GENDER AND RACE REPRESENTATIONS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by DUONG THUY THI PHAM B.A., University of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 1988 Grad Dip., La Trobe University, Australia, 1995 M.A., La Trobe University, Australia, 1996 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (ENGLISH) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 2005 © Duong Thuy Thi Pham, 2005 Abstract ii Table of contents iii CHAPTER I: Gender Representations in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, And Edith Wharton CHAPTER II: Gender Representations in Adam Bede, Felix Holt, The Sun Also Rises, Native Son, The New Magdalen, And Lost And Saved 19 CHAPTER III: Race Representations In “The Monster” And Huckleberry Finn 30 Works Cited 88 Notes 93 CHAPTER I: GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON, WILLIAM FAULKNER, DJUNA BARNES, AND EDITH WHARTON ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD Missy Kubitschek attacks the common critical oversimplification of the character Janie as a black woman in Their Eyes Were Watching God Kubitschek asserts that Janie is a true heroine on a quest for her identity and meaning of life, and her eventual return to her community as a boon completes the quest in a way that signifies communal as well as personal growth Many critics, according to Kubitschek, trivialize or subordinate Janie; they see nothing more than a woman searching for romantic love or, alternatively, a subordinate spouse for a dominant male character While romantic love is indeed an essential element of Janie’s life, Kubitschek contends that Janie’s adventures represent a successful struggle to bring her life into harmony with her vision of the pear tree, the symbol of human life Kubitschek defines a successful quest as answering the call to adventure, crossing the threshold into the unknown, facing trials, finding the reward, and returning to the community Janie indeed goes through all of the above stages She responds to the call to adventure with Jody when her hope of developing harmony between her first marriage and the pear tree evaporates She again crosses the threshold separating personal safety from the risk necessary to fulfilment embodied in Tea Cake Part of the quest requires her to undergo trials in her marriage to Tea Cake on the road to development The trials come on the individual level (the possibility of personal betrayal when she finds Tea Cake responding on some level to Nunkie’s sexual invitation), the social level (in the form of Mrs Turner, a black woman who idolizes white culture, and thus poses a threat to the black community), and through nature (the hurricane) What Janie learns in each case is, respectively, a) rejection of her earlier passivity by striking Tea Cake and forcing a confrontation on her own terms; b) acceptance of Tea Cake’s anger and the community’s violent annihilation of Mrs Turner’s threat to its integrity; and c) use of memory as a means of transcending Tea Cake’s death Her reward is full participation in community expression and construction with the people in the Everglades Janie’s quest comes to a full circle when she returns to Eatonville to share her experience and reward with the community there through her friend Pheoby, thereby enabling the community to learn from her experience in a call and response fashion analogous to that of the work songs composed during slavery, a major source of black heritage Annye Refoe hails Janie as a hero in a feminist sense, for, in her journey from self-denial to self-awareness, Janie transcends the societal norms designed to keep women in their place At the beginning of the story, Janie is prevented from listening to her inner voice by the societal emphasis on material possessions and her own lack of self-esteem As a result, she looks to others for guidance and fulfillment: first to Logan Killicks with his sixty acres of land and later to Joe Starks, the mayor of Eatonville Both men regard himself as important and Janie as secondary, or important only by association, and resent the nonchalant way she holds them and their possessions For this reason, Janie withdraws into herself to protect her innermost feelings, as it is the only strategy available to her at the time With Jody’s death, Janie is finally freed of the shackles put upon her and proceeds to her next excursion into a relationship with a man of the new age Tea Cake and Janie complement each other and together, they form an equal partnership that allows them both to explore and experience the limitlessness and exquisite beauty of loving and of being a complete person Tea Cake never takes Janie for granted He insists that he and Janie are of the same mind and encourages her to extend her limits and to accomplish things she has always yearned to Thus placed in situations where she can practice the theories of self she has been contemplating for years, Janie blossoms into a new, happy woman with a positive self-image and pride for herself Her marriage to Tea Cake has allowed her to practice following her own inner voice to the extent that outside influences are now inconsequential, as her stance at the trial for Tea Cake’s death, and her return to Eatonville dressed in overalls suggest At last, Janie has no need for outward