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Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, and American Identity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature Tarah Demant Washington University in St

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Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, and American Identity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature Tarah Demant Washington University in St Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) January 2010 Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, and American Identity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature Tarah Demant Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Demant, Tarah, "Impossible Whiteness: Race, Gender, and American Identity in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature" (2010). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 87. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/87 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Vivian R. Pollak, Chair Mary Ann Dzuback Andrea Friedman William Maxwell Linda Nicholson Daniel B. Shea IMPOSSIBLE WHITENESS: RACE, GENDER, AND AMERICAN IDENTITY IN EARLY TWENTIETH- CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by Tarah Ann Demant A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2010 Saint Louis, Missouri Acknowledgements According to Edith Wharton, there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. This dissertation is a reflection of the many people who have shone throughout my journey and it is my pleasure to thank them here. I would like to extend special thanks to my advisor, Professor Vivian Pollak, for her guidance, advocacy, support, and no small amount of patience. I’d also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Professors Mary Ann Dzuback, Andrea Friedman, William Maxwell, Linda Nicholson, and Daniel Shea for their interest in my project and their support and help in bringing it to this final fruition. And I’d like to thank Kathy Schneider, without whom none of this would be possible. My personal and professional debts are numerous and I want first thank Keya Kraft and Brooke Taylor who have made the journey all sweetness and light. I’m indebted to those friends and colleagues who have supported me throughout this process with draft-reading, park-jogging, hand-holding, work-parties, general encouragement, and—most importantly—levity, chiefly Courtney Bates, Lee Spitzer, Kate Fama, Christine Smith, Kate Bloomquist, James Williams, and Joe Conway. I’d also like to acknowledge the inspiring group of professors who fundamentally shaped my learning and development and who helped me to seek beauty and love literature: Professors Tom Campbell, Jim Albrecht, Sharon Jansen, Lisa Marcus, Beth Kraig, and Jim Holloway. I am grateful to my parents, Paul and Linda Demant, for their love and support and for instilling within me a deep love of reading and learning, to Sara Wolbrecht for shining her light in my life, to Josh Dasler and Tim Glynn for keeping the home-fire burning (and for the computer on which this project depended), and to Anna George for ii helping to keep me sane, such as I am. Finally, for his support, encouragement, patience, and inspiration, my greatest thanks and appreciation go to Christopher Watson, to whom this work is dedicated. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction The End of White America 1 Chapter One Writing the Race: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, and Discourses of American Whiteness 26 Chapter Two Death of the White Heroine: The Racial Uncertainty of Lily Bart 75 Chapter Three All She Could Never Be: Anzia Yezierska and the Task of Becoming American 117 Chapter Four White Man’s Burden: The Ebb and Flow of White Identity in The Great Gatsby 176 Chapter Five The Dying Fall: Tender Is the Night and the Decline of White Masculinity 221 Conclusion 270 Works Cited 277 iv Introduction The End of White America We have a great desire to be supremely American. -Lothrop Stoddard Quoting President Calvin Coolidge Upon the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the cover of The Atlantic featured a picture of the president-elect staring solemnly at the reader and an accompanying caption over his profile in big, bold, black letters: “THE END OF WHITE AMERICA?” Race1 had certainly permeated the campaign that ended in Obama’s election, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, national discussions of race had side- stepped the issue of whiteness and focused instead on the question of Obama’s blackness: Was Obama too black to be elected? Was he not black enough? Was he black at all? Was his blackness a major factor in the way he would govern? Was he even, in fact, American? All these questions speak to the continued relevance of race in America (despite simultaneous claims that Obama’s candidacy and eventual victory somehow signaled a “post-racial” America),2 as well as an underlying bias that understands non- 1 Though I do not put “race” in quotations marks here or throughout this study, I understand race as a socially and politically constructed category, one that could very well be encapsulated in quotes to emphasize its constructed and varying nature. Further, I also understand the categories of differentiated races, both historical (many of which we no longer considered races) and those we use still today, as cultural constructions, “designations” that are “coined for the sake of grouping and separating peoples along lines of presumed difference” (Jacobson 4). Additionally, race and the categories considered therein are not fixed even throughout the period covered in this study. Any quotations marks remaining for this lexical set is to show a specific word or phrase is taken from the quoted text, or to emphasize a certain author’s specific reference to a word or category (e.g. “Hindoos,” “Native-born,” or “Native” Americans [referring to white Americans of certain lineage] for example). 2 For the question of Obama’s racial position as being “black enough” or “too black” see Gwen Ifill, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (2009), pp. 52-62, 67; and Harvey Wingfield and Joe R. Feagin, Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign (2010), pp. 31- 49. For the question of Obama not being black, see Debra J. Dickerson, “Colorblind” (2007). For an overview of the claims that Obama is not American, see: David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack 1 whites as raced while implicitly understanding whites as lacking race (Obama’s rival John McCain did not bear the parallel burden of commentary fretting: Is he too white or not white enough? Will his whiteness dramatically affect the way he governs?). This invisibility of whiteness, as Richard Dyer notes in his seminal study of whiteness, White (1997), is central to maintaining whiteness as “normal” and non- whiteness as abhorrent and in need of investigation. In such, the focus on Obama’s race as opposed to the race of his white opponent is not surprising as, “[t]here is no more powerful position that that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race” (2). This is not to say that whiteness is not a central concern in our discourses, or in this election specifically, in fact, “for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of ‘people’ in general “(3). The political commentary and second-guessing about the role of race in the campaign revealed this underlying bias as discussions of race during the election season had largely skirted the underlying and unspoken white anxiety that lay at the root of this “suddenly” relevant question of race during the election. With the election of the first non-white president, the cover of the Atlantic finally asked the question implicit in all the campaign race-talk: what does this mean for American whiteness? To make sense of this question, the author of the cover-story, Hua Hsu, opens the discussion in a somewhat surprising way: he turns to fiction, specifically a novel at the Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate (2008), p. 72. For an overview of the debate of America as “post-racial” see again: Yes We Can?, pp. 201-44. 2 center of the American literary canon—the The Great Gatsby (1925).3 The article on American whiteness in a post-Obama nation opens quoting Tom Buchanan: “Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored [sic] Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.” (46) Hsu goes on in “The End of White America?” to outline these long-standing white American race-anxieties and fear of white racial loss. These anxieties may be resurfacing in the early years of this century, but they have their roots deep in the early years of the last century. What Hsu calls the “racial paranoia” of Tom Buchanan was rooted, after all, not in the pages of fiction, but in the mainstream politics and science of early twentieth- century America (48). Tom is only a mouthpiece for the theories of white apocalypse that he has read about in The Rise of the Coloured Empires, a thinly-veiled reference to the immensely popular The Rising Tide of Color (1920) by eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard who warned that the increasing number of (inferior) non-white races meant the dwindling prevalence and influence of the white race.
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