Creating Realities: Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865-1929 9783839447994

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Erhan Şimşek Creating Realities

American Culture Studies  | Volume 25

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Erhan Şimşek (Dr.) teaches at Bielefeld University. His research interests include American literature, literary theory, and composition studies.

Erhan ŞimŞek

Creating Realities Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865–1929

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: The Flatiron Building (Fuller Building) in Manhattan, New York City, c. 1903 (Author: unknown); Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division #LC-USZ62-101814 Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4799-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4799-4 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447994

Contents

Acknowledgments | 7 Introduction | 9 1. The Loss of Reality in Late Nineteenth-Century America | 33 2. Business in American Romance and Realism | 47

2.1 Didactic and Satirical Business in American Romance | 49 2.2 American Realism: An Aesthetics of Orientation | 59 2.3 Business in the Works of Early Realists | 76 3. The Realist Business in The Rise of Silas Lapham | 91

3.1 W. D. Howells: The Search for Orientation | 93 3.2 Orienting Business in The Rise of Silas Lapham | 109 4. The Naturalist Business in The Financier | 131

4.1 American Naturalism: An Aesthetics of Scandal | 133 4.2 Theodore Dreiser: The Search for Intensity | 158 4.3 “Uncivilizing” Business in The Financier | 178 5. Business in American Modernism | 199

5.1 American Modernism: An Aesthetics of Subjectivity | 201 5.2 Subjectivizing Business in The Great Gatsby | 216 Conclusion | 225 Works Cited | 237

Acknowledgments

It has been a long and challenging journey. My path to this book began in the early 2010s, when I was a young graduate student of English and American Studies in Germany. Whilst attending seminars in Heidelberg and Berlin, I realized that business could be an important tool in understanding American culture. In the subsequent years, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the topic, which I submitted to the Faculty of Modern Languages at Heidelberg University in August 2016. The book at hand is a revised version of my dissertation. Over these years, I received the help of various people and several institutions from near and far. Their assistance allowed me to complete this study and nurtured me as a person. Firstly, I would like to note the thoughtful assistance and invaluable support I received from several scholars. I am indebted to my supervisor, Dietmar Schloss, for his generous supervision, patience and enthusiasm throughout my graduate years in Heidelberg. I would like to thank Margit Peterfy for evaluating my dissertation as the second reader. An unfailing friend and mentor, Sherry Föhr, has been a key source of inspiration and awe. I would like to thank her for her critical acumen and unwavering help in her role as director of the Writing Resources Center at Heidelberg University over the years. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I benefited from discussions I had with Nicholas Bromell and Ruth Jennison. John Stifler fostered my interest in fictions of business and opened up original and stimulating ways of approaching literature. I was fortunate to receive encouragement from David Fleming, whose expertise in composition and rhetoric broadened my intellectual horizons. Parts of this research project were presented at various conferences convened by the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle 3 and the Center for North American Studies (EHESS) in Paris, the Institute of North American Studies at King’s College London, the American Literature Association in Washington DC, and the English Graduate Organization at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and at various doctoral colloquiums at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies

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(HCA). I am indebted to all participants who shared their ideas and views on the topic. I would like to extend my gratitude to the institutions that supported me in numerous ways. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies proved a fruitful venue for my research project. I would like to thank Manfred Berg, Tobias Endler, Günter Leypoldt, Wilfried Mausbach, Anja Schüler, Anne Sommer, Martin Thunert and other faculty members and staff for their assistance throughout my studies at the HCA. The Akademisches Auslandsamt at Heidelberg University arranged the opportunity for me to study and carry out research in the US. At the Department of English at UMASS Amherst, faculty members and staff provided a welcoming atmosphere and a productive environment. Librarians at Heidelberg University, the Five College Consortium, Harvard University and the Boston Public Library helped me find my way through stacks and various collections. I gratefully acknowledge the stipend I received from the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung that allowed me to spend two semesters at UMASS Amherst. The Ghaemian Foundation awarded me with grants that not only enabled me to attend a conference in London but also to carry out research at several libraries in Boston. I am indebted to many friends for their unflagging support. I owe much gratitude to Jesper Ruben and Sarah Andersen who not only made my stay in Amherst delightful and a place to thrive but also helped me in ways that I could not have imagined. Çağatay Çapar and Peker Milas made my stay in Amherst a gratifying and rewarding one. In Heidelberg, Heike Jablonski, Dmitry Khesin, Thomas Kull, Hilal Şan, and several others witnessed the completion of my dissertation (patiently!) and shared their enthusiasm in times of hopelessness. Stefan Weger has encouraged me, comforted me, and accepted me as I am. His friendship has left a mark on me as a person. Nicole Schirmer kept me sane, kept me stable, and kept me going, for which I am deeply grateful. I am much obliged to my uncle, Alişan Özdemir, for being there whenever I needed help. My brothers, Mustafa and Ersin, have been unconditional supporters of my endeavors in my personal, social and academic life. The travels I undertook with them shaped me in ways that I am still discovering. I am indebted to my mother, Memduha, and my father, Sabri, for their untiring support and patience during my studies. I owe them much more than these few words of gratitude can express.

Introduction

In January 1925, Calvin Coolidge remarked, “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.” When he said that, he was not making an argument, but was defining the daily lives of Americans from all walks of life. In July 1929, a few months before the notorious Black Tuesday that marked the start of the Great Depression, American historian James Truslow Adams took Coolidge’s definition one step further. He stated that America “has come to be almost wholly a business man’s civilization.” Instead of feudalism, aristocracy and other social institutions that set standards of civilization as in England, “a business man’s standard of values has become that of our civilization at large” (10, 15). In the absence of aristocratic institutions, businessmen became the aristocrats that the public looked up to, envied, and imitated. Americans showed business off as an activity worthy of pride and imitation, as Benjamin Franklin emphasizes in several instances in his autobiography.1 Accordingly, business dominated the public sphere: even Tocqueville saw that “Americans carr[ied] their businesslike qualities” into “agriculture” and “other pursuits” in their social activities (168).

1

In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin illustrates the pride he takes in his business activities and the virtues they bring by saying, “In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman, I took care not only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances of the Contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting, a Book, indeed, sometimes debauch’d me from my Work; but that was seldom, snug, and gave no Scandal: and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a Wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem’d an industrious thriving young Man, and paying duly what I bought, the Merchants who imported Stationary solicited my Custom, others propos’d supplying me with Books, and I went on swimmingly” (54).

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In fact, Coolidge points to a deeper truth about the dominance of business in his speech. He says that Americans “are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” More than an external economic activity, business was an important concern for Americans. As much as they were engaged in business, they were also preoccupied with it. Adams agrees with Coolidge in saying that “most of the energy, ability, and ambition of the country has found its outlet, if not its satisfaction, in business” (14). In other words, as an endeavor that could bring respect and envy to its practitioners, business pervaded the American psyche. As George Washington prophesied, “commerce” had a deep influence not only on “society in general” but also on “human manners” (194).2 No one who observed the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could deny that the United States was socially and mentally a nation of business par excellence. Notwithstanding the fundamental omnipresence of business, American writers were not always open to incorporating it as a theme into their works. In fact, this pervasiveness obliterated authors’ interest in the topic for the majority of American literary history. Before the 1860s, business was not a popular theme among American writers. Occasional works that focused on business appeared throughout the colonial period and sporadically thereafter, but business did not become a popular theme until the 1860s. Until the Civil War, business was like an imperceptible lens behind the eyes, through which American writers observed the nation in that it was pervasive and thus not explicitly articulated. In contrast, the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression saw the proliferation of business fiction: writers wrote numerous novels on different aspects of the topic ranging from farming to finance in an attempt to make the lens perceptible and converse with the reader about the topic. Except during the 1950s, when the theme of business management gained some popularity, the subsequent decades reveal the gradual fading of this concerted effort. Having lost its versatility, the topic was no

2

Thoreau summarizes this dual omnipresence of business for Americans from all walks of life by saying, “This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or seared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for business!” (347).

Introduction | 11

longer comprehensive and the second half of the twentieth century saw the publication of fictions of business only occasionally. The period between the Civil War and the Great Depression – the period of the business renaissance – stands as the only period when business was not taken for granted, but discerned, explored and debated in American literary history. This book explores the images of business in American fiction written during this period of business renaissance. In this study, I embark on a journey where I delineate the motifs of business in various literary works as well as account for their rising appeal for the writers of this period. I argue that the writers of the period utilized the motif of business because of the pragmatic possibilities the motif offered in responding to readers’ needs. In other words, the motif became useful for realists, naturalists and later for modernists through the much-needed effects it could potentially leave on the reader. A quintessentially realist work like The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) by William Dean Howells offers moral and social orientation through the motif of business. Written almost three decades later, Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) uses the world of finance to create the effects of intensity and shock. In The Great Gatsby (1925), business reveals the impossibility of accessing social and external reality in line with the communicative agenda of American modernism. From a broader perspective, the evolution of the motif of business coincides with the evolution of American literature – an evolution that becomes palpable and articulable through the motif of business. What is Business? In fact, when Coolidge called business a “concern,” he unknowingly revealed the origin of the word as well. Etymologically, there are two possible paths through which the word business could have evolved. First, in Northumbrian English, the word bisig indicated “careful, anxious, busy, occupied, diligent” and “later ‘continually employed or occupied,’ cognate with Old Dutch bezich, Low German besig.” The word bisig, which indicated a state in contrast to a pastime, later evolved to “busy.” The noun form of the word bisignes indicated “care, anxiety, occupation” (Online Etymology Dictionary). The alternative account illustrates that in the Anglo-Norman language, there were words such as bosognes, busuines, busuinnus, which indicated “busy, occupied; attentive,” among others. The Oxford English Dictionary says, “It is unlikely that there is any connection between [former word] and Anglo-Norman bosognes, besognes, busuines, etc. (plural) in the sense ‘affairs, business’ although it is possible that the two words were occasionally associated with one another.” Still, both the Germanic and the Anglo-Norman genealogy were obviously used to indicate “concern” in the beginning.

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Gradually, the word changed from expressing a mental state to adopting the meaning of occupation, profession or job. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, as early as the fourteenth century, the word business meant “A pursuit or occupation demanding time and attention; a serious employment as distinguished from a pastime,” among others. In time, the word combined the meanings of occupation and trade – the occupation of trade. As early as the late 1400s, the word connoted commercial activity. For instance, the OED lists a sentence written in 1478 (quoted with the original punctuation): “I wyll ye com home,..for there schall be no besynese at Caleys thys marte tyme.” In other words, the word business started as “mental busyness” and later adopted the meaning of profession, and lastly the idea of commerce as a profession. When Coolidge delivered his talk in 1925, he was surely unaware of these implications, but his statement unwittingly recalls the origin of the word. Today, The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than twenty-three meanings for the word business. The meaning that was probably the most popular not only during Coolidge’s time but also in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries is “Trade and all activity relating to it, esp. considered in terms of volume or profitability; commercial transactions, engagements, and undertakings regarded collectively; an instance of this. Hence more generally: the world of trade and commerce.” Simply put, in today’s world, business means, primarily, commercial activity. Accordingly, business literature or literature of business refers to fictional works that have commercial activity or institutions and people who deal with commercial activities such as companies and businessmen as dominant themes in their plots.3 Novels like The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells and The Financier by Theodor Dreiser are good examples of this genre: while the former novel represents a businessman involved in transactions around a paint business, the latter describes the banking and finance world of Philadelphia after the Civil War through the eyes of a financier. What is Function? The discrepancy between the omnipresence of business in American life and its fluctuating representation in fiction reveals that there is no referential relationship between literary texts and actual realities – between actual business and business-

3

Interestingly, business fiction (keizai shōsetsu) and industry fiction (kigyo shōsetsu) are quite popular genres in Japanese literature. See Tamae K. Prindle, Made in Japan and Other Japanese “Business Novels,” M. E. Sharpe, 1990.

Introduction | 13

men and their image in literature. Rather, the representations of business are constructs. This was the case even in the period in which fictions of business proliferated in the US. In 1898, Henry James said that business is “as special and occult [as] Arctic exploration” (Literary Criticism 655). Like all “American things […] it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination” (Theory of Fiction 46). James not only considered business obscure and esoteric, but he also needed “a really grasping imagination” to write about business – crucially, in a period when business organizations were booming in the American economy. Seemingly paradoxical at first glance, James’s statement clearly confirms that writers did not incorporate the representation of business to mirror the social or mental reality mimetically, but constructed their texts independent from actual realities. Rather than duplication, writers such as William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser were engaged in Darstellung, which “brings about something that hitherto did not exist as a given object” (Iser, Prospecting 236).4 Put differently, writers did not merely represent business, but constructed, performed, staged and figured it as a literary motif. This lack of referentiality did not amount to arbitrary images though: fictional businesses had a direction and followed specific patterns. I argue that the images of business were constructed in line with the potential aesthetic functions these fictions of business serve. The concept of function – the function(s) of a literary work – is an underdefined concept, particularly in the Anglo-American scholarly tradition. Since it is a crucial concept for my study, let me briefly explain what I mean by the term before delving into the motif and its affective functions. Literary works have social and political functions. For instance, American literature at the turn of the century was dominated by naturalist novels which drew attention to specific social causes. Upton Sinclair was able to impress President Theodore Roosevelt with his reformist novels: after reading The Jungle, the President wrote, “radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist” (qtd. in Auchincloss 50). Similar to Sinclair’s novel, many other influential works of fiction have led to social and political changes. Most of the time, however, it is empirically impossible to trace the social and political consequences literary works lead to. And these concrete social and political functions that literary works serve as in the case of The Jungle are not the functions I mean. Rather, function denotes a heuristic category in this study. To say that a work of fiction has functions is to assert hypothetically that it has a semantic Funktionspotential:

4

In this study, Darstellung and “representation” are used interchangeably. For more information, see Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

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an aesthetic potential of effects that can be “concretized” or “realized”5 by the reader.6 Funktionspotential is not a particularly common term in literary scholarship. Nor is substantiating the semantic and aesthetic functions of a literary work a mainstream approach among literary scholars. Exploring the idea’s roots in literary theories helps to illustrate the attractiveness of the business motif. Eagleton states that we can “very roughly periodize the history of modern literary theory in three stages: a preoccupation with the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); an exclusive concern with the text (New Criticism); and a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years” (64). The aesthetic functions of a literary work have to do with the latter – the effects of a literary work on the reader. It is commonly agreed that literary texts “do” something: they trigger emotions, create reactions and leave an indescribable effect on readers. Among literary scholars, audience-oriented literary theories such as reader and response criticism and reception aesthetics (Rezeptionsästhetik) are utilized to unveil these effects of a literary work on its readers. The fact that there are multiple theories exploring the functions of literary texts on readers is telling: what happens to readers during the process of aesthetic experience and how they receive and realize a literary work is not easy to discern. In fact, just like the social or political consequences literary works lead to, the exact effects a literary work on readers is difficult to trace and translate. Readers’ actual aesthetic experience is unique: even though they read the same literary work, they go through different aesthetic experiences due to their unique histories and perceptions. Notwithstanding this difficulty, it is possible to come up with assumptions and hypotheses about the potential functions of a literary text – about what a literary text “does” to its readers – by exploring the mechanics of its reception.

5

According to Roman Ingarden, the reader “concretizes” the places of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) while reading a literary text. For a discussion of concretization, see Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, Northwestern UP, 1979. Wolfgang Iser repeats a similar but a more nuanced idea when he argues that the reader “realizes” the indeterminacies (Leerstellen) in the process of reading. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. For a comparison of these two terms, see Peter V. Zima, The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory, Athlone Press, 1999, pp. 55-80.

6

For a detailed discussion of the concept of function, see Roy Sommer, “Funktionsgeschichten. Überlegungen zur Verwendung des Funktionsbegriffs in der Literaturwissenschaft und Anregungen zu seiner terminologischen Differenzierung” in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, vol. 41, 2000, pp. 319-341.

Introduction | 15

Among other elements, an analysis of the interplay between a literary text and readers in particular can productively expose the functions of a literary text. As Lane says for reception aesthetics, “neither text nor reader has autonomy: the text depends on the reader for its meaning to be realized, and the meaning produced by the reader is controlled by the text” (282). If the reader and the text are dependent on each other, then an analysis of this interaction is all the more helpful in hypothesizing about the potential functions of literary works. Having emerged in the 1970s in West Germany as a part of reception aesthetics, this attempt to identify the Funktionspotential of literary works has been systematized in Germanspeaking countries as Funktionsgeschichte – “history of the changing functions of literature” (Fluck, “Why We Need Fiction” 376). Less known outside of Germanspeaking academia, this approach offers the theoretical background through which I explain not only the emergence but also the poetics and hermeneutics of business in American fiction between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In this complex process of reception, the crucial element is the text: the unchanging textual design of a literary work gives hints about its potential functions. Unlike many reader and response critics such as Stanley Fish who emphasize the independence of the reader from the text during the process of aesthetic experience,7 scholars of reception aesthetics such as Wolfgang Iser and Winfried Fluck ascribe a pivotal role to the text in shaping the reading process and how a literary text functions. Literature, as Iser argues, “constitute[s] an organization of signifiers which do not designate a signified object, but instead designate[s] instructions for the production of the signified” (The Act of Reading 65). I agree with Iser: the reader is not free from the text in the reception process as Fish implies. However, I contend that a literary text does not have a fixed effect that is the same for all readers, either. Rather, the text operates like a rough guideline in the construction of effect, limiting the scope of aesthetic experience. In other words, although individual readers’ actual aesthetic experience is unique and thus untranslatable, the textual design of a literary work roughly outlines the contours and range of potential aesthetic experience. Iser summarizes the relationship between the text and the reader by saying, “the stars in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable” (“The Reading Process” 287), to be drawn by the reader individually. 8

7

Rather than the text, “interpretive communities” determine readers’ aesthetic experience. For more information, see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class, Harvard UP, 1980.

8

This duality, which Stanley Fish considers amorphous, was at the basis of his disagreement with Wolfgang Iser in the early 1980s. For more information, see Stanley Fish, “Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 1, 1981, pp. 2-13;

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Put differently, it is neither possible to interpret a work of literature in one single way nor in an infinite number of ways, because the textual design of a literary text limits readers’ reception to a finite range (“joining the lines”). If “stars” in a literary text limit the range of reception, it is possible to discern the possible effects literary works emanate by looking at its very textual design, where its potential functions are inscribed and prestructured. As Iser says, “the order and the formation of structures depend on the function that the text has to fulfill” (“The Current Situation of Literary Theory” 11). Function precedes the text; the author creates the text according to the effects the texts serve. Similarly, Fluck argues that in order to serve specific communicative functions, writers have “a particular organization of the text” or “a particular structure of aesthetic effect” (“Why We Need Fiction” 378). If the potential effects of a literary work are already inscribed into the text (“the stars”), it is possible to infer these functions by looking at the specific ways the literary work is structured. The components of a literary text such as its plot, subjects, themes, topics, motifs, devices, tropes, genres and other elements – the “stars” – constitute the Funktionspotential of a literary work. In other words, such components of a literary text have functions and they, in turn, shape the effects of the literary works on the readers. Significantly, the motif of business greatly shapes the potential aesthetic functions of the literary works I explore. In this study, you will read a Funktionsgeschichte of the motif of business and how the motif creates the potential aesthetic functions of these works of fiction. Uncovering what literary texts “do” to readers is an ambitious challenge and several scholars’ attempts to this end reveal the pitfalls of Funktionsgeschichte. Two major such pitfalls are the multiplicity of functions and the level of functional analysis.9 First, literary texts have multiple functions inscribed into them and affect readers in various different ways. Although the text guides and to some extent conditions the aesthetic experience, it does not determine this process. Saying that a motif or a work of fiction has one function does not exclude other functions. Rather, focusing on a motif such as business and its contribution to the functions of a literary text is a way of foregrounding the specific functions relevant to the motif and putting other potential functions of a literary work in the background. Rather than homogenizing the multiplicity of functions in literary works, my approach aims to put a “spotlight” on specific functional aspects while bracketing other aspects, which does not mean that other possible functions do not exist.

and Wolfgang Iser, “Talk Like Whales: A Reply to Stanley Fish,” Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 82-87. 9

See Sommer, p. 324.

Introduction | 17

Clearly, if the spotlight falls on other parts of a literary text, numerous other functions will emerge. Similarly, scholars of reception aesthetics tend to use the term “function” on at least three different levels without making the differences among these levels explicit. First, they explore functions of literature writ large such as the “functions of literature in the nineteenth century” or “functions of the historical novel in the antebellum period.” Works like Iser’s “Changing Functions of Literature” or Fluck’s seminal Kulturelle Imaginäre explore literature from a very broad perspective, investigating literature in general terms. The latter, for instance, explores the functions of genres such as the historical novel in American literature over a long period of time. Second, they analyze the functions of singular works, often in different periods and spaces,10 which makes a Funktionsgeschichte approach surmountable in a study. Third, scholars investigate the smaller components such as motifs and tropes within a single literary text and how these constitute the functions of a literary work. In line with his commitment to the continental tradition which tends to keep ideas and concepts amorphous, these levels often remain unmentioned and unexplored in Fluck’s abovementioned study. Nevertheless, an awareness of these latent assumptions and articulation of the differences among them are necessary to clarify the concept of “function” and to expose the potential aesthetic functions of literary texts. This study delves primarily into the last-mentioned level through its focus on the motif of business in singular literary works. Explorations at the level of the motif lead to conclusions on the other two broader levels as well: the functions of the motif of business for singular literary texts and for literary movements such as realism, naturalism and modernism. For instance, an exploration of the ineffable nature of Gatsby’s business activities reveals that the motif in the novel subjectivizes readers, leading them to their own personal realities. A deeper view into contemporary literary works demonstrates how other writers offered a similar model of individualization by using other themes. Exploring the functions of the

10 Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, for instance, became a popular book in the Eastern part of Germany right after the unification of Germany. Fluck explains the reasons for this as follows: “the temporary identification of some East Germans with the fate of the American South right after German unification when historical phenomena like the carpetbagger or the myth of a lost cause appeared as plausible concepts to make sense of present-day developments. Although the feudal social structure of the Old South and the ideology of socialist egalitarianism of the GDR are miles apart, the representation of the Old South in Gone With the Wind could thus function as host for the articulation of feelings of loss and historical defeat” (“Imaginary Space” 35-36).

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motif of business with an awareness of different functional levels and their intertwinement not only sheds light on the American literature in the period, but it also offers a way of avoiding theoretical pitfalls and ambiguities. How Do We Reveal Functions? As previously indicated, uncovering functions of literary texts is epistemologically challenging, yet not impossible. I utilize a broad and innovative variety of materials, tools, methods and texts for that end. This study explores literary texts and their interplay with the reader, the author and the dominant literary modes of the period. If, as explored above, the text shapes the Funktionspotential of a literary work, limiting the way readers’ reception range, an analysis of the text is inevitable. A close reading of the image of business in a number of singular works from the pre-Civil War period to the post-Depression period lies at the center of this study. Exploring the relationship between the motif and the plot – to be precise, the contribution of the motif to the evolution of the plot – reveals how a novel executes its pragmatic functions. In the novels I explore, the motif is what makes the plot possible in the first place. Silas Lapham’s paint business ensures his financial failure and moral rise, which offers the reader social and moral orientation; Frank’s financial activities in The Financier enables him to rise, fail and finally triumph in Philadelphia, which shocks the reader; and Fitzgerald utilizes Gatsby’s shady business activities to illustrate that there is no common reality and to subjectivize the reader. Elucidating how the motif of business evolves with the plot and thereby creates potential effects in a literary work is central to understanding the motif of business; however, the reading public – their social, cultural, economic and mental state – is also significant. If readers “concretize” a literary work, it is necessary to apprehend how they go through aesthetic experience. Writers are rarely disconnected from their readers and this was the case between the Civil War and the Great Depression as well. In fact, readers – their demands, expectations, dreams, habits and fears – had a major impact on the literary production in the period and how literary works were written. A deeper look at economic, social, cultural and mental history of the reading public in the period (as in Chapters 1 and 4) reveals unfathomable feelings of longing for various forms of reality. Business was the “real” thing: as an activity that Americans from all walks life witnessed in their daily lives, the motif was a versatile tool in compensating for the absent realities. Moreover, although “the death of the author” was announced decades ago and has been repeated by scholars of reception, if the text is the source that conditions the aesthetic experience as explored above, an investigation of how the author

Introduction | 19

composed the text and constructed the motif of business yields useful insights into its potential functions as well. Like the interplay between the text and the reader, a deeper insight into writers’ (auto)biographies and their interaction with their texts confirm the hypothesized functions of the literary works in question, including the functions of the motif of business. For instance, the motif of business in The Rise of Silas Lapham cannot be understood without understanding Howells’s personal views. As his writings reveal, his social, ethical and religious beliefs – such as his belief in the perfectibility of man – motivated him to construct his literature in order to “perfect” the reader and facilitate the process through which the reader’s true potential could be realized. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, business allows Howells to reveal what is “bad” by showing how a character confronts moral conflicts, gradually gaining moral and social integrity, to orient the reader accordingly. Likewise, Herman Melville’s biography reveals that he, in a quite modernistic fashion, distrusted general, common and shared knowledge. This made him emphasize the uniqueness of reality and knowledge in different ways in his stories. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” he criticized and even attempted to refute the universalism of transcendentalists such as Emerson. Business, for Melville, was the ideal motif to criticize transcendentalism and hence the romance tradition in “Bartleby.” Authors’ personal writings include several helpful details regarding how they came up with the idea of writing about business and more importantly, for what ends. In order to fathom what the motif of business “does,” this study sheds light on the interplay between the text and writers’ lives and “deep structures” (Eagleton 51) of their minds with a focus on their literary imageries. In addition to the text, the reading public, and the author, the particular ways through which writers interacted with dominant literary practices shaped writers’ texts and thus motifs of business profoundly. An analysis of broader literary movements such as realism, naturalism and modernism reveals that writers like Howells, Dreiser and Fitzgerald were not alone in their attempts to ascribe specific functions to their works; their contemporaries’ works trigger a similar aesthetic experience, if not always with the motif of business. Mark Twain’s regionalism, for instance, like Howells’s plots of social integration, introduces the reader characters from other parts of the country – a similar attempt at brotherhood and social gathering. If Theodore Dreiser utilizes finance in The Financier to create intensity and shock, Stephen Crane triggers a similar aesthetic experience in Maggie through the motif of broken family. From a broader perspective, this study reveals that literary movements such as realism, naturalism and modernism are concerted venues of pragmatic functions.

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American realists mainly stage bland, “middle path” realities in order to orient the reader towards an idealized social and ethical society. American naturalists also stage realities, but specifically those realities that American realists avoided, in an attempt to shock the reader through the “scandal” they bring about. Works under the rubric of American modernism, on the other hand, repudiated the possibility of a shared and common reality and attempted to induce readers to look for their own subjective reality.11 Even though literary movements are performative tendencies in flux rather than solid, tangible or reified literary constructions, there is no question that they exist. Seen in this light, such dominant literary practices help to elucidate the performative functions of literary texts,12 including the particular motifs such as business and businessmen. Detailed descriptions of the latter two – authors’ biographies and literary movements – might seem long and irrelevant at first sight; yet, they are essential in uncovering the potential functions of the motif of business and the literary works. As indicated earlier, by functions, I do not mean social or political functions but possible potential aesthetic effects of a literary text. These possible functions, however, cannot be laid bare using quantitative methods. Rather, we can come up with hypotheses about their Funktionspotential and we need evidence for strong hypotheses. Probably the most paramount evidence is the “negative” of a

11 See Winfried Fluck’s analyses of American realism and naturalism in Das Kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Geschichte des Amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900, Suhrkamp, 1997; “Declarations of Dependence: Revising Our View of American Realism” in Victorianism in the United States. Its Era and Its Legacy, edited by Steve Ickingrill and Stephen Mills, VU Press, 1992, pp. 19-34; and “Beast/Superman/Consumer: American Literary Naturalism as an Experimental Literature” in Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies, edited by Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz, Winter, 2009, pp. 199-217. For Wolfgang Iser’s understanding of modernism as “an art of reflexivity,” see The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 12 The idea of performativity was especially important for writers of the late nineteenth century. Dow describes novels such as Life in the Iron Mills, Maggie, and McTeague – key texts of the late nineteenth century – as performative texts that do not “define the world,” but stage “the appearance of something that cannot be manifest or completed, that cannot admit any final limits” (34) like other texts in the period. For more information, see “Performative Passages: Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Crane’s Maggie, Norris’s McTeague” in Twisted From the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Tennessee Studies in Literature, edited by Mary E. Papke, U of Tennessee P, 2003, pp. 23-44.

Introduction | 21

literary text: authors’ biographies and the literary movements, like the “negatives” a photo, mirrors the functions of the motif of business and literary texts. If negatives are inversed images, where the lightest objects appear darkest and the darkest objects appear lightest, looking at the negatives would help us delineate the positive image – the functions of business. In line with Iser, who says that the critic's “object should […] be not to explain a work, but to reveal the conditions that bring about its various possible effects” (The Act of Reading 18), a comprehensive analysis of the interplay between the literary text, the motif of business, authors’ biographies and literary movements is essential for blueprinting the functions of business in the American fiction in the period, thus explaining the raison d’ être of the motif. Why These Novels? This theoretical and methodological grid shapes the selection of business fictions explored in this study. Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, many novels that included business were written. However, only some left a long-lasting “afterimage,” to use another visual metaphor. That is, only some of the literary texts make a reconstruction possible by revealing information about the interplay between the text and the reader, the author and the dominant literary discourse. If components such as readers’ reactions, contemporary and later critical acclaim and scholarly interest make an analysis of the functions of business possible in the first place, it is difficult to hypothesize about works that did not make an effect on the reader by lesser-known authors whose autobiographical information is obscure and which did not play a major role in the dominant literary discourses of the period. In short, more popular and critically-acclaimed works written by relatively popular authors who shaped the literary landscape of their period pave the way for a thorough reconstruction of the functions of the motif of business by looking at the “afterimage.” The fictions of business explored in this study are the ones that have left the longest and deepest “afterimage” both on the reader and the critic. The Rise of Silas Lapham, like the Ragged Dick series, was a bestseller in the decade it was published. The novel even had a deep impact on architecture and interior design of the period, as Chapter 3 reveals. Since its publication, it has been recognized as one of the central realist novels in American literary history. Theodore Dreiser was a major American writer with a literary career spanning four decades. In ad-

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dition to its first edition in 1912, his novel The Financier was revised and published again in 1927.13 Moreover, it has been translated into several languages. The depth of the afterimage The Great Gatsby left is without question: even though the novel was not immediately successful, after World War II, it became one of the greatest and most popular novels of American literature. Americans read these novels; they have been affected by them, shaped by them and, if I may say, culturally constituted by them, which open them to analysis from a Funktionsgeschichte perspective.

13 Fifteen years later, in 1927, Dreiser revised The Financier and published a version shorter by 227 pages. This study utilizes the 1927 edition of the novel not only because it is markedly closer to the text Dreiser actually wanted to publish in the first place, but also because it was appreciated as a better novel by contemporaries as well as later readers. Even though the 1927 edition was shorter, it included new text that was not in the 1912 version. However, many of the inserted parts were not really new: they were the parts that Dreiser had in the page proofs of the 1912 edition, which were taken out in the published 1912 edition due to editorial pressure (Mulligan 585). While Dreiser could not resist editors’ demands before the publication of the novel in 1912, he was more adamant in 1927 and reinserted these original passages into the later edition of the novel. Seen from this perspective, the 1927 version of the novel arguably represents Dreiser’s original vision of the novel. Moreover, notwithstanding the fact that the 1927 edition of the novel is the only version that has been widely available in print, the later edition of the novel has been accepted as “superior to the original version” (Ziff xviii). Pizer thinks that “its fictional pace is swifter and its characterizations sharper” (Theodore Dreiser 165). Mulligan reiterates a similar idea, saying, “the plotting is swifter and the characters appear bolder” (585) in the newer edition. Accordingly, despite its positive reception among critics, the sales of the 1912 novel disappointed Dreiser and the publisher in contrast to the 1927 edition. Understandably, the economic optimism of the 1920s appreciated a powerful character overcoming financial obstacles. Furthermore, the novel appeared in Russian and German in 1928 and in Spanish in 1930, which confirm the positive reception of the later edition. From a reception aesthetics perspective, the omissions in the 1927 edition were not even crucial. Although the novel became substantially shorter in the latter version, the plot did not change much: Dreiser primarily cut the long and detailed descriptions, while the events stayed nearly the same. Accordingly, there was no great difference in the pragmatic functions the novel served, while the book became more readable. For more information on the composition of the novel, see Roark Mulligan’s comments in The Financier: The Critical Edition, U of Illinois P, 2010, pp. ix-xi and 557-646.

Introduction | 23

Why Another Book? Surprisingly, although business has always been an essential component of American life and a major motif between the Civil War and the Great Depression literature, there are surprisingly few monographs published on the motif.14 Moreover, only a few essays and articles were published. Neither the books nor shorter studies, which appeared mainly in the early decades of the Cold War, do the motif justice, though. A short chronological overview of the previous research not only demonstrates why a new monograph written without the constraints of the Cold War is justified, but it also reveals the general weaknesses and one-sidedness of recent literary scholarship on American literature in general. For most scholars, just like most authors, business was nothing special – a backdrop, not a player. Before World War II, there were only sporadic interest and hence little academic dialogue around the image of business and businessman in American fiction.15 By contrast, the few decades following the war witnessed the proliferation

14 George Lyman Kittredge elucidated the earliest American research on the image of business and businessmen in fiction in a speech entitled “The Business Man and Literature,” which he delivered before the Boston Commercial Club in 1911. Interestingly, Kittredge’s research features no American writers. Instead, he starts his discussion with piracy, which he sees as “one of the most ancient businesses among mankind” (3), its reflection in Julius Caesar’s narrative, its appearance in Nordic mythology, and its “survival in culture” until the 1910s (3). He also discusses how poets like Shakespeare and Bacon handled trade and art as a trade, and the patronage system in England. In addition to Kittredge, Vernon Louis Parrington and Granville Hicks explore the theme of business on the axis of social and political inequality and democracy. F. O. Matthiessen, on the other hand, celebrates Dreiser’s social realism “beneath the surface” (154) in his business novels. Other relevant works on the topic from pre-WWII period are as follows: John Erskine, “American Business in the American Novel.” Bookman, vol. LXXXIII, July 1931, pp. 449-457; Charles R. Walker, “Business in the American Novel.” Bookman, vol. LXVI, December 1927, pp. 401-405; and Edward E. Cassady, “The Business Man in the American Novel: 1865 to 1903.” Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1939. 15 The primary reason was that in contrast to British literature, American literature had not been established in American universities as a research field for a very long time. Even though there were courses in American literature as early as 1875, research in the field was not perceived positively by scholars of English. In fact, some scholars shared the belief that “there is no such thing” as American literature, “unless the pictorial scratchings of aborigines on stones and birch bark are to be classed as literary productions.

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of academic discussion on the topic. Nevertheless, the discussion was driven by the anxieties Cold War brought about – anxieties that prevented scholars from delving into the topic from a critical point of view and thus grasping the complexity of the motif. Americans were anxious about issues impacting the American identity: issues such as individualism, market economies, political liberalism, patriotism and communism. The vehemence of these anxieties, which eventually led to McCarthyism on the political level, also manifested itself on the cultural level in discussions of American literature. These anxieties are reflected nowhere better than the editorial of Life Magazine in 1955: Ours is the most powerful nation in the world. It has had a decade of unparalleled prosperity. […] Yet, it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it was written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty on the city dump while awaiting admission to the country poorhouse. (48)

Clearly, Americans were uncomfortable with the mismatch between an unparalleled prosperity and the “unsmiling” images of wealth, capitalism and liberal economy in American literature. In an atmosphere that was harbinger of the subsequent Red Scare, many scholars were worried that a negative view of America in American literature was playing into the hands of Soviet Russia and communism. This atmosphere made previously neglected topics such as the image of business and businessmen in American literature an important topic for discussion about American culture. Business was never “only” business: doing research about the topic almost always had broader implications about the liberal market economy, capi-

Every piece of literary work done in the English language by a man or woman born to the use of it is a part of that noble whole which we call English literature” (qtd. in Graff 211-2). As a result, early scholars of American literature were apologetic about their research and focused strongly on New England, which still had a strong cultural and intellectual connection to Britain. For instance, while drawing A Literary History of America, Wendell states that “in literary history New England is so predominant that, at least for the moment, we may neglect the other portions of the country” (28). However, even when they did research on New England, they were selective. Their research foci stood strongly against the material side of American culture, inducing them to study topics like New England idealism. This focus anti-materialism made themes such as trade and commerce unfit for their research.

Introduction | 25

talism and indirectly even communism. In an age when it was traitorous to condemn capitalism, business fiction became one of the controversial topics which scholars continuously tested against the official doctrine of liberalism. 16 Accordingly, the two decades subsequent to World War II witnessed the publication of a significant body of criticism on the motif of business. These studies reveal that critics’ anxieties soon turned into expectations and standards about the images of business and businessmen in American literature. As Henry Mumford Jones symptomatically illustrates, “businessmen are by no means the admirable creatures theory requires them to be” (21).17 Jones’s statement reveals a broader trend in the period: while business was a positive activity to many contemporary critics in the period, writers described it in rather negative terms,18 which rendered the representation “a little unrealistic” (Jones 21),19 creating misrepresentation. As Henry Nash Smith later illustrated, for critics, “It was difficult to find the elements of an acceptable code of values within the system” (“The Search for a Capitalist Hero” 86) in business novels. Accordingly, both academic and non-academic discussions revolved around the negativity of the motif in American literature in general.20

16 Interestingly, in one of the rare studies carried out on the topic in the German Democratic Republic, an important Americanist and translator of numerous American writers, Karl-Heinz Schönfelder, repeats the same pattern in his analysis. In a speech he delivered at a conference on the American novel in East Berlin in 1981, he argued that the image of businessmen in American literature in the period between Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Dreiser went from “affirmation and adoration to negation and contempt” (217). That is, to Schönfelder, while business was represented unrealistically in the beginning, writers gradually portrayed the motif more “realistically” in the course of time – realistic (and thus negative) from an anti-capitalist standpoint. 17 Originally published in Harvard Business Review, vol. 31, no. 1, January-February 1953, pp. 133-142. 18 These discussions were so powerful that Linda Barnes Gardner Jobe wrote a thesis entitled “The Businessman in the American Novel: Evidence of the Novelists’ Sympathetic Treatment” in 1970. 19 Noting this discrepancy, Robert L. Souders wrote a thesis entitled “The Successful American Business Man, 1865-1900: A Discrepancy between Image and Reality” in 1958. 20 The rising interest among students led to numerous theses on the topic in the period, such as Albert L. Lemen’s “The Business Man in the American Novel” (1941), Margaret J. Tibbets’s “The Business Man in American Literature from 1865 to 1915” (1941), Margaret Hunt’s “The Business Man As Presented in Representative American Novels

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John Chamberlain initiated the discussion by problematizing the businessman’s image in American literature as “a villainous creature” (134) in 1948. A few years later, Commager expressed the same discomfort, saying, “most authors portrayed an economic system disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to workingmen, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and morally corrupting” (16).21 Similarly, Seligman perceived the businessman in American literature as a “ruthless and rapacious tycoon, consumed by ambition and devoid of ethics” (23).22 Van R. Halsey Jr.23 called these fictional businessmen “immoral scoundrels of the worst sort” (32).24 For Ludwig von Mises, the businessman was “a barbarian, a gambler and a drunkard” (72). Such anxieties about the negative image of business and businessmen were so powerful that scholars like Jones berated writers of business fictions for their misrepresentations harshly: “if there is any calling in the world which is occupationally rife with frustration, gossip, innuendo, backbiting, back-scratching, and jealousy, it is the trade of being a writer” (21). To many critics in the 1950s and 1960s, writers who failed to represent business positively not only disqualified themselves from being good writers but also sullied their own reputations! The declining vehemence of the Cold War in the subsequent decades diminished the influence of the Red Scare, but it did not kill existing anxieties. In 1982, Emily Stipes Watts published one of the first monographs on the topic, entitled The Businessman in American Literature. In her book, she explores the image of the businessman from the pre-Colonial period to the 1980s. Notwithstanding its immense historical scope, which makes depth impossible (she devotes only a few

During the Period 1873-1918” (1952), Robert A. Kavesh’s “Businessmen in Fiction: The Capitalist and Executive in American Novels” (1955), Charles R. Lown’s “Business and the Businessman in American Drama Prior to the Civil War” (1957), Elizabeth Kahr Jacobs’s “The Business Man in the American Novel Since 1920” (1958), Donald C. Wall’s “The Concept of the Businessman in the American Novel” (1960), William J. Roach’s “Theodore Dreiser’s Fictional Treatment of the Business Man” (1960), L. P. Brown’s “W.D. Howells’ Portrayal of the American Business Man” (1961), and James H. Wood’s “The Image of the Businessman and the Conception of Success in the Modern American Businessman Novel” (1965). 21 Originally published in The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880’s, Yale UP, 1950, pp. 247-76. 22 Originally published in Fortune, vol. XLVI, no. 6, December 1952, pp. 111-126. 23 He also wrote a dissertation in 1956 entitled “The Portrait of the Businessman in Twentieth Century American Fiction” at the University of Pennsylvania. 24 Originally published in American Quarterly, vol. XI, no. 3, Fall 1959, pp. 391-402.

Introduction | 27

pages to highly complex business novels like The Rise of Silas Lapham or The Financier), it is impossible to miss the bothersome persistence of Cold War anxieties in her book. She says, “Indeed, so pervasive is this negative image of the businessman, especially in American literature, that it can be labeled a syndrome” which she calls “Scrooge syndrome” (2). Throughout her study, she explores how writers of American literature – regardless of the period – handled the motif critically. Setting “the positive values of American capitalism” (151) as the standard against which to evaluate the novels, Watts explores fictions of business and businessmen in such an anxious way that a more suitable title for her study would be “The Anti-Business Bias in American Literature.”25 In the post-Cold War period, interest in the topic continued to dwindle. Still, Watts’s 1982 study reappeared in 2004. In 2009, the Northeast Modern Language Association held a session about the businessman in literature. In 2010, the proceedings were published under the title Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature by Christa Mahalik. The volume combines papers that analyze “the changing image of the businessman throughout literature” (1). Even though the papers focus on the image of the businessman rather than on the image of the business as an organization, the variety of the approaches to the topic makes coherence difficult. Similarly, 2014 saw the publication of Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film by Edward W. Younkins. He sees a didactic potential in business fiction. As he

25 Other works reiterate scholars’ positive-negative approach when exploring the motif of business. In 1977, Lorne Fienberg submitted a dissertation which later appeared as a book with the title of A Cuckoo in the Nest of Culture: Changing Perspectives on the Businessman in the American Novel, 1865-1914 (1988). Fienberg’s study explores the “implied author” and the “vision du monde” in the novels which “expresses the world view of a specific social group which necessarily shapes his portrayal of the business sphere” (1), revealing his objective to apply contemporary theoretical tools to the topic. Despite this theoretical approach however, he comes to the conclusion that novelists become more and more sympathetic to the businessman towards the early decades of the twentieth century. Other works continue the trend: in 1982, John R. Cashill wrote a dissertation entitled “The Capitalist as Hero in the American Novel,” which reveals the latent desire to find a capitalist hero in American novel – the need which dominated the aftermath of World War II. Similarly, in 1988, Clare Virginia Eby wrote a dissertation with the title “Representative Men: Businessmen in American Fiction, 1875-1914,” and argued that writers of business novels attempted to portray the businessman as the representative man of America. Like Cashill’s study, Eby’s project reveals the latent but ongoing anxiety about the negativity of the image of business among literary scholars.

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argues, “It is likely that people who read business novels and plays and watch movies about business will continue to search for more of them as sources of entertainment, inspiration, and education” (xiii). Interestingly, the starting point for both Mahalik’s and Younkins’s studies were literature courses designed for business students. In other words, fictions of business were attractive to these scholars due to their utility: they could teach different topics in business and management departments such as business ethics by using fictions of business. The Cold War ended decades ago and we live in a quite different world today, where it is easier to lead creative discussions about the motif of business without talking about Cold War dichotomies such as liberalism, capitalism and communism. This major change in the geopolitical situation and civil society has opened up a new and less fraught space where the topic can be critically explored. The more tolerant social and academic environment in the past three decades has been quite inviting for diverse approaches in American Studies. It is not a coincidence that the transnational movement in American Studies followed the Cold War. The end of the Cold War has made it easier for non-American scholars, who used to be hesitant to venture into hotly debated issues of the Cold War, to join discussions, as the field is no longer the purview of American scholars only. It also led established scholars of American Studies to take non-US scholars’ approaches seriously. This process of diversification has opened up new possibilities for younger scholars unencumbered by older anxieties, rejection, and resistance, but the fictions of business have still been neglected. Both this new methodology and the new social and temporal space situate the contributions of this study firmly within transnational American studies.26 For one thing, even though reception aesthetics have many pillars including “empirical” research, Funktionsgeschichte is deeply embedded in the German tradition – the continental side of reception aesthetics – which has not received much attention

26 In fact, transnational experiences were crucial in US-based research into the images of business and businessmen in literature, if not specifically in American literature. The first monograph written on the topic reveals a profoundly surprising fact: an analysis of the businessman in Russian literature in the US precedes an analysis of businessmen in American literature. In 1937, Louis Perlman published his dissertation entitled Russian Literature and the Business Man, which he submitted to Columbia University. Perlman’s interest in the theme may have been personal as his Vita at the end of his dissertation reveals: born in Russia, he attended Russian schools before coming to the US (238). Still, it was this transnational experience that apparently made Perlman realize what was omnipresent in American society and induced him to combine it with his experiences in Soviet Russia.

Introduction | 29

among literary scholars in the US. To Thomas, Funktionsgeschichte is a largely ignored but important way of carrying out transnational research in the field. He argues that “such an engagement” with scholars of reception aesthetics such as Winfried Fluck and Wolfgang Iser who emphasize Funktionsgeschichte, “might make a difference in how we relate works of literature to history” and it does, indeed. It can “open up new possibilities for the study of American literature” (“The Fictive and the Imaginary” 8) if scholars really aim for transnational approaches, which includes delving into other traditions of doing scholarly research. Business in American fiction between the Civil War to the Great Depression allows us to delve into the aesthetic and thus affective grid inscribed in the literature of the period from a continental perspective. Other Possible Approaches Leaving the simplistic outlook previous research adopts aside, scrutinizing the motif of business from a phenomenological point of view, i.e., probing the apprehensible aesthetics of the motif of business, is only one way of analyzing it. It is possible to wear other glasses, use different lenses and look at the topic from many other perspectives. If one leaves the path taken (genealogically) by Kant, Husserl, Iser and Fluck, and follows a more Hegelian track, one could come up with a “conceptual” account of business in American fiction in the period of business renaissance.27 If such an approach were applied to business, the focus would lie on the essence of business rather its appearance, on the idea rather than its aesthetics, and on the Hegelian “monosemic or univocal unity” of art over the Kantian concept-less polysemy of literary works (Zima 7). The Hegelian lens would be a completely different but a legitimate outlook with its own virtues, offering insight into visions of business in American fiction from a contrasting perspective.28 The Hegelian conceptualization of art denies the autonomy of literary works and underscores their totality. Accordingly, this theory emphasizes the production over reception and the author over the reader in Eagleton’s simple taxonomy. As authors express “historical consciousness” and “historical content” (Zima 6) in their literary works in this approach, a more conceptual analysis would shed light on authors’ Weltanschauung and their understanding of the world, including business. Focusing on the essence of business would also lead to a more thorough

27 For instance, post-1980 scholars of American naturalism tend to see the movement either as a formalist writing practice or as “the episteme of consumerism” (Den Tandt, “Refashioning” 416), which are Kantian and Hegelian respectively. 28 See Zima, Chapter 1.

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definition of business as authors conceived of it (though glossing over the indeterminacies literary works typically include, from a reader-oriented perspective). An interesting undertaking would be to explore the concept of commerce in the eighteenth century as it is manifested in literary works. The prioritization of the concept of business over its appearance would also make room for non-literary works, e.g. the social theory of business or the works of economists like Henry George and Thorsten Veblen. In fact, following a Hegelian path would pave the way for a combination of literary works and social and economic writings on business, thus leading to a fuller picture of the concept of business in a specific period of time in history. Political discussions on the gold standard during the Gilded Age and literary works dealing with the gold standard would theoretically result in a thorough spirit of history à la Hegel, for instance. To come up with such an alternative, totalizing account, however, a fairly high price has to be paid: in an attempt to delineate the concept of business, the literary qualities of a work of fiction have to be peeled away. Works of fiction have many literary devices that escape easy conceptual definition – not only imageries, rhymes and euphemisms, but also tropes, themes and motifs. A conceptual approach would downplay these literary qualities, leading scholars to analyze literary works, simply put, in the way they explore other forms of non-literary writing like the works of George and Veblen. The literary residue would be a nuisance clouding the concepts, while works expressing ideas on business more philosophically, clearly and transparently (that is, in a non-literary manner) would be more valued.29 This downplaying of the literariness of fictional works makes it difficult to concentrate on business in the first place, because business is a literary device – a motif – and it belongs to the “expression plane” rather than the “content plane;” it escapes a univocal concept (“ohne Begriff”) (Zima 7). As a result, a Hegelian attitude cannot hover over the motif of business for long and spills almost automatically over to the idea of economy, which is a major component of the “base,” hence historical consciousness. It is almost impossible to talk only about “commerce in the eighteenth century;” the topic quickly becomes “economy in the eighteenth century,” with the “aesthetics” of business being cleansed through the “idea” of business. In all likelihood, a conceptual analysis of the idea of business cannot be done without the temptation to refer to the economy or rather to carve the economic component out of the business element in literary works. For instance, critics such as Amy Kaplan and Walter Benn Michaels use the motif of business to come up

29 Therefore, Hegel postulated that philosophy, as “the highest manner of comprehending the Absolute Idea,” will eventually overcome art (qtd. in Zima 7-8).

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with an “economic” argument: they put forward that cultural artifacts not only describe capitalism in different ways but also participate in the economic structures they describe. As a motif only “related” to economics, business is especially prone to the attempt to reveal how cunningly literary texts hide or accommodate dominant but elusive socioeconomic structures. Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Capitalism (1987) explores business novels such as Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Financier and argues that the dominant but not ineffable ideology of the period was the gold standard. Kaplan explores Howells’s and Dreiser’s novels and concludes that realism is “a strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change” (10). As a result, neither Michaels nor the scholars in this tradition focus on the phenomenology of business; instead, the motif of business becomes a tool to reach the spirit of the age. In the best case, business remains a minor motif in a ground sweep of literary-economic philosophizing. The legacy of Hegel is presumably one of the reasons why there are so few monographs on business in American fiction, even though exploring the relationship between economy and fiction is a popular research endeavor among scholars of American literature.30 Rather than an undesired distraction, the literary “residue” of fictional texts is what makes aesthetic experience possible in the first place. For many readers, the aesthetic potential of literature is not only the starting point but also the main reason behind their incessant desire for fiction. Today, people choose to read a work like Main Street (1921) by Sinclair Lewis over The Mind in the Making: The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform (1923) by James Harvey Robinson – both bestsellers of their period – primarily because of the aesthetic potential of the former. Unfortunately, this starting point – literary aesthetics – is neglected in many English departments in the English-speaking world. If the literary potential is so vital for people’s ceaseless desire to read fiction, it is worth analyzing the aesthetic

30 The roots of Michaels’s and Kaplan’s “ideological” approach is even more revealing about the need for a different American Studies. Often, behind scholars’ ideology-oriented studies, there are underlying romantic ideals which America is judged against. Put very simply, to many scholars like Michaels and Kaplan, the ideal America is, among others, democratic, egalitarian, free of oppression, and diverse. Whenever America is represented differently, scholars will intervene and detect any digression to these ideals. In other words, being a scholar of American literature is like being an explorer of where America fails its ideals. Surprisingly, although recent scholars of American Studies such as Michaels and Kaplan are outspoken opponents of narratives of American exceptionalism, they reiterate the basic tenets of American exceptionalism in their attempts to see American cultural artifacts from an idealistic point of view.

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potential of literary works and the components that make up their aesthetic potential. In this book, my goal is to tease out exactly these aspects of The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Financier and The Great Gatsby via the motif of business and its literary functions. *** In Chapter 1, I explore the social developments in the second half of the nineteenth century and explain how the need for an externalized form of fiction – realism and naturalism – gradually took hold in the US. In Chapter 2, I investigate Romantic and realist aesthetics through the theories of Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács and Ian Watt. This chapter analyzes the transition from American Romanticism to American realism through the motif of business in works such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Business Man” (1840), Timothy Shay Arthur’s Riches Have Wings: A Tale for the Rich and Poor (1847), Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (1868) and Elisabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871). Chapter 3 explores the motif of business in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). I argue that the Darstellung of the business organization in the novel is shaped by Howells’s emphasis on moral and social orientation. The subsequent two chapters are devoted to the image of business in American naturalism and modernism, respectively. Chapter 4 explores the motif of business in Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). The protagonist Frank Cowperwood’s financial activities in the novel reveal Dreiser’s attempts to come up with a “truer and better” reality, which shocks the reader ultimately. In Chapter 5, I argue that the image of business in The Great Gatsby (1925) is persuasive but ineffable – inarticulable – because American “high” modernism, rather than attempting to convey writers’ preconceptions about social reality to the reader, offered alternative ways of reaching personal, unique and subjective realities. Lastly, the Conclusion looks at the development of the motif in the post-Depression era and the implications of this motif-based study for literary research in general. From a broader perspective, the literary works this study explores as well as their authors are not only brilliant representatives of their respective movements, but they also shed light on the evolution of American literature between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

1

The Loss of Reality in Late Nineteenth-Century America

In The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), Kenneth Burke wrote that “critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose.” Critical and imaginative literary works do not simply represent the external world; rather, they are responses to it. What is more, these works are not “merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers.” As Burke further elaborates, “These strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude towards them” (1). In other words, writers construct critical and imaginative works – like those that this study investigates – as strategic responses to the questions that the external world poses. As enlightened individuals living in society, writers recognize the demands and challenges the external world poses and attempt to answer them in their literary works in a well-thought-out manner. American fiction writers who were active between the Civil War and the Great Depression were no exception. Their literary works not only reveal a deep and composite perception of the external world – or of “the situations,” in Burke’s words – but also their perceptive reactions to the lively social changes that took place during the period. However, writers were not alone in decoding and responding to a changing America. Readers assisted them in this process with their feedback, to which writers always had an open ear. In Edith Wharton’s “Copy: A Dialogue” (1900), for instance, the successful writer Mrs. Dale declares, “Don’t talk to me about living in the hearts of my readers! We both know what kind of a domicile that is,” namely “freezing” (113). Through Mrs. Dale's statement, Wharton reveals how writers of the post-Civil War period often attempted to confound their readers’ expectations and produce the type of literature that writers actually wanted to write instead.

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Despite such opposition, writers took readers’ thoughts and desires quite seriously.1 As Howells says, a writer often attempts to “bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers” (“The Man of Letters” 3), which becomes possible only through a readiness to listen to readers’ expectations. In several cases, readers were even more influential than critics in shaping literary texts. Recalling Gene Stratton-Porter’s process of literary production, her daughter Jeannette Porter Meehan says, “too often critics are mistaken. They sit, smug and secure, barricaded by their own self-sufficiency, and write criticisms […] for the world to read.” By contrast, the busy mother or harassed business man, the ambitious youngster or unfortunate criminal, who sits down and writers from his heart, for the author’s eyes alone, what he thinks, and when such letters come from all over the civilized world, then you get a real basis from which to judge what your writing is doing. (299)

Apparently, readers’ letters were more effective than criticisms in shedding light on the reception of literary works. Meehan’s words represent a broader trend in the period: the late nineteenth century bore witness to an unprecedented interaction between the reader and the writer. This interaction not only helped writers decode the external world but also profoundly shaped their literary responses. Arguably, between the Civil War and the Great Depression, both writers and readers felt distinctively anxious about the idea of “reality,” which in turn played a formative role in the representation and evolution of the motif of business. Industrialization, Urbanization and Centralization The post-Civil War period in the US was marked by changes brought about by brisk industrialization, urbanization and centralization. Between 1860 and 1900, the American economy grew by more than 400%. While the total wealth of the nation was 16 billion dollars in 1860, by 1900, it equaled 88 billion dollars. This sudden growth of national wealth translated into a per capita increase from 500 USD in 1860 to 1100 USD in 1900 (Bailyn et al. 569). The manufacturing sector generated 3 billion dollars in 1869 and 13 billion dollars three decades later in 1900. The railroad grew from 35,000 miles of track after the Civil War to 240,000 miles of track in 1910. “As early as 1890, the United States contained one-third of

1

For more information on readers’ interaction with writers in the period, see Barbara Hochman, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism, U of Massachusetts P, 2001.

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the world’s total rail road mileage” (Kelley 379). Inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell facilitated this progress through their technological innovations, while a largely laissez-faire market paved the way for this hefty growth. A vast influx of immigrants – more than 13 million between 1860 and 1900 (Mohl 23) – contributed to the required workforce. Industrialization went hand in hand with urbanization in the period. People left rural areas in astounding numbers, which dramatically altered society. Cities boomed: while 6.2 million urban dwellers populated the cities in 1860, constituting less than one-fifth of the total population, “30 million urbanites constituted about two-fifths of the nation’s residents” (Barrows 102) by the end of the century. “In 1860, there were only 400 towns with more than 2,500 residents, 58 cities with 10,000 – 25,000 residents, and just nine cities with more than 100,000 residents” (Shrock 2). End-of-the-century figures illustrate the urban transformation that had been taking place in the country: “By 1900, there were 1,737 towns of 2,500 or more, 280 cities of 10,000 – 25,000, 38 cities of more than 100,000, and three cities (New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) with more than 1 million residents” (Shrock 2). If rural areas had dominated American life before the Civil War, the US was now primarily dominated by the city with its roaring social, economic and cultural life after the war. This process of industrialization and urbanization led to a process of centralization and socio-economic interdependence in the post-Civil War period – a process Trachtenberg analyzes under the term “the incorporation of America.” The social and economic changes in the period encouraged the loosely connected communities across the country to give up their stable yet isolated lifestyles and form tighter networks with other communities. To put it simply, there was more trade, more movement (humans and commodities), more contact and more obligations among communities than there was ever before. Similarly, Wiebe points out the strengthening interaction among “island communities” (295) after the Civil War. The communities were, of course, aware of each other’s existence previously; however, intense interaction started only after the Civil War period with the swift industrialization, urbanization and advancing transportation technologies as Trachtenberg and Wiebe explore in detail in their works. These broader social effects aside, this process of centralization had a major impact on individuals – the way they lived in, interacted with and perceived the world. This process of “incorporation” dislocated the individual by taking him2 from the center of economic and social activities to the periphery of the social world.

2

All gender-specific pronouns in this study are to be considered to refer to both the feminine and the masculine form, except when referring to a particular person.

