Issue 7, Spring 2005 Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 7, Spring 2005
Reimagining the Shopping Mall: European Invention of the “American” Consumer Space
Paul Edwards
© Paul Edwards. All Rights Reserved
Little tables all over those marble streets, people sitting at them eating, drinking or smoking – crowds of other people strolling by – such is the Arcade. I should like to live in it all my life [1]
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880)
Sitting in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Mark Twain reflected on the “vast and beautiful Arcade” recently completed in the northern Italian city of Milan. Admiring both the architecture and use of space, Twain temporarily dreamt, albeit with his usual ironic tone, of abandoning his travels around Europe and remaining in a Milanese shopping arcade.[2] The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele was, and indeed continues to be, an impressive example of late nineteenth century, neo-classical architecture, occupying a central place in Milanese urban life; a place for commerce as much as a place for relaxation and people watching. Despite the practical possibility of remaining in the Galleria all his life, however, Twain quickly grew bored with it and moved onto his next set of observational “trampings”. Milan’s gallerias had little architectural echo in the America of the late 1870s. With mass industrialization and immigration creating the teeming cities of Chicago and New York, there seemed little time or space to sit and watch crowds of people strolling by. The spirit of hardwork and individualism evident in John Winthrop’s City on a Hill survived intact and America’s urban spaces have reflected that spirit throughout the nation’s history. Perhaps Twain was most impressed by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele because he had seen nothing to resemble it in extensive travels around his own country, no urban spaces to sit and watch city life pass him by. Eighty-five years after Twain’s Milanese people-watching, another iconoclast, the architect Robert Venturi, explained his failure to adopt a plaza for his entry to redesign Boston’s historic Copley Square: “The piazza, in fact, is ‘un-American.’ Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television, or perhaps at the bowling alley”.[3] Venturi’s America of the 1960s and 70s seemed to be the first society in history with no need for the architecture of public, urban space that Twain had admired in Italy all those years earlier.
Venturi’s comments ignored one public space that already existed in American’s cities, albeit removed from the increasingly deserted downtown areas, one with much in common with the gallerias that Twain took such pleasure in. By 1965, the suburban shopping mall was well on its way to becoming an established part of American life. Providing an opportunity for one-stop shopping, alongside spaces to sit and meet with friends, the suburban mall could serve much of the communal function offered by the traditional, and much mythologised, town square or European gallerias and piazzas. The archetype for these malls was Southdale, designed by the Viennese-born architect Victor Gruen, which opened in 1956 in the suburbs of Minneapolis. With 72 stores, anchored by two major department stores, all arranged in a two-level design around a brightly lighted central court with free parking for 5000 vehicles, Southdale signalled a new paradigm in the way Americans would shop, away from distant downtowns and disorganised “Miracle Miles”. As one contemporaneous architecture critic writing in the influential Architectural Forum was moved to remark: “Here [at Southdale] we see architecture fulfilling one of its most creative roles: building a new kind of environment”.[4] The shopping mall signified a remarkable change in how Americans used and thought about their urban space.
In the ensuing 50 years, the shopping mall has become the signifier of all that ails American public space. Beginning with Neil Harris in the mid 1970s, cultural critics have highlighted many of the social, architectural and cultural negatives engendered at the mall.[5] In 1985, William Kowinski’s celebrated The Malling of America identified the mall as the key site in explaining American culture and society, from the oft-quoted “retail drama” of consuming in the mall to “mallrat” kids escaping the confines of both school and home in spending their evenings “growing up” at the mall.[6] More recently, both James J. Farrell and Sharon Zukin have used the mall to interrogate America’s obsession with consumption, taking different methodological approaches but arriving at the conclusion that America needs to change its shopping habits be it in or out of the spaces of the mall.[7] Lizabeth Cohen in A Consumers’ Republic has suggested that the centrality of the shopping mall in American culture has led to the nation’s “public spaces” becoming more commercialised, privatised and feminised than they had been before the advent of the mall.[8] The mall, for many, has become the terrible signifier of American society obsessed by image, pseudo-individuality and, perhaps most importantly, fetishised consumption. In designing Southdale, and its open-air precursor, Northland, Victor Gruen forever changed the spaces in which America shopped.
In this paper, I argue that the shopping mall is not the exceptionally American space that cultural critics and historians on both sides of the Atlantic would have us believe. With historical foundations in the Agora of Greek antiquity and the Milanese galleria that Twain admired so much, the mall updated the trans-historical combination of community and commerce in one urban space. The designer of Southdale, Victor Gruen brought to the mall an understanding of that history of buying and selling, which combined with his experiences of living in inter-war Vienna led to the creation of a Europe-inspired and designed new shopping space out in the automobile dominated American suburbs of the 1950s. Although built in a time and space uniquely American, Victor Gruen’s shopping mall was an attempt to bring the refined, communal spaces of European central cities to the vacuous, soulless space of 1950s American suburbs.[9]
The America of the 1950s in which Southdale emerged was undergoing a remarkable and rapid transformation in its urban space. Returning servicemen, aided by cheap government loans, flocked, with their families, to the good life of the suburbs, encouraged by the affordability of the automobile and a new federally funded Interstate Highway system of more than 42,000 miles. The Levittowns of Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were the most well-known examples of this dramatic change in American metropolitan space. The suburbs were growing everywhere. By 1950, the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities, and in 1954, the editors of Fortune magazine estimated that more than 9 million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade.[10] As consumers increasingly pursued their individual suburban dreams, downtown retailing stopped being so important. Unplanned, roadside strip developments sprung up along most commuter routes in an effort to attract shoppers, but the rapid expansion of suburbia meant that it was increasingly difficult both to attract customers and to predict where they would want to shop.[11] Gruen proved more aware than most of these rapid changes and proposed a new site for retailing that could also act as a “coalescing” space away from the private spaces of the automobile and the suburban home.
Despite his status as a pre-war Jewish émigré with a string of successful architectural projects in America to his name, Victor Gruen has received none of the critical attention of his architectural contemporaries, Walter Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[12] Only in 2004 did the first major work on the career of Victor Gruen emerge in M. Jeffery Hardwick’s Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Well researched and fluently written, Mall Maker takes a biographical approach and convincingly positions Gruen as an influential and important figure in American space, as the “architect” of the shopping mall. Before 2004, the most significant publications on Victor Gruen were the works of the British planning historian, David R. Hill, in “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis” (1992) and “A Case for Teleological Urban Form History and Ideas: Lewis Mumford, F.L. Wright, Jane Jacobs and Victor Gruen” (1993). Hill not only places Gruen alongside canonical figures in planning thought, but makes the case for the European origins in Gruen’s work as vital for understanding the possibilities for regional and environmental planning, while maintaining the urban intimacy proclaimed by the likes of Lewis Mumford or Jane Jacobs.[13]
Others have examined Gruen’s career, including Howard Gillette Jr., Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Søren Askegaard and, more recently, Timothy Mennel, but none go significantly beyond examining Gruen as the father of the shopping mall.[14] Perhaps that is because of his concentration in the hyper-commercialised field of retail architecture or perhaps because he had none of the clear, modernist ideology that dominated the functional designs of a Gropius, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. But Victor Gruen should not be dismissed as an architect of little influence who had the fortune, be it good or bad, to design one of the epochal spaces of the twentieth century. Gruen was a thinker as well as a practitioner and had a coherent ideology of his own. He was a humanist and a socialist who believed in improving the built environment by building for the enjoyment and relaxation of people. Gruen was a pragmatic and successful architect who got projects built, but he was also a humanist, interested in people more than buildings, and heavily influenced by his time in pre-1938 Vienna. His designs for the shopping centre clearly show these influences; with the mall, Gruen was building more than just a machine for shopping.
Gruen began his American career designing New York Fifth Avenue jewellery and clothing stores. In designing such stores, he took advantage of his earlier Viennese career in which he had designed seven small stores. But Gruen’s work quickly progressed into the emergent suburban department branch stores in the 1940s and 50s.[15] By the early 1950s, he had firmly established himself as a successful store designer. His work on Milliron’s department store in Los Angeles and his innovative store designs for Bay Fair Shopping Center in San Leandro, California won him numerous awards.[16] However, even in these early stages of his architectural career, Gruen saw himself as more than just a designer of stores. As early as 1943, Gruen and his partner, Elsie Krummeck, had responded to the call of Architectural Forum for visions of post-war America by proposing a new kind of shopping space.[17] Following the end of the war, Gruen observed, “the building boom, higher income levels, and the increased use of automobiles” had “accentuated the development of suburban shopping facilities and engaged the attention of more and more retailers”.[18] Such unorganised retail growth, he argued, could not continue. Roadside shopping facilities were no longer sufficient to serve, let alone attract, the suburban consumer. Only by bonding together with other stores in cooperative enterprise, Gruen argued, could storeowners integrate their activities within the local scene and begin to predict shopping patterns again. Gruen proposed building shopping centres, populated by a wide range of stores, which would also act as social centres for surrounding communities.
Gruen’s vision for the mall reflected his architectural experience in inter-war Vienna. Lacking the formal training of his more well-known émigré contemporaries such as Walter Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gruen’s designs for the mall combined romantic ideas of pre-war Europe with a pragmatic modernism. Gruen began studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1917, under the tutelage of the modernist Peter Behrens, now known as the father of industrial design. Forced to leave school following the death of his father in 1918, Gruen went to work in the architectural and construction firm of Melcher and Steiner. Engaged in this firm for more than eight years, Gruen’s practical experience of building far outweighed any theoretical, formal learning. Despite his deficiency of formal architectural education, Gruen lacked nothing in intellectual depth or profundity. Behrens and Adolph Loos proved to be key influences on Gruen’s architectural thinking, along with the work of the Viennese, Camillo Sitte and Frenchman, Le Corbusier. Behrens inaugurated industrial modernism, directly influencing such luminaries as Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, while Loos achieved renown for the lack of ornamentation in his functionalist buildings. Such proto-modernism combined with Camillo Sitte’s focus on human scale and aesthetic pleasure in architectural design to provide the intellectual foundation for Gruen’s thinking on the shopping mall. Perhaps most importantly for the construction of malls, his practical architectural background encouraged him to reject the prevalent dogmas of modernist architecture and instead embrace the practicalities of completing successful projects in a profession dominated by commercial considerations.[19]
With a training in some of the key European architectural ideas of the early twentieth century, a delight for the pre-war Vienna of his youth and a pragmatism born from his experience in the construction industry, Victor Gruen used his experience of retail design to apply himself to the needs and problems of the American suburbs of the 1950s. His solution was Southdale Mall, a “new environment in 20th Century life, not only for shopping but for many other activities as well”.[20] More than just a practical solution to the obvious problem of declining downtown retail sales, his shopping centres were to be an ideological counterpoint to the increasing suburbanisation of America. Gruen believed that the post-war growth of suburbia had outstripped the facilities provided for it. As a result, he argued, “suburbia had become an arid land inhabited during the day almost entirely by women and children and strictly compartmentalized by family income, social, religious, and racial background”.[21] For Gruen, Southdale could fill that emerging void and reverse social and cultural homogeneity. The mall could become a community focal point, encouraging, “a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans – to have social meetings, to relax together, to enjoy art, music, civic activities, the theater, films, good food, and entertainment in the company of others”.[22] Such a centre could provide the variety, heterogeneity and community of his own youth that Gruen felt was sadly missing from America’s suburbs.
Gruen’s theorising on this matter grew directly from his experiences in Vienna. He remembered the inter-war Vienna of his youth as Europe’s “center of intellectual and cultural life”. His vision of urbanity came directly from the cafés of Vienna, where a cross-section of peoples would gather and discuss culture, politics and everyday life. Frequently in speeches, as his biographer M. Jeffrey Hardwick illustrates, Gruen would pair “slides of European cities with American shopping centers”.[23] Venice’s Piazza San Marco would be juxtaposed with Detroit’s Northland. More than his own experiences, Gruen saw a direct intellectual link between the origins of civilised Europe and what he felt could become a civilised America. After all, buying and selling was “as old as mankind;” “In the Greece of antiquity the merchant spread his wares under the colonnades of the Stoa, a building especially designated for his activity”.[24] The spaces of the Agora had numerous functions as citizens would stroll in the square, discuss the topics of the day, transact their business, “while philosophers, poets, and entertainers argued, recited and performed”. The Agora was the centre of city life, and “in this colorful, lively, dynamic environment commerce had its share”.[25]
While antiquity provided one intellectual and spatial model for the mall, a more recent paradigm were the gallerias and arcades of France and Italy. Gruen argued that the conditions of nineteenth-century European cities shared much in common with post-war American suburbs:
The conditions of the streets were rendered so disagreeable and unsafe that walking on narrow or nonexistent sidewalks became an unpleasant experience. Thus merchants, bonding together, in cooperation with many outstanding architects, created new, exclusively pedestrian, weather-protected areas in the middle of building blocks, connecting one major street with another.[26]
By the 1950s, walking in America’s suburban shopping districts had become an impossible task. The dangers of the horse and carriage had been replaced by those of the automobile to the detriment of both pedestrians and retailers. Explicitly, Gruen wrote, the mall was directly “inspired by the pedestrian areas of the gallerias in Milan and Naples”.[27] In intellectually positioning the mall in this way, both temporally and spatially, Gruen successfully historicized the space of the mall; for him, “the colonnades, gallerias, and covered arcades of European cities found contemporary expression in the covered mall”.[28]
Gruen’s efforts to position the mall as an historic continuation from earlier, European shopping experiences found expression both in his writings and the aesthetics of mall design. Speaking in 1954 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he argued that the mall recreated an “old architectural form – the square or plaza”. There people could “relax – not just shop”. The built spaces of Southdale would allow people to “attend fashion shows, concerts and exhibits of everything from new cars to paintings”.[29] Architecturally, Gruen expressed himself through concern with human scale, commodity and delight. While this terminology came from the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, Gruen updated it a little, noting how: “In clusters of shops surrounding medieval churches, in the Italian piazza . . . historic market places had one thing in common, an intimate relationship between architecture and the human being. In the language of the Architect all these had HUMAN SCALE”.[30] Similarly, at the mall, Gruen designed space “in which the structure does not interfere or impose upon the conditions of commodity and delight”.[31] This meant the establishment of clean lines and structurally neutral space that allowed the introduction of mall “furniture” that could help construct, for the pedestrian, the sensation of delight. For Gruen, “Trees and flowers, music, fountains, sculpture and murals, and the architecture of free-standing structures” were “vital parts of the over-all composition”.[32]
Gruen’s plan for Northland Centre in Detroit illustrates how he aimed to achieve these aims in built structure. Open-air Northland consisted of a cluster of one-storey buildings grouped around the three-storey J.L. Hudson Department Store. Between the individual stores were attractively landscaped garden courts and pedestrian malls. At the time of its completion, Architectural Forum praised Northland as a “classic in shopping center planning, in the sense that Rockefeller Center is a classic in urban skyscraper-group planning, or Radburn, N.J. in suburban residential planning”.[33] Narrow walks and lanes lead the “customers from the transportation area into a series of generously dimensioned squares and plazas, each one of different size and character”. Gruen designed these open spaces between buildings “in accordance with the pattern found in European cities”.[34] Colonnades, protecting shoppers from the weather, surround all buildings and connecting, covered walkways allow crossing from one structure to another without exposure to the weather. The architecture aims to “achieve impressiveness and unity by simplicity and straightforward design”, standardising the design of all tenant buildings while allowing individual expression with store signs (but only under the overall control of Gruen).[35]
Gruen was most concerned with creating space that would attract shoppers and, once there, provide them with the relaxing environment envisioned in Camillo Sitte’s earlier call for aesthetically pleasing public spaces which reinforced civic culture. For Gruen, this meant recreating many of the qualities of the European piazza, designing space that was visually appealing, comfortable and relaxing. The central mall space at Northland illustrated Gruen’s attempt to provide both visual spectacle and comfort. Situated between Hudson’s department store and tenant stores were a series of seating areas for relaxation, consisting of both benches and low walls. The most striking aspect of this space were the extensive flower beds, in which spectacular blooms operated both to break up the sightlines of the square, making it into a more intimate space than would otherwise be the case, and to create a park-like quality. Mature trees further emphasised this sensation, hiding some of the shopping space from view and providing shade in summer. These park-like qualities differentiated the square from the surrounding stores, defining it as non-shopping space. The colonnades in Northland, surrounding Hudson’s, not only served to shelter the shopper from the weather but the solid overhangs and columns further separated shopping space from non-shopping space. Within the general shopping mall environment there were spaces firmly demarcated as away from the experience of consuming; spaces that provide an area both for relaxation and the enjoyment of non-intrusive visual spectacle. This explicit differentiation between shopping and non-shopping space reflected Gruen’s desire to recreate the experience of the European central city in which people could both shop and sit in nearby parks and gardens or cafés, unmolested by the demands of commerce.
Gruen frequently merged the language of the European central city with a more recognizably American vernacular to position, aesthetically, spatially and historically, his mall designs. He felt that it was important to maintain variety in store design, suggesting that otherwise the mall “owner risks monotony and complete lack of ‘downtown’ personality”.[36] Similarly, he justified the use of basements for the separation of service vehicles from shoppers, pointing out how, “Basements are to the large, regional shopping center what side streets are to the downtown area”.[37] However, despite the language used, the downtown to which Gruen referred was not the automobile dominated downtown of 1950s and 60s America, but an historic, romanticised European vision of that downtown. Gruen felt that the conscientious mall designer should “study the anatomy of the organically or sensitively planned old urban pattern which consists of a rich vocabulary of clearly defined urban spaces”.[38] He argued that this would help the mall designer to reproduce urban qualities at the mall. For example, an architect could learn how in the historicized city, “through narrow and intimate lanes one reaches in surprising fashion spacious ones of different sizes and shapes. There are no endless, straight, and uniform avenues; there is always something new and unexpected around the corner”. This design approach could be recreated in the mall by developing: “The entranceways from arrival areas to the main shopping streets [which] can, through their dimensioning and their treatment, assume the role of sideways and byways, of intimate lanes and mews”.[39] Gruen wanted his mall to be a new version of his romantic vision of the European city and by and large, at Northland he was successful. As the reporter for Ladies Home Journal observed: “Something of the Vienna waltz pervades Northland”.[40]
As critically praised as Northland, but moved entirely indoors, Southdale contained a “children’s activity area with a miniature zoo”, a sidewalk café, subtropical trees, plants and flowers, and a bird cage “populated by feathered folk happily existing in the spring-like temperature”.[41] With two large department stores, along with the by now usual mix of clothing, footwear and variety stores, innovations at Southdale included opening three nights a week and providing “fair and mild” shopping conditions all year around, away from the extremes of Minnesota weather. While the primary innovation at Northland had been the removal of vehicles from the shopping environment, situating people as the key “traffic” at the mall, Southdale moved everything inside; not only had traffic been removed but so had the weather. By placing shopping indoors, Gruen overcame the climate extremes of Minnesota and achieved space that catered to the every need of the suburbanite. Ordered around the central garden court, from which it was “possible to see almost all of the stores”, Southdale provided community, human-scaled space.[42] In these pedestrian areas, Gruen wrote, he was able to re-establish, “the enjoyment to be found in the contemplation of architecture, landscape and the arts”.[43]
The architectural centrepiece of Southdale, and what still sets it apart from many malls built today, was the garden court. Sharply distinguished from shopping areas by its openness and airiness, the garden court allowed people who visited the mall to remove themselves from shopping. The “attractions” of the court were all positioned in or near the centre of the courtyard encouraging shoppers to turn their backs on the stores; it was a non-shopping space. With this design, Gruen positioned Southdale as not only a place for shopping but also one that encouraged a wide range of social and cultural activities. It resembles the plazas and piazzas of European central cities. A sidewalk café attracted people to the centre even when stores closed on Sundays. One 1956 commentator observed the European qualities at Southdale: “In the square is a sidewalk café. Shoppers will walk on pavement of red brick a la [sic] Copenhagen, Denmark. And there are antiquated areas remindful of an old Roman road”.[44] As a public, weather-protected space, the garden court became “not only a meeting ground but also, in evening hours, the place for the most important events, as for example the yearly ball of the Minneapolis Symphony”.[45] It was a space designed for people, as distinct from shoppers, that merged “art works, contemporary architecture, rich decorations and furnishing into a background of beauty and relaxation”.[46] Southdale brought European high culture into a space of European design, encouraging mid-westerners to enjoy everything that the Viennese could.
The shopping mall in America failed to develop according to the European principles that Gruen had laid out for it, however. Suburbs and suburban shopping continued to grow with little or no concerted effort to plan these new American spaces. Statistics on the growth of shopping malls following the opening of Southdale in 1956 are difficult to pin down accurately, primarily because of the lack of an accepted definition of what a mall constitutes.[47] In 1960, the Urban Land Institute estimated that there were approximately 100 regional shopping centres with a minimum of 350,000 square feet of floor area and at least one major department store.[48] A shopping centre of this size would meet the minimum definition today of what we think of a shopping mall. Smaller, self-contained shopping centres, including a minority of regional centres, developed at a remarkable rate of growth. Historian Lizabeth Cohen suggests that there were 940 shopping centres by 1957. By 1967, there were 8,000 shopping centres selling goods totalling $54 billion and by 1976 there were 17,520 shopping centres in America.[49] The economic impact of these suburban shopping centres on downtown America was hugely significant. By 1971, shopping centres accounted for more than 50 per cent of all retail trade in twenty-one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.[50]
Alongside this remarkable growth in the number and retail trade reach of suburban shopping centres were the cultural changes that they brought to American urban and suburban space. As an article from the Urban Land Institute noted in 1960: “Of all changes in the American scene in the past ten years, the modern shopping center is still the most striking”, the mall had introduced “new merchandising concepts and architectural patterns”, which had “extended into every city in the United States”.[51] Following the financial successes of Gruen’s designs at Northland and Southdale, an exponential growth in copycat shopping malls followed. Despite having no relationship to the European ideals of Northland or Southdale, almost all successfully achieved a profit. Placing a wide variety of stores within a controlled environment and with plentiful free parking close to suburban tracts proved popular enough without the environmental or community-oriented considerations that Gruen had used in his malls.
The majority of architects and architecture critics bemoaned the poor quality of mall development in the years following Southdale’s opening. A 1962 publication by the editor of Architectural Record complained that whilst great “numbers of shopping centers are being built across the country”, the “unhappy truth is that the overwhelming majority of them are neither good to look at nor a real pleasure to use”.[52] James S. Hornbeck felt that mall developers and architects had ignored the spaces between and around stores, the parking areas and the relationship of centres to the highway and the surrounding residential community. He argued that only “when more owners appreciate the importance of such an environment and the unique role of the architect in achieving it can large numbers of shopping areas benefit in both financial and human terms”.[53] The architect Cesar Pelli was more direct observing how “the formula” for malls had become “trite” and bemoaned that “everyone has learned how to reduce it to a mimimum”.[54] A mere six years after the acclaimed opening of Southdale, developer James Rouse, writing an article in Architectural Forum questioned “Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?” He suggested that shopping centres had lost their sense of human scale, with huge parking areas, “the massive factory-like buildings, the enormous unbroken spaces, the store fronts and signs all add up to a big project imposed on a community rather than a warm and friendly market place growing out of the community”.[55] The suburban mall had become a formulaic collection of stores with few or no features designed to distract from the shopping experience or encourage the rest, relaxation and communal activities of Gruen’s European-influenced spaces.
One of the highlights of the Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers, held at the Hilton Hotel in London in February 1978 was a speech given by Victor Gruen. The delegates at the conference knew the reputation of Gruen well, as the designer of Southdale, more than twenty years earlier. However, Gruen was not in London to reminisce about his achievements in reshaping the spaces of retailing; instead, he was there to warn those in attendance about the development of shopping malls and the damage they were doing to European cities.[56] In his speech, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?” Gruen argued that the shopping centre in America had “no future at all” and that signs of its downfall were “already recognizable” and would “express themselves increasingly with every year that passes on”.[57] He went on to criticise the shopping mall as an extreme “expression of the effort of substituting naturally and organically grown mixtures of various urban expressions by an artificial and therefore sterile order”.[58] By way of clarification to his no doubt somewhat bemused audience, Gruen provided a brief history of the development of his two most paradigmatic mall developments at Northland and Southdale. At both sites, Gruen told his audience, he had given “thousands of citizens living in an area without desirable shopping facilities a place to meet, walk and rest in a landscaped setting free of automobile traffic”. Besides shops and department stores, they offered spaces for “cultural and festive activities, a community centre with auditorium, a post office, medical offices and even a theatre”.[59] He was able to achieve this because of the interests of the department store-developers, Hudson’s in Detroit and Dayton’s in Minneapolis, who proved “deeply concerned not only with the quality of their own stores, but in a paternalistic manner with that of the entire centre and all of its tenants carried by the conviction that their qualities had to measure up to the high standards which they had set for themselves”.[60]
However, in the ensuing twenty-two years since the completion of Southdale, Gruen’s dreams for the use of the shopping mall for human-centred and environmental ideals had been derailed by the pursuit of profits as only “those features which had proved profitable were copied” in future developments.[61] Rather than benevolent local developers building shopping centres to serve the needs of an established neighbourhood, “anonymous real estate enterprises” built a “shopping machine” large and powerful enough that “it could be located almost anywhere, on the cheapest land available, and because of its gigantic scale people would flock to it even if they were forced to travel dozens of miles”.[62] Those developers proved more interested in making a “fast buck” than designing shopping centres that could provide the retailing and communal central space for the ever-expanding suburbs. Such suburban shopping centres soon became the accepted practice, “dragging the last remaining activities” out of central cities, “somewhere to the periphery and if possible to locations outside the city boundaries, in order to save taxes”.[63] But Gruen felt that a backlash was growing amongst Americans, with opposition to increasing air pollution, “loss of landscape quality, loss of small local shops – and the rising costs of car ownership”.[64] European retail developers in his audience still had the opportunity to avoid the worst of American malls, which would cause even more damage to the central cities of Europe than they had in America. Gruen proposed for his listeners a grander vision in which they would devote their energies to the “future-directed much greater, more useful and more exciting task of revitalizing or establishing our newly to be created integrated multi-functional centres for tomorrow”.[65] Gruen’s shopping experience of the future had to be a part of the enitre urban pattern.
The response of the audience to this speech has not been recorded, but given its majority composition of retailers and developers, it is likely to have been somewhat muted and even confused. Surely, the inventor of the shopping mall was not advocating ceasing development of such immensely profitable centres of consumption. Those who had closely followed the career of Victor Gruen, however, would not have been so bemused. As early as 1968 in an article in the important Architectural Review, Gruen had begun to question, publicly, the development of shopping malls.[66] He argued both in architectural publications and the American press that the shopping centre had become too successful for its own good. Developers had taken his idea for a communal, centralising space in the American suburbs and transformed it into a “selling machine”. By 1978, the mall in America had become all-pervasive to the extent that failed developments were now occurring because centres were being built too close together, failing to take account of the needs and demands of the surrounding populace. Downtown retailing had all but been eliminated in many cities and the decline in facilities of variety, culture and urbanity had not been adequately replaced by the monofunctional spaces of the suburban mall. As one profile of Gruen in the Los Angeles Times later that year observed: “Rare is the man who conceives an idea that spreads around the world and then disowns his own progeny”.[67] But Victor Gruen disowned the shopping mall and all that it represented and showed no regrets for doing so.[68]
To us in the twenty-first century, the shopping center as vibrant, cosmopolitan urban space is an absurd notion. Today malls, in America, Europe and around the world, have become homogeneous Meccas of shopping, with no space for any activity but consumption, be it in stores, food courts or multiplex cinemas. However, Gruen never intended that destiny for his malls. Throughout the 60s and 70s Gruen became increasingly disillusioned with the development of the shopping mall, finally denouncing them in London for failing to become “what I was aiming for, namely the creation of a counterpart to the typical organically grown European city as it still existed at the time”.[69] By then, European developers had learnt the lessons of the mall from America as huge, out-of-town regional centers sprang up over the countryside and suburbs of Western Europe. This horrified Gruen, who, having retired back to Vienna, witnessed the destruction of a more historic urban pattern than America had ever had; the “thoughtless copying of the American shopping center” had been “truly catastrophic”. Gruen maintained his belief in the vitality of European civilization: “The economic rape of central city areas was a much more serious crime in Europe where cities had grown organically, often over thousands of years, and were important expressions of urban form offering opportunities for human communication, for culture, for the arts and civic virtues”.[70] Ironically, soon after Gruen moved back to Vienna, he found, just south of the central city, a mall had been built. The intellectual roots of the shopping mall, which had originated in a European, socialist, quasi-utopian humanist vision, had been corrupted by the demands of capital and exported back to Europe as a ruthless tool, a machine devoted to consumption. Today this American model dominates world shopping space.[71] But we should not ignore the mall’s European and utopian origins, which suggest an alternative future, even today. The tragedy for Victor Gruen, as Malcolm Gladwell reminded us in the New Yorker last year, was that he “invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America”.[72]
University of Nottingham
Notes
[1] Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 495 musing on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.
[2] Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 495
[3] Quoted in James Sanders, “Toward a Return of the Public Place: an American Survey”, Architectural Record, 173.4 (Apr. 1985): 87-95, 87
[4] “A Break-Through for Two-level Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum Dec. 1956: 114-123, 117
[5] Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). His discussion of the mall in this book is based on his article “Spaced Out at the Shopping Center” first published in The New Republic 13 Dec. 1975: 23-26. See also Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall”, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992)
[6] William S. Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985)
[7] James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003) and Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004)
[8] Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004)
[9] Other historians have noted Victor Gruen’s European origin and its influence on his design approach. See M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and David R. Hill, “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis”, American Planning Association Journal 58.3 (Summer 1992): 312-326. This article expands on these points, examining the intellectual, spatial, and cultural linkages between the shopping mall and the Greek agora of antiquity, nineteenth century gallerias and inter-war Vienna.
[10] Statistics taken from Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 238 and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 182
[11] For contemporaneous reflections on this problem see, for example, Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Shopping Centers: Design and Operation (New York: Reinhold, 1951) and “Suburban Retail Districts”, Architectural Forum 93.2 (Aug. 1950): 106-110
[12] Rightly acclaimed as the founder of the shopping mall, Gruen also worked on significant projects in housing, retail and urban planning including housing for the Gratiot Projects in Detroit and urban redesign in such disparate cities as Boulder, Colorado, Fresno, California and Rochester, New York.
[13] Hardwick, Mall Maker; Hill, “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis”; and David R. Hill, “A Case for Teleological Urban Form History and Ideas: Lewis Mumford, F.L. Wright, Jane Jacobs and Victor Gruen”, Planning Perspectives 8.1 (Jan. 1993): 53-71
[14] See Howard Gillette Jr., “The Evolution of the Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City”, Journal of the American Planning Association 51.4 (Autumn 1985): 449-460; Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Søren Askegaard, “Malls and the Orchestration of the Shopping Experience in a Historical Perspective”, Advances in Consumer Research 26 (1999): 34-40; and Timothy Mennel, “Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias”, Journal of Planning History 3.2 (May 2004): 116-150
[15] M. Jeffrey Hardwick discusses Gruen’s early career in detail in Mall Maker, 48-117
[16] See “Victor Gruen Recognition” (undated) Victor Gruen Collection, Accession Number 5809, Unprocessed Box 1, Folder “Victor Gruen: Biographical Data and Listing of Work”, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (hereafter VGC Box No., Folder “Title”)
[17] Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck, “Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum 78.5 (May 1943)
[18] Victor Gruen, “Dynamic Planning for Retail Areas”, Harvard Business Review 32.6 (1954): 53-62, 53
[19] Gruen discusses the early influences on his career in Victor Gruen, “John Peter interviews Victor Gruen”, Library of Congress John Peter Collection, Transcripts, Box 3, Title 32-33, Folder “Gruen, Victor”
[20] Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns, USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 140
[21] Ibid. 21
[22] Victor Gruen and Lawrence P. Smith, “Shopping Centers: the new building type”, Progressive Architecture (June 1952): 67-109, 68
[23] Hardwick, Mall Maker, 133
[24] Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns, USA, 17
[25] Ibid. 18
[26] Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973) p 14
[27] Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 194
[28] Victor Gruen, “Retailing and the Automobile: A Romance Based upon A Case of Mistaken Identity”, Stores and Shopping Centers ed., James S. Hornbeck (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962): 96-114, 106
[29] Quoted in Kay Miller, “Southdale’s Perpetual Spring”, Minneapolis Star and Tribune 28 Sept. 1988 Sunday Magazine: 8-23, 10-11
[30] Victor Gruen, “Shopping Centers of Tomorrow”, Arts and Architecture (Jan. 1954): 12-17, 13
[31] John Winter, “Gruen, Victor”, Contemporary Architects ed. Ann Lee Morgan and Colin Naylor, 2nd ed. (Chicago: St. James Press, 1987), 361:2
[32] Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns, USA, 148
[33] “Northland: a new yardstick for shopping center planning”, Architectural Forum 100.6 (1954): 102-119, 103
[34] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 28
[35] Ibid. 30-31
[36] Larry Smith and Victor Gruen, “How to Plan Successful Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum 100.3 (Mar. 1954): 144-147, 192, 145
[37] “Northland: a new yardstick for shopping center planning”, 111
[38] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 83
[39] Ibid.
[40] Quoted in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 131
[41] Victor Gruen, “The Regional (Shopping) Center”, Technical Bulletin 104 (June 1963) n. pag.
[42] Dudley R. Koontz, “Southdale Shopping Center: An Investment in Good Planning”, Buildings (Oct. 1958): 34-37, 35. VGC Box 22 Loose.
[43] Gruen, “The Regional (Shopping) Center”
[44] Barbara Flanagan, “He Brought Charm to Southdale”, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune 7 Oct. 1956 Southdale Supplement: 26. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 131
[45] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 37
[46] John A. Wickland, “$20,000,000 Southdale Center Opens Monday”, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune 7 Oct. 1956 Southdale Supplement, 1
[47] Even as late as 1999, the Urban Land Institute felt it was necessary to define what a shopping mall is to those interested in its development. See Michael D. Beyard and W. Paul O’Mara et. al., Shopping Center Development Handbook 3rd ed. (Washington D.C.: ULI – the Urban Land Institute, 1999)
[48] Statistics from Homer Hoyt, “The Status of Shopping Centers in the United States”, Urban Land 19.9 (Oct. 1960): 3-6, 3
[49] Statistics from Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic p 258 and Downtown Idea Exchange (Oct. 1967) VGC Box 54, Folder “Shopping Towns USA – Revised edition”, 1
[50] Seth S. King, “”Suburban ‘Downtowns: The Shopping Centers”, Suburbia in Transition ed., Louis H. Massoti and Jeffrey K. Hadden (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974): 101-104, 102
[51] Hoyt, “The Status of Shopping Centers in the United States”, 6
[52] Hornbeck, Stores and Shopping Centers, 89
[53] Ibid.
[54] Quoted in John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998), 91
[55] James W. Rouse, “Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?”, Architectural Forum 116.6 (June 1962): 104 -7, 106
[56] M. Jeffrey Hardwick comments on this significant moment in the career of Victor Gruen, which was widely reported and republished on both sides of the Atlantic in popular and trade press at the time, in Mall Maker 216-221. However, our interpretations of this important speech differ as I suggest that Gruen proposed a grander, yet possible, vision for the mall in Europe, whereas Hardwick argues that this moment formed part of Gruen’s “jeremiad” against the mall and his retreat “more and more into the realm of fantasy” (218).
