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.
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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. (Heinze 237-38)
I do not wish to refute that naturalist characters have no self; rather, as contradictory as it might sound, I wish to argue that an absence of a force might function as a force in itself. In other words, naturalist characters are as determined as they are precisely because they have no selves. In order to become a “sophisticated self”, Dennett writes, “the aspirant to a higher 4
order of self-control must have the capacity to represent his current beliefs, desires, intentions, and policies in a detached way, as objects for evaluation”. (94) Without the ability to self- reflect, then, one cannot obtain control; and without a self, one, of course, cannot self-reflect. This, I argue, is what one sees happening in naturalist characters. Rather than merely being determined by external forces they are determined, primarily, because of their lack of selves. The gap where the self might have been allows for these external forces to take its place, thus creating characters who, absorbed into their surroundings, disappear as individuals. Moreover, as naturalist characters come to be determined by additional external narratives, naturalist fiction reveals the potentially determining quality of the narrative – that is, the stories one tells about oneself and about others, and the stories others might tell about you. Without a self and a story of one’s own, American literary naturalism suggests, other stories might come to determine you. To explore this, I will trace the (non–)development of the protagonists of three naturalist novels: Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893). The three case studies will be analyzed separately, although, when analyzing one novel, I will refer to the other two. In this way, through character analysis and close reading, the protagonists’ different stories will be discussed and compared. In the conclusion, the main argument will be summarized and its implications will be laid out, suggesting a new way to read American literary naturalism as well as what the mode of writing, in its turn, suggests about human beings. The focus of my analysis lies on different naturalist depictions of the self in these narratives, and on how such selves – or absence of selves – interplay with the novels’ portrayal of the deterministic forces that shape the characters’ lives. For me, these three novels tell the story of determined protagonists who lose themselves in external narratives, resulting, finally, in the protagonists’ erasure from the story via suicide. As will be shown, a major deterministic force in the case of Martin, Lily, and Maggie is the extrinsic narrative of character; as others tell the protagonists’ stories for them, these main characters own (sense of) selves prove to be too weak for them to effectively become agents, resulting in them becoming absorbed in their environment and external narrative. The deterministic narrative is stronger than the autonomous characters and steers them from without, but the reason for its dominance lies within: namely, in the gap within the characters where the self could have been. Analyzing the novels in this way I argue that, for London’s Martin Eden, Wharton’s Lily Bart, and Crane’s Maggie Johnson, the narrative of the perceived character takes the place of the perceiving self and thus works as a deterministic 5
force upon the protagonists; they are no longer (or have never been) a telling agent in the story, but have become the object of something told. What renders the three protagonists defenseless against circumstances is not merely the novels’ acceptance of determinism, but the characters’ loss of self. Moreover, suicide not only finalizes the definite erasure of the experiencing self, but is also a direct consequence of this erasure. These naturalist novels, then, suggest that, without a self, one cannot live, and they portray suicide not as a reasoned- out, self-controlled act but as a final, determined happening in the process of the loss of self. As Lee Clark Mitchell asserts, naturalism’s triumph is the erasure of the self – and what is a more definite erasure of self than suicide?
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1 The Origin of Naturalism Naturalism, as the name might suggest, does not simply mean ‘naturalness’ or ‘nature’. (Furst 1) The term “naturalism” came into being in ancient philosophy and, though still related, carried a different meaning than it does now. In the beginning, the term expressed things such as epicurism and secularism (2) – that is, focusing on materialist ideas in its broader meaning rather than specifically ‘natural’ ideas. Materialism, in the ancient naturalist context, denotes the assumption that “physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter”. (Merriam Webster) According to this belief, the world we perceive is the only world. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Holbach gave the term a more specific meaning. Still nestled within materialism, philosophical naturalism came to entail the belief that man lives in a “cosmic machine which determined his life as it did nature”. (Furst 2) This “cosmic machine” is what was understood as nature – a universe devoid of all spiritual and transcendental forces. Thus, for naturalist philosophers, the world was chiefly materialistic and, therefore, observable. Man’s psychological inner world came secondary to these observable, physical laws, and a naturalist was seen as someone “who studies external nature”. (3) In the second half of the nineteenth century, naturalism found its way into literature through the pen of Émile Zola, who was the first author of fiction to use the term in the preface to his novel Thérèse Raquin (1867). (4) It was Zola, then, who introduced established literary naturalism in Europe and became its leading and most important defender. (5) According to his ideas around the “experimental novel”, Zola’s ultimate goal was to adopt the methodologies of science in literature and write a novel that is purely scientific, realistic, objective, and unconcerned with morals. (Link 78) Naturalist novels should be written through
the direct, non-ironic application of the scientific method to the drafting of a novel, so that [it] can in a real sense be used as a scientific tool for the study of human documents. [...] If the experiment is carried off by a true craftsperson with a keen eye for detail and an unwavering commitment to scientific accuracy and methodology, the novel will represent a kind of scientific case study and will produce data about human nature that will be observable and verifiable in the real world. (77-78)
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It might not come as a surprise that this ideal turned out to be too strict to be maintained; even Zola himself was unable to write such a truly scientific novel. (78) After all, novels stem from the author’s mind; they are per definition subjective. Moreover, naturalist literature, like all fiction, is not fully realistic nor objective, it does include moral messages, and its novels “do not produce data that would withstand the scrutiny of any “scientific” test”. (78) In Europe, it did not take too long before the naturalist mode of writing merged into other modes. In the United States, conversely, the philosophical ideas found in literary naturalism were less strict and more divers – even competing –, making the tradition more viable and enduring. (Link 81; Furst 24) While American literary naturalism saw its peak in between the two world wars, it was Stephen Crane who wrote what is generally accepted as being the first American literary naturalist novel: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893). (Furst 24; Bassan 3; Frye 164) Not Crane but Frank Norris, however, ended up establishing American literary naturalism as a tradition – or, as Norris himself called it, a “school”. (Cowley 421; Norris 171) While literary naturalism was – and still is – mostly seen as an “inner circle” of realism, Norris saw it more as a “form of romanticism” instead. (Norris 169) As Norris himself formulated it, “[w]here is the realism in the Rougon- Macquart? Are such things likely to happen between lunch and supper?”1 (169) In this statement, Norris makes a difference between “Truth” and “Accuracy”. Things that actually happen are accurate but they are not, by definition, true; for example, if the first sheep one ever sees is black, it is accurate to say that “all sheep are black”, but this would not be true. (170) For Norris, realist literature is Accurate rather than True; conversely, the Rougon- Macquart is True but, taken in its entirety, not quite Accurate. However, Norris argues, literary naturalism is not merely romanticism either; it is a combination of both, merging the realist Accuracy and the romantic Truth, making it an autonomous mode of writing that differs from both. (170-71; Link 79) Tied to this, the naturalists’ seemingly infallible belief in the “scientific” power of fiction is perhaps best captured by Norris himself:
Is it too much to say that fiction can be truer than Life itself? I take it that we can say this and yet be well within conservatism. For fiction must not be judged by standards of real life, but both life and fiction referred to a third standard. The expression “true
1 Les Rougon-Macquart is a work written by Émile Zola and consists of twenty novels. The name is derived from two characters – Pierre Rougon, who has died, and Macquart, an alcoholic who has a tendency to disappear. There is no need to summarizing the plots here, but a series named after two such characters has quite a high probability of exhibiting events that are, indeed, not “likely to happen between lunch and supper”. 8
to life” is false, is inadequate, for life itself is not always true. [...] It is not difficult to be accurate, but it is monstrously difficult to be True”. (170-71)
What Norris calls “True” might be interpreted as Zola’s “science”: both strove toward writing a novel that is universal and objective, a novel that does not stop with the individual but puts forth something about mankind. In the case of American naturalism its authors seemed, at least to an extent, to realize the challenge that lies beneath this ideal; Norris, already, calls it “monstrously difficult”. As Eric Carl Link points out, many American naturalist authors do not make statements but ask questions, often contradicting themselves in the process. (87) In other words, “they showed what determinism could involve, what living in such a world might actually mean”. (Mitchell 33) Through these questions and amid all the pessimism that determinism, in (American) naturalist fiction, seems to imply, “there is an undercurrent of optimism about the potential progress of human development and human society in many naturalistic works”. (81) As stated, the novels are not Accurate; moreover, many naturalist characters suffer and / or die, but often the reader can, quite clearly, follow why this happens, and what one might do to prevent such an outcome for oneself – that is, within the limits of one’s freedom and capacity. In short, naturalist authors “share a common desire to try to make sense of human nature in the wake of the scientific and philosophical revelations and revolutions of the nineteenth century”. (88) The ongoing rise of industry, capitalism, and immigration disrupted both the American identity and the individual’s sense of autonomy; the more traditional belief in an autonomous subject had to give way to the view that “[t]he self had at last been absorbed, in almost every conceivable way, into its social functions”. (Mitchell 119, 124-25) The development of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, along with Herbert Spencer’s social interpretation thereof shook Western life even further. Spencer, especially, was influential in the United States, putting forward natural development as moving steadily “from simplicity to complexity”, thus favoring “fitter” individuals – as opposed to Darwin, who saw evolution as “random variation”, a “process going nowhere”. (S. Brennan 188) Context is important, and, when reading or analyzing literary naturalism, “it helps to remind ourselves how [the naturalist] approach to understanding humankind’s place in nature was initiated by “the biological blow” that Darwinian evolution dealt “to human narcissism””. (Bender 65) Darwinian evolution questioned the place of mankind in nature, but it also questioned the place of the individual within mankind: Darwin recognized that the wishes and needs of a species or community are frequently conflicted with the wishes and needs of the individual, “thus questioning the effect of group values on the individual”. 9
(Armstrong 141) As we will see, this type of questioning corresponds quite well to the plots found in naturalist novels. Herbert Spencer, in his turn, reworked Darwin’s theories into a social context and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. (Armstrong 140) This might be where the well-known naturalist “plot of decline” stems from: as will be shown later, naturalist protagonists tend to not be the fittest, resulting in their seemingly inevitable downfall. (Howard 401) Naturalist novels, I argue, trace the erasure of the self within a community built on illusion, and seem to question the “unfit” individual’s place in a society that seems equally unfit, and whose collective desires vastly differ from theirs. Because American naturalist novels are so different from each other, absolutely defining American literary naturalism is a difficult task. Many attempts have been made, resulting in rather divergent conclusions. In this case, it suffices to characterize naturalism as a mode of writing most prominent around the turn of the century, searching for an objective Truth in a post-Darwinist life, often doing so via a plot of decline, and taking determinism as its central philosophical belief (cf. next chapter). Moreover, American literary naturalism is often associated with radical productivity – mainly because the authors needed the money – and a general inattention to style. Between 1899 and 1916, Jack London wrote “only” 1.000 words a day, but finished a total of fifty books, and he stated that he would finish and publish every novel he had started no matter whether he liked or disliked its result: “If it’s good, I sign it and send it out. If it isn’t good, I sign it and send it out.” (Cowley 424) Another naturalist, Upton Sinclair, employed three secretaries to write for him and once wrote 18,000 words in one day. (424) Naturalist novels’ arguable lack of style might very well be a direct result of this productive flurry, but it is also a result of Frank Norris, who, as stated, set the principles for naturalism and who was of rather explicit opinion that “fine writing” and “elegant English” correspond quite nicely to “tommyrot”, and that one might do best to “let [one’s] style go to the devil”. (Cowley 434) Both its style and its unfeasible ideals have been reasons for critics to discard (American) literary naturalism as a mode of writing that should not be taken too seriously (Mitchell vii); in more recent years, though, critics like Lee Clark Mitchell, Keith Newlin, and Donald Pizer have paved the way to start taking naturalism seriously. When looking through naturalism’s flaws, its specific goals and particular combination of beliefs arguably resulted, if not in truly objective and scientific literature, at least in interesting case studies, three of which will be discussed in this paper.