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Before the Civil War, Americans were economically much more self-sufficient. A small comparison illustrates this shift clearly: in the pre-Civil War period, they were not only baking their own loaves and growing their crops for family use, but they were also selling the produce in regional markets to supplement their income. By contrast, in the decades following the Civil War, Americans started buying their bread and vegetables from bigger industrial producers: The proportion of flour used by commercial bakeries climbed rapidly from only one-seventh in 1899 to more than two-fifths by 1939. And during the same period, the per capita production of canned vegetables multiplied fivefold, and of canned fruits twelve times over. As with food, so with clothing, shelter, household articles of all sorts: the range of commodity production extended itself rapidly. (Braverman 190)3

This economic transformation was not voluntary: a significant number of Americans could not oppose the extension of the market economy in the late nineteenth century and gradually became dependent on others. In other words, Americans gradually fell to the social periphery, where they were forced to live on what was available in the market rather than what they could produce themselves. No one seemed untouched by the transition from small societies of participation to groups of individuals outside the center, in which a society of spectacle and consumption was created. The desire to be “at the center” persisted yet remained unfulfilled, creating discomfort and restlessness for the individual. Disorientation and Dislocation All these economic and changes in post-bellum America meant a huge shift with wide-ranging results in the lives of Americans who were still rooted in the legacy of the previous agrarian republic. These developments not only impacted Americans’ lifestyle or behavior but also shaped their mental and emotional life. Americans from all walks of life felt disoriented, dislocated and fragmented – a sense that revealed itself primarily in the way people defined reality: reality was an “absent” category for enlightened middle classes.4 According to Lears, due to the social developments in late nineteenth-century America, the idea of “reality itself

3

See Trachtenberg’s analysis of Braverman’s arguments in The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age, Hill and Wang, 1982, pp. 101-139.

4

For a detailed description and analysis of the enlightened middle class in the nineteenth century, see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, U of Chicago P, 1994.

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began to seem problematic, something to be sought rather than merely lived” (“Self-Realization” 6). In whichever way they defined it, Americans had the feeling that they had lost connection to “reality” – a sense that could be seen to indicate the individual disorientation that haunted the enlightened middle classes in that period. Without a strong basis for what is real, what is right, which way to go and how to do it, the individual faced perplexity, unhappiness and dizziness in a struggle to locate his position in the social structure. To be precise, this process of roaring social change created feelings of unreality by challenging Americans’ mental and psychological identity – their self. Firstly, with the growing of the market economy in cities and the impossibility of being self-sufficient, the “primary experience” that people had in providing for the needs of daily life disappeared, leaving in its place a hunger for intense experience. The introduction of industrial products such as canned food and condensed milk into households obviated the need for cooking or milking the cow. Disconnected from the solid procedures of the basic household, Americans were “cut off from the hard, resistant reality of things” (Lears, “Self-Realization” 7). Lacking the hands-on routine they were used to, enlightened middle classes started to feel less concrete and less sure about their own realities. Intensity was missing.5 Similarly, Americans witnessed a new social interaction pattern after the Civil War. If the relationships were defined on a personal level and through small-town values previously, by the end of the century, the American life was marked by numerous impersonal relationships in urban environments as a result of centralization and interdependence. Lears explains that “As Americans fled the surveillance of the village, they encountered the anonymity of the city” (“Self-Realization” 6). When Freud claimed that an important amount of ancient material in human psychology is “buried in the soul of the city or beneath its modern buildings” (Civilization and Its Discontents 17), he was defining the mental state of Americans in post-Civil War America, where modern buildings suppressed the small-town souls of their new inhabitants, creating disorientation. The values of the small community were replaced with the “values of continuity and regularity, functionality and rationality, administration and management” (Wiebe 295). These values required a new, more anonymous and less transparent model of interaction, which was a massive challenge to Americans who grew up with the small-town mindset. If people were more “tradition directed” before the War, they gradually adopted an “other-directed” mentality in the last decades of the nineteenth century, becoming more malleable and flexible with regards to others in

5

See Chapter 4 for a broader discussion of the rising lack of intensity in the period.

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order to gain their approval, making personality more important than character. 6 This approach created an expectation to suppress the real “self,” hence their own realities.7 The interdependence of the national market economy also challenged the notion of selfhood upon which the American society relied on. The centralization and “incorporation” of American society not only created an interdependence among communities or industries, but it also led individuals to depend on the bigger economic actors for survival. “For entrepreneurs as well as wageworkers, financial rise or ruin came to depend on policies formulated far away, on situations beyond the individual’s control” (Lears, “Self-Realization” 7). The loss of control on the side of the individual over his future threatened the autonomous selfhood, or self-reliance, that was deeply ingrained in the American way of life. The challenge against the selfhood led to uneasiness; the loss of control over one’s future created discomfort and made reality an elusive idea. Lastly, for Lears, “the secularization of liberal Protestantism” was a crucial reason for the emergence of feelings of unreality. In line with the economic and social developments explored above, institutions such as organized religion started to lose their authority over the individual and the values that accompanied these institutions. As Trachtenberg argues, “economic incorporation wrenched the American society from the moorings of familiar values [and] that the process proceeded by contradiction and conflict” (7). The declining importance of religious rituals shows that people had less commitment to liberal Protestantism and became more concerned with secular life. The aim was to succeed in this life rather than in the afterlife. Working for God was replaced with secular achievement in, as Lears puts it, “a moral and spiritual void” (Lears, “Self-Realization” 10). This shift in perception again challenged people’s long-held beliefs about reality. Feelings of guilt emerged as a result of following a secular lifestyle and of ignoring the

6

See Riesman’s taxonomy of “tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed” in The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, Yale UP, 2001.

7

The loss of selfhood not only challenged the autonomy of the individual but also changed the meaning of success in American society. As Lears says, “The older ethic had required adherence to an internalized morality of self-control; repressive as this ‘inner-direction’ had been, it helped to sustain a solid core of selfhood,” while the “newer ethic of ‘other-direction’ undermined that solidity by presenting the self as an empty vessel to be filled and refilled according to the expectations of others and the needs of the moment” (“Self-Realization” 8). This loss of autonomous selfhood increased the importance of social masks. Lacking a core self to decide what is good and right, the individual was left disoriented in a restless and “unreal” world.

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afterlife, thus Americans grew uneasy and nervous in their relations to their surroundings.8 As a result of these changes in American society, feelings of unreality grew and became a basic source of psychological discomfort. It is in this context that Beard defines neurasthenia,9 or nervous exhaustion, as a large “family of functional nervous disorders that are increasingly frequent among the in-door classes of civilized countries, and that are especially frequent in the northern and eastern parts of the United States” (23). He calls neurasthenia a principally American disease: “The sufferers from these maladies are counted in this country by thousands and hundreds of thousands; in all the Northern and Eastern States they are found in neai’ly [sic] every brain-working household” (23). With the loss of the feelings

8

From a broader perspective, these mental and psychological changes that the post-Civil War America brought about resemble the social, economic and psychological changes Europeans experienced in the preceding decades. In the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, Karl Marx defines the developments that accompany the rise of modernity in Europe by saying, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (10). Marx is not alone in his analysis of the new social life; Friedrich Nietzsche echoes this melting solid with his word “weightless,” in his definition of life in modernity (qtd. in Lears, No Place of Grace 32). In other words, the period witnessed a process of resolution of the individual from tradition, ritual and habitual, which was accompanied with dislocation, disorientation and fragmentation, not only for Americans but also for Europeans. As W. B. Yeats summarizes, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (76) – the West, if not the whole world in the late nineteenth century. American modernity was a part of Western modernity, though with several different characteristics in the roots of the rising feelings of “weightlessness” and societal responses to them. Most importantly, in America, the timing was unique: these feelings prevailed especially during the post-Civil War period when America swiftly became an urban and industrialized country.

9

Writers such as William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered from neurasthenia throughout their lives. For Howells’s experiences with the disease, see Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life, U of California P, 2005, pp. 25, 218. For Dreiser’s experiences, see Bill Brown, “The Matter of Dreiser’s Modernity” in The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 83-99. For F. Scott Fitzgerald’s case, see Nicholas M. Evans, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s, Garland, 2000, pp. 46-48.

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of reality, the integrity of the individual became a problem, resulting in an increased incidence of several psychological diseases in the period. Lears’s description of the late nineteenth-century psyche of middle-class Americans is echoed in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and C. D. Warner. In the novel, when the naïve Washington visits the Colonel, he gets cold even though there is a fire in the stove. “He was nearly as close to the stove as he could get” (71), but the fire does not warm him. When he tries to get a trifle, he trips over the supporting poker, making the stove-door tumble to the floor. Surprisingly, there is nothing in the stove but a lighted tallow candle. Washington is surprised at Colonel’s attempt to warm himself by the appearance of fire rather than fire itself. This short incident concisely represents the disorientation the American society was experiencing in the post-Civil War period. In this new era, the cure for rheumatism is “the appearance of heat, not the heat itself – that’s the idea” (72). When reality seemed out of reach, Americans tried to replace it with the appearance of reality. The Colonel’s attempt to substitute reality with appearance reflects a wider social trend, namely, a desire to counter and overcome disorientation through different means and to regain individual integrity. The individual explored new ways to re-orient himself in the social world he inhabited and attempted to overcome the spiritual homelessness he faced. Just like the appearance of heat that substitutes for the heat itself, the loss of reality among the enlightened classes created a need for substitution as well. As Freud says, the question is never only “a loss of reality” as such for the individual; once the reality is lost, there is also a need for “a substitute for reality” (“The Loss of Reality” 186). In the face of missing reality, Americans turned to different venues to find reality and “authenticity” (Orvell xv).10 One of the venues they looked to for reality was nonfiction: Lears argues that advertising (and self-help books) was one of the main providers of reality, soothing the public with its “therapeutic ethos.” 11 Another source of reality was mass media. Kaplan counts the rise of journalism as a substitute for the feelings of lack of reality in the social sphere. 12 Similarly, the

10 Miles Orvell supports Lears’s arguments in several ways. See The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, The U of North Carolina P, 2014. 11 For more information on the therapeutic functions of advertising, see Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Riots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930” in The Culture of Consumption, edited by R. Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, Pantheon Books, 1983, pp. 1-38. 12 For a discussion of the rise of journalism and mass media in the context of American realism, see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, U of Chicago P, 1988, pp. 35-38.

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popularity of self-help books in the period confirms feelings of disorientation, as Americans clearly wanted to be shown “the right way.” However, these forms of nonfiction were not the “strategical” or “stylized” answers the public really needed; at least, these were not the most preferred strategies. Fiction as Refuge Significantly, in spite of the diversity of nonfiction in a growing cultural economy and a broader supply and demand chain, Americans turned to fiction in particular to compensate for the loss of reality and the subsequent feelings of disorientation.13 Paradoxical as it may seem at first sight, fiction was more effective than nonfiction in this regard, because, through the made-up worlds it portrayed, fiction fulfilled the need for realities in a way nonfiction could not. Fiction allowed the reader to “concretize” or “realize” literary realities in the reader’s mind through a creative process: the complex realities represented in text allowed readers to use their creativity and thereby immerse themselves in the literary work in a way nonfiction could not. In addition, compared with other art forms, it had clear advantages. As a semantic art, literature could communicate with the reader in a much easier and continual manner than forms such as painting and sculpture, which did not always allow the reader or the receiver to easily translate the experience into meaningful knowledge. In contrast to the more complex art forms that required specific knowledge to be appreciated, the requirements for making sense of literature were not high: the public needed only to read and understand the text. Moreover, literature was both more easily accessible through circulation libraries and more affordable for the enlightened middle classes in the US. In short, the need for secular reality was met by literature in the late nineteenth century in the US. The decades following the Civil War saw the popularization of American literature as an important and strategic method of offering reality to the dislocated against the encroaching processes of modernity and restlessness. In fact, the loss of reality and the literary attempts to offer a solution were not confined to America. The development of the novel form in Western literature, which necessarily includes American literature, strongly accorded with the loss of reality and the subsequent need for the reality effect. In his seminal study The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács connects the rise of the novel to the loss of

13 Literature offers an opportunity to get to know ourselves as well. Fluck says, “By stepping out of ourselves” through literature, we gain the possibility “to grasp our own identity” (“The Search for Distance” 194-5). For further information on literature as a provider of experience and reality, see Iser, Prospecting.

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totality of life – the loss of essential, organic and natural reality. To him, unlike the Greek epic, which was the epic of ages when the totality of life was obvious and given, the novel emerged as “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem” (Novel 56). In other words, Lukács directly relates the rise of the novel form to the lack of the “meaning in life” that people started to feel with the rise of modernity. Moreover, the disappearance of the “meaning in life” did not quench the desire to reach an organic reality. Rather, the age of the novel “still [thought] in terms of totality” (56) and people needed this totality that was no longer readily and naturally available. The post-Civil War America was no exception: helplessly disoriented, the enlightened middle classes turned to fiction to seek totality in a secular world. A look at the American literary market in the second half of the nineteenth century reveals how developments in the market eased this process of substitution of the lack of reality with fiction by facilitating interaction between the reader and the writer. Before the Civil War, “the creative writer was not a professional author or a producer of a literary commodity but a gentleman amateur who exhibited his talent to his social equals” and somebody who “did not depend upon it for a living; or he accepted the patronage of a social superior and was still independent of the larger reading public” (Lichtenstein 35). As such, many authors had to earn their living through other jobs during their lifetime. Margaret Fuller, like many others, worked as a journalist, Hawthorne at the Liverpool Consulate, Emerson as an orator, and Thoreau at a pencil factory. Charvat “estimate[s] that from 1800 to 1870, from 60 to 75 per cent of all male American writers who even approached professionalism either held public office or tried to get it” (294-5). The impossibility of earning a living through literature was one of the primary reasons for this patronage system. At the same time, the “inability of the institutions of American literature to support such writers reinforced the skepticism of the gentleman-author toward popular patronage” (Lichtenstein 37). Accordingly, Emerson implicitly rejects the idea of the market supporting the author in “The American Scholar,” saying, “Free should the scholar be, – free and brave.” He adds, “it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry” (54, 53). Interestingly, while Emerson saw the author’s loss of freedom in the reading public, writers in the post-Civil War America gained their freedom in the demands of the reader, because the literary market allowed them to earn their living through literature. The literary market was thus not disconnected from the reading public; in postCivil War America, it was more responsive than ever to the reader’s needs. Moreover, it not only expanded like many other sectors but also became the dominant

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way of earning money for writers. Accordingly, they were incorporated into the supply and demand chain in the economy. As Lichtenstein argues, The institutional and economic framework within which the American man of letters had functioned was re-established on a new economic basis involving large and complex markets, relative economic security and a qualitatively new relationship between publisher and author. […] The basis for much of this transformation lay in certain technological and demographic changes which wedded the entire institution of American literature more closely to a capitalist ethos. (35)

The growth of the literary market after the Civil War allowed writers to earn their living from authorship and obviated the need for a public office. When the patronage system was replaced with a strong literary market, the professional author replaced the gentleman author. This change in the economic structure of the literary market made the public taste one of the primary concerns for writers when selecting and constructing their works. Put differently, now that the writer depended on the reading public to earn his living, public demand became more important than ever. Lichtenstein’s demonstration of the literary syndicates confirms the rising importance of public demand to the literary establishment of the period. For example, Samuel S. McClure “knew precisely what the public sought” (Lichtenstein 39). This dependence on the reader created a supply and demand chain that was unprecedented in American literary history. If the authors, publishers and other agents ignored the demands and the needs of the reading public, they would fail financially. 14 In such a precarious economic setting, writers were more than willing to offer the reality that readers lost in their social life and compensate for their anomie15 through their literary motifs. Several realist writers of the period recognized what readers were looking for, namely reality. Many authors admitted that they were trying to compensate for the

14 They, too, depended on this supply and demand chain in order to extend their cultural outreach against the mass media and popular journalism, to which the American realist authors were strongly opposed. On Howells’s opposition to mass media, see Kaplan, American Realism, pp. 15-43. 15 Roughly, Émile Durkheim defines anomie as a condition where norms are vague, incoherent or absent. As such, anomie defines post-Civil War American society as well. For more information on the term and the way Durkheim uses it, see Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, edited by Steven Lukes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Free Press, 1951.

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lack of reality through fiction. As James says, “the air of reality […] seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel” (The Art of Fiction 35; emphasis added). Less frequently quoted than James, Howells says that realism is “the perfect artistic illusion or the effect we call reality” (qtd. in Nettels 64; emphasis added). The naturalist Norris could not agree more with James and Howells: “Fiction is what seems real, not what is real” (“Fiction is Selection” 124). Likewise, in “The Autobiography of Alice Toklas” Gertrude Stein declares that literature “should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality” (199). These statements confirm the highly performative nature of the literature in the period.16 Writers were aware that they were creating representations of reality in their works instead of representing reality in a mimetic way. Apparently aware of the needs of the reading public, American writers of the period offered “reality” through fiction. As Berthoff summarizes, American realists shared “certain fundamental motives to expression” which emerged out of “prevailing conditions of social and economic life” in the post-Civil War period (3, 4) – namely, the absence of reality in American life. However, although this dialogue between the reader and the writer shaped fictions of business to a great extent, it was not only the readers’ longing that had such an influence. *** Although writers of the period strove for a “real” literature and attempted to create a good performance of reality, they vastly diverged over how they perceived and defined “reality.” There were differences among writers about the functions they wanted their texts to serve; there were even differences among the works of a single writer in terms of the functions they ascribed to their texts. These differences stemmed mainly from their personal histories and the dominant literary mode in and through which they lived, operated and wrote. Obviously, writers, like every human being, lead unique lives, experience inimitable events and reach individual conclusions about their involvements, hence the unique differences in their conceptions of reality. Notwithstanding these personal dissimilarities, the dominant literary mode of each decade and period led to resemblances in writers’ preconceptions of reality, which in turn led to similarities in their representations. In general, realists and naturalists underscored less personal and more social and

16 For performative functions of language and literature, see Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” in Style in Language, edited by T. A. Sebeok, MIT P, 1960, pp. 350-377; and John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford UP, 2009.

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political realities. Accordingly, both realists and naturalists included numerous social motifs in their texts. Modernists, on the other hand, perceived reality as a matter of subjective perception. Reality existed in mind and since everybody had an own mind, they also perceived the reality differently. It is for this reason that modernist literature problematizes human consciousness, and uses methods such as “stream of consciousness” to capture in minute detail the characters’ mental processes. Writers’ diverse literary responses to the loss of and longing for “reality” fashioned their motifs of business between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Since realists and naturalists thought that reality was a social and political phenomenon, business became an endless resource. Accordingly, writers frequently included this motif in various forms, ranging from farming to finance. Obsessed with the human mind, modernists were less interested in social and political themes, hence the lack of such themes and minimal use of business even during the financially optimistic 1920s. A short example from the turn of the century illustrates the impact of biographies and contemporary literary modes on writers’ diverging conceptions of reality and representations of business. In his works, Theodore Dreiser used motifs such as slums, prostitution, poverty and blood. For one thing, Dreiser knew such realities very well: he had experienced great poverty and misery in his life and his sister worked as a prostitute at some point in Chicago. Dreiser was not alone though: American naturalists in general were obsessed with realities outside of the realist “middle path” – the realities American realists did not include in their works. Frank Norris, Stephen Crane and Jack London grappled with similar motifs in their fiction. Naturalists were convinced that the realities that Howells and Twain avoided offered them (and the reader) the intensity and shock the late nineteenth-century Americans longed for. Tellingly, the motif of business allows Dreiser to transcend the middle path: in The Financier, he uses the volatile and fluid nature of the finance in a versatile way to shock the reader with intensity. Before delving into the motif of business in American naturalism in detail however, let us start with American realism, the way reality was conceived among writers of this movement and the Darstellung of business before the turn of the century.

2

Business in American Romance and Realism

The swift social, economic and psychological developments explored in the previous chapter led to profound cultural differences between the pre-Civil War and post-Civil War period in America. These changes can be best observed in the distinct literary constellations that dominated the respective periods. While antebellum literature was dominated by the Romantic tradition, which gradually came to be known as American romance, the 1870s and 1880s witnessed the rise of American realism. These movements had recognizably contrasting aesthetic and thematic characteristics. It is generally agreed that writers of American romance such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville represented often unusual events, mystery or melodramatic journeys in their texts. On the other hand, the generation of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James had a different focus, preferring more ordinary motifs such as business to the unusual or shaded themes of the Romantic tradition. This transition from an aesthetics of mystery to an aesthetics of ordinary is by no means limited to the US authors in the period but it is part of a larger trend across Western literature, an understanding of which is essential before addressing the particulars of American fiction, including the motif of business.1 1

Traditionally, mainstream scholars of American literature have shied away from discussing American literature in relation to other literatures. As Baym puts forward, “the early critic looked for a standard of Americanness rather than a standard of excellence” (125-6) in works of American literature – an endeavor that led scholars to neglect the similarities with other literatures, emphasizing instead the unique aspects of the New World. Contemporary research on American literature carries the seeds of a similar obsession with America, leaving out the deeper structures that are shared with other literatures. However, a discussion of such deeper structures is vital in grasping the motif of business in American literature during the American Renaissance.

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Because this transition from American romance to American realism is comprehensible against the background of deeper literary structures in Western literature, a broader outlook that views literature from a wide-ranging perspective rather than a national standpoint is indeed inevitable. Erich Auerbach, in the first chapter of his seminal Mimesis, provides a useful and crucial distinction between the ways transcendental and externalized literary forms represent reality. To him, the Elohist narrator in the Old Testament externalizes only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place alone are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and fraught with background. (15)

In other words, the narrator of the Old Testament does not offer many details on the particularities of reality in the story. In fact, it excludes even simple details: “Abraham and his followers rose ‘early in the morning’ and ‘went unto’ the place of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar” (9). What happens in between remains unexternalized and hidden. In contrast to the shaded nature of the Elohist text, the Homeric text “leave[s] nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized […], [instead] represent[ing] phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations” (6). If the Elohist narrator hides, the Homeric narrator externalizes – a term that is vital for my study – the plot in bountiful detail.2 The reader even knows the story behind Odysseus’ scar, the result of a boyhood accident, which is a minor matter in the plot. While American romance resembles the Biblical narrative in focusing on the universal, ignoring the particularities of reality, American literary realism uses an aesthetics of externalization similar to the Homeric text. The image of business and businessmen in American romance and realism can be best understood, framed and sketched through this basic analogical distinction between the unexternalized-Elohist-romantic and externalized-Homeric-realist literary forms. Significantly, the aesthetic differences between American romance

2

Auerbach uses the terms “ausgesprochen” and “unausgesprochen” (13) for “externalized” and “unexternalized,” respectively. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in Der Abendländischen Literatur, Francke, 2001.

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and realism stem from the distinctive functions respective texts serve. These functions in each literary movement condition the selection and handling of motifs included in a literary work. Motifs of business and businessmen were utilized rarely in American romance, primarily because the attempt to place emphasis on teleology – the “higher power” and “universal” – induced writers to neglect this apparently “mundane” motif. By contrast, American realism frequently incorporated the motif, as it – like other political and social motifs – allowed writers to offer forms of social experience and knowledge, hence orientation, to the reader. A masterful utility of the motif is most apparent in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, where business and businessmen allow Howells to present the reader with social and ethical orientation in a period of social disorientation. Before delving into Silas’s orienting journey, we first explore the gradual fading of American romance and the rise of American realism in the American literary landscape, with a special focus on the handling of the motif of business in the late nineteenth century.

2.1 DIDACTIC AND SATIRICAL BUSINESS IN AMERICAN ROMANCE Functionally speaking, the Old Testament, like other sacred texts, offers divine orientation. As manuals of life, such texts tell mankind what to do and what not to do to enter “the God’s kingdom.” To that end, they not only include direct orders such as the Ten Commandments (e.g. “Thou shalt not steal”), but also recount other prophets’ lives as meritorious examples. These stories illustrate the divine orientation in a clearer, more detailed, more convincing and more pictorial way than direct commands. The abovementioned story about Abraham in the Book of Genesis serves exactly this purpose: to manifest to the reader what kind of exemplary obedience and belief is appreciated by God. Abraham goes to the place God tells him to fulfill a promise he made to God – to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham loves and obeys God so much that he is even ready to sacrifice his son to prove this. The message to mankind is unmistakable: love, fear and follow the word of God as steadfastly as Abraham did. The holy scriptures include many such stories, such as those of Adam and Eve and Joseph, which epitomize noble devotion, divine conduct and moral growth against demonic temptations. This objective of divine orientation not only lies behind the inclusion of prophets’ experiences in holy books, but it also accounts for the lack of detail in Abraham’s journey and the Elohist narrative in general. Significantly, the audience of the sacred scriptures is the whole of mankind: the Bible addresses humans of all

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ages – past, present and future. After all, the Christian faith is strongly based on the principle that Jesus died for the sins of all mankind. In order for mankind of all ages and continents to connect with the Old Testament, an unexternalized aesthetics is essential. By excluding even basic details, the Elohist narrator defies specificity and attempts to reach the universal truth. Abraham’s story does not represent a singular event that an individual experienced at a specific time and place. Rather, it is larger-than-life; it projects universal, timeless and fundamental divine concepts. Abraham’s journey is a model to all humans on Earth without spatial or temporal limits. Such a mysterious Darstellung is conducive to the identification of human beings across all ages and continents with Abraham’s virtue. The lack of detail facilitates identification without “misleading” as to the particulars of the Darstellung. If Abraham’s physical features were externalized, for instance, not everyone would be able to identify with his story due to obvious physical variances among people of different geographies. In this case, the likelihood that Abraham’s journey sounds “foreign” would be greater. Human history after Christianity (and probably even earlier) has witnessed how religious communities culturally appropriated Biblical figures, representing characters like Jesus often as one of them. That is why Maria Magdalena is very often represented as a peasant Italian woman in Southern Europe rather than a woman with Semitic features. This cultural appropriation is one of the major ways of achieving identification and thereby offering divine orientation. As Auerbach says, in order “to fit our life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history” (15), the narrative needs to be unexternalized and appropriable. This unexplicated mode of representation allows readers to immerse themselves in the metaphysical nature of the divine reality by filling in the gaps freely without the cumbersome burden of misidentification. In other words, even though it seems paradoxical at first sight, the unexternalized aesthetics of the Biblical narrative is what makes the Book of Genesis a powerful and persuasive tool of divine orientation. Despite the lack of detail, Abraham’s undetailed journey is not unrealistic; in fact, it lays a powerful claim to truth. Auerbach argues that the Elohist narrator believes in the stories he told “passionately,” because his “religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth,” excluding the probability of other truths’ having any value in the world. The Biblical truth is thus “tyrannical.” The narrator is certain of the stories he tells and does not leave any doubt about their truth value: “Woe to the man who did not believe it!” (14). This absolute belief in the truth value of the stories obviates any need to externalize fixed spatial or temporal relations in the representation. What is already true does not need to be reiterated, proven or illustrated in detail. The reader is not expected to question the missing

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information (e.g. as to Abraham’s bodily characteristics) but believe in the story despite its larger-than-life and metaphysical nature, because it is essentially the singular Godly truth. Needless to say, the clerical institutions played a detrimental role in this “tyrannical” truth throughout history. In cases of doubt and feelings of lack of clarity, the Church confirmed the truth value of the Old Testament, which compensated for the Elohist lack of detail. That is, the Sunday mass made up for the lack of Abraham’s scars, creating an interpretive convention that reassured readers throughout history. In short, the shaded, mysterious nature of the Biblical text, combined with a powerful claim to truth, is the way the Elohist narrator offers divine orientation. This aesthetics of non-externalization was later taken up by writers of American romance. Like the Elohist narrative, which elucidates almost nothing of Abraham’s society nor of his social surroundings, the Romantic narrative lacks detail on social reality. Instead, the narrator in Romantic texts focuses on the protagonist, who usually has minimal relations with other social entities. In fact, one of the most distinctive characteristics of American romance is this excessive focus on the individual protagonist, while the social environment is often left shaded and mysterious. Prominent scholars of American romance underscore this solipsism of the Romantic narrative. Poirier says that writers of American romance “try through style temporarily to free the hero (and the reader) from systems, to free them from the pressures of time, biology, economics, and from the social forces” (5). Instead of establishing relations between the protagonist and social forces, the Romantic writer describes the protagonist as a self-contained character with weak ties to the social world. In his highly influential work The American Novel and Its Tradition, Chase argues alike: in contrast to the European novel, in American romance it does not “matter much what class people come from, and where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery” (13). Trilling reiterates the solipsism of American romance by saying, the novel in America diverges from its classic intention, which, as I have said, is the investigation of the problem of reality beginning in the social field. The fact is that American writers of genius have not turned their minds to society. Poe and Melville were quite apart from it; the reality they sought was only tangential to society. Hawthorne was acute when he insisted that he did not write novels but romances – he thus expressed his awareness of the lack of social texture in his work. (206)

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Like Abraham, Romantic heroes are often represented with rather insubstantial links to their community, friends and social structure in general, rendering American romance an unexternalized genre. In addition to this Romantic solipsism, writers of American romance adopted a universalist approach in their selection and handling of motifs against the particularism of Homeric-realist narratives. Like the Elohist narrator, who defies specificity in representation and attempts to reach universality through timeless and fundamental truths, the Romantic narrator is interested in broader, deeper, higher and larger-than-life realities. Rather than the particulars such as an irrelevant scar on the protagonist’s forehead, the Romantic narrator thematizes concepts such as innocence, nature and spirit. Most probably, in the early nineteenth century, readers did not look for the representation of a specific group of people in some specific town in America, as realism in subsequent decades provided. What they needed was more a national epic like Leatherstocking tales, full of symbols where the characters and the setting stood for America. Tellingly, in order to defy specificity and referentiality, writers of American romance continued the shaded and unexternalized nature of the Biblical narrative, because the indefinite, mysterious nature of the narrative prevents the reader from receiving the Darstellung as the reflection of specific events and characters in real life. The universalist approach in American romance reveals that the movement addresses readers’ souls rather than their minds. If, as Lukács says, the soul is “wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it” (Novel 56), what it needs is not the particular but rather the universal and larger-than-life concepts that explore human existence. American romance offers a strongly subjectivized plot of a defeatedly melancholic world that comforted readers’ inner world, which explains the lack of attempts at “objectivity” in the realist-Homeric sense. Behind the unexternalized aesthetics of American romance lies key philosophical and spiritual assumptions that account for the aesthetic similarity between the Elohist and Romantic narratives. Like the Elohist narrator, writers of American romance thought – consciously or subconsciously – in teleological terms. In his “Nature,” Emerson talks of the “perpetual presence of the sublime” when looking at stars (5), making God’s grandeur evident. Authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne were not devout Christians and did not aim to persuade the reader about the word of God as staunchly as the Old Testament or even the transcendentalist Emerson did. Still, their writings reveal a conviction about a higher power. In their stories, things happen for a reason that cannot be always known and, more importantly, does not need to be known. The frequently used motif of “sheer” – i.e. unexternalized – coincidences and chance

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meetings reveal how the writers of these narratives were convinced of a providential force. Significantly, if there is an intelligent designer behind human life, there is no need to externalize the events in detail because all threads are connected on this divine level anyway. What is not mentioned in the text can be completed in mind using the general divine thread. In line with writers’ teleological worldview, the Romantic plot is idealistic. As Alsen postulates, “all romantics either embraced or entertained the basic idealist belief that physical world is only temporal and hence less real than the eternal world of the spirit, the world of ideas” (14). The dominance of supernatural, psychological or metaphysical plots in American romance reveals the Romantic idealism Alsen mentions. If there is a higher power, there is a higher reality and an afterlife beyond what is perceived, and the higher concepts such as the “spirit” are significant. By the same token, idealism renders social life and social motifs “mundane” and obviates the need to externalize life, focusing instead on what “really” matters: larger-than-life concepts. Often, this idealism was combined with “a monism which arrived at identification of God and the world, soul and body, subject and object” (Wellek, “Romanticism” 150). In contrast to the modern idea of atomism where entities do not constitute unity and the divisions and distinctions are real, Romantic writers still lived in a monistic age where all existence was perceived as a single unity and where human beings, like other entities, were part of a greater and holier whole. Accordingly, to the Romantic writer, all divisions and distinctions among entities are artificial and man-made. If one cannot divide, one cannot really define and describe an entity – i.e., externalize. Moreover, if the physical world is a dull appearance of a holier and all-encompassing truth, and all existence is a single unity, there is no need to externalize this mundane world in the first place. By contrast, literary externalization is an atomistic process: describing and defining smaller details of life can only be possible if entities are not unified on a spiritual and abstract level, hence there is a need to name them and know them. In short, literary externalization goes beyond Romanticists’ teleological, idealistic and monistic assumptions. Clearly, these assumptions and the unexternalized aesthetics they brought about had profound implications for the way writers of American romance handled the motif of business and businessmen. Their larger-than-life focus made the portrayal of society and social affairs secondary in American romance. Social affairs were incorporated in detail into the text only when they served the objectives of American romance. In a teleological universe, business, as a premise belonging to the social and economic sphere – i.e. life, – was considered “worldly” like other social and political motifs. Because it did not qualify as a suitable topic, there were

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not many fictions of business in the pre-realist American literature. When utilized, the motif of business was often used to show the sheer mundanity of the nontranscendental values to reveal “what not to do” for spiritual wellness. Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield” (1835) is a good example of the unexternalized Romantic text in search of timeless universals. In his story, Hawthorne tells the story of Mr. Wakefield, who leaves his house in London one day and lives a block away from his wife for twenty years. He returns after he has been forgotten and resumes his life as a faithful partner. Remarkably, Hawthorne leaves central questions unanswered, as does the Elohist narrator in Auerbach’s analysis; events just “happen.” The reader is not aware of even basic cause-and-effect relationships: Wakefield decides to leave his wife and comes back twenty years later for no explicit reason. The creator of the text, just like the creator of the Elohist text, might know the reason but prefers not to externalize. It is obvious that Hawthorne aims to show a man outside of the family and the organization of home in general; he even ends the story by generalizing: “individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever” (298). The characters in “Wakefield” exist within a transcendental cosmos, which obviates the need for explicit and secular cause-and-effect relations, so the reader does not really need to know why Wakefield leaves home. In fact, if the reader knew the specifics of the case, it would hamper the universality of the story, leaving the reader with a specific character instead of a message about humanity. This emphasis on the generality and universality of the story is also the reason why Hawthorne’s text is not a text about business but a story about organization in general. Using a business organization instead of a general idea of organization would already be too specific for a Romantic text. In this case, Hawthorne would not be easily talking about “individuals” in general, but about a particular person and possibly time, which would lead to a more Homeric effect. Although there were other literary works in the antebellum period that were more specific about the business motif, writers employed it only as long as it accentuated the importance of larger-than-life concepts. Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Business Man” (1840) is a good example of the satirical incorporation of the business motif through which he criticizes both the idea of greed and the attempts to represent the particularities of secular life. Throughout the story, the protagonist Peter Proffit enters different lines of business that earn him money mostly by pitting him against individuals or society. Similar to “Wakefield,” the story contains an attempt to unearth the universal: greed and human existence. In line with this larger-than-life approach, the protagonist and the plot are not socially or spatially externalized; the character does not have the psychological depth and

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visibility that externalized literature were to introduce later. The character’s surname is Proffit because he represents more than a specific character; he represents the universal category of the greedy. Such a general name exemplifies one of the ways in and through which the Romantic literature takes up the universality of the Biblical narrative. The story also shares the shaded nature of the Biblical narrative. In a story of a few pages, the protagonist moves from job to job without much detail or causeand-effect relationship except that he wants to profit – the main universal theme. In fact, in one of the rare cause-and-effect relationships Poe establishes, he clearly attacks the idea of externalization as such: Proffit attributes his fate and fortune to a nurse’s bumping his head to the bedpost when he was still a baby. Satirically, Proffit says that this produced a “positive appetite for system and regularity which has made [him] the distinguished man of business that [he is]” (116). By using the realist technique of externalization, Poe satirizes the transition from larger-thanlife to the externalization of life and the atomism of the latter that was popular in Europe at the time. Popular and prolific in his time (he wrote around a hundred books), one of the lesser-known writers who incorporated the motif of business in the pre-realist period is Timothy Shay Arthur. Just like Hawthorne’s and Poe’s works, Arthur’s writings emphasize larger-than-life concepts in line with the communicative functions of American romance. Unlike the former two, however, Arthur’s novels of “sentimental morality” (French 56) have a visible religious element: he generously preaches through his works. Business is an important component of his “sermon” in Riches Have Wings: A Tale for the Rich and Poor (1847). If Poe utilizes business to criticize greed in his short story, Arthur includes the motif to lay bare the existence of a benevolent providential force against a swiftly modernizing world. Throughout the story, Arthur comforts the reader about the existence of a benevolent God despite incidental mishaps, which happen on a business level – i.e., speculation. Arthur tells the story of two sisters: Eveline loves wealth and chooses a suitor who is interested in her for her father's wealth. The other sister, Eunice, loves virtue and marries an upright suitor, Mr. Albertson. While the former suitor loses interest in Eveline after her father, Mr. Townsend, loses his wealth as a result of speculation, Eunice leads a modest and happy life. At the end of the story, the married sister lectures Eveline and her father about the significance of Christian values. Mr. Townsend and Eveline listen to Eunice and lead humbler (and more Christian) lives at the end. Significantly, Mr. Townsend’s bankruptcy is part of God’s plan. As the narrator says, “in this seeming Evil, we see a Divine Providence, still educating good” (10). Whatever God does – even the seemingly negative facets of life – there is a benign reason. Similarly, towards the end of the

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story, Eveline remarks, “The evil has been good!” – that is, her father’s financial problems – because it reveals her suitor’s real (i.e. wealth-seeking) face. Aware of the volatility of modernizing American life, Arthur still sees a heavenly design on Earth, soothing people in doubt. Business is Arthur’s way of including this modernization in his narrative. In line with his teleological approach, Arthur’s story is shaded and unexternalized like the Elohist narrative. He even insists on the shaded nature of this text in the end, saying, “Need we add sentence to sentence, and page to page to show how salutary had been the misfortunes they had suffered, and how all were but blessings sent in disguise by the Giver of all good? No, this would be useless” (192). In other words, externalization is unnecessary because there is a God within the text almost as in the Old Testament. In Riches, Arthur demonstrates the importance of timeless and fundamental religious ideals with the motif of business as the counterpole. His other works such as his popular Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1854) and stories for the “Godey’s Lady’s Book” magazine are similar to Riches in championing the values, beliefs and moralism of nineteenth-century America through other literary tools and motifs. Considering the functions, all of the three works comfort the reader in the face of changing social and economic developments and the motif of business plays an essential role. Business allows writers to demonstrate the “right way of living” by constituting a counter pole to the antebellum ideals – as an unattractive, worldly and mundane pole to the grandeur of Godly stability. Hawthorne’s text offers reassurance with the Darstellung of a character who experiences a twenty-year break from the family. Significantly, Wakefield does not have any problems with resuming his life despite such a long break. The fact that the character can come back and resume his life where he has left it offers comfort to the reader from the instability of modernizing America. Arthur’s text reassures by openly lecturing the existence of God despite social and economic fluctuations, which are translated into fiction in the form of speculation. After the bankruptcy, deranged characters come back to the “right” path as desired by God. Poe’s text is different from the other two in that it does not include a plot of movement or change. Still, it offers comfort through its satirical structure, which essentially criticizes greed, thus reassuring the reader about the larger Romantic ideals. Significantly, in all of the narratives, business acts as the destabilizing layer: in Poe’s text, Proffit is a clear danger to society, and in Arthur’s, business reveals the deviation of the characters from the Godly values of the period. If Wakefield included a business, it would be the part where Wakefield lived apart from his family, a part of his “deranged” years as well. This plot of destabilization is necessary to underscore the

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teleological alternative; that is why business is used as an antipode to the largerthan-life ideas in American romance. In fact, offering psychological comfort against modernization was not confined to these three works. As Henry Nash Smith puts forward, the literature of the antebellum period offered spiritual “reassurance,” for which the middle class “craved” (“The Scribbling Women” 58). His statement can be extended to the works of American romance published in the pre-Civil War period. Arguably, the overarching function of American romance is to offer spiritual comfort. More secular than divine orientation, spiritual reassurance was needed to comfort the reader about the changing life in the country, as Hawthorne’s, Poe’s and Arthur’s works reveal. If quintessentially religious texts like the Old Testament offer divine orientation to show people “right ways of living” on Earth – that is, an orientation towards what God wants – romance assures the reader spiritually that “all is fine” in the face of the instability and volatility of social and economic life. Smith is not alone with his assumptions. To Fluck, the plots in American romance were used strategically to serve this purpose. He argues that the Romantic plot, with an emphasis on “a movement beyond everyday experience and the claims of common sense” and “[r]emote, forbidden, elusive, idealized, miraculous, magic, and marvelous” plots (“The American Romance” 422) created a “constant tension between wish-fulfillment and restraint” (428). While reading a Romantic text, readers are faced with not only larger-than-life imaginary worlds, but they are also aware of the fictive quality of these far-away settings. The tension between the imaginary and the real and the ultimate relief that the real eventually triumphs (because fictional works end while life continues) creates an inevitable reassurance, which often includes a religious undertone. Obviously, business has no “business” in a transcendental cosmos, and when it does, it offers spiritual reassurance. Interestingly, the Romantic preoccupation with modernization and the instabilities it brought about3 disclose the reasons why American romance gradually waned as the dominant literary movement in the second part of the nineteenth

3

It is not a coincidence that Francis William Edmonds describes a destabilizing experience – how a speculator tempts a couple to neglect their family table with his painting The Speculator in 1852 – almost at the peak of American romance. Apparently, modernization was perceived as a destabilizing experience not only by writers of American romance but also by other artists. For more information, see Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford UP, 1991, pp. 147-8.

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century. Although preoccupied with modernization in many ways, American romance was incompatible with the modern needs of readers. As the previous chapter documents, during this period people lost their feelings of reality in the face of a swiftly changing America. Once the church, the family and tradition lost their power as providers for reality, Americans faced difficulty in understanding and operating within the rapidly secularizing social life. Consequently, people needed explicit knowledge; they needed experience. As Fluck says, when metaphysical forms of truth did not satisfy the need for reality on the side of the individual, experience “replace[d] the religious or metaphysical revelation” (“Beast” 199). In a secular world where the long-held beliefs about the transcendental nature of human existence were no longer valid, the reader needed concrete experiences with other individuals or institutions in a new social system of relations in order eventually to replace the former knowledge structures and be functional in the modern world. However, the individual was limited in his capacity to gain experience both physically and intellectually. Not only could he not meet many people or encounter various events all the time, but he was also not able to process his experience and transform it into knowledge easily. These individuals turned to literature among other means to extract the fictional experience and thereby adapt to social changes. However, American romance was far from offering answers to the questions posed by the age: neither the divine orientation of religious texts nor the metaphysics of American romance could offer possibilities for experience. As Henry James says in the preface to The American, writers of American romance were interested only in ”experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it” (xvii). James condemns what Poirier, Chase and Trilling consider the defining feature of American romance: the Darstellung of experience disconnected from its social context, which rendered the genre unhelpful for the post-Civil War reader. Once the divine framework slowly dissolved, people could not utilize American romance to fulfill their need for secular knowledge. The shattering of the divine framework meant that American romance was no longer relevant in the second part of the nineteenth century, paving the way for a new, non-transcendental literature. In Fluck’s words, people needed: a literature adapted to present-day American conditions. It would have to be modern, realistic, and democratic: it would have to focus on the present and not the past; on common, everyday life and not on the heroic or melodramatic exception; and it would have to be accessible to the common reader and not require a literary education in order to appreciate

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it. This […] led to what would eventually be called American realism. (“Anglo-European Contexts,” 79-80)

This modern literature was open to social and political motifs, hence giving way to the “business renaissance” in American literary realism.

2.2 AMERICAN REALISM: AN AESTHETICS OF ORIENTATION As explored in Chapter 1, the cultural, social, economic and psychological developments in the second part of the nineteenth century created a need for reality, which transcendental forms of literature no longer met. As such, writers of the post-Civil War America came up with a literature that offered strategic answers to the readers’ needs. In other words, the feeling of absence of reality in American life led to the emergence of what we know as American realism today. Several scholars agree on this: in Kaplan’s words, realism was a “strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change” (10). Bersani says that realism served “nineteenth-century society by providing it with strategies for containing (and repressing) its disorder” (Astyanax 63). Glazener verbalizes a similar causality when she says, “In the broadest of historical frames […] American realism can usefully be understood as playing a part in modernity’s restructuring of life around capitalism” (“American Literary Realism” 30). The relationship Glazener indicates is not a relationship of pure referentiality between American realities and American literature, where realist representations replaced Romantic representations because American realities changed. Rather, Glazener points to the impact of capitalism – swift industrialization, urbanization and social change – as generating the need for reality by the reader, and the literary response to these needs in the form of American realism. In order to offer such reality, American realists formulated an externalized aesthetics in the same way that the Homeric narrator did. As in the link between the Romantic and Elohist, the link between the realist narrative and Homeric narrative is by no means coincidental. Both pairs use similar strategies to create reality. If the Romantic and Elohist (narrator) creates reality through the indeterminacies (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) completed with transcendental reading habits, the Homeric narrator creates reality through externalization. Having emerged many centuries before Judaism and Christianity, the Homeric narrator does not have profound teleological claims; neither does he pretend to tell universal or fundamental truths. Similarly, without a metaphysical cosmos to support readers with

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indeterminacies in a text in the second part of the nineteenth century, American realists excessively externalized to create the “real.” Notwithstanding the importance of reality, a realistic Darstellung was not the only ambition of American realists. American realists also offered orientation: they often aimed to guide the reading public to a specific set of values, to have Americans change their opinions, and to take readers with them to an imagined setting. As Howells says, “a novelist […] can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a physician or a priest” (Criticism 73) – both of whom indeed orient the public. The attempt to offer reality and orientation had profound implications for the motif of business. The search for the real not only allowed but also encouraged writers to incorporate “mundane” social and the political themes that the transcendental writers avoided in their attempt to emphasize the universal. Accordingly, “economic and political novels” flooded the market more than any other “purposenovel” in the 1880s (Rose 409). It is easy to add the business novel to this category. As Parrington says, “If a novel were to be true to American life, it must adjust its perspectives to the facts of the great American game of money-chasing; it must shift its habitat from Fifth Avenue to Wall Street, from the club to the factory. So the business man entered the portals of fiction” (181). As mentioned in the introduction, the motif of business experienced a “renaissance” in the second part of the nineteenth century, where numerous works of business fiction appeared. American realists used the motif of business in line with the communicative functions of the realist movement. This endeavor culminated in The Rise of Silas Lapham. In his magisterial realist novel, William Dean Howells utilizes the motif to offer social and ethical orientation. Before addressing Howells’s novel, however, let me explore American realism and other literary works that included the motif. First of all, we locate American realism within the existing literature.4 Research into American realism can be roughly divided into two phases. Before the

4

Early definitions of realism in the arts included “an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity” (Columbia). Another dictionary defines the term as a word “used as vaguely as ‘naturalism,’ implying a desire to depict things accurately and objectively” (Chilvers and Glaves-Smith 588). For the OED, the term implies “a concern with accurate and objective representation.” One other dictionary offers the following definition: “Realism, term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color” (Hart and Leininger 552). In other words, objectivity, or the lack of subjectivity, has been the key tenet of realist art for a variety of scholars and institutions. However, these definitions not only take the literary text as a

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poststructural turn in the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholars held to a more referential understanding of the movement. Following Vernon Louis Parrington, scholars such as Richard Chase, Warner Berthoff and Donald Pizer thought that American realists objectively registered “the industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class” (Parrington xxvi). Alfred Kazin reiterates a similar idea by saying, “Our modern literature in America [i.e., American realism] is at bottom only the expression of our modern life in America” (On Native Grounds xxii). Behind these statements lies the assumption that literature was a referential medium and American realism mirrored social and political realities in particular. In fact, this mimetic attitude paved the way for early critics’ preference of American romance over realism as the “more American literature.” Baym is right in her argument that “the early critic looked for a standard of Americanness,” which he found in the romantic plots of “individual against society” (125-6, 132). Yet, this is not the whole story. Behind scholars’ rejection of American realism lies a mimetic attitude to literature: they thought that American romance reflects American realities more forcefully. In his highly influential work The American Novel and Its Tradition, Chase argues that while in the European novel, the characters “are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past” (12), in American romance, it does not “matter much what class people come from, and where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery” (13). Since the dominant belief was that America was a classless society in contrast to Europe and the Soviet Union, the realist literature of describing people “in relation to their social class” was rejected on the grounds that it described America inaccurately. Instead, “novel[s] with an improbable plot, inconsistent characterizations, and excesses of style” (Baym 130) were more real, because they were mimetic expressions of the unshackled American experience. With the poststructural turn in the decades following the 1970s, however, scholars gradually moved away from this orthodox view of American realism. To scholars like Amy Kaplan, Brook Thomas, Michael Davitt Bell and Walter Benn Michaels, American realism does not reflect reality mimetically, but rather exists in a complex and dynamic relationship with the social realities of the period. The incompatibility between reality and text is the reason why scholars such as Kaplan argue that “We tend to find the conclusion of American realistic novels singularly unsatisfying” (159). The asymmetry she points out is clear: while life or reality

referential tool, describing a given reality without mediation, but also assume that there is a stable objective reality outside, regardless of the subjectivity of human perception.

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goes on, novels (have to) end. If mimesis is an illusion, then (realist) literature constitutes contemporary social realities rather than reflecting them. In turn, these scholars analyze this process of construction by focusing on gender, race and capitalism, among other factors. While Bell focuses on realists’ preoccupation with gender anxiety and art, Thomas takes a more legal stance and sees the contemporary promise and failure of contract in American society and economy in the works of American realism. Michaels, on the other hand, comes up with a New Historicist perspective and postulates how authors incorporated the capitalist ideology in various disguised ways. Accordingly, post-1980 scholars see American realists as conservative, complicit with the dominant ideologies of the period, while the orthodox scholars perceive the movement as progressive, because it represents harsh realities. The research into realism after the 1980s provides profound insight into American realism from a variety of perspectives and most importantly acknowledges the impossibility of achieving mimesis between reality and text. However, scholars have missed the impact of the readers’ needs and writers’ responses to these needs in the construction of realist texts. The Reality Effect True to their name, realist writers were obsessed with reflecting reality in and through their texts. British writer Walter Besant says, “the characters must be real, and such as might be met with in actual life” (qtd. in Barnett 232). American realists were not different: Howells says, “every true realist […] is careful of every fact” (Howells as Critic 83). Howells’s oft-quoted statement on grasshoppers illustrates his obsession with reality clearly: to him, the realist author should “reject the ideal grasshopper […] because it is not like a real grasshopper.” Instead, he wants “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper [to] have a fair field” in literature (Criticism 13). Like Howells, nearly every American writer in the period attempted to offer the real grasshopper and claim credibility through his realistic portrayal of the external world. Henry James was sure “that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality” (The Art of Fiction 10). To him, one of the faults of Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter is a “want of reality” (The Art of Criticism 119). Considering the fact that the novel is a good example of American romance, it is no coincidence that he finds faults in its conception of reality. Fluck is right in arguing that “the starting premise of realism […] was the goal of overcoming the separation of art and life” (“Anglo-European Contexts” 90). If there is no difference between art and life, art mirrors life, which was the ultimate realist objective.

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Notwithstanding this emphasis on reality, providing reality through words is impossible. For one thing, they are dissimilar and incompatible: reality, whatever it is, is multi-faceted, while literature is composed purely of letters. The round object we know as apple is a fruit that can appear in different colors; an “apple” is a five-letter word. The word does not mirror the fruit but signifies it, which conveys less of the fruit than mirroring does. Unlike early scholars of American realism, American realists were aware of the fact that reality could not be provided in its original form as it existed in the external world, that it was not completely graspable through words. This theoretical impossibility did not halt the desire to express a priori reality, though. Realists continued writing prolifically to meet the reader’s needs for reality, but instead of genuine reality, what they could offer the reader was “the reality effect” or “referential illusion” (Barthes 148).5 That is, reality in text is a matter of senses. As Jakobson says, “we call realistic those works which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitude” (20; emphasis added). Realists’ texts were not real as a real fruit was, but they felt real. As mentioned earlier, James and Howells admit that instead of being able to mirror reality, they attempted to offer “the air of reality” (The Art of Fiction 35) and “the perfect artistic illusion or the effect we call reality” (qtd. in Nettels 64) respectively. Mark Twain similarly contends that “a well-arranged unreality” can bring about “a blistering and awful reality” (Letters 735). Instead of duplication, realists were after a real-feeling Darstellung. In order to make the reader feel that the text is real, realists came up with several methods. Realist writers incorporated, for instance, what Wellek calls “bad aesthetics” (“Realism” 18) or what Kaplan calls “flawed prose” (5). As a rule, the external reality is not a straitjacket and it is not symmetrical. There are no natural frames or compositions inherent in the external reality. All forms of framing reality – periodization, categorization and composition – are ascribed anachronistically, i.e. later by individuals. The realists were aware of this free-floating shape of the external reality. In an attempt to represent this asymmetrical reality without any losses that the process of signification brings about, they began using asymmetrical language. “Bad aesthetics,” “flawed prose” or the avoidance of “artful”6 language, represented best by poetic structures such as rhyme, give the idea that language can represent the naturally asymmetrical reality, because it creates a

5

Barthes introduced the term first in his article, “L’Effet de reel” in Communications, vol. 11, 1968, pp. 84-89. All references are to the English translation of his article in The Rustle of Language, U of California P, 1989, pp. 141-148.

6

For a discussion of Howells’s rejection of “artful” writing, see Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism, U of Chicago P, 1993, pp. 17-38.

