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  • The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism
  • Cindy Murillo
The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism. Florence Dore. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ix+167. $50.00 (cloth).

In The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism, Florence Dore sets out to redefine our current understanding of obscenity laws' impact on the modern novel. This relatively short book covers a lot of ground. As Dore points out in her introduction, many scholars tend to read literature as informed by law, which serves as "the historical key that will unlock the ambiguous literary text" (10). At the turn into the twentieth century, issues regarding free speech contributed to the weakening of obscenity laws and modernist texts were regarded as part and parcel of this ultimate rejection of sexual prudery with their forthright explicitness of sexuality. Dore, however, challenges such assumptions through a re-positioning of silence, what the author terms a "negative narration" (2), that resists sexual explicitness and conversely reproduces censorship. In this respect, Dore's book is unique in that she suggests that modern novels convey silence at the moment of what appears on the surface to be an explicitly sexual scene.

Dore begins her argument by drawing on Michel Foucault, whose theoretical contributions have also questioned law as the primary characteristic of power. She dismisses other critical assumptions that associate Foucault's concepts of power with a culturally constructed text, which limit our understanding of the novel in purely socio-political terms. Placing herself within the framework of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist thought, she revises these theories to fit her purpose. Dore relocates cultural influence onto the notion of a "phallic logic" (5), demonstrating that Marxist terminology can't completely explain the reaffirmation of conventional gendered categories during a time considered sexually progressive. Theoretical assertions of sexuality are read into the discussed texts, which show how gender categories, and thus a "phallic logic," persist regardless of the emergence of free speech and the weakening of obscenity laws at the turn [End Page 195] of the twentieth century. This ideology works against feminist scholars, such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to name only a few, who have asserted that the modern novel was preoccupied with gender and can be seen as giving rise to a new and assertive femininity. Conversely, Dore sees these feminist theories as misconstrued.

To demonstrate her theory, Dore examines four modernist works, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), and she looks at how sexuality is mollified at points which might be considered obscene. Her discussion centers around three obscenity cases—Queen v. Hicklin (1868), which established as obscene a text that could "corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (12); U.S. v. One Book Called "Ulysses" (1933), which renamed obscene material as that which could potentially cause "lustful thoughts" in a "person of average sex instincts" (12); and the infamous phrase spoken by Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, "'I know it when I see it.'"(15). Her justification for using these modern novels in her analysis is based on their historical status as openly illicit in terms of sexual representation whether heterosexual, homosexual, or interracial.

Dore's book is broken into two sections: Knowing and Seeing, the first two chapters devoted to issues of obscenity law and knowledge, and the later two chapters concerned with analyzing obscenity with respect to sight. In her analysis of Sister Carrie, Dore conceptualizes the sexuality rendered absent in terms of Carrie's stupidity and Ames's inability to associate Carrie's body with anything sexual. Drawing on both Hicklin and One Book's definitions of obscenity, the author argues that the descriptions of Carrie's emotions undermine any attempt on Carrie's part to demonstrate the ability to reason. Dore asserts that "Carrie's move away from morality delivers her into a physical realm that reproduces feminine sexual innocence as innocence of mind" (31). Sexual freedom is not unleashed; rather, Carrie is unable to achieve independent subjectivity...

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