Show and Tell: Photography, Film and Literary Naturalism in Late Nineteenth Century America.

Abstract

This dissertation traces the vexing complexity of the relationship between naturalist literature of the American 1890s and emerging technologies of visual representation: although photographic representation was frequently invoked as naturalism’s ideal model, the novels I consider are better characterized as skeptical interrogators, rather than as eager imitators, of photographic accuracy. In Frank Norris’s McTeague, for example, narrative shifts between intimacy and distance mirror the promise and threat epitomized by the practice of documentary photographers like Jacob Riis. Riis’s photography represented an ideal of accuracy, but McTeague’s narrator ultimately rejects it: the threat of becoming complicit in reprehensible acts or of becoming indistinguishable from their perpetrators, proves too great a risk for the reward of producing a photographically accurate representation. Stephen Crane’s The Monster offers a similarly skeptical assessment of the potential of narrative mediation, one that I read through a comparative consideration of Crane’s novella and the practice of the moving picture lecturers of the 1890s. I argue that these lecturers—poised between a didactic culture of genteel entertainments and an emerging culture of film that was more interested in thrilling than in edifying its audience—embodied the kind of paradoxical mediation that complicates any moral or ethical interpretation of The Monster. In Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, photography and film model representational modes that seem better suited to the hapless characters of these novels than to their knowledgeable narrators. What Maisie Knew articulates the possibility of a naturalist brute mastering her own story. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier represents the unique accuracy of the embodied, subjective experience of individual subjects, an experience figured by the novel’s soundscape of music and noise. This soundscape functions much like those of early films, in which the sounds of so-called “silent” films often indexed a reality that exceeded the limits of the images playing on the screen. My dissertation urges us to take naturalism seriously, as an insightful commentator on a social world in which everything, it seems, can be made readily available for our viewing pleasure.