House of Mirth (1905) Edith Wharton

Considered by most to be Wharton’s first significant work of fiction, House of Mirth was an immediate best-seller, selling out its first printing of 40,000 and its second printing of 20,000 in two weeks. By the end of 1905, it has sold 140,000 copies. It was the most successful book that Scribner’s had published to date. The title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4, “The house of the wise is in the house of mourning / The house of the fool is in the house of mirth.”

Wharton’s books are about values, but also about their economic derivation. In The House of Mirth, tragic heroine Lily Bart is seen in the light of both views, with consequent irony. Lily is the “highly specialized product” of a civilization that needs specimens of beauty to exhibit, “a rare flower grown for exhibition” in high society; but her moral scruples afford her no basis for survival in a system based on economic energy. Lily attempts gradually to build the two by behaving not as a social product but as a moral agent, but this threatens her position and sets her on a downward spiral, and she comes to suspect that morality has no social support, is merely “a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent”: this might be said to be the naturalist or determined crisis.

But the outcome is irony, and the result is tragedy, for there is no real class to enshrine morality, especially for women, who are not in control of their economic destiny. Morals and culture have place but not power, and so the moralist may desire one world and the naturalist may perceive another. Wharton’s writing is filled with a distinctive sense of waste, founded on emotional renunciations, willed self-confinement, and a sense of universal inhospitality.

Lily, dangerously single at 29, as she struggles to survive aristocratic New York society with dwindling funds and dwindling future possibilities. Over the course of the novel, her prospects decline from house parties at which she is still welcome as long as she helps out her hostess with various duties, to being a sort of hired guide by the nouveau riche who need help navigating the unfamiliar waters of aristocratic society, to finally near-destitution as she works unsuccessfully in a millinery shop. After using the last of her funds to pay off her debts, she dies of a suspicious overdose of sleeping drops.

Lily cannot ever completely give herself over to the kind of mercenary self-commodification required for financial success in New York society. Every time she is on the verge of marital success she makes a choice to dash the prospect–for example, when Percy Gryce is in love with her enough to only require her to attend a church service with him and his mother, Lily instead goes for a walk with her friend Selden.

Selden, despite his love for Lily, never completely translates this into marrying her. Rather, in the frequent visions of Lily presented from his point of view, he fails to see her as either completely human or as innocent of artifice as she at times genuinely can be. Indeed, from the opening scene forward, Lily is present as a commodity to be appraised or exchanged. Selden thinks to himself that “she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.” Lily, brought up by a mother who instills above all an absolute fear of anything resembling what she characterizes as “dinginess” and a father who dies after losing his fortune, is poorly prepared for adult responsibility. An exemplar of naturalism, leaving Lily vulnerable to a cruel and heartless society, Wharton places Lily in a place that she describes as a “hot-house of traditions and conventions.”

The Ambassadors (1903) Henry James

James’s The Ambassadors bridges the gap between fin de siecle literature and modernism. As a master of realism in his early work, James reaches toward modernism in his later novels. The novel presents Paris as Paternian image of a liquid jewel–or some even so so far as to say that it is a Paternian universe, a world tending toward entropy. The novel follows the trip of protagonist middle-aged Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad, his widowed fiancée’s supposedly wayward son; he is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether’s point of view.

Strether agrees to go to Paris and rescue Chad Newsome, his fiancée’s son, from the clutches of a presumably wicked woman. Along the way Strether meets Maria Gostrey, an American woman who has lived in Paris for years. Her cynical wit and worldly opinions start to rattle Strether’s preconceived view of the situation. Once Strether meets Chad, he’s impressed by Chad’s sophistication and becomes sympathetic to Chad’s point of view of the situation. Chad takes him to a garden party, where Strether meets the beautiful Marie de Vionnet and Jeanne, her daughter. Strether has trouble determining whether Chad is more attracted to the mother or the daughter. Strether finds himself attracted to Marie de Vionnet, despite his engagement (to Chad’s mother).

Strether then confides in Chad’s friend Little Bilhan that he feels he may have missed his life somehow, and begins to relish his time in Paris. His enjoyment is cut short by new “ambassadors,” which include Sarah Pocock, Chad’s sister, who dismisses Strether’s impression that Chad has improved, condemns Marie as an indecent woman, and demands that Chad immediately return to the family business in America. In his confusion, Strether takes a trip to the French countryside where he encounters Chad and Marie and realizes the extent of their romance. After returning to Paris, he counsels Chad not to leave Marie; but Strether finds he is now uncomfortable in Europe. In the event, he declines Maria Gostrey’s virtual marriage proposal and returns to America.

