Lecture 7
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Twentieth Century American Literature
Survey Course Instructor: Mihai Mîndra
Social Realism and Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) Modern Darwinism and the Novel of Manners: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)
Social Realism and Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922)
realistic portrayals of life in art or literature
Purpose?
To make a social or political point
Edith Wharton: Modern Darwinism Nineteenthcentury Evolutionism Determinism Edith Wharton’s Modern Darwinism
Forces of inertia
Socially instilled habits
Edith Wharton: Novel of Manners
Detailed Description of customs, behaviors, habits
Of a certain social group at a specific time and place
spirit as genuine love suppressed by social norm assuring social and economic security
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
ten – to - fourteen years older than the bitter Lost Generation writers more contemporary with him had produced the best of their work during the first two decades of the century:
Theodore Dreiser Willa Cather.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Influenced by the late nineteenth century spirit of Utopian idealism
E.g: Edward Bellamy’s immensely popular Looking Backward, 2000-1887 [1888]
depiction of an ideal socialistic society in the year 2000 inspired the formation of many socialistic clubs and the Progressive political heritage of the turn of the century when Lewis was coming to maturity.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Mirrors the confusion of formerly Midwest agricultural frontier little town whose traditional local values are being converted to the industrial/city/progressive standards in the post-Reconstruction Progressive era (1890 – 1920) of rapid economical growth Reconstruction: 1865 – 1877
his native Midwest: Sauk Center, Minnesota: an economy of scarcity is changed into one of abundance
Ensuing problem: how to integrate the pastoral into the urban.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
GENERAL CULTURAL THEMES
Little town middle class (also Main Street, 1920)
middle class characters - the Good Citizen's League in Zenith:
real estate brokers, a physician, a banker, a coal merchant, a company executive, a mattress manufacturer, newspaper owner.
American business enterprise. Commercial culture.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
“The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled until 1860”. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
A Map of Sinclair Lewis' United States as It Appears in His Novels George Annand, Illustrator New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1934
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
1920s North American mentality:
urge toward “normalcy” and “business as usual” fear of socialists, “Reds”, labor unrest suspicion of foreigners and “radical” ideas the suppression and denial of non-WASP culture: mid-20th century, the term referred to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, became a common designation for Americans of British heritage. American writers often equated WASPs with the dominant class in the United States.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
the appeal of bohemianism the lure of nature the hypocrisy of Prohibition following the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in 1919 ended in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was repealed. the influence of the mass media and advertising in shaping public desires the replacement of religion by science and technology the conformity of the Solid Citizen
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Babbitt’s drama:
his wish for idealism not able to understand/spot the former/latent spirit of pioneering and reform stifled by middle-class conformity and corrupt political ambition reveals an ambivalent, divided self: idealism and wish for genuine values vs. conformism.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Underlying Babbitt’s conformism:
some genuine idealism and wish for change materialized in: his failed love affair political orientation and almost breakaway from the Zenith community. the end of the novel: his new, redeemed perception of truth.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
“I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!"
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
Lewis in letter to critic Carl Van Doren (November, 1920):
planning the story of “an Average Business Man…in a city of …four hundred thousand people [like] (…Minneapolis or Seattle…)with its enormous industrial power…and menacing heresy hunt…crushing of anything threatening its commercial oligarchy” Similar to: London’s Iron Heel [1908] Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here [1935]: imagining capitalism as fascism.