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2 Determinism and the (Absence of) Self As already mentioned, something that distinguishes naturalist fiction is its belief in, and depiction of, determinism. Depicting and questioning the ways of determinism, in fact, is the central principle of literary naturalism, both in Europe and in the United States. (Mitchell 30; Parrington 211) Evolving mainly from the theories of Darwin and Spencer, “the idea of the free, responsible human will, making ethical choices that control its fate, is set aside in favor of such concepts as determinism and survival”. (Walcutt “New Ideas” 289) Examining the place of the individual in a species or community, naturalist novels can be read as fiction “committed to a truthful account of the human mind in conflict with itself and its environment”. (S. Brennan 199) There is, however, no exact agreement among critics on how determinism is depicted in literary naturalism. Charles Child Walcutt, for example, saw determinism as a general philosophy nestled within the novel, whereas Lee Clark Mitchell is convinced that the naturalist novel’s language is the leading deterministic force. (“New Ideas” 211-212; Mitchell xiv) Donald Pizer, seemingly weary of critics’ discussions about the inconsistency of naturalist works’ attempts to depict a determinist universe, has attempted to dislodge determinism from its central place altogether. (Roberts 121-22) At this, however, he did not succeed: whether as a linguistic force, a more general philosophical idea, or a combination of both, determinism is there, revealing a paradox within human belief:
We tend to assume not only that we are the kind of beings who act in the world, but that our actions (at least the important ones) result from choices we have consciously made. And we treat others similarly, judging them by the choices we can infer from the actions they perform. Yet the more we reflect on this assumption, the less coherent it comes to seem, as we grow to appreciate how fully we are all a part of the world beyond our control. (Mitchell 1)
Before exploring this paradox further, we need to establish what, exactly, is meant by determinism and its apparent counterpart, free will. The three main deterministic forces in naturalist literature commonly accepted are heredity, upbringing, and environment. (Roberts 125) Determinism, then, favors biology and circumstances over an individual’s agency. There are two main interpretations of determinism: the compatibilist– and the non-compatibilist position. Free will and determinism absolutely exclude each other in the non-compatibilist 11
view, but not in the compatibilist one; hence the name “compatibilism”. Free will, from a compatibilist viewpoint, is defined as “the ability to act as one wishes, without denying the fact that one’s wishes are themselves determined by one’s upbringing, genetics, and circumstances”. (125) This might sound as a contradiction in itself: how does one hold the position that acting upon one’s wishes and desires is free will, if it is precisely these wishes and desires that are determined? As the compatibilists argue, multiple choices are possible without denying the desire behind them; man’s ability to (consciously) select, or not select, one of these choices, then, is free will. Moreover, accepting determinism, human beings still have the ability to, via the will, influence certain circumstances; thus, we can both “shape those circumstances” and “modify our future habits or capabilities of willing”. (Roberts 125) Yet, in the case of naturalist fiction, the complexity of bringing together determinism and free will is not so easily resolved. More often than not, the will of the naturalist protagonist is ultimately drowned out by the biological and environmental forces that determine the character. Where, then, is the naturalist character’s free will, even when looking from a compatibilist position? The key-words, perhaps, are self and self-consciousness. As Keith Newlin argues, the prototypical naturalist character is a “whole character”; they are flat rather than round, they lack meaningful inner conflict, and they are “propelled by a single force”. (“Introduction”2 13) The character might be “dimly conscious of conflicting desires” but this is not enough to take action, resulting in a passive character who is deprived agency. (13) As will be shown, there is a form of inner conflict going on in all three protagonists discussed here, but the characters are insufficiently aware of this conflict. The reader is the one who sees it happening, not the character themself. Because the naturalist character lacks self-awareness, they lack the ability to successfully alter the course which the inner conflict, and thus their life, is taking. As Weedon Scott, a character in Jack London’s White Fang, phrases it when he is confronted with his inability to effectively take charge of his life: “‘I don’t know my own mind, and that’s what’s the trouble.’” (242) These protagonists are either not aware of the very possibility of change, or, conversely, that there are any limits to such change. Essentially, I argue, determinism exists within a character – and, arguably, a person; if one does not realize that one might be able to, in one way or another, effectively control one’s destiny, one can no longer do so. The character may recklessly attempt change, as Martin Eden does, but without sufficient self-awareness he cannot succeed. As I will argue, naturalist fiction shows
2 Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations from Keith Newlin are taken from this source. 12
how such absence of self-consciousness can effectively result in the fading and, ultimately, absolute erasure of the self. In a determined world, it seems, letting one’s self escape one’s consciousness equals a more absolute escape of this self, not only from the character’s consciousness but from the narrative. The problem naturalist characters encounter is that they do not realize this is happening, or they realize it too late, and are unable to return to– or rewrite the self. In naturalism, if the self leaves the character, the character cannot live. What remains is the necessity to explain the difference, in naturalist literature, between self and character. Mitchell emphasizes perspective as the major distinction; fiction depicts either an “external perspective”, which creates a “character”, or an “internal perspective”, which creates a “self”. (14) The distinction between round and flat characters already stated is echoed here: a round character might develop a self, whereas a flat character remains merely a character. The naturalist character, as stated, is flat; typically, an omniscient narrator conveys an external perspective, resulting in the reader knowing more about the character than the character themself. Moreover, naturalist authors “present each situation as if it had no historical antecedents, and their characters might be men and women created yesterday morning, so few signs do they show of having roots in the past”. (Cowley 429) This technique further turns the character away from their (potential) self and culminates in the reader doing the same, i.e. making the reader’s interest in the character end where the text ends. (Mitchell 32) Such flat characters, as we will see later, further convey determinism. But first, let us return to what naturalist characters are not: selves. A contemporary philosopher, Daniel C. Dennett, defines the self as “a locus of self-control”. (Dennett 88) “Control is the ultimate criterion”, Dennett continues, “I am the sum total of the parts I control directly”. (89) Another important criterion for developing and preserving a self is self-consciousness, and the ability to question and evaluate oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. (93) The controlling self must be able to step out of oneself, as it were, and review one’s actions, motivations, desires, and believes in a detached, objective-like manner. (94) We, as selves, evaluate what we find important, and “define ourselves in the process”; in this manner, we can create a flexible, yet stable enough, self. (98-99) Conversely naturalist characters, as will be shown, lack control, self-consciousness, and self-reflection; in other words, they lack selves. Whereas Dennett’s definition of the self is focused internally, on the “I” – I am what I control, what I evaluate, etc. – the protagonists that will be analyzed experience the self as being confirmed externally, by other characters, thus leading to a different, schizoid definition of the self: “‘I am the person that other people know and recognize me to be’.” (Laing 119) As opposed to Dennett’s definition, Laing’s 13
renders the interpretation of “I” uncontrollable to the I themself. As the self is externalized – and thus is no longer a self, but a character – the characters’ narrative, now told by other characters and the reader, is taken out of their control, rendering them determined and superfluous to the main narrative. Subsequently, the loss of self culminates in suicide, the full erasure of the autonomous character. The absence of a self, the belief in determinism, and – in the cases of Martin, Lily, and Maggie – suicide, are directly linked together; naturalist authors, in other words, “denied any hope of [...] release from circumstance by excluding the very category of the self”. (Mitchell 15, my italics) This depiction of the self – or, more correctly, of the absence of the self – is what makes naturalist literature valuable, as it mirrors the psychiatric view of divided individuals during the beginning of the twentieth century, according to which “a disturbed individual faced one of two very bleak horizons: possibly irreparable inner conflict or complete loss of memory of one’s original nature”. (Heinze 236) Rather than dismissing the novels as stylistically “bad”, as numerous critics have done, it might be more interesting to see the naturalist style, too, as signifying determinism; “philosophy and style are one [...] Fiction, that is, does not so much argue for a certain philosophy – as if characters were no more than separate voices in a Socratic dialogue – as it embodies a metaphysics in its very syntax itself”. (Mitchell x, 29) Around the turn of the century, as the belief in a unitary self crumbled and shifted toward a view of identities as fragmented and divisible, literary naturalism strove to convey the “threatened dissolution of the self” in an urban, industrialized environment. (Heinze 228; Campbell 161) Involving the (absence of) self in analyzing literary naturalism, we, again, encounter the crux of determinism: human beings are part of a universe “that appears to be structured by laws of causality”, but “when our actions are reduced to those laws, we seem to disappear as responsible agents”. (Mitchell 2) Determinism in naturalism, as stated, can be read as a question, a suggestion of how things might have been: it is true for the characters, but not necessarily for mankind. (Mitchell 33) After all, fiction does not equal life and, as Norris already pointed out, the plots of naturalist novels do not seem too realistic. Naturalist fiction might not be suited to serve as scientific documents, but it can, through magnified circumstances, suggest something about human beings. Most naturalist characters, even in the midst of a world ruled by the belief in determinism, have the potentiality of self- consciousness and, therefore, of free will. However, naturalism “turn[s] our attention to fictional worlds into which its characters are absorbed, not to selves that stand somehow free of those worlds”. (Mitchell 32) The tragedy in naturalism is that the reader is forced to watch 14
this potentiality glimmer and then fade away; naturalism’s triumph, conversely, is “to estrange us from the very notion of a self”. (32)
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3 Martin Eden: A Divided Character
Saints in heaven! – they were only saints, and could not help themselves. But he was a man.
– Martin Eden
Introduction & Determinism Martin Eden (1909) is a novel filled with dualistic motives, and in terms of dualism its author, Jack London, fits right in; generally accepted as one of the most notable American naturalist authors, London did not think of himself as a naturalist writer at all. (Newlin “Documentary Strategies” 105; Mitchell viii) Resultantly, discussions about whether or not London is a naturalist have been rather prominent in the literary field. It is not my aim to rekindle such a discussion; rather, let us focus on the presence of naturalist ideas in the novel itself. Martin Eden is set, mainly, in San Francisco, and narrates the story of its eponymous protagonist, a sailor who falls in love with a bourgeois woman, Ruth Morse. The story starts with Martin meeting Ruth after he rescued her brother, Arthur, from a gang of muggers. Entering Ruth’s life, Martin is introduced to books and -knowledge, which kindles a hunger in him he did not know he had; revering the learned, middle class, Martin keeps on visiting Ruth and, with her assistance, slowly but steadily severs his ties with the working class. As the story progresses, two desires propel Martin through life: he wants to be with Ruth, and he wants to write. Selling one’s writing, however, does not come as easily as Martin assumed; in the meantime, Martin meets Russ Brissenden, a fervent socialist who attempts to persuade Martin to give up writing for money and return to his ocean. Martin, driven by his dream, does not listen; the aspiring author is engaged to Ruth and on the verge of success when Brissenden commits suicide, and Ruth leaves him because of a rumor. Disillusioned and with nothing but extinguished desires, Martin returns to his old working class friends, only to realize that he can no longer fit in; the time he spend with his books, his writing, and the middle class has pushed him too far away. His success as a writer, on the other hand, is not forceful enough to propel Martin back toward life, and finally the protagonist boards a steamer headed for Tahiti, slips through the porthole, and drowns. 16
Jack London wrote the novel as a semi-autobiography, intending, as he did with all his novels and within the line of literary naturalism, to “portray the fundamental human condition as he had come to understand it”. (Baskett 141) Whether its author is considered a naturalist author or not, naturalist and determinist motives are undeniably present in Martin Eden. (Cowley 430) The novel, echoing Darwinian, Spencerian, and Marxist thought, portrays biological, environmental, and social forces as driving its characters through life. (Armstrong 149-50; Baskett 142) What motivates Martin and other characters to act the way they do are forces and desires of which they are only dimly conscious at best, as opposed to reflexive, controlling selves. (Newlin 12-13) Furthermore, the novel’s characters are flat characters rather than selves; they lack self-consciousness and -control, and the minimal development they experience is told from outside by an omniscient narrator rather than shown through an internal perspective. Martin’s love for Ruth, for example, is described by the narrator as an “organic demand of his being” of which Martin is unaware: “He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation”. (22 i) The protagonist is not the only one suffering from such a case of unawareness; Ruth, too, “was tenderly disposed toward [Martin], but she did not know it. She had no way of knowing it.” (121 i) Starting from the beginning of the novel, the characters, in correspondence with the naturalist doctrine, lack the self-consciousness and -reflection necessary to effectively control their actions; rather than such characters determining their own actions, the narrative style sketches them as if the actions they take are determined for them. Martin Eden experiences three main determining forces: class, desire, and the narrative of the perceived character, Mr. Eden. The latter, being both the most complex and the most important determining force in this analysis, will be uncovered in the next part of this paper. A more prototypical determining force in naturalist literature in general is Martin’s desire, both for Ruth and to write. Desires determines his actions and his ability to stay alive – without his desires, as will be shown later, Martin cannot go on living. But to return to the beginning, it is these very same desires that propel Martin away from the working class and toward a life as a writer, together with Ruth. As Martin, when introduced to Ruth, sees the books on her table, there “leaped a wistfulness and a yearning [into his eyes] as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food”. (8 i) In the same way, Martin is “famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands had gripped his life with a giant’s grasp”, this girl being, of course, Ruth Morse. (61 i) The narrator conveys their love as a biological force, a hunger over which they have no control; it is simply there and, being naturalist characters, Martin and Ruth have no choice but to act upon it. The same goes for 17