In the novel, all of Strether’s encounters are mediated in some way, if only through the “eternal nippers” he wears. As Strether struggles to make sense of his new surroundings and encounters, he is privy to new sights and ideas; however, his Woollet background often prevents him from grasping their meanings. Even the most perspicacious of characters sees the same scenes differently from each other, depending on their respective positions and the prejudices which block their view. When Strether looks through the Woollett party’s shuttered window and sees “the Tuileries garden and what was beyond it…visible through the gaps,” this obstructed view is emblematic of the idea of blocked vision which permeates the novel.

Strether most often relies upon Maria Gostrey to help him sort out what he has seen. Like Strether, with his “perpetual pair of glasses astride” his nose, Miss Gostrey also uses an “aid to sight,” which shows that she, too, is interested in new views and viewpoints. However, Miss Gostrey is much more perceptive than Strether; he even admits that “she knew things he didn’t.” While Strether is often confused by people, Miss Gostrey, the “mistress of a hundred cases or categories,” is particularly adept at interpreting others. Strether’s Woollett background often occludes his vision of reality; he is reliant upon his conversations with Miss Gostrey to provide some of the metaphorical gaps through which he can begin to grasp the true nature of events.

Over the course of the novel, Strether also comes to rely upon the viewpoint of Madame de Vionnet to supplement his knowledge, especially that which pertains to his mission to “save” Chad Newsome. As they both have vested interests in the success of this venture, it is important to them that they are able to compare impressions. Often, though, Madame de Vionnet, like Miss Gostrey, sees more than Strether does. For example, when they both examine Madame de Vionnet’s furnishings, “she seemed to see gaps he didn’t.” Here again, the novel shows that there are both obstructions to sight as well as gaps to be seen through.

While Miss Gostrey and Madame Vionnet both signify new vistas for Strether, the obstructions in his vision are also represented by a woman: the formidable Mrs. Newsome. She represents the Woollett values and strictures which keep Strether from fully living, a regret against which he warns Little Bilham: “it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.” Mrs. Newsome is such a heavy presence in Strether’s life that even the sight to of her handwriting holds a “queer power” over him. It is on her behalf that he is on his current mission in Paris, to bring back her errant son. And, it is notable that it is from her family’s apartment that the emblematic description is made: the room for which she has financially provided both provides the access and obstructions to the view of Parisian gardens.

The observant Miss Gostrey remarks that Strether “owes more to women than any man I ever saw.” It is true that much of Strether’s experiences are made possible and mediated by women, whether his understanding of the sophisticated Parisians or concerned Americans, his position as editor of the green-covered Review, or his exposure to Paris itself. Strether’s challenge for himself is to learn to distinguish the obstructions from the gaps. Had he never come to Paris, Strether might never have been aware of the skewed vision which Mrs. Newsome’s Woollett has given him. In Paris, though his view is still obstructed, he can at least see the Tuileries.

Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907-1909) Henry James

The New York edition was a 24-volume collection. James wrote prefaces for the set. The prefaces discuss topics such as point of view, the central intelligence of the protagonist, “foreshortening” or the presentation of complex material in a reasonable length, creating the sense of wonder necessary for effective storytelling, the need for attention on the part of the reader, the proper selections and exclusions of additional developments of the original narrative idea, the relationship between narrative art and ordinary human life, and the contrast between romanticism and realism.

Preface to The Portrait of a Lady

Inspiration came from the “sense of a single character,” Isabel Archer, rather than the plot. Ivan Turgenev also did this; it works as long as the character is exposed to certain people, conditions, and situations. Turgenev calls this “disponsible,” i.e. subject to the chances of existence. Isabel Archer’s value as a subject comes from her significance for others in a social world, and is added to by her own interpretation of that significance. The Portrait of a Lady has architectural competence.

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Henry James

Overview

In the character and career of Isabel Archer, James found the focus for his first masterpiece of international theme, The Portrait of a Lady. Here, the complex inner lives of his American characters are fully realized and realistically portrayed. The last third of the novel involves the heroine’s awakened understanding and her attempts to escape her miserable marriage without sacrificing her principles or harming other people she cares about. James’s tendency to have his main characters sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of principle has been criticized by some for its rejection of self-expression. But in Portrait and in other works, James underscores how renunciation is a form of self-expression.

For James, throughout Portrait, America is a place of individualism and naivete, while Europe is a place of sophistication, convention, and decadence. Isabel’s cousin, Ralph, convinces his father to leave his fortune to Isabel so she will never be forced to marry for money, but it forces Isabel to confront a host of other problems. Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond conspire to Isabel to marry Osmond so he can access her wealth. It leads to the book’s central conflict, where Isabel must explore the need to conform to social expectation and her fierce desire for independence. Stylistically, James utilizes ellipses to disconnect the reader from the moments when Isabel fails to choose her own independence and falls prey to social convention (e.g., her wedding to Osmond, her return to Rome at the end of the novel).

