PARASITIC MODERNISM: BIOETHICS, DEPENDENCY, and LITERATURE by Sebastian Williams

PARASITIC MODERNISM: BIOETHICS, DEPENDENCY, AND LITERATURE by Sebastian Williams A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English West Lafayette, Indiana May 2021 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Dr. Maren Tova Linett, Chair Department of English Dr. John Duvall Department of English Dr. Arkady Plotnitsky Department of English Dr. Jeanne Dubino Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Appalachian State University Approved by: Dr. Dorsey Armstrong 2 To Rachel, Nadja, Phoebe, Maybe, and Bonnie. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my dissertation advisor, Dr. Maren Linett, and my committee, Dr. John Duvall, Dr. Arkady Plotnitsky, and Dr. Jeanne Dubino. I am grateful for their support and feedback. I also wish to thank my colleagues and fellow graduate students in the Department of English at Purdue University, especially the members of my writing group who helped to shape my thinking and writing. These members include Dr. Elizabeth Boyle, Dr. Amy Elliot, Daniel Froid, Alejandra Ortega, and Erika Gotfredson. Financial support for this project was provided by the Department of English in various ways, for which I am very grateful. This includes a teaching assistantship and the Excellence in English Research Fellowship (2020-21). I also received support through a Purdue Summer Research Fellowship (2017) and the Robert Liddell Lowe Scholarship for Graduate Studies (2018). I could not have completed this project without the support of friends and family. I wish to thank my parents, Mike and Regina Williams, who instilled in me a sense of curiosity and a passion for the humanities from an early age and always encouraged me to pursue my passions. As a first-generation college student from a working-class background, I benefited from their support in ways too complex to put into words. Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to my wife Rachel, whose love and support made all of this possible. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 8 Theory and Approach ................................................................................................................ 11 Parasitology: A Brief History .................................................................................................... 15 The Literary Parasite .................................................................................................................. 19 Chapter Overview ...................................................................................................................... 25 CONTAGION, PESTS, AND PARASITES IN TRENCH POETRY ......................................... 33 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 33 Medicine and Public Health ....................................................................................................... 39 Rosenberg and Owen in the Trenches ....................................................................................... 47 Lasting Impressions: Pests and Parasites after the War ............................................................. 63 “THE MILLION ENEMIES OF THE EARTH”: PARASITISM AND POVERTY IN GREAT DEPRESSION LITERATURE ..................................................................................................... 86 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 86 Parasites, Public Health, and the Great Depression ................................................................... 89 Steinbeck: Hookworms, Social Parasites, and Public Policy .................................................... 95 Caldwell: Eugenics, Weevils, and Weeds................................................................................ 110 “MONSTROUS VERMIN”: BECOMING THE MODERNIST PARASITE ........................... 130 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 130 Kafka’s Caregiver: Becoming and Dependency ...................................................................... 134 Anonymous Matter, Cockroaches: Lispector and G. H. .......................................................... 149 Nathanael West: “Anus Mirabilis!” and the Holy Flea ........................................................... 162 “PARASITISM & PROSTITUTION—OR NEGATION”: THE PARASITE IN MODERNIST FEMINISM ................................................................................................................................. 181 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 181 Mina Loy: Parasitic Women .................................................................................................... 187 The Voyage Out: Tropical Medicine and Parasitology ............................................................ 201 Larsen’s “Freedom”: Subversive Parasitism ........................................................................... 217 5 THE TRAMP: SOCIAL PARASITISM, VAGRANCY, AND HEALTH ................................ 237 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 237 In the Abyss and on the Road: Jack London............................................................................ 244 The Orwellian Tramp ............................................................................................................... 257 6 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that the unstable category of the parasite was used to debate the limits of humanism during the modernist period (approximately 1890 to 1945). I show how the most marginalized individuals and organisms are deemed “parasitic” and positioned at the core of social issues, such as tropical disease, poverty, and racism. Authors from Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen to John Steinbeck and George Orwell reveal how parasitism occupies a liminal space between categories of sickness/health, human/animal, and production/exploitation. This project contributes to developing debates in modernist studies about the relationship between nature and culture, and it builds on animal studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate that aesthetics shapes our evaluation of various forms of life. 7 INTRODUCTION Documenting homelessness in his 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell writes that the tramp is “a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering” (173). For Orwell, the social parasite became a highly political concept in the early twentieth century, as the term was used to scapegoat the most marginalized individuals in Western cultures. The word parasite tends to conjure images of tapeworms, ticks, and other hangers-on, and for many it also alludes to a social category of individuals who “drain the system” without giving anything in return. While the term parasite now carries a negative connotation, the Greek word from which it is derived, parásitos, merely means “beside the grain” or to “eat at another’s table.” And as many Classical scholars note, the parasite was initially a character trope associated with comedy and patronage. Adapting the parasite from Greek drama, the Romans were the first to link this trope to pathology, to the “unhealthy aspects of patronage relationships in their own real world” (Damon 2). By the twentieth century, the parasite was a convoluted biosocial category. It could refer to a biological organism that drained the energy of its host, or, with the rise of eugenics at the fin de siècle, the parasite could refer to various social groups, from the Jewish people to the impoverished. By the modernist period, parasites represented a threat to the health of the body politic, an idea challenged by a strain of modernist authors who resisted the privileging of the autonomous, independent subject that North American and European cultures had inherited from humanistic ideologies. My dissertation traces shifting definitions and deployments of parasitism during the modernist period (1890–1945). I consider parasitism in the popular literary, scientific, and 8 political imagination, suggesting that it became a site of contention that very often exposed how conceptualizations of the natural world are shaped by cultural narratives (and vice versa). For example, in the early twentieth century the portrayal of the social parasite often evoked biological vermin, and, alternatively, the biological term parasite was coopted from a long- standing social concept. Ultimately, this dissertation engages bioethical concerns—the value individuals and societies assign to various forms of life, especially in biological and medical contexts—as they have developed since the late nineteenth century. In this sense, literature responds to and

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