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The Mirrors of Naturalism: Stephen Crane's Pragmatic Determinism

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The Mirrors of Naturalism: Stephen Crane's Pragmatic Determinism The Mirrors of Naturalism: Stephen Crane’s Pragmatic Determinism Anthony Manganaro A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Robert Abrams, chair Monika Kaup Mark Patterson Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © 2017 Anthony Manganaro University of Washington Abstract The Mirrors of Naturalism: Stephen Crane’s Pragmatic Determinism Anthony Manganaro Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Robert Abrams English My dissertation contributes to current scholarship on nineteenth-century American naturalism by arguing that the emergent theories of determinism and pragmatism were antithetical to, and yet dependent upon, one another. On the one hand, Stephen Crane’s fiction reveals determinism’s heavy weight upon the naturalist genre (the sense that humans cannot affect their worlds), yet unlike Frank Norris or Jack London, for instance, Crane innovatively employs pragmatic elements that work against the very deterministic frameworks that structure his stories. By tracing the dialectic between these theories, I demonstrate how Crane’s fiction not only reveals the destructive relationship between nature and humanity but also, in his pragmatic suspicion of static concepts, the failure of language to accurately interpret the world of the fin de siècle. My lens provides for more complex interpretations of Crane in addition to Theodore Dreiser in ways that highlight how the deterministic yet pluralistic character of naturalism serves as a bridge between the realist and modernist styles. The Mirrors of Naturalism: Stephen Crane’s Pragmatic Determinism Anthony Manganaro Introduction: Literary Naturalism in the Context of Determinism and Pragmatism 1 Chapter 1: “The Little Man” Making Orations: Crane’s Faithless Vision (1890-1894) 49 Chapter 2: Orientation on the Battlefield: Managing Perceptual Thresholds in The Red Badge of Courage (1895) 102 Chapter 3: “Everybody Says What?” Crane’s Irony & Metafiction (1897-98) 150 Afterword: Crane at the Fin de Siècle 186 Works Cited 232 Introduction Literary Naturalism in the Context of Determinism and Pragmatism Stephen Crane’s death on June 5, 1900 concluded a decade-long career that had coincided with the brief rise and decline of naturalist fiction in all its complexity. This study places Crane’s fiction within the intersecting world of 1890s thought, grappling on the largest scale with the crises of representation that all naturalist works were subsumed by in the wake of cultural revolutions in science, technology, and the making of history itself in the late nineteenth- century. More specifically, it narrows these responses into two categories, what I am calling the ‘deterministic’ and ‘pragmatic’ reactions. Both of these types of reactions, I will argue in this chapter, are representational choices, and both, as I will show in the following chapters, are dependent upon one another in Crane’s fiction in a way that helps explain and complicate the naturalist genre. Overall, I will be discussing how the emergent theories of determinism and pragmatism are antithetical to, and yet dependent upon, one another. On the one hand, Stephen Crane’s fiction reveals determinism’s heavy weight upon the naturalist genre (the sense that humans cannot affect their worlds), yet unlike Frank Norris or Jack London, for instance, Crane innovatively employs pragmatic elements that work against the very deterministic frameworks that structure his stories. By tracing the dialectic between these theories, I am able to read how Crane’s fiction not only reveals the destructive relationship between nature and humanity but also, in his pragmatic suspicion of static concepts, the failure of language to accurately interpret the world of the fin de siècle. My lens provides for more complex interpretations of Crane in 1 addition to Theodore Dreiser that highlight how the deterministic yet pluralistic character of naturalism serves as a bridge between the realist and modernist genres. This introductory chapter is bracketed into three sections which serve not only to specify naturalism as a genre, but to situate it within a larger literary arc between the American renaissance and modernism. Part I unpacks, from a historical and literary perspective, my definition of the ‘deterministic style,’ which comes to a head at the turn of the century. This section gives a brief tour of the cultural problems inherent in the late nineteenth-century which prompted a specific type of stylistic response (represented chiefly by Frank Norris, Henry Adams, and others). Part II tells a parallel, though strikingly different, story of how the ‘pragmatic style’ unfolded in American history and literature in the late nineteenth-century (using Emerson, the James Brothers, and Herman Melville as main examples). Both representational styles, as we will see, seem