Martin’s desire to write, a desire which Martin cannot surpass even when it pushes him away from Ruth. Martin himself tells Ruth this when she asks him why he did not write something that will earn them money, since that (supposedly) is his reason for writing: ‘Yes, that’s right; but the miserable story got away with me. I couldn’t help writing it. It demanded to be written.’” (121 ii) After Ruth leaves, Martin loses his desire to write, indicating that he was writing in order to earn money and create a living for them both; but during the time that they are together his writing does not bring Martin closer to Ruth, even though he believes that it does. Almost from the beginning on, Martin’s lack of self-reflectiveness and his inability to understand the circumstances he finds around him shows itself to the reader – but not to Martin himself. The second determining factor, for Martin, is class; but, as opposed to desire, class holds him back rather than propelling him forward. If we are to believe the narrator, Martin is somewhat aware of this happening: he spends his time with Ruth, while “with each glance of theirs he felt the fingers of his own class clutching at him to hold him down”. (66 i) He does not seem to believe, however, that class can truly determine him; further on in the story, when Martin and Ruth have become engaged, he reflects on this and concludes that “there was no bar to their marriage. Class difference was the only difference [between him and Ruth], and class was extrinsic. It could be shaken off.” (238 i) As it turns out, however, it cannot – that is, living in a narrative ruled by determinism, the protagonist can “shake off” his class by becoming a successful writer, but he cannot shake off and rewrite the self that can exist only in the working class. The turning point for Martin Eden lies here: in order to be with Ruth he has to rise above the working class and enter the bourgeois society, which he can do in theory but not in practice. The perceived character – Mr. Eden – goes where the perceiving self – the sailor and hoodlum Mart Eden – cannot follow, something which Martin Eden realizes only after he has irretrievably split himself. (237 ii) In the beginning of the narrative, when he is called “Mr. Eden” for the first time – by Arthur; that is, someone belonging in the middle class, not the working class – Martin immediately notices the difference – a “thrilling impression” – but he sees no danger there, only novelty and possibilities. (9 i) “[W]ith eyes that dreamed and did not see” the protagonist lets himself be carried on by his passion, away from himself. (232 i) For Martin, class and self are entwined, as are desire and self, and class and desire: Martin is determined by his class because his self cannot exist outside the working class environment, and desire cannot survive without a self, nor can a self exist without desire. In the determined world of London’s Martin Eden, the self seems a house of cards: remove one aspect, and it all falls down. 18
Martin’s Illusion: Character & Self These are the determining forces; but what about Martin Eden himself makes him as determined as he is? Simply said, Martin Eden is a rather mysterious character, and we learn little about him as he was before the events of the novel take place; “without specific ancestry, [he] almost literally emerges from the sea” to lead a brief and passionate but naïve life filled with opposing forces, until he abruptly decides to disqualify himself from the game by drowning himself in this same sea. (Baskett 142) Apart from that, Martin Eden is “a fluid organism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and crannies”, the narrator writes. (37 i) Such rootlessness and overly flexible “self”, as explained earlier, is typical for a naturalist character. What the reader learns is that Martin is a sailor, that he has an extraordinarily vivid imagination, and that, before meeting Ruth, he has never been conscious of himself or his body. (37, 9, 46 i) Moreover, what we learn about his past is contrasted to the protagonist’s experiences with the bourgeois society and, specifically, with Ruth Morse. Upon seeing Ruth, “[t]he women he had known” line up before Martin in a vision “to be weighed and measured”, with Ruth as the measuring unit. (10 i) Compared to his new love, “a pale, ethereal creature”, these women do not come out well: Martin sees “a grotesque and terrible nightmare brood [...], gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all the vast hell’s following of harpies, [...] the scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.” (9, 11 i) This might seem slightly exaggerated, but this is how Martin sees it; it is not surprising, then, that Martin’s desire for a place beside Ruth and her class takes on as forceful a form as it does. Almost immediately, the novel’s language makes it clear that Martin’s is a universe filled with dichotomies and extremes3; contrasting the angelic image of Ruth with these hellish visions of the other women, Martin, still standing with one foot in hell, aspires a place in heaven, where Ruth is “a spirit, a divinity, a goddess”. (10 i) As explained in the previous part, both desire and class play a role in steering Martin’s story. As we have just seen, Martin’s desire – for Ruth, for books, to transform hell into heaven – is strong enough for him to attempt to rewrite his self. The self he was belongs in the working class and, leaving, Martin seems to have no desire to bring his former self, or any aspect of this self, with him. Instead, Martin’s dream is “nothing less than to create a new self
3 In “Divided Self and World in Martin Eden” George M. Spangler provides an interesting analysis of all the dichotomies in the novel – working class vs. middle class, dreams vs. reality, self-consciousness vs. self-obliviousness, life vs. death, … –, in which Martin’s dream is unity, whereas his reality consists solely out of divisions. Adding to this the dichotomy of self vs. character, Spangler’s is an interesting additional read. 19
and a new universe for that self, a universe of the imagination”. (Baskett 146) As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Martin does not understand the difference between imagination and reality; the things he sees around him he calls a dream, while “[t]he real world [is] in his mind”. (123 i) In this imagined universe, transcending one’s class and becoming a writer is easy: you write, you send out, you get published, and you profit. Writing is easy work. That Martin, however feverishly he is toiling, is, in fact, not getting published does not seem to matter, as becomes clear through numerous, tirelessly repetitive conversations between Martin and Ruth, most of which go something like this:
‘But if you did sell it, what do you think you’d get for it?’ ‘Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the way prices go.’ ‘My! I do hope you’ll sell it!’ ‘Easy money, eh?’ Then he added proudly: ‘I wrote it in two days. That’s fifty dollars a day.’ (126 i)
And when, after two years of writing, returned manuscripts, unreceived cheques, and countless disappointments, Martin finally manages to sell some of his writing, his view on things seems unaltered:
“‘But that wasn’t so bad, was it – two acceptances in three days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all my debts.’ ‘For two years’ work?’ she queried. ‘No, for less than a week’s work.’ [...] ‘Four days for ‘The Ring of Bells,’ two days for ‘The Whirlpool.’ That’s forty-five dollars a week’s work, one hundred and eighty dollars a month. That beats any salary I can command.’” (26 ii)
Until Martin loses Brissenden and Ruth, he is carried by his confidence in his capability to survive, to make it. (Baskett 145) Martin is blinded by his dreams and does not consider the factors that might influence or control him, “[a]nd so Martin’s rôle was arranged for him, while, he, led on [...], was meditating an extravagance”. (114 i) In short, in his imagined universe “[t]he joy of creation that is supposed to have belonged to the gods was his”, and determinism does not exist. (123 i) Martin, having learned to write fiction and unable to differ between fiction and reality, seems to believe that he is now capable of writing life. 20
London’s protagonist as a character, regardless of the liveliness of his desire, is essentially whole. Being a whole character entails “singleness of feeling”; that is, though such characters are not utterly unable to make decisions, they “can never refrain from acting as their desires compel them to act, even if they have resolved to act otherwise”.4 (Newlin 14) Martin’s decision to write occurs when, having run out of money, he is temporarily working on a treasure-hunting schooner:
And then, in splendour and glory, came the great idea. He would write. [...] There was career and the way to win to Ruth. [...] Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with unguessed power, and felt that he could do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective. (102 i)
Dennett philosophizes about whether our decisions are, or are not, voluntary, since “[w]e do not witness [the decision] being made; we witness its arrival.” (85) This is exactly what happens to Martin, and, in his case, it does not seem too voluntary – the decision does not grow, a more neutral word, it germinates, and it immediately takes over. The juxtapositions in the paragraph are quite striking. Martin is mastered by an idea, yet he feels powerful; he is in a drunken, dream-like state, yet he “gained perspective”. The protagonist is propelled by this single desire that encapsulates everything: Ruth, books, and a one-way ticket away from the working class. The aspiring writer’s inability to grasp that he is living in a dreamworld might seem too naïve to be believable, but in the light of literary naturalism it only makes sense. As the above paragraph suggests, Martin Eden is no longer an aspiring self – from here on he is a servant of his desire, and he has no chance to develop, nor to act differently than he does, because he himself does not rule over his decisions and acts, his desire to write does. Martin, however, believes he is in full control, which ironically renders him powerless – without self- awareness, the protagonist, now rudderless, cannot steer his life. Of course, as the novel progresses, Martin Eden develops from “Mart Eden, the sailor” into “Mr. Eden”, and then into “Martin Eden, the famous writer” (236 ii), but this is a development of character, not of self. Martin, as opposed to developing as a self, creates what
4 Mitchell provides a useful explanation of this difference between choice and being free in his Determined Fictions: “Nothing about choice itself denies determinism, after all, since characters opting for an alternative may still be determined to make that choice [...]. Determinism simply implies an absolute responsiveness to forces that seem to have nothing to do with the character’s ‘self.’” (8) Choice, then, is not necessarily free choice. 21
George M. Spangler calls “a false self, a newspaper personality”. (Spangler 161) In other words, London’s protagonist focuses his gaze on the external. Having arrived home after his visit to Ruth, he investigates his own appearance as he sees it in his dirty looking glass (indicating that it has not been used in a long time, if ever). He looks “long and carefully”, but “being unused to such appraisement” he “[does] not know how to value it”. (46-47 i) Apart from wondering “what kind of brain lay behind [his square forehead]”, he begins to decide that, over all, what he sees is “healthy” and “wholesome”5; his lips, for example, “could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and command life”. (48 i) Such a positive evaluation based on Martin’s own experience with life, however, cannot last:
But as he looked, he began to be troubled. Somewhere, stored away at the recesses of his mind, and vaguely remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed their teeth every day. They were the people from up above – people in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days of his life? (48 i)
This is another turning point in the novel, after which Martin no longer values life based on what he experiences, but on what he sees. His ongoing contact with Ruth endorses this behavior. She, too, values life based on external appearance rather than internal experience; or, in other words, she is interested in “forms, rather than substance”. (Christopher 83) When seeing Martin for the first time, for example, Ruth immediately notices Martin’s rough appearance and his clothes, “the cheap and unaesthetic cut”. (11 i) As they grow closer, Ruth works with Martin to change his speech – which, initially, is the rough speech of sailors, not the sophisticated, correct speech of the middle class –, clothes, and manners. Martin is now “talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common”, but these are all Ruth’s things, not his. (129 i) Martin becomes “clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her ideal of man”. (112 i) This “ideal of man” is not a rough, uneducated sailor and it is not himself – if anything, the ideal is Martin’s opposite. For most of the novel, then, we follow Martin’s transformation from “Mart Eden” into “Mr. Eden” – in other words, we follow Martin’s slow loss of self. In the novel, this loss of
5 Note the usage of both “healthy” and its synonym, “wholesome” (my italics), subtly foreshadowing the sickness that will come along with Martin’s self-division. 22
self is exemplified by the hauntings Martin begins to experience; while he is busy changing into Mr. Eden, his former self, Mart Eden, stalks into rooms with him, lost and clearly not at home. Martin watches this “youthful hoodlum” metamorphose and merge into the character he is now. (44, 75-76 ii) The key-word, here, is watching: whatever merging or metamorphosing might happen, it happens only externally, and the Martin Eden we follow throughout the narrative remains but a passive spectator. There is no integration of self going on here, and this shows Martin’s inability to allow his past to become a part of the person he is now. (Campbell 177) Mr. Eden does not merely wish to evolve; he wants to become new. As a result, Martin’s past experiences – as a sailor, as a self – “become [...] externalized within a field of reflection whose reflective subject – “Mr. Eden” – Martin Eden cannot yet recognize as himself.” (Pease 155) This splitting paves the way for Martin’s disembodied suicide explored below; what remains is a “surviving narrative”, an external tale that does not coincide with Martin’s “subjectivized interiority”. (Pease 142) All of this, in short, is a fiction, mostly, of the protagonist’s own making, a narrative that will become his downfall. Although Martin did not initiate the character of Mr. Eden – an external impulse did – he does, to a great extend, shape it. Martin cultivates his “self” in yet another fiction, his own writing, and believes that this is enough; his writing becomes “a way of realizing the self in public”. (Karaganis 164) Texts one writes are, however, not selves; they are objects and, moreover, commodities that can be sold publicly. (Kim 11) Via his contact with Ruth and his writing, “Martin himself becomes a commodity, and sees himself as one”. (Christopher 85) The “self” Martin has – or believes he has – is external, public, and out of his control, whereas Martin’s internal drive is no more than a desire. He is propelled by a single force, unaware of this happening, and thus lacks the ability to change his course; it is only after he has lost everything that Martin realizes what has happened to him, as
[h]e drove along the path of relentless logic to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. Mart Eden the hoodlum, and Mart Eden the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden, the famous writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapour that had arisen in the mob-mind, and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the corporeal being of Mart Eden the hoodlum and sailor. But it couldn’t fool him. (236-37 ii)
Publicly selling his writing, the only expression of self Martin had left, allowed for the “mob- mind” to shape and control him. The irony in this passage is, of course, that it could fool him 23
