Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism
208
Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism
208eBook
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Overview
Applying current theoretical work on globalization to the writing of authors as diverse as Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, Peyser reveals the ways in which turn-of-the-century American writers struggled to understand the future in a newly emerging global community. Because the pressures of globalization at once fostered the formation of an American national culture and made national culture less viable as a source of identity, authors grappled to find a form of fiction that could accommodate the contradictions of their condition. Utopia and Cosmopolis unites utopian and realist narratives in subtle, startling ways through an examination of these writers’ aspirations and anxieties. Whether exploring the first vision of a world brought together by the power of consumer culture, or showing how different cultures could be managed when reconceived as specimens in a museum, this book steadily extends the horizons within which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture can be understood.
Ranging widely over history, politics, philosophy, and literature, Utopia and Cosmopolis is an important contribution to debates about utopian thought, globalization, and American literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398905 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/21/1998 |
| Series: | New Americanists |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 314 KB |
About the Author
Thomas Peyser is Assistant Professor of English at Randolph-Macon College.
Read an Excerpt
Utopia & Cosmopolis
Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism
By Thomas Peyser
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9890-5
CHAPTER 1
The World a Department Store
The entire discourse on consumption aims to transform the consumer into the Universal Being, the general, ideal, and final incarnation of the human species.—Jean Baudrillard
We are bodies of one another.—Edward Bellamy
This chapter shares its title with a Utopian novel published in 1900 by Bradford Peck, president of the largest department store in New England and a visionary deeply influenced by Edward Bellamy. The work of this disciple usefully underlines an aspect of Bellamy's thought that has previously received little emphasis: its inherently globalizing tendencies. Usually, attempts to place Bellamy in his historical context have focused on his many affinities with other progressives engaged in domestic politics. Peck, however, was clearly inspired by the largely submerged international theme in Looking Backward and its far less widely read sequel, Equality. Unlike many other American progressives, whose efforts often amounted to an attempt to regulate the resident aliens, so to speak, whose presence was the major sign of America's seemingly problematic openness to the rest of the world, Bellamy called for an expansive embrace of the globe, an embrace that, though not exactly imperial, presaged the emergence of a more or less unified world culture. When many others saw labor unrest and the ethnic array as a call to arms in the cause of conservative retrenchment, Bellamy sensed the birth pangs of a new and comprehensive reordering of the world. Indeed, this was the aspect of Bellamy's thought that must have been hardest to swallow for many Nationalists and sometime Nationalists such as, as we shall see in the next chapter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
This is not to say, however, that Bellamy advocated the kind of toleration of "difference" that would satisfy those who typically use that word as a rallying cry today. When in a notebook entry Bellamy enthusiastically looked forward to a time when there will "no longer be either Jew or Greek, Irishman, German, Swede or Frenchman, but Americans only," he was thinking more of a way of dissolving all kinds of irreducible particularities in an abstract medium—"America"—that reduced all difference to a level of comparative irrelevance. Bellamy uses the term "American" in the same way he uses monumental classical architecture in Utopia: not as a positive value implying a set of articulated virtues —Bellamy dwells no more on the superiority of traditional, threatened American values than he does on Greek arete—but rather as a capacious (because empty) topos, a solvent that transforms real, potentially disruptive difference into harmless idiosyncrasy. This is how Bellamy differs from someone like Peck, who has talked himself into believing that the department store is valuable because it embodies the social reforms advocated by Christ, even if the latter lacked a vocabulary to articulate this surprising conclusion himself. For Bellamy, however, what is most essential is not that the department store world provides a comfortable life for all—human comfort, as we shall see, does not harmonize with the crucial mystical strains of Bellamy's thought —but that it teaches its citizens the lesson that many people learn today when confronted with a bewildering variety of goods and values: the arrangement of human life is arbitrary and, ultimately, not of much consequence.
This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from the work of a man who, after all, probably hastened his own death by exhausting himself while stumping for alterations in social arrangements. Bellamy's relation to other, more practical reformers, however, has been for the most part misconstrued. Jarred by the results of New England's industrialization, and the demographic and class alterations that accompanied it, Bellamy ultimately endorsed a position ironically asserted by Nietzsche, who with his usual astringency noted: "Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy—as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly 'adapted' gears." Bellamy welcomed the notion of interchangeability this metaphor implies, adjuring people to consider themselves merely "bodies of one another." Well aware of the impermanence of social forms, he arrived at the historicist belief in the ungroundedness of institutions and even of identity itself, and in response attempted to conceive of an order in which the essential emptiness of being could be harmlessly explored. Bellamy's imagined globalization of an American-style consumer society, then, needs to be understood as part of a program aiming to overthrow the groundedness of identity in something resembling a "natural" culture, one rooted in the particularities of a group or place. Faced with the real potential of technology to overcome the barriers that had made both regions and nations sharply distinct, Bellamy supposed that the globalization of culture called for the creation of a form of life in which we can recognize the emerging contours of an aimless consumerism. Keeping in mind recent arguments about how "the victory of the VCR" has paved the way for the universalization of Western-style economic and political arrangements, we may conclude that Bellamy's call for the kind of culture that can be transplanted anywhere in fact has been largely heeded. Emerging at the dawn of a century that was to witness an astounding dissemination of the American cultural style throughout the world, Bellamy's vision of the future amounts to a startlingly prophetic revelation of globalization in its manifestation as consumerism; in his works, as much as in anyone's, the links between the ethos of consumption and the dissolution of traditionally bounded localities become plain.
