ABSTRACT A (RE)CONCEPTION OF THE CITY: COMMERCIALIZATION, DOMESTICATION, AND RESISTANCE IN NEW YORK CITY FROM MELVILLE TO MCKAY James Baltrum, Ph.D. Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2014 Dr. Deborah DeRosa, Director This dissertation characterizes the historical changes that shaped nineteenth and twentieth century New York City by examining how Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, and Claude McKay expressed these changes in their literary works. I employ the ideological principles of scholars such as Henri Lefebvre, who viewed physical spaces including the modern city as socially constructed products, and the methodology of writers such as Michel Foucault, whose genealogical approach prompts an open-ended and multi-faceted analysis. Consequently, my argument shows how various economic, social, cultural, political, and technological developments worked with and against each other to shape (and reshape) people’s perceptions of New York City and how particular writers have work such perceptions into their literature. Starting in the 1850s with the American Renaissance and concluding in the late 1920s with the emergence of Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, my dissertation focuses on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1856), Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and George’s Mother (1896), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928). I focus on how the developments in the city influenced these authors to continually re-conceive New York City’s commercial and domestic social spaces from the 1850s through the 1920s. Likewise, each text illustrates how certain historical developments produced counter-cultural currents of resistance against hegemonic authorities in each author’s given era. My research reveals that these literary representations demonstrate just how fluid New York City’s identity has always been. Much of the ebb and flow of the city’s identity has been due to the contentious and volatile nature of the social struggles to which the city has been home throughout its history. Some of the notable developments within the scope of my analysis, starting with Melville, include the labor and real estate contests of the antebellum 1850s as well as the solidification of Wall Street as the city’s financial and commercial center, resulting in de- domestication of the neighborhood and northward migration of many of its residents. In Crane’s texts, the Progressive reformers and the swelling immigrant populations of the 1890s swallowed up the city as they waged combative cultural conflicts over standards and separations of gender identities and gendered spaces such the home, the workplace, public places of entertainment and culture – the saloon, stage hall, and museum. The House of Mirth tracks the emerging status- seeking affluence of the leisure class mentality following the turn of the century. In doing so, Wharton explores how the inverted private-to-public utilization of the family home and dual subjective-objectified nature of the leisure-class woman played into the redefinition of New York society. Other developments, as Dos Passos illustrates, include the rise of the city’s skyscraper- dominant skyline and the city’s proliferating advertising culture as well as the desensitizing and mechanizing effect they had on New York City’s citizens. McKay’s Home to Harlem charts the hopeful but all-too-human influences that the returning and largely marginalized African- American soldier had on the racial sanctuary of Harlem. McKay’s novel also demonstrates the repercussions that the city’s loosening mores and opening economic opportunities had on gender identities as well as hetero-social and homo-social relationships. From Melville to McKay, these authors shed critical and unique light on New York City’s multiple faces and facets. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2014 A (RE)CONCEPTION OF THE CITY: COMMERCIALIZATION, DOMESTICATION, AND RESISTANCE IN NEW YORK CITY FROM MELVILLE TO MCKAY BY JAMES BALTRUM ©2014 James Baltrum A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFIFLLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: Dr. Deborah De Rosa ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The following thoughts of appreciation are all heart-felt and meant with the utmost sincerity. I owe a great deal of thanks to Dr. Deborah De Rosa for the opportunity to work with and learn from her every fortunate chance I had. A special thank you goes to Dr. James Giles and Dr. Mark Van Weinen for their gifted insights as well as to Dr. Betty Birner and the entire English Department at Northern Illinois University for all the support and assistance that I have received throughout my degree. I gladly thank NIU’s Graduate School for their fellowship assistance, without which this project would not have been completed in such a thorough fashion. Moreover, I gladly thank Dr. Keith Gandal at City College of New