Vibrant Environments: the Feel of Color from the White Whale to the Red Wheelbarrow
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to COREyou by provided by Carolina Digital Repository Vibrant Environments: The Feel of Color from the White Whale to the Red Wheelbarrow Nicholas Gaskill A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Approved by: Jane F. Thrailkill (Director) Robert Cantwell Priscilla Wald John McGowan Gregory Flaxman © 2010 Nicholas Gaskill ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT NICHOLAS GASKILL: Vibrant Environments: The Feel of Color from the White Whale to the Red Wheelbarrow (Under the direction of Jane F. Thrailkill) In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a host of color media technologies combined with new theories of embodied perception to alter both the types of color experiences commonly available and the general understanding of their significance. Synthetic colors brightened all manner of manufactured goods, from textiles and tin can labels to candy and oil paints, and these colored materials sparked a flurry of interest in the sensory and affective impact of cultural environments. This dissertation argues that the discourses and practices of modern color in the U.S. guided literary writers in experimenting with the effects of textual “environments” on readers and in demonstrating, through these investigations, the role of aesthetic experience in the extra-artistic realms of commerce, political reform, and education. At issue in each of these areas is the formation of individual subjects—and the groups they might create— through interactions with an arranged material environment. Color, more so than other sensory qualities, proved especially useful in tracking and intervening in these processes because it so readily slides among sensory, linguistic, and cultural domains, all functioning within a complex act of perception. I contend that late-nineteenth-century writers such as Hamlin Garland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, and L. Frank Baum—and later authors such as Nella Larsen and Claude iii McKay—embraced color both as a model for literary practice (of how texts might affect readers) and as a technique for dramatizing the ways in which social identities emerge from a historical network of material and cultural practices. In the end, these two functions prove inseparable, and my account of how color launched literary realism into modernism doubles as an argument for the role of the aesthetic in our daily lives. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Whatever sparkles in this dissertation about bright color does so only against the background of the brilliant mentors and interlocutors I’ve had at UNC. Among these, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jane Thrailkill, who from my first year as a graduate student has been a sensitive and sharp reader of my work. Her seminars introduced me to the fascinating terrain of turn-of-the-century culture, and as an advisor she kept me attuned not only to the logical rigor of my arguments but also to their aesthetic feel. With generosity and perspicacity, she has guided the growth of this project. Robert Cantwell first challenged me to consider the impact of material culture on literary discourse, and his unflagging and infectious enthusiasm about intellectual labor has energized my thinking at crucial stages of the writing process. I have also had the pleasure of working with Priscilla Wald, another model of intellectual energy; it was Priscilla who showed me that the topic of color was big enough for a dissertation and more expansive than I had initially imagined. My gratitude also goes to Gregory Flaxman and John McGowan, two paragons of conceptual clarity. Gregg’s teaching and writing have each played a crucial role in shaping the philosophical frameworks I bring to literature, and John’s grasp of the finer points of pragmatist thought helped me to refine an interest in James, Peirce, Dewey, and company first kindled by Bill Myers. I could not have hoped for a more inspiring committee. v Thanks are also due to a number of other UNC faculty members who helped me along the way: to Eliza Richards for her careful eye and generous advice; to Tyler Curtain for encouraging me early and often in my dissertation work; and to Tim Marr for sharing his expansive knowledge of nineteenth-century culture in casual hallway-chats about color. I have benefited much from my graduate colleagues as well, and lessons learned from conversations with Ben Sammons, Elissa Zellinger, Ben Rogerson, Meredith Farmer, Aaron Shackelford, Elena Oxman, and Kelly Ross, among others, run throughout this dissertation. Joel Winkelman has been an especially provocative and enabling interlocutor; his