Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

Grotesque Relations

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Grotesque Relations Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State

SUSAN EDMUNDS

2008

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edmunds, Susan, 1961– Grotesque relations : modernist domestic fiction and the U.S. welfare state / by Susan Edmunds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–533853–9 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Domestic fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature—United States— History—20th century. 4. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 5. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 6. Public welfare—United States—History—20th century. 7. Grotesque in literature. 8. Welfare state in literature. I. Title. PS374.M535E34 2008 813.'50936—dc22 2007040015

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Kathryn Riely with love

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Acknowledgments

In a book of this kind, first thanks go to my teachers, who sought to shape me and succeeded. First among first, I thank my parents, whose lessons were offered and absorbed with love. Several people provided needed guidance as this book began. John Crowley, Margaret Himley, and Linda Shires read drafts, shared their knowledge, and gave me good advice. Members of the Syracuse English Department Faculty Writing Group contributed at every turn; Crystal Bartolovich, Dympna Callaghan, Steve Cohan, Amy Feinstein, Bob Gates, Mike Goode, Karen Hall, Roger Hallas, Priya Jaikumar, Claudia Klaver, Amy Lang, Janis Mayes, Jolynn Parker, Patty Roylance, Amy Shore, Adam Sitze, Vincent Stephens, Mary Strunk, Christian Thorne, and Monika Wadman all read drafts and many shared their own. Your help was crucial. I want to thank Steve Cohan and Amy Lang for their scholarly example and professional advice, and Crystal Bartolovich and Monika Wadman for years of intellectual stimulation and enjoyment. Anonymous readers at Contemporary Literature, Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Oxford read earlier versions of these arguments with care and generosity; the book matured with each review. Warm thanks to Eileen Gregory, Jennifer Haytock, Jack Matthews, and Bonnie Kime Scott for helping me to secure release time from my teaching; to Dorcas MacDonald at Bird Library for making sure I got my books; and to Shannon McLachlan, Christina Gibson, Paul Hobson, and Merryl Sloane for guiding this book into print. A number of people left imprints on the book of a different kind. I thank Pedro Cuperman for the boat I saw and the one I didn’t. Charles H. Long I thank for showing me my country. Big thanks to my sister Monnie, her husband,

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Doug, and their children, Melanie, Sam, and Lucy, for bringing babies back in, and to my brother, Jim, his wife, Christine, and their daughter, Emiko, for the Paris fair and that June day in Chicago. Karen Hall, Marla Lender, and Sensei Yousuf Mehter provided focus in the final lap. Special thanks to Kay Levering for talking sense (and getting me to listen) and to Maria Wadman for growing up next door. Thanks to Beth Povinelli for sticking with this chicken: your love and thinking pulled me through. Last thanks to Kathryn Riely—for wishing me luck on Oxford’s doorstep. And for being my sister all along. Portions of chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 are revised versions of previously published articles: “Narratives of a Virgin’s Violation: The Critique of Middle-Class Reformism in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, 2 (1997): 218–236. Copyright © 1997 NOVEL Corp. Reprinted with permission. “The Race Question and the ‘Question of the Home’: Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” American Literature 75, 1 (March 2003): 141–168. Reprinted with permission. “Modern Taste and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust,” Modern Fiction Studies 44, 2 (1998): 306–330. Reprinted with permission. “Through a Glass Darkly: Visions of Integrated Community in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood,” Contemporary Literature 37, 4 (Winter 1996): 559–585. Reprinted with permission.

Contents

Introduction “As with a Startling Picture”: Modernism and the Domestic Sphere, 3 1. “For She Asks Forever Only Help”: The Critique of Maternalist Reform Discourse in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, 39 2. Tortured Bodies and Twisted Words: The Antidomestic Vision of Jean Toomer’s Cane, 65 3. Freaked: Eastern European Immigration and the “American Home” in Edna Ferber’s American Beauty, 95 4. “Not Sentimental”: The Double Bind of White Working-Class Femininity in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, 123 5. Siren Calls: Consumer Revolution and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, 149 6. “Not Charity Yet!”: State-Supported Capitalism and the Secret Life of God in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, 181 Notes, 209 Bibliography, 233 Index, 253

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Grotesque Relations

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Introduction “As with a Startling Picture” Modernism and the Domestic Sphere

In his 1939 essay “What Is Epic Theater?” Walter Benjamin conjures up “a family scene” to explain the concept of Brecht’s alienation effect to his reader: Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with a situation as with a startling picture: troubled faces, an open window, the furniture in disarray. But there are eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.1 Benjamin’s unsettling scene fits comfortably within a picture we have devised for modernism as a whole: marked by a broken or alienated relation to the favored subject matter and representational modes of an earlier era, the work of modernist and avant-garde writers teaches us to regard the world with startled eyes, to question the unquestionable, to find the ordinary strange. And, as Benjamin himself suggests, one could hardly find a better place to begin such a project than within the fond embrace of the family, whose spirit presides over the most “ordinary scenes of middle-class life,” first giving that ordinariness its possibility and then, all too quickly it seems, its pervasive inevitability. To attack the ordinary itself—to expose the non-inevitable conditions of its possibility—Benjamin begins with the extraordinary, systematically inverting and deforming conventions too well known to require explicit citation. The sentimental mother, guardian of culture and loving caretaker of the young,

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rediscovers in the domestic art object a murder weapon to brandish against her own. The genteel father, kind master and giver of the law, flees the irrelevance of his own authority. And the policeman, noble protector of the propertied, the law abiding, and the good, swings his gaze from the criminal activity of the street to the rustling inner sanctum of middle-class domestic privacy. All this, Benjamin tells us, would appear as nothing before “eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.” Thinking about Benjamin’s scene in this way allows us to affirm other aspects of a common critical account of modernism. It’s all in those eyes—the eyes of a stranger—whose appearance on the scene allows us, the ones who stayed home, to see our own lives as startling. The one who’s missing from the scene—who could he be but the son?—is having no part of it. Unlike the daughter, he’s already gone, to become an artist no doubt, one of the many people who, as Raymond Williams has argued, experienced “the bourgeois world [as] grotesque” and located a “growing critique of the bourgeois family” at the center of European modernism and the avant-garde. Drawing the conversation over to the American scene, where the concerns of this book are also located, Suzanne Clark has observed that the avant-garde’s “ ‘revolution of the word’ appears to precipitate a crisis of the family by rejecting domestic claims along with domestic, genteel fiction.”2 But, on closer inspection, the critical commonplace that foregrounds the role of the estranged son in generating the antidomestic and antibourgeois counternarratives of modernism both does and does not accord with Benjamin’s parable of the stranger in the doorway, whose gaze absorbs and fuses the interior and exterior spaces of the family domicile, taking in not only the emboldened mother, the flustered father, the endangered daughter, but also the hailed policeman, whose face is just now appearing at the window. For, in Benjamin’s parable, the modernist artist’s ability to gaze at the middle-class family3 with the eyes of a stranger appears less as a sui generis act, an originary event, than as a social consequence of that policeman in the window. In this sense, Benjamin’s parable—composed in Europe in the midst of World War II—forms a fitting counterpart to the material examined in this book: modernist domestic fiction written in the United States in the period spanning the two world wars. Not fully prepared to argue, alongside Suzanne Clark, that U.S. modernists rejected the genre of “domestic, genteel fiction” altogether, I propose instead that such writers use grotesque modes of representation to deform and estrange the genre, shuffling its contents and upending its conventions until, like Benjamin’s parlor with its “furniture in disarray,” it becomes all but unrecognizable as such.4 I contend that the radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction serves as the locus of modernists’

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engagement with the rise of the U.S. welfare state. Our current critical accounts of this encounter, drawing on the groundbreaking work of Michael Szalay, begin with the New Deal. But such accounts fail to register two significant features of our welfare state’s history: the surprisingly late passage of comprehensive welfare legislation at the federal level, decades after welfare states had been set up in Germany, Britain, and Sweden;5 and the development of a distinctively gendered approach to both the concept and the practice of social welfare in the absence of strong federal commitment. Attention to this history requires a return to the Progressive Era, when white middle-class reformers began to call for state intervention to shore up crumbling homes. Middle-class white women, in particular, played a leading role in the welfare state’s unique history of emergence in the United States. Redeploying nineteenth-century discourses of sentimental domesticity to authorize new roles for themselves as social housekeepers, maternalist reformers turned the domestic sphere into a primary site and source of modern social transformation.6 Activist participants in a sentimental culture that was itself actively modernizing, these reformers became the architects of a national project of white domestic security that provided the template and the rationale of the welfare state we now—however precariously—possess. Faced with the upheavals of rapid industrialization, massive immigration, and unchecked corporate profit taking, maternalist reformers of the Progressive Era agitated for a protective infrastructure to be constructed on a triangular ground opening up between home, market, and state. Located outside the home, this infrastructure would nevertheless define a domain singularly dedicated to the home’s preservation and support. In keeping both with maternalist reformers’ flipped discourse of social housekeeping and with modernist writers’ own strategies of defamiliarization and grotesque inversion, I call this new domain the “domestic exterior” and make its appearance central to my analysis of modernist domestic fiction. As I will explain in more detail shortly, the concept of the domestic exterior offers a way to understand both the distinctive formal features of modernist domestic fiction, in which the space of domesticity is repeatedly turned inside out, and the distinctive history of the welfare state’s emergence in the United States, where the public extension of one class’s power to mother, on behalf of mothers of another class, set the political terms and supplied the political will for the transition to welfare statehood. This transition effected not only macro-changes in government and market practice but also micro-changes in the practice of everyday life: increasing traffic in the domestic exterior found its reflection in new states of alienated intimacy that arose as the state, in open partnership with the market, reconfigured the domestic foundations of personal life. Throughout this book, I argue that

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modernist writers in the United States made the domestic exterior a persistent object of representation in their domestic fiction. Working in antagonistic combination with maternalist reformers, they sought to render this domain visible and conceptually inhabitable as a crucial zone of contemporary political and social struggle. In contrast to the serene interiors celebrated in nineteenth-century elaborations of sentimental culture, the modern sentimental domain of the domestic exterior was experienced from the start as a space of open contestation and conflict. In the loose triangle of relations joining home, market, and state at the beginning of the twentieth century, the strongest, oldest, and most disruptive axis joined home and market. Along this axis, the wage economy continued to yank older patterns of family life out of kilter, even as corporate philanthropists sponsored new efforts to clean up the home lives of the urban poor, and media sources trafficked in clashing images of domestic bliss, rectitude, and peril. Both rooted in and suspicious of this first axis of relation, maternalist reformers agitated for the creation of a second axis, between home and state, and thus a more shadowy third axis, between state and market, that could by turns counter, support, and codify the diverse energies of market change swirling through the nation’s homes. During the Progressive Era, white male reformers in the United States largely failed to institute the social insurance programs, already in place in European welfare states, which would later become the hallmark of the New Deal.7 In the space left open by their failure, maternalist reformers secured the home as a third point on the emerging map of state-market relations—a crucial third point through which those same relations could be looped, legitimated, and organized. In doing so, they invested the domain of the domestic exterior with the task of mediating all the particular and individual demands that arose among families, the market, and the state. And they also produced this domain as the preeminent site for negotiating a growing set of general demands that different groups of citizens addressed to the state, to the market through the state, and to one another in the name of family. Over the course of the U.S. welfare state’s development, the axes of market and state relation to the domestic sphere were gradually coordinated. This coordinating trend culminated in the second half of the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration’s adoption of a Keynesian economic vision placed a federally supported order of private—and almost exclusively white—domestic consumption at the center of the nation’s economic recovery plan. But the roots of such coordination lay in the Progressive Era vision of maternalist reformers, who had produced the three-sided ground of the domestic exterior as a crucial launching pad for state and social transformation. Through struggles

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played out on this ground, a sentimental model of family life, cultivated by and marketed to the northeastern, white, middle class throughout the nineteenth century, slowly acquired state and federal endorsement in the twentieth, passing through the sieves of government to become the dominant family model first for the nation’s white citizens and then for the nation’s citizenry at large. When the architects of the New Deal offered qualified male breadwinners a government-backed “family wage” that would allow for the support of a stay-athome wife and mother, they made this family model citizens’ primary gateway to a tiered array of welfare benefits.8 In the shadow of the same gateway, the bid for collective social security found ambiguous fulfillment in an overtly racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. Today, the social transformations that account for the normative status of the modern sentimental family have largely been forgotten. While a politics of “family values” once again dominates our national scene, an array of voices on the Right encourages us to embrace a family model only recently issued to us by the welfare state as the best antidote to that same state’s liberal interference and overreaching. In this political mythology, family is the clean alternative to history’s dirt; it is the living root and flower of all that is most our own, even most ourselves. But for modernist writers of domestic fiction, the historical work of naturalizing the modern sentimental family had yet to be completed. Poised to participate in an unfinished and open-ended process of social and political struggle, U.S. modernists approach the modern sentimental family and the domestic sphere as entities open to question and to change. When they submit the conventions of sentimental domesticity to grotesque deformation, they do so not to battle the fading ghosts of another era but to engage a fully contemporary political discourse invested with enormous—for some, even revolutionary—transformative potential. In the clasp of this engagement, modernists rework some of the bestknown conventions of grotesque representation itself. Their fiction typically retains the vertical inversions of bottom over top that have long marked the revolutionary energies of the grotesque. But, as I have already begun to suggest, it also pushes those inversions sideways, making a new confusion or transfusion between inside and outside central to representations of early and mid-twentieth-century domesticity. In fact, domestic fiction’s fundamental innovation in this period is to turn itself inside out, forgoing an earlier emphasis on psychological and domestic interiors in order to map the new domain of the domestic exterior. With this shift in focus, modernist domestic fiction writers train their eyes—and our own—on a self-consciously modern space whose ruptures produced, even as they belie, those timeless traditions of family life to which we are now attached.

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In some of the works I discuss in subsequent chapters—Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928), Edna Ferber’s American Beauty (1931), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio (1932–1936, 1974)—domestic fiction’s perennial focus on the home life of a single family persists, but family members inhabit a domestic space thrown open to the outside, and negotiate the terms of their destiny with intimate strangers authorized to share and even to direct the contents of their private lives. The other works I discuss—Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952)—have not been read as domestic fiction before. In these texts, the emphasis on private life gives way to plots in which family and would-be family members confront each other and the very idea of family on alien ground.9 All six works make the busy border zone between home, market, and state the object of explicit narrative attention. At the same time, they establish ways of representing a folding of that border inward, rejecting or ironizing sentimental codes of sympathy and authenticity to focus on new states of alienated intimacy. I use this latter phrase to name the qualitative shift in personal experience that occurred as state and market representatives pressured domestic subjects to adopt standards of intimate regard and self-regard forged in the domestic exterior. In contrast to current accounts of modernists’ encounter with the welfare state, which emphasize their ambivalent registration of new forms of impersonal, abstract sociality in everyday life,10 the concept of alienated intimacy indicates a breakdown in the very distinction between personal and impersonal. In the shadow of the domestic exterior, impersonal, state- and market-issued directives, demands, and knowledges remake the field of the personal, as family members find themselves relying on extraneous but now essential standards of care, desire, and judgment in their daily encounters with one another. The little “family scene” with which I began might serve as one index of the new sense of alienated intimacy that surfaces in homes connected to and through the domestic exterior. Another, more arresting index appears in a 1930 account of modern family life published in Harper’s Monthly. In an article entitled “Must We Scrap the Family?” Floyd H. Allport writes: The influences which are estranging wives and husbands are also producing a gulf between successive generations. . . . Should I wish really to know my boy or girl . . . , I must go out into the community to gain my knowledge. I must study my child’s school record. I must learn about his physical condition from the clinic. I must go to the playground supervisor or to the Y.M.C.A. in order to discover his athletic and social adjustments. His employer, should he have one, must be interviewed. And finally, I must see how he is getting on at

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the Church-school and in his art or his music class. When all these reports have been collected and, granting that the information is accurate, I now have before me only the fragments of my child. What he is, in himself, as apart from all these pigeonholes and compartments, I have had no way of knowing. He has ceased to be, for me, an intimately experienced personality, but has become a case study. I am no longer a parent, but a social worker.11 While Allport writes from a position of scandalized reaction and Benjamin from one of revolutionary hopefulness, both men trace a connection between modern forms of alienated intimacy and the presence of authoritative outsiders whose interventions have become so integral to the conduct of middle-class domestic life as to make themselves felt even in the most private and spontaneous encounters between one family member and another. Benjamin suggests that this experience of alienated intimacy is still somewhat rare, available to some eyes but not to others. But Allport, writing almost ten years earlier, makes the more radical point that no other way of seeing exists any more: in the United States, parents now see with the eyes of social workers, and children, divided up and rearranged across “pigeonholes and compartments,” present themselves as case studies. For the inhabitants of this domestic sphere, there is no space inside the home, inside the family, that has not already absorbed—does not already reflect back—strangers’ perspectives on family life, which have been forged in the domestic exterior. Though neither man uses the term grotesque to define the inverted states of domestic experience he invokes, the spirit of the grotesque is clearly evident here, gleaming in the violated expectations, the carefully crafted incongruities that characterize both accounts. The U.S. modernists join Benjamin and Allport in portraying the modern domestic sphere as a site of alienation as profound as any encountered on the factory floor. But they explicitly code the experience of domestic alienation as grotesque and openly associate it with the present threat or promise of revolution. In doing so, modernist writers participate in a much wider cultural readiness to see revolution popping up in every corner of their contemporary world. Geoffrey Galt Harpham has observed that “it is one characteristic of revolutions, whether literary, political, or scientific, that they liberate, dignify, and pass through the grotesque.” Hayden White argues further that the immediate experience of historical change, which throws us into a present at once “unclassified and unclassifiable,” is always grotesque, while Mikhail Bakhtin associates the grotesque with the revolutionary onset of historicity itself.12 The historical onset of a sense of historicity was initially confined to particular sectors of European and American society and did not reach into the domestic

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realm—long defined “as the antidote to history, a utopian site in which ‘changes never come’ ”13—until the latter half of the nineteenth century. In that period, numerous studies placing the “modern family” and the “modern home” in comparative historical perspective began to emerge in the United States alongside new social initiatives, aimed at protecting and reforming the home, which were later combined to form the matrix of our welfare state. To recognize the historicity of the domestic sphere is itself a revolutionary insight, laden with the power to alienate even the most ardent champions of home from a passive acceptance of its given state. The U.S. modernists amplify the power of this insight by looping their representations of domesticity through three overt discourses of revolution. In their very reliance on the grotesque, these writers signal their embrace of the “revolution of the word” famously associated with avant-garde production in the transition manifesto of 1929.14 Modernist writers also join numerous nonliterary commentators in connecting their depictions of domestic life to the discourses of socialist revolution and the “revolution in manners and morals,” a term first used by Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931 to name the new culture of liberated sexuality and mass consumption. The lived experience of a sharp break with the recent past and particularly with sentimental paradigms of domesticity informs all three discourses. Today, most critics of U.S. modernism continue to affirm the declared terms of this experience, positing modernist and sentimental literature as archenemies in a culture war that took no prisoners. Our leading accounts either argue or assume that this culture war turned on a generational divide, with modernists occupying the younger, winning side. But as a decade and a half of revisionary historical scholarship has established, the cultural legacy of sentimental domesticity was not rejected, killed off, or supplanted in this period.15 Instead, it was rearticulated, making the sense of a revolutionary break with the past shared by modern domestic subjects an important but untrustworthy guide for later critics. In Grotesque Relations, I seek to comprehend and also to interrogate modernists’ revolutionary depictions of the domestic sphere. My aim is not to find the real revolution in the shell games that pervaded the period but to track the blurry motions of the game itself—a game fully capable of casting modern sentimental culture not only as the enemy of revolutionary change in the United States but also as its engine. The interpretive methodology I’ve developed combines a detailed historical approach with the social theory of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Donzelot, and Pierre Bourdieu; in the remaining sections of the introduction, I offer an overview of both strands of my approach. In subsequent chapters, I present extended analyses of six modernist texts, each of which engages a distinct set of social struggles critical to the formation of the

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U.S. welfare state. As the restricted sample would suggest, the book digs more than it surveys, and the digging yields different findings at different points. Because the state and market axes of the domestic exterior were only fully coordinated with the New Deal and the subsequent passage of the GI Bill, some of the earlier texts I examine emphasize the axis between home and state more than the axis between home and market; some do the reverse. By the end of the sequence, however, the literary texts themselves insist on a fully triadic set of grotesque relations among home, market, and state that renders any one term fully dependent on the other two.

Keeping House My argument as a whole rests on the claim that early campaigns in the United States to invest the state with a moral duty to protect and preserve the family ended up transforming both the family and the state. Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families provides a useful model for thinking about the double nature of this achievement. In that text, he adapts Hannah Arendt’s distinctive concept of the social to theorize the jagged course of modern domestic relations in France. Donzelot claims that the domain of the social first emerged in France and other liberal democracies in the late eighteenth century as an uncoordinated set of responses to the events of 1789. Arendt defines the social as “that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance,” and links its emergence to the moment when a focus on the magnitude of poor people’s need fatally diverted the energies of the French Revolution. Bouncing off this account, Donzelot uncovers a series of developments in the areas of education, philanthropy, medicine, law, and the various branches of psychology, all focused on the family, that gave rise to “a new political technique whereby need was made to operate as a means of social integration and no longer as a cause of insurrection.” When it rerouted the revolutionary impulses of political dissidents through the space of the domestic, the social domain established the needs of the modern family as a primary nexus for articulating and adjudicating wider social demands and conflicts. Arendt argues that the modern conception of society recasts “the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.” She gives “society” and “the social” a very broad field of reference, one that encompasses the entire national economy as well as the welfare state that regulates it. In contrast, Donzelot narrows the concept of the social to refer only to that sector of the service economy, lodged between the family and the

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state, which is charged with assuring the family’s minimal welfare and proper functioning.16 Located between these two definitions of the social, my concept of the domestic exterior plays Goldilocks to both. Pointing to a zone neither as big as the one nor as small as the other, it names a modern sentimental space developed to coordinate and moralize a triangle of relations emerging among market, home, and state. In modifying the term as well as the concepts that Arendt and Donzelot offer us, I’ve chosen a phrase that explicitly names an exfoliation of domestic space, and thus points to the primary role played by women’s sentimental discourse—over and against various professional discourses elaborated by men—in shaping the emergence of this new domain in the United States. When women reformers developed a maternalist politics “devoted to extending domestic ideals into public life,”17 they unfolded a sentimental construction of domestic space outward and, as Arendt’s own discussion indicates, created an enduring set of terms both for naming and for understanding a province of collective responsibility crucial to the construction of the U.S. welfare state. As a domain first brought into being at the level of discourse took on increasingly complex material form, the domestic exterior ceased to be simply an extension or effect of the domestic interior and began to shape and organize it in turn. For this reason, I use the phrase “domestic exterior” to indicate a new turn in experience as much as a new place on the social map. The domestic exterior emerges from and serves to reinforce a shifting axis of domestic expectation, one first articulated by the women activists who sought to fulfill their domestic roles through public action, and then confirmed by ordinary family members who increasingly turned outward to official sources in the public sphere to learn both who they were to one another and who they should become. Harking back to Arendt’s original concept of the social, the domestic exterior enforces the convergence of intimacy and alienation through a process of historical imbrication yoked to coordinated forms of state and market intervention in the domestic sphere.18 In the early decades of the twentieth century, this process was still new enough to startle contemporary observers. Modernists, in particular, played an important role in registering its effects. Through the heightened preoccupation with inversion that characterizes their grotesque aesthetic, they sought to capture and make thinkable the turn that occurred as the domestic exterior began to recast domestic and psychological interiors as ruly and unruly by-products of itself. In their fiction, modernists portray the domestic exterior as an unfamiliar and defamiliarizing site of collective negotiation and struggle, one radically open to further proposition and debate. In keeping with their own emphasis on ideological contest, I further modify Arendt’s and Donzelot’s definitions of

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the social to foreground the role of print and media culture in producing, mapping, and remapping the ground of the domestic exterior. This modification is particularly germane to the study of the United States. In the early decades of the twentieth century, maternalists ran media campaigns featuring stories of poor families in distress to generate public support for the nation’s earliest welfare initiatives. As the century wore on, commercial representations of domestic life—long pitched to the white middle class—reached ever-broader audiences, operating in tandem, if not always in accord, with a growing set of government directives aimed at securing the centrality of the domestic sphere in a consumption-driven national economy. From the start, modernist domestic fiction shared the task of depicting the “American family” with a cacophonous array of other state- and market-issued textual forms. One of its most important innovations was to make the collective and contested nature of this task an overt object of literary representation. Literary critics and historians have long recognized the ways in which domestic discourse, and sentimental discourse in particular, has shaped political agendas, market opportunities, and social destinies in the public sphere. By Nancy Armstrong’s account, from the late eighteenth century onward, European print discourses surrounding the sentimental wife and mother helped to define and determine the class borders and class destiny of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Amy Schrager Lang argues that, in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction, the nation’s increasingly fraught class relations were typically “figured . . . through the home, within the home, between homes, in the absence of homes, and in the creation of new homes.” Likewise, Lora Romero examines how nineteenth-century U.S. writers used domestic discourse to engage and even generate the terms for numerous debates over public policy. She claims that “within the discursive parameters which house them all,” domestic texts “acquire their own, highly contingent fronts for mediating cultural, social, and political conditions.” And she points to the role played by domestic discourse in erecting “the skeletal structure upon which the nation built a system of social welfare.” In her study of the period, Lori Merish argues that sentimental culture and domestic fiction elaborate “an ‘ethic’ of feminine consumption” “while suppressing the marketplace orientation of ‘private’ life.” And she tracks the translation of domestic habits of “sentimental ownership” into the political postures of benevolent guardianship which went on to become the hallmark of the “liberal-capitalist social order” maintained by the welfare state.19 Historians join literary critics in pointing to the intimate relationship between sentimental discourse and state building. Recent studies highlight the role of sentimental texts and narrative conventions in revising laws governing marriage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 Sentimental

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discourse also authorized the nation’s first state-sponsored welfare programs. As Kathryn Kish Sklar has argued, several historical factors peculiar to the United States initially limited the power of a white male elite to realize social welfare proposals through conventional legislative and executive channels, and gave a white female elite enlarged opportunities to effect change in the name of gender rather than class.21 Still denied a formal role in the political process, early twentieth-century women activists relied on national club networks and savvy media campaigns pitched at women readers to build support for their initiatives. Two examples culled from Theda Skocpol’s study of the campaigns to set up state-level mothers’ pension programs give a sense of the strength and character of their political rhetoric. A story in the August 1912 issue of the Delineator begins by invoking the annual catastrophe of “thousands of American children . . . torn from their mothers to be given to strangers. Not because those mothers are bad. Only because, through no fault of their own, they are poor.” A December editorial that ran the same year, titled “Our Christmas Wish for Women: That Every Decent Mother in America Could Have Her Babies with Her,” insists to readers that mothers’ pensions “need not be a vain wish, in the years to come, if you will only let your mother-love spread itself just a little way outside your own door.”22 When they circulated sentimental and sensational accounts of poor mothers in crisis to win readers over to their cause, maternalist reformers blew new life into a discourse that modernists were eagerly knelling to the grave, self-consciously modernizing that discourse even as they used it to modernize the state. Skocpol’s attention to these narratives is crucial because it locates an important turning point in the history of sentimental narratives’ commercial circulation in the United States. As commodities, such narratives helped to build and define the axis of home and market from the eighteenth century onward. When maternalist reformers used the same commodity form to garner support for welfare reform, they redeployed sentimental narrative conventions to generate a second axis—of moral protection, provision, and regulation—between home and state, and thus an implied third axis between state and market. The domestic exterior first emerged in this triangular space mapped out by their endeavors. This exfoliated domestic domain, I am arguing, became the best available ground at the time for imagining and constructing the U.S. welfare state, and remains to this day the favored terrain through which the state’s address to citizens is routed. In an important sense, domestic fiction—to reinvoke Romero’s metaphor— has always faced outward, no matter how interiorized its ostensible concerns might be. What makes modernist domestic fiction historically distinctive, then, is not the way in which it “fronts” and confronts a home-haunted

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space beyond the home, but the way in which it seeks to make that space of confrontation—the space of its own possibility—visible and legible within the text itself. With the emergence of modernist domestic fiction, the conflictridden space between home, market, and a newly engaged state becomes the explicit object of narrative attention and rhetorical figuration. Through their myriad inversions of sentimental discourse, modernist writers forged an enduring set of strategies for representing—and misrepresenting—the U.S. welfare state’s own modern sentimental project of domestic reform. In the final phase of this project, state promotion of a sentimental domestic model for all white citizens became the linchpin of the welfare state’s protective and regulatory relationship to the market. Precisely because nineteenth-century markets in sentimental fiction had shaped and disseminated domestic norms for which the state would assume administrative responsibility in the twentieth, modernist aesthetic struggles over the representation of domesticity in this period become inseparable from social and political struggles over the combined role of market and state in everyday life. Modernist domestic fiction registers its struggle with modern sentimental power at two levels of the text. While the texts I analyze include overt references to agents and agencies associated with the emerging history of the welfare state—social workers, public health clinics, antilynching activists, and so forth—I have not chosen to work with these texts because such references abound. Judged at the level of content, sentimental and realist narratives from the same period offer a much more accessible array of pertinent references.23 Instead, I am interested in the way grotesque domestic fiction responds to the unfolding history of the welfare state through form as much as content. A formal reliance on the grotesque marks modernists’ common resistance to the sentimental, a refusal of its newly normative and normalizing power. But it also seems to mark their common intuition of what the sentimental itself becomes in the fraught space of the domestic exterior from which our welfare state arose. In the flickering chambers of their domestic fiction, modernists bequeath to us a discursive legacy that complicates our continued indebtedness to sentimental paradigms of domestic life, not vanquishing those paradigms entirely but creating and codifying modes for expressing the sense of alienation and ambivalence that accompanies even our most intimate reliance on them.

Helping Mother Because the texts I’ll be discussing engage distinct nodes of struggle critical to the emergence of the welfare state and because they tend to do so most

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tenaciously at the relatively opaque level of form, a brief macro-history of that emergence—which foregrounds the state’s absorption and elaboration of sentimental domestic agendas—will help to situate their individual representational projects in a common frame. Any history of the welfare state must confront the question of which struggles were relevant to its formation. Here and throughout the book, I assume that debates about what counted as a welfare issue were themselves critical to the formation of our welfare state and that the arguments of historical losers in these debates are as important to consider as those of historical winners. In addition, I review a number of state initiatives—such as educational reform and shifts in marriage, reproduction, and immigration law—that were not considered welfare issues at the time, but that take on a special pertinence when viewed in relation to the welfare state we now possess. My approach, indebted to a recent wave of revisionist and feminist historiography, challenges a more familiar account that associates the origins of the U.S. welfare state with Roosevelt’s New Deal. Current scholarship on modernism and the welfare state takes its cue from the latter account.24 This scholarship has opened up an important new field of discussion and has rejuvenated the project of reading modernist texts back into the historical and political contexts from which they were initially disengaged. But the equation of the New Deal with the origins of the U.S. welfare state has also served to reintroduce critical biases into our contextual understanding of modernist texts that several decades of feminist, labor, postcolonial, and critical race studies have sought to expose and dislodge. Such an equation reproduces, rather than examines, assumptions about the normative status of middle-class, white, male civic experience inscribed within New Deal legislation, generating critical accounts whose explanatory power is limited not only to what is, after all, a nonrepresentative group, but is also distorted even in relation to that group. In the leading example of this scholarship, New Deal Modernism, Michael Szalay presents the idea of social insurance as the defining characteristic of our welfare state, founded on a new conception of responsible community radically at odds with older, sentimental traditions of charitable giving. As Szalay puts it, “Insurance is not charity; we don’t collect from insurance companies because they feel sorry for us, but rather because we have paid for the benefits we receive. In this account, insurance affiliates individuals with financial collectives precisely to moot the role of sympathy in producing harmonious social outcomes.”25 Szalay’s focus on social insurance gives his argument a synecdochic structure, which identifies the Social Security Administration as “the heart” of a “nascent” and “newly forming welfare state” and places conceptual innovations associated with “broadly actuarial patterns of thought and practice” “at the heart of the Social Security Administration.”26 This argument,

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while it has generated provocative and often persuasive readings of the period, poses a monolithic and originary relationship between the 1935 Social Security Act and the welfare state we now possess, as opposed to the two-pronged and revisionary role it actually played historically. As Szalay himself notes in passing, historians now routinely locate the origins of our welfare state much earlier than the New Deal, in early veterans’ and mothers’ pension programs. And they emphasize the importance of a sentimental family model both to the state’s vision of social welfare and to its system for defining and distributing benefits. When critical emphasis is placed on these two factors, the 1935 act appears not so much to disrupt, as to preserve in new form, traditions of sentimental thought and action dating back to the nineteenth century. Even social insurance programs participate in the perpetuation of these traditions. Such programs, as Szalay stresses, were designed to be resolutely impersonal. But they were also designed to cut off most white women and racial minorities from various “entitlements” conferred on steadily employed white men. As such, these programs gave new federal backing to the old idea that nonwhite communities did not really have home lives worth securing in the first place and that white women’s social security properly depended on securing husbands—almost never an entirely impersonal business. In addition, the same 1935 Social Security Act authorized a second track of programs for the poor that retained the personally stigmatizing associations of “public relief” and that attached the delivery of benefits to open-ended forms of personal supervision. Poor mothers, in particular, found state support contingent on their conformity to sentimental standards of sexual and moral conduct.27 The full significance of such a demand does not become clear until we look beyond the 1935 act and take into account a whole array of earlier and later state and federal initiatives aimed at normalizing and modernizing families of all classes. What emerges from this larger picture is not a monolithic welfare state radically committed to the impersonal notion of social insurance, but a heterogeneously constituted welfare state prepared to back up its promotion of a specific—modern sentimental—form of personal life in different ways for different populations. New Deal investments in the modern sentimental family rested on decades of activity spearheaded by reformers who sought to fuse a sentimental tradition of maternalism with an often groundbreaking commitment to the objective methods of modern social science.28 Historians trace the roots of this reform activity to the rise of the social sciences and the changing vision of women’s volunteer work in the late nineteenth century. Early gender and racial divisions in the social sciences had a lasting impact on the development of social research and social reform in the United States. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, a series of academic freedom trials, combined with professionalizing

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trends in their fields of study, had persuaded most white male social scientists to cut the bond between social research and social activism and to redefine their knowledge base in purely impersonal and objective terms. In contrast, African Americans and white women drawn to the social sciences tended to maintain the vital link between research and reform. Black activists were forced to organize outside official channels to ensure the welfare of black communities. Profoundly marginalized in their professions, black male scholars and educators nevertheless made major contributions to the social sciences and created forums for social reform and welfare in the black metropolis, founding the National Urban League in 1910 and its journal, Opportunity, in 1923. Black women, shut out of university positions and white women’s organizations alike, took the leading role in creating a variety of social institutions for their communities that state and local governments provided to white people as a matter of course. They set up local schools, settlement houses, libraries, hospitals, orphanages, and old age homes; created a national framework for their work with the foundation of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896; and contributed heavily to the welfare efforts of later organizations like the National Urban League. A number of white women, also shut out of university careers in the major disciplines, were nevertheless able to trade on race- and class-based privileges to forge highly influential careers in the professions and eventually in government. They dominated the new disciplines of social work and domestic science, and pioneered in settlement work and welfare reform legislation.29 By the 1920s, the different inheritances of these four social groups had hardened into distinct spheres of activity and modes of contribution. During the late teens and early twenties, the drive to pass federal antilynching legislation became the primary site of African American demands that the federal government protect their welfare along with that of other citizens. This attempt to shape federal policy from the outside would constitute the race’s most significant engagement with an emerging welfare state that all but excluded black participation on the inside. The federal government had been officially segregated since 1913, and African Americans only won the chance to shape federal welfare policy at the national level, and then only marginally, with the New Deal.30 After years of failed attempts to set up social insurance programs at the state level, white male academics successfully interested the federal government in their objective scientific methods during the Great War, creating a partnership that would culminate in the historic legislation of the New Deal.31 In contrast, white women activists saw decades of achievement in the areas of public health, protective labor legislation, and mothers’ pension programs fall under attack in the anti-Red campaigns that closed out World War I. But their

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record of reform could not be wiped out overnight, and the sentimental ideal of white motherhood that they championed went on to become one of the organizing principles of our welfare state. Theodore Roosevelt summed up the vision of this early cadre of welfare activists at the watershed 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. There, he prophetically insisted: “Surely . . . the goal toward which we should strive is to help the mother, so that she can keep her own home and keep the child in it.”32 This conference provided the jumping-off point for a nationwide drive for state mothers’ pension programs, fueled by a media campaign whose emotionally appealing story lines reached millions of women readers. Mothers’ pension programs passed in twenty states between 1911 and 1913, with victories tallied in forty states by 1920. A milestone in modern U.S. welfare legislation, these programs retained many of the features of nineteenth-century charitable giving, excluding African Americans almost entirely and relying on morals testing to manage limited funds.33 During the same years, the National Consumers’ League joined forces with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the male-dominated National Child Labor Committee to protect women and children in the paid labor force. Between 1908, when a landmark Supreme Court decision upheld hours limits for working women, and the Red Scare of the late teens and early twenties, when a series of Supreme Court decisions on child labor and minimum wage laws went against them, these groups scored multiple victories. Maternalist reformers gained a Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1918 and crafted state-level protective labor laws for women and children that would constitute the major legal precedent for the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act of the New Deal.34 But the coalition’s biggest victories—again rooted in media campaigns directed at women readers35—were the 1912 creation of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor and the subsequent passage of the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act in 1921. Linda Gordon has called the creation of the Children’s Bureau “an extraordinary development unique to this nation” and one “which was extremely consequential for the formation of welfare in the United States.”36 The bureau gave maternalist reformers an opening foothold in the federal government and became the leading testament to their ability to mobilize women readers’ sentimental attachments in order to modernize the state. The 1921 SheppardTowner Act inaugurated the nation’s first federal social welfare program. Between 1922 and 1929, when the last federal funds dried up, the act disbursed grants to states to provide free public health clinics for mothers with infants, regardless of their race, class, or moral status. But relaxed standards of eligibility went hand in hand with an emphasis on Americanization, and clinics

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defined many immigrant and African American cultural practices as inimical to infants’ health. Gwendolyn Mink has characterized the Sheppard-Towner Act as “the first national policy to tie cultural and gender-role conformity to the social welfare,” and she argues that its programs, which did save many children’s lives, also made “the imitation of a middle-class, Anglo American maternal ideal the price of women’s citizenship.”37 A similar concern for the well-being of the nation’s families and particularly its children led many maternalist reformers to join male academics in calling for government involvement in eugenics. As the legally monitored gateway to the nation’s future generations, marriage attracted particular anxiety and concern. Progressive Era reformers inherited marriage codes already shaped by court battles dating from the Civil War. In 1879, a Supreme Court case upholding an 1862 ban on polygamy granted heterosexual monogamy a foundational relationship to the democratic state.38 During the same period, twentyfour states introduced, updated, or preserved bans on interracial marriage in legislation that survived fifteen separate court challenges between 1869 and 1895.39 The discourse of eugenics offered new ways of justifying and extending this legislative trend. Armed with pseudoscientific arguments declaring the genetic inferiority of African Americans and Southern and Eastern European immigrants, thirty states passed new marriage laws between 1896 and 1914 that prohibited unions between various categories of the “unfit.” Between 1907 and 1917, sixteen states passed sterilization laws aimed at the same dubiously defined populations; on the strength of a sympathetic 1927 Supreme Court decision, eight more states passed similar legislation by the end of the decade. Because eugenicists considered female sexual expression outside of marriage to be an index of “feeble-mindedness,” sterilization laws effectively made adherence to sentimental codes of domestic conduct a state-enforced condition of women’s right to sexual reproduction, particularly among the poor.40 But reformers’ largest coup in controlling the genetic composition of the nation’s future citizenry came with the federal passage of the 1924 Immigrant Restriction Act, which banned Asian immigration entirely and eventually pegged annual quotas for other immigration groups to the distribution of “national origins” in the current U.S. population.41 This act left a deep mark on contemporary struggles to define the boundaries of whiteness, struggles that undergirded the racial politics of the New Deal. Anti-immigrant feeling and a sentimental concern for the distressed child jointly informed the drive to set up a second legal system for the young. Maternalist reformers successfully pushed for the creation of the first juvenile court in 1899; by 1917, only three states lacked such a court system. Juvenile courts pioneered in the use of social environmentalist and psychotherapeutic approaches

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with young offenders. But major components of a sentimental tradition survived in their assumption that flawed cultural norms and a faulty home life lay behind the problems of their largely poor, urban, and immigrant clientele. By 1914, concern for the child brought divorce suits—and, with them, an increasing number of middle-class couples—under the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts, and led to the development of separate domestic or family courts. By the 1920s, a sentimental bias toward the mother’s irreplaceable role as caretaker—recast in the new language of psychotherapy—came to dominate the new court system.42 The courts also created important links across an expanding network of social and therapeutic agencies: they drew hundreds of social workers into the legal system and routinely referred clients to marriage counseling and child guidance centers. During the same period, new pedagogies, combined with legislative reform and demographic shifts, profoundly changed the roles that schools played in the lives of young people. By 1918, new or newly strengthened compulsory education laws in all states worked in tandem with child labor legislation to put and keep record numbers of children in school. Administration of public education occurred at the state and local levels, except in the case of Native Americans, who were placed in federally run vocational boarding schools as early as the 1880s. For other populations, a few important federal acts had widely felt effects: the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 endowed state land-grant colleges for whites and later for African Americans, and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 provided federal funds to the states for vocational education. In 1936, the George-Deen Act updated and expanded these provisions as part of the New Deal. Educational tracking became common practice in U.S. schools after World War I; at the same time, a 1917 federal study, titled Negro Education, gave unprecedented federal backing to plans to mandate segregated vocational training for all black students in the South, despite long-standing objections from W. E. B. DuBois and other black intellectuals.43 For female students, vocational education almost always meant training in home economics (initially called domestic science). Domestic science departments, first introduced into the land-grant colleges through another successful media campaign pitched at women, were installed in 30 colleges and universities by 1900 and in 195 by 1916. A series of acts stretching from the Hatch Act of 1887 to the Capper-Ketchum Act of 1928 allotted federal funding through the land-grant colleges to set up experiment stations, extension courses, 4-H clubs, radio programming, health campaigns, and home demonstrations in rural areas. These programs supplemented home economists’ efforts in the cities, where educators used federal money to train immigrant daughters and their mothers in “American” childrearing and housekeeping practices. These

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training programs largely excluded African American students and typically prepared those who did enroll for work in white people’s houses. The sheer variety of domestic education programs in these years supported the growth of the home economics profession, even as it secured the federal government’s intimate involvement in the movement to improve and standardize family life nationwide.44 While home economists initially felt that only poor people needed instruction in child care, by the mid-1920s, the profession’s national association endorsed parent education for all classes.45 This shift coincided with a trend to offer children social services, ranging from subsidized lunches to medical check-ups, through the public schools. Private philanthropic foundations, settlement workers, and women’s groups piloted numerous programs in the 1920s and ’30s that often went on to receive municipal and state funding at a later point. After 1915, increasing numbers of social workers got jobs in urban public schools, where they worked alongside public health nurses and, more rarely, school psychiatrists and psychologists. While the premium placed on stay-at-home mothering prevented the widespread establishment of nursery schools, child study centers and child guidance clinics proliferated rapidly in the 1920s, becoming important centers for the investigation and treatment of maladjusted children.46 The expansion of social services to families through the schools dovetailed with a growing emphasis on individual and family casework among social workers. Thus, Charles H. Judd’s declaration in the major 1933 federal study, Recent Social Trends in the United States, that modern schools were assuming “responsibility for many phases of child care and training which formerly were thought of as belonging wholly to the home” finds its counterpart in Sydnor H. Walker’s observation in the same volume that “social workers of the United States start from the assumption that preservation of the family as the basic unit of social living is their accepted objective.”47 This objective arose directly from sentimental traditions of charity. The first schools in social work grew out of turn-of-the-century programs set up by the Charity Organization Societies to train “friendly visitors” to instruct poor people in their homes. The casework approach, favored by the COS from the start, received a boost from the growing authority of psychiatry in the 1920s, even as psychiatric caseworkers deployed in the mental hygiene movement, the child guidance movement, and veterans’ services began to identify middle-class people as an important sector of their clientele.48 In the same period, the steady flow of African American workers from the South propelled municipal and state social service agencies to integrate their staffs, giving black social workers important roles in the urban landscapes of the North.49

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The catastrophic upheavals of the Depression led a number of social workers to question their nascent profession’s prevailing emphasis on individual adjustment, to protest the systemic effects of racism, and to revive an earlier emphasis on modern poverty as an unjustifiable by-product of capitalism. These critiques energized the rank-and-file movement of the early thirties, which called for a thorough rethinking of U.S. welfare policy along Communist lines. But by the end of the decade, radical dissent within the profession gave way to widespread support for a New Deal that was making trained social workers a pervasive and integral part of the government’s address to its citizens. Riding the crest of the Keynesian turn in New Deal economic policy, public assistance programs opened large new markets for social casework. At the same time, a growing demand for their services in more affluent public school districts and among a private middle-class clientele allowed social workers to refine the psychological approach to casework, which now became the dominant model for all income groups.50 The class-bifurcated nature of the social and therapeutic professions’ postwar focus on the family accords with Donzelot’s account of a new style of “government through the family”; as he argues, families of means usually choose to contract privately to acquire or refine the social and psychological skills underpinning their “autonomy”—if only to keep from falling into a second, involuntary and state-managed, “register of tutelage.”51 The casework model, grounded in a prescriptive understanding of the home’s—and particularly the mother’s—lasting influence on social and psychological development, also testifies to the success of early campaigns to modernize nineteenth-century templates of sentimental domesticity. The triumph of this model in a coordinated state-and-market system of social adjustment suggests the reaches of the federal government’s investment in private life, even as it highlights the mixed, conservative and transformative, character of maternalists’ modern sentimental project of domestic reform. In 1909, when Teddy Roosevelt declared that “the goal toward which we should strive is to help the mother, so that she can keep her own home and keep the child in it,” he signaled the welfare priorities of a vanguard elite. By the time Franklin Roosevelt presided over the making of the New Deal, the government’s hand in helping mother had lodged itself at the core of a welfare paradigm that eventually proved capable of transforming the government itself.

Three Revolutions For modernist writers of domestic fiction, the continuities of family life seemed negligible when weighed against actual and potential changes associated with

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three contemporary discourses of revolution. When they linked the topsy-turvy space of modern domesticity to the threat or promise of either socialist revolution or the “revolution in manners and morals,” modernists joined a wide number of other commentators who routinely framed the subject in just these terms. But modernist writers were unique in the special prominence they gave to the avant-garde’s “revolution of the word” as a force of domestic upheaval. All of the writers considered in this book—with the partial exception of Edna Ferber— developed an aesthetic strongly associated with the European avant-garde. Three of them—Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, and Nathanael West—participated directly in the bohemian and avant-garde circles of New York, Chicago, and Paris and published their work in the little magazines that disseminated the avantgarde’s radical blend of art and politics to a wider U.S. readership.52 These three writers, along with Tillie Olsen, paid particular tribute to surrealist themes and techniques in their fiction.53 But the common reliance on a grotesque aesthetic also links these and other writers of modernist domestic fiction with a wider spectrum of European avant-garde experimentation, running from the early dramas of German expressionism to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. As critics have long noted, attacks on sentimentality were a prominent component of the avantgarde assault on bourgeois definitions of art and morality. Feminist critics rightly identify a misogynist strain running through many of these attacks,54 but we have paid less attention to avant-garde groups’ objections to the new relations being forged between family and state, relations which revolved around the state’s new investment in, and sponsorship of, sentimental codes of feeling. Attacks on sentimentality became a minor specialty for Italian futurists. Raging against “the pestilence of sentimentality” in a 1919 manifesto on “Marriage and the Family,” Marinetti acidly describes the bourgeois family as a “grotesque squeeze of souls and nerves” composed of “one victim, two victims, three martyrs, one slaughter, one total madness, a tyrant who is losing his power.” Such critiques did not extend to the public realm, where the futurists exalted militant forms of patriarchal tyranny as the antidote to a floundering national scene overrun by women. But for the Dadaists, war emerged as the connecting link between a sentimental family and a sentimental nation-state. In 1918, Tristan Tzara argued that “every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada,” and fused Dada’s attack on the canons of good taste, guarded “by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners,” with an indictment of forms of feeling nursed in support of patriotic carnage: “literature and art . . . served the war and, all the while expressing fine sentiments, they lent their prestige to atrocious inequality, sentimental misery, injustice and degradation of the instincts.”55

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The French surrealists took the fight one step further. Their celebration of amour fou developed, at least in part, in reaction against the growing rationalization of love by a state claiming new responsibility for the welfare of families. In their 1927 manifesto, “Hands Off Love,” Breton and friends rail against the state’s involvement in the marital affairs of their beloved Charlie Chaplin, dragged into a U.S. divorce court on charges of immorality by a “housewife with her brats backed up by the figure of the constable, the savings bank.” Surrealists’ subsequent affiliation with the Communist Party only strengthened this critique: a 1936 protest rally, held in international opposition to “the concepts of family and country,” signaled the important place an antidomestic agenda had in the larger campaign to abolish the nation-state. This campaign drew surrealists into line with projects under way in Russia to dispense with private life altogether. There, avant-garde innovations in theater and film called on peasant traditions of carnival to incarnate the hopes of the people’s revolution. A parallel critique of middle-class domestic culture found the very furniture of the bourgeois household guilty of preserving unjustifiable social attitudes, giving rise to such memorable interventions as Tatlin’s 1930 manifesto, “The Problem of the Relationship Between Man and Object: Let Us Declare War on Chests of Drawers and Sideboards.”56 For modernists attuned to the subversive spirit of the little magazines, the bonds of allegiance forged between avant-garde and radical socialist and communist circles in Germany, France, and Russia helped to create a feeling of proximity and overlap between the discourses of aesthetic and socialist revolution, not least at their convergence point on questions of modern domesticity. For Americans in general, the 1917 revolution in Russia gave new urgency and weight to a native tradition of labor radicalism that reached back to the Haymarket trials of 1886 and grabbed headlines again with the strong socialist vote of 1912 and the widely publicized activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). To many right- and left-wing activists of the period, socialist revolution in the United States seemed to be just around the corner. Modernists were well positioned to feel the force of such anticipations. Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, government officials not only jailed and deported suspected radicals, but also brought the editors of the Masses to trial, shut down the pacifist journal The Seven Arts, and threatened other leftist journals like The Little Review and The Messenger with prosecution. In the following year, the formation of the Communist Party, combined with a wave of strikes and racial clashes nationwide, spurred the government to still more acts of violent repression, culminating in several thousand arrests and hundreds of deportations in late 1919 and early 1920.57

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The fate of the family under socialism became a sensational news item in the United States during these years, particularly after passage of the new Soviet Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in 1918. This code granted greater autonomy to women and radicalized laws governing divorce, alimony, adoption, and illegitimacy. A 1920 law made the Soviet Union the first country in the world to offer women unrestricted legal access to abortion, and the establishment of public day care centers and collective kitchens in major cities by the early twenties partially fulfilled the state’s promise to socialize women’s traditional household duties. But tensions between the code and lingering habits of patriarchal oppression, exacerbated by widespread famine, unemployment, and homelessness, forced a sharp about-face on family matters. By 1936, the Soviet state had adopted a pronatalist stance and abandoned its plans for socializing domestic labor. With passage of the conservative 1944 Family Edict, its earlier, revolutionary vision of family life was largely repealed.58 The actual record of Soviet attempts to revolutionize the domestic sphere was, however, ultimately less significant in the United States than the rash of discussions concerning the imminent threat to American families which that record inspired. Despite the CPUSA’s pronounced indifference to domestic oppression at the time,59 right-wing organizations made the Soviet “nationalisation of women” a standard feature of anti-Red propaganda.60 In Jean Toomer’s 1922 play, Natalie Mann, members of Washington’s black bourgeoisie respond with shock to rumors that the cultural prophet Nathan Merilh “is a socialist and a bolshevist” who “wants to communize women.”61 As Toomer’s glancing satire indicates, social conservatives often worried more over the threat of Communist penetration of the bedroom and nursery than of the shop floor. A number of anti-Communist groups held up the historic victories of maternalist reformers as proof that such penetration had already taken place. In a 1927 article written to refute claims that the Sheppard-Towner Act had been “ordered in Moscow,” Carrie Chapman Catt ruefully ventriloquizes contemporary charges lodged against the Children’s Bureau: “It appears that the reds always begin with special care of babies!”62 For Tillie Olsen, who portrays one of the public health clinics sponsored by the Sheppard-Towner Act in Yonnondio, the special care of babies would become an important site for exploring just how “Red” federal intervention in working-class family life really was. But for right-wing critics, fine distinctions were irrelevant. Bolstered by the infamous Spider Web chart of 1924, which purported to identify the Bolshevik affiliations of numerous women’s groups and women activists, anti-Communists and other conservatives managed to scuttle the Children’s Bureau’s main initiatives, repealing the Sheppard-Towner Act and blocking passage of a federal child labor amendment. The force of their accusations halted the implementation of further

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federal welfare legislation until the New Deal, when new threats of socialist takeover dogged the Roosevelt administration or, for more careful observers, rendered the president’s proposals the lesser evil amid radical alternatives.63 Anti-Communist organizations of the period were not the only ones to entertain the idea of the American family’s radical transformation along socialist lines. Several liberal academics included sections on socialism in their studies of the family and, after 1917, routinely made reference to the Russian experiment.64 Further to the left, socialist historian Arthur Calhoun concluded his massive 1919 study, A Social History of the American Family from Colonial Times to the Present, with a detailed picture of the coming American socialist family ruled by “equality of opportunity for every child born in so far as social control, and subsidy where necessary, can secure such equality.”65 Marxist literary critic and editor V. F. Calverton followed suit, advancing the argument in his 1929 book, The Bankruptcy of Marriage, that the new family relations of Soviet society were giving fullest expression to a “revolution in morals” “already tearing at the roots of [American] social and economic life.”66 In three other anthologies on modern sex and family relations published with his co-editor, Samuel D. Schmalhausen, between 1929 and 1931, Calverton continued to relate the “revolution occurring in moral life” in the United States to the Russian experience.67 In insisting upon the essential continuity between changing family patterns in the United States and the Soviet Union, Calverton established a socialist pole of connotation for a phrase that Frederick Lewis Allen would deploy in his 1931 memoir, Only Yesterday, to characterize the recent shift in mainstream values. “The revolution in manners and morals,” as Allen titles a chapter in that memoir, has subsequently been used by historians to name the broad set of cultural changes associated with accelerating levels of consumption, the growing influence of mass culture, and liberalized attitudes regarding middle-class white women’s sexuality.68 I use the term here to name the third major discourse of revolution to inform U.S. modernist representations of the domestic sphere. Allen himself identifies women’s suffrage and professional gains, the popularization of Freud, the flapper lifestyle, and modern home conveniences as the mixed signs and sources of a cultural revolution that found its “principal remaining forces” in “prohibition, the automobile, the confession and sex magazines, and the movies.”69 Allen’s account synthesizes over a decade of wider media discussion on the subject, which had made the middle-class flapper, with her sparkling blend of sexual ease and consumer savvy, the revolution’s favorite figurehead. As early as 1914, Owen Johnson, in his novel The Salamander, was evoking a “world revolution” led by a “new army of women” “bundles in arms, light of purse, rebel in heart, moving in silent thousands toward the great cities.”70 His mock-militaristic fantasy of “feminine revolution” recurs,

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in both strong and weak forms, in countless subsequent descriptions of the New Woman, who, in heading up the “revolution” from “good pal” to “flapper,” had, as one commentator playfully assured his readers, “for free white persons” “saved what 1776 won.”71 The cultural trends promoted under the banner of a revolution in manners and morals had a complex and often co-optive relationship to the two other discourses of revolution informing modernists’ depiction of the domestic sphere. In his memoir of the twenties, Exile’s Return (1934), Malcolm Cowley argues that, while the bohemian and avant-garde circles of Greenwich Village were not “the source of the revolution in morals that affected all our lives in the decade after the war,” they nevertheless “gave form to the movement, created its fashions, and supplied the writers and illustrators who would render them popular.”72 Villagers were among the earliest supporters of Margaret Sanger and were the first to popularize Freud’s ideas in the mainstream U.S. press, inflecting them with an optimistic faith in instinct that Freud himself hardly shared.73 The rapidly expanding field of advertising also drew on major strands of Villagers’ radical political culture. As historians Nancy Cott and Stuart Ewen have documented, advertisers in the interwar period absorbed and rearticulated both radical feminist and revolutionary socialist sentiment in their pitches to consumers, selling commodities as daring expressions of gender- and class-based demands for social equality and increasingly associating the act of consumption itself with both the practice and the preservation of democracy.74 Several modernists considered here enlarge upon these connections among consumer culture, greater sexual expressiveness, and the promise of radical equality in their fiction. In the middle sections of Cane, Toomer invests the new commercial venues of black art and entertainment with a revolutionary power to liberate participants from the linked orders of racist oppression and domestic repression. In Edna Ferber’s American Beauty, the assimilative logic of market exchange levels racial and cultural hierarchies. Writing from the opposing vantage point in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West associates cinematic paradigms of domestic consumption with a destructive capacity to loosen women’s attachment to the home and to turn its role in preserving racial, gender, and class hierarchies upside down. The recurring scenes and tropes of consumer revolution in this fiction—like those of socialist and aesthetic revolution—exceed anything the historical record can confirm. But because revolutionary socialist and avant-garde ambitions were not fulfilled in the United States, many critics on the left continue to keep faith with their genuine revolutionary potential. In contrast, the revolution in manners and morals, which did generate the terms of a new status quo, appears quite suspect to

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readers today, and modernists’ intense emotional and political investments in it now seem misplaced. The mixed history of the relationship between modern U.S. consumer culture and the emerging welfare state helps to explain the gap between modernist claims regarding the revolutionary power of sexual and consumer pleasure and our own disenchantment with such claims. Historians locate a shift in the dominant codes of sexual conduct as far back as the early 1890s, long before Freud’s impact was felt in the United States, when social scientists began to back campaigns for liberalized divorce laws.75 Judge Ben Lindsey, of the Denver Juvenile and Family Court, is widely credited with formulating and promoting the “companionate marriage”—a childless marriage form grounded in legal access to birth control and no-alimony divorce—that came to stand at the heart of the revolution in manners and morals. Less often noted is Lindsey’s enlarged vision of the state’s role in regulating human sexuality. Lindsey used his 1927 book, Companionate Marriage, to call for the creation of government “House[s] of Human Welfare”—also to be known as “Temple[s] of Venus”—which would offer prospective heterosexual couples instruction in “the meaning and significance of sex and . . . the art of love.”76 The idea of direct government oversight of “the art of love” may strike our own ears as a little wild; after all, in a 1918 manifesto calling for a Dadaist state, the Berlin-based “Dadaist revolutionary central council” roguishly extended a similar demand for “immediate regulation of all sexual relations according to the views of international Dadaism through establishment of a Dadaist sexual center.”77 But, in fact, something of the kind was achieved in the United States through the introduction of home economics courses on family living in the public schools. In addition to promoting the latest sociological understandings of appropriate family roles, classes in home economics constituted one of the most important ways in which the federal government endorsed a consumer lifestyle and sought to anchor it in the domestic sphere. After an array of federally funded jobs helped to establish the profession, home economists of the twenties increasingly turned to the business sector for jobs in journalism, the food industry, department stores, and household manufacturing firms. Though they now used their skills to advance the interests of private employers, they retained an authority grounded in the profession’s history of public service. Moreover, the persistence of home economics courses in public schools created myriad opportunities for indirect federal endorsement of a family-based consumer lifestyle and further blurred the line between consumer pedagogies disseminated for the public good and for private gain.78 Roosevelt would not recognize aggregate consumption as the necessary engine of stable economic growth until the 1937–1938 recession threw his

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administration’s previous achievements into jeopardy and prompted the turn to the Keynesian economic policies that have dominated federal oversight of a mixed economy ever since.79 But from the start, New Deal programs envisioned the linked concepts of a family wage and increased consumer purchasing power as the way out of economic crisis,80 and inscribed gender- and race-inflected norms of domestic labor and consumption in the general plan for national recovery. The Works Progress Administration refused to hire women with access to a male wage and further discriminated on the basis of race. Mimi Abramovitz reports that “black women comprised only 2.1 percent of all WPA workers in 1939, compared to 11 percent for white women.” The WPA also upheld domestic definitions of women’s labor when it routed most successful female applicants to jobs in sewing, canning, and school lunch preparation. Emergency education programs defined (white) women as modern home consumers, offering instruction in “cooking, nutrition, child care, and consumer skills.” Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps also instructed women in the wifely arts, while the Household Service Demonstration Project, instituted in 1937, trained women as domestic servants.81 But the government’s most heavy-handed endorsement of the domestic sphere as a site of escalating white consumption came with its new presence in the housing market. In 1932, Herbert Hoover convened the national Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. In 1934, the National Housing Act, which created the Federal Housing Authority, mandated limited construction of low-income public housing, while approving handsome subsidies on single-family home purchases to qualifying sectors of the middle class. The explicit endorsement of redlining and racial covenants in federal mortgage guidelines—tactics that were not declared illegal until 1948—placed the expanded power of the federal government behind existing patterns of racial segregation in the housing market. Passage of the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act only aggravated the negative effects of these developments. In combination, FHA policies and the GI Bill routinized race-based cycles of poverty and prosperity, funding white flight to the suburbs where rising tax bases ensured good public schools, and locking generations of African Americans into badly serviced urban ghettos.82 For numerous commentators of the twenties and thirties, the revolution in manners and morals appeared to be a veritable force of social upheaval, generating new forms of everyday life that resonated with the promise of greater gender, class, and even racial equality. But consistent trends in advertising and public education, which linked leisure and consumption to domestic life and particularly to the white mother’s domestic role, helped to sideline radical impulses gaining expression in and through consumer culture. The New Deal confirmed these trends with its homemaking, domestic service, and parent

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education programs. More important, it attached the enormous weight of its differential system of monetary benefits to social hierarchies that a modern sentimental definition of home, jointly promoted by market and state, served to hold in place. Families featuring a steadily employed white male breadwinner and a stay-at-home white mother could expect the most secure and ample benefits at work, in the housing market and public school systems, and in sickness, retirement, or death. Everyone else, employed in lower-paid, part-time, and noninsured sectors of the economy, restricted to inferior housing and underfunded schools, and/or slated for stigmatized forms of public relief, got less—a fate that simultaneously registered the cost of failing to uphold governmentsupported domestic norms and tended to perpetuate that failure. If the New Deal crowned a historical process that made the modern sentimental home an omnipresent artifact of everyday life, the modern sentimental home did much the same for the New Deal. For it was on the ground of that home’s material and ideological extension outward, inaugurated by the sentimental activism of early twentieth-century reformers, that the New Deal eventually built the edifice of its own address to citizens. When it pegged the state’s delivery of benefits to a particular model of family life, Roosevelt’s administration also drew on and transformed preexisting discourses associated with the revolutionary power of labor, on the one hand, and consumption, on the other, even as it confirmed the power of the domestic exterior to tip the topsy-turvy energies associated with these revolutionary discourses on their side. In this sense, the New Deal marked the historical maturation of the “new political technique” described by Donzelot, “whereby need was made to operate as a means of social integration and no longer as a cause of insurrection.” Tying the uniform promise of social security to a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security, the New Deal cinched a dynamic in which the domestic sphere’s lateral extension outward in various forms of differential embrace with the market and the state served to block rather than support vertical upheavals in the social order.

