The first thing that strikes me about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is how similar it is to The Searchers, especially in terms of its John Wayne character. In Valance, Wayne plays Tom Donophin, a goodhearted and decent, but dangerous, farmer who is the only man in town not afraid of the titular villain. Donophin is, like Ethan Edwards, on the same side as the communitarians - he's for making the territory into a state, for democracy, for some sort of advancement of African-American rights, etc. He eventually fights for the side of good, shooting down Valance when he's facing off with the tenderfoot Ransom Stoddard, that Donophin's former girlfriend loves. In other words, Donophin is Ethan Edwards: he's the muscle that the community needs to protect it from the outlaw, but he doesn't end up getting his own family, he provides that muscle technically outside the law, and the film ends with him being shut outside the community. In fact, in Valance the final scene of Searchers is reenacted twice: first, just after Donophin tells Stoddard that he secretly shot Valance when Stoddard was facing him down, but Stoddard should continue to take the credit for it. Stoddard, henceforth "the man who shot liberty valance," walks back into the crowded meeting hall and accepts political appointment as the man who vanquished the rancher's hired gun and who will make the territory into the state. Donophin is left looking into the community meeting, then walks away. This is the final scene of the flashback that occupies the bulk of the film; in the next scene, Stoddard and his wife leave Donophin's casket, and the casket remains, just as in the earlier scene, behind the doors after the community builders have walked out.
Valance is most different from The Searchers in that it presents a stronger alternative to the "good bad man" than Searchers does. Although Stoddard is constantly mocked, as a dishwasher who can't shoot straight, he eventually becomes a well-known teacher and lawyer, and, in the frame story, a multi-term senator, governor, and ambassador who brings railroads and irrigation to the desert and truly civilizes it. In The Searchers we see all these things as distant promises at best, but in Valance Jimmie Stewart's Stoddard brings them all to pass and embodies them, sometimes forcefully. He still needs Donophins (aka Ethan's) gun, but only in the past - in the present day, we hear that Donophin hasn't worn a gun for years. The Community, at last, has come to pass.
The strangest part about this film, when compared to naturalist literary texts, is the reversed position of the ranchers and the railroads. As in Shane, the villains are the cattle ranchers and the true community is made up of small farmers trying to band together against the giant villainous specter. As people repeatedly point out in Valance, the railroad brings both progress and civilization, and promises a better life in the future for the small farmers. This is a vast contrast from The Octopus where the big ranchers, growing wheat instead of raising cattle, are the sympathetic figures, and the railroad brings not progress but the destructive corporatization of the West. I've already noted this as a strange feature in Norris' text to begin with - for all that that novel, especially in Presley's poem "The Toilers," attempts to embrace the proletariat, its heroes are mostly giant land barons of the kind scorned in Valance and Shane. This might just underline Norris' fundamental conservatism, or at least his disconnect with the common people as displayed in McTeague, but it certainly bears further investigation.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Martin Eden
So far, Martin Eden is my leading candidate for the masterpiece of American naturalism, beyond even McTeauge, Studs Lonigan, and The USA Trilogy in excellence. It is Jack London’s semi-autobiographical story of a hoodlum sailor who, upon meeting a middle-class woman, falls desperately in love with her and begins a project of self-education in order to be worthy of her. The project is eventually a failure, as he winds her hand in marriage, loses it, and then regains it only to shun it, but along the way London has created the most persuasive portrait of excessive desire I have yet encountered. Once Martin Eden is exposed to history, poetry, biology, and above all philosophy, he becomes an unstoppable machine of knowledge collection and story writing, eventually finding fame and fortune only to find it all meaningless. At the novel’s close, he sets up all of his impoverished friends and family for bourgeois respectability, then commits suicide.
The first interesting aspect of Martin Eden is that, in its fairly complicated rags to riches narrative, it gives us a new type of naturalist narrative, one not mentioned by Donna Campbell. In this one, the brutish man, who the author identifies with and doesn’t condescend to, is introduced to the feminine poetry and manners of upper middle-class society. That the result is still disaster has less to do with the new environment that Martin finds himself in and more to do with the fact that he surpasses the feminine society of his beloved Ruth and her class and ascends beyond them. This is a narrative with one further step than a traditional rags to riches story; upon receiving his riches, Martin is completely dissatisfied for him because he cannot find a place that makes him happy, not because he still empathizes with his previous state, but because he has surpassed upper-class morality with his Spencer and Nietzsche.
