Protest and the Body in Melville, Dos Passos, and Hurston

Thomas McGlamery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135877323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book analyzes the work of Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, and Zora Neale Hurston alongside biographical materials and discourses on the body. Thomas McGlamery views each of these authors' literary output as an effort to "work through" the political meanings associated with the body, examining how they negotiate identities of class, gender, race, sexuality, and age.

Chapter One
Introduction

This book about three authors and the way their bodies manifest in their texts was conceived within a welter of academic discourses on the body. Feminist scholarship has a long tradition of explicit engagement with the body as a contested site, and the wider field of gender studies that has developed out of this scholarship has continued to make the body a focal point in cultural analysis. Foucault's work on disciplined bodies and on sexuality has continued to generate, in gender studies and queer studies principally, detailed analysis of the implication of the body in the discursive shaping of gender and sexuality. Class-invested scholarship has been built upon Pierre Bourdieu's investigations into habitus and the category of taste and upon Elaine Scarry's work on the body in pain. Increasingly, we read the body as cross-hatched by a multitude of cultural vectors, and a sophisticated and often recondite apparatus of theory has grown out of these efforts. While attempting to take advantage of insights offered by portions of this theoretical discourse, I have chosen to write in what I hope is a different though supplementary direction, focusing on the practical body problems of three authors, problems assigned to them, as it were, by their cultures and their circumstances. I have attempted to meld biographical approaches, discursive analysis, and close reading to achieve a textured, lively understanding of these works as personal and political statements. Perhaps I can best locate the critical practice I seek in this dissertation by using two examples of types of criticism to which I see my own being in part opposed, in part complementary.

In 1992, Frederick Crews published what he called “a report to nonacademic readers” regarding the kind of criticism practiced and taught in university English departments. Crews's book, The Critics Bear It Away, collects a number of spirited, highly readable essays he had published over the past few years in The New York Review of Books. In it he calls for an “empirical” literary criticism steeped in biography, one that understands American fiction “with as few illusions as possible” (xv). Distancing himself from cultural conservatives like Bloom and Bennet and acknowledging the revitalizing influence of New Americanists, Crews nevertheless would chasten the latter for what he sees as certain critical excesses, registering the following objections to New Historicist practice: a proclivity for “apriorist” theory-driven readings that fail to take appropriate advantage of biographical scholarship and screen biographical and textual data to suit theoretical premises, a propensity to reduce the range of critical inquiry to considerations of the rhetorics of race, class, and gender operating within a text, a tendency to dismiss aesthetics as a mystification of politics, and, if I read him correctly, a commitment to dissolving the (canonical) author into “a helpless vector of forces that typically cannot even be located, much less stemmed” (xix). (Crews's corollary claim is that authors inhabiting subaltern subject positions are often read as having an intention and agency that these others are not granted.)

In registering these objections, Crews neglects to substantially argue the very arguable premises on which many of them rest, namely, that there can be such a thing as a non-theory driven, non-selective reading of texts, that aesthetics is not a mystification of politics, that “authors” are not a nexus of discursive forces that express themselves through persons. His “report” to nonacademics holds such nettlesome questions in abeyance, instead issuing a flattering appeal to an audience that has not been “academically retrained to distrust their pleasures” and can thereby “sense the difference between calculatedly progressive pap and art that flows from vision, albeit a feverish one” (xxi). Crews rather grants this intuition, this “pleasure,” its own a priori status, thereby indicating that something like “common sense” will arbitrate the validity of critical practice, an impression re-enforced by other approving references to such notions as “the empirical center” (xvi). When he adds that he prefers to honor this commonsensical distinction between “pap” and “art,” “even while exploring the challenge to criticism posed by a major writer's blatant prejudices” (xxi), Crews does little to qualify his embrace of nonacademic commonsense, since what is “blatant” is, by definition, well within the purview of such sense (and, one might add, perhaps only marginally worth interrogating).