Plot Synopsis

Isabel Archer’s father dies and her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, visits Isabel in Albany, NY and invites her to England. Isabel goes, leaving behind her suitor from Boston, Caspar Goodwood. She spends time with Mr. Touchett (her uncle) and her cousin, Ralph. The neighbor Lord Warburton falls in love with her. He proposes but Isabel declines because she doesn’t want to lose her independence. Mr. Touchett leaves half of his fortune to Isabel at Ralph’s prompting. Mrs. Touchett’s friend, Madame Merle, becomes taken with Isabel and they become friends. While traveling to Florence, Madan Merle introduces Isabel to Gilbert Osmond, Merle describes him as wholly devoted to arts and aesthetics.

Merle manipulates Isabel into marrying Osmond. Osmond’s daughter, Pansy, is being raised in a convent because his wife is dead. Osmond treats Isabel as an addition to his art collection. Everyone around Isabel disapproves of Osmond but Isabel marries him anyways. Isabel has a son three years into the marriage but he dies after six months. They live in a palazzo in Rome with Pansy. To Osmond, Isabel is a social hostess and a source of wealth, he is annoyed by her independence and opinions.

Pansy is courted by American art collector, Edward Rosier, and Lord Warburton, who wants to be closer to Isabel. Osmond supports Warburton because of his wealth. Isabel demonstrates Rosier’s sincerity to Warburton at a ball and he arranges to leave Rome. Osmond is furious with Isabel, convinced that she is plotting to intentionally humiliate him. Madame Merle is also furious with her, confronting her with shocking impropriety and demanding brazenly to know what she did to Warburton. Isabel realizes that there is something mysterious about Madame Merle’s manner with her husband; now she realizes they are lovers.

Ralph’s health in England is deteriorating, but Osmond forbids a visit. Encouraging her to go, Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, tells her that there is still more to Merle and Osmond’s relationship. Merle is Pansy’s mother. Pansy was born out of wedlock & Osmond’s wife died about the same time so Merle and Osmond spread the story that she died in childbirth. Isabel is shocked and disgusted and feels pity for Merle for being ensnared by Osmond. She leaves for England without Osmond’s blessing, but promising Pansy she will return. In England, she reconnects with suitor Caspar Goodwood who asks Isabel to run away with him. The next day Goodwood can’t find Isabel and he is told she returned to Rome, unable to break free.

Sister Carrie (1900) Theodore Dreiser

This novel tells the story of Carrie Meeber, a country girl from Wisconsin who comes to Chicago, attracted by the excitement of the rapidly growing urban centers that appealed to so many young people in the late 1800s, but even more by the possibility of supporting herself, especially given the meager opportunities in her small rural town. In Chicago she is seduced first by a traveling salesman, Charles Drouet, then by George Hurstwood, a married middle-aged manager of a stylish saloon patronzed by wealthy man. Eager to elope with Carrie, Hurstwood steals $10,000 from the bar’s safe; then he and Carrie flee to New York, where unable to find a job equivalent to the one he gave up, he deteriorates while she begins a successful career on the stage. They eventually part ways and, unbeknownst to Carrie, the impoverished Hurstwood commits suicide. The novel depicts social transgressions by characters who feel no remorse and largely escape punishment, and it is candid about sex and names living persons.

The opening theme of this novel, i.e. the break with the past and the entry of Carrie Meeber into a new world of goods and forces, introduced one of the most powerful 20th c. American novels:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has cunning wiles no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure, with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective, to all moral intents and purposes, as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman.”

The passage begins in morality and ends in naturalist theory, where the disposition of transhuman forces makes moral questions finally irrelevant. The transhuman is humanized and becomes sensual and enveloping; the human becomes increasingly material and mechanized.

One of the things that has often been noticed about Sister Carrie, and variously read as the book’s strength or weakness, is that it moves on to create a world in which there are no real human attachments. Some displacement of the person is endemic in naturalism, and makes the tendency of a post-liberal one; it depends on a new economy of relations between person and process. But what is noticeable in Dreiser is precisely that the force he removes from people he relocates in things. The city and the machine, goods and property, have romantic powers, and indeed the capacity to make choices for human beings.

In Sister Carrie, a naturalism turns toward expressionism, and finds the means to display not just the ironies but the energies of American urban culture, or post-culture. Crane had used naturalism as a mode of aesthetic perception and a tactic of irony. Norris had seen it as a neo-philosophy generating the plots of modern romance. Dreiser takes up a position of personal implication; he is part of the naturalist world. He delights in the struggle, moves emotionally along with Carrie, shares many of her wants, and looks with her at the alluring material possibilities of the great dream theatre of city life. His characters, too, generally understood that they are within a naturalist world, and respond to its laws of energy; they know their own shortage of self. At the same time Dreiser stands outside, as naturalist commentator, generalizing, explaining human action in neo-scientific terms, moving from detailed specifics (‘her total outfit consisted of…’) to the large generalities (‘Half the undoing of the…natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman). He sees much more than Carrie, and distances her, but he takes each sense of her life as a self-justifying event and he shares her sense of living in an exciting post-moral world. The result is that Sister Carrie is founded on an unmasked economy of want, a sexual economics in which the self is an object, objects have selves, and the body is a none too intimate instrument in social success.