The Grotesque Body Any examination of the ways in which the New Deal scuttled hopes for radical change in the United States must also acknowledge a persistent ambiguity that informed the very discourses of revolution that flourished in the years leading up to its creation: these discourses typically found their most passionate adherents in alienated sectors of the white middle class. Thus, Raymond Williams associates the avant-garde project of “anti-bourgeois revolt” with the historical

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emergence of “distinctly bourgeois” forms of dissidence, and argues that “in many respects” modernism “was an authentic avant-garde, in personal desires and relationships, of the successful and evolving bourgeoisie itself. The desperate challenges and deep shocks of the first phase were to become the statistics and even the conventions of a later phase of the same order.”83 Initially rooted in the new cultural practices of both the white and black urban working class,84 the revolution in manners and morals similarly leapfrogged from bohemian outposts to the sheltered playgrounds of the respectable mainstream. Even the dream of proletarian revolution seemed to tug hardest at people who were not themselves proletarian: as Paul Buhle notes, by the end of World War I, the Communist Party in the United States was finding its strongest base “outside the aging European immigrant communities, . . . among intellectuals and white collar workers.”85 Multiplying preexisting lines of division between “old” and “new” sectors of the white middle class that had helped to fuel the early welfare initiatives of the Progressive Era,86 these radicalized constituencies frequently expressed the ambivalent and contradictory relationship to the current social order that is characteristic of cultural insiders. The insider status of their revolt was one of the factors that made grotesque depictions of middle-class domesticity such a politically volatile and historically significant site of modernist literary production. When modernists began to represent middle-class domestic life in grotesque terms, they called on a discourse whose own long-established propensity for ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradiction informed the texture and expanded the significance of their contemporary endeavors. In the 1930s, Mikhail Bakhtin undertook his famous study Rabelais and His World, writing under Stalin’s sway only a few years after Meyerhold’s and Mayakovsky’s theatrical experiments revived the medieval language of carnival to create and celebrate the new culture of proletarian revolution. The revolutionary ferment of carnival remains uppermost in Bakhtin’s account, which opposes the openended and excessive grotesque body of the European peasantry, forever “ambivalent and contradictory” in its nature, to the closed, ranked, and finished world of kings, lords, and clergy.87 The U.S. modernists, poised as they were to appreciate cultural experiments abroad, likewise embraced the grotesque body as a symbolic vehicle of revolution. But they also drew on a later symbology of the grotesque body integral to modern discourses of bourgeois self-making. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue, grotesque discourse provided the emerging European bourgeoisie with a crucial set of symbolic distinctions, as that class sought to set off its own powers of discipline, self-denial, and moderation from the grotesque excesses of a corrupt aristocracy and a rude working class.88 By the nineteenth century, the sentimental domestic sphere and

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sentimental domestic fiction had become central sites both for dramatizing such distinctions and for attaching various middle-class bids for dominance to proofs of a superior home life. Thus, when modernists turned a grotesque discourse back upon the white middle-class family, they not only turned sentimental representations of the middle-class domestic sphere upside down and inside out, but also generated a historically acute set of terms for representing the middle class as other to itself. Opening up a new space for registering alienation and dissent in a discourse long associated with the ends of bourgeois self-promotion and advancement, they created a forum for questioning white middle-class people’s own ability to keep house at the very moment in which state and federal agencies were assuming responsibility for disseminating the domestic ideals of that same class to all citizens. In this sense, a discourse of the grotesque provided modernists with an unusually flexible language for articulating struggles occurring within as well as against the dominant white middle class. This flexibility is evident not only in the wide range of political positions aired in modernist domestic fiction, but also in the unstable function of the grotesque across different instances of the genre. As we will see, modernists contest the widening reach of the modern sentimental home from both reactionary and radical positions (sometimes in the same breath) and use the grotesque to deride both old and new forms of domestic life that they oppose. But they also associate the grotesque aesthetic with the restorative power of carnival, which reinvigorates what is high with all the saving power of the low. Similarly, modernists display a double relationship to the value of grotesque distortion as a mode of social commentary. On the one hand, distortion stands in their fiction as a measure of existing injustice and wrongheadedness. On the other, distortion supplies the terms of a corrective vision, one that explodes the ideological lie of a smooth, closed, and finished world and replaces it with a broken and uneasy social field where perception is always crooked and truth itself has a warping touch.89 Modernists’ interest in Freud and a related primitivism frequently inform this positive valuation of grotesque distortion. In Freud’s writings, distortion reveals the truth of the mind’s unceasing war against itself, whether that war is registered in the distorted fabric of dreams or in the body’s disfiguring symptoms. In his 1919 collection, Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson adapts Freudian theory to older traditions of representing the grotesque body, using the figure of the neurotic to trace out fraught connections between respectability and repression. Anderson’s stories themselves, as well as the paradigm of “The Book of the Grotesque” offered in his preface, establish an insistently American locus for the avant-garde project to rewrite bourgeois culture in grotesque terms and constitute an important precursor for the fiction I discuss in

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this book. But where Anderson, like so many writers of the period, continues to explore a world of domestic and psychic interiors, the writers who interest me most do not linger inside much of anything. Instead, they focus on the exterior reaches of the domestic sphere as it stretches out in new engagement with the market and the state. For these writers, the mannered surfaces of the human body, which register and help to organize a social symbology of inside and outside, constitute one of the most important relay points of the domestic exterior. Where, for orthodox Freudians, the body’s surfaces record a lifelong struggle between ideology and instinct, modernist writers of domestic fiction inscribe on those same surfaces a history of struggle between rival (domestic and/or antidomestic) ideologies. Like many before them, these writers foreground those creaturely habits of the grotesque body—eating, drinking, copulating, and defecating—that tie us to the collective labor of life. But they do so for new reasons, connecting the lifesustaining processes and manners of the grotesque body to a modern social space where, as Hannah Arendt argues, “the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance.”90 For fully historical reasons, then, when modernists make the genteel bodies of sentimental domestic fiction grotesque, they draw the old discourses of carnival into a new field of political action, supplying a language both for portraying and for participating in wider struggles to define the domestic exterior, which were critical to the formation of the U.S. welfare state. Because I am interested in the ways that modernist writers use the grotesque body as a vehicle for advancing ideologically charged accounts of ideological conflict rather than as a vehicle for representing ideology’s skirmishes with instinct, I return at intervals throughout my argument to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu offers an account of how liberal capitalist societies educate children for particular social destinies under conditions permanently fraught with contest. His concepts of cultural capital and class habitus map modern struggles for power and position, played out on and through the classed body, onto an older, Rabelaisian language of pure taste and hearty appetite, distinctive refusals and indiscriminate revolt. In his account, a child’s earliest experiences shape her class habitus for life; except in rare cases, formal schooling confirms rather than disrupts social trajectories launched at home.91 As early twentieth-century reformers fighting for child labor and mothers’ pension legislation well understood, systems of democratic education rest upon the child’s initial training in the home and thus confer enormous power and authority on the mother, herself educated, who cares for and instructs her own children. Bourdieu contends that the mother’s role in transmitting cultural capital and shaping class habitus is most powerful when least recognized, which is to say,

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when it is most misrecognized as natural ability on her children’s part. As he puts it, “what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent.”92 But, of course, in Western capitalist societies, traditions governing the domestic transmission of culture have never been entirely silent. Because sentimental ideology has always depended on print culture for its transmission, its prescriptions were, from the start, open to public discussion and debate. By the opening decades of the twentieth century, multiply articulated lines of struggle over middle-class models of domestic life made contests over the content of that class’s cultural capital a crucial part of early campaigns to construct a welfare state. But even as a whole range of activists and innovators successfully challenged and partially rearticulated the content of the cultural capital embodied in the habitus of the white middle class, they reinforced—and won government sanction for—a model for the domestic transmission of cultural capital that owed everything to the sentimental cult of domesticity and its mystifying discourses of the mother’s touch. This endorsement of a middle-class definition of women’s domestic duties was strengthened by the fact that social groups outside the white middle class placed affirmations of sentimental domesticity at the center of their own petitions to the state. To take two examples from the period, which will receive fuller attention in subsequent chapters, organized labor and the activist black middle class both called upon a sentimental model of family life to validate campaigns for a living wage and for federal antilynching legislation, respectively. Attaching partisan projects of group amelioration to a common investment in sentimental domesticity, outsider groups in this period confirm Donzelot’s claim that a modern politics of family simultaneously provided “the point where criticism of the established order stopped and the point of support for demands for more social equality.”93For many activists in the first half of the twentieth century, standardizing children’s home lives seemed like a valid and sufficient way to achieve more social equality. While it was painfully clear to these activists that middle-class white children received protections and advantages at home that children of other groups sorely lacked, they believed that the government could and would eventually extend these protections and advantages to all groups by prohibiting children’s wage work and requiring their formal schooling, by guaranteeing qualifying mothers a minimum stipend to stay in the home, and by educating all mothers in the latest, government-sanctioned standards of childrearing. As it turns out, this endorsement of sentimental domesticity as a means of securing “equality of opportunity for every child born”94 has not fulfilled the hopes invested in it: the eventual foundation of a two-track welfare state has only served to reinforce the lifelong economic and cultural advantages

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routinely conferred on children of the largely white middle and upper classes. Our current welfare state continues to support and to veil the home’s role in reproducing race, class, and gender advantages, despite its ostensible rejection of the earlier ideal of the stay-at-home mother. As the contemporary outcry over mothers on welfare indicates, the state now expects a majority of wives and mothers to work, in at least some capacity and at some point, for pay.95 But New Deal endorsements of the stay-at-home mother and her historic complement, the family wage, continue to structure a society that lacks universal public day care, health care, and housing; retains older patterns of ranking occupations by gender and race; penalizes citizens for noncontinuous and part-time work histories; assigns most badly paid and unpaid care work to women; and places the largest burden of its many contradictions on the poor. Today, global corporations, Christian fundamentalists, and right-wing libertarians entertain their own arguments for dismantling the U.S. welfare state. Both the force and the terms of these arguments make it necessary to balance any account of the New Deal’s failures with a recognition of its successes.96 New Deal programs undoubtedly saved lives and improved the quality of life for many citizens, whether or not they were the right color or lived in the right kind of family. In the postwar period, the welfare state’s commitment to education and home ownership raised many citizens’ skill level, opened psychological and cultural vistas, and lifted a generation of previously stigmatized European immigrants into the expanding ranks of the white middle class. Both Nancy Weiss and Alan Brinkley argue that, even as they capitulated to white supremacists, New Deal administrators enlarged the horizon of political expectation for racial minorities, setting the stage for the protest movements of the sixties. And better practical alternatives are hard to locate.97 The deeply rooted and long-standing racism of the U.S. government and U.S. society made the option of a non- or antiracist welfare state unviable. Though New Deal legislation stabilized a widening set of class divisions, it did not introduce these divisions; instead, in the initial postwar years, this legislation, in combination with the GI Bill, bolstered society’s middle ranks. The family forms in which most citizens lived before the emergence of the welfare state were also exploitative, oppressive, and often violent; for many, the liberal mandates of the modern sentimental family offered partial, but welcome, improvement. When placed in comparative perspective, the U.S. welfare state at midcentury was not the best but also not the worst on offer. Other welfare states, including those with more radical ambitions, also pursued eugenicist policies, promoted or settled for male-dominated families and households, modernized populations against their will, and routinely stranded their citizens in the shattering gap between what was promised and what could be delivered.98 Furthermore, it is possible

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to argue that the very premium placed on national self-enrichment by our welfare state kept the majority of citizens off the bottom of a rapidly globalizing economy, and provided the funds for significant federal attempts to revisit the project of social amelioration in the sixties and seventies. In the end, the critical perspectives on the U.S. welfare state that I cull from modernist writers—and pursue in my own interpretations here—remain ambivalent. Though I join other scholars in faulting our welfare state for investing a whole new order of federal power in existing hierarchies of gender, class, and race, I am not prepared to say that we would have been better off with no welfare state at all. Nor do I offer readers a better welfare state that could or should have emerged instead. Instead, I confine the political component of this book’s contribution to the act of reopening to history a set of cultural forms and a mode of political engagement that currently underwrite the false alternative between conservative and liberal family-values agendas in our country. The erasure of the mutually constitutive relationship of the American family and the U.S. welfare state has allowed various figures on the Right to portray that family as a residual site of popular resistance to, and refuge from, liberal state interference. Many of the most hotly invested topics of contemporary debate— from same-sex marriage, school vouchers, and federal funding for faith-based charity initiatives, to Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare cuts, and proposals to dismantle Social Security—turn on this fantasy of the American family’s virgin birth and messianic powers of deliverance. Meanwhile, the persistent belief among defenders that the welfare state offers citizens adequate social provision and protection and that individual family members (and their caseworkers and therapists) must solve any remaining problems on their own underpins the widespread conviction—hardly confined to the Right—that bad home lives and bad parenting are to blame for all social failure and (unnecessary) social conflict. In both cases, collective social demands are routed through—and lost within—the family, as if family were all we had left in a world where nothing else answers or endures.99 Instead, I argue, we need to recognize the American family as a recent, costly, and deeply unreliable vehicle of personal and social amelioration, the alienated product of an uneasy partnership between the global market and a welfare state no longer prepared to fund its own initiatives. Of course, for modernist writers of domestic fiction, all this lay in the future. In their day, the idea of routing efforts to create a better society through the home was relatively new, its field of possibility still unmapped. Inverting sentimental domestic fiction’s customary emphasis on interiority in order to represent a range of contemporary struggles located in and over the domestic exterior, modernists engaged in a process of social transformation that had yet to shed its bonds with revolutionary dreaming. When they chose to depict

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this process in grotesque terms, they took up a discourse whose own history of popular carnival and bourgeois self-making rendered it remarkably well suited to their purpose. At a time when a variety of political actors formulated their demands on the state as bids to access a middle-class domestic ideal, modernists used a grotesque discourse to question white middle-class people’s own ability to keep house. At odds with one another (and often with themselves), they located their representations of grotesque domesticity at the convergence point of a number of colliding definitions of what is grotesque and why. In doing so, they made visible a fraught social space tied to the normative status of the white middle-class family but not yet ruled by it. In the process, modernists created fiction that draws our attention not only to historically specific sites of social and political struggle but also to a mode of struggle that continues to dominate our national scene today. Though the American family has regained center stage in contemporary negotiations between the people and the state, we have largely lost modernists’ recognition of the state and the market’s combined role in constituting and maintaining the domestic sphere we now possess. Part of my aim, then, in the chapters ahead is to restore a sense of the range and intensity of early twentieth-century struggles to reimagine the relations among home, market, and state. Leaning on modernists’ lively understanding of the domestic sphere’s inherent strangeness, its radical openness to query and change, we might learn to become keener strangers in the doorway of our own time and find, when confronted with all the ordinary scenes of contemporary middle-class life, pictures to startle ourselves with equal force.

1 “For She Asks Forever Only Help” The Critique of Maternalist Reform Discourse in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder

In 1928, when Horace Liveright published Djuna Barnes’s avant-garde domestic novel, Ryder, two paragraphs on the dust jacket listed her among “the révoltés of The Little Review group” who “one by one . . . have come into their own.” Inducting Barnes into a hall of fame already inhabited by such American luminaries as Sherwood Anderson and Maxwell Bodenheim and such “international figures” as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, Liveright’s advertising copy proudly swathed her debut novel in that charismatic—and faintly Parisian—atmosphere of aesthetic and social radicalism which we now routinely associate with a leading strand of literary modernism.1 When it came to being a révoltée, Barnes’s credentials were better than most. Upon moving to Greenwich Village in 1915 at the age of twenty-three, she found her way to the left-wing milieu of the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild, and supplemented her first literary and dramatic efforts with an impressive career in freelance journalism. Sent to Paris by McCall’s in 1921, Barnes soon became a fixture in that city’s expatriate community, using the earnings from her newspaper and magazine work to support a transatlantic lifestyle divided between Paris and New York. By the time Ryder became a brief bestseller in the fall of 1928, she was already known to New York readers as a witty commentator on topics ranging from urban amusements and Village bohemia to labor activism, women’s suffrage, and celebrity culture.2 Unlike many of her peers, who sought out the new insurgencies in flight from staid middle-class upbringings, Barnes had entered the mercurial world

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of radical art and politics at birth. Raised in a family of freethinkers, she attended school irregularly and received most of her education at home, where her father and grandmother served up an eclectic array of teachings drawn from the reform philosophies, utopian ventures, and visionary investigations of the previous two generations. In her own day, Barnes’s grandmother Zadel Barnes had been a successful journalist and minor poet who supported the causes of abolition, temperance, universal suffrage, and child labor reform. She divorced at an early age, became an ardent proponent of free love, and dabbled in the occult. Her son Wald, an avowed polygamist, spiritualist, and admirer of Henry Thoreau, combined the family commitment to free love with an array of creative ventures in literature, painting, opera, and aeronautics. His record, though largely one of failure, was of a kind destined to leave lasting impressions on the young.3 Barnes draws on these and other details of her family history in her fictive account of the Ryder clan, whose grotesque attachment to the ideals of polygamy, promiscuity, idleness, and freethinking at once parodies and overturns inherited conventions of sentimental domestic fiction.4 In her reliance on a grotesque aesthetic to tell the Ryders’ story, she aligns her (anti-) domestic novel with the wider attacks on the bourgeois family launched by avant-garde groups on both sides of the Atlantic. But Barnes’s critique of middle-class domestic culture is complicated by her focus on the ongoing history of debate and contestation internal to the culture she critiques. Throughout her novel, members of the Ryder family not only fail to conform to dominant norms of sentimental domestic conduct; they actively dispute the social mandate to uphold such norms. Barnes juxtaposes their struggles to defend their “noble philosophy in the home” (R 168) with Progressive reformers’ own efforts to make the domestic sphere a primary site and source of modern social transformation. She uses the discourse of maternalism, in particular, to structure the domestic battles that emerge in Ryder. Returning again and again to the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation, she revisits maternalist figures of female helplessness and endangerment central to early twentieth-century welfare initiatives. In the gap opened up between the figure and the fact of female helplessness, Barnes calls into question both the means and ends of maternalist reform and the larger modern sentimental project that maternalists embedded in the founding propositions of our welfare state. In Ryder, the heads of the Ryder family repeatedly confront fellow citizens intent on bringing their domestic practices into line with the growing demands of the wage economy and an emerging welfare state. Barnes stages these confrontations as a complex reckoning with not one but two moments in the history of U.S. white middle-class reformism. Wendell Ryder and his aging mother, Sophia, invoke grotesque versions

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of mid-nineteenth-century traditions of sentimental activism and social experimentation in order to defend themselves against reformers who take their cues from the later scripts of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. In this way, the battles waged over the Ryders’ maverick domestic project absorb and reconfigure much wider sociohistorical struggles. As Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot argue, the family has served as a pivotal site of social struggle and social control throughout the modern period. Foucault identifies the family as “the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal” associated with the rise of the modern state. In turn, Donzelot traces for the French case the emergence of a new social domain, eventually lodged between the home, the market, and the welfare state, that further sorts families by class. As he contends, the welfare state offers poor families social and economic support in exchange for active oversight of their domestic sphere. The same welfare state offers the middle-class family a choice: such a family can either preserve its domestic “autonomy” through voluntary compliance with “norms that guarantee . . . social usefulness” or “become an object of surveillance and disciplinary measures in its own right.”5 During the Progressive Era, white middle-class women were leading actors in the task of constructing a similar domain in the United States. Recasting older definitions of women’s sentimental role in the home, they elaborated a political discourse of maternalism “devoted to extending domestic ideals into public life.”6 As they opened domestic space and domestic discourse outward to embrace the wider field of civic life, maternalists made the emerging domain of the domestic exterior a key site and source of social change. At the same time, they sought to invest this new domain with unprecedented forms of social control. When maternalists petitioned the state to serve as the guarantor of a common standard of family life for all white citizens, they strove to make a particular—northeastern, middle-class, and sentimental—model of domesticity the vehicle and end of progressive social transformation. In this attempt, they were both aided and frustrated by the long tradition of middle-class reform that lay behind them. For this reform tradition, characterized throughout by an emphasis on social experimentation, supported not one but a number of understandings of the kind of domestic life best suited for the nation’s citizens. In Ryder, Barnes stages a distinctively American struggle over family life by condensing diffuse and long-ranging sociohistorical movements into a series of direct and densely symbolic confrontations between representative individuals. Through such acts of condensation, the unorthodox home life of the Ryder family comes to stand as the site on which old and new middle-class reform philosophies vie for the authority to determine state and federal norms

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of domestic and social life. Barnes places recurring figures of female helplessness and endangerment at the center of the novel’s various reform battles, even as she reworks the conventions of sentimental domestic fiction through which these figures received their initial elaboration. Inverting the focus of the traditional domestic novel on domestic and psychic interiors, she makes actions staged along the outer edge of family life, on the volatile fault line opening up between individual and state-and-corporate investments in domesticity, central to her story’s drama. In Barnes’s portrayal, heavily reiterated figures of female helplessness and female endangerment both arise from and help to develop the new ground of the domestic exterior; when they appear in her novel, they remain rooted in Progressive Era reform discourses surrounding new age-of-consent laws, protective labor legislation, tightening school-attendance policies, and groundbreaking mothers’ pension programs. But Barnes also spins these figures in new directions, making them into tools for contesting, as much as for extending, the state’s power to know and control what goes on in the domestic sphere. In her novel, powerful representatives of corporate capital and the state repeatedly fasten on the figure of female helplessness in their efforts to expose the Ryders’ domestic activity as a set of clandestine and dangerous practices in scandalous need of reform. But Wendell and Sophia successfully combat this threat to their autonomy by turning the same figure and the same charges against their attackers. In parodic rehearsals of the reform philosophies of an earlier era, they cast their maverick domestic practices as a source of alternative and even superior care and protection for helpless women and children. And they use these earlier philosophies to demonstrate that it is not they, but their attackers, whose reckless powers of endangerment need to be exposed and disciplined. Barnes performs a further act of condensation on her materials by making the specific narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation central to the various struggles waged between the novel’s rival reformers. A number of critics have argued that Barnes’s own history of childhood sexual abuse lies behind the recurrence of this narrative in her fiction and, to confirm this account, have sought in Ryder traces of autobiographical fact not recorded elsewhere.7 In contrast, I focus on Barnes’s overtly figurative deployment of this narrative in order to pursue a historical reading of a different kind. In Ryder, the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation not only offers a particularly scandalous instance of the scenario of female helplessness and endangerment elaborated in maternalist reform discourses of the Progressive Era; it also provides Barnes with a flexible trope for exploring the complex relationship set up between the persistent helplessness of individual women and girls and the growing institutional power of reformers acting in their name. In the sections that follow,

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I examine four episodes from Ryder where this narrative crops up. In these episodes, sexual violation acquires a dual figurative function. On the one hand, it serves as a figure for the reformer’s act of penetrating and scandalizing the secret of another person’s misconduct. On the other hand, it serves as a figure for the deviant or wrongful contents of the secret itself. In this way, Barnes locates a disturbing symmetry at the heart of her critique, whereby the targets and the agents of social reform are assigned an equal power to abuse. The mimetic relation thus established is further evidenced in the structure of the struggles staged in the novel, in which reformers vie to reform one another, if only to elude reform themselves. The narrative proliferation of the scene of a young girl’s violation and the disturbing logic of resemblance that overtakes rival reformers who rally to her aid combine to create a hall of mirrors out of the shadowy facts of Barnes’s life story. In the wavering and distorted social optics that results, Barnes effectively dislocates the figure of female helplessness from any recoverable truth about her own experience. Instead, she uses this figure to offer a sophisticated evaluation of the discursive economy out of which the earliest provisions of our welfare state were generated. At the heart of this economy, she places the ghostly body of a young girl whose erased or cancelled agency makes possible the long history of social amelioration which the welfare state, its proponents, and even many of its critics have pursued, so tenderly, on her behalf.

Sophia’s Nothing As Barnes’s narrator points out early in the novel, the reformist spirit of New England runs in the Ryders’ very blood. Sophia Ryder is a descendant “of a great and a humorous stock” of “the early Puritan,” and she has “in her the stuff of a great reformer or a noisy bailiff” (R 9). Like Barnes’s grandmother Zadel Barnes, Sophia divides her time among an eclectic assortment of utopian ventures, radical causes, and reform efforts: during her years in London, she moves “among the Pre-Raphaelites” and befriends Oscar Wilde (R 34, 18); in the States, she writes “manly editorials for the Springfield Republican” and accompanies Elizabeth Cady Stanton on her public speaking tours (R 154, 18). But Sophia manifests her greatest commitment to the cause of reform in her unfailing support for her son’s “noble philosophy in the home” (R 168). This philosophy has several components. First, there is the commitment to polygamy and free love, which leads Wendell to take a second wife, KateCareless, after returning to the States with his British bride, Amelia, in the late 1880s or early 1890s. As the two women reluctantly set up housekeeping

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together on the family’s Long Island farm, “Bulls’-Ease” (R 128), Wendell busies himself with seducing as many more women as wit and circumstance permit. Complementing this commitment to free love is his commitment to freethinking, which leads Wendell to educate his growing family at home. Finally, there’s the commitment to idleness. Disenchanted with his brief, youthful employment as “a drug-clerk,” Wendell vows “never, never again to battle as a self-supporting unit!” (R 18). Minus a breadwinner, the family does its best to survive outside the wage economy. What Wendell’s wives cannot produce through subsistence farming, Sophia procures on lucrative begging trips to the city. “At seventy” (R 15), Sophia keeps “her family from ruin” (R 14) through an ingenious writing scheme that she wisely conducts on the sly. She composes heartbreaking appeals to wealthy capitalists and statesmen, and then drops by in person, disguised as an old beggar woman, to collect their alms. “A mendicant of the most persistent temerity,” she has thus “lied and wept and played the sweet old woman to the partial undoing of every rich man in the country, and of one of the Presidents of the States” (R 14). The power of Sophia’s epistolary appeals lies in her intrepid mastery of the art of closure: “into those hundreds of begging letters went all of Sophia Grieve Ryder, her cunning, her humour, her deceit, her humbleness, and always, with unerring faithfulness to her original discovery of the way to the heart of man, they were signed ‘Mother’” (R 15). In Sophia’s begging routine, Barnes satirizes the maternalist politics subtending the welfare activism of her own day and the longer history of social benevolence that lay behind it. At the same time, she uses the scattered path of Sophia’s forays into public life to map out the emerging coordinates of the domestic exterior, generated historically through a similar set of motherly excursions across the ground joining home, market, and state. Sophia’s begging routine parodies the rhetorical strategies used by white middle-class women reformers in the Progressive Era. Barred from direct participation in the political process, these reformers had to rely on the power of persuasion to achieve their ends. As I recounted in the introduction, they developed a discourse of benevolent maternalism, disseminated through national women’s organizations and mass media campaigns directed at women readers, to highlight poor women’s and children’s vulnerability in industrial society and to agitate for a raft of new state protections and provisions to guard the home. In campaigns reaching from the mid-1880s to the 1920s, maternalist reformers persuaded lawmakers to raise state age-of-consent laws for girls, pass legislation protecting women’s and children’s labor, set up a separate court system for juveniles, and authorize the use of its resources to enforce school-attendance laws. At the height of their power, they rallied mass support for mothers’ pensions programs, setting up such programs for qualified white

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women in twenty states between 1911 and 1913 alone, and securing programs in twenty more states by 1920. These programs were designed to provide for the faultless widow otherwise unable to keep herself and her children out of the labor market. As such, they drew states into an unprecedented role as financial guarantors of a sentimental family model that extolled the peerless care of the stay-at-home mother and the unburdened nature of childhood.8 In campaigns that modernized an older tradition of sentimental activism, Progressive maternalists charged the state with a new responsibility to uphold and disseminate white middle-class domestic values, even as they made that charge the vehicle of the state’s own transformation. Their innovative and—at the time—uniquely effective approach to the task of welfare state building in the United States rested on a canny reapplication of long-standing conventions of sentimental fiction. In Patrick Wilkinson’s formulation, maternalism “was a politics of the selfless helping the helpless.” As he argues, middle-class white women sought to connect themselves with “causes whose transparent selflessness would defy any accusations of mannish ambition or self-promotion.” In turn, poor white “women supplied the sympathetic figure of helplessness on which the movement depended for its own emergence and success[;] . . . it was precisely the plausibility of this figure that secured maternalist arguments for state intervention in the lives of poor families.”9 Barnes highlights these exact features of maternalist reform discourse in her portrait of Sophia, whose own artful manipulation of the figures of female selflessness and helplessness fuels a welfare scheme of grotesque design. Sophia is a woman with the courage to renounce herself, that she might in herself be equal for that struggle, self-imposed—a passionate and precarious love of family. A family in need had brought her to this pass, and a family in need it must remain to be kept at heel; and for their blind devotion, she had a locked mouth, and a stubborn heart, crying where they heard not, “Pity the poor.” (R 16) A poor old widow masquerading as a poor old widow, Sophia translates the unruly fact of her family’s actual need into a sentimental figure of need that has already been assigned a predictable cash value. Circulating the fiction of her own helpless maternity to rich men and presidents, she selflessly sacrifices her pride in order keep her grown child Wendell out of the labor market. On the whole, her scheme works very well. But when she tries to collect a mother’s pension from a magnate named Boots, he fights back. Confronting her in the den of his corporate office, he correctly suspects that she’s only pretending to be poor, and prepares to lift up the skirts of her beggar costume to reveal the

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layers of expensive petticoats beneath. It is at this point that Sophia invokes the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation, both to protect her own ruse from scandalous exposure and to discredit the motives of the man who assaults her. In the antagonism that erupts between Sophia and Boots, Barnes cuts away from the current landscape of social welfare reform to the long history of social benevolence that lies behind it. Throughout this history, the discursive circulation of figures of white female selflessness, helplessness, and endangerment served to authorize elite women’s ventures into public life even as that same circulation helped to consolidate doubts about the true nature of poor people’s need. Insisting on her own helplessness throughout her encounter with Boots, Sophia enacts a parodic version of an antebellum discourse of benevolence dedicated to guarding the virtue of the sentimental mother, while Boots works from a more recent cultural script in which social and moral suspicion of the poor all but eclipses the act of charitable giving. The condensations at work in their encounter are multiple and will take some unraveling. In the antebellum period of Sophia’s youth, the sentimental cult of domesticity provided middle-class white women with the rationale for their escalating participation in all of the philanthropic reform movements of the day. Divinely appointed to set God’s house in order, they charged themselves with using the Christian and maternal principles of charity and love to bring about the moral reconstruction of society. White women threw their weight behind the abolitionist and temperance movements, organized charity networks, and participated in the female moral reform movement. In this latter movement, reformers’ construction of poor “women as victims in a lustful society”10 helped to authorize a sentimental coupling of middle-class sororal vigilance and workingclass female helplessness that would prove to have long-lasting political effects. Sophia herself stays true to the tenets of her youth when she models a lifetime of charitable activity on sentimental ideals, though she usually does so to grotesque effect. For instance, in her first act as a married woman, she lays down “the foundations . . . of relief” (R 11) that will define her role throughout the novel. These foundations turn out to be a set of “five fine chamber-pots,” which spell out in succession: “Needs there are many, / Comforts are few, / Do what you will/ ’Tis no more than I do /. . . . Amen” (R 11). As the rhyme suggests, Sophia founds her domestic order on a “love of family” (R 16) that expresses a permissive rather than censorious approach to the many “needs” of man. The same love of family informs her maverick vocation as a sentimental fiction writer. Like other women writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Sophia uses her craft to support her kin but prefers to keep the exact nature of her lucrative occupation secret.11 “When someone, none too wisely, questioned her on this matter, she smiled and said: ‘I am writing,’ and she was writing”

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(R 14). Antebellum women writers circulated their writing within a marketbased discursive economy that gathered the female author, moral reformer, charity volunteer, and helpless unfortunate into a single round of mutually empowering association. Sophia operates in the same economy, but short-circuits it. Appearing as both the selfless author and the helpless object of sentimental interventions undertaken on her own behalf, she invokes the transformative power of sentimental motherhood on which that larger discursive economy depends in order to enforce direct demands for cash. While Sophia’s career as a beggar thus stands as a witty parody of the antebellum sentimental fiction writer as much as the early twentieth-century welfare reformer, the man who tries to end her career hails from an intervening moment in the history of social benevolence. During the 1870s and 1880s, the social benevolence movement underwent reorganization in the United States, strengthening ties with the state forged during the Civil War as well as ties with corporate capital, which were forged as new industrial tycoons sought to clean up reputations tarnished by increasingly violent clashes with labor. When corporate philanthropists called on the sentimental script of benevolence to recast their own inordinate schemes of self-gain as loving service to the public good, they also injected a new degree of suspicion into charity workers’ relations with the poor. In a calculated revival of the moral ambiguity buried in earlier constructions of the working-class prostitute as helpless unfortunate, Gilded Age reformers questioned poor people’s capacity to create proper homes and interpreted economic hardship as a direct effect of the working-class family’s—and particularly the mother’s—moral failure. By the turn of the twentieth century, new schools of social work sponsored by the leading charity organizations stressed the importance of fact finding to ensure that poor families were not faking their distress. In turn, poor people learned how important it was to attach the fact of genuine need to increasingly codified displays of helpless female virtue. Several of these historical strands came together in the handling of mothers’ pension plans: typically administered through the juvenile justice system, mothers’ pensions were framed by a discourse of domestic deviance and delinquency, and awarded only to those women—almost always white and usually widows—who could prove their flawless moral character, good housekeeping skills, and full-time devotion to mothering.12 Barnes uses the many tensions in this history to animate the showdown between Sophia and Boots. When Sophia enters Boots’s corporate “sanctum” “to sweep up her gains” (R 176, 15), she confronts a man, flanked by twelve “disciples” (R 176), who has successfully merged the gospel of Christ with the gospel of wealth. In calling upon him in the guise of “Mother,” Sophia poses literal, blood relations between the antebellum sentimental fiction writer and

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the late nineteenth-century corporate philanthropist, even as she highlights the celebration of virtuous maternity that joins their otherwise divergent enterprises.13 For Boots, the fictitious nature of Sophia’s motherly relation to him offers a golden opportunity to expose her as a fraud, but wise Sophia knows that her unlucky “sons” cannot expose the fraudulence of her investment in the sentimental script of benevolence without simultaneously exposing their own. She opens her petition by offering Boots a vacuous, if vaguely menacing, sentimental blessing: “There is a world without end, and I fully believe in it. And what is there in that world for you, my dear, what shall I promise you?” (R 176–177). The very emptiness of the gesture suggests that Sophia here offers Boots a mother’s blessing not to provide him with any practical benefit that he would otherwise lack, but to threaten him with the disaster that would ensue should such a blessing be withdrawn. In effect, she proposes that, if Boots and his ilk want to ensure her anonymous assent to the transparently false sentimental script of the capitalist’s and the statesman’s filial piety and benevolence, they will have to pay for it—up front and in person.14 Boots responds, somewhat rashly, by attempting to deploy the corporate philanthropic script that casts the poor as undeserving imposters. When his twelve disciples recommend that he “toss” Sophia “from wall to wall, and from the midst of her nefarious skirts you’ll hear the mother cry!” (R 178), Boots agrees: An there be a battle and no old woman found among her clothes, connivance and no mother look,—for even praying you can tell the mother bottom,—why, we will set her out at the gate, that the citizens may witness so heinous a thing! I am all charity an the supplicant be truly tattered to the skin and the skin well parched, but whole cloth estranges me, as a patch of well-fed stomach throws me off scent! (R 178) As Boots detects, the “double set of real Irish linens” that Sophia wears under “her pauper’s cloak” gives the lie to her postures of indigence (R 178, 15). Yet, when he and his men finally resolve “to try her,” Sophia is able to exploit the proposed scenario of her own exposure for its unsuspected power to reestablish her dissembling body as newly, if grotesquely, truthful. Should her body be turned upside down and inside out before the citizens “out at the gate,” her bottom would back up her face as a portrait of helpless and deserving poverty. Thus, Sophia supplies her genital lack, which must also come to view in any attempt to “tell the mother bottom,” as the culturally indisputable sign of a motherly “need” and “nothing else.” “This is the hour when men seek a girl among your skirts!” (R 178), she cries out in conference with herself, before

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addressing Boots: “Why, find her then, catch her on the flicker, for she asks forever only help, and reeks of that condition. Tear her into pieces adequate for the glutting of your suspicion, and every rag will speak the selfsame story, for there’s nothing else about” (R 178). Unable to expose Sophia’s worldly all without also revealing her sexual “nothing,” Boots and his men find themselves trapped by appearances if not by intent in the scandalous scenario of gang rape implied by their desire to try her. When Sophia calls out in warning to “the girl” among her skirts, she suddenly switches from playing the poor old widow to playing the helpless miss and, in doing so, reframes the meaning of Boots’s proposed investigation in two ways. First, she recasts the philanthropic project to expose a pauper as a fraud as a criminal project to rob a young girl of her virtue. This translation resonates directly with late nineteenth-century maternalist campaigns to raise the age of consent in states across the nation. Second, she invokes the newly broadened crime of statutory rape as an all-too-fitting figure for the rapacious greed and animosity toward the poor at work beneath capitalists’ shows of benevolence and warm family feeling. Throughout her performance, Sophia relies on the current media value invested in figures of female helplessness and endangerment to achieve her ends. For while it might cost Boots very little to violate the girl among her skirts in the privacy of his office sanctum, coverage of the event in the contemporary muckraking press would cost him a lot.15 In this way, Sophia artfully manipulates the popular currency of key maternalist figures in order to deflect the threat of scandal away from her family’s antinormative scheme to live off the labor of others, and onto corporate capitalists’ all-tooacceptable scheme to do exactly the same thing. Bested at his own game, Boots can only acknowledge defeat. When he extracts from his “left trouser pocket” “a bill of no mean proportions” (R 178), Sophia exclaims, Need is no longer need, shall the leaf tell of the tree? Who is pauper here now? Not I, though I’ve been, so the two conditions have buzzed within the hour. I bring you, Boots, my most dear, many things therefor. Farewell, then, and cry, “Mother, mother, mother!” for it is a word that comes up to me ever. (R 179) As the arrow of advantage shifts between them, emptying his pockets and filling hers, Sophia gloats over the power of sentimental motherhood to throw even the most nefarious corporate kingpin in her lap. But throughout the scene, Barnes insists that it is the emptiness of both characters’ personal investment in this power that ultimately explains its generative social and political force. For Barnes, the “nothing” of Sophia’s genitals offers a fitting

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emblem of the entire enterprise of modern sentimental reform, standing as the grotesque bodily sign of a self-serving hollowness at the center of the proliferating tributes to sentimental motherhood used to legitimize and coordinate the goals of white middle-class reformers, corporate philanthropists, and early state welfare administrators. By the same token, Boots’s bold proposal to turn the skirts of the sentimental mother upside down and inside out might stand as an apt emblem of Barnes’s own ambitions in the scene. On the one hand, the gesture sums up her iconoclastic relationship to the inherited conventions of sentimental domestic fiction: relying on a grotesque, avant-garde aesthetic of upheaval and revolt, she inverts the traditional focus on domestic and psychic interiors in order to narrate new clashes on the border between the home, the market, and the state. On the other hand, the gesture symbolically rehearses the logic of inversion governing the historical emergence of the domestic exterior in the first place, and dramatizes the production of that domain from the increasingly intrusive investments in poor people’s private lives made by successive inheritors of the sentimental script. In Boots’s office, Sophia acts to protect the inner folds of her person and of her family from a modern sentimental project of reform that authorizes knowledgeable outsiders to investigate and regulate the “secre[t]” (R 14) of her irregular domestic practices. But, as we have seen, the very success of her scheme depends on her willingness to seek out, meet, and match this intrusive external gaze: oriented outward, toward a new world of intimate strangers, Sophia relies on the evolving propositions of the domestic exterior to get and guard what she cherishes at home.

Wendell’s All Sophia’s funds, procured like so much in the Ryders’ lives through a love of family, allow her son Wendell to throw body and soul into his philosophy, unhampered by the petty routines of wage earning. The scope of his leisurely endeavors is considerable, for, as Anne Dalton remarks, Wendell “imagines himself to be the new Adam and casts himself as artist, social iconoclast, and prophet and founder of a new religion.”16 In this, he too stands as the direct descendant of several mid-nineteenth-century social reformers and social philosophers. The tenets of his philosophy perhaps stand closest to those of the transcendentalists. Wendell shows more sympathy for Thoreau’s aversion to labor than for Emerson’s endorsement of industry and ambition, and he rejects both men’s valorization of self-reliance. But he amply shares their regard for nature, their impatience with the shackles of social custom, and their high

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hopes for the world-transformative power of original genius. Where both Emerson’s and Thoreau’s enthusiasm for the natural man carefully skates above a condoning of his baser impulses, Wendell’s regard for nature embraces all that is low in man and beast alike. In this sense, Wendell’s philosophy can be read as a grotesque parody of transcendentalism, one that both degrades and revives its loftier sentiments.17 “He is nature in its other shape,” confides his wife Amelia, who thinks him “great oftener than anything else”; “he is a deed that must be committed” (R 241). His mother agrees, telling Wendell, “You are nature, all of you, all of you, and nature is terrible when law hunts it down” (R 238). “The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature,” Emerson says, and repeats: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” “There are no fixtures in nature,” he proposes further. “The only sin is limitation.”18 To his mother, Wendell explains, “I sport a changing countenance. I am all things to all men, and all women’s woman” (R 164). And to one of many lovers, he confides, “I, my love, am to be Father of All Things” (R 210). With this latter declaration, he announces his intention to give rise to a “Race” of Ryders that will encompass the earth in its human variety, “though never one” shall be “bourgeois or like to other men as we now know them” (R 210). Blending sex and religion in his visionary ideas of a world to come, Wendell moves away from Emerson and Thoreau and closer to such prophets as Ann Lee, John Humphrey Noyes, and Joseph Smith, who all founded utopian communities built around alternative religious and sexual norms in the mid-nineteenth century. The “complex marriage” practices of Noyes’s Oneida community and the Mormon endorsement of polygamy offer direct parallels to Wendell’s domestic philosophy.19 But they also played a central role in the creation of the historical conditions that severely limit his ability to practice it. Beginning in the 1850s, middle-class white women began to mobilize sentimental discourse—and the sentimental domestic novel in particular—against the Mormon practice of polygamy. Through literary depictions of female helplessness and endangerment, they struggled to make visible a sexual and moral threat to all women posed by the sectarian practices of a religious minority and successfully rallied public support for the unprecedented idea of direct federal oversight of the marriage bed. In its 1856 national platform, the Republican Party called for a federal ban on “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery”—in the territories.20 By 1862, Congress had passed the territorial ban on polygamy. In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld and extended this ban throughout the nation and proclaimed a foundational relationship between heterosexual monogamy and the democratic state. As Sarah Barringer Gordon has noted, this ruling dealt a blow to “the federalist concept of states as ‘laboratories’

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for social experimentation.”21 New York’s Oneida community gave up the practice of complex marriage in the same year. The Mormon response was less compliant, and white female reformers resumed their nationwide crusade, paving the way for a further series of laws mandating federal intervention in Mormon civic and private life. In 1890, the Mormon church withdrew its endorsement of plural marriage and conceded defeat in its battle for the legal right to promote alternative norms of sexual and domestic conduct.22 This historical context lends urgency and poignancy to Wendell’s conversation with Sophia about his own practice of polygamy, undertaken in the very years when reformers and lawmakers aggressively organized against it. Sophia notes, “It is very advanced, very old, and very nice, perhaps . . . but we must keep it from the public, at all costs.” In Wendell’s reply, he wonders, “Who is to eat me? The authorities of the state and the wiseacres of the nation?” (R 168–169). Wendell’s refusal to conform to the dictates of monogamy makes him an enemy of the state. His only weapon of self-defense is obscurity, and this weapon is understandably hard to wield when his overarching ambition is to people the world anew. As Barnes’s narrator reports, Wendell has “trouble in keeping [his] life out of the papers” (R 213), and the mayor wants him in jail. Eventually, the law hunts him down in his own home. When “a delegation . . . headed by a social worker” arrives to inquire about his two wives, Wendell rightly predicts, “I am about to be infested with scrutiny” (R 213). With the social worker’s arrival, Wendell finds himself involuntarily thrust onto the ground of the domestic exterior in an uneasy repetition of his mother’s voluntary excursions over the same terrain. Where Sophia’s forays as a beggar serve to cast the new space opening up between the home, the market, and the state as a site worth plundering for its resources, Wendell experiences his more reluctant location on the border between home and state as a form of self-endangerment, grounded in a newly estranged relationship to that which is most intimate in his own practice. As he tells his mother, “I date from a sentimental period, and, accordingly, I name myself as I find myself. What I would be, that I say I am, and thus, eventually, I become. . . . I am myself a company apart, for no man is born abnormal; the diverse soul is as pleasing, I dare say, to the universal, as he who can play but one tune upon a comb” (R 165). But this assertion takes on the status of a lament as Wendell pays negative tribute to the alien category of the “abnormal” that intrudes upon and “infest[s]” his reflexive relationship to his own history of becoming. A letter sent by Wendell’s British sister-in-law to his wife Amelia earlier in the novel helps to pinpoint the nature of the change that overtakes him: “I have discovered, dear sister, that what you do is to yourself only what you do, but to the public what they do not, and therefore all this great business of right and wrong, judges and juries, to

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say nothing of prisons and sentences” (R 154). With the social worker’s appearance on his doorstep, Wendell completes the transition—at once internal and imposed—from doing only what he does to doing what the public does not. Caught in the cone of her gaze, he experiences an alienated relation to his own domestic practice that arises from the moment when state- and self-scrutiny are made to coincide. By the end of the novel, Wendell successfully repels state scrutiny and heads off “prisons and sentences” by striking a bargain with the social worker at his door—though it must be said that this bargain is noticeably less felicitous than the one his mother strikes with Boots. In the meantime, the state finds fault not with Wendell’s two wives but with his children’s poor school attendance. Where the social worker’s visit spells doom for the Ryder philosophy, forcing one wife and her children out on the street, Wendell emerges as the victor in his encounter with the school authorities. Once again, this success is due to his skillful deployment of the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation to discredit the charges lodged against him. Like his mother before him, Wendell temporarily forecloses the scandalization of his domestic life by threatening agents of the domestic exterior with scandal in kind. And like her, he does so by taking up reformist arguments of an earlier era in order to resist and condemn the leading reform agendas of his own day. Wendell’s battle with the school system occurs after a shift in its organization that parallels the shift reviewed above in the social benevolence movement. The common-school movement began in the 1830s as an elite reform effort; however, it was only after 1890 that a conjunction of forces—including bureaucratic reform, child labor legislation, compulsory schooling legislation, and a juvenile justice system armed with court-appointed truancy officers—put in place procedures capable of enforcing school-attendance laws nationwide. With these changes, schools became pervasive stations of the domestic exterior, as educators “assumed responsibility for many phases of child care and training which formerly were thought of as belonging wholly to the home.”23 Different strands in the ideology of democratic education took on new strength as the school joined the family as a “privileged locus” for posing “the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal.” This ideology has been variously interpreted. Some critics point to the education system’s role in creating an efficient and tractable workforce, others to its role in promoting religious piety and loyalty to the state.24 Wendell incorporates several of these points in a speech he delivers to an investigating school “superintendent” (R 131) and a crowd of his neighbors after he is called to the town schoolhouse to account for his children’s truancy. Rejecting the ideological aims of the latest wave of educational reform, he reaches

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back to the ideas of an earlier reformer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, to defend his own position. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson grows impatient with a system of education built upon the principle of imitation rather than originality. “Every great man is a unique,” he insists. “Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare.”25 Similarly, Wendell condemns the school authorities for “trying to make scrub-oak of my sons’ trees” (R 130) through an uninspired curriculum devoted to rote memorization of religious and state propaganda. He complains that “the Board of Education” would have children memorize “dates and speeches, half forgotten, of dead statesmen,” and learn to “render Hamlet backward, and the Commandments sideways” (R 130). And he defends his children’s truancy on the grounds that it offers them “immunity . . . from the common and accepted conditions of life, as taught in the parochial schools” (R 131). With this last claim, Wendell holds up the increasingly risky activity of doing what the public does not as the explicit goal of an earlier American educational philosophy newly valued for its power to refuse the disciplinary question of normality. Yet it is the beauty of the investigating official’s self-sought mediocrity that such arguments are “Greek and a tomb to him” (R 131); any success that Wendell might hope to have in this encounter must be sought on other ground. The school’s case against the Ryders, on the other hand, is simple and predictable. The school “principal” informs Wendell that “there are laws in this country, and one of them is that children must attend school” (R 130). And he contends that children who don’t go to school “will grow up . . . deflowering women, and defaming God” (R 130). With this latter charge, violated virginity joins religious blasphemy as a measure of the more general threat of social havoc posed by children whose upbringing is not supervised by the state. In his reply, Wendell adroitly takes up the principal’s chosen figure of a young girl’s sexual violation and uses it to represent a moral threat that the state itself poses to the children it claims to guide and protect. In making his second critique, Wendell concedes the need to send his children to school for the new leverage it allows him as a concerned parent. With this concession, he chooses to affirm rather than resist his enforced location on the disciplinary ground of the domestic exterior and blandly accepts the school authorities’ inquiry into how well he carries out his moral duties as a parent in exchange for the power to hold them to the same role and the same standard. “If you insist,” he tells his interlocutor, “I, being but a humble citizen, can but submit, but I may warn you that Ryder as an outlaw is less trouble than citizen Ryder” (R 131). In what follows, Wendell assumes the part of a good father scandalized by the secret pockets of corruption he uncovers on school property. He first focuses attention on the school drinking well, whose common cup

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communicates the taint of “three rats and one cat” festering in its depths (R 132). He then turns to the school privy: “its double-seated grandeur two black pits, the wood carved over with hearts and arrows, and successive generations’ initials twined therein” (R 129). Positioned in front of the schoolhouse’s only window, the “gaped, doorless” structure of the privy offers its amorous graffiti as a rival scene of instruction to the blackboard within (R 129). In his new role as public watchdog, Wendell exposes the schoolyard’s darkest interiors as secret sources of endangerment to children in an action that mimics and counters the state’s attempt to expose his home as a den of iniquity. He reveals the school’s pure well of knowledge to be an “abyss of disease and filth” (R 132). And he indignantly refuses to “permit my daughter to learn of love as it is written on yonder privy ring” (R 132). With the latter remark, Wendell conjures up the figure of a helpless girl child, violated by lessons in love learned with her pants down in a school privy, in order to identify a form of moral violation which proceeds from the state when it acts in loco parentis. The Emersonian complaint originally lodged against the school’s blackboard curriculum—that it will infect his children with “the common and accepted conditions of life”—reemerges as mock outrage against the degrading commonness and defiling vulgarity of the privy’s adjoining pedagogy. Wendell here reveals the democratic school system as the propagator of precisely those forms of promiscuous contact and moral contagion from which it claims to shield the innocent. In doing so, he draws public attention to scandalous instances of neglect and hypocrisy on the part of the school authorities. But he also points to a more deep-seated eagerness on the part of the state-educated public to constitute itself as a public by reading and writing about the very activities it would forbid him to practice in private. In the frame of Wendell’s investigations, the state betrays its own mandate to protect helpless women and children: however inadvertently, it inaugurates the sexual corruption of young girls on the very ground of the domestic exterior created to guard and cultivate their virtue. Faced with these disclosures, a crowd of Wendell’s fellow citizens rushes forward to attack the school official. In the ensuing tumult of righteous indignation, Wendell makes his escape, resuming the role of outlaw that his unexpected success in the role of citizen newly affords him. The next time the law catches up with him, however, he is not so lucky. In a midnight conference with his mother held shortly after the social worker’s visit, he decides to prune his noble philosophy down to a size that better accords with state requirements. Once again, Sophia holds out the sentimental figure of selfless maternity as the blade of the shears, noting, “At night a woman will do anything for the pitiful human creature, for at night everyone, everywhere, is unprotected, and she feels that, and for that she would do anything. It is an advantage. Do you

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want to take it?” (R 239–240). He does. Calling for his legitimate wife, Amelia, he asks her to leave with her five children. Unsurprisingly—for she has always been “good and dependable”—she agrees (R 241). As Amelia prepares to ferry her young into a state of homelessness precipitated by new state measures designed to secure their welfare, Barnes throws the contemporary politics of Progressive reform into sharp relief. Positioned throughout the novel as the helpless beneficiaries of other people’s selfless efforts on their behalf, Wendell’s legitimate wife and children ultimately enter a terrain that falls outside the warm embrace of both family and state, but one whose terrors faithfully define the limit of what either is prepared to protect. It is at this point—where she opens up a further outside to the state- and market-sponsored ground of the domestic exterior—that Barnes’s disillusionment with the whole project of maternalist reform becomes most clear. In a late interview, Barnes comments disparagingly on Wendell: “Ryder is one of those impossible people who are going to save the world—how can anyone save the world?”26 Wendell and Sophia initially offer to save the world from the imperfect salvation foisted upon it by middle-class reformers working in concert with corporate philanthropists and a nascent welfare state. For most of the novel, the pair successfully resist and expose the hypocrisy and self-interest underwriting their opponents’ ostensibly selfless devotion to the public good. But in the last pages of the novel, they too succumb to new depths of hypocrisy and self-interest, sacrificing family for the sake of family. As far as Amelia and her children are concerned, Wendell, Sophia, and the state finally appear as identical dispensers of ruin. In the Ryders’ ultimate complicity with the social worker’s delegation, Barnes points up the continuity between the mid-nineteenth-century models of utopian experiment and reform that the Ryders embrace and the turn-of-the-century reform measures that they would ostensibly use such models to overcome or defy.

Julie’s Share When they make their brutal bargain with the social worker, Wendell and Sophia not only abandon their own policy of principled resistance to the wage economy and the state. They also seem to close off possibilities of successful resistance for Amelia and her children. But this foreclosure begins much earlier, when Wendell and Sophia take up the role of selfless protectors acting on behalf of helpless domestic dependents. In the final part of this chapter, I will turn to two characters who are particularly ill served by this arrangement: Amelia herself, the good wife who gets thrown out on the street; and her daughter

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Julie, namelessly invoked in her father’s debate with the school authorities. They too bear potentially scandalous secrets that gain representation through narratives of sexual violation. Yet because they find themselves positioned as agency-less in domestic scenarios designed to ensure their welfare, they fail to deploy these secrets, even momentarily, as a means of personal gain or political protest. Relegated to the recesses of the domestic and psychic interior, they lack a location from which to mobilize the topsy-turvy resources of the domestic exterior on their own behalf. Consequently, their secrets fail to empower them, but instead enforce and deepen their initial lack of power. Hemmed in by the “magnificen[ce]” of Sophia’s nothing and Wendell’s all (R 9, 168), the rest of the women in the Ryder household command a share of the family’s greatness only insofar as they grow great with child. The illegitimate wife, Kate-Careless, a lusty and affable woman, finds the terms of such a bargain to her taste. Though her son Elisha sees in “his mother’s experiment-shocked body . . . a distorted shape of death” (R 222), she herself has no complaints. “I’ve become infatuated with the flavour of motherhood,” she tells Wendell, “you poked it under my nose, and I’ve learned to like it” (R 170). In contrast, Amelia and Julie never learn to like it, which may be why the pregnancies they bear in the novel are both, in some sense, false. These pregnancies serve as vehicles for muffled protest, providing the occasion and the terms through which each woman attempts to speak the secret of her own resistance. At the time of Amelia’s lying-in, she is convinced she will die and warns Julie never to “let a man touch you, for their touching never ends, and screaming oneself into a mother is no pleasure at all” (R 95). When the baby is born, Wendell cries out, “The babe is black!” But the transvestite midwife, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, assures him, “Bile alone is father of its colour” (R 97). The scandalous possibility that Amelia has secretly taken a black man as her lover, though quickly invalidated by O’Connor, returns in the next chapter.27 There, Amelia dreams of an averted rape. In her dream, she stands at the keyhole before an ornate chamber lined with the trophies of Western culture. Inside the chamber, a black ox approaches the bed of a white woman, asking that he be given “a place in your Saviour” (R 99). She refuses, saying, “Go away and do not try to defile me, for I have time in which to think, but you must labour” (R 99). In response, the ox warns, “Give me a place in your God, or . . . he will damn himself in me,” but when he kneels before Christ’s crucifix at the end of the dream, he says simply, “Remember the woman” (R 99). This dream, like most dreams, gives representation to a contradictory assortment of hidden wishes. And it borrows from two distinct phases of the history of sentimental activism in order to do so. The narrator initially aligns Amelia’s dream with the antebellum abolitionist movement, glossing the

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dream as an attempt to “set a mighty wrong to rights, to get the black man the attention of the Lord, and a place in his mercies” (R 98). Yet the text of the dream, with its transparent allusion to the threat of interracial rape, exposes the limits of white abolitionists’ merciful love for black slaves. In its recourse to images of black defilement, the dream is more readily aligned with the dominant account of lynching that fed the cause of white supremacy during and after Reconstruction. This account, supplied by advocates of the practice, intersected with the political discourse of maternalism at a number of points; both discourses relied on figures of helpless white womanhood and childhood to legitimate a form of civic activism devoted to the selective protection of white homes. Amelia’s dream reproduces components of each discourse: juxtaposing images of the black man’s bestiality, labor, menace, and damnation with images of the white woman’s angelic humanity, leisure, election, and endangerment, it points to funds of racial violence both preserved and hidden in the era’s penchant for stories about “the selfless helping the helpless.”28 Why does Amelia have such a dream at such a juncture? What does the plight of the black man have to do with her fear of childbirth or her aversion to her husband’s touch? Matthew O’Connor’s comment that “bile alone is father” of the baby’s color provides a place to begin. Designed to refute an unspoken charge of infidelity, O’Connor’s diagnosis reaches back to the medieval theory of the four humors, in which bile denotes irascibility, gloominess, and ill humor. In this sense, Amelia’s black baby replicates the nineteenthcentury yoking of “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery”—in an unhappy display of color that registers Amelia’s own suffering within her polygamous marriage. At the same time, her dream invokes a story of sexual transgression strangely reminiscent of Wendell’s adventures beyond the marriage bed. In the figure of the black ox at the bedside, the contemporary black man’s purported offense (interracial rape) and his exacted punishment (castration) find simultaneous representation.29 But as the narrator suggests, this scenario serves as a cover for protests more properly lodged elsewhere: the dream represents “an effort to retake Wendell,” king of the yard at Bulls’-Ease, “in his own colours” (R 98). In the multiple narratives prompted by her baby’s blackness, Amelia finds a way to connect her individual anger and suffering within a polygamous marriage with the collective anger and suffering of African Americans in the aftermath of slavery. But the contradictions of her dream (born of the ox’s double status as wronged victim and punished sexual aggressor) lead her to reject the very alliance that gives vicarious voice to her own resistance. Through the body of her newborn child, Amelia’s bilious anger at her lot takes on the sign of interracial union and solidarity, while her dream’s adherence to the taboo

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against interracial union signals her unwillingness to acknowledge and act upon that anger. Her baby’s coloring invokes the widely known suffering of African Americans to make the secret of her marital suffering scandalously visible, but her subsequent dream of averted violation refuses that very conflation of African American grievances and her own. The text of Amelia’s dream, like the texts of Sophia’s encounter with the magnate and Wendell’s encounter with the school official, stages a confrontation between earlier and later forms of sentimental activism. But the public, interpersonal conflicts dramatized in those episodes reappear in Amelia’s dream as a private, intrapsychic conflict waged over the very question of whether or not she will speak out in protest on her own behalf. Ironically, it is precisely the white woman’s successful resistance to violation in the dream narrative that comes to represent Amelia’s self-defeating resolve to keep quiet: retreating to the high ground of racial privilege, she agrees to confine herself to a domestic interior falsely cast as the scene and source of her protection. In its conflation of tropes drawn from the sentimental discourses of abolitionism, maternalist reform, and mob violence, Amelia’s dream ultimately betrays its own aim to “set a mighty wrong to rights.” Fittingly, the dream occurs in a self-contained chapter. Amelia, a country girl “well rounded in restrictions” (R 98), reports its contents to no one. Julie is less willing to remain silent on her mother’s account. At one point, she lashes out against Kate-Careless, who manifests “the disease . . . emanating directly from her father” “to the torment of her mother” (R 143). But when Julie tries to give representation to her own torment, she, like Amelia, relies on a preexisting cultural script that inspires both a false pregnancy and a grotesquely deformed sentimental dream. As such a parallel would suggest, her protest has no great effect on her position within the Ryder household. In chapter 24, “Julie becomes what she had read” (R 106). Schooled at home on the literary diet of Sophia’s youth, she dreams of tiny Arabella Lynn, another beautiful Little Eva dying a sentimental death, but with a grotesquely exaggerated bad conscience because she has doubted the existence of God. By the end of the dream, Arabella joins a parade of pregnant “little girls” (R 109) as they fall through the sky. Julie then wakes to find Sophia protecting her from Wendell’s blows as he bitterly rejects her, crying, “She is none of mine. Did I not hear her deriding me greatly?” (R 110). In an important feminist psychoanalytic reading of this scene, Anne Dalton plausibly establishes Julie’s dream as an encoded incest narrative. But in order to make her most far-reaching claims, Dalton is obliged to go beyond the dream text that Barnes provides to a projected second narrative (to which, she claims, Barnes herself may or may not have had conscious access) concerning

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the sexually abusive treatment that Barnes herself received at her father’s hands. Dalton’s argument contributes to a larger body of feminist scholarship, developed both within and beyond the field of modernist studies, which invests the task of the literary critic with an urgent social mission. Her argument coordinates an account of why incest narratives are encoded in the first place with an account of the political and moral obligations that fall to the literary critic in the face of such encoding. Dalton contends that the “metaphorical descriptions of father-daughter incest” in Julie’s dream reflect the pressures of psychic and social censorship; unable to accuse her father directly, Barnes resorts to fiction and to figuration to convey her traumatic life story. The responsible critic must read past the dream text’s figures to uncover and condemn the “real” acts of violation (to Julie and to Barnes herself ) that lie behind them. Anything less, according to Dalton, serves “to perpetuate the silencing of those who have suffered from child abuse.”30 If we accept the terms of Dalton’s argument, we might read Julie’s dream as the final secret that the text presents, one that lends its narrative to all the other secrets in the novel: Julie is the helpless little girl whose sexual violation gains endless representation both inside and outside her dream. Yet precisely because she is positioned as helpless and dependent in a narrative whose cultural currency empowers not her but her selfless protectors, Julie’s secret offers her no leverage in the world beyond her dream. Like her mother, she is defined by, but cannot move within, a domestic exterior sealed against her by the very profusion of agents who act in her stead and on her behalf. As a result of this foreclosure, her secret, like Amelia’s, recedes from the social border between secrecy and scandal to the psychic border between fantasy and fact. Julie lives in a house whose interior walls have been papered over with media images of incest and rape. But where her grandmother Sophia can silently rely on newspaper clippings of “the pretty girl untimely raped” (R 14) to guard her skirts during her excursions into the domestic exterior,31 such a clipping provides Julie with no protection within the domestic interior. In this regard, her experience, like her mother’s, troubles the otherwise appealing fantasy of pre- or antinormative domestic experiment that Wendell and Sophia fight to protect from outside scrutiny and regulation. The mute pain of these two white women reminds us just how devastating the dream of domestic security can be for the stay-at-home mother and child in whose name that dream was forged. But as soon as we reach this point in Dalton’s line of argument, problems arise. Dalton assumes that the critic can (indeed, must) supply what Julie lacks in the text itself. She offers a reading that speaks out publicly on behalf of the sexually abused child and on behalf of the facts, and she “corrects . . . misreadings and ‘nonreadings’” by earlier critics who have failed to do likewise.32 In effect, she rescues Barnes’s novel from both its silences and its silencers,

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inscribing the text and its current readers in a new “politics of the selfless helping the helpless.” In Dalton’s reading, the interpretive strategies of the literary critic fuse with the self-authorizing strategies of the Progressive reformer: the appeal to fact, the exposure of secrets, the declared devotion to another’s welfare, and the self-appointed mission of correction equally characterize both enterprises. Yet Ryder itself meticulously examines these discursive strategies and the reform agendas they legitimate, only to reject them. Dalton’s act of reading uncovers evidence that “incriminate[s]” Wendell Ryder (or Wald Barnes) as his daughter’s violator.33 Within the novel itself, Wendell and his mother use the same narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation to incriminate a set of state and corporate initiatives designed to secure the home lives of white women and children. Posing in their own ways as selfless protectors of the helpless, Wendell and Sophia mirror and deform the discursive strategies used to generate the founding propositions of our welfare state. From the start, as the novel makes clear, these tenets secured a version of home that upheld the coercive and exploitive power of wage labor, white supremacy, heterosexual monogamy, and female dependency. In the very symmetry that she sets up between her unruly protagonists and the corporate and state agents they oppose, Barnes calls into question how well domestic dependents are served by any social initiative advanced for their protection. Alert to the dangers lurking in all noble philosophies in the home, Ryder refuses stable oppositions between criminal projects and projects of correction. Instead, it repeatedly foregrounds the morally suspect and historically variable nature of that very distinction. Moreover, two episodes in the novel openly question the kind of justice typically achieved in the name of protecting sexual innocence. As we have seen, Ryder uses the dream text of Julie’s mother, Amelia, to dramatize a dangerous readiness to cast the black man, sooner than the white, as the offending “bull” in the rape scenarios of white America’s cultural imagination. The only other “bull” to be publicly condemned for a sexual crime in the novel is Oscar Wilde, who was tried and imprisoned on charges of sodomy. In the same conversation with his mother in which she reiterates the need to keep his polygamous practices secret, Wendell remembers seeing Wilde in London after the scandal had burst, and though he was the core, the fragrant centre of a rousing stench, in a month he was a changed man, not changing, sitting within his cell, weeping, writhing, plotting “De Profundis,”. . . ; a bull caught and captured, sentenced, hamstrung, marauded, peered at, peeped upon, regarded and discovered to be a gentle sobbing cow. (R 166)

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Here, Wendell invokes Wilde as the exemplary instance of a “diverse soul” (R 165) abruptly alienated from the intimate terms of his own practice by the combined powers of public scrutiny and court investigation. “[C]hanged . . . , not changing, . . . marauded, peered at, peeped upon,” he, not Wendell, is the man whom the state offers up as the measure of its disciplinary power in the domestic sphere. For Barnes, who dedicated Ryder to “T.W.” in cloaked tribute to her lover Thelma Wood, the memory of Wilde’s fate and its testimony to the quality of a justice dedicated to preserving norms of moral decency was likely to have been quite chilling. The extent to which Barnes distrusted a reformist “politics of the selfless helping the helpless” is further suggested by an anecdote she reported to Hank O’Neal in her old age to explain her departure from newspaper journalism. According to O’Neal: She finally quit the papers because of a rape case in which a girl in her teens had been raped six times. The editor of the Journal American wanted an interview with the victim and suggested that Miss Barnes contrive a story to gain access to the girl. She managed to sneak past the guards at the hospital, entered the girl’s room, made up some wild tale, and got an interview, but when it was over felt guilty about what she had done. When she told her editor she would never cover another rape case and would not write a story about this one or give the information to anyone else, he fired her on the spot.34 With this anecdote, Barnes narrates a moment of protracted and painful decision in which she finally chooses to perpetuate the silence of a victim of sexual abuse rather than publish the facts on her behalf (and against her will). In the brashness of her own attempt “to gain access to the girl,” Barnes seems to expose and then refuse the suspect nature of a selfish—moral, political, economic—investment in the reformist potential of scandalizing someone else’s helplessness. Of course, until the anecdote is repeated, such an exposure carries little critical force since it finds its medium in silence. Yet we might use the grim choice of absolute silence with which Barnes marked her departure from investigative journalism better to measure what she achieves through the porous silences, the paraded secrets, which distinguish the investigative forays of her fiction. In Ryder’s recurring narratives of a young girl’s violation, Barnes creates a third alternative to the limiting choice of absolute silence or full factual disclosure presented in her anecdote to O’Neal, even as she calls into question the assumption that full factual disclosure is the best (most politically and juridically effective, most psychically healing) way to narrate a story of domestic or sexual

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abuse. Indeed, her overtly figurative deployment of the narrative of violation provides Barnes with the means for troubling the ongoing currency of this very assumption. In refusing to specify the exact nature of Julie’s relationship to the novel’s proliferating narratives of a young girl’s violation, Barnes denies her readers access to a “real” originary event to which the figural play of her text might be referred and through which it might be contained. Lodging formal accusations against no single attacker on Julie’s behalf, Ryder conducts no trial and brings no guilty party to justice. But by the same token, the novel resists the sensationalist impulse to restrict the sources of social horror to the supernaturally corrosive effects of lone individuals whose practices fail to conform to the current terms of the state’s domestic agenda. When Barnes frustrates attempts to locate an individual threat to Amelia’s or Julie’s domestic security, she turns our attention outward toward the wider, structural impediments to female autonomy, which invalidated the maternalist promise of domestic security at the very moment of its issuance. Barnes pays a price, both for her refusal to moor Julie’s dream of protest in a verifiable scene of wrongdoing and for her wider refusal to ground her protest novel in a coherent and circumscribed set of grievances. Withholding final judgment on which agents are to blame—and for what—her novel cannot lend the weight of its critique to a specific program of change. But this is only to say that Barnes writes her protest novel to lambaste, rather than to serve, the evolving project of state-directed domestic reform. The very impossibility of pinning down an actual crime of incest or rape against Julie in Ryder makes possible a metaphorical widening of the field of suspects and of crimes in the recurring dream scene of her violation. Barnes makes repeated, figurative use of the narrative of a young girl’s sexual violation to foreground the underlying complicity between Progressive reformers and the oppressive social and economic structures they would reform, while eschewing the scandalous appeal to fact on which such projects depend. In her novel’s widened field of crimes and suspects, the reformist character of the early U.S. welfare state ultimately stands accused, on the grounds that its selective promise of domestic security demands of white women and children a helplessness that belies any protections levied on their behalf. Taking aim at the rhetorically productive space opened up between their need and someone else’s power, Barnes promotes figure over fact in order to implicate the generative terms of U.S. welfare policy in a scandal that cannot be localized.