Launching his readings of various “New” and “Old” Americanist efforts to define the field of American literature from such a foundation, Crews nevertheless produces some valuable insights into the practice of Americanist literary criticism and into the work of traditionally canonical authors and texts who serve as its subject. His review of surveys of the American Renaissance illuminates weaknesses in the strong readings that have come out of efforts to define that period and its canon, and his biographically informed readings of canonical texts often yield surprising insights that suggest the need to revise established readings. The latter readings demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of a commonsensical, “empirical,” traditional biographical criticism that I have sought to, respectively, exploit and avoid in my own work. I turn, then, to Crews's chapter on Hemingway for an example of such criticism and a reference point for locating my own critical practice.

Entitled “Pressure Under Grace,” Crews's discussion of Hemingway and such well-known works as “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and The Sun Also Rises relies heavily on Kenneth Lynn's 1987 biography of Hemingway. Lynn's biography is praised for its “admirable combination of justice and compassion,” for offering “our first cogent and sustained explanation of the psychological, familial, and environmental pressures that helped to make the willful yet deeply cautious [Hemingway] what he was” (91). The result, writes Crews, is certainly a “diminished figure” compared with the Hemingway of traditional myth, but he is also “not the exposed fraud we have grown accustomed to meeting in ideological diatribes of recent decades,” a man who “secretly entertained broader sympathies that his manly code implied” (91). According to Crews, the Hemingway Lynn allows us to see speaks most revealingly in this passage of a letter to F.Scott Fitzgerald: “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist” (91).

Crews, using Lynn, will shortly tell us that, as Hemingway saw it, the bitch that bitched him so bad that he could write like a serious scientist was his mother, his damning Grace. Lynn, says Crews, shows “how pervasively the writer's mind was ruled by his sense of what Grace had done to him” (105).

Crews will go on to argue that what Grace Hemingway did to Ernest begins with what she did to Ernest's father, Clarence Hemingway, whom in Ernest's eyes was castrated by Grace, whose lavish spending created financial difficulties, whose willfulness made her the primary decision-maker in the family, and whose relationship with her voice student and housekeeper, Ruth Arnold, prompted rumors of lesbianism that shamed both father and son. Though Crews speculates that Hemingway was genetically predisposed to depression, he claims, standing on firm ground, that Hemingway himself blamed his mother for both his father's depression (and therefore, one must infer, his suicide) and his own.

The other source of Hemingway's resentment is his own treatment at Grace's domineering hand. Crews does not believe that Ernest was both dressed and coiffed in the manner of a girl for the first two-and-a-half years of his life merely because such was the convention of the time; rather, he assails Grace's programmatic attempt to “twin” Ernest with his older sister, Marcelline, a passage from whose memoir he cites. It seems that Grace Hemingway arranged it so that Ernest and his sister

slept in the same bedroom in twin white cribs; they had dolls that were just alike; they played with small china tea sets that had the same pattern. Later, the children were encouraged to fish together, hike together and visit friends together, and after Grace deliberately held Marcelline back, they entered grade school together. (106)

Crews adds that Grace once disgusted her son by insisting that he and Marcelline be in the same class. Adducing this evidence, and noting that even well past infancy Hemingway's mother gave both sister and brother identical haircuts, Crews concludes,

In all likelihood, what Grace wanted, beyond an enactment of some private cross-gender scheme, was a boy whose sexual identity would remain forever dependent upon her dictates and whims. If so, she gruesomely got her wish. The apparent effect of all that dolling and doting was not so much to lend Ernest a female identity as to implant in his mind a permanently debilitating confusion, anxiety, and anger. (106)

The upshot of this, in Crews's words, is “a man possessed,” a mind “deeply strange,” and fiction that “abound[s] not only in castrating shrews and shattered men but also in sibling-like lovers whose deepest fantasy is to trade sex roles or merge into androgynous oneness” (107), writing that is “saturated in a mood of indefinite resentment, pessimism, and urgency about maintaining control” (97).

In providing this biographically informed reading of Hemingway's psyche and work, Crews seeks not to put to final rest the myth of Hemingway the hard-drinking, hard-writing, hard-loving, hunting-and-fishing hard-on—that he sees as a myth already thoroughly debunked—but rather to complicate and, to some extent, moderate the debunking of that myth: to see Hemingway as a man with strong cross-gender identifications who also saw himself as wounded (perhaps mortally) by his mother, thus enabling us to “return to the fiction with fresh appreciation” (91).

