Gender and race representations in twentieth century american literature

CHAPTER I: GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON, WILLIAM FAULKNER, DJUNA BARNES, AND EDITH WHARTON ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD Missy Kubitsche

GENDER AND RACE REPRESENTATIONS IN

TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN

LITERATURE

by

DUONG THUY THI PHAM

B.A., University of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 1988 Grad Dip., La Trobe University, Australia, 1995 M.A., La Trobe University, Australia, 1996

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

Abstract ii Table of contents iii

CHAPTER I: Gender Representations in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, And Edith Wharton 2

CHAPTER II: Gender Representations in Adam Bede, Felix Holt, The Sun

Also Rises, Native Son, The New Magdalen, And Lost And Saved 19

CHAPTER III: Race Representations In “The Monster” And Huckleberry Finn 30

Works Cited 88 Notes 93

CHAPTER I: GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN THE WORKS OF ZORA NEALE HURSTON, WILLIAM FAULKNER, DJUNA BARNES, AND EDITH WHARTON

ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Missy Kubitschek attacks the common critical oversimplification of the character

Janie as a black woman in Their Eyes Were Watching God Kubitschek asserts that Janie

is a true heroine on a quest for her identity and meaning of life, and her eventual return to her community as a boon completes the quest in a way that signifies communal as well as personal growth

Many critics, according to Kubitschek, trivialize or subordinate Janie; they see nothing more than a woman searching for romantic love or, alternatively, a subordinate spouse for a dominant male character While romantic love is indeed an essential element

of Janie’s life, Kubitschek contends that Janie’s adventures represent a successful struggle to bring her life into harmony with her vision of the pear tree, the symbol of human life

Kubitschek defines a successful quest as answering the call to adventure, crossing the threshold into the unknown, facing trials, finding the reward, and returning to the community Janie indeed goes through all of the above stages

She responds to the call to adventure with Jody when her hope of developing harmony between her first marriage and the pear tree evaporates She again crosses the threshold separating personal safety from the risk necessary to fulfilment embodied in Tea Cake Part of the quest requires her to undergo trials in her marriage to Tea Cake on the road to development The trials come on the individual level (the possibility of

personal betrayal when she finds Tea Cake responding on some level to Nunkie’s sexual invitation), the social level (in the form of Mrs Turner, a black woman who idolizes white culture, and thus poses a threat to the black community), and through nature (the hurricane) What Janie learns in each case is, respectively, a) rejection of her earlier passivity by striking Tea Cake and forcing a confrontation on her own terms; b) acceptance of Tea Cake’s anger and the community’s violent annihilation of Mrs Turner’s threat to its integrity; and c) use of memory as a means of transcending Tea Cake’s death Her reward is full participation in community expression and construction with the people in the Everglades Janie’s quest comes to a full circle when she returns to Eatonville to share her experience and reward with the community there through her friend Pheoby, thereby enabling the community to learn from her experience in a call and response fashion analogous to that of the work songs composed during slavery, a major source of black heritage

Annye Refoe hails Janie as a hero in a feminist sense, for, in her journey from self-denial to self-awareness, Janie transcends the societal norms designed to keep women in their place

At the beginning of the story, Janie is prevented from listening to her inner voice

by the societal emphasis on material possessions and her own lack of self-esteem As a result, she looks to others for guidance and fulfillment: first to Logan Killicks with his sixty acres of land and later to Joe Starks, the mayor of Eatonville Both men regard himself as important and Janie as secondary, or important only by association, and resent the nonchalant way she holds them and their possessions For this reason, Janie withdraws into herself to protect her innermost feelings, as it is the only strategy

available to her at the time With Jody’s death, Janie is finally freed of the shackles put upon her and proceeds to her next excursion into a relationship with a man of the new age Tea Cake and Janie complement each other and together, they form an equal partnership that allows them both to explore and experience the limitlessness and exquisite beauty of loving and of being a complete person Tea Cake never takes Janie for granted He insists that he and Janie are of the same mind and encourages her to extend her limits and to accomplish things she has always yearned to do Thus placed in situations where she can practice the theories of self she has been contemplating for years, Janie blossoms into a new, happy woman with a positive self-image and pride for herself Her marriage to Tea Cake has allowed her to practice following her own inner voice to the extent that outside influences are now inconsequential, as her stance at the trial for Tea Cake’s death, and her return to Eatonville dressed in overalls suggest At last, Janie has no need for outward facades; she no longer needs nor invites outside interference in her life and can now overcome the loneliness and the other voices

Refoe argues that this Janie who returned to Eatonville is the prototype for the successful woman of the new age She has discovered her potential, lived up to it and consequently has become a complete and happy person with a healthy sense of self-respect and independence

Michael Cooke finds Their Eyes Were Watching God to be the record of how

affection turns materialism and passivity to respect, reliance, and realization

self-At the start, Janie does not have a sense of self, evinced by the way she does not recognize herself in the picture and by the name Alphabet As a result, she is easily

persuaded by her grandmother to seek safety in materialism in the form of marriage to old Logan Killicks When she runs away with Joe Starks, Janie still does not advance very far beyond materialism, which finally yields to political power as a goal As the wife

of the town mayor, Janie has been reduced to a projection of Joe’s ambition, without substance or activity of her own Eventually, Janie’s realization that Joe is but “illusory substance” puts her on the way to a further stage of development where, driven by his carping insults, she retorts against him by calling him a big-belly who looks like “de change uh life.” This incident indicates that all through her life until that moment, she appears to have yielded to other people’s demands of her, but at bottom, she has held fast

to her freedom The moment has come when she refuses to be psychically put away and

to be cancelled However, the freedom she enjoys after Joe’s death is only rudimentary—

it is freedom from falsehood and obstacles, but without any positive expression or form The relationship with Tea Cake, therefore, is ideal, as it first confirms and elicits her powers, physical, social, and moral Janie is finally shown how to fulfill herself by surrendering to someone who surrenders to her, which causes the fiction of domination to disappear Despite the violence and unpredictability of the ending of their relationship, the novel does not end on a tragic note For, if Janie begins in accidental solitude with her grandmother and passes into accepted solitude with Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, she finally emerges in what can be called accomplished solitude Not only has she acquired the power of speech, she has proved herself to be a woman of resilience who knows what she wants, and has the strength to survive and to forgive (e.g Tea Cake’s friends in “De Muck” and her own friends back in Eatonville), and the command and lucidity of

experience to understand the nature of love (“Love is lak de sea It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”)

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

Peter Swiggart contends that Faulkner’s main achievement in The Sound and the

Fury is the vivid recreation of past events in the characters’ imagination, which involves

the passage of time and other time symbols

The opening section is presented through the stream of consciousness of Benjy, the idiot of the Compson family Because of Benjy’s lack of a moral point of view and of

a conscious self, representation of events through his camera-mind effectively exposes the false or destructive morality of his brothers, and the vices and virtues of other characters He reacts in pain to Caddy’s misadventures, but his recollections return him to the past and relieve him from the clutches of despair that strangle Quentin