– it fooled him so thoroughly in doing everything in his power to create a narrative of perceived character, “Martin Eden, the famous writer”, that he managed to exclude himself from what ought to have been his own story. He was a self around his working class friends because “No book of his had been published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes. They liked him for himself.” (201 ii, my italics) The novel did not turn into a science fiction and Martin is not residing in an alternate universe; a book of his has been published, but the language indicates, quite directly, that Martin does not experience this as his book. It is the book written by Martin Eden, the writer – and this, it seems, is not “he”. Conversely, he feels that his bourgeois acquaintances tolerate(d) him, not for himself, but for his capability to become someone else. This feeling seems rather justified, as it takes only two fictitious newspaper articles for Martin to be discarded (cf. later), and all it takes for him to be invited back in society is to become a successful writer, which, indeed, he does become. But Martin’s fictions that kept his desire alive have shattered, and he realizes now that he cannot get them back:
It was an idealised Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love poems. The real bourgeois Ruth [...] he had never loved. (248 ii)
Desire & Suicide Desire, in Martin Eden, is a curious force. On the one hand it is an expression of both life and self – as Martin himself phrases it, “‘[m]y desire to write is the most vital thing in me’”. (88 ii) –, but it is this very same desire that propels Martin away from himself. As explained earlier, desire (to write) fills the space where the self was and so becomes the force that drives Martin on, out of his control. The text repeatedly points this out. “[I]t was this desire [to know]”, the narrator at one point explains, “that had sent [Martin] adventuring over the world”. (141 i) Such passive language is in line with literary naturalism: it was not Martin who actively went adventuring over the world, it was his desire that send him. In another example, when Martin is attempting to read Spencer, “[l]ove [...] overrode his will, so that, despite all determination, he found himself [writing again]”. (226 i) He does not go to his desk to write, he finds himself there, almost as if someone who is not “he” has placed him there. In Martin’s case, this is exactly what happened – it is his desire that send the protagonist traveling and placed him at his desk, and a desire is not a controlling self. Martin’s life exemplifies the paradoxical quality of that desire can take on (in naturalist 24
fiction): desire is an expression of the internal self and reads as an external force; desire makes him feel in control and fully controls him; desire is the most vital thing in him and excludes and erases him from – what started as – his own narrative. That desire is indeed the most – the only – vital thing in Martin becomes clear near the end of the novel, as Martin can no longer desire anything; or, as he himself phrases it, “‘[l]ife has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything’”. (250 ii) The protagonist invested all of himself in writing and in Ruth, and it was for Ruth that Martin aimed to become a writer in the first place; when the latter leaves him, he has no reason to go on desiring. It is worth noting that Ruth leaves Martin because of a story that is told about him, not for something he has actually done. Martin went to a socialist meeting and impulsively decided to speak up against socialist doctrine – that is what he did. (162 ii) What happens, however, is that “[i]t changed that a cub reporter sat in the audience”, who is “too dense to follow the discussion” and who has an “ideal”, namely “to make something – even a great deal – out of nothing”. (165 ii) This ideal, the “cub reporter” achieves: he picks up the word revolution, reconstructs an entire pro-socialist speech out of this single word “[l]ike a paleontologist”, and makes Martin say the whole thing. (165 ii) In other words, what appears head-lined and on the first page of the next day’s newspaper is a lie, a fiction, something that is out of Martin’s control. The next day, the same reporter visits Martin’s room to interview him and, now avenging the spanking Martin gives him for spreading rumors, he, again, writes a fictional article and puts the words into Martin’s mouth – and this is why Ruth leaves him.6 Martin attempts to explain to her his own story, what he has truly said at the meeting and afterward, but there is no reply from Ruth. Immediately, Martin discontinues his writing; and, as Martin’s narrative revolves around writing and Ruth, the novel jumps forward in time, skipping some weeks. It seems that, without Ruth and writing, there remains, quite literally, nothing else to say. When, after these same weeks, the protagonist meets Ruth and forces out a reply from her, it is only to hear that “[y]ou have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell you.” (179 ii) Again, Ruth focuses not on what happened in itself but on the external effects of it, leaving Martin to wonder, perhaps quite rightly, how true their love actually was. (179 ii) After this meeting, Martin walks home – “but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked [the long walk]” (179 ii) – and mechanically
6 In the world of Martin Eden, socialists are not exactly well-liked; the rumor that Martin was a socialist renders him “a traitor to his country” in many of his colleague characters’ eyes; as the “cub reporter” makes Martin say it, “‘[w]e are the sworn enemies of society’”. (175, 171 ii) 25
picks up his writing, not because he feels a desire to write but because “[t]here was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone.” (180 ii) Five days later Martin goes to visit Brissenden – again, because he has something to tell his friend, not because he desires to – only to find out that Brissenden has died by suicide. (181-82 ii) It is all over for Martin then. He finishes his last manuscript and keeps on existing for a while, but nothing can revive him anymore. Until right before he dies the protagonist strives “to stir himself and find something to interest him”, but he cannot succeed. (264 ii) “[F]or something to be a controller its states must include desires” (Dennett 58), and Martin has neither desires nor a self. As stated, without desire Martin cannot live, but as “[a]ll the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making towards death”, Martin still needs an impulse before he can actually choose to die. (257 ii) His suicide is, therefore, both a choice and determined. Martin is utterly dependent on an external impulse to be able to decide; he needs to stumble upon a stanza from Swinburne in order to realize that
[t]hat was it – the very thing! Strange that it had never come to him before! That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. (265-66 ii)
Curiously this impulse, again, stems from a fiction. Martin’s friend died by suicide, an occurrence which could have served quite well as a catalyst, but this, evidently, did not do it for Martin; after Brissenden died, committing suicide himself does not once cross Martin’s mind. Moreover, Martin lacks the self-consciousness and -understanding to grasp what is happening to him; he does not feel or care about anything, and he knows that “[s]omething’s wrong with [his] think-machine” – because a working class friend, Lizzie, tells him so – but he does not understand what, or why. (239 ii) The poet Swinburne can tell him what is “the meaning of it all”, but Martin himself cannot. Subjectivity, reality, and fiction seem to have become utterly entwined. The moment Martin decides on suicide, he largely takes back control. He is dependent on an external narrative – Swinburne’s poem – to get there, but he can now, quite literally, escape the narrative that has come to control and erase him – the one of Mr. Eden, the socialist, the famous writer. Again, this is paradoxical; he takes back control and escapes the narrative that determines him, but the only way for him to do so is through erasing himself; after all, the “mob-mind” put the narrative in his body. In order to erase the determining 26
narrative, the body has to be erased with it.7 At the moment of Martin’s suicide, his split identity and loss of self is striking, as “[h]is wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down.” (268-69 ii) Death does not happen to the Martin who is in control; instead, he both watches and makes it happen to a body that is not him. Conversely, the Martin who actually experiences the dying is no self, but a mere “automatic instinct to live”. (267 ii) In fact, there is no self present in this scene, only a controller and a controllee sharing the same body, the same life: the scene “leaves a disinterested consciousness, a gaze voided of subjectivity”. (Pease 140)
The subject(s) who has undergone the drowning vanishes into words that borrow the consciousness of the narrator for their recitation. [...] [T]he narrator has reexperienced the event as a consciousness without a subject. (141, my italics)
Thus, Martin actively commits suicide while, at the same time, he does not. The acting “he” is a spectator who seems to view the occurrence from without, while the body “he” kills is simultaneously referred to as “his”, denoting (being him), and “they”, denoting separation. As Donald E. Pease points out, “[t]he division within Eden becomes active at the word fooled”, as the language referring to the drowning body switches from “his” to “they”. (140) Finally, the narrative of Martin Eden begins and ends with him; Martin dies, “[a]nd at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.” (269 ii) This is the novel’s final sentence. So far, London’s protagonist has succeeded in taking back control and making the narrative his own again. However, now with no story, no self, no body, and no life, this arguably is a meager victory at best. Martin’s suicide makes sense, however, because “he”, a self, ceased to exist long before the remaining “he”, a character, and a body seeming to no longer belong to this character, follow suit. In that light, death is the completion of the erasure of self and a kind of reuniting of the self – albeit a reuniting in nonexistence. The controlling Martin, no longer wanting to be alive, sneers at “his” will to live that is, simultaneously, not his: “he had will”, he reflects, “[a]ye, will strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and
7 Yung Min Kim points out this same paradoxical quality within Martin Eden but in an imperialist context: for Kim, Martin is both the “savage” (in my reading, Martin’s original self) and the “conqueror” (the character Martin creates to fit in capitalist civilization). (5) In this reading, Martin’s suicide becomes “a moment of triumph”, an effective escape from “the oppressive and meaningless life as defined by civilized, capitalist society”. (15) Kim’s argument is interesting but the conclusion seems simplified, as it ignores that all Martin conquers and escapes, in the end, is himself, not capitalism, which arguably renders his triumph meaningless. 27
cease to be”. (267 ii, my italics) What used to be the novel’s subject has disappeared behind words, and in order to escape those words Martin, re-emerging as a conflicting will turning upon itself, ends the words that hid and determined him. But since Martin as a literary character, too, is words, he has no choice but to end himself.
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4 The House of Mirth: A Divided Desire
‘Talk of jewels – what’s a woman want with jewels when she’s got herself to show?’
– The House of Mirth
Introduction & Determinism Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) tells the story of Lily Bart, a beautiful girl living with her aunt, Mrs. Peniston, and struggling to obtain a place for herself within society. Being brought up with no skills but to be “ornamental” and with only a small fortune of her own, Miss Bart needs a well-off man to support her. For Lily, nearing the age of twenty-nine within a society fully focused on appearances, time is ticking. The problem is, however, that Lily is drawn toward Lawrence Selden, an acquaintance who is critical toward both the leisure class and Lily’s wish to be a part of it. Selden does not have enough money to support Lily, and throughout the novel he, excluding the very end, expresses no wish to marry her. Miss Bart is thrown back and forth between her two desires – to be with Selden and to live within society – while her need for money becomes more and more acute. Lily manages to hold her head up, until Bertha Dorset, another of Lily’s acquaintances and a very popular woman within society, spreads the rumor that Miss Bart has had an affair with her husband, George Dorset. Moreover, because of another speculation about Lily, her aunt does not leave her her house and money after she dies. These are both lies, but the consequences for Lily are very real, and she is cast out of society. Lily continues to exist for a while but only to fall deeper, until she finds herself to be completely alone. Sleepless and hurting, she finally takes in an overdose of chloral hydrate, a sedative, and dies in her sleep. The reader then follows Selden, who, the next morning, goes to visit Lily in the boarding house where she rented a room, to learn that she has died. The novel ends with Selden reflecting on their lost love and lamenting her death. Comparable to London’s Martin Eden, a tension between reality and illusion, facts and stories, lingers in The House of Mirth. Lily differs from Martin, however, in that she does not create her own determining fictions; rather, the narrative of the perceived character, Miss Bart, is created for her. The society culture that surrounds Lily values appearances over truth, and its characters are drawn toward how circumstances seem to be, rather than how they truly are; or, to borrow Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s words, the novel displays a “consistent confusion 29
between the ideal and the real”. (Wolff 320) In this respect, it is important to highlight that the novel does not start with Lily, but with Selden perceiving Lily, and Selden is interested in observing her “surface appearance” rather than in Miss Bart as a (potential) self. (Wolff 329) Such narration continues throughout the novel; more often than not, Lily is observed by other characters rather than observing and experiencing herself. The reader, too, gets information about Lily through an omniscient narrator and other characters. The focus within the society of which Lily longs to be a part is external, on character rather than self, resulting in depersonalization, objectification, and loss of self:
[W]omen like Lily [...] might be lured by the seductive confusion between representation and reality. Should this confusion occur, the woman would view herself not as a person but as an object – to be admired, to be sustained in her beauty. [...] It is this exquisite, empty image of self that has contaminated Lily’s life (Wolff 324)
Consequently, Lily Bart lives the consequences, not of what she does, but of what society believes she has done. Such a narrative, existing outside Lily, cannot be controlled by her, and because Lily had no stable (sense of) self to begin with, this perceived narrative can take over until it has rendered Lily Bart, the actual character in the novel, obsolete. Before this tension between fiction and fact will be explored further, however, we first need to situate the novel within literary naturalism and pinpoint the deterministic forces that are at play. As is the case in Martin Eden and Maggie, these forces influence and steer all the novel’s characters; this analysis, however, will focus on the protagonist, Lily Bart. As mentioned above, Lily is torn between two desires: she wants a rich husband who can support her within society, but, at the same time, she is drawn toward Lawrence Selden. Both these desires pull at Lily, determining her path. Lily herself is unable to take control because she does not realize what is happening to her; she simply responds to impulses rather than questioning them. Not too far into the narrative, for example, Lily is supposed to go to morning church with Percy Gryce, a man she is scheming to marry. She wakes up “with the most earnest conviction” but, as it turns out, both her mood and the day are most fit for “impulse and truancy”, and Lily goes ahead and arranges a morning walk with Selden instead. (47) When sitting outside with him, the narrator points out that Lily, like Martin and Ruth, cannot recognize the feeling of love: “Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.” (52) Being in love with an inanimate, material entity like a fortune or a 30