Crews's reading, whose debt to Lynn's he readily acknowledges, validates his claims for the uses of biography by enabling such a return, revealing, for instance, that “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” “undercut[s its] own impulse to distinguish between the he-man and the weakling, the compliant kitten and the castrating bitch” (109), (though it is not clear to what degree the terms of distinction are challenged) and that in The Sun Also Rises Hemingway can be found to “identify with a woman's point of view,” which should “thus mitigate some of the tendentiousness of his schematizing” (110). Yet Crew's readings also demonstrate the limitations, even dangers, of criticism that founds itself too comfortably on biography and common sense. What the essay lacks most of all is an adequate etiology/sociology of Hemingway's illness, greater reference to the discursive forces shaping gender—as well as class—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.¹ Such a discussion could not only cast more light on the conflicts that may have eventually put a gun to both Hemingways' heads, but, at least as importantly, if not more so, also begin to explain the politics and psychology of Grace Hemingway's own obviously beset self-negotiation, played out in respectable, upper middle-class, heterosexual Oak Park, Illinois.

The importance of such an addition could be overstated, but that would be hard to do. Even if one grants Crews's privileging of Ernest Hemingway and his fiction over the “life-writing” of Grace Hemingway, too much of Crews's chapter on Hemingway is about his mother for it to leave unexamined the motives for her own behavior. Even if one accepts Crew's hastily arrived at conclusion that Grace Hemingway sought to create an Ernest whose sexuality she would always control, there remains to ask why she would do so. Without a greater appreciation of the discursive shaping of both Ernest's and Grace's work, readers are left with something that looks suspiciously retrograde: a psychologism that, though occasionally qualified, traces the origins of Ernest Hemingway's misogyny, sexual dysfunction, and grotesque masculinist posturing back to his monstrous mother, then looks no further. This is to risk rewriting misogyny in a different, less blatant, register. To look further into the potential sources of Crew's own critical practice, the “common sense” that permeates his Hemingway chapter is something that could quite arguably be traced back to a kind of thought prevalent during the nineteen fifties, when Crews's academic career began. The “momism,” that appears to operate in this chapter was a post-World War II psychology that sought to return women from the factory to the home and placed enormous burdens on housewives by emphasizing the absolutely crucial importance of mothering in the development of children.² (And to track Crews's critical practice one step further, I would add that it seems that, with the “return” of appreciation of Hemingway in this chapter, we also get the return of a lately repressed figure in Crews's own work, for the apostles of momism claimed for their authority Freud.)

Crews's useful analysis of what ailed Ernest Hemingway provides an example of what is valuable about biographical criticism, but also of what can go wrong when such criticism fails to assess the discursive conditions of the texts it analyzes and its own critical practice.³ In 1992, the same year Crews published The Critics Bear It Away, there appeared a collection of essays entitled Kate Chopin Reconsidered. Published by Louisiana State University Press, in its subtitle, Beyond the Bayou, the collection of New Americanist readings of Chopin's work promises to be anything but backwater in perspective. One essay by John Carlos Rowe provides an example of the kind of critical practice that Crews may have in mind when he weighs in against “theory-saturated” criticism that pays little attention to biography: “The Economics of the Body in Kate Chopin's The Awakening” (1172–4).

Rowe's essay seeks to reveal a political unconscious at work in Chopin's novel, reading it as an expression of the alienating workings of capital and patriarchy in late-nineteenth-century America. Drawing foremost on Marx, Engels, Lucacs, and Elaine Scarry's discussion of Marx—and using biographical materials sparingly—Rowe succeeds in arguing that Edna Pontellier “successively experiences the inadequacy of the modes of production available to her to express her body, to offer her any substantial and self-sufficient being.” He provokes reconsideration of Sandra Gilbert's influential reading of the novel (complicating her interpretations of Edna's last supper and last swim). Finally, Rowe discusses the novel as Edna's (and Kate Chopin's) working out of a problematic related to that which I am using to read the authors and texts in this dissertation: “how to make the body other—an object, an artifact, a child, a novel— without losing that body” (139).