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American journalist, critic, and essayist perceptive and often controversial analyses of American life and letters one of the most influential critics of the 1920s and 1930s. on Babbitt: A criticism of America’s conformist Puritanism, commercialism, moralism. The real America > Lewis the first really national/American novelist, Babbitt the archetypal Yankee. Popular success proved by the coining of “Babbitt” and “Babbittry” as synonyms of middlebrow conformist/m.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt/Babbittry
dictionary definition of Babbitt/Babbittry
A problem of reception > superficial public/canonic perception: The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: College Edition, ed. Laurence Urdang, New York: Random House, 1968, 97: “A self-satisfied person who conforms readily to middle-class attitudes and ideals […]”
Actually Babbitt is the second character (in a mass of middle class conformism), after Paul Riesling, who dangerously rebels against the Good Citizen's League mentality.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
objective representation of contemporary social reality
Realism in the preliminary research method used by Lewis before writing Babbitt > full familiarization with the field and the setting of the book: through carefully recorded interviews reading listening to speeches attending conventions preparing full summaries of the plot and structure of the story drawing maps of the imaginary Zenith and the floor plan for Babbitt’s house.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Critics called Lewis a literary sociologist of American life:
Keen analytic description of social setting (e.g. the Athletic Club description) and character (e.g. Conrad Lyte, real estate speculator). Similar to the radical sociology of Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899): Conspicuous consumption relation between status, money, and social competition.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Social realism: qualities set forth by William Dean Howells (in his 1891 collection of critical essays Criticism and Fiction):
Stories drawn from contemporary everyday life full accounting and depiction of middleAmerican life in the 1920s (Babbitt’s milieu: family, company, club). Familiar settings remarkable detail; Lewis described by critics as a notable photographer.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Believable characters Ordinary, everyday, colloquial English
Much dialogue as a means of self-revealing characters (no omniscient narrators)
faithful recorder of American speech sounds, patterns, and rhythms
everyday conversation as a revelation of relationships and class
Limited point of view
There is authorial intrusion in Babbit
ironically critical: highlights middle class hypocrisy.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Babbittry; American middleclass regimentation: “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares-toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE; also often known as the Elks Lodge or simply The Elks), is an American fraternal order and social club founded in 1868. It is one of the leading fraternal orders in the U.S., claiming over one million members. Booster club: an organization that is formed to contribute money to an associated club, sports team, or organization. Booster clubs are popular in American schools at the high school and university level.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
American middle class kitschy, degraded dream/romanticism satirized as undermined or taken over by harsh technological economics realism:
“For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
(continued) Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
“To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore”. “To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glasstopped desk, whose title of nobility was "Gogetter," and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling--not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
ADVERTISING as bogus/faker of reality:
Parody of the degraded, business/pragmatic vulgarized version of education and intellectual values in newspaper advertising (next slide):
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
“He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Parody of literary art as advertising in commercialized America: the “poetry of industrialism”:
(…) the poetry of industrialism, now there's a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who's really THE American genius? The fellow who you don't know his name and I don't either, but his work ought to be preserved so's future generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads!”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
ORATORY as PUBLIC LIFE:
Parody of public oratory as insubstantial and nationalistic (Americanness) as public life itself. Nativism and demagogy:
Babbit – Chamber of Commerce dinner annual address: (next slide)
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
"'In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry! But, mind you, it's the appreciation of the Regular Guy who I have been depicting which has made this possible, and you got to hand as much credit to him as to the authors themselves.”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Parody of degraded religious middlebrow oratory:
see novel for:
Mike Monday’s speech “Intellectual” oratory: Reverend John Dennison Drew’s speech alternative “New Thought” oratory: Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge’s sermon
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
greatness of the novel:
not just a satire approaching critically social types, but also an existential examination of Babbitt’s inner life marking his change and the insertion of drama with Paul Riesling’s tragic, violent breakaway from the Zenith society.
a technologically highly developed city:
people do not communicate with technology and each other; alienated from romance/idealism/pioneeradventurer-frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
alienated from romance/idealism/pioneer-adventurerfrontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
“Wish I’d been a pioneer same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a house like this”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Romance and business: “Know what I wanted to do as a kid? Know what I wanted to do? Wanted to be a big chemist. Tha's what I wanted to do. But Dad chased me out on the road selling kitchenware, and here I'm settled down-settled for LIFE--not a chance!” “Know what I could 've been? I could 've been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe a Stevenson. I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination. Lissen. Lissen to this. Just made it up: Glittering summery meadowy noise Of beetles and bums and respectable boys. Hear that? Whimzh--whimsy. I made that up. I don't know what it means! Beginning good verse. Chile's Garden Verses. And whadi write? Tripe! Cheer-up poems. All tripe! Could have written--Too late!"
