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Prostitutes have played a significant role in society and literature for many centuries, both as subjects of irresistible desire and repentant shame. Although prostitution plays a role in patriarchy, female prostitutes have often defied the conventions of patriarchal society by supporting themselves outside marriage, outside the reign of religious conviction and, more recently, by seeking to continue their professional work with legal sanction. Other groups of women, such as those active in civic reform interests, have yearned for the reformation of prostitute behaviors, powerfully countering the cry from those who support prostitution and call for their legal right to pursue their profession. As a literary theme, prostitution makes a remarkably consistent showing throughout time, but it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the prostitute as a character was portrayed in such a way as to allow prevailing assumptions to disperse. This study discusses the representations of prostitutes in two novels by American authors, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, as read through the lens of social science literature existing during the authors' lives. The social science literature noted here spans most of the nineteenth century and was known to maintain a high degree of influence over social scientists of the time. The novels cover a period stretching from 1893 (with the first publication of Maggie) to 1907 (with the second publication of Sister Carrie). This study explores how each author's portrayal of the prostitute character corresponds with the stereotypical assumptions of the day and how the representations differ from those stereotypes. The study also examines portraits taken of the Storyville Prostitutes by a commercial photographer in New Orleans, E. J. Bellocq, in order to exemplify the visual aspects and constructions of prostitution. Due in part to the principles of scientific determinism that influenced writers like Crane and Dreiser, the prostitute was observed and portrayed through a lens presumed to filter out subjective convictions which had so long colored the prostitute in a reddish light. By analyzing three forms of representation--the photograph, the sociological report, and the novel--my thesis shows that accepted ideologies were beginning to change with respect to the ways people viewed prostitutes.

This thesis examines the rhetoric of Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Published anonymously in 1839, Weld's publication became the longest antislavery tract in American history. It left its mark on the abolitionist movement itself and future antislavery literary works most notably Uncle Tom's Cabin. Despite its historical and rhetorical importance, Weld's text has been subjected to little critical exploration. This being the case, it is the goal of this study to find the dominant means of persuasion that Weld used to argue to antebellum northern audiences that slavery is evil and should be abolished. Weld accomplishes this goal by using a judicial motif throughout his tract. In his text, Weld acts as prosecutor and asks his readers to act as jurors in judging the legitimacy of slavery in the United States. In doing so, Weld relies on evidence in the form of testimony and newspaper advertisements to prove his arguments. I utilize the Hermagorian system of stasis to shed light on Weld's use of the judicial motif. This system points to four main questions, which represent the main stands of argument between a prosecutor and defense. The four main questions are the stases of conjecture, definition, quality, and objection. Under the stasis of conjecture I show that Weld demonstrates that slavery results when individuals are motivated by absolute arbitrary power. Under the stasis of definition I argue that the South offered the justifications of "necessary evil" and "positive good" in linking their way of life to the institution of slavery. Weld rejects these justifications and establishes his own account of slavery to be a thirst for absolute power over others. In the third stasis of quality I show that Weld argues that human nature is against slavery and therefore, should be abolished. In the last stasis of objection I show that Weld answers the question of whether abolitionists are justified in condemning slavery. Using The Hermagorian system of stasis shows that although each one is applicable to an analysis of Weld's tract, the stases of quality and objection are the most fruitful in establishing the effectiveness of Weld's rhetoric. By combining both emotion and logic for his jurors, Weld accomplishes his role as prosecutor in the case. Once his jurors act in accordance to the judicial motif as members of humanity and see the slaves in the same light, they are forced to bring back a just verdict of guilty because slavery is against the very essence of humanity itself. / Graduation date: 1999

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Uppsala, 1981. / Includes quotations in Greek. Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 130-134).

This project examines the impact of Christian Science on American culture through the interventions of three major literary figures—Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser—in the major debates that surrounded the movement. I argue that both Christian Science itself and the backlash against it were responses to the shifting conditions of modern life, that Christian Science and public discourse on it laid bare distinctly modern tensions and anxieties about changes in U.S. culture. Recent scholarship has pointed to the durability of the secularization thesis in the study of American literature despite the easily discernible impact of religion on American culture more broadly throughout the history of the U.S. This critical perspective has been particularly difficult to dismantle in the study of post-Civil War American literature. While it is true that Protestant Christianity lost some of its dominance in the late nineteenth century, this period also saw the rise of various influential heterodox religious groups, including Christian Science. This dissertation will make sense of why and how Christian Science captured the imaginations of so many Americans, including some of the greatest storytellers of the day. Christian Science was not the story of how a group of deluded fanatics attempted to turn back the tide of modernity. Instead, Christian Science was a product of modernity that provided a unique and, in its particular context, scientifically plausible response to the problem of human suffering. Furthermore, the controversies that surrounded Christian Science crystallized anxieties about the fate of individual autonomy in the modern U.S., the exercise of therapeutic and religious freedom, the concentration of individual wealth and power among a privileged few, the extension of American power abroad, and sexuality. Each chapter will examine a narrative or set of narratives that demonstrate how the Christian Science debates heightened and spoke to those concerns. / text

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg., reg. - Met samenvatting in het Engels.

Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1988. / Title from title page screen, viewed September 6, 2005. Dissertation Committee: L. Moody Simms (chair), Roger J. Champagne, Mark A. Plummer, Lawrence W. McBride, David W. Wright. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [262]-270) and abstract. Also available in print.