American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather (review)

Donald Pizer’s study of Naturalism and anti-Semitism is thoughtful and gracefully written, as we would expect from this scholar. It is also frustratingly circumscribed. Why these five writers and not, say, Jack London, Stephen Crane, or E. A. Robinson? Pizer, moreover, largely ignores the European dimensions of Naturalism and anti-Semitism, and this is especially surprising since three of his five writers were, in varying degrees, Francophiles.

Anti-Semitism pervaded American society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pizer locates two strong sources in the Populist Movement, where the antagonism expressed by western farmers and their supporters against eastern financial interests often showed itself in stereotypes about Jewish bankers and in the resentment of established East Coast society against newer immigrant groups. Higher education unfortunately reinforced anti-Semitism through quasi-scientific racial theories that attached themselves, like barnacles, to the ideas of Charles Darwin.

All five authors indulged in anti-Semitic stereotyping in varying degrees of offensiveness. Garland, Pizer sardonically concludes, had views “compatible … with the common middle-class American tendency to express a nonactivist anti-Semitisim in as seemingly discreet and inoffensive a manner as possible” (14). Dreiser, who wrote his play The Hand of the Potter (1918) to express sympathy for poor Jewish immigrants, employed the Shylock stereotype in his later years. Cather and Wharton, subjects of Pizer’s most subtle analysis, created rounded, even likeable characters in Rosedale in The House of Mirth (1905) and Marcellus in The Professor’s House (1925); but even these characters reveal the commercial taint and lack of culture that the WASP ascendency found offensive. Norris, of course, produced some of the most hateful anti-Semitic stereotypes among major writers of his era, and his reputation has suffered from it.

Since anti-Semitism was everywhere at the time, it is often difficult, even fruitless, to insist on particular sources. Pizer writes in some detail here, as he has before, about the presumed influence of Joseph Le Conte—the popular Berkeley lecturer on evolutionary theory—on Norris’s beliefs. Yet, as Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse Crisler point out in Frank Norris: A Life (2006), there is not one reference anywhere in Norris’s writing to Le Conte. This is true even though Norris made extensive literary use of his student days in Paris, Berkeley, and at Harvard. An equally likely influence, I suggest, would be the undergraduate culture of Berkeley at the time, and particularly its fraternity life, since almost every fraternity, including Norris’s Phi Gamma Delta, excluded Jews. Norris, by the way, had to dispel a belief among his classmates that he was Jewish in order to join.

Pizer’s book is useful and even brave. It deserves to be widely read by students of this period. It is not the breakthrough claimed, however, nor the last word on this complex and troubling subject.