Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940

Sex Expression

and American Women Writers, 1860–1940

Sex Expression

and American Women Writers, 1860–1940

Dale M. Bauer

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

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Bauer, Dale M., 1956–

Sex expression and American women writers, 1860–1940 / Dale M. Bauer.

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1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Sex in literature. 5. Language and sex. 6. Expression in literature. I. Title.

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TO GORDON, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 | The Sexualization of American Culture

2 | Blood, Sex, and the Ugly Girl

3 | Refusing Middle Age

4 | Sex Power

5 | Inarticulate Sex

6 | Is Sex Everything?

Conclusion: Sexual Exhaustion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming, since I taught my first graduate seminar on sex expression in 1999 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a seminar I have now taught three times at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I owe a huge debt to the students in those courses, particularly Christine DeVine at Madison and Ted Faust, Stephanie Henvaux, Andy Gustin, Katie Maulbetsch, Susan Rodgers, Ryan Haas, and Kyle Garton at Illinois. Past and present colleagues at Madison and the University of Kentucky have been crucial in shaping this project: Bruce Burgett, who invented the term American Sex; Susan Friedman and Susan Bernstein, two of the best feminist critics around; and Amy Mohr and Kirstin Wilcox, excellent colleagues at UIUC. One of the finest academic communities I’ve known was at the University of Kentucky, where Jeff Clymer, Andy Doolen, Janet Eldred, Ellen Rosenman, and Steve Weisenburger were all generous readers and terrific friends.

Many invited talks allowed me to test my ideas in public, and I’m grateful to the Arizona Quarterly Symposium, the University of Florida, the University of Kansas, Wesleyan University, the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, the Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture Conference at the University of Louisville, and North Central College. I thank my hosts at these talks for their warmth and engagement: Ed Dryden, Phil Wegner, David Leverenz, Tom Byers, Frank Farmer, Joel Pfister, Lisa Long, and Christine DeVine. Parts of this book were originally published in various journals. I thank Heldref Publications for permission to reprint Refusing Middle Age, ANQ 15.1 (Winter 2002): 46–60. I especially thank Phil Gould and Len Tennenhouse for including my article, ‘In the Blood’: Sentiment, Sex, and the Ugly Girl, in America the Feminine, special issue of differences 11.3 (Fall 1999–2000): 57–75, © 1999–2000 Brown University and differences, used by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

Chris Green, Mary Unger, and Mandy Wescott are amazing researchers, filled with all sorts of courage and intellect. Lisa Long and Jean Lutes have helped me immeasurably with their careful comments and support. Tina Karageorgos read my work with striking enthusiasm and intelligence. Kim O’Neill is a wonderful editor, someone whose skill and talent are matched by her wit and kindness.

Joel Pfister, Eva Illouz, Eric Haralson, Priscilla Wald, Susan Ryan, and Ann Ardis—friends from various universities all over the world—offered keen insights and astute recommendations. Both Priscilla and Joel were instrumental in leading me at the beginning of my work on the book.

Nina Baym is always there as a counselor, resource, and source of encouragement. And she’s a remarkable reader. Bruce Michelson gave me several new ways of looking at the topic of this book, teaching me how to growl in the process. Besides giving on-target advice, Peter Mortensen exemplified dedication; his writing continues to inspire me. Bob Markley—friend and colleague—was there for me while I finished the manuscript, especially while I was recovering from brain surgery. He knew exactly the right amount of goodwill to get me through those hard times.

Susan Griffin brought her incredible wit and energy to the project when I first began work on this book and again when I most needed it, during my recovery.

Virginia Blum, at Kentucky, was one of the most amazing comrades throughout this process; nothing stopped her from giving help and offering love. Over the last eight years, a constant exchange of work with Dana Nelson has made a huge difference in my life. Dana’s advice is the gold standard for toughness and engagement.

Lynda Zwinger kept me writing, and rewriting, always giving me words of enthusiasm and encouragement. Her friendship sustained me through this last year, keeping me both living and working. There’s no colleague wiser than she is.

