©Copyright 2012 David Thomas Holmberg Prying, Peeping, Peering: The Voyeuristic Gaze in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literary Naturalism David Thomas Holmberg A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Robert E. Abrams, Chair Habiba Ibrahim Leroy Searle Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English University of Washington Abstract Prying, Peeping, Peering: The Voyeuristic Gaze in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literary Naturalism David Thomas Holmberg Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Robert E. Abrams English This dissertation seeks to redefine late-nineteenth-century American literary naturalism as a movement that is continually negotiating the tension between speculative fantasy and scientific objectivity, a tension that both reveals and is revealed by naturalism’s voyeuristic gaze. This interdisciplinary project brings together novels and paintings to examine the ways that this voyeurism was dramatized and enacted by the literature and art of this period, as well as served as a method for critiquing the preeminent role that vision played in constructing knowledge in the nineteenth century. Foregrounding the scopophilia of the late nineteenth century and its representation in novels such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Frank Norris’s McTeague, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, as well as paintings by Thomas Eakins and Ashcan School artists, makes manifest naturalism’s complex portrayals of asymmetrical visual authority, including unequal configurations of class hierarchies and challenges to traditional representations of sexuality and gender. These works become sites through which we can read the fantasies of class, of masculinity, and of sexuality that were integral to the experience of the nineteenth century but have often been obscured by claims of formal realism. Naturalism’s attempts to create a detached spectator reveal the impossibility of realist objectivity, and this failure engenders the radical subjectivity found in twentieth-century modernism. Although naturalism attempts objectivity through its subjectivity, modernism reveals the impossibility of this project even while celebrating this failure. In this way a full appreciation of literary naturalism’s voyeuristic gaze reveals the tensions inherent to the movement itself while simultaneously illuminating the influential legacy of naturalism in twentieth-century modernism. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the University of Washington and the English Department for their support throughout the completion of this project, as well as Allan and Mary Kollar for their generous fellowship. This project could not have been completed without the help of Professor Robert Abrams, whose patience and intellectual guidance were instrumental in helping me achieve the best possible vision of my dissertation. I also am indebted to my committee, Leroy Searle and Habiba Ibrahim, and the many graduate students with whom I discussed this project over the years, in particular my writings groups, including Allison Gross, Jamie Oldham, Anne Dwyer, and Ashley Bashaw. Earlier versions of material from the introduction and chapter three previously appeared in Studies in American Naturalism 6.1 (2011), and I am grateful to the University of Nebraska Press for their permission to reprint it here. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Katie and daughter Amelia for their amazing support and continued encouragement throughout the entire process. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………...……… ii Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………...……… 1 Chapter One: Revolutions and Evolutions of Nineteenth-Century Urban Visuality ……......... 23 Chapter Two: Narration and Marginalization in Literary Naturalism …………………...…..... 66 Chapter Three: The Perversion of the Clinical Gaze …………………………..………........... 112 Chapter Four: The Making and Unmaking of Public and Private Space…………………........ 155 Chapter Five: The Emasculation of the Masculine Gaze ……………………………..…...….. 201 Conclusion: Literary Naturalism’s Epistemological Crisis and its Modernist Legacy ………. 246 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 257 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure Number Page 1. John Sloan, Night Windows …………………………………………………………………... 2 2. David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout ………………………………………………………… 41 3. David Gilmour Blythe, The Match Seller …………………………………....……………… 42 4. David Gilmour Blythe, Ole Cezer …………………………………………………………... 42 5. Jacob Riis, “The Tramp” ………………………………………………...………………….. 50 6. Robert Henri, Snow in New York …………………………………………....…………….… 57 7. George Luks, Hester Street …………………………………………………...………..