THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO STUCK IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE AFTER EFFECTS OF FREEDOM AND CAPITALISM IN THE NEW SOUTH, 1865 - 1913 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 ALEXANDER WHITLYN JACOBS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Alexander Whitlyn Jacobs All rights reserved For Mom Contents Abstract v Introduction 1 Chapter One: Reconstruction Stories Defeat Before and After the Lost Cause South 26 Chapter Two: Self-Help as Self-Making The Rhetoric of Black Moods in the Early Twentieth Century 72 Chapter Three: These Violent Affections Dunbar, Chesnutt, and the Dangers of Capitalism 108 Chapter Four: An Old South Turned New The Generic as Genetic in Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia 158 Bibliography 199 iv Abstract This dissertation asks two questions, one dependent on the other: what does it feel like to be left behind, defeated, and stuck in the U.S. South at the turn of the twentieth century, and how do people make new stories (or old ones) when they’re stuck outside of a narrow script like The American Dream? These questions point to the ways in which affects, feelings, and moods are often more than psychological details but social testimony to the experience of living without the succor of a dependable historical narrative. To answer these questions this dissertation turns specifically to the period between 1890 and 1913 when the pressures of industrial capitalism, scientism, and a retrograde white nationalism came to bear on the first generation of white and black Americans living after the Civil War, and, in this, I turn to literatures of the South. In the aftermath of the war many could not adequately adjust to modernity, instead clinging to Lost Cause mythologies fixated on a nostalgic chivalrous past. This cultural program spoke to how both white and black people could be both bereft of a story of success and without an adequate story of their loss. In the late nineteenth century, Protestant values coalesced around capitalism to form the Gospel of Business Success, an important forerunner to what would by the 1930s be termed the “American Dream.” The American Dream offers a conventional story of success through risk, specifically claiming that capitalist individuality means that diligent (or exploited) labor is virtuous and virtuous labor promises social mobility; this dissertation is about the promise of many other American cultural myths. But, at the turn of the twentieth century, there were more narratives too: the Lost Cause, the New South, Populism, and the Cult of True Womanhood to name a few. This dissertation is about those who fall out of the optimism of them. But it is more specific than that too. The cultural v fantasies of post-slavery freedom are not monolithic for those identifying as whites, for blacks, or Northerners and Southerners. Fantasies of overcoming difference and antagonism between whites and blacks, men and women also varied. Such fantasies and the practices that extend from them overlap, stretch, and often their bearers admit their own hollowness. This dissertation demonstrates how these kinds of fantasies hold and often fail to live up to the promise of escape. When people fall out of them, they must scavenge to build new, rickety, genres for continued survival. Transitional spaces, as this project shows, lead to transitional, unhandsome, and bewildered, feelings. These feelings shape the event and sense of living beyond and with failure. My first chapter explores how subjects negotiate political defeat by examining the genre of Confederate life writing after the Civil War. Here I put literary attention on canonically historical texts—the writings of Emma LeConte, Jefferson Davis, Jubal A. Early, Alexander H. Stephens, and James Longstreet. Each author, through different subgenres of life writing (diary, missive, essay, recollection, and memoir) engages the affect of political failure. Any discussion of Southern cultural reaction to Reconstruction must discuss the ideology of the Lost Cause South. My chapter considers two founding texts for this ideology—Jefferson Davis’s letters and Jubal Early’s essays—to purposely find where and how their rhetoric fails. By reading these figures against the Lost Cause I demonstrate how their new affective states (neither nostalgia or melancholia) cannot find a suitable genre but instead an abject present, affectively detached from past and future. In surrender, ordinary temporal logic evaporates. Alexander H. Stephens illustrates how feelings of indignation, and righteousness break to the lasting atmosphere of defeat. His personal dogma of achievement cannot negotiate reality. Ultimately he acknowledges how it feels to vi be unfairly treated by the world. This disgrace echoes James Longstreet’s insight at his memoir’s conclusion. Forced to fail in public, Longstreet becomes marked by the lasting influence of failure. These compelling moments articulate the expressed-yet-inexpressible condition of failure. Eventually I argue that defeat is a range of