U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

‘Something so fundamentally right’: Djuna Barnes’s Uneasy Intersections with Margaret Sanger and the Rhetoric of Reform

Richard Espley
© Richard Espley. All Rights Reserved

In 1938, two years after the publication of her most famous work, Nightwood, Djuna Barnes wrote to her friend Emily Coleman of flawed but fervent reformulations of ‘how to live’. The attempt to prescribe a panacea for society’s ills was a yearning that she seemed to class as peculiarly American, referring to ‘all those hairy, open shirt prophets […] Thoreau, Whitman, […] full of theories and whiskers’. She explained to Coleman that whatever ‘passionate feeling for truth and right’ underlay such prescriptions, one had to accept both ‘the good and the evil of the fanatic’. [1] Barnes’s examples are both men who were dead by the time of her writing, but male and female advocates of such liberating social or political causes were ubiquitous in Greenwich Village, Barnes’s home until her emigration to France in 1920. As Steven Watson suggests, in that environment total reform was the endlessly stated aim, where ‘revolution was the most widely used metaphor for cultural and political upheaval’. [2]

However, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White emphasise in their masterful The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, transgression of existing codes and laws is not necessarily sufficient to generate ‘politically transformative power’. Indeed, ‘unless one addresses the question of the domain of discourse’, and challenges ‘the hierarchy of the sites of discourse’, then ‘the equation is politically meaningless’. [3] In the light of these arguments, this article will explore the extent to which Djuna Barnes accepted the promised revolutions of her day as carrying redemptive political power. It will suggest that she rather saw those campaigns, so passionately claiming ‘truth and right’, as fatally flawed by the ‘evil of the fanatic’, and ultimately insidiously bolstering fundamental, and oppressive, hierarchies and attitudes.

Ultimately, this piece will focus on an analysis of Barnes’s claimed textual relationship with an iconic reformer, Margaret Sanger. However, to clearly establish Barnes’s general attitude of smiling despair towards the radicals with whom she was surrounded, it is instructive to explore her early journalism. Her opinion of the campaign for women’s suffrage in this period, for example, has so far been only imperfectly analysed. Phillip Herring’s largely excellent biography passes over the issue, stating that ‘Barnes’s attitude seems more bemused than supportive’. [4] However, it is crucial to recognise that this bemusement is not at the cause but at the way in which it is championed. In a 1913 column tellingly entitled ‘Part Victory and Part Defeat at Suffrage Aviation Meet’, Barnes describes with a restrained baleful relish the excuse handed down for the cancellation of a fundraising flight by ‘the only woman suffrage aviator’. Mrs. Mary Simms, the flyer, announces that her plane ‘isn’t well’, that she has been ‘down on my knees to her, but not my hat off to her, for she’s no lady who refused to rise to the occasion’. [5] Childishly anthropomorphising her plane, this woman then merely reiterates and reinforces exactly the stifling social roles of femininity that must, Barnes implies, be overcome to achieve true emancipation. That accusation of not being a ‘lady’ was one that was repeatedly thrown at the suffragists, and their cause demanded its abandonment, not its acceptance. Moreover, the fund-raising endeavours in Barnes’s article were restricted to a cake sale in a parlour where ‘women drooped in chairs like wilting, ungardened China asters’. [6] They do nothing to resist their portrayal as delicate organisms in need not of self-determination but of outside nurture and care, whose only labour can be the domestic production of other consumable confections. This irony is deepened when Mr Laidlaw, his name rather heavily emphasising the entrenched conventions on display, buys up the unwanted cakes and distributes them in an act of gallantry. The women then call upon other men to build them a bonfire, and sit around it, and ‘forgot to reach any farther down into the theories’. [7] Simply claiming the vote without reaching down into the fundamental reasons for its denial means the campaign remains hopelessly inadequate. The event was intended to secure funds for a car, but Barnes suggests that ‘they will have to change their minds and get a go-cart’; they are ineffectually playing at suffrage. [8]

Also in 1913, Barnes visited the New York academy set up by Carrie Chapman Catt to train suffrage orators. Catt had publicly promised ‘a presidency in two weeks’ from amongst her supporters, and Barnes mocks her, claiming trepidation at approaching, fearing that ‘the presidential chair might be thrust upon one’. [9] Whatever the ultimate impact of Carrie Chapman Catt on women’s liberation in America, here Barnes shows her handing down four cardinal truths to her students that fall ludicrously short of genuine politically transformative power. These are never to ‘wear a dress that shows your feet in front’ or ‘strike out at an audience with a fist that has done duty as a biscuit molder. Third, do not dress in spots […] Fourth, don’t wear hat or gloves; the hat shadows your face, and the gloves veil your soul’. [10] Focussing entirely on superficial matters, Catt does not begin to exceed the restricted patriarchal vision of women which deprived them of the vote. She also fails to truly consider her campaign’s objectives; when Barnes asks her if the academy has met expectations, ‘she said, hesitatingly, “We don’t know what to expect”’. Barnes then closes her article with the cruelly open question, ‘So what is the public to expect?’ but the answer is clearly very little. [11]

The inadequacy of this reforming vision is the one constant theme in Barnes’s accounts of such activists, seen again in a piece on street oratory. The idlers who listen to the various demagogues assembled are, Barnes insists, ‘given a real treat’ when an ‘automobile drove up, decorated with yellow bunting; in the machine were three pretty girls waving VOTES FOR WOMEN banners. Immediately there was a stampede. Everyone lost interest in how to secure lower rents’. [12] The women are at best a comic diversion; it is clear that suffrage will prove as ephemeral a concern as rent reform when its pretty advocates drive away. Indeed, their failure to truly embody their cause is clearly marked by the dissonance between their claim on behalf of ‘women’, and Barnes’s description of them as ‘girls’. These appearances become mere public entertainment, seen again when one of Mrs Catt’s speakers fails to materialise at a rally, and another is sent ‘to make up for the disappointment the public felt when there was no one to smile over’. [13] The raising of crowds and smiles is clearly not enough.

These articles were written from amidst the very Greenwich Village which was often claimed as home to activists who sought to radically refashion society, integrating a host of programmes of which universal suffrage was only an example. June Sochen insists that certain briefly prominent figures, such as Henrietta Rodman and Crystal Eastman, believed in a feminism that ‘involved a complete revision of attitudes and customs regarding women and men’. [14] However, Barnes undoubtedly came into contact with these women, as well as Margaret Sanger, at the salon of Mabel Dodge, and her report of this famous gathering again exposes a fundamental lack of reflection, and a concern with the superficial by the reformers. She mocks the posed lifestyles and dress of the participants, asking, ‘Why is it that all similarity of ideas and tastes has the same manner of dress, of speech and mode of living?’ Barnes cannot share these reformers’ belief in themselves, and admits that ‘I felt cold because I wanted so dreadfully to feel warm and hopeful and one with them’. [15] Her disappointment implies a real sense of personal loss and pain at experiencing a similar inadequacy to that which disabled the suffrage campaign. However, here she clearly suspected that, as Sochen suggests, this was as genuinely revolutionary a gathering as Greenwich Village could offer.

This account makes clear that Barnes was not seeking out the ridiculous, but was finding it nonetheless at every fervent gathering. The self belief and radical pose that she finds amongst the acolytes of Mabel Dodge is essentially no different to the more overtly risible campaigns she uncovered, as depicted in her interview with ‘Mrs Ellen O’Grady, Fifth Deputy Police Commissioner’ of New York. This officer had made it her duty to protect any girl who might ‘fall into trouble’ (i.e. become prostitutes), but her analysis of the problem was that girls were working as messengers, and were thus forced ‘to go through the back entries of houses’. She imagined that by writing to their employers and asking ‘that [the girls] be allowed to enter through the front’, the problem would evaporate. [16] O’Grady would clearly prefer to believe that prostitution is forced upon naïve women rather than countenancing the desperate pragmatism that might lead them to choose it in the absence of alternatives.

What all of these articles share is not an authorial lack of sympathy with the fundamental causes or hopes being advanced, but rather a caustic impatience with the disastrously limited means by which they are undertaken. The parading of girls dressed to arouse groups of men, or the avoidance of certain dress fabrics, is no more likely to bring about universal suffrage than the use of front doors will be the miraculous cure for prostitution in the metropolis. Moreover, in all these cases, the advice given and the courses pursued in fact strengthen the attitudes that initially led to the lack of the vote and the commercialisation of female sexuality. Not only are notions of feminine dress and sexual availability not being challenged, they are being ratified.

This exasperation at the fatally limited terms of the discourse is Barnes’s dominant attitude to the period’s reformers, and yet her textual relation to the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger has been claimed as more complex. Sanger herself never doubted the truly revolutionary potential of her cause. Looking back at her life, she summed it up as one that had ‘touched profoundly millions of other lives’, her work ‘unquestionably proved of value, something so fundamentally right’. [17] However, this assessment still fell short of her claims from 1920, when she had declared that her own particular brand of reform would ensure that ‘child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration, hunger, oppression and war will disappear from the earth’. She had both warned and prophesied that with her help, woman ‘will not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it’. [18]

However, Barnes at least suggests in a 1916 newspaper article that Sanger was indistinguishable from the ostentatious but impotent reformers of Greenwich Village. In the piece, a bourgeois visitor, identified only as ‘Madam Bronx’, stalks a villager, finally asking her whether she is an artist. In response,

[…] a twinkle came into her eye. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘I am a pamphleteer.’
‘What is that?’
‘One of the birth controllers’. [19]

The villager, a ‘red haired woman who had somehow forgotten to cut her hair’, is physically reminiscent of Sanger, who was indeed principally known for her illegal pamphlet, Family Limitation, published in 1914 and continually revised until 1921. It is worth remarking that the term ‘pamphleteer’, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, is ‘often contemptuous’, but to discover the substantial and critical dialogue that Barnes initiated in response to Sanger’s pamphlets, it is necessary to turn to her first novel, Ryder. This text was published while Barnes was a Parisian exile in 1928, but its setting is American, and the central action takes place in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In contrast to the suspicion of reform in her journalism, this novel has been claimed as all but propaganda for Sanger herself. Sheryl Stevenson, in a seminal article in 1993, marked ‘parallels between Ryder and texts of the early birth-control movement – specifically […] Margaret Sanger’s’. [20] Beth Widmaier Capo, in 2004, accepted and amplified Stevenson’s argument, suggesting that ‘the novel contains many of the messages found within birth control arguments’. [21] Undoubtedly, the endless unwanted pregnancies in the text do reduce its women characters to the status that Sanger feared, that of ‘brood animal for the masculine civilization’. [22] The novel’s male protagonist, Wendell Ryder, lives in cramped conditions with his legitimate wife, Amelia, as well as his mistress, Kate Careless, and children are an inevitability that both women loudly lament, for ‘screaming oneself into a mother is no pleasure at all’. [23] Moreover, Wendell extends this siring outside of the home to numerous extramarital encounters, all of which he explicitly pursues in the hope of more children. Nonetheless, it is vital to distinguish between Barnes’s broad agreement with Sanger’s assessment of the problem, and her faith in the offered solution.

It has too often been argued that Ryder presents a world before contraceptive knowledge of any kind, one that aches for the panacea of Sangerian intervention. Stevenson suggests that this is the novel’s power, only admitting the possibility that one character, Wendell’s mother, ‘probably benefited from some birth-control method (if only […] withdrawal)’, and this only before the action of the text. [24] Moreover, Capo insists that ‘Barnes does not explicitly discuss birth control in her novel’. [25] However, such certainty is dubious, and is partially reminiscent of the reactions to the text from those same postal office censors who hounded Sanger. Although Ryder was heavily censored, much of its subversive message and content was left unmarked because of Barnes’s sometimes contorted prose. Similarly, direct if submerged discussion of contraception is not recognised by Stevenson or Capo, despite their interest in the issue. This failure of perception is sometimes surprising, most notably in the account of Amelia’s first, premarital, sexual encounter with Wendell, narrated almost entirely through the series of nicknames by which she refers to him. In the midst of intercourse, she cries ‘“Weigh-Yourself-Short-Pound” and “Wrench-Away-Willie”’, and ‘Much-Beating-No-Music!’ This suggests Amelia’s attempt to secure what may well have been her only feasible contraceptive option as an unprepared, unmarried young woman, coitus interruptus. Less ambiguously, she then says, ‘Babe’s-Beginning-Spill-It-Less-Lightly’. Wendell’s own motivation in this encounter is also illuminated by Amelia’s cry of ‘Can-You-or-Can’t-You?’ suggesting that he becomes impotent when withdrawal is demanded and his chances of impregnation are threatened. [26] It is important to recognise this fairly transparent attempt to practice non-conceptive sexual intercourse, but also to mark Amelia’s eventual actions. Overcome by her own desire, she rapidly abandons her caution, crying ‘Work-and-I’ll-Worry, Tarry-No-Longer’. [27] Once she accepts the ‘worry’ of potential conception, Wendell is pacified, and her pregnancy, and their marriage, follows swiftly. Barnes is careful to depict Amelia’s sexual desire as ultimately sealing this outcome, for Wendell clearly states that because of her demands, ‘I liked her none so well, and would have desisted’. It is only because she ‘seasoned her scorning’ with her abandonment to chance that he perseveres. [28] Thus, Barnes places female sexuality at the heart of the discussion, if leaving it awkwardly complicit with male insistence on conception.

This at least problematises Stevenson’s and Capo’s accounts of Ryder, for they largely portray the women of the text as being forcefully held in submission by their husband and patriarch. It also clouds Barnes’s claimed implicit support of birth control reform, although it must be admitted that withdrawal was not a method Sanger advocated. Indeed, Sanger’s justification for this decision may seem to be in tune with Ryder, for she insisted upon its ‘evil effect upon the woman’s nervous condition’ had she not ‘completed her desire’. [29] This comment appears to recognise the importance of female sexual fulfilment, as Barnes does through her depiction of Amelia. On examination, though, this statement awkwardly offsets it, casting the libido as a dangerous and uncontrollable force within, focussing instead on pseudo-medical worries over nervous collapse. This is representative of a wider restriction amongst American reformers analysed by Linda Gordon, where, ‘still uneasy with a straightforward hedonist position toward sex, that is, that pleasure was good in itself’, they ‘preferred the notion of sex as an irresistible drive, dangerous to interfere with’. [30]

This article seeks to suggest that this uneasiness with sexual desire was exactly the principal charge which Barnes lays against Sanger. It crippled, to Barnes’s mind, the attempted revolution of both the women of Ryder, and those who were reading Sanger’s pamphlets, as surely as the suffragists’ failure to engage with their position in society did. A reluctance to embrace women’s sexual pleasure in a society without easy access to birth control leads directly to its renunciation as the principal cause of unwanted children. Barnes clearly depicts this self-lacerating process in Amelia’s later assessment of her situation. While she initially rejects Wendell’s penis with some revulsion as ‘Shaft-Pole-of Cod’s-Withers’, she soon hymns it as ‘Sweet-Driller and Dear-Damage’. [31] She realises the ‘damage’ done to her, Wendell’s attempt to hold her in pregnant submission, but cannot resist the pleasure which sexual intercourse brings, and so turns instead upon that desire. She screams, ‘How damned he seems, yet all my hate’s not his. I shall be fond of him again in some way I know naught of’. [32] She cannot accept her fondness, her sexuality, as an intrinsic part of her own identity, but envisages it as an inevitable but unknowable adjunct.

Sanger does sometimes address what she terms the ‘atmosphere of degradation’ that surrounds women’s sexuality, but she insists that birth control is the only solution. [33] However, as Barnes explicitly demonstrates, contraception alone cannot counter such an attitude to the female libido. In Wendell’s assignation with the married Laura Twelvetrees, his determination to father children is again obvious, for as foreplay he announces, ‘I replenish the world. I have the spirit and the works’. Laura, though, openly denies these hopes, counselling him that there is ‘an aristocracy in no outcome’. She adds that ‘to this one should point the instrument, for otherwise it’s a grave price to pay’. [34] Her speech raises Sanger’s standard spectres of unwanted children and maternal illness and death, by punning on ‘grave’, but she mounts another, more concerted, contraceptive attempt, one which has gone critically unnoticed. In a cryptic passage, a ‘child’s hand […] came through the door downward, holding the India red fountain-of-all-ladies’-hope’. [35] What ladies hope for, Laura has already made clear, is an absence of pregnancy, and this item is what Sanger urged every woman to purchase, ‘a good two quart rubber douche bag called fountain syringe’. [36] The term ‘fountain’ was widely in use for this device, made of India rubber, which, while it has no connection to the genuine pigment ‘India red’, was nearly always of that colour. Sanger eventually became aware of the limitations of this contraceptive technique, but in the years preceding 1920, when Barnes was aware of her as a pamphleteer, she championed it as ‘the most important part which every woman should learn in the methods of preventing conception’. [37]

However, Laura does not secure the triumphs and liberation that Sanger held out; this device does not deliver a race ‘spiritually free and strong enough to break the last bonds of intellectual darkness’. [38] Rather, its user is left nervous and distracted; initially seen to go ‘down, crying softly’, the narrator reveals how she then ‘rose to scream and knelt to pray, and found her position in no wise altered’. Her thoughts are morbid, and she sees self-worth only in terms of male approval, asking ‘If I should die tonight […] what man would care?’ [39] The reason for this despair is the characters’ denunciation of their sexuality, regardless of the presence or absence of contraceptive methods. The only acceptable solution passed from mother to daughter has not been contraception, but total sexual abstinence. Amelia cries to her child as she goes into labour, ‘take warning by my size and don’t let a man touch you, for their touching never ends’. [40] Amelia was educated in similar terms by her own mother: ‘Never let a man touch you, never show anything, keep your legs in your own life’. [41] Crucially, this advice is not given because contraception is unknown, but because the only image of female perfection to be countenanced is one of asexuality. It is notable that in these injunctions what is actually forbidden is allowing men sexual access. The notion of desiring sexual contact is not even discussed. In the contraceptive development from withdrawal to technological intervention, what has not changed is this underlying repudiation of the women’s initial motivation, desire. Any method of contraception will still leave these women prostrate if trapped within such beliefs.

Sanger’s unshakeable faith in contraception conceals a certain complicity with the fundamental renunciation of desire that Barnes detects, despite her reputation as enlightened sexual prophet. She insisted in print more than once that ‘continence is the highest ideal’, advocating that same version of femininity that Laura, and every woman, whether or not they had read Family Limitation, would inevitably fail to achieve. [42] Not only did Sanger not embrace female sexuality, but she frequently ignored and sometimes appeared even to deny it. In 1914, in the very first issue of The Woman Rebel, Sanger insisted that because of ‘her emotional nature’, the adolescent girl ‘is often as well satisfied to hold hands or go arm in arm with a girl as in the companionship of a boy’; sexual intercourse is at most only ‘partly desired’. [43] In the advice she wrote directly for such girls, she depicted them as creatures who ‘kiss and fondle a man without any conscious desire for the sexual act […] innocent of any serious consequences’. [44] Indeed, this attitude was consistent throughout Sanger’s career, the only drive that she wholly accepted in women was that which impelled them to motherhood. So central was that impulse to Sanger that she stated of any woman who wished to remain childless while sexually active, that ‘that type of woman should die out biologically, just as did the different species that were caught in the mire and slime’. [45] Sometimes she used the adjectives ‘maternal’ and ‘sexual’ almost interchangeably, as for example when she warned that ‘great maternal powers are being used up in the activities of modern life […] modern Woman turns her sexual impulse into a big directing force’. [46] It was principally this maternal instinct, and not sexuality, that she portrayed as being manipulated by oppressive husbands. Indeed, in a startling article, Sanger insisted that woman has ‘chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature’. [47] Sanger is driven to harangue all women, ‘who, while wringing their hands at each fresh horror, submit anew to their task of producing the multitudes who will bring about the next tragedy’. [48] By not recognising active desire, women’s choice to be sexually active is left as at best compulsive mothering, at worst pliant submission.

In stark comparison to Sanger’s rare and qualified acceptance of female sexuality, Barnes consistently accentuates the erotic motivations of her women characters. Wendell’s first sexual encounter with his wife is entirely initiated by Amelia, and he relates how she pulled him down from a wall, having ‘never looked me in the face’ but ‘seeing something in my posterior that tempted her’. [49] This is an action incontrovertibly motivated by libido, and even while identifying constant pregnancy as a primary means of ensuring female suppression, Barnes allows her women characters that desire, and laments its renunciation. While this is an ambiguous gift, for it makes them complicit in their own subjection, it also vitally restores them as beings with self-will.

The revolutionary utopia that Sanger declares is thus portrayed by Barnes as inadequate in its objectives, and there is considerable evidence for the validity of this stance. Sanger’s projected state was not of sexual freedom, but one that relied very clearly on ideas of human sexuality that would have been shared by many campaigners who opposed her. This is true even of statements that appear to be emphasising the value of sexual pleasure. For example, she demanded that women should require ‘the greatest possible expression and fulfilment of their desires on the highest possible plane’. [50] However, the plane which she envisages is not an intensity of pleasure, but a moral and all-but-unreachable plateau. What she pointedly referred to as ‘sex-communion’ was ‘the finest flower of monogamy; and the miracle of undying love is the fruit of such experience’. It was foremost a ‘true union of souls, not merely a physical function for the momentary relief of the sexual organs’. Sex did have that other, physical manifestation, but ‘unless the psychic and spiritual desires are fulfilled, the relationship has been woefully deficient and the participants degraded and dissatisfied’. [51] Those indulging in such limited activity were degraded by the desire which Sanger not only termed ‘the villain’, but, bizarrely, defined as a ‘relentless, inhuman driving power’. [52]

Contemporaneously, and again in contrast, Barnes repeatedly depicts the polymorphously-desiring woman for whom birth control is an important means of securing greater pleasure, and in situations which mock Sanger’s ideals. Amelia’s sexual appetite has already been noted, but in the scenes discussed above, Laura has sex with Wendell while his wife waits on the other side of the door, and her very douche is presented by his child. Similarly, another of Wendell’s mistresses, Molly Dance, ‘got her children where and when it pleased her’. Indeed, Molly does not trouble as to the identity of her lovers, but views those penises that secure her pleasure as disembodied ‘important instruments’. [53] Clearly, Barnes is presenting extreme situations, something probably alien to her own and Sanger’s readers, but what she is restoring is a sexual longing divorced from constricting societal frameworks. What triumphantly emerges is that which Barnes, in a story written in 1919, referred to as ‘lust – not a self-willed lust at all, a matter of heat’. The heroine of this piece is bringing an illegitimate and unannounced child home to her husband after several years’ absence. She insists that ‘one learns to be careful about death, but never, never about…’, where the ellipsis clearly sets out the perceived value of thoughts of contraception in the moment of erotic excitement. [54] Barnes refuses to valorise abstinence or to denounce desire itself, whatever its consequences.

It is ironic that while Barnes critiques birth control rhetoric for its failure to properly accept and embrace female sexuality, it is for exaggerating and succumbing to that force that Sanger is currently most violently attacked. The cultural anxiety over this drive has clearly not expired, for a profusion of anti-abortion websites vilify Sanger with catalogues of corrupted, misleading and baldly invented statements purporting to be quotations from her. For example, a claim endlessly resurfaces that Woman and the New Race contains the stated objective of ‘unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children’, while the text contains no sentence even resembling this one. [55] The necessity of its fabrication eloquently illustrates the extent to which such views are anathema to Sanger’s published message, and that in turn rather proves the validity of Barnes’s critique.

To Barnes, Sanger’s reluctance to countenance female sexual desire not only hobbled her campaign but rendered it complicit with the very patriarchal values that had initially outlawed contraceptive instruction. Ryder thus demonstrates not only the estrangement from their own sexuality that women suffer within such a value system, but also the extent to which any attempted resistance is impossible within such constraints. For example, following a difficult birth Amelia dreams of a woman ‘sleeping, with pleasant hands crossed on small pleasant breasts, her fair hair about her thoughtless face’. [56] This vision of an asexual woman, pleasant but calm, with her ‘small pleasant breasts’ makes a pointed comparison to Amelia’s own full-breasted lactation. The woman in the vision has renounced her desire, represented by her finery, ‘slippers of down’, ‘down-enriched robe’ and ‘little litter of women’s things’, abandoning these in favour of the ‘heavy Bible’ pointedly open over them. [57] This is Amelia’s visualisation of the chaste femininity which she fails to achieve: walls decorated with ‘pictures […] of women going nowhere to nothing’, and a narrator who ironically asks ‘who can say that a woman dreams of aught […] surely nothing uncomely’. [58] In comparison Wendell is cast as a ‘great fair ox’, gaining entry to the room but firmly rebuffed with the instruction, ‘Go away and do not try to defile me’. [59] This dream clearly serves as a correlative, allowing Amelia imagined resistance in a reality where she is free from unwanted pregnancy. However, it only transfers her renounced desire onto her husband, and does nothing to question the casting of female sexuality as unfeminine and inappropriate, something to be suppressed through religious and social control. There is an attempt here not to exceed patriarchal suppression but to mount a rebellion from within its values, attempting vainly to find strength in the image of the sexually unmotivated woman which it has created and demands.

This multivalent chapter is at least in part Barnes’s angry response to the toothless campaigns that sought to alleviate women’s subjection without at first examining and rejecting its basic framework. It is in this sense analogous to her newspaper articles on suffrage campaigns. While it is misleading to suggest that this chapter is a parody of Sanger alone, Barnes certainly considers that the campaigner was fatally guilty of some of this myopia. Sanger’s failure in this regard is all the more puzzling in that she wrote perceptively and persuasively on the subject of women’s need to escape established modes of thought. She claimed that:

Women are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to think as men think […] hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element […] She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her. [60]

However, Sanger’s conception of that ‘feminine element’ was too often a slight reordering of patriarchal visions of woman, and she very rarely wholly abandoned marriage, monogamy and motherhood. As Linda Gordon argues in her politically charged account of American birth control, Sanger’s campaign ‘could hardly be considered radical in that it did nothing to challenge the conventional Victorian structure of sex relations’. [61] Sanger’s biographer, David M. Kennedy, similarly described her as one who ‘seemed merely to dress out in new language nineteenth-century ideas about woman’s sacredness and sexual uniqueness’. [62] Such disguised recycling of a repressive ideology is clearly potentially damaging, but Sanger’s rhetorical power and political success aggravated this effect. Proclaiming such a retrograde assessment of humanity as the key to unchain ‘woman’s nature [and] uplift her to a plane unimagined’ to the thousands of women who appealed directly to her prevented genuine progress that might have been advocated elsewhere. [63] Sanger did more than anyone to bring female suffering to public attention, but what she could not do, as Barnes detected, was to exceed the cultural suppression of active female sexual desire, or deeper stereotypes of femininity. In the terms of Stallybrass and White, Sanger failed spectacularly to challenge the ‘domain of discourse’, and remained perversely and impotently reliant upon it.

Sanger’s attitude towards women is intriguingly reminiscent of her approach to the thousands of letters which she edited into the compilation Motherhood in Bondage. These original missives are quite untraceable, and there is not one date or even general address amongst them. Moreover, even Sanger’s staunchest supporters admit doubts as to the collection’s authenticity, admitting, for example, that it is possible to ‘question whether the men and women who wrote to Sanger could really have been as ignorant of contraceptive methods as these letters suggest’. Moreover, there is sometimes a suspiciously similar vocabulary across the letters, such as the phrase ‘“happy-go-lucky husbands” (a term used both by the letter writers and Sanger herself)’. [64] The exact nature of Sanger’s raw material, her treatment of it and her potential motivations are beyond this discussion, but it seems that her vision required at least extensive editing. In her pamphlets and books she appears to have attempted to analogously re-craft humanity, writing out and concealing those desires that Barnes rather foregrounds. This may have secured Sanger greater support, but, as is seen with the fate of Barnes’s Laura Twelvetrees, a rejection of the libido as inhuman and villainous leaves women helplessly bemired in their subjection, whether or not contraception is possible.

Sanger assaulted only one symptom of a wider and more fundamental oppression and objectification of women, and did even this in limited terms. Attacks on Sanger have recently become both widespread and fervent, but have most commonly accused her of diluting her demands, of associating with eugenicist and racist groups, and above all of hypocrisy. It is certainly true that whatever her publicly stated ideals, she understood and accepted non-monogamous sexual desires; the index to only the first volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger lists eleven named lovers. Madeline Gray remarks from readings of her diaries that ‘when [Sanger] was too tired or disturbed to sleep, only one thing seemed to relax her, and that was sexual intercourse. If [her husband] wanted to stay celibate for a while, let him. She knew what she wanted’. [65] This does demonstrate that at some level, Sanger was quite aware of the distortion she practised, but this behaviour had little or no impact on her public message. It was importantly not her personality but that inadequate message which Barnes attacked.

Barnes’s detection of an inability to truly grasp the contributory discourses amongst the suffrage campaigners and other reformers she interviewed and observed is inescapably subjective, for there is no established record of such meetings. However, Margaret Sanger’s campaign was one largely waged through extant publications, and it is possible to test Barnes’s implied criticism that it accepts and to an extent champions the underlying structures of an inherently oppressive view of women. While Sanger’s campaign undeniably benefited American women ultimately, Barnes perceptively reveals Sanger as grasping, with revolutionary rhetoric, the domains of discourse, but merely lightly rearranging or re-dressing them. Sanger, like Barnes’s portrayal of her contemporary New York reformers, emerges as unable or unwilling to address the fundamental hierarchies that would allow the securing of Stallybrass and White’s ‘politically transformative power’. [66] This is not, crucially, to claim that Barnes opposed the cause of female suffrage, nor to suggest that she did not passionately advocate birth control, if that phrase can be reclaimed from Sanger’s idiosyncratic campaign. She might have believed in both, but she also exposed these particular advocates’ own self-inflicted defeat, as part of a despairingly delivered portrait of a culture for which she delivered a diagnosis, but for which she would not presume to offer, or believe in, any universal cure.

University of Birmingham

Notes

[1] Letter to Emily Coleman, 7 August 1938. University of Maryland Special Collections, Djuna Barnes Papers, Series II, Box Three, Folder 12.

[2] Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 145.

[3] Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 201.

[4] Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), p. 80.

[5] Djuna Barnes, ‘Part Victory and Part Defeat at Suffrage Aviation Meet’, in New York, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 54-6 (p. 55).

[6] Ibid., p. 55.

[7] Ibid., p. 56.

[8] Ibid., p. 56.

[9] Djuna Barnes, ‘Seventy Trained Suffragists Turned Loose on the City’, in New York, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 64-68 (p. 65). Hereafter cited as ‘Suffragists’.

[10] Ibid., p. 66.

[11] Ibid., p. 68.

[12] Djuna Barnes, ‘’Round Ben Franklin’s Statue Forum Orators Fret and Fume’, in New York, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 37-42 (p. 41).

[13] ‘Suffragists’, p. 68.

[14] June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (New York: Quadrangle, 1972), p. 4.

[15] Djuna Barnes, ‘Alfred Stieglitz on Life and Pictures’, in Interviews, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1985), pp. 211-222 (pp. 213-4, 215).

[16] Djuna Barnes, ‘Woman Police Deputy is Writer of Poetry’, in New York, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 305-315 (pp. 305, 306, 307, 307).

[17] Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger; An Autobiography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1938), pp. 39, 494. Hereafter cited as Autobiography.

[18] Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), pp. 234, 8. Hereafter cited as New Race.

[19] Djuna Barnes, ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’, in New York, ed. by Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989), pp. 233-45 (pp. 238, 240).

[20] Sheryl Stevenson, ‘Ryder as Contraception: Barnes v. the Reproduction of Mothering’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13 (1993), 97-106 (p. 98).

[21] Beth Widmaier Capo, ‘Can This Woman Be Saved?: Birth Control and Marriage in Modern American Literature’, Modern Language Studies, 34 (2004), 28-41 (p. 33).

[22] New Race, p. 2.

[23] Djuna Barnes, Ryder (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p. 95. Hereafter cited as Ryder.

[24] Stevenson, p. 100.

[25] Capo, p. 33.

[26] Ryder, p. 126.

[27] Ibid., p. 126.

[28] Ibid., p. 126.

[29] Margaret Sanger, Family Limitation, 2nd ed (London: Bakunin, 1920), p. 6. Hereafter cited as Family.

[30] Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 186.

[31] Ryder, p. 127.

[32] Ibid., p. 96.

[33] New Race, p. 177.

[34] Ryder, p. 160.