Caddy, who is a symbol of innocence and affection in early childhood, is taught a sense of guilt by Quentin’s puritanism To Quentin, sexual union means death; he is thus dressed up as if for a funeral for the wedding He cannot understand his sister’s behavior and therefore hides from reality in his morbid rage and selfish agony His concern for honor compels him to change his memory (since past events cannot be altered) by admitting incest When that fails, he decides to destroy himself Like his father, Quentin looks upon the passage of time as the source of inescapable human frustration and tries to establish a permanent identity in a shifting and ambiguous reality His suicide is consequently an attempt to free his consciousness from the inevitability of change and decay that time brings

For Jason, the third Compson boy, time is the equivalent of money, so he is constantly seen racing against time, and always losing The organization of Jason’s section is based upon his two main obsessions, his chase after financial profit and his hatred of Caddy and her daughter Quentin His inhumanity can partly be traced back to his mother’s influence and the unsuccessful marriage of his parents, as can in fact the failures of the other children

The last section of the novel sees Dilsey, a passive witness of Compson decay, elevated to the symbolic status of prophetic time-keeper of the Compsons and of time itself Her role indicates the destructive impact of time, and at the same time, the possibility of a religious vision that can help free the individual at least from despair

Olga Vickery contends that in The Sound and the Fury, Caddy’s surrender to

Dalton Ames serves both as the source of dramatic tension and as the focal point for the different perspectives The four sections of the novel are then sequenced by the significance each of her brothers attaches to her act With regards to the central focus, each of the first three sections presents a version of the same facts, which is at once the truth, and a distortion of the truth by the perspective of the narrator The theme of the novel, as revealed by the structure, is the relation between the event and the interpretation

of it

With Benjy readers are restricted to sensations that cannot be communicated Benjy orders and evaluates his experience rigidly, and protests against any novelty or change Within his rigid world, Caddy is both the focus of order and the instrument of its destruction, for she is associated with the things he loves most, yet she cannot prevent

herself or his world from changing Benjy, however, suffers the least because even pain is external to him, and because one pattern can be replaced by another

Despite obvious parallels with Benjy’s section (with regards to its rigidity and the importance of Caddy), Quentin’s world is based on abstractions rather than sensations, and he is always trying to coerce experience into conformity with his system If Benjy is saved by being outside time, Quentin is destroyed by his excessive awareness of it, hence his desire for death as a way to stop his memory of Caddy’s betrayal of Compson honor Jason’s section is totally different from Benjy’s and Quentin’s, and yet related to theirs through Caddy It is also the clearest, though not any more objective, since he operates with a logic (cause and effect, profit and loss) which forms the basis of social communication However, logic isolates Jason as effectively as the moral abstractions of Quentin or the dependence on sensations of Benjy

Finally, the fourth section with its objectivity finds Dilsey becoming the embodiment of the truth of the heart—and morality By working with circumstance and not against it, she creates order out of disorder; by accommodating herself to change, she preserves some semblance of decency for the Compsons She is also able to live with time thanks to her patient preoccupation with the present Her triumph and peace come from the simple verities of human life: love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice

Michael Millgate finds the title of “Twilight” in the manuscript of The Sound and

the Fury an apt reference both to Benjy’s section (to his suspension between the light and

the dark, comprehension and incomprehension, human and animal), and to the whole book (to the decay of the Compsons in the dimmed glory of their past) The four sections

of the book represent a movement outwards from Benjy’s private world to the public

world of the fourth section There is also a different grouping of the first and last sections for their objectivity, and of the second and third for their intense subjectivity

Benjy reports events of which he is a spectator with a camera-like fidelity, since

he does not have the intelligence to order, and hence to distort, them He does not interpret events, nor does he judge people, although he becomes the instrument by which the other characters are judged

Quentin in his obsessions with family tradition and honor is divorced from actuality Whatever he does, his concern is for the act’s significance as a gesture rather than for its practicality He seeks to defend Caddy’s honor, knowing in advance that he will be defeated He then turns to a futile search for a means to arrest time at a moment of perfection Caddy’s vitality and humanity therefore exposes Quentin’s inadequacy—her sexual freedom an expression of rebellion against the repressive demands made upon her

by members of the family

Jason’s single-minded and ruthless pursuit of material self-interest isolates him both from his family and from the community as a whole However, his commercial and materialistic instincts, anti-rural and anti-traditional as they are, make him the only male Compson with enough practical competence to cope with the practical and social implications of Caddy’s defection

The desperate mood of The Sound and the Fury is also evident in the last section,

for even though it contains certain positives that to some extent offset the negations of the previous sections, it is far from being an uncontested affirmation Dilsey’s endurance, a major positive influence in the section, is in fact derived from her submission to the tedious, trivial and inconsiderate demands by the Compsons The moment of simplicity,

love and innocence of the Easter service soon passes, and they all return to the Compson house, a symbol of decay

NIGHTWOOD

According to Judith Lee, Nightwood is modern both in its subject and form and in

its re-consideration of the concepts of masculine and feminine The primary experience

of our individual difference is found in sexual difference In Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

gives an inversion of this experience in a world of darkness, irrationality, and degeneration The deconstruction of the opposition between masculine and feminine shows that it does not define the most fundamental experience of difference: the difference between the self as Subject (the identity one imagines oneself to be) and the self as Other (one’s identity as perceived by someone else)

Lee focuses on the three ways Nightwood reworks our assumptions about

masculine and feminine by exposing the inadequacy of our cultural myths: Barnes’

retelling of the fairy-tale romance in the first four chapters of Nightwood; her depiction of

the love between Nora and Robin; and her characterization of Robin and Matthew as “the third sex.”

