READING FASHIONS, FASHIONING READINGS: GENRE, STYLE, AND SARTORIAL SEMIOTICS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE Rosa Arrington Heath Sledge A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Jane F. Thrailkill John McGowan Matthew A. Taylor Eliza Richards Jane Danielewicz ©2015 Rosa Arrington Heath Sledge ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Rosa Arrington Heath Sledge: Reading Fashions, Fashioning Readings: Genre, Style, and Sartorial Semiotics in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Under the direction of Jane F. Thrailkill and John McGowan) We are nothing without clothes, and American novelists of the nineteenth century, with their careful attention to hats, trains, ruffles, corsets, and shoes, know it. This dissertation examines the ways in which, at the tumultuous end of the nineteenth century, two kinds of reading—the reading of dress and the reading of novels — affect one another. As America becomes increasingly urbanized, and as advances in manufacturing (sewing machines, commercially- available sewing patterns) and marketing (the rise of the department store and the mail-order catalog) change the fashion industry, Americans read dress differently. This change in readership also changes the late-century novel: naturalism and realism, which emerge in response to midcentury domestic sentimentalism and revise both its stylistic and philosophical tenets, show an increasing reliance on their reader’s active interpretation of texts. A close examination of the works of Theodore Dreiser and of Henry James, alongside contemporary theories of acting, of psychology, of philosophy, and of semiotics, offers a re-evaluation for the modern critic of the role that clothes (and other types of self-representations) play in the development of identity. For James, the problem of the self is to externalize itself (by dressing itself) in such a way as to invite proper readings of that self. This is a problem of readership: how can one ensure that his utterances—fashionable or literary—are properly read? For Dreiser the self does not exist until it creates itself—a problem of authorship. iii James and Dreiser both work through two different sets of related questions in these novels: the relation of dress to self, and the relation of performance to performativity, both variations on the central question of the nineteenth century: what is the relationship of representation to the real? These novels, like dress, invite the active, subjective, distanced, materially-aware, and contingent kind of reading that I will call pragmatic: just as there is no fashion that remains eternally in style, so there is no single reading or representation that fully captures reality —nor should there be. iv To Robert, because you put up with an absent wife for so long—and because I couldn’t have finished without you. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS So many people have helped me! Thanks to Jane for your infinite patience, for teaching me how to write, and for showing me I could finish despite having a baby in the middle of grad school. John is a most encouraging and pragmatic critic; thanks to him for lighting a fire under my butt and telling me I was finished. I’m the last one of our writing group to finish, so many thanks to Lauren Garrett, Katie Shrieves, Kate Atkisson, and Ben Sammons for reading so many incomprehensible drafts, and for their generosity with time, laughs, intellectual support, and margaritas when necessary. Thanks to my dad, for reading drafts of dreck all my life and teaching me that reading, writing, and thinking mattered, and to my mom, sister, and brother for keeping me (relatively) sane and normal throughout this process. My UNC students deserve thanks; they proved to me that one can learn to write all over again—a very encouraging lesson. Tommy Nixon helped me track down so many references. Thanks to Ben Bolling for all the kikis in the library that gave me life when I thought maybe dying might be preferable to finishing. Thanks to Ashley Reed for snarking and cheerleading in equal measures. Thanks to the McElroys (Magnus, Taako, Merle, and Griffin) for increasing the world’s stock of “harmless cheerfulness” and for getting me through the final push. And most thanks to Robert, for keeping everything going while I did this, and to Archie, for continually reminding me that there’s life after graduate school. (I promised I’d learn to play Minecraft once I finished!) vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: REPRESENTING REALITY OR FASHIONING REALITY? ............................ 21 Representation ........................................................................................................................... 25 Sumptuary laws, English Puritanism, and the war of images .................................................... 27 America’s fashionable Puritans ................................................................................................. 35 The age of revolutions: political, social, and theatrical ............................................................. 38 American sumptuary law: regulating racial representation ....................................................... 53 Sentimental racial transparency: black dress and the one-drop rule .......................................... 60 Epidermalizing clothes, biologizing race ................................................................................... 63 Staging black performance and performativity ......................................................................... 71 Defining novelistic sentimentalism ........................................................................................... 76 Postbellum semiotic distance ..................................................................................................... 81 Reading the fashionable detail ................................................................................................... 88 Semiotic and aesthetic distance in novels, dress, and theater .................................................... 96 CHAPTER 2: WHAT CARRIE CARRIES: ACTING AND SELF-FASHIONING IN SISTER CARRIE ....................................................................................................................................... 101 The grammar of pathos: subjects and objects .......................................................................... 104 Things without which we are nothing ...................................................................................... 107 Fetishizing and fashioning the foot .......................................................................................... 110 Sentimental appearances .......................................................................................................... 113 Corsetry and shells ................................................................................................................... 117 vii Costuming the public self ........................................................................................................ 123 Fashioning actresses, characters, and selves ............................................................................ 128 Costly costuming ..................................................................................................................... 132 Identity as object: selling the image of the self ....................................................................... 136 The star factory ........................................................................................................................ 141 CHAPTER 3: PATHETIC NATURALISM IN SISTER CARRIE ............................................. 149 Naturalism and the problem of Dreiser .................................................................................... 151 Staging distance ....................................................................................................................... 155 From sympathy to pathos ......................................................................................................... 156 The pathos of desire ................................................................................................................. 158 Framing the theatrical self ....................................................................................................... 160 Infectious sympathy ................................................................................................................. 166 Artificial feeling ....................................................................................................................... 171 Dreiser’s pathetic style ............................................................................................................. 175 Pathetic democracy .................................................................................................................. 183 CHAPTER 4: READING JAMES’S REALISM ....................................................................... 186 Patterns and pieces: “the elements of Appearance” ................................................................. 187 The feeling of the real: sentiment, realism, and description ...................................................