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2 Tortured Bodies and Twisted Words The Antidomestic Vision of Jean Toomer’s Cane

In Jean Toomer’s 1922 play, Natalie Mann, the title character offers a shocking comparison to convey the force of her aversion to the domestic ideals of her day. When a well-meaning Washington matron advises Natalie to trade in her bohemian commitment to free love and modern art for a safer life of domestic respectability, the young woman protests the silencing of her creative potential that such a choice would entail. She declares, “I would rather die outright, be burnt or lynched, than to build myself such a sepulchre, to cheat death by calling it home” (NM 296). In characterizing the promise of domestic security as a form of cheating, a kind of death-in-life, against which even lynching would be preferable, Toomer’s protagonist signals her impatience not only with prevailing sentimental definitions of women’s domestic role, but also with the contemporary elaboration of sentimental and domestic discourse as a leading site and source of modern social transformation. As I discussed in the previous chapter, during the Progressive Era a variety of citizens invoked the need for greater protection of the home to authorize new forms of social activism. White women reformers in the Northeast and Midwest used a discourse of maternalism to win support for a range of new state provisions and protections for white women and children. Meanwhile, southern white men, working outside rather than within the law, used a strikingly similar discourse to justify mob violence. As Claude McKay would write in 1920, “the reactionary South . . . professes to disfranchise, outrage and lynch Negro men and women solely for the protection of white women.”1 In the face

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of this rhetoric and the disparate forms of social action it authorized, black activists placed campaigns against lynching at the forefront of their organized political work. Ida B. Wells laid out the terms of the campaign in the early 1890s: calling on a discourse of domestic respectability that cast the white man, rather than the black, as the true enemy of domestic security, she and others used the scandal of mob violence to demand federal protection of African Americans’ investment in the prevailing social values of self-government, self-advancement, and family life.2 For African Americans, the fight against lynching occupied a vital place in Progressive Era struggles for welfare reform. Linda Gordon notes that “black reformers could not separate welfare from civil rights agitation. . . . Race uplift work was usually welfare work by definition, conceived as a path to racial equality. . . . A nice example: In 1894 Gertrude Mossell referred to Ida Wells’ antilynching campaign as ‘philanthropy.’ ”3 African American women spearheaded the major welfare initiatives in their communities, overseeing the creation of schools, libraries, hospitals, and old age homes, which state and local governments provided to whites as a matter of course. Through their support for Wells, black clubwomen also helped to propel the scandal of lynching into the national and international spotlight. By the end of the Progressive Era, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had joined the National Association of Colored Women and its subsidiary organizations in making lynching the preeminent national political issue in the black community. With the introduction of federal antilynching legislation in Congress in 1918, the fight against lynching became the cornerstone of African Americans’ collective engagement with the emerging welfare state. Intervening in the new social space that was opening up between the home, the market, and the state, activists used the practice of lynching to highlight the racially exclusive nature of state-level provisions and protections created to secure the home. And they demanded the federal government’s formal recognition of its duty to ensure the welfare of African Americans along with other citizens. This historical context makes the line that Toomer assigns to Natalie in his 1922 play all the more shocking and hard to fathom: preferring a horrific death at the hands of the white mob to the promise of her “own home” (NM 295), Natalie openly rejects not only a widely desirable personal fate but also the predominant terms of the contemporary struggle for collective African American enfranchisement. The violence of Natalie’s remark resonates throughout Toomer’s play, whose privileged black characters consistently subordinate the race question to the more pressing “question of the home” (NM 289). At first glance, Toomer’s more famous collection, Cane, written concurrently with Natalie Mann, seems to reverse the play’s priorities, replacing stagy debates on domesticity with

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recurring tales of racist atrocity. But the two questions cannot be disentangled. In both Natalie Mann and Cane, Toomer revisits deeply racialized connections between an inherited model of sentimental domesticity and emerging forms of state power and state responsibility. Writing against other antilynching literature of the period, he questions the quality of both private and public life made possible by a modern sentimental project of domestic reform, and ultimately he indicts contemporary proponents of black respectability for jeopardizing the very work of African American emancipation that they sought to oversee. At the center of a critique that he develops most fully in Cane, Toomer uses the concept of hysterical trauma to expose an underlying continuity between the repressive regime of domestic respectability and the brutally oppressive order of southern lynch law. At the same time, in ways suggested by the words of Natalie Mann with which I opened this chapter, Cane transforms the traumatized figure of the hysteric into a multivalent symbol of black protest, remaking a body strangely shared by the lynching victim and the victim of domestic propriety into a complex emblem of artistic, sexual, and social revolt. For all their iconoclasm, Toomer’s treatments of the lynching plot in Cane and Natalie Mann are strongly indebted to the politics of black respectability that he sets out to dispute. Critics to date have largely overlooked Toomer’s debts to the literature and political journalism of his African American contemporaries, in part because Toomer’s own racial identifications were so fluid and shifting. But in recent years, this critical oversight has become increasingly untenable as scholars have presented new evidence and arguments establishing both the depth of Toomer’s early involvement in a number of black middle-class literary and political circles and the larger impact that the cultural politics of the African American elite had on his formation.4 Antilynching activism played a key role in constituting the publishing forums and readership networks that sponsored Toomer’s earliest ventures into print. When Crisis, the first journal to publish Toomer’s literary writing, featured his lynching poem “Song of the Son” (later included in Cane) in its April 1922 issue, it inscribed Toomer’s literary debut within the NAACP’s own four-year-old campaign against lynching. The years leading up to the publication of Cane coincided with the peak years of this campaign. From 1918 to 1920, Crisis published Walter White’s investigative journalism on lynching in a series punctuated by the NAACP’s 1919 publication of White’s Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918. In April 1918, Congressman Leonidas Dyer introduced antilynching legislation, which was quickly endorsed by African American women’s organizations and won the public support of the NAACP by 1919. In 1920, the new NAACP executive secretary, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White spearheaded an intensive national drive to pass the bill. This drive reached a high point in June 1922,

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roughly five months after the Dyer bill passed in the House and a month before Toomer announced his plans to collect his writings under the title Cane. In that month, 5,000 African American protesters gathered in the nation’s capital (and Toomer’s hometown) to conduct a silent protest march on behalf of the Dyer bill. But on December 4, 1922, as Toomer completed work on his collection, Senate Republicans, under pressure from southern Democrats, agreed to withdraw the bill without a vote. The NAACP would not revive its drive to pass federal antilynching legislation until the early years of the New Deal. In September 1923, when Cane went on sale, the organization was already beginning to redirect the energies of Crisis readers elsewhere. Yet by that point, both Toomer and the NAACP had accomplished the crucial task of consolidating a public for themselves, and, in both cases, lynching had been made to play the pivotal role.5 This strategic use of lynching to constitute and mobilize African American print communities drew on a decades-long tradition. In the wake of Wells’s groundbreaking work in the 1890s, numerous magazine and newspaper editors made courageous stands against lynching the primary sign and symbol of a free black press.6 In doing so, middle-class black journalists redefined the power of publicity inherent in lynching’s deployment as a weapon of terror. In the predominantly oral cultures of the post-Reconstruction rural South, rumors of past and future lynchings had the power to choke the open expression of protest and self-assertion in African American communities. But when they were translated into print and circulated internationally, the same lynchings became equally powerful catalysts in the collective work of African American self-enfranchisement. The 1922 protest march of 5,000 silent demonstrators in Washington aptly concretizes the political import of this translation: in making a collective spectacle of their own muteness, demonstrators transformed lynch law’s power to enforce their silence into a powerful vehicle for regaining a political voice and visibility in the nation’s capital. The dynamic self-reflexivity of the 1922 demonstration finds its counterpart in Toomer’s own complex meditations on involuntary silence and free expression in both Cane and Natalie Mann, as well as in the dense transactions that these texts stage between the oral and written registers of black expression. But if Toomer shares with his black middle-class contemporaries an urgent investment in the national emergence of a collective black voice, he departs from them on the question of the social vision that such an emergent voice was to articulate. In his literary writing from this period, Toomer disputes the value of identifying the struggle for African American freedom and prosperity with the fight for full inclusion in the current bourgeois democratic order. Sharply

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criticizing the assimilationist goals advanced by proponents of black respectability, he articulates an alternative, antidomestic social vision anchored in the art and culture of the rural black folk and the newly urban black working class. Toomer makes the unstable conventions of grotesque representation bound up with the lynching plot central to both of these undertakings. Proponents of black respectability had long foregrounded the political need to counter the grotesque representations of blackness that linked African Americans’ unfitness as citizens to an inherent domestic and sexual depravity. Both in their antilynching activism and in campaigns of racial uplift directed at the black working class, they sought to distance the race as a whole from the minstrel stereotypes used to disenfranchise it.7 In contrast, Toomer portrays the African American community’s pursuit of domestic respectability as itself grotesque, “an imitation of bigotry just to prove to the white man that what he says is not true” (NM 290). For him, sentimental codes of domestic virtue and protection not only offer an untrustworthy route to securing the welfare of the African American community, but, like lynching, constitute a historical force of racist oppression in their own right. In representing the politics of black respectability as itself grotesque, Toomer aligns himself both with the white-dominated circles of Greenwich Village and with the two literary mentors and champions he found there, Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson. In Natalie Mann, Toomer pays direct tribute to Frank’s circle in his portrayal of the exuberant gathering of “young America” (NM 303) that befriends Natalie and her lover, Nathan Merilh, when they flee the stifling hypocrisy of Washington’s African American elite for an uncharted life of free love and artistic experiment. At a deeper, formal level, Toomer pays tribute to Anderson throughout Natalie Mann and Cane when he embraces the grotesque aesthetic that Anderson had used in Winesburg, Ohio to dramatize the psychologically repressed culture of small-town white America. Through this use of a grotesque aesthetic to portray middle-class experience, both men signal their affiliation with the larger revolt against bourgeois values that was animating avant-garde groups across the Atlantic.8 But Toomer parts company with other avant-garde writers, including Anderson, in his refusal to endorse the minstrel images of undomesticated blackness that those writers prized as positive repositories of sexual and artistic freedom. Like their avant-garde counterparts in Europe, the literary vanguard in Greenwich Village celebrated the redemptive potential of an African primitivism understood to be radically extrinsic to, and untouched by, the founding prohibitions of bourgeois culture. A similar faith in African Americans’ unrepressed sexuality informed the larger white enthusiasm for black music and

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dance that stood at the heart of the era’s revolution in manners and morals.9 In contrast, Toomer locates a revolutionary power in the art of the rural black folk and the urban black working class that he links to that art’s capacity not to evade, but to engage and overcome, a racist history of murder and rape bound up in the lynching plot. At the same time, he recognizes both in the lynching plot itself and in black working people’s aesthetic engagements of that plot a crucial testimonial to the ultimate continuity between oppressive and repressive forms of white bourgeois morality. While this recognition shapes the contents of Natalie Mann, it receives its fullest formal realization in Cane. There, Toomer repeatedly links the public torture of terrorized rural blacks with the occluded domestic suffering of black and white hysterics. In the final turn of his collection, Toomer presents racial stigma itself as a species of hysteria grounded in the lynching plot. Blackness appears, with this move, not as a biological fact, but as an ideological force that robs the body of its powers of speech and marks its flesh with indelible signs of moral violence. As the historical meaning of blackness comes to reside in systemic forms of social injury associated with involuntary muteness, Cane zeroes in on the core question of how to forge an authentic mode of national expression capable of restoring the African American community to the fullness of its own collective power. Toomer’s startling solution to this question is to redefine blackness itself as the sum of a dynamic, historically changing and changeable, relation between unconsciously and consciously articulated memories of racist atrocity.10 Toomer faults proponents of black respectability for placing a deadlock on the dynamic meaning of blackness by endorsing forms of sexual reticence and repression that are inextricably bound up in the very history of racist oppression they oppose. And he locates the means to break this deadlock in the newly metropolitan black culture, rooted in a rural past and flowering in a fusion of working-class and avant-garde sensibilities. For Toomer, the emancipatory force of this new culture lies in its ability to draw to the surface radical powers of disruption associated with censored memories of racist atrocity: where proponents of domestic security shy away from exposure to the pain of the ancestral past, metropolitan black culture embraces that exposure, engaging the nation as a whole in a conscious, collective, and material working through of common historical trauma. In Cane, the welfare of the race—and of the nation—depends on the healing properties of this engagement. Locating the sources of national recovery not against but in the past, Toomer seeks to weld the power of the printed word to a “true art” of African American expression, capable both of articulating and of overcoming the history of its horrific conditions of emergence.

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Scenes of Inversion When Toomer published his poem “Song of the Son” in Crisis in 1922, he joined a long line of black writers who made published accounts of lynching central to the larger work of group emancipation. Thirty years earlier, Ida B. Wells inaugurated her transatlantic antilynching campaign after a Memphis mob murdered three of her friends and destroyed the offices of her newspaper, the Free Speech. In 1892, she published the pamphlet Southern Horrors, to be followed by A Red Record in 1895 and Mob Rule in New Orleans in 1900. Together, these pamphlets established a number of rhetorical conventions that would govern factual and fictive representations of lynching for years to come. As Gail Bederman has argued, “in Southern Horrors, Wells refuted the lynching scenario by inversion.”11 Tropes of inversion figured at two levels in Wells’s analysis. On the one hand, she sought to “revolutioniz[e]” “public sentiment” on the issue. On the other, she sought to portray lynching itself as a deadly form of “carnival” designed to block African American access to the wider bourgeois democratic culture of self-government, self-advancement, and family life.12 For Wells, lynching backed up white efforts to deny black men the power of the ballot, the courts, and “the fruits of . . . labor.” This “subjugation of the young manhood of the race” went hand in hand with attacks on black women, black children, and the sanctity of the black home.13 In Southern Horrors, after methodically refuting “the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she draws attention to “the outrage upon helpless childhood” in six recent cases of white men’s rapes and attempted rapes of African American minors. Similarly, in A Red Record, she reviews the 1894 lynchings of seven black men in Brooks County, Georgia, before reporting that “the wives and daughters of these lynched men were horribly and brutally outraged by the murderers of their husbands and fathers. But the mob has not been punished and again women and children are robbed of their protectors whose blood cries unavenged to Heaven and humanity.” Here and elsewhere, Wells self-consciously engages sentimental codes of male protection and female helplessness already deployed by advocates of lynching in order to expose the white mob as the true agent, and the black family as the true victim, of lawless attacks on the domestic order.14 Both the endorsement of a middle-class model of sentimental domesticity and the strategic use of inversion became prominent features in subsequent literary representations of lynching. Participating in the wider elaboration of domestic discourse as a pivotal language of modern social reform, African American writers frequently laced their antilynching narratives with

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sentimental motifs of family loyalty and self-sacrifice, the sacredness of the mother-child bond, and the helpless vulnerability of domestic dependents.15 Angelina Grimké’s 1920 story “Goldie” provides an apt example of this literature, in part because it so neatly reworks a logic of inversion already associated with the grotesque positioning of blackness in earlier sentimental fiction. In many ways, “Goldie” exemplifies the discourse of black respectability against which Toomer positioned his own work, but it also develops motifs that reappear directly in that work. Grimké based her story on the infamous 1918 lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child in Georgia, a lynching that Toomer would also incorporate into the final section of Cane.16 In “Goldie,” Victor Forrest heads north after the death of his parents while his sister, Goldie, stays behind to marry and create a “little home all her own” (G 289). When her husband discovers that a white man, Lafe Coleman, has been harassing her, Goldie fears a violent confrontation and calls her brother home in a frantic letter. Victor reaches the couple’s house in the dark of night only to discover that he has become a stranger to himself at the very moment of his homecoming. Grimké’s deliberate dilation of this moment anticipates Toomer’s own focus on the alienating physical effects of witnessing racist atrocity in Cane.17 As Victor stands on the threshold of his sister’s home: This other person who seemed, somehow, to have entered into his body, moved forward, struck another match, lit the lamp and took it down out of the bracket. Nothing seemed to make very much difference to this stranger. He moved his body stiffly; his eyes felt large and dry. He passed through the open door at the left and what he saw there did not surprise him in the least. In some dim way, only he knew that it affected him. (G 299–300) Grimké’s portrayal of Victor’s homecoming, like Walter Benjamin’s later parable of the stranger in the doorway, dramatizes a modern scene of alienated intimacy. But the terms of this alienation, unlike that discussed by Benjamin, are reserved for those positioned beyond rather than within an emerging order of state-sponsored domestic security. Thrust by the horrific—and as yet unnarrated—contents of Goldie’s home into an estranged relationship with all he holds dear, Victor’s character pointedly revises an archetypal image of blackness as an alien domestic presence that appears in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The shifting relations set up among racial otherness, sentimental domesticity, and the grotesque and carnivalesque, first in Stowe’s text and then in Grimké’s, find complex echoes in Toomer’s handling of the lynching plot in Cane, and are thus worth reviewing here in some detail.

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In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the northern spinster Miss Ophelia attempts to make the young slave Topsy into a chambermaid. At first, Topsy seems to excel in the role, but when Miss Ophelia turns her back: Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours. Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the pillow-cases, butting her woolly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be grotesquely ornamented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s nightclothes, and enact various scenic performances with that,—singing and whistling, and making grimaces at herself in the looking-glass; in short, as Miss Ophelia phrased it, “raising Cain” generally.18 In “Goldie,” Topsy’s “perfect carnival of confusion” reappears as the work of a white mob bent on desecrating the sentimental space of the black home. When Victor enters his sister’s parlor, he discovers that “there was not, in this room, one single whole piece of furniture” (G 300). A toppled piano, scattered “pictures,” “knick-knacks, vases,” and “a china clock” lie “smashed and broken” on a rug “torn into shreds and fouled by many dirty feet,” while “over and over the splay-fingered imprint of one dirty hand repeated itself on the walls” (G 300). Entering the bedroom, Victor “saw the same confusion as elsewhere. A brass bed was overturned and all things else shattered and topsy-turvy” (G 300–301). At the foot of the bed, he finds a “dark object” (G 301) that turns out to be his sister’s dog. “A kick in the belly had done for him. He leaned over; the little leg was quite stiff. Less dimly, this time, he knew that this affected him” (G 301). Grimké accomplishes several things in her rewriting of Stowe’s scene of domestic carnival. The imputed savagery of the enslaved black child, “grotesquely ornamented with feathers,” returns as the degenerate evil of the free white man, Lafe Coleman, who spreads his “splay-fingered imprint” on the parlor walls. The gay spirit of mockery with which Topsy “dress[es] the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s night-clothes” returns as the vicious depravity of the mob which leaves a dark body on the bed, itself a stand-in for the bodies of Goldie, her husband, and their unborn child, whom Victor later finds slaughtered in the yard. Most important, the comedy of Stowe’s scene, which turns on the enslaved black child’s alien presence in the spinster’s bedroom, returns as trauma in Grimké’s scene, where Victor’s abrupt self-alienation marks the power of white rule to wrench black men and women from their deepest attachments to family

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and home. In Stowe’s portrayal, a proper sentimental education prompts the change of heart needed to turn Topsy into a warm and willing domestic subject. But in Grimké’s portrayal, the sentimental home ultimately fails to nourish and reward the willing heart. Instead, it absorbs and makes grotesquely visible the violent contradictions between white rhetoric and white practice, contradictions that threaten African American families with self-shattering forms of horror and loss. In Grimké’s fiction, as in other antilynching narratives of the period, scenes of inversion once again work on two levels: dramatizing the white mob’s grotesque overthrow of the black family’s sentimental home, these scenes also dramatize the meta-discourse of inversion at work in black middle-class writers’ rebuttals to dominant accounts of the lynching plot. Yet these rebuttals, for all their power, do little to disturb the basic antithesis between the domestic and the grotesque that runs throughout sentimental discourse. In fact, the larger politics of black respectability, which sought to distance the race from dehumanizing associations with the grotesque, was built upon the refusal of any traffic between these two terms. In the same period, however, white middle-class writers, drawn to the bohemian and avant-garde circles of Chicago and New York, were beginning to question this antithesis. First in Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 Spoon River Anthology and then, more explicitly, in Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 collection, Winesburg, Ohio, the grotesque emerges as a category of experience internal to the repressive culture of white middle-class domestic respectability. In the opening story of his collection, “Hands,” Anderson presents the memory of an averted lynching as the buried source of white neurosis. The story parallels Grimké’s “Goldie” in its focus on a modern scene of alienated intimacy, but departs from her example in its grotesque revision of sentimental codes calling for the protection of helpless innocents. For both of these reasons, Toomer would find in “Hands” another important, if problematic, precedent for his own attempts to rewrite the lynching plot in Cane. In Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson develops a grotesque theory of character based upon Freudian principles. In the collection’s prologue, an “old writer” (WO 22) proclaims that people are “made . . . grotesques” (WO 24) when they try to confine the “truth” of their lives to one side or the other of such founding dichotomies of bourgeois culture as “the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon” (WO 23). Caught in an unspeakable relationship to the sides of these dichotomies they would disown, Anderson’s smalltown grotesques experience the return of the repressed in an array of strange

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obsessions and deforming gestures. “Hands” introduces readers to the first of these grotesques, a “forever frightened” and self-doubting man named Wing Biddlebaum, who “did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years” (WO 27). As the story’s title suggests, Wing’s social isolation and “long years of silence” (WO 28) stem from a fear of his own hands. In his youth, Wing was a schoolteacher named Adolph Myers who sought by voice and touch to teach the boys in his care to dream. But Myers’s inspiring pedagogy soon roused the ire of his rural Pennsylvania neighbors. When one of Myers’s students falsely accuses him of sexual misconduct, the town fathers rally in the night to drive him from the town. “They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape” (WO 32). Repenting moments later, the mob resumes its hunt, “swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster and faster into the darkness” (WO 33). Myers’s rumored sexual transgressions render him symbolically black, and he is spared violent communal retribution only when he inadvertently draws attention to his whiteness. Evading death through racial privilege, the schoolteacher lives to have that privilege rescinded as the town fathers ritually muddy a body already bent on plunging “faster and faster into the darkness.” When he reappears in Winesburg under a new name, Myers has become a permanently mortified hysteric, whose strangely alienated relationship to his own hunger for human contact cryptically encodes the memory of a night of terror. The disturbing power of Anderson’s story turns on its inverted relationship to sentimental codes of helpless innocence and virtuous protection: in “Hands,” these codes themselves become grotesque when they are used to condemn and destroy a man “meant by nature to be a teacher of youth” (WO 31). When he uses the lynching plot to illuminate a story of false innocence and false guilt, Anderson places the reckless power of the white mob at the origin of his theory of repressed middle-class character. At the same time—and rather incredibly—he carefully confines this traumatic theory of character to whites, reserving for the collection’s only two African American characters a primitive and unrepressed relationship to the grotesque and carnivalesque. Thus, in “The Thinker,” Seth Richmond abandons a plan to “live like kings” (WO 131) at a country fair when the unpleasant experience of “sleeping on wet straw” next to “two drunken Negroes” (WO 131–132) prompts his abrupt rejection of a carnival life of lawless pleasure. In direct contrast to Seth’s unruly night companions, Wing seems to suffer the full neurotic effects of his ordeal because he is, in the end, only symbolically black.19

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Split Voices In 1921, Toomer traveled to Sparta, Georgia, to assume the role of substitute principal at a vocational school for blacks. The trip gave rise to the portraits of rural Sempter that make up both the first and third parts of Cane. In these portraits, Toomer draws complex inspiration from earlier literary representations of lynching. Like Grimké, he emphasizes the catastrophic effects that white hypocrisy has on black lives, but he does not suggest that a higher standard of domestic rectitude will put things right. Instead, like Anderson, he deploys a grotesque aesthetic to critique the repressive culture of middle-class respectability. But unlike Anderson—and the wider, white-dominated avant-garde circles that championed both men’s art—Toomer refuses to locate African Americans in a carefree carnival space outside this culture. Instead, he foregrounds the ways in which middle-class norms of domestic conduct actively police a subject population largely denied the resources or incentive to uphold those norms. Like the good wife and children who get thrown out on the street at the end of Ryder, most of Toomer’s characters in part 1 of Cane find themselves at a double remove from the sheltering space of white middle-class domesticity. They are portrayed as neither inside that space nor on the ground of the domestic exterior charged with overseeing its protection and support. Instead, they occupy a further outside, where no protection is offered or called for, and where various forms of social violence, generated to uphold and defend the nation’s fledgling order of domestic security, become frighteningly visible. For Toomer, the practice of lynching most fully illuminates the order of violence awaiting those who fall into this further outside. Reconnecting Anderson’s displaced and averted lynching plot with the ongoing history of African American experience, he identifies lynching as the site where the cultural mechanisms of sexual repression and racist oppression inextricably mesh. At the same time, he modifies the action of the returning repressed that informs Anderson’s traumatic theory of character. In their dreams and somatic symptoms, Toomer’s characters, like Grimké’s, enact something closer to “the return of the oppressed”20 as they cryptically restage narrative components of the lynching plot in displaced and scattered form. In their involuntary rehearsals of publicly neglected histories of racist and sexual violence, these characters also rehearse the foundational power of the lynching plot to define and enforce the normative gender and racial identities of modern U.S. society.21 Toomer pushes his critical analysis of the lynching plot one step further in his exploration of the black community’s own highly ambivalent role in enforcing the dominant moral codes and moral violence of the nation’s white

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bourgeoisie. In Natalie Mann, this ambivalence plays out along lines of class: the play’s middle-class characters exhibit a hyperbolic conformity to bourgeois moral codes that its working-class characters (and middle-class rebels) indignantly reject, explicitly connecting these codes to the silenced history of white men’s sexual abuse of African American women (NM 278). But in part 1 of Cane, Toomer offers a more nuanced and unstable portrait of such ambivalence, depicting a community whose voice is internally split, or self-divided, by competing moral traditions. In its casual routines of gossip and rumor, the black community of Sempter enforces white middle-class standards of sexual morality, but when it comes together in song, the same community assumes a sharply critical relationship to those same standards. Throughout part 1 of Cane, Sempter’s black community joins the white community in holding women to the twin dictates of racial segregation and domestic respectability. Both groups sentence wayward women to narrative trajectories that lead from prurient censure to ostracism, insanity, and death. Toomer’s decision to focus on the stories of these wayward women contrasts sharply with the lynching narratives of his black middle-class contemporaries, which uniformly underscore the domestic virtue of their black protagonists. Lyrically embracing troubled lives of undomesticated desire, he shifts the burden of moral accounting from disreputable women to the communities that violently condemn them. On one level, these stories record the pain and urgency of black communal attempts to overcome the traumatic legacy of slavery: the very intensity of the community’s embrace of middle-class moral codes measures the strength of its desire to protect new generations of African American women from white men’s sexual abuse. But Toomer faults Sempter’s African American community for caring less in the end about the protection of its members than about the protection of its own good name. In the world Toomer presents, like the world recounted in Southern Horrors, codes of black manhood—forcibly wrested from the power of the ballot, the courts, and the fruits of labor—rest on the sole remaining power to control black women’s sexuality. In the face of this control, Toomer’s women characters choose silence over public naming rituals that threaten to put the lives of their forbidden lovers on the line. As a result, they call the full force of communal censure upon themselves, and, like Wing Biddlebaum, end up suffering ghostly versions of the lynching plot that their silence would fend off. An examination of the four violent deaths that take place in part 1 bears out this point. As several critics have noted, the text’s first murder, in the opening story, “Karintha,” is implied but never named. The silent repetition underwriting Karintha’s unnamed murder of her unnamed child suggests that she may have killed the child rather than disclose its patronymic—or accept the

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consequences of its lack of one. When Becky, a “poor-white” Catholic woman, bears a black son, she too fails to name the man “who gave it to her” (C 7). Becky’s refusal to identify her lover saves him from the mob, just as Carma’s refusal to identify her lover saves him from her husband’s knife. But in rejecting their parts in naming rituals used to justify the maiming and killing of black men, both women bring on a communal wrath so strong as to exact its own measure of physical suffering. Like Wing Biddlebaum with his fluttering hands, or like Goldie and Victor Forrest—the one with a “twisted smile” (G 285) and the other with a “stiff” gait and “terrible eyes” (G 299, 302)—Toomer’s characters somatize their fear of communal violence. In Toomer’s portrayal, this violence does not wait upon mob action, but proceeds directly from communal words of moral judgment. Becky’s “mouth setting in a twist” below her “vacant, staring” eyes testifies, as a hysterical symptom might, to the enduring trauma of the “words” that break and finally kill her (C 7). Carma, too, becomes “hysterical” under the force of her husband’s interrogation when the “weekold boasts and rumors” of other men drive him to clear his name with blood (C 13). “Words, like corkscrews, wormed to her strength” until it “fizzled out” (C 13), sending her to the canebrake where she makes a feigned, or perhaps merely failed, attempt on her own life. Male gossip and rumor play a similarly catastrophic role in “Blood-Burning Moon,” where the never-ending chain of efforts to besmirch, defend, and avenge men’s names leaves two men dead and a woman, Louisa, “dazed, hysterical,” and on the verge of madness (C 35). Toomer underscores the deadliness of the community’s verbal acts of moral judgment in the echoes he sets up between female hysteria and the lynched black body, echoes which will receive even greater elaboration in Cane’s final section, “Kabnis.” The words of censure that fill her “like a bubble rising” (C 7), only to burst and break her, link Becky both with the plum-like bodies “squeezed” and “bursting” (C 14) on the lynching tree in “Song of the Son,” and with Tom Burwell, whose “eyes po[p]” (C 36) in the fire’s heat in “BloodBurning Moon.” Similarly, Bane’s words, which pierce Carma’s body “like corkscrews” (C 13), eerily recall the infamous 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife in Doddsville, Mississippi, where a white mob tortured the couple with a corkscrew before allowing them to die.22 Rehearsing the grotesque rituals of white supremacy in their hysterical symptoms, these women stage the return of the oppressed in the field of their own bodies. Like Grimké’s and Anderson’s characters, they suffer violently somatized forms of social ostracism and selfalienation that stem from larger social contradictions. Toomer follows his predecessors in locating these contradictions in the gap between mouthed codes of domestic respectability and the unspeakable sexual politics of murder and

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rape that lies at the heart of both the African American community’s and the nation’s history. He goes beyond Grimké and Anderson, however, in identifying an artistic space of reintegration that lies on the other side of social and self-alienation, one that shares and acknowledges, rather than displacing and denying, the larger history of the group. Toomer finds this space in song. In slave spirituals and modern blues, he recognizes a second register of the African American community’s voice, one which harbors vital resources for remembering and resisting the moral violence of white domination. For Toomer, the tradition of African American folk song holds out the power not only to save the community’s moral outcasts from the permanent censure of oblivion, but also to save the community from embracing the terms of its own subjugation. Consistent with the coded verbal style of the songs themselves, his references to the critical force of black folk art are often oblique in Cane. But a more explicit discussion of the topic in Natalie Mann helps to draw out the premises of his thought. In Natalie Mann, a character named Therman Law condemns white America for a 300-year-old record of using “its own moral pretensions as a footrule of universal measurement” in order to heap “scorn and condemnation” on “what it calls the benighted moral looseness of the Negro” (NM 289–290). And he berates contemporary middle-class blacks for “knuckl[ing] to” whites’ dubious moral standard. As he puts it: The result is obvious: what should be the most colorful and robust of our racial segments is approaching a sterile and denuded hypocrisy as its goal. What has become of the almost obligatory heritage of folksongs? Jazz on the one hand, and on the other, a respectability which is never so vigorous as when it denounces and rejects the true art of the race’s past. They are ashamed of the past made permanent by the spirituals. (NM 290) Natalie Mann takes Therman Law’s protest one step further when she embraces African American folk song as an ongoing force of critical understanding and emancipation in her own life. Natalie loves Nathan Merilh, a man whose “socialist” ’ and “bolshevist” (NM 258) convictions pit him against the bourgeois family—he is reputed to want “to communize women” (NM 268)— and align him with the cause of world revolution. Natalie locates the source of her own revolutionary ardor in the songs of the ancestors. In a bid to become Nathan’s lover, she offers to “tell [him] a folk-tale” (NM 301) about Coomba, an African princess who follows her lover into slavery and creates the first folk song one night after she witnesses his murder and is herself “cruelly violated”

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(NM 301). Closing her tale with the assertion, “I love with the passion of that woman” (NM 301), Natalie uses this origin story to convince Nathan that she is ready to abandon a protected life of false appearances for one of hard truths, sexual daring, and creative endeavor. In the first part of Cane, folk songs are not literally emancipatory, but they do provide a vital communal resource of critical understanding and resistance against racist oppression. In the stories of Karintha, Becky, Carma, and Louisa, the songs and song fragments that frame and punctuate tales of sexual transgression and moral retribution hold out to the listener encrypted testimony of an age-old, oppositional moral sensibility. Aligning the muted wording of their own verses with rising smoke (C 4), whispering winds (C 7, 9), and bloody moons (C 31, 33, 37), these songs invoke a landscape smoldering with suppressed evidence of racist atrocity that gives the lie to white claims to moral superiority. They serve as the repository for an ancestral knowledge of the history of murder and rape buried beneath the nation’s selective investments in domestic security, and voice an alternative model of black communal welfare, one that rejects the moral divisions of respectable society and restores outcast members to the common fold. After Tom Burwell’s lynching, Louisa, like Coomba before her, believes that her neighbors and her slain lover might “come out and join her” if she sings (C 36). Delusional with grief, she nevertheless understands the power of song to reclaim the lost bodies of lynching victims and “give virgin lips to cornfield concubines” (C 15), removing society’s designated scapegoats from a moral discourse that attributes their suffering to their own wrongdoing, and relocating them in a realm of artistic memory that transforms the mute traumas of outcast individuals into “soul sounds” (C 15) of collective unity and persistence. Toomer makes the modern black poet heir to this aesthetic tradition in two poems that obliquely reiterate Natalie Mann’s derivation of folk songs from ancestral experiences of murder and rape. In “Georgia Dusk,” an African American singer is “surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds” after witnessing the eerily indeterminate spectacle of “night’s barbecue, / A feast of moon and men and barking hounds” (C 15). And in the immediately preceding poem, “Song of the Son,” Toomer equates the “passing” of the African American folk song tradition with the “parting soul” of a lynched slave (C 14). Far from dying a natural death, these songs, “denounce[d] and reject[ed]” (NM 290) by the black middle class, are themselves falling victim to the moral violence inherent in the culture of domestic respectability. In protesting attacks on the life of African American folk art, Toomer’s poet joins the wider avantgarde revolt against bourgeois standards of moral and aesthetic judgment. But his poet parts company with white avant-garde artists when he recognizes himself not as the originator, but rather as the inheritor, of a radical artistic

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tradition that has opposed the dominant structures of everyday life for centuries. Haunted by the vision of a tree burdened with the plum-like bodies of his forebears, the poet in “Song of the Son” declares, “One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes / An everlasting song, a singing tree” (C 14). Toomer’s lynching tree becomes “a singing tree” when his poet shares Natalie Mann’s insight that the “seed” of contemporary black creative expression grows directly out of the transatlantic ordeal of the African ancestors. In the story “Fern,” Toomer confronts the question of whether the modern black artist can inherit “the true art of the race’s past” without directly undergoing the horrific suffering this past contains. Fern’s story both reiterates and complicates the network of images in part 1 of Cane, linking female hysteria, lynching, and African American folk art. Through his contact with Fern, Toomer’s narrator becomes a potential double not only for the rural folk singer but also for the men and women whose traumatic lives that singer commemorates. A veteran of many love affairs, Fern disdains the “petty gossiping people” (C 19) who oversee her trip with the narrator into a canebrake. But when he touches her, she reacts hysterically, with gestures that somatize the violent racial and sexual politics subtending the modern U.S. social order. Her body shakes, “tortured with something it could not let out” (C 19), and her voice cries out “inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds” (C 19) before rising into broken melody in the gathering dusk. Vera M. Kutzinski notes that the image of “boiling sap” that “flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her” (C 19) links Fern with Tom Burwell, whose own body burns like the cane syrup cooking over an outdoor stove.23 Fern’s ghostly singing also recalls the “resinous . . . songs” (C 15) inspired by lynchings in “Song of the Son” and “Georgia Dusk,” while her wordless cries and tortured, fading body hark back to Becky and Carma, traumatized and lost from view when they, too, fail to speak. Through the patterns of repetition set up across these stories, Fern seems to suffer the obliterating pain of both a personal and a communal past. In turn, the danger inherent in sharing other people’s pain overwhelms the narrator himself when Fern’s neighbors, outraged by rumors of her fainting in his arms, set up “a watch-out” to track his movements and threaten to run him out of town (C 19). Placed directly inside the narrative of sexual transgression and moral retribution that Toomer’s narrators elsewhere contemplate from afar, the narrator of “Fern” is forced to confront a New World legacy of moral violence that cannot be safely contained in someone else’s past. But with the shift to the northern, urban settings of part 2, Toomer is able to establish new ground for staging the modern black artist’s encounter with “the true art of the race’s past.” In the cabarets, dance halls, and theaters of Washington, DC, and Chicago, he identifies emerging forms of African American art and entertainment which continue to

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provide a critical alternative to the isolating and alienating culture of domestic respectability, while offering his protagonists more mediated—and potentially restorative—access to the defining violence of southern black experience.

Falling Houses The majority of the pieces in part 2 of Cane focus on protagonists whose struggles with the culture of domestic respectability parallel those of Toomer’s bohemian rebels in Natalie Mann. In both cases, black middle-class characters’ yearning for personal liberation propels them into intimate and transformative contact with the black working class. At the same time, the stories in part 2 of Cane deepen and complicate the plotline of Natalie Mann by attributing scenes of transformative contact across class and color lines to the power of African American art to rewrite the historical template of the lynching plot. One story in part 1 of Cane, though set in the South, anticipates both the plot structure and narrative style of these later stories. Sexual repression replaces racist oppression as the major focus of “Esther,” whose story of frustrated desire rewrites the lynching of Tom Burwell. The pale and lifeless daughter of “the richest colored man in town” (C 24), Esther has been raised “to make distinctions between the business and the social worlds” (C 24). She learns to “be just as black as any man who has a silver dollar” when working “behind the counter of her father’s grocery store” (C 24) and to hold herself aloof when that counter is removed. Toomer grounds Esther’s ensuing social and self-alienation in the classic bourgeois relationship to the grotesque and carnivalesque. Refusing all public contact with carnival’s generative disorder, she reestablishes such contact privately, in fantasy and dream. Esther’s secret life comes to center on a wandering preacher named King Barlo, who has a vision on Broad Street, where Burwell’s lynching is set in motion. The death of Burwell, “whom the whole town called Big Boy” (C 30), haunts Barlo’s messianic vision of the ancestral African who, though “big an black an powerful” (C 23), is also brought low by an ant-like swarm of white men (C 23, 35). The kerosene poured on Burwell’s body and the fire that kills him reappear in the tobacco juice white men spit on Barlo’s upturned face and the Pentecostal fire burning in his throat. All of these images merge in Esther’s subsequent dream, where firemen squirt tobacco juice into a burning structure and a “singed, woolly, tobacco-juice baby” (C 24) appears within the flames. Esther’s dream, like the somatic symptoms of other women in part 1, stages the return of the oppressed in displaced and distorted form. Running the lynching plot in reverse, it converts the fiery fluids that debase and kill black men

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into the forbidden semen that gives Esther a savior child. By the end of her dream, the “miraculous” baby “nibble[s]” at “her breast” (C 24). Esther’s dream confirms the messianic vision that accompanies Barlo’s gift of tongues and embodies a promise of restored community linked to the overthrow of middleclass codes of sexual repression and white supremacist codes that silence black speech. Further images in the story of fire, smoke, burning shanties, and a face amid the fumes prepare readers to accept Esther’s eventual sexual proposition to Barlo as the final, triumphant replotting of Burwell’s death (C 26, 27, 30, 36). But in the end, Toomer blocks the fulfillment he promises and ironically assigns Esther’s failed redemption to a resurging class gap measured in the predictable moral terms of last-minute prudery and drunken lust. The patterns established in “Esther” recur throughout part 2, where the return of the oppressed emerges as an organizing logic that pulls together the section’s disparate scenes and social populations. In part 1 of Cane, southern blacks and whites embody displaced versions of the lynching plot in various forms of hysterical suffering. But in part 2, African American characters instead embody the lynching plot in ecstatic acts of aesthetic and cultural transformation that simultaneously transform the fabric of everyday life. Toomer makes the newly urban and commercial venues of black working-class art and entertainment critical to this work of transformation. Like his peers in Greenwich Village, he places urban black music and dance at the heart of a revolution in manners and morals that promises to liberate middle-class rebels from the repressive culture of domestic respectability. But for Toomer, these aesthetic forms are revolutionary not because they escape, but because they absorb and reconfigure, the history of moral violence that subtends the modern sentimental home. Throughout part 2 of Cane, Toomer locates repressed reserves of pain and longing in the alienated private lives of the black middle class, and reconnects those reserves to the race’s wider experiences under white domination. In his portrayal, popular black art forms offer northern and middle-class blacks vitally expressive points of contact with a horrific southern past and hold out to all members of the African American community the creative terms of a collective and political, rather than individual and psychological, working through of common historical trauma. Toomer’s insistence on the socially transformative power of urban black art and entertainment is rooted in a clear sense of the critical force which working-class black performers and patrons assigned to their own practice.24 Once again, Natalie Mann makes explicit Toomer’s understanding of this point. In the character of Etty Beal, Toomer creates a working-class cabaret dancer who must combat both the empty pieties of respectable black society and the predatory lusts of white men in order to devote her life to “the needs and beauty

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of art” (NM 278). When Beal takes Natalie’s lover, Nathan Merilh, to the floor, their dancing, at one point accompanied by an experimental “medley of national, racial folk-tunes” (NM 324), “becomes a spontaneous embodiment of the struggle of two souls, against external barriers, for freedom and integrity” (NM 276). The radical power of black dance sets the stage for two stories in Cane, where it holds out a similar power to unite and liberate participants across lines of color and class. In these stories, Toomer locates the power of black dance in its symbolic engagements with the displaced indices of racist atrocity. In “Theater” and “Bona and Paul,” jazz dancing breaks apart and recombines key narrative elements of the lynching plot, simultaneously marking and overturning the power of that plot to maintain the oppressive and repressive conditions of everyday life. The “dictie” (C 53) manager’s brother, John, in “Theater” seeks to counter sexual repression and social alienation in his fantasies about the workingclass chorus girl, Dorris. Attendant images of “roasting chestnuts” and burning leaves attach his fantasies to a larger cycle of imagery which associates black men’s bodies with chestnut trees and “multi-colored leaves” “split, shredded: easily burned” (C 55, 59, 109). More directly, the reiterated image of a falling house reworks an earlier symbol of racist atrocity into the vehicle of John’s creative release. In part 1, Barlo and the narrator watch Becky’s house fall in on itself, possibly crushing her to death (C 8–9). Similarly, in part 2, the middleclass character “Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet” that cuts him off from life, but threatens to “cave in” and “crush” him if he takes it off (C 42). Both images resonate with the story of Tom Burwell, whom the white mob first considers burning over a well—“and when the woodwork caved in, his body would drop to the bottom” (C 36)—before taking him to an abandoned factory, where, “flow[ing] around the walls to either side” (C 36), they “pressed in” (C 36) on his body, bound to a pyre of “rotting floor boards” (C 36). These imploding and self-devouring structures return in John’s fantasies, first as the walls of the theater-house which “sing and press inward . . . towards a center of physical ecstasy” (C 53) and then as the walls of Dorris’s vagina contracting in orgasm (C 55). In “Bona and Paul,” the college student Paul experiences a similar return of the oppressed when the racist history of sexual exploitation and bloodshed surfaces inside the newly permissible thrills of the Crimson Gardens. The dance music recalls for Paul the lullaby that a southern black woman sings to her child’s white father (C 73, 78), while the death of a black man shimmers in the furious “bur[n]” of his southern white date’s sexual allure (C 76) and in the “body” of the crowd “whose blood flows to a clot upon the dance floor” (C 79).

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For both John and Paul, the public intimacy generated by new forms of African American music and dance merges with the private intimacy of the sexual couple to provide linked forms for working through the oppressive and repressive power of the lynching plot. A similar dynamic underwrites the action of “Box Seat,” where an unemployed poet, Dan Moore, comes calling at the home of a young schoolteacher, Muriel. In this story, Toomer pointedly inverts earlier African American writers’ own inversions of the lynching plot. Thus, where Angelina Grimké revises Stowe by presenting the white male sexual attacker and mob participant as the true enemy of domestic security, Toomer reassigns to his black male protagonist the grotesque role of disturbing the domestic order. But this time, the domestic order Dan disturbs belongs to black, not white, members of the respectable middle class. Identified by others with “goring bull[s]” (C 65) and escaped baboons (C 59), Dan defiantly assumes the role of a black beast come to disrupt “the house” (C 59) of his reluctant date, Muriel. But he also aligns himself with a lynched black man converted, in death, to a singing tree. In his thoughts, “the dusk body of the street,” stretching upward into blossoming chestnut trees, doubles as the rising body of a black man whose “street songs” would “woo virginal houses” and “stir the root-life of a withered people” (C 59). Like Anderson’s misunderstood teacher, Dan longs to draw Muriel’s neighbors “from their houses, and teach them to dream” (C 59). When Dan’s wooing fails to move Muriel, he follows her to the Lincoln Theater. The theater brings the entire African American community together under a single roof. But its rows of bolted metal seats—which replicate “the endless rows of metal houses” (C 60) associated with Muriel’s censorious landlady, Mrs. Pribby—leave the different members of the audience boxed in and alienated from one another. On the theater stage, a boxing match between two dwarfs, followed by one dwarf’s gift of a bloody rose to Muriel, grotesquely recapitulates the occluded history of murder and rape that Toomer places at the origin of “the true art of the race’s past.” Yet Dan is the only member of the house who is able to recognize the race’s history in this scene; the rest are condemned to repeat it. When Mr. Barry confronts a crowd hungry for his blood with “hate pop[ping] from his eyes and crackl[ing] like a brittle heat about the box” (C 69), Tom Burwell seems to stand again inside the flames, facing down his white killers (C 36). Dan alone identifies with the baited man on stage. In the fantasy that he is “going to reach up and grab the girders of this building and pull them down” (C 68), he assumes the role of a latter-day Samson who brings the house down on the heads of contemporary Philistines.

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Through this fantasy of another falling house, Dan expresses his desire to topple shackling class and color divisions within the African American community. In doing so, he reveals his solidarity with the critical vision of the performers on stage. But he also reveals the strain of violence running through the visions of restored community that possess all of Toomer’s male prophets in Cane. In each case, this violence threatens most directly the women whom his male prophets hope to liberate. Closer to the sentimental protagonists of his contemporaries’ antilynching narratives than to the defiant female characters of Natalie Mann, these women remain actively invested in the dream of domestic security. Bona desires “love” (C 76) as well as sex, while Muriel desires a suitor who “fit[s] in” (C 61), but it is the working-class dancer Dorris who, in direct contrast to Etty Beal, turns out to be most eager for “kids, and a home, and everything” (C 55). The painful gap between her desire and John’s desire to “get her to herself” in “some cheap, dingy bedroom” (C 54) points up the larger shortcomings of the antidomestic social vision projected by middle-class rebels throughout part 2. Like the privileged white characters Art, Helen, and Bona, who turn to urban black culture in their eagerness to embrace the contemporary revolution in manners and morals, John assumes that his contact with the black working class will enhance rather than erode the power advantages conferred upon him in the present social order. Together, he and Dan Moore seek to counter the weight of middle-class repression with sexual overtures so forceful that they risk literalizing the scenarios of rape from which they draw complex and ironic inspiration. Dan’s culminating vision in the Lincoln Theater gives fullest expression to both the appeal and the limits of the larger social vision put forth in part 2 of Cane. In the flashing swirl of faces caught in Mr. Barry’s mirror, Dan sees “a god’s face” (C 68) whose composite image heals the class and color divisions of the theater audience in a dynamic act of intimate public communion. But the audience itself openly resists the terms of Dan’s vision. A group of people who have exchanged their “work-clothes” for “Sunday-go-to-meeting dress” (C 64), these theatergoers represent neither the respectable black middle class whose culture he attacks nor an oppositional black working class whose cause he ostensibly champions; instead, they are largely working-class people who, like Dorris, yearn for the very respectability he rejects.25 With the force of their refusal, the ecstatic transformations of the lynching plot undertaken in part 2 begin to look less like popular blueprints for social and cultural revolution and more like the compensatory fantasies of isolated dreamers, whose adversarial relationship to the culture of domestic respectability protests a state of social and self-alienation that they are ultimately unable to transcend.

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Twisted Mouths In the closet drama that concludes Cane, Toomer again revisits the lynching plot to deepen his critique both of black respectability and of the oppositional vision advanced by a black bohemian, avant-garde sensibility. The play focuses on Ralph Kabnis, a light-skinned northerner who returns to his ancestral home in rural Georgia to teach school. Upon his return, Kabnis begins to suffer in mind and body from a family history that has conjoined the bloodlines of master and slave. At the heart of this history lies a deadly contradiction in the culture of respectability, which simultaneously promises and denies to black men the power of a gentleman’s word. Kabnis eagerly aligns himself with the codes of respectability that Cane’s earlier black middle-class protagonists oppose, and he openly covets the prestige accorded to society’s men of substance. A newly appointed professor and aspiring poet, he hopes, quite literally, to speak himself into being. Kabnis stakes this ambition on his inherited claim to the title of southern gentleman, whose word holds sway in the patriarchal enclave of the home and in the elected assemblies of the state. But, as the leading black men of Sempter are quick to point out, the power of commanding speech is precisely the power denied to Kabnis as a black man in the South. Through their intervention, Kabnis’s identification with a genteel white “family of orators” (C 111) gives way to an involuntary and phobic identification with the brutally silenced black family, haunted by an unspeakable history of sexual violation, illegitimacy, and lynching. In his portrait of Kabnis, Toomer rehearses Ida B. Wells’s argument that southern whites used lynching to subjugate “the young manhood of the race.”26 In conformity with her account, he identifies Kabnis’s dedication to the ideal of the southern gentleman and to the wider culture of bourgeois democracy as the source of his heightened vulnerability to the mob. Thus, Kabnis’s very claim to the elegant speech and gestures of the gentleman orator calls up inside him the choked and writhing specter of the lynching victim. This bind swiftly renders him hysterical: his body “twitches” (C 101), “jerk[s]” (C 96), and “writhes” (C 101, 85), and his voice “sputters, gurgles,” and “chokes” (C 108). Like the female hysterics in part 1 of Cane, Kabnis unconsciously impersonates the lynching victim he fears he may become. This return of the oppressed in the field of his own body grows all the more insistent when he attempts to deny the grotesquely violated black family whose history underpins his own. Unable to assert control over the terms of his homecoming, Kabnis experiences the psychosomatic return of all the unwanted and unspoken familial attachments that he has tried to exclude from his self-enunciated identity as professor and poet.

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Kabnis’s hysterical relationship to his biracial family past proves to be the rule rather than the exception among Sempter’s African American elite. In this section, Toomer treats racial stigma itself as a hysterical symptom that inscribes the body at the very point word becomes flesh. A group of family portraits nestled in the fading gentility of Fred Halsey’s parlor reveals the wider pattern. While Halsey’s great-grandfather is white, his great-grandmother’s face reveals “a Negro strain,” though “it is difficult to say in precisely what feature it lies” (C 87). The narrator finally locates the “strain” of blackness in the woman’s “wistfully twisted” mouth (C 87). This detail links Halsey’s genteel grandmother with Angelina Grimké’s Goldie, who, as noted earlier, has a “twisted smile” (G 285) and who is ultimately lynched, along with her husband and unborn child, by the white man who wants to rape her. The same detail links Halsey’s grandmother with two of Toomer’s own working-class female characters, Becky and Stella, whose strained and “twisted” mouths somatize memories of an averted lynching, on the one hand, and, on the other, a white man who “took” her “mother” and “broke” her father’s “heart” (C 7, 107, 109). As Becky’s and Stella’s stories suggest, the “strain” of blackness visits these characters as a force of social violence so powerful that it leaves them, like Victor Forrest, strangers in their own bodies. Kabnis himself has a mouth that “twists” and “curl[s]” (C 104, 98); the narrator attributes this habitual expression to “a savage, cynical twist-about within him” that keeps him “suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (C 98). In the shadow of this last image, the twisted and “tongue-tied” (C 106) mouths of Sempter’s black population refigure blackness itself as a communal symptom of shared trauma, grounded in the repressed history of murder and rape that shadows and belies contemporary investments in the ideal of domestic security. Marking the assembled bodies of the living with the mute specter of a dead man twisting on the rope, this symptom simultaneously enforces and protests the power of lynching to terrorize the African American community into silence and submission.27 In treating racial stigma as a species of hysteria, Toomer proposes an arresting model of race itself, grounding racial blackness not in biology or genealogy, but rather in shared memories of racist atrocity. For Toomer, people incorporate terrible memories unconsciously in the form of hysterical symptoms of communal trauma, but they can also incorporate them consciously, at the level of word and chosen gesture, in the form of group stories, songs, and dances that forge a critical and potentially emancipatory relationship to that same communal trauma. This model of racial identity allows Toomer to expose troubling links between race and gender norms and the contemporary politics of black respectability. As his portraits of female hysterics suggest, the

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Freudian model of hysteria cast it as a largely feminine disorder, most often affecting the sheltered daughters of the white middle class. When he portrays black women and especially black men as hysterics, Toomer points to a savage “twist-about” in African Americans’ contemporary political investment in the culture of respectability: in grooming white men to enjoy the patriarchal and democratic privileges of verbal command and free expression, the middle-class culture of domesticity deeds a violently imposed “feminine” legacy of repression and self-silencing to those deemed unsuited for public power by virtue of their gender and/or race. This legacy of repression and silence compounds the historical trauma of racist oppression by choking the myriad forms of collective African American expression created to confront and overcome that trauma.28 Kabnis’s own initiation into the formidable contradictions of southern black middle-class identity begins with a covert conversation in Fred Halsey’s home regarding the region’s history of mob violence. Layman, an itinerant preacher who “knows more than would be good for anyone other than a silent man” (C 88), prefaces his account of a lynching with the remark: “White folks know that niggers talk, an they dont mind jes so long as nothing comes of it, so here goes” (C 92). As Layman makes clear, Kabnis’s lessons in local history are to be embedded in a set of still more crucial lessons in the intricacies of a talk of which nothing comes. These lessons begin with an elaborate speaking-in-opposites, which allows Halsey to suggest that Kabnis is a “stuck-up” “northern nigge[r]” by claiming that he isn’t (C 88). As they continue, Halsey and Layman systematically ironize Kabnis’s own ideas on what it means to be “good at talkin” (C 91). Their ironic speech ridicules their pupil, plays on his fears, and ruptures his illusions, but it also communicates vital words of caution and demonstrates a twisted, middle course between open protest and abject silence. Initially positioning Kabnis as a white listener, the men gradually induct him into the circle of black male speakers after testing his own ability to detect and stow meaning in the underbelly of language. Before they are through, Halsey’s preposterous opening claim that there “aint been a stringin up I can remember” (C 89) has been overturned by a rehearsal of four mob murders and the names of three of the dead, and Kabnis learns in graphic detail that, for African Americans, there are no “permanent categories” between classes “when it comes t lynchin” (C 89). What Halsey and his friends teach Kabnis with their talk that comes to nothing is yet another version of “the true art of the race’s past”: a mode of oratory that communicates ancestral memories of murder and rape while offering practical guidance on how to survive in the present. Professor Layman presents Kabnis with a complex emblem of this art and the history that underwrites it in a fictive retelling of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child in Georgia. As noted earlier, Toomer joins Angelina Grimké and other African

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American writers in using Turner’s story to discredit white attempts to couple the lynching plot with a reformist discourse of domestic protection. Toomer follows his literary precursors in using Turner’s death to expose the violence systematically visited on African American families and homes in the name of preserving white people’s domestic security. But he also subtly shifts the details both of the historical record and of earlier fictive accounts of Turner’s lynching in order to recreate her story as a grim allegory of middle-class black men’s political and domestic impotence. Mary Turner met her death in a remote rural area after she threatened to identify the men who lynched her husband. In contrast, Toomer’s Mame Lamkins dies when she attempts to shelter her husband from the mob. As he hides, alive and safe, Lamkins bleeds to death “like any cow” in the public street, and her unborn “kid” is “ripped [ from] her belly” and crucified (C 92). The death of Lamkins and her child in the public street offers a gruesome measure of the racial limits inscribed in contemporary promises of domestic security, just as the inversion of middle-class gender roles underwriting this scene of slaughter measures the powerlessness of Lamkins’s husband to put things right. Hounded from public life, he also utterly fails to protect and preserve his family in the domestic sphere. As such, Lamkins’s story offers a grotesque genealogy of the circumstances and mode of its own telling; disclosed in the genteel privacy of Fred Halsey’s home by “a silent man” (C 88) to silent listeners, the story uses the tortured body of a pregnant woman to warn African American men that there is no private space secure enough, no shelter sacred enough, to guard black speech and black life. As if to confirm this message, Layman breaks off his telling of Lamkins’s story when a weighted note bursts through Halsey’s window, informing the “northern nigger” that it’s time to go (C 92). When Kabnis learns that, as a black man in the South, he is to enjoy the rights and securities neither of public nor of private life, he reacts with terror. Trapped inside the collapsing divisions of the bourgeois democratic order, he experiences the collapse of yet more basic divisions between male and female, self and other. Amid the rubble, Kabnis’s poetic aspirations to speak for the South as “the lips of its soul” (C 84) collapse as well. In a series of hallucinatory fantasies, Mame Lamkins lends her body to the “misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words” that “feed” his soul (C 111), itself a ghastly double for her hungry unborn child. Initially wishing death by lynching on such a soul, Kabnis then attacks the mute and captive Father John for “throwin [death] in my throat” (C 114). A fantasized counterassault on Father John’s “dirty, black, foul-breathed mouth” (C 115) gives way to one last attack in which Lamkins’s fetus becomes the lyncher’s knife and torch “that’ll pop out of me an run you through, an scorch y, an burn an rip your soul” (C 114).

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All of Kabnis’s fantasies draw on twisted images of orality that repeat and deform the history lessons he receives from Halsey and Layman. Kabnis’s fantasies also revisit the ecstatic scene of birth and breastfeeding in “Esther,” only to reverse that story’s conversion of a lynching into a dream text of African American male prophecy and messianic deliverance. With the latter reversal, Toomer marks the defeat of the modern black poet’s ambition to ground his visions of personal and social transformation in the lynching plot; instead, Kabnis is forced to recognize his potential identity with the lynching victim as the untransformed premise of his historical present. This recognition prompts Cane’s most graphic and horrific portrait of domestic alienation, as the brutally ruptured bond between Mame Lamkins and her unborn child comes to inhabit and disrupt Kabnis’s inner sense of self. Halsey and his friends offer the split register of their own ironic discourse as an alternative art of communal survival and self-respect in a land where black men’s talk must, by all appearances, come to nothing. But as the masterful doubleness of his teachers’ talk devolves into the wildly swinging pendulum strokes of his own imagination, Kabnis proves unequal to the demands placed on him by the true art of his race’s past.

Escaping the Heat In Kabnis, Toomer presents a young man whose harrowing encounters with the lynching plot shape and ultimately crush his passage from silence to selfcreating speech. In this sense, Kabnis serves as an inverted portrait of Toomer himself, who followed many of his contemporaries in making oppositional accounts of the lynching plot into an effective vehicle for achieving voice and power in the national public sphere. This inverted self-portrait becomes all the more curious when we consider the systematic occlusion in “Kabnis” of the historical conditions governing Toomer’s own emergence as a writer. For Toomer deliberately sets “Kabnis” at a purely fictive moment in time just before a comprehensive account of lynching enters the public record.29 Thus, the highly mediated story of Mary Turner’s lynching, which had received widespread coverage in the northern black press before Toomer traveled to Sparta in 1921, appears in Cane as a guarded recounting of local secrets too dangerous “fer notin down” (C 91).30 What does Toomer accomplish by divorcing his parable of the modern black artist from the historic achievements of the modern black press? When he links Kabnis’s personal failure to a wider, communal inability to navigate the passage from involuntary silence to authoritative speech, Toomer is able to make several points. He foregrounds the terrors of voicelessness that the

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practice of lynching continued to inflict on contemporary African Americans of all classes. But he also poses connections between this weapon of white supremacy and the templates of domestic respectability that many middle-class black activists were fighting to defend, and through which they sought to win federal protection of their welfare. In his portrait, Kabnis is defeated as much by his eagerness to embrace the codes of an aristocratic and bourgeois tradition of gentility and by his denial of the violence these codes have visited upon African American families as he is by any external threat of lynching. Kabnis’s genteel ambitions further cut him off from the resources of a southern black oral tradition. “Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him” (C 98), he fails to connect with an alternative vision of group empowerment, grounded in the promise of healed community, that is preserved in both the “low” and the underground culture of ordinary folk. In Cane, Toomer diverges from white avant-garde celebrations of the black folk as a primitive source of cultural redemption in order to give a full accounting of the damage wrought by the lynch mob’s power to block African Americans’ access to dominant, bourgeois democratic forms of self-government, self-advancement, and family life. But he also remains alert to the artistic forms of recall and communion that African Americans, in the rural South and in the urban North, devised when other routes were closed to them. In the true art of the race’s past, embodied in the choral harmonies of the sorrow songs, the syncopated rhythms of jazz, and the double registers of black speech, Toomer recognized a valuable critique of white bourgeois culture that was largely missing from the contemporary print forms and forums of both the white avantgarde and the African American middle class. The unwavering focus on the lynched black body in Cane serves as an index of Toomer’s eagerness to participate in shaping the social vision articulated by a burgeoning black print community at a key moment in time, as it organized nationally to demand equal protection for African Americans from an emergent welfare state. Many of his contemporaries gladly identified the protection they sought with a state-backed order of domestic security. But for Toomer, the modern sentimental domestic sphere held little promise as a source either of personal or of social amelioration. Less than a decade after its publication, the wrenching upheavals of the Great Depression brought many of the issues Toomer engaged in Cane to the fore once again. A sudden upsurge in the annual rate of lynchings, combined with competition from the Communist Party, spurred Walter White to reignite the NAACP campaign to pass federal antilynching legislation. Nancy Weiss argues that the ensuing “battle for antilynching legislation came to symbolize the cause of racial advancement in the 1930s,” constituting the major African American political effort to shape the

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terms of the New Deal. But from 1934 to 1940, southern Democrats once again successfully blocked efforts to bring proposed legislation to a Senate vote, and the president, eager to see his own agenda into law, never publicly supported White’s campaign. “Symbol of racial justice or not, antilynching legislation was too hot for Franklin Roosevelt to touch.”31 The New Deal legislation that did pass had a mixed impact on African Americans. Many benefited in the short run from federally funded jobs and housing. But the Roosevelt administration also upheld patterns of racial bias inscribed in earlier maternalist templates of domestic reform, routing most African Americans to the margins of programs created to serve select populations of whites. Typically confined to occupations not covered by the 1935 Social Security Act, redlined by federal housing policies, and still lacking basic civil rights, African Americans, for the most part, did not experience the heralded forms of personal and social amelioration associated with the new state-backed order of domestic security, but instead bore the brunt of the “stimulus to inequality”32 built into Roosevelt’s welfare vision. The barring of African Americans’ collective political participation in the making of the New Deal further ensured the welfare state’s final articulation as an agent as well as a guarantor of structural racism in the United States and, in doing so, set the stage for the massive social struggles of the postwar period.33 By that time, Toomer had long abandoned both his ambition to mold the terms of national black expression and his antidomestic vision of restored community.34 But precisely because that vision made it into print, Cane continues to hold up its challenge to a modern sentimental discourse of home and family whose power to shape the terms of national political discussion continues to be felt into our own day.