In the first sections of the novel, Matthew O’Connor’s version of the fairy-tale romance is a tale of narcissistic love (the rejection of sexual difference), not androgyny (the resolution of sexual difference) In both of the Hedvig-Guido and Felix-Robin pairs, Barnes parodies the stereotypes of male and female and the values mythologized in the prince-princess romance She shows Hedvig and Guido to be a parody of complementarity, while Felix and Robin are portrayed as inherently incompatible

The relationship between Nora and Robin also follows the pattern of fairy-tale romance, but is an escape from history With this story, Barnes shifts the focus from the struggle to overcome difference to the struggle to establish difference Moreover, she de-emphasizes the difference between self and other and emphasizes the difference between self as Subject and self as Other She implies that the love of a woman for a woman inevitably leads to the discovery of an insurmountable difference that bars the possibility

of any relationship

Finally, in the two figures of the third sex, Matthew and Robin, Barnes parodies the idea of redemption, through innocence in Robin’s case, and through knowledge in Matthew’s case

After a summary of the plot and a look at of the structure of Nightwood, James Scott continues to discuss the novel’s center of focus He contends that Nightwood is a

story of human entrapment of characters who are unable to relinquish their own desires to the needs of others Because of their sexual natures, the characters are incomplete When their affairs end, they are made even more acute of their loneliness

Felix is perhaps the least damaged, for his relationship with Robin gives him Guido to love Dr O’Connor, on the other hand, is entirely and desperately alone, even though he appears amid a crowd Of all the characters, Robin is a radical example of this solitary condition, for all of her relationships with the other characters reinforce a sense

of estrangement Robin lives in a world of brief encounters that are impersonal and untouched by love, although she leaves behind her several people who have fallen in love with her and whom she forgets

In real life, there could be an illusion of reconciliation of the Self to others The doctor explains that most people marry and thus postpone the problem indefinitely When self-need in a person matches self-need in another sufficiently to engender a workable relationship, a person’s essential aloneness may not be felt until the final moment

Scott argues that Nightwood is essentially the story of Robin She is born with a

kind of consciousness that is unlike that of civilized human beings She is both a woman who needs to be cared for, and a nocturnal animal who wanders at night According to Scott, Robin differs from the other characters only in degree, for all have her desperate dualism between the animal and the intellectual dimensions of the human personality

What distinguishes Nightwood from the rest of the literature of the 1920s that discussed a

night world is the fact that in the main body of that literature, the night world is depicted

as depraved and hellish, and the nightlife of the invert is presented as the most degraded

of all In Nightwood, however, this life is presented as a perceived reality that evokes in

each individual a subjective response

According to Jane Marcus, Nightwood constitutes a political case of communal

resistance of underworld outsiders (the Other—the black, lesbian, transvestite, or Jew) to domination Djuna Barnes accomplishes this through laughter, a form of folk grotesque derived from Rabelais and the circus; and she laughs at both Leviticus and Freud at the same time

If Leviticus warns against tattoos as impure, as are incest, homosexuality, and the

mixing of things, Nightwood, on the contrary, is about merging, dissolution, and

hybridization It features mixed registers of language, it is the night world of lesbian, gay and transvestite Paris, and makes a modernism of marginality From the tattooed body of

Nikka the nigger to Dr O’Connor’s stories of grotesque and painful suffering to his speeches of mixed prayer, oath, and profanity, Barnes emerges as the female Rabelais, the articulator of body/bawdy language, and an artist of the Modernist Grotesque

Moreover, as a study of abjection, Nightwood traces the political unconscious of the rise

of fascism, as the “outsiders” bow down before Hitler’s perverted Levitical prescriptions for racial purity

Nightwood also exposes the inhumanity of the madness for order in both Freudian

psychoanalysis and fascism, and asserts that the outcast is normal and truly human “It is

as if Djuna Barnes had decided to include in her novel every word, image, and story that women have never been able to tell, to flout every possible taboo from the excretory to the sexual, and to invent…taboos uncatalogued even by Freud” (235) Dr Freud is clearly parodied in the figure of Dr O’Connor in his filthy bedroom answering Nora’s questions Robin’s cross-dressing acts out a female fetishism, challenging Freud’s claim that fetishism is the exclusive domain of males Djuna Barnes is also argued to project a

differentiated female sense of the uncanny in Nightwood, disproving that which Freud

claims to be universal

Thus, Nightwood reveals that gays and outcasts do have a linguistically and

philosophically rich culture, and proposes that the human condition is a sister- and brotherhood of difference, and that ideologies that attempt to erase those differences and claim only themselves to be human are outright dangerous

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

Margaret McDowell contends that The House of Mirth marks the first time Edith

Wharton “wrote a novel…with economy and concentration, focusing upon one central character and confining herself to a few important themes.”

The central character of the novel is Lily Bart The two major themes of the novel revolve around, on the one hand, her descent from a world of aristocratic glamour and riches to that of anonymity and poverty, and on the other, her attaining a spiritual and moral victory through her suffering McDowell agrees with Richard Poirier’s interpretation of Lily’s death as deriving from a vulnerability to loneliness and from an alienation typical of modern individualism The human significance of the novel comes from a depiction of the battle between the good and the evil within Lily in which the good finally emerges the victor: Lily not only refrains from an attempt to blackmail her enemy, Bertha Dorset, and in so doing destroys an opportunity to salvage her own social reputation, but manages to repay Gus Trenor the full amount of her debt and clears her entanglement with him Although Wharton seems to suggest that moral integrity hampers rather than rewards a good person in a materialistic and predator society, Lily remains a strong and admirable woman who is able to gain insight, compassion, and emotional depth from her crushing experiences

In the second half of the chapter, McDowell analyzes the subordinate themes and

characters in The House of Mirth One of the themes Wharton seems to be projecting via

the tragedy she puts Lily through is that of economic determinism Wharton suggests that Lily’s inherited tendencies and early training make her helpless once she is driven out of

a parasitic existence in the world of the rich Lily is also defeated by her emotions,

inclinations and personal weakness, as well as by chance and by impersonal social forces

As an unmarried upper-class woman with no father, husband, or a career education, she is eventually defeated by an inflexible, shallow, and hypocritical society and by a universe indifferent to the welfare of any individual or group

Carol Wershoven compares and contrasts Lily Bart’s social falls in The House of

Mirth with Undine Spragg’s social climbs in The Custom of the Country Both the falls

and the climbs reflect a corrupt, hypocritical society in which money is the only standard

by which virtues and values are judged The falls and climbs also refer to Lily’s social downfall from the world of luxury and of the leisure class and her moral climb away from

it

Even before the action of the novel begins, Lily has repeatedly jeopardized her social standing and her chances for marriage This is so partly because of her flightiness and partly because she despises the prize she has been trained to strive for: a wealthy husband and the luxury he is able to provide But the world of the leisure class of New York is morally bankrupt, debased, and debasing It is one in which money is the supreme good In this world, women become commodities on sale, and consequently are constantly in a fierce competition for the best marital deal This world is also riddled with double standards, jealousy, and envy Starting out with less than optimum financial security, Lily is left to predicate her social climb on her beauty and grace alone, a beauty and grace which ironically sets her apart from the rest of the women in her circle and earns her their envy and jealousy as a result Because of her superiority in beauty and innate goodness, Lily is fated to be defeated socially and thus begins her descent But as she begins to fall, Lily starts to gain an understanding, not only of the cruelty and

emptiness of the narrow little world she lives in, but also of the suffering, and conversely, the beauty and good faith of the working class She now realizes that the so-called old social insiders are not much different in substance from the aspirants—the newly rich— they disdain She also begins to make human connections that are not based on mutual manipulation, but on a recognition that other people suffer the way she has suffered It is this understanding that facilitates her steady character development and aids her decisions each time she chooses to follow her moral instincts and further disentangles herself away from the “frivolous society,” even as it means annihilation to her chances and eventually her survival