facades; she no longer needs nor invites outside interference in her life and can now overcome the loneliness and the other voices Refoe argues that this Janie who returned to Eatonville is the prototype for the successful woman of the new age She has discovered her potential, lived up to it and consequently has become a complete and happy person with a healthy sense of selfrespect and independence Michael Cooke finds Their Eyes Were Watching God to be the record of how affection turns materialism and passivity to self-respect, self-reliance, and selfrealization At the start, Janie does not have a sense of self, evinced by the way she does not recognize herself in the picture and by the name Alphabet As a result, she is easily persuaded by her grandmother to seek safety in materialism in the form of marriage to old Logan Killicks When she runs away with Joe Starks, Janie still does not advance very far beyond materialism, which finally yields to political power as a goal As the wife of the town mayor, Janie has been reduced to a projection of Joe’s ambition, without substance or activity of her own Eventually, Janie’s realization that Joe is but “illusory substance” puts her on the way to a further stage of development where, driven by his carping insults, she retorts against him by calling him a big-belly who looks like “de change uh life.” This incident indicates that all through her life until that moment, she appears to have yielded to other people’s demands of her, but at bottom, she has held fast to her freedom The moment has come when she refuses to be psychically put away and to be cancelled However, the freedom she enjoys after Joe’s death is only rudimentary— it is freedom from falsehood and obstacles, but without any positive expression or form The relationship with Tea Cake, therefore, is ideal, as it first confirms and elicits her powers, physical, social, and moral Janie is finally shown how to fulfill herself by surrendering to someone who surrenders to her, which causes the fiction of domination to disappear Despite the violence and unpredictability of the ending of their relationship, the novel does not end on a tragic note For, if Janie begins in accidental solitude with her grandmother and passes into accepted solitude with Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, she finally emerges in what can be called accomplished solitude Not only has she acquired the power of speech, she has proved herself to be a woman of resilience who knows what she wants, and has the strength to survive and to forgive (e.g Tea Cake’s friends in “De Muck” and her own friends back in Eatonville), and the command and lucidity of experience to understand the nature of love (“Love is lak de sea It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”) THE SOUND AND THE FURY Peter Swiggart contends that Faulkner’s main achievement in The Sound and the Fury is the vivid recreation of past events in the characters’ imagination, which involves the passage of time and other time symbols The opening section is presented through the stream of consciousness of Benjy, the idiot of the Compson family Because of Benjy’s lack of a moral point of view and of a conscious self, representation of events through his camera-mind effectively exposes the false or destructive morality of his brothers, and the vices and virtues of other characters He reacts in pain to Caddy’s misadventures, but his recollections return him to the past and relieve him from the clutches of despair that strangle Quentin Caddy, who is a symbol of innocence and affection in early childhood, is taught a sense of guilt by Quentin’s puritanism To Quentin, sexual union means death; he is thus dressed up as if for a funeral for the wedding He cannot understand his sister’s behavior and therefore hides from reality in his morbid rage and selfish agony His concern for honor compels him to change his memory (since past events cannot be altered) by admitting incest When that fails, he decides to destroy himself Like his father, Quentin looks upon the passage of time as the source of inescapable human frustration and tries to establish a permanent identity in a shifting and ambiguous reality His suicide is consequently an attempt to free his consciousness from the inevitability of change and decay that time brings For Jason, the third Compson boy, time is the equivalent of money, so he is constantly seen racing against time, and always losing The organization of Jason’s section is based upon his two main obsessions, his chase after financial profit and his hatred of Caddy and her daughter Quentin His inhumanity can partly be traced back to his mother’s influence and the unsuccessful marriage of his parents, as can in fact the failures of the other children The last section of the novel sees Dilsey, a passive witness of Compson decay, elevated to the symbolic status of prophetic time-keeper of the Compsons and of time itself Her role indicates the destructive impact of time, and at the same time, the possibility of a religious vision that can help free the individual at least from despair Olga Vickery contends that in The Sound and the Fury, Caddy’s surrender to Dalton Ames serves both as the source of dramatic tension and as the focal point for the different perspectives The four