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3 Freaked Eastern European Immigration and the “American Home” in Edna Ferber’s American Beauty

Between Barnes and Toomer, the earliest lineaments of a racially exclusive welfare state appear, one prepared—up to a point—to provide for and protect white women and children because they were white and to deny the same provisions and protections to black families because they were not. But in this period, exactly who was white, and on what grounds, was an open question. Disturbed by a new wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that began in the 1880s,1 nativist thinkers and reformers of various stripes entwined the racial question of who was white with the political and cultural question of who was “American.” Unable to come to agreement among themselves, they turned to the emerging welfare state with conflicting ideas of how that double question might be answered. Struggles over American whiteness pervaded the labor market, the professions, and the political process, but they also raged within the domestic sphere. “To America,” in the words of a contemporary observer, “the ‘immigration problem’ is a great ‘problem’ of homes.”2 One powerful nativist contingency understood the home as a crucial site for turning Southern and Eastern European immigrants into white Americans. These reformers sought to oversee a state-directed process of acculturation that would bring unhealthy and irregular immigrant homes into line with sentimental domestic norms first championed by New England’s white middle classes. Another set of nativist reformers, inspired by the pseudoscience of eugenics, viewed templates of sentimental domesticity as a racial rather than a cultural endowment, and thus the distinctive birthright of “Nordics” and “Anglo-Saxons.”3 The Southern

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and Eastern European immigrant home, in contrast, was a breeding ground of cacogenic traits that would destroy the superior fiber of the white race and imperil the future citizenry of the nation. These nativists sought to pass state and federal legislation that would restrict immigration, monitor marriage, and sterilize citizens thought to pose a threat to the nation’s fragile gene pool. By 1931, when the popular writer Edna Ferber published her eugenics novel, American Beauty, in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal,4 both groups of nativists had won significant victories. Maternalist reformers had achieved state and federal support for a project of Americanization first articulated by the many patriotic societies that sprang up in the 1890s. Between 1895 and 1910, groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Colonial Dames created scores of New England house museums in order to teach immigrants about their forebears’ superior way of life; subsequent reformers sought to recreate the immigrant home on the highly sentimentalized, though purportedly ancestral, model of domesticity held out by such museums.5 At the state level, public schools and after-school programs joined mothers’ pension programs in making conformity to sentimental domestic standards a condition of aid and premise of instruction. A similar focus on “Americanizing” the immigrant home informed the nation’s first federal welfare program which, with passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921, sought to lower rates of infant mortality.6 But the prospect of more poor babies of foreign parents horrified eugenicists, who sought to cut off immigrant reproduction at the source. Their efforts stood behind the complicated rationale of the 1924 immigration law, which pegged annual quotas for Southern and Eastern European immigration first to 1890 census figures and then to fabricated ratios based on the “national origins” of the present U.S. population.7 The spate of state laws passed between the late 1890s and the end of World War I that prohibited “unfit” marriage unions and authorized compulsory sterilizations of the “feeble-minded” also disproportionately affected the lives of urban immigrants and people of color. The 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision, which upheld the legality of state sterilization in Virginia, gave such practices federal sanction; and by the end of the decade, sterilization laws were in effect in 24 states.8 Taken together, these diverse reforms inscribed the domestic exterior with a contradictory mandate: to foster and Americanize, but also to fend off and curtail, sexual and cultural reproduction in the immigrant home.9 In her novel, Ferber confronts this contradictory mandate head on. A multigenerational family saga set in rural Connecticut, American Beauty chronicles the racial and cultural decline of the Oakes clan, tobacco farmers of colonial fame, and the clan’s unexpected salvation in the late nineteenth century when a wayward daughter decides to marry a Polish immigrant. The new couple sets

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up house in the family’s museum-quality but shabby colonial mansion, and raises the son who will eventually restore both house and farm to their former grandeur. Throughout the novel, Ferber relies on eugenicist terms and paradigms to tell her story. Reinscribing many of the racist assumptions of this discourse in her own prose, she reattaches such assumptions to a maverick plan for regional and national recovery, one dedicated, in Daylanne K. English’s useful formulation, to the ideal of “hybrid vigor.”10 Most of her contemporaries who championed this ideal sought to advance the lot of people of color. But Ferber, in an anticipation of the New Deal’s own recovery plans, confines the utopian dimensions of her racial vision to the field of an expanded whiteness. Like Barnes and Toomer, she makes the struggle between grotesque and sentimental domesticity integral to the aesthetic and political project of her text. But her investment in this struggle does not signal an affiliation with the European avant-garde.11 Instead, Ferber works within two discursive traditions native to the United States, in which the impulse to redefine the sentimental as grotesque—and the grotesque as sentimental—took center stage. Nativist eugenicists developed one tradition. These writers attacked a modern sentimental project of reform grounded in the ameliorative power of a specific kind of home life. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), republished to popular acclaim throughout the twenties, Madison Grant argues that “we Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development . . . and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.” Bemoaning the “wave of sentimentalism” that appeared “in New England” “early in the last century” and “destroyed, to a large extent, pride and consciousness of race in the North,” he warns that “indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often result in serious injury to the race” and that “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend[s] to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.”12 Nor did Grant stand alone in associating modern sentimental reform efforts with grotesque racial outcomes. In his 1921 text, Why Europe Leaves Home, originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, Kenneth Roberts blames “the hazy dreams of sentimentalists,” wafting from a “belief in the whimsical fairy-tale of the melting pot,” for the nation’s policy of “unrestricted immigration” and hence for the epidemic of “cross-breeding” and “mongrelization,” which was producing “corrupt” government, “degenerate” art, and “depraved” morals.13 Roughly a decade earlier, in his 1914 book, The Old World in the New, Edward A. Ross flatly rejects sentimental solutions to the perceived crisis of racial decline among old-stock Americans, and recommends child neglect, which kills off the weak, as a “simple,

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but drastic” “remedy for the alleged degeneration of our stock.” In a passage that may well constitute a source text for Ferber’s novel, he notes with dismay: Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are coming to own “abandoned farms” in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of onion and tobacco. “In old Hadley . . . all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles.” In one year these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for two-thirds of the births. Complaining that many of these babies, “who would certainly have perished in the Slavic world,” were being saved in America, he declares: There is . . . no illusion more grotesque than to suppose that our people is to be rejuvenated by absorbing these millions of hearty peasantry, that, to quote a champion of free immigration, “The newcomers in America will bring fresh, vigorous blood to a rather sterile and inbred stock.”14 In American Beauty, Ferber dares to embrace exactly this “illusion” and to affirm it as—redemptively—“grotesque.” She locates a positive articulation of grotesque possibility in the nation’s living traditions of carnival, originally rooted in the peasant culture of medieval Europe and flowering on this side of the Atlantic in the hugely popular freak shows, medicine shows, dime museums, and circuses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ferber carefully coordinates representations of the freakish and grotesque in her novel with three of the major exhibition strategies employed in these shows, which by turn aggrandized, exoticized, and domesticated performers’ public images. But she makes particular use of the exhibition strategies of the respectable freak—the Bearded Lady or the Armless Wonder—whose impeccable domesticity anchored a popular imaginative world in which the grotesque and the sentimental, the offbeat and the sweet, appeared in deeply appealing combination. As Robert Bogdan has documented, the domestic attraction of the “respectable freak” was so strong that many patrons tucked the exhibit photos of their favorite performers into the pages of their own home photo albums.15 Ferber exploits this same power of attraction to refigure the grotesque threat of Eastern European immigration as an unsuspected source of domestic renewal: a chance to invite the freak into the family and thereby effect the recovery of both the “white race” and the nation. In American Beauty, the wayward daughter of the Oakes clan who grows up to marry a Polish immigrant spends

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her childhood in her father’s traveling medicine show. There, freaks of divers “Aryan” and European origin oversee her upbringing and teach her the meaning of family. Their alien acts of tenderness produce “Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show” (AB 105) as a fictional site that simultaneously mirrors and inverts the historical space of the domestic exterior. Where nativist reformers of her day invested the domestic exterior with rival attempts to Americanize the immigrant home and to protect the American home from the immigrant’s racial pollution, Ferber’s medicine show successfully Americanizes an ailing old-stock New England family by authorizing an infusion of immigrant domestic values and immigrant sperm. The grotesquely sentimental paradigms of domestic life developed in Ferber’s medicine show cure the Oakes clan of a hidebound nativism that threatens both its own and the nation’s future with multisystemic collapse. In one of the most interesting moves she makes, Ferber extends the novel’s governing metaphors of sickness and cure to engage the nation’s leading crisis of the early thirties. She opens the novel with the stock market crash of 1929 (the same year in which the permanent version of the 1924 Immigration Act went into effect),16 only to fold this event back into more long-standing disturbances in the circulation of the nation’s racial, cultural, and agricultural stock. The immigrant domestic practices forged in Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show provide the template for injecting all of the nation’s ailing circuits of stock exchange with a salutary vigor. When the novel’s old-stock New Englanders learn the value of pooling and trading various kinds of stock with their immigrant neighbors rather than trying to maintain the value of that stock outside communal circulation, they recover the road to racial, cultural, and economic health. This medicinal formula, Ferber insists, is the only genuinely “native” tradition that the United States possesses. In a discussion of the research undertaken for American Beauty, Ferber singles out two texts as particularly important to her compositional process (PT 332–333). These texts—Old Houses of Connecticut, put out by the Colonial Dames of America, and William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s watershed sociological study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America—could not have been more different. The first, a by-product of the house museum movement, joined a wave of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts devoted to documenting and celebrating the domestic realm in colonial New England. In contrast, Thomas and Znaniecki’s massive comparative study focuses on how tradition-bound populations respond to rapid social change. The authors reject biological explanations for different patterns of response and also cast a cold eye on state-directed efforts to Americanize the immigrant home. In their account, contemporary efforts to integrate the Polish peasant into a wider national life largely fail in the United States but succeed in Poland, where those

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same efforts prove vital to the recovery of the lost Polish nation-state. Ferber makes structural and incidental use of both of these texts in creating the plot of American Beauty. Turning the ancestral claims of the Colonial Dames against their own nativist agenda, she also freely transposes elements of Thomas and Znaniecki’s argument to suit the needs of her own design. The new forms of social action that they identify as essential components of a revived Polish nationalism reappear in her novel as an ancient “native” formula for realizing the long-deferred promise of American democracy. In effect, she argues that the only way the United States will ever live up to the ideals upon which it was founded is by undertaking a serious and collective effort to become . . . Polish. Needless to say, Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show turns out to play a crucial role in this development. Ferber was well aware of the subversive stance she was taking on a range of prickly topics in her novel. The child of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and grandchild of German Jewish immigrants on her mother’s side, she had firsthand knowledge of the strength of the nation’s immigrant and anti-immigrant traditions. In her 1939 autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, written in defiance of Hitler’s tightening grip on Europe, Ferber appropriates the language of eugenicists in the United States to describe the “birth” of American Beauty. “Perhaps I should have been stern about practising birth control on American Beauty,” she writes. “Conceived in careless love I hadn’t meant to have it. But there it was” (PT 332). In her view, “the body of the book was true and sound” (PT 334), though others, no doubt, would disagree. Be that as it may, she declares: “I should love to think that when I am dead the chronicles of my own country written by me because I so wanted to write them will be my descendants, however puny and short-lived” (PT 335).17 A single mother of immigrant stock, taken to conceiving “puny and short-lived” progeny “in careless love” simply because she wants to, Ferber dares potential readers to neglect this chronicle of her own country. Let my little baby live or die, she seems to say, but don’t pretend it falls outside your power to decide.

Buried Treasure American Beauty opens with the coordinated crashes of several different kinds of stock. “The physical collapse” of Chicago millionaire True Baldwin, which “had been as swift and inevitable as the Wall Street debacle by which it was timed” (AB 6), prompts a doctor to suggest that he return to his boyhood Connecticut home to recuperate, thus establishing the curative bent that will guide the narrative to its conclusion. Within this framework, it quickly be-

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comes evident that much more than True’s personal health is at stake. True tells his doctor that he fled his family’s ailing farm after he lost his chance to court Judith Oakes, proud descendant of the illustrious colonial planter, Orrange Oakes. Instead, he married into an “old Chicago family” (AB 16), suffered for that fact, made money, raised a daughter, and eventually buried his wife. True’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Candace, is a distinguished architect and a New Woman, drawn from “the type of American girl that came into fashion after the War” (AB 15). Unmarried and without marriage prospects, Candy threatens her father’s old-stock New England family line with a collapse more devastating than anything Wall Street has produced. Other old-stock New England families and their farms are in similar straits. All the fine young men like True have abandoned the region for the West, leaving behind at least two generations of women forced to marry inferior males or remain single. Jude Oakes has never married, her sister Amaryllis ran away with a scurrilous Yankee peddler, and her cousin Arabella Champion is married to an abusive hired man. Jude’s bad moods, coupled with the dwarfish stature and mental vacancy of her brother Jot, the sexual irregularity of her sister Amaryllis, and the giantism, alcoholism, and childlessness of her cousin Big Bella, make clear that racial degeneracy now threatens the Oakes and Champion family lines. In these details, Ferber recycles themes of rural New England’s racial, cultural, and economic collapse that date back to the 1890s.18 New England had long been cherished as the region that best lived up to the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of family farms, where the yeoman farmer’s self-sufficiency guaranteed the promise of democracy. As Matthew Frye Jacobson argues, the idea that New England Puritans and their descendants were uniquely capable of economic and political independence informed the 1798 law that restricted naturalization rights to “free white persons,” and then resurfaced in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about whether Southern and Eastern Europeans could really be considered white—which is to say, racially capable of upholding democratic rule.19 This particular narrative retained its strength even as Americans found themselves embedded in ever larger and more inscrutable market structures of interdependency. In fact, as Richard Hofstadter insisted in 1955, Americans’ “sentimental attachment to rural living” actually grew stronger as farm and city people alike moved away from “the noncommercial agrarian values” mythically equated with “the fancied innocence of their origins.”20 Such ideological investments overdetermined the sense of doom associated with New England’s reputed decline and helped to fuel nativist efforts to protect and preserve the lifeways of a dying people. Nativist fears regarding the failing state of old New England inevitably betrayed a certain leakage in the conceptual order of various kinds of stock. David

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Roediger notes that turn-of-the-century U.S. participants in the discourse of eugenics “thought in terms of the nation’s biological ‘stock,’ a term that by then evoked images of Wall Street as well as the farm.”21 In the developing field of social science, scholars like Thomas and Znaniecki confirmed a cultural and ideological application for the term as well, with phrases such as “the stock of common traditions,” “the old stock of beliefs,” and “a stock of sexual information and attitudes” (PP 1:148, 205, 123). Because cultural traits and economic states were routinely racialized in the discourse of eugenics, and carefully detached from race in the discourse of its opponents, the logic governing both the boundaries and the relations between different kinds of stock had become, by the twenties, a site of intense social struggle. Two historical practices in the United States cast their own shadows across this site of struggle, further confusing the difference between sexual and racial (both understood at the time as biological) and market forms of stock exchange. The Atlantic slave trade commodified human sexual reproduction, thus infusing the transmission of racial stock with a market logic. Similarly, a popular tradition of racial masquerade, which enters Ferber’s novel in the form of the Indian medicine show, recast racial traits as a movable cluster of cultural signs, rendering those signs fully fungible and within reach of all market participants. In American Beauty, “story-book” (AB 101) versions of the African slave and Indian maiden anchor an imaginative world in which all categories of stock turn out to be mysterious variables of one another. Setting up magical correspondences among several different stock economies, Ferber uses the stock market crash of 1929 to signal a social crisis manifesting itself through the market but in no way confined to it. At its core, her narrative turns on the perils and possibilities of stock exchange in a region—and a nation—never really capable of single-family self-sufficiency in the first place and now tottering on the verge of permanent, pan-economic breakdown. Ferber’s solution to this crisis is a new paradigm of family, one still governed by sentimental norms but opened up to previously interdicted forms of sexual, racial, and market exchange. Though the narrative path to this solution can only be called bizarre, the solution itself should ring a bell. Like the New Deal, Ferber’s novel promotes a nationally organized domestic order that both depends on and secures an expanded field of racial whiteness and an economically vital ethic of domestic consumption. In the opening scene of Ferber’s novel, True Baldwin sits “slumped and inert” (AB 2) in the passenger seat of the car that Candy hurtles through the Connecticut countryside. Though she anticipates a landscape as “grim and barren as a New England spinster” (AB 3), Candy discovers that under immigrant care the region has become “lush,” even “tropical” (AB 3). The old Oakes mansion is “in shocking disrepair,” but Candy knows it is “the most beautiful house

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in America,” and she “want[s] it” no matter “how many Polacks own it” (AB 22). An ensuing search for the farm’s current proprietor uncovers an extremely good-looking young man tending the tobacco in his bathing suit. He introduces himself as Orrange Olszak. Ferber devotes the rest of her novel to measuring the significance of this last development. A reader of today might be tempted to imagine, as early as the end of the first chapter, that if Candy would just marry the sexy farmer and use her father’s leftover money to fix up the old farm and stunning mansion, everything would turn out great. Given the number of pages devoted to arriving at this very solution, we must suppose that Ferber judged the novel’s first readers, in main, to be incapable of making the indicated leap on their own. The Ladies’ Home Journal was one of a number of popular magazines that promoted eugenicist arguments and agendas in the early twenties. As Jennifer Scanlon argues, for decades it also “participated in . . . the social construction of whiteness” by casting the modern sentimental home as the exclusive cultural property of “native-born Anglo-Americans.”22 In an important sense then, Ferber sets up her narrative to pose and then work through an imaginative block or breakdown that threatened to put the inevitability of her proposed marriage solution beyond the reach of her first, powerfully selective, domestic readership. Ferber enacts this block in her novel when she abruptly swerves the narrative line back to the 1700s the instant Orrange Olszak identifies himself. Her swerve returns us to the colonial world of old New England aggrandized by both major nativist constituencies that were striving to shape state and federal immigration policy in the present. Ferber’s own portrait of colonial Connecticut is also laudatory and reverential, but a subversive strain crops up in the novel’s engagement with its source texts. Ferber culls numerous elements of her own plot from Old Houses of Connecticut, but recombines the earlier text’s selfpleased family anecdotes to new effect. The literally aggrandizing tendencies of the Colonial Dames—who repeatedly point out the gigantic stature of their forebears23—reappear in American Beauty as an emphasis on more or less admirable people who have a fatal tendency to get too big and to hold themselves too high. Like the Colonial Dames but to different effect, Ferber also raids the past for lofty precedents to various social arrangements and causes that she supports in the present. She casts her colonial characters as forerunners of her own era’s revolution in manners and morals and uses their prior example to affirm greater freedom and opportunity for middle-class white women, ethnic and (more uncertainly) racial equality and integration, and a Keynesian ethic of consumption. In Ferber’s novel, members of the Oakes clan, who run large, and their cousins the Champions, who are sometimes giants, hail from a line of dissident

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dissidents. The original Orrange Oakes, an English lord, came “to Boston in 1635” (AB 46) but returned to England, where he clashed with Cromwell and was “beheaded on Tower Hill” in “1657” (AB 46), the year in which Parliament augmented Cromwell’s dictatorial powers as England’s lord protector. A “Republican and Puritan” (AB 46) who “died for freedom” (AB 163), Sir Orrange Oakes lost his life in a vain attempt to protect the cause of popular selfgovernment from self-betrayal. Two generations later, Captain Orrange Oakes rebels against the “primness, blue laws, witchcraft, repression” that make “Puritan Massachusetts” “worse than . . . England” (AB 32, 33). His decision to move his family to “the valley of the Housatonic and the Still rivers” (AB 197) results in the one “brief period of lavish magnificence” between Connecticut’s “first Puritan meagerness and its later decay” (AB 28). The world Ferber recreates puts this lavish magnificence on display. An ethic of conspicuous consumption and a liberalized code of conduct for leisured white women, both prominent features of the contemporary revolution in manners and morals, lend the period Ferber evokes much of its narrative appeal. But Ferber’s loving portrayals of Puritan luxury simultaneously undercut nativist constructions of old New England as an ideal republic of selfsufficient yeoman farmers and ultimately destabilize nativist constructions of whiteness. Her “precious Puritans” (AB 5) get their land by “grab[bing] it from the Indians” (AB 5), and they keep it by exploiting slave labor: “the Connecticut settler, abhorring political or religious slavery, saw no objection to human family slavery so long as it paid” (AB 57). Captain Oakes and his cronies are neither self-sufficient nor self-reliant, and their prosperous farms, far from providing the racially homogeneous basis of a sound democracy, are the direct expression of a calculated policy of cross-racial exploitation, oppression, and fraud. When judged by eugenicists’ own accounts of racial identity, these Puritans are not white. Temmie, the teenage daughter of Captain Oakes and his wife, Judith, occupies the point of contradiction between the English settlers’ professed commitment to a world of shared freedom and shared plenty and their policies of African and Indian subjugation and dispossession. This point of contradiction is unbearable and eventually kills her. Ferber lifts three narrative details from Old Houses of Connecticut—one about fifteen-year-old Clarissa Champion who dies on a journey, one about a gravestone placed before a kitchen hearth, and one about a home fire left burning for wandering Indians24—to tell Temmie’s story. Temmie flees her family on the day they celebrate the completion of their new mansion, and heads into the woods, where she dies of “exposure” in an aborted attempt “to join the camp of the Weantinocks” (AB 49). Her death exposes lingering discrepancies between colonial white women’s confinement

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to the home and the principles of freedom championed by their men. It also arises from and memorializes a botched history of interracial stock exchange subtending the “lavish magnificence” (AB 28) of her father’s household. Temmie’s first encounter with the Weantinocks occurs when she travels with her father’s party to finalize the purchase of their land. Upon discovering that his new friends have tried to cheat him, Chief Waramaug decides to hold Temmie, the “most precious treasure of Captain Oakes” (AB 37), until the settlers come back with what they owe him. The fact that Temmie finds her Indian captivity liberating and, consequently, her English liberty imprisoning introduces the first of several grotesque inversions that structure the novel’s reevaluation of the domestic lives of colonial women. A second grotesque inversion makes Temmie a “precious treasure” forced into temporary equivalence with “the money and trinkets” (AB 34) owed to the Weantinocks. The perceived sexual threat of this equation immediately slaps “a coating of gray paint” over “the ruddy English coloring” of Captain Oakes’s party (AB 36). By the time they get their color back, Temmie has abandoned hers; she returns home by force, not choice. In this, the earliest of the novel’s many scenes of racially transformative market exchange, Ferber stages the possibility of trading race within an American framework in which the fantasy of going native and the scandal of human commodification dangerously converge.25 In a novel where a young English girl temporarily occupies the positions of African slave and Weantinock Indian, African slaves permanently occupy—and ironize—the positions of sturdy farmer and good housekeeper celebrated in nativist accounts of the colonial past. Ferber’s narrator quotes a “blithe advertisement” from “the Connecticut Gazette” (AB 58) that announces the sale of “a strong and healthy Negro man, 29 years of age, . . . brought up in the country to the farming business” and “an able body’d wench, 16 years old (with sucking child)” who “can do all sorts of housework” (AB 58). Temmie’s father owns “a full hundred slaves” (AB 57) who, in addition to farming, build the house in which he lives (AB 41–42) and do the heavy household labor (AB 43–44) that the family’s “white” “servants” (AB 29) are apparently unwilling to perform. The slaves rely on Weantinock methods to fertilize the fields, “raise corn and tobacco,” and store the leaf and grain (AB 58, 61–62), while inside the home Weantinock “medicines” (AB 62) sustain the settlers’ health. Interracial cooperation and exchange form the very fabric of Ferber’s colonial world but develop under conditions that unjustly elevate the English above their social and economic partners. Ferber deals the final blow to nativist myths of old New England with the assertion that “these early settlers and their offspring” “never had been farmers, really. . . . They had a practical—an almost Teutonic—ambition for trade

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and enterprise” (AB 61). She deftly manipulates dissonances and instabilities within nativist discourse in order to make this claim. In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant kicks a hole in arguments that asserted Anglo-Saxons’ singular racial fitness for agrarian democracy. “In sharp contrast to the essentially peasant and democratic character of the Alpines” who are “an agricultural and never a maritime race,” he writes, “Nordics are . . . a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers and aristocrats.” Grant mournfully associates Nordics’ roving spirit with the “racial degeneration” evident “in many New England villages,” where “the loss through emigration of the more vigorous and energetic individuals” has “[left] behind the less efficient to continue the race at home.”26 His claims resurface in American Beauty, where Alpine peasants prove to be much better democrats than Nordic aristocrats, who are all going to seed anyway. In the proud old families, “thin blood intermarried with thin blood or married not at all. The wedded seemed to breed daughters, for the countryside was now almost denuded of men. Or perhaps it was only the daughters who remained locked, perforce, in the cold and stony embrace of this New England soil” (AB 64). As Ferber’s settler families lose their vigorous “blood” to cyclical male emigration, the biological stock exchange necessary to human reproduction breaks down, threatening to empty the cradle of the nation. In Old Houses of Connecticut, we learn of a Reverend Timothy Edwards, who had “ten daughters, every one of whom is said to have been six feet tall, making . . . ‘sixty feet of daughters, all of them strong of mind.’ ”27 But in Ferber’s text, a freakish abundance of female flesh exposes genetic weakness, not strength, in the family line. The Champion race of giants has come down to a childless trio: Big Bella, who has “the body of a giantess, the bones of a behemoth” (AB 83); her cousin Jot, who never outgrows his name; and Jot’s sister Judith, an embittered and humorless “shrew” (AB 110). But in a sense, the crisis of exchange that these cousins embody has already been prefigured in the ugly trading practices of Captain Oakes’s generation. Temmie’s death, which twice marks a failed attempt at exchange with the Weantinocks, makes her the first unwed daughter to be “locked . . . in the cold and stony embrace of this New England soil” (AB 64). Buried beneath “the hearthstone” in “the dining room” (AB 51) of the family mansion, she survives as “a skull at the feast” (AB 52). Ferber will insist, however, that this skull is also a seed, pushing up through the Oakes family’s excessive clannishness and opening their home to the outside. In tribute to their daughter, Temmie’s parents order that a fire be left burning in an unlatched room of their new house to welcome and comfort the “wayfaring Indian, original owner of this soil” (AB 53). The undeveloped possibilities of interracial exchange and metamorphosis that Temmie embodies may

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fail to carry her beyond her father’s house, but they have rooted in its ground, a forgotten crop or a peculiar treasure for another generation of New Englanders to find and claim.

Savages in the House Ferber’s story line picks up again in 1890, the date chosen to anchor the caps on Southern and Eastern European immigration after 1924.28 In the Oakes family, the date commemorates the homecoming of Temmie Pring in a story that both mirrors and inverts that of her ancestor Temmie Oakes. The second Temmie is the child of Amaryllis Oakes, who ran away with a notions peddler in a “dash for life and freedom” (AB 103–104). The peddler, the direct descendant of a colonial New England slave trader (AB 58), runs “Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show” (AB 105) and travels the country “from Louisiana to Minnesota” (AB 105). As was customary in actual medicine shows of the time,29 Pring assembles a group of circus freaks to help him sell his product: “Housa-tonic, the Great Indian Remedy, the Elixir discovered two centuries ago by the historical Chief Waramaug himself” and “revealed as a her-i-tage to Captain Orrange Oakes of Puritan fame” (AB 102). Temmie’s job within the troupe has been to dress up as “a story-book Indian maiden” (AB 101) and present herself as the descendant not of Captain Oakes but of “old Waramaug” (AB 103). In this role, she embodies the only traces of a multiracial colonial past that survive in Ferber’s fictional world. No African Americans or Native Americans show up in the novel after 1700. Instead, they forfeit their expropriated histories as a necessary symbolic currency for facilitating exchange among different kinds of white people in the present. The commercial possibilities of racial masquerade presented by the medicine show allow the second Temmie to redeem the tragic story of her namesake. When her father’s desertion and her mother’s death cut short “her nomad life” (AB 111), she returns to her ancestral home, now headed by Judith Oakes, and immediately turns it upside down. To amuse her uncle Jot and the new hired man, Ondy Olszak, Temmie reenacts her show spiel, broadcasting the virtues of a commodity that “enriches the buh-lood! Brightens the eye! Makes the pulse leap with health. Strengthens the heart. Eases and ul-ti-mately cures all ailments of the lungs, liver, and kidneys, ladies and gents” (AB 102). Delighted, Jot performs “his favorite trick”: “ben[ding] double” with “his head between his legs” (AB 101). The reference here to an ancient Weantinock formula for “enrich[ing] the buh-lood” should not be overlooked. With Temmie’s return, the carnival space of the market invades the home, opening it up to previously

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interdicted possibilities of exchange that, in the end, will prove to be the real “Housa-tonic” (AB 102), capable of restoring an entire society whose “blood” has started to run “thin” (AB 64). When Ferber uses a grotesque aesthetic to carnivalize the New England domestic sphere, she creates an alternative, purely fictive, version of the domestic exterior, but one endowed, like its historical counterpart, with significant powers of social transformation and amelioration. She bypasses an avant-garde investment in the grotesque for two “native” traditions governed by the same aesthetic, and then flips the pathological grotesque elaborated in the discourse of U.S. eugenics into the curative grotesque of the American medicine show. With this move, the historical space of the domestic exterior, dedicated by turns to a monoracial and a monocultural understanding of the American home, reappears in her text as its own ideological inverse: manifesting itself in the guise of Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show, Ferber’s domestic exterior does not Americanize the immigrant home by bringing it into line with the sentimental ideology of old-stock New England, but rather Americanizes an old-stock New England home by infusing it with the grotesque and carnivalesque energies of the nation’s newest immigrant communities. The troupe of European freaks who work in Pring’s medicine show help to make this last point clear. The show’s company includes “Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy; Franko, the Living Skeleton; Mlle. Maude, the Fattest Woman on Earth”; “Haj, the Armless Hindoo Wonder”; “Bonita, the Bearded Lady”; and “Major Hop-o’-My-Thumb, the Smallest Living Man”—the latter a stage name taken by “Oscar Schmaltz” (AB 110, 112). This cast of characters recalls well-known stage identities of the late nineteenth century, but transforms the racial spectrum on display. Where historical freak shows of the period featured exotic spectacles of ancient Aztecs, Zulus, and Australian aborigines, Ferber confines her cast of characters to performers with some claim to European or Aryan racial stock. The Pring family, of English extraction, lives and works alongside Jo-Jo, a historical performer of Russian origin,30 and—one presumes—his French, Hindu, Hispanic, and Jewish colleagues. By assigning these characters to a freak show, Ferber reproduces eugenicist assertions regarding the cacogenic menace of Europe’s inferior races. But she does so in order to submit those same assertions to carnivalesque parody and inversion. The range of somatic difference found in the show troupe closely mirrors that found in Temmie’s “Norman” and “Saxon” ancestral line (AB 39), jeopardizing any case to be made about the genetic inferiority or superiority of either group. In keeping with her larger endorsement of a eugenicist program of hybrid vigor, Ferber suggests that both populations could use some new blood. Furthermore, the troupe members are clearly superior to the Oakes family in an area of conduct that many eugenicists

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believed to be racially transmitted: they keep a better home. Thanks to their care, Temmie acquires the templates needed to reform and “cure” her ancestral family’s failed domestic practice. In her account of Temmie’s childhood, Ferber artfully exploits show conventions of the nineteenth century in which “respectable freaks,” played by white performers, transposed cherished codes of domesticity to the midway. In American Beauty, “outlandish” (AB 110) immigrants see to it that Temmie is raised respectably, even though her New England father is a scoundrel and her mother is an invalid. Franko teaches her arithmetic. Bonita teaches her “how to embroider” (AB 112) and makes the child’s “best dress” “from a pattern out of Harper’s Bazaar” (AB 166). Bonita is also “a lovely cook” (AB 112) and on Sundays invites the troupe’s “bizarre company” to gather about her “festive lunch cloth, while she herself bustle[s] between gasoline stove and table, her kindly bearded face, above the homely apron, flushed with heat and hostess fever” (AB 112–113). A perfect housewife, Bonita subtly revises the domestic standards she transmits. In direct contrast to maternalist reformers’ Americanization programs of the teens and twenties, in which immigrant women were taught that their traditional dishes posed a health threat to their children,31 Temmie learns from Bonita how to relish diverse cuisines of the Continent (AB 109). Brought up at her table, she comes to see that “these men and women of the side show were normal, friendly; those others of the outside world it was who were strange, frightening” (AB 110). When Temmie herself assumes the role of “housekeeper” in the troupe’s “strange wandering life” (AB 108), the house she keeps remains open to the bounty as well as the threat of “the outside.” It is, in fact, nothing but outside. Temmie’s alien domestic education perfectly equips her for life among the nation’s racial and cultural elite. When she arrives at the old Oakes place, she immediately “accept[s] Jot, the dwarf, and Big Bella, the giantess, and Olszak, the Pole, and Jude, the shrew, with the cheerful tolerance of one who all her life had mingled with the twisted, the odd, the misshapen, the outlandish” (AB 110). But the house itself is inexcusable. Despite their distinguished pedigrees, both Jude and Big Bella are slobs. Jude is “a terrible cook” (AB 76) and a “slovenly housekeeper” (AB 72). Big Bella also keeps a “dreadful kitchen” (AB 131) and a “poor larder” (AB 129). A “sentimental lady” (AB 171), she smokes “big cigars” (AB 130) and exudes “soft whisky-laden breaths of tenderness” (AB 130). Worst of all, Temmie’s relatives know nothing about love. Burdened with a “repressed soul” (AB 189), Jude cannot “speak the words of love. The fount was dry” (AB 133). Jot has never been kissed (AB 133–134), and Big Bella, a woman capable of “sympathy and understanding” (AB 129), finds little of either in her marriage. Her husband, Hen Mossop, is a vicious little man who “beat[s] Big Bella cruelly”

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(AB 84) until she “cringe[s]” (AB 84) in his presence and weeps “because nobody cares” (AB 90). Temmie’s own mother—a runaway girl turned “wanton woman” (AB 94)—may or may not have married the peddler who eventually abandoned her (AB 67); one way or another, the relation was also loveless. The domestic histories of Temmie’s relatives reflect patterns of social maladjustment—bad housekeeping, emotional neglect, alcoholism, wife beating, and female sexual delinquency—that nativist reformers typically associated with urban immigrant families and attributed to deeply ingrained racial and cultural deficiencies.32 When Ferber makes the medicine show company the site of admirable domestic habits and domestic harmony and an old-stock New England family the site of deranged habits and disharmony, she does more than flip the nativist sentiments of contemporary reformers on their head. In her portrayal, the medicine show folk improve the model of sentimental domesticity they uphold by applying market rules of engagement to the home. In the wider trajectory of the novel, their venture appears as a queer kind of stock exchange. The stock each member possesses—ranging from commodified physical attributes to various parenting skills—may be viewed as either racial or cultural in nature: indeed, the very question of how to distinguish racial from cultural stock stands at the center of the immigration controversies that Ferber is engaging.33 Though they lack a “blood” tie, troupe members successfully pool their various stock holdings in a common economic venture in order to sell a product to the public. In their private lives, they freely exchange the same stock to the common benefit of all. As a result, Temmie receives positive forms of nurture from a racially diverse group of gender-bending men and women, all of whom possess and pass on both “professional” (AB 110) and domestic skills. Housing this unorthodox model of family life in a roving Indian medicine show, Ferber presents a “story-book” (AB 101) image of Weantinock communalism as the ground of a newfound “native” tradition capable of overturning assorted nativist agendas in the present. When Temmie reenters her ancestral home dressed up as an “Indian maiden” (AB 101), she becomes the racial and/or cultural stockbroker who imports “native” or “savage” values into her biological family circle. Both racial masquerade and historical repetition prove essential to this process. When Captain Orrange Oakes and his wife light a fire in their house for the “wayfaring Indian” (AB 53), the neighbors tremble at the thought that “those savages are there in your very house, plotting who knows what manner of murder without mercy and you helpless in your bed” (AB 53). The first Judith Oakes dismisses their fears (AB 54), but the second one doesn’t like having savages in the house. In addition to her “Indian” niece, there’s the hired man, Ondy Olszak, rumored by the neighbors to belong to a race of “wild savages” (AB 78, 146) who will

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surely murder her family “in their beds” (AB 79, 138). In truth, Temmie’s and Ondy’s Indian acts do prove deadly—at least for Jude. The trouble starts when Temmie decides to buy a Polish baby. Rozia, a darkeyed, dark-haired child with an “olive” complexion (AB 150), is born to Ondy’s wife, Polcia, by an unknown father shortly after Polcia rejoins her husband in Connecticut. After Polcia dies in childbirth, Ondy farms Rozia out to relatives, until Temmie learns that, for “a hundred dollars” (AB 160), she can purchase the baby for herself. To raise the money, she puts on a family freak show, assigning her old-stock New England relatives and neighbors stage identities once played by members of her father’s troupe (AB 180). Temmie herself trades in her Indian costume for colonial fancy dress in order to double as the first Temmie, whose portrait anchors the act. But for all her good intentions, the show’s a flop. Audience members conclude that the actors have “gone mad” (AB 182), and Aunt Jude, who arrives home unexpectedly, has a stroke on the spot. The specter of human commodification pervades this episode. Marketing herself in order to buy a baby, Temmie, who is now “sixteen” (AB 151, 161), mirrors not only bygone Weantinock and English maidens but also the African “able body’d wench, 16 years old” (AB 58) advertised for sale in the 1700 Connecticut Gazette. Her partner in this venture, the thirty-year-old Ondy Olszak (AB 127)—a Slav who works “like [a slave]” (AB 198, 271)—equally resembles the “strong and healthy Negro man, 29 years of age, and brought up in the country to the farming business” listed in the same advertisement (AB 58). Temmie’s show puts her other friends and family in the same racially destabilizing position to the market. Though they do not sell their bodies outright but only the way their bodies appear, the conditions of their performance grotesquely overlap with those of the human stock markets that flourished in the days when Captain Medad Pring “did a brisk trade in New England” (AB 58). But Temmie’s commodified acts of colonial masquerade also uphold the racial taboos they ostensibly dispute. There are, after all, easier ways of getting a Polish baby. Ferber drives home this latter point by highlighting the racial and sexual paralysis involved in Temmie’s efforts to become a mother (AB 178–179). Attempting to protect the racial purity of her family line, Temmie stages a market theory of female reproduction in which the purchased picture of a colonial virgin mysteriously gives rise to another virgin, whose image may also be purchased in order to fund the purchase of yet another (infant) virgin. No need for male—or immigrant—intervention here. Temmie’s commitment to market bonds rather than “blood” bonds as the source of family values marks the limits of her “outlandish” (AB 110) domestic education. Luckily, the other savage in the house—“gay as a boy, and resourceful beyond Temmie’s dreams” (AB 180)—knows something about starting families

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too. After consummating their love on the floor of the tobacco shed, Temmie and Ondy marry and come inside. Jude dies of a second stroke upon discovering the couple in the Oakes’s heirloom marriage bed (AB 223), and Jot, too, quickly freezes “to death, on Jude Oakes’ grave” (AB 227). No matter: in Ondy, Temmie finds “someone to tend her—to tend her who was forever tending others” (AB 208). Recognizing the immigrant stranger as a potential mother, Temmie inverts contemporary maternalists’ own project of reform: where they would teach immigrant women how to become better American mothers, Temmie finds in male and mannish immigrants a mother love lacking in both sexes of her old-stock New England family. When she opens her body and her family to the outside, she restores a multilevel economy of interracial cooperation and exchange preserved as a failed dream in the first Temmie’s hearthstone grave and later realized in the immigrant circle of her father’s Indian medicine show.

Polish America Temmie’s marriage to Ondy sets in motion the eugenicist program of “hybrid vigor” endorsed by the novel as a whole. It also rejuvenates the revolutionary spirit of her colonial forebears, recast by Ferber in terms that mirror her own era’s revolution in manners and morals: for the first time in generations, an Oakes woman enjoys satisfying sexual companionship and domestic abundance. As Lary May argues, Hollywood movies of the period commonly associated white women’s adoption of the new ethic of sexual and consumer pleasure with the intervention of a nonwhite foreign lover. In a related argument, Michael Rogin proposes that Hollywood presented racial masquerade (in the form of blackface) as a crucial intermediate step in European immigrants’ attempts to become white Americans. Giving these discourses a twist, Ferber makes the same practice crucial to the whitening of old-stock New Englanders.34 Because they are free to occupy and pass through commodified identities defined by the memory of the African slave and Indian maiden, Ferber’s oldstock New Englanders and immigrant Poles are able to recognize and approach one another. This mutual approach allows both parties to rid themselves of various inferior traits culled from the discourse of eugenics. It also allows Ferber to pretend that no American is barred from her imagined fold of expanded whiteness. But since African and Native Americans inhabit the text’s present only as a set of disembodied signs, the pretense rings hollow. As its own plotline dramatizes, the novel’s program of hybrid vigor depends on a racist logic of appropriation and exclusion intrinsic to all versions of American whiteness.

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Temmie Olszak makes racial masquerade an everyday component of her married life. In her youth, she “had been allowed to dress up to her heart’s content” (AB 167). She continues the practice in adulthood, wearing heirloom clothes on little family picnics that the Olszaks enjoy “outside” “like gypsies” (AB 224). There, she “set[s] a lavish table, and wasteful, compared with peasant standards” (AB 233), cooking “Polish dishes” dear to Ondy’s heart and her own “more cosmopolitan palate” (AB 241, 142). Her love of food and finery revives her ancestors’ “longing for possessions” in a biological resurgence that mocks the “vain attempt to stifle this” in a race of “merchants and traders” (AB 65). Revolution, picnic-style, also aligns Temmie with the contemporary commitments of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which embraced escalating domestic consumption as a cherished, if threatened, repository of 100 percent Americanism.35 When Ferber associates the merger of the Oakes and Olszak family lines with a restored lifestyle of lavish consumption, she packages her racial project of expanded whiteness in terms one would have to be un-American to reject. At the same time, she openly bends the meaning of “American” in directions previously plotted by the qualifier “Polish”—or, more pejoratively, “Polack.”36 Under the joint care of Ondy and Temmie Olszak, the “Oakes farm” becomes “a curious mixture . . . of Poland and New England” (AB 241), and a passing neighbor, seeing Temmie and her family eating in the yard, is hard “put to it to know whether she’s Polack or American” (AB 224). It is only by occupying an indeterminate terrain—Polish “or” American— that Ondy and Temmie can overcome the genetic deficiencies of their separate racial pasts. As their son, Orrange, tells his mother, the Oakes family has come to the “end of the line, like a street car. The Polacks, too, like Pa” (AB 281). In contrast, Orrange, who strikes both his parents as a living “reincarnation” of Captain Orrange Oakes (AB 268, 235), is “pretty good, with Ondy’s blood in me, and yours” (AB 281). In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant advances his infamous thesis that “the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type.”37 But in Ferber’s hands, reversion to the primitive type has already occurred spontaneously in the Oakes and Champion family lines, producing the pathologically large body of Big Bella and the pathologically small bodies of Jot and Temmie herself; only with Ondy’s intervention does this reversionary cycle produce a perfect specimen. Similarly, on Ondy’s side, pure Poles make poor Americans. Ondy’s son Stas grows up to be a man filled with “unrest,” “dissatisfaction, and hate” (AB 251), while Rozia develops a “hard peasant stubbornness” (AB 272). Neither child’s spirit of “rebellion” (AB 251, 272) kindles “the look of freedom” (AB 247) that shines in “the clear gray eye” (AB 247) of an Oakes. Instead, these rebels belong to a lower type—perhaps, Ferber hints,

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the type that has recently turned “Black Russia” “red” (AB 4). “Outwardly, in later years, they were to take on the aspect of Americans, but fundamentally they never changed” (AB 238). With these pronouncements, Ferber both echoes and undermines the conflicting arguments of rival U.S. nativists. To maternalist reformers intent on Americanizing the immigrant home, she suggests that acculturation without full racial and sexual integration changes nothing. And to eugenicists intent on keeping the American home racially pure, she demonstrates that racial purity and racial degeneration go hand in hand. The Oakes and Olszak lines must pool and trade their stock at every level—racial, economic, cultural—if they want to produce Americans worthy of the name. Through the successful merging in Orrange Olszak of Northern and Eastern European bloodlines, Ferber sets up her novel’s last eugenic union, in which the homegrown peasant aristocrat will marry the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. This anticipated marriage delivers to the country as a whole the prototype of an agrarian democracy championed but never realized in the nation’s past. In Ferber’s inverted version of U.S. history, the Jeffersonian republic of family farms is not a lost Anglo-Saxon ideal but a continually postponed future possibility whose realization will depend on unrestricted Southern and Eastern European immigration. Her account depends on ideological links among family farming, economic self-sufficiency, democracy, and whiteness already in circulation. Recollecting Grant’s thesis regarding “the essentially peasant and democratic character” of the Alpine “agricultural . . . race,”38 Ferber makes Orrange Olszak the implicit repository of national traits, particular to contemporary Poland, that appear as racially indexed cultural traits within the framework of eugenics. Through Orrange, she imports such traits into the United States, injecting the nation with a democratic and agricultural “Housa-tonic” capable of curing its pan-economic health crisis. In this sense, when she holds Orrange Olszak up as a model American farmer and marriage partner, Ferber celebrates the vigor not only of a new man, the Polish American, but also of a new land, Polish America. She relies on central aspects of Thomas and Znaniecki’s account of revived Polish nationalism to achieve the hybrid vigor of her story. In The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Thomas and Znaniecki attempt to account for the patterns of social disorganization and reorganization that emerge as tradition-bound populations begin to modernize. The divergent fates of Polish peasants in their native homeland and in the United States provide the comparison on which they base their analysis. In their account, Polish peasants, transposed to urban America, do not fare well. The first of their institutions to erode is that of the family. The authors reject a eugenicist approach that views family breakdown as evidence of racial deficiency. But they

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also reject state-backed programs of cultural reform aimed at reconstructing immigrant homes on American and Anglo-Saxon lines.39 Unable to report “a single instance where official interference strengthened the conjugal bond” (PP 2:1747), Thomas and Znaniecki instead argue that “direct or indirect state interference” in immigrant families “undermines the institutional significance and traditional social sacredness of marriage,” by “humiliat[ing] . . . masculine dignity” and tipping the balance of power in favor of the wife (PP 2:1749, 1750). They conclude: The only possible way to counteract this degeneration of marriage is to give the Polish-American society new ideals of family life or help it develop such ideals. And this can be done only by its actual incorporation into American society, not merely into the American state and economic systems—if American society has really vital family ideals to give. (PP 2:1752) In the absence of such ideals, Thomas and Znaniecki advocate the Polish immigrant’s “incorporation into a new, coherent and normal primary-group, Polish or, better still, American” (PP 2:1702). They suggest that this primary group take the form not of a family but of an economic cooperative, which, multiplied in number, will yield the “new form” of a “cooperative society” composed of “mixed [immigrant and native-born] groups” endowed “with really important productive purposes” (PP 2:1827, 1826). And they insist that “all immigrant groups, among them perhaps preeminently the Poles, bring to this country precisely the attitudes upon which cooperative enterprises can be built” (PP 2:1827). As signaled in this last remark, Thomas and Znaniecki see in the history of Poland a template not only for bypassing the misguided Americanization campaigns of the emerging U.S. welfare state, but also for modernizing tradition-bound nativist populations in a country whose decidedly unvital “family ideals” preside over a failed project of social amelioration. The history that concerns them begins with the establishment of a Polish democracy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This democracy was confined to the nobility, but by the late eighteenth century, as the country fell to hostile foreign powers, the peasantry emerged as the symbolic repository of Polish nationalism. The battle to regain Poland for the Poles, under way as Thomas and Znaniecki conducted their fieldwork, centered on attempts to make the peasants’ symbolic status materially efficacious. In the absence of positive state initiative—indeed, in the shadow of hostile state opposition—Polish nationalists set out to achieve the “rapid transformation of the peasant class into a nationally conscious and culturally constructive body” (PP 2:1307). As they loosened their primary attachments to extended kin networks, peasants were encouraged to

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adopt new, individuated positions in rapidly modernizing economies. Thomas and Znaniecki note that “economic progress, in particular the introduction of new methods of production and exchange,” was “morally idealized as contributing to the development of the country,” and they point to the distinct success of new, nonfamilial cooperative societies that allowed individuals’ voluntary investment in “the common stock” to better all members’ competitive position within a larger market economy (PP 2:1365, 1400). Finally, they argue that participation in these societies ultimately makes “possible” the “reorganization of the family . . . on an entirely new basis—that of a moral, reflective co-ordination and harmonization of individual attitudes for the pursuit of common purposes” (PP 2:1169–1170). Ferber’s creative adaptation of Thomas and Znaniecki’s argument in American Beauty invests her novel with its strongest and most intriguing refutation of nativist ideology. In Poland, democratic traditions, originally confined to the nobility, failed to sustain the nation. Reviving the nation-state required the incorporation of the peasantry in every aspect of social, political, and economic life. Ferber simply imports this historical trajectory to the United States. In her novel, eighteenth-century aristocrats build a falsely democratic agrarian society on the backs of other people’s labor. Two centuries later, peasant participation in the creation of a genuinely democratic nation proceeds through the voluntary creation of agriculturally based “economic cooperat[ives]” (PP 2:1826) that also inscribe a new model of family life. The concluding events of the novel, in which True Baldwin decides to buy the old Oakes farm and to hire Orrange Olszak to run it, and in which Candy longs to marry the man her father plans to hire, anticipate the attainment of both ends. But the precedent for this arrangement has already been worked out by the immigrant freaks of Pring’s Indian Miracle Medicine Show. Pooling their divers forms of physical and cultural stock to better the group’s competitive position in a market economy, Ferber’s makeshift family effects “a moral, reflective co-ordination and harmonization of individual attitudes for the pursuit of common purposes” (PP 2:1170). Together, they manage to award all troupe members—regardless of gender, national origin, or ability—satisfying professional and domestic lives. And they raise Temmie. When the troupe’s group ethos passes through Temmie to preside over her son’s prospective economic and emotional partnership with the Baldwins, it shifts from being an outsiders’ to an insiders’ paradigm of American family life. Ferber sticks to Thomas and Znaniecki’s account of Polish social transformation in plotting her novel’s denouement. As they report, mounting peasant lawsuits over land mark the break-up of one social order and the emergence of another, as individual family members seek funds for their own use (PP 2:1140).

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So too in American Beauty: after Ondy dies in a car crash within months of the “smash” (AB 9) on Wall Street, Stas and Rozia sue for their share of the farm (AB 310), forcing Orrange to sell. The crash that precipitates the dissolution of one family form makes possible the emergence of another, better form in which “individual” and “common purposes” achieve harmonic coordination. In Ferber’s fictive world, the maternalist project of domestic reform takes another path, yielding a freakish family structure in which the previously opposed tasks of nurture and self-support, service and self-development, merge and become multiply distributed.40 The allegorical dimensions of the new household further guarantee its fitness as a formula for national, as opposed to merely personal, recovery. Candy Baldwin brings to the proposed union the professional training, career aspirations, and active heterosexuality of the New Woman. As her father points out, she “can move [her] business to New York, if [she’s] got to be an architect” (AB 312), though he hopes she’ll choose the “job” (AB 312) of restoring the Oakes mansion. True himself brings the surviving capital of a recovering Chicago millionaire and the agribusinessman’s desire to “run this place as a farm . . . and make it pay” (AB 312). Orrange brings the nearly intact ancestral property holdings, refined sensibilities, and latest farming techniques of a college-educated peasant aristocrat. Each of the three possesses some of the racial, cultural, and economic stock needed to return the Oakes place to its former glory and adapt it to modern times, but none of them can accomplish those ends alone. Instead, the power of their democratic combination constitutes the “Housa-tonic” that will revive New England and the nation, and make them all truly American— which is to say, Polish—in the process. In this allegory, the participation of agricultural and industrial laborers—like that of African and Native Americans—is both assumed and erased. Lightly bronzed and muscled in his bathing trunks, Orrange is clearly a gentleman farmer who will become an owner-manager in a modernizing economic order where wage workers need not be represented by themselves to remain vital to the welfare of the nation.

An Awfully Sick Patient When American Beauty first appeared in 1931, the full dimensions of the nation’s economic crisis had only recently become apparent. Subsequent scholars have pointed to persistent depressions in U.S. agricultural markets throughout the twenties as a harbinger of bad days ahead, and Ferber herself gives oblique representation to these depressions in Orrange Olszak’s recurring worries about falling tobacco prices and menacing competition from the Cuban

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market (AB 276, 299–300). As she reports in A Peculiar Treasure, Ferber’s more sophisticated friends initially dismissed the 1929 crash as a “little recurrence of . . . hard times” that would cause only “temporary unpleasantness” (PT 27). Ferber, by contrast, was convinced that the nation was afflicted with “no mere economic sickness.” The problem lay with “a sickness of the soul and of the spirit that might well usher in the end of our world” (PT 27). Eight years later, her anxieties had only deepened. A proud supporter of FDR, Ferber claims in 1939 that the president alone, in these past five hideous years, has had the courage and the vision and the skill to try to devise a cure for a sick and dying world. But the measures he is taking require almost superhuman effort, for he must fight the virulent hatred of the very rich, and the inertia caused by the white blood corpuscles of the very poor, and the curious indifference of the vast American middle class. (PT 382) Hatred, inertia, and indifference were also “bring[ing] down indescribable agony, humiliation and death upon hundreds of thousands of people of one religion” in Europe as “the countries of the world . . . stood by” (PT 382). This destruction, orchestrated by “the Nazi or ape-man regime” (PT 362), represented nothing short of human devolution on a global scale. Ferber’s conviction throughout the thirties that the nation and the world were dying of something far worse than “mere economic sickness” found an echo in Roosevelt’s administration. In 1943, Roosevelt told the U.S. electorate that “in 1932,” there had been “an awfully sick patient called the United States . . . suffering from a grave internal disorder.” “Old Doc New Deal” took charge, but when, “on the 7th of December” 1941, the patient “got into a pretty bad smashup,” he had to be transferred to “Dr. Win the War.”41 At the time that Roosevelt made these remarks, he could look back on a medicalized record of accomplishment whose symbolic overtones frequently matched Ferber’s fictional diagnosis of what it would take to bring about the “spiritual and moral” (PT 337) recovery of the nation. Like Ferber, Roosevelt understood that the mythic dimensions of his patient constituted a crucial site of crisis and necessary healing. When he took office in 1933, agricultural strikes in California and organized revolt among midwestern Holidayers pressed federal intervention in agriculture to the top of his agenda. Roosevelt’s immediate predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had sought to resolve the crisis with the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, which established federal support for private marketing cooperatives such as those praised by Thomas and Znaniecki. The failure of this effort paved the way for the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, whose administrators consistently championed the interests of agribusinessmen like True Baldwin. In contrast, programs developed

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under the 1935 Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration to help the small farmer, tenant, and sharecropper remained inadequate and insecure; as a result, many of the latter were displaced from the land. Despite these developments, FSA photographs of the rural poor, which served to document trial and triumph in a nation of small family farms, quickly came to constitute the symbolic record of the times. For New Dealers, as for Ferber, the fate of the family farm, a homely screen for twentieth-century capitalism, inscribed the fate of the nation.42 Other New Deal policies form a more ambivalent fit with the model of recovery Ferber promotes in American Beauty. With the 1935 Social Security Act, the modern sentimental family took center stage in a state-backed project to secure the boundaries of an expanded whiteness. When they agreed to exclude agricultural and domestic work from the range of occupations covered by the act, New Dealers placed a ceiling on the economic and social aspirations of most families of color—a ceiling that simultaneously functioned as a rising floor for many families of recent European immigrants. Federal interventions in the housing market further enforced and intensified the power of the color line, as did the practical administration of the GI Bill in the aftermath of World War II. In American Beauty, the coordination and mutual convertibility of economic, cultural, and racial stock appear as magical premises underwriting a fictional project of national recovery. But a similar logic of stock coordination and conversion subtended the New Deal’s historical role in creating an enlarged white middle class: selective economic support, combined with selective access to better schools and residential areas and intensive acculturation campaigns in the home, helped recent European immigrants and their descendants lay claim to a newly nonambiguous racial identity. Juggling the chicken and the egg, New Deal policies simultaneously secured the whiteness of American families only recently treated by the government as “not-quite-white,” and secured those families’ claim on a range of present and future government provisions and protections to which only a secure whiteness gave one access.43 Of course, the same policies narrowed the economic and social opportunities for educated white women like Candy, making it more likely than not that marriage to a handsome stranger would require giving up one’s “business” in “New York” (AB 312). The doubts of dissident intellectuals notwithstanding, New Dealers placed the full force of the federal government behind the idea that “American society has really vital family ideals to give” (PP 2:1752) and effectively shut down active public consideration of other family and postfamily social forms in the process. Candy’s desire to marry Orrange Olszak was the only thing Ferber eventually came to dislike about American Beauty. In A Peculiar Treasure, she faults the novel’s ending for being overly “false and sentimental”

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(PT 334). When read against the domestic norms institutionalized for whites by the New Deal, however, it would have to be judged not sentimental enough. But in 1939, as she surveys the contemporary scene, the question of business and professional opportunities for white women—a favored topic since her Emma McChesney days—matters less to Ferber than the whole new scale of deadliness overtaking ongoing struggles over whiteness. Alert to “the poison of Nazism” that “had begun to ravage Germany,” Ferber writes A Peculiar Treasure in the shadow of the fear that “the Jews of Germany, the Jews of the world, were to be destroyed” while “the civilized world” (PT 21) looked on. In the face of such a prospect, her autobiography unfurls as a courageous public confrontation with popular traditions of anti-Semitism in the United States. This is her own New Deal medical intervention, designed to draw out the “poison, virulent and dreadful,” which “was being fed into the veins of the free American people” (PT 358). The poisoned patient, awaiting cure, already languishes in the pages of American Beauty, though Ferber never says as much. In The Old World in the New, E. A. Ross declares that “an American” should “lower his voice” when discussing Jews.44 In American Beauty, Ferber’s response to reformers like Ross also takes place sotto voce. When read against nativist literature of the teens and twenties, the novel’s focus on Polish Catholics starts to appear as a complex stand-in for eugenicists’ obsessive focus on Polish Jews. In 1921, Kenneth Roberts complains that “between ninety and ninety-five per cent of our immigrants from Poland at present are Jews,” and argues diligently that Jews should not be allowed to fill U.S. immigration quotas for Poles. Polish peasants, so good at farming, are capable of “becom[ing] citizens of whom the American nation can be justly proud,” but “the Jews of Poland never go in for agriculture.” “Hardly ever producers,” they “are human parasites.”45 Ross and Grant agree. Though he has almost nothing good to say about Slavic peasants, Ross concedes that if their “descendants . . . have the proper training and surrounding they will prove as orderly as the old American stock.” But he remains steadfast in his commitment to holding the color “line” against the “Jewish invader.”46 Grant also worries about invasion, conjuring a world in which “the man of the old stock is . . . being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.”47 When Ferber makes Polish Catholic immigrants the restorers of New England’s fields and bloodlines, she stages the mutually transformative encounter between old-stock New Englanders and an unjustly reviled immigrant group, closely shadowed by a group even more reviled, not least by the very population that it shadows. Occasionally, those other, ghosted immigrants flicker across the face of her story. How else are we to explain the faint but persistent narrative attention paid to Maks Kusak, “one of Ondy’s far-flung family connections”

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(AB 135), a “little Polish tailor who had lived with his wife and his brood in one of the crowded downtown New York streets” (AB 244)? When Maks becomes a farmer, his fields flourish (AB 270), but his children remain sensitive to the plight of the religious outsider: when the Protestant Temmie visits her husband’s Catholic church, “one of the Kusak boys rose, awkwardly, and proffered her his seat in a pew at the back” (AB 261). While one can argue about whether or not Ferber has placed a Jewish farmer amid the Catholic enclave steadfastly reviving Protestant New England, at least some early readers of American Beauty were acutely aware that a Jew had written the story, and they didn’t like it. In A Peculiar Treasure, Ferber reports that “even staid Boston papers called me nasty names. What right had I to write about New England! How dared I vilify Connecticut! What right (one newspaper actually demanded) had a Jew to come into New England and write about it!” (PT 334). Racialized—and racist—evaluations of the novel and its author were pervasive enough to figure in discussions of the novel’s literary merit. Writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby first condemns Ferber as a lowbrow writer and then reads that occupational identity and cultural role as a tainted racial condition. Ferber’s “gifts can be too easily vulgarized,” he writes, and she approaches her story with “too much gusto . . . to capture the spiritual realities of her American scene.” She is essentially “a showman” “dangl[ing] stock characters and stock situations before the door of [her dime] museum.” “No one wants her to be a New Englander, but she should stop playing the Pole.”48 Unwanted in New England whether or not she plays the Pole, Ferber herself becomes, in this review, the site of a literary critical struggle over American whiteness that revives and then rejects the carnivalesque terms of collective racial transformation she proposes. If Ferber’s reviewers tended to write her into the story she tells in American Beauty, Ferber did so as well. A haunting measure of her personal investment in the novel emerges from the final chapter of A Peculiar Treasure. There, she announces that she’s “been building a house” on “one hundred and sixteen stony acres” of a “Connecticut hilltop” (PT 379) while writing her memoir. She calls it “Treasure Hill.” The symbolic import of her venture could not be clearer: For centuries it has been said the Jew is not an agriculturist, he knows nothing of the land, he cares nothing for the land. For those same centuries the Jew was denied the privilege of owning land. You can’t be a farmer if you have no farm. The Jews, as a matter of fact, were the original farmers. (PT 360) As the owner and restorer of Treasure Hill, Ferber enacts the ideological fantasy that the nation’s “peculiar treasure of democracy and freedom”49

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resides in the very soil first deeded to English settlers by the Indians. Replacing her fictional Polish peasants on the land, she invests directly in that soil. “I have fed the dying soil and coaxed it back to life,” she writes. “Perhaps—who knows what the next year will bring?—I may never live [on] it. But it is good, nevertheless, to feel that at least one small piece of this continent is the richer for my having possessed it” (PT 379–380). Through this private investment in the world’s future, Ferber claims for herself, and on behalf of her country, the ancient mantle of the earth’s “original farmers.” An urban professional, a successful single woman, and a Jew turning up the soil of old New England, she takes the place of Candy—the one whose given name means “whiteness”—in a projected scene of national recovery where rich fathers and sexy husbands need not play a part. All by herself, she stretches the nation’s mythic identity as an agrarian democracy to embrace an uninvited celebrant, even as she ensures that such a democracy, never quite established in the nation’s past, will have at least one safe house in the present.