Elaine Showalter argues that The House of Mirth mirrors the challenges Edith

Wharton faced in her career at the time she wrote the novel

Wharton in The House of Mirth takes on the challenging task of telling the history

of women past thirty, the threshold established for women in the 19th century in terms of girlhood and marriageability, which continued into the 20th century as the ripe time for the formation of female identity According to Showalter, Lily Bart’s crisis of adulthood

is placed in a larger historical shift, from the homosocial women’s culture of intense female relationships of the 19th century to the heterosexual fiction of modernism, characterized by more intimate friendships between women and men In this transitional phase, Lily is neither the socially conscious, rebellious New Woman, nor the old type who clings to the past She represents in her skills and morality the Perfect Lady, a “lone and solitary survivor of a bygone age.” Her plight parallels Wharton’s career as the elegant writer of upper-class New York society, a society which encouraged women to

“spend their artistic inclinations entirely upon a display of self.”

In the novel, Wharton was exploring the tension between the male and female

literary heritage As a result, The House of Mirth alludes to but subverts the

sentimentalism of 19th century women’s literature by creating a woman close to spinsterdom whose relationship to other females is distant, formal, competitive and even hostile, and who is continually defeated Wharton’s revision of a male text, on the other hand, shows in the hard, abhorrent female personality Lily is afraid of becoming as a product of a patriarchal society and a capitalist economy It is also apparent in the male characters’ dilemmas that parallel those of the women, such as loneliness, dehumanization, anxiety, and uncertainty In the end, Lily as the last Lady of the old society must die But the union of the leisure and working classes at her death also brings

a vision of a new world of female solidarity in which the New Woman like Gerty Farish and Nettie Struther will struggle courageously and hopefully

The House of Mirth marks the point of Wharton’s ability to assert her creative

power as a woman artist, and to unite the male and female sides of her lineage into a mature fiction of men and women in a modern world Lily’s death is also the death of Wharton’s lady novelist, who dutifully struggles to subdue her powerful creative impulses In rejecting the escapism of the lady’s world and in learning to express strong emotions, including sexual desires, Wharton was also marking her own rebirth as an artist who would go on to create the language of feminine growth and mastery in her later works

CHAPTER II: GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN ADAM BEDE, FELIX HOLT, THE SUN ALSO RISES, NATIVE SON, THE NEW MAGDALEN, AND LOST AND

SAVED

ADAM BEDE Bartle, the permanent bachelor, has very amusing opinions about women and how women negatively affect men His holding his tongue at Adam and Dinah’s wedding at the end seems to be a symbol of the final conformity to the Victorian family-oriented values

Adam Bede, for all that he is portrayed as the hero of the book, seems to be quite nạve and shallow when it comes to love The fact that he pines for Hetty and not some other, mature and responsible maiden somehow makes him less than admirable, and at the same time more human This, to me, shows Eliot’s talent as a writer, who is different from the majority of Victorian writers, as she deals with the duality of men and women more realistically, portraying them as imperfect human beings who are capable of having both admirable and less than admirable qualities

Her other characters, e.g Hetty, Arthur, and Mrs Poyser, also show the same duality of qualities at times Mrs Poyser is supposedly a loving woman to her children, husband and people around her in general while at the same time can be quite harsh in her judgement and treatment of Hetty Hetty is both shallow in her aspirations to luxury and a higher social class, and pure, simple, and straightforward (like Nature herself) in her passion for Arthur Arthur himself fluctuates between being the truthful, honest and caring young man and a seducer and liar

Sally Mitchell in The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading

1835-1880 argues that there is an undercurrent of antiromanticism in the sentimental novels of

the time “Woman’s goal is marriage, which provides her with station, role, duties and economic security Anything—including emotion—which keeps her from achieving that goal is counter-productive” (p.10) Dinah is thus a proof of the contrary She has feelings

of love for Adam even when he is still smitten with Hetty Moreover, she refuses to

marry and settle down, although this is done with the excuse of caring for all mankind as

a Methodist preacher

FELIX HOLT There seem to be conflicting details in the representation of Mrs Transome

Eliot seems to me to be making a strong subversion case with Mrs Transome’s fall Mrs Transome seems not only to have made an independent decision regarding the relationship with Jermyn and given her full consent to the relationship, but to have enjoyed the relationship as well The periodical pangs of regret she suffers have more to

do with her being involved with a selfish man than with the “immorality” of her adultery

Mrs Transome seems to be unabashedly celebrated as the mother of a love child Her joy at giving birth to him, her seeing in him a much greater source of happiness than her elder son and later on, her hopes for him all show this Yet, her life seems to be a continual disappointment, also because she’s his mother The fear, the bitterness, the thwarted hopes seem to negate the happiness of being his mother It is almost as if Eliot meant this to be the punishment for the fallen woman, even though the illicit relationship was never found out while it was still going on, and Mrs Transome was able to retain her status and respectability in life

Esther is described as having the nature of a fallen woman, not totally different from Hetty Sorrel (i.e aspirations to a higher social class, fascination with things that make her look pretty, attention to appearance/mannerisms, and snobbery) Yet Eliot somehow decides to save her for a nobler ending

Both of the female leads in Felix Holt are very strong women who make their own decisions and have their own opinions about things that happen in their lives, which

is quite unusual in novels of the time

THE SUN ALSO RISES

Sibbie O’Sullivan reads The Sun Also Rises as a story about the survival in the

realistic but nihilist twentieth century of love and friendship that breaks away from the Victorian moral conventions

The Sun Also Rises reflects the changing sex roles prevalent in the Western

society of the time The conventional courtship and marriage is parodied in the relationship between Cohn and Frances where it brings only anger and humiliation With the entrance of Brett Ashley the focus shifts to the New Woman and her friendship with Jake Barnes Brett is the epitome of a generation of liberated women who “smoke, drank, slept around, and earned a living.” Independent and sexually active, she nevertheless enjoys a deep and equal friendship with Jake, even though they can never be completely, physically united In their relationship, they accept each other as they are, and easily merge the traditional sex roles of being soft and caring (feminine) and hard and straight-forward (masculine) Their friendship is characterized by the survival mechanisms of honesty, shared histories, and love

