I studied Sister Carrie and House of Mirth in juxtaposition once upon a time, and the more I think about it, the more curious it is. The two are relatively contemporaneous, but Dreiser is completely unconcerned with the world of old breeding and old money. It's not just because his characters don't belong; you'll notice that in his description of New York society when Hurstwood and Carrie first arrive, the big guns are the magnates -- no Van Osburghs here. On the other hand, House of Mirth does admit some of the world of Sister Carrie -- there's the working girl who Lily befriends (Nettie), and there are Ames's pretensions to science that make him an interesting contrast with Selden. (my first ever English paper.)
Also interesting is the thread of fatalism/inevitability in both. House of Mirth, I don't know -- is it really fatalistic? Perhaps. Perhaps Lily's very nature makes it impossible that she'll stop at any one of the millions of chances she has to redeem herself. I occasionally find myself wanting her to just suck it up and play the game... or become a Gerty. Sister Carrie, on the other hand, I find completely fatalistic. Hurstwood is set up to fall, as his youth and energy decay. It's all spelled out for us in Dreiser's little perorations.
How to weave in DuBois? Regionalism. Both Sister Carrie and Souls of Black Folk are very concerned with the issue of regionalism. I'd also like to point out the importance of trains in both of them -- social mobility, ease of flight, Jim Crow cars... DuBois is far from concerned with the vagaries of New York society, but his sociological attitude in Souls is not far different from the sociological observations of Wharton. Dreiser feels less sociological to me, somehow -- I haven't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it's something in how many of his characters are presented without much history/family.
I would also like to point out the role that Europe plays in all three as a kind of offstage for Americans. Alexander Crummell, Carrie, and Lily can all disappear offstage when need be. and it's not that action doesn't happen there -- but the real action happens HERE.
That "what is a book, and what are its purposes?" is a really good question, Janaka, especially if we think about it in regard to Dickinson's writing practice (and specifically "Publication is the Auction"). (Honestly, I only put it up there thinking about the underlying meter and slant-rhyme in Du Bois' prose.) Du Bois seems, throughout, very aware that what he is producing is a text with particular rhetorical aims. This book is going to GO somewhere and SPEAK to some people; it's certainly not addressed to the choir, but it's also almost certainly not addressed to a grand wizard.
I'll get to Du Bois again in a day or two -- I was just compelled to put this down before I forgot it.
Stay tuned -- I want to see what kind of befellows Wharton and Thoreau make.
I was about 2/3 through Wharton when I spilled an inordinate amount of water on my book. Whilst it dries, I'll make a few comments, specifically directed toward what Heidi called the book's fatalism. I'm not sure "fate" is the word I'd use -- "obligation" is a word that comes up a lot, and Wharton stresses that everything must be paid for (the phrase "pay up" occurs at least three or four times). There is this incredible economy of social capital that structures the network of the novel, and from which Lily could not escape, despite her many attempts to do so. To make an egregious comparison: as the transparent manumission of Jacobs became the Veil of Du Bois' Reconstruction, Lily comes to find that any move she makes within social circles only immerses her in a new economy with new obligations in which everything must still be paid for. Wharton's irony is vicious when she allows Lily to condescendingly admire Gerty for her relative freedom from the obligations which structure Lily's life, only for Lily to find that she had viewed Gerty with a high degree of fungibility (correct use?), and that even Gerty's relatively simple life came with its own costs. Thoreau comes in here for me because of the way he viewed America's rapid infatuation with capital and the valuation of a man's time. (Why not walk rather than take the train, if it takes you two weeks to earn the money you needed for the train fare?) The only "way out" Wharton presents with any degree of potency is that offered by Rosedale. The accompnaying cost, of course, is that she must join the "other," insistently marked by the narrative voice as doing things typical of "his race."
Which brings me to my big question: is House of Mirth considered a straight satire? Or is it a tragedy with satirical elements? Or is it just a shame? The narrative voice often explicitly marks its irony, but in these cases it is generally the light ironic tone of an over-educated elite. Wharton insistently writes Lily with a high degree of irony: Lily possesses little capacity for sympathy, seems to have no valuable traits other than the often-deprecated ones of beauty and social volubility, lives with no cognizance of those who make her life comfortable, and this is someone we're supposed to care about? Gerty fares little better: Wharton frequently characterizes her view of life as pathetically limited, whatever its moral rectitude. Seldon makes a rather poor romantic object, and Wharton asserts several times that he is someone Lily feels akin to rather than passionately interested in. I'm not trying to make an argument that this should be a Danielle Steele novel, just trying to figure out how to class a novel as insistently doom-hungry as this.