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symmetry between the asymmetry of life and asymmetry of the text. This realization led writers to attempt to avoid the “artful” language of former narratives in order to establish compatibility between life and art, society and literature, and external reality and the word. Still, however, there was no perfect match between the asymmetry of life and asymmetry of the text. Aware that the asymmetrical Darstellung does not suffice, realist writers attempted to “embed” the reader in the text, making the reader a part of the plot to make them feel the reality of the Darstellung. In order to do that, realists formulated a very specific semiotic structure in their texts – a semiotics of externalization. As explored in the previous section, in the transcendental text, the reader did not have doubts about the truth value of the text because of his extra-textual belief in the existence of a divine power. The indeterminacies of the text – the unspecific, shaded and unexternalized Darstellung – do not diminish the reality effect of the Romantic text. Once the reader believes in the divine power, he uses his imagination and interpretation that his cultural background provides and comes up with a universal truth. However, his options for imagining are not numerous. A centuries-long established tradition of reading around the Church limits the range of interpretation. Likewise, the reading habits of the public limited the interpretation of the Romantic text in the period. As the reading public was used to the universality of the representation in American romance, thus the mysterious nature of the narrative, the reader did not need a secular reality effect that canceled out the transcendental. As a result, the writer of the transcendentalist text was not afraid of unclear, ineffable motifs that led to a wide range of interpretations. Semiotically, this extra-literary limitation on interpretation allows the signifier and the signified in the transcendental text to remain peacefully arbitrary and separate from each other. That is, writers of American romance did not attempt or pretend to refer to external reality as strongly as the realist writer. The Romantic writer was aware that his signifiers signified largerthan-life concepts. The reader’s extra-textual belief, in turn, solves any semiotic indeterminacies that the distance between the signifier and the signified may create. In a secular text, however, this distinction and the distance between the signified and the signifier constitutes a serious problem. Since the realist text is not the projection of transcendental principles, and thus lacks a strong extra-literary belief system, this distance cannot be covered through extra-literary means such as religion or divinity. It is direction-less in many ways. As a result, the reader has to be actively persuaded about the truth value of the text – that what is represented is real – crucially, through the text itself. In order to do that, the best scenario would be to “fix” the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and achieve a

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one-to-one relationship: mirroring instead of signifying. In this case, the writer would be able to control the communication with the reader and directly tell what he wants to say, avoiding all other interpretations the reader might come up with and prove that he represents the reality one-to-one, i.e., completely. For one thing, his job is to construct signifiers without a direct control over the signified, or what the word might mean. Inevitably, however, the word “profit” might signify several different things and can have different referents each time it is articulated, and this process cannot be completely controlled by the writer. This ambiguity leads to unavoidable indeterminacies and lack of clarity in the reader’s mind, because he can interpret the text in more than one way. This process of rough signification diminishes the reality effect of the text, because these indeterminacies show that the text, in contrast to the claims of realist writers, does not signify or refer to the external reality perfectly. Realists came up with a specific signifier and signified structure to overcome this problem. Their solution, put simply, was to emphasize that the realist text was the reality itself rather than a tool signifying the real. As Barthes argues in his analysis of Flaubert’s fiction, “the absence of the signified […] is the very signifier of realism” (148). Barthes sees the signified as an absent category because the signifier is strongly visible in the realist text. However, the signified is not completely absent in the realist text as Barthes argues; rather, in an attempt to claim a secular truth, the signified is rendered almost invisible behind the signifier. By insisting on the reality of the word – for instance, “business” rather than what the word actually signifies – the signifier crushes the signified in the realist text. In this way, the realist text attempts to render the word “business” real rather than what it might possibly signify. This process of what I prefer to call crushing the signified is one technique of creating the reality effect, because it helps the realist writer to limit readers’ range of interpretation by violently shortening the distance between the signifier and the signified. If the transcendental text becomes “tyrannical” through a loose relationship between the signifier and the signified, the realist text becomes “tyrannically” real through the lack of distance between the two, that is, through the signifier that crushes the signified. Writers used several methods and techniques to allow the signifier to crush the signified and thereby create the referential illusion. First and foremost, classical realism of the post-Civil War period sought to reject the larger-than-life approach of the Biblical and subsequent literary traditions of different transcendentalisms. Instead, American realists attempted to present a secular and thus non-transcendental world in the same way the externalized Homeric narrative does. American realists externalized or attempted to augment as many details as possible about the

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social world and reasons for the events in their plots. As Barthes argues, description – in his wording, notation – “denote(s) what is ordinarily called ‘concrete reality’ (insignificant gestures, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words)” (146). He argues that the realist authors include “useless details” in their texts, which do not contribute to the plot, character development or structure, in order to enhance the idea that their works appear less fictional and more “real.” The realist text establishes clear cause-and-effect relations and clarifies indeterminacies in the course of the text less like the Old Testament and more like Odyssey. That is why the events in a realist story tend to have clear and socially wellgrounded reasons that can be traced back to preceding events in the plot. In this process of externalization, the signifier has to be magnified so that the signified becomes less visible behind the signifier. In order to magnify – or draw the focus to – the signifier, the language of the text has to be clear, canceling out the shaded, mysterious spaces in the shape of the signifier. Watt argues that “the function of language is much more largely referential in the novel than in other literary forms” such as ancient Greek narratives, where poets like Petronius “would use language as a source of interest in its own right, rather than as a purely referential medium” (30, 28). Watt puts forward what seems obvious: the language of the realist text is (seemingly) referential. This seeming referentiality is, first of all, the result of the accessibility of language in the text. Henry James’s The American (1877) starts with such accessible language: “On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carre, in the Museum of the Louvre” (33). The reader does not have difficulty in understanding the language of this sentence or what happens in the course of the novel, unlike modernist novels, for instance. Through this opacity, the writer offers a magnified and accessible representation and does not tend to leave questions unanswered in the mind of the reader about the plot. This process of externalization, in turn, paved the way for the particularization that was absent in the Biblical narrative or Romantic texts. Once writers explicated the social world, they realized that reality, if it is not transcendental, is also not universal. Rather, reality existed with its particularities, and with its differences to other realities, which in turn accounts for the anti-idealism of realism: the particularity of reality prevented writers from portraying reality as part of a higher rule and as its projection. Howells echoes this anti-idealist sentiment, saying, “nothing [was] abstract or typical, but everything standing for itself, and not for some other thing” in good literature, i.e. realism (“Shakespeare” 77). If everything stands for itself in a text, the text does not signify larger-than-life realities. This particularity

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of reality was especially important for the reader, because with the death of transcendental plans among enlightened middle classes, so did also the universals die. To be able to identify with the textual Darstellung, the individual needed particular people and particular circumstances in the realist text. Accordingly, in realism, “the plot had to be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past, by general human types against a background primarily determined by the appropriate literary convention” (Watt 15). In that context, Watt points to the disappearing of the symbolic names and their replacement with common human names, because the reader could be oriented in a secular society only by portraying characters whose names were John and Marie rather than Prudence or Proffit. However, this objective to create a literature that did not refer to a larger reality, phenomenon or divinity remained only an attempt in American realism. For one thing, the theoretical impossibility to come up with a one-to-one relationship between the signifier and the signified made the realist writer signify broader concepts than their particularized texts could refer to, even if this process of broader signification was contrary to their objectives. Once they saw that the complete particularity was not possible, American realists incorporated secular symbols into their literature in order to avoid referring to larger-than-life concepts. Kolb confirms this by saying, “Natural facts, for the realists, are symbols of other natural facts” (449). Cady shares the same view: “unlike the symbols of a Hawthorne or Melville,” Howells’s symbols “have no referents outside the immediate field of the novel. They do not point to abstractions of general validity or significance” (214). For instance, in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the house the Laphams build on the Back Bay is more than a specific house; it symbolizes the hopes of the nouveau riche and the impossibility of social mobility for the newcomers. It is a “symbol of Lapham’s social pretensions and his ruthless extermination of his partner” (Kolb 450), in contrast to the larger-than-life symbols writers of American romance used in order to connect the reader to a divine plan similar to the religious narratives. The attempts to externalize and particularize shaped the dominant form of the literature American realists preferred as well; it made prose the primary genre and led them to downplay verse. First of all, traditional poetry is shorter than prose, which renders it an inauspicious genre for externalization. There is too much information left outside the text in verse; therefore, it is more like Abraham’s narrative than the Homeric narrative in Auerbach’s taxonomy. Not being able to explicate through the text was a serious problem, which is why there is a lack of a strong poetry tradition in classical American realism. In the same way, the traditional poetry in the period was more “artful;” it incorporated rhyme and repetitions

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that would create an artistic and music-like aura in the process of reception. American realists, like their European colleagues, were clearly reluctant to create the reflection of the universal that this music-like quality brings about. Even the genre of the short story shared the same shortcoming as verse. Therefore, American realism triumphed primarily in the novel form, which allowed writers to externalize and particularize without the limitations other genres set. This is also why realist novels tend to be longer in comparison to novels influenced by other movements. In addition to this semiotics of externalization, American realists included many thematic strategies to generate the feeling of reality and embed the reader in the text. For instance, they often attempted to offer the Darstellung of social relations in the text, because the idea of relation was one of the basic tenets of reality in social life. To realist writers, reality stood first and foremost as a network of relations in life; it was basically found in a context. The loss of reality meant the loss of this network of relations, which was previously obvious and intact. The lack of connection between fire and heat and its replacement with light and heat in The Gilded Age is a small but effective example of the collapse of relations in human life and the resulting confusion. As a response to the need for relation, American realism puts the characters “in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past” (Chase 12). That is why the job of the realist writer was to explore, in Henry James’s words, “the ‘related’ sides of situations” (The Art of Criticism 281). Auerbach agrees with James, saying, “the serious realism of modern times cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving” (463). The realist writer provided a relation to the reader by incorporating social relations as the main theme of his text and thereby attempted to embed the reader in the textual totality. By immersing himself in the textual representation of relations, the reader possibly feels that he is a part of the Darstellung. This attempt to embed the reader in the text is why realist texts have a “conversational structure” (Fluck, “Anglo-European Contexts” 82). In order to provide the necessary relation to the reader, the realist text explicitly talks and negotiates with the reader throughout the plot. Through a gradual process of establishing trust, this “conversational structure” allows the realist writer to establish a relationship with the reader and eventually embed him in the totality of the text. Moreover, this conversation is constant; the narrator rarely leaves the reader outside of the Darstellung, except in exceptional cases of crisis. This conversational structure of American realism stands in opposition to the communicative strategies of American romance, where “The reading activity […] denies communication” and “the reader is cut off from communication and thus from the possibility of genuine

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experience and knowledge” (Ickstadt 86). American romance elicits a more passive reaction from the reader, because its primary function is to reassure the reader. Conversation with the reader was a novel project in the literary history of the time – a project that the reader did not anticipate. American realism is thus “a nonaddictive variety of fiction” (Glazener, Reading 95), because constant negotiation does not allow the reader to remain passive in the act of reading and simply consume the text. Instead, the reader has to work with the text in order to make sense of the made-up world therein. The non-addictive nature of the realist narrative made literature arduous. As Kaplan argues, “realism turns reading into work” (17). As a result, before entering a conversation with the reader, realists had to attract the reader to the text through different means. Among other techniques, American realists facilitated an easy identification between their Darstellung and the reader at the inception of their works in particular. Fluck argues that in classic American realism, “individual growth rests on the assumption that there exists something like a narcissist and childish inner core that can be trained and cultivated until it finally reaches mature adulthood” (“Beast” 200). This inner core is untrained, uncultivated and disoriented especially at the beginning of the text, not unlike the disoriented and dislocated reading public in the post-Civil War America. This technique facilitates a possible identification between readers and characters. By establishing a strong relationship between the text and the reader through identification, American writers persuaded readers to start reading the text even if the text was not easy to consume and required effort on the side of the reader. Frequently, the attempts to establish identification between the reader and the text led classical American realists to structure their novel in the form of Bildungsroman, i.e. a novel of education. American realists often represented the social, psychological and moral growth of their characters, because this was an easy way of establishing identification between the reader and characters. In novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the Darstellung of the Bildung of the protagonist and thus possibly the reader is clear: Silas Lapham starts as a naïve and self-centered character and by the time the novel ends, he is enlightened about the importance of moral values. In the same way, rather than joining and trusting the precepts of the society, Huck Finn gradually learns to trust his own experience and reach his own conclusions. There is a crucial difference between the representation of characters at the beginnings and endings in the realist novel; there has to be enough distinction between the two in order to highlight the process of gradual education. The more the reader identifies with the character, the easier it is to persuade them to read the novel even if it requires labor.

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American realists’ attempt to establish identification between the reader and the characters account for the importance of the character in the realist text. Henry James, in his preface of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), remarks that the idea behind his novel “consisted not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot’ […] but altogether in the sense of a single character.” Scholars reiterate this prioritization of character as a central tenet of American realism. Fluck says, “characters, not plot, stand at the center of Howell’s fiction” (“Anglo-European Contexts” 86). American realists’ foregrounding of characters facilitates identification in that everyday world with everyday characters in the text allow easy identification between the reader and such characters in a way the representation of aristocratic or marginalized characters would never be able to achieve. Catherine Belsey supports this argument, saying, “Classic realism tends to offer as the ‘obvious’ basis of its intelligibility the assumption that character, unified and coherent, is the source of action” (60). Yet, character for writers like Howells and James was “more than a neutral descriptive term for a structural element in the novel; it carried the moral connotations of personal integrity – to have character” (Kaplan 24). The externalized representation of characters with personal integrity made it easy for readers to identify themselves with the protagonists and possibly grow up with them throughout the novel. Social and Ethical Orientation in American Realism Even though the need for the reality effect was the primary factor behind the rise of realist aesthetics and the popularity of such novels, it does not completely account for the way writers constructed their literary texts. There was never a singular and free-floating aesthetics of externalization. Rather, American realists thematized a specific range of motifs through repeated patterns, leaving out other motifs from their fiction. The background of this selection process is crucial to understand the functions of American realism. Significantly, American realists’ project was “to civilize:” American realists offered social and ethical orientation within the “civilizatory control” of Victorian moralism (Fluck, “Beast” 207, 205).7 In other words, even though writers were obliged to be free in constructing their literature, they used this freedom not arbitrarily but to guide and orient the reader in line with the ideals and norms that Victorian moralism set. In fact, the realist fiction exposes that American realists utilized the reality effect to orient the reader. As Claybaugh puts forward, “Anglo-American realists […] represent the world as it is in order to bring about the world as it should be” (40). In turn, this project of

7

For more information of Victorian moralism and “civilizatory control,” see Winfried Fluck, “Beast.”

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orientation profoundly shaped realists’ methods, selection and construction of signifiers, including the motif of business. To begin with, realists like Howells attempted to direct the reader to an “imagined,” “better” society, which did not really exist but which could have existed. Howells justifies this attempt through an interesting wordplay: he defines realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” (Criticism 38). As Fluck argues, “‘Truthful,’ however, is not to be confused with ‘factual’ or ‘documentary.’ It refers to that which is considered truly representative of a society, including its ‘true’ potential” (“Anglo-European Contexts” 80). In other words, Howells’s definition of realism replaces reality with truth and highlights the things that are “representative” of American society and its “true potential.” That is probably why realist writers such as Henry James often sent their characters abroad, where the true potential of America could be demonstrated easily through comparison. In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), an engineer from Connecticut goes back in time to the court of King Arthur and surprises the British with different feats, revealing what Americans could potentially achieve. In fiction that takes place in the US, however, the “true potential” of an imagined society stands often in opposition to what is “out there;” it connotes a possible future rather than the present, the real and the existing. Cox agrees, saying, Twain’s reality “is clearly not actuality, but an extravagant invention which, poised against the clichés, displaces them” (47). In other words, the realist Darstellung is an invention that potentially replaces the real. Notwithstanding the impossibility of grasping reality through words, what Howells wrote bore little resemblance to the actual realities dominant in the period – the harsh conditions of the working class or the robber barons. He was clearly aware of the optimism of his assumption, but he still insisted on this project in an attempt to change American society for the better. The fact that we see a benevolent and moral businessman and business organization in The Rise of Silas Lapham in an age dominated by immoral businesses is a clear result of the attempt to reveal this “true potential.” Accordingly, Howells’s realism emphasizes a future objective that American society can and should reach if Americans try hard enough along the lines of what Howells presents. The attempt to bring about the “true potential” of American society led American realists to emphasize the importance of social integration through their literary texts – a social integration of all layers of American society. American realists not only acknowledged the disintegration and diversity of American society but also strove to introduce Americans to each other. Howells’s call to his fellow realists is telling about this integrative function: “let us make [Americans] know one

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another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity” (Criticism 87). Pizer confirms this, saying that literature in the period, more than anything, “had a job of work to do.” Its main goal was “to make us known to each other in our common political and social progress” (“The Problem of Definition” 7). In other words, American realism was an attempt to establish what Hassan calls “cognitive trust” (qtd. Kaplan in 18) and eventually create a “known community” (Kaplan 18) of Americans in the late nineteenth century. In order to achieve social integration, American realists adopted an “aesthetic of the common” (Kaplan 22). They endorsed the ordinary American, which appeared in the text not as a comic or minor figure but as a serious protagonist. The integrative function also accounts for the wide use of regionalism, dialects and local color in the literary works of the period. Such representation helped the reader to get to know the groups he could not easily meet in real life, paving the way for the brotherhood of a heterogeneous society in the eyes of realist writers. The emphasis on recognition is the reason why Howells considered American realism as “democracy in literature” (Criticism 87). Introducing different groups to each other compelled realists to address everyone (in contrast to former forms of literature), including the “ungenteel.” That is why American realism is “supposedly most inclusive of literary movements” (Glazener, Reading 116, 49). Creating “a more democratic culture” (Shi 7) in contrast to the more aristocratic writing practices of former decades called for representational inclusion of non-mainstream Darstellung. Moreover, the emphasis on the “true potential” of America encouraged American realists to contain anxieties about the declining role of religion through morality. Although the realist text, like the Homeric text, is non-transcendental, American realists believed that America in its “true potential” operated according to a specific set of ethical rules. As Fluck argues, American realists had the “almost metaphysical assumption that reality is governed by moral laws” (“AngloEuropean Contexts” 91). As Howells says, “We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true? – true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth […] necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry” (Criticism 49). If the highest morality was the truth of America, and realists’ aim was to be realistic about America, describing a moral America was not only a crucial tenet but also a natural component of American realism. Since morality is deeply connected to the religious network within which it functions, American realists’ attempts to consolidate morality aimed to contain the anxieties that the death of God brought about in an age when the traditional structures were gradually breaking down. Stessin confirms the mor-

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alism of Howells’s novel, saying, The Rise of Silas Lapham, “the story of a hardworking, humorless paint manufacturer, is not realism but a nostalgic throwback to the genteel tradition of New England puritanism” (284). In order to achieve this social and ethical orientation, American realists chose a specific set of motifs: they constructed a “civilizing,” positive and imagined “middle-path” and avoided other forms of realities that did not serve this communicative objective. Understandably, Howells staged and called other contemporary writers to stage “the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American” (Criticism 62). These aspects are “more American” because by presenting such realities, Howells sought to help Americans realize their true potential – a process that would ultimately bring about the true potential of America as a whole. Commenting on McTeague, Hamlin Garland justifies his decision not to consider negative realities, stating, “Of what avail is this study of sad lives? for it does not even lead to a notion of social betterment” (qtd. in Macelrath and Knight 276). As Garland’s statement reflects, realists’ reformative attempts along the lines of Victorian moralism limited their vision of American realities in the late nineteenth century. American realists’ methods included easily accessible themes and topics. In line with their objectives and the limitations these objectives brought, reality in American realism, in contrast to the shaded nature of American romance, is externalized, accessible and easy to follow. As Fluck argues, in realism, “reality is a sphere that can be rationally studied and causally explained and in which experiences can therefore produce knowledge” (“Beast” 203). That is, the realist writer constructs and represents only what can produce “civilizing” experience and knowledge in the reader. To borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams, the communities constructed in the realist text were “knowable communities” (165). With this emphasis on opacity, realists posited that there was an actual social center upon which the realist text could elaborate, showing the readers how to deal with it within the Victorian framework. The attempt to come up with a knowable, analyzable and causally understandable world required the realist writer to construct his Darstellung carefully: to civilize but not to “misorient” the reader in ways that escaped Victorian moralism. Lapham’s paint business is a clear example of how the realist writer limits the interpretation of his motifs. It not only demonstrates how immature Lapham is in the beginning, but it also allows the protagonist subsequently to undergo a moral enlightenment. Lapham’s enlightening business is constructed in such a specific way, because only in this way can the realist text “civilize” the reader toward an imagined society. In addition, American realists constructed an imagined “even-handed […] middle path” (Elliott 295, Lehan 65) in line with the Victorian objective of “civilizing.” “The goal of realism” is “to minimize excess” (Michaels 38), not because

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the realists wanted to react to the rising speculative capitalism as Michaels argues, but because the Darstellung of restraint and equilibrium8 served realists’ efforts to orient the reader. In their representations of the middle path, realists such as Howells attempted to present the reader with the social highway rather than the verge, the city center rather than the slums, and more importantly middle-class people. For instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham depicts neither extreme poverty nor lunacy. In the novel, Sewell justifies this exclusion on behalf of Howells, claiming that disproportionate representations such as acts of self-sacrifice “do greater mischief than ever” to “the whole intellectual experience” (175). That is, the less “even-handed” the middle path was, the less orientation the realist text could offer in the way Victorian moralism envisioned, and the representation of social and mental peripheries amounted instead to acts of “mischief” and misorientation. Norris later beautifully defines the limitations of this shared middle path, defining American realism as follows: “the smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon, crises involving cups of tea” (“Zola” 1106). Dreiser confirms the realist emphasis on the middle path by referring to “the almost complete absence of any reference to the coarse and the vulgar and the cruel and the terrible” (A Book About Myself 490) in American realism. The attempt to “civilize” often led American realists to bracket the reality effect temporarily through the representation of an ultimately ideal, hence non-existing, society, which creates the effect of unreality – an inescapable by-product of this attempt at orientation. That is, there is an emblematic dualism in American realism: in principal works of the movement, the reality effect coexists with this attempt at orienting the reading public. While classical American realists are those that emphasized the reality effect, reformist realists such as Edward Bellamy or Upton Sinclair often neglected the effect of reality for the sake of their social objectives. The feminist, socialist or other forms of orientation that contemporary works – such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887 offers – reveal how reformist writers downplayed the reality effect and the relevance of the realities represented to realities experienced for social ends. Considering the importance of the reality effect, these writers are now often recognized as minor writers of American realism.

8

For a discussion of balance and equilibrium of responsibility in The Rise of Silas Lapham, see Wai-Chee Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel” in New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, edited by Donald E. Pease, Cambridge UP, 1991, pp. 67–90.

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Major American realists were compelled to establish a balance between these two, which made writers choose their themes and motifs strategically. 9 Crucially, the motif of business was a versatile tool that fulfilled the communicative requirements of American realism. As an omnipresent social phenomenon in all sites people inhabited, business almost automatically ensured the reality effect. Americans did not have difficulty identifying what they read with what they actually saw and experienced. Put differently, the Darstellung of the motif allowed American realists to diminish the separation between textual realities and actual realities profoundly. Moreover, the motif was conducive to ethical and social orientation. The Gilded Age was an age of shady transactions, which made readers associate the motif with inevitable moral questions. Business and morality, in other words,

9

The effort to evoke the referential illusion to orient the reader socially and ethically reveals an institutional compromise. For the American literati of the period, New England, specifically Boston, was the literary mecca of America. The accent on the reality effect threatened the position of New England, because it granted writers from different parts of the country kinds of knowledge which the New England literati lacked. In order to uphold their powerful position and “exercise[] the elite privilege of cultural outreach” (Glazener, Reading 33), New England intellectuals had to make concessions: they combined their “genteel tradition” with the democracy that the realism of provincial America inherently supported. As Santayana says, “America is not simply […] a young country with an old mentality: it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generations.” In literature, “it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails.” He adds, “The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition” (4). A commitment to “the beliefs and standards of the fathers” in this cultural landscape made the Boston literati ignore the “aggressive enterprise” that dominated the post-bellum America at first. Considering the importance of ensuring similarity between realities represented and realities actually experienced in the period, a dismissal of “the sphere of the American men” would not only mean commercial failure for authors but also would hamper the cultural outreach of the New England values throughout the country, for the reality effect would be lost. In order to maintain their cultural authority and be still relevant for the reading public, the Boston literati allowed more modern forms of literature such as realism into the literary establishment. As Chapter 3 explores, their celebration of young Howells, a simple writer from Ohio at the beginning of his career, and their expectation that he would carry the flag of American realism in line with this tradition is a clear example of this reconciliation between democracy in literature and “genteel tradition.”

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stood adjacent in people’s mental categories, the former often connoting questions of ethics. Aware of the ubiquity and unscrupulousness of the phenomenon, American realists seized the opportunity and represented the motif throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Obviously, the transition from American romance to American realism, from an aesthetics of mystery to an aesthetics of externalization, and from a knowledge gained from spiritual essence to a knowledge that comes as a result of secular experience, did not happen overnight. Rather, writers slowly and gradually moved from their Romantic representations to an aesthetics of externalization and orientation. And so did the motif of business increasingly begin to play a more prominent role for the writers in the subsequent decades. In early realist texts, writers utilized the motif primarily to create the reality effect, while attempts at orientation came slowly and steadily after the Civil War only. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853), Herman Melville utilizes a business organization to externalize “life” in contrast to the Romantic notion of “larger-than-life,” ushering in the growing need for the reality effect. In later decades, with the rise of early American realism, new writers ascribed weightier roles to the theme. In Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (1868), Horatio Alger utilizes business to provide social and ethical orientation by externalizing “the right” and “the wrong” to his younger readers in particular. A few years later, in The Silent Partner (1871), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps sought to orient the reader to her feminist ideas with the help of business. Howells incorporated the motif of business into The Rise of Silas Lapham in order to orient the reader socially and ethically to an ideal America. By making different forms of experience in the secular world palpable, the motif allowed writers to talk about the broader social world in general, but in the end, all these staged transactions served the larger realist objective of offering reality and orientation.

2.3 BUSINESS IN THE WORKS OF EARLY REALISTS Melville’s Anti-Transcendentalist Business in “Bartleby” As a writer who wrote predominantly in the antebellum period, Herman Melville was not a classical realist; however, his texts register the burgeoning importance of the reality effect while dialogically keeping the Romantic focus on the universal. On the one hand, Melville is frequently categorized as one of the antebellum writers – a group which epitomizes American romance. His masterpiece MobyDick (1851) is considered to be one of the best representatives of the American

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Renaissance. Northrop Frye confirms this, calling the novel one of the examples of “romance-anatomy” (104). Most importantly, in his texts, Melville explores universal themes similar to other antebellum writers and thereby participates in the Romantic movement. On the other hand, Melville visibly opposed the transcendentalist movement that was dominant in the era throughout his career. Specifically, it was the way transcendentalists approached knowledge that was problematic for him; he had “distrust for more speculative and general knowledge” (Martin 31), which the transcendentalists held. Melville devoted a significant portion of his fiction to opposing and criticizing them.10 This anti-transcendentalist tendency led Melville to negate the aesthetics of Romanticism through an aesthetics of externalization, which brought him to the theme of business in “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” (1853).11 It is possible to say that Melville

10 This anti-Romantic component in Melville’s text also brings him close to the modernist movement that was to dominate the early decades of the 1900s. The distrust of general knowledge highlights the particular so strongly that a full picture of Bartleby, just like the full picture of the whale in Moby-Dick, can never be drawn: “no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man” (“Bartleby” 19). This emphasis on the evasiveness of Bartleby’s full picture prefigures the modernist disbelief in the possibility of knowing a human completely or of general knowledge. In both, getting to know a phenomenon or a person completely is impossible, because in both, the emphasis lies on the particularity of the individual, including the narrator. This focus on the particular against a priori also shapes the narration in the novella; that is, the narrator of “Bartleby” has often been defined as unreliable in a way similar to the modernist narrators. Thus, rather than giving a picture of Bartleby, the narrator tells “the story of his effort to understand […] Bartleby” (Maddox 67). As a result, we get one specific point of view on Bartleby, a view that reveals the conflict between the lawyer’s rational side that got him hired and his more emotional side. Melville’s anti-transcendental narrative emphasizes particularity so deeply that a full picture of Bartleby cannot be drawn; only filtered through the particularity of the narrator. Therefore, it is no coincidence that it was modernists like D. H. Lawrence who were interested in Melville’s works and eventually rescued them from the dusty shelves of libraries in the 1920s. For more information on modernism, see Chapter 5. 11 The story is published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in November and December, 1853. When it first appeared, it was entitled, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of WallStreet.” In 1856, the story is published in The Piazza Tales with the title “Bartleby.” For more information on the publication history of the story as well as the variations in its title, see Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby, Cornell UP, 1989, pp. ix – xiii.

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ended up with the motif in an attempt counteract the transcendentalists and offer an alternative form of literature. In the novella, Melville specifically criticizes Ralph Waldo Emerson, who defended a highly individualist philosophy of idealism (Sten 30). In order to do that, Melville uses Emerson’s The Transcendentalist, one of the primary texts of American transcendentalism. As Sten argues, “Bartleby” is modeled strongly after this piece: “a comparative examination of the two suggests that [Melville] had and that he had read it with care, using Emerson’s idealist for his portrayal of the incommunicative Bartleby and Emerson’s materialist (also depicted in that essay) for his portrayal of the Wall Street lawyer (32). In other words, in order to criticize transcendentalism, Melville used one of the very own texts that established the groundwork for American Renaissance. In contrast to Emerson’s text, however, Melville reverses the story to present the shallowness and dysfunctional nature of transcendental principles, for which he utilizes business. First of all, Melville’s anti-transcendentalism required worldly locations in the text such as a business organization. Business in “Bartleby the Scrivener” functions specifically as a venue to assert the worldliness of the external reality; hence the irrelevance of American transcendentalism in an age when traditional structures slowly declined. To Melville, as a “mundane” location, the narrator’s business organization was an ideal venue where characters come together and interact as a result of worldly needs in contrast to the unexternalized Darstellung of American romance. As such, it constitutes an antithetical pole to the less “mundane” and mysterious locations of the Romantic tradition: a church, a village, a town or a chateau, where the characters tend to interact within a transcendental framework. It is not only the anti-transcendentalist “reality effect” that the organization offers, but business also limits the interpretation of the Darstellung by canceling out the universal and transcendental in the process of readers’ reception through its secularity. That is, anti-idealism was a new and unusual literary form in the period, and the business organization in the novella allows Melville to prevent the public from reading the text as a story of transcendentalism. The narrator’s business organization is not an incidental location; it allows Melville to externalize the social setting in the way the Homeric narrator does. Firstly, the narrator justifies the genesis of the story – why the story was written – with the theme of business. As the narrator clearly puts in the beginning, he wrote the story in order to let the reader know about his experiences with this “scrivener of the strangest I ever saw, or heard of” (19) in the first place. As an anti-idealist narrator, the lawyer’s experiences with Bartleby are non-transcendental and as a result, they have to be based on externalized social and personal reasons unlike Abraham’s journey. The lawyer gets to know Bartleby through business, because

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his office needs another scrivener, saying, “I must have additional help” (27). In other words, the reason for hiring Bartleby is carefully accounted for in economic terms, in a way the romance tradition rarely does, as Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” demonstrates. In short, business allows the narrator to establish cause-and-effect relations at the inception: it allows the narrator to get to know the character, thus accounting for why the texts were written in the first place within the text. Externalization reveals further cause-and-effect relations, which become palpable again through business. Specifically, business reveals the dysfunctionality of idealism through cause-and-effect relations. Throughout the story, Bartleby rejects the work that the lawyer assigns by saying, “I would prefer not to” (31), which is probably one of the most popular sentences in the novella. His rejection reveals his refusal to integrate into the small community in the business, which would require him to do his part. His preference “not to” works against the social contract: Bartleby is hired and paid because of the effort he was supposed to offer to the firm. By rejecting the work, which implicitly breaks the contract he made in the beginning, he creates an asymmetry and becomes a burden on the community, because then his colleagues have to do his part. In an absurd way, this rejection leads to his death in the end. Business allows Melville to show that the individualism of the transcendentalists did not really make them individuals. Rather, they still functioned within society and thus their attempts at individualism were harmful to society. Business allows Melville to demonstrate the failed logic of American transcendentalists through this unusual cause-and-effect relation. Getting to know Bartleby through business allows the narrator to further externalize the social reality throughout the text. As he says in the beginning, Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employés, [sic] my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented. (19)

In other words, the lawyer’s business allows Melville to justify his externalization of the environment in his story: through business, he can delve into the social reality – “the general surroundings” – in his Darstellung. This, in turn, allows the writer to describe and thereby increase the reality effect as in: “My chambers were upstairs, at No. – Wall Street. At one end, they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious skylight shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom” (20-1). In other words, the narrator’s business organization not only accounts for the reasons that lay behind the existence of the text or create other cause-and-effect

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relations, but it also allows Melville to externalize the social reality on a secular and believable basis through description. Accordingly, the business organization allows Melville to satirize Romantic attempts at universalization or generalization in a way Poe did against externalization. Needless to say, the business office houses and thus allows the interaction among the characters in the story. The two other scriveners and the errand boy have nicknames in the story – Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut, respectively. As the narrator says, the names of the scriveners are “expressive of their respective persons or characters” (21), while the errand boy is named that way because he often brings along ginger nut cake for the two others. At first glance, these names resemble “general human types” that Watt mentions in the pre-realist tradition (15). However, it soon becomes clear that Melville uses these nicknames to satirize the Romantic tradition that uses general human types; and thus emphasizes particularity in the realist sense. These characters are denied names like Prudence or Proffit in the Romantic tradition – serious names that give the idea that characters are the embodiment of these values. Yet, the attempt to satirize this practice is clearly visible through the comic naming of these characters. In a reverse way, Melville mirrors the way Poe satirizes the attempts at externalization of the business intelligence of his character – “nurse’s bumping his head to the bedpost.”12 Melville’s criticism of universalism is completed with his emphasis on particularization of the textual Darstellung, again through the theme of business. To him, social reality does not simply exist; it exists in a specific time and location. This, in turn, allows Melville to incorporate real-life locations and figures, which basically function to increase the reality effect in a way similar to the later realist texts. The narrator-lawyer’s office is situated on the well-known Wall Street. Moreover, the narrator mentions the Trinity Church, which is located at Broadway and Wall Streets. In the same way, business allows Melville to incorporate reallife businessmen: the narrator says that he was formerly employed by John Jacob Astor, a real-life millionaire. The process of particularization through the incorporation of a well-known street, church, and a figure like J. J. Astor, who was the first multi-millionaire in the country, increases the reality effect of the Darstellung

12 From a different angle, Royle confirms Melville’s anti-universalist stance, saying “the ghostliness” in the story “is a condition of perception and experience, not merely the ghostliness of some projected afterlife” (168) that the writer leaves shaded. That is, even Bartleby’s ghostliness is worldly, specific, and based on perception and experience in a modernist sense.

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because the reader can establish an identification between the external reality and the text through these elements of particularization.13 In the end, the dialogue between romance and realism is revealed in the narrator’s business organization as well. The business organization serves a windowopening function, helping the narrator to get to know and develop the plot in an externalized and well-explicated way. However, the narrator does not include a detailed description of the business organization itself, or the context or the background of business affairs. That is, Melville pushes the theme only to the point where it allows him to explicate the absurdity of the transcendental, and leaves it there. While the realist tendency in the novella brought about business in order to externalize, the Romantic and universalist influence on the novella obviates the need for further details, most importantly, details about the business organization that hires Bartleby. As a result, the business organization remains unexternalized and mysterious not because Melville aims for a Romantic effect through the organization but because business is a means for other affective ends. This is the reason why “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a novella, not a novel, because the Romantic tenet renders it unnecessary to externalize as much as classical American realism would require. In a remarkable way, what Melville discovered in his attempts to counter the aesthetics of American transcendentalism constituted the basics of the realist aesthetics in the post-Civil War period. Not all writers who wrote after Melville were

13 Despite his strong emphasis on externalization and particularization throughout the novella, Melville was not really a realist author. His obvious doubt about the generality of knowledge in his stories brought him close to realism; but he was not able to replace the universalism of his age with pure particularism. Apparently, he was not yet able to imagine conveying this epistemological discovery through pure externalization as in the realist text. His story still participates in the universalism of American romance in different ways. Not only does the narrator identify Bartleby’s end with the end of humanity: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” (65) at the end of his story, but also he discusses themes like jealousy, anger, hatred, selfishness, spiritual pride, and charity – highly universal themes fit for transcendental texts. In this way, Melville relies on transcendental tools to undermine the very tool that makes this transmission possible in “Bartleby.” Thus, Melville’s novella is not a realist story per se, but a story that anticipates the realist movement by negating the Romantic tradition. Combined with the attempts at particularity and externalization, the universalist outlook in “Bartleby the Scrivener” is paradoxically Melville’s way of saying that “the universal truth is that there is no universal truth.”

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necessarily against transcendentalism, but from a broader point of view, the declining nature of traditional structures brought about a need for secular orientation. That is, even if transcendentalism was not hated, the shaded, mysterious, Romantic form it utilized was irrelevant in an age, where people could not find the orientation they looked for in such texts. Accordingly, early realist writers incorporated the aesthetics of externalization and particularization in a Homeric way in order to provide social and ethical orientation. This profound reversal in aesthetics did not necessarily lead to a reversal in values: in an attempt to “reveal the true potential of America” (Fluck, “Anglo-European Contexts” 92), American realism still filled in the aesthetics of externalization with Victorian moralism. That is, although the shape of the realist aesthetics was crucially different from the aesthetics of Romanticism on a continuum of externalization to mystery, realist writers were not against religion and traditional values as such. Rather, they attempted to contain the public anxieties about traditional values within their aesthetics of externalization by ascribing a reassuring function to institutions such as religion as Ragged Dick and The Silent Partner demonstrate. Alger’s Educating Business in Ragged Dick If Melville registered the burgeoning need for the reality effect and foreshadowed the coming of an aesthetics of externalization with business, Horatio Alger Jr. went a step further with the motif and offered ethical and social orientation in his Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (1868). In the novel, Alger instrumentalizes Dick’s shoeshine business to didactically and almost comically show the “right” and “wrong” way of behavior. While looking for business, Dick gets to know the well-off Frank Whitney. As Frank is not from New York and he wants to see the city, they start to explore New York together. As in Melville’s novella, business allows the story to unfold in a “realistic” way: shoeshine is a believable business that allows Dick to get to know Frank and walk around the city, from a business point of view, in a legitimate way. While guiding him, Dick has experiences with different types of people. The protagonist comes across swindlers who try to get easy money but eventually fail. A pocket-book swindler loses his pocket-book while trying to cheat Dick – a trick about which Alger warns his readers. Similarly, a young countryman is swindled with a 60 USD note from a non-existent Washington Bank for which he pays only 50 USD. Alger not only demonstrates “bad” behavior but also emphasizes Dick’s exemplary disposition. Dick is determined not to steal: “It’s mean and I wouldn’t do it” (77). Once, “awful hungry,” Dick enters a bakery. He resists the idea of stealing even though he gets a chance for it when “the baker went into the back room.”

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After the baker comes back, he offers Dick a small “gig” and Dick gets his “pay in bread and cakes,” for which he initially longed (78). The ending of this small job is crucial: by not stealing, Dick not only avoids police and possibly prison, but he is also rewarded with what he initially wanted to eat. By juxtaposing bully characters like Micky Maguire to Dick, Alger further accentuates Dick’s good behavior. Reading Dick’s adventures persuades the reader that hard work pays off over swindling, speculation and stealing in Alger’s cosmos. It is not a coincidence that Alger chose business to orient the reader, because business in the period was one of the visible and worrying fields where public had anxieties about the “right” and “wrong” way of behavior. This process of orienting the reader to the “right” behavior in the novel is not always in the form of static didacticism – purely asserting what is acceptable and what not – but in line with the methods of American realism, Alger presents the acceptable behavior through Dick’s Bildung. Dick starts as a dislocated, disoriented, purposeless character on the “wrong” side of life – a situation against which he fights in the course of the novel and wins. Dick admits early in the novel that he “went to the Old Bowery last night, and didn’t turn in till past twelve” (9). Not only is he irresponsible with his time, but he is also “above such refinement” as “washing the face and hands” in the mornings (11). In the course of the novel, Dick finds orientation and potentially, the reader as well: “work hard, but work in the right way;” that is, “in order to succeed well, you must manage to get as good an education as you can” (81). As in the case of orientation to the “right” behavior, this process of growing up, or better Bildung is articulated through business: working hard means working hard in business terms for Dick. It helps Dick to “grow up ‘spectable” (59). Alger, as an early realist, does not represent this process of Bildung without a purpose. This process of beautifully ingrained Bildung is exactly the right way to provide orientation, because it allows the reader to identify with the character. Representing a process of education after mistakes is better than static didacticism, because the reader identifies longer and more intensely with the character in such a process, while the intensity of experience is missing in static didacticism of simply pointing out. As a result, the representation of Bildung allows the reader to experience the secular world deeper and opens the way for providing knowledge to the reader. In Alger’s text, this process of education requires business, because as a common economic activity, business is an easily recognizable tool to invite the reader to identify with the character; it facilitates identification. In other words, writers like Alger incorporated a familiar motif to orient, as the orienting function of the realist text requires at least partial identification.

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In addition to this ethical orientation, Dick’s small business organization allows Alger to introduce the city of New York and the social life in the city to readers – a fact, which fits the integrative function of American realism. Throughout their journey, Dick introduces Frank (thus the reader) different parts of New York like Chatham Street, Broadway, the City Hall, Burnum’s Museum, Wall Street, the Central Park, Fifth Avenue and other locations. Secondly, Frank introduces different walks of life, occupations, tricks and accents that are found in New York. The reader comes across a businessman agent of the Excelsior Copper Mining Company, who tries to sell the company stocks, gets to know how the shops lie about their pricing policy and most significantly hears the distinct New York slang. Dick uses words like “hunky,” “swell,” “tip-top,” and “bulky” that the street kids often used in the period. In this way, business not only introduces people outside New York to imagined lifestyles in this flagship metropolis of the country but also shows these lifestyles to common New Yorkers, who felt they were left at the social periphery due to the disappearing traditional lifestyles. In this way, Alger signals the realist attempts at creating communities that trust each other and nation-building, all with the help of the theme of business. As in Melville’s novella, this externalized nature of the narrative shows the declining function of transcendental ideas such as religion. However, often early realists like Alger were defensive about traditional values. Accordingly, how to deal with religion became a problem in Alger’s novel as well as in later works of classical American realism. Alger represents religion as a secular institution that grants position – a means and a proof of growing respectable in a secular world. In the beginning of the novel, Dick admits that he has not read the Bible even though he has “heard it’s a good book” (144). In the same way, when he sees that his tutor and roommate Fosdick saying his prayers, Dick crucially asks, “What’s the good?” (157). Dick’s early ignorance of religion reflects the difficulty of acquiring religious knowledge without a proper bringing up, but more importantly, it reveals the impossibility of any inherent religion in the human mind as the religious narratives held. Despite his lack of knowledge and practice, Alger says that Dick was not “irreligious” (158) in his disoriented days; he was not against religion, as such. As frequently seen in protagonists of American realism, Dick was narcissist and childish, but he had a pure heart and mind that gave itself easily to improvement. In the course of the novel, with the help of his Bildung, Dick becomes more religious, attending the church at the end of the novel, which shows that with the right ideas, he (and the reader) can gain respectability. In other words, in the novel, religion is not only ineffective in shaping human life but it is also a human-made and almost non-divine institution invented for

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social life. Like most of the major realist novelists, Alger represents the diminishing importance of religion for his characters as a way of justifying their non-transcendental nature of the text. In an attempt to compensate for this loss, they ascribe a new and positive role to the religious institutions within their secular cosmos. Put differently, the text is not transcendentally shaded and mysterious, but the world is represented in an externalized manner in the realist sense. In spite of the externalized nature of the Darstellung, the values behind religion and traditional structures are represented positively in line with the dominant Victorian moralism of the period. Business plays an indirect but an important role in revealing the way Alger represents religion: it is the way through which Dick reaches religion and not the other way around. That is, business is a tool through which Dick is able to experience and educate himself – the result of which is confirmed by religion as well. If Melville had a dialogue with Romanticism, Alger had a dialogue with the Founding Fathers – a fact which curbs the realism of the novel. Remarkably, the relative wealth and respect that business brings and Dick’s turn to religion at the end of the novel are not mutually exclusive. Rather, business and religion are complementary: Dick’s respectability, success in business and turn to religion happen all at once. In this sense, the similarities between Franklin’s and Alger’s narratives are striking. Alger’s text reveals his dialogue with the texts of the founding period such as Franklin’s Autobiography, where religious gentlemen were also passingly businessmen. In the early American republic, religion was a way of justifying wealth, as a way of revealing the “selected-ness” of the individual, according to Protestant ethics. In American realism, however, “moral integrity and riches come to stand in inverted relation to one another. The two values, which for Franklin reinforce each other, now get in each other’s way and begin to exclude one another. One can either be virtuous or gain riches, but not both” (Fluck, “Wealth” 58). Morality and wealth cannot be combined in American realism, because such a combination destroys the reality effect, as Americans in the period were constantly confronted with robber barons who were not concerned about morality. Accordingly, Alger’s dialogue with the texts of early American literature disqualifies Ragged Dick from classical American realism, for the possibility of being a religious and successful businessman did not sound realistic at all in the post-Civil War period. Phelps’s Feminist Business in The Silent Partner A deeper look at the literary works in the decade following the Civil War demonstrates a gradual shift from a dialogue between Romantic and realist aesthetics to

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a dialogue between realist and naturalist aesthetics, as romance slowly became less relevant and satisfactory for an urbanizing society. Elisabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871) is one of the early realist novels that registers the disappearing Romantic mystery and its replacement with attempts to externalize the social world. Accordingly, as a realist novel, The Silent Partner provides social and moral orientation. Interestingly, that is, interesting when compared with her contemporaries, Phelps orients the public toward an ideal society where women are independent and powerful. The novel primarily attempts to orient the reading public toward respecting women; therefore, it is often called a reformist novel. The theme of business is crucial for this affective objective: Phelps uses business to give the female characters the mobility that is needed in the Darstellung for the social orientation. It allows the writer to introduce readers to uncommon but familiar female characters through cause-and-effect relations; i.e., in a believable way. By introducing the reader both to the fictional women of power palpably and to an idealistic society, business in the novel functions again to “reveal the true potential of America” (Fluck, “Anglo-European Contexts” 92). Firstly, business helps Phelps to externalize the social structure of “Five Falls, Massachusetts,” making the social relations among characters visible. After her father dies, Perley Kelso, one of the two protagonists in the novel, becomes a partner at the Hayle and Kelso Mills. This partnership increases her awareness of the social affairs of “Five Falls” and leads her to explore the social structure in the town. With the help of this partnership as a well-constructed cause, Phelps gradually introduces other characters to Kelso and thus to the reader: Sip Garth, Maverick Hayle, Mr. Hayle Sr., Catty Garth, Bub Mell, Mr. Mell, Mr. Garrick, Dirk Burdock and others. Phelps takes pains to describe the backgrounds of these characters as particularly as possible. Although Mr. Mell, for instance, is a minor character as the father of Bub Mell, who finds Perley Kelso’s glove and incidentally gives Phelps a chance to externalize the social structure, Phelps makes the background of this highly unimportant character visible: “English; Scotch by breed, you know; they’d named the first gell after her grandma, – Nynee; quite Scotch, ye see; she was a Hielander, grandma, – but married to England” (110). In other words, Kelsey’s silent partnership opens an important window to the social life in America, making different layers of American society palpable and articulable. Among many possible motifs, business is the one Phelps utilizes to externalize the social life in the town, because it is the mills that determines the social conditions in the novel. In other words, relations are as they are because the mills shapes them. As it is a realist novel, it makes sense for Phelps to use the source of social conditions as the tool to explicate the social conditions themselves. If the basis of the constellation of cause-and-effect relations is business, externalizing the town

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only becomes possible with this starting point. As a result, it is the tool through which the most is externalized and the least remains mysterious – a goal in line with the aesthetics of post-Civil War realism. Externalizing the starting point of social conditions portrayed in the novel increases the reality effect. However, this strategy does not make the text less fictional; instead, it reveals the background of the Darstellung – the writer’s mindset behind the constructions in the novel. Phelps underlines the reality effect not only through externalization, causeand-effect relations and symmetry but also through her incorporation of “real-life” data regarding business and working conditions into her novel. In several instances, Phelps cites “the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor” in order to make her case. In this way, Phelps again pretends that rather than writing artful fiction, she transcribes the truth, “real life,” in her novel and her “proof” is the data taken from government institutions. While describing Bub Mell’s working conditions, Phelps states in the footnotes that “‘Three out of every five laboring men were out of employ.’ – Statistics of Labor” (113). This source of authority allows Phelps to represent the general conditions of the working class in the town through a single character – Bub Mell. In other words, this relationship between the “real-life” data and the character Bub Mell increases the reality effect of the character (and thus the novel) by connecting the signifiers in two different sources of narratives – novel as well as the statistical report. In a way, in contrast to the relationship between the character and the divinity, which necessarily required mysteries as the divine power was not to be physically experienced, this realist novel establishes a relationship between two different signifiers on a secular level in order to arouse the effect of secular reality. This constellation would not be possible without the mills in the novel. After establishing the reality effect through augmented detail, the novel carefully externalizes the gender relations within this social structure. While the female characters are mainly traditional at the inception, the protagonists Perley Kelso and Sip Garth are both socially and personally empowered in the course of the novel: Perley becomes a prominent figure among the factory workers; Sip Garth becomes a preacher. This empowerment is mirrored in their personal lives as well: both women reject marriage proposals, deciding to live alone. Perley Kelso rejects a marriage with Mr. Hayle and Mr. Garrick, and Sip Garth rejects Dirk Burdock’s proposal although she likes him “Well enough to be [his] wife” (286). This empowerment – radical for its time – does not increase the reality effect through broad externalizations as the beginning of the novel does. Rather, it offers orientation. It is a means to exert a direct influence on the reader, or better, persuading the reader about the necessity to have stronger women in society and respect for them.

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This reformist side of the novel foreshadows the subsequent naturalist movement that would dominate the 1890s in America. Turn-of-the-century literature was dominated by naturalist novels which attempted to draw attention to specific social causes. Upton Sinclair was even able to draw President Theodore Roosevelt’s attention with his reformist novels as indicated previously. Phelps’s novel is a similar but earlier attempt to direct readers’ attention to a specific cause: women’s rights. Phelps achieves this by magnifying the society throughout the novel – a process which naturalist novels, such as Zola’s Germinal, beautifully exemplify. In her case, this process of magnification of the signifier becomes possible through business: without the silent partnership in the mills, neither Kelso nor Phelps would be able to portray social structures in a believable way. Despite its reformist side and its naturalist twist in its magnification, The Silent Partner is not a naturalist novel, but a work of literature that participates in classical American realism. For one thing, unlike naturalist novels, the call to reform is not made on purely secular grounds – reform for a better and healthier society – but on grounds within Victorian moralism: for a better and healthier society along the lines of Christianity. In her introduction, Phelps clearly exhorts that “Had Christian ingenuity been generally synonymous with the conduct of manufacturing corporations, I should have found no occasion for the writing of this book” (iii). In other words, like other works of classical American realism, the novel addresses the reader to adopt a more religious attitude for a better social world – for equality and happiness in the field of manufacturing. If this was a purely naturalist work, the writer would attempt to demonstrate the irrelevance and dysfunctional nature of religion. The way Phelps incorporates religion within Victorian moralism into the realist aesthetics makes the work an early example of American realism. In fact, this realist moralism is even clearer in the empowerment of women as seen in the way Sip Garth’s life changes – a change, which provides religious orientation. In the beginning, Sip Garth is similar to Dick in that she is disoriented, dislocated and on the wrong side of life. Sip’s disorientation is revealed mainly through her religious uncertainty. When Sip opens “an abused old book,” she cannot “ask a Man upon a Cross, ‘What was the sense of it?’” (195; emphasis added). Her feelings reveal her doubts not only about religion but also about the divinity of Jesus Christ, because she considers him “a Man” rather than “the Man.” There are other instances which Phelps carefully includes in the novel to reflect the inceptive religious uncertainty. When Sip tries to persuade her “blind-mute” Sister Catty to be calmer, she says:

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“For love’s sake,” said Sip, on her patient fingers; “Here a minute, for love’s sake, Catty.” “For love’s sake?” repeated Catty, in her pathetic language. “Only for love’s sake, dear,” said Sip. […] “For love’s sake?” asked Catty, rising too. “I don’t know for whose sake!” said Sip. (87)

In other words, she clearly reveals that she has doubts about basic tenets of Christianity such as Jesus, as her words “I don’t know for whose sake!” reveal. This uncertainty does not last long: the ending of the novel presents a complete reversal of her religious beliefs, portraying the completion of her Bildung. Not only does she become a preacher in the end of the novel but also she ends her sermon with “Be our Savior, Lord Christ, for thine own name’s sake” (300). Her last words demonstrate her re-orientation through religion; reflecting that her suspicions about “a Man upon a Cross” disappeared, giving way to “the Man.” Her choice of symmetrically contrastive constructions such as “a Man” and “the Man,” or “whose sake” and “for thine own name’s sake” makes it easier for the reader to perceive the attempt at offering ethical orientation in the novel. In order for this religious Bildung to take place, Sip Garth has to encounter experiences that change the way she feels about religion. Tellingly, it is the mills, the business that allows the characters to encounter new situations and change the way they feel about life, thus allowing them to grow up. In other words, business is what makes the work realist; aside from externalizations, it situates the process of experience within Victorian moralism. In spite of this externalizing function, however, just like Melville’s and Alger’s texts, The Silent Partner does not externalize business organizations per se – a fact which makes the novel early realist in contrast to the proto-realist novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham. The reader never learns the details of the business; that is, how business is exactly carried out in an externalized way. Interestingly, the business organization itself remains still shaded just like Abraham’s journey. In this way, it reveals a broader pattern: business paradoxically plays a minor but crucial role in early American realism. It opens a window for the Darstellung of the “profane and mundane” world even though writers do not focus on the details of business as such. This is also what makes realist fiction different from these early fictions of realism, which anticipate the coming of realism, but refuse broad externalizations. The lack of detail about the business organization is the reason why it would be difficult to call these fictions of business or businessmen and they are rarely considered and analyzed in this category.

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*** The two decades following the Civil-War saw the publication of novels of business and businessmen which were different from the abovementioned early realist novels in their treatment of the motif of business. In contrast to the “windowopening” function of novels like Ragged Dick and The Silent Partner, later novels assigned a more central role to the organization and detail to describe the business organization. The inclusion of more detail never amounted to pure descriptions of business activities with little imagination in canonized novels like The Rise of Silas Lapham. Rather, business and businessmen still served performative functions that were inherent in the realist, naturalist and modernist modes of Darstellung. It is possible to conclude from this growth that the need for the reality effect gradually became more important; accordingly, writers relied more and more on business and businessmen to evoke the desired effects. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham epitomizes the performative functionality of the realist literature with its deep characterization and highly complex plot.

3

The Realist Business in The Rise of Silas Lapham

The Rise of Silas Lapham was one of the national bestsellers in the decade it was published. Roswell Smith of Century told Howells in April 1885 that he estimated more than a million people were reading the novel, “the largest number […] ever to read a serialized story” (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh xxiv). The novel was immensely popular: shortly after its publication, a businessman requested unsuccessfully to be allowed to use “Silas Lapham” as a trademark for “a very superior quality Mineral Paint” (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh xxiv). It even influenced architectural design in the country. Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Woolworth Building in New York, argued that a single sentence in “Silas Lapham” about [the ugliness of] black walnut changed the entire trend of thought and made it possible for the architects of the time to stem the turbid tide of brown stone and black walnut so dear to the heart of the American millionaire. (qtd. in Goodman and Dawson 259)

Neither the financial success nor the popularity of The Rise of Silas Lapham was coincidental; rather, both were the result of a well-prepared response to the social needs of the time. Apparently, the novel hit a tender spot in the period: in a society where people needed social reality, the novel offered a highly realistic Darstellung of the social life – so much that tourists visiting Boston wanted to “see the house that the Laphams lived in” (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh xxiv). The popularity of the novel reveals that it served other complex functions in addition to the reality effect. In a society where coherence was lacking, Howells gave a comprehensible and strategic response to the needs contemporary conditions created – a relatively harmonious and believable network of relations in which morality still played an important role. As explored in Chapter 1, for Americans living at the communal and mental

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periphery of social centers, society was to a great extent unintelligible. Accordingly, they required a guide to modern social life. American realism can be understood as a response to the readers’ inability to “read” society. Put differently, if realism was a way of dealing with the swiftly changing social life, in Howells’s novel, this strategy functioned to “contain[] social difference and control[] social conflict within a cohesive common ground” (Kaplan 23). More than an ideological containment or concealment however, the novel contains social conflict and disorder through orientation: it offers social and ethical orientation through which society becomes gradually intelligible compared to what the enlightened middle classes felt in their daily lives. Significantly, Howells utilizes the motif of business both to increase the reality effect and to offer social and ethical orientation to the reader. The motif increases the reality effect first by emphasizing the relationship between the reality experienced and reality represented in the text. Lapham’s business activities in the beginning of the plot create the reality effect and thereby draw the reader into the text. Howells’s Darstellung of the Laphams’ business as a strong, functional and operational motif is successful in creating the reality effect in particular, primarily because such an image mirrored the image of business in the minds of post-Civil War Americans. To most people, the immediate post-Civil War era was “gilded” because of the proliferation of business organizations which were powerful agents of social change. In many ways, business organizations shaped the daily life of millions: many people adapted their lifestyles in accordance with the inventions, decisions and philosophies – like efficiency – that powerful businesses introduced. The incorporation of the very category of business into the text as an operational motif encourages the reader to establish a strong relationship between the signifier of business and the possible signified actual businesses, between the word and the socioeconomic entity, and between the text and the real life. This association increases the reality effect in the minds of the readers, which is one of the reasons why the novel was a bestseller in the period. In addition to the reality effect, Howells utilizes the motif of business throughout the plot to offer readers the social and ethical orientation they needed through a process of Bildung in the world of business. If “character develops only when tested by experience in a world without fixed values” (Contract 150), as Thomas argues, offering the Darstellung of Bildung definitely contributes to this project of social and ethical orientation. The process of Bildung requires explicit tools that unfold the plot in a believable way in order to provide ethical and social orientation to the reader. Crucially, it is Lapham’s business organization that allows Howells to present the Darstellung of this gradual social and moral growth. By allowing wealth to accumulate in the hands of an inexperienced character, business reveals

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how Lapham is naïve, childish and self-centered at the inception. Subsequently, the business organization stages the phases he undergoes as he “grows up” from narcissism to integrity, eventually completing his Bildung at the end of the novel. Howells’s biography offers indispensable insight into the reasons why he emphasized the reality effect and why he offered social and ethical orientation through the motif of business.

3.1 W. D. HOWELLS: THE SEARCH FOR ORIENTATION William Dean Howells was born in Martins Ferry (then Martinsville), Ohio, in March 1837, as the second of eight children. He had a “typically American” background: his father, William Cooper Howells, was of Welsh and English origin and his mother, Mary Dean Howells, had a Pennsylvania-German and Irish background (Years of My Youth 4). Baptized in the Swedenborgian church,1 Howells spent his childhood and adolescence in different towns in Ohio. During his youth, rather than attending school regularly, he helped his father in his printing business as Benjamin Franklin had done a century ago before. Starting writing poetry early on, Howells learned several languages and worked as a journalist in different towns in Ohio throughout his youth. After serving as the American consul in Venice between 1861 and 1865, he started working for the Atlantic Monthly, the major literary journal of Boston. Deciding that his aim in life was “to write books, not to edit magazines” (Goodman and Dawson 108), he left the journal in 1881, producing numerous novels, travelogues, works of poetry and criticism until his death in 1920 instead. By the time he wrote The Rise of Silas Lapham, he was the “dean of American letters” and an internationally-renowned author. It is difficult to trace when the idea of such a book came to him and how the plot gradually developed, but his “Savings Book” notebook, which he started writing in 1883, includes details about a “vulgar but not sordid” protagonist named Lapham (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh 329). As an established writer, Howells had the privilege of selling his stories to publishers simply by submitting a short outline of the story in advance. In an undated synopsis he sent to Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, he named the novel “The Rise of Silas Needham.” After making his fortune in “Mineral Paint (or Stove-Blacking, or Boy’s Clothing, etc),” Needham was going to be given the

1

For a detailed discussion of the importance of the Swedenborgian faith for William Dean Howells, see James William Taylor, “The Swedenborgianism of W. D. Howells,” Diss. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1969.

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choice between “oppressively ‘squeezing’ another man, or getting squeezed himself” (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh 369). In the subsequent months, the Needhams were replaced with the Laphams. Howells started actually composing his novel during the summer of 1884, probably in July. It was first serialized in the Century between November 1884 and August 1885 and was published in book form in June 1885 in England. The plates of the book were prepared for the American edition in July the same year by Ticknor & Co. By 1923, 48,000 copies had been printed in America – a number which made it one of the bestselling novels of late nineteenth-century American literature.2 Notwithstanding the difficulty of gaining direct insight into the actual process of Howells’s authorship of The Rise of Silas Lapham, the author’s childhood, youth and adolescence offer invaluable insight into his construction of the novel and his attempts to provide social and moral orientation through the motif of business. In fact, Howells produced numerous autobiographical works during his lifetime. However, these were often public autobiographies. Taking James Russell Lowell’s advice “Never write anything personal” very seriously to mean “confidential” (Goodman and Dawson 106), Howells rarely wrote about personal matters in his works, fiction and nonfiction alike. 3 Still, an analysis of a broad array of primary and secondary literature about Howells is quite telling about the communicative attempts that lay behind his construction of the Laphams’ story. Significantly, his positive upbringing, the importance of “usefulness” in his family environment and later his belief in human progress were quite influential in the way he defined his authorship of the novel as well as the motifs he incorporated into his novel. Biographers of Howells agree that Howells grew up in a family of utter optimism: to Howells, his father and grandfather were epitomes of naïve optimism,

2

For a detailed discussion of the publication history of the novel, see Don L. Cook’s notes on the text in his The Rise of Silas Lapham, Norton, 1982; and Walter J. Meserve and David J. Nordloh’s edition and discussion of the novel in The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indiana UP, 1971.

3

Even the autobiographical works he wrote late in his life reveal how hesitant Howells was to express himself frankly. Unlike most of the leading intellectuals of the period who came from established New England families, his Midwestern background often made Howells insecure in Boston, the town where he spent most of his adult life. There, “his restless ways confirm[ed] an unavoidable, often painful rootlessness” (Goodman and Dawson 102). In an attempt to secure his place in Boston society, which accepted him only slowly and reluctantly (he was rejected from the Saturday Club twice), Howells was very careful about the material he wrote.