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Power and energy for business; no spiritual pathos (churches) or pioneer romance (citadels)
Zenith > the heroic city:
“THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Babbitt’s ways of escape:
into the past American tradition and present > nature (Thoreauvian Transcendental) bohemian (the Roaring ‘20s) liberal Seneca Doane’s (Progressive)
fail. A chastened rebel (like Carol Kennicott in Main Street).
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
The Mount, Edith Wharton's House & Gardens
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton – born into the post–Civil War Victorian era
inherited a domestic, often sentimental, literary tradition from her female predecessors: Harriet Beecher Stowe Louisa May Alcott Sarah Orne Jewett. Acknowledged her debt to them but rejected the “rose-coloured” lenses through which some of these writers saw the world (Backward, NW, 1002) aimed instead for moral depth and ambiguity (more associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne).
The House of Mirth (1905)
helped to transform nineteenth-century romantic literature into a twentieth-century realism
confronted directly and critically the pressing issues facing men and women at the turn of the century Her realism is: more uncompromising than William Dean Howells's more rooted in physical passion than James's.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton takes special interest in women:
In novels as different as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, she documents:
the effects of an increasingly consumerbased culture shifting sexual relations changing urban & rural demographics on women of all classes.
The House of Mirth (1905)
portraits of people negotiating the requirements of place and custom
tradition of the novel of manners original contributions to the school of literary naturalism.
characters, like those in Theodore Dreiser's and Frank Norris's fictions, are often
trapped by biology or circumstance.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton’s major theme:
the dispossession of the old New York aristocracy by the vulgar new rich (The Custom of the Country, 1913; The Age of Innocence, 1920) the action of The House of Mirth occurs in the first years of the 20th century, a few decades beyond the dispossession of old New York. distant offshoots of NY aristocracy, already tainted by the vulgarity of the new bourgeoisie, yet contemptuous of it.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Lily Bart descends from the hereditary nonmercantile society to that of the new investors (moneymaking climbers).
The financial ruin of her father when she is 19 leaves her with one way of making a living: a useful companion to women of wealth. Next possibility: make a suitable marriage for money
The House of Mirth (1905)
Social steps in Lily’s decline:
The Trenors – pretense of styles and values they actually violate The Dorsets – lower rung: no longer pretend to care about traditional styles and values. Carrie Fisher – frankly materialistic, a guide for the arrivistes ready to pay for social acceptance. The Wellington Brys – rich and feverishly on the make. The Gormers – also on the rise Norma Hatch – wealthy adventuress, not socially highly integrated The milliner’s workshop
The House of Mirth (1905)
defies the principles that give force to the two most famous narrative traditions that secure other American classics:
the twin faiths in: the ability to control one's rise to riches and social success (Benjamin Franklin's contribution) to attain self-sufficiency (the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson).
In contrast Wharton's plot traces Lily Bart's wavering course toward poverty, loneliness, and death.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Dual meanings of 'success‘: Seldon’s v. Lily Barth’s:
"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?“ "My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of success," he said, "is personal freedom.“ "Freedom? Freedom from worries?“ "From everything--from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit--that's what I call success."
The House of Mirth (1905)
The hypothesis proposed by Selden that 'personal freedom' is the only true 'success'.
Selden defines freedom for Lily as breaking away from 'all material accidents'--all of society's stringent demands--in order to enter into 'the republic of the spirit'.