questions, insights, and general willingness to entertain my spacier musings on “experience” have made intellectual labor a pleasurable occupation. Thanks also to the participants in the Americanist Writing Group at UNC who read work from this dissertation on three separate occasions, and to the anonymous readers at American Literature, whose comments on my Stephen Crane essay helped to sharpen my sense of the entire project. On a practical note, a semester-long Evan Frankel dissertation completion fellowship from the Department of English and Comparative Literature and a summer research grant from the Center for the Study of the American South provided me with the time to think and write, and for that I’m grateful. My family has been an unfaltering source of support and encouragement. My deep and humble thanks go to my parents, Wayne and Marsha Gaskill, for their lifelong love and guidance. Thanks also to my sisters, Lauren and Rebecca Gaskill, whose humor and goodness I’ve been lucky to enjoy. Finally, thank you to the entire group of brilliant, big-hearted, hilarious friends who have made North Carolina such a vibrant environment in which to live and work. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………………………………………………………….…….ix Introduction ~ How to Get from a White Whale to a Red Wheelbarrow………1 The Mauve Decade……………………………………...6 Color Scheme………………………………………...…13 Chapter One ~ A Natural History of Local Color: Hamlin Garland and the Evolution of Regionalism………….…22 The Art of the Earth…………………………………….28 Colored Shadows……………………………………….44 Vocal Color……………………………………………..58 Chapter Two ~ Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Color Schemes of Late-Nineteenth-Century Design…………………………….69 The Alhambra and the Vatican………………………….72 Color Unspoiled…………………………………………78 Color Schemes…………………………………………...95 Chapter Three ~ Red Cars with Red Lights and Red Drivers: Color, Crane, and Qualia………………………………………116 The Physiology of Color………………………………....121 Crane’s Four-Color Posters……………………………....129 The Redness of The Red Badge of Courage……………..135 Chapter Four ~ Oz and the Upset Ink-Bottle: The Production and Consumption of a Child’s View of Color…................................148 Impressionism for Babies………………………………...158 Milton Bradley’s Classroom……………………………...170 “And I Too Was Coloured into This Landscape”………..201 vii Chapter Five ~ On Feeling Colorful and Colored in the Harlem Renaissance…...210 The Savage on the Sidewalk…………………………...…216 How It Feels to Be Colored Me……………………..........234 Art and Savage Life………………………………….…...241 Coda: A Night at the Savoy………………………………252 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………....255 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Cowardly Lion (full-color plate)……………………………….154 Figure 2. The Tin Woodman…………………………………………………..154 Figure 3. The Deadly Poppy Field…………………………………….………154 Figure 4. The Lion Confronts the Wizard……………………………………..156 Figure 5. The Scarecrow……………………………………………………….156 Figure 6. The Dainty China Country…….…………………………………….165 Figure 7. Toto in the Emerald City…………………………………………….165 Figure 8. The Cyclone………………………………………………….………167 Figure 9. Dorothy in Kansas…………………………………………………...194 Figure 10. The Gates of the Emerald City…………………………………….197 Figure 11. The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays…………………………………..202 ix INTRODUCTION How to Get from a White Whale to a Red Wheelbarrow Between Ishmael’s meditation on the eerie whiteness of Moby-Dick (1851) and the brilliant red of William Carlos Williams’s wheelbarrow (1923), synthetic dyes and vibrant color media radically altered the hues of everyday life. The effects were impossible to miss: by the 1890s, new colors made from coal-tar had brightened all manner of manufactured goods, from textiles and tin can labels to candy and oil paints, and these colored materials sparked a flurry of interest in the sensory and affective impact of cultural environments. In domestic interiors and on city streets, in psychology labs and Kindergarten classrooms, colors vivified the visual landscape, and this chromatic proliferation emerged from the developing networks of scientific research, industrial production, and aesthetic design that continue to engineer the sensory milieux of the twenty-first century. This dissertation argues that the discourses and practices of modern color in the U.S. guided literary writers in experimenting with the effects of textual environments on readers and in demonstrating, through these investigations, the role of aesthetic experience in the creation and contestation of individual selves. In this inquiry into the feeling of color, Melville’s Ishmael leads the way. His meditation on the whiteness of the whale captures an incipient interest in the intensity of bright hues that