My love to Elana Crane, who has been there during every change, every transformation, of the book. I couldn’t have done it without her. Many thanks and much love, too, to Mary Pinard, whose strong presence can be found on every page.

Sian Hunter, my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, was patient and smart, especially during the last year of the project. Sian has made this book worth doing. The Press is also lucky to have Ellen Bush and Dino Battista. I am also grateful for the wisdom of copyeditor Paula Wald. Nancy Bentley read the manuscript twice: she is the perfect interlocutor, giving me the best of her acumen in the process. It’s been a pleasure to earn her meticulous remarks. Both readers for the press were invaluable, and I’m grateful for Sian’s wisdom in locating them.

My gratitude to Samira Didos and Michael Chicoine—for saving my life this year.

As always, I thank my parents, Dorothy and Daniel Bauer, and my brother David for their love and support. Through the course of writing this book, my brother became one of my closest friends, and I’m grateful for his presence in my life.

The Hutners—Gordon, Dan, and Jake—have been there through every page of this manuscript. Dan and Jake grew up asking questions about sex expression—the topic and the book—and kept me inventing new ways to answer them. Gordon is a terrific editor and an even better friend, father, and—above all—partner. He’s incomparable, and I’m lucky to share my life with him.

Sex Expression

and American Women Writers, 1860–1940

Introduction

Sex behaviors, sex experience, sex rationalism, sex propensity, sex excess, sex values, sex suppression, sex starvation, sex freedom, sex inclination, sex impulses, sex distinction, sexual efficiency, sex morality, sex potentiality—Mary Austin deploys all of these terms in Love and the Soul Maker (1914), her treatise on how women might understand the great adventure of sex life in the twentieth century (137). In explaining the modernization of sexuality, including the moral values associated with love and the emergence of women’s sex expression, Austin uses these and other similar phrases to devise a new rhetoric of sexuality. Nor was she alone in using these phrases, of which only sex appeal seems to have survived. The term sex expression was thus introduced into the cultural lexicon as a means of describing this radical upheaval in sex imagination, a new discourse that corresponded to the visual signs of women’s signifying on the body and putting on style, a discourse that belonged to expressive culture rather than to nature or the marketplace. In this way, the new sexualization of American culture at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was indeed both material and rhetorical.

Much of the fiction concerning sex expression is inevitably middle class since these are stories written by women fitting narrative styles (like dresses in Anzia Yezierska’s fiction) to passions that have no settings or forms. These women would even seem at odds with themselves since they were, according to Freudian theories of their sexual constitution, conflicted by the opposing desires of self- and sex expression, the former through work and power and the latter through heterosexual pleasure. And that conflict is deflected onto age and aging, beauty and ugliness, race and ethnicity, and psychology: women must do sex first while young, then—as middle-aged agents in the world—move on to power. Working-class women’s stories, on the other hand, are mediated through middle-class desires to discover sexual ownership. But there is no prevailing narrative of young, sexually active women with power or of middle-aged women with sex lives. My work here concerns how various women writers—some better known than others—tried to create these new stories.

Seventy years prior to Austin’s declaration about the sexualization of U.S. culture and its resonance for women’s social and political meanings, Margaret Fuller advocated the primacy of woman’s self-culture in The Great Lawsuit (1843): We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man … to bring forth ravishing harmony (1629). Self-expression for American women took shape in Fuller’s demand to have all arbitrary barriers flung open so that women could use any of the available venues for self-culture. The new narratives of sex expression that emerged in women’s writing after Fuller’s call heralded a new sphere of combined public and private life. Fuller famously protested that without freedom to engage in contract relations, women’s marital state was no less a confinement than chattel slavery. This increasingly open private life allowed women writers over the century to create a new mode of self-expression, to the extent that they pushed the boundaries of sexual norms beyond conventional rituals of romance.

