Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” 1990. (Chapter 3 from Gender Trouble). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2488-2501.

Norton intro to Butler

to explore how gendered identity is socially produced through repetitions of ordinary daily activities. Her goal is to uncover the assumptions that “restrict the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity.” In opening up “the field of possibility for gender,” Butler aims for a feminism that avoids “exclusionary gender norms” in its portrayal of acceptable identities. 2485

Key for Butler is the insistence that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. 2485

Following Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality (1976), Butler stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity. Our sex and sexual desires and activities are profound indices of who we are. Butler hopes—like many contemporary critical theorists—to reveal that the seemingly “natural” is actually socially constructed and, thus, contingent. The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been different in other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision or, to use on of Butler’s favorite words, “resignification.” The meanings and categories by which we understand and live our daily existence can be altered. 2485

For Foucault, discourse (the articulated categories of thought) orders knowledge along lines that produce subjects open to power’s control. Such power, he stresses, works at the level of daily routine. For Lacan, individuals achieve an identity, a recognized place in the social order, by passing into the Law (the culture’s signifying order)—at the cost of creating the unconscious and establishing a permanent split, an alienation of self from desire, within the subject. 2485

But Austin realized that some utterances are creative: they make something come into existence, rather than referring to something that already exists. Anyone who makes a promise, or a judge who sentences someone to prison, creates a fact (the promise, the sentence) through the act of speaking. Such speech acts are performatives. 2486

An utterance that departs too far from received understandings will be incomprehensible. But exact repetition does not occur very often either. After all, we are using the old words in new contexts. Each separate use of a word tweaks it in this or that direction in relation to a variety of pressures: the context, the audience, conscious or unconscious purposes. 2486

The little boy learns that his crying is not masculine; he must grow into his masculinity by imitating the behavior designated as “male” to the point that such behavior becomes “second nature.” The little girl learns that some ways of acting make her a tomboy, and she is encouraged to dress the part of “femininity.” In Butler’s view, we feel our way into these roles, slowly establishing (under the watchful eyes of powerful social forces) the way we will occupy them. Given our prevailing categories, we experience this process as discovering our identity. Butler believes identity is a trap, a hardening into rigid, binarized categories of much more fluid and heterogeneous possibilities. She calls for actions that will “resignify” our received meanings—actions that will lead to a “proliferation” of the “constitutive categories” into which all selves are now constrained to fit. 2486

Thus, while Butler’s work grows out of feminism, she is against any “identity politics” that sees political groupings and beliefs as grounded in a shared identity, whether ethnic, racial, sexual, national, or economic. All forms of identity politics, she believes, are prone to aggressions used to enforce rigid consistencies. 2487

At the end of Gender Trouble, Butler advocates parody in general and drag performances in particular because such “subversive” performances “destabilize the naturalized categories of identity and desire. 2487

From Butler:

To expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry that Foucault, reformulating Nietzsche, designates as “genealogy.” A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. The task of this inquiry is to center on—and decenter—such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality. 2490

Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of “women.” But is there a political shape to “women,” as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? 2490

Even within Foucault’s essay on the very theme of genealogy, the body is figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription: “the body is the inscribed surface of events.” The task of genealogy, he claims, is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history.” 2491

In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values. Within the metaphorics of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as a relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge. 2492

By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction operates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogical investigation. 2492

If the presumption of some kind of precategorial source of disruption is refused, is it still possible to give a genealogical account of the demarcation of the body as such as a signifying practice? 2492

The construction of the stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability. Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. 2494

Significantly, Kristeva’s discussion of abjection in The Powers of Horror begin to suggest the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion. The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. 2494

Regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired. “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. 2495

When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the “inner world” no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? As if internalization were a process or mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified? How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth? 2495In a sense, Discipline and Punish can be read as Foucault’s effort to rewrite Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization in On the Genealogy of Morals on the model of inscription. In the context of prisoners, Foucault writes, the strategy has been not to enforce a repression of their desires, but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their very essence, style, and necessity. 2496

The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender—indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another. When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence, it seems that the expressive model loses its descriptive force. That regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe. 2497

Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. 2497

If the “cause” of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. 2497

I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity. Newton writes:

At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says [Newtown’s curious personification] “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance / ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.”

Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender signification from the discourse of truth and falsity. 2498

But we are actually in presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. 2498

In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. 2498

The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a “figure” in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that in its effect—postures as an imitation. 2498

Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction. 2499

Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. 2499

Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional / and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. 2500

Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right. Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress. 2500

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and style of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. 2501

Gender is also a norm that can never be fully internalized; “the internal” is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody. 2501

The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. 2501

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Prose since 1945

The first two—and only two—atomic bombs were exploded in Japan in August 1945; their effect was so horrific that a strategy of geographical “containment” emerged as a military policy. 2261

In the years following World War II the U.S.S.R. had assumed a stance considered adversarial to Western interests. Ideologically, the opposition was between Western capitalism and Soviet state socialism; militarily, the contest exhibited itself in the West’s rebuilding of Germany and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus the Soviet Union’s influence over Eastern Europe’s nations by means of the Warsaw Pact. Geopolitically, the U.S.S.R. sponsored the formation of socialist governments in what became known as its satellite nations of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, separated by what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill characterized as an Iron Curtain inhibiting contact with the democracies of Western Europe. 2262

By the end of the 1970s some characteristics of the previous decade’s countercultural revolt had been accepted in the mainstream, including informalities of dress, relaxation of sexual codes of behavior, and an increased respect for individual rights. The 1980s experienced a call for traditional values, which were interpreted not as a / return to community and self-sacrifice but as the pursuit of wealth. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan incomes rose while taxes fell; the Sixties’ distrust of government mutated into a defense of personal acquisition. 2264

Economically, American boomed, but in new ways: manufacturing dominance was replaced by service efficiency . . . 2264

[writers wanting to be like Hemingway] Hence the desire to write what was called “the great American novel,” a major work that would characterize the larger aspects of experience. Ambitions were not simply to write a war novel, for example, but the war novel; not just a work about corporate big business, but something that generalized the subject for all times. Regionalism could remain an interest, but only if it provided deeper meaning; here the example of William Faulkner encouraged the belief among younger writers that dealing with the American South meant grappling with monumental issues of guilt and the inexorable power of history. 2265

The first such challenge was the “death of the novel” controversy, sparked by some writers’ sense that social reality had become too unstable to serve as a reliable anchor for their narratives and fueled by certain critics’ conviction that fiction had exhausted its formal possibilities. The short story and the novel, it was argued, demanded a set of fairly limited conventions; these conventions, such as characterization and development by means of dialogue, imagery, and symbolism, however, relied on a securely describable world to make sense. 2265

As boundaries of time and space were eclipsed by television, air travel, and an accompanying global awareness, the once essential unities of representation (time, space, and action) no longer provided ground on which to build a work of literary art. 2265

A parallel development in literary theory posed another great threat to conventional literature. Known as “Deconstruction” and brought to American shores from France by means of a series of university conferences and academic publication beginning in 1966, this style of criticism questioned the underlying assumptions behind any statement, exposing how what was accepted as absolute truth usually depended on rhetoric rather than fact, exposing indeed how “fact” itself was constructed by intellectual operations. 2265

New Journalism, which held that characterization, imagery, symbol, and the like were no longer the exclusive province of fiction but appropriate tools for an improved journalism. One of Deconstruction’s / claims was that there is no absolute objectivity; every author, journalist or not, writes from a point of view whose perspective carries with it any number o colorings and biases. Why not capitalize on that perspective—be honest about it, and report not so much the event as the writer’s place in it? 2266

The second development involved not transposing the conventions of fiction to another medium but discarding them as completely as completely as possible. The beginnings of this movement involved rejecting the principal convention of traditional fiction, the suspension of disbelief that enabled an invented story to be presented as factual. By emphasizing their own presence as creators of the tale and making their main subject the procedures by which their narratives were brought into being, writers of Metafiction (as the form was called) sidestepped objections from both the Deconstructions and the Death of the Novel critics. There were no false illusions in Metafiction; what you saw was what you got, a literary work representing nothing other than itself. The value of such work lay in the author, not the tale: how interesting the writer could make the process, how much evidence of imagination and intelligence and creative personality showed through. 2266