York for his patience, encouragement, and advice all along the way. I also counted on Dr. Jeffery Einboden for his insightful commentary and support regarding my work with Melville and gladly give him an appreciative thank you for that. Paula Diaz, Don Haynes (in memoriam), Carrie Roath-Ernst, Mick McMahon, Peter Stern, Amy Keck, and especially Gerard Wozek and Mary Russell of Robert Morris University, Illinois, must all be acknowledged for the numerous facets and forms of encouragement they have provided over the years. Librarians Su Erickson and Deirdre Rawls each merit a particular note of thanks for their patient and unwavering assistance with my innumerable and sometimes impatient research requests. Ultimately, A (Re)Conception of the City would not have gotten off the ground let alone completed were it not for the incredible support and inspiration of my wife, Ann, and our two terrific children, Cameron and Loretta, as well as of my parents, Bob and Lorraine Baltrum, and my in-laws, Dr. Fred and Patricia Rodriguez; for my family, in the scope of this project and in all things beyond it, I am forever grateful. DEDICATION For my parents, Bob and Lorraine, and for Ann, for everything TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION: “Complicating the Concept of the City, New York 1850-1930”…………………....1 CHAPTER I: “Melville’s Antebellum New York as Seen Through the Scrivener’s Pen”………..19 CHAPTER II: “Stephen Crane and the Chaotic Complexities of the Slum’s Social Spaces”……...56 CHAPTER III: “Personal Privacy Turned Cultural Commodity in the Publi-City of The House of Mirth”…………………………………………………………………………….106 CHAPTER IV: “The Mechanized Megatropolis and Destabilized Domesticity of Manhattan Transfer”………………………………………………………………………….…138 CHAPTER V: “The Post-War Sanctuaries and Strictures of Harlem in McKay’s Homecoming Novel” ……………………………………………………………………………....176 CONCLUSION: “Sighting New York City in the Citations of New York’s Authors”………………211 WORKS CITED...………………………………………………………………………….219 INTRODUCTION: Complicating the Concept of the City, New York 1850-1930 Thrive, cities – bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers, Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual, Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. - Walt Whitman (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) In an article from the April 2011 National Geographic Traveler titled “New Yorker’s New York City,” Adam Graham opens with an anecdotal conversation between himself and first- time visitors to the city who, after asking for Graham’s advice on where to go and what to see, receive the unexpected response of, “I’ve clocked 40 years living in or near the city, and though my love/hate for the place grows stronger each year, I would be a fool to say I know it, that I’ve seen all of it” (74). Graham’s comments testify to the magnitude and complexity of New York City. Given that, astonishing difficulty awaits anyone attempting to perceive and describe the city as a single entity. Like any cultural construction, New York City has backgrounds and textures that cause it to appear different depending on “where” you are standing to see it. When looked at from a historical perspective or as a literary subject, the idea of New York City as a singular entity becomes even more problematic. For instance, late in 1609, Robert Juet, sailing as first mate to Henry Hudson and working for the Dutch West Indies Company, described the coasts of Mana-hat-ta in pastoral terms as simply, “a very good Land to fall with …[and] pleasant Land to see” (Willis 29). But by 1664, the year New Amsterdam became New York, the former Dutch trading post had transformed itself into a then-modern city, with a 2 population reaching about 1,500 people. Later, in 1704, Madam Knight1 summarily described New York in her travel journal as “a pleasant, well compacted place” and its residents as “sociable to one another and Curteos and Civill [sic] to strangers” (109). Conversely, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) casts a disparaging light upon New York’s cultural landscape. When asked if he had ever attended one of the city’s theatres, Tyler’s satirical character Dimple responds, “I was tortured there once,” and explains, “there is nothing that is worthy the name of amusement to be found in this city” (45). Since its founding as a Dutch settlement bent on trade and profit through to its post-9/11 transformations, the city has continually and increasingly mesmerized, horrified, and fascinated people from all walks of life. Edward Margolies suggests that New York, “so large and seemingly random, offers an abundance of choices,” generally falls into two classifications: “[t]he city as a savage amoral Wild West… or the city as an imagined New West offering American dreams of self-renewal, self-reinvention, individualism, and promises of prosperity” (11). These perceptions are evident in much of fiction focused on the city, certainly.