The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (review)

Where many cultural studies offer thinner description than they would claim in theory, The Material Unconscious examines the Gilded Age exposed in Stephen Crane’s work by invoking the professional discourses of the day (from anthropology to the child study movement); the rise of mass cultural amusements (from Chautauquas to amusement parks); the history of photography (from moving pictures to the Kodak snapshot); the history of written practices (from journalism to the boy’s story to the short story), and a multitude of material cultural artifacts and practices (from the minstrel show and the freak show to toys), not to mention labor history, economic history, and portions of the history and construction of gender, race, and class relations in Gilded Age America.

The Material Unconscious is not simply offering a thick description of a historical era, however; the book is also interrogating theoretical practices. The footnotes contain a heterogeneous crowd of critics, historians, and theorists ranging from Jameson to Halttunen and Lacan to Slotkin, while the text uses and argues with Freud, Foucault, New Historicism, and Derrida as it moves from a thematic examination of Stephen Crane’s work to a developing theory of the material unconscious, which for Brown can be authorial or cultural. Proposing literature as what “exposes the latent dialectics in the history of things” (250), Brown’s book does not require of its readers a prior, or even an ultimate, interest in Stephen Crane’s writings per se.

The unifying thematic thread of Brown’s argument is that sports, play, leisure, amusement, and pleasure, mixed as Brown argues they were in the period, were reconfigured in the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Thus, to tell the story of this reconfiguration is to tell also the story of how labor, class, race, nation, commerce, and other categories invoked by or opposed to play were simultaneously reconfigured. The first chapter, which is biographical and social historical, focuses on the “massification of leisure” (7) in the 1890s as amusement parks and the bicycle craze coincided with modern advertising and growing print technologies. (The illustrations in The Material Unconscious are an education in themselves.) Focusing on the rationalization of recreation, Brown shows how Crane nonetheless exposes the disruptions in public sites and sights. There is an especially powerful juxtaposition of the already geographically and historically juxtaposed Ocean Grove—it was founded by the Methodist Camp Meeting Association in 1869, and attended by Crane and his mother—and the secular amusement park, Asbury Park, founded by a Methodist layman, James Bradley in 1871, about which Crane wrote for the Tribune. Brown not only analyzes Crane’s thematization of the cultural conflicts read into or performed in, for instance, worker’s parades or the “legislated visibility of Asbury Park” (59), but also uncovers Crane’s tacit figuration of race questions at Asbury Park, noting that by 1885 the park’s attempt to segregate its public space provoked a New Jersey law addressing the segregation question the summer after Homer Plessy’s train ride. That Crane’s writing would figure race and the performance of race on a New Jersey boardwalk in just this period is then neither literary emblem nor coincidence, but a trace or residue of national conflicts already encoded in the recreational site that Crane represents and examines.

A second chapter similarly studies recreational time (including mass tourism as related to Crane’s imagination of the west, of Mexico, and of gambling) as well as the ways in which leisure was being culturally encoded, turning finally to what Brown calls a “somatic economy” (89) related to the market economy, to labor strikes, and to the problem and inculcation of American excitement, crowd psychology, and physical sensation, a topic to which the book returns in a third chapter on The Red Badge of Courage, photography, the human body, and the refiguration of American seeing.

Brown at the same time “imagines literature as a...