sections of the novel are then sequenced by the significance each of her brothers attaches to her act With regards to the central focus, each of the first three sections presents a version of the same facts, which is at once the truth, and a distortion of the truth by the perspective of the narrator The theme of the novel, as revealed by the structure, is the relation between the event and the interpretation of it With Benjy readers are restricted to sensations that cannot be communicated Benjy orders and evaluates his experience rigidly, and protests against any novelty or change Within his rigid world, Caddy is both the focus of order and the instrument of its destruction, for she is associated with the things he loves most, yet she cannot prevent herself or his world from changing Benjy, however, suffers the least because even pain is external to him, and because one pattern can be replaced by another Despite obvious parallels with Benjy’s section (with regards to its rigidity and the importance of Caddy), Quentin’s world is based on abstractions rather than sensations, and he is always trying to coerce experience into conformity with his system If Benjy is saved by being outside time, Quentin is destroyed by his excessive awareness of it, hence his desire for death as a way to stop his memory of Caddy’s betrayal of Compson honor Jason’s section is totally different from Benjy’s and Quentin’s, and yet related to theirs through Caddy It is also the clearest, though not any more objective, since he operates with a logic (cause and effect, profit and loss) which forms the basis of social communication However, logic isolates Jason as effectively as the moral abstractions of Quentin or the dependence on sensations of Benjy Finally, the fourth section with its objectivity finds Dilsey becoming the embodiment of the truth of the heart—and morality By working with circumstance and not against it, she creates order out of disorder; by accommodating herself to change, she preserves some semblance of decency for the Compsons She is also able to live with time thanks to her patient preoccupation with the present Her triumph and peace come from the simple verities of human life: love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice Michael Millgate finds the title of “Twilight” in the manuscript of The Sound and the Fury an apt reference both to Benjy’s section (to his suspension between the light and the dark, comprehension and incomprehension, human and animal), and to the whole book (to the decay of the Compsons in the dimmed glory of their past) The four sections of the book represent a movement outwards from Benjy’s private world to the public world of the fourth section There is also a different grouping of the first and last sections for their objectivity, and of the second and third for their intense subjectivity Benjy reports events of which he is a spectator with a camera-like fidelity, since he does not have the intelligence to order, and hence to distort, them He does not interpret events, nor does he judge people, although he becomes the instrument by which the other characters are judged Quentin in his obsessions with family tradition and honor is divorced from actuality Whatever he does, his concern is for the act’s significance as a gesture rather than for its practicality He seeks to defend Caddy’s honor, knowing in advance that he will be defeated He then turns to a futile search for a means to arrest time at a moment of perfection Caddy’s vitality and humanity therefore exposes Quentin’s inadequacy—her sexual freedom an expression of rebellion against the repressive demands made upon her by members of the family Jason’s single-minded and ruthless pursuit of material self-interest isolates him both from his family and from the community as a whole However, his commercial and materialistic instincts, anti-rural and anti-traditional as they are, make him the only male Compson with enough practical competence to cope with the practical and social implications of Caddy’s defection The desperate mood of The Sound and the Fury is also evident in the last section, for even though it contains certain positives that to some extent offset the negations of the previous sections, it is far from being an uncontested affirmation Dilsey’s endurance, a major positive influence in the section, is in fact derived from her submission to the tedious, trivial and inconsiderate demands by the Compsons The moment of simplicity, 80 with clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief” (W, 15) Thoreau concludes by criticizing those who yields to wealth and respect fashionable dress and equipage as being “so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them.” Consequently, Walden is for the reader a lesson in how to dip beneath the surface in order to “get at the inside at last” (W, 122) and Thoreau accomplishes this task in several different ways One of them is through proliferating imagery of breakthrough or penetration As Joseph Allen Boone has noticed, the earth thus becomes a metaphor for the material reality which truth-seekers must break Bodies of water, too, serve as markers dividing perceived reality, or life on the top, from the unseen substratum of truth and reality that is hidden underneath Another method of instructing