4 Not Sentimental The Double Bind of White Working-Class Femininity in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio

When Tillie Olsen began Yonnondio in 1932, she was a committed member of the Young Communist League who had already been jailed once for her political activity. A portion of the novel’s first chapter appeared in Partisan Review in 1934; with the help of a Random House contract, Olsen spent the next several years balancing the demands of writing with childrearing, labor activism, and more jail time. As she cast back from the crisis of the early thirties to focus her novel on the impoverished domestic life of a working-class family in the 1920s, she wrote with a strong sense of the revolutionary import of her subject matter. The larger pattern of events only served to heighten such conviction. In the brief span of time separating Edna Ferber’s completion of American Beauty in June 1931 from Olsen’s start on Yonnondio the following year, ballooning discontent transformed the national political scene. Veterans, in June 1932, made their Bonus March on Washington, where they were repelled with violent police and military force. That same summer, midwestern farmers formed the Farm Holiday Association to block farm foreclosures, raise crop prices, and demand federal relief for agriculture. In 1933, Upton Sinclair ran for governor with a socialist plan to end poverty in California, and Francis Townsend drew phenomenal support for his plan to provide federal pensions to the elderly. In Louisiana and Detroit, Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin started their own, protofascist welfare movements. Passage of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act strengthened the hand of organized labor, paving the way for a

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series of general strikes in 1934. Meanwhile, the Communist Party was gaining national attention for its role in organizing unemployed councils, anti-eviction actions, hunger marches, food boycotts, and rent strikes. From 1931 on, the party promoted the Lundeen or Workers’ Bill, which was introduced into Congress in 1934. The bill, which proposed a universal program of unemployment relief to be administered through worker councils, helped to touch off the rank-and-file movement among social workers, who joined the fight for a radical approach to social welfare. As Olsen told an interviewer in later years, “We believed that we were going to change the world, and it looked as if it was possible.”1 By “1936 or perhaps 1937,”2 when she forfeited her publishing contract and put the unfinished manuscript of Yonnondio aside, the political outlook had shifted dramatically. The 1935 Social Security Act had answered popular demands for permanent federal welfare provision without putting workers in control of the state. In the same year, the Communist Party embraced the broadly antifascist aims of the Popular Front and suspended the revolutionary commitments of its Third Period. In 1936, the party gave tacit support to Roosevelt’s reelection and aligned itself with the New Deal. Abandoning her manuscript before the 1937–1938 recession cast new doubt on the efficacy of Roosevelt’s programs, Olsen may well have found her original projections for the novel out of step with the times: in a 1932 outline of the plot, she had envisioned Jim Holbrook’s desertion of his family in the aftermath of a failed packinghouse strike and the death of his wife, Anna, through a botched abortion. With the loss of their parents, the two oldest children were to relocate to California’s Imperial Valley, where they would become Communist organizers and where the daughter Mazie would emerge as a revolutionary writer by the novel’s end.3 A MacDowell grant in the early seventies allowed Olsen to retrieve the story she had left unfinished, and she published a reassembled text of the novel’s first eight chapters in 1974.4 Initially championed by second-wave feminists for its searing portraits of working-class women’s oppression, Yonnondio has since achieved an honored place in contemporary canons of radical modernism. Michael Denning hails Yonnondio as “the Popular Front’s lyric masterpiece” and offers the novel pride of place in a new genre of the period, which he calls the “proletarian grotesque.”5 And yet critics insist on divorcing Olsen’s novel from the uncertain aesthetic achievement of much proletarian and Popular Front literature, and particularly from the era’s sentimental populism. Where reviewers in the mid-seventies expressed some doubt on this score, there is now uniform agreement that Yonnondio is not sentimental.6 But what is “not sentimental”? I ask this question because I think it offers a crucial point of entry into the domestic scene of Olsen’s engagement with the revolutionary hopes of the early thirties and into current accounts of the era’s

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politics of literary form. Far from steering clear of the sentimental, I would argue, Yonnondio makes visible a historically specific struggle with and over sentimentalism that was integral to wider struggles over the maternalist legacy of welfare reform in the making of the New Deal. At the center of such struggles lay the question of whether U.S. welfare programs would support socialist or capitalist solutions to the crisis of the Great Depression. A similar struggle continues to structure our understandings of U.S. literary modernism. Contemporary commentary on Yonnondio sustains an aversion to the sentimental that has long been considered one of modernism’s own defining traits. In contrast, recent accounts of modernism’s relationship to the New Deal respectfully acknowledge literary reworkings of the sentimental as a key mode of engaging the welfare state, while denying the sentimental any place in the workings of the welfare state itself. Thus, both Michael Szalay and Sean McCann read New Deal forms of sentimental populism—what McCann calls “macho sentimentality”— as significant expressions of a white male literary culture that vilified cultural expressions of the feminine and responded with ambivalence to new forms of impersonal sociality sponsored by the federal government.7 Joined by the thread of a common refusal of feminine and particularly maternal articulations of the sentimental, all of these critical narratives fail to account for maternalists’ central bequest to the New Deal, a bequest that Yonnondio squarely confronts: the absorption of sentimental paradigms of domesticity into the very fabric of the welfare state’s address to all citizens and the institution of different forms of state address—ranging from the impersonal to the hyperpersonal—for distinguishing one class of citizens from another. In Yonnondio, Olsen both deploys and attacks sentimental narrative codes as she strives to articulate the relationship between a recently whitened workingclass woman, Anna Holbrook,8 and a nascent welfare state intent on securing her power to mother. In Olsen’s portrayal, the culture of sentimental domesticity captures Anna twice: that culture not only determines the narrative codes available for telling a poor woman’s story, but also structures the domain of the domestic exterior that Anna confronts within the story as a powerful and intimate partner to her own maternal efforts. Anna’s initial positioning vis-à-vis the sentimental pedagogies of the domestic exterior is that of an avid pupil: she is eager to incorporate any and all directives from government and market authorities about the proper forms of caregiving. But by the end of the novel, she has become a woman trapped in a double bind, one that insists that she meet the standards of sentimental motherhood and simultaneously judges her incapable of doing so. Olsen’s portrait of Anna resonates sharply with the welfare battles of the early 1930s. When she returns to the 1920s to tell Anna’s story, Olsen revisits

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a period when maternalist reformers in the Children’s Bureau had sole command of federal welfare policy. And she does so at a crucial historical juncture, in the years when the emergency relief programs and permanent welfare legislation of the New Deal simultaneously displaced and preserved maternalists’ pioneering programs in the second track of a two-track welfare state. In the process, welfare planners in the Roosevelt administration placed a whole new order of force behind an essentially sentimental vision of the state’s relationship to white native-born and immigrant women and their children. The social insurance provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act institutionalized for the nation’s newly constituted white majority a domestic model grounded in the family wage of a male breadwinner and the unpaid ministrations of a stayat-home mother. This model exempted elite white women (who could afford to work) and poor women of color (who couldn’t afford not to) from an oldbut-new maternal paradigm that simultaneously became the only admissible option for single white mothers living in poverty and for all families in which a wife’s inferior wages would not cover child care expenses.9 Olsen follows established modernist precedent when she casts this updated model of sentimental domesticity in grotesque terms. As Denning has discussed,10 Olsen’s use of the grotesque signals an allegiance with Marxist and avant-garde traditions of antibourgeois critique. In this regard, her fictional project in Yonnondio can be aligned with the work of Barnes and Toomer considered in previous chapters. But Olsen also shares with the middlebrow writer Edna Ferber an unstable investment in sentimental forms and sentimental agendas that Barnes and Toomer do not display. As Olsen herself suggests, this investment is classed—but not necessarily middle-class—in nature. Yonnondio stages its own formal struggle between the sentimental and the grotesque as a struggle with and over the cultural determinants of class. Through this struggle in and over literary form, Olsen poses sentimentalism as a proffered axis of class relation that undergoes a powerful—if not, in the end, revolutionary—turn from the bourgeois locus of its heyday in the nineteenth century to the increasingly popular and populist province of its expression in the 1930s. As Yonnondio grapples with the new configuration of class relations forged by the creation of a two-track welfare state, it traces the down-classing of sentimental discourse during an era when the much-touted rejection of sentimental values on the part of the modernist literary vanguard and professional elites coincided with a coordinated—state and market—imposition of those same values on the nation’s white wage-earning families and single mothers.11 Roughly seventy years later, we can say with confidence that this down-classing of the sentimental has in no way compromised its persistent social power. Continuing to operate as a cultural dominant through its absorption into the

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mandates and provisions of a market-friendly welfare state, sentimental domestic culture has not needed the endorsement of an intellectual or economic elite to play an ongoing role in maintaining and organizing the nation’s class divisions. In Olsen’s novel, only one character embraces the values of sentimental domesticity wholeheartedly: the white working-class mother, Anna, who must assent to those values or risk losing her children and her reproductive power altogether. Other key narrative figures—Anna’s daughter Mazie, the Marxist narrator, and the implied reader—all manifest deep ambivalence to the sentimental domestic values that Anna embraces, in large part because those values not only fail to lift her family out of their poverty and despair but even seem to propel the Holbrooks to further depths of misery. The relentlessly grotesque spectacle of Anna’s failures as a sentimental mother provides Olsen with a focal point around which to organize a wide array of targets for political analysis and critique. Olsen derives from sentimental discourse itself a valuable critical account of the crucial role played by the domestic sphere in forging class identity and class destiny, at a time when official Communist circles in the United States showed no interest in such questions. But her novel also exposes the ways in which the welfare state’s modern rearticulation of the sentimental project serves only to secure the domestic reproduction of class divisions that maternalist reformers originally hoped to disengage. At the same time, the novel questions the power of existing paradigms of radical aesthetic and political expression to dismantle this dynamic. Olsen ultimately uses the narrative terrain of Yonnondio to reveal a historically grounded moral continuity between sentimental discourse and the grotesque discourse deployed against it by Marxists and modernists alike. This moral continuity not only throws into doubt the declared distance between sentimentalists and their radical antagonists, but also points to a multiply determined discursive suspicion of white working-class maternity that the modernist rejection of sentimental culture has only served to reinforce. Simultaneously enmeshed in and uneasy with both sentimental and grotesque modes of representing white working-class domesticity, Yonnondio finally renders the critical question of its own generic status unanswerable. Instead, as it patiently shaves down the difference between being and not being sentimental, it forces the question itself to change.

A Mother’s Touch Olsen’s focus on working-class domestic life in Yonnondio bears a complex relationship to the larger literary and political culture of the CPUSA in the twenties

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and early thirties. Paula Rabinowitz argues that narratives about working-class women’s private lives ran counter to the privileging of male protagonists and wage-work settings in the period’s leftist discussions of proletarian literature. Van Gosse offers a similar evaluation of the wider print culture of the CPUSA during the 1920s, which “continued to insist, by omission, that the domestic world did not matter.” But she argues that, by the early 1930s, when Olsen began composing her novel, the disastrous upheavals of the Great Depression were forcing a change in party policy. In the face of escalating hunger, eviction, and male desertion, the party granted new weight to domestic struggles and neighborhood organizing, and began to revive an older, distinctively American and working-class version of sentimental discourse that used stories of leisure-class corruption and working-class familial peril to measure the moral and social costs of capitalism. The conservative turn in Soviet family policy and the emergence of the Popular Front by mid-decade helped to strengthen investments in this discourse. Thus, during a period in which it made almost no attempt to analyze the role of domestic labor in capitalist society, the CPUSA placed sentimental domestic narratives firmly at the center of its own class struggle.12 In this context, the palpable ambivalence with which Olsen engages the topic of working-class sentimental domesticity in Yonnondio takes on added significance. While she joins other party members in treating the sentimental domestic narrative as a valid vehicle of radical protest, she is also at pains to demonstrate the devastating effects that sentimental discourse has on the working-class mother who embraces it. In pursuing this latter theme, Olsen not only departs from party politics to undertake a sophisticated investigation of the domestic sphere as a site of class and gender inequity and exploitation, but also ambivalently indicts the Left’s own investments in sentimental domesticity as an important factor in working-class women’s oppression. Throughout Yonnondio, Olsen’s narrator juxtaposes Anna Holbrook’s efforts to prove her fitness as a sentimental mother with the spectacle of those efforts’ defeat. Numerous textual details suggest that it is the very intensity of Anna’s desire to meet sentimental standards that occasions her failures as a mother, mapping her position vis-à-vis sentimental culture onto the unendurable space of a double bind. In this regard, Olsen’s portrait of Anna anticipates more recent accounts of how white working-class women have constructed themselves in relation to a welfare state determined to teach them how to care. As Beverley Skeggs argues in the case of Britain, white working-class women addressed by the welfare state confront a long history of social discourse that posits their pathological inadequacy as caregivers. This history overdetermines a frequent resolve on the women’s part both “to prove that they can care in the correct way” and to flee the question of their adequacy altogether through the

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“longing for a different place.”13 In Anna’s case, the templates of sentimental domesticity inform both her attempts at proper caregiving and her longing for a different place, with the result that even her impulses to escape bind her to the place of failure in which she is trapped. Olsen’s narrator identifies three overlapping arenas of prescriptive authority that enforce the double bind that Anna inhabits: the discourses of mass culture, organized labor, and the emerging welfare state. Through its demonstration of how Anna’s personal troubles as a mother are rooted in her relation to all three sectors, the novel strives to represent and to protest the incorporation of nineteenth-century discourses of sentimental domesticity into the very fabric of twentieth-century class relations. The most persistent sign of Anna Holbrook’s sentimentalism in Yonnondio is the large repertoire of popular songs she sings. Identified by title and lyrical fragments, “Anna’s favorite songs” (Y 53), almost all of which date back to the nineteenth century, record stories of lost love and broken dreams that resonate directly with her “longing, [her] want undefined, for something lost, for something never known” (Y 53).14 Both the reader and Anna’s daughter Mazie, who is “six and a half” (Y 2) when the novel begins, learn to associate the sound of Anna singing with moments of tenderness and emotional connection unmatched elsewhere in the novel. Intimately associating Anna with other singers both living and dead and both inside and outside the text, the nostalgic power of these songs helps to cast them as a genuine expression of the people’s voice and hence to mask their distant commercial origins. But the mass cultural origins of Anna’s hopes for her family’s future are harder to ignore. Trapped by poverty and fear of death in a Wyoming mining town, she cherishes a dream of country life so lovingly rehearsed, so sweetly commodified, that it seems to have been lifted directly from a novel or an advertisement: “school for the kids, Jim working near her, on the earth, lovely things to keep, brass lamps, bright tablecloths, vines over the doors, and roses twining” (Y 27). Anna’s dream of “roses twining” reflects the larger “sentimental attachment to rural living” that Richard Hofstadter associates with the nation’s mythic status as an agrarian republic of family farms.15 In American Beauty, this myth survives industrial development and economic collapse to become a powerful endorsement of modern agribusiness. In Yonnondio, Olsen patiently grinds the same myth into the dirt. At Anna’s urging, the Holbrooks make a stab at farming in South Dakota, where her vision hovers at the edge of fulfillment for one brief summer before the grotesque realities of tenant farming overtake them and they abandon a life of unrelieved toil, debt, and hunger. But even then, Anna’s faith in commodified depictions of middle-class domestic happiness continues to offer her abstract guidance, presiding over the “task of making

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a better life for her children,” which “loom[s] gigantic beyond her, impossible ever to achieve, beyond, beyond any effort or doing of hers” (Y 88). While something painfully fantastic adheres to the itemized contents of the “better life” that Anna wants for her children, she shows a surprisingly realistic knowledge of the states of mind and habits of being cultivated by those who actually do live the good life she imagines. The narrative attention paid to Anna’s familiarity with the various cultural practices central to the formation of U.S. middle-class identity is all the more surprising when we consider the wider disinterest in the cultural determinants of class on the Left at that time. Taken together, Anna’s many comments on the subject add up to a sound understanding of what we would today, in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s writing on the subject, call the workings of cultural capital; in particular, she shows a keen awareness of the crucial role that a mother’s caregiving plays in transmitting the cultural matrix of aptitudes and attitudes that her children will need to achieve and maintain middle-class status. First and foremost, there is the emphasis on education: “school for the kids” (Y 27). Anna fully understands both the meaning of education (“It means your hands stay white and you read books and work in an office” [Y 3]) and the narrow door it opens onto class ascendancy (“Dont you know learnin’s the only hope a body’s got in this world?” [Y 67]). She understands the role that schools play in maintaining class inequities, and makes distinctions between schools (“a good school—not a Catholic one” [Y 16]; “a good school, not a country one” [Y 49]) based on the real social chances of the populations they serve. She also understands the home’s role in preparing children to excel in school.16 Money plays a part. And so, over her husband’s explicit objections, Anna secretly hands over a quarter a week in “insurance payments” toward a college fund and “a sure edjication” (Y 94, 107) only to lose her investment when the money dries up. But she knows, too, that the more essential investment made at home is cultural. In other words, she is familiar with the central claim underwriting the sentimental mother’s superior status as a caregiver: the power of her care to turn economic and material resources, however scarce or shoddy, into the moral, psychological, and intellectual habits that will ensure her children’s proper social adjustment and success. Thus, while Anna struggles to acquire knockdown versions of the various material goods that grace the sentimental home, she works even harder to demonstrate her ability to care for her children in the correct way. This work never ends: to get each of her children a library card at the packing town’s “Temple of Learning” (Y 107); to befriend the one college graduate in their midst (Y 34, 37); to study “The Wheel of Nutrition” (Y 97) and grow or hunt for greens which will “per[k] up” (Y 56) her children’s faces “pulpy with charity starches” (Y 64); to hold the baby’s “bottle

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up so’s there always milk in the neck” “like they told her in the clinic” (Y 86); to instruct her daughter in how to straighten a room (Y 86–87); to decorate the kitchen sill with scavenged bottle-glass “soaked and scrubbed a dozen times” (Y 108); to clean and clean again the grimy walls of their packing-town home “to make a whiteness inside” (Y 54). As such details suggest, Anna does not discern the correct forms of maternal care on her own. In addition to the influence of mass culture and advertising already noted, Olsen’s narrator traces Anna’s understanding of her domestic role to the indirect influence of organized labor and the more direct ministrations of the emerging welfare state. The positions taken on the subject by organized labor reach Anna through her husband, Jim. Most notable in this regard is Jim’s refusal to let his wife enter the industrial labor force, no matter how broke or desperate the family becomes. Anna’s wageless status leaves Jim choking with resentment over the “wife and kids [who] hang round his neck like an anchor and make him grovel to God Job” (Y 63), but he also repeatedly forbids Anna to work for a wage, and smarts with shame whenever a crisis drives her to seek laundry jobs door to door (Y 21, 93–94, 104). Anna’s confinement to the home makes her a ready target for blame whenever the family fails to make ends meet. As Jim puts it: “No wonder we’re starvin. Look at the woman I got” (Y 41). Jim joins the ranks of organized labor only at the end of the novel and, even then, only tangentially and informally. But his attitudes echo the contemporary commitments of the union movement, whose drawnout fight for a family wage in the 1920s went hand in hand with a campaign to keep white women and other groups from achieving collective power in industry. This campaign actively endorsed the sentimental ideology of separate spheres in a double effort to hold up the price of white men’s labor and shore up their patriarchal authority in the home. While the strategic nature of such an endorsement seems lost on Jim, his actions and attitudes nevertheless reflect a collective vision of nativist white male solidarity grounded in a hostility to black and immigrant labor and a strict understanding of women’s domestic place.17 Jim’s insistence that his wife define her social role exclusively in domestic terms, combined with his readiness to fault her in that very role, leaves Anna vulnerable to a host of government-funded and professionally administered educational initiatives centered on how to turn working-class women into good wives and mothers. Jim himself correctly detects—and resents—the strong middle-class bias that informs the education Anna receives. But his own role in enforcing Anna’s sentimental status in the home should be kept in mind as we explore the terms of her multiply sponsored acculturation as a mother. While many of Anna’s ideas about mothering, like the many songs she sings,

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derive from the nineteenth century, Olsen’s narrator points to the intervening passage of those ideas through the domestic exterior, a domain that those ideas helped to construct and one that, in turn, guaranteed their own cultural persistence and diffusion. In 1921, the domestic exterior, already established as a set of loosely organized relations among the home, the market, and state and local governments, acquired a further link to the federal government when passage of the Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act created the nation’s first federal welfare program. Administered by the Children’s Bureau, Sheppard-Towner provided funds for setting up public clinics that offered free medical examinations and advice to mothers with infants. The education offered through these clinics did, by some accounts, bring about significant reductions in maternal and infant mortality. But Sheppard-Towner also precipitated the federal government’s active participation in the maternalist project to impose white middle-class norms of family life on the nation’s diverse citizenry. Through its provisions, cultural biases against mothers’ paid labor, bottle feeding, midwifery, and black and immigrant folkways ascended to the status of medical knowledge, as purportedly objective questions of sickness and health absorbed and reinterpreted a set of cultural differences that were strongly classed in nature.18 Olsen confronts the mixed legacy of Sheppard-Towner directly when she makes one of its clinics the scene of Anna’s terrible self-reckoning as a mother after Jim rapes her and an ensuing miscarriage brings a doctor to the house. Indignant that Jim did not know that his wife “was pregnant—again” (Y 77), the doctor prescribes “fresh fruits, vegetables, and liver” (Y 77) for Anna and “canned milk” (Y 77) and sunshine for her youngest baby, Bess, before referring both to the public health clinic. There, Anna learns the proper way to bottle-feed a baby (Y 86), studies “The Wheel of Nutrition” (Y 97), and discovers posters that teach her that “Dirt . . . Breeds Disease” (Y 82, 88). It is also in the clinic that she absorbs the additional, if unspoken, government-sponsored message: “You Make Your Children Sick” (Y 88). As ghastly as this message is, it faithfully echoes the wordless opinion of the doctor who refers Anna to the clinic in the first place: “These animals,” he thinks, “they ought to sterilize the whole lot of them after the second kid” (Y 77). Far from marking the vagaries of individual class prejudice, the doctor’s judgment resonates directly with sterilization laws in place in twenty-four states by 1930, and upheld at the federal level in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell.19 Furthermore, as I discussed in chapter 3, evidence of incorrect or inadequate mothering could itself serve as proof of a woman’s genetic “unfitness” in this period and hence as a rationale for mandatory sterilization.20 As Olsen’s doctor betrays,

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the same clinic that seeks to educate Anna as a mother also throws her right to be one into question. The narrative coupling of the doctor’s menacing suspicion of Anna’s reproductive power with the public health posters that teach her to suspect her own abilities as a caregiver help to establish a fully social context for Anna’s mounting alienation and self-alienation as a mother. At the same time, Olsen’s narrator uses Anna’s terrible identification of herself as the social agent most responsible for her children’s suffering to expose a violence, disavowed as such, that the modern state addresses to its poorest citizens. By disseminating standards of care that poor families can only fail to meet, the new cadre of public caregivers portrayed in Olsen’s text pursues its work of social amelioration in bad faith. Members of this cadre simultaneously place their clients in a double bind and deny that they do so. Adopting a posture of Olympian disgust and detached disapproval, Olsen’s public servants insist that working-class families’ failed forms of caregiving make them solely responsible not only for their own misery but also for any corrective or punitive measures that the state might have to take against them. In turn, the narrator’s obvious disgust for the doctor who most crudely articulates this viewpoint highlights a pattern of counterjudgment against public caregivers that runs throughout Olsen’s text. But the very consistency of this pattern begins to suggest that a dynamic of disavowal and bad faith may also underwrite the narrator’s own stance, which posits a relationship of detached disapproval vis-à-vis the modern sentimental reform project itself.

Bad Faith The doctor associated with the public maternity clinic in Yonnondio is the most hateful, but hardly the only, exemplar within the text of a whole line of social agents who have been authorized to teach working-class people the proper way to care. This line stretches from self-appointed white women citizens, at one end of the spectrum, to the shadowy dignitaries of the juvenile justice system, at the other. In the middle are clumped a mixed group of public servants who offer Anna and her children second-rate material handouts (if they’re lucky) and first-rate advice about those handouts’ proper use. As Jim notes, the doctor tells him “everything” Anna “needs, but not how to get it” (Y 78).21 Similarly, nameless agents feed Anna’s malnourished children “charity starches” (Y 64) and found a Temple of Learning in a “squat dirty converted storefront (good enough for packingtown, they said)” (Y 107). There, a librarian

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picks out gender-appropriate books for Anna’s children (Y 107), while at school, a teacher who catches Mazie shoving little girls down in the dirt, officiously declares: “Perhaps you indulged in rough play of this nature where you came from, but we do not permit it here, nor does it go unpunished” (Y 50–51). The teacher, whom Mazie promptly bombards with her body, links up with other punitive figures who never appear directly in the novel’s final text but who hover just beyond its edges: the juvenile court judge who waits at the end of the road on which Mazie’s brother Will embarks when “a lust for the streets” (Y 57) overtakes him—“a lust to hit back, a lust not to care” (Y 57)—or the juvenile “detention” (Y 144) center, “reformatory” (Y 144), and “Hall of Justice” (Y 148, 149) briefly mentioned in unused portions of Olsen’s original manuscript, which have been placed at the end of the novel’s published version. Routed to the text’s peripheries, these representatives of the new family court system give concrete embodiment to a threat distributed more abstractly through the text as a whole, namely, the threat to Anna of the loss of her children—and her power to bear children—if she fails to mother them correctly. Anna reacts to this invisible threat with a series of all-too-visible threats of her own, which, though they reflect the intensity of her desire to keep her children on track, end up producing the very spectacle of bad mothering she works so hard to evade. Faced with the continual absence of other resources, Anna repeatedly resorts to violence to close the gap between the requirements of the sentimental script and the reality of her family’s poverty, disaffection, and despair. Frantic to impress the do-or-die value of educational achievement and effective home management on her daughter, she threatens to “beat” Mazie “to a pulp” (Y 67, 49) if she brings home another failing report card, and berates her for a disorderly house with the icy aphorisms of a social worker: “Dont you know if you cant keep your own things out of a mess, you’ll never keep your life out of one?” (Y 86–87). Resorting to threats and blows to keep her children on track, Anna pays back her husband’s attacks in kind when the promises of sentimental domesticity fail to materialize. Just as he abuses her when a filthy house and badly cooked meals expose her shortcomings as a homemaker (Y 40, 73), she berates him for not delivering the “new life” on the farm he had promised her (Y 42), and later curses him for selling off books meant for Mazie (Y 39) and for failing to “pu[t] in a garden like you promised and never done” (Y 89). Midway through the text, a particularly abject family scene sums up the disastrous cumulative effect of this dynamic: as Jim grumbles hungrily outside while Mazie helps her exhausted mother in the kitchen, Mazie unconsciously recoils from a blow she has learned to expect from Anna only to gloat moments later over the beating her brother is sure to receive for flunking (Y 72). With this testimony to the pleasure an abused child has learned to derive

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from a sibling’s abuse, the violent effects of Anna’s sentimental ambitions for her children jump to the next generation, marking out depressing patterns of alienated intimacy that nullify the bonds of mutual identification and solidarity integral to Marx’s idea of a revolutionary proletariat. At exactly this point, Olsen introduces her reader into the text, casting that reader as a skittish middle-class pedestrian who has wandered into the wrong neighborhood at dusk: “Perhaps it frightens you as you walk by,” the narrator drily insists. “And you hurry along, afraid of the black forsaken streets, the crooked streets, and look no more” (Y 71). The implied reader’s momentary intrusion upon the Holbrooks’ devolving home life allows Olsen to align the novel’s actual readers with all those characters criticized within the text for peering into the Holbrooks’ domestic arrangements long enough to condemn them while disavowing any responsibility for the violent effects associated with such acts of condemnation in the current social order. In this way, Olsen confronts her reader with the historical fallout of a favorite nineteenth-century literary device, which places the sentimental reader inside the working-class home as a disembodied and benevolent onlooker.22 With the historical expansion of the domestic exterior—itself originally constituted, in part, by the circulation of those same textual gazes—Anna now finds herself confronting a host of fully corporeal social agents authorized to know about and to pass judgment on her domestic abilities. Indeed, in Olsen’s portrayal, Anna’s own anticipatory knowledge of such agents’ knowledge of her has intervened in, disrupted, and reconstituted her immediate role within the family.23 As she folds judgments and directives arising from the domestic exterior back into her most intimate relations with her children, Anna internalizes and passes on its alienating dictates as the very soul, the very matter, of her mother’s touch. When the touch turns out to be a violent one, Olsen’s narrative insists that such violence does not originate with Anna herself. Instead, Olsen traces the manifest violence of Anna’s touch back to the abstract violence of the double bind that structures the scene of her mothering. Faced with this larger social dynamic and implicated in it by the judgment—a hard one to avoid—that Anna is mothering her children badly when she hits them, Olsen’s reader must place him- or herself among that host of corporeal agents whose sentimental interventions have wrought new forms of division, alienation, and strife in the working-class domestic sphere. Of course, the very gestures of the text that out the reader as a selfdisavowing party to the Holbrooks’ domestic violence help to closet the narrator. Adopting the posture of a canny accuser, the narrator indirectly clears the novel of precisely those charges of sentimental bad faith that it so nimbly lodges against intrusive middle-class characters and readers alike. Such a move—we

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might call it the move of declaring oneself “not sentimental”—is consistent with a long tradition of Marxist refusal and refutation of bourgeois sentimentalism, dating back to Marx and Engels’s famous disdain for the “bourgeois claptrap about the family and education” and for “hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind” in The Communist Manifesto.24 But in Yonnondio, the narrator’s declared antipathy to a modern sentimental project of domestic reform contains its own element of bad faith, repeating the very gesture of disavowal attributed to the reader and other social agents who would flee their part in modern scenes of sentimental domesticity gone bad. For a highly complex fusion of sentimental and Marxist commitments informs both the novel that Olsen writes and the welfare state’s construction of white working-class motherhood that she writes against. A return to the narrator’s depictions of the public maternity clinic will help to make this point. As I discussed in the introduction, the 1921 federal legislation that created these clinics marked the preeminent achievement of the Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912 as a subdivision of the Department of Labor. Following close on the heels of the new Family Code of 1918 in the Soviet Union, the unprecedented public mandate behind the clinics was widely viewed by friends and foes alike as socialist in its commitment to providing limited forms of free heath care for mothers with infants regardless of the recipients’ income, race, or moral status. At the same time, additional provisions within the act for home visiting preserved a nineteenth-century model of private charity dedicated to the moral and domestic reconstruction of workingclass women. Indeed, if we consider the political origins of the clinics in the Children’s Bureau itself, it becomes clear that, in the United States, a sentimental investment in mothers and children created the entry point through which socialist agendas began to shape policy at the federal level. Maternalist reformers in the Children’s Bureau themselves viewed their health care programs for mothers and children as the “entering wedge” to a universal federal health care program, while their opponents saw their commitment to socialized medicine as shining evidence of a nascent Communist conspiracy. Through a highly publicized Red-baiting campaign directed at women in the welfare network, the American Medical Association and other conservative groups managed to repeal Sheppard-Towner in the late 1920s and to limit health care provisions in the 1935 Social Security Act.25 By the early thirties, when Olsen was writing Yonnondio, other welfare proposals, such as the Communist Party’s Lundeen Bill, offered a more comprehensive socialist vision than that entertained by maternalist reformers within and beyond the Children’s Bureau.26 But precisely because their angle of social analysis began with (white) women and children, maternalist reformers

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stressed the role of the domestic sphere in the reproduction of class inequities during a period when the Communist Party discounted or ignored such arguments. At the same time, maternalist reformers succeeded in formulating and instituting domestic policies crucial to the practical creation of a more egalitarian society. In his 1919 account of the coming socialist family in the United States, socialist historian Arthur W. Calhoun notes among a list of anticipated changes several state policies for which maternalists were actively lobbying. These included the “provision of ideal conditions for pregnant women and nursing mothers” and “scientific . . . assistance in the birth and care of children”; “hygienic, aesthetic, and stimulating surroundings in home, school, and social center, all directed to the continual education of young and old”; and most important, “equality of opportunity for every child born in so far as social control, and subsidy where necessary, can secure such equality.”27 Exactly how much Olsen’s own vision of a socialist future owes to maternalist welfare discourse becomes clear when we compare Yonnondio with a federally sponsored home instruction manual of the period, The Home and the Child, published under the aegis of the 1930 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection convened by President Hoover.28 Updating the advice of earlier middle-class domestic manuals for an audience of “home economics workers” (HC 5) and their clients, The Home and the Child details the features of the correct domestic environment required for children’s proper social and psychological development. In doing so, it places the home at the center of a class-specific process of acculturation that begins in a child’s earliest years and assigns lasting importance to even the smallest elements of the child’s home life. What The Home and the Child delivers, in effect, is a handbook on the domestic sources and composition of white middle-class cultural capital: offering an explicit and precise account of all those features of a middle-class home that prepare the child to scale the social and economic ladder, it renders this account available to readers and clients regardless of class, while leaving unspecified exactly how families might make good on such an account in their own lives.29 As Jim says about the clinic doctor, such a book tells a working-class mother “everything she needs, but not how to get it” (Y 78). Committed to exposing the systematic absence of the very resources whose presence The Home and the Child makes central to a child’s successful upbringing, Olsen’s novel nevertheless shares with the latter text a fundamentally sentimental account of how the domestic environment shapes a child’s social destiny. Thus, Yonnondio echoes, item by item, the almost obsessive interest paid in The Home and the Child to the importance of such things as fresh air and sunshine (HC 9), the proper disposal of garbage (HC 16), the need for separate beds and private washing areas (HC 20–21, 24), the dangers of street play

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(HC 14), the harmfulness of residences located “unduly near railroads . . . dumps, marshes, or obnoxious industries” (HC 15), the nutritional benefits of leafy vegetables and infant formula (HC 105), the psychological harm of improper or inferior clothing (HC 154, 156), the advantages of rural life that allow a father “daily companionship” with his children (HC 81), and the necessity of teaching the young “to value books and to care for them” (HC 44).30 While The Home and the Child records the salutary effects of a domestic environment buzzing with health, security, and wonder and Yonnondio dramatizes the grotesque effects of a domestic environment racked by hunger, violence, and disaffection, both texts actively promote the sense that the deepest injuries of class are domestic in origin and social and psychological in nature. One scene toward the end of Yonnondio helps to pinpoint how Olsen both reiterates and reconfigures government-sponsored discourses of social welfare that her narrator ostensibly opposes. While the scene is brief, its obvious symbolic overtones give it an important place in the novel as a whole. The scene opens with Mazie’s discovery that Anna has thrown out the ingredients of her childish attempt to make perfume. Mazie’s desire to make a perfume she cannot afford to buy resonates directly with an earlier passage in which the narrator uses “perfume” as a symbol of the surplus value extracted from the “lifeblood” of exploited labor. In that passage, the narrator describes Omaha’s packinghouses as a gigantic heart—pumping over the artery of viaducts the men and women who are the streets’ lifeblood, nourishing the taverns and brothels and rheumy-eyed stores, bulging out the soiled and exhausted houses, and multiplying into these children playing so mirthlessly in their street yards where flower only lampposts. (They say this heart pumps lifeblood far and far—thin and blue the vein—to purest air where scents flower under glass and in hundred-dollar perfume bottles, and a rare and cherished few are nourished). (Y 47–48) In the later scene, Mazie’s attempt to make perfume functions symbolically as an attempt to recover both the material fruits and the hidden logic of her family’s dispossession. But this venture comes to naught because she lacks a place in which to carry out her work. When she quarrels with her mother, who has thrown out a mess of fermenting “flower leaves” (Y 123), Anna berates her for leaving her “dirty-smelly” handiwork “in the cupboard where it didn’t belong” (Y 123). Mazie “shriek[s]” in turn, “I dont have no place. . . . Why dont I have no place?” (Y 123). Mazie’s outcry resounds throughout the novel as its most heartrending articulation of labor’s dispossession. At the same time, her protest echoes a

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persistent concern expressed in The Home and the Child, which insists that, because “there is no one factor in personality development more essential than privacy” (HC 10), “each child should have a place . . . for uninterrupted study of home lessons or for reading or playing” (HC 24) and for the attractive “display” of childhood “treasures” (HC 44). Of course, in The Home and the Child, the “place” set aside for a child’s exclusive use serves to mystify private property as the necessary mirror and support of healthy individual selfhood,31 while in Yonnondio, the lost or canceled “place” of Mazie’s labor marks her aborted efforts to demystify private property—to discover, in effect, that in its guise as capital, private property continually strips her family of the fruits of their own labor. In this sense, the place that Mazie discovers she does not have points to a double dispossession: as a working-class child fated to be dispossessed of her labor’s productivity, she is dispossessed again of a viable social place from which to work out both an understanding and a reversal of her losses. And yet the Marxist valence of Mazie’s aborted perfume-making venture does not so much explode as reinhabit the discursive parameters of a text like The Home and the Child. It is, after all, through the frustration of a sentimental desire to have a place of her own that Mazie first recognizes and articulates the double fact of her labor’s dispossession. Both the domestic setting and the sentimental pathos of Mazie’s outcry help to highlight the fact that modern sentimental templates of childhood development have become the locus through which both Mazie and the novel as a whole identify a crucial—cultural and domestic—mode of capitalist dispossession not explored in other, more strictly Marxist theory of the period. But while Mazie’s lost perfume prompts the recognition of wider losses, she misrecognizes the agent responsible for those losses in culturally predictable ways. Mazie blames her mother for her lost perfume, and Anna tacitly accepts the blame, vowing to “make a place” for her daughter “on a shelf somewhere soon as I get some time” (Y 123). With this exchange, Olsen dramatizes the default position, one that holds working-class parents responsible for their children’s dispossession, generated by a text like The Home and the Child through its refusal to outline a plan for making its proffered list of domestic necessities available to all children regardless of their parents’ economic condition: once working-class mothers like Anna gain public access to the standards of domestic caregiving through which middle-class families reinvest cultural capital in the next generation, it becomes no one’s fault but their own if their children fail to benefit from the knowledge that the welfare state so plainly offers them. In narrating Mazie’s and Anna’s acceptance of such an account, Olsen exposes yet another way in which the sentimental templates of domesticity imposed on working-class women by the state serve to intensify, rather than alleviate, their

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oppression. At the same time, however, the placement of the perfume scene in the larger trajectory of the novel suggests that Olsen attributes this cultural pattern of displaced blame as much to Marxist as to sentimental sources. Indeed, much of the novel can be read as a critical engagement of key Marxist tropes which—when read historically—have reinforced, much more than they have offset, sentimental narratives that hold working-class women responsible for the bad lives of the poor. I want to briefly examine Olsen’s efforts to dramatize the ideological violence that popular Marxist tropes have unleashed against working-class women before returning for a second look at the game of blaming Anna that frames the loss of her daughter’s perfume.

Refiguring (Cultural) Capital In the opening chapter of Yonnondio, Olsen begins embedding literalized versions of popular Marxist tropes in the scene and action of her story. Daybreak finds six-year-old Mazie in the densely symbolic landscape of a Wyoming mining town, listening to a conversation between her parents about men lost in “da bowels of earth” (Y 2). By noon, she has puzzled out the meaning of their talk: “Bowels is the stummy. Earth is a stummy and mebbe she eats the men that come down” (Y 4). As night falls, a drunken worker named Sheen McEvoy drives home this ugly lesson when he dangles Mazie over the “hungry mouth” (Y 12) of the mineshaft. Crazed by a mine explosion that has burned away his face and killed his fellow workers, Sheen believes that a child sacrifice will glut the mine’s appetite for more men. “All women want kids,” he asserts. “She only takes men ’cause she aint got kids” (Y 11). Rendered literally faceless and mindless by the dispossessing power of capital, Sheen grotesquely incarnates the images of the industrial wage earner as “a crippled monstrosity,” “living appendag[e],” and mutilated “fragment of his own body” which pepper the pages of Capital. Similarly, Sheen’s grotesque understanding of the mine as a woman “hungry for a child” (Y 11) literalizes Marx’s recurring poetic descriptions of capital as a monstrous feminine force which, enlivened by “an insatiable hunger for yet more profit,” consumes the life of the male proletariat to fuel a perversely sexual drive toward self-reproduction. In Capital, Marx calls on a line from Goethe to describe capital as “value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work,’ ‘as if its body were by love possessed.’ ” In a further elaboration of the same trope, he writes that the capitalist’s means of production “instead of being consumed by [the worker] as material elements of his productive activity, . . . consume him as

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the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.” Here and elsewhere, Marx adopts the promiscuous and ravenous body attributed to the industrial female wage earner by sentimentalists and revolutionary socialists alike as the privileged figure of capital’s own aberrant nature.32 With Sheen’s help, Mazie discovers Marx’s descriptions of capital’s gargantuan appetite for the worker in the literalized landscape of Olsen’s text, but she misrecognizes the crucial distinction Marx makes between the exploited worker and the invisible forces of his exploitation. Glancing frantically between Sheen’s “writhing” (Y 11) face—a “red mass of jelly” “opening in the middle” (Y 11–12)—and the bottomless pit of the mineshaft (Y 12), she confronts two monstrous images of the same abstract horror: the faceless face of capital itself. Mazie’s conflated memories of Sheen and the mineshaft reappear at regular intervals throughout Yonnondio. Though her father is initially fearful that Sheen has raped her (Y 14), these recurring memories function less as symptoms of past psychosexual injury than as uncanny markers of impending social revelation, prefacing three catastrophic experiences within Mazie’s own family. While she is still in Wyoming, memories of the culm resurface hours before a mine explosion traps Mazie’s father for five days underground (Y 17). In South Dakota, memories of Sheen’s jellied face (Y 42) haunt Mazie on a day that ends with her mother’s labor and “the blood and pain of birth” (Y 43). And in Omaha, memories of Sheen (Y 69, 72) well up in the hours before Jim’s drunken rape of Anna and her miscarriage later that night. As Anna lies bleeding and exposed on the kitchen floor, images of Anna and Sheen coalesce for Mazie in “the coarse hair, the night bristling, the blood and the drunken breath and . . . something soft, mushy, pressed against her face” (Y 77). The textual collation of Mazie’s memories of Sheen with glimpses of Anna’s body contracting in agony transfers the allegorical charge of the novel’s opening scene onto Mazie’s later experiences of working-class motherhood, as Anna’s open body gradually takes on the power to reveal, in masked and fleshly form, all of capitalism’s hidden horror.33 Through this action of the returning repressed, Olsen carefully retraces the pattern of poetic displacement behind Marx’s own descriptions of capital. In Capital, Marx’s decision to assign a recklessly hungry and oversexed female body to the abstract force of capital registers his self-conscious redeployment of the grotesque figure of the working-class prostitute central to bourgeois sentimental accounts of the moral origins of class identity. In making capital a prostitute, Marx figuratively exposes the essential immorality of the bourgeoisie itself even as he pointedly retraces the ravages of capitalist society to economic rather than moral causes. With this rhetorical move, he activates

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the same strategy deployed by antilynching activists that I discussed in chapter 2. Just as those activists used a power of inversion already intrinsic to the grotesque positioning of blacks within white writers’ sentimental discourse in order to rewrite the lynching plot, Marx stirs up the topsy-turvy energies that swirl around the grotesque positioning of the white working-class woman within that same discourse. But, as we saw with Jean Toomer’s inversions of his black contemporaries’ inversions, the very action of inversion that starts the wheel of revolution turning also keeps it rolling, opening up the space for future figurations that override the political commitments invested in any one account of the relationship between sentimental discourse and the grotesque. In Marx’s case, the strategy of reassigning to the abstract force of capital bodily characteristics previously attributed to the working-class woman-as-prostitute all too easily collapses back on itself, leaving the careless body of the pregnant and hungry working-class woman, newly invested with an additional layer of allegorical meaning, to take the blame for capital’s endlessly devouring and self-propagating “life-process.” Olsen explicitly stages just this collapse in Mazie’s spontaneous displacement of the horrific contents of capitalism’s primal scene onto the open and bleeding body of her mother. A further series of remarks made by Mazie’s father, Jim, anchors this dynamic of displaced blame in the historically grounded political unconscious of working-class white men rather than in any unconscious we might assign to Olsen’s own text.34 In one scene, Jim shifts from cursing the capitalist sponsors of his failed farming venture, who “batten on us like hogs” (Y 39), to cursing his pregnant wife for growing “monstrous fat as if she were feeding on” the couple’s thinning children (Y 40). The same shift recurs when the sewage line contractor forces Jim and his coworkers to work twice as hard for the same pay (Y 60): Jim holds his wife, not his boss, responsible for his subjugation on the job, as he greets the news with unwelcome images “of Anna counting his pay money” and corresponding plans to “bash her head in” (Y 61). The specter of the devouring and self-propagating body of capital also seems to preside over the confused energies that lead Jim back to the home he has recently abandoned in order to rape his pregnant wife. Over Anna’s protests, Jim fumes, “Cant screw my own wife. Expect me to go to a whore? Hold still” (Y 75), as if the whole purpose behind his unannounced visit in the night were to equate his wife with a prostitute and thus revenge himself on the whore of capital. Anna’s positioning in both her husband’s and her daughter’s political unconscious overdetermines their ambivalence toward her sentimental ambitions for the family, an ambivalence that periodically casts her as a class enemy within their own home. Like Jim, who consistently resists Anna’s attempts

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to put away money for the children’s college education (Y 9, 93–94), Mazie angrily abandons all interest in books and school, where she and the other working-class children have “already” been “stratified as dummies” (Y 103, 67, 107). She dodges her obligation to help Anna in the house (Y 36, 87, 92, 116) and hotly contests the sentimental division of household labor (Y 105, 122). But Mazie’s rejection of Anna’s mothering carries a different weight than Jim’s, simply because she, too, is female. If Anna appears in Olsen’s text as a woman fated to toss endlessly between the two poles of sentimental and grotesque maternity, Mazie flatly refuses to identify with either position. By the end of the novel, she has fled the scene of working-class domestic femininity altogether, drawn instead to the dump and its shifting world of “make-believe selves” (Y 104) inspired by the new mass-cultural icons of Hollywood. And yet Mazie’s violent disidentification with her mother marks not so much her successful escape from the script of sentimental domesticity as her final, if unwitting, articulation within it. For this script—strengthened by the uncanny support offered to it by its Marxist detractors—has functioned historically to pit workingclass women against one another. Deployed first by charitable volunteers and later by state and federal workers as a means of separating the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor, the script of sentimental domesticity itself imposes the choice of sentimental or grotesque maternity on working-class women. Moreover, it sponsors a secondary dynamic through which working-class women’s mutual experiences of repulsion and self-repulsion—grounded in a tutored aversion to the careless body of the grotesque working-class (m)other, who may always turn out to be oneself—serve to corrode bonds of group solidarity. Ironically, the historical down-classing of sentimental domestic culture has only strengthened this dynamic. With the turn against the sentimental on the part of modern and modernist professional elites, the anxiously sentimental maternity of a character like Anna Holbrook emerges not as the ameliorative alternative to, but as the newest incarnation of, a grotesque femininity whose attributes of bad taste and false feeling have long been the assigned badges of class subordination. Thus, in Olsen’s text, when Mazie abandons her mother’s kitchen for the Hollywood scenarios played out on the dump, it is hard to tell if she is fleeing the grotesque effects of Anna’s failure to be a sentimental mother or if sentimental maternity has itself become thoroughly grotesque for her. Mazie’s eagerness to prove that she is not sentimental resonates with the more general insistence in recent years that Yonnondio itself is not sentimental and, by this measure, deserves the high place we have given it in the canon of radical modernism. But, as I hope to have demonstrated, the case is considerably more complicated than that. The radical aesthetic and political charge associated with early twentieth-century attacks on sentimentalism did not inaugurate

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a more general emancipation from the bourgeois culture of sentiment, but rather effected a partial revolution in value that opened up a new position of unease with an increasingly common—because now state-mandated—sentimental configuration of white working-class femininity. This unease did not inaugurate a critical investigation of the role played by the welfare state in sustaining gender, class, and race oppression, but instead sustained—even as it disowned—the original pathologizing of working-class women’s culture accomplished by the sentimentalists themselves. Through the example of Mazie and her playmates on the dump, Olsen exposes the disorienting effects of such unease on white working-class women and girls: thrown through their enforced contact with sentimental domestic culture into an alienated relationship to their mothers and to themselves, Mazie’s generation fails to inherit the templates of mutual regard and common purpose necessary for effective group action. At the same time, however, Olsen uses Mazie’s vexed relationship with her mother as a textual site for sketching out the first glimmerings of a different relationship to workingclass women’s sentimentalism, one that transcends the false opposition between modern sentimental culture and its various radical detractors. In the final pages of the novel’s published version, Mazie tries, in condensed and poetic form, to forge her own critical understanding of the culture of debased sentimentalism in which she and her mother are caught. To recover both the terms and the implications of this critical effort, let’s return now for another look at her aborted efforts to make perfume. Mazie wants to make the perfume for Jinella, a playmate on the dump who demands small tributes in exchange for the privilege of participating in her games of Hollywood make-believe. These games satisfy each girl’s “feverish longing, unutterable, to be other than she is; to be otherwhere than she is—places spacious and elegant, idle and served and cool. . . . Not shamed and shameful, not judged and condemned” (Y 127). Through Jinella’s games, the girls of Mazie’s generation flatly refuse the modest virtues of the sentimental woman in favor of forbidden realms of glamour and delight, but they also repeat the “longing for a different place” that informs their mothers’ own fraught attachment to the modern sentimental project. For Jinella, perfume becomes the magical sign and substance that transports her to that different place, a place where she is the “queen of lilac time” (Y 109), doted on by a devoted court. And yet Jinella’s “dream of lilac time” (Y 109) reaches well beyond the children’s world of Hollywood illusion. When read against the accumulating imagery of the novel as a whole, a flower’s perfume emerges as the symbol of everything white working-class women currently lack and everything they might hope to have, not only in the current social order, but also in that host of possible social orders that the revolutionary energies of Yonnondio struggle to make visible.

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Olsen establishes the motif after the birth of Mazie’s sister, Bess, on the South Dakota farm when Anna’s friend and midwife, Ellen Burgum, comments “heavily,” “Life’s no bottle of perfume. I’m tired enough to die” (Y 45). When the Holbrooks abandon the farm a short time later, the wind carries a “scent of lilac” (Y 45) that clings to the family long after they leave their dream of country living behind. Mazie repeatedly conjures up the “voluptuous fragrance” of the farm “in early June” (Y 58) as a fragile refuge from the “stink” (Y 46) of the packing town. As the farm itself shifts from a sentimental promise of future happiness to a site of loss and nostalgic longing, it begins to take on utopian qualities tinctured by protest and the felt experience of dispossession. When the Holbrooks gather with friends to sing Anna’s favorite songs—and again when Anna and her children sing under a flowering catalpa tree (Y 101)—“the sweet intoxicating smell of spring” fuses for Mazie with the sound of “separate voices chorded into one great full one” (Y 53), and becomes associated with the singers’ common “longing . . . for something lost, for something never known” (Y 53). In this chain of associations, “perfume” does not mark the break that has opened up between the novel’s two generations of working-class women, so much as it marks a surviving point of contact, a shared investment in a single, common vision. Two further passages anchor this vision in a field of possibility that exceeds, even as it remains in touch with, the current cultural attachments of the novel’s working-class female characters. One night, having fled the house “after a beating from Anna” (Y 32), Mazie longs to “smell” the flowering stars of a night sky (Y 32); later, she greets those flowering stars again in the fireworks which her family sets off on the Fourth of July (Y 106). With this latter reference, the scent of celestial flowers attaches itself to a more just and perfect world launched skyward by the force of a second—proletarian— American revolution. When read against this backdrop, Mazie’s attempts to make her own perfume signal a complex, even contradictory, set of ambitions. While her gesture reflects the combined, if mutually competing, desires of her own and her mother’s generation to secure a better place for themselves in the current social order, the same gesture also reflects a desire for change that the current social order cannot contain. This double valence of desire deepens the significance of Olsen’s initial grounding of the perfume image in a reference to Marx’s theory of surplus value. For the strong feminine connotations of perfume, substantiated by its expanded field of reference within the novel, give the text’s recurring sign of surplus value a set of meanings not found in Marx. In Olsen’s narrator’s extended metaphor, workers give up their “lifeblood” to a process of refinement (“thin and blue the vein”) that turns that blood into a “hundred-dollar perfume” for the “rare and cherished few” (Y 47–48). While

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this process of refinement clearly evokes the scene of industrial labor central to Marx’s theory of surplus value, it also evokes a scene of cultural labor (or the labor of acculturation) located in the domestic sphere, which is central to Olsen’s own investigation of working-class oppression. In this second scene, the labor of refinement makes bluebloods of the “cherished few” while consigning the many to lives of unrewarded toil.35 Within the metaphor that Olsen develops, perfume takes on several of the meanings we now attribute to the concept of cultural capital: signifying an access to material wealth, it also signifies a corporeal change of state, one that allows the wealthy to derive their superior social and economic position from an ostensibly innate—because embodied— superiority of culture. When Mazie seizes upon perfume as the elusive object of her own domestic labor, her gesture reads symbolically within the text as an attempt to grasp the secret of this embodied cultural advantage. In essence, she attempts to grasp the secret of (cultural) capital hidden inside sentimental power—that mystified power of the mother’s saving touch—whose promised rewards constantly elicit, but just as constantly elude, her actual mother’s labor. At the same time, the utopian strands of Yonnondio redefine the current social function of sentimental power, making perfume into a common sign of working-class women’s longing for another social order that would make good on the false promises of the capitalist marketplace and the welfare state, allowing the domestically and maternally transmitted cultural advantages of the few to redound to all. In this sense, Mazie’s desire to make perfume anticipates in childish form the creative bid for revolutionary consciousness that Olsen attributed to the adult Mazie in her original projections for the novel. The same desire contains, in miniature, the elements of a hybrid political project that might be said to characterize Yonnondio itself. Generating its narrative at the unquiet intersection of sentimental and Marxist discourses, Olsen’s novel rearticulates the nature of their fusion: affirming the utopian impulses in both discourses, she also uses each discourse to locate and address the ideological blind spots of the other and exposes the continuities between them that persist at the expense of workingclass women. When read in this light, the question of whether Yonnondio is or is not sentimental loses its critical force. Instead, the novel compels us to work back through the history that has given this question its enduring aesthetic and political importance, while exploding the question itself. In Yonnondio, Olsen uncovers the role of sentimental culture in constituting the social terrain of the domestic exterior from which the U.S. welfare state emerged. Returning to the 1920s to explore the double bind embedded in the welfare state’s address to poor women, she exposes the oppressive nature of the domestic paradigm that would inform the welfare state’s address to white

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citizens of all classes with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. At the same time, Olsen traces the complex social and political effects of the downclassing of an overt commitment to sentimental culture that accompanied this embedding of a tacit commitment to sentimental domesticity in the very structure of the welfare state’s pact with corporate capital and a newly white majority being rapidly de-ethnicized. Required to meet middle-class standards of sentimental motherhood or to give up their right to mother altogether, Olsen’s white working-class women become the ostensible bearers of a debased and self-defeating sentimental culture that their more privileged fellow citizens are free to say they reject. But, as Yonnondio makes clear, sentimental culture in the United States no longer presents itself as an elective consumer choice that the radical aesthetic and/or political subject may simply refuse: instead, it stands as the very ground of a network of classed and racialized social relations, held in place by the welfare state, in which we all take part. At its most forceful, Yonnondio challenges its readers to figure out not whether but how we occupy this ground. Faced with such a challenge, we might wish to keep Mazie’s own early struggles on the same ground in view. Recasting her antipathy toward the sentimental as an attempt to repossess the logic of its continued power, Olsen’s heroine ultimately links her radical bid for critical understanding to the labor not of refusing sentimental culture, but of accounting as fully as possible for her own social positioning within it.

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5 Siren Calls Consumer Revolution and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust

As we turn from Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, the horizon shifts from socialist to consumer revolution: where Olsen planned, in the projected ending of her novel, to draw Mazie and Will Holbrook into a revolutionary struggle touched off by agricultural workers in California’s Imperial Valley, West concludes his 1939 novel with a Hollywood mob scene in which “whole families” (CW 411) of consumers, frustrated by the stars’ delayed arrival at a world premiere, turn their pent-up sexual and murderous energies on one another.1 Tod Hackett, the modernist painter who serves as the novel’s protagonist, meets in the body of this mob both a threat to his own existence and a confirmation of the apocalyptic vision contained in his uncompleted masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” From the start, Tod has been fascinated by the “old” and “middle-aged” (CW 411) consumers who have “come to California to die” (CW 420). He identifies them as “cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious” (CW 420), and includes them in his painting as “torch-bearers” (CW 347) marching “behind [the] banner” of “a super ‘Dr. Know-All Pierce-All’ ” “in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land” (CW 420). Midway through the novel, Tod encounters a reallife model for Dr. Know-All Pierce-All. This man, whose “name most likely was Thompson or Johnson” and whose “home town” was probably “Sioux City,” is “very angry” (CW 366): The message he had brought to the city was one that an illiterate anchorite might have given decadent Rome. It was a crazy jumble of

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In his biography of West, Jay Martin identifies Dr. Francis Townsend as the real-life model for this real-life model named “Thompson or Johnson,” when he notes that “the Townsendites” were “obviously the group which gave West a hint of the economic frustration of the Torchbearers.”2 In 1933, at the age of sixty-six, Dr. Townsend launched a proposal demanding that the federal government pay $200 a month to all retired persons over sixty, with the provisions that all stipends be spent within thirty days and that funds be raised through a pay-as-you-go transaction tax. Given the official slogan “Youth for Work—Age for Leisure,” his plan would, as he assured his followers, restore older Americans to an esteemed, even enviable, place in U.S. society by making their purchasing power the driving force of national economic recovery. Dr. Townsend’s message struck a nerve with other aging residents who had moved to southern California in the twenties in record numbers, seeking better health and more leisure opportunities. But Townsend’s movement was not merely a regional phenomenon. By 1936, his movement boasted 1.5 million members represented in 7,000 clubs nationwide.3 The Townsend plan was only one of a number of proposals in the early thirties to reflect a Keynesian vision of economic recovery. On a practical level, the plan had multiple flaws, and no trained economist ever endorsed it. But the people did. Abraham Holtzman notes that Townsend’s movement “crystallized tremendous popular sentiment in favor of old-age security.”4 The political threat posed by his movement pushed New Dealers to enlarge plans for a federally funded Old-Age Insurance program well beyond the scope initially proposed for it, and then helped to nudge welfare opponents to the president’s side. OAI went on to become the best funded, most respected, and most popular program of the New Deal. But because the original legislation for OAI called for the deferral of benefits until 1942 and left the present generation of the elderly out of the equation entirely, support for Townsend’s plan and other old-age pension schemes flourished even after the 1935 passage of the Social Security Act. In 1938, during the midst of another severe recession, “the California electorate”— who had clearly caught the eye of Nathanael West—“voted upon a scrip money scheme paying ‘$30 Every Thursday’ to all who would retire at age fifty.” In 1939, the year in which The Day of the Locust appeared, two-fifths of the national population still wanted to see the Townsend plan instated.5

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West’s allusions to the Townsend movement and its spin-offs place his vision of consumer revolution squarely within the context of New Deal politics and the Roosevelt administration’s own relatively late shift to a Keynesian economic policy. Roosevelt signaled the shift in a fireside chat delivered early in 1938, when he told his radio audience that “we suffer primarily from a lack of buying power” and that government needed “to make definite additions to the purchasing power of the nation.”6 Building on foundations already laid out in the 1934 National Housing Act and the 1935 Social Security Act, late New Deal and early postwar policies made a particular model of state-backed domestic consumption the engine of national economic prosperity and expansion. This model, reserved almost exclusively for whites, was financed by government-backed housing loans and the socially insured family wage of a male breadwinner and was expressed in the purchasing decisions of an educated stay-at-home mother.7 Today, historians credit the Keynesian turn in New Deal economic policy with securing the necessary conditions for postwar prosperity and ultimately with ensuring the popular legitimacy of the welfare state itself. But West saw something else in the decade’s multivocal endorsements of consumer power. No doubt inspired by Townsend’s 1936 affiliation with the anti-Semitic and anti-Communist Father Coughlin and by a congressional investigation of Townsend on charges of fraud undertaken in the same year,8 West detected in the messages of populist leaders fascist inclinations and a resolution to delude. In Tod’s painting, the “torchbearers” (CW 347) who follow Dr. Know-All Pierce-All harbor an “awful, anarchic power” and have “it in them to destroy civilization” (CW 366). “The Angelenos would be first,” Tod muses, “but their comrades all over the country would follow. There would be civil war” (CW 335). In choosing to foreground consumption’s “anarchic” possibilities, West broke ranks with both fringe and centrist leaders of the period who jointly invested domestic consumption and the home consumer with almost messianic powers of deliverance. Instead, he revived and enlarged upon an earlier, highly negative account of consumer culture that associated escalating patterns of consumption with a threat to family life and the larger social order. As I will argue throughout this chapter, West was particularly unnerved by the modern cult of the body beautiful. Like Dr. Townsend’s movement, this cult found a perfect hatching ground in southern California, long known for its commitment to leisure and healthy living. But where Townsend’s movement championed the cause of the aged and infirm, the cult—or culture—of the body beautiful glorified youth. Actively promoted by movies and movie stars, this new culture foregrounded “the importance of appearance and the ‘look’” and

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equated both the consumer’s body and the consumer’s home with “hedonism, leisure and display.”9 As such, the body beautiful served as an apt figurehead for the revolution in manners and morals, which advanced new, more liberal norms of sexual expression and personal consumption for respectable women of the white middle class.10 With the Keynesian shift in New Deal economic policy, the federal government gave its final, most significant endorsement to a larger project of reform that sought to reconcile the emancipatory energies of this cultural revolution with a sentimental model of family life. From now on, middle-class white women’s sexual and consumer desire, at once stimulated by and contained within the home, would simultaneously drive and stabilize the larger socioeconomic order. But in The Day of the Locust, the body beautiful emerges along the market axis of the domestic exterior as a purely anarchic force that threatens to turn the traditional arrangements of the sentimental home upside down and inside out. Eventually supplanting the “messianic rage” (CW 366) of various Thompsons and Johnsons, this new body reveals itself to be the real upstart, driving U.S. consumers to a state of civil war. At the center of his novel’s action, West pits the bodily charms of a young Hollywood wannabe, Faye Greener, against the stored-up purchasing power and eroticized consumer desire of a retired homeowner, Homer Simpson—one of the many people in the novel who have “come to California to die” (CW 420). In the charged field of their encounter, he locates the explosive ingredients of a domestic revolution that topples the power of the sentimental woman and disrupts her material and symbolic role in organizing race, class, and gender hierarchies in society at large. Throughout the novel, Tod Hackett, who also desires Faye, keeps careful watch on her relationship with Homer. What he sees inspires the terms of his projected masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles,” but it also jeopardizes his ambition to serve as the artistic prophet of the nation’s coming “doom” (CW 335): in the consumer revolution that Faye embodies, traditional hierarchies between high and low culture, on which Tod’s claims to superior vision depend, are the first to fold.11 In August 1933, a few years before he began work on his Hollywood novel, West became an associate editor of Americana: A Magazine of Pictorial Satire alongside Gilbert Seldes and George Grosz. West was responsible for assembling the journal’s Hollywood issue, which appeared in October 1933.12 In November of the same year, Americana put out its last issue. In that issue, a fictional sketch by Don Langan presents the germ of the idea that West would develop so spectacularly in The Day of the Locust. Entitled “Consumers, Arise!” Langan’s sketch focuses on a “‘Consumers’ Parade” in Manhattan that gets out

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of hand: “The night before the parade a mass meeting had been held in the park, and there had been speakers who used such phrases as ‘Are we mice or men?,’ ‘Our homes and families are being invaded,’ and ‘It is high time we act.’ ” During the actual parade, participants hold up “banners and placards” denouncing the advertising industry for promoting new standards of body presentation and body care that have subjected U.S. consumers to unprecedented levels of self-scrutiny and self-alienation. In Langan’s portrayal, the modern cult of the body beautiful, founded on compensatory acts of domestic consumption, does not provide a paradigm for widespread social security and economic recovery, but instead induces heightened states of personal insecurity, dissatisfaction, and distress, which ultimately fuel an anarchic counterattack on the city’s commercial interests. Before turning to my analysis of West’s novel, I’d like to offer a few excerpts from Langan’s sketch because I think it anticipates, in good prophetic fashion, the critical vision animating West’s own hallucinatory depictions of consumer revolution in The Day of the Locust. Langan writes: The banners and placards were interesting. One read, “They are pursuing our daughters with the specter HALITOSIS.” Another said, “They tell our wives they have ‘THAT HAGGARD LOOK.’” A third proclaimed “WASH DAY HANDS is just another sales insult . . . not a slogan.” Some of the signs seemed quite defiant. For instance, one lady brandished a card which read “We’ve watched out for ‘B.O.’ long enough . . . now you watch out for us.” (Ellipses in the original) As the parade continues, its ranks swell. “At about 50th Street,” one marcher notices a display in a drugstore window: It advertised a new mouth wash; there was a large picture of a man in pajamas, hair awry, mouth open, tongue out. . . . Over his head ran the legend, “Don’t start the day with that MORNING TASTE * * * Use William’s Wonder Wash.” It was a very unfortunate window for that particular day. “There’s one now,” the marcher who spied it shouted. A piece of brick hurtled through the air. The window was shattered. A half-dozen of the men dashed from the line, reached the broken window and dragged the personification of MORNING TASTE into the street. “This is the way we look to them in the morning,” one of the men shouted, as they tore the sign to bits. . . . The drug store window incident was an appetizer. All semblance of order disappeared and the parade of The Consumers became a riot.13

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Really Cultured Women In his novel’s protagonist, Tod Hackett, West creates a character who lacks what it takes to excel in the new culture of the body beautiful. Tod comes to Los Angeles “to learn set and costume designing” after “a talent scout for National Films” sees some of his drawings in an exhibit of undergraduate work at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn’t have sent him to Hollywood. . . . His large sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact. (CW 260) But West’s narrator quickly insists that appearances aren’t everything and that Tod is really a man of considerable talent. West attaches Tod’s superior reserves of talent to a superior social background, investing his protagonist with precisely those forms of cultural capital that Anna Holbrook desperately tries— and fails—to secure for her children in Yonnondio. Details about Tod’s childhood, though scarce, point to a middle-class upbringing in a home laden with books and culture and imbued with the elevating influence of a sentimental mother. When Tod must design military costumes for a movie production of Waterloo, he not only knows enough to consult the verbal “descriptions in ‘Les Miserables’ ” (CW 353) for abstract visual models, but can also call on more distant memories of “all the gay and elaborate uniforms that used to please him so much when he was a child and spent long hours looking at the soldiers in an old dictionary” (CW 354). Similarly, when he hears an “electric organ . . . recording” (CW 348) of a Bach chorale at the funeral of his friend Harry Greener, he is the only mourner to “recogniz[e] the music,” and he does so because “his mother often played a piano adaptation of it on Sundays at home” (CW 348). As Tod listens to the music of “Come Redeemer, Our Saviour” (CW 348), he translates Bach’s wordless melody into a narrative that weaves together all the spiritual, moral, and social ideals associated with the sentimental woman’s traditional role as guardian of culture. He hears in the music’s “free,” “clear and honest tones” the voice of the (unnamed) bride of Christ calling to the “lover” for whom she has been waiting “more than seventeen hundred years” (CW 348–349). By the end of the piece, the bride pledges to remain true to Christ whether or not he ever arrives. “Come or don’t come” is what Tod hears the music saying; “I love you and my love is enough” (CW 349). For Tod, the aesthetic purity of Bach’s music expresses and depends on the spiritual and moral purity of Christ’s bride, a figure who merges in his memories with the chaste and genteel figure of his mother at the piano.