Consider the approaches taken to a common figure, the salesperson, by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949) and David Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). The older playwright poses his character struggling to articulate his identity as an antihero, fighting to keep his head above water in a world so powerful as to overwhelm him. Four decades later, David Mamet’s sales staff is awash in a tide of language, their slick talking managing to submerge all traces of reality in a realty world built on illusive premises; as long as a character can talk, he survives. 2267

Challenged by new understanding of how reality is constructed, literary realism is transformed. John Cheever’s The Swimmer takes recourse to the magical to express what in an earlier time might have been a sociologically and psychologically inclined story. 2268

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature between the Wars, 1914-1945

The modern temper was also shaped by forces internal to the United States that had long been at work but whose pace quickened between the wars. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration—these general terms encapsulate huge demographic shifts in the nation: from country to city, from farm to factory, from native-born to new citizen. Technological evolution was another part of the mix. The telephone and electricity, nineteenth-century inventions, now expanded into American homes at large. They made life more comfortable and interesting for many and changed the nature of the gap between better- and worse-off Americans. Those without electricity and phones were, literally, out of the network. The phonograph record and the record / player—devices for playing recorded music—the motion picture, which acquired sound in 1929, and the radio made for a new kind of connectedness, and a new kind of culture, which we call mass or popular culture. Television and the computer did not arrive on the scene until the end of World War II. 1800

By far the most powerful technological influence between the wars came from the automobile. 1800

Back in the 1830s, the French social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to continual movement, lack of tradition, and rootlesssness as characteristics of American life. Now it could be more truly said than ever before that the United States was a nation, not so much of immigrants, but of migrants. 1800

Just as the interwar period has authentic historical specificity, so too does each of the two decades it encompasses, the 1920s and the 1930s. In 1929 the New York stock market crashed (in fact, the crash was worldwide), putting millions of Americans out of work and obliterating the life savings of many others. Throughout the 1930s, Americans struggled to restore or restructure the nation’s economy. The 1920s saw great struggles over such concerns as personal freedom, social permissiveness, the pursuit of pleasure, and the results of new affluence. 1800

The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, forbidding the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” was ratified in January 1919. It was widely and openly ignored. Some historians believe that Prohibition opened the door to organized crime, and certainly the phenomenon of the “gangster” arose in the 1920s in connection with bootleg liquor, which organized crime was ready to transport and supply to otherwise law-abiding citizens. The amendment was finally perceived to be unenforceable and was repealed in 1933. The gangster, however, persisted in American life and became a central figure, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, int eh movies and in the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s. 1800

The 1920s also saw significant changes in sexual mores. The middle-class double-standard had always granted considerable sexual freedom to men; now women—enfranchised politically by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in August 1920 after more than seventy years of suffragist agitation, and also liberated by automobiles and new job possibilities—began to deman similar freedoms for themselves. The demand went far beyond erotic behavior: it encompassed education, professional work, mobility, and whatever else seemed like a social benefit reserved / for men alone. 1801

The 1920s was also a decade in which African Americans made themselves a permanent part of the nation’s cultural life. In 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War I, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories of the North, and the so-called Great Migration out of the South began. Once in the North, African Americans faced the problems of adjusting from rural to urban ways, problems vastly compounded by racism, by segregated occupations and neighborhoods. Still, there was comparative economic improvement and an increase in personal freedom for African Americans who went north. 1801

Visitors to the Soviet Union returned with glowing reports about a true workers’ democracy and prosperity for all. The appeal of communism was significantly enhanced by its claim to be an opponent of fascism. 1801

But Soviet communism showed another side to Americans when Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, instituted a series of brutal purges in the Soviet Union beginning in 1936 and then in 1939 signed a pact promising not to go to war against Germany. 1801

The most important development in the period before the wars was certainly the growth of modern science. At the turn of the century and soon afterward scientists became aware that the atom was not the smallest possible unit of matter, that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were relative to an observer’s position, that some phenomena were so small that attempts at measurement would alter them, that some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability, that the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding; in short, much of the commonsense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far more complicated theories. Among many results, scientists and literary intellectuals became less and less able to communicate with each other and less respectful of each others’ worldview. 1802

Scientists saw literary people as careless thinkers; literary people, especially the more conservative among them, deplored the loss of authority for traditional, humanistic explanations of the real, concrete, experienced world and the felt human life. 1802