commodification of young women in the marriage market: the full impact of late capitalism upon the lives of women
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Three layers of language:
discourse of nineteenth-century evolutionists whose paradigm of physical determinism still held sway. up-to-the-moment metaphors suggestive of the forces of inertia: fascinated quasi-scientific historians like Henry Adams, who borrowed his vocabulary for the depletion of mental energy from Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics. words descriptive of socially instilled habits > influence of: sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim, William James, John Dewey.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Wharton on the Darwinist causes for Lily Bart's 'ineffectiveness":
“…she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized produce she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast?” (301)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Lily's inertia, her capitulation to the supersensual forces of entropy erasure of the distinctions between the conscious state and the sedative pull of chloral:
“But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about--she had returned to her normal view of life.” (323)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
the forces of habit:
socially imposed impulses that direct one's actions for good (Gus Trenor does not rape Lily) and for ill (Selden's self-assurance that he is no slave to habit and thus free to tell his love to Lily, belied by the ease with which he falls back into old patterns of doubt instilled in him by his class and by his role as a male): “To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled. . . . Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts.” (147)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
L.B.’s social involution: determined by the conflicting crisscrossing of her moral evolution:
started by her love for Selden and the consequent assimilation of his “republic of the spirit” principles and the social rules of her environment.
What she lacks: the capacity to tear herself away from the comfort and hedonic aspects of this environment that traps and suffocates her through aesthetic and social addiction. Thus: the way towards a new/authentic identity stops wavering in intentional accident.
Wharton provides this diversity of signals about the source and nature of forces that appear cruelly to limit, if not to crush, faith in one's unfettered freedom of the will Naturalism.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
The Independent at the time when the novel appeared:
questioned whether there should even be novels like Wharton's that suggest that 'environment' is the reason her characters participate in society's 'refined ferocities, its sensual extravagances . . . the tragedies which underlie its outward appearance of mirth and prosperity'. this review notes perceptively that the fatalism Wharton projects in 1905 is different from the fatalism practiced in 'the old days in Greece'. Never has 'fatalism been so emphasized as it is now, particularly in fiction. The difference is that we lack pagan cheerfulness.'
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
Questioning the verisimilitude of The House of Mirth:
readers in 1905, telling the truth in the case of The House of Mirth:
the accuracy with which Wharton brought into single focus the relations that linked Lily's character, Lily's socially constituted conduct, and Lily's fate.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
some reviews never moved beyond fretting over the degree of 'realism' Wharton conveys by being:
'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', 'ethical' or 'unethical', 'didactically preachy' or impersonally 'impressionistic' in the treatment of her material. the San Francisco Chronicle noted perceptively that Wharton had romanticized her story since in 'real life' Lily would become the mistress of a man she loathed but eventually tolerated.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
contemporaries of Wharton on 'truthtelling‘:
Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor: sociology of 'parasitism'.
deplorable social condition causes the 'prostitution' of the 'fine lady' who--'clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers'--is recognizable as Lily Bart on the brink of becoming either 'kept wife [or] kept mistress'.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
Paul Bourget -- preface he prepared for the 1908 French edition of The House of Mirth Frenchman who had travelled in the United States during the mid 1890s while gathering notes for Outre-Mer He observes that Americans like to think theirs is a classless society, one based on principles of complete equality for all citizens. this is not the case. Masked by the look of democracy, the United States consists of two worlds in conflict: that of the aristocrats of great wealth and that of the general populace which labours without guarantees of economic or social equality through Wharton's depiction of Lily's life as a 'social pageant', she breaks through the masks to the truth regarding America.
Novel of Manners
novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. struggle to fit into high society: proper and improper ways of acting / behaving
Novel of Manners
tradition developed in England (17th century & continued throughout the 19th):
Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James etc
the place of women in society and the social effect of marriage
America: Hannah Foster's The Coquette, Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s novels, and even Kate Chopin's The Awakening
Novel of Manners
specific conventions in the 19th century:
protagonist is usually a single woman looking to get married socio-economic class as a factor in marriage proper and improper way of acting within high society differences and relations between classes The end of the novel: either marriage or death of the female protagonist
The House of Mirth (1905)
There were questions with regard to the possibility/ adequacy of such a genre:
In America, there were no official social classes
Wharton adapted the form:
to better suit the New York society: different kind of aristocracy -- elegant New York. Class mobility as an important factor. Lily Bart: lower-class world v. her upper-class sensibilities
Wharton: spirit as genuine love suppressed by social norm assuring social and economic security.
Survey Course Instructor: Mihai Mîndra
Social Realism and Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) Modern Darwinism and the Novel of Manners: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)
Social Realism and Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922)
realistic portrayals of life in art or literature
Purpose?
