Martin Eden, Edith Wharton’S the House of Mirth, and Stephen Crane’S Maggie

On Narratives of Fading Selves: Naturalism, Determinism, and Suicide in Jack London’s Martin Eden, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie Word count: 24,709 Vossa Varkevisser Student number: 01303540 Supervisor: Dr. Jasper Schelstraete A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics and Literature: English and Scandinavian Studies Academic year: 2017 – 2018 In depression you become, in your head, two-dimensional – like a drawing rather than a living, breathing creature. [...] There is a heavy, leaden feeling in your chest, rather as when someone you love dearly has died; but no one has – except, perhaps, you. – Tim Lott TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 The Origin of Naturalism 6 2 Determinism and the (Absence of) Self 10 3 Martin Eden: A Divided Character Introduction & Determinism 15 Martin’s Illusion: Character & Self 18 Desire & Suicide 23 4 The House of Mirth: A Divided Desire Introduction & Determinism 28 Lily’s Illusion: Character & Self 32 Self & Suicide 37 5 Maggie: A Divided Narrative Introduction & Determinism 41 Lily’s Illusion: Character & Self 43 Narration & Suicide 47 6 Conclusion & Implications 51 Works Cited 58 Word-count: 24,709 Acknowledgements I would like to thank myself for writing the master’s thesis now in front of you. Furthermore, I wish to thank Jasper Schelstraete for his kindness, support, and general enthusiasm, as well as for missing only one appointment, and Jürgen Pieters for taking the time to read this paper. Finally, I owe my thanks to Philippe Codde for so patiently putting up with my eternal confusion surrounding my bachelor’s paper, without which I would not have gotten here. 1 Introduction If you decide to eat steak for dinner, change jobs, read this paper at this particular moment, who was it that made that decision? Stupid question – you did. But when did you decide, and why? Or, more simply put, were you actually there – that is, were you consciously present at the moment of decision-making? Quite often, it seems, you were not; as Daniel C. Dennett, a contemporary philosopher, points out, one observes most of one’s decisions arrive but one does not consciously, all things considered, make it. (85) Dennett explains how [t]his invisibility of causal paths is not just a matter of the invisibility (to us) of other minds. From our own first-person “introspective” vantage point the causal paths are equally untraceable. [...] Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? (85) Such causal paths are untraceable because they are everywhere: in the past, present, and probable futures; in other people; in the deciding individual’s neurons and protons; in their conscious and unconscious desires, thoughts, beliefs, … (83-84) Moreover, it seems quite impossible to consciously consider all things, as one would have little time left to do anything else. Yet, throughout the years, there has existed the illusion of absolute human agency; perhaps because most causes are so hard, if not impossible, to trace. As we move through life, “we exploit the cognitive vacuum, the gaps in our self-knowledge, by filling it with a rather magical and mysterious entity, the unmoved mover, the active self”. (Dennett 87) In short, “[w]e see the dramatic effects leaving; we don’t see the causes entering; we are tempted by the hypothesis that there are no causes”. (84) For many, indeed, it is quite tempting to believe that one is free. Yet, this is not the only human belief. Stories about determinism – the idea that an individual is controlled by forces and that one’s life, therefore, is (pre)determined rather than within one’s own control – are everywhere in (Western) culture. Take, for example, religion. In days of yore, the Norse gods were many and had much to say about the destiny of mankind. For the ancient Greeks, too, it was not the individual who, ultimately, is in charge of what happens to him; it was the gods together with the Moirai, the weavers of one’s destiny. These Greek gods were whimsical, and it was very easy to offend them on accident, or because one simply had no other choice. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, offends goddess Artemis by accidentally killing a deer in one of her sacred groves, the consequences of which 2 put forth a moral dilemma – Agamemnon is supposed to fight for his country in the Trojan war, but now he has to offer his daughter Iphigenia before Artemis will allow him to sail to Troy; when Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena ask Paris whom he thinks is the most beautiful goddess, the latter, always having to offend two goddesses, can only give a wrong answer but has to live the consequences anyway; meanwhile, if you happened to be female and Zeus fell in love with you, you suffered quite a high chance that Hera, his wife, would avenge herself on you. Life under the Greek gods, in short, was not easy to control. Then came forth Yahweh, then God, then Allah. As time passed on, clearer rules of worship were established, and it became easier for man to understand how to stay on good terms with god. This rendered one’s fate less random and therefore easier to anticipate and thus control, but still it was god, not man, who had the final say in the human story. Throughout history, it seems, there exist few narratives in which (Western) mankind has rendered itself truly free. But, slowly, god seemed to lose his power, and forward came the self-made man; the one who achieves success even if circumstances dictate otherwise, through hard work, endurance, and power of will. “Self-made” seems to imply the opposite of determinism: god does not “make” you, circumstances do not make you, you make you. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature”, Benjamin Franklin, probably the best known developer of the concept of the self-made man, wrote, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do”. (Franklin 33) Being a “reasonable creature”, here, seems to imply control; the ability to create a reason – and thus a motivation – for everything one might do – acting, thinking, even feeling – is convenient only if one is effectively able to select to which cause one will, and will not, ascribe a reason. Franklin is writing about whether or not he might eat some “admirably well” smelling cod, as he is (briefly) philosophizing on his idea that it is wrong to eat cod, since the cod itself has not done anything to harm him or mankind. Subsequently, however, he recollects that cod eats smaller fish, and so Franklin decides that it is fine for him to, in his turn, eat the cod (on a side note, an adult cod also unscrupulously eats small cod, so it might be best not to stretch Franklin’s reasoning any further). (33) The situation which Franklin describes is not one with substantial consequences, but the citation itself is general enough to be applied anywhere. If one has set one’s mind to improve oneself or do something beneficial, one can make up a reason; if one sets one’s mind to self-destruction, equally so. For the assumed ability to ascribe reasons to everything to be “convenient”, an individual has to continually be sure that they focus on the former, not the latter. However, a person is not always rational, steered by emotions and the unconsciousness, and not always in control. 3 A literary mode of writing that experiments with this other side, putting forward characters who are often irrational, impulsive, and incapable of self-reflection, is literary naturalism. This paper will focus on the American version of literary naturalism, which was roughly the same as its European counterpart but less strict and, therefore, longer lived. As the 19th century ticked its way into the 20th, while the belief in both a unitary self and nation started to crumble, American literary naturalism came to life. Man and nation grew to be viewed as fragmented and deeply influenced by (external) forces rather than as being fully in control, and naturalist narratives reflect this fragmentation while exploring “[t]he disturbing possibilities for the individual personality” in a vastly uncontrollable world. (Heinze 237) Naturalist characters are enmeshed in a determined narrative told by an omniscient narrator, thus uncovering the forces steering their lives. Traditionally, these determining forces are analyzed as being fully external, existing outside of the characters. As Richard Chase already phrased it, Naturalistic doctrine [...] assumes that fate is something imposed on the individual from the outside. The protagonist of a naturalistic novel is therefore at the mercy of circumstances rather than of himself, indeed he often seems to have no self. (199) This is also how the naturalists themselves seemed to view it, as they wished to write objective science, not psychology. However, it is not always wise to let oneself be led by the authors’ views on their own work, and if one looks at history one finds that psychology, during the naturalist days, was at least equally important as external circumstances: A fascinating linguistic twist had already established proximity between the political concept of a non-citizen and the psychological concept of mental disturbance. An individual could be alienated from a polity or from the mind itself. [...] Unlike an external enemy, an alien [could now reside] in the body that it might infect. In psychology, too, health and wholeness – or sanity – depended on the absence of alien notions in the mind.

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