feelings and emotions that are expressed in writing through paradoxes, experiments, aphasia, and incoherence. If the first chapter focuses upon those who lost the war, my second chapter focuses on those who won—and lost in turn. In the 1890s African American authors and presses tapped into emerging literary markets by selling self-help guides. Often borrowing wholesale from hugely popular white success manuals of the period, black self-help books like The College of Life (1895) and Progress and Achievements of the Colored People (1913) offered readers hundreds of pages of instruction in bourgeois, protestant values based upon Washingtonian respectability politics while also conspicuously overlooking the sobering conditions of Jim Crow. I show how these guides frame a profound moment in African American social history when the terms “optimism” and “discouragement” were frequently used to describe the mood of being in the present. While optimism might have been possible at the end of the 1890s, I find that by 1915 its overuse in the face of Jim Crow ultimately leads black writers to realize that one cannot merely tell black men and women how to affectively attach to the world. As optimism fails, these authors instead call for a new kind of realism that can guide subjects through the pitfalls of the present. As the second chapter concerns Washingtonian strategies to cope with a market- driven world outside of slavery and politics, the third chapter is about what the predations of racial capital actually looked like. Emerging from the shadows of this black self- improvement narrative—but before the Great Migration and the Harlem renaissance—are vii two important novels: Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905) and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902). These novels form a provisional genre, eschewing optimism in order to craft stories of survival. Separately both illustrate the failed promise of mobility—be it physically migrating from South to North or moving into the bourgeoisie. In Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream a white Northern philanthropist attempts to liberalize his backwater Southern hometown, only to find that white nationalism and industrial capitalism had already claimed victory. In Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, a bourgeois black family flees North to New York City after the family patriarch is wrongfully convicted of theft, finding in the city only moral degradation and ruin. These novels portray black and white people searching for the meritocratic promise of uncorrupted free market capitalism. Here protagonists find that economic answers to political problems only lead to more exposure and exploitation. Both end without social or spiritual transformation, outlining a complex of affects and attitudes that mired black and white subjects after disenfranchisement. My first chapter was about what comes after the Lost Cause; this chapter is about what comes under the banner of the New South. While Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream is particularly committed to describing the new systems of economic exploitation, the Virginian novelist Ellen Glasgow was particularly interested in understanding the psychological ramifications of the New South. Here I demonstrate how Glasgow’s Virginia (1913) stages two parallel stories: the triumph of the New Woman over the Old, and the triumph of the New South over the remains of the Confederacy. While Virginia rarely strays from its heroine’s intimate psyche, it sets her internal life in historical context, by way of set-pieces common to both Glasgow’s contemporary audience and this dissertation—the viii Confederacy’s defeat, the exploitation of the South under Northern investment after Reconstruction, and the rise of capitalist massification posed through the language of Darwinian thought. In this, Glasgow tells a story of socioeconomic and historical change located not on the scale of the State but that of the individual’s psychological state. This becomes clear when one sees how Virginia Pendleton, as the prototypical antebellum Southern woman, embodies the distorted and aggrandized nostalgia of Lost Cause sentimental culture. Glasgow, as a suffragist and strongly independent woman, chafed under the sexist ideologies of the retrograde South. In staging Virginia’s demise, Glasgow offers a timely premonition about the eventual rise of the New South and, in this, the New Woman too. Virginia knowingly moves between generic forms, modifying nineteenth- century sentimentalism with Spencerian evolutionary theory and the language of literary naturalism in order to redefine Lost Cause genres as themselves retrograde and ill-suited for the inevitable triumph of modernity and the world it offered—one of reason, science, strong wills, and strong women. This project proposes a new method for tracking the ongoing aftereffects of catastrophe. Following the Civil War and emancipation, both Southern whites and blacks found that their fantasies of the good life were dramatically different from the real thing.