UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Time’s Citizens: American Fiction and the Sexual Politics of U.S. Civic Membership, 1886-1929 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by William Stoughton Clark 2018 © Copyright by William Stoughton Clark 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Time’s Citizens: American Fiction and the Sexual Politics of U.S. Civic Membership, 1886-1929 by William Stoughton Clark Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Christopher J. Looby, Co-Chair Professor Richard A. Yarborough, Co-Chair “Time’s Citizens” explores how American fiction shaped the public classification of sexual identification and civic membership in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During a period when discourses of anti-progressive deviance were used for purposes of civic exclusion, “Time’s Citizens” argues that a subset of novelists deployed the qualities ascribed to queers in order to claim civic presence. As critics have shown, the U.S. novel in both its realist and its romantic incarnations has long depicted heterosexual life to underwrite civil belonging. The novels of my study—Henry James’s The Bostonians, William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand—expose and critique this formation through their depiction of racial, sexual, and gendered exclusion. Even as the modern ii sexual binary was coming into articulation, these novels show queer modes of belonging that did not assimilate to the heteronormative model standardized in the law and assumed in most literature. “Time’s Citizens” claims that this strain of U.S. fiction reveals the limitations on rights for subjects who did not contribute to the narrative of national progress, which was associated with marriage, reproductive futurity, property ownership, and the regulated time of the industrial economy. In dialogue with current trends in queer theory and historiography, “Time’s Citizens” suggests that the novel was uniquely positioned to register the political stakes of queer difference. Deploying the temporal deviance used to represent queer subjects and their relation to, antagonism toward, or erasure by the progressive, reproductive state, the novel was able to represent modes of civic presence that were becoming impossible under U.S. social and legal regimes. To explore the relation between politics and the novel, “Time’s Citizens” works at the intersection of legal studies, critical race theory, and the investigations of queer time to show how marginal figures of a variety of identities relate to the ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation. When taken together, the novels of this study question the presumption of normativity and view queerness as a mode of identification deeply tied to civic structures and local politics. Instead of carving a separate sphere for queer being, these texts sought relations to citizenship not predicated on conformity but able to accommodate more diverse modes of expression and identification. iii The dissertation of William Stoughton Clark is approved. Yogita Goyal Carrie Leah Hyde Joan Waugh Christopher J. Looby, Committee Co-Chair Richard A. Yarborough, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv For family, the ones who got me here, and those I found along the way. v Contents Acknowledgments vii Vita ix Introduction 1 1 | Their Own Times and Places: Narrative Time and the Construction 35 of the Queer Citizen in Henry James’ The Bostonians 2 | A Deceitfully Permanent Present: Realism and the Limits of 86 Reproductive Futurity in William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes 3 | Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and the Racialization of 141 Progress 4 | Queer Backwardness and the Nativist Impulse: The Case of Willa 196 Cather 5 | Expatriate Longings: Finding Queerness Elsewhere in Nella Larsen’s 255 Passing and Quicksand Coda | James Baldwin and Discovering Love Beyond the Nation 312 Bibliography 322 vi Acknowledgments So many contributed to the writing of this project, it seems impossible to do those contributions justice. First, this dissertation wouldn’t have happened without my committee, whose guidance, care, intellectual rigor, and encouragement kept me curious and engaged throughout its research and writing. Chris Looby helped me to write with exactness and clarity, but also to see the importance of compassion and collegiality in our profession. Dialogue with Richard Yarborough always encouraged me to see intellectual challenges as opportunities and left me more excited to tackle conceptual knots than when I started. I am so grateful to be counted as one of the many students both have mentored through graduate school and beyond. Yogita Goyal, without fail, pushed me to the limits of my conceptual framing, helping me to see the broadest stakes and implications of this project where I couldn’t. Thank you for always motivating me to reach beyond what I can yet see in my work. Carrie Hyde has proven an