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The University of Chicago West of What? the Paradox

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The University of Chicago West of What? the Paradox THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO WEST OF WHAT? THE PARADOX OF WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY KEVIN MASAO KIMURA CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 Contents List of Figures iii Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction: The West and the Nation 1 Chapter One Alternative Transnationalisms: Timothy Flint and the Atlantic Reviewers 28 Chapter Two Frontier Manliness: Francis Parkman, Jr., the West, and The Knickerbocker 72 Chapter Three Fiction and Authenticity: Boosterist Periodical Fiction at the Closing of the Frontier 138 Chapter Four Americy to America: Multiculturalism and Nativism in Willa Cather 176 Coda: Afterlives of the Paradox of Western American Literature 224 Bibliography 231 ii List of Figures Fig. 2.1: Felix O. C. Darley Illustrations 104 Fig. 2.2: “The Ranger’s Pursuer Impaled” 120 Fig. 3.1: “—The Widow threw herself upon the grave in a paroxysm of grief” 157 Fig. 3.2: “For it was really a dagger!” 163 Fig. 4.1: “G. P. Cather’s Army Unit” 202 Fig. 4.2: “The Presidential Election of 1896” 213 Fig. 4.3: “JOIN, or DIE” 218 iii Abstract: West of What? The Paradox of Western American Literature This dissertation examines literary articulations of national identity from the 1820s to the 1920s and finds that the qualities that purportedly define the national literature of the United States (“American literature”) and the qualities that purportedly define the regional literature of the American West (“Western literature”) frequently become conflated and entangled. When American writers attempt to produce texts that articulate the national character, the West is an indispensable source of images and virtues. But at the same time, they also turn to the West when they need to estrange undesirable characteristics. This pattern of making the West the same but different, the essence and also the other of the nation, I argue, produces and reproduces this eponymous paradox: at the same time that only a subset of American literature is Western, all of it is. Although the precise terms under which the nation and the region are defined change over the period I discuss in “West of What?”, I nonetheless show how examining the West’s special relationship to the nation produces literary histories of American literature that expose surprising, counterintuitive narratives of many crucial themes, including transnationalism, gender, boosterism, and nativism. The dissertation’s four chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with the twin births of Western and American literature in the late 1820s. The first chapter, “Alternative Transnationalisms: Timothy Flint and the Atlantic Reviewers,” argues that Flint produces defiantly Western writing that actually constitutes a reimagining of American literary transnationalism. I show how Western regionalism complicates our understanding of how the idea of American literature fits into hemispheric flows of people, ideas, and texts by acting as an alternative to rather than merely a subset of the national literature. It uses new evidence published in Flint’s Western Monthly Review to show that his novel Francis Berrian (1826) is as iv concerned with sectional rivalries as it is with international ones. The second chapter, “Frontier Manliness: Francis Parkman, Jr., the West, and The Knickerbocker,” inverts how cultural historians have long understood the relationship between manliness and the Western frontier in the 1850s by arguing that Francis Parkman, Jr.’s iconic travel narrative The Oregon Trail (published serially 1847-1849) produces a version of Western manliness characterized by aesthetic vision rather than violence. In my reading, The Oregon Trail becomes not a wellspring of a revitalized national manliness, but rather a reinscription of the forms of gender performance that it claims to transcend. The third chapter, “Fiction and Authenticity: Boosterist Periodical Fiction at the Closing of the Frontier,” examines a corpus of texts published in Western periodicals that are avowedly boosterist. Their ostensible strategy is to show how the West is different from the nation because it is romantic and exciting and part of the nation, which makes it a safe place for investment, and then to present this paradox in writing that audiences will interpret as authentic. But I show how these texts undermine their own commercial projects in surprising ways, deploying irony and self-awareness in their self-sabotage. The fourth chapter, “Americy to America: Multiculturalism and Nativism in Willa Cather,” restructures the relationship between regionalism and transnational modernism in the career of Willa Cather by showing how even Cather, perhaps the writer most closely associated with Western literary regionalism to achieve widespread literary recognition, is unable to produce a cogent differentiation of Western from national literary qualities. I argue that Cather’s prairie novels, especially