UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE ANTIMODERN STRATEGIES: AMBIVALENCE, ACCOMMODATION, AND PROTEST IN WILLA CATHER’S THE TROLL GARDEN A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By STEPHANIE STRINGER GROSS Norman, Oklahoma 2004 UMI Number: 3122298 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3122298 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ©Copyright by STEPHANIE STRINGER GROSS 2004 All Rights Reserved. ANTIMODERN STRATEGIES: AMBIVALENCE, ACCOMMODATION, AND PROTEST IN WILLA CATHER’S THE TROLL GARDEN A Dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Dr. Ronald Schleifer, Director Dr. William HenrYiMcDonald )r. Francesca Savraya Dr. Melissa/I. Homestead Dr. Robert Griswold ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would never have been completed without the many hours of discussions with members of my committee, Professors Henry McDonald, Melissa Homestead, Francesca Sawaya, and Robert Griswold, and especially Professor Ronald Schleifer, and their patience with various interminable drafts. I hereby name Dr. Pamela Genova an honorary member: she literally did as much as anyone to encourage and support, not to mention model, academic behavior. She is a true “professional” in the very best sense of that word, and a good friend too. Professors Nicholas Howe and the late Michael Flanigan, who thought I belonged in academia long before I ever did, are owed belated debts of thanks as well. I also want to thank my students who long ago made me take a hard look at Gather and question the typical ways she was taught. Many of the ideas contained in this project were first kindled, oddly enough, in a modem poetry class I took years ago under Dr. James Comas. I hope I can someday tell him what a fantastic teacher he was for me. Thanks to Dr. Richard Barney, not only for his friendship, but, as graduate liaison in the department his final year here, for his help in making it possible for me to have a semester to focus on writing; thanks to him and to the other members of the graduate committee for that invaluable support. I would like to acknowledge also Dr. Hunter Cadzow, Dr. Geary Hobson, and Dr. Dan Cottom for their support through the years as well in various conversations which have, in their own ways, informed this project and helped me in my perspectives on the profession in general. The English Department staff cannot be thanked enough: former secretaries Cindy Adams, without whom I would never have had the guts to quit a job and make the move to OU, Lorene Wilcox who for a long time was the GAs’ “mom,” and Cindy Greenwood, a continuing source of humor and support; and El, who does everything: you guys make the world go ‘round. Marianne and Liz deserve mention as well for their patience and many little kindnesses. Dr. Sharia Hutchison is my hero (who first suggested a bait shop instead of becoming professional noodlers). Dr. David Mair has been a great “boss”— even-handed, responsive when crisis reigns and a really nice guy. I also need to thank Christine Skwiot and Larry Gross for their lessons in history and “introducing” me to Jackson Lears over lobster one summer. Outside the academic world I must begin with thanking my mother, Dottie Stringer, since she (along with SallieMae) literally supported me at times; she also inspired me by going back to school herself as an adult, getting her MA, and teaching, always teaching. She and my dad, Tom, taught me to love to read, and to pass that on. I sure wish he could have been here through all this. My kids, Sarah, Maggie and Tom, have paid the priee of a stressed-out mom way too often, and yet have always been there to urge me on — and as they have now become amazing youngadults I see how resilient they areand see how well they’ve negotiated their lives, and well, that’s enough to be thankful for. I do still wish though that I’d written a few less papers and baked a lot more cookies. I mean it. To the older kids, Angela and Stuart, you’ve always been supportive and I appreciate it; don’t think I don’t know you guys have sacrificed too. My friend Nicolette Nicar has always, since we were six years old, given me support and consolation. I’m really going to miss her as we IV move on. Muriel Perkins first accompanied me to the philosophy stacks in the library one day long ago, and was the first to suggest I could actually do this. Of course, finishing a PhD program would have never been possible without the support and love of one incredible person, generous, patient, some might say masochistic: Dr. David Gross. From making dinner every night, making sure I had a place to work, taking kids to practices, listening to me whine, to inspiring me with his own teaching and writing, he’s done it all. Nearly everything I think is influenced to one degree or another by conversations we’ve had, arguments we’ve had over ideas or positions on intellectual topics, but most importantly, you can hear the wood thrush and we finally figured out what baby bam owls sound like. Here’s to summers with them with no dissertation hanging over our heads, memories of Lahoma Avenue, and long years ahead in Maine. Table of Contents Antimodern Strategies: Ambivalence, Accommodation, and Protest in Willa Gather’s The Troll Garden 1-29 Introduction 30-90 Chapter One: Antimodern Alternatives in the New Century: Art, Authenticity and “the nothingness of system and discipline.” Part I. Introduction: Rhetorics of modernity and the question of “devotion” Part II. The dialectic of aesthetic modernity: “vague longing” and the price of “cold calculation” in “The Garden Lodge” 91-144 Chapter Two: The “Iron Cage” of Acquisition: Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption, “tasteless amplitude,” and Ascetic Rationalism in “Flavia and Her Artists.” 145-193 Chapter Three: “Paul’s Case” and The Rhetorics of Pleasure: Protest and Problems in Gather’s Aesthetic. Part I. Introduction: “His dearest pleasures” and “sense of power”: Paul’s protest and Gather’s excess of seeing Part II. Pater, Impressionism, and the problem of pleasure 194-244 Chapter Four: Aesthetic Strategies of Accommodation: Gather’s American Dandy and Consuming Experience Part 1. Icons of ambivalence: Calvinism, class, and conformity in “Paul’s Case” Part II. Paul as flâneur: the aesthetic body and “morbid desire’ 245-249 Works Cited VI Introduction In 1905, the same year which saw the publication of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Willa Gather published her first collection of short stories entitled The Troll Garden, a volume of seven stories which includes “The Garden Lodge,” “Flavia and Her Artists,” and her perhaps best known short story, “Paul’s Case.” The following year would see Gather give up her teaching job in Pittsburgh and accept S. S. McClure’s offer of a position at his magazine in New York. In Gather’s second collection of stories, which includes some revised stories from The Troll Garden, entitled Youth and the Bright Medusa. Gather alludes to life in the still uncommercialized, bohemian Washington Square,* what Gather’s lifelong companion Edith Lewis calls “the rather poetic mood of those days before the automobile, the radio, the moving picture—and before the two wars.”^ However, Gather’s position at McClure’s magazine, a notorious muckraking journal, consisted almost entirely of reading stories submitted in the hopes of commercial success, without the “devotion” to art that Gather all her life avowed. “In reading manuscripts submitted to me,” Gather * Walter Tittle writes about Greenwich Village in 1925 in a way which confirms Gather’s own observations: “One does not need to be old to remember when its streets were quiet, but now it is the haunt of Bohemianism, Incorporated, where from humble beginnings that were more sincere have risen myriad dance-halls, taxi-stands, tea-shops, theaters, and cabarets with convert charges and like ostentations that promise soon to rival Broadway. Persevere still farther west, and one is rewarded. This modem commerce has not yet obliterated all of the former charm. The crooked streets again resume their quiet, and an Old World touch is contributed by occasional lingering architectural fragments of Georgian flavor. In this pleasant back-water I found the dwelling of Willa Sibert Gather.” (Excerpted from Genturv Magazine. July 1925). Reprinted in Wasserman, 103. ^ From the introduction to Willa Gather Living, by Edith Lewis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). xi-xviii. says in a 1921 interview, “I found that 95 per cent of them were written for the sake of the writer—never for the sake of the material. The writer wanted to express his clever ideas, his wit, his observations. Almost never did I find a manuscript that was written because a writer loved his subject so much he had to write about it.” As a result.