career is not the same thing as being in love with another human being, but categorizing these two things together might imply that Lily thinks they are comparable. Moreover, the narrator continues to explain, Lily’s love for this other man was years ago and more like a passion, and “[i]f Lily recalled this early emotion it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her8”. (52) Lily herself, however, seems to experience the situation differently; for her, “[t]he peculiar charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she could put her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing them together”. (52) Apart from the deterministic imagery – a “chain that is drawing them together” – these links which Lily understands are all external: it is Selden’s popularity, his inconspicuousness, his “reputed cultivation”, and his attractive appearance. (52-53) Finally, “[Lily] admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met”. (53) The latter quote links Lawrence Selden to what he must be to support Lily: a rich man. He is not a rich man, however; Lily, although she rationally knows that Selden is not rich, seems to be fooled by his appearance. She believes that she understands her feelings for Selden but clearly she does not; she cannot recognize love, and all that draws her toward Selden are external qualities and, ultimately, an illusion. Both Lily and Selden sees the other in a shallow light, judging and valuing their counterpart solely by appearances, and both are easily fooled. One can write an additional thesis about what love is, but this is arguably not it. Lily’s unawareness of her own feelings and circumstances continues throughout the novel, and is not linked only to Selden. Lily has loaned money from Mr. Trenor, an acquaintance, and she feels increasingly pressured to pay this money back. Instead of finding ways to pay Mr. Trenor back, however, she joins a cruise on which the Dorsets have invited her, “so that she found herself figuring once more as the “beautiful Miss Bart” in the interesting journal devoted to recording the least movements of her cosmopolitan companions”. (153) Like Martin Eden, Lily passively finds herself figuring a part; unlike Martin, however, she seems to consciously create this part for herself, a part fully rooted in conspicuousness9. This will be explored later. First, we shall return to aforementioned cruise, where Lily forgets her difficulties:
8 Note that Wharton uses language similar to the deterministic language used in Martin Eden; where Martin becomes “mastered” by desire, Lily is now “possessed” by it. 9 This role Lily creates for herself is not the narrative that comes to determine her – which is why I stated earlier that she has no say in the latter. Martin, conversely, co-writes his determining narrative but he does not consciously create a role, per se; he merely acts upon his desire for Ruth, while Lily is actively scheming. 31
[H]er faculty for renewing herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of conduct as easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen, made the mere change from one place to another seem, not merely a postponement, but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications existed for her only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they changed their background. (153)
Moreover, the narrator reflects, “[Lily] could not have remained in New York without repaying the money she owed to Trenor [...] but the accident of placing the Atlantic between herself and her obligations made them dwindle out of sight”. (153) The language conveys how determined Lily is: “she did not mean to” … but an “accident” occurred and then …, etc. Lacking reflective consciousness concerning both her environment and herself, Lily, it seems, has no choice but to allow herself to be determined by her circumstances. Lily is back in her role of the “beautiful Miss Mart” in society, and her money-problems do no longer exist for her – how, then, could she act to solve them? Miss Bart’s shallowness and inability to take responsibility brings forth another determining factor: upbringing. Unlike Martin Eden, Lily has not completely fallen out if thin air and into existence, and the reader gets some information about her parents and the circumstances in which she grew up. We learn, most importantly, that Lily has been brought up as a “highly specialized product” designed to fulfill a “purely decorative mission”. (235) “Since she had been brought up to be ornamental”, the narrator explains, “she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose”. (232) To be ornamental implies to be passive; moreover, the word implies that Lily was brought up to be seen, to be an object of beauty and decoration rather than a person. The usage of the word “product” rather than person, or woman, conveys a similar message. Lily’s beauty, her mother taught her, is what values her:
[Mrs. Barth] watched [Lily’s beauty] jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of responsibility that such a charge involved. (29)
Again, Lily is objectified. Such an upbringing does not generate much room for a self; rather, it emphasizes being a character, carrying a beauty that is becoming almost like a commodity, and that certainly is not Lily’s “own property”. And this is how Lily experiences herself. 32
Situated within her determined universe, she cannot think past her belief that her beauty is what values her, and that she needs a husband to sustain her because she cannot be anything else than ornamental. “[S]he was not made for mean and shabby surroundings”, Lily believes, “for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” (23)
Lily’s Illusion: Character & Self The paragraphs analyzed in the beginning of this case study make clear the link, in The House of Mirth, between determinism and reality. This link is twofold: fictional narratives determine Lily’s own narrative, and they determine Lily’s inability to see the difference between fiction and truth. The latter is environmental determinism; Lily, already sufficiently trained to see herself as an object, is “all too much a product of the environment indicated by the title – a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes; “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth”” (Lewis 344), and this environment values appearances over facts. Its members are constantly portrayed as actors on a scene who are there to be observed, generating a sense in the novel – for both the reader and its characters – that nothing is real. Society members are the “principal actors” on a “stage” performing before an “audience”, and as Lily is in the process of being cast out she has “an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung”, as if she is now situated behind the scenes. (77, 215) The further Lily drifts away from society, the more its quality of seeming unreality is highlighted within the novel, until Lily herself feels how “[s]omewhere behind [its members], in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities [...] yet they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo”. (213) In short, in “a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction”, all characters strive to be seen, not to be real. (168) In such an environment, consequently, “[Lily’s] sense of “self” is confirmed only when she elicits reactions from others”, and thus her sense of self becomes utterly dependent on being seen. (Wolff 334) In other words, the only “self” Lily knows has no internally experienced qualities, but is rendered wholly external. Selden, as much as he criticizes society, is as enwrapped in this confusion as Lily is, as he repeatedly concludes that he knows “the real Lily”, which, of course, is the Lily he observes. Fittingly, such a declaration occurs when Lily is on stage impersonating a tableaux (106); in other words, she is literally impersonating a part that is not herself, which, in a universe that does not completely revolve around being seen, would not be the most logical time to declare that one knows and sees 33
someone as they truly are. For Selden, however, it makes perfect sense; he believes that he sees the “authentic Lily”, while it is only “the carefully constructed Lily of his desire that he sees”. (Showalter 365) In the midst of this Lily’s aunt, taking it all quite literally, “never lit the lamps unless there was “company””. (80) Simply said, what Lily experiences as a self is no self at all but a character that can only exist when it is seen; a confusion that makes sense within her environment, but which blurs the boundary between fiction and reality only further. What is seen within society, as we will see, often has much more to do with fiction than with facts. Miss Bart, unconscious of the force within her that draws her toward Lawrence Selden, believes that making herself into a character will aid her in getting what she desires – a place in society – while the reader is left to watch “her unfocused spin away from potential self- determination to complete subjugation to external control”. (Ammons 353) As opposed to interacting with the world around her Lily, like Martin, is rudderless, at the mercy of the tide that surrounds her. The extent to which Lily allows her life to be determined by stories becomes clear in the following conversation between her and Gerty Farish, her friend who spends quite a lot of time with working-class girls and who, as opposed to the members of the leisure class, is less interested in appearances:
“The important thing–––” Gerty paused, and then continued firmly: “The important thing is that you should clear yourself – should tell your friends the whole truth.” “The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.” Miss Farish still fixed her with an anxious gaze. “But what is your story, Lily? I don’t believe any one knows it yet.” “My story? – I don’t believe I know it myself. You see I never thought of preparing a version in advance as Bertha did – and if I had, I don’t think I should take the trouble to use it now.” (176)
Perhaps Lily still does not understand the difference between made-up stories and truth; it seems more probable, however, that she has learned that, in society, fiction is valued over facts. She was cast out because of a rumor started by Bertha Dorset and her own story has become irrelevant, simply because Bertha, with her big house and opera box, is perceived to 34
be better off. However, this realization can do nothing to aid Lily since, neatly playing the role of the determined character, she refuses to act. Gerty, valuing what actually happened over a mere story, does not give up that easily, but Lily sticks to her point:
But Gerty continued with her quiet reasonableness. “I don’t want a version prepared in advance – but I want you to tell me exactly what happened from the beginning.” “From the beginning?” Miss Bart gently mimicked her. “Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose – in the way I was brought up, and the things I was taught to care for. Or no – I won’t blame anybody for my faults: I’ll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress […] You asked me just now for the truth – well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.” (176)
The way Lily sees it, she is stuck; the story that is told about her determines her, and her own story, even if she herself knew what that story was, has no value. She passively accepts her determining fictions, and makes no attempt to struggle free. How come, then, that Lily is so quick to accept determinism? Of course, in her world, determinism is all around her – this does not mean, however, that she has no choice but to passively accept it. Here lies, perhaps, the most striking difference between Martin Eden and Lily Bart: while the former believes that he has all the power, the latter believes that she has none. Both living in unrealistic extremes – all power / no power – the outcome of both novels is roughly the same: Martin and Lily trade self for character, and suicide is the final step in the erasure of the self. Their respective processes, however, differ. To begin with, Lily experiences conflicting desires, which makes her character slightly more complex; whereas Martin is simply propelled forward by one desire that encompasses all, Lily is propelled back and forth between two. Whereas such a conflict might lead to a break with determinism10, in Miss Bart’s case it only further conveys her naturalist inability to not act on desire explained in the beginning of this paper. Believing that she is fit for no environment except society, she
10 In Jack London’s White Fang (1906), for example, the wolf-dog protagonist experiences similar, mutually exclusive conflicting desires, simultaneously propelling him toward civilization and the wild. The key-word here is “experience”; whereas Lily passively undergoes the conflict, White Fang actively and consciously experiences it. As a result, he is able to go against his nature and choose civilization over the wild, thus resolving the inner conflict and breaking with determinism – something Lily cannot do. 35
“learned to suppress and camouflage her own impulses and ambitions”. (Ammons 349) Though able to suppress, she cannot overcome these impulses and ambitions: this is prototypical naturalist determinism. Paradoxically, Lily is constantly acting and not acting according to desire; after all, her desires are mutually exclusive. She cannot be with Selden and remain a respected part of society. Lily Bart exemplifies Mitchell’s proposition that “when everything required for an action is present, determined characters cannot refrain” (7) – driven by two desires, she cannot help but to act on both. Thus, Lily conveys the trouble naturalist characters are likely to run into when they are driven by such mutually exclusive forces; she does not possess the self-consciousness necessary to resolve her struggle, and so it remains unknown to her and, subsequently, out of her control. As we are nearing her end, the narrator leaves her lying sleepless, observing “the two antagonistic forces which fought out their battle in her breast during the long watches of the night; and when she rose the next morning she hardly knew where the victory lay”. (235) Again, the language is passive and Lily is merely an observant of her own inner conflict, not an active participant. Another difference between Martin and Lily is that, while the former embraces the narrative of Mr. Eden and comes to embody it, the latter has no part in the narrative that comes to determine her. Lily is judged and determined by what other characters see – or, rather, think they see – her do, and she has no control here. How truly Lily is wrapped in this narrative of visibility is exemplified by something that she does, near the end of the novel, that is not perceived by anyone. Miss Bart has come into possession of a bundle of letters between Bertha Dorset and Lawrence Selden, revealing a past love affair. Lily could use these letters to bribe Bertha, the woman who ruined Lily’s reputation, and restore her place within society. Sitting on her own in a small restaurant, Lily realizes she has “unconsciously arrived at a final decision”, and her plan is to take the letters to Mrs. Dorset and confront her. (236) Once again, however, Lily’s plan is not executed; she has to pass by Selden’s home on her way to Bertha’s, which, reminiscent of Martin Eden, kindles within her a “longing to see him [that] grew to hunger”11. (237) Instead of taking the letters to Bertha Dorset Lily enters Selden’s house, where, unplanned, she ends up slipping the letters into his fire:
11 It is worth noting that Lily, as she passes Selden’s house, “suddenly [seemed] to see her action as he would see it”, which makes her feel ashamed. (237) Again, this is the language of spectatorship, but at the same time it seems to point toward something akin to empathy; instead of constantly observing other characters or valuing her own appearance through other characters’ eyes, Lily is now able to see her own action, and the potential consequences of it, through someone else’s eyes. 36
She knelt on the hearthrug, stretching her hands to the embers. [...] [H]e noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes. She knelt there for a few moments in silence; a silence which he dared not break. When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something from her dress and drop it in to the fire; but he hardly noticed the gesture at the time. (241)
Selden, characteristically focusing on Lily’s appearance, does not perceive her action; thus, unseen, “Lily’s moral triumph evaporates as if it had never taken place”. (Dimock 78) In other words, since Lily is now fully determined by the narrative of the perceived character, such an unperceived action cannot change the course Lily’s life is taking. Unschemed and stemming from a deep desire, throwing the letters into the fire might be an expression of “the real Lily” – a side of her that Selden has not seen – but it has come too late, and only results in her drifting further away from herself. The Lily whom Selden sees, visibly thin, covered in black shadows, enwrapped in a silence which he dares not break, seems dead-like against the liveliness of the flames, an image foreshadowing her end. Unlike Martin Eden, Lily Bart shows no hints of having started out with a self which she has left behind. When Lily finds herself in a threatening situation, the narrator talks about Lily’s “two selves”: “the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained”. (117) Both of these selves, however, are unconvincing. The “self” Lily “had always known” cannot quite be a self since, as far as the reader knows, Lily has always seen herself as a mere object of beauty. The “abhorrent being”, on the other hand, is immediately externalized, representing a confining, deterministic image rather than a self. Earlier on in the novel, when Lily is with Selden, she again feels as if there are “two beings” inside of her,
