MIDWESTERN MISCELLANY XXXI Fall 2003 being a collection of essays on Midwestern Moderns by members of The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature edited by DAVID D. ANDERSON The Midwestern Press The Center for the Study of Midwestern Literature and Culture Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1033 2003 In honor of Herbert Martin Copyright 2003 by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without pennission afthe publisher. MIDWESTERN MISCELLANY XXXI PREFACE CONTENTS In this issue of Midwestern Miscellany, focused on modernist writers of the region, we round up the usual suspects: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Anderson. However, these essays "make it new;' Preface some by providing a new perspective on a Midwestern classic, some 4 by illuminating little-discussed Midwestern texts. In "What is What Is Midwestern Modernism? Sara Kosiba 6 Midwestern Modernism?" Sara Kosiba explores some continuities shared by several of the writers discussed in this issue of the Hemingway's Midwest: Miscellany. James Seaton supplies a partial answer to the question The Interior Landscape James Seaton 14 that Kosiba poses in her title, demonstrating how Hemingway's Midwestern fiction is characterized by an absence of traditions, ritu­ Becoming White: Race and Ethnicity als, and values, and by the presence of violence and disorder. John in The Great Gatsby John Rohrkemper 22 Rohrkemper situates The Great Gatsby within the context of the twenties debate on immigration and racial/cultural identity. Merging the Novel and the Epic: Catherine Kalish argues that Sister Carrie, considered by many to be Understanding Morality in a work of realism or naturalism, participates in the formal experi­ Dreiser's Sister Carrie Catherine Kalish 32 mentation that characterizes modernism, innovatively mixing novel and epic, a narrative strategy that influences the way we read the Winesburg, Ohio: Beyond the Revolt novel. Abigail Tilley interrogates the notion of a revolt from the vil­ from the Village Abigail Tilley 44 lage that posits Winesburg, Ohio as a leading text of that movement; she argues that contextualizing Anderson's novel in this way impov­ Narrative Art and Modernist Sensibility erishes our understanding of it. Marcia Noe and Fendall Fulton take in the Civil War Fiction of a look at four little-discussed Civil War stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald Marcia Noe and tracing the progress of Fitzgerald's narrative sensibility from melo­ Fendall Fulton 53 dramatic to modernist. Together these essays offer new ways to look at Midwestern modernism. 4 WHAT Is MIDWESTERN MODERNISM? 7 and political lives of many Americans, and the literatnre of the Midwest reflects the perspectives of one regional area coming to terms with those changes. Some of the Midwestern writers became WHAT IS MIDWESTERN MODERNISM? part of the modernist movement in literature, influencing the way it was defined or being influenced by the major writers and critics who worked to define it. Participation in this movement allowed those SARA KOSIBA writers to become part of a larger national or global discussion. Some Midwestern writers were responding to some of the same issues, but without the same aesthetic values of the modernists; In The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing, Ronald others were addressing particular regional concerns. A great deal of Weber contends that Midwestern literatnre came into its matnrity the writing by Midwestern authors was also flooding publications of during the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen~ry, rea~hing its this period, both in America and abroad; by exploring how those pinnacle in 1930 with the awarding of the Nobel Pnze .for h~eratnre writers and works were caught up in the contemporary literary to Sinclair Lewis. Whether or not one agrees with him that milieu we can explore how modernism was influenced by American Midwestern writing diminished in significance after that point in regional characteristics and how the literature of the Midwest was time, his examination of Midwestern literatnre's evolution places shaped by modernism. the height of its productivity during the same period of time gener­ The scholarship examining the specific connection between ally attributed to the height of literary modernism. While Weber Midwestern writing and the modernist movement is limited. While a states that the early work of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, great variety of criticism exists on Midwestern writers who gained Hart Crane and others marks the end of an era, their work shows a success during the modernist period, such as Fitzgerald and deliberate connection to the Midwestern landscape, albeit a connec­ Hemingway, and the connection of their individual works (both tion bombarded by changing social and cultnral forces of the time. Midwestern and otherwise) to modernism, fewer stndies attempt to I think Weber is prematnre in killing off Midwestern