Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 5-2008 Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933 Nathaniel Z. Heggins Bryant University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Heggins Bryant, Nathaniel Z., "Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/379 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Nathaniel Z. Heggins Bryant entitled "Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. Mary Papke, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Charles Maland, Lisi Schoenbach Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Nathaniel Zachery Heggins Bryant entitled: “Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. ___________________________ Mary Papke, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: _____________________________ Charles Maland ____________________________ Lisi Schoenbach Accepted for the Council: ___________________________ Carolyn R. Hodges, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Experiencing the Modern American City and Addressing the Slum in the United States and Brazil: 1890-1933 A Thesis Presented for the Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Nathaniel Zachery Heggins Bryant May 2008 Copyright © by Nathaniel Zachery Heggins Bryant All rights reserved. ii Table of Contents Chapter I: Introduction…………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter II: “‘To Catch the Gotham Spirit’: The Elevated Train in William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes…………………………………………………...12 Chapter III: Bringing the Crowd to Life, Building the Slums from Scraps: Brazilian Naturalism in Aluísio Azevedo’s The Slum……………………………………………...40 Chapter IV: To the Real City, Toward the Total Text: Abstraction and the City in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer……………………63 Chapter V: Braz, City Within a City: Labor, Gender, and Modernity in Patrícia Galvão’s Industrial Park…………………………………………………………………………...85 Coda………………….…………………………………………………………………105 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….111 Vita………………….…………………………………………………………………120 iii Acknowledgements A number of people must be thanked for the work invested in this project. First, Dr. Mary Papke has been a wonderful director, mentor, resource, and, most importantly, friend throughout the entirety of this project. Enough can’t be said about her, but I hope a hearty thanks will suffice. Thanks also to my readers, Dr. Charles Maland and Dr. Lisi Schoenbach, for helping this project run along (and for signing on to read what turned out to be a long one!). I must also thank my parents, Steve and Brenda Bryant, and my little sister Rikki Bryant, all of whom I have never properly thanked for anything but who nevertheless have always supported me in my intellectual and academic efforts—both in spirit and in more immediate material concerns, even from afar—and my fiancée Hannah Burdette deserves a lot of credit for moral support despite putting up with the rigors of a long-distance relationship for almost two years. Finally, I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude and a wish of good luck to my intellectual compadre and dear friend Matthew Raese, who has helped me in more ways than one these last two years and who will soon start dissertating—I can’t wait to read the book! iv Abstract This thesis examines the treatment of slum spaces in the US and Brazil spanning the period 1890-1933, seeking to understand better the ethics of representation regarding the slum as well as the varying aesthetic agendas and political engagements of four novelists. The works under consideration are A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by William Dean Howells, The Slum (1890) by Aluísio Azevedo, Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos, and Industrial Park (1933), by Patrícia Galvão. I chart the varying methods of representation associated with each novel, from Howell’s critical realism to Azevedo’s unique version of naturalism to the fragmented experiences of modernism found in the final two novels, in part to understand how each novelist engages with the slum as well as employs it as a literal and metaphoric space in his or her work. Finally, this work also engages with and contributes to the relatively new fields of metropoetics and inter- American studies, and allows me the opportunity to take a comparativist approach to the literatures of this period, a concern that motivates me as a scholar and academic. v Chapter I Introduction “Why the hell do people live in cities?” “Why do I go on dragging out a miserable existence in this crazy epileptic town . that’s what I want to know.” —John Dos Passos1 The bittersweet end of John Singleton’s riveting and controversial 1991 film Boyz N The Hood finds Doughboy (played by rapper Ice Cube) and Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) talking on Tre’s porch. Reeling from his brother Ricky’s savage murder, his late- night revenge upon the murderers, and the early morning forty ounces of malt liquor he is drinking, Doughboy poignantly observes the difficulties associated with living in the crime-ridden neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles during the early 90s: “Turned on the TV this morning. Had this shit on about—about livin’ in a, in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places . where foreigners live, and all. Started thinkin’, man. Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s goin’ on in the ‘hood.” Doughboy then crosses the street at the same moment two separate intertitles appear on the screen; the first reads, “The next day Doughboy saw his brother buried.” The appearance of the final intertitle— “Two weeks later he was murdered”—coincides with Doughboy literally growing more transparent until he disappears from the film altogether after reaching the other side of the street. Doughboy’s violent life and death gives vivid, concrete visibility to a moment at the beginning of the film, when we read in an introductory intertitle that “One out of twenty-one Black American males will murdered 1 Quoted from Page 193, Manhattan Transfer. Boston: Mariner Books Books, 2000. 1 in their lifetime.” Sadly, the film seems to suggest that there is no way for individuals like Doughboy to escape the crushing anonymity associated with inner-city violence; by revenging his brother’s death, he in turn becomes another young African-American man killed in the ghetto. Doughboy’s poetic statement regarding the invisibility of living peripherally in the postmodern megacity echoes more than a decade later and half a world away in a television show that a writer for the Los Angeles Times calls a Brazilian version of “‘The Wonder Years.’ With some guns” (Lloyd). Following Fernando Meirelles’s wildly successful Cidade de Deus (City of Men) in 2002, producers, writers, and directors began collaborating on a mini-series—one that would last four seasons—entitled Cidade dos homens (City of Men), which aired from 2003 to 2006. The show revolves around the lives of two thirteen-year-old boys—named Laranjinha and Acerola—in an unnamed favela, or slum, in Rio de Janeiro. In the episode entitled “Correio,” or “The Mail,” a local patrão (a boss; in this case, a drug-dealing community leader) chooses the boys to deliver mail to the residents of their favela because the informal residences there have no legitimate street addresses, making it nearly impossible for the real mailman to deliver his mail. An undeliverable letter complicates their job, and to return it they make their way down the morro (hill) into Rio proper where they quickly become lost. They find their way thanks to a map given to them by a magazine vender, and upon ridding themselves of the letter, they consult the map to find their way home. Much to their surprise and consternation, a huge green patch—denoting a forest—represents the morro on which their favela is located, instead of the familiar grid pattern symbolizing Rio proper. At 2 least according to one map, the favelas are so informal that they do not even exist, despite the fact that Rio de Janeiro’s six hundred favelas now house close to a third of the city’s population and “have been growing at a faster rate than the middle- and upper-class areas” of the city (Peixoto 170).2 Doughboy’s virtual invisibility in Boyz N the Hood is compellingly linked to the blank spaces on the map of Rio. It is as though Doughboy’s anonymity has been reinscribed geographically, uprooted from the inner city of Los Angeles, transplanted to Rio de Janeiro, and peripheralized to the point that city planners refuse to recognize the area on a map, despite our ability now to view favelas—and to see plainly the unequal distribution of wealth that supports favelaization—from satellites in space.