“Frederic, Norris, and the Fear of Effeminacy” by Donna Campbell

“Frederic, Norris, and the Fear of Effeminacy” by Donna Campbell, from Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. 75-108

Donna Campbell argues that fears of the feminine illuminate both The Damnation of Theron Ware and Vandover and the Brute. She begins by suggesting that naturalists were hostile to “the feminine” in literature, without noticing that the decadent, one of the strongest strands of the feminine, was often either in accord with or a parody of naturalism. Caught up in a general social mistrust of the “mollycoddle” and admiration for the “bully” (T. Roosevelt’s words), the naturalists rushed to the defense of the masculine, particularly in the two novels mentioned, but failed to appreciate the complexity of their undertaking.

Campbell notes three possible arrangements of the masculine and the feminine. The first is the standard naturalist one: brutish people are exposed to brutish conditions, and the result is the brutality of McTeague or L’Assomoir – something deplored by both Lombroso and the middle-class naturalists (77). Another option is the healthy compromise; over-civilized men are confronted with brutish nature, and, thanks to their genetic “good stock,” develop into healthy men – this is the model of Moran of the Lady Letty and Sea-Wolf (78). The final option, the option of Vandover and Theron, is to become so civilized that, paradoxically, one becomes a degenerate. By repeatedly surrendering to civilizations emphasis on taste, the feminine man eventually becomes a creature totally devoted to his desire – the brute (80).

From the start, Theron occupies the position of the woman – the novel repeatedly describes him in womanly terms, both him specifically and his profession particularly. Even his wife declares that he should carry a parasol like a woman (84). And he feigns illnesses to get out of responsibilities, just as a woman of the period (82-83). Perhaps most interestingly, Campbell notes that he displays all of William James candidates for the degenerate: they “show fear, anger, pity, tears, and fainting … they are ‘oversensitive’ and show an ‘excessive response’ which can include neurasthenia and dependency” (84). Ultimately, Campbell concludes that Theron falls because, rather than taking up any of the ideas of those surrounding him, he merely apes their taste or style, and thus gives himself over to the feminizing influence that causes Ledsmar to view him as a lizard. “He begins, in fact, to see himself as a victim of impersonal forces and to measure things by only the most elemental laws of nature: greed, self-interest, and sexual attraction. The education of this local minister has led him only into a self-delusional justification of the naturalistic brute within” (91). The only escape the novel affords is to throw off his profession altogether, and become a man of business.

Vandover, as Campbell points, out, could hardly be more similar to Dorian Grey: an artist who is distracted from his art by sensual pleasures, who impregnates a woman who commits suicide, who attempts to redeem himself but fails, and who is beset by an almost supernatural malady ( 93). Ultimately, Vandover fails as an artist because he’s not a naturalist – with a vibrant city scape in front of him, and an exciting shipwreck in his past, he does nothing but plan a romantic landscape in a desert. To succeed as an artist, he would have needed to become another Ash-can School painter, but instead he’s just another failure (105). He can’t reconcile his artistic impulses with his everyday life because his attempts to unite the masculine and the feminine “lead him not only into misreadings but into exaggerations or perverse visions of traditional masculine and feminine behavior” (94). Vandover needs to simply grind out a great work of art, to apply a masculine force of will to a masculine subject, but instead he allows himself to be feminized, by virtue of the pliancy the novel always mentions in connection to him. As with Theron, allowing his whims free range in the rarefied air of culture eventually just turns him into a brute, as he becomes controlled by his desires (105). All of this stems from his belief that the feminine manner of art can be reconciled with the masculine, when in fact no reconciliation is possible and, as a man abandoning himself to the feminine, “he becomes the brute that the new age demanded without any of the brute’s traditional vitality” (107).

Quite simply, both of these characters foolishly try to cultivate feminity, to graft it on to their masculine natures, and the result is a masculine brute who lacks even the brutes raw power. Campbell argues that this plight which the two authors attempt to depict affects them as well. By obsessing over all of the topics of the decadents – philosophy, vividly “real life,” lists of facts, and in depth descriptions of “things, money, clothes, houses, phrases – the naturalists recapitulate to a lesser degree those very symptoms they sought to critique. Like their characters, they walked dangerously close ‘to the edge of the slope, at the bottome of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicide view of life,” which constitute the real menace of degeneration” (108).

Once again, as I repeatedly mentioned in the case of Nordau, when one tries to separate naturalism from decadence, one manages only to tie the two closer together.