly confused in their efforts to dramatize a fully deterministic universe[,] [t]hat their novels were therefore both untrue and inept. (3) Pizer contends that in “naturalistic” novels, the attempt to identify a consistent literary determinism in the text—a determinism where characters in the novels are essentially powerless to forces surrounding them or lack a will to do something about their victimization—is rather reductive to the work of the text. Instead, he argues that . a flexible concept of naturalism as a tendency or impulse reflecting the various ways in which human freedom is limited or circumscribed and the various ways in which this truth is made palatable by combining it with traditional notions of human worth . will have to do . (9) in the attempt to define this genre because naturalism is a powerful form of literature. He insists “there is no neat definition applicable to the movement in America but [that it is] rather a variable and changing and complex set of assumptions about man and fiction that can be called a naturalistic tradition” (16). Pizer favors a looser definition. Yet, the concept of determinism in the naturalist novel is one that is rather interesting and one that has held some critics’ attention in the attempt to lend credence to this genre (paradoxically since, as Pizer points out, a few critics thought that naturalists failed to demonstrate a fully determined universe). In Determined Fictions, Lee Clark Mitchell discusses this concept in more detail when he says, “Strictly speaking, determinism means that no one has any freedom of will” (6).