Illuminating Rowe's essay is Elaine Scarry's reading of Marx in The Body in Pain. Rowe's interest in Scarry stems from what she has to say about the body's capacity for self-transformation, and most crucially for its socialization in labor. Rowe, who begins by noting the numerous critics who have remarked the novel's many private moments in which Edna examines and cares for her body in a relieved manner, concludes that Chopin's protagonist wants “to experience her body in the world around her, not simply in the private moments when she touches herself as if to confirm an existence so tenuous in public but in the labor of socialization itself” (139). He then quotes Scarry on the transformations of the body in this self-socializing activity:

The socialization of sentience—which is itself as profound a change as if one were to open the body physically and redirect the path of neuronal flow, rearrange the small bones into a new pattern, remodel the ear drum—is one of Marx's major emphases. Sense organs, skin, and body tissue have themselves been recreated to experience themselves in terms of their own objectification. It is this now essentially altered biological being that, in going on to remake himself or herself in other ways, enters into that act of remaking as one whose sentience is socialized, fundamentally restructured to be relieved of its privacy. (139)

Rowe then extends Scarry's argument:

Because these modes of objectification can be shared by others, they enable us to extend our “bodies,” amplify our “privacy” (and thus our mortality) to encompass society (and thus an enduring history). In Scarry's reading of Marx's philosophy of the social commodity as an extension and amplification of the individual body, that commodity is not fetishized but endlessly productive: ‘For Marx, the more extended and sublimated sites of making should extend this attribute of sharability; the interaction made possible by a freestanding object is amplified as that object now becomes a ‘commodity’ interacting with other objects and so increasing the number of persons who are in contact with one another; the socialization of sentience should continue to be amplified as one moves to more extended economic (money, capital) and political artifacts.’ Under capitalism such a socialist economy is detoured into the peculiar economy by which the amplification of a fabricated body (the capitalist's capital) depends upon the diminution of the natural body (the worker's physical body). (139)

To take seriously Scarry's reading of Marx is to perceive texts as the extension of bodies that are, under the right dispensation, “endlessly productive.” If I read Crews correctly, his argument is that, rather than allow this endless productivity to take place, something analogous to the kind of amplifying and diminishing process Rowe describes above is occurring now in American literary studies, with critics occupying the position of the capitalist working in the “peculiar economy” of academic scholarship, the author in the position of industrial worker, now alienated from his or her labor (and often conveniently dead and therefore unlikely to resist). Indeed, the title of Crews's book evokes the element of force, of piracy, that Rowe, in the course of enfolding details of the life of the pirate Jean Lafitte into his discussion of Chopin's narrative, claims is not only “capitalism's secret law” but also “one of its origins” (132).

Rowe's critical practice at times invites such a comparison. Those passages that can be construed to refer to Chopin's artistic intentions consistently transvalue them into Marxian or Marx-compatible terms: “Chopin uses this knowledge [precise referent unclear] to explore woman's problematic relation to the new economics of speculative capitalism (119)…. Even so, a woman's rebellion will involve much more for Chopin than merely the assertion of her naked self; that rebellion will require a thorough transvaluation of the modes of production that govern both the psyche and the economy of late-nineteenth century capitalism (121)…. Chopin wants …to entangle Edna's erotic sense of her body with more general economic questions of human production (129)…. the legends of Lafitte seem to suggest for Chopin how easily rebellion may be co-opted (132)…as Edna only dimly recognizes at the very end of the narrative but Chopin knows all too well, there can be no nature for a woman that is not always already shaped and determined, inscribed and charted, by the laws of the social order (135)…there can be no myth, after all, without culture, and it is just this mythopoetic role that both Chopin and Marx imagine every worker ought to assume in his or her everyday labors” (137). Rowe reductively glosses scenes of great complexity and psychological depth, such as those in which Edna Pontillier experiences her oppressive torpor in the wake of encounters with her husband: “In these two scenes Edna's frustration and rebellion are analogous to the industrial worker's recognition of the alienation of her labor power, an alienation by means of which the ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Reading a Man Like a Book: Bodies and Texts in Billy Budd
• Chapter Three Producing Remembrance: John Dos Passos's Body in the Text
• Chapter Four How it Feels to be Not-So-Young, Gifted, and Black: Passing and “de change uh life” in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index