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4 Middle-Class Melancholy and Proletarian Pain The Writer as Class Transvestite The struggle of classi‹cations is a fundamental division of the class struggle. The power of imposing a vision of divisions, that is, the power of making visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit, is the political power par excellence: it is the power to make groups, to manipulate the objective structure of society. —Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Re›exive Sociology Strong and in‹nitely appealing are the basal elements of existence , and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like a spectre from your craving grasp. —Walter Wyckoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality STEPHEN CRANE’S EXPERIMENT On a rainy winter night in the depression year of 1894, Stephen Crane “went forth” dressed in “rags and tatters . . . to try to eat as a tramp may eat, and sleep as the wanderers sleep.” His experiences in New York City’s Bowery Mission that night provided the basis for his sketch “An Experiment in Misery,” which confronted readers of the New York Press with an unusual journalistic message: much of what they thought they knew about poverty was invalid. “You can tell nothing of it unless you are in that condition yourself,” he wrote, “It is idle to speculate about it from 105 . . . [a] distance.”1 Like the “squads of well dressed Brooklyn people, who swarmed toward the Bridge” (248) after their daily work in Manhattan, Crane’s middle-class readers were geographically and culturally divided from those in rags and tatters, unable to conceptualize how the poor really “feel” (862). The sketch’s ‹ctionalized account of one middleclass youth’s disguised journey into the world of poverty attempts to bridge this distance, providing Crane’s readers with a study of class subjectivity in transformation. What Crane wishes to show is not “how the other half lives” but how misery, as a class-speci‹c social force, shapes perception. His young and impressionable protagonist serves as a gauge of this environmental effect: apprehending misery (as well as luxury, in a paired sketch) as an exogenous condition to his own experimental body, and then interpreting the outcome to his readership. The point of the journey, as the youth tells his elder friend, is not to actually become “a tramp,” but to “discover his point of view,” to momentarily take his guise in order to “produce a veracious narrative” (862). Working toward such ends, Crane carefully depicts the youth’s representative change through a gradual movement into economic abjection. “Trudging slowly” along the streets dressed in an “aged suit” (862), the youth is “completely plastered with yells of ‘bum’ and ‘hobo’” and cast into “a state of profound dejection” (283). Later, in a lodging house, he feels the alteration deepen as “his liver turn[s] white” from the “unspeakable odors that assail him like malignant diseases with wings” (287). However unpleasant, such misery does produce the desired sociological reward: during the long night, the youth stays awake watching “the forms of men . . . lying in death-like silence or heaving and snoring with tremendous effort” (287), and he then “carv[es] biographies for [them] from his meager experience” (289) in poverty. In their class now, but still not of it, he is able to distinguish “an utterance of meaning” in each “wail of a . . . section, a class, a people” (289). The mediatorial role he assumes through this ability to discern meaning and translate perception allows him to arrogate the cultural power of authentic social knowledge . First internalized and then incorporated, the distance that once stood between him and such “sorry humanity” (862) now constitutes his own expanded and thus authoritative perspective. I have termed such tales of temporary guise “class-transvestite narratives ,” a phrase that best describes their attempts to close epistemological gaps through cross-class impersonation.2 Although Crane’s experiment is the best known of this type, its methodology and goals were hardly unique. Between the depression of the early 1890s and the reforms of 106 VANISHING MOMENTS the 1910s, an impressive number of white middle-class writers, journalists , and social researchers “dressed down” and entered what Jack London called (in his undercover narrative) the “human wilderness,” in order to traverse with their bodies what they saw as a growing social gulf.3 They joined early sociological surveys, progressive social movements, and a series of reform efforts, in an attempt to repair the ruptures made evident by the insurrectionary class struggles I discussed in chapter 3. Like...

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