[57] Victor Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres. Hilton Hotel London. 28th Feb. 1978: 1-18. VGC Box 32, Loose, 2
[58] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 12
[59] Victor Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, Town and Country Planning 46.7-8 (July/Aug. 1978): 350-353, 350
[60] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 6
[61] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 351. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 217
[62] Ibid. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 217
[63] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 9
[64] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 352
[65] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 18
[66] Victor Gruen, “A New Look at Past, Present, and Future Shopping Centers”, Architectural Record (Apr. 1968): 168-171
[67] Neal R. Peirce, “The Shopping Center and One Man’s Shame”, Los Angeles Times (22 Oct. 1978): Part IV
[68] For an alternative reading of Gruen’s repudiation of the shopping mall see Hardwick, Mall Maker, 210-224
[69] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”
[70] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 351
[71] See Chuihua Judy Chung et. al., Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Köln: Taschen, 2001). The observation on the Viennese mall comes from Malcolm Gladwell, “Annals of Commerce: The Terrazzo Jungle”, New Yorker 15 Mar. 2004: 120-127. M. Jeffrey Hardwick makes the same observation in Mall Maker, 217-8
[72] Gladwell, “Annals of Commerce: The Terrazzo Jungle”, 127
Issue 4, Autumn 2004, Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 4, Autumn 2004
‘Neutralising the Indian’: Native American Stereotypes in Star Trek: Voyager
Lincoln Geraghty
© Lincoln Geraghty. All Rights Reserved
I: Star Trek: Voyager’s Review of Multiculturalism: Re-screening the Pluralist Fantasy.
From the point of view of the popular imagination, multiculturalism’s most insistent reason for being is a recognition, however belated, of the fundamentally multiracial and multiethnic nature of the United States (Newfield and Gordon, 1996: 77).
Star Trek’s goal is to promote the multicultural future of America, however impossible it may seem. Gene Roddenberry’s ideological foundation for the series was to show that there was such a thing as ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’ (IDIC). That through a constant ‘didactic project to engage the experiences and politics of the 1960s’, Star Trek could address real problems America was facing when it came to race and the politics of pluralism (Bernardi, 1998: 29-30). Unfortunately, according to Daniel Benardi (1998: 30), this premise was ‘inconsistent and contradictory’, and as a result Star Trek only succeeded in participating in the subordination of minorities on the screen and embedding them in a ‘white-history’ narrative which Roddenberry had originally set out to attack. Star Trek, like America, had bought into the notion that ‘multiculturalism’s most insistent reason for being’ was reliant on the United State’s ‘multiracial’ and ‘multiethnic’ nature. However, it appears that Star Trek has forgotten or not realised that America is not the multicultural country it likes to see itself as. People of colour and other social minorities continue to live under implicit, even overt racism that discriminates against them as citizens and excludes them from society. Star Trek failed to show this because it continued to mediate racial and ethnic stereotypes that only served to ‘alienate’ Star Trek’s cast and crew.
Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon (1996: 77) describe multiculturalism as ‘the building of racial democracy through popular pluralism’. Cultural pluralism, a notion that contributes to the theory of multiculturalism’,was popular in that it imagined ways in which intercultural rules would be drawn and redrawn by those affected by them’ (1996: 77-78). Yet what also comes with this attempt at redrawing the boundaries of racial equality is the shrouded concept of early twentieth century liberal assimilationism. Newfield and Gordon want to investigate if assimilationism is any different to its late twentieth century counterpart, multiculturalism, in the way in which white dominated culture can form control of any multicultural attempt at equality. Assimilationism is dangerous because it ‘likes to portray itself as nothing more than the innocent desire for a good life’, and by doing this can incorporate any minority culture into the white dominated mainstream (Newfield and Gordon, 1996: 80).
Star Trek’s effort to produce an environment of equality and pluralism in space fails because it uses the assimilationist model for the Federation—described as ‘a homo sapiens only club’ by the Klingon Ambassador’s daughter in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country [1991]. Any ‘alien’ that comes in contact with the organisation, or even the minority members of the cast, is made subordinate to a self-evident superiority. Newfield and Gordon (1996: 81) call this sort of assimilationism ‘assimilationist pluralism’ because it insists on conformity to the core even if it professes its belief in plurality. Henceforth Star Trek’s ‘IDIC’ ideology assumes then that everyone is equal in their diverse attributes but only if they are willing to accept the white dominated cultural control that the Federation symbolises. Star Trek’s multiculturalism is a fallacy and yet because it is assumed that Star Trek mediates a positive multicultural message, the thin layer of racial stereotyping and inequality is hidden.
Star Trek Voyager is no different in intent from the mission of its predecessors. Its crew, made up of a mixture of aliens and humans, was thrown together to form a miniature version of America’s multicultural ‘nature’ as explained above. However, this time the show would be aware of the mistakes that past series had made when it came to addressing multiculturalism’s role on America’s imaginary final frontier. It endeavoured to re-examine the meaning of the ‘IDIC’ ideology and to finally root out the assimilationist pluralism that had plagued Star Trek’s earlier representations of different races and cultures.
Voyager first aired in 1995, as part of Paramount’s new UPN cable channel line-up. It was new, bold and brash and provided a somewhat different twist on Star Trek’s familiar motif of a starship-orientated show; the Voyager ship and its crew were 70,000 light years away from home and the security of Federation space. Voyager came on the back of several major events in American race relations, all of which contributed to the growing uncertainty over multiculturalism and its role in a fractured American society. In 1991 Rodney King was brutally beaten by LA police, the evidence of which was broadcast to the whole nation. Yet that did not stop a white jury letting the accused policemen go free a year later, sparking the worst race riots since Watts in 1965. Then in 1995 the widening gap between races was made into a television event when the football star OJ Simpson was tried and acquitted of murder. Causing a reaction of hooligan proportions, the case showed that there was still an underlying racism eating away at inter-racial relations in American cities. Besides these great media events an academic movement was growing, one that was undermining the work multiculturalists were doing to promote inter-racial harmony and cultural understanding. The so-called Culture Wars represent the battle between left and right and the conflicting ideologies within which both sides wanted to frame and solve America’s social divisions. Education was the means by which those politicians and teachers who wanted to recognise the plural, multicultural nature of America could forge a civic culture based on tolerance and respect for diversity; those who saw pluralism as a threat to their hegemonic control over cultural capital claimed that multiculturalism only added to America’s social problems and a return to the cultural core of the nation would provide cohesion (Gates Jr. 1992: 105-120 & 173-193).
In 1991 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote the book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. In it he criticised multiculturalism and its attempts at revising American history taught in schools, emphasising the supposed harm it did to the country and its children of all races. His solution was to reunite America by making minorities who wanted to become more culturally independent conform to its so-called liberal historical and political traditions. He focused on documents of note such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and work by authors such as Emerson, Jefferson, de Tocqueville and Lincoln [1]. His aim of providing an alternative to multiculturalism and a solution to the break-up of America complies with Newfield and Gordon’s description of assimilationist pluralism in that Schlesinger wants to celebrate America’s diversity through a common obedience to the white dominated cultural core. Schlesinger, like Star Trek, is attempting to interpret a message of equality and cultural diversity whilst continuing to work within the fallacy that America’s white dominated culture is the proper template for American pluralism as a whole.
Voyager, as well as being post LA riots and post OJ Simpson, was post Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). By this I mean that it was entirely separate from the shadow of the widely popular and less critical series that lasted for seven years; TNG had been created as a continuation of Gene Roddenberry’s idea of the omnipotent Federation. Its philosophical background still relied on the idea of ‘IDIC’ and its ‘multicultural’ crew followed the patterns of assimilationist pluralism. What made it different from the original series was the fact that it was set further into the future and had a different crew to what America had been used to. To be set apart from this meant that Voyager could deal with issues differently to TNG. Its premise was distinctive because the crew was away from Federation space and it had to tackle new problems on its own instead of falling back on Federation standards like The Next Generation crew had done. In contrast, Deep Space Nine (DS9), which started in 1993, had suffered from being aired in the shadow of The Next Generation because it could not match up stylistically or ideologically to the ever-popular series. It was chastised for being located on an isolated space station that could not explore the galaxy and for the fact it tried to address rather complicated issues of political and religious significance that some fans said were not the point of Star Trek. DS9’s attempts at reviewing and examining issues in contemporary American politics and society were not appreciated. DS9 did not ‘feel’ like it was part of Roddenberry’s vision; ironically DS9 came the closest in trying to reproduce Roddenberry’s original wishes for a multicultural future, but because it did not feature strong parallels to America’s ‘exploration imperative’ it was rejected by many fans. Voyager however was able to attract a fan base and at the same time was able to review some of the mistakes that Star Trek had made in the past. It could attempt to eliminate assimilationist pluralism in the light of the aforementioned regressive events in the mid-nineties and accommodate a truly plural multiculturalism.
Gene Roddenberry foresaw a time when all of mankind would put aside their differences and learn to live with each other and with the huge cultural diversity that characterised the 1960s when Star Trek first aired. From the beginning, Roddenberry wanted to symbolise the ever increasing ‘salad bowl’ that was America by showing a mixed-race crew on board the U.S.S. Enterprise: the flag ship for inter-galactic peace. The term ‘salad bowl’ comes from a 1991 poem by Adrienne Rich called ‘An Atlas of the Difficult World’ (142-158). Rich uses this term as a metaphor to describe the process of America’s construction through the constant migration of immigrants to its shores. This process has resulted in the immense diversity that can be seen in all American cities and landscapes (the bridge on the Enterprise and Voyager also being an important site). Just as she used the ‘salad bowl’ image to call attention to America’s cultural diversity in the nineties, I have used it here to describe how America was beginning to recognise the unique, multi-faceted society that was rapidly developing amid turbulent political and social upheavals.
America has consistently been given a metaphor that implied some form of mixture or mixing process. Israel Zangwill published the play The Melting Pot (1914), which concerned the immigration and assimilation of Jews into American society, a critical piece at a time of increased American Nativism. William Teeling (1933: 13), an Irish travel writer, wrote a book called American Stew within which he describes America as a ‘sizzling pot of many ingredients’. I have not used these terms to describe what Star Trek was trying to articulate about America’s cultural diversity because they refer to specific contemporary images of American society that excluded non-whites who were seen as un-American and therefore exempt from its democratic traditions. Even though ‘salad bowl’ refers to the multicultural nature of America in the nineties, we can see the early signs of it in the sixties when shows like Star Trek were used as weapons in the war for equality and political freedom.
Among the original actors there was an Asian-American male and an African-American female, plus three of the characters were Russian, Scottish, and importantly one of them was an alien who represented all that was ‘Other’ to American white society. As I have already intimated, Roddenberry’s heart-felt need to show cultural diversity and inter-racial harmony gave Star Trek a unique place in American TV history and is one of the main reasons for Star Trek’s rise to the status of a cultural phenomenon. It is obvious that successive series have copied from the original template for racial equality and continued casting racial minorities as major plot characters. When The Next Generation aired in 1987, the public was treated to the sight of a Klingon, the once feared enemy of the Federation, standing side by side with the humans that made up the crew of the new Enterprise. This was an allegory for a changing American society that since the sixties and the end of the Cold War, had opened up its institutions to those once excluded from sharing in the freedoms offered by a democratic government and society. Star Trek was now showing that everyone had a place in its integrative mission. Like America, its moral message about cultural diversity is one of inclusion and everyone, including the Klingons, has their chance to show that they belong and can be redeemed.
Voyager also promotes this message of the multi-racial community because it is representative of the shift toward multiculturalism. Her crew of main characters constitutes the most diverse ever seen on a Star Trek series. The captain is a woman, the first officer is a Native American and there are also characters played by African, Asian and Hispanic-Americans [2]. The look of Voyager is certainly heterogeneous, one could say it provides a reflection of America’s position as the most ethically diverse nation in the nineties. Therefore, Voyager promotes diversity and inclusion. Anyone who wishes to be a part of the team can join and be assured of racial and cultural equality; within this new-found community the diverse attributes of all will be equally accepted and valued. In the pilot episode ‘Caretaker’ [1995], Neelix and Kes joined the crew and were immediately given duties and places as senior officers. In return, Voyager benefited from Neelix’s knowledge of the Delta Quadrant and Kes’ expertise in Botany. The Maquis rebels, including the Native American Chakotay, were also adopted into the crew although they were intended for arrest and extradition back to Earth for crimes of terrorism.
However, Star Trek Voyager has failed to live up to its revisionist designs and continued to ground its multicultural visions in assimilationist dogma. At the same time, Voyager has supported this by using historically motivated stereotypes that perpetuate ultimately subordinating and marginalising roles assigned to people of colour on board the ship. One character in particular that I wish to address is Chakotay the Native American, Voyager’s treatment of his character, and therefore Native Americans in general, has failed to work in a manner akin to the true pluralism that Voyager wanted to show. M. Annette Jaimes Guerrero has put forward her theory for the reason why multiculturalism in schools and American Indian Studies does not, and has not, worked for Native Americans. Yet it can be used to view more than just the education system, it can also be used to identify why Voyager has failed to treat the Native American character in a truly multicultural way:
For American Indians, there is a substantial case to be made for the necessity of decolonization before any genuine multiculturalism can take place. Decolonization is a necessary first step in countering the relations of subordination imposed on Native peoples and established by U.S. colonizers through federal Indian policy. Putting decolonization before multiculturalism would ease the tension produced by the mandated policies of assimilation and marginalization to which Native peoples have been subject in the process of their colonization (Guerrero, 1996: 49-50).
When Voyager undertook the placement of a Native American character on board the ship, its representation of Indians became entirely assimilationist and marginalist. Chakotay’s character, if treated properly, should have forced an examination of colonial relations with the US, and in Star Trek’s case, the Federation. However, my research has found that this is not the case and as a result Voyager manages to isolate the Native American in the show and American society. Consequently it assimilates him into a white dominated society without recognising the cultural diversity such a character should bring to the series. The Indian is continually stereotyped as isolated and separate from American society, just as he has been throughout history. Incorporating Chakotay into Voyager – as a sort of ‘Indian for Indian sake’ character – before recognising the dominant colonizing role white society has played, and still plays, with Native Americans ultimately incorporates him into the same assimilationist pluralism that Star Trek has been practising for more than thirty years.
II: ‘An Indian Amongst Savages’: Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager.
The over romanticising and simplification of Native existence were the two greatest assaults on Native existence and continue to be (Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie quoted in Native Nations, 1998-1999).
It would seem that Voyager is the perfect medium for assuaging the stereotypes that films, television, and other media have perpetuated about Native Americans (see Rollins and O’Connor eds., 1998 and Bird ed., 1998). Having a Native American main character combined with the fact Star Trek symbolises multiculturalism, the image of the Indian could not fail to be a realistic one. In Heather R. Joseph-Witham’s insightful book, Star Trek Fans and Costume Art (1996: 17), Chakotay is recognised as being influential for some fans because he is a symbol for their own independence and individuality. She specifically refers to a fan that dresses as Chakotay at conventions. The fan, who himself is part Indian and part Spanish, feels comfortable dressing up as Chakotay because it allows him some inclusion into a community of Trek fans: ‘You get away from reality and you’re in a better universe. Where it’s more peaceful than having all these racial things’. It is obvious from the fan’s statement that he likes Star Trek because it represents an escape from a racist world to a universe where racism does not exist. It is also obvious in his case that he prefers to dress as Chakotay because he is half Indian and that Chakotay represents an empowering identity that he can assume when mixing with a lot people of different race at conventions. They do not look at him as an outsider or someone who is different, but rather as a fan who likes dressing up in his favourite character’s uniform.
However, from my reading of Voyager I have found that Chakotay has not only been portrayed stereotypically, but has also been terminally isolated from the group. To this extent, he has been left alone to act and represent the Native American. He has been targeted as the cultural ‘Other’ even in a crew that is made up of many so-called ‘Others’: The Talaxian character Neelix, Tuvok played by an African-American, and the half-breed Klingon B’Elanna Torres, played by a Puerto Rican actress.
Native Americans have been stereotyped in two pervasive ways: the ‘Noble Indian’ or the ‘Ignoble Savage’. Throughout American history, they have been the two categories in which Euro-Americans have placed the Native American, and in turn formulated their own identities as Americans on a new continent. The historian Daniel Francis (1992: 8) has likewise said: ‘Non-Natives in North America have long defined themselves in relation to the Other in the form of the Indian’. Star Trek is no different. Chakotay has been represented as the exemplar of the Noble Indian; he is loyal and kind, unquestionably a good officer. Yet in regards to his relationship with other crewmates he is isolated, someone to whom others compare themselves. In the episode ‘Maneuvers’ [1995] Torres describes Chakotay as a ‘proud’ but ‘isolated’ man. I want to show in this essay that Chakotay, as the stereotypical Indian, has been set apart from the other crew members on Voyager. Ultimately, the character replicates previous stereotypical versions of the Indian that have permeated American film and television. Because Chakotay is a ‘white man’s Indian’ the Voyager crew continually use him as a standard against which they measure themselves (McLaren and Porter, 1999: 102). In the process of this cultural blindness Voyager entrenches the Native American further into his own neutrality, making him ‘invisible’ until he is needed by the crew to undertake a particularly ‘Indian’ mission.
In the episode ‘Cathexis’ [1995] Chakotay is badly injured and in an effort to cure him Torres and the Doctor resort to consulting Chakotay’s Medicine Wheel. ‘New Age’ medicine is shown as the alternative solution to Chakotay’s predicament. This apparent act of spiritualism is contingent upon the notion that Indian medicine is mystical and only appropriate when ‘civilised’ medicine cannot find a ‘proper’ scientific answer. When pioneers were on the frontier all they had to live by was their ability to adapt to the terrain. If Indian techniques were their only means of survival then they were employed. Often this would turn the pioneer into what Frederick Jackson Turner (1994: 4) termed ‘a new product’, because he had dropped the old ways of the Europe he had left behind and become like the Indian. In ‘Cathexis’ this pattern is repeated because Voyager is on the frontier and the civilised Federation crew that attempt survival in new surroundings is using the Indian ways of Chakotay.
Chakotay’s Indian method of healing not only helps him to recover but also helps the ship escape; the noble Indian uses his mystical powers over nature to help his crew. Unfortunately for Chakotay once he saved the crew by his own unscientific methods the Doctor returns him to an isolated state because he uses ‘proper science’ to return Chakotay’s spirit to his body. The Doctor relegates the Medicine Wheel and spiritual healing to a primitive existence by saying he would write an academic paper on his method, not the unscientific Indian method. This may have been fit for the frontier, but in a modern civilised society the only accepted scientific method is based on systematic observation and experimentation, not New Age spiritualism. It seems that Star Trek is using the device of New Age medicine to portray a stereotype of the Indian that was popular with a movement that wanted to return to simpler, more natural times. Native Americans and the way they lived were taken by this movement as symbols of a better life. Unfortunately, their image suffered because it cemented them as primitive representations of the past. Darcee McLaren and Jennifer Porter (1999: 102) recognise this appropriation of Native American identity by the New Age movement and say that it optimises a New Age vision of generic Native American spirituality.
Ostensibly the Doctor welcomes new methods of healing, his holographic matrix not only holds the collected medical knowledge of every Federation member society but throughout the series he learns a multitude of advanced medical techniques from many new alien species. It comes as quite a surprise then that he rejects the Medicine Wheel even though it has proven its worth. What this suggests is that even in the future there is a divide between what the dominant white cultural centre decides is appropriate and what does not measure up to their standards; something still evident in today’s society. By the twenty-fourth century this divide should not be in effect considering Star Trek’s Earth by that time has broken down its cultural barriers and human society as a whole has learnt to respect every different aspect of its multiple cultures. Perhaps for a more consistent assessment of where issues of Indian identity lay in America today both Chakotay’s traditional method and the Doctor’s medical marvels might have been combined to form a twenty-fourth century version of traditional Indian beliefs. This would reflect both Star Trek’s ethos of continued human development and the current increase of what Vine Deloria Jr. calls ‘retribalization’, where Indians must learn to live as Indians and redefine their identities and traditions in a modern world in order to catch up and join the twenty-first century – and in Star Trek’s case, the twenty-fourth (Vickers, 1998: 159).
Chakotay’s heritage is explained in the episode ‘Tattoo’ [1995]; he is a member of the Rubber Tree People of Central America yet there is no specific name for his tribe. Instead he follows the archetypal patterns of Indian tribal society. Euro-Americans have continually viewed the Indian people as one entity, not as separate groups of people who differ as much from each other as they do from white people. Star Trek’s failure to cast Chakotay as anything but the generic Indian within a tribe that seeks knowledge from its honoured ancestors falls into the historic trap of simplifying the Indian. Robert Berkhofer Jr. recognises in his 1978 book The White Man’s Indian, that all Indians have been seen as one and the same. Since Columbus, they have not been seen as a diverse and multicultural people:
Not only does the general term Indian continue from Columbus to the present day, but so also does the tendency to speak of one tribe as exemplary of all Indians and conversely to comprehend a specific tribe according to the characteristics ascribed to all Indians (Berkhofer Jr., 1978: 26).
Chakotay is again left in the shadows, visible only when he acts as the stereotypical Indian. In most episodes the rituals and ceremonies of Chakotay’s heritage are highlighted and celebrated by his crewmates, but are all too often dismissed as examples of the ancient ‘Other’. His generalised Indian characteristics are things that are part of an Indian heritage not allowed a place in the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-fourth.
When Chakotay came aboard Voyager and was made first officer, Star Trek was paralleling famous Colonial American incidents of the Native Savage coming to the aid of white explorers. Mythical Indian figures from America’s past have historically been portrayed as ‘friendly’ Indians, willing to help the ‘superior’ whites until they had mastered the frontier. Pocahontas helped John Smith survive execution at the hands of the Powhatan Chief; Sacajawea interpreted for Lewis and Clark on their epic expedition of the unknown American frontier; and, most monumental of all, Squanto helped the Puritans survive winter and celebrate the first Thanksgiving. The similarities between the role of Chakotay on board Voyager and Squanto are striking, yet they serve to illustrate that although they both hold important places within a group they are both isolated because they are Indian.
Squanto was an important figure in his band, a pniese to his sachem, which meant he was able to call upon the powerful tribal spirits to help his fellow warriors fight their enemies. This type of ‘vision quest’ was important to his band and showed that he was a respected member. Chakotay is also able to embark upon ‘vision quests’ in order to help Voyager. In ‘The Cloud’ [1995] he directs Captain Janeway on her own ‘vision quest’ to help the ship out of danger. Like Squanto helped his sachem, Chakotay helps his captain, their powers being all-important to the survival of their communities. Neal Salisbury (1981: 231) describes the pniese’s role as an aid to the tribal leader: ‘They constituted an elite group within the band, serving as counselors and bodyguards to the sachems’. Throughout Voyager’s run Chakotay has always acted as a counsellor to Janeway, sometimes running into a conflict of ideas, yet remaining ever loyal.
In some episodes it has been hinted that there might be more between Chakotay and Janeway, yet it has never been fully explored. In ‘Resolutions’ [1996] the two of them are forced to remain on a planet together and Janeway asks Chakotay to define some ‘parameters’ for their relationship. His reply is in the form of ‘an ancient legend among [his] people’, describing the joining of two tribes, one led by a woman the other by a warrior male. The story becomes a metaphor for what Chakotay feels about Janeway: Nothing but an undying desire to stand by her and to lighten the burden of captaincy. Chakotay puts himself in the service of his captain. Yet by this statement and Janeway’s inquiry, he is not allowed anything more personal, indicating that the white woman is out of reach of her Indian admirer.
The parallels with Squanto do not end there, Salisbury (1981: 229) described him as having ‘participated in the intensely ritualized world of trade, diplomacy, religious ceremonies, recreation, warfare, and political decision making that constituted a man’s public life’. Chakotay is a deeply ceremonial man who wants to honour his father. Plus he is constantly involved with the political and social ramifications of the merging of the Maquis and Starfleet crews, he is always playing the political advocate. In ‘Alliances’ [1995] he tries to keep relations calm as the ship heads home under the command of the Starfleet captain, even though many Maquis crewmembers think that they should forget Starfleet rules and protocols. Interestingly, he suggests making an alliance with the Kazon-Nistrim – the savage Indians – in order to get the ship home safely.
Squanto and Chakotay are both ‘white man’s Indians’ and are therefore allowed to fit into their adopted societies more easily. Squanto was accepted into the English colony because he helped them in times of hardship and adapted to become their version of a noble savage. Chakotay fits into Voyager’s crew so well because he is respected and has proven his worthiness to them when they are faced with unique circumstances that only he can handle. Yet both men are left isolated from their friends. Squanto is the only Patuxet left after his band was wiped out by disease, on his deathbed he hoped that he be accepted by the ‘Englishman’s God in Heaven’ because he had been alone among whites for some time before his death (Salisbury, 1981: 244). Chakotay is many thousands of light years from ‘the sacred places of [his] grandfathers, far from the bones of [his] people’, so he must live in isolation within a community that has accepted him, yet continue to treat him as the ‘Other’ because of his spiritual and Native beliefs.
As Voyager has progressed, the stories have centred more on attempts to return home to the Alpha Quadrant. The character of Chakotay, as well as many others, has not been the focus of many episodes. This is because the show took on board a new main character called Seven of Nine at the end of the Third Season. Many of the original actors had their characters pushed into the shadows as more time was devoted to fleshing out the new Borg character and her relationship with the crew. As a result Chakotay was scarcely present in many episodes, being relegated to a secondary role taking care of the bridge while the action took place else-where. This situation did not help to reverse the trend of isolating the Native American image in Voyager, but rather worsened it because it appeared that Chakotay had vanished from the normal running of the ship.
Just as the stereotype of the ‘Vanishing Indian’ made Americans believe that he had disappeared from the continent, the lack of stories for the Chakotay character tended to give the impression that he had become less important. His Native American character had become redundant because his crew and captain did not need him, and his neutrality had become complete, again through no fault of his own. It was instead the need for the Borg character, Seven of Nine, to be redeemed from her prior captivity that served to isolate Chakotay even more. Her redemption as a white female from the captivity of the Borg collective took precedence over Chakotay’s as the noble Indian. Seven has been somewhat isolated from the crew because she is a Borg trying to fit into Federation society. Although, her isolation serves only to highlight her usefulness to the crew, the character gains strength from the fact that she is isolated. Other characters have helped her to assimilate; it has been a personal project of Captain Janeway to make her fit in. Chakotay on the other hand has never had such attention paid to him; it is as if the show no longer wants to recognise the uniqueness of his character. He remains detached from the crew for the remainder of the voyage home because there have been no further insights into his Indian heritage, however stereotypical they may have been. Chakotay is now seeing out the rest of Voyager’s run as Native Americans have been viewed in the latter half of the twentieth-century: Isolated from white society.
So far as Chakotay’s Native culture is concerned Voyager has continued to leave him in isolation. But where Chakotay’s ‘Indianness’ – a historically and culturally constructed Indian identity – can provide an exciting story line, Voyager has continued to treat the character stereotypically. There has been a collection of episodes where Chakotay was the main plot character. In ‘Nemesis’ [1997] the parallels between an alien war and the Vietnam War are evident, and it was interesting to see that Chakotay was on the side of the faction that used the ‘beast’ image to help demonise their nemesis. As on the frontier with the demonisation of Indians, the demonisation of the Viet-Cong in Vietnam made it easier for Americans to kill them. Ironically, Voyager has played with that paradigm by putting the noble Chakotay on the side of the humans who represent the US in the episode. It shows him to be part of the demonising process that once helped to kill the people his character is meant to represent (see Drinnon, 1997: 455-467; cf. Pfitzer, 1995, and Horsman, 1975 & 1981).
In ‘The Fight’ [1999] Voyager returns to themes I have already explored in this paper: Chakotay’s ‘Vision Quests’ and the benefits they have for the crew. In this episode the Doctor asks Chakotay to embark on a ‘Vision Quest’ to find out how the ship can escape chaotic space, the physical manifestation of Chakotay’s mental condition. The issues raised over New Age medicine in the episode ‘Cathexis’ apply here, yet more significantly Chakotay has become an active participant in the saving of the ship and crew. Whereas before Chakotay was injured and laid passive, in ‘The Fight’ he takes part in a blood-match that asserts him as a fierce warrior doing honourable battle. In retrospect this episode not only cements Native American Spirituality as primitive compared to Euro-American beliefs, but it also poses the Indian as the fearless warrior. This cultural motif perpetually hinders Native Americans trying to redefine their identities in Modern America because it casts them as long-since-dead ‘Noble’ warriors.
Voyager also returns to the warrior theme in ‘Memorial’ [2000] where Chakotay reprises the role of an unwitting participant in a jungle war first seen in ‘Nemesis’. Chakotay’s character is again placed in a position that contradicts his Native American identity and the ‘Indianness’ that it is meant to represent because he undertakes a role that is historically associated with Euro-Americans when they systematically wiped out Native resistance to their expansion across America.
Voyager’s transference of historical identities – a Native American becoming an active participant in the murder of innocents and expansionist colonists becoming victims of genocide – mirrors the shifting identities that Philip J. Deloria speaks of in his book Playing Indian (1998). His research indicates that white colonists chose to mimic Indian identities so that they could both ‘imagine a civilised national Self’ in opposition to Native savagery, and copy their way of life that represented instinct and freedom (1998: 3). Chakotay’s shifting character traits also allow for a transference of guilt or blame for the harsh treatment of Native Americans held on behalf of whites onto the Indian population themselves. In terms of Freudian ego defence mechanisms, Euro-Americans have historically defended their actions towards Indians by projecting their own repressed feelings of guilt onto them. Christopher Badcock (1992: 172) describes Freudian projection as: ‘A defence typical of paranoia in which repressed contents of the mind are guarded by being attributed to others or the outside world’. Thereby, Native Americans are held responsible for the socially disadvantaged position they now occupy in Modern America and white Americans can feel comfortable believing that it has happened through no fault of their own. This method of attributing blame onto Indians dates back to the original European conquest of America when defeat at the hands of settlers was explained as progress over Indian savagism: ‘The guilt of conquest being transferred from usurper to usurped’ (Hulme, 1986: 168).
From the Season Three episode ‘Distant Origins’ [1997] to the present Chakotay described himself as an anthropologist: Someone keen to investigate social behaviour and the evolution of cultures. This is a dramatic change in what the audience has already found out about the character – it has never been mentioned before. What this new character role suggests is that Chakotay has not only moved beyond his Indian stereotypes leaving them with the savage Kazon, but that Native Americans today have also been left behind as representative of a ‘dead culture’. It is ironic that Chakotay has assumed the role of Voyager’s anthropologist and no longer talks about his once important heritage considering anthropologists and Indians are presently in the middle of a cultural debate concerning who is at fault at for the misrepresentation of the Indian in American society; Vine Deloria Jr. calls this misrepresentation ‘a conceptual prison’ created within academia by ‘quaint mores’ that attract anthropologists (Deloria Jr., 1988: 93). For example, in ‘One Small Step…’ [1999] Chakotay renews his passion for history and archaeology even though Native Americans are represented as passive historical figures, i.e. historical artefacts rather than contemporary citizens.
In further episodes such as ‘Blink of an Eye’ [2000] and ‘Tsunkatse’ [2000] Chakotay is shown to have a keen interest in the social behaviour of alien societies, he is determined to investigate how their cultures developed in comparison to the more advanced Federation ship and its crew. Consequently, Voyager epitomises the situation where Americans once measured their own superiority and civility by comparing themselves to the ‘savage’ Indian. However, Chakotay is placed with those who compare themselves to the ‘Other’ thus switching the dichotomy so that Voyager’s Indian can be both part of civilised society and part of the society being scrutinised. According to Deirdre Almeida, this means that the white dominated culture sees all other cultures as history and their cultural symbols worthy only of museums:
For Native American Indians, attending an exhibit which portrays their cultures as not surviving past a set historical time period can be a very emotionally upsetting experience. Internally a Native person might feel the museum (and the society) does not want to recognize the historical and cultural contributions Native nations have made to this continent. There is also a political message in representing native people as having ‘vanished’. Relaying as fact that these cultures and their people no longer exist frees non-Indians from any responsibility to honor the rights established for Indian nations through federal policies and treaties (Almeida, 1992: 63).
Voyager does seem to be making an attempt to redress some of the typical mistakes it made in the original portrayal of Chakotay. However, depicting him as an anthropologist tips the scales in the other direction and repeats the current trend of treating Indians as if they are no longer present in contemporary society.
III: The Continuing Mission: Star Trek’s Next Step.
In terms of evolution, I don’t know that there has really been one. I think we occasionally see different colours of Chakotay, but I don’t think there’s been any great evolution in the character (Beltran quoted in ‘Restless Native’, 2000: 20).
Since originally researching this paper, Voyager has finished its seventh and final season. As a result one can view a fair amount of changes in the series, character and plot development being two of the most important. However, as Robert Beltran’s quote concerning Chakotay states, there had been hardly any change in the mediation of Voyager’s Native American character on screen [3]. What this passage suggests is that whatever was intended for the Indian character was not accomplished and that the only characteristics allowed to develop were his more ‘colourful’ Indian traits: Vision Quests, redemption from savagery, warrior-like status, even pseudo-archaeologist. This may have been good for the fans of the show and the ratings, but it was less auspicious for Native Americans trying to counteract archetypal and out-dated Indian identities.
In Star Trek’s future, considering society has changed to such a degree that humanity no longer views the differences and variances between its cultures as negative, would there be a place for a distinct Native American representation on board Voyager? In the three hundred years that have passed between our time and Chakotay’s, might human culture have become more unified and the desire to protect cultural distinctiveness less urgent? In fact, the very nature of Indian identity would have changed considering that Indians today are calling into question their own ideas of who they are and what position they must take in an ever changing political and social hierarchy. For example, Fergus Bordewich (1996: 13) observes that at the same time new tribal autonomy provided Indians with political power and independence it also bestowed ‘practical autonomy upon groups of people whose very identity was, at least arguably, based on obsolete ideas of race and ethnicity, even as Indians continued to blend into the larger population through intermarriage at a faster rate than ever before’. In simpler terms, Native Americans are becoming American. Modern Indians are at this very moment calling into question their own identities, if not to at least learn the socioeconomic ways of the white culture that surrounds them so as to remain economically viable (Vickers, 1998: 160). As I pointed out when discussing the use of Chakotay’s Medicine Wheel, the move toward recapitulating Indian identities and traditional religious beliefs is not only a necessary step in the very survival of those beliefs but an important part of the process to become active members of society moving toward the future. The main fault with the character of Chakotay is that it seems he has been written and portrayed as if none of these developments have occurred in Indian society; it is as if Star Trek has rightly tried to redress the imbalance within the cultural hierarchy without noticing that Indians themselves have started to do so already. Science fiction such as Star Trek is a valuable tool to show this transition for Native American identities. However, as I have also pointed out, Star Trek must not rely on stereotypical modes of representation or else it will continue to mediate Indian identities more familiar to America’s past than to its future.
Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a future where everyone is included does not appear to be a viable one on Voyager. Like so many other media of popular culture, Star Trek has failed to recognise that Native Americans are still a living and breathing presence in America. To exploit a phrase used by William Cronon (1983: 164) when writing about the changing Native American relationship with the New England landscape: ‘By ceasing to live as their ancestors had done, they did not cease to be Indians’. Because of Star Trek’s inability to understand modern Native American identities, and recognise that Indians have not ‘vanished’ and will probably not have ‘vanished’ by the twenty-fourth century, the character of Chakotay and the image of the Indian have suffered. Rather than the ‘white man’s Indian’ stereotype Star Trek, and science fiction in general, should be looking at what the ‘red man’s Indian’ is and where he fits in both society of today and the future. It is important to remember that the under-represented themselves have conflicting ideas about how they should appear to the majority culture now that they are increasingly becoming more active in the political arena, at the same time that the assimilationist culture may sincerely wish to move beyond its own stereotypes and realise there is nothing so historically concrete to replace them with. To quote Bordewich (1996: 343-344): ‘To see Indians as they are is to see not only a far richer tapestry of life than our fantasies ever allowed but also the limitations of futile attempts to remake one another by force’.
Whatever the outcome of my research and my attempts at showing Star Trek: Voyager’s enduring frailties one thing can be said for certain, Star Trek will continue. It may not be in the form it uses today, using starships and space stations as backdrops for its stories, but it will persist in the mediation of social and cultural messages. Besides showing Star Trek’s resilience and tenacity I hope I have adequately explained its tendency to make the same mistakes in its most up-to-date series that the very first series had made. More importantly, I hope to have indicated that Star Trek’s continued mistakes are not only evident in its representation of a Native American character but are also a result of the fact that American society has made, and also continues to make, the very same mistakes.