Hemingway also offers a parallel of intimate male-male friendships, such as that between Jake and Bill Gorton, or the intense male interaction with Wilson-Harris in Burguete, and with the aficionados in Pamplona This parallel between male bonding and heterosexual bonding removes the sexual barriers that inevitably place the burden of bad behavior on sexually active women Through his description of these relationships, Hemingway also suggests that people who survive the best are those who have the ability

to accept simultaneously two opposing ideas or modes of behavior Thus, Cohn and Romero, representatives of the traditional male role, are ultimately excluded from any relationship with Brett, while Jake is able to continue his friendship with her because he accepts her as she is, even in her peculiar and unstable ways Their reunion at the end of the story reflects the cyclical nature of true friendship in its rhythm of disintegration and renewal

Brett Ashley is thus a positive figure, a determined yet vulnerable New Woman who lives honestly, and her relationship with Jake unites love with friendship in a way Victorian women were never allowed to do

Wolfgang Rudat offers a rebuttal of James Hinkle’s 1985 article “What’s Funny

in The Sun Also Rises.” While Hinkle argues that the anger Jake Barnes feels towards the

gay men in Brett’s company reflects Jake and the author’s dislike of gays, Wolfgang contends that Hemingway may in fact be satirizing the habit of stereotyping people according to their sexual orientation—or what we perceive to be sexual orientation, by presenting Jake as guilty of “composure-envy.”

According to Wolfgang, Hemingway is giving us a satiric portrayal of a man who has not come to terms with his physical handicap, impotence caused by a war injury Jake

is upset by the “intrusion” of the gays into his life and especially by his exchange with Prentiss because Jake assumes that Prentiss is homosexual, and in Jake’s view, the gays freely choose not to do what he himself cannot do: have physical intercourse with a woman Ironically, Jake at first tries to deny that there is a linkage between him and the gays with regards to women But that attempt is exposed when Prentiss unknowingly jokes about the loss of a certain “faculty,” which Jake takes as a reference to his own manhood Eventually, in order to be able to tolerate himself as he is in his sexual status, Jake will have to learn to tolerate other men with a sexual preference different from his own In fact, his eventual tolerance of the gays is to become a way for him to come to grips with his physical handicap Jake is envious of the gays both because they are able to have sex without women and because they seem to feel comfortable about their sexuality, with a “superior…composure,” in his own words Wolfgang argues that before the cab

ride from the bal musette, Jake had entertained the hope that Brett might eventually allow

him a two-way sexual relationship When he is disillusioned in that aspect, Jake is confronted with the need for a decision: whether to turn homosexual in order to achieve a measure of “composure.” Because becoming gay, or in other words, voluntarily choosing

to sexually reject Brett represents the only way he can exorcise the woman who had continually kept him obsessed with his war injury, and thus exorcise that obsession In ironically making the protagonist apologize for his earlier bias against otherness in sexuality, Hemingway is presenting the acceptance of sexual diversity as instrumental in helping Jake find himself and as such, bucking the customary contemporary attitude toward homosexuals as marginalized characters

Like Wolfgang Rudat, Debra Moddelmog focuses on the scene of Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley’s meeting at a dance club in which Jake is accompanied by a prostitute and Brett is with a group of homosexual men Moddelmog argues that the characters emerge from this scene as bodies of contradictions that challenge the validity of defining gender and sexuality in terms of binarisms, i.e masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual

None of the characters or relationships in the scene is simple to classify in the traditional way Brett symbolizes a category of women who were crossing gender lines

by cross-dressing and behaving in masculine ways Her cross-dressing also evokes associations to the lesbians of the time who chose to cross-dress in order to announce their sexual preference Her affiliation with homosexual men and her transgendering in turn complicate her relationship with Jake His own relationship with her could be seen as one of the manifestations of his homosexual desire, mannish-looking as she is Other manifestations include his conflicting response to her gay companions (with whom he shares an impotence with regards to women), his aficion (which must be confirmed by the touch of other men), and his relationships with Bill Gorton and Pedro Romero (which have the same intensity as any heterosexual love at its best) When Jake brings Pedro (who, like Brett, blends male and female, feminine and masculine) and Brett together, a web is formed in which desire flows in many directions Given the similarity between Brett and Pedro in Jake’s description of them, given the homoerotic way Jake responds to the bullfighter’s meeting with the bull, and given the sexual ambiguities found in Brett and Jake, when Brett and Pedro consummate their desire for each other, they also fulfill

Jake’s desire for Brett and hers for him while at the same time satisfying his infatuation with Pedro

The Sun Also Rises thus represents a network of ambiguities and contradictions

pertaining to gender and sexuality Actions, appearance, and desire cross over conventional boundaries of identity and identification in such a way that categories become fluid and merge with one another The result is a need to question the traditional

“systems of representation that are insufficient and disabling to efforts to understand the human body and its desires.”

NATIVE SON

Kenneth Kinnamon contends that while Bigger Thomas represents the larger and

freer American ideals and aspirations, the black women in Native Son are in league with

the oppressors of black men

Black women share responsibility for the plight of black men for their insensitivity and failure to understand Bigger’s problems or to support him as a male They also fail him in their acceptance of the ideals of manhood hailed by the larger culture and the imposition of those ideals on him Bigger’s mother, his sister, and his girlfriend all want desperately to get along with whites and the place prescribed and defined for blacks in the dominant white culture Their personalities have taught them to

be acquiescent and even satisfied with their lot They actively assist in maintaining the very forces that oppress them and their black men physically and psychologically Mrs Thomas, for example, nags rather than nurtures; she holds Bigger down to the mundane tasks of everyday existence and will not permit him to fly, literally or symbolically She

is a burden to Bigger when she pleads with him, either by insult or cajoling, to get a job

and take responsibility for the family in their pitiful situation Moreover, she destroys his efforts to retain a semblance of dignity when she begs Mr and Mrs Dalton to spare Bigger’s life, thanks them for not forcing her to move, and puts on a minstrel show for them The other women in Bigger’s life bring no more essence to him than his mother Bigger’s sister Vera is but an echo to her mother in her position His girlfriend Bessie,

with a weakness in character typical of all black women in Native Son, asks for nothing

more than an existence on a mundane, routine level—work, sex, and alcohol

By contrasting the black women in Native Son with Bigger in their actions and

inactions, Wright establishes a dichotomy of “native” and “foreign” qualities The women preach subservience and conformity to white ideas of what blacks should be, and are thus foreign to individual black development Bigger, on the other hand, is native to the best of American traditions in his desire to break out of the confines of racism and express his individualism The tragedy is that the structure of American society was never intended to include people like Bigger, and he is doomed to die whether he conforms to the dominant expectations or not

Jerry Bryant argues that Richard Wright in Native Son voices his strong criticism

of an unhealthy society Bigger Thomas is thus a modern victim of white racism who turns to violence because he is closed off from self-fulfillment and self-expression and excluded from the world around him