…… 58 8. John Sloan, Six O’Clock, Winter ………………………………………...………………..… 58 9. Everett Shinn, Nude By The Door …………………………………………………………… 58 10. William Glackens, Nude Arranging Her Hair…………………………...………………… 58 11. Everett Shinn, Window Shopping ………………………………………………………..… 60 12. John Sloan, Spring Rain …………………………………………………...………………. 61 13. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic ………………………………………………………... 122 14. Thomas Eakins, The Agnew Clinic ……………………………………………………….. 126 15. Thomas Eakins, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River …. 129 16. John Sloan, Sunday Afternoon in Union Square ………………………………………….. 170 17. John Sloan, The Cot ………………………………………………………………………. 171 18. John Sloan, Turning Out the Light ………………………………………………………... 174 19. John Sloan, Three A.M. …………………………………………………………………… 175 20. John Sloan, Fun, One Cent ……………………………………………………………….. 178 21. Mary Cassatt, At the Opera ……………………………………………………………….. 221 22. Edward Hopper, Night Windows ………………………………………………………….. 247 ii 1 Introduction In John Sloan’s 1910 etching Night Windows (fig. 1), three windows of a lower-class apartment building glow against the half-darkness of the urban night. The composition of the picture draws one’s eye initially to a window in which stands a tantalizing woman wearing only a negligee, pulling back her hair, readying herself for bed (or more). An image of sexuality illuminated against the gray stove pipes and drying laundry, the woman in her nightgown poses in the lower-third of the frame, her window luring the eye towards it, irresistibly. To the right sits another window adjacent to the woman’s—perhaps even part of the same apartment—which has its shade drawn, but just visible appear to be the legs of someone resting on a bed. Nothing is necessarily inappropriate about the scene—just a woman preparing for bed and a mostly-closed shade—and yet the difficult to decipher arrangement is suggestive of more. Only after focusing on the young woman does the eye drift left and slightly up, glimpsing a stout mother hanging laundry on a clothesline as a child watches. Exhibiting none of the sensuality of the woman in the nightgown, the mother appears as a stark contrast, a classic representative of the lower classes who are so often depicted as enmeshed in a never-ending cycle of unglamorous work and responsibility. The final detail of the etching emerges above this window, overlooking all of the action in the alley: a man on the roof, a dark outline craning his head to see into the apartments below. Compared with the luminosity of the window scenes, the man’s dark shape stands out like a photographic negative, a black hole in the upper left of the frame that shifts the narrative weight of the picture and transforms the man into the etching’s pivotal image.1 As the viewer’s eye traces the angle of his head and the path of his vision, the likely destination of his gaze becomes 1 According to a January 30, 1911 journal entry Sloan even considered calling his etching “‘Man on the roof’ (looking at girl dressing)” (John Sloan’s New York Scene 502). 2 Figure 1. John Sloan, Night Windows, 1910. evident: the woman in the nightgown. Whether he ascended to this perch for the express purpose of looking through this particular woman’s window or if his is an equal opportunity gaze, the man is clearly a kind of voyeur, intent on passively peering into the concealed lives of his neighbors to satisfy his own curiosity and pleasure. However, one final participant completes Night Windows: the viewer of the image. The work realizes the fantasies of the urban viewers Sloan envisions, viewers whom he imagines desire to see into those physical or psychological forbidden spaces. Just like the man on the roof, viewers watch the poor, unsuspecting denizens of the alley go about their nightly rituals, although when they look into the young woman’s apartment, their gaze seems somewhat justified because they simply follow the man’s line of vision. And yet his presence as an 3 obviously deviant figure also makes manifest the issue of voyeurism, highlighting the viewers’ complicity in the scene, as they not just witness a dramatization of voyeurism but enact it, as well. The whole picture is presented with an eye to eliciting the interest of the viewer, of the voyeur: to view this etching is in fact to become a voyeur. People have, it seems relatively safe to assert, always taken a certain pleasure in looking, but while the act of voyeurism dates back to at least the biblical Book of Daniel’s story of Susanna and the Elders, the term “voyeur” did not have its first usage until 1900, just ten years before Sloan etched his picture.2 In this initial decade of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud also first analyzed the pathology of voyeurism, defining scopophilia as, in part, a disorder in which looking supplanted