[35] Ibid., p. 160.

[36] Family, p. 8.

[37] Cited in Joan M. Jensen, ‘The Evolution of Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation Pamphlet, 1914-1921’, Signs, 6 (1981), 548-567 (p. 559). There is no extant accessible copy of the original 1914 version of Sanger’s Family Limitations pamphlet. The British Library holds the 1920 UK version of it. However, Jensen reproduces the first edition of the pamphlet in full in her article.

[38] New Race, p. 170.

[39] Ryder, p. 159.

[40] Ibid., p. 95.

[41] Ibid., p. 32.

[42] Autobiography, p. 391.

[43] Margaret Sanger, Woman Rebel, ed. and introd. by Alex Baskin (original document published as The Woman Rebel, March 1914; facsimile repr. New York: Archives of Social History, State University of New York, 1976), p. 1.

[44] Margaret Sanger, ‘What Every Girl Should Know: Sexual Impulses – Part II’, in The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003-), I: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, ed. by Esther Katz (2003), pp. 41- 46 (p. 43). (First published in New York Call, 29 December 1912). Hereafter cited as ‘Every Girl’.

[45] Autobiography, p. 292.

[46] ‘Every Girl’, p. 43.

[47] Margaret Sanger, ‘Woman’s Error and her Debt’, in The Birth Control Review (Aug. 1921), no page numbers available, in the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, catalogue number MSM S70: 0911-2 <www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger> [accessed 17 December 2005].

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ryder, p. 125.

[50] New Race, p. 117.

[51] Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (New York: Brentano’s, 1926), pp. 141, 142, 142.

[52] Margaret Sanger, Motherhood in Bondage, foreword by Margaret Marsh (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. 265-6. Emphasis mine.

[53] Ryder, p. 191.

[54] Djuna Barnes, ‘Spillway’, in Collected Stories, ed. and introd. by Phillip Herring (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997), pp. 266-278 (pp. 272, 274).

[55] This entirely spurious remark is reproduced endlessly, but is here taken from the home pages of Eads Home Ministries <www.eadshome.com/MargaretSanger.htm> [accessed 30 November 2005].

[56] Ryder, p. 98.

[57] Ibid., pp. 98-99.

[58] Ibid., pp. 99, 98.

[59] Ibid., p. 99.

[60] New Race, pp. 98-9.

[61] Gordon, p. 225.

[62] David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 135.

[63] New Race, p. 182.

[64] Margaret Marsh, ‘Foreword’, in Motherhood in Bondage, by Margaret Sanger (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), pp. xi-liii (pp. xix, xxvii).

[65] Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), p. 71.

[66] Stallybrass and White, p. 201.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 8, Spring 2006

America Actually: An Introduction

Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans
© Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans. All Rights Reserved

The annual BAAS Postgraduate Conference has an important function in galvanising the next generation of American Studies scholars in the UK. This year’s one-day postgraduate conference on 19 November 2005 was enormously popular, attracting more than 70 delegates, over 60 of whom were postgraduate students. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of BAAS, ‘America Actually’ explored multiple readings of American literature, culture and history and, as always, aimed to provide a supportive and informal environment within which young academics can present their work. This special conference edition of U.S. Studies Online offers a small selection of some of the excellent papers that were heard during the day.

Richard Espley’s article, ‘‘Something so fundamentally right’: Djuna Barnes’s Uneasy Intersections with Margaret Sanger and the Rhetoric of Reform’, argues persuasively against traditional critiques of Barnes’s fiction. Interrogating concepts of social reform, the same ones which prompted Barnes’s attitude of ‘smiling despair’, Espley demonstrates how previous readings of Barnes’s famously censored first novel, Ryder, published in 1928, have subscribed to the view that Barnes essentially presents a vision of a world before the impact of birth control. Espley maintains that the novel exposes Barnes’s frustrations with the birth control movement, led by famous reformer Margaret Sanger whose refusal to countenance ideas of female sexual desire fundamentally eclipsed an integral component in female identity. Drawing on socio-historical sources and examining the cultural anxiety with which contraceptive reform was associated, Espley examines Barnes’s emphasis on female sexuality, and her claimed ‘textual relationship’ to Sanger.

Also keying into contemporary debates over society’s relationship to the individual, John McKiernan’s article, ‘Tyranny of the Majority and Judicial Power: Using Tocqueville to Evaluate the Activism of Justice William Brennan’, delivers an insightful reading of Justice William Brennan’s 1956-1990 Supreme Court career through the lens of Tocqueville’s judicial theory. Working from the observation that both men held similar views of the nature of tyranny, McKiernan considers why their views on judicial activism differed so greatly. Tocqueville stresses the central passivity of the judiciary, while Brennan’s emphasis on the ‘pro-active court’ raises questions of judges ‘making rather than following the law’. Interrogating ideas of power, judicial impartiality, and the rights of the individual in the legal system, McKiernan’s article thoughtfully engages with contemporary cultural and legal issues.

Yan Ying focuses on the functions of language in her article, ‘In the Ruins of the Tower of Babel: On the Use of Language in Chinese American Literature’. Examining a wide range of different ‘Englishes’ in her study of Gus Lee’s China Boy, including American English, Pidgin English, dialect Chinese and Pidgin Chinese, she focuses on their use in articulating identity and difference within a Chinese American cultural context, with Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen’s God’s Wife, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior all supplying crucial points of reference in her argument. Adapting the language of psychoanalysis, Ying’s postcolonial reading of these second generation Chinese American texts confronts issues of identity, subjectivity and voice.

Simon Turner’s exploration of Vietnam war culture in his article ‘“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there”: Vietnam combat literature and the limits of authenticity’ ponders the ethics involved in writing military history. He uses Paul Fussell’s breakthrough critical study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and notions of a hierarchy of authenticity as a touchstone for his investigation. Pitting more contemporary Vietnam combat literature, such as that written by Lewis Shiner and Robert Olen Butler, against well known texts by Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien, the article seeks to unpick the ‘secret history’ perpetuated by previous authors. Turner offers new readings which do not rely on restrictive binary discourse and estimations of heroism. Concentrating on the valorisation of the veteran’s account, Turner examines the ‘unknowableness’ of warfare and questions Fussell’s conclusions. Offering a postmodern critique on the war narrative, the article deconstructs notions of authenticity, representation and literary exclusions.

These four challenging and diverse papers, evolved from the proceedings of ‘America Actually 2005’, reveal the exciting research climate which currently characterizes the field of American Studies. We hope that the BAAS Postgraduate Conference continues to provide such a fertile proving ground for postgraduates seeking to develop their academic skills.

The fifth paper in this collection is the 2005 winner of the BAAS Ambassador’s Postgraduate Essay Prize, Camilla Cox’s ‘Unearthing Resistance: African American Cultural Artefacts in the Antebellum Period’. Noting that discussions of African American art have traditionally ignored the cultural production of slaves, Cox argues for a ‘critical revision of the tenacious belief that African and African-American slaves did not have, and could not create, a vigorous and expressive culture’. Using recent archaeological and documentary evidence, Cox seeks to redress the underestimation of a community of artisans whose very circumstances implied a lack ownership of their own production, cultural or otherwise.

University of Sheffield

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 9, Autumn 2006

Multilingualism and Immigration in U.S. Public Policy: 1850-1910

Antony Adolf
© Antony Adolf. All Rights Reserved

Language provides the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
Ferdinand de Saussure [1]

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat [2]

The Unmaking of American Multilingualism?

In a historic session on May 19^th, 2006, the U.S. Senate decided by two separate majority votes that English would officially become, for the first time, not only America’s ‘national’ language, but its ‘common and unifying’ language as well. [3] If backed by the House of Representatives, the proposed legislation would give the federal government bold new powers to ‘preserve and enhance’ the English language in U.S. territories, presumably at the cost of non-English languages. [4] Were these decisions radical first steps towards unmaking America’s multilingual past? Or were they conservative continuations of a historically constant idealization and bias in favour of American English-only monolingualism?

The aim of this study of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy is to present and discuss key legal, economic and cultural developments that have and continue to shape confluent debates surrounding the legitimacy and place of so-called ‘foreign’ (i.e., non-English) languages and their users in U.S. territories in the period between about 1850 and 1910. [5]

It is imperative for our purposes here to begin at this point in U.S. history because in the decades immediately following there occurred what may be called a major internal ‘implosion’ and an equally significant external ‘explosion’ in U.S. public policy, pushing America into a new age and onto the world stage. The internal implosion was that the cultural and linguistic plurality encouraged by global migrations became a polarizing force in American daily life as well as in the national self-awareness. The external explosion was that the U.S. government began its international interventions abroad, often causing similar implosions and polarizations in host countries and, in so doing, reinforcing biases and prejudices at home. As a result, between Reconstruction and World War One inclusively, many of the systems and institutions from which multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy cannot be separated came to power and still hold sway today. These networks of influence paradoxically transformed multilingualism into both a rallying cry for political conservatism and a catalyst for radical social change. Tracing the history of American multilingualism from these two antithetical perspectives simultaneously makes it possible to contextualize the emergence of multilingualism not only within certain patterns of immigration discourse, but also amongst the concrete actualities upon which immigration discourse is based. Doing so also permits us to keep in sight multilingualism’s longstanding relationships with other defining aspects of American culture and society, such as law, government, business, religion, race and foreign relations.

The argument is in two parts. The first is that English and English-speakers have indeed held an increasingly privileged place in the United States since at least the signing of the English-only Constitution in 1776, regardless of the fact that English has never been an ‘official’ national language. However, this does not mean that America has always been a monolingual or homo-lingual country where everyone uses One and the Same language. Rather, historical data supports the claim that multilingualism, a plurality of languages, has been the historical norm on the North American continent since before colonial times, just as it has been and still is in Europe, Asia and Africa.

This leads to the second part of the argument: that hetero-lingual (i.e., those who use ‘Other’, in this case non-English, languages) immigrants and their descendants have formed and will continue to be a vital if previously overlooked constituency in the U.S. polity, especially within the context of the emerging religious and market economies of the times. An analysis of how this heterogeneous collective negotiated its place(s) within often deliberately homogenizing systems and institutions brings the hidden history and power of linguistic plurality to light and, as such, may suggest how inter-linguistic understanding and cooperation can be inaugurated, sustained and enhanced both within and between national borders — or jeopardised.

Focusing on the dynamics of homo-lingual and hetero-lingual forces, or sometimes the lack thereof, also makes evident certain discrepancies between ‘America’s Promise’ to immigrants and what has actually been delivered. [6] These incongruities — intentional or not — converge in a consideration of how hetero-lingual immigrants have triumphed over and/or succumbed to their politically-charged plight. University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee accurately summarizes the situation in saying that the ‘dispute over immigration reform has been characterized as a battle between two messages: “Welcome to America” and “Please Go Home”’. [7] These contradictory messages place hetero-lingual immigrants and those who support their cause between a rock and a hard place. But the inauspicious irony in the two messages is found in the fact that they are both made in the English language.

The questions to be asked and tentatively answered here arise out of this ironic dichotomy: At which points in American history and for what reasons did unwelcoming messages advocating monolingualism and their real-world implications prevail? What role has multilingualism and language policy played in this ongoing immigration ‘battle’? And, ultimately, what insights into the current global dilemma regarding multilingualism and immigration can be gained by examining their complex but coherent history in U.S. public policy?

Linguistic Migrations

On the one hand, the U.S. Census Bureau uses the term ‘foreign-born’ population to refer to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen at birth. The category of foreign-born thus includes legal permanent residents, or immigrants; temporary migrants, such as students and seasonal workers; humanitarian migrants, such as refugees and asylum-seekers; and persons ‘illegally’ present in the United States. On the other hand, the U.S. ‘resident population’ is comprised of a) the ‘native’ population, including anyone born in the United States, a U.S. Island Area such as Puerto Rico or born abroad of a U.S. citizen parent and living within American territories; and b) the foreign-born population. [8] In this way both immigrants and natives are considered American ‘residents’, regardless of what language(s) they use. By omitting language as one of their constitutive elements, these essentialist categories have, until recently, marginalized multilingualism statistically. But this relatively recent statistical marginalization itself stems from a longer-established epistemological erasure of multilingualism in American political and social thought.

The U.S. Census Bureau only began collecting wide-ranging data on language-use in 1980. Nevertheless, it is telling that from 1850 to at least 1910, the American government did not consider language as important as other demographic markers in foreign-born populations. In many ways, 1850 was a turning point in the history of the U.S. Census, as the first questions on birthplace and occupation were inserted at this time and continue to be asked to this day. What this may mean, from the point of view of the American government until 1910, is that birthplace and occupation were on the whole more important to individual and national identity than language. With no push — yet — for official monolingualism, a push for official multilingualism by hetero-lingual immigrants would have seemed irrelevant and vice versa. This sustained denial of language as a definitive aspect of national and individual identity makes it necessary to use immigration data from the mid-19^th to early-20^th centuries for historical and analytical purposes. It was these immigrants and their descendants who shaped the linguistic demographics of America in 1910, when the Census Bureau first began asking linguistically-oriented questions on a racial basis. [9]

‘The dramatic increase in immigration to the United States’, write demographers Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, ‘during the 1840s may have been a motivation for adding the question on place of birth in the 1850 census’. [10] Two years earlier, in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, guaranteeing U.S. citizenship to Mexicans remaining on their land after the Mexican-American War. [11] This was, at the time, only a small part of a very big picture. American immigration increased from 599,000 in the 1831-1840 period to 1.7 million in the 1841-1850 period. [12] Annual data show an increase from 52,000 in 1843 to 235,000 in 1847, and the figure remained above 200,000 through 1857. [13] In 1850, less than 10% of the American population was born on foreign soil; by 1910, the number had grown to about 15%. The fact that from 1850 to 1910, over 95% of the population came from multilingual Europe, while making a significant ethnic or racial statement of preference, says relatively little about linguistic preference. Taken statistically and collectively, European immigrants were as likely to speak different languages as Africans or Asians in absolute terms, or more so if their relative scales are taken into consideration. [14] In terms of international migration and its socio-linguistic effects, the fate of these two last groups is astonishing: during this time, the foreign-born Asian population grew tenfold, while that of Africa rounds to zero percent throughout. [15] European immigration actually fell some 5% from 1850-1910, while the resident population of ‘Latin’ American descent more than doubled, thanks in large part to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. [16]

These figures offer more of a schema than an accurate depiction of the linguistic landscape of America at the time. Still, taking nationality as an indicator of language, we may be certain that America after the Civil War was not the superficially monolinguistic place it had been before these mass movements of peoples and the languages they brought with them, or linguistic migrations. In all probability, after the international immigration boom of the mid-19^th century, America looked and even sounded different. During the period in question, immigrants differed not only in quantity, but also and more importantly in diversity; that is, not only were there more immigrants, but they were also from more places of origin. This plurality of origins implies that immigrants brought with them a stunning array of languages as constitutive elements of their respective national heritages.

More telling, perhaps, is the fact that from 1850 to 1910, the foreign-born population of the North-Eastern States actually shrank by 10%, while that of the West grew ten times bigger. [17] It was as though the American North, already loud with New England English, was not as welcoming of multilingualism as the American West, where only echoes of the formerly dominant Native Indian languages could still be heard. The important thing to keep in mind is that by around 1850, immigrants were congregating in American cities more than anywhere else: the immigrant populations of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco and Cincinnati accounted for more than half of their respective populations. [18]

Data on ‘mother-tongues’ for 1910 was tabulated exclusively for the White population. [19] This racialization of language is rather difficult to understand, let alone accept uncritically. Language became a demographic marker for Whites in 1910, and non-Whites were considered English-speakers by default. This despite the fact that at this time immigration from historically non-White regions becomes pronounced, which led to such restrictive measures as the Japanese and Chinese Exclusion Acts. Within the racially-defined categorization of language-users set by the government, 12 out of the more than 13 million Caucasians who used a language other than English used European languages. The most frequently used of these were the Germanic languages, used by just under 4 million; the Romance languages, used by just over 2 million; Slavic languages, used by about 1.5 million; and Scandinavian languages, used by just over 1 million. [20] These impressive numbers may be taken as the socio-linguistic culmination of international immigration to America earlier in the 19^th century. Had it not been for the great influx of immigrants over the course of half a century, America’s linguistic make-up probably would not have changed much, if at all. It is at this point in American cultural history that the notion of English as the ‘native’ language and all others as ‘foreign’ languages entrenches itself in the national consciousness. However, its presence in the national subconscious probably dates back to at least the writing of the Constitution.

A comprehensive history of non-English languages and their literatures in America has yet to be written. Nevertheless, based on the previous figures, two concise but precise statements relative to our discussion may be made. First, much like democracy and capitalism, collective multilingualism may be considered a political, socio-economic and cultural experiment before 1910. By not keeping track of languages, let alone enforcing discriminatory laws against certain of them, the position of the federal government seems to have been that the use of non-English languages was acceptable so long as the English language remained America’s unquestioned lingua franca. America’s experimentation with collective multilingualism had a double effect. First, immigrants and their children who did not originally use English often learned to after coming to America. Second, residents who until then had lived exclusively in English were exposed to non-Englishness to a degree hitherto unheard of, particularly in the cities. This hetero-lingual exposure transformed American English into a homogenizing melting pot of languages that continues to boil to this day, and may one day boil over. That is, while English-speakers may or may not have accepted non-English-speakers, the English language accepted more than just a few non-English words and ideas, thus transforming both the language and its users, over time perhaps beyond recognition. [21]

However, the more governmental bureaucracy entered the scene in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the more stunted the use of non-English languages seems to have become. Between 1910 and 1940, the number of non-English users in America drops sharply by over 20%. This demographic plunge leads to a second preliminary conclusion. The archiving and statistical analysis of language coupled with the drastic change in linguistic policies it brought about seem to have motivated hetero-lingual American residents to become an (un)silent minority, in that they were unofficially free to speak the language(s) of their choice so long as they were never officially heard. This process was often internalized by the well known and documented ‘second generation syndrome’, in which the children of hetero-lingual parents are more likely to use the homo-lingual hegemonic language of their surroundings than their hetero-lingual ‘mother tongues’. In other words, immigrants and their children may have still used their non-English ‘native’ languages, but in order for them to be considered ‘native’ Americans, they had to use English. The more immigrants attempted to become American via English, the more their ‘native’ languages became ‘foreign’ to the English-speakers around them as well as the hetero-lingual immigrants themselves.

Logocide

As late as 1997, one critic described the history of monolingual American public policy vis-à-vis multilingualism in this way:

For most of our [American] history, language has not been a major theme in American political life. The chief reason for that, to be sure, is that God in his wisdom has given us a single dominant language, with few real dialects or patois of the sort that European nations have had to deal with in the course of their nation building… It’s true that America has always had substantial communities of speakers of non-English languages: indigenous peoples; groups absorbed in the course of territorial expansion, like the Francophones of Louisiana and the Hispanics of the Southwest; and the great flows of immigrants from 1880 to 1920 and during the past 30 years. And since the eighteenth century there have been recurrent efforts to discourage or suppress the use of other languages by various minorities, particularly at the time of the nativist movement of the turn of the century. But the focus on language has always been opportunistic, a convenient way of underscoring the difference between us and them; the issue has always subsided as minorities have become anglicized, leaving little symbolic residue in its wake. [22]

The tensions present in this broad overview reveal certain historically constant pressures and anxieties regarding collective multilingualism in America. To take just two examples: the first use of the word ‘us’, meaning the polity as a whole, resonates only partially with its second use in ‘us and them’, in which the polity is divided by language; and the incongruity between hetero-lingual groups ‘always’ existing and multilingualism as an issue ‘always’ subsiding. Moreover, hybrid forms of language such as Spanglish, as well as the processes of mutual transculturation or ‘transcreation’, are completely overlooked here. These unstated tensions, fleshed out with historical actualities, make clear that insofar as language in American political life is concerned, ‘systematic negligence’ of multilingualism on the federal level until about 1910 may be a more accurate description than what is described as an ‘opportunistic’ national enterprise in the quote above. Put differently, language has played a pivotal role in American political life, even if its role has most often gone unrecognized. This may be because homo-lingualism and national identity are so closely knit together in the tradition of Western political thought upon which the United States was founded that social formations based on hetero-lingualism are viewed either as Babel-like dreams or nightmares. [23] Political positions surrounding the language question thus become polarized into monolingual conservatives who want to keep alive a real or imagined linguistic status quo at any cost, and multilingual radicals who oppose them. The contentiousness embedded in this unwarranted polarization has left America’s multilingual track record far from spotless.

Once the only languages used on the continent, most Native Indian Languages are now considered ‘endangered languages’. [24] Only five of these genuinely ‘native’ languages spoken in what is now the United States have as many as 10,000 to 20,000 speakers, and only two have as many as 40,000 to 50,000. The Navajo language is the only native language with more than 100,000 speakers. [25] It is difficult if not impossible to establish how many Native Indian languages have existed in the Americas. However, that estimates reach as high as five thousand is a strong indication of how the European colonial, then continental national, governments’ early laissez-faire immigration and linguistic policies led, at least up to a certain point, directly to the de-legitimization of all non-European languages for political and legal purposes, and sometimes to their very extinction.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the colonial impulse of early Americans to view Native languages as inferior or unnecessary compared to English changed only insofar as the objects of their disregard or hostility switched to the languages of hetero-lingual immigrants instead. A review of the relative lack of federal governmental reforms regarding hetero-lingual immigrants before and after the 14^th Amendment in 1868 may help to contextualize its enactment as a turning point in the history of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy. This watershed Amendment denied basic rights to hetero-lingual immigrants precisely as it granted them to other disenfranchised minorities. From its enactment onwards, the federal government made bold and consistent efforts to severely limit the influx of non-English languages and their users from without, while State governments attempted to limit their growth from within.

When the Constitution was drafted in the late 18^th century, it seems not to have occurred to anyone that it was being written in English. Nothing seemed more ‘natural’, and no one who could ‘speak’ against it being written in English did so. The fact that the Constitution was wholly monolingual and denied the very existence of other languages within the framework of American democracy and jurisprudence passed altogether unnoticed. Multilingualism was thus refused a place in the pantheon of American freedoms and liberties, despite its predating monolingualism on the continent. Even if non-English users had spoken out, could they have been understood? The unfortunate answer is no, an answer that is as valid today as it was when Thomas Jefferson finished the last draft of the document which became the monolingual, and monolingually-biased, Constitution of the United States of (English) America. [26] In fact, I found no record of any significant federal law pertaining specifically to language in America before 1917, when Congress enacted the Immigration Law which included a literacy test in English.

This literacy test made explicit the necessity of having a working knowledge of English which had implicitly been a sine qua non of both American identity and participation in political life since the signing of the Constitution. [27] After the silencing of Native Americans, perhaps the greatest linguistic atrocity in human history, and through major territorial expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, American territories became geo-glossically English by virtue of becoming part of the supposedly monolingual ‘homeland’. Manifest Destiny thus became synonymous with manifest monolingualism. This de facto linguistic state remained largely uncontested until the mass influx of hetero-lingual immigrants after 1850 became an undeniable presence in American life. Nor was America ‘di-glossic’ in a socio-linguistic sense, if the term is taken technically as a society in which two languages co-exist in a relatively stable arrangement. There was nothing stable or dichotomous about multilingualism in America between 1850 and 1910. Rather, its fluid dynamics seem to have facilitated its legal and political sidestepping as an issue worthy of public debate. [28]

The situation changed significantly after the Civil War. Faced with reconstruction costs and a lack of labour, Congress passed the Homestead Act, granting up to 160 acres of land to settlers who promised to develop the land and remain on it for five years. Although the Act attracted immigrants from all over the world, it was also one of the last significant actions the American government would take to tacitly encourage hetero-lingual immigrants to come to the U.S. The Act also marked a change from the city as the only active site of collective multilingualism, to the rural countryside acting as one as well. Instead of or after congregating in city enclaves, many immigrants began to form smaller non-English communities across the West. These groups were usually hetero-lingual to each other but homo-lingual within themselves. Though Chicago and New York remained the primary destinations for new immigrants to the U.S., the point here is that rural areas presented opportunities and constraints to collective multilingualism which urban settings did not. As it turns out, the next best thing after silencing city-dwelling hetero-lingual immigrants proved to be isolating them in places where they could not be heard to begin with. While American agricultural and industrial capitalism promoted, defended and to a certain extent depended upon collective multilingualism, American government did not and could not do so officially without dealing a decisive blow to the language in which it came into being and through which it sustained its existence.

While the issues of race, class, and gender generated local and national self-empowering movements, the issue of language was not yet generating a similar response in disenfranchised American minority groups. Everyone in America having to fight for rights, or having rights to fight for, has to ‘speak out’ in English. The effect of this lack of inter-linguistic cohesion has been a double erasure of language, both as a political constituency and as an epistemological category. While language as such has been politically vested and investigated historically, language-groups by and large have not. [29] The passing of the 14^th Amendment was a key victory in the history of civil rights in America, but it was a key failure in the history of American multilingualism and immigration. This English-language Amendment to an English-language Constitution served only to reinforce the primacy of English over other languages in a territory whose borders were still taking shape. It benevolently guaranteed citizenship to all persons ‘born and naturalized’ in the United State s, including slaves. But by the very same stroke, it deliberately excluded each and every hetero-lingual immigrant who a) does not speak English, as they are not able to read the very law which for this reason would deny them citizenship, and b) is a ‘foreign-born’ resident who has yet to be ‘naturalized’. [30] To be ‘naturalized’ into the American body politic was and is to be ‘anglicized’. How, then, can it be claimed that language has never been part of American political life? [31]

In 1891, Congress passed yet another law excluding more would-be hetero-lingual immigrants from admission into the American Dream. This law forbade the direct and often non-English soliciting of immigrants by domestic American companies and also created the Superintendent of Immigration — ‘grand gatekeeper’ of immigrants.[32] Already by 1892, Ellis Island on the East Coast was opened and soon became the most important port of entry for Europeans émigrés, while Angel Island on the West Coast served the same function for those from Asia. In 1906, Congress enacted the Basic Naturalization Law, codifying a uniform law that forms the basis of all immigration laws today. In 1911, the Dillingham Commission issued its famous report, which solidified the sentiments and amplified the attitudes being discussed. Mr. Dillingham’s recommendations paved the way for the Quota Acts on immigrants of the 1920s, which were to stall the development of American multilingualism through immigration until after the Second World War.

A final blow came in 1915, when the ‘Americanization/100 Percentism’ campaign began, with its well-known pro-English and English-only slogans. A fiercely conservative, exclusivist and protectionist venture carried out by both the public and private sectors, ‘Americanization/100 Percentism’ is often said to have failed after the Great War. Even if this were true, the campaign fueled the Quota Acts of 1920s, which effectively put an end to the emergence of a truly 20^th-century American multilingualism and signalled the beginning of mass ‘illegal’ migrations. This monolingual campaign was the American government’s greatest triumph over multilingualism apart from the 14^th Amendment. By designating ‘foreign-born’ residents as less than or even non-Americans, the non-English languages they used also became at best ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ and at worst non-American. This exclusivist mentality reinforced the geo-glossic presupposition that America is ‘natively’ English while forsaking all those who, in its judgment, were mere barbarians — those absolute Others who, philologically speaking, to ‘our’ ears say ba-ba.

If there is one thing to take away from this slow but steady advance of restrictive and exclusive language policies, it is that the ‘officialization’ of one or more languages through governing documents, political institutions and legal systems entails what may be called a ‘logocide’ of all non-official languages. [33]

The American Babel, At Home and Abroad

In a little-known Pennsylvania trial of 1816, Frederick Eberle and others were charged with ‘Illegally Conspiring Together, By All Means, Lawfully and Unlawfully, With Their Bodies and Lives, to Prevent the Introduction of the English Language Into the Service of St. Michael’s and Zion’s Churches, Belonging to the German Lutheran Congregation in the City of Philadelphia’. [34] This case became one of the early precedents for State rather than federal governments privileging English over other languages, which in part explains the relative lack of federal language legislation until the early 20^th century. To be more precise, while Anglo-supremacy at the federal level was assured by the customs, covenants and conveniences discussed above, its status at the State and local levels was being actively and passively challenged by the millions of non-Anglophones arriving each decade. In reaction to this, State and local authorities for the most part took a much harder line on multilingualism than did federal authorities. For example, exclusivist legislation followed active resistance to anti-multilingualism when German immigrants united to uphold their linguistic traditions in their State- and locally-run churches and schools. Passive resistance to anti-multilingualism, which led instead to restrictive legislation, lay in the sheer number of hetero-lingual immigrants arriving each year, as well as in their status as (un)silent minorities.

In 1889, seventy years after the Eberle trial, the Bennett Law of Wisconsin embodied the exclusivity and restrictiveness of anti-multilingualism by submitting all schools and their hetero-lingual immigrant students to a monolingual English pedagogy. [35] Again, it was religious groups of German origin who fought against this monolingually-biased law. Thanks to their efforts, it was repealed three years later. [36] Religion thus seems to have been a pivot point from which hetero-lingual immigrants could fight for their linguistic rights.

More precisely, America’s religious platform was a double-edged sword for multilingualism because it was, as the Eberle case makes evident, equally a vehicle of (un)official monolingualism. According to martyrs of multilingualism such as Eberle, with the allowance for a plurality of religions under the Constitution, there ought also to be an allowance of a plurality of languages in which to worship, praise and preach. God, so their argument ran, created this American multilingualism through immigration. Who are we to limit it through law or other means, let alone destroy it? According to the religious foes of multilingualism, God’s chosen people (Americans) have been united by a common faith (Christianity) that must be reinforced through a common language (English). The debate continues both within and without religious communities to this day.

To draw upon a metaphor which has directed the course of Christian views on languages such as these for two milliennia, ‘Babel’ has two traditional meanings: the better known is ‘confusion’, the lesser known, ‘gate’. As in legal and political public policies, immigration was often the battleground upon which 19^th-century America’s covert religious warfare over multilingualism took place. Those who saw multilingualism as a path to national religious confusion were in direct opposition to those who saw it as a gate opening onto collective spiritual salvation. In an article entitled ‘America’s Ever-Changing Religious Landscape’, Richard N. Ostling writes:

The story of religion in the United States is the story of immigration. Ongoing waves of newcomers to this country, in combination with internal developments, have assured that no nation on earth has experienced such wholesale changes in its religious makeup or had such a lavish variety of faiths from which to choose. A brief survey of the past two centuries illustrates the point— and suggests no diminution of the trend in the future. [37]

While mass movements of immigrants were dramatically changing American demographics, another movement was on the rise and would forever change the religious and linguistic landscapes into which they were entering: evangelism. In 1776, the Methodists had been the 9^th largest religious group in the country; by 1850, they were the largest overall, due in large part to their active evangelical practices. Ranked behind them were the Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians Congregationalists, Episcopalians and Quakers. However, by 1890, the top four denominations had switched ranks again: Catholics were by this time followed by Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. Then, from 1925 onwards, Baptists ranked first among Protestant groups. ‘Religious evangelism’, claims one historian, ‘was the first continental force, an all-American phenomenon which transcended colonial differences… and made colonial boundaries seem unimportant’. [38] However, while transcending the ethnic differences this historian has in mind, evangelism made the boundaries between languages in post-colonial America more important both domestically and internationally, not less.

One of the 19^th-century counterparts to the 18^th-century colonial impulse to disregard or degrade colonized language-groups was evangelism’s drive towards anglicizing hetero-lingual immigrants while proselytizing them. The link between the Word of God and the English ‘Word’ was thus also a mediating factor in the transition from inter-national colonialism, in which arriving foreigners dominated native inhabitants, to intra-national colonialism, in which now-native inhabitants dominated the foreigners who were arriving.

Carl Follen, an immigrant from Germany who came to America at this time, is an exemplary case of the latter. Upon arrival in America, he declared his intention to become a citizen, which for him meant first and foremost learning English and adopting an evangelical tradition.[39] For a hetero-lingual immigrant to submit to the Spirit of American evangelism was to submit to the Spirit of English Grammar. ‘Churches once conducted wholly in the German language’, writes Arthur R. Shultz, ‘have [during this period] adopted the English language’, and the same can be said for most non-English Christians who adopted a ‘new’ evangelical faith. [40] As has been noted by Y. N. Kly,

[t]he American identity which the foreigners were to assume simply happened to concern the English Language and the Protestant religion. Cultural homogeneity was to be established at the cost of their language, at minimum. It was up to the schools [often run by religious bodies] to create and purvey the national history, and indeed, the national myths. The plan proceeded slowly, with much assistance from government legislation and public funds, indicative of strong ruling elite support. [41]

Evangelism’s advocacy of God’s Word as monolingual was not altogether different from the active and/or passive imposition of English upon hetero-lingual immigrants by State and local governments. Aside from both being divinely sanctioned, support for their mutually monolingual causes can be said to have come both ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. In addition to the many social and economic factors that may have prompted them to do so, hetero-lingual immigrants often learned English as a second language as a means of achieving their very salvation. A Catholic Archbishop gave voice to this willingness on the part of immigrants to learn another language, despite the fact that it caused generational conflict between German speakers: ‘It is enough to reflect that no English, American, or Irish citizen learns German, and that every German seeks earnestly to acquire the English language. The rising German generation speaks and understands English so well that mothers complain they cannot understand their children when they converse together’. [42]

For the most part, American missions abroad followed their churches’ domestic linguistic policies, which were strikingly similar to those of colonial Britain. The British Macaulay Minute of 1835 ordered that ‘all funds be henceforth employed in imparting knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language’.[43] As in American offshore territories, this linguistic indoctrination took place largely through domestic tax-payer supported English-language schools run by religious bodies. At the end of the 19^th century, American Adventism’s foreign membership already equaled that in North America, spurring a growth-rate averaging 67.9% per decade throughout the 20^th century. [44] In 1862, the American missionary sent to ‘educate’ the ruler of Thailand wrote that ‘knowledge of the English language, science, and literature’ was essential in order to be considered educated by the factitious monolingual standard of American evangelism. Hallett Abend, a missionary to China, equated ignorance of English with lack of intelligence. [45] Another young American missionary claimed, in 1910, that the ‘English language is today becoming a universal language. Almost everywhere you travel you will find your railway tickets printed both in English and the vernacular’. [46] Notwithstanding its invalidity, the idea that all non-English languages around the world have become ‘vernaculars’ as a consequence of its supposed universality may be understood as the international articulation of the particular domestic cultural and political climate in America vis-à-vis mono/multilingualism.

American interventionist policies in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war also made explicit in foreign lands what was rarely acknowledged as domestic U.S. policy, even implicitly. Part of the provisional Philippine Constitution reads:

No person shall be eligible to election as Resident Commissioner who is not a bona fide elector of said islands and who does not owe allegiance to the United States and who is not more than thirty years of age and who does not read and write the English language. [47]

By this statement, one’s allegiance to the English language became inseparable from one’s allegiance to America as a nation. In this way, the American government simultaneously actively put down and let down non-English languages outside the homeland as it had passively within its borders. Rather than acting strongly and decisively against collective multilingualism, the federal government was content to keep it weak and unable to do anything for itself. A turn of the century diplomat claimed that he was hired ‘without any qualifications whatever for diplomatic work — not even the knowledge of French or any other foreign language’. [48] How many people in America at the time did have these linguistic qualifications? These discriminatory practices were an extension of the monolingual paradigm of American domestic public policy into foreign policy, in which evangelism acted as a common catalyst.

Farms, Factories and Friction

The economic historian David C. North points out that the years between 1850 and 1857 were ‘were periods of significant foreign borrowing’. [49] Such usurious practices were to increase dramatically until World War One, when the tide of debt began to be transferred across the Atlantic. At the same time, in 1850 America made 144 million in exports and, by 1860, 333 million. The numbers were to increase exponentially from then on. [50] The massive loans that backed the Reconstruction Era boom in exports can be attributed in large part to the increase in connections with foreign investors, consumers and importers facilitated by the waves of linguistic migration in the second half of the 19^th century. This rising economic importance of hetero-lingual immigrants, in turn, amplified the traditional frictions between those in favour of multilingualism and those opposed to it.

In 1894, Congress established the Bureau of Immigration within the Treasury Department and, in 1903, moved it to the Department of Commerce and Labour. Thus, in two swift strokes, hetero-lingual immigrants were first categorized as deficient but potential citizens, then as a) producers of domestic goods and foreign capital, b) commodities, insofar as they constituted source of labour, and c) consumers. [51] In 1820, the foreign-born population of the United States accounted for only 9% of labour, 25% of merchants and 31% of farmers and mechanics; in 1850 they accounted for 38% of labour, only 5% of merchants and a whopping 54% of farmers and mechanics.[52] These numbers suggest that the more employers in industrial centres and on farms came to realize the value of the variety of human capital flowing in with hetero-lingual immigrants, the more the latter were welcomed with open arms.

Henry Ford himself appears to have believed that multilingualism could play a pivotal role in furthering America’s interests abroad and protecting them at home. In this belief, he sought to protect free market multilingualism from monolingual government attacks as a means of hastening his unique version of ‘Americanization’. In the words of Stephen Vaughn, ‘Ford felt that emphasis should be on teaching English rather than erasing German. He believed that the loyal foreign-language groups not only could hasten Americanization but could take a stand that would make impossible the survival of an un-American or anti-American press’. [53]

In 1850, 55.5% of the immigrants were in the industrial Northeast, creating serious tensions between State governments’ support for monolingualism and local industries’ support for multilingualism. [54] Many occupations during this period show an increase of foreign-born hetero-lingual workers entirely disproportionate to the number of immigrants of the same occupation who came into the country. This statistical disjunction suggests that those who came to America during this period chose an occupation, and a second language (English), irrespective of what they had done for a living and what language they used ‘back home’. [55] Another historian has shown that between 1870 and 1880 ‘there were changes in the occupational distribution of the labour force, including a decrease of the proportion in agriculture, an increase of the proportion in the other major occupational groups, and further changes in particular occupations’. [56] Through the immigrant workforce, multilingualism was never wholly separated from the workplace, regardless of the fact that the Census to this day asks only what language residents speak at home, not at work.

The quasi-schizophrenic split between work in one language and domestic life in another must, among other things, have taken a serious psycho-affective toll on immigrants. [57] As a unique dimension of multilingualism, ‘split-linguisticality’ is the experience of work in one language, family life in another and community life in another still, and so on. This experience may be reinforced by geography (as in ghettos, enclaves and isolated rural groups), labour divisions (including class, education level and job characteristics) and the repetition of culture activities (as in the arts and general recreation). However, split-linguisticality seems to have become less pronounced around 1910, when new laws and economic policies as well as an aging workforce diminished the presence of multilingualism in the industrial workplace until immigration picked up again after World War Two. [58]

As fast as the rise of smokestacks, railroads spread across the American horizon for much of the 19^th century. This new mode of transportation became as important to rural multilingualism as major cities were to urban multilingualism. [59] ‘The major determinant of the pace of westward expansion before 1860’, North notes, ‘continued to be the profitability of the traditional staples: wheat, corn, and their derivatives. Waves of western expansion in 1816-1818, 1832-1836, 1846-1847, and 1850-1856 reflected the increased profitability of these products’. [60] Another reflection of this profitability is to be found in the value of agricultural implements produced in the West, which grew from $1.9 million in 1850 to $7.9 million in 1860. [61] Western expansion translated into a linguistic utopia for hetero-lingual immigrants who were quick to discovered that they were free to live and learn in any language if they congregated in places far from government eyes and ears. Across the Midwest, small villages began to appear in which not a word of English could be heard. On the West Coast, enclaves of immigrants from China, Japan and the Philippines began to overflow, especially after the Spanish-American War. This trend has led some labour analysts to claim with assurance that ‘much of this [immigrant] flow was initiated by active recruitment on the part of American employers’. [62]

The initiative on the part of America’s business community in favour of hetero-lingual immigrants was met with hostility at all governmental levels, due in part to the different voting patterns they brought with them. In 1885, Congress passed an act prohibiting labourers to come to the U.S. on a paid ticket by an employer. An attempt was made in Congress to add a Japanese Exclusion Act to the Chinese one of 1882 when the Japanese population in America reached 72,000 in 1910 with more that 40,000 in California alone. These bills, whether failed or successful, are a testament to the inequity hetero-lingual immigrants experienced even before they stepped on the proverbial boat. [63] The chasm between industrial and rural policies on multilingualism on one side, and government policies on hetero-lingual immigrants on the other, would only grow in the next few decades. Then, under the unified banner of patriotism, monolingualism overcame multilingualism in the ‘Americanization/100 Percentism’ campaign.

Linguistic Agency

Both as a complex social body and as a diverse cultural unit, America has always been multilingual. Even if monolingualism has prevailed legally and politically, multilingualism has been sustained in American life through economic, religious, and immigration practices, among other means. The point is that since inception, certain of America’s systems and institutions—legal and political ones—have privileged one language over others. However, others have been more linguistically equitable, including certain industrial, rural and occasionally religious ones. The problem is that while many prejudices embedded in American history have been challenged and invalidated by scholars and activists alike, the bias against those who do not speak ‘our’ language persists intact and is seemingly inviolable. [64] With this end in sight, the history of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy becomes a study in a particular kind of agency — linguistic agency — that can be granted or denied, fostered or cut off, negotiated for or fought against in and by the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government, as well as corporations, organizations, churches, households and individuals. The notion of linguistic agency captures and ties together many of the threads that run throughout this study, and so may form a fitting end to it.

By using a given language, it may be said that a person is acting as an ‘agent’ of that language. With a critical mass of such linguistic agents in a given geographical area, a language can, in turn, be said to become its geo-glossic ‘principal’. [65] Unofficial monolingualism can be sustained passively as long as the principal-agent relationship is homo-lingual and remains unchallenged by hetero-lingual elements. Having no real need to become official, recourse to active measures is unnecessary and perhaps unadvisable. This is also how a language becomes unofficially identified with a country, as was the case with America. This principal-agent relationship is limited on all sides by contingencies such as which language(s) and dialect(s) have traditionally been used, the geographic characteristics of the places in which they are used, and the demographics of those who use them. These contingencies entail a degree of linguistic determinism because one rarely chooses the language-group or place into which one is born, and one is rarely able to change the language of everyone else around.

When hetero-lingual elements enter a homogeneous principal-agent structure, the whole dynamic changes — and this is when things get tricky conceptually and politically. If a single Agent of language X arrives in the geo-glossic territory of language Y, it is improbable that such Agent X will have much influence on language Y or on Agent Ys as a whole. But if a critical mass of Agent Xs arrive, the geo-glossic balance of power between languages X and Y may be upset. This is when efforts to restrain and/or eliminate multilingualism become necessary from a protectivist and exclusivist standpoints. Numbers are not the only factors that play a pre-eminent role in determining the geo-glossic characteristics of residents in a given territory: institutions and systems can also act as agents for a given language, often weathering time much better than living linguistic agents. These linguistic and para-linguistic factors, taken together, go a long way in explaining how the English language came to dominate non-English languages in America before 1850.

Being the agent of a language and having agency in a language are two very different things, and both are equally important in understanding linguistic agency. Agent X can only be effective as an agent of language X as long as there are other Agent Xs around. When Agent X enters the geo-glossic domain of language Y alone, she ceases to be an effective agent of language X, but does not necessarily stop having agency in language X. She can, for example, still read and write in language X to other Agent Xs at their geo-glossic place of origin or elsewhere. If Agent X gains a sufficient degree of fluency in language Y, she would thus gain a corresponding degree of agency in language Y. But this Agent X/Y may not be accepted as an Agent Y by other Agent Ys because she was previously an Agent X, because she has not reached the level of linguistic agency in language Y necessary to become its agent, or simply because she does not want to. If, however, a critical mass of Agent Xs categorically refuse to gain any agency in language Y, or find no need to, or instead propose that language X be accepted as geo-glossically equivalent to language Y in a given territory, this makes all Agent Ys quite anxious and creates an impetus for anti-multilingual sentiment and the establishment of official monolingualism, either as a defensive or pre-emptive measure.

Conversely, Agent Ys may see the intrinsic value in, say, commerce and culture in having as many multilingual agents on its side as possible. This added linguistic value stems from the fact that as an Agent X gains agency in language Y, she is also gaining agency between language X and Y. By positioning herself at this crossroad, Agent X/Y brings into being a world of possibilities for both inter-linguistic communication and cooperation. It is along these lines that, for instance, free market systems between 1850 and 1910 seem to have supported the peaceful co-existence of languages in collective multilingualism, while government institutions at all levels did not and perhaps could not have without peril. While all this may sound purely theoretical, it is not. I have simply translated some of the discourse patterns and concrete actualities of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy into abstract terms in the hope that, as such, they may prove useful in other historical contexts, including our own.

University of British Columbia

Notes

[1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Tullio de Mauro, my translation (Paris: Payothèque, 1974), p. 71.

[2] Gustavo Pérez Firmat, ‘Dedication’ to his website (2005) <http://www.gustavoperezfirmat.com> [accessed July 28 2006]

[3] Suzanne Gamboa, ‘Senate Votes Twice for English Language’, Associated Press (19 May 2006) <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1980874> [accessed 28 July 2006]

[4] Ibid.

[5] This is the first of a two-part study of multilingualism and immigration in U.S. public policy, the second of which focuses on the period between 1910 and the present.

[6] ‘Securing America’s Promise’ was the slogan of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ‘Strategic Plan’ after September 11, 2001, but applies retroactively in spirit, as well. The ‘Strategic Plan’ is available at the USCIS website. <http://www.uscis.gov/graphics/aboutus/repsstudies/USCISSTRA TEGICPLAN.pdf> [accessed 28 July 2006]

[7] Austan Goolsbee, ‘Legislate Learning English? If Only It Were So Easy’, New York Times (22 June 2006) <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/business/worldbusiness/22scene.html?ei=5088&en=1fce75edd7ad51fe&ex=
1308628800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1156457931-9PpC0me7AsduzNg9W52Q4A> [accessed 24 August 2006]

[8] U.S. Census Bureau Home Page. <http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/immigration.html> [accessed 28 July 2006]

[9] For a provocative contemporary approach to the concept of ‘mother tongues’ and multilingualism, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Tongue Ties : Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). I would like to thank Professor Gustavo Firmat for his encouragement.

[10] If this is true, then the mass immigration of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the 1970s onwards may have motivated the inclusion of questions concerning language in 1980. Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, ‘Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850-1990’, Population Division Working Paper no. 29 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999) <http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029 /twps0029.html> [accessed 28 July 2006]

[11] The Mexicans who became American citizens pursuant to the Treaty were not strictly speaking immigrants because their nationality changed without migration. They are grouped together with immigrants here based on their shared hetero-linguistic profile.

[12] Gibson and Lennon.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid. Not including the descendents of slaves.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 8. I would also like to thank Professor Honore Watanabe for his insights on this topic.

[19] The aim of this essay is, in part, to contribute to the discourse of diversity by examining the social construction and impact of variable traits on individual and collective levels, which can be acquired or lost within a person’s or collective’s lifespan (such as language), rather than invariable traits (such as, to debatable extents, race and gender). Taking variability as a starting point makes the significance of invariable traits germane to this study only insofar as the latter were a vehicle of the geo-glossically dominant system of signification (English).

[20] Gibson and Lennon.

[21] For more on the mixing of languages and its consequences to meaning, see Antony Adolf, ‘Multilingualism and the (In)Stability of Meaning: A Neo-Heideggerian Perspective’, EnterText 3.2 (2003) <http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~acsrrrm/entertext/issue_3_2.htm>

[22] Geoffrey Nunberg, ‘Lingo Jingo: English Only and the New Nativism’, The American Prospect 33 (July 1997), 40-52 (p.40). My emphases.

[23] For a theoretical exposition of the dynamics of collective multilingualism, see Antony Adolf, ‘Multilingualism and its Discontents: Hetero-Lingual Collectivity and the Critique of Homo-Lingual Communities’, in Returning (to) Communities: Theory, Culture and Political Practice of the Communal, ed. by Stefan Herbrechter and Michael Higgins (New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 143-159; for more on cross-cultural dynamics, see Antony Adolf and Robert Young, ‘Culture Without Borders: A Dialogue with Robert Young’, Safundi: The Journal for Comparative South African and American Studies 20 (October 2006) <http://safundi.com/issues/20/young.asp> [accessed 28 July 2006]

[24] Categorizing a language as ‘endangered’ is highly problematic. From a Darwinian perspective, the term suggests that such languages have run their evolutionary course and must give way to languages which better suit their environment; from a humanitarian perspective, such languages and their users need to be protected and preserved; from a colonial perspective, they need to be replaced with a so-imagined ‘stronger’ language; and, from a logocidal perspective, they ought simply to be exterminated.

[25] Nettle and Romaine, p. 8.

[26] Thomas Jefferson was multilingual, however.

[27] Debates about literacy tests in Congress date from about 1895 onwards, and have been fuelled by groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Protective Association, among others. But until the debates leading up to the 1917 bill, the focus is predominantly on the issue of literacy/reading ability and only indirectly on the language in use. In the same vein, the Lodge Bill of 1897 had a lot to do with voting rights and race, but little to do with language, per se. The point here is not to give an exhaustive account of immigration or minority rights, but rather to trace how and why multilingualism changed from the peripheral issue it was to the central one it became.

[28] Joshua A. Fishman, Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 132.

[29] Except within the narrow fields of di-glossic studies, psycholinguistics and macaronic poetry. One theorist who has in some ways realized this is Pierre Bourdieu, in his Language and Symbolic Power, ed. by John Thompson, trans. by Gino Raymond and Mathew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). It is significant that Bourdieu spent much of his earlier career in Africa, where French was competing with native languages for political supremacy.

[30] The 14th Amendment also encompasses those who are ‘under [U.S.] jurisdiction’, which eventually came to mean those under American interventionist power, as in the Philippines.

[31] In an isolated 1886 case, the Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment could be used to protect immigrants in Yick Ho v. Hopkins.

[32] Much useful information on immigration, though not always on language, during this period can be found in U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History, ed. by Elliott Robert Barkan and Michael Lemay (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

[33] The term ‘logocide’, as far as I can tell, was coined by Edmund Cohen and Frank Zappa. For them, logocide refers particularly to an interpretive abuse of the Word or Logos of the Christian God as presented in the Bible. Here, however, it is meant as an attempt, intentional or not, by monolingual supremacists to silence or exterminate one or more languages, or multilingualism itself. Edmund D. Cohen and Frank Zappa, The Mind of the Bible-Believer (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), pp. 183-201.

[34] Monolingualism is still the norm in State-run education systems, even when ‘foreign languages’ are taught.

[35] Church and State in America: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. by John F. Wilson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 355.

[36]Robert Michaelsen, Piety in the Public School: Trends and Issues in the Relationship between Religion and the Public School in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 151.

[37]Richard N. Ostling, ‘America’s Ever-Changing Religious Landscape’, Brookings Review 17.2 (1999), 10-21 (p.14). Ostling draws heavily on Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America: 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

[38] Paul Johnson, ‘God and the Americans’, Commentary 99.1 (1995), 25-52 (p. 36).

[39] See Francke Kuno’s essay ‘Karl Follen and the German Liberal Movement’ in the Papers of the American Historical Association 14.2 (1891), 65-81; and Dieter Cunz’s essay ‘Karl Follen; In Commemoration of the Hundredth Anniversary of His Death’ in the American-German Review, 2.1 (1940), 25-27.

[40] Henry A. Pochmann and Arthur R. Schultz, German Culture in America, 1600-1900: Philosophical and Literary Influences (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 40.

[41] Y. N. Kly, The Anti-Social Contract (Atlanta, GA: Clarity, 1989), p. 43.

[42] Thomas O’Gorman, A History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1916), p. 429.

[43] William Ernest Hocking and Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), p. 117.

[44] Ronald Lawson, ‘From American Church to Immigrant Church: the Changing Face of Seventh-Day Adventism in Metropolitan New York’, Sociology of Religion 59.4 (1998), 323-342 (p. 330).

[45] Hallett Abend, My Life in China, 1926-1941 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1943), p. 343.

[46] Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Students and the Present Missionary Crisis: Addresses Delivered before the Sixth International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Rochester, New York, December 29, 1909, to January 2, 1910 (New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1910), p. 59.

[47] Quoted in Katherine Mayo, The Isles of Fear: The Truth about the Philippines (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), p. 351. My emphasis.

[48] William Barnes and John Morgan Heath, The Foreign Service of the United States: Origins, Development, and Functions (Washington, DC: Washington Historical Office, Bureau of Public Affairs, Dept. of State, 1961), p. 145.

[49] North, p. 82.

[50] The Bureau of Immigration is now part of the department of Homeland Security, and requires that all prospective citizens prove that they know English, implying that hetero-lingual immigrants are also now considered to be a matter national security.

[51] North, p. 233.

[52] Louis Bloch, ‘Occupations of Immigrants before and after Coming to the United States’, Journal of the American Statistical Association 17 (1921), 762-763 (p. 763).

[53] Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 51.

[54] Morris D. Morris, ‘The Recruitment of an Industrial Labour Force in India, with British and American Comparisons’, Comparative Studies in Society and History II 3 (1960), 315-20 (p. 318).

[55] Bloch, p. 762.

[56] Such linguistically-derived psycho-affective splits form an important aspect of subjectivity that has yet to be fully explored. Aside from the difficulties and possibilities of working in more than one language, the hetero-lingual experience may also be a fertile source of creativity. For example, traces of the multilingual imagination abound in two modernist masterworks, Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and James Joyces’ Finnegans Wake. In precisely the reverse situation of the majority of the immigrants we are discussing, the two authors were themselves hetero-lingual (Anglo) immigrants in continental (non-Anglo) Europe. This suggests to me that the hetero/homo-linguistic structure itself plays an equal or perhaps even greater role in the making of individual and collective subjectivity than the actual languages in question.

[57] E. P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 1850-1950 (New York: Wiley, 1956), p. 113.

[58] Hutchinson, p. 218.

[59] North, p. 252.

[60] North, p. 113.

[61] U.S. Census Bureau, Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), p. 169.

[62] Joseph R. Meisenheimer, ‘How Do Immigrants Fare in the U.S. Labour Market?’, Monthly Labour Review, 115.12 (1992), 11-32 (p. 26).

[63] Seth N. Asumah and Matthew Todd Bradley, ‘Making Sense of U.S. Immigration Policy and Multiculturalism’, The Western Journal of Black Studies, 25.2 (2001), 82-121 (p. 96).

[64] This despite the fact that even the government has for some time now offered many services in non-English languages, creating an even more complicated double standard than the rather simple denial of non-English languages up until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[65] For more on geo-glossia, see Antony Adolf, ‘Multilingualism, Textuality and Pragmatic Analysis’, Interculturality & Translation 2 (2006), forthcoming.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 9, Autumn 2006

The Geography of Production: Charting the Modernist Spaces in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt

Michael P. Moreno
© Michael P. Moreno. All Rights Reserved

In his celebrated study of spatiality entitled The Production of Space (1991), Henri Lefebvre posits that ‘[e]very language is located in a space. Every discourse says something about a space (places or sets of places); and every discourse is emitted from a space’. [1] Indeed, space itself is a language which can be used to articulate not only the material manifestations surrounding us, but also the social relationships we forge in our varied communities. This vocabulary of place and the characterization of space are evident in Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), a satirical portrait of the post-Great War American middle-class businessman and the quirkiness of efficient Modernist living.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the United States had recognized the supremacy of the machine and was widely celebrating a new system of production and consumption that transcended the language of a capitalist economy. A new culture emerged as a result of the machine, one which re-established the everyday experience of living for Americans whereby their lives could be defined by the very modern machines, gadgets, and mechanisms they consumed or encountered on an hourly basis. Such a new Modernist language simultaneously reflected and created the world people inhabited. Lewis’s Babbitt captured the genesis of this transformation in American society. Moreover, quotidian locales in the novel reveal another side to Modernism that was rapidly transforming the early 20th century American landscape.

The post-World War I terrains in the United States—the landscapes of early suburban homes, the sky-scrapers, the philanthropic and company lodges, the trolleys, and automobiles inhabited by the American bourgeoisie—engender a spatial vernacular through which the notions of mobility, standardization, and production in the industrial age can be articulated and understood. While the European continent was engaged in sweeping up the political and psychological debris remaining from World War I, the United States emerged by default as the sole politico-economic superpower. With this success, the country abounded in material wealth that manifested itself in the mass production of industrial and domestic goods. The American Modern period is characterized by the illusion that the common citizen could participate in forging this new America while simultaneously sharing in its power and prosperity. Thus, the philosophy of production gave birth to and saw the proliferation of machines and gadgetry, such as the automobile, trolley, train, telegraph, and telephone, and made it possible for professional businessmen and their families to move to the growing suburbs, deliberate middle-class communities which offered sanctuary from the sky-scraping mountains of glass and steel and the urban features of crime and immigration which marked the industrialized cities. Babbitt details America’s initiation into this period of industrialization by establishing an aesthetic of acceleration and innovation within the narrative’s literary architecture.

Whereas the Babbitts of middle America endorse a standardization of all new and efficient things–everything from the colossal skyscrapers to the ‘nifty’ electric starters in automobiles–this philosophy of production is even more evident in the protagonist’s speedy and colloquial vernacular, the language of the ‘cult of business,’ a characteristic ‘Babbitt-speak’ that illustrates the mechanization of the human environment. This article will examine how these modernist symptoms of American power during the 1920s (mechanization, mass-production, standardization, and speed) correlate with one another by analyzing the literary landscape of Sinclair Lewis’s satirical representation of emerging suburbanites as portrayed in Babbitt. Indeed, Babbitt underlines the emergence of suburban literature on the newly articulated landscape of American Modernism.

In interpreting literature spatially, the reader can align physical bodies and cultural constructs within the built environment. This enables the development of a critical discourse with which to articulate how bodies inform and engineer space, while simultaneously helping to understand how space is both marked and classified by its occupants and how it thus assembles human subjects. Conversely, reading architectural and spatial systems through a literary lens provides an artistic foundation upon which to reinterpret the role of the civic and national body politic. This methodology is valuable for conceptualizing the figurative thumb-prints which mark literary landscapes at the start of the 20th century. Little attention has been given to the detailed spaces and places in Babbitt’s world, yet a spatial reading of Babbitt demonstrates how early suburbia and the emerging ‘new cities’ of the Modern Era mirrored the economic, cultural, and political tenets of the corporate philosophy of ceaseless production and standardization, for such a philosophy empowered the modernist suburbanite and crafted him/her into a ‘Standardized American Citizen’. [2] This was an altogether different creature from the Bohemian/Jazz-inflected one which paradoxically emerged at this same time and marked the intellectual and pro-labor spaces of urban cafes, galleries, speakeasies, and cabarets, for this particular American identity articulated its own distinctive and critical vocabulary and challenged the isolating grids and contours of Babbitt’s America. Nevertheless, the central goal of this article is to demonstrate exactly how Babbitt reveals not only a spatial language within American Modernism, that is a ‘suburban modernism’, but also how this language manifests the form and function of political, cultural, and ideological architecture within one of the earliest works of American suburban literature.

The study of the suburb in American literature is a rapidly emerging field. What ‘qualifies’ as ‘suburban literature’ in today’s scholarship is at present being debated and articulated. Suburban literature is more than literature that employs the suburbs as a scenic backdrop for a story. It is a literary genre that treats the suburb as a force that both creates and is created by the characters and conditions in each respective suburban novel. Babbitt sets a pace for establishing a suburban discourse within American literature and offers a look, albeit a satirical and parodic one, at suburban sensibilities forged during the zenith in American productivity and power.

Throughout the architectural evolution of Western civilization, a given city could be identified by the largest structures along the urban skyline visible from afar. In contemporary times, major urban centers each have identifiable features that continue to signify that location in the popular imagination: the Golden Gate Bridge for San Francisco, the Statue of Liberty for New York City, Big Ben for London, or the Eiffel Tower for Paris. Such quintessential structures represent the centers of political, economic, and social power of their time. For instance, during the medieval period, the largest edifice in a wealthy European city was the cathedral, whereas in the Renaissance, when bankers and merchants began to rise in the economic ranks to govern city-states and provinces, the citadel or merchant villa/palace towered above the roof-tops. Conversely, during the Enlightenment, parliamentary and civic structures were the visible giants on the horizon. In the Industrial period, however, it was the skyscraper whose glittering trunks ‘enacted the twentieth-century traits of functionalism, efficiency, and speed’ [3] and within which corporate princes dwelled.

Thus, it was not coincidental that the ‘literary establishing shot’ Sinclair Lewis employed to commence Babbitt is a visual image of the city of Zenith itself, the American ‘Everycity’ in which newness, mobility, and innovation reign supreme: ‘The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings’. [4] The emphasis placed on the newness of the secular skyscrapers and, in the continued quotation, of a growing city and surrounding suburbs illustrates how the spaces of Zenith denote not ‘an arrival’, that is, a completed journey whose goal is advancement, but instead connote the symbol of constant upward-mobility, a ceaseless motion. It is in the act of aspiring towards this zenith of modernism that America sustains its role as principal producer and innovator for a new century. There was no room in this network of production and construction for the spatial tenets and monuments of the past; the topography of the old world was quickly fading, and American cities like Zenith were rising everywhere from their former urban necropolises:

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes—they seemed—for laughter and tranquility. [5]

In the United States, the 1920s heralded a forward-looking era that would leave behind the travesties of Europe’s Great War and the dark-inlayed claustrophobia of America’s Victorian period. New machines and materials suggested architectural possibility and gave birth to new American styles of domestic design that freed up living spaces and exposed rooms that once traditionally divided and demarcated servants from family members, parents from children, and women from men. ‘With the overcoming of the Victorian pattern of interior segregation’, according to Robert Fishman’s Bourgeois Utopias (1987), ‘the suburban house reclaimed the domestic openness which was its true legacy’. [6] Indeed, growing machine use and the prosperity that was forging a new industrial Eden was now eclipsing the old horse-drawn system.

The world in which George F. Babbitt resides is marked by the mechanical and material spaces which Sinclair Lewis has elaborately crafted in this novel, for such places function not as backdrops for the scenes between individuals, but rather, as multi-dimensional ‘characters’ whose associations with their inhabitants form a narrative mirror that reflects the American sub/urban middle-class sentiments of the 1920s.

During this pivotal time in history, both American and European architects and urban designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier, were articulating how modern mechanical spaces could be constructed in an effort to provide a sustainable apparatus in which both inhabitant and structure could co-exist harmoniously and pragmatically. In 1928, for example, a collection of European architects representing France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Belgium formed a design school known as CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) with the desire to establish:

a new conception of architecture that satisfies the spiritual, intellectual and material demands of present-day life. Conscious of the deep disturbances of the social structure brought about by machines, [CIAM] recognize[d] that the transformation of the economic order and of social life inescapably brings with it a corresponding transformation of the architectural phenomenon. [7]

The desire to create a new method for transforming space into the modern period was strong and passionate, as evidenced by the countless creeds and manifestoes which emerged from architectural schools of thought like those of the Prairie School, Bauhaus, or International Style. As such, many design schools sought to develop a language that expressed the Modernist phenomenon of production and mechanization through constructed spaces.

Like CIAM and other Modernist architectural movements, Sinclair Lewis designed not simply a parodic archetype in modern American literature in the form of George F. Babbitt, but a landscape of American ‘sights and sounds of common life’. This was an authentic environment that expressed the language of capitalism, standardization, and innovation. [8] In short, Babbitt is a literary place as well as a person, a machine as well as a suburban paragon. The assertion that spaces in American Modernist literature reflect the post-World War I symptoms of mechanization and alienation is further illustrated by many important works, such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (1946). Whereas in Hemingway’s novel, the ubiquity of war and its wounding-effect is reflected in ‘the broken walls of old houses that were being torn down’ or the explosive images of the Spanish fiesta [9], Williams’s Paterson assembles the quotidian artifacts of everyday mechanized living, such as newspapers, maps, photographs, and letters, into a living machine that generates a new language from the geographical, historical, and psychological spaces of this New Jersey industrial city. Like Hemingway, Williams recognized how the process of writing and producing art was similar to the machine’s transmission of power in that the ‘fixed and moving parts’ had the artistic ability to generate and create new arrangements from pre-constructed material, for, indeed, this was the ideological principle employed by architects like Frank Lloyd Wright. [10]

Although Lewis’s Babbitt does not precisely parallel the economical prose and leanness that characterizes Hemingway’s writing or the complex narrative architecture of Paterson, Babbitt does complicate Lewis’s ethnographic utilization of built environments by emphasizing how such spaces can produce a language of machinery. The inclusion of fictional advertisements, pro-business poems, public speeches, and memorandums manufactures a narrative rooted within a vibrant business world. Moreover, George F. Babbitt’s dialogue throughout the novel incarnates the efficiency, speed, and pro-production ‘pep’ of a machine, for his standardized vernacular is the ‘[embodiment of] the harried verbal nature of the American businessman’. [11] When applying the cartographic design of CIAM’s planning apparatus – spaces of dwelling, production, recreation, and transportation – to this spatial language of machinery in Lewis’s writing, we see that the various geographies of Babbitt, such as the suburban home, the skyscraper, the lodge, and the automobile, correspondingly function as alternative agents (and purveyors) of Modernist ideologies in Lewis’s literary world.

If poetry or literature can be construed as ‘machine[s] made of words’ as William Carlos Williams suggests [12], then the spaces about which Lewis writes operate as machines in and of themselves. This is most evident when examining the mechanization of the dwelling space in Babbitt: the suburban residence. In 1920, the French architect Le Corbusier recognized that the domestic realm of the family home had to mimic the 20th century machine in efficiency and function. Only then would this quotidian space serve the inhabitants’ growing dependency on manufactured gadgets and innovations. ‘If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house’, Le Corbusier maintains, ‘and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the “House-Machine”, the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful’. [13] Conceptualizing the house as a machine was a revolutionary notion in redefining vernacular domains; however, the modern house as a symptom of an automated aesthetic does not necessarily produce a home. In Lewis’s Babbitt, the American suburban domicile is a mechanical nurse designed to nourish the electrical lives of appliances while augmenting a sterile and standardized aura:

[The house] had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass cupboard, its creamy plaster walls, its modest scene of a salmon expiring upon a pile of oysters) had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster. [14]

As such, the Babbitt house itself, with its intricate network of electrical appliances, is more like a factory that generates the illusion of familial associations. Throughout the novel, Lewis’s meticulous attention to the Babbitt house projects greater connections between the inanimate objects themselves than between the Babbitt family members, for the Babbitts seem absent from the spaces and corridors of this typically bourgeois residence. The description of the house itself is reminiscent of the many advertisements selling the idea of the modern home in the early 20th century. In this same vein, while Lewis’s city of Zenith operates as a living hallmark for the newly mechanized society, the suburban house itself should theoretically foster ‘a world of good little people, comfortable, industrious, credulous’. [15] And yet, the suburban Dutch Colonial house of the Floral Heights development, ironically, ‘was not a home’. [16]

Part of Lewis’s own critique of white-collar Americans concerned their penchant for standardization and love for mechanization, for the principal deity in the pantheon of American Modernism was the god of ‘Modern Appliances’ to whom Babbitt is an unconditional devotee. [17] Accordingly, the suburban house functioned as the church of American consumption and underscored the values, behavior, and ideologies the middle-class wrought from the theology of production. Such critiques of the burgeoning middle-class were widespread and began to mark the suburbanite with a kind of secular zealotry towards material acquisition. ‘What distresses [the bourgeoisie’s] critics more than anything else’, posits Frederick J. Hoffman, author of The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (1963), ‘was the religious intensity with which they exploited what had originally been chiefly an economic convenience. The bourgeoisie were condemned, not for having made money, but for having turned the making of it into a religion and a morality.’ [18] The domestic dwelling spaces in Babbitt are identified by a moralizing and didactic standardization and mechanization, for they embody not only a conformity which ‘conspicuous consumption’ engenders among suburbanites [19], but also a loyalty to a socio-economic system which guarantees the proliferation of monetary investments. [20] House as machine, therefore, transformed the family’s value system into one which emphasized mechanized innovation and consumptive standardization and de-emphasized meaningful relationships and emotional connections between members. Such an outcome, then, is antithetical to architectural principles of familial unity and fluidity, particularly those fostered by Wright’s Prairie School with its open design in domestic spaces.

Whereas domestic dwelling spaces in Babbitt mirror the standardization to which suburbanites were conforming, the urban skyscraper – the nucleus of production – operates as a self-contained metropolis free from the public spaces of the exterior city. This emphasis on the interiority of spaces thus establishes a controlled environment in which an urban-dweller acquires a new identity while inhabiting the structure. This identity is generated by the efficiency of ‘The Building’ [21] and by a kind of corporate nationalism or culture which signified neither a city nor a state, but which manufactured a corporate self that would transcend even national borders by the mid-20th century. [22] The skyscraper, as such, is a conjunction of mechanized spaces and corporeal bodies that work for the good of ‘The Building’ and the proliferation of capitalism. In Babbitt, the Reeves Building denotes this microcosm of American production and profit-making:

The little unknown people who inhabited the Reeves Building corridors—elevator-runners, starter, engineers, superintendent, and the doubtful-looking lame man who conducted the news and cigar stand—were in no way city-dwellers. They were rustics, living in a constricted valley, interested only in one another and in The Building. Their Main Street was the entrance hall, with its stone floor, severe marble ceiling, and the inner windows of the shops. The liveliest place on the street was the Reeves Building Barber Shop, but this was also Babbitt’s one embarrassment. Himself, he patronized the glittering Pompeian Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh, and every time he passed the Reeves shop—ten times a day, a hundred times—he felt untrue to his own village. [23]

George F. Babbitt’s spatial relationship to the office building which holds his real estate company signifies a re-organization of social and productive space in the 20th century American city. Equating the skyscraper with a capitalist village underscores the transformation of the citizen into a loyal and faceless cog in the corporate apparatus of mechanization, a ‘Standardized American Citizen’. [24] Babbitt resides in a modern world ‘where man, menaced by organizations […] [and] machines, must resort to irrational forms of compensation in order to preserve his identity’ [25]; and yet, the seemingly irrational construct of a corporate villager makes sense when placing Babbitt and others in the social machine of the skyscraper and recognizing that urban ‘[a]rchitecture is the autobiography of economic systems and of social institutions.’ [26]

Whereas the suburban house-machine is read as a small religious site in the consumptive parameters of Babbitt, the office building serves as a ‘temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men’. [27] Powerful and sublime, the divine skyscrapers of Babbitt become the paradigm of American masculine virility, ‘tall soldier[s]’, leviathans, that could absorb the anonymous identities of their cell-like inhabitants into their bodily steel frames and concrete skin. [28]

Like the terrains of suburban dwelling and urban production throughout Babbitt, the recreational spaces of the social clubs and civic lodges are laboratories for cultivating a masculine communion of networking and conformity, for in a milieu where collectivity is esteemed above individuality, these leisure spaces contain and sustain the citizenry in an effort to ensure the hegemony of the middle-class lifestyle. Like his fellow joiners, Babbitt himself is not encouraged by these realms to be ‘the autocratic individualist, [for] he is the compromising conformist,’ according to Mark Schorer’s observations. ‘No producer himself, his success depends on public relations. He does not rule; he “joins” to be safe. He boosts and boasts with his fellows, sings and cheers and prays with the throng, derides all difference, denounces all dissent—and all to climb with the crowd’. [29] The recreational sectors throughout Zenith are more than social spaces; they are standardizing machines whose garish interiors poorly imitate an aesthetic of power found within the European villas, cathedrals, and courtly chambers of the distant past.

The famous Athletic Club, of which George F. Babbitt is an active member, is an example of the power aesthetic that constituents of Babbitt’s middle-class sphere are attempting to harness. Here, the spaces of leisure are marked by disparate design styles and lack of function; the purpose of this amalgamation of architectural languages is solely to effect an aristocratic air of tradition and elitism. However, the mixture of styles within these powerful buildings reveals both the sterility and the provincial tastes of these middle-class conformists:

The entrance of the Athletic Club was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission, and the reading-room in Chinese Chippendale, but the gem of the club was the dining-room. […] It was lofty and half-timbered, with Tudor leaded casements, an oriel, a somewhat musicianless musicians’-gallery, and tapestries believed to illustrate the granting of Magna Charta. The open beams had been hand-adzed at Jake Offutt’s car-body works, the hinges were of hand-wrought iron, the wainscot studded with hand-made wooden pegs, and at one end of the room was a heraldric and hooded stone fireplace which the club’s advertising-pamphlet asserted to be not only larger than any of the fireplaces in European castles but of a draught incomparably more scientific. It was also much cleaner, as no fire had ever been built in it. [30]

The Athletic Club, which ‘is not athletic and it isn’t exactly a club, but…is Zenith in perfection’ [31], functions as a heterotopic space ‘that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable’ since it is an architectural pastiche assembled by the middle-class in an attempt to create a language of privilege and regency with which to pay homage to imperialist expressions of cultural potency while imparting that status and vitality onto common members of the American business community. [32] And yet, this spatial pastiche is merely a mechanical reproduction of these historical cultures and is actually disconnected from the ‘aura’ of the original architectural designs which they mimic. [33] More importantly, the overlapping and incongruent designs of the various chambers that Lewis so intricately describes further suggest the commodification of culture and an appropriation of noble virtues.

Another note-worthy example of commodifying culture that takes place in Babbitt occurs when Zenith’s Rotarians are trying to organize a patronage for a symphony hall in the city. However, rather than fostering a sense of cultural appreciation for classical music, the Rotarians see the hall as an incentive for attracting business. Chum Frink, a respected Rotarian, pleads his case, saying:

Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city today as pavements or bank-clearances. It’s Culture, in theaters and art-galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors to New York every year and, to be frank, for all our splendid attainments we haven’t yet or at least we don’t get the credit for it. The thing to do then, as a live bunch of go-getters, is to capitalize Culture; to go right out and grab it. [34]

Although the topography of the Athletic Club does not reveal the Modernist embrace of newness and innovation on the surface, the arcane designs imply a resurrection of classical motifs very common among middle-class members who were, at the time, rejecting the avant-garde themes in artistic expressions in favor of earlier, more familiar ones. Again, at the center of this leisure space is the will to empower a class through the vocabulary of architecture and design. The Athletic Club’s executive bathroom is an expression of this imperial, almost cult-like, language of power the American business class was cultivating during the 1920s:

[The members] grinned and went into the Neronian washroom, where a line of men bent over the bowls inset along a prodigious slab of marble as in religious prostration before their own images in the massy mirror. Voices thick, satisfied, authoritative, hurtled along the marble walls, bounded from the ceiling of lavender-bordered milky tiles, while the lords of the city, the barons of insurance and law and fertilizers and motor tires, laid down the law for Zenith. [35]

The recreational spheres throughout Babbitt indirectly reflect the fear many of the suburban class members had of being alienated or singled out for harboring a dissenting belief or position, for the anti-labor, anti-socialist, and anti-immigrant sentiments among these members worked to establish a closed system that preserved the home, the business, and the community’s social organizations. As such, the local club or lodge operated as a networking space that produced profitable ideas and was designed to function much like a regulated ‘piazza, […] [or] pavement café [where the businessman] could shoot pool and talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant’. [36] These exclusive and narcissistic designs ensured the white, middle-class male that his position within the capitalist culture and economy was not only necessary for the country’s continued domination in production and consumption, but also integral to fostering the emerging 20th century suburban ideal and identity.

Conjoining the dwelling spaces, the sectors of production, and the leisure sites are the transportational tentacles and mobile machines of Babbitt. Whereas the proliferation of rails across the American topography allowed trains and trolleys to extend beyond city limits and begin forming the early clusters of suburban communities along the urban frontiers, the automobile was the preeminent and romanticized mode of traversing the mutable landscape of the built and natural environments during the 1920s. According to Kenneth T. Jackson’s discussion of suburban construction after 1920, the author maintains that by 1922, the year of Babbitt’s publication, ‘about 135,000 suburban homes in sixty cities were already completely dependent upon cars for transportation […].’ [37] The mass production of the automobile during this time and its growing availability to middle-class consumers ignited the obsessive relationship Americans continue to have today with their cars, one marked by the equating automobile travel with basic democratic/consumer liberties.

Moreover, the cult of the automobile begins to be represented in other Modernist literature of the 1920s, such as the works of John Dos Passos or F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was the contoured car, ‘terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns’ [38], that epitomized a mechanized space of mobility, privilege, and independence. The automobile was a liminal cell passing between the organs of fixed and conforming units such as the suburban home, the downtown skyscraper, or the social lodge. Although confined to a metal frame and asphalt roads, the driver could still partake of a kind of self-liberation by motoring across the open corridors. The open road thus offered an intimate relationship with the wider landscape for those who could afford to access it.

For George F. Babbitt, the automobile allows a private and personal interaction with the public, exterior spaces in and around Zenith. The automobile generates sundry rites which provide the operator with an assortment of spiritual experiences. For example, in re-fueling his vehicle, Babbitt experiences an aesthetic pleasure in gazing upon other machines and structures which sustain and are devoted to his own four-wheeled machine. The quotidian act of having gas pumped becomes not only religious, but highly sensual and empowering for Babbitt:

The familiarity of the rite fortified him: the sight of the tall red iron gasoline-pump, the hollow-tile and terra-cotta garage, the window full of the most agreeable accessories—shiny casings, spark-plugs with immaculate porcelain jackets, tire-chains of gold and silver. […] He admired the ingenuity of the automatic dial, clicking off gallon by gallon; admired the smartness of the sign: ‘A fill in time saves getting stuck—gas to-day 31 cents’; admired the rhythmic gurgle of the gasoline as it flowed into the tank, and the mechanical regularity with which [the attendant] turned the handle. [39]

Democratizing machinery during the 1920s—that is, making instruments like the automobile available to the rising middle-class—ensured a level of contentment among the consuming masses and secured the promise of their upward-mobility in the form of upgrades, something Madison Avenue was promoting at the time through widespread lifestyle-advertisements. As transportational space in Babbitt, the automobile becomes an extension of masculinized power and potency in the socio-economic sphere of corporate America. This characterization of automotive space is made clear in the exchange which transpires between Babbitt and Tanis Judique, Babbitt’s ephemeral mistress:

He boasted, ‘You know, there’s a lot of these fellows that are so scared and drive so slow that they get in everybody’s way. The safest driver is a fellow that knows how to handle his machine and yet isn’t scared to speed up when it’s necessary’ […]

[Tanis]: ‘Of course, we had a car—I mean, before my husband passed on—and I used to make believe drive it, but I don’t think any woman ever learns to drive like a man’. [40]

Accessing a multitude of spaces via the automated vehicle suggests a kind of masculine privilege and freedom. Yet, while this mobility empowered the male suburban car owner, there was also the safeguard against being exposed to the broader outside world. As such, a passive relationship commenced between traveler and landscape, one that disconnected the former from the immediate association with the latter. Nevertheless, being technologically savvy in a society that was becoming more and more mechanized is a Modernist attribute celebrated by the American middle-class; it is a trait which denotes civility and status in the cultural geography of Babbitt.

‘Suburban modernism’ was an ideology that reflected the changing value systems of the American middle-class. Values predicated upon cultural mechanization and commodification, ceaseless productivity, capitalist empowerment, and acceleration epitomized this form of Modernist behavior in many Standardized American Citizens during the 1920s. More significantly, the re-conception of human spaces such as the house, skyscraper, lodge, and automobile as machines provided middle-class Americans with a distinct Modernist vocabulary through which to produce a lexicon of suburban sensibilities in the early 20th century. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, with the subsequent ‘Babbittry’ that marked American consciousness, is an important work (and movement) in that it succeeds in calling attention to the standardization, innovations, and production that greased the wheels of mechanizing America. While illuminating these Modernist features in middle-class/suburban life, the novel simultaneously warns of the dangers inherent in homogenization, xenophobia, alienation, and subjugation to the machine. Nowhere are these themes more resonant than in the very spaces Lewis constructs, for these literary blueprints reveal the genesis of the aesthetic of mechanization and power that is still ubiquitous in contemporary literature.

University of California, Riverside

Notes

[1] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), p. 132.

[2] Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Bantam Classics, 1998), p. 190.

[3] Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 289.

[4] Lewis, p. 1.

[5] Lewis, p. 1.

[6] Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 150.

[7] Programs and Manifestos on 20th Century Architecture, ed. By Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 109.

[8] John Wickersham, Introduction to Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (New York: Bantam Classic Book, 1998), p. xiii.

[9] Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Charles Scribner, 1954), p. 77, 152-4.

[10] Tichi, pp. 267-268.

[11] Wickersham, p. xvi.

[12] Williams Carlos Williams, ‘Author’s Introduction’ to ‘The Wedge’ in The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams, (New York: New Directions Book, 1950), pp. 3-5 (p. 4).

[13] Quoted in Programs and Manifestos, p. 62.

[14] Lewis, p. 15.

[15] Lewis, p. 330.

[16] Lewis, p. 15.

[17] Lewis, p. 5.

[18] Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 360.

[19] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1979), p. 56.

[20] Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 52.

[21] Lewis, p. 33.

[22] Zeynep Çelik, ‘Cultural Intersections: Re-visioning Architecture and the City in the Twentieth Century’, in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, ed. by Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles & Harry N. Abrams, 1998), pp. 190-228 (p. 191).

[23] Lewis, p. 33.

[24] Lewis, p. 190.

[25] Howell Daniels, ‘Sinclair Lewis and the Drama of Dissociation’, in Sinclair Lewis, ed. by Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), pp. 83-102 (p. 92).

[26] Quoted in Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, ed. by Joseph A. Barry, trans. by Milton Gendel (New York: Horizon Press, 1974), p. 167.

[27] Lewis, p. 13.

[28] Lewis, p. 13.

[29] Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961), p. 356.

[30] Lewis, p. 60.

[31] Lewis, p. 56.

[32] Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 350-356 (p. 352).

[33] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 222-3.

[34] Lewis, p. 269.

[35] Lewis, p. 60.

[36] Lewis, p. 211.

[37] Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 176.

[38] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner, 1980), p. 64.

[39] Lewis, pp. 28-29.

[40] Lewis, p. 290.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 9, Autumn 2006

‘I live to be their protector and friend, and not their tyrant and foe’: Gender and Household Authority in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798)

Tara Deshpande
© Tara Deshpande. All Rights Reserved

Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland begins with an advertisement in which Brown declares his aim to be ‘the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man’.[1] This claim, along with the subtitle ‘An American Tale’, immediately identifies a political element to the novel’s sensational plot. A number of critics have analysed the fragmentation of its central family in terms of the political and social anxieties of the early Republic. Such interpretations have tended to read the destruction of the family as a representation of the failure of the Revolution to establish a stable nation. Jane Tompkins, for example, offers an early, influential reading in her volume Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Literature. She argues that the murder and insanity that afflict the Wielands express federalist fears that the absence of strong institutions in the new nation would result in chaos and disintegration.[2] More recently, Christopher Looby has suggested that the novel’s disrupted, gothic form and its focus on the problems of voice engage concerns over social coherence and the legitimacy of the nation’s founding, and Julia Stern has argued persuasively that ventriloquism and the corruption of family relationships express doubts as to whether the inhabitants of the United States can be united harmoniously by sympathetic bonds.[3] This article will also suggest that Wieland questions the achievements of the Revolution and undermines notions of a stable, inclusive nation. However, I treat the family from a different perspective. Instead of reading the relationships between the individual Wielands as symptomatic of larger cultural and political forces, I will emphasise the role of the family as a constitutive institution of the state. In Wieland, as in the early Republic, dynamics of authority within the household affect individuals’ relationship to the state. In particular, gender proves determinative of family and civic identity.

Before beginning to analyse the text in detail, it is necessary to give a brief overview of the plot. Wieland is notoriously difficult to summarise, but there is a key sequence of events that is relevant to questions of gendered citizenship. Clara Wieland, the first-person narrator, discovers the body of her murdered sister-in-law, Catharine. The attacker’s identity remains a mystery for some time and it is only gradually revealed that her husband was the perpetrator and was obeying the command of a disembodied voice he believed to belong to God. In his insanity he goes on to kill his children, attempt the life of his sister, and finally commit suicide. Carwin, an enigmatic acquaintance of the Wielands’, confesses that he is a biloquist, or ventriloquist. He admits to imitating the voices of Catharine and Clara at several points earlier in the narrative. However, he denies ordering the murder, and the confusion as to whether he is responsible or Wieland merely hallucinated the voice is never resolved. As I will demonstrate, Brown uses Catharine’s murder to examine the ways in which the civic identity of married women is mediated by their position within the family. By characterising Theodore Wieland as an advocate of Jefferson’s republican ideology, Brown places his representation of married women’s qualified citizenship in relation to the ostensibly universal language of the American Revolution.

As a former lawyer, Brown would have been aware that after the Revolution, the United States retained the laws of ‘coverture’. This body of English law merged a married woman’s legal identity with that of her husband and was also revealingly called the law of ‘baron et feme’, or ‘lord and woman’. Under this system a married woman could not hold property, make contracts, or be held responsible for most crimes. Linda Kerber has argued that the logic of coverture lies in privileging a woman’s obligation to her husband over any to the state. For example, one of the reasons she could not make a contract was that if she defaulted she would be liable for imprisonment, which would remove her from the household and interfere with her husband’s claims. The potential for coercion in the relationship was acknowledged implicitly by the law: the husband’s influence prevented a wife’s criminal guilt. Consequently, her relationship to the state was always mediated by her husband. Kerber also emphasises the inconsistency of the status of married women with the proclaimed ideals of the Revolution: most obviously, women paid taxes to a government that did not represent them.[4]

This tension between coverture and republican ideology is exposed and explored in the relationship between Theodore and Catharine Wieland. Early in the novel, Wieland asserts his republican credentials by articulating a theory of legitimate authority. He discovers that he has inherited ‘large domains in Lusatia’ but he is reluctant to claim them. In contrast, Pleyel, his friend and brother-in-law, urges him to go to Europe and do so. The focus of their argument is the legitimacy of obtaining ‘the revenue and power annexed to a German principality’ by keeping ‘vassals’ in what they call a ‘servile condition’. Pleyel tempts Wieland, mentioning the ‘benevolence’ he might bestow, and attempts to frighten him with the ‘evil’ that would result from that power ‘in malignant hands’ (pp.34-35). In response, Wieland ‘expiate[s] on the perils of wealth and power’ (p.40) in terms that evoke the rhetoric of the American Revolution, in particular the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense. To Wieland, ‘power and riches’ are ‘two great sources of depravity’. They are ‘instruments of misery to others [and] to him on whom they were conferred’. He fears he will ‘degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary’ because ‘power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor’ (p.35).

Wieland repeatedly uses the words ‘tyrant’ and ‘tyranny’ to suggest the specific Lockean construction of the terms adopted by Jefferson in the Declaration. He does not say that keeping peasants in a ‘servile condition’ is ‘tyranny’ in itself, but rather that to inflict on those labourers ‘misery’ instead of ‘positive felicity’ is tyrannous (p.35). This definition depends on a notion of reciprocal right and obligation between citizen (or subject) and ruler: the power to govern must be contingent on responsibilities to the governed if it is capable of misuse. Specifically, for Locke and for Jefferson, the purpose of the monarch’s power is to secure the interests of the people and the state. Jefferson’s arguments for the colonies’ independence relied on allegations that the King had exceeded the proper limits of his authority by imposing taxes without consent, by obstructing the assembly of legislative bodies, and by failing to enforce the law when his supporters committed crimes. In short, he had selfishly advanced his own interests to the detriment of his people. While the Declaration carefully restricts its criticism to the acts of George III, Paine goes further and attacks the institution of hereditary monarchy as ‘evil’. One of his key arguments is that under that system rulers’ ‘minds are early poisoned by importance’.[5] Although Wieland does not go so far as to say that corruption is inevitable, his compulsive return to the effects that power would have on his own moral character resonates with similar ideas in Common Sense.

When he refuses to go to Europe, then, Wieland represents himself as a good republican who subscribes to the declared ideals of the Revolution. The second objection that he raises to Pleyel’s scheme implies that these principles govern his behaviour within his Philadelphia household, as well. He claims that his sister and, more significantly, his wife ‘are adversaries whom all [Pleyel’s] force and stratagem will never subdue’ and that ‘their concurrence is indispensable’ (p.40). Although he suggests that Catharine has equal and independent control over the family’s property interests, she would have had no such rights legally guaranteed. His assertion that her consent is important to him is closely followed by an acknowledgement of her legal subordination. He says, ‘It is not my custom to exact sacrifices of this kind. I live to be their protector and friend, and not their tyrant and foe’ (p.40). Again, the word ‘tyrant’ acknowledges the anti-republican implications of an attempt to control her, but he makes it clear that benevolence is his choice. Coercion is not ‘my custom’, although it is the law’s, and the decision to be a ‘friend’ rather than a ‘foe’ is at his discretion. However, Wieland’s earlier comments suggest that the democracy of the household is precarious. He himself doubts that he can maintain his virtue under the influence of absolute power and this implies that ‘depravity’ threatens his family as well as nameless Saxon ‘vassals’. Clara’s narrative further undermines even this contingent role that Catharine is ascribed in deciding a property matter. From its introduction, the question of the inheritance implies the limits on women’s access to property and challenges Wieland’s claimed reluctance to ‘exact sacrifices’. Clara summarises what she calls the ‘information of considerable importance to my brother’ like this:

My ancestors were noble Saxons, and possessed large domains in Lusatia. The Prussian wars had destroyed those persons whose right to these estates precluded my brother’s. Pleyel had been exact in his inquiries, and had discovered that, by the law of male-primogeniture, my brother’s claims were superior to those of any other person now living. Nothing was wanting but his presence in that country, and a legal application to establish a claim. (p.34)

She immediately distances Catharine and herself from the inheritance. Despite its derivation from ‘my ancestors’ it is of ‘importance’ only to ‘my brother’. The hierarchy of claims, Wieland’s ‘right’, and the necessity of an ‘application’ make it clear that his connection to the estates is purely legal. She gives no information about the others who might claim the land, but does hint at their existence. The ‘law of male-primogeniture’ makes Wieland’s claim ‘superior’, implying that there are other potential claimants and that they are women. She mentions the death of ‘those persons’ with a ‘right to these estates’, but fails to mention the fate of those who live there but have no legal right to hold property. The female survivors of the Prussian wars are not seen in the plot and have no voice with which to contest Wieland’s claims. However, their presence is suggested, disturbing the narrative’s foreground with the injustice of gendered property laws.

The ventriloquist, Carwin, interrupts Wieland’s conversation with Pleyel and reveals the same legal dynamics in the United States. When Pleyel suggests that Catharine’s sense of duty will lead her to support her husband, her voice is heard ‘from another quarter’, saying ‘“No”’ (pp.40-41). Carwin later admits to appropriating Catharine’s voice in order ‘to terminate the controversy in favor of the latter [Wieland]’ (p.184). Since his goal is Wieland’s, the interjection can be read as a displaced representation of the metaphoric ventriloquism her husband performs in mediating her legal identity. The imitation of Catharine’s voice gives the illusion that she is able to give an opinion, but the prominent disembodiment of that voice emphasises her absence from the conversation. This links the restricted access to property that married women experienced in the early Republic to their lack of a public voice. Without property a woman could not demonstrate the necessary independence to qualify to vote, even if her gender had not been a bar in itself. Lack of access to property therefore results in a lack of representation in government, or a lack of independent voice. This silencing was justified by the assumption that a husband would inevitably act in sympathy with his wife’s interests because they had a merged legal identity. Carwin’s ventriloquism exposes the danger inherent in presuming to know a wife’s mind without allowing her to speak for herself. Significantly, Catharine never articulates a view on the Lusatian estates and so it is only the disembodied, deceitful utterance that confirms Wieland’s speculation that she would disapprove. Carwin disrupts the unity of husband and wife to highlight the latter’s silence.

In Catharine’s death, Brown continues to represent women’s exclusion from the apparatus of state as a lack of voice. The murder is detailed in the transcript of Wieland’s confession at his trial. Although Clara edits his account she cannot substitute her own version (and voice) because she did not witness the attack. Wieland gains a degree of control over the event by describing it in his own voice. Significantly, this is one of only three sections that Clara does not narrate directly. The conspicuous displacement of the female narrator involves Wieland and Catharine in a power dynamic at the level of representation. The shift in narrative voice is therefore an integral part of Brown’s treatment of household authority and must be addressed carefully.

A thorough analysis is assisted by two strategies of reading formulated by Elisabeth Bronfen in her work on the representation of femininity and death. In her chapter, ‘Violence of Representation – Representation of Violence’, she considers a series of paintings of a woman in the final stages of a terminal illness and asks:

Should one assume the position of a morally involved spectator, treating the represented body as though it were the same as the material body it refers to, focusing, that is, on the question of reference and in so doing denying the representational aspect? From this position, these images appear monstrous because, in some way inadequate to the demands of the real, losing the real so to speak to the needs of a representational unity. Or should one assume the position of the aesthetically involved spectator, distanced, disinterested, treating the representation of a dying body only as a signifier pointing to many other signifiers; judged on the basis of comparison with other signifiers (previous images in the painter’s oeuvre, in the image repertoire of his culture); foreclosing the question of the real? [6]

Bronfen suggests that the second kind of reading, in which the body becomes ‘an object externally coded’, involves rhetorical violence because it denies the dying woman ‘her individual meaning, a possibility of signifying other than in relation to him [the painter]’. [7] However, Bronfen warns that a focus on this violence risks replicating it because, again, it shifts attention and meaning away from the actual suffering of the woman. Her attempt to negotiate a position for the spectator that is engaged both morally and aesthetically provides a model that is useful to readers of Wieland.

The account of Catharine’s death is given in a court, for the particular purpose of answering the charge of murder. Wieland’s narrative is modified by his need to give meaning to his own actions, which he does when he states that he acted ‘to testify my love of thee [God]’ (p.152). The language of his confession further locates Catharine and her murder as meaningful only as signifiers of his pious motive. He calls her ‘the treasure of my soul’ and God’s ‘last and best gift’ to demonstrate the magnitude of his sacrifice (pp.151, 158). Her questions and pleas are followed repeatedly by references to their effect on him, specifically that they make his task more difficult: ‘my heart faltered’; ‘my thoughts were thrown anew into anarchy’; ‘when she could speak no longer [because he was strangling her], her gestures, her looks appealed to my compassion. My accursed hand was irresolute and tremulous. I meant thy death to be sudden, thy struggles to be brief. Alas! My heart was infirm; my resolves mutable’ (pp.156-57). Her suffering is appropriated to demonstrate his struggle. She loses her specific identity completely in the moments after her death: ‘I looked again at my wife. […] I asked myself who it was whom I saw. Methought it could not be Catharine. It could not be the woman who had lodged for years in my heart’ (p.158). When Wieland testifies, he represents her as an object of sacrifice, not as a suffering, individual woman. In Bronfen’s terms, he re-enacts his violence on a rhetorical level.

Because this occurs in a court, it resonates beyond the personal tragedy that takes place within a family. The merging of a woman’s legal identity with her husband’s and his mediation of her relationship to the state meant that there was practically no female presence in the judicial sphere. Just as women were unable to make contracts because that might interfere with their presence in the home, they were not required to serve on juries. The release from this obligation of citizenship meant a denial of the reciprocal right: to a trial by a jury of one’s peers. [8] Wieland’s representation of Catharine to the court illustrates the more pervasive metaphoric death of women within and to state institutions, and imbues it with his murderous violence. Coverture is rendered not only reckless as regards individual women’s identities, but also brutally repressive and the product of insanity.

The court that tries Wieland is the only state institution that appears in the novel and so Brown’s critique of the law can be extrapolated to the state’s treatment of female citizens more generally. The narrative suggests the reality that Catharine would always be dead, metaphorically if not literally, to those institutions. Although Wieland kills his children as well as his wife, Clara edits the transcript of his confession so that their deaths are not represented. Instead, she focuses the court’s attention on the death of a woman. [9] That emphasis is reinforced by Clara’s displacement from her role as narrator and by her illness at the time of the trial. In her ‘delirium’, she hallucinates a ‘giant oppressor under whose arm [she] was forever on the point of being crushed’. Her ‘malady’ divorces her from the physical world to the extent that ‘strenuous muscles were required to hinder [her] flight’. Crucially, it takes her memory of ‘the scenes that [she] had witnessed’, so that even after her recovery she pleads, ‘my narrative would be imperfect’ (p.145). There is no possibility of Clara giving evidence to the jury or even to her readers. Immediately after she reads the confession she falls ‘lifeless’ and a relapse takes her ‘once more to the brink of the grave’ (p.160). Metaphors of Clara’s death surround the state’s intervention in the household to illustrate the dislocation between its institutions and the female Wielands.

