Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 1998"

Women On the Go: Blues, Conjure, and Other Alternatives to Domesticity in Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows

Abstract: Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, literary depictions of African-American female sexuality continue to be extremely rare. With the exception of Nella Larsen's Helga Crane and Zora Neale Hurston's Janie Starks, female protagonists ate latgely asexual, the result of authors' attempts to fight the Jezebel stereotype and to prove that black women could and did adhere to middle-class values even if they were, by virtue of their color, excluded from the "cult of true womanhood." These protagonists, specimens of the black bour-

Auctions of the Mind: Emily Dickinson and Abolition

Abstract: 'hat were emily Dickinson's opinions on the great moral issue of slavery, which so shook the foundations of her society? Neither letters nor poems offer direct testimony. We know, however, that Dickinson's father, elected as a Whig to the 33rd Congress, participated in the House debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill; we know, too, that she read newspapers and magazines avidly, and that her chosen \"Preceptor,\" Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a prominent abolitionist.1 She was, in other words, almost certainly well informed on the subject, but chose consciously (for whatever reasons) to keep close counsel with her beliefs.2 One indication that Dickinson did take note of the slavery debate is her oblique use of the language of abolition in poems that don't directly address that topic. A case in point is poem no. 709 in the Harvard edition of Dickinson's work:

From the Seminary to the Parlor: The Popularization of Hermeneutics in The Gates Ajar

Abstract: ?t? the renewal of interest in nineteenth-century American popular culture has come a fairly polarized discourse between its critics and its defenders. The battle lines have been familiar since at least the 1950s. One side tends to defend popular cultural manifestations as creative, subversive, even revolutionary responses to cultural givens; the other criticizes them as evidence of the co-optation of the masses by cynical culture-making machines and ideologies. Perhaps nowhere is this split more evident tiian in studies of a body ofwork that has seemed to many late-twentieth-century readers a perfect window into the \"real\" sentimental culture of nineteenth-century America: the fictions of popular evangelical women writers like Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Despite the increased sophistication of cultural studies and American studies in the last few decades, readings of these works have largely retained the old lines of demarcation, with critics taking sides on the basis of their sympathy or discomfort with \"sentimental domesticity\" or the \"feminization\" of American culture. We have tended, therefore, to portray evangelical women writers either as subversive heroines in an age bent on repressing them, or as agents of the degradation of formerly rigorous literary and theological standards. These dichotomies, crystallized in the response of Jane Tompkins to Ann Douglas' characterizations in TKe Feminization of American Culture, still structure much late-twentiethcentury interpretation of nineteenth-century popular religion and liter-

The Hazards of Osage Fortunes: Gender and the Rhetoric of Compensation in Federal Policy and American Indian Fiction

Abstract: 'hen william dean HOWELLS chose A Hazard of New Fortunes as the title for his 1890 novel, he probably had the multiple connotations of the term hazard—gamble, risk, or venture as well as danger, menace, or peril—in mind. Certainly, his character Dryfoos experiences these hazards: \"he began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and in large sums.\" Howells describes Dryfoos's \"ambition to go somewhere and be somebody\" as a \"poison\" instilled in him by the local speculators. If he did meet someone \"worth\" more than him, his \"soul bowed itself and crawled . . . with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck\" (226-27). Through his depiction of the moral decline of Dryfoos, Howells cautions that speculation, however alluring and profitable, may not be worth the risk. These hazards are also the subject of John Joseph Matthews' Sundown (1934) and Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit (1990), two novels written about another aspect of this era of intense accumulation, the Allotment period in American Indian history, ushered in by the 1887 Dawes Act and revised with the 1934 Collier Reorganization Act.1 The effects of the new wealth generated in the 1920s by an oil boom on the individually-allotted lands of the Osage Indians was a hazard in both senses of Howells' title. On a national level, the Osage were caught up in and Howells was concerned with the hazards of the emerging attitude toward success

