Capitalism and Freedom

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority

The middle class in both Britain and America has always been a precarious position, its vague economic perimeters and financial vulnerability making it uniquely reliant on cultural and aesthetic values to define its boundaries. In mid- to late-nineteenth century America, the ability to see aesthetically to perceive any object as beautiful or interesting became a definitive feature for a class emerging between increasingly extreme wealth and poverty. The eighteenth-century British tradition of picturesque aesthetics, which prized the rough and the natural, made aesthetic taste a means by which the nascent middle class could define its social position. In America, works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman imported picturesque modes of perception and infused them with moral, spiritual, and political significance: to apprehend roughness or dereliction as beautiful became a virtuous act, fundamental to the creation of their radically new nation. The Transcendentalists made the picturesque a means of unification with otherness, a process which allowed moral sentiments to become a primary site of personal agency, and thus to serve as intervention in social problems. Frequent economic crises, mass immigration, and rapid urbanization during the Gilded Age created an urban middle class for whom aestheticizing roughness could foster a cosmopolitan identity; members of the bourgeoisie needed an antidote to their sense of the contingency and unreality of middle-class life, as well as a structure for understanding their obligations toward structurally distanced others. Sketches about the picturesque qualities of urban ghettos, ranging from touristic journalism to reform literature, educated genteel Americans on aesthetic and affective responses to class and ethnic difference. Writers responding to this tradition such as H.C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, Hutchins Hapgood, and especially William Dean Howells use the picturesque to probe their own interest and that of their class in rough people and places. The self-directed irony of their work depicts and interrogates the position of genteel viewers whose sympathy with poorer people is effected primarily through aesthetic products or cross-class spectatorship. These writers forge an important link to contemporary liberal culture, which upholds the social value of moral sentiment but consistently projects an ambivalent and ironic relation to it.

Sympathy for Strangers: Picturesque Aesthetics and the Politics of Feeling in the American Gilded Age

Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915

"Urban Underworlds" is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying the 1890s to the 1990s, Thomas Heise chronicles how and why marginalized populations immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin. The quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege. Following a diverse array of literary figures who differ with the assessment of the underworld as the space of the monstrous Other, Heise contends that it is a place where besieged and neglected communities are actively trying to take possession of their own neighborhoods.

Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

In the great city the poor, the vicious, and the delinquent, crushed together in an unhealthful and contagious intimacy, breed in and in soul and body, so that it has often occurred to me that those long genealogies of the Jukes and the tribes of Ishmael would not show such a persistent and distressing uniformity of vice, crime, and poverty unless they were peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned to exist. —Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, The City

"Going Blood-Simple Like the Natives": Contagious Urban Spaces and Modern Power in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Fantasies and the Death of Downtown S within the blighted and economically polarized geography of 1980s New York City, Bret Easton Ellis’s neoliberal revenge satire, American Psycho (1991), greets its reader with a chilling smear of graffiti that conflates Dante’s Inferno with Marx’s guided tour in Capital with “Mr. Moneybags. . . . into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business’” (279–80).1 “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank,” Ellis writes in the opening line as he begins to render in visceral detail what Marx called “the secret of profit making” (Ellis 3; Marx 280). The secret formula of profit in American Psycho is violence, exploitation, and reification, and what Ellis’s novel palpably dramatizes through the handsome, Harvard-educated, Wall Street investment executive and serial killer Patrick Bateman is what it feels like to have one’s labor forcibly expropriated through the reduction of oneself to human material. American Psycho translates for readers the massive social costs of neoliberal economics into a terrifyingly intimate experience of violence by a psychotic subject who embodies neoliberal theory and performs it through his repeated acts of disembowelment. The first assault in American Psycho, a confrontation that I will consider more fully in the pages that follow, makes this claim painfully clear. It is against a “bum, a black man” sleeping among “bags of garbage” in the East Village where Bateman is out on the prowl in “a silk-lined coat . . . by Luciano Soprani” that soon will be stained with flecks of blood (126). Before slicing the man’s eyes and leaving him to bleed to death, Bate-