The implications of Brown’s use of death as a metaphor for women’s citizenship are illuminated by Russ Castronovo’s recent work, Necro Citizenship. He argues that since the Revolution, the United States has sought to define freedom as an abstract ideal, without resorting to contingency on the antithetical concepts of slavery and oppression. Given the continuing existence of social and political inequalities, this required a denial of the historical and material specificity of both state and citizen. Simultaneously, the desire to postpone the decay of the nation-state engendered a desire for stasis that could only be achieved through the passivity of its population. Both of these tendencies contributed to an ideology of ‘political necrophilia’ in which the citizen is constructed as disembodied and universal. Castronovo argues that a range of nineteenth-century cultural works represent death as liberty in order to preserve this model of citizenship. In particular, the metaphor is applied to those whose bodies mark their difference from the enfranchised white, male citizen. Gender and ethnicity threaten to disrupt the universal language of freedom and so are removed from their social meaning by death. [10]

Brown’s representation of Catharine follows Castronovo’s model to some extent. In Wieland, the state requires the passivity and ‘death’ of female citizens. However, the narrative resists the process of ‘equalizing’ through death. Catharine’s murder does not involve an erasure of her material specificity or of its social meaning. Wieland’s recollections figure her in explicitly feminine roles, as his ‘wife’ ‘who had borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father’. He graphically describes her body: ‘her eyeballs started from their sockets. Grimness and distortion took place of all that used to bewitch me’. Her eyes are ‘blood-suffused’ and there are ‘livid stains’ on her body (pp.158-9). These details not only embody her after death, they also maintain a level of violence in the representation that exposes the oppression inherent in the construction of the dead citizen. He conjures a specific, physical presence in the court that confronts the state with Catharine’s individuality and refuses the conflation of liberty and death for women. The confession re-enacts the murder and allows Wieland’s authority to continue, mediating her citizenship even in death. ‘Dead’ citizenship is revealed to be violent, and remains exclusive. Brown uses metaphoric death to emphasise the material difference between citizens and to haunt the new nation with its injustice.

At this point, I reintroduce Bronfen’s warning. Has Brown, or my reading of Brown, fallen into the trap of focusing on the (male) artist’s violence at the expense of the dying woman’s specific experience? Is there any potential for a morally-engaged reading of the murder? Wieland’s voice dominates the only explicit representation of the attack and obviously hinders such a reading. However, this is where Clara’s role as narrator and the retrospective structure of the novel become especially relevant. Together, they open up the imaginative space for Catharine’s experience of the attack.

Clara’s account of discovering the body precedes Wieland’s confession. Throughout her description, there is a strong implication that Catharine has been substituted for her. Clara goes to her house expecting to meet Carwin but is greeted by a note from him that asks, ‘Judge how I was disappointed in finding another in your place’ (p.137). When she sees the corpse she says, ‘the merciless fangs of which I was designed to be the prey, had mistaken their victim, and had fixed themselves in her heart’ (p.138). Textual details strongly suggest that ‘the fate which had been reserved for me’ was not simply murder, but also involved a sexual assault. She believes that ‘violation and death awaited my entrance into this chamber’ (p.138) and in lamenting Catharine’s fate she goes on to say, ‘To die beneath his grasp would not satisfy thy enemy. This was mercy to the evils which he previously made thee suffer! After these evils death was a boon which thou besoughtest him to grant’ (p.139).

Clara prepares for the return of ‘the exterminator of my honor and my life’ and fears that she ‘should perish under the same polluting and suffocating grasp!’ (p.138). In addition, the narrative has already offered a model for the attack on Catharine. The exchange of her for Clara, the location in Clara’s chamber and the suspicion that Carwin was present all recall a previous scene, in which he emerged from the closet and declared his intention to ‘have borne away the spoils of [her] honor’ (p.83).

I am not the first to draw the obvious conclusion from Clara’s language. Bernard Rosenthal has observed that:

Readers need not have prurient imaginations to take for granted that Clara can be suggesting nothing other than rape. Does she see something that she will not narrate? Or does Brown raise the spectre in order to encourage the false lead that Carwin was guilty? Certainly nothing in Wieland’s account suggests that he raped his wife before murdering her, and Brown never returns to clarify this issue. [11]

Rosenthal’s reading rightly emphasises the text’s ambivalence and the reader’s subsequent uncertainty. He places this conundrum within a pattern of disruptions that he says dramatise the novel’s warning against relying on sensory perception. However, by designating it as just another inexplicable puzzle, he occludes important questions raised by the insistence of Clara’s language: what would it mean if Wieland did rape Catharine? More particularly, what does it mean for readers to imagine that he could?

This raises a possibility that could only be disturbing in the context of coverture. If Clara had revealed that Wieland was the culprit immediately, the legal impossibility of rape within marriage would have foreclosed any representation of a sexual assault. Instead, she figures the attack as one perpetrated by an ‘enemy’, probably Carwin, that was aimed at herself – Catharine was just in the wrong place at the wrong time (p.139). By representing Clara and Carwin in the place of Catharine and Wieland she enables a reader to interpret the hints that are too emphatic to be ignored. Furthermore, Clara’s insinuations are self-consciously retrospective. She already knows the ending, knows that Wieland is the murderer, but still suggests that his wife was raped. His subsequent confession should not be read as contradicting her because its recognition of crimes is circumscribed by the law. Clara imagines Catharine’s suffering perspective. That is, she offers a morally-involved reading of the corpse. This allows her to focus on the attack, not the attacker. When she later replaces suspicions of Carwin’s guilt with certainty of Wieland’s, she cannot erase the earlier representations of Catharine’s suffering. To ensure that her representation haunts his, Brown duplicates vocabulary in the two scenes. The corpse is marked with ‘lividness’ or ‘livid stains’; it is ‘breathless’ and ‘her breath was stopped’; both speak of ‘the assassin’, his ‘fury’ and of ‘agonies’ suffered. Clara ‘fixed steadfast eyes upon’ the corpse, while Catharine had ‘fixed enquiring eyes on’ Wieland (pp.138-39, 151-52). Bringing together the two versions erodes the distinction between the legitimate sexual dominance of the husband and the criminal assault by the stranger. Clara forces her reader to confront the hidden implications of the legally guaranteed access of a husband to his wife’s body, and implies a conception of marriage as a form of sexual slavery. Most importantly, she makes violence and coercion inherent characteristics of the new nation’s treatment, or neglect, of its female citizens.

There is, however, a persistent question that might trouble a reader, especially one sensitive to the novel’s concern with the uncertainty of event and the characters’ preoccupation with causality. Quite simply, when could Wieland have raped Catharine? Up until ‘the moment of triumph’ when his ‘sacred duty is fulfilled’, the confession is characterised by his claim to have ‘subdued the stubbornness of human passions’ (p.158). It seems tenuous to suggest that an assault occurred somewhere between the lines of his blow-by-blow description of murder. However, his account of the moments following her death is less clear. Initially he says that he ‘gazed upon it [the corpse] with delight’, in ‘rapture’. Soon after, his immunity to passion subsides and eventually becomes an uncontrollable excess of emotion: ‘I imagined I had set myself forever beyond the reach of selfishness; but my imaginations were false’ (p.158). After his moment of self-congratulation, Wieland remains fascinated by Catharine’s body. He begins to construct an image of her alive in an attempt to recreate the woman who could ‘bewitch [him] into transport, and subdue [him] into reverence’ (p.157). As he stares, he projects fantasies of life onto the corpse: looking at her ‘deadly and blood-suffused’ eyes he envisions the ‘azure and ecstatic tenderness’ they used to hold; seeing ‘these livid stains and this hideous deformity’ on her body, he imagines ‘the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek’. Wieland’s language revivifies Catharine who ceases to be ‘the corpse’ to him, and again becomes ‘my wife’. The shift in her identity precedes a corresponding change in his self-perception. Having previously declared himself her ‘appointed […] destroyer’, he becomes ‘mere man’ and displaces the agency for the murder onto the third-person ‘assassin’ (p.158). The memories he conjures reinforce their relationship as husband and wife, baron et feme, rather than destroyer and sacrifice. Wieland focuses on the domestic role of the woman who had lodged for years in my heart; who had slept, nightly, in my bosom; who had borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father; whom I had watched with delight, and cherished with a fondness ever new and perpetually growing. (p.158)

The specific memories of her ‘bewitching’ appearance, sleeping in his bosom, and bearing his children add a sexual connotation to Wieland’s regard of the corpse. The implication of sexual desire is heightened if the persistence of Wieland’s gaze and his emphasis on the visual are read with regard to Freud’s comments on scopophilia. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he calls seeing ‘an activity that is ultimately derived from touching’ and states that ‘visual impressions remain the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is aroused’. [12] Wieland’s prolonged stare, therefore, becomes equivalent to touching. When touch and conjugal memories are read through the frame of Clara’s insinuations, they suggest sexual desire.

What follows this contemplation of the corpse is a period of uncontrolled ‘degeneracy’. Wieland deliberately obscures the episode, saying, ‘I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow’. After his descent ‘into mere man’ his behaviour is irrational and excessive:

I leaped from the floor: I dashed my head against the wall: I uttered screams of horror: I panted after torment and pain. Eternal fire, and the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and a bed of roses. (p.158)

Whereas he represents the murder as ‘sacred duty’ to a ‘divine command’, this interlude is figured as a fall into ‘the bickerings of hell’ (pp.158-9). His imagery implies a crime worse than murder, but conceals it in an impression of confusion. The ellipsis allows for the disturbing possibility that desire was enacted on the corpse as necrophilia. A post-mortem sexual assault would explain Clara’s comments without contradicting Wieland’s description of his mental state before the murder. It would also resolve an otherwise puzzling detail. After the murder, Wieland ‘lifted the corpse […] and laid it on the bed’ (p.158). When Clara finds the body she notes that Catharine’s ‘flowing drapery was discomposed’ (p.139). Why would the corpse’s clothes be dishevelled if it had been moved onto the bed and carefully placed there after death? The suggestion of necrophilia dramatises the desirability of the passive female citizen as an expression of a taboo, irrational passion. It adds another layer to the critique of women’s legal death and challenges the liberating notion of necrophilia that Castronovo attributes to the state. In Wieland death is not a condition of equilibrium divorced from disruptive, individual passions. Rather, the death of women in relation to the state makes their husbands unaccountable. As a consequence, married women are left subject to the state lifts any restrictions that might have been placed on their husbands, subjecting them to selfish, violent passions. The pairing of absolute authority and enforced passivity is detrimental to both Catharine and Wieland, who becomes ‘inhuman’ in his violence (pp.159, 174).

Of course, there can be no certainty that there was any sexual assault or if there was that it was post-mortem, but to some extent that is the point. Catharine’s experience cannot be reliably reconstructed because her relationship to the reader, like her interaction with the state, is ultimately mediated by others. Possibilities are raised between the narrators’ conflicting accounts but their very uncertainty emphasises the silence of the woman at the centre of the plot.

Wieland’s claim to be a ‘protector’ is obviously contradicted by his transformation into a murderer. However, I would like to suggest that there is no fundamental change in him. As the narrative progresses the mask of republican rhetoric is replaced by insanity, and repressive speech becomes physical violence. The change is in the expression of the power that already exists. Wieland fulfils his pessimistic prediction of degeneration ‘into a tyrant and voluptuary’ without exposure to the corrupting influence of Europe, without even leaving his Pennsylvania home. The problems of female citizenship and Wieland’s oppressive exercise of authority within his household are evident from his discussion of the Lusatian states, long before he loses his reason. The origin of the murder, therefore, is inherent in the household from this early stage. In both of the incidents I have examined, Carwin is used to defamiliarise the conjugal relationship and reveal the vestiges of absolute power that it retains. His disruption is crucial to recognising Catharine’s independent identity and experience. By placing Wieland’s aesthetically-involved representation of the murder within Clara’s morally-involved reading of events, Brown reveals the tyranny enshrined in the institutions retained by the post-revolutionary, democratic United States.

University of Leeds

Notes

[1] Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or The Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist, ed. by Emory Elliott (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 3. All further references made within the body of the text.

[2] Jane Tompkins, ‘What Happens in Wieland’, in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 40-61.

[3] Christopher Looby, ‘“The Very Act of Utterance”: Law, Language, and Legitimation in Brown’s Wieland’, in Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.145-202; Julia A. Stern, ‘The Plight of Feeling’, in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), pp.1-29.

[4] For an overview of the law of ‘baron et feme’ and on the married woman’s obligation to her husband, see Linda K. Kerber, ‘A Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship’, in U.S. History As Women’s History, ed. by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp.17-35. For a more detailed discussion of coverture in the early Republic and revolutionary ideals see Linda K. Kerber, ‘“Disabilities … Intended for Her Protection”: The Anti-Republican Implications of Coverture’, in Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp.137-55.

[5]Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and other Political Writings, ed. by Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; repr. 1998), p.17; Thomas Jefferson, A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress Assembled, in The Thomas Jefferson Papers, ed. by Frank Donovan (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), pp.12-18; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[6] Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Violence of Representation’, in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 39-56 (pp.44-45).

[7] Bronfen, pp. 50-51.

[8] Kerber, ‘A Constitutional Right to Be Treated Like American Ladies’.

[9] Clara’s ability to edit Wieland’s words does imply that she is not completely disempowered. As an unmarried, propertied woman she is less constrained by her family and enjoys greater independence than Catharine. However, this episode reveals that her relationship to the state is little different from her sister-in-law’s. Her editorial authority over the confession does not translate directly into a civic, or even public identity. The novel’s advertisement assures readers that ‘this narrative is addressed, in an epistolary form, by the Lady whose story it contains, to a small number of friends, whose curiosity, with regard to it had been greatly awakened’ (p.3, my emphasis).

[10] Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

[11] Bernard Rosenthal, ‘The Voices in Wieland’, in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. by Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: Hall, 1981), pp. 104-25 (p.107).

[12] Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), VII, pp.123-45 (p.156).

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007

Reading Gender in Amy Bloom

Alison Kelly
© Alison Kelly. All Rights Reserved

A scene in Duncan Tucker’s 2005 film Transamerica shows the panicked reaction of pre-operative male-to-female transsexual Bree Osbourne when a child in a diner asks whether she is a boy or a girl. Despite cultivating stereotypically feminine mannerisms and being meticulously dressed, coiffed, made up and manicured, Bree has not put on a fully convincing performance as a woman; some aspect of her appearance or behaviour is ambiguous. In a distraught phone call to her psychiatrist, Bree reports that the child has ‘read’ her, and the emphasis placed on this term suggests acute prior consciousness on both their parts of her susceptibility to such expository reading.

This article discusses the importance of legibility to representations of transsexualism in the fiction and nonfiction of American psychotherapist and author Amy Bloom. It examines the accounts of gender reassignment in Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude and the short story ‘A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You’ in light of competing cultural and biological theories of sex and gender identity.[1] Engaging with a discourse elaborated by, among others, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Holly Devor, it argues that Bloom represents sex change as a primarily social rather than medical procedure, entailing a difficult repositioning of the self within the culture’s structures of expression and interpretation. Tropes of vision and perception in the fiction reinforce this view of gender reassignment as largely a matter of the projection and reception of image.

Judith Butler’s well-known theory of identity as mutable and performative opens fruitful avenues into Bloom’s fictional and nonfictional writing on transsexualism. In Gender Trouble Butler argues that gender, like other aspects of identity such as sexuality, is produced through culturally intelligible acts and processes of signification.[2] Equally opposing biological determinism, foundationalism and passive models of identity-construction founded on inscription by cultural forces, Butler proposes an active understanding based on repetitive practices and enactments; gender, she says, is an ‘effect‘ of articulate processes. Physical actions, embodiment, language and dress are among the numerous discourses that individuals deploy for the expression of gender. The conventions on which such self-representation relies are normative, ‘determining what qualifies as intelligible sex’ (p. 189), which is why certain performances of masculinity or (as in Bree’s case) femininity are deemed not to ‘pass’. Butler urges subversion of these norms – in particular, the dismantling of what she regards as an unnatural gender binary – and ‘the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new possibilities for gender that contest the rigid codes’ of male and female (p. 185). This radical agenda is shared by theorists such as Kate Bornstein, discussed below; and some of Bloom’s interviewees in Normal express frustration with restrictive and regulatory gender categories. What is most relevant to my reading of Bloom, however, is Butler’s underlying proposition that ‘gender is a kind of persistent impersonation’ exploiting a repertoire of culturally intelligible ‘signifying gestures’ (p. xxviii).

The protagonist of Transamerica is a male-to-female transsexual (MTF), but Bloom’s texts focus on female-to-male gender converts, or FTMs. Bloom foregrounds vision and perception in all her work, repeatedly employing the eye as a metaphor for the ‘I’, [3] and Normal establishes the importance of visual presentation and interpretation from the outset. In the preface, Bloom uses language that articulates a link between understanding and sight. Incomprehension of transsexualism is one of ‘our culture’s blind spots’ (p. xiv), and her purpose in writing the book was to tell the personal stories of transsexuals in such a way as to ‘offer readers a chance to see what I saw, perhaps to see further and better, and to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share’ (p. xv). This emphasis on intelligent perception is twinned with a heightened image-consciousness in the objects of vision. Among the FTMs Bloom interviewed in the course of her research, body-tattooed Loren Cameron is conscious of making ‘“a striking-looking couple”’ with his fitness-fanatic girlfriend (p. 13), while bisexual Luis believes that his new male body is an appropriate outward expression of his identity: ‘“What I perceive and what my partner perceives now match up. Inside and outside, I’m a man”’ (p. 13).

It is worth noting in connection with image-awareness that for many FTMs, one of the early signs of gender dysphoria is discomfort with or resistance to traditional female clothing. One of Bloom’s interviewees, whom she calls Michael, tried as a child to ‘“get used to”’ being a girl, which among other female gender-role behaviours involved going around in ‘“what felt like drag”’ (p. 44). By his own account he did it ‘“pretty well”’ (p. 44) – that is, presented convincingly and attractively as a girl and was perceived as such by family, friends and the wider society. But the disjunction between this female gender role and attribution, and his inward self-identification as a male, grew wider as he matured sexually and socially. In the case of Lyle, who started transition at the age of 14, symptoms of juvenile gender dysphoria were more pronounced, especially with regard to visible inscriptions of femininity: his name, which he hated, and ‘party dresses, Mary Janes, and even girl-styled polo shirts’, over which he fought fierce battles with his mother and wept ‘astonished, frightened tears’ (p. 9).

Bloom was assisted in her research for Normal by eminent plastic surgeon Don Laub, who dubs his work in this field ‘“the ultimate body-image surgery”’ (p. 10). But this is not to belittle it: he regards the transformations he works as going to the heart of his patients’ sense of identity. As one FTM put it, complaining of the insurance companies’ unwillingness to fund the surgery, ‘“Like I wanted a nose job. […] Well, it was only my life”’ (p. 10). Bloom defines transsexuals as people who go to any lengths to ‘bring their bodies into accord with the gender to which they have known themselves, since toddlerhood, to belong’ (pp. 3–4). This definition, with its essentialist assumptions about ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ gender, might be contested by a theorist such as Butler, who argues that gender identity as ‘inner substance’ is always an ‘illusion’.[4] The empirical evidence, however, is that significant numbers of people are so unhappy with the gender to which they are assigned at birth on the basis of their physical sex characteristics that they take drastic measures to change their sexed embodiment.

The medical procedures involved in rebuilding the ‘physical package’ [5] for FTMs are painful and expensive: courses of hormone treatments; mastectomy; then genital reconstruction, with options ranging from metoidioplasty (enlargement of the clitoris) to basic or deluxe phalloplasty. The literature on gender is replete with critiques of a phallocentric model of gendered embodiment traceable back to Freud and the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis. Holly Devor argues that ‘males are defined by what they are, […] females […] by what they lack’ – what they lack being a penis, which she identifies as ‘the insignia of sex’.[6] Kate Bornstein, an MTF who, like Butler, regards herself as living on the ‘frontier’ of a binary gender system that has no place for her, states in her book Gender Outlaw that ‘Gender assignment happens when the culture says, “This is what you are”’, and that this is determined by whether you have or don’t have a penis.[7]

In Normal, Don Laub appears to subscribe to a phallocentric view of male corporeal identity – ‘“if money’s no object [… m]en want penises”'(29) – but he is not unequivocally supported by the interview testimony. Financial considerations did influence some of the men’s decisions to settle for metoidioplasty, but in making this choice at least one of the interviewees willingly sacrificed penetrative function for the sake of full feeling. His partner endorsed his decision, saying that her sexual satisfaction was not diminished by his not having ‘“a regular penis. It wasn’t a loss to me. We have a lot more variety. We make love to each other, after all, not to organs”’ (p. 42). Another man stated that he would opt for phalloplasty if it could give him a ‘“fully functioning”’ penis, but he wasn’t ‘“prepared to go through more surgery […] to wind up with a pair of testicles and not much more”’ (p. 32). Significantly, his lack of a traditional totem of masculine sexuality notwithstanding, he ended his statement with a confident affirmation of identity: ‘“I know who I am”’ (p. 32).

The limits to medical technology mean that transsexuals’ reconstructed genitals always require explanation to their sexual partners. As Holly Devor points out in FTM, many still have vaginas and all ‘carry their pasts with them in their most intimate of places’.[8] This has implications for their success in passing as members of their chosen sex, especially with regard to activities that involve exposing ‘critical areas’, including participating in sports and using public toilets or changing rooms.[9] The importance of credibility in social contexts is discussed repeatedly in Devor’s work, often couched in terms of the body as text. With respect to hormone treatments she says, ‘The changes wrought in the bodies of participants by testosterone added more indelible and more legible layers of legitimization to participants’ manliness’.[10] FTMs’ chances of being read as men are increased with the acquisition of secondary sex characteristics such as beards and deep voices, but while they still have breasts they remain in danger of exposure (just as Bree, in Transamerica, is exposed as genetically male when Toby sees her penis); only with breast reduction and removal do the physical markers of femaleness, at least for everyday social contexts, disappear.

If passing is difficult, so is accurate reading. In Normal Bloom records how, at Don Laub’s clinic in Palo Alto, she became preoccupied with studying men and women for clues as to whether they were genetically male or female. In women who were too femininely dressed and made up or had big hands she detected the possibility of transsexualism, as she did in ‘short, wide-hipped men with scraggly facial hair’ (p. 21). The unreliability of such scrutiny is comically illustrated in Transamerica, when a thickset genetic woman is misread as a poorly realised MTF, and in Normal Bloom attests to the pitfalls of examining people for ‘traces of the other gender’ (p. 22), since there are few examples of perfect masculinity or femininity, or what Butler calls ‘ideal morphologies of sex’.[11] Photographs taken before, during and after hormone treatments brought home to Bloom just how susceptible the human body is to transformation: ‘what we take as the immutable biological fact of our existence is […] largely hormonal and unnervingly fluid’ (p. 22).

The difficulty of visual interpretation does not, however, deter Bloom from attempting it. In her extratextual capacity as interviewer of FTMs and her intratextual role as narrator of Normal, Bloom assumes the prerogative of judging performed masculinity. Her definition of the male is a broad one, as the typology of gender converts in ‘The Body Lies’ (p. 16) illustrates, but it is a definition none the less. Unlike more radical theorists such as Butler and Bornstein, Bloom adheres to gender categories while arguing for their expansion. Her reiterated verdict on her research subjects is ‘I met men’ (p. 16), demonstrating her ongoing enterprise of observing, evaluating and, where they are successful in her eyes, validating their performances.

In Normal and related literature, then, gender reassignment is represented as necessitating an intensified attentiveness to the presentation, passing, perception and reading that are involved in all gendered identity-construction. In the second part of this article I consider how this understanding of transsexual experience is reflected in the form of Bloom’s short story on the subject, as well as in the tropes and terms that pervade it. This analytical framework suggests answers to the questions why a story about FTM gender conversion is called ‘A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You’, and why the centre of consciousness is the mother, Jane Spencer, rather than the teenager, Jessie/Jess Spencer, who is partway through the transition from young woman to young man.[12]

‘Blind Man’ opens with a visual scenario: a private view of the ‘pictures of slim young men’ (p. 1) that Jane Spencer keeps in the bottom drawer of her desk. At first glance a stash of sexy pinups, on closer inspection these photographs look more like a picture documentary of issues close to Jane’s heart. Ambiguous gender, questionable sexuality and growth to adulthood are all reflected in this portfolio, which includes homoerotic icons James Dean and Robert Mapplethorpe; Rudolph Valentino; Jeremy Irons; Kevin Bacon; B. D. Wong. These matters are relevant to Jane because she is a ‘transsexual mom’, in California to support her teenage child through the surgical procedures that will complete his transition to a man. The description of this child’s gender dysphoria (when much younger and living as a girl) is typical of the story’s representational strategies, presenting sight as both a perceptive and an expressive faculty. Confronted with an item of girl’s clothing to wear to a wedding, Jessie ‘stared’ at it ‘as if her mother had gone mad’ (p. 3) – her eyes here a double-edged tool allowing her to apprehend the depth of Jane’s delusion about her as symbolised in the garment and to express her utter refusal to accept the ‘girl’ label that wearing it would apply.

Up to this point Jane has wilfully ‘managed not to see’ the truth about Jessie, but now the evidence is too plain to ignore, and the ‘rose petals falling from [Jessie’s] blazer pocket’ (p. 4) while she sleeps on the way home from the wedding are poignant symbols of the femininity the child has cast out. Just because Jessie ‘looks like a girl’ it doesn’t mean she is one: her misleading appearance is a ‘joke’ played by God, allowing Jane to think of ‘the love of her life’ as female flesh created of her own female flesh, but then saying ‘Oops. […] Sorry’ and advising her to adjust ‘accordingly’ (p. 4). The adjustment in question is twofold: of Jane’s vision, so that she sees her daughter afresh as her son, and of Jessie’s body, which involves saving fifty thousand dollars for hormone treatments and reconstructive surgery.

Jessie’s first phalloplasty is in fact a homespun one motivated by the wish to urinate like a boy; she makes ‘a funnel with both hands and a baggie’ so that she can ‘pee […] on the far side of the rhododendron’ with her school friends (p. 3).When, in first grade, however, the boys notice the oddness of her organ and start ‘thinking something of it’, Jessie’s cover is blown, and the teacher – that traditional custodian of society’s morals and norms, and the one empowered to administer lessons – ‘push[es] Jessie firmly into the girls’ bathroom’ (p. 3), literally and metaphorically locating her on the wrong side of the gender divide. Later in life the transitioning Jess attaches great importance to a ‘realistic penis’, at the same time accepting that his most desired body-image, seen in his dreams and glimpsed in the mirror ‘with a few beers and a sock in his shorts’ (p. 14), isn’t what his bottom surgery is going to get him.

While Jess is preoccupied with the kind of penis to choose (p. 14), Jane is pondering the ‘small things’ (such as smoking an occasional cigar (p. 13)) that might help him to pass as a male after transition. Like Bloom as narrator in Normal, Jane as centre of consciousness in ‘Blind Man’ measures the success of transsexual presentation, identifying herself as ‘practically a professional observer of gender’, sensitive to the ‘markers’ that make a passable or convincing man or woman. She judges that, having had top surgery but not bottom surgery, Jess is an embodiment of mixed gender, a ‘handsome boy-girl’ with validating male characteristics such as hairy arms and ‘neat round biceps’ (p. 15), while the telltale scars where his breasts used to be have almost disappeared thanks to her nagging him to massage them with vitamin E oil (p. 16).

An interior designer and a smart dresser, Jane is herself a dedicated and accomplished image-artist on the personal and professional levels, and she has a tendency to judge others by the same visual standards. In her eyes, an unconcern for personal appearance is expressive of weak character. At the parents’ support group attached to Dr Laurence’s gender conversion clinic, she rebuffs the friendly overtures of one of the ‘sad and scruffy’ (p. 8) other mothers, Sheila, and notes with disapproval that Sheila’s daughter-cum-son Jo(e) is overweight, wears thick glasses, and has ‘short, frizzy brown hair’ and acne: ‘Your Jo, waddling through life, will never be an attractive anything’ (p. 9).

This tendency to place high value on attractiveness is something Jane recognises in herself, but she does not believe it is peculiar to her. Society in general is highly susceptible to a pretty face: ‘in this world […] good-looking itself smooths over the more awkward parts of your presentation’ (p. 10). During a contact-group session involving parents and transitioning youngsters she is unfavourably impressed by the testimony of an MTF who has morphed into a Malibu Barbie look-alike, but her contempt ‘dissolves’ into compassion when she inspects Barbie’s makeup, finds it ‘a good job’, and ‘thinks of this boy teaching himself the stupid, necessary girl tricks’ (p. 10) that a presentation-conscious culture requires.

To a greater or lesser degree, Jane argues, most of us are engaged in the same enterprise – of enhancing our appearance to reflect an improved and augmented image of masculinity or femininity. Men have ‘calf implants’, women go in for ‘tattooed eyeliner and colored contacts and ass lifts’, and although these forms of makeover are less radical than ‘a complete reversal of gender’ they enable the individuals concerned to conceal what they perceive as their faults and make desirable alterations: ‘Who does not change and hide?’ (p. 10). Having modelled her physical and fashion images on Western consumer culture’s most iconic plastic sex-symbol, Malibu Barbie regards herself as a complete embodiment of her chosen gender – every bit ‘“as much a woman”’ as the genetic women in the group – prompting Jane to consider the question of what exactly it is that constitutes femaleness (p. 11).

In a period when Jane and Jessie both thought (wrongly) that Jessie’s apparent gender dysphoria might be a case of suppressed lesbianism, Jane took Jessie to Northampton, Massachusetts, ‘the Lesbian Paradise’ (p. 17) , where Jessie initially experienced a sense of joyful belonging and for once ‘did not feel like a complete impostor’ (p. 17). The ‘parade of everyday lesbian life’ was an ‘unexpected, extravagant gift’ that Jessie felt she must possess with her eyes, not daring to take them off it for fear that it would disappear. We are not explicitly told when or why Jessie became dissatisfied with a lesbian identity, but for Jane the aversion seems to have been experienced largely in terms of aesthetics. Although some of the lesbians in Northampton were strikingly fit and one was ‘beautiful as Apollo is beautiful’, too many of them for Jane’s liking were overweight women swaggering along in overalls and ugly mullet haircuts. Not here but in the glamorous, stylish figures of Nathalie Barney, Barbara Stanwyck and Greta Garbo were to be found models of lesbianism on which Jane (a compulsive designer of images for other people) would have liked Jessie to fashion herself. Only these beautiful film stars were ‘lesbians of the kind Jane would be happy for Jessie to be’ (p. 17).

The roll call of famous names mentioned in ‘Blind Man’ is a striking feature of the text. On top of the six ‘slim young men’ in the opening paragraph and the three photogenic lesbians just discussed, Jane’s mind turns to some fourteen celebrities, living or dead, in the course of the story. Among these are Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Lee Curtis – Hollywood idols whose authenticity as, respectively, a genetic man and a genetic woman Jane finds herself questioning in light of what she knows about transsexualism. Isn’t there ‘something about’ Leo DiCaprio? And doesn’t Jamie Lee Curtis have telltale masculine legs? Spending time at Dr Laurence’s clinic shakes Jane’s confidence in her own perceptions: ‘Once you know there are transsexuals, you see them everywhere’ (p. 6) – people who may not be what they seem to be, whose body shapes are conventionally associated with the opposite sex.

The absence of any immutable ‘physical underpinnings’ for gender, contends feminist scientist and social activist Anne Fausto-Sterling, is the reason why ‘labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision’. In support of this position she cites the case of a Spanish athlete who was barred at the last minute from the 1988 Olympics because sex testing carried out by the International Olympic Committee uncovered a Y chromosome in her cells. Further examinations revealed that the athlete had testes within her labia and no uterus or ovaries: to all outward appearances she was a woman, but her reproductive organs were essentially those of a man. Owing to a condition named androgen insensitivity (in which her testes made testosterone but her body couldn’t detect it) she had developed a female form. So what was she ‘really’? In her own unwavering view, which Fausto-Sterling supports, she was a woman – but this was a social determination, not a scientific one. According to Fausto-Sterling, no scientific sex testing (whether based on chromosomes, DNA, or inspection of breasts and genitals) is infallible: ‘A body’s sex is simply too complex. There is no either/or’.[13]

Kate Bornstein would agree. After subverting five conventional identifiers of gender she states that she has found no ‘rock-bottom definition of woman’, ‘no unquestionable sense of what is a man’.[14]Signing up for one of ‘the only two sanctioned gender clubs’ (p. 24) is an individual decision within a social context, partly to do with being whoever and whatever you think you are and partly about belonging where you feel comfortable. In many cases, she argues, the choice is a false one, a matter of ‘non-consensual gender’ imposed by an artificial, normative, bi-polar gender system insufficiently flexible to accommodate the multiplicity of gendered and transgendered identities. Although (like Butler’s) her manifesto for the deconstruction of the gender polarity and the creation of a ‘third sex’ or a ‘third space’ (p. 101) for ‘anyone who falls through the cracks of the cultural floorboards’ (p. 164) takes her into more radical territory than Bloom ventures into, the metaphors of fluidity employed by both Bornstein and Bloom, and their critical engagement with the myth of normality, mark out their common ground. ‘Is there such a thing as a normal man or woman?’ Bornstein asks (p. 65).

