EUGENIC FANTASIES: RACIAL IDEOLOGY IN THE LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE OF THE 1920s By BETSY LEE NIES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1998 Copyright 1998 by Betsy Lee Nies To Jane and Perry Nies and Vincent Mirizio . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my parents Jane and Perry Nies and my husband Vincent Mirizio for their constant support during the composing process. Dr. Malini Johar Schueller, my committee chair, remained a continuing source of guidance and encouragement. Dr. Anne Goodwyn Jones generously held dissertation reading groups at her home, giving all of her graduate students the careful feedback their work deserves My thanks to my other committee members, Dr. Carl Bredahl and Dr. Louise Newman, for being excellent readers. Dr. Marsha Bryant also provided strong feedback for my H.D. chapter. I especially wish to thank all of the graduate students who helped shape this project conceptually: Rhonda Morris, Gary MacDonald, Bill Beverly, David Russell, Lisa Houston, Maria Martinez, Tamara Olaivar, Scott Lucious, and Zareen Tarapore IV TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT viii CHAPTERS INTRODUCTION 1 1 THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL CONTEXTS 9 The Historical Moment 9 Theorizing the Body 11 Racing the Body 11 Binding the Body 16 Inscribing Gender 19 Imagining the Nordic Body 23 The Critical Background 24 2 "BLOND GIANT," "LITTLE BRUNETTE": EUGENICS AND THE MALE BODY 34 Bodily Image, Social Text 34 The American Soldier's Body 40 Bolshevik Bodies, New Immigrant Bodies 47 Classical Nordic Bodies, Grotesque Immigrant Bodies of Eugenic Texts 52 The Nordic and Immigrant Bodies of Popular Periodicals 69 Lost White Civilizations and the Nordic Male Body of Pulp Fiction 77 Eugenic Dreams 83 3 HEMINGWAY'S RESPONSE TO EUGENICS: DAMAGED MEN, PHILANDERING WOMEN 85 Nordic Men, "Newest New Women" 85 Critiquing Eugenic Fears, Modernist Dreams .... 91 Polluting Women, Idyllic Nordic Men 104 v 4 IMAGINING THE STATUESQUE: H.D., EUGENICS, AND THE AESTHETICS OF LESBIAN IDENTITY 128 H.D. and the Politics of Eugenics 128 The Historical Moment 131 Eugenic Fathers and the Limits of Heterosexuality 132 Imagining the Statuesque: Identifying Across Racial Borders 141 Abjecting the Mother, Embracing the Androgyne . 146 Staging Cultural Revisions: White (Nordic) Statues, Dark Immigrant Bodies 148 Reconfiguring Racial Hierarchies 159 5 F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, EUGENICS, AND RACE NOSTALGIA . 168 Dismembered Bodies and a Lost White America . 168 Fixed Bodies and Racial Nostalgia 170 The Rise of Jew, the Fall of the Nordic .... 175 "Civilization's Going to Pieces" so Let's Honor a Sacred Past 186 Postscript: The Changing (or not so Changing) Times 208 CONCLUSION 214 WORKS CITED 218 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 226 vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy EUGENIC FANTASIES: RACIAL IDEOLOGY IN THE LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE OF THE 1920s By Betsy Lee Nies August 1998 Chairperson: Dr. Malini Johar Schueller Major Department: English This dissertation examines the function of eugenics during the 1920s in popular periodicals, pulp fiction, and the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, H.D., and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1924, eugenicists fueled the passage of the Johnson Immigration Act which reduced the number of Southeastern and Central European immigrants entering the country from seventy to fifteen percent of the total. Calling them "new immigrants," eugenicists argued they were racially different from their Northeastern European ("Nordic") predecessors. Even though Hemingway, H.D., and Fitzgerald reacted with disdain to such racial discourses, they recreated the science's values. I draw on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the "classical" and "grotesque" body and Julia Kristeva's theory of "abjection" to explore why such immigrants became the target Vll , , . of legislation. Eugenicists drew sharp bodily dichotomies between Nordics and the new group, figuring Nordics as classical figures and Southeastern and Central European immigrants as grotesque, with wildly deformed bodies. Such dichotomies reinforced traditional class hierarchies unstable in a post-war era. Hemingway ridiculed such eugenic rhetoric in his satire The Torrents of Spring: A Romance in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race (1925) which disparages Madison Grant's widely read eugenic bible The Passing of the Great Race (1916) . While he debunks Nordic hierarchies explicitly here, I argue that he recreates its