To make a social or political point
Edith Wharton: Modern Darwinism Nineteenthcentury Evolutionism Determinism Edith Wharton’s Modern Darwinism
Forces of inertia
Socially instilled habits
Edith Wharton: Novel of Manners
Detailed Description of customs, behaviors, habits
Of a certain social group at a specific time and place
spirit as genuine love suppressed by social norm assuring social and economic security
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
ten – to - fourteen years older than the bitter Lost Generation writers more contemporary with him had produced the best of their work during the first two decades of the century:
Theodore Dreiser Willa Cather.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Influenced by the late nineteenth century spirit of Utopian idealism
E.g: Edward Bellamy’s immensely popular Looking Backward, 2000-1887 [1888]
depiction of an ideal socialistic society in the year 2000 inspired the formation of many socialistic clubs and the Progressive political heritage of the turn of the century when Lewis was coming to maturity.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Mirrors the confusion of formerly Midwest agricultural frontier little town whose traditional local values are being converted to the industrial/city/progressive standards in the post-Reconstruction Progressive era (1890 – 1920) of rapid economical growth Reconstruction: 1865 – 1877
his native Midwest: Sauk Center, Minnesota: an economy of scarcity is changed into one of abundance
Ensuing problem: how to integrate the pastoral into the urban.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
GENERAL CULTURAL THEMES
Little town middle class (also Main Street, 1920)
middle class characters - the Good Citizen's League in Zenith:
real estate brokers, a physician, a banker, a coal merchant, a company executive, a mattress manufacturer, newspaper owner.
American business enterprise. Commercial culture.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
“The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled until 1860”. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
A Map of Sinclair Lewis' United States as It Appears in His Novels George Annand, Illustrator New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1934
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
1920s North American mentality:
urge toward “normalcy” and “business as usual” fear of socialists, “Reds”, labor unrest suspicion of foreigners and “radical” ideas the suppression and denial of non-WASP culture: mid-20th century, the term referred to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, became a common designation for Americans of British heritage. American writers often equated WASPs with the dominant class in the United States.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
the appeal of bohemianism the lure of nature the hypocrisy of Prohibition following the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in 1919 ended in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was repealed. the influence of the mass media and advertising in shaping public desires the replacement of religion by science and technology the conformity of the Solid Citizen
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Babbitt’s drama:
his wish for idealism not able to understand/spot the former/latent spirit of pioneering and reform stifled by middle-class conformity and corrupt political ambition reveals an ambivalent, divided self: idealism and wish for genuine values vs. conformism.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
Underlying Babbitt’s conformism:
some genuine idealism and wish for change materialized in: his failed love affair political orientation and almost breakaway from the Zenith community. the end of the novel: his new, redeemed perception of truth.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt (1922)
“I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!"
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
Lewis in letter to critic Carl Van Doren (November, 1920):
planning the story of “an Average Business Man…in a city of …four hundred thousand people [like] (…Minneapolis or Seattle…)with its enormous industrial power…and menacing heresy hunt…crushing of anything threatening its commercial oligarchy” Similar to: London’s Iron Heel [1908] Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here [1935]: imagining capitalism as fascism.
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American journalist, critic, and essayist perceptive and often controversial analyses of American life and letters one of the most influential critics of the 1920s and 1930s. on Babbitt: A criticism of America’s conformist Puritanism, commercialism, moralism. The real America > Lewis the first really national/American novelist, Babbitt the archetypal Yankee. Popular success proved by the coining of “Babbitt” and “Babbittry” as synonyms of middlebrow conformist/m.
Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt/Babbittry
dictionary definition of Babbitt/Babbittry
A problem of reception > superficial public/canonic perception: The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: College Edition, ed. Laurence Urdang, New York: Random House, 1968, 97: “A self-satisfied person who conforms readily to middle-class attitudes and ideals […]”
Actually Babbitt is the second character (in a mass of middle class conformism), after Paul Riesling, who dangerously rebels against the Good Citizen's League mentality.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
objective representation of contemporary social reality
Realism in the preliminary research method used by Lewis before writing Babbitt > full familiarization with the field and the setting of the book: through carefully recorded interviews reading listening to speeches attending conventions preparing full summaries of the plot and structure of the story drawing maps of the imaginary Zenith and the floor plan for Babbitt’s house.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Critics called Lewis a literary sociologist of American life:
Keen analytic description of social setting (e.g. the Athletic Club description) and character (e.g. Conrad Lyte, real estate speculator). Similar to the radical sociology of Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899): Conspicuous consumption relation between status, money, and social competition.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Social realism: qualities set forth by William Dean Howells (in his 1891 collection of critical essays Criticism and Fiction):
Stories drawn from contemporary everyday life full accounting and depiction of middleAmerican life in the 1920s (Babbitt’s milieu: family, company, club). Familiar settings remarkable detail; Lewis described by critics as a notable photographer.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
Believable characters Ordinary, everyday, colloquial English
Much dialogue as a means of self-revealing characters (no omniscient narrators)
faithful recorder of American speech sounds, patterns, and rhythms
everyday conversation as a revelation of relationships and class
Limited point of view
There is authorial intrusion in Babbit
ironically critical: highlights middle class hypocrisy.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Babbittry; American middleclass regimentation: “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares-toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE; also often known as the Elks Lodge or simply The Elks), is an American fraternal order and social club founded in 1868. It is one of the leading fraternal orders in the U.S., claiming over one million members. Booster club: an organization that is formed to contribute money to an associated club, sports team, or organization. Booster clubs are popular in American schools at the high school and university level.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
American middle class kitschy, degraded dream/romanticism satirized as undermined or taken over by harsh technological economics realism:
“For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
(continued) Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
“To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore”. “To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glasstopped desk, whose title of nobility was "Gogetter," and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling--not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling”.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
ADVERTISING as bogus/faker of reality:
Parody of the degraded, business/pragmatic vulgarized version of education and intellectual values in newspaper advertising (next slide):
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
“He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs. The text ran:
$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Parody of literary art as advertising in commercialized America: the “poetry of industrialism”:
(…) the poetry of industrialism, now there's a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who's really THE American genius? The fellow who you don't know his name and I don't either, but his work ought to be preserved so's future generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads!”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
ORATORY as PUBLIC LIFE:
Parody of public oratory as insubstantial and nationalistic (Americanness) as public life itself. Nativism and demagogy:
Babbit – Chamber of Commerce dinner annual address: (next slide)
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
"'In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry! But, mind you, it's the appreciation of the Regular Guy who I have been depicting which has made this possible, and you got to hand as much credit to him as to the authors themselves.”
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
Parody of degraded religious middlebrow oratory:
see novel for:
Mike Monday’s speech “Intellectual” oratory: Reverend John Dennison Drew’s speech alternative “New Thought” oratory: Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge’s sermon
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
greatness of the novel:
not just a satire approaching critically social types, but also an existential examination of Babbitt’s inner life marking his change and the insertion of drama with Paul Riesling’s tragic, violent breakaway from the Zenith society.
a technologically highly developed city:
people do not communicate with technology and each other; alienated from romance/idealism/pioneeradventurer-frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
alienated from romance/idealism/pioneer-adventurerfrontiersman nostalgia. Babbitt’s nostalgia due to such loss (next slide):
“Wish I’d been a pioneer same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldn’t have a house like this”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Romance and business: “Know what I wanted to do as a kid? Know what I wanted to do? Wanted to be a big chemist. Tha's what I wanted to do. But Dad chased me out on the road selling kitchenware, and here I'm settled down-settled for LIFE--not a chance!” “Know what I could 've been? I could 've been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe a Stevenson. I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination. Lissen. Lissen to this. Just made it up: Glittering summery meadowy noise Of beetles and bums and respectable boys. Hear that? Whimzh--whimsy. I made that up. I don't know what it means! Beginning good verse. Chile's Garden Verses. And whadi write? Tripe! Cheer-up poems. All tripe! Could have written--Too late!"