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despite the difficulties and insecurities in their lives. Howells’s grandfather, Joseph Howells, had learned “to build and operate woolen mills in Wales” (Olsen 10). When he immigrated to the land of opportunity with great expectations, however, he lost “a good deal in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New York City, from New York to Virginia, and from Virginia to eastern Ohio” (Years of My Youth 9). In Steubenville, Ohio, he wanted to be independent and tried farming. However, “Had a farm [been] given to him, ready stocked,” as his son, Howells’s father William Cooper said, “he would scarcely have been able to live on it” (qtd. in Olsen 11). He accepted that he had been too optimistic about farming only after failing five times consecutively. His experiments with mills were full of hope but just as unsuccessful. Talking of his grandfather, Howells said, “Amidst the rude experiences of their backwoods years, the family had continued gentle in their thoughts and tastes” (Years of My Youth 13) through Joseph’s unusual optimism. Like Joseph Howells, William Cooper (Howells’s father) had “a buoyant expectation of the best in everything” (Years of My Youth 116). As Howells says, William Cooper’s motto was that “you could do what you wished to do if you wished it potently enough” (New Leaf Mills 30). A man of “serene temperament,” William Cooper “had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always kept life interesting and sunshiny for him” (Years of My Youth 84), despite his constant financial troubles and political uneasiness. Accordingly, believing that “The unfriendly eye always loses what is best in a prospect,” Howells thought William Cooper’s “eye was never unfriendly” (Recollections vii). Although he constantly failed in his endeavors, among others the study of medicine, bringing suffering to the family, he never lost his optimism. William Cooper’s unrealistic disposition made Howells’s mother, like the mother in New Leaf Mills, wish “if he would only be a little more afraid! I wish he could have some of my fear” (51). With a day-dreaming husband and eight children to look after, Howells’s mother, Mary Dean, had to be realistic, grounded and practical. In the first years of their marriage, Howells’s father changed jobs five times, which required the family to move and start over again and again (Goodman and Dawson 11). While he was attempting different endeavors, she “did the whole work of her large household.” Also, she was anxious about the safety and well-being of the family. As Howells recounts, “To own the house she lived in had always been my mother’s dream since her young married days” (Years of My Youth 28, 115). More lonely than optimistic, Mary Dean’s “housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions,” which she found “horrible” at times (Years of My Youth 28). As a result, she was often homesick for her parents’ household. Yet, his mother’s

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attitude was neither bitter nor gloomy: Howells’s “father and mother were very happy” in the house Howells was born (Years of My Youth 10). If Howells’s paternal relations exuded optimism, Howells’s relationship to his mother gave this optimism a more realistic, practical and down-to-earth twist. His later decision to avoid the Civil War “so long as there are people more eager to go” (qtd. in Olsen 214) confirms how down to earth Howells was – like his mother and in contrast to his adventurous father and grandfather. Such a family brings up children accordingly and Howells had a “cheerful and most happy” home during his childhood (A Boy’s Town 18). Referring to the childrearing practices of the nineteenth century, Olsen argues that in an attempt to imbue self-control, “middling parents” such as Howells’s emphasized “affectionate persuasion and loving explanation” over “coercive measures” of previous generations (15). William Cooper and Mary Dean’s attitude toward parenthood was also influenced deeply by the former’s Swedenborgianism. The New Church William Cooper discovered after his father’s Methodism saw salvation as “entirely voluntary.” That is, it emphasized that “As the ‘sovereign chooser’ of his own destiny, an individual might further the good of all and initiate a heavenly serenity within himself” (Olsen 17). Though voluntary, this form of salvation required affectionate guidance and reinforcement instead of coercion. Accordingly, William Dean Howells was often peacefully guided towards salvation and right decisions, which kept his optimism about human nature alive during his childhood and adolescent years and later in his adulthood. A specific instance illustrates this beautifully. When Howells’s grandfather complained about some boys, William Dean among them, throwing stones at a dog, Howells’s father scolded (!) them by saying, “Boys, consider yourselves soundly thrashed” (A Boy’s Town 13). Howells’s parents not only abstained from punishment, preferring instead delightful guidance, but they also kept the young Howells away from the hard labor that the family needed in order to make ends meet. As Howells’s father failed constantly in his business endeavors, the family members often had to work collectively to pay the debts and survive. Still, Howells’s family followed the contemporary middle-class tendency to emphasize “the development of individual children” in contrast to former generations for whom children were seen mainly as free labor without a special focus on their individuality or their professional future.4 The Howells family’s “hopes concentrated on […] William Dean” (Olsen

4

As “land acquisition became more and more difficult, parents typically directed sons toward the expanding clerical and professional occupations. Parents of narrower means,” such as Howells’s, “found it necessary to concentrate resources on a single son” as the hope of the family (Olsen 28).

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36, 29): he was often given the opportunity and freedom to follow his own talents more than other children, even if the family needed Howells at times in their various attempts at journalism and the printing business (which is one of the reasons why he did not receive a formal education). William Cooper was very clear about the indulgence he wanted to give his son. He told Howells how “he regarded [him] as different from other boys of [his] age” and this saved Howells from hard labor (Years of My Youth 96). This investment through indulgence made Howells comfortable and fulfilled at home for most of his life; therefore, whenever he was away, he was constantly homesick. Instead of hard work, Howells inclined to literature naturally: he “made verses, [he] even wrote plays in rhyme” (Years of My Youth 20) as early as he could not remember in the time he was given luxuriously. Unsurprisingly, both of Howells’s parents shared a love of literature. Mary Dean had “an innate love of poetry; she could sing some of those songs of Burns and Moore” (Years of My Youth 17) to her husband and early in their marriage, William Cooper “illustrated and colored a ‘wreath book’ composed of her favorite poems” (Goodman and Dawson 9). William Cooper took literature even more seriously. Early in his life, he had attempted to pursue a literary career; yet, like most of his endeavors, this objective never materialized: “He had composed a few poems and written a melodrama on the War of 1812 that had failed after a single performance” (Olsen 33). The Howells instilled their love of literature in their children: Howells’s sister Annie Fréchette was to be a writer as well. Yet, they emphasized literature mostly to their “chosen” son, Will. William Cooper never failed to praise Howells’s early attempts in literature. In fact, “this made [Howells] so proud” that he usually showed his works to other people (Years of My Youth 17). Significantly, literature was more than a leisure activity for the Howells family; it was a way of becoming useful in the Swedenborgian sense. 5 To Swedenborg and his disciple William Cooper, everything existed for a reason, and man is created to be useful. As Swedenborg asks, “Can anyone fail to see quite clearly that the goals of creation are useful functions?” Yet, salvation in the Swedenborgian scheme forbids people to be useful only to themselves: “If [something] is to be useful, it must be for the sake of others” (180). In other words, utility is acceptable only as social utility. William Cooper Howells’s understanding of Swedenborg

5

Swedenborg’s theology emphasizes the usefulness of mankind as a central practice on Earth – a practice which helps the individual avoid undesired self-love and glory. For more information, see Rodney D. Olsen, Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells, New York UP, 1991, pp. 3-26.

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underlined the idea of social utility and usefulness for others as well, even in occasions where man helped himself: “Our inevitable duties in some way relate to others; and even what we do for ourselves, if rightly done is done for others” (qtd. in Olsen 39). Improving the condition of fellow Americans through the idea of social utility played a significant role in the way William Cooper chose his occupation: as a politician and diplomat, William Cooper supported the anti-slavery movement in Ohio, where there were still slaveholders, especially in the southern part of the state. Interestingly, William Cooper believed that a person could be useful through “words” as well: he was a journalist with a printing office, working in different towns in Ohio. Throughout his life, he edited and published several newspapers through which he attempted to disseminate Swedenborg’s theology and his application of Swedenborg’s ideas to the daily and political life of the nation. He emphasized the Swedenborgian idea that “wicked words were of the quality of wicked deeds” (Years of My Youth 24). Accordingly, through his journalism of “good words,” William Cooper aimed to orient the public in the way he believed. As his son recounts in retrospect, he actively “sought to form [people’s] tastes and opinions” (Years of My Youth 87). A quite talented speaker and a local opinion leader that could “skilfully [sic] persuad[e]” the public (Years of My Youth 89), William Cooper published rather positive and pleasant news, columns and shorter literary works to orient the public. Crucially, he imagined literature also as a tool: it could be used to orient the reader in many ways. Reinforced by father’s idea of “being usefuler” (Years of My Youth 125), William Dean Howells chose literature and journalism as his profession “to be of some use in this world” (Annie Kilburn 4). To Howells’s parents, literature was not pure leisure but it was not pure utility, either, but a combination on the two. As Howells recollects, his father’s “notion was of the use that could be combined with the pleasure of life” (Years of My Youth 21). Howells became a fiction writer primarily because it allowed him to be useful while dealing with a delightful endeavor. His rejection of other opportunities confirms the importance of this combination of utility and delight for Howells. In May 1855, Howells “quit[] the printing-office, and enter[ed] upon the study of the law” (qtd. in Olsen 91) under the US Senator, Benjamin F. Wade (Years of My Youth 107). However, after one month, Howells gave up the study of law, for it did not allow him to immerse himself in literature. He recalls how he “came home […] mentally fagged” and how he “could not take the authors whom at the bottom of my heart I loved so much better” (qtd. in Olsen 91), because “the law was a jealous mistress and would brook no divided love” (Years of My Youth 107). Though law was useful in shaping politics along the lines of Swedenborgian belief

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– with its popular emphasis on the anti-slavery struggle among others – it gave Howells no delight and prevented him from spending time on literature. After quitting law, he was so relieved to return to his family home where he could read literature that he said, “Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have conceived of my ecstatic relief” (My Literary Passions 127). If law killed leisure for Howells, journalism canceled out both utility and delight. In his memoirs, Howells originally called journalism “my passion, and I was passionately a journalist well after I began author” (Years of My Youth 178). His successful Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860) was the product of his journalistic aspirations. Yet, Howells quit journalism as well. After working several years in different newspapers – his father’s, among others – Howells started working for the Gazette in Cincinnati as a local reporter in 1857. Even though he never elaborated on this period of his life in detail, in retrospect, it becomes clear that the reasons for his leaving were the unpleasant events he witnessed there. Shortly after he quit the job, he asked himself, “how could I intelligently endure the ravings of the drunken woman which I heard one night in the police-station where my abhorred duties took me for the detestable news of the place?” (Years of My Youth 142). It was not only repulsive to experience “the ravings of the drunken woman;” reporting these disagreeable events required him to use “wicked words,” which, in turn, obliterated the Swedenborgian objective to be useful to the reading public through positive examples. These events made Howells aware of a broader truth about journalism: if he was going to work as a journalist, he had to admit that the profession limited the realities he could represent. No matter where he worked, the events dictated what he was to report. This revelation made journalism unsavory, unproductive and inconvenient. Subsequently, he left journalism altogether, concluding that he was after “cleanly respectabilities, and […] if experience cannot have more than the goodly outside in life, that this is not well worth having” (Years of My Youth 142). Unlike journalism, fiction gave the young Howells the freedom to use “good words” in the construction of his stories and thereby allowed him to be useful while dealing with a delightful activity. Howells’s first experiments with literature were in verse; in fact, he “defined himself and his future by his writing of poetry” (Goodman and Dawson 57-8) until he left for Venice. Reading and writing poetry since childhood, Howells was so motivated about poetry that he was “meaning to give all time and all eternity to poetry” (Literary Friends 64). Poetry was self-evidentially delightful to Howells, but it also reconciled pleasure with the Swedenborgian view of utility. For his father, William Cooper, like many other antebellum Americans, poetry was a redemptive tool. Howells’s father thought that poetry looks “inward to the soul. […] Its range is universal. Whatever

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we think, or love, whatever we imagine or know; whether of Earth or Heaven, our highest conceptions of it are told in poetry” (qtd. in Olsen 30). In his view, poetry, which is full of spiritual meaning, awakens the reader to godly and universal realities and thereby brings him closer to God. Significantly, poetry – or rather the traditional Romantic poetry William Cooper describes – achieves this through a shaded and unexternalized Darstellung of reality, in a way similar to the “unausgesprochen” (Auerbach 13) events Abraham experiences in the Old Testament in Auerbach’s analysis. The goal to facilitate humankind’s salvation lay behind William Cooper’s decision to publish poetry in his Swedenborgian paper Retina. William Dean Howells’s early poems reveal that he adopted a quite similar view of poetic utility. He conceived of poetry as a tool, allowing the reader to reach the universal. Significantly, Howells’s love of poetry was accompanied by a love of non-American poets such as Heinrich Heine and his growing interest in other cultures and languages. The first poem he submitted to the Atlantic Monthly, “Andenken” (1960) was so similar to Heine’s poems that the editor of the magazine spent months ensuring that the poem was not plagiarized. Moreover, Howells admits that he had studied poetry “in [Charles] Kingsley’s ‘Andromeda,’ and Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea’” (Years of My Youth 179). The importance of representing shaded and unexternalized realities in this traditional form of poetry not only allowed but also forced Howells to downplay externalized and particularized realities such as the Darstellung of specifically American settings, themes and motifs. That is, the redemptive function ascribed to the poems required in essence, an unexternalized Darstellung of reality. Howells’s admiration for and imitation of non-American poets allowed him to unexternalize – to transcend the literary themes specific to America, thereby allowing him to be able to direct the reader toward universals. Accordingly, “to pursue the study of German literature” (qtd. in Goodman and Dawson 69) and to avoid the war, Howells lobbied for an office abroad, preferably the American consulship in Munich. Abraham Lincoln was no longer a presidential candidate but the president and with his successful biography, Howells had deserved a prize. Yet Munich was not available; in fact, no German-speaking town was. Not getting what he wanted, he was eventually satisfied with the consulship in Venice. He stayed in Venice between 1861 and 1865, which gave him the time to get to know Italian culture as well as allowing him to focus on his literary experiments – a period of “measureless leisure” (Years of My Youth 220), as he did not have a lot of work as the representative of a country with little diplomatic interest in Venice. Spared the horrors of war unlike his brother Sam, he spent his time observing the Italian lifestyle, traveling and writing. His married Elinor Mead

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in 1862 and his daughter Winifred was born in 1863 during his consulship in Venice. Howells’s pleasant experiences between his childhood and the early years of his consulship made him a firm believer in the possibility of humans to progress – “perfectibility of humanity” (“The Editor’s Easy Chair” 806). On the other hand, his parents’ Swedenborgianism made human progress an objective every individual could and should work toward. After his eldest sister Victoria got married, Howells’s mother wrote her, saying, “It is your duty to improve every advantage you have” (qtd. in Goodman and Dawson 10). Improving was the motto of the family not only in house chores, errands and occupations, but most importantly, it was one of the central elements of their mental world. Accordingly, Howells wove in the necessity of human progress continuously in his literary works. In Venetian Life, he said, “I am so far a believer in the perfectibility of our species” (118-119).6 The need to work toward human progress was fostered by other mental changes he experienced during his years in Venice. By the time he returned to the US, Howells had changed substantially: he had become a husband, father and an individual different from other members of his family. One of the major changes had occurred in his view of religion. From the moment Howells left his parents’ household for Venice through the end of his life, Howells experienced spiritual uneasiness. Despite the profound influence his father’s Swedenborgianism had on him, Howells started to have doubts about the existence of a benevolent God. Firstly, Howells’s experiences with breakdowns of hypochondria and neurasthenia led him to conclude that “I must always be a different man” (qtd. in Olsen 76), because they led him to “see reality as anomalous or chancelike,” unlike his father’s stern belief in a “moral universe” guided by God (Olsen 76). His daughter Winnie’s sickness, the Howells’s long search for a cure and her eventual death in 1892 contributed to his doubts about the existence of a benevolent God as well. Howells reveals this uneasiness in his poem, “Calvary” by saying, “My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me” (22). Accordingly, throughout his adulthood, he found himself in a place “where there is every manner of doubt” (Years of My Youth 186). In that sense, he was no different from the most enlightened middle-class individuals: having grown up in the relative social and mental security of the pre-Civil War years, Howells was uneasy about the practicality or functionality of religion. As he said, “the authority of Faith”

6

He kept his optimistic disposition throughout his life. In Criticism and Fiction, citing Senor Valdes, he emphasizes the “purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it” (33).

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both internal and external was “more imperative [in the 1850s] than [in the 1910s]” (Years of My Youth 149). Although his belief in religion deteriorated, the Swedenborgian mores remained in Howells throughout his life. Consequently, Howells emphasized “a social religion” and focus on “application of Christian ethics to democratic life” instead of a strong theory or creed. In other words, to Howells, “Real religion was conduct. It meant a way of living” (Belcher 264-5, 272). In his review of James Parton’s Famous Americans of Recent Times in 1867, Howells highlighted the importance of social religion by saying, Mr. Beecher […] is the leading thought and speech of the strong, earnest, self-reliant element – not refined to intellectual subtlety or morbid doubt – which is perhaps the most hopeful element in New York, and which is the beginning of a social rather than a religious regeneration. (qtd. in Vanderbilt 53)

And Howells celebrated this religious regeneration. In the same way, although Howells is often associated with Christian socialists, he distanced himself from their organization as they were moved by belief rather than behavior (Belcher 272). In addition to the idea of usefulness and utility, which stayed in Howells’s mind as an unconscious principle even in the decades when he experienced religious doubt, this new emphasis on the application of ethics over mere belief ascribed a new role to him as well as to his fiction. In subsequent decades, he attempted to facilitate this process of application by offering social and ethical orientation to readers via his literary works. Howells reveals this objective in several of his works he wrote in the subsequent decades. In Criticism and Fiction, Howells offers the artist “the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity” (67). In Their Silver Wedding Journey, General Triscoe asserts the typical counter-argument to Howells’s conception of integration: “Every stupid race thinks it’s happy because it’s united, and civilization has been set back a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about; and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up” (151). His insistence on unification was not only for the artists but also for the society of his time: “Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united for the operation of the industries” (Literature and Life 151). According to Howells, social unification and moral integrity bring peace and sustainability to society, but more importantly, individuals need to be guided in this process via the imaginary potential of literature.

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This change in Howells’s understanding of religion and the new function this change brought to his literature greatly stripped verse of its potential as a form. For one thing, looking “inward to the soul” and reassuring the reader about a “universal” truth was not useful in offering social orientation. The poetry of the period in particular, through its shaded and unexternalized Darstellung of reality as in the Elohist narrator and Poe’s, Shay’s and Hawthorne’s works, was helpful in disseminating God’s word through the universalities represented. However, it did not allow Howells to be useful by fostering a social religion – orienting the reader socially and morally. As a form of pure personal pleasure, poetry had become a tool of self-utility, hence socially dysfunctional for Howells. To be able to offer social and ethical orientation and become useful to others, Howells gradually turned to the externalized prose, which later became known as American realism. This is the reason why in contrast to his poetry, in his prose, Howells was “at home with circumstance and scenery.” As he says, his highly poetic short story, “The Pilot’s Story,” came “from a potentiality of our own life” (Years of My Youth 179). Orienting the reader through prose required externalizing and particularizing through the material that the reader could relate to – through the Darstellung of local and vernacular. This, in turn, not only emasculated verse for him but also “Americanized” his representations – a process, which his stay in Europe facilitated by showing what was “American” about America. Practical concerns were also influential in his neglect of poetry: verse was not a viable way of earning a living. For instance, when he thought that the editor of Ohio Farmer would publish his poetry, he was told that the editor “would never pay [him] three dollars a week in the world for that” (Years of My Youth 113). Howells confesses that he had recognized in prose “a more practical muse” (Years of My Youth 220), which could allow him to earn a living, as he actually realized after he moved back to the US. The New England establishment favored prose over verse as well. Howells’s major mentor and supporter in Boston, James Russell Lowell – poet, critic and editor of the Atlantic Monthly and one of the leading figures of the New England establishment – began guiding Howells’s literary production and continued throughout his Venetian consulship and later. Though poet himself, Lowell openly told him that “he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he bade me ‘sweat the Heine out of’ me, ‘as men sweat the mercury out of their bones’” (Literary Friends 216). America was ready for realism, for which verse, with its unexternalized representations of the universal, had little to offer. Subsequently, Howells slowly came to immerse himself in the realist aesthetics I explored in Chapter 2: an externalized form of literature where “everything

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stand[s] for itself” (“Shakespeare” 77) like the Homeric narrative instead of referring to larger-than-life truths like the Elohist and Romantic narratives. Howells’s “commitment to the healing powers” (Trachtenberg 186) of fiction was the main cause of his turn to realism. Realism was “made for the benefit of people who have no true use of their eyes” – to correct the reader’s “faulty vision” (Trachtenberg 185-6). Not surprisingly, his first works after his turn to prose were written in the tradition of travel writing – a form of pure externalization and particularization. In Venetian Life (1866), Howells describes his impressions of Venice such as his first days there, traditions such as love-making and marrying, and traits and characters of Venetians in a highly artistic way. In Italian Journeys (1867), Howells spread his focus to other Italian towns, but his style of artistic notation stayed. Reminiscent of “The Pilot’s Story,” No Love Lost: A Romance of Travel (1869) is an interesting attempt to bring together externalized literature with verse. In this narrative poem where he externalizes broadly, Howells sought to combine his desire for pure aesthetics with the need for externalization. Suburban Sketches (1871) reiterated the externalized form he brought about in his Italian travelogues to the American town “Charlesbridge,” which clearly stood for Cambridge, Massachusetts. Clearly, his initial works in the 1860s and 1870s allowed him to finance his family by responding to the literary market, but more importantly, he was able to practice externalization and particularization “with the touristic and autobiographical ease” (Goodman and Dawson 174) – with the ease his knowledge of concrete locations and events brought about. Howells’s works in the following years reveal how he started to consider such attempts at mere externalization insufficient in terms of social and ethical orientation. In contrast, after a successful apprenticeship in realist aesthetics with works of travel writing, which earned him entrance to Boston society, he sought to offer social and moral orientation through his novels. As he says, a work of fiction was not only a tale; instead, “fiction has to tell a tale as well as evolve a moral” (Years of My Youth 186). However, “evolving a moral” through works of pure externalization was not possible, as travel writing was quite directionless: it often lacked a story and thereby the orienting potential fiction has on the reader. This is the reason why several scholars called Howells’s early work Their Wedding Journey “a dead end,” making the reader wonder “if Howells really had anything to say” or think that the novel “barely evades the reproach of planlessness” (qtd. in Seib 18). What Howells needed was characters, plots, events – that is, the novel – which all come together to serve his communicative objectives. Accordingly, Howells slowly moved away from travel writing and turned to the novel form. His first novels were modeled after travel writing, but increasingly included elements of a novelistic plot. In 1870, Howells confirmed this combination in a

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letter to his father: “At last, I have fairly launched upon the story of our last summer’s travels, which I’m giving the form of fiction so far as the characters are concerned.” This was a “path […] no one else has tried” (Life in Letters 162). His works Their Wedding Journey (1872) and A Foregone Conclusion (1875) have this distinct form: the combination of travel writing, in which he was by then an expert, and novelistic techniques that were to dominate his oeuvre in the decades to come. Different from travel writing, Howells’s novels include a variety of popular motifs to develop the plot that was intended to offer social and ethical orientation. Religion, for instance, dominates The Undiscovered Country, in line with Howells’s ongoing spiritual upheaval and his need to emphasize and establish a “social religion.” European travel and cultural differences between the continents were motifs he dealt with, among others, in The Lady of the Aroostook (1879). Moreover, Howells represented women and their social status in American society in several of his novels, most importantly in A Woman’s Reason (1883). These motifs increased the reality effect not only by connecting the reader in need of answers to the real-life situations but also by allowing Howells to construct a believable plot through innumerable cause-and-effect relations. Although he made use of these themes and motifs repeatedly, there was one motif that dominated his early novels: courtship. While Their Wedding Journey recounts a newly-wed couple’s experiences during a journey from to Niagara Falls through New York City, Albany, Rochester and Quebec, A Foregone Conclusion explores the love story of a young American girl traveling in Venice with her mother and her experiences with the American consul and a Venetian priest. On the other hand, his The Lady of the Aroostook (1879) explores Lydia Blood – the only woman on the ship Aroostook during a passage to Europe – and her courtship with men on board. In addition to the plays he wrote during this period out of financial need, his subsequent novels, The Undiscovered Country (1880), Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881), A Modern Instance (1882), A Woman’s Reason (1883) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) all include marriage or courtship plots with changing settings and characters. The motif of courtship was one of the most enduring motifs Howells handled, because it was especially useful in constructing stories that would eventually help him suggest a social religion to the reading public. To Howells, the motif was crucial on a quite elementary level: the Darstellung of male and female relationships was a perfect way of attracting contemporary readers who were habituated to the sentimental novel of the period. In the era leading up to the turn of the century, “The mass audience was impersonal, but it was definitely female” (Olsen 158). The Darstellung of the courtship attracted

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middle-class female readers, because they could thereby experience infinite encounters with men – encounters which were not easily possible in the Victorian period. As a provider of experience, the theme allowed Howells to “hook” the reader, female and male alike, and keep their interest sustained throughout the novel. The motif attracted readers usually even before they started reading his works, because it allowed Howells to be categorized in the literary market as a writer of books that women were particularly interested in. Having been “bookmarked,” Howells could then orient the reader through the Darstellung of interaction between male and female characters. In this framework of courtship, Howells used the Darstellung of conversation, mediation and negotiation among characters as a textual tool to offer social and ethical orientation. Their Wedding Journey explores the relationship between the westerner Basil with the “qualities conventionally attributed to his type […] candid, flexible in behavior and thought, somewhat naive, populist, and progressive” and Isabel – “a Boston Brahmin, thus urbane, a bit pretentious, patrician, and conservative” (Seib 18). On the other hand, A Foregone Conclusion tells the story of characters with distinct social and cultural backgrounds in a way similar to Howells’s earlier novel. The representation of a young girl and her naïve mother, an American consul and a priest and conversation and negotiation among these characters with distinct ways of perceiving life offered Howells the opportunity to present the reader with innumerable encounters and thus experiences in their imagination. Dr. Breen’s Practice presents the reader with a doctor who gets married at the end, after courting and rejecting – that is, interacting with – other suitors. Notwithstanding the differences between setting, themes and characters, these novels present the reader with a Darstellung of conversation, mediation and negotiation among personally and socially highly distinct characters. The representations of such interactions function as models of social calibration for the reader. Accordingly, these stories of mediation allowed Howells to make the reader more malleable through his novels. The novels encouraged awareness of the existence of different social groups with new ways of thinking, which they did not necessarily share. In his pleasant and artistic description of these groups, Howells sought to increase the reader’s sympathy for others: although readers and characters have quite different worlds, Howells’s Darstellung of social calibration prepares the reader to understand and empathize with different characters. At the end of this highly democratic process of rapprochement and introduction, Howells reassures the reader about the fruits of ongoing conversation through a final resolution: peaceful (re)union among characters and partners. The Darstellung of a happy and growing family at the end of Their Wedding Journey and an ultimate marriage between characters at the end of A Foregone Conclusion

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and Dr. Breen’s Practice as resolutions reassure the reader that there is no threat to his personal integrity in communicating with others. After all, the conversation with other social groups has the potential to end peacefully as Howells’s novels assert – an understandable endeavor in a period of personal dislocation where individuals needed comforting and reassuring representations of the complex world out there. Although stories of conversation were effective in terms of making the reader malleable, they did not automatically bring the reader up or change them socially or ethically. His position as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly allowed him to recognize that the social and ethical growth of the reader had to be actively and deliberately steered. This required a slight change in his method: Howells clung to the framework of courtship but added the representation of models of individual growth to the Darstellung of conversation to be able to orient the reader more actively. Through the Darstellung of maturation, readers could see how characters process the events they encounter in text and possibly learn to process real-life experiences in a similar way, turning them into knowledge in their own lives. The best example of this approach is Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), where Isabel Archer psychologically, socially and culturally grows up after several experiences, that is, after she successfully processes her experiences and gradually turns them into knowledge.7 In several of his novels during the 1880s, Howells included the representation of characters’ maturation in addition to conversation. The Lady of the Aroostook, The Undiscovered Country and Dr. Breen’s Practice reveal this change of literary means in his attempt to orient the reader in a more aggressive and assertive way. During her voyage to Europe, Lydia Blood of the Aroostook not only communicates with several men, but at the end of the journey, she matures greatly, eventually reaching her own conclusions based on her experiences. The Undiscovered Country explores the spiritual journey of a man, Dr. Boynton, his daughter and her lover and their relationships to Boston and a community of Shakers. Their experiences with spiritualism change these characters; in the peaceful Shaker village, the daughter Egeria’s spiritual powers vanish at the end. At the end of Dr. Breen’s Practice, after marrying Mr. Libby, Dr. Breen becomes able to practice medicine and attend cultural events at the same time, forgetting her ex-boyfriend and insecurities about her social position. In these novels, Howells took his method of inviting the reader to a “social religion” one step further; yet, his editorship showed him that not only the means

7

For an insightful discussion of James’s The Portrait of a Lady and how Isabel Archer gradually grows, see Fluck, “Beast.”

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but also the general framework – that is, the motif of courtship – fell short of offering the social and ethical orientation he sought. As a renowned writer who wanted to reach larger audiences, he had seen the limits of the motif as well as the potential of interweaving it with other motifs in executing the communicative functions he valued. Despite his attempts to come up with a rich and interesting Darstellung of the motif, courtship remained interesting mainly for readers who were familiar with and drawn to the sentimental novel – young women. Accordingly, if the categorization of Howells as a writer of domestic sentiments earned him a large readership among them, the motif was paradoxically sufficient to disqualify Howells from many others’ bookshelves. In fact, the motif seemed to fail Howells even among his loyal readers. Courtship was interesting and functional as long as characters courted each other; when they married and entered into the closed and “sacred” institution of marriage, the motif lost its attraction for the reader. Furthermore, courtship emasculated Howells’s power in controlling and limiting readers’ range of interpretation of his texts. From a receptive point of view, the motif was broadly used in the literary landscape. In fact, the popular, sentimental novels of the period included courtship almost excessively. Accordingly, it created a specific horizon of expectation in the reading public. However, Howells’s Darstellung of courtship was far from meeting readers’ expectations of romance. Consequently, Howells’s drastically different – that is, realistic – handling of the motif had the potential to frustrate readers. He needed other interesting motifs which readers did not approach with the interpretive baggage they had with regard to courtship plots. During the period when novel writing was only one of his jobs – that is, until 1881 – his failure to attract readers as much as he wanted did not matter much financially. His resignation from his position as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as the rising expenses of his sick daughter, Winnie, forced Howells to reconsider his literary production: he not only had to write faster but he also had to attract more readers through a broader variety of motifs. At the same time, his travels in Europe in 1882 and 1883, which he undertook to look for a cure for his daughter, made him think about “Americanness.” In line with the contemporary debates on “the Great American novel,”8 defining America had become the central intellectual and literary concern for Howells. He was aware that America was different from Europe, but as a novelist, he was less after mere descriptions as he had been as a travel writer. Having turned to orienting the reader through fiction years

8

Lawrence Buell offers an interesting insight into “the great American novel” and Howells’s relationship to the concept in his book, The Dream of the Great American Novel, Belknap Press, 2014.

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before, Howells wanted to come up with unexhausted and less-broadly used “American” motifs. This would allow him not only to define America with fresh eyes, but it would also give him the opportunity to mediate the process of interpretation more effectively. The Darstellung of “American” material would orient the reader better in contrast to the universals of the romance tradition, which the motif of courtship, despite Howells’s radically different handling, carried. The motif of business, as Howells (re)presented in The Rise of Silas Lapham, seemed to offer the versatility Howells needed to reconcile his communicative objectives, artistic values, worries over his social and cultural status and his financial goals in the mid-1880s. The motif offered possibilities for social and ethical orientation: it allowed Howells to externalize countless cause-and-effect relations within the text in a way similar to the Homeric narrative, but it also allowed the reader to connect the reality represented with the reality experienced in the period. Incorporating this new motif in an externalized way helped him break literary boundaries and made him the “dean” realist among other writers fighting for the trophy. Through the motif, Howells could speak to completely new groups of readers, while its combination with a love story satisfied his loyal readers of domestic sentiments. Relieving him and his family of financial fears, business made the novel a lucrative business in itself and a bestseller. Thus emerged the great American realist novel, if not the great American novel.

3.2 ORIENTING BUSINESS IN THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM Social Orientation Through Social Integration The Rise of Silas Lapham offers social orientation to the reader via the Darstellung of social integration. The architecture of the Laphams’ planned house symbolizes how Howells realizes social integration in the course of the plot. While talking about the plans for the Laphams’ house on the Back Bay, the architect suggests a dining room behind the hall because such a plan “gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly staircases” and “gives you an effect of amplitude and space” (36).9 As Tanselle argues, the architect plans a house “which contains, not a ‘long, straight, ugly’ staircase, but rather two staircases that intersect in many ingenious

9

All references to the novel are to the following edition: William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham: An Authoritative Text, Composition and Backgrounds, Contemporary Responses, Criticism, edited by Don L. Cook, W. W. Norton, 1982.

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ways before they finally come together at the upper level” (430). Through this plan, Howells not only presents an architectural solution for the Laphams’ house; he also symbolizes a path for social integration, at the end of which different groups “finally come together.” The representation of these attempts for social integration is not an easy task for Howells; he needs specific literary tools to unfold the plot in a well-externalized and believable – that is, realistic – manner. Most importantly, Howells utilizes business as a space and a catalyst in order to present the reader his representation of social integration. Significantly, the primary function of business in the novel is to unite diverse social groups in American society. Howells offers a social integration pattern for different segments of the community under the auspices of small business organization, with its limited yet complex commercial structure. He accounted for his ascription of this integrative function to business a couple of years later by saying, “At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us” (“The Man of Letters” 4). In other words, Howells clearly relies on business’s power to bring different groups in society together, despite the differences of interest, tastes and ideas. In his novel, Howells incorporates a specific business organization – Lapham’s small paint business – to achieve this social unity. Lapham’s business brings together the commoner Laphams with their rural background and the aristocratic Coreys from Boston. In this way, business not only allows Howells to realize his desires on paper but it also allows him to call his reading public to integrate with other groups in society. In this process of social integration, Lapham’s business functions, first and foremost, as the abstract space where groups, who otherwise seldom mingled, gather, interact, and subtly negotiate the terms of social integration. Before achieving social integration, that is, at the beginning of the novel, Lapham’s business not only reveals the existence of two discrete social layers in Boston but also shows that their members do not even engage with each other. Gradually, Lapham’s business offers multiple opportunities for a sustained interaction, which, in turn, allows the Laphams and Coreys to talk to each other and see that they both need the other group in order to survive and realize their full potential. Business not only prepares the space for a variety of ways of interaction between the groups, it also functions as the textual agent that brings the groups together. Lapham’s business organization is a catalyst in that it forces characters to address issues that arise out of the interaction between these groups. Slowly, both groups set out to approach each other, testing their limits and power, failing in their initial attempts. Out of this space of contact Howells provides between the families, a new community eventually arises.

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Obviously, in order for business to integrate the Laphams and Coreys in the first place and thereby present the reader with a plot of social integration, the families have to be distinct from each other at the inception of the novel. What is more, this difference must be clearly elucidated, externalized and illuminated in order to be believable, like Odysseus’ scar in Auerbach’s analysis. Howells utilizes business, first and foremost, to externalize the differences between the social groups, their background and their manners. In fact, business is the defining feature of both families. Born in 1820 in Vermont, Silas Lapham grew up with “the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard’s Almanac” (5). His childhood is marked by poverty and hardship. After a short stay in Texas, he returns to Vermont and works at different jobs: at saw-mills and at a hotel, as an ostler. Subsequently, he marries a teacher, Persis, who probably has a modest background similar to Silas’s. They have two daughters, Penelope and Irene. Subsequently, Silas serves in the Civil War, for which he was awarded the nickname, “Colonel.” In the initial years of the post-Civil War era, the Laphams got rich from their paint business, so much that “they did not know what to do with [money]” (22) and moved to Boston. The novel starts when the Laphams are at the peak of their success in business: throughout the novel, business dominates the Laphams’ life, their lifestyles, and most importantly, their desires. If business defines the Laphams, the lack of it frames the Coreys: they are a well-educated, refined, upper-class family, living on the Back Bay, where the Laphams aim to move. Bromfield Corey, the father, spent several years living in Europe with the support of his father. While the Laphams’ lack of manners and ignorance of social mores frequently surface in the course of the novel, the Coreys know the social code exactly. Moreover, the Coreys are respected in their environment and are friends with other prominent families in Boston, who confirm and strengthen their position on the Back Bay. The difference rests on more than manners or their position; the Coreys are also intellectually superior to the Laphams. The fact that Bromfield Corey reads Revue des deux Mondes, an important magazine of art and culture of the period, is a good example of his intellectual orientation. His son, Tom, studied at Harvard – the central institution that educated American intellectuals in the period. The Coreys thus represent the American ideal of refinement and intellectual authority that the Laphams do not possess. In spite of this, the Coreys do not have any “business:” they are the members of the leisure class that Veblen proposed in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). They are not hard-working people; in fact, they do not work at all. Neither Bromfield Corey nor other family members have any concrete occupation. Bromfield is, from time to time, a painter but talks “more about it than working at it” (62). Throughout the book, the family mainly appears to be on holiday, reading

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journals, and talking about the Laphams. The Coreys are more than uninterested in business; in fact, they disdain business and businessmen in many ways. When Anne Corey hears the Laphams’ business activities, she says, “It’s very distasteful to me.” The problem is not only “the kind of business, but [also] the kind of people [to] be mixed up with” (63). To the Coreys, both the paint business and the Laphams are rather “vulgar, braggart, [and] uncouth” (187). Even though they seem to have lost the necessary functions to continue this upper-class life in the postCivil War society they live in, they would like to continue their status, for which they need, paradoxically, money – but without the vulgarity of business. Business not only allows Howells to externalize the differences between the families; in line with realist aesthetics, the motif also increases the reality effect by making this process of externalization less “artful.” Howells frames Silas’s life story as an interview, where a journalist asks Lapham questions for the “Solid Men of Boston” series for his newspaper. Clearly, Lapham is a “solid” man because of his business. In line with the realist attempts to represent life completely and transcend the artfulness of art, this way of frame-less externalizing increases the reality effect by creating the feeling that the text is less unnatural, less invented and less manipulated by Howells. Business creates the potential for the reader to perceive that instead of Howells, it is “Silas” who recounts his own story. The way the Coreys enter the scene is just as seamless: the Lapham ladies get to know the Corey ladies in a “Canadian watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec” (22). Tellingly, the Laphams are there because of the opportunities their business offers. In an aesthetics of externalization where nothing remains “unausgesprochen” (Auerbach 13), we learn the details of Silas’s biography as a result of cause-and-effect relations which the motif of business constructs. Significantly, this “artless” introduction to the novel allows the reader to immerse himself in the story right at the beginning – a process necessary for the subsequent integration plot to be effective. The way Howells externalizes the characters reveals one central and crucial symmetry: while the Laphams do not know what to do with money, for the Coreys “In process of time the money seemed less abundant. There were shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had grown much more expensive” (62). Due to their shrinking wealth, the Coreys descend the social ladder, thus approaching the ascending Laphams economically, if not socially. By revealing this economic leveling of the families, the motif of business allows Howells to externalize a broader tenet about the novel: the genesis, the central conflict and the engine of the plot. This process of approaching between the Laphams and the Coreys is the reason why the story is worth telling: this is the starting point of the conflict in the story

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and this is the reason why the story is being told in the first place. The developments before the inception of the plot demonstrate that the Laphams neither had nor needed any social orientation about upper-class lifestyles. It is only through their business that their encounter with old money become meaningful and they want more in a way that is well-justified: only due to their business do the Coreys begin to represent the social measure to achieve for the Lapham family. Subsequently, the Laphams struggle to move up the social ladder to join Boston society and to be accepted by Boston’s elite on equal terms despite their simple background – an objective which is materialized through their plan of a home on Beacon Street. Considering the fact that they are Americans having grown up not only with “the Old Testament” but also with Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” (5) – books which promise respectability for hard work – it is only natural that the Laphams desire social prominence in accordance with their successful business. Having framed the differences between the families, the motif allows Howells to gradually integrate them realistically, that is, after overcoming several obstacles which Howells carefully constructs. In the course of the novel, Tom Corey starts working for Silas Lapham’s paint business. This working relationship allows Tom to have sustained interaction with the members of the Lapham family. Gradually, it allows Silas Lapham and Bromfield Corey to get to know each other as well. It leads the Coreys to invite the Laphams over for dinner and introduce them to other upper-class Bostonians. Soon however, the Laphams and the Coreys realize that the families are markedly different from each other. After getting to know the Coreys, the Laphams are convinced that any attempts for social integration with them will endanger their personal integrity. The dinner in the climactic Chapter 12 reveals that there are far too many social obstacles to the Laphams’ objective of social mobility, confirming Persis’s prediction and fear: “we’re too old to learn to be like them” (160). The same goes for the Coreys: this interaction demonstrates that their suspicions about the Laphams were justified. Although the Coreys are quite appreciative of the assistance Persis provides to Anna, and the job Silas gives to Tom, they are now certain that they do not want deepening interaction, let alone the assimilation of the Laphams into Boston society. Rather, they prefer to keep the distance between the groups at the level that existed in the very beginning of the novel. Any deepening of relations is unfavorable because of the overt social differences between the families. When Tom says, “they’re not unintelligent people. They are very quick, and they are shrewd and sensible” about the Laphams, Bromfield’s response reveals this clearly: “I have no doubt that some of the Sioux are so. But that is not saying that they are civilized” (104). Just like Bromfield, Anna Corey

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and their two daughters became aware that deeper integration with the Laphams will damage their self-worth and prevent them from being who they are. This initial obstacle to social integration, which business cannot overcome, increases the reality effect in several ways. Howells makes it clear that if the parents were to merge with each other, it would not lead to a happy situation. If they were happy, it would not be realistic: a successful integration of the elder Laphams into upper-class Boston life would endanger both groups’ values and be highly unrealistic to the reader. Howells is aware that quick, unexplained social mobility – a world without social limits – would threaten the reality effect of his text and the novel would not be able to orient the reader. The Darstellung of the impossibility of social mobility may disappoint the reader; however, it allows the reader to identify the text with the real life in the post-Civil War period, where social mobility was a strong desire but at the same time highly difficult. Again, the Darstellung of this realistic experience becomes not only possible but also vigorously effective through Lapham’s paint business, which justifies the attempts at social mobility in the eyes of the Americans who grew up with stories of social mobility. Subsequently, Howells utilizes the motif of business to overcome these obstacles to integration and find a more feasible integration pattern. Accordingly, he delegates the project of social integration to the younger members of the families. Silas’s response to the hopeless Persis demonstrates this beautifully: “The children ain’t [too old to learn to be like the Coreys]” (160). That is, Silas thinks that the younger generation can achieve this project of social mobility much easier than they can. With these words, he is referring to the interaction between his daughters and Tom Corey, which constitute the love subplot of the novel. Crucially, the business relationship, which starts early in the novel and makes the families understand that they do not fit well together, at the same time paves the way for Tom to get to know the Lapham girls and fall in love with the elder, Penelope. It is not only the space that it creates for the younger generation; business is also the catalyst that introduces Tom and Pen to each other, eventually leading to their marriage – the perfect epitome of social integration between two different people from two different groups. In other words, if business is the space that teaches the elder characters that they cannot integrate, it is also the space where the young people realize that they can come closer with fewer obstacles. An important aspect of this process of integration is the agent of this project, Tom Corey. In fact, it is unusual for an aristocratic man like Tom to be the ideal agent in establishing a business relationship with the Laphams. After all, Howells shows that while Tom Corey and Silas Lapham have many similarities, Tom is tremendously different from the other members of the Corey family. In this epitome work of externalized aesthetics, Howells carefully accounts for the reasons

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why Tom has, surprisingly, a lot in common with the Laphams, which become articulable again through the motif of business. Firstly, as common for the period, heredity10 plays a major role in Tom’s difference from his parents. He physically resembles his grandfather: “Grandfather and grandson had both the Roman nose which appears to have flourished chiefly at the formative period of the republic, and which occurs more rarely in the descendants of the conscript fathers” (61). Crucially, the heredity resemblance symbolized through the nose stands for more: Tom’s grandfather was not a member of the leisure class, but a productive and hard-working businessman just like the workaholic Silas Lapham. Accordingly, the grandfather was a man of action – a person of “doing” things. When Bromfield says he wants to travel, Tom’s grandfather says, “You must do something. […] No Corey yet ever proposed to do nothing” (61). The grandfather’s sentence “I must do something” (59) is repeated by Tom before he enters the Lapham’s business, proving that Tom and his grandfather think alike in life. In fact, this resemblance is what makes Tom valuable in the world of business. Just like his grandfather, Tom has “done” several things and gained experience, which is important for trade activities. Lapham hires Tom because he can speak and write in German, Spanish and French, which, in turn allows Lapham to expand his business network. In contrast to this similarity between the grandfather and Tom, “Bromfield Corey had not inherited” (61) the nose, nor had he “done” business, hence Tom’s similarity to the Laphams instead of his own father. In addition to heredity, Howells accounts for Tom’s similarity to Silas (and difference from his own father) through social experiences, which become palpable through business. Tom decides to enter business after he travels to Texas – an experience which Silas made in his youth in the same state. After coming back from Texas, Tom says, “I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little out of our tradition” (57). Tom clearly shows that he perceives the differences among people maturely, because he is aware that people are different in different parts of the country in contrast to the unexperienced Bromfield, who believes that “the Bostonian ought never to leave Boston” (58), except to see Europe. Significantly, Tom’s openness is revealed through business. He also decides to enter business because of his experiences in Texas, as he says, “I’ve seen much younger men all through the West and South-west taking care of themselves” (59). Tom decides to become the social agent for the unification process only after he sees that the younger men in other states take care of themselves through business activities. In other words, Tom has changed as a result of getting to know fellow

10 Howells’s use of heredity reveals the incorporation of naturalistic elements. For more information, see Chapter 4.

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Americans doing business: “if I hadn’t passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much” (57). As a versatile tool, the motif of business offers social orientation within this plot of social integration on a quite different layer as well. The motif allows Howells to create a romantic misunderstanding, which is cleared up in the course of events. Before Pen and Tom get married, from Chapter 2 on, Howells implies the possibility of a love plot between Irene and Tom. In this chapter, the narrator arouses interest through Silas Lapham, who says, “Seem struck up on Irene?” In the same way, Irene receives a newspaper clipping from Texas when Tom is traveling around the state. Although the clipping gave a “complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton” (34) – that is, no story that can be interpreted as a romantic – Irene “cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her mirror” (34-5), interpreting it as a sign of romantic interest. Furthermore, when Tom jokingly gives Irene a wood shaving during the construction of the Laphams’ house on the Back Bay, because it looks like a flower, Irene takes this as a sign of attraction. She puts the shaving in her belt and recounts the events to Pen. This is not only a proof of excitement and interest on the side of Irene but also evidence that Irene assumes Tom is attracted to her. It is not only Irene, Pen and the elder Laphams who assume a possible love relationship between the two; the Coreys follow the fashion. When Anna Corey suggests “I wish he had married some one” (83), both she and Bromfield think of Irene as a potential, if not positive, partner. Yet, this love plot between Irene and Tom is only a misunderstanding, as Tom gradually demonstrates. Before Chapter 10, when he says, “She’s charming!” (119), Tom demonstrates that he is not interested in either of the Lapham girls. In fact, he is very clear about his socioeconomic objectives. Tom wants to work for Lapham purely for economic reasons. He explains his desire to work for Lapham’s paint business in Chapter 6, after talking to his father about the importance of work, saying, “I’ve wasted time and money enough” (59). In the same way, in the fifth chapter, when Bromfield suggests matrimony as the logical next step to save them from economic problems, Tom answers “I shouldn’t quite like to regard it as a career” (55). Further, when Bromfield tells him to marry a rich girl because they are not “so ambitious and uneasy,” Tom responds: “It would depend […] upon whether a girl’s people had been rich long enough to have given her position before she married. If they hadn’t, I don’t see how she would be any better than a poor girl in that respect” (56). With this response, Tom seems to admit that the Lapham girls still might be ambitious and uneasy. This is an indication of the fact that in the first half of the novel, Tom neither fancied nor thought of marrying any of the Lapham ladies. Moreover, when the Laphams are invited to the dinner, Tom agrees with his mother, repeating her words “I certainly don’t wish you to make

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more of the acquaintance than I have done. It wouldn’t be right; it might be very unfortunate” (155). This, again, proves that, as of the fourteenth chapter, Tom is very hesitant about the Lapham girls. Initially, Howells presents this misunderstood love plot as an alternative to the business plot in terms of its integrative power. At the end of the novel, when all misunderstandings are cleared out, the reader sees how love as a socially integrating catalyst fails to integrate families. Love is too personal, individual and usually coincidental to be a social catalyst; therefore, it is not generalizable for the reader. If love achieved social integration, the reading public would learn from the novel that finding a partner from a different social group is the path to social mobility. Needless to say, Howells envisioned a generalizable social integration pattern where people can have social mobility regardless of their ability to find a partner from a different social group. As an agent, business makes social integration and social mobility applicable to all citizens, as it was an omnipresent institution in the period. While business allows the reader to turn the Darstellung of experience in the novel to knowledge, love, through its individuality, suggests that the Darstellung of the experience is not generalizable; therefore, it does not provide knowledge to the reader. As a result, while social integration through love does not provide orientation to the reading public, business is more successful in carrying out Howells’s pragmatic objectives. This is the reason why love can only be a result of the sustained interaction that business achieves, not the other way around. It is not only the characters who misunderstand the relationship between Tom and Irene; the reader shares this misunderstanding as well until Tom reveals that he likes Pen rather than Irene. The Darstellung of this misunderstanding and the gradual revelation allows Howells first to “hook” the reader, who was used to the love plot in contemporary sentimental novels of the period, and ultimately to wake up the reader up about romantic forms of literature. Interestingly, by making love fail to achieve social integration, Howells attempts to enlighten the reader about their reading habits. This misunderstanding and the revelation shows the reader that Romantic literature is not useful in real life at all; instead, the realist text is the useful and helpful literary form. While the failure of love allows Howells to oppose the Romantic movement conceptually, from an affective perspective, it orients readers socially by enlightening them about their reading practices and inviting them to read the useful realist texts instead of unrealistic and dysfunctional love stories. One last example proves how ineffective love can be in the creation of a stable community. The mysterious and beautiful Zerilla, whom we encounter every now and then working for Silas Lapham, is revealed to be the impoverished daughter of Lapham’s military friend, who died while trying to save Lapham in the war.

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After the Civil War, Lapham recruits Zerilla for the business, against the wishes of his wife. Toward the end of the novel, Persis imagines a love affair between Silas and Zerilla. However, it is soon revealed that Silas Lapham has recruited Zerilla not because of a love relationship, but in order to help her and her mother financially, thinking of what her father had done for Silas. Persis’s misunderstanding shows that love does not have an integrative power for Howells; it can only be the result of a community being integrated through other social means such as business. The Lapham’s business organization is the central platform in America, connecting not only the deteriorating aristocracy but also the impoverished groups, thus achieving social integration on both sides with the assets it provides. The motif of business also allows Howells to overcome a symptomatic problem of the realist text, namely, the ending. As realists attempted to represent life completely but could not really achieve it – because life goes on, while novels end – they tried to come up with a realistic solution for the endings of their texts. At the end of the novel, Howells situates his characters in their ultimate place in society after a long journey in different temporary positions. Silas and Persis move back to the farm, where they started their economic and hence indirectly their moral rise. Silas handles the Persis brand for the West Virginians, who bought Lapham’s paint. This purchase relieves Lapham’s debt and allows him an interest; that is, he can still earn a living. All other minor characters in the novel, the Coreys, Irene and Rogers have stopped their search, having arrived at their final position through the events that business unfolds. Tom and Pen are sent abroad to carry out business activities for the paint business – a move, which solves several possible problems in the narrative. In this way, they do not have to spend time with each other’s families, which would clearly create further social problems due to their contrasting socio-economic background – problems similar to those faced by the parents. By sending characters abroad to represent the company, Howells overcomes a possible problem: at the end of the novel, the reader is not left wondering how the characters will socialize with each other’s socially distinct parents. Obviously, a relationship between Pen and Tom’s parents and sisters could only result in disharmony and clash. This ending of the novel, in contrast to the advent, where characters, especially the Laphams were constantly looking for more, demonstrates a sustainable solution. The reader knows at the end that the characters are going to have a lifestyle that belongs to their “real” position in society without further turbulence. Howells’s response to Kaplan’s paradox that novels end while life goes on is this final settlement; at the end of the novel, the reader can predict a sustainable future without the need to read further.

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The only exception that business cannot make happy is Irene: “five years after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried” (319). With the elder sister, Irene, Howells is again realistic, not only because no story ends with happiness for everyone in a world of realism, but because the motif, though versatile, is not a magic tool: it has its limits. Business allows people to come into contact with each other, converse, negotiate and mediate, but it does not force people to stay in contact, let alone marry. Business introduced Tom and Irene as well; yet, the way she sought to interact did not work out. In line with Howells’s attempts to orient the reader in such a way to make him individually functional, it is solely in the hands of the individual to make the best out of the interaction that business prepares. Howells is thus highly democratic in his desire for social integration: this process of getting to know each other should never harm the individuality, privacy, free will and hence integrity of the individual. As a master realist, Howells draws the boundaries of this potential of introducing different groups to each other as well. As in Horatio Alger’s and Elisabeth Stuart Phelps’s narratives, this process of externalizing different characters and then integrating the younger members through business is a way of introducing different layers of American society to the reader. Yet, Howells is careful in his desire; this process of getting to know each other should never harm the privacy and hence integrity of the individual. As Lapham says, I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out – even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad – it’s pretty much all up with him. No, sir. I don’t want to know people through and through. (70)

Lapham’s warning makes business activities even more important in achieving social integration, because as seen in the novel, it is a tool that introduces people to each other and allows them to interact without disturbing their privacy. It is exactly this impersonality of business that allows the social integration to function; in Howells’s naïve understanding, no party needs to be afraid as long as they are interested in their own business activities. For Howells, this search for self-interest should remain within ethical limits, and the second function of business in his novel is to emphasize the morality lost in the post-Civil War period.

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Ethical Orientation Through Moral Bildung From a broader perspective, through the social orientation he presented the reader with, Howells desired a social change where fellow Americans could be economically, socially, and more importantly, mentally better off. Significantly, this social change required a change on a personal, individual level: a well-functioning society required individuals with strong moral integrity and self-control. Accordingly, Howells offers ethical orientation to the readers through the Darstellung of moral growth with regard to others – through a plot of realizing the importance of fellow Americans. In the novel, the more the Laphams and the Coreys interact, the more they realize that they are not alone; the other group has desires and choices as well. In this way, both of the families gradually recognize broader entities such as society, community and the public. In that sense, it is an ethical process: by recognizing the public, characters are forced to recognize the interests of the public – a process through which Howells attempted to invite the reader to embrace moral integrity. Howells uses the protagonist, Silas Lapham, in particular to reveal this process of realization. The novel presents the reader with Lapham’s process of gradually choosing to be moral with regard to the public good despite temptation. The ethical growth of this character is so fundamental to the novel that it could have been named “The Moral Education of Silas Lapham.” First, this process of realization reveals a clash between his interests and the interests of the others – the public good. At the end of the novel, Lapham leaves his childish narcissism and egotism behind, valuing the public good over petty interests. In Chapter 4, right after Persis complains about Lapham’s unfair “crowding out” of his former business partner, the narrator says, “Lapham could not rise to it” (44). At the end of the novel, Lapham seems to have changed completely: he refuses to sell the mills to the Englishmen without telling them “how things stood,” in which case they would not buy them. Lapham confirms his moral rise at the end by saying, “the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it” (321). Tellingly, Howells utilizes business as a literary tool to show Lapham’s lacking moral sense and then the process of gaining it. Specifically, Lapham’s business organization prepares the grounds for Lapham to learn the importance of public good. The moral orientation Howells portrays is by no means an abstract ideal in the novel; rather, it is clearly defined through “the economy of pain” formula. As Sewell, the priest, simply puts it, this formula elevates the good of the majority: “One suffer instead of three” (212). In other words, the preferable moral choice is the option that will injure the least number of people. In that sense, it highlights the public good over the individual

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interest. This formula represents the objective that Lapham ignores at the inception but gradually reaches in the subsequent parts of the novel. As such, it is not only the shaping force in the love plot of the novel – as when Irene suffers, Penelope, Tom and their parents are spared suffering – but it is, to Howells, also the way individuals form, or rather, should form the social world. The business organization enables Howells to unfold Lapham’s gradual learning process, in which he comes to understand “the economy of pain” formula and how to apply it at the end of the novel. At the beginning of the plot, Lapham’s business activities reveal him to be childish, narcissist and self-centered – unaware of the public good. The reader is introduced to Lapham’s egocentric morality pattern in Chapter 3. When he and his wife Persis go to have a look at their construction on the fancy upper-class Back Bay, they see Lapham’s former business partner, Milton K. Rogers, whom Lapham forced to leave the business in the past. To be exact, Lapham takes Rogers as a partner at a period of financial difficulty and forces him to buy out or leave when Silas realizes that he does not have enough money to buy the company. Needless to say, this offer comes at a point when Silas sees that the business will be highly profitable, revealing his greed. Both Persis and the narrator consider Lapham’s behavior as unfair. However, Lapham disagrees, saying, “My conscience is easy as far as he is concerned, and it always was” (41). Crucially, Howells can demonstrate that Lapham has been childish, narcissist and thus unfair to Rogers through business. If Lapham did not have a paint business, Howells would not have the chance to demonstrate Lapham’s egocentrism in a believable way, which would deprive him of the reality effect. The Darstellung of Lapham’s business activities establishes a clear and possible cause-and-effect relationship and makes Lapham’s moral disorientation palpable to the reader. Subsequently, business allows Howells to demonstrate a gradual change in Lapham’s moral disposition by providing further opportunities for conflicts. In Chapter 10, Rogers comes to ask for money from Lapham because he wants to further his business activities: “he had got hold of a patent right that he wanted to go into on a large scale, and there he was wanting [Silas] to supply him the funds” (115). Surprisingly, Lapham is less insistent about his rightness about the Rogers issue than he was at the inception of the plot. He says, “We settled our business, and then we went into the old thing, from the very start. And we talked it all over. And when we got through we shook hands. Well, I don’t know when it’s done me so much good to shake hands with anybody” (115). The good feeling after shaking hands reveals feelings of guilt and rising awareness. Yet, the change is incomplete. He still thinks that he is right: “I hadn’t anything to make up to Milton K. Rogers” (116). If Rogers did not want to carry out further business activities and Lapham

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did not have a business that produced sufficient wealth enough for further investment, Lapham would not have this conflict, which comes so beautifully as a result of cause-and-effect relations. As a result, Howells would not be able to provide moral orientation through the representation of social sphere so seamlessly. Specifically, Lapham’s narcissism at the inception of the plot, which is articulated through his paint business, “hooks” the reader by enabling identification with Lapham on two different levels. Firstly, Lapham’s initial immaturity is attractive to the reader, because in many ways the enlightened middle classes were similar to Lapham in their dislocation and discontent. Neither Lapham nor the reader grasps the workings of society well but clearly both want to find happiness in a world of insecurity. More importantly, the identification with a character who takes independent decisions which serve his own ends even at the expense of the public good offers the reading public, who felt constant hopelessness, mental suffocation and social limits, the freedom that was missing in their lives. In this way, Howells satisfies the reader’s social desires through the text. The representation of Silas Lapham like a bull in a china shop, who moves freely in business and social life, is Howells’s way of overcoming discontent and hopelessness on the side of the reading public. This attempt to “hook” the reader is the reason why Howells refrains from openly condemning Lapham’s narcissism as socially unacceptable at the beginning; in fact, the inception justifies Lapham’s childishness and makes it appear negligible. In the subsequent chapters, business helps Lapham to lose his childish narcissism, thereby giving Howells the opportunity to provide moral orientation. Lapham’s business not only provides the resources for the family to plan a house on the Back Bay but it also allows them to dine with the Coreys and other upper-class people through Tom. This dinner, as explored in the previous part, makes Lapham realize that he was not fit for upper-class life in Boston. From that point on, Lapham begins to question his childish self-centeredness, because he has become aware of the obstacles on his way to upward social mobility. He is so disappointed that he lost his self-confidence: “I’m not fit for any decent place” (185). Specifically, he sees that his wealth cannot buy him position among the upper-class. In short, Lapham’s paint business starts a journey for the Laphams but also slowly makes them realize that the wealth this business produces does not clear out all the burdens on the way to social mobility. Instead, business educates them. Crucially, this burden demonstrates to Lapham that he is an individual with a specific position within society, surrounded by obstacles – he is not alone. These obstacles are social obstacles; they show him the existence of others living in society. Once he becomes aware of this, he cannot ignore the existence of others, or more specifically “the rights of others” (291). Clearly, he was aware that there

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were other people in society before, but he was not yet careful about their rights and shares. In this context, his rising awareness about the shares of others forces Lapham to choose between caring for his interests and caring for the public good, because his share and the public good are irreconcilable, as later seen in the case of his reaction to the English parties. Eventually, as a result of his experiences, he begins to locate fellow Americans into his – once – self-centered mindset and looks at the world from a broader perspective – from the perspective of “the economy of pain formula,” where other individuals have claims and rights as well. It is the business world that creates all these conflicts. Just like the genesis of Lapham’s egocentrism, the completion of Lapham’s Bildung is revealed through business as well: he proves that he cares for the public good by refusing to sell the mills to the English businessmen at the end of the novel. Since the English businessmen are an “association of rich and charitable people” (285-6) – representatives of a wealthy group of people in England, they want to buy the mills at all costs, even if they know that, in fact, the mills are not worth much and they are “willing to be cheated.” Still, Lapham refuses to sell the mills, because as Pizer suggests, the English “represent the society at large” (“The Ethical Unity” 431). Lapham’s decision to sell the mills fits the economy of pain formula, because Lapham and his family and Rogers and his family are less important than society. Lapham’s failure, just like Irene’s suffering, fits the formula because these characters make less than what society equals. Howells attempts to imbue this process of Bildung in the reader through business; without Lapham’s business and the conflicts it brings, not only would Lapham be less derailed at the inception but also Howells would not be able to reveal Lapham’s moral rise. While the Darstellung of social integration is an attempt to orient the reader socially by inviting him to communicate with fellow Americans from all walks of life, this plot of moral growth is there to enlighten the reader ethically. The representation of this process of gradual realization, in a manner foreshadowing the modernist epiphany, is an attempt to have the reader, who is “hooked” into the plot through this initial self-centeredness, to undergo a similar experience in his process of reading. In this way, Howells demonstrates to his readers the need to recognize and respect the rights of fellow Americans, hence the public good. Crucially, neither of these communicative objectives can be executed without business: the motif offered Howells the versatility to present the reader with a coherent, realistic and convincing plot in instilling the social religion he dreamed of throughout his life.