By 1890, for example, U.S. anarchist and sex radical Voltairine de Cleyre would denounce men’s sexual authority in marriage (Delamotte 224) and the violence of the sex act: A young mother … had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was no redress (226). De Cleyre would contend that marriage was worse than chattel slavery because of the romantic illusions that undergirded the institution: Young girls! If any one of you is contemplating marriage remember that is what the contract means. The sale of the control of your person in return for ‘protection and support.’ The sad part of it is, the majority of women think it is all right (238). Fuller’s and de Cleyre’s positions frame the debate over female desires for self-expression by claiming that these desires culminate either in a ravishing harmony of the sexes or in the violent punishment of enslaved sex (Delamotte 229).

While Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Bodily Bonds teaches us to read the hyperbole of equating marriage with slavery (the former based on contract), Fuller’s gesture speaks to the investment in sexuality that women used to express how self-culture might liberate them. As Fuller discovered, there was no way to invent a rhetoric of female self-culture without recourse to the language of sexuality. Despite her ambivalence about sex expression, the forces of the culture and female self-understanding pushed in that direction. Bound up with ravishing harmony, women’s desire for sexual expression, according to Fuller, is part of self-culture. She thereby anticipates issues that writers a half-century later tackled more explicitly. By the time de Cleyre passionately denounced sex authority, women writers had already begun to express their continued hope for and troubling ambivalences about sexual equality. Writers such as de Cleyre and Austin speculated courageously about the consequences of discarding sentimentality, even as they moved into psychological and social realms new to women writers. My book moves from sentimental sexuality to an analysis of modern sexual exhaustion, the refusal to accept sex expression as potentially liberating.

To that end, I consider how sex expression is embedded in the move from sentimentality to sexuality and, thus, from self-expression to sex expression. The nineteenth-century classical liberal emphasis on self-culture or, more specifically, self-expression—with the self understood as an autonomous and private being—gives way in modern American writing to a focus on intimacy and sexuality as the primary modes of personal expression. Women authors helped fashion a dominant idiom of sexual expression (with intimacy as the necessary condition for inter-relational equality) to replace self-expression as the primary goal of the modern self. The heterosexual couple thus appeared as the rightful social arrangement in the United States. Self-expression paled next to the possibilities of sex expression, grounded as these new sexual, liberal possibilities were in the political transformations of contract relations. I also examine what the rhetoric of sex expression has meant in the literary history of U.S. women writers.

By studying the tradition of women writing on this transition from self-expression to sex expression, I follow the lead of scholars such as Nina Baym who study women’s writing as a coherent literary tradition. Following Baym’s pioneering work, Susan Williams contends in her thoughtful study of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Reclaiming Authorship, that we need to develop a nonoppositional approach to men’s and women’s writings. I, too, will argue for women’s development of their own sexual lexicon, not in contrast or contradiction to men’s¹ but from inside their own diverse psychological and social positionings. In analyzing their treatments of female sexuality, I prove Williams’s contention that women’s writing was a distinct nineteenth-century classification, insofar as women writers wrote in conversation with and sometimes against each other.

I examine how women turned from the general, possibly desexualized desire for self-culture (at its zenith in the 1840s to the 1870s) to an investment in sex power and sex expression. Sex expression, a term circulating in the 1880s, was not really popularized until 1926, when V. F. Calverton published Sex Expression in Literature, which argued that sex expression constituted all the ways of representing a culture’s measure of sexual life, a phrase bridging bodily practice and literary production.² Beginning with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Harriet Beecher Stowe and through the opening decades of the twentieth century, women writers celebrated sex expression as a linguistic and physical style.³ These writers constructed a psychological and social transition from sentimentality to intimacy, moved the culture from a praxis of self-expression to a praxis of sexual expression, and won a Pyrrhic victory. Although these new modes of sex expression might ultimately be co-opted or normalized over time, they had historically specific and culturally relevant moments of illumination for women, moments when women appeared or felt able to change the way they could imagine themselves as sexual beings. I explore those symbolic episodes in a history in which changes come fitfully, partially, and often uncertainly. The sum of these changes, however, affirms a sexual dimension to identity, whereby women writers found themselves confined within sex expression; it created a new circumscription, another social and imaginative strategy for being reduced to an It that, ironically and perhaps inadvertently, women had helped to construct themselves.

