Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction Between 1900 and 1940

Chapter 8: Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction between 1900 and 1940 … Zerkow was a Polish Jew … He was a dry, shrivelled old man of sixty odd. He had the thin, eager, cat-like lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching amidst muck and debris; and clawlike, prehensile fingers – the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses. It was impossible to look at Zerkow and not know instantly that greed – inordinate, insatiable greed – was the dominant passion of the man. Zerkow is a ragman, who is consumed by greed for the mythical gold dishes the Mexican cleaning woman Maria Miranda Macapa has fantasized about, and whom he urges to repeat her story until he finally commits murder and dies himself.1 In introducing this subsidiary character in his novel McTeague (1899) Frank Norris draws on a cliché which had been revived and used effectively in 19th- century theater. It fitted well into the world picture conveyed by the radical naturalists, who emphasized the depiction of ugliness, crime, abnormality and pathology over the banality of everyday life, and for whom the marginalized of ethnic groups in the congested ghettos of New York, Chicago, or San Francisco offered abundant material. The incomparably more frequent encounters of American fiction writers and their readers with these foreigners, compared with the experiences of their English counterparts in the 18th or 19th centuries, fostered the introduction of their representatives in fiction. While a number of American authors, such as Henry James and William Dean Howells, utilized their European impressions for a fictional analysis of the contrast between the manners and values in the Old and the New Worlds in the form of the international novel (for reasons of space this tradition, in which stereotypes figure prominently, cannot be considered here), the fictional treatment of the masses of immigrants 1 Frank Norris, McTeague, rpt. 1995, 36. 210 Imagology Revisited seemed only feasible if traditional and fairly crude methods were employed. The growth of large ethnic slums, and of the ghettos inhabited by hundreds of thousands of recently arrived Jews and following in the footsteps of previous newcomers such as the Irish, as well as immigrants from Italy and Eastern and Southeastern Europe, contributed not insignificantly to the waxing of anxieties among writers.2 The fundamental change to which the erstwhile homogeneous population and culture of New England was subjected prompted the fears expressed by James as well as Howells as a young writer, and led Frederick Jackson Turner to lament this reality, which also agitated Henry Adams.3 The local color tradition had paid close attention to the specific customs, habits and linguistic patterns in the various regions of America. The rise of social realism which consistently developed tendencies only implied in the local color tradition, now placed representatives of ethnic minorities in the center. The portrait of the old German social revolutionary Lindau in Howells’ 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, whose foreign accent is fairly exactly transcribed, is a landmark in this development. Various writers of this new movement, such as Norris in the passage cited above, readily accepted many of the assumptions and heterostereotypes of the advocates of environmental determinism and of racial theory. He thus indirectly furthered the use of recurring clichés such as the Jew as a Shylock figure; the virulence of Zerkow’s characterization is not tempered even by the fact that avarice, greed and miserliness also shape other characters in the novel, such as Trina Sieppe-McTeague. Admittedly, in Abraham Cahan’s long story “Yekl”, a fictional text had been published, in spite of the skepticism of Harper’s about the interest of American readers in the ethnic experience. It graphically depicted the ghetto on the Lower East Side and the idiom of East European immigrants, and mediated the problems of this ethnic group from their own angle; similar narratives from the ghetto indirectly indebted to the local color tradition appealed for understanding for a culture which seemed so alien and exotic to the 2 Cf. Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (rev. ed. 1969), 94-105. 3 Cf. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (1979), esp. 85-88, and 117-125 (on F. J. Turner), and E. N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (1948), 128-136. .

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