University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1999 Domestic visions and shifting identities: The urban novel and the rise of a consumer culture in America, 1852-1925 Nancy Helen Von Rosk University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Von Rosk, Nancy Helen, "Domestic visions and shifting identities: The urban novel and the rise of a consumer culture in America, 1852-1925" (1999). Doctoral Dissertations. 2087. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2087 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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DOMESTIC VISIONS AND SHIFTING IDENTITIES: THE URBAN NOVEL AND THE RISE OF A CONSUMER CULTURE IN AMERICA, 1852-1925 BY NANCY VON ROSK BA.., SUNY Oneonta, 1984 M A , Northeastern University, 1987 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment- of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English May, 1999 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9926036 Copyright 1999 by Von Rosk, Nancy Helen All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9926036 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©1999 Nancy Von Rosk Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation has been examined and approved. Brigitte Ballsy, Associate Professor <Professor of English Lisa MacFarlane, Associate Professor of English John Ernest, Associate Professor of English •, Associate Professor of English Ellen Firapaadck, Associate Professor of History ' rjDate Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For Pete and Cameron iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iv ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 I. THE LURE OF THE CITY AND THE LONGING FOR HOME: URBAN SPACE AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BLTTHEDALE ROMANCE 57 H. DESIRE, DOMESTICITY AND THE AESTHETIC VISION: URBAN HOMES AND HOMELESSNESS IN THE BOSTONIANS AND A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES 83 The Bostonians 83 A Hazard of New Fortunes 109 m. DECIPHERING THE SPECTACLE AND DISMANTLING THE HOME: THE NEW PUBLIC SPACE AND URBAN CONSCIOUSNESS IN SISTER CARRIE 136 IV. COON SHOWS, RAGTIME AND THE BLUES: RACE, URBANITY AND THE LOSS OF HOME IN PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR'S THE SPORT OF THE GODS. 176 V. SPECTACULAR HOMES AND PASTORAL THEATERS: GENDER, URBANITY AND DOMESTICITY IN THE HOUSE OF MIRTH 210 VI. 'GO, MAKE YOURSELF FOR A PERSON': URBANITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN AMERICAN IDENTITY IN THE NOVELS OF ABRAHAM CAHAN AND ANZLA. YEZEERSKA 250 The Rise of David Levinsky “Ever Conscious of My Modem Garb" 258 Bread Givers "My Beautiful Aloneness" 287 CONCLUSION 310 BIBLIOGRAPHY 331 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT DOMESTIC VISIONS AND SHIFTING IDENTITIES: THE URBAN NOVEL AND THE RISE OF A CONSUMER CULTURE IN AMERICA, 1852-1925 by Nancy Von Rosk University of New Hampshire, May, 1999 Adviser: Professor Brigitte-Bailey Domestic Visions reexamines the tradition of the urban novel in America by reading the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska within the historical and cultural contexts of an evolving urban consumer culture. Bringing together not only a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts, but also an analysis of America's shifting domestic ideals over the last half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study traces the impact of a new spectacular urban public culture on both the private realm and those who are marginalized. As it illuminates the intersections between public and private realms of experience as well as the intersections between dominant and marginalized cultures. Domestic Visions complicates traditional approaches to urban literature. Analyzing canonical works such as The Blithedale Romance and Sister Carrie alongside such lesser known works as The Sport of the Cods and Bread Givers, this study highlights how urban novelists across the varied spectrum of gender, race, ethnicity and class shared a certain vision of America's new urban culture, and yet diverged in that vision in important and oftentimes surprising ways. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION The urbanite is faced with a never-ending series of partial visibility, o f gaps—figures framed in the windows of high-rises, partly drawn blinds, taxis transporting strangers, noises front the other side of a wall, streets on maps or around the bend but never traversed, hidden enclaves in adjacent neighborhoods. Faced with these and unable to ignore them, the city dweller reconstructs the inaccessible in his imagination. Because no urbanite is exempt from this partial exclusion and imaginative reconstruction, every urbanite is to some extent an outsider. Modem urban life then is a landscape of partial visibility and manifold possibilities that excludes in the very act of inviting. Horn Wirth-Nesher, from City Codes 'London,' Hardy wrote in 1887, ‘appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody is conscious o f themselves collectively, except perhaps some poor gaper who stares round with a half idiotic aspect.' There is still the sense o f paradox: that in the great d ty itself, the very place and agency or so it would seem of collective consciousness, it is an absence o f common feeling, an excessive subjectivity, that seems to be characteristic. Raymond Williams, from The Country and the City Focusing on the last half of the nineteenth century, the historical moment when America's modem metropolis was bom, this dissertation examines the development of the urban novel in the United States while keeping in mind the paradoxical qualities of urban life described by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Raymond Williams: that somehow an "inviting" Landscape of "manifold possibilities," excludes, is impenetrable, and that amidst such a collective space as the dty, we find an "excessive subjectivity." As I analyze a wide range of American writers' responses to the new urban landscape, I explore how the dty is envisioned during this period and how, in turn, the dty transforms vision—how urban culture creates new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking about public and private space. Moreover, I highlight how issues of gender, race or dass are used to construct urban space and urban popular culture. While my first three chapters focus on canonical texts by white male authors—Hawthorne, James, Howells and Dreiser—my readings of these texts foreground not only spedfic "urban" issues, but issues of gender, race and dass as well. Continuing in this vein, my last three chapters analyze novels written by female, black and Jewish-American writers, for these "marginalized" writers draw our attention to the 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 radalized, gendered and class-bound aspects of the white male