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Power and energy for business; no spiritual pathos (churches) or pioneer romance (citadels)
Zenith > the heroic city:
“THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.”
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
Babbitt’s ways of escape:
into the past American tradition and present > nature (Thoreauvian Transcendental) bohemian (the Roaring ‘20s) liberal Seneca Doane’s (Progressive)
fail. A chastened rebel (like Carol Kennicott in Main Street).
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
The Mount, Edith Wharton's House & Gardens
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton – born into the post–Civil War Victorian era
inherited a domestic, often sentimental, literary tradition from her female predecessors: Harriet Beecher Stowe Louisa May Alcott Sarah Orne Jewett. Acknowledged her debt to them but rejected the “rose-coloured” lenses through which some of these writers saw the world (Backward, NW, 1002) aimed instead for moral depth and ambiguity (more associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne).
The House of Mirth (1905)
helped to transform nineteenth-century romantic literature into a twentieth-century realism
confronted directly and critically the pressing issues facing men and women at the turn of the century Her realism is: more uncompromising than William Dean Howells's more rooted in physical passion than James's.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton takes special interest in women:
In novels as different as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, she documents:
the effects of an increasingly consumerbased culture shifting sexual relations changing urban & rural demographics on women of all classes.
The House of Mirth (1905)
portraits of people negotiating the requirements of place and custom
tradition of the novel of manners original contributions to the school of literary naturalism.
characters, like those in Theodore Dreiser's and Frank Norris's fictions, are often
trapped by biology or circumstance.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Wharton’s major theme:
the dispossession of the old New York aristocracy by the vulgar new rich (The Custom of the Country, 1913; The Age of Innocence, 1920) the action of The House of Mirth occurs in the first years of the 20th century, a few decades beyond the dispossession of old New York. distant offshoots of NY aristocracy, already tainted by the vulgarity of the new bourgeoisie, yet contemptuous of it.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Lily Bart descends from the hereditary nonmercantile society to that of the new investors (moneymaking climbers).
The financial ruin of her father when she is 19 leaves her with one way of making a living: a useful companion to women of wealth. Next possibility: make a suitable marriage for money
The House of Mirth (1905)
Social steps in Lily’s decline:
The Trenors – pretense of styles and values they actually violate The Dorsets – lower rung: no longer pretend to care about traditional styles and values. Carrie Fisher – frankly materialistic, a guide for the arrivistes ready to pay for social acceptance. The Wellington Brys – rich and feverishly on the make. The Gormers – also on the rise Norma Hatch – wealthy adventuress, not socially highly integrated The milliner’s workshop
The House of Mirth (1905)
defies the principles that give force to the two most famous narrative traditions that secure other American classics:
the twin faiths in: the ability to control one's rise to riches and social success (Benjamin Franklin's contribution) to attain self-sufficiency (the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson).
In contrast Wharton's plot traces Lily Bart's wavering course toward poverty, loneliness, and death.
The House of Mirth (1905)
Dual meanings of 'success‘: Seldon’s v. Lily Barth’s:
"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?“ "My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of success," he said, "is personal freedom.“ "Freedom? Freedom from worries?“ "From everything--from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit--that's what I call success."
The House of Mirth (1905)
The hypothesis proposed by Selden that 'personal freedom' is the only true 'success'.
Selden defines freedom for Lily as breaking away from 'all material accidents'--all of society's stringent demands--in order to enter into 'the republic of the spirit'.