University of Nottingham
Notes
[1] In the 1998 edition of the book, Schlesinger even goes as far as to offer his own ‘Baker’s Dozen Books Indispensable to an Understanding of America’. Within it he lists 13 works of major importance to Americans, some by the authors I have already mentioned. What he fails to notice is that his list is comprised of all white males bar one, that being Harriet Beecher Stowe. The only non white representation is also Stowe, through her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Schlesinger Jr, 1998: 167-179). There is no more obvious sign of Schlesinger’s assimilationist pluralism than his ‘canon’, so much for a new multiculturalism.
[2] It is interesting to note that a Hispanic actor plays the Native American character, although that was not unusual for portrayals of Indians in TV and Film. Many Mexican and Asian American actors were hired to act as Indians in films because they looked like what the stereotyped ‘Indian’ was supposed to look like. Ricardo Montalban, a well respected Hispanic actor in Hollywood, made several movies where he played prominent Indian characters, taking advantage of his stern and chiselled features.
[3] However, as a conclusion to Chakotay’s voyage home he became romantically involved with Seven of Nine. Ironically, it was her character that forced Chakotay into the background of many episodes as Janeway and the crew tried to assimilate Seven into the dominant mainstream. Because of this she seemed to be more important to Star Trek’s agenda of multiculturalism as opposed to critical issues that could be raised by an Indian character aboard a starship in the future.
Works Cited
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Badcock, Christopher (1992), Essential Freud. (2nd edition), Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, [1988].
Berkhofer Jr., Robert (1978), The White Man’s Indian: Images of the Native American from Columbus to the Present. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Bernardi, Daniel L. (1998), Star Trek and History: Race-ing Towards a White Future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Bird, S. Elizabeth, ed., (1998), Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bordewich, Fergus M. (1996), Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Cronon, William (1983), Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Deloria, Philip J. (1998), Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Deloria Jr., Vine (1988), Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, [1969].
Drinnon, Richard (1997), Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press.
Francis, Daniel (1992), The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis (1992), Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Guerrero, M. Annette Jaimes (1996), ‘Academic Apartheid: American Indian Studies and ‘Multiculturalism’’. In Avery F. Gordon, and Christopher Newfield, eds. Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 46-63.
Horsman, Reginald (1975), ‘Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’. American Quarterly, vol. 27, pp. 152-168.
_____. (1981), Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hulme, Peter (1986), Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. New York, NY: Meuthen Press.
Joseph-Witham, Heather (1996), Star Trek Fans and Costume Art. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
McLaren, Darcee L., and Jennifer E. Porter (1999)’,(Re)Covering Sacred Ground: New Age Spirituality in Star Trek: Voyager’. In Jennifer E. Porter, and Darcee L. McLaren, eds. Star Trek and Sacred Grounds: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999, pp. 101-115.
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Issue 4, Autumn 2004, Article 2
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 4, Autumn 2004
The New American Jeremiad: the Writer as Apocalyptist
Elizabeth Rosen
© Elizabeth Rosen. All Rights Reserved
In his book Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future, Robert Scholes contemplates the role of the author in the foreseeable future:
If we are to break the circle of indifference and act in accordance with a structural perception of the universe, we shall have to depend upon the lonely voices of imaginative human beings to bring home to us the implications of our actions. To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future.
I am not very hopeful about our ability to rise above present selfishness and direct our culture toward a decent human future. But if there is any hope at all, it will depend on the ability of our men and women of imagination to make us see and feel the reality of our situation and the consequences of our present actions. Truly, where there is no vision, the people perish. [1]
Scholes was specifically talking about science fiction, what he calls ‘fiction of the future’, but the role he describes here is equally applicable to any writer whose aim is that their work to be socially meaningful. Yet the onus laid upon writers with this pronouncement—to be visionary and cautionary—is a heavy one, for Scholes essentially urges writers to take up their place as secular prophets.
What is striking about this statement, written in 1975, is not so much what it advocates, but when. Though the call for prophetic voices to provide vision and enumerate consequences is at the heart of American letters, postmodern thought has called into question the very ability of authors to speak to and for any community comprised of more than the writer’s self. Accordingly, the seeming failure of confidence in the American prophetic voice is a relatively recent phenomenon, occurring largely in the second half of the twentieth century, and stands in stark comparison to the way the Pilgrims depended upon the prophetic voices among them for guidance in their ‘errand in the wilderness’.
That most urgent of prophetic calls, the jeremiad, was a favorite rhetorical form of Puritan preachers who feared that their constituencies were shirking their responsibilities and thereby imperiling both their individual souls and the collective destiny of the group to found a City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. These ‘doomsday sermons’ predicted the awful punishment that lay in store for those who strayed from the path of righteousness. Indeed, the apocalyptic tenor of the settlement of America is well documented: the Puritans looked to the New World as the New Heaven on Earth and regarded their settlement as the precursor of the millennium. When the millennium was slow to arrive, the religious leaders could only suspect that the fault was theirs, and the primary means of relating this to their congregations was through jeremiads, sermons that chastised sinful behavior and lamented the events which they took to be God’s punishment. [2]
As America defined its status as a nation, such cautionary voices were gradually drowned out. Separation of church and state, manifest destiny, and the emphasis on progress all contributed to the muting of this particular prophetic note. To be sure, there were always writers—Melville, Twain, and Hawthorne to name several—who were skeptical about the glitter of the golden Progressive age and suggested that our optimism might not be warranted, but America was moving too fast to stop for nay-saying pessimists. It was becoming an economic and military giant; its founding ideas were becoming the ideals which other, less free, nations aspired to.
Over the course of two centuries, the ‘wailing in the wilderness’ faded to a mewling kitten’s cry. But the twentieth century has seen a renewal of the jeremiad form. Lamentations are being written once again, and the apocalyptic writer is no longer an endangered species. What this paper seeks to understand is why there now appears to be a resurgence in American jeremiad.
Considering that this resurgence has taken place largely during the second half of the twentieth century, is it possible to identify any events or trends unique to the time period that might have contributed to bringing jeremiad back to the fore? One thing we might point to is a confluence of certain historical events and the ideas we now associate with postmodernism. Beginning with World War One, there is a growing pessimism about the future. All of the progress seen to be made in the nineteenth century finds a terrible nexus in the Great War. It is not just the mass deaths of the battlefields that cause this gloominess. There is also a profound disappointment that human advancements have been turned toward such a deadly end; the sense of wastefulness is acute, as is the shock at the carnage. That feeling of despair is briefly offset during the early 1940’s by the need to pull together in order to fight the Axis powers, but the conclusion of World War Two, with the exposure of the Nazi death camps and the demonstration of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, seems to solidify the sense of despair about the future.
The advent of the atomic bomb seems to be the pivotal moment in the twentieth century that encourages the re-emergence of apocalyptists, a particular kind of prophet. Whereas a prophet exhorts his people to effect a change in behavior in order to avoid God’s punishment, an apocalyptist warns of an unalterable End, which includes God’s punishment. He exhorts his people to stand fast in the face of trials even though they cannot change the future. The End is coming, says the apocalyptist, but so long as we maintain our faith, we shall be rewarded with the New Heaven on Earth. [3] As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, this emphasis on the post-judgment phase of apocalypse is the difference between the European jeremiad, which merely castigates and laments the sinful ways of the world, and the American jeremiad which castigates but never loses sight of the world to come after God’s punishment. [4]
The first atomic test heralded a new age, but it marked the end of one, as well. In Robert Oppenheimer’s utterance after the first test’,I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’ we can already hear the acknowledgment of this change. There is the dawning sense that man has acquired the ability to utterly annihilate the planet. Additionally, there is the sense, hinted at by another of Oppenheimer’s comments’,We knew the world would not be the same’, that something has been lost in the moment of transition into an atomic age. [5]
Two perceptions result rather immediately from this mid-century turning point and both seem to have become more firmly entrenched in our worldview with succeeding historical and political events such as the Vietnam War and Watergate. The first is a pessimistic mindset that sees the present age as different from any age preceding it because of the sheer weight of atrocities which have since been perpetuated, and the second is a view of man as somehow equivalent to deity. [6] The latter view has been aided in part by the secularization of Western society, and therefore the loss of the traditional deity. [7] Combined, these two ideas form the agar in which the germ of jeremiad has been re-cultured.
If Auschwitz and Los Alamos were the birthing places of the New Apocalyptic, then the turbulent Sixties were when it came of age. Indeed, the ‘old world’ was disintegrating: World War Two had pushed women into the work place and now the Pill helped break down old attitudes about sexual conduct and gender roles; Vietnam caused a mostly generational schism in which the middle-class American dream was being challenged by those who wanted to live in communes, tune in and turn on; Watergate confirmed suspicions first hinted at in the Fifties with the Rosenberg spy trial and McCarthy hearings that once respected institutions such as the government were no longer trustworthy; and the habitual racial prejudice so long ingrained in society was under attack by the Civil Rights movement. The instability that all these changes caused in the social structure made it a particularly fertile time for lamentations.
Just as the instability and disintegration of the Assyrian empire had fostered the original wailing prophet Jeremiah, the instability of the Sixties and the disintegration of the America they knew fostered a new group of lamenting, castigating prophets: Mailer, Vonnegut, Baldwin, Heller, all of them wailing in the newly chaotic wilderness. [8]
These men—and it is remarkable how often it is men who write the apocalyptic genre—form what I consider to be the first generation of New Jeremiahs. They are born in the early 1920’s and are old enough to remember the deprivation of the Great Depression. All of them saw military service during World War Two, with the exception of Baldwin who worked in military defense at Belle Meade in New Jersey during the war and suffered the prejudice that would later give rise to his essays on racism. All these men had a firsthand knowledge of war and mass hatred.
Their jeremiads differ significantly from the ones written towards the end of the century. The great laments of the Sixties—Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse Five, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—were jeremiads more in tune with the European sort that castigated and criticized the times. In these works, one finds little hope for the future. No New Jerusalems are depicted, per se. The works are reprimands and little about them could be said to be optimistic. They depict humans (and institutions), as fool-hardy and unwilling or unable to correct their despicable behavior. The sense of crisis is these works is acute.
But there is a second generation of apocalyptic writers whose works tend to be written much later in the century, and their novels conform more closely to the American Jeremiad form. Men such as Don Delillo, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Russell Hoban, and Cormac McCarthy comprise what I identify as the second generation of New Jeremiahs.
The use of the word generation here is not meant strictly to imply that the second group evolved from the first or that the first generation is the progenitor of the second, though in some cases that might be true. Rather, I am using the term in its looser sense to refer to wider social groups, often differentiated by age but certainly by distinct characteristics and perspectives which can be used to ‘define’ them as a group. While I recognize the oversimplification which often occurs in categorizing a group with a blanket term such as ‘The Me Generation’ or ‘The X Generation’, I find the term generation to be a useful tool here in thinking about how these two groups of writers differ from one another, as well as how they might be related in a kind of genealogy of approaches to the apocalyptic genre. The boundaries between ‘generations’ are not rigid. [9]
What I want to suggest is that the defining influence for the second generation is the Cold War experience, while the defining influence for the first is actual war. For second generation writers such as Delillo who grew up during the Cold War with the possibility of nuclear war hanging over their heads, it is the threat of war which appears to be the formative experience, rather than any actual experience of war. The nuclear confrontation threatened by the Cold War never materialized for this second group, so their apocalyptic writing is largely influenced by this sense of imminent threat, rather than any actual experience of devastation. In what appears to be a significant difference, many of the first generation of New Jeremiahs actually witnessed war first hand, and their apocalyptic writing is steeped in that experience.
These different influences make themselves apparent in the kind of jeremiads each group writes. Whereas the first generation’s jeremiad lacks for any sense of the future, the second generation’s jeremiad does tend to have a vision of the future.
As a result perhaps of the threat not actualizing, second generation writers can imagine a future where, if we don’t live happily ever after, we at least don’t experience the worst we’ve been promised. [10] But first generation writers, perhaps because they have experienced some of the worst humans have to offer, are much less hopeful about the future.
Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Armies of the Night is an excellent example of first generation New Jeremiad. Mailer was born in 1923. He served in the U.S. Army during World War Two from 1944-46, first as a field artillery observer and later as an infantry rifleman in the Pacific theater. In 1946, at the age of twenty-three, he published his account of that experience in the acclaimed novel The Naked and the Dead. His account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon protesting the Vietnam War, Armies of the Night, was published in 1968. Claiming both dual status as a history and a novel, Mailer’s depiction of the March and subsequent arrests is perhaps one of the most cogent analyses ever written of the domestic turmoil which gripped the United States during the Vietnam War, but what is most interesting about it is its clear engagement with the apocalyptic genre. The words ‘apocalypse’ or ‘apocalyptic’ are used six times in reference to the March, and there are numerous other eschatological references used in conjunction with the protest, as well. [11]
Mailer is self-conscious about his responsibility as a documenter of the events and he broods on his own Jeremiah-like role. He writes first about the general role of the writer:
As the power of communication grew larger, so the responsibility to educate a nation lapped at the feet, new tide of a new responsibility…. It was an old argument and he was worn with it—he had written a good essay once about the failure of any major American novelist to write a major novel which would reach out past the best-seller lists of a major part of that American audience brainwashed by Hollywood, TV, and Time….Yes, there was a dark night if you had the illusion you could do something about it, and the conviction that not enough had been done. [12]
Then he describes his own frustrations as an apocalyptic prophet:
Mailer had been going on for years about the diseases of America, its oncoming totalitarianism, its oppressiveness, its smog—he had written so much about the disease he had grown bored with his own voice, weary of his own petulance; the war in Vietnam offered therefore the grim pleasure of confirming his ideas. The disease he had written about existed now in open air… [13]
The old world which Mailer sees failing is America. Vietnam is merely a symptom of the disease killing the patient, for Mailer perceives that in the Technocratic, Capitalistic and Christian American showdown against Communism which serves as the excuse for the war, the world treads dangerously close to cataclysmic nuclear war. Mailer’s keenest apocalyptic lament is reserved for an ideal America being cannibalized by the Corporation and its technological reliance.
He came at last to the saddest conclusion of them all for it went beyond the war in Vietnam. He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane. The country had been living with a controlled, even fiercely controlled, schizophrenia which had been deepening with the years. Perhaps the point had now been passed. Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. The average American, striving to do his duty, drove further every day into working for Christ, and drove equally further each day in the opposite direction—into working for the absolute computer of the corporation. Yes and no, 1 and 0. Every day the average American drove himself further into schizophrenia; the average American believed in two opposites more profoundly apart than any previous schism in the Christian soul. Christians had been able to keep some kind of sanity for centuries while countenancing love against honor, desire versus duty, even charity opposed in the same heart to the lust for power—that was difficult to balance but not impossible. The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no Mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition—since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic. [14]
Armies of the Night is a dirge for a country and ideal being destroyed. Mailer has an acute dread of what will follow upon this destruction, and the novel cannot even clearly envision that something will follow when the old America is finally subsumed. He ends his account with a two-pronged image, neither of which is terribly comforting. The first part of this image is of the pacifist Quaker Marchers, naked and dehydrated, in solitary prison cells. Mailer poses the question of whether they, in their delirium and piousness, prayed to God to forgive the nation and whether the nation might not be the tiniest bit redeemed by these ‘saints’ and their suffering. But Mailer ends this image with the words ‘and no one will know if [the prayers] were ever made, for the men who might have made them were perhaps too far out on fever and shivering and thirst to recollect, and there are places no history can reach’. [15] The reader cannot even be certain the prayers were said, and, in fact, Mailer’s description of the Quakers’ circumstances suggests exactly the opposite.
The second part of the image is in the novel’s final section, headed ‘The Metaphor Delivered’. Mailer does not specify what the metaphor is, but there is a pun on the word ‘delivered’ in the final image of a failing America about to give birth to some potentially monstrous offspring.
Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? Or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. [16]
It would seem that the metaphor which is about to be delivered is apocalypse. Mailer’s wording suggests that God is bound and suffering, unable to deliver Americans from their own affliction. The future doesn’t look good, and if, as Mailer notes, we are on a road that ends with death, the future is possibly nonexistent.
Mailer’s contemporary, Kurt Vonnegut, has also written a number of New Jeremiads. Vonnegut has made a career out of his Jeremiah-like complaints. No author has sounded the alarm so loudly and consistently as he has. Of the three novels he published during the Sixties that could be considered apocalyptic, the best known are Cat’s Cradle (1965) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969), with the other being Mother Night (1961). But in 1985 Vonnegut wrote another apocalyptic novel, Galapagos, and so he is unusual in having written on both sides of the intervening Cold War. His work pre-Cold War shows the characteristic pessimism of a first generation New Jeremiad, while the post-Cold War novel shows the more optimistic tendencies of the second generation. Vonnegut, then, is both rule and exception, spanning both generations.
Born in 1922, and serving in the Army Infantry from 1942 to 1945, Vonnegut was taken prisoner and witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, an experience which formed the basis of Slaughterhouse Five. But it was a comment overheard in his civilian life when he worked in public relations for General Electric laboratories which gave him the kernel for Cat’s Cradle. At a cocktail party one evening, Vonnegut overheard two men discussing whether it would be possible to create a substance that would freeze all the water molecules it came into contact with. This imaginary substance became Ice-9 in his novel.
The narrator of Cat’s Cradle sets out to research the first atomic bomb, but is soon involved instead in the pursuit of information about an alternative weapon: Ice-9. The substance eventually falls into the wrong hands, but the world ends through folly rather than malevolence when a crystal of Ice-9 tumbles by mistake into the ocean and freezes all the world’s water. Since the human body is mostly water, most of the human race is soon frozen solid, too, and the novel ends with the narrator watching the one messianic character of the story, Bokonon, deliberately ingesting a crystal of the substance to be frozen forever. As in Armies of the Night, there is a striking lack of hope about the future. It is made clear that eventually the ice age will claim all life, and there is no redeeming vision of a world beyond for those who, like the narrator, kept some kind of faith. [17]
Compare this to the apocalyptic novel Vonnegut wrote in 1985, Galapagos. As before, Vonnegut demolishes the world, this time with a virus that causes sterility, but in this case, he not only leaves survivors who avoid the virus by a chance marooning on the isolated Galapagos islands, but also creates a kinder, gentler world for them, albeit an eon into the future. Narrator Leon Trout reveals that a million years on, the descendents of these castaways have evolved to be more like seals and that, because of it, war, famine, and economic deprivation have also become extinct. [18]
By 1985 Vonnegut can not only imagine a future for his characters, but his vision comes close to being a vision of a New Heaven on Earth. What has changed for the author in the intervening twenty-five years? It’s certainly not that the world itself has become less-bloodthirsty. One possible explanation is that the threat of human extinction that was so keenly expected during the Cold War never materialized, and that, given the worst did not occur, optimism begins to creep back into Vonnegut’s work.
There are two other notable exceptions to the generational schema. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is one of the most celebrated apocalyptic novels of the 1980s. Born in 1925, Hoban also served in the Army infantry between 1943-1945, so he shares biographical details with other first generation New Jeremiad writers. Yet Riddley Walker is clearly a second generation jeremiad. Set in a post-nuclear world in which all technology and history has been lost, the young narrator struggles to discover how the world came to be as it is. The novel ends on a hopeful note, however, with a new world order being built, if still mostly in ignorance of the technological past, and Riddley having taken on the role of a ‘teller’, a traveling story-teller who vows to keep interrogating the status quo and spreading the new word. [19] This isn’t the happy New Heaven on Earth of Vonnegut’s Galapagos, but it is a future world at least, and it is not unhappy.
Why, if Hoban shares the first generation’s war experience, is Riddley Walker not a first generation jeremiad? In the decades preceding this novel, Hoban was writing mostly children’s fiction, and he didn’t try his hand at apocalyptic fiction until 1980 with Riddley, so he is, by then, decades past his own war experience and an observer of not only Cold War fears, but also of their continuing imminence.
Walter M. Miller, Jr. presents another interesting exception. Born in 1923 and an infantryman during the war, Miller published A Canticle for Leibowitz in 1960. Canticle is widely considered one of the most inspired works of apocalyptic fiction ever written, but because it is a science fiction novel, few people who work outside the genre are aware of it. The novel is clearly informed by the devout Miller’s Catholicism, and I would suggest it is this devotion that allows Miller to pen a second generation jeremiad during the time period dominated by eschatological visions so bereft of hope for the future. The Christian promise of New Jerusalem seems to have influenced the pious author to end his novel—set in another post-nuclear world of ignorance and fear—with the promise of a new and better world to be established on Alpha Centuri. [20] Unlike his peers, perhaps, who cannot throw off the awfulness they have observed, Miller’s faith in the Christian eschatological vision of hope seems to override his own personal experience of war and makes his novel one of the only hopeful visions of the future during the turbulent decade in which he writes.
Other second generation jeremiads are more ambiguous than Miller’s. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is one example. McCarthy was born in 1933, and while he served a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force, his service began in 1953, the year the Korean War ended, and he spent two of the four years stationed in Alaska. [21] A virtual catalogue of massacre and mayhem, his 1985 novel Blood Meridian follows the adventures of ‘the kid’, a feral boy who joins up with one of the most infamous groups of Indian Scalp Hunters of the American West, John Glanton’s gang. The novel gives an account of the gang’s progress across Mexican deserts in pursuit of Indian scalps, a pursuit that gets progressively bloodier and murderous as it continues, until all but two of the main characters, the kid and the judge, are left alive. While the bulk of McCarthy’s story is occupied with the hellish bloodletting set in Mexico, it is the end of the novel, set many years later in the nascent American West of 1868, which puts it squarely into the second generation of New Jeremiads.
After the kid’s extreme and arbitrary violence throughout the novel, two separate incidences confirm that something has changed for him in his adulthood: his offer of aid to what he believes is the solitary survivor of a massacre, and his initial refusal to kill a boy who calls him a liar. Neither incident could have occurred in the cold-blooded indifference of the first part of the novel, and so both signal a changed state of mind for the character. Yet, in spite of this change, the kid meets his death at the hands of the judge at the end of the novel. But it is exactly this death which confirms an old world ending and its replacement by a new one.
As a representative of the Old West, with its murderous, racist overtones, the kid cannot be allowed to survive the transition to what is clearly civilization. This is first hinted at when McCarthy writes that, as an adult, the kid always rides away from cities and other signs of civilization and returns to the wilderness. The dying away of the Old West is made explicit in the story told to the kid by an old buffalo hunter.
…the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the tone and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion.
I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many hides reached the railhead. Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all. [22]
No clearer intimation of the coming of civilization exists than the dancing bear that provides the entertainment in the saloon in Griffin where the kid loses his life. The fierce grizzly bear had been the terror of the West, but McCarthy here dresses the beast in a crinoline skirt and has it dancing to a barrel organ on stage. When, moments later, it is shot and killed, its death elicits more tears and mourning than any of the massacres that have previously occurred.
The little girl had unbuckled herself out of the barrel organ and it clattered wheezing to the floor. She ran forward and knelt and gathered the great shaggy head up in her arms and began to rock back and forth sobbing. Most of the men in the room had risen and they stood in the smoky yellow space with their hands on their sidearms. Whole flocks of whores were scuttling toward the rear and a woman mounted to the boards and stepped past the bear and held out her hands.
It’s all over, she said. It’s all over. [23]
The New World of McCarthy’s novel is the coming civilization, but the future it depicts is not a purely hopeful one. Left dancing in the saloon, the master of the men around him, is the judge who has killed the kid in the jakes and has been the author of some of the worst and most arbitrary violence of the novel. This figure, about whom McCarthy writes, he ‘never sleeps…He says he’ll never die’, haunts the New World just as he has haunted the Old World. [24] So while, as a second generation jeremiad writer, McCarthy can envisage a future, that vision is not an easy or redemptive one and the City on the Hill which civilization is bringing is portrayed ambivalently.
Other second generation writers approach their jeremiad from a theoretical, rather than literal, perspective. Don Delillo’s 1997 novel Underworld is such a work. Delillo was born in 1936, so his experience of World War Two is relatively limited and he never served in the armed forces at all. Instead, he grew up under the shadow of the Cold War, an experience that Underworld makes clear was a seminal one for an entire generation. Yet the Cuban Missile Crisis was averted, and the Berlin Wall eventually crumbled. The result is that, like much second generation apocalyptic fiction, Underworld becomes a meditation on jeremiads; it is one level removed from the apocalyptic vision of its character Lenny Bruce with his repeated cry ‘We’re all gonna die!’ Instead, the novel examines the place of jeremiad in our lives. Its inquiry is into how our lives are affected when Bruce’s lament is changed to ‘We’re NOT gonna die!’
Delillo’s novel suggests that without the threat of the End, we have a tendency to lapse into the crippling sort of nostalgia that his character Marvin Lundy does, pottering in a basement filled with the old memorabilia he collects, obsessively chasing the lineage of baseballs and ruminating on better times. Delillo’s apocalyptic prophet Lenny Bruce predicts that once the threat is gone, the only option that will be left for us will be a commercialization of the End.
And all this cold war junk is gonna be worth plenty, as quaint memorabilia. Those yellow and black signs you’ve been seeing everywhere but never really noticed until six days ago—Fallout Shelter. Collector’s items. All the stuff that’s stashed in the storage rooms and laundry rooms that are designated shelters. Drums of drinking water. Saltines. Chapstick, for the flash. Cardboard toilets that double as salad bowls. [25]
Bruce understands that it is the threat of the End which allows us to make sense of and categorize our life experiences. It is the Ending which allows us to delineate beginnings and middles, to organize our experiences in a meaningful way. That such an organization might be teleological and therefore flawed is irrelevant, because, as Bruce has foreseen, without that anchor of meaning we will have to find a new organizing principle for our lives and that anchor will likely be consumerism.
Marvin Lundy is proof of Bruce’s vision; he is a salesman of memorabilia. He recognizes that people aren’t satisfied with the ambiguity of modern life; they feel lost without ‘the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet’. [26] They yearn for the time when all the boundaries—beginning/end, good/evil—seemed clearer. He recognizes the value of memorabilia that taps into that time: ‘There’s men in the coming years they’ll pay fortunes for these objects. They’ll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking’. [27]
Delillo’s Cold War experience of unfulfilled prophecies of the End leads him to a meta-inquiry into the nature of eschatological prophecy and its role in our lives. His novel falls into the category of second generation New Jeremiad because it makes clear there is a future after the near-apocalyptic moment engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it also suggests that this future—our world—is bereft of some deeper meaning which is available when the End is in sight. Delillo’s novel is a lamentation over the loss of lamentations, an irony that paradoxically turns it into a jeremiad. It reflects the kind of postmodernist and intellectual approach to the genre which might be the result of a lack of real crisis to inform it.
However, the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 may very well provide current American jeremiad writers with the experience of crisis that first generation New Jeremiad authors inherited with their World War Two experience. One would expect to see another surge in jeremiad as a result of September 11th. What remains to be seen is whether these lamentations will be able to dredge up any optimistic hope of the future, or whether, like first generation New Jeremiad writers, the experience of actual catastrophe will muffle the expectation of a future New World entirely.
University College London
Notes
[1] Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 74-5.
[2] There is some debate—notably between Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch—as to whether the jeremiad is ultimately a pessimistic or optimistic rhetorical form. Miller argues that it is a doom-saying form, a rhetorical sign of disappointment and dismay. Bercovitch, however, sees it as a ‘corrective, not destructive’ form, arguing that the Puritans re-interpreted the traditionally gloomy and castigating European jeremiad into a new, celebratory form which confirmed their status as a chosen people and whose ‘function it was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless ‘progressivist’ energies required for the success of the venture’. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 8 and 23. See Perry Miller’s works Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1956) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953) for more on his position.
[3] Other major differences between apocalyptic and prophetic eschatologies are that apocalyptic eschatology imagines the End as an abrupt disruption of History in which the old corrupt order is overthrown entirely and replaced, while prophetic eschatology imagines the End as a period of transition within History. Accordingly, in prophetic eschatology it is expected that evil will by won over and absorbed into the good, while in apocalyptic prophecy the forces of good and evil are always opposed to one another and evil is destroyed and vanquished rather than brought into line. For more on the differences between apocalyptic and prophetic eschatology see John Wiley Nelson’,The Apocalyptic Vision in American Popular Culture’ in The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982), 154-182.
[4] Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 23.
[5] National Atomic Museum website. <http://www.atomicmuseum.com/tour/tr5.cfm> Qtd. from Richard Rhodes’ ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb‘ (10/10/03)
[6] As Frank Kermode points out in his seminal The Sense of an Ending, however, all ages tend to regard themselves as a degeneration of the previous one. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Rpt. 2000).
[7] What this term ‘secularization’ actually means is the center of a debate among scholars. See for example Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Blackwell Publishers: Oxford, 2002) or Nicolas Lash, The Beginning and the End of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Nonetheless, many scholars and artists, from Joseph Campbell to the authors whose novels are referred to in this paper, have perceived a movement from a religious society (or at least one in which religion played an important part) to one in which science and technology have pushed aside faith. Some of Norman Mailer’s most stunning analysis in Armies of the Night has to do with what he perceives as the schizophrenic nature of America resulting from the conflict between its dual fidelity to both God and Technology.
[8] The perception of crisis often plays a part in the blossoming of the apocalyptic genre. Bercovitch notes how American jeremiad bloomed with ‘every major crisis of seventeenth-century New England: doctrinal controversy, the Indian Wars, the witchcraft trials, the charter negotiations. From the start the Puritan Jeremiahs had drawn their inspiration from insecurity…Crisis became both form and substance of their appeals’. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 62.
[9] As with any categorization, there are exceptions. For instance, Vonnegut manages to span both generations since the tone and dates of his apocalyptic novels vary significantly. I also examine two other notable exceptions, Walter M. Miller, Jr. and Russell Hoban, whose work do not appear to fit comfortably into the generational schema.
[10] This is in keeping with Bercovitch’s assessment that American jeremiad revises the European form into a celebratory one: The Puritans ‘revised the message of the jeremiad….They qualified [the threat of divine retribution] in a way that turned threat into celebration. In their case, they believed, God’s punishments were corrective, not destructive. Here, as nowhere else, His vengeance was a sign of love, a father’s rod used to improve the errant child. In short, their punishments confirmed their promise’. Bercovitch, 8.
[11] See, for example, the final two paragraphs which reference Book of Revelation imagery such as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (London: Plume, a division of Penguin Books, Ltd., 1994), 288.
[12] Mailer, Armies of the Night, 157-8.
[13] Mailer, Armies of the Night, 188. Mailer’s book is divided into two sections, the first called History As a Novel in which Mailer writes about his personal experience in the March and about himself in the third person, and the second called The Novel as History in which he reverts to a more historically objective form, reportage, using other journalistic sources and research to try to report on the March from a larger perspective. One might argue that in blurring the line between these two types of writing, Mailer is the author of a kind of literary apocalypse.
[14] Mailer, Armies of the Night, 188.
[15] Mailer, Armies of the Night, 287.
[16] Mailer, Armies of the Night, 288.
[17] Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (London: Penguin, 1965).
[18] Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985).
[19] Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (London: Picador/Pan Books Ltd., 1980).
[20] Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (London: Orbit, 1993). Originally published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson,1960.
[21] I was unable to verify whether or not McCarthy had actually participated in any of the fighting during the Korean War.
[22] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (London: Picador, 1989), 316-7.
[23] McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 326.
[24] McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 335.
[25] Don Delillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1999), 593.
[26] Delillo, Underworld, 182.
[27] Delillo, Underworld, 182.
Issue 5, Spring 2004, Article 2
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 5, Spring 2004: Special Conference Edition
Icons, Canons and Iconoclasts: Reading Adolescents in Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks and Joyce Carol Oates’s I’ll Take You There
Rachael McLennan
© Rachael McLennan. All Rights Reserved
In Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks (1976) [1], the twenty-seven year old protagonist Ginny Babcock Bliss returns to her home town of Hullsport, Tennessee because her mother is seriously ill with a rare blood disorder, a crisis which forces Ginny to contemplate the significance of her own life. Now the mother of a young daughter, and estranged from her husband, Ginny has to decide what these relationships mean to her, which entails engaging in acts of reading over and narrating her own life. Ginny reviews her adolescence in great detail, particularly her first year in Worthley College, Boston, as it is from her college reading that Ginny internalises philosophical prescriptions about the nature of existence and the relations between self and world, experiencing bafflement and frustration throughout the rest of her adult life because she cannot make personal events conform to any philosophical paradigm. However, initially Ginny does not want to attend college at all – forbidden to see her boyfriend, Clem Cloyd, after a motorcycle accident, her father insists that she apply, thinking that this will keep them apart. In a gesture of adolescent rebellion against her family and the wider world, Ginny refuses to fill out her college application form in the standard manner – she writes, for example, that ‘I don’t really wish to attend Worthley. I’m being held prisoner in a hospital bed. Please send help.’(K,194) To her surprise she is invited for an interview and Miss Head, her interviewer and future philosophy instructor, decides that she will fit into the college very well. In a recalled discussion which serves as a useful illustration of the privileges, risks and consequences attendant upon various acts of reading and being read, central concerns of this article, Miss Head asks
‘ Who is Virginia Babcock from Hullsport, Tennessee? What books does she read? What kinds of activities are most meaningful to her self-concept?’
‘Which self concept? I’ve had several.’ I speculated as to whether or not I could admit that my reading list over the past year had mostly consisted of such old favourites from Clem Cloyd’s bookshelves such as Hard Bargain and Tongue Power, with their blacked-out cover illustrations and their vast vocabulary of words never tested for on the SAT exams.
‘Oh ho ho. That’s what attracted me to your application, Miss Babcock. Among other things. I can be quite honest with you now. “Being held prisoner in a hospital bed,” indeed!’
‘But I was.’
‘A delicious wit you displayed, Miss Babcock, in your handling of the questions. Most refreshing. I’m sure you can appreciate how tedious it becomes for those of us who have to read these endless applications. “I desire to attain a Worthley education in order more fully to appreciate the world around me.” But your answers, Miss Babcock, well, they betrayed you as being true Worthley material, as it were. What field do you intend to pursue?’ She consulted her watch quickly.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, Miss Head, I hadn’t planned to pursue much of anything. I hadn’t expected to be accepted. I guess I’ll have to get busy and think of something.’ (K,197-198)
By asking what Ginny reads immediately after asking who she is, Miss Head suggests that Ginny’s identity and self-definition are related to what she reads. Ginny seems aware of this when debating whether to be honest about what she has read, as naming particular texts allows others to construct certain ‘self concepts’ about her – indicating the power of a society to sanction or reject particular texts and readers according to values held by a majority. However, although the adolescent Ginny is selective in responding to Miss Head, the adult Ginny, who narrates, endeavours to let her readers into the truth of the situation. In relating her adolescent self’s dilemma, the older narrating Ginny anticipates the dangers of being misunderstood or misread. The act of narrating allows the adult Ginny to combine her recalled memories of adolescence with her adult perspective, and while nonetheless complicating her narrative with the difficulties associated with the nature of memory, the adult Ginny is able to exert more control over her readers and how she is interpreted, whereas Miss Head’s misreading of the adolescent Ginny’s words has serious implications for Ginny’s future. By refusing to interpret the sentiments in Ginny’s application as revealing her true feelings and transforming her gesture of rebellion into evidence that she is ‘true Worthley material’, Miss Head safely incorporates Ginny into the world of the university, in which the adult representatives of the system wield power to read and interpret the behaviour of the students under their care.
This article aims to explore female adolescent reading experiences in Kinflicks and Joyce Carol Oates’s I’ll Take You There (2003) [2], as these experiences are central to the development of both adult female narrators and to the acts of narration themselves. The words in the title of this article, ‘Reading Adolescents’, indicate that the adolescents are not only subjects, active readers and interpreters, but are themselves the objects of critical inquiry, the site of significant readings (or misreadings) in American culture. Examining the female adolescent reading practices in these novels, and subsequently offering wider readings of these female adolescents in America raises questions about relations between narrator and audience, adulthood and adolescence, and ultimately about processes of canon formation in American literature.