According to Bryant, Bigger kills Mary out of a sense of terror, for he is conditioned to feel the taboo of raping a white girl When he chooses to kill her rather than get caught, however, he realizes for the first time the worth he has put upon his life His new consciousness gives him a more acute sense of being present, and important, in

life Bigger as such becomes a representative of modern man, defined by his seizing upon violence as a proof of his reality From then on, like a true addict, he develops a need to experience that sense of elation again and again, each time with a stronger dose But Bigger’s crime is not only a stroke against the boundaries of racism Through Bigger, Wright expresses his fear that violence is being used for national and self-fulfillment at the time of the holocaust and increasing totalitarianism in Europe

Moreover, Bryant finds that in Native Son, Wright has whites appear as a natural

force in the world that is hostile to the black man’s individual fate Cramped by circumstances created by a racist social order, natural occurrences, and chance, Bigger is

forced to do things that are violent, final, and self-destructive, for even that is preferable

to abject submission, spiritual enslavement, moral paralysis, and denial of self To become a whole man, he then refuses to be damned by the conventional morality, denying the white world the power to judge him guilty for having a black skin Trying to seek unity and coherence for his new existence in Max, Bigger ironically finds something other than what he seeks: instead of completeness and ultimate meaning, he gets

knowledge of isolation and emptiness Bigger eventually realizes that his meaning can

only come from his existence, the only thing he can rely upon, the only thing he knows for certain The horror of the novel lies in the fact that Bigger has to kill to learn how far humans will go to save themselves when pushed; and it is on this horror that Wright’s critique of American racism and his analysis of the modern experience rest

According to Louis Tremaine, Bigger Thomas’s essential dilemma is his inability

to express his emotional experience in a meaningful way His intellectual and linguistic apparatus an inadequate means to explain himself and create a true image of his feelings,

he is turned into a mass of unsatisfied urges that drive him to indifference and violence This need for self-expression is due in part to socio-economic conditions that deny Bigger access to conventional modes of communication systematically reserved for the dominant race and class Bigger’s failure to communicate his feelings is also due to his fear—of the whites, of himself, of delving into his own experience only to learn that understanding is futile As a result, he resorts to killing as an involuntary consequence of his failure to understand and communicate his own fear and thereby to break the pattern

of indifference and violence that rule his life

Tremaine argues that Bigger is finally given a chance to understand and express himself by the way Wright wields his plot and narrative voice Wright “gives the reader not the world Bigger lives in but the world Bigger lives He presents the world as Bigger feels and experiences it”—through the distorting lens of fear The events of the novel also work together to force Bigger to contemplate them, as when he is made to think of the

significance of his killings after those events Likewise, the narrative voice in Native Son

functions as an expressionistic projection of Bigger’s sensibility and concretely embodies his dilemma The power of the preacher and of Max, the lawyer, to manipulate through words the images that hold meaning for Bigger’s life compensates, for a while, for Bigger’s mute incomprehension before his own experience In the last part of the novel, Bigger acts and feels while the narrator reasons aloud about Bigger’s actions and feelings, until the triumphant moment when Bigger is ready to accept his own feelings, now beyond explanation or justification, and has the last word over Max as well as over the narrator: “What I killed for must’ve been good…I can say it now, ‘cause I’m going to

die I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds But I’m all right I feel all right when I look at it that way….”

THE NEW MAGDALEN Again, the author could not convince me that the heroine should be celebrated or loved for her personality rather than for her physical beauty Mercy Merrick behaves rather badly toward her fiance after their engagement She is moody, petulant, defensive, and quick to put the blame on Horace Holmcroft for everything (not that he is in the end capable of generosity or open-mindedness, but) Her behavior toward Lady Janet is not much better She is grateful, yes, but who could help but be grateful to someone who has taken her in from the streets and loved her so much? Why should we praise a person just because she, after having unlawfully stolen someone else’s identity, now agrees to expose herself and return to her former life? Collins has to portray Grace Roseberry as a violent, mean and impetuous person just so Mercy can make a better impression on the readers against her foil And just as well, for I can’t see anything admirable about Mercy

She does show some courage and the will to get out of the degrading situation of an outcast, and here, at last, Collins does have a point, if his intention is to call for society to help fallen women back to a good, “virtuous” life But I would rather see her rescued from her position when she is still out on the streets than after she has assumed someone else’s identity

In the end, though, society defeats individuals’ attempt to right the wrongs heaped upon the fallen woman Mercy Merrick goes into a kind of exile, albeit voluntarily, with a loving husband and in the esteem of a loving aunt

LOST AND SAVED There seem to be conflicting details in the representation of Mrs Transome

Eliot seems to me to be making a strong subversion case with Mrs Transome’s fall Mrs Transome seems not only to have made an independent decision regarding the relationship with Jermyn and given her full consent to the relationship, but to have enjoyed the relationship as well The periodical pangs of regret she suffers have more to

do with her being involved with a selfish man than with the “immorality” of her adultery Mrs Transome seems to be unabashedly celebrated as the mother of a love child Her joy at giving birth to him, her seeing in him a much greater source of happiness than her elder son and later on, her hopes for him all show this Yet, her life seems to be a continual disappointment, also because she’s his mother The fear, the bitterness, the thwarted hopes seem to negate the happiness of being his mother It is almost as if Eliot meant this to be the punishment for the fallen woman, even though the illicit relationship was never found out while it was still going on, and Mrs Transome was able to retain her status and respectability in life

Esther is described as having the nature of a fallen woman, not totally different from Hetty Sorrel (i.e aspirations to a higher social class, fascination with things that make her look pretty, attention to appearance/mannerisms, and snobbery) Yet Eliot somehow decides to save her for a nobler ending

Both of the female leads in Felix Holt are very strong women who make their own decisions and have their own opinions about things that happen in their lives, which is quite unusual in novels of the time

CHAPTER III: RACE REPRESENTATIONS IN “THE MONSTER” AND

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

STEPHEN CRANE’S “THE MONSTER”