I have this idea that there are only people who are fluidly-gendered […] To attempt to divide us into rigid categories is like trying to apply the laws of solids to the state of fluids. (pp. 65, 69)

This goes further towards subverting gender classification than ‘Blind Man’, but there too Jane’s preconceptions about gendered embodiment, and her confidence in her ability to read gender, are so shaken by her contact with transsexuals that eventually she even sees herself doubtfully, as ‘odd […] funny’, with male markers such as wide shoulders and a possibly receding hairline. Her own gender identity seems unstable to her, as capable of alteration as Jess’s: ‘Maybe she’s morphing’; ‘Maybe she’ll cross over before Jess does’ (p. 7).

It is against this background of disturbed vision and unreliable judgement that Bloom sets the second storyline of ‘Blind Man’, Jane’s encounter and developing relationship with Cole Ramsay. When she meets him in a branch of Rite Aid, she experiences the symptoms of powerful attraction and grows flustered. Her confusion is increased by the mixture of conflicting indicators in his physical appearance. Cole’s cheekbones suggest ‘Cherokee’, while his haircut evokes another race and an anachronistic time-period – ‘a high-style black man from the forties’ (p. 19). Even so, when that night Jane ‘falls on her bed’ (p. 20) (a prefiguring of sexual yielding?), she ‘exhales happily’ at the thought of Cole, exuding contentment that the text represents as arising specifically from the attentive interest of a ‘charming’ man who is ‘a pleasure to look at’ (p. 21).

Only one fact, mentioned almost in passing, disturbs an otherwise straightforward picture of romantic love in the making: the fact that Jane believes Cole is gay. Why? Because he is ‘“so decorous”’ (p. 20)? Because his jokes are ‘self-deprecating’ and his voice is ‘soft’ and ‘light’ (p. 21)? Features of Cole’s appearance and aspects of his behaviour might be interpreted as physical, behavioural, mythic and power-dynamic cues for homosexuality,[15] but they are more amenable to a reading that identifies him as a gallant and sensitive heterosexual, and his advances to Jane invite a construction of him as straight rather than gay. Jane’s misreading of Cole is plausible only in the context of her generally confused relation to visual evidence. The next time she sees him, he is exchanging shows of friendly affection with a ‘fat blond nurse’ whose ‘wide body’, when she hugs him, obscures him from Jane’s view (p. 21). Too eagerly associating Cole with her late gay friend Anthony, with whom, to his gratification, women often fell in love (p. 22), Jane jumps to the conclusion that this nurse must be in love with Cole. In the disorientating setting of an ‘unexpectedly tropical city park’ (p. 21), Jane has a conversation with Cole in which she makes another wrong connection between him and a homosexual man, this time the actor Cary Grant. Dismissing Cole’s modest protest that no one falls in love with him now that he is over fifty, she refers him to the film star for visual evidence of older men’s sex appeal (‘“look at Cary Grant, he looked fabulous until he died”’ (p. 22)), in the process overlooking a gesture that might give her a clue about the state of Cole’s feelings: after claiming that no one falls in love with him any more, Cole ‘pulls gently on Jane’s hand’ (p. 22), appealing to her, perhaps, to prove him wrong.

When Cole says reluctantly that he has to ‘“run”’ (p. 23), Jane correctly reads this as meaning that someone is waiting for him at home, but wrongly assumes that that person is a gay partner and the home is a happy one. Having misconstrued him as part of a ‘gay couple’, she proceeds to fit herself into the picture she has painted, planning how she will invite her new gay friends over ‘for dinner, for pizza’. Even when Cole explains that he is in ‘“mid-divorce”’ and refers to his ‘“soon-to-be-ex-wife”’ (p. 23), she subjects these terms to complicated deconstruction, ‘trying to figure out whether he means “wife” in the sense of “woman I am married to,” or “wife” in the sense of [“]man in my life who played a kind of wifely role”’ (p. 23). It takes two uses of the feminine pronoun and explicit references to ‘“twelve years of unhappy marriage”’ and to his wife having met ‘“the kind of man she should have married in the first place”’ for Jane to perceive that Cole is ‘[s]traight’ (p. 23) – and even then she appends a question mark.

When Cole comes to Jane’s apartment that night, Jane admits that she thought he was gay, attributing her mistake to his good manners and the disruptive effect of associating with transsexuals on her perceptions of identity: ‘“Spending all my time at Dr. Laurence’s clinic, I could have been wondering if you were, you know, genetically male”’ (p. 25).[16] Cole’s reaction to being misconstrued as gay is equable, but by making direct eye contact (‘He looks right at Jane’ (p. 25)) he conveys unequivocally that his desires are heterosexual and she is the object of them.

Attacked by readers of my acquaintance as contrived and implausible, the love story in ‘Blind Man’ has also been criticised for promoting a conservative heterosexual agenda: plot conflict revolves around Cole’s apparent homosexuality; plot resolution is accomplished through his realignment with the heterosexual majority.[17] In my reading, however, Cole’s sexuality is never in question, except to Jane, and any tension in the plot arises only from her misunderstanding. The love story turns on a correction, but it is a correction of Jane’s reading, rather than of Cole’s sexual orientation, which I see as neutrally, not normatively, represented as heterosexual. If the love story contains a weakness, it is perhaps that it is too clearly a foil to the main narrative in its exploration of the same issues of projection, perception and interpretation. Just as Jane is called on to assimilate an apparent change in Cole’s identity (from gay to straight) which isn’t really a change at all, except in the way she sees and interacts with him, so her adjustment to Jess’s gender conversion involves a refocusing of vision. In FTM, Holly Devor underscores the need for family and friends to see transsexuals as members of their chosen, not their assigned, gender groups. She describes this adjustment as a matter of assimilating a ‘new perspective’ at the transsexuals’ request and trying to ‘see the coherence of it’. This meant they had to ‘look back and piece together participants’ histories in such ways as to make their futures as men appear consistent with their pasts as women and girls’. Researching and discussing transsexualism helped them build ‘bridges between their older understandings and their newer perceptions’. Ultimately, acceptance was a matter of ‘learning to see participants as men’.[18]

This understanding of transsexualism explains Bloom’s choice of the title ‘A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You’.[19] Although the subject matter of ‘Blind Man’ is gender conversion, it is not primarily a medical story about hormone treatment and phalloplasty; nor is it even thematically a story about gender, sexuality or sex. The significant terms in the title are ‘Blind’ and ‘See’, because this is a story about the way we see people – about impairments in and adjustments of our vision. This in turn explains Bloom’s use of Jane as centre of consciousness throughout most of the story. Adopting Jane’s perspective underlines the role of the other as reader of identity as text, supporting Devor’s proposition that ‘Gender is as much in the reading as in the telling’ and Bornstein’s formulation of a similar insight: ‘The concept of passing invites and even demands the concept of reading […] and being read’.[20] Gender conversion presents a challenge to narrow gender categories and unalterable biological assignations of sex, but it does not exempt transsexuals from social processes of inspection and interpretation. The persistence of these cultural mechanisms is represented in ‘Blind Man’ by Jane’s acts of reading, while their fallibility is underlined by the errors she makes.

The approach employed by Bloom in Normal and the mode of narration in ‘Blind Man’ tend to position the individual predominantly as object within the set of social relations by means of which gender-identity is constructed. Devor’s reference to ‘telling’ acknowledges the obverse aspect, however: the subject’s active role of signification – of writing the text that others read. The individual subject, including the transsexual subject, also plays an agentive role in looking at and reading others as texts; what Anne Fausto-Sterling terms identity as ‘social expression’ is a reciprocal process.[21] Thus, in ‘Blind Man’, three short but significant passages from Jess’s point of view represent him as subject rather than object, offering insights into his clear and close understanding of his mother (pp. 5–6, 13), the unbearable loneliness he suffered as a cross-dresser at the University of Michigan (p. 6), and his anxieties and dreams concerning virile masculine embodiment (p. 14). Together these passages show Jess looking out, mainly at his mother, and inwards, to his most private subjective feelings. They portray him as a perceptive individual whose sensitivity in reading others has been enhanced by the difficult process of redefining himself in the eyes of the world. In this they accord with an observation made by Jamison Green, a female-to-male transsexual and president of FTM International, concerning the alteration transsexuals experience as subjects as well as objects of vision: ‘[Transsexuals] perceive the world through transfigured eyes’.[22]

Transamerica, incidentally, attaches plot resolution and character development to this aspect of the subjective experience of gender reassignment. If Bree’s road trip from the East to the West coast is a metaphor for gender conversion as journey (and it is an apt one – much used, for instance, by Devor[23]), it is also a metaphor for the progress she makes in understanding her rebellious and damaged son Toby. As they travel together across America, each of them both sees the other and is seen by the other more clearly – and eventually more compassionately.

University of Reading

Notes

A short version of this article was presented as ‘Morphing: Transsexuals in Amy Bloom’ at the ‘Mutation and Mutability’ conference, Institute for English Studies, University College London, 4 March 2004.

[1] Amy Bloom, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude (New York: Random House, 2002); ‘A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You’, in A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories (London: Picador, 2000), pp. 1–29.

[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ([1990] London: Routledge, 1999).

[3] See David Brauner, ‘Fifty Ways to See your Lover: Vision and Revision in the Fiction of Amy Bloom’, in Anglophone Jewish Literature, ed. by Axel Stähler (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2007); I am grateful to Dr Brauner for allowing me to read this work in typescript. I discuss Bloom’s visual constructions of subjectivity in ‘Visual and Verbal: Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us and Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?‘ in chapter 1 of my PhD thesis, ‘“The Value, Beauty, and Malarkey of Words”: Constructions of the Subject in Lorrie Moore’ (University of Reading, submitted August 2006).

[4] Butler, p. 187.

[5] Bloom, Normal, p. xv.

[6] Holly Devor, Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. vii; Holly Devor, FTM: Female to Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 35.

[7] Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 22.

[8] Devor, FTM, p. 420.

[9] Devor, FTM, p. 418.

[10] Devor, FTM, p. 418.

[11] Butler, p. xx.

[12] I follow Bloom’s practice in using feminine pronouns to refer to Jessie when she is living as a girl and masculine pronouns to refer to Jess once he has started living as a man.

[13] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 3–4.

[14] The five are: presence or absence of a penis or vagina; chromosome profile (she lists five common combinations other than XX and XY); levels of testosterone and oestrogen (if hormones determined gender, ‘you could buy your gender over the counter’); reproductive ability; the sex stated on your birth certificate. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, pp. 56–7.

[15] For discussion of this typology, see Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, pp. 27–32.

[16] The implied conflation of sexuality and gender here is an error on Jane’s part. As Bloom states in Normal, ‘Male is not gay or straight; it’s male’ (p. 18).

[17] My thanks to the anonymous reader of this paper for drawing my attention to this perspective.

[18] Devor, FTM, pp. 445–6.

[19] The title is adapted from dialogue in Bloom’s novel Love Invents Us (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 157.

[20] Devor, Gender Blending, p. 153; Kate Bornstein, available at URL www.tootallblondes.com/KatePages/kate_bornstein.htm [Accessed 03 March 2007]

[21] Fausto-Sterling, p. 3.

[22] Available at URL www.jamisongreen.com [Accessed 03 March 2007]

[23] Devor, FTM, pp. 511, 582.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007

‘Sloughing off the Old Skin’: Ideology, Folklore and the Invention of Tradition in the Tales of Washington Irving

Michael Collins
© Michael Collins. All Rights Reserved

A culture is in decline when it submits to intellectual martial law, and a fresh understanding is denied in a denial of further controversy… a culture achieves identity not so much through ascendancy of one particular set of convictions as through the emergence of its peculiar and distinctive dialogue.

RWB Lewis, The American Adam (1955) [1]

Sometimes new traditions [can] be readily grafted on old ones, sometimes they could be devised by borrowing from well-supplied warehouses of official ritual, symbolism and moral exhortation – religion and princely pomp, folklore and freemasonry…

Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (1983) [2]

After Foucault, the near dominance of the left in the social sciences and humanities, facilitated by the rise of poststructuralism and the New Historical method, has created an intellectual climate sceptical of tradition and committed to exploring the historical action of power in literature through the understanding of ideology and its operation in the formation of texts. This has effectively debunked the New Critical persuasion towards hermetic analysis while the engagements of the old guard with ‘representative imagery and anecdote’ [3] have come to be understood as limited in scope and contentedly contained within the very conception of tradition that the exposure of ideology may conceivably undermine.

Both waves of criticism have unfairly overlooked Irving. The focus on representative democracy of the old myth and symbol school largely neglected Irving for his anti-American strain: poststructuralism, race and gender studies for his bourgeois ideological prejudices. However, it may be noted that symbolic readings do greater justice to Irving’s work than the current focus on race and gender in academia would allow for. As it stands his themes place him in a negative relationship to the contemporary process of nineteenth-century canon formation, despite his massive popularity, and for this reason, excluding his much overlooked aesthetic talents, he is notable. Rather than focusing on his quite remarkable talent in and of its self, what interest there is in Irving emerges from an understanding of him as a popular writer and therefore worthy of study, usually within the framework of the New Historicist reading of his era. Like the genteel, cloistered reading that New Historicism sought in its way to overturn, the project is essentially still based in a hierarchical reasoning, with many texts of an era being of especial value primarily for their supposed lack of quality and their impact on what remains a largely untouched canon since DH Lawrence. As Charles Neider states, ‘the prejudices against Irving… have been replaced by a kind of studied indifference to the work of an early American author worthy of our serious admiration, not our lip service.’ [4]

Self-confessed non-conservatives though they may be; Frederick Crews and Steven Watts variously espoused the limitations of the poststructuralist view in the nineteen-nineties, through their controversial critiques of ‘Left Eclecticism’ and ‘The Idiocy of American Studies.’ Whilst these two critics varied in tone and focus, they converged on the essential point that by allowing ‘only a small band of opinion to be considered tolerable,’ [5] the bulk of recent academia has ostensibly adopted a negative view of the past and received knowledge, limiting the intellectual potentialities of a fully maintained academic and political pantheon and arguably spelling the end of Crews’ own fantasy of a ‘pluralistic arena.’ For Crews and Watts at least, what the focus on ideology and discourse has resulted in has effectively been the ‘ideologisation’ of the academic forum, where ideology is defined as the internalised discourses of a steadily stagnating Leftist politics in addition to the interest in ideological concerns within the process of textual analysis performed. Watts evokes this change as centred in a specific historical epoch when he states that, ‘by the 1980s, what had once been a disgruntled political retrenchment gradually evolved into a sophisticated political disengagement.’[6]

As Edward Shils showed in Tradition, the commitment of academia in the late twentieth-century to rejecting tradition in favour of ‘discursive logic’ has come at the expense of an understanding of tradition as anything more than the operation and action of power through ideology. ‘Tradition,’ Shils observes ‘is a dimension of social structure which is lost or hidden by the atemporal conceptions which now prevail in the social sciences.’ [7] For the poststructuralist, discourse is abstract and based in an ‘authoritarian power structure that is vague and amorphous, yet absolutely defining and constituting of all discourse.’ [8] This view negates the possibility of tradition as offering a potentially useful and valid, non-Hegelian, non- teleological relationship to history.

Terry Eagleton’s conception of the Hegelian model, from which contemporary literary studies draws much of its narrative force, is as a formulation that ‘grants art a lowly status within [its] theoretical system.’ [9] Since Foucault, Derrida and others have demonstrated that ‘epistemes,’ or long-term structures shaped by patterns of ‘discursive regularity’ provide the key to linkage between language and cultural expression,’ [10] why then the reluctance to talk, except abstractly, about tradition? This is because the Foucaultian method, with all its nods to the Hegelian historical dialectic, expresses a tendency to equate ‘tradition,’ which may be opposed to the action of power, with ‘dogma,’ which is always projected through violence. Shils argues that the left has bequeathed a largely negative view of history whereby ‘the existent, and especially the inherited [have] suffered under a presumption of untenability; they had to be changed.’ [11]

In this climate of canon-formation centred on democratic inclusion of marginalised voices it is unsurprising that the work of Washington Irving has been so recently neglected, since Irving’s engagements settle more easily into the right-wing, ‘transfusion model of education, whereby the stored-up wisdom of the classics is considered a kind of plasma that will drip beneficially into our veins.’ [12] For most, currently, Irving’s work is at best diversionary and understood mostly at the level of whimsy, “Just childishness, on our part.” [13] However, Irving’s short stories should be understood as operating under the assumption of ‘tradition as normative models of action and belief,’ [14] which is not to say he views it as useless and burdensome or more nefariously, to be condemned for its maintenance through violence and oppression. Expressed simply as Watts does, ‘the incantation of “race, class and gender” that so dominate recent scholarly publications and conferences… establish a formula of repression with prosperous white men as villains.’ [15]

What may be missing in this analysis is the apolitical sense peculiar to Irving’s special formulation of Romanticism, which I will attempt to case for being most unusual and closer to the engagements of contemporary scholarship that may be initially obvious. The Irvingian sense is both simultaneously ‘conservative’ in its rejection of state intervention in the lives of the individual and active in its use of the folk as a technique with which the writer can dodge political engagement. This is a device enacted through Irving’s narrative method, which I will discuss more fully later. Irving’s use of the folk is far from counter-hegemonic, albeit focused primarily on a criticism of American national character, but this does not mean that it is not possible to reclaim Irving in some way for contemporary scholars. As Leslie Fiedler stated of the earliest American literature, ‘the new audience was middle-class, Protestant, and urban… uncertain of its status and alienated from older folk literature.’ [16] It is this estrangement from the subject matter that Irving engages with and which defines the method and preconditions that manifest themselves in Irving’s apolitical — or rather bourgeois ideological — stance.

To reject Irving’s analysis of post-revolutionary culture for its elitism is to open contemporary scholarship to criticism for precisely the close-mindedness that Watts’ has explored. Irving does, in fact, explore how power is implicated in the formation of texts, but at one remove, through exhibiting how writing, as a creative, imaginative and highly personal act can evade the political responsibility placed upon the individual in the new American republic. What figures in his writing is how a deliberately formulated apolitical stance- where politics is that of a larger system of sociality, such as the new Republic, and not the later micro-politics of Deconstruction, Wittgensteinian ‘language games,’ or Foucaultian historiography- can critique the character of a larger society without exposing the author to criticism in turn from the audience. Irving’s conservatism has a near unique, deconstructive and corrosive quality.

Irving is not the American writer one may presume him to be as his oeuvre sits uncomfortably in the canon of European and American Romanticism despite sharing many its associated correlations with profligate excess and later, academic fascism. As Charles Neider stated in his introduction to Da Capo’s The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, ‘The romantic side of Irving revered Scott.’ [17] However, he also challenges his mentor by exploring, through an early form of metafiction informed by Lawrence Sterne and the British tradition, the modernity of folk texts. It is here that Irving is able to create something uniquely American in his writing, because the age of his country allows references to timelessness and the romance of antiquity to be self-consciously facetious. As Eric Hobsbawm states ‘traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.’[18]

Irving’s stories reek of a kind of elite distrust of the masses and reverence for true antiquity of the immediate pre-Emersonian, but post-Revolutionary era. His writing however shows little respect for folk traditions that he so ably constructs and is suggestive of a view of the world that is largely opposed to his new native scene. In ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ Irving’s scepticism of the invented traditions of the new America, ‘the great torrent of migration and improvement,’ [19] science and the self-reliance of Jeffersonian democracy are as vehemently opposed as the ‘the dominant spirit” [20] of the townspeople, that of superstition and provincial folk consciousness, is decried for its thoughtlessness. As symbols of the idiocy of American folk consciousness and the author’s own perception of the danger of too great a reliance on empiricism and positivism in the new American republic, ‘the apparition of the figure on horseback without a head,’ [21] and the dandyish figure of Crane stand impressively tall.

In David Greven’s recent reading of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ ‘it is the story of Ichabod Crane’s murderous removal from the ranks of the homosocial sphere by a fraternity deeply interested in maintaining its own purity.’ [22] I argue however, that whilst the figure of Brom Bones disguised as the horseman provides the narrative impulse for Crane’s flight, or in Greven’s materialistic reading facilitates his murder and the subsequent cover-up, the genuine battle in the text is the author’s battle with the ideological and symbolic. Irving’s resistance to democracy is informed by a non-Hegelian and essentially static view of history. For Irving, a sense of newness may pervade the cultural scene, but his educated mind rejects the possibility of newness informing progressive social change.

It is the character of the ‘ghost of the Hessian trooper,’ [23] which has the greatest agency in the text, since it operates materially and symbolically at numerous levels of social interaction. Firstly, it is a material, ‘invented tradition’ performed by the townsfolk, ‘which seek[s] to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with [an imagined] past.’ [24] It is at this level that it affects Brom Bones, whose character is largely inviolate before being subsumed into the horseman myth and becoming fused with a more violate and stable entity.

Until Brom enacts the role of the spectre his exploits are related after the fact as form of machismo and all are supposedly apocryphal and boasting. As the narrator states of Brom at the dance, a marvellous story by ‘old Brouwer,’ ‘was immediately matched by a thrice marvellous adventure of Brom Bones.’ [25] This suggests that his actions and boasts are governed by the prior actions of others, leaving a question as to what agency Brom, as a man and Katrina’s primary suitor, actually has. When Brom becomes the ghost however, Irving’s style of writing alters to reflect the newfound activity and agency of Brom that the ghost figure has facilitated. The tense of the story changes to the present and the action is described minutely. The same is true of Crane, whose activity is related in the past tense until the attack. The figure of the ghost therefore, is the inspiration of all the male characters in the story, governing their actions almost totally. This is Irving showing the power of history and ideology in controlling men in the age of the American Revolution. Since ideology operates to inspire violence in the suggested murder of Crane, the story is Irving’s criticism of ideology and the American mind.

The second role of the horseman is as a corporeal and material truth that, although a ghost, is as ‘real’ in Irving’s fictional world as any of the other characters. Irving demonstrates how traditions and ideologies are not merely performed but internalised. These then become an actual governing factor in the lives of men. As such the ‘Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow’ is given a routine by Irving, which reflects the routines of the townsfolk and the division of time established by the expectations of liberal democracy; what Foucault explores as the ‘technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning.’ [26] He is as comical as any one of Irving’s living characters and the author takes great pains to demonstrate that the ghost is a peculiarly modern spirit. He is restless, often ‘belated, and in a hurry’ [27] and, hilariously, always late for church. He is actually almost the model citizen of Tarry Town.

The third role of the horseman is purely symbolic. He becomes throughout the text the force of history around which Irving’s fictional models of American ideology, Crane and the Van Tassels operate. The ghost provides impetus to the narrative and its aesthetic centre. Formally therefore, Irving unfolds the tale intelligently, with its central message of ideology and the ‘American’ way of life being established in the central figure of the text, the ghost, in his various guises. [28]

The comparative recentness of the ‘nameless battle during the Revolutionary War’ [29] from which first springs the figure of the Headless Horseman and the ‘bewitching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people’ [30] of Tarry Town symbolises the ideology of the newly fought for democratic America, not a timelessness of the Old World. When the narrator speaks of the ‘dominant spirit’ being the Headless Horseman he is engaging the reader in a three-way pun. The ‘ghost’ may semantically also be a ‘spirit’, the spirit may also be the ‘zeitgeist’ and the headlesseness of the Sleepy Hollow spectre a reference to the instability of folk traditions based in a modern consciousness, as well as Irving’s snobbery towards those that believe in them. The lack of a head is a comic device to demonstrate the unquestioning regularity that an internalised ideology places upon the lives of the average man. Collectively the ghost is therefore a criticism of the American mind and the modernity of American tradition, since the spectre is the centre around which the rest of the tale moves.

Crane, rather than being the figure of a modernity that the town fails to accept is another figure based in the ideological constructions of the new America and by Irving, if not Diedrich Knickerbocker, he is justly punished. As Martin Roth states, ‘Ichabod Crane is definitely the enemy. Crane is not only a Yankee of Franklin’s stamp; he also possesses many of the qualities of his earlier Puritan ancestors.’ [31] From the first introduction of Crane we can see that he is a figure whom Irving particularly despises. His motivations as teacher stem from his feeling that he stands to gain financially or personally from his vocation rather than genuine zeal. As the narrator states, ‘on holiday afternoons [he] would convey some of the smaller [boys] home, who happened to have pretty sisters.’ [32] Irving finds Crane morally reprehensible and locates half of the criticism he has with America in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ with him.

The ambiguity in Irving’s work is best summed up in the phrase from Lawrence’s critique of Cooper that serves for my title, ‘sloughing off the old skin.’ [33] On one hand the title relates to the process of inventing traditions in America by removing the old, but also my own process of newly revising Irving’s contribution to American letters and making account for the unusual comedic tradition in which he is placed. The irony of the title is that in coming to an understanding of Irving’s ideological investment in replacing the old skin with the new, what emerges in his writing is an exact replica of the first skin, that of old world ideology. The moral of his tales is often the Pyrrhic nature of fighting to achieve democracy. As DH Lawrence expressed it, ‘Democracy was a form of self-murder, always… or of murdering someone else.’ [34] Just as Rip Van Winkle passes into old age demonstrating that ‘the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him,’ [35] so Irving’s seemingly bland detachment from political or ideological concerns is a deliberate form of resistance to democracy. Irving, as well as establishing ‘the real beginnings of [American] national literature,’ [36] is a reluctant American and an even more reluctant democrat.

Much of the intelligence of Irving’s work comes from his use of oral history. By separating the tale from the teller the story becomes even further removed from Irving himself, allowing the true moral of the tale to be obscured by several levels of narration. For Charles Neider, ‘One of the effects of this “distance” between author and subject is to suggest a sense of tradition as well as counteract the greenness of immediacy.’ [37] The effect however deliberately belies the covert purpose, which is to veil a subtle criticism of the democratic impulse through comedy, and demonstrate Irving’s rejection of his country’s national character by distance and separation of narrative voice. Irving effectively removes his stamp from the tale almost as if he refuses to equate the experiences fictionalised in the tale with anything worthy in the America of the early nineteenth-century.

Of Irving’s many fictionalised narrator’s, few obscure the tale so totally as Diedrich Knickerbocker, the deceased author of The History of New York, for whom Irving’s own persona and Geoffrey Crayon oftentimes act as literary executors. As Martin Roth notes:

Knickerbocker is the first narrative voice in American literature that rings true… the voice of a mad egoist, unable to order the story in his mind, unable to exert any control over the story he wishes to tell, unable to decide whether the story is fact, myth, actual or marvellous. [38]

It is in this character that Irving locates the American attitude in literature, as Knickerbocker becomes the exemplar for the American national character, the liberal interest in the folk and, for Irving, the perversity of using the tall tale as official history. As Irving writes concerning Knickerbocker in ‘Rip Van Winkle,’

His historical researches… did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favourite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore so invaluable to true history. [39]

His voice drips in this passage drips with the ironic, scornful tone so characteristic of his writing. He later labours the point with references to Knickerbocker’s ‘scrupulous accuracy’ and how his work ‘is now admitted into all historical collections as a book of unquestionable authority.’ [40] Irving’s tone is as peculiarly opposed to a certain liberal model of social history, as it is critical of American liberalism more broadly. Folk knowledge, so Irving reasons, is incommensurable with actual reality, because it is ‘legitimated’ exclusively by the action of power, which in this case is the institutions of liberal democracy in which social science finds its logical home. As Lyotard adduces, ‘this is how legitimation by power takes place… It legitimates science and the law on basis of their efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency on the basis of science and law.’ [41]

Unlike his mentor, Sir Walter Scott, ‘who was showing how the sentiment of nostalgia for the past could infuse fiction and become its informing principle,’ [42] Irving demonstrates a reservation in elevating the folk to the condition of representing the true American consciousness. Irving’s own narrative voice in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ becomes fused with that of Knickerbocker and is designed to reflect the author’s own contemporary moment and the growing interest of the new America in its own native history. When Irving writes, as Knickerbocker, that ‘the story, therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt,’ [43] the irony is clear and the deception is completed. The whole process of establishing and inventing a new tradition in America, by recourse to the ‘history of the province during the reign of the Dutch governors’ [44] is shown to be inherently flawed and liberalism blind to the limited nature of its own vision.

The literary sketch, with its fleetingness and smallness of scope is the perfect model to evoke this idea, since the end of most of Irving’s tales facilitates the beginning of another that is usually of a similar structure and remarkably similar narrative. The tall tale becomes in Irving, not the last vestige of apparent truth in a confusing age but the very embodiment of the spirit of that age. The author therefore uses the short story to explore his vision of an immobile or cyclical history and the ‘new consciousness,’ created by the conditions of modernity and explored by Wordsworth in 1800. Wordsworth stated that modern consciousness, ‘can only find interest in the way in which each moment differs, grossly and violently, from previous moments. It can only find pleasure in the perpetual liberation from the context and continuity that an “extraordinary incident” provides.’ [45]

This loads Irving’s work with scepticism towards the Enlightenment in its entirety. The form that the Diedrich Knickerbocker tales take is self-reflexive, often absolving the teller at the end from the moral weight of the tale, alluding to the ‘pure immanence of positivism [where] nothing may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear.’ [46] Inherent in this is also a critique of bureaucracy, whose systems diffuse the weight of effect over a wide area. This effect in itself is something peculiar to the diffusion of systems of power in liberal democracies. As such Irving uses several narrators to explore how the work of writers has been affected by the condition of modernity and the bureaucratisation of the artistic process. Irving’s statement that ‘I am no politician… the more I have considered the study of politics, the more I have found it full of complexity,’ [47] points to his disaffection with the current scene. In this way Irving demonstrates his anti-liberal tendencies by critiquing the process of documenting history scientifically, the bureaucracy of the process, and the provincialism of the American folk consciousness.

In The American Adam RWB Lewis claims that in the eighteen-fifties ‘the image contrived to embody the most fruitful contemporary ideas was that of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.’ [48] Irving, writing some thirty years before this myth took hold, evokes a morally and historically barren America, which must invent its own traditions in order to survive but whose traditions in their modernity reflect not new truths but the old fictions of Europe. I place him in a great tradition of writing by Americans against the American scene. As an example of the oppositional tendency, his work sits as well next to Hawthorne as Hemingway, whilst his cosmopolitanism and occasional snobbery, seem to suggest the very best in James. With liberalism in crisis, is Irving’s comedy not now worth taking seriously?

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth-Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1955), p. 2.

[2] Eric Hobsbawm ‘Inventing Traditions’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1983), p. 6.

[3] Lewis, p. 1.

[4] Charles Neider, ‘Introduction’ to Washington Irving, The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, ed. By Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo: 1975), p. xxxvii.

[5] Frederick Crews, ‘The New Americanists’, New York Review of Books Vol. 39, No. 15 (Sept. 24th 1992) p. 32.

[6] Steven Watts, ‘The Idiocy of American Studies’, American Quarterly Vol. 43, Issue 4 (Dec. 1991), p. 631.

[7] Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber: 1981), p. 7.

[8] Watts, p. 633.

[9] Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Gateshead: Blackwell Publishing: 1990), p. 1.

[10] Watts, p. 631.

[11] Shils, p. 2

[12] Crews, p. 1.

[13] DH Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin: 1977), p. 7.

[14] Shils, p. 3.

[15] Watts, p. 653.

[16] Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press: 2003), p. 41

[17] Neider, p. xiii.

[18] Hobsbawm, p. 6.

[19] Washington Irving, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving ed. Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo: 1975) p. 33.

[20] Ibid. p. 32.

[21] Ibid. p. 32.

[22] David Greven, ‘Troubling Our Heads About Ichabod: ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood’, American Quarterly Vol. 56, No.1 (March 2004), p. 86.