In an essay called ‘Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature’, Oates recalls one of her adolescent experiences of reading:
To have read Nietzsche at age eighteen, when one’s senses are most keenly and nervously alert, the very envelope of the skin dangerously porous; to have heard, and been struck to the heart, by that astonishing voice –what ecstasy! what visceral unease! – as if the very floor were shifting beneath one’s feet. Late adolescence is the time for love, or, rather, for passion – the conviction that within the next hour something can happen, will happen, to irrevocably alter one’s life. [3]
Here adolescence and the experience of reading are grounded in the body. A passionate relationship exists between reader and text, rendering the very world around the reader unstable, causing fear and pleasure in equal measure. If for Oates, adolescence is predicated on such a belief in the power of external events to change the future forever (note the depiction of the adolescent passively waiting for the world to act upon her, suggesting the inability of the adolescent to actively cause or create in the world – her skin is like an envelope, fulfilling its function only when addressed) then the act of reading can provide such an experience. Just as the narrative voice of Nietzsche exerts a dangerously seductive influence on the adolescent Oates, the experience of reading exerts a similar influence on the adolescent protagonists in Kinflicks and I’ll Take You There. Both Ginny and Oates’s nameless narrator are students of philosophy in 1960s America. They avidly read and revere the work of Descartes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, among others, in efforts to comprehend their own identities and the relation of self to world, anxiously seeking some template or guide to live by, although this receptiveness to texts can have negative consequences. For example, in trying to assess the influence of former boyfriends and Miss Head, the major figures in her life so far, Ginny claims that
I had studied Hegel. I knew that Clem had merely played the antithesis to Joe Bob’s thesis, and that Miss Head was the pure and elevated synthesis. That Miss Head herself might be the thesis for a yet higher synthesis, as Hegel would have insisted, was unthinkable. (K, 236)
Ginny attempts to make her relationships with others conform to the Hegelian dialectic, even though as she says herself, she chooses not to take Hegel’s argument further, indicating both the effort that has to be made in order to force her life’s events into this paradigm and her power to be selective in interpretation. When Miss Head proves to be less elevated than imagined, Ginny embarks on a lesbian relationship with her friend Eddie, who rejects the rationalism that Miss Head represents, and upon Eddie’s death Ginny turns to Ira, who provides her with the stability and constraints of the patriarchal family. When Bonnie Hoover Braendlin, in summing up these events, describes how Ginny ‘ricochets’ [4] towards Ira, she uses a term which, while suggestive of Ginny’s lack of independence and willingness to be led by others, fails to stress the importance of reading as a factor which determines those by whom she is led. Also, Ginny’s ability to form interpretations of her own in the act of narrating her story indicates that this lack of independence is not total. When Ginny finally accepts that Hegel’s theory is not applicable to her own life, she initially thinks that suicide is her only option – it does not occur to her that she could abandon her idolisation of that theory. However, her narrative ends on a tentative note of hope, with Ginny eventually summoning the strength to live under the dictates of nobody but herself, even though she has no idea what this may entail and if she will be successful – the novel’s final sentence reads, ‘She left the cabin, to go where she had no idea’ (K, 567). Ginny is at once most empowered and most vulnerable when granting reading less influence. The difficulties inherent in deciding whether this is to be regarded positively, in that Ginny is finding increased independence, or negatively, in that she seems unable to find revered paradigms of autonomous female experience from which she can gain hope regarding her own future, constitutes a significant reminder of the multiple and contradictory readings of Ginny’s life that can be made by herself and others.
Oates’s nameless narrator also tries and fails to make her relationships and existence conform to the postulates of the philosophers she reads, philosophers encountered through the reading lists of the university lecturers whom the narrator claims to admire and fear as ‘minor deities’ (ITYT, 41). I’ll Take You There is divided into three parts, each focussing on the adolescent protagonist’s relationship with one of three significant others – her sorority house mother, her African American boyfriend, and her father. These are relationships in which the narrator, like Ginny, idolises people whose identities differ widely from her own but which she wishes to appropriate. She seeks guidance in how to make them care for her and gain power over them from the philosophical texts she worships, such as Spinoza’s Ethics, which privilege mind over body, rationality over sensuality, the adherence to absolutes as the means to mastery of self and world. However, in each case the narrator’s desire for knowledge of the other person in the relationship induces her to commit acts of betrayal which destroy the relationships forever. In each case, acts of reading and interpretation constitute these acts of betrayal, yet again testifying to the potentially destructive power of such acts. The narrator reads private papers belonging to her house mother and her boyfriend, and disobeys her father’s injunction that she never look at him to see the ravages that cancer has wrecked on his body – the shock he experiences when he realises that she has seen him hastens his death. This narrator’s reverence for more intimate knowledge of another at all costs, and her belief that this knowledge resides in the work of certain authors, texts and ideas results in unthinking repetition of the same mistake. With this in mind, it is worth considering another comment by Oates about the experience of reading:
It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin; another’s voice; another’s soul. One might argue that serious reading is as sacramental an act as serious writing, and should therefore not be profaned. That, by way of a book, we have the ability to transcend what is immediate, what is merely personal, and to enter a consciousness not known to us, in some cases distinctly alien, other … [5]
In both novels the experience of reading resembles a falling into love or lust, an act of worshipping a particular text or author – Oates and the narrators of both novels are unclear about distinctions here. Also, both novels, like Oates’s comment above, illustrate how the experience of reading can itself be read in various ways – most commonly, as a threat to the self’s autonomy and control, or as an enriching, pleasurable experience which furthers knowledge about others. Oates’s ambivalence is seen in the fact that she considers reading a sacramental act of transcendence and also an action of ‘falling’, so that reading constitutes both a dangerous fall from innocence and a rise to an enlightened state of knowledge, not unlike the dual manner in which the transition from adolescence to adulthood is often regarded. Oates’s nameless narrator concludes her narrative by describing her father’s funeral and the burial arrangements she plans for her parents:
For the joint grave I would replace my mother’s marker with a small but, I thought, beautiful granite marker engraved with both my parents’ names, birth- and death-dates. I would not be joining them in that rocky soil, but my family was now complete.
If things work out between us, someday I’ll take you there. (ITYT, 290)
The words ‘if things work out’ again emphasise a loving relationship between narrator and ideal reader. It is significant that the narrator often complains that her house mother, lover and father all call her adolescent self ‘you’, rarely if ever using her name, reflecting the fact that in their lives she functions as object rather than subject, lacking a knowable identity. She experiences this as threatening, although when she narrates she not only withholds her name but in turn calls her imaginary reader or readers ‘you’, at once a sign of intimacy and a strategy which allows her to narrate herself as subject, at the cost of objectifying others. Similarly in Kinflicks, the novel’s chapters alternate between first- and third-person narration, which offers room for multiple readings of Ginny’s identity and existence in the world, although Ellen Peel, in her discussion of the novel’s narrative style, offers only one:
In a patriarchy, a woman may refer to herself as “she” rather than “I” because of alienation from herself rather than a healthy detachment. Also, in a patriarchal society, a woman may be referred to as “I” rather than “she” because someone else, acting as a sort of ghostwriter, is usurping her voice rather than feeling empathy with her. Such a society encourages a woman to see herself as an object and to relinquish her voice to a masculine subject. [6]
Peel’s focus on a negative reading of such a narrative technique fails to account for the fact that the ability to regard oneself as subject and object need not be a sign of alienation but rather of increased awareness of the shifting relationships between individuals in the world – also, she does not admit that, as Oates’s narrator’s stance towards her readers illustrates, ‘you’ is an indeterminate term which can not only designate both singularity and plurality but also is not gender-specific, pointing to the fact that experiencing oneself as both subject and object is a potentially universal experience. Rather than trying to formulate a definitive reading of Ginny’s narrative, which would involve deciding whether her story claims that it is healthy to regard oneself as subject and object, or whether it expresses concern about the formation of identity in a world where women in patriarchal societies have found it more difficult to narrate themselves as subjects, it might be better not to fall into the same trap as the adolescent readers in both texts discussed here (in that they seek a single, infallible reading of their lives and cannot accept that this does not exist) and instead consider what is involved in granting validity to multiple, even conflicting interpretations.
Oates’s narrator’s phrase, ‘I’ll take you there’, illustrates this clearly. ‘There’ designates the gravestone of the narrator’s parents (there lie her parents), where those lives are starkly summarised in terms which it pleases the narrator to read. She has controlled the manner in which her parents’ lives will be officially remembered, although the words hardly render the true complexity of those individual lives (there lie her parents), so that a space is made available in which their lives can be read and interpreted in different ways by others.
Although the comments in Oates’s essay are instructive, her own words highlight the benefits of resisting the helpless fall into the skin or voice of another in the act of reading. Oates’s use of the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ suggest homogeneity, some aspect of shared identity or experience, which means that if ‘we’ already share so much, if there is already a ‘we’ which can be defined and identified with, then reading is not the sole means of getting into another’s skin, or at the very least renders the ‘other’ as less alien than Oates describes. While this could be a positive idea, Oates’s ‘we’ masks the very real differences between individuals, such as gender, age and race, which do influence the experiences of reading and narrating, as examination of these female adolescent protagonists illustrates. All of the philosophers who are revered in these texts are male, and all devote their attention to the male self, male existence, which is assumed to be an experience applicable to everyone. Judith Fetterley describes what she perceives to be the consequences of such thinking in American culture:
American literature is male. To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male. Though exceptions to this generalisation can be found here and there – a Dickinson poem, a Wharton novel – these exceptions usually function to obscure the argument and confuse the issue – American literature is male. Our literature neither leaves women alone nor allows them to participate. It insists on its universality, at the same time as it defines that universality in specifically male terms. [7]
Oates’s notion of reading as allowing an individual to transcend the personal and enter the consciousness of what may seem ‘other’ is taken to nightmarish extremes, seen in Fetterley’s insistence that for female readers, the experience of being excluded from a literature which claims to define your identity results in
a peculiar form of powerlessness – not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one’s experiences articulated, clarified and legitimated in art, but more significantly the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male, to be universal, to be American, is to be not female. [8]
This complicates the situation of the adolescent protagonists of these texts, who as adolescent and female, are doubly objectified or marginalised by the patriarchal adult societies in which they live. Fetterley’s depiction of female readers being neither fully accepted nor dismissed as identifiably ‘American’ serves as a useful correlative to the manner in which adult American society neither wholly includes or excludes adolescents of either gender. Fetterley may advocate the stance of being a ‘resisting reader’, but none of the texts she discusses are written by women and about female experience, so that Fetterley portrays the female reader in a very limited position. Able only to ‘resist’ the seductive advances which these texts make upon her (the adoring relationships which the female adolescents in Alther’s and Oates’s novels form with the male-figured texts they read foreground heterosexual romance narratives and suppress others) the female reader is apparently incapable of finding stories about experiences with which she can identify, and equally incapable of narrating her own experience.
In Kinflicks, one of the moments in adolescence to which Ginny devotes the greatest amount of reflection concerns a visit to the opera with Miss Head. Ginny feels that she has disgraced herself because of her inability to value the quality of a performance. She feels that this inability is caused because
I had allowed my emotions to swamp my intellect. I had permitted myself the indulgence of becoming personally involved in Aida’s and Rhadames’s deaths in a neurotic process of identification. I had failed Miss Head. (K, 227)
To atone for her perceived failure, Ginny goes to a biology lab (which she seems to regard as a place of rationality, free from problems of emotional identification) and scrapes some cells from her cheek, which she puts on a slide and studies. The extended description of the cell activity is detached and clinical, Ginny taking pleasure and pride in the fact that her reading has given her the necessary knowledge to understand what is happening – the processes involved in the death of cells in her own body. However, her description suddenly changes:
If the amino acids were the letters of the alphabet that combined to form word proteins, proteins in turn formed sentences – cells like this one. The paragraphs in the book of life and death were multicelled organisms. Cells were dying continuously in this same fashion in Aida’s body, in my body, in Miss Head’s body. (K, 228)
The change in Ginny’s description is caused by her use of metaphor to compare the body and the components of cells to literature (seen in her description of ‘the book of life and death’) and the components of language – words and sentences – which are used in the creation of literature. Ginny’s use of metaphor allows her to set up an identification (not ‘neurotic’) between cells and language – concepts which would not normally be said to share similar qualities, yet inspire Ginny to achieve a major insight about her own life. The cells from her own body lie there, dead, in front of her, complicating the idea of clear boundaries between self and world and allowing Ginny to narrate herself as subject and object, crucially realising that this scientific process allows genuine identification with all. It is an identification rooted in the universality of death and the workings of the human body, nonetheless allowing Ginny to acknowledge the particularity of experience; the examples given – of herself, Miss Head, and Aida – are female. It is also an identification very different from that suggested in the essentialist discourse of the philosophers Ginny studies, whose discussions of mankind subsume female experience into the male, ignoring female experience while purporting to incorporate it.
Like Fetterley’s resisting female readers, Ginny and Oates’s nameless narrator do not seek to find texts which discuss female experience, which means that they do not challenge the canonical status grated to the philosophical texts they study. They believe that any difficulties in applying such apparently universal theories to their own experience lie not within the texts, but are indicative of inadequacy within themselves, a useful reminder that reading can function as a strategy for locating and positioning individuals within a culture’s power structures, generally in a manner which validates the values of the dominant and most powerful groups, those most visible and who (self)authorise cultural scripts – the manner in which Miss Head, as an adult authority, is able to transform the adolescent Ginny’s subversive college application form into evidence that she can be embraced by the adult, mainstream world of Worthley College may be a good example of this, as now Ginny can be literally located within the college and taught to read its culturally-approved texts. With this in mind, it does not seem strange, though it is certainly unproductive, that so many critics and writers account for the importance of adolescence in American literature (putting ‘adolescence’, as a generic term, under the microscope this time) by claiming that the developmental stage of adolescence presents a useful metaphoric means of considering America itself. [9] Adolescence exists in a liminal, transitory space between childhood and adulthood, just as America is often depicted as being both a youthful nation and a global, ‘adult’, superpower, and it is perhaps for this convenient reason that so many novels with adolescent protagonists are critically acclaimed as representing ‘American’ experience. However, it also seems that if adolescence is a stage regarded as subordinate to adulthood (as can be discerned in the fact that the philosophical texts these female adolescents read privilege not only male experience but also adult experience, making it doubly difficult for Ginny and Oates’s narrator to locate themselves), then a means must be found for justifying study of the portrayal of this stage in literary texts. This notion, and the practice of labelling America as metaphorically ‘adolescent’ are extremely problematic, as Ginny’s engagement with metaphor and the adolescent reading experiences she shares with Oates’s narrator should make clear. Engagement with metaphor tends to be undertaken for the purposes of rendering one concept, presumed somehow unknowable, more comprehensible by relating it to another concept, less problematically unknowable, hopefully resulting in a new and more enlightened way of perceiving both concepts. In this case, ‘America’ is presumed to be the problematic unknown, with ‘adolescence’ enlisted to make it more comprehensible. Such thinking must be revised, as ‘adolescence’, as a stage in human development, tends to be discussed in the essentialist terms displayed in the philosophical texts studied by Ginny and Oates’s narrator, with its gendered, class-based and racial components effaced. The result is that critical texts making such arguments based on the portrayal of adolescence in American literature generally concern white male adolescents such as Holden Caulfield in J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Arguing that these adolescents are representative of ‘America’ as a whole, and that to read their narratives is to read the story of American experience, begs the question of how and in what way Holden, like the philosophers studied by the adolescent protagonists of Oates’s and Alther’s texts, can be said to speak for everyone. Some critics, such as Jonathan Arac, in his study of the critical response to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), argue for an end to what Arac calls the ‘idolatry’ which allows such assumptions to be made about texts which are granted canonical status (being canonical, as Fetterley explains, they are concerned with what is believed to be ‘universal’ about American experience) and disallows deeper critical engagement of problematic themes in such texts. [10] Nina Baym outlines the pitfalls of such idolatry when she illustrates the circular argument that if the best literature is that which is the most American, and the most American is about what is male in American experience, a canon of American literature which privileges texts by male authors excludes women from being involved in what constitutes American experience, and in writing great literature about it. [11] Although Arac also finds the overlapping definitions of what entails the ‘most’ and ‘best’ in American experience to be troubling because they exclude the opinions of groups of people who may not be able to identify with this experience, while allowing those who can identify to ignore the fact that not everyone can, he notes the further important fact that texts which are elevated to canonical status nonetheless very often critique aspects of American society, even if that society remains unchanged at the end of the novel. [12] Huck lights out for the territory, refusing to accommodate to the civilising world, and Holden seems unable to decide whether or not to adjust himself to the adult world he feels so ambivalently towards; the implication is that the world, despite its flaws, will not change, but these adolescents may have to. When Patricia Hunt Steinle notes that by 1981 The Catcher in The Rye ‘had the dubious distinction of being at once the most frequently censored book across the country and the second most frequently taught novel in the public schools’, [13] she raises the problems which every critic discussed so far is concerned – problems of articulating what it may mean to read as an American or to read for Americanness, articulations that lie (as Arac would have it, falsifying the truth) at the very heart of defining the canon of ‘American literature’. And what are the benefits and costs of reading in these ways? Just as Ginny fears that her identification with characters may affect her value judgments (the irony being that she has so far struggled to find coherence in her life because she desires so much to find postulates about existence with which to identify), how do such questions of identification affect the critical readings of texts? Who is reading, and on behalf of whom?
Examining these issues as they relate to the reading practices of female adolescents in American literature indicates how such issues refuse to simply lie there, whether knowable, dormant or safely at a distance. This exposition of the narrow definitions of what constitutes both adolescence and canonical texts should make it no surprise that Ginny and Oates’s narrator do not try to find texts which reflect their experiences or tell them how to live in the world. In fact, it is the central contention of this article that the female adolescent reading experiences of Ginny and Oates’s narrator (their search for paradigms of experience, their thwarted efforts to conform to established, sanctioned patterns of existence) dramatise the estrangement and confusion encountered when realising that their experience is not valued highly enough to be reflected, narrated in the canonical works of a culture, leading to their adult obsessions with reading and narrating their own female experiences, their worries about being misread and wrongly positioned, their desire for the specific and yet universal ‘you’, the loving ideal reader. Steinle’s work on the controversies surrounding the inclusion of The Catcher in the Rye in school reading lists testifies to the fact that fears exist in adult American society about the readings adolescents are capable of making of that very society. American literature which deals with adolescent protagonists of all genders, races and classes offers a particularly important means of engaging with debates over what is meant by the concepts of canon formation (particularly as this refers to readings and evaluations of texts) and American individual and national identities.
When reading criticism about canon formation and American literature, two powerful metaphors consistently recur. Two critics can be given here as examples – Stephen Greenblatt uses the extended metaphor of boundaries, with their associations of place, conquest, and limits, to describe relations between different fields of literary study [14] whereas when Judith Fetterley describes American literature as ‘male’ it sounds as if she is describing a gendered body. Both metaphors are problematic, as the notion of boundaries may result a in concept like ‘American literature’ being envisioned as a definable territory contested by different warring factions, whereas Fetterley’s own language shows that she oversimplifies her argument. Her use of the word ‘it’ to describe the canon of American literature in her comments above sounds as if the American canon is a single unsexed body, capable of narrating itself, when Fetterley is trying to argue that it is in fact male and in need of being narrated by others, particularly female readers. Although she is insistent that ‘American literature is male’, she cannot call the American canon ‘he’ as obviously the canon is not a person, but a vague entity which eludes definition.
The most important fact is that critics are compelled to seek such metaphors in the act of narrating the story of American literature. Like the concept of adolescence, the concept of canonicity resists concrete definition and suffers from essentialist readings. Metaphor is often employed to render both terms comprehensible. Debates about the concepts of adolescence and of canon construction in America took on a particular urgency and importance in the years immediately following the Second World War, with the postwar economic boom creating a new generation of young people who called particular attention to themselves as independent consumers at the same time as America began to regard itself and be regarded as a major world power. Definitions of individual and national identity, and how these concepts were to be narrated became paramount, reflected in increased debates among critics about which American novels best represented the nation and should be taught to the young at this major point in history. [15] Ginny’s use of metaphor increases her understanding of herself and others, but the reading practices of her adolescent self, and that of Oates’s narrator, show that sometimes acts of reading and narrating obscure rather than reveal understanding. Perhaps – to engage in another problematic act of reading and metaphor-usage – it is a good idea to think of canonicity, or successfully functioning canonicity, as somehow an adolescent enterprise, in that it partakes of some of what are commonly assumed to be adolescent qualities, qualities which are shared despite gender, race and class differences, and yet underline the plurality of both ‘adolescence’ and ‘canonicity’. This idea is further justified since questions of canonicity are, after all, questions of reading, and it has been argued so far that reading itself can be read as a fundamentally adolescent activity (seen in Oates’s idea of reading as both a falling and a rise to adult knowledge, mirroring the ambivalent passage from adolescence to adulthood). Successfully functioning canonicity, then, would be liminal and developmental, resisting concrete definition. It would regard individual and national identity as fluid, plural and relational, something to be constructed and discovered, read and narrated again and again, and in multiple, conflicting ways. It would concern itself with past and future, tradition and innovation, so that it includes all voices while privileging none.
Reading adolescents – that is, looking at the idolatory reading practices of selected female adolescents in American literature, and considering the often idolatory critical analysis of (usually male) adolescents in American literature, shows that although loving readings are fruitful, stressing intimate collaboration between readers and texts, idolatory readings, which privilege and suppress certain texts and voices, are not. When at the end of I’ll Take You There, Oates’s narrator offers her tentative but loving invitation to readers, it may be that she is forced to because she has not learned to read her own life properly so far, and so may well be doomed to the same mistakes, but it also indicates that she is prepared to try again. It is important that when the narrator describes her plans for the gravestone she does not say that the gravestone actually exists – she only describes how she would like it to be, how she would like it to read. As her description stands, the gravestone stands as a kind of Barthesian site of bliss or pleasure to encountered when reading the text it displays, emblematic of the narrator’s utopian dream of multiple readings in the future. Barthes argues that
The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction). Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed) this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end), if it is true that every narrative (every unveiling of the truth) is a staging of the (absent, hidden or hypostatised) father – which would explain the solidarity of narrative forms, of family structures, and of prohibitions of nudity, all collected in our culture in the myth of Noah’s sons covering his nakedness. [16]
Although Barthes is talking about Western civilisation rather than American culture in particular, this passage is relevant to Oates’s narrator, who in telling her own story is also telling about the death of her father, and in inviting the ‘you’ whom she loves to the gravestone, is extending an invitation for further pleasurable readings in the future – readings of the lives of herself and her mother and father. Although Barthes privileges mind over body, male experience over female, and adulthood over youth – he likens lesser, physical sexual pleasures to male (adolescent?) fantasy and considers more intellectual pleasures to validate the authority of the father, which involves validating the patriarchal structures of society – the determination of Ginny and Oates’s narrator to accommodate and undertake multiple readings and narrations of their lives by themselves and others leads to a more productive way of considering the concept of American canon formation and readings of female adolescence in American literature. When Oates’s narrator says ‘If things work out between us, someday I’ll take you there’, and when Ginny, at the end of her narrative, undertakes her journey to an unknown destination which holds the same significance for her as the gravestone site does for Oates’s narrator, they acknowledge that the pleasurable readings have yet to take place, but that they could become a reality – it may be possible to get closer to ‘there’.
University of Glasgow
Notes
[1] Lisa Alther, Kinflicks (London:Virago Press, 1999)
[2] Joyce Carol Oates, I’ll Take You There (London, Fourth Estate, 2003)
[3] Joyce Carol Oates, (Woman) Writer – Occasions and Opportunities (New York: E.P Dutton, 1988), 53-65, 59
[4] Bonnie Hoover Braendlin, ‘New Directions in the Contemporary Bildungsroman: Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks’ Women and Literature, (1980), 160-171, 163
[5] Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature’, in (Woman) Writer, (56-57)
[6] Ellen Peel, ‘Subject, Object, and the Alternation of First- and Third-Person Narration in Novels by Alther, Atwood and Drabble: Toward a Theory of Feminist Aesthetics’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 30:2 (1989), 107-122, 119
[7] Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xii
[8] Ibid., xiii
[9] For only a sample of many such examples, see Frederic I. Carpenter, ‘The Adolescent in American Fiction’, English Journal, 46:6 (1957), 313-319, Barton Friedberg, ‘The Cult of Adolescence’, Nassau Review, 1:1 (1964), 26-35, or ‘Author Joyce Carol Oates on Adolescent America’, US News and World Report, May 15 (1978), 60
[10] Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), vii
[11] Nina Baym, ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’, American Quarterly, 33:2 (1981), 123-139
[12] Arac, 138
[13] Patricia Hunt Steinle, In Cold Fear – ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 2
[14] Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries – The Transformation of English and American Studies (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992)
[15] For a good introductory discussion about canonicity in the postwar era see Arac, and for adolescence in the postwar era see Kirk Kurnutt, Alienated-Youth Fiction (Michigan: Gale Group, 2001)
[16] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill&Wang, 1975), 10
Issue 5, Spring 2004, Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 5, Spring 2004: Special Conference Edition
Editing the Great Literary Comeback: Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream
Alan Gibbs
© Alan Gibbs. All Rights Reserved
Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that’s my greatest social crime, I’ve overstayed my hibernation, since there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play (Ellison, Invisible Man, 468).
It was only towards sleep one knew himself still lying on the cobbles, felt the cobbles under him, and over him and scudding ever towards him like a black foam, the perpetual blur of shod and running feet […] and feel them all and feel, not pain, not terror, but strangest triumph, strangest acquiescence. One might as well call it sleep. He shut his eyes (Roth, Call It Sleep, 440).
Metaphors of sleep towards the close of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep might be taken as uncannily prophetic of their writing careers in the immediate aftermath of publishing those first novels. For many years following these extraordinary first efforts, both writers laboured in attempts to write a second novel. Aside from this, the writing careers of Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth might appear to have little in common. Indeed, it would be foolish to disregard the differences in racial and ethnic background, their contrasting political positions, or the ways in which these factors affect their work. There are, nevertheless, numerous similarities in their literary careers and, most importantly, in the editorial fates of their later texts.
I
Roth and Ellison were born 8 years apart, the former in 1906, in what is now part of Ukraine, the latter in 1914 in rural Oklahoma. From such diverse beginnings, both ended up in New York City, Roth emigrating there with his family at the age of two, and growing up in the Lower East Side, before moving to a less homogenously Jewish neighbourhood in Harlem. Although Roth left the city in 1945, moving to Massachussetts, then Maine, and finally New Mexico, his literary output remained preoccupied by his earlier life in New York. Ellison moved to New York City in his early twenties, after studying music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1933 to 1936. In New York he met important figures such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, both of whom encouraged him to write. By 1938 Ellison had written reviews and short stories and was working with the Federal Writers’ Project. He spent much of his post-War life in New York City.
Both writers are known predominantly for one book, largely conforming to a Bildungsroman model, set mainly in New York, and based partly on events from their own lives. The two novels were written relatively early in the lives of their authors, Roth publishing Call It Sleep in 1934, at the age of 28, Ellison with Invisible Man in 1952, when he was 38. Call It Sleep follows approximately three years in the life of David Schearl, a timid Jewish boy growing up in early twentieth-century New York. Employing descriptive prose of startling intensity, the novel follows David’s coping with a terrifyingly domineering father, prevailing anti-Semitism, and a growing awareness and fear of sex. Ellison’s Invisible Man tracks its credulous and nameless protagonist from disgrace and expulsion from a southern college to New York. After various misadventures, suffering exploitation and abuse characteristic of the African American experience, he finds himself being used as a public speaker for the socialist ‘Brotherhood’, before becoming caught up in a Harlem race riot at the novel’s close.
While Ellison’s novel was almost immediately hailed as a masterpiece, winning the National Book Award in 1953, the fate of Roth’s was more complicated. Published in the midst of the Depression, Call It Sleep disappeared – despite largely favourable reviews – when the publisher went bankrupt. The book vanished from sight, although not from the memory of a few admirers, for thirty years. [1] It was republished in 1964 in paperback form, instantly proclaimed as a ‘lost classic’ of twentieth-century American fiction, and became a number one bestseller. [2] During this time, Roth had conspicuously failed to write another novel. Despite several attempts, all he had published was a short piece of work-in-progress for the intended second novel, a handful of short stories, and a few position pieces. By the time of Call It Sleep‘s reemergence, he had virtually turned his back on writing, having worked as, amongst other things, a machinist, a firefighter, and a mental hospital orderly. When Call It Sleep was finally republished, Roth was ‘rediscovered’ by Life magazine, running a small duck and goose farm in rural Maine.
Although he continued writing, Ellison, too, failed for many years to follow Invisible Man with a second novel. Although he worked continually on the manuscript for another book, all he published until his death were essays and short stories – collected in Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) – and excerpts in journals from his projected novel. Both writers, then, published one novel at a relatively young age, which sooner or later came to be regarded as a classic of twentieth-century American fiction. Similarly, both authors failed for a protracted period to follow up their initial novels with further substantial works.
To explore possible reasons for the twin silences of Ellison and Roth is to uncover further similarities between the two. In neither instance is it a case of straightforward writer’s block. For Ellison, it was almost the opposite, an inability to stop writing: he seemed compelled to rework and revise material for the second novel begun in the early 1950s. His practice during this period is dominated by an incessant urge to extend scenes that worked well, while attempting to improve those which did not. As Richard H. King suggests, it was not so much writer’s block as a publishing block, arising from “a kind of hubris which compels the writer to get it perfect before letting the finished product see the light of day” (308-09). Ellison would keep tinkering with passages he had written over thirty years earlier, although the result of this was frequently a deleterious loss of narrative focus rather than discernible improvement. Similarly, although he essentially wrote nothing for a period in the 1940s, Roth produced a considerable amount of material between his first and second novels. In particular, from the mid-1960s onwards, following the successful republication of Call It Sleep, Roth worked unrelentingly on drafting large swathes of semi-autobiographical narrative. These sections slowly coalesced into what would become his Mercy of a Rude Stream.
Working on their material for such a sustained period might have had similar effects on the two writers. Ellison began a follow up to Invisible Man in the early 1950s, that is, before Brown versus Board, in a time when so-called separate but equal still held legal sway. In toiling so protractedly on a novel meant to dissect attitudes towards race in America, it is worth pondering how Ellison maintained an ideological position, given the huge changes in race relations which took place throughout that period. During this time, Ellison had come under attack from a number of prominent writers and intellectuals, both white and African American. Important as his work undoubtedly was, Ellison was perceived as a conservative, especially by black nationalists. He was widely criticised for his apparent valuing of aesthetic purity over political affairs such as the Civil Rights Movement or anti-Vietnam War protests. [3] Jan Nordby Gretlund suggests that comparisons of the early published extracts from Ellison’s work-in-progress with what was eventually to be Juneteenth reveal a softening of Ellison’s attitudes towards the transcendentalists (109). I would argue that such a change is symptomatic of many other shifts which are inevitably manifest in Ellison’s political position during those decades of dramatic social change. This suggests one reason why he found it necessary constantly to revisit and revise his work over that period.
Roth, too, was subject to criticism – from both without and within – regarding the perceived lack of political stance taken by Call It Sleep. An infamous and anonymous review from the New Masses condemned Roth for making “no better use of [his] working class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels” (‘Brief Review’, 27). Although a number of radical intellectuals, among them Kenneth Burke and Edwin Seaver, came to his defence in subsequent issues of the paper, Roth apparently found himself agreeing with much of the criticism. Shortly after Call It Sleep was completed, Roth had joined the Communist Party, a catastrophic move in terms of his art, since it committed him to a social realism completely antithetical to his more instinctive aesthetic. The results of this ideological clash are evident in the surviving remnant of Roth’s attempt to write a programmatically committed proletarian novel. [4]
In the ensuing years, Roth claims to have found shifts in ideological position inhibiting in terms of even beginning to write again. In numerous interviews he argued that the gap between his communist sympathies and his modernist aesthetic for many years prevented him from being able to write. Moreover, the loyalty to communist ideology seemed to ebb and flow over the years, frustrating Roth’s attempts to establish a secure foundation for his fiction. Finally, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Roth found himself in direct opposition to the Communist Party line, fervently supporting Israel, as he related to David Bronsen:
I followed the daily events of the war with great avidity. I found myself identifying intensely with the Israelis in their military feats, which repudiated all the anti-Jewish accusations we had been living with in the Diaspora, and I was glorying in their establishment of themselves as a state through their own application and resources (278).
Roth goes on to elaborate on how an “intellectual excitement” caught him and forced him to write down his new thoughts about Israel, and his growing alienation from the Soviet Union’s position. However unsophisticated his reading of the political situation of the Middle East appears in retrospect, Roth undeniably believed that his new identification with Israel and reconciliation with Judaism provided him at last with a solid ideological position. This in turn granted him a secure identity that enabled him to write again, in particular to broach the difficult material from his life that formed the basis for the Mercy series. Of course, the notorious later revelations about the adolescent incestuous relationship with his sister, and the consequent problems of writing autobiographically-based fiction, retrospectively suggest that Roth’s diagnosis is a smokescreen. Nevertheless, the problem of shifting ideological bases for the writer who compulsively revises, as Roth and Ellison were wont to do, should not be underestimated.
Another determining factor in the difficulties encountered by Ellison and Roth might be found in Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence. Bloom envisions this anxiety functioning as a kind of displaced oedipal complex, the writer feeling constrained by those iconic and canonical figures who have gone before. For Ellison and Roth, then, one might think of the inhibiting influence of modernist mentors such as Faulkner and Joyce. Indeed, much of Roth’s later writing is characterised by vituperative invective against the baleful influence of Joyce. A more important obstruction to writing a second novel, however, might be the very existence of a successful first. Invisible Man was and remained a critical and commercial success and provided Ellison with a comfortable income. [5] John Callahan writes that “as the years melted into decades, the success of the first novel may have inhibited Ellison…in the creation of his second novel” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 31). King similarly concludes that Ellison was his own most trenchant critic, and therefore “his own worst enemy… It was not Faulkner or Joyce who elicited that ‘anxiety of influence,’ which Harold…Bloom has taught us to recognize… It was, rather, a black writer of great achievement, a most intimate precursor – himself, Ralph Ellison” (309-10).
Although Call It Sleep‘s commercial success was much-delayed, Roth was not unaware of its merits even as he finished writing. The predominant admiration of critics and of his own intellectual circle (including Margaret Mead, Léonie Adams, Hart Crane, and Daniel Fuchs) gave him ample cause for feeling the novel to be a success. Roth’s sense that he had potential as a novelist would have been further bolstered by interest – and a generous advance – from renowned editor Maxwell Perkins in publishing a second novel. The mid-1960s triumphant return of the novel can only have reinforced these feelings, but its undeniable triumph seemed to weigh heavily upon Roth’s attempts to write again. In the introduction to her monograph on Call It Sleep, Hana Wirth-Nesher observes how Roth wrote – and this would be as he worked on Mercy of a Rude Stream – in a room wherein the “bookcase across from the desk holds dozens of copies of Call It Sleep, in a great many languages” (2). This image of Roth’s past looming over him as he tried to compose a sequel is a striking concretisation of Bloomian anxiety, but here deriving from one’s own writing rather than that of others. While I do not hold with Bloom’s theory as a general model of literary production, it provides an inescapably revealing paradigm for the peculiar careers of these two writers.
II
Writing about editorial intervention, Claudine Raynaud states that readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road may “seldom contemplate that they might be treading in a mine field of excisions, deletions, changes – sometimes willed by the author, other times imposed by the editor(s)” (35). Even under the most auspicious circumstances, the role of the literary editor can be very contentious. When the texts emerge posthumously or, as in the cases here under consideration, semi-posthumously, it is inevitable that the case is further problematised. After all, intentions might be difficult enough for an editor to determine from reading a text and talking to a living author. If only the former element is available, as cases involving, for example, Hemingway and Fitzgerald have demonstrated, then it is the editor who enters the minefield.
To reiterate, by the time their respective editors became attached to the projects, both Roth and Ellison had been working on their manuscripts for decades, producing thousands of pages of amorphous material. The commonly agreed date for Roth starting work on what was to become Mercy of a Rude Stream is 1979, although notebook sketches of scenes that found their way into the series exist from the mid-1960s onwards. Robert Weil, Roth’s editor for the Mercy series, became involved in the project in late 1992, after Roth and his previous editor-collaborator, Mario Materassi, had rancorously parted ways. Weil, now Executive Editor and Vice President at Norton, worked as a Senior Editor at St. Martin’s Press from 1988 to 1998. Having read Call It Sleep some years earlier, he was enthusiastic about publishing new work by Roth. According to Weil, although Roth’s new manuscript did not read well, Weil felt that he could employ his own strength in structuring to bring shape to the narrative. The publishing board at St. Martin’s Press was apparently unenthusiastic, and Weil persuaded them to go ahead with the project only on an unusually low budget.
Ellison began working on what was finally published in 1999 as Juneteenth nearly half a century earlier in the early 1950s. John Callahan, the editor for Juneteenth, is currently a humanities professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He came to know Ellison in the late 1970s, after the two struck up a correspondence. They remained friends until Ellison’s death in 1994, at which time Callahan was named Ellison’s literary executor. As with Roth, Ellison had produced a confusing mass of manuscript for his proposed second novel. Callahan describes facing “more than two thousand holograph pages, typescript pages, computer disks, printouts, false starts and new starts, revisions and re-revisions, notes, clips, scraps of notes, and outlines” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 32). Callahan found himself having been bequeathed, by Ellison’s estate and Random House if not by Ellison himself, the daunting task of trying to turn an assortment of fragments, written and continually revised over nearly five decades, into a coherent publication. Moreover, Callahan was well aware of the importance which would be attached to the second novel of, or at least attributed to, a literary giant such as Ellison. He found, also, that despite Ellison’s sometimes grandiose claims before he died, he was actually not that near to completing this intended epic panorama of twentieth-century American race relations.
Mention of the respective backgrounds of Weil and Callahan is crucial, in that it foregrounds the very different perspectives they brought to their roles as editors. Callahan is from a decidedly academic background: he first became acquainted with Ellison through having published a journal article about Invisible Man. Soon after Ellison’s death, Callahan edited and published a complete collection of Ellison’s essays, and a volume of short stories; he therefore came to the task of bringing order to Ellison’s chaotic manuscripts with considerable awareness of his characteristic literary practice and technique. After having twice read through the full manuscripts and notes, Callahan concluded that attempting to publish a version of the complete work was impossible. When he tried to arrange the whole into what he thought might have been Ellison’s intended structure, Callahan found glaring gaps in the narrative. Finally, and on the advice of his wife, Callahan returned to the manuscripts in search of a smaller, but central and coherent, narrative which might be separately extracted and published. Although nothing presented itself in final form, Callahan recognised a story thread, running through the sprawl, of the dual reminiscences of Sunraider and his former guardian, the preacher Reverend Hickman. In this narrative, Sunraider is a racist Senator – although himself of indeterminate colour – who is the victim of an assassination attempt as he speaks in Congress against integration. The remainder of the narrative is taken up with both his and Hickman’s recollections of the Senator’s past, and meditations on how he arrived at his present state. In extracting this narrative core, Callahan performed what Horace A. Porter appositely identifies as “an unprecedented literary caesarean operation” (92).
Callahan portrays his own practice in editing Ellison’s work as “improvisational” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 32), a description that has also been used regarding Ellison’s writing practice. [6] Such a characterisation also, perhaps tendentiously, suggests that Ellison would have approved. A number of critics – most vociferously, as we shall see below, Louis Menand in the New York Times Book Review – have been less convinced. A measure of improvisation would indeed be necessary, however, given the awesome task facing him, and Callahan’s fundamental aim was rigorously to represent the intentions of Ellison. He underlines that “every word was Ellison’s…nothing was my invention” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 34). While this sidesteps the significant amounts of selection, omission, and structuring Callahan found necessary to bring a measure of coherence to the patchwork text, he nevertheless clearly bore a fidelity to Ellison’s wishes, in so far as he could perceive them, as a guiding principle. His scholarly practice, informed by robustly academic habit, led him to treat Ellison’s work extremely carefully.
Callahan’s approach would be characterised as following the classic Greg-Bowers methodology of textual editing. This practice attempts to establish a definitive, ‘eclectic’ text, by drawing on the full range of available versions of the text, in order to produce something as close as possible to the author’s intentions. [7] While generally pursuing this method, Callahan admits, in interviews and in his introduction to Juneteenth, that the manuscripts were not only disorganised, but also incomplete. Callahan also supplies a selection of Ellison’s notes at the end of the published volume, although these provide only sketchy illumination of the latter’s intentions for the work. For Callahan, as is the choice for the majority of editors, these intentions were to be the final ascertainable ones: “if all things are equal, the latest version of an author’s manuscript should carry special authority” (‘Afterword’, 366). It is necessary to recognise, however, that it would be virtually impossible to establish definitive authorial intentions for a text written and revised over nearly half a century. As Menand suggests of the various manuscripts, “There are lots of loose bricks in the edifice – and this is why Callahan found it necessary to throw so much textual cement at it. He made choices where Ellison was still meditating options” (4).
Roth’s editor, Robert Weil, came to his text from a significantly contrasting direction, and his editing practices were strikingly different to Callahan’s. Weil was a commercial editor, fulfilling a more active and interventionist role. Roth had produced one long, often rambling and repetitive, manuscript, and like Ellison’s it was devoid of parts or chapters. To begin with, Weil worked with Roth to bring shape to what would be the first two books of the series, carving out volumes and chapters from the morass. It was Weil’s decision, also, to use different typefaces to separate the voices of the old man narrating and the younger man narrated. Weil also suggested cutting certain sections and even characters who contributed little to the central narrative, and providing family trees and glossaries of Yiddish terms to help the reader. [8] All of these suggestions were accepted by Roth.
Weil’s role was complicated by two events outside his control. Firstly, Roth’s sister objected strongly to the narrative in the second volume, which revealed an adolescent incestuous relationship between the protagonist, Ira, (a thinly-veiled representation of Roth) and his sister. Her legal moves resulted in huge changes – mainly deletions – being made to subsequent volumes of the series before publication. Weil asserts that both he and Roth were actually happy with these deletions, which were mainly additional scenes depicting sexual intercourse between Ira and his sister:
certain scholars have already gone on record saying that the books lose their oomph because the incest has been cut, well parts of it. I don’t feel [volumes] three and four at all are weakened because Minnie and Ira are not busy copulating… It’s my belief – and I repeat this again – that the book is better because the obsessional interest between Ira and Minnie no longer has a sexual level in three and four. Henry was very comfortable with the arrangement (‘Personal Interview’).
The ‘certain scholar’ to whom Weil refers here is almost certainly Marshall Berman, who wrote a coruscating article for The Nation, condemning what he envisaged as corporate censorship, “a crime against the living as well as against the dead” (29), and lamenting the loss of a number of powerful scenes. [9] Berman in fact knew only of cuts between the galleys and final publication stage, being unaware that much greater sections had already been edited out at the manuscript stage. The overall effect of these substantial cuts of additional incest scenes is to weaken the narrative arc of the series. Roth clearly intended thoroughly to debase his central character before providing a measure of redemption in the later volumes, and this movement is lost or, at best, rendered opaque, in the volumes as published.
Secondly, Roth died in 1995, at which time editing work on the third volume was near completion. By this time Weil’s confidence had clearly grown from the tentativeness which marked the editing of the first volume, and he was fulfilling a more active role, such as supplying titles for the individual volumes and relocating whole sections. His perspective on such intervention is summarized in a comment he made to me about “the task of editing [being] to make everything seamless; you have to find the right part for everything” (‘Personal Interview’). This responsibility to make “everything seamless”, an imperative deriving from Weil’s eye on the commercial potential of the series, evidently became a preoccupation. Such seamlessness was both difficult, given the nature of Roth’s manuscript, and perhaps even inappropriate, given the kind of rough aesthetic Roth clearly intended for the work.
For the fourth volume, Requiem for Harlem, the commercial pressures on Weil are yet more evident. Roth’s original intention was that there would be a total of six volumes to Mercy of a Rude Stream, but at his death the latter two volumes were (as they remain) in an insufficiently complete state to allow publication. Requiem for Harlem would thus be required to provide a measure of closure to the 1,400 page series. At what was to be the end of this volume, however, the manuscript just peters out, without a sense of conclusion, and so Weil decided to provide the necessary ending himself. In direct contrast to Callahan’s determination to include only Ellison’s words, Weil, in conjunction with Roth’s amanuensis, Felicia Steele, constructed the last few sentences of the fourth volume. This artificial ending was based in part on fragments of Roth’s manuscript, but is partly their own work. Weil professes that:
Felicia and I…agonised over that final paragraph, and we would bounce off each other exactly what Henry would have said…’avoiding the monotonous façade of the 119th Street tenements, preferring the holiday smells of the clangorous Avenue.’ I believe ‘clangorous’ is my word. It’s a very ’20s word you’d find in Dreiser. ‘…squealing on the tracks of the long curve westward,’ now I remember Felicia checked subway maps to establish that the subway would curve westward. (Personal Interview).
Regardless of their relative success in the painstaking construction of a closure that is entirely missing from the manuscripts, when one is familiar with these original manuscripts it is impossible not to wonder how compatible this process is with Roth’s intentions.
Another contrast between Weil and Callahan is the way they represent their own role to the reader. Callahan, although his textual intervention is, as we have seen, actually less intrusive than Weil’s, emphasises the incompleteness of Ellison’s text, and the fact that Juneteenth represents only a part of what existed. He even admits to feelings of disquiet with regard to the selections necessary to shape Ellison’s work:
Aiming, as Ellison had, at one complete volume, I proceeded to arrange his oft-revised, sometimes reconceived scenes and episodes according to their most probable development and progressions. While doing so, I felt uneasily procrustean: Here and there limbs of the manuscript needed to be stretched, and elsewhere a protruding foot might be lopped off, if all the episodes were to be edited into a single, coherent, continuous work (‘Afterword’, 365).
Here and elsewhere, Callahan expresses unease about the way in which his often contingent editorial decisions may become entrenched and definitive over the years, hence his strenuous attempts to make transparent exactly what his role was with regard to Juneteenth. Menand focuses not only on this, but also on Callahan’s bodily metaphor for the text, arguing that the problem with “Frankenstein’s monsters” such as Juneteenth as published “is that after a while the seams and the stitches disappear and what at first seems hideously contrived begins to seem perfectly natural, even a little adorable. Juneteenth will go into the world and become ‘Ralph Ellison’s second novel'” (4). Not unusually for cases such as this, and justifying Callahan’s unease, the editorial history of the book might indeed be receding from view as Menand’s gloomy prophecy is vindicated.
By contrast, Weil, who shaped the published work much more actively, strenuously downplays his editorial role. For example, the jackets of the first two volumes proclaim that Roth has completed work on the six volumes of the Mercy series. After Roth died, however, there was a gradual backsliding, in tacit recognition that the last two volumes were not ready for publication. Volumes three and four were nevertheless tendered to the public as if completed by Roth, the ‘About the Author’ section concluding Requiem for Harlem evasively stating that “Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 shortly before his death” (290), without admitting that these revisions were far from final. The whole is presented as a unified and complete series, again foregrounding the commercial imperatives underlying Weil’s function as an in-house editor; a fuller acknowledgement of his role in bringing the text to the public would severely undermine its authenticity. This would have had a damaging effect, both critically and commercially. Moreover, it suggests that Weil and Callahan perhaps perceived markedly different audiences for the works they were editing. The tone and presentation of Juneteenth hints at more academic interest – Callahan’s ‘Afterword’, for example, is subtitled, ‘A Note to Scholars’ – whereas Weil’s editorial choices throughout indicate that he had a more commercial readership in mind.
The tensions between the publishers’ commercial obligations and the intentions of the two authors are evident in both Ellison’s and Roth’s case. Both were engaged, over many years before their deaths, in writing works with many significant differences from what has so far been published. Roth, as mentioned above, projected Mercy of a Rude Stream as a six volume series, of which only four, often severely edited and indeed censored, have emerged. To a certain extent, the compromised nature of the Mercy series, as published, is demonstrably the result of the text having been forced to comply with often inappropriate commercial, as well as legal, pressures in excess of those undergone by other texts. Regardless of its undoubted strengths, Roth’s highly personal confessional narrative was perhaps never likely to be the commercial opportunity Weil envisaged. As for Ellison, according to Callahan, he was aiming to produce “an epic novel charting the immense, and uneasily settled, moral and racial territory of America” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 32). All that has been published, however, is the disappointing 350 pages of Juneteenth. As with Roth, this raises certain ethical issues with regard to the gap between the intended and resulting text.
Finally, and to return to similarities in the literary fates of Roth and Ellison, the relative critical reception of the two sets of works is again revealing. Given the unusual, even freakish, careers of Roth and Ellison, it is not surprising that reviewers demonstrated a preoccupation with the way the events of their lives had so protractedly affected their inability to complete second novels. Unavoidably, it seems, reviewers found it impossible to assess the merits of the new work without reference to the old, published decades previously. Sometimes, this involved a relatively sensitive reevaluation of the old work in the light of the new. In Roth’s case, for example, many reviewers now perceived Call It Sleep‘s status as fiction rather than autobiography somewhat challenged in the new light of Mercy of a Rude Stream. In the worst cases, however, reviewers often made simplistic comparisons between the earlier and later works. Predictably, given the esteem in which Invisible Man and Call It Sleep are held, the new works were generally found wanting. Tellingly, in his ‘Afterword’ to Requiem for Harlem Weil comments not only on the fatuousness of such comparisons, but alludes also to the other writer here under consideration:
As the first two volumes of the Mercy series came off the press, most reviewers felt compelled to compare these new works to a book published in 1934 when its author was a mere twenty-eight years old, as if a man in his late eighties was simply expected to pick up writing in the exact manner as he had done as an unexamined young man. The notion was absurd, and this wretched form of comparison would be enough to dissuade any blocked writer, like J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, or the late Ralph Ellison, from even contemplating a new work late in life (276).
Ellison indeed suffered similarly from sometimes reductive comparisons to his earlier novels. James Wood, in a markedly critical review (both of Ellison and Callahan), claims that Juneteenth “veils in faded colors the bright, remembered perfections of Invisible Man” (38). Menand, as suggested above, is especially uncomfortable about the editorial process, declaring that “It seems unfair to Ellison to review a novel he did not write” (4). Like Weil, Callahan was clearly aware of the intractable position in which editing the great literary comeback placed him, stating that “It was inevitable…that whatever was published would be measured by the yardstick of Invisible Man” (‘Riffer’s Muse’, 31).
The editor of the long-awaited posthumous work of major literary icons is in an unenviable situation. Even if they perform their task with utmost proficiency, critical praise is more likely to be directed at the writer. If, as in these cases, the resultant texts are perceived as multifariously unsatisfactory, they are likely to be the recipient of heavy criticism. Given what I have said about Callahan and Weil it would be easy to assume that I, too, am highly critical of their respective work. This is not the case, and I merely wish to draw attention to the unusually difficult role of the editor in bringing to light texts such as Juneteenth and Mercy of a Rude Stream. Moreover, one must acknowledge that different pressures – commercial, moral, even legal in Weil’s case – were operating to make their tasks yet more onerous. To return to Claudine Raynaud’s assertion cited earlier in this essay, the published versions of these texts indeed resemble minefields of “excisions, deletions, changes,” that are at some remove from apparent authorial intention. Nevertheless, both editors finally deserve praise for their sincere efforts in an impossible situation, regardless of the imperfect resultant texts.
Works Cited
Berman, Marshall. ‘The Bounds of Love.’ The Nation 263: 8, (23 Sep. 1996): 25-30.
‘Brief Review.’ The New Masses 16: 7 (12 Feb. 1935): 27.
Bronsen, David. ‘A Conversation with Henry Roth.’ Partisan Review 36: 2 (1969): 265- 80
Callahan, John F. ‘The Riffer’s Muse.’ The New Republic 27 Sep. 1999: 31-35.
– – – . ‘Afterword: A Note to Scholars.’ Juneteenth. By Ralph Ellison. New York: Vintage, 1999. 365-68.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952). London: Penguin, 1964.
– – – . Juneteenth. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Gretlund, Jan Nordby. ‘In a Run-Away Buggy,’ Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial and Existential South. Odense: Odense U P, 1998.
Howe, Irving. ‘Life Never Let Up.’ The New York Times Book Review 25 Oct. 1964: 1, 60-61.
King, Richard H. ‘The Uncreated Conscience of My Race/The Uncreated Features of His Face: The Strange Career of Ralph Ellison.’ Journal of American Studies 34: 2 (2000): 303-10.
Menand, Louis. ‘Unfinished Business.’ The New York Times Book Review 20 Jun. 1999: 4-6.
Porter, Horace A. Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2001.
Raynaud, Claudine. ‘”Rubbing a Paragraph with a Soft Cloth”? Muted Voices and Editorial Constraints in Dust Tracks on a Road.’ De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep (1934). London: Penguin, 1977.
– – – . Shifting Landscape (ed. Mario Materassi). New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.
– – – . Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 4: Requiem for Harlem. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
Weil, Robert. Personal Interview. New York City. 14 & 21 March 2002.
– – – . ‘Editor’s Afterword.’ Mercy of a Rude Stream, volume 4: Requiem for Harlem. By Henry Roth. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 273-82.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. New Essays on Call It Sleep. Cambridge UP, 1996.
Wood, James. ‘The Writer and the Preacher.’ The New Republic 28 Jun. 1999: 38-42.
University of Nottingham
Notes
[1] In its 25th anniversary Autumn 1956 edition, The American Scholar conducted a symposium in which it asked prominent literary critics and academics to name their ‘Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years’. The only novel to be mentioned by two different contributors – Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler – was Call It Sleep. A further correspondence: a 1965 Book Week poll of writers and critics named Invisible Man as the most distinguished novel published during the previous twenty years.
[2] The influence of Irving Howe’s highly complimentary review, referring to Call It Sleep as “one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American” (1), and appearing on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on October 25th, 1964, should not be underestimated. This was the first time in the history of the newspaper that a paperback reprint had been given front page treatment.
[3] See Irving Howe’s essay ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’ (in Decline of the New [London: Lowe and Brydone, 1963]) for criticism of Ellison’s allegedly misguided ideology, and Ellison’s response ‘The World and the Jug’ (in Shadow and Act [London: Trinity Press, 1967]). The exchange is discussed thoroughly in chapter three of Jerry Watts’s Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: UP of North Carolina, 1994). Ellison was also reproached for attending a White House Arts Festival in 1965, which had been boycotted by many other artists and writers in protest against the Vietnam war.
[4] See ‘If We Had Bacon’ in Shifting Landscape, the 1987 collection of Roth’s shorter pieces. This rather stilted surviving fragment betrays Roth’s uneasiness both with the aesthetic demands of social realism, and with trying to write less autobiographically-rooted material.
[5] The issue of the writers’ contrasting economic statuses should not be overlooked. While Ellison enjoyed a relatively prosperous lifestyle based on the proceeds of his writing, Roth and his family lived barely a step above penury, at least until Call It Sleep became commercially successful. It might be argued that neither circumstance is particularly conducive to producing major new writing: the former being too comfortable to be in a hurry to publish, the latter being too preoccupied with mere survival to be able to write.
[6] Ellison himself employs the phrase in his introduction to the 1982 edition of Invisible Man, xix.
[7] The Greg-Bowers method has in the last two decades come increasingly under fire from revisionist scholars who advocate taking greater account of editing as a necessarily social process. See, for example, Jerome McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[8] One character, Jane, appears briefly in the contemporary interludes of volume one, but was, on Weil’s advice, cut from subsequent volumes. In his words: “The sections concerning her were kind of obsessive; they never went anywhere. It reflected [Roth’s] obsessions of the moment. He agreed immediately, so she was cut from the book” (Personal interview).
[9] To be fair to Berman, he also attests that “Robert Weil did a heroic job of transforming [the manuscripts] into roughly coherent volumes” (25).
Issue 6, Autumn 2004 Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 6, Autumn 2004
Building Up America: Architecture, Autobiography and the Precarious Construction of Urban Identity in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers
Elizabeth Boyle
© Elizabeth Boyle. All Rights Reserved
All night long I walked the streets, drunk with my dreams. I didn’t know how the hours flew, how or where my feet carried me, until I saw the man turning out the lights of the street lamps… The silence woke up from the block. There began the rumbling of milk wagons, the clatter of bottles and cans, and the hum of opening stores, peddlers filling their pushcarts with fruit and loaves of bread. (Yezierska, Bread Givers, 155)
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 4)
The search for space has always been central to America’s definition of itself, whether space as geographical reality or as ideological principle. A relatively new society confronted by the enormity of its attendant land mass and propelled by a tenet of ‘manifest destiny’, America has consistently defined its national identity through spatial models of expansion and ascension. American literature is by default crowded with examples of turgesence, from Cather’s prairies to Cooper’s Western frontier and Melville’s ocean. Within an urban context, moreover, where physical space is at a premium, these models of selfhood assume unique architectural significance. James’s imperious brownstones, for example, or Bartleby’s Wall Street office, interrogate the relationship between an elusive American selfhood and the intense upward thrust of city space. Such a relationship is further complicated by the interruptive diversity of an immigrant population.
Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) is both an illustration and a subtle critique of America’s mainstream dependence upon linear spatial constructions of urban identity. In pursuing an assimilationist agenda within her semi-autobiographical fiction, Yezierska’s attempt to create a space of acceptance for the Jewish community in New York’s Lower East Side presents no direct challenge to the prevailing spatial ethos of her adopted country. Her narrative frame for Bread Givers adheres to the vertical paradigm of success encoded within the proverbial ‘rags to riches’ experience which the millions of immigrants landing on Ellis Island were hoping to realise. Sara Smolinsky’s rise from the poverty of slums to self-sufficiency reflects the capitalist ideal encoded within the confident, aspiring skyscrapers of New York. Yet Yezierska’s attempt to locate an authentic space for the gendered ethnic self within this frame draws upon more subversive models of urban life; not only upon the Naturalism of earlier writers like Dreiser and Crane, who, responding to the crisis of numbers in American cities at the turn of the century, became interested in reflecting the obscure urban spaces hosting marginal experience [1] but also upon wider debates on the relationship between women and city space. These debates constitute a radical shift in questions of gender representation and patriarchal (spatial) discourse taking place at the time, explored most prominently across the Atlantic by writers like Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s notion of the city was as a vital collective, independent of its constituent parts, wherein the individual can or may be forced to subsume her identity to the public space. It is this ability to lose the prescriptions of gender and self within the dense urban environment that Yezierska, publishing Bread Givers in the same year as Mrs Dalloway appeared in both Britain and the United States, embraces. By privileging the corridors and chaotic backstreets of the Jewish ghetto as liminal, disruptive spaces sustaining marginal identity, Bread Givers reads against traditional ascensive configurations of American urban identity and in doing so, posits an alternative schematic for the practice of female selfhood in the early twentieth century city.
All of Yezierska’s fiction, whether about young, working-class immigrant Jewish women, or the elderly, isolated urban poor, expresses the feelings of characters considered by others to be marginal to the American mainstream. But Yezierska’s objective is not to elucidate the squalid idiosyncrasies of ghetto life, nor lose her readers entirely in overblown melodrama, although both elements are consistently in evidence throughout her fiction. While bearing witness to the strength and vibrancy of the ethnic community in which she lived, the social project behind Yezierska’s writing actively encourages the assimilation of Yiddish culture into America. For her as an immigrant, and for her central characters, the goal is to become a “real” American. Direct, emotional, and unashamedly dealing in the currency of the icon, Yezierska’s voice appears naïve, even formulaic; it is only relatively recently, in fact, that the literary value of Yezierska’s work has been credited over its value as social history [2]:
Then came a light – a great revelation! I saw America – a big idea – a deathless hope – a world still in the making. I saw that it was the glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower. [3]
What lifts Yezierska’s work above the level of panegyric, however, is its deliberate exploitation of the apocalyptic language embraced by much contemporary journalism. For example, the subtitle to Bread Givers, Yezierska’s most successful novel, casts the process of Americanisation which Yezierska promoted so vigorously as a generic struggle “between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New”[4]; Yezierska’s writing attempts to meet contemporary anti-immigrant feeling on its own ground. Ron Ebest argues convincingly that Yezierska’s overwrought style and frequent use of sometimes anti-Semitic stereotypes (such as the selfish scholar-father personified in Talmudic scholar Reb Smolinsky in Bread Givers) are better understood as products of the journalistic context in which she wrote. Yezierska published in the same periodicals which were debating the thorny ‘Jewish Question’. Ebest continues, “Yezierska’s stories engaged this debate in the space it was already occupying… Thus the stories may be understood as arguments, offered by one of the Jews under discussion, and interjected into an ongoing, often ugly, frequently nativist, many-voiced debate”.[5]
This exaggerated process of Americanisation within Yezierska’s writing is, however, countered by more subtle, counteractive processes of gender and ethnicity – of being in the city. Writing against essentialism of gender stereotyping, Judith Butler has argued that sex and gender are both “culturally constructed within existing power relations”; “‘Woman’ itself is a term in process, a becoming, a construction that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”[6] In writing of a woman’s experience within what Claudine Herrmann has called the “man’s space” of the city – “a space of domination, hierarchy and conquest, a sprawling, showy space, a full space”[7] – Yezierska traces the open-ended logic emergent in liminal spatial configurations which competes with hierarchical territory to support a increasingly equivocal reading of urban space. ‘Woman’, then, is a process of “intervention”, unpicking the encoded spaces of the city. Architectural space in Yezierska’s Jewish ghetto consequently becomes a territory of negotiation between competing discourses of gender and, of course, ethnicity.
Such negotiations are played out within the architectural narrative of Bread Givers. The plot follows the fortunes of a heroic individual, Sara Smolinsky, who is born into abject poverty on Hester Street in the heart of New York’s Lower East Side. We watch as she scrapes together enough money to put herself through college and eventually is ‘rewarded’ with marriage to an American-born educator, while her sisters slowly fall victim to the claustrophobic ghetto. The tenement within Bread Givers becomes an analogue for Sara’s integration into ‘successful’ American society. Not only that, but each space Sara inhabits marks the construction of iconic space, so that the novel builds until it itself becomes a monument to success. Sara starts in the crowded slums of Hester Street. There is no room for either personal expression or neat, American educational maxims here:
It was now time for dinner. I was throwing the rags and things from the table to the window, on the bed, over the chairs, or any place where there was room for them. So much junk we had in our house that everybody put everything on the table. It was either to eat on the floor, or for me the job of cleaning off the junk pile three times a day. The school teacher’s rule, “A place for everything and everything in its place,” was no good for us, because there weren’t enough places. (Bread Givers, 8)
Defying her repressive and ‘Old World’ father, who insists on claiming the largest room in the apartment for himself and his religious books, Sara abandons her family to their tenement and rents a room of her own:
It was a dark hole on the ground floor, opening into a narrow airshaft. The only window where some light might have come in was thick with black dust… But the room had a separate entrance to the hall. A door I could shut. And it was only six dollars a month. (Bread Givers, 158)
The space is “dark” and “narrow” and dirty. But, as Yezierska foregrounds, it has “a door I could shut”. Privacy is at a premium – private space implies independence and self-determination, a space to be free of the limitations which poverty and gender imposed in the cramped spaces of Hester Street. This “dark hole”, despite its drawbacks, marks the “gutter” point from which Sara will later rise, the “bottom starting-point of becoming a person” (Bread Givers, 159). From this room Yezierska shifts Sara to a suburban setting as she attends college among “quiet streets, shaded with green,” forsaking the inner cityscape entirely for the moment. Sara occupies a number of rented rooms as she tries to fit in with her fellow American students and teachers. All her choices of accommodation, however, prove invalid – somehow inauthentic – because they motivated by a misplaced desire to fit herself into an alien space. Her final college room, for example, is chosen because Sara is drawn to her psychology lecturer who lives in the room above. She rapidly discovers that her attraction is hollow, and that she must find a space for herself alone:
Stupid yok! Always wasting yourself with wild loves. I’ll put a stop to it. I’ll freeze myself like ice… I’m alone. I’m alone. (Bread Givers, 230)
Finally, on her return to the city after winning a college degree, Sara locates a room which mirrors her newly found independence:
I had selected a sunny, airy room, the kind of a room I had always wanted… No carpet on the floor. No pictures on the wall. Nothing but a clean, airy emptiness… I celebrated it alone with myself. I celebrated it in my room, my first clean, empty room…. I had achieved that marvellous thing, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ (Bread Givers, 240-1)
Sara has literally achieved the heights of success- she has scaled the icon and is now enshrined at the top of the tenement, in America’s urban heart. Having developed an architectural authority superior to the ghetto spaces she used to inhabit, she can now use her vantage point to survey both old and new worlds. More pointedly, the top floor high above the slums of Hester Street has now become its own shrine to the finally realised and completed selfhood – that monumental and ever-present character “I” which is so much part of all Yezierska’s fiction. The insistent quality of the “I” repeatedly keys into an individualism explored in an increasing number of contemporary fictional contexts; Melville’s obsessive sea-captain Ahab seems expressive of a fundamental American drive towards single consciousness and personal success. Sara becomes the stereotypical Columbus-figure: “I felt like Columbus starting out for the other end of the earth,” she says, “I felt like the pilgrim fathers who had left their homeland… and trailed out in search of the New World.” (Bread Givers, 209) But more than a horizontal journey across the Atlantic, Sara’s ambition towards independent selfhood is fundamentally expressed through a language of heights and depths, a kind of architectural ascension: “It was like looking up to the top of the highest skyscraper while down in the gutter” (Bread Givers, 155). Amongst the ‘junk’ of the kitchen on Hester Street, the authorial “I” battled within each sentence against the rags and tables and chairs and windows and “things”; in the lush, alien environment of college this “I” turned in on itself, forging into something powerful, and dominating every sentence. Finally, back within the city, the “airy emptiness” of this final room signals the absence of any controlling discourses: Sara has achieved both spatial and personal independence and the personal pronoun assumes a triumphant position.
This gaining “a room of one’s own” is reflected in the feminist agenda set by Virginia Woolf on the other side of the Atlantic. Mrs Dalloway also posits the assumption of a separate female space through the medium of architecture:
Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe … So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. [8]
Woolf creates an ideal of female solitude and space in which gender is stripped of its “rich apparel”, revealing a liberating “emptiness about the heart of life” – the same “clean, airy emptiness” that Yezierska seems also to celebrate. In this, Bread Givers enters into dialogue with a radical feminist tradition. Yet, if Sara’s bare apartment echoes a feminist negation of gender, Yezierska is uncomfortable with any implicit rejection of racial identifiers. As a Jewish immigrant to the United States, Yezierska writes within a very different cultural environment to Woolf. Bread Givers seeks to illuminate the processes by which the gendered self negotiates rather than negates that environment. The disruptive spatial strategies of race and gender, played out in obscure corridors and crowded streets, offer some release from gender signifiers while simultaneously embracing a larger Jewish heritage.
Yezierska engages in a subtle exposition of the intimate or private spaces and complex processes which contest American monumentalism. Yezierska restricts most of the action to internal spaces and domestic scenes. Despite Sara’s final, iconic white room, the novel retains a claustrophobic atmosphere. Such architectural claustrophobia is mirrored in the plot development: Sara’s success story remains significantly incomplete. Her white-room-independence is complicated and then compromised by Sara’s acceptance of her father back into her newly made home on the final lines of the book:
In the hall, we paused, held by the sorrowful cadences of Father’s voice. “Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.”… Hugo’s grip tightened on my arm and we walked on. But I felt the shadow still there, over me. It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me.” (Bread Givers, 297)
Complete independence from the ‘Old World’ is undercut by an acknowledgement that there is no entire escape from the “shadow” of the past, or from the weight of marginal cultural identity. Yezierska’s timing of this revelation for the last page of the book leaves the reader in a limbo state, suddenly bereft of the happy ending which we had anticipated. Our last view of Sara is a powerful one, precisely because it reveals the ultimate failure of iconic stereotype in the face of harsh reality; it is of Sara confronting the limits of iconic space from a darkened tenement corridor.
If the corridor remains our final spatial image of the novel, the street plays a central and more positive role within the body of the text. The urban street resists an iconic reading and Yezierska consistently locates her subject in this environment, emphasising Sara’s determination to walk everywhere.[9] Certainly, this is a result of Sara’s poverty since she cannot afford the fare for the ‘L’ tram or a cab; but it is also a question of choice, and thus a space of agency. By locating Sara here, in a space utterly opposite to that blank apartment room, Yezierska signals a rejection of that ivory tower subjectivity. The street becomes a locus of power for the gendered ethnic self, an embrace of multiplicity and a celebration of the mastery of architectural discourse. It is both freeing and enmeshing: Hester Street is of course a site of oppression and crushing poverty but the street is also an in-between space outwith the claustrophobia of the tenement rooms, both a connection and an interruption in the architectural lexicon of the immigrant Lower East Side. It is within this impermanent or transitional context that Sara can attempt to construct a precarious representation of individual selfhood within the capitalist market of America. After Sara has made her first profit for her family, selling herring, she glories in her street power:
It began singing in my heart, the music of the whole Hester Street. The pushcart peddlers yelling their goods, the noisy playing of children in the gutter, the women pushing and shoving each other with their market baskets – all that was only hollering noise before melted over me like a new beautiful song. (Bread Givers, 22)
On a textual as well as architectural level, the street also offers a location for the final release from the monolithic authorial “I” of the novel. Yezierska produces this through a manipulation of the fissure between the real and the fictional, between the authorised and unauthorised narrative space. Sara’s father, Reb Smolinsky, is a Talmudic scholar and arrogant, violent father-figure. His repeated identification throughout Bread Givers with the heavy, leather-bound Talmudic scriptures of his faith signals both a religious and a textual power. The narrative is filled with his constant quoting of the ‘words of God’, especially in defence of his own deeply ingrained sexism:
It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman enter Heaven.” (Bread Givers, 137)
In allowing Reb Smolinsky to be stripped of his books at the novel’s close, Yezierska symbolically transfers textual authority to Sara, recently qualified as a teacher herself. By this token, the New York of Bread Givers becomes a textual arena contested by the double authority of Sara, the narrator, and her father, the Talmudic scholar. While Sara’s “I” represents the determination of an individual consciousness in this new world, Reb Smolinsky’s voice represents the legitimate space of religion and of the past, especially of the ‘Old World.’ This authority finds architectural expression in his reputation as the “speaking mouth of the block.” (Bread Givers, 26) Reb Smolinsky, a man reduced to his vital (and only) function – that of the ‘mouth’ – is firmly identified with the immutable manifestation of the Russian Jewish community in New York: the block. His words seem to bind the block together. Confirmation of Reb Smolinsky’s representative power seems to come with his acquittal from court, where he has been accused of slapping his landlady after she accidentally stepped on his Torah manuscript. Everyone comes out on the street to celebrate his release:
In the evening, when everybody sat out on the stoop, the women nursing their babies, the men smoking their pipes, and the girls standing around with their young men, their only talk was how Father was the speaking mouth of the block… Shprintzeh Gittel put the baby down in the gutter, and stuck a nipple into its mouth to keep it quiet, and right before everybody on the stoop, acted out, like on the stage, the way Father hit the landlady first on one cheek and then on the other. All the people stamped their feet and clapped their hands, with the pleasure of getting even, once in their lives, with someone over them… (Bread Givers, 26)
This passage, however, charts the transference of authority from the male figurehead into a space that is both communal and female. Shprintzeh Gittel (notice Yezierska’s resolute determination to use real Jewish names to emphasise the authenticity of her narrative) literally performs the dual role of mother (with a suckling baby) and actress as she narrates Reb Smolinsky’s victory, narrativising it so that it becomes a communal victory for “all the people”. Far from being alienated in the urban environment, the woman has been able to manipulate the city space to her advantage, creating from it a platform for narrative and even a place for motherhood, confidently placing her baby in the “gutter.” The tenement stoop becomes a “stage” where it is the voice of a minor female character, rather than Reb, which binds the block together in “the pleasure of getting even.” Thus the authoritative space of religion is displaced by an unauthorised and marginal space dedicated to the communal process narration or fiction.