The author’s local stylistic gestures can make us uneasy; but Dreiser’s power lies in style in a larger sense–his capacity to create fictionally a vigorous world that is seen mechanically and causally, yet which overflows with vital energy. Material life becomes abundant with hieroglyphics; individuals in it toss on a ‘thoughtless sea,’ moving either with or against force, in a total metaphoric flow encompassing success and failure, consciousness and the expressive voice of things.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) Stephen Crane

This novel takes the Civil War as its background for a story about the effects of battle on a young man. Many American writers have used war as a setting; Crane is in the advance guard of those who chose not to judge characters at war by their actions, but instead to focus on their immediate and relatively unfiltered feelings. That is, Crane is distinctively modern in conceiving personal identity as complex and ambiguous and in obliging his readers to judge for themselves the adequacy of Henry Fleming’s responses to his experiences.

Shifting from the city to another naturalistic locale, the battlefield, he set the book in the American Civil War, which he had not known; as he explained, “Of course I have never been in a battle…I wrote it intuitively…” But war was a key naturalist image of life; it was real and existential, a place where human delusions of heroism and power were tested, a field of struggle and competition, and it involved the ironic nullification of the human self, the process of mortal reduction. Crane focused the book on the battle itself: political issues are absent, the characters have designations rather than names (the tall soldier, etc.), and individuals are swamped in the experimental texture. the central character, Henry Fleming, is named only once; otherwise he is called “The Youth.”

The book consists of his impressions over two days of fighting; events and objects become the correlatives of his mood. Henry becomes, in fact, the exemplary experiencer of war as embroilment in flux, movement, sensation, color, fear and physical pain; the sequence of impression itself nullifies his initial desire to perform a heroic role. In a sense, the technique itself overwhelms Henry’s heroic self-image. His commanding consciousness dissolves; war’s impact on him is that of sensation, producing a mechanical response. He encounters the brute fact of death, the indifference of nature; he is pushed to flee, then pushed back into battle again, acquiring, accidentally, his red badge, the initiatory wound, less a mark of heroism than entry into a modern world of exposure. The wound is a token of arbitrary and nihilistic reality, but also a sign of complicity with that reality; Henry ends the book “a man,” an initiate in experience.

The ending is troublesome to many readers…because its language suggests that there is a potential for heroism even in the indifferent naturalistic world; Henry leaves the battlefield in tune with “a world for him,” and even indifferent nature seems to agree: “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the host of leaden rain clouds.” Given nature’s performance in the book, this can be read as irony; what it rather points to is an ambiguity in Crane’s impressionism. The Red Badge of Courage is very much about reality as immediate and hostile, assaulting the formal organization of consciousness, displacing its function into acts of perception, instinct, reaction, immersion, withdrawal.

Crane is symbolist enough to want this, desiring, he said, a “hidden long logic” in his stories. In fact the extraordinary quality of the novel lies in its capacity to present consciousness in half-apprehending motion through a shimmering world of experience: this is the heart of its visionary naturalism. But its symbolism remains less than a logic of experience discovered, turned into wisdom.

Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) Stephen Crane

Overview

In a highly stylized way using heavy dialect, Maggie told the story of a girl born in the slums of New York who during her short life is driven to prostitution. As one of the first reviewers of the 1893 edition observed: “the evident object of the writer is to show the tremendous influence of the environment on the human character and destiny.”

Maggie is the story of an innocent–indeed over-innocent–girl from the tenements of Rum Alley who glimpses larger horizons than those among which she lives, becomes sexually attracted to a flashy young man who seems to offer them, and is ruined when he discards her; she then turns to prostitution, suffers moral condemnation from those around her, and kills herself.

The stories are conventional, but Crane deflates their sentimental potential with insistent irony, for the lessons in morality occur inside the stories, and are part of the damage. As for the city itself, dominating both stories, it is duplicitous. It is the Darwinian jungle, where, in Maggie, the woman of ‘brilliance and audacity’ rules, snatching Maggie’s lover from her and then discarding him for better, where traffic snarls on the streets, and children fight animalistically for victory in tenement yards; it is also the place of dream, wealth, indulgence, the social theatre where ever fresh roles are offered.

What she is consistent with is Crane’s need for irony, his devotion to unexpected juxtapositions, his contrastive impressionism. Indeed his characters are impressionistic of a sort, living by small acts of consciousness among contingent awareness. Over them is the larger condition: the city, dominant, gives rise to their competitive struggles, their fleeting mode of consciousness, their moral void.

