Disability Ecology: Re-Materializing U.S. Fiction from 1890-1940 By Joshua Kupetz A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor June Howard, Co-Chair Professor David T. Mitchell, Co-Chair, George Washington University Professor Tobin A. Siebers (Chair, Deceased) Professor Paul N. Edwards Emeritus Professor Alan Wald Professor Patricia Yaeger (Deceased) If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similar in shape to their own. Xenophanes © Jonathan Joshua Kupetz 2016 Dedication For Shana, Edith, and Oscar ii Acknowledgements I first learned of disability studies from K. Wendy Moffat, my mentor and colleague in the Department of English at Dickinson College, who brought to my attention the conference “Disability Studies and the University” hosted by Emory University in 2004. At that conference, I was introduced to a discipline that has changed my life’s path. I was also introduced to Tobin Siebers, my late mentor and dissertation chair. If not for Wendy’s encouragement, I would not have met Tobin; if not for meeting Tobin, I would not have applied to Michigan; if not for Michigan, I would have missed the great pleasure of working with passionate and engaged professors like Lucy Hartley, John Whittier-Ferguson, Gabrielle Hecht, and Robert Adams, as well as the brilliant colleague-comrades Jina Kim, Jenny Kohn, and Liz Rodrigues. And if not for stockpiling years of Tobin’s stern encouragement—typically prompted by Jill Greenblatt Siebers, his wife—I may not have finished this project after losing both Patsy Yaeger and him. I miss them both so much, and I am grateful that I can hear their voices each time I find them on the page. Many people encouraged me to pursue the PhD at Michigan, and I would like to thank Mark Winokur, David Glimp, and Jeffrey N. Cox from the English Department at iii the University of Colorado for their investment in my scholarship and support in my application. I would like to offer the most profound thanks (what is called in the Star Wars universe a “life debt”) to my committee members, Alan Wald and Paul N. Edwards, and my co-chairs, David T. Mitchell and June Howard. Alan has been a champion of my work since I first became his student. Whereas Tobin preferred to interact from an emotional arm’s length, Alan has provided both the critical attention and the collegial warmth that an aspiring PhD candidate hopes to find in graduate school. And although Paul first wondered about his contribution to the project, the specificity and precision of his criticism continues to make me a better writer and thinker. I aspire to be as committed and gifted a teacher as he. When you lose a dissertation chair who is a world-renowned, field-defining scholar in your discipline—as well as your friend—you rarely have the opportunity to fill that vacancy with someone of equal measure. Unless, of course, you can call upon David T. Mitchell. From a space of sheer good will, David has given my work the most careful scrutiny and has brought my disability scholarship up to date. His criticism is frank, direct, and tremendously useful. While no one could replace Tobin, I can say that after more than a year of working with David, no one could replace him, either. This project would be vastly inferior had David not put a steadying hand on the tiller. Finally, June Howard has been nothing short of a miracle, and to her I owe, as Springsteen says, “debts no honest man can pay.” When Tobin died, I scheduled a meeting with her to seek advice about how to move forward. Before I could ask, she immediately said, “if you are here to ask for my help, I will do anything I can.” She iv endured many early meetings in which I was petulant, self-important, and frustrated, and I see those meetings now as moments when I was negotiating my grief more than the direction of dissertation chapters. I’m fairly certain she knew that well before I did, and I thank her for the generosity and the lesson in mentorship. June has challenged my thinking in so many productive ways that I will be long in unraveling them. I would also like to thank administrators and staff in the Department of English, especially Scott Lyons and Daniel Hack, Directors of Graduate Studies who scavenged resources to bring David aboard and who provided compassionate guidance after Tobin’s death. And I would be completely remiss if I did not thank Jan Burgess, Lisa Curtis, Linda Dietert, and Senia Vasquez, whose expertise and patience have helped me negotiate the practicalities of the program, find fellowships, and sustain benefits as funding bounced between units and departments. Special thanks go to Carol Ann Johnston, Martha Porter Sellers Chair of