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John Dos Passos Newsletter 1 John Dos Passos NEWSLETTER June 1999 John Dos Passos Newsletter 1 John Dos Passos NEWSLETTER No. 4 June 1999 GENDER ATTITUDES IN insisting that theirs was the truly virile literary enterprise and disparaging their opponents’ as effeminate. Because DOS PASSOS’ FICTION Dos Passos was both a modernist and a socialist writer, AND RECEPTION he was at times caught in the cross-fire and “his work was A Book Review always subject, implicitly or explicitly, by one side or the other, to the charge of effeminacy” (20). As a result, ac- by cording to Casey, “Dos Passos emerges from the tangle of Seth Moglen literary and cultural history as a feminized ... writer” (21). This anxiously masculinist devaluation of Dos Passos also stems in part from the unusual centrality of gender DOS PASSOS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE FEMI- considerations in his work. The bulk of Casey’s monograph NINE. By Janet Galligani Casey. Cambridge University is devoted to exploring this crucial and neglected dimen- Press, 1998. 230 pp. sion of his fiction. Above all, she ably demonstrates that in the literary works leading up to and including U.S.A., Janet Galligani Casey’s Dos Passos and the Ideology Dos Passos reveals the pervasiveness of misogynist gender of the Feminine is a pathbreaking study, providing the first ideology in early twentieth-century America. From this sustained feminist analysis of this major modernist’s liter- vantage point, Casey finds more of interest in Dos Pas- ary career. Essential reading for Dos Passos specialists, sos’ earliest fictions than most critics have. Specifically, this book will also be of substantial interest to students of she shows that his first stories, published in the Harvard proletarian and left literature, and to scholars concerned Monthly, are already interested in exploring the nature of with the current revisionary debate about the politics of gender identity and male desire, albeit in an Orientalizing American literary modernism. and conventionally romantic fashion. On her account, Casey’s book provides a strikingly new, if partial, Three Soldiers reveals the misogynist structure of norma- explanation for the peculiar fate of Dos Passos’ literary tive masculinity by representing male protagonists who reputation. While other scholars have perceived Dos view women either as status-markers, as pure romantic Passos’ critical marginalization as the outgrowth of his discomfiting relationship to the anti-capitalist Left, Casey suggests that it stems in large part from the fact that both Dos Passos and his work have been persistently perceived Also in this issue . as troublingly feminine in a literary culture that associ- ates aesthetic and political value with maleness. Relying Melvin Landsberg contrasts Dos Passos’ on letters and diaries, Casey shows that Dos Passos was The Best Times with The Education of personally uncomfortable with certain aspects of norma- Henry Adams tive masculinity, especially with predatory heterosexuality. Some of his literary contemporaries—especially the ever- Claudia Matherly Stolz reviews Lisa macho Hemingway and that would-be lothario, Edmund Wilson—were made uncomfortable by Dos Passos’ style Nanney’s John Dos Passos Revisited of masculinity (including his shyness, social awkwardness, Review note: about challenging essay on and reticence about sexual matters), and they felt compelled to ridicule him as effeminate in their letters and published Dos Passos in festschrift volume writings. Similarly gendered (and at times homophobic) arguments surfaced in evaluations of Dos Passos after his Letter from Richard Layman on death. More broadly, Casey draws on interesting recent Dos Passos’ watercolors scholarship about the culture wars of the 1920s and 30s to argue that both modernists and proletarian writers sought Invitation for special issue of Newsletter to validate their sometimes conflicting cultural projects by 2 John Dos Passos Newsletter June 1999 idealizations, or as the objects of a sexuality that is indis- most regressive strand of the trilogy from a gender per- tinguishable from violence. spective, she argues that the Camera Eye and Newsreel Casey’s critical analysis is most revelatory in her dis- segments provide a “coherent locus of ‘feminist’ insight” cussion of Streets of Night and Manhattan Transfer. Draw- (135). The Newsreels, in particular, focus increasing at- ing heavily on the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, she tention on women’s growing economic and social power argues that the main female characters in both novels are during and after World War One and on the violence against trapped in a “specular economy” in which they must either women that accompanied it. The fictional storylines of embrace the role of passive but willing object of the sexual U.S.A. collectively demonstrate that “sexual destinies” male “gaze,” or else lose the possibility of any form of and gender roles are “predetermined” by ideology: the sexual connection or social visibility. Either way, women male characters all assume cultural superiority to