The most interesting part of this novel, for me, is Martin’s early love for Spencer and later love for Nietzsche. In Spencer, Martin finds the piece of knowledge that will come to dominate his entire theory of knowledge: “And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization […] There was no caprice, no chance. All was law.” (109). From Spencer, Martin learns that evolution dominates every process, from biology to philosophy, and this becomes his intellectual framework: the dominance of evolutionary process. From there, he eventually becomes the disciple of Nietzsche, combining Nietzsche and Spencer such that he comes to understand slave-morality as a misguided evolutionary process which hijacks the natural evolution of humanity away from the ubermensch and towards the unwashed masses. There’s no doubt that London himself regards Martin as a version of the superman; Martin accomplishes intellectual and artistic feats that seem impossible, while in his previous life he got every girl and won every fight.
It is impossible for me to discuss every point I found of interest in this novel. I want to conclude simply by stating that, in Martin Eden, London seems to have put every single imaginable aspect of naturalism into play, while also writing the philosophical novel of ideas. Such an accomplishment is, to my mind, nigh impossible, and I expect to study this novel extensively, as it is both the perfect example of what makes naturalism pathological and how a naturalistic work of literature can overcome the standard strictures of naturalism.
The first interesting aspect of Martin Eden is that, in its fairly complicated rags to riches narrative, it gives us a new type of naturalist narrative, one not mentioned by Donna Campbell. In this one, the brutish man, who the author identifies with and doesn’t condescend to, is introduced to the feminine poetry and manners of upper middle-class society. That the result is still disaster has less to do with the new environment that Martin finds himself in and more to do with the fact that he surpasses the feminine society of his beloved Ruth and her class and ascends beyond them. This is a narrative with one further step than a traditional rags to riches story; upon receiving his riches, Martin is completely dissatisfied for him because he cannot find a place that makes him happy, not because he still empathizes with his previous state, but because he has surpassed upper-class morality with his Spencer and Nietzsche.
The most interesting part of this novel, for me, is Martin’s early love for Spencer and later love for Nietzsche. In Spencer, Martin finds the piece of knowledge that will come to dominate his entire theory of knowledge: “And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization […] There was no caprice, no chance. All was law.” (109). From Spencer, Martin learns that evolution dominates every process, from biology to philosophy, and this becomes his intellectual framework: the dominance of evolutionary process. From there, he eventually becomes the disciple of Nietzsche, combining Nietzsche and Spencer such that he comes to understand slave-morality as a misguided evolutionary process which hijacks the natural evolution of humanity away from the ubermensch and towards the unwashed masses. There’s no doubt that London himself regards Martin as a version of the superman; Martin accomplishes intellectual and artistic feats that seem impossible, while in his previous life he got every girl and won every fight.
It is impossible for me to discuss every point I found of interest in this novel. I want to conclude simply by stating that, in Martin Eden, London seems to have put every single imaginable aspect of naturalism into play, while also writing the philosophical novel of ideas. Such an accomplishment is, to my mind, nigh impossible, and I expect to study this novel extensively, as it is both the perfect example of what makes naturalism pathological and how a naturalistic work of literature can overcome the standard strictures of naturalism.
Monday, March 10, 2008
My Antonia
It would appear that My Atonia is the perfect example of how a work of realism can have little or no connections to the realm of naturalism, just like The Rise of Silas Lapham. It begins with a fairly simple frame story – an unnamed female writer (implied, of course, to be Cather herself) discusses a girl, Antonia, she once knew with her friend Jim Burden. They decide to each write an account of Antonia, with an interesting sort of impressionistic collaboration: “I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her” (5). Apparently two different impressions, when triangulated together, can provide some sort of greater accuracy – an idea that seems to me to be slightly opposed to the idea of impressionism itself.
I must confess that, on the whole, I found My Antonia fairly dull. The first portion follows the orphaned Jim Burden’s time on the farm and his relationship to the neighboring Bohemian girl Antonia; in the next section, Jim and his grandparents have moved to town, and Antonia has come as well to work in the house of their next door neighbors. Book III, Lena Lingard, describes Jim’s lackasdaisacal romance with Lena, a more promiscuous doppleganger of Antonia while he’s in college, whereas Book VI is the story of Antonia’s failed attempt at marriage, which ended her pregnancy and eventual marriage to Cuzak. The final portion details Jim’s visit to the adult Antonia Cuzak, and her preponderance of offspring. The novel closes with a final two lines which sum up, I think, much of my disinterest in the proceedings: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (273). Not only does this last sentence call into question the triangulation I mentioned earlier, it makes it clear that My Antonia is a work of nostalgia for a frontier time and place, and a frontier woman, and I was never drawn into and understanding of Burden’s/Cather’s desire.