Rhetoric and the English Language, who has talked me through various points in my argument and recommended a new way to pitch my ideas. Additional thanks go to Mark J. Madigan, Professor of English and Communications at Nazareth College, who offered expertise on the literary history of Willa Cather’s “The Profile” included in chapter four; Scott Eric Kaufmann, whose dissertation Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910 helped focus what were the preliminary questions I was trying to ask in chapter three and whose generous correspondence helped me along the path to answering them; Isaac Gerwitz, who curates the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and Anne Garner, for their assistance in research on Kerouac’s aesthetic philosophy, especially Anne’s many trips to my table where she would say, “I thought v you might be interested in…” and then show me something extraordinary; and Steve Ennis, Director, and the entire staff at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin for a wonderful week of research that has informed this study and will shape projects to come. Dear baristas of Zingerman’s South Side, I am forever at your service. Lastly, I would like to thank a dear friend and family. William Dickey, my close friend since the sixth grade, set an example by starting a PhD program in English when we were already in our thirties. We have taken care of each other from a distance as we both negotiated our candidacies, and I congratulate him on his recent promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure at Juniata College. I would like to thank my mother, Michele Fleming, for decades of love and support. Growing up where and when I did, attending college was not a foregone conclusion, and my sister and I are among the first-generation of college students in our extended family. She has supported my curiosity and hunger to learn since I sat on her lap memorizing the digestive system while she studied to become a nurse. I would also like to thank my sister, Tabatha Griffin, and my nieces Julia and Sophia, who have been so supportive—the Minié ball that sits on my desk comes from Julia, who listened patiently to my explanation of new Civil War ordinance, and the love that Sophia has gone to great lengths to bring to Ann Arbor is, I’m sure, beyond her own estimation. Finally, I would like to thank Shana, my wife, and Edith and Oscar, our children. Shana, thank you for taking on so many of my responsibilities so that I could finish this project and realize a dream, admittedly a threadbare one compared to the dream I live as your husband, partner, and friend. I am difficult sailing in the best weather, and this vi project has brought many rough waters. I learn from you every day, and I am the luckiest. Edith and Oscar, thank you for enduring all the hours I have spent behind a closed door at home, and I promise, cross my heart, that I was always thinking of what those hours will mean for you, for us, another turn or two down the road. You’re in for many more “daddy days” very soon. The three of you are my head and my heart, and whatever good I am, you’ve made me. vii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract x INTRODUCTION Returning to Bodies: Disability, Ecology, and Literary Disability 1 Disability as a Material-Semiotic Object 4 Disability and Genre as Acts of Social En(crip)tion 7 Cripping Literary Disability Studies: The Death of the Distant Reader 12 Organization of the Study 20 CHAPTER ONE Disability, Subjects, Ecology 25 A Story of “When We Lived Wrong” 25 The Matter of Disability and Other Disability Matters 33 Crip/Queer Phenomenology under the Sign of Disability Ecology 43 Subjects without End: Human and Nonhuman Actors in Literary Disability Narrative 50 Better Living as Chemistry: “Mutable Substance Had no Final Shape” 57 CHAPTER TWO The Spectacular Banality of Literary Disability 63 “You are making him, and he will be a monster” 63 The Disability Effect 70 American Literature Gets “Real” about Disability 83 The Ordinary-Extraordinary: Disability as Spectacular Banality in William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes 89 Caught between the Social and the Material: Two Views of Disability in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition 102 “It’s about what nobody talks of—much” 117 CHAPTER THREE Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Crip Gesture of Naturalism 122 viii Nurturing “Nature”: The Production of Literary Biopolitical Inferiority 122 The Naturalist Thematic 126 The Disabled Face of Degeneracy 133 American Literary Naturalism and the Biopolitical Aesthetics of Human Disqualification 141 Atavism