women are deprived of sexual subjectivity and social agency by and are represented as “sexual victimizers,” while female this ideological double-bind. While in Streets of Night, characters must “learn to cope with their status as victims.” Nan refuses to be the “object of the gaze” and is doomed Extending one of the trilogy’s most emblematic assertions, along with both of her male suitors to sexual repression Casey suggests that for Dos Passos “America is not only and frustration, Ellen Thatcher in Manhattan Transfer is divisible into two economic nations... but also two gen- the first of a series of Dos Passos’ female protagonists to dered ones” (158). manipulate this ideologically constructed male desire for Unfortunately, Casey’s argument about U.S.A. is more her own financial gain, as a sexualized media icon. Dos tendentious, more contradictory and less convincing than Passos forces us to recognize the disastrous position in her discussion of earlier works. She asserts that U.S.A. which women have been placed by showing that the power evolves in a feminist direction, as the predominant sexism acquired by even a consummate manipulator of the system of The 42nd Parallel and especially Nineteen Nineteen like Ellen is nevertheless “a supreme illusion” because the gives way to the dramatically more feminist outlook of The ideological game she is playing has deprived her of any Big Money. Casey weakens her own argument by overstat- “sense of self, of true subjectivity” (118, 121). Casey is at ing her case. She claims, for example, that the feminist her best when explaining the subtlety of Dos Passos’ fusion content of The Big Money is principally revealed by the of gender and class analyses in his fictional anatomiza- fact that the most central male character in this volume, tion of “gendered capitalism” (114) in this novel: while Charley Anderson, “represents the most complete suscep- Ellen’s class position enables her to elude the economic tibility to the nation’s dominant ideological paradigms,” exploitation suffered by the working-class Anna Cohen, while the primary female characters, Margo Dowling and for example, her financial privilege blinds her to the ways Mary French, embody “a valorized cultural resistance” in which she shares the fate of female objectification, as (174). I suspect that few readers will be convinced that sexual fetish rather than worker. Margo, who is thoroughly implicated in the destructive Casey’s analysis of U.S.A. also contains valuable new culture industry which Dos Passos deplored, should insights. Viewing the male-dominated biographies as the be viewed as a heroine in the author’s eyes. And while Mary French is indeed the most sympathetic of U.S.A.’s fictional characters, Casey’s claim that Mary is the “single efficacious radical figure” in the trilogy and offers “a new THE JOHN DOS PASSOS NEWSLETTER paradigm for social activism” seems unfounded (174). Mary, after all, like all the fictional radicals, participates The Newsletter seeks to promote scholarship on in a long series of failed activist campaigns, culminating in and interest in Dos Passos’ writings and biography, and will publish short articles on these subjects. It the futile effort to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti—the will also publish news items, notes, letters, and que- lost cause of the radical Left which touched Dos Passos ries on these and other relevant matters. Among these most personally. matters are work in progress, manuscript locations The interpretive strains and overstatements contained and accessions, bibliographies, and textual scholar- in Casey’s analysis of U.S.A. stem from a deeper conceptual ship. problem. She has adopted an unnecessarily rigid and deter- For return of manuscripts, contributors should ministic model of ideology which causes her to compro- send, along with their submissions, stamped enve- mise many of her most sophisticated textual interpretations lopes addressed to themselves. They should address and her most significant historical arguments. Although all queries and manuscripts to the editor, Melvin Landsberg, Department of English, University of she alludes to a large number of theorists, her conception Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-2115. Our fax number of ideology derives principally from a particular strand is (785) 864-4298. of post-structuralist thought—exemplified most clearly by Laura Mulvey—which has attempted to adapt Althus- serian and Lacanian models for feminist ends. In practice, COPYRIGHT © 1999 by Melvin Landsberg Casey tends to view ideological determination as virtually All rights reserved. complete and absolute. What she appears to admire most in Dos Passos is the way in which his novels suggest a June 1999 John Dos Passos Newsletter 3 similar determinism: she commends U.S.A., for example, the Left. It is worth emphasizing the reductive effects of for demonstrating that “ideological imprisonment” is “ines- this model of ideology-critique because it has, in various capable” (175). Because Dos Passos represents misogynist forms, become commonplace in U.S.
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