readers to get at the inside is through his metaphoric discussion of clothes and what should be the primary function of clothing Thoreau’s attitude toward clothes is that of a Transcendentalist, to whom the most important part one needs to transcend to is the inside Because clothing is only needed to, first, retain our vital heat, and secondly, to cover nakedness in “this state of society” (p.14), Thoreau advocates a simple style, with as little clothing as possible In this, the author himself sets an example, as he wears “light shoes and thin clothing” compared to the Irish man John Field, who aspires to more riches and who thus has to work harder and wear sturdier clothes, which are “yet soon soiled and worn out” (W,138) Thoreau believes that the longer people wear them, the more essential clothes become, and that garments eventually become part of the body, like the skin Moreover, it is the person that shapes the clothes he or she wears Denouncing those who go after “superfluities” like richer food, larger and more splendid houses, and finer and more abundant clothing, he 81 advises readers to take their roots in reality (the way trees in the soil), to delve to the bottom of truth and embark on a life of fruitful adventure upward from there (W, 10) He is disappointed at the hypocrisy society has become, in the way most people heed “a broken pantaloon” more than a broken leg (W, 14) According to Thoreau, the important function of clothing is to conserve our animal heat, our energy Somewhat paradoxically, Thoreau recommends light clothes as part of the process of simplifying our lives Because Thoreau believes the self shines through clothing, it also means clothing reflects the person inside This is evident in the story about a “conceited fellow…in fine clothes” who pretends to know everything about plastering When he one day ventures “to substitute deeds for words,” his clumsiness results in a whole trowel of plaster landing on “his ruffled bosom” (W, 164) Thoreau’s advice to readers to try to get at the truth buried deep in things is evidenced in several examples in which clothing not accidentally play a prominent part One is the story of Alec Therien, the wood-chopper who sticks to the truth, without any embellishment, and who dresses in home-made gray Commenting on his frankness and honesty, Thoreau writes: Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own views always, or not pretend to see at all; who are bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy (W, 101) 82 By this, Thoreau is saying, first, one’s primitive thoughts, i.e those which originate directly from first-hand experience with nature, are so much more worthy than bookish knowledge; and second, there are redemptive qualities in the animal otherness of Therien (which may come from the term therios ‘beast’); though dark, mud can also be deep and productive—out of it grows the lotus; and the surface of awkwardness and ignorance may hide unimaginable depth and wisdom The wood-chopper, in his simple, down-to-earth home-made gray cap, is thus compared to “a prince in disguise” (W,100) He represents the blithe literalist, natural beings who we cannot help but admire with a wistful nostalgia The high regard Thoreau attaches to the primitive is revealed a little later in the book, when he apparently discusses growing beans: “Mine [his crop] was…the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated” (W, 106) As his mentioning of civilization indicates, the half-cultivated bean fields are just another metaphor for the goodness of going back to nature and truth The second example, the episode about a weak-minded pauper, which comes immediately after the wood-chopper story, reinforces the idea that Thoreau values simplicity and truth above all else, including conventional learning and “wisdom.” Thoreau relates how he finds half-witted men to be “wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town,” and remarks that “with respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole” (W, 101) He then goes on to tell readers how a slow-witted pauper confesses to him that he is deficient in 83 intellect Thoreau finds this simplicity and truth so superior as to be exalting and concludes: “It seemed that from such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weakheaded pauper had laid, our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages” (W, 102) Yet another of Thoreau’s methods for delving to the bottom of truth is through the use of language, which, as Walter Benn Michaels has warned, should not be reduced to one all-encompassing pattern that implies a single meaning The language of Walden is, in a very immediate sense, strategic The problem Thoreau faces here is to create in his audience the “waking moments” in which they can appreciate the “truth of which [he had] been convinced” (W, 143) In other words, he tries to wrench into line with his own the reader’s attitudes toward the self, toward society, toward nature, and toward God He “translates” the readers, raising them out of their conventional frame of reference into a higher one, in which extreme truths become intelligible To these ends, Thoreau employs a rhetoric of powerful exaggeration, antithesis, and incongruity Habitually aware of the “common sense,” the dull perception