The two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the German Karl Marx (1818-1883), both of whom tried to create far-reaching sciences of the human. 1802

Marx provided an analysis of human behavior opposed to Freud’s, yet both seemed to espouse a kind of determinism that, although counter to long-standing American beliefs in free will and free choice, also seemed better able to explain the terrible things that were happening in the twentieth century. 1802

In the 1920s American Marxists, Socialists, anarchists, and radicals, along with union organizers, were often subject to violence. The most dramatic instance of this was the so-called Sacco-Vanzetti case. 1803

modernism. Used in the broadest sense, it is a catchall phrase for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world. More narrowly, it refers to work that represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity. Much modernist literature of this sort (which critics now call “high modernism”) is actually antimodern; it interprets modernity as an experience of loss. As one can tell from its title, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—the great poem of the movement—represents the modern world as a scene of ruin. 1803

The American public was introduced to modern art at the famous New York Armory Show of 1913, which featured cubist paintings and caused an uproar. 1803

At the heart of the modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed of shown up as falsehoods or fantasies. To the extent that art incorporated such a false order, it had to be renovated. Order, sequence, and unity in works of art might well be considered only expressions of a desire for coherence rather than actual reflections of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and high-flown writing might conceal rather than convey the real. The form of a story, with its beginnings, complications, and resolutions, might be mere artifice imposed on the flux and fragmentation of experience. 1803

The subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extensions, the poem or literary work itself. Ironically—because this subject matter was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life—this subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist work. The difficulty of this new type of writing also limited the appeal of modernism: clearly, difficult works about poetry are not candidates for best-sellers. Nevertheless, over time, the principles of modernism became increasingly influential. 1804

The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that would also previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lots its authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he asserted that the American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn. 1804

The reading audience in America was vast, but it preferred a kind of book quite different from that turned out by literary modernists: tales of romance or adventure, historical novels, crime fiction, and westerns became popular modes that enjoyed a success the serious writer could only dream of. The problem was that often he or she did dream of it; unrealistically, perhaps, the Ezra Pounds of the era imagined themselves with an audience of millions. When, on occasion, this dream came true—as it did for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—writers often accused themselves of having sold out. 1805

Because modernism was an international movement, it seemed to some to conflict with the American tradition in literature and hence was by no means automatically accepted by American writers. To some, the frequent pessimism, nostalgia, and conservatism of the movement made it essentially unsuited to the progressive, dynamic culture that they believed to be distinctive of this nation. To many others, modernist techniques were exciting and indispensable but required adaptation to specifically American topics and to the goal of contributing to a uniquely American literature. Thus artists who may be thought of as modernists in one context—Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams, for example—must be thought of as traditional American writers in another, since they wanted to write “American” works as such. And a profoundly modern writer like William Faulkner cannot be extricated from his commitment to writing about his native South. 1805

expatriates like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot . . . these writers left the United States because they found the country singularly lacking in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not downright hostile, to artistic achievement. They also believed that a national culture could never be more than parochial. 1806

Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took very seriously the task of integrating modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Many writers chose to identify themselves with the American scene and to root their work in a specific region. 1806

Something akin to regionalism can be seen in the surge of literary expressiveness of black Americans. In the 1920s the area of New York City called Harlem, whose population had been swelled both by black New Yorkers moving “uptown” and by southern newcomers, became a center for black cultural activities. The so-called Harlem Renaissance involved the attempt of African American artists in many media to develop a strong cultural presence in America, both to demonstrate that black artists could equal white artists in their achievements and to articulate their own cultural traditions and values. 1806

Healthy changes in American theater are often in reaction against Broadway, a pattern observable as early as 1915 with the formation of the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, both located in New York’s Greenwich Village and both dedicated to the production of plays that more conservative managers refused. The Provincetown Players would short be producing the first works of Eugene O’Neill. 1808

[O’Neill] experimented less in language than in dramatic structure and in new production methods available through technology (e. g., lighting) or borrowed from the stylized realism of German expressionism. 1808

