A manly art? Masculinity and aesthetics in American literary naturalism
Description
Few concurrent literary movements have offered such divergent philosophies of art as did British aestheticism and American naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century. American naturalist writers defined their work through direct opposition to what they saw as the 'literary,' and therefore 'feminine,' qualities cherished by an American intellectual establishment dominated by the principles of aestheticism. In this dissertation, I examine the work of specific naturalist authors in order to demonstrate how this opposition contributes to the shaping of an artistic sensibility which relies upon a remarkably unstable conception of the artist I locate the naturalist artistic sensibility within the context of the volatile cultural climate of the 1890s and the perceived 'crisis in masculinity' that concerned American society. This work investigates the transformation of the cultural tensions arising from ideologies of race, class, and gender into an aesthetic perspective which adopts the language of 'masculinity' as a metaphorical tool to redefine the idea of authorship. I focus on a group of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and James Weldon Johnson, whose texts are unified by a common concern with the issues of masculinity and artistry. The male-dominated realm of Crane's, London's, and Norris's fiction reflects the authors' investment in the 'bachelor culture' of the late nineteenth century, while the novels of Wharton and Johnson articulate ideas seemingly at odds with the dominant ideology of America at the turn of the century and the very concept of American 'masculinity' itself. Each author, however, attempts to redefine literature as an active, vital enterprise within the gender-based confines of progressive-era American culture. This problematic and persistent connection between masculinity and aesthetics in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts illuminates a significant relationship between the naturalist tradition and a continuing twentieth-century American literary preoccupation