Bread Givers itself rests in a space somewhere between fiction and fact, so similar are the plot’s events to Yezierska’s own experience. In such circumstances it is possible to cast even the monolithic “I” of the narrator as a space resistive to iconic status. The recurring presence of the “I” has become ammunition for some critics wishing to emphasise Yezierska’s conformity to male tradition and thus reassess her ‘radical’ status as a feminist writer. For, the “I” traditionally symbolises an idea of unified, coherent, male selfhood, and links in with the autobiographical stereotype. But in Yezierska’s text, there is an alternative version of the “I” which subverts this tradition. Recalling Derrida’s identification of the “signature” as the “internal border” marking the gap between the life and the text of an autobiographical subject, the “I” in Bread Givers marks the site at which ideas of the ‘real’ and the ‘constructed’ collide.[10] Indeed, Derrida makes an interesting point about autobiography and the act of writing itself, arguing that autobiography is never wholly commensurate with the ‘truth’ because, as an act of writing, it is necessarily a secondary function – that is, the ‘truth’ comes first and the testament second. Always privileged above textual truth is the vocal truth, in one’s own voice. Therefore, the autobiography itself rests upon a fissure, one remove away from the ‘truth’ of the experience. Because the “I” invites synonymy with the ‘real’ authorial presence (when audiences read “I”, they pictured Yezierska) it acts as an authorising force within the text. In effect, it declares “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Yet, because Bread Givers is a novel – a fictional work of art which makes no overt claims on reality – the “I” is also unauthorised.
Responding to Derrida’s ideas on ‘Otobiography,’ for example, Rodolphe Gasché is very clear in his delineation of the real and the textual, and that the resulting text is unauthorised by both of them:
[A]utobiography is not to be in any way confused with the so-called life of the author, with the corpus of empirical accidents making up the life of an empirically real person. Rather, the biographical, insofar as it is autobiographical, cuts across both of the fields in question: the body of the work and the body of the real subject. The biographical is thus that internal border of work and life, a border on which texts are engendered. The status of the text – if it has one – is such that it derives from neither the one nor the other, from neither the inside nor the outside. [11]
Gasché’s “internal border” – that is, the space where the auto/biographic text is “engendered” – is an un-policed area, defined by “neither the inside nor the outside.” This border can be traced in Bread Givers past the autobiographical boundary to a more crucially unauthorised position between the autobiographical and the fictional. This generic gap maps on perfectly to the experience of an immigrant woman in an early twentieth century urban environment, for the ethnic female subject is positioned at the margins of two major discourses, that of ethnicity and gender. Being both a controlled and uncontrolled space, therefore, the text becomes a space wherein the ethnic female self can confront and also escape the discourses that attempt to construct her. [12] That Yezierska was constantly aware of this textual escape route is clear from her description of her own working method. Speaking of the woman after whom she had modelled Hannah Breineh, protagonist of the prize-winning tale, ‘The Fat of the Land,’ she said:
She was so full of color, but when I tried to put her down on paper, the words stared back at me stiff and wooden. But I went on writing and rewriting, possessed by the need to get at something unutterable, that could only be said in the white spaces between the words. Weeks, months, I labored over a bit of dialogue, over a fragment of a scene till the words that blacked the meaning got out of the way, and the characters leaped to life. [13]
In the light of this, rather than forming the ideological “hearth” of the book, the white room itself becomes a transitional “white space” – an androgynous space between genders, a precarious space which actively resists concrete identity. Barthes’ architectural view of ‘truth’ is pertinent here: he suggests that “western discourse has a tendency to privilege a closure of meaning, the closure of ‘truth’ over the openness of metaphor.” In such cases, he says, the tendency is “to arrange all the meanings of a text in a circle around the hearth of denotation (the hearth: center, guardian, refuge, light of truth).”[14] This shift in literary theory parallels the deconstructive move in architecture, which similarly rejects ideas of enclosure and safety.
It’s clear, in conclusion, that Yezierska’s novel struggles with the idea of iconic space, even as it champions it. By rejecting stable architectural space, Yezierska makes her novel a debatable ground. Architectural ascension forms the scaffolding of the text; icons become the currency it trades in. But Yezierska also works against this. It is not simply that iconic space is untenable; more that it is barren. It is in the space of the corridor and of the urban street – transitional, impermanent, in-between spaces – that marginal identity can begin to unfold. Yezierska’s novel also signals a rejection of the safe/sanctioned generic space of truth-oriented autobiography. The seam separating Sara and Yezierska lies at the heart of this rejection: the space between author and subject is assumed to be zero under the rules of ‘true’ autobiography, but the existence of space – the exploitation of that space by Yezierska herself, and for very practical and political reasons – reveals Yezierska’s violation of textual confinement through her knowledge of and sophisticated manipulation of author/subject relations. As Sara’s declaration confirms, Yezierska’s intention is to uncover a unique space for the self outwith the constructions of gender, of the poverty-stricken tenement streets, and of the necessity of the real. Within this unique space, she can be her own “boss”:
No! No one from Essex or Hester Street for me… I’d want an American-born man who was his own boss. And would let me be my boss. And no fathers, and no mothers, and no sweatshops, and no herring! (Bread Givers, 66)
University of Sheffield
Notes
[1] Examples include: Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co, 1900); Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York, private printing, 1893).
[2] Yezierska’s work was ‘rediscovered’ in the early 1970s by Columbia University historian Alice Kessler-Harris. In her introduction to a new collection of Yezierska’s short fiction, The Open Cage (1979), Kessler-Harris admits that critical opinion current in the 1970s pronounced Yezierska’s fiction “[more] valuable as social history and somewhat less important for its place in literature” (The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection, ed. with an introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris, (New York: Persea Books, 1979), v.) Some readers, like Irving Howe, openly call her stories “not very good”, while even fans like Grace Paley admit serious weaknesses in style and structure (Ebest, 1).
[3] Anzia Yezierska, ‘America and I’, Children of Loneliness (New York & London: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1923)
[4] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New, introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris (New York: Doubleday, 1925; reprinted Persea Books, 1975)
[5] Ron Ebest, ‘Anzia Yezierska and the Popular Periodical Debate over the Jews’, Melus, 25.1 (2000), 3.
[6] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York & London: Routledge, 1990), 33.
[7] Herrmann, The Tongue Snatchers, tr. by Nancy Kline (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 169. See Johanna X K Garvey, ‘City Limits: Reading Gender and Urban Spaces in Ulysses’, Twentieth Century Literature 41(1), 1995, 108-123.
[8] Virginia Woolfe, Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), 45-46.
[9] For an interesting recent study on the more iconic role of the street in Yezierska, Roth and several other American authors, see Mary Esteve’s The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
[10] Derrida, Jacques, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation ed. by Christie McDonald, transl. by Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985)
[11] Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Roundtable on Autobiography’, in Derrida, Jacques, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 41. Derrida identifies the leaf between the title and the main text to be the “lift-off point” or “engendering place” of autobiography as it is neither the work nor the author’s life. For Derrida, the leaf is the “heterogeneous space.”
[12] This space could also be figured in terms of the “wild zone” as described by Elaine Showalter in her essay, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 243-270.
[13] The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (New York: Persea Books, 1979), vii.
[14] Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), 7. The rejection of textual “closure” espoused by Barthes is more commonly associated with the deconstructionist work of Derrida, See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. by Christie McDonald, transl. by Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).
Issue 6, Autumn 2004 Article 2
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 6, Autumn 2004
Time of transition: Is it fair to discard Gilded Age expansionism as the ‘worst chapter in any book’?
Oliver Brown
© Oliver Brown. All Rights Reserved
William Henry Seward, the secretary of state who did so much to develop abstract conceptions of the United States’ ‘manifest destiny’ into a grand imperial design, challenged a Boston audience in June 1867 to “give me fifty, forty, thirty more years of life, and I will engage to give you the possession of the American continent and the control of the world” [1]. While, by the time of his death a mere five years later, the majority of the expansionist schemes he had formulated were left incomplete, his fundamental assumptions about how international balances of power were shifting – towards, most significantly, a decline of Spain’s Latin American empire and a struggle by the United States to assert control in Asia – display remarkable prescience when analysed in the longer term. Indeed, the received wisdom that the 1890s marked a phase of total transformation in foreign policy, implying a barren record of inaction in the period from 1865, does not give adequate weight to the continuation of a trend throughout the Gilded Age of increasingly ambitious thinking on expansion that closely informed how the men who would later prosecute the Spanish-American War acted [2].
The essential concept that needs testing in a study of this ‘prelude’ period is that of transition, in the sense of a defined philosophical progression from isolationism to internationalism, which would help refute the more standard accounts of policy being fashioned on an ad hoc basis and of the nation’s diplomatic successes and territorial acquisitions representing little more than a series of distinct incidents. Although James A. Field fails to acknowledge it in his ‘worst chapter’ critique, opting instead for derisive reference to American conquest of worthless ‘guano islands’, developments in foreign affairs at this time did carry cumulative significance. More recent work by Robert Beisner underlines the point by introducing the notion of paradigmatic change, whereby some measure of historical integrity is restored to the period through conceptualising the ways in which policy-makers’ style of diplomacy was advancing [3]. The Gilded Age as subject of satire can be a tradition easy to continue, but by rejecting at least the supposition of failure and passivity on the external front, it will be shown that, contrary to Field’s thesis, these were years in which ideas integral to the philosophy of expansion so popular by the end of the century had their incubation.
Where disparagement may be more deserved is at the level of historiography, in that since the 1960s a static view has taken hold, aimed at advancing an economic interpretation of foreign policy by the argument that during the Gilded Age (not immediately post-Civil War, but certainly from the late 1870s) the United States began pursuing its commercial imperatives above all else. The volume of literature produced on issues of economics, traceable from the enduringly controversial work of William A. Williams to more revisionist treatment by William Becker, means this has virtually become a separate field of enquiry that concerns itself as much with free trade as expansion, yet it does point to the drawback of forming too monolithic an appreciation of the period [4]. Marilyn Young, writing at the height of ‘New Left’ dissent in 1968, highlights such a concern when she accuses proponents of the economic perspective of neglecting to address the aggressive cultural nationalism she sees emerging in the 1880s. In part, the criticism is targeted at Walter LaFeber, who has been most influential in disavowing the previously standard view of the Gilded Age as a forgettable hiatus on the grounds that, as the United States moved with apparent seamlessness through the process of industrialisation, it continued seeking out new overseas markets to which it could export [5].
The potential problem in LaFeber’s assessment, although vitally important in stressing the consistency of long-term objectives, is that it can make the history too linear and can attribute uniform priorities to a set of presidents and secretaries of state who in some instances were profoundly different in outlook. Perceiving a wider policy, in which the enhancement of national prestige went alongside the search for markets, was among the achievements of Milton Plesur’s meticulous 1971 survey of the period, and yet Hugh deSantis observes that Plesur went about the task “desultorily,” as if incorporating alternative explanations purely to support a thesis that remained primarily economic in focus [6].
In an interpretative sense, this is, manifestly, a subject in urgent need of revitalising, not only in terms of improving the extent of thematic coverage but in also trying to understand how foreign policy-making responsibility was channelled and co-ordinated. The era of Andrew Johnson, dominated as it was by the agonies of Reconstruction, effectively established in the Gilded Age a political normality in which a weak presidency would be juxtaposed with an ever more confident Congress. What practical implications this had for the course of American expansionism were swiftly evidenced through successful congressional opposition to President Grant’s plan to annex the Dominican Republic in 1871, as well as through the ability of congressmen often heavily influenced by private interests to determine the level of appropriations for the navy [7].
In the absence of any genuinely purposeful executive leadership, and against a backdrop where serious domestic tensions created doubts as to how power ought best to be deployed, foreign diplomacy was, in the initial post-1865 stage, distinctly reactive in nature. It has been speculated that Seward embarked on his campaign to purchase Alaska from Russia out of his conviction of the United States’ undifferentiated need for greater power, and while this is plausible given his known belief that other non-contiguous territories such as Iceland and Greenland could likewise simply be bought, it should not detract from his subsequent efforts to use his triumph over Alaska as a basis for systematising policy [8]. A renewal of negotiations to take charge of the Danish Virgin Islands was, for example, an immediate concern arising from Seward’s insistence that the nation could not afford to be disinterested regarding the transfer of colonial property in the Caribbean, and one that only failed to be brought to fruition as a result of congressional intransigence (the people of the islands themselves having already agreed to annexation). The impression of an expansionist ‘masterplan’ being followed through is reinforced by Seward’s explicit desire to bring Hawaii into the American orbit, a target he had set back in the 1850s and that he strove to accomplish by the use of treaty and not by landed conquest.
Equating successful treaties with the conferral of “great advantages upon one party without serious cost or inconvenience to the other”, he scrupulously avoided a strategy of forcible annexation even though he undoubtedly was conscious of its benefits in the case of Hawaii [9]. This suggests a slight oversight in the work of Beisner, which, while otherwise sound in examining Sewardite policy and its legacy, fails to mention that where there may not have been a completely unambiguous prescription of overall strategy there was still evidence of Seward attempting to control his own modus operandi. A direct line of continuity emerges between this type of approach and the reluctance of Hamilton Fish, Seward’s successor, to step into the civil war in Cuba in 1873. Equally, Seward’s ideas could be seen dictating policy in a more positive and directly interventionist fashion, as when Fish completed, in 1875, a reciprocal trade agreement with Hawaii that would help secure a Pacific foothold [10].
Effective diplomatic technique did not guarantee, however, that even the periodic American ‘victories’ of this early postwar phase in foreign affairs would go on to have any more far-reaching consequences. The Treaty of Washington, finalised in May 1871, saw Britain pay to the United States an indemnity of more than 15 million dollars for the depredations of Confederate raiders from British ports during the Civil War, an act that could legitimately be interpreted as a satisfactory settlement for which diplomats on both sides took full credit. A dispatch from a New York Times correspondent reporting on the proceedings in Washington bears this out, observing: “Everyone here looks upon the notable event as the last feature in the greatest victory of peace” [11]. While it is probably true to say that the spirit of Anglo-American reconciliation had been somewhat obscured by the lengthy and tortuous arbitration over indirect claims, the treaty did have a substantial effect upon flows of capital, restoring the confidence of cautious banks and prompting plans by the Grant administration to market 800 million dollars worth of low-interest bonds in Europe [12].
Grandiose talk of political union with Canada, stimulated by a long-running campaign to reintroduce reciprocity in trade relations, was also circulating in this period but petered out inconclusively. Charles Sumner, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recalled at a Republican state convention in 1869 the “aspirations of our fathers for the union of all Englishmen in America, and their invitation to Canada to join our new nation at its birth” [13]. In accordance with the diplomatic code established by Seward, Sumner did not invoke the notion of outright annexation, which, in any case, was highly unlikely in light of how few Canadians appeared inclined to support this. The fact that the United States could not make much headway in persuading its neighbour to embrace its republican ideals – or, indeed, take maximum advantage of the resolution of its dispute with Britain – is not as serious as might be imagined, though. Firstly, these possible outcomes were sought in a reactive sense, since they did not fall within the general framework of policy that Seward had inaugurated, and secondly, what sustains the argument of continuity is that the character of policy (calculated and non-aggressive) survived intact.
If expansion were to be hastened, the nation would, from the outset, have to turn to building its navy into a force capable of delivering the schemes that Seward and his heirs concocted. The obstruction to this was the overwhelmingly defensive doctrine of the period, born out of the reality that the United States, unlike Britain, had no ‘balance of power’ issues to confront in its continental sphere, and that Congress typically saw no logic at all in engaging in competition with the European navies [14]. Maintaining such a doctrine in spite of possessing, as James G. Blaine noted in recollections of his time as a congressman, a “more extended frontage on the two great oceans of the world than any other nation”, risked grave injury to pride. British mockery of the American fleet, well advanced towards obsolescence by the late 1870s after years of declining investment, was especially unsparing, with Rudyard Kipling announcing in his American Notes that “the big, fat republic that is afraid of nothing…is as unprotected as a jellyfish.”
An inescapable conclusion is that by allowing themselves to be preoccupied with such perennial concerns as the brokering of reciprocity treaties and the construction of an isthmian canal in Central America, successive administrations in the Gilded Age were caught in a classic scenario of “putting the cart before the horse,” with no means of maximising their new-found gains [15]. Some hesitation is necessary, though, before adopting the standard analysis that the navy’s parlous state until the 1880s casts a reflection upon the chronic negativity and disorganisation of policy-makers. Since the years of postwar demobilisation, when naval appropriations had dwindled to around a meagre 20 million dollars a year, signs of transition were tangible through the programme of rebuilding associated with President Arthur’s Secretary of the Navy, William E. Chandler, anticipating a phase of increased foreign adventurism. Additionally, it is helpful to view this change in terms of how contemporary understanding of the United States’ strategic necessities advanced, because the stubbornly isolationist or ‘continentalist’ mindset that had held sway over policy in the aftermath of war had to recede before the possibilities of naval reform facilitating the beginnings of an outward thrust were realised.
This current of continentalism in attitudes to foreign affairs, engendered as it was by a broad postwar consensus that the national interest would be best served through dedication to the domestic agenda, was frequently reaffirmed at official level until the mid-1870s and did not wholly disappear for the duration of the period [16]. Some illustration of this is offered by the limitations of the American diplomatic service, which routinely kept just 25 ministers resident in foreign capitals and contained not a single ambassador. Even in the 1880s, the scant pay and resources on which most ministers had to rely implies that matters of foreign policy continued to receive only grudging attention, and prompted the threat from Secretary of State Evarts that he would soon have to carve above his door the words “Come ye disconsulate.” James Bryce, in 1888, seemingly captured a certain constancy in the national mood of the Gilded Age when he declared: “The one principle to which people have learnt to cling in foreign policy is that the less they have of it the better” [17]. Crucial to this was the widespread perception that the Western frontier remained open, which meant it was not inconceivable to reason that territorial expansion could still be restricted within continental limits.
Alternatively, however, the period may be characterised as one in which grander expansionist tendencies were not completely inert, but merely quiescent. President Cleveland, having pronounced in 1885 his determination not to be drawn into entangling commitments abroad, was nonetheless made to contemplate an extension of American influence in the Pacific and Caribbean theatres by the tentative steps already taken towards this end. The transition that had occurred was largely unwitting but no less momentous for that, as in less than twenty years, for example, national editorial writers had moved from having barely an opinion on foreign affairs to directly recommending a more activist style of diplomacy [18]. A strengthening of the United States’ economic base in the interim evidently had a major bearing upon their thinking, but prior to measuring that there are powerful emotional and ideological shifts that warrant investigation.
Accepting the point that the ‘twilight’ years of the Gilded Age signified a period of incipient imperialism, it can further be seen that the imperialist mentality upheld by the politicians involved had several subtle gradations. Although a pragmatic philosophy centring on the belief that market forces had to be satisfied was particularly prevalent, this does not encompass the more extreme thinking of those “wild jingos” for whom expansion was positively evangelical in nature, and limitless in possibilities. Theories of ‘manifest destiny’ and American exceptionalism had been growing more elaborate at least since the 1840s – when westward expansion as far as the deep-water Pacific ports had given rise to ambitions of greater overseas expansion – yet it was during the 1880s that a demonstrably new “American spirit” became unmistakeable [19].
The impetus for this was taken from the attractiveness in academic circles of Darwin’s natural selection idea as applied to the development of American history. Thus, the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ – where the supposed superiority of the world’s Anglo-Saxon peoples would empower the United States to undertake a policy of “benevolent assimilation” in territories it wanted to acquire – was popularised. As a rationale for expansion, it was filled with universal abstractions, but displayed its power to persuade in the diverse readership of works including John Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) and the Reverend Josiah Strong’s Our Country (1885), both of which had racialist overtones throughout. The thesis presented by Fiske, who had served as president of the Immigration Restriction League, could ultimately be pared down to a vision of a world partitioned between the Anglo-Saxons of England and the Anglo-Saxons of America, while Strong, reaching a sizeable audience through the pages of Harper’s Weekly, proposed instead a federation of English-speaking peoples [20]. Written originally for the American Home Missionary Society, Our Country exhorted a more intense campaign of evangelism overseas and could detect no “reasonable doubt that this race…is destined to dispossess many weaker races” [21]. To a degree, this Social Darwinist rhetoric existed in a kind of theoretical vacuum, for it was never specifically cited in connection with the expansionist campaigns then being waged over Hawaii and Samoa. Its reception at the most influential levels of government was highly favourable, though, as President Hayes indicated by inviting Fiske to lecture in Washington. What constituted a striking change from, for instance, the controversy that had descended on Grant’s abortive ‘grab’ of the Dominican Republic was the readiness of politicians now to countenance a foreign policy in which the United States acted like a colonising power.
How much voice the American public had in moving the debate forward is difficult to gauge, considering that the articulation of even marginal popular interest in the achievements of foreign diplomacy was itself a recent trend. Only spasmodically, and occasioned by historically resonant events such as the signing of the Treaty of Washington, was there any sign of an inclination to address what Seward called “questions of an extraneous character” [22]. The most reliable barometers of a general broadening of public outlook, when it did begin to happen, were the newspaper editorial pages, on which discussion of tariff laws and canal rights was normally crowded out by such rather more pressing news such as the prospect of President Johnson’s impeachment. It required the transfer of power in Alaska in March 1867, enabling the largest accession of territory to the United States since the Louisiana Purchase, to inspire more animated commentaries in the press, and almost immediately opinion was polarised. Vehemently rejecting the ‘official’ representation of Alaska as a land of “grandeur and sublimity”, The New York Tribune portrayed it as “worthless, inhospitable, wretched, God-forsaken” at the same moment as The New York Times was speaking of it providing “paramount influence in the Pacific” [23]. Alaska is, in fact, a curious case in point because of the intimations of political wrongdoing that surrounded its acquisition. Consequently, the effect upon the popular mind was twofold, in that besides the invigoration of expansionist feeling that the Alaskan success contributed to (and that a Russian minister, indeed, openly recognised), the allegations of clandestine dealings investigated by Congress for two years afterwards aroused public suspicion of ulterior motives behind expansion [24].
It is believed to have been precisely this legacy of distrust that compromised government manoeuvres over the Dominican Republic, and lasted well beyond if the resistance to Blaine’s policy, after his appointment as President Garfield’s secretary of state, of exploiting links with Latin American nations is attributed to the same factor. There is scope for claiming that more dynamic administrations than those of the early 1880s, pursuing a more carefully prioritised foreign policy, might have been better equipped to fire the public imagination. A change to the national psyche is only ever a subtle, underlying element of transition, however, and enough evidence remains of editorials from the 1880s advocating American “spread-eagleism” to hint that a wider cross-section of the public were at last persuaded of the legitimacy of expansion [25].
The distances over which the United States was attempting to expand did, admittedly, mitigate any hopes that its campaigns would end in unqualified success. Latin America had from Seward’s earliest plans been isolated as the vortex of American power, by virtue of long-standing economic interest in the region coupled with ease of communication, yet the restless energies of Gilded Age expansionists were also focused with varying intensity on almost every other continent. Such extensive ambition was, in addition, not by implication disjointed, because the consistent purpose of developing remote Hawaiian and Samoan outposts from the 1870s onwards was the establishment of a commercial ‘highway’ to relatively untapped Asian markets. Even the 1874 Selfridge Report on the advantages of proceeding with plans for an interoceanic canal made reference to American commercial ties with the Far East, asserting: “The Pacific is naturally our domain” [26]. Without question, it was a sphere of influence more zealously attended to than Africa, where the American presence steadily shrank in the late nineteenth century despite Commodore Robert Shufeldt’s mission, at the order of the Departments of State and Navy in 1878, to explore how trade links might best be forged there.
The principal issue of contention related to this pursuit of many separate ventures is whether, in looking to strengthen the United States’ place in the world, policy-makers of the Gilded Age were following an essentially westward or eastward orientation. Ostensibly this is hardly a conundrum, when American diplomatic contact with the European powers was comparatively minimal and when the profound political upheavals then transforming Europe tended to be regarded across the Atlantic with studied detachment. President Hayes actually congratulated himself for managing to avoid entanglements in Europe, and yet to eliminate this theatre of activity completely from an assessment of foreign policy, as more market-centred interpretations of the 1960s seem satisfied to do, signifies an excessively parochial approach [27]. So finely balanced were the European alliance systems and power structures formed in the 1870s that the policy, long since enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine, of continued American isolation was fast becoming outdated. Moreover, it was acknowledged by contemporary writers such as Alfred Mahan that the United States had chances to benefit from the preservation of European peace, and while Field overstates the case by arguing that, as a result, the ‘thrust’ of foreign policy was more trans-Atlantic than trans-Pacific, the necessities of economic co-operation with Britain and discouragement of German intrigue in Samoa ensured that illusions of isolation in this sphere were, by 1890, beginning to diminish [28].
A more global way of thinking characterised, too, the blueprint for “pan-Americanism” unveiled by Blaine in 1881 as a far-sighted means by which arbitration with representatives from Latin American governments could help assuage international tensions and prevent future conflict. The ultimate objective was to organise an inter-American conference where there would be debate over the settlement of “hemispheric disputes,” and the opportunity for the United States to guarantee itself a secure commercial and, in turn, strategic position in the Latin American region. At no stage, though, was the question of executing this plan sent any further than congressional committees, and the very essence of it soon came to be repudiated by Blaine’s more cautious successor, Frederick Frelinghuysen [29]. That most of Blaine and Frelinghuysen’s private papers have been lost complicates the work of retracing exact details of planning during these years, but one indisputable conclusion is that the content of the policy Blaine had innovatively framed was compromised by Republican Party infighting and diplomatic incompetence. The style of handling the War of the Pacific, which saw Chile fighting over grievances against Peru and Bolivia and in which the Americans decided to mediate for fear of European interference, is broadly viewed as having been particularly inept [30]. Here, blame rested squarely with ministers on the ground in South America, although the secretaries of state themselves cannot escape censure for other miscalculations – whether in Blaine’s forcing of Mexico to accept a resolution of its boundary dispute with Guatemala, or in Frelinghuysen’s justification, opportunistic at best, of an 1884 treaty granting the United States control over the isthmian canal project on grounds that the existing power-sharing agreement had lapsed by neglect.
Charges of inconsistency and confusion are often, and with ample support, levelled at the policy-makers of the Gilded Age generation, but by the end of the period enough progress had been made to counter the assumption that their ideas were misconceived. Blaine, having been vilified before his reinstatement under President Harrison, was in 1889 still a figure of influence, as Harrison himself implied by professing a commitment to the “improvement of our relations with the Central and South American states,” adding: “We must win their confidence by deserving it. It will not come upon demand” [31]. He could feel vindicated by how, that same year, the pan-American conference opposed by politicians more instinctively resistant to change did finally go ahead.
This second term for Blaine has been marked out as a high point of economic expansionism, featuring as it did a bill in October 1890 that authorised imposition of the higher tariffs deemed by many, through rather nonsensical logic, to be conducive to the growth of foreign trade by encouraging American industries to create a more competitive product [32]. In effect, it might also be read as the culmination of a second phase of Gilded Age foreign policy, originating in the late 1870s, where a sudden upturn in the United States economy fuelled almost relentless lobbying for the projection of business interests abroad. From a prolonged depression that had taken approximately half the nation’s iron and steelworks out of operation, a situation was faced, by 1881, of agricultural and industrial surpluses that could only apparently be redressed through a rapid rise in exports and the extension of reciprocity treaties. In the era of Seward, some impulse towards this type of expansion had been noticeable in a convention the United States signed with the Dominican Republic, pledging both countries to “augment, by all the means at their disposal, the commercial intercourse of their respective citizens,” yet for all the bankers and railroad entrepreneurs he gathered in support of his cause he was never so crucially assisted by circumstance [33].
At first glance, therefore, the ‘glut’ thesis of which market-minded historians such as Williams have proven so enamoured is compelling, and underpinned by the semblance of a consensus, at least in the 1880s, that massive surpluses had to be directed overseas to guard against domestic discontent. However, there is margin for misinterpretation in terms of whether a contemporary assertion by Kansas senator Preston Plumb that the United States stood at the “threshold of a contest for the foreign commerce of the world” ought to be construed as endorsement of expansion or free trade [34]. Another key area of weakness in arguments dominated by economics is that they omit to say how the spread of American commerce in these years was both uneven and discontinuous. In contrast to the concentrated campaign to turn Cuba into an economic satellite by exploitation of its iron reserves, trade relations with China suffered during the 1880s from government capital shortages and the decline of major American merchant houses [35]. Meanwhile, LaFeber is mistaken in adhering to a view that highlights the near complete continuity and rationality of transition towards expansion driven by commerce, since he overlooks evidence from President Cleveland’s first administration of a deliberate dissociation from efforts to penetrate new foreign markets, and even an active withdrawal of the reciprocity system linking the United States with Latin America.
It is this artificial sense of complete continuity that partly colours Field’s perception of the Gilded Age – or, more accurately, the accounts of it that stress economic determinism – as constituting the ‘worst chapter’ in a history of American expansion. Without doubt, the primacy traditionally accorded to economic motivation is shown to be misplaced by analysis, for example, of equally important shifts in expansionist ideology in this period, yet his additional criticism of policy-makers’ “almost total lack of accomplishment” is far less convincing. A key component of the more conceptual framework within which foreign policy at this time needs to be examined is to recognise that pre-eminent personalities such as Seward and Blaine did understand the means by which to accomplish the ends of the campaigns they pursued. Seward, notably, was lauded at his funeral for the “courage” he had shown in running counter to popular preoccupations with domestic troubles, and it remains beyond dispute that his many schemes, whether completed or not, were invariably premised carefully upon strategic or commercial considerations [36]. Similarly, it might be said that the sincerity of Blaine’s faith in what diplomatic arbitration could achieve renders his somewhat maladroit practical handling of the process incidental.
Worthy ambitions, furthermore, were matched with concrete progress to confirm the overall impression of transition, as revealed through the emergence, by 1890, of a strategic ‘synthesis’ that rejected a purely passive, defensive posture, and through strident rhetoric that presented American aggrandisement as the “grandest moral and political sight possible on the face of the globe” [37]. These were the sure signs that American politicians, together with an increasing number of the people for whom they spoke, had undergone during the Gilded Age intellectual and psychological adaptations that emboldened them to reinforce the nation’s place in the world.
University of Oxford
Notes
[1] Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 358
[2] Ernest N. Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire: William Henry Seward and US Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 210. Here it suggested that the events of 1898 be rethought as “The Great Culmination” as opposed to “The Great Aberration”, and that those imperialists involved in them may have been “unconscious Sewardites”.
[3] James A. Field, Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book”, The American Historical Review 83:3 (Jun. 1978), 655; Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1986), 32
[4] William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Norton, 1988), 19-25; William H. Becker, “American Manufacturers and Foreign Markets, 1870-1900: Business Historians and the ‘New Economic Determinists'”, Business History Review 47:4 (Winter 1973), 466-481
[5] Marilyn B. Young, “American Expansion, 1870-1900: The Far East”, in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 177; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963). LaFeber’s later work, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1893 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), has a grander scope.
[6] Milton Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865-1890 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), esp. 10-11; Hugh deSantis, “The Imperialist Impulse and American Innocence, 1865-1900”, in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Overview (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), 73
[7] Lance C. Buhl, “Maintaining an American Navy, 1865-1889”, in Kenneth J. Hagan, ed., In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775-1978 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978), 151
[8] T. C. Smith, “Expansion After the Civil War, 1865-1871”, Political Science Quarterly 16:3 (Sep. 1901), 425
[9] Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 515
[10] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1875, Pt. I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1875), 677. The Hawaiian king himself acknowledged: “Our [geographical] position is a most favourable one”.
[11] Edith J. Archibald, Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald: A Memoir of Fifty Years of Service (Toronto: G. N. Morang, 1924), 206. Sir Edward served as the British Consul-General in New York at the time, and this dispatch was found among papers he bequeathed.
[12] Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 244; Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 2003), 255
[13] E. L. Pierce, “A Senator’s Fidelity Vindicated”, North American Review 127 (1878), 79
[14] Buhl, “Maintaining an American Navy”, in Hagan, ed., In Peace and War, 157
[15] James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress (Norwich, Connecticut: Henry Bill, 1893), 614; Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (Boston: Brown, 1899). The navy was also satirised in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (London: John W. Luce, 1906); David M. Pletcher, The Awkward Years: American Foreign Relations Under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 350
[16] Smith, “Expansion After the Civil War”, PSQ 16:3, 416. In July 1868, Senator C. C. Washburn (Wisconsin) resolved, following the Alaska episode, “that in the present financial condition of the country any further purchases of territory are inexpedient”.
[17] Pletcher, The Awkward Years, 20; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888)
[18] Foster R. Dulles, Prelude to World Power: American Diplomatic History, 1860-1900 (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 120; Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust, 10
[19] Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 25. Benjamin F. Butler was urging the United States to expand “so far north that the wandering Esquimau will mistake the flashings of the midnight sun reflected from our glorious flag for the scintillations of an aurora borealis”; Field, Jr., “American Imperialism”, AHR 83:3, 647
[20] Edward N. Saveth, “Race and Nationalism in American Historiography: The Late Nineteenth Century”, Political Science Quarterly 54:3 (Sep. 1939), 440; Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 226. For the most part, this has superseded the earlier account of Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 147-154, although Hofstadter includes a helpful mention of a transformation in contemporary political theory too, in terms of how John W. Burgess was encouraging the view of strong political capacity being limited to only a small number of nations.
[21] Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1885), 178
[22] Paolino, The Foundations of the American Empire, 206
[23] Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, 1869, Pt. I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1869), 478; Smith, “Expansion After the Civil War”, PSQ 16:3, 429, 433
[24] Paul S. Holbo, Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, The Press, and Congress, 1867-1871 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 88-89; LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 12. Minister I. A. Shestakov recorded: “This principle [of ‘manifest destiny’] enters more and more into the veins of the people and this latest generation imbibes it with its mother’s milk and inhales it with the air”.
[25] Pletcher, The Awkward Years, 354; Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust, 10
[26] Buhl, “Maintaining an American Navy”, in Hagan, ed., In Peace and War, 165
[27] Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust, 5; Young, “American Expansion”, in Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past, 180. LaFeber is among those economic historians Young criticises for focusing too narrowly.
[28] Norman A. Graebner, Foundations of American Foreign Policy: A Realist Appraisal from Franklin to McKinley (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1985), 309-310. Mahan was a leading advocate of more constructive Anglo-American relations; Field, Jr., “American Imperialism”, AHR 83:3, 656
[29] Russell H. Bastert, “Diplomatic Reversal: Frelinghuysen’s Opposition to Blaine’s Pan-American Policy in 1882”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42:4 (Mar. 1956), 668
[30] Herbert Millington, American Diplomacy and the War of the Pacific (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 132-143. Diplomacy had been calculated to reduce Chilean demands on Peru, but due to ever-changing tactics, could do nothing to bring about an equitable peace. Also see Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 64, for a memorable illustration of diplomatic bungling in China, where American minister John Russell Young depicts members of the Chinese imperial court as “pink-buttoned censors who read the stars”.