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1865-1914

The result was that between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I the country was wholly transformed. Before the Civil War, white American had been essentially a rural, agrarian, isolated republic most of whose idealistic, confident, and self-reliant inhabitants believed in a Protestant God. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was an industrialized, urbanized, continental world power forced to deal with some of the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as with profound changes in social institutions and cultural values. Increasingly, it would be obliged to acknowledge (if not to remedy) racism that emancipation had not eradicated, military expansionism initiated by the war of aggression against Mexico in 1846-48, and the policy of Indian removal that was a prominent fact of its pre-Civil War life. 1241

Some of this urban growth was the result of population shifts from country to cities, but even more of these new urban dwellers were immigrants. 1242

During his long literary career, James evolved from a recognizably “realistic” writer to one concerned with the complexities of the inner life and the instability of subjective perceptions on which meaning-making depends. No small part of the pleasure in reading The Ambassadors (1903), for example, comes from observing the deepening perception and subtle but certain growth of its protagonist, Lambert Strether. James’s fiction still makes demands on readers even after many of his innovations—stream of consciousness, limited point of view, and so forth—have become commonplace. But as the continuous flow of first-rate criticism of James suggests, the taste for his fiction is worth acquiring. 1245

Broadly speaking, realism is used to characterize a movement in European, English, and American literature that gathered force from the 1830s to the end of the century. As defined by William Dean Howells, who not only practiced realism but argued powerfully in support of its esthetic and ethical rightness, realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” While this definition does not answer every question that may be raised about truth, treatment, or even about material, it offers a useful point of departure. When Henry James, in the letter quoted above, spoke of the “documentary” value of Howells’s oeuvre, he called attention to realism’s fascination with the physical surfaces, the particularities of the sensate world in which fictional characters lived. 1246

This same novel illustrates another aspect of American literary realism—its tendency to select “representative” or ordinary characters—characters one might meet on the street without noticing them. Unlike their romantic counterparts, they don’t walk with a limp, their eyes don’t blaze, they don’t emanate diabolical power. 1246

To verisimilitude of setting and ordinariness of characters living conventional lives as markers of realism, we may add the use of a point of view that reduces authorial intrusion. In Lapham the proportion of dialogue—all of it attempting to render accurately the spoken language of individuals—is very high. And on occasions when the author intrudes, he or she does so in plain language and simple syntax. 1247

Naturalism is commonly understood as an extension or intensification of realism. The intensification involves the introduction of characters of a kind only occasionally to be found in the fiction of Howells, James, or Wharton—characters from the fringes and lower depths of contemporary society, characters whose fates are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and a good deal of bad luck. 1248

One of the most far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the nineteenth century was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This book, together with his Descent of Man (1870), hypothesized on the basis of massive physical evidence that over the millennia humans had evolved from “lower” forms of life. Humans were special, not—as the Bible taught—because God had created them in his image, but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival-making characteristics. 1248

They were all concerned on the one hand to explore new territories—the pressures of biology, environment, and other material forces—in making people, particularly lower-class people, who they were. 1249

Regional writing, another expression of the realistic impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these early and allegedly happier times. At a more practical level, much of the writing was a response to the rapid growth of magazines, which created a new, largely female market for short fiction along with correlated opportunities for women writers. 1251

Kate Chopin, not unlike Samuel L. Clemens, may be thought of as a regional writer interested in preserving the customs, language, and landscapes of a region of the south. We have no better record of antebellum lower Mississippi River Valley than Clemens provided in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, and Chopin’s short stories and her novel The Awakening pick up, almost literally, / where Clemens’s books leave off—in the northern Louisiana countryside and, downriver, in New Orleans. 1251-52

so too does Chopin, in The Awakening, give us unique access to the interior life of a Protestant woman wakening to her oppressions and repressions in the context of a Catholic community still marked by less conscience-stricken Old World attitudes. That The Awakening also has crystallized many women’s issues of the turn of the century and since is testimony to the potential for regional realism to give the lie to attempts to derogate it as a genre. 1252

Chesnutt’s black people, by contrast, are clearly post-Civil War in outlook; even if they live on plantations, they are as much concerned to serve their own interests as they are to please their “master.” 1252

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1820-1865

Gender differences in literary knowledge were more obvious than regional differences, for at least into the middle of the century efforts were made to censor the / reading of girls and young women. 410

and even in the next generation Emily Dickinson read fiction against her father’s wishes. 410