This transition from self-expression to the ideal of sexual intimacy was profoundly reflexive—a complex discourse about the transition itself—and a self-conscious inquiry into the strengths and treacheries of language and social custom as forces for stasis or change. Sex expression is a simple term for these combined rhetorical and material practices that takes into account not only physical and conjugal affirmation and adventurousness but also expression in social interaction, clothes, the body, politics, and the forms, perspectives, and rhetoric of American fiction.

I began this study with two major questions in mind: Who was presumed to have sexuality in the nineteenth century, and when did sexuality emerge as a modern identity for women in ways that qualified it as a subject for American women writers? In pursuing these questions, I encountered a tradition, previously either inchoate or openly determined, of women writing about sex and teaching readers how to understand the new languages of sexuality, including how to interpret American literary realism, postsentimentality, modernity, and their codes. Some of these new sexual norms were in ascendancy, while others were just emerging; still others (like sex power) were evolving and perhaps would not become demonstrable for another decade or two. This has been a long process of unearthing women’s writing on matters of sexuality and distinguishing the newness of their claims. Instead of reading for these claims against the grain or for resistance, my method is to read for signs of an emerging style, whether in terms of characterization, tropes, setting, rendering of consciousness, or new language and sexual styles. I have found that this history of sex expression is not linear but richly recursive and startlingly dynamic.

At the same time, not everyone envisioned sexuality in the same liberatory ways. Some writers I study, like Fannie Hurst, were more conservative than others. Some were apologists for the status quo; others eschewed transgression or resistance as a means of dealing with sexuality. Few discussed lesbianism, bisexuality, or other sexual arrangements, although I explore some of these hopes for freedom in chapter 6 and the conclusion; fewer still featured interracial sexuality. Despite these conventional limits, the writers I examine tested sex expression as the means to argue for women’s social ascension and equality. Even the most mainstream writers did not accept heterosexual norms without glossing them or trying to change them for their own purposes. I focus on those writers who invested hope in the emancipatory dimensions of sexuality for a mainstream audience, some of whom are quite familiar, like Edith Wharton, others almost forgotten but once admired, like Fannie Hurst. In many ways, I follow through on the hope that sexuality could be imagined as an equalizing, democratic force, taking my lead from such activists as Jane Addams, Mary Austin, and even Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who dourly predicated that sex was just a bribe to keep women from transforming the status quo.

More recently, my work has been informed by theories of intimacy and analyses of new forms of social suffering, along with recent critical studies of sexuality in U.S. culture like Ann duCille’s The Coupling Convention, Pamela Haag’s Consent, and Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies. Uniting these books, and others, is their interest in the increasing complexity of sexuality in modern American culture. According to Mary Odem, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans exhibited deep anxieties about the increased potential for sexual expression outside of marriage—a situation that threatened middle-class Victorian ideals of sexual restraint and marital, reproductive sex (2). Odem’s Delinquent Daughters focuses on efforts to control young single women; Siobhan Somerville’s concerns in Queering the Color Line are lesbian and gay desire and the color line; Sharon Ullman’s Sex Seen features the intersecting language of court documents juxtaposed with film and vaudeville (3); Nina Miller’s Making Love Modern studies the bohemian literati of the 1920s; David Shumway’s Modern Love details the creation of intimacy as the dominant form of romance in the twentieth century; and Susan Koshy’s Sexual Naturalization analyzes interracial sex. All of these important arguments suggest the cultural complications around sexuality itself and its significations, which result in changes to the meaning of It with each expression.

WHY SEX EXPRESSION?