Roth/CounterRoth: Postmodernism, the Masculine Subject, and Sabbath's Theater

Abstract: In the couNTERLiFE (1986), when Philip Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, raises the question of whether there exists an \"irreducible self,\" he concludes that \"It's all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through\" (320). Since the impersonations Nathan refers to are all aggressively discursive—Roth's characters are nothing if not talkers—it would seem that Roth subscribes to the poststructuralist view of subjectivity summarized, for example, by Kaja Silverman when she writes that \"without language, there would be no subjectivity\" (45). Throughout his career, Roth's concern has been subjectivity—usually the subjectivity of the Jew, who is usually male, usually a breaker of taboos, and usually both source and target of a comic perspective—a subjectivity constituted and exposed by desires and by embeddedness in linguistic fabrications. Like much of Roth's recent work—Operation Shybck (1993), Deception (1990), the autobiography The Facts (1988), as well as The Counterlife come to mind—Sabbath's Theater (1995) inquires particularly into issues of impersonation and linguistic self-construction. The novel's conclusions, however, diverge from the playful postmodernity of the previous work. Here, Roth confronts the notion of performance with the brutal facts of physical decay and death, which restore the possibility of an essentialism conceived in relation to the body. By taking to its grotesque limits the exploration of verbally and physically consttucted subjectivity, Roth offers a profound

Alien3: A Postmodern Encounter with the Abject

Abstract: IN his aggressive response to Lt. Ripley's question, Morse sums up the abject of postmodernity in his description of life on Planet Fiorina \"Fury\" 161, the scene of the action in Alien3. A wasteland of rotting technology at the \"ass end of space,\" Fury 161 offers an apocalyptic view of life on the underside of the postmodern condition. \"Postmodernity,\" says Baudrillard, \"is the attempt to reach a point where one can live with what is left. It is more a survival among the remnants than anything else\" (qtd. Denzin 31 ). No screens, no videos, no images or spectacles, the planet is \"what is left\" after technology has left town and turned off the postmodern lights. Worse than this, as Morse continues down the list, the community of men on Fury 161 has no guns, no rubbers, and no women. Without phallic signification, without protection against the enemy, and without identity through sexual differentiation, all they've got is \"shit.\" All they have is a postmodern encounter with the abject.

Imprisoned In/At Home: Criminal Culture in Rebecca Harding Davis' Margret Howth: A Story of To-day

Abstract: 'idway through Rebecca Harding Davis' first novel, Margret .Howth: A Story o/ To-day (1862), her social reformer, Dr. Knowles, exposes the seemingly uninhabitable dens of the homeless to the title character, demanding of her, \"Home! . . . oh, Margret, what is home?\"1 Knowles' deceptively simple question conjures up issues central to the text: the ravages of industrial capitalism, the dictates of domestic ideology, and the vulnerability and marginal status assigned to those unsuccessfully negotiating either one. Several critics have already noted that despite the fact that mainstream culture reified the home as a secluded refuge, untainted by the public world of work, there was as Michael Grossberg identifies it, a mid-century anxiety about the home. Many nineteenth-century writers suspected that \"public America seems almost to pour into the private sanctuary,\" infecting the apparently insular sphere with anti-democratic ideals and capitalist notions. Indeed, one critic has noted that the crime stories and murder mysteries contemporaneous to Margret Howth repudiate the effectiveness of the home as safehouse.2 In Margret Howth Davis shows us that the domestic space is part of a criminal culture in which homes are prisons and prisons become homes. Especially striking is how the discourses of \"home\" and \"criminality\" animate each other; criminals are defined as homeless, while non-traditional homes and the people who inhabit them are considered criminal. Davis' pairing is neither isolated nor incidental; prison reform

Memory Under Reconstruction: Beloved and the Fugitive Past

Abstract: \"uch t? the chagrin of its detractors, the legacies of modernism continue to exert their powers in our period of the prolonged \"posts-.\" The butden of those legacies is perhaps felt nowhere more strongly than in the genre of the novel. For if the distinguishing features ofwhat is known as \"high modernism\" or \"utopian modernism\" are its preoccupation with the theme of temporality and its faith in the restorative powers of human memory, then the problem of imagining narrative fiction within the context of postmodern thought is a difficult task indeed.1 What is narrative, if not a representation of time? What is fiction, if not the collaboration of memory with imagination? Such questions have been the mainstay of postmodernism's novelistic experiments and if those experiments have not necessarily proffered answers to their own inquiries, the energy of their failures has offered its own compensatory rewards. Through the voices of Proust, Bergson and Freud, modernism told us that memory was recuperative in the double sense of that word: the past could be recovered and its recovery could cure its subject.2 The past could free us, could give meaning to our experiences in the world, if only we could get to it. Hence, all three of those \"utopian\" writers dedicated their lives to developing theories of memory and its recollection. Remembrance of Things Past, Matter and Memory and The Psychopathol-