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Mrs. Hackett’s domestic cultivation of the arts sets in motion the more general program of elite aesthetic training that culminates in Tod’s strong sense of artistic vocation as an adult. The privileged sign of Tod’s artistic capability is his psychological complexity: as the narrator observes, “despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes” (CW 260). Tod’s highly developed psychic interiority, like the cultivated domestic interior to which it is structurally linked, confirms in him ethereal qualities of mind and soul associated with the production and consumption of great art. Yet, for all his talent, Tod rejects the genteel tradition of beauty and refinement, now devolved into “illustration or mere handsomeness” (CW 261), which has presided over his education as an artist. Repulsed by the quaint charms of old New England distilled in academic paintings of “a fat red barn, old stone wall or sturdy Nantucket fisherman” (CW 261), he turns against predeterminations of “race, training and heritage” (CW 261) to take “Goya and Daumier,” rather than “Winslow Homer,” as “his masters” (CW 261). When Tod chooses a grotesque aesthetic over one of purity and beauty, he aligns himself with other “bourgeois dissidents” of the avant-garde who placed the inversion of traditional aesthetic hierarchies at the center of their attacks on mainstream art and culture. As Peter Bürger argues, in the teens and twenties avant-garde groups in Europe sought to overcome the false division in bourgeois society between a pure, disinterested realm of art and the profit-driven realm of everyday life by forging a materially grounded and politically subversive art as the radical source of a new life praxis. The grotesque aesthetic, which routinely drags what is high down to the level of the common and the low, provided the perfect idiom for carrying out this agenda. For his part, Tod is more willing to assume the avant-garde artist’s role as social critic than the role of architect of a new life praxis: adopting an aristocratic rather than a proletarian stance against the bourgeoisie, he holds back from allegiance with the “torch-bearers” (CW 347) who crowd the canvas of “The Burning of Los Angeles.” Determined to locate revolution in the frame of his art, he nevertheless embraces a reactionary vision that, as I’ve already indicated, equates the “awful, anarchic power” (CW 366) of the people with chaos, devastation, and “civil war” (CW 335).14 Given the critical tendency to endorse Tod’s viewpoint in the novel, it is worth pointing out that his depictions of the coming revolution exist largely in his mind. For the duration of the novel, material evidence of his artistic talent, like evidence of his psychological complexity, remains locked inside a nest of Chinese boxes: he keeps his preliminary sketches for “The Burning of Los Angeles” in a “portfolio,” “tied . . . with a string” and tucked “away in his trunk” (CW 365), itself stored in a bachelor’s apartment which no one except

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Tod himself ever enters. In the world outside these boxes, Tod’s transgressive sensibility and prophetic insights fail to register. His Hollywood companions, uniformly disinclined to look beyond the surface of things, repeatedly identify him as the transparent sum of his privileged social history: to them, he is “educated” (CW 318) and “good-hearted” (CW 270), a “college man” (CW 268) and “a nice boy” (CW 399). West contrasts the simultaneously exaggerated and undetectable nature of Tod’s (anti-) bourgeois interiority with the insistent exteriority of the novel’s other characters, and links this exteriority with their positioning along the market axis of the domestic exterior. In Djuna Barnes’s 1928 novel, Ryder, the domestic exterior swings into view at the newly forming intersections of the home, corporate philanthropy, and the state. Ten years later, West associates the domestic exterior with corporate capital’s commercial grip on the home, a grip tightened and secured by the federal government’s recent endorsement of domestic consumption as the driving force of national prosperity. In The Day of the Locust, the Hollywood film industry dominates the market axis of the domestic exterior and becomes the major sponsor of the body beautiful’s invasion of the sentimental home. The many actors in West’s novel vie for the chance to be the star who will best personify this invasion; each tries, more cunningly than the next, to perfect the revolutionary look and lifestyle of a body on the rise. As Mike Featherstone argues, in the late teens and twenties Hollywood stars began to equate the allure of their own stardom with this new consumer body, associated, on the one hand, with “idealised images of youth, health, fitness and beauty,”15 and, on the other, with fashion, artifice, opulence, and glamour. In their promotion of the body beautiful, stars fused a wide array of previously incompatible, class- and race-specific body projects and practices into a single, cross-class body ideal.16 As a result, much of the fascination associated with the body they created sprang from its inherent class ambiguity. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, “the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste,”17 and struggles to define the legitimate body and legitimate taste lie at the heart of larger economic struggles waged over the social division of labor and its rewards. In this sense, Hollywood movies of the twenties and thirties that both staged and waged a culture war between the modern ideal of the body beautiful and the older ideal of sentimental womanhood played a pivotal, and not merely an epiphenomenal, role in class struggles of the period. Most of the time, successful challenges to dominant definitions of the legitimate body simply reformulate the dominant terms by which the dominant class embodies its privilege. But such challenges also carry the threat of abolishing the embodiment of class privilege altogether by deranging the system of distinctions that a society uses to rank one body above another. For conservative observers,

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the revolution in manners and morals, with its endorsement of greater sexual freedom, increased public mobility, and more conspicuous levels of consumption for women of the white middle class, seemed to pose just this sort of threat to the status quo.18 During the same years in which federal and state governments set up a variety of programs to keep and train white women in the home, Hollywood’s promotion of the revolution in manners and morals invited white women to define themselves in nonmaternal terms and to imagine glamorous and exciting lives for themselves beyond the private sphere. This challenge to white women’s domestic role also challenged their role in maintaining and transmitting class- and race-based cultural distinctions. In its unprecedented synthesis of flawless visual perfection and lawless sexual vitality, the body beautiful disrupted codes that had previously distinguished the pure tastes of the sentimental woman from the grotesque excesses of black and white working-class women and the nouveaux riches. As such, it performed a symbolic assault on hierarchies of taste and conduct that the sentimental woman, in particular, had been appointed to uphold.19 In The Day of the Locust, the body beautiful appears as a revolutionary body whose commercial entry into the consumer’s home visibly disrupts the role of that home in reproducing social and cultural distinctions. Offering a new paradigm of cultivated femininity to white women, the body beautiful threatens to reconfigure both the content of the cultural capital invested in children of the dominant white middle class and the dominant mode of transmitting that capital, which relies on an educated mother’s care of her own children. In this sense, the body beautiful holds up a double challenge to the aesthetic categories of experience that Tod embodies and that subtend his faith in his own artistic greatness. In its claims to forge a new relation between art and everyday life, the body beautiful usurps the avant-garde project to generate the terms of a new life praxis, and jeopardizes the social relevance of Tod’s artistic vision.20 This challenge to his artistic authority lends both urgency and irony to Tod’s convictions regarding civilization’s impending collapse. The difficulty Tod has in communicating his convictions to anyone outside himself suggests the dimensions of his problem: yielding the public stage of art and culture to others—and particularly to women—he must wrestle with the possibility that his self-appointed role as social critic and artistic prophet has already been rendered obsolete. The novel’s first demonstration of Hollywood’s anarchic power to turn the sentimental home on its head comes with the private screening of a naughty French film, “LE PREDICAMENT DE MARIE” (CW 279), in the upscale bordello of a former silent film star, Mrs. Jenning. The film stages the proliferating erotic encounters between a “very respectable” “middle-class family” (CW 279)

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and their maid, and reveals “that while the whole family desired Marie, she only desired the young girl” (CW 280). Later, the appearances of the belligerent Ling family, whose members star as “rocketing Orientals” in a circus act (CW 284), and the “Gingos, a family of performing Eskimos” (CW 315), fill out this early portrait of familial perversity. Paid to perform their domestic roles in the limelight, these families-for-hire openly refuse and traduce the genteel habits associated with the domestic interior in the social history of Tod Hackett. A similar ambition to live in the public eye unites all of the family members Tod encounters in southern California. “Anna and Annabelle Lee” formed “a sister act [in] the nineteen-tens” (CW 315). Mrs. Loomis and her son Adore spring from “that army of women who drag their children around from casting office to casting office . . . , waiting for a chance to show what Junior can do” (CW 361). And Tod’s friend Harry Greener, unable to relinquish a failed career in vaudeville, “clown[s] continuously” (CW 282), while his seventeen-year-old daughter, Faye, moves in a dream of her own imminent Hollywood stardom. The most egregious example of a family member who chooses public glory and attention over a quiet life at home is Faye’s mother, Mrs. Greener. A “beautiful dancer” and “headliner on the Gus Sun time” (CW 338), she used her stage career to facilitate a series of extramarital affairs before running off with “a foreigner, a swarthy magician fellow” (CW 338), when Faye was a baby. The history of the beautiful Mrs. Greener neatly recapitulates the antisentimental career of the public woman, concentrating in a single figure the connections among paid labor, promiscuity, and poor mothering that had long animated grotesque constructions of white working-class femininity. In a melodramatic rehearsal of the sad family story, complete with imitations of “the whimper of a little girl crying for her vanished mother” (CW 337), Harry Greener suggests to Tod that his wife’s infidelity lies behind his own failures as an actor. In his youth, he intended “to play Shakespeare in the auditorium of the Cambridge Latin School” (CW 337). But marriage to the beautiful dancer brought him low, and “he who had hoped to play Hamlet, Lear, Othello, must needs play the Co. in an act called Nat Plumstone & Co., light quips and breezy patter” (CW 338). Harry’s sorrowful tale highlights the devastating social and cultural effects of the woman who strays from her sentimental role. Where Mrs. Hackett’s polite Sunday serenades to a reluctant Christ set her son on an upward path to artistic greatness, Mrs. Greener’s own passage along a string of shady male admirers sinks her husband’s fortunes for good. But in The Day of the Locust, the antithesis between Mrs. Hackett and Mrs. Greener belongs to the past, and the women themselves survive only as memories. In the present, Mrs. Greener’s daughter, Faye, models a new art of the body that throws the very distinction between the sentimental woman and her

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grotesque antithesis out of joint. In this regard, Faye resembles Mrs. Jenning. A “really cultured” (CW 278) woman who combines a taste for “Gertrude Stein and Juan Gris” (CW 278) with a taste for commercial sex, Mrs. Jenning neatly severs the connections between pure taste and the sexually pure Victorian woman multiply figured in Tod’s memories of his mother. Instead, she promotes a rival, modern aesthetic that combines an elite appreciation for the purities of cubist abstraction with a vulgar devotion to the grotesque pleasures of carnality. Faye pins her dreams of Hollywood stardom on her ability to embody the same aesthetic: studiously adopting the simultaneously pure and grotesque postures of the body beautiful, she carries this body off the screen and into the common rounds of daily life. West uses Harry Greener’s side business as a salesman to stage the body beautiful’s entry into the sentimental home. Harry sells silver polish door to door “to supplement his meager income from the studios” (CW 284). A third of the way through the novel, he and his daughter converge on the house of the transplanted midwesterner Homer Simpson. As Homer notes, times are bad: “there’s an awful lot of unemployment going around” (CW 374), and “lots of people” are “out of work” (CW 372). In contrast, Homer himself has been able to draw on personal savings and a small family inheritance to fund a needed rest in southern California. A homeowner who can spend without having to earn, he represents the retired American whose undiminished purchasing power anchored multiple visions of national economic recovery in the mid- to late thirties. But for West, Homer is merely one of the many “middle-aged” and “old” people who have spent a lifetime “saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough” (CW 411), and his fate within the novel is to learn that he has “slaved and saved for nothing” (CW 412). The path to this discovery begins when Harry and Faye step inside his home to sell their wares. West uses the events that follow to portray the market axis of the domestic exterior as a literally invasive and disruptive force, brought into existence by the mandate to enter and remake the spaces of domestic and psychic interiority so prized in sentimental culture. In Don Langan’s sketch, outraged consumers portray the market that has “invaded” “our homes and families” as a classic bully intent on insulting and shaming customers into buying. In contrast, West locates Harry’s success as a salesman in his uncanny ability to play sentimental victim and market bully at the same time. Appearing as her father’s sidekick, Faye participates in a sales routine whose patent theatricality desacralizes cherished codes of sentimental domesticity and reveals those codes to be an instrument of, rather than a guard against, ceaseless market expansion. But she also upstages her father, embodying a new commercial formula of irresistible allure that breaks

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through even the most cautious homemaker’s opposition to escalating standards of domestic consumption. Harry gains entry to Homer’s house by posing as a sick man needing water. After pressing his mark into the role of respectable homeowner bound to help the stranger in distress, he expresses his gratitude for Homer’s “Christian deed” (CW 312) in an elaborate routine, “doing Harry Greener, poor Harry, honest Harry, well-meaning, humble, deserving, a good husband, a model father, a faithful Christian, a loyal friend” (CW 300). As a final flourish, he offers a discount price on his silver polish by way of thanks. In Harry’s sales pitch, sentimental codes of charitable giving structure a cash transaction in which the refusal to buy comes to represent a heartless blow against a helpless family man and a traitorous rejection of home and church. Midway through the transaction, Harry suffers an actual attack of bad health that complicates, but in no way compromises, his routine. When Faye comes in to check on her father, the warring demands of sticking to the sales script herself and berating her father for treating her like just another mark produce the grotesque spectacle of a sentimental melodrama collapsing under the weight of its own falseness. As the two exchange lines like “Darling daughter, . . . I have been badly taken” (CW 303) and “Speak to me, Daddy” (CW 306), Harry and Faye unwittingly bait each other to acts of fury that culminate in Faye’s decision to punch her father in the mouth (CW 307). Throughout their performance, Faye’s and Harry’s cynical citations of the sentimental script not only expose their own thoroughly alienated relationship to it, but also serve to desacralize that script in the eyes of the lingering believer. When they embrace codes of sentimental melodrama as a selling technique governed by the desire for profit, they divest those codes of their ideological association with genuine feeling, natural talent, and religious piety—all of which inform Tod’s idyllic recollection of his mother’s Sunday concerts. At the same time, their performance exposes the dependency on market goods and market formulas that forms the hidden condition of Mrs. Hackett’s own genteel display: the ethereal voice of Bach’s music may be able to say “love is enough” (CW 349), but to say it herself, Mrs. Hackett needs a piano. Rehearsing in the clichéd nature of the lines that make up their exchange the history of commercial circulation that yokes the market and the sentimental home,21 Harry and Faye implicitly reveal Mrs. Hackett’s domestic practice to be not a superior alternative to, but a none-too-honest translation of, their own patently grotesque family values of predation, belligerence, and greed. In its demystifying relationship to sentimental culture, Harry’s sales routine draws on his roots in vaudeville, where actors and audience members created a working-class forum for mocking the moral and social pretensions of the bourgeoisie.22 Its flagrant contempt for higher-ups made vaudeville the muse

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of several avant-garde groups,23 and in West’s novel Harry’s overt irony, mercilessly directed against the homeowner’s “patroniz[ing]” (CW 313) faith in his own benevolence, gives his sales routine much of the feel of an avant-garde provocation: “terrified” (CW 301) and “shocked” (CW 302), Homer considers “phon[ing] the police” (CW 301). But Harry’s ironic stance ultimately undercuts his own ambitions as a salesman. The real provocation in the scene, and the only one that proves genuinely capable of transforming the terms of everyday life, comes not from Harry but from Faye. Faye’s relationship to the home consumer differs fundamentally from her father’s. She has no critique to make and no specific product to sell. Instead, she sells an image and the promise of a lifestyle. This formula proves to be incredibly lucrative. Where Harry milks Homer for a dollar, Faye will end up taking him for all he’s worth. Faye’s selling power inheres in her body, which actively provokes the consumer’s look. Homer “tried not to stare at her, but his good manners were wasted. Faye enjoyed being stared at” (CW 304). Two qualities in particular sustain Homer’s gaze: “he thought her extremely beautiful, but what affected him still more was her vitality. She was taut and vibrant. She was as shiny as a new spoon” (CW 304). Faye’s beauty and her vitality vie for prominence in the ensuing scene where Homer serves her lunch while her father recovers on the couch. After “set[ting] the table with his best cloth and his best silver and china” (CW 305), he plies the girl with buttered bread, salmon salad, milk, “a large red apple” (CW 305), two cups of coffee, and “a plate of gingersnaps” (CW 309). Throughout her meal, Faye meticulously performs eating, folding together a bizarre array of class-specific table manners in the process. She crooks her little finger, speaks of “a luncheon date” and “salmon sal-ahde,” “nibbl[es] daintily,” and worries that she’ll get fat. But she also begins eating before she takes her seat, “smear[s]” mayonnaise on her food, and goes “to work” on it, taking “big bite[s]” and “gobbl[ing] up” everything in sight (CW 304–305). From start to finish, Homer stands “watching her like a waiter” (CW 305), “fascinated” by “the dainty crunching sound she made” while “chewing” (CW 309). The perverse detail of this scene alerts us to its symbolic importance within the novel. When read against Faye’s commercial errand in Homer’s home, the scene offers an allegorical representation of the market’s cannibalization of the home as even the most private reaches of the domestic interior succumb to an external logic of conspicuous consumption. But the scene offers an equally vivid portrait of the ordinary white female consumer whose eagerness to experience the spectacular possibilities of consumption points to a desire to star in her own life. Faye’s faith that her ability to model the look and lifestyle of the body beautiful will make her a movie star holds these two readings in permanent tension

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with one another and helps to reinforce the mirroring relationship between market spectacle and home consumption, which is one of the central premises of the body beautiful itself.

Miracle Solvent In the end, the most notable aspect of Faye’s performance is that it works. Simply showing up at Homer’s house is enough to win her a free lunch. By the time he shows up at her place, carrying “flowers . . . and a bottle of port wine for her father” (CW 285), she’s well on her way to forging the “business arrangement” in which Homer will agree “to board and dress her until she [becomes] a star” (CW 357). Given the persistent focus on failure in West’s novel and the critical tendency to view Faye’s own dreams of Hollywood stardom as deluded, it is worth investigating the market formula of the body responsible for this undeniable success. Homer’s infatuation with Faye’s beauty and “vitality” provides an important clue, pointing to the two most salient qualities ascribed to the body beautiful in mass cultural depictions of it. Part of Faye’s beauty resides in the physical features of her body, over which she exercises little control: She was a tall girl with wide, straight shoulders and long, swordlike legs. Her neck was long, too, and columnar. Her face was much fuller than the rest of her body would lead you to expect and much larger. It was a moon face, wide at the cheek bones and narrow at chin and brow. (CW 270) These features literally give Faye the shape of “a new spoon” (CW 304), that shining instrument of consumption that becomes an emblem for who Faye really is: in the right light, even a tin spoon will look like silver. The same features align her body with a recognizable Hollywood ideal of feminine beauty and recall traits attributed to the tall, blond race of Nordics in the discourse of eugenics. Other, more artificial aspects of her body presentation, such as her free-flowing “‘platinum’ hair” (CW 270), which she likes to squeeze into “a shiny ball” (CW 304), emphasize the social cachet of her superior whiteness and help to enforce the more general impression of shininess that endows her ordinary appearance with the luminous glow that white bodies acquire on the silver screen.24 But as important as these aspects are to the star power of Faye’s body, they don’t get at the truly maddening source of her allure, which inheres in how she moves and acts. Two passages toward the end of the novel try to capture this allure in words. In both passages, Faye is “very much the lady. It was her favorite role and she assumed it whenever she met a new man, especially

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if he were someone whose affluence was obvious” (CW 384). Twice, West turns the sound down on her performance to emphasize her body’s power as sheer image. In the first passage, Faye repays the “new man,” screenwriter Claude Estee, for his compliment by smiling in a peculiar, secret way and running her tongue over her lips. It was one of her most characteristic gestures and very effective. It seemed to promise all sorts of undefined intimacies, yet it was really as simple and automatic as the word thanks. She used it to reward anyone for anything, no matter how unimportant. (CW 385) In the second passage, Faye entertains an entire group of men with a lengthy exposition of her career plans: None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didn’t really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. (CW 387) In these passages, Faye disrupts the mimetic relationship between bodily signs and their signifieds that was posed in sentimental constructions of “the lady,” where a woman’s every gesture was thought to express a moral and spiritual purity located in the interior reaches of her soul. In contrast, Faye’s lady act expresses a new, insistently modern kind of purity that adheres, like Stein’s and Gris’s cubist experiments, in the logic of dissociation itself. When Tod sees Faye at her father’s funeral after she’s started working for Mrs. Jenning, he is surprised to learn that “she was still beautiful. That was because her beauty was structural like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart” (CW 346). Similarly, Homer, initially “puzzled” by her “odd mannerisms and artificial voice” (CW 304), eventually discovers that her “elaborate gesture[s]” were “so completely meaningless, almost formal that she seemed a dancer rather than an affected actress” (CW 304). Specific properties of Hollywood cinema enforce the logic of dissociation subtending Faye’s body practice. The empty but “very effective” (CW 385) drama of Faye’s smile betrays the restructuring power of the close-up shot, which abstracts and decontextualizes the body’s expressions and rescales the hierarchy of events. When inserted into a random series of laughs, shivers, and whispers, Faye’s “automatic” (CW 385) smile also reflects the abrupt and

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disjointed transitions of montage editing. Watching Faye as she moves from animated descriptions of her recycled Hollywood fantasies to absorbed meditation on them, Tod discovers that “all these little stories, these little daydreams of hers, were what gave such extraordinary color and mystery to her movements. She seemed always to be struggling in their soft grasp” (CW 320). Uncontained by any one narrative, Faye’s gestures bear the illegible trace of many, generating allusions that may never be deciphered and creating montage effects divested of any retrievable relation to their source texts. Homer’s and Tod’s observations regarding the oddly meaningless purity of Faye’s body practice resonate with a number of commentaries from the thirties that focus on fans’ indiscriminate adoption of their favorite stars’ mannerisms. In a 1935 essay from which Pierre Bourdieu would draw his notion of the habitus, Marcel Mauss observes that such a practice has the effect of canceling out preexisting distinctions in “body technique,” which link people to the specific cultures and social sectors from which they originate.25 Tillie Olsen notes the same phenomenon in Yonnondio, and links it to the longing for a different place that pushes the Holbrook children out of their parents’ home and onto the dump where the dreams of “make-believe selves” reside. Her narrator observes: Already the conjurer is working spells on Anna’s children. Subtly into waking and dreaming, into imagination and everyday doings and play, shaping, altering them. Even outwardly: Will’s eyes are narrowed now, his mouth drawn up at the corner, his walk—when he remembers—loose; for the rest of his life he will grin crooked: Bill Hart.26 In Olsen’s account, the incorporation of a star’s mannerisms holds particular attraction for the young working-class fan, who seeks in a change of body the means to evade poverty’s ruthless power to enforce low social status and a closed horizon. Similarly, Faye’s own repertoire of borrowed gestures reassembles the somatic markers of social place in a senseless montage of styles that dissociates her from her shabby working-class origins and restores the possibility of an open future. In effect, she finds in the movies a substitute for the mother who ran away. Where Tod, the novel’s “nice boy” (CW 399), faithfully embodies bourgeois cultural traits transmitted to him by Mrs. Hackett, Faye gets her habitus from Hollywood and, in it, discovers routes of escape that promise to outclass her mother’s own reckless grab at freedom. When she adopts the look and outlook of the body beautiful, Faye actively incorporates the new, cinematic model of ladyhood currently being marketed to all classes. In doing so, she both joins and seeks to represent a cultural revolution shaking up class-based codes of taste and conduct at every level of society. In the very purity

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of their abstraction, her gestures give life to the antihierarchical principles of hybridity, contradiction, and category collapse associated with a grotesque aesthetic and the revolutionary energies of carnival. The Hollywood stories that hold Faye “in their soft grasp” (CW 320) disrupt her relationship not only to the codes of social distance used to distinguish one class from another, but also to codes of social distance used to distinguish intimate encounters from encounters between strangers. Once again, West links this latter mode of social disruption to the restructuring power of the closeup shot, which offers fans intimate access to stars they will never meet. As I already noted, Faye’s imaginary self-subjection to the close-up stands behind the “very effective” drama of her smile, which fuses the “promise” of “all sorts of undefined intimacies” with an “automatic” address used “to reward anyone for anything” (CW 385, 305). The same self-subjection reconstitutes Faye’s intimate relationship with herself and with the people she knows best. Like Don Langan’s distressed consumers haunted by “THAT HAGGARD LOOK”—or like readers of a 1922 soap advertisement, who were encouraged to regard themselves with “strangers’ eyes, keen and critical”27—Faye closely inspects herself in mirrors throughout the novel (CW 308, 327, 343). In one particularly unfortunate instance of this practice, she fails to witness her father’s death because she discovers “what looked like the beginning of a pimple” while “examin[ing] herself in the wall mirror” (CW 340). “It was only a speck of dirt and she wiped it off, but then she had to do her face all over again” (CW 340). In this scene, Faye’s relentless quest for the visual purity of the body beautiful incites and enforces her grotesque indifference to Harry’s final collapse. A strangely voided intimacy, structured by market formulas for how to please your man, prevails in her relationship with her father at the very point where sentimental codes of feeling would require a tearful, makeup-smearing verification of filial devotion. It is hardly surprising, then, that when Faye goes to work for Mrs. Jenning to get the money to pay for her father’s funeral, conditions of alienated intimacy long associated with prostitution do not corrupt so much as confirm the understanding of “love” she’s had all along. As she tells Tod, who wants to kiss her but worries she “would insist on making it meaningless” (CW 317), she “could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her” (CW 270). “She wasn’t sentimental and she had no need of tenderness” (CW 271).28 For Tod, Faye’s rejection of the values of the sentimental woman makes her a whore, and he can’t understand why, even after working in the sex trade, she refuses to go to bed with him (CW 369). But for Faye, the new consumer ideal of the body beautiful overthrows the entire system of class-based gender distinctions governing Tod’s responses to her. West traces this consumer

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ideal, and its revolutionary impact on earlier norms of sentimental domesticity, to Faye’s favorite movies, whose plots all explore “the Cinderella theme” (CW 320). He uses his own plot to parody this theme when he has Faye give up a life of prostitution in order to move in with Homer Simpson. Given the importance of West’s parody to the larger trajectory of his novel, it is worth reviewing some of the salient features of the genre he sends up. Hollywood’s Cinderella films of the twenties and thirties typically feature a working-class hero or heroine whose power to attract the erotic interest of a wealthy stranger fuels a rise to social prominence. In such films, it is not money but manners that initially threaten to keep the working-class protagonist out of society’s highest circle. Confronted with this injustice, the protagonist must demonstrate both that he or she already has class, or knows how to get it, and that upper-class manners are too stuffy and outdated to merit serious regard. In the most developed of Faye’s own movie plots, all of these elements are present. A “young” and “handsome” “sailor refuses to be toyed with” by the rich girl “cruising on her father’s yacht,” but he agrees to marry her in the end. He wins out over his rival, an aging “Russian count” “with beautiful manners,” for two reasons. He dares to say no to the wealthy cultural elite, and he alone can save the girl when calamity strikes on a deserted island, where money and “beautiful manners” are worse than useless (CW 318–319).29 Like the original fairy tale on which they draw, Hollywood’s Cinderella films ostensibly narrated individual acts of class metamorphosis within an otherwise fixed class hierarchy. But these stories of exceptional individuals actually served to market the far more wide-reaching revolution in manners and morals to consumers of all classes: in films of this type, working-class protagonists join very wealthy protagonists in modeling a new, sexually emancipated, and consumption-oriented lifestyle that leaves the older culture of gentility looking dowdy and used up. Like Faye or like her handsome sailor, these Hollywood characters incorporate stereotypical working-class traits into a new model of the legitimate body and legitimate way of life; vital, pleasure-driven, and frequently fighting mad, they infuse the pure forms of the body beautiful with a crude, animal energy. At the same time, such characters display an unprecedented attention to the body and its rituals of daily care, driving home the revolutionary message that the body beautiful is not born, but made. Both on screen and off, Hollywood stars of this era enacted stunning bodily transformations designed to demonstrate that the new body beautiful was at heart a Cinderella body: a miracle creation whose powers of class metamorphosis were thoroughly commodified and potentially available to all consumers.30 As numerous films of the era suggest, a brand-new domestic space, itself thoroughly commodified, emerged to play an integral role in the material and

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symbolic production of the body beautiful. This space was the modern bathroom. Dedicated equally to the grotesque pleasures of carnality and the genteel labors of purification, the modern bathroom was ideally suited for staging the unprecedented complex of social meanings inscribed in the body beautiful. In the twenties, Cecil B. DeMille began to use bathrooms as prominent settings and symbols of the revolution in manners and morals. DeMille’s glamorous bathrooms “highlighted [the] Cinderella message”31 of his films, serving as magical spaces of transformation that revitalized and eroticized the pallid bodies of the white middle class even as they refined and purified the corporeal exuberance of the white working class. At the same time, DeMille’s films urged fans to conflate glamorous scenes on the silver screen with the mundane scene of their own body care. Setting up an implicit relay between the mirrors that multiplied the beauty of a bathing star and the mirrors into which consumers peered in the privacy of their own bathrooms, DeMille helped to install “strangers’ eyes, keen and critical” in the innermost recesses of the modern home. Later films, like The Girl from Missouri (1934) and My Little Chickadee (1940), were quick to parody DeMille’s treatment of bathrooms, turning them into unruly—and unreliable—carnival spaces of class and gender inversion.32 In The Day of the Locust, West sustains this parodic treatment of the Hollywood bathroom, though the comedy he presents is darker. In his portrayal, modern bathrooms secure the hopes and dreams of some consumers but condemn others to lives of personal insecurity and abjection, instituting a merciless new set of somatic distinctions that turns the sentimental home into a breeding ground of consumer dissatisfaction, anger, and revolt. West’s critical revision of Hollywood’s Cinderella plots begins with his description of the silver polish that Harry and Faye sell door to door. Harry makes the polish in “the bathroom of the apartment out of chalk, soap and yellow axle grease” (CW 284). In his sales pitch to Homer, he presents his product as “Miracle Solvent, the modern polish par excellence, the polish without peer or parallel, used by all the movie stars” (CW 300). Eventually, Homer is sold on Miracle Solvent, though the “modern polish” he admires inheres less in Harry’s boxes of axle grease than in the spoon-like shininess of his daughter, Faye. As we have seen, the new manners and morals that give Faye her modern polish also work as a miracle solvent, dissolving older codes of class distinction and investing Faye’s body with latent properties of class metamorphosis. In the movie proposal that Faye narrates to Tod (an adaptation of DeMille’s Male and Female), the rich girl “is bathing naked in a brook” when “a big snake” brings the doughty sailor to her rescue (CW 319). Her bath closes the social gap between them, washing away the class barrier undissolved in the “big storm” (CW 319) that drowns her fancy friends and family. Similarly, the Miracle

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Solvent that brings Faye and Homer together provides the occasion for her own magical transformation, inaugurating a Cinderella story in which he agrees to rescue her from a life of poverty and want and to set her on an upward path to stardom. Once installed in Homer’s home, Faye continues to make bathrooms work on her behalf, regularly resorting to them to fix her makeup, bathe, and dress (CW 308, 343, 358). Her cross-class allure is inextricably caught up in a DeMillian bathroom aesthetic that unites luxury, glamour, and sex appeal with a squeaky clean, unassailable freshness. When Tod observes Faye “poised, quivering and balanced, on the doorstep,” she looks “just born, everything moist and fresh, volatile and perfumed” (CW 364). In Tod’s fantasies, Faye becomes an unsinkable cork bobbing on a beautiful sea, “a very pretty cork, gilt with a glittering fragment of mirror set in its top” (CW 406). Shining like silver, like gilt, like a glittering mirror, or like glistening water, she embodies the purified sensuality of a Venus rising from the waves of a Hollywood bathtub.

Cinderella Men But Faye is not the only character in The Day of the Locust who hopes that modern rooms and rituals of body care will bring about a change of fortune. The men who desire Faye engage in equally dedicated attempts to attain the sexual and social charisma of the body beautiful. In fact, they spend far more narrative time in the bathroom than she does. Abe Kusich borrows Tod’s bathroom to restore his male identity after he emerges from a scene of sexual rejection dressed in a woman’s bathrobe (CW 264–265). Later, he takes a soaking in the kitchen sink to recover from a fight, while Homer takes a soak in the tub to recover from a nap (CW 394, 289). It takes two chapters for Homer to leave his bath, which he revisits every morning (CW 315). Tod shares Homer’s taste for naps and baths as well as Faye’s taste for mirror gazing: he keeps his only photograph of Faye on his “bureau mirror” (CW 269), which he consults at the end of the elaborate routine of napping, bathing, shaving, and dressing that occupies his leisure hours immediately after work.33 Yet, for all the time they spend in bathrooms sprucing themselves up, West’s male characters uniformly fail to achieve the Cinderella transformations promised to them in the new consumer culture. Bathing does not increase their vitality, nor does it improve their sex lives; indeed, bathing does not even make West’s men particularly clean. During his bath, Homer is drawn back to a memory of sexual humiliation and impotence, and afterward he feels “even more stupid and washed out than usual” (CW 294). Likewise, in an awkward moment of comparison, Tod’s appreciation of Faye’s moist freshness and volatility

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prompts an acute sense of insecurity, grounded in the sudden awareness “of his hands, sticky and thick,” and “of his dull, insensitive feet bound in dead skin” (CW 364). In these moments, both Tod and Homer experience the heightened levels of self-criticism undergirding modern rituals of body care without experiencing a corresponding increase in flattering attention and romantic possibility. Instead, the two men suffer forms of alienation and self-alienation so entire that the leisure hours they spend at home, far from offering pleasure and fulfillment, only exacerbate an unshakable loneliness, vacancy, and despair. After taking possession of his new home, Homer sits “down on the couch in the living room” “as though waiting for someone in the lobby of a hotel” (CW 288). When no one arrives, he sleeps away the afternoon and then undresses for a bath, “fumbling with the buttons of his clothing as though he were undressing a stranger” (CW 289). The “same impersonal detachment” overtakes him as he “open[s] cans of soup and [makes] his bed” (CW 296). Faye’s appearance on his doorstep, brimming with beauty and vitality, prompts Homer to realize “how empty the house was” (CW 314). Confronted with an “anguish” that is “basic and permanent” (CW 315), he pursues Faye so intensely because he is trying to escape a life of domestic isolation that has become unbearable. Tod, too, succumbs to anhedonia and inertia, so much so that he begins “to wonder if he himself didn’t suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw in others. Maybe he could only be galvanized into sensibility and that was why he was chasing Faye” (CW 365). When confronted with the bored and frustrated consumers he plans to paint, Tod notices “the contrast between their drained-out, feeble bodies and their wild, disordered minds” (CW 365) in large part because he experiences that contrast himself. Exhausted and alienated by modern rituals of body care, Tod and Homer will achieve a volatile vitality only when they enter the sea of sweating bodies in the novel’s final mob scene. But it is not enough to say that the Cinderella transformations of the modern bathroom fail to work for West’s male characters. Instead, they work backward, turning bachelor princes into kitchen maids and servant girls. In West’s portrayal, when the market axis of the domestic exterior enters and remakes the inner spaces of the home, it not only isolates and enervates men; it also emasculates them. Like W. C. Fields’s bumbling groom who emerges from the bath dressed as a woman or like the transvestite who sings lullabies at “the ‘Cinderella Bar,’ ” West’s male characters risk becoming “homo”/“momo” Cinderella men in the new consumer culture (CW 367, 371). The Cinderella pact that prompts Homer to invest his retirement savings in “clothes” (CW 358), “ice cream sodas” (CW 358), and “a light blue Buick runabout” (CW 367) for Faye gives her a chance to get a “real rest” (CW 358). But it turns him into a housewife who “waits” on the lazy teenager “hand and foot” (CW 367). While

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she sleeps late, he prepares her breakfast in bed: “He took a housekeeping magazine and fixed the tray like pictures in it. While she bathed and dressed, he cleaned the house” (CW 358). The pair’s new life together recapitulates the terms of their first encounter, in which Faye ate while Homer “stood watching her like a waiter” (CW 305). Tod’s own desire to keep an eye on Faye leads to similar concessions. Initially, he uses Harry’s illness as “an excuse for hanging around their apartment. He ran errands and kept the old man company” (CW 281). Later, he replaces Faye as a devoted nurse at Harry’s sickbed and comes to Homer’s rescue with a housewife’s knack for making coffee and “tidy[ing] up” after Faye runs away (CW 315, 397). Even the hypermasculine Earle and Miguel fix a home-cooked meal of sorts when they entertain Faye and Tod in their mountain cowboy camp. Faye is the only major character who never takes on any maternal or domestic traits. Instead, she makes men mother her, using male attention and male resources to launch her bid for stardom. In her unapologetic reliance on male self-sacrifice to advance her artistic career, Faye exposes and inverts the unacknowledged dependency on women’s genteel domesticity that lies behind Tod’s own bid for artistic greatness. For in the topsy-turvy world of modern Hollywood, it is Homer and, more ambivalently, Tod himself who turn out to be most like Mrs. Hackett. Polite, enervated, and obliging, they perform the hidden labor that lies behind the apparent “self-sufficiency” (CW 320) of Faye’s image, taking over the numerous unpaid and uncelebrated domestic duties that she refuses on principle. (After all, a movie star’s hands “have to be beautiful” [CW 358].) This, then, is the final, most anxious, and hostile way in which West links the glamorous perfection of the body beautiful with the grotesque. In his novel, the new consumer ideal of the body beautiful, like the grotesque body, turns the hierarchies of the sentimental home upside down and inside out, raising bottom over top and dressing men and women in each other’s clothes. West unveils the full “anarchic” power of Faye’s body at the party that she holds in Homer’s living room right before she runs away. When Tod comes by to check on Homer the next day, he sees: The room was just as they had left it the night before. Tables and chairs were overturned and the smashed picture lay where it had fallen. To give himself a reason for staying, he began to tidy up. He righted the chairs, straightened the carpet and picked up the cigarette butts that littered the floor. He also threw aside the curtains and opened the window. . . . Tod went to the kitchen and put the pot on the stove. While it was boiling, he took a peek into Faye’s room. It

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had been stripped. All the dresser drawers were pulled out and there were empty boxes all over the floor. A broken flask of perfume lay in the middle of the carpet and the place reeked of gardenia. (CW 397) This scene of devastation recalls the one portrayed in “Goldie,” when Victor Forrest enters his little sister’s cabin in the woods. In West’s novel, it is not the lynch mob but the body beautiful that unleashes chaos and destruction on the sentimental home. But the U.S. obsession with interracial sex organizes his text as much as Grimké’s. After the party, Homer discovers Faye in bed with Miguel, a Mexican cowboy who recalls the “swarthy” “foreigner” (CW 338) with whom Faye’s mother fled the scene. In choosing Miguel as a sexual partner over three white middle-class men also present at the party, Faye exercises a commitment to women’s sexual autonomy that proves far more transgressive than the predictable—and hardly unaccommodating—option of female prostitution. Her desire for Miguel also confirms a transgressive racial identification that has informed her revolutionary body project all along: whether “roll[ing] her hips to the broken beat” of “the ‘bump’” and the “rumba” (CW 332), slowly “sway[ing]” to the “tango” (CW 392), or invoking the pleasures of “bust[ing] your conk on peppermint candy” (CW 392), Faye incorporates expressive styles drawn from modern forms of African and Latin American music and dance as essential sources of the vitality that enhances the insistent whiteness of her beauty.34 In this regard, the threat of social solvency posed by her body is, in the end, as much raced as gendered and classed in nature. Unmasked as a race traitor, Faye bolts, taking her many new possessions with her. Once she disappears, Tod and Homer quickly abandon the gutted contents of the house to take their own places in the mob of consumers rioting in the street. For West, a domestic revolution, fueled by a young white woman’s resolve to have all (and only) the men and market goods she wants, is ultimately what generates the “awful, anarchic power” (CW 366) of the larger consumer revolution that closes out the novel. It has become customary for critics to read Tod’s fantasies of raping Faye as expressions of a desire for revenge prompted by her sexual teasing, which, like the rigged purse that Adore Loomis dangles before Homer’s eyes, promises a satisfaction that is really just dissatisfaction in disguise.35 Homer’s response to Adore’s purse trick is to stomp him to death, an action that elicits cries from the surrounding crowd that Homer “ought to be lynched” (CW 418), and it is with the sexually aroused and murderous energies of a lynch mob that the consumers rise up at the movie premiere in the aftermath of Faye’s escape.36 But several details in the text suggest that these characters resort to violence less to get even with someone else than to experience personal sensations of beauty and

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vitality that they are unable to access any other way. Provoked by the “taut and vibrant” (CW 304) bodies of the stars, West’s consumers lash out in stubborn denial of the fact that “nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their” own “slack minds and bodies” (CW 412). Once united in the body of the mass, they shake off individual feelings of insecurity and self-loathing and displace those feelings onto others. When Tod approaches the crowd, its members jeer at him with the aggressive tactics used by advertisers, “commenting on his hat, his carriage, his clothing” (CW 409). Passing through its midst, he observes “a change come over” people “as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious” (CW 411). As “new groups, whole families, kept arriving” (CW 411), the crowd swells in size, taking on the feelings of “self-possess[ion]” (CW 384) and “self-sufficiency” (CW 320, 365) that Tod repeatedly detects in Faye and that make him want to “break” (CW 365) and “crush” (CW 320) her. Tod’s rape fantasies fulfill a similar function in the novel: allowing him to replace furtive diffidence with arrogant pugnacity, rape absorbs the promise of magical transformation advertised but not delivered to Tod by the new culture of the body beautiful. Rape would, of course, also punish the woman whose artistic ambitions take her beyond her assigned social place, reversing the grotesque logic of reversal that frees Faye from the role of domestic drudge only to reassign that role to nice white men.37 But precisely because rape gets invested with the power to satisfy desires and counter losses associated with Tod’s selfpositioning as a mass cultural consumer, it jeopardizes the critical distance underwriting his prophetic ambitions as an artist. As he gazes at Faye’s publicity photo, he decides that such an act would “crush” him, not her: If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. (CW 271) At first glance, Tod’s unfinished masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles,” would seem to negate his fantasy career as a rapist: boldly reasserting the critical distance—and the claim to high position—canceled out by Faye’s gravitational attractions, it elevates him above the base impulses of the masses. When the crowd surrounds Tod in the final mob scene and threatens to tear him limb from limb, he turns to fantasies of his painting to sustain himself. And yet the painting, which presents a toppling structure organized by tropes of high and low, embodies the same threat of leveling contained in Faye’s publicity photo.

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Across the top of the canvas, Tod has sketched in “the burning city” of Los Angeles with “rough charcoal strokes” (CW 419–420). In the bottom foreground, he includes images of Claude Estee, Homer, Harry, and himself “fle[eing] wildly” (CW 420) behind the “naked” figure of Faye Greener, who “is running with her eyes closed and a strange half-smile on her lips” (CW 321). And “through the center, winding from left to right,” he draws a “crusading mob” that “can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence” (CW 420). In Tod’s oblique tribute to Dr. Townsend’s movement, consumers mobilize a revolutionary force. But they do so not to secure the federal stipends that will reward retired Americans with lasting days of leisure and abundance, but rather to chase down the Hollywood scriptwriters, actors, costume designers, and financial backers who have created the false dream of leisure and abundance for which they “have slaved and saved” “all their lives” (CW 412, 411). Faye’s naked body, which appears at the forefront of the crowd, provides an apt allegorical emblem for the people’s revolutionary fervor. It’s hard to say whether she’s leading or fleeing the mob massed above her. And it’s just as hard to decide whether popular allegiance to the consumer revolution she embodies or popular revenge upon it constitutes the leveling force that bears down indiscriminately on Hollywood’s assorted cultural workers and threatens to trample them all underfoot. In Don Langan’s satirical piece, “Consumers, Arise!” the parade leader, Mr. Uppercue, manages to keep the alienated consumers from pillaging the commercial districts of New York City. “A quiet, polite gentleman” who tells the crowd, “We’ll never accomplish what we intended to by violent action,” he arranges for “a committee of five” to meet with business leaders to work out a new code for advertising products on the basis of their “intrinsic merits” and not on irresponsible claims about their putative “social benefits.” Mr. Uppercue’s intervention ensures that “the Consumers Parade went down in history as the most successful revolt of the people in a century.”38 Six years later, West insists that the collective state of consumer alienation is too far gone for any Mr. Uppercue to curb. In Tod’s art, the consuming power of fire may yet “purify the land” (CW 420). But in his life, the purifying waters of a Hollywood bathtub give way to a carnal sea that threatens to drown Tod “in a hacking cross surf of shoulders and backs” and an undertow of “churning legs and feet” (CW 415–416). The siren that begins to sound in the final paragraph of the novel, like the beautiful sirens who lured ancient sailors to their deaths, confirms the avant-garde artist’s doom.39 No longer the prophet of consumer revolution but rather one of its nameless casualties, Tod loses himself in the body of the mob whose power “to destroy civilization” (CW 366) he once sought to counter with his art. As the novel ends, he raises his voice in imitation of the siren’s abstract

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“scream” (CW 421). It’s as close as he’ll get to fulfilling his fantasy of throwing himself on Faye “with a scream” (CW 271). And if the prophecy inscribed in that fantasy is accurate, he will not “rise again” (CW 271).

Then and Now Since the 1939 publication of The Day of the Locust, the legitimation of a postmodern aesthetic within the U.S. academy has encouraged literary critics to retire the stock once placed in the moral and aesthetic superiority of high art and to champion instead the breakdown and recombination of all cultural hierarchies. West’s Hollywood novel, once celebrated for its modernist commitments, now wins approval for its uncanny anticipations of our own condition.40 But when read as a work of domestic fiction, The Day of the Locust hardly stands out for the accuracy of its predictions. West’s focus on the rise of the body beautiful to its own position of cultural legitimacy can only impress members of a society in which that body ideal continues to dominate, and many readers will recognize in his portrayal of the consumer’s alienated and self-alienated relationship to such a body a powerful account of the personal insecurity and unease that so often dog our current attachment to the good life. But West’s insistence that the culture of the body beautiful could and did displace the culture of sentimental domesticity, giving women keys to the car and handing men the apron, is notable less for its acuity than for its vivid manifestation of cultural anxieties that have actually helped to keep the paradigm of sentimental domesticity in place. As we saw in Tillie Olsen’s portrait of white working-class femininity, discussed in chapter 4, cultural shifts in the teens and twenties did not vanquish sentimental culture altogether but rather assigned its overt expressions the lowest place in a new cultural hierarchy dominated by assertions of the modern, even as state and federal welfare policy placed sentimental norms of family life at the center of the state’s tutelary relationship toward the poor. The same set of norms inspired an expanding pedagogical program that channeled federal monies into high school and adult education classes in home economics and family life. These classes routinely included instruction in the proper aims and methods of consumption, giving the state an important part in forging the terms of the consumer culture we possess today. Since Andreas Huyssen launched his trenchant analysis of the “hidden dialectic” between modernism and mass culture thirty years ago, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that the culture industry had usurped the avant-garde project to create a new art of everyday life by the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, this thesis informs

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my own discussion of Tod and Faye’s relationship in The Day of the Locust. But during this period, the state also jumped into the game of transforming everyday life, and did so along explicitly aesthetic lines. Without a concrete sense of the state’s aesthetic and cultural investment in the home, the vexed relation between West’s “prophe[cy] of doom and destruction” (CW 335) and the culture of everyday life we now possess cannot be understood. The 1932 home economics text The Family and Its Relationships provides a place to begin forging this revisionary understanding. The text opens with an epigraph from Herbert Hoover that declares “the unit of American life” to be “the family and the home” and then asserts that “we must bend every energy of government” toward “the perfecting of this unit of national life.”41 Unit XIV of the text, entitled “The Art of Everyday Living,” opens with a subsection entitled “Art, a Transforming Power.” It reads as follows: Everyone has in him some power of transforming the ordinary surroundings and happenings of home and family into a richer and more significant experience. Such creative living in family relationships may be a beautiful art product, as it calls for the same qualities of creativeness that we associate with the work of the painter or sculptor; the product, a wholesome family life, like the fine art product gives pleasure to all who share in this experience. Art then becomes a fabric whose warp is our plans and purposes, and whose woof is the daily experiences and achievements wrought in terms of our purposes.42 Unit XIII of the same text, titled “Leisure and Its Opportunities,” explores the topic of “creative living” from the vantage point of the consumer. The unit begins with a critique of mass culture that anticipates Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous argument in “The Culture Industry.” Arguing that “business men . . . have commercialized amusements,” the authors assert: They have patterned the use of leisure on the methods of mass production, and as a result methods of spending leisure are dictated to us by business interests rather than by our own desires and needs. . . . As our recreation has been commercialized, so our play has been largely standardized. Standardized play is the outgrowth of standardized work. . . . Our play should be free and spontaneous. But if we subject ourselves to standardized amusements, are we free?43 This critique opens the way for the assertion that leisure is not a spontaneous but a “learned” activity, and that plans “for the spending of leisure should take place within the home.” The chapter concludes with advice on creating a

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“home workshop” and on the pleasures awaiting those who devote their leisure hours to reading, writing, gardening “automobiling,” and collecting.44 These suggestions highlight the conservative nature of the state’s commitment to the art of everyday life. In the same decades when many of the commercial texts of mass culture challenged the cultural authority of sentimental domesticity, the state, through its hold on the public education system, continued to uphold traditional middle-class domestic values as the measure of proper acculturation for all classes. As the economic and social crisis of the Great Depression deepened, statements associated with the state’s pedagogical promotion of “creative living” shifted from relatively Olympian celebrations of “significant experience” to a more pronounced awareness that the inherently creative—and hence radically unpredictable—properties of leisure could jeopardize the rule of law and order. The mixed political potential of leisure and consumption as forces capable of either shoring up or tearing down established social hierarchies became an explicit site of concern and intervention during the New Deal, when widespread unemployment made the social threat contained in involuntary leisure all too palpable to government officials. In a 1939 report on the Educational Activities of the Works Progress Administration, the authors note: The depression has served . . . to make adjustment to the creative usage of leisure time the more difficult, because to idleness it added economic uncertainty, anxiety, and restlessness. Under these circumstances there has been urgent need for competent and effective leadership to guide people into recreational activities in which they might find solace and healthful therapy. “Among underprivileged groups,” they add delicately, “the need is particularly urgent.”45 New Deal planners created a number of programs to provide such leadership and, in doing so, yoked various forms of domestic instruction to a Keynesian vision of economic recovery. In 1936, the federal government increased funding to public schools for girls’ vocational training in the home. The Works Progress Administration created emergency education programs that taught white women “cooking, nutrition, child care, and consumer skills” and ran “discussion groups for youth ‘in preparation for wholesome adult living in home and family life.’” The CCC camps also instructed white women in subjects ranging from cooking to personal hygiene, while the Household Service Demonstration Project trained less privileged, though largely white, women as domestic servants.46 Relatively short-lived, New Deal emergency programs nevertheless highlight the federal government’s pedagogical investment in a particular model of

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“wholesome” domestic life as the cornerstone of social security. Anchored by a male breadwinner’s family wage, this model featured patterns of educated female consumption and was actively endorsed for whites only. Passage of the 1935 Social Security Act gave the model unprecedented federal support. Old-Age Insurance, in particular, not only shored up the existing race, class, and gender hierarchies associated with this domestic model but, for many citizens, steepened their slopes: offering no benefits in occupations where African Americans and other minorities were overwhelmingly concentrated and pegging other workers’ benefits to their earning histories, OAI tied the security of most older white women to their status “as dependent wives rather than as mother-citizens” or independent wage earners. Furthermore, as Linda Gordon notes, the “large public relations campaign” created “to sell OAI as an honored citizen entitlement” actively promoted the idea that other provisions of the 1935 act, much less generous in nature, constituted unearned handouts. The net effect of this campaign was to elevate the moral status and financial security of the white male breadwinner above the status and security of other citizens; even the family of that breadwinner, who shared in his financial security, did so from the less admirable and more vulnerable position of enforced dependency.47 The historical record, then, directly contradicts West’s portrait of Homer Simpson, the retired yet financially secure white man who is first dethroned and then destroyed by the antidomestic energies of the new culture of consumption. A more accurate picture emerges if we seek to understand the ways in which the divergent commitments of the market and state axes of the domestic exterior were actively coordinated under the umbrella of Keynesian economic policy to create a new cultural matrix, one that we now identify as postmodern. Mike Featherstone begins to sketch out the terms of such an understanding in his discussion of the “‘new cultural intermediaries,’ who rapidly circulate information between formerly sealed-off areas of culture” for the benefit of all those “who adopt a learning mode towards consumption and the cultivation of a lifestyle.”48 Featherstone usefully points to the combined role of the state and market in promoting “a learning mode towards consumption” even as he highlights the fact that both state and market pedagogies of consumption have attempted to redistribute class-specific aesthetic aptitudes and attitudes to consumers of all classes. Significantly, the focal point of these consumer pedagogies has been and remains the domestic sphere: as Pierre Bourdieu notes, the new cultural intermediaries have played “a vanguard role in the struggles over everything concerned with the art of living, in particular, domestic life and consumption, relations between the sexes and the generations, the reproduction of the family and its values.”49

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In Featherstone’s view, the new cultural intermediaries—a comparatively high proportion of whom are women—have served as the ground troops in the struggle to legitimate a postmodern aesthetic. On the basis of his discussion, we might identify West’s portrait of Faye as an early representation of this group of cultural workers. Like West—but much more affirmatively—Featherstone links the postmodern aesthetic with the grotesque tradition of popular carnival, and draws a direct connection between the partial breakdown of symbolic hierarchies in the postwar period and the emergence of more equitable relations among classes, genders, and generations.50 In his own study of postmodern culture in the United States, Fred Pfeil sharply questions the optimism of such an account, asking “for whom is the ‘breakdown’ of the mass/high culture distinction more real, the American working class or the PMC?” Pfeil goes on to locate the suburban and domestic scene of white childhood affluence as the eclipsed origin of a postmodern cultural profile, marked by the convergence of the TV viewer’s taste for mass culture and “the acquired taste for high culture” invested in the college-bound. Gently reminding us that the professional managerial class “is not, in and of itself a potentially revolutionary class,” he instead characterizes it “by its resistance to incorporation—a resistance which . . . coexists uneasily and inevitably with a concomitant desire for home.”51 When we examine the history of the body beautiful in the sixty or so years since West’s novel was published, Pfeil’s remarks take on particular force. As a one-time challenger to dominant definitions of the legitimate body, the body beautiful aptly concretized the modern revolution in manners and morals when it spliced together white middle-class body practices with those of the very wealthy and the black and white working class. In the initial phase of its marketing to consumers of all classes, this body served as a fitting repository for the symbolic transgressions and utopian longings traditionally associated with a grotesque aesthetic. But since the body beautiful has itself become the legitimate body, it has proved all too effective at shoring up the class, race, and gender hierarchies it once seemed capable of overturning. Safely installed in the bedroom communities of the nation’s suburban elite, the body beautiful absorbs and expresses the economic and political power invested in the modern sentimental home by a federally regulated, consumption-driven national economy. True to form, this body remains a body anyone can buy. But it also remains a body that wealthy whites can best afford to buy and that women can least afford not to: once associated with the revolutionary notion of women’s sexual autonomy and unhampered access to public life, the body beautiful now serves as a good investment for those whose social security has been linked to compulsory heterosexuality, long-term monogamy, and suburban motherhood.52

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If we recall Bourdieu’s point that the body serves as “the most indisputable materialization of class taste,”53 we can recognize in the body beautiful a successful, if ultimately partial, transformation of the content of the cultural capital invested in children of the dominant race and class. But thanks to the welfare state’s overwhelming commitment to the family wage system, the dominant mode of transmitting that cultural capital has remained unchanged: unlike Faye, most of us still get our habitus from our mothers, not from the movies. Because our current wage system continues to enforce mothers’ sentimental positioning as the primary caretakers of the young whether or not they also work for pay, women’s cultural ministrations in the home, closely pegged to their class status, continue to determine the particular terms of each new generation’s induction into consumer culture. Through such ministrations, the widely varying economic and cultural resources of different families pass into the bodies of the next generation more or less intact, despite the ostensibly democratizing impulses of state and market consumer pedagogies. When read against this history, the symbolic text of the body beautiful provides a sharp reminder of the limits of a postmodern aesthetic of transgression. Perhaps by the late thirties even West himself had caught a glimmer of these limits as he watched a history of broken promises unfold from the body of his revolutionary heroine. Casting Faye as “a Napoleonic vivandière” (CW 350) in a Hollywood reenactment of the battle of Waterloo, he gives her the job of providing food and comfort to the troops in a war dubiously waged in the people’s name and fated for defeat.

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6 “Not Charity Yet!” State-Supported Capitalism and the Secret Life of God in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, Wise Blood, follows the life of Hazel Motes, a young GI who migrates to the progressive southern city of Taulkinham upon his release from the army. Hailing from a line of preachers in rural Tennessee, Haze is another angry prophet from the hinterlands like the “Thompson or Johnson” who grips the imagination of Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust. But unlike most prophets, Haze urgently desires release from mankind’s covenant with God. The self-appointed apostle of the new Church without Christ, he attempts to enter by force the secular frame of modern life that the novel’s other characters already occupy with resignation, if not ease. Within this secular frame, the U.S. welfare state looms large. The New Deal and the Second World War have literally remade the physical and social landscapes through which O’Connor’s protagonist moves, breaking up the old terms of country life and pumping people, money, and dreams of more money into the city. All of this money passes most of the novel’s characters by. The street vendors, itinerant preachers, prostitutes, waitresses, zoo keepers, and small-time landlords who crowd the novel’s pages eke out livelihoods at the bottom of Taulkinham’s boom economy. In contrast, Hazel Motes, like Homer Simpson, is “not obliged to work” (WB 120). As a war veteran who carries the ghost of “schrapnel” (WB 12) in his chest, he qualifies for lifelong disability payments, achieved in veterans’ legislation of the 1930s and secured in the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act; consequently, everything he does throughout the novel, he does on the government’s dime.1

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In contrast to the other writers I’ve considered here, O’Connor encountered the U.S. welfare state as a largely accomplished fact. Coming to her subject matter and her vocation as a writer in the late forties, she was able to confront the greater arc of a process of government and social transformation that her predecessors had necessarily experienced as fragmented and incomplete. A similar point can be made about O’Connor’s relationship to the project of literary modernism. By her own report, O’Connor first encountered modern literature as a neatly anthologized academic field during her years in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.2 Schooled in the precepts of New Criticism, she absorbed a set of literary and critical values dominated by the refusal of sentimentality and a corresponding privileging of modernist irony, objectivity, and detachment.3 But unlike her protagonist, Hazel Motes, O’Connor was a committed Catholic and tended to regard articulations of the modern and the sentimental with equal suspicion. Although her graduate teachers and textbooks routinely opposed these two terms, she saw important continuities between them, stemming from a common matrix of convictions regarding humanity’s fundamental innocence and capacity for self-perfection. For O’Connor, the modern and the sentimental came together most clearly in the ameliorative state agendas of the twentieth century. From her religious vantage point, state-sponsored attempts to improve the human condition were just bigger, more powerful versions of Haze’s Church without Christ. As such, they were doomed to end in failure. As she would put it in a 1961 essay: If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced laborcamps and in the fumes of the gas-chamber. (MM 227) To evoke the terrors of Nazi genocide and Stalinist persecution in 1961 was one thing. For O’Connor’s postwar American readers, ensconced in the suburban trenches of the Cold War, these terrors were well known and thoroughly condemned. But when she links the Nazi and Stalinist regimes to the more general concept of “government by tenderness,” O’Connor also implicitly condemns the U.S. welfare state. Its project to alleviate human suffering and ameliorate the human condition had yet to yield widely disseminated images of terror, but terror, she insists, could be its only “logical outcome.” This insistence may have been informed by recent events in O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. In 1959, a reporter uncovered systemic abuse

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at the Milledgeville State Hospital for the mentally ill. As Edward J. Larson reports, “even a high state official admitted that the hospital was ‘worse than the German prison camps.’ ” The scandal prompted the governor to sever the hospital’s ties to “the troubled state welfare department” and appoint an advisory committee to look into the situation. The committee subsequently disclosed the fact that members of the hospital staff were still sterilizing patients, already numbering to “several thousand,” under the authority of a 1937 state eugenics law. Nurses had performed many of the surgeries without a doctor’s oversight.4 For O’Connor, the mediating term between government-sponsored tenderness and government-sponsored terror is charity. Known in Latin as caritas and in Greek as agape, Christian charity, in its root sense, signifies a Father God’s perfect love for his creation and the divinely inspired love that the children of God have for one another. As O’Connor puts it in her 1961 essay, “this action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state” (MM 228). Like a number of other prominent religious thinkers of her time, O’Connor associates the welfare state’s secular project of social amelioration with a corruption of charity’s biblical meaning. This corruption—or, as she believed, sentimentalization—of the concept springs from the false positing of human innocence, a refusal of the necessity of human suffering, and a consequent faith in the duty and power of human beings to perfect themselves.5 Almost a decade before she would collect her thoughts on the subject in essay form, O’Connor created in the character of Hazel Motes a man torn between two rival understandings of charity. All of the evident structures of his world inscribe and advertise a modern sentimental articulation of charity rooted in nineteenth-century traditions of social benevolence and flowering in the new provisions and protections of the welfare state. Charity understood in this sense has freed Hazel from the poverty, ignorance, and superstition of his family’s backward country ways. It has sent him into war to fight for the good of the world, and it has returned him from that war wounded but with victory on his side and an endless source of money in his pockets. All he needs to do now is enjoy what he has. Cleaving to the promise of the good life inscribed in the welfare state’s postwar address to whites, Haze readily associates enjoyment with the collective ideals of home and family life. In O’Connor’s portrayal, however, neither home nor family provides a locus for the collective enjoyment of anything in Taulkinham, let alone God’s love. Instead, both exist, largely in ideational form, as continually deferred and severely compromised ideals that only serve to intensify O’Connor’s characters’ pandemic experiences of isolation, alienation, and mutual predation. But O’Connor also

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inserts in the vacated intermediate spaces of Haze’s social world strange and unstable visionary evidence of a surviving, antithetical articulation of charity, one still tied to a religious conception of the integrating and elevating power of God’s love. Haze’s fellow citizens have adjusted too well to modern life to pay such visionary evidence any mind. But Haze himself, precisely because he seeks so actively to free himself from the grasp of God, is not so lucky. Through the recurring scene of his confrontation with evidence he does not wish to see, O’Connor asserts the terms of a rival vision of human connection, one which secures little and guarantees still less. In the radically unfixed and wildly transformative space of that connection, Hazel loses and pays what he might otherwise gain and keep. When he has nothing, he dies. It is left to his landlady, Mrs. Flood, eager to get hold of his “government check[s]” (WB 124) but insistent that she’s “not charity yet!” (WB 124), to make of his fate what she will.

Ever More Violent Means In O’Connor’s fiction, the saving action of God’s grace can easily elude the untrained eye, but the “grotesque state” of “human imperfection” is pretty hard to miss. As she writes in her 1957 essay, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”: My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . . The reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause. The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. (MM 33–34)

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With these lines, O’Connor signals her debts to Bertolt Brecht, revisiting in Christian terms prominent features of his concepts of epic theater and the alienation effect. In his critical writings, Brecht explains that “a representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.” The alienation effect is a teaching tool; it teaches us to see “with an astonished eye.” It gives “what is ‘natural’ ” “the force of what is startling,” and shows us that “people’s activity must simultaneously be so and be capable of being different.”6 Brecht prizes the alienation effect for its power to disrupt the codes of empathy and mimetic realism prevailing in the Aristotelian dramatic tradition and “the bourgeois novel”: in his view, empathy invites acceptance while “alienation . . . is necessary to all understanding.” “If art reflects life,” he writes, “it does so with special mirrors. Art does not become unrealistic by changing the proportions but by changing them in such a way that if the audience took its representations as a practical guide to insights and impulses it would go astray in real life.”7 In turn, O’Connor argues, “for the kind of writer I have been describing, a literature which mirrors society would be no fit guide for it” (MM 46). Reminding us that “Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is the true anti-bourgeois style,” she bemoans the fact “that in this country, the general reader has managed to connect the grotesque with the sentimental, for whenever he speaks of it favorably, he seems to associate it with the writer’s compassion” (MM 43). O’Connor condemns “the kind of hazy compassion” that leads the writer to give up being “anti-anything” (MM 43). She could be Brecht when she concludes, “Certainly when the grotesque is used in a legitimate way, the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it will have the ascendency [sic] over feeling” (MM 43).8 But O’Connor diverges from Brecht’s example and from the wider avantgarde investment in distortion and shock as tools of antibourgeois critique when she roots her literary vision in Christian theology. For O’Connor, as for the other writers I’ve discussed, the written page emerges in and from the clash between the reader’s naturalized and distorted vision and the writer’s alienated and corrective vision of “modern life.” But O’Connor also locates her writing at the crossroads between her own distorted and partial vision and the true and perfect life of God. At this crossroads, she finds “mystery,” “mystery as it is incarnated in human life” (MM 176). She calls on the medieval concept of “anagogical vision” to illuminate the fiction writer’s ceaseless encounter with mystery. Anagogical vision is “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” It directs us to a level of reality that “ha[s] to do with the Divine life and our participation in it” (MM 72). For O’Connor, anagogical vision harbors a power to transform the viewer that is rooted in the relationship it poses between a theory of representation

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and a theory of history. Where Brecht’s theories of representation reflect and serve a Marxist theory of history, O’Connor’s thoughts on the same subject spring from a Christian theory of history advanced by religious and political philosophers working in the Pauline tradition. In this tradition, human history, imposed by the Fall, stretches toward the Second Coming, when Christ will return to bring about a state of perfect community grounded in justice and love. But people, in their capacity as historical agents, do not merely look forward to the perfection of Christian community; they participate in it. O’Connor joins a number of the most influential national figures of her day—ranging from Eric Voegelin and Will Herberg in the scholarly world to John Foster Dulles and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the world of politics—in posing an analogical relationship between human history and the life of Christ. As this powerful cluster of postwar intellectuals would insist—though with widely varying objectives in mind—such an analogical relationship is dynamic and open-ended, allowing people the freedom to exert themselves actively in the fulfillment of God’s historical vision.9 In the New Testament, Paul identifies charity as the form that people’s participation in God’s life takes on earth, and he uses the image of a distorted mirror to suggest that such participation is by necessity partial and incomplete. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul derives the concept of charity from Christians’ common membership in the mystical body of Christ, “whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free” (1 Cor. 12:13). Grounded in a radical communion, charity is not the act of bestowing “all my goods to feed the poor” (1 Cor. 13:3), but rather the principle that “there should be no schism in the body” (1 Cor. 12:25). This principle survives the transition between this life and the next, and thus surpasses knowledge, prophecy, and faith. An oxidizing mirror provides the figure for people’s clouded knowledge of the perfect communion God bestows: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor. 13:12–13).10 If O’Connor’s reliance on grotesque distortion aligns her with Brecht’s belief that a critically transformative art must reflect life “with special mirrors,” it aligns her yet more fully with Paul’s account of the dark glass. But her investment in Paul’s vision is tinctured by a Brechtian refusal of “hazy compassion.” Brutally inverting a sentimental attitude that identifies charity with liberal tolerance,11 O’Connor seizes upon the alienation effect as the proper vehicle for revealing the action of God’s charity in the modern world. For O’Connor, the alienation effect provides the mirror that allows us to see “with an astonished eye,” to know that we are “capable of being different,” and thus to apprehend—at

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least “in part”—what it means to participate in the divine life of God. In Wise Blood, all this becomes quite literal. And yet, by the terms of her own analysis, the very literalism of O’Connor’s text involves and supports the anagogical. O’Connor models the story of Hazel Motes directly on the life of Paul, the apostle who “persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9) before being blinded and reborn.12 At the most simple and obvious level of the plot, Paul’s dark glass shows up in the “dark glasses” (WB 20) worn by the fake blind preacher, Asa Hawks, to signify a vision that has failed and one that has been, or might be, redeemed. But O’Connor also inscribes more oblique and fleeting references to the dark glass in a series of scenes involving opaque mirrors, whose distortions catch both Haze and the reader off guard. Haze expects from the looking glass a kind of social guarantee of the fact and value of his individual selfhood, but he repeatedly finds the space that should be reserved for himself usurped by the faces of strangers. His encounters with the mirror do not elicit his compassion, but instead register and intensify his alienation. In Wise Blood, mirrors continually make visible a wider zone of alienated intimacy that bears the name of family in communities reconstituted by the state’s modern sentimental project. But they also inscribe another, better possibility. O’Connor presents this possibility not as a free-floating theological ideal but as a historically specific and politically charged “practical guide” to human action that arises from the clash between two modes of seeing, one grounded in the charitable provisions of the newly consolidated U.S. welfare state and the other in Christian scripture. As I will demonstrate at the end of this chapter, O’Connor’s mirror scenes resonate sharply with larger struggles of the era to bring U.S. federal policy into transformative alignment with a Christian vision of undivided community. Defined at one end of the spectrum by Dulles’s Cold War precepts of “free-world unity”13 and nuclear brinkmanship and at the other by King’s nonviolent leadership of the civil rights movement, these struggles differed considerably on the all-important question of specifics. But before we can understand the precise terms of O’Connor’s relationship to the major state projects of her time, we’ll need to work more carefully through the text of Haze’s story.