This is a quintessentially realistic book, particularly in that it looks at the lives of Midwestern farmers and never, it would seem, finds excess. It bears many similarities to Main-Traveled Roads, but mostly lacks that book’s interest in the damage that the bleak farm life can do to human beings, outside of the suicide of Antonia’s father, who misses the old country but was compelled to find a way to feed his family. Furthermore, My Antonia seems to have absolutely no interest in punishing female misbehavior; no one is ruined, and although Antonia is described as “disgraced” by the pregnancy that resulted from her failed engagement, her life with Cuzak is, if small, not a bad one (253). Lena, the novel’s constant candidate for ruination (which is described as being “compromised” (215)) has a different fate than we would expect: “And that Lena, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out so well” (233) as a dressmaker in San Francisco. My Antonia seemed to me mostly a tranquil novel, with most desire confined to the past and, even then, existing only below the surface.
This tranquility, which is the novel’s clearest sign of being opposed to naturalism and its excessive desires, has one more clear manifestation. In naturalism, people are often described as animals; naturalism’s entire product blurs the line between man and animal. But My Antonia has an entirely different model: “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we were used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons” (28). Here, and elsewhere (253), the boundary between trees and humans is compromised, and the plant kingdom seems to be the model for humanity: tranquil, grounded, able to be transferred only with difficulty (Antonia’s father), and endlessly reaching into the past.
I must confess that, on the whole, I found My Antonia fairly dull. The first portion follows the orphaned Jim Burden’s time on the farm and his relationship to the neighboring Bohemian girl Antonia; in the next section, Jim and his grandparents have moved to town, and Antonia has come as well to work in the house of their next door neighbors. Book III, Lena Lingard, describes Jim’s lackasdaisacal romance with Lena, a more promiscuous doppleganger of Antonia while he’s in college, whereas Book VI is the story of Antonia’s failed attempt at marriage, which ended her pregnancy and eventual marriage to Cuzak. The final portion details Jim’s visit to the adult Antonia Cuzak, and her preponderance of offspring. The novel closes with a final two lines which sum up, I think, much of my disinterest in the proceedings: “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past” (273). Not only does this last sentence call into question the triangulation I mentioned earlier, it makes it clear that My Antonia is a work of nostalgia for a frontier time and place, and a frontier woman, and I was never drawn into and understanding of Burden’s/Cather’s desire.
This is a quintessentially realistic book, particularly in that it looks at the lives of Midwestern farmers and never, it would seem, finds excess. It bears many similarities to Main-Traveled Roads, but mostly lacks that book’s interest in the damage that the bleak farm life can do to human beings, outside of the suicide of Antonia’s father, who misses the old country but was compelled to find a way to feed his family. Furthermore, My Antonia seems to have absolutely no interest in punishing female misbehavior; no one is ruined, and although Antonia is described as “disgraced” by the pregnancy that resulted from her failed engagement, her life with Cuzak is, if small, not a bad one (253). Lena, the novel’s constant candidate for ruination (which is described as being “compromised” (215)) has a different fate than we would expect: “And that Lena, that was always a bad one, say what you will, had turned out so well” (233) as a dressmaker in San Francisco. My Antonia seemed to me mostly a tranquil novel, with most desire confined to the past and, even then, existing only below the surface.
This tranquility, which is the novel’s clearest sign of being opposed to naturalism and its excessive desires, has one more clear manifestation. In naturalism, people are often described as animals; naturalism’s entire product blurs the line between man and animal. But My Antonia has an entirely different model: “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we were used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons” (28). Here, and elsewhere (253), the boundary between trees and humans is compromised, and the plant kingdom seems to be the model for humanity: tranquil, grounded, able to be transferred only with difficulty (Antonia’s father), and endlessly reaching into the past.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
House of Mirth
The House of Mirth
The House of Mirth has been described as one of the two works by female novelists of this period most likely to be considered naturalism, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening being the other. It’s the story of Lily Bart, a high-society maiden whose family fortune is lost. Lily has a chance for a middle-class existence with the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but Wharton makes it quite clear that Lily is the product of her early environment, in which there was nothing worse to live in a dull apartment and own ugly things, and thus cannot ever marry Lawrence Selden (316). For the same reason, she cannot marry the wealthy Mr. Rosedale, who is not quite in society enough and highly unrefined; she needs both taste and money. She is finally reduced to the point that neither Lawrence nor Rosedale desire to marry her (although Rosedale offers to, if she can regain stature), and lives a pathetic lower-class existence, without any lower-class skills, before accidentally overdosing one sleeping medication – committing suicide (if unintentionally) in true naturalist fashion.