One of Ours (1922), express her ardent desire to offer an account of a distinctively Western embrace of European immigrants, even as maintaining Randolph Bourne’s ideal of a transnational America proves to be impossible as the West becomes swallowed up by the nation in a surge of national feeling associated with the nation’s entrance into WWI. v Acknowledgements A person like me doesn’t finish a project like this without incurring debts of all shapes and sizes. Thanks, first and foremost, to my committee. Ken Warren and Adrienne Brown guided me through the writing of this dissertation with patience and wisdom. They are my models for what serious scholarship and mentorship looks like. Debbie Nelson and Rachel Galvin were tireless supporters, providing counsel and encouragement throughout my time in graduate school. They showed me how to teach, as did Leela Gandhi and Valerie Levan. Raúl Coronado, Amy Lippert, Richard Jean So, Eric Slauter, and Chris Taylor made key contributions to my thinking at various stages of this dissertation. Jim Chandler, Maude Ellmann, and William Weaver offered kind words when I needed them most. Hannah Stark, Jessi Haley, Lex Nalley, Angeline Dimambro, and Robert Devendorf always knew what to do and were always up for a chat. None of this would have been possible without the support of a Rosenthal-Frankel Dissertation Fellowship and funding from the Division of the Humanities Conference Grant, the Graduate Council Travel Fund, and the Tillotson Travel Award. Special thanks to librarians at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Thank you to everyone I’ve met through the Newberry Library and the Scholl Center for American History and Culture, especially Walter Benn Michaels and the participants of the Newberry Seminar in American Literature and Liesl Olson and the participants of the Chicago Studies and the Archive Seminar. Thank you to all of the delightful colleagues I’ve met through the Western Literature Association, especially Nicolas Witschi, Tara Penry, Dana Philips, and Nathaniel Lewis. vi Love and gratitude to my fellow graduate students at the University of Chicago. My cohort was the best possible group with whom to share all of the highs and lows of the past few years; thank you, Hadji Bakara, Oscar Chavez, Hannah Christensen, Katie Krywokulski, Andrew Inchiosa, Rachel Kyne, Abigail Marcus, Peter Lido, Jose-Luis Moctezuma, Andrew Peart, Cass Picken, and Amanda Swain. Thank you to the Americanists, especially those who organized workshops and helped me think through these ideas: Jonathan Schroeder, Marty Rayburn, Jose Arellano, Michelle Skinner, Noah Hansen, Matt Boulette, Steven Maye, Peter McDonald, Ingrid Becker, and, above all, Alex Jacobs. Thank you also to the friends and colleagues who were equally up for a conversation about teaching or research or shooting some hoops, especially Ricky Davila, David Barr, Jonathan Brent, Nathan Hardy, Joel Brown, Philip Goldfarb Styrt, Jacob Blecher, Andres Millan, Tessa Murphy, Emily Lord Fransee, Sam Rowe, Bill Hutchison, Katharine Mershon, Brady Smith, Chandani Patel, Amanda Shubert, Nell Pach, Carmen Merport, and Cat Cleveland. There are several more people I would like to acknowledge here whose primarily contributions were not so much directly to this dissertation as they were to other parts of my personal, professional, and intellectual development over the last few years. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of my students at the University of Chicago and Lake Forest College. Their patience, enthusiasm, and willingness to experiment and take risks in the classroom have shaped my life in uncountable ways. Thank you to everyone at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, especially Patti Gibbons, Joe Scott, Diana Harper, Barbara Gilbert, Christine Colburn, Ashley Gosselar, Brittan Nannenga, Catherine Uecker, Kathleen Feeney, Eileen Ielmini, and Daniel Meyer. Thank you to the warm community at Lake Forest College, especially Miguel de vii Baca, Carla Arnell, Tracy McCabe, Kate Oakley, Kim Hazlett, Robert Archambeau, Ben Goluboff, and Katy Reedy. My desire to study English began long before I came to graduate school. I am so grateful to my mentors at the University of Pennsylvania, especially David Kazanjian, Rita Barnard, Melissa Sanchez, Josephine Park, Emily Steiner, and Walter Licht. My first models of what graduate study and graduate student teaching should look like were Poulomi Saha, Jessica Lautin, and D’Maris Coffman. I am grateful to all of my K-12 teachers, especially Erik Christensen, Mike Brandon, Tom Doelger, Lindsay Aegerter, Anne Stavney, Jim Gaul, Bob Henry, and Molly Peterson. The memory of Kim-An Lieberman and her dedication to teaching and belief in the importance and capacities of literature have been an ongoing source of inspiration. Thank you to all of my friends in Chicago, especially Meghan and James and Jeff and Erin. Thank you to a tight circle of friends who have always been there for me: Jenna, Zack and Nancy, Jon and Alison, Francisco and Jae, Steven and Lindsay, Mike and Barbara, and Rich and Sarah.
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