Celebrated by William Dean Howells as the best short story ever written by an

American and considered his favorite story by Stephen Crane himself, The Monster is

unique among Crane’s stories, being at once a synthesis of biographical, historical, and literary influences Thematically, the novella invites a wide range of readings, from a simple children’s tale to a metaphor of the defacing effects of writing, an example of individual responsibility in the face of mob rule, a brilliant social satire, a study of the village virus, and an examination of race in post-Reconstruction Americai Technically, Crane’s writing also treads the line between Realism, Naturalism, and Impressionismii If there are many possible readings of the novel’s themes and techniques, the author’s intent

in the matter of race in this novel has also been the subject of much debate, occasioning many different, even opposing, views There has been speculation as to why Crane chose

to complicate matters by making Henry Johnson a black man when both of the models for Henry in the real world were whiteiii R.W Stallman extols Crane as a champion of the Negro cause, observing that “no white American author had pictured a Negro

performing a truly heroic act before Crane did it in The Monsteriv.” John Cooley, on the contrary, has delivered a rather persuasive indictment of Crane’s “sadly limited racial consciousnessv.” Considering the profusion and often-times confusion of images and symbols in the narrative, both positions seem to be warranted As enigmatic as the mutually defining, and yet mutually exclusive shadow and light images that abound in the

novel and provide the setting for the events, The Monster generates many different

readings, each only partially complete and partially convincing My perception is that Johnson’s blackness and Crane’s treatment of him are only parts of a larger concern: the lack of certainty in judging people’s intentions that is typical of American thinking at the turn of the century In an attempt to comprehend the power of Crane’s writing, Edward Garnett has singled out two qualities: “his wonderful insight into, and mastery of the primary passions, and his irony that checks the emotional intensity of his delineation, and suddenly reveals passion at high tension in the clutch of the implacable tides of lifevi.” Crane, as Garnett correctly points out, invites identifications with human emotions and psychological positions while at the same time distancing us from those reactions with

the use of irony and a slippery point of view The Monster is, therefore, a case of art

imitating life, when the dilemma of modernity in late nineteenth-century America meant increasing ambiguity and uncertainty in all facets of life It was when such things as

morality and agency were put to test, and their validity severely questioned The Monster

is clearly an excellent demonstration of these doubts and cynicism

The opening episode of the novel features Jimmie breaking a peony in the Trescotts’ garden Reprimanded by his father, Jimmie retreats to the stable yard for sympathy, because no one provides that better than the Trescott’s black stablehand, Henry Johnson We are here invited to sympathize with Henry because Henry is kind enough (or at least we assume it is kindness) to try to divert the boy’s sullenness Henry gains the boy’s sympathy in two ways: one is to recall his own past wrongs so as to arouse a feeling of comradeship; the other is to point out where the latter has done wrong

That these two are good friends is clear Jimmie feels very comfortable confiding

in Henry, and the two are united in their admiration for the doctor Throughout the rest of

this second section, Henry’s “seductive wiles” continue to win Jimmie, and in so doing win us So, why do we get an uneasy feeling that all may not be as it seems?

First, let us examine the manner in which Henry is introduced to us:

[Henry] grinned fraternally when he saw Jimmie coming These two were pals In regard to almost everything in life they seemed to have minds exactly alike …It was plain from Henry’s talk that he was a very handsome negro, and he was known to be a light, a weight, and an eminence in the suburb of the town, where lived the larger number

of the negroes, and obviously this glory was over Jimmie’s horizon; but he vaguely appreciated it and paid deference to Henry for it mainly because Henry appreciated it and deferred to himself (393)vii

This passage is full of complicated and contradictory meanings The lack of an

objective point of reference immediately renders problematic any judgment of value and

highlights the elusiveness of the point of view in the novel The author thus informs us that Jimmie’s judgment of Henry (as being handsome and eminent) is derived directly and exclusively from Henry’s own judgment of himself, which is, of course, a totally subjective opinion If we, the readers, appreciate Henry and do not find him unbearably conceited, then, it is because a) he has been endeared to us via his cordial relationship with Jimmie, and b) we are inclined to believe Jimmie’s judgment of Henry, because of the ingenuousness of Jimmie’s point of view But there is still another level of complication to all of this With regards to a), we are assuming that the friendship between the two is a locus of value and sympathy It leads us to suppose a benevolence underneath Henry’s exterior, an essential character that loves the boy and conforms to our

value standard However, the manner in which Henry is described when consoling Jimmie also invites ambiguity

When Jimmie appeared in his shame [Henry] would bully him most virtuously, preaching with assurance the precepts of the doctor’s creed, and pointing out to Jimmie all his abominations Jimmie did not discover that this was odious in his comrade He accepted it and lived in its shadow with humility, merely trying to conciliate the saintly Henry with acts of deference (393)

We are here left to wonder whose judgment it is that sees Henry as bullying and odious and whether it is valid, even while we try to determine whether the same narrative voice is delivering a serious judgment of Henry’s act Assuming that it is serious and that

it is the voice of the omniprescient author, what we at first reading may take for kindness may very well be something else: a kind of moral hypocrisy that reflects the theme of the whole story, coupled with what is almost a ruthlessness of which Henry himself will be the victim later on And yet, this reading goes against our grain, as our instinct tells us someone who has so completely gained a boy’s affection and trust cannot be all that bad,

a feeling which necessarily entails mistrusting the narrative voice

On the other hand, if we choose to believe in Henry’s worth, that is, if we take the b) position, Jimmie clearly does not sense the odium of Henry’s bullying But, as the author specifically tells us, Jimmie’s ingenuousness automatically disqualifies him as an adequate and discerning judge of Henry’s character, simply because “this was a justice of his age, his condition He did not know” (393) Jimmie’s very ingenuousness as a little boy consequently puts us in a precarious position for taking Henry’s physical, moral, and social assets seriously Furthermore, the subtle irony of the phrase “a light, a weight, and

an eminence in the suburb of the town where lived the larger number of negroes,” i.e., the very margins of the Whilomville society, and the ambiguity of the words “pals” and

“fraternally” (which may refer simply to Henry’s friendship with the boy, or to both the

friendship and Henry’s cognitive/mental capability) completes the contrary movement (in

judging Henry’s character in this case) that, in Garnett’s view, is the distinctive quality of Crane’s work

This contrary movement is by no means alleviated in the subsequent chapter, when Henry is out taking an evening walk and visiting his love interest If we have, through the previous chapter, chosen to believe that perhaps there is decency in the interior of Henry, we are set up once again to be frustrated by the author’s ironical point

of view in this chapter Decked out in lavender trousers and a straw hat, Henry is described by the narrative voice as immediately transforming into a different persona

It was not altogether a matter of the lavender trousers, nor yet the straw hat with its bright silk band The change was somewhere far in the interior of Henry But there was no cake-walk hyperbole in it He was simply a quiet, well-bred gentleman of position, wealth, and other necessary achievements out for an evening stroll, and he had never washed a wagon in his life (395)

If we regard this passage as another instance of the author’s general ironic attitude, as the last part of the passage so apparently suggests to us, we are then forced to invert all the previous observations for a “correct” vision of Henry That is to say, according to the narrative voice, a) Henry’s transformation is but a matter of changed clothes, b) there is no change whatsoever in the interior of Henry, if there is such an interior, c) there is cake-walk hyperbole in this changing of exteriors from humble

coachman to distinguished gentleman, and d) Henry is far from being this well-bred gentleman of necessary achievements, because he is indeed Dr Trescott’s stablehand whose job is to wash the doctor’s wagon We are thus presented with serious problems in judging Henry’s character with this reading If we have entertained any presumption of Henry’s internal decency, that presumption is now minimized by c) and d) We are left to infer that Henry is and remains a humble coachman despite the external changes, and our perception of the hyperbole in Henry’s appearance derived from this reading seems to be further confirmed by Crane’s very obvious, high-handed use of exaggerated language Moreover, according to a) and b), not only Henry’s transformation into a gentleman is superficial, it also challenges our previous assumption of a different, decent interior beneath a misleading appearance now that that appearance has been greatly changed The fact that Henry is seen exclusively from the outside and that his character remains strangely flat only serves to intensify our initial doubt about the existence of an interior Henry Against our wishful thinking, there is no other reading possible, since the alternative interpretation of taking the narrative voice seriously is precluded by the fact that Henry does indeed wash wagons