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The “Reality” of Lapham’s Business In contrast to early realist fictions of business, Howells externalizes the business itself in his novel: The Rise of Silas Lapham includes a highly detailed description of business organizations as well as business activities. As in early realist fictions of business, the Darstellung of business organizations in the novel reveals not only the broader communicative functions of the novel and the motif within the plot, but it also reveals symptomatic conflicts and dichotomies of American realism. The businesses in the novel, especially Lapham’s paint company, demonstrates a strained dialogue between the reality effect and the effect of unreality: while Howells attempted to increase the reality effect through an intricate construction of the institution, the specific Darstellung of businesses, which he needed in order to offer the orientation he aimed at, decreases the reality effect. Although the design of Lapham’s company is highly realistic in many senses of the word, especially before the climax, its eventual failure because of moral decisions ultimately foreshadows the fall of American realism and the unavoidable rise of American naturalism. Firstly, Howells sought to increase the reality effect by combining the popular image of business with the actual experience of business through his Darstellung of Lapham’s paint business. Lapham’s company is large and small at the same time: while it functions as a strong and operational institution, Lapham employs only a few people in Vermont and Boston. The larger aspirations of the paint business mirrored the image of business in the minds of post-civil War Americans. The post-Civil War era was “gilded” because of the proliferation of large business organizations, such as Standard Oil, which were powerful agents of social change. In many ways, they shaped the daily life of millions. Many people adapted their lifestyles in accordance with the inventions, decisions and philosophies – such as efficiency – that powerful businesses introduced. Similarly, Lapham’s paint business is a wholesale business; he produces the paint, putting it in boxes and selling it through retailers in several countries. For a reader with no special interest in the paint business, the amount of paint involved is huge. On the other hand, the small size of Lapham’s works fits the frame of business organizations most people experienced in their daily lives. The size of the business forces Lapham to “do” the business himself. Accordingly, his involvement in business activities resembles an occupation like teaching or practicing medicine. He is often tired because of the labor he gives to his business. Once, on a usual (and thus representative) day, “In his office Lapham lay asleep in his arm-chair, with a newspaper over his face” (91). Similarly, Silas Lapham condemns the Coreys for their objection to “the possible encroachment of work and ‘business’ and a life of

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leisure” (Eby, “Representative Men” 137). Especially readers who did not have access to “the metropolitan sprawl” (Den Tandt, “American Literary Naturalism” 99) were more familiar with trade and craft-based business, where labor was the main source of wealth. While the grandness of Lapham’s paint mine helps the reader connect this representation with other representations of large and popular businesses in other media, the small size and his actual involvement in business affairs resemble the way many Americans experienced business in their daily lives. In these ways, Howells encourages the reader to establish a strong relationship between the signifier of business and the possible signified actual businesses, between the word and the socioeconomic entity, and between the text and real life – hence the reality effect, which is one of the reasons why the novel was a bestseller in the period. In addition to facilitating this process of association, the Darstellung of business organizations in the novel increases the reality effect by allowing Howells to externalize realistic cause-and-effect relations as in Homer’s Odyssey, accounting for Lapham’s morality, which was unrealistic for the time. Through Howells’s careful representation, Lapham’s business is as real as other actual businesses or businesses in other media; however, it does not face the problems – or make Lapham face problems – real businesses do. Significantly, Howells imbues ethical orientation through Lapham’s moral growth; that is, the plot of moral growth is indispensable for Howells’s communicative objectives. However, this moral growth does not amount to a 180-degree turn throughout his moral journey; at the end of the novel, Lapham just returns to the morality he has always kept in his heart but with a stronger awareness of the public good. In other words, for the moral growth plot to function, Lapham should be already inherently moral, innocent, pure, virtuous, guiltless, childish – hence a “raw diamond” (Fluck, “Wealth” 58). For his ultimate growth to sound realistic in the first place, Lapham has to be described as an inexperienced character at the beginning of the novel. Howells’s nuanced Darstellung of Lapham’s paint business creates a realistic account of how Lapham has remained inexperienced, although he has been doing business for a long time. The small size of Lapham’s business justifies his lack of experience, because only in this way could Howells create a realistic representation of Lapham’s character. In the planning phase of the novel, Howells conceived of “Mineral Paint (or Stove-Blacking, or Boy’s Clothing, etc)” as Lapham’s business – all small-sized businesses (qtd. in Meserve and Nordloh 369). Because Lapham owns a small business with few employees, he cannot delegate the work to others. This emasculates a possible alienation between Lapham’s labor and income – the alienation that owners of large corporations experienced. Accordingly, Howells can draw a

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clear relationship between Lapham’s labor and income: what he earns is always the result of his hard work, not the result of ambiguous and untraceable transactions. It explains why Lapham is unaware of schemes and strategies that would lead him to immorality. As a small business owner, he needs to work hard to be able to profit. As Lapham confirms, “Well, say I’m fifty-five years old […] not an hour of waste time about me, anywheres!” (4). This direct relationship between labor and income, in turn, allows Howells to keep the profit margins small. In larger organizations or more abstract business models, such as finance, the profit margin is large because the businessman accumulates wealth mainly through speculation or others’ hard work or capital. Even though Lapham is able to get rich through his business, Lapham’s first-hand labor keeps its profit margins in a reasonable range, because he cannot benefit from others’ labor as much as large organizations could. This “saves” Lapham from the sins and conflicts of gaining great, untraceable wealth. This small size of the paint business allows Howells not only to emphasize the moral importance of labor but also to make the novel more realistic by justifying how Lapham remains, despite his financial rise, a hardworking and hence moral character in his heart. The starting point of Lapham’s business reiterates Howells’s attempts to represent Lapham as an inexperienced character at the beginning of the novel as well. The source of Lapham’s wealth is a paint mine that Lapham’s father discovered years ago on their farm in Vermont. In that sense, the starting point of the Laphams’ wealth is like a lottery. Significantly, through this lottery, Lapham does not experience the process of collecting and investing capital. He can stay away from possible conflicts between profit and morality, which he would face if he had to accumulate wealth through a traditional business organization with a usual capital accumulation process. Such a “lucky” beginning and moral naivety allow Howells to make the transition between Lapham’s childish narcissism at the beginning and moral growth at the end believable as well. Through the lottery, his transformation at the end of the novel into a more experienced moral character becomes more convincing because it allows Howells to reveal how Lapham returns to the essential qualities he originally possessed, after shedding his egotism along the way. If Howells had left the difference between Lapham’s point of departure and arrival widely open through the representation of a crook turning ultimately to morality, this profound change would threaten Lapham’s personal integrity and hence would have the potential to sound unconvincing. Other forms of capital accumulation would not allow Howells to offer ethical direction. A businessman who manages a large corporation would have a similar problem because such a company requires capital accumulation in the first place and possible moral questions, as a result which the protagonist cannot remain

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childish. Such a start might “insist on […] antipathy at every step of the way” (38) for a left liberal intellectual such as Walter Benn Michaels, but for many readers of the period, Lapham’s “sinless” start into business is easy to connect to. In theory, Lapham could also have inherited a legacy from a distant aunt, which would make him rich overnight. Howells does not take this path, because inheriting a legacy would not allow Howells to externalize how he remains moral and create possibilities for further consistencies. For instance, it would not help Howells to illustrate how Lapham subsequently gains experience and sheds his immaturity away through his unfair handling of Rogers. Only a business like Lapham’s paint company can offer orientation, not a story that starts with inheritance or any other windfall. This lottery ensures that he has always been a diamond waiting to be processed in a realistic way. The growth of his wealth reveals that he was just not experienced enough to recognize the importance of morality and the social good at the beginning, that is, to be a “cut” diamond. To increase the reality effect even more, Howells draws a broader picture of the economic sphere and situates Lapham’s paint business within a variety of other business organizations such as P. Y. & X Railroad Company, the English businessmen, and the West Virginia Company. As gradually becomes clear, the dealings of P. Y. & X Railroad Company and the English businessmen reveal the existence of amoral business organizations. Talking about the P. Y. & X, Silas Lapham finds it natural that the company wants to use its monopoly status around Roger’s mills in order to increase profit. Silas says to Persis, “If such a road as that took a fancy to his mills, do you think it would pay what he asked? No, sir! He would take what the road offered, or else the road would tell him to carry his flour and lumber to market himself” (230). Still, amoral companies were not the only ones, either. Howells blends other firms similar to Lapham’s into this externalized economic sphere for more reality effect. The West Virginia Company resonates with Lapham’s moral paint business: they “were young fellows, and country persons, like Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement above the level of their window” (279). Howells incorporates this company into the story next to the P. Y. & X Railroad Company and the English businessmen in order to offer a balanced view of the business world: Lapham’s business is not unique in being moral and socially conscious. If “the novel’s central concern” was really “the sudden development of American capitalism in the late nineteenth century” (38), as Michaels argues, Howells would not include a responsible and moral businessmen such as the West Virginians. If “Lapham has been brought low as just punishment for becoming a capitalist” (39) at the end of the novel, why are West

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Virginians still portrayed so positively? Michaels is wrong in his Hegelian attempts: neither the novel nor the motif of business is there to reflect economic concerns in the period. Instead, they are there to orient the reader socially and ethically. From a broader perspective, Lapham’s business organization reveals how Howells attempted to reconcile the reality effect created by the motif with the effect of unreality that the moral plot inevitably evokes. Lapham’s company not only “sounds” real, but is also moral and thus exceptional. In fact, the paint business is real enough to be believable and the kind of unreality it exhibits is not unbelievable. Crucially however, it is unlikely: it is very rare that a businessman discovers a paint mine behind his house and gets rich from it. The exceptional nature of Lapham’s business eventually decreases the reality effect. Although Howells attempted to increase the reality effect by accounting for the exceptional nature of Lapham’s company through a careful plot, the exceptional – and thus unrealistic – nature of Lapham’s business no longer resonated with readers. Despite such a skillful construction, people could no longer believe in the reality of such an exceptionally moral business as of the 1890s. The discontent with the lack of the reality effect, which the moral plot imposes, is symptomatic for the crisis of reality American realism faced in the period. Accordingly, Lapham’s business not only embodies the communicative functions of Howells’s novel, but it also signals the end of American realism and the rise of American naturalism. Despite Howells’s attempts to create the reality effect by drawing on the popular image of business in the period, creating similarities between the represented and experienced businesses or externalizing delicate cause-and-effect relations, the exceptional features of Lapham’s business that are crucial for Howells’s moral objectives clearly decrease the reality effect. The popular or rather notorious businessmen of the period were markedly different from Silas Lapham. Businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts neither had any direct contact with the production or construction activities nor discovered a paint mine behind their house. That is why Dimock is wrong to argue for “a direct link” between the text and “social arrangements outside” (80). As Lehan argues, the novel depicts American commerce before the era of the robber barons. […] While Silas chooses poverty over dishonor, Rockefeller was ruining his competitors with deceitful deals and railroad rebates; Drew, Gould, and Fiske were bribing legislators; and Elkins, Widener, and Yerkes were deviously securing streetcar franchises. (65)

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In other words, real businessmen of the period were very experienced with the intricacies and loops of the business world and earned substantially more than the personal labor they invested. The Darstellung of the failure of Lapham’s moral business at the end of the novel decreases the reality effect as well. At first sight, Howells seems to emphasize the reality effect with the disappearance of Lapham’s business: it seems that under the harsh economic conditions of the period it becomes impossible for the Laphams to survive through their paint. However, this is not the case. Among others, Lapham’s business fails because he has become a socially aware and moral person. Also, through the failure, divine justice punishes Lapham’s investments, which Persis calls “gambling” (113), on the stock exchange. Most importantly, his moral awareness of the public good leads him to refuse to play the game. As a “mundane” social reality, business functions to show how “mundane” and unimportant the category actually can be, significantly in an age when people usually considered businesses vitally sensational. Therefore, Lapham’s moral, self-sacrificing decision regarding his business is unavoidably unrealistic, but Howells insists on this ending because this is the only way he can accentuate the importance of morality. A mere mutual exclusivity of “moral integrity and riches” (Fluck, “Wealth” 58), which sounded realistic right after the Civil War, no longer sufficed in the 1890s; in fiction, readers expected to see businessmen who thought like real businessmen, and as such, who would not choose morality over morality at the end. *** In the end, the motif of business in the novel gives hints about the fall of American realism and the subsequent transition to American naturalism as well. This need for a better reality effect was not confined to Lapham’s moral decision in his business affairs but reveals a broader problem with American realism. As a matter of fact, this discrepancy between the represented reality and the perceived reality brought about the idea that American realism, due to the limitations Victorian moralism set, did not present the reader with what was real in general. The enlightened middle classes felt that, by focusing on “the smiling aspects of life,” American realists avoided the “real” reality – the genuine problems and hopelessness of the period. This realization and writers’ simultaneous attempt to respond to this need, in turn, fostered the gradual transition from American realism to American naturalism.

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Howells’s novels in the 1880s and 1890s register an anxiety that the lack of the reality effect brought about. In fact, even Howells’s preceding novel, A Modern Instance, gives hints about the gradual fading of American realism. The novel is the “first novelistic treatment of divorce in America” (Lehan 64), hence high in reality effect due to its representation of what was actually present in – albeit few – social lives of people. The crucial point that heightens the reality effect, however, is that “the couple in A Modern Instance goes through a series of painful experiences, but in contrast to the classical realist model, they do not learn anything from these experiences.” The characters in the novel do not have a self that can be “trained” (Fluck, “Beast” 201, 200) – a reality which fit the way the reader experienced reality in his life at the turn of the century. Howells’s later novels, which are closer to works of American naturalism, reiterate this Darstellung of the human’s inability to learn and change. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells confronts the capitalist Dryfoos, the socialist Lindau and the pro-slavery colonel Woodburn in New York City with strikes and riots. Basil March says, “Does anything from without change us? […] We’re brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays. But I doubt it” (318). Basil March reveals – on behalf of Howells – that the human character is not changeable. From a broader point of view, this impossibility cancels out the classical realist project of orientation altogether. If humans cannot be perfected, as these early naturalist texts reveal, then the realist project of orientation becomes dysfunctional; hence the lack of orientation as an objective in American naturalism. By the same token, if human character is not easy to change, Howells’s character was no different. Howells was aware of the lack of the reality effect that orientation necessarily brought about; however, he was dedicated to emphasizing the “social religion” he learned from his parents. Even though he was aware that he was following an unrealistic ideal as he had recognized the limits of American realism, he still believed in and followed the objective of orienting mankind. The Rise of Silas Lapham, where the motif of business allowed him to execute his ideals, was his last hopeful endeavor. In his subsequent novels, like other realists, Howells slowly gave up the attempts to orient the reader to an idealized world. Gradually, the unreality of the realist “aesthetic of the common” (Kaplan 22) was replaced with “scandalous” intensity in American naturalism – intensity which amounted to the effect of reality at the turn of the century.

4

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In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Sinclair Lewis defines Dreiser as the American writer, who, more than any other man […] has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.

Here Lewis, a contemporary rival who managed to win the Nobel Prize (in contrast to Dreiser) in 19301 succinctly situates Dreiser as a representative American naturalist in both his unique conceptions of realities and the effects he sought to evoke. Firstly, he reveals that Dreiser deconstructs the realist conception of reality, which was marked with “Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility” and replaces these conceptions with an “honest,” that is, a better conception of reality that expresses “life” truthfully. Secondly, Lewis argues that Dreiser’s anti-realist fiction seeks to discover the “passion of life,” and boldly expresses “beauty and terror,” which reveals Dreiser’s attempts to provide intensity through his literary texts. Lewis’s statements on the pragmatic functions of Dreiser’s fiction are not only based on Sister Carrie, to which he refers in his speech; The Financier also demonstrates how Dreiser attempted to offer intense and shocking realities to the reading public of the period through anti-realist narratives. In his novel, Dreiser deconstructs American realists’ conceptions of reality – he exposes the insufficiencies of American realism and externalizes a new and “truer” explanation and representation of reality. In Chapter 10 of The Financier, Dreiser defines Frank as a person who is “influenced to a certain extent by the

1

For a story of Dreiser’s nomination to the Nobel Prize, see Rolf Lundén, “Theodore Dreiser and the Nobel Prize” in American Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 1978, pp. 216-229.

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things with which he surrounded himself” (61). In Chapter 15,2 the narrator extends this definition to “the human” as follows: We think we are individual, separate, above houses and material objects generally; but there is a subtle connection which makes them reflect us quite as much as we reflect them. They lend dignity, subtlety, force, each to the other, and what beauty, or lack of it, there is, is shot back and forth from one to the other as a shuttle in a loom, weaving, weaving. Cut the thread, separate a man from that which is rightfully his own, characteristic of him, and you have a peculiar figure, half success, half failure, much as a spider without its web, which will never be its whole self again until all its dignities and emoluments are restored. (107)

This definition of the human self is representative of the reality conception of classic American naturalism: the human is not only complicit with the material objects he owns but is also constituted by these objects. Tangible and material objects make up the characteristics of an individual, just like the spider web is a fundamental feature of a spider. As such, this naturalist definition deconstructs the realist conception of the human, which views human as “individual, separate, above houses and material objects generally.” In fact, it is a direct attack on American realists who convincingly “peeled” characters away from their belongings in an attempt to orient the reader to an imagined social and moral status, as in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Naturalist narratives such as the inseparability of the human from his possessions lay clearly outside the “civilizatory control” (Fluck, “Beast” 205) and the “middle path” that American realists relied on, and thereby presented means to create scandalous intensity for the reader. It is not only the shocking narratives in themselves that offer intensity to the reader; in fact, Dreiser carefully prepares the effect of intensity in his presentation of these anti-realist narratives. Dreiser initially offers the reader a narrative that the fin-de-siècle reader was already habituated to, only to reveal how dysfunctional and useless such habituated narratives in human life ultimately are. In other words, The Financier starts as a pseudo-realist text, but Dreiser breaks the implied contract between the reader and the realist narrative in the subsequent parts of the novel through Frank’s anti-social triumph in the financial world – a process which distorts the reader’s horizon of expectations and thereby creates intensity. The motif of business is crucial in the novel, for it works as the overarching motif that creates the habituated narrative as well as the ultimate anti-realist narrative through believable cause-and-effect relations which the reader can follow. It is

2

All references to the novel are to the following edition: Theodore Dreiser, The Financier, Penguin, 2008.

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indispensable to explore American naturalism as well as Dreiser’s biography first to have a deeper understanding of why and how Dreiser utilizes the motif of business for his pragmatic ends.

4.1 AMERICAN NATURALISM: AN AESTHETICS OF SCANDAL In May 1897, Frank Norris claimed,“We don’t want literature, we want life” on behalf of American naturalists. This was not a call to abandon literature as such. After all, Norris was highly prolific in his short life, producing several novels, short stories, translations and essays. Rather, Norris called for a more truthful literature that could portray life in a more “real” way in contrast to “fine writing” (“An Opening” 274). He abhorred the aesthetization of reality – a process which portrays reality as more beautiful than it actually is. Other contemporary naturalists shared this objective of a more realistic portrayal of life in literature. Theodore Dreiser says, “the business of the author is to say what he knows to be true.” This is the only way to create “a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down” (“True Art” 180). Like American realists, American naturalists wanted to see genuine reality on paper rather than aesthetized, moral and unrealistic representations of life. Naturalists’ attempts at a “better” reality shaped their selection and Darstellung of motifs profoundly, including the motif of business in The Financier. Despite this similarity in the way both groups defined their objective in literature, a deeper look at the naturalists’ texts reveals that their conception of a realistic literature contrasted starkly with the conceptions of reality that American realists shared. In a frequently-quoted statement from his Nobel Prize speech, the naturalist Sinclair Lewis says: Mr. Howells […] had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called “the jolly coarsenesses of life.” In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys, the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the quaintness of the beggars.

In a quite cynical way, Lewis suggests that the world Howells portrayed was not realistic at all. While in reality, dirt was a part of every farmer’s life, seamen sang

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obscene songs, and workers did not really like their factory’s owner, Howells described these realities much more positively than they actually were. Such a discrepancy between reality and the way it was represented in the realist text was not confined to Howells only; to American naturalists of the turn of the century, American realists as a group failed to grasp the reality of life in their texts. Tired of American realists’ “unrealistic” Darstellung of reality, American naturalists attempted to come up with a better, more genuine and more truthful reality – a better way of diminishing the distinction between life and literature. As in the 1860s and 1870s, in the 1890s, Americans still needed knowledge about the modern “Godless world,” but they needed to know more about the part that American realists refused to represent. In an attempt to respond to this need, American naturalists provided such social knowledge by externalizing realities that American realists ignored. Furthermore, American naturalists aligned their Darstellung of reality with the new ways enlightened middle classes experienced reality. In addition to social knowledge, Americans needed knowledge about their own individuality – their self. American naturalists responded to this need for individuality by seeking to evoke intensity through different texts. From an epistemological point of view, American naturalism can be defined as an attempt to reconcile the traditional need for social knowledge of the neglected with the need for more individual knowledge – knowledge about the self. Previous research on American naturalism has a similar genealogy to the scholarship on American realism. Before the poststructural turn, a mimetic understanding of the movement dominated the scholarship. Orthodox scholars viewed naturalists often as “men of science” (Zola, qtd. in Parrington 323), describing the world objectively and scientifically. Accordingly, scholars such as Vernon Louis Parrington, Donald Pizer and Alfred Kazin focused on how naturalists reflect the contemporary scientific ideas such as Social Darwinism in their literary works. To them, American naturalists portrayed the external reality with the tools of science, but there was a negative twist to this descriptive writing practice: American naturalism described reality in a more pessimistic, deterministic and amoral way than the works of American realism. Parrington sees naturalism as embodying “a philosophy that sets man in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that world” (325), for instance. Seeing the movement as a systemic and scientific endeavor, these scholars glossed over several recurring facets such as the dominance of the “unknowable” and “inexplicable” forces in the naturalist text. Clearly, the inexpressible and incommunicable realities did not fit the orthodox definition of naturalism as literature of science. Apparently, the scientific attempts were only a part of American naturalism; the movement includes a concoction of

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methods, techniques and strategies that served specific pragmatic effects such as intensity. With the poststructural turn during the 1980s, writers came up with alternative, less mimetic accounts. These anti-referential attempts were emancipating. For instance, unorthodox readings by Walter Benn Michaels, June Howard and Mark Seltzer enriched the scholarship immensely from a variety of novel perspectives. Focusing on “naturalization, surveillance, management, or containment” (Den Tandt, “American Literary Naturalism” 104), neo-Marxist and new Historicist critics started to explore naturalism’s complicity with the hegemonic structures, rendering the movement more conservative than the way in which first-wave scholars perceived it.3 However, although they were less mimetic than the firstwave critics, the poststructuralists still insisted on a deeper, camouflaged referentiality. Seeing American naturalism (and literature in general) as a Hegelian-conceptual endeavor, this newer group of scholars often focused on dominant ideologies and values such as the gold standard or bimetallism as disguised but contained by the works of the period. Accordingly, they draw attention to the parallels between the ideas of novelists and (among others) economists such as Marx and Veblen, glossing over the literary residue in texts, as if literary works consisted purely of conceptual material. Furthermore, like the orthodox scholars, unorthodox scholars have not really offered a satisfying distinction between realism and naturalism. In a conceptual world, it is impossible to come up with genre definitions, because genre definitions belong to the part where literary residue (such as pragmatic functions of a movement) is taken seriously. That is what I do in this chapter: I argue that what separates American naturalism from other movements is naturalists’ attempts at evoking the effect of intensity, which is done through the use of specific motifs such as business. The Rise of American Literary Naturalism As of the 1890s, literary works of American realists had lost the reality effect due primarily to their restricted conceptions of reality as well as the limited ways they conveyed these conceptions. While the post-Civil War era was marked by swift industrialization, urbanization and “incorporation” of America along with profound dislocation and disappointment for the individual as explored in Chapter 1, American realists’ Darstellung of reality stayed resolutely positive. They were

3

For more information, see Christophe Den Tandt, “American Literary Naturalism” in A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914, edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 96-118.

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well aware of these social developments; however, having grown up in the relatively peaceful antebellum period, they attempted to offer social and moral orientation as a way of “saving” American society from this dislocation. This pragmatic approach required realist writers to limit their Darstellung carefully to a specific set of realities – “civilizing,” positive, “smiling” realities in the “middle path” – and forced them to leave out representations that did not serve their pragmatic objectives. Yet, as of the 1890s, this “optimistic assumption […] turned into a problem for American realism, for it was undermined by social and political developments of the Gilded Age” (Fluck, “Beast” 200). The Darstellung of a businessman who chooses morality over money no longer sounded real; there was a discrepancy between the realist text and the reality readers experienced. From a broader perspective, while attempting to replace the grand narratives of the Bible and American romance by shedding light on ignored realities, American realists had created another grand narrative. This narrative was more specific and less larger-than-life than the Biblical and Romantic narratives; however, it still failed to shed light on each and every reality. The Bible was extreme in taking reality for granted, with Abraham’s journey as the basic reality. Romance shed more light on the Darstellung, yet it was still a shaded form of representation. While American realists externalized in an unprecedented way, they still could not externalize uncomfortable realities due to their concerted objective of orientation. Narratives of American realists sounded like the Homeric narrative that externalized Odysseus’ scar as of the 1860s. As of the 1890s however, they sounded like the Biblical narrative: staged realities were too limited for people to believe in their real-ness. The discrepancy between the reality experienced in social life and the reality effect of realist works did not only stem from realists’ limited conceptions of the realities they represented; there was also a discrepancy between the ways realists transmitted these realities and the ways readers perceived them. While American realists represented general, shared and common realities, Americans needed realities that addressed them individually. The social developments in the post-Civil War era not only created a need for reality as explored in Chapter 1, they also spurred a rising awareness among Americans of their individuality, particularity and distinctiveness from others (along with the rising perspectivalism in philosophical debates).4 On the one hand, social, cultural and economic changes especially towards the 1890s emasculated feelings of belonging to different ethnic,

4

For a more detailed discussion of the rising perspectivalism in philosophy, science and arts, see Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative, Yale UP, 1999.

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religious or social groups. The move from smaller communities to cities and immigration of minority groups such as Jews and Catholics, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe respectively, destroyed the homogeneous social fabric in the US. Living in a highly multi-cultural society, Americans realized that they often had a different ethnic heritage, lifestyle, religion or race from others. While before the Civil War, America was quite homogeneous, which made membership in a group self-evident, the social changes in the 1890s brought heterogeneity and secularization to American society and showed Americans that feelings of belonging were rather artificial and constructed. It is possible to observe that Americans still felt that they were part of a social whole and needed a sweet and relaxing orientation towards it in the 1860s. However, as of the 1890s, a majority of enlightened Americans felt their distinction from the groups they “seemed” to belong to such as family, nation, religion or a nebulous divine plan. On the other hand, the dominant social and economic conditions in urban areas, while robbing Americans of feelings of belonging, paradoxically acted to deny the individuality of the reader at the same time – a process which fostered the need for individuality even more. From a broader perspective, the antebellum lifestyle – e.g. chopping wood, milking the cow and cultivating the fields – had a natural intensity in them, as Howells experienced during his childhood. When this disappeared from the American psyche in the late nineteenth century, Americans lost the intensity they naturally experienced. Also, the new national market economy and the dependence on the market for survival forced the individual to the social and economic periphery. Accordingly, as Trachtenberg argues, “viewing and looking at representations, words and images, city people found themselves addressed more often as passive spectators than as active participants, consumers of images and sensations produced by others” (122). The impossibility of taking part in society easily is the reason why “the thrust toward the spectacular had taken over mass entertainment” (Harris 291) in fin-de-siècle America, because the spectacular often offered individuality over the bland options mass entertainment provided. The changing rules of economy and society forced Americans into a society of growing interdependence and uniformity, which contributed to their need for experiencing individuality as well. In a gradually growing national market economy, not only communities as explored in Chapter 1, but also individuals needed to collaborate with other unknown human beings and systems to survive in an urban setting. As Edward A. Ross illustrates, “Under our present manner of living, how many of my vital interests I must intrust [sic] to others! Nowadays the water main is my well, the trolley car my carriage, the banker’s safe my old stocking, the policeman’s billy my fist” (3). Gone were the days of self-reliance; Americans

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had to collaborate with others to survive. This process of collaboration brought about the need for social adaptation. Collaboration with others led enlightened Americans to leave their self-reliance – their inner-orientation – and follow more other-oriented behavior, more interested in impressing others than having integrity and happiness. Obviously, in a setting of social interdependence, integrity was not attractive; Americans had to fit in and at times pretend in order to be successful in their social lives. This inevitable other-orientation threatened urban Americans’ personal integrity and individuality. The impossibility of selfhood in the social and economic world did not automatically obviate the need for it; on the contrary, it fostered the need among enlightened Americans for the recognition of their individuality. Accordingly, reality for the reader was no longer only social reality but also individual reality; others had other, different individual realities. The need for individuality, particularity and a sense of a heightened selfhood was not articulated easily; after all, the absence of a formerly existing mental state is rarely palpable. It surfaced mostly in the form of a need for intensity: in such a social and mental environment, Americans attempted to experience the world as intensely as possible in order to feel their individuality, stabilize their lost self and survive psychologically. As Lears argues, “the educated bourgeoisie […] yearned to smash the glass and breathe freely – to experience ‘real life’ in all its intensity” (No Place of Grace 5). Feeling intensity became a way of becoming an individual; the intense reality became the individual reality in the period. At the same time however, this mental dislocation eliminated the venues in which Americans could practice their individuality: traditional opportunities for experiencing intensity were decreasing. The frontier was a great psychological experiment for Americans, as a location where intense experience could occur. With the loss of American frontier around 1890, however, one of the vital sources for intense experience disappeared from the American psyche. Until then, the frontier was a vast, untamable wilderness which provided a rich source of intense experience not only for the people moving westward but also for the American psyche in general, that is, for the urban dwellers who depended on the narratives of the frontier in different media. The closure of this “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner 3) eliminated the possibility of a space where intensity was possible for Americans in and outside of urban areas. As Trachtenberg says, If the frontier had provided the defining experience for Americans, how would the values learned in that experience now fare in the new world of cities – a new world brought into being as if blindly by the same forces which had proffered the apparent gift of land? Would the America fashioned on the frontier survive the caldrons of the city? (15)

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Americans needed new frontiers where they could experience the world intensely in an urban environment. Many Americans, men as well as women, felt this longing for intense experience and Theodore Dreiser was no exception. During his college years, Dreiser attributed his mediocrity in his studies to his need for intensity: to an “immense and intense yearning which gave [him] little mental peace” (Dawn 388). As an adolescent, he realized that there were two fields where he could find intense experience: sex and money. In terms of sex, he was “looking for gratification in that field anywhere I could find it” (539). Money was equally enticing: “loose silver and bills, the mere handling of which was an immense satisfaction, and even delight” (582). Dreiser’s desire for intensity, as he reflected in his autobiography, was common in the period, though people chose different paths to satisfy their yearning. Against this process of social “incorporation” and mental uniformity, fin-de-siècle Americans needed not only social knowledge, but knowledge of themselves: venues where they learn about, experience and assert their individualities. The enlightened middle classes took part in a variety of activities in their leisure time, many of which emphasized selfhood through mental or physical strenuousness. In contrast to the lost bucolic world of the past, where intensity was invisibly available, Americans sought intense experience in various venues in the cities in order to feel their individuality with their own minds and hearts, to feel that they were at the center rather than at the periphery. Dreiser’s tone in praising Chicago is revealing: “The spirit of Chicago flowed into me and made me ecstatic. Its personality was different from anything I had ever known; it was a compound of hope and joy in existence, intense hope and intense joy” (Dawn 159). At first sight, this might seem paradoxical, as it was the middle-class lifestyle in the cities that robbed Americans of individuality and intensity. A deeper look reveals the nuance, though: it was the transition from an agrarian society to urban society and the resulting middle-class lifestyle in the cities that created the need for intensity. Outside of middle-class parlors in metropolitan areas, the lower-class and upperclass ways of life included enough intensity. Especially the slums, with their immigrants, prostitution, and high rates of crime, were the center of intensity for Americans. More than a paradox, cities had various sides; some reduced the intensity, while others harbored opportunities to reduce the lack of intensity. For others, the military and wars were the solution. This explains the success of the Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, during the 1890s – three decades after the war ended. Crane had not witnessed the war – he was not even born then – however, his novel was full of intense descriptions that

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spoke to the needs of the reading public. In a similar vein, journalists and the public were interested in Spanish-American War not only due to its importance for the country but also for the intense experience it offered. Some journalist-writers like Crane went as far as Greece to report the war and get a sense of the intense atmosphere during battles. Others devoted themselves to mysticism as a way of reaching intense experience. While some people such as William James were interested in Christian mysticism, others turned to oriental mysticism and Eastern religions. As Elisabeth Stuart Phelps says, “It [was] au fait to be a Buddhist” at the time (qtd. in Lears, No Place of Grace 175). The growing American power in the period and accordingly the growing social, cultural and missionary activities in the Orient brought intense experience one step closer through news and reports, though these never fully satisfied people’s need for intensity. In fact, the demand for intense experience was one of the main reasons for the crisis of masculinity that reached its peak in late nineteenth-century America. At the turn of the century, especially American men living in urban centers (like Dreiser) felt increasingly domesticated due to the lack of intense experience, which led to fears of femininity. Accordingly, the “era of ‘passionate manhood’ […] called for aggression, ambition, and brutality – a celebration of the primitive to combat the various ‘feminizing’ forces of an increasingly technical and bureaucratic society” (Dudley 24). Again, intensity was a way of overcoming fears of femininity among men. Theodore Roosevelt is a symbolic example of the endangered manhood. He said, “We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done” (257). Through strenuous activity, Roosevelt attempted to compensate for the lack of intense experience that put manhood in danger. Not surprisingly, martial arts like boxing and spectator sports gained a large audience in fin-de-siècle America. As Dudley argues, the legalization of several hard sports in the period represented the opening of a new frontier for a public whose feelings of reality were suffering from “overcivilization” through feminine virtue.5 In fact, the need for intense experience had not only made men feel like sissies, but it also paved the way for curricular change: “The concept of ‘physical education’ swept through such colleges as Harvard, Yale, and the University of

5

For an interesting discussion of “overcivilization” with regard to American literary naturalism, see Christophe den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism, U of Illinois P, 1998, pp. 189-194; and “Amazons and Androgynes: Overcivilization and the Redefinition of Gender Roles at the Turn of the Century” in American Literary History, vol. 8, no. 4, 1996, pp. 639-64 by the same author.

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Chicago” (Dudley 27). Apparently, college life had become a venue for male students to learn and practice the manhood that the lack of intense experience put in danger. The old college ideal of developing a character included an explicit emphasis on methods and activities that allowed American men to experiment with intensity.6 Interestingly, literature was another new frontier; it had the potential to offer intense experience, though only few people were aware of this possibility at the time. Just as in the 1870s and 1880s, it was one of the epistemological tools that American writers and readers utilized to experience individuality at the turn of the century. The increasing number of libraries and magazines made literature even more accessible than it had been a few decades earlier. Finding individual realities through literature is a highly problematic and paradoxical endeavor, as the literary text is one for all, while the expectation at the time was that it addressed each individual distinctively. However, what was at stake in this need for individuality was, apparently, less the preconceptions of reality as in American realism than literature’s potential to feed the reader’s need for individuality through intensity. In an interesting turn of events, the indirect equation between individuality and intensity allowed both writers and readers to conceive of literature as a tool that could offer intensity. However, as of the 1880s and early 1890s, the time was not yet ripe for aesthetics of intensity: when readers and early naturalists looked at the dominant literary mode, realism, they were rather disappointed. In retrospect – that is, from the naturalists’ perspective – American realism was far from offering the individual or intense reality to the reader, for the communicative attempt to provide orientation restricted realist Darstellung to bland and un-intense realities. The representation of general realities of a positive “middle-path” and the conversational structure and the stable spectatorial distance, where the narrator had a reliable and broad view of what is narrated, eliminated the possibility of evoking intensity. In Howells’s novels, moral and social orientation are there to influence everybody, regardless of the fact that people might see the world differently and individually. This stable distance was antithetical to individual or intense reality: the reader could not experience intensity in events and characters in American realism. Talking with readers to orient them required writers to establish a less intense plot, where the reader could experience the textual realities in a safe environment and produce conclusions and knowledge about his own life. Accordingly, as of the

6

For more information regarding the relationship between the American college and manhood, see Daniel A. Clark, Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, U of Wisconsin P, 2010.

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1890s, the attempts to orient the reader to this broad and shared world sounded like preaching rather than telling the truth. Crane’s statement that “preaching is fatal to art in literature” is thus a criticism of the way realists attempted to reform American society through general realities in the nineteenth century. As Norris summarizes the problem of realism on behalf of American naturalists, “Realism stultifie[d] itself” (“A Plea for Romantic Fiction” 215): it lacked intensity, hence reality. In the “unreality” of American realism, American naturalism emerged as the “real” literature. Replacing the realist attempts “to civilize” the reading public – and the complete package of orientation – American naturalism attempted to offer intensity. Both contemporary and modern critics agree that American naturalism was more “real” than its predecessor was because it could provide intensity. For the American individual of the period, as McGurl writes on Maggie, “It is as though the intense gravitational pull of these bodies [of the lower class], as referents, can draw [Crane’s] rhetorical ‘art’ closer to the surface of ‘nature’ and ‘truth’” (93). In other words, the intense experience that Crane’s lower-class characters offer the reader constitutes the reality – the reality effect. This argument indeed represents a broader pattern in naturalist fiction; in American naturalism intensity is reality. As Julia A. Walker says of American drama of the period, “what makes naturalism different is the intense pressure it puts on things within the stage milieu” (268) – different primarily from former narratives, that is. In the same way, considering James’s A London Life (1888), which like A Modern Instance deals with a deteriorating marriage, an anonymous reviewer wrote that it “tends to give an air of intense reality” (qtd. in Gard 192). By combining intensity and reality, American naturalists aligned their representations of reality with the understanding of reality which was tied to intensity among the enlightened middle classes. In fact, even the naming of the movements confirms the idea that naturalism was perceived as a more “real” literature on the side of American naturalists. Once it was understood that realism was paradoxically not real but constructed and invented, “the natural” replaced the invented realities of American realism. According to its practitioners, in the new literature, there was less mediation, less construction and less invention. Instead, it sounded more like a reality that was found in its original context such as a tree in a forest than a tree planted by the municipality. Therefore, naturalism could also be named the “real Realism,” and in fact, Norris said of his contemporaries’ fiction: “this is the real Realism” (“Zola” 1106). A new and independent name on its own clearly sounded more forceful and Europeans had invented the word naturalism for a fiction that sounded similar to American naturalists’.

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More than anything, literature was a safe provider of intensity in contrast to martial arts, military action or violence, although only few writers were aware of it yet. Dreiser was one of them: he captured this appeal of literature in his Dawn, as he says, A paper rock backed by painted if torn canvas, and presto, a mountain view of unparalleled grandeur! A wooden bench, a tin basin, and a wooden door near at hand – behold, you were before a woodland cottage of great beauty and most gloriously placed! Three bearded and black-garbed men huddled about a small red glass and gas-jet stage fire, and behold the entire and almost illimitable bandit-infested West of 1849! In short, a thunder-storm upon the stage was almost more real than about our own door. And besides, and just then (why?), there was no beauty equal to that of a stage beauty. (362)

In other words, different forms of art, especially literature, could capture the intensity of images in such a safe way that it made him think that a thunderstorm on the stage was more real than a thunderstorm at his own door. The safety of the literary form allowed him to experience the brutality and gruesomeness of these events in the first place; for in real life, no one really can easily observe the intensity of a thunderstorm. Dreiser’s emphasis on the ability of literature to frame the intense experience and offer it to the reader in a safe way represents a broader trend in the period. Considering the lack of economic, social and psychological web of safety for the individual, literature could be liberating: it opened the door to capturing intense experience that was otherwise not safely observable to readers in general. As a result, naturalism gradually replaced realism as a better form of representing reality and reconciling life and literature through the intensity it provided in the 1890s through 1910s. For American naturalists, offering intense realities through literature equated to offering their own realities in many ways. For one thing, intensity was a natural part of naturalists’ personal and professional life. Coming mostly from lower-class backgrounds, naturalists like Theodore Dreiser knew what it meant to lack money. As his biography reveals, he worked hard to survive and then to move up in the social ladder. Intense experience was a part and parcel of earning a living for Dreiser: he held several awkward jobs, which condemned him to long hours of hard labor. This immersion in intensity continued in his career as a journalist and later novelist as well. By the 1900s, the patronage system had been to a great extent replaced with a competitive literary market, which functioned like markets in other sectors. The rising dominance of the supply and demand nexus required demanding work from naturalists, who easily translated their experience into stories of intensity. This naturalist conception of writing as a serious profession rather than

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a calling assured that naturalists were in the same ring as their readers – in the ring where both groups needed intensity – thus making their literature marketable to a reading public begging for intensity. In fact, this strong link between intense experience and income represents a broader pattern; it distinguished naturalists from realists in the way they imagined their profession. For most American realists, literary fame and money were mutually exclusive. Howells said, for example, “there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue” (“The Man of Letters” 1). Realists maintained that they were writing “truthful” literature and they perceived money as a threat that might deter them from their ideals. After all, they felt that they were almost on a “holy mission.” American naturalists repudiated this idealism in a very outspoken way, focusing instead on connecting the two. Like Dreiser, naturalists imagined themselves as writers who deserved money in return for their labor. Having overthrown the idea of a “holy mission,” which condemned realists to modesty, naturalists longed more than earning a living; they were overtly after immense popularity. 7 This longing brought even more intensity into their lives and eventually into their fiction. Naturalists’ repudiation of the idealist-moralist perception of authorship was one of the major symptoms of change in their literature; it signaled that they were free from metaphysical constraints which hindered the new intense reality effect from entering into the realist text. Significantly, American naturalists’ discontent with the reality effect that American realists came up with laid the groundwork for the naturalist conceptions of reality as well as the ways naturalists sought to transmit these conceptions to the reader. As American naturalists considered the realists’ project of orientation a socially ill-defined objective – and thus obsolete – they left several features of American realism, including the Darstellung of conversation. Considering the fact that conversation between the reader and the text was a means of orienting the reader in realism, it is understandable that naturalists dropped “the dialogic goals of the realist novel.” Accordingly, naturalists avoided characters whose purpose was to persuade the reader through conversation: “The ‘primitive’ characters of naturalism do not possess sufficient self-awareness to function as conversational equals” (Fluck, “Beast” 215). The fact that in A Modern Instance, the characters

7

As Lichtenstein argues, starting roughly in the 1890s, a new generation of writers, such as Jack London and Frank Norris, abandoned the distinction between fame and money in their view of the profession (48). For further information, see Nelson Lichtenstein, “Authorial Professionalism and The Literary Marketplace, 1885-1900” in American Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1978, pp. 35-53.

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do not learn from their mistakes and go on making the same mistakes is a pioneering example of this “uncivilized” American naturalism, because these mistakes and the protagonists’ eventual divorce do not enlighten or orient readers through conversation. Instead, what this novel conveys to the reader at the end of the novel is the intense disappointment and disorientation. The Anti-Realist Aesthetics of American Naturalism American naturalists’ discontent with American realism did not only lead them to leave realists’ techniques and methods but also establish a literary aesthetics based on a contrary view of American realism. Literary practitioners of reception theory assume an implied contract between the writer and reader in the production process of the literary text. “Every work encodes within itself what Iser calls an ‘implied reader,’ intimates in its every gesture the kind of ‘addressee’ it anticipates” (Eagleton 73). In order to create the feeling of intensity, American naturalists attempted to break this implied contract between their text and the reader that former literary movements – mainly realism – had established. In an attempt to come up with an intense and thus “better” reality, American naturalists first referred to the reality conceptions of former movements such as American realism, only to deconstruct these conceptions in the course of their texts by subverting, manipulating and abusing the effects realists created and habituated the public to. This is the reason why American naturalism was called “a proto-deconstructionist writing practice” (Den Tandt, “Refashioning” 415). In other words, naturalism is negative aesthetics: naturalists based their conceptions of reality strictly on a negative view of realism to execute the communicative functions they aimed at – namely, intensity. In an attempt to offer the reader a more “real” reality than the way writers such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James provided, naturalist writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Stephen Crane referred to the realist conceptions of reality and often offered alternative realities that American realists ignored. In contrast to American realists, who defined reality as “a sphere that can be rationally studied and causally explained,” American naturalists “redefine[d] [reality] as a sphere that escapes civilizatory (and therefore also rational) control” (Fluck, “Beast” 203). In an attempt to come up with a “better” reality, American naturalists obliged themselves to construct their texts, with a 180-degree turn, in ways that refused to civilize, enlighten, and morally orient the reader. Put differently, the text had to be anti-civilizing and anti-rational in American naturalism in order to subvert the long-held beliefs of the reading public with sensational elements that had hitherto been ignored.

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Interestingly, naturalists’ attempts to escape the middle course or to look beyond “civilizing” truths made them highly experimental: while an author employed the theme of Social Darwinism in one novel, in another, he would attribute the background of events to economic factors. At first sight, endlessly different representations seemed to be inconsistencies in their thoughts, as many scholars have noted. This is one of the primary reasons why Alfred Kazin thinks, “With us naturalism was not so much a school as a climate of feeling” (“American Naturalism” 50). A recent scholar reiterates a similar idea, saying, “Naturalism in the United States had no unifying school, no group of disciples, and no formal manifesto” (Campbell 499). In fact, however, naturalists were decidedly consistent in their attempt to come up with alternative anti-realist narratives. Most orthodox and some poststructuralist scholars such as Walter Benn Michaels ignore this fact – the world in the naturalist text is inexplicable unlike in realism, which is why these scholars emphasize naturalists’ obsession with science. American naturalists did not incorporate these secular ideas in order to mime the reality or to pretend that they were sociologists, but to benefit from the new reality effect these alternative narratives provided. From a broader perspective, in order to deconstruct American realism, among others, naturalists incorporated methods and techniques that writers of American romance – American realists’ main enemy – utilized, but in a way that served the pragmatic functions of naturalism. This collaboration made Frank Norris assert that “Naturalism is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism” (“Zola” 1106).8 American naturalists primarily incorporated melodrama – probably the central method of romance – into their texts. Melodrama is a highly complex technique with several features,9 but most importantly, it is antithetical to realism in that it emphasizes the moral conflict, the plot against characterization, sensational elements, and simplistic struggle between good and evil, highlighting unbalanced vivid sentiments and sacrifices. In contrast to the realist aim to externalize complexities on the way to social and moral orientation, in melodrama, “character, conduct, ethics, and situations are perfectly simple, and one always knows that the

8

Naturalism’s partial affiliation with romance has been noted by several scholars as well. As early as 1956, Charles Child Walcutt points out naturalism’s position between realism and transcendentalism in his American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream, Minnesota UP, 1956.

9

For a detailed analysis of melodrama, see Lori Merish, “Melodrama and American Fiction” in A Companion to American Fiction 1780 – 1865, edited by Shirley Samuels, Blackwell, 2004, pp. 191-203; and Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess, Yale UP, 1976.

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end will be, although the means may be temporarily obscure” (Booth 14). American naturalists’ conceptions of reality and the highly particularized and focused Darstellung of life, as discussed above, establish a resemblance between naturalism and the melodrama. Different from the way writers of romance incorporated melodrama, however, American naturalists utilized melodramatic tools without any moral core: while Romanticists attempted to provide a moral outlook in the way the Elohist narrator provided, naturalists used the sensationalism and unbalanced representations of melodrama eventually to confront the reader with “the scandalous” and provide intensity to the readers of the turn of the century. Specifically, in their attempts to deconstruct the grand narrative of American realism, American naturalists displaced the Victorian philosophical idealism – the set of values that American realists attempted to elevate to default among Americans. American naturalists revealed the failure of Victorian philosophical idealism by problematizing values and origins of things in general – entities that American realists took for granted. In fact, realists were aware of the variability of values; however, they were not happy with the “deterioration” or de-standardization of values, which they thought should encompass everyone. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells acknowledges the declining reliability and certainty of moral values by having the painter Bromfield Corey – on behalf of himself – say, “some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking” (83); of getting smaller and less important. As a representative realist, though, Howells eventually tried to halt this deterioration through the moral emphasis that Lapham’s ultimate rise demonstrates. In this way, Howells reflects the position that although the values are indeed not standard and valid for all, especially in the post-Civil War period, it would be a good idea to keep the moral values high – a naïve attempt from a naturalist perspective. In an attempt to deconstruct this blend of American realism and the moral idealism their works embodied, American naturalists emphasized the uncertainty, irregularity and variability of values. Accordingly, they attempted to represent new values that contrasted with former ways of conceiving the “standard” value system in their works. In “Novelists of the Future,” Norris asks his fellow naturalists: “Have you found the value of x in your equation?” In other words, the displacement of American philosophical idealism led American naturalists to seek “the value of x” – new value systems that deliberately and pointedly negated realists’ Victorian moralism (205). In The Financier, for instance, Dreiser takes the gold standard as a system which “all values were calculated according to” (8). Crucially, this financial value system, as a highly secular standard, denies the religious and moral aspects of Victorian ide-

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alism where values are calculated according to the definition Victorian philosophical idealism set. Dreiser does not feel the obligation to better society through his fiction; he just provides another account – secular, experimental and anti-moralist. From a naturalist perspective, the fact that there is no constant and standard value reveals that the origin and source of things – the cosmos and phenomena – in general are not static, as American realists represented, but variable as well. Accordingly, American naturalists attempted to problematize the way Victorian moralism attempted to contain the origin of the phenomena and offered alternatives. They benefited from science and scientific discourse in offering alternative narratives for the origin of the cosmos, increasing the relevance of naturalist narratives for a reading public thirsty for secular realities. The ideas from the fields of psychology, social Darwinism, Marxism and scientific management not only provided alternatives to the dominant traditional narratives but they also explained the origins of events in a way that these previous narratives ignored. Psychology, for instance, gave an idea about how thought and feeling originated in mind. Marxism offered a very clear and secular understanding of the origin of capital. One important tenet of origin is production. As Seltzer confirms, “production, both mechanical and biological […] troubles the naturalist novel at every point” (25). For instance, Norris’s The Epic of the Wheat explores the question of agricultural production – the sources of grain as well as the source of labor and capital. In his novel, Norris benefits from Marxism to come up with a world functioning in ways realists could not and would not explain in an attempt to stay within Victorian moralism. As Ostwalt summarizes, the late nineteenth-century American literature saw the “redefinition of American natural and social space from a sacred and utopian garden to a secular and impersonal nation” (117) by naturalist writers. Where alternative origins to Victorian moralism did not suffice, American naturalists often emphasized “forces” in the origin of events – the unknown or inexplicable “forces.” In Sister Carrie, Dreiser talks about “mesmeric operations of super-intelligible forces” (Pennsylvania Edition 78). In The Financier, Dreiser connects the happenings to “inexplicable inclinations” and “some inexplicable trick of chemistry” (60, 465). In The Octopus, Norris talks of “natural forces” that shape the events. Åhnebrink registers the naturalist attempt to offer alternative origins and workings of the world as well by saying, “To a naturalist man can be explained in terms of the forces, usually heredity and environment, which operate upon him” (vii). The incorporation of “forces” gave naturalists greater freedom in constructing their plots. For one thing, these forces were not traceable unlike the narratives of science where cause-and-effect relations are clearly stated. By the same token, these forces allowed American naturalists to create narratives of loss of control and disorientation. Characters could end up anywhere the writer wanted

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to without much trouble and externalization and this came handy in evoking the ultimate intensity effect, as accounting for every event in the narrative as Homer accounts for Odysseus’ scar is a difficult endeavor. Moreover, novelists often represented the Darstellung of determinism, forces determining characters’ lives. In fact, determinism is considered one central tenet of American naturalism. To Becker, naturalism is “no more than an emphatic and explicit philosophical position taken by some realists. […] [It is] a pessimistic, materialistic determinism” (35). I disagree with Becker. Naturalists represented determinism not because they thought that life functions in such a deterministic way but because it was a useful tool in creating the effect of intensity. In an attempt to overcome the moralist veil of American realism, American naturalists also represented realities that escaped the “middle path” that was central to American realism in a way reminiscent of American romance. Confirming Dreiser’s discontent with realism, in contrast to realist characters who “live across the street from us, [that] are ‘on our block,’” naturalism prefers “a world of big things; the enormous, the formidable, the terrible, is what counts; no teacup tragedies here” (“Zola” 1106, 1107). In other words, American naturalism negates the realist “middle path” by depicting realities that the Victorian moralism induced realists to suppress. In fact, naturalists emphasized that even the middle path was broader than realists thought of it. In another statement, Norris is clearer on the naturalist escape from the middle path: Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death. (1107)

His formula is a clear call to escape the middle path: “Terrible things must happen,” because this is the way to overcome the “even-handed” and thus unrealistic middle path of American realism. Writers’ programmatic escape from the “middle path” made what the period considered the “immoral” an important factor that shaped the motifs in American naturalism. Dreiser says, “The extent of all reality is the realm of the author’s pen, and a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down, is both moral and artistic whether it offends the conventions or not” (“True Art” 180; emphasis added). Dreiser’s statement demonstrates the naturalist conception of reality: real morality requires portraying the realities without a moralist filter. From a realist perspective, Dreiser’s statement was a call to focus on “immoral” representations as they were perceived in the period, knowing that moralists would say, “Immoral!

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Immoral!” However, he contends that “Under this cloak hide the vices of wealth as well as the vast unspoken blackness of poverty and ignorance; and between them must walk the little novelist” (180). In other words, in an attempt to deconstruct the moralist filter of American realism, American naturalists employed another filter which avoided the realist reality but allowed the realities that did not pass through the realist filter: the realities that were on the periphery of the realist middle path. Hamlin Garland ably summarizes naturalists’ anti-moralist stance by saying, “a claque for the pornographic has developed. It is becoming fashionable to sneer at marriage, chastity, home life, and the church, and to bring into the dining room the phases and jokes of the roadhouse” (532-3). In a similar vein, in order to escape the middle path and portray social and mental peripheries, American naturalists presented the reader with representations of reality that were not easy to find in every-day life. As Fluck confirms, “In its attempt to identify and represent that which has been excluded by the Victorian idea of civilization, the naturalist text brackets the normality of everyday life” (“Beast” 205). In other words, if reality in American realism is located in the common, “middle path,” American naturalists ignored the “quiet, uneventful round of every-day life” (“Zola” 1107) and represented realities that were uncommon and unusual according to the values and lifestyles of the period, such as divorce in A Modern Instance. Norris confirms this objective to bracket the everyday reality by asking the naturalist writer, “Have you solved the parenthesis of your problem?” (“Novelists of the Future” 205). Clearly, American naturalists knew that the realities they were interested in (“terrible things”) were not necessarily easy to come across; they were in the parentheses, as Norris says. However, these authors still insisted on portraying them in order to demonstrate that there were other, neglected realities, which increased the intensity (and thus reality) effect of their texts. This attempt to achieve a better reality effect is the reason why there are often “unleashed passions,” “blood,” and “sudden death” in American naturalism (Norris, “Zola” 1107). The objective to “bracket[] the normality of daily life” (Fluck, “Beast” 205) led naturalists not only to choose rare events arousing feelings that escaped the middle path but also to locate their stories in places that allowed them to deconstruct the realist conception of knowledge. In Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), upon coming to the city, Wilbur says, “We’ve come back to the world of little things. […] But we’ll pull out of here in the morning and get back to the places where things are real” (261). His next stop is the ocean. In other words, in order to grasp the “real” reality, Wilbur needs to leave the everyday life of the city and go to unusual areas, where reality supposedly lies. In a similar vein, Norris’s The Epic of the Wheat explores the conflict between the farmers and the railroad

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company not in the urban middle-class centers, but in the fields – a location where the enlightened groups have already lost their connection as a result of urbanization. Likewise, Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire focuses closely on the financial world of Philadelphia, a new location outside “the middle course” which antecedent narratives had exhausted. Truth for Crane “reside[s] not in the middle-class parlor […] but among the bodies struggling for survival in the slums” (McGurl 92-93). In short, American naturalists sought a change of venue to escape the moralism of American realism in order to provide a “deeper” reality, which equaled a “better” reality effect. Less often than offering new, alternative, rare locations, naturalists also attempted to go beyond the surface of the phenomena in their representations. Norris was convinced that the realist text “notes only the surface of things.” To realists, truth “is not even skin deep, but only a geometrical plane, without dimensions and depth, a mere outside” (“Salt and Sincerity” 215). Almost seamlessly contrasting realists, he called naturalists to look at “the deeper pools below the cataract” (“Salt and Sincerity” 276) and “beneath the clothes of an epoch and [get] the heart […] and the spirit of it” (“The True Reward” 17). To offer a better reality than realists required naturalists to represent the “flesh and blood underneath” (16-7). Only in these deeper, neglected ways could the new naturalist conception of reality deconstruct the realist conception of reality and eventually offer a new form of reality effect that Americans needed in the period. Significantly, even though naturalists’ Darstellung of reality was based strictly on a negative view of American realists’ representations of reality, naturalists utilized the Homeric methods of externalization and particularization as realists did. They externalized and particularized anti-realist realities outside of the middle path, but they still externalized and particularized. In fact, naturalists adopted the Homeric mode of narration much more vigorously than American realists. They devoted more energy and effort to thick description or what Zola calls, “continuous description” (qtd. in Pavis 323); therefore, works of American naturalism tend to be longer than works of American realism. The first edition of The Financier was nearly 780 pages and that was much shorter than what Dreiser initially wanted to publish. On the publisher’s insistence, Dreiser had to delete several parts of the novel to reach a more readable version of the text. The thick description of antirealist conceptions of reality was one of the major ways of evoking the feeling of shock and intensity later in the novel, but it also helped naturalists construct other methods and techniques in their attempt to create intensity.