Plot Summary

Part 1

The novel opens with young Jimmie in the midst of a street fight “for the honor of Rum Alley,” a tenement street in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. Jimmie is caught up in the “fury of battle’ as he is continually assaulted by a gang of children from nearby Devil’s Row. He alone defends his street after his compatriots have run off. Some workmen watch the bruised and bloody-faced boy with mild interest and no intervention until a sixteen-year-old boy named Pete approaches and, after recognizing Jimmie, pulls the assailants off of him. When Jimmie’s friends return, the child upbraids them for leaving him to fend for himself until he gets into a fight with one of them. Jimmie’s father soon arrives and breaks up the fight by kicking his son and his combatant. The battered boy then sullenly follows his father home. On the way, they meet his younger brother Tommie and his sister Maggie. When she complains that his fighting angers their mother, Jimmie slaps her.

At home, their drunken mother explodes in anger after seeing Jimmie’s bruises and begins to inflict some of her own on the body. When Mr. Johnson complains that she beats the children too often, she turns on him, and they engage in a fierce quarrel that ends with his departure to the local pub. During this brutal scene, the children cower in the corner. Mrs. Johnson flies into a new rage after Maggie accidentally breaks a dish and Jimmie escapes to the hallway, where an elderly female resident joins him, listening to the shrieks, emanating from the Johnson’s apartment.

The old woman asks Jimmie to slip down to the pub and buy her some beer. After completing his mission, his father spots him and steals the beer from him, drinking it down in one gulp. When Jimmie returns to the apartment later that night, he discovers his parents engaged in a new fight and so he waits in the hallway until the noise dies down. After returning home to find his parents passed out on the floor, Jimmie and Maggie sit in fear, watching their mother’s prostrate body until dawn.

Part 2

Some years later, Tommie has died and Jimmie has grown into a hardened young man who has “clad his soul in armor.” He takes a job as a truck driver, which gives him a measure of pride, and gains a reputation as a troublemaker with the police. Jimmie easily lives up to that estimation, determining “never to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or a much larger man than himself forced him to it.” After his father dies, he becomes the head of the household.

Maggie “blossomed in a mud puddle” into a rare sight in the tenements–a pretty girl. She gains employment at a shop where she makes collars and cuffs along with several other young women of “various shades of yellow discontent.” The “eternally swollen and disheveled” Mrs. Johnson has become famous in the neighborhood, especially at the police station and the courts, where she offers a continual stream of excuses and prayers for her troubles.

One day Jimmie brings Pete home, and Maggie is immediately impressed by his dress and his confident air, as he gestures like “a man of the world.” She is an attentive audience for his tales of valor in his position as bartender, which involves dealing forcibly with anyone who disrupts his bar, and soon determines that he is “the ideal man.” She admires his elegance and the way he defies the hardship of tenement life. Pete also takes notice of Maggie, declaring eventually to her, “I’m stuck on yer shape.” The two begin to go out on dates.

On their first evening out, Maggie is embarrassed by her mother’s drunken state and the disheveled apartment that her mother has wrecked in one of her tirades that afternoon. Maggie has only a shabby black dress to wear and is “afraid she might appear small and mouse-colored” in contrast to Pete and his crowd, which she is certain will be quite elegant. Pete takes Maggie to a vaudeville show, where he displays a confident indifference to all. His attitude impresses Maggie and reinforces her vision of his superiority. Pete showers attention on her, which she revels in, along with the performances on stage. After the show, Pete asks for a kiss, but Maggie declines, insisting “dat wasn’t in it.” On the walk home, Pete wonders if he as “been played fer a duffer,” expecting Maggie to offer some more tangible form of gratitude.

As Maggie and Pete continue to date, she becomes more critical of her clothes, her home, and her job, and Pete becomes more like “a golden sun” to her. The two attend plays and museums, which excite Maggie but bore Pete. One evening, Jimmie finds his mother staggering home from a bar from which she has just been ejected, jeered on by the local children and her tenement neighbors. An embarrassed Jimmie yells at her to shut up and get into the apartment. Inside, the two begin a fierce battle that ends with broken furniture and Mrs. Johnson in her usual position in a heap on the floor. When Pete arrives, he shrugs and tells Maggie they will have a good time that night. Mrs. Johnson curses her daughter, insisting that she is a disgrace to the family and tells her not to return, which causes Maggie to tremble. Pete insists that her mother will change her mind in the morning and the two depart.

Part 3

Jimmie is decidedly upset that Pete has “ruined” his sister. The old neighbor tells him that she saw Maggie return home one evening, crying to Pete, asking him if he loved her. Jimmie determines to kill him while Mrs. Johnson curses her. Soon all of the neighbors are discussing Maggie and her ruin, insisting that they knew that there was always something wrong with her.

