Thèse--Lettres--Paris 7, 1989.

A study of strategies and attempts in Theodore Dreiser's novels The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic to resolve the conflict between the material and the spiritual. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that conflicts in Dreiser criticism reflect unresolved conflicts between these issues in his "Trilogy". Having outlined and shown the division in the literary criticism of the "Trilogy", in the first chapter of this thesis, I will discuss the three main themes, finance, art and women, which can be seen as strategies to bridge the division between the material and the spiritual. I will attempt to transcend the traditional categorization of Dreiser criticism to come to a more complex understanding of the core issues of his writing.

Beginning in 1911 with Jennie Gerhardt and continuing through the publication of The "Genius" in 1915, all of Dreiser's major fiction is curiously marked by the same recurring narrative pattern. The pattern is always triangluar in construction and always contains the same three figures-- a vindictive and vengeful parent, outraged by an outisder's violation of personal and societal values; an enchanted offspring; and a disrupted outsider who threatens established order. In spite of each work's different characterization, setting, and episode, the narrative conflict invariably arises from the discovery of an illicit relationship between offspring and outsider, and the narrative climax involves a violent clash of wills, with victory sometimes going to the parent and sometimes to the outsider. The denouement is consistently sorrowful and pensive in tone, with a philosophical epilogue which speculates on man's melancholy and puzzling fate. As both a guide to personal therapy and a key to the work with which Dreiser established his artistic identity, the recurring narrative pattern is important. Its examination (1) illuminates an obscure period in Dreiser's life, (2) reveals his personality priorities as he turns the kaleidoscope of introspection to observe the Cudlipp crisis from various angles, and (3) offers to the discerning reader a reliable clue to the developing system of aesthetics of one of America's greatest artists.

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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 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.

The author's purpose has been to trace in a very broad and general manner the trend of naturalism up to this point where the central figure of our study, Theodore Dreiser, enters into the picture. This survey is designed primarily to give the reader an indication of what naturalism is, both in philosophy and method, and a very brief historical background of the movement.