The Misery He Had In the opening chapter of Wise Blood, Haze sits on a train bound for Taulkinham, a city based, at least in part, on Atlanta.14 Freshly released from the army, he has already returned home to Eastrod, Tennessee, where he discovered a ghost town. As he tells his inquisitive seatmate, Mrs. Hitchcock, he’s now

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headed to a place where he “don’t know nobody” (WB 5). In the face of further prattle, Haze asserts, “You might as well go one place as another” (WB 6). The realization is about as new as the “glaring blue” suit and “stiff black” hat (WB 3) that he’s just bought with his mustering-out pay. Haze grew up in a town characterized by close family ties, religious fundamentalism, and a strict sense of social place, but he entered the army an orphan. At eighteen, he had already buried his grandfather, both parents, and two little brothers: one died in infancy, and the other “fell in front of a mowing machine when he was seven” (WB 10). His only surviving tokens of his past are his mother’s Bible and her glasses (WB 12). As an enlisted man, Haze quickly sheds religion but holds on to family. Convinced by his fellow soldiers and a long stay in a hospital bed that he has no soul, he decides that “the misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus” (WB 13). Haze’s subsequent return to his abandoned hometown does not dispel this longing so much as it abstracts and purifies it: when he arrives in Taulkinham, he will continue to seek out any number of homes. Plugged into the modern circuitry of the domestic exterior, each one proves just as good as another. When he exits the train, Haze searches for “a private place to go to” (WB 15), and he eventually selects the one room in the city where physical space and social place explicitly coincide: the sign reads “MEN’S TOILET. WHITE” (WB 15). Of course, for all of its specificity, the logic of social assignment that governs this space is fungible, and fungibility will turn out to be the single constant in a city where everything is on the move. Downtown Taulkinham is largely an affair of gleaming “store fronts” (WB 19) and omnipresent movie theaters, surrounded by a residential perimeter where “long blocks of gray houses” gradually give way to “blocks of better, yellow houses” (WB 41). In this city, where some people live better than others, nobody lives better than the animals. At the downtown zoo, a bunch of animals don’t “do anything but lie around” (WB 46). They live “in a long set of steel cages,” which are “electrically heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer,” and “six men hired to wait on” them “feed them T-bone steaks” (WB 46). Outside the cages, the police presence is strong. Dressed up in “tall new boots and new policemen’s clothes” (WB 130) and wielding “new billy” (WB 131) clubs, officers of the law generally appear to be doing almost as well as the wild beasts. When Haze steps into a lane of moving cars, one officer snidely points out the traffic light, before remarking: “Maybe you thought the red ones was for white folks and the green ones for niggers. . . . Red is to stop, green is to go—men and women, white folks and niggers, all go on the same light. You tell all your friends so when they come to town, they’ll know” (WB 24).

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The point, though a good one, is a little strange, since there is not a single African American living in Taulkinham or its vicinity. On the train ride into the city, Haze thinks he recognizes Cash Parrum’s son in the sleeping-car porter who prepares his train berth. The porter, who identifies himself as the son of “a railroad man” “from Chicago” (WB 9), refuses any connection. He is the last African American Haze will meet until he encounters the new Jesus, a tiny mummy described by Enoch Emery as “a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf” (WB 99). But there are plenty of white women in Taulkinham, and it does seem to be the case that they go by the same rules of the road as the men. Haze runs across only one “motherly-looking woman” (WB 101) in the city, and she works in a “glass ticket box” (WB 101) in front of a movie theater. Most of the other women he meets or hears about also work for pay. Filling jobs as till tenders, waitresses, prostitutes, advice columnists, welfare workers, and landladies, they translate older forms of domestic labor into a newly fragmented and routinized set of services anchored in the wage economy. The one labor they no longer perform is the labor of love. Enoch, another displaced country boy, tells Haze on his second night in the city, “This is one more hard place to make friends in. I been here two months and I don’t know nobody. Look like all they want to do is knock you down” (WB 26). Haze, who is about to develop his own penchant for knocking Enoch down, already knows better than to disagree. Taken together, the stark details of Haze’s social world fuse to create a distorted mirror whose changed proportions simultaneously reflect and exaggerate the massive social changes that transformed the South during the New Deal and World War II. In the reactive political climate of Georgia, where O’Connor grew up, New Deal programs and policies had a particularly rocky, if ultimately dazzling, career. During the early years of Roosevelt’s administration, Governor Eugene Talmadge refused to accept desperately needed federal aid, arguing that, “if the government keeps handling relief, manicuring ladies’ nails and giving relief people cars to ride around in, it will stifle religion in the country and all religion will just dry up.” His opposition proved so formidable that, by 1934, the Roosevelt administration decided to federalize all relief efforts in Georgia, bypassing state bureaucracies and state authority altogether. But subsequent governors Eurith Rivers and Ellis Arnall quickly reversed Talmadge’s course. After his election in 1936, Rivers worked closely with the federal government to bring a “Little New Deal” to Georgia. He combined a probusiness stance with an emphasis on law and order, and created the state’s first Department of Public Safety and the State Highway Patrol, a fact that may lie behind the steppedup police presence in Wise Blood.15 It is quite possible that O’Connor grew up hearing these and other details about the Rivers administration. By late 1937, her father, Edward O’Connor, was trying to win a political appointment in the

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Little New Deal. He became “a real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Authority in Atlanta in 1938,” though by 1941 he was dead and Rivers had been driven from office amid financial scandal.16 When Governor Arnall took over in 1943, he presided over an economic boom sustained by wartime defense spending and increasingly aggressive political efforts to bring outside capital to the state. O’Connor’s portrait of Taulkinham reflects, albeit in distorted form, white women’s recent prominence in the wartime economy. It also reflects a persistent class gap among whites that the new era of prosperity failed to close. Numan Bartley traces much of that prosperity to federal initiative and links rising levels of consumer demand in Georgia to “federal farm price supports, social welfare projects, and especially military expenditures during World War II and the postwar era.”17 But not everyone shared in the new opportunities to consume. Georgia’s politicians funneled public resources into magnificent package deals for incoming industry, helping to swell the ranks of the metropolitan elite, while social spending on the poor in the state—and in the South as a whole—remained well below national averages. As Bartley notes drily, this uneven commitment to the public good prompted critics to suggest that, in the thirties and forties, “Georgia cities increasingly provided socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”18 Some of those poor were city dwellers of long standing, but many—like five of the central characters in Wise Blood19—were recent refugees from the countryside. The Great Depression had dealt the first catastrophic blow to southern rural populations already locked into multigenerational cycles of poverty. New Deal agricultural policies were also rough on small-time farmers and farm tenants. Like Haze’s little brother plowed under by “a mowing machine” (WB 10), they could not survive government acreage-reduction programs and the growing number of agribusiness competitors that had the capital to consolidate land holdings and mechanize production. As a result of federal efforts “to subsidize bigness,”20 huge numbers of people shifted out of agriculture, shutting down myriad small rural towns like Eastrod in the process. Between 1940 and 1945, “approximately one-quarter of the region’s farm population— some four million people—left the land.” Many of those leaving were African American. Like O’Connor’s sleeping-car porter from Chicago, they formed part of a larger black exodus from the South that reached 4.5 million by 1960. Many were also young: scholars estimate that an astounding three-fourths of the southern rural population who came of age in the 1940s quit the farm. A significant number in this group headed north, but an even greater number relocated elsewhere in the South, dragging hardship with them. As Numan Bartley comments, “to an appreciable degree, . . . the convulsion in southern agriculture moved the region’s rural poverty into the cities.”21

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When they got to the city, the displaced rural poor faced severe forms of culture shock. Shaped by a world that for many no longer existed, they confronted the tasks not only of establishing a new place for themselves but also of deciphering and adapting to a new set of ideas regarding place. Throughout Wise Blood, O’Connor makes deliberations on the changing nature of place central to her investigation of her rural characters’ experience of Taulkinham. The one word these characters have to connect what they’ve lost with what they’ve found is “home,” and O’Connor deftly uses that word to highlight the uneasy nature of their “adjustment to the modern world” (WB 67). Haze’s own adjustment owes more than money to the terms of the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. When he first identifies “the misery he had” as “a longing for home” (WB 13), Haze associates home with a specific place, but in Taulkinham, he quickly learns to associate home with placelessness and the attendant promises of freedom, progress, and upward mobility held out to white veterans by the government after World War II. True to the fundamentalist tenets of his upbringing, Haze takes the promise of mobility literally. In a quirky fulfillment of Eugene Talmadge’s prediction, O’Connor makes her character one of the “relief people” who can afford to buy a car, even as she collapses the postwar ideals of car ownership and homeownership into one another. When he closes a deal with the seller at a used car lot, Haze announces, “I wanted this car mostly to be a house for me. . . . I ain’t got any place to be” (WB 41). Having a car means “having something that moved fast, in privacy, to the place you wanted to be” (WB 105). “Since I’ve had it,” Haze tells a skeptical mechanic, “I’ve had a place to be that I can always get away in” (WB 65). In an extended reading of Haze’s obsession with his car, Brian Abel Ragen traces twentieth-century car advertisements to a longer U.S. literary tradition that combines assertions of white men’s freedom and Adamic innocence with a “Unitarian confidence in the perfectability of man.” Where this tradition routinely opposes the freedom and innocence of masculine motion to the morally suspect bonds of home, O’Connor gives the sanctioned binary a twist. A home that leaves him, in Ragen’s words, “completely free, not bound by memories or obligations,” Haze’s car is a version of the home awarded to those who make it to the suburbs. In the late forties and early fifties, the GI Bill helped to push millions of white servicemen and their families into the suburbs as larger patterns of social spending built up suburban perimeters at the expense of inner cities. O’Connor appears to satirize this historically specific notion of white flight when she chooses a car as the fulfillment of Haze’s longing for a private “place to be” that he “can always get away in” (WB 65).22 The satire gains in power from the fact that Haze’s car allows him to “get away” from the urban poor right in front of them. Though he leaves the city repeatedly, he never

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leaves for long, and his mobility, maximally exposed, deeply impresses all involved because it is not shared. If owning a car infuses Haze with the power and prestige of physical motion, it also sets him moving in a different way, one associated with money and its logic of fungibility. O’Connor is at pains to demonstrate that both the car and the man who owns it become fully interchangeable in and through their relation to one another. In doing so, she points to new powers of abstraction and standardization that accompanied the postwar state and market’s coordinated investments in the home, severing its older associations with one’s distinctive roots in favor of new associations with indiscriminate rootlessness. When he purchases a used car, Haze substitutes for its past owner(s) and any possible future ones. The car itself assumes a place in a long line of commodified equivalents, all of which partake of—even as they modify—the meaning of home. Thus, Haze’s car substitutes backward for the coffins that house his family members, the one that holds a naked lady at the carnival, the train berth that carries him to Taulkinham, the toilet stall that greets him on his arrival, and the “white iron bed” (WB 17) of the prostitute who urges him to “[make himself ] at home” (WB 18). It substitutes forward for the “long set of steel cages” (WB 46) that house the zoo animals, the one-room apartment “a little larger than his car” (WB 60) for which he pays rent to a widowed landlady, a series of lunch counters (WB 50, 77) and glass ticket boxes (WB 58, 101) also worked by white women, and the three “coffin-like” “glass cases” (WB 56) in the city museum, one of which houses the mummy who will become the new Jesus. When viewed as a series, these interchangeable spaces of home begin to reek of death and money, not to mention solitary confinement: Haze’s much-prized freedom resurfaces in chains. O’Connor’s dual focus on fungibility and solitary confinement points up the loss of shared experience in Taulkinham. A city in which people displace and replace one another but rarely occupy a common place, Taulkinham registers the aggregate effect of an entire population bent on securing “a private place to go to” (WB 15). As Jon Lance Bacon argues, the false freedom and security that Haze finds in his car resonates with O’Connor’s acid appraisal of a postwar consensus that translated New Deal affirmations of domestic security into Cold War policies of domestic containment.23 The spin that O’Connor puts on the evolving ideal of domestic security torques it in the direction of an imprisonment all the more profound for going by the name of freedom. No one registers this contradiction better than Haze’s rootless adolescent acquaintances, Enoch Emery and Sabbath Lily Hawks. Both characters have mothers whom they’ve never known (WB 28, 66) and fathers who can’t stand them (WB 31, 61), a state of affairs conducive to the realization that their own urban

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isolation is not chosen but imposed. In Taulkinham, “a man has to look out for hisself” (WB 114), and most people end up alone: like The Day of the Locust, Wise Blood presents a world of bachelor apartments and broken homes. But in O’Connor’s portrayal, unlike West’s, the longing for home continues unabated in the city’s myriad households of one, thanks to that longing’s multisponsored cultivation in the domestic exterior. Vigorous, if largely uncritical, promotions of the longing for home turn the wheels of Taulkinham’s commercial culture. A more suspicious and openly disciplinary promotion of the longing for the right kind of home also characterizes local welfare agencies’ address to the displaced rural characters who constitute their clientele.

Just to Keep You Company A commercial pitch directed at the home consumer momentarily brings strangers together on Haze’s second night in Taulkinham. Through this pitch and the desires it mobilizes, Haze meets Enoch and Sabbath, as well as Sabbath’s father, Asa Hawks—the only one of the three whom Haze decides that he wants to get to know. A street vendor selling potato peelers picks Haze out of a tangle of late-night shoppers, urging him to “take one of these home to [his] wife” or his “dear old mother” (WB 20). Upon learning that he has neither, the vendor announces brightly to the crowd: “he needs one theseyer just to keep him company” (WB 20). The pitch works like magic on Enoch and Sabbath, so eager for family that they’re willing to accept any of its fungible equivalents, no matter how dubious. Barred by lack of funds from even a potato peeler’s company, Enoch watches enviously as Haze purchases one for Sabbath, who is eventually able to work the strength of this connection into a more lasting domestic bond. Enoch is left to content himself with images of the domestic security he lacks— such as the ice cream advertisement of the “cow dressed up like a housewife” (WB 50) that presides over his meals at the snack bar, or the calendar art of a kneeling little boy who prays “And bless daddy,” which he hangs “directly over his bed” (WB 75–76). Both Enoch’s and Sabbath’s market-cultivated longing for home binds them to men who abuse them. When welfare agents get wind of this abuse, they intervene in ways that favor the abusers. As Enoch reports, he grew up with a father who “moved around with a sawmill where we worked” (WB 25) until a “Welfare woman” ran into them and “traded me from my daddy” (WB 25). She sets the twelve-year-old Enoch up in her own “brick house” (WB 25), where he doesn’t have to work but does have to listen to her talk “all day long” (WB 25) about Jesus. Since “she had papers on [him] and she could send [him]

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to a penitentiary” (WB 25), Enoch is obliged to do her bidding until he gets old enough to threaten her with rape. By that time, the terms of their acquaintance have taught him to associate the promise of “certain relief” (WB 25) with escaping the welfare system rather than embracing it. Unlike Haze, who gains mobility from the government, Enoch experiences the state’s charitable provisions as a poor trade for patriarchy. State intervention does not dissolve but rather intensifies his longing for the company of a daddy who “beats” (WB 32) women and banishes his only child to the city. As his choice of bedroom art might indicate, Enoch continues, even in solitude, to invest the fantasy of rewarded filial devotion with all of the postures of abjection. On his own way out of town, Sabbath’s daddy warns her that she won’t be eating any more if she fails to get her man (WB 82). She takes him at his word, telling Haze point-blank that she plans to stay with him even if he hits her “with a table” (WB 95). She hasn’t “got any place to go” (WB 95). Once she’s established in his apartment, the attractions of his company—and the attendant attractions of food and shelter—outweigh her growing conviction that he is “mean and evil” (WB 106). But Haze’s place turns out to be little more than a pit stop on the way to government housing; when the landlady decides that she can no longer stand seeing “her tax money” used “to support such trash” (WB 121), she “call[s] the Welfare people and [makes] arrangements to have the girl sent to a detention home; she was eligible” (WB 121). The charity that Enoch and Sabbath receive from the welfare state exposes the contradictions of a system prepared to offer freedom and security to qualifying white men, while leashing their domestic dependents to a lesser set of unfree and insecure attachments. As grimly funny as the two teenagers’ stories are, they also point to forms of misery and grief, lodged within the longing for home, which are not adequately covered by the concept of nostalgia. For both Enoch and Sabbath, any love they might have experienced within the family once upon a time has long been alienated from them, reconstituted by the state and market precepts of the domestic exterior, and then delivered back to them as simultaneously what they most lack and what is most their own. Love of family, in their cases, is all the more insistent for remaining unconfirmed. This dynamic enforces its own violence. One need not meditate long on the implications of an abandoned fifteen-year-old girl’s decision to move in with a man who may or may not hit her with a table to understand the ways in which government by tenderness can end up breeding terror. When Haze takes word of his Church without Christ to the streets, he attracts the attention of a man who has experience marketing the kind of love that Enoch and Sabbath ache to call their own. Onnie Jay Holy “was on the radio for three years with a program,” called “Soulsease,” that gave “real religious

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experiences to the whole family” (WB 88). This background has helped him to refine a pitch based on exploiting the gap between the orders of lived and state- and market-posited domestic experience. Onnie Jay’s sales pitch draws on a modern sentimental faith in people’s power to heal themselves through tutored forms of domesticated love. In turn, O’Connor uses his pitch to satirize the twisted logic through which state and market promotions of that love seek to reconstitute capitalist alienation as its own antidote.24 To a crowd of departing moviegoers, Onnie Jay explains that, until recently, he didn’t “have a friend in the world” (WB 85): “not even my own dear old mother loved me” (WB 85). But then he found “the Church of Christ Without Christ” that “was going to get a new jesus to help me bring my sweet nature into the open where ever’body could enjoy it. That was two months ago, friends, and now you wouldn’t know me for the same man” (WB 86). As Onnie Jay insists, alienation is the form through which human beings live out their connection to one another in the postwar city of Taulkinham, not only when they encounter actual strangers but also when they confront members of their own family. In exchange for a dollar, Onnie Jay proposes to repair this situation by offering people a religion that will “make the natural sweetness inside [them] show” (WB 85). Since this sweetness already inheres in their nature, what they buy for a dollar is a formula for making it appear, and this formula is nothing more than the dollar they pay. In a world where potato peelers aptly concretize one’s love for “dear old mother” (WB 20), paying expresses the natural sweetness inside, making it visible to mothers who might not otherwise love their sons, and those who can’t pay lack the only currency available to prove they’re sweet. It is to Haze’s credit that he not only doesn’t pay, but hotly denounces Onnie Jay to the crowd. “It don’t cost you any money to know the truth!” he shouts. “You can’t know it for money!” (WB 87). Haze’s commitment to the truth compels him to live out his alienated connection to other human beings as alienation. This attitude makes him dangerous. He threatens to “bring . . . down” (WB 82) a chair on Sabbath during the courtship process. The first night he meets Enoch, he hits him “in the chest” and “knock[s] his mouth open” (WB 33). Later, he shoves him to the ground and hits him in the head with a rock (WB 57). But the same unfiltered experience of alienation that makes Haze a danger to other people also enforces a critical distance from the false promises of his society, which gives him a kind of bitter integrity. Lived as an openly felt rather than denied and covered-over condition, Haze’s alienation brings him within range of the transformative potential that Brecht attaches to the alienation effect. In O’Connor’s patently Christian reworking of this concept, the alienation effect becomes a vehicle for breaking with the modern sentimental project of personal and social redemption through domestic reform. In the

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gap left open by that break, Haze apprehends another, more destructive and demanding arena of love and charity not yet fungible with money. As I have already suggested, O’Connor turns to Paul’s image of the dark glass to show us this alternative. In a series of mirror scenes, she assigns Haze increasingly disorienting experiences of human connection that reassert the biblical ideal of undivided community otherwise denied in Taulkinham. To highlight the political import of her gesture, O’Connor identifies the first “private place” (WB 15) that Haze seeks out in the city—the segregated men’s toilet—as the social paradigm that her mirror scenes patiently dispute and eventually overturn. A further set of textual details establishes the segregated bathroom as a way station between older forms of social division and social domination that prevailed in the impoverished rural South and the new forms of division and domination that characterize the region’s booming postwar cities. In stressing the continuities as much as the differences between two systems of inequity, O’Connor calls the ameliorative social agendas of the New Deal into question. In Eastrod, white men enjoyed a dominance backed up by the ever-present threat of mob violence. A carnival show recalled from Haze’s childhood encodes the joys and guilty burden of this privilege. At ten, Haze stood outside the carnival tent that his father had just entered, bargaining with the barker to let him in. “It’s something about a privy, he was thinking. It’s some men in a privy” (WB 34). With his next guesses, Haze speculates plausibly on the terms through which men like his father might open up their “privy” to other people. “Maybe it’s a man and a woman in a privy,” he thinks, before asking, “Are they doing something to a nigger?” (WB 34). But it turns out that the carnival tent holds a whole group of white men staring down at a naked white woman “squirming . . . in a box” (WB 35). In the city, Haze experiences the same white male privilege in a reconstituted form that derives from his favored relation to the welfare state. If white men in Eastrod exercised a power given visceral immediacy by their exclusive freedom to assemble, in the city Haze discovers an inverted version of that power in the government funds that allow him to buy “a place to be that [he] can always get away in” (WB 65). But in the mirror, Haze cannot get away. The first two mirror scenes in a series of four pass quickly, but they establish patterns that gain full expression later. On his first night in Taulkinham, Haze follows a note from “Brother” (WB 16) scrawled on the wall of the bathroom stall to the home of Mrs. Leora Watts, reputed to have “the friendliest bed in town!” (WB 16). Before he enters that bed, Haze goes to the prostitute’s bureau: “He looked in the yellowish mirror and watched Mrs. Watts, slightly distorted, grinning at him. His senses were stirred to the limit” (WB 17). In this first scene, Paul’s dark glass awakens Haze’s desire for a woman he can buy.

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The next recurrence of the dark glass racializes its yellow color. While he bargains with the seller at Slade’s used car lot, Haze gazes at Slade’s adolescent son through the windows of the car he likes: “the two window glasses made him a yellow color and distorted his shape” (WB 38). Slade himself eagerly assures Haze that “that car yonder ain’t been built by a bunch of niggers” (WB 40). “All the niggers are living in Detroit now, putting cars together. . . . I was up there a while myself and I seen. I come home” (WB 40). Then he adds, “They got one nigger up there . . . is almost as light as you or me” (WB 40). Like the sleepingcar porter from Chicago “with a round yellow bald head” (WB 4) or the Detroit auto worker who is “almost as light as” a white man, the novel’s ghostly African American characters have fled the white South but remain visibly related to it. Exploited, persecuted, and finally absent members of the family, they persist in Taulkinham as the tincture of a dark glass that points to a disquieting history of human commodification even as it calls into question reigning definitions of “home.” The third time that Haze gazes into the dark glass, he loses all sense of himself. At the park museum, Enoch takes him into “a dark room full of glass cases” (WB 55–56) to see a mummy, “about three feet long,” who is “naked and a dried yellow color” (WB 56). As Haze peers through the glass containing the mummy, a white woman and her two little boys approach the case. When she stops and “look[s] down into it,” “the reflection of her face appear[s] grinning on the glass, over Hazel Motes’s” (WB 56). The vision that results escapes rational definition: a self that is also a family, it is the product of an integration so radical that all have literally become one. Haze reacts to the vision with a violent gesture of refusal that only implicates him further in the vexed connections of the scene: “When Haze saw her face on the glass, his neck jerked back and he made a noise. It might have come from the man inside the case. In a second Enoch knew it had. ‘Wait!’ he screamed, and tore out of the room after Hazel Motes” (WB 56).25 After this, Enoch decides that the mummy is the new Jesus, the “one that’s all man, without blood to waste” (WB 80) or “foul with redemption” (WB 59). When he delivers the body to Haze’s apartment, Sabbath takes “the package to the bathroom, where there was a good light” (WB 104) so she can examine its contents. Sabbath’s action again integrates “the private place” (WB 15), first signaled by the label “MEN’S TOILET. WHITE” (WB 15), that Haze attempts to claim for his exclusive use. When she unwraps the mummy, she discovers there is something “familiar about him,” “something in him of everyone she had ever known, as if they had all been rolled into one person and killed and shrunk and dried” (WB 104). Meanwhile, Haze uses his mother’s glasses to examine his face in the mirror on the back of the apartment’s front door.

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“His blurred face was dark with excitement” (WB 105), and “he saw his mother’s face in his” (WB 106). When Sabbath abruptly returns from the bathroom, Haze’s darkened and feminized self-image bifurcates into two faces: the white one of Sabbath and “the smaller dark one” (WB 106) of the new Jesus. Sabbath commands, “Call me Momma now” (WB 106). As the mirror swings away to leave Haze “face to face” with Sabbath’s improvised nativity, O’Connor dramatizes the passage from partial to complete recognition, from human to divine history, that Paul outlines. But this recognition is more than Haze can bear: overcome with rage, he seizes the new Jesus, slams it against the wall, and then drops its bursting body into the yard below.

Caritas In the park museum and in the doorway of his own apartment, Haze confronts unwelcome evidence of a common human bond at the insistence of two characters struggling wildly to communicate their love. The conditions of alienated intimacy that structure these encounters turn a random mummy into the new Jesus and then destroy him. But in the fused spaces of the dark glass, Haze must acknowledge something larger than the loneliness of two bereft and lovecrazed teenagers. Through the cumulative force of the visions thrust upon him, two populations that have historically been alienated from the very status of the human—one through prostitution, the other through slavery—regain the center of a questioning field of vision. When dark and female faces crowd the spaces where Haze seeks his own, they shatter the selective and detached security of all the “private place[s]” (WB 15) awarded to him by the government. Inverting the imaginary worlds of a carnival “privy” (WB 34), which reflect the violent hierarchies of the rural South, the distorted field of images that emerges between the bathroom and the swinging door of Haze’s apartment insists on a radical equality, indeed a radical identity, between men and women, blacks and whites. Like West, O’Connor invests her bathroom with mysterious powers of social transformation. But where West portrays the modern bathroom as an unreliable space of individual class metamorphosis, O’Connor treats it as a prophetic site of racial and gender integration ultimately involving all of humanity. Closer here to Toomer than to West, O’Connor’s bathroom scene recalls Dan Moore’s vision of “a god’s face”26 flashing in the swirling light of Mr. Barry’s mirror in the Lincoln Theater. Both scenes reference not only Paul’s image of a dark glass but also the specific passage in which he writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Stretching Toomer’s vision of undivided

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community beyond the borders of Jim Crow, O’Connor’s disorienting glass reveals itself as an alienating force imbued with redemptive possibility. This glass exposes both what continues to be “so” in the ameliorated social landscapes of the postwar South and what is “capable of being different.” It offers up the faces of people who have been rendered fungible with money and thus with things, and re-presents them as fungible with God and thus with one another.27 None of this makes any real difference to Haze. The anagogical axis of his visions remains untapped; the mystery and its attendant call to action are refused. Instead, when Haze discovers strangers in the places where he seeks himself, he suffers a self-estrangement so entire that he ceases to be a man who merely batters other people and becomes a man who kills them. An earlier sermon, delivered to departing moviegoers, helps to make sense of this transition. In the sermon, Haze deliberates on what it means to have a conscience in a world where there is “no truth” (WB 93). His words express a growing disillusionment with the terms of his life in the city: “There’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth. . . . Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place” (WB 93). “Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?” he continues. “Who is that that says that it’s your conscience?” (WB 93). “Your conscience is a trick” (WB 93), he says, “it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you” (WB 94). The only thing to do with it is to “hunt it down and kill it” (WB 93). Haze finds a literal version of the morally demanding “face in the mirror” in the True Prophet, an unwitting impersonator who has been hired by Onnie Jay Holy to do the same thing Haze does, but for money. His real offense, though, is to say that he doesn’t believe in Jesus when he does, and, still unable to recognize that this is also true of himself, Haze chases the prophet’s car down, pitches it into a “ditch” (WB 114), and runs the man over. Later, a highway patrolman returns at least part of the favor when he pushes Haze’s own car over a thirty-foot “embankment” (WB 118). Both O’Connor and her Christian critics read the patrolman’s destructive gesture as the vessel of an act of grace.28 With the loss of his car, the dream of selective and detached security—an individuated dream of endlessly renewable innocence, progress, and self-perfectability—shatters around Haze as the longing for home dies within him. Confronted with evidence of an original sin, he blinds himself in a gesture of atonement. From that point on, Haze becomes an inscrutable and almost silent character, consumed by the task of receiving rather than relaying a message. What we know of him, we must learn through the eyes of his landlady, Mrs. Flood.

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O’Connor uses the final encounter between Haze and Mrs. Flood to launch an explicit critique of the welfare state, which has been quietly building throughout the novel.29 The welfare state defines and administers all evident forms of charity in Taulkinham, and it is against this evidence that the dark mystery of God’s charity comes briefly into view. For O’Connor’s disabled World War II veteran, charity initially takes the form of money, money everlasting. Haze is content to treat this money as his own, but Mrs. Flood figures out that it comes from the government and thus is really her money, snapped up and given to people who don’t deserve it: She felt that the money she paid out in taxes returned to all the worthless pockets in the world, that the government not only sent it to foreign niggers and a-rabs, but wasted it at home on blind fools and on every idiot who could sign his name on a card. She felt justified in getting any of it back that she could. She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it. (WB 120) Mrs. Flood’s resentment allows her to see the U.S. welfare state’s vision of security as a global venture, one that not only supports “blind fools” and Social Security cardholders at home, but also funds the Lend-Lease program and Marshall Plan abroad.30 Entirely uninterested in the Cold War and neo-imperialist agendas attached to such a venture, she prefers to view the government’s charity as a gigantic act of fraud perpetrated against her personally. Haze’s landlady is convinced that her tenant, in particular, is “cheating her in some secret way” (WB 120), and she acquires proof that her money is being “wasted” (WB 120) when she finds dollar bills in his trash. But when Haze, confronted on the subject, replies, “You can have it,” she responds, “I’m not charity yet!” (WB 124). With this last remark, Mrs. Flood provides the measure of the welfare state’s failed project of social amelioration. Nothing and no one in Taulkinham embodies “charity yet”: the money recirculated nationally and internationally by the government ratifies rather than repairs an alienation enforced by the primacy of the money bond itself. It is left to citizens like Mrs. Flood to repackage this alienation as love. Since, by her own account, she can’t accept the government’s money without ceasing to deserve it, she decides to trick her tenant out of it by resurrecting in him the longing for home. A vision “of the benefits that might accrue to his widow should he leave one” (WB 124) spurs her on. Mrs. Flood’s ambition lays bare the connection between alienated intimacy and the state and market penetration of the domestic sphere. With a lifetime of cash payments on her mind, she tells Haze, “It’s fortunate for you that you have this warm place to be and someone to take care of you” (WB 128). “Nobody

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ought to be without a place of their own to be,” she pipes, “and I’m willing to give you a home here with me, a place where you can always stay” (WB 129). The one alternative to home is homelessness: “ ‘If we don’t help each other, Mr. Motes, there’s nobody to help us,’ she said. ‘Nobody. The world is an empty place’ ” (WB 128). So empty, in fact, that it provides “no other place to be but mine!” (WB 129). Mrs. Flood’s mercenary sentiments both expose and undermine the opposition between the “warm place” of home and the “empty place” of the world secured by the welfare state in its pact with corporate capitalism. By endorsing a modern sentimental vision of human connection that confines love and care (caritas) to the domestic sphere, the welfare state accepts and institutionalizes the evacuation of these modes of being from the rest of the world. As a result, the world’s emptiness ends up enforcing a longing for home that, in the absence of viable social alternatives, absorbs that emptiness, coordinating care with cash, love with security, choice with no choice. When Haze flees the terms of such a bargain, two policemen track him down “in a drainage ditch near an abandoned construction project” (WB 130) and drag him home to pay his rent. In the meantime, Mrs. Flood realizes that she values Haze for something more than money. In the act of his self-blinding, she finds mystery and in mystery the beginning of a transformed understanding that releases her from one definition of charity and involves her in another. When he “come[s] home,” she tells him, “You needn’t to pay any more rent but have it free here, anyway you like. . . . Just however you want it and with me to wait on you, or if you want to go on somewhere, we’ll both go” (WB 131). But he’s already gone. The darkened eyes of his corpse mirror back to Mrs. Flood the fact of her own blindness. In the distance that stretches out between them, this ghastly mirror becomes “the star on Christmas cards” (WB 123), and Mrs. Flood watches her tenant move “farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light” (WB 131). Through the “anagogical level of action” implied by this final image, O’Connor registers her perennial “concern with grace.” In a late lecture, she would define this as “a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action” (MM 204). Within the compass of Wise Blood, “the charity that breeds action” is almost indiscernible. Far from heeding the call for fully integrated community presented earlier in the novel, Haze separates himself from the world in a gesture of refusal that never reaches beyond Mrs. Flood. Even if we take seriously her allegorical function as a sulky Noah, who used to feel that “she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it” (WB 120) but now stands on the verge of a renewed covenant with God, the novel’s endorsement of social and political transformation in this life remains cryptic at best. But in the decade spanning the 1952 publication of Wise Blood

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and the 1963 lecture in which O’Connor delivers her remarks on charity, two prominent political figures used the same biblical mandate to spearhead powerful agendas of national and international change. As the secretary of state from 1953 until his death in 1959, John Foster Dulles pursued a foreign policy, grounded in a Pauline vision of global fellowship, that deputized the United States to take the “spiritual offensive”31 in the fight against Communism. Beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. would make the same Pauline concept of Christian community a crucial point of reference in the collective struggle to end racial segregation and inequity. A comparison of the two men’s use of Pauline doctrine helps to situate O’Connor’s own gravitation toward Paul in the early fifties even as it highlights the multiple understandings of political action which Americans derived from this single biblical source at midcentury. Dulles’s and King’s interpretations of Paul arguably constitute the two leading efforts to redefine the legacy of the New Deal in the immediate postwar era, while dramatizing major points of disagreement as to how best that work of redefinition might proceed. A heightened concern for international “welfare” and “security” pervades the writings of John Foster Dulles, who simultaneously preserved and refigured New Deal understandings of these terms when he fused a Cold War strategy of “free-world” solidarity with the Pauline ideal of undivided community. By the end of the forties, when O’Connor was drafting her novel, the key elements of Dulles’s Christian political vision were already in place. Early efforts to win congressional support for the Marshall Plan, like his later role in forging a peace treaty with Japan, strengthened both his faith in Christians’ “responsibility to exercise freedom with regard for the welfare of fellow men” and his belief that Christian “fellowship,” not “mastery,” should be the watchword of a U.S. bid for world leadership. Dulles’s hand in defining U.S. foreign policy at war’s end finds its fictive reflection in Mrs. Flood’s resentment over U.S. taxes spent abroad. But even before the war was over, in a 1943 address to church representatives, Dulles was eagerly heralding the “joy that is reserved to those who seek here to create in God’s image” as he unveiled the nation’s “next great adventure, that of building a fellowship that is world-wide in scope.” At the same time, he believed that fellowship could not be extended to godless Communists. Thus, while he argued in 1945 that “the postwar trend . . . toward increased fellowship . . . itself will bring us a large measure of protection as a by-product,” Dulles also insisted that “the cornerstone of security for the free nations must be a collective system of defense.”32 In his six-year career as Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Dulles managed to combine an inviolable idealism with a chilling readiness to annihilate his enemies should they jeopardize his—and now the nation’s—mission of

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Christian fellowship. The same man who complained publicly in 1952 that the United States had not given money to other nations lovingly enough went on to embrace games of nuclear chicken, psychological warfare, and CIA-orchestrated regime change as necessary components of “an increased doing of God’s will on earth.” This strange bundle of commitments could yield surprisingly candid evaluations of the nation whose ideals and interests he championed. The incomplete and even misdirected nature of New Deal templates of social amelioration elicited recurring comment from Dulles in the immediate postwar period, when he used a Pauline vision of Christian fellowship to measure the gap between advertised and achieved states of social well-being. In 1948, he found “much to be done, particularly in terms of broad social welfare,” and spoke with concern about “persist[ent] inequities of many kinds, economic, social, and political,” in the nation, reserving special opprobrium for “the discrimination against colored persons practiced by much of the white population of the United States.” But when read against his record as a whole, such criticisms molt into calculated demonstrations of Americans’ superior moral fiber: for Dulles, the fact that “the problem is recognized,” as he argued in a 1948 discussion of segregation, is enough to elicit the conclusion that “great efforts are being made to deal with it.”33 Within a short span of years, Martin Luther King, Jr., would disrupt the stance of political quietism masked by Dulles’s—and so many white Americans’— growing religious objections to segregation.34 Part of King’s success in activating the concept of Christian fellowship that Dulles and others championed in theory lay in his insistence on a literal-minded return to biblical sources, and particularly to Paul’s injunction against “schism in the body” (1 Cor. 12:25). From the Montgomery bus boycott on, King claimed that the goal of the civil rights movement was the “creation of beloved community.” He identified agape, the Greek version of caritas, as “the spirit” of “the contemporary non-violent revolution,” the principle whose invocation “initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action.” In a 1956 sermon entitled “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” King demands, “How can segregation exist in the true Body of Christ?” In the same sermon, and throughout his speeches and writings, he follows Paul in asserting that “racial prejudice is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ, for in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, Negro nor white.” At its most radical, King’s Pauline vision, like Dulles’s, prompted criticism of persistent economic as well as racial divisions in the United States. In another 1956 address, he declares, “We are striving for the removal of all barriers that divide and alienate mankind, whether racial, economic, or psychological.” But in contrast to the example set by Dulles, King’s widening commitment to an economically and racially desegregated society

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went beyond the level of rhetoric. In the last phase of his life, as he prepared to launch the poor people’s campaign, King called for an economic bill of rights, like the one proposed but never seriously pursued by Franklin Roosevelt in the months leading up to passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act.35 The common reliance on Pauline doctrine and a Christian conception of history in Dulles’s and King’s otherwise divergent political programs confirms the political import of O’Connor’s own turn to Paul in her debut novel, even as it renders the precise nature of her text’s political commitments that much harder to grasp. Though Dulles’s rising prominence in the late forties may have influenced O’Connor’s decision to use Paul’s vision as an intertext for life in the postwar urban South, she did not share his politics. No friend of Communism, she was also no apologist for the “American way of life.” As Jon Lance Bacon demonstrates, O’Connor consistently declined to join the Cold War consensus that Dulles sought to personify, falling back on her dissident positioning as a Catholic, an intellectual, and a southerner whenever invitations to glorify either the fact or the terms of U.S. world leadership crossed her path.36 The decision to make structural use of Paul’s figure of the dark glass in Wise Blood, and her persistent racialization of that figure, further suggest that, by the late forties and early fifties, she had formed particularly sharp objections to segregation, whether she considered the practice on its own or as a synecdoche for larger failures associated with the welfare state’s most recent phase of social amelioration. Far more than Dulles, O’Connor concerns herself in Wise Blood not with championing but with questioning midcentury U.S. claims to the title of a good society. There is some extratextual evidence to support the idea that racial injustice motivated O’Connor’s turn to Paul in Wise Blood: by her own report, she “became an integrationist” after riding buses between Milledgeville and Atlanta in the mid-forties, when she was a student at Iowa and beginning work on the novel. But when a dynamic movement to integrate society actually emerged, her commitment to racial unity in this life, not the next, began to buckle. Identifying herself as “a Kennedy conservative” on race matters, she acknowledged that Martin Luther King Jr., while not “the age’s great saint,” was “at least doing what he can do & has to do.” But she opposed the more militant actions of the Congress of Racial Equality and opposed mandatory busing for schoolchildren. She feared that publicizing integrationists’ efforts would bring “trouble” and advocated discretion and respect for privacy in implementing change.37 A few months before the 1963 March on Washington, O’Connor went public with her belief that “the Negro” should have “his rights” but argued that, in the South, “that’s only the beginning” (MM 234). She believed that overcoming the legacy of segregation in the South would require the creation of a new “code

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of manners based on mutual charity” and “mutual forbearance” (MM 233). Yet nothing in her writings acknowledges that the traditional southern “code of manners,” praised for its power “to preserve each race from small intrusions upon the other” (MM 233–234), was the same code of manners that lynch mobs routinely roused themselves to enforce.38 In July 1964, a few weeks before O’Connor died, the struggle to end segregation was partially fulfilled with passage of the Civil Rights Act and further secured with passage of the Voting Rights Act the following year. Historians tend to treat these legislative victories as watershed events that help us to distinguish one era from another. Thus, Alan Brinkley makes a distinction between the liberal “accommodation with capitalism” that produced the New Deal welfare state and the “new crusades” of the postwar era, in which the fights for civil rights and against Communism both figure prominently.39 But Brinkley’s periodization scheme obscures the complex roots of religiously inflected postwar “crusades” in a longer history of U.S. sentimental activism. This history not only proved crucial to the formation of the U.S. welfare state but also generated critiques of its deficiencies at numerous steps along the way. A large part of Dulles’s and King’s successes at the national level stemmed from their ability to rearticulate the terms of a Christian familial discourse that had helped to authorize many of the social and political transformations of the first half of the twentieth century. As we have seen, white and black reformers of the Progressive Era developed a sentimental discourse of maternalism in order to cast society at large as a single family in need of equitable and adequate provision and protection. The refinement of that vision to one of selective and detached domestic security, under way from the start, eventually closed the borders of the family to its smallest possible circumference, while enlarging white citizens’ opportunities for individual prosperity in a revived Keynesian economy. In different ways and with different degrees of commitment, Dulles, King, and—I would suggest—O’Connor sought to counter those centripetal energies by reopening the modern sentimental language of “family” to an explicitly religious field of meaning and the full reaches of humanity.40 Calling on the ideal of Christian brotherhood that had been integral to the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century,41 all three figures attempted to use the patriarchal discourse of the nation’s most widely practiced religion to revive Americans’ faltering sense of mutual responsibility and common destiny. In our own era, critiques of the welfare state emerge most powerfully from political players who oppose the state’s role in enforcing bonds of mutual responsibility that would exceed and jeopardize the state-backed pacts of the nuclear family and the private corporation. In the meantime, chances for

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national or international fellowship of any kind falter as refigured investments in the Christian warrior soar and the achievements of the civil rights era slowly crumble. Because racial justice has yet to be achieved in the United States, O’Connor’s vexed relationship to King’s movement continues to be an important topic among scholars today.42 But the religious habit of reading her fiction anagogically has also started to bring new issues to the fore. During the more than five decades since Wise Blood first appeared, the mysterious points of contact between U.S. history and the life of God, while still caught up in a discourse of family, have drifted decisively to the right. In a 2004 book entitled Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Ralph C. Wood attempts to bring O’Connor’s work into line with this migration. The task calls for some delicate maneuvering. Her respect for Christian fundamentalism does not, in Wood’s view, amount to an endorsement of our current political leadership. In a footnote, he declares, “O’Connor admired old-fashioned Southern fundamentalists, the kind who were poor and marginalized, derided and passed-over, not the new-fangled kind who have grown materially prosperous and politically powerful, who influence the outcome of presidential elections.”43 But, according to Wood, O’Connor does endorse the political positions that get “new-fangled” fundamentalists elected. In a reading of Wise Blood that renders Sabbath Lily a prochoice “nymphomaniac,” he argues that the character’s “obsession with a murdered child” represents “O’Connor’s prophetic anticipation, in the early 1950s, of the sexual abandonment that would begin in the 1960s and then become a world pandemic. Twenty percent of all pregnancies now end in abortions, more than fifty million per year,” a statistic that O’Connor deftly protests in advance. Though evidence of racism in O’Connor’s private correspondence earns Wood’s condemnation, similar evidence of homophobia wins his approval: “Again anticipating the church’s future teaching, O’Connor regarded homoerotic yearnings as sinless unless acted upon.”44 Wood rounds out this latter claim with a full rehearsal of recent papal policy on the subject. In his account, O’Connor herself becomes a “backwoods prophe[t]” (MM 207) able to detect the will of God in a politics of family values whose latest registration of eternal truth remained sealed to the rest of us until forty years after her death. With this move, her critique of the U.S. welfare state for its alienating endorsement of the modern sentimental home fades into a very different critique, currently championed by right-wing politicians who would dismantle the welfare state while keeping the family form that it produced in place. Perhaps Professor Wood is right. Perhaps, if she had lived into her eighties, O’Connor would now be taking the bold public stands against women’s reproductive rights and the gay community that she never quite managed to take

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against segregation. She was—it cannot be denied—a devout Christian. For this reason, then, as much as any other, I prefer to leave O’Connor to her own time: ruthlessly forging one critique of “the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world” (MM 26), straining herself to accept the terms of another, not yet ready to “hunt . . . down” (WB 93) anyone in the name of God and family.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Benjamin, Illuminations, 150–151. 2. See Williams, Politics of Modernism, 86, 56; and Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 139. 3. Class and classes are notoriously difficult to define, especially when we consider “the essentially contested nature of classes in society and of the middle classes in particular” (Wacquant, “Making Class,” 51). My own understanding of class—and the idea of a “dominant middle class”—derives largely from Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of cultural capital illuminates the ways in which members of the middle class who possess relatively little economic capital may nevertheless contribute to and (seek to) benefit from states of class-based cultural domination. For two influential accounts of the critical role that claims to superior domestic and family arrangements played both in the historical formation of the white middle class in the United States and in its successful bid for cultural dominance, see Ryan, Cradle; and Blumin, Emergence. 4. Here, I follow the lead of Jennifer Haytock, who argues that some modernists “challenge the limits of ‘woman’s sphere’ as well as the definition of the ‘domestic novel.’” See At Home, xv. 5. For discussions of why the United States lagged behind European states that had established national social insurance programs as early as the 1880s, see Skocpol and Ikenberry, “Political Formation,” 89, 98; see also Gordon, Pitied, 153–154. 6. On this point, see Wilkinson, “Selfless.” See also his overview of uses of the term “maternalist” (595n1). 7. As Skocpol and Ikenberry note, the one exception to this record was state-level workers’ compensation legislation. For their discussion of how such laws “undercut rather than furthered momentum toward public social insurance,” see “Political Formation,” 109.

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8. Thus, Theda Skocpol argues that “women’s ideologies of ‘social housekeeping’ . . . eventually served to justify calls for governmental policies designed to help, first underprivileged women, then all mothers and children, and finally all American families” (Protecting Soldiers, 21). And Linda Gordon notes that the U.S. welfare state “has been predicated” from the start on a “family-wage assumption,” even though “full dependence on husbands has actually been a ‘privilege’ of a minority of women” (“New Feminist Scholarship,” 20). 9. In my selection of modernist texts, I use an expanded definition of the term, in keeping with current critical trends and with my own understanding that the innovations in domestic fiction I discuss are not an elite formation but a broadly situated response to historical change. Thus, while all six of the texts I examine share a grotesque aesthetic that aligns them with the avant-garde, some of these texts were only recently included in the modernist canon, and others remain liminal. For two critics who deploy modernism as an omnibus term for a historical era, see Singal, “Towards a Definition”; and Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 5. For accounts that pose a relation of dynamic interdependency between modernism and mass culture, on the one hand, and modernism and the labor Left, on the other, see Francis, Secret Treachery, xxiii; and Wald, Exiles, 12, 196, 204. 10. Michael Szalay argues that “New Deal sentimental writing” dramatizes the “displacement” of “the biographical to the impersonal, of the private and biological to the abstract and public,” and thereby offers the liberal subject the fantasy of “a personal relationship with impersonality itself” (New Deal Modernism, 193, 232). See also McCann, Gumshoe America, 222–223. 11. Allport, “Must We Scrap,” 186, 187. 12. See Harpham, On the Grotesque, 20; White, Tropics of Discourse, 96; and Bakhtin, Rabelais, 25. 13. See Lang, Syntax of Class, 12. 14. See Boyle et al., “Revolution of the Word,” 11, 13. 15. On this point, see Douglas, Terrible Honesty, ch. 6; and Francis, Secret Treachery, 43, 60. Michael Szalay advances a complicated version of this argument. In his account, male modernists become the leading practitioners of a new form of sentimental fiction that aims to reeducate the sentimental woman, teaching her to value “detachment and impersonal charity rather than attachment and affective interpersonal identification” (New Deal Modernism, 171, 167). What gets lost in all three accounts is maternalist reformers’ pivotal role in constituting a welfare state that affirms and preserves the mother’s sentimental power. 16. For cited material, see Arendt, Human Condition, 35, 28; and Donzelot, Policing of Families, 64. See also Arendt, On Revolution; and Pitkin, Attack, 217–277. On Arendt and the use of “needs talk as a means of control” in U.S. welfare policy, see Gordon, Pitied, 163. Hanna Pitkin traces Arendt’s thinking about the social to Gunnar Myrdal’s account of welfare states’ misguided attempts at “collective housekeeping” and to the wider contemporary perception that the United States and the Soviet Union were both becoming “bureaucratically administered, conformist, repressive welfare states” (Attack, 188, 100). Pitkin faults Arendt for totalizing and

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demonizing the social along lines consistent with unconscious fantasies of the bad mother (Attack, 165–176)—something I seek to avoid by narrowing the concept and by focusing on the domestic exterior’s role in standardizing and disseminating the very fantasies of good and bad mothering now understood to be pervasive unconscious phenomena. 17. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 36. Historians note that the “woman’s sphere” always included religious and charitable work outside the home. See, for instance, Ryan, Cradle, ch. 5. By the turn of the century, women activists were making exfoliated versions of the domestic sphere an explicit topos in their rhetoric. For previous citations of this rhetoric, see Reese, “Between Home,” 6; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 10–11. A 1920 article on women’s franchise offers a particularly arresting instance of such rhetoric, casting “our President” as “the nation’s housekeeper” who must now convince “millions of experienced housekeepers” that he can “swee[p] under the beds,” “[set] the national table,” and “cloth[e] his large family” (Rinehart, “Waiting for the Stork,” 26–27). 18. For ties between Arendt’s concept of the social and Marx’s concept of alienation, see Pitkin (Attack, 134–144). Eli Zaretsky notes that Progressive reformers’ “key concept was that of the ‘social,’” and he argues that “a certain kind of alienated public life and a certain kind of alienated private life have expanded together” as twin effects of a welfare state committed to the family wage (“Place of the Family,” 207, 218). For more recent critical accounts of intimacy, to which my thinking is indebted, see Warner, Publics; Gaonkar and Povinelli, “Technologies,” 389; and Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” 19. See Armstrong, Desire; Lang, Syntax of Class, 13; Romero, Home Fronts, 6, 33; and Merish, Sentimental Materialism, 2, 3. 20. See Korobkin, Criminal Conversations; and Gordon, “Our National Hearthstone.” 21. See Sklar, “Historical Foundations.” 22. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 437. See also Skocpol and Ikenberry, “Political Formation,” 105; Gordon, Pitied, 161; and Halem, Divorce Reform, 81. 23. For a checklist of such works, see Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 194n53, and “Not Just the Facts.” See also Edmunds, “Modern Domestic Fiction.” 24. In addition to Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism, the new work on U.S. modernism and the welfare state includes Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism; Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal; and McCann, Gumshoe America. 25. Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 206. 26. Ibid., 9, 18, 13, 185, 173–174. 27. See Gordon, Pitied, 64, 105, 192, 297–299; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 135, 175, 190. 28. On women reformers’ leading role in developing the norms of “social science quantitative work” and “statistical work” in the United States, see Gordon, Pitied, 169, 171. 29. On the divergence of white men’s and women’s legacies in the social sciences, see Silverberg, “Introduction,” 3–32. For discussions of early black sociologists, see

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Rudwick, “W. E. B. DuBois,” 25–55; and Jones, “Tradition,” 121–163. For discussions of black women’s welfare activity, see Salem, To Better Our World; Shaw, What a Woman; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, ch. 6; and Gordon, “Black and White” and Pitied, ch. 5. 30. On black social workers’ experience, see Shaw, What a Woman, 188–192; and Walkowitz, Working with Class, 17, 213, 241–243. For African Americans’ role in the federal government, see King, Separate; Gordon, Pitied, 138–139; and Weiss, Farewell, esp. ch. 7. 31. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 9; and Ross, “Development,” 125. 32. See U.S. Senate, Conference, 36; cited in Michel, “Limits of Maternalism,” 294. 33. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, ch. 8; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, ch. 2. 34. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, chs. 7 and 9; Ladd-Taylor, “Hull House,” 110–126; and Lemons, Woman Citizen, 145–147. 35. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 502. 36. See Gordon, “Putting Children First,” 71. 37. See Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 71, 73. 38. See Gordon, “Our National Hearthstone.” 39. See Cott, “Giving Character,” 119. 40. See Kline, Building a Better Race, chs. 2 and 3; and Kevles, In the Name, 99–100, 110–112. 41. See Kevles, In the Name, 97. 42. See Platt, Child Savers, 9–10, 129–130, 139, 141–145, 176; and Halem, Divorce Reform, 116–134. On the bias against inadequate or absent mothers, see Michel, “Limits of Maternalism,” 299; and Gordon, Pitied, 45. 43. See Judd, “Education,” 329, 367; Ravitch, Left Back, 108. 44. See Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 63–66, 81–96, 115–120; Matthews, “Just a Housewife,” 148, 157; Helvenston and Bubolz, “Home Economics”; Berlage, “Establishment,” 196, 200; and Holt, Linoleum, 170–177. 45. Grant, “Modernizing Mothers,” 56. 46. See Sedlak, “Attitudes”; Michel, “Limits of Maternalism,” 280–292; Judd, “Education,” 358, 370; Frank, “Childhood,” 768, 774; Walker, “Privately Supported,” 1173–1174. 47. See Judd, “Education,” 325; and Walker, “Privately Supported,” 1171. 48. Ehrenreich, Altruistic Imagination, 55, 60–65, 76, 131, 136–137, 188; and Wenocur and Reisch, From Charity, 31, 47, 55, 62, 63, 71. 49. Shaw, What a Woman, 188–190. 50. See Frank, “Childhood,” 752; Sedlak, “Attitudes,” 75–77; and Wenocur and Reisch, From Charity, 154, 214, 218, 260. 51. Donzelot, Policing of Families, 91–92. 52. On the avant-garde and little magazines, see Francis, Secret Treachery, ch. 2; Platt, “The Little Review”; and Stansell, American Moderns, 132–133, 166–177. For information on individual writers’ contributions to these magazines, see Herring, Djuna, 352–356, 363; Kerman and Eldridge, Lives, 395–398; and Martin, Nathanael West, 143–150.

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53. See Chisholm, “Obscene Modernism”; Goodwin, “Jean Toomer”; Veitch, American Superrealism; and Denning, Cultural Front, 122–123. 54. See, for instance, Suleiman, Subversive Intent; Lewis, Politics of Surrealism, 71–74; and Sawelson-Gorse, Women in Dada. See also Williams, Politics of Modernism, 56–57. 55. See “Against Past-Loving Venice” and “Marriage and the Family” in Marinetti, Selected Writings, 57, 76, 77; and Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto, 1918” and “An Introduction to Dada” in Motherwell, Dada Painters, 81, 403. 56. Alexandre et al., “Hands Off Love,” 160, 163; Lewis, Politics of Surrealism, 137; Matich, “Remaking the Bed,” 60. See also Boym, Common Places, ch. 1. 57. See Foley, Spectres, 11–13, 105; Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, 104; Stansell, American Moderns, 313–317; Buhle, “Socialist.” 58. See Goldman, Women. 59. On this point, see Gosse, “To Organize.” 60. See Calverton, Bankruptcy, 214. 61. Toomer, Wayward, 258, 268. 62. Catt, “Lies-at-Large,” 202. See also Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution, ch. 13. 63. Lemons, Woman Citizen, 146–147, 209–227. For a contemporary account of the right-wing assault on the Women’s and Children’s Bureaus, see Howard, “Our Professional Patriots.” 64. See, for instance, Goodsell, History, 498–506, and Problems, 205–206, 240, 267–268, 498, 502; Groves, Social Problems, 182–184; Folsom, Family, 156, 161, 163, 241, 278, 294, 297, 402–403, 424, 569–573. Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals includes a chapter on “The Family and the State,” which places the Russian experience in a wider, European context (204–220). 65. Calhoun, Since the Civil War, 327. 66. Calverton, Bankruptcy, 14, 12. 67. See Schmalhausen and Calverton, Woman’s Coming of Age, 482; Calverton and Schmalhausen, New Generation and Sex in Civilization. 68. See McGovern, “American Woman”; and Burnham, “Progressive Era.” 69. Allen, Only Yesterday, 99. 70. See Owen Johnson, Salamander, foreword. 71. See Aikman, “Amazons,” 27, 33. In an informal survey of journals from the period, I found a wide range of popular references to “revolutionary” changes in the status of women, marriage, education, childrearing, household labor, contraceptive use, and media portrayals of sexuality. For specifics, see Gregory, “Changing Morality,” 296; Hays, “Modern Marriage,” 33; Hinkle, “Chaos,” 9; Villard, “Sex,” 388; Dublin, “Home-Making,” 335; Barnard, “Child,” 324; Blanton and Riley, “Shell Shocks,” 283; Lindsey and Evans, Companionate Marriage, 318; Frederick, Selling, 169 (cited in Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 162); and Watson, “After the Family,” 66, 67. 72. Cowley, Exile’s Return, 63, 64. 73. On the Village embrace of Sanger and Freud, see Stansell, American Moderns, 234–241; Fishbein, “Freud”; and Douglas, Terrible Honesty.

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74. See Cott, Grounding, 172–174; and Ewen, Captains, 87–89, 94, 198–202. For discussions of how mass consumption came to be seen as a necessary support of democracy, see McGovern, “Consumption”; and Cohen, “New Deal State.” 75. See Halem, Divorce Reform, 40–48. 76. See Lindsey and Evans, Companionate Marriage, 175–176. 77. See Hülsenbeck, “Dada Forward,” 48–49. 78. See Grant, “Modernizing Mothers”; and Goldstein, “Part of the Package.” 79. On this point, see Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal.” 80. On this point, see Glickman, Living Wage, esp. 155–162. 81. See Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives, 280–285; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 156–162. Quoted material appears in Abramovitz on 283 and in Mink on 159. 82. See King, Separate, 189–202; Weiss, Farewell, 237–238, 296–297; and Coontz, Way We Never Were, 76–79. 83. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 57, 56. 84. On this point, see Erenberg, Steppin’ Out; Peiss, Cheap Amusements; and Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, chs.7 and 8. 85. Buhle, “Socialist,” 2262. 86. For Hofstadter’s discussion of Progressive Era tensions between the old and new middle class, see Age of Reform, 217–218. 87. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 25. 88. See Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics. 89. Modernists’ positive evaluation of distortion inverts realist codes of literary value, which attribute grotesque distortion and disproportion to a bad (romantic or sentimental) other. See, for example, Glazener, Reading for Realism, 38, 39; and Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, 327, 328. 90. Arendt, Human Condition, 46. 91. See Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital” and Outline, 87. For a compatible argument, see Donzelot, Policing of Families, 205–207, 224–226. For Bourdieu’s references to Bakhtin and Rabelais, see Distinction, 491. See also his suggestive comments on the ways in which children incorporate various classed versions of the conceptual schemes of a given society through daily contact with the “objectified schemes” which order “the internal space of the house and the relation of this internal space to external space” (Outline, 90). 92. Bourdieu, Outline, 167. 93. See Donzelot, Policing of Families, 53; and Zaretsky, “Place of the Family,” 191–192. 94. Calhoun, Since the Civil War, 327. 95. For an overview of this historical shift, see Handler and Hasenfeld, Moral Construction, esp. 135–138. 96. Thus Bruce Robbins argues for a leftist program that “would look beyond welfare” “in the long term” while insisting “in the short term . . . that welfare tasks like providing a safety net and re-distributing wealth even to a limited degree form a transnational rather than a merely national project” (“Cosmopolitanism,” 250). 97. See Weiss, Farewell, 299; and Brinkley, End of Reform, 164–170. 98. See, for instance, Broberg and Roll-Hansen, Eugenics; Goldman, Women; Boym, Common Places; and Stites, Women’s Liberation, ch. 12.

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99. On contemporary family-values politics, see Jagger and Wright, Changing Family Values, esp. ch. 1; Noble, Welfare as We Knew It, chs. 6–7; and Stacey, In the Name, chs. 3–4.

CHAPTER 1 Throughout this chapter, references to Ryder appear parenthetically, designated by the abbreviation R. 1. Citations from the dust jacket of Ryder are drawn from the 1928 Horace Liveright edition, housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. On the radical reputation of The Little Review, see Platt, “The Little Review”; and Francis, Secret Treachery, ch. 2. 2 For Barnes’s biographical information, see Herring, Djuna, 66, 117–129, 130, 142–143. Barnes also regularly commented on social welfare issues in her New York journalism, writing about the prison system, rival theories of charity, educational surveillance, female juvenile delinquency, and the human “refuse” housed in “the prisons, hospitals, and home for incurables” (Barnes, New York, 290, 292). 3. Herring, Djuna, 4–18, 24–26, 31–32, 34, 38–40, 43–44. 4 The following timeline of the Ryder family history will help to situate the novel’s action in a wider social context: Sophia marries in 1860, and Wendell, her third child, is born in 1865 (R 17). He meets his first wife, Amelia, in London in 1886 (R 32), marries her around 1887 (R 84), and returns to the United States. Kate-Careless joins the Ryder household in Storm-king-on-Hudson in 1897 (R 84). When Sophia visits Boots, the magnate, Wendell is at least forty (R 177), putting the time of her visit around 1905. Amelia’s marriage with Wendell breaks up after “twenty-six years,” or around 1913 (R 241). For two earlier accounts of the novel’s subversive relationship to earlier domestic fiction, see Kannenstine, Djuna Barnes, 36; and Miller, Late Modernism, 129–130. 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 216; and Donzelot, Policing of Families, 91–92, 85. 6. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 36. Barnes cites the rhetoric of social housekeeping directly in a 1918 interview with a “Woman Police Deputy” who exclaims, “The state, the world, the entire administration and public life—what is it if not housekeeping on an immense scale?” (Barnes, New York, 314). 7 See Herring, Djuna, 1, 313n2; and Dalton, “Escaping from Eden,” 167. For the leading biographical evaluation of Barnes’s history of sexual abuse, see Herring, Djuna, 53–64, 268–272. 8. On campaigns to raise age-of-consent laws, see Larson, “Even a Worm.” On maternalists’ labor protection legislation, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, ch. 7. On juvenile courts and school attendance, see Platt, Child Savers, 9–10, 127–130, 139–145. On mothers’ pension programs, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, ch. 8; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, ch. 2. The theme of protecting women’s sexual virtue ran through many of these reform initiatives. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 413–414; Larson, “Even a Worm,” 65; and Gordon, Pitied, 60, 63. The same concern surfaces in “Woman Police Deputy” (Barnes, New York, 306–308). 9. Wilkinson, “Selfless,” 592, 591. 10. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 19.

