INFORMATION to USERS the Most Advanced Technology Has Been Used to Photo­ Graph and Reproduce This Manuscript from the Microfilm Master

INFORMATION to USERS the Most Advanced Technology Has Been Used to Photo­ Graph and Reproduce This Manuscript from the Microfilm Master

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UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9002033 The commodification of the American dream: Capitalist subjectivity in American literature Tyson, Lois Marie, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1989 Copyright ©1989 by Tyson, Lois Marie. All rights reserved. UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106 THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE AMERICAN DREAM: CAPITALIST SUBJECTIVITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Lois Marie Tyson, B.A., M.Ed., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1983 Dissertation Commitee: Approved by Walter A. Davis James Phelan Adviser Mark Conroy Department of English In passing from history to nature, myth . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves. Roland Barthes, Mythologies C1357) c u t is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked. c u t is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to . change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself. Roland Barthes, Image - Music - Text (1977) Copyright by Lois Marie Tyson 1989 To Mac Davis The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies. — Kate Chopin 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Professors James Phelan, Mark Conroy, and Alan Hausman for their very helpful and good- natured comments and suggestions. Very special thanks go to Professor Walter A. Davis, without whose inspiration and encouragement this dissertation would not have been written. To my parents, Marie and Charles Tyson, I wish to express my gratitude for teaching me the importance of independent thinking and for having the patience to put up with me when I exercised it. Deepest appreciation is expressed for Toni M o r r i s o n , William Faulkner, Ella .'itzgerald, Ray Charles, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vincent van Gogh, and all the artists, known and unknown, whose work has made our work possible and whose spirit has given our species something to shoot for. Ill VITA 1972 ............................ B. A., Douglass College Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 1982 ............................ M. Ed., Ohio University Athens, Ohio 1 9 8 4 ............................ f1. A., Ohio University Athens, Ohio 1984-85 ........................ Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Massachusetts 1985-Present .................... Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio 5tate University, Columbus, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field; English Studies in: American Literature, 20th Century Ernest Lockridge American Literature, 19th Century Thomas Cooley American Women Writers Daniel Barnes Critical Theory Walter Davis IV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION .............................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................... iii V I T A ..................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ............................................ 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. THE ROMANCE OF THE COMMODITY: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY ................ 23 II. WOMAN AS FETISH: EDITH WHARTON’S HOUSE OF MIRTH .................................... 65 III. ’’LIFE IS BUT A DREAM”: ARTHUR MILLER’S DEATH OF A S A L E S M A N .............................. 115 IV. BEYOND BEING AND NOTHINGNESS: JOSEPH HELLER’S SOMETHING HAPPENED .................... 174 CONCLUSION .................................................221 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 237 INTRODUCTION Commodification- The Dreamer and the Dream If, as Martin Heidegger suggests, humans are those creatures whose very being is at issue for them (573, then it is not surprising that one of the reasons we study literature is to learn about ourselves, both individually and collectively. A literary text is not only an art object, but also a storehouse of the norms, mores, ideologies, and emotional conflicts of the culture from which it emerges. Whether literary works endorse or criticize cultural values, they provide fertile ground from which we can harvest an understanding of a culture’s collective psyche, an apprehension of how cultural habits reveal the nature of men and women’s existence in and perceptions of the world. Homer’s Illiad reveals the conflicts of the warrior-ethic in Greek culture; Shakespeare’s King Lear explores the meanings and values attached to kingship and fatherhood in Elizabethan England; Eliot’s Middlemarch investigates the relation between individual action for change and societal inertia in Victorian England. 2 What can American literature of the twentieth century tell us about ourselves today? Among other things, it can throw into contemporary focus a very traditional American concern; the relationship between the individual and the group. From F. □. Matthiessen's portrait of American Renaissance writers as literary revolutionaries committed to exploring the possibilities of a self-expression inspired by the lack of a specifically American literary tradition, to Donald Pease’s recent reconsideration of the motives of American Renaissance writers in terms of their desire for community and continuity, critics of American literature have discussed the individual and the group as more or less discrete entities, often placing them in a polarized opposition. I start with a different assumption about the relation between the individual and the group. They are not discrete entities, and their relatedness is more than interactive: the individual and the group are mutually constitutive. As Louis Althusser has explained, in order for any social system to survive, its conditions of production must be reproduced in the individual psyche. This task is accomplished by ideology: CTlhe category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but . onlu . insofar . as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects. (171) 3 That is, subjects are "aiways-already interpellated by ideology” C17G). This perspective problematizes the relation between the individual and the group because it doesn’t let us treat them as autonomous, discrete entities but, instead, focuses our attention on their dialectical relationship, on the ways in which they inhabit and define each other. How do the individual and the group inhabit and define each other in contemporary American society? Or, in Althusser’s terms, how are the conditions of production in contemporary American society reproduced in the individual subject? To answer this question, we must reflect upon the nature and importance of the commodity; for, in a free- enterprise, consumer society such as ours, conditions of production rest largely upon relations among commodities. A commodity, by definition, has value not in terms of what it can do (use value), but in terms of the money or other commodities it can be traded for (exchange value) or in terms of the prestige and social status its ownership confers (sign-exchange value).1 For example. Jay Gatsby owns a well-stocked, expensive library. Its use value consists of the vast amount of information contained in its volumes, the learning it can impart to readers. Its 1 Karl Marx’s analysis of the commodity is, of course, responsible for the distinction between use value and exchange value. French political economist Jean Baudrillard has extended Marx’s discussion to include sign-exchange value, a non-material but important form of exchange value. 4 exchange value consists of the money Gatsby could gat if he sold it. Its sign-exchange value consists of the prestige

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