In 1926, V. F. Calverton’s Sex Expression in Literature helped to codify for modern Americans what sexual freedom in literature might be. Like other modernists, Calverton trusted that the greater liberation of sex discourse would lead to an even greater freedom in American culture. Calverton also thought of sex expression as sex-imagination or sex-magnetism, terms signifying the new ideas about sexuality as a fantasy of personal empowerment. A host of similar studies followed, including Calverton and Samuel Schmalhausen’s Sex in Civilization (1929) and Floyd Dell’s much-debated Love in the Machine Age (1930), to which I turn in chapter 6. Following a sociological line, Calverton claimed that a greater sex expression would democratize the language of sexuality, opening it up to the repressed middle class and liberating sexual gratification from its reproductive ends. Once language was freed from its bourgeois restrictions, Calverton ascertained, sexual activity would follow: The greatest cultural degradation and decline have been accompanied by increased sex repression and purity (Sex Expression xxii). For him, sex expression countered the sex repression that the bourgeoisie had wrought. Class rivalry, he contended, produced an equally intense literary rivalry between free flowing sex expression and more restrictive bourgeois art (55, 58). Calverton reaches these conclusions by way of an overview of the literary history of sexuality—both English and American—and a history of bourgeois culture. In Calverton’s view, a regenerated art and literature should instruct the masses in how to behave sexually and how to rebel against bourgeois constraints. Insofar as literature reflects either the bourgeois restrictions on sex or the liberation of sex from repression (58), he argues that sex expression registers the cultural freedom of both writers and readers (92, 126). Ultimately, for Calverton there was something even more emancipating in sex expression than sex itself: a liberation of the masses.

From the tropes of sex expression in 1860 through the novels by popular women writers of the first four decades of the twentieth century, I analyze the rhetorical figures enabling such writers to explore the representation of sexuality. In doing so, I trace how they move from self-expression as a cultural idea to sex expression as a personal ideal. Such values for sexual consent also validate the individual. Yet when we come to questions of consent, as Pamela Haag argues, sex is no longer simply a private issue. In reform work of the 1870s to the 1930s, Haag writes, America celebrated the image of the sexually autonomous and desirous female. If a woman needed money, however, she could not truly consent, for sexual consent, Haag posits, is a "class-specific luxury" afforded only to those women who were beyond need or wages (Consent 45; Haag’s emphasis).

Could women ever get beyond need or wages to a sexual equality of expression? Once women writers invoked sexuality as a pleasure, they also questioned when women consented to pleasure and when sexuality was coerced. In short, what would it mean to be considered a consenting adult? Did consent depend on context—like identity categories? How, for example, could marginalized racial or ethnic groups, like Jews, be considered consenting adults when they were often not yet recognized as citizens? Indeed, for some cultural observers such as sociologist E. A. Ross, Jews inherited sexuality as a racial characteristic and could never truly be liberal American individuals, free to create sexual selves—perhaps the central challenge of Anzia Yezierska’s oeuvre. Could African American women consent to sex? Did lesbianism count as consent? In African American literature, women writers attempted to create an authentic language of sexual experience transcending race and class, ethnicity and age. According to Ann duCille, Hazel Carby, and Nancy Bentley, slavery’s legacy made writing about sexuality an anxious topic since questions of consent were problematic or remote. Much of this sex expression was coded and deflected, and by the time references to lesbianism did appear in mainstream fiction—for example, in Gale Wilhelm’s 1935 We Too Are Drifting, Fannie Hurst’s 1942 Lonely Parade, or Mary McCarthy’s 1963 The Group—the ideal of authenticity in sex expression was exhausted and replaced with a new quantification of sexuality. The new sexual expression was normalized through the therapeutic management of intimacy. With this new therapeutic goal, how were American women writers to define—and possibly defend—sexual autonomy? How much could American society regulate the norms of sexuality for its female sexual citizens? Who even counted as a sexual citizen?

In creating a new lexicon for sex expression, women writers confronted economic and market discourses that kept the language of contract distinct from sexual consent and the transcendence of real love (see Haag, ‘Real Thing’ 554). Love—as transcendence, as It, as the real thing, or as sexual magnetism—replaced earlier assumptions about intimacy as doing harm or leaving scars, the physical as well as psychological marks of passionate expression. What was once on the body or in the blood became instead an interior state characterized by a refusal of material or somatic conditions. Real love was imagined as a condition of transcendence of blood inheritance, not a situation emerging from bodily circumstances or social conditions like desire or need.