One evening, Jimmie and a friend enter Pete’s bar and begin to harass him. Pete tries to calm him down but Jimmie and his friend back him into a corner and a fight breaks out. Soon all of the bar’s patrons join in, smashing the mirrored walls, bottles, and glassware. When the police appear, Jimmie dashes out just in time.

On a subsequent evening, Pete and Maggie attend a show. She has changed markedly, her sense of self now lost in her complete dependence on Pete, whose confidence has grown as Maggie’s has diminished. Pete is proud of the effect he has on Maggie, who fears any sign of anger or displeasure from him. Others at the show treat her with the same lack of respect as her neighbors have.

When Jimmie returns home several days after the fight, he discovers that Maggie has not been home either. He and his mother are shamed by her behavior, but Mrs. Johnson uses her tale of woe as an effective method to gain leniency when she is arrested for drunkenness.

Three weeks after she leaves her home, Maggie accompanies Pete to another show where he runs into an old friend who pays no attention to Maggie. As Pete shows his obvious pleasure in the other woman’s company, Maggie can think of nothing to say. When the woman asks Pete to leave wit her, he initially refuses to abandon Maggie, hinting that she is pregnant. However, when he goes outside to discuss his situation, he never comes back for Maggie, stranding her at the show. An astounded Maggie waits for quite a while until she accepts the fact that Pete is gone and then leaves.

Part 4

The narrative jumps here to a time in the future when an unidentified “forlorn woman” wanders the streets in search of someone. As Jimmie walks up the street and the woman greets him, the reader learns that the woman is Hattie, apparently someone who is in a similar situation to that of Maggie. Jimmie turns his back on her, just as Pete has done with Maggie, departing with an admonition to “go t’hell.” When he arrives home, he finds Maggie suffering her mother’s wrath and ridicule. Neighbors join in the torment until Maggie turns to Jimmie for support and is rebuffed.

The narrator now focuses on Pete, who has not given a second thought to Maggie’s fate. He determines that he has never really cared much for her and was in no way responsible for her. The evening after he leaves her at the show, Maggie walks by his bar and he feels a temporary twinge of guilt. When he speaks with her, though, he shows no mercy telling her to leave before she gets him in trouble. She asks him where she should go, and he answers, as Jimmie had done to his similar “problem,” “oh, go t’hell.”

Afterwards Maggie wanders the streets, looking for some support but finds none. Several months later, she is still walking the streets, willing to offer herself to anyone in order to survive. Initially, she frequents the more well-respected areas of town, but the men there soon realize her lack of refinement and so reject her advances. Even when she walks on to the poorer sections of the city, she has no luck. She moves onto the worst sections near the river where she encounters “ragged” men “with shifting, blood-shot eyes and grimy hands.” The narrator suggests at this point that Maggie is drawn to the river, where the “sounds of life…came faintly and died away to a silence” and jumps in. Pete and several women, including the woman who lured him away from Maggie, participate in a drunken revelry in a local saloon. They all seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Pete gets too drunk, however, which eventually disgusts the women who leave him in a heap on the floor. The woman whom he has admired so much concludes on her way out of the bar, “what a damn fool.”

The novel closes with Mrs. Johnson’s tearful response to Jimmie’s report that Maggie has died. At last, Mrs. Johnson expresses tender feelings toward her daughter and swears she will forgive her.

McTeague (1899) Frank Norris

Overview

The main character deteriorates under the pressure of economic, romantic, and finally natural disasters, ending up dying of thirst in California’s Death Valley. The novel introduces the common naturalistic motif of people destroyed by their own animal natures when they are caught in extreme circumstances.

Firmly based in San Francisco poor life, set in a world of deprivation, immigration, and urbanization, it follow his own prescription that ‘The novel of California must now be a novel of city life.’ But it is also the story of a naturalist process, a movement towards degeneration; in it, an evolving chain of events, once set in motion, releases the underlying forces, energies, and conflicts–especially those that come from the primitive, secreted desires of men and women, and their atavistic sources in life of the race and the herd.

Norris is evidently after the psycho-social sum of his characters, in whom culture and nature, the aesthetic and the atavistic, habitually contend; in this sense they are the agents of forces which they do not control. This underlying subject pushes Norris towards a typological, a symbolist, a mythic dimension.

Published in 1899 and written by Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco is a novel in the tradition of naturalism, a literary movement that explores how people are at the mercy of forces, internal and external, that dictate their behavior and destiny. In McTeague, despite their attempts to fight these forces, even fundamentally good people are brought to their destruction by their nature, their environment, and their social class. As their tenuous hold on civilization dissolves, characters devolve into their basic animal states. The novel centers around McTeague, a slow, sluggist dentist in San Francisco who in both body and mind skirts the boundary between animal and human. After painting a picture of the mundane lives of McTeague and his friends, Norris introduces a catalyst that leads to the emergence of characters’ innermost instincts and examines what happens when these instincts collide. Norris also uses the California landscape to reflect the futility of humans’ endeavors to rise above their natures. The result is a grim vision of a world that is not only indifferent to humans but hostile. Though McTeague himself slips into vulgarity and violence, his lack of free will prevents him from being wholly unsympathetic. McTeague looks at humanity through the lens of a ruthless, objective universe, asking whether we are truly to blame for our choices when so much works against us.