[31] Albert T. Volinder, ed., The Correspondence Between Benjamin Harrison and James G. Blaine, 1882-1893 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1940), 44
[32] Paul S. Holbo, “Economics, Emotion and Expansion: An Emerging Foreign Policy”, in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970), 206-207. This was the McKinley Bill, which Democrats complained would lead to the creation of monopolies; David M. Pletcher, “1861-1898: Economic Growth and Diplomatic Adjustment”, in William H. Becker & Samuel F. Wells, Jr., eds., Economics and World Power: An Assessment of American Diplomacy Since 1789 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 133
[33] William M. Molloy, ed., Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements Between the United States of America and Other Powers, 1776-1909, vol. II (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1910), 403. The convention is dated February 8, 1867.
[34] Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 20
[35] Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 143-146
[36] Charles F. Adams, An Address on the Life, Character and Services of William Henry Seward (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1873), 57
[37] Buhl, “Maintaining an American Navy”, in Hagan, ed., In Peace and War, 158. The ‘Mahanian’ synthesis, after Admiral Mahan, approved the use of offensive military tactics; Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust, 13. The quotation comes from Democrat George E. Seney, addressing his party’s 1887 convention in Ohio.
Issue 7, Spring 2005 Article 2
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 7, Spring 2005
‘In Sight of the New World’: Wilkie Collins and the USA
Paul Woolf
© Paul Woolf. All Rights Reserved
“In Sight of the New World”: Wilkie Collins and the USA
I. Introduction
Over the last twenty years there has been what Tamar Heller calls a “renewed interest” in the work of the nineteenth-century English novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) [1]. For most of the twentieth century Collins was probably best known even by literary historians as a friend, protégé and sometime collaborator of Charles Dickens. The increasing attention paid within academia to popular fiction has, however, given more prominence to some of Collins’s own works. The Moonstone (1868) in particular has attracted much examination, both for its role in the development of Victorian detective fiction (it is, arguably, the first novel-length English detective story) and for its treatment of British imperialist anxieties [2]. Collins’s progressive depictions of women and of sexuality, meanwhile, have also generated a number of studies [3].
One area of Collins’s work that has remained relatively untouched, though, is his writing about other countries. Aside from the several analyses of the role that British-colonised India plays in The Moonstone, little has been said about the fact that Collins’s novels and short stories are studded with scenes set in, and allusions to, far-away nations. In this article, I want to explore Collins’s numerous references to one such country – the United States. I intend to show how his frequent comparisons between American and English culture might help in our understanding of his writing. It is perhaps an especially useful topic to pursue for it offers a point of access into some of Collins’s lesser-known works.
I have, rather crudely, divided the ways in which Collins deals with America into four categories, and will use these classifications to structure this article. The piece will, I hope, constitute a brief overview of the relationship between Collins’s fiction and the USA. I aim to demonstrate that, although Collins never set a novel in the country, America nonetheless represented for him something genuinely significant – the hope of a more egalitarian and humane society in Britain.
II. Collins in America
In January 1874 Wilkie Collins was midway through a six-month-long reading tour of North America. Collins’s performances had been praised and panned in equal measure by the American press and the tour, though popular with the public, was proving less profitable than he had hoped [4]. Nonetheless, the fifty-year-old author was enjoying himself immensely. In a letter written that month to his friend Frederick Lehmann, Collins remarked:
“The enthusiasm and the kindness are really and truly beyond description. I should be the most ungrateful man alive if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people. I find them to be the most cordial, and the most sincere people I have ever met … When an American says, ‘Come and see me,’ he means it. This is wonderful to an Englishman” [5].
The tour of 1873 and 1874 was Collins’s first and only visit to the United States. In works written in the years after Collins’s US trip, American characters appear more frequently than they had done in the stories he had published before it. In the light of his apparently unequivocal praise of real-life Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising to note that the fictional Americans of Collins’s later fiction are almost always depicted favourably. Their good humour and sincerity represented for Collins a welcome counterpoint to the more formal and inhibited manners of the English. But Collins’s juxtaposition of New World candour with Old World reserve was not merely a superficial comparison of modes of etiquette. As I aim to demonstrate here, Collins saw in American attitudes and behaviour a possible remedy to the moral inflexibility, the intolerance, petty-mindedness and hypocrisy of life in Victorian England that, throughout his career, he made it his authorial project to attack.
To begin, it is worth pointing out that Collins never wrote about the Anglo-American relationship as extensively or as explicitly as his mentor Dickens. Collins never wrote a novel like Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dickens’s transatlantic tale, nor produced an account of his visit to the United States like the older writer’s travelogue, American Notes (1842). No doubt for this reason, barely a fraction of the amount of critical attention given to Dickens’s interest in America has been paid to Collins’s treatment of the nation and its people.
Indeed, out of the two-dozen novels and almost fifty short stories that Collins published, I can find only two short stories and half a page of one novel actually set in the USA. However, as I now want to suggest, America and Americans are significant in much of Collins’s fiction.
Before continuing, though, a further word of introduction to Collins’s fiction might be helpful for those not familiar with his work. Collins, the elder son of the famous English landscape painter William Collins, was pre-eminent among a group of English writers publishing around the 1860s and dubbed “sensation novelists.” Classics of the “sensation” genre include Collins’s own The Woman in White (1860), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Such works are characterised by their use of implausible plots and supernatural events, and by their interest in uncovering the guilty, sinister secrets of apparently respectable families. It will become clear during this article that Collins’s stories are, in this sense, most certainly “sensational.” One might not unjustly compare his storylines to those of modern-day television soap operas. At their best, Collins’s narratives are mesmerising and enthralling; at their worst, melodramatic and a little silly.
III. “Thousands of miles away from Europe … in a situation of peril …” [6]
In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, as soon as Antigonus has served his purpose in the plot, he is swiftly dispensed of with the famous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” [7]. Often in Wilkie Collins’s fiction, America fulfils the same function as Shakespeare’s bear: it is where characters are sent when they need to be got rid of in a hurry and, preferably, in a manner that adds to the excitement of the story. Such incidents constitute the first of my four categories.
In the 1881 novel The Black Robe, the young Jesuit priest Arthur Penrose must, for the sake of Collins’s characteristically labyrinthine plot, leave England for a period of time. He is sent to work in a Catholic mission, established in the territory of Arizona, newly purchased by the United States at the time the novel is set. The mission is burnt to the ground and the missionaries massacred by the, “bloodthirsty” and “ferocious” “Apache Indians” native to the area [8]. Only Penrose and another priest survive, Penrose spared by the “Indians” because of his medical skills. One of the novel’s heroes, Bernard Winterfield, mounts a rescue mission and brings Penrose back to England, just at the point that his presence is again handy for the narrative. We never learn, though, how exactly Winterfield finds and saves Penrose for there is an unexplained “lapse of seven months” in the series of English newspaper articles and diary entries through which Penrose’s fate is recounted [9].
At the very end of The Legacy of Cain, published in 1888, when the attempted murderess Helena Gracedieu is released from prison in England, we discover that she has emigrated to the United States, far enough away from the novel’s other characters to prevent her from further disrupting their lives. In America, Helena has become the leader of a new, proto-feminist religious community whose doctrine “asserts the superiority of women over men” [10].
The Evil Genius (1886) begins with the tale of an English lord wrongly accused of stealing diamonds. He dies soon after being found guilty at his trial. Following the court case, the lord’s unscrupulous wife runs off with her equally scurrilous lover to open a saloon bar in New York. In doing so, she deserts her daughter, Sydney, who now becomes the novel’s central character. Moving forward some years later, we discover that in America Sydney’s mother has been murdered by her lover. This leaves Sydney orphaned, a necessary detail in the story that now unfolds [11].
In all these instances, then, America is for Collins primarily an exotic convenience. What is interesting is that Collins only ever reports the dramatic lives his characters lead while in the United States, using letters and newspaper accounts to describe events in retrospect, rather than narrating them as they happen, as he typically does when the setting is in Britain or Europe. Events in America, it seems, only ever happen off-stage.
As anyone who has read Collins’s most famous works, The Woman In White and The Moonstone, knows, Collins was fond of using several narrators in one book, enabling both the location and narrative perspective of the story to move around as the author pleases. For a writer so willing to use this technique, there seems to be nothing in terms of self-imposed formal constraints to have prevented him writing more directly about extraordinary American incidents such as the attack on Penrose’s mission or the murder of Syd’s mother. Nor, given Collins’s predilection for the “sensational” and improbable, can we say that it was the very incredibility of such episodes that made him consign them to the past tense and the third hand. He was, after all, perfectly comfortable including equally fantastic moments in his stories ‘as they happen’ when they take place on this side of the Atlantic.
There is a more likely explanation. Collins seems to me to have been keen to maintain America at a distance from his readers so as to keep it free of the kind of complex social realities he so carefully details when writing about England, to preserve America as a place of possibilities – possibilities not only of adventure, but also the possibility for human kindness to flourish – and of opportunities for personal redemption. We can start to see this at work as we move on to the second of my four categories: Collins’s depictions of Americans living or traveling in England.
IV. “The Englishman rode on one side of the carriage and the American on the other” [12]
Collins’s short story “Mrs Bertha and the Yankee,” written in 1877 but set in 1817, sees two friends, an English army captain and a Bostonian gentleman, compete with each other for the affections of Miss Bertha, an English heiress. The two rivals fall out and end up challenging each other to a duel, to be fought in woods neighbouring Miss Bertha’s recently inherited Derbyshire estate. The American, a superior shot and a better fencer, diplomatically chooses that the duel should be conducted with swords so that he can win, but not will not kill his former friend. The Englishman, however, cheats in the duel, stabbing and leaving the American for dead. The American, it later transpires, was only injured and he returns at the end of the story to marry the heiress.
As the tale progresses, Collins increasingly contrasts the calm, friendly and noble American – described by one character as “as brave and true a man as ever breathed” and praised by another for his “unaffected sincerity and good humour” – with the obsessive and temperamental Englishman [13]. Collins connects the captain’s mean and provocative behaviour to a specifically English malady: a bout of “sunstroke” endured while serving for the colonising British Army in India [14]. The American, free of the imperial guilt that taints many of Collins’s English families, perhaps most notably the Verinders of The Moonstone, is proven to be the suitor worthy to take control of the English country estate.
Likewise, in The Two Destinies (1876) American characters are contrasted approvingly with English ones in order to critique English society. The story begins with an American married couple visiting London. They are invited to dinner by newlyweds, George and Mary Germaine. Three other couples, all English, are also invited to the dinner but the wives of all three pointedly send, at the last moment, very obviously contrived excuses for absenting themselves. After the dinner, in order to explain the cause of this thinly veiled social sleight, George Germaine hands the American couple a written account of his and Mary’s relationship. The continuance of the two couples’ friendship, it is made clear, depends upon the Americans being un-offended by the narrative, which now forms the bulk of the book.
The account informs us that George and Mary were childhood sweethearts, Mary the daughter of the bailiff employed on the estate owned by George’s father. Disapproving of his relationship with the lower-class girl, George’s father took his family to America, where he attempted to make a fortune in “a speculation in agriculture in one of the Western States” [15]. When, as we again discover only through a report, the speculation failed and George’s father died, he and his mother returned to England, but too late for George to trace and be reunited with Mary.
As the two would-be lovers grow into and through early adulthood, their two destinies become intertwined and they begin to communicate telepathically, through dreams. On the few occasions that the two actually meet, they fail to recognise each other, age and illness having changed both their appearances. The story incorporates many of Collins’s favourite themes: bigamy, illegitimate birth, attempted suicide and financial fraud before George and Mary can finally be married. Throughout, we are impelled to understand George and Mary as humanly flawed but, above all, decent, caring and moral people, deserving of mutual happiness. Their separation is initiated by the insistence of George’s father on maintaining class boundaries in what is revealed to be a rigidly stratified society, and that separation is enforced throughout by similar prejudices. Even when finally married, the exposure of their unconventional past lives, just before the fateful dinner party, ensures their ostracism from polite English society.
Having handed his narrative to the Americans, George takes Mary away to live in Naples so that they can escape the shame sure to be inflicted upon them by their intolerant English peers. The end of the novel shows the American couple to be less quick to rush to judgment than their English counterparts, much more sympathetic and, importantly, free from class bigotry; they decide to continue their European holiday by joining the Germaines in Italy immediately. They alone can recognise and acknowledge the Germaines for their true goodness.
The Fallen Leaves, published in 1879, features the wonderfully named Rufus Dingwell, another American whose tolerance and humanity throws into relief the narrow-mindedness of the English. Throughout, Rufus’s “straightforward sincerity of feeling…one of the indisputable virtues of his nation” is set against “the innumerable insincerities of modern English life” [16]. Later, “insincerity” is described as “one of the established institutions of English Society” [17]. The novel portrays an American encountering English cant and prejudice. It also contains an example of the third of the four categories into which I have divided Collins’s ways of treating Anglo-American themes. This category involves Englishmen who return to England from lengthy periods in the United States, primed by their unconventional experiences in the New World to confront Old-World straitlacedness.
V. “I come from America last …” [18]
The Englishman in question in The Fallen Leaves is the even more spectacularly named Amelius Goldenheart. The twenty-one-year-old Goldenheart, though born in Buckinghamshire, has been brought up in Tadmor, a Christian Socialist commune in Illinois. The story begins with a sea voyage from New York to Liverpool on which Rufus first meets Amelius, who is on his way, as he says, “to London to see life” [19]. The encounter gives Collins the opportunity of having Amelius expound his Christian Socialist beliefs, and of demonstrating how he has internalised those values.
The critic Philip O’Neill has argued persuasively that the portrait of Tadmor combines “the best features” of several real communes then established in the States [20]. Certainly, judging by The Fallen Leaves, Collins seems to have approved of the fundamental ethics of the American Christian Socialist movement. The novel, predominantly set in London, revolves around Amelius’s relationship with an impoverished young prostitute, Simple Sally, who he rescues from her ruthless and violent pimp and takes into his house. The community is, inevitably, scandalised, with only Rufus and Amelius’s French servant supporting Amelius’s consistent prioritisation of human compassion and forgiveness above maintaining respectable appearances. Collins also deploys Amelius as a mouthpiece for certain specific political beliefs, having him at one stage deliver a public lecture in which he attacks modern capitalism as anti-Christian and calls for reform of the British parliamentary system to give workers greater rights [21].
At the beginning of the novel, Amelius says of Tadmor: “We find our Christianity in the spirit of the New Testament – not in the letter” [22]. The narrative then makes the case that, if the purpose of Christianity is to improve people’s lives, it is this “spirit” – rather than the prudery, piety and Scriptural literacy of the orthodox church – that represents genuine Christianity. This is not to say, though, that Collins presents Amelius’s Christian Socialism without consideration or qualification. We often see Amelius as an impetuous idealist, too quick to act on well-meaning instincts to think through the consequences for himself and those around him of his actions. Collins uses Rufus, Amelius’s older, more worldly American friend, to offer a more moderate and pragmatic agenda. If Amelius is a walking experiment, the experiment being to discover what happens when the teachings of a Chrisitan Socialist commune are applied in the world at large, then Rufus is there to help bridge the gap between the absolute idealism of self-enclosed communities like Tadmor and the realities of the modern urban world.
The mystery at the centre of The Fallen Leaves involves a middle-aged woman, Emma Farnaby, obsessively attempting to trace the illegitimate child who was stolen from her at birth. Between them, Amelius and Rufus solve the mystery and expose as the villain of the piece Mrs Farnaby’s husband, now a successful tradesman and seemingly upright member of the community. The father of the lost baby, Farnaby had taken the child in order to avert a scandal that would, in turn, prevent him from marrying Emma and taking control of her father’s business, the basis of the wealth and status that he now enjoys. The child, rather predictably, is discovered to be Simple Sally, the prostitute for whom Amelius is now caring, and she and Emma Farnaby are reunited at the mother’s death-bed. Rufus and Amelius thus effect a satisfactory, if not entirely happy, ending, as well as exposing the destructive secrets of past immoral behaviour that, as in so many Victorian novels, fester not far beneath the veneer of social respectability.
It is implicit in The Fallen Leaves that people like Rufus and Amelius could only come from America, that a community like Tadmor could only survive there, and that Rufus’s combination of wisdom and open-mindedness could only flourish in the New World. In the novel, London is a place of lives ruined by greed, by the bourgeois need to pretend that sexual desire does not exist, and by the brutal system of prostitution that is there to serve those self-same, supposedly non-existent, sexual desires. It takes Rufus’s American-ness and Amelius’s Americanisation to put right some of those wrongs.
It is, though, in a novel written by Collins twenty years before he visited the American continent that he deals most thoroughly with the idea of the New World redeeming the Old. Hide and Seek, published in 1854, bears a certain similarity to The Fallen Leaves in that it too deals with an Englishman who returns from a long stint in America to expose the sins of middle-class England.
Matthew Grice is, as is perhaps suggested by the alias he assumes, Mat Marksman, a figure seemingly modeled (at least in part) on Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. Cooper was, not incidentally, one of Collins’s three favourite authors, along with Scott and Balzac [23]. A restless and solitary man, Mat has spent “twenty years of wandering amid the wilds of the great American continent,” has been scalped by one set of South American “Indians” and has lived with another [24]. He carries with him a Leatherstocking-esque long rifle, is described as being “cool, [with a] quick eye just as vigilant as ever” and, like Cooper’s frontiersman, says of himself that he is “not much better than a cross between a savage and a Christian” [25].
Mat has returned to England to try to find out what happened to his sister, Mary, and the illegitimate child she was carrying when he last heard news of her, nearly twenty years ago. In London, Mat befriends Zack Thorpe, another of Collins’s impetuous and irreverent but well-meaning young men. The novel’s prologue introduces us to Zack as a six-year-old, unsuccessfully protesting to his rigidly disciplinarian father, the secretary of an “eminent” Religious Society, about having to sit through a patience-testing, two-hour church sermon [26]. For the adult Zack, forced by his father into a stultifying career in petty commerce, London is a dreary place, only coming alive at night as he sneaks out of the house to visit theatres and after-hour drinking dens.
At the time Mat meets him, Zack has just left home, his relationship with his increasingly strict and unbearably pious father having broken down entirely. Zack introduces Mat to another friend, Valentine Blyth, a jovial painter who has a beautiful, though deaf-and-dumb, adopted daughter, nicknamed Madonna. Mat sees in Madonna the unmistakable likeness of his sister Mary. He becomes determined to investigate what happened to Mary, and to find out how Madonna ended up living in Blyth’s family. Mat, who proves to be a tirelessly determined investigator, eventually learns that his aunt Joanna had forced the pregnant Mary out of the family home and that Mary, destitute, had died not long after giving birth to Madonna. After an early childhood being raised in a circus, Madonna was adopted by Blyth. Mat also discovers the name of Madonna’s biological father who, in a final and ironic twist, turns out to be Mr Thorpe, Zack’s seemingly spotless father. The end of the novel sees Zack and his now-humbled father reconciled (at least, partially) and Mat, finally at peace with himself, reintegrated into a family unit with Zack, Madonna and Blyth.
It is indicative of the critical neglect of Collins’s interest in America that, despite the extent to which Mat’s various adventures on the continent are described during Hide And Seek, in her introduction to the most recent edition of the novel, the leading Collins scholar Catherine Peters makes absolutely no reference to America. Peters instead concentrates on the novel’s depiction of Madonna’s disability.
Yet, it seems to me, this is very much a story about America, about the possible influence for good that the New World might have on the Old. At almost every key point in Mat’s investigation, Collins reminds us of his (Mat’s) time in America – the scars he picked up when attacked by Indians becoming red and inflamed each time he unearths a new clue. Collins attributes Mat’s “cunning,” his detective ability and his absolute determination to his experiences in America, noting that “nothing could escape” his “observant eyes…which had been trained by his old Indian experience to be always unscrupulously at work, watching something” [27]. At one critical point in the plot, Mat needs to steal the key to Blyth’s bureau, in which is locked a bracelet that proves Madonna’s identity. In order to do this, Mat effectively drugs Blyth with a drink called “Squaw’s Mixture” which he learnt to make while part of “an exploring gang” in the North West of America [28]. Mat is further aided in his quest by his wealth; he carries a large roll of banknotes earned prospecting for gold in California.
America equips Mat – practically, financially and psychologically – to be the agent who ultimately brings truth and happiness to London. Working class, but rich because of his time in America, Mat represents a radical challenge to the English society Collins delineates in Hide and Seek – again, one of unyielding class stratification. Furthermore, Mat liberates Zack from “the strong strait-waistcoats of prudery and restraint” represented by both Zack’s father and Mat’s aunt, taking the younger man with him when he returns to America for “‘a season’s hunting … in the wild country over the water'” [29].
The novel proffers one other, self-evident, clue to its engagement with questions of Old and New World relations. Perhaps the pivotal moment in the entire book is when Mat first lays eyes on Madonna. This occurs at Blyth’s house during an exhibition the painter is giving to friends of two recently completed works. One of these paintings is entitled “‘Columbus In Sight of the New World'” (from which I derive the title of this article). The painting is a bizarre piece that conflates time and space to incorporate Columbus arriving in America, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin all in the same scene. It is described as “the largest canvas … encased in the most gorgeous frame” yet produced by Blyth [30]. Mat saves the painting from falling to the floor from the wall, to which it has been inadequately attached, shortly before first seeing his sister’s child. Quite literally, Mat preserves the aspirations to human redemption, individual and communal endeavour, social progress and democracy that are for Collins embodied in figures like Columbus and Washington. The next moment, Mat sees Madonna, and the process through which he ‘saves’ Zack, exposes the hypocrisy of Mr Thorpe, and reunites himself with his family begins in earnest. It is a moment that ignites the possibility of transferring the New-World hopes symbolised by the painting back to the Old World.
VI. “…the voyage to America …” [31]
This section deals with the last of my four categories: the rare scenes of Collins’s stories actually located in America. Hide and Seek contains the half-page of novel set by Collins in the United States to which I referred earlier. This is a short passage added to the very end of the story by the author when it was republished in 1861. These three brief paragraphs see Zack convincing Mat to return with him to England and “the friends who loved him,” America figured as the catalyst of familial reunion [32].
As I noted at the start of this article, Collins also set two short stories in America. One of these, “A Sad Death and Brave Life” is actually taken up almost entirely with a description of a highway robbery and a criminal trial that take place in England [33]. The other, a long short story, is titled “John Jago’s Ghost or, the Dead Alive.” The basic plot of the tale is loosely based on an account of a real-life murder case in Vermont that was published while Collins was in the US and that he read some time during his reading tour of the country [34].
When Collins writes about the US, the images he usually invokes are glamorous or sensational ones: gold-prospecting in California, murders in New York saloon bars, religious and political communes, massacres by Apache Indians in Arizona and so on. It seems at first glance strange, then, that on the one occasion Collins situates a story in the country, he chooses an actually somewhat banal episode of domestic jealousy and sets it on a farm in the midst of “scenery as flat, as monotonous, and as uninteresting to the traveler, as any that the earth can show” [35]. Even the murder turns out not to have been a murder after all, the supposed victim having run away rather than been killed.
“John Jago’s Ghost” is narrated by Philip Le Frank, a London lawyer. At the very beginning of the tale, Le Frank is at pains to point out that, coming originally from the Channel Islands, he is as much French as he is English. “It is to this day a trial to my father to hear his son described as a member of the English bar,” Le Frank notes [36].
Suffering from overwork and nervous exhaustion, Le Frank is told by his doctor to take a holiday abroad and chooses to visit distant relatives in the States, owners of a farm. The exact location of the farm is not given in the story, but seems from Collins’s description of the landscape to be somewhere in the arid mid-west. At the farm, Le Frank finds that his cousins “‘stick fast to our English ways'” [37]. The family is unhappy and dysfunctional, riven by greed and envy stirred up by the family’s eldest daughter, one of Collins’s many middle-aged women who quote the bible and moralise while simultaneously intriguing and plotting. The only likeable member of the family is Naomi Colebrook, an attractive and, with her “strong American accent,” thoroughly American young woman [38]. It is through her persistence and sense of justice, allied with Le Frank’s legal experience, that the mystery of the seeming murder is solved and the family’s two brothers – unpleasant, but innocent of any crime – escape being executed for it. At the story’s end, Le Frank takes Naomi back to England, where they are married.
“John Jago’s Ghost” is subtitled “An American Story” but what one notices about it is that, even when setting a narrative in the US, Collins utilises America to illuminate English attitudes. In adapting his story from its source, he changed the nationality of the protagonists from American to English, stressing the family’s persistence in “‘stick[ing] fast'” to “‘English ways'” even while they live in America. Only the Anglo-French Le Frank and the very American Naomi – both of whom Collins invented for his version of the story – represent any kind of integrity, humanity or goodness.
However, Collins cannot maintain in “John Jago’s Ghost” an entirely unproblematic portrayal of Americans. John Jago himself, the American man apparently murdered, is violent and obsessive, willing to trick Naomi into marrying him. And the members of the farming community depicted in the tale are seen as superstitious and as primitive in their legal processes. The America glimpsed in “John Jago’s Ghost” starts to seem just as dour and just as flawed as England. When experienced at first hand rather than by remote report, the United States cannot remain the place of adventure and ideals that it is everywhere else in Collins’s fiction. It is, maybe, no surprise that Collins ends the tale by taking Le Frank and Naomi back to London, retreating from this all-too-real America.
After “John Jago’s Ghost” Collins never again attempted to set a substantial work in America; preserving an idea of the country unsullied by reality was, perhaps, much too useful to him to do that. It was better to tell stories about an imagined America, than to tell any further authentically American stories
VII. Conclusion
Although he had hoped to, Collins never returned to America after his 1874 reading tour. A man notoriously beset by illness upon illness, his deteriorating health did not allow him to make a second trip [39]. Not long after arriving back in London, Collins wrote to a friend that: “I came back from America with a new stock of health – as I supposed. But my native climate has already made me so ‘bilious’ that I can hardly see. My eyes are yellow, and my head aches and the doctor positively forbids dinner today” [40].
It was a pity that Collins could not again cross the Atlantic because, just as his imaginative rendering of America was as a potential remedy to the degradations of old England, so the real America was a tonic to the author himself.
The USA is just one of a number of countries that Collins mentions recurrently in his fiction. I suspect that in their own, different ways each foreign nation about which Collins writes represents for him first and foremost a reference point, against which he can compare the successes and, especially, the failures of English society. It would be interesting to examine in more specific detail his interest in other nations, France and Italy in particular, as I have here done here with America. As the “renewed interest” in Collins’s work continues, such studies will help to form a more complete view of the provocative and challenging ways in which he critiqued the political, social and cultural life of Victorian England.
University of Birmingham
Notes
[1] Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets. Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 4.
[2] See David A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 32-57; Peter Thoms, Detection and its Designs. Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), 93-121; John Sutherland, Introduction to Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, edited with an introduction and notes by John Sutherland (1868; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Christopher GoGwilt, The Fiction of Geopolitics. Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Brian W. McCuskey, “The Kitchen Police: Servant Surveillance and Middle-Class Transgression,” Victorian Literature and Culture 28:2 (2000), 359-375.
[3] See Heller, and Philip O’Neill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988).
[4] See The Letters of Wilkie Collins: Volume 2, 1866-1889, edited by William Baker and William M Clarke (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 366-376; Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (London: The Bodley Head, 1951), 260-274.
[5] Printed in Letters, 372.
[6] The quotation is from Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe: Volume II (1881; Chestnut Hill: Elibron Classics, 2004), 233.
[7] William Shakespeare, “The Winter’s Tale” (1610/1611), in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1959), 393.
[8] Collins, The Black Robe, 233.
[9] Ibid., 253.
[10] Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain (1888; Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), 326.
[11] Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius (1886; Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995), 26-47.
[12] The quotation is from Wilkie Collins, “Mrs Bertha and the Yankee” (1877), in Wilkie Collins: The Complete Shorter Fiction, edited by Julian Thompson (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 621.
[13] Ibid., 629; 620.
[14] Ibid., 635
[15] Wilkie Collins, The Two Destinies (1876; Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995), 10.
[16] Wilkie Collins, The Fallen Leaves (1879; Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), 27; 45.
[17] Ibid., 55.
[18] The quotation is from Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Catherine Peters (1854/1861; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, reprinted 1999), 187.
[19] Collins, The Fallen Leaves, 20.
[20] Philip O’Neill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1988), 41.
[21] Collins, The Fallen Leaves, 116-126.
[22] Ibid., 25
[23] See Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 377.
[24] Collins, Hide and Seek, 203.
[25] Ibid., 184; 220.
[26] Ibid., 403.
[27] Ibid., 267; 246.
[28] Ibid., 304-305.
[29] Ibid., 21; 418.
[30] Ibid., 230
[31] The quotation is from Wilkie Collins, “John Jago’s Ghost” (1873-74), in Wilkie Collins, Who Killed Zebedee? (London: Hesperus Press, 2002), 33.
[32] Collins, Hide and Seek, 430.
[33] Wilkie Collins, “A Sad Death and Brave Life,” in Complete Shorter Fiction, 879-884.
[34] See Robert Ashley, “Wilkie Collins and a Vermont Murder Trial,” New England Quarterly 21:1/4 (1948), 368-373.
[35] Collins, “John Jago’s Ghost,” 34.
[36] Ibid., 33.
[37] Ibid., 36.
[38] Ibid., 38.
[39] See Catherine Peters, King of Inventors for an account of Collins’s ongoing medical problems and The Letters of Wilkie Collins Volume 2 for Collins’s various expressions of his desire to return to the US.
[40] Letters, 381-382.
Issue 7, Spring 2005 Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 7, Spring 2005
Reimagining the Shopping Mall: European Invention of the “American” Consumer Space
Paul Edwards
© Paul Edwards. All Rights Reserved
Little tables all over those marble streets, people sitting at them eating, drinking or smoking – crowds of other people strolling by – such is the Arcade. I should like to live in it all my life [1]
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880)
Sitting in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Mark Twain reflected on the “vast and beautiful Arcade” recently completed in the northern Italian city of Milan. Admiring both the architecture and use of space, Twain temporarily dreamt, albeit with his usual ironic tone, of abandoning his travels around Europe and remaining in a Milanese shopping arcade.[2] The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele was, and indeed continues to be, an impressive example of late nineteenth century, neo-classical architecture, occupying a central place in Milanese urban life; a place for commerce as much as a place for relaxation and people watching. Despite the practical possibility of remaining in the Galleria all his life, however, Twain quickly grew bored with it and moved onto his next set of observational “trampings”. Milan’s gallerias had little architectural echo in the America of the late 1870s. With mass industrialization and immigration creating the teeming cities of Chicago and New York, there seemed little time or space to sit and watch crowds of people strolling by. The spirit of hardwork and individualism evident in John Winthrop’s City on a Hill survived intact and America’s urban spaces have reflected that spirit throughout the nation’s history. Perhaps Twain was most impressed by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele because he had seen nothing to resemble it in extensive travels around his own country, no urban spaces to sit and watch city life pass him by. Eighty-five years after Twain’s Milanese people-watching, another iconoclast, the architect Robert Venturi, explained his failure to adopt a plaza for his entry to redesign Boston’s historic Copley Square: “The piazza, in fact, is ‘un-American.’ Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television, or perhaps at the bowling alley”.[3] Venturi’s America of the 1960s and 70s seemed to be the first society in history with no need for the architecture of public, urban space that Twain had admired in Italy all those years earlier.
Venturi’s comments ignored one public space that already existed in American’s cities, albeit removed from the increasingly deserted downtown areas, one with much in common with the gallerias that Twain took such pleasure in. By 1965, the suburban shopping mall was well on its way to becoming an established part of American life. Providing an opportunity for one-stop shopping, alongside spaces to sit and meet with friends, the suburban mall could serve much of the communal function offered by the traditional, and much mythologised, town square or European gallerias and piazzas. The archetype for these malls was Southdale, designed by the Viennese-born architect Victor Gruen, which opened in 1956 in the suburbs of Minneapolis. With 72 stores, anchored by two major department stores, all arranged in a two-level design around a brightly lighted central court with free parking for 5000 vehicles, Southdale signalled a new paradigm in the way Americans would shop, away from distant downtowns and disorganised “Miracle Miles”. As one contemporaneous architecture critic writing in the influential Architectural Forum was moved to remark: “Here [at Southdale] we see architecture fulfilling one of its most creative roles: building a new kind of environment”.[4] The shopping mall signified a remarkable change in how Americans used and thought about their urban space.
In the ensuing 50 years, the shopping mall has become the signifier of all that ails American public space. Beginning with Neil Harris in the mid 1970s, cultural critics have highlighted many of the social, architectural and cultural negatives engendered at the mall.[5] In 1985, William Kowinski’s celebrated The Malling of America identified the mall as the key site in explaining American culture and society, from the oft-quoted “retail drama” of consuming in the mall to “mallrat” kids escaping the confines of both school and home in spending their evenings “growing up” at the mall.[6] More recently, both James J. Farrell and Sharon Zukin have used the mall to interrogate America’s obsession with consumption, taking different methodological approaches but arriving at the conclusion that America needs to change its shopping habits be it in or out of the spaces of the mall.[7] Lizabeth Cohen in A Consumers’ Republic has suggested that the centrality of the shopping mall in American culture has led to the nation’s “public spaces” becoming more commercialised, privatised and feminised than they had been before the advent of the mall.[8] The mall, for many, has become the terrible signifier of American society obsessed by image, pseudo-individuality and, perhaps most importantly, fetishised consumption. In designing Southdale, and its open-air precursor, Northland, Victor Gruen forever changed the spaces in which America shopped.
In this paper, I argue that the shopping mall is not the exceptionally American space that cultural critics and historians on both sides of the Atlantic would have us believe. With historical foundations in the Agora of Greek antiquity and the Milanese galleria that Twain admired so much, the mall updated the trans-historical combination of community and commerce in one urban space. The designer of Southdale, Victor Gruen brought to the mall an understanding of that history of buying and selling, which combined with his experiences of living in inter-war Vienna led to the creation of a Europe-inspired and designed new shopping space out in the automobile dominated American suburbs of the 1950s. Although built in a time and space uniquely American, Victor Gruen’s shopping mall was an attempt to bring the refined, communal spaces of European central cities to the vacuous, soulless space of 1950s American suburbs.[9]
The America of the 1950s in which Southdale emerged was undergoing a remarkable and rapid transformation in its urban space. Returning servicemen, aided by cheap government loans, flocked, with their families, to the good life of the suburbs, encouraged by the affordability of the automobile and a new federally funded Interstate Highway system of more than 42,000 miles. The Levittowns of Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were the most well-known examples of this dramatic change in American metropolitan space. The suburbs were growing everywhere. By 1950, the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities, and in 1954, the editors of Fortune magazine estimated that more than 9 million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade.[10] As consumers increasingly pursued their individual suburban dreams, downtown retailing stopped being so important. Unplanned, roadside strip developments sprung up along most commuter routes in an effort to attract shoppers, but the rapid expansion of suburbia meant that it was increasingly difficult both to attract customers and to predict where they would want to shop.[11] Gruen proved more aware than most of these rapid changes and proposed a new site for retailing that could also act as a “coalescing” space away from the private spaces of the automobile and the suburban home.