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11. Mary Kelley establishes these facts about a number of sentimental novelists in Private Woman, 18, 25–26, 126–137, 145–146. 12. For an overview of social benevolence in the Gilded Age, see Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, ch. 6. On the relationships among scientific charity, social work, and corporate philanthropy, see Wenocur and Reisch, From Charity, 31, 47–49, 56–58, 62–69, 107–114; and Alchon, Invisible Hand, 10–15, 52, 56, 75, 171. For Andrew Carnegie’s views on the dangers of “indiscriminate charity,” see Gospel of Wealth, 14–15. For cited information on mothers’ pension programs, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers, 465–479; Gordon, Pitied, 45, 60–64; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 39, 49–52. Barnes rehearses contemporary associations among poverty, immorality, and bad housekeeping in “Woman Police Deputy,” in New York, 309. 13. On this latter point, see Coontz, Way We Never Were, 56–57. 14. Attacks on capitalist postures of benevolence were commonplace by the time Barnes published Ryder. In an 1873 piece for Harper’s, Barnes’s grandmother criticizes the “narrow charity” of the Gilded Age from a pro-labor standpoint (Buddington, “Where Is the Child?” 239). See also Barnes’s 1915 interview with Mother Jones (Interviews, 102). Where Mother Jones and Zadel’s figure of the sorrowful Dreamer both articulate maternalist versions of anticapitalist critique, Sophia emerges as a trickster figure bent on beating benevolent capitalists at their own game. 15. Sophia pays tribute to the power of the press on the walls of her writing room back home, which are “covered over” (R 13), like her heavily skirted body, with a thick layer of images. The uppermost layer consists of “clippings from newspapers” and includes the photo of a “pretty girl untimely raped” (R 14). Buried in the bottom layer, “Beatrice Cenci” appears beside “Shakespeare and the Divine Dante” (R 14). 16. Dalton, “Escaping from Eden,” 166. 17. On the symbolic power of the grotesque to degrade and revive, see Bakhtin, Rabelais, 21. 18. Emerson, Essays, 70, 262, 403, 406. 19. For information on these religious communities, see Foster, Women, Family and Utopia. For biographical material linking Wald Barnes to the Mormons, see Herring, Djuna, 31–32. 20. Gordon, “Our National Hearthstone,” 305. 21. Ibid., 316. 22. On the 1879 decision, see Clayton, “Supreme Court,” 51. See also Iverson, “Debate”; and Lyman, Political Deliverance, 22–26, 124–149. 23. Judd, “Education,” 325. 24. See Tyack, “Ways of Seeing”; and Gordon, “Patriots and Christians.” For Barnes’s own portrayal of the public school as an institution of social control, see New York, 60. 25. Emerson, Essays, 279. 26. See Field, Djuna, 185. Field notes Barnes’s declaration that the break-up of the family through state intervention was the one part of her novel she made up (185). 27. Here, it is useful to compare O’Connor’s comment with Ida B. Wells’s discussion of a prominent white Mississippi family’s attempts to explain away the coloring of two dark children. See Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors (10), reprinted in On Lynchings.

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28. Wilkinson, “Selfless,” 592. 29. As Bonnie Kime Scott notes, the dream ox is a castrated bull (Refiguring Modernism, 111). On the link between castration and lynching, see Wiegman, “Anatomy”; and Hodes, “Sexualization.” 30. Dalton, “Escaping from Eden,” 167–168. See also Ponsot, “A Reader’s Ryder,” 98, 102. 31. See note 15 above. 32. Dalton, “Escaping from Eden,” 168. 33. Ibid., 165. 34. O’Neal, Life, 52. On Barnes’s wider efforts to deconstruct the interview’s promised “narrative of [ feminine] self-exposure,” see Green, Spectacular Confessions, 173.

CHAPTER 2 Throughout this chapter, references to Toomer’s Cane are cited parenthetically within the text as C. References to Natalie Mann (included in Toomer, Wayward ) are cited parenthetically as NM. References to Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio appear parenthetically as WO, and references to Grimké’s “Goldie” (included in her Selected Works) appear as G. 1. McKay, “Socialism,” 52. Some maternalist reformers openly endorsed mob violence as a legitimate way to protect white women and white homes. See, for instance, Ida B. Wells’s discussion of Frances Willard in A Red Record (ch. 8), reprinted in On Lynchings. See also Larson, “Even a Worm,” 47–53. 2. For discussions of black women’s welfare activity, see Salem, To Better Our World; Shaw, What a Woman; Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, ch. 6; Gordon, “Black and White” and Pitied, ch. 5. On black clubwomen’s antilynching activism, see Carby, “On the Threshold.” On the politics of black respectability, see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race. 3. Gordon, Pitied, 132. 4. On Toomer’s racial self-positioning, see Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse” and “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ ”; Scruggs and VanDemarr, Jean Toomer, 105; Johnson, “Those Who Stayed”; and Foley, “Jean Toomer’s Washington.” On his engagement with black struggles in Cane, see Foley, “In the Land” (188) and “Jean Toomer’s Sparta.” 5. On the making of Cane, see Kerman and Eldridge, Lives, 81–108. On the NAACP campaign against lynching, see Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, 18, 41–71, 73, 77–79. 6. On the rise of the black press, see Vincent, Voices, 19–31. For a list of black newspapers known for their stands against lynching, see Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, 13. 7. On the North American conflation of blackness and the grotesque, see Cassuto, Inhuman Race, 1–29. On the derogatory portrayal of African American sexual and familial relations, see Gutman, Black Family, 531–544; and Guy-Sheftall, Daughters of Sorrow, 37–90. On efforts to revise African Americans’ public image in this era, see Gates, “Trope.”

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8. On Toomer’s ties with the Village and the intellectual circle of “young America,” see McKay, Jean Toomer, 27–31, 47; Kerman and Eldridge, Lives, 70, 92–93, 105; and Scruggs and VanDemarr, Jean Toomer, 6–7, 47–52. On the white American avant-garde’s primitivist embrace of black culture, see North, Dialect of Modernism, 127–146, 162–174; and Scruggs and VanDemarr, Jean Toomer, 83–108. For a dissenting viewpoint, see Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance, ch. 4. 9. On the embrace of African American music and dance by the urban white middle class, see Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 22–25, 150–158, 249–259. 10. My argument here is indebted to Toni Morrison’s discussion of racism as a “trauma” compounded by “national amnesia” (Conversations, 258, 257) and to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s account of the roots of middle-class hysteria in a rejection of the grotesque sediment of popular memory (Politics and Poetics, ch. 5). Toomer notes that he was reading “Freud, and the psychoanalysts” between “the summer of 1920 and the spring of 1922” (Wayward, 117, 122). 11. Bederman, “Civilization,” 14. 12. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings. Quoted material appears in A Red Record, 97, 47. The pagination in this reprint edition begins anew with each pamphlet. 13. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors, 20. 14. Quotations, in order of appearance, are drawn from Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors (4, 12) and A Red Record (91). 15. For a list of lynching dramas from the period, see Perkins and Stephens, Strange Fruit, appendix 2. Judith L. Stephens notes the prevalence of domestic motifs in these plays (Perkins and Stephens, Strange Fruit, 9; and Stephens, “Racial Violence,” 660). For Daylanne K. English’s argument that African American women’s antilynching plays “offer a scathing indictment of an entire racist, morally inverse modern social order,” see Unnatural Selections, 120. On Grimké’s and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s antilynching literature, see Hull, Color, 117–132, 171–172; and Tate, Domestic Allegories, 209–230, and “Introduction,” lvii–lxi. 16. Foley, “Jean Toomer’s Washington,” 301–302. See also White, “The Work of a Mob.” 17. On Grimké’s use of the figure of the hysteric to portray “the psychological effects of racism,” see Storm (“Reactions,” 470) and English (Unnatural Selections, 129). 18. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 248. 19. On Anderson’s view that Toomer himself was an exception among African Americans because he was “neurotic,” see Turner, “An Intersection,” 105. 20. I borrow this phrase from Homi K. Bhabha, who defines it as the colonizer’s “terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust and anarchy which are the signal points of identification and alienation, scenes of fear and desire, in colonial texts” (“Other Question,” 25). In contrast, I use the phrase to indicate the surfacing of symptoms of racial trauma in the bodies and speech of racial oppressors and oppressed alike. 21. This model of race is consistent with other remarks Toomer made on the subject. He notes, for instance, the psychiatric “fact that mental and emotional factors are involved in and frequently cause bodily disease,” and extends this idea to claim that “the entire ordinary self oppresses and deranges the body” (Jean Toomer Reader, 58).

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Toomer represents “racial conditioning” in the same terms when he reviews a friend’s conviction that he is “colored”: “there it was, having gone down from his head and emotions to become lodged in the behavior patterns of his body. And a similar kind of fixing and conditioning had doubtless occurred also in members of the white group at large” (Wayward, 122). 22. See Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 2; and NAACP, Thirty Years, 15. 23. Kutzinski, “Unseasonal Flowers,” 170. 24. For subsequent assessments of the critical force of new urban forms of African American music and dance, see Carby, “Policing”; and Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom (chs. 7–8) and “Sexual Pantomimes.” 25. On the display of middle-class aspirations among working-class patrons of urban black entertainment, see Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 159–160, 183. See also Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187, 204–211. 26. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors, 20. 27. For an earlier reading of the twisting motif in “Kabnis,” see Scruggs and VanDemarr, Jean Toomer, 192. 28. Toomer’s focus on black men’s feminization both invokes and revises earlier arguments regarding the power of lynch rule to emasculate black men. For contemporary versions of the same argument, see Carby, “On the Threshold,” 308; and Wiegman, “Anatomy,” 224. 29. For a possible connection between the drama’s mysterious northern investigator, Lewis, and Walter White, see Foley, “In the Land,” 188. 30. In contrast, newspaper accounts of past and future lynchings play a prominent role in Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Safe,” and Grimké’s “Goldie.” 31. Weiss, Farewell, 96, 119. See also Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, chs. 5–7. 32. Gordon, Pitied, 302. 33. On these points, see Weiss, Farewell, 178, 235, 297. 34. Some evidence suggests that Toomer backed away from his successful literary career in order to distance himself from the lynching plot. Margery Latimer reports that he told her, “I wrote the story of a negro lynching and they want me to keep on writing that over and over, feeling crucified myself. They want me to keep on with that forever” (Kerman and Eldridge, Lives, 198). At the same time, Toomer’s unfulfilled desire to start a magazine as Cane went to press suggests the scope of his ambition to shape the contours of national black expression. In a 1922 letter to Anderson, Toomer argues that his magazine “would function organically for what I feel to be the budding of the Negro’s consciousness.” See Turner, “An Intersection,” 104.

CHAPTER 3 Throughout this chapter, references to American Beauty are cited parenthetically as AB. References to Ferber’s autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, appear parenthetically as PT, and references to Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America appear parenthetically as PP. I would like to thank Crystal Bartolovich for helpful explanations of the stock market and Monika Wadman for ongoing discussions of Polish

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history, U.S. immigrant culture, and white-to-Indian masquerade. Both women’s knowledge enhanced this chapter’s arguments. 1. Higham, Strangers, 64–65. 2. Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 25. For the argument that “the family” emerges as “the essential form of nativist identity” in this period, see Michaels, Our America, 11. 3. Madison Grant includes the “ideals of family life” in his list of “Nordic” racial characteristics (Passing, 153; cited in Ludmerer, Genetics, 22–23). Similarly, Ferber’s friend and mentor William Allen White associates the strength of U.S. democracy with “the Teutonic Aryan” whose freedom inheres in “the home with the mother never out of caste” and children with “no bondswoman’s blood in our veins” (Old Order, 198, 197, 199; cited in Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 77). 4 American Beauty appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal between July and November 1931. For a summary of Ferber’s career, see Wilson, White Collar Fictions, 57. 5. On the Americanizing campaigns of patriotic societies and the role of house museums in these campaigns, see Higham, Strangers, 74–75, 236–237; Wallace, “Visiting the Past,” 141; and Conforti, Imagining New England, 248, 253. See also Conforti on the popular writer Alice Morse Earle, whose books “reassembled the artifacts of colonial domesticity and imbued them with the cultural politics of Victorian America” (226). 6. On maternalist reformers’ mixed record on questions of racial exclusion versus racial assimilation, see Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 7, 12, 39, 49–50, 52. Distinguishing between the reform efforts of racial assimilationists and eugenicists was not always easy. Compare, for instance, Daniel Kevles’s description of eugenicist Fitter Family contests of the 1920s (In the Name, 61–63) with Marilyn Irvin Holt’s descriptions of the Better Baby contests sponsored by maternalists in the Children’s Bureau a decade earlier (Linoleum, 117). Wendy Kline argues that eugenicists themselves shifted from hereditarian arguments about bad genes to environmental arguments about bad mothering to justify compulsory state sterilization in the thirties (Building a Better Race, 100). 7. Higham, Strangers, 319–324. 8. Kevles, In the Name, 99–100, 110–112; and Kline, Building a Better Race, 58, 107. Kevles reports that, “by the mid-thirties, some twenty thousand sterilizations had been legally performed in the United States” (112); these were disproportionately imposed on black and immigrant families, many of whom were Catholic (168). 9. Two influential accounts of U.S. nativism present as chronologically distinct campaigns that I, following the work of Gwendolyn Mink, here regard as contemporaneous. See Higham, Strangers, 262–263; Michaels, Our America, 67, 136; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 78, 158–160. 10. English, Unnatural Selections, 17. See also Higham, Strangers, 19–23. For opposing arguments on Ferber’s views regarding “intermarriage,” see Campbell (“Written,” 33) and Blejwas (“Inherited and Disinherited,” 49, 55). 11. For Ferber’s antipathy to the avant-garde and the bohemian, see PT 182, 191; and Gilbert, Ferber, 182–183. 12. Grant, Passing, 263, 86, 48, 49. See also Higham, Strangers, 271. 13. Roberts, Why Europe, 98, 113, 46–47, 114; and Higham, Strangers, 273. For other examples of antisentimental eugenicist rhetoric, see Kline, Building a Better Race, 27; Ludmerer, Genetics, 26; and Ordover, American Eugenics, 51–53.

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14. Ross, Old World, 292, 127, 291. Ferber credits a conversation with Walter Lippmann, to whom she dedicates the novel, for its inspiration (PT 331). For Lippmann’s review of Ross’s book, see “Pride of Race.” 15. Bogdan, Freak Show, chs. 6–8. Bogdan uses the phrase “respectable freaks” to title chapter 8 (200). For the practice of including freak show photos in home photo albums, see 16. 16. Higham, Strangers, 324. 17. Ferber’s baby metaphor resonates disturbingly against the backdrop of the times. As Wendy Kline notes, “between 1931 and 1939, over twenty thousand institutionalized patients were sterilized” in the United States, “nearly triple the number sterilized between 1920 and 1929” (Building a Better Race, 107). 18. For a discussion of these motifs, see Glazener, Reading for Realism, 194–201, 222, 226; Conforti, Imagining New England, 168, 203, 211; Brown, Inventing New England, 150–154; and Barron, Those Who Stayed, 31, 37–39. 19. Jacobson, Whiteness, 68–90. 20. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 24. 21. Roediger, Colored White, 146. 22. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 35. See also Higham, Strangers, 273, 276–277, 285. 23. Trowbridge, Old Houses, 160, 401, 460. 24. Ibid., 281, 320, 438. 25. For an earlier discussion of these themes, see Campbell, “Written.” 26. Grant, Passing, 228, 227, 41. 27. Trowbridge, Old Houses, 160. 28. Higham, Strangers, 64–65, 315. 29. See Anderson, Snake Oil, 55. For Anderson’s discussion of Indian medicine shows, see 61–73. It is likely that Ferber bases Temmie’s show identity on “Little Bright Eyes,” the fictional Indian princess used to promote “Kickapoo” medicinal products (63). 30. Bogdan, Freak Show, 98. 31. Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 59, 63–64. 32. All of these traits of bad immigrant homes recur in city and county records cited by Thomas and Znaniecki (PP 2:1658–1687, 1707–1735, 1802–1817). 33. To take one example, eugenic family studies of the period frequently read housekeeping and childrearing skills as indices of race. See Rafter, White Trash, 134, 135, 139, 147, 148. 34. May, Screening, 174, 206–211; and Rogin, Blackface, 49. See also Deloria, Playing Indian. 35. On this point, see Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings. Lawrence Glickman notes that, in this period, organized labor associated the “American” standard of living with the higher consumer needs that purportedly distinguished native-born white male workers from “immigrants, blacks, and women” (Living Wage, 85). 36. On Ferber’s use of the term “Polack,” see Blejwas, “Inherited and Disinherited,” 56, 60n27. 37. Grant, Passing, 18.

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38. Ibid., 228, 227. 39. For a rejection of racial explanations of social behavior, see PP 2:1823. For contrasting arguments regarding Thomas ’s views on contemporary Americanization campaigns and social reform efforts, see Janowitz, “Introduction,” xiv, xxvii, lvi; and Cappetti, Writing Chicago, 101, 105–106. 40. Fred Pfeil associates this narrative strand in Ferber’s work with the “desire . . . for a feminist heterosexuality—one founded, that is, on the free flow of reciprocating, ungendered needs and capacities rather than on rigid, gendered antinomies” (Another Tale, 182). Some of Ferber’s free flows, more multi- than ungendered, jump the fence of heterosexuality. 41. Sunstein, Second Bill, 14–15. 42. On New Deal interventions in agriculture, see Perkins, Crisis, ch. 2; and Gilbert and Howe, “Beyond State.” On the FSA photographs of the rural poor, see Levine, “Historian and Icon,” 15–42; and Veitch, American Superrealism, 9–10, 67–68. 43. For the term “not-quite-white” and for a wider discussion of the impact of welfare legislation and the GI Bill on the construction of “an expanded version of whiteness,” see Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 36, 38–52, 60, 89–102. See also Jacobson, Whiteness, 95, 246–247; and Bennett, When Dreams Came True, chs. 8 and 9. On the federal government’s postwar endorsement of racist practices in the housing market, see King, Separate, 189–202. On the restricted educational options of black GIs in the South, see Mohr, “World War II,” 43, 45–46. 44. Ross, Old World, 143. 45. Roberts, Why Europe, 14, 116, 19, 14, 52, 15. 46. Ross, Old World, 129, 154, 164. 47. Grant, Passing, 91. On the wider imbrication of nativist and anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States, see Higham, Strangers, 92–94, 160–161, 277–286, 309–310. 48. Canby, “Gusto vs. Art,” 201. On Canby’s role as editor of the Review, his later tenure on the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, and his xenophobia, see Rubin, Making Middlebrow, 115–123. 49. Gilbert, Ferber, 293. Gilbert also identifies Ferber’s Connecticut home as Treasure Hill (301–302). As the title of her autobiography suggests, the biblical passage in which Yahweh identifies the Israelites as “a peculiar treasure unto me above all people . . . and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:5) provides a governing metaphor for Ferber’s text (PT 9, 255, 383) and underwrites its strategic conflation of Jewish and American identity (PT 25, 68, 82–83, 313).

CHAPTER 4 Throughout this chapter, references to Yonnondio are cited parenthetically as Y. References to The Home and the Child, authored by the Subcommittee on Housing and Home Management, are cited parenthetically as HC. 1. For biographical information on Olsen in the years she was writing Yonnondio, see Coiner, Better Red, 145–147, 174–175. On social movements of the early thirties, see Gordon, Pitied, 186–187, 209–251. On CPUSA activity in this period, see Gosse, “To Organize.” For Olsen’s interview comment, see Rosenfelt, “From the Thirties,” 383.

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2. See Olsen, “A Note about This Book,” in the preface to Yonnondio. The edition of Yonnondio to which I refer includes several unused portions of the original text in a final “Editor’s Note.” 3. On the CPUSA in the mid-thirties, see Buhle and Georgakas, “Communist Party,” 150; and Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 55–59. For the novel’s original plot outline, see Coiner, Better Red, 178–179. 4. Olsen asserted that her recovery of the text involved “no rewriting, no new writing” (“A Note”). On her editorial role in the novel’s reassembly, see Wilson, “Unlimn’d”; and Linden, “Negotiating Upward Mobility.” 5. Denning, Cultural Front, 471, 118–123. 6. For two reviews from the early seventies that take opposing stances on the novel’s sentimental content, see Peter Ackroyd, “The Living Image” (26–28), and Scott Turow, “Review of Yonnondio” (28–31), both in Nelson and Huse, Critical Response. For current evaluations of the novel’s “lyricism” and “unsentimental” style, see Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 125; Coiner, “Literature,” 160; and Faulkner, Protest, 38, 136. On Olsen’s own insistence that her novel is “not sentimenta[l],” see Duncan, Unless Soul Clap, 52. 7. See Szalay, New Deal Modernism, ch. 4; and McCann, Gumshoe America, ch. 3. For McCann’s phrase “macho sentimentality,” see 249. 8. On the novel’s oblique allusions to Anna Holbrook’s Jewish lineage, see Wilson, “Unlimn’d,” 45n8; and Lyons, “Tillie Olsen.” See also Y 27. 9. On maternalists’ role in shaping the New Deal even as they were sidelined by it, see Gordon, Pitied, chs. 7 and 9. On distinctions between elite working mothers and other white mothers built into the Social Security Act, see Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 135. On the impact of the federal assumption that African American mothers would remain wage workers, see Gordon, Pitied, 197, 272, 304; and Mink, Wages of Motherhood, ch. 6. 10. See Denning, Cultural Front, 122–123. 11. On modernists’ vexed relationship to sentimental culture, see Clark, Sentimental Modernism; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, esp. ch. 6; and Francis, Secret Treachery, ch. 2. Joel Pfister argues that the sentimental persists at the level of popular culture in this period even as the middle and upper classes reject—or recode—sentimentalism in favor of the psychological (“Glamorizing the Psychological,” 182). 12. See Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 65–78; and Gosse, “To Organize,” 111. See also Brown, “Savagely Fathered.” On the impact that Grace Hutchins’s and Mary Inman’s analyses of domestic labor had in U.S. Communist circles, in 1934 and 1940 respectively, see Weigand, Red Feminism, ch. 2; and Coiner, Better Red, 45–46, 156. 13. Skeggs, Formations, 67, 76. For an overview of initiatives aimed at regulating the working-class domestic sphere in the United States, see Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, 124–131. For an account of the central role played by sentimental practices of caregiving in the formation of modern liberal identity, see Merish, Sentimental Materialism. 14. For titles and lyrical excerpts, see Y 27, 53, 101. Six of the eight songs I have been able to identify narrate tales of true love lost. These include “Shenandoah” (1826), “Darling Nelly Gray” (1856), “Sweet Genevieve” (1869), “In the Gloaming” (1877), “Red

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River Valley” (1896), and “Down in the Valley” (1912). The two earliest songs in this group are exceptional in their willingness to indict “trade”—namely, the slave trade and unfair trade with Native Americans—as the cause of broken hearts. 15. See Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 24. 16. On Bourdieu’s ideas regarding “the domestic transmission of cultural capital,” its relation to scholastic achievement and to a process of embodiment that “costs time, time that must be invested personally by the investor,” see “Forms of Capital,” 244, and Distinction, 75. The stay-at-home mother’s maximal investment of her own time in her children’s acculturation marks the crucial distinction between sentimental mothering and the forms of child care that previously prevailed among social and economic elites. 17. The immigrant neighbor Mr. Kryckszi draws Jim into plans for a slowdown at the packinghouse in the last chapter (Y 114, 124). On the positions of organized labor and the CPUSA regarding women’s domestic role, see Schofield, “Rebel Girls”; Strom, “Challenging ‘Woman’s Place’”; Shaffer, “Women”; Coiner, Better Red, ch. 2; and Weigand, Red Feminism, ch. 1. On the long-standing working-class male bias against women’s paid work in the United States, see Stansell, City of Women, ch. 7. On Marx’s mixed record of opinion on the subject, see Benenson, “Victorian Sexual Ideology.” 18. On the historical significance of the Sheppard-Towner Act, see Gordon, Pitied, 93–96; Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 66–73; and Ladd-Taylor, “Hull House,” ch. 6. For contrasting evaluations of the act’s impact on clients’ mortality rates, see Ladd-Taylor (“Hull House,” 186–187) and Holt (Linoleum, 118–119). 19. Kevles, In the Name, 111. 20. Kline, Building a Better Race, ch. 4. 21. Public maternity clinics disseminated medical information but no actual medical aid (Gordon, Pitied, 94–95). 22. Further details within Yonnondio suggest that the novel’s implied reader is white, female, and middle class. An earlier address casts readers as choosy consumers who waver over the purchase of a “cameo” of the Holbrook family’s suffering to “pin . . . onto” their “aesthetic hearts” (Y 20). Two other ladies in the text react with aversion to momentary contact with the Holbrooks (Y 98–99, 121). The text’s addresses to a judgmental middle-class reader rework a device used in the 1861 novel Life in the Iron Mills, which Olsen helped to return to print. There, the narrator urges the reader “to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me” into the home of the impoverished mill worker Hugh Wolfe, “and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night” (Davis, Life, 13, 25). 23. Here, I follow Beverley Skeggs’s argument that, under the welfare state, white working-class women constitute their domestic subjectivities in relation to “a judgemental [sic] external other who positions them as surveillant of themselves” (Formations, 89). 24. See Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 28, 40. 25. On the relationships among the Children’s Bureau, the prospect of socialized medicine, and Red baiting, see Gordon, Pitied, 256–257, 267; and Lemons, Woman Citizen, chs. 6 and 8. 26. For more detailed discussion of this point, see Gordon, Pitied, 195–199, 236–241, 272, 304. In the early eighties, Olsen told Erika Duncan that, “for years,” the

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Communist Party “was the fueling force for essential changes such as the establishment of social security, welfare, and union organization” (Unless Soul Clap, 53). 27. Calhoun, Since the Civil War, 327. 28. The Home and the Child originated as the report of a subcommittee chaired by Martha Van Rensselaer, the long-standing director of the College of Home Economics at Cornell University. Rensselaer helped to coordinate Cornell’s extension service network with New York state’s new public welfare system during FDR’s tenure as governor. See Grant (“Modernizing Mothers,” 63) and Babbitt (“Legitimizing Nutrition,” 151–162). 29. On the gap between the necessary domestic resources posited by The Home and the Child and a plan for how to secure them, see the concluding comments in the text’s introduction (6). 30. Yonnondio reiterates all of these criteria through their negation, portraying Mazie as a little girl who plays “between the outhouse and the garbage dump” (Y 3), watches her father bathe naked in the common room (Y 7), shares a bed with her brothers (Y 87–88), subsists on a diet of “fatback and cornmeal” (Y 16), suffers at school over “her scuffed shoes, rag-bag clothes, quilt coat” (Y 35), loses a neighbor’s gift of story books when her father sells them for drink (Y 39), and runs loose in streets thick with the stench of the packinghouses (Y 47, 68–69, 104, 108) or at the dump and over the railroad yards near her house (Y 103, 116–117). 31. Here, The Home and the Child provides government backing for a paradigm of “sentimental ownership” which, as Lori Merish argues, insists on “the continued existence of beloved objects” as “essential to the subject’s personal growth and emotional development” (Sentimental Materialism, 4, 117). 32. Citations, listed in the order in which they appear in my text, are drawn from Marx, Capital, 481, 548, 482, 530, 302, 425. For commentary on Marx’s trope of “money” as “the universal whore” and his more general habit of using “erotic imagery” to condemn capitalist society as “a giant whorehouse,” see Meyer, “Marxism,” esp. 87. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels raises the specters of workingclass men emasculated by household chores and of wage-earning women demoralized by their unchecked appetite for sex, drink, and “fine clothes” (218, 144, 162). For the persistence of these specters in the rhetoric of the U.S. labor movement, see Glickman, Living Wage, 36, 42. 33. For an alternative reading of the mine as a devouring woman, see Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire, 126, 129–130. 34. On the original definition of the term “unconscious” in this context, see Jameson, Political Unconscious, 20. 35. Olsen’s perfume metaphor resonates with the sentimental notion that properly used commodities “‘spiritualize’ and ‘refine’ the body” (Merish, Sentimental Materialism, 231).

CHAPTER 5 Throughout this chapter, references to West’s fiction are cited parenthetically as CW. 1. On West’s relationship to the Communist Party, see Martin, Nathanael West, 148–150, 221–223, 255–260, 343–353, 388–390.

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2. Ibid., 307. The 1932 strike called by the Farmers’ Holiday Association began in Sioux City, Iowa (Perkins, Crisis, 13). Townsend himself originally came to California from South Dakota (Holtzman, Townsend Movement, 59). 3. Holtzman, Townsend Movement, 36, 44, 46–47, 58, 84, 86. 4. Ibid., 87. On economists’ reactions to the plan, see ibid., 108, 109; and Skocpol and Ikenberry, “Political Formation,” 123. 5. On “$30 Every Thursday,” see Holtzman, Townsend Movement, 103. On OAI and Townsend’s enduring popularity, see Gordon, Pitied, 242, 255, 282–283. 6. For Roosevelt’s 1938 comments, see Brinkley, “New Deal,” 96–98. See also Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal.” 7. George Lipsitz notes that many of the New Deal’s public works programs were “aimed at stimulating suburban growth” and thus catered to the domestic needs of the white middle class (“Consumer Spending,” 131–132). For discussions of the New Deal and the rise of the citizen consumer, see Cohen, “New Deal State”; and McGovern, “Consumption.” 8. On Townsend’s alliance with Coughlin and his investigation on charges of fraud, see Holtzman, Townsend Movement, 156–168, 172–174. West continued to revise his novel through December 1938 (Martin, Nathanael West, 312, 322). 9. Featherstone, “Body,” 170. 10. Thus, Frederick Lewis Allen notes that “the most conspicuous sign” of the revolution in manners and morals “was the immense change in women’s dress and appearance” (Only Yesterday, 103). 11. West’s portrayal of the body beautiful rehearses themes long associated with the female consumer as a threatening figure of modernity. On this point, see Felski, Gender of Modernity, 65, 73, 74. 12. For details on Americana, see Martin, Nathanael West, 214–218. On West’s larger ties to the European avant-garde, see ibid., 67–71, 74, 82–91, 114, 124–126, 146; Veitch, American Superrealism; and Roberts, “Bonfire.” 13. Langan, “Consumers, Arise!” 143–146. 14. See Bürger, Theory, 22. For the phrase “bourgeois dissidents” and the distinction between “aristocratic” and “working-class” articulations of avant-garde revolt, see Williams, Politics of Modernism, 54–57. 15. Featherstone, “Body,” 177. 16. Thus, the body beautiful combined the society lady’s taste for conspicuous consumption, the prostitute’s taste for paint and artifice, the chorus girl’s and cabaret dancer’s taste for uninhibited sensual movement, and the working girl’s taste for public amusement. Insistently white in its visual presentation, it incorporated movements and expressive attitudes drawn from the new commercial culture of the urban black working class. In setting a premium on health, fitness, good hygiene, and an ethic of self-improvement, this body also bore the imprint of numerous nineteenth-century white middle-class reform movements. Mike Featherstone uses the phrase “calculating hedonism” to describe the contradictory complex of social meanings inscribed in this new body (“Body,” 171). His description finds an echo in Bourdieu’s description of the new “morality of pleasure as a duty” (Distinction, 367) and in Foucault’s description of

NOTES TO PAGES 156–166

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a contemporary “control by stimulation” (“Body/Power,” 57). All three phrases play on the breakdown of ruling oppositions once used to organize bodies by race and class. For further information on the body beautiful’s cultural origins, see Banner, American Beauty; Enstad, Ladies of Labor, chs. 1, 2; Erenberg, Steppin’ Out; Leach, True Love, chs. 1, 3, 9; May, Screening, ch. 5; and Peiss, Cheap Amusements and “Making Faces.” 17. Bourdieu, Distinction, 190; and see Shilling, Body and Social Theory, 144–145. 18. See, for instance, Seabury, “Stereotypes,” 228–229; Gregory, “Changing Morality,” 298; and Collins, “Woman’s Morality,” 35. 19. For a discussion of the constitutive opposition between the pure tastes of the bourgeoisie and the grotesque pleasures of the common people, see Bourdieu, Distinction, 486–491; and Bakhtin, Rabelais. See Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, ch. 5, for an analysis of the cultural injunction placed on the Victorian lady to maintain her own purity, and that of her class, by keeping her distance from the grotesque. 20. I am indebted here to Andreas Huyssen’s argument that “it was the culture industry, not the avantgarde [sic], which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century” (After the Great Divide, 15). For an interesting discussion of the body beautiful as a revolutionary project of the Russian avant-garde, see Bowlt, “Body Beautiful.” 21. For the role of sentimental culture in constituting “liberal consumer subjectivity,” see Merish, Sentimental Materialism, 25. 22. On this point, see Snyder, Voice of the City, 43, 52, 138. 23. See, for instance, Marinetti, “The Variety Theatre,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 126–131; and Tzara, “Zurich Chronicle,” in Motherwell, Dada Painters, 235–242. 24. On this point, see Dyer, White, 122–142. 25. Mauss, “Body Techniques,” 100. See also Blumer, Movies and Conduct, ch. 3; and Ryan, “Projection,” 506–507. 26. Olsen, Yonnondio, 104, 107–108. 27. For a photo reproduction of this ad, see Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings, 210. 28. Faye’s approach to love resonates with Herbert Blumer’s discussion of the “love techniques” (Movies and Conduct, 44) that American adolescents derive from watching Hollywood movies. Blumer bases his discussion on the survey responses of high school and college youth. The alienation effect crops up as a routine component of these responses and is particularly pronounced in statements where respondents report trying their “technique” “on” someone else; feelings of mirth and scorn in witnessing someone else’s “technique”; or failure. See, for instance, the hilarious account of one respondent’s failed attempts to model his “style” on “later Valentino” (Movies and Conduct, 53). As readers will recall from chapter 4, the state also promoted conditions of alienated intimacy in this period when it assumed the role of teaching white working-class women the proper way to care. In turning to the movies rather than to the state for her lessons in love, Faye chooses between distinct formations of alienated intimacy, but does not choose an alienated condition that the modern sentimental woman could somehow avoid. 29. For an alternative reading of Hollywood’s Cinderella films, see Ross, WorkingClass Hollywood, 194–208.

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30. Levine notes the practice of reporting on stars’ real-life bodily transformations amid ads for body remedies in movie magazines of the period. See “American Culture,” 218; and Featherstone, “Body,” 179–181. 31. May, Screening, 213. 32. In The Girl from Missouri (1934), the beautiful but common Eadie Chapman (Jean Harlow) is about to give herself to another man in despair when her unjustly alienated upper-class fiancé returns to her. Thrust into the shower, Eadie “comes clean” to the man she loves, as the waters dissolve the vulgar traits (drunkenness, flashy clothes, a gaudy perm) which make her unfit for high position. Purified, vindicated, and sopping wet, she leaves the bathroom directly for the wedding altar as the movie ends. In the harsher comedy of My Little Chickadee (1940), the delights of the tub surpass those of the wedding bed. When the new groom (W. C. Fields) emerges from a luxurious bath in his bride’s hotel suite—ridiculously clad in a woman’s bathrobe—he finds a goat in the bed and his woman gone. 33. The standards of cleanliness reflected in these references were still quite new. For instance, a “1929 ad sponsored by the ‘Cleanliness Institute’ advised women to shampoo every two weeks, which at the time was considered frequent” (Lupton and Miller, Bathroom, 17). 34. The association of Faye’s and her mother’s sexual waywardness with racial contamination culminates in Tod’s fantasies of Faye driven like a “pretty cork” on a “beautiful” sea to “a strange shore where a savage with pork-sausage fingers and a pimpled butt picked it up and hugged it to his sagging belly” (CW 406). All three episodes engage popular fears and fantasies that respectable young white women were modernizing themselves in the arms of unscrupulous Latin lovers. On this point, see Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 76–87; and May, Screening, 102, 112, 207–211. For inaugural discussions of the racial semiotics of the body beautiful, see Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, ch. 1; and Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 77–80, 86–89. 35. Almost all early critics read Faye as “a classic bitch goddess” (Apple, “History,” 239) who goads men to sexual violence and (self-)destruction. See also Wadlington, “Nathanael West and the Confidence Game,” 315; and Widmer, “Last Masquerade,” 187. For accounts that pathologize Tod’s sexuality instead of Faye’s, see Roberts, “Bonfire,” 77; and Strychacz, Modernism, 194. 36. In 1939, references to lynching were still topical. For statistics on lynching and antilynching efforts in the thirties, see Weiss, Farewell, 100, 241–242, 248–249. 37. Tod’s rape fantasies recall the curious scene in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) in which a group of men decides that “female writers” all need “a good rape” (CW 82). Two stories follow in which working-class men gang rape women writers whose literary pretensions offend them (CW 82–83). 38. Langan, “Consumers, Arise!” 143, 145, 146. 39. The sea and siren imagery at the novel’s close may allude to the work of James Ensor, who is thought to have served as a model for Tod (Martin, Nathanael West, 316). Ensor’s “The Baths at Ostend” depicts a mob of ocean bathers while “The Call of the Siren” depicts a woman beckoning to a reluctant male bather from the sea. Diane Lesko speculates that the woman represents Ensor’s working-class mistress, whom he nicknamed “the Siren” (James Ensor, 13, 66, 68).

NOTES TO PAGES 174–182

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40. See Barnard, Great Depression, 169, 170–171; Strychacz, Modernism, 200–206; and Wilcox, “West’s The Day of the Locust,” 63. For an opposing view, see Roberts, “Bonfire,” 81–84. For two early accounts that align West’s viewpoint with Tod’s and with the redemptive project (or “saving game”) of high modernism, see Wadlington, “Nathanael West and the Confidence Game,” 315; and Torchiana, “The Day of the Locust,” 251. 41. See Groves et al., Family, xiii. The authors note that their textbook is “planned primarily for pupils in their later teens” (vii). 42. Ibid., 257. 43. Ibid., 237–238. See also Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137. 44. Groves et al., Family, 239, 244, 246, 248–249. 45. See Campbell et al., Educational Activities, 81, 83. 46. See Mink, Wages of Motherhood, 125, 156–162. For quoted material, see 159. For the reference to “wholesome adult living,” cited by Mink, see Brown, “Trends,” 78. For other government bulletins concerned with the problem of involuntary leisure and the risk of “social maladjustment” among young people, see Johnson and Harvey, National Youth, 4, 6; Russell et al., Vocational Education, 139; and Campbell et al., Educational Activities, 113–119. 47. For facts and quoted phrases, see Gordon, Pitied, 283, 293–294. 48. Featherstone, Consumer Culture, 10, 19, 43; and see Bourdieu, Distinction, 359. Featherstone further specifies that “the new cultural intermediaries can be found in market-oriented consumer cultural occupations—the media, advertising, design, fashion, etc.—and in state-funded and private helping professions, counselling [sic], educational and therapy occupations” (35). 49. Bourdieu, Distinction, 366–367. 50. See Featherstone, “Leisure,” 135; and Consumer Culture, 79, 115. Leonard Wilcox reads Faye as “a proto-postmodern character” (“West’s The Day of the Locust,” 63). See also Strychacz, Modernism, 189, 204. 51. Pfeil, Another Tale, 107, 108, 121. 52. In an interesting anticipation of this latter point, Robert Lynd links the “increased utilization of beauty devices” to “the personal insecurity of woman, in a culture where . . . her status must constantly be won and re-won by personality and attractiveness if she is to get and keep a husband under the dissolving bans of modern marriage” (“Family Members,” 91–92). For many women in the United States, social security and personal insecurity may well be structurally linked. 53. Bourdieu, Distinction, 190.

CHAPTER 6 In this chapter, references to Wise Blood, included in O’Connor’s Collected Works, are cited parenthetically as WB. References to O’Connor’s essays, collected in Mystery and Manners, are cited parenthetically as MM. 1. On disabled veterans and the GI Bill, see Ross, Preparing for Ulysses, 25–28, 48–49, 78–82, 100–104. 2. See O’Connor, Habit of Being, 98–99.

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3. Throughout her writing, O’Connor rehearses the case against sentimentality launched in her graduate textbook Understanding Fiction (Brooks and Warren, 219). On O’Connor’s years at Iowa, see Cash, Flannery O’Connor, ch. 4. On O’Connor and New Criticism, see Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, ch. 3. 4. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 159. 5. See MM 41, 133, 148, 226–227. Henry Edmondson notes that O’Connor underlined a passage in her copy of Eric Voegelin’s 1957 book, Plato and Aristotle, criticizing the Enlightenment idea that “the powers of man can create a society free from want and fear” (Return, 19–20). For a discussion of Voegelin’s Christian theory of history and its impact on O’Connor, see Desmond, Risen Sons, 93–103. O’Connor’s views on “government by tenderness” also resonate with a later essay by Will Herberg, in which he faults Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society for setting itself up as “a divinized WelfareBringer,” “an order of redemption,” “in short, a church” (Faith Enacted, 275, 276). 6. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 192, 144, 71. 7. Ibid., 70, 71, 204. 8. On O’Connor’s affirmation of a contrasting mode of compassion, “which implies a recognition of sin,” see MM 165–166. 9. On O’Connor and the Christian concept of history, see Desmond, Risen Sons, chs. 1 and 4. See also MM 59. 10. Throughout the chapter, I cite the King James Bible. On this point, see Ragen, Wreck on the Road, 211. 11. On this point, see MM 43. 12. See Giannone, “Paul”; and Ragen, Wreck on the Road, ch. 3. See also WB 63, 65. 13. Dulles, Spiritual Legacy, 125. 14. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 416. 15. On Georgia and the New Deal, see Bartley, Creation, 172–189. Quoted material appears on 173. 16. On Edward O’Connor and the New Deal, see Cash, Flannery O’Connor, 8. Edward O’Connor was also active in the American Legion (ibid., 8). During his lifetime, the Legion sought to restore benefits to disabled veterans and, after his death, drafted the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (Ross, Preparing for Ulysses, 27–28, 98–107, 120–124). 17. Bartley, Creation, 201. 18. Bartley, New South, 157; and Creation, 186. 19. In addition to Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery, Solace Layfield reveals country origins as he dies (WB 115). Enoch also consistently refers to Asa and Sabbath Hawks as “hicks” (WB 23, 24, 32). 20. Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost, 77. 21. See Bartley, New South, 122–124, 126–131. Quoted material appears on 11, 131. See also Bartley, Creation, 192, 201. On the black exodus from the South, see Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost, 53, 253, 314–320. James C. Cobb reports that “a total of 1.6 million civilians moved out of the South” during the Second World War, “and almost as importantly, three times that many moved elsewhere within the region” (“World War II,” 11). 22. See Ragen, Wreck on the Road, ch. 2. Quoted material appears on 89, 60. See also Bennett, When Dreams Came True, ch. 9. Elaine Tyler May links the suburban

NOTES TO PAGES 191–203

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domestic ideal with postwar “rootlessness” and “freedom from kinship obligations” (Homeward Bound, 24–25, 174). 23. Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, 41–49. Bacon here relies on May’s discussion of Cold War “domestic containment” as “the key to security” (Homeward Bound, 13–14). 24. On Onnie Jay Holy and the postwar cultivation of an American civil religion, see Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, 61–66; and Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 17–22. 25. For an alternative reading of this scene, see Kahane, “Gothic Mirror,” 344–345. On the link between interracial and spiritual union in O’Connor’s fiction, see Kahane, “Artificial Niggers,” 196; and Desmond, Risen Sons, 66. 26. Toomer, Cane, 68. 27. I owe this point to Charles H. Long. A dream given to Haze reinforces the contrast between human commodification and alienation and divine recognition and reconciliation in the novel’s mirror scenes. Asleep in his car, Haze dreams that “he was not dead but only buried” (WB 91). People peer in at him, “look[ing] at him critically as if he were something—a piece of fish—they might buy” (WB 91). Finally, the woman with the two little boys comes up and tries to get in the car with him to “keep him company for a while” (WB 92). Both a commodity and an analogue to Jesus, the “piece of fish” defines two poles of Haze’s selfhood. 28. See MM 72; Ragen, Wreck on the Road, 151; Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (169) and Comedy of Redemption (91, 92, 100). 29. O’Connor also inscribes a more oblique critique of welfare state promotions of domestic security in the fate of Enoch Emery, who attacks and possibly kills a man to get hold of his gorilla costume. The gorilla’s appeal derives in part from the kingly lives enjoyed by the animals in the city zoo where Enoch works—lives that Enoch regards with “awe and hate” (WB 46). In representing Enoch’s willingness to become a gorilla in order to enjoy such plush security, O’Connor indicts state and local governments’ reduction of human need to its animal components. 30. On the Lend-Lease Act and U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia, see Gardner, Economic Aspects, 170, 231–236. As a blind person, Haze, like Asa Hawks, would have been eligible for additional public funds under Title X of the Social Security Act. 31. Immerman, John Foster Dulles, 32. 32. For citations of Dulles’s writing, in order of appearance, see Dulles, Spiritual Legacy, 168, 205, 63, 215; and Immerman, John Foster Dulles, 84. On Dulles’s role in U.S. passage of the Marshall Plan and in negotiating the U.S.–Japan peace treaty, see Immerman, John Foster Dulles, 29–30, 37. 33. For citations of Dulles’s writing, in order of appearance, see Dulles, Spiritual Legacy, 95, 157, 173, 184–185. For his comments on the need for a truly charitable foreign aid policy, see ibid., 211. For his support of nuclear and psychological warfare and of CIA operations in Guatemala, Syria, Iran, and Indonesia, see Immerman, John Foster Dulles, 66–68, 71, 110–115, 120, 123, 130, 160, 166. Dulles distrusted the welfare state’s newfound ability “to prevent the cyclical breakdown of [the] production process,” but supported the principle of “centralized direction to promote the equitable distribution of goods in short supply,” going so far as to argue that “there is no inherent incompatibility between

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the Christian view” and “the practice of economic communism or state socialism” (Spiritual Legacy, 173, 170). 34. In the forties, Paul’s concept of Christian fellowship pushed many white church organizations to rethink their commitment to the racial status quo. In 1946, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America voted to renounce its longstanding endorsement of segregation; such a policy, the council now declared, was “a violation of the Gospel of love and human brotherhood” (Reimers, White Protestantism, 112). But such policy statements did little to change practice, particularly in the South (ibid., 118, 117). Directly engaging a religious discussion already under way, King’s rhetoric challenged the existing balance between talk and action. 35. On King’s concept of the beloved community and agape, see Zepp, Social Vision, 91, 107–112, 207–234; and Smith and Zepp, Search, ch. 6. For King’s cited comments on agape and references to Pauline doctrine, see King, MLK Treasury, 9, 61, 127, 130, 172, 222, 247. King’s 1956 statement on “the removal of all barriers,” cited by Zepp (Social Vision, 233), appears in “We Are Still Walking,” 9. For an account of King’s call for an economic bill of rights—“a Marshall Plan or GI Bill for the disadvantaged of all races”—and plans for a poor people’s campaign, see Bartley, New South, 359–362. For a discussion of Roosevelt’s own short-lived proposal for an economic bill of rights, see Bennett, When Dreams Came True, 122–127, 136. 36. See Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture. For a contrasting view, see Kreyling, “A Good Monk.” On O’Connor’s “aversion to Communism” and her role in the Yaddo Red Scare of 1949, see Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, 4, 57–59. 37. See O’Connor, Habit of Being, 329, 335, 499, 541, 542, 562, 580. Quoted material appears on 253, 499, 580, 542. 38. O’Connor’s biographer notes that, in a 1964 letter to Maryat Lee, O’Connor “clearly stated her position on race, calling herself publicly in favor of integration but privately favoring segregation” (Cash, Flannery O’Connor, 150–151). 39. Brinkley, “New Deal,” 112. 40. For Dulles’s use of a Christian rhetoric of family, see Spiritual Legacy, 78, 209. 41. For King’s intellectual debts to the Social Gospel movement, see Zepp, Social Vision, ch. 2. On the long-standing tradition in the black church of interpreting Christ’s message in social and political terms, see Moyd, Redemption. 42. For critical accounts that address O’Connor’s racial politics, see Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, 235–244; Elie, Life You Save, 148, 241–244, 322–328; and Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 93–103, 110–119. See also Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, ch. 4; Crews, Critics Bear It Away, 157–160, 203; Dunleavy, “Particular History”; and Kahane, “Artificial Niggers.” 43. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 33. 44. Ibid., 237, 238, 249.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 175 age-of-consent legislation, 42, 44, 49 Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), 118 Agricultural Marketing Act (1929), 118 alienated intimacy, 5, 8 – 12 passim, 52 – 53, 72 – 74 passim, 83, 135, 144, 165, 187, 194, 198, 200 alienation, 4, 33, 37, 52 – 53, 79, 82, 85, 86, 91, 133, 153, 160, 167, 169, 173, 174, 183, 203, 211n8 alienation effect, 3, 15, 185, 186, 195, 199, 227n28. See also Bertolt Brecht Allen, Frederick Lewis, 10, 27, 226n10 Allport, Floyd, 8, 9 Americana, 152 American Beauty. See Ferber, Edna American family, 13, 37, 38 American home, 95, 99, 108 Americanization, 19, 21, 96, 99, 108, 109, 112, 114 Anderson, Sherwood, 33 – 34, 39, 69, 74 – 75, 76, 78, 79, 218n19, 219n34 antibourgeois critique, 31, 40, 69, 80, 82, 85 – 87, 126, 141 – 142, 155, 160 – 161, 185. See also avant-garde antilynching campaigns, 18, 35, 66 – 69 passim, 91, 142 antilynching legislation, 18, 61, 67, 68, 92, 93. See also Dyer bill

antisentimental revolt, 24, 126, 143, 144, 147, 182, 223n11, 230n3 Arendt, Hannah, 10, 11, 12, 34 Arnall, Ellis, 189, 190 avant-garde, 39, 50, 70, 108 European, 4, 24, 25, 69, 97, 155, 161 227n23 and everyday life, 157, 174 and primitivism, 69, 92 See also antibourgeois critique; revolution of the word. Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 32, 214n91, 227n19 Barnes, Djuna, 8, 24, 39 – 63, 96, 97, 126, 156 Ryder (1928), 8, 39 – 63, 76, 156 Barnes, Wald, 40, 61 Barnes, Zadel, 40, 43 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 4, 9, 72 black middle-class activism, 18, 35, 65 – 68, 91, 92 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 39 body beautiful, 149 – 179 passim, 226n11, 226n16, 227n20 Bonus March (1932), 123 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 156, 164, 177, 179, 214n91, 226n16, 227n19. See also cultural capital; habitus Bürger, Peter, 155

254

INDEX

Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 24, 185, 186, 195 Breton, André, 25 Calhoun, Arthur, 27, 137 Calverton V. F., 27 Canby, Henry Seidel, 121, 222n48 Cane. See Toomer, Jean Capper-Ketchum Act (1928), 21 carnival, 25, 32 – 34, 38, 71 – 75, 76, 82, 165, 178, 196, 198. See also freak and medicine shows; the grotesque Catt, Carrie Chapman, 26 charity, 16, 46, 160, 181, 183, 186, 187, 194, 196, 200, 201, 210n15, 211n17, 215n2, 216n14 Charity Organization Societies (COS), 22 Children’s Bureau, 19, 26, 126, 132, 136, 220n6, 224n25 Christian fundamentalism, 36, 188, 191, 206 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 30, 176 Civil Rights Act (1964), 205 civil rights movement, 203 205, 206. See also Martin Luther King, Jr.; racial integration Civil War (American), 20, 47 Cold War, 182, 187, 192, 202, 204 Communist Party (CPUSA), 23 – 32 passim, 92, 124, 127, 128, 136, 137, 224n26, 225n1 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 204 corporate philanthropy, 6, 22, 47 – 49, 156 Coughlin, Charles, 123, 151 Cowley, Malcolm, 28 Crisis, 67, 68 cultural capital, 34, 35, 130, 137, 139, 146, 154, 157, 179, 209n3, 224n16 Dada, 24, 29 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 96 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 224n22 Day of the Locust, The. See West, Nathanael DeMille, Cecil B., 167, 168 domestic consumption, 6, 13, 20, 28 – 30 passim, 102, 113, 151, 153, 156, 160 – 162 passim, 177, 193, 226n7

domestic exterior, 5 – 9, 12, 15, 34, 37, 41 – 44 passim, 50 – 57 passim, 60, 67, 76, 96, 99, 108, 125, 132, 135, 146, 152, 156, 159, 161, 167, 169, 177, 188, 193, 194, 210n16, 211n17, 231n29 domestic science. See home economics domestic security, 5, 7, 31, 63, 65 – 90 passim, 193, 198, 199, 205 domestic violence, 3, 101, 109, 134 – 135, 145, 160, 194, 198 Donzelot, Jacques, 10 – 12, 23, 31, 35, 41 DuBois, W. E. B., 21 Dulles, John Foster, 186, 187, 202 – 205 Dyer bill, 67, 68 Earle, Alice Morse, 220n5 Educational Activities of the WPA (1939), 176 education reform, 21 – 22, 42, 44, 53 – 55 Eisenhower, Dwight, 202 Eliot, T. S., 39 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 50, 54, 55 Engels, Friedrich, 136, 225n32 Ensor, James, 228n39 Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917, 1918), 25 eugenics discourse, 20, 95 – 114 passim, 162, 220n3, 220n6, 221n33 eugenics legislation, 20, 96, 183 everyday life, 5, 8, 15, 30, 81, 83, 154 – 162 passim, 174 – 176 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 19 Family and Its Relationships, The (1932), 175 family values, 7, 37, 160, 177, 206, 215n99 family wage, 7, 30, 35, 36, 126, 131, 151, 177, 179, 210n8, 211n18 Farm Holiday Association, 118, 123, 226n2 Federal Housing Authority, 30, 190 female helplessness, trope of, 40 – 63 passim, 71 – 75 passim feminism, 24, 27, 28, 40, 43, 59, 124 Ferber, Edna, 8, 24, 28, 95 – 122, 123, 126 American Beauty (1931), 8, 28, 95 – 122, 123, 129 Peculiar Treasure, A (1939), 100, 118, 119 – 122 passim Foucault, Michel, 41, 226n16 Frank, Waldo, 69

INDEX freak and medicine shows, 98 – 100, 102, 107 – 111, 116, 221n29 French Revolution, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 28, 29, 33, 74, 89, 218n10 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 19 George-Deen Act (1936), 21, 176 German Expressionism, 24 GI Bill, 11, 30, 36, 119, 191, 222n43. See also Servicemen’s Readjustment Act Gilded Age, 41, 47 Grant, Madison, 97, 106, 113, 114, 120 Great Depression, 23, 92, 118, 123 – 124, 128, 190 Greenwich Village, 28, 39, 69, 83 Grimké, Angelina, 72 – 79 passim, 85, 88, 89, 171, 218n17, 218n30 Gris, Juan, 159, 163 Grosz, George, 152 grotesque, the, 37 – 38, 51, 82, 97 – 99, 184, 218n10 and blackness, 69, 72 – 75 passim, 85, 87 bourgeoisie as grotesque, 4, 32, 33, 38, 40, 69, 74 and distortion, 7, 33, 59, 184, 189, 214n89 and Marxism, 124, 126 and white working-class femininity, 127, 128 – 129, 134, 140 – 143, 147, 158 See also carnival, sentimental grotesque aesthetic, the, 12, 33, 40, 50, 69, 76, 108, 155, 165, 178, 210n9 grotesque body, the, 31 – 33, 48, 50, 98, 101, 107 – 113 passim, 141 – 142, 157, 160 – 168 passim, 170, 178, 227n19 grotesque inversion, 7, 9 12, 15, 24, 33, 34, 37, 48, 50, 57, 71 – 75, 90, 91, 105, 107 142, 152, 155, 170 – 173, 186, 196, 198 habitus, 34, 164, 179 Harlow, Jean, 228n32 Harper’s Monthly, 8, 216n14 Hatch Act (1887), 21 Haymarket trials (1886), 25 Herberg, Will, 186, 230n5 Holbert, Luther, 78 Hollywood, 27, 28, 112, 143, 144, 149 – 173 passim

255

Home and the Child, The (1931), 137 – 139 home economics, 18, 21 – 22, 29, 174 – 176 Hoover, Herbert, 30, 118, 137, 175 Horkheimer, Max, 175 Household Service Demonstration Project, 30, 176 Huyssen, Andreas, 174 hysteria, 67 – 91 passim, 218n10, 218 n17, 218n21 immigration, 5, 20, 95 – 114 passim immigration law, 16, 20, 96, 101, 103 Immigration Restriction Act (1924), 20, 96, 99, 107 impersonality, 8, 17, 125, 169, 210n10, 210n15 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 25 interracial desire, 20, 58, 77, 78, 84, 87 – 88, 103, 171 exchange, 102, 105, 106, 112 See also racial integration interiority, psychological and domestic, 7, 12, 34, 37, 42, 50, 57, 59, 60, 155 – 161 passim inversion. See grotesque inversion Italian futurism, 24 Johnson, James Weldon, 67 Johnson, Lyndon B., 230n5 Joyce, James, 39 juvenile court system, 20, 21, 44, 47, 53, 133, 134, 215n2 Kennedy, John F., 204 Keynesian economics, 6, 23, 29 – 30, 103, 151, 152, 176 – 177, 205 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 186, 187, 202 – 206, 232n34, 232n35 Ladies’ Home Journal, The, 96, 103, 113 Langan, Don, 152, 153, 159, 165, 173 Lee, Ann, 51 Lend Lease Program, 200, 231n30 Lindsey, Judge Ben, 29 Lippmann, Walter, 221n14 Little Review, The, 25, 39 Long, Huey, 123 Lundeen Bill, 124, 136

256

INDEX

lynching, 58, 65 – 93, 171, 205, 217n1, 219n28, 219n34, 228n36 Lynd, Robert, 229n52 Mann, Thomas, 185 March on Washington (1963), 204 marriage legislation, 16, 20, 51 – 52, 96 Marinetti, F. T., 24 Marshall Plan, 200, 202, 232n35 Marx, Karl, 135, 136, 140 – 142 145, 146, 225n32 Marxist discourse, 126, 127, 136, 139, 186 Masses, 25 Masters, Edgar Lee, 74 maternalist reform and Americanization, 96, 109, 112, 114 and the domestic exterior, 6, 12, 13, 56, 63, 127 and racial bias, 65 93, 217n1, 220n6 and red baiting, 26, 136, 137 and social transformation, 5, 17, 23, 125, 205 210n15 and welfare activism 20, 40, 44, 49, 58 See also Children’s Bureau; mothers’ pensions Mauss, Marcel, 164 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 32 McKay, Claude, 65 Medicare and Medicaid, 37 Messenger, The, 25 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 32 modernism, 3, 4, 16, 32, 33, 39, 124, 125, 127, 143, 149, 174, 182, 209n4, 210n9 modern sentimental culture, 5, 7, 10, 14, 17, 23, 31, 33, 41, 92, 93, 103, 139, 144, 178, 201, 205, 206 modern sentimental project, 15, 23, 40, 50, 63, 67, 97, 112, 117, 125 – 127, 132, 133, 136, 144, 152, 183, 187, 195 mothers’ pensions, 14, 17, 19, 34, 35, 42 – 47 passim, 96 Mormonism, 51, 52 Morrill Land Grant Acts (1862, 1890), 21 Morrison, Toni, 218n10, 228n34 Natalie Mann. See Toomer, Jean National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 66, 67, 68, 92

National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 18, 66, 67 National Child Labor Committee, 19 National Consumers’ League, 19 National Housing Act (1934), 30, 151 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), 123 National Urban League, 18 nativism, 95 – 115, 220n2 Nazism, 118, 120, 182 New Deal and the domestic exterior, 5, 6, 11, 31 and domestic security, 5, 7, 36, 120, 125, 126, 192 and economic recovery, 102, 118, 181, 189, 190 and Keynesian economics, 6, 23, 150 – 152, 176 legacy of, 202 – 205 and racial bias, 18, 36, 68, 92, 97, 119 and social insurance, 6, 17, 124 and 1937 – 1938 recession, 29, 124, 150 New Woman, 28, 101, 117 Noyes, John Humphrey, 51 O’Connor, Flannery, 8, 181 – 207 Wise Blood (1952), 8, 181 – 207 Old-Age Insurance (OAI), 150, 177 Olsen, Tillie, 7, 8, 24, 26, 123 – 148, 149, 164, 174 Yonnondio (1974), 8, 26, 123 – 147, 149, 154, 164 Opportunity, 18 Paul, Saint, 186, 187, 196, 198, 202, 203 Peculiar Treasure, A. See Ferber, Edna personal life, 5, 8, 17, 23, 25, 125 politics of black respectability, 67 – 74, 88, 92 polygamy, 20, 40, 51 – 52, 58, 61 postmodernism, 174, 177, 179 Pound, Ezra, 39 primitivism, 33, 69, 75, 92 Progressive Era, 5, 6, 40 – 44, 56, 61 – 63, 65 – 66 protective labor legislation, 18, 19, 21, 26, 34, 42, 44, 53 racial integration, 103, 197, 198, 201 – 205 passim, 232n34, 232n38

INDEX rank-and-file movement, 23 Red Scare, 18, 19, 25, 26, 136, 224n25, 232n36 Rensselaer, Martha Van, 225n28 revolution consumer, 28, 29, 149 – 153, 166, 169, 171 – 174 and the grotesque, 7 – 11, 32, 126, 155, 165 in manners and morals, 10, 24, 27 – 30, 32, 70, 83 – 86, 103, 104, 112, 113, 152, 157, 166, 178, 179, 213n71, 226n10 socialist, 10, 24 – 28, 31, 32, 79, 123, 135, 141, 144 – 146, 149 of the word, 4, 10, 24, 28 Rivers, Eurith, 189 Roberts, Kenneth, 97, 120 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 16, 23, 29, 31, 93, 118, 124, 126, 151, 189, 204, 225n28 Roosevelt, Theodore, 19, 23 Ross, Edward A., 97 – 98, 120 Russian avant-garde, 25, 32, 227n20 Russian Revolution (1917), 25, 27, 114 Ryder. See Barnes, Djuna Sanger, Margaret, 28 Saturday Review of Literature, 121 Seldes, Gilbert, 152 sentimental downclassing of, 126, 143, 144, 147 relationship to the grotesque, 15, 33, 40 – 50 passim, 59, 72 – 75, 97 – 99, 109 – 110, 126 – 143, 147, 158 – 160, 185 See also modern sentimental culture; modern sentimental project sentimental activism, 31, 41, 45, 57, 59, 205 sentimental motherhood, 3, 13, 21, 35, 47, 50, 55, 125 – 133, 143, 146, 147, 179. See also stay-at-home mother sentimental populism, 124 – 126 sentimental power, 15, 49, 146, 147, 210n15 sentimental womanhood, 152, 154 – 159, 165, 170, 227n28 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), 30, 181, 191, 204, 230n16, 232n35. See also GI Bill Seven Arts, The, 25 sexual violence, 42 – 43, 48 – 49, 54 – 63 passim, 70 – 89 passim, 132, 172, 174, 194, 216n15, 228n35, 228n37

257

Shakspeare, William, 54 Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act (1921), 19, 20, 26, 96, 131 – 133, 136 Sinclair, Upton, 123 slavery, 51, 58, 77, 87, 102, 104 – 107, 111, 197, 198, 223n14 Smith-Hughes Act (1917), 21 Smith, Joseph, 51 social, the, 11, 12, 34, 41, 210n16, 211n18 social amelioration, 37, 43, 56, 92, 97, 133, 183, 200 social benevolence movement, 44, 46 – 48, 53, 183 social experimentation, 41, 52, 56, 57, 60 socialist family, 26, 27, 128, 137, 213n64 social housekeeping, 5, 11, 210n8, 210n16, 211n17, 215n6 social security, 7, 31, 153, 177, 178. See also domestic security Social Security Act (1935), 17, 37, 93, 119, 124, 126, 136, 147, 150, 151, 177, 200, 223n9, 231n30 Social Security Administration, 16 social insurance, 6, 16, 17, 126 social work, 18, 22, 23, 47, 52 – 53, 55 – 56, 193 – 194. See also rank-and-file movement Society of Colonial Dames, 96, 99, 100, 103 Soviet Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship (1918), 26, 136 Soviet Family Edict (1944), 26 Soviet Russia, 25 – 27, 114, 210n16 Stalin, Joseph, 32, 182 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 43 stay-at-home mother, 7, 19, 31, 34, 60, 126, 131, 151, 157, 224n16. See also sentimental motherhood Stein, Gertrude, 159, 163 sterilization laws, 20, 96, 132, 183, 220n6, 220n8, 221n17 stock market crash (1929), 99, 100 – 102, 117 – 118 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 72 – 74, 85 surrealism, 24, 25 Talmadge, Eugene, 189 Tatlin, Vladimir, 25 Thomas, William I., 99, 114, 115, 116, 118

258

INDEX

Thoreau, Henry, 40, 50 Toomer, Jean, 8, 24, 26, 28, 65 – 93, 95, 97, 126, 198 Cane (1923), 8, 28, 65 – 94 Natalie Mann (1922), 26, 65 – 70, 77, 79 – 84, 86 Townsend, Francis, 123, 150 – 151, 173, 226n2 transition, 10 Turner, Mary, 72, 89 – 91 Tzara, Tristan, 24 U.S. Department of Labor, 19 U.S. Supreme Court, 19, 20, 51, 96, 132 Voegelin, Eric, 186, 230n5 Voting Rights Act (1965), 205 Wells, Ida B., 66, 68, 87, 216n27, 217n1 West, Nathanael, 8, 24, 28, 149 – 179, 198 Day of the Locust, The (1939), 8, 28, 149 – 179, 181 Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), 228n37

White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children (1909), 19 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (1930), 137 White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1932), 30 whiteness, 95 – 122 passim, 147, 162, 171, 222n43 White, Walter, 67, 92, 219n29, 219n30 Wilde, Oscar, 43, 61 – 62 Williams, Raymond, 4, 31 Wise Blood. See O’Connor, Flannery Women’s Bureau, 19 Wood, Thelma, 62 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 30, 176 World War I, 18, 96 World War II, 4, 118, 119, 189 – 191, 200 Yonnondio. See Olsen, Tillie Young Communist League, 123 Znaniecki, Florian. See Thomas, William I.