Modernism and Matricide

In the decade after World War I, writes Ann Douglas, America entered a “post-colonial phase.” It was a time of liberatory struggles, a period of breaking away and killing off, when American moderns, black and white, turned their backs on Anglo/European traditions and “genteel” bourgeois “cultural cowardice” to embrace their own cultural resources, including the heritage of African-American folk and popular art (p. 4). Douglas’s Terrible Honesty sets out to chart “the larger American emancipation” and within it the “African American movement of liberation” (p. 5).

New York was the media, music, theater, advertising, artistic, and literary capital of the nation—symbol, mecca, and leading edge of America’s modernist sensibilities. ¹ If any one term serves as a metaphor for Manhattan modernism, Ann Douglas argues, it is “Mongrel.” This is what Dorothy Parker (half Jewish and half WASP) had planned to call her never written autobiography; it was also part of the cultural vocabulary of white conservatives who worried about race suicide. Mongrel modernism, an eclectic mix of white and black voices, of mass culture and avant garde literary, social, and artistic criticism, was not just a New York phenomenon, but what Douglas sees as its extremes of commercialism and artistic innovation were, as she puts it, “unimaginable without New York City” (p. 13).

Terrible Honesty provides a stunningly erudite, imaginative, and provocative analysis of the mental landscape of urban American modernist culture. Whether one agrees or disagrees with its interpretations, the sheer breadth of its treatment of urban modernism and its ability to synthesize a vast literature on literary and popular culture makes Douglas’s book a work to be reckoned with.

The first part of the book analyzes the cultural shifts that gave birth to modernist culture in America, or what might be called its enabling conditions. In order for the rivers of cultural emancipation to flow as freely as they did, Douglas argues, a powerful obstacle had to be cleared away, if not altogether demolished—the “white middle class matriarch of the recent Victorian past” (p. 6). The matriarchs that exerted such a powerful force as the champions of Anglo-Saxon moralism, piety, sentimentality, sexual repression, and racial exclusivity in mid- and late-Victorian culture were the subject of Douglas’s influential study The Feminization of American Culture (1977).

In her new book Douglas instead charts what might be called the modernist masculinization of American culture. For just as in the nineteenth century the Victorian matriarch (or “Titaness,” as Douglas labels her) “successfully attacked the Calvinist patriarchy,” so in the twentieth century the matriarch was “hunted down . . . by the forces of masculinization bound together in a backlash known as modernism” (p. 241). If Douglas admits that the New York moderns “could not altogether sever the umbilical cord” between themselves and the matriarchs of Victorian culture (pp. 7–8), the concept of “matricide” nevertheless shapes the analysis in her book. In a key chapter devoted to this topic, Douglas lays out the dimensions of “maternal rebuke and filial revolt,” where the influence of Titanesses like Emma Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt are symbolically exorcised by the rebels.

What replaced the moralizing piousness of the matriarchy was an irreverent, “egalitarian popular and mass culture,” steeped in the ethos of what writer Raymond Chandler would call “terrible honesty” (pp. 8, 33). Douglas interprets the concept as the desire to strip away the “deceptive appearances” of modern life and glimpse the sometimes unpleasant underlying realities. The conceptual muse of Douglas’s Terrible Honesty isn’t Raymond Chandler, however, but Sigmund Freud. Douglas is quite sure that “what Freud loathed above all else in American culture was its ‘dominating women’” (p. 134). Like Gertrude Stein and William James, Freud was part of the “off stage” influences on New York’s modernist...