Beyond the obvious connection to naturalism that comes from Wharton declaring that Selden “was, like Lily, the victim of his environment” (160), I’m most interested in the way this novel manages to reduce everything to basic economics. Strangely, Lily is never described as “ruined” in the novel, perhaps because she is never physically “ruined” but only rumored to have been ruined, by virtue of her connection to a married man, Gus Trenor. Her connection to Trenor is of course provable because she borrowed money from him; she is rumored to be ruined sexually because she was ruined financially. Of course, women can’t be ruined financially, as men can; in the case of House of Mirth, Lily’s father: “I’m ruined” he says, when the fortune fails (34). But the family’s fortune isn’t entirely gone until Lily is ruined as well: Lily’s beauty “was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt” (35). This completes the circle. Men are ruined when they lose finances; women are ruined when they have had sex outside of marriage, rendering them no longer eligible to marry men with fortunes. This observation is of course not unique to Wharton – Prince Amerigo, after all, hears in Charlotte’s beauty the chink of gold in The Golden Bowl – but it draws an incredibly clear line between Wharton’s novel and The Rise of Silas Lapham, a line that solidifies Mirth’s status as naturalism. In Lapham, money turns out to be no substitute for taste, and morals rise above both of those; in Mirth, both taste and morals are simply processes by which money makes itself felt – even the possibly immoral and seemingly distasteful Mr. Rosedale is eventually able to transmute his gold into a strong standing in the upper-class community. In The House of Mirth, every interaction is fundamentally revealed to be a financial transaction. The only possible exception is Lily’s union with Lawrence, which she can never bring herself to make, as it is a move full of both morality and taste, but forecloses all paths to future financial success.
On a side note of naturalist import, the novel is full of interesting naturalistic observations – characters are often described as automatons or cogs in a giant machine (54, 324-325). More important is an interesting gender distinction; when Lily is in a more lively (aka Aestheticist) surrounding we get this description: “Little as she wasin the key of their milieu, her immense social facility, her long habit of adapting herself to others without suffering her own outline to be blurred […] had won for her an important place in the Gormer group” (248). The downfall of both Theron Ware and Vandover is that they cannot adapt themselves to those around them without losing their own selves; Lily, I think for purely gender reasons, is allowed that privilege.
The House of Mirth has been described as one of the two works by female novelists of this period most likely to be considered naturalism, with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening being the other. It’s the story of Lily Bart, a high-society maiden whose family fortune is lost. Lily has a chance for a middle-class existence with the lawyer Lawrence Selden, but Wharton makes it quite clear that Lily is the product of her early environment, in which there was nothing worse to live in a dull apartment and own ugly things, and thus cannot ever marry Lawrence Selden (316). For the same reason, she cannot marry the wealthy Mr. Rosedale, who is not quite in society enough and highly unrefined; she needs both taste and money. She is finally reduced to the point that neither Lawrence nor Rosedale desire to marry her (although Rosedale offers to, if she can regain stature), and lives a pathetic lower-class existence, without any lower-class skills, before accidentally overdosing one sleeping medication – committing suicide (if unintentionally) in true naturalist fashion.
Beyond the obvious connection to naturalism that comes from Wharton declaring that Selden “was, like Lily, the victim of his environment” (160), I’m most interested in the way this novel manages to reduce everything to basic economics. Strangely, Lily is never described as “ruined” in the novel, perhaps because she is never physically “ruined” but only rumored to have been ruined, by virtue of her connection to a married man, Gus Trenor. Her connection to Trenor is of course provable because she borrowed money from him; she is rumored to be ruined sexually because she was ruined financially. Of course, women can’t be ruined financially, as men can; in the case of House of Mirth, Lily’s father: “I’m ruined” he says, when the fortune fails (34). But the family’s fortune isn’t entirely gone until Lily is ruined as well: Lily’s beauty “was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt” (35). This completes the circle. Men are ruined when they lose finances; women are ruined when they have had sex outside of marriage, rendering them no longer eligible to marry men with fortunes. This observation is of course not unique to Wharton – Prince Amerigo, after all, hears in Charlotte’s beauty the chink of gold in The Golden Bowl – but it draws an incredibly clear line between Wharton’s novel and The Rise of Silas Lapham, a line that solidifies Mirth’s status as naturalism. In Lapham, money turns out to be no substitute for taste, and morals rise above both of those; in Mirth, both taste and morals are simply processes by which money makes itself felt – even the possibly immoral and seemingly distasteful Mr. Rosedale is eventually able to transmute his gold into a strong standing in the upper-class community. In The House of Mirth, every interaction is fundamentally revealed to be a financial transaction. The only possible exception is Lily’s union with Lawrence, which she can never bring herself to make, as it is a move full of both morality and taste, but forecloses all paths to future financial success.
On a side note of naturalist import, the novel is full of interesting naturalistic observations – characters are often described as automatons or cogs in a giant machine (54, 324-325). More important is an interesting gender distinction; when Lily is in a more lively (aka Aestheticist) surrounding we get this description: “Little as she wasin the key of their milieu, her immense social facility, her long habit of adapting herself to others without suffering her own outline to be blurred […] had won for her an important place in the Gormer group” (248). The downfall of both Theron Ware and Vandover is that they cannot adapt themselves to those around them without losing their own selves; Lily, I think for purely gender reasons, is allowed that privilege.
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