structural relationships implicitly in The Sun Also Rises (1926) In her autobiographical fiction of the decade, H.D. attacks eugenics as patriarchal yet relies on its divisions in her portrayal of the statuesque white lesbian body and deformed immigrant bodies . Works treated include Hermipne (1981) Asphodel (1992) and Paint It Today (1992) F. Scott Fitzgerald ridicules eugenics overtly in his treatment of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsbv (1925) . Tom spouts the rhetoric of Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy (1921) . Yet Fitzgerald returns to images of a whitened racial landscape as the text closes, suggesting a fantasy of return to a nativist Nordic land. He engages similarly with eugenic discourse in Vlll This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) . The study contributes to cultural analyses of whiteness and theoretical formulations of race. IX INTRODUCTION In Plavina in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison provides an analysis of Marie Cardinal’s The Words To Say It (1986), the autobiography of a white woman who, while attending a Louis Armstrong concert, experiences an emotional and mental breakdown. As Cardinal recounts, My heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so that air could no longer enter them. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed. (Qtd. in Morrison wi) Cardinal's feeling of dying takes form in what Morrison describes as "hallucinatory images of fear, " "black" images Cardinal links to the racial relations of her childhood, in particular to a fantasy about a white child killing a black mother. Morrison notes that Cardinal's sense of death-- "I am going to die!" she thinks as she runs from the concert --is associated with the blackness of Armstrong and a history of a fear of blacks (viii-ix) . Getting better means killing off this blackness, eradicating it from her consciousness. As Morrison rightly points out, such images of blackness pervade American literature, creating an "Africanist" 1 .. 2 presence, often evil yet desirable, used to define by contrast are not the identity of white characters . These characters labelled as white but the reader knows they are white by the way they take form against a background of African Americans Such contrasts are not limited to images of blacks and whites, I will argue, but rather extend to white/ethnic relations, as is evident in the literature of the 1920s. Cardinal's experience of dying in the face of blackness also speaks to the central point of my dissertation, namely the relationship between merging and racial identity. For Cardinal, for whiteness to remain a marker of identity, she must separate it from blackness. She experiences a loss of boundaries at the concert, a thought visualized as the death of her body, perhaps because she fears she was going to merge either with the music (which "tore at the nerves of those who her, followed it" [qtd. Morrison vii] ) or with those around thus losing her white form. As James Snead notes, "The fear of merging, or loss of identity through synergistic union with the other, leads to the wish to use racial purification as a separating strategy against difference" (x) . Snead continues, "Marking, or supplying physically significant (usually visual) characteristics with internal value equivalents" follows in this effort to separate one identity from the other (x-xi) Cardinal's fantasy of cross-racial matricide is particularly interesting here; she kills off the mother figure, a Black woman, in her efforts to break free of her fear of subjective 3 loss. It is with the mother that the child first experiences a sense of merging. As Julia Kristeva argues, the child must "abject" her or reject her in order to finally establish a sense of both bodily unity and concurrent subjective identity. 1 Cardinal abjects a certain blackness when she runs from the concert and in her fantasy of killing the black mother, thus trying to create for herself a sense of physical wholeness, metaphor for psychic wholeness, one separate from those around her. My musings on Cardinal's image and Morrison's interpretation speak to the heart of my dissertation in which I will argue that bodily image reflects subjective identity and the desire to demarcate the physical characteristics of the body as "racial" or "ethnic" rests upon the need to solidify both physical and psychological autonomy. The assignment of physical markers as "racial" or "ethnic" arrests a sense of merging. Attention to physical difference intensifies during moments of ethnic, racial, class or gender change when economic and social relations are in flux, accentuating fears of identity loss