Although discussions of Bellamy tend to focus almost exclusively on Looking Backward, his largely forgotten early fiction sheds crucial light on the origins of his Utopian vision and suggests what Bellamy himself is likely to have found most compelling about Boston in the year 2000. Bellamy's bizarre novelistic romance Miss Luddington's Sister of 1884 is particularly important if we are to understand his trajectory toward utopia, inasmuch as this work brings together two linked themes that become paramount in his subsequent writings: the attenuation of the self and of the unsettling of localized space. The plot revolves around the beautiful heiress Ida Luddington who, on the brink of womanhood, contracts a disfiguring disease, which teaches her that there is really no such thing as a continuous self; she comes to see the alteration of her body as merely the outward sign or objective correlative of the fact that the self is radically disjunctive. She even goes so far as to refer to her previous self in the third person. The romance, however, does not confine itself to the elaboration of this psychological theory; Miss Luddington's metamorphosis has a social correlative as well: the transformation of the small town of her youth (modeled on Bellamy's own boyhood home of Chicopee Falls) into a small, but nevertheless dirty and noisy, industrial metropolis. As a distraught member of a now marginalized village nobility, she arranges for a duplicate of the preindustrial town to be built on a vacant tract on Long Island. She lives alone in this ghost town, joined only by her nephew Paul, whom she raises. Her obsession with her dead self is communicated to Paul, who in adolescence falls passionately in love with a portrait of his aunt before her illness. (The incestuous drama could be a displacement of Bellamy's own concerns: he married his foster sister, whom he met in his parents' household when he was twenty-two and she eleven.) They go to a medium in New York who manages to raise the "ghost" of Ida's younger self. During one of these seances, the medium dies, stranding the ghost in the land of the living. She moves to the simulated town with Paul and Miss Luddington, marriage to the former is planned, and she is reeducated. Overwhelmed by guilt, the young Ida finally admits that she is an imposter and the medium a fraud and that the latter's "death" was staged in hopes of bilking the Luddingtons of their fortune. Paul forgives her and marries her anyway, unshaken in his belief that our past selves continue their existence on another plane. Miss Luddington dies secure and happy in the same faith.
At first glance, this odd production may seem to have little to do with Bellamy's Utopian writings. In many ways, however, Miss Luddington's Sister is at heart consistent with the vision of looking Backward. Miss Luddington learns, and teaches, two important lessons imparted to her by her experience of disease and industrialization, both of which serve parallel pedagogical functions. If her disfigurement suggests to her the momentary nature of the self, the lack of any durable core of the ego, the destruction of traditional village life allows her to appreciate the only slightly less momentary nature of social arrangements. Faced with the shifting nature of society and the lack of a stable ego, Miss Luddington builds an artificial world—the first manifestation of Bellamy's interest in Utopia. Clearly, her Utopia is escapist in nature, but it is an escape with more than just personal resonance. She finds her traditional, deferential community transformed into a contractually organized society, and thus her retreat would seem to have decidedly conservative implications. There would be something misleading, however, in the suggestion that the architectural recreation of the past is above all a fortress for the preservation of her old, secure sense of self; the point, after all, of this ghost town is to give free play to the disintegration of the self, to create a space in which past and present selves can uncannily mingle: it is a town that tries to be haunted. What might seem to be a shrine dedicated, like the pyramids, to the grandeur of an individual is actually something like a factory for the dismantling of the ego.