at first glance to be opposed to one another (in many ways they are opposites), but Part III explains how their interdependence provides a crucial understanding of the naturalist genre at the turn of the century and how my project intervenes with recent critical approaches to naturalism. Part III concludes by introducing the specific lens through which I analyze Crane – how the deterministic and pragmatic style are combined – and provides a chapter breakdown for the rest of the dissertation. I: “To Find the Value of X”: The Evolution of the Thesis-Driven Deterministic Style Frank Norris always had a plan. “I entered college,” he declared, “with the view of preparing myself for the profession of a writer of fiction” (qtd. in French 24). After all, as he later noted, one “who can address a hundred thousand people is, no matter what he may be, in an 2 important position” (“Conscience” 88). Education was paramount for Norris in achieving this goal, as he supposed it would be for others: he later argued that novelists “go fumbling and stumbling along in this undisciplined fashion, governed by no rule, observing no formula, setting themselves no equation to solve” (“Future” 11). Throughout most of his widely-read essays at the turn of the century, it seems Norris’s instinct is not to discuss “life” in its mobile complexity, but rather to pin it down with finalized concepts – to capture it, in a sense. In admitting that novelists needed an equation to solve, he set up equations for himself in McTeague and the Trilogy of Wheat, texts which ultimately became the greatest icons of the American naturalist movement. Norris, in fact, helped create the movement by damning the “Teacup Tragedies” of literary realism (domestic dramas he figured had little to do with real life) and attempting to push the regionalist movement aside.1 This style, in his words, “notes only the surface of things”: it is “the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call . Realism bows upon the doormat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: ‘That is life.’ And I say it is not” (“Plea” 76). Yet despite sharing an obsessive resolve with other late nineteenth-century writers to rid American literature of cliché (an admirable enough goal), Norris’s rhetoric also seems curiously simplistic. In labeling writing as a self-conscious project of construction with rigid aims to realistically depict the human condition against its natural backdrop, Norris declared what writing should do and how it could be achieved in strikingly binary terms. The novel, he asserts, . must tell something, must narrate vigorous incidents and must show something, must penetrate deep into the motives and character of typemen, men who are composite pictures of a multitude of men . The social tendencies must be expressed by means of analysis of the characters of the men and women who compose that society, and the two 3 must be combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose – to find the value of x. (“‘Purpose’” 91) To ask a rather basic question: why is Frank Norris so serious? Why is he so utterly humorless and sincere about the purpose of fiction at the turn of the century? (And why does he bizarrely propose, as a solution, to represent “typemen?”) His vague yet pompous pronouncements are symptomatic, I would argue, of a sense of panic, of being part of a literary age which Jackson Lears has famously depicted as engrossed by a widescale crisis of representation, a time in which “reality itself began to seem problematic, something to be sought rather than merely lived” (“Salvation” 6). Fiction writers were reacting in new ways to a rapidly industrializing society, to the “reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique” (Lears Grace 4), or to what Alan Trachtenberg simply calls “the incorporation of America.”2 The dramatic rise of wealth, growth of the city, extension of the frontier, immigration, education, revolutions in science (specifically the influence of Darwinism), and radical ‘improvements’ in technology had a sort of stunning effect on the American public – Lears describes “a spreading sense of moral impotence and spiritual sterility” as promoting the pervasive feeling that “life had become not only overcivilized but also curiously unreal” (Grace 4-5). Darwinism alone posed an obvious challenge to intellectuals in its foundational idea; in the words of George Cotkin, its acceptance “posited change, process, and struggle as essentials; it promised little succor to those thinkers who craved a solid, unshifting foundation for values and beliefs” (xii). From a literary, representational perspective, it was difficult to imagine readers relating with quotes like this one, drawn from Margaret Fuller’s 1843 Summer on the Lakes: The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that they cease to seem so … After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its 4 crest. In the middle waterfall beyond, nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design.
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