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Naturalist Techniques of Creating Intensity Naturalists not only came up with a specific and limited shape of reality conceptions but they also incorporated several narrative methods and techniques in an attempt to evoke intensity. Obviously, the mere Darstellung of “blood” from the beginning to the end of the novel would not help the naturalist writer in reaching the reader. Instead, naturalists lulled the reader: they broke the contract between the reader and the text also by starting like an assuring realist text and ending in a completely different way. Baguley suggests that “the incipit of the naturalist text introduces readers into the familiar world of their mimetic literature, into the reassuring reflection of their own reality by the mirror aesthetics” (179). In other words, the beginning of the naturalist text aims to establish an effect of referentiality or mimesis in line with the avowed principles of its writer, similar to the safe and un-sensational nature of the realist novel. Its main function is to lull the reader into a false sense of security in order to set up the disintegrating ending. To Baguley, the ending of the naturalist text is, in contrast to its realist counterpart, “more particular to the genre” as “the naturalist work takes on its own ‘genericness,’ undermining the realist ‘contract’ with the reader’s expectations and instigating a new (dis)order” (179). Baguley calls this shock effect the “scandal” of naturalism in that not only in the sense of an outrageous action or of the refined sort of gossip that it often resembles, but also in the etymological sense of the term, as a snare or trap, which involves its readers in secure expectations and offers them the pleasures of the “readable” text, all the better to provoke them with its disturbing content. (180)

That is, the naturalist text, especially after establishing verisimilitude in the beginning, often offers the shock effect with a provocative and disturbing conclusion. The naturalist text needs this combination of a reassuring reality effect and a shocking reality effect in the same text, the former setting up the latter throughout the novel. Once readers are trapped by verisimilitude, naturalists drown them in the shocking intensity of events. A few examples from seminal naturalist works illustrate this clearly. At the end of Maggie, the protagonist becomes a prostitute and dies helplessly. Society cannot keep her under control nor help her realize herself through individual development as a realist novel would have done. What was surely even more shocking for the readers of the period is her drunk mother’s reaction: when she hears her daughter is dead, “‘Deh blazes she is!’ said the woman. She continued her meal” (154). She begins to weep only after she finishes

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her food and coffee. Clearly, this ending offered a shockingly intense experience for an audience who grew up with the values of an agrarian America. Not only were the characters but also the readers were “flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama” (Norris, “Zola” 1107), as they paradoxically anticipated. Naturalist fiction not only brought anxieties to the social consciousness, but it also played with loopholes in the American psyche such as alienation in the family. Similarly, at the end of Sister Carrie, it is the respectable Hurstwood who fails, not a naïve woman like Carrie. Indeed, such an ending must have been even more shocking to the public than Maggie’s, because the rational control that governs Maggie’s story completely disappears in Carrie’s story. Maggie fails mainly as a result of her own choices, as a result of her naïve reasoning, and thus, there is a causality principle in her destiny, reminiscent of preceding realist novels. Carrie’s final success, on the other hand, exhibits neither the rationality nor the causality that Maggie’s death does. In contrast to Maggie, Sister Carrie clearly manifests the absence of a civilizing and enlightening inner core which would embody a set of rules concerning causality. In Dreiser’s book, there are no rules or guidelines to individual enlightenment; it is random whether naïve people make it or fail. This lack of causality is probably the reason why Howells said to Dreiser: “I don’t like Sister Carrie.” By the same token, although Howells supported several other naturalists, he was reluctant about endorsing Dreiser (M. D. Bell 165). To enhance this process of shock, American naturalists varied the spectatorial distance by playing with the focalization of their narration between omniscience and non-omniscience. Especially in Dreiser’s naturalist novels, narrators are both omniscient – having knowledge of events, objects and thoughts in a way the characters do not – and more frequently not. As Dudley argues, “The naturalist writer must simultaneously occupy a space inside and outside the ring. […] On the one hand, the author adopts the attitude of a Kiplingesque man of action and, on the other, that of an impartial social scientist” (21). The omniscient narrator – “impartial social scientist” – with a clear spectatorial distance, which is usually the norm in the realist novel, constitutes only some parts of the naturalist text. American naturalists incorporated this stable distance especially in order to create the initial realist impression that the subsequent parts deconstruct. One passage in Sister Carrie confirms this: Drouet was not a drinker in excess. He was not a moneyed man. He only craved the best, as his mind conceived it, and such doings seemed to him a part of the best. Rector’s, with its polished marble walls and floor, its profusion of lights, its show of china and silverware, and, above all, its reputation as a resort for actors and professional men, seemed to him the

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proper place for a successful man to go. He loved fine clothes, good eating, and particularly the company and acquaintanceship of successful men. (58)

This non-interventionist observation presents the reader with a broad, reassuring social structure with a special focus on characters’ social relations from an omniscient perspective. In short, the omniscient narration provides the reader with steady externalizations from a broader perspective. When the narrator is not omniscient and the spectatorial distance diminishes, the narrator voices characters’ thoughts as a part of the narration without making the shift apparent. In Chapter 11 of The Financier, the narrator says, “If Drexel & Co., or Jay Cooke & Co., or Gould & Fiske were rumored to be behind anything, how secure it was!” (68). However, at the end of the novel, Jay Cooke goes bankrupt, proving that his investments were not at all secure. It is not the omniscient narrator that utters this security, because an omniscient narrator would know the eventual fate of these companies. Rather, the narrator voices Frank’s thoughts, which are financially still very immature as of this chapter. The lack of spectatorial distance in Dreiser’s novels is the reason why Lears suggests that “Dreiser was never good at bringing the big picture into focus” (“American Longing” 64). Similarly, in Sister Carrie, “the omniscient narrator, the narrator who supposedly understands characters as they cannot understand themselves, nevertheless speaks to us in a language seemingly as limited as the language and sensibilities of these characters” (M. D. Bell 157). In other words, when not presenting the reader with broad externalizations in the realist sense, the naturalist text, especially in Dreiser’s hands, externalizes what the character thinks in a way similar to the firstperson narratives do. The crucial difference lies, however, in the fact that the naturalist writer externalizes the protagonist’s thoughts also through the omniscient narration, thus diminishing the border between omniscience and non-omniscience in the reading experience. Put differently, it is not clear whether the narrator or character speaks – a useful technique in misleading the reader and shocking him at the end of the text. It turns out that more than a matter of ability, Dreiser deliberately avoided bringing the big picture into focus, for it would not help him with the effect of intensity he wanted to evoke. In addition to the strong difference between the inception and end of the plot, this unsteady focalization, which constitutes an important part of Dreiser’s naturalism, creates the effect of intensity. By maintaining a spectatorial distance at the beginning of his text, he gives readers a general picture of society similar to that of his realist counterparts. This omniscient narration enhances the effect of verisimilitude; it reminds readers of the realist narratives of reassurance. The intermediary between the reader and the plot is gradually replaced by a narrator voicing

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the characters’ views rather than interpreting. This subsequent lack of spectatorial distance abolishes the distance between the narrator and what he narrates and shocks the reader. By presenting the reader, who is accustomed to the reassuring and stable narrator, with a character-narrator, the naturalist writer breaks the implied contract between the writer and the reader. Crucially, as the character does not function within the rules of Victorian moralism, the reader is faced with the realities in a highly unfiltered way. This loss of the narrative control on the reader consciously subverts the values of turn-of-the-century America, just like the alienation and anonymity of the relationship revealed between mother and daughter in Maggie. Dreiser’s novels reveal that, just like a storm whose violence only becomes apparent if there is quiet weather first, the presentation of the mimetic first and later the shock only becomes possible through a floating and unsteady spectatorial distance. To put it differently, American realism brought the reader to a civic center, gave him a back seat and kept him there throughout the novel in order to help him orient himself by observing others. Through a conscious and steady spectatorial distance, realists were able to present stories of integration of the individual into society because the reader needed a steady seat in order to be able to locate himself and then relate to the social structure presented in the hall. American naturalism, on the other hand, took the reader from the civic center to other, previously ignored realities, to the boxing ring, for instance. Moreover, unlike realists, naturalist writers gradually pushed the spectator from his seat in the stands into the boxing ring itself where the boxers were duking it out. In the end, readers of the naturalist text could experience the knock-out first-hand; indeed, naturalists even aimed to make the reader feel the shockingly intense knock-out blow himself. McTeague starts with a very general picture, yet ends with a fight between McTeague and Marcus – a fight which Norris describes as colorfully and intensely as possible. In the last chapter, there is no residue of a general social picture; the novel ends with gruesome intensity: McTeague did not know how he killed his enemy, but all at once Marcus grew still beneath his blows. Then there was a sudden last return of energy. McTeague’s right wrist was caught, something licked upon it, then the struggling body fell limp and motionless with a long breath. (442)

The intermediary control is lost at the end; readers are condemned to feel the shock.

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In fact, this process of diminishing spectatorial distance between the narrator and the narrated was the harbinger of American modernism. As Chapter 5 explores, the modernist narrator approaches the character so closely that he enters characters’ minds and streams their consciousness, a technique that epitomizes the modernist movement. An early form of this technique is already visible in American naturalism. Walcutt counts “stream of consciousness” (21) as one of the forms that American naturalism assumes. The first-person narration of a seemingly omniscient narrator as in the case of Dreiser’s novels demonstrates the presentation of characters’ minds clearly. Yet, this decreasing distance between the narrator and the world was a highly experimental and premature objective for American naturalists; they did not have a clear concept behind it. It was American modernists who programmatically utilized the representation of the mind as a central technique in their communicative program, hence the transitory nature and shorter lifespan of naturalism in contrast to realism or modernism. American Naturalism and Journalism The late nineteenth century was fertile ground in terms of sensational narratives of intensity not least because of yellow journalism or jingoistic press. Canonical naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair and Jack London worked as journalists before or during their literary career. In order to construct the specific narrative/semiotic structure that would evoke this new, shocking reality effect, American naturalists drew on their experiences in journalism. Crucially, journalism provided naturalists with new ways of constructing and conveying sensational narratives as well as new locations of reality to the reading public. In particular, naturalists benefited from the techniques journalists used in their presentation of “facts.” Both naturalists and journalists combined externalization and notation effectively in their narratives. Works of documentary journalism such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) describes places like “Chinatown,” the “Cheap Lodging-Houses” and the “Down Town Back-Alleys” in New York with rich detail. While realists like Howells were interested in “portraying” castles, habits and journeys, naturalists and journalists wanted to “reveal.” Naturalists’ reliance on journalism is the reason why Michael Robertson argues that “the blanket hostility to journalism in the generation of Howells and James is transformed after Crane into an acceptance of the journalist as a fellow literary artist” (qtd. in M. D. Bell 203) – a fellow who could help in the construction of the reality effect in naturalism in contrast to merely trying to orient the society to an “unreal” reality as the realists did.

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In spite of their deep interest in other narratives, American naturalists were very careful to stay within the borders of literature, though. Although the borders that existed for realist writers were less tangible for naturalists and although journalists could be collaborators with naturalist writers rather than “polluting” their literature, naturalists had their own borders, less distinct than those dividing realists from journalists but distant enough to make them literary avant-gardes. Talking about Crane, McGurl argues that one can also see why this alliance cannot at any cost be allowed to collapse into an identity with the “nonliterary” reformist texts to which it is allied […]: this would imply [Crane’s] departure from the field of literary production altogether, his participation in a distinctly different game. This is, no doubt, the constitutive risk of the avant-garde text, and the balancing act that it must perform: to “bravely” reject literary conventions without, after all, making itself institutionally unrecognizable as literature. (93)

Crane was not alone; other naturalists also incorporated ideas of contemporary journalists and scientists while keeping the literariness of their work. Journalism offered not only new techniques in creating scandalous plots but also presented naturalists with a wide array of locations, characters and plots through which they could embroider their literary works. These experiences in journalism allowed naturalists to shift their focus from the social center to the periphery in their attempt to create the effect of intensity: to the slums of New York, the fields of California, or to Yukon as in the case of Jack London. In fact, their experience in journalism shaped the motifs naturalists incorporated into their fiction. Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) contains short stories that take place in Cuba, which he visited to report the SpanishAmerican War. Upton Sinclair benefited from his experiences in the meatpacking industry in Chicago before he wrote The Jungle (1906). While writing The Epic of The Wheat trilogy, Frank Norris used his experiences as a journalist in San Francisco in order to construct the events in many of his novels, including McTeague (1899). The case of Dreiser was no different: working in a variety of venues as a journalist allowed him to rely on his experiences in his fiction. These experiences have been especially influential in his construction of the business motif in The Financier (1912). A deeper insight into Dreiser’s biography is indispensable to have a clearer understanding of business in the novel.

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4.2 THEODORE DREISER: THE SEARCH FOR INTENSITY Theodore Dreiser was born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father, Johann Paul Dreiser, was a Catholic German from Rhineland-Palatinate who left Germany “to escape conscription and make his fortune” in 1844 at the age of 23. His mother, Sarah Maria Schänäb, was born in Dayton, Ohio to Moravian “of Dunkard or Mennonite faith” (Dawn 4).10 Theodore was the twelfth child of the Dreiser couple, who had thirteen children in total, among whom was Paul Dresser – a popular songwriter in fin-de-siècle America. Dreiser grew up in Indiana, lived in Chicago at different stages of his life but spent most of his life in New York City. After several years as a journalist, he turned to literature, becoming one of the key authors until his death in 1945. Dreiser produced fiction over many decades; but for many contemporary and recent scholars, his name is associated mostly with American naturalism. By the time he published The Financier in 1912, he was considered to be one of the finest practitioners of naturalism. Recent scholarship is no exception: Pizer argues that he is “the author whose work and career most fulfill the received notion of American naturalism” (Theory and Practice 57). In retrospect, there was almost a perfect match between Dreiser, the writer of Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhard (1911) and The Genius (1915), and American naturalism: Dreiser was the American naturalist and this shaped his motifs including the motif of business in The Financier (1912). His prominence within the movement hinges heavily on the coincidence between naturalism’s focus on improbable and neglected realities and Dreiser’s own realities, which he later found out to be highly “twisted from the ordinary” (Norris, “Zola” 1107). Unlike Howells, Dreiser did not live a linear, consistent and coherent life. As he says, You must remember that with me you are abroad in those mystic chambers of brain where vagaries and fancies of all descriptions, and even the indescribable, abound, and that this illusion as to my condition was half the time crossed with forgetfulness as to whether I was in this condition or not. (Dawn 481)

Therefore, any attempt to come up with a systematic account of Dreiser’s life is deemed to remain merely an attempt. Despite his difficult biography, it is possible to argue that Dreiser’s personal experiences led him to produce literary works that

10 For a detailed analysis of his German background, see Renate von Bardeleben’s articles in Engaging Dreiser, edited by Klaus H. Schmidt, Winter, 2010.

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not only participated in the naturalist epoch but also constituted the movement along with other prominent writers such as Frank Norris, Stephen Crane and Jack London. Previous biographies emphasize how Dreiser’s concrete experiences such as his poverty led him to the movement. For instance, naturalist writers were highly interested in sexuality and prostitution, as these themes were on the periphery of the dominant discourse in the period. Dreiser could relate to these issues: he knew that his sister Emma had worked briefly as a prostitute in Chicago. When he fictionalized his sister’s story, he easily placed himself in the avant-garde camp. The correspondence between specific biographical details and dominant themes in the period does not suffice to account for Dreiser’s turn to naturalism, though. In a remarkable way, Dreiser’s psychological development played a crucial role in this process as well. Dreiser used his fiction not only to record unhappy experiences but also as a way of dealing with his desires – to realize what he was not able to in real life. Understanding Dreiser’s fiction thus requires understanding his inner world and subsequently the interaction of his psyche with the outer world – factors which previous research largely ignored. A psychoanalytic approach to Dreiser’s autobiographical works provides a deeper insight into Dreiser’s turn to and participation in American naturalism. Clearly, psychoanalytic theory is a speculative practice and it cannot explain everything about a person, but it is a very useful and explanatory framework for revealing the rough patterns of a person’s personality, behavior and desires. It is especially useful for Dreiser, not only because he wrote two autobiographical books full of details about his childhood, youth and family background, but also because he strove to convey his mental structures openly. He says, “I think it will be obvious that I am moved only by motives of analysis which are as honest and sympathetic as I hope to make them revealing” (Dawn 3). This transparency was not feigned; he included even unflattering truths in his autobiographical works. Although Dreiser finished Dawn in 1916, “because he felt its frankness might embarrass members of his family” (Whaley 81), he did not publish it until 1931. This openness signifies that the supply and demand nexus that shaped his fiction did not influence his autobiographical works in the same way. In other words, he did not care if his autobiographical books sold in the way his novels did; they were personal revelations like those most authors undertake in their literary career. In short, Dreiser produced numerous symptoms for scholars to understand the background of his writings in a way most other writers were hesitant to offer. I will take the opportunity to attempt to explore these symptoms to understand his Darstellung of the motif of business.

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Another primary reason why a psychoanalytic approach is applicable to Dreiser’s autobiographical works is that Dreiser was strongly interested in human psychology and in psychoanalysis in particular. In 1914, Dreiser moved to Greenwich Village, the residents of which were often interested in psychoanalysis as he was. In the subsequent years, he befriended A. A. Brill, an important psychoanalyst and Freud’s translator in the US. Considering Freud’s work, Dreiser said, “Every paragraph came as a revelation to me – a strong revealing light thrown on some of the darkest problems that haunted and troubled me and my work. And reading him has helped me in my studies of life and men” (Uncollected Prose 263). This revelation was incorporated both into his fiction and essays. As early as Sister Carrie, he attempted to explore human desires from a psychoanalytical perspective as a way of deconstructing former narratives. Moreover, he wrote essays such as “Neurotic America and the Sexual Impulse” (1920) where he viewed America as a country shaped deeply by religious repression. Crucially, what provided alternative ways of seeing in his fiction and essays – that is, Freudian psychoanalysis – made his autobiographical works psychoanalytically more intelligible. Due to his familiarity with the psychoanalytic framework, the way he recounted his own past fits the psychoanalytic grid, making it easier for the reader to grasp how he perceived his own life. Dreiser’s autobiographical writings reveal that Dreiser had an unresolved Oedipal complex that surfaces in his texts in repeated but different ways. In fact, if Sigmund Freud had psychoanalyzed Dreiser, he could have based his theory of the Oedipus complex on Dreiser’s psyche. Put simply, in Freudian psychoanalysis, this complex assumes that the male child desires to possess his parent of the opposite sex, while at the same time replacing the parent of the same sex – that is, his father. Among others, Malcolm is right in suggesting that the Oedipal period – roughly three-and-a-half to six years – is like Lorenz standing in front of the chick, it is the most formative, significant, moulding experience of human life. […] If you take a person’s adult life – his love, his work, his hobbies, his ambitions – they all point back to the Oedipus complex. (158-9)

Crucially, successful completion of this stage is only possible by identification with the same-sex parent. As the symptoms in Dreiser’s autobiographical writings reveal, Dreiser had an unhappy childhood and adolescence, corresponding to an unsuccessful phallic stage in his psycho-sexual development, which defined his perception in the subsequent parts of his life. Because Dreiser had an unsuccessful Oedipal development stage, Dreiser rejected his father and attempted to distance himself from his father’s mindset. At the same time, he associated his mother with

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comforting and positive ideas and attempted to come closer to her, though without success. Dreiser’s writings clearly reveal his negative perception of his father and the reasons behind his refusal to idealize him and his values. In order to understand this refusal, it is important to reconstruct Johann Paul’s conditions at the time of Dreiser’s birth, childhood and adolescence, as Dreiser perceived them. The uncontrollability of life, which is a dominant theme in Dreiser’s fiction, entered Dreiser’s life via his father. Before Theodore was born, Johann Paul (John Paul by now) had experienced a series of tragedies in his personal and social life. He was a weaver by trade. Being quite industrious, he built a mill of his own in Sullivan, Indiana. In 1865, his uninsured mill burned, burdening the family with serious financial problems. While rebuilding the mill, “a great beam […] fell and struck him on the head shoulder,” making him deaf in one ear and leaving brain damage (Dawn 5). The Dreiser family had not yet overcome this shock when they lost other property. Shortly after the accident, two people trying to benefit from John’s infirmity took some papers from Sarah, who naively gave them up – believing that they could help the Dreiser family. However, the papers – and along with them Paul’s property rights – disappeared. Thus, “by bare-faced robbery and while he was ill […] my father lost the remainder of his local wealth” (Dawn 5). When Theodore was born, his father was “a broken-spirited man of fifty” (Matthiessen 5) who had severe health and financial problems. Indeed, he had no steady job for the first six years of Theodore’s life. Understandably, he felt disappointed and tremendously hopeless about his and his family’s future. This is why Dreiser “looked on [his father] as mentally a little weak” (Dawn 6). John Paul had always been a devout Catholic, and unsurprisingly, his piety increased following these tragic incidents. By the time Dreiser was capable of recognizing the world beyond his mother’s care, his father had become “a man of […] iron conventionalism and moral intolerance,” leading Theodore to think “Never have I known a man more obsessed with religious belief” (Dawn 10, 5-6). Accordingly, John Paul “tried to discipline his children into severe religious behavior” (Matthiessen 5). As a result, for Theodore, his father represented religion, tradition, discipline and old-fashioned values. He could have idealized these traits and become a man like his father had his psychological development followed a different pattern. Rather than embracing him, he rejected “the name of the father,” and along with it, the rules and traits Dreiser associated with him. Concepts like religion, tradition and every other fatherly value had a negative connotation for Dreiser and he tried to distance himself from these values early on. Accordingly, rather than identifying with his “pathetic” father (Dawn 6), as an identification

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with a competitor would represent a defeat in the competition for Sarah, he was in constant competition with him. In contrast, he perceived his mother Sarah in a remarkably positive way. His “earliest recollection of her is of a fair, plump and smiling woman of about forty, to me altogether lovely. She appealed to me as thoughtful, solicitous, wise, and above all, tender and helpful” (Dawn 4). For him, she was “a strange, sweet, dreamy woman” (Dawn 10). The references to her physique in these statements are striking. In a quite psychoanalytic way, Dreiser attributed her positive features to the way she grew up, saying, The world of her rearing must have been a pleasant one, for often I have heard her speak of her parents’ prosperity as farmers, of orchard and meadow and great fields of grain, and of some of the primitive conditions and devices of pioneer life that still affected them – neighbors borrowing fire, Indians coming to the door to beg or be sociable. (Dawn 4)

In short, to Dreiser, Sarah was a happy woman with a well-balanced background of integrity. As expected, he called himself “always a ‘mother child,’ hanging to her skirts as much as [he] was permitted” (Dawn 19). Dreiser had a strong primal urge to return to his mother as he reveals in his positive descriptions of her in several instances in his autobiographical works: “It always seems to me that no one ever wanted me enough, unless it was my mother” (Dawn 81). In fact, Dreiser’s mother was also religious and superstitious; yet, in contrast to his father’s, her beliefs were neither rigid nor limited Dreiser’s mental freedom. Several incidents reveal that Sarah was a traditional woman with common superstitions. As Dreiser reports from his mother, when his mother was giving birth to him, three maidens garbed in brightly-colored costumes, come up the brick walk that led from the street gate to our front door, into the room in which my mother lay, pass about the foot of the bed and finally through a rear door into a small, exitless back yard, from whence they could have escaped only by vanishing into thin air! (Dawn 6)

In a similar vein, once his mother “saw a number of will-o’-the wisps or bog-fires, dancing over the water and among the trees, seemingly blown about by feeble breaths of air. Aroused by the spectacle, she counted them and found there were thirteen” (Dawn 6). This was, according to Sarah, a sign of the thirteen children the Dreiser couple was going to have. In a remarkable way, these superstitious beliefs did not suffocate Dreiser, but liberated him from the uniform rigidity of his father’s strict Catholicism. And Dreiser loved the liberty his mother gave him.

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The death of Dreiser’s mother when he was 19 years old and his subsequent despair also confirm Dreiser’s strong connection to her. As he wrote more than a quarter century later, Sarah’s death was “the most profound, psychologic [sic] shake-up I ever received” (qtd. in Loving 42). Dreiser never completely recovered from this loss, which led to persistent periods of depression throughout his life. Indeed, Dreiser found himself suffering from neurasthenia in the first decade of the twentieth century as a result. He felt dislocated for a very long time after her death, and this was clearly a consequence of a loss of the main object of desire for Dreiser: “In the very face of this, was a part of my own life that had died, my earliest youth, my earliest happiness and pains and dreams and illusions (Dawn 515). Dreiser felt the need to grow up because his mother, who had always responded to Dreiser’s needs, was no longer alive. Furthermore, after her death, Dreiser could idealize his mother even more than before, as his autobiography exposes. After his “binding” mother’s death in 1890, Dreiser did not even want to share the same home with his father and siblings. Considering a life with a stubborn father, Dreiser and his brother, Ed thought, “that’s the end of our home” (Dawn 513). While trying to get used to the loss of their mother, Dreiser’s sister, Mame tried to dominate the household in a way reminiscent of his mother. “What I took to be the airs and polluting domination of my sister M-, toward whom I had never borne any real affection, had become unbearable” (A Book About Myself 27). Her attempt to adopt the mother role created so much frustration and anger in Dreiser that he “went and rented [another] flat, had the gas turned on and some furniture installed; and then […] we moved” (A Book About Myself 30-31). Even though he and his two siblings moved back after a few months, “For weeks and even months I had a burning desire to strike [Mame], although nothing more was ever done or said concerning it. For over fifteen years the memory of this one thing divided us completely” (A Book About Myself 29). Considering the affection of this “mother’s child” to his mother, his elder sister’s dominating motherly role reinforced Dreiser’s separation anxiety from the comfortable bosom of his mother to whom he was connected psychologically even after her death. He was not ready to replace her with anyone, including his sister. In short, his autobiographical writings reveal that Dreiser’s relationship to his parents constituted two extreme poles: a strict, traditional and stubborn father and a lovely, comforting mother. This clear opposition between his perception of his mother and father reveals the unresolved Oedipal complex during the phallic stage of his psycho-sexual development. As in all unresolved Oedipal complexes, Dreiser wanted to replace his father. This was, however, an impossible objective. Dreiser’s strong primal desire and his inability to meet it created deep tensions in his

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psyche, which revealed itself in different ways as Dreiser grew up. For instance, as Dreiser explains in Dawn, he experienced severe impotence during his early adolescence, which led to failure and anxiety in his relationships with women. Most of the time he was “so worried and harassed [that he] scarcely [knew] which way to turn” (qtd. in Loving 198) next to women. Evidently, his impotence did not stem from physical or physiological reasons: even without a female next to him, he was afraid and anxious about the idea of sexual intercourse. Dreiser’s impotence stemmed possibly from psychological factors, namely castration anxiety. Most probably, Dreiser felt castration anxiety as a result of an unsuccessful phallic stage and this led to erectile dysfunction as a defense mechanism. One incident exemplifies Dreiser’s unresolved psychosexual conflict plainly. One day, when one of his sisters brought a beautiful friend of hers home and introduced her to Dreiser, he felt over-joyed: “Oh, if I could have a girl like this – if I could just have her!” Upon meeting Alice, Theodore noticed the absence of his brothers and was cheerful about it, for there was no competition. Later, he was rather angry that his brothers “were there endeavoring to entertain her” and one of them “attempting to make love to her.” This, “because of jealousy […] waked in me seemed to me out of the depths of dullness” (A Book About Myself 11). This jealousy lasted until Dreiser received encouragement from Alice. After Dreiser saw that she chose him, he thought, “I flattered myself that I was preferred over my two brothers” (A Book About Myself 12). Dreiser’s competition with his brothers over Alice was again not only an external reality; it was a dominant psychological reality for Dreiser as well. It is common in a psychoanalytic framework to connect such feelings of competition, anxiety about defeat, and the final triumph over siblings to transference from the original parental conflict. Especially the fact that Dreiser experienced those feelings in his early adolescence – at a period when males start to leave their parental home and look for a partner to establish their own family – reinforces the idea that Dreiser had a long unresolved Oedipal conflict. Significantly, the primal desire this unresolved psychosexual development created in Dreiser’s psyche formed further smaller ambitions that deeply shaped his choices in his life. Writing in the same period from the Old World, Freud argues that “when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitute objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction” (qtd. in Dollimore 184). In other words, the loss of the original object creates other desires in different forms throughout a person’s life, none of which really satisfies the individual. Žižek confirms Freud, saying, “desire’s raison d’etre […] is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire” (39). In Dreiser’s case, this loss

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of the original object and the constant reproduction of desire can be best observed in his private life: no woman he was interested in offered him the ideal he was looking for. His marriage and affairs reveal what Freud and Žižek state clearly. Dreiser married Sallie “Jug” White in 1898. Although he had a long relationship with her before he got married and enough time to decide, his marriage did not satisfy him. In an attempt to find the ideal woman, in the subsequent years, Dreiser had numerous affairs and relationships with women who disappointed him even further. One short example plainly illustrates this: in 1910, Dreiser fell in love with Thelma Cudlipp, the eighteen-year-old daughter of an assistant editor at the Butterick Corporation. He was not afraid to lose his well-paying job as the editor at Butterick because of this love affair. However, Cudlipp did not return Dreiser’s affection. Her parents opposed this relationship on the grounds that he was married and much older. She was sent to England to study art and Dreiser was left with heartache again. The fact that he was obsessed with her despite her lack of interest proves that Dreiser was chasing an impossible ideal. Clearly, it was not all about Dreiser’s psyche; desires have a great deal to do with external factors as well, as several of Dreiser’s biographies outline. Physical conditions are crucial in creating desires as well. Being the son of a poor immigrant father, Dreiser suffered from severe economic disadvantages during his childhood and adolescence. To Pizer and Harbert, Dreiser’s family “was a family at the very bottom of social scale – poor, large, ignorant, and superstitious” (146). Understandably, he “wanted to get up oh, how eagerly! I wanted to shake off the garments of the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public arena” (A Book About Myself 34). In another instance, he repeated his wish, saying, “I wanted – or thought I did – a profession and money and a good family such as other people could boast of, […] have good clothes, smart friends, and this and that” (Dawn 442). Though he had a clear working-class background, he was not only hopeful about his future but also highly determined: “I’ll get along and be somebody in spite of them! Beautiful girls will yet be interested in me, and society, too!” (Dawn 295). In other words, he wanted what most adolescents wanted in the period; he wanted the American Dream, and thus to realize the dreams with which his father immigrated to the US. The way Dreiser recounts his adolescence reveals how he gradually learned to clarify his desires and the ways to realize them. After temporary residences in Terre Haute, Vincennes, Sullivan, Evansville, Chicago and Warsaw, Dreiser quit school and moved to Chicago in the late 1880s. Joined by his other siblings, he was employed in unskilled jobs for the next three years, which gave him little chance to follow his dreams. With the help of his high school teacher, Dreiser attended Indiana State University as a special student. College life broadened his

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horizons and enabled him to define his desires better; however, it also led to more longing, because there, he saw and befriended richer students who were able to achieve their goals. Despite enhancing his imagination through concrete examples, college did not give him a clear idea about how he could realize his dreams. At the time, the skills he learned at college – which mostly enhanced his creativity – seemed far from practical. Surprisingly, the English classes and the creative skills he gained at college were going to help him realize his dreams in the subsequent years but he was not mature enough to recognize that then. He was forced to drop out after one year due to lack of financial means. After leaving the university in 1890, Dreiser worked as a salesman, assistant realtor and laundry driver in Chicago – all low-paying jobs. None of these experiences came close to satisfying him. Having lived in poverty for a few years, Dreiser gradually realized that his creativity would give him an edge in reaching his desires. Especially, he was considering writing, as he says, “I seethed to express myself. I bubbled. I dreamed. And I had a singing feeling […] that some day I should really write and be very famous into the bargain” (A Book About Myself 3). His feeling was that he was naturally talented in writing. Loving argues that one of Dreiser’s college mates, Russell Ratliff, first brought the ideas of Darwin and Herbert Spencer to Dreiser’s attention (36). Considering the importance these scholars ascribe to inherited abilities, it is highly possible that Dreiser wanted to use his own natural abilities to move toward success, namely, writing. Yet, on its own, writing was not an occupation; he needed a venue to use his skills. At that point, considering his workingclass background, it is not surprising that he did not have a conception of fiction writing. Instead, he opted for a more concrete occupation to practice writing: journalism, as he says, “But how? How? My feeling was that I ought to get into newspaper work” (A Book About Myself 3). Slowly but surely, he struggled to secure a place in the world of journalism, which he hoped would give him an opportunity to “step forth into the public arena” (A Book About Myself 34). Arguably, journalism – and later fiction writing – became one of the major strategies through which Dreiser sought satisfaction. Dreiser’s career as a journalist was another learning process: it indirectly helped him find newer and better ways of achieving his desires. He started his first job at a newspaper, Chicago Herald, not as a reporter but as a promoter for a holiday campaign on Christmas. Later, he worked for other newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, covering the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. His experience as a journalist confirmed his intuition: he was talented in writing. In 1894, he moved to New York. Although he aimed to become successful and famous via writing, the road was not that smooth; Dreiser was not able to find

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a job in New York easily. In 1894, Dreiser recalled sitting in a public park, watching crowds of other unemployed New Yorkers like him: “I presume I looked at them and then considered myself and these great offices, and it was then that the idea of Hurstwood was born” (A Book About Myself 464). In New York, living in poverty, he edited the music periodical Ev’ry Month, which his brother Paul aided in establishing. Journalism opened his eyes to different American realities and showed him that he was not alone in this reality of poverty; there were others in similar positions, and he was part of a system. However, Dreiser’s enthusiasm about journalism did not last forever. As Bigelow says, “Dreiser quit [journalism] in March 1895 and never worked again as a full-time reporter” (223), gradually turning to literature in the subsequent years. Although journalism allowed Dreiser to observe “uncivilizing realities,” a few years of experience as a journalist proved to him that journalism would not bring him social and financial capital, give him intellectual freedom and as he said, allow him to “be somebody.” Journalism did not offer him social mobility: it did not allow him to “frequent the hotel lobbies and gossip with important people” (Kaplan 116), be “The Prophet” or “The Genius” or follow his dreams in text. In the same way, reporting did not bring enough money; he was constantly living in poverty throughout his career as a journalist. Probably more important than both, journalism did not leave him enough creative freedom in his texts. At the end of A Book About Myself, he admits that he could not explicitly name the reasoning behind his decision to leave journalism, which he had started so enthusiastically. Considering his activities before and after this firm decision, it becomes clear that newspaper reporting did not leave enough room for “him.” His writing was controlled and edited to meet journalistic standards, which meant he was expected to follow journalism’s special rules. He admitted this point a few years later in Ev’ry Month: “The things I am able to get the boss to publish that I believe in are very few” (qtd. in Loving 118). In fact, Dreiser would have persisted in journalism despite the lack of financial and social capital, had it provided him with the creative freedom he craved. This feeling of limitation had surfaced at the beginning of his career as a journalist, too, but he had ignored it until the mid-1890s, though it chafed more and more as time passed. Considering the editorial restrictions, minimal prestige and income, Dreiser realized that journalism had become “a boy’s game and [he] was slowly but surely passing out of the boy stage” (A Book About Myself 500). Reporting was more like a temporary job that youngsters do in order to earn pocket money than a solid occupation that would lead him to the position he desired. Journalism did not come close to satisfying him, but it helped him refine his desires further, like his college experience. He spent the years 1897 and 1898 as a

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reporter and interviewer at Success magazine. His main job at the magazine was to interview “successful” people like Thomas Edison. Tellingly, he also interviewed successful businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie and Marshall Field. His interviews with prominent men of business helped him define his desires in business terms: he still dreamed “to be president or vice-president or secretary of something” (qtd. in Interviews 48). In another instance, he is even clearer about the business-like success he dreamed of: he wanted to be an owner of “some great thrashing business of some kind” (A Book About Myself 33). Subsequent to his career as an interviewer at Success, Dreiser became interested in these long-lasting assets and the prestige that being a businessman would bring to his own life. Yet, he knew that he was not cut out to be a good businessman and his “natural” talents lay in writing. In contrast to journalism or business, Dreiser perceived literature as a tool that could give him opportunities to satisfy his desires, even the privileges that other high-class occupations entailed. As M. D. Bell argues, “‘Art’ for Dreiser was ‘life’ in the sense that it provided his ticket into the privileged environment” (153). Dreiser confirms this idea by equating successful businessmen and leaders with successful artists: “Those who interested me most were bankers, millionaires, artists, executives, leaders, the real rulers of the world” (A Book About Myself 33). In the last years of the nineteenth century, Dreiser left journalism, turning to literature – the other major occupation where he could utilize his creative talent in text – in order to gain social, cultural and financial capital and thereby satisfy his desires. In fact, Dreiser had a quite nuanced understanding and expectation of success from creative writing: as a tool, literature could offer supreme satisfaction, just as a business activity could. Crucially, bankers, millionaires, leaders and the real rulers of the world did not become successful merely as a result of their hard work. The resulting prestige was much larger than the effort they invested; it was a result of speculation, a result of doubling more than usual, and a result of gambling. In Dawn, Dreiser draws on this asymmetry between their labor and income. He pits “Dreamy and speculative against practical and unpoetic” (463). This statement reveals an equation between art and speculation: if the unpoetic is the opposite of dreamy and speculative, the poetic – that is, literature – is speculative. Dreiser’s equation of literature and speculation demonstrates not only that fiction is the result of mental speculation but also that it could lead to sensational success like speculative activities in the economy. As speculators’ success is often not based on real, practical, and hard economic facts but rather on abstract fluctuation of economic values, their profit margins are quite broad: a real estate object’s value can skyrocket overnight due to fluctuations in the market. In contrast to journalism, which was restrictive and not lucrative, literature was less restrictive and

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could be exceedingly lucrative. Accordingly, Dreiser saw the latter as a potential through which he could realize his dreams without limitations. If Dreiser’s longing for success made literature a solid career option, his psychosexual development shaped the form of literature he was going to adopt – that is, naturalism. The creative freedom he sought throughout his life did not mean including arbitrary realities in his literary works; rather, there was a direction in the realities he staged. His experiences as a journalist and an avid reader of fiction had proven to him that contemporary narratives were rather restraining. While editors in newspapers expected a rather rigid journalistic template in the stories, American realism was filled with stories of Victorian moralism – another rigid narrative form where stories outside of mainstream values were considered unfit. Dreiser established a similarity – transference – between the restraining potential of both writing practices to his father’s narrow-minded Catholicism. In other words, Dreiser experienced a déjà vu in the late 1890s in a quite different form and setting: limitations of journalism and literature resembled the limitations that his father tried to impose on him during his childhood and adolescence. He needed to overthrow these fatherly rules, replacing them with form and content that escaped the moralist values of a former generation. Naturalism was the perfect literary form that allowed Dreiser to undertake this attempt: as a protest literature – “proto-deconstructionist” writing practice – naturalism helped him thwart the narratives begging to be protested against. Considering Howells’s conception of authorship, which was based on pure labor like teaching or medicine, Dreiser’s speculative understanding of his occupation is another instance of transcending the social and financial boundaries that limited him. Literature was not only a means for success, creative freedom and a venue to reveal his talents; interestingly, it enabled Dreiser to share his protest with others as well. Simply dreaming or thinking in ways that escaped dominant narratives was not sufficient, because both his father’s narrow-minded Catholicism and the contemporary narratives were rigid primarily in social terms. They not only influenced the way Dreiser thought but also the way he moved or was allowed to move socially. Accordingly, he felt that his dissent had to be social: he needed to share his protest with others. Through naturalism, he not only dreamed but also invited other people to dream in ways that disrupted the status quo. This process of immersing the reader allowed Dreiser to exert the effect of intensity on the reader. As a communal performative practice, Dreiser’s naturalism created intensity, not only for him but also for the community. His starting point was quite personal but in his attempt to create intensity, he was gradually approaching the naturalism Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Jack London were practicing at the same time.

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His attempts at deconstruction are visible in his selection of themes for his novels in particular. Dreiser’s psychosexual development – the Oedipal complex – shaped his whole life and his career as a novelist but it was especially influential in the themes of his first two novels, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. In these novels, he apparently reconciled his need to protest with what concerned him the most. As previously explored, his unsuccessful phallic stage made the woman one of his primary concerns and accordingly, both had female protagonists. Dreiser used his “women” novels as a form of self-therapy – as a tool to explore and reflect on what he thought about women. Exploring the female mind allowed Dreiser to problematize his relationship to her mother. In line with this, he worked through and articulated his own fear of rejection, failure and shame – the feelings he was coping with – through the female characters. At the same time, Dreiser utilized the Darstellung of the female in order to reject the dominant narratives and to come to terms with his own image of women. Female characters’ behavior in an uncontrolled environment dominated the plots of these novels. These women start as pure women – reminiscent of the realist narrative – and transgress the reader’s horizon of expectations, which allowed Dreiser to attempt to prove the former narratives wrong. In his early novels, Dreiser was still quite the amateur; he needed to practice his skills in literature at first. He initially dealt with the impression that his mother left on him through the material he gathered at home – by selecting plots from his personal and family biography. Sister Carrie substantially parallels the life of his sister Emma, who, suffering under her father’s oppression, started an affair with a married barkeeper in Chicago and fled with him first to Montreal and then to New York. Like Hurstwood in the book, Emma’s lover had stolen money from the safe of his employer. Moreover, in one of the early drafts of Dawn, Dreiser indicates that he knew that Emma “was obviously selling her virtue for cash” (qtd. in Loving 93), which is strongly reminiscent of Carrie Meeber. Similarly, Jennie Gerhardt was based on the life of Dreiser’s sisters Mame and Sylvia. Similar to Jennie, whose friend provides her with financial and social assistance but who in the end makes her pregnant, Mame had an affair with a man whom Dreiser calls “Colonel Silsby,” and who treated Mame similarly. Tellingly, the incorporation of biographical elements allowed Dreiser to emphasize the reality effect: in the end, he was able to minimize the logical contradictions as well as the indeterminacies in the plot. Dreiser proved with his first novel that he was a skilled writer who was able to create the effects he aimed at. After several attempts at writing short stories, poetry and essays, Dreiser started writing Sister Carrie, “the first great novel of 20th century” in 1899 (Loving 130). Initially submitted to Harper’s and Brothers,

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the novel was rejected on the grounds of decency. Clearly, the immoral experiences of a young girl in Chicago, uncontrolled by community pressure, could be disturbing for many readers. As the company said, Dreiser’s “touch is neither firm enough nor sufficiently delicate to depict without offense to the reader the continued illicit relations of the heroine” (qtd. in Loving 153). Later, he submitted the novel to Doubleday, Page & Co., where Frank Norris worked. Having already published his McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), Norris praised the novel, saying, “it was the best novel I had read in M.S. since I had been reading for the term, and that it pleased me as well as any novel I have read in any form, published or otherwise” (qtd. in Loving 154). Despite Norris’s efforts, Doubleday was hesitant to publish the novel for reasons similar to Harper’s. After long discussions at Doubleday, the firm agreed to issue one edition but with neither much advertising nor publicity. While some newspapers reviewed the novel, many literary magazines ignored it due to its “indecent” depiction of life. One contemporary reviewer confirmed that Dreiser transcended the common plots of Victorian moralism by saying that the novel showed “the Godless side of American life” (qtd. in Loving 161). In the end, Dreiser managed to become an avant-garde naturalist writer with relatively more freedom than he had with journalism. From a pragmatic point of view, his attempts to achieve satisfaction through deconstruction were successful: he was able to create the intensity he craved. However, his attempts were not financially profitable yet: between November 1900 and February 1902, he earned only $68.40 from his novel (Loving 158). The economic failure of Sister Carrie reveals that not only Dreiser’s attempts for supreme satisfaction in economic terms were shattered but also his belief in speculation as an opportunity offering unlimited success. Instead of satisfaction, Sister Carrie showed him the other side of speculation. The speculative nature of literature brought about risks: he failed and endangered his livelihood in a way he had never experienced. This risky endeavor created an intense fear for Dreiser – a type of dangerous intensity Dreiser was not really looking for. Consciously or subconsciously, he utilized this intensity for his literary purposes: he translated this fear of not being able to support himself into sensational narratives in his subsequent works such as Jennie Gerhardt and The Financier. In other words, there was a clear link between his feelings of failure after Sister Carrie and the feelings of intensity he sought to evoke: the psychology behind his earlier novels was a psychology of intense fear that his inability to subsist brought about. In addition to the loss of his mother, whom he was never able to forget, the lukewarm reception of Sister Carrie led Dreiser to a state of mental neurasthenia in the subsequent years. As a result, after Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s literary output underwent a long dry spell. Once he regained his health and started writing again

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in 1904, he decided to split his time between magazine editing and fiction writing. Significantly, Dreiser’s return to journalism was quite different from his initial interest in newspaper work. He did not return to mainstream journalism of sensational events. Rather, he edited women’s magazines such as Smith’s Magazine, Broadway Magazine, and three magazines by Butterick simply to earn money. It was still journalism, but a journalism that was lucrative enough to make a difference in that it allowed him to focus on his literary works. It is interesting to note how Dreiser utilized writing both to earn a livelihood and to achieve great success at some point in his career. His dependence solely on writing reveals a profound drive: this division was not only a natural result of the failure of his first novel, as he had realized that he could no longer bind his subsistence only to literature, but it was also a symptom of his urge to write. Despite his neurasthenia, the failure of his first novel, unsympathetic editors and poverty, he managed to write. His insistence on a literary career was again intense, which was transformed into intensity in his literary texts. Writing was thus a business activity for Dreiser: it allowed him to make money on a monthly basis and gave him hope of great success (including wealth) in the future. Dreiser’s biography reveals how he gradually fused with the naturalist movement. He was a pioneer with his first novel, even though he did not realize it then. From the moment he published Sister Carrie up to 1907, the literary environment changed profoundly. Both literary institutions, such as publishers and literary magazines, and the reading public were more open to naturalist works. In 1916, Howells admitted the changing rules of the literary establishment and the popularity of naturalism, by saying, it was a mistake to miss the “university of the streets and police stations, with its faculty of patrolmen and ward politicians and saloon keepers” (Years of My Youth 141), because that was where intensity was to be found. In this period, several naturalist authors like Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair published their works, which repeated the naturalist aesthetics through different plots. Dreiser was aware of this; he was also aware that his first novel was a prime example of the literature that was being published more widely in the years subsequent to its first appearance. He published Sister Carrie again in 1907. Understandably, it was much easier to publish it this time, and this edition sold more than the first. Even the publishers who were against him after the first edition of his novel seemed positive about it. While Dreiser’s fiction was pioneering and thus “unusual” in 1901, six years later, naturalism had become the mainstream in the literary establishment. Having established himself as a pioneer naturalist, Dreiser published his subsequent novel Jennie Gerhardt in 1911. The novel repeated Dreiser’s wishes to protest against the dominant narratives with plots that included a destitute woman

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– Jennie – who cannot control her own life. Dreiser’s initial title for the novel, The Transgressor, clearly explains his attempt to write a naturalist novel – a novel that transgresses the dominant narratives. In the novel, both men with whom Jennie has relationships die and Jennie is left alone with her illegitimate daughter. In addition to this destitute woman, Dreiser incorporated two powerful men: George Brander, a United States Senator and Lester Kane, the son of an affluent manufacturer. Remarkably, the inclusion of powerful men allowed Dreiser to emphasize the uncontrollability of life in the novel, which was a clever way of deconstructing former narratives of moral and social guidance. In fact, with Hurstwood and Drouet, Dreiser had already signaled the Darstellung of powerful men in his first novel, but it became clearer in Jennie Gerhardt. These powerful male characters were destined to become more prominent in his following novels, serving a slightly different function in Dreiser’s attempts to protest against the status quo both personally and socially. Dreiser’s interest in writing about women lasted only until the early 1910s. For Dreiser, women were a mystery in his early adolescence, but with time and numerous relationships with women, this mystery disappeared, leaving disappointment in its place. Moreover, his occupation as an editor for women’s magazines allowed him to gain a deeper insight into the female identity. By the early 1910s, Dreiser did not really care to explore female psychology in his novels any more, as he said, “because I know more about women now” (qtd. in Loving 218). Women were simpler than he initially thought. Also, the pain that the loss of his mother created in his heart seemed to fade in the second decade of the century. He had come to realize that no woman could be like his mother. As a result, women no longer posed a mystery for Dreiser; the woman question no longer occupied Dreiser’s mind as strongly as it did before. He quit writing about women, but he quit neither writing nor protesting through literature. As he said, he still needed to express himself via literature “for about four or five books” more (qtd. in Loving 199). From the early 1910s on, his other objectives and desires started to dominate his themes and motifs. Success had always been a key goal for Dreiser, but by the 1910s, his desire for it had grown profoundly. He had turned 40 in 1911 and still had not achieved the success he wanted. Yet, writing was too slow in bringing him the success he described. He neither earned enough nor became very popular, as his novels before The Financier demonstrate. After Jennie Gerhardt, he rethought the function of his literature and came up with a “shortcut” to the success he was dreaming of. Accordingly, in the subsequent years, he quit writing about the woman as a serious subject that is worthy of analysis. Instead, he started to fictionalize an alternative universe, in which he would be more successful – “how it would have been” in fiction – and

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thereby deconstruct former narratives through stories of wish fulfillment. In the early 1910s, Dreiser used fiction as a tool to fulfill the wishes that he could not fulfill in real life. This new function of literature fit Dreiser’s philosophy. As he says, “any craving or desire based on some necessity of the individual essence, and which lurks as a wish or thought in the mind long enough, will eventually make it further appearance in a form reasonably suitable to and characteristic of the individual of which it is a part” (Dawn 442). By the 1910s, Dreiser was aware that his craving was not possible to realize in the material world; only fiction could simulate the fulfillment of his wishes. In a similar vein, he says, our uttermost dreams of love or possession or power are transmuted – by what magic I know not – into lands, power, works of art, achievements in science or thought, houses, position, affection, public applause; in short, achievement in any field. As we think, not only so we are, but so we become. (Dawn 423)

In other words, human desire can and will lead to success in different fields, not only through literature as a profession but also in thought, through fiction. Considering the fact that Dreiser insisted on literature even though it did not bring the success of which he dreamed, he saw the possibility that he could realize his objectives fictionally – not through the social, cultural and economic capital novel writing could bring, but through its potential as a venue of wish fulfillment. This new function strengthened fiction’s importance for Dreiser and fueled his unstoppable drive to write. Frank Cowperwood of The Financier is “a figure of wish fulfillment, in whom the author has embodied and realized all the desires to which circumstances have denied satisfaction in his own life” (Whipple 75). Dreiser identified himself with Frank Cowperwood, as several of his statements in his autobiographical works confirm. Cowperwood is Dreiser because the former confirms the latter’s equation of both business and art to speculation. Cowperwood thinks in The Financier that “Buying and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was an art,” in fact, a “great art” (42, 8). In order to carry out both finance and art, a man needs imagination and speculation. More importantly, as a speculative activity, both finance and art could bring supreme satisfaction without boundaries, as explored earlier. This similarity between Dreiser and the protagonist reveals that The Financier was Dreiser’s way of imagining and projecting himself into the successful setting he desired. In the novel, Cowperwood was to overcome social and moral boundaries, escape the fatherly rules and create irritating scandals for the dominant values on behalf of Theodore Dreiser.

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His identification with successful businessmen assumes a non-ironic Darstellung of the character of Frank Cowperwood. Therefore, it is rather difficult to agree with scholars like Mukherjee, who considers The Financier as a book of irony, which takes the character of Frank as “a representative figure, a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm of American society” (72). According to this view, Frank Cowperwood is not a character of wish fulfillment but rather a figure that symbolizes the inner unified core of an era, criticizing the greed among businessmen of the period.11 However, Dreiser was still full of desires by the time he wrote the novel, so the novel was not only a perception of his youthful desires “in the ironic light of his present knowledge,” as Mukherjee argues (73). Dreiser had a good feeling about the rich as well as riches; he dreamed of wealth himself, fictionalized it also as a way of escaping “civilizatory control” (Fluck, “Beast” 205) and tried to gain popularity, success, power and thus satisfaction via his financier. Dreiser wanted to problematize the woman in his first two novels; therefore, he utilized the abundant material available at home. When he shifted his fiction’s emphasis to wish fulfillment, he saw that there was no one who could achieve the things he was dreaming of at home. Accordingly, he had to look for the material outside: he turned to his experience in newspapers and his journalistic instincts and did extensive research on American business and economic history. In December 1905, the American financier and railway tycoon Charles Yerkes died while trying to monopolize the London underground system, following his financial success in different sectors in the US. His death prompted a number of newspaper articles, columns and opinions in the progressive atmosphere of the period. Dreiser clipped and kept one of those news pieces, which was entitled “The Materials of a Great Novel.” It proposed that the “Yerkes affair alone presents enough raw material to lay the foundations of another Comedie Humaine if the novelist capable of using it had the courage of his genius” (qtd. in Loving 223). This call was directed explicitly at Howells or James, naively, as if Howells had not written a novel of business considered to be highly genteel already in 1906 or as if James had not said describing business requires “a really grasping imagination” (Theory

11 Theodore Dreiser’s novel was celebrated in German Democratic Republic because many East German intellectuals read the book as Mukherjee did. In a review in the Berliner Zeitung on August 12, 1953, Sabine Brandt writes, “Der Dichter nimmt von Anfang an eine konsequent demokratische Haltung ein und kritisiert die kapitalistische Gesellschaft vom Standpunkt des ausgebeuteten Volkes, vom Standpunkt der Zukunft” (3). [My Translation: “The poet takes a democratic stance from the outset and criticizes capitalist society from the standpoint of an exploited nation and from the standpoint of future”].

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of Fiction 46) rather than raw material. Instead, this call was apparently accepted by Dreiser, who would have been more than happy to be the American Balzac – as successful and influential as he was. In the following years, he did extensive research on the life of Yerkes and so the Trilogy of Desire was born. Dreiser did not choose just any businessman; in fact, his careful selection of Yerkes is crucially performative in itself: the figure of Yerkes enabled Dreiser to escape Victorian moralism and thereby offer intensity through his literature. Before opting for Yerkes as his model financier, Dreiser “looked into the careers of twenty American capitalists” active in the post-Civil War period. Among them, he selected Yerkes because it was “the most interesting of them” (qtd. in Matthiessen 129). Josephson is highly insightful in accounting for this choice, because the businessmen who were richer than Yerkes were puritanical and pious, with the exception of Carnegie, a child of radical Scotch weavers. Only one of them, Fisk, was given to free living, drinking and fleshpots in youth; in private life they were generally discreet, sober, well-controlled, their strongest lust being the pecuniary appetite. (32)

From a naturalist’s perspective, they were too traditional; if Dreiser fictionalized the lives of this group, he would not be able to deny Victorian moralism. In other words, the selection of Yerkes over other businessmen was a careful decision which allowed Dreiser to write a naturalist novel of protest through the representation of wish fulfillment. Reading the novel as an adaptation of Yerkes’s life would not be wrong. However, this attempt cannot be reduced to another account of Yerkes’s biography, not only because Dreiser obviously used his imagination broadly in depicting Yerkes’s private life and feelings, but also because Dreiser ignored several details or rather selected the events in Yerkes’s life in order to fit his construction. In short, Yerkes was more an inspiration for Dreiser than a model; like most authors who are inspired by real events and fictionalize them in their literary works, Dreiser fictionalized the life of a tycoon. However, what he was doing was essentially creative writing: The Financier became one of the prime examples of American literary naturalism rather than being considered as a biography of Charles Yerkes in the coming decades. Thanks to his meticulous research, Dreiser was able to include highly technical transaction schemes from the financial world of post-Civil War America. The incorporation of Yerkes’s biography, as well as the technicalities, of business allowed Dreiser to create the effect of mimesis. The financial world was complex

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for the uninformed reader: though most Americans were bombarded with coverage regarding finance, not many knew how it really functioned. In the face of such ignorance, Dreiser didactically externalized financial dealings in detail, making finance intelligible, accessible and follow-able for the reading public. What was presented in the form of cause-and-effect relationships shed light on “shaded” and “unausgesprochen” (Auerbach 13) details of finance and thus “seemed” highly plausible and real for the financial world of the time. As Mencken says of Dreiser’s novels, “do I give the impression that the result is dullness, that all this persistent, undeviating effort leads to nothing but a confused and meaningless piling up of words? […] [T]he net effect is exactly opposite, [namely,] an almost perfect illusion of reality” (229). Furthermore, his in-depth research allowed Dreiser to overcome possible logical contradictions that novelists might inadvertently include when dealing with technical themes about which they know little. This, too, contributed to the reality effect immensely. Lastly, although the starting point for the novel was quite personal – deconstructing former narratives through stories of wish fulfillment – Dreiser’s novel had a broad context and implications: he was able to capture the Zeitgeist of his time. Dreiser’s explanation shortly before the publication of the novel confirms this: “any one who follows the detailed study of Cowperwood’s life would fancy perhaps that it was more a man than a condition that I was after.” However, “In ‘The Financier,’ I have not taken a man so much as I have a condition” (Interviews 34-5) – one which prevailed throughout the US. In A Hoosier Holiday, he explains what he meant by this “condition:” The spirit of America at that time was so remarkable. It was just entering on that vast, splendid, most lawless and most savage period in which the great financiers, now nearly all dead, were plotting and conniving the enslavement of the people and belaboring each other for power. […] Actually, the average American then believed that the possession of money would certainly solve all his earthly ills. You could see it in the faces of the people, in their step and manner. Power, power, power, – everyone was seeking power in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was almost an angry dissatisfaction with inefficiency, or slowness, or age, or anything which did not tend directly to the accumulation of riches. The American world of that day wanted you to eat, sleep and dream money and power. (171, 172)

In other words, Dreiser aimed to represent the core thoughts and feelings of the era, such as longing for power, money and satisfaction on a national level – to register what was in “America’s mind.” However, the incorporation of such broad social ideas does not confirm Mukherjee’s idea of an ironic double vision in The

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Financier. Dreiser’s admission of the fact that he was heavily interested in social conditions does not actually mean that Dreiser promoted the poor and condemned the rich in the sense Upton Sinclair did. As Dreiser adds to his statement above, “And I, to whom my future was still a mystery (would that it were so still!), was dreaming of love and power, too” (A Hoosier Holiday 172). Dreiser was able to record the Zeitgeist because he saw himself as no different from other Americans he described; he was “the average American,” if not socially or culturally, surely psychologically. The Financier was thus the result of reconciliation between Dreiser’s inner life and broader social life – America. This combination made the novel successful as a central naturalist text; in fact, if Sister Carrie made Dreiser an American naturalist, The Financier made him one of the best representatives of American naturalism. The motif of business was crucial for its success. As a contemporary anonymous critic stated, “our descendants will have in [the novel] the means of reconstructing for themselves the business life and immorality of a whole period” (“Recent Reflections of a Novel-Reader” 233).12 The novel accomplished more than merely showing the business life or (the lack of) moral questions in the period. Like most timeless works of art, The Financier has become a great novel by chronicling of the intricacies of his time in a way contemporary writers rarely accomplished – intricacies that could be articulated through the motif of business. As Kazin says, “we have all identified Dreiser’s work with reality that, for more than half a century now, he has been for us not a writer like other writers, but a whole chapter of American life” (“The Stature” 49). Finance was a “great art” for Dreiser; as a motif, it allowed him to create the effects he wanted to while at the same time fulfilling his wishes. Even though Dreiser thought, “Life was better than any other book” (Dawn 368) early in his life, since he did not have yet that life he yearned for, he wrote a book about it – the second best thing after actually living Cowperwood’s life.

