The Reinvention of the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature"

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2001 A living lump of appetites': the reinvention of the primitive in naturalist and modernist literature" Gina M. Rossetti University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Rossetti, Gina M., "A living lump of appetites': the reinvention of the primitive in naturalist and modernist literature". " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2001. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6378 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Gina M. Rossetti entitled "A living lump of appetites': the reinvention of the primitive in naturalist and modernist literature"." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Mary E. Papke, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Gina M. Rossetti entitled" 'A Living Lump of Appetites': The Reinvention of the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature." I have examined the final paper copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. tl ~ We have read this dissertation and recommend its 7tance: ~t~,~ ~87:Jl~.L ~t?-~ Accepted for the Council: Vice Provost and Graduate Studies "'A Living Lump of Appetites': The Reinvention of the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature" A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Gina M. Rossetti December 2001 Copyright © Gina M. Rossetti, 2001 All rights reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people to whom I am grateful for shaping my educational and professional careers. As an undergraduate student in Professor Pamela Menke's English courses at Regis College, I became intensely interested in postbellum American literature and its deployment of theories about class and race. Professor Menke encouraged me not only to major in English, but to pursue graduate study. I hope that I continue to bring to the field the kind of probing analysis she helped foster. As a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee, I have had the great fortune to receive generous support of my scholarly endeavors. I wish to thank the English Department for its graduate teaching associateship and the special extension that enabled me to complete my dissertation with funding. I am also grateful to have received a number of important dissertation fellowships that provided much-needed release time. Specifically, I wish to thank the University of Tennessee for the Arthur E. Yates Graduate Fellowship, the UT English Department for the Norman J. Sanders Dissertation Fellowship, and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund for the Durant da Ponte American Literature Fellowship, which provided generous monies for research at the Bancroft Library. I also wish to thank the reference librarians at the Bancroft Library for their assistance as I perused materials from their Frank Norris and Jack London archives. Of course, I owe a humble thanks to my dissertation committee members for their commitment, guidance, and support. I am grateful to Professor Carolyn Hodges, who joined the project late in the game, kindly agreeing to serve as my outside reader. I also thank Professor Stanton B. Garner, Jr. for helping me to carefully nuance my argument and for providing me with probing questions that iii further encouraged me to consider my project's questions and implications. I also wish to thank Professor Charles Maland for his tremendous help with the era's intellectual history and, more specifically, with the literary implications of American progressivism. His insights and questions helped me to better conceptualize many of the era's competing philosophies. Certainly, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation director, Professor Mary E. Papke. From the time I began the Ph.D. program, I have had the great fortune to learn from and be mentored by Professor Papke. Far beyond the call of duty, she has encouraged me to pursue professional opportunities, to seek leadership positions in the Department's graduate student organization, and to exhibit the highest standards of intellectual engagement. Professor Papke unreservedly supported me in this project, lending her intellectual rigor and command of the selected literary periods to give the dissertation greater analytical depth. In addition to professional support, I am heartily grateful for my many friends who helped to keep me balanced during this process: Pat Bradley, Rich Bryan, Lisa Byrd, Jo Angela Edwins, Steve Holcombe, Bill Larsen, Susan North, Laura Rutland, Dan Schierenbeck, Stacey Sisco, and Anne Snellen. I am especially appreciative for the opportunity to have assisted Bill Larsen with his 400-level course on American Realism and Naturalism. Additionally, I am particularly thankful to Laura Rutland and Dan Schierenbeck for their encouraging words, and, more particularly, for their camaraderie. Finally, I extend a special thank you to Jennifer Buhman, whose sacrifices during this process were too numerous to count. Jennifer saw me at my highest and lowest points and through it all she believed in the certainty of my finishing this dissertation. Without Jennifer's companionship, I know this project would have been a far more difficult process. iv ABSTRACT When we consider the historical and cultural events that mark the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, we discover a growing fear about the "vanishing Anglo-Saxon." This response to the non-Anglo-Saxon or "primitive" differs significantly, however, from earlier, more romantic definitions and philosophies wherein the primitive is considered a positive alternative to civilization. While earlier eras conceive of the primitive as positive, these eras' judgments change as one considers turn of the twentieth-century American literature. It is this reassessment of the primitive that is the focus of my study. am particularly interested in how these ruminations about the primitive are codified scientifically and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I examine selected literature written during the naturalist and modernist movements in order to determine the degree to which these texts advance theories about the primitive that participate in an agenda of fear and loathing. Pivotal to my study is a trajectory of the primitive that shows its many forms, its changes and contradictions, and the degree to which naturalist and modernist texts draw upon earlier romantic images of the primitive and transmogrify them. In selected works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, I will show how primitivism manifests itself therein and changes over time. I will argue that the primitive serves as a literary figure whose presence might link naturalism and modernism. Consequently, the primitive's many forms, contradictions, and slippages reveal the degree to which it is a transformational set of processes sustained and challenged by influences both within the dominant class and by V those that lie at its edge. In sum, my dissertation will argue that the primitive is not static but is contradictory, transformational, and it is the source from which many naturalist and modernist texts draw their concerns, fears, and attractions. In doing so, my study will examine how and for what purpose the selected texts came to rely on the primitive. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Primitive as Primordial Beast 30 Chapter Two: The Primitive as the Brute Working Class 87 Chapter Three: The Primitive as the Immigrant 126 Chapter Four: The Primitive as the Racial Exotic 163 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 208 Vb ~1 vii Introduction I think that the simplestaccount of the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any sensitivecitizen who may have happenedto 'look in' is that he comes back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. ... [He] goes about ever afterwardswith a new look, for those who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionablyprivileged person who has had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedlysafe old house. Let not the unwary, therefore, visit Ellis Island.(Henry James, The American Scene,85) Henry James's observation of Ellis Island underscores not only his impressions of the non-Anglo-Saxon's presence in the United States but his attempts to reacclimate to an American culture, from which culture he had been absent for twenty-five years, and to understand the complexities involved in being an "American."

Load more