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UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE the Ethics of American Realism UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Ethics of American Realism: 1860-1910 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Elissa Janae Weeks Stogner December 2010 Dissertation Committee: Professor Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson Professor John Briggs Professor Katherine Kinney Copyright by Elissa Janae Weeks Stogner 2010 The Dissertation of Elissa Janae Weeks Stogner is approved: _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I would like to extend my gratitude to the following people and institutions for their contributions to the completion of this project: To Prof. Jennifer Doyle for her encouragement and engagement with this project from its beginning; To Prof. John Briggs for his investment in my success as a scholar and teacher; To the late Prof. Emory Elliott and to Prof. Katherine Kinney for her willingness to take his place on my dissertation committee; To the Huntington Library, for giving me reader privileges and access to the James T. Fields collection; To the colleagues and friends who have supported me in sometimes small but valuable ways: Prof. Rise Axelrod, Dr. Kathleen Moore, Dr. Linda Strahan, Tina Stavropoulos, Debbie Sims, and Helen Lovejoy; To my friend Dr. Elizabeth Spies, without whose encouragement, ideas, and unfailing support this dissertation would not have been finished; To Ken Pense, for guiding and nudging me toward success; To my parents, Timothy and Kathleen Weeks, for praying for me every day; To my parents-in-law, Gregory and Angela Stogner, whose financial support made day-to-day concerns less of an obstacle in completing this project; To my sisters and sisters-in-law, for keeping me grounded and connected: Emily Lee, Lindsey Gonzales, Elizabeth Wainright, Brenna Weeks, and Laura Stogner; iv To my dear, dear husband Scott, for offering me whatever I needed: affection, patience, stability, laughter, peace, hope, encouragement, and much more; To God, from whom all blessings flow. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Ethics of American Realism: 1860-1910 by Elissa Janae Weeks Stogner Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2010 Professor Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson For over a century—since its appearance on the American literary scene—realism has presented challenges to those who have attempted to define it as a genre. From realist writers themselves (Howells, James, Norris) to prominent contemporary scholars (Kaplan, Bell, Sundquist), many have debated the boundaries, characteristics, and coherence of American realism. The most crucial questions concerning genre, those of how texts within the genre are both unified and divided, have yet to be resolved. So, for example, no adequate account has been given for how Henry James’s delicate eloquence and Upton Sinclair’s heavy sermonizing belong to the same genre of fiction. Furthermore, no satisfactory explanation as to the obvious differences between two such texts has been offered. This project, The Ethics of American Realism: 1860-1910, adds to conversations about American realism by working through these particular issues. Specifically, it examines how realist texts are rhetorically deployed in order to explain vi both the coherence of the genre and its inconsistencies. Chapters of this dissertation include discussions concerning the writings of William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Émile Zola, and Frank Norris. Throughout, it argues that the uses to which realist texts are put and the ethics that drive these uses provide a framework through which scholars of American literature can define the genre. Theoretically speaking, The Ethics of American Realism: 1860-1910 situates itself as a bridge between literary critical approaches to realism and rhetorical approaches to literature, re-casting American realist novels as rhetorical acts that have been designed to work in the “real” world and rightly positioning ethics at the center of the realist project. Keywords: realism, naturalism, genre, rhetoric, ethics. vii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 20 Deformed Bodies and Texts: Reading the Realism of Rebecca Harding Davis Part I: “Life in the Iron Mills” Chapter 2 64 Deformed Bodies and Texts: Reading the Realism of Rebecca Harding Davis Part II: Margret Howth Chapter 3 114 The Tragic Muse and Henry James’s Ethics of Realism Chapter 4 165 Naturalism and the Ethics of Authorship: The Problem of Presley in The Octopus Works Cited 230 viii Introduction The goal of The Ethics of American Realism: 1860-1910 is to theorize American literary realism, a genre that has frustrated scholars with its apparent lack of coherence and absence of defining characteristics. (After all, what is a genre if not a grouping of texts that all have something in common?) In this dissertation, I propose that American realism can be defined by a conviction that underlies nearly all of its fiction: that mimetic, fictional texts can do work in the real world. In other words, the genre is unified by its rhetorical nature. One only has to look as far as realism’s historical context to begin to see the validity of this claim: During the nineteenth century in the United States, the project of democracy had given rise to a culture that was characterized by the widespread use of deliberative rhetoric. Not since early in the common era did public discourse have such an influence over the material, social, and political lives of an entire nation. Along with increases in literacy and a growing print culture, the dependence of civic life on persuasive speech fostered a society characterized by public debates, lecture circuits, and magazine editorials. It was into this rhetorical culture that realists deployed their fiction, and upon closer examination, it is clear that realist writers were keenly aware of their participation in the American web of rhetoric. The Logic of American Realism Since realism’s appearance on the American literary scene (around 1860), literary theorists have debated the genre’s status qua genre. It is not difficult to see why. Realist literature encompasses a stunning spectrum of nineteenth-century texts. These are often further divided into sub-genres, some of which overlap each other: the social realists 1 (Howells, Sinclair, and Davis), the psychological realists (James and Wharton), the regionalists (Twain, Chopin, and Jewett), the naturalists (Crane, Dreiser, and Norris), the high realists (James and Howells), and so on. Some scholars argue to exclude certain writers from the realist pantheon, depending on these scholars’ definitions of the genre: for example, Twain, for the elements of fantasy and irony that seem to undermine the realism of his work, or Wharton, for her seeming inability to portray common, working- class characters. Some scholars propose that particular texts belong more appropriately to a different genre of literature, usually romanticism or sentimentalism. One thing is clear: the term realism does not represent a stable grouping of texts. These debates about realism’s legitimacy as a genre began when the label was first applied to American literature (it was widely used in Europe for at least two decades previously). William Dean Howells, nineteenth-century novelist and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, championed realism as a genre, calling it “democracy in literature” (Criticism and Fiction 187) and praising it for “paint[ing] life as it is” (The Rise of Silas Lapham 178). Henry James seemed to recommend the same approach in “The Art of Fiction,” where he wrote that the “air of reality” and the “illusion of life” are the “supreme virtue[s] of a novel” (53). But it is clear that the two theorists are not arguing for the same version of realism; in fact, the feature of realism that Howells insists on, the moral function of the novel, is the feature that James most despises.1 Frank Norris out-and-out rejected the application of the label realism to his fiction, arguing that his literary form, 1 See pages 70-84 of Michael Davitt Bell’s The Problem of American Realism for a thoughtful, persuasive argument concerning the essential differences between these two writers on the topic of realism. 2 naturalism, was essentially different than realism and that it was in fact derived from romantic fiction (“Zola as a Romantic Writer”). However, most of Norris’s work bears a great deal of resemblance to work traditionally categorized as realist; many scholars identify naturalism as a sub-genre of realism. In other words, if Norris’s fiction is not realist, then it is difficult to say what fiction is realist. This dilemma typifies the problems with defining American realism; each individual text has characteristics in common with other realist texts, but no defining characteristic occurs in every instance of realism. Because of this, contemporary scholars have struggled to stake out realism’s boundaries. The genre’s concern with materiality and labor, its investment in detail, and its staunch refusal of romantic conventions have all been proposed as the genre’s unifying feature. However, valid arguments have been made against each proposal. As a result, more sophisticated theories have been proffered. In Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910, Nancy Glazener writes, “[My] title insists that
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