And none of the men are independent either. Everyone is led inexorably on by obligation.
I read Du Bois, as I suggested above, as attempting to imagine the history of manumission, complicating the high fungibility of Jacobs' view of what freedom will accomplish. For Du Bois, of course, legal manumission just gets reinscribed as economic slavery. Here again Du Bois is closer to his fellow Massachusettsean Thoreau than Jacobs, Thoreau using the hot-button issue of slavery to draw attention to the volitional slavery of the poor. Du Bois is at his most Thoreau-ian when he describes how the "ideal of freedom" becomes the "deification of bread" 962).
Du Bois has some interesting things to say about hybridity. Miscegenation gets read here transparently as "not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home" (13).
While I was reading my thoughts strayed: Whitman -> Jackson, Jacksonian democracy -> Jefferson, Jeffersonian democracy. Thinking back to Notes on VA as the grounding for Jacksonian democracy, I started thinking that such a political system is absolutely consistent with policies of Indian removal and Jim Crow laws. As Jefferson noted when he spoke about the need to curb immigration, the sudden insertion of one type of people into a Republic composed of another type of people virtually guarantees a corruption of the original order. As long as we all have the same values, we can have votes and elections (because, on all the really "important" issues, we all already know we agree). However, once our voting base becomes diluted, our very system could change -- a strong faith in democracy ends up precluding tolerance for different peoples. Discuss.
If I were to find a like between Wharton and Du Bois, I would have to find it in a similar anxiety regarding Darwin, especially in its uglier guise of social Darwinism. Du Bois notes at the end of his book that those who assert the inferiority of the liberated slaves presume that the "probation" of the races is over, reminding his reader that had we stopped time and evaluated at different points in history, the European-descended man would not have fared as well. (Maybe there is a corresponding fin-de-siecle anxiety here.) Wharton brings up similar questions as to strength, particularly in the social sense. Lily is the glue that keeps her society together, until they decide (with their infererior sociality) that they don't need her anymore. It really isn't people, but capital, that proves strong enough to survive its competitors.
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I pray you -
receive my little book,
in all charity -
studying my words with me,
forgiving mistake and foible
for sake of faith and passion -
seeking the grain
hidden there.
Dickinson or Du Bois?
I studied Sister Carrie and House of Mirth in juxtaposition once upon a time, and the more I think about it, the more curious it is. The two are relatively contemporaneous, but Dreiser is completely unconcerned with the world of old breeding and old money. It's not just because his characters don't belong; you'll notice that in his description of New York society when Hurstwood and Carrie first arrive, the big guns are the magnates -- no Van Osburghs here. On the other hand, House of Mirth does admit some of the world of Sister Carrie -- there's the working girl who Lily befriends (Nettie), and there are Ames's pretensions to science that make him an interesting contrast with Selden. (my first ever English paper.)
Also interesting is the thread of fatalism/inevitability in both. House of Mirth, I don't know -- is it really fatalistic? Perhaps. Perhaps Lily's very nature makes it impossible that she'll stop at any one of the millions of chances she has to redeem herself. I occasionally find myself wanting her to just suck it up and play the game... or become a Gerty. Sister Carrie, on the other hand, I find completely fatalistic. Hurstwood is set up to fall, as his youth and energy decay. It's all spelled out for us in Dreiser's little perorations.
How to weave in DuBois? Regionalism. Both Sister Carrie and Souls of Black Folk are very concerned with the issue of regionalism. I'd also like to point out the importance of trains in both of them -- social mobility, ease of flight, Jim Crow cars... DuBois is far from concerned with the vagaries of New York society, but his sociological attitude in Souls is not far different from the sociological observations of Wharton. Dreiser feels less sociological to me, somehow -- I haven't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it's something in how many of his characters are presented without much history/family.
I would also like to point out the role that Europe plays in all three as a kind of offstage for Americans. Alexander Crummell, Carrie, and Lily can all disappear offstage when need be. and it's not that action doesn't happen there -- but the real action happens HERE.
That "what is a book, and what are its purposes?" is a really good question, Janaka, especially if we think about it in regard to Dickinson's writing practice (and specifically "Publication is the Auction"). (Honestly, I only put it up there thinking about the underlying meter and slant-rhyme in Du Bois' prose.) Du Bois seems, throughout, very aware that what he is producing is a text with particular rhetorical aims. This book is going to GO somewhere and SPEAK to some people; it's certainly not addressed to the choir, but it's also almost certainly not addressed to a grand wizard.
I'll get to Du Bois again in a day or two -- I was just compelled to put this down before I forgot it.
Stay tuned -- I want to see what kind of befellows Wharton and Thoreau make.
"Bedfellows" is spelled with a "d".
I was about 2/3 through Wharton when I spilled an inordinate amount of water on my book. Whilst it dries, I'll make a few comments, specifically directed toward what Heidi called the book's fatalism. I'm not sure "fate" is the word I'd use -- "obligation" is a word that comes up a lot, and Wharton stresses that everything must be paid for (the phrase "pay up" occurs at least three or four times). There is this incredible economy of social capital that structures the network of the novel, and from which Lily could not escape, despite her many attempts to do so. To make an egregious comparison: as the transparent manumission of Jacobs became the Veil of Du Bois' Reconstruction, Lily comes to find that any move she makes within social circles only immerses her in a new economy with new obligations in which everything must still be paid for. Wharton's irony is vicious when she allows Lily to condescendingly admire Gerty for her relative freedom from the obligations which structure Lily's life, only for Lily to find that she had viewed Gerty with a high degree of fungibility (correct use?), and that even Gerty's relatively simple life came with its own costs. Thoreau comes in here for me because of the way he viewed America's rapid infatuation with capital and the valuation of a man's time. (Why not walk rather than take the train, if it takes you two weeks to earn the money you needed for the train fare?) The only "way out" Wharton presents with any degree of potency is that offered by Rosedale. The accompnaying cost, of course, is that she must join the "other," insistently marked by the narrative voice as doing things typical of "his race."
Which brings me to my big question: is House of Mirth considered a straight satire? Or is it a tragedy with satirical elements? Or is it just a shame? The narrative voice often explicitly marks its irony, but in these cases it is generally the light ironic tone of an over-educated elite. Wharton insistently writes Lily with a high degree of irony: Lily possesses little capacity for sympathy, seems to have no valuable traits other than the often-deprecated ones of beauty and social volubility, lives with no cognizance of those who make her life comfortable, and this is someone we're supposed to care about? Gerty fares little better: Wharton frequently characterizes her view of life as pathetically limited, whatever its moral rectitude. Seldon makes a rather poor romantic object, and Wharton asserts several times that he is someone Lily feels akin to rather than passionately interested in. I'm not trying to make an argument that this should be a Danielle Steele novel, just trying to figure out how to class a novel as insistently doom-hungry as this.
And none of the men are independent either. Everyone is led inexorably on by obligation.
I read Du Bois, as I suggested above, as attempting to imagine the history of manumission, complicating the high fungibility of Jacobs' view of what freedom will accomplish. For Du Bois, of course, legal manumission just gets reinscribed as economic slavery. Here again Du Bois is closer to his fellow Massachusettsean Thoreau than Jacobs, Thoreau using the hot-button issue of slavery to draw attention to the volitional slavery of the poor. Du Bois is at his most Thoreau-ian when he describes how the "ideal of freedom" becomes the "deification of bread" 962).
Du Bois has some interesting things to say about hybridity. Miscegenation gets read here transparently as "not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home" (13).
While I was reading my thoughts strayed: Whitman -> Jackson, Jacksonian democracy -> Jefferson, Jeffersonian democracy. Thinking back to Notes on VA as the grounding for Jacksonian democracy, I started thinking that such a political system is absolutely consistent with policies of Indian removal and Jim Crow laws. As Jefferson noted when he spoke about the need to curb immigration, the sudden insertion of one type of people into a Republic composed of another type of people virtually guarantees a corruption of the original order. As long as we all have the same values, we can have votes and elections (because, on all the really "important" issues, we all already know we agree). However, once our voting base becomes diluted, our very system could change -- a strong faith in democracy ends up precluding tolerance for different peoples. Discuss.
If I were to find a like between Wharton and Du Bois, I would have to find it in a similar anxiety regarding Darwin, especially in its uglier guise of social Darwinism. Du Bois notes at the end of his book that those who assert the inferiority of the liberated slaves presume that the "probation" of the races is over, reminding his reader that had we stopped time and evaluated at different points in history, the European-descended man would not have fared as well. (Maybe there is a corresponding fin-de-siecle anxiety here.) Wharton brings up similar questions as to strength, particularly in the social sense. Lily is the glue that keeps her society together, until they decide (with their infererior sociality) that they don't need her anymore. It really isn't people, but capital, that proves strong enough to survive its competitors.
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