Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of Deviance
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Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of Deviance The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Gavranovic, Altin. 2012. Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of Deviance. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9904014 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ©2012 Altin Gavranovic All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: John Stauffer Author: Altin Gavranovic Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of Deviance Abstract This dissertation is a cultural history of deviance in the United States. I use a series of case studies to examine the way deviant figures have been represented and experienced within American culture. The dissertation covers four historical eras and examines a representative deviant figure in each of them. The first chapter deals with the figure of the witch in Puritan New England, the second examines the libertine in the early American republic, the third deals with freaks in Victorian America and the fourth studies the flapper in the roaring twenties. Each of these chapters is focused on a particular historical crisis, trial or scandal that produced a rich body of historical evidence for study and analysis: the Salem Witch Trial of 1692, the Apthorp-Morton Scandal of 1788, the sensational Beecher-Tilton Affair of 1875 and the Ruth Snyder Trial of 1927. My overarching thesis is that representations of deviants reveal a deep cultural preoccupation with failure and inadequacy, which are projected onto deviant figures. This interpretation is an attempt to move beyond viewing representations of deviance as simply being attempts to repress those who do not conform to societal norms, or to shore up fragile social identities by creating ‘others’ against whom the normal American could be negatively defined. iii Instead, I argue that representations of deviance were compelling to the Americans who created them primarily as powerful fantasies about failure, lack and inadequacy. On to the rich symbolic canvas of the deviant figure, Americans projected their anxieties about personal and social failure. In different ways at different times, deviants have been used to articulate the various possible ways in which a person could fail to meet their society’s ideals and expectations, and to imagine the consequences of such failures for both individual personhood and society as a whole. The deviant has therefore historically served as a kind of mirror to the culture which produced him or her: a mirror in which a culture might darkly glimpse its own values, distorted by the terrifying failure to achieve that which is most prized. iv Table of Contents Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii-ix Introduction 1 1692: The Witch 52 1788: The Libertine 110 1875: The Freak 176 1927: The Flapper 247 Coda 309 Bibliography 315-334 v Za Mamu i Tatu vi Acknowledgements Let me begin by thanking a few people who do thankless and often overlooked work, and yet who bring an enormous amount of grace and humanity to a job that the world condescends to deem unglamorous. One of the many tasks assigned to departmental administrators is to guide graduate students through the byzantine rules, spoken and unspoken, which govern life at institutions of higher education, and to be their friend, ally and advisor in the treacherous passage through graduate school. They are in every way the Virgils to our Dantes, and the best of them are shining examples of how to turn a bureaucratic job into a form of human excellence. All who know them will be able to think of countless situations in which the interventions of Christine McFadden and Arthur Patton-Hock removed with seeming ease barriers that had seemed impenetrable, or miraculously effected labors that seemed impossibly herculean. To them both, for innumerable such favors both large and small, my many thanks. Many thanks also to John Stauffer, Arthur Kleinman and Ann Braude, who formed my dissertation committee, and also to Jackson Lears, who was kind enough to be an outside reader for the defense. To break with customary and conventional ways of doing a thing is always a somewhat precarious enterprise, and such experiments are always in need of friends in high places. My academic advisors entrusted me with an enormous amount of freedom, allowed me to take the risks that are so essential to real thinking, and humored me when I wandered very far indeed from their own areas of geographic, temporal and even disciplinary expertise. Without John’s early and ongoing encouragement, I might well have left graduate school without ever starting this dissertation, and without Arthur’s and Ann’s generous support for the project, the hostility and skepticism it met with in other quarters might have made it impossible to bring the project to completion. They not only made the work better through their insightful comments, they made it possible for me to do it at all, and for that I am profoundly grateful. vii Writing is solitary and miserable labor, and I have only ever found it bearable when surrounded by friends whose warm company provides a much-needed counterpoint to the loneliness of the work of thinking and creation. I’ve long looked forward to the moment when I would be able to thank the Am Civ crew: Marisa Egerstrom for those countless evenings (and, less occasionally than one might like to admit, mornings) spent justifying the ways of God to man over Manhattans; Summer Shafer for that curiously charming surliness and wanton aggression with which she so delightfully makes her way through life, not to mention for finally giving me someone to play pool with; Hillary Kaell for her irrepressible lightness of heart and for teaching me that the way to survive graduate school was to never take it the slightest bit seriously; to Steven Brown for the endless meanderings through Cambridge and the worlds of literature, history and art, and to Sandy Placido for her toughness and optimism and for getting what friendship looks like in a way that few people really do. And, of course, to Eva Payne, Katie Gerbner and Sean Blanchet, Aaron Hatley and Maggie Gates for all the happy hours and happy-hours, and to Eli Cook for his all-around excellence as a thinker and human being and for reminding me at a crucial moment that capitalism is not about markets but rather social relations. Outside of Harvard, I think fondly back on late nights of booze and excellent conversation with Chris Schultz and Taylor Daynes, and my treasured, albeit intermittent, friendship with Karla Bertrand. Back home, my main intellectual partner in crime was Samia Khatun, with whom I threshed out on the colonial veranda over those much-missed lunches matters pertaining to witches and lascars, freaks and emus, the evils of capitalism and academia, and much else besides. And of course I must thank Frances Olive, not for anything to do with the dissertation, but for being far more to me than a dissertation ever viii could be. Thanks also to Andrew Geeves, Catherine Deans, Freya Brennan, Rachel Burton and Gareth Williams for friendships which made the last year of writing feel rich with new promise. Finally, a big, warm thanks to the Nerkez Gavranovic and Amela Aganovic Bequest for the Support of Wayward Children, without which the last twenty-eight years (and the last five in particular) would have been a much dicier proposition. And thanks, besides, for love and support of all kinds, and much more, most of which I have doubtless forgotten! ix Introduction 1 I. The face in the mirror Dreams, too, have their history and so, of course, do nightmares. The dark currents of the imagination ebb and flow with the passing of time, and every age has secret midnight fears particular to itself. For much of Western history, for instance, people were gripped by terror in the face of overwhelming, implacable Gods. The rape of the swan, the belly of the devouring whale, the flood which covers all the earth; powerful symbols of this terrible fantasy of being in the grip of something vast and unfathomable.1 However, though we readily recognize this terror of the ancients, it has no very great resonance for us. Though we live in an age for which the prospect of catastrophic environmental changes has become a commonplace, the story of Noah is today merely quaint. And, indeed, the terror before the inhuman has been on the wane for some time; the failure of Moby Dick with the nineteenth century public can perhaps be blamed in part on the average reader’s utter inability to be awed by a fish. Of course, the terror of the inhuman has not vanished entirely – witness, for instance, disaster films or (speaking of fish) Jaws and its shark-horror progeny. Yet in these modern instances of the old fear, terror often seems to have degenerated into mere horror and anxiety.2 Today, when you go to the 1 The idea of contextualizing a study of modern culture through contrast with a more ancient mythic tradition I draw from Jackson Lears, Fables of abundance : a cultural history of advertising in America (New York: BasicBooks, 1994). My understanding of religion as an attempt to come to terms with and express an existential experience draws on a tradition that includes Perry Miller, The New England Mind: the seventeenth century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954) and Jackson Lears, No place of grace : antimodernism and the transformation of American culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.) The broad conception of the holy as a sometimes terrifying otherness I owe to Rudolf Otto, The idea of the holy : an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, Trans.