Plot Summary

McTeague, a former miner, is a young dentist who lives in a small flat in San Francisco. One day his best friend Marcus Schouler brings his cousin Trina Sieppe–whom it is understood Marcus will marry one day–to McTeague’s office because she has broken a tooth. McTeague trats her over the next few weeks. On one occasion McTeague is obliged to use anesthesia on Trina. While she is asleep, he wrestles fiercely with an urge to kiss her, ultimately succumbing and assaulting her. When she wakes up, he asks her to marry him. Instinctively fearful of him, Trina refuses. When McTeague admits to Marcus that he loves Trina, Marcus decides he will step aside so McTeague can have her. In the following weeks McTeague frequently visits Trina and her family. When he kisses her again, she at first resists, but then, compelled by instinctive enjoyment of submission, returns his kiss.

Trina learns that a lottery ticket she bought from Maria Macapa, the eccentric woman who cleans the flats in McTeague’s apartment building, has won her $5,000. After she and McTeague are engaged to be married, Trina insists they not spend any of her $5,000. Instead, she will invest it in her Uncle Oelbermann’s toy store, and he will pay her monthly interest. For extra income, she will also whittle Noah’s ark figures for his store. Marcus is furious that the lottery money would have been his if he had married Trina, and he blames McTeague for having what he believes is rightfully his.

Trina and McTeague are married, and they move into a larger apartment in McTeague’s building. Under Trina’s influence, McTeague’s habits are refined. Trina gradually grows more miserly with her money, lying to McTeague about how much she has saved and refusing to help her mother when her father’s business fails.

One day shortly after Marcus moves to a ranch in Southern California, McTeague is informed he is not allowed to practice dentistry because he did not go to dental school. Though McTeague wants to depend on her lottery winnings or her savings, Trina insists their only option is to move into a small dirty room in the back of their building. McTeague struggles to find new work. Trina becomes lax in her cleaning and appearance. After she refuses to give him money for the train on a rainy day, McTeague has whiskey with friends. When he returns home, he berates Trina for making them live in this shabby room and threatens to hit her.

McTeague slips back into his old habits and ceases looking for a job. He spends much of his time drinking, and when he returns, he hurts Trina, often biting her fingers. When he is out, Trina counts and plays with her money, which she hides from McTeague.

To save even more money, Trina makes McTeague move into the back room of the house where Maria Macapa was murdered by her husband Zerkow. When McTeague steals her savings and disappears, Trina falls into a fit. She also learns that because of the damage done by McTeague biting her fingers and her painting Uncle Oelbermann’s toys, several of her fingers must be amputated.

Trina moves to a room above a kindergarten, where she works as a scrubwoman. Dejected by the loss of her savings, she coerces Uncle Oelbermann to return her $5,000, which she plays with and sleeps with in her room. McTeague, now living in the back of a music shop where he works, asks her for money one night, but she refuses. The next night he kills her as she works in the kindergarten.

Instinct leads McTeague back to the mine where he worked when he was younger. He enjoys his life for a time, until he is moved by an inexplicable urge to flee. Two days later police officers arrive, having traced him from San Francisco to arrest him for Trina’s murder. Now on the run, McTeague ends up in the desert town of Keeler, California. He greets a man named Cribbens, who invites McTeague to go with him toward the Armagosa Mountains to prospect for gold.

On the way to the mountains, Cribbens and McTeague strike gold. As they set up their camp, McTeague is plagued by an ever greater urge to flee. He abandons the camp and heads through the desert, deciding to cross Death Valley to throw his unknown pursuer off his trail. Several brutal days into his journey, he encounters Marcus, who is helping the sheriff in his pursuit. The two men have a physical altercation, and McTeague kills Marcus. Before dying, Marcus handcuffs himself to McTeague, who is left in the middle of Death Valley with no water.

1890s Fiction

The fiction of the 1890s creates a new mood in the novel because it was a fiction of that which had been hidden and suppressed. It released into the novel’s discourse a vision of the underlying processes men now found in the world, of the conditions and determinants that structured genetic, biological, and social life, of the patterns and instincts that lay within or beneath consciousness.

Something of the decade’s ferment seems to die too as the century turns, and yet there is an evident deposit of influence. It pointed, in one direction, towards the enlargement of naturalism as a native American philosophy, a form of positivism consonant with American evolution and above all the nation’s new movement into the century of the machine, the city, and the struggles of groups and masses; in the other, towards consciousness less as process than as subjective and aesthetic awareness, consciousness as the flux of mind that stirred in the face of the new naturalist world, and as the pressure of the arts toward form. And these signals and preoccupations were to shape American fiction in the years that followed.