one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight. (52)
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Clearly, these are not the same selves as the ones quoted in the above example; there are no abhorrent- nor well-known beings here, but a free one and a trapped one. This is the same scene in which Lily impulsively broke off her plan to go to morning church with Percy Gryce, the rich gentleman she was scheming to marry, to be with Selden. In this context, Lily feels liberated when she is with Selden, being momentarily released from her fears. This shows the potential deliberating feeling of an illusion; the same feeling likely turns upon oneself, however, if one cannot let the illusion go. If Lily has some beginnings of self, they seem to lie here, with Lawrence Selden; the things she does for- and related to him, throughout the novel, are never schemed beforehand but arise spontaneously, out of a desire with which Lily cannot seem to come to terms. But it is only a beginning; even if she would act on it, her desire for Selden is no lasting soil out of which to grow a self. Their “love” is built on illusions, and when the two are together neither of them sees the other as real. Miss Bart builds her identity and self around how she is perceived, culminating in “identification of the self with the fantasy of the person by whom one is seen”. (Laing 117) Even when she is with Selden Lily identifies with an illusion, a fantasy, not with a self. On the other hand, there is her belief that her only possible function within life is a passive one. The narrative she attempts to create for herself is not the narrative that is her downfall; Lily does not co-write the perceived character that takes her place like Martin did. Unlike Martin, Lily understands what society wants her to be – a beautiful girl married to someone with money – but desire is in her way and, constantly planning and abandoning her plans, she does not grasp the consequences of her actions. Lily, “malleable as wax”, is flexible the way Martin is: lacking a self, such characters can take on many appearances but they are without a stable enough inner force to act as a rudder, and thus are “hampered [...] in the decisive moments of life”. (Wharton 44) Quite early on, Lily is described as “a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today”, as on many other days to come, “the whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence Selden”. (44)
Self & Suicide One of the strengths of American literary naturalism is that it shows the power of narrative, and how, if one does not act out one’s own story, others might tell it for you. This happens in Lily’s case. When exploring the difference between “self” and “character”, “[t]he point is that what one actually does need not coincide with one’s self-perception, and that perspectives on action therefore produce quite different kinds of actor”. (Mitchell 14) In The House of Mirth, indeed, different actors are created, but none of these actors is Lily herself, because she does 38
not act. The only significant action she performs is her throwing Selden’s letters into the fire, but this action remains private; it saves her from “trad[ing] on his name” and thus it can be read as a slight moral victory for Lily, but it does not alter “the path she was now following”. (Wharton 237; Dimock 78) If Lily wants to redeem her place within society she has to act visibly, and outside of society she cannot exist. (Ammons 350; Wolff 332) Even if throwing Selden and Bertha’s letters into the fire is an act of self, it has ultimately done nothing but remove her from society and, in extension, from life. Having lived as an object all her life, Lily cannot cultivate a self now because she does not know how. Morally, Lily might triumph – but it cannot save her. (Dimock 78) As it went for Martin, realization does come to Lily but it comes too late: she “gain[s] insight, but not the capacity to free herself”. (Wolff 332) In a moment of understanding, Lily now recognizes that it is not “material poverty” that makes her suffer like she is suffering now, but
a sense of deeper empoverishment [sic] – of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor [...] But there was something more miserable still – it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now – the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. (248)
Lily herself now sees both the absence of self and her lack of control over her own life, and she sees how she is being swept along because her self was never able to take root. She muses on about her parents, who were similarly “rootless [and] without any personal existence”, and how she herself grew up without a “centre [...] to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others”. (248) Lily understands all this, but she also understands that, without a self, she is powerless – to recall Dennett, the self is “a locus of self-control”, and of this Lily has none:
how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses – she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some 39
fresh compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only life could end now – end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the loving and foregoing in the world! (249)
In short, Lily realizes she has no more say in her own story and, like Martin, she longs to “end life now”, to erase herself from it. What the reader sees in both is not so much a wish to die as a wish to sleep, to no longer be conscious, alive. In contrast to Martin, Lily is not quite an action-oriented character, and her suicide remains characteristically vague. Moments before she dies, now unseen and truly alone, she is on “the verge of delirium … she had never hung so near the dizzy brink of the unreal”. (250) Earlier on, she has been warned by her pharmacist not to increase the dose of her sedative because such an increase has a high chance of being lethal.12 Lily, however, feels like she is only taking a “slight risk”, “but one chance in a hundred”. What is more, she does not “consider the question very closely – the physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation”. (250) Again, Lily acts on an impulse, and, again, she is not quite conscious of doing so. In this she differs from Martin Eden, who consciously and deliberately erases himself from his own story. In Lily’s case, suicide happens to her rather than that she actively seeks it out. A delusional suicide might still be deemed a suicide, however, but this is not the story that lives on for the characters in The House of Mirth. This time, it is Gerty who imposes the narrative on Lily that will co-determine how she will “live” on, as Gerty tells Selden how “‘[t]he doctor found a bottle of chloral – she had been sleeping badly for a long time, and she must have taken an over-dose by mistake…. There is no doubt of that – no doubt – there will be no question –”. (253) Unwilling to consider suicide, Gerty appoints another external narrative to Lily; a narrative to which Lily herself, again, cannot respond, as she is no longer around. This narrative is the opposite of Maggie’s, on whom suicide is imposed rather than denied. Whereas calling Martin’s deliberate suicide a triumph might be an overstatement, London’s protagonist did achieve one thing: to escape and end the narrative that came to determine him. Earlier I stated that Martin’s and Lily’s outcomes were roughly the same (they both die by suicide), but in this respect they differ. Lily’s suicide, happening outside of her
12 “‘You don’t want to increase the dose, you know,’ [the pharmacist] remarked. ‘Of course not,’ [Lily] murmured, holding out her hand. ‘That’s all right: it’s a queer-acting drug. A drop or two more, and off you go – the doctors don’t know why.’” (225) 40
control, is an erasure of self but not of character; while Martin Eden begins and ends with the protagonist, The House of Mirth begins and ends with its protagonist as seen through Selden’s eyes. This Lily is a character rendered fully external – it stems from, but does not coincide with, the actual character of Lily Bart. Lily is finally redeemed in Selden’s eyes, but she is also objectified; “her “self” has finally been transfixed”. (Wolff 337-38) For herself – or her self – Lily’s redemption is void:
Selden saw a narrow bed along the wall, and on the bed, with motionless hands, and calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart. That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier – what had he to do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the first time, neither paled nor brightened at his coming? (252-53)
A dead body is, quite arguably, not someone’s “real self” either, but Selden sees Lily only through her reactions to him. For him, Lily was real when she herself was not even around – “[h]er real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier” – but she is not real now, it seems, because she no longer responds to him. The Lily whom Selden has created is the Lily Bart that will live on, and it is from this viewpoint that Selden draws his curious conclusion about how their love “ha[s] been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives. It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction.” (255) As Linda Wagner-Martin points out, Selden’s statement has no meaning, for “[h]ow could the moment be saved for both when Lily is already dead?” (Wagner-Martin 124) But the Lily Bart about whom Selden is talking is the one he has created, a disembodied character existing solely within him. It is this Lily, the narrative of character rendered external, that is victorious and will live on.
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5 Maggie: A Divided Narrative
She stopped once and asked aloud a question to herself: ‘Who?’ A man who was passing near her shoulder, humorously took the questioning word as intended for him. ‘Eh? What? Who? Nobody! [...]’
– Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Introduction & Determinism Similar to Jack London, Stephen Crane wanted “to show people to people as they seem to me”. (Fitelson 182) This was his purpose with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893), a novella narrating the life of the Johnson family in the tenements. The novel starts out with Jimmie, Maggie’s brother, who is in the middle of a fight with children from Devil’s Row “for the honor of Rum Alley”, the street Jimmie is from. (3) Pete, a sixteen years old acquaintance of Jimmie, comes along to encourage Jimmie, until the latter’s father comes along and the fight breaks off. It is only when Jimmie and his father come home that we meet Maggie, together with their little brother, Tommie, and their mother. A few pages later, Tommie has died; from then on, the reader follows Maggie’s and Jimmie’s growing up in the intensely violent tenement environment that Crane has painted. Though violence is everywhere in the tenements, the most violent factor is Maggie’s and Jimmie’s mother, ironically called Mary, an enormous woman whose face, during her frequent rages, keeps busy turning into all shades of red. Jimmie successfully adapts to his violent environment; Maggie as a character, however, remains curiously untouched. She does not revert to violence, but instead she “blossom[s] in a mud puddle”. (16) Moreover, she takes a fancy to Pete, seeing him as her way out of the violence that surrounds her. Yet, though she can remain untouched, Maggie cannot escape her environment; as her mother, believing that Maggie has “gone teh deh devil” (30) – a less than neutral phrase used mainly by Mary and Jimmie, denoting prostitution – turns her out of the house and Pete leaves her, Maggie is all alone. The story then skips several months to show the last night of “[a] girl of the painted cohorts”. (52) This girl is Maggie, who is now, as her mother suggested, a prostitute, soliciting different men until she meets “a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments”, who willingly follows her to the 42
river. (53) The story, leaving the reader with a gap, jumps away from Maggie to show “a man” – Pete – drunk and surrounded by women who are clearly there for Pete’s money, not for Pete, and finally jumps to “a soiled, unshaven man” – Jimmie – telling “a woman” – Mary – that Maggie has died. (57) The novel ends with a mourning Mary, being implored by other female tenement residents to “fergive [h]er bad, bad chil’”, which she finally does. (58) As for determinism, the analysis of Maggie will differ somewhat from the above two case studies. There are the more accepted deterministic forces within the novel, such as environment, upbringing, and nature. There is also the loss of self in favor of character. Similar to Martin and Lily, Maggie is determined by a narrative that is told about her but that is not truly hers; her mother and brother kick her out because they believe that she has turned to prostitution, which she has not done (yet). This makes her utterly dependent on Pete, and when he leaves her the girl goes into prostitution, it seems, because she has no other alternative; the novel conveys a sense of inevitability, while determinism and Maggie’s lack of identity make of her what other characters think her to be. (Howells 154; Solomon 206) There is, however, an additional determining narrative of character, continuing outside of the novel: the narrative of suicide that the reader creates. Similar to the way that the three naturalist characters analyzed here exhibit a lack of self, allowing an external narrative to take its place, Maggie as a novella presents the reader with gaps as well; gaps that, throughout time, have been filled up by readers. How these ongoing narratives of character determine Maggie even further will be explored below. I do wish to point out that, of course, it is commonly accepted nowadays that the reader and the text are always telling the story together – or, as Roland Barthes phrased it, “the goal [...] is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text”. (4) Nevertheless, I will argue that in Maggie’s case the text’s narrative gaps have allowed the reader, an external force, to become the only producer of the narrative of Maggie’s end, leaving the girl herself, a literary character and thus only potentially in control within the text, powerless and determined. But first, let us return to the beginning. At the start of this case study it is mentioned that Maggie “blossomed in a mud puddle”, something which her character seems to back up; whereas other characters, including Jimmie, are visibly influenced by their violent environment and become violent themselves, Maggie does not. If it is true what Jacob Riis, a social reformer, New York tenements expert and contemporary of Crane, wrote, that “in the tenements all the influences make for evil”, Maggie does not seem easily influenced. (Riis 76) This has puzzled critics and caused a number of them to debunk Crane’s well-known inscription of Maggie stating that “environment is a tremendous thing in the world and 43
frequently shapes lives regardless”. (Sorrentino 43) Donald Pizer, for example, has commented on how Maggie, “strangely untouched by her physical environment”, seems expressionistic rather than naturalistic; after all, the novel seems to show that Maggie is not determined by environment. (Pizer 187) In a sense, this is true; but is Crane’s protagonist’s untouchability failed determinism, or social Darwinism? As mentioned, Jimmie adapts where Maggie does not, and Jimmie, not Maggie, is ultimately the one who lives. Her environment may not have shaped Maggie’s character but it has certainly shaped her life, since Maggie is not fit to survive in such violent circumstances while “[i]n this environment, there is no escape from violence”. (Sorrentino 43) Blossoming in a mud puddle, I would argue, does not make Maggie any less determined; rather, it seems to be an ironic inversion of the way Spencer’s survival of the fittest is usually conveyed, an inversion where the primitive brute lives while the (somewhat) more civilized must die. As David Fitelson points out in his analysis of Maggie,
[a] world so governed [by violence] provides certain clear guidelines for the way life is to be lived within it. To the degree that a character is aware of the nature of the world, and more particularly, to the degree that he conducts life in accordance with that nature – to that degree will he be a survivor of violence and free from frustration. (109-110)
Evolving to become as violent as Maggie and Jimmie’s environment might not create a nice, morally sound being; it does, however, create one who is capable of surviving, and survival, not morality, is what matters to Crane’s tenement characters.