4.3 “UNCIVILIZING” BUSINESS IN THE FINANCIER Dreiser utilizes the Darstellung of business within an inimitable textual strategy to evoke the effect of scandalous intensity in his novel. The Financier includes a pseudo-realist narrative which resembles the texts American realists wrote and

12 For a detailed discussion of Dreiser’s novel and its relationship to the Progressive Era, see William E. Moddelmog, Reconstituting Authority: American Fiction in the Province of the Law, 1880-1920, U of Iowa P, 2000, pp. 190-220.

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which dominates roughly the first half of the novel, from the inception to Frank’s penitentiary days. Dreiser utilizes this pseudo-realist narrative to counterbalance the naturalist conceptions of reality, which require realist conceptions as reference points to have the necessary effect on the reader: it is a way of showing what is to be constructed before deconstructing it. Subsequently, Dreiser gradually deconstructs the realist narrative outlined in the beginning of the novel with Frank’s controversial financial triumph. In other words, while The Financier starts like a realist novel, through which Dreiser gains the trust of the reader and raises the expectation that the novel will end like a realist one, it ends as a naturalist one. The Darstellung of Frank’s triumph creates the potential to shock the reader through the intensity it inherently possesses – through the clash of the Darstellung with the dominant values in the period. The motif of business is crucial for this affective process: Dreiser utilizes the motif both to construct the pseudo-realist narrative at the inception and to deconstruct it at the end of the novel. The Pseudo-Realist Narrative To begin with, the motif of business allows Dreiser to construct individuals, a functioning social structure and a process of Bildung in a way typical of the realist writer. Frank’s parents epitomize the well-integrated individuals of the realist narrative. In line with the moralism that dominates the behavior of the realist characters, Henry Cowperwood “was as much afraid of expressing a rabid or unpopular political or social opinion as he was of being seen with an evil character” (2). Always tactful in his daily deeds with the aim of socially advancing, he was “too honest, too cautious;” in fact, he was “the soul of caution” (2). Accordingly, “he was very careful of whom or with whom he talked” (2). As a socially and ethically well-integrated individual, he had neither the willingness nor the power to stand out in the society he inhabited: “he lacked in a great measure the two things that are necessary for distinction in any field – magnetism and vision” (2). Similarly, Frank’s mother, Mrs. Cowperwood’s personal traits reiterate the traditional mindset of a well-integrated female living within the Victorian moralism of the realist text. She is “of a religious temperament” and worries a lot about her children “getting in with bad boys […] and seeing and hearing things they should neither see nor hear” (3). She is as traditional and self-abnegating as Silas Lapham’s mother, whom Lapham describes as: a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from daylight till dark – and from dark till daylight, I

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was going to say; for I don’t know how she got any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD. But it ain’t her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I’d run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet yet! (Howells, Silas Lapham 5-6)

In other words, both Silas and Frank have traditional and self-sacrificing mothers, in line with the realist attempt to orient the reader ethically and socially and the naturalist attempt to start like a realist text. With all these traits, Frank’s parents resemble the loyal, dull, ethical, socially aware and middle-path characters that the Laphams in Howells’s novel reach at the end of their moral rise. Crucially, Dreiser externalizes the traditional, realist, well-integrated status of Frank’s parents through the motif of business. Henry Cowperwood’s caution becomes palpable, crucially, through business. When Henry Cowperwood realizes the extent of Frank’s investments, he warns his son, saying, “aren’t you afraid you’re going a little too fast in these matters? You’re carrying a lot of loans these days” (159). Moreover, he is too loyal – in line with his social and ethical integration to the community – and Dreiser dramatizes this through business terms. He becomes “exceedingly grateful” (1) for the promotion that enables him to move his family to a larger house and a better neighborhood. He repeats this pattern when Frank decides to quit the commission house Waterman & Company, saying, “Don’t you think you are doing them an injustice not to tell them?” (30). As Robbins argues, “Gratitude to his employers is a sure sign that […] he is going nowhere.” Significantly, “Loyalty will keep you in or near your place” (97); that is, stable and integrated into a sustainable social structure – all revealed in his business environment. Surprisingly, Dreiser externalizes Mrs. Cowperwood’s socially and ethically integrated nature through business as well. When young Frank offers to buy her any present she wants for Christmas, she refuses, saying, “Nothing, I don’t want anything. I have my children” (30). This refusal is indeed a refusal of the gift economy, which is essentially a matter of exchange: people, including family members, buy gifts for each other with the expectation that they will receive gifts in return. In other words, “Gifts are never free” (Robbins 100); instead, gifts create an unspoken obligation to return them. One difference from the actual economic exchange is that the exchange rate of the gifts is less than one-to-one: often, there is no obligation to buy a gift that costs the same amount of money. Yet, considering the fact that the exchange value of products in the actual economy constantly

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fluctuates, exchanging gifts is not that different from the exchanges in the actual economy; hence, it is like business. By rejecting the gift exchange, Frank’s mother rejects business – the economy of exchange altogether. She wants to give her love without taking anything in return. The Darstellung of such a conventional character illustrates how traditional she is, like the realist Darstellung of a mother. In other words, business not only reveals how traditional, loyal and well-integrated Frank’s father is, it also demonstrates Frank’s mother’s ethical integrity – the integrity that comforts the reader by revealing that business can still be rejected and kept outside of the home in line with the pseudo-realist narrative. In addition to this repetition of a nostalgic character typology through Frank’s parents, the inception of the novel externalizes a tight and comprehensible social network in the way the realist text does. Along with its political activities, the business activities of this social network make the group comprehensible and “externaliz-able” in the first place. The main figures of this political-economic sphere are Edward Malia Butler, Henry A. Mollenhauer and Mark Simpson. Butler is a contractor working in the field of drainage and sanitation in Philadelphia. As an Irish immigrant, he is a devout Republican. In the elections, he has a big influence on the Irish immigrants, ward leaders, and Catholic politicians. Henry A. Mollenhauer is a coal dealer and an investor. He holds political influence over German immigrants and some of the Americans. Mark Simpson, a US Senator, is slightly different from the other two in that he is principally a politician and his business activities remain in the background. Although the book is largely about the activities of the Big Three, other characters, described in less detail, serve to outline the network in a realist manner. George Stener is the city treasurer-elect, who administers the city money. Together with Frank, he invests the money that belongs to the city. Similarly, Edward Strobik is a stone dealer and the owner of a brickyard. In the world of politics, he is a councilman and a ward leader. He is Mollenhauer’s tool in the council and sees to it that the right decisions are taken there. This social structure is palpable and comprehensible because the characters are interconnected through business. At the inception of the novel, business activities confirm the well-integrated, stable and established nature of the social structure in a way Howells describes at the end of The Rise of Silas Lapham. In Chapter 3, the narrator explains there are auctions held in Philadelphia – auctions in which Frank participates and makes a profit. Crucially, these auctions are open to everyone. In fact, they are so open that even a childlike Frank can participate and profit from trading soaps to Mr. Dalrymple, his mother’s grocer. The Darstellung of this openness gives the reader the feeling that everyone can participate in economic activities and there is a place for everyone in society. Put differently, not all niches are taken; some are still open

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for newcomers who wish to be a part of this functioning society. The representation of a grocer who does not think of buying cheap soap even though he has apparently been selling it for years is necessary for the reader to believe that he can be a part of society economically, as long as he does the right thing. The Darstellung of such a social structure reiterates the realist idea that the US is a land of opportunities but people can be happy only if they deal with these opportunities fairly. Crucially, it is the auctions in Philadelphia that allow Dreiser to create such a society that resembles the way realists represented society. In the same way, the business activities that are described in the beginning of the novel reiterate the nostalgic stability and integration that the realist Darstellung of society was based on. At the auction, the products sold are coffee, vinegar and soap; they are sold in large amounts and on limited margins of profit or loss. Also, there is a fish market in Philadelphia, where “Delaware Bay fishermen” sell seafood to common people. In both business ventures, profit margins are low. Larger margins would threaten the sustainability of society in the text; thus, it would make the representation of a functioning society less realistic and believable. By contrast, it is impossible to threaten the integrity of society with wholesale trade of commodities and smaller margins. In that sense, these business ventures are no different from the paint Silas Lapham sells. It is not surprising that Dreiser brackets and deemphasizes the finance in the beginning of the novel to create the Darstellung of pseudo-realism. Frank does not experience finance or other abstract businesses where characters could aim for larger margins of profit; he only hears about them – for early externalization of the financial world would threaten the effects the pseudo-realist narrative inherently evokes. As explored in Chapter 2 and 3, one of the distinguishing features of classical American realism is the representation of the “individual growth” of characters. This process of maturation is also clear in the beginning of The Financier: as a child, “He was forever pondering, pondering – one fact astonishing him quite as much as another – for he could not figure out how this thing he had come into – this life – was organized.” At the end of his experiences in the fish market, he learns that “Things lived on each other – that was it” (5). Significantly, this process of maturation takes place in the world of finance in the novel. When he starts working for the Tighe’s Co., he soon picked up all of the technicalities of the situation. A “bull,” he learned, was one who bought in anticipation of a higher price to come; and if he was “loaded up” with a “line” of stocks he was said to be “long.” He sold to “realize” his profit, or if his margins were exhausted he was “wiped out.” (41)

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The novel is full of such learning experiences, which emphasize the Bildungsroman qualities of the novel, hence reminds the reader of the realist narrative and creates a similar expectation from the narrative. The realist Darstellung of “individual growth” requires characters who have not grown up yet; they are “narcissist and childish” (Fluck, “Beast” 200) and thus deviant, like Silas Lapham in the lead-up to the climax. The motif of business allows Dreiser to externalize the process through which Frank can deviate like a realist character and thereby create the need for Bildung. Firstly, business allows Dreiser to create a Frank who gambles. According to American realists, gambling is deviant behavior: one of the reasons why Lapham fails at the end is his investments in the stock exchange. After Waterman Co., Frank starts working as an agent of Tighe & Company, which is a stock-brokerage company. Once he understands the stock exchange, he concludes that it is “gambling pure and simple” (43). Accordingly, “he had come to the conclusion that he did not want to be a stock gambler” (48). However, Frank cannot resist temptation: Frank’s abstinence from trading on the stock exchange does not last long. After he establishes his notebrokerage company, “A certain Joseph Zimmerman, a dry-goods man for whom he had handled various note issues, suggested that he undertake operating in streetrailway shares for him, and this was the beginning of his return to the floor” (63), that is, the stock market. Soon after he opens his own company, he becomes an “insider banker,” who is entitled to invest the city funds. After some time, George Stener, the city treasurer, comes up “with a proposition which was not quite the same thing as stock-gambling, and yet it was” (94): Frank is asked to invest city funds in the stock exchange as well. Just like Lapham, who cannot resist temptation and invests his money in the stock exchange, Frank cannot resist temptation and continues gambling, through which Dreiser constructs an inexperienced and deviant character like those often found at the beginning of the realist text. Moreover, Frank resists social integration, which realists frowned upon, as it was their ultimate objective to “unite rather than sever humanity” (Howells, Criticism 67). Dreiser dramatizes this resistance through the motif of business. From the moment he starts working at Waterman Co. up to the Chicago Fire, Frank receives several offers to settle down and become a part of the existing social structure like his parents. In fact, both companies he works for offer him good conditions. The Tighe Co. even offers a “minor partnership,” but “it failed to tempt him” (50). This demonstrates that he does not want to stay where he is, working nine to five and living a “small” life. He continues his resistance even after establishing his own note brokerage company. His position as an insider banker ascribes him a place in the political-economic structure like Stener, Strobik and others. Yet, he wants to move up. To do this, he violates the agreement he made with

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the Big Three, who originally envisioned Frank as an investor working for them. Subsequently, he betrays the trust of the Big Three: in addition to having an extramarital affair with Mr. Butler’s daughter Aileen, he invests the city funds much more heavily than the Big Three knows, expects or would allow. Moreover, he holds railway stocks, which the Big Three would not allow Frank to own if they knew. In other words, he grows too big within the city, which is against the interests of the Big Three. This growth is an indication of his rejection of pressure to integrate into the social structure. In addition, Frank attempts to transcend agency – responsibility, transparency, and accountability – in his life, which is seriously aberrant from a realist point of view. Realists were obsessed with “how to maintain a notion of responsible human agency” (Thomas, Contract 120), and emphasized the responsibility of each individual to be accountable and transparent in his activities. These were necessary for a unified and functioning social structure American realists attempted to create through their fiction. Accordingly, they represented characters who gradually become more responsible, accountable and transparent in their social lives. The motif of business allows Dreiser to create a Frank who defiantly attempts to transcend agency. After his experiences in Waterman and Tighe, Frank realizes that “A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler – acting for himself or for others – he must employ such. A real man – a financier – was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led” (44). It is clear that working for others as an agent will not satisfy his desires: he will just be a “small” salaried officer, while his employers will benefit from his decisions. What is more interesting in his realization is that Frank does not want to be an agent even of himself; he wants to avoid transparency, responsibility and accountability in his business activities just like trusts did in the late nineteenth century.13 For instance, his transition from a notebroker to an insider banker is an attempt to be less visible to the public and hide the questionable nature of his activities. In fact, he wants to be invisible even as an insider and that is the reason why he keeps most of his business activities secret from the Big Three. Frank’s attempts to hide his financial activities are attempts to escape public control over his deeds and thereby deeply divergent from a realist perspective. In short, Frank needs Bildung. At the end of the realist Bildungsroman, deviant characters often realize their mistakes and grow up, constituting the climax of the realist text. Dreiser constructs a similar pseudo-climax through the motif of business. In some realist texts such

13 For more information on trusts and agency and their relationship to American literature, see Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford UP, 1991.

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as Silas Lapham, a shocking final experience paves the way for the ultimate growth of the character. Silas Lapham grows up as a result of his several experiences, but the last blow is the “accidental” burning of his house on the Back Bay. In The Financier, the motif of business allows Dreiser to reiterate this tendency of constructing a “final blow” reminiscent of the realist narrative through the Chicago Fire, which “burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky” (165) like the fire that burns Lapham’s house. The Chicago Fire is a shocking blow to begin with, because by burning the financial areas in Chicago, it bankrupts Frank. Following the fire, Frank’s loans are called in and he cannot meet his obligations. Subsequently, he ends up in prison. Without the motif of business, it would not be easy for Dreiser to have Frank fail, which is a necessary lesson for a deviant character, in a believable and attributable way on the side of the reader. In addition, Frank’s trial and his rehabilitation create the feeling that the social structure “corrects” Frank’s deviant behavior – like the realist attempt to orient the reader – all through business. Frank is guilty because of his business affairs: of Frank’s crimes, the district attorney Dennis Shannon says, “We have direct and positive evidence of all that we have thus far contended” (334). Accordingly, he wants Frank to be convicted on four counts: larceny, larceny as bailee, embezzlement, embezzlement on a check – all business-related crimes. At the end of the trial, the jury and the majority of justices, who largely represent society, find Frank guilty on all counts and he is convicted. They articulate the realist narrative in their decision. As the narrator says, “Rarely would you have found a man of great distinction [in the jury]; but very frequently a group of men who were possessed of no small modicum of that interesting quality known as hard common sense” (3301). “The hard common sense” refers to the Victorian moralism the realist narrative adopted and it clearly condemns Frank’s activities. The Darstellung of social guidance through punishment clearly demonstrates that Dreiser’s narrative is similar to the habituated realist narratives such as Silas Lapham, where Sewell offers guidance throughout the narrative. Dreiser even illustrates the process of rehabilitation in prison through the motif of business. Interestingly, it is a realist form of business that offers rehabilitation to Frank. While serving his term, the penitentiary decides to teach Frank a “new trade. […] [He has] got to learn to cane chairs” (461), as a way of realizing his mistakes. The Darstellung of caning chairs as an alternative trade to finance is not surprising, because as handiwork, it requires manual labor. A person’s manual labor is limited: he can cane only so many chairs in a day. Accordingly, the margin of profit or loss is kept extremely small in contrast to finance – the tool that led him to subvert the realist moralism. As such, caning chairs is similar to selling fish or running a paint mine, which realists favored due to their orienting power in

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contrast to the forms of business that lead Frank to deviate. Dreiser’s selection of different business forms throughout the novel reiterates the relationship between his pragmatic objectives and the business organizations: when he builds a pseudorealist narrative, he chooses a traditional low-margin activity; when he offers intensity, he chooses finance as a venue that escapes Victorian moralism. In short, Dreiser uses the motif of business to represent not only Frank’s deviant behavior but also the attempts to correct such behavior and even the forms of business confirm the pragmatic functions of the novel. Frank’s loss of his business, his conviction and subsequent imprisonment constitutes a climax in the eyes of the reader habituated to the realist narrative. In Howells’s novel, Lapham’s loss of his house and business is the actual climax and the resolution is Lapham’s growth. The narrative until Frank’s imprisonment in The Financier leads the reader to believe that the loss of Frank’s business and conviction is the climax. By putting Frank in prison after he cannot meet his obligations to his partners, Dreiser creates the expectation that Frank will be rehabilitated from his deviant behavior and will not repeat the same “mistakes.” Naturally, the reader is relieved, as is often the case after a realist climax. Since readers do not know the end of the novel as of Frank’s imprisonment, it is natural that they consider Frank’s failure the turning point, after which the character normally grows up. However, this is not a real climax but a pseudo-climax. The Financier continues after Frank’s conviction, only to reach its real climax with Frank’s shocking success in the financial world of Philadelphia. This cameo appearance of the motif of business makes the pseudo-realist narrative possible – the narrative which is crucial for the ultimate effect of intensity to function. Obviously, simply presenting disturbing anti-realist narratives from the beginning to the end risked putting off the reader, making the necessary process of immersion impossible. Readers needed the familiar Homeric externalization to become engaged in the story. Through the detailed externalization of the business world as well as the details of finance in Philadelphia, Dreiser invites the reader to the false safety of American realism. Only after this reassuring narrative can readers’ expectations be subverted effectively. Subsequently, Dreiser gradually deconstructs this pseudo-realist narrative – a strategy which has the potential to subvert the horizon of expectations of the reader – and thereby create the effect of intensity through the motif of business.

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The Deconstruction of the Pseudo-Realist Narrative Before actually deconstructing it, though, Dreiser foreshadows this process through allusions, symbols and other figurative tools that bely the Homeric externalization of the initial pseudo-realist narrative. To begin with, the full name of the protagonist is Frank Algernon Cowperwood, through which Dreiser clearly refers to Horatio Alger Jr., the writer of several business and money-related texts, including the Ragged Dick series.14 Lundquist argues that The Financier is “essentially a retelling of the standard Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story” (64). Despite this reference, Dreiser’s novel does not merely repeat Horatio Alger’s stories. As Warren argues, Frank, “except for the fact of success, has scarcely anything in common with honest little Horatio” (24). Rather, Dreiser’s reference frames Frank in contrast to Ragged Dick: Frank is a reversed version of Horatio Alger Jr.; he is a non-Alger and thus a non-Dick. Accordingly, Dreiser reveals that Frank does not aim for “lower middle-class respectability” as Dick does (Pitofsky 280); he seeks individualistic success that comes as a result of resistance to social integration. With this allusion, Dreiser foreshadows the aim of the novel as well: to show that antecedent success narratives like Alger’s are no longer functional at the turn of the century. Instead, the novel is going to deconstruct Alger’s conceptions of reality. In the beginning of The Financier, Frank – still a child – witnesses a fight at a local fish market between a lobster and a squid. Left in a fish tank, the lobster and squid fight for days and after a long struggle, the squid dies. Walter Benn Michaels, in his otherwise brilliant book, argues that the fight is “curiously inapplicable to the events” (76) in the novel. In contrast to his argument, this puzzling incident is central to the novel and represents a broader pattern reaching beyond the fish market. It not only symbolically covers the way naturalists perceived the American realist conceptions of reality but it also foreshadows the way Dreiser sought to offer a “better, more real, and more natural” conception of reality in the subsequent parts of the novel. Through this fight, Dreiser symbolically defines the relationship between the individual and the society of the time. In contrast to the Darstellung of society in American realism, where the social structure rehabilitates deviant characters such as Silas Lapham, in The Financier, society has the

14 Significantly, Dreiser does not compare his protagonist with Alger’s; rather, the comparison is between Frank Algernon Cowperwood and Alger himself. In this way, Dreiser implies that Frank writes his own story as a writer does. It is not Dreiser who “invents” the reality; it is the reality, bare and unmediated, in line with the Homeric aesthetics.

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power to determine the freedom of the individual, condemn and punish him. In this incident, it is the seaman who brings the squid and lobster to the tank and people in the market offer the squid to the lobster: “The lobster, it appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as the squid was considered his rightful prey” (3-4). The fact that the squid dies because people put the animals in the tank symbolically demonstrates the power of society in shaping human life in the novel. This is the universal rule in the lead-up to the climax and applies to Frank as well: Frank’s experiences between the Chicago Fire and his release from penitentiary reveal that Frank is the squid in the tank that society – the Big Three and other functionaries – put in the tank by considering him “a scapegoat possibly” (258). However, Dreiser considers such a one-sided and deterministic relationship between society and the individual – between the Big Three and Frank – unnatural, which he reveals through this symbol as well. The fight takes place in a fish tank, not in nature – their usual habitat. If they were in nature, the squid could have fled, considering the long duration of the fight. In other words, what society does is highly unnatural; it forces individuals to live artificially. Frank’s conviction after the Chicago Fire makes him the squid confined in the tank. From a naturalist perspective, his conviction is neither natural nor fair. After all, the chaos in the system is not wholly his responsibility; he did not start the fire in Chicago, as he says. This fish tank also foreshadows what will come next by begging for a better narrative. If the former narratives of “good” society prove in fact to be unfair and hostile, integration into these is untenable, because they offer no solace. What Dreiser demonstrates at the end of the novel is the shattering of this unnatural tank through Frank’s triumph: behind proxy firms and names, Frank becomes a millionaire again as a result of astute financial transactions. In this way, he liberates himself from social constraints, which amounts to his arrival in his natural habitat. In other words, Dreiser reveals the deconstruction of the realist Darstellung of the relations between society and the individual by ultimately destroying the artificial social structure called society – a process which is clearly outside the realist moralism. In fact, non-externalized literary tools such as these are used infrequently in realist and naturalist texts because of their reference to larger-than-life concepts as found in Bible or Romantic narratives. Yet Dreiser accounts for his use of symbolism within the novel as well. As he employs the lack of spectatorial distance strategy throughout the text, his narrator initially perceives life like the protagonist – a child Frank. As children often cannot think like adults in highly complex terms, figurative tools are imperative for children to visualize the world around them.

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The symbolic representations in the beginning still fit the naturalist aesthetics outlined previously, because even though these figurative tools are not externalized, the reason for their use is externalized and make the novel realistic and believable. These symbolic caveats cannot be understood without reading the rest of the novel and a reader who reads the first a few chapters of the novel is very likely to consider the novel a realist one. However, the ending of the novel is quite different from the beginning; it is more naturalistic, as the lobster-squid fight foreshadows. From a naturalist point of view, this attempt to foreshadow deconstruction is understandable: it allows Dreiser to create pseudo-realist and naturalist narratives without disturbing their pragmatic results. The Darstellung of both seem to be contradictory and mutually exclusive at first; after all, it does not make sense to attack the realist narrative and create an imitation of it (even if it is only to discredit the realist narrative later) at the same time. This process of foreshadowing overcomes this possible contradiction without these narratives revoking, refuting or neutralizing each other. Specifically, Dreiser attempts to lull the reader at the beginning of the novel in order for the ultimate process of deconstruction to evoke intensity. This process of foreshadowing adds a caveat to the pseudo-realist narrative without disturbing the reassuring effect of mimesis at the inception. If Dreiser deconstructed the realist narrative through dramatized plot – through externalized events – at such an early phase of the novel, it would destroy the “realism” of the text, because a text that looks realist and yet deconstructs realism at the same time would offer neither deconstruction nor the ultimate intensity to readers. The deconstruction of the realist narrative comes indirectly and figuratively in the beginning instead of being explicitly externalized, because in this way Dreiser can reflect his critical views on the realist conceptions of reality without disturbing the reassuring effect of mimesis in such an early phase of the novel. The motif of business plays a vital role in this process of foreshadowing the naturalist narrative without refuting the novel’s pseudo-realism. Dreiser historicizes the beginning, making the inception look like it takes place at a far distant point in history, and justifies the distinction between the past and present through the motif of business. The present time in the novel starts from Frank’s adolescence on and continues until the end of the novel. In contrast, the beginning of the novel, where Frank is still a child, is narrated in retrospect. As the narrator says, “Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in existence – the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer, city delivery of mails” (1). The narrator’s words “we and he knew later” clearly positions him in a present that comes much later than Frank’s childhood. In this way, Dreiser creates a fairly clear distinction between the novel’s past and present, making it easier for the

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reader to believe in the possibility of major changes in the time that passes between the beginning and the ending of the novel. Significantly, the changes between the past and present become palpable for the narrator through these business-related inventions. Subsequently, Dreiser explicitly deconstructs the pseudo-realist narrative by representing a variety of anti-realist realities, which become palpable through the motif of business. Dreiser deconstructs characters in Philadelphia with his description of Frank (a difference which makes the ending of the novel more believable by rendering Frank’s ultimate success attributable and accountable as well). It is clear from the very beginning that Frank is a starkly different character from the established members of the realist social structure in Philadelphia. As Eby argues, “Dreiser insists that Cowperwood’s point of view distinguishes the financier from almost everyone around him” (Status Quo 106). Dreiser equates Frank with the naturalist narrative by presenting the reader with Frank’s uniqueness – his distinction to other characters. Dreiser outlines a quite unusual childhood: unlike most children who are sensitive and cry often, Frank was not only “a sturdy youth,” but he also “never had an ache or pain,” just like a machine. Physically, too, Frank is attractive: “He was a clean, stalky, shapely boy, with a bright, clean-cut, incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide forehead; short, bristly, dark-brown hair.” Moreover, “Frank Cowperwood, even at ten, was a natural-born leader […] [and] ruled his brothers with a rod of iron” Accordingly, his brothers “looked up to Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened to eagerly” (3). While his parents constitute the “even-handed […] middle path” (Elliott 295, Lehan 65) through their traditional and well-integrated social status, Frank’s childhood reveals that he is all but the middle path; he escapes the habituated notion of what a child in literature could be. Accordingly, the Darstellung of his character transcends the realist “civilizatory control” (Fluck, “Beast” 205). In line with the Homeric externalization of the realist and naturalist text, Dreiser externalizes Frank’s naturalist uniqueness in this social structure through a Darstellung which combines heredity and business. What sets Frank apart is his resemblance to his businessman uncle Seneca Davis – a resemblance which Frank’s brothers lack. Upon seeing Frank, Uncle Seneca feels this resemblance, which he reveals by saying, “Well, you might have named him after me. There’s something to this boy.” This is not an abstract resemblance though; Dreiser externalizes it crucially through the motif of business. After pointing out to the resemblance between him and Frank, Uncle Seneca says, “How would you like to come down to Cuba and be a planter, my boy?” The resemblance that strikes Seneca at first is confirmed later even more clearly through business. When Seneca learns that Frank is interested in money like him, he says, “What’s bred in the bone, eh?

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[…] Nancy, you’re breeding a financier here, I think. He talks like one” (2). Uncle Seneca’s statements not only foreshadow Frank’s successful future in the realm of finance but also give a causal and well-externalized explanation for Frank’s distinctiveness to his parents and his mental resemblance to Uncle Seneca through business. In fact, this resemblance reveals a literary dialogue with Howells, who accounts for Tom’s difference from his parents through business as well. This dialogue is a dialogue of function: both novelists utilize business to externalize in line with the effects they aimed to evoke through their texts: social orientation in realism, intensity in naturalism. Accordingly, although both writers utilize business to externalize cause-and-effect relationships in line with the Homeric aesthetics, Howells constructs a fairly ideal Tom through his resemblance to his hard-working grandfather, because Howells needs an ideal upper-class character to make the social unification with the hard-working Laphams possible. By contrast, the resemblance Dreiser establishes between Uncle Seneca and Frank avoids any sharp turns. The resemblance is a construction as a disguised deconstruction: it justifies Frank’s difference from his parents and accounts for his ultimate success without disturbing the mimetic realism at the inception of the novel. These uses of the motif demonstrate how business was constructed as a highly versatile motif; writers were able to form their literary texts as easily as dough in line with the pragmatic effects they wanted to evoke. Considering the fact that the material artists have technical, artistic and financial boundaries in general (e.g. the lack of colored cameras or voice recording systems in the early twentieth century, which decreased the reality effect of the movies), business seemed to offer supreme flexibility to the writers of the period. Dreiser deconstructs the realist narrative through his description of the social structure in the novel. Gradually, Frank (and the reader) realizes that the social structure in Philadelphia, which initially looked hospitable, peaceful, traditional, sustainable, i.e. realist, is rather different from the realist Darstellung of the social structure in general. A few representative examples in the business world illustrate this. After he opens his note-brokerage company, Frank learns that “All these city and State officials speculated” (63), unlike what realist writers represented. Apparently, they are experts in having “illegitimate gain, unethical” (108) through complicated schemes: They had a habit of depositing city and State funds with certain bankers and brokers as authorized agents or designated State depositories. The banks paid no interest – save to the officials personally. They loaned it to certain brokers on the officials’ secret order, and the latter invested it in “sure winners.” The bankers got the free use of the money a part of the

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time, the brokers another part: the officials made money, and the brokers received a fat commission. (63)

What is even worse from the realist point of view is that this evil social structure is not even controlled. “The newspapers were always talking about civic patriotism and pride but never a word about these things” (63). The public “did not know. It could not find out. […] The men who did [these illegitimate activities] were powerful and respected” (95), thus uncondemned. Probably most importantly, society is not as open as the auctions in the beginning claimed to reveal: “There was a political ring in Philadelphia in which the mayor, certain members of the council, the treasurer, the chief of police, the commissioner of public works, and others shared. It was a case generally of ‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’” (63). The Darstellung of the lack of meritocracy deconstructs the realist Darstellung of social affairs, surely shocking the contemporary reader looking for a solution to his dislocation in the period. In addition, Dreiser deconstructs the pseudo-realist narrative by incorporating elements from the classical realist Bildungsroman he constructs, again through the motif of business. In contrast to the pseudo-realist Bildung Dreiser sets up at the beginning of the novel, Frank does not undergo a realist process of maturation. After he goes to prison, he says, “I have had my lesson.” However, the lesson does not involve any rehabilitation in the realist sense, but has taught him how to escape the Victorian moralism of the realist society: “They caught me once, but they will not catch me again” (501). Thirteen months later, Frank comes out of the prison and with the experience he gains in the business world, he becomes a millionaire again in the financial crisis of 1873, “one of the most startling financial tragedies that the world has ever seen” (489), which constitutes the real climax of the novel. Through the motif of business, Dreiser demonstrates that The Financier is not a realist Bildungsroman, as he initially tricks the reader into believing; it is a naturalist Bildungsroman, where Frank’s process of maturation takes place outside of the individual growth narratives of Victorian moralism. Instead, Frank grows up just like an animal – to be precise, like the fish Mycteroperca Bonaci. At the end of the novel, the narrator states the most important feature of this species: its “almost unbelievable power of simulation.” That is, this fish species “lives a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions” (503). Frank is like the fish, and he has a superior capability to adapt to different conditions. In human terms, this sharp ability to adapt requires learning; that is, in contrast to the fish in question, Frank has the ability to recognize and learn what to adjust himself to – a process which Dreiser was able to illustrate

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through the world of finance. Dreiser’s Darstellung of this financial triumph deconstructs the realist Bildungsroman by revealing that Frank was right to resist receiving a realist Bildung, instead learning a naturalist reality – a process, which automatically shocks the readers habituated to antecedent narratives. Dreiser reveals Frank’s naturalist Bildung in the world of finance and utilizes the technical specifics of the financial world to create the effect of intensity. There are two kinds of speculators in the financial market: bulls and bears. Bulls are by far the more traditional group in this constellation. They try to buy at a low price, hoping that the prices will rise and they will profit. This is the simplest form of financial mindset. Understandably, “The general public […] is always overwhelmingly bullish” (Michaels 73). It is not only the general public interested in the financial world; the general readership in the late nineteenth century also favored bullish transactions. Crucially, economic stability is often the key to gradual increases in the market and bulls are aware that they are investing in stable and gradual growth in contrast to short, quick and massive gains. Any economic instability is likely to scare the bullish investor, as seen in the movements of foreign investments in countries experiencing social, political and economic upheaval today. Most importantly, bulls invest to profit as a group: the more economic stability, the greater number of investors profit – though within smaller margins – and eventually the country profits. As Cowing argues, great bulls in the market are in general associated with “builders,” “doers,” with “great dreams of the future” (qtd. in Michaels 286). They make the nation richer; therefore, they are associated with the American Dream. Joseph Kennedy, for instance, is said to have sold all his stocks after a shoeshine boy told him that he bought stocks in the Big Bull Market of the 1920s and became a part of the American Dream. Bears, on the other hand, represent a counter pole to the bulls in their highly “anti-social” investments. They try to sell (the stocks they previously bought) as fast as possible to drive the stock prices down and create a crisis, only to buy the same stocks again at much lower prices than they initially sold. As such, being a successful bear requires the expertise to manipulate the market consciously. Their aim is to convince other investors to sell their stocks at much lower prices than they actually worth in order to avoid a drastic loss. A bear needs to have enough stocks to be able to create fear among other stockholders. Yet, even though the markets are susceptible to events ranging “from the failure of a bank to the rumor that your second cousin’s grandmother has a cold” (40) as Tighe says in The Financier, neither the public nor the financiers are naïve; they are not easily scared. Events reminiscent of financial crises are thus perfect moments for bears because such moments arouse deep fear, doubt and restlessness in the market. Accordingly, they are rarely encountered in the market because of the expertise and amount of

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investment one needs to be a bear. Most importantly, in contrast to bulls, bears profit by destroying others’ wealth: the scared stockholders have to lose their shares in order for the bears to profit in this zero-sum game. In the pre-Chicago Fire period, Frank’s investments in street railway stocks are of a bullish nature, following the idea that “the city was growing. The incoming population would make great business in the future” (111). As a naïve and traditional financier, Frank wanted to grow with other financiers, the public and the nation together. As such, Frank’s bullish investments until the pseudo-climax build up the pseudo-realist narrative, reassuring the reader about the “safety” of the text. Frank’s failure in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire, however, teaches him that growing while letting others grow as a group or as a nation is impossible, as the social structure is too confining – like the fish tank. He learns that for some to gain, others inevitably have to lose. Having taken the lesson that being a bull failed him, Frank becomes a bear in the crisis of 1873. He gives orders to sell – everything – ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty points off, if necessary, in order to trap the unwary, depress the market, frighten the fearsome who would think he was too daring; and then he would buy, buy, buy, below these figures as much as possible, in order to cover his sales and reap a profit. (496)

Subsequently, he becomes a millionaire again, while selfishly destroying the wealth of others through a man called Stephen Wingate, as the market no longer trusts his name. Frank’s success as a bear, based on its selfish destruction of others’ wealth, deconstructs the realist Darstellung of the harmonious relationship between the individual and society. Realists’ objective to orient society required them to represent processes of reconciliation between characters and society and the public good. By contrast, The Financier decouples this familiar relationship, offering instead the idea that in fact the disharmony between the two is “natural.” Considering Frank’s anti-social triumph at the end, the novel makes it impossible for the reader to evade this well-crafted, disturbing possibility. After all, in a period of social dislocation, anti-social and selfish solutions were disturbing but realistic alternatives. In this way, Dreiser offers the shocking intensity to the “realist” reading public in an era when it had been thought that the transactions that would benefit the nation would and should be successful, not vice-versa. Finance opens a window for Dreiser to demonstrate broader realities regarding how life is organized in general – anti-realist realities that shock the reader through the intensity they evoke. Frank’s activities as a bear in the stock exchange reveal

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how nature really functions. First, nature is extremely powerful: floods, avalanches, tornadoes and earthquakes are drastic events that release large amounts of energy. What is more, nature is inherently unstable; it is not easy to predict when these events will occur. As Michaels says, “Nature […] is most herself when she is least like what she usually has been” (77). In the novel, the Chicago Fire clearly proves that finance is, just like nature, powerful, unstable and unpredictable. Neither can be predicted, regulated or tamed; “accidents will happen” (Michaels 78). In other words, the motif of business allows Dreiser to unfold a broader reality – the workings of nature on a socioeconomic level – in the world of finance. These broader, “natural” realities that finance manifests constitute a counter pole to the realist conceptions of reality. The realist narrative recognizes this instability of nature, life and finance; however, in crises, society comes together and restores equilibrium as the Big Three do during the Chicago Fire. In an attempt to deconstruct the realist narrative, the naturalist narrative denies the existence of equilibrium in life, nature and finance. Life and nature do not follow a norm, as realists assumed and invited the reader to acknowledge. Dreiser articulates these fundamental discrepancies between the realities of the realist narrative and the naturalist one and the rightness of the latter over the former in the world of finance. Being a bull – investing in relatively gradual and stable economic growth – in a principally unstable financial world is highly unnatural and leads to losses, as the Chicago Fire shows. Being a bear, on the other hand, is a way of collaborating with nature: rather than investing in the stability of the market as bulls do, a bear flows with the instability of nature. When crises occur, a bear goes with the collapse that nature brings by selling at much lower prices than what the stocks are worth, as Frank does. Throughout the novel, Frank learns how to adjust his behavior to nature – to the “natural” events such as the crisis of 1873 – rather than trying to control the market as the Big Three do during the pseudo-realist narrative. Investing ultimately like a bear, Frank surrenders to nature. Rather than losing control, Frank becomes “an agent of nature” (Zimmerman 193), of its drastic “generosity” (Michaels 74). In this process of collaboration, Frank’s activities remain invisible and unaccountable, allowing him to transcend human agency. After all, as in the Chicago Fire, it is not Frank, but nature that causes and controls the crisis of 1873. Having learned how to adjust his behavior, Frank simply rolls with nature’s drastic generosity invisibly. That Frank is able to transcend human agency behind nature is shocking; what is more shocking is that is the fact that natural laws, in contrast to the social laws that realism emphasizes, allow and even reinforce this process of collaboration. Astonishingly, life is inherently amoral, unlike what realists thought – a fact which the motif of finance manifests beautifully.

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*** Readers were able to process this process of deconstruction and the intensity that threatened the integrity of the individual only because literature was a safe way of simulating reality – e.g. without the dangers of an actual bankruptcy. It was fiction, but it was a realistic form of fiction. It allowed readers to thrill in the risk without taking it: Frank takes the risk on behalf of the reader. Crucially, this fictional work is realistic because of the business motif it includes: it not only allowed Dreiser to create a believable pseudo-realistic narrative through the Darstellung of a hospitable society but also enabled him to escape the values of Victorian moralism. Because of its versatility, finance allowed Dreiser enough space to make Frank rich, have him fail and make him a millionaire – a large project – without losing the reality effect. As such, business was one of the rare tools that could reconcile Dreiser’s affective objectives. In the end, the motif of business in the novel reiterates the pattern through which it appeared and disappeared in American literature from a broader perspective. Interestingly, once the attempt to externalize is replaced with figurative tools such as the fish tank, Mycteroperca Bonaci and other symbols, Dreiser utilizes the motif of business only implicitly: Alger was a writer of business novels, the fight takes place at a fish market and seamen brought the fish to this market. Yet considering Frank’s financial activities, which Dreiser details throughout the novel copiously, these are minor uses of the motif. Dreiser pauses in his externalization via this motif; that is, he does not utilize the motif blatantly when he is focusing on the symbolic level. This decreasing pattern in the appearance of the motif reiterates a broader, symptomatic trend: in American literature, symbolism or even larger-than-life Darstellung in general and the motif of business seemed increasingly incompatible. Instead, writers utilized the motif when they externalized in the way Homeric narrator does, as the relationship between the motif and the rise of American realism evidences. Writers employed the motif of business pragmatically, that is, in order to evoke specific effects such as the reality effect and left out when they aimed at different effects as the Elohist narrator or writers of American romance did. From a broader perspective, the absence of business in symbols confirms the argument that literature is an epistemological and pragmatic tool that “does” something to the reader and writers chose their motifs according to what they wanted to “do.” Accordingly, the motif of business in The Financier presages the rise of American modernism as well. In the process of Frank’s Bildung, the business world teaches him that society is egoistic, unfair and hostile, unlike the realist constructions of it. Subsequently, Frank completely retreats from the social structure and

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follows his individual interests, which become manifest primarily in his business life. After he comes to know more about society, “‘I satisfy myself,’ [becomes] his motto; and it might well have been emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility” (134-5). The novel describes how he gradually turns inward, concentrating on his own interests, fears and dreams. The Darstellung of this process of individualization is an early attempt to subjectivize the reader – a pragmatic objective that later modernists eventually aimed for in a more concerted way. It subjectivizes not only by shocking the reader with a motto like “I satisfy myself,” but also by offering a means to identify with the Darstellung, giving readers the idea that they are different from others – and so are their realities. Once American modernists adopted subjectivization through literature as an objective, they needed motifs that could serve this purpose. The murkiness, lack of clarity, difficulty and unintelligibility of the Darstellung thus became crucial. This purpose as well as the method of achieving it emasculated the accessible Homeric externalization altogether, requiring not only a new semiotic structure but also a new set of themes. Even though business was still powerful as a social reality, modernists no longer needed a “social” motif like business: the functions that business served were no longer required in this new form of literature. Instead, they turned to more individual themes such as the mind, relegating society and social themes to the background. Accordingly, the motif of business was no longer incorporated as often as it was in the decades before the 1920s. Despite authors’ decreasing tendency to include the motif, one author in particular was aware of the versatility, potency, popularity and potential of business even for a modernist text. F. Scott Fitzgerald skillfully utilized the motif in one of the central texts of American modernism and American literature in general, The Great Gatsby (1925), in order to subjectivize the reader.

5

Business in American Modernism

At the end of Chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick says, For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. (87)1

The inability to communicate is not confined to this moment alone; in fact, it is one of the central themes of The Great Gatsby. In another instance, Nick says, “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments” in life and this is the “consequence” of his father’s advice, who had said, “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one […] just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (5). However, in contrast to his statement, he proves that he has not really been communicative with his father: Nick’s father tells him to be tolerant rather than non-judgmental with his advice. It is not only Nick, the novel is full of misunderstandings – cases of miscommunication between the characters. Seeing Nick next to Gatsby, Wolfshiem says, “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion” (56), yet Nick’s relationship to Gatsby is far from a business relation. After Gatsby meets Daisy, he complains about Daisy’s inability to comprehend: “It’s hard to make her understand. […] [S]he doesn’t understand. […] She used to be able to understand” (86). Apparently, no one really seems to be able to understand each other in the novel. Miscommunication and misunderstanding are not only dominant themes in The Great Gatsby, but they also hint at the communicative function of the novel

1

All references to the novel are to the following edition: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Cambridge UP, 1991.

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itself. If communication is categorically not possible, communicating a preconceived reality – like the realist and partly naturalist text does – becomes futile. Instead, Fitzgerald communicates what Adorno calls “non-communication” (6):2 the impossibility of transmitting writers’ preconceptions of reality to the reader. An analogy in the novel explains Fitzgerald’s objectives clearly. In Chapter 2, Nick says, “I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’ – either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me” (20). Fitzgerald’s objective with The Great Gatsby is an effect on the readers similar to the one Simon Called Peter creates on Nick. Gatsby’s story is a well-crafted attempt to prevent the reader from constructing consistency or making sense and thereby to subjectivize readers – helping them find their individual realities – in line with the pragmatic functions of American literary modernism. Fitzgerald sought to execute this affective objective not through the “terrible stuff,” not through “whiskey,” but through various modernist literary techniques. The primary method Fitzgerald employs to subjectivize the reader is the unreliable first-person narration. The text of the novel is written by the narrator Nick: what the reader gets is Nick’s perception of his external world in retrospect – two years after the events happened. Accordingly, the way Nick relates to the external world and retells the events is highly unreliable. Nick omits, modifies and manipulates the external world he perceives in different ways. One example illustrates his unreliability beautifully. In the beginning of the novel, regarding Tom and Daisy, Nick says, “Why they came east I don’t know” (8). However, in Chapter 4, Nick implies a love story between Tom and one of the hotel chambermaids, an affair which came out following a car accident. Later, Daisy implicitly confirms this love story by saying, “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree” (103). In other words, Nick knows already at the inception that Tom and Daisy left Chicago because of Tom’s love affair, and still he says, “I don’t know,” omitting the information he has heard. The novel is full of similar narrative inconsistencies, which Fitzgerald manifests through several tropes, motifs and incidents like Tom’s love affair. Primarily, the motif of business functions as an underlying and overarching tool that renders Nick’s narration unreliable, thereby offering subjectivization to the reader.

2

Adorno is especially insistent on the communication of “non-communication” in his analyses on music. For more information, see Theodore Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, Verso, 1992.

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5.1 AMERICAN MODERNISM: AN AESTHETICS OF SUBJECTIVITY Once, one of the leading American modernists, Ezra Pound, said, “My preference is for realism, for a straight statement of life, of whatever period you will” (qtd. in Moody 300). Writing on T. S. Eliot, he reiterates a similar idea: “All good art is realism of one sort or another” (“T. S. Eliot” 420). At first glance, Pound’s use of the word “realism” is misleading. A closer look at his criticism and fiction, however, reveals that his understanding of realism does not include the generation of Twain, Howells and James, but writers such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams who are in retrospect categorized as American modernists. Pound’s statements reveal a broader pattern among modernists: they thought that modernism was the genre that acquainted readers with reality in a way better than realism and naturalism did. Correcting Pound’s statements, William Carlos Williams says works of art “must be real,” like modernist texts, “not ‘realism’ but reality itself” (Collected Poems 204). In fact, even later critics such as Auerbach confirm modernists’ attempts to come up with a better reality. He says that in To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf attempted to “fathom a more genuine, a deeper, and indeed a more real reality” (540). American modernism is frequently considered as antithetical to American realism or naturalism in its handling of reality and it is indeed antithetical in many ways; however, it was at least similar to the former two movements in its practitioners’ insistence that it presented reality in a way better than antecedent movements did. Despite American modernists’ claims for the “realism” of modernism – as a better epistemological tool – over the “realism” of American realism and naturalism, American modernists differed from the two in their conception of reality as well as their method of conveying it. In contrast to realists and naturalists, American modernists did not aim to offer reality to the reader by representing reality through text. American literary modernism cannot be taken as an attempt at mimesis – a form of signification where words signify external reality as in the former two movements. In his Art (1914), the British modernist, Clive Bell, illustrates the lack of mimesis in modernists’ works clearly: In the autumn of 1912 I was walking through the Grafton Galleries with a man who is certainly one of the ablest, and is reputed one of the most enlightened, of contemporary men of science. Looking at the picture of a young girl with a cat by Henri-Matisse, he exclaimed – “I see how it is, the fellow’s astigmatic.” I should have let this bit of persiflage go unanswered, assuming it to be one of those witty sallies for which the princes of science are so justly famed and to which they often treat us even when they are not in the presence of

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works of art, had not the professor followed up his clue with the utmost gravity, assuring me at last that no picture in the gallery was beyond the reach of optical diagnostic. Still suspicious of his good faith, I suggested, tentatively, that perhaps the discrepancies between the normal man’s vision and the pictures on the wall were the result of intentional distortion on the part of the artists. (85)

While the professor thought that the artwork represents reality as mimetically as possible and thus attributes the distortions from habituated reality to an optic distortion in Matisse’s eye, Bell argues that the painting, as well as modernist art in general, were not only not mimetic; they were not even conceived of as representing reality mimetically in the first place. By contrast, the representation was intentionally distorted from habituated forms of reality for functional reasons – to evoke various effects on the reader. Instead of offering reality to the reader through signification, modernists tended to offer reality indirectly through texts that allowed readers to find out, define, and refine their subjective, individual, private and mental realities. In other words, rather than signifying writers’ preconceptions of reality, literary works that have been categorized under the rubric of American modernism were attempts at subjectivization. As Fluck says, “In their experimental mode, modernist texts defy realist representation and compel the reader to become active in making sense of what often appears incomplete or even incomprehensible” (“Why We Need Fiction” 368). American modernists came up with representations to evoke mental processes that “bug” the reader and thereby increase their self-awareness. The Modernist Conception of Reality Behind modernists’ attempts at subjectivization lay a quite specific and distinctive conception of reality, which evolved in line with the social changes of the period. As explored in the first and fourth chapter, the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression was one of individualization:3 the enlightened middle classes, which constituted an important portion of the reading public, gradually lost feelings of belonging to their community, society, religion and broader entities in general, turning slowly to their individual realities – to the self. This turn from the external reality to the inward reality revealed that reality essentially lay in the

3

For more information on the concept of individualization, see Winfried Fluck, “Theories of American Culture: Comment on Helmbrecht Breinig’s Review of Winfried Fluck’s Das Kulturelle Imaginäre” in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 49, no. 3, 2001, pp. 277-281.

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mind. In 1909, William James succinctly summarized the way people defined reality by saying, The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the “field of consciousness”) comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is “here”; when the body acts is “now”; what the body touches is “this”; all other things are “there” and “then” and “that.” (380)

In other words, reality was a matter of perception: it happened when the mind, as the “centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest” perceived and processed it. There was no external reality independent of perception; all reality was what the mind took notice of and instilled as a residue in the psyche of the individual. American modernists’ definition of reality shows important parallels to the individual and personal way enlightened middle classes perceived reality throughout the period. Like the enlightened middle classes, modernists conceived of reality as a matter of perception as well. As Dostoyevsky says, man “apprehends nature as it is reflected in his idea, passing through his feelings” (qtd. in R. L. Jackson 80). The British modernist, Ford Madox Ford, repeats the same idea in a clearer way by saying, “We saw that life did not narrate [as realists and naturalists thought], but made impressions on our brains” (182). In other words, there was no readily available, external reality; rather, reality was perceived and processed by the mind subjectively. T. S. Eliot confirms the individual’s subjective perception of external reality by problematizing the idea “that there is one world of external reality which is consistent and complete: an assumption which is not only ungrounded but in some sense certainly false” (Bradley 112). Instead, reality was private, personal and immanent. As Ortega y Gasset says, two men observing a landscape give two different accounts of the landscape because of the difference in their perspective. Both perspectives are accurate because the reality is subjective, or, as he summarizes the modernist reality: “all knowledge is knowledge from a definite point of view” (90). The fact that each mind perceived reality differently emasculated the general, common, accessible and shared conception of reality that realists and to some extent naturalists emphasized. Instead, for American modernists, each reality was unique. As Eliot says, “any vital truth is incapable of being applied to another case: the essential is unique” (“Eeldrop and Appleplex” 8-9). Because reality is unique, the truth for one case cannot be used in another case. In “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot reiterates his belief in the uniqueness of reality:

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Because time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place. (60)

Every phenomenon was unique not only in the sense that people perceived reality differently from one another. Individuals also perceived the “same” external reality differently depending on their momentary perception. Since external realities were constantly changing even for one individual, the modernist writer attempted “to paint a tree as it appeared to him at the moment under particular circumstances.”4 As a result, it was impossible to truly encompass the idea of an object or the external world. “The ‘treeness’ of the tree was not rendered at all” (Fry and MacCarthy 9), because what was written on paper could never be more than momentary impressions of the tree which were subject to change anytime, rather than the reality of a tree as it had always existed. By the same token, Virginia Woolf answers the question “What is meant by ‘reality’?” by saying, “It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable” (110) – in constant flux against former narratives of stable realities. The new conception of reality constituted a follow-up to the conceptions of reality that antecedent movements adopted. In an attempt to provide a reality “better” than that provided by naturalists, American modernists took the idea of reality where realists and naturalists left it on its journey toward particularization. While the realist conception of reality was strongly based on a shared and easily accessible notion, the naturalist conception of reality revealed the first signs of doubt regarding the availability of a shared reality – the idea that there is one reality for all, comprehensible and general. As William James reveals, in American modernism,5 the conception of reality opposed a shared, general and external knowledge of reality; instead, it was strongly based on perception and mind. Once, the

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For an interesting analysis of how Crane’s writing was affected by his momentary experiences while he was composing his texts, see Michael Fried, “Almayer’s Face: On ‘Impressionism’ in Conrad, Crane, and Norris” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 1, 1990, pp. 193-236.

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For several different reasons, American modernism was close to European modernism in a way that American realism and naturalism was not. Bradbury argues that “Modernism bears the American impress, even outside America, it and American modernity being natural kin” (28). For more information, see Malcolm Bradbury, “The Nonhomemade World: European and American Modernism” in American Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, 1987, pp. 27-36.

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knowledge sought – such as the secrets of human existence or nature – was universal as in the Elohist and Romantic narratives. In the modernist epoch, this knowledge became so particular and unique that it was based purely on the mental. The uniqueness of reality stood strongly against idealism; in fact, modernism can be dubbed as anti-idealism. Pound defines idealism in modernist art as “that which tries to make others more aware of the relations between one thing, or one state of mind, and another; to make them more aware of the cosmos in which they exist” (Pound/Joyce 220). By contrast, the uniqueness of reality in American modernism made establishing similarities or even relations between things impossible. The anti-idealist tendency among American modernists had drastic implications for the functions modernist literature served. For one thing, it made conveying individual realities impossible. As Fitzgerald says, “The chief thing I’ve learned so far is: If you don’t know much – well, nobody else knows much more” (qtd. in Bruccoli and Bryer 219) and you cannot know by learning from others. Just like the Finnish woman’s wisdom which Nick cannot grasp in The Great Gatsby, in modernism, no wisdom can be transferred through the text. As Fitzgerald adds, “If knowledge comes naturally, through interest, as Shaw learned his political economy or as Wells devoured modern science – why, that’ll be slick. On study itself – that is, in ‘reading up’ a subject – I haven’t anthill moving faith” (Conversations 4). Fitzgerald does not trust “reading up” a subject, because unique reality cannot really be transferred. In Brewsie and Willie, Gertrude Stein reiterates a similar idea: “there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, thats the answer” (30; punctuation in original). In short, to modernists, reality is strictly subjective, imprisoned in the mind of an individual and thus not transferable. The new, private, subjective and unique conception of reality posed ontological challenges to the profession of authorship, eventually directing modernists to redefine their writing practice. If reality is so unique and particular that it cannot be grasped thoroughly or ideally, what was the point of attempting to grasp those ephemeral, momentary impressions? Moreover, if there was no reality outside of what was inherently subjective, personal and private, what was the purpose of attempting to transfer a writer’s conceptions of reality to the reader in the first place? Even more drastic, if conceptions of reality were not really transferable, what was the point of attempting to transfer them in the first place? Modernists were aware of the challenges these new conceptions of reality brought about. The elusive and subjective nature of reality in modernism made the communication of writers’ preconceptions of reality to the reader obsolete. If the reality was subjective, then the writer and reader had different realities and different ways of

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perceiving the world. This, in turn, obviated the need for conveying these preconceptions to the reader. Moreover, the impossibility of transferring these conceptions rendered any attempts in this direction worthless. Still, this impossibility – a drastic shift in the literary history – did not kill literature as an art; instead, writers ascribed a new function to literature in the modernist epoch. American modernists offered individual orientation: they sought to assist the reader in finding, refining and coming to terms with their own subjective realities. This underlies the individualist focus behind American modernism. As Eysteinsson says, modernism directs “its attention so predominantly toward individual or subjective experience, it elevates the ego in proportion to a diminishing awareness of objective or coherent outside reality (27),6 in an attempt to increase self-awareness and thereby subjectivize the reader. In fact, the way modernism is criticized confirms modernists’ pragmatic objectives as well as the affective functions their works serve. The attempts at subjectivization through non-mimetic literary forms resulted in the loss of social orientation that realist literature provided for a couple of decades in Europe and the US. This lack of orientation was the reason that led several Marxist scholars like Georg Lukács to condemn modernist literature in different ways. The main problem with expressionism and modernism to Lukács was that it “disavows” literature’s “every relation to reality” (qtd. in Eysteinsson 23). Not reflecting the “total complex of reality” (Lukács, “Realism” 36), modernism rejects the socio-pragmatic functions realism claims; that is, modernism rejects orienting people toward a social reality in the way realism does. Yet, Lukács sees this orienting function as crucial: “What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary” (33-4). This orienting function is crucial because it prepares readers in the public sphere and arranges their relationship to the external world in the “correct” way. “Abstraction must have a direction” (38); otherwise, readers will take the “wrong” path in their lives. To Lukács, realism portrays reality and the “man in the whole range of relations to the real world” (48) and in this way the reader can get to know the capitalist structures in society and turn possibly to socialistic fraternity. Fredric Jameson is no exception. To him, modernism, through its attempts to increase subjectivity of the human, completely undermines projects of social awareness. Jameson says that Lukács

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For a thorough sample of the discussions and disagreement about the orienting function of modernism, see Ernst Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, NLB, 1977.

