INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter 6ce, while others may be from aity type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality9” black 6” x and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE SPATIAL DISCOURSE OF REALISM AND MODERNISM IN AMERICAN FICTION, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND POETRY A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Richard Scott Kelley Norman, Oklahoma 1997 UMI Number: 9728707 UMI Microform 9728707 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. Ail rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Richard Scott Kelley 1997 THE SPATIAL DISCOURSE OF REALISM AND MODERNISM IN AMERICAN FICTION, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND POETRY A Dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY 'd Schleifer Robert Con Davis T| Henry McDonald Nancy M. West Daimd Levy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, and especially Ron Schleifer, RC Davis, and Henry McDonald, for their close supervision and enthusiasm over the long course of this project. I also thank Dan McRaniels for reading and commenting on earlier portions of this study and for sharing his clever understanding of Lefebvre and social space. For their unconditional love, encouragement, and support, I owe the most significant debt to my family. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction: Crane's Maaaie and the Place of Everyday Life in Realism and Modernity........................... 1 II. The Spatial Practice of William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes....................................... 38 III. Consuming the Social Space of "The Other Half": Realism and the Production of Consensual Knowledge in Jacob Riis's Tenement Studies...................................... 85 TV. "To Look and Yet Go Beyond That Look": Dissonant Realism in the Ellis Island Portraits of Lewis Hine............. 143 V. Reforming Realism, Forming Modernism: The Supreme Fiction of Space in Wallace Stevens........................... 192 WORKS CITED.......................................... 257 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. Jacob A. Riis, "The Mulberry Bend." The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 114. Museum of the City of New York................................................. 86 Fig. 2. Jacob A. Riis, "Thompson Street 'Black and Tan Dive.'" The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 162. Museum of the City of New York .................................... 115 Fig. 3. Jacob A. Riis, "Poverty Gap Family." The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 154. Museum of the City of New York. ...116 Fig. 4. Jacob A. Riis, "Italian Mother and Her Baby in Jersey Street." The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 157. Museum of the City of New York............................... 118 Fig. 5. Jacob A. Riis, "Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement— 'Five Cents a Spot.'" The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 155. Museum of the City of New York ................. 127 Fig. 6. Jacob A. Riis, "An All-Night Two-Cent Restaurant in 'The Bend.'" Also titled "Bandit's Roost, In a Stale-Beer Dive in Cellax." The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 104. Museum of the City of New York............................... 128 Fig. 7. Jacob A. Riis, "Mulberry Park Bend, 1900." The Jacob A. Riis Collection # 457. Museum of the City of New York................................................ 135 Fig. 8. "Types of Immigrants." Charities 12.6 (February 6, 1904)............................................... 161 Fig. 9. Lewis W. Hine, "Jews at Ellis Island." Collection of Walter and Naomi Rosenblum. Reproduced courtesy Walter Rosenblum by George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography.......................................... 167 Fig. 10. Lewis W. Hine, "Joys and Sorrows of Ellis Island, 1905." Gelatin silver print. Courtesy George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography.................... 172 Fig. 11. Lewis W. Hine, "Albanian Woman, Ellis Island, 1905." Gelatin silver print. Gelatin Silver Print. Courtesy George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography.......178 Fig. 12. Lewis W. Hine, "Elderly Jewish Immigrant, Ellis Island, 1905." Gelatin silver print. Courtesy George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography....... 184 Fig. 13. Lewis W. Hine, "Young Russian Jewess, Ellis Island, 1905." Gelatin silver print. Courtesy George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography.................... 185 VI ABSTRACT This Study establishes a discursive framework for reading a continuity in how realist fiction, social documentary photography, and modernist poetry represent social space. The work of French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, provides the basis for spatially-informed readings of the fiction of Stephen Crane, the social documentary photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, and the modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens. Lefebvre's analysis of the spatial subtext of modern urban social reality, in particular its conceptual, perceptual, and communal spheres of influence, helps reveal a pattern that cuts across the realist and modernist text's representations of space: the attempt to create or discover a cohesive spatial environment at a time of great social, cultural, and technological transformation in America. The first three chapters establish the principles and methods underlying the spatial practice of realism. In Crane's Maaaie. A Girl of the Streets. Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Riis's How the Other Half Lives, social environment is comprehensible only insofar as its ideational substructure (conceived space) corresponds to that which can be visually represented (perceived space). Chapter four reads the "cognitive dissonance" in Hine's Ellis Island photographic portraits as a transition to modernism seen through Hine's practice of drawing the viewer into the traditionally transient social space of southern and eastern European immigrants. Chapter five charts, in Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other poems, the emergence of a modernist poetics of social space. Abstraction and change, as the social conditions of realism, become for Stevens the ineluctable first and second principles of modernism. Abstraction, change, and pleasure thus inform the aesthetic principles of Stevens's modernism as social fields able to re-articulate the discourse and daily life practice of space. Vll Chapter One Introduction: Crane's Maaaie and the Place of Everyday Life in Realism and Modernity When Stephen Crane, a little more than a century ago, embarked on what would be a fruitless search for a publisher for his first major work of fiction, Maaaie. A Girl of the Streets (1893), the author soon found himself living out the fate of his heroine: wandering the streets in search of a "buyer" for his wares, betrayed by an establishment that had formed him yet cruelly turned against him, and outcast because of his (novel's) overindulgence in sensory experience. That Maaaie's rejection by the major New York publishing houses mirrors its protagonist's rejection by the culture of the Bowery is more than a case of art becoming life; it suggests the consequences of the failure to meet the expectations of established codes of conduct. While Crane was able to keep Maaaie alive by adopting a pseudonym, excising the novel's profanity, and raising the funds to publish it privately, Maggie is unable to rewrite her tarnished past or to find financial sanctuary, and throws herself into the East River in despair. What codes of conduct did the two Maggies violate that caused them to be ostracized by and exorcised from the culture that produced them? As Forum editor John D. Barry wrote to Crane upon seeing the manuscript, the novel closely approaches the morbid and the morbid is always dangerous. [0]ne ought always to bear in mind that literature is an art, that effect, the effect upon the reader, must always be kept in view by the artist and as soon as that effect approaches the morbid, the unhealthful, the art becomes diseased. It is the taint in the peach. (2-3) In effect, Barry charged Crane with the sin of ignoring the interests of his audience, of drawing readers into the slum and then failing to offer evidence of their presence and positive