Moreover, Miss Luddington's restoration amounts to an aesthetic manifesto pointing in the direction of Looking Backward. The re-created village, we might say, vacillates between painstaking mimesis and a wholesale rejection of the existent, suggesting Bellamy's impatience with Howellsian realism. The town on Long Island, after all, is a perfect copy, a masterpiece of realism, but one that, far from creating a sense of contact with some solid reality existing "out there," blurs the distinction between the real and the ideal, between the fact and the model that is derived from it; freed from its dependency on the now vanished actual, the model happily lives a life of its own. Indeed, we might say that in Miss Luddington's Sister, Bellamy pushes realism to the point at which it takes on the characteristics of surrealism: reality is precisely reproduced in order to dislodge the commonsense oppositions—self and other, past and present, New England and Long Island—that normally and normatively constitute the real. Exemplifying what Miles Orvell has characterized as a move away from a "culture of imitation," Bellamy defamiliarizes realism itself, and in so doing implies that imitation alone cannot carry one to the end of the quest for the real. The hallucinatory quality of the town is thus best understood not only as a retreat from the hard facts that have made a more beautiful way of life impossible, but also as a challenge to the alleged "hardness" of the facts themselves, a rebuke to the pride of the existent, which everywhere takes itself to be solid and understands any alternative realities as mere fancy and moondust.
If, then, Miss Luddington exposes the fictiveness of the self, her encounter with historical change has made clear to her the fictiveness of society, thus voiding any obligation to stay in the "real" world, the reality of which boils down merely to the fact that the majority recognizes it as real. Her town stands as a monument to the arbitrariness of any form of life, daring the onlooker to explain why or how it can be understood as "wrong." She seems, in short, to be a person with what Nietzsche described, in a fortuitously appropriate way, as the "consuming historical fever" characteristic of the nineteenth century, a fever whose symptom is the credo "things were different in all ages, it does not matter how you are."
These tendencies of Bellamy's thought become clearer when we consider "The Religion of Solidarity," an essay he wrote in 1874 that at the end of his life he endorsed as the core of his mature thinking. This essay has often been cited in discussions of Looking Backward because, as its title suggests, it denounces the aggrandizement of the ego and emphasizes the degree to which human beings share a common life and destiny. By relating the essay to Miss Luddington's Sister, however, we can become more aware of the mystical elements of Bellamy's writings that, although they became more muted in his later work, persist throughout his career; these are the elements that most strongly bear on the globalizing aspects of his Utopia. For Bellamy, the real problems of human beings stem from the fact that they possess a soul that "seeks to enfold and animate the universe, that takes all being for its province, and, with such potential compass and desire, has for its sole task the animating of one human animal in a corner of an insignificant planet." From this perspective, the real disease with which Miss Luddington is afflicted is not smallpox but embodiment itself, the tethering of an infinite soul to a particular place and time: "individuality, personality, partiality, is segregation, is partition, is confinement; is fine in a prison, and happy are we if its walls grow not wearisome ere our seventy years' sentence expires" (9).
In "The Religion of Solidarity," therefore, he exhorts man to "assume his birthright, and live out, live up, in others, in the past, in the future, in nature, in God" (n): everywhere, in short, but where he is, an insignificant—because finite—place deserving only "a certain calm abandon, a serene and generous recklessness" (17). To carry out this mystifying injunction Bellamy prescribes the adoption of an aesthetic stance toward life and the self. If "as universalists we inherit all time and space" (25), if "we are now living our immortal lives" (25), then the body and what happens to it ought to be met with a lofty indifference, or at most a purely aesthetic appreciation. Life for Bellamy is "a delightful game of passions and calculating, superior in interest to chess on account of partial identity with the personalities which serve us as puppets," an identity that nevertheless, "at least to a philosopher's mind, is so incomplete as to prevent the interest from attaining a painful degree of intensity" (18). Miss Luddington's disjunctive life offers an object lesson in just this perspective. Because the real life is always elsewhere—or rather, everywhere—"Let us then play with our individual lives as with toys, building them into beautiful forms and delighting ourselves in so brave a game" (17).
Venturing to sum up in a phrase the implications of Bellamy's early work, we might say that it amounts to an assault on the local, if by local we include anything that might be said to have a locus, be it the self, a place, or, metaphorically, a moment. As we have seen, Miss Luddington's village, which seems to be an enshrinement of one place and time, is something more like a hyperbolic assertion of particularity that by its very extremity calls the particular into question, and is even meant to disturb the categories by whose authority people usually distinguish one thing from another. There is, to be sure, something incoherent in her gesture, for she can induce a fluid—or, as Bellamy says in "The Religion of Solidarity," "universalist"—conception of time and space only by looking backward and, so to say, standing pat with a vanquished past. This incoherence is required by the fact that locality is the precondition of human being, even if this is a precondition that, in light of the religion of solidarity, must always seem galling and even stupid. The stupidity of the merely local, however, is overcome to the degree that one adopts toward it a detached, aesthetic outlook, seeing in it only the form adopted for the moment by universal life in the way a magician binds himself in chains merely to display virtuosity in escape, testifying to the elusiveness of the apparently solid. It is probably a sign of how well Miss Luddington's nephew has profited from her instruction that, upon her death, he demolishes her village rather than let it stand, for if it ever was a monument to anything it was to the frangibility of space and time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Utopia & Cosmopolis by Thomas Peyser. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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