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turns out in the long run to have been right after all about the nature of modernism: very far from a break with that older overstuffed Victorian bourgeois reality, it simply reinforces all of [modernism’s] basic presuppositions, only in a world so thoroughly subjectivized that they have been driven underground, beneath the surface of the work, forcing us to reconfirm the concept of a secular reality at the very moment in which we imagine ourselves to be demolishing it. (18)

Just like Lukács, Jameson prioritizes realism over modernism, because the former has the potential to make the society they imagine possible by spreading ideas of equality and fraternity.7 What these two scholars latently criticize is the function modernism serves; namely, the subjectivization of the individual at the expense of possible social orientation. In fact, modernists were adamant about their “individualistic” objective; subjectivization was exactly what they wanted to achieve through their literary texts. This central objective to subjectivize the reader was a profoundly novel project in literary history – a project that makes modernist literature a highly complex form of literature, but not impossible to retrace. From a broader perspective, naturalism and later impressionism, which is considered to be an early and more compact form of modernism, already foreshadowed the coming of subjectivization in American literary history. In fact, the increasing emphasis on the intensity of the Darstellung should be taken as a harbinger. As Chapter 4 explores, naturalists gradually attempted to evoke more and more intensity through their literary works. Often, impressionists followed the same trend. R. G. Vosburgh reveals how Stephen Crane – one of the main representatives of American literary impressionism – showed attention to intensity in his writings by saying, “his daring phrases and short, intense descriptions pleased him greatly” (36). Of Crane’s highly impressionistic The Red Badge of Courage, Charles Dudley Warner says, “Every page is painted […] with this intensity of color.” A few sentences later, he adds: “The natural eye cannot stand a constant glare of brilliant light, and the mind soon wearies of the quality that has come to be called ‘intensity in literature’” (qtd. in Bloom and Smith 152). Writing in The Art of Fiction (1888), James dwells on the idea of reality in fiction and states that a novel’s value “is greater or less according to the

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Brecht’s understanding of art, as well-known, constitutes a counter position to orthodox Marxists. In contrast to them, he supports the subjectivity of the individual in his arts and the road to equality passes first through the changes in the individual mind, which would create a more egalitarian and humane society. For more information, see Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics.

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intensity of the impression” (60-1).8 Underlying naturalists’ and later impressionists’ focus on intensity is a latent yet unnamed disbelief in the generality and transferability of writers’ preconceptions of reality. Though neither had a clear idea about the pragmatic functions of their intense representations, they were intuitively convinced of the uselessness of mere Homeric externalization, which manifests the changing conceptions of reality among naturalists and impressionists. In fact, the way naturalists and impressionists created the effect of intensity also confirms how modernism is the next natural step in American literary history. As Chapter 4 illustrates, one of the ways through which naturalists created intensity was through focalization: they gradually “zoomed in” on their Darstellung, which offered intense experience to the reader. Continuing this naturalist trend, impressionists often focalized so closely on the objects that they did not limit the frame with few characters or narrow incidents as naturalists did. Instead, they focused directly on the characters’ mind and recounted the impressions left there rather than external realities. Weingart confirms this direct relation between focalization and intensity by saying, “The more limited the point of view, the more intense is the recapitulation of stimuli, wherein lies the strategy of the Impressionist” (26). Once modernists asserted that reality lies strictly in the mind rather than outside, they focalized further and ended up with a purely mental Darstellung. The increasing emphasis on closer focalization reveals that impressionism and later modernism were organic continuations of American realism and naturalism on a technical level as well. While both naturalists and impressionists revealed discontent with American realism, in contrast to realists, neither had a common, clearly-defined, and concerted definition of the pragmatic functions of their literary works. Roughly, naturalists attempted to shock the reader, while impressionists “use the impression […] to move aesthetic experience from the realm of sensuous perception back toward that combination of (or middle ground between) sense and thought always at work in the ‘aesthetic’” (Matz 50). Put differently, rather than purely representing impressions, impressionists attempted to direct the reader to combine the re-

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This emphasis on intensity represents a broader trend in the Western canon. Writing on Claude Monet, Zola says, “There is more than a realist here, there is an interpreter of delicacy and intensity” (qtd. in Brodskaïa 70). Or as Ford Madox Ford says, “In writing a novel we agreed that every word set on paper – every word set on paper must carry the story forward and, that as the story progressed, the story must be carried forward faster and faster and with more and more intensity. That is called progression d’effet, words for which there is no English equivalent” (225).

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presented sense and thought in the reader’s mind, which was one of the early attempts at individualizing the reader. Having clarified the understanding of reality as well as ways of offering it, American modernists had a better-defined and more concrete objective than either naturalists or impressionists: namely, subjectivization, though writers had quite colorful and individual ways of bringing readers to their unique realities. There was one common problem, though. The reading public was not only habituated to a specific – realist and naturalist – set of works, they also had a habituated way of reading literary works. For decades, the public had been reading literary works as clear representations and reflections of the external world. If American literary naturalism was a “proto-deconstructionist writing practice” (Den Tandt, “Refashioning” 415) through the new conceptions of reality they offered over American realists’, in the face of the habituated horizons of expectations, American modernism was a proto-deconstructionist reading practice: American modernists sought to subvert the way literary works were being read in order to prevent the reader from receiving or attempting to receive their works mimetically. That is why Fitzgerald proposes that “The wise literary son kills his own father” (Conversations 4) and by extension, the reading practices fathers had established. One example encompasses this attempt beautifully. Wallace Stevens says that “In the ‘June Book’ I made ‘breeze’ rhyme with ‘trees,’ and have never forgiven myself. It is a correct rhyme, of course – but unpardonably ‘expected’” (Letters 157). Stevens’s insistence on the unexpected is one way of making readers rethink their ways of reading literary works. In their attempts to subvert habituated reading practices and thereby bring readers to their own subjective realities, modernists came up with different experimental representations; in fact, methods of American literary modernism can be considered as a cohort of distinct experiments to change the reader’s ways of reading literary texts. First, modernists sought to make literary works anonymous tools which did not refer to any a priori world. They attempted to disrupt the taken-forgranted relationship between the text and its writer. In his analysis of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Whitworth symbolically draws attention to the narrator’s desire to disrupt this relationship. Talking of the theme of disconnection of hands from the body in Eliot’s poetry, he says, “These hands achieve something, but they seem to do so independently of their owners” (1). Just like the Eliotian disconnection between hands and body, American modernists adamantly tried to prevent the reader from reading literary works as the reflection or expression of a writer’s life or memories or as their conceptions of reality. That is why they emphasized the impersonality of literature. As Eliot says, “The emotion of

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art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done” (“Tradition” 42). Rather than asserting the effects of the artwork, Eliot’s statement reveals an attempt and call to other writers to make art impersonal, anonymous and even generic. Similarly, American modernists attempted to disconnect the text from possibly reflecting an external, shared and common world. In his analysis of Ulysses, Wolfgang Iser argues that the rich details in the novel do not attempt to “authenticate the view of life offered” as realist and naturalist works did; rather, they are “a sort of end in themselves […] the details illustrate nothing.” They are redundant and thus cannot be “taken for life itself” (Implied Reader 198). In other words, the details in the novel are there to prevent the reader from establishing referentiality, and to reflect the redundancy and the impossibility of reaching a world beyond the text. Semiotically, the modernist text disrupts the relationship between the signifier and the signified so strongly that the two are not only separate from each other, but there are only signifiers without signifieds on the field. Unlike in realism and naturalism, where the signifier crushes the signified in an attempt to render the former real, the absence of the signified is the signifier of modernism. This new semiotic structure denies any referentiality between the word and the world. Often, this non-referentiality between the text and outside world took the form of purported self-referentiality among American modernists. Gertrude Stein’s frequently quoted line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (“Sacred Emily” 187) is a powerful example of this attempt. The word “rose” does not necessarily refer to a flower in the external world; rather, it refers to another word “rose.” In the same way, Wallace Stevens’s poem “Metaphors of a Magnifico” repeats the idea of selfreferentiality: Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village. (19)

Just like Stein’s rose, the twenty men have a textual reference point, not an a priori one. Stevens highlights his aim to establish self-referentiality by saying, “My intention in poetry is to write poetry” (Opus Posthumous 240), not to refer to the outside world. Seeming highly tautological, Stevens indeed seeks to halt the referentiality of texts by calling for an autonomous and self-referential literature.

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This objective of establishing non-referentiality between the text and a priori world led writers to accentuate the form of their end products – that is, the literariness of their literary works, in contrast to the realists and naturalists who tried to overcome the form of their texts for mimesis. The modernist emphasis on the “treeness of a tree” or to “to make the stone stony” not only reveals the need for intensity but also underlines the formal component of the artwork: that a tree is only a tree but nothing else, and a stone is a stone without any further meaning or referentiality beyond. Following this premise, modernists asserted that a work of literature is only a text; it does not represent anything a priori beyond a bunch of words. The more visible the form is, the less it mirrors and teaches and the more non-referential it is. The reader sees the word rather than the world in the modernist text, because to modernists, the reader could reach his subjective reality only through this disruption between the text and the external reality. The Difficulty of Modernist Aesthetics In addition to breaking the implied contract between the reader and the antecedent narratives, American modernists struggled to “increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 12). What the pioneering Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, purports to be an aesthetic end is in fact a means for subjectivization: the more difficult the text is and the longer it takes to understand it, the easier it is for the writer to direct readers to turn to their own realities. In contrast to the easily accessible texts of American realism and modernism, modernist writers and several contemporary critics of modernism (among others, New Critics and Russian Formalists) emphasized the importance of difficulty. With his concept of defamiliarization or ostranenie, Shklovsky calls writers “to make forms difficult” (12). T. S. Eliot is also very clear on that point: “poets in our civilization […] must be difficult” (“Metaphysical Poets” 289). Writing on Ulysses, Joyce says, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality” (qtd. in Ellmann 521). Bersani confirms that saying, Ulysses is full of “stylistic intrusions” which “take the form of discontinuities or inconsistencies in point of view” (“Against” 206). In fact, this is also the reason why verse is more important and visible than prose in American modernism; verse tends to be difficult, less accessible, making less “sense.” American modernists frequently experimented with form in order to make their texts less accessible and more “mind-bugging.” In fact, many authors confirm how they highlighted the form to subjectivize the reader in their literary

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works. Shklovsky says, “Form is sensation and intensity: art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things” (12). Art subjectivizes the recipient through the intensity it brings out. Probably the most quoted philosopher of modernity, Max Weber, concurs: “The stronger or more forceful the form the more intense is the dream or vision” (qtd. in Crunden 294). Accordingly, the modernist writer built in formal obstructions throughout the narrative – obstructions, which led Eliot to see art as “work to be done,” as this creative process, rather than revealing a direction, evades giving a direction. By deliberately refraining from giving direction to the reader, American modernists left the reader the only remaining option, namely, directionless. In this way, they attempted to direct the reader to his own subjective reality – to find his inner direction. As Greenberg summarizes, “Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art” (86). One example – repetition – suffices to demonstrate the point. In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot says, This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. (59)

The repetition does not serve a communicative or semantic function; there is no new information in these lines. Rather, it serves to disrupt the process of meaningmaking in readers’ minds. In the same way, in “The Return,” Pound repeats the word “these,” even though it does not really contribute to the meaning: These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. (198)

The rhythm that the word creates is devoid of any referential or communicative function; it is redundant just like the superfluous detail in Joyce’s text. Through this redundancy, modernist literary works disrupt the process of referentiality and prevent the reader from establishing consistency. American modernists increased the subjectivity of the reader by telling them: “Do not believe in grand narratives; the reality is subjective.” The difficulty of American modernism raised a novel challenge for the writers of the period – a challenge at a quite elementary level. Although American modernists needed less accessible texts, they also had to persuade the reader to start

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reading the text in the first place. After all, readers had to read their texts for these texts to subjectivize them. Often, American modernists incorporated first-person narratives, yet not because of an attempted psychological mimesis as Roseanne Rini argues for Woolf’s The Waves. She says, “To render character truthfully the novelist must include a multi-faceted consciousness, a consciousness that may embody many inconsistencies” (qtd. in Transue 143). To Rini, since consciousness is multi-faceted and inconsistent, Woolf represented such inconsistencies through a first-person narrative to be loyal to the reality – that is, to be mimetic. In contrast to these claims for mimesis, the first-person perspective is utilized in American modernism primarily because the reader can identify with the first-person narrator more easily than with other narrator types. The modernist writer compensates for the difficulty of the text by allowing readers to identify with the narrator in a way the third-person narratives of the realist and naturalist works do not facilitate. In short, American modernists did not write completely inconsistent and illegible words on paper; the reader is often faced with a combination of consistent passages with different levels of formal difficulty. Through the first-person narrative and a constant potential for identification, the reader is induced to keep reading the work despite formal difficulties. The process of identification allowed American modernists to have their narrator – and thus possibly readers – reach epiphany, thereby subjectivize them. Joyce defines epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation.” The protagonist “believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (Stephen Hero 211). In other words, it is a moment of striking and sudden realization, as a result of which the reader gets things “freshly perceived.” In Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s epiphany after Kurtz’s last words “The horror, the horror” (Conrad 157) is another great example. In the same way, after Stephen Dedalus sees a girl on the beach, he thinks, Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! (A Portrait of the Artist 199)

In The Great Gatsby, Nick says, “That was it. I’d never understood before.” Yet, he had realized it now: Daisy’s voice “was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it” (94). He

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then sees the true face of Daisy. These examples reveal modernists’ attempts to simulate a change in the way the individual perceives the world by identifying with characters who reach epiphany. After such instances of epiphany, the modernist writer often tries to make the narrator’s realization into the realization of readers and thereby have them realize their own subjective truth in their own lives in specific circumstances. As such, through epiphany, the modernist writer attempts to offer an orienting experience that religion used to provide, yet on a more secular level, which fits an age where the organic world of the previous ages had already dissolved. A French critic says, “the nineteenth century began with the poetry of religion and ended with the religion of poetry” (qtd. in Shapiro 297). This is true for America as well: while Romantic poetry in America incorporated religion frequently, modernist poetry was a religion in itself in the sense that it offered individual orientation like religious poetry once predominantly did, though without a religious core. As Shapiro adds, “the poetic mysticism of Emerson and Whitman turn[ed] into the cultural priestliness of T. S. Eliot” (297). Modernists attempted to fill the void created by the loss of social and religious orientation through the epiphany their texts brought about – an effect that was reminiscent of Christian revelation. Considering the importance of epiphany in a way reminiscent of religious awakening, it is not a coincidence that a Catholic, F. Scott Fitzgerald, became known as one of the central modernists of his age. A small description in his Tender is the Night (1934) retrospectively became the description of the aesthetics of American literary modernism: refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments; the totality of this refraction – appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time. (109)

Crucially, this refracted image “account[s] for what Rosemary afterward mystically described as ‘realizing’ that there was some one in the room” (109). In other words, what makes Rosemary “realize” is not the clear and direct view of the external objects but the refracted view of realities, distilled through the subjective perception. This modernist awareness is visible in The Great Gatsby as well. After he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned in 1923, Fitzgerald said, “I shall never write another document-novel. I have decided to be a pure artist and

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experiment in form and emotion” (Correspondence 126). Obviously disappointed about the externalized form of his novel (“document-novel”), Fitzgerald was ready to leave the realistic form behind. Bruccoli confirms this, saying some critics “were put off by Fitzgerald’s naturalistic material in this novel, which showed the influence of Dreiser and the Norris brothers” (Epic Grandeur 163) – experts of externalization. Talking of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins, “The happiest thought I have is of my new novel – it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure – the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find” (qtd. in Bruccoli and Baughman, Max Perkins 47). The fact that he links his new form with Joyce and Stein is telling about his transition to modernist aesthetics. His categorization of Ulysses as the “the great novel of the future” (Fitzgerald on Authorship 91) underlines his determination. He reiterates his emphasis on modernism in The Great Gatsby by saying, “I think the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. […] It is in protest against my own formless two novels, and Lewis’ and Dos Passos’ that this was written” (A Life in Letters 110). Considering the fact that Sinclair Lewis was writing more in the “formless” realist mode at the time, Fitzgerald’s distinguishing himself from the two reveals his willingness to join the modernist camp through his groundbreaking novel. In The Great Gatsby, the narrator says, characters bring out “a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again” (84) and thereby communicate the “unreality of reality” (77) in line with the modernist aesthetics. As such, the novel made Fitzgerald one of the central American modernists. Talking of Hemingway, Alfred Kazin summarizes American modernism by saying, “The artist works by locating the world in himself” (An American Procession 365). This definition does not refer to a timeless and space-less artist, instead to the modernist writer who expressed the external world “through the twist of [their] imagination” like Edith Bradin in Fitzgerald’s “May Day” (61). In other words, in order to subjectivize the reader, American modernists downplayed external reality in favor of mental reality; the former was relevant only to emphasize the latter, if relevant at all. This determined the fate of the representation of the external world and hence the image of business and businessmen, leading to the disappearance of the motif of business from American literary modernism to a great extent. There are few fictions of business or businessmen in American modernist literature, unlike in American realism or naturalism. If reality is not based in society but in the “self,” social motifs lose their salience and so does their portrayal in literary works. Surprisingly, The Great Gatsby is one of the exceptional works where business is included to emphasize the mental over external reality and thereby to subjectivize the reader.

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5.2 SUBJECTIVIZING BUSINESS IN THE GREAT GATSBY After Martyle – George Wilson’s wife and Tom’s mistress – dies, Nick says, “Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.” Subsequently, he recounts the following dialogue between George and his friend, Michaelis: “Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?” “Don’t belong to any.” “You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?” “That was a long time ago.” […] “‘Look in the drawer there,’ he said, pointing at the desk.” “Which drawer?” “That drawer – that one.” (123)

On the surface, this dialogue seems unproblematic. A deeper look, however, reveals a fundamental inconsistency: Nick was physically not there when the dialogue between George and Michaelis took place. He never tells the reader how he learns what really happened, let alone the individual utterances. Yet, Nick’s epistemological omniscience is not a universal rule in the novel; he is profoundly unomniscient in other instances. In Chapter 9, shortly after Gatsby dies, Nick says, “he’d never told me definitely that his parents were dead” (128). Nick’s judgment is noteworthy because in Chapter 4, Gatsby repeats twice that “My family all died” and they are “all dead now” (52). Nick, who can recite the conversations he does not take part in, does not remember what Gatsby has actually said to him in this instance; he omits the information from his narration. These two instances reveal that there is no universal epistemological pattern in the novel: Nick knows a lot and less or nothing about the external world at the same time. As Phelan suggests, “We might suppose that either Fitzgerald made a mistake or assumed that he did not need to include any […] explanation” (106) for this epistemological inconsistency. It is not a mistake; in fact, the lack of a clear epistemological pattern is one of Fitzgerald’s major methods to render Nick’s narration unreliable, creating difficulties in understanding the text and

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thereby subjectivizing the reader in line with the pragmatic objectives of American literary modernism. Significantly, although it is possible to manifest this epistemological variance through minor literary devices, tropes and motifs such as the death of Gatsby’s parents, Fitzgerald utilizes an overarching and recurring motif that makes it possible for the reader to negate Nick’s epistemological reliability in different but comparable instances throughout the novel, namely, the motif of business. Before the motif of business reveals Nick’s unreliability, though, Fitzgerald incorporates the motif to externalize in a way similar to the realist text, establishing believable and plausible cause-and-effect relations and gaining the reader’s trust at the inception of the novel. Seemingly paradoxical at first sight, for a narration to be unreliable in a literary text, the narrator has to be reliable often – reliable enough for inconsistencies to be apparent. Nick is no exception: he constantly establishes trust on the reader like the habituated realist and naturalist narratives only to deconstruct this reliability later on. Business allows Nick to create the initial trust: it allows Nick to meet Gatsby in the first place as a result of believable and realistic events. Nick moves to New York from the Midwest for business reasons, as he says, “I decided to go east and learn the bond business” (6). New and lonely in New York, he tries to open up contact to his “old friends” (9), Tom and Daisy. Once Gatsby realizes that Daisy is his cousin, he becomes more interested in Nick. Subsequently, Gatsby and Nick start to meet more often and develop a deeper relationship. This friendship lies at the basis of the plot of the novel: Nick is able to retell Gatsby’s story because he gets to know him by moving to New York to learn “the bond business.” Like the fight that created Odysseus’ scar, the reader knows why and how Nick meets Gatsby in a believable set of events – thanks to business. In the same way, the motif increases the reality effect by accounting for Nick’s unreliable narration. Interestingly, Nick is not in the midst of the events he recounts. He is “within and without” (Gatsby 30); or as Bruccoli says, he is a “partially involved narrator” (“Introduction” xii). Seen from a different perspective, Fitzgerald’s Nick is a markedly passive narrator, like Conrad’s Marlow and Eliot’s Prufrock. In fact, Nick admits his resemblance to Prufrock with the words: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair” (106). Fitzgerald’s editor, Max Perkins noticed the modernism behind Fitzgerald’s construction of the passive narrator. As he says, “You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective” (Dear Scott, Dear Max 82). He keeps his

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distance to what he narrates, which the motif of business reveals. 9 Nick is halfhearted about the bond business, doing it for lack of a better option: “Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man” (6). His half-heartedness is the reason why he constantly refers to business in exotic terms, like “the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew” (7). In the same way, when Nick comes to New York, he does not seem to be learning much about business. He indicates that “I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint” (7). Throughout the novel, Nick rarely reads these volumes, if he reads at all. This partial involvement, which Fitzgerald reveals through business, ensures that although business brings Nick close to Gatsby, it does not bring him close enough to allow a clear view of Gatsby and his business activities. As a result, it is realistic for Nick to be unreliable in recounting the story, simply because he is not really interested in all aspects of Gatsby’s life – such as business. The Salience of Gatsby’s Business Fitzgerald uses business to subjectivize the reader through two contrasting epistemological layers in the narrative: Nick’s subjective and evasive perception of business and the unavoidable salience of the business world that Nick does not grasp. In other words, while Nick constantly downplays Gatsby’s business side, Fitzgerald also reveals how Nick resists processing the information he actually receives due to his subjective perception. To begin with, the majority of Nick’s narration is based on Gatsby’s love for Daisy. Nick’s interpretation and presentation of Gatsby as a romantic hero starts early, in the epigraph, in a stanza of a love story: Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” (1)

9

Nick is a businessman by necessity; even though he went to Yale, he is too “slender and keen and romantic” to be a businessman. He is more like a Princeton alumnus, as Fitzgerald mentions in his other writings, in contrast to the “brawny and brutal and powerful” Tom Buchanan of Yale. For Fitzgerald’s perception of Princeton and its differences from Yale, see F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Princeton” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Personal Essays, 1920-1940, edited by James L. W. West, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 6-15.

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Whoever reads this epigraph is automatically prepared for a love plot. In addition to the textual evidence upon which a significant portion of previous research is based, this interpretation is shaped strongly by extra-literary factors like Fitzgerald’s personal life and his love for Zelda, as explored in numerous biographical works. Movie adaptations which take Gatsby as a romantic hero have contributed to the novel’s reception as a love story as well. Recently, Baz Luhrmann called the novel a “great, tragic love story with action, passion, drama” (qtd. in Shone). As a result, both previous research and the majority of readers tend to focus on the love plot in Nick’s narration: The Great Gatsby is a novel about Gatsby’s love for Daisy. Accordingly, Nick frequently emphasizes Gatsby’s positive features. Gatsby’s love and his greatness are equated throughout the novel. Gatsby is “great” to Nick because of his never-ending love for Daisy. As Nick suggests, Gatsby “wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” (86). In one of his latest conversations with Gatsby, Nick says, while the rest is “a rotten crowd,” Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch put together” for him. Considering the fact that he says, “I’ve always been glad I said that” (120) right after and his elevation of Gatsby throughout the novel, it is impossible to ignore Nick’s positive feelings about him. At the end of the novel, Nick is even clearer about his thoughts on Gatsby: “I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone” (127). This positive interpretation of Gatsby is the dominant feeling Nick reflects throughout the novel: in the end, he is even worried that Gatsby might not have a proper funeral. In this great love story that Nick portrays, there is no place for business. As a character who “snobbishly repeat[s] a sense of the fundamental decencies,” Nick wants to “leave things in order” and his emphasis on “conventional standards of propriety” (Donaldson 131)10 forces him to downplay the business plot in the novel.11 Accordingly, Nick’s narration does not really provide a clear understanding of the business affairs that surround Gatsby. Most of the time, it is the untimely phone calls, secret meetings, rumors, and the like that give the reader the idea that

10 Donaldson attributes Nick’s conformist stance to his “undoubted ‘advantages,’ which include good schools, social position, family background, and even an exclusive senior society at Yale” (131). 11 In fact, Nick’s feelings of propriety and responsibility make it possible for such a passive character to recount the story. In Chapter 9, Nick says, “it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested – interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest” (127). With this answer, “for the only time in his life, Nick makes a commitment himself” (Donaldson 137).

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Gatsby is involved in some business affairs. What he does for a living is never clear. One thing is clear, though: after talking with Jordan Baker, Nick is convinced that his wish to reach and attract Daisy is what lies behind Gatsby’s business activities and wealth. For instance, Nick says Gatsby “had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden” (81). Essentially, Nick concludes that business is a tool for Gatsby to attract Daisy. To Nick, business is almost a romantic motif yet by the same token a minor one, subordinated to love, which does not require much discussion. Yet, the love plot that makes Gatsby a romantic hero, getting rich to be able to contact Daisy, is only a part of the story: the part that Nick wants to put in the foreground and narrates in the end. It is only one way of seeing Gatsby; Fitzgerald is careful to present the polysemy of Gatsby’s character. In contrast to Nick’s narration, Fitzgerald provides the reader with enough evidence that Gatsby has numerous personal features that refute Nick’s “romantic readiness” (6) to interpret him as a heroic lover – personal traits which are articulated through the motif of business. In several instances, Gatsby’s shady dealings reveal that, in contrast to Nick’s romantic narration, he is indeed an adulterer, bootlegger and criminal, which also explains the source of his wealth. Tom says, “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of [Gatsby’s] little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him and I wasn’t far wrong” (104). Gatsby does not reject these accusations outright. Similarly, he uses his connections to evade the policemen in traffic, showing the corrupt nature of his dealings: “I was able to do the commissioner a favor once” (54), thus he is exempt from rules. Even though Fitzgerald includes several such negative proofs of Gatsby’s personality, it does not persuade Nick; he does not take heed of Gatsby’s illegal activities, but finds himself “on Gatsby’s side” (127) – and so do many readers. It is not only Gatsby’s hideous bootlegging activities that Nick ignores; in fact, he filters out the business element as such in the course of the novel. After the accident that kills Martyle, even though Gatsby says, “I suppose Daisy’ll call” (120), the next day Nick cannot reach Gatsby because “the wire was being kept open for long distance from Detroit” (121). Apparently, Gatsby was not waiting for a call from Daisy but for a business call from Detroit. Even though Nick focuses on Gatsby’s love for Daisy and attempts to equate Gatsby’s love to the American Dream, business plays a key role even in Gatsby’s relationship to Nick. For example, Nick leads the reader to believe that Gatsby sends special party invitations to him in order to get to Daisy in the end, but at some point Gatsby tries to make a business agreement with Nick. He says, “Well, this would interest you.

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It wouldn’t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.” Yet, Nick rejects the offer saying, “I’ve got my hands full. […] I’m much obliged but I couldn’t take on any more work” (65). This chat between Nick and Gatsby confirms that Gatsby is not the romantic hero Nick wants to portray throughout the novel nor does he want to use Nick solely to advance his love affair. He sees Nick in terms of a business opportunity as well. These examples demonstrate that Gatsby is a much broader character who cannot be reduced to a great romantic lover, as Nick primarily attempts to present him. From this point of view, neither the story is a pure love story nor is Gatsby “great.” As the English novelist, L. P. Hartley, summarizes, the novel has a profoundly un-romantic plot: An adventurer of shady antecedents builds a palace at a New York seaside resort, entertains on a scale which Lucullus would have marveled at but could not have approved, and spends untold sums of money, all to catch the eye of his one time sweetheart, who lives on an island opposite, unhappily but very successfully married. At last, after superhuman feats of ostentation and display, the fly walks into the web. A train of disasters follows, comparable in quantity and quality with the scale of the Great Gatsby’s prodigies of hospitality. Coincidence leaps to the helm and throws a mistress under a motor-car. The car does not stop, which, all things considered, is the most natural thing that happens in the book. An injured husband finds the Great Gatsby in suicidal mood sitting on a raft in his artificial lake and (apparently) forestalls him; anyhow they are both discovered dead. The elder Gatsby is unearthed and gives a pathetic account of his son’s early years. All the characters behave as though they were entitled to grieve over a great sorrow, and the book closes with the airs of tragedy. (qtd. in Cousineau 110)

That is, while Nick provides a positive account of Gatsby, in fact, Gatsby is an “adventurer of shady antecedents.” Cousineau is thus right in arguing that “this must be among the most cogent, disabused responses that the plot of The Great Gatsby has ever received” (110). In contrast to Nick’s constant downplaying of Gatsby’s “bootlegger” side, trying to make it ineffable, business is salient: the motif constitutes a major contrast to Nick’s biased narration. Indeed, there is more to the businessman Gatsby than what is outlined in these examples. When it becomes clear that Gatsby has been shot in Chapter 8, supposedly he was swimming in his pool on a mattress. Interestingly however, shortly before Gatsby dies, he says to Nick that “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?” (120). It does not make sense that Gatsby takes an interest in swimming in the pool all of a sudden; it is especially difficult to understand

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why he would enjoy swimming on the day following Daisy’s murder of Martyle. In fact, considering the fact that pools are used for relaxing on nice days, it seems a very un-Gatsby act to use the swimming pool following a murder for which Gatsby will be later held responsible, as he owns the car Daisy was driving. What raises even more suspicion is that the bullet that kills Gatsby does not even puncture the mattress. Supposing that Gatsby was lying on the mattress when he was killed, it seems highly unlikely that the murderer could kill Gatsby but leave the mattress intact. Furthermore, when he is shot, “the chauffeur – he was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés – heard the shots – afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much about them.” Even though the “butler went without his sleep and waited for [a call] until four o’clock” (126), he does not hear the shots that killed Gatsby. These facts about Gatsby’s death increase suspicions about the cause of his death. Was it really Wilson who killed Gatsby, out of anger? More importantly, was Fitzgerald being inconsistent, providing evidence against what Nick narrates? Anne Crow raises similar questions about Gatsby’s death and comes up with an alternative plot. Moving on from the intact mattress, Crow says that it is highly possible that “Gatsby was killed and placed on the mattress afterwards.” Returning to the moment Gatsby fires his servants and hires – in Gatsby’s words – “some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for,” Crow argues that “Wolfshiem may have put” these people with “villainous” faces “to spy on Gatsby, and, if necessary, eliminate him” rather than to help Gatsby. Considering the fact that Gatsby’s kitchen looked, as a grocery boy put it, “like a pigsty” exactly at a period “when [Daisy] was beginning to visit him,” Crow’s argument is highly plausible. If Wolfshiem has Gatsby killed through his men in Gatsby’s house, then the cause of his death is probably a business deal. Crow refers to the phone call that openly reveals Gatsby’s illegal business activities, which follows as: “Young Parke’s in trouble. […] They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They just got a circular from New York giving ‘em the numbers just five minutes before” (129). Crow says, “If the police investigation is closing in on Gatsby’s enterprises, then Wolfshiem might be worried that it will uncover some of his own activities.” Thus, he has good reasons to have Gatsby killed. In this probable interpretation, Gatsby does not die because of his romantic love and sacrifice for Daisy (although he promises himself to keep the fact that Daisy was at the wheel when the car hit Martyle), but because of his business affairs – an option Nick excludes but Fitzgerald emphasizes. Business plays a much more important role in this interpretation; first and foremost, it reveals that a single interpretation is not really possible.

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In other words, it is true that Gatsby does anything and everything for Daisy; however, his love for Daisy is at least as real as his shady business affairs are. Yet Nick misses this fuller picture in his interpretation of Gatsby. He hints that “Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there” (127), not only for people and police but also for himself. Apparently, most critics of the novel follow Nick rather than Fitzgerald in that the case “rested there” for them, too. Still feeling the agony of Gatsby’s death, Nick indeed re-writes Gatsby’s story, just as he re-writes Gatsby’s statements that confirm the death of his parents. While re-writing Gatsby positively, Nick creates more inconsistencies within the narrative: once, he cannot help but say that “Gatsby […] represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn” (5-6) and “I disapproved of him from beginning to end” (120). In a world of inconsistencies, Nick’s judgments about Gatsby’s greatness are naturally also inconsistent. Yet, these inconsistencies are not mere contradictions; they are deliberately constructed conundrums. Fitzgerald’s juxtaposition of Nick’s narrative with the narrative Nick tries to suppress is an attempt to subjectivize the reader. Business, with its refracted and un-externalized nature, is the motif through which Fitzgerald chooses to subjectivize the reader. In a movement that was interested less in the external world than in the way mind perceived the external world, employing business as a motif was the American way of participating in modernism. *** Not only Gatsby’s but also Nick’s relationship to his own business activities reflect Fitzgerald’s modernist incorporation of the theme of business. Nick is a bond man; yet, he is notoriously bad at making social and personal bonds with people. He cannot establish bonds with Tom or his cousin Daisy, saying, “They were careless people. […] I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child” (139-140). He cannot establish a bond with Jordan Baker, nor with other women he dates. As he says, he “let[s] [relationships] blow quietly away” (46). Most importantly, he cannot establish a bond with Gatsby. Even though Gatsby is the person he understands most, as abovementioned examples show, he understands him mostly partially, ignoring several factors. All of this reiterates Nick’s inability to grasp Gatsby’s business life and the social life altogether, providing instead a strongly subjective perception of the social world. Choosing the bond business cannot be a coincidence for Fitzgerald; it demonstrates not only the impossibility of a shared world for the subjectivized individuals but also the absurdity of expecting communication and understanding among people.

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After Gatsby dies, Nick tries to reach Meyer Wolfshiem, thinking that he and Gatsby were good friends. However, “Meyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book” (128). Even though he finds his office address, he cannot reach him. He is able to contact Wolfshiem only after overcoming many obstacles. In that sense, Wolfshiem not only represents business or a businessman in the novel but also the social reality, per se. The inaccessibility of Wolfshiem is analogous to the inaccessibility of the social world in the novel. This is a succinct example of what the modernist text problematizes through different plots: there is no possible communication, hence no possible referentiality. In a world of imprisoned individualities, the Darstellung of a social world in the realist or naturalist sense would be misleading; hence the modernist preference of the individual over the social. In The Great Gatsby, the social world is “uncommunicable forever” (87); and in American literary modernism, business was the way to articulate this non-communication and the impossibility of a coherent social world through a concrete plot.

Conclusion

On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the American stock market experienced the most devastating crash in the history of the United States, creating the deepest and longest-lasting economic crisis in the Western world in the subsequent ten years. The Great Depression halved the industrial production and left 13 to 15 million people jobless by 1932, creating an unemployment rate of more than 20%. Government figures registered the unemployment rate at 25% in 1933, 20.1% in 1935, 16.9% in 1936 and 10% in 1941 (qtd. in Yanella 5). The Dust Bowl – severe dust storms and drought that greatly damaged nature and agriculture in several states – coincided with the Great Depression, contributing to the rising unemployment rate, especially in the agricultural sector. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless; many – approximately 3.5 million people – moved out of the Plains states, immigrating to the West, to California in particular (Worster 49). In Woodie Guthrie’s words, “we loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,/We rattled down that highway to never come back again” (qtd. in M. A. Jackson 59). The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl left no one in the country untouched: even the wealthy, who owned a significant portion of the nation’s stocks at the time and whose wealth indirectly depended on sectors such as agriculture, were walloped by these destructive incidents. Nearly every social group faced dislocation on a variety of levels: while crime and suicide rates increased, the birth rate dropped tremendously, revealing changing family structure. These drastic events led to far-reaching mental changes in American society in general – changes which profoundly shaped American culture in the 1930s. As McElvaine says, “Perhaps the chief impact of the Great Depression was that it […] took away, at least temporarily, the easy assumptions of expansion and mobility that had decisively influenced so much of past American thinking” (qtd. in Entin 7). In fact, the closure of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century had already demonstrated the impossibility of limitless growth and movement. The economic optimism of the 1920s, however, made many forget these limitations.

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As Edward Earle Purinton, a journalist, wrote in 1921, “The rewards are for everybody, and all can win. There are no favorites – Providence always crowns the career of the man who is worthy. And in this game there is no ‘luck’ – you have the fun of taking chances but the sobriety of guaranteeing certainties” (395). Subsequently, the Great Depression reiterated the early lesson from the frontier in the socio-economic sphere, reversing the economic optimism of the 1920s again. Accordingly, the belief that hard work guaranteed survival – not to mention social and economic mobility – which had largely dominated the American psyche for a long time despite reservations disappeared in the 1930s. After the Depression, a general feeling of hopelessness dawned on Americans. Doors were closing; preDepression truths and options no longer worked; there was no easy way to escape these feelings of confinement. Americans had the feeling that they were living in the worst of all times. American culture responded to these feelings in a variety of ways. Popular culture responded by offering escape. Hollywood producers mainly made musicals, screwball comedies and romances in the period. Through movies such as Frankenstein and It Happened One Night, producers attempted to offer the Darstellung of another universe to the otherwise unhappy audiences. Radio gained popularity through soap operas and buoyantly cheerful music. Dance-oriented melodies dominated the music tastes of a significant portion of the population. Magazines such as Life filled their pages with spectacular events and pictures of idolized personalities. Pop literature was no different: works like Gone with the Wind (1936) presented the readers of the period with a romantic escape from the social suffering. Popular culture was not the only available medium that responded to social changes and feelings of captivity, though. In contrast to the transient nature of popular culture, the rising feelings of limitation shaped the “high” literature of the period as well. As a response, many literary works offered textual strategies to work through these feelings of confinement and the social discontent prevalent in American society. Often, writers incorporated the motif of business as a part of these strategies – as a way of helping the reader cope with the exhausting social world. The Motif of Business After the Great Depression One of the profound results of the Great Depression on the literature of the period was the changing representation of reality: in contrast to high modernists of the 1910s and 1920s, the writers of the 1930s incorporated clearer and more accessible – that is, externalized – representations in their literary texts. As explored in the previous chapter, one of the primary functions of American literary modernism

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was to subjectivize readers, allowing them to find their own realities. This objective led to a highly experimental form of literature, where the Darstellung was rendered unclear and uneasy, in contrast to the antecedent realist and naturalist forms of representation. The 1930s saw writers stripping off the difficulty of the high modernist Darstellung and coming up with more stable and accessible literary referents. Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel starts like a realist or a naturalist novel with a clear and accessible representation of the external referent: “General Miles with his gaudy uniform and spirited charger was the center for all eyes, especially as his steed was extremely restless” (1). The rise of a relatively stable Darstellung in the literature of the period was one of the symptoms that scholars diagnosed as the rebirth of naturalistic tendencies. Pizer says, in the 1930s and 1940s, “American literary naturalism […] once more came upon the scene” (“Three Phases” 29). A contemporary critic, Edward Dahlberg, confirms this in his definition of the literature of the period by saying, Today, the modern novelist, announcing a frankly realistic physical man, has spawned a fetal thing whose brains and bones cause us […] to pit rue into our nostrils. We are, finally, so defiled unto ourselves that we have to shriek at the Uncleanness of man’s organs and functions out of the ugly cloaca of the naturalistic novel. (51)

Dahlberg’s definition of the modern novelist in 1941 could also be valid for classical American naturalism of the 1890s – one of the major externalized literary forms in the history of American literature. The main reason behind this emphasis on externalization was no different from the factors that had required representational shifts previously: the need for the reality effect. Essentially, the need for the reality effect brought the motif of business back to American literature. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the reading public needed social reality in a way reminiscent of the post-Civil War reading public. The way post-Depression readers defined social reality was quite different from the social reality of post-Civil War readers, though: the major tenet of readers’ understanding and experience of social reality in the 1930s was their relation to the dominant social and political system. The effects of the Depression, the subsequent New Deal, the emergence of the Soviet Union with an alternative model, and the rising popularity of communism and the Communist Party of the USA1 led readers to question the system. As a response – that is, in an attempt to connect the textual reality to the experienced social reality of the time – writers of

1

For the rising popularity of communism in the US and among American writers, see Philip Yanella, American Literature in Context after 1929, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

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the period often represented system-related realities, leaving the mere “high” modernist Darstellung of the mind behind. In particular, writers started to include the Darstellung of the individual vis-à-vis the system so that the reader could identify with the textual reality. Once social reality became a significant matter in literature again, the motif of business became popular as well, waking up from its modernist sleep: the motif was utilized in order to create a realistic Darstellung of the individual against the system. Interestingly, this rebirth of the motif occurred in spite of the reductive and negative ideas about business organizations in the period. During the Depression, the ambivalence about business that marked the pre-Depression period had disappeared once and for all.2 With the Depression and the subsequent New Deal policies, Americans started to adopt a strongly negative view of the business organization as well as businessmen. Business and businessmen were scapegoats for the limitations and constraints Americans faced in their social lives. As FDR summarized, “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence. […] Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.” In spite of this clearly negative view, American writers did not avoid the motif, for it had the potential to engender the reality effect. Even though many people hated business organizations and blamed them for their misery, writers still saliently represented the motif because it enabled them to connect readers’ experienced reality (of feelings of limitation through the system) to the literary reality. From the Depression up through the 1960s, writers utilized business in order to create representations of the individual vis-à-vis the system in many different ways. One group of writers employed the motif to represent the individual against the broader social, political and economic system. The works of Ayn Rand, who is among the major writers of business fiction in general, epitomize this group. In one of her early works, Night of January 16th (1934),3 Rand utilizes the motif of business to represent a struggle between individualism and social conformity in general. The play describes the trial of Karen Andre, who is accused of killing her boss, business tycoon Bjorn Faulkner. The motif of business and businessman sets up the conflict between the non-conformist Karen Andre and the socially restrictive jury, offering readers conflicts similar to those they experienced in their daily

2

In fact, scholars’ paradigm of positivity and negativity regarding the business novel, which is explored in the Introduction, can be traced back to the 1930s.

3

The play was originally staged under the title Woman on Trial in 1934.

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lives. In her We Are the Living (1936), Rand presents the reader with a post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, where the protagonist, Kira Argounova resists social and political conformity. Business is again the tool that allows Rand to present the reader with the Darstellung of an individual against the system: the protagonist’s father’s textile factory is nationalized by the government, which constitutes the starting point for Kira’s journey into individualism and capitalism. Perhaps the most popular of her novels and one of the most popular business novels in general, Atlas Shrugged (1957) pits the individual against the system even more harshly through the motif. In the novel, American businessmen leave their companies in the face of strict state regulations. Rand tries to answer the question: what happens if the industrialists, the Atlases, shrug? In this “dystopian” scenario, where the individual, appearing as the businessman, is oppressed, New York loses its electricity and life becomes unbearable. Considering that Rand’s favorite novel was Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster’s Calumet “K” (1901),4 which tells the story of a heroic businessman overcoming obstacles in constructing an industrial elevator, Rand’s use of business to emphasize the individualism or objectivism is not really surprising. Though less openly propagandistic than Rand, other writers in the post-Depression period represented the struggle between the individual and the system through the motif of business as well. Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy includes a part entitled, “The House of Morgan,” which is about J. P. Morgan and his family. In it, he criticizes the capitalist greed that smashes the individual through the motif of business: Wars and panic on the stock exchange, machine-gun fire and arson, bankruptcies, war loans, starvation, lice, cholera and typhus; good growing weather for the House of Morgan. (645)

Here, the capitalist system leads to “starvation, lice, cholera and typhus.” Both Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck followed this trend of representing the motif as a way of creating characters against the system in their works. Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not (1937) reveals how economic problems force a man into crime and result in death, demonstrating how weak an individual is

4

In a letter, she wrote, “the very best I’ve ever read, my favorite thing in all world literature (and that includes all the heavy classics) is a novelette called Calumet ‘K’ by Merwin-Webster” (252).

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against the system. Steinbeck’s seminal The Grapes of Wrath (1939) describes the dissolution of a family from Oklahoma after the Dust Bowl hits the area. In Oklahoma and California, the family members lose their familial and personal integrity while trying to survive against the system. The Darstellung of the individual against the broader social, political and economic system in these texts often required characters that are outside the system. Therefore, there are neither well-off white-collar tradesmen nor businessmen as protagonists; instead, workers, unemployed, or suffering businessmen frequently have the leading role. In contrast to the Darstellung of the individual against the broader social, political and economic system such as capitalism or socialism, another group of writers utilized the motif of business in order to represent the individual vis-à-vis a narrower concept of system; namely the corporation. In this group of business fiction, the system is no longer the larger, broader political or economic regime but the business organization itself. How the individual operates within the corporation is the main theme of this group of novels. In fact, the “father” of this genre is Sinclair Lewis, whose Babbitt (1922) explores a realtor, George Babbitt, and his unsuccessful attempts at rebellion against social and organizational conformity, appearing in the form of “lodges” or booster clubs. Point of No Return (1949) by John P. Marquand reiterates a similar theme with an upper-middle class organization man, Charles Gray, who, after receiving a promotion at the bank where he works, realizes that he is a part of the system in a way similar to Babbitt. In Executive Suite (1952), Cameron Hawley, himself a businessman, explores the story of struggles to find a vice-president for a furniture company, and the debates around this decision. His 1955 Cash McCall tells the story of a good businessman who acquires poorly managed companies and makes them profitable. Adamant about the importance of the reality effect in their Darstellung of the individual vis-à-vis the system, writers sought to come up with realistic business corporations and businessmen in their fictions. Accordingly, several of these corporate novels took the popular and newly-emerging media industry as their setting. While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941) explores the individual vis-à-vis the system in the movie industry, Frederic Wakeman’s protagonist in The Hucksters (1946) works in the advertising industry. Similarly, Herman Wouk’s Aurora Dawn, or, The True History of Andrew Reale (1946) revolves around radio and advertising industries, while Office Politics (1966) by Wilfrid Sheed explores the power struggles in a publishing house. Probably the most popular of these corporate novels, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (1956), has a New York-based television network as its setting. Writers sought to come up with not only “realistic” corporations but also realistic protagonists as well.

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In contrast to the blue-collar characters of the former group of business fiction, characters work already as businessmen in this group of novels, as they are already within the system. Often however, they are only employees, working as salesmen or representatives. Considering the fact that the Darstellung of the individual visà-vis the system requires them to be within the middle of the system, writers’ representation of mid-men – rather than executives with more room for their decisions – increases the reality effect. At the end of the novel, these businessmen are squeezed within the system, not really being able to leave their organizations, which fit the limitation readers of the post-Depression period experienced in their social lives. Arthur Miller utilized the business motif in his post-war plays, All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), in a more complex and subtle way than the abovementioned writers did. Like others, Miller constructed business in an attempt to represent the individual vis-à-vis the system. However, rather than focusing on the broader political and economic system or on narrower corporations, he took society in and through which individuals operate as the system. The earlier play tells the story of Joe Keller, a successful businessman, who lives with his wife and son in a suburban neighborhood. His other son, Larry – a pilot – went missing during World War II. In the course of the play, it becomes clear that Joe sold defective machine parts to the Air Force during the war. In an ironic turn of events, the play reveals that the defective cylinder heads he sold to the army led to Larry’s death, suggesting that Joe indirectly killed his own son. The motif of business allows Miller to demonstrate that individuals are responsible for their decisions: a narcissist and egocentric individualism will have disillusioning results, as it clashes with the social system. Through the motif of business, Miller asserts the existence of a society of zero-sum game, where actions have indispensable results in society. In his later play, Miller explores the mismatch between individual and social perceptions through the motif of business. Death of a Salesman tells the story of Willy Loman, an old traveling salesman. Unrealistic expectations from others, that is, the lack of knowledge about how others – society – functions and the individual’s place within it, lead to disaster in the novel. Willy wants to transfer to a local job because he can no longer drive due to psychological instability: he hallucinates and constantly talks to imaginary people. Upon his demand to work in a local office, his boss fires him instead of making the transfer. Similarly, his son Biff, for whom Willy has high hopes, tries to take a loan from a former employer, Bill Oliver, to start a new business. However, Bill does not even know him and rejects Biff’s request. Not being able to connect his expectations from others with the way others see him and his family, Willy commits suicide at the end of the play.

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With this ending, the motif of business allows Miller to assert how disillusioning the difference between the individual’s and society’s perceptions can be. In short, after the Great Depression, business was still omnipresent in the social and mental lives of Americans, as the frequent use of the motif reveals. However, the way the motif is utilized after the Great Depression – to represent the individual vis-à-vis the system – reveals that business served communicative functions different from those it served between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Possibly, writers were attempting to offer a form of social and mental orientation for the contemporary dislocation in a way realists sought several decades earlier, but with the lessons of naturalism and modernism in mind – that is, by acknowledging the subjectivity of reality for individuals. This applies to the literary works that included the motif in the second part of the twentieth century as well. In order to gain a deeper insight into the functions of the motif in novels such as Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) and William Gaddis’s JR: A Novel (1975), a deeper understanding of the background of postmodernism is necessary. As the narrator in the earlier novel says, “Where is a frame of reference now for any of us that extends even the distance to the horizon, only eighteen miles away?” (222). This question is highly symptomatic of postmodernism, where frames of reference are always in flow, making it impossible for the reader to access deeper “truths.” However, these are only preliminary assumptions. Considering the popularity of late twentieth-century novels, research into the functions of business and businessmen in the works published after the Great Depression would offer invaluable insights into twentieth-century American literature in general. The Motif of Business and Literature All the literary texts I explored in depth in this study were written partly abroad: Howells composed parts of The Rise of Silas Lapham in England, Dreiser traveled Europe in the midst of The Financier and Fitzgerald resided in France when he started writing The Great Gatsby. These novelists, like people in general, attempted to define their own culture especially when they were abroad, after seeing the differences between home and what is not home. Cultural differences are often mentioned in these novels: after Lapham refuses to sell mills to the English, the “Englishmen treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff” (284), not understanding what the American Lapham meant in the first place. When Mrs. Corey gets sick, the doctor says “but for Mrs. Lapham's timely care, the lady would hardly have lived.” The doctor was “a very effusive little Frenchman, and

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fancied he was saying something very pleasant to everybody” (22). In The Financier, Dreiser talks of “an atmosphere of European freedom not common to America” (60). In Fitzgerald’s novel, in addition to the unintelligible Finnish wisdom, Nick is “struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans” (35). These small incidents are indicative of writers’ attempts to define America in relation to Europe. For this purpose, they utilized the motif of business. It is not a coincidence that business popped up in their minds abroad: to them, it was the common denominator that distinguished America from Europe. It was a dominant, omniscient and ubiquitous component of American civilization, constituting America as an abstract notion. Accordingly, these novelists were also aware of the pragmatic power that the motif of business could have in the reception process of their literary texts. Undoubtedly, American writers between the antebellum and the Great Depression utilized the motif of business as a tool to execute specific communicative functions. The motif can be utilized as a tool for scholars as well, not for its affective potential but for its revelatory and explanatory power about American culture – that is, as an epistemological tool. An investigation of the business motif not only yields results about its evolution in the period, but it also allows us to frame broader tendencies about American literature in particular and literature in general. By using a motif in order to know more not only about the motif itself but also about the broader “halo” around the motif, this research reveals that mere close-reading is insufficient for literary research. The problem with mere close reading is that because it often offers insight into a literary work in a detailed way, it makes it difficult to talk about American literature or literature in general due to the impossibility of evidence from many other literary works. Notwithstanding the importance of reading as many literary works as possible, scholars will never really be able to read all of the relevant works in order to outline literary trends. Considering the fact that there are thousands of “novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand – no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will” (Moretti, “World Literature” 55), any history of American literature must necessarily exclude many fictional texts. In the face of such an impossibility, Moretti’s unorthodox suggestion of “distant reading” – literary research through “testable knowledge” (Distant Reading 155) via methods such as z-score, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficient – is understandable: it offers results that traditional scholarship cannot generate. Although Moretti’s starting point is well-justified, his “empirical” method still misses significant literary facts and implications that cannot be empirically

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demonstrated. Literary texts have simply too many features that can only be discerned by “manually” analyzing the text in contrast to Moretti’s computational analysis. Most importantly, Moretti’s method is not helpful in understanding the composition of texts – put simply, why a text is constructed in the way it is. In contrast to Moretti’s computational approach, this study demonstrates how a motif allows us to gain a deeper insight into literature writ large and American literature in particular through its explanatory power, responding to Moretti’s diagnosis in an alternative way. It reveals that literary research, as an epistemological tool, is a historiographical act in itself: it unearths historical realities in a way that is in other ways (as historians do it) unrecoverable. Notwithstanding the fact that any approach, theory or method is just a lens through which a new vision becomes possible, this approach exposes, through the motif, the needs of the reading public as well as the way writers responded to them in the period. As such, this study is a history of imagination, as it were, which is possible to unearth neither through “distant reading” nor through traditional ways of “doing” history. It has since long been admitted that literature – in fact, language in general – serves performative functions. Building on previous research, this study demonstrates that writers’ pragmatic objectives constitute an important component of these functions. Although there are always differences between writers’ objectives and the functions literary texts serve (as these functions are also determined by readers, who are essentially unique personally and historically, as well as their process of reception), writers’ communicative intentions direct them to attempt to limit the interpretation of their texts. They seek to control the process of reception through different components of their texts, including the motifs they include. Building on this idea, this study proposes an implicit definition of the relationship between the literary work and the motif: motifs in literary works, such as the motif of business, are placed there to evoke the broader communicative functions literary works serve. In fact, an analysis of the motif of love in The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Financier and The Great Gatsby reiterate the deliberate nature of the communicative functions literary works serve. The love plot in the first novel allows Howells to orient the reader socially: while the misunderstood romance between Irene and Tom orients readers through a bad example, the marriage of Penelope and Tom is an attempt to enlighten readers about courting and real love in general. Frank’s extra-marital affair with Aileen in The Financier contributes to the effect of intensity that the motif of business evokes. Gatsby’s impossible love for Daisy reiterates the impossibility of accessing external reality, hence highlighting the modernist subjectivity. Considering the way both motifs are utilized, it is impossible to deny the deliberate nature of the communicative functions motifs are designed

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to perform. Accordingly, although reception aesthetics is dominated by approaches which take the reader as its center, writers – the unique way they perceived the reading public and combined this perception with their agendas within the supply and demand nexus – shaped individual literary works as well as the course of American literary history. That is why the author biographies in this study are crucial: they shine a special spotlight on writers’ communicative objectives regardless of their success. The pragmatic functions literary works are designed to serve also speak to the patterns of literary evolution in the US in the period. They suggest that, the way the reading public and writers defined reality was the engine of literary evolution: while realists defined it through the “middle path,” naturalists and modernists defined reality as intensity and subjectivity, respectively. The changing needs and conceptions of reality brought about new literary forms and techniques, which writers embraced uniquely but wholeheartedly. In this light, it is reasonable to assume that the changing conceptions, as well as ways of transferring reality in postmodernism, lie behind the representations in the postmodernist movement. It cannot be a coincidence that pastiche – imitating the style of others in a celebratory way – is a common tool in postmodern writing. Presumably, the tool is frequently utilized because it serves a specific communicative function that other tools cannot, as future research may reveal. Out of this literary history emerges a new account of literary movements in American literary history. The concept of a movement – or genre, as some call it – such as realism, naturalism or modernism is highly controversial and scholars have long sought to come up with clearer and neater definitions of these movements. Den Tandt calls literary movements “sites of connectedness – interwoven strands” (414). Roland Barthes calls them “a fabric of voices” (qtd. in Den Tandt, “Refashioning” 414). Yet, none of the definitions are precise and concrete enough to draw a full picture. This analysis of the motif of business has demonstrated that it is fruitful to look at literary movements as collective and concerted efforts at executing specific communicative functions. While American realism was a collective attempt to offer social orientation, American naturalism and modernism were efforts to present the reader with intensity and subjectivization, respectively. Both Den Tandt’s and Barthes’s definition of literary movements are correct but deserve elaboration. Movements are “interwoven,” but the relationship among the amalgam of literary works belonging to the same movement is not really as abstract as these scholars imply; what connects literary works within a movement is the communicative functions these works are designed to serve.

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*** From an even broader perspective, it might be illuminating to frame literature, at least American literature in this period, as a provider of reality and experience. Considering the fact that religious texts also offered various conceptions of reality, modern literature seems to continue this function, though through different means. If religious texts simulate realities that our worldly bodies cannot experience, modern literature simulates realities that we cannot experience in our daily lives. As a rule, the range of our experience is severely limited: people cannot experience all the feelings and events that exist on Earth. There is a limited amount of love, hate, sex and death for everyone. Literature, on the other hand, allows us to simulate the experience of what we cannot experience in real life in a variety of ways. It allows us to see other possibilities that life denies us. This freedom from the shackles of daily life is especially important in the case of America: it is not a coincidence that American literature has been dominated by stories of characters who embark “on a melodramatic quest through a symbolic universe, unformed by networks of social relations and unfettered by the pressure of social restraints” (Kaplan 2) – characters who are often represented without social restraints. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood movies tend to portray mafia families who always manage to escape the police, common individuals traveling in time and lovers who find unlimited joy. As one of the greatest American businessmen, Steve Jobs, says, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy” (qtd. in Sculley and Bryne 157). In America, this need for fictional possibilities has been especially strongly perceived; therefore, such narratives of unrestrained experiences have enjoyed continual popularity. Pursuing the simulation of other possibilities is, in turn, a way of getting to know ourselves. After all, to be able to see who we really are, we first need to get out of ourselves to look at ourselves from outside like an external observer. Literature shows us who we are in a way we cannot know in other ways through a variety of textual tools – in this case, that of business.

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Games | Game Design | Game Studies An Introduction (With Contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman) 2015, 296 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-2983-5 E-Book: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2983-9

Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger

Network Publicy Governance On Privacy and the Informational Self February 2018, 170 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4213-1 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4213-5

Nicolaj van der Meulen, Jörg Wiesel (eds.)

Culinary Turn Aesthetic Practice of Cookery (In collaboration with Anneli Käsmayr and in editorial cooperation with Raphaela Reinmann) 2017, 328 p., pb., col. ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3031-2 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3031-6

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Cultural Studies Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.)

Performing the Digital Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures 2016, 304 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3355-9 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3355-3

Suzi Mirgani

Target Markets – International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall 2016, 198 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3352-8 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3352-2

Ramón Reichert, Annika Richterich, Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Karin Wenz (eds.)

Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 3, Issue 2/2017 – Mobile Digital Practices January 2018, 272 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3821-9 E-Book: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3821-3

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!