Early calls for the existence of an American literature were altered by the popularity in the United States of Sir Walter Scott, first as the author of widely read poems such as The Lady of the Lake, then, decisively, as a historical novelist. After 1814, when he published Waverly anonymously, Scott produced a new novel almost every year. Until the secret authorship was revealed in 1826, the novels were ascribed to “The author of Waverly” or, by reviewers, to “the Great Unknown.” In the United States, where a new novel by the author of Waverly was almost a national event, literary critics and aspiring novelists instantly saw the appeal of Scott’s use of historical settings and his creating imagined scenes in which real historical people intermingled with fictional characters. Scott’s example not only made the novel a respectable, even elevated, genre, it had much to do with redirecting the literary efforts of ambitious Americans from epic poetry to prose fiction. 410

Scott marks shift from poetry to prose / esp. historical novels / in American fiction

From adolescence Hawthorne was steeped in Scott . . . 411

Before the midcentury, when every up-to-date American read Dickens, every literate American read Scott, and all appeals for the creation of a great American literature were infused with the knowledge that Scott had invented an infinitely adaptable genre of historical fiction. 411

Washington Irving, beloved by ordinary readers and by most of his fellow writers, was the central American literary figure between 1809 and 1859. 411

Despite the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 and the vast southwest from Mexico in 1848 . . . 414

Through almost all the century, American printers routinely pirated English writers, paying nothing to Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens or later writers for their novels, which were rushed into print and sold very cheaply; but American writers suffered, because if they were to receive royalties, their books had to be priced above the prices charged for works of the most famous British writers. 416

In Amherst, Emily Dickinson out-Thoreaued Thoreau in her resolute privacy, idiosyncracies, and individuality. 417

Despite such powerful individualists, it seemed to some of the writers that Americans, even while deluding themselves that they were the most self-reliant populace in the world, were systematically selling out their individualities. Emerson sounded the alarm: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. 417

Thoreau repeatedly satirized America as a nation of joiners that tried to force every newcomer “to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society”: to Thoreau, members of the Odd Fellows and other social organizations were simply not odd enough, not individual enough. 417

All the major writers found themselves at odds with the dominant religion of their time, a Protestant Christianity that exerted practical control over what could be printed in books and magazines. 418

This church, Emerson said, acted “as if God were dead.” Whitman, bred as a Quaker, was even more bitter toward all Protestant churches: “The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves.” Still, the writers all came from Protestant backgrounds in which Calvinism was more or less watered down (less so in the cases of Melville and Dickinson), and they knew their theology. 418

Awareness of the faction of religious ecstasy was not at issue. Emerson, for instance, showed in The Over-Soul a clinical sense of the varieties of religious experience, the “varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.” Similarly, Thoreau acknowledged the validity of the “second birth and peculiar religious experience” available to the “solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord” but felt that any religious denomination in America would pervert that mystical experience into something available only under its auspices and in accordance with its particular doctrines. 418

By the end of the Civil War many native-born American whites shared Stowe’s profound nostalgia for the days before the railroads, before the influx of Catholics, before the even more alien influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, few of whom spoke English and many of whom were not Christian at all. 420

The major writers of the period lived with the anguishing paradox that the most idealistic nation in the world was implicated in continuing national sins: the near-genocide of the American Indians (whole tribes in colonial times had already become, in Melville’s erroneous phrase for the Massachusetts Pequots, as extinct as the ancient Medes), the enslavement of blacks, and (partly a by-product of slavery) the staged “Executive’s War” against Mexico, started by President Polk before being declared by Congress. Emerson was an exception, but most writers were silent about the successive removal of eastern Indian tribes to less desirable lands west of the Mississippi River, as legislated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. American destiny plainly required a little practical callousness, most whites felt, in a secular version of the colonial notion that God had willed the extirpation of the American Indian. The imperialistic Mexican War was so gaudily exotic—and so distant—that only a small minority of American writers voiced more than perfunctory opposition; an exception was Thoreau, who spent a night in the Concord jail in symbolic protest against being taxed to support the war. 420

Lincoln was not wholly teasing if in fact he called Stowe “the little woman had started the big war.” 421

and Douglass’s oratory had revealed to many white Northerners a sense of the evils of slavery and the humanness of those of another race (or of mixed races). 421

In the young country, Emerson’s fellow writers fervently shared his conviction that “nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. 423