that desperate life produces, he could turn the world of his audience upside-down by rhetorical means He explores new sources of meaning in their “rotten diction” and challenges ingrained habits of thought and action with ennobling alternatives: “Read not the Times,” he exhorts in “Life Without Principle,” “Read the Eternities.” With all the features of his characteristic extravagance—hyperbole, wordplay, paradox, mock-heroics, loaded questions, and the ironic manipulation of cliché, proverb, and allusion—Thoreau urges new perspectives upon his reader Thoreau places as much emphasis upon the “shams and delusions” which hinder men from “seeing” nature as upon the spiritual meanings of individual natural objects 84 But he always believes that to recognize one’s relations with nature is the basis of moral insight; and he is convinced that the obstacles to this wisdom are removed by the simplification of life Strip away the artificial, Thoreau tells the “desperate” man and you will be able to read nature’s language Reality, “the secret of things,” lurks under appearances, waiting to be seen, the same way our bodies are hidden underneath encumbersome clothing Describing his conversations with Therien, the woodchopper, Thoreau says he tried to “maneuver” him to “take the spiritual view of things” (W, 100) It was Thoreau’s conviction that by reducing life to its primitive conditions, he had come to the roots from which healthy art must flower, whether in Thessaly or Concord It was not just a figure of speech when he said that “Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere” (W, 141) He describes his most fertile process while saying why he went to the woods: “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake” (W, 147).Thoreau, like many other authors of the time, took from Emerson a set of dispositions about language and composing The central one is a kind of linguistic primitivism, a sense that simpler, less “civilized” people spoke a language that in its deepest sense was more authentic, closer to some kind of primary truth In light of this idea, Thoreau’s move out to Walden, his building of a house, and his working in nature were not mainly to get the leisure to write or even mainly to live more in accord with certain values, but, rather, to return to a condition in which language is at 85 once truer and more poetic Recent critics (e.g West, Gura, Dillman, and Dettmer) have demonstrated Thoreau’s conviction that all language has a common origin in the past and in nature To find original truths, one must dig through the corruptions of meaning that have encrusted themselves on words through the centuries Etymology thus becomes a philosophical and spiritual search for truth This belief in the essential core of truth in language as reflecting a similar core of truth in nature is in one sense affirmed by his discovery of apparently fresh meanings through puns and revived clichés, because the new meanings might, in fact, be a rediscovery of the old, original meanings The job of the writer, Thoreau believes, is to rediscover and revive the original truths of language In matters of fashion, Thoreau thus not only advises readers, but also practices simplicity However, reading Walden is not an easy exercise It presents readers with many difficulties, not only because of its intense conflicts within a pastoral structure (Daniel Peck) but also because of the book’s language and inconsistencies (as Anne LaBastille and Michaels have noticed) In a typical appeal to truth, Thoreau notes, I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced… I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression (W, 170) It is clear that, with the same intention of searching for the truth beneath the veneer of language and clothing as Mark Twain does in Huck Finn, Thoreau nevertheless chooses to employ several kinds of elevated linguistic devices that compound his meaning throughout Walden His language is incredibly rich, multi-layered with 86 metaphors and puns The book is filled with puns, so many that even the most alert reader is likely to miss a few Writing of a fisherman who, after fishing for a long while, has decided that “he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites” (W, 173), Thoreau plays on the sound of the name and “see no bites.” Thoreau also puts his own twists on clichés and aphorisms: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity” (W, 4), or (referring to a postfunereal auction) “When a man dies he kicks the dust” (W, 68) Richard J Schneider remarks that “at times these resuscitated bits of language serve as parodies of the American dependence on oversimplified moral maxims in the tradition of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard.” However, they are a crucial part of Thoreau’s search for the hard bottom of truth that he believed could be found in language On the other hand, the fact that words can have multiple meanings in a pun or take on additional meanings when Thoreau shifts emphases or places a cliché in a new context completely undercuts his attempts to find certainty in language If words can have more than one meaning at the same time, how can they also have only one original meaning? For Thoreau, then, language is both a hard bottom and a slippery surface The more our guide