Exalted and perverted fury: Violence, masculinity, and American literary naturalism

This dissertation reconsiders the role of destructive physical action and its relationship to the identity of the American man in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study focuses on the works of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London, three seminal authors of literary naturalism who often fashion their male protagonists through these characters' indulgences in violent and/or dominant behavior. My investigation explores the significance of such literary episodes, both as they illustrate the historical and cultural influences of the period, and in regard to their role within the ideological framework of the texts themselves. I argue that the presence of violence in these works—whether perpetrated by or against the protagonists—reveals and informs the era's perception of exactly what it means to be an American man in the latter half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. I also devote significant attention to the presence of what might best be described as markers of "vice" in these stories: indulgent actions or proclivities that disregard the pervasive communal expectations of the day. As is often the case with antisocial behavior, incidents of malicious performativity are frequently influenced by, or work in concert with, other variables, such as alcohol abuse, gambling, and prostitution. Through rigorous analyses of an American masculinity inexorably attached to violent expression, my dissertation offers an innovative reexamination of the literary and historical relevance of canonical turn-of-the-century American texts, including Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Norris's McTeague (1899), and London's The Game (1905), among others. By arguing for the role of violence as an imperative thematic element within these and similar works, I establish new and important taxonomic criteria to more effectively identify, catalog, and understand the literature of one of the most contentious and perplexing periods of American history.^