[23] ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 31.

[24] Hobsbawm, p. 1.

[26] The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 49.

[27] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 199.

[28] The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 32.

[29] Ibid. p. 32.

[30] Ibid. p. 32.

[31] Martin Roth, Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving (London: Kennikat Press, 1975), p. 163.

[32] The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 34.

[33] Lawrence, p. 58.

[34] Ibid, p. 59.

[35] The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 14.

[36] Roth, p. ix.

[37] Neider, p. xxiv.

[38] Roth, pp. 169-170.

[39] Washington Irving, ‘Rip Van Winkle’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving ed. By Charles Neider (New York: Da Capo: 1975) p. 1.

[40] Ibid. p. 1.

[41] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2005), p. 47.

[42] Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press: 1965), p. 83.

[43] ‘Rip Van Winkle’, in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. 15.

[44]Ibid. p. 1.

[45] Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature (Cambridge: CUP: 1991), p. 4.

[46] Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso: 1994), p. 16.

[47] Washington Irving, The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, p. xvii.

[48] Lewis, p. 1.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007

Natural Disasters in America: The Northridge Earthquake (1994), Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the Relationships between Human Societies and the ‘Natural Environment’

Clare Russell
© Clare Russell. All Rights Reserved

On September 10^th 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush delivered a speech comparing the devastation in New Orleans to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington D.C. Whereas the terrorist attacks were the consequence of ‘the malice of evil men’, the disaster in New Orleans was the result of ‘the fury of water and wind’. [1] The speech blamed the natural environment alone for the social and ecological catastrophe in New Orleans. Furthermore, the speech referred to Americans’ ‘resolve’ to ‘overcome this ordeal’ and become ‘stronger for it’. [2] This is reminiscent of responses to natural disasters throughout U.S. history. For example, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, George Harvey, editor of Harpers Weekly, wrote that the ‘city was certain to arise quickly from the ashes, greater and more beautiful than ever’. [3] Similarly, William Cronon argues that many American environmental historians ‘tell a story of more or less linear progress, in which people struggle to transform a relatively responsive environment.’ Some historians may regard natural disasters as a ‘setback’ that human societies overcome before they continue their ‘linear’ progression, others may view them as a portent of increasing devastation, due to societies’ inappropriate interventions in the natural environment. [4] This essay will argue that the terms ‘society’ and ‘nature’ should not be conceived as separate entities. Rather, it will argue human systems develop networks of interdependencies among and between social units and organizations, and physical features and settings and construct social ecologies that guarantee their own survival. Patterns of belief, which shape human perceptions of the natural world, affect these networks. These networks create ‘natural’ disasters and affect the way that societies respond to them. Recovery depends on social and physical features, such as the number of community-based organizations (CBOs) available to deal with disaster or patterns of vulnerability within the system. It also depends on how people’s values and beliefs shape the way they perceive nature, and how they view their own capacity to recover.

Scholars have stressed the way that both landscapes and human societies have developed from relationships between physical and biological features, social groups and social forces into socio-ecological systems. [5] For example, Jared Orsi, in his study of flooding in Southern California, argues that water (and this can be extended to another feature of ‘nature’ such as wind or wildlife) moves through an ‘urban ecosystem’, consisting of the ‘political, social, economic and physical features of the city’ combined with ‘climate, geology, biology and topography’. [6] The ways that water flows is determined by the combination of features in society and the environment, such as industry and household needs, rainfall patterns, and engineering. In Los Angeles, Orsi claims, the urban ecosystem’s features have ‘directed the flow of water along unpredictable and occasionally destructive paths’. [7] According to this theory, natural disasters are not attacks from ‘outside’. Instead, the relationships between the constituent parts of an ‘urban ecosystem’ create them. Frederick Bates and Carlo Pelanda conceive of human societies’ relationships with the natural environment an ‘ecological field’ that has developed as human societies adapt to reduce their vulnerability to social and environmental threats. Ecological fields consist of a network of interdependent social units operating in certain ways, a similar network of ‘biotic systems’ such as animals and plants, a ‘store of physical resources’ and a ‘set of physical conditions’. [8] Fields are developed as human individuals and social units evolve to find ways to assure their basic needs (physical resources such as food and water, protection from physical forces like shelter from physical processes like wind and rainfall or social needs like company and community). By securing certain short-term security, however, ecological fields may develop long run vulnerability. [9] Social and ecological interdependencies extend beyond individual towns and cities, as physical conditions and social units, are dependent on features throughout the country, and around the world. [10]

Different units in an ecological field may be more vulnerable to natural disasters than others are. [11] Robert Bolin and Lois Stanford define ‘vulnerability’ as peoples’ inability to ‘avoid, cope with and recover from disasters’. [12] They argue that vulnerable people have an ‘unequal exposure risk’ and ‘unequal access to resources’ that would help them to cope if they were exposed to a disaster. Risks and resources include location (for example, whether people live in a fault zone or by a riverfront), ‘economic resources’ (like income, savings and property), ‘social support’ (such as family and friends, social care or non-profit humanitarian agencies) and health (in the United States, access to health insurance is particularly relevant). [13] Researchers have shown that certain racial and ethnic groups, lower socio-economic classes, female-headed households and elderly people tend to have greater exposure to risks, reduced access to resources and are therefore vulnerable to disasters. [14] In the United States (unlike in developing countries) there is a weak correlation between class, race, and locations that expose people to risks, although poor people may live in less safe structures, including mobile homes. [15] However, poor people and people of colour may have limited access to social support, economic resources and health and social care. Although the U.S. is a rich country, the economic and social forces that distribute its resources do so unevenly. [16] Historically, this has meant that certain demographic groups lack the resources that help them to develop resilience to disasters.

Beliefs and values are also important forces in socio-ecological networks. They shape the nature of interdependencies between social and physical units, and the ways that these interdependencies change following a natural disaster. Scholars have emphasized that humans perceived and interpreted nature in different ways and in different times and places. While during the Enlightenment period, Western European intellectuals believed that a person’s ’emancipation’ depended on their ability to dominate nature, Eastern religious teachings such as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism, teach that all life is connected and that humans should not work against natural processes and organisms. [17] Nature is ‘constructed’ via works of art and literature, but also by the way that apparently ‘natural’ landscapes, such as national parks are presented to and interpreted by, social groups. [18] People may construct myths about nature in a way that creates or reinforces national identity. For example, Frederick Jackson Turner saw the ‘frontier’ as a ‘testing ground’ for immigrants to acquire values and skills that made them truly American. [19] Furthermore, residents of a city or state think about their immediate natural environment in specific ways. For example, William Alexander McClung gives two examples of the ‘myths’ shaping the built environment and landscape architecture in, as well as literary and artistic interpretations of, Los Angeles. These are ‘Arcadia’, a natural paradise, or the opposite, ‘Utopia’, which ‘treats the landscape as raw material to be shaped for human purposes’. [20] Societies cannot ‘socially construct’ the tectonic plate movement that creates an earthquake or heavy rainfall, although they do make interventions that exacerbate natural disasters and expose groups and individuals to hazards, as is argued below. [21] However, people can shape the way that they and others think about such an event. For example, an entrepreneur seeking to attract labour and capital to recover profits following a disaster may promote it as a minor obstacle that humans can overcome. [22] In turn, this reinforces the interdependencies between business organizations and physical features and resources. Ironically, these narratives about disasters have socially constructed disasters to be solely ‘natural event’, blaming ‘nature’ for deaths and devastation and undermining human responsibility. [23] Beliefs, however, may vary throughout the ecological field, as social groups view nature in different ways.

Both sets of literature raise important questions to consider when discussing the environmental histories of New Orleans and Los Angeles and both cities’ reactions to natural disasters. How has each community’s values, hopes and anxieties affected their relationship to the natural environment? How do natural disasters change these culturally constructed sets of relationships and how do people’s values affect the way that they interpret disasters? How have social units’ interactions with physical features changed features in the ‘urban ecosystem’ or ‘ecological field’? Have these features made natural disasters more common, frequent or intense? How have relationships between different social units affected one or more groups’ vulnerability to disasters?

On April 15, 1927, New Orleans’ streets filled with water. This was an example of a natural catastrophe constructed through a series of processes in the ‘urban ecosystem’. After months of heavy rainfall (a physical process), the water level of the Mississippi River began to rise. [24] New Orleans’ engineers (a social ‘group’ influenced by prominent individuals and by scientific discovery and dependent on state and federal government for funding) had over many years, constructed high levees on the riverbank to protect the city from floods. [25] Levees were, by 1927, a long established part of New Orleans’ landscape. The Orleans Levee Board had even planted grass along the levee so it looked like a ‘natural’ physical feature. However, levees affected the river and its surroundings in several ways. For millennia, the Mississippi River has deposited sediment near its banks, creating a ‘natural’ levee, which ‘leaves land sloping down away from its stream’. It is difficult to describe this as a ‘natural’ process, as human and non-human activity (such as clearing trees for agriculture) along the Mississippi River has channelled water in the river and caused erosion that increases levels of sediment deposits.[26] By building the levee higher, engineers raised the river higher above New Orleans, which has meant that, in the event of levees breaking, water will flow downhill more rapidly into the city. [27] Levees also imbued a misplaced sense of security among New Orleans residents. Although they are designed to protect cities, they can fail. Furthermore, when a city below sea level is flooded, it is difficult to remove the water. [28] New Orleans had invented a drainage system that pumped water away from the city, however the 1927 storms damaged the city’s central power system and without electricity (another force or ‘feature’ in an urban ecosystem,) the pumps stopped working. [29]

Ari Kelman, in A River and It’s City argues that, after this event, residents, investors and business leaders no longer felt secure about their natural environment. Alarmed at the impact of insecurity on New Orleans economy, the Citizens’ Flood Relief Committee (an unelected body set up in 1927 to tackle potential flooding) advocated dynamiting the levee twelve miles downstream from New Orleans. It hoped that this would reduce the rivers’ pressure along New Orleans’ waterfront levee. After a series of debates at local and federal level, the state governor acceded to this plan. The subsequent flooding in the ‘River Parishes’ outside New Orleans affected several social units: the residents of flooded parishes evacuated from their homes, as well as farmers and fur trappers whose livelihoods were destroyed by this flooding. [30]

The 1927 floods illustrate how a series of physical processes (rainfall and water flows), man-made processes and features (electricity and levees), economic pressures, social units (such as engineers and local and federal governing bodies), and politics interacted to create a ‘natural’ disaster. It also highlights some of the historical problems that characterized New Orleans ‘urban ecosystem’. Since 1927, after the floods exposed the fact that levees alone could not protect cities, engineers intervened by building overflows in the Mississippi to reduce water levels and pressure. These interventions have disrupted the river’s processes of erosion and deposition. This process is eroding Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and as this happens, the coast loses its ability to trap sediments. This accelerates the land-loss process. As the coastlines are worn away, cities like New Orleans lose ‘buffers’ against hurricanes from the Gulf. [31] Furthermore, global climate changes (which, according to most scientists, are caused by human activity that increases levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere) may exacerbate hurricanes’ severity. One journalist cited a study in Science. which found that although the annual number of hurricanes classified as one, two and three fell over the past 35 years, storms classes as 4 or 5 have nearly doubled. He argued that rising sea temperatures and warmer water vapour may have increased Hurricane Katrina’s intensity as it moved west from Florida over the Gulf to Louisiana and Mississippi. [32] These are both examples of the ways that changes in the environment in Louisiana, the United States, and internationally, may have exacerbated Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans.

However, structures in New Orleans’ ‘urban ecosystem’ made the hazard even more of a catastrophe. On August 30^th, the ‘storm’s eye veered away from New Orleans’. This limited the hurricane’s direct impact on the city. However, broken levees allowed water to flood New Orleans’ Lower ninth Ward. [33] Moreover, groups of residents responded to the disaster by looting stores and threatening violence, creating social upheaval alongside a natural disaster. [34] Furthermore, conditions in New Orleans’ Superdome (which was used to shelter refugees before they were moved to the Houston Astrodome on September 1) exacerbated victims’ experiences. The hurricane affected a number of processes in New Orleans ecosystem- such as electricity and running water, which meant that the Superdome had no air-conditioning and poor sanitation. [35] The federal government’s delayed response also exacerbated the disaster, as discussed below.

Similarly, the history of interactions within Los Angeles’ and the United States’ ecological system contributed to the Northridge Earthquake Disaster in 1994. Although human activity did not cause the tectonic plate movements, interventions between social groups and physical processes combined to create large-scale urbanization and human settlement in an ‘at risk’ Los Angeles area. [36] In the mid nineteenth century, Los Angeles remained an ‘agrarian backwater’, constrained by an insufficient water system. However the region, with abundant land and resources, attracted the interests of capitalist investors from 1860. From 1900, ‘powerful ruling elite(s)’ laid the groundwork to make L.A. the ‘premier urban center of the West Coast’. [37] For this, they needed to bring water into the city, and by 1913, the Los Angeles aqueduct was completed. Between the 1930s and 1970s, there were a series of Federal government funded water development projects in the Western states. This included the 200-metre concrete dam, built on the Colorado River near Las Vegas, which generated electricity and provided irrigation for Southwestern states. [38] This development shows the way that political and economic interests encouraged a series of engineering efforts that created a physical system of water provision that enabled vast urban growth in Los Angeles. Boyle Workman, a real estate developer, wrote in 1935, ‘Every tree, every lawn every blade of grass in this section as it exists today, is a forced growth, made possible by man’s ingenuity in bringing water to what would otherwise be a treeless waste’. [39] When an earthquake hit the region in 1973, over 3 million residents were dispersed across the L.A. suburbs, linked to distant water systems. [40] ‘Man’s ingenuity’ in developing water systems that allowed for urban development also brought millions of citizens to an earthquake zone and ‘deliberately put them in harm’s way’. [41]

Socio-ecological systems in New Orleans and Los Angeles also contain economic and social forces that increase certain social groups’ vulnerability to disasters. First, some New Orleans residents were better able to escape impending floods before August 30^th. Two residents who had escaped the city argued in The Atlanta Journal, ‘Mandatory evacuation of New Orleans meant that if you had the means, you got out. If you didn’t, you stayed’. People left behind may not have been able to leave their jobs and lose hours of pay; they may not have owned cars; been able to afford temporary accommodation or they may have lacked networks of family and friends who could offer them somewhere to stay. [42] Poverty (often linked to race) therefore, placed New Orleans residents at differential risk in August 2005. Elderly residents were particularly vulnerable, as they had mobility problems preventing them from escaping flooding. Of Hurricane Katrina’s 1050 fatalities, 60% were aged 61 or older. This was partly due to failures in care-giving social units, and one nursing home was charged with 34 cases of negligent homicide, when it failed to evacuate its elderly residents. [43] Furthermore, in the Lower 9^th Ward, which became an ‘icon for the city’s ruin’ after it was flooded by broken levees, 97% of the population was African American and the mean per capita income was $10,300 (less than half the United States average of $21,587). [44] Despite reconstruction funding, their poverty may make it difficult for them to rebuild their homes, businesses and lives in years after the disaster. These examples reveal that as well as the flood control policies that contributed to the broken levees, the devastation in New Orleans was the consequence of structural problems of poverty, racial discrimination and insufficient social care, which left people vulnerable to disaster.

In Los Angeles, furthermore, social and economic forces have created vulnerabilities within the ecological system. The city was a major source of steel and tyre manufacturing, and both industries boomed during World War II. The city attracted large numbers of migrants, for example 600 000 African Americans moved to LA from the southern States between 1942 and 1965. This developed a large working class black and white social group. [45] However, in the second half of the twentieth century, these industries and the industrialized working class was in decline. Jobs in the new electronics and apparel industries are often poorly paid and part time. [46] Furthermore, the number of Latin Americans in the city grew after immigrants moved to the city, attracted by available unskilled jobs. However, they are poorly paid, often live in threat of deportation, lack political representation and are not always proficient English language speakers. Large-scale immigration has also ‘put a severe strain on the availability of low cost housing.’ [47] This has implications for natural disasters. For example, often more than one family lives in an apartment, which complicates disaster authorities’ compensation efforts. [48] In both the Los Angeles and the New Orleans ecological fields, therefore, environment, society and economics have combined to create large sections of vulnerable social groups, who suffered disproportionately during ‘natural’ disasters.

The essay has so far argued relationships between different physical and social features in socio-ecological systems, including the belief patterns of social groups, create ‘natural’ disasters. It will now discuss the ways that these relationships affected responses to, and recovery from, disaster. Kevin Rozario argues that the ‘narrative imagination’ has historically helped Americans to see disasters as minor obstacles on societies’ progression, and in turn, this has ‘contributed greatly to this nation’s renowned resilience’. [49] For example, following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (which until the 2001 terrorist attacks caused the most devastating property destruction in the history of American catastrophes) the city was rebuilt in four years. [50] He argues that this was partly due to the capital, resources and labour that rebuilt the city, but also to the ‘cultural expectations that shaped the ways that the calamities were seen and interpreted’. [51] Because social units believed that they could rebuild and improve the city, they invested resources into the city that helped it to recover. Furthermore, he claims that narratives help people to make sense of events, reassuring them that disasters are not a random, unfair ‘event’ but a stage in their socio-ecological systems development. [52] Similarly, on September 16^th 2005, President Bush promised that the ‘great city’ of New Orleans ‘would rise again’. He backed his optimism with ‘one of the largest reconstruction projects the world has ever seen’. [53] Congress had already approved $10.5 billion for emergency hurricane relief, while FEMA delivered $20 million on 18 November. [54] However, US citizens (especially in New Orleans) will not share his optimism unless the government matches it with adequate federal spending and a consistent commitment to the city in future years, particularly given widespread criticism of its initial response. [55] Furthermore, on November 4^th, New Orleans’ mayor, Ray Nagin stated that eighty percent of New Orleans electrical services, sixty per cent of gas services, all water and sewerage functions in ‘targeted areas’ had been restored, the levee system had been repaired and some schools had opened. ‘The private sector is ready to invest in New Orleans’, he stated. [56] By reassuring corporate units that most of the city’s functions had resumed, he implied that New Orleans socio-ecological system was once again suitable for business activity.

While ‘recovery narratives’ in 1906′ promised that the new San Francisco would be ‘greater’ and ‘more beautiful [57]; in 2005 narratives also expressed hopes for improving New Orleans. However, many of these argued that the reconstructed city should change the social and ecological features and relationships that helped create the disaster and exacerbated its social consequences. For example, Silas Lee, a sociologist and pollster, stated that for decades, residents had seen New Orleans as a ‘broken city’. Reconstruction should create ‘a more diverse economy, stronger schools (and) better infrastructure’. [58] Furthermore, at times ‘recovery narratives’ doubted that New Orleans could recover its unique ‘character’. According to Barbara Major, a New Orleans community activist, ‘the flavour of the people… made the city. And if they don’t come back, then New Orleans won’t come back’. [59] Such comments do not just signal nostalgia for the city’s past, they show concern that an ‘improved’ New Orleans should include all of its former social groups, and its recovered social systems should reduce their vulnerability.

However, responses to recent disasters have followed another trend: prediction of impending catastrophe. Following a storm in 1995, which followed a series of disaster events including Northridge, an article in the Los Angeles Times claimed, ‘there is no question that we are caught in the middle of something strange’. [60] Such narratives again frame disasters as a sign that something worse is to come. These views are facilitated by the fact that large natural disasters do seem to follow a pattern and frequently systems experience a series of disasters in short periods. While the Northridge earthquake followed a series of Californian disasters, Hurricane Katrina happened only months after a devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia and earthquake in Pakistan. Mike Davis explains that the fact that climatologists and statisticians use the terms ’50-year storm’ or ‘100-year flood’ misleadingly implies that large disasters should happen once in a lifetime, although they only refer to the intensity of the event. [61] The fact that the disasters often occur in short succession induces a tendency to view disasters as part of a larger catastrophe.

Following the Northridge earthquake, scientists embarked on what Davis suggests was one of the ‘most intense public research effort(s)’ in modern American history. Debating the exact origin of the thrust fault that ‘nucleated almost 11 miles under Northridge’, scientists suggested that earthquake activity in the Los Angeles basin was potentially more dangerous than Southern California’s history suggested. [62] James Dolan, from the Caltech Seismology lab claimed, ‘Los Angeles appears to have been settled in a quiet period in terms of earthquakes, and that can’t last forever. At some point we’re going to have to relieve all the strain that’s built up over that period’. [63] According to Dolan, Los Angeles had built up a ‘seismological debt’ that would eventually be paid with either a ‘deadly swarm of Northridge-size quakes’ or a ‘single monster event’, about M 7.2 or M 7.6. [64] Furthermore, a report for the Southern California Earthquake Centre predicted that there was ‘an 80% or 90% probability of an M7 or greater earthquake somewhere in Southern California before 2024’. [65] Furthermore, geophysicists at UCLA found evidence that large quakes on the faults under the LA basin usually follow a series of intermediate events like the Northridge quake. [66] Every earthquake on Northridge’s scale reinforces the belief that California is on the verge of an unprecedented destructive disaster. Scientific research and discoveries reinforce this belief. Californians are increasingly afraid that physical features (i.e. earthquake faults) will overwhelm Los Angeles’ social units and built environment. [67] Similarly, commentators have noted that southern states are at risk from similarly devastating hurricanes in future years. Peter King, in an article in The Seattle Times claimed that a significant question affecting New Orleans’ reconstruction was how much low-lying land should be rebuilt, given the risks of flooding. [68] People might also be afraid to return if convinced that the region will see a series of catastrophes. However, other commentators are concerned that if people do not return, the rebuilt city would lose much of its charm and character. [69]

In 1906, people rebuilt San Francisco because they believed that it could be ‘greater’ and ‘more beautiful’ than before. In 1994 and 2005, ‘catastrophic’ belief systems were more common in the United States. No longer convinced that cities could be rebuilt, many people feared that natural disasters signalled a far worse environmental catastrophe and therefore were no longer prepared to return to socio-ecological systems where they would be ‘at risk’. This will hinder the ‘optimistic’ visions of New Orleans outlined above.

As well as belief systems, units and forces in socio-ecological fields shape responses to disasters. Following the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, the Clinton administration spent $13 billion dollars on relief, 90% of reconstruction costs. It suspended an amendment in the 1974 Disaster Relief Act, which required local and state governments to pay 25% of these costs. [70] Federal funding was distributed through several agencies, such as the Small Business Administration (SBA), which grants loans to individuals to pay for reconstruction and the Housing and Urban Development agency (HUD), which supplies rental and reconstruction assistance. Furthermore, Los Angeles benefited from networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs), such as Habitat for Humanity, the Christian Reform World Relief Committee (CRWRC) and ‘Rebuild: Hand to Hand’ or Mano a Mano (a coalition of local churches, businesses and civic organizations) which aimed to address needs that were ‘unmet’ by state and federal authorities. [71] Political motivations arguably shaped the Clinton administration’s relief efforts. In the 1996 election, Clinton ‘turned his 1992 margin in California into a landslide’. [72] However, relief agencies reinforced patterns of vulnerability, despite efforts to the contrary. Mexican immigrants, for example, were reluctant to pursue disaster assistance, because of linguistic and cultural barriers. Most lacked experience with the US relief system and its bureaucracy. Some may have expected a response closer to that of the 1985 Mexican earthquake, where relief was not nearly so generous. Other residents, even those in the United States legally, were afraid of deportation. As for illegal immigrants, as one interviewed resident testified, ‘the undocumented who don’t have papers, they didn’t even apply’. [73] While it appears that existing social units and networks helped the city recover, this does not necessarily imply a ‘return to normalcy’, as Bolin and Stanford explain. For example, the city of Los Angeles produced agendas to increase availability of low cost, seismically secure housing. This fell short of attacking the social and political ‘root causes’ of vulnerability. [74]

In New Orleans, the scale of the disaster meant that features of the socio-ecological system were overwhelmed when the hurricane hit. For example, police services were unable to exert law and order, largely because forces were employed saving lives, rather than in ‘guarding the city’ [75] and the city’s socio-ecological system was unable to supply food, water and electricity. New Orleans was dependent on its relationship with outside forces, namely FEMA. The agency’s slow response contributed to the social crises in the hurricane’s aftermath, and earned the government much criticism. [76] Although some social units, such as schools, have re-opened, the city is still dependent on FEMA workers. [77] It is too soon to evaluate long-term relief efforts, although one striking development is that increasing numbers of Latinos have come to the city to work in the reconstruction effort. These workers are often vulnerable because they contractors abandon them without transport or shelter, and employers pay them poorly or not at all. [78]

The essay has conceptualized the relationships between societies and their environments as a system of networks of social units and organizations interacting with different physical, biological, social and economic forces and features, values and patterns of belief. Although President Bush’s speech compared Hurricane Katrina to an attack from outside, socio-ecological systems created disasters through settling in disaster zones, controlling river flows and developing socio-economic systems that rendered some social units more vulnerable than others. Features in the socio-economic system, from the presence of NGOs, to patterns of federal relief efforts to the narratives that frame disaster events in historical processes shape the ways that systems can recover, and even solve some of its problems. Both disasters have shown that Los Angeles and New Orleans are integrated into socio-ecological systems throughout the United States and across the world. This can determine the ways that rivers flow, the air and sea temperature and the ways that relief efforts operate.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] ‘Bush pleads for Spirit of 9/11’, Saturday September 10 2005, available at URL http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hiamerican/4233266.shtm [Accessed on 2/12/2005]

[2] Ibid.

[3] ‘Comment’, Harper’s Weekly, 15 May 1906, p 616, cited in Kevin Rozario, ‘Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the art of optimism in Modern America’, in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, ed. by Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas Camparella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p 30.

[4] William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative’, The Journal of American History, 78, 4, March 1992, pp 1346-1375, (p 1353).

[5] To emphasise the way that units in society, culture physical processes and biological features are bound into systems, I will use the terms ‘socio-ecological system’ interchangeably with the two theoretical models discussed in this paragraph.

[6] Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), p 8.

[7] Ibid, p 9.

[8] Frederick Bates and Carlo Pelanda, ‘An Ecological Approach to Disasters’, in Disasters, Collective Behaviour and Social Organization, ed. by Russell R. Dynes and Kathleen J. Tierney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994) citations on p 154.

[9] Ibid, p 156.

[10] See Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, ‘Anthropology and the Angry Earth’ in The Angry Earth: disaster in anthropological perspective, ed. by Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (London: Routledge, 1999), p 31.

[11] Ibid, pp 156-8.

[12] Robert Bolin and Lois Stanford, ‘Constructing Vulnerability in the First World: The Northridge Earthquake in Southern California, 1994’, in The Angry Earth, ed. by Hoffman and Olive-Smith, pp 88-112, citations on p 90, 92.

[13] Robert Bolin with Lois Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake: Vulnerability and Disaster (London, New York: Routledge, 1998), p 53.

[14] Ibid, pp 91-100; Walter Gillis Peacock with A. Kalken Ragsdale, ‘Social Systems, Ecological Networks and Disasters: Toward a Socio-Political Ecology of Disasters’, in Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disaster, ed. by Walter Gillis Peacock, Betty Hearn Morrow and Hugh Gladwin (London: Routledge, 1997), pp 20-35.

[15] Bolin and Stanford, Northridge Earthquake, p 46. They point out that the relationship between class and race and physical exposure is more pronounced in technological than in natural hazards. For a discussion of mobile homes and vulnerability to disaster, see Theodore Steinberg, Acts of God: the Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially p 113.

[16] For a discussion of distribution in ecological fields, see Bates and Pelanda, ‘An Ecological Approach to Disasters’, p 153.

[17] Katherine Fry, Constructing the Heartland: Television News and Natural Disaster (Cresshill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2003) pp 10-23.

[18] William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994).

[19] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1893).

[20] William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p 5.

[21] Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories’, p1372. On the other hand, a society might try to change the course of, or create physical processes. For example, Steinberg discusses how American researchers attempted to ‘create’ weather, Acts of God, pp. 128-147.

[22] Rozario, ‘Making Progress’.

[23] Steinberg argues that by blaming nature solely for disasters, politicians, business leaders and engineers could justify social and environmental policies that either made disasters more common, or exacerbated their consequences.

[24] Ari Kelman, A River and its city: An Environmental History of New Orleans (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003) p 158.

[25] The history of levee building in New Orleans began in 1718, when French colonists founded the city. Colonists expected its ‘magnificent system of watery roads’ to enable commerce within a colonial city and with other ports and cities, via the Gulf; Kelman, A River and its City, p 4. However, the river also posed a hazard, as it threatened to flood the city. Colonists began to reinforce the river’s natural levees, and by 1727 they had built an eighteen foot wide, yard high artificial embankment that had stretched for one mile. Throughout the colonial, antebellum and post civil war eras, the levee continued to grow in order to deal with rising water levels; Kelman, A River and its City, p 161.

[26] Ibid, p 171, p 158, p 161, p 162. Kelman points out that the river, and its sources (the Red, Ohio and Missouri rivers) cover ten entire states, and sections of another twenty-two, p 2. This means that flooding is affected by deposits made by human activity in different American states and regions.

[27] Ibid, p 158.

[28] Ari Kelman, ‘City of Nature: New Orleans’ blessing, New Orleans’ Curse’, Slate Magazine, August 31 2005

[29] Kelman, A River and its City, p 158.

[30] Ibid, pp 173-188. John M. Barry argues that the social and political interests of an elite ‘club’ in New Orleans was vital in shaping decisions made about flood responses in 1927. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).

[31] Phillip Boman, Dr Ben Lahn and Paul Coreil, ‘Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast: Processes and Problems’, Part III., Louisiana Conservationist (May/June 1994) pp 4-6, cited in Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, This South: An Environmental History (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

[32] Jeffrey Kluger, ‘Global Warming: The Culprit? Evidence mounts that human activity is helping fuel the number of hurricanes’, Time, 3 October 2005, available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[33] Joseph B. Transter, ‘Life- Or- Death Words of the Day in a Battered City’, The New York Times, (31 August 2005), available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[34] Ibid. Transter cites Colonel Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’ chief of homeland security who admitted that there was ‘a major looting problem’ involving ‘large groups of armed individuals’.

[35] ‘Refugees brace to make a home in another dome’, Journal Gazette, September 1^st 2005, available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[36] Bolin and Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake, p 64.

[37] M. Dear, ‘In the City Time Becomes Visible: Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781-1991’ in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. by A. Scott and E. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), cited in Ibid, p 68.

[38] Bolin and Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake, p 68.

[39] Boyle Workman, The City That Grew (Los Angeles, 1935), cited in Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992, UK edition, London: MacMillan, 1998), p 9. McClung argues that ‘funnelling water’ is one part of LA’s ‘Utopian commitment’, as enabling social units to ‘cultivate and shape the landscape’ according to its mythologies of desire. In ‘Arcadian mythology of California’, human improvements are viewed as tampering with natural paradises; Landscapes of Desire, p 15. This illustrates how ‘myths’ or belief systems shape the development of social ecologies and expose them to natural disaster risks.

[40] Bolin and Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake, p 72.

[41] Ibid, p 10.

[42] Helen F. Hester and Sara B. Shull, ‘Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans, a snapshot of America’, The Atlanta Journal, (September 7 2005), available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[43] ‘Katrina takes lives of elderly, immobile’, Journal Gazette, 26 October 2005, available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[44] Thomas Frank, ‘Roots may save lower of 9^th Ward, New Orleans’ Ground Zero Remains Home in the Hearts of Many’, USA Today (December 6 2005), available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[45] E. Soja, ‘Los Angeles 1965-1992: From Crisis Generated Restructuring to Restructuring Generated Crisis’ in The City, ed. by Soctt and Soja, cited in Bolin and Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake, p 74.

[46] Ibid, p 74.

[47] Ibid, p 75.

[48] Ibid, p 186.

[49] Rozario, ‘Making Progress’, p 27.

[50] Ibid, p 29.

[51] Ibid, p 29-30.

[52] Ibid, p 32.

