LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER The Jazz Controversy in TwentiethCentury American Fiction Kristin K.Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin America Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman THE SELF IN THE CELL Narrating the Victorian Prisoner Sean Grass REGENERATING THE NOVEL Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J.Miracky SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL V.S.Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball THROUGH THE NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams LOVE AMERICAN STYLE Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 Kimberly Freeman FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant Tatiana Teslenko DEAD LETTERS TO THE NEW WORLD Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism Michael McLoughlin THE OTHER ORPHEUS A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality Merrill Cole THE OTHER EMPIRE British Romantic Writings about the Ottoman Empire Filiz Turhan THE “DANGEROUS” POTENTIAL OF READING Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth-Century Narratives Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin Thomas Nissley REVISED LIVES Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship William Pannapacker LABOR PAINS Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn Maibor NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Jennifer Cognard-Black PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, DOS PASSOS, AND HURSTON Tom McGlamery SURVIVING THE CROSSING (Im)migration, Ethnicity, and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen Jessica G.Rabin Routledge New York & London Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abington Oxon OX14 4RN http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rabin, Jessica G., 1973 Surviving the crossing: (im)migration, ethnicity, and gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen/Jessica G.Rabin. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-97118-7 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. Stein, Gertrude, 1874–1946—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Cather, Willa, 1873–1947—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Larsen, Nella— Criticism and interpretation. 8. Immigrants in literature. 9. Ethnicity in literature. 10. Sex role in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS228.E55R33 2004 813.’52093552—dc22 2004014245 ISBN 0-203-50139-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58091-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-97118-7 (Print Edition) To Toby And in memory of my grandparents who made the crossing: Robert Rabin Susan and Henry Schurenstedt Contents Acknowledgments x Chapter One Introduction: A Sense of Selves 1 Chapter Two “The Peculiar Combination of Elements Long Familiar”: 22 Willa Cather Chapter Three “Fiction Was Another Way of Telling the Truth”: 64 Gertrude Stein Chapter Four “The Mixedness of Things”: 105 Nella Larsen Chapter Five Conclusion: Other Countries, Other Romances 141 Afterword “A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven” 149 Notes 152 Bibliography 168 Index 176 Acknowledgments Many thanks to Paul Foster Johnson, William Cain, and Routledge for giving me the opportunity to revisit, revise, and revitalize this text. The insights and scholarship of Walter Kalaidjian, Julie Abraham, and Martine Brownley help set the foundations of this project; I appreciate the time and effort that they contributed in order to bring it to fruition. I am indebted, as well, to my mentor Merrill Skaggs who introduced me to the great (literary) love of my life and encouraged me in all my academic pursuits. I am also grateful for the support and enthusiasm of my other friends in Cather Studies, especially Marilee Lindemann, Susan Rosowski, and Joseph Urgo. My family, like Vickie Templeton’s friends the Rosens, set me on the path that “led toward the moon,” by serving as a source of academic and personal inspiration. I’ve always been proud of my family, and I am grateful for the way they prepared me for the world and then welcomed me back to the parish—and will no doubt send me forth again with glad hearts when the time comes. Many thanks to my parents, Bernard and Debbie Rabin, and Joan Rabin and Barbara Slater; my grandmother, Rose Rabin; and my brother, Dan Rabin. Thank you to my friends who listened, laughed, and reminded me to breathe, especially Pam Garrettson and Pierrette Stukes. I also appreciate my soccer teammates who helped me channel my excess energies and occasional frustrations into a socially acceptable and (relatively) non-destructive format. For permission to reprint here a portion of an essay I first published in the collection Willa Cather’s New York, I would like to thank the volume’s editor, Merrill Skaggs, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Chapter One Introduction: A Sense of Selves Binarisms permeate the foundations of our western cultural and intellectual framework— native/foreign, black/white, man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual—but are the fixed essentialisms implicit in such models truly reflective of the reality of human experience (actual and literary)? It is my goal to join the ongoing scholarly complication of binaries by offering a more fluid conception of boundaries. In place of essentializing categories of identity, I explore the ramifications of using multiple subject positioning as a means of conceptualizing and representing identity. By examining the literature of three women modernists, I show how the dispersal of fixed identity is facilitated through language. In other words, I focus on the ways in which fiction unhinges identity, along with the consequences of such a process—both liberating and dislocating. Such a process does not take place in a vacuum. The transnational atmosphere of the interwar period in the United States facilitated a loosening of identity categories which was both created by and reflected in the literature of the period. Writers who had a complicated relationship to identity categories and who created characters whose lives could not be neatly compartmentalized found in this cultural climate the psychological space prerequisite to writing and the possibility of communicating with an audience. In my quest for a fuller, more useful paradigm of identity formation and perpetuation, I examine issues of ethnicity and race, nationality and geography, and gender and sexuality in the fiction of Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Nella Larsen. The emphasis I place on how language facilitates the dispersal of fixed identity has its roots in post-structuralist philosophy. In particular, Derridian and post-structuralist critique of binarisms provides an important underpinning for my study. By emphasizing the instability of language, Derrida interrogates the idea of the unitary subject itself, as Terry Eagleton explains: “to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but me: since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction” (130). In addition, Derrida uses the term “deconstruction” to describe “the critical operation by which [binary] oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning” (Eagleton 132). Although deconstruction is not my goal, I take up Derrida’s dissatisfaction with binary paradigms in my approach to the texts under consideration. By offering a critique of binary models, I participate in a series of ongoing explorations in literary and cultural studies. Eagleton points out, for example, that feminism and post-structuralism share some important goals and preoccupations: “for all the binary oppositions which post-structuralism sought to undo, the hierarchical opposition between men and women was perhaps the most virulent” (149). In addition to feminist critics, gender, queer, and race theorists have subjected binary models to intense Surviving the crossing 2 scrutiny over the past fifteen years. Diana Fuss argued in 1989 that “the binary articulation of essentialism and difference can…be restrictive, even obfuscating, in that it allows us to ignore or to deny the differences within essentialisms” (xii). The following year, Eve Sedgwick suggested that binarisms in sexual orientation should be more fluid than the homo/heterosexual division implemented in the late nineteenth century (9–10), while Judith Butler urged feminists to avoid “totalizing gestures” (Gender 13) and noted that heterosexuality needs and creates “an oppositional, binary gender system” (Gender 22). In 1991, Jonathan Dollimore proposed that “the essentialist/anti-essentialist opposition is rather less stable than is often supposed in theoretical discourse” (26).