William Dean Howells y Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: masculinidad, feminidad y representaciones literarias del matrimonio. Estados Unidos, 1870-1880

Objetivo: el objetivo de este artículo es analizar la dimensión simbólica de las tensiones de género que se desarrollaron en Estados Unidos en el periodo de 1870 a 1880, cuando las esferas de lo público y lo privado habían comenzado a desdibujarse. Metodología: se comparan las representaciones literarias del matrimonio en las novelas Their Wedding Journey (1872) de William Dean Howells y The Story of Avis (1877) de Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, relacionando los personajes femeninos y masculinos y sus preocupaciones en torno al matrimonio con el contexto histórico de las obras. Originalidad: estas novelas no han sido estudiadas en años recientes, aun cuando su contenido resulta valioso para examinar tanto la estructura de sentimiento de la época respecto al género, como las luchas simbólicas de los autores en un contexto de crisis de la feminidad y la masculinidad. Conclusiones: esta investigación revela que la pertenencia sexual de los autores determinó su relación con el género como estructura de distribución del poder y fungió como principio de separación cultural, por lo que cada uno trató de incidir en el ordenamiento de la estructura social desde su forma propia de ser en el mundo: Dean Howells abordó la identidad femenina como complemento de una noción específica de masculinidad, mientras que Stuart Phelps participó en el proceso de creación de la conciencia feminista.

Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

“The Taste of Life”

This chapter begins with a comparative analysis of pain’s importance to three prominent nineteenth-century literary modes: sentimentalism, naturalism, and realism. It then turns to the distinctive aesthetic and ethical priorities of the high realism practiced by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. It concludes with an extended analysis of Howellsian realism as the first of several examples of the high realist aesthetic. From the outset of his career, Howells explored the idea that a more refined literary sensibility hinges on a subtle sensitivity to suffering of various kinds, emphasizing a view of the elevated individual as possessing a heightened ability not just to experience pain but to manage his or her own reactions to it in a sophisticated fashion. Even in his most socially engaged fiction, Howells evinces a preference for a troubled, ruminative, and restrained affective response to others’ suffering over reactions his works portray as rash, boorish, or at best ill-conceived.

Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics

In a materialist vitalism that emerged, nerve force as a physical energy was assumed to give idiosyncratic shape to organisms, races, and species. Borrowing from evolutionary theory and biometrics, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests in Elsie Venner that the vital force of the average members of a race or species will prevail, while hybrids at the edges of the vital bell curve will expire, a principle that applies as well to literature, which has its own vital curve. William Dean Howells promotes a naturalized realism of the healthy, national (white, middle-class) average. W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins take on the task of establishing the African American race as vigorous and empowered rather than enervated—and of eluding constraining racial definition by oscillating between biological and immaterial conceptions of racial force.

Among the Ruins

From the ancient past of Chapter 3, this chapter moves to the account of contemporary American travelers through the ruins and remnants of the ancient Roman world. Starting with Jhumpa Lahiri’s period living in Rome, and touching also on Thomas Jefferson’s account of antique ruins over two hundred years before, the chapter uses the potent image of the “ruin”—both as noun and as verb—to read American travelers in Europe as observers of empire’s recursive temporalities. Closer examinations of travel writing by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Eleanor Clark, and Margaret Fuller reveal the ways in which the contemporary moment for each of these writers ends up filtered through the liberal observing subject via their confrontation with the materiality of an ancient empire, collectively registering the analogical history that the ruins of empire inculcate within the landscape.

Land symbol in the trilogy The House of Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck was the first American female writer (later Toni Morrison) to receive the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. Her writing pages have created streaks of spectroscopy that have a strong, lasting effect on world literature from the 30s of the twentieth century. In particular, with Good Land, Divided Sons and Families are works in the trilogy of The House of Earth, and she received the William Dean Howells medal from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Arts and Literature for the best writing in 1931-1935, at the same time, it also helps her name in the world. Up to the present time, nearly 70 of her compositions can still be found in isolated villages and farms in Tanzania, New Guinea, India, Colombia or in a hut in Malawi. The object of literature, after all the "land" and "the", and each writer often "freeze" a land of their own, a social class to tell, to describe and dissect. Pearl Buck chose vast country like China and the most populous in the world, rather than her native country, to "ground" his art. Despite of living in the land of China only about three decades, time only a third of the life she lived, but the land and the people here have written off the source of her career, which she wrote more works profound value. Through the land symbol in the trilogy of The Real Estate, Pearl S. Buck pointed out the organic relationship between land and people.

Touching a Button

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.