[53] ”This Great City Shall Rise Again’, Bush tells nation, recovery plan for Gulf Coast- Jobs, housing, reconstruction’, The Seattle Times, September 16 2005. Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[54] ‘‘We’re going to make it right,’ Bush promises’, The Seattle Times,September 3 2005; Department of Homeland Security, ‘New Orleans Receives $20 million payment from FEMA’, both at http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[55] For examples of criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of relief efforts, see Simon Schama, ‘Sorry Mr President: Katrina is not 9/11’, The Guardian (September 12 2005), Available at URL www.guardian.co.uk/Katrina/story/0,16441,1567841,00.html; ‘We’re going to make it right’, Bush promises’, The Seattle Times, 3 September 2005, Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[56] ‘New Orleans Mayor Says Improved Levees Will Help Spur Recovery- Federal, State and Local Officials Seeking to Lure Back Business Residents’, State Department, Press Releases and Documents (4 November 2005) Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[57] George Harvey ‘Comment’, Harpers Weekly, 5 May 1906, p 616, cited in Rozario, ‘Making Progress’, p 31.

[58] ‘Analysis, Rebuilding New Orleans, how and for whom’, All Things Considered, Broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR), 3 October 2005, available at http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005].

[59] ‘Rebuilding New Orleans’

[60] Peter King, ‘The Latest 100 Year Disaster’, Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1995, cited in Davis, p 6.

[61] Davis, p 36.

[62] Ibid, p 32.

[63] Quoted in R. Monastersky, ‘Los Angeles Faces a Dangerous Quake Debt’, Science News (21 January 1995), p 37, cited in Davis, p 32.

[64] These measurements refer to the intensity of an earthquake, measured along a Richter scale. The Northridge quake measured M 6.7.

[65] Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities, ‘Seismic Hazards in Southern California: Probability of Earthquakes, 1994 to 2024’, Bulletin of the Seismological Society in America, 85, (April 1995), p 394, cited in Davis, p 33.

[66] L. Knopoff et al, ‘Increased Long Range Intermediate-Magnitude Earthquake Activity prior to Strong Earthquakes in California, Journal of Geophysical Research, 101 (10 March 1996) pp 229-32, cited in Davis, p 34.

[67] Stallings argues that the ecology of risk in California has been ‘socially constructed’ as scientific research warn the public of the risk of future catastrophic disasters. Los Angeles residents see the earthquake risk changing constantly, not because the likelihood of a disaster is necessarily any greater than before, but because scientific knowledge evolves. R. Stallings, Promoting Risk: Constructing the Earthquake Threat (New York: Aldine de Gryter, 1995), cited in Bolin and Stanford, The Northridge Earthquake, p 15.

[68] ‘Above the Water, Plans Float for Rebuilding the City’, The Seattle Times, September 12, 2005. Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[69] For example, Joseph Wagner, Professor of urban planning at the University of Missouri explained, ‘The city of New Orleans is all about the people. If the people come back and rebuild, the city will survive. If they don’t, fragmentation of local culture could occur’, Tony Freemantle, ‘Recapturing the City is not a Given,’ Houston Chronicle, September 4, 2005. Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[70] Davis, p 48.

[71] Ibid, p 168-9. This contrasts with the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995, in which 6,400 people died. Although there was a large scale mobilization of volunteer groups, existing civil society networks were weak, and could not co-ordinate volunteers in a relief effort, Ibid, p 61.

[72] Davis, p 46.

[73] Bolin and Stanford, ‘Constructing Vulnerability in the First World’, pp 105-7.

[74] Ibid, p 213-5.

[75] Colonel Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’ Chief of Homeland Security, cited in Transter.

[76] Residents called FEMA’s intervention ‘anaemic, uncoordinated and agonizingly slow and tardy’. Federal aid did not arrive for four days after the hurricane first struck. ‘We’re going to make it right’, Bush promises’, The Seattle Times, 3 September 2005, Available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[77] Ollie Reed Junior, ‘A Square Sill in Knots’, The Albuquerque Journal (26 November 2005), available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

[78] Manuel Rois Franzeria, ‘A Day’s Work Does Not Come Easy in New Orleans; Latino Labourers Drawn to City Live in Squalor’, The Washington Post (December 18 2005), available at URL http://global.factiva.com/default.aspx [Accessed on 23/12/2005]

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007

‘Ya Basta! – That’s enough!’ [1] – Gangbanging and Protesting; an analysis of the Political Subculture of Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running

Josephine Metcalf
© Josephine Metcalf. All Rights Reserved

And for a time, for a most productive and wonderful time, gang violence stood at a standstill. For a time it appeared the internal warfare had given way to the struggle for land, language and liberty – when we had something more important to fight for.[2]

Whilst Rodriguez’s autobiography, Always Running: La Vida Loca – Gang Days in LA (1994), offers graphic depictions of life in his gangbanging prime, including armed robberies, heroin abuse, shootings and stabbings, he simultaneously delineates his active role in the radical Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This essay will demonstrate that this equivocal positioning remains central to his autobiography. Indeed, Rodriguez fully admits that whilst struggling to process his life as a member of ‘The Animal Tribe’, he possessed a conflicting heightened sense of consciousness that ‘wanted to flirt with depth of mind, to learn more about my world. My society. About what to do’. [3] Although Always Running is dedicated to his gangbanging son, Ramiro, in ‘helping to end the rising casualty count for the Ramiros of this world’, [4] the reader also perceives the radical and Marxist undertones that permeate the body of the text with a far wider reaching focus than merely the gangs of East LA. This paper will scrutinise the development of Rodriguez’s political disposition, in the context of the radicalisation of America during that era (unprecedented since the 1930s), and chart its deliberate impact on his life writings.

Whilst Mexican American autobiographical theory shares numerous traits with life writing criticism in general, questions of identity have often specifically been raised by Chicano authors as a result of their wish to draw on traditions from both sides of the border. Predominantly, this is manifested in language usage, as both English and Spanish (representing their American/Mexican selves) wrestle for ultimate control of their authors’ identities. Some of the most renowned contemporary Chicano autobiographers, for instance Oscar Zeta Acosta and Richard Rodriguez, have voiced their struggle to find a comfortable position between the two languages and it will be useful herewith to draw a comparison with Luis J Rodriguez’s predecessors. As the life writing theorist, Laura Marcus, claims, ‘this trying-on of alternative identities is central to ethnic autobiographies’; thus autobiographical form has become ‘a key element in new understandings of cultural identity and coalition politics’. [5] Richard Rodriguez depicts his use of Spanish as a private experience, contrasted with his public association with English. Acosta’s identity struggle culminates in a visit to Mexico, whereby ‘One sonafabitch tells me I’m not Mexican and the other one says I’m not American. I got no roots anywhere’. [6] Luis J Rodriguez relates to this dilemma: ‘I had fallen through the chasm between two languages. The Spanish had been beaten out of me in the early years of school – and I didn’t learn English very well either. This was the predicament of many Chicanos’. [7]

All three authors use their autobiographies to shape their personal and political identities, moving precariously through these two opposing cultural forces. Whilst Richard Rodriguez happily succumbs to the domination of English, letting language become what Marcus terms ‘a magical instrument of reconciliation’, Acosta’s text remains a ‘dangerous double agent’ moving between these oppositions. [8] Luis J Rodriguez repeatedly refers to the plight of the Mexican experience, whereby immigrants were viewed as ‘phlegm stuck in the collective throat of this country’. [9] Dissimilar to Acosta and Richard Rodriguez, however, Luis J Rodriguez expands on Marcus’s reference to ‘coalition politics’, aiming his text not merely at rejected immigrants or gang members, but additionally other minority groups, as well as those on the lowest social stratum – ‘This book is part of their story’. [10] As early as his Preface, Rodriguez makes clear that he is seeking a society ‘not where a few benefit at the expense of the many, but where everyone has access to decent health care, clothing, food and housing, based on need, not whether they can afford them’. [11] Always Running becomes a brief lesson in sociology, as Rodriguez emphasises that issues of unemployment and poverty are not limited to the Chicano population of LA and should not necessarily be viewed as such. Thus, Rodriguez’s ‘I’ has incorporated Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s infamous referencing of the ‘I’ of the individual, as well as the ‘I’ of the race (in Gates’s essay, this was applied to African American autobiography), but moreover developed the referential ‘I’ to apply to all those struggling to survive in American society. [12]

As Always Running progresses, Rodriguez becomes increasingly ensnared between resistance (resistingresisting the ruthless dominant milieu of 1970s LA) through subcultural rituals as part of the gang, and resisting itance through revolutionary protests as part of the Chicano Movement: ‘I ended up back in the streets. Somehow, though, it wasn’t the same as before. A power pulled in those books I learned to savor…’. [13] The Reagan Administration’s retort to the gang’s ritual resistance was a dramatic increase in suppressive tactics, a trend continued through subsequent Presidential years. Certainly, the 1980s witnessed extensive condemnation of gangs in the media, the construction of nine new Californian prisons, and the launching of the militant Operation Hammer by the LAPD’s CRASH team in order to – literally – smother gangs. [14] Clinton continued the war on crime with longer prison sentences (‘3 strikes and you’re out’) and the recent Bush Administration has even, in the case of former gang member, Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams, answered with the death penalty as a suppressive tool. Rodriguez pleads for a change in America’s response to these marginal subcultures, claiming, ‘young people are looking for people, places, art and literature that can reflect their values, pain, visions and confusions’. [15] Rodriguez documents a similarly oppressive reaction to revolutionary rituals in the 1970s, when the federal government intervened: ‘…every organized expression for justice and liberation was targeted, its leaders killed or jailed, its forces scattered’. [16] He cites as examples, not merely the Brown Berets, but allied groups such as the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Liberation Group, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and the Weathermen. [17]

The binary opposites of ritual resistance (the youth subculture) versus revolutionary resistance form the backbone to Always Running. [18] The life writing critic, Herbert Leibowitz, famously argued that literary style, rather than content, is the crucial interpretive link to understanding an autobiography. Hence the reader becomes a ‘secret agent’, or ‘literary sleuth’ who must analyse the ‘slippery clues’ that an author leaves behind, in order to grasp their intentions. [19] For instance, Richard Rodriguez shrewdly divides his autobiography into distinct private and public chapters, to represent the two extremes of his assimilation experience. The bulk of Luis J Rodriguez’s story forms a linear narrative, chronicling his childhood and teenage years. He is ardent in emphasizing that although the essence of the book is about La Vida Loca, this is inextricably linked with his life as an activist. These two conflicting lives are collapsed into one account, with opening chapter quotations from characters such as Antonin Artaud (a French philosopher with radical views), Nelson Perry (an African American revolutionary) and Sandra Cisneros (a Chicano novelist/poet), combined with chapters that commence with citations from a Lomas gang member, a Barrio boxing coach or a Mexican adage. Accounts of friends killed in a police chase are followed in the next breath by assemblies to discuss social revolution; when arrested for intent to commit murder, his description of prison revolves around poetry; attendance at the Chicano Moratorium Against The War results in being sucked into the criminal justice system. This concoction of stories delineates the continual, irresistible lure of the gang for youth, despite Rodriguez’s role as a radical advocate. Indeed, Rodriguez refuses to construct himself as a preaching mentor, and instead we witness him confess on more than one occasion, ‘I was back to the way of the ‘hood’. [20] Even the glossary of Spanish terms included at the end of Always Running, lists a continual blend of barrio terminology (‘Vatito’, ‘Vato Loco’, ‘Chota’) with revolutionary expressions (‘La Raza’, ‘Regeneracion’, ‘Teatro’). [21]

On a perfunctory level of analysis, it appears that Rodriguez’s stories of gang exploits hold much in common with other memoirs, such as those by African American street gang members: ‘Tookie’ Williams (Redemption) and Sanyika ‘Monster’ Shakur (Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member). Certainly, all three confront issues of LA’s ‘pobreza’ (poverty, described Rodriguez as ‘an old friend’ [22]) and economic deprivation, as well as police brutality and war analogies. Despite slightly diverse reasoning behind the development of contemporary street gangs (the Crips were founded as a quasi-political version of the Black Panthers during the Civil Rights Movement, while the Mexican Cholos have been traced to the earlier Pachucos and their immigratory experience of culture conflict), both African American and Mexican American gangs have interchangeably swapped styles and rituals of the gang experience. For instance, Rodriguez affirms that as they grasped the English language, ‘it was usually the Black English we first tried to master’. [23] Later, in prison and juvenile detention centres, Blacks mimicked the Cholo style and emulated Mexican slang. This similitude extends into their autobiographies, as all three are ambivalent in their attitude towards the gang: they voice anti-gang reflections in hindsight, despite concurrently glorifying their battle tales.

Yet it is difficult, beneath the surface of these gang narratives, to identify any notably similar lines of political thought. This is particularly engaging in view of Rodriguez and Shakur, whose autobiographies were both published in 1993. Despite voicing comparable concerns with modern day LA (such as the Rodney King riots and resulting temporary Crip-Blood truce), Rodriguez’s mindset appears to remain in the radical era of over twenty years prior, thus sharply altering the political undercurrent of his text. By comparison, Shakur was not born until 1963 (nine years after Rodriguez and ten years behind Tookie), and did not commence gangbanging until 1974.

By 1974, Rodriguez had already rejected gangsterism, and was actively involved in M.E.C.H.A. (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan), recently becoming the Mecha organiser for all East LA High Schools. This corresponded with the rupturing of the radical sentiment that had swept America over the previous decade: once the Brown Berets disbanded in 1972, the movement gradually splintered and attention turned to alternative matters such as the environment and second-wave feminism. For exhausted radicals, it became an excuse to return to mainstream America. As Shakur strode towards his gangbanging prime, he was blind to what Eithne Quinn has described as ‘the wider forces of depoliticization and conservative retrenchment in 1970s America’. [24] In essence, by 1974 Shakur was not positioned in such a socially consequential historical era. Instead, he was simply an 11-year-old child banned from his school’s outing as punishment for flashing a gang sign during a class photograph. [25] Whilst conservative forces took hold in the early 1970s, the peak political challenge to gangs has often been linked to the election of Reagan a few years later. During the 1980s, Reagan’s rise to power signified a reduction in state funding for education, increase in prison spending, a slumping economy with resulting loss of jobs, and emphasis on an individualist rather than collectivist way of thinking that would come to represent America’s widespread mood over the next two decades. These forces combined, led to a dramatic surge in gang membership.

Despite having renounced gangsterism by this stage, Rodriguez deliberately refers to the ongoing impact of Reaganomics, witnessing its effects played out through his son, Ramiro. This too, is the environment which is described so emphatically during Shakur’s gangbanging glory. It might be useful to herewith draw a brief comparison with Monster in order to demonstrate the importance of radical politics to Rodriguez. Indeed, Shakur’s text, with its discussion of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and requests for a separate state, quite clearly understands radical ideologies that aim at fundamental change in the structure of society. But Shakur does not contextualise this in the larger frame of the Civil Rights Movement; instead it remains very much an individualist attitude, within solely his African American experience. Certainly, there is a selfish, maverick feel to Monster, in stark contrast to Always Running‘s call for collective radicalism. This is perhaps reflective of the early 1990s American consciousness, whereby, ‘this political dissipation, the sense of the intractability of social problems and declining believe in government intervention, seem to have fostered a situation in which the only thing worth discussing is personal responsibility and entrepreneurial self-reliance’. [26] Indeed, during Clinton’s era, ‘an individual – in the face of deindustrialisation and punitive government policy – is cornered into a position of callous individualism’. [27]

It should also be noted that Rodriguez’s situation meant that he was quite literally free to participate in a revolution (he started writing excerpts of the book when he was 16 years old, and was only ever imprisoned for minimum periods of time): ‘At 18, I barely escaped a long prison term. I had the help of mentors and activists in the most radical wing of the Chicano Movement, people to whom I owe my life, people who steered me in the direction of struggle, study and poetic science’. [28] In contrast, Shakur’s autobiography is a faithful prison ‘conversion’ narrative, having been written whilst the author was incarcerated and thus physically hindered from contributing in anything stronger than textual politics. [29]

In the space of a larger essay, it would be useful to assess the wider media responses to Always Running and its radicalist inclinations. Particularly in view of the rightwardly realigned, post Civil Rights environment in which Rodriguez, Shakur and Tookie have all found such a receptive audience. Whilst gang theorists such as Martin Jankowski have chronicled the tense relationship between contemporary gangs and the media, for Mexican Americans in particular the strained association between the two is often traced back to the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, whereby a press smear campaign contributed to the start of the insurgence. In Beatrice Griffith’s American Me, a study of the 1940s Pachuco experience in California, she highlights the sensationalised press coverage of the early gangs and the chaos that ensued as a result:

There have been many reasons suggested for the newspaper blow up of the ‘Mexican’ juvenile gang activities. Some say news was scarce, and these kids were good copy. Others believe that there was a well-planned conspiracy afoot to incite race riots and put Mexicans in their place. Whatever the cause, the results were patent: the jitterbug Mexican American youth, who looked upon the zootsuit as his mark of style distinction and group security, had become the chief adversary of servicemen and a threat to local civilians. [30]

Rodriguez details the booming business of the local press due to media coverage of gangs in his era, as well as the inflated media-police response in the wake of the 1992 riots. [31] Some book reviews of Always Running which I have collated to date do certainly invoke – to varying degrees – the social/racial constructions and political ways of thinking that fed into Rodriguez’s text. These reviews were published in either traditionally left-wing journals (for example, Progressive, Choice or Nation) or literary-based journals (Poets & Writers Magazine, Grand Street), thus similar to those very style of publications in which Rodriguez himself found such an appreciative audience when publishing sections of his book (as this essay will later demonstrate). It could be interesting to assess whether more mainstream (capitalist) media sources address the cultural and social messages of Always Running, and whether they do so in specific times and social circumstances (for instance, whether different readers inhabit different social locations in the narrative; whether different readers stress the radicalism of the 1960s/70s or whether they apply his political viewpoints merely in the context of contemporary LA society).

Whilst simultaneously locating the cultural meanings of Always Running through media reception work, it would also be valuable to do so by encompassing audience studies, in particular those Californian high school pupils who have been actively encouraged to read the text. In an interview I conducted with Rodriguez in 1997, he felt it important to mention that his book was originally banned in areas of the US (for instance school districts in Texas, Illinois and Michigan; in Kalamazoo he was invited to speak at a school but was not allowed to bring a copy of the text with him). In the same interview, Rodriguez made his opinions on gang autobiographies quite clear:

I believe those youth who need to relate to books such as Always Running or Monster should be able to read them. These are hard-core and intense books. Perhaps younger readers should be guided through them with the help of teachers or parents. I can even see why some of them would be ill-served by such books, especially children at an impressionable age. But I am against the censoring of such books. They need to be made available for the community as they are needed. I know my book has saved lives. I know young people who have never read a book all the way through until they read mine. [32]

It could be argued that the origins of the above assessment manifested themselves in 1970 when, as Always Running records, Rodriguez demonstrated his faith (or lack of) in the power of books and curriculum texts. For instance, he voiced disgust when a schoolteacher refused his request to write a book review on Griffith’s American Me, and instead forced him to write about Wordsworth. [33] Tookie too, recognises the influential, pedagogical potential of books, and from his cell on death row produced a series of children’s books, assisting with reading skills whilst also preaching anti-gang sentiments. (Interestingly, Shakur prognosticated this outcome, for whilst he was still a little Crip, he recalls Tookie as a ‘magnificent storyteller’. [34])

As the Chicano Movement gathered momentum in the 1960s, schools and the educational system became a crucial site of struggle. In fact, Rodriguez illustrates his radical social positioning as early as 1968 when, aged 13, he participated in his ‘first conscious political act’ [35] at one of the East L.A. ‘Blowouts’. During these so-called protests, students across the country walked out of their schools to demand equal education. Their dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that ‘the school had two principle languages. Two skin tones and two cultures. It revolved around class difference’. [36] A couple of years following his first Blowout, Rodriguez participated in his school district’s chapter of To.H.M.A.S (To Help Mexican American Students), in addition to aiding the development of the Chicano Studies Centre within his own school. According to his autobiography, Rodriguez played an industrious role in both of these later two remonstrances. Indeed, in an article written in 1994, Rodriguez explained that ‘schools for the most part, fail to engage their creativity and intellect. As a result young people find their own means of expression – music being the most obvious example, but also the formation of gangs’. [37] Rodriguez’s continual belief in the need for education to play an active role in the reorganization of society is demonstrated not merely in his action plan for Ramiro, but moreover in the numerous selective review quotations from high school pupils and instructors situated in the front of the Touchstone edition of the text.

By the late 1960s, frustration at the lack of recognition for the Chicano canon exploded to produce a demand, as evidenced in Always Running, for a strict academic commitment to the study of minority literatures, as well as the recruitment of minority faculty, as a means of expressing the distinct features of Chicano culture. [38] Rodriguez asserts that Mexican American gangbanging was a logical riposte to this previous lack of cultural discourse: ‘As a Chicano, born into this world stripped of dignity, history and culture, bereft of my language and land, how will I respond? Mi Vida Loca was a response’. [39] The 1960s Chicano Renaissance sparked a fundamental change in Rodriguez, as for so many other Chicano poets struggling to find an appropriate voice in a culturally frustrated America. Indeed, the period consequently produced a new wave of social protest poetry. As Chicano critic, Joseph Sommers, writes of this poetry:

…rather than merely reflecting historical experience, [it] carries in its form and its structures an interpretation of this experience, an interpretation which is capable of impact upon the consciousness of its reader. By this logic, the writer is neither an omniscient vates, a seer, nor a self-anointed revolutionary, but rather a creative interpreter, whose identification with a social group connotes responsibility to it, one who must assure the contradictions of his or her social conditions and struggle to resolve them. [40]

Rodriguez independently undertakes this role of creative interpreter aged 15, when his father donated him an old typewriter. [41] Shortly thereafter his school entered him (successfully) into a competition reflective of the era: a Chicano Literary Contest in Berkeley, organised by Quinto Sol Publications. [42] Although the promised publishing contract with Quinto Sol neglected to materialise, throughout the two decades prior to 1993, Rodriguez published excerpts of his narrative and poetry in locations varying from journals analysing Mexican American thought, to literary magazines for new authors, to a critical cultural journal that encouraged non-institutionalised work from a radical perspective. [43] His commitment to social protest in the poetical mould has thrived past his school days, as detailed in Always Running, and sought to saturate his continued dedication to revolutionary ideologies: ‘Today I fight with words, ideas and poetry’. [44] In 1992, Rodriguez won the prestigious PEN/Josephine Miles Award for his book of poetry, The Concrete River River was published by Curbstone (as was Always Running before being purchased by Touchstone Press), a diminutive publishers devoted to South-Of-The-Rio Grande political writings, including those of Claribel Alegria and Roque Dalton. [45] In 1989, Rodriguez went one step further in his belief that ‘Poetry can point the way out of our present cultural crisis’ [46] and founded the Tia Chucha Press, a poetry publishing house that deliberately solicits socially conscious material. [47]

The reader of Always Running cannot help but note how the author deliberately steers them into his radical mindset of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unarguably, it is difficult to avoid noticing that Rodriguez’s revolutionary tendencies are deeply embedded in his role as an anti-gang activist (both ‘then’ and ‘now’); a role which he has chosen to execute through his (life) writings. The realist autobiography has become a progressive text, one that calls upon the reader to question their views of American society. Always Running bespeaks the political climate of America in the 1960s/70s in all its radical standpoints with a twofold result. Firstly, Rodriguez demonstrates his anxiety towards the youth gang (the ‘Ramiros’) of contemporary American society. Despite Shakur’s alternative views, Rodriguez argues that gangbanging cannot be overcome by oneself: ‘The thing is, no matter what one does individually in this setting, the dangers keep lurking around every corner’. [48] Secondly, he exemplifies his own sense of responsibility, and moreover encourages a collective response, in order to work towards the reorganisation of American society. ‘Ya Basta’ Rodriguez exclaims, ‘That’s enough!’, referencing both gangbanging as well as unequal societal rights. This equivocal positioning is the crux of Rodriguez’s text; his redemption is not merely a literary reflection, but instead is equally situated in hindsight and in the revolutionary Brown Power years of the 1960s/70s.

University of Manchester

Notes

[1] Luis J Rodriguez, Always Running: La Vida Loca – Gang Days in LA (NY: Touchstone, 1993), p. 260. A popular slogan during the Chicano Movement.

[2] Ibid, p. 166.

[3] Ibid, p. 113.

[4] Ibid, p. 11.

[5] Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 292-293.

[6] Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), p.196. Acosta was famous for being a legendary defensive lawyer, whose contempt for America’s legal system as well as his ostentatious personality, was often said to personify the Chicano mood in the 1960s/70s. Both his autobiographies (Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People), published in 1972 and 1973 respectively, address the revolutionary implications of the era.

[7] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 219.

[8] Marcus, p. 7.

[9] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 19.

[10] Ibid, p. 10.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gates is quoted in Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics; Racialization in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 12.

[13] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 139.

[14] ‘Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums’ (CRASH) was the LAPD’s specialised anti-gang unit, started in the 1970s and disbanded in the wake of the Rampart Scandal in 1999. Operation Hammer was a CRASH initiative that Chief of Police Daryl Gates introduced in 1987 to crack down on gang violence in South Central Los Angeles, favouring aggressive tactics and mass round-ups of black youth as suspected gang members.

[15] Interview conducted with Luis J Rodriguez, 1997.

[16] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 249.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Stuart Hall has examined at length the ‘ritual resistance’ of youth subcultures, referring to the process of ‘bricolage’: of adapting or utilising styles and spaces for a group’s own usage. Ritual resistance can be considered a process of ongoing negotiation, rather than ‘revolutionary resistance’, which ultimately aims to reject or overturn.

[19] Herbert Leibowitz, Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (NY: Alfred A Knopf), 1989, p. 3.

[20] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 233.

[21] Ibid, p. 253-260.

[22] Ibid, p. 32.

[23] Ibid, p. 85.

[24] Eithne Quinn, ‘Work, Play and ‘Lifestylization’ of the Black Pimp Figure in Early 1970s America’, in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed. by Brian Ward (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), p. 228.

[25] Sanyika Shakur, Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member (NY: Atlantic/Penguin, 1993), p. 4.

[26] Eithne Quinn, Aint Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 168.

[27] Ibid, p. 31.

[28] Rodriguez, Luis J, ‘Writing Off Our Youth’, in Prison Life Magazine (New York: October 1994), pp.8-9.

Rodriguez, Prison Life, p.8.

[29] Contemporary prison ‘conversion’ narratives are often considered to start with The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965, and include authors such as George Jackson and Thomas Carr.

[30] Beatrice Griffith, American Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 17.

[31] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 111 and p. 249 respectively.

[32] Interview conducted with Luis J Rodriguez, 1997.

[33] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 139.

[34] Shakur, p. 246.

[35] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 165.

[36] Ibid, p. 83.

[37] Luis J Rodriguez, ‘Rekindling the Warrior’ in Utne Reader (July/August 1994), p. 58.

[38] Interestingly, one of the most famous contemporary Chicano autobiographies, by Richard Rodriguez, controversially argues for an assimilationist posture that rejects bilingual education. This caused great controversy amongst Chicano theorists as it worked against the demands of the Chicano Movement.

[39] Rodriguez, Prison Life, p. 9.

[40] Joseph Sommers, ‘Critical Approaches to Chicano Literature’ in Modern Chicano Writers; A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Joseph Sommers and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1979), p. 38.

[41] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 134.

[42] In 1965, a professor from Berkeley founded Quinto Sol Publications, the pioneer publisher of Mexican American authors.

[43] Amongst others, these journals include El Grito, Puerto del Sol and Left Curve.

For a list of the Rodriguez’s articles, please see A limited list of Rodriguez’s articles are available at URL http://www.luisjrodriguez.com/works/works.html#mag [Accessed 28 March 2007.]

[44] Rodriguez, Prison Life, p. 8.

[45] Alegria is a Nicaraguan-American poet, dedicated to non-violent resistance; Dalton was a poet and revolutionary from El Salvador.

[46] Rodriguez, Luis J, ‘What is American About American Poetry’, available at URL on http://www.poetrysociety.org/rodriguez.html. [Accessed 28 March 2007].

[47] Interestingly, this Mexican American perspective corresponds with Kinohi Nishikawa’s discussion of a backlash trend in the early 1990s towards funding independent, localized black publishing houses.

[48] Rodriguez, Always Running, p. 9.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

‘America(s): Representations and Negotiations’: A Report of the British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Conference, University of Nottingham 2006

Ceri Gorton
© Ceri Gorton. All Rights Reserved

On the 18th of November 2006, the University of Nottingham welcomed delegates from Harvard, Bergamo, Dublin and various institutions across the United Kingdom to the 51st Postgraduate Conference of the British Association for American Studies.

The conference appealed to a broad range of postgraduate interests. In all, sixty-seven people attended to participate in six panels convened around the diverse themes of Negotiating the Nineteenth Century, Contemporary Regional Literatures, Sexuality and Violence in American Memoirs, Exploring the Sixties, Immigration and Identity, and (Trans)National Influences. Papers were offered on topics ranging from studies of Washington Irving and Stephen King, to International Relations in Weimar Germany, and Drag and Identity in the work of Mark Doty and Michael Tremblay.

Professor Liam Kennedy, Director of The Clinton Institute, University College Dublin, explored the idea of a ‘New’ American Studies in an informative and interesting plenary session. Drawing together the interdisciplinary strands of the day’s panels, Professor Kennedy’s lecture was well received by delegates and provided a focus for the conference’s wide-ranging subject matter.

Later in the day, the buffet lunch and wine reception allowed postgraduates, delegates and speakers to mingle freely and discuss the issues explored during the day in an informal and relaxed manner. This stimulated debate and created a friendly and positive forum for postgraduates.

The final formal session of the day was a Roundtable Discussion on ‘Getting Published’. Panellists included Professor Nahem Yousaf, editor of Contemporary American and Canadian Writers at Manchester University Press; Dr Julian Stringer, editor of Scope: The Online Journal of Film Studies; former Nottingham PhD student and published author, Karen McNally; and Elizabeth Boyle, editor of U.S. Studies Online, the BAAS Postgraduate Journal. This discussion was greeted enthusiastically by delegates, who asked questions on all aspects of the publishing process, and benefited from the experience of a panel representing a variety of publishing interests.

Building upon the premise of the Roundtable Discussion, four papers delivered by postgraduates on the day were selected for publication in U.S. Studies Online. The papers chosen for publication were by Rebecca Janicker (University of Nottingham/University of Portsmouth), Madeleine Lyes (University College Dublin), Jenny Woodley (University of Nottingham) and Thomas Wright (Cambridge University).

Rebecca Janicker’s paper, entitled ‘The Horrors of Maine: Space, Place and Regionalism in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary’, focuses on the impact of King’s affinity with New England upon his work. Offering a bold regionalist reading of his 1983 novel Pet Sematary, Janicker explores the author’s use of space and the apparent binaries of urban/rural and civilisation/wilderness. A student of the University of Nottingham, Rebecca Janicker is working on a doctoral thesis exploring the haunted house motif in American horror fiction, entitled ‘Half-way Houses: Liminality in the Haunted Spaces of Popular American Gothic Fiction’.

Working on a PhD at University College Dublin, Madeleine Lyes’s thesis is entitled ‘The Resurrection of Urban Thought: Urban Literature and Theory during the Golden Era of the New Yorker’. Her conference paper, which appears in modified form in this issue of U.S. Studies Online, analyses the epistolary narratives of New Yorker columnist and self-confessed ‘long-winded lady’ Maeve Brennan, and the work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs. Entitled ‘“Speaking of Survival and of Ordinary Things” – The Emergence of an Urban Philosophy in the 1960s New York Writing of Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan’, Lyes’s paper unpacks Jacobs’s assertion of the uniqueness of an urban existence determined by the presence of strangers. It goes on to explore the intersection of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Brennan’s journalistic representations of a city in constant flux.

Jenny Woodley, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham, is working on a doctoral thesis exploring the cultural work of the NAACP between 1910 and 1950. Stemming from research conducted at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, Woodley’s paper is entitled ‘The Hollywood Front: the Battle over Race in the Movies during World War II’. It analyses the representation of race in America during World War II and the extent to which African Americans used this opportunity to fight for better treatment in motion pictures.

Cambridge PhD student Thomas Wright’s research interests centre on US urban history, nineteenth-century literature and transatlantic literary relations. His paper is entitled ‘The Port of Liverpool in the American Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’ and explores the apparent ‘problem of Liverpool’ in nineteenth-century American travel writing. Focusing in particular on the responses of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Merseyside, Wright’s paper suggests that these representations of the city help to reveal American attitudes to urbanism, globalisation and modernity.

The organisers would like to thank all those who participated in making the day a success and extend congratulations to the students whose papers were chosen for publication. Particular thanks also go to the British Association of American Studies and the US Embassy in London for the financial support which made the conference possible.