Eroticism in American Literary Realism

EROTICISM IN AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM Joseph Katz University of South Carolina The most serious flaw in American realistic literature still seems to be its sexual sterility. During the half century after the end of the Civil War, while the American realists fought for freedom to write about life as they saw it, they apparently made an abrupt retreat from the sexual arena. Sometimes the about-face was reluctant, as indicated in H. H. Boyesen's complaint about "the Iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist." But more frequently the withdrawal appears to have been voluntary and even amiable, as in William Dean Howells's stricture: If the novel were written for men and for married women alone, as in continental Europe, it might be altogether different. But the simple fact is that it is not written for them alone among us, and it is a question of writing, under cover of our universal acceptance, things for young girls to read which you would be put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice of your intention, and so cutting yourself off from the pleasure—and it is a very high and sweet one—of appealing to these vivid, responsive intelligences, which are none the less brilliant and admirable because they are innocent.1 The "Iron Madonna" and her immaculate ward "The Young Girl" became figures of fear or veneration for professional writers whose vision was realistic in both senses of the word. And with good reason. Those figures represented a principle of female purity that was upheld and guarded by publishers of respectable magazines and novels. Pornography is not the question. There was pornographic literature in America before the Civil War, during it, and in the years after it—as, likely, there always will be. The question is at once more simple and more complex than that of pornography, centering as it does on the admissibility of sex and sexual awareness into literature in any way beyond the mere demarcation of characters as male and female. Looking backwards through the generation of H. L. Mencken to the generations of the realists themselves, it seems that anything more was inadmissible among respectable writers and readers. Affection was commonly rendered, even love, but apparently neither could have physical bases. Gentlemen did not even speak of the subject 36Joseph Katz directly. As late as the first year of the twentieth century, whoever read Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie on its first submission to a publisher (Harper & Brothers) recommended its rejection mainly on the following grounds: His touch is neither firm enough nor sufficiently delicate\o depict without offense to the reader the continued illicit relations of the heroine. The long succession of chapters dealing with this important feature of the story begin to weary very quickly. Their very realism weakens and hinders the development of the plot. The final scenes in New York are stronger and better—But I cannot conceive of the book arousing the interest or inviting the attention, after the opening chapters, of the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels.2 The Iron Madonna and The Young Girl were real enough to bar immediate publication of a great American realistic novel. They were real indeed. "Puritanism," expostulated H. L. Mencken in an essay written while the storm of World War I was gathering.3 "Naturally enough," he raged publicly, "this moral obsession has given a strong color to American literature. ... In none other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice of aesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notions of what is meet, proper and nice." Take Howells: "His investigations, one might say, are carried on in vacuo; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of passion, but in terms of giggles." The war for absolute sexual frankness was under way in American literature, and the preceding two generations of its native realists were—with their Iron Madonna and Young Girl—chief among the enemies. Whether reluctant or eager in their homage to those icons, writers of that group had been astonishingly reticent in matters of sex. Or so it seemed...