commodification of young women in the marriage market: the full impact of late capitalism upon the lives of women
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Three layers of language:
discourse of nineteenth-century evolutionists whose paradigm of physical determinism still held sway. up-to-the-moment metaphors suggestive of the forces of inertia: fascinated quasi-scientific historians like Henry Adams, who borrowed his vocabulary for the depletion of mental energy from Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics. words descriptive of socially instilled habits > influence of: sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists such as Émile Durkheim, William James, John Dewey.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Wharton on the Darwinist causes for Lily Bart's 'ineffectiveness":
“…she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized produce she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast?” (301)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
Lily's inertia, her capitulation to the supersensual forces of entropy erasure of the distinctions between the conscious state and the sedative pull of chloral:
“But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about--she had returned to her normal view of life.” (323)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
the forces of habit:
socially imposed impulses that direct one's actions for good (Gus Trenor does not rape Lily) and for ill (Selden's self-assurance that he is no slave to habit and thus free to tell his love to Lily, belied by the ease with which he falls back into old patterns of doubt instilled in him by his class and by his role as a male): “To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled. . . . Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts.” (147)
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
L.B.’s social involution: determined by the conflicting crisscrossing of her moral evolution:
started by her love for Selden and the consequent assimilation of his “republic of the spirit” principles and the social rules of her environment.
What she lacks: the capacity to tear herself away from the comfort and hedonic aspects of this environment that traps and suffocates her through aesthetic and social addiction. Thus: the way towards a new/authentic identity stops wavering in intentional accident.
Wharton provides this diversity of signals about the source and nature of forces that appear cruelly to limit, if not to crush, faith in one's unfettered freedom of the will Naturalism.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Modern Darwinism
The Independent at the time when the novel appeared:
questioned whether there should even be novels like Wharton's that suggest that 'environment' is the reason her characters participate in society's 'refined ferocities, its sensual extravagances . . . the tragedies which underlie its outward appearance of mirth and prosperity'. this review notes perceptively that the fatalism Wharton projects in 1905 is different from the fatalism practiced in 'the old days in Greece'. Never has 'fatalism been so emphasized as it is now, particularly in fiction. The difference is that we lack pagan cheerfulness.'
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
Questioning the verisimilitude of The House of Mirth:
readers in 1905, telling the truth in the case of The House of Mirth:
the accuracy with which Wharton brought into single focus the relations that linked Lily's character, Lily's socially constituted conduct, and Lily's fate.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
some reviews never moved beyond fretting over the degree of 'realism' Wharton conveys by being:
'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', 'ethical' or 'unethical', 'didactically preachy' or impersonally 'impressionistic' in the treatment of her material. the San Francisco Chronicle noted perceptively that Wharton had romanticized her story since in 'real life' Lily would become the mistress of a man she loathed but eventually tolerated.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
contemporaries of Wharton on 'truthtelling‘:
Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labor: sociology of 'parasitism'.
deplorable social condition causes the 'prostitution' of the 'fine lady' who--'clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers'--is recognizable as Lily Bart on the brink of becoming either 'kept wife [or] kept mistress'.
The House of Mirth (1905) – Realism & Verisimilitude
Paul Bourget -- preface he prepared for the 1908 French edition of The House of Mirth Frenchman who had travelled in the United States during the mid 1890s while gathering notes for Outre-Mer He observes that Americans like to think theirs is a classless society, one based on principles of complete equality for all citizens. this is not the case. Masked by the look of democracy, the United States consists of two worlds in conflict: that of the aristocrats of great wealth and that of the general populace which labours without guarantees of economic or social equality through Wharton's depiction of Lily's life as a 'social pageant', she breaks through the masks to the truth regarding America.
Novel of Manners
novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. struggle to fit into high society: proper and improper ways of acting / behaving
Novel of Manners
tradition developed in England (17th century & continued throughout the 19th):
Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James etc
the place of women in society and the social effect of marriage
America: Hannah Foster's The Coquette, Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s novels, and even Kate Chopin's The Awakening
Novel of Manners
specific conventions in the 19th century:
protagonist is usually a single woman looking to get married socio-economic class as a factor in marriage proper and improper way of acting within high society differences and relations between classes The end of the novel: either marriage or death of the female protagonist
The House of Mirth (1905)
There were questions with regard to the possibility/ adequacy of such a genre:
In America, there were no official social classes
Wharton adapted the form:
to better suit the New York society: different kind of aristocracy -- elegant New York. Class mobility as an important factor. Lily Bart: lower-class world v. her upper-class sensibilities
Wharton: spirit as genuine love suppressed by social norm assuring social and economic security.