Up from Slavery (1901) Booker T. Washington

Washington relates the story of his life from birth to late adulthood, while introducing his theory for racial uplift and using his own personal story as example. His life begins on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. Following Emancipation and the end of the Civil War, Washington and his family, including his mother, his stepfather, his sister, and his older brother, move to Maiden, Virginia, where Washington’s stepfather secures work at a salt-furnace. The first few years out of slavery are difficult for the family, but Washington is a curious, ambitious child and pursues his desire for an education. His first glimpse of education comes from his labor at the salt-furnace. Following this, Washington receives a spelling-book from his mother and with it, masters the alphabet. When a literature black man from Ohio arrives, he offers his services as a teacher to the town’s black population. In this way, Washington begins to develop academically.

Eventually a school that holds both day and night classes opens in a nearby town and Washington attends after his work each day at the salt-furnace. At work, Washington hears word of a new school for black students called the Hampton Institute and vows to go there for his education. He continues to work to raise money to travel to Hampton, Virginia, where the school is located. He stops working at the salt-furnace and begins to work for the owner’s wife, Mrs. Ruffner, as a servant. Mrs. Ruffner teaches Washington the strictures of civilized living: order, cleanliness, promptness. Washington also begins his first personal library at this time. After a short while, Washington heads off to Hampton. On his journey to Hampton, the stage-coach that he takes to the train station in the next town stops at a hotel. The hotel-keeper refuses to give Washington a room because of his race. Washington, consequently, sleeps outside.

After this episode, Washington walks and hitches rides to Richmond, Virginia. He reaches Richmond at night and sleeps under a raised sidewalk. The next morning, he finds work loading and unloading ships. He continues to sleep under the raised sidewalk as he earns money for the rest of his trip to Hampton. When he arrives at Hampton, his general appearance and the state of his clothing make a poor first impression. The head teacher admits several students to the school ahead of him and finally asks him to sweep the room adjoining the main hall. Washington sweeps the room as thoroughly as possible and so impresses the head teacher that he is admitted to the school and offered a position as a janitor. This provides Washington with a way to pay for his room and board, as well as a portion of his tuition.

A new life begins for Washington at Hampton. Hampton introduces Washington to the dignity in hard work and labor and teaches him the value and virtue of selfishness. Both lessons will later form the foundation of Washington’s social program for racial uplift. The man who makes the strongest impression upon Washington at Hampton is the school’s founder, General C. Amstrong. Armstrong admires Washington’s selflessness and his strength of leadership. At Hampton, Washington works at his studies and is an enthusiastic participant in the school’s debating societies. Washington does not return home to Malden, Virginia until after his second year of school.

Washington’s mother dies during this summer and the event throws his family into disarray. Washington considers not returning to Hampton, but his desire for an education is strong. He returns to Hampton and eventually graduates. After graduation, he returns to Malden where he opens a school for the black community. Washington’s curriculum for the school extends beyond “mere books education” to include lessons on proper grooming, personal comportment, and personal industry. In addition to teaching the school, Washington also starts a night-school, multiple debating societies, and establishes a reading room. After two years teaching in Malden, Washington goes to Washington, D.C., to further his studies. Washington eventually returns to Hampton as a teacher and his first work at the school is to teach newly admitted Native American students. The experience solidifies Washington’s beliefs in hard work and selflessness. Washington teachers the Native American students how to operate in white society as well as traditional academic subjects.

His success at Hampton leads to an invitation to head a new school in Alabama. Once Washington reaches Tuskegee, Alabama, he finds eager students but no proper building in which to hold a school. For the first few months, Washington holds the school in a shanty located near a church. Eventually, Washington purchases an old plantation for the school. Washington, alongside his students, labors to repair the buildings to make them suitable as classrooms. He also has the students plant crops to make Tuskegee self-sustaining. These early experiments in student labor become part of the foundational curriculum at Tuskegee, each student having to learn a trade or industry alongside more traditional academic subjects. During this time, Washington makes many trips North to raise money for the school and as a result, establishes a profile as a public speaker and black leader. Washington begins to receive invitations to speak at all manner of events. By the time he receives the invitation to deliver what will become his most famous speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, his views about the proper approach to racial advancement and uplift have crystallized. In his speech at the Atlanta Exposition, Washington exhorts former slaves to “cast down [their] bucket[s] where you are” and expresses opposition to political agitation. Washington also emphasizes racial intermingling only for common business interests, and otherwise says that the races “can be as separate as the fingers.” This speech catapults Washington to a new level of fame and renown, despite vocal detractors.

Washington ends the book by reflecting on the legacy of Tuskegee and his hope for the race in the coming years. He is optimistic about both because of the large distance he himself has traveled.