Maggie’s Illusion: Character & Self The interplay of Maggie’s violent environment with her gentle nature, then, steers her toward her ruin. Another determining factor is illusion, a force mainly embodied by Pete, whom one of the novel’s contemporary reviewers, Edward Bright, called the “instrument of [Maggie’s] ruin”. (Bright 153) Pete seems to be exactly that, as his outings with Maggie probe the latter’s mother to accuse her of having lost her respectability and “bring[ing] disgrace upon her family”, leading to the girl’s downfall. (Crane 40) Maggie herself sees Pete as her way out, her one “opportunity to fight inevitability and to “rise” above the slums”. (Gullason 248) In this respect, Crane’s language is somewhat reminiscent of London’s. Maggie’s direct environment, like Martin’s, is described as hellish, with Jimmie as a “tiny, insane demon” and 44
the mother as a red and howling “villain” who “need[s] only to awake and all fiends would come from below”. (3; 12-13) Conversely, Pete is seen by Maggie as “elegant and graceful”, “the beau ideal of a man” whom she associates with God rather than the devil. (18-19) Pete certainly is not angelic like Ruth Morse and he is still violent, but he is “invincible in fights [...] with disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him to endure”. (19) In other words, Pete is powerful where Maggie is not. Moreover, he is never violent to Maggie, and “in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage” she waits for him to take her to music halls, where there is culture, laughter, and dancing. (21) Comparable to London’s Martin Eden, in such a black and white world it is quite understandable that Maggie bets her life on Pete, her one chance to escape the tenements and aim, if not for heaven, at least for a life somewhat closer to God. Maggie, though barely there, has put all her hope on someone like Pete to lead her into existence, as
[h]er dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover. (19)
Maggie’s enclosed environment, while not directly determining her character, does blur her vision and breeds within her this one “primary drive” to escape the tenements. (Pizer 191) From the beginning on Maggie idealizes Pete and, not sufficiently adapted to her environment, she is “unable to distinguish the romantic from the real”. (Campbell 171) There exists no romance in the environment Crane has created, but blossoming Maggie can dream and, consequently, is deceived. Maggie’s whole life and future comes to depend on the illusion of escape, and when Pete – and thus the illusion – leaves her she has nothing left. Maggie is quite thoroughly a character without a self; the novel’s style leaves no room for inner perspective, and Maggie is defenseless against a narrator who spends most of his time elaborating on Jimmie13. The reader is told things about Maggie – she is kind and beautiful, a blossom in a mud puddle – but none of these things are shown, since Maggie is barely present. (Gibson 214) Yet
13 There are naturalist characters who are able to defy their narrator, though this is rare; one such example is Jack London’s White Fang, a character already mentioned earlier in this paper. During the novel’s latter part the narrator and character seem to be enwrapped in a struggle of their own, with the narrator repeatedly stating that the protagonist is incapable of evolving any further – because he is “too old, too firmly molded, to become adept at expressing himself in new ways” (235) – and the character evolving anyway. In contrast, Maggie is granted neither the self nor the room to resist, let alone conquer, her narrator and creator. 45
perception, most of all perhaps of Maggie, is a constantly recurring motif in the novel, adding a sense of forlornness and, indeed, inevitability, as a constant audience is watching from the sidelines while Maggie’s fate unravels itself. Whenever Mary, Jimmie, or any other character turns violent there is an audience there to watch it happen. At the music halls everyone is staring at Maggie through the whirling smoke; when Maggie is turned out of her house people watch it happen “as if [...] at a theatre”, while Mary, “like a glib showman at a museum”, keeps on entreating the public to “‘Lookut her [Maggie]! Lookut her!’” (47, 48) Perception comes to blur out reality, as
Crane apparently recognized that if environment shapes lives it does so, above all, by predetermining perception, by granting so much authority to the styles in which others’ perceptions have been expressed that these styles come to constitute, in effect, the only experience there is (Bell 139)
Similar to Lily Bart’s society the tenements revolve around spectacle and spectatorship, but this seems to render Maggie invisible rather than seen. Like Lily, Maggie is objectified by being seen, something which is most notable during the moments right before Maggie is turned out by her mother:
Through the open doors curious eyes stared in at Maggie. [...] A baby, overcome with curiosity concerning this object at which all were looking, sidled forward and touched her dress, cautiously, as if investigating a red-hot stove. Its mother’s voice rang out like a warning trumpet. She rushed forward and grabbed her child, casting a terrible look of indignation at the girl. (48, my italics)
Maggie is an object, and a dangerous one at that; the sin she did not commit seems almost contagious in the spectators’ eyes. Jimmie responds to his sister in the same way, drawing back from her as “his repelling hands expressed horror of contamination”. (48) Crane’s audience looks at spectacle, violence, sometimes beauty, but no one really “looksut” Maggie; when she is still a child, [a]ttired in tatters and grime, she went unseen”, and nearing the end of her journey through life even the buildings “seemed to have eyes that looked over her, 46
beyond her, at other things”. (16, 53) Finally no one, not even the reader, is present to perceive it when Maggie dies14. Objectified by the novel’s language and its characters and unable to develop, Maggie needs Pete; without a self she cannot create an inner narrative to save her, and so she needs someone else to create one for her. Pete seems the only plausible candidate. Maggie’s inability to act for herself is exemplified in the scene where Pete leaves her; Pete has taken Maggie to another music hall where he runs into Nellie, “[a] woman of brilliance and audacity”. (43) Maggie almost effectively disappears from the scene, as neither Nellie nor her companion pay any attention to her, “looking toward her once or twice and apparently seeing the wall beyond”. (43) Pete does not immediately forget Maggie; he does, however, follow Nellie outside to explain to her why he cannot leave the girl, which of course results in him departing with Nellie and leaving Maggie seated with Nellie’s no-longer companion. Dazed and astounded, Maggie lets this companion ramble on while she is “watching the doors”. (45) The scene reaches a kind of deadlock as an unresponsive Maggie keeps on staring at the doors, until the companion “spur[s] himself into being agreeable”, and tells Maggie that Pete and Nellie will not come back and offers her a beer, upon which Maggie announces that she is going home. (46) The repetition in the text of Maggie’s staring at the doors makes it feel as if, without the external impulse offered by her table companion, Maggie would have just remained there, silently and motionlessly staring at some doors. But the deadlock breaks and the girl goes home, and it is after this scene that Maggie is turned out by her mother, after which she loses her name, her final glimmer of identity, and becomes “a girl of the painted cohorts of the city”. (52) Despite her blossoming Maggie is enmeshed in her environment, too much so to escape. It has steered her, blinded her, and enclosed her, until it leaves her with only one option: to become “a girl of the streets”. Similar to Wharton’s Lily Bart, Crane’s novel continues without Maggie, and, like Lily, Maggie “is passively made into a figure to justify the society that has ignored her”. (Solomon 209) The novel ends, not with Maggie, but with an image, a narrative of Maggie that has very little to do with herself – something which Crane ironically emphasized by having the mother ask for the “worsted boots” Maggie used to wear as a child, when “her two feets was no bigger dan yer t’umb”, so that Maggie, who lived long enough to no longer be a child, can wear them in her grave. (57) Even her dead
14 No one except the “huge fat man”, who might or might not be there when Maggie dies; but even if he were, in theory, present, Maggie’s moment of dying is nothing but a gap in the story and thus there would not be much, for another literary character, to perceive. 47
body, it seems, is now disconnected from the image Mary has of Maggie. The narrative of character that survives is the one of the girl who sinned, the “disobed’ent chil’ [with] [a]ll her t’ankless behavior to her mudder an’ all her badness”, and the novel ends with Mary, the mourner, the victim of a disobed’ent chil’, forgiving Maggie in “a scream of pain”. (57-58) This narrative of character does not correspond well to the Maggie whom the reader has seen, who was steered into prostitution by the mother herself. (J. Brennan 176; Pizer 190-91) But Maggie, unfit to survive within her violent environment and driven by a desire rooted in illusion, was never a match for this determining narrative because she was never an agent. One can argue that Maggie, at least, attempts to “act” through her thoughts, which is more than her colleague characters do (Gullason 248-49) – but ultimately this is still thinking, not acting. She has no self, no inner drive other than escapism to propel her, while her desire for Pete is an expression of an illusion rather than a self. Maggie – like Lily and, after his crash of will, Martin – passively “floats along” in the currents of the other characters, until she “slips quietly into the waters of the East River, her stillness at last become permanent obscurity”. (Solomon 203) Nowhere in the novel have we seen a Maggie who is in control, and even if she does die by suicide, it seems improbable that she has consciously chosen to do so herself.
Narration & Suicide But, as pointed out earlier, nothing in Crane’s text itself points to suicide. The last chapter featuring Maggie when alive “conveys a sense of stark inevitability” as it follows Maggie’s journey from the illuminated avenues crowded with well-off people into darker, desolate blocks. (J. Brennan 178) Here, there are indeed some questions to be asked, as numerous critics have done before me. Maggie, with her “handsome cloak” and “well-shod feet”, seems to be doing quite well as a prostitute; why, then, when soliciting, does she journey into “darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled”? (Crane 52) Is that really the best place to find potential customers? And if this indicates that she does mean to drown herself, why would she do so on this particular evening? As Joseph X. Brennan suggests, Maggie’s final journey might make more sense when taken symbolically rather than literally, i.e. as a “symbolic telescoping of the inevitable decline and ruination to which Maggie and all the women of her order [i.e. prostitutes] must come”. (178) For now, I will settle on a somewhat simpler reading of the chapter as symbolizing Maggie’s own travels, from hope of self toward loss and disillusion. Death is foreshadowed in the language – Maggie’s last customer has a body “like that of a dead jelly fish”, while the river at their feet “appeared a deathly black hue”. (53) Finally, the girl and her last costumer stand together at the river bank, as “[t]he 48
varied sounds of life [...] came faintly and died away to a silence”, suggesting, perhaps, the final silence of Maggie’s death. (Crane 53) This is reminiscent of the language used in The House of Mirth to describe Lily and Selden’s last meeting, as they stand together “as though [...] in the presence of death” and Lily’s “secret hope”, now shattered, to be with Selden “revealed itself in its death-pang”. (241, 239) However, in contrast to both Martin Eden and The House of Mirth, Maggie does not initiate or portray a death-scene, nor does it hint at the way its protagonist dies. Objectified and stared at when alive, Maggie is allowed no stage when she dies, and the reader is left with a narrative gap to fill in. It is interesting to perceive how effortlessly this gap has been filled – namely with a narrative of suicide. Throughout the years after the release of Maggie, countless critics have wondered and hypothesized as to why Crane’s protagonist has committed suicide, and what her suicide might mean. In 1955, Marcus Cunliffe argued that Crane’s novel is unconvincing, since it provides no reason as to why a seemingly successful prostitute would kill herself; in 1962, Joseph X. Brennan pointed out the same thing. (96, 178) Daniel Aaron and Donald B. Gibson, among others, mention her suicide, and Katherine G. Simoneaux argues that deliberate drowning is Maggie’s escape from her hopeless environment, while for Pete and Nellie no such escape is possible. (115, 215, 224) An analysis especially worthy to point out is Thomas A. Gullason’s, as he explains his reasons for deriving from the novella that Maggie’s death is a suicide – something which many critics have not done. Reminiscent of Kim’s reading of Martin Eden, Gullason argues that Maggie’s “decision” to drown herself denotes that “she refuses to accept her inevitable fate”, and therefore can be read as a moral triumph. “Maggie’s “action” proves many things”, Gullason argues, and “Crane tactfully avoids sketching a large-scaled and dramatic suicide because Maggie has reached bottom”. (249) The problem with this statement is that nowhere in Maggie’s last chapter do we see her perform an action that points toward suicide, and that Crane does not avoid sketching “a large-scaled and dramatic suicide”; he does not sketch a suicide at all, nor does he hint at one. The point is that the majority of critics seem to have accepted the narrative of Maggie’s suicide, even though this narrative does not exist in the novel itself. Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins, too, point this out, emphasizing that “[t]he idea that [Maggie] is meaning to commit suicide is not authorial but adventitious”, since “soliciting, not suicide, has been her motive during the time we have seen her”. (239, 243) The duo argues that the idea of Maggie committing suicide is likely to stem from the censored 1896 version of Maggie, in which the “huge fat man”, whom Maggie encounters in the original version right before she dies, does not appear. In consequence, the 1896 version leaves Maggie alone during her final 49
moments, seemingly no longer soliciting and with no motive at all, inviting “sense-making readers” to project their own reading “onto the unintelligible 1896 text”. (Parker & Higgins 239, 243) Whatever its origins may be, the narrative of Maggie’s suicide has become widely accepted, and there have been precious few readers to question its validity. I do not wish to argue that the aforementioned readings are false readings of Maggie, per se; the point I wish to emphasize, rather, is that these readers seem to explore an idea that they themselves have woven around the text rather than the text itself. These are two different things, and the fact that none of these critics have pointed this out seems to imply that they are either not aware of this difference, or that they have deemed it unimportant. I would argue, however, that it is beneficial to differentiate – as far as possible – between stories and one’s interpretation thereof, in literary studies as well as in daily life, if only to prevent one’s subjective perspective on what has happened to become the only perspective. To recall Mitchell’s conclusion “that perspectives on action [...] produce quite different kinds of actor”, not allowing these different perspectives to coexist is a form of imposing determinism, as it denies the agency of one, or more, different actors. Maggie, to me, is a fascinating case study, as it shows how easily the text is replaced by a reader’s interpretation thereof. The main determining narrative of character, then, is an ongoing one, and it exists outside of the text. In the novel itself, it is the mother’s narrative of the sinning child that determines Maggie and takes her place after she dies. Maggie’s lack of self prevents her from creating her own narrative and finally renders her obsolete for the story; in other words, “Maggie is not now, and she never has been, an identity”. (Solomon 206) There was a brief possibility of cultivating a self within her desire to escape the tenements, but the desire itself was built on an illusion rather than reality, and thus out of Maggie’s control, as “[h]er life was Pete’s and she considered him worthy of the charge”. (Crane 39) Quite literally, she loses herself in Pete, but the novel takes it a step further, leaving a gap, not only of self but of character – that is, Maggie the autonomous character is erased even before she dies. Maggie was never a rounded character and the text never granted her much room, but until Pete leaves her and her mother kicks her out Maggie was there; after these events, there is only “[t]he girl”, implied by the text to be Maggie, a narrative of a disgraced child, and a narrative of a suicide. “In responding positively to Maggie, we are likely to be responding to an idea rather than to a seemingly live character”, Donald B. Gibson writes. (214) The same could be said about responding to her negatively, and about calling her death a suicide, or a murder, or anything in between, since in the text itself Maggie’s death is not shown, we are merely told about her passing. Despite the narrator’s comments, the Maggie whom actually appears in the 50
text – the Maggie whom is shown, not told – is neither good nor bad, as she is barely there. (Gibson 214) She simply does not get the chance to show herself. All novels and stories leave gaps for the reader or listener to fill in, but Maggie shows how far such a gap can be taken, and how easily an external narrative can come to determine both character and text, without being questioned.