Everybody's Faneuil Hall: The Imaginary Institution of Democracy

Abstract: The case of boston's faneuil hall suggests that a politically conscious citizenry of the post-revolutionary era did not lack in imagination when it came to conceiving its public space. From its inception in 1 742, the building had suffered through an abortive career as a city-run marketplace and been widely reviled, but during the Revolutionary War, Faneuil Hall served as the historic site of the Stamp Act protest, the tea tax protest, and the Boston Massacre commemoration. In the aftermath, a civic monument to Boston's tradition of public assemblies was born, as was a figurative expression: the \"Cradle of liberty,\" synonymous with the name of Faneuil Hall, and signifying the popular sovereignty of free speech. By the early nineteenth century, this trope and its historic associations had gained such purchase on the civic life of Bostonians that the building's previous incarnation was forgotten. In keeping with its standing as the \"Cradle of liberty,\" Faneuil Hall was recreated as the birthplace of democracy, the place where colonial subjects grasped their right of free speech and became \"the people.\" Dignitaries and public officials of the new republic gathered in the building to toast its name, while civic architect Charles Bulfinch was commissioned in 1805 to adorn the old marketplace with republican ornamentation suitable to its figurative appellation. Indeed, the trope for Faneuil Hall seemed to authorize not only the form and function of the public space but the exercise of free speech, which was said to pay tribute to Faneuil Hall. An 1826 pamphlet offered an appropri-

Cheating with Sound: Imagining Civic Culture in Federalist America

Abstract: In 1799 Jonathan MAXCY, a preacher and President of Union College in New York and the University of South Carolina, delivered an address that spoke to anxieties of the French Revolution and that offered an implicit defense of the 1 798 Alien and Sedition Acts. \"Those metaphysic knights in the science of civil policy,\" said Maxcy, \"who have attempted the subversion of our government, have done no small mischief by the perpetual use of certain words and phrases, which, though they conveyed no definite meaning, yet were calculated like the incantations of magic, to blind, seduce and mislead the wary\" (Hyneman 1047). As part ofMaxcy's larger warning against the French spirit of dissent emerging in American political culture, the sentence reveals Federalist frustration with the ways in which words were used to \"seduce and mislead\" the citizenry. But even more than this, the passage, by suggesting that subversives use \"words and phrases\" that convey \"no definite meaning,\" shifts the focus away from the content of political radicalism to the rhetorical practices of political radicals. This strategy reveals how many Federalists writing during the era of Jefferson's ascension to power saw the political and cultural shifts that eventually spelled their doom in terms of changing language practices to which the Federalists failed to adapt. Worries about whether an \"authentic,\" representative language system was truly possible were frequent in documents from the early republic, especially during an era when anxieties about \"representation\

Negotiating the National Voice in Faulkner's Late Work

Abstract: ROKE, all but out of print and trying to join the Air Force 'in the spring of 1942, Faulkner wrote "Shall Not Perish," a short story centered on one of his minor avatars of poor rural virtue, the Grier family. The story is set in the present and concerns the efforts of Mother and her nameless younger son (the narrator) to understand the death of the older son, Pete, in the war. It was rejected by no less than eight magazines and went through nearly as many versions before Faulkner managed to pawn it off to Story magazine for $25. Although he included it in his Collected Stories, "Shall Not Perish" has been consigned, for the most part, to critical oblivion. Nonetheless, it marked, I would argue, a watershed in Faulkner's literary trajectory, inaugurating his efforts to reintegrate Southern history into a redeemed and unified vision of national life. It also marked something of a professional watershed: once it became clear that at age forty-four the best he could expect from the military was a desk job in Washington, he returned to Hollywood as a scriptwriter under a penurious seven-year contract with Warner Bros.' In retrospect, "Shall Not Perish" shows early signs of the ambition that would occupy Faulkner for the next decade: the extrication of social and political positions from what had become virtually a stock repertoire of themes, characters and situations in his work. This moralizing turn has often perplexed and frustrated admirers of his novels of the thirties. As Michael Gresset has put it, expressing a near consensus on Faulkner's late work, "To put values on stage, as once he had put