literatnre at a connect the movement of Midwestern literature to that of modernism. time when it was, rather, adapting to new forces in American litera­ A few scholarly articles have addressed the subject. David Wright's ture and culture. While writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and "Modernism and Region: Illinois Poetry and the Modern" (1998) others may have drifted away from their roots (again, perhaps even looks at connecting some of the elements of a particular Midwestern an arguable contention there as well, as many of these writers never state and how its literatnre might connect with modernism. Wright entirely severed their ties, both personal and literary, to the contends that "Regional art, in this case Illinois poetry, though often Midwest), they were among many of the Midwestern writers in the modern(ist) in style and subject matter, offers divergent versions of 1920s and 1930s writing from, about, and for the Midwest, address­ and alternatives to the modemist sensibility of the fragmented indi­ ing the region and its place in the country as a whole as it emerged vidual and cultnre, alternatives which should complicate our usual and developed in modern times. constructions of literary and cultnral history" (216). Focusing pri­ Midwestern authors, writing concurrently with the modernist marily on Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, Wright fails to demon­ movement in literature, were consistently using their work to under­ strate a greater connection between Midwestern literatnre and mod­ stand the shift that was taking place in both urban and rural societies. ernism. By focusing solely on one state, Wright never addresses the Modernization, industrialization, and the emergence of an increas­ region as a whole, but despite this narrow focus, his work on Illinois ingly global identity in the United States were changing the social poetry suggests that the same types of influences might be found in literatnre from other Midwestern states. John Rohrkemper also attempts to link modernist techniques and 6 concerns to Midwestern writers. In his article "The Great War, the 8 MIDWESTERN MISCELLANY XXXI WHAT Is MIDWESTERN MODERNISM? 9 Midwest, and Modernism: Cather, Dos Passos, and Hemingway" Nick Adams's experiences in upper Michigan. The Midwestern ele­ (1988), Rohrkemper examines the novels and stories written by three ments of the :ollecti~n ~ould eas~ly be explained away by attributing Midwestern writers that emerged directly after World War I. Looking them to Henu~gway s SImply usmg a setting from memory, but that at Willa Cather's One ofOurs, John DosPassos's Three Soldiers, and seems a reductive way to define those elements considering the delib­ Ernest Hemingway's In Our TIme, Rohrkemper argues that the three eration he put into his work. Nick Adams of In Our TIme does repre­ texts all incorporate the modernist technique of juxtaposition, most sent an alte~ e?o ~or H~~ngway,. based in part on his own experi­ often between images of Europe as scarred by war and images of an ence~ vacatio.mng m MIchigan while he was growing up. In terms of idyllic Midwest. In juxtaposing these images, these authors attempt ~awmg o~ hl~ ?wn knowledge and past experience in building a set­ to redefine and understand the world as they experienced it. tmg . or slgmflCance for his stories, it seems important that Rohrkemper believes that by examining how these writers contrasted Henungway would choose to draw on Michigan rather than Oak these particular images, a greater understanding can be reached of P~k" Chica~o, Paris, ~r a fictionalized version of a city to stage modern American literature and how modernism was connected to NICk s lear~m~ scen~os. Also, for Hemingway to intersperse the Midwest. While his study only discusses three novels, it raises scenes of MIchigan WIth scenes detailing the destruction and inllU­ interesting questions and comparisons that could be further devel­ manity of World War I (particularly in the vignettes that divide the oped by looking at more of the writers or works being produced at stories) seem.s to infuse the Midwest (or Michigan in particular) with the time, Again, Rohrkemper's views serve merely as a starting point a representative value, making the region a symbol of the world that for a larger discussion of Midwestern modernism and what that ex!sts in contr~st ~o the chaos of war..Nick comes of age in the movement or area of literature entails. Midwestern MIchigan landscape through the experiences he has Addressing modernism and its connection to the Midwest as a throughout many of the early stories of In Our TIme, and by the end whole is David D. Anderson's "Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, of the novel, returns to that landscape to rediscover himself after and Midwestern Modernism" (1994). Anderson's article focuses on experiencing the alienation and fragmentation of the world at large. connecting Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with its influ­ ~.