Seen under this light, the exchange between Henry and the town’s citizenry then takes a different meaning Henry’s exchanges with Pete seem to be ridiculously out of character and we are again led to infer that Henry’s professed politeness and “generosity” toward his friend are but a put-on, thus validating both the hyperbole and the suspicion of either no interior or a less than perfect motive beneath Henry’s action discussed earlier

As to the white men,

When Johnson appeared amid the throng a member of one of the profane groups

at a corner instantly telegraphed news of this extraordinary arrival to his companions They hailed him “Hello, Henry! Going to walk for a cake tonight?”

“Ain’t he smooth?”

“Why, you’ve got that cake right in your pocket, Henry!”

“Throw out your chest a little more.”

Henry was not ruffled in any way by these quiet admonitions and compliments In reply, he laughed a supremely good-natured, chuckling laugh, which nevertheless expressed an underground complacency of superior metal (396)

On first reading, we are likely to think negatively of the white men for their seemingly cruel jeering, especially if we harbor the idea of a physically, mentally and morally superior Henry But, the attention they pay to Henry is described to be not all negative (the combination of “quiet admonitions and compliments” takes care of that) nor obviously malicious Furthermore, now that Henry has been suggested to be altogether equivocal physically, mentally, and morally, these white young men’s opinion of and attitude toward him may be vindicated after all When we can no longer take at face value Henry’s “underground complacency of superior metal” for reasons discussed earlier Henry’s obvious enjoyment of the effect his parade creates shows, if anything, his vanity and dandyism, which does not exactly make him more endearing or admirable to us

Henry’s visit to the Farraguts seems to aim at further lowering our estimation of Henry’s character The narrative voice now becomes plainly and gleefully derisive in relating this minstrel show comedy Henry, Bella, and her mother are likened to three monkeys painfully mimicking courtly white behavior in their super polite conversation

Consequently, the apparent compliment that “he was perfect” may refer not to Henry’s personality and intention, but to his skill of feigning ignorance that is supposedly required

to make him appear like a gentleman—in other words, a reversal of the compliment Similarly, the enthused “Oh, ma, isn’t he divine?” from Bella, “who encouraged herself

in the appropriation of phrases” (398) can only be taken as a sardonic joke at both Henry’s and Bella’s expense In any case, the whole visiting episode appears as just another piece of superficial show

Two conclusions can be drawn from the first 3 chapters, if we can reach any sort

of conclusion from all this First, the point of view is highly slippery, which means no consistent or reliable pillar of judgment for assessing people and situations in this novel

In this way, Crane is remarkably and confusingly contradictory in his narration, offering both “admonitions and compliments” on all characters and events Second, and more importantly, Crane seems to be demonstrating the elusiveness of moral concepts such as value and agency in the modern world Historically, 1890s was a time of transition, from Realism (where man is free to make decisions when ethical crises arise) to Naturalism (where man is doomed by socio-economic conditions) in fiction writing; from rural small towns to big industrial cities in America; from Reconstruction to post-Reconstruction; and from the hopes of the Gilded Age to 20th-century pessimism In an age of uncertainty

in every aspect of life, such as the 1890s was, we simply do not know what kind of system of value we should apply to people and situations, or if there is any justifiable system of value at all The significance of this conclusion is an uncertainty in our judgment of Henry, which will have a major effect on how we interpret his alleged heroism, the town’s treatment of him, as well as the validity of Dr Trescott’s moral

stance later on in the story Never shown more than the very external appearance of Henry, we are left to conjecture on the possibility of an interior beneath that surface, and what it is like if there is something at all By all appearances, Henry seems to be aspiring

as much as the town’s people to the hypocrisy and superficiality (and to even manipulation and calculation) of which he will later be a victim Repeatedly, Crane sets Henry up as a hero while simultaneously and explicitly denying us of sufficient grounds for thus conceiving him In the face of all arguments against it, we might still credit Henry with better motives than hypocrisy and superficiality because of our supposition about his internal character But it is this supposition that the novel repeatedly erodes and

in the end totally annihilates

Fastforward to the fire scene and we see Henry rushing into the Trescotts’ burning house for Jimmie Let us consider the following passages:

[Henry] cried out then in a howl that resembled Jimmie’s former achievement His legs gained a frightful faculty of bending sideways Swinging about precariously on these reedy legs, he made his way back slowly, back along the upper hall From the way

of him then, he had given up almost all idea of escaping from the burning house, and with

it the desire He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration

He now clutched Jimmie as unconsciously as when, running toward the house, he had clutched the hat with the bright silk band

Then, when he remembers the back staircase

He was no longer creature to the flames, and he was afraid of the battle with them

It was a singular and swift set of alternations in which he feared twice without submission and submitted once without fear (405)

Our attention is immediately drawn to four aspects in the passages above: 1) Henry is here again equated with Jimmie (in case there is any doubt, a later passage tells

us that Henry tries in vain to wake Jimmie up to “participate in his tremblings”); 2) Henry’s will (or intention) is vulnerable to problems of agency not related to race, but to the human condition brought about by centuries of slavery; 3) his apparent courage is made to appear somewhat as a case of action without intent (as unconsciously as clutching the hat)viii; and 4) in this emergency, he either fears or submits to the crisis of the fire Eventually, he does not even succeed in bringing Jimmie to safety—it is Trescott that does Rescuing a child from a fire should be an automatically praiseworthy act Therefore, it is highly interesting and significant that Crane chooses to circumscribe Henry’s intentions in such a way that causes us to suspect the moral value attached to his action like this Halliburton, Stallman, and a few other critics may prefer to see in Henry’s rescue attempt the independence and individualism of a black man “who insists upon his freedom.”ix But Crane’s depiction of Henry and of the whole situation, for the reasons pointed out above, is all too equivocal for an easy assertion in that direction

If there is a briefest moment when we almost believe Michael Fried’s assertion of Henry’s will and attempt to imprint his mark in historyx, Crane all too quickly ushers us away from it by turning Henry into a monstrous victim for the rest of the story Shortly after Jimmie is brought to safety, a man brings out “a thing” and lays it on the grass Henry has been stripped of both his face and what little we suspect of his interior—he has