Whether performed on the streets or configured in marriage, prostitution symbolized women’s failure to achieve this sexual equality. As Amy Dru Stanley argues in From Bondage to Contract, Sex represented the human essence whose sale as a market commodity transformed its owners from free persons into slaves (263). Neither marriage nor wage work guaranteed women’s freedom from this transformation since men in power lowered women’s wages to maintain their control. Selling sex on the market did not guarantee women much greater freedom since men (and women) of the middle and upper classes denounced and legislated against such sexual market exchanges. Selling sex seemed to be as much about slavery as it was about power, given that prostitution was a symbol of both slavery and a free market society. How could one sell oneself and still be free? Sex, in this formulation, was the essence of one’s self-ownership. Prostitution—the literal exchange of intercourse for money—did not afford women much power, but the symbolic value of sexuality did have its own rhetorical weight. If the only option most women had on the marriage market was to wait for the most eligible bachelor, how could women extend that market power into marriage itself? Only when women could use sex as a symbolic power—rather than as a commodity to be sold or as an identity to be cultivated for emotional capital or influence—could women writers imagine sex power as a liberating social possibility.

The following chapters trace the shifting articulations about female sexuality and their spiraling effects. Rather than taking a linear path, this history tends to double back on itself or blend together tropes, thereby yielding nuances of development; period norms are often fused together, competing for dominance, instead of straightforwardly leading from one to the next. I begin with the mid-nineteenth-century transition from the ideal of sexual purity to the goal of sexual pleasure, which is not to say that at any point in time an ideal of sexual purity was out of place or the goal of finding sexual pleasure had not yet been conceived. These tentative explorations of pleasure proliferated in the literature of sex power, even as other stories about changes in sexual norms appeared: while some women argued for the class expansion of sex expression, other women focused on age as sexuality’s most crucial liberation. As much as I have wished to adhere to a literary historical progression, these fictions about sex expression moved in sometimes conflicting, sometimes circular directions; stories about sex expression often occurred at the same time, in layers and palimpsests. Even in the career of one American writer, Fannie Hurst, overlapping concerns complicated the range of possible sex expressions and the fears that emerged as part of her fictions about therapeutic sexuality.

Chapter 1 explores the origins of sex expression in women’s writing, although male writers, too, alternately profited and suffered from sex expression. Much of the fiction by writers such as Gertrude Atherton, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather was generated to help women assess new sexual norms. Because of their relation to the emotional labor of sentiment and sympathy, such writers had a head start on creating the fictions of sexuality, especially those exploring who was allowed to have sex or what sort of sex it was. Their major questions led me to generate three categorical questions: Who spoke about sexuality in these decades? How did women writers create a new sexual rhetoric? And why did sex expression become the focus of women writers’ literary expertise?

First, who spoke about sexuality in these decades? We know that, by the 1920s, new sexual discourses were debated everywhere, by eugenicists, social scientists, and psychologists, as well as by cultural critics and philosophers. As Christine Stansell writes in American Moderns, sex talk went public (275). New terms and studies defined sex power and its various manifestations. More important, as Hurst dramatizes in Back Street (1931), sex style was a new power: When [Ray Schmidt] so much as walked past the Stag Hotel, skirts held up off the sidewalk with that ineffable turn of wrist which again denoted ‘style,’ there was that in her demeanor which caused each male head and eye to turn (7). For Hurst and a host of American women writers before her, style expressed both physical and material desires. American women developed and performed sexual style—in contrast to character and personality—as a series of gestures, codes, even clothing. American women novelists created a corresponding literary style to convey these new sexual gestures and purposes, a commensurate way to get readers’ heads to turn—such as the idea of pleasuring that appears in Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)—to their unspoken desires. The changes in sexual style required adjustments in the class status of sexuality, from the realm of the working class to the domain of middle-class women, so these writers also had to distinguish sexual rhetoric from talk of prostitution, fallen women, and bad or fly girls.

Second, how did American women writers go beyond thematizing issues of sexuality and invent a literary tradition—and a style—of their own? How did they develop a literary style equal to the new sexual styles of their heroines and their readers? Would there be a new genre of sexual melodrama and female