tries to lead us to the hard bottom of truth with language, the more mysterious and distant that truth sometimes becomes The difference in form between Thoreau and Mark Twain can perhaps be rationalized by the writers’ different approaches to presenting language and their purposes in doing so Where Twain apes the authentic language of real simple people, thus presenting it as close to what is truthfully spoken in reality as possible, Thoreau attempts to manufacture a “simpler” language to educate a more sophisticated audience, an attempt which necessarily involves craft and artifice Twain tries to get past the veneer 87 of language to the truth inside and decides on the simplest form of verbal language (simplest in terms of vocabulary and syntax) as the closest reflection of that truth if Huck has to speak at all In the end, not even that simplest form is adequate as a conveyor of truth, and Twain chooses to forgo both the written and the spoken forms when he has Huck tear to pieces the letter he wrote to Miss Watson, and finally swear he will never tell another story in book form again, as story-telling necessarily involves “stretching” it Thoreau, on the other hand, celebrates the relative permanence and subtlety of the written language (the father tongue) over the ephemeral spontaneity of the spoken form (the mother language) in “Reading.” In other words, he imposes a beautified, elevated form of language as example of how language should be used In “Conclusion,” Thoreau explains his desire for an extravagant language whose meanings burn into a vapor that will rise beyond positivistic significance and direct us towards self-transcendence (W, 218) Recalling the ealier admonition in “Reading” that “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (W, 69) and considering that Walden is the fruit of several years of work and of seven revisions, we begin to sense the implications of this statement for readers The language of Walden reflects an effort to discipline the transient experiences of the material world towards extravagance, the ultimate Walden meaning of which is “too significant to be heard by the ear” (W, 69) In conclusion, Twain’s achievement in Huck Finn is thus discovery of simplicity in language and clothing; Thoreau’s in Walden is manufacturing it 88 WORKS CITED Bickman, Martin Walden: Volatile Truths (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992) Boone, Joseph Allen “Delving and Diving for Truth: Breaking through to Bottom in Thoreau’s Walden,” ESQ Volume 27, 3rd Quarter 1981, pp 135-46 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne “A Complaint about Correspondents,” in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House, 1969) Dettmer, Kevin J “Ransacking the Root Cellar” The Appeal to/of Etymology in Walden” (Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics 1, 1988, pp 182-201) 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Winter Park, Florida, 1991 “Rage Against Time: The Sound and the Fury” by Peter Swiggart in The Art of Faulkner’s Novels, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1963 “Worlds in Counterpoint: The Sound and the Fury” by Olga Vickery in The Novels of William Faulkner, Louisiana State University Press, 1964 91 “The Sound and the Fury” by Michael Millgate in The Achievement of William Faulkner, Random House, New York, 1966 “Nightwood: The Sweetest Lie” by Judith Lee, in Silence and Power, Mary Broe ed., Southern Illinois University, 1991 “Nightwood: The Poetic Novel” by James Scott, in Djuna Barnes, Twayne Publishers, 1976 “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as a Woman’s Circus Epic” by Jane Marcus, in Silence and Power: a Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, Mary Lynn Broe, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 “Sharpening of the Moral Vision: The House of Mirth” in Edith Wharton, by Margaret McDowell, Twayne Publishers, 1991 “Social Falls and Social Climbs: The House of Mirth” in The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton, by Carol Wershoven, Associated University Presses, New Jersey, 1982 92 “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s The House of Mirth” by Elaine Showalter, in Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, by Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit ed., Garland Publishing, Inc, New York and London, 1992 “Love and Friendship/Man and Woman in The Sun Also Rises” by Sibbie O’Sullivan In Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism, by Linda Wagner-Martin ed., Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 1998 “Hemingway on Sexual Otherness: What’s Really Funny in The Sun Also Rises” by Wolfgang Rudat In Hemingway: Repossessed, by Kenneth Rosen ed., Paeger, Connecticut, 1994 “Contradictory Bodies in The Sun Also Rises” by Debra Moddelmog In Reading Desire in Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway, Cornell University Press, 1999 “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters” by Trudier Harris, in New Essays on Native Son, Kenneth Kinnamon ed., Cambridge University Press 1990 “The Violence of Native Son” by Jerry Bryant, in Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, Arnold Rampersad ed., Prentice-Hall 1995 93 “The Dissociated Sensibility of Bigger Thomas in Wright’s