Despite his status as a pre-war Jewish émigré with a string of successful architectural projects in America to his name, Victor Gruen has received none of the critical attention of his architectural contemporaries, Walter Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[12] Only in 2004 did the first major work on the career of Victor Gruen emerge in M. Jeffery Hardwick’s Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Well researched and fluently written, Mall Maker takes a biographical approach and convincingly positions Gruen as an influential and important figure in American space, as the “architect” of the shopping mall. Before 2004, the most significant publications on Victor Gruen were the works of the British planning historian, David R. Hill, in “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis” (1992) and “A Case for Teleological Urban Form History and Ideas: Lewis Mumford, F.L. Wright, Jane Jacobs and Victor Gruen” (1993). Hill not only places Gruen alongside canonical figures in planning thought, but makes the case for the European origins in Gruen’s work as vital for understanding the possibilities for regional and environmental planning, while maintaining the urban intimacy proclaimed by the likes of Lewis Mumford or Jane Jacobs.[13]
Others have examined Gruen’s career, including Howard Gillette Jr., Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Søren Askegaard and, more recently, Timothy Mennel, but none go significantly beyond examining Gruen as the father of the shopping mall.[14] Perhaps that is because of his concentration in the hyper-commercialised field of retail architecture or perhaps because he had none of the clear, modernist ideology that dominated the functional designs of a Gropius, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. But Victor Gruen should not be dismissed as an architect of little influence who had the fortune, be it good or bad, to design one of the epochal spaces of the twentieth century. Gruen was a thinker as well as a practitioner and had a coherent ideology of his own. He was a humanist and a socialist who believed in improving the built environment by building for the enjoyment and relaxation of people. Gruen was a pragmatic and successful architect who got projects built, but he was also a humanist, interested in people more than buildings, and heavily influenced by his time in pre-1938 Vienna. His designs for the shopping centre clearly show these influences; with the mall, Gruen was building more than just a machine for shopping.
Gruen began his American career designing New York Fifth Avenue jewellery and clothing stores. In designing such stores, he took advantage of his earlier Viennese career in which he had designed seven small stores. But Gruen’s work quickly progressed into the emergent suburban department branch stores in the 1940s and 50s.[15] By the early 1950s, he had firmly established himself as a successful store designer. His work on Milliron’s department store in Los Angeles and his innovative store designs for Bay Fair Shopping Center in San Leandro, California won him numerous awards.[16] However, even in these early stages of his architectural career, Gruen saw himself as more than just a designer of stores. As early as 1943, Gruen and his partner, Elsie Krummeck, had responded to the call of Architectural Forum for visions of post-war America by proposing a new kind of shopping space.[17] Following the end of the war, Gruen observed, “the building boom, higher income levels, and the increased use of automobiles” had “accentuated the development of suburban shopping facilities and engaged the attention of more and more retailers”.[18] Such unorganised retail growth, he argued, could not continue. Roadside shopping facilities were no longer sufficient to serve, let alone attract, the suburban consumer. Only by bonding together with other stores in cooperative enterprise, Gruen argued, could storeowners integrate their activities within the local scene and begin to predict shopping patterns again. Gruen proposed building shopping centres, populated by a wide range of stores, which would also act as social centres for surrounding communities.
Gruen’s vision for the mall reflected his architectural experience in inter-war Vienna. Lacking the formal training of his more well-known émigré contemporaries such as Walter Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gruen’s designs for the mall combined romantic ideas of pre-war Europe with a pragmatic modernism. Gruen began studying architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1917, under the tutelage of the modernist Peter Behrens, now known as the father of industrial design. Forced to leave school following the death of his father in 1918, Gruen went to work in the architectural and construction firm of Melcher and Steiner. Engaged in this firm for more than eight years, Gruen’s practical experience of building far outweighed any theoretical, formal learning. Despite his deficiency of formal architectural education, Gruen lacked nothing in intellectual depth or profundity. Behrens and Adolph Loos proved to be key influences on Gruen’s architectural thinking, along with the work of the Viennese, Camillo Sitte and Frenchman, Le Corbusier. Behrens inaugurated industrial modernism, directly influencing such luminaries as Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, while Loos achieved renown for the lack of ornamentation in his functionalist buildings. Such proto-modernism combined with Camillo Sitte’s focus on human scale and aesthetic pleasure in architectural design to provide the intellectual foundation for Gruen’s thinking on the shopping mall. Perhaps most importantly for the construction of malls, his practical architectural background encouraged him to reject the prevalent dogmas of modernist architecture and instead embrace the practicalities of completing successful projects in a profession dominated by commercial considerations.[19]
With a training in some of the key European architectural ideas of the early twentieth century, a delight for the pre-war Vienna of his youth and a pragmatism born from his experience in the construction industry, Victor Gruen used his experience of retail design to apply himself to the needs and problems of the American suburbs of the 1950s. His solution was Southdale Mall, a “new environment in 20th Century life, not only for shopping but for many other activities as well”.[20] More than just a practical solution to the obvious problem of declining downtown retail sales, his shopping centres were to be an ideological counterpoint to the increasing suburbanisation of America. Gruen believed that the post-war growth of suburbia had outstripped the facilities provided for it. As a result, he argued, “suburbia had become an arid land inhabited during the day almost entirely by women and children and strictly compartmentalized by family income, social, religious, and racial background”.[21] For Gruen, Southdale could fill that emerging void and reverse social and cultural homogeneity. The mall could become a community focal point, encouraging, “a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans – to have social meetings, to relax together, to enjoy art, music, civic activities, the theater, films, good food, and entertainment in the company of others”.[22] Such a centre could provide the variety, heterogeneity and community of his own youth that Gruen felt was sadly missing from America’s suburbs.
Gruen’s theorising on this matter grew directly from his experiences in Vienna. He remembered the inter-war Vienna of his youth as Europe’s “center of intellectual and cultural life”. His vision of urbanity came directly from the cafés of Vienna, where a cross-section of peoples would gather and discuss culture, politics and everyday life. Frequently in speeches, as his biographer M. Jeffrey Hardwick illustrates, Gruen would pair “slides of European cities with American shopping centers”.[23] Venice’s Piazza San Marco would be juxtaposed with Detroit’s Northland. More than his own experiences, Gruen saw a direct intellectual link between the origins of civilised Europe and what he felt could become a civilised America. After all, buying and selling was “as old as mankind;” “In the Greece of antiquity the merchant spread his wares under the colonnades of the Stoa, a building especially designated for his activity”.[24] The spaces of the Agora had numerous functions as citizens would stroll in the square, discuss the topics of the day, transact their business, “while philosophers, poets, and entertainers argued, recited and performed”. The Agora was the centre of city life, and “in this colorful, lively, dynamic environment commerce had its share”.[25]
While antiquity provided one intellectual and spatial model for the mall, a more recent paradigm were the gallerias and arcades of France and Italy. Gruen argued that the conditions of nineteenth-century European cities shared much in common with post-war American suburbs:
The conditions of the streets were rendered so disagreeable and unsafe that walking on narrow or nonexistent sidewalks became an unpleasant experience. Thus merchants, bonding together, in cooperation with many outstanding architects, created new, exclusively pedestrian, weather-protected areas in the middle of building blocks, connecting one major street with another.[26]
By the 1950s, walking in America’s suburban shopping districts had become an impossible task. The dangers of the horse and carriage had been replaced by those of the automobile to the detriment of both pedestrians and retailers. Explicitly, Gruen wrote, the mall was directly “inspired by the pedestrian areas of the gallerias in Milan and Naples”.[27] In intellectually positioning the mall in this way, both temporally and spatially, Gruen successfully historicized the space of the mall; for him, “the colonnades, gallerias, and covered arcades of European cities found contemporary expression in the covered mall”.[28]
Gruen’s efforts to position the mall as an historic continuation from earlier, European shopping experiences found expression both in his writings and the aesthetics of mall design. Speaking in 1954 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he argued that the mall recreated an “old architectural form – the square or plaza”. There people could “relax – not just shop”. The built spaces of Southdale would allow people to “attend fashion shows, concerts and exhibits of everything from new cars to paintings”.[29] Architecturally, Gruen expressed himself through concern with human scale, commodity and delight. While this terminology came from the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius, Gruen updated it a little, noting how: “In clusters of shops surrounding medieval churches, in the Italian piazza . . . historic market places had one thing in common, an intimate relationship between architecture and the human being. In the language of the Architect all these had HUMAN SCALE”.[30] Similarly, at the mall, Gruen designed space “in which the structure does not interfere or impose upon the conditions of commodity and delight”.[31] This meant the establishment of clean lines and structurally neutral space that allowed the introduction of mall “furniture” that could help construct, for the pedestrian, the sensation of delight. For Gruen, “Trees and flowers, music, fountains, sculpture and murals, and the architecture of free-standing structures” were “vital parts of the over-all composition”.[32]
Gruen’s plan for Northland Centre in Detroit illustrates how he aimed to achieve these aims in built structure. Open-air Northland consisted of a cluster of one-storey buildings grouped around the three-storey J.L. Hudson Department Store. Between the individual stores were attractively landscaped garden courts and pedestrian malls. At the time of its completion, Architectural Forum praised Northland as a “classic in shopping center planning, in the sense that Rockefeller Center is a classic in urban skyscraper-group planning, or Radburn, N.J. in suburban residential planning”.[33] Narrow walks and lanes lead the “customers from the transportation area into a series of generously dimensioned squares and plazas, each one of different size and character”. Gruen designed these open spaces between buildings “in accordance with the pattern found in European cities”.[34] Colonnades, protecting shoppers from the weather, surround all buildings and connecting, covered walkways allow crossing from one structure to another without exposure to the weather. The architecture aims to “achieve impressiveness and unity by simplicity and straightforward design”, standardising the design of all tenant buildings while allowing individual expression with store signs (but only under the overall control of Gruen).[35]
Gruen was most concerned with creating space that would attract shoppers and, once there, provide them with the relaxing environment envisioned in Camillo Sitte’s earlier call for aesthetically pleasing public spaces which reinforced civic culture. For Gruen, this meant recreating many of the qualities of the European piazza, designing space that was visually appealing, comfortable and relaxing. The central mall space at Northland illustrated Gruen’s attempt to provide both visual spectacle and comfort. Situated between Hudson’s department store and tenant stores were a series of seating areas for relaxation, consisting of both benches and low walls. The most striking aspect of this space were the extensive flower beds, in which spectacular blooms operated both to break up the sightlines of the square, making it into a more intimate space than would otherwise be the case, and to create a park-like quality. Mature trees further emphasised this sensation, hiding some of the shopping space from view and providing shade in summer. These park-like qualities differentiated the square from the surrounding stores, defining it as non-shopping space. The colonnades in Northland, surrounding Hudson’s, not only served to shelter the shopper from the weather but the solid overhangs and columns further separated shopping space from non-shopping space. Within the general shopping mall environment there were spaces firmly demarcated as away from the experience of consuming; spaces that provide an area both for relaxation and the enjoyment of non-intrusive visual spectacle. This explicit differentiation between shopping and non-shopping space reflected Gruen’s desire to recreate the experience of the European central city in which people could both shop and sit in nearby parks and gardens or cafés, unmolested by the demands of commerce.
Gruen frequently merged the language of the European central city with a more recognizably American vernacular to position, aesthetically, spatially and historically, his mall designs. He felt that it was important to maintain variety in store design, suggesting that otherwise the mall “owner risks monotony and complete lack of ‘downtown’ personality”.[36] Similarly, he justified the use of basements for the separation of service vehicles from shoppers, pointing out how, “Basements are to the large, regional shopping center what side streets are to the downtown area”.[37] However, despite the language used, the downtown to which Gruen referred was not the automobile dominated downtown of 1950s and 60s America, but an historic, romanticised European vision of that downtown. Gruen felt that the conscientious mall designer should “study the anatomy of the organically or sensitively planned old urban pattern which consists of a rich vocabulary of clearly defined urban spaces”.[38] He argued that this would help the mall designer to reproduce urban qualities at the mall. For example, an architect could learn how in the historicized city, “through narrow and intimate lanes one reaches in surprising fashion spacious ones of different sizes and shapes. There are no endless, straight, and uniform avenues; there is always something new and unexpected around the corner”. This design approach could be recreated in the mall by developing: “The entranceways from arrival areas to the main shopping streets [which] can, through their dimensioning and their treatment, assume the role of sideways and byways, of intimate lanes and mews”.[39] Gruen wanted his mall to be a new version of his romantic vision of the European city and by and large, at Northland he was successful. As the reporter for Ladies Home Journal observed: “Something of the Vienna waltz pervades Northland”.[40]
As critically praised as Northland, but moved entirely indoors, Southdale contained a “children’s activity area with a miniature zoo”, a sidewalk café, subtropical trees, plants and flowers, and a bird cage “populated by feathered folk happily existing in the spring-like temperature”.[41] With two large department stores, along with the by now usual mix of clothing, footwear and variety stores, innovations at Southdale included opening three nights a week and providing “fair and mild” shopping conditions all year around, away from the extremes of Minnesota weather. While the primary innovation at Northland had been the removal of vehicles from the shopping environment, situating people as the key “traffic” at the mall, Southdale moved everything inside; not only had traffic been removed but so had the weather. By placing shopping indoors, Gruen overcame the climate extremes of Minnesota and achieved space that catered to the every need of the suburbanite. Ordered around the central garden court, from which it was “possible to see almost all of the stores”, Southdale provided community, human-scaled space.[42] In these pedestrian areas, Gruen wrote, he was able to re-establish, “the enjoyment to be found in the contemplation of architecture, landscape and the arts”.[43]
The architectural centrepiece of Southdale, and what still sets it apart from many malls built today, was the garden court. Sharply distinguished from shopping areas by its openness and airiness, the garden court allowed people who visited the mall to remove themselves from shopping. The “attractions” of the court were all positioned in or near the centre of the courtyard encouraging shoppers to turn their backs on the stores; it was a non-shopping space. With this design, Gruen positioned Southdale as not only a place for shopping but also one that encouraged a wide range of social and cultural activities. It resembles the plazas and piazzas of European central cities. A sidewalk café attracted people to the centre even when stores closed on Sundays. One 1956 commentator observed the European qualities at Southdale: “In the square is a sidewalk café. Shoppers will walk on pavement of red brick a la [sic] Copenhagen, Denmark. And there are antiquated areas remindful of an old Roman road”.[44] As a public, weather-protected space, the garden court became “not only a meeting ground but also, in evening hours, the place for the most important events, as for example the yearly ball of the Minneapolis Symphony”.[45] It was a space designed for people, as distinct from shoppers, that merged “art works, contemporary architecture, rich decorations and furnishing into a background of beauty and relaxation”.[46] Southdale brought European high culture into a space of European design, encouraging mid-westerners to enjoy everything that the Viennese could.
The shopping mall in America failed to develop according to the European principles that Gruen had laid out for it, however. Suburbs and suburban shopping continued to grow with little or no concerted effort to plan these new American spaces. Statistics on the growth of shopping malls following the opening of Southdale in 1956 are difficult to pin down accurately, primarily because of the lack of an accepted definition of what a mall constitutes.[47] In 1960, the Urban Land Institute estimated that there were approximately 100 regional shopping centres with a minimum of 350,000 square feet of floor area and at least one major department store.[48] A shopping centre of this size would meet the minimum definition today of what we think of a shopping mall. Smaller, self-contained shopping centres, including a minority of regional centres, developed at a remarkable rate of growth. Historian Lizabeth Cohen suggests that there were 940 shopping centres by 1957. By 1967, there were 8,000 shopping centres selling goods totalling $54 billion and by 1976 there were 17,520 shopping centres in America.[49] The economic impact of these suburban shopping centres on downtown America was hugely significant. By 1971, shopping centres accounted for more than 50 per cent of all retail trade in twenty-one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.[50]
Alongside this remarkable growth in the number and retail trade reach of suburban shopping centres were the cultural changes that they brought to American urban and suburban space. As an article from the Urban Land Institute noted in 1960: “Of all changes in the American scene in the past ten years, the modern shopping center is still the most striking”, the mall had introduced “new merchandising concepts and architectural patterns”, which had “extended into every city in the United States”.[51] Following the financial successes of Gruen’s designs at Northland and Southdale, an exponential growth in copycat shopping malls followed. Despite having no relationship to the European ideals of Northland or Southdale, almost all successfully achieved a profit. Placing a wide variety of stores within a controlled environment and with plentiful free parking close to suburban tracts proved popular enough without the environmental or community-oriented considerations that Gruen had used in his malls.
The majority of architects and architecture critics bemoaned the poor quality of mall development in the years following Southdale’s opening. A 1962 publication by the editor of Architectural Record complained that whilst great “numbers of shopping centers are being built across the country”, the “unhappy truth is that the overwhelming majority of them are neither good to look at nor a real pleasure to use”.[52] James S. Hornbeck felt that mall developers and architects had ignored the spaces between and around stores, the parking areas and the relationship of centres to the highway and the surrounding residential community. He argued that only “when more owners appreciate the importance of such an environment and the unique role of the architect in achieving it can large numbers of shopping areas benefit in both financial and human terms”.[53] The architect Cesar Pelli was more direct observing how “the formula” for malls had become “trite” and bemoaned that “everyone has learned how to reduce it to a mimimum”.[54] A mere six years after the acclaimed opening of Southdale, developer James Rouse, writing an article in Architectural Forum questioned “Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?” He suggested that shopping centres had lost their sense of human scale, with huge parking areas, “the massive factory-like buildings, the enormous unbroken spaces, the store fronts and signs all add up to a big project imposed on a community rather than a warm and friendly market place growing out of the community”.[55] The suburban mall had become a formulaic collection of stores with few or no features designed to distract from the shopping experience or encourage the rest, relaxation and communal activities of Gruen’s European-influenced spaces.
One of the highlights of the Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers, held at the Hilton Hotel in London in February 1978 was a speech given by Victor Gruen. The delegates at the conference knew the reputation of Gruen well, as the designer of Southdale, more than twenty years earlier. However, Gruen was not in London to reminisce about his achievements in reshaping the spaces of retailing; instead, he was there to warn those in attendance about the development of shopping malls and the damage they were doing to European cities.[56] In his speech, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?” Gruen argued that the shopping centre in America had “no future at all” and that signs of its downfall were “already recognizable” and would “express themselves increasingly with every year that passes on”.[57] He went on to criticise the shopping mall as an extreme “expression of the effort of substituting naturally and organically grown mixtures of various urban expressions by an artificial and therefore sterile order”.[58] By way of clarification to his no doubt somewhat bemused audience, Gruen provided a brief history of the development of his two most paradigmatic mall developments at Northland and Southdale. At both sites, Gruen told his audience, he had given “thousands of citizens living in an area without desirable shopping facilities a place to meet, walk and rest in a landscaped setting free of automobile traffic”. Besides shops and department stores, they offered spaces for “cultural and festive activities, a community centre with auditorium, a post office, medical offices and even a theatre”.[59] He was able to achieve this because of the interests of the department store-developers, Hudson’s in Detroit and Dayton’s in Minneapolis, who proved “deeply concerned not only with the quality of their own stores, but in a paternalistic manner with that of the entire centre and all of its tenants carried by the conviction that their qualities had to measure up to the high standards which they had set for themselves”.[60]
However, in the ensuing twenty-two years since the completion of Southdale, Gruen’s dreams for the use of the shopping mall for human-centred and environmental ideals had been derailed by the pursuit of profits as only “those features which had proved profitable were copied” in future developments.[61] Rather than benevolent local developers building shopping centres to serve the needs of an established neighbourhood, “anonymous real estate enterprises” built a “shopping machine” large and powerful enough that “it could be located almost anywhere, on the cheapest land available, and because of its gigantic scale people would flock to it even if they were forced to travel dozens of miles”.[62] Those developers proved more interested in making a “fast buck” than designing shopping centres that could provide the retailing and communal central space for the ever-expanding suburbs. Such suburban shopping centres soon became the accepted practice, “dragging the last remaining activities” out of central cities, “somewhere to the periphery and if possible to locations outside the city boundaries, in order to save taxes”.[63] But Gruen felt that a backlash was growing amongst Americans, with opposition to increasing air pollution, “loss of landscape quality, loss of small local shops – and the rising costs of car ownership”.[64] European retail developers in his audience still had the opportunity to avoid the worst of American malls, which would cause even more damage to the central cities of Europe than they had in America. Gruen proposed for his listeners a grander vision in which they would devote their energies to the “future-directed much greater, more useful and more exciting task of revitalizing or establishing our newly to be created integrated multi-functional centres for tomorrow”.[65] Gruen’s shopping experience of the future had to be a part of the enitre urban pattern.
The response of the audience to this speech has not been recorded, but given its majority composition of retailers and developers, it is likely to have been somewhat muted and even confused. Surely, the inventor of the shopping mall was not advocating ceasing development of such immensely profitable centres of consumption. Those who had closely followed the career of Victor Gruen, however, would not have been so bemused. As early as 1968 in an article in the important Architectural Review, Gruen had begun to question, publicly, the development of shopping malls.[66] He argued both in architectural publications and the American press that the shopping centre had become too successful for its own good. Developers had taken his idea for a communal, centralising space in the American suburbs and transformed it into a “selling machine”. By 1978, the mall in America had become all-pervasive to the extent that failed developments were now occurring because centres were being built too close together, failing to take account of the needs and demands of the surrounding populace. Downtown retailing had all but been eliminated in many cities and the decline in facilities of variety, culture and urbanity had not been adequately replaced by the monofunctional spaces of the suburban mall. As one profile of Gruen in the Los Angeles Times later that year observed: “Rare is the man who conceives an idea that spreads around the world and then disowns his own progeny”.[67] But Victor Gruen disowned the shopping mall and all that it represented and showed no regrets for doing so.[68]
To us in the twenty-first century, the shopping center as vibrant, cosmopolitan urban space is an absurd notion. Today malls, in America, Europe and around the world, have become homogeneous Meccas of shopping, with no space for any activity but consumption, be it in stores, food courts or multiplex cinemas. However, Gruen never intended that destiny for his malls. Throughout the 60s and 70s Gruen became increasingly disillusioned with the development of the shopping mall, finally denouncing them in London for failing to become “what I was aiming for, namely the creation of a counterpart to the typical organically grown European city as it still existed at the time”.[69] By then, European developers had learnt the lessons of the mall from America as huge, out-of-town regional centers sprang up over the countryside and suburbs of Western Europe. This horrified Gruen, who, having retired back to Vienna, witnessed the destruction of a more historic urban pattern than America had ever had; the “thoughtless copying of the American shopping center” had been “truly catastrophic”. Gruen maintained his belief in the vitality of European civilization: “The economic rape of central city areas was a much more serious crime in Europe where cities had grown organically, often over thousands of years, and were important expressions of urban form offering opportunities for human communication, for culture, for the arts and civic virtues”.[70] Ironically, soon after Gruen moved back to Vienna, he found, just south of the central city, a mall had been built. The intellectual roots of the shopping mall, which had originated in a European, socialist, quasi-utopian humanist vision, had been corrupted by the demands of capital and exported back to Europe as a ruthless tool, a machine devoted to consumption. Today this American model dominates world shopping space.[71] But we should not ignore the mall’s European and utopian origins, which suggest an alternative future, even today. The tragedy for Victor Gruen, as Malcolm Gladwell reminded us in the New Yorker last year, was that he “invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America”.[72]
University of Nottingham
Notes
[1] Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 495 musing on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.
[2] Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 495
[3] Quoted in James Sanders, “Toward a Return of the Public Place: an American Survey”, Architectural Record, 173.4 (Apr. 1985): 87-95, 87
[4] “A Break-Through for Two-level Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum Dec. 1956: 114-123, 117
[5] Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). His discussion of the mall in this book is based on his article “Spaced Out at the Shopping Center” first published in The New Republic 13 Dec. 1975: 23-26. See also Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall”, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992)
[6] William S. Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985)
[7] James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003) and Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004)
[8] Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004)
[9] Other historians have noted Victor Gruen’s European origin and its influence on his design approach. See M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and David R. Hill, “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis”, American Planning Association Journal 58.3 (Summer 1992): 312-326. This article expands on these points, examining the intellectual, spatial, and cultural linkages between the shopping mall and the Greek agora of antiquity, nineteenth century gallerias and inter-war Vienna.
[10] Statistics taken from Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 238 and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 182
[11] For contemporaneous reflections on this problem see, for example, Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Shopping Centers: Design and Operation (New York: Reinhold, 1951) and “Suburban Retail Districts”, Architectural Forum 93.2 (Aug. 1950): 106-110
[12] Rightly acclaimed as the founder of the shopping mall, Gruen also worked on significant projects in housing, retail and urban planning including housing for the Gratiot Projects in Detroit and urban redesign in such disparate cities as Boulder, Colorado, Fresno, California and Rochester, New York.
[13] Hardwick, Mall Maker; Hill, “Sustainability, Victor Gruen, and the Cellular Metropolis”; and David R. Hill, “A Case for Teleological Urban Form History and Ideas: Lewis Mumford, F.L. Wright, Jane Jacobs and Victor Gruen”, Planning Perspectives 8.1 (Jan. 1993): 53-71
[14] See Howard Gillette Jr., “The Evolution of the Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City”, Journal of the American Planning Association 51.4 (Autumn 1985): 449-460; Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Søren Askegaard, “Malls and the Orchestration of the Shopping Experience in a Historical Perspective”, Advances in Consumer Research 26 (1999): 34-40; and Timothy Mennel, “Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias”, Journal of Planning History 3.2 (May 2004): 116-150
[15] M. Jeffrey Hardwick discusses Gruen’s early career in detail in Mall Maker, 48-117
[16] See “Victor Gruen Recognition” (undated) Victor Gruen Collection, Accession Number 5809, Unprocessed Box 1, Folder “Victor Gruen: Biographical Data and Listing of Work”, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (hereafter VGC Box No., Folder “Title”)
[17] Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck, “Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum 78.5 (May 1943)
[18] Victor Gruen, “Dynamic Planning for Retail Areas”, Harvard Business Review 32.6 (1954): 53-62, 53
[19] Gruen discusses the early influences on his career in Victor Gruen, “John Peter interviews Victor Gruen”, Library of Congress John Peter Collection, Transcripts, Box 3, Title 32-33, Folder “Gruen, Victor”
[20] Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns, USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 140
[21] Ibid. 21
[22] Victor Gruen and Lawrence P. Smith, “Shopping Centers: the new building type”, Progressive Architecture (June 1952): 67-109, 68
[23] Hardwick, Mall Maker, 133
[24] Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns, USA, 17
[25] Ibid. 18
[26] Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973) p 14
[27] Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 194
[28] Victor Gruen, “Retailing and the Automobile: A Romance Based upon A Case of Mistaken Identity”, Stores and Shopping Centers ed., James S. Hornbeck (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962): 96-114, 106
[29] Quoted in Kay Miller, “Southdale’s Perpetual Spring”, Minneapolis Star and Tribune 28 Sept. 1988 Sunday Magazine: 8-23, 10-11
[30] Victor Gruen, “Shopping Centers of Tomorrow”, Arts and Architecture (Jan. 1954): 12-17, 13
[31] John Winter, “Gruen, Victor”, Contemporary Architects ed. Ann Lee Morgan and Colin Naylor, 2nd ed. (Chicago: St. James Press, 1987), 361:2
[32] Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns, USA, 148
[33] “Northland: a new yardstick for shopping center planning”, Architectural Forum 100.6 (1954): 102-119, 103
[34] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 28
[35] Ibid. 30-31
[36] Larry Smith and Victor Gruen, “How to Plan Successful Shopping Centers”, Architectural Forum 100.3 (Mar. 1954): 144-147, 192, 145
[37] “Northland: a new yardstick for shopping center planning”, 111
[38] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 83
[39] Ibid.
[40] Quoted in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 131
[41] Victor Gruen, “The Regional (Shopping) Center”, Technical Bulletin 104 (June 1963) n. pag.
[42] Dudley R. Koontz, “Southdale Shopping Center: An Investment in Good Planning”, Buildings (Oct. 1958): 34-37, 35. VGC Box 22 Loose.
[43] Gruen, “The Regional (Shopping) Center”
[44] Barbara Flanagan, “He Brought Charm to Southdale”, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune 7 Oct. 1956 Southdale Supplement: 26. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 131
[45] Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment, 37
[46] John A. Wickland, “$20,000,000 Southdale Center Opens Monday”, Minneapolis Sunday Tribune 7 Oct. 1956 Southdale Supplement, 1
[47] Even as late as 1999, the Urban Land Institute felt it was necessary to define what a shopping mall is to those interested in its development. See Michael D. Beyard and W. Paul O’Mara et. al., Shopping Center Development Handbook 3rd ed. (Washington D.C.: ULI – the Urban Land Institute, 1999)
[48] Statistics from Homer Hoyt, “The Status of Shopping Centers in the United States”, Urban Land 19.9 (Oct. 1960): 3-6, 3
[49] Statistics from Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic p 258 and Downtown Idea Exchange (Oct. 1967) VGC Box 54, Folder “Shopping Towns USA – Revised edition”, 1
[50] Seth S. King, “”Suburban ‘Downtowns: The Shopping Centers”, Suburbia in Transition ed., Louis H. Massoti and Jeffrey K. Hadden (New York: Franklin Watts, 1974): 101-104, 102
[51] Hoyt, “The Status of Shopping Centers in the United States”, 6
[52] Hornbeck, Stores and Shopping Centers, 89
[53] Ibid.
[54] Quoted in John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998), 91
[55] James W. Rouse, “Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?”, Architectural Forum 116.6 (June 1962): 104 -7, 106
[56] M. Jeffrey Hardwick comments on this significant moment in the career of Victor Gruen, which was widely reported and republished on both sides of the Atlantic in popular and trade press at the time, in Mall Maker 216-221. However, our interpretations of this important speech differ as I suggest that Gruen proposed a grander, yet possible, vision for the mall in Europe, whereas Hardwick argues that this moment formed part of Gruen’s “jeremiad” against the mall and his retreat “more and more into the realm of fantasy” (218).
[57] Victor Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centres. Hilton Hotel London. 28th Feb. 1978: 1-18. VGC Box 32, Loose, 2
[58] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 12
[59] Victor Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, Town and Country Planning 46.7-8 (July/Aug. 1978): 350-353, 350
[60] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 6
[61] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 351. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 217
[62] Ibid. Also cited in Hardwick, Mall Maker, 217
[63] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 9
[64] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 352
[65] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”, 18
[66] Victor Gruen, “A New Look at Past, Present, and Future Shopping Centers”, Architectural Record (Apr. 1968): 168-171
[67] Neal R. Peirce, “The Shopping Center and One Man’s Shame”, Los Angeles Times (22 Oct. 1978): Part IV
[68] For an alternative reading of Gruen’s repudiation of the shopping mall see Hardwick, Mall Maker, 210-224
[69] Gruen, “Shopping Centres, Why, Where, How?”
[70] Gruen, “The sad story of shopping centres”, 351
[71] See Chuihua Judy Chung et. al., Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Köln: Taschen, 2001). The observation on the Viennese mall comes from Malcolm Gladwell, “Annals of Commerce: The Terrazzo Jungle”, New Yorker 15 Mar. 2004: 120-127. M. Jeffrey Hardwick makes the same observation in Mall Maker, 217-8
[72] Gladwell, “Annals of Commerce: The Terrazzo Jungle”, 127
Issue 3, Spring 2003: Article 1
U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal
Issue 3, Spring 2003: Special Conference Edition
Coast to Coast: An Aerial Introduction
Rachel van Duyvenbode and Colin Howley
© Rachel van Duyvenbode and Colin Howley. All Rights Reserved
On Saturday 23, November 2002 over fifty postgraduates from the United Kingdom and overseas congregated in Sheffield for the annual British Association for American Studies (BAAS) postgraduate conference. Titled ‘Coast to Coast: An American Trip’, the 2002 conference embarked upon a series of intellectual journeys that moved between disciplinary borders. In particular, the conference provided space for the performance of intersectional readings and this special edition of US Studies Online brings together six papers from the conference that call for the re-mapping of existing subject field/s.
James Campbell’s paper, ‘African American Responses to Crime in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia’, opens this collection. Campbell’s paper argues that re-examining African American interactions with local legal practices/institutions offers alternative ways of understanding the relationship between African Americans and the law in the antebellum South. Campbell’s archival research gives voice to the significant numbers of African Americans who, utilising the institutional settings of the Mayor’s Court and the African Baptist Churches, claimed their personhood through testimony. Campbell suggests that via legal testimony African Americans in Richmond experienced a degree of independence from the ‘legal hegemony of the slaveholding elite’, thereby challenging notions of African American powerlessness to the law.
Sara Upstone’s paper, ‘Toni Morrison and the Magical Re-Visioning of Space’ makes a similar gesture through relocating power for the African American subject within Morrison’s novel use of space. Upstone argues that an examination of space within Morrison’s novels provides both a critique of America’s colonial past and spaces of resistance to the legacy of colonisation for African Americans. Upstone identifies ways in which Morrison subverts colonialism’s reliance upon territory and mapping to witness the survival of African American communities.
The next two papers continue the reappraisal of American textual spaces through an examination of Puritanism’s ideological influence upon contemporary fictional landscapes. Elizabeth Rosen’s paper ‘The American West through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian‘ addresses the complexities of the Puritan ‘apocalyptic paradigm’ filtered through the postmodern, secular sensibilities of McCarthy’s Western novel. Rosen suggests the narrative of Blood Meridian revises Puritan thought by applying its conventions to a morally ambiguous historical period of frontier expansion in the 1840s. In doing so, Rosen argues that McCarthy’s text both questions and reconfigures the conception of finite ‘judgement’ and a ‘New Jerusalem’, inherent in the apocalyptic paradigm. Reconfiguring the apocalyptic paradigm, Rosen suggests that McCarthy’s fiction troubles binaries of good/evil thereby destabilising the coherence of America’s historical past.
Ben Williamson’s paper ‘The Unutterable Entertainments of Paradise: The Landscape and Waste in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace’ draws upon Puritan narratives of the New England ‘wilderness’ to analyse contemporary cultural discourses of ‘textualised spatiality’ represented in recent American fiction. Williamson argues that the discourses surrounding commercial landscapes of late capitalism are encoded with ‘heavily mediated data’ and mapped upon natural geographies in such ways as to supplant them with virtual ones. Via an examination of Wallace’s novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, Williamson reads the fictionalised localities of America’s surplus waste, ironically former New England territory ceded to Canada, as a contemporaneous rendering of what Cotton Mather once referred to as the ‘outer darkness’, the unsanctified landscape of Puritan thought. Synthesising the doctrines of these two disparate cultures and their propagation of a ‘mundas imaginary’, Williamson provides a critique of textual constructs of ‘wastelands’ as persistent forms of abjection, originating in the society of providential intervention and now entrenched firmly in the society of wilful consumption.
Catherine Morley’s paper ‘Epic Aspirations for the Great American Novel: John Updike’s Song of America’, akin to Rosen’s and Williamson’s papers, invokes the historical past to re-evaluate and resituate contemporary American fiction. The focus of Morley’s critique is upon a reconsideration of the generic conventions that comprise the tradition of the Great American Novel. Analysing Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom series of novels from the perspective of an ‘inclusive, trans-Atlantic frame’, Morley casts her critical eye over the American myth of individuality to suggest that a singular vision of nation is forestalled given the increasingly ‘disparate and miscellaneous aspects of American life’. Citing Updike’s novels as both representative of a polymorphic American identity and a palimpsest of American political and historical shifts from 1959 to the present, Morley argues that the narrative panegyrics of the Rabbit texts share significant associations with the tradition of the European epic. Aligning Updike’s protagonist with the ‘hero’ of Homer’s, Virgil’s, and latterly Joyce’s quest narratives, Morley asserts that the Rabbit series incorporates moments of American history, not to formulate a unified narrative (long the preserve of the Great American Novel) but to articulate the multifarious nature of American national consciousness.
Scott Duguid’s ‘Normal Mailer and Pop: Totalitarianism and Mass Culture in The Naked and the Dead’ is the final paper in this collection. Duguid argues that Mailer’s first novel struggles with the demise of a historical conception of the humanistic modern novel at a time when the forces of mass culture and postmodern aesthetics produce a culture increasingly ‘morally and politically neutral’. Tracing discourses of totalitarianism and liberalism through military hierarchies represented in the novel, Duguid situates his analysis within the context of contemporary intellectual debates of the period, including the Frankfurt School and the work of post-war New York intellectuals. Reading popular culture as political affront, Duguid’s paper shows how the ‘cultural iconography’ of Mailer’s internal aesthetic confronts both the demise of the modern novel and the emergence of hegemonic ‘cultural fetishism’ in American society.
Borne out of the annual BAAS Postgraduate conference, we hope that this special edition of US Studies Online provides a flavour of the dynamic scholarship currently undertaken by postgraduates within the field/s of American Studies.
