Corporate Impersonation: The Possibilities of Personhood in American Literature, 1886-1917.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which certain U.S. novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century engaged with the problem of the corporation, a form of business organization that had become ascendant over nearly every aspect of modern life. In a moment when legal scholars were deepening and expanding the ancient doctrine of corporate personhood (which grants corporations the status of people under the law), novelists used literature to explore how the changing status of the corporation might generate new possibilities of personhood for other groups with tenuous legal status — most notably women, immigrants, and animals. Through close reading of novels by Upton Sinclair, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Harding Davis, and Frank Norris, this manuscript argues that popular novels in the turn of the twentieth century were as much a part of the debate over the nature of corporate personhood as more traditional legal texts such as law reviews and court opinions. For Sinclair, the Beef Trust’s grotesque exploitation of livestock and immigrant workers alike forces the protagonist to reclaim his humanity by joining a socialist collective — another form of group personhood. Likewise Norris’s The Octopus explores the problems and possibilities of direct action against corporate power. For other writers, however, the corporation was less a force of oppression than a vehicle for personal and political transformation. Dreiser’s Cowperwood, by creating his own corporate self, is able to achieve a different kind of financial and social potential, while in Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree, the corporate structure enables the empowerment of its female shareholders — even as the corporation itself becomes naturalized into the familiar collectivities of the family and of “society” writ small. Indeed, Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune goes so far as to valorize the multinational corporation as integral to the financial and social promises of the U.S. imperialist project. Although corporate personhood is often lampooned today as an absurd symbol of oligarchy, the authors in this dissertation grappled with the more complicated problem of how the corporation was changing the nature of personhood itself, for better or worse.