Copyright by Todd David Onderdonk 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Todd David Onderdonk certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: I, Modernist: Male Feminization and the Self-Construction of Authorship in the Modern American Novel Committee: _____________________________ Phillip Barrish, Supervisor _____________________________ Evan Carton _____________________________ Mia Carter _____________________________ Brian Bremen _____________________________ Janet Staiger I, Modernist: Male Feminization and the Self-Construction of Authorship in the Modern American Novel by Todd David Onderdonk, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2005 Acknowledgements I would acknowledge the mentors who first acknowledged me as an aspiring critic at the University of Texas at Austin—my director, Phil Barrish, and committee members, Evan Carton and Mia Carter, who, in my first years of grad school, seemed to believe in me more than I did in myself. They were my models of conscience, intellectual rigor and humane values, and without their encouragement and insights this dissertation would never have been begun, much less completed. I would particularly thank my director, Phil Barrish, for his compassion, heroic tact, and intellectual engagement with this project. His lectures for a sophomore lit course (in which I was a teaching assistant) inspired my interest in identity as an area of cultural contestation and political possibility. Committee members Brian Bremen and Janet Staiger have been similarly generous and collegial mentors whose comments on drafts of this project were both demanding and heartening, and whose interests and expertise were crucial to the dissertation’s development. In the English department, Michael Winship, Wayne Lesser, and (especially) Mary Blockley were generous with their time and supportive of the project, and I was also buoyed by the savvy and good will of graduate office coordinators Cristina Zambrano and Kevin Carney. Of colleagues, my friend Julie Sievers helped me see what conscientious scholarship looked like—and her critiques and comments helped me divine what my own scholarship was all about. For kindnesses un-repaid, I’d also like to thank colleagues (and iv email victims) Eric Lupfer, David Barndollar, Chris LeCluyse, Ben Fischer, Allison Perlman, Vim Pasupathi, Carol Blosser, Scott Blackwood, Vince Lozano, Sue Mendelsohn, and all of my colleagues at the University Writing Center, where I found community as I finished this dissertation. Finally and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge, with love, my wife Anne, whose understanding, many sacrifices, and intellectual and emotional support have made this dissertation possible—and inspired me to try to be a better person. v I, Modernist: Male Feminization and the Self-Construction of Authorship in the Modern American Novel Publication No. ________ Todd David Onderdonk, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Phillip Barrish An unexplored peculiarity of the male modernist novel is the frequency with which we find some version of the author himself in its pages, speaking, thinking and experiencing. Diagnosing this tendency as a symptom of cultural strain, this dissertation analyzes literary self-constructions in the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison. These key modernists, plagued by anxieties about manhood, race and the literary marketplace, used their works as implicit self-portraiture to suggest their own achievement of exclusive forms of masculine authorship. Central to this aim is the use of author surrogates, first-person narrators or protagonists who evoke the author himself in the act of attaining “literary manhood,” a form of masculine identity distinguished not by physical or sexual dominance, but by intellectual and emotional superiorities. Yet the surrogate attains these qualities through shocking humiliations and defeats; he is wounded and laid low by mediocrity, by women, “lesser” men, and by modern life itself. Critics have argued that so many feminized protagonists were a sign that modern men felt threatened by the rise of women in the public sphere. But male vi woundedness—even to the point of castration—emerges in this study as the very condition of modern authorship. As Hemingway wrote, the true artist “impersonally” turned his feminization into art: “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist.” Scientifically turning “damned hurts” into difficult new forms of modern knowledge, modernists redressed cultural and professional anxieties by converting trauma into intellectual mastery, agency, and social authority. To privilege certain traits, however, is to reject others. The epistemological victories modernists attained through their defeats rely on a repudiation of the “feminine,” whether portrayed in women, in male homosexuals, or in racial others. This study thus implicates highly influential concepts of modern authorship with broader cultural attitudes toward race, gender and ethnicity, investigating a crucial node of aesthetics, epistemology and identity politics at the heart of the modern novel. vii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………….……………...1 Chapter 1: …………………………………………………………….……….….....46 The Great Nick: Authorship, Epistemology, and Fitzgerald as “Recovering Romantic’ in The Great Gatsby. Chapter 2: ………………………………………………………………….…….....95 “Bitched”: Feminization, Identity and the “Hemingwayesque” in The Sun Also Rises Chapter 3: …………………………………………………….………………..…..128 “One Man Alone”: Agency and Collectivism in To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls Chapter 4: …..………………………………………………………………....…..167 “The Unseen Seer: Vision, Knowledge and Phallic Reversals in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Bibliography: ……………………………………………………....……….……..216 Vita: ………………………………………………………………………………..225 viii INTRODUCTION: In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), budding modernist Stephen Daedalus advances a theory of literary forms prizing, above all, artistic “impersonality.” Lowest in Stephen’s hierarchy is the lyrical form, that “simplest verbal gesture of an instant of emotion . such as ages ago cheered on the man who . dragged stones up a slope.” The epic form, in which the artist “broods upon himself as the center of an epical event,” represents the achievement of some intellectual distance from the lyric form, but the artist’s personality is nevertheless still present, “flowing round . the persons and the action like a vital sea.” Highest, for Stephen, is the dramatic form, achieved when “the personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood, and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.” A logic of purification ennobles this artistic achievement: “The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” 1 Whether or not this promulgation represents the views of the more mature Joyce who created him, Stephen does articulate what has long been considered a defining tenet of “modern” literary representation, and not just in drama (Joyce was, of course, a frustrated playwright), but in narrative prose. Like the god of creation, the story goes, the 1 modern author no longer seems to intrude in the world he has created. This change in representation completed a 19th century shift away from impossibly omniscient narrators, the direct address to the “Gentle Reader,” and above all, heavy-handed literary moralizing. As Wayne Booth has argued in The Rhetoric of Fiction, “showing,” was displacing “telling” as a normative mode of authorship.2 Meanings were not to be explained but dramatized, left for the reader to unearth. But let us look again at this passage, for Stephen’s image of the “impersonal” artist, “paring his fingernails,” also suggests a high degree of affectation, a posture of seeming nonchalance disguising a deep and inevitably personal engagement and deliberation. Indeed, the very casualness of the pose calls this male loiterer to our attention. Could it be that the goal of Stephen’s modernist aesthetic is not self-effacement at all, but self-display? Might not an ethic of “impersonality” covertly function to glorify rather than suppress the authorial self? This question is compounded by the frequency with which we find some version of the male modernist author himself in the pages of his novel, speaking, thinking and experiencing. Besides the Joycean Stephen Daedalus in Portrait and Ulysses, there is also the “Hemingwayesque” Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), labeled “Hem” even in late drafts of the novel, and like his creator, an American journalist in Paris who likes to fish and drink and watch bullfights in Pamplona. In The Great Gatsby (1925), there is Nick Carraway, who like Fitzgerald, comes from a family of “prominent, well-to-do people” in a “middle-western city” (Fitzgerald was from St. Paul), remembers