Realism after liberalism: Women, desire, and the modern American novel

Scholars of eighteenth-century and Victorian fiction associate literary realism with Lockean liberalism. The realist novel, in their view, is an expression of bourgeois individualism and the values of self-possession, autonomy, and meritocratic success. Because of the mobility that these values required, the exemplary figure of liberalism, as represented in both the novel and philosophy, has come to be seen more often than not as male and always white. Personified in the non-aristocratic proprietor, merchant, tradesman, or artisan, the liberal individual was imagined as the primary economic agent of his production-oriented society— Economic Man, in Regenia Gagnier\u27s terms. These critical assumptions have been immensely productive in regard to nineteenth-century British realism, so productive, in fact, that it is tempting to extend them to all realist fiction. The claim of this dissertation, however, is that it would be a great mistake to apply them to turn-of-the-twentieth-century American realism. These novels, on the contrary, are a direct reaction against the ideology of their British precursors. Realism after Liberalism: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel describes the transformation of realist fiction in early-twentieth-century America from a vehicle of liberalism to an expression of a very different social and economic order. The ascendancy of corporate capitalism and consumer culture in the U.S. (perceptible as early as the 1870s) eliminated the very premises of liberal individualism. Corporations rather than individuals were now the engines of economic productivity, and, with the rise of the wage system, individuals were becoming increasingly alienated from their own labor. In the work of both canonical writers (such as Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and Nella Larsen) and writers less known (such as Robert Herrick and Booth Tarkington), the crisis of liberalism wrought by these cultural and economic developments provoked a full-scale re-conceptualization of modern subjectivity.