Uneasy Assembly: Unsettling Home in Early Twentieth-Century American Cultural Production

Uneasy Assembly: Unsettling Home in Early Twentieth-Century American Cultural Production Camilla Perri Ammirati Canton, NY B.A., Carleton College, 2000 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia August, 2013 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….i Introduction: “Come Right In”: Situating Narratives of Domecility…………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Solid American Spaces: From Domestic Standardization to Dilemmatic Democracy…………………………………….30 Chapter Two: “Their Only Treason”: Domestic Space and National Belonging in Djuna Barnes’ Ryder………………………………………………..68 Chapter Three: “Honor Bilt”: Constructions of Home in Absalom, Absalom!..………………………………...147 Chapter Four: “Home Thoughts”: Domestic Disarray and Buffet Flat Belonging in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem………………………………..…216 Chapter Five: Lock and Key Blues: Mobile Domecility in the Recorded Works of Bessie Smith………………………………………………………..242 Coda: Talking With the House Itself…………………………………………………………………..314 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………...321 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my wonderful committee. Deborah McDowell has been an incredible director and mentor, not only providing invaluable intellectual guidance throughout this process but offering true insight and kindness beyond the bounds of the project that kept me going at critical moments. Victoria Olwell has worked closely with me through countless rough pages, offering vital feedback and support and re-invigorating my thinking at every step. In my first term of the program, Eric Lott ignited my enthusiasm and set me on an intellectual path that keeps me always thinking about the next set of questions worth asking. Our conversations over the course of this project have been essential both in shaping my thinking and in encouraging me to take the chance of pursuing ideas I believe in. While my committee has worked most closely with me on this project, many of its details as well as my thinking process developed through coursework. In addition to my advisors, I’d like to thank Cindy Wall, Susan Fraiman, Rita Felski, Johanna Drucker, Michael Levenson, Bonnie Gordon, Stephen Railton, Christopher Krentz, Jennifer Wicke, and the late Chuck Perdue for acquainting me with notions and texts that inspired, grounded, and otherwise proved essential to my work. Outside of courses, Randy Swift made my progress possible by patiently answering my endless questions about program logistics, start to finish. I’d also like to thank my cohort and other UVA compatriots for the lively conversations and camaraderie essential to making this long journey. In particular, thank you to Jane Carr, Phil Maciak, Erin Kelly, Heather Miner, Melissa White, Michael Lewis, Carolyn Tate, Andrea Holliger, Erin Brown, Teddy Angelos, and Evan Rhodes for keeping it real. And an extra special thank you to Kristin Gilger, without whose friendship, insight, and humor I couldn’t have made it down this road. ! "! I also owe all kinds of thanks to many dear people outside the program who nonetheless got me through these last many years with their kindness, love, thoughtfulness, tolerance, and tunes. Megan Reynolds, Jean Capizzi, Theresa Kelly, and Colleen Gorman have been incredibly supportive, patient, and dedicated friends. I must also acknowledge my deep gratitude to my dear friend Emily Montgomery, who passed away earlier this year, for her friendship, her understanding, and her bountiful insight on matters both academic and personal. I’ve also been very fortunate in my time at UVA to have the support of many friends in Charlottesville’s fantastic music community. Lew Burrus and Liam Kelly backed me (and Megan!) up these last few years off-stage as surely as on. Marc Perdue and Molly Pickral, Susanna and Paul Rosen, and James and Anne Rucker, among many other wonderful friends and musicians, have not only put up with my ramblings over the years but have kept me sane and made sure I kept finding ways to balance my academic investments against other worthy pursuits. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t thank the good people at the Blue Moon Diner and the Bluegrass Grill for the fortifying breakfasts, musical evenings, and late-night discussions. I don’t know how to begin to thank my family, immediate and extended, the incredible people who taught me what “home” means and how nurturing, inspiring, supportive, and downright delightful a place it can be. My late grandparents not only loved us all to pieces and encouraged us to pursue our dreams but also instilled in us a particular respect for education that helped to set me on this path. My sisters, Jessica Ammirati and Jennifer Doyle, along with my brothers-in-law, John Mark and Kelley Doyle, have cheered me up and talked me down more times than I can count, supporting me not only in this project but in all my endeavors. My parents, Thomas and Theresa Ammirati, have made my work possible not only by shaping me as a person and constantly encouraging me in my pursuits, but by investing in my academic work in ! ""! all kinds of ways both figurative and, ahem, literal. Your love, your faith in me, your unflagging support, and the examples you’ve set as human beings, as scholars, as teachers, and as parents, have been meaningful to me beyond words. And finally I want to thank my darling, Adam Harr, who has supported and sustained me in more ways than I can count, whose love and curiosity and good humor have lifted my spirits at every turn. And who, let it be stated for the record, first spoke the word “domecility.” Getting to make a home with you is the best thing in the world. ! """! Introduction “Come Right In”: Situating Narratives of Domecility “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered…” -Attributed to Thomas Jefferson It wouldn’t seem that Jurgis Rudkus, the poor immigrant protagonist of Upton Sinclair’s muck-raking tale The Jungle, would have much in common with Jackie and David Siegel, the billionaire subjects of the recent documentary The Queen of Versailles, which tracks their efforts to build the largest private residence in the United States. And in most ways, he doesn’t. While the Siegels agonize over whether the financial crisis will snatch from their bejeweled hands the partially-built dream house with its 35 bathrooms and special deck for viewing the nightly Disney fireworks, Jurgis and his family fight quite literally to survive in the trenches of poverty and prejudice. There is, however, a thru-line between Jurgis’ struggle and the Siegels’ perhaps more dubious travails. While The Jungle is better known for its indictment of working conditions and food quality in Chicago’s meat-packing industry, it also traces the Rudkus family’s encounter with a housing scam. When they first arrive in the neighborhood where they’ll live, someone hands them a pamphlet with the image of a proto-suburban dream house and the phrase “Home Sweet Home” written in several languages. Despite their fears of getting swindled, they purchase a house and do indeed thus entangle themselves in a predatory scheme that puts them in deeper and deeper debt until one day Jurgis comes home to find the house repainted and his own family gone, as if they “had been wiped out of existence; as if they were proving to be dream people, who never had existed at all” (204). Though the people have only been displaced as of this moment, their dream of home has indeed been wiped out of existence, and the loss of the material structure precipitates the family’s ultimate disintegration. Earlier in the process, much of the anxiety over the housing ! 1! scam had been crystallized in an argument over the deed, in which the agent confirmed that now that the deed was signed, there was no escape from its terms. This notion of the housing “deed” distills, I would argue, the Rudkus family’s larger dilemmas as well as the Siegel family’s attitude toward their own domestic dwelling possibilities in the face of national economic crisis. And it ties them both to national narratives of self-making through home-owning. Jurgis is poised at the precipice of the “American Dream,” an immigrant homeowner working his way to prosperity. The Siegels represent that dream on steroids. They are presented as having shot up from modest origins to the social and financial heights. In their case as with the Rudkus’, a “Home Sweet Home” crystallizes their hoped-for success, and the loss of it registers their potential downfall. Also, in each case there is an ongoing tension between the individual and the system, the agent and the machine. The thing at stake in each case, in a sense, is the hinged meaning of the word “deed” itself. The word corrals the meanings of individual action and ownership of the material framework in which one might ideally take refuge from the toils and trials of the world. The question this word raises—particularly in The Jungle’s dramatization of it as the thing that seals the family’s fate—is whether one’s actions are the path to success, as the American Dream promises, or whether one’s fate is determined, locked into some sort of contract, by a pre- existing set of structures one cannot change once one buys in to the dream of home. Both Jurgis and the Siegels have bought in, and both have found it disturbingly tenuous, likely to dissolve at any moment into the ultimate estrangement represented by the loss of a home.

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