Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T16:56:53.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Pathological Identity and the Ambiguities of Race and Class: Nature and the Anxious Naturalism of Frank Norris and Rebecca Harding Davis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Stephen Germic
Get access

Extract

Distinctions are most zealously produced in theory where they least exist in fact. This axiom is a crucial aspect of the concept of abjection as it is used by theorists of white male hysteria. Julia Kristeva writes that, for the abject, “‘unconscious’ contents remain… excluded but in a strange fashion.” They remain excluded to a degree that “a defensive position [can] be established, [but] not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object” (7). In particular, it is the presence of the other with the self around which the often hysteric dance of exclusion takes place. Kristeva writes, “I abject myself within the same motion through which T claim to establish myself” (3).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ahnebrink, Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction. New York: Russell, 1961.Google Scholar
Baguley, David. Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. 1888; rept. New York: Penguin, 1982.Google Scholar
Bellows, Henry. “Cities and Parks, with a Special Reference to the New York Central Park.” Atlantic Monthly 7 (1861): 416–29.Google Scholar
Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Bower, Stephanie. “Dangerous Liaisons: Prostitution, Disease, and Race in Frank Norris's Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 42 (1996): 38–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bramwell, Anna. Ecology in the 20th Century: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Burbick, Joan. Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Calverton, V. F.The Liberation of American Literature. New York: Scribner's, 1932.Google Scholar
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories. 1861; rept. New York: Feminist, 1984.Google Scholar
Daves, Rebecca Harding. Margaret Howth. 1862; rept. New York: Feminist, 1990.Google Scholar
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein, 1960.Google Scholar
Fiedler, Leslie. Waiting for the End. New York: Stein, 1972.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1984.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sandar L.Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Sandar L.The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siecle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Sandar L.Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981.Google Scholar
Hall, Prescott F.Immigration and Its Effects on the United States. New York: Holt, 1906.Google Scholar
Haltunnen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1879. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Harris, Sharon. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.Google Scholar
Hicks, Granville. The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War. New York: Macmillan, 1935.Google Scholar
Horkheimer, Max. “Sociological Background of the Psychoanalytic Approach.” Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease. Ed. Simmel, Ernst. New York: International University Press, 1946.Google Scholar
Horn, David G. “The Norm Which Is Not One: Reading the Female Body in Lombroso's Antropology.” Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives in Science and Popular Culture. Ed. Terry, Jennifer and Urla, Jacqueline. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985: 109–28.Google Scholar
Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Hughes, Shiela Hassel. “Between Bodies of Knowledge There Is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in ‘Life in the Iron Mills.’” American Quarterly 49 (1997): 113–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Khan, Sholem J.Science and Aesthetic Judgement: A Study of Taine's Critical Method. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970.Google Scholar
Kraut, Alan M.Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the “Immigrant Menace.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Trans. Roudiez, Leon S.. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Lukacs, Georg.Writer, Critic, and Other Essays. Trans, and ed. Kahn, Arhur B.. New York: Grosset, 1970.Google Scholar
Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsh, George Perkins. “The Study of Nature.” American Environmentalism, the Formative Period: 1860–1915. Ed. Worster, Donald. New York: Wiley, 1973.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Brian C.The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–61. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Newbury, Michael. “Healthful Employment: Hawthorne, Thoreau and Middleclass Fitness.” American Quarterly 47 (1995): 681–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, Frank. McTeague. 1899. New York: Norton, 1977.Google Scholar
Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Doubleday, 1901.Google Scholar
Norris, Frank. Vandover and the Brute. New York: Doubleday, 1914.Google Scholar
Norris, Frank. “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” San Francisco Wave 15 (06 27, 1896).Google Scholar
Pfaelzer, Jean. Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pfaelzer, Jean. “Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel.” International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1981): 234–44.Google Scholar
Rezneck, Samuel. Business Depressions and Financial Panics: Essays in American Business and Economic History. New York: Greenwood, 1985.Google Scholar
Rozenzweig, Roy, and Blackmar, Elizabeth. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Sedgewick, William T. “The Call to Public Health.” Science 28 (1908): 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgewick, William T. “On Recent Epidemics of Typhoid in the Cities of Lowell and Lawrence due to Infected Water Supply: With Observations on Other Cities and Towns of the Merrimack Valley, Especially Newberryport.” Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts. Boston: Wright, 1893.Google Scholar
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Stocking, George W. Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe. History of English Literature. Vol. 1. Trans. Laun, Henry Van. New York: Colonial, 1897.Google Scholar
Terry, Jennifer, and Urla, Jacqueline, eds. Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives in Science and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Worster, Donald. Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology. New York: Anchor, 1979.Google Scholar
Zola, Emile, “The Experimental Novel.” The Great Critics: An Anthology of Literary Criticism. Ed. Smith, James Harry and Parks, Edd Winfield. New York: Norton, 1932.Google Scholar