Women as Superfluous Characters in American Realism and Naturalism

WOMEN AS SUPERFLUOUS CHARACTERS IN AMERICAN REALISM AND NATURALISM Jan Cohn" Radical feminist criticism at the present time attempts not merely the eradication of literary-critical expressions of male superiority, but goes further, tying attitudes of male ascendancy to bourgeois views and values and asserting the necessity to turn their attack against the bourgeois fabric of society. These critics begin with the Marxist assumption that the ideas of the dominant class become the ruling ideas of the entire society and extend their analysis of the contemporary role and position of women to an analysis of the culture in which values of market-place aggressiveness outrank values of any other kind. To quote Lillian Robinson: [Feminist criticism] is about to contract what can only be called a me'sallUince with bourgeois modes of thought and the critical categories they inform. To be effective, feminist criticism cannot become simply bourgeois criticism in drag. It must be ideological and moral criticism; it must be revolutionary.' A full history of the novel in England and America will have to reflect an awareness of the effect of the developing bourgeois society on the depiction of women. As the bourgeois art-form par excellence, the novel burgeoned in the eighteenth century into a vehicle for the investigation of the middle-class interpretation and application of medieval conceptions of romantic love, now firmly tied to marriage and the home.2 The most cursory comparison of Tom Jones and Clarissa Harlowe highlights the canonization of the double-standard; the young man sows his sexual oats around a good deal of the English countryside, while the seduced maiden dies, a victim of her own shame and remorse. Christopher Hill's analysis of Puritan society in England stresses the socio-economic basis of marriage and the concommitant value of the middle-class marriageable daughter, as long as she is not, in Hill's phrase, "shopworn."3 Heroines from Clarissa to Tess testify to the female tragedy that comes from sending their bodies out of the shop on the credit system. Remarkably, even perversely, the further entrenched the bourgeois society became and the greater the real-life concentration on the market-place, the more insistently did the major novelists focus their vision on women. 'Professor Jan Cohn teaches English and American Literature at Carnegie-Mellon University. 155 Studies in American Fiction The bourgeois novel in America did not develop along so undeviating a line as did the British due to the unique influences of American culture, where the myth of the New Eden continued to make itself felt in the fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and even James. But for the generation of writers who grew up after the Civil War, the facts of American life turned them from the continued absorption in that Romanticism peculiar to America and toward a realistic interpretation of contemporary society. In this fiction of the "real" subject of struggle and survival in mercantile America, a new set of pressures redefined the fictional roles available for women. The major distinction between the fiction of American realists and naturalists from 1880 to 1910 and the novels of the British bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lies in a shift of interest. For the typical British novel the market-place served merely as the given backdrop against which the narrative of love and marriage could be staged. But for Norris and Dreiser and their contemporaries, the marketplace itself frequently became the focus of the novel, and the central action could now be the masculine struggle for success. Theoretically, such a novel could feature an all-male cast, but the traditions of fiction and the facts of the book-buying public militated against this; a sentimental action was requisite. The novels resulting from this compromise between the fascination for the market-place and the necessity for a sentimental action create the superfluous woman, a particular set of female stereotypes which are in part a reflection of a cultural view of women and in part a new set of forces defining the cultural position of women. Once the American novelist learned to manipulate the motif of financial success so that it intersected, positively or inversely, the basic themes of good...