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6 Conclusion & Implications There exists a double narrative within determinism as depicted by American literary naturalism, where all that will happen seems predetermined and, therefore, knowable, yet none of its characters are in control. As Dennett writes,
[f]oreknowledge is what permits control. Circumstances that are clearly beyond our control may nevertheless not disrupt or prevent our control of the events we wish to control – if we know about those circumstances in time. [...] We are at the mercy of only those causal chains that either creep up on us without warning [...] or that leave us no paths by which we can avoid their unwanted effects. (60)
In the cases of Martin Eden, The House of Mirth, and Maggie, the reader is kept at a distance, and they can see, relatively early, that its protagonists stand no chance. (Auchincloss 317; Berryman 164) The characters themselves, however, have no idea. As John Berryman wrote about Maggie, “[e]verything is exactly what we expect but not at all what they expect”. (164) Confronted by outcomes that really turn out exactly as one would expect, the three protagonists and their colleagues are constantly surprised. This is most notably depicted in Maggie, where the characters’ astonishment rises to an absurd degree. When Maggie’s mother decides that Maggie has turned to prostitution she moans to Jimmie about what an utter, dismal shock this is, since, “‘[w]hen a girl is bringed up deh way I bringed up Maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?’” (40) Jimmie, too, “could not conceive how under the circumstances [Maggie] could have been so wicked”. (40) Meanwhile, the reader learns that Maggie is the forty-second daughter of Mary to become “ruined”, which, aside from being a stellar amount of ruined daughters, shows, once more, that circumstances left Maggie with no other alternative. (43) In the meantime, as her family is going through life morally aghast, Maggie herself “did not feel like a bad woman. To her knowledge she had never seen any better.” (39) In other words, the different characters create different stories of the same happenings, and the narrative that the reader perceives, in its turn, differs vastly from how the characters see their stories unfold; and while the reader possesses all the foreknowledge, the characters have none. American naturalist fiction, whatever its authors’ intention(s) might have been, has fabricated novels filled with different – often incomplete, deluded, and at times 52
simply unbelievable, absurd – perspectives, showing the effect and influence of point of view on agency. To briefly recap, the three novels that were analyzed – Jack London’s Martin Eden, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) – all depict the effect of external forces, in a determined universe, on internally destabilized characters. Ultimately, I argue, all characters are determined by their inability to cultivate a self; this gap of self, then, allows for external forces and narratives to steer them. Martin Eden is determined, mainly, by his environment; his “self” is fluid enough to make Martin believe that he can become anything, but too rigid to truly develop. As a self, he can only exist within the working class, and as he rises above his origins he has to leave his self behind – thus Martin creates room for the narrative of the perceived character to take over control. The novel also reveals a paradoxical quality of desire: Martin’s desire to write is a direct expression of self, “the most vital thing in [him]”, but at the same time it propels him away from himself. Martin Eden shows a protagonist who is divided between self – Mart Eden, the sailor and hoodlum – and character – Mr. Eden, the famous writer. Unable to regain control and unite himself, Martin finally commits suicide; that is, the “he” who commits this act is both outside of the dying body as he is the body himself, making him both executor and victim. Lily Bart, Wharton’s protagonist, is not so much a divided character as a character exhibiting divided desires; she longs for a place within society, for which she needs to marry a rich man, and she longs to be with Lawrence Selden, who is not a rich man. Lily believes that she has no capabilities expect being “ornamental” because that is how she was brought up; additionally, she is enmeshed in an environment that focuses on appearances rather than facts. Consequently, Lily has no self; rather, she builds her (sense of) self around how others perceive her. Representing an externalized character Lily is incapable of self-reflection, which renders her powerless against opposing forces. The narrative of character takes full control the moment Miss Bart is cast out of society because of a rumor, after which she dwindles into obscurity; throwing Selden’s letters into the fire, the one potential act of self she commits, is not perceived and therefore it cannot influence the narrative that determines her, as this narrative is built solely on perception. Lily, craving rest, finally takes an overdose and dies alone, after which the novel continues without her, through Selden’s (and Gerty’s) eyes. This completes the triumph of character in favor of self. Maggie, finally, is barely allowed a place in a novel that carries her name but focuses, mainly, on other characters. Determined by upbringing and circumstances, Maggie leads a 53
short life focused on one hope of escape from her determined narrative: Pete. Pete proves to be a part of the determining narrative rather than a possible escape from it, however, and as he leaves her the girl’s mother and brother are convinced that she has become a prostitute and throw her out of the house, Maggie seems to have no alternative than to, indeed, become “a girl of the streets”. Her death finalizes the erasure of self and character, as the novella presents Maggie’s death as a narrative gap to be filled up by an additional narrative of perceived character – the readers create the girl’s narrative of suicide, and Maggie herself is erased from the novel before she dies. Like The House of Mirth, Maggie continues after the protagonist’s death, and the narrative of character existing within the novel – the one of Maggie as a sinful child – is completed in the novel’s ending, in which the mother forgives her “disobed’ent chil’”. Concludingly, none of the three protagonists is fully in control at the moment of their death, as their suicide becomes a part of the external narrative of character rather than a controlled action executed by the self. Most importantly, then, the novels all show how the external narrative of character can take the place of the internal narrative of self. Because of omniscient narration and an absence of internal, experiencing perspectives, the texts leave no room for its characters to develop a self; after all, a self functions through an internalized experience rather than external perception. Literary naturalism creates a distance between the reader and the text; it tells rather than shows. Naturalism’s style, then, becomes a deterministic force in itself rather than simply “bad” writing. For Lee Clark Mitchell, who has argued the value of the naturalist style before me, textual repetition is the main deterministic force; for me, it is the narrative style. Locked into such shallow narration, Martin, Lily, and Maggie are determined, primarily, because they lack the self-consciousness, -understanding, and -reflection to remain in control – in short, they have no self. Fooled by illusions and unable to become acting agents, Martin, Lily, and Maggie drift away from themselves and finally allow for the external narrative of character to take their place, thus rendering the characters themselves obsolete. Without a self and exiled from their own narrative, the determined character cannot continue to exist within a text, and their suicide is a finalization of the erasure of self. All three characters discussed are determined by external narratives; that is, rumors that have very little to do with their own actions – rather, these rumors have to do with what other characters perceive, or think they perceive – but that come to replace the protagonists’ own stories anyway. In Lily and Maggie’s case, the narrative of character is victorious, as the story continues without them. Moreover, Maggie’s suicide is externalized even further as it exists only outside of the novel, imposed on her by the readers rather than the text itself. Only Martin Eden is able, in a way, 54
to wrench back control by ending the narrative with him; but to achieve this he himself, too, has to be erased. Concludingly, I argue that determinism in these novels is not portrayed as an objective, scientific reality, as Zola and others wished it to be. Its presence is not merely conveyed through external forces, but through its narrative style and the whole character that is so typical of naturalist fiction, together with the character’s interplay with these forces. Determined characters are so vastly influenced by external forces, not because these mechanisms themselves cannot be overcome, but because the characters lack something internally; a narrative, a desire, a self, something to propel them forward. Looking at determinism as an interplay between the traditional deterministic factors – environment, upbringing, and heredity – and subjective reality, I suggest, allows the naturalist mode of writing to show its value, even if this was not its original authors’ goal; after all, they meant to focus on biology and objectivity, not psychology and subjectivity. Many critics have dwelled upon naturalism’s flaws, given that, when treating its novels as merely conveying biological determinism as a philosophical idea and dismissing the narrative style, the novels simply are not convincing. Charles Child Walcutt and George M. Spangler, for example, have responded to this in Martin Eden, and it is worth citing them both:
But the question [Martin] keeps asking with such tormented intensity [...] is a question to which he has known the answer all his life: they want him for his fame and his money. Anybody knows that. It’s so obvious that it’s not worth saying; it makes the ending painfully false; the suicide becomes an act of sulky spite, of childish pique. (Walcutt Jack London 41)
Because Martin has been so strong for so long in face of every adversity, his sudden failure of will and desire simply fails to be convincing. Since Martin has been fully aware for more than a year of Ruth’s limitations, could her desertion on quite trivial grounds be such a surprise, and more important, could it be so debilitating? (Spangler 146)
Both Walcutt and Spangler, in these citations, respond to the character of Martin Eden as if he represents a rounded, self-conscious human being who is supposed to understand what the reader so clearly sees: the difference between the ideal and the real. The fact that everything within the text itself points to the opposite, that Martin does not see nor understand, indeed is unconvincing when analyzing him as representing a self-conscious and -understanding 55
person. But perhaps this is expecting too much of Martin, who is, foremost, a naturalist character existing in a text whose style specifically revolves around denying agency. I can only repeat Mitchell here, as I, too, believe that “readers of naturalism must learn that the human body which moves in a textual world need not be a person, and that will-less characters need not be treated as if they possessed full “selves”.” (15) Within the context of the text, the protagonist’s crash does make sense. I would argue that Martin was created, rather, to represent a blinded person at best; or, as Mitchell phrases it, rejecting the self “creat[ed] characters who seem little more than occasions for passing events – who merely mark the bodily intersections of outer force and inner desire”. (xii) Martin, believing that he is the “god of creation”, puts forward a perspective grown out of his environment and desire; it is a deluded and naïve one, but nonetheless his. The fact that the reader is presented with the opportunity to see things as they are does not justify, I think, denying Martin’s view. London’s protagonist, believing unconditionally that “‘[a]ll things may go astray in this world, but not love’” (89 ii), has no way of seeing; and, essentially having become desire, he cannot exist without this inner force. The same goes for Lily and Maggie, though critics have been less critical toward Wharton’s and Crane’s protagonists. If we were to analyze Lily Bart as a rounded, fully conscious human being, her downfall would not make much sense either, as it ought to be quite clear that she cannot solve her money problems by performing actions such as partaking in a cruise. Similarly, to most rational beings it would not seem too effective, if one wishes to live in society, to cling to Lawrence Selden the way Lily does. Maggie, in her turn, has been rendered human through critics’ confusion as to why she would commit suicide on the particular evening that she dies, since nor the text nor Maggie herself provides the reader with a reason. This, various critics concluded, is a flaw within Crane’s text. A sufficiently self- analytical person would not drown themself without a reason, we assume; but Maggie, whether she did effectively drown herself or not, would be perfectly capable of doing so. After all, she is not a person but a determined character; she would only need the right impulse to jump. Moreover, as Donald Pizer points out, if one treats Maggie as representing a rounded human being it is not realistic that her character is not influenced by the violence that surrounds her. However, as Pizer also notes, this does not seem to be the point; rather, he writes, the novella conveys the destructive quality of an amoral environment, as “[i]t is only when her environment becomes a moral force that [Maggie] is destroyed”. (Pizer 191) To convey this, Maggie does not need to represent a self-conscious person; instead, it is probably more effective if she does not. The same goes for Maggie as a character to illuminate the 56
forces that shape her, since, if Maggie were sketched as a rational self, determinism would not have worked the way it does. Andrew Lawson has – quite effectively – described the “late realist novel”, as
a declension of omniscience, a blurring or obscuring of the authorial bond with the reader, a deepening of subjectivity, a heightened sense of the constraints and possibilities of point of view. The human subjects whose eyes we learn to look through are typically perplexed, self-divided, unsure of their ground. Vistas open up, only to be abruptly closed down; the experience of looking turns into the experience of being looked at; the bursting of constraints is matched by a confrontation with confining structures. (157-58)
This, to me, seems like a more effective way to approach the naturalist novel, rather than dwelling on the novels’ “flawed” style or the things they were “supposed to” – but do not – convey. We, the readers, are not naturalist characters and, in their turn, naturalist characters are no selves, while we are. Still, the novels discussed uncover ways in which different perspectives produce different agents – or, in the case of American literary naturalism, how certain perspectives might erase agency. In the footsteps of Mitchell, I argue that literary naturalism reveals a paradox within the human belief, where we accept a world governed by laws while, simultaneously, people tend to believe that they, themselves, are ultimately in control. Naturalism shows us what a determined narrative could look like, and how determinism and (sense of) self can become intertwined. By involving both self and style in the analysis, still more might be said about (American) literary naturalism; e.g. how do some naturalist characters keep on existing without a self? Are there additional naturalist characters who, like Jack London’s White Fang, are able to break with determinism? What happens to the narrative style then? What do we, human beings, have in common with characters like Martin Eden, Lily Bart, or even Maggie Johnson, even though she is barely there? Additional to circumstances, genetics, and upbringing, what effect does a person’s “narrative style” – the way one thinks, the words one uses, … – have on the degree of freedom one experiences? Naturalist novels might not be “good” novels – but that does not mean that they cannot be interesting. They ask questions and pose theories about narrative determinism that are still relevant today. As stated, human beings are not naturalist characters, rendering our potential less bleak than such novels itself suggest; yet we, too, live within stories, and sometimes our 57
“think-machine” does break. I would suggest that literary naturalism can serve as one of the mirrors through which to see the potential effect(s) of narrative perspective on agency and (sense of) self, as some of our stories might be more naturalistic than many of us dare to admit.
58
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