The American Dream: a Place of My Own, a Place to Call Home Jason M
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2013 The American Dream: A Place of My Own, a Place to Call Home Jason M. Gibson Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE AMERICAN DREAM: A PLACE OF MY OWN, A PLACE TO CALL HOME By JASON M. GIBSON A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2013 Jason M. Gibson defended this dissertation on March 21, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were: John J. Fenstermaker Professor Directing Dissertation Neil T. Jumonville University Representative William J. Cloonan Committee Member David F. Johnson Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii This dissertation is dedicated to my family, friends, and mentors who have all patiently seen it through to fruition, especially my grandmother (Lee) and my mother (Debbie). iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge and thank Dr. John Fenstermaker for his continued encouragement and steady hand. Without his leadership and friendship, I would not have finished. Rachelle Wadsworth deserves credit for her tireless editing and her gentle and kind support. She has been flawless in her efforts to see this project through. I could never begin to express my gratitude for her patience. An additional thanks is given to Rachel Davis and Dr. John “JR” Woodward for their assistance in the document’s final stages. Their last minute efforts provided a far better product than I could have done myself. Including the individuals mentioned thus far, those who have encouraged my completion and have been tireless in their support include: Dr. Penny Devine, Dr. Margaret Wright-Cleveland, and Dr. Johann Pautz. I would be remiss in not acknowledging and thanking my mentors throughout the course of my education. Dr. Christopher Robbins deserves credit for opening my eyes to the world of letters and the beauty of art and culture. Dr. Burt Perinchief in his guidance and friendship taught me that no matter the adversity, one could accomplish anything. Dr. David Kushner transitioned me into the world of academic work with a persistent belief that I had it within my power to be successful. And Dr. Neil Jumonville taught me that cultural context means just as much in our understanding of a text, as the text itself. I wish to thank my committee for their support throughout my doctoral program and for helping me bring the dissertation to conclusion. Finally, let there be no doubt in the importance of friendship and our interdependence for success. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... vi 1. THE AMERICAN DREAM....................................................................................................1 2. THE DREAM AND AMERICAN LITERATURE ..............................................................24 3. HEMINGWAY’S TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT AND THE DREAM..................................47 4. HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD AND THE DREAM......................69 5. RAWLINGS’ CROSS CREEK AND THE DREAM ............................................................98 6. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................124 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................128 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................136 v ABSTRACT This study uses literary texts from the twentieth century to explore the interaction between liberty and democracy at the heart of the American Dream. Of particular interest is the way in which the Dream is invoked and then called into question in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Cross Creek (1942). These works demonstrate the failure of a social order meant to guarantee individual success. The protagonists are forced to counter expectations of normalcy concerning the identity politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in order to achieve the Dream’s goal of a good life rooted in domestic happiness. vi CHAPTER ONE THE AMERICAN DREAM The April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair featured an article by David Kamp entitled “Rethinking the American Dream.” Well-timed, the article appeared as Americans, staggering under a mountain of personal and national debt, asked whether the nation was heading towards another Great Depression. Amid Norman Rockwell-esque photographs of the 1950s and 1960s, Kamp asks whether the shared ideal of the American Dream is truly dying, or “has it simply been misplaced?”1 Kamp offers copious cultural images and statistical data in his chronicle of the American Dream in the twentieth century, showing how the Dream has been historically realized, at least superficially: the standard of living has risen, material plenty underpinning popular conceptions of the Dream abounds. He also notes, however, that the Dream has shifted from a national ideal for a “better, richer, and fuller life” to a debt-ridden reality driven by extreme consumption and the cult of celebrity. Focusing on a malaise among American dreamers, he concludes, “What needs to change is our expectation of what the Dream promises—and our understanding of what that vague and promiscuously used term, ‘the American Dream,’ is really supposed to mean.”2 Defining and realizing the American Dream has been constant in America’s cultural narrative. From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms to Fox television’s American Idol, evocations of the American Dream have been impossible to avoid. All dimensions of the American ‘imagined community’—political, social, economic, religious, cultural—can be 1 David Kamp, “Rethinking the American Dream,” Vanity Fair (April 2009): 118-123 and 177- 180. 2 Ibid., 120. 1 addressed through the rubric of the Dream.3 Though the term was not coined until 1933, its meanings, tenets, and models have been present since Jefferson asserted the “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Scholars have often placed the Dream’s inception within the Puritan enterprise and traced it throughout American history. Such cultural texts consider the ways the Dream has been conceived and applied, revealing hope and optimism mixed with uncertainty and despair. As a lens for understanding American culture and more specifically American literature, the Dream is a useful concept for analyzing the writing of such canonical authors as Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neal Hurston, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This lens enhances and clarifies issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality as elements—positive and negative—in the role of the American Dream. Such authors invoke the American Dream as a cultural ideal and call into question presuppositions associated with “traditional Dream narratives.” For them, the Dream is found lacking in its ability to ameliorate the conflict caused between liberty and democracy—the individual and the collective. Particularly noteworthy are acts affecting the family and domestic space. Failure of the Dream in this space suggests, metaphorically, the frustration and exclusion in the larger imagined family—the community, the nation. Functioning as a cultural ideal, the American Dream embodies an array of images, feelings, and opinions, which begs precise definition or codification. As Jim Cullen notes in his 2003 monograph The American Dream, “It’s as if no one feels compelled to fix the meanings and uses of a term everyone presumably understands.”4 Although Walter Lippmann first suggested the phrase “American Dream” in Drift and Mastery (1914), most historians and 3 The phrase “Imagined Community” is used by Benedict Anderson as a definition for nationalism. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983). 4 Jim Cullen, The American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5. 2 cultural critics agree that the expression was introduced into the lexicon as an ideal by early twentieth century historian essayist and social critic James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America (1933).5 Adams sought to interpret American history based on an ideal or driving force. What he referred to as the “American Dream” was a dream “of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man,” and where opportunity is afforded to “each according to his ability or achievement.” Moving away from notions of material gain—the acquisition of “motor cars,” “high wages,” and “keeping up with the Joneses”—to a progressive (and liberal) belief in individual achievement, Adams roots the dream in a “social order” in which the innate capability of the individual triumphs over “birth or position.”6 Though present in the Dream, material plenty yields to “being able to grow to one’s fullest development,” unhampered “by barriers which had been slowly erected in older civilizations”—barriers historically rooted in social class, whether hierarchical or economic. 7 Growth and development