interlocutor one can only dream of, especially for thinking about the particular legal history this project traces; the force and clarity of her scholarship have proven motivational, and her guidance in even the most granular concepts and levels of writing have made me a better scholar. Thanks to all of you I have completed this project feeling vitalized, grateful for what I’ve learned in the process, and eager to start its next phase. The UCLA English Department has been more of a home that I ever could have imagined when I took my first class as an undergrad; from poetry workshops to grad seminars to teaching classes myself, I cannot imagine my life without this department. The department’s generous staff, and superb faculty have made the rigors and difficulties of graduate school something that I will always look back on with respect and pride. Jeanette Gilkison, Janel Munguia, Michael Lambert helped me through the process of grad school on the administrative side; I remember and am thankful for all that help. Thanks for the many conversations with Joseph Bristow, Michael Cohen, Helen Deutsch, Raphael Pérez-Torres, Marissa López, Reed Wilson, Justin Torres, and Uri McMillan; your advice, conversation, and perspective have always been invaluable. The Americanist Research Colloquium proved an extraordinary place to share work, as well as to learn from other scholars from all stages in their careers; I’m also grateful for the attentive readers of the 20/21 Reading group. Chris Mott, you’ve made our teaching environment the envy of the university; whatever I know about instruction is thanks to you. Not by any means least, our department has devoted essential resources to its graduate students that have made my research and progress possible in an environment of scarcity; as a recipient of multiple Department fellowships, including the Grace M. Hunt Award for Archival Research, I have benefited greatly from the department’s generosity. I am grateful to have learned in and been supported by such a place as this. But most importantly, I cannot imagine a more supportive, generous, incisive, and inspiring community of scholars and friends than those I have met, learned from, and collaborated with during my graduate career. The list cannot but feel limited, but especially thanks to Kirsten Lew, Sujin Youn, Jay Jin, Grant Rosson, and Caitlin Benson for being interlocutors, reading many drafts, and always offering a wise word. Eric Newman has been my comrade in arms; for sharing so much of our writing and for all our conversations about queer theory, thank you. These last few years would have been inconceivably impoverished without the friendship, companionship, vii and scholarly engagement of the Normandie Ave crew, Angelina Del Balzo, Ben Beck, and Sam Sommers, always ready for a discussion about C18-19 or life more generally at a coffee shop or over a beer. Thanks to Shir Alon for long writing sessions under the orange tree and to Sydney Miller, my compatriot at the Huntington, who made the last year bearable. To Jonathan Kinkaid, Abraham Encinas, and Efren Lopez, thanks for keeping it real. I could not have grown as a writer or an instructor without Jackie Ardam, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Renee Hudson, and Amy Wong, whose example helped me to learn elegance and care in writing, whose friendship and wisdom I couldn’t do without. To Kate Bergren, Justin Eichenlaub, Katherine Isokawa, and Adrienne Posner, thanks for your friendship across many years and places. The members of my cohort have always inspired me in their work, both academic and otherwise; special appreciation goes to Lindsay Wilhelm, Sharon Tran, Medaya Ocher, Claire Kim, Maggie Howell, Sharon Chon, Erin Conley, and Gabriel Mehlman. Thanks also to Whit Strub, now at Rutgers, and to Comfort Azubuko-Udah, Gabriela Valenzuela, and Jené Pledger, good luck, keep them honest. The department alone is but a part of my experience at UCLA, and I also want to thank the many other people I have met and collaborated with, from UAW 2865 to the Undergraduate Research Center and the Graduate Writing Center, especially Yvette Martinez, Andrea Slater, Calvin Ho, Michael Moses, and Billie Buchanan. I’m proud of all of you. Without the support of many dear friends, especially Stephanie Ding and Nathan Brown, the rough parts of grad school that inevitably come would have seemed unnavigable. Los Angeles wouldn’t be the same place to me without Ann Tsueng, and Paula Schaffer, thanks for always being there through thick and thin for so, so many years. Samara Weiss and Patrick Jones, I’ve learned so much from you both as intellects, writers, friends, and travelers. Thanks to the Hammarskjold crew, especially Jenn Chen, Abhay Sukumaran, and Diederik Marius and Julia Schmitt, for all the back-country adventures, bike rides, and shared meals over the years; thanks to the 24th and Bryant set, Susan Kim, Bryce Esch, the Maki family and Linh Phu for all those years of good food, drink, and conversation.