Yours for the (Marriage) Revolution

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolutionists such as Austin and London in Greenwich Village, who shared their era’s enthusiasm for scientific systems. Austin and London protested conventional forms of marriage both from the sociological standpoint of its unnecessary conventions and from its failure to account for the irrationality of sexual desire and its dampening effect on genius. Yet their accounts of unconventional unions reveal another set of problems. Pitting conventional marriage against its more revolutionary counterparts, Austin, in A Woman of Genius and Number 26 Jayne Street, and London, in “Planchette” (1908) and Little Lady of the Big House (1916), critique conventional marriage but also cast a cold eye on its Bohemian alternatives, revealing the gap between the ideal and the real in progressive marriage by highlighting the stubborn realities of gender inequality and of the irrational desire, cast in London’s “Planchette” as the supernatural world, that plagued their idealistic efforts.

Boarding School Poetry, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and the Demands of Americanization Poetics and Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This chapter focuses on the under-examined corpus of Carlisle poetry, viewing it as a vital archive for theorizing the role of the American Indian intellectual tradition in negotiating Americanization discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. Materials published in newspapers and magazines at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (1879–1918) include “Carlisle poetry,” which encompasses original poetry by Native American students, reprints of poems by Indian authors, poems by school personnel, and poems by well-known American authors. This poetry, along with the letters and articles published in Carlisle newspapers and magazines, is complicit with the ideological underpinnings of the institution’s ambitious goals of “making” Indian students into Americans, even as elements of this literature critique the Americanization that Carlisle boarding school demanded of its students.

On Jane Addams’s Feminist Pragmatism

What power did Jane Addams see in a group of elderly female Hull-House clients who came searching in 1913 for a purported “Devil Baby”? Kristen Renzi argues that Addams uses the tale as a catalyst for her depictions of cultures that explicitly challenge the modern tendency to discount the past in the name of progress. Temporally and ideologically, Addams can be situated at modernity’s threshold, for her work exhibits ties to both nineteenth-century femininity and twentieth-century public intellectualism. Through The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916), Addams not only overtly analyzes the ways in which women experience, remember, and give meaning to their gendered realities, but also uses the Devil-baby tale to query her own “threshold” position. Her equal investment in both modern possibilities for women and traditional, explicitly feminine forms of knowledge provides a model of considering a feminist recovery that, far from objectifying relics of the past, demonstrates the contemporary socio-political needs and possibilities that can only be understood through a pragmatic turning backward.

Writing into Modernity

Chapter 3 situates Edith Wharton’s guidebook The Writing of Fiction within a culture of advice that traverses the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The essay argues that Wharton’s text formulates relational, comparative aesthetics that place contemporary modernist experimentation (such as stream of consciousness narration) within novelistic traditions developed the nineteenth century. Additionally, The Writing of Fiction emphasizes twentieth-century novelistic investigation of character subjectivity that challenges nineteenth-century novels’ portrayals of characters in relation to their historical conditions. While Wharton’s guidebook has often been read as a reflection upon her own writing practices, this essay submits that within a genre of advice about writing, Wharton’s guidebook addresses a wider conceptual field: the novel’s exploration of character identity within modernity.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

Introduction

Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.

Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as part of a history of long nineteenth-century representation. Countering the dominant perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a break from the past—a view that has shunted Fauset’s work to the sidelines—the essay argues that Fauset’s work explores the legacy of late-nineteenth-century US culture in the emergent modernity of the early twentieth century. Excavating the literary, cultural, and scientific tropes of feminine representation that burst from the pages of Fauset’s fiction, the essay identifies a recent literary past that informs Fauset’s constructions of her modern urban heroines.

Companionate Marriage across the Century’s Turn

The struggle to realize companionate marriage appears as a central conflict in literary works by Anglo-American, African American, and ethnic American writers, who grapple with the issues raised by new ideologies and cultures of marriage. Drawing from cultural history that includes Lindsey and Evans’s volume, The Companionate Marriage (1927), and responses to it as well as a range of literary marriages that demonstrate the power of the companionate ideal, this piece charts the interaction between changing attitudes toward marriage in life and literature. As the range and complexity of opinions circulating around this issue demonstrate, the ostensibly “modern” question of equality in marriage had been debated as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. By contrast, later, more modern narratives increasingly turn to depictions of non-companionate, patriarchal arrangements, which offer both cautionary tales about the past and counter a trenchant idealism about the companionate model.

Wavering in Delight

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.

Laura Jean Libbey and Sexual Transformation

In chapter 7, Dale Bauer charts the innovations in transitional modernism that turn-of-the-century popular novelist Laura Jean Libbey created in her novels devoted to women’s romance and independence. While little-known today, Libbey’s serialized novels were highly popular and often translated into film. Libbey’s fictions bridged the divide between late nineteenth-century feminism and modern fictions of the New Woman. These novels often end with immediate brain surgeries and near-instant recoveries, with marriages into higher social classes, with rivals for suitors defeated by these women’s pain and bitterness and their transcendence. Many of Libbey’s novels chart women’s social recovery from “brain fever” and brain traumatic injury through brain surgery. As they are almost-instantly transformed to “modern women,” they are often robbed of their resistance. Libbey’s fictions emphasize the uneven development of the New Woman across the century’s turn.