Summoning Candyman: The Cultural Production of History

Abstract: ERNARD rose's i 992 film, Candyman, opens with dual sequences of narration. The first consists of the eponymous villain/hero's voice-over preface; it presents the Candyman legend proleptically, beginning with the words \"They will say,\" and establishes itself as a fantastical alternative to progressive linear history, as it is spoken against a scrolling aerial shot of traffic-filled Chicago freeways and the Chicago skyline.1 The longer, second sequence foregrounds itself as official history by occurring within an academic setting, a classroom where history is produced and reproduced. Nonetheless, it links itself to Candyman's narration through the use of narrative voice-over—this time, of a young woman who is being interviewed about urban legends—and the emphasis on oral history. Although this account of Candyman takes place in the past, as the interviewee tells a story about a baby-sitter who used the Candyman ritual (saying \"Candyman\" five times while looking in a mirror) to seduce her lover, it, too, carries proleptic force. Accompanied by standard slasher-movie images filmed \"realistically\" so as to construct a coherent short narrative, this sequence suggests that Candyman should be viewed as a conventional horror film, in which a female victim is punished for pursuing her desires—a misleading narrative and generic expectation that the movie subsequently problematizes.2 The two narrative sequences thus counter each other in form and content, stage the contested status of historical narrative, and question the reliability of visual proof. Together, they imply that Candyman is about the status of narrative and its roots in representational modes and in historical particulars.

Miniatures and Monstrosities of Recursive Valorization: On Barthelme and Gaddis

Abstract: The canon debate has bordered in recent years on a more general critique of values. Building on deconstruction's disfigurements of aesthetic value and the grand narrative of emancipation, critics have described canonical texts as endorsing the hegemonic values of dominant social groups (Smith 51). While it is not entirely clear that, conversely, noncanonical texts will prove politically effective enough to function antihegemonically, the way canonical and noncanonical works are currently made to confront one another in our curricula reflects a question concerning the larger social order: whether nonhegemonic subcultures form subordinate, subaltern, and/or subversive relationships with a given dominant culture (Thomas 82-83, 101-2). As a result, readings of canonical texts that are sympathetic to pluralist rationales, such as the reading I will be presenting, will have to consist of exposing those texts' hegemonic values. However, the theoretical basis for such readings must not emerge as a cultural value which would itself stand in need to be exposed as hegemonic elitism. Thus, the tension between included and excluded texts continues to be seen from the mutually exclusive perspectives of the canonical and the noncanonical, while the theories of representation that dismantle identity politics and the politics of representation that endorse it have begun to move in quite different directions. Those criticizing the literary canon on a pluralist basis have frequently advanced a dismissal of aesthetic value from critical discourse

A Passion for Things: Cicerones, Collectors, and Taste in Edith Wharton's Fiction

Abstract: I N an isthmus of land, at the narrowest and highest point of the Cap Ferrât on the French Riviera, stands a pink Italian palazzo, built between 1905 and 191 2 for the Baroness Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild. In 1934, Rothschild donated the palace, stocked with priceless objects and canvases, to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Blue Guide, indispensable cicerone to the sites of Provence, states that the house has preserved its character as \"la résidence d'un riche amateur d'art à l'aube du XXe siècle\" (709). This residence, turned museum, contains Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture, Sèvres porcelain, forged iron objects, paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, Moreau, Monet and others. Legend has it that the baroness had items shipped from all over Europe to the train station in nearby Beaulieu. She then sauntered among heaps of goods that sat on the platform and selected and rejected at whim. Her diverse taste manifests itself also in the assemblage of garden styles behind the house. There, Italian fountains, English hedges, Spanish pergolas and French promenades each have a designated place, as if landscape were an esperanto of flowers and greenery. The pink palace incarnates a modern collector's passion and raises two interrelated questions. First, why do so few women collect art or art-objects in the modern period? Second, how is space designed to display the modern collector's possessions and regulate her privacy? The Baroness' collection is the distillation of a female art-lover's taste, the emblem of female purchasing power manifest in teacups, paintings and

The Toy Madness of Jane Bowles

Abstract: This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case because my kind of isolation I think is an accident, and not inevitable. . . . Not only is your isolation a positive and true one but when you do write from it you immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside. With me who knows? Jane Bowles to Paul Bowles August, 1947

Faces and Things

Abstract: If you want someone bad enough and you can't have them, then you become them. I've always thought of this ritual as the deepest possession. Desire turns into the will to convert, to turn the self inside out in order to remake it in the image of the person you love. To steal the appearance of the other, to accomodate your face, hands, and every part of you that can be seen to what you admire, to what you lust for brings that person into you. What happens inside, what cannot be seen or exposed 1 am not sute about. But for now, I want to reflect on what this masquerade of love, this performance of mimicry might mean. How can a cult of surfaces get at the core, the heatt of being, our deep knowledge of who we are known only by how well we become what we