Native Son” by Louis Tremaine, in Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, Arnold Rampersad ed., Prentice-Hall 1995 i See, for example, Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); Chapter VII, “The Village Virus” in Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism (Harvard UP, 1966), pp 177-200; and Lee Clark Mitchell, “Face, Race and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane’s The Monster” (Critical Inquiry 17, 1990), pp 174-92 ii A perceptive discussion of Crane’s art can be found in James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1980) iii See James Nagel, “The Significance of Stephen Crane’s The Monster” (American Literary Realism, 1999, Spring 31[3]): 48-57 iv R.W Stallman, Stephen Crane (Braziller, New York, 1968), p 344 v John Cooley, Savages and Naturals (University of Delaware Press, 1982), p 49 vi Edward Garnett, Friday Nights: Literary Criticisms and Appreciations (New York: Knopf, 1922), p 213 vii The page numbers and all references to the novella are to Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984) viii In The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane (University of Illinois Press, 1993), Patrick K Dooley argues that, although Henry’s response in rescuing Jimmie is essentially “moral,” it is little more than a reflex action, considering his personal ties with Jimmie (as his friend) and his formal ties with the Trescotts (as their employee) ix David Halliburton, The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p 186 Interestingly, Ralph Ellison himself, in Shadow and Act (Random House, New York, 1953), was likewise impressed with Crane’s portrayal and sympathy with Henry Ellison comments that “there is no question as to the Negro’s part in [The Monster]” (pp 87-88) x See Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) xi See John Cooley, Savages and Naturals (University of Delaware Press, 1982) xii David Halliburton, The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp 183-4 xiii Malcolm Foster, in “The Black Crepe Weil: The Significance of Stephen Crane’s The Monster” (The International Fiction Review, 1976, 3: 87-91) even argues that the novella is “an angry condemnation of white America…including above all its weak-willed and compromising meliorists such as Dr Trescott” (87) xiv Patrick K Dooley, The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane (University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp 97-104 xv Donald Gibson, The Fiction of Stephen Crane (Southern Illinois UP, 1968), p 139 xvi Halliburton, p 190 xvii Catherine Juanita Starke, Black Portraiture in American Fiction (Basic Books, 1971) xviii Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa New York, 1935, p 22 xix Marx, p 436 xx All references to Tom Sawyer are from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1982 94 xxi All references to the novel are to Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, eds Gerald Graff and James Phelan, Boston, New York: Bedford Books of St Martin’s Press, 1995 xxii See a discussion of the relationship between clothes and hypocrisy in American society in Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1982 Interestingly, Huck Finn demonstrates Halttunen’s point that women were considered the safeguards of social conventions and propriety In Twain’s novel, Huck is at first “dreaded by all the mothers of the town” (45) as the juvenile pariah He is later “civilized” by Widow Douglas and Miss Watson xxiii Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962 xxiv James S Leonard, “Huck, Jim, and the Black and White Fallacy,” p.143 In Laura Trombley and Michael Kiskis, eds Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship, Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2001 xxv Mark Twain Speaking Ed Paul Fatout Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1976, p.530 xxvi The Autobiography of Mark Twain Ed Charles Neider New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959, p.370 xxvii Quoted in Justin Kaplan, Mr Clemens and Mark Twain New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, p.380 xxviii “’The End Yours Truly, Huck Finn’: Postscript.” Modern Language Quarterly, 24, No (Sept 1963), 256 xxix See a discussion of the relationship between clothes and hypocrisy in American society in Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 Interestingly, Huck Finn demonstrates Halttunen’s point that women were considered the safeguards of social conventions and propriety In Twain’s novel, Huck is at first “dreaded by all the mothers of the town” (Tom Sawyer, 45) as the juvenile pariah He is later “sivilized” by Widow Douglas and Miss Watson ... movement toward freedom, and in Huck’s progress toward a greater understanding of life’s realities [Clothing and language go hand in hand in Huck’s initiation into, and final rejection of, civilized... validity of defining gender and sexuality in terms of binarisms, i.e masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual None of the characters or relationships in the scene is simple to classify in the traditional... begins to fall, Lily starts to gain an understanding, not only of the cruelty and 16 emptiness of the narrow little world she lives in, but also of the suffering, and conversely, the beauty and