American Psycho: Neoliberal Fantasies and the Death of Downtown

In a remarkable but largely overlooked 1918 interview with New York City Police Commissioner Richard Enright, Djuna Barnes made this stunning admission: "some of the nicest people I know are either potential or real criminals" ("Commissioner" 301). Before the interview was over she reiterated: "I have a lot of friends, as I before said, who are either potential criminals or criminals" (304). Barnes's so-called criminal friends were the gays and lesbians who were part of her social milieu in Greenwich Village in the 1910s, where she resided before relocating in 1920 to a similar community of American expatriate sexual dissidents on Paris's Left Bank, whose lives she memorialized in Nightwood. Richard Enright was the commissioner who publicly pledged to stamp out the "depraved tastes" of the "new underworld" in the Village, to make it "unattractive to the sightseer" and restore it "to its previous status as a respectable residential and business neighborhood" ("Enright"), which it had been in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, before the likes of Barnes took up residence there. The interview ends with Enright breaking out in uncomfortable laughter as Barnes, apparently, sits silently relishing her minor triumph, her brief disruption of the procedures that police the geographical borders of sexual difference. The Village's "new underworld" was a real and imagined territory of prostitutes, gay men and women, and bohemian artists and writers. The trope of a criminal, socially disruptive, and morally licentious sexual underworld in Greenwich Village appears repeatedly in sociological, urban-planning, and popular discourse in the interwar period, when Barnes was writing articles for numerous New York newspapers. Though Greenwich Village in the 1910s and 20s is remembered for its sexual, social, and aesthetic freedom and experimentation, a proper accounting of this period is not complete without understanding the geographic and discursive forces that constructed, regulated, and quarantined the spatially and socially marginalized populations whose liberation has been celebrated in many cultural histories. (1) These forces included the City Practical urban-planning movement of the 1910s, the emergence of a new nighttime leisure economy in the Village, the heated gentrification battles in the neighborhood between Italians, gays and lesbians, and a new class of urban corporate professionals, and the campaigns by civic reform societies and the New York Police Department to prosecute queer subcultural sexual practices. Out of these forces emerged what writers and reformers labeled a sexual underworld. An investigation of the social meanings of this underworld in the 1910s illuminates how sexual identities and communities are geographically constructed and how the spaces of those identities and communities are contested in the midst of a cultural sex panic. Barnes's journalism (impressionistic sketches, interviews, and articles from 1913 to 1919, many of them collected by Alyce Barry in New York), and her novel Nightwood imagine urban space from the perspective of the marginalized neighborhoods that were targeted by municipal authorities, police, urban planners, and real estate developers. As I will argue, urban planning initiated new methods of spatial and social control to produce what Michel de Certeau calls a "planned and readable city" (93). Against the panoptic, abstract, implicitly (and at times explicitly) heterosexual spatiality of urban planners--the City Practical architects in New York in the 1910s and Georges-Eugene Haussmann in Paris in the 1850s--Barnes's was a secretive city of queer desire and pleasure. Her work underscores the erotic possibilities of a territorial politics where the sexualized and gendered nature of urban space is foregrounded, and where the relays between bodies and architectures create frictions that rub the city's dominant powers the wrong way. Among Barnes's numerous articles, I will consider four devoted to Greenwich Village--"The Last Petit Souper," "Greenwich Village As It Is," "Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians," and "How the Villagers Amuse Themselves"--focusing on how they articulate from an insider's perspective a clandestine queer subculture. …

Degenerate Sex and the City: Djuna Barnes's Urban Underworld

Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)--the final installment in a series of detective novels Chester Himes began publishing in 1957 with For Love of Imabelle--opens with a view of one of the darkest houses in American literature, one that updates Poe's phantasmagoric, falling house of Usher for the more sinister and disturbing terrors of the late 1960's inner-city graveyards of poverty and waste. As Himes's narrator insinuates, Harlem is not merely in a state of disrepair; rather, it is sinking back into the earth in a slow, but inexorable burial: On 119th Street there had been a sign for years in the front window of an old dilapidated three-storey brick house, announcing: FUNERALS PERFORMED. For rive years past the house had been condemned as unsafe for human habitation. The wooden steps leading up the cracked, scabby front door were so rotten ... the foundation was crumbling, one side of the house had sunk more than a foot lower than the other, the concrete windowsills had fallen from all the upper windows and the constant falling of bricks from the front wall created a dangerous hazard for passing pedestrians. (7) The opening scene of Blind Man with a Pistol takes readers to the place considered by the 1960's liberal discourse on the "black underclass" to be the ground zero of Harlem's social failures--the black family whose very foundations were rotting. The text's closing scene, in turn, is a riot ignited by a blind African American man wildly firing a pistol down in the New York City subway system and then up on the streets of Harlem, where a slum demolition project is creating a neighborhood housing emergency. The resulting conflagration that ends Himes's short novel is born out of ongoing race-based housing discrimination, the failed postwar civic policy of urban renewal, and the purported pathology of the "black underclass." Himes's narrator succinctly summarizes the dangerous nexus of these three urban conditions: "They had been forced to live there, in all the filth and degradation, until their lives had been warped to fit, and now they were being thrown out. It was enough to make a body riot" (187). Blind Man emerges from two interrelated historical and discursive contexts--the devastating ghetto riots of the post-World War II period that erupted in Harlem, Watts, Detroit, and elsewhere, and the highly influential and controversial sociological studies of the "black underclass" that pathologized familial structures of inner-city African Americans. (1) In circulating representations of black pathology and in furthering a misguided policy agenda that alienated poor, urban African Americans, this discourse constituted the new racial and class formation it claimed merely to discover and describe: a black underworld trapped below the lowest rung of the class ladder in a culture of poverty, disease, drugs, violence, and vice. With Blind Man, Himes does not respond to his era's images of purported black degradation with a social protest novel in the vein of his 1945 If He Hollers Let Him Go. Nor does Himes present a potentially warm--if still fraught--black community's travails as Toni Morrison would in Sula (1973) four years later. Rather, Blind Man engages in the risky strategy of hyperbolizing extant images of "black underclass" abjectness and "filth and degradation" in a way that so excessively embodies them that their racial contours are revealed as cartoonish, ideological constructs (Himes, Blind Man 187). (2) Himes's narrative of detection, thus, exposes the white liberal fantasies of racial difference that legitimized, rather than ameliorated, the racist socioeconomic practices that sparked the conflagrations consuming inner-city neighborhoods in the 1960s. Blind Man with a Pistol is a bitter and at times bitterly funny skewering of both this liberal discourse and of the ideology of black empowerment that later critiqued and replaced it. While Himes's novel embraces the discursive representations of urban black pathology in a manner that discloses their bases in social and spatial injustice, it does so neither to suggest an alternative model for "ethical masculine subjectivity," as some scholars have maintained, nor to advocate the black underworld as a nonnormative counterpublic to the official upper-world's coercive bourgeois morality (Breu 771). …

Thomas Heise

Papers

Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

"Going Blood-Simple Like the Natives": Contagious Urban Spaces and Modern Power in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

American Psycho: Neoliberal Fantasies and the Death of Downtown

Degenerate Sex and the City: Djuna Barnes's Urban Underworld

Harlem Is Burning: Urban Rioting and the "Black Underclass" in Chester Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol