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Fictions of representation: narrative and the politics of self-making in the interwar American novel

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Fictions of representation: narrative and the politics of self-making in the interwar American novel

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FICTIONS OF REPRESENTATION:
NARRATIVE AND THE POLITICS OF SELF-MAKING IN THE INTERWAR
AMERICAN NOVEL

by

Andrew Mark Hakim

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Andrew Mark Hakim

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 “I Thought This was Americy”:
Immigration, Americanization, and the Nineteenth Amendment in My Ántonia 29

Chapter 2 “Like Driving with Your Brakes On”:
Dangerous Drivers, the Melting Pot, and Representations of Americanness
in The Great Gatsby and What Makes Sammy Run? 70

Chapter 3 “Anything Might Happen”:
Race, Representation, and Refusal in Passing and Intruder in the Dust 128

Chapter 4 “The Theory of Historical Costs”:
Culture, Progress, and the (Mis)Representation of the Past in All the King’s
Men and The Professor’s House 170

Bibliography 220

iii
Abstract

Fictions of Representation examines the ways literary, political, and social
processes of representation operated in constructing a specific national history of being,
subjectivity, and citizenship in the interwar era United States. I draw a parallel between a
shifting national story of representation during this time period and the proliferation of
novels where the story of a central figure pursuing the American dream is related through
the eyes of another character – a character who seemingly stands for the protagonist and
represents his or her tale to readers. Exploring the complex narrative strategies employed
by novels such F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia, I link literary technique and political representation to highlight the
tension between having the right to be autonomous and free, yet at the same time having
one’s interests represented by another. Connecting narrative structure and interwar era
concerns over representation and American character and identity, I uncover a growing
distrust toward and crisis in confidence in both representative democracy and
representations of “Americanness.” More specifically, I theorize that the increased
appearance of novels such as Gatsby, Passing, and My Ántonia in the years between the
wars reflects national apprehension about changes in the shape and scope of political
representation in the U.S., and is in direct proportion to a concomitant increase in
anxieties over what it meant to be “American” as the nation grappled with acute
dislocation fostered by immigration, industrialization, woman’s suffrage, race and labor
strife, political radicalism, and global war. Through a critical remapping of work by
Fitzgerald, Larsen, Cather, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and Budd Schulberg,
I consider the troubled ethical implications of a democracy that supposedly cares for
iv
those who are ruled, yet frequently denies its citizens full equality and meaningful voice.
Although the writers in my study were not, for the most part, radical in their politics, I
suggest that their texts, when placed in context with each other and with their era,
elucidate how the act of relying on one person to represent someone else, whether in
literature or in politics, can create a comfort with the act of appropriation that leads to
cultural dominance.

1
Introduction

He had come a long way to the blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so
close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already
behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the
dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream”
to describe the ostensible promise of America: a “dream of a land in which life should be
better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his
ability or achievement” (374). This was not “a dream of motor cars and high wages
merely,” according to Adams, but one where “each man and each woman shall be able to
attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by
others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”
(374). Although Adams was writing in 1931, his conception of the American dream
drew upon the long prevalent American myth of success, the rags-to-riches story
Benjamin Franklin impressed upon the national consciousness in the late eighteenth
century when he linked his own life to the country’s history in his memoirs. Yet self-
making and the American dream – as well as American traditions of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness – are heavily invested with a fictional ideology. Representing them
as truths required and continues to require an imaginative act on an enormous national
scale, an imaginative act rooted in myths of the United States as a “created” country, a
virgin land lying fallow and waiting to be shaped by the imagination of its European
settlers, where anyone could raise him or herself above their origins.
2
The concepts of representation and citizenship, which are widely perceived as
facilitating equality, also enable a culture and politics where being American means not
only sublimating one’s identity to a specific cultural standard, but having someone else
speak for one as well, having someone else represent and mediate one’s voice. As far
back as the founding fathers and the within Constitution itself, we find a profound tension
between liberalism and regulation, between a supposed tolerance of diversity and an
impulse toward conformity. By the early twentieth century when Adams wrote, moves
such as the Seventeenth (1913) and Nineteenth (1920) Amendments – which gave direct
election of senators to the people for the first time and granted women the right to vote,
respectively – had been made to alleviate this tension and ensure that the American
people had a say in shaping the nation and themselves. Nevertheless we see growing
distrust toward both representative democracy and the viability of the American dream
during this same era, as the nation grappled with acute dislocation fostered by
immigration, industrialization, changing gender roles, race and labor strife, political
radicalism, and global war. Distrust to the point of crisis: a crisis of confidence in
authority, representation, and representations of Americanness and the American dream
of remaking oneself. The epigraph above from the close of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby (1925) underscores this crisis. Six years prior to Adams’s coining “the
American dream,” Fitzgerald is paradoxically characterizing this same dream as already
behind both Gatsby and the nation itself, as somewhere back in a “vast obscurity” where
the “dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.” Fitzgerald’s America is one
haunted by an already vanished American dream, a nation frustrated by the falsity of its
own ideals, and his narrator, Nick Carraway’s, representation of Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of
3
this dream offers readers crucial insights into the fictions inherent to the U.S.’s system of
political representation and myth of self-creation.
My project examines the ways Fitzgerald and other American writers explored the
concept of self-making through a literary form that both emulated and challenged the
United States’ system of political representation during the years roughly spanning the
world wars. At the same time that literary characters such as Tom Buchanan in The
Great Gatsby were proclaiming that “Civilization’s going to pieces” (7) and politicians
such as Woodrow Wilson were discussing the need “to maintain the dominance of
‘white’ civilization” (Leuchtenburg 25), we see the proliferation of novels where the
story of a central character
1
pursuing the American dream is related to readers through
the specific, limited vision of another character, a character who seemingly stands for the
protagonist and represents his or her tales to readers. I draw a parallel between novels
such as Gatsby, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918)
and the politics of representation in the United States to emphasize the tension between
having the right to be autonomous and free, yet at the same time having one’s interests
represented by another. The increased appearance of novels using this narrative
technique during the interwar years has not heretofore been much noticed, yet I contend
that a crucial connection exists between these texts and American culture at this time. I
theorize that the proliferation of novels such as Gatsby in the years between the wars
reflects national apprehension over changes in the shape and scope of political

1
Although I describe characters such as Gatsby as “central,” I am aware that each of the texts in my study
can be read as finally being as much about the characters observing and representing the protagonists –
Nick Carraway, etc. – as the protagonists themselves.

4
representation in the U.S., and is in direct proportion to a concomitant increase in
national anxieties about what it meant to be American during these same years, issues
deeply concerned with voice and representation – from woman’s suffrage to pushes for
greater racial and class equality to widespread concerns over immigration and the
xenophobia spawned by the world wars. Through a critical remapping of The Great
Gatsby, Passing, My Ántonia, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946), William
Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), and Budd
Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), I explore the troubled ethical implications
of a democracy that purportedly cares for those who are ruled, yet frequently denies its
citizens full equality and meaningful voice.
Criticism of early twentieth century American literature has a tendency to pigeon-
hole writers and texts into specific movements: the Modernist movement of the 1920s,
for instance; or the Harlem Renaissance of the same era; or the “Leftist” or proletarian
writers of the Depression.
2
In contrast to such criticism, my study of the politics of
narration and fictions of representation in American novels runs from Cather’s
exploration of representation, the American dream, and the contested meaning of
Americanness in My Ántonia, to Faulkner’s and Warren’s inquiries into these same issues
in the years immediately subsequent to World War II. Taking my cue from historians
and critics such as Alfred Kelly and Gary Gerstle, I examine the ways World War I, the
xenophobic pushes for “normalcy” during the boom of the 1920s, the continued “Nordic

2
Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America (1995) is a striking take on Modernism. Nathan Huggins’s Harlem
Renaissance (1971), among others, offer strong readings of the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Douglas’s
Terrible Honesty (1995) and Houston Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) are
compelling studies that explore the artists of both of these “movements” in conjunction. For the proletarian
writers of the 1930s, see in particular Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front (1997).

5
Americanization” of the 1930s and the Depression, and the U.S.’s build up to and
participation in the Second World War kept the nation in a near-continuous state of
hypertension between 1918 and 1948.
3
Sketching the contours of the crisis of confidence
in authority, representation, and representations of the American dream and
Americanness during this period demands a focus on a range of writers and works that do
not fit neatly within the parameters of any particular movement. The recent critical
reappraisal of Cather as a Modernist as opposed to a Realist enables a loose grouping of
her, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner within Modernism. But Larsen is linked to the Harlem
Renaissance, and Schulberg, when he appears in critical discussions at all, is most often
dubbed a “Hollywood” novelist. Warren is perhaps the most difficult of the writers in my
study to locate, as various commentators have read him as a New Critic, Southern writer,
modernist, or postmodernist. Novels such as Gatsby, Passing, My Ántonia, and All the
King’s Men, however, not only share a narrative strategy, but also, when placed in
context with each other and their era, illuminate a sustained critique of a specific
American national history of being, subjectivity, and citizenship. Although many of the
writers I examine were not exactly radical in their politics, I contend that the most
persuasive way of reading the novels composing this study is as subversive, as texts
offering readers alternative, critical visions of American democratic practice.

3
Kelly, for instance, argues that “the first World War’s enlarging of executive powers did much to
accustom the American people to an enlarged conception of federal authority; and thus when the great
economic crisis of the 1930s beset the nation, the country more readily accepted legislation that delegated
various measures of legislative authority to the president and that invaded the traditional sphere of state
authority. Still later, the president’s power to erect emergency offices, commissions, and bureaus based
upon his constitutional authority as commander in chief was again prominently exercised in World War II”
(453). “Nordic Americanization” is Gerstle’s phrase.

6
In drawing a parallel between the narrative form of novels such as Gatsby and
Passing and the politics of representation in the United States, I am making a
comparison, not setting down an equation. To connect narrative structure and interwar
era concerns over representation and Americanness is to unearth complex links between
political representation, cultural myths such as the American dream, and the ways
literature and art speak to and interrogate social phenomena. Christopher Looby has
argued that from its beginning, the American republic has “had to resort to schemes of
representation – to designated voices representing other voices, legislative representatives
speaking for their constituents” (171-72). “What is such speaking-for,” Looby asks, “but
a kind of ventriloquism?” (171-72). Put another way, representation is a reflection of an
original person or voice, a distortion. Ventriloquism, reflection, distortion – such
incomplete and unsatisfactory representational modes fueled the crisis of confidence in
representation and authority in interwar era America as women, immigrants, and
minorities fought to change their positions and attain equality – to remake themselves –
but frequently met with legislation which curtailed this equality.
Novels of this era that trade upon the trope of representation by relating one
person’s story through another character must have a reason for both distancing readers
from the ostensible main characters and investing the characters that represent them with
textual authority. It would be both facile and disingenuous, however, to suggest that
Fitzgerald, for example, sat down to work on The Great Gatsby with the intention of
critiquing political representation in the United States. Instead of relying on too-easy
readings of authorial intention, I view Fitzgerald, Larsen, Cather, et al. as ideologically
complicated and often conflicted writers whose work is both consciously and
7
unconsciously permeated by the major issues and concerns of their time. To this end, my
argument builds on Fredric Jameson’s notion that there is a “political unconscious” at
work in texts, that formal novelistic processes contain and act as “sedimented content”
and convey “ideological messages” to readers, messages often “distinct from the
ostensible or manifest content” of the text (98-99). According to Jameson, “the
production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own
right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable
social contradictions” (79). Novels such as Gatsby, Passing, and My Ántonia, in
representing the stories of their protagonists’ failed pursuits of the American dream at a
time when the very idea of who and what Americans were was in flux, demonstrate just
how flawed were the “solutions” politicians and cultural critics offered to the U.S.’s
“unresolvable social contradictions.”
Fictions of Representation examines the boundaries of specifically American
culture and identity during the interwar era, especially as they are informed by concepts
such as representation, democracy, and the American dream. What, for example, are the
politics involved in telling another person’s story? How, novels such as My Ántonia ask,
can either a nation or an individual adequately speak for their people? How do novels
such as Passing that are filtered through limited, third-person consciousnesses – or what
Dorrit Cohn has dubbed “narrated monologues” (100) – convey a similarly problematic
vision of representation as first person narratives? How do the texts in this study reflect
the “classical dilemma” political theorist Hanna Pitkin sees surrounding representation:
namely, whether representatives pursue the interests of their constituents or the interests
of the nation as a whole (215)? Even more pointedly, what do such narratives tell readers
8
about both fiction and representation – or what might be termed the “fictions of
representation” – in a country where women, immigrants, minorities, and the lower class
have been regularly excluded from the polity? And how does the novel form itself, a
purportedly dialogic space of freedom and democracy that is ultimately constrained
within a sequence of pages and a set of covers, speak to the tensions of representative
democracy?
Both formally and culturally, novels such as Gatsby and Passing unsettle our
perceptions of representation and storytelling. Paul Armstrong’s recasting of
estrangement in terms of “bewilderment” is particularly helpful here. Armstrong argues
that “defamiliarization is not [merely] a distinguishing feature of art; it is a recurrent
aspect of life,” whose function is to “call into question the bond of sign to thing which
our interpretations claim to establish” (4). Focusing on the fin-de-siècle formal
experimentation of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford – the former
two of which were major influences on several of the novelists herein
4
– Armstrong
contends that
the experience of bewilderment has not a negative but a positive value because
it can call into question our confidence in the “roads” that make up “reality.” It
reveals that the “real” is not simply there for judgment to uncover but is, rather,
a collection of constructs – avenues we find laid out for us by social conventions
for meaning-creation, or paths we chart for ourselves by projecting interpretations
based on personal assumptions and expectations. (2-3)

The bewilderment generated by the novels I examine in this study comes from the
representation of one character’s pursuit of a dubious American dream through the eyes
of another. Instead of presenting Gatsby’s story through Gatsby’s eyes, Fitzgerald

4
Cather and Fitzgerald in particular discussed the influence James and Conrad had on their work.

9
represents it to readers through Nick Carraway, a character who is both fascinated by
Gatsby’s Platonic self-conception and disturbed by the transgressions against the nation’s
social and political order such self-making entails. A similar pattern emerges in each of
the novels herein. By employing highly subjective points of view through which to tell
their main characters’ tales, writers such as Fitzgerald, Larsen, and Cather trouble the
“reality” of representing events through a limited consciousness.
Troubling the viability of one person representing another in a literary context is
itself a manner of representing and disturbing a political system where everyone is
represented by someone else. In texts such as The Great Gatsby, Passing, and My
Ántonia, then, representing one character’s story through another character becomes a
way of confronting the nation’s system of representative government, of defamiliarizing
it. Pitkin has noted that “representation means, as the word’s etymological origins
indicate, re-presentation, a making present again” (9). Ultimately, the power of the
literary works I consider derives from the complex narrative strategies writers such as
Fitzgerald, Larsen, and Cather use to demonstrate that all representation is, in the end, re-
presentation, an act of re-envisioning and re-interpretation. The novels in this study force
readers to grapple with the disjunction between the cultural and political realities of the
United States and the promises of freedom and self-making. More specifically, I suggest
that the texts herein elucidate how the act of relying on one person to speak for someone
else, whether in literature or in politics, can create a comfort with the act of appropriation
that leads to cultural dominance. In this way, the practice of literary art becomes a way
of engaging the U.S.’s cultural and political systems, rather than simply the escape from
history or politics it has been so often taken to be.
10
The term “representation” is itself somewhat elastic. In both literature and
politics, it has been frequently tied to mimesis and the endeavor to present people,
objects, and the world in as realistic a fashion possible. Raymond Williams tells us that
after “represent” appeared in English in the fourteenth century, it “quickly acquired a
range of senses of making present: in the physical sense of presenting oneself for
another, often to some person of authority; but also in the sense of making present in the
mind …” (222-23). The dualism Williams points out is essential to recognize. In the
first sense, political and literary representations both involve a form of “standing for,” of
someone or something standing for someone or something else. This version of
representation is central to not only the way the U.S.’s governmental system functions (or
is supposed to function) with elected representatives speaking for their constituents, but
also to novels such as Gatsby or Passing, where one character’s tale is represented
through another, a character who seemingly stands for the central character by relating
his or her story to readers. At the same time, as Williams points out, representation also
involves making someone or something present in the mind. Put another way,
representation is in many senses an imaginative act, a form of “make-believe.”
According to philosopher Kendall Walton, “What all representations have in common is
a role in make-believe” (4). “To represent a thing is not just to pick it out somehow,”
Walton contends, “but to make some proposition about it fictional, and to do that is to
represent it as something, as being such that that proposition is true” (107).
In a representative republic like the United States, political representation is at its
core a fiction, a form of make-believe. Historian Edmund Morgan argues that
“Government requires make-believe,” make-believe of the sort that enables us to believe
11
that “the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are
the people” (13). Such fictions are, of course, both useful and necessary, yet they also
point to the fundamental paradox of American citizenship wherein Americans are granted
freedom and voice but at the same time cede that voice to a representative they believe
will serve their interests. Mark Patterson describes how
A representation actually creates a fictional territory, a metaphoric space, in
which the inherent contradictions of the process are suspended. In this sense,
senators and novels cohabit the territory of fiction, constructed, as it is, out of
perceptions of identity and difference. (xxii)

Within this construction of representation, Nick Carraway becomes Gatsby’s ostensible
advocate, offering a narrative that stands in for Gatsby’s own. At the same time,
however, Gatsby’s pursuit of the American dream and Americanness is re-presented
within the fictional territory of Nick’s narrative and Nick’s vision. The problem is that
representation, as Pitkin writes, “means the making present in some sense of something
which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact” (8-9). “Now, to say that something
is simultaneously both present and not present is to utter a paradox, and thus a
fundamental dualism is built into the meaning of representation” (Pitkin 8-9). I contend
that this dualism feeds into the bewilderment generated by novels such as Gatsby and
Passing. Placed in the context of my argument, Gatsby is only present in Nick’s
narrative insofar as Nick re-presents him and makes him seem present; The Great Gatsby
is Gatsby’s story only insofar as Nick realizes it for readers. And the story Nick realizes
is a disruptive and potentially dangerous tale that, while intriguing, must finally be
suppressed within the boundaries of the larger national narrative which is itself a (hi)story
that denies outsiders agency and relegates them to the (fictional and literal) margins of
12
American society. The underlying fiction that novels such as Gatsby, Passing, et al.
expose is thus that in both politics and literature, representation is a method we use to tell
ourselves stories and perpetuate myths about freedom, equality, and democracy.
The national story of representation underwent significant changes in the early
twentieth century, as the passage of a sequence of legislation fundamentally altered
political representation in the United States. The ratification of the Seventeenth and
Nineteenth Amendments challenged previous conceptions of who was a citizen and who
was not, of who was “in” and who was “out,” and, perhaps above all else, who was
“American.” On April 8, 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution was ratified, transferring the election of senators from the state legislatures
directly to the people. This was a major shift, since previously only the House of
Representatives was elected by the general populace. The Senate, James Madison wrote
in the sixty-third number of the Federalist, “may be sometimes necessary, as a defense to
the people against their own temporary errors and delusions” (273), and was initially
intended as a governing body that could act as a far-sighted check on the more of-the-
moment popular will embodied by the directly elected representatives in the House.
Madison believed the Senate would provide “the cool and deliberate sense” necessary to
balance out those “particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by
some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful
misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will
afterward be the most ready to lament and condemn” (270). Nearly a century and a half
after the ratification of the Constitution, though, the nation’s swift and continuing
expansion, as well as industrialization, modernization, and changing demographics
13
created a pervasive sense that democracy has been removed from the hands of the people.
The Seventeenth Amendment was intended as an antidote to this feeling, and was seen as
necessary to restore control to the ordinary citizen. Yet after decades of massive
immigration, it also served to stir up fears of mob rule.
The Nineteenth Amendment, which was ratified on August 18, 1920, gave women
the right to vote, seemed to signal a similarly sizable shift, and it too created a sense of
destabilization. Yet the amendment’s early influence was not nearly “the reconstitution
of society that supporters of suffrage had prophesied nor the disintegration that its
enemies has predicted” (Minter 75). Indeed, although winning the right to vote was
undoubtedly a major gain for American women, it hardly freed them from the restrictive
gender roles long in place in U.S. society. The ensuing conflicts over space and place –
among women and men, and women and women – would be symptomatic of nationwide
conflicts over American identity and Americanness as the country’s crisis in confidence
intensified during the interwar years.
While the United States had long been a pluralistic country in its composition,
during the early twentieth century and especially following World War I its many plural
groups had begun to emerge more clearly and vociferously than ever before upon the
national stage. Growing national concerns with Americanness and American
“character”
5
had been building since the late nineteenth century as waves of immigrants
arrived and urban centers rapidly expanded. Once the U.S. entered World War I in 1917,

5
Philip Gleason had noted that, prior to World War II, the expression “American identity” was not
common, and that in the first half of the twentieth century people generally “spoke of American nationality
or American character” (154).

14
pushes for national solidarity and conformity increased. The seeming failure of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century Progressive ideology in the wake of the war
accentuated this anxiety, and the xenophobic tendencies that had long percolated just
beneath both the melting pot metaphor and the Americanization movement rose to the
surface, reaching a fever pitch as the nation sought a return to “normalcy” in the 1920s.
The beginning of the Great Migration in 1916, which saw over a million southern African
Americans move north as part of northern industry’s subsidizing of the war in Europe,
only heightened these concerns, especially when soldiers returned home after the war – as
evinced by the numerous race riots that erupted across the United States in 1919 (Klein
14). In response to these changes, coercive efforts at Americanization were used to deny
divisions in the country.
6
Backlash against this “rising tide” of plurality was nurtured
beneath the cloak of “100% Americanism” initiatives, as the nation granted women and
minorities voice, then regulated the terms through which those voices could be heard.
Beneath the auspices of widespread educational, Americanization, and citizenship
programs at work between the world wars, American character was in many ways
portrayed as a fixed category. The First World War, as historian Burl Noggle explains,
“turned this impetus for Americanization into a national crusade,” and despite the war’s
end, by 1919 a series of policies had been set into motion restricting immigration,
exacting loyalty oaths, censoring textbooks, and establishing an “American plan” for

6
Henry Ford offers an extreme, yet telling, insight into the national mindset of the era. A proponent of the
melting pot before the war, he authorized spying on his foreign-born workers once the U.S. entered the
conflict. Afterwards, he became an outright xenophobe and anti-Semite who blamed Jewish bankers and
the “House of Rothschild” for the war and subsequent travesty of Versailles. Beginning on May 22, 1920,
his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, began publishing its notorious series of ninety-one articles on
“The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”

15
labor unions, all under the guise of fostering “100% Americanism” (115-17). Instead of
celebrating its diversity, the United States became obsessed with a surging enthusiasm for
conformity as it embarked upon a decade long search for “normalcy” and stability.
This turn toward Americanization, 100% Americanism, and greater conformity in
terms delineating American identity and character coincided historically with the
ascendancy of eugenic race sciences in the United States, which had gained a foothold in
the country in the late nineteenth century. By World War I organizations such as
Madison Grant and Charles Davenport’s Galton Society emerged, which proclaimed its
mission as “to foster research, promote eugenics, and restrict immigration” (Brodkin 29).
Amidst the continuing clamor for 100% Americanism and national conformity, lawyer
and writer Lothrop Stoddard warned in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-
Supremacy (1920) that “Unless man erects and maintains artificial barriers the various
races will increasingly mingle, and the inevitable result will be the supplanting or
absorption of the higher by the lower types” (528). Davenport, who directed the
Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, took a similar line in The
Effects of Race Intermingling (1917), assailing the increasing “hybridization” of the
nation’s populace and arguing that “A hybridized people are a badly put together people
and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people” (83). Such hybridization – or
“mongrelization,” as it was often termed – had potentially deadly results in the eyes of
Davenport, Stoddard, and their peers. Mongrelization, Stoddard cautioned, led to
detrimental national and “racial” results:
A little while ago we were taught that all men were equal and that good
conditions could, of themselves, quickly perfect mankind. The seductive
charm of these dangerous fallacies lingers and makes us loath to put them
16
resolutely aside.
Fortunately, we now know the truth. At last we have been vouchsafed
clear insight into the laws of life. We know that men are not, and never will
be, equal. We know that environment and education can develop only what
heredity brings. (530)

Stoddard’s comments here stand in stark contrast to changes in the nation’s
representational system that were supposed to make people more equal. At the same time
that the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments were giving Americans greater say in
the representational process, Stoddard, Grant, and other influential eugenicists were
emphasizing the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon heredity of the “American race.” The nation’s
best “hope,” according to Davenport, was that
if immigration is restricted, if selective elimination is permitted, if the principle of
the inequality of generating strains be accepted and if eugenical ideals prevail in
mating, then strains with new and better combinations of traits may arise and our
nation take front rank in culture among the nations of ancient and modern times.
(84)

Several leading politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, followed suit. In 1919, for
instance, “Lodge proclaimed the [initial] striking of race from the census bill a ‘great
mistake.’ Lodge, by then a Massachusetts senator, allowed that Europeans did not differ
as to ‘scientific race’ but held that they were nonetheless ‘historically racial’” (Roediger
17). The work of politicians such as Lodge and eugenicists such as Stoddard eventually
led to the passage of a sequence of immigration restrictions in the 1920s that effectively
curtailed the previous large-scale immigration of non-Anglo and non-Nordic Europeans
to the U.S.
7

7
Guy Reynolds notes how the rate of European immigration slowed down in the post-World War I period:
“from 3 687 564 (1891-1900), to 8 795 386 (1901-10) and 5 735 811 (1911-20), the huge influxes of
migrants had now passed their peak” (75).

17
Although many contemporary critics write as though these issues slipped from the
national psyche with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, in particular, Gary
Gerstle has persuasively demonstrated that the “racialized tradition remained an
important strain in 1930s politics and culture, its influence extending well beyond the
ranks of southern opponents to the New Deal …” (161). In the 1930s, Gerstle argues,
the allure of Nordic Americanization (or what some scholars have called ‘Anglo-
conformity’) was difficult to escape or resist. … it was deeply ingrained in the
movies and other aspects of mass culture from which millions of Americans took
their cues about how to dress, act, and talk American. (170)

This is one of the reasons I do not restrict my study to the First World War or the 1920s.
Where the critical mythology of race in early twentieth century American literature often
sketches the passage of the immigrations restrictions of the 20s as a closing point, I want
to push through World War II to explore why novels of the 1930s and 1940s such as
What Makes Sammy Run? and All the King’s Men remain preoccupied with
representation, the American dream, and the American “race.” The Depression and
World War II, in fact perpetuated a national environment where the nation’s entrance into
World War I had, as David Minter has noted, marked the beginning of “an era in which
the American dream remained an enabling myth and one in which it was becoming a
cultural lie” (116). Against this cultural and political backdrop, it would be easy to
assume that the idea of the American dream would become tenuous, especially once the
nation entered the Depression.
Yet as the novels in this study demonstrate, despite the increasing tenuousness of
the American dream, it remained in many ways a cultural focal point during the interwar
era. From 1918 to 1948, at a time when the country was questioning its identity, and a
18
redefinition of the meaning of “American” was called for in order to assuage anxieties
over race and labor strife, woman’s suffrage, and the continued displacement of Native
Americans, we see dark James Gatz with “gonnegtions” to Jewish gangsters using capital
funneled out of Prohibition drug stores to establish himself among the social elite on
Long Island, while the man who represents his story to readers, Nick Carraway, trades on
Wall Street and laments the vanished “fresh, green breast” of America’s promise. In the
wake of the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s influx into the World War I workforce
(and subsequent retreat back into the home), we see Bohemian immigrant Ántonia
Shimerda struggle to both assimilate and free herself from prescribed gender roles, while
Jim Burden nostalgically ruminates on and re-presents her story at the same time that he
works as a lawyer for the railroad industry and furthers the modernization of America. In
a country undergoing the changes occasioned by the Great Migration, where African
American culture was becoming a form of cultural capital that whites could exploit, and
where proponents of race sciences such as Stoddard and Grant gained cultural and
political clout, we find not only Irene Redfield’s fascination with the phenomenon of
passing, but also her obsession with demarcating race as she represents Clare Kendry’s
tale in Passing. These novels’ representations of Gatsby’s, Ántonia’s, and Clare’s
pursuits of the American dream through the eyes of Nick, Jim, and Irene thus produce
associations that run counter to the mythic American dream celebrated by Adams and
disseminated by the nation, and become a metaphor for the distortions generated by
representation and storytelling on both the individual and national level.
The narrative form of the novels composing this study emphasizes this distorting
nature of representation and storytelling. Discussing eyewitness narrators such as Nick
19
Carraway, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg describe how such characters “tend to give
way to fictional impulses in their narratives. The impulse to shape, to improve, to present
not what was said or what did happen but what should have been said or ought to have
happened …” (258). We see the same impulse at work in third-person perspectives such
as Irene Redfield, Chick Mallison in Intruder in the Dust, and Professor Godfrey St. Peter
in The Professor’s House. When St. Peter begins his editing of Tom Outland’s diary, for
instance, he thinks, “To mean anything it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and
some account of his later life and achievements” (150). In other words, the Professor,
Nick, and company represent Tom’s and Gatsby’s tales by critiquing and interpreting
them, by re-presenting them in ways that make them mean something. The narratives I
explore herein are thus grounded in a form of representation that is more interpretive than
objective, a form of representation that passes judgment. If these characters shape their
narratives – and it seems clear that they do – then their narrative “attitudes” are critically
relevant to my subsequent study. As readers, we need to consider why they take such an
interest in Jay Gatsby’s and Tom Outland’s quests after Americanness and the American
dream. What so draws them to these outsiders seeking to get “in,” yet is so unsettling
about the stories they represent that they go out of their way to re-present them?
One answer that applies to both characters like Nick and readers is vicariousness.
Kendall Walton argues that the value of make-believe is that it allows us to experience
without a great degree of personal cost. “The divergence between fictionality and truth,”
he writes, “spares us pain and suffering we would have to expect in the real world. We
realize some of the benefits of hard experience without having to undergo it” (68). Jay
Gatsby’s and Clare Kendry’s pursuits of the American dream and Americanness allow
20
readers to vicariously experience transgression against the limits of the U.S.’s social
order, yet not have to pay the same price as Gatsby and Clare. Peter Brooks writes that
It is characteristic of textual energy in narrative that it should always be on the
verge of premature discharge, of short-circuit. The reader experiences the fear –
and excitation – of the improper end, which is symmetrical to – but far more
immediate and present than – the fear of endlessness. (109)

The key phrases here are “improper end” and “short-circuit.” Improper ends of the sort
where rough, self-made Jay Gatsby takes Daisy Buchanan away from her husband, or
where Clare Kendry both marries a wealthy white man and then steals the affection of
Irene Redfield’s husband Brian. (And perhaps on an even more taboo level, as several
critics have hypothesized, Clare steals Irene’s love as well.) Short-circuits insofar as
possible endings that transgress well beyond the lines of acceptable whiteness, wealth,
and power Americanness is predicated upon; but also the short-circuits that occur
between Nick and Gatsby or Irene and Clare, when the improper endings move from
hypothetical possibilities to seemingly all too plausible realities. Lennard Davis, making
use of the psychoanalytic notion projection, asserts that
In projecting unacceptable emotions into characters, we are doing the very thing
we cannot do without damage in real life – we are blurring the distinction between
fact and fiction. The space of novel reading obviously provides a safe place to
allow reality testing to go haywire. (20)

The novels in this study offer such “reality testing” for both the characters representing
the central figures and readers, experiences of vicarious transgression and taboo.
The problem with Nick and company’s representations and the “reality testing”
they offer, though, is that their “solutions” to the fascinating yet disquieting stories of
their protagonists are not really solutions at all, so much as reaffirmations of the nation’s
hegemonic power structure at the central characters’ expense. If we bear in mind Pitkin’s
21
claim that “The representative is, typically, both special pleader and judge, an agent of
his locality as well as a governor of the nation” (218), we see that the characters
representing the main characters’ stories, despite their fascination with Gatsby, Clare, et
al., are finally tied to the nation’s power structure. They are both pleaders of the main
characters’ cause and judges of their foreign (in both racialized and gendered terms)
unconventionality and transgressive behavior. Novels such as Gatsby, Passing, and My
Ántonia, where Fitzgerald, Larsen, and Cather utilize more conventionally “American”
characters to represent the main characters’ tales, thus embody Lanser’s contention that
“it seems always to have been more convenient for a society to speak on behalf of the
Other than to let the Other speak” (Fictions 35) – whether that other is other because of
class and ethnicity/race (such as Gatsby), race (such as Clare), or gender (such as
Ántonia). Yet, as I shall explore more thoroughly in my chapters, a major factor in the
unsettling effect these novels have is that, as Bakhtin tells us,
not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this
seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist,
others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated
them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and
fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of
the speaker. (294)

No matter how ardently Nick, Irene, or Jim Burden endeavor to represent their
protagonists’ tales as Gatsby’s story, or Clare’s, or Ántonia’s, the texts themselves
provide a sense of disjunction between what we must read and what we read between the
lines.
The failed exchanges within these texts, the gaps they open up, illustrate that the
protagonists’ words, voices, and stories do not submit easily to the appropriative
22
representations of Nick, Irene, or Jim. Texts such as The Great Gatsby thereby
exemplify Bakhtin’s notion that “at any given moment of its historical existence,
language is heteroglot from top to bottom,” that every novel is “a dialogized system”
wherein language “not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation,”
and that “[n]ovelistic discourse is always criticizing itself” (291; 49). To this end, my
study examines the subversive, dialogic nature of these novels to explore both how
dominant notions of American identity were (re)constituted and (re)affirmed in the
decades between world wars and what the dialogic voices within these novels have to tell
us about the texts’ seemingly monologic narrative voices. For even as narratives such as
Nick’s seem to preclude the possibility of Gatsby’s story ending any other way, the larger
textual awareness of The Great Gatsby – its political unconscious – points to the fallacy
of representation, and how such endings are only necessary because of a national
determination to define “American” in limited terms – even as myths such as the
American dream and the melting pot persisted to encourage Gatsby, Clare, and others in
their pursuits.
My intention here is not to create a history, to trace a forced evolution of
American novels that serves my own intellectual interests. Nor is this dissertation meant
as an argument for an American exceptionalism that privileges American experience as
unique. At the same time, though, American authors faced and dealt with highly
specified challenges between 1918 and 1948. The novels of Fitzgerald, Larsen, Cather,
et al. do not comprise a movement so much as exhibit the connections between literature
and specific social, cultural, and political concerns at a time when national confidence
was ebbing in authority, representation, and representations of the American dream and
23
Americanness.
8
Susan Stanford Friedman has written that “identity is literally
unthinkable without narrative. People know who they are through the stories they tell
about themselves and others. As ever-changing phenomena, identities are themselves
narratives of formation, sequences moving through space and time as they undergo
development, evolution, and revolution” (8). The years between the United States’
entrance into World War I up to shortly after the close of World War II, then, serve as an
important formative narrative of how not only “mainstream” America reinforced the
parameters of Americanness against a turbulent, changing cultural backdrop, but how
disenfranchised groups such as minorities, women, and the lower class both struggled for
representation and voice.
Before laying out my chapter trajectory, a brief note on my choice of terminology
throughout this project is necessary, especially as I consider representations both in texts
that employ first-person narration and ones that are filtered through limited third-person
perspectives. Technically speaking, Girard Genette’s term “focalization” may be more
accurate than “point of view,” “narration,” or even “representation,” since the stories of
Gatsby, Clare Kendry, and others are indeed “focalized” through the limited vantage
points of first-person narrators such as Nick Carraway in Gatsby or third-person point of
view characters like Irene Redfield in Passing. I am sensitive to the fact that there are
distinctions inherent in different narrative viewpoints. Clearly, a difference does exist

8
Douglas has argued persuasively in this regard: “From the start the nation has had a tangible and unique
mission concocted of unlimited natural resources, theological obsessions, a multiracial and polyglot
population, and unparalleled incentives and opportunities for democratization and pluralism” (3). While
Douglas’s notion of all this as a national “mission” may be a bit forced, the point she makes seems valid in
its demarcating a significant, specific national historical experience with which American writers of the
interwar era struggled.

24
between various first and third person points of view, such as Nick’s first person (“I”)
voice in The Great Gatsby as opposed to Irene’s third person (“she/her”) consciousness
in Passing. But as this study is only in part a formal one, and is as much concerned with
the cultural and political contexts surrounding and shaping the novels it explores – issues
from which narrative theorists too often distance themselves – I opt to avoid overly
technical sounding terms such as “focalizers” or “centers of narrative consciousness.” At
the same time, Wayne Booth’s contention that “any sustained inside view, of whatever
depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator” (164) is not
entirely satisfying, in large part because terming such points of view “narrators”
oversimplifies a complicated narrative technique. Conversely, Dorrit Cohn’s description
of third-person point of view as “narrated monologue,” as “the technique for rendering a
character’s thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the
basic tense of narration” (100), is simply too cumbersome. Genette’s distinction between
“voice” and “vision” presents perhaps the most ready way of grappling with the first
person/third person dichotomy. “Voice” refers to who “speaks” the story: clearly, first
person narrators speak their stories, third person ones do not. “Vision,” on the other
hand, refers to who “sees” the narrative, the consciousness through which the narrative
events are focalized, and is something both first and third person points of view exercise
in their texts. Therefore, I will restrict “voice” to discussions of first person narration, but
employ “vision” in a wider sense. Ultimately, though, I am less concerned with refining
or redefining narratological taxonomies than with exploring the ways these narratives
engage the concept of representation, particularly given their interwar context and the
U.S.’s long history of and preoccupation with representational modes and practices.
25
My first chapter, “‘I Thought This was Americy’: Immigration, Americanization,
and the Nineteenth Amendment in My Ántonia,” traces Jim Burden’s representation of
Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda against a backdrop of historically contentious
debates over citizenship, the changing shape of the nation’s population, and alterations in
the country’s system of representative government. Contextually and formally, Cather’s
novel serves as an excellent launching point for my study. Written amidst the U.S.’s
entrance into World War I and the final push for woman’s suffrage, and set during the
surge of European immigration to the American west in the late nineteenth century, My
Ántonia is structured as a series of embedded stories competing to be heard within Jim’s
larger narrative framework. I argue that Jim’s attempts to represent Ántonia and the
other characters display an ideological struggle between a white American male
determined to offer readers a romanticized vision of the nation and its people, and a
heterogeneous population struggling to both become American and retain its own diverse
cultural heritage. In the end, Jim’s endeavors to transform the stories of his, Ántonia’s,
and their community’s pasts into a singular, cohesive whole comes at the expense of the
multiple stories and voices vying for space within the novel – stories and voices whose
dissonance challenges both Jim’s individual story and the parameters of the national
narrative.
I probe the limitations of two prominent myths featured in this national narrative
in my second chapter, “‘Like Driving with Your Brakes On’: Dangerous Drivers, the
Melting Pot, and Representations of Americanness in The Great Gatsby and What Makes
Sammy Run?.” Specifically, I assess the stories of Jay Gatsby and Sammy Glick in terms
of the ways they attempt to remake themselves and “melt” into a melting pot that
26
compels conformity at a time when an emerging myth of automobility reemphasized
“American” ideals of individuality, liberty, and freedom. Key to my reading of these
texts is a pair of women, Jordan Baker and Kit Sargent, who challenge the moral brakes
of both the narrators and a nation that promulgates mythic melting pots and links
automobility to freedom, yet at the same time delimits who can “melt” and what
constitutes a “good driver.” Exploring the metaphoric system of brakes, morality, and
good and bad “drivers” laid out in Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s novels, I argue that part
of the “greatness” of Gatsby is the way it highlights the disjunction between American
ideals and reality. Schulberg’s novel, by contrast, ultimately co-opts the threatening
voice of its Jewish protagonist, and in the end functions much like the melting pot myth it
critiques.
Problematic myths such as the melting pot were not available to African
Americans during the interwar years. My third chapter, “‘Anything Might Happen’:
Race, Representation, and Refusal in Passing and Intruder in the Dust,” explores the
ways Clare Kendry’s and Lucas Beauchamp’s pursuits of Americanness destabilize
conceptions of racial identity in novels by Larsen and Faulkner. The Supreme Court’s
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision sets the stage upon which these narratives play out,
especially as it sanctioned Jim Crow and the “one drop rule” of racial descent. Viewed in
conjunction with one another, these two novels interrogate a shifting national
understanding of race that moved from biological fact to questioning its roots as a
cultural construct by the close of World War II. I investigate the ways Larsen’s novel
employs the trope of passing to destabilize national delineations of race and

27
Americanness, as well as Faulkner’s somewhat less successful attempt to contest these
same delineations through the eyes of a conflicted white teenager.
My final chapter, “‘The Theory of Historical Costs’: Culture, Progress, and the
(Mis)Representation of the Past in All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House,”
centers on the historical excavations of race and American history performed by Cather’s
The Professor’s House and Warren’s All the King’s Men. I investigate the ways these
novels speak to and open up the early twentieth century’s contentious scholarly debates
between traditional, conservative historians and reform-minded Progressive scholars over
the proper uses of the past. Related through the vision of a pair of historians, these texts
trace Willie Stark’s and Tom Outland’s pursuit of the American dream by linking their
self-creation to a problematic national history premised upon the notion of the United
States as a created country. Through extended, embedded narratives presented as
historical journals, these novels explore the ways the very possibility of the American
dream in the present is predicated upon past injustice – especially when it is yoked to
calls for a spurious American “culture” or static form of “progress.” Critiquing the ways
proponents of both traditional and Progressive historiographic outlooks frequently
overlooked the nation’s record of marginalization, Warren and Cather offer complex
articulations of the past wherein history emerges not as a passive narrative of the past, but
rather as a politically fraught process of interpretation, meaning-making, and re-
presentation.
Embarking on a project of this sort necessitates selecting certain texts to discuss,
while unavoidably discarding other equally viable ones. John Dos Passos’s fictionalized
version of Huey Long’s rise and fall, Number One (1944), for example, presents an
28
interesting parallel to All the King’s Men, and it was tempting to compare the two texts
re-presentation of the former Louisiana governor. In the end, though, Warren’s broader
concerns about historiography and narrative processes formed a more compelling fit with
Cather’s The Professor’s House. Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon
(1941) was another intriguing possibility which might have offered an interesting parallel
to the Hollywood of What Makes Sammy Run?, but Fitzgerald died before completing it.
A particularly difficult choice involved Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937), which was originally conceived as pairing with My Ántonia to form the
dissertation’s final chapter. It quickly became apparent, however, that this pairing
worked better in the abstract than as a concrete, coherent argument. Not only that, but
Cather’s novel emerged as a more fitting starting point for the dissertation as a whole.
Hurston’s text, though, likely is a key piece for pushing the basic premise of the
dissertation further in book form.
Reading against the grain of criticism that views writers such as Fitzgerald and
Cather as conservative artists who did not challenge the nation’s entrenched social order,
I argue that the novels in my study offer readers alternative, critical notions of American
democracy and history, and imagine instead an America crucially defined through
multiplicity, dissonance, and difference. Ideally, my study of the politics of narration and
fictions of representation opens the way to a critical reconsideration of the cultural work
performed by many vital American texts, and holds the potential to reconfigure how these
novels are read and taught today.

29
Chapter 1
“I Thought This was Americy”:
Immigration, Americanization, and the Nineteenth Amendment
in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia

Toward the middle of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), the title character,
Ántonia Shimerda, encounters a tramp when she is working on a local farm. This tramp
declares without preamble that “The ponds in this country is done got so low a man
couldn’t drownd himself in one of ‘em,” and then asks Ántonia for a beer (143). When
she tells him the farm they are on is owned by Norwegians and they have no beer, he
exclaims, “My God! … so it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy”
(143). Shortly thereafter, the tramp commits suicide by jumping into a threshing
machine. All that is found on his remains is a penknife, a chicken wishbone, and a copy
of the American poet Samuel Woodworth’s “The Old Oaken Bucket” (1818) cut out of a
newspaper – this last a nostalgic piece so popular it was set to music in the 1820s and
memorized by several subsequent generations of American school children. The tramp’s
carrying this specific poem on his person is noteworthy, because it connects him with a
growing national nostalgia for an older America, a lost, imagined “Americy” free of the
Norwegians, Bohemians, and other immigrants he finds all around him. Although his
suicide is extreme, it signifies failing national confidence in the idea of the United States’
ability to assimilate all people during the decades spanning the late nineteenth century
when My Ántonia is set and the early twentieth century when Cather wrote. Like many
Americans of the era, the tramp is distraught over the strange country he sees taking
shape, a nation rife with alien foreigners and an “Americy” rapidly filling with non-
“Americans.” It is no accident that Ántonia describes his eyes as “awful red and wild,
30
like he had some sickness” (143), for the tramp, like so many of his contemporaries,
carries a feverish desire for a more clearly delineated, more uniform “Americanness.” In
Cather’s novel, however, such desire is exposed as both problematic and dangerous. The
dilemma at the center of My Ántonia is thus the dilemma of the United States itself, of e
pluribus unum, and throughout the text both Cather and her narrator, Jim Burden, grapple
with the problematics of making one out of many.
In this chapter, I examine Cather’s novel’s thematic and formal preoccupation
with representations of Americanness and the fictions inherent to such representations,
focusing specifically on Jim Burden’s endeavors to speak for other characters yet at the
same time to confine these characters within both his individual story and his re-
envisioning of the national narrative. Contrary to the title Jim Burden gives his narrative,
the larger story of My Ántonia is realized through the multiple and often conflicted
registers of not only Ántonia, but also the gender-role-defying stories of Lena Lingard
and the other immigrant “hired girls”; the tales of immigrant men such as Peter and
Pavel, Mr. Shimerda, and Otto Fuchs; the story of the suicidal tramp; the history of Blind
d’Arnault the black pianist; and even – and perhaps in spite of itself – the story of the
Native Americans forced from the Great Plains by westward expansion, and of whom
only traces remain. Written amidst the U.S.’s entrance into World War I and the final
push for woman’s suffrage, and set during the surge of European immigration to the
American west in the late nineteenth century, My Ántonia is structured as a series of
embedded stories competing to be heard within Jim’s larger narrative framework.
Against a backdrop of historically contentious debates about citizenship, the changing
shape of the nation’s population, and alterations in the country’s system of representative
31
government, My Ántonia depicts Jim’s attempts to represent other characters as an
ideological struggle between a white American male determined to offer readers a
romanticized vision of the nation and its people, and a heterogeneous population
struggling to both become “American” and retain its own diverse cultural heritage.
9

Through Jim’s attempts to represent the lives and stories of others – in particular Ántonia,
her fellow immigrant Lena Lingard, and the African American piano prodigy Blind
d’Arnault – Cather’s text exposes that representation only works as a re-presentation, as a
transformation of potentially dangerous and transgressive physical actuality into a
metaphoric standing for. In so doing, the novel points to the problematic ways American
identity was formulated and enforced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, during an era when, as historian John Higham notes, the physical “foreignness”
of African Americans and southern and eastern European immigrants generated “intense
concern about personal hygiene, pure foods and drugs, public sanitation, and infectious
diseases,” and led to “a national effort to wipe out corruption of every sort” (98).
Although the “America” of Jim’s narrative is not the “Americy” of the tramp, nor is it the
overriding Anglo-Saxon national narrative popularly promulgated at the time, it is a
nation Jim insists on memorializing through a displacement of what he has lost, a
nostalgic re-imagining of the country of his youth – an illusory America that never truly
existed.

9
Jim’s affinity for immigrants and particularly the immigrant children with whom he grows up is likely
tied to the fact that he is something of a displaced person himself. On the first page of his narrative, he
describes the train journey west on which he meets Ántonia and her family: “I was ten years old then; I had
lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my
grandparents, who lived in Nebraska” (9). Although I am not positing a psychoanalytic reading of Jim, his
pseudo-émigré status is worth considering.

32
Through Jim’s account of the nation’s developing West, Cather explores key
“American” concepts such as nation, American identity, and the politics of representation
in the United States, and raises questions about narrative authority and the process of
storytelling. What, for instance, are the politics involved in telling not just another
person’s story, but an entire community’s? How, Cather’s novel asks, can either a nation
or an individual adequately speak for its or his/her people? Especially a nation with such
a heterogeneous population as the United States? Even more pointedly, what does the
diverse array of characters contained within Jim Burden’s narrative tell readers about
both fiction and representation in a nation where women, immigrants, and minorities
were regularly excluded from the polity?
Criticism of My Ántonia has centered largely on two aspects of the text: Jim and
Ántonia’s relationship and the importance of storytelling to the novel’s structure. In the
former strand of criticism, scholars such as Charlotte Goodman and Patrick Shaw have
explored the novel’s ostensible double narrative wrapped around these two characters.
For Goodman, the novel is a sort of double bildungsroman, “with its focus on both a male
and a female protagonist,” that is “congenial form for the woman novelist who wishes to
emphasize the ways in which a society that rigidly differentiates between male and
female gender roles limits the full development of men and women alike” (134). Shaw’s
critique is less positive, but he too focuses on doubling, arguing that “in My Ántonia,
Cather bifurcates her psyche in the dual personae of Jim and Ántonia …” (53). Michael
Peterman finds Jim and Ántonia’s interaction beneficial to both characters. The
embedded stories in the novel, Peterman argues, “are delicately placed steps or building
blocks that image and characterize the rich and enduring relationship between Ántonia
33
and Jim. They provide a sense of that special cohesiveness, so much so that these
memories live as freshly for Jim in the present as they originally did” (161). In contrast,
critics such as Demaree Peck contend that this is a highly conflicted relationship where
“whenever Ántonia tries to assert her own individuality apart from Jim, Jim renounces
the friendship; conversely, whenever Ántonia accommodates herself to Jim’s imaginative
ideal, he seeks a reunion” (141). Still others, like Patrick Shaw, view Jim and Ántonia as
“dual personae” through which Cather herself “bifurcates her psyche” (53). Those critics
who approach the text via storytelling often propose that the various stories within the
novel are community-building and crucial to a communal memory process. Hermione
Lee, for instance, concludes that “the shape of the book is the making of Jim’s memory.
It’s ‘formless’ structure – two long and three short sections spread over about forty years
– is, in fact, very carefully formed to represent the process of memory-making” (139).
More recently, Lisa Marie Lucenti has persuasively reinforced and expanded upon this
view, arguing that the multiple tales in My Ántonia are “memory houses” Jim, the
denizens of Black Hawk, and the nation at large establish to displace and contain their
own dangerous memories (204). Somewhat surprisingly, though, Cather’s text has not
often been interpreted within the political and cultural context of its era.
One of the few critics who situates My Ántonia within the cultural and political
milieu of its era, Guy Reynolds, contextualizes the novel amidst the Americanization and
“100% Americanism” programs that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and whose aims ranged from homogenizing the U.S.’s immigrant population to
excluding that same population from the polity. Reynolds argues that the novel’s “open,
receptive form … facilitates the democratic mingling of stories from the new and old
34
worlds” (87). The text, however, complicates and troubles this “democratic mingling of
stories,” and Reynolds warns that although “It is tempting to read Cather as a liberal
multiculturalist attuned to the American plethora, sympathetic to difference in all its
forms,” at the same time, “we must also recognise the dangers of this diversity –
incoherence, fragmentation, disunity” (124). Reynold’s assessment is, I think, on the
right track, and points to an underlying reality of the novel too often treated lightly:
despite the fact that Jim’s narrative contains multiple cultures and Jim himself seems
adverse to Americanization ideology – at least as it is manifested in the townspeople of
Black Hawk’s unease regarding Ántonia and other immigrants – he can only loosely be
described as a multiculturalist, and throughout the text he struggles to rein in the
incoherence, fragmentation, and disunity of those he represents. Ultimately, My Ántonia
showcases how Jim, like the United States itself, strives to open up boundaries and
assimilate “outsiders” while at the same time restricting this inclusion.
Indeed, much like Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Jim Burden too “contains
multitudes” – or at least tries to – and in so doing he attempts to transform the stories of
his and others’ pasts into a singular, cohesive whole at the expense of the multiple voices
vying for space within the novel. Alex Woloch’s work on novelistic character space and
his discussion of the tension between major and minor characters in novels is useful to
consider here. To a considerable degree, My Ántonia presents a variant on the type of
“asymmetric structure of characterization” Woloch describes, “in which many
[characters] are represented but attention flows toward a delimited center” (30-31), a
center that regularly and conspicuously overwhelms the other characters’ autonomy – a
center that is not Ántonia Shimerda, but Jim Burden himself. Although Woloch’s study
35
is grounded in the nineteenth century European realist novel, his argument that the
asymmetric structure of characterization “reflects actual structures of inequitable
distribution” on the one hand, while drawing readers’ attention to issues of inequality and
democracy through the claims of minor characters on the other, also illustrates the
struggle at play in Cather’s novel (31). It is a struggle between Jim’s efforts to
monopolize the narrative of My Ántonia and supersede the “checks” and “balances”
offered by the other voices and stories in the text and those same voices and stories
struggle to be heard. Ultimately, he represents Ántonia, Lena Lingard, and the other
characters through retrospection and his imagination because the past and the page are
spaces where those he represents can, to use Hanna Pitkin’s terms, be “made present in
some sense, while not really being present literally or fully in fact” (153). Within his
imagination and his narrative, Jim can render his versions of other people as the real
them, and his “America” as the real United States – much as the official narrative of U.S.
history is constituted in hindsight through a series of memorialized displacements.
Cather complicates Jim’s narrative from the start by offering readers an
introduction that serves as an opening frame to the novel and calls into question Jim’s
motivations and ability to represent others. In this introduction, an unnamed “I” narrator
who knew Jim in their youth recounts running into him on a westward bound train.
10

This narrator tells readers that Jim’s presence on the train is job-related, and that as legal
counsel for “one of the great Western railways,” he is quite influential, a man whose

10
Many critics, such as Terence Martin, take this narrator to be Willa Cather herself. Others, such as Jean
Schwind, view the narrator as another figure, “the editor” or “the narrator.” Judith Butler argues that in
terming the prologue an “introduction,” Cather marks it as if it was “written by someone other than the
author” (145). However one wants to read the introduction, its narrator has a rather subversive role in
Jim’s narrative.

36
clout is such that if a young man “with an idea can once get Jim Burden’s attention, can
manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or
exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming” (3).
The narrator also explains that Jim’s career has been advanced by a “brilliant” but sterile
marriage to a wealthy New York woman who backs feminist and labor causes. The
apparent gap between Jim and his wife highlights the gap between the causes Jim serves
(the railroads, capital, expansion) and the feminist and labor causes his wife backs.
11

Through these descriptions, Cather’s narrator subtly raises questions about Jim’s
narrative authority and his ability to present a tale centrally concerned with working class
immigrant women in the nation’s developing West. For Jim’s endeavors to represent the
other characters’ stories cannot be separated from his ties to the railroads for whom he
works, not to mention a hegemonic national power structure that seeks to contain and
limit those it deems as “Other” (and therefore not-“American”). From the outset, then,
My Ántonia sets in motion a narrative of the sort that “allow[s] and solicit[s] us to
construct a story – a distributed pattern of attention – that is at odds with, or divergent
from, the formed pattern in the discourse” (Woloch 41). The novel’s introduction, in
effect, challenges readers to sift through Jim’s representations to come up with their own
Ántonia, Lena, and others.
The introduction to My Ántonia also emphasizes the possessive nature of the tale
upon which readers are about to embark. As the train journey continues, the narrator and
Jim’s talk turns to their shared past, eventually focusing upon “a central figure, a

11
Interestingly, the “I” narrator does not altogether believe that Jim’s wife “has much feeling for the causes
to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest,” although s/he offers no further explanation (2).

37
Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired” (3). This is
Ántonia Shimerda, who “More than any other person we remembered … seemed to mean
to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood” (3). The narrator
of the introduction, although a writer herself (or himself), has never written about
Ántonia, and proposes that s/he and Jim compile their recollections and compare notes at
a later date.
12
Jim responds by composing a long manuscript. This piece, he admits, is
one in which he has had to say a great deal about himself because, “It’s through myself
that I knew and felt her, and I’ve had no practice in any other form of presentation” (4).
Jim’s point here reinforces the fact that his representation of Ántonia is finally a re-
presentation, his own construction and interpretation of her life and desires. Jim’s choice
of title for his manuscript underlines this possessive aspect of representation. After first
titling it “Ántonia,” he then prefixes the word “My” to it. This is a crucial narrative
move, a moment where, as Sharon O’Brien notes, the text posits the very act of
storytelling as “both possessive and subjective” (“Introduction” 17). The story of
Ántonia, who symbolizes the plains, the country, etc., is in truth the story of Jim’s
presentation of Ántonia, the plains, the country – and by implication the nation. The title
of both Jim’s manuscript and Cather’s larger novel thereby signals a link between
possession, appropriation, and the processes of storytelling and literary and political
representation – a link heightened by the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the United
States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

12
The narrator never comes up with a manuscript, despite telling readers of her/his and Jim’s agreement:
“I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this
way, get a picture of her” (4). When Jim delivers his manuscript a few months later, the narrator confesses
to compiling only “a few straggling notes” (5). The “picture” we get of Ántonia, then, is Jim’s entirely.

38
Jim’s conflicted representation of not only Ántonia, but also Lena Lingard and the
other “hired girls” – immigrant girls who work for Anglo-American families in the town
of Black Hawk to help support their own families’ farms in the outlying countryside – is
further complicated by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which finally
granted women the franchise after nearly three quarters of a century of struggle. My
Ántonia is set in the late nineteenth century when suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams led the struggle for the vote and equal
rights, and Cather wrote the novel just as the final push for suffrage was in progress. The
Nineteenth Amendment is particularly salient to a novel where Jim Burden gives voice to
the tales of numerous women, especially immigrant women. Until 1920, women were
“spoken for” by the patriarchal heads of their households, be it husbands, fathers,
brothers, or some other male relation. Immigrants – especially those of non-Anglo or
western European descent – were even more limited, as putative scientific studies of race
both demarcated a line between old-stock Anglo-Americans and these newcomers, and
facilitated literacy tests, poll taxes, and other bars to their attaining citizenship and
Americanness. It is against this backdrop that Jim Burden presents his narrative to
readers.
A striking sequence when a “dancing pavilion” comes to the town of Black Hawk
underscores just how problematic is Jim’s representation of Ántonia, Lena, and the hired
girls. From the moment of its arrival, this entertainment is marked as transgressive, run
as it is by the Vannis, a family of “cheerful-looking Italians” who, in spite of keeping
“exemplary order” cannot help being Italian (155-56). And, as Jeffory Clymer has noted,
“To look Italian” during these years “is to look ‘wicked,’ and, implicitly, to look
39
unAmerican” (161). Like Bohemians such as the Shimerdas, the Irish, Italians, and other
“new” immigrants were regularly perceived as racially “Other” from and inferior to
Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Although state and federal court rulings had judged such immigrants white and
thus potentially “American,” their racial fitness and capacity to function as citizens of the
polity was challenged by race scientists, nativists, and politicians. Massive waves of
immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the rise of
industrialization and modernization, and the demands for equality made by women,
minorities, and the underclass produced anxieties in “mainstream,” old-stock American
culture that in turn led to pronounced pushes from promoters of nativism and proponents
of various Americanization programs to consolidate a definition of who was and was not
an “American.” In 1895, Henry Cabot Lodge first introduced the idea of a literacy test in
Congress, a measure which passed with bipartisan support before President Grover
Cleveland vetoed it. “For the next two decades,” Alexander Keyssar tells us,
it was reintroduced almost annually, garnering the support of a unique, if not
bizarre, coalition of northern professionals, many Republicans, southern
Democrats, anti-Catholics, anti-Semites, and the American Federation of Labor.
Although unstated, the bill’s target was clearly the “new” immigrant population,
eastern and southern Europeans who had high rates of illiteracy (more than 20
percent in 1914) and who generally were regarded as less desirable than their
English, Scandinavian, and even Irish predecessors. (139-40)

Despite strong support in both the House and Senate, the literacy test was vetoed by both
William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson as well, until World War I so heightened
“concerns about the loyalty of the foreign-born, coupled with a new emphasis on the
“Americanization” of immigrants, gave a boost to the measure, and in 1917 Congress
mustered enough votes to override Wilson’s second veto” (140). The xenophobic and
40
anti-immigrant mindset of the era took hold not only among politicians and other
members of the cultural elite, but also had strong purchase among less educated,
everyday Americans, and indeed even among the so-called lower class and lower orders.
Endeavoring to explain the contentious debate over American identity during these years,
Marcus Klein has written that
In larger measure, immigration prompted the invention of ‘Americanization,’ and
Americanization in turn prompted the invention of a set of terms by which
America could be regarded as having some kind of predefinition. The terms of
the predefinition were potentially meaningful, obviously, by the amount that they
distinguished Americans from immigrants. (28)

The “great evil” associated with new immigrants such as the Vannis and Shimerdas,
according to Higham, was a fear of pollution, “a new feeling of defilement through
contact with what was dark and unclean” that threatened to contaminate “the very body
of the nation” (98). In short, a fear of the “dangers” of physical contact with the bodies
of southern and eastern European immigrants. This view was underpinned by a highly
race-conscious culture in which Americanization ideology often “sought to fix the
meaning of ‘American’” by “making it synonymous with ‘Protestant’, ‘English-
speaking’, ‘North European’” (Reynolds 83-84).
By attending the Vannis’ dances, Ántonia and her fellow hired girls intensify the
denizens of Black Hawk’s view of their fundamental difference – and their potential
threat. These are girls, after all, whose “vigour” and “positive carriage and freedom of
movement” Jim describes as making them “conspicuous among Black Hawk women,”
and who quickly come to be “considered a menace to the social order” when the young
Anglo-American men of Black Hawk pay more attention to them than to their “white,”
“American” peers at the Vannis’ dances (158; 161). The impact dancing pavilion has on
41
Black Hawk’s perceptions is particularly striking in Ántonia’s case. Jim tells us that
prior to its arrival, Ántonia “had been looked upon more as a ward of the Harlings [for
whom she works] than as one of the ‘hired girls’” (163). Once she becomes a regular at
the Vannis’ pavilion, however, she becomes “irresponsible” in her duties; “[a]t the first
call of the music” she hurries her dishes, dropping and smashing them in her excitement
(163). Finally, the Harling family gives her the choice of either quitting the dances or
leaving their employ. She chooses the latter. “After Ántonia went to live with the
Cutters,” Jim says, “she seemed to care about nothing but picnics and parties and having
a good time” (170). “Her new clothes,” he continues, “were the subject of caustic
comment” (170). Yet Jim tells us that he “continued to champion Ántonia” (172), and
even attends with her and the other hired girls a few of the dances the town allows
following the Vannis depart. The dance pavilion, instituted by Italians (re: “aliens” or
“non-Americans”), thus becomes a dangerous space where not only are the young Anglo-
American men of Black Hawk drawn to the siren song of the immigrant hired girls, but
so too is these girls’ difference made manifest and accentuated.
The paradox of Jim’s representation of Ántonia, Lena, and the hired girls is that it
is on the one hand far more inclusive and open in its vision of an America composed of
multiple peoples and cultures than that of his Black Hawk contemporaries – or, for that
matter, many of his fellow Americans during the daces spanning My Ántonia’s setting
and its publication. Yet on the other hand, Jim himself works throughout his narrative to
contain and control the very figures to whom he gives voice. Drawn to and fascinated by
the hired girls, Jim scorns the outlook the townspeople of Black Hawk take toward them
as being “very stupid” (160). He relates that
42
If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and
much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All
foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English. There was not a
man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the
personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between
her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all “hired girls.” (160)

At moments such as this, Jim quite plainly situates himself in opposition to the
xenophobia of his era, as well as the disdain of difference frequently concomitant with
Americanization ideology. In this regard, he echoes his creator, who took a clear position
against Americanization. In 1921, for instance, Cather publicly remarked that at the
bottom of Americanization were “overzealous patriots who implant into the foreign
minds a distaste for all they have brought of value from their own country”; she would
further describe it as “a deadly disease with us” in 1924 (qtd. in Reynolds 79).
Cather’s stance in many ways echoed some of the foremost cultural critics of her
time, such as the progressive Randolph Bourne and the Jewish activist and philosopher
Horace Kallen. Bourne, in his 1916 article “Trans-National America,” espoused a vision
of the United States as “a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with other lands, of
many threads of all sizes and colors” (159). Kallen too envisioned America as
embodying a multiplicity of peoples and cultures, and his views are particularly resonant
with the version of the United States Cather presents in My Ántonia. In “Democracy
Versus the Melting Pot,” a two-part article published in The Nation in 1915, Kallen
proposed an alternative to Americanization that would eventually come to be called
“cultural pluralism”
13
, and contended that democracy “involves, not the elimination of

13
See Gleason, pages 52-57 in particular, for a discussion of Kallen’s introduction of the term “cultural
pluralism” in a 1924 revision, as well as the entrance of it into the vernacular around 1937.

43
differences, but the perfection and conservation of differences” (53). As opposed to the
conformist and limiting impulses underlying Americanization, Kallen posited a vision of
the United States as a “symphony” composed by the orchestra of its diverse people, “the
free and well-ordered cooperation of unique individualities toward the making of the
common tune” (172).
14
Although Cather published My Ántonia two years after Kallen’s
article, it is not altogether clear whether she read the piece prior to or even during the
novel’s composition. Yet it seems likely, as her sympathies plainly dovetailed with
Kallen’s ideas. Katrina Irving has noted, in fact, how Cather’s novel appears to embrace
Kallen’s “vision of a homogeneous economic and political structure underwriting the
proliferation of distinct and peacefully coexisting cultural communities” (96).
The problem in Jim’s case, though, is that no matter how stupid he considers
others’ views of the immigrant girls, he too wishes to fit them within the constraints of
his own ideas of the world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Jim does not hold with
the belief that “you were likely to get diseases from foreigners” (10). He is, in fact,
drawn to the young immigrant women of Black Hawk, despite their seeming to
destabilize the social order: from Ántonia, who takes on masculine tasks during their
youth and occasionally affects a “superior tone” with Jim, to Lena, whose unaffected
sexuality scandalizes the community, to the three Marys who are viewed by the people of
Black Hawk as “high explosives” (162). At the same time that Jim finds the hired girls
so fascinating, though, he is also unsettled by them. He may scoff at the citizens of Black
Hawk’s outlook: “So that was what they were like … these white-handed, high-collared

14
For an excellent reading of the parallels between Cather and Bourne in particular, see Reynolds.

44
clerks and bookkeepers!” (163). But as we shall see, his representation of the hired girls
proves to be both inclusive and rigid – Ántonia and the other immigrants are part of Jim’s
America, but only if they comport themselves within the parameters he establishes. A
telling instance of Jim’s accepting-within-limits outlook occurs in his childhood when,
after befriending Ántonia and her family, Jim and his grandfather’s ranch hand, Jake
Marpole, attempt to reclaim a borrowed horse collar from Ántonia’s disagreeable brother,
Ambrosch. When Ambrosch returns a plainly mistreated collar, a fight ensues. In its
aftermath, Jake declares, “These foreigners ain’t the same … They ain’t to be trusted”
(105) – meaning, namely, that immigrants such as the Shimerdas cannot be entirely
trusted. To which Jim vows, “I’ll never be friends with them again, Jake … I believe
they are all like … Ambrosch underneath” (105). Although Jim grows out of such
reactionary racism, textual incidents such as the horse collar scene convey how swiftly
his fascination with and acceptance of Ántonia, Lena Lingard, and the other characters he
represents can shift to disavowal and condemnation when they do not behave in
accordance with his desires.
I do not intend to be overly negative in my assessment of Jim here; the vision of
America he presents to readers is without doubt more multicultural and cosmopolitan
than that permeating much late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural and
political discourse in the United States. Yet, I want to stress that despite Jim’s relative
open-mindedness, his attitudes and actions are inevitably influenced by his era and by the
power structure of which he is a part. The often conflicted fascination and repulsion Jim
feels toward Ántonia in particular illustrates that he cannot entirely free himself of his
cultural constraints. For despite his friendship with her, the narrative he offers always
45
circles back to her and her family’s difference. In fact, throughout Cather’s novel, Jim’s
relationship with Ántonia is conflicted, and his representation of her life to readers darts
back and forth in a pattern of investment and divestment.
15
Throughout the novel, as
Marilee Lindemann notes, “Jim polices Ántonia’s speech” and behavior throughout the
narrative “for evidence of gender or ethnic transgressions” – especially when she “talks
‘like mans’ and ‘jabber[s] Bohunk’” (123). While he finds her assertiveness and
willingness to do “men’s work” on her family’s farm compelling, it is only compelling to
a point – the point where Ántonia gains power or seems superior to Jim. After all, she
may be four years his senior, he tells readers, “but I was a boy and she was a girl” (39).
Ántonia herself is all too aware of Jim’s capricious friendship, and the strings attached to
it. “Maybe I be the kind of girl you like better; now I come to town,” she tells him once
she moves off of her family’s farm where she works like a man and becomes a hired girl
in Black Hawk (126). For a time his fascination overcomes his sense of propriety even
after she goes to work for the shady Cutter, and he continues to invest in Ántonia in spite
of the changes he sees in her. When Ántonia behaves in a way that accords with his
sense of how she should behave, such as on the night when she prevents him from kissing
her one night and scolds him, Jim responds in a paean-like fashion: “she was, oh, she
was still my Ántonia!” (178). Ultimately, though, Jim’s attitude toward and relationship
with not only Ántonia, but also Lena and the other hired girls boils down to his ability to

15
Here I draw loosely on Judith Fetterley’s analysis of The Great Gatsby, where she describes a “pattern of
investment/divestment” in both Nick Carraway’s relationship to Gatsby and Gatsby’s relationship to Daisy
Buchanan (Resisting 79). Jim’s relationship to Ántonia is not the same sort of romantic one as Gatsby’s to
Daisy, nor is it quite the same as Nick’s to Gatsby. Yet Jim’s desire to capture a specific vision of Ántonia
in his imagination and his fluctuating fascination-repulsion for the ostensible protagonist of his narrative is
something of a hybrid of the two relationships Fetterley discusses in The Great Gatsby.

46
fit them within his (re)envisioning of America. As Marilee Lindemann puts it, “what
women say matters less than how they are heard, and Jim’s power to situate women’s
words in such charged social, spiritual, and erotic contexts assures that he is the primary
maker of meaning in My Ántonia” (120). In this regard, Jim echoes Horace Kallen and
his notion of cultural pluralism, which, as several critics have noted, was rather limited in
its inclusiveness. To draw on Kallen’s orchestral metaphor, even when Jim gives
someone a seat in his orchestra, he invariably is the one who positions that seat and
delineates its function.
16

Another excellent example of Jim’s troubling representation of the characters in
his narrative – not to mention the ways it parallels the nation’s (hi)story, is the way he
grapples with Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia’s melancholy father. Jim’s account of Mr.
Shimerda’s suicide is invaluable insofar as it highlights both Jim’s desire for control and
to speak for others and the bleak, unhappy existence of late nineteenth century
immigrants who failed to Americanize. At a young age, Mr. Shimerda married a family
servant – who it is strongly insinuated he impregnated, an ironic parallel to his daughter’s
later experiences with Larry Donovan – and eventually brought his family to the United
States at his wife’s insistence, in search of a new start. This new start is a difficult one,
however, and he has trouble acclimating. When Ántonia tells Jim about her father’s
unhappiness, an unhappiness that does not accord with Jim’s vision of the transformative
power of America, his response is telling. “People who don’t like this country ought to

16
According to Stephen Whitfield, although Kallen was “a progressive who detested racial as well as
religious discrimination, [he] gave no seats in his orchestra to the indigenous Indians or to Asian
Americans. Nor did he defy the widespread denial of the value of black participation in the nation’s culture
– even during the Harlem Renaissance” (xliii). For an interesting look at Kallen’s racial views and his
relationship with Alain Locke, see Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism.”

47
stay home,” Jim says. “We don’t make them come here” (75). At first blush, this
jingoistic retort seems incongruous coming from a narrator who later castigates the
“stupidity” of the outlook of people in Black Hawk about the mingling of their sons and
daughters with immigrants. It is not really so surprising, though, given Jim’s later career
working to further the interests running the nation he loves, as well as the era’s growing
national xenophobia where “new” immigrants such as the Shimerdas were concerned.
Similarly, Jim’s response to Mr. Shimerda’s unhappiness reveals his desire for control
and his distaste for real dissent, views shared by many contemporaneous Americans.
Only after Mr. Shimerda commits suicide does Jim’s outlook soften. Having
failed to “Americanize” in life, and excluded in death by his fellow immigrants who
refuse to bury a suicide in their cemetery, Mr. Shimerda is finally buried on his family’s
farm. It is at this juncture that Jim wonders about the old man’s spirit and its long
journey back to the homeland Mr. Shimerda so loved. Recollecting all Ántonia ever told
him about her father, Jim recounts how, “Such vivid pictures came to me that they might
have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories” (84). Despite what might appear to be an
empathetic imagining on Jim’s part, I contend that what Cather offers here is an exposure
of the type of narrative sleight-of-hand Jim performs throughout the novel. Mr.
Shimerda, who could not – or would not – fit into either Jim’s or the nation’s notions of
an assimilated immigrant, becomes in the passage above suddenly real in Jim’s
imagination – these “vivid pictures” that “might have been Mr. Shimerda’s memories.”
Yet, crucially, these are not his memories but Jim’s (safe) imaginative reconstructions.
By asserting his control over Mr. Shimerda through these imaginings, Jim, much as he
endeavors to do throughout his narrative, places himself in a position of seeming
48
authority. In effect, he places himself in a position that enables him to re-present Mr.
Shimerda in a more palatable light.
In large part, Jim is able to incorporate immigrants such as Ántonia and Lena in
particular into his America by juxtaposing them with a character whose difference and
distance from Americanness is even more pronounced. As was the case with the Vannis’
dancing pavilion, music is again linked to transgression when Jim introduces the African
American piano prodigy, Blind d’Arnault, to his narrative. The pianist arrives in Black
Hawk to give a concert at the Opera House, but Mrs. Harling tips Ántonia and Jim to the
impromptu performance d’Arnault gives at the local Boys’ Home on the night before the
concert. Like the hired girls, d’Arnault both fascinates and disturbs Jim. D’Arnault’s
difference, though, unlike that of Ántonia, Lena, and their peers, is represented as alien
and rather grotesque. When Jim and Ántonia go to the Boys’ Home, they watch as
d’Arnault is directed to the piano before the roomful of travelers and businessmen staying
there. Jim describes the pianist as having “a Negro head, too; almost no head at all;
nothing behind the ears but folds of neck under close-clipped wool”; it is a head that,
according to Jim, “would have been repulsive if his face had not been so kindly and
happy” (147-48).
17
D’Arnault’s voice is “the soft, amiable Negro voice” Jim remembers
from his early childhood in Virginia, with “the note of docile subservience in it” (147).

17
According to Elizabeth Ammons, one of the potential models Cather drew on for Blind d’Arnault was a
traveling pianist known as Blind Tom. In an 1862 review in the Atlantic Monthly of Blind Tom, Rebecca
Harding Davis describes him as “but a lump of black flesh, born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy,
they thought, already stamped on his face.” He is “as repugnant an object as the lizards in the neighboring
swamps” (qtd. in Ammons 68-69). Although Cather herself claimed never to have seen Blind Tom, an
1894 Nebraska State Journal article some have attributed to her states: “Certainly the man was worth
hearing – at least once. Probably there has never been seen on the stage a stranger figure or one more
uncanny” (qtd. in Ammons 69).

49
Nearly headless, almost repulsive, docile and subservient – Jim’s depiction here quite
plainly marks d’Arnault as someone vastly different from the assertive, alluring hired
girls. D’Arnault, however, is anything but subservient. While he may be known as Blind
d’Arnault in Black Hawk, his actual name is Samson. As Lisa Marie Lucenti points out,
“In Judges 16, Samson, blinded by the Philistines, brings down the temple of his
oppressors, crushing them beneath its weight: the name does not, there, simply evoke
blindness, but a blindness invested with subversive and enormous power” (205). His
presence in Jim’s narrative, in fact, disrupts both Jim’s representations and larger issues
of racial hierarchies and inequality in the United States.
Amidst the “atmosphere of unusual freedom” that prevails at the Boys’ Home,
d’Arnault’s kindliness and happiness swiftly disappear in an explosion of music, dancing,
and pleasure that, even moreso than the Vannis’ dancing pavilion, destabilizes social
norms (146). “Seems like we might have some good old plantation songs tonight,” the
pianist declares, and proceeds to lead the gathered men through “one Negro melody after
another” (148). In an ironic displacement, it is a black man who leads a group of white
men in slave songs here, a “kindly” and “subservient” African American who instigates
this group of travelers and businessmen to sing “Negro melodies.” Then, “In the middle
of a crashing waltz,” Jim relates how d’Arnault softens his playing and draws the other
men’s attention to the fact that “Tiny and Lena, Ántonia and Mary Dusak, were waltzing
in the middle of the floor” in the dining room behind the parlor (152). The implication
here seems to be that d’Arnault’s music inspires the hired girls not just to dance in the
back room, but to dance with each other, coupled off into “Tiny and Lena” and “Ántonia
and Mary Dusak.” Under the influence of d’Arnault’s transgressive music, these hired
50
girls, who are themselves deemed transgressive by so many citizens of Black Hawk, now
push even further against prescribed gender norms. Jim quickly diffuses the potentially
threatening lesbian undertones here by relating how, after the girls are discovered, they
giggle and attempt to flee. The men cry, “What’s the matter with you girls? Dancing out
here by yourselves, when there’s a roomful of lonesome men on the other side of the
partition!” and cajole the girls to dance with them, and order is seemingly restored (152).
The men’s move to draw the hired girls into a heterosexual dance is in accord with Jim’s
narrative. For although he is fascinated by the hired girls and their sexuality, his re-
presentation of them works to bring them back within his system of values and vision of
Americanness by, if not de-eroticizing them, at least representing their sexuality as more
socially acceptable. The male-female couplings, though perhaps antithetical to Black
Hawk sensibilities, are plainly less menacing to Jim himself – in fact, they reinforce the
hired girls’ place within his America. Conversely, he stresses the pianist’s otherness as
d’Arnault suddenly takes on the appearance of “some glistening African god of pleasure,
full of strong, savage blood” (153). “Savagery,” as Lucenti notes, “names the implicit
threat of [d’Arnault’s] presence in a society determined to see him as somewhat
monstrous’” (205). Trading upon contemporaneous U.S. society’s desire to view African
Americans as utterly alien and, indeed, “somewhat monstrous” – “repulsive” head,
“savage blood,” and all – Jim demonstrates that Ántonia, Lena, and the other immigrant
girls are not so foreign after all.
The story Jim relates concerning d’Arnault’s “history” and his learning to play the
piano further reinforces the pianist’s distance from the America Jim attempts to represent
in his narrative. It is a tale that renders d’Arnault disturbingly and fundamentally
51
different from Jim and the denizens of Black Hawk. In Jim’s account, the piano prodigy
was left blind from an illness at three weeks old, and grew up on a plantation “where the
spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted” (148). At age six, he began slipping off to the
“Big House” on the plantation, and one day found his way to “the Thing,” the piano
(150). In a strange, unsettling scene, Jim describes how d’Arnault “shivered” as he stood
at the piano for the first time, ran his fingers along its “slippery” sides, “embraced” its
legs, and soon “coupled himself to it” (150). The erotic overtones here are quite
shocking coming from Jim – he of the sterile marriage and fascinated-yet-somewhat-
repulsed responses to overt displays of sexuality.
18
Since Jim offers no source for his
information, though, it can only be his own imaginings, his own reconstructions of
d’Arnault’s first (erotic) experience of music and performance that he represents here. It
is in Jim’s mind, then, that d’Arnault shivers, embraces, and couples with the piano. He
continues in this vein when he notes that although d’Arnault’s mistress hired him several
piano teachers, “He could never learn like other people. … He was always a Negro
prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully. … To hear him, to watch him, was to
see a Negro enjoying himself as only a Negro can” (151-52). Through this description,
Jim in effect hypersexualizes race by trading upon contemporaneous stereotypes of the

18
The hypersexualized, hyperracialized nature of d’Arnault’s appearance in the novel proved so disquieting
to readers and critics alike that for years it remained a fallow spot in an oft-analyzed novel. One of the few
early exceptions is Richard Giannone. Giannone reads the pianist as representing “elemental musical
sensation itself,” and argues that his performance at the Boys’ Home “enlarges into a metaphorical
description of Ántonia’s inner nature, of the burning fire of life that warms her spirit, of the ‘inner glow’
that never fades” (116). The problem with this sort of reading is that it both largely ignores d’Arnault’s
race and the manner in which Jim marks it, and in many ways echoes Jim’s own troubling representations.
More recently, scholars such as Linda Joyce Brown, Elizabeth Ammons, and Lisa Marie Lucenti
have engaged with d’Arnault’s brief appearance in Black Hawk, drawing readers’ attention to the
importance of this uncomfortable scene within the narrative.

52
oversexed African American male. While on some levels this may be Jim’s displacement
of his own repressed sexuality, the passage heightens d’Arnault’s otherness not only from
Jim himself, but also from what might be termed the “safely eroticized” type of
Americans he wants Ántonia, Lena, and the other hired girls to be.
At the bottom of Jim’s relationship to Blind d’Arnault is the post-Emancipation
practice of excluding and suppressing purportedly free and equal African Americans.
Despite being made full citizens following the Civil War, during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries black Americans were routinely denied rights throughout the
southern states, often with the complicity of the northern and western states. The
methods used to refuse them citizenship and Americanness during these years were
directly tied to the politics of representation in the United States: “poll taxes, cumulative
poll taxes (demanding that past as well as current taxes be paid), literacy tests, secret
ballot laws, lengthy residence requirements, elaborate registration systems, confusing
multiple voting-box arrangements, and eventually, Democratic primaries restricted to
white voters” (Keyssar 110). By the turn of the twentieth century, not only were the
majority of African Americans denied the right to vote, but their fledgling ability to
politically represent themselves had dwindled to near nonexistence. Although twenty-
two blacks were elected and served in Congress between 1869 and 1901 – twenty in the
House of Representatives and two in the Senate – by 1900 “Only one black member,
George White of North Carolina, remained,” and he left voluntarily in 1901 (Swain 21;
28). In many ways, Jim’s representation of Blind d’Arnault reflects this continued
suppression, and demonstrates the manner in which not only the South, but also the rest

53
of the United States participated in classifying African Americans as outside of and
foreign to American identity.
19

What is perhaps most notable about Jim’s representation of the piano prodigy is
that, unlike the other characters in the novel, no source is given for the elaborate story
Jim constructs about him. By comparison, Jim sees much of Ántonia’s life firsthand; the
rest he hears from his grandmother, Lena, and others. The same is true of his knowledge
of Lena, Mr. Shimerda, the hired girls, etc. Blind d’Arnault’s case stands out because
Jim offers readers the pianist’s story with no description for how he knows it. The
closest we come to an explanation is Jim’s rather offhand comment that “Mrs. Harling
has known d’Arnault for years” when she tips him and Ántonia to the Boys’ Home
performance (146). Yet this reference to Mrs. Harling’s knowledge of the pianist is
difficult to square with Jim’s apparently extensive knowledge of d’Arnault’s youth. And
the idea that an adult would be the source of teenage Jim’s incredibly eroticized version
of the pianist’s musical awakening verges on the preposterous. This gap between Mrs.
Harling’s knowledge and the story Jim presents to readers points to the troubling nature
of his representation of others and the license he takes in re-presenting them. It is as
though it is a given that Jim, as a (white) representative of the (white) American
hegemony can appropriate, eroticize, and “other” this (black) man’s tale in his own terms
without even the façade of a mediating agency, and can manipulate it to fit his (and the

19
Anne Goodwyn Jones reads Jim’s account of d’Arnault as being informed by his early years in Virginia
and ties to the South: “The ambivalence of his descriptions – d’Arnault is repulsive but kindly, brainless
but amiable, sensual but subservient – testifies to the contradictory Southern blend of abstract racist theory
and actual human relationships, of paternalism and intimacy” (92). Intriguing as this reading is, Jim’s
experiences are not limited to his southern roots, and the nation he constructs in My Ántonia is a place both
similar to and quite different from the Old South.

54
nation’s) (hi)story. Within the parameters of Jim’s narrative of America and
Americanness, d’Arnault’s difference emphasizes that the pianist, unlike Jim’s
representation of the hired girls, is after all quite dangerous. Given that his “savage”
blood acts as such a catalyst to transgressive behavior among people Jim wants to make
“American,” it is no surprise that Jim ultimately presents d’Arnault as at last leaving,
tapping his cane and bowing, “docile and happy” (154).
20

Recent criticism has taken Cather to task for Blind d’Arnault’s appearance in My
Ántonia. Linda Joyce Brown, for example, has argued that Cather “rejects the idea that
racial difference is meaningful among Europeans and their descendants, but in doing so
she reifies the racial Otherness of African Americans” (21). Similarly, Anne Goodwyn
Jones contends that
the novel, while it openly embraces Nebraska and Ántonia, keeps a closet date
with Virginia and Southern white manhood. The buried text of My Ántonia is the
story of the burden of Jim’s, and Cather’s, Southern history, of how to relieve –
and how to be broken by – that burden. (107)

However, characterizing Cather and her novel as liberal in one sense, yet having racist
tendencies in another seems a little too easy. It is Jim, after all, not Cather, who
constructs My Ántonia’s inclusively exclusive America; it is Jim, not Cather, who “reifies
the racial Otherness of African Americans.” My intention here is not to exculpate Cather
from responsibility for what she wrote, nor to portray her as being above the racial biases
of her time. Indeed, many commentators have noted that Cather’s attitudes toward

20
D’Arnault is also a reminder that although slavery was no longer legal, the conditions of and ideology
behind it persisted in many parts of the country – the “plantation” where “the spirit if not the fact of slavery
persisted” (148). In the “progressive” United States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this
was a particularly unwelcome reminder.

55
minorities such as African Americans, Jews, and Native Americans were often less than
admirable even in the terms of her times.
21
As Ammons notes, “rationalizing Cather’s
failure to rise above bigoted racial attitudes at the same time that we praise her for
enlightened attitudes toward certain European immigrants or certain groups of women
represents the height of willful delusion” (62). But it seems crucial to recognize a
separation between author and narrator in a novel like My Ántonia, where the text itself
calls readers’ attention to its narrator’s failings. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “second
story” in novels is apt here. Bakhtin argues that in every novel, “Behind the narrator’s
story we read a second story, the author’s story; he is the one who tells us how the
narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself” (314). Whether a
second story set forth by the author or one inherent to the text itself as a type of what
Fredric Jameson terms the “political unconscious,” My Ántonia’s unsettling depiction of
Jim’s representation of others demonstrates the fictions inherent to a system of
representation that purportedly gives everyone freedom and a meaningful voice, yet at the
same time operates to oppress and exclude large segments of the populace. What we see
in Cather’s novel is on the one hand the way Jim Burden troubles his era’s formulation of
Anglo-Americanness and opens up its boundaries, yet on the other how he finally re-
imposes new limits upon American identity by representing immigrants such as Ántonia
and Lena as “white” and “American” while closing off the voices of African Americans
like Blind d’Arnault and denying Native Americans any voice at all.

21
See, for instance, the work of Ammons, Walter Benn Michaels and Mike Fischer.

56
Further evidence of there being a second story behind the one Jim represents to
readers surfaces during a scene where a character with the initials “W.C.” undermines his
narrative. Everywhere in My Ántonia there are fissures that expose Jim’s faulty narrative
and his inability to adequately represent the other characters, but the Wick Cutter episode
is especially significant, as it leads to a literal fracturing of the text. After the Harling
family asks Ántonia to stop going to the Vannis’ dance pavilion, she asserts her freedom
and leaves their employ to work for Cutter, a notoriously philandering moneylender. Not
long after, Cutter and his wife go to Omaha for a few days and leave Ántonia to look
after their home. Ántonia tells Jim and his grandmother how “strangely” Cutter has been
acting lately, and, given the moneylender’s reputation, they fear he wants more from
Ántonia than help around the house. To assuage her concerns, Jim agrees to take
Ántonia’s place watching over the Cutters’ home and sleeping in her bed. A rather
remarkable scene ensues, where Jim physically represents Ántonia in a way that echoes
his more metaphoric representation of her throughout the text, not only standing for her
as her advocate and voice, but also standing in for her physical person – only to be
mistaken for Ántonia by Cutter, who has snuck back in an attempt to molest her. A
scuffle follows, and Jim escapes despite being injured. While critics have focused on
everything from the castration overtones in Wick Cutter’s name, to Jim’s gender-
bending, to the shame and fear of homosexuality raised by this incident, what I find so
interesting about it is that Jim’s attempt to represent Ántonia in a concrete, physical sense
fails miserably. Instead, Jim is stunned and bruised, both physically and emotionally.
The irony here is that an episode featuring a character with the initials “W.C.” exposes
Jim’s inability to physically represent Ántonia, and raises questions about his more
57
metaphoric representative abilities as well. It is as if Cather herself is directly intervening
in Jim’s narrative through a surrogate “W.C.” and accentuating the instability of Jim’s
already tenuous position as Ántonia’s representative voice in the text.
The gender implications of the Cutter incident are also notable. Following
Cutter’s assault, Jim is reminded by his grandmother that they should be grateful he was
in Ántonia’s place, because he was at least somewhat able to defend himself and
therefore spared Ántonia harm. Jim, though, feels “no particular gratitude” (197).
Instead, he relates that “I felt I never wanted to see her again. I hated her almost as much
as I hated Cutter. She had let me in for all this disgustingess” (197). The victim of first
an attempted rape and then a beating, Jim’s consequent repulsed reaction to Ántonia is
suggestive in that it shows a fundamental aversion to femininity, or at least to the
potential hazards of being female – “all this disgustingness.” It also demonstrates his
response to things beyond his control, to people and events he cannot represent in the
fashion he desires. His firsthand experience of what it is like to be Ántonia emphasizes
his feeling that other people – and especially women – are more safely represented in his
mind and memory than in reality.
22
So traumatic is the Cutter episode for Jim, in fact,
that at its conclusion his narrative literally breaks off, and does not pick up again until his

22
Cather’s lesbianism has been much bruited about by critics, many of whom focus on the male “masks”
she often dons to tell her tales – whether first person narrators such as Jim Burden or third person points of
view such as Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor’s House. Sharon O’Brien, for instance, argues that “Jim
Burden is more the author’s mask than a fully imagined male character, so in the novel’s conclusion we are
presented with a woman’s construction of another woman’s meaning, with Cather again resorting to
camouflage when revealing her deepest preoccupations” (“Mothers” 347). Judith Fetterley takes a
somewhat similar approach when she asserts that Jim’s hostility to Black Hawk men in general and Mr.
Harling in particular, “though unintelligible in a male, makes perfect sense in a female who recognises in
patriarchal privilege both her own future as the object of personal tyranny and a possibility of power from
which she is excluded” (“My Ántonia” 416). Such “gender-bending,” regardless of how one might want to
read it into Cather’s persona, is taken to an intriguing extreme in the Wick Cutter episode. Here, a male
“W.C.” attempts to rape Jim, who is impersonating a woman – with a resulting rupture of Jim’s narrative.

58
first year in college. Having failed to physically stand for Ántonia, Jim responds by
temporarily excising her from his narrative.
Following his beating by Wick Cutter, Jim distances himself from Ántonia, and
attempts to reassert control over his narrative by representing yet another character’s life
– albeit from a safer, less concretely physical standpoint. In the subsequent section of the
novel, which is titled “Lena Lingard,” Jim delineates his experiences at college and the
time he spends with Lena in Lincoln. It is rather conspicuous that in a novel titled My
Ántonia an entire section would be titled “Lena Lingard.” Indeed, Lena Lingard’s
position in the novel is particularly provocative, and poses a difficult challenge to Jim’s
representation. Her life and story have long troubled Jim, particularly her sexuality that
so infatuates men young and old: from the farmer, Ole Benson, who loses his head over
her and whose wife threatens Lena with violence, to the cashier, Sylvester Lovett, who
“was daft about her, and everyone knew it,” and only “escapes” Lena’s lure by running
away with a propertied widow six years his senior (162). Jim himself is hardly immune
to Lena’s physical allure. During their childhood, he considered her “something wild,”
whose bare arms and legs, “in spite of constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous
whiteness which somehow made her seem more undressed than other girls who went
scantily clad” (133). Several times in Jim’s youth he dreamed of lying in a harvest-field
and being approached by Lena, “in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand,
and she was flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness about her” (179). In
this dream, Lena tells Jim that now that everyone is gone, she can kiss him as much as
she likes. Between the violence inherent to the reaping-hook and Lena’s sexuality and its
lure for him, readers encounter here a portrait of a young woman Jim finds tantalizing,
59
yet above all disturbing and potentially dangerous, a woman he works diligently to
contain within the “Lena Lingard” section of his narrative.
23
Lena, though, is less
containable, less representable than Ántonia in the type of narrative Jim wishes to
present.
A good example of the disconnect between Jim’s desired representation of Lena
and Lena herself occurs when Jim’s academic adviser, Gaston Cleric, persuades him to
leave Lincoln and follow him to Harvard. Jim convinces himself that his leaving will be
a good thing for Lena, “that if she had not me to play with, she would probably marry and
secure her future” (227). Never apparently realizing that Lena’s investment in him is less
than he imagines, Jim encourages her to marry one of her several suitors instead of
wasting time with him, and he is shocked when she claims she has no plans to ever
marry. Despite the fact that Lena has voiced her resistance to marriage on numerous
previous occasions, Jim appears unwilling to believe her. “Nonsense, Lena,” he
responds. “That’s what girls say, but you know better” (228). In spite of Jim’s
preconceptions, and perhaps those of many readers as well, Lena is not interested in
prescribed gender roles. Family life, she declares, is “all being under someone’s thumb,”
especially for a woman, and she prefers to be accountable to no one (228-29). After
marriage, she tells him, all men “begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and

23
Jim’s wistful declaration that he often wished he “could have this flattering dream about Ántonia,” but
never did, may in part embody a form of sexual/romantic desire he suppresses throughout his narrative
(179). At the same time, this desire is also a longing for a safer, less transgressive femininity. The fact that
Jim never does have a similar dream about Ántonia is important. She may transgress and in so doing
disappoint and frustrate Jim, but he is always able to circle back around her transgressions, to recapture her
within his ideal, to represent his Ántonia to readers in the end – even if it takes him a separation of twenty
years to do so. Unlike Lena, Ántonia would never come to Jim “flushed like the dawn,” in a short skirt and
bearing a potentially deadly weapon, even in a dream.

60
want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be
accountable to nobody” (228). In contrast to the young woman Jim wants Lena to be, the
real Lena turns traditional ideas of femininity on their head by becoming a dressmaker.
Her success, Jim relates, “puzzled” him, because “[s]he was so easy-going; had none of
the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business” (219). As Sarah
Gardam notes, Lena employs “the conventional female need for adornment (to garner the
objectifying male gaze) in order to make a living,” and takes on “one feminized role to
escape another – the role of becoming somebody’s wife” (243-44). Unlike her dream
counterpart, the real Lena doesn’t approach Jim with a reaping-hook, and her refusal of
the fetters both Jim and U.S. society attempt to foist upon her further demonstrates just
how limited Jim’s narrative is in its scope. Purporting to be open-minded, he closes off
Lena from readers, much as he does with Ántonia throughout his narrative. He consigns
these women, in fact, to the same type of romanticized visions and limited roles set forth
for women not only in the late nineteenth century United States, but which also persisted
in the early twentieth century when Cather wrote – even as women themselves were
breaking boundaries and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was imminent.
Never is Jim’s conflicted fascination with and desire to include Lena, Ántonia,
and the other hired girls, while at the same time constraining them and their stories within
his own representative vision, plainer than in a brief passage immediately following
Lena’s first visit to him while he is at college in Lincoln. After Lena departs his rooms,
Jim begins to wax rhapsodic. “How I loved to hear her laugh again!” he exclaims.
“When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing – the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys” (213). From what begins as a seemingly innocuous bout of
61
nostalgia, Jim swiftly re-imagines the hired girls, claiming that it suddenly “came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of
Virgil [which he has been studying]. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry” (213). Throughout Jim’s narrative, the hired girls have been “my
country girls” (160; emphasis added). Now he describes them, in what is surely a forced
parallel, as bearing a vital relation to Virgil’s poetry, a parallel he emphasizes by quoting
a line from the Georgics: “Optima dies … prima fugit” (“The best day passes first”).
This “revelation” is to Jim “inestimably precious” (213). But upon closer examination,
the connection he draws here does not hold up. If the hired girls are muses, they inspire
Jim’s imagination only in a narrow fashion. As Blanche Gelfant has noted, Jim’s parallel
is strikingly selective, if not specious, given that he “quote[s] only the last line” from the
passage of the Georgics he selects. In translation, the passage reads:
So, while the herd rejoices in its youth
Release the males and breed the cattle early,
Supply one generation from another.
For mortal kind, the best day passes first. (qtd. in Gelfant 309)

When we consider the larger implications here, the link Jim makes between the hired
girls and poetry becomes not only reductive, but also rather insidious. Lena, Ántonia,
and their fellow hired girls are included in Jim’s narrative and his America, but it is a
space wherein he cannot comprehend a life for them outside of marriage, a life aside from
breeding and raising families. Gelfant contends that this (mis)connection is particularly
problematic where Lena is concerned: “If anything, the allusion is downright
inappropriate, for Virgil’s poem extols pastoral life, but Lena, tired of drudgery, wants to
get away from the farm” (309). Ironically, although Jim’s representation of these women
62
is steeped in his metaphoric re-imagining of them as poetic Muses, at the same time the
future he envisions for them is one grounded in the physical, in a limiting view of women
as finally being child-bearers and mothers. In this light, the view held by critics such as
Susan Rosowski that the “Lena Lingard” section of the novel “instruct[s] Jim in the
mutuality of friendship as an alternative to dominance and possession” (87), seems to me
a problematic misreading. By contrast, Jim’s experiences in this section of My Ántonia
appear to reinforce his feeling that other people, and especially women, are better
represented as he sees them within the confines of his vision.
Returning to Pitkin’s definition of representation, Jim’s narrative is nothing less
than a re-presentation – a romanticization of the America of his childhood that never
quite existed as he presents it, a displacement in which fact and fiction blur. Readers see
this when Jim finishes his reverie by stating that his “old dream about Lena coming
across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like a memory of an actual
experience” (213). Dreams, imaginings, and fictions thus become reality for Jim, his
mind a place where the people he knows are “quickened,” as he puts it, where they are
“so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere
else, or how” (207). Demaree Peck has argued that while Jim is “putatively a lawyer for
one of the great Western railways,” he “aims not to advance the progress of civilization
and industry but to develop the country as a romantic idea” (135). The “romantic idea”
of America Jim develops, though it incorporates immigrants, is not far removed from the
Virgilic patria that is the national narrative of United States history – a patria that, as
Mike Fischer notes, has more in common with “the brutal imperialism recorded in the
63
Aeneid” than the pastoral Georgics (51).
24
Although Jim’s narrative is not particularly
“brutal,” it serves as a paradigmatic example of the appropriative and often oppressive
nature of representation. Jim remaps the boundaries of Americanness by attempting to
represent the other characters within his own vision – all the characters, that is, of
European descent. Yet his vision extends only so far, for not only is Jim’s inclusiveness
exclusive, but it also limits even those he includes to his imaginative reconstructions of
them, particularly the women he is so drawn to yet disturbed by.
The closing section of Cather’s novel drives home the constructed and misleading
nature of Jim’s representation. While Jim was in college, Ántonia ran off with Larry
Donovan, a vagabond train conductor and womanizer, and bore him an illegitimate child.
When Donovan abandons her, she returns to Black Hawk in ignominy. So disappointed
is Jim that, aside from one brief visit to Black Hawk during the subsequent years, he
“tried to shut Ántonia out” of his life and mind (238). Even after she returns to her
family’s farm as an unwed mother, Jim cannot, he says, “forgive her for becoming an
object of pity” (234). Years pass and Jim, despite making frequent trips west for
business, does not visit Ántonia. “Perhaps it was cowardice,” he admits. “I did not want
to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it” (255). Instead, he endeavors to represent
to readers the “real” Ántonia throughout his narrative, his Ántonia, an Ántonia the idea of

24
Furthering this notion of the novel’s imperialist undercurrents, Fischer argues “it is not only the history
of women on the Plains that is being ‘rewritten’ by Jim but also the conquest of the Plains Indians that is
being rewritten by Willa Cather” (51). I will not directly discuss how Jim’s representation applies to
Native Americans in Cather’s novel quite simply because there are no actual Native American characters in
My Ántonia. Both Lucenti and Mike Fischer offer excellent analyses of this topic, examining the
ramifications of a novel concerned with the history of the Great Plains that largely disregards the original
Native American inhabitants. Not to mention a novel set largely in a town named “Black Hawk.”
William Handley also notes a link between the Aeneid and Jim, who “shares Virgil’s Aeneas’
burden in transmitting culture in book VIII of the Aeneid” (142).

64
whom “is a part of my mind …” (251). When Jim finally returns to Black Hawk and
visits Ántonia after twenty years, she has ironically returned to the sort of masculine farm
life that once seemed so transgressive to Jim. Now, however, despite her illegitimate
child, she is married and lives respectably on an outlying farm. Ántonia is once more
“safe” for Jim, containable within his imagination. No longer a girl made “irresponsible”
by music, dance, and desire, she is now, in Jim’s view, “the impulse,” and her husband,
Cuzak, “the corrective” (278). Ultimately, Jim’s final representation of Ántonia is as
containable and docile, her foreignness, femininity, and sexuality bounded.
Even this late in the story, Jim persists in re-presenting Ántonia within his own
vision, within his own story, no matter the evidence proffered by the woman before him.
When he finally visits her and her husband, Cuzak, after twenty years, his first
impression of his former friend is of “a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly
brown hair a little grizzled,” a woman with few remaining teeth (258). This first sight of
her after so much time, Jim admits, “was a shock” (258). As the visit becomes more
comfortable, though, he begins to recapture his Ántonia in this worn, tired farmwife.
“She was there,” he relates, “in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not
diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so
well” (258). Though worn, she “still had that something which fires the imagination,
could still stop one’s breath” (274). In Jim’s vision, she becomes an Earth Mother figure
whom he somewhat absurdly concludes, “lent herself to immemorial human attitudes
which we recognized by instinct as universal and true” (274). Ántonia is, he continues,
“a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races” (275).

65
Yet although Jim represents Ántonia as an Earth Mother, a figure whose very
function is predicated upon the physical and on the body, it is as a strangely de-
sexualized one. Indeed, as David Stouck points out, Ántonia’s husband, Cuzak,
poses no masculine threat. He is described as a “crumpled little man” without
much force, and Jim soon calls him ‘Papa’ with the rest. In Cuzak’s relation to
Ántonia there is no suggestion of sex: theirs is a friendship in which he is simply
“the instrument of Ántonia’s special mission” of procreation. (56-57)

As I have argued throughout this essay, Jim’s fascination with the transgressive and the
sexual is always counterbalanced by his desire to control and contain the often
uncontrollable physicality of those he represents. In Cuzak, then, Jim finds a seemingly
perfect medium to balance out his desired re-presentation of Ántonia.
Several critics take Jim’s Earth Mother vision as a positive empowering one.
O’Brien, for example, argues that “although the Earth Mother can be a limiting
stereotype, the image of a woman as possessing mythic powers of fertility and nurturance
could be interpreted as Cather’s re-claiming and reworking of a male-perpetuated
stereotype which she uses to enhance rather than limit woman’s dignity and stature”
(“Mothers” 347). Similarly, Rosowski reads this scene as one where Ántonia claims
some degree of authority and power, as a signal that “In Cather’s version of the Fall,
Ántonia disappeared from Jim Burden’s text only to return independently to claim her
language and to demonstrate its power” (92). Such readings seem overly idealistic
interpretations of the novel’s conclusion, however. What language is it, exactly, that
Ántonia claims? It is Jim, not Ántonia herself, who depicts her as a mythic Earth Mother.
It is Jim, not Ántonia, whose language has power here, a fact driven home when Ántonia
confesses that Jim’s surprise visit has so stirred her up that she cannot think of what to
66
say to him. She can’t think what to say to Jim because, as she tells him, “I’ve forgot my
English so. I don’t often talk it any more” (261). To converse with Jim, Ántonia is
literally forced to speak his language. Whatever claims Ántonia appears to make are in
the end confined within Jim’s narrative, within his mind and his memory. Demaree Peck
is much closer to the mark, I think, in arguing that “Far from offering Jim a sobering
vision of reality, however, the last section of the novel functions as a wish fulfillment that
affirms his memories and dreams” (153). Surely, Ántonia would never dress herself in
the apotheosized Earth Mother trappings in which Jim and some critics adorn her.
25
The
final vision of Ántonia Jim presents to readers here parallels his analogizing of the hired
girls to Virgilian muses – and has as little basis in reality.
Despite Jim’s attempts to project his Ántonia to readers, the woman we see at the
novel’s close is both geographically and culturally removed from the nation into which
he wants to incorporate her. She is not merely a farmwife, but one whose family lives in
a remote portion of Nebraska, “in one of the loneliest countries in the world” (285). The
Cuzak farm is so remote, in fact, that Jim has to “set off with an open buggy and a fairly
good livery team” just to find it (256). It is striking that Jim disregards – or willfully
ignores – just how separated Ántonia, Cuzak, and their children appear to be from their
fellow “Americans.” Not only has Ántonia herself “forgot” her English, but her family

25
Although Jim represents Ántonia as an Earth Mother, a figure whose very function is predicated upon the
physical and on the body, it is as a strangely de-sexualized one. Indeed, as David Stouck points out,
Ántonia’s husband, Cuzak, “poses no masculine threat. He is described as a ‘crumpled little man’ without
much force, and Jim soon calls him ‘Papa’ with the rest. In Cuzak’s relation to Ántonia there is no
suggestion of sex: theirs is a friendship in which he is simply ‘the instrument of Ántonia’s special mission’
of procreation” (56-57). As I have argued throughout this essay, Jim’s fascination with the transgressive
and the sexual is always counterbalanced by his desire to control and contain the often uncontrollable
physicality of those he represents. In Ántonia and Cuzak Jim finds a seemingly perfect medium for his
desired re-presentation.

67
always speaks Bohemian at home, and the Cuzak children do not learn English until they
begin school. While opponents of Americanization such as Horace Kallen argued against
educational moves that privileged English language acquisition at the expense of
immigrants’ native tongues, Jim himself is deeply exasperated throughout his narrative
when he remembers moments in his and Ántonia’s youth when she “loses” her English –
when she, in short, fails to Americanize in the way he desires. The relative absence of
English from the Cuzak home thus must be aggravating for him, but he glosses over it.
Nor does he appear to realize that his final representation of Ántonia as an Earth Mother
further stresses the Cuzaks’ isolation, how removed this “rich mine of life” is from the
“America” in which he has struggled to include her. She remains in her way nearly as far
outside the Americanness of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Jim’s
depiction of Blind d’Arnault renders the African American pianist.
Ántonia’s story about the tramp is a salient place to return to here at the close of
my argument. Just prior to her telling the tramp’s tale, Jim describes how Ántonia often
led the Harling children in “acted charades” and “costume balls” (141) when Mr. Harling
– whom he depicts as a rigid exemplar of paternal order and authority – is absent.
Charades and costume balls are by their nature transgressive, drawing as they do on the
carnival tradition Bakhtin describes as offering “liberation from the prevailing truth and
from the established order” (Rabelais 10) – a point emphasized by young Sally Harling’s
always dressing like a boy during the balls (141). The stories Ántonia relates to the
Harling children and the games they play are thus destabilizing and escapist; they both
allow the participants a space of release and undermine the paternal, national social order
represented by Mr. Harling. Equally important is the fact that Ántonia is the one who
68
tells this tale of the tramp’s suicide, a tale tied to national concerns with destabilization.
Considering Jim’s propensity for editorializing and re-presenting people and events to fit
his desires, one might expect him to say something about the tramp’s opinions and his
concerns about a swiftly fading “Americy,” or to at least interject himself somehow into
Ántonia’s tale as he has done throughout the novel. Instead, Jim is curiously silent.
Once Ántonia finishes telling the story to the Harlings, he merely describes the “basic
harmony” between her and Mrs. Harling, nothing more. It is as if the dangerous
implications of the tramp’s tale – implications more frightening than play charades and
costume balls – demand that Jim remind not only readers but also himself that in spite of
Ántonia’s immigrant background and transgressive behavior, she, too, is an “American.”
The only way he finds to do this is to work throughout his narrative to re-present her to
readers as someone and something different than who she is.
While Jim’s America is not to be confused with the suicidal tramp’s “Americy” or
Americanization ideology that excluded immigrants such as Ántonia, Lena, and the other
hired girls, even his revised version of the national narrative is one riddled with gaps.
Although he appears to sympathize with the hired girls, his depictions of them are
frequently reductive, and his representation of these characters grows even more
troubling when we consider the holes within the contradictory ideas of America and
Americanness he constructs in the novel. While Jim’s endeavors to represent Ántonia,
Lena, and the other immigrant girls as “Americans” do offer a counter to the
contemporaneous racializing of such immigrants as not-white and not-American, this
same representation enables Jim to re-present these people as he wants them to be instead
of as their true selves. This is especially relevant given that Cather was writing on the
69
eve of the Nineteenth Amendment and amidst the intensification of already widespread
Americanization ideology following the onset of World War I. Her novel serves as an
eloquent example of the complications and pitfalls inherent to the process of
representation, and illuminates how representation itself constitutes a re-presentation of a
subject’s voice and story that has more to do with a representative’s vision than those
represented. In demonstrating the fictions of representation, My Ántonia places the
responsibility for liberty and justice squarely upon the reader. It is up to us as readers,
the text seems to say, to recognize and work to end the violence of an in/exclusive
representation.

70
Chapter 2
“Like Driving Your Car with the Brakes On”:
Dangerous Drivers, the Melting Pot, and Representations of Americanness in F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy
Run?

Shortly after Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby (1925), has begun his romantic involvement with Jordan Baker, he describes her
as a bad driver because she “passes so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a
button on one man’s coat” (63). For the most part, Jordan has been glossed over by
critics, written off as being little more than a facsimile of Daisy Buchanan or another
particle of the “foul dust” floating in Gatsby’s wake, and her centrality to the novel’s
metaphoric scheme of good and bad drivers has been largely ignored.
26
In a novel brim-
full of car crashes and bad drivers, however, one of the major problems facing readers is
whether to take Nick Carraway at his word or to consider whether he too might be a
metaphoric “bad driver.” Jordan – whose name Fitzgerald drew from two popular
automobiles of the era, the flashy Jordan Playboy and the Baker Electric – speaks directly
to this issue. Although Nick labels her a bad driver, I contend that she embodies a
pervasive strain of self-reflexivity in the text and that she is, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms,
a sharply dialogic voice who criticizes Nick’s narrative and the moral “brakes” upon
which it is predicated. Jordan may be of the same social and class order as Nick and Tom

26
See, for instance, Paul Lauter, who views Jordan as a “pat reduplication of Daisy” whose “presence
eliminates the possibility of conflict between Gatsby and Nick” (284). Judith Fetterley falls into a similar
trap, arguing that “Nick’s relation to Jordan is a less complex version of his relation to Daisy” (87).
Fitzgerald himself seemed to anticipate such views. In letter to Max Perkins dated December 20, 1924, he
laments that “Jordan of course was a great idea … but she fades out” (A Life in Letters 91-92). To my
knowledge, Beth McCoy is the only critic of The Great Gatsby to offer as sustained reading of Jordan. In
her dissertation, McCoy examines what she terms Jordan’s “color fluctuation” and the ways Jordan’s
bodily signifiers destabilize notions of identity in the novel.

71
and Daisy Buchanan, but as a New Woman of the 1920s she frequently challenges the
traditions and value systems of that order. In so doing, she exposes the fallacies behind
two of the major ideological tenets of the era: what we might term the U.S.’s emerging
myth of motoring that linked automobiles to such core “American” ideals as
individuality, freedom, and autonomy, and the myth of the melting pot that promised
inclusion in “America” and “Americanness” to immigrants and outsiders.
Budd Schulberg’s 1941 Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? – a text that
in many ways begs comparison to The Great Gatsby
27
– presents readers with a similarly
structured tale wherein Al Manheim recounts Sammy Glick’s rise from copy boy to
movie producer. Like Nick Carraway, Al has a love interest, Kit Sargent, whose role in
What Makes Sammy Run? is in several ways analogous to Jordan Baker’s in Gatsby. Kit
too sees more clearly than the narrator of her novel and frequently undercuts his
representation of Sammy’s story. Through Jordan and Kit, these novels draw readers’
attention to a national mindset that, although fascinated with the idea of self-creation,
views men like Gatsby and Sammy suspiciously. This mindset is further complicated by
the revivification of the myth of the melting pot within a cultural and political
environment that frequently finds racial and ethnic intermingling disturbing and anxiety-
inducing, and which regularly viewed the success-at-all-costs mentality driving Gatsby’s
and Sammy’s pursuit of Americanness as transgressive and borderline criminal. Critics
have not often treated either Fitzgerald’s novel in particular as overly subversive, nor

27
Thematically and formally, the correspondences between The Great Gatsby and What Makes Sammy
Run? are striking. Charles Hearn has noted that “Schulberg approaches the riddle of Sammy Glick as
Fitzgerald approaches Gatsby – by characterizing him as both an individual and a figure in a myth much
larger than himself” (187). Less kindly, Chip Rhodes argues that Sammy’s “narrative structure is baldly a
reproduction of Fitzgerald’s heralded Gatsby structure” (58).

72
have they given much space to either Jordan’s or Kit’s impact upon these texts, so I am
framing here an argument that is somewhat at odds with many standard reads of these
novels. Exploring the metaphoric system of brakes, morality, and good and bad “drivers”
laid out in Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s texts, I argue that part of the “greatness” of
Gatsby is the way it highlights the disjunction between American ideals and reality.
Schulberg’s novel, by contrast, not only finally co-opts the threatening voice of its Jewish
protagonist, but Kit’s dissonant one as well, and in the end functions much like the
melting pot myth it critiques. Looking at Gatsby and Sammy from such a standpoint and
in conjunction with one another illuminates the ways these texts engaged with early
twentieth-century political and cultural questions of representation and demarcations of
who was and who was not “American.” Their differences are equally revealing,
especially when it comes to the outcomes of Nick’s and Al’s relationships with Jordan
and Kit.
In this chapter I am particularly interested in Jordan’s and Kit’s textual and
contextual implications, from the automotive significance of Jordan’s name, to the
seeming “masculinity” of both women, to the interconnections they draw between Nick’s
and Al’s representations and a national narrative that promulgates mythic melting pots
and links automobility to freedom yet at the same time delimits who can “melt” and what
constitutes a “good driver.” Henry Ford, who I will touch upon shortly, plays a
particularly significant role within the context of my argument, both because of his
tremendous influence upon the American automotive industry and his stance as an early
champion of the melting pot myth that inspired Jimmy Gatz’s and Shmelka Glickstein’s
desire – and belief in their ability – to remake themselves as new Americans. While it
73
would be a stretch to call either Jordan or Kit their author’s mouthpiece, giving greater
attention to their roles in The Great Gatsby and What Makes Sammy Run? usefully opens
up what Frederic Jameson has termed the political unconscious and the way it operates in
these novels. Reading Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s novels in this manner exposes an
ideological crisis inherent to their narratives, a crisis that helps us understand the terms
and stakes of the stories Nick and Al frame for readers: namely, what it means for these
narrators and readers alike to be both fascinated and unsettled by the tales of Jay Gatsby
and Sammy Glick, a pair of racial outsiders
28
and class-climbers who attempt to “melt” in
a U.S. proliferating with good and bad drivers. Benjamin Schreier has recently argued
that “Through Nick, Fitzgerald’s novel dramatizes a naïve longing for interpretive
security,” and that when “[i]nterpreted through Nick’s insecure skepticism rather than
through Gatsby’s deluded optimism,” The Great Gatsby ultimately undermines both
identity constructs such as “Americanness” and the power structure that generates belief
in them (167; 155).
29
Centering my argument on Jordan’s impact on Nick’s narrative in

28
Modern day critics often think of race in terms of black and white in an American context, or, broadening
this outlook, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native American, etc. However, from 1890 to 1945, the term
“race” encompassed numerous ethnic groups now considered white, but which at the time were seen as
racially distinct from the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic “white” race: the Irish, Italians, Germans, Slavs, Finns,
Jews, etc. As I argue throughout this chapter, part of Gatsby’s and Sammy’s difficulties in their pursuit of
Americanness is that their outsider status would have been emphasized by their racial backgrounds:
Jewishness in Sammy’s case, and an ambiguous, possibly German origin in Gatsby’s.

29
Schreier offers one of the more provocative recent reading of The Great Gatsby, in essence challenging
the work of critics such as Walter Benn Michaels and Betsy Nies by claiming their critique of race and
American identity “ends up reifying a variety of presumably characteristic raced American identities in
place of a presumably characteristic unraced (if surreptitiously white) one, reinforcing the very formations
whose genealogy it purportedly seeks to unearth” (153-54). Schreier’s contention that other critics fail in
their assessment of the novel because talking in terms of “America” and “America identity” equates to
buying into those concepts is debatable. More compelling is his notion that although the novel “rehearses
the desire that identity serve as an interpretive key to America, the book insists on that desire’s frustration
and fundamental inconsequence,” which speaks to my ideas about how the text gets beyond Nick’s
narrative (163).

74
Gatsby and Kit’s on Al’s in What Makes Sammy Run?, I push Schreier’s ideas of Nick’s
“insecure skepticism” and “naïve longing for interpretive security” to consider the
ramifications of Nick and Al themselves as conflicted participants in Gatsby’s and
Sammy’s stories – not to mention America’s.
For despite their interest in Gatsby’s and Sammy’s pursuits of the American
dream, Nick and Al are finally most concerned with order and the maintenance of the
status quo, a concern made plain in both texts’ metaphoric conflation of good and bad
drivers, “brakes,” and morality. This conflation is driven home in What Makes Sammy
Run? when Sammy comments on Al’s censorious view of life by telling him that “Going
through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on” (63). The
connection Schulberg draws here between purported morality and driving with one’s
brakes on is paralleled in The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway tells readers that he is
“slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires …” (63-64). The
implication in both novels is that for Al and Nick these “brakes” are necessary cultural
mores, consciences they have that grant them the right to not only relate Gatsby’s and
Sammy’s stories, to represent them to readers and speak for them, but to judge them as
well. In claiming internal brakes and purporting to be good drivers, Nick and Al
differentiate between themselves and the novels’ protagonists, and intimate that Gatsby
and Sammy have lost their own brakes somewhere along the way in their endeavors to
melt away their origins and become American – or perhaps these outsiders never had
them to begin with. Jordan and Kit, however, question this dubious outlook and
illuminate its complicity with a national mythos that invokes freedom, individuality, and
transformative possibilities, yet finally denies these same possibilities. They demonstrate
75
that the narrators are themselves just as bad drivers as everyone else, in spite of their
supposed brakes and judgment, and that in the end Nick’s and Al’s essentially
conservative outlooks place a barrier between them and the protagonists.
Assertive, shrewd, and driven, Jordan and Kit represent a transgressive early
twentieth century femininity less willing to accommodate itself to the prescribed roles
into which women such as Daisy Buchanan are inevitably pigeon-holed. Yet at a time
when women’s roles – work, familial, and political – were in contest, Jordan, Kit, and
their fellow New Women’s more sexual, public form of femininity produced anxieties
throughout the nation, as it seemed to threaten traditional gender roles and the U.S.’s
established social order. The flipside of independence and autonomy, the New Woman
quickly discovered, was that she was frequently forced to defend her behavior and right
to freedom and autonomy. Driving and the right to automobility became a central issue
(and metaphor) in these debates, as the New Woman was assailed by both men and other
women who viewed female motorists as threats. As historian Virginia Scharff relates,
forums such as Motor magazine’s 1914 “Do Women Make Good Drivers?” were
common during the early decades of the twentieth century and were perceived as
addressing a vital issue (31). The automotive roots of Jordan Baker’s name thus present a
good starting point for considering both Jordan’s and Kit’s transgressive roles in Nick’s
and Al’s narratives, as well as the metaphoric conflation of driving and morality (both
personal and national) underlying the narrators’ representations of Gatsby and Sammy
As a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, Fitzgerald would
undoubtedly have noticed the auto advertisements run in its pages as he worked on The
Great Gatsby in 1924. He also would have noticed how automakers were increasingly
76
targeting women consumers during the twenties. The Jordan Company’s advertisements
in particular were notable in this regard, especially its “Somewhere West of Laramie” ad.
This advertisement, which depicts a woman driving an open Jordan Playboy touring car
and racing a rider on horseback, appears to champion the adventuresome and rather
transgressive femininity of the New Woman. As Laura Behling notes, the Jordan ad
was directed to an altogether different type of woman than most automobile
advertisements dared even to admit existed. Independent, strong, and
masculine in work habits, and not given to the traditional modes of feminine
appearance which dictated an absence of natural color on her face, the woman
pictured in the speeding roadster leaves man and feminine tradition in a cloud
of dust. (22)

Yet the freedom promised to women here is more symbolic than concrete. The Jordan
Company might tell female readers that “The truth is – the Playboy was built for her,” but
it adds the caveat: “she loves the cross of the wild and the tame” (Scharff 131). The
message, in short, of the “Somewhere West of Laramie” ad is that while the femininity of
the New Woman might seem alluring (or threatening, depending on one’s standpoint), it
is finally docile and controllable, it is “wild” yet “tame.” By comparison, the Baker
Company from which Jordan draws her surname made no pretense about women’s roles
in its Baker Electric advertisements. The electric car, which only offered a limited
amount of mobility and freedom to begin with, was marketed largely as a “woman’s
vehicle,” one useful for making social calls or family outings, but not much else. The
core message of Baker’s marketing strategy was that although the automobile might be
reshaping everyday life in the early twentieth century, gender roles would remain the
same. By combing the specific names “Jordan” and “Baker,” Fitzgerald points to the
paradox of automobility during this time period: that on the one hand it appeared to offer
77
freedom and autonomy, but on the other hand it took part in limiting that same freedom
and autonomy in the national imagination, especially when it came to women. Jordan
Baker may be sporty and transgressive, but ultimately her range is limited within Nick’s
and the nation’s narratives – or so Nick would have readers believe. A similar unease
about gender roles frequently surfaces in the 1930s of What Makes Sammy Run? – such
as Al’s discomfort when he first meets Kit. “Because we really haven’t learned to take
female superiority in stride,” he relates, “I resented it” (66). “We,” of course, meaning
men. As we shall see, however, these New Women will prove beyond Nick’s and Al’s
powers to “tame.”
It is hardly surprising that early twentieth century automakers both targeted
women as consumers and downplayed the threat of female motorists by reifying
traditional gender paradigms. That Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company
participated in this behavior is more notable, though, given that numerous commentators
past and present have lauded Ford for the “democratization of the automobile,” for
transforming the car from a luxury item for the rich to a part of everyday American life.
So pronounced was the impact of the Ford Model T, in fact, that “with the Ford
automobile, America became a nation on wheels” (Heitmann 44). However much Ford
did to make the automobile available across class lines, however, his approach to women
and automobility was more restrained.
30
Much like the ads run by the Jordan Company,
the booklets the Ford Motor Company published targeting female consumers promised
“It’s woman’s day” and declared that “she is no longer a ‘shut in,’” yet simultaneously

30
Scharff notes that in the very year Ford introduced his Model T, 1908, he also bought an electric car for
his wife Clara which he deemed more suitable to her needs (53).

78
subverted this freedom (Behling 14). Deborah Clarke describes how the 1912 “The
Woman and the Ford” pamphlet, for instance,
deftly dances between offering women what has largely been identified as
masculine power and insisting that the car will make a woman “more the
woman” ... There is no reason to fear this new technology, suggests the
automaker, because women, though they may indulge themselves by playing
with it, will remain women; as long as women are holding down the fort of
femininity, of home, the “new order” will retain the stability of the old. (15)

Following World War I, the automobile industry became the largest industry in the nation
and nearly half of the cars sold in the United States were Fords. During these same years
Ford ads were gendering cars as female and expounding on their feminine traits: “she”
was pleasant, graceful, attractive, and easy to handle (Behling 14). So while Ford may
have been democratizing the automobile, his advertising drove home that women’s
access to the freedom and equality of this democratization was more illusory than
tangible.
Indeed, aside from making the automobile widely available, Ford cannot exactly
be termed an advocate of democratic principles. In fact, his vision of democracy was
underscored by a deep-rooted need for control. Enticing his employees with
unprecedented wages, profit-sharing, and the benefits of the “American way,” Ford also
demanded conformity. Famously, he established the $5.00-a-day wage and a profit-
sharing plan for his workers – a wage he did not initially offer his female employees,
because he “expect[ed] the young ladies to get married” (Scharff 54). At the same time,
he also created both the Ford Sociological Department and the Ford English School. The
Sociological Department was comprised of a force of more than 150 “investigators.”
These investigators, who later became known as “advisers,” were
79
an odd hybrid of social worker and detective, venturing into the crowded back
streets of the city with a driver, an interpreter, and a sheaf of printed
questionnaires. Their job was to establish standards of proper behavior
throughout the company. (Baldwin 38)

These standards were based on a proselytizing form of Americanization popular at the
time, and Ford used his Ford English School to indoctrinate his workers in “good habits.”
However, as Neil Baldwin notes,
If a Ford worker was determined by the Sociological Department investigators to
be diverging from the path of righteousness in ways either explicit or implicit, he
was offered the opportunity for rehabilitation so that he could be “lifted up” to the
requirements of the company and his “fellow-men.” (39)

If said worker failed to comply, he did not work for the company much longer.
This strategy of offering acceptance and inclusion at the cost of conformity was
remarkably similar to that used by Americanizers across the country in the early
twentieth century, and dovetailed with the contemporaneous revivification of the melting
pot as a cultural myth that sold men and women like Jay Gatsby and Sammy Glick on the
idea that they too could become Americans. That Ford and other Americanizers drew
upon the notion of the melting pot makes sense, because from its inception the metaphor
had promised inclusion yet in fact enforced uniformity and conformity – if one could
even manage to “melt” to begin with. As far back as 1782, J. Hector St. John de
Crevecoeur had famously asked in his Letters from an American Farmer,
What then is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the
descendent of an European: hence that strange mixture of blood, which you
will find in no other country. … He is an American, who, leaving behind him
all his antient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode
of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,
whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
(43-44)

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Crevecoeur’s formulation is important because it posits the idea of “melting” into
Americanness later taken up by political and cultural discourse in the United States. His
version of the melting pot, however, is focused solely upon European immigrants, a
population largely composed of those from northern and western European countries at
the time of his writing. His theory therefore not only disregards the newly-founded
United States’ large population of African American slaves and Native Americans, but
also sets the stage for the logic utilized by influential politicians and thinkers from Henry
Cabot Lodge to Lothrop Stoddard in their late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
endeavors to maintain the “purity” of American blood by excluding southern and eastern
European immigrants from discussions of American identity.
Not long before Gatsby would platonically conceive himself in Fitzgerald’s novel,
Israel Zangwill synthesized Crevecoeur’s ideas, Old Testament rhetoric, and a belief in
the positive transformative power of the United States to disseminate a vision of the
country as an amalgamated nation whose elements were distilled into a greater whole in
his popular 1908 play, The Melting Pot – a drama whose action occurs in a New York
neighborhood not far removed from the one where Shmelka Glickstein remakes himself
as Sammy Glick. Zangwill’s choice of the melting pot as a metaphor for assimilation had
a particular salience as both an ideological and popular culture concept during the early
twentieth century, an era marked by rapid urbanization, massive immigration, and
heightened xenophobic fears. The widespread appeal of this specific metaphor owed a
great deal to the fact that, as historian John Higham tells us, the melting pot “also implied
a tender; it suggested that assimilation needs control and supervision” (117). Compared
with other contemporaneous metaphors for assimilation such as cultural critic Randolph
81
Bourne’s vision of the United States as “a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth,
with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors” (159), or Jewish philosopher
and activist Horace Kallen’s description of America as an orchestra composed of “the
free and well-ordered cooperation of unique individualities toward the making of the
common tune” (172), the notion of a melting pot stands in stark contrast. Instead of
advocating diversity within a common national unity, it implied a national uniformity, an
American type into which immigrants and outsiders could be melted.
31
Put another way,
the melting pot connoted mechanisms of control, of being manageable even as it
conditioned conformity at a time when eugenicists, nativists, and politicians were stoking
fears of uncontrollable alien immigrants, transgressive radicals, and white women
committing “race suicide” by exercising their autonomy instead of raising families.
Far from being the melting pot Israel Zangwill envisioned, the early twentieth
century United States was a country where diversity was subsumed beneath uniformity
and where “assimilation” became another way of saying “conformity.” The graduation
ceremony Ford employees underwent after nine months of study at the Ford English
School offers an excellent example of the country’s mindset at the time. For this
ceremony, a huge “melting pot” of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché was constructed at a
local Detroit area baseball field. As a band began to play,

31
Zangwill himself was aware of the symbolic resonance the melting pot accrued as time went by, and he
went to great lengths to distinguish between the type of “melting” he espoused and simple uniform
assimilation. In his 1914 “Afterward” to The Melting Pot, for instance, he argued that “The process of
American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly
supposed, but an all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished”
(Nahshon 379). The key phrase here is “popularly supposed,” which points to the difference between
Zangwill’s version of the melting pot and the ideological and cultural associations of sameness and
uniformity it swiftly took on among the general populace.

82
a procession moved forth from a gate at one side of the field – men from the
foreign nationalities employed at the plant. They were wearing their various
native costumes, singing their national songs, and dancing folk dances. The
master of ceremonies was the principal of Mr. Ford’s School, Clinton C. DeWitt,
dressed up as Uncle Sam. He led the group to the ladder on one side of the big
pot. Then he directed them up the stairs to the rim, and down inside. One by one,
he called the men out again on the other side. Now they were dressed in derby
hats, coats, pants, vests, stiff collars, polka-dot ties, ‘undoubtedly each with an
Eversharp pencil in his pocket,’ singing the Star-Spangled Banner – and wearing
the distinctive Ford Motor Company badge on their lapels. (Baldwin 42)

As this ceremony makes plain, the Ford ideal was “a purely impersonal world, a world of
interchangeable men who would operate like interchangeable parts of a machine. The
‘melting pot’ at Ford’s was an assembly line” (Schwartz 196). Ford may have been in
many ways responsible for the democratization of the automobile, but the conformity and
Americanization his company required of workers, as well as its campaign of gender role
reifying advertisements, demonstrate the limitations of such democratization. Although
the Ford English School’s graduation ceremony is without doubt exaggerated in its
presentation of employees melting in a literal melting pot, it speaks to the collective
mania of an age where the unum of the country’s motto e pluribus unum was stressed at
the expense of the pluribus. Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s use of narrators who come
equipped with moral and cultural “brakes” to relate Gatsby’s and Sammy’s tales speaks
to this mania, and highlights Higham’s claim that the melting pot implied a tending hand,
that regulation of Americanness was ideologically implicit in the metaphor. The Great
Gatsby and What Makes Sammy Run?, then, elucidate the dangers of buying into such a
concept in a cultural and political landscape where “careless people” recklessly drive the
automobiles Ford had such a hand in making central to the national culture into a
sequence of car crashes.
83
In the case of The Great Gatsby, Nick’s first-person narration and his seeming
sympathy for Gatsby make it easy to miss just how influenced he is by the standards of
his era. The sheer volume of critical articles debating Nick’s reliability would be tedious
to rehearse here, but Peter Lisca’s notion of him as a “Trojan horse” is worth spending a
moment on.
32
According to Lisca,
The first person narrative form compels us to extend the effects of Nick’s
sensibilities to even the seemingly most objective aspects of the novel, to see
his bias for order and decorum as having not only ethical and autobiographical
but epistemological and formal significance as well. Thus both what Nick takes
note of and the language in which he notes it become important factors. (23)

Although little critical consensus exists about Nick’s reliability, both those who trust
Nick and those who distrust him most often confine themselves to discussing the novel as
Gatsby’s story. What Lisca points out is that The Great Gatsby might be more accurately
described as being about Nick’s account of Gatsby’s story – the epistemological and
formal significance, in short, of Nick, not Gatsby, relating Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy and
quest to raise himself up from humble origins to become a successful “American.” What
Nick takes note of in the novel is the carelessness and profligacy of those around him,
and the language he uses to describe this behavior invokes a connection between good
and bad drivers and a system of morality of which he purports to be a representative.
Though he may be fascinated by Gatsby, Nick’s point of view is tightly imbricated with a
cultural and political outlook privileging uniformity and order, a position that has little
tolerance for difference and diversity. He makes this outlook quite plain from the outset

32
For interesting takes on Nick as problematic but reliable, see Fetterley and Elizabeth Preston. R.W.
Stallman, Gary Scrimgeour, and Scott Donaldson offer classic critiques of Nick as unreliable. Compelling
recent interpretations that explore Nick as rather conflicted and ambiguous have been made by Robert and
Helen Roulston, John Hilgart, and Elizabeth Kerr.

84
of the novel, where he asserts that after his experience with Gatsby he “wanted the world
to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention …” (6). Transgression is intriguing, but
it is also finally too disruptive, too destabilizing to Nick’s sense of order.
Yet Nick cannot seem to avoid disruptive people, for not only is he drawn to
Gatsby, but he also becomes romantically involved with Jordan Baker. Like Gatsby,
Jordan is both fascinating to Nick and distressing, and he uses these conflicted feelings to
establish his system of good and bad drivers before readers. When Nick and Jordan
attend a house party in Warwick early in their relationship, he tells us that she left “a
borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it” (62).
33
This
incident causes Nick to “suddenly” remember a story about Jordan cheating in a golf
tournament. But her cheating makes no difference to him, he claims, because
“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply – I was casually sorry, and
then I forgot” (63). Nick’s rather odd reasoning here is further compounded when he
continues: “It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about
driving a car,” a conversation that occurs after Jordan flicks a button on a workman’s coat
as she drives past (63).
“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful or you
oughtn’t to drive at all.”
“I am careful.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an

33
Scharff has noted that “The industry-wide decision to manufacture cars with fixed roofs was frequently
depicted as a concession to female vanity and frailty. Women were said to prefer sedans and coupes
because they wanted to ride in opulent comfort without messing up their hair and clothing” (122). Jordan’s
leaving a car roof down is then one more way in which she transgresses the purported boundaries of
femininity – not to mention aggravates Nick.

85
accident.”
“Suppose you met someone just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s
why I like you.” (63)

So pleased is Nick with Jordan’s assessment of him that for a moment he tells us he
believes he loves her, in spite of her bad driving. He immediately reins himself in,
though, and describes the “interior rules that act as brakes” on his desires (63-4). In the
span of a few pages, he has set up Jordan as a cheat and a bad driver, made a connection
between driving and morality (bad drivers = careless people), told readers that he was
nearly – but not quite – in love with this dishonest driver, and established himself as a
metaphoric good driver. Beyond allowing him to arrest his budding feelings for Jordan,
Nick’s claiming internal brakes here also draws a distinction between him and the novel’s
other characters. The implication is that Nick’s brakes are necessary cultural mores, a
conscience he has that grants him the right to judge others. Just in case we have not
followed his logic, he adds that “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal
virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (64).
The irony, as readers soon see, is that Nick’s judgment and “driving” are both subtly and
not-so-subtly undermined by Jordan – the same bad driver he almost believes he loves –
as his narrative progresses.
In the same way that Nick posits Jordan as a bad driver, he also appears to draw a
connection between Gatsby and bad driving. When he leaves the first of Gatsby’s parties
he attends, he comes upon “a bizarre and tumultuous scene” where a crowd has gathered
around “a new coupé which had left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before,” but which
86
now rests in a ditch, “violently shorn of one wheel” (58).
34
The man Nick earlier dubbed
Owl Eyes emerges from the wreck, utterly perplexed as to how the crash occurred. When
bystanders question him, he declares, “I know very little about driving – next to nothing”
(59). Immediately, the crowd denounces him as a “bad driver.” But as readers quickly
learn, Owl Eyes was not driving; another man was behind the wheel, a reveler who
finally comes out of the wreck so intoxicated he does not realize the car has stopped.
Nick, in recounting this scene as the conclusion to his first experience at one of Gatsby’s
parties, positions Gatsby as a man whose influence loosens others’ morals and inhibitions
and turns them into bad drivers. The fact that both the crowd and Nick are too quick to
jump to conclusions at this crash scene also serves as a warning to readers to take Nick’s
account with caution, and to be cautious with their own judgments as well.
Although Gatsby himself seems to be a “good” driver for the most part, Nick
never quite sees him in this light, and waffles throughout the novel between a desire to
believe in him and a hardy skepticism. This conflicted fascination with and doubt about
Gatsby is highlighted when he first recounts his story to Nick. Fittingly, Gatsby relates
his story on an afternoon drive into the city, as though only when he is behind the wheel
is his story possible. Gatsby’s tale, though, reminds Nick of nothing so much as
“skimming hastily through a dozen magazines” (71). When Gatsby looks at him
sideways at one point, Nick thinks he now knows “why Jordan Baker had believed he
was lying” about his past (69). (From the start, Jordan, “who seemed to have mastered a

34
The violence of this accident echoes a wreck Tom Buchanan causes in Santa Barbara shortly after his and
Daisy’s honeymoon. Jordan tells Nick how Tom ran “into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and
ripped a front wheel off his car” (82). Worse, “The girl who was with him got into the papers too because
her arm was broken – she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel” (82).

87
certain hardy skepticism” (20), is a bit dubious about Gatsby’s history; unlike Nick,
though, she never seems bothered by Gatsby’s ambiguity.) Gatsby’s performance at this
point is too much of a performance for Nick, enough to make him wonder “if there
wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all” (69). But when Gatsby produces a
medal of valor he was awarded by Montenegro during the war and a photo of himself at
Oxford, Nick comes to the conclusion that “it was all true,” no matter how preposterous
the tale may seem (71).
35
Gatsby then mentions that he is going to make a “big request”
of him, but refuses to discuss it beyond saying Jordan will explain more later that
afternoon (71). Shortly thereafter, they are pulled over by a policeman on a motorcycle.
Gatsby removes “a white card from his wallet [and] wave[s] it before the man’s eyes,”
and the policeman lets them go (72). Having almost convinced Nick of his legitimacy –
having nearly become a “good” driver – Gatsby then hints at a mysterious favor and is
pulled over for speeding, an act of decidedly “bad” driving. But he avoids a ticket
because he “was able to do the [police] commissioner a favor once” (73). No wonder
Nick is confused.
Matters become clearer as they start off again on this “disconcerting ride” (69), or
at least the strange paradox of Gatsby appears to clarify. When they cross the
Queensboro Bridge, Nick relates how,
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two
carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The
friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern
Europe and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their

35
Peter Mallios asserts that “Montenegro” can be read as “rising blacks” and that Gatsby’s medal “is
clearly the novel’s anticipatory figure of American norms of cultural difference and internal fracture that
Nick imaginatively enlists Gatsby to solve” (377).

88
somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwells Island a limousine passed us, driven
by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I
laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought;
“anything at all….”
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder. (73)

Anything can happen – even Gatsby. In an America whose population includes “south-
eastern” Europeans and where African Americans can look at Nick in “haughty rivalry,”
why can’t Gatsby “happen”? Why can’t he be the same type of American as Nick,
Jordan, and the Buchanans? The trouble, of course, is that in the United States of the
early twentieth century, anything can’t happen. Outsiders such as Gatsby cannot
suddenly become insiders. They cannot melt away their origins, marry women like Daisy
Buchanan, and become “American.” Although the trip over the bridge seems to be a
miniature version of the melting pot – or at least Zangwill’s version of it – where people
of varying races and classes pass by each other in automobiles, Nick quickly dismantles
this vision by differentiating the other drivers from himself and Gatsby. He is “glad,” he
tells us, that the “south-eastern” Europeans in the funeral train – members, we need to
keep in mind, of races Congress and the Senate were busy passing immigration quotas to
suppress during the 1920s – could have a glimpse of Gatsby’s splendid car, a glimpse of
privilege and wealth that might bring a smile to their “short upper lips.” Glad their
“tragic eyes” could see a seeming embodiment of successful melting that might further
indoctrinate them into buying into and perpetuating this problematic ideology. Likewise,
while Nick finds the African Americans in the limousine driven by the white chauffeur
fashionably “modish,” he disparages the men as “bucks” and the woman as a “girl”; all
three, he informs us, have “yolks” for eyeballs. Although he may laugh at the
89
incongruous sight of their passage, he cannot escape a sense that the juxtaposition of
normalized race positions in the limousine indicates a threat to civilization of the type
Tom Buchanan fears.
The equation here is startling, as the Queensboro Bridge suddenly becomes a
space where early twentieth-century American hierarchies of race and class are
destabilized and made strange. Having passed these visions of social disruption, now
Nick thinks such a fantastic figure as Gatsby can happen, now such a being can truly be
real. In this context, Nick’s earlier claim that he “would have accepted without question
the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East
Side of New York” (54) is both troubling and revealing. The swamps of Louisiana or a
racially diverse New York neighborhood – Nick may be willing to believe many things
about Gatsby, but all of them seem to subconsciously tag him as having a racialized
origin, as being not-white, not melted into the melting pot, not the same type of American
as Jordan, the Buchanans, and Nick himself. Or, as Michael Nowlin puts it,
What the ‘provincially inexperienced’ Nick is prepared to believe, or more
precisely has been prepared to believe by his Victorian, upper-middle-class, third-
generation, mid-western American upbringing, is that someone as showy as
Gatsby must be either a Jew or a black – at best, perhaps, Southern white trash.
(70)

Given the U.S.’s denial of rights and Americanness to immigrants and minorities – not to
mention women – during this time period, Nick’s vision of Gatsby on the Queensboro
Bridge marks him as not only implausible, but also finally impossible.
The attitude of conflicted fascination-repulsion Al Manheim takes in his
representation of Sammy Glick’s story is quite similar to Nick Carraway’s toward
Gatsby, and reveals that he too has moral “brakes.” Walter Wells characterizes Al as
90
“everybody’s Regular Guy, a man of minor talents and minor vices,” but also as a man
“ever ready to stand in judgment of the world around him” (94). Chip Rhodes goes
further, noting that Schulberg’s novel is “a story about Sammy told from the often
judgmental but always fascinated point of view of Al,” a man who “identifies himself
quite clearly as a champion of a set of traditional standards that are imperiled by new
cultural trends in general and the movies in particular” (58). Al’s outlook “is thus
convincing mostly to someone who wants to keep the classes as they are and who feels
the trouble with society is insufficient respect for such hierarchies” (Rhodes 58-9). On
the one hand, Al facilitates Sammy’s early rise by giving him career advice and the name
of a Hollywood agent; later, Al writes a sequence of small B films that help Sammy gain
the artistic credentials he desires. On the other hand, watching Sammy run makes Al
“uneasy,” “uncomfortable,” and even “afraid” (4). “He was like a splinter festering under
my skin,” Al explains. “If I broke off now, I had the feeling his memory would go on
torturing me” (61). Al even goes so far as to proclaim, “If I were trying to tell this as a
picture story instead of just putting it down the way it happened, my hate for Sammy
Glick would have to be exalted into something noble and conclusive” (61). But at the
same time that Al critiques the dream that makes Sammy run, his work in Hollywood –
often as Sammy’s lackey – affords him a place in the very “Dream Factory” that churns
out reels of rags-to-riches, poor-boy-meets-rich-girl fodder upon which the American
masses feed. Such stories, though, held little reality in the interwar years, especially
when applied to outsiders such as Sammy and Gatsby.
The United States of this era was not a place that welcomed destabilization,
strangeness, or challenges to the established social order – exactly the things Nick
91
portrays Gatsby as fostering, and which Al connects to the first part of Sammy’s career.
Even prior to World War I, eugenics and race science movements found fertile ground in
the U.S., and following the war their influence spread. The sway of such thinking is
evident at the first dinner Nick attends at the Buchanans’ home. Tom asks him if he has
read “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard,” laments that
“[c]ivilization’s going to pieces,” and declares that “It’s up to us who are the dominant
race to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (17).
36
Tom further
explains that “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly
submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved” (17). Tom continues: “This idea is
that we’re Nordics. I am and you are and you are and—,” then hesitates before including
Daisy (18). This moment demonstrates that Tom positions Nick on the same “side” of
the Americanness debate as himself, that despite the liminal place of the Carraway “clan”
within the American social hierarchy
37
, he believes Nick shares the core values of the
(white, Anglo) upper class. Tom notably hesitates to include his wife, who has been
poking fun at his race theories throughout this scene, a hesitation that foreshadows

36
I tend to agree with critics who believe Fitzgerald is poking fun at Tom’s misconstrual of Lothrop
Stoddard, the eugenicist and author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), as
“this man Goddard.” At the same time, it is also possible that Tom (or perhaps even Fitzgerald himself)
mixes up Stoddard with the New Jersey educator and intelligence tester Henry H. Goddard, who, like
Stoddard, participated in the race sciences of the early twentieth century. Goddard classified immigrants
“and developed a taxonomy of types – a unilinear scale of intellectual ability – terming ‘moron’ those
‘high-grade defectives’ who were capable of functioning in modern life, but whose genetic material was
dangerous flawed” (Guterl 31).

37
The Carraways are “well-to-do people,” but only proprietors of a “wholesale hardware business” which
leaves Nick “too poor” to marry a girl back west. It is the family’s middle-class status which forces him to
sell bonds on Wall Street (7; 24).

92
Daisy’s affair with Gatsby and the manner in which Tom will conflate it with
miscegenation.
Although Tom’s diatribe may appear bombastic and ill-informed to modern day
readers, these ideas were widespread at the time. In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard, a lawyer,
writer, and prominent eugenicist, had warned in The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World-Supremacy that “Ours is a solemn moment. We stand at a crisis – the supreme
crisis of the ages” (526). This crisis, according to Stoddard, was the diminishing of
“racial values” whose “logical end” was “racial bankruptcy and the collapse of
civilization” (528).
38
Similarly, Edward Alsworth Ross, who taught sociology at
Stanford and the University of Wisconsin, predicted that by the twenty-first century,
the philosophic historian will be able to declare with scientific certitude that the
cause of the mysterious decline that came upon the American people early in the
twentieth century was the deterioration of popular intelligence by the admission
of great numbers of backward immigrants. (524-25)

38
Fitzgerald himself at times appeared to buy into this type of race thinking. In a letter he sent to Edmund
Wilson from London in July 1921, he complained:

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is
only a few years behind Tyre + Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to
defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise
the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons +
Celts. France made me sick. … My reactions were all philistine, anti-
socialistic, provincial + racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s
burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the negro.
(A Life in Letters 46-47)

Most commentators agree that Fitzgerald’s views softened as time passed. But it is difficult to reconcile
the writer of this letter with the author who depicts Tom Buchanan so negatively three years later in The
Great Gatsby. How are we to explain what appears to be a critique of eugenics and nativist thought in the
novel, given that Fitzgerald himself seems to advocate views similar to Tom’s only a few years earlier?
One way is to think of Fitzgerald as Matthew Gidley does, “as a prisoner of prejudice who yet sees beyond
his own chains” (181). Another is to consider The Great Gatsby in Bakhtinian terms, as a heteroglossic
space where multiple voices and views rise to the surface and can be heard, regardless of an author’s
intention or set of beliefs at a given moment, voices and views that reveal the novel’s political unconscious.

93
Politicians were no exception to such thinking, even at the highest levels. In 1924, then-
president Calvin Coolidge warned the nation that “Biological law tells us that certain
divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully.
With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides” (535). “Our country
must cease to be regarded as a dumping ground,” Coolidge proclaimed, before adding,
“[w]hich does not mean that it must deny the value of rich accretions drawn from the
right kind of immigration” (534). The “right kind of immigration” meaning that from
northern and eastern Europe. Xenophobia, concerns over racial intermingling, pushes
to police immigration standards – in such a cultural landscape, anything assuredly can’t
happen, not even Gatsby. Although the passing of a decade will allow Sammy Glick a
greater ability to “melt” into a form of Americanness, it will be an Americanness with
limitations and one that ultimately maintains his status as an outsider.
Somewhat surprisingly, the pronounced impact of Jewishness on What Makes
Sammy Run? has not been much explored on a critical level. Perhaps this is to some
extent due to the backlash the book’s publication generated, when Schulberg was accused
of being an anti-Semitic Jew because of his unpleasant characterization of Sammy.
39
Or
perhaps critics have shied away from the race angle because of the negative Hollywood
stereotype of the Jewish studio heads, a stereotype that persists into the present day.
Nevertheless, the prominence of Jewish studio executives during Hollywood’s studio era
in the 1930s provides important context for Sammy Glick’s endeavor to melt into the

39
See Schulberg’s discussion of these accusations in the “Introduction” to What Makes Sammy Run?,
specifically pages xiv-xv. Critical attacks of this sort persist today, as several recent condemnations of
Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) display; not to mention Philip Roth’s long
antagonistic relationship with critics.

94
melting pot and attain Americanness. Schulberg situates Sammy’s ascent during the
emergence of the Screen Writer’s Guild, roughly 1933-1938. By this time, the explosion
of talking films had raised moving pictures to the predominant American art form and
Hollywood to the country’s new artistic capitol, the chief purveyor and proponent of
America’s dreams and the American dream. However, as Walter Wells tells us,
The industry of Griffith, Chaplin, and Thalberg, with its already legendary
successes and its limitless potential, is, by the late thirties, being remade into a
superficial medium of mass entertainment, newly presided over by the wheeler-
dealers and profit-mongers who have replaced its founders. (87)

Embracing the narrow, often draconian ideals of the studio system and its powerful
financial backers, Sammy remakes himself as a high-powered studio producer, eschewing
his origins to become just the sort of profit-mongering wheeler-dealer Wells describes.
His ability to succeed is due in large part to the fact that, as Neil Gabler notes, “There
were no social barriers in a business as new and faintly disreputable as the movies were
in the early years of this century” (5). As opposed to the social world of East Egg in The
Great Gatsby which barred entrance to Jews such as Gatsby’s mentor Meyer Wolfshiem,
Hollywood proved a haven for Jews such as Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, and Adolph
Zukor.
These Jewish “moguls” ran several of the major movie studios in the 1930s:
MGM, Warner Brothers, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and Paramount. Yet, as
Gary Gerstle has shown, even with this power, Laemmle, Mayer, Zukor, and their peers
were terribly anxious about being accepted in an America where hostility
toward immigrants and Jews was strong. Many conceived of acceptance as
depending on their ability to shed their Jewish pasts, which they did through
a variety of techniques, including Anglicizing their names, marrying Gentile
women, and even hiding their Jewish identity from their children. (70)

95
Just as important, these studio heads used their films as vehicles for promulgating and
maintaining iconic versions of the type of American identity they sought to adopt
themselves, and created “images of America in which Nordic types loomed large and
Jewish and other new immigrant types disappeared from view” (Gerstle 70). Circulating
redundant films that fed into cultural myths such as the melting pot and the American
dream, Laemmle, Mayer, Zukor, and company instantiated an ideological construction
that, as Schulberg’s novel makes plain, ultimately betrays aspirants like Sammy Glick.
These studio heads in effect failed to challenge the national status quo and fed into its
perpetuation, despite the fact that this “America” still marked them as outsiders.
In a fashion similar to the studio heads he seeks to emulate, Sammy Glick too
casts off his past and becomes part of a cultural machine that perpetuates a version of
American identity he can never fully attain. When Al travels back to New York late in
the novel in search of Sammy’s history, he meets Sammy’s mother in the Rivington
Street neighborhood where Sammy grew up. Mrs. Glickstein relates how, at the
precocious age of three and a half years old, young Shmelka Glickstein changed his name
to “Sammy Glick,” a transformation that went well beyond a mere name change. “In the
old country,” Mrs. Glickstein explains,
there may have been Jews who were thieves or tightwads and rich Jews who
would not talk to the poor ones, but she had never seen one like Sammy.
Sammy was not a real Jew any more. He was no different from the little wops
and micks who cursed and fought and cheated. Sometimes she could not
believe he grew out of her own belly. He grew out of the belly of Rivington
Street. (216-17)

Both in school and on the street, Sammy is “Americanized” in the best melting pot
manner. Behaving like the “wops” and “micks” and other children, he casts off the
96
traditions of his family and assumes those of his native land from an early age. He not
only changes his name and is “always on the lookout for a dollar” (216), but also
excoriates “kikes,” strikes down his (symbolically named) older brother Israel, and
breaks into Italian gibberish in order to secure a job as a messenger boy for an outfit that
has a “no Hebes” policy (219). So traumatic is Sammy’s transformation that it drives his
father to despair. “He was run over,” Israel tells Al. “Coming home with his pushcart
one night. Poor Papa. It was like he really wanted to get run over” (207). If going
through life with a conscience is like driving with one’s brakes on, as Sammy espouses,
then his ruthless pursuit of Americanness equates to driving recklessly. In such an
equation, Sammy is clearly a bad driver, and so too is the “America” which runs over Mr.
Glickstein.
The price of Sammy’s success is that he becomes a tourist to his own heritage.
This, Schulberg’s novel demonstrates, is the cost of melting in the melting pot. When
Sammy returns to Rivington Street years later, he relates to Al how “some Hebe who was
unloading a fish wagon took a look at me and yelled, ‘Well, how d’ya like it down here?
Enjoying the sights?’” (230). We see here Sammy both eschewing his past and buying
into and propagating stereotypes that denigrate less melted Jews (“Hebes”) and which
persist in marking them as outsiders. “What the hell did the Jews ever do for me?” he
asks Al at one point, “except maybe get my head cracked open when I was a kid” (122).
The paradox is that no matter how far or fast Sammy runs, no matter how he may try to
distance himself from less Americanized Jews by using such terminology, he cannot
escape his Jewishness in the eyes of either the upper class or fellow “assimilated” Jews
such as Al. Mrs. Glickstein’s ascribing sameness between Sammy and the “wops” and
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“micks” is also revealing, in that it illuminates the limitations of melting pot
Americanization: it is not Anglo and Nordic children Sammy becomes “no different
from,” after all. However much they might melt, Italians and the Irish and Jews such as
Sammy were not truly white by the standards of interwar era lawmakers and legislation,
and thus could not entirely melt, could not become fully American. Ironically, only un-
Americanized Jews such as his mother and the fish vendor see him as American. The
only way to escape race, What Makes Sammy Run? seems to indicate, is to abdicate all
ties to it, to melt away all traces of one’s background in the melting pot. But even this, as
Sammy’s tale demonstrates, is not enough in a country where Americanness is an
inherited quality based on one’s class and bloodlines, not an attainable one.
To even attempt to “melt” in the melting pot, both Gatsby and Sammy need to
obfuscate their outsider origins and perform a version of Americanness. In Gatsby’s
case, his entire persona is predicated upon performing an identity not his own, on the
illusion of his having become an American of the same type as the Buchanans.
Nourished in his youth on the rags-to-riches stories first propagated by Ben Franklin and
later popularized by Horatio Alger, Jr., he attempts to cancel his past in order to create a
new, more successful, more American self for the future. As a young man, he jots down
a Franklin-inspired plan for self-improvement in a Hopalong Cassidy book.
Accumulating wealth through mysterious means, Gatsby eventually joins the American
Legion, where, we are told, “he used to stand high” (179).
40
Buying a house a brewer

40
Fitzgerald’s irony here is thick, considering that the American Legion was one of the foremost
proponents of “100% Americanism” and frequently backed restrictive race and immigration legislation and
public policy.

98
had built, “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one
side” (9), Gatsby throws raucous, lavish, even somewhat garish parties. As his status
grows, he becomes a figure of rumor, and the rumors are legion: that he is a nephew of
Kaiser Wilhelm; that he once killed a man; that he was a German spy in World War I;
that he is a bootlegger; that he is involved in the “underground pipe-line to Canada”
funneling alcohol into Prohibition era America; that he doesn’t live in a house at all, “but
in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island
shore” (103; 37; 48; 65). There is more at stake here, however, than merely fascinating
rumors about an enigmatic figure. Quite pointedly, all of these rumors link Gatsby to
transgression that borders on criminality.
The performative nature of Sammy Glick’s pursuit of Americanness is equally
pronounced in What Makes Sammy Run?. Similar to Gatsby, Sammy too needs to
discard his past in order to recast himself as a new, successful American. At one point he
tells Al that he gains confidence by repeating his name over and over again:
“SAMMYGLICKSAMMY-GLICKSAMMY GLICK” (33). He achieves success not
through his own intellectual efforts, but through his ability to appropriate and capitalize
upon the labors of others. In New York, his swift promotion from copy boy to columnist
is fueled by his successful plagiarism of the British novelist Somerset Maugham. Later,
Sammy’s talent for manipulating the work of others facilitates his move from New York
to California, as he “co-authors” a screenplay with the young Jewish dramatist, Julian
Blumberg. This screenplay eventually writes Sammy’s ticket to Hollywood – but not
Julian’s. The trend continues after Sammy moves west, where his work in Hollywood
reminds Al of “an old junk dealer … who used to collect all our old newspapers to grind
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into fresh pulp again. That was the kind of story mind Sammy was developing” (74).
Yet despite Al’s disapproval of Sammy’s methods, he cannot help but feel Sammy’s
ascent is “screwy, it was Horatio Alger, it was true” (34). So overwhelming is Sammy’s
performance that Al recounts how he reached “the stage of loathing him so much I was
beginning to admire him” (19). Sammy’s pulp-recycling story mind serves him so well
in the appropriation- and repetition-steeped environment of Hollywood that at one point
Al even thinks Sammy “looked like a confidence man, but a confidence man who had
risen to the position of employer of other con men” (109). This idea that Sammy is in
some sense a confidence man is notable, especially in terms of the larger implications of
“confidence men” to both Schulberg’s and Fitzgerald’s novels. For Sammy’s and
Gatsby’s performances, their endeavors to convince others (and themselves) of their
Americanness – are attempts to instill confidence. In large part, though, Sammy and
Gatsby ultimately fail because neither the narrators representing them to readers nor the
members of the upper class they seek to emulate completely buy into their performances.
Gatsby’s affectation “old sport” will always give him away; Sammy’s lack of “culture”
will inevitably lead him to such public faux-pas as confusing a reference to Thomas
Gainsborough’s painting Blue Boy with a foreign film.
Given the tenuous nature of Gatsby’s and Sammy’s Americanness, it is no
surprise that both men pursue “golden girls” in attempts to validate and reinforce the fact
that they have melted. In Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s novels, social standing is located
as the apex of the American dream, and the golden girl is the incarnation of attaining that
position. In The Great Gatsby, it is Daisy Buchanan whom Gatsby courted Daisy in
Louisville in 1917 – a time Jordan describes as their “white girlhood” – and whose image
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Gatsby carries with him throughout his time as a soldier in Europe, and to whose green
light flashing across the bay in East Egg he lifts his arms from his home in West Egg.
For Gatsby, Nick tells us, Daisy is “High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the
golden girl…” (127). As Meredith Goldsmith has noted, Daisy epitomizes the type of
white Americanness to which Gatsby aspires, wearing “white dresses and pearls and
owns a ‘little white roadster’” that instantiates “her whiteness and class position through
her objects” (456). As a daughter of white American wealth and privilege Daisy
represents exactly the kind of background Gatsby lacks, and which all of his parties and
money cannot impart.
Sammy too comes to value his success in terms of a golden girl, Laurette
Harrington, daughter of the chairman of the board of World-Wide studios. And the
language Al Manheim uses to describe Laurette’s effect upon Sammy is strikingly similar
to that which Nick uses for Daisy.
41
Sammy, All tells us, “had finally found a woman
worthy of his ambitions, she was the golden girl, the dream, and the faster he ran the
farther ahead she seemed to be” (254). Much like Daisy, Laurette’s “job was not to do
anything and do it attractively and amusingly” (249). “[W]hen Sammy falls in love,”
Jonas Spatz argues, “his sexual desire is mingled with an equally potent emotion evoked

41
Winchell has argued that “The main difference [between Gatsby and Sammy] is that Gatsby seeks to rise
in the world in order to win the golden girl, whereas Sammy seeks that girl as confirmation that he has
already risen” (155). But this assessment is only partly true, since Daisy comes to symbolize Gatsby’s
quest to remake himself only after he has already failed once in this endeavor – his apprenticeship to Dan
Cody. In fact, the first time Gatsby verges on attaining financial means and independence in the form of a
bequest from Cody, he is disinherited through the connivance of the gold-digging newspaperwoman Ella
Kaye (whose name, of course, echoes Daisy Fay). Having tasted the American dream, Gatsby knows both
what he wants and what it will take to validate his success. He may love Daisy in some sense, but I believe
there is a far greater degree of calculation in his pursuit of her than critics such as Winchell admit.

101
by his wife’s wealth and social position” (106), an adulterated mix similar to that at the
heart of what Nick terms Gatsby’s “incorruptible dream” of Daisy.
An important difference exists between the two women, however. In the 1920s,
amidst fears of “race suicide” following World War I wherein “old stock” Anglo-Saxon
women were viewed as custodians of American “racial” character (Roediger 71), Daisy’s
affair with Gatsby is perceived as miscegenation by Tom Buchanan and those who share
his outlook, a threat to the foundations of the United States’ social order. By contrast, in
the Hollywood of the 1930s where “Americanized” Jews ran many of the studios, and
where said studios propagated notions of the American dream and American identity that
helped maintain the social order, Harrington marries off his daughter to Sammy as a
means of ensuring Sammy’s loyalty. Put another way, where Gatsby remains a threat to
Tom’s (and Nick’s) social order because his affair with Daisy is fraught with the potential
for upheaval, Laurette’s marriage to Sammy enables American plutocrats like Harrington
to rein in the transgressions of outsiders such as Sammy who have already worked their
way “inside” to some degree, to co-opt the threat they represent by making them
complicit in disseminating a vision of the melting pot that reinforces a specific, limited
definition of Americanness. Yet Sammy’s seeming acceptance into the nation’s power
structure through his marriage to Laurette nevertheless leaves him marginalized. Daisy
ultimately ceases her infidelity and abandons Gatsby once Tom exposes Gatsby’s
nefarious money-making activities, but Laurette marries the outsider, then cheats on him
continuously with men of her own “race” – including on their wedding day. In both
cases, the wooing and winning of these golden girls by Gatsby and Sammy facilitates a

102
series of car crashes, both literal and metaphoric, which play havoc with Nick’s, Al’s, and
the nation’s vision of good drivers and good Americans.
This is where Jordan Baker and Kit Sargent are so important to their novels.
Much like Nick’s and Al’s fascination with Gatsby and Sammy, they are also drawn to
Jordan and Kit because of the way these women transgress against the social order. As
with Gatsby and Sammy, the narrators attempt to fit Jordan and Kit within the boundaries
of their own (limited) vision, boundaries that Kit and Jordan stretch to the limits. Yet
instead of fitting within Nick’s and Al’s representations, Jordan and Kit destabilize the
narrators’ and the nation’s narratives. Both of these New Women are rather tellingly
described by Nick and Al as having somewhat “masculine” traits. According to Nick,
Jordan is “a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by
throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (15). “It is Jordan’s
‘hard, jaunty body’ (63) that initially attracts Nick,” Frances Kerr notes, “along with her
‘masculine’ personal qualities – her self-assurance and careful control over her emotions”
(418). Al portrays Kit in an analogous fashion. Upon first meeting her, he describes her
as
arresting, but no beauty, at least not stamped from the Hollywood mold. She
looked liked the type that always gets picked to play the leading man in the girls’
school productions. She was in her middle twenties, maybe five-eight, and neatly
put together though there was something about the masculinity of her carriage and
gestures that scared you off. (64-65)

Although Kit is not a professional golfer like Jordan, she walks with “a mannish,
swinging stride, like a good woman golfer following her ball …” (64). Later, when
comparing her to Rita Royce, Sammy’s starlet du jour, Al remarks that Kit has a gait
“better suited to slacks than evening gowns” and elaborates that he “actually preferred
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Kit’s figure” because, “Kit made you feel she was always going to be this way, hard and
slim” (147). Hard and slim, hard and jaunty, walks better suited to slacks than dresses –
Nick’s and Al’s portrayals of Jordan and Kit are remarkable in how sharply they contrast
with those of Daisy and Laurette.
Jordan’s and Kit’s “masculine” aspects open up questions of homosocial and
homosexual tension between the narrators and their protagonists.
42
Within the
parameters of my study here, though, their “masculinity” is less a measure of
homosociality/sexuality in the texts than a signifier of the ways changing early twentieth
century gender roles were perceived as destabilizing and dangerous to the entrenched
social order. The scene in What Makes Sammy Run? where Al attempts to compliment
Kit by saying, “You think more like a man than any woman I’ve ever known,” is
exemplary here. Kit’s rather acerbic response is, “Every time a man discovers that a
woman thinks, the only way he can explain it is that she happens to have a male mind”
(131). In Al’s and Nick’s and the nation’s terms, for a woman to be assertive and
successful, she must be like a man – and she is almost certainly a poor driver.
Jordan may be a literal bad driver, but she also strikes a pivotally dissonant note
in The Great Gatsby that helps us see the problems of eugenics and nativist thinking, as
well as the fear of the New Woman, and how the anxieties behind such ideas infiltrated

42
The texts themselves occasionally offer evidence that appears to support such readings. At one point in
What Makes Sammy Run?, for example, Sammy jokes to Al, “I don’t know whether I’m just getting soft or
whether I’m queer for you” (186). At another, when Kit first invites Al to dance, he remarks that, “For
some reason it reminded me of a night down in the Village when a man invited me to dance. I wanted to
go on talking with her, but I knew I would feel foolish having to take her in my arms. I don’t think I ever
had that reaction to a woman before” (77). Chip Rhodes, who reads What Makes Sammy Run? through the
psychoanalytic theory of sadomasochism, argues that Al’s unreliability arises from “homoerotic
repression” (12). For critics on Gatsby and homosexuality, see Wasiolek and Fraser.

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and influenced myths such as the melting pot and the myth of motoring. Jordan’s regular
attendance at Gatsby’s parties offers an excellent illustration.
43
These parties can in fact
be read as embodiments of the melting pot in their own right.
44
From old money, Anglo
East Egg come
the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a man named Bunsen whom [Nick]
knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet who was drowned last summer up in
Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires and a whole clan named
Blackbuck who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats
at whosoever came near. (65-66)
45

From the city itself arrive scions of Old New York, “the Chromes and the Backhyssons
and the Dennickers,” as well as those of seeming Irish – and thus borderline “white” –
descent, “the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys …” (67). The
West Egg contingent is more varied, from “the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil
Roebuck and Cecil Schoen,” to film and theater people such as “Newton Orchid who
controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Coen and Don S. Schwartze
(the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another” (66).
Not to mention more nefarious types such as “Da Fontano the promoter” and “James B.
(‘Rot-gut’) Ferret,” who come to gamble (66). Although Jordan comes from the same

43
Significantly, these parties are enabled by automobility. Nick describes how on weekends, Gatsby’s
“Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and
long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains” (43).

44
Underscoring the idea that Gatsby’s parties embody the basic premise of the melting pot – at least
Zangwill’s version, if not Ford’s – is the “July 5
th
, 1922” timetable upon which Nick records the guest list
(47). The day after Independence Day, anyone and everyone gathers together to mingle at Gatsby’s.

45
That a family named “Blackbuck” appears to be the most snobbish “clan” at Gatsby’s parties is ironic
and unsettling when we recall Nick’s condescending description of the African American men in the
limousine on the Queensboro Bridge as “bucks.”

105
class (and race) background as the Buchanans, she shows little compunction about
attending these parties and mingling with the diverse multitude that converges on
Gatsby’s West Egg estate.
By comparison, when Nick first attends one of Gatsby’s events, he feels so out of
place that he is well on his way to getting “roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment”
until Jordan appears and rescues him from his discomfort (46). While he attributes his
uneasiness to the way the guests “conducted themselves according to the rules of
behavior associated with amusement parks” (45), he is also plainly disturbed by the
mixture of people “melting” together beneath Gatsby’s auspices. Robert Emmet Long
notes the “large proportion of new immigrant groups – Irish and Jews and Italians” in
attendance, and describes the “loss of outline” created by this mixture, “the effect with
which they seem scrambled together incongruously” (142).
46
It is precisely this loss of
outline and scrambling together that makes Nick so uneasy. Tellingly, he feels most at
ease at Gatsby’s party once he is ensconced at a table with the three married couples and
“persistent undergraduate” who compose Jordan’s party, a group which he feels
“preserved a dignified homogeneity” – the homogeneity of the East Egg upper class (49).
Disdaining Gatsby’s parties as amusement parks, Nick in essence presents an assessment
similar to the one Tom Buchanan will make later in the novel when he describes the
parties as a “menagerie” (114). This is a seemingly small textual moment, but it

46
Both Long and Bryan Washington assume Fitzgerald is critiquing democracy here, Long arguing that the
guest list “is a satire of democracy – of a preposterous mingling, and with it a blurring and loss of identity”
(143), whereas Washington believes the list “clearly attest[s] to Fitzgeraldian outrage at the new America”
of the melting pot (49). Neither of these explanations, however, is entirely satisfactory. While satire is
present in Fitzgerald’s depiction of the crowd of partygoers, I read Nick’s discomfort and Jordan’s lack of
it as more revealing.

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demonstrates that Nick’s insistence on morality and orderliness is unsettlingly similar to
Tom’s outlook. Jordan, in contrast, finds the people she has come with “much too
polite,” and urges Nick to leave them after half an hour (49).
Throughout The Great Gatsby, Jordan instigates several similarly revealing
moments that call into question Nick’s position as the good driver behind the wheel of
the novel’s narrative.
47
When she first learns the truth of Gatsby’s past relationship with
Daisy and tells Nick about it, for example, he exclaims with wonder at the “strange
coincidence” of Gatsby buying the house across the water from the Buchanans. “But it
wasn’t a coincidence at all,” Jordan quickly corrects him, exhibiting his naiveté (83). As
they drive through Central Park following this revelation, Nick hears “the clear voices of
little girls” singing:
I’m the Sheik of Araby / Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep – (83)

One moment Nick is exclaiming about Gatsby and Daisy’s past history, the next he hears
a song about the “Sheik of Araby” – a man assuredly dark-skinned and racialized
creeping into a white woman’s tent at night.
48
It is as if the little girls in the park are in
harmony with Nick’s frame of mind, and are singing on cue. Jordan’s revelation of
Gatsby and Daisy’s romance thus elicits a strange reaction from Nick that combines

47
McCoy makes a somewhat similar point in her discussion of Jordan’s “color fluctuation.” She argues
that the novel deploys Jordan “both at and as key narrative flash points, flash points that erupt, apparently,
near and because of difference” (102). McCoy, however, is largely interested in Jordan’s body and the
text’s potential racializing of it, and isn’t overly concerned with Jordan’s connection to the novel’s driving
motif.

48
For an interesting look at the connections between Rudolph Valentino, Gatsby, and the fear of new
immigrants, see Jeffory Clymer.

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wonder and aversion – the story appears to move him, but it also causes him to step once
more on his “internal brakes.” Although he may later facilitate Gatsby and Daisy’s tryst,
we see here the seeds of the same sort of ideological outlook that causes Tom Buchanan
to view his wife’s affair with Gatsby as miscegenation. Moments such as this
demonstrate that while Nick’s narrative appears to present a fascinating story of an
American dreamer, it finally produces a specific, limited vision of America and
Americanness very much in accord with the era’s prevailing ideology.
Jordan’s romantic relationship with Nick also helps us see the limitations of his
narrative, especially as it opens up the disjunctions within Nick’s presentation of the
story’s events and our understanding of the text and its series of car crashes. Unlike the
rest of The Great Gatsby’s major characters, Jordan never appears to seek Nick’s
approval, which seems odd given their romantic involvement. It is as though the novel is
waving a red flag before readers, a red flag warning us about a man who professes his
own honesty and need for order, but who at the same time gets involved with a woman he
views as unscrupulous. The novel emphasizes this point when Nick states that Jordan
“instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt
safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible” (63).
Nick’s assertion here begs the question if Jordan avoids clever shrewd men, what then is
Nick himself, whom she cannot seem to avoid? Nor is his relationship with her
particularly principled, despite his supposed moral rectitude. During the sequence where
he first labels Jordan a bad driver and then wonders if he might love her anyway, he
finally applies his interior brakes because he realizes that “first I had to get myself
definitely out of that tangle back home” (64). “That tangle” being a young woman in the
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Midwest with whom he has “a vague understanding,” an understanding so vague, in fact,
that he has fled to the east to escape gossip about their impending marriage (64). Not
only is Nick seeing Jordan and writing love letters to this woman back home, but he also
has “a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting
department” of his firm – an affair he breaks off when “her brother began throwing mean
looks” his way (61). Nick’s relationship with Jordan, then, significantly counters his self-
image. Instead of being the honest moral center of the novel, he looks more like a flawed
narrator who espouses a shaky metaphorical system of cars, drivers, and morality. With
this ostensibly good driver at the wheel, it is no surprise that Gatsby’s story ends in a
wreck.
The wreck of Gatsby’s ambitions takes place after he and Daisy, Nick, Jordan,
and Tom have driven into New York and taken a room at the Plaza Hotel. Tensions rise
as the afternoon progresses, and finally Tom demands of Gatsby, “What kind of row are
you trying to cause in my house anyhow?” (136). “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back
and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife,” he continues. “Well, if
that’s the idea, you can count me out…. Nowadays people begin by sneering at family
life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have
intermarriage between black and white” (137). At this juncture, Jordan attempts to
intervene by assuring Tom that “We’re all white here” (137). Not only is Jordan
vouching for Gatsby’s (white) Americanness notable, but so too is the fact that it is
Jordan, not Nick, doing so. Although Nick may tell readers he thinks that Tom’s views
are laughable, it is Jordan who actually calls Tom out on them – something it is difficult
109
to imagine Nick himself ever doing.
49
Nick is, in fact, quite cowed by Tom’s “hard
malice” and the determination of the power structure he represents to maintain the status
quo. He may be allowed into the Buchanans’ home, but he has to knock first. Indeed,
several times he feels the need to apologize in front of Tom, and allows himself to be
“compelled” by him from room to room “as though he were moving a checker to another
square” (16).
A similar instance occurs shortly before this same group of characters arrives at
the Plaza Hotel. Tom has just realized that Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair, and he,
Nick, and Jordan climb into Gatsby’s car to follow the lovers into New York. (Yet
another scene involving an automobile!) Tom declares that though they may think he’s
dumb, he has
“almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t
believe that, but science–”
He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back
from the edge of the theoretical abyss.
“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I could
have gone deeper if I’d known—”
“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.
(128)

Connecting Tom’s “second sight” and “investigation” of Gatsby to the dubious
paranormal realm of mediums and séances, Jordan undermines the credibility of the
“science” upon which his ideas are premised. New Women such as Jordan, as Jeffory
Clymer points out, posed challenges to eugenics and nativist thinking because, “from a
racist perspective such as Tom’s, the ‘incurably dishonest’ (58) Jordan … cannot be

49
This said, just because Jordan seems willing to include Gatsby and his partygoers in her America, she is
not necessarily above certain prejudices – as her saying “we’re all white here” indicates (emphasis added);
even for Jordan, “American” equals “white.”

110
counted on to know where to draw the line of racial purity, the mythical line between
whiteness and non-whiteness” (186). This perceived inability of assertive women like
Jordan to properly differentiate along race and class lines is a big part of why Tom
emphasizes the threat of miscegenation between “black and white” when he confronts
Gatsby and Daisy.
50
And it is also why he is not persuaded by Jordan’s assurance of
Gatsby’s “whiteness.” Just as important, Nick, who Jordan considers “a particular friend
of Tom’s,” is likewise unconvinced, and his narrative makes it abundantly clear that not
everyone is “white,” not everyone is truly “American” – especially not Gatsby (84).
Like Jordan in The Great Gatsby, Kit Sargent serves as a voice of dissent in What
Makes Sammy Run? in spite of the fact that she becomes romantically involved with Al –
or perhaps because of it. During a decade when the flapper’s appeal had faded, Kit
continues to embody the New Woman in her strength, assertiveness, and frank sexuality.
These traits, in fact, enable her success in the heavily male realms of Hollywood and the
Screen Writers’ Guild, but are often quite jarring to Al. When she and Al are first
introduced, he realizes that “this was the gal all the critics were nominating a couple of
years back to write the great American novel,” the writer of the acclaimed yet somewhat
scandalous novel The Sex Express, about “the mind of a flapper after her day is done and

50
Another interesting interaction between Jordan and Tom takes place early in the novel, just after Tom’s
diatribe about “the rise of the coloured empires.” Taking Tom inside, Jordan calms him by reading from
the Saturday Evening Post. Kirk Curnutt argues that this is a highly paradoxical moment, because the Post
“aimed to create … an egalitarian aristocracy of readers who believed in cultural elevation through better
living” (45). For Curnutt, “The unspoken irony in Gatsby is that Tom Buchanan, who complains that his
social status is eroding at the hands of the ‘Colored Empires’ (12), would turn to this source for solace”
(45). This view is valid to an extent, but it can also be argued that the calming effect the Post has on Tom
is entirely appropriate. Although Fitzgerald does not tell us what it is exactly that Jordan reads, the fact that
it is Jordan reading brings us back to the transgressive yet finally reassuring aspect of the Jordan
Company’s automobile ads. And despite the Post’s pushes for an “egalitarian aristocracy,” its editor,
George Horace Latimore, was an advocate of eugenics and nativism, and often gave thinkers such as
Stoddard and Madison Grant space in his magazine.

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the depression has set in, when she’s floundering in a backwash of neuroticism and
mental disease” (65). Adding to his discomfort is the fact that she is dating Sammy –
Sammy whose trangressive pursuit of Americanness Al finds so disconcerting. Even
after Kit and Sammy break up and she and Al subsequently become close, he cannot
quite rid himself of his nagging doubts about her involvement with Sammy. “I thought
about attraction,” he tells us. “My attraction for Kit. The attraction Sammy had for us
that brought us together. I tried to trace it all through again. I wanted to get it straight in
my mind” (226). Assuredly, this triangle, as is the case with Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, and
Daisy, has Girardian overtones. But Al’s angst is just as much caused by his odd, often
prudish morality – this is a man, after all, who insists on describing a friendly prostitute
as “a very moral lady” because she won’t sleep with Sammy, and who describes himself
as a “Puritan” where sex is concerned (273; 57). As they continue dating, it becomes
clear that Kit, like Jordan Baker, has involved herself with a man full of sexual hang-ups,
a man who, when they are dancing, wonders disconcertedly whether he is doing the
leading, and has to fight down the temptation, as he tells us, to “mess her up a little bit,
muss her hair, mix her up” (77).
Al’s feeling threatened by Kit even as he is drawn to her echoes Nick’s response
to Jordan. Where Nick writes off his sense of Jordan’s “dishonesty” in an attempt to
buttress his narrative authority and sense of self, however, Al comes to an impasse. For
if anything, Kit is honest and straightforward. We see this in the way she defends Julian
Blumberg from Sammy’s manipulations, not to mention her leading role in the emerging
Screen Writers’ Guild. Al, by comparison, often comes across as vacillating and self-
righteous. He temporizes about the Guild, and only joins it because of his romantic
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interest in Kit – although he never hesitates to condemn Sammy’s anti-union stance. In
truth, he comes close to resigning from the Guild at Sammy’s urging in order to maintain
his position as a studio screenwriter, and in the end stays on mainly to spite Sammy.
Similarly, Al is frequently outraged by Sammy’s treatment of Julian, yet it is Kit who
becomes Julian’s defender. It is also Kit who hooks Al up with his first really good
Hollywood job, a chance to work for the idealistic producer Sidney Fineman – whom
Sammy will later oust – and write a film about the democratic Czech leader Tomás
Masaryk, who advocated Czech independence in World War I and became the founder
and first president of the Czechoslovakia. The upshot of all this is that Kit, much like
Jordan does with Nick, unsettles our reading of Al’s representation of Sammy and the
larger national narrative into which he seeks to fit it.
Kit’s own back story offers a counterpoint to both Sammy’s pursuit of
Americanness and Al’s rather limited worldview. Growing up the daughter of a man
who aspired to the United States Supreme Court, but who only made it to the state level,
Kit witnessed her father and mother as they “shared one life between them” (153).
Although she tells Al that this “sounds very romantic,” the problem is that the life her
parents shared “was his [her father’s], exclusively” (153). Her parents’ marriage reminds
Kit of nothing so much as “a motorcycle with Father at the controls and Mother sitting in
the sidecar, not asking where she was going but only if he was sure he was warm enough
without the extra scarf she brought along” (153). Here again we see automobility
factoring in to gender roles. Kit’s mother is not even given the chance to become a “bad
driver” – she is stuck in the motorcycle’s sidecar as her husband drives them through life.
Tellingly, to Al the Sargents’ union “sounds rather like a typical happy marriage” (153).
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Kit, however, cannot see “why the hell men should have a monopoly on independence
any more,” and asks Al to think about “the difference between the two words spinster and
bachelor” (154). The real-life subordination of many women in American society even
today is reflected in Kit’s mother’s tale, and Kit’s own subsequent pursuit of autonomy
and a life other than her parents’ displays a clear critique of such a culture. A critique, it
should be noted, of the very value system Al himself espouses.
Kit’s being better equipped to “drive” through and negotiate the early twentieth
century American cultural landscape is plain throughout Schulberg’s novel. We see this
in her commitment to the Screen Writers’ Guild, as opposed to Al’s dabbling in it. We
also see it in their differing views of the same people and events. While Kit admires
Sammy’s drive to succeed enough that she admits, “A little bit of Glick would be a good
thing in all of us,” she carefully qualifies herself by adding, “a very little bit” (125).
Where Al remains fixated on Sammy, Kit posits the idea that
he is the id of our whole society. … you know how the id is supposed to be
the core of your basic appetites which the superego dresses in the clothes of
respectability to present to the outside world? … I think that’s what first hit
me about Sammy. He wasn’t something trying to be something else. He was
the thing itself, the id, out in the open. It might not be very pretty but there it
was. (193)

And it is Kit who suggests to Al that the answer to “what makes Sammy run?” lies in
Sammy’s childhood, a suggestion that eventually leads Al to Rivington Street and the
Jewish ghetto in New York where both he and readers see the pernicious nature of the
melting pot up close. Similarly, she is much more acute when it comes to Laurette
Harrington. When Al at one point wishes he could listen in on Sammy and Laurette’s
conversations, Kit points out how banal those discussions are likely to be. She also
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correctly perceives the basis of Sammy’s attraction to Laurette, explaining to Al that “It’s
all mixed up together. The fact that her name is Harrington must be just as sexually
exciting to Sammy as that moist red mouth or those snooty boobs of hers” (251). When
Al describes Laurette as “exotic-looking,” Kit replies, “You mean those droopy lids and
the dark shadows under her eyes? … That’s dissipation” (250). Yet even though Kit
finds Laurette rather artificial – she describes Laurette’s entering Vassar as being a “little
bit like Tallulah Bankhead enrolling as a freshman at Smith” (250) – she also discerns
that although “Laurette babbles like an idiot,” she “has a good mind which she’s been
brought up to believe is very poor taste for a woman of her position to use” (248). She
recognizes that Laurette is more than just the “show horse with a dark red mane,
prancing, beautifully groomed, high spirited, accustomed and proud to be on exhibition”
(246) Al sees her as.
In light of Kit’s undermining Al in What Makes Sammy Run?, his earlier claim
that Sammy is a confidence man raises questions about Al as well. For if Sammy is a
confidence man employing other con men, Al himself then must also be a con man. The
same charge can be leveled at Nick Carraway, who, while professing his unaffected scorn
for Gatsby, willingly abets his affair with Daisy. Simply put, Al and Nick themselves are
confidence men who spin out representations of the protagonists’ stories that emphasize
Sammy’s and Gatsby’s fascinating attempts to melt and become Americans, while at the
same time portraying their final failures as inevitable. Ostensibly, Al’s and Nick’s
interior moral brakes, their consciences, allow them to separate themselves before readers
from the dark side of Sammy’s and Gatsby’s pursuits. But the narrators’ conflicted
obsession with and representation of Sammy and Gatsby demonstrate that Nick’s and
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Al’s views are, ultimately, aligned with the nation’s power structure. Tom Buchanan can
include Nick in his vision of Anglo/Nordic Americanness because Nick’s worldview is
predicated upon the classed, racialized system at the heart of such a vision. Al, although
he is Jewish, reifies a similarly conservative outlook; he is so consistently appalled by
Sammy’s transgressions against the nation’s social order that he waits with bated breath
for Sammy’s comeuppance, for “justice” to “smite” Sammy (275).
In the case of The Great Gatsby, critics have often noticed how Tom’s exposure
of Gatsby during the Plaza Hotel scene affects Daisy’s view of her lover, but they have
less frequently noted how Nick too subsequently alters his outlook. When Tom brushes
aside Jordan’s assurance that everyone is “white” there in the room at the Plaza, he also
announces he’s found out the truth about Gatsby’s “drug stores”: that Gatsby is a
bootlegger and criminal (141). Worse, he adds that the “drug store business was just
small change,” and that Gatsby has something in the works about which even Tom’s
sources are afraid to tell him (141). When Nick glances at Gatsby following this
revelation, he is reminded of one of the rumors swirling at Gatsby’s parties: that Gatsby
looked “as if he had ‘killed a man’” (142). Although Nick initially scorns Tom as being
“Flushed with his impassioned gibberish,” his attitude changes the more Tom reveals
(137). What Tom discloses here is that the only way Gatsby can pass himself off as an
American of the same sort as everyone else in the room is by using criminal means to
accumulate money; that he is an uncontrollable outsider who cannot be melted into the
melting pot, a man far beneath Daisy, the type of interloper against whom civilization
needs to be defended. Nick is apparently struck speechless at this crucial juncture – an
odd development, since he has already met Meyer Wolfshiem and has a sense of
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Gatsby’s criminal activities.
51
He may distance himself from Tom, Daisy, and Jordan
after they arrive back on Long Island, but his attitude toward Gatsby is never quite the
same. Prior to the confrontation at the Plaza Hotel, for instance, Nick portrays Gatsby
and Daisy’s affair five years earlier in romantic tones and lyrical language: they walk
upon sidewalks “white with moonlight” and beneath “a stir and bustle among the stars”
(117). When Gatsby first kisses her, Daisy “blossomed for him like a flower” and he
“forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath” (117). But after Tom
exposes Gatsby as a criminal and an outsider, after Daisy decides Gatsby wants too much
of her and chooses Tom over him, Nick’s story becomes a rather sordid tale where
Gatsby “took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously – eventually he took
Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand”
(156). Nick’s terminology here – “ravenous” and “unscrupulous” – makes plain the
revision Gatsby has undergone in his mind. What denies Gatsby the “right” to touch
Daisy’s hand? Nick’s moral vision and his “interior rules that act as brakes,” which now
seem to have a great deal in common with Tom’s outlook, and which in effect position
Nick too as a “defender of civilization.” He may occasionally criticize the system that
fosters an unattainable dream upon people such as Gatsby and seem sympathetic to the
man whose story he tells, but he cannot escape his own preconceptions and prejudices.

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What Nick finally “does” for Gatsby comes too late: arranging his funeral and erasing the obscenity
“scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick” on the steps of Gatsby’s empty house (188). In this light, the
excuse Wolfshiem gives for not attending Gatsby’s funeral can be seen as less a lame excuse (although it
certainly is that), than a critique of Nick himself. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is
alive and not after he is dead,” Wolfshiem opines. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone”
(180).

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Once Tom has wrecked Gatsby’s ambitions at the Plaza Hotel – once he runs
Gatsby over, so to speak – Daisy finishes him off in the novel’s most pronounced
incident of “bad driving” when she runs over Myrtle Wilson in a hit-and-run accident on
the drive back to Long Island.
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By the time Nick, Tom, and Jordan arrive at the scene
outside George Wilson’s garage, the “death car” Daisy and Gatsby are in is long gone,
and a policeman is asking for witnesses and information. The only witness, Nick tells us,
is a “pale, well dressed Negro” who steps forward and identifies the “big yellow car” that
ran Myrtle down (147). In the bustle at the crime scene, however, neither the police
officer (the manifestation of legal authority), nor Tom (the manifestation of the United
States’ dominant class and its power) pays much attention to this man.
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Nick further
recounts how only he and the African American man are close enough to overhear Tom’s
quiet bullying of George Wilson. Only Nick and this witness hear Tom convince Wilson
that the car that ran down Myrtle is not Tom’s own – but neither Nick nor the witness
speak up. In The Great Gatsby’s America, the African American witness’s silence is
enforced because no one will listen if he brings up Tom’s conversation with Wilson.
Nick’s silence, by contrast, is self-chosen; he will only recount the incident to readers

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Ernest Lockridge offers a fascinating if not entirely convincing assessment of Daisy Buchanan as a
Moriarty-esque villainous mastermind manipulating the text’s events and who has planned all along to
murder Myrtle Wilson and rid herself of her rival for Tom’s affections.

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Mitchell Breitwieser argues that this witness in many ways parallels Gatsby: he “owns a car; he has light
skin; he dresses well. He is, we presume, an aspirant, an outsider getting in, or at least enjoying for a time
the illusion that such is possible. He is, in short, maybe, though black, like Gatsby” (43-44). The African
American witness is so like Gatsby, in fact, that he too can be buried beneath the deluge of Tom
Buchanan’s words and cruel malice. As Ralph Ellison has noted, “in the world of The Great Gatsby the
witness who could have identified the driver of the death car that led to Gatsby’s murder was a black man
whose ability to communicate (and communication implies moral judgment) was of no more consequence
to the action than that of an ox that might have observed Icarus’ sad plunge into the sea” (14-15).

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long after the fact. It is a silence that effectually abets Tom’s manipulation of George
Wilson’s desire for vengeance – a desire that leads Wilson to murder Gatsby.
In a novel about the failure of American myths promising equality and autonomy
such as the melting pot and the myth of motoring, it is no accident that the men who
combine to kill Gatsby are named Wilson and Buchanan. Nor is it an accident that “the
only car visible” when Nick first enters Wilson’s “unprosperous and bare” garage is “the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner” (29) – Ford, the
democratizer of automobility and advocate of a flawed (and failing, by 1925) vision of
the melting pot. George Wilson shares his surname, of course, with Woodrow Wilson,
the president who sent Gatsby and Nick to war in Europe, a man noted for his anti-
hyphenated American stance and views on old-stock American superiority. By the end of
Wilson’s presidency, though, his failed promises about keeping the nation out of the war
and his deteriorating health left him defeated and worn down, much like his namesake in
Fitzgerald’s novel. Tom Buchanan’s surname is similarly resonant. Roughly three-
quarters of a century earlier, President James Buchanan too had attempted to stand as a
barrier defending civilization from the barbarians at the gates
54
– in this case to hold
together a United States fragmenting over race issues in the years leading up to the Civil

54
John F. Callahan makes the Tom-Buchanan connection as well, noting that “his presidential namesake,
James Buchanan, owed his 1856 election to fourteen slave states, only five free, and […] in his inaugural
[speech] he called for an end to agitation against slavery and supported the policy of noninterference with
slavery in the states and ‘popular sovereignty’ in the territories” (51). Susan Marie Marren also explores
The Great Gatsby’s connections to the Civil War, albeit from a different perspective. Focusing on Nick’s
great-uncle’s buying a substitute to fight in his place in the war and subsequently founding the Carraway
“clan,” Marren argues that “It may be that Nick needs to believe in Gatsby’s success at the recreation of his
family history in order to feel that his own genealogy is solid, that his own identity is pure despite the
dubious legitimacy of his family’s establishment in the respectable middle class” (90). She also posits the
provocative claim that “Nick’s ideal America, like his uncle’s, has suffered no civil war; thus it need
acknowledge no civil war legacy of competing American identities” (102).

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War. That the novel connects a Wilson and a Buchanan here suggests a textual critique
that equates the defense and maintenance of American civilization and values with tired,
defeated men and pompous, ignorant plutocrats. This, the novel reveals, is the power
structure Nick’s narrative upholds. Within this United States, an outsider named Jimmy
Gatz trying to melt into Jay Gatsby can be murdered by a bad driver named Buchanan
and a downtrodden mechanic named Wilson seeking revenge for his wife’s death, while a
wrecked Ford gathers dust in a dim corner. In this U.S., Gatsby will fight for “America”
in the First World War, surviving that violent conflict only to be killed by men named
Wilson and Buchanan.
Although less central to the plot of What Makes Sammy Run?, a pair of
significantly named characters also have a hand in shaping Sammy’s fate in Schulberg’s
novel. As the Screen Writers’ Guild’s struggle with the studios grow more contentious,
Sammy joins a small cadre of writers who dub themselves the “Sanity Five” and pledge
“to rescue the writers’ ship from the hands of the crackpots and adventurers and steer it
back to the port of sanity again” (166). One of the leaders of this group is yet another
Wilson: Harold Godfrey Wilson, “an old boozer,” defeated like Woodrow Wilson, who,
according to Kit, “had written himself out ten years ago” (168). The Academy Award
winning Lawrence Paine is also a member of the Sanity Five. Kit describes him as a man
who has “been nursing his paranoia for years” (168), a man whose argument for
“common sense” and compromise with the studios stands in polar opposition to his
namesake Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet’s assailing of tyranny and opposition. After
initial tension with the Guild, the Sanity Five make such a show of supporting their
fellow writers that when the Guild pushes for a better agreement with the studios even
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Kit is taken in and proposes that they are added to the Guild’s executive board. Soon
after, though, Sammy, Wilson, Paine, et al. double-cross their fellow writers, resigning
and setting off a sequence of walk outs that temporarily submerges the Guild.
Schulberg’s depiction of the Sanity Five highlights a tension numerous of his
contemporaries wrote about as well: namely, that the Hollywood which was one of the
most influential purveyors and perpetuators of the American dream during the
Depression years was also quasi-totalitarian. When Kit compares Sammy to “Adolph
and Benito” at one point, he is “rather flattered by the comparison” (81). In making this
connection, the novel not only draws an analogy between Hollywood and Fascism, but
also exhibits the corruption of American idealism. When Al asks Sammy how it feels to
have everything, Sammy replies, “It makes me feel kinda … patriotic” (259).
This, then, is the United States where Fitzgerald’s last-minute attempt to change
his novel’s title to Under the Red, White and Blue takes on rather ominous tones. The
title switch never occurred, because Fitzgerald’s suggestion came too close to
publication, but Jordan Baker is once more instructive here. When she describes her and
Daisy’s youth to Nick, she mentions walking the sidewalks of Louisville one afternoon:
I had on a new plaid skirt that also blew a little in the wind and whenever this
happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out
stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way. (79)

The symbolic resonance of American flags tut-tut-tut-tut-ing as Jordan’s skirt blows
transgressively in the wind speaks to the era’s preoccupation with conformity and
Americanness. Under the red, white and blue, Gatsby can dream, can try to melt away
his origins and imbue himself with a self-created form of American identity. But under
the red, white and blue, he will always remain an outsider tut-tut-tut-tuted by the nation’s
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power structure. Under the red, white and blue, men such as Tom and Nick can carry on
affairs with multiple women, but women who do likewise, such as Daisy or Myrtle
Wilson, will crash into each other at a catastrophic cost. Under the red, white and blue,
one can imagine Nick, though titillated by Jordan’s blowing skirt, tut-tut-tut-tuting right
along with the flags as she walks by. And perhaps we can even envision a banner of red,
white, and blue draped over Gatsby’s coffin, watched over by his fellow veteran Nick tut-
tut-tut-tuting away.
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Following Gatsby’s death, Nick and Jordan meet one last time. After Nick breaks
things off with her, Jordan reminds him of their earlier conversation about bad drivers.
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?” she prompts him.
“Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a
wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it
was your secret pride” (186). Nick’s feeble response is that he is thirty now and “too old
to lie to [himself] and call it honor” (186). Critics such as David Parker and Lawrence
MacPhee have read this moment as an epiphanic one for Nick. Parker, for instance,
argues that “Nick’s rupture with Jordan shows him that honesty is not a simple value, that
cleanness and simplicity are not enough in the conduct of personal relations. It marks,
moreover, the beginning of Nick’s maturity” (15). In a similar vein, MacPhee contends
that “In dropping her, Carraway also repudiates very pointedly what the automobile has
represented in the book” – namely, “bad drivers” (207). Yet the epiphany is difficult to

55
Along similar lines, Pearl James notes that “Nick’s narration has the telltale shape of a war story: he has
to memorialize a comrade whose story will otherwise remain untold, all the while wondering if he died for
nothing, for a dream” (37), and she makes the compelling argument that “Nick’s unreliability as narrator is
one way in which Fitzgerald represents the historical experience of World War I” (36).

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see. Judith Fetterley is more on the mark when she asserts that “Nick, as always, has the
last word” in his meeting with Jordan, “and that last word in this charade of deceptions is
the ultimate lie, for Nick implies that out of her sense of disadvantage Jordan stoops to
the slander of calling him dishonest” (90). But this is hardly slander on Jordan’s part.
Instead, it is a reassessment of her initial impression of him as a careful person. Having
known him now for a few months and watched his behavior, Jordan realizes that Nick too
is a bad driver, and their final conversation demonstrates the hollowness of his judgment
and moral system.
In contrast to Nick and Jordan, Al and Kit do not end acrimoniously. And it is
this ending, I contend, that makes What Makes Sammy Run? such a troubling text. For
on some levels Schulberg is clearly raising the same concerns as those raised by The
Great Gatsby. But instead of jarring readers and leaving them dissatisfied with a failed
vision of the American dream like The Great Gatsby, What Makes Sammy Run? provides
a “happy” ending. Despite the disjunction in Kit’s and Al’s outlooks, they finally marry.
This seems a highly anomalous move, given that Kit has been calling not only Al’s
representation of Sammy, but also his world view into question throughout the novel.
Yet late on the evening of Sammy’s wedding, Kit and Al go to a pier-side amusement
park, where she forces him to ride a rollercoaster with her repeatedly. When she tells him
her desire to take flying lessons, Al “forbids” it, and tells her, “I want you to quit this
funny business and come along like a good girl and get married” (365). Kit replies that
he is “getting awfully possessive” and beginning to act as if they were married,
underscoring the problematic gendering of marriage where men “possess” women and
can forbid them from behaving certain ways. Surprisingly, Kit agrees. Independent,
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successful, and assertive, Kit finally gives in to cultural pressure to be a “good girl.”
Instead of flying – an endeavor even more dangerous than driving – she effectively
grounds herself with Al. On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine Kit emulating her
mother and riding in the sidecar attached to her husband’s motorcycle. She has, after all,
shown readers how much better a driver she is than Al. But on the other, Al’s
representation of Sammy has already demonstrated the way dissonant, transgressive
voices such as Sammy’s can be co-opted by a Hollywood system that propagates the
national status quo. Not to mention the way Al, who is himself Jewish, also aligns
himself with a conservative, orderly national outlook. So we have to wonder what will
prevent Kit’s voice from being co-opted as well, once she marries Al.
This ending balances out Sammy’s failed marriage to Laurette Harrington. It is a
failure that in the end undermines his realization of the American dream and
demonstrates that even after changing his name and doing his utmost to buttress the
nation’s power structure, he still has not truly melted in the melting pot. After Laurette
succumbs to her father’s badgering and finally marries Sammy, she immediately cheats
on her new husband with the young actor Carter Judd – on the day of their wedding, no
less. Laurette’s wedding night infidelity not only leaves “the thick, sour taste of defeat”
(270) in Sammy’s mouth, but also accentuates his false standing as an “American.” Al
describes how Sammy
had fallen in love with position, with the name and the power of Harrington, and
it came to him not as something sordid and cold but as love, as deep respect for
Laurette’s upbringing and attraction to her personality and desire for her body.
(269)

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Laurette, though, sees her betrayal of Sammy as perfectly just, and claims that now he
has what he wants, and her father has what he wants, finally she will have what she wants
as well: a marriage of convenience, the semblance of respectability without any real ties
or restrictions. Sammy eventually rallies himself while confessing to Al, and falls back
upon the tie he has established with Harrington. But it is plainly a hollow new resolution
with which he girds himself. As Mark Royden Winchell notes, “The one thing that
[Sammy’s] gall and his money cannot buy him is entrance into the aristocracy. To
achieve that level of decadence requires several generations. Instead, he simply ends up
as Gatsby with horns” (155). Even possessing the golden girl, Sammy does not really
possess her – much like how all his running after the kind of Americanness does not truly
make him into the kind of American he wants to be. Yet he remains a lackey of men like
Harrington, who back the studio system which keeps outsides such as Sammy running
after American dreams such as the melting pot. Schulberg’s text critiques American
ideals, but this critique is tempered beneath the pressure of giving a Hollywood novel a
“Hollywood ending.”
In 1926, one year after Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, the New York
Times ran an obituary for Israel Zangwill that proclaimed his dream of the melting pot
“as dead as the author himself” (Roediger 145). The Great Gatsby too sounds a death
knell, one not only for the purported promise of the melting pot, but also for the dreams
of women and men like Jay Gatsby of rising above their origins and becoming
“American,” of taking hold of the wheel and driving themselves into new, better lives.
The passage of restrictive immigration legislation in 1921 and 1924, as well as cultural
pushes to return women to the “normalcy” of the home following the war and to firmly
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demarcate the boundaries of Americanness at the time Fitzgerald was writing made these
dreams seem even more deceptive. We get a sense of this even in Nick’s romanticized
final lament for the disappearance of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” and the
loss of our “capacity for wonder” (189).
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes
before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past. (189)

Although Nick is mourning an illusory, vanished past here, the image he closes with goes
beyond his lament. The melting pot, the freedom and autonomy offered by automobility,
the notion of remaking and bettering oneself – all seeming promises toward which we run
(and drive!), stretching out our arms father…. The Great Gatsby suggests finally a kind
of national stasis, no matter how the country might appear to progress. In its outlook
Fitzgerald’s novel is perhaps more pessimistic than readers usually take it to be,
presenting as it does a vision of the nation “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is
both ironic and fitting, then, that a liar, cheat, and bad driver such as Jordan Baker may
be the most honest window into the novel. For even in its pessimism, The Great Gatsby
challenges readers to see beyond their own prejudices and reconsider the myths of
“America” so many of us so readily buy into and perpetuate even today.
What Makes Sammy Run? attempts a similar critique, particularly in its depiction
of the history of Hollywood as a metaphoric history of the nation in the interwar era. It is
a history of social-climbing, back-stabbing, plagiarizing, and perpetuating problematic
myths such as the melting pot and the American dream. It is no accident that the
American identity Sammy so tenuously attains is one predicated on power and tyranny.
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“Now Sammy’s career meteored through my mind in all its destructive brilliance,” Al
relates in the novel’s final paragraph (276).
It was a terrifying and wonderful document, the record of where Sammy ran …
And some day I would like to see it published, as a blueprint of a way of life that
was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century. (276)

While Nick closes his tale by reducing Gatsby’s story to a failed dream, Al situates
Sammy significantly in the present, as a man of modern America, a disturbing glimpse of
the future. Composing what he calls “a short history of Sammy Glick,” Al eschews
Nick’s nostalgic “fresh, green breast of the new world” and “dark fields of the republic”
(189). “It was America,” he says of Sammy’s running, “all the glory and the opportunity,
the push and the speed, the grinding of gears and the crap” (37). But for all the speed, the
grinding of gears and the crap, Sammy is in the end a Hollywood success, even if a
limited one. And Al both experiences the joy of Sammy’s comeuppance and wins his
own golden girl in the best (or worst) Hollywood fashion.
Not only Sammy and Gatsby, but also the men representing their stories to readers
buy into the ideologies that keep the social order intact, an order that kills Gatsby and
marginalizes Sammy even as it lets him “in.” We see in Fitzgerald’s and Schulberg’s
novels that Gatsby and Sammy can never truly become American by the standards of
their era. Not in a United States where the men who speak for them and represent their
tales to readers watch their transgressive pursuits with a mixture of fascination and
repulsion, and wait, as Al says, “for justice to suddenly rise up and smite [them] in all its
vengeance” (275). Read through the lens of Jordan Baker and Kit Sargent, Nick’s and
Al’s representations of Gatsby’s and Sammy’s pursuits of American dreams that finally
fail them reveal the troubling nature of what it meant to be “American” during the
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interwar years. Ultimately, these novels shed light on what historian John Lukas calls
“the insubstantial essence of what so many Americans thought (and still think) reality is”
(239-40). Gatsby’s critique of this American “reality” in large part explains why it still
resonates with and often disturbs many readers today. The attempted commentary in
What Makes Sammy Run? is less successful, finally, because Schulberg cannot escape a
desire to present some form of happy ending, an ending that vitiates its critique. This
difference between the texts is likely why The Great Gatsby is considered a “great”
American novel, whereas What Makes Sammy Run?’s appeal is less widespread for
critics and readers alike.

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Chapter 3
“Anything Might Happen”:
Race, Representation, and Refusal in Nella Larsen’s Passing
and William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust

We first encounter Lucas Beauchamp in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
(1948) as a “voice” heard by Charles (Chick) Mallison after he has fallen into an iced-
over stream – “just a voice,” instructing Chick’s friends to stand back so the boy can
make his way out of the water (6). In a similar fashion, Clare Kendry’s first appearance
in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) is as “a woman’s slightly husky” voice overheard by
Irene Redfield on the rooftop of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago (148).
56
These initial
depictions of Lucas and Clare as “voices” are misleading, though, as neither Lucas nor
Clare are given much voice in Faulkner’s and Larsen’s novels. Nor do the characters
representing their tales to readers, Chick Mallison and Irene Redfield, respectively,
actually speak: as third-person limited points of view, they represent Lucas’s and Clare’s
stories by thinking about them throughout their texts. So unsettling do Chick and Irene
find Lucas and Clare that they cannot stop turning over the protagonists’ behavior in their
minds, cannot stop representing and re-presenting them, cannot, in short, stop re-
imagining them through their own limited visions of race. In this chapter, I explore the
challenges posed to normative American identity by Lucas’s and Clare’s pursuits of a
form of the American dream and Americanness, and in particular how Chick and Irene
are both fascinated with and troubled by these pursuits. Viewed in conjunction with one
another, Larsen’s and Faulkner’s novels interrogate a shifting national understanding of

56
Although Clare is introduced to readers through the letter she sends Irene in Passing’s first chapter, it is
not until chapter two that she physically enters the narrative at the Drayton Hotel.

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race that moved from biological fact to questioning its roots as a cultural construct by the
close of World War II. Even with the differences between the two texts – Larsen’s rather
more successful subversion of representation and race, as opposed to Faulkner’s – both
point to the fundamentally ambiguous and frequently problematic nature of race and
representation in the U.S.’s political, cultural, and literary discourses. By ultimately
positing race itself as an imaginative construction, both novels call into question a social
order that grants whiteness agency while objectifying and degrading blackness. But
where Larsen’s text undermines the very notion of race, Faulkner’s undercuts its own
questioning of race two decades later by “saving” Lucas from being lynched, only to
return him to a marginalized, subordinate position.
The Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision sets the stage upon which
these narratives play out, especially as it sanctioned Jim Crow and the “one drop rule” of
racial descent. In the years subsequent to the Plessy decision, writers such as Charles
Chesnutt, Jessie Fauset, and George Schuyler, to name only a few, wrote novels that
challenged the highly subjective premises upon which race and American identity were
defined
57
, even as the U.S. itself worked to instantiate the idea of an Anglo/Nordic
“American” race via political legislation such as censuses, literacy tests, and immigration
restriction. Looking at Passing and Intruder in the Dust within this context enables a
reading focused on the manners in which the texts’ form specifically affects their content.
Both novels stand out because of the way they employ a narrative device critics as far
back as Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) defined as a mind “dramatized”

57
See for instance Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900); Fauset, Plum Bun (1929); and Schuyler,
Black No More (1931).

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(147): limited, third-person centers of narrative consciousness. In Passing, Larsen
dramatizes Irene’s mind; in Intruder, Faulkner dramatizes Chick’s. And both texts
function as extended “narrated monologues,” which Dorrit Cohn defines as “the
technique for rendering a character’s thought in his own idiom while maintaining the
third-person reference and the basic tense of narration” (100). The fact that these novels
unfold before readers through Irene’s and Chick’s vision creates a somewhat disjunctive,
unsettling experience because, on a surface level at least, the novels are not about either
of these characters: Passing focuses on Clare Kendry’s passing as a wealthy white
woman and her subsequent longing for blackness, while Intruder centers on the murder
charge of shooting a white man brought against Lucas Beauchamp. By relating Clare’s
and Lucas’s tales to readers through Irene and Chick, Larsen and Faulkner demonstrate
the troubled ideological ramifications underlying a representative democracy where being
represented (and re-presented) by another frames one within not only other people’s
definitions, but also other people’s purposes.
My reading of these novels is therefore grounded in point of view and the manner
in which it is employed by Larsen and Faulkner both as a technical device and as a
standpoint, attitude, or relationship of the sort Susan Sniader Lanser describes. Lanser
asserts that point of view “not only constructs and controls narrative but also enacts
more-or-less visibly a ‘plot’ of its own” (Fictions 277). Passing and Intruder in the Dust
are very much structured as the construction or the enactment of Clare’s and Lucas’s
struggles for autonomy, equality, and access to the privileges of Americanness within
Irene’s and Chick’s subjective viewpoints, viewpoints influenced by the racial ideology
of their era. I suggest that Larsen’s and Faulkner’s use of such a complicated narrative
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technique draws a parallel between literary form and the United States’ system of
representative government. Although neither Clare nor Lucas actually elect to have
others represent them, Clare does use Irene’s Harlem ties to reconnect with her black
heritage, and Lucas does pick Chick as the one to (literally and figuratively) dig up the
evidence of his innocence. Such representation is necessary because in the United States
of Passing and Intruder, the stories of Clare’s and Lucas’s pursuit of the rights ostensibly
granted by the Constitution and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments can only be
related by proxy. Through Irene’s and Chick’s troubling narratives, however, these
novels depict both the potential failure of representation as a democratic and narrative
process and the deception at the core of an American dream that maintains the nation’s
power structure while selling its people on the pursuit of a form of Americanness and
citizenship many of them cannot truly attain – especially when said people are imagined
within the national consciousness as racially “Other.”
Unable to speak for themselves in Passing and Intruder in the Dust, Clare and
Lucas, like many African Americans and those labeled as “black” throughout the first
half of the twentieth century, are forced to rely on others to represent their interests.
Irene and Chick, though, do not speak for Clare and Lucas at all, so much as represent
them through a continuous narrative thinking through and thinking about their attempts to
claim American identities. Such thinking through and thinking about emphasizes the
interpretive nature of their representations of Clare’s and Lucas’s stories. Further
complicating the novels is the fact that though Irene and Chick are fascinated by Clare
and Lucas, they ultimately work to contain them within Plessy-influenced designations of
identity. Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that “Novelistic discourse is always criticizing itself,”
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and that in every text, “[b]ehind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s
story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the
narrator himself” (49; 314). The second story in both Larsen’s and Faulkner’s novels
brings to light how Irene and Chick buy into and perpetuate national demarcations of race
and American identity. Moreover, the intricate manner in which Larsen structures
Clare’s tale through Irene’s eyes and Faulkner offers us Lucas’s tale through Chick’s,
reveals that the act of representation is itself fraught with interpretive and mis-interpretive
possibilities.
Several critics of both novels have touched upon the importance of the texts’
telling one character’s story through the eyes of another, particularly in terms of Irene’s
and Chick’s reliability. In the case of Passing, for instance, Mary Mabel Youman,
Claudia Tate, and Joyce Ann Joyce have questioned the veracity of Irene’s vision of
Clare’s story, pointing out that for a supposed “race woman,” Irene shows little concern
for advancing racial equality or aiding working-class or poor African Americans. In fact,
as Joyce notes, “Her main contact with them is through her house servants and the charity
balls which she sponsors merely to cement her place among the Black bourgeoisie”
(72).
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Claudia Tate asserts that, “The problem of interpreting Passing can … be
simplified by defining Irene’s role in the story and determining the extent to which she is
reliable as the sole reporter and interpreter of events” (144). Tate believes Irene’s is not a
particularly reliable viewpoint, pointing out that, “Whether in the midst of a social

58
Further evidence of Irene’s distance from lower-class African Americans can be seen in the maid she
keeps, “Zulena, a small mahogany-coloured creature” (184), who is a voiceless servant with whom Irene
barely interacts, and in whose presence in the Redfield home we can discern Irene’s craving for stratified
forms through which she can shore up her own sense of identity and self-worth.

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gathering or alone,” she “often falls prey to self-dramatization, which is half egoism and
half ironic undercutting of the evolving story” (144). Deborah McDowell offers a similar
critique, describing Irene as “by turns, hypocritical and obtuse, not always aware of the
import of what she reveals to the reader” (xxv). Similarly, Elizabeth Kerr, Walter Taylor,
and Myra Jehlen, among others, have explored the reliability of Chick’s perception of
Lucas’s travails. Kerr argues that though “In some ways Charles is untypical of southern
boys, a deviation from the social tradition,” he is in the end “less a rebel against southern
tradition than a defender of the best of his heritage” (167). Taylor contends that Chick
and his uncle, the bombastic lawyer Gavin Stevens, who favors a “go slow” approach
when it comes to racial equality, agree “so often, and so completely, that Chick’s shame
at his heritage seem[s], finally, unreal” (156). And Jehlen describes Chick as
“conservative, a Tory who never doubts the rights of his class to rule” (129). Such claims
have merit, since even as Chick endeavors to extricate Lucas from the charge of
murdering Vinson Gowrie, he still considers him “a damned highnosed impudent Negro
who even if he wasn’t a murderer had been about to get if not what he deserved at least
exactly what he had spent the sixty-odd years of his life asking for” (148). And it is
worth noting that, early in Faulkner’s novel, Chick actually hopes to not to have to take
up Lucas’s defense, feeling “a surge of relief” (56) when he believes the townsfolk have
already lynched him.
Beyond merely challenging Irene’s and Chick’s reliability, however, I want to
suggest that the story that Larsen’s and Faulkner’s novels bring to light is the fallacy of
the American dream’s promise for those coded as “black” in the Plessy-influenced United
States, as well as the manners in which the texts’ controlling points of view are complicit
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in re-imagining and reconstituting American identity in the interwar era. In contrast to
the view of Americanness promulgated by politicians, eugenicists, and groups backing
“Americanization” during the interwar era, the publication of Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography in the late eighteenth century promoted the notion that all Americans
could, through their own efforts, reshape their lives and make of them what they would.
Indeed, as John F. Callahan has noted, since the nation’s inception, “the idea and
covenant of American citizenship required that all individuals make themselves up in the
midst of the emerging new society” (“Fitzgerald’s …” 379).
In many ways, both Clare Kendry and Lucas Beauchamp struggle toward just
such a citizenship compact in their respective novels, and both characters very much
“make themselves up.” While Clare’s and Lucas’s pursuit of Americanness may not
echo exactly the rags-to-riches template stamped upon the national consciousness by
Franklin, they clearly fit the prototype of the self-made woman or man. Born “the
daughter of Mr. Bob Kendry, who, it was true, was a janitor, but who also, it seemed, had
been in college” (154), Clare “disappeared” as a young woman when her white aunts
extricated her from the largely black neighborhood she and Irene shared. The reshaping
of Clare’s identity soon followed, as both she and her family worked to pass her off as
white and marry her to a wealthy white financier. To those who knew her formerly,
rumors are all that remains. Lucas too attempts to reshape his identity. Grandson of a
white slaveholder who had sexual relations with his slaves, Lucas lives in a house his
white cousin “had deeded to [him] and his heirs in perpetuity … and the ten acres of land
it sat in …” (7-8). With a “face like a Negro’s but with a nose high in the bridge and
even hooked a little and what looked out through it or from behind it not black nor white
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either” (13), Lucas enacts his “whiteness” through behavioral codes such as clothing,
public address, and a refusal of racially prescribed hierarchies. Claiming the privileges of
his white forefather, Lucas insists on his McCaslin blood and refuses to let his
community “make a nigger out of him” (31).
Although distinct, Clare’s and Lucas’s efforts toward self-transformation share a
refusal to conform to restrictive American racial ideologies. In her study on passing and
American individualism, Pfeiffer connects challenging and destabilizing one’s race to the
idea of self-made identities, claiming that when she speaks of American individualism,
she means “to evoke the mythology that animates American notions of autonomy, self-
determination, and free choice” (4). Such a mythological backdrop is prevalent
throughout Passing and Intruder in the Dust, as Clare and Lucas endeavor to employ
these same individualistic tropes of autonomy, self-determination, and free choice to
determine their own fates. In so doing, they threaten to collapse the black/white binary
that was emerging more forcefully as various “racial” European immigrants fought for
incorporation into “white” America as the interwar era progressed. But the success of
those such as Clare and Lucas whose mixed blood is part “black” is inevitably limited in
a nation seeking clearly defined identity parameters. In a Plessy-influenced nation where
having mixed blood limits one’s right to pursue happiness, Joyce notes how the American
dream heightens “the disappointment and frustrations of Black Americans who aspire to
unrealistic goals, given the historical, sociological, and economic relationships of Black
Americans to the dominant American culture” (69). Clare and Lucas can chase their
dreams of equality, identity, and selfhood. However, moving out of one identity into
another, as Clare finds, or refusing the stigmatism of a predefined identity, as Lucas
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attempts, does not necessarily bring one happiness, autonomy, or equality. Clare may
enter a privileged position of whiteness and class, but to do so she must cut herself off
completely from her past. And her status is constantly at risk should her secret come to
light. Lucas may be his own man, but the denizens of Jefferson, Mississippi see only his
blackness, and are determined to “make a nigger of him” yet. The individualistic
tradition, as Pfeiffer notes, has frequently proved mythic, and Passing and Intruder in the
Dust demonstrate just how dangerous this myth is for women and men like Clare and
Lucas – not to mention how fascinating yet finally disturbing Irene and Chick find it.
Ultimately, then, the American dream is a bromide for these characters, the pursuit of it a
placebo.
Central to Clare’s and Lucas’s experiences is the racial order affirmed in the
Plessy decision. Both Passing and Intruder in the Dust revolve around the manners in
which their main characters attempt to cross the color-line and remake themselves as
“Americans” in an era marked by the “one drop rule” underscored by Plessy. According
to Eric Sundquist, Plessy
largely determined the parodic ‘form’ of American race relations for the next half
century, and did so by defining race as a genetically transmitted, but essentially
metaphysical, factor – subject to reproductive, not ocular laws. Race could not
always be seen, but it was there and became a form of biological property. (7)

The similarities and differences in the manners by which Clare’s and Lucas’s endeavors
destabilize and blur this understanding of race engage readers in dialogues about the
complexity of shifting racial paradigms and conceptions of American identity between
World War I and World War II. The national preoccupation with firmly delineated race
and identity categories in the early twentieth century drives this home, and is particularly
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apparent in the 1920 census. The census, as Carla Kaplan points out, provides a telling
example of the country’s prevailing cultural and political mindset in “dropping the
category of ‘mulatto’ and insisting that every American ‘be one thing or the other,’ black
or white” (“Nella Larsen’s Erotics” 10-11). Larsen’s and Faulkner’s novels trouble such
either/or distinctions, and their depictions of American identity highlight both the
fallacies of and discrimination of such racialized identifications. Pfeiffer has noted that
“To a nation that craved certainty, Plessy offered the illusion of clear segregation. Yet it
simultaneously invited subversion of the most dramatic sort: the number of light-skinned
people passing for white best illustrates the potential for racial anarchy” (9). Against a
backdrop of exclusion and inclusion, of black and white, performing the tropes of
normative whiteness offers Clare and Lucas a way of circumventing race-based barriers,
a way of attaining a form of the American dream and Americanness. The only avenue
seemingly available to them whereby they can both chase the American dream and shed
the stigma of “race” was to destabilize the constraints of race altogether, whether through
passing or simply and outrightly rejecting the categories of American culture.
The different approaches to Americanness the protagonists of Passing and
Intruder undertake – Clare in the more traditional sense of passing herself off as being
white without anyone’s knowing otherwise; Lucas of defying every social convention
that tries to mark him as black, despite his skin color and social ostracism – illuminate
how such performances themselves were responses to the (problematic) equality
supposedly offered by the American dream in the interwar years. Discussing the
phenomenon of passing within the United States, Werner Sollors notes the irony of its
being
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a form of defining identity on the basis of only partial ancestry … which seems at
particular odds with a social system that otherwise cherishes social mobility and
espouses the rights of individuals to make themselves anew by changing name,
place, and fortune, and that has produced famous parvenus and confidence men.
(Neither Black 249-50)

Sollors goes on to describe the paradox of a nation that cherishes the notion of the self-
made man, yet condemns passers such as Clare as an “impostor” (Neither Black 250).
These ideas are equally applicable to those such as Lucas who claim an Americanness
their skin color denies them. Clare’s and Lucas’s pursuits of Americanness, however,
occur in a country and culture where having even one drop of African blood is to be
deemed not-white in the post-Plessy America of in the first half of the twentieth century.
To be not-white in a nation endeavoring to (re)constitute Americanness as Anglo/Nordic
whiteness is to be denied a viable American identity and the cultural and legal privileges
it entails. This is why, for instance, Clare’s aunts “didn’t want anyone to know that their
darling brother had seduced – ruined, they called it – a Negro girl. They could excuse the
ruin, but they couldn’t forgive the tar-brush” (159). Similar sentiments lie behind Clare’s
white husband, Jack Bellew’s, assertion that, even after years of marriage, were he to find
out that she was “one or two percent coloured,” he would draw the line: “No niggers in
my family. Never have been and never will be” (171). An analogous principle of
drawing firm distinctions between black and white is visible in Intruder in the crossroads
store owner Mr. Lilly, a man whom Chick’s uncle points out as embodying the
community’s mindset. According to Stevens, Mr. Lilly
has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell
you that he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will
believe it. … All that he requires is that they act like niggers. (47-48)

Textual moments such as these underscore a national preoccupation with categorizing
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people as being either black or white, one or the other, and, as these texts illustrate, that
one challenges and destabilizes such categories at one’s peril.
Moreover, in opening Irene’s and Chick’s consciousnesses to readers, the novels
offer an unsettling vision of an America where the only way those on the outside of a
supposedly democratic social hierarchy can get “inside” is through complicity with a
culture that defines Americanness as whiteness. The roles Irene, a black woman, and
Chick, a white male teenager, play in presenting and representing Clare’s and Lucas’s
stories illuminates a textual critique of the longstanding national trope of playing the
marginalized against one another. This is also a critique of the problematic nature of a
representational system where only complicit, relatively agency-less insider-outsiders can
relate the stories of Clare and Lucas. In Passing, Irene fears that if Clare Kendry is
“freed” from the cultural constraints of her position as a wealthy white family woman, if
she is allowed to move fluidly between both the black and white worlds, “anything might
happen” (236). Ironically, it is not Clare’s passing for white that Irene fears, so much as
“the menace of impermanence” Clare’s immersion into Harlem social life brings with it,
and the threat she represents to the middle-class security of the black bourgeoisie (229).
Like Clare, Lucas Beauchamp also poses a threat, especially to sixteen-year-old Chick’s
conceptions of race and identity. Despite the persistent attempts of the citizens of
Jefferson to classify Lucas as black, he refuses to defer to whites, dresses up on Saturdays
like his white ancestor, and wears his grandfather’s pistol in public. This last act
eventually leads to his being framed for murdering a white man when he is discovered
over the body of Vinson Gowrie behind Fraser’s store on a Saturday evening, just after
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Gowrie is shot. In this manner, Lucas both affects a performative similar to Clare’s, and
forces the population of Jefferson to notice – if not recognize – him.
Despite being themselves outsiders, Irene and Chick view Clare’s and Lucas’s
transgressions in pursuit of Americanness as disquieting, and reify a national system of
identifications founded on racial difference and the privileges of whiteness and class. At
one point in Passing, Irene says to her husband, Brian,
It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it.
It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an
odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it. (185-86)

However, the manner in which both Irene and Chick represent their protagonists belies
such assertions. In fact, maintaining the status quo is a priority for both. In Irene’s eyes,
security and stability are paramount to happiness. “Having always had complete
confidence in her own good judgment and tact,” we read, “Irene couldn’t bear to have
anyone seem to question it. Certainly not Clare Kendry” (191). Chick, although uneasy
with his community’s view of Lucas, still somewhat romantically wishes to defend its
values. He may be sympathetic towards Lucas, but he remains a part of the white
Southern society he believes in: “One people one heart one land” (205). He also often
thinks of Lucas in disconcerting terms, in fact, considering him “just a nigger after all for
all his high nose and his stiff neck and his gold watch-chain and refusing to mean mister
to anybody even when he says it” (57). Though fascinated by Clare’s and Lucas’s
destabilization of racial identities in their pursuit of Americanness, Irene and Chick
themselves finally view race as being, if not altogether authentic, at least a necessary
component of maintaining their comfortable space within status quo American society;

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this becomes particularly clear when the latter characters threaten Irene’s middle-class
security and Chick’s flawed yet valorous South.
A good illustration of Chick’s problematic view of and interaction with Lucas
occurs in the novel’s opening chapter. He recalls four years earlier when, at age twelve,
he fell into an icy stream. Lucas and his wife, Molly, take Chick in, drying his clothes
and feeding him, and Chick remembers that he
sat down and ate in his turn of what obviously was to be Lucas’ dinner – collard
greens, a slice of sidemeat fried in flour, big flat pale heavy half-cooked biscuits,
a glass of buttermilk: nigger food too, accepted and then dismissed because it
was exactly what he had expected, it was what Negroes ate, obviously because it
was what they liked, what they chose. (13)

When Chick tries to pay Lucas for these services as a means of reestablishing his sense of
racial order, Lucas refuses his money, and a long, complicated series of failed exchanges
occurs between them over the ensuing years. First Chick sends Lucas cigars and Molly
snuff for Christmas, thinking that this would defray some of his debt, then purchases a
“flowered imitation silk dress” (22) for Molly
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; Lucas, in turn, has a white boy on a mule
deliver a gallon of homemade molasses to Chick, which makes Chick’s sense of debt
worse, because “this time Lucas had commanded a white hand to pick up his money and
give it back to him” (23). Despite his efforts to return his relationship with Lucas to the
hierarchical racial order he has grown up believing in and comprehends, Chick finds
things much more complicated, less black and white. In fairness to Chick, the novel does
at points reflect his changing attitudes and understanding as he matures. We are told, for

59
The “imitation” nature of the dress can, on the one hand, be taken as symptomatic of the lack of financial
resources available to a teenage boy. On the other, it is interesting to note that Chick buys an imitation silk
dress for the wife of Lucas, who is himself presented throughout Intruder in the Dust as in some ways
imitating a white man.

142
instance, that years later as a “man grown” (13), he does come to question whether blacks
truly all desire to eat “nigger food,” or whether their circumstances have forced it upon
them. However, as I shall discuss at greater length later, his maturation and shifts in
thought are frequently hesitant and conflicted, and far less epiphanic than many critics
make out.
Although Passing, by comparison, does present readers with a representative
black viewpoint in Irene, her representation of Clare too raises questions. After all, Irene
is a woman for whom “security was the most important and desired thing in life” (235), a
woman so consumed by a need for order and regularity that she “didn’t like it to be warm
and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudy as if snow was
about to fall,” believing that “[t]he weather, like people, ought to get into the spirit of the
season” (213). At one point, after her husband has challenged her conservative
management of their lives and family, Irene wonders, “Couldn’t he see, even now, that it
had been best? Not for her, oh no, not for her – she had never really considered herself –
but for him and the boys” (186-87). We see in these instances examples of Tate’s “ironic
undercutting.” Even though we, as readers, are limited to Irene’s thoughts, the frantic
self-justification evident in these textual moments is instructive, and displays Irene’s need
for control, a need which will drive her to reinterpret Clare through her own desires as
she represents her to readers.
Both Irene’s longing for order and control and Chick’s comfort with the U.S.’s
status quo social order assume even greater significance in light of the ways that
“patriotic” groups such as the American Legion and Daughters of the American
Revolution waged influential campaigns – frequently with state and federal assistance –
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aimed at enforcing a uniform “100% Americanism” and establishing men and women of
Anglo-Saxon stock as “native” Americans during the early decades of the twentieth
century. Characterizing Americanness as conformity instead of plurality, and marking
those outside its parameters as “unpatriotic” and “un-American,” these groups worked to
(re)consolidate power in the hands of the white upper class This exclusionary paradigm
was particularly resonant for African Americans, as the vast majority of Americanization
programs during these years were aimed at European immigrants alone. In large part, the
ease with which assimilationist Americanization discussions left black outs was
concomitant with the separate-but-equal ideology the Plessy decision sanctioned. Noting
the differences in the era’s political programs, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that “The
point of Americanization was to make immigrants more like native Americans; the point
of Jim Crow was to erect impassible barriers between African and native or European-
born Americans” (152). Americanization ideology thus distinguished between those
“not-white” and thus not “American,” such as African Americans, and those who could
potentially become “white” and “American,” such as immigrants – although, as we have
seen in My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby, and What Makes Sammy Run?, the “whiteness”
and “Americanness” of many immigrants and those with ambiguous race backgrounds
was itself limited and often nearly as implausible as that of Clare Kendry and Lucas
Beauchamp.
Toward the conclusion of Passing, Irene and her husband, Brian, quarrel over
their son’s desire to know why only blacks are lynched. Brian is angered by Irene’s
determination to remain in the United States, yet at the same time to shelter their children
from the harsh reality of American life and its implications. “If … they’ve got to live in
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this damned country,” he tells her, “they’d better find out what sort of thing they’re up
against as soon as possible” (231). Brian’s assertion serves as a touchstone for not only
the novel, but also for the interwar era experience of people of African descent in
American society – even those, like the Redfields, whose middle-class success situates
them as semi-insiders within the country’s social hierarchy. As Passing demonstrates,
such an understanding of what one is “up against” is pertinent for those living in a nation
(re)defining who and what “Americans” were. For what the Redfields’ sons and those
such as Clare and Lucas, who attempt to move beyond firmly entrenched racial identities,
are “up against” is a stratified society where having a single drop of African blood is
enough to deny a person the civil rights ostensibly guaranteed by the Constitution and the
Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments, and where challenging the nation’s
demarcations of race is inherently perilous.
Lucas’s peril is particularly pronounced, given his public refusal of racial
hierarchies – his refusal to acknowledge his ostensible race. Chick cannot recall having
ever “seen him in town on Saturday when all the other Negroes and most of the whites
too from the country came in” (24). Instead, he remembers
Lucas’ annual and necessary visits – but on weekdays like the white men who
were not farmers but planters, who wore neckties and vests like merchants and
doctors and lawyers themselves, as if he refused, declined to accept even that little
of the pattern not only of Negro but of country Negro behavior …” (24)

Rejecting Jefferson’s codes of racial conduct, Lucas becomes “the Negro who said
‘ma’am’ to women just as any white man did and who said ‘sir’ and ‘mister’ to you if
you were white but who you knew was thinking neither …” (18). When he is called a
“‘goddamn biggity stiffnecked stinking burrheaded Edmonds sonofabitch’” by a white
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customer at Mr. Lilly’s country store, Lucas, typically, replies, “‘I aint a Edmonds. I
don’t belong to these new folks. I belongs to the old lot. I’m a McCaslin’” (19). Instead
of earning him the place and space he desires in Jefferson, however, Lucas’s recasting of
“refusal as a manifestation of essential identity – of permanence of character … places
him, not surprisingly, in constant danger of the normalizing violence of that community”
(Karaganis 68). Never is this truer than when his habit of always wearing old Carothers
McCaslin’s pistol on Saturdays leads to his being framed for the murder of Vinson
Gowrie.
Despite the ability to pass for white that Clare Kendry’s light skin affords, her
performance too is not without inherent risks, as well as potential moments of exposure.
And Clare’s passing entails “Stepping always on the edge of danger” (43), particularly
when she turns to Irene and Harlem to satiate her growing desire to re-immerse herself in
black life and culture. Even before Irene recognizes the threat to her security that Clare’s
passing poses – indeed, even before she even physically recognizes Clare – she finds her
disturbing. During an early scene at the Drayton hotel, for instance, Irene sees and “An
attractive-looking woman … with those dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth
like a scarlet flower against the ivory of her skin” – and a smile “just a shade too
provocative” (148-49). This woman is, of course, Clare Kendry. Thus, even when Irene
thinks Clare is a random white woman, she finds her “a shade too provocative” (note the
color undertones), and marks her as transgressive.
Adding to Clare’s and Lucas’s danger is the fact that from the outset Chick and
Irene depict them as “Others,” a stigmatization that intrinsically marks and hinders them
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throughout the texts.
60
We see this “Othering” occur in Passing’s opening scene, when
Irene receives the “exotic” Clare’s letter, a letter upon which Irene inscribes her essential
conception of her friend as “alien,” “mysterious,” and “slightly furtive” (143). Chick
similarly marks Lucas as “Other” in the opening chapter of Intruder when he remembers
falling into the icy stream four years earlier, and subsequently being given food and
shelter at Lucas’s home. He recalls how “he could instantly smell that smell which he
had accepted without question all his life as being the smell always of the places where
people with any trace of Negro blood live …” (9-10). “Mysterious,” “exotic,” “alien,”
“slightly furtive,” having a distinct racial odor – these are the terms in which Irene and
Chick present Clare and Lucas to readers. In Larsen’s novel, in particular, it is striking
how many times Irene’s reaction to Clare is of a similar sort to the kind of reaction she
ascribes white women having to black men: “I think that what they feel is – well, a kind
of emotional excitement. You know, the sort of thing you feel in the presence of
something strange, and even, perhaps, a bit repugnant to you …” (205). What are we to
make of examples such as these, or of Clare’s later, apparently quite literal, darkening, in
novels like Passing and Intruder which seems to imply that race is a constructed
condition, that it is a perception as much as a conception? Representations such as these
are both challenging and disturbing, and demand quite a bit more from readers than if the
novels had been written from either Clare’s or Lucas’s point of view or an omniscient
one. What we find here is a fissure opening up between the prohibitive ideological

60
My discussion of “Othering” here is indebted to Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism, wherein
Westerners (“Occidentals”) “gained in strength and identity” by setting themselves apart from “Orientals.”
Just as important where the “Othering” of blacks from whites in the United States is concerned, is Said’s
description of how the Oriental/Other is projected as being “irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike,
‘different,’” whereas the European/white is portrayed as “rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (3; 40).

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boundaries set in place by the novels’ representative points of view and the exposure of
problematic notions of American identity that the texts themselves illuminate for readers.
In the case of Passing, Irene’s representation of Clare emphasizes her own
separation from African Americans outside of her immediate social circle. As Pfeiffer
has pointed out,
Irene’s exaggerated gentility, her attention to social propriety, her desire for safety
in the service of race loyalty satirizes the Du Boisian idea of “soul” – blackness as
an internalized and constant identity – and casts it cynically as something external
and wholly manipuable, more a fashion statement than an ideology. (143)

Like Pfeiffer, I too read Larsen as satirizing biological conceptions of race through
Irene’s behavior.
61
From this standpoint, Irene’s representation of Clare grows more and
more dubious. Consider the early scene at the Drayton hotel, where, despite her purported
scorn for Clare’s passing, Irene herself passes for white. Once ensconced at a table,
however, she is disconcerted by the gaze of the unknown white woman, and feels
her colour heighten under the continued inspection … What, she wondered,
could be the reason for such persistent attention? … And gradually there rose
in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. … Did that
woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on
the roof at the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were
always so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they
were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands,
shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an
Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they
even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. (149-50)

The preceding passage presents racial identity as a construction, even poking fun at

61
In The Mulatta and the Politics of Race, Teresa Zackodnik submits a view of Irene far different from my
own and that of many other critics of Passing. In Zackodnik’s reading, Larsen presents Irene “as mastering
and ultimately parodying bourgeois standards of womanhood,” and asserts that “To an audience missing
Larsen’s parody, Irene’s performance would be read as mimetic, as an attempt to ‘ape’ the behaviors and
values of white bourgeois ideology in an assimilationist maneuver” (169-70). Both Larsen’s location of her
narrative within Irene’s consciousness and the novel’s ending, however, argue against this view of Irene as
a sort of “trickster” figure.

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“stupid” white people who espouse the ability to draw clear racial distinctions: “finger-
nails,” “shapes of ears,” and “other equally silly rot.” The problem here, though, is that it
is Irene expounding these notions about race, Irene’s “colour” that heightens, Irene who
is “always” taken for “an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.” And at the same
time it is Irene who does not recognize that the “white” woman whose gaze so agitates
her is actually Clare – although Clare recognizes Irene. It is Irene who takes Clare’s lack
of these same physical giveaways to mean she is a white woman. Although what we see
of Irene’s outlook here reeks of hypocrisy, the passage itself is quite revealing in the way
it illustrates the unevenness of black and white, the extent to which they are different
kinds of identity. Blackness equates to what it is, signs that can be seen; whiteness, by
contrast, equates to what it is not, the absence of the signifiers of blackness and otherness.
On a personal level, Irene’s failure to recognize Clare is a failure of her own competence
to discern Clare’s “race.” On a larger cultural level, however, her judging Clare’s race
based on appearance is hardly surprising, given the era’s mindset of defining people as
either black or white, a predictable mistake even for someone such as Irene, who, as the
above passage illustrates, knows that appearances “had a way sometimes of not fitting
facts …” (156).
The textual undercutting of Irene’s authority is crucial to recognize, because
Passing is a narrative which, despite Irene’s apparent mocking of racial essentializing,
itself frequently appears to support biologically-based views of race. For example, Irene
represents Clare as so terrified that her first pregnancy might reveal her mixed blood, that
she refuses to have a second child. And her fear seems somewhat justified. Although
Clare was a “pale small girl” with a “pasty-white face,” and her adult face seems to Irene
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“an ivory mask,” as Irene’s representation of her tale progresses Clare not only longs for
a re-immersion in black culture, but also appears to undergo a strange, almost atavistic
darkening of her skin as she ages (143-44). In fact, Jack Bellew makes a point of
describing how
When we were first married, she was as white as – as – well as white as a lily.
But I declare she’s getting darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out,
she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger. (171)

Clare’s “blood,” of course, does mark her as a “nigger”; strangely, within the frames of
Irene’s vision in Passing, that same blood seems to be working toward a physical
revelation of her heritage.
But the key concept to bear in mind here is that we see all this through Irene’s
vision. For it is in Irene’s vision, her re-presentation of Clare, that Clare seems to darken,
especially as she becomes more and more of a threat to Irene’s sense of security and
order. It is in Irene’s vision that Clare laments how lonely she is:
You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright
pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of…It’s like an
ache, a pain that never ceases… (145)

On a surface level, the emptiness of Clare’s “white” life here seems to formulate race as
an essence. Conversely, I would argue that the emptiness of Clare’s “pale life” can be
attributed to the performative quality of her white identity, as by its very nature such a
performance is an imitative act supposedly lacking authenticity and depth. Counter to the
biological undercurrent of Irene’s narrative, Clare’s passing itself postulating race as a
construct. Carla Kaplan has discussed the “moment of regret” where passing characters
like Clare long for the “bright pictures” and vitality of their former (black) lives. The
moment of regret, Kaplan argues,
150
might have gone some distance towards alleviating national anxieties over tens of
thousands of undetectable passers. While they might get across “the line”
undetected, readers could be reassured that eventually, like Clare Kendry, they
would “always” at least try to “go back” (“Erotics” 11-12).

For readers of Plessy-era texts such as Passing, this form of essentializing desire
conveyed reassuring certainty to a nation seeking clearly identified identity parameters.
Not only readers, but black bourgeois women like Irene Redfield could also take
reassurance from Clare’s longing for blackness. Such reassurance both permits Irene to
maintain a positive sense of her own selfhood and excuses the fact that, while she might
occasionally pass, her choice of life as an African American was the right one. It also
buttresses her sense of order and desire for maintenance of the comfortable status quo.
It is not a huge leap to suggest, as Pamela Caughie does in Passing and
Pedagogy, that Irene actually performs the sort of masquerade she describes to her friend,
the white writer Hugh Wentworth, as being so difficult. Namely, she in some ways
mirrors a white woman passing for black. Caughie describes Irene as a
“race woman” who in a sense passes as black. Ironically, Clare – the one who
lacks race consciousness, passes in white society, and accepts the appellation
“Nig” given her by her racist husband – is more the “race woman” than Irene,
who lives a bourgeois lifestyle, gives up her seat at a dance to a white man
(Hugh), and clings to the security of her own place, unable or unwilling to see
that her place – whether the Negro Welfare League dance, her middle class
marriage, or racist America – is already made vulnerable by the other. (137)

While Irene is not white, her need for security and order, as well as the emptiness the
gaps and fissures in Passing reveal as central to her life and character, do mark her as
being metaphorically “white.” Perhaps this is why she so struggles to understand Clare’s
chafing against the constraints of her white identity. For instance, when Clare is
exasperated by the confines of her married life and complains that Jack Bellew keeps her
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out of everything, claiming that “I could kill him! I expect I shall, some day,’” Irene
responds:
“really, Clare, after everything’s said, I can’t see that you’ve a right to put all the
blame on him. You’ve got to admit that there’s his side to the thing. You didn’t
tell him you were coloured … As far as I can see, you’ll just have to endure
some things and give up others. As we’ve said before, everything must be paid
for. Do, please, be reasonable.” (200)

Clare presents a disruptive threat to not only cultural and political moves re-inscribing
American identity as white, but also to the self-conception of middle-class blacks such as
Irene. This is why she so agitates Irene. As Merril Horton notes, “The Redfield’s [sic]
economic and social position allows Irene to participate in all the activities of a
comparably situated white woman, activities such as charity work and bridge games.
Irene wants ‘black’ emotional security and familiarity, and ‘white’ financial security”
(34). While Horton’s view of Irene’s need for emotional security and familiarity as
distinctly “black” is not altogether convincing, the parallel she draws between Irene’s
situation and that of a middle-class white woman is instructive. Given Irene’s outlook, it
is hardly surprising that she views herself as “an American” in an era when “American”
meant “white.” No, she thinks, “she would not be uprooted. Not even because of Clare
Kendry, or a hundred Clare Kendrys” (235). To protect her own established life and
sense of self, she will, in the end, much like the town of Jefferson attempts with Lucas
Beauchamp, endeavor to “make a nigger” of Clare.
In the near two decades between Passing’s publication and Intruder in the Dust’s,
cultural and scientific moves were made away from the biological racist outlook of the
century’s first decades. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Otto Klineberg had been
attempting to counter biological race theories since the early twentieth century, and the
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work of thinkers such as social activist W.E.B. Du Bois, Swedish sociologist Gunnar
Myrdal, social psychologist Gordon Allport, and journalist Carey McWilliams further
unsettled such theories in the 1930s and 1940s.
62
Legal moves toward a more equitable
brand of justice were also made. By 1939, for example, the Supreme Court had begun
requiring retrials for southern African Americans who had been convicted by exclusively
white juries (Levine 172). And in the aftermath of World War II, Harry Truman became
the first United States president to place a civil rights agenda before Congress – albeit
one met with harsh resistance.
63
But while Supreme Court rulings, fledgling Civil Rights
legislation, and the publication and best-seller status achieved by several anti-
discriminatory studies during the latter part of the interwar era display alterations in the
nation’s views of race, Faulkner’s novel exhibits that despite these shifts, race itself
remained problematic in the national imaginary. The Supreme Court’s 1939 decision
concerning more just retrials, for instance, has little impact upon the white community of
Jefferson’s desire to lynch Lucas Beauchamp in 1948. Indeed, Lucas’s circumstances
display that legal mandates toward greater racial equity do not always establish racial
justice. Faulkner’s text depicts Jefferson, the South, and by implication the nation at
large as remaining a place where “every white man … had been thinking …: ‘We got to

62
See Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944); Allport, ABCs of Scapegoating (1948); and McWilliams’s
Brothers Under the Skin (1952).

63
Congress rejected nearly all of Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation, from his plan to institute a Fair
Employment Practices Commission to his attempts to abolish the poll tax; from his desire to make lynching
a federal crime to his endeavors to ban housing discrimination. Despite the positive intentions behind
Truman’s platform, however, lay equivocation. As Michael Levine remarks, “Truman tried to support civil
rights without offending the white South. This meant that while he backed civil rights measures with
rhetoric, he often did not press Congress very vigorously to pass them” (177).

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make him be a nigger first. He’s got to admit he’s a nigger. Then maybe we will accept
him as he seems to intend to be accepted” (18; italics Faulkner’s).
Even if Lucas had “admitted” his blackness, it is doubtful the white hegemony
would “accept him as he seems to intend to be accepted” – that is, as an American.
64

Ultimately, Wesley Morris is correct in insisting that Intruder “does not really seem to
eliminate the word difference from the vocabulary of racism, classism, and sexism”
(235). But neither Faulkner nor his text can do so, because difference had not
disappeared by the time of Intruder’s composition. (Nor, for that matter, has it now, in
the new century.) This sense of racial difference becomes even clearer when we consider
Lucas’s (in)action within the novel. Discussing the rather convoluted and not altogether
coherent murder mystery that drives Intruder’s plot, Joe Karaganis notes how it
hinges on the implausible and somewhat grotesque proposition that, believing he
would never be believed, Lucas would refuse to finger a white murderer in order
to save his own life. Thus, it isn’t Lucas’ innocence but, perversely, his silence
that sets in motion the long deferral of information about the crime and its
circumstances that constitute, such as it is, the narrative arc of the novel. (69)

The cultural implications such an idea carries are provocative, and Karaganis’s notion
that Lucas chooses to be silent and thus sets in motion the novel’s circumstances points to

64
A pointed reminder of the limitations of racial progress made in the 1930s and 1940s is the fact that, as
Gary Gerstle notes, “[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt consistently refused to support legislation to make
lynching a federal crime – a key objective of civil rights activists at the time” (163). Similarly, in spite of
rulings such as the 1939 just trials decision, “For an extended period of time, the Supreme Court did very
little to alter the level of black disfranchisement. In fact, the white primary was declared legal as late as
1935 in Grovey v. Townsend; the poll tax was upheld in 1937 (Breedlove v. Suttles); and the literacy test
was declared constitutional as recently as 1959 (Lassiter v. Northhampton County Board of Elections)”
(Grofman 10).

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the continued resistance to racial equality in the United States, and perhaps even a
resistance on Faulkner’s part – conscious or unconscious – despite his text’s challenging
of the notion of race. How else can we describe the novel’s improbable plot and
Faulkner’s choice to not only filter it through sixteen year old Chick Mallison’s
consciousness, but also to make Chick Lucas’s savior as well? Lucas’s silence in regard
to the murder is indicative (and indicting) of a society that continues to maintain
whiteness as Americanness, and which, particularly in the South – though by no means
limited to there – continued to mete out “justice” with lynching. It also directs readers to
Lucas’s deliberate choice of Chick as his detective/defender. This choice is illuminating,
for Lucas knows all too well that, “a middle-year man like [Chick’s] paw and [his] uncle,
they cant listen. They aint got time. They’re too busy with facks” (70). But what about
Faulkner himself, a similar “middle-year man” when he wrote Intruder? Despite
supposedly shifting cultural ideologies, in his 1948 novel Faulkner “solves” his struggles
to portray the story of a black man striving to be an American – and thus, paradoxically,
to be white – by making that black man finally dependent on a (comparatively)
marginalized, angst-ridden white teenager.
In an astute exploration of Intruder in the Dust, Karaganis discusses the “notion
of being, in effect, a minority within a race” (70). He describes how Chick is just such a
minority, both in aiding Lucas and in his ire against his community’s readiness to indict
Lucas for murder simply because he is black. Yet, while Chick regrets his community’s
attitude toward Lucas, he does not reject his community. In fact, Chick’s views on
intolerance and prejudice are never made entirely clear, tied as they are to Lucas as a
singular person. Whether he would react the same way in defense of the rest of
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Jefferson’s African Americans is debatable, a point furthered by both Chick’s and the
text’s insistent separation of Lucas from other African Americans.
65
His fellow
Jeffersonians’ willingness to act as Lucas’s judge, jury, and executioners may disturb
him, and he may be frustrated by the prejudiced, murderous “Face” he sees the white
mob outside the Jefferson jail becoming, “a Face monstrous unravening omnivorous and
not even insatiate, not frustrated nor even thwarted, not biding nor waiting and not even
needing to be patient since yesterday today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One”
(190). At the same time, the murderous “Face” of the white mob remains “the composite
Face of his native kind his native land, his people his blood his own with whom it had
been his joy and pride and hope to be found worthy to present one united and
unbreakable front to the dark abyss the night” (190). Similarly, a little later Chick feels
the fierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was
theirs, that furious intolerance of any one single almost instinctive leap and spring
to defend them from anyone anywhere so that he might excoriate them himself
without mercy since they were his own and he wanted no more save to stand with
them unalterable and impregnable … above all one unalterable durable
impregnable one: one people one heart one land…. (205)

A teenager on the outside of authority looking in, Chick is still white and, in the end, in
spite of his feeling for Lucas, remains part of the dominant community so willing to
lynch Lucas for a crime he did not commit. He may “excoriate” the “Face,” but he still
wants to “defend” it and remain “above all one unalterable durable impregnable one”
with it.

65
This view is at odds with the readings of critics such as Joseph Urgo, who in my opinion place too great
an emphasis on Chick’s maturation as a redemptive facet of the novel.

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Passing presents an even stronger illustration of Karaganis’s notion of being a
minority within a race. From the start, Larsen makes clear that Irene belongs to the type
of black bourgeois community that embraced the white middle-class values of
“mainstream” America, values such as ancestry, wealth, and lightness of skin tone.
Judith Berzon has noted that in several major United States cities, “black middle- and
upper-class communities have emphasized their rejection of the black proletariat and
have embraced white middle-class values in which physical appearance, (white) ancestry,
money, status, and conspicuous consumption play major roles” (6). “Membership within
these elitist communities,” she adds, “provided the means for making the American
dream work – to some extent – for an oppressed racial minority” (6). Irene belongs to
such a black bourgeoisie community, and throughout the novel, her narrative actively
works to propagate its ideology. The premium Irene places on the security and degree of
privilege she accesses through her standing as the wife of a well-to-do Harlem doctor
thus stand in stark contrast to the parties she throws for the supposed “uplift” of her race.
Indeed, contrary to her belief that she is not a snob, Irene “cares greatly for the petty
restrictions and distinctions with which what called itself Negro society chose to hedge
about itself” (157); much more, it seems, than acting for the racial uplift she pays lip
service to.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Clare’s determination to reconnect with black life
leads Irene to think of herself and Clare as strangers:
Strangers in their ways and means of living. Strangers in their desires and
ambitions. Strangers even in their racial consciousness. Between them the barrier
was just as high, just as broad, and just as firm as if Clare did not run that strain of
black blood. (192)

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This division between them eventually leads Irene to conclude that “The trouble with
Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her own cake and eat it too, but that she
wanted to nibble at the cake of other folk as well”(182). In this case, the “cake” becomes
Irene’s husband, Brian. Once Irene begins to fear that Clare and Brian are romantically
involved – an involvement for which the text offers no conclusive evidence – her
fascination with her friend’s crossing of the color-line turns to panic and anger. Deciding
that Clare has no “proper morals or sense of duty,” that to get what she wants, she would
“do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away,” that she is “not safe” (210), Irene’s
representation of Clare becomes a negative vision of her as a person and emphasizes the
purportedly immoral and unscrupulous nature of her peregrinations across the color-
line.
66

The shift in Irene’s feelings toward Clare and her narrative’s move to recontain its
transgressive protagonist gather momentum at a party at the Redfields’ home. During it,
Irene notices an exchange of looks between Brian and Clare that, to her mind, confirms
her fears. At this moment, Irene’s agitation turns to rage. “There was a slight crash. On
the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup [she had been holding]. Dark stains dotted the
bright rug. Spread. The chatter stopped. Went on. Before her, Zulena gathered up the

66
Such depictions echo the “morality” trumpeted by national projects – cultural, political, and legal –
aimed at delineating clear racial distinctions. As Ian Haney Lopez notes in his study of early twentieth
century prerequisite cases, White By Law, “To be unfit for naturalization – that is, to be non-White –
implied a certain degeneracy of intellect, morals, self-restraint, and political values; to be suited for
citizenship – to be White – suggested moral maturity, self-assurance, personal independence, and political
sophistication” (16). Lucas’s presumed guilt in Vinson Gowrie’s murder has a comparable resonance.

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white fragments” (221). Turning to her white friend, Hugh Wentworth
67
, Irene mutters,
“Did you notice that cup? Well, you’re lucky. It was the ugliest thing that your
ancestors, the charming Confederates ever owned” (221-22). The cup that Irene drops is
white; the stains that spread after it shatters are dark. Metaphorically, the shattering of
the cup symbolizes the shattering of the “white” ideals Irene, in this case, literally
upholds, with the resulting appearance of dark stains on the national landscape, stains that
demonstrate the adulteration of visions of national homogeneity by those like Clare who
challenge the country’s conceptions of not only race, but also American identity. The
fact that the cup Irene drops is a Confederate relic adds to the charged racial tone of this
scene, for it is no longer the Confederates who own the cup, but a middle-class African
American woman, and even she cannot maintain its sovereign wholeness in the face of
Clare’s disruption of normative “American” identity.
Following the cup incident, the racial “allegiance” Irene has felt in defending – or
at least not exposing – Clare’s passing fades. She comes to believe that Clare “cared
nothing for the race. She only belonged to it” (182). Now Irene begins to reevaluate her
childhood friend:
Clare Kendry. She wanted to be free of her, and of her furtive comings
and goings. If something would only happen, something that would make John
Bellew decide on an earlier departure, or that would remove Clare. Anything.
She didn’t care what. Not even if it were Clare’s Margery were ill, or dying.
Not even if Bellew should discover–
She drew a quick, sharp breath. And for a long time sat staring at the
hands in her lap. Strange, she had not before realized how easily she could put
Clare out of her life! She had only to tell John Bellew that his wife – No. Not

67
Most critics identify Wentworth as Larsen’s fictional depiction of Carl Van Vechten. Pfeiffer, by
contrast, argues that Wentworth and Van Vechten have little in common, and offers a plausible argument
that if any character in Passing is based on Van Vechten, it is Clare Kendry.

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that! But if he should learn of these Harlem visits – Why should she hesitate?
Why spare Clare?
But she shrank from the idea of telling that man, Clare Kendry’s white
husband, anything that would lead him to suspect that his wife was a Negro.
(224-25)

Irene’s thoughts then take on an even darker tenor:
a thought came to her which she tried to drive away. If Clare should die! Then –
Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! She felt faint and sick. But the
thought stayed with her. She could not get rid of it. (228)

While Irene does not immediately act upon this impulse, in the space of only a few pages
we have seen her ponder the potential benefits of exposing Clare to her husband, her
daughter taking ill and perhaps dying, and finally Clare’s own death. Clare has gone
from fascinating to dangerous to a threat needing removal.
Unwilling to directly inform Bellew of his wife’s ancestry, Irene is instead,
conveniently, caught passing by him, and then fails to warn her friend that Bellew’s
suspicions are aroused. This is, of course, the same Irene who has all along denied
passing herself, who now becomes “conscious of a feeling of relieved thankfulness at the
thought that she was probably rid of Clare, and without having lifted a finger or uttered a
word” (228). Soon after, Bellew catches Clare at a Harlem apartment party and
condemns her as “a damned dirty nigger!” (238). What transpires subsequently is
ambiguous. Irene is “maddened” by Clare’s calm smile at Bellew’s accusations, but she
also realizes that “She couldn’t have her free” (239). While Irene does not remember
what happens next, she “wasn’t sorry” (239) – which, of course, begs the question, sorry
for what? In the confusion Clare plunges through a window to her death. “What would
the others think?” Irene worries. “That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately
leaned backward? Certainly one or the other.” Panicked, Irene tells herself that “It was
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an accident, a terrible accident” (239). Although Larsen never makes clear whether Irene
pushes Clare out the window or not, this ending plainly diffuses the threat Clare signifies.
Caughie asserts that Passing’s ending is less, as some critics would have it, contrived,
and “is not a critical problem to be explained away but a narrative necessity in a text that
deals with racial and sexual differences that can be neither resolved nor reconciled”
(136). Given that Irene believes Clare has moved beyond her control, that in passing for
white and at the same time having an affair with Brian and longing for blackness, Clare
has become too dangerous, too transgressive, and that it is Irene’s vision driving the
narrative, Passing’s conclusion is indeed a narrative necessity.
In presenting Lucas’s story to readers through Chick’s eyes, Intruder in the Dust
too ultimately silences its protagonist, though in a less deadly fashion than Passing. The
denial of Lucas’s voice within the text – a denial enforced by Chick’s reluctant
representation of him – is troubling because, as Jay Watson has noted, Lucas “is not
allowed to speak in [his] own defense”; his silence, however, “will be interpreted with
pleasure by the white population as a sign of guilt” (129). Along analogous lines, several
critics have pointed out that while Lucas is the center around which all of the novel’s
action revolves, he has little actual role, next to no agency, and is only before readers for
a limited time. Myra Jehlen in particular notes his “enforced passivity,” and that “[a]fter
the first chapter, Lucas is confined to jail and is thus effectively out of the action … he
can only await his deliverance …” (129). First introduced as a voice, Lucas has no real
voice in the novel, and must rely upon Chick to represent him. He is bound by a national
power structure steeped in white prejudice and paternalism. Those in positions of
privilege and power, such as Chick’s uncle, are far more concerned with maintaining the
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“truth” of racial distinctions than understanding or working to rectify the actual facts
behind Vinson Gowrie’s murder. Although Lucas apparently chooses to isolate and
estrange himself from other African Americans, his predicament is symptomatic of the
problems blacks still faced at the end of World War II, and not only in the South –
racism, intolerance, and the threat of lynching.
In the end, Chick is only capable of offering Lucas a conflicted form of
representation. He is, after all, a teenager who has felt both a sense of obligation and a
need “for re-equalization, reaffirmation of his masculinity and his white blood” ever
since Lucas helped him when he fell into the frozen stream (26). While he does at times
challenge his uncle’s views concerning Lucas, these moments of resistance scarcely
exculpate him from complicity with a national power structure that implicitly defines
American identity as white and marginalizes its other citizens. A revealing moment
occurs when, after Chick saves Lucas from being lynched, Stevens asks his nephew at
what point he truly began to believe in Lucas’s innocence. Chick realizes “that he had
never really believed Lucas” (125). Despite having dug up Vinson Gowrie’s coffin and
forced the Jefferson community to face not only Lucas’s innocence, but also Crawford
Gowrie’s fratricide, Chick comes to the conclusion that
his first instinctive impulse – to run home and fling the saddle and bridle on the
horse and ride as the crow flies into the last stagger of exhaustion and then sleep
and then return when it was all over – had been the right one … because it
seemed to him now that he was responsible for having brought into the light
something shocking and shameful out of the whole white foundation of the
county which he himself must partake of too since he too was bred of it, which
otherwise might have flared and blazed merely out of Beat Four and then
vanished back into its darkness or at least invisibility with the fading embers of
Lucas’ crucifixion. (135; emphasis added)

While Chick by no means wishes for Lucas’s death, as Irene wishes for Clare’s in
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Passing, he does finally come to rue how his actions have unearthed the “shocking and
shameful” character of his community. The patently unequal and unjust racialized
hierarchy embedded in American culture would, for Chick, have been better left in the
dark instead of having been “brought into the light” by Lucas’s near-lynching and
subsequent vindication. Unlike Clare Kendry in Passing, Lucas’s pursuit of an
autonomous American identity and the rights being an “American” ostensibly entail does
not lead to his death. However, although he is exonerated, his performance of white
Americanness remains just that: an impersonation, a condition his skin color and other
people’s views of it prevent him from attaining.
Yet as complex and often problematic as Chick’s point of view and representation
of Lucas are, he is not to be confused with his pompous uncle, Gavin Stevens. And
Stevens’s presence in the novel is hard to ignore. Claiming to defend an ambiguously
defined regional “homogeneity”
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, Stevens eventually arrives at the falsely syllogistic
premise that “the postulate that Sambo is a human being living in a free country and
hence must be free. That’s what we are really defending: the privilege of setting him
free ourselves …” (151). Numerous critics have noted both the racist insensitivity
inherent to Stevens’s use of the term “Sambo,” and how it exposes him as more a
purveyor of stereotypes and generalizations than a rational, nuanced orator. His rhetoric
of Southern whites themselves being the ones who will free blacks – eventually – without
federal interventions plainly embodies a containing, suppressive ideological standpoint.

The alarming quality of Stevens’s pontifications throughout Intruder are further

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John Bassett has pointed out the irony that, “the most homogeneous people in the novel are the Gowries
and their ilk from Beat Four, who provide the murderer and the lynch mob” (172).

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heightened if we believe, with Richard King, that Chick will one day come to not only
echo his uncle, but also to firmly believe his notions.
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At times the text supports this
view of Gavin being the type of man Chick will become, especially during moments
when we read, “whereupon once more his uncle spoke at complete one with him and
again without surprise he saw his thinking not be interrupted but merely swap one saddle
for another” (150). However, I contend that the space Intruder in the Dust grants
Stevens, and the attention Chick gives to his uncle’s words, allows us to see Chick react
both with and against Stevens, and also what his doing so means, what is at stake in
agreeing or disagreeing with him amidst the complex cultural and political ideologies that
continued to permeate the country at the end of World War II.
The moments where Chick himself appears to take a critical eye towards Stevens
are some of the most suggestive in the text. Of particular relevance to my own argument
about point of view and its effects is Watson’s notion that our scrutiny of Stevens “only
exists as a direct function of Chick’s scrutiny – that, according to the narrative logic that
drives Intruder, the speeches stand out in the text because they stand out in his mind”
(118). “And they stand out in his mind,” Watson continues, “precisely because they are

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Many of Faulkner’s post-Intruder speeches and public statements concerning race issues echo Stevens’s
ideas, and have led several critics to conflate Stevens and Faulkner. However, the idea that Gavin Stevens
serves as Faulkner’s mouthpiece in the novel is problematic. While many of Faulkner’s post-Intruder
public statements about race do indeed echo Stevens’s “go slow” pronouncements on civil rights and
integration, conflating Faulkner and Stevens is oversimplifying, especially when we consider the ways in
which Intruder regularly undercuts Stevens. Jay Watson offers an insightful analysis of Stevens’s role in
the novel when he argues that “If Gavin is the mouthpiece for Faulkner he is thus a mouthpiece whom
Faulkner himself, whether consciously or unconsciously, undermines” (247). Both contemporaneous and
contemporary critics of the novel have noted the way Stevens’s performance marks him as rather
bombastic, in love with the sound of his own voice, and frequently syllogistic. His propensity for
exaggeration, extremes, and self-contradiction – not to mention his delving into stereotypes and confusing,
circuitous logic – to my mind plainly calls his credibility into question. Faulkner’s depiction of Stevens in
this manner, then, raises serious questions about both the Faulkner-Stevens connection and the specious
reasoning Stevens’s rhetoric promulgates.

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so troublesome, too troublesome to be absorbed indiscriminately” (118). We, as readers,
then, notice and are troubled by Stevens’s speeches specifically because Chick notices
and is troubled by them. It is difficult to conceive of the convoluted, paternalistic nature
of Stevens’s bombast coming across so clearly if Chick is not on some level registering it
as well, and perhaps even resisting it. In fact, several times Chick rejects or contradicts
his uncle’s views, as when Stevens declares,
“I only say that the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it
ourselves, alone and without help or even (with thanks) advice. We owe that to
Lucas whether he wants it or not (and this Lucas anyway wont).” (199)

To which Chick simply responds, “‘But you’re still excusing it’” (199). A similar
moment occurs when Chick disagrees with his uncle’s assessment of the town’s differing
reactions towards Lucas and the real murder, Crawford Gowrie. Having threatened to
lynch Lucas when it believed him guilty, Jefferson directs a far different face to
Crawford, one based on ostracism and exclusion – a position Lucas himself,
paradoxically, already inhabits – instead of violence. “So for a lot of Gowries and
Workitts to burn Lucas Beauchamp to death with gasoline for something he didn’t even
do is one thing but for a Gowrie to murder his brother is another,” Chick asks. Stevens
replies, simply, “Yes,” and Chick chastises him, telling him that he “cant say that” (195-
96). Stevens does say it, however, invoking the biblical injunction over killing one’s
brother as a justification for Jefferson’s hypocritical behavior. Instances such as these
demonstrate a textual awareness on some level – a political unconscious – of how, by the
close of World War II, the problematic nature of the older racial ideologies Stevens relies
upon had grown more and more apparent. At the same time, these moments also

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elucidate just how deeply embedded in the cultural (and national) psyche such
conceptions remained.
Up to this point, I have placed little emphasis on the ways both Passing and
Intruder in the Dust hinge on murder, yet this shared plot device bears looking into. Not
only are both novels similar in that they are tales of protagonists endeavoring to re-
imagine themselves beyond the restrictive parameters of birth and race, but the texts also
manipulate equally imaginative acts tied to murders to undercut the protagonists’ self-
imagining. In Passing, Irene and Clare’s highly competitive relationship is charged by
sexual jealousy, and Clare’s supposed affair with Brian seemingly drives Irene to push
her to her death. The murder of Clare Kendry, however, as Gayle Wald argues, does not
resolve
any of the dilemmas (real or imagined) Irene faces, or for that matter any of the
many questions – about the stability of race and gender identities, the construction
of national citizenship, and the nature of “race” loyalty – that Passing raises. (47)

Clare’s death presents few, if any, answers. More than anything else, it erases the threat
she represents to the nation’s and Irene’s visions of race and identity. In Intruder in the
Dust, Chick and Lucas’s relationship is likewise competitive. Here too there is a
sexualized element, as it is Lucas’s taking up his white ancestor’s (phallic) gun that leads
to his near-lynching at the hands of Jefferson’s white citizens. While Chick does clear
Lucas of the charge of murdering Vinson Gowrie, his doing so has as much to do with a
desire to repay a personal debt and thereby rectify his sense of the social order as it does
with justice. The truth may save Lucas from being lynched, but it does little to alter the
pattern of racial oppression in Jefferson. In this regard, Donna Gerstenberger correctly
notes that Chick’s
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effort to establish the truth can free Lucas of the charge of murder, but it cannot,
as the last section of the book proves, in any way free the Negro or the
community from the complexities of history and habit which dictate the mob’s
reaction to Lucas Beauchamp. The real problem cannot be solved by solving the
mystery of the murders. (224)

Neither the move towards murder nor towards solving a murder in these novels, then,
offers a solution to the paradox of race in the United States.
In Lucas’s case, though he is vindicated his position in society has scarcely
changed. We might well ask, as Patrick Samway does, “what of Lucas at the end of the
novel? Where is he going? Back to an empty house? Back into a community that has no
regard whatsoever for him and would like to see him banished or imprisoned forever?”
(220). Lucas avoids Clare’s fate, but Chick’s representation of his story relegates him to
both textual and societal margins in the end. The novel’s final scene drives home just
how little has changed, as we observe an exchange reminiscent of the one between Lucas
and Chick after Chick’s fall into the frozen stream four years prior. Here, though, it is
Lucas insisting on recompensing Gavin Stevens for his (minimal) services as his lawyer.
“Name whatever your fee is within reason,” Lucas says. “I want to pay it” (238).
Stevens refuses because, as even he admits, he did not initially believe Lucas and did
little to aid him. Typically, though, he allows Lucas to pay him two dollars for his
“expenses” – expenses incurred by forcing Stevens to figure out a way to make sense of
his innocence. For Noel Polk, this scene reestablishes a social hierarchy where Stevens’s
allowing Lucas to pay him is
a patently paternalistic ruse that cannot be interpreted otherwise than his
allowing Lucas Beauchamp, an innocent black man, to pay him for something
that he, Stevens, did not do, allowing Lucas to pay for the very freedom that
Stevens has throughout the novel said the South, if left alone, would eventually

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give him. In this way, Stevens … tries to keep Lucas obliged to him, in effect,
in the bondage of gratitude. (142-43)

Chick’s response to this scene? Nothing. Silence. We see it through his eyes, but he
casts no judgment upon it, or on the fundamental system of inequity it highlights – a
system saturated with inequality in spite of Lucas’s insistence on paying for services
rendered. The murder solved, Lucas cleared, Chick’s desire to right the wrongs of his
community submerges beneath his desire to take his place within it. Having repaid his
debt to Lucas, he, like his uncle, can now resume his life in Jefferson’s status quo, a
communal – and even national – racial hierarchy that will allow Lucas to be separate, but
never equal.
The marginalization of Lucas at the conclusion of Intruder, a novel seemingly
about him, is suggestive of the way art, in this case textual form, imitates life. For in the
end Chick Mallison’s troubled representation of Lucas parallels what we see Faulkner
himself attempting in the novel. As numerous critics have noted, Faulkner’s novel
appears to be less about the false accusations against Lucas and his subsequent ordeal, as
about the psychological implications such a situation creates for the communal
(dominant) white psyche. Discussing Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, John Carlos Rowe
has written of the
dramatization of this conflict between the writer’s desire to speak for others in the
interest of their political and cultural rights and the reader’s recognition that such
aesthetic advocacy is still very much a part of the problem of cultural exclusion
both in the political and literary domains. (223)

We see a version of this conflict in Intruder in the Dust, where Faulkner seems to give
serious consideration to the continued legacy of slavery and racism in the South near the
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close of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, however critical Faulkner may be, the
critique he offers is often problematized by his representing Lucas’s story to readers
through Chick. It would be rather disingenuous to criticize Faulkner for what he likely
intended as a progressive literary exploration of the problems of race and identity in the
U.S. At the same time, it would also be dishonest for us as present day readers and critics
to ignore the fact that he challenges racist ideology while at the same moment denying
Lucas either meaningful voice or real agency. Perhaps what is most useful to take from
Intruder is knowledge of this dichotomy, an awareness of the importance of the text’s
critique of race and identity balanced with an awareness of the problematic mechanisms
of representation it uses to arrive at this critique.
Exploring Clare’s and Lucas’s travails in Passing and Intruder in the Dust
illuminates the problems of race and representation. For even in 1948, as Gavin Stevens
explains to Chick, Crawford Gowrie’s literal frame-up of Lucas nearly succeeds because
it is driven “by means of a plan a scheme so simple and water-tight in its biological and
geographical psychology …” (223) that it seemed bound to succeed. Lucas’s insistence
on being a “McCaslin” of the old line takes him to the very precipice of being lynched by
a community determined to “make a nigger of him,” and it is only through the
intervention of a white teenager already in his debt that he is finally saved. Even at the
close of the interwar era, Lucas remains a man who “will be carrying his pigment into ten
thousand situations a wiser man would have avoided and a lighter escaped ten thousand
times” (237) in a nation unwilling to accept him as he wants to be accepted. But as Clare
Kendry’s fate illustrates, having lighter skin carries no guarantees if one has “dark”
blood. Her desire to be both black and white, to blur the unstable but restrictive identity
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delineations of the color-line, establishes her as being neither in the eyes of Irene
Redfield, and eventually results in her death. Yet through Irene’s reaction to Clare,
Larsen self-consciously indicts Irene as a representative of all those who are intrigued by
passing, all those who are fascinated by challenges to the nation’s racial hierarchy, but
who finally believe that transgression must be socially repressed or exorcized in defense
of their own interests. This is why the “push” Irene (or perhaps merely Irene’s narrative)
gives Clare through the apartment window is finally so convincing. Using Irene’s point
of view as a filter through which to represent Clare’s story, Larsen thus provides us with
a critique of ideology that extends to the nation as a whole, where culture, politics, and
legislation foster an environment that requires women and men such as Clare and Lucas
to transgress if they want to attain the most basic of supposedly “American” ideals:
liberty, individuality, and equality.

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Chapter 4
“The Theory of Historical Costs”:
Culture, Progress, and the (Mis)Representation of the Past in Robert Penn
Warren’s All the King’s Men and Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

“How can you do it?” she demanded, and the fingers closed on my arm.
“It is easy,” I said. “I can change that picture of the world he carries
around in his head.”
“How?”
“I can give him a history lesson.”
“A history lesson?”
“Yes, I am a student of history, don’t you remember?”
–Jack Burden in All the King’s Men

In the preceding quotation, Jack Burden, the narrator of All the King’s Men
(1946), explains to Anne Stanton how he can coerce her brother to accept a job in the
corrupt gubernatorial administration of Jack’s Boss, Willie Stark, by offering Adam
Stanton a manipulative “history lesson” that will “change that picture of the world he
carries around in his head” (248). Although Robert Penn Warren’s interest in history has
long been a subject of critical discussion, somewhat surprisingly Jack Burden’s past
history as a historian has often been treated only cursorily, or, worse, overlooked.
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Yet
as Jack reminds both Anne Stanton and readers above, he is a “student of history,” a self-
proclaimed “amateur” who began but never completed his Ph.D. By comparison, critics
routinely consider Godfrey St. Peter, the eponymous professor of Willa Cather’s The

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Warren’s alignment of himself with New Critical ideals in his discussions of art and style is somewhat
paradoxical, considering his engagement with the past and historical context in not only All the King’s
Men, but all of his major works of prose and poetry. Indeed, L. Hugh Moore points out the irony that
“Warren, despite his great concern for history and for literary tradition, is known as one of the New Critics
who rescued literature from the stifling confinement of historical criticism” (19). Robert Koppelman
argues, rightly, I believe, that “We may appreciate the fact that Warren never intended his formalist
approach to deny the work’s relationship to the world beyond the physical document known as the work”
(113). All the King’s Men is a formally intricate and powerful work, but it is the cultural, political, and
historical connections it draws – connections that are difficult to ignore, though several critics have made a
habit of doing so – that is central to my argument herein.

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Professor’s House (1925), as a historian, or at least as a professor of history. Scholars of
The Professor’s House, however, have frequently either examined history in a
generalized sense, or endeavored to force connections between elements of the novel and
Cather’s own exploration of Mesa Verde. Although several commentators have
independently explored the interweaving of past and present in All the King’s Men and
The Professor’s House
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, none of them, to my knowledge, locate either Jack or St. Peter
(or Warren or Cather, for that matter) within the historiographical discourse of the
novels’ era: namely, the scholarly debates between traditional, conservative historians
and their Progressive counterparts during the early decades of the twentieth century over
the proper vision of American history.
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These debates centered on the question of
whether the nation’s past should be celebrated and could explain the present in a
satisfactory fashion, or whether that same past provided a guidepost for undertaking
reforms to remedy the country’s failures. In neglecting to locate Jack and St. Peter amidst
this discourse, scholars have missed a rich opportunity to consider the ways All the
King’s Men and The Professor’s House engage with American history. To redress this
omission, my final chapter centers on the historical excavations of race, gender, and
American history performed by Cather’s and Warren’s novels, and focuses on Jack and

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In terms of All the King’s Men, see, for instance, L. Hugh Moore, Robert Penn Warren and History:
“The Big Myth We Live” and Jonathan Cullick, Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert
Penn Warren. Where The Professor’s House is concerned, Sarah Wilson’s “‘Fragmentary and
Inconclusive’ Violence” and Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America offer insightful analyses of Cather’s
engagement with elements of U.S. history.

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I term these somewhat loose schools of historiographical thought “conservative” and “Progressive” in
keeping with the way they are most frequently described nowadays. The conservative historians are also at
times described as “scientific,” “orthodox,” or even, by John Higham, as “conservative evolutionists.”
Progressives are also sometimes called “New Historians,” though their affinities with progressive social
scientists makes “Progressive” the more apt description.

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St. Peter specifically as historians to explore the questions raised by locating them within
the historiographic deliberations of their time. Through extended, embedded narratives
presented as historical journals, these novels explore the ways the very possibility of the
American dream in the present is premised upon past injustice which facilitated the idea
of the U.S. being a “created” country. I argue that where Cather’s text critiques the
failure of the national narrative even as it appears to lament a “vanished” American
culture, Warren’s demonstrates that failing to comprehend the nation’s past potentially
leads to a present where even “progress” is finally static. Such an exploration illuminates
the ways history emerges in these novels not as a passive narrative of the past, but rather
as a politically fraught process of interpretation, meaning-making, and re-presentation.
Late in All the King’s Men, Jack explains what he terms “The Theory of historical
costs”: a belief that “All change costs something,” and that “[y]ou have to write off the
costs against the gains” (393). With this theory in mind, we might ask how the novel’s
long, embedded excursion into the past – Jack’s presentation of his ancestor Cass
Mastern’s life – informs and reflects the text’s larger narrative and concerns.
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How, for
instance, does Jack’s aborted Ph.D. work speak to the contemporaneous struggle between
conservative scholars and Progressive historians for prominence in delineating a national
narrative? What are the “costs” and “gains” of Jack’s narrative, not only for Jack, but
also for readers? For the nation at large? The same questions can be brought to Godfrey
St. Peter’s presentation to readers of his former student, Tom Outland’s, journal of his

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Ironically, we later learn that Cass is not Jack’s actual ancestor. When Jack first begins his study, he has
access to Cass’s journal and letters because they have been handed down to him from his father, Ellis
Burden. Cass, in turn, was one of Ellis’s two maternal uncles. Jack’s eventual discovery of his true
patrimony, however, breaks this tie between Jack and Cass; once it becomes clear that Judge Irwin is Jack’s
biological father, he can no longer claim Cass Mastern as his ancestor.

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excavation of the Blue Mesa. As historians – St. Peter a professional, and Jack an
amateur – these men endeavor to represent the tales of the texts’ protagonists, Tom
Outland and Willie Stark, respectively, and their pursuit of the American dream by
linking Tom’s and Willie’s self-creation to a problematic national history. Weaving
together the strands of Tom’s and Willie’s histories, these historians re-present them as
seemingly coherent narrative wholes that fit within a larger national narrative of history.
Even more so than the other representative points of view I have examined thus far – Jim
Burden, Nick Carraway, Irene Redfield, etc. – Jack and St. Peter situate their protagonists
within their own re-envisioning of American history. Through Jack’s and St. Peter’s
struggles to find a viable historical outlook, Warren’s and Cather’s texts illuminate what
Hayden White describes as “the fictions of factual representation”: that “[t]he historian –
like any writer of a prose discourse – fashions his materials” (Tropics 106). Bearing this
in mind, I argue that, contrary to the final understanding and the “history lessons” offered
by the historians through whose eyes we view these novels, the “costs” cannot so easily
be written off against the “gains.”
History in both All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House, then, has a more
complex significance than it is generally given. Intertwining the myth of the American
dream with excursions into the historical past, these texts expose the constructed nature
of history and the ways it was manipulated by politicians, cultural critics, and historians
alike as part of a (re)definition of the term “American” during the interwar years. In The
Professor’s House, for instance, we see not only Professor Godfrey St. Peter’s wistful
longing for his lost youth and the bond he shared with Tom Outland, but we also get a
glimpse of Tom’s own experience discovering the archaeological remains of a lost Native
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American civilization and his subsequent identification with that people as progenitor
Americans. In All the King’s Men, Jack’s chronicling of Willie Stark’s rise from idealist
to demagogic governor is contrasted with Jack’s ancestor, Cass Mastern’s, despair over
Civil War era “America” – and Jack’s finally abandoned attempt to make sense of Cass’s
life through his Ph.D. work. In both novels, the combination of the two narratives – the
protagonists’ stories and the embedded histories – demonstrate the manner in which the
United States’ power structure has been historically constructed along race and gender
lines, and how the past reverberates in our own present day. In this light, Warren’s and
Cather’s texts expose a national narrative that celebrated only a limited, inclusive group
of “Americans,” and did so at the expense of marginalizing and “Othering” many
Americans, in particular minorities and women. Through Jack’s and St. Peter’s imperfect
representation of Willie Stark’s and Tom Outland’s stories, these novels illustrate not
only who has access to the American dream, but also the illusory, fictive coherence of the
historical narrative enabled by the nation’s myths of self-creation. The history lesson of
these novels, in the end, is a lesson about the flaws inherent to any vision of American
historiography that ignores or obfuscates crucial aspects of the past, or that consigns
particular groups to the periphery of U.S. history while valorizing a limited vision of the
national story.
In one of All the King’s Men’s most-cited textual moments, Jack describes how
his reading of Cass Mastern’s journal and subsequent experience working for Willie
Stark have, finally, led him to what can be described as a “Spider Web” theory of history.
He hypothesizes that Cass’s experiences of adultery, a friend’s suicide, slavery, and war
taught him that
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the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly,
at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy
spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the
gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black,
numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant
to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed
it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider,
bearded black and his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like
God’s eye, and the fangs dripping. (188-89)

In essence, Jack draws from Cass’s life the idea that everything is interconnected, that by
simply entering into contact with other human beings, one affects the world, often in a
negative fashion – hence the spider metaphor with its “fangs dripping” and “black
numbing poison.” His ultimate acceptance of this theory in his own life has frequently
been taken by critics as a sign of Jack’s personal maturation. For Beekman Cottrell, “The
Spider Web theory demands responsibility,” and Jack “gradually learns to become
responsible” (42). In a similar vein, James H. Justus views Jack as taking “a stand
similar to Cass Mastern’s” as he comes to accept responsibility for the death and disasters
around him (197). William Bedford Clark describes the convergence of past and present
within Jack’s understanding as a “revelation,” as a “rebirth that is finally the equivalent
of a religious conversion in which the ‘sick soul’ of a representative modern man,
alienated, skeptical, and vulnerable, is made whole” (93). These readings are
understandable, since Jack has spent much of his life vacillating between escapist
philosophies such as the “Great Sleep” and the “Great Twitch” that exculpate him from
responsibility, and a hesitant yet persistent desire for action exemplified by his
fascination with Willie Stark’s political rise. Yet the idea that Jack matures and takes
responsibility as a person and as a historian by novel’s end is premised on the notion that
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he finally understands both Cass Mastern’s and Willie Stark’s stories once he accepts the
interconnectivity of all life past and present. But the Spider Web theory, instead of
highlighting Jack’s arrival at responsibility and insight, points to both the flawed nature
of his representation of Willie’s tale and the vast gap between Jack and Cass. Unlike
Cass, who will ultimately hold himself responsible for the disasters in his life, Jack
eschews final responsibility for the deaths of his friends and colleagues. The (forced)
parallels he draws between himself and his ancestor thus in the end tell readers less about
the past and present than about Jack’s misunderstanding, misappropriation, and
misrepresentation of history.
Unlike Jack, the Professor does not have a theory such as the Spider Web by
which he can explain life and history. He is unable, in the end, to piece together his
narrative the way that Jack does, a problem several critics have at least implicitly noted
when describing the difficult structure of Cather’s novel. Incapable of wrapping up his
vision of history in a neat little package, St. Peter grows so despondent that he seemingly
attempts suicide by remaining in his study as it fills with gas fumes – only to be rescued
by Augusta, the sewing woman who keeps her “forms” there. As with Jack and his
Spider Web theory, critics have often read this moment as leading to an awakening on the
Professor’s part, his arrival at, if not an epiphany, at least a willingness to move forward
in his life. Susan Rosowski, for instance, argues that after Augusta saves St. Peter, he
recognizes her humanity and thereby “recognizes his place in the human family” (“Willa
Cather’s …” 281). Stephen Tanner takes a similar line, asserting that St. Peter “opts for a
wise and courageous solitude among the living, a solitude that distances him from his
family but enhances the significance of his humanity and provides a sense of human
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purpose that endures where career and creativity and even family fail” (114). Other
critics, such as David Stouck, argue that following St. Peter’s failed suicide attempt, the
Professor accepts the present and lets go of the past, that what he “has let go of is the will
to power through love, the instinct to possess and dominate that brings great joy in
achievement, but that also breeds much misery and unhappiness” (103). According to
Stouck, Augusta “is the embodiment of calm and ‘proper action,’ a person with whom the
Professor feels he can be ‘outward bound’ again,” and her “act of saving the Professor is
symbolic of the route he will now travel” (103). In contrast to such readings, I contend
that although St. Peter assuredly grows resigned by novel’s end, his final outlook is not
exactly more forward-looking, nor does he show any indication of growing closer to the
rest of humanity. Instead, the man readers see at the conclusion of The Professor’s
House continues to despair of the world changing around him. He carries on, but he is by
no means more optimistic. It is, after all, Augusta who saves him from death – stoic,
Catholic Augusta who represents, at least in the outlook St. Peter projects upon her, the
sort of deep-rooted conservatism with which he is more comfortable. Much like Jack
Burden, the Professor’s fascination with Tom Outland’s pursuit of the American dream
leads him to a finally static vision of U.S. history, one where “progress” is cyclical and
the desire for a renewal of the present relies on a view of American “culture” based on a
false past.
Transforming the past and the present into narrative form, both Jack and St. Peter
attach meaning to and represent Cass Mastern’s, Tom’s, and Willie’s tales in order to
frame them within historical “truths” acceptable to their own and the nation’s notions of
propriety, even as these notions were in contest amidst the nation’s historians. In Jack’s
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case, the trajectory his historical and personal understanding undergoes in All the King’s
Men in many ways parallels the scholarly fluctuations in American historiography during
the first part of the twentieth century. Although Jack is a scion of the Old South raised in
a conservative tradition, he is also drawn to Willie Stark’s push toward progress and
populism, and wavers between it and the conservative ideology of his aristocratic
background before finally returning to the traditionalism of his Delta aristocracy heritage
by the close of Warren’s novel. In a similar fashion, the twentieth century began with
conservative historians firmly ensconced as the arbiters of United States history, but then
underwent a sea change in historiographical thought as the Progressive reform movement
in social sciences influenced a similar movement in historiographical scholarship. By the
close of World War II, though, Progressive views of history had fragmented beneath a
relativistic outlook, and more traditional historiographic outlooks returned to prominence.
Influenced by German historiography, the conservative history of the early
twentieth century repudiated the “romanticism” of nineteenth century “amateur”
historians such as George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, and sought to professionalize
American historiography and scholarship by making it “objective” and “scientific.”
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The “objectivity” and “science” practiced by scholars such as Ephraim Emerton, Herbert
Baxter Adams, and Albert Bushnell Hart, however, was itself highly subjective.
Conservative history, as contemporary historian Peter Charles Hoffer writes, was “a self-
congratulatory tale, told by a white, Protestant elite” that “concerned itself little with the

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Worth noting here is the fact that Jack terms himself an “amateur” historian because he never completed
his Ph.D. Yet Jack is far different from the nineteenth century historians scorned by conservative scholars,
both in his professional training and his unalloyed cynicism. For an explanation of how the term “amateur”
was also applied in a negative sense to female historians in the early twentieth century, see Bonnie Smith,
The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998).

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dangers of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism,” and “insofar as it labored to exclude
people of color, women, servants, and slaves, it embraced profound fictions” (13).
According to this view, the country was comprised of “one people, forming one nation,
with one history …,” and “[t]hose whose stories did not fit this master narrative were
shunted to the side” (Hoffer 13).
Prior to World War I, however, a new, often younger group of scholars led by
James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Carl Becker questioned the conservative
position. Discontented with a history they saw as exclusionary and discriminatory, these
scholars sought to “turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance” (Robinson
24). Advocating a present-minded historiography, Progressive historians such as Beard
and his wife Mary strove to unmask “the power dynamics that drove American society in
the past and propelled it to its state of social inequality in modern times” (Des Jardins
59). Specifically, Progressive historians saw the conflict at the heart of American history
as specifically economic and political. In emphasizing such conflict, Progressives joined
what John Higham terms the “revolt against formalism” that was part of a “general effort
of progressive intellectuals to democratize American culture” and that also encompassed
“muckraking journalism, the pragmatism of [George Herbert] Mead and [John] Dewey,
and the shift in social sciences from doctrines and systems to immediate facts” (113).
However, most Progressive historians, like the Beards, “did not totally reject the notion
that American history had a central unity, or that it had progressed toward greater liberty”
(Hoffer 42). Instead, they “enlarged the scope of the drama, rather than rewriting the plot
line” (Hoffer 42). At the same time, although the Progressive movement achieved a
degree of prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, conservative history continued to have
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proponents and maintained a steadfast hold within the historical profession, leading to
continuous struggle and debate in American historiography between 1910 and 1945. At
stake was the way American history would be explained, how it would be delineated,
whether the national narrative would be celebratory or would acknowledge the conflicts
and inequalities pervading the country’s past. The contest was, at heart, one of
ownership, for whoever owned the past would hypothetically be able to direct the
nation’s future.
Ownership is at the center of Jack Burden’s struggle with history in All the King’s
Men and Professor St. Peter’s in The Professor’s House. In fact, the titles of both All the
King’s Men and The Professor’s House point to the possessive nature of their stories.
Where in the former case, the “King” appears to refer to Willie Stark
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, the title of the
latter book directs readers to St. Peter’s various struggles with possession: over his
family, his home, the memory of Tom Outland, and history itself. We can see the
centrality of ownership to Jack’s historiographical enterprise in his recounting of Willie
Stark’s tale, his abandoned Ph.D. project, and his digging up of the “dirt” on Willie’s
enemies. The same holds true for the Professor who, shortly before entering into “Tom
Outland’s Story,” thinks there are, “some advantages about being a writer of histories.
The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep into” (141).
Within the narrative parameters of All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House, being

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We might also read the title of Warren’s novel as referring not to Willie, but to history itself, and that All
the King’s Men positions Jack and the contestatory schools of American historiography as proffering
flawed attempts at remaking a cracked shell into a singular whole. A similar case can be made about The
Professor’s House, with its possessive title and St. Peter’s desire to make a “house” for history in his study.
For St. Peter, despite his efforts at narrativizing the past into a coherent whole, cannot put the pieces of his
desired history back together again, much in the same way that the “king’s men” of the rhyme Warren’s
novel draws its title from fail to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

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a historian, whether a professional or even an amateur like Jack, does indeed have
advantages. Certainly, as the Professor thinks, writing history affords both him and Jack
an escape from the troubling aspects of the present. It enables them to “digest” and
“sort” through records and ideas as well, “weaving” them into their “proper place,” as St.
Peter thinks. Being a historian also grants these men the ability to stamp their own
consciousness upon Willie’s and Tom’s tales, to put together the puzzle of the past, to
shape it in such a fashion that it provides release from reality and the disturbances of the
interwar era – disturbances such as women gaining suffrage and struggling for equality,
the troubling issues of immigration and race, and the questioning of a “historical”
national narrative.
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In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson has convincingly argued that
history “is not a text,” that it is “fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational,”
while at the same time it is “inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words,
that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization” (82). What we see in
All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House is the manner in which American history
– “fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational” – is channeled into narrative
forms by Jack’s and the Professor’s (re)textualization of it. The Professor’s thoughts
when he is about to embark on editing Tom Outland’s diary are revealing in this respect.

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The Professor’s need to meddle with and manipulate history is highlighted in an early scene in The
Professor’s House. When St. Peter’s students give a historical pageant “to commemorate the deeds of an
early French explorer among the Great Lakes,” they ask the Professor “to do a picture for them, and he had
arranged one which amused him very much, though it had nothing to do with the subject. He posed his two
sons-in-law in a tapestry-hung tent, for a conference between Richard Plantagenet and the Saladin, before
the walls of Jerusalem” (59-60). Although “The tableau had received no special notice, and Mrs. St. Peter
had said dryly that she was afraid nobody saw his little joke … the Professor liked his picture, and he
thought it quite fair to both young men” (59-60).

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“To mean anything,” he thinks, “it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some
account of his later life and achievements” (150). If we bear in mind Jameson’s
admonition that interpretation “is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric
battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in
conflict” (11), it becomes clear that both St. Peter and Jack view history as being unable
to stand on its own; “to mean anything,” it must be narrativized. This impulse to make
meaning is also an impulse to control, and Jack and St. Peter participate in a possessive
struggle for ownership of the past, for the right to promulgate their version of events as
“truth.” The Hegelian distinction between the res gestae, the historical object, and the
historia rerum gestarum, the verbal account of events, is useful to keep in mind here, as
Jack and St. Peter seek to contain and frame the histories they relate within “truths” they
can accept.
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Like both conservative and Progressive historians, Jack and the Professor
manipulate history (and Willie’s and Tom’s (hi)stories) by offering historia rerum
gestarum that imprint meanings upon the past that serve these historians in the present,
and Warren’s and Cather’s novels challenge readers to sift through their narratives to see
what other interpretations the res gestae might offer.
Perhaps even more than All the King’s Men, The Professor’s House showcases
just how much of a battleground historical understanding had become in determining
“American” identity and character by the interwar era, and how competing conceptions

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Significant parallels to this split between object – be it history, an event, a fact, or even a text – and its
interpretation exist in literary criticism, from the Russian formalists’ distinctions between fabula – “the
order of events referred to by the narrative” – and sjuzet – “the order of events presented in the narrative
discourse” – to later variants upon this basic distinction such as histoire and discourse (or recit), or “story”
and “plot” (Brooks 12-13). These parallels reinforce Hayden White’s views concerning the analogous
nature of historical and literary narratives. See Tropics of Discourse (1978) and The Content of the Form
(1987).

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of the “right view” of history informed Americanization programs, Progressive ideals,
race sciences such as eugenics, and a series of legislative moves bent on maintaining the
“purity” of old-stock Anglo-Americanness. Elaborating upon the distinctly conservative
historical stance embedded in Tom Outland’s diary, Sarah Wilson notes how “Tom’s
language of wholes and parts” was at odds with the “[t]he New, or Progressive, history”
(586). “By refusing to lose the whole in parts,” Wilson argues, “Tom aligns his nostalgia
with earlier versions of national history and with reactions against the Progressive
historians” (586). Not only Tom, I maintain, but the Professor as well subscribes to a
narrativized history reliant on wholeness and meaning. In fact, Tom’s influence is
pronounced upon St. Peter – St. Peter who finds that writing the final four volumes of his
seven-volume Spanish Adventurers in North America became “more simple and
inevitable” after he met Tom. Later, while annotating Tom’s diary, the Professor thinks
how beautiful Tom’s plain – re: uncomplicated – account is, “because of the stupidities it
avoided and the things it did not say” (234; 238). It is therefore quite telling that Cather
never grants us a glimpse of the Professor’s own historical study on the Spanish
Adventurers. What, we might ask, are these “stupidities” Tom and the Professor would
prefer to avoid? Perhaps even more unsettling, what are the “things” these historians do
not say? Such a historiographical outlook grows more disturbing when we consider that
both St. Peter’s and Tom’s histories are predicated upon the genocide of Native
Americans that enabled the United States’ repopulation by “native” white Americans.
The Professor’s and Tom’s vision of history come together most clearly in the
novel’s major embedded narrative, “Tom Outland’s Story,” wherein St. Peter
ventriloquizes Tom’s voice. Given the Professor’s tendency to edit and narrativize, the
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Tom readers encounter in the novel is as much a representation of the person St. Peter
wants to remember as an actual human being. St. Peter’s son-in-law, Scott McGregor,
emphasizes this notion when he says, “You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more.
Sometimes I think he was just a – a glittering idea” (94). Within the confines of the
novel McGregor’s assessment is accurate, as the Professor’s narrative turns Tom Outland
into little more than “a glittering idea.” And the “idea” Tom embodies in this narrative is
one that was common in the U.S. at the time Cather wrote: the call for an American
“culture,” a “usable past,” for history to provide the American people with a stronger
sense of who they were – and, by the same token, who they were not. Walter Benn
Michaels describes this outlook as one responding to a perceived “crisis of culture” (35)
on a national level, a crisis upon which Calvin Coolidge, among others, frequently
commented, and which increasingly was tied to “vanishing” Native American culture
during the early part of the interwar era.
Yet it might also be argued that the “idea” Tom epitomizes is the American
dream. His parents were “‘mover people,’ and both died when they were crossing
southern Kansas in a prairie schooner” when Tom was just a baby (98). Tom’s father,
who had been a school-teacher in Missouri, drowned in a river, and his mother
succumbed to a weak constitution (105). Despite his orphaning, Tom, who St. Peter
represents as the epitome of a self-educated, self-made man, becomes an explorer and
inventor. He goes on to discover the principle of the Outland vacuum, invents a
revolutionary aviation engine, and gets engaged to the Professor’s elder daughter,
Rosamond. He has, it appears, attained everything the American dream promises. Even
before the novel begins, though, he has lost it all as well, having joined the Foreign
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Legion and died fighting in Europe in the First World War. Having risen above his
origins, Tom is emblematic of the notion of achievable Americanness of the sort
purportedly promised by the myth of America. But the American dream that Tom
achieves finally fails him.
Tom’s transformation from a poor, uneducated orphan into a groundbreaking
inventor of aviation technology is also somewhat tainted. Like the visions of history
proffered by the Professor and Tom himself, Tom’s success is inherently tied to
possession. I will discuss his acquisition of and relationship to the Anasazi artifacts on
the Blue Mesa in greater detail later, but even early in the novel, chronologically
speaking, we find Tom and his desires tied to wealth and acquisitiveness. Materializing
seemingly out of nowhere at the St. Peter’s front door, without origin or apparent
resources, Tom presents the Professor’s young daughters with precious stones:
turquoises he removed from the Blue Mesa. After Tom departs, the Professor’s wife,
Lillian, declares, “Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor
perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs leaving princely gifts”
(103). This episode demonstrates that Tom is someone familiar with the tie between
acquisition and success in the United States. Tom’s success, though, is finally corruptive,
first on the Blue Mesa where he and his best friend, Roddy Blake, fall out over the
Anasazi remains, and later, after his death, when the posthumous success of the Outland
vacuum fosters petty, materialistic jealousies between his former teacher, Professor
Crane, and the St. Peters. Although Tom does not live to reap the rewards of his
invention, his creation too has detrimental consequences. As Kitty St. Peter later remarks
to her father, “now he’s turned out chemicals and dollars and cents, hasn’t he?” (112).
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Willie Stark is also an idealist whose success proves ultimately tainted. His
presence and personality dominate Warren’s novel to such an extent that even Jack
Burden’s exploration of Cass Mastern’s journal is informed by Willie’s rise to political
stardom and subsequent fall – and vice versa.
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As in Tom Outland’s case in The
Professor’s House, Willie’s tale is seemingly the history of All the King’s Men. Jack
describes how Willie began as a “red-faced and red-necked farm boy with big slow hands
and shock of dark brown hair coming over his brow” (4), but raises himself above his
origins to become a self-made man. After spending the First World War stuck in a camp
in Oklahoma “feeling cheated” (67), Willie returns home and studies law, reading
everything on which he can get his hands. Much like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Willie jots
down ideas and inspirations in a ledger. Years later, when Jack thumbs through this
ledger, he finds it full of quotations from “Emerson and Macaulay and Benjamin Franklin
and Shakespeare …” (67). Spurred by the desire to emulate the “great names” he
admires, Willie becomes first a lawyer and then a politician who, after experiencing up
close the corruptness of American politics, vows to work for change, and takes as a
slogan, “My study is the heart of the people” (6; italics Warren’s). Yet he soon learns
that to both accomplish his goals and stay afloat in the shark-infested political waters
surrounding him, he must subordinate the morality and ethics of his methods to the ends
he hopes to achieve.

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Anthony Szczesiul describes how where “the novel as a whole increasingly moves from the political
arena to the private sphere, the Mastern narrative progresses the other way; more specifically, it shifts from
Cass’s private sin of adultery to an awareness of the cultural sin of slavery” (62). What we see in All the
King’s Men is the way not only are the past and present interconnected, but so too are the public and private
intertwined: politics, culture, and individual lives. In this light, the Spider Web theory of history is
accurate; it is Jack’s misapplication of it that is the problem.

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Aside from the parallels between Willie and former Louisiana governor Huey
Long that numerous critics have noted, All the King’s Men also connects Willie’s rise to
that of another iconic American politician and self-made man: Abraham Lincoln. As
Jerome Meckier points out, Willie and Lincoln both come from log-cabins and study law;
they each suffer several defeats before winning a major political victory; and Willie’s
epithet, like Lincoln’s, is “honest” (63). At one point during Willie’s first campaign, Jack
even describes how Willie tried to make each speech “a second Gettysburg address” (70).
However, the parallel extends only so far: as Willie’s political stature grows, his idealism
diminishes, and he resorts to any means necessary to achieve his ends, transforming from
Willie Stark into “The Boss,” a demagogic figure Warren himself described as “the kind
of doom that democracy may invite upon itself”(“Introduction” 97).
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Initially striving to
better the lives of his state’s underclass and to establish greater overall class equality,
Willie cleans out the Democratic party and works for social good, forcing changes in his
state’s education and health care systems, and modernizes the state by building a network
of roads. But in a nation where political legislation is predicated upon an ends justifying
the means mentality, the desire to do good gets swiftly buried, and the efforts of men
such as Willie to enact meaningful change are inevitably swept under the rug by both the
nation’s dominant power structure and those, like Jack and St. Peter, who seek to
recapture their idealism in escapist, illusory past histories.

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In a 1912 campaign speech, Woodrow Wilson warned the nation about the danger of political “bosses”:
“A boss is a man who uses this splendid open force [politics] for the secret processes of selfish control”
(Vought 108). Prescient words, when we consider “The Boss” Willie becomes.

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History, though, is hardly the refuge Jack, St. Peter, and even Tom Outland desire
it to be. Warren warned that “the word ‘history’ is a very ambiguous word” (qtd. in
Woodward 64). His novel emphasizes this ambiguous nature of history when Jack relates
how, during the years following World War I, Willie worked on his father’s farm and
read books late into the night because, “He wanted to know the history of the country”
(67). Willie is swiftly frustrated by his exploration of U.S. history, though. After reading
a college textbook, he finds that “the fellow that wrote it didn’t know a God-damned
thing. About how things were” (67). Willie’s criticism here is an explicit refutation of
early twentieth century American historiography, especially in the terms espoused by the
late-nineteenth and early twentieth century conservative historians: namely, history as a
unified, evolving national narrative. Dissatisfied with history in its received, accepted
formulation, Willie, who believes he does know a few things, starts his own notebook, his
own history – a prelude to his attempts to rewrite the history of his state by looking to the
concerns of its people in the present. His desire to rewrite history so that it better
reconciles with early twentieth century conditions is strikingly in line with the basic
premise of the Progressive historians who rose to the forefront of national historiography
in the 1920s and 1930s: a desire to employ the past to further the needs of the present.
So compelling is Willie’s re-visioning of American history that even a scion of the Delta
aristocracy such as Jack Burden is moved, for a time at least.
Reading Warren’s and Cather’s novels with a critical eye toward Jack’s and St.
Peter’s representation of both their novels’ main characters and history is crucial, for,
contrary to claims such as Jack’s that he is merely “a piece of furniture” (32), or St.
Peter’s projection of himself as a man content to reside in the seclusion of his study, these
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historians play central roles in delineating Willie, Tom, and U.S. history to readers. “It’s
the wrong guy,” Jack tells Willie’s assistant and sometimes mistress, Sadie Burke, at one
juncture, “I’m not the hero of the piece” (142). But this remark is misleading, for as Jack
admits a mere fifteen pages later, “the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden
are, in one sense, one story” (157). A similarly suggestive textual moment occurs in The
Professor’s House when Kitty St. Peter spots an old blanket of Tom Outland’s in her
father’s study and exclaims, “He wouldn’t haven given it to anybody but you. It was like
his skin” (111). In many ways, the narrative readers encounter in The Professor’s House
is analogous to Kitty’s metaphor: throughout the novel and St. Peter’s representation of
Tom, the Professor seeks to don Tom’s skin, to inhabit his story and make it his own.
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In representing Willie’s and Tom’s stories to readers, Jack and St. Peter are always also
presenting readers with their specific interpretations (and manipulations) of these tales.
Mikhail Bakhtin contends that
the speech of another, once enclosed in a context, is – no matter how accurately
transmitted – always subject to certain semantic changes. The context embracing
another’s word is responsible for its dialogizing background, whose influence
can be very great. Given the appropriate methods for framing, one may bring
about fundamental changes even in another’s utterance accurately quoted. (340)

Bakhtin reminds us here of the potential inherent to Jack’s and St. Peter’s historical
endeavors. He reminds us of the subjective truth adhering to the historical facts, of the
ways Jack and St. Peter edit and alter the stories they present. Ultimately, by mapping

80
For a compelling reading of the queer undercurrents of the Professor’s relationship with Tom, see Eric
Haralson and Marilee Lindemann. Both of these critics do a far better job of making this case than I could
in a small space here. It is more difficult to make a case for the homosocial element in Jack Burden’s
relationship with Willie Stark, though Michael Szalay offers an interesting reading that draws on both
Freud and Rene Girard’s notion of triangulation to explain the Jack-Anne Stanton-Willie triangle, as well
as triangles that can be formed between Jack, Anne, and Adam Stanton, and finally Willie, Anne, and
Adam.

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out the boundaries – and in particular, the limits – of Willie’s and Tom’s pursuit of the
American dream and quests to remake themselves as Americans, Jack and the Professor
inadvertently describe the limits of United States history as well, especially as it is
conceived as a singular, inclusive narrative.
Central to my discussion of the depiction of history in these works are the
extended journal sections embedded in Warren’s and Cather’s novels: Cass Mastern’s
journal in All the King’s Men and “Tom Outland’s Story” in The Professor’s House. I
read these inserted sections, both of which represent excursions into the United States’
historical past, as disruptive to and undermining of the history lessons proffered by Jack
and St. Peter. For despite Jack’s and St. Peter’s attempts to narrativize both these tales
and American history, Cass’s and Tom’s accounts offer history lessons of their own.
Cass Mastern’s story, as well as Jack’s failure to come to terms with it, offers a
good starting point for examining the problems of trying to mythologize a unified past in
a nation rife with disunity and inequality. Jack first comes to Cass’s Civil War era tale,
he tells us, after entering a doctoral program in American history. He endeavors to edit
his ancestor’s journal and letters, to “write a biographical essay, a social study based on
those and other materials” (163). In presenting Cass’s story to readers, Jack, like any
historian, manages and distributes information, parsing out to readers his own version of
what happened. Driven by a yearning for “truth,” Jack uneasily balances his desired
“truth” against the “facts” he uncovers. He begins by telling us that Cass was an
abolition-minded youth of twenty-two who traveled from his native Mississippi to attend
college in Kentucky. While there, Cass is taken under the wing of Duncan Trice, a young
socialite who introduces him to drinking, gambling, and whoring. Drawing from Cass’s
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journal, Jack describes Cass’s fascination with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend and
social mentor, and relates how the “darkness and trouble” that entered Cass’s life started
with him, “in the beginning at least, the pursued rather than the pursuer” (164). In other
words, Jack locates Annabelle Trice, not Duncan or Cass himself, at the heart of Cass’s
problems. (As we shall see, Annabelle is only the first, chronologically speaking, of a
number of women who play significant, detrimental roles in Jack’s various histories.)
The affair between the two continues for a year before Annabelle’s husband kills himself
in what appears to be a gun-cleaning accident, although Cass and Annabelle soon realize
it is a suicide.
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Duncan Trice’s suicide confounds Cass and Annabelle’s affair in ways his living
presence never did, for, prior to shooting himself, Duncan removes his wedding ring and
places it on his wife’s pillow as a sign that he knows of her infidelity. Annabelle,
however, does not find the ring. Instead, her mulatta waiting maid, Phebe, discovers it.
Realizing that her servant knows very well what the found ring means, Annabelle begins
to undergo a nervous breakdown, declaring to Cass: “She knows – and she looks at me –
she will always look at me” (175). Even worse, “She will tell. All of them [the Trices’
slaves] will know. All of them in the house will look at me and know …!” (175).
Annabelle’s reaction here, as Forrest Robinson has noted, is curiously extreme. Since
Duncan is already dead, what does it matter if the Trices’ slaves know about Annabelle’s
affair with Cass? Many of them likely knew anyway. What Annabelle’s behavior

81
It is this “accident,” in fact, which gives Jack the key to Cass’s journal, for Cass himself never offers the
names of the Trices. Instead, Jack sifts through the Lexington newspapers of the 1850s and pieces together
the identities of the players in Cass’s story.

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“implicitly concedes,” according to Robinson, is that “her maid, in theory subhuman, in
fact possesses penetrating moral judgment” (517). Not merely the revealed affair, but the
fact that it is Phebe who discovers the ring drives Annabelle into a frenzy, as Phebe’s
knowledge threatens to disrupt the hierarchy between slave and slave owner, to
undermine the supposed intellectual and moral divide between whites and blacks in the
antebellum South. Finally, Annabelle declares, “I will not abide it, I will not abide it!”
and sells Phebe downriver into likely sexual bondage (175). Carl Freedman has written
that the affair goes well beyond Cass and Annabelle, and that the “secret” within Cass’s
tale “is not merely the empirical fact of the illicit liaison but the entire system of racial
injustice” (136). The affair’s repercussions bear Freedman out, as Cass and Annabelle’s
liaison is the catalyst not only for Duncan’s suicide, but also for Phebe’s (further)
degradation. Simply put, adultery, slavery, horror, and death are inexorably linked in
Cass Mastern’s tale, the betrayal of a friend and husband tied to the betrayal of an entire
race of human beings.
Cass’s tale illuminates how the politics of African American enslavement affected
both individuals and the nation at large, and how slavery’s ramifications continue to
resonate. Although he had been an uneasy party to slavery his entire life, only after the
disaster with the Trices does he fully understand the magnitude of its evil. Driven by a
desire to atone not only for the affair with Annabelle, but also for what he now perceives
as the sin of slavery, Cass pursues Phebe. His efforts are stymied, however, when he is
stabbed in a melee at a slave auction. Cass’s wound becomes infected, and he falls into
delirium. When he recovers, he realizes that not only has he failed to find and free
Phebe, but that Annabelle has abandoned him. Determined to make amends for a
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sequence of events for which he believes himself responsible, Cass returns to Mississippi,
frees his own slaves, and employs them as paid laborers. This endeavor fails, though,
after one of the freed slaves is shot while attempting to flee with his wife, who is a slave
on a neighboring plantation (and here again, strikingly, a woman is the catalyst for
failure). Finally, Cass puts his former slaves on a northbound boat. Watching the boat
depart, he notes that his “spirit was troubled,” because “the Negroes were passing from
one misery to another,” and “the hopes they now carried would be blighted” (183).
Drawing a parallel between himself and Annabelle, Cass describes how
What I had done I had done for myself, to relieve my spirit of a burden, the
burden of their misery and their eyes upon me. The wife of my dead friend
had found the eyes of the girl Phebe upon her and had gone wild and had
ceased to be herself and had sold the girl into misery. I had found their eyes
upon me and had freed them into misery, lest I should do worse. For many
cannot bear their eyes upon them, and enter into evil and cruel ways in their
desperation. (183)

The account Cass gives holds up Phebe and his former slaves as a sort of negative mirror
to himself and Annabelle, who see their own guilt, shame, and fear reflected in their
former slaves’ eyes and cannot bear it. The paradox here is that while the African
American characters in Cass’s story play a vital, illuminating role, even Cass ultimately
perpetuates a system of marginalization by viewing them as negative mirrors of himself
and Annabelle instead of human beings.
Aside from a few recent critics such as Robinson and Freedman, commentators
have long overlooked the centrality of race to Cass Mastern’s tale, which is itself central
to Warren’s novel. When Cass Mastern’s story is considered at all, the focus is most
often solely on the affair and its disastrous effects upon Cass and the Trices, instead of
the consequences faced by Cass’s slaves and Phebe. A good example of this type of
194
criticism is Jonathan Baumbach’s assertion that “three lives are destroyed” by the affair:
Cass’s, Annabelle’s, and Duncan’s (138). But what about Phebe, sold downriver into
likely sexual bondage? What about Cass’s freed slaves, “passing from one misery to
another” as they head north to states that wish them to be free, but to stay in the South?
This critical evasion of race in All the King’s Men echoes the manner in which
both conservative and Progressive historians largely overlooked race in the first half of
the twentieth century. Conservative historians frequently either ignored or obfuscated the
roles played by minorities (and often women) in U.S. history. During the 1930s and
1940s, many historians began to discard the traditional notion of the Civil War and end of
slavery as leading to “a more perfect union,” and scholars such as George Fort Milton,
James G. Randall, and Avery Craven, in fact, challenged the belief that the Civil War was
a necessary step in nation’s progress.
82
According to historian Richard Hofstadter, the
Civil War also became a “stumbling block” for Progressives, who, “with their disposition
to set ‘democratic’ agrarian against capitalist and to play down the issues of slavery and
race that cut across this alignment, usually failed to confront the importance of
slaveholding leadership in American democracy …” (460). Although Progressive
historians regularly criticized the United States’ power structure and several, such as
Charles and Mary Beard, emphasized women’s roles in the American past and present,
they were less interested in African Americans’ part in American history. To the
Progressive mind, “Race problems would be solved automatically in the course of
progressive developments” (Breisach 80). This type of outlook is difficult to reconcile

82
See, for instance, Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (1934);
Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction (1937); and Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (1942).

195
with the cultural and political climate of the United States during the interwar years,
when political moves from the Supreme Court’s Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923)
decisions to legislation such as the Johnson-Reed Act (1924) and the Indian Citizenship
Act (1924) worked to make “Americanness” synonymous with whiteness. Whether the
Progressives’ discounting of race was naïve or exclusionary, much like conservative
historians, they too relegated those deemed not-white to the periphery of American
history and perpetuated a cultural and political environment that denied minorities their
ostensible Constitutional rights. Perhaps this is why Jack Burden, our “student of
history,” cannot quite grasp Cass Mastern’s tale. For in contrast to the marginalization of
African Americans in Jack’s life and in both versions of historiography vying for
prominence during the interwar years, those in Cass’s story cannot be so readily
dismissed. In large part, this is why Jack fails with Cass’s story. Unlike his
representation – and re-presentation – of Willie Stark’s tale – Jack finally cannot co-opt
Cass’s voice. And he cannot do so because Cass refuses in the end to co-opt the voices
of his former slaves.
The marginalization of race in both the conservative and Progressive historical
outlooks assumes greater significance when we consider the emergence of
Americanization programs in the early twentieth century. Such programs regularly
promoted a nationalist discourse aiming to historicize a fabricated Anglo-Saxon
American cultural identity. Americanization and concomitant calls for “100%
Americanism” made by xenophobic, “patriotic” groups ranging from the American
Legion to the Ku Klux Klan to the Daughters of the American Revolution called into
question Progressive assertions of a forward-moving, progressive American history
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where race problems “would be solved automatically.” At the same time, not only did
traditional, conservative historians frequently premise their arguments on a “nativist” past
wherein “native” Americans were those of old English and Western European stock, but
so too did Progressives buckle under cultural pressure to alter their textbooks, and to
transform “history lessons in elementary schools into a form of civic indoctrination” (Des
Jardins 68). According to Peter Novick, once the United States entered World War I,
oftentimes “historians’ principal activity was the provision of serviceable propaganda;
producing, in the phrase of the time, ‘a sound and wholesome public opinion’” (118).
Such kowtowing by Progressive historians and their willingness to work “within the
system” even as they attempted reform has led Novick to describe the Progressive
historical movement as an “accomodationist” ideology (62). Although Novick is right to
critique the capitulation of many Progressives, and the accommodations they made are
perhaps regrettable, such behavior is also understandable. For, As Peter Charles Hoffer
notes,
Who could blame them? … However sophisticated the progressives might have
seemed in the 1920s and 1930s, their dismantling of consensus certainties and
unities lent no aid to the crusade to save democracy and human dignity from the
Nazis and Fascists” (43).

Ultimately, the nation’s move toward World War II led both conservative and
Progressive historians to work alongside Americanization programs in buttressing a
national power structure founded upon whiteness, masculinity, and affluence.
The embedded history within The Professor’s House, “Tom Outland’s Story,”
also delineates an endeavor to reinforce the national narrative, albeit one that reaches
deep into the nation’s prehistory to draw forth a history and “culture” that has “vanished”
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in the novel’s present. Yet “Tom Outland’s Story” too finally displays the flaws of such
historical narrativizing. In this section of Cather’s novel, Professor St. Peter presents the
tale of Tom’s experiences on the Blue Mesa, where Tom and his friend, Roddy Blake,
discover the remains of the extinct Anasazi, and Tom rather oddly comes to view the
Anasazi as progenitor Americans and his own ancestors. Not only is Tom’s
appropriation of the Anasazi as his ancestors disturbing, but so too is the fact that what
enables him to do so is the fact that these progenitor Americans are long dead. Indeed,
Ian Bell notes that “It is their extinction which renders the cliff dwellers as a site of origin
within the mythologizing idealism of Outland and St. Peter” (486-87; emphasis mine).
Tom’s connection to and appraisal of the Anasazi echoes the long tradition in historical
writing that historian Ellen Fitzpatrick describes as viewing “Native American history
from the outside looking in,” a tradition that, “however sympathetic, missed a crucial
dimension of Native American history – a sense of the Indians themselves” (124). Tom’s
history is solely that of an outsider looking in – and one who looks in from a safe distance
upon the remains of an extinct, un-troublesome people that he can manipulate, a people
whose “truth” he can make fit his ideas. I read Cather’s depiction – and the Professor’s
valorization – of Tom’s appropriation of the extinct Anasazi and his perplexing
identification with them as intentionally jarring. For, as Patrick Shaw notes, Anasazi
civilization “was at best marginal” (115), and this fact would have been known both by
scholars such as St. Peter and Cather herself by the time of The Professor’s House’s
publication in 1925. Shaw further argues that “St. Peter in his definitive studies would
certainly have to account for the Spanish contact with the aborigines, the pueblo revolts,
the harsh reprisals against the Indians, and the general subsistence quality of Indian life”
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(115). No such awareness is present in the Professor’s edited version of “Tom Outland’s
Story,” however, nor is it even hinted at, and its absence raises questions about the kind
of history St. Peter presents in his own sequence on the Spanish Adventurers.
Walter Benn Michaels argues that Tom Outland’s experiences on the Blue Mesa
position both Tom and Cather herself as partaking in a widespread 1920s national fantasy
that connects the archetypal figure of the “Vanishing (Native) American” with the
pronounced fears of white American racial suicide. The concept of race suicide was not
only promoted by eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, but also by
politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, and prophesied the adulteration of pure white –
and thereby “American” – blood by the nation’s increasing immigrant population. Along
Michaels’s line of reasoning, Tom and Cather, like many others at the time, turned to
Native American culture as a means of reinvigorating a barren national landscape with
the type of “culture” the country supposedly needed (36). While it is difficult to argue
against the sense of nostalgia permeating The Professor’s House, it seems to me that
Michaels’s claim erroneously conflates Cather with her character. In so doing, he misses
the self-reflexivity brought out by the novel’s unsettled structure, and how the jarring
union of the Professor’s and Tom’s attempts to (re)write history offer readers a novelistic
history lesson about reclaiming history and re-historicizing it to serve one’s own ends. In
my reading, the evocation of Native American “ancestry” by Tom in The Professor’s
House, and St. Peter’s subsequent escape into Tom’s Blue Mesa world, represent a
critique the novel makes about the problems, pitfalls, and perils of attempting to foster
false connections to the past, to narrativize the non-narrative, while at the same time
ignoring or eliding over significant historical information.
199
The faulty “connection” between Tom and the Anasazi – and, I would argue,
between the Professor and both Tom’s story and the Spanish Adventurers of his own
historical scholarship – is exacerbated when we consider the textual space, or lack
thereof, inhabited by present day Native Americans in U.S. history at the time of The
Professor’s House. Only a few decades before Tom’s sojourn on the Blue Mesa, the
Supreme Court had ruled in the Elk v. Wilkins case of 1884 that the Fourteenth
Amendment, which made all people born in the United States citizens, did not extend to
making Native Americans citizens. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 had instigated
legislation to transform Native Americans through economic and educational means, yet
it only “conferred citizenship on Native Americans who disassociated themselves from
the tribe” (Arrington 35). A sequence of similar legislation intended to at least partly
absorb Native Americans into the nation if they adopted U.S. definitions of Americanness
followed, from the Lacey Act of 1907, to the Sells “Declaration” of 1917, to the
Citizenship for World War I Veterans Act of 1919. By the time of Tom’s experiences on
the Blue Mesa, the attempted incorporating and “Amercanizing” of Native Americans
had largely failed, though, and they had come to be viewed by mainstream, white
America as
outcast and pariah who represented the fate of all those who do not work, who do
not own, do not prefer the benefits of legal status within the hierarchies of modern
institutions to the prerogatives of freedom and cultural autonomy.
(Trachtenberg 33-34)

Finally, the 1924 Indian Act granted Native Americans citizenship through smoke and
mirrors chicanery that actually excluded them from the benefits such an identity
purportedly entailed.
200
Tom experiences the nation’s conflicted relationship to Native Americans
firsthand when he journeys to Washington, D.C. to bring his and Roddy’s discovery of
the Blue Mesa to light. In the nation’s capitol, he finds a disjunction between his interest
in the Anasazi remains and the apathy expressed by the bureaucrats he meets. “The
clerks at the Indian Commission seemed very curious about everything and made me talk
a lot,” he relates. “But when one of the fellows there tried to get me to give him my best
bowl for his cigarette ashes, I began to suspect the nature of their interest” (204). The
weeks in D.C. drag by, and Tom realizes that the so-called historians and archaeological
experts “don’t care much about dead and gone Indians” (212).
83
His disappointment is
compounded when he returns to the Mesa to discover that Roddy has “cleaned up”
monetarily by selling off the artifacts they have unearthed to a German collector.
84
Irate,
he rails at Roddy that the artifacts, “belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the
people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit
from” (219). And he compares Roddy to the famous French traitor, Dreyfus.
85
But since

83
David Harrell contends that “Cather not only exaggerates the obsessive nature of her Smithsonian
officials, she also misrepresents the Smithsonian’s attitude toward Native American archaeology and
anthropology” (118). Even if the attitude of Cather’s fictional bureaucrats is exaggerated, however, her
description highlights the conflicted uncertain national view of Native Americans’ place with the nation.

84
The significance of the collector’s being German should not be discounted, especially in terms of a
foreigner’s buying the cultural artifacts Tom so values as being distinctly American.

85
Angry over Roddy’s crime, Tom declares, “You’ve gone and sold them to a country that’s got plenty of
relics of its own. You’ve gone and sold your country’s secrets, like Dreyfus” (219). Yet Sarah Wilson
rightly notes that “Too many critics have accepted Tom’s assertion of his and his nation’s inheritance of the
mesa culture without recognizing that the Dreyfus reference, with which this claim is intertwined, is,
frankly, wrong. Tom’s nationalized link with the mesa embraces the French nationalist discourse on
Dreyfus’s treason even though, at the time of the novel’s composition, Dreyfus’s innocence had been
established” (574). Through the allusion to Dreyfus, then, Cather points out that Tom is just as misguided
as the D.C. bureaucrats who so exacerbate him. Defending his view of the Anasazi village’s importance,
Tom spins yet another questionable interpretation here.

201
Tom’s experiences in D.C. have already shown readers that “the country and the State”
are little interested in the Anasazi remains – or, put another way, little interested in
histories which fall outside of accepted United States history – his claim for orphans such
as himself is dubious at best. In spite of his angry condemnation of both Roddy’s actions
and the historical malaise of the experts in Washington, Tom too, the novel hints, is
guilty of confused, problematic motives when it comes to the Anasazi. His impassioned
contention of to whom the artifacts belong is illuminating in this regard. He does, after
all, think on his first night alone on the Mesa that his feeling of contentment is one of
“possession” (226). And his equation of the Anasazi relics as ancestral artifacts, as things
he cares “more about … than anything else in world” (216) is in many ways a spurious
claim, a forced connection. The history lesson of The Professor’s House, at least as far
as Tom Outland’s Blue Mesa experience is concerned, thus constitutes a warning to
readers about the dangers of misreading the past, of making faulty connections, and the
tenuousness of those connections when exposed to the circumstances of the present.
Given such views, it is not surprising that Tom’s “ancestors” are long dead and gone. By
the same token, when we remember the Professor’s affinity for the “simplicity” of Tom’s
history, not to mention the positive effect he believes Tom has upon his own work,
Cather’s novel appears to suggest that we cannot expect a particularly nuanced or open-
minded vision of American history from men such as St. Peter either, men in whose care
our national past supposedly resides.
Where Tom is so affronted by other’s indifference to his vision of history, his
own privileging of the past and the mythic ancestry he unearths for himself on the Blue
Mesa stands in sharp contrast to the way he ignores present day Native American issues.
202
In fact, the only reference Tom makes to present day Native Americans is an offhand
claim about how “In New Mexico the Indian boys sometimes went to a trader’s with their
wives and bought shawls or calico, and we thought it rather contemptible” (210). This,
then, is the depth of Tom’s connection with vital, living Native American culture. In a
single sentence, he offers a reductive vision of Native American males that completely
effeminizes them.
Jack Burden likewise discounts of present day African Americans in All the
King’s Men. Although it often goes unnoticed because blacks have so little presence in
Jack’s 1930s narrative, the marginalization we see in Cass Mastern’s tale persists there as
well. In the world Jack moves through, African Americans only appear as roadside
workers and servants, and even in the thirties, Jack’s neighbor Judge Irwin still maintains
a plantation where, in Jack’s facetious yet disquieting words, “the cotton grows white as
whipped cream and the happy darkies sing all day, like Al Jolson” (216). For Robinson,
Jack’s silence where racial inequalities are concerned signals “bad faith” on his part: an
“ingrained habit of denial” that allows Jack to avoid Cass’s “guilt-laden moral reckoning”
(521).
86
Indeed, Jack abandons his Ph.D. project because he decides that he cannot
comprehend Cass Mastern’s life. He cannot match the facts in the journal and letters to
his ideas; nor can he match his ideas to the “truths” about American history he finds in
Cass’s papers. In one of his more honest moments in All the King’s Men, Jack admits

86
However, Robinson’s claim that Jack’s “burden of bad faith must be shared … by the novel’s many
readers and critics and by Robert Penn Warren himself” (524) is a stretch. Although Warren undoubtedly
was somewhat evasive on race, as his career progressed he changed from the reactionary young writer of
“The Briar Patch” (1930) in the Southern Agrarians’ I’ll Take My Stand, to an advocate for Civil Rights.
To accuse him of “bad faith” similar to Jack’s seems problematic, especially when his 1946 novel makes
such an issue of Jack’s inability – or his unwillingness – to understand Cass’s story.

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that he “laid aside the journal of Cass Mastern not because he could not understand, but
because he was afraid to understand for what might be understood there was a reproach
to him” (188-89). He is afraid, perhaps, of what Cass’s experiences might impart about
the problem of “Otherness” in a nation seeking wholeness and uniformity of the sort
offered by conservative historiography, of a historical profession where Progressives
scholars too had little concern for race. Afraid, maybe, of how Cass’s tale illuminates
Jack’s own ignoring and marginalizing of African Americans, and draws attention to the
ways Jack depicts women too, past and present, as “Other.”
Both Cather’s and Warren’s novels also offer problematic portrayals of women
that work alongside their depictions of race. The texts showcase how the nation’s race-
and gender-based politics of exclusion were frequently intertwined, and how the
effeminizing of race and the racializing of gender played significant parts in re-inscribing
who and what Americans were during the interwar years. In All the King’s Men, for
example, Cass Mastern’s tale showcases both the nation’s marginalization of women and
African Americans – not to mention the double-bind of being both African American and
a woman. Strikingly, it is Phebe the waiting maid who is both the only black character
given a name and who also destabilizes Cass’s story and Jack’s exploration of United
States history. In linking these two forms of “Otherness” – race and gender – the history
Jack composes from Cass’s journal and letters further separates African Americans and
women from Americans such as Jack himself. This linkage between race and gender is
visible in Jack’s depiction of Cass and Annabelle’s interaction after Annabelle sells
Phebe. Annabelle tells Cass that she “got a good price” for her former servant, “thirteen
hundred dollars” (176), to which he responds that the price came from Phebe’s sexual
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attractiveness, and that Annabelle has sold her into worse than slavery.
87
Annabelle
counters that for an adulterer, Cass has suddenly developed fine sentiments, and accuses
him of being “more concerned for the honor of a black coachman” – i.e., Phebe’s
husband, not Phebe herself – than for his deceased friend, Duncan’s, honor (177). When
formulated in this way, it is not Phebe who will be ruined by sexual degradation, but her
husband’s honor. By the same logic, it is not Annabelle’s marriage that the affair with
Cass destroys, but Duncan Trice’s honor. Although the oppression of women and the
slavery of African Americans by no means can be taken as coevals, Annabelle’s remarks
about adultery and honor underscore the ways women too were marginalized in the
antebellum South and in U.S. history writ large. At the same time, Jack’s version of
Cass’s history seems to blame continued racial injustice on Annabelle, to lay it at the feet
of capricious female sexuality. After all, in Jack’s view Annabelle’s seduction of Cass
leads to Duncan’s suicide, Phebe’s being sold downriver, and Cass’s haunting fear of the
irreconcilable dilemma his slaves represent. In other words, women’s pernicious
influence destabilizes the national narrative.
The embedded (hi)story in The Professor’s House allows readers to draw similar
connections between race and gender. As in Cass Mastern’s tale, only one minority
character in “Tom Outland’s Story” is even given a name. In this case, it is the
mummified Anasazi woman Tom and Roddy find on the Blue Mesa: “not a skeleton, but
a dried human body, a woman,” who “had dried into a mummy in the water-drinking air”
(191-92). Henry Atkins, the old English cook who assists Tom and Roddy’s excavations

87
Even Annabelle appears to recognize that her selling off of Phebe is tainted, and upon returning from the
sale, she gives the money from it to an old, blind black man she sees singing and playing a guitar.

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on the Mesa, dubs this Anasazi woman, “Mother Eve.” Henry’s naming her Mother Eve,
a Westernized name no Anasazi woman would ever have, further signals the
appropriation at the center of Tom’s connection with his “ancestors.” And the biblical
allusion of her name is prophetic, as shortly after the discovery of the mummy, a literal
snake slithers out of the Mesa and strikes Henry in the forehead – Henry, who Tom
considers “so innocent and defenceless” that he wonders how he “managed to get along
at all” (176) – and he dies.
Much like the dubious connection Tom creates between himself and the Anasazi,
who are useful to him and his reconstruction of history solely because they are dead and
offer no resistance to his appropriations, so too do Tom’s feelings about Mother Eve
speak to his view of women. After Tom returns to the mesa from Washington, the
discord between him and Roddy crystallizes in Tom’s mind around Mother Eve, about
whom he declares, “I’d as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve – I’d have
sold any living woman first” (221). He would sooner sell his own grandmother – a
woman, it needs to be noted, whom Tom, an orphan, cannot have known – or any living
woman than Mother Eve. Why? Perhaps because Mother Eve can signify whatever sort
of past Tom wants to impose upon her. Unlike living women who can rebel against his
construction of feminine identity, Mother Eve is static. This stasis enables men like
Tom’s first mentor, Father Duchene, to speculate without consequence or refutation that
Mother Eve was murdered because of an infidelity on her part: “Perhaps her husband
thought it worth while to return unannounced from the farms some night, and found her
in improper company. … In primitive society the husband is allowed to punish an
unfaithful wife with death” (201). Speculating about her identity, her behavior, and her
206
demise, Tom and his companions can dress Mother Eve in whatever narrative they
choose. And the narrative they choose is one where her death was triggered by infidelity,
by her disruption of the social order – an accusation to which Mother Eve, her mouth
open “as if she were screaming,” giving her face “a look of terrible agony” (192), cannot
respond.
Mother Eve is important not only as a critique of gender roles in the text, but also
of racial hierarchies and the sexualizing of race. Within The Professor’s House she
presents an important critique of Tom’s – and, through him, the Professor’s – restrictive
historical vision, an effeminizaing of race that maintains racial hierarchies and connects
women and minorities and categorizes them as “Other,” as not-American. But Mother
Eve ultimately refuses the fate Tom ascribes to her, she refuses to fit into the narrative of
history historians such as Tom and the Professor seek to establish. In the end, she is lost
to the appropriations of both Tom and the German collector, because the mule carrying
her from the mesa slips and falls into the vastness of a canyon, removing Mother Eve
from the constraints of history. Through the “terrible agony” of Mother Eve’s awful
silence, Cather shows us the inability of minorities and women to speak throughout
American history, and marks a protest against both history’s and the nation’s practice of
marginalization.
I want to emphasize here that the troubling view of women, race, and U.S. history
in both Warren’s and Cather’s novels’ embedded (hi)stories is largely the product of Jack
Burden’s, Tom’s, and Professor St. Peter’s restrictive historical outlooks. Jack so
struggles to come to terms with Cass’s story and place his own interpretive stamp upon it
because the people in it are finally uncontainable within the sort of unified,
207
uncomplicated history he desires. Tom, by contrast, has a feeling of “possession” on the
Mesa, a feeling enabled by his rewriting of the (dead) Anasazi as his ancestors. Later, St.
Peter takes comfort in Tom’s story and the vision of history he finds there. Above all,
writing history lends Tom, the Professor, and even Jack an authority and control they
cannot actually maintain over their everyday lives. Far from following Progressive
historian James Harvey Robinson’s dictate that “The principal task of the historian, and
especially the intellectual historian, was to point out anachronisms in our thinking, to
clear away inherited rubbish, to explain the circumstances that had given rise to inherited
shibboleths” (Novick 94), the historians in All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House
use history as both a refuge where they can hide from the present and as a form of truth.
The problem is that these historians are in many ways complicit with interwar era cultural
and political movements such as the Americanization and “100% Americanism”
programs which delineated an American identity that was not-raced and not-female.
For historical meaning is finally dependent on the historian who affirms and
arranges it. During the 1930s, at roughly the same time that Jack investigates Judge
Irwin at Willie Stark’s behest in All the King’s Men, searching for “dirt” on him,
Progressive historians such as Charles Beard, who were unsettled by the aftershocks of
World War I and the disaster of the Great Depression, began proposing a more relativistic
view of the progress of history than they had previously posited, a view that troubled the
efficacy of historical “facts.” Carl Becker, who had long harbored relativist leanings,
began to argue that “to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will
‘speak for themselves’ is an illusion” (249). “Left to themselves,” Becker continues,

208

the facts do not speak; left to themselves they do not exist, not really, since for all
practical purposes there is no fact until someone affirms it. The least the historian
can do with any historical fact is to select and affirm it. To select and affirm even
the simplest complex of facts is to give them a certain place in a certain pattern of
ideas, and this alone is sufficient to give them a special meaning. (251)
88

Becker here envisions history as an interpretive endeavor dependent on the beliefs and
values of a historian’s time period, and the “facts” of the past as having meaning only
insofar as a historian gives it to them. In the case of Jack and St. Peter, they channel their
dissatisfaction with the present into research that enables them to fit together the pieces of
Cass Mastern’s, Willie Stark’s, and Tom Outland’s lives into “a certain pattern of ideas.”
This pattern of ideas, this re-assemblage of information, is, of course, all based on the
way these historians fit their accumulated facts together, how they represent the past to
readers.
Particularly unsettling is the harmful role we see women playing in both Jack
Burden’s and Godfrey St. Peter’s reassemblages of not only the past, but also the present
day United States. In Jack’s case, although he often appears drawn to women who
“transgress,” he invariably portrays them as disruptive. Like Annabelle Trice and Phebe
in Cass Mastern’s story, the present day women in Jack’s history too affect terrible

88
Becker elaborates:

Since history is not part of the external material world, but an imaginative reconstruction of
vanished events, its form and substance are inseparable: in the realm of literary discourse
substance, being an idea, is form; and form, conveying the idea, is substance. It is thus not
the undiscriminated fact, but the perceiving mind of the historian that speaks: the special
meaning which the facts are made to convey emerges from the substance – form which the
historian employs to recreate imaginatively a series of events not present to perception. (251)

By describing history as being a fundamentally interpretative act, Becker anticipates Hayden White’s later
comparison between historical and literary production. Noteworthy too is Becker’s discussion of form and
substance, which in some ways prefigures Fredric Jameson’s work, albeit from a non-Marxist perspective.

209
consequences. Mabel Carruthers, for instance, who was Judge Irwin’s second wife,
increases the judge’s debts through her profligacy, which leads him to accept the bribe
that taints his career and drives another man, Mortimer Littlepaugh, to suicide.
Littlepaugh’s sister, Lily Mae, in a move reminiscent of Phebe’s proffering of Duncan
Trice’s ring to Annabelle, saves her brother’s suicide note for decades before furnishing
Jack with it to use as evidence against the judge. When Jack is hesitant to confront Judge
Irwin, his childhood friend and former sweetheart, Anne Stanton, urges him to use his
knowledge of the judge’s bribe-taking – and her own father, the former governor’s,
covering for the judge – to convince her brother Adam to work for Willie. Anne herself
becomes Willie’s mistress. Jack’s mother has “cold hands” and carries on with a string
of husbands and younger lovers, and denies Jack knowledge of his true paternity for
decades. And Jack’s first wife, Lois Seager, is a woman he describes as sexually
voracious and claims to have loved “the way you love the filet mignon or the Georgia
peach” (304). Lois so threatens Jack’s sense of himself and the social order that he
abandons her and consorts for a time with whores. Perhaps the only woman who does
not have a harmful influence in All the King’s Men is Willie’s wife, Lucy – Lucy who is
reduced quite early on to the ineffectual role of rejected woman watching the text’s
dramatic action from the margins. If Lucy is an example of a good woman, then a good
woman in Jack’s representation of history is one who knows her place, who is content on
the periphery.
Jack’s problematic interactions with and understanding of women is most
apparent in his relationship with Anne Stanton, with whom he experienced a failed sexual
encounter in their youth, an encounter that Jack somehow construes as one that gives him
210
a feeling of “great wisdom” which later becomes “nobility” (297). While he claims that
the failure of his and Anne’s youthful relationship evolved out of her dissatisfaction with
his lack of direction in life, Lucy Ferris’s assessment seems more accurate. Ferris argues
that
The demand that Jack have a purpose to his life is less important as a motif in the
grander scheme of All the King’s Men than as a barrier to his obtaining Anne, who
is not incidentally objectified by that demand. (32)

When Anne reenters his life years later while he is working for Willie Stark, Jack persists
in objectifying her. He connects the adult Anne to “Otherness”
89
, relating to readers that
she does charity work, “fooling around with orphans and half-wits and blind niggers, and
not even getting paid for it” (103). Like the majority of women in Jack’s various
histories, Anne is largely a one-dimensional character who is both denied substance by
Jack’s objectification of her, and at the same time serves as a negative influence upon
events. She is both an ideal of purity and an embodiment of frustration, the catalyst for
Jack’s disillusion, her brother’s death, and Willie’s fall. She is, Jack tells readers, “the
Anne Stanton whom Willie Stark had picked out, who had finally betrayed me, or rather,
had betrayed an idea of mine which had had more importance for me than I ever realized”
(309). Yet Jack comes to believe that “somehow by an obscure and necessary logic I had
handed her over” to Willie (311). This “obscure and necessary logic” highlights how he
ultimately denies Anne even the pernicious agency he first ascribes to her upon learning
of her affair with Willie. Finally, though, Anne is ostensibly “redeemed” when Jack

89
Michael Szalay pushes the idea of Anne’s connection to Otherness even further, arguing that “Burden
can never quite decide whether having sex with Anne is like having sex with his sister, his brother, or with
and African American” (368). Lending credence to Szalay’s argument is the fact that just prior to the failed
sexual encounter between the two, Jack arranges Anne’s hair so she looks “just like a pickaninny” (292)
and grows aroused.

211
marries her at the novel’s conclusion. Indeed, Jack and Anne’s marriage seems to rectify
the class transgression that occurs when this daughter of the Southern aristocracy
becomes Willie Stark’s mistress.
Intertwined with Anne’s fate is another woman Jack “Others,” a woman who
likewise contributes to the novel’s cataclysmic final events: Sadie Burke, Willie’s
longtime assistant and on-again, off-again mistress. Sadie, according to Jack, “wouldn’t
have been called good looking,” yet was “built very satisfactorily but you tended to
forget that, because of the clothes she wore and the awkward violent, snatching gestures
she made” (73). She not only propels Willie’s rise to power through her political
connections and acumen, but she too “had come along way from the shanty in the mud
flats,” Jack tells us.
She had come a long way because she played to win and she didn’t mean to win
matches and she knew that to win you have to lay your money on the right
number … She had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them
straight in the eye like a man. (84)

Not surprisingly, Jack is discomfited by Sadie. She is too mannish, both in her physical
presence and in her powerful, manipulative role behind Willie’s administration, too
transgressive against Jack’s view of gender roles, too, we might say, not-Other.
Conveniently, Sadie in the end succumbs to the “feminine” emotion of envy after
Willie’s affair with Anne becomes serious. Feeling scorned, she uses her lackey Tiny
Duffy to tip Adam Stanton to his sister’s affair. This information leads Adam to believe
he has compromised his principles for nothing in working for Willie, and he shoots the
governor on the capitol grounds. Willie’s bodyguard guns Adam down as well, and both
men die. By the conclusion of All the King’s Men, Sadie herself has suffered a nervous
212
breakdown and is confined to a sanatorium. When Jack learns of her actions, he
condemns Sadie, telling her “You killed him [Willie…] You killed Adam Stanton” (410).
Unlike Jack, Sadie has no Spider Web theory she can use to reason away her guilt. In
contrast to Anne Stanton, she does not, in the end, accept a woman’s “proper place.” The
result is that she is locked away from society.
The history Godfrey St. Peter offers readers in The Professor’s House portrays
women in an equally problematic light. Not only Mother Eve in “Tom Outland’s Story,”
but also almost all of the text’s other female characters appear to have a corrosive effect
on St. Peter’s world. The Professor’s response to the women of his own family is
particularly indicative of both the type of world St. Peter would prefer to live in and the
type of history he writes. At one point, he tells his wife that he has been pondering
Euripides:
how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was
thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him.
I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.
(136)

Unlike Euripides, though, the Professor does not seem to have observed women very
closely, despite their proximity to him; in fact, his understanding of women frequently
seems comprised of the same sort of stock objectifications employed by Jack Burden.
For example, after realizing that Lillian’s interest in her sons-in-law would rescue her
from the “stretch of boredom between being a young woman and being a young
grandmother,” St. Peter decides that she is, “less intelligent and more sensible than he
had thought her” (65). This is hardly a flattering assessment of one’s wife. When he
envisions a perfect escape from the everyday troubles of his life and the world, he
213
imagines a shipwreck that leaves him stranded and happy, “but his wife was not in it”
(79). The Professor is equally judgmental of his daughters, particularly Rosamond, the
elder. Although everyone else considers her beautiful, “Her father, though he was very
proud of her … thought her too tall, with a rather awkward carriage. She stooped a trifle,
and was wide in the hips and shoulders” (26). Rosamond may indeed appear this way to
her father, but it is not a stretch to suggest that St. Peter’s vision of her is clouded by her
resilience in getting over Tom Outland’s death and subsequent marriage to Louie
Marsellus – not to mention her later capitalizing upon Tom’s posthumous patents. Only
the sewing woman, Augusta, “a reliable, methodical spinster, a German Catholic and
very devout” (8), is exempt from his somewhat misogynistic feelings, and largely
because she is a lower class, God-fearing woman who knows her place and does not
challenge St. Peter’s notions of how women should behave.
The female company St. Peter most prefers is that of the “forms” Augusta uses in
her sewing and keeps in his study in the old house. These two forms are “the subject of
much banter between them [St. Peter and Augusta]” (9). The first, named “the bust” by
Augusta,
was a headless, armless female torso … Though this figure looked so ample
and billowy (as if you might lay your head upon its deep-breathing softness
and rest safe forever), if you touched it you suffered a severe shock, no matter
how many times you had touched it before. It presented the most unsympathetic
surface imaginable. (9)

The second form,

was more self-revelatory; a full-length female figure in a smart wire skirt with
a trim metal waist line. … At times the wire lady was most convincing in her
pose as a woman of light behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had his
blind spots, but he had never been taken in by one of her kind! (10)

214
These descriptions epitomize St. Peter’s anxieties over women. “The bust,” much like
the Professor’s wife and elder daughter, may present a soft, feminine façade, but, like
Lillian and Rosamond in their materialism and incomprehension of St. Peter’s desire to
remain in the old house, this form is in the end, “the most unsympathetic surface
imaginable.” The second form “poses” as “a woman of light behavior,” but this doesn’t
fool the Professor, who believes he understands women far too well to be taken in by
their wiles. Oddly enough, these same female forms are the women with whom St. Peter
feels most at home. When Augusta discusses moving them to the family’s new house,
the Professor argues against such a move: “They stay right there in their own place. You
shan’t take away my ladies! I never heard of such a thing!” (12). In large measure, St.
Peter’s attachment seems to develop out of the fact that, whatever their flaws, the forms
represent a femininity that is finally not threatening. Although the Professor thinks of
these “terrible women” as “entirely plausible” (84), he “prefers the company of these
headless and armless torsos to the real women in his family because they give him the
illusion of company while being unable to hurt or disappoint him” (Peck 179). Much like
his flights into histories which he can manipulate and manage, so too are the forms part
of his escape – headless, mindless female surrogates over which he will always maintain
authority.
Both Warren’s and Cather’s novels’ portrayals of women work alongside the
texts’ depiction of race to present a disturbing vision of the American past to which
neither traditional, conservative views of history nor the (limited) reform of even
Progressive historiography offered a remedy. Returning to the “Theory of historical
costs” I raised earlier in this essay, we can see in All the King’s Men and The Professor’s
215
House the “costs” paid by not only Jack and St. Peter, but also American historiography
during the interwar years: the continued omission of minorities and women from
mainstream considerations of American history and identity, the conflation of them as
“Other,” and, in the case of women, dangerously “Other,” even as they were purportedly
moving toward greater equality. The roles afforded minorities and women in these
novels – or perhaps, better put, the roles they are restricted to – thus raise serious
questions about the production of historical narrative and how historians such as Jack and
St. Peter take part in reifying the United States’ systems of power.
The “gains” Warren and Cather show readers are equally disquieting. The
Professor’s work on the Spanish Adventurers bolsters his reputation and wins him
financial awards. His daughter, Rosamond, becomes rich through the posthumous
success of Tom Outland’s patents. Both of these successes seem tainted to St. Peter,
however. When Kitty asks him, “Daddy, why didn’t you and Professor Crane work to
stop all this before it began? You were to blame. You knew that Tom had left something
that was worth a lot, both of you. Why didn’t you do something?” (71), he responds
lamely that “Things might have turned out the same, anyway” (71). Unwilling to act in
the present, he has not prevented his life and the lives of those around him from taking
turns he views as negative, and instead secludes himself in his exploration of an idyllic
past, refusing to leave his study in his old house. At the conclusion of The Professor’s
House, the Professor appears to attempt suicide, only to be saved by his traditional,
conservative sewing woman, Augusta.
Whereas in 1925, the Professor, a successful historian career-wise, despairs when
he cannot realize a return to his vanished youth and the innocence of a “historical” world
216
where race and gender pose no threat to stability, by the late 1930s when All the King’s
Men’s narrative closes, Jack Burden can and does exercise control over women,
minorities, and even Willie Stark’s populism – as we learn when he announces his
resolve to reenter politics backing a more moderately candidate. Yet it is reasonable to
ask how much Jack has been truly changed by his experiences. Assuredly, his eyes have
been opened to a wider worldview than that from which he sprung. But in the end he
reclaims his personal past by marrying Anne Stanton, accepting his legacy from Judge
Irwin –despite his professed desire to give it to Lily Mae Littlepaugh, who conveniently
dies before he has the chance – and, at least temporarily, returning to Burden’s Landing.
When Jack’s narrative closes, he has what he desires: namely, both Anne as his wife and
validation that the man he always wanted to be his father – Judge Irwin – actually was his
father.
90

At this juncture, when Jack’s world has finally ordered itself to his desires, he
decides to take another stab at Cass Mastern’s story, which he believes he now may
understand. Given what we have seen, though, how much hope are we intended to hold
out that Jack will understand Cass’s history any better this time around, as opposed to
simply trying once more to narrativize it into an acceptable form? Especially since, as
Robinson has noted, the crucial race theme underlying Cass’s narrative “never reaches
the surface of [Jack’s] consciousness” (512). Contrary to critical assertions such as L.

90
Carl Freedman terms the conclusion “a wholly conventional moralism and domesticity” (134). I would
disagree, however, with Freedman’s contention that “The use of the political to code the erotic – the way in
which the novel has all along subordinated its manifest public theme to its more latent private theme – has
functioned throughout as a strategy to avoid the most fundamental issues of the political, and, as such,
amounts to an individualistic reductionism, a conjuring trick in the service of liberal ideology” (134). I
give Warren and the text more credit, and read All the King’s Men as a critique instead of an evasion.

217
Hugh Moore’s that Jack “refuses to interpret either the Cass Mastern story or, later, the
little piece of history that is his past merely to suit his own needs” (80-81), Jack goes out
of his way to interpret Cass’s tale, though he fails, and likewise attempts to stamp his
interpretation on both Judge Irwin’s and Willie Stark’s stories – the little pieces of history
in his own life. He tells us, in fact, that he was determined, after the deaths of the judge,
Willie, and Adam Stanton, “to gather the pieces of the puzzle up and put them together to
see the pattern” (383-84). But what pattern? Writing about All the King’s Men as a
whole, John Burt might well be discussing the conclusion of Jack’s historiographic
enterprise when he asserts that “Desire for the truth inevitably reveals itself as desire for
mastery” (164). For mastery is exactly what Jack desires and seeks, mastery over his life
and over history, a pattern into which he can fit all the pieces.
Developing out of the contestatory historiographic landscape of early twentieth
century American historical scholarship, the histories Jack Burden and Godfrey St. Peter
offer readers in All the King’s Men and The Professor’s House are in many ways
exercises in historical production that illustrate the narrative and interpretive nature of
representing (and re-presenting) history. In particular, Warren’s and Cather’s novels
showcase the costs endured by historiography when historians participate in an American
history that relegates minorities to the margins and marks women as both marginal and
pernicious. Moreover, by the close of Jack’s and the Professor’s excursions into history,
readers gain insight into the way history itself is a construct, how historians impose
narrative on something that, as Jameson has argued, is fundamentally non-narrative. All
the King’s Men and The Professor’s House likewise demonstrate the dangerous
delineations such historical constructions can lead to and the ideological mechanisms
218
they can support. In these novels, the American dream is not only a dream of recreating
oneself, but also of recreating the history of the nation – and this is finally where Jack’s
and St. Peter’s desire for “truth” leads them.
Near the conclusion of Warren’s 1956 study Segregation: The Inner Conflict in
the South, he posits that, “We are prisoners of our own history” (109). Examining
Warren’s and Cather’s novels in light of the contemporaneous historiographic debates
surrounding them makes plain how Jack Burden and Godfrey St. Peter, Cass Mastern and
Annabelle Trice and Phebe, Tom Outland and Roddy Blake and Mother Eve, Willie Stark
and Anne Stanton, St. Peter’s wife and daughters and sons-in-law, and indeed all
Americans are prisoners of their own history. Yet Warren follows his statement by
asking, “Or are we?” (109). This is a question readers, literary critics, and cultural
historians need to continuously confront. Is the past imprisoning or illuminating? Can
we break out of the confines of our personal and national histories, or does the present
depend on perpetuating past inequity? Does making meaning out of the past have to be at
someone else’s expense? Although Jack Burden may repress the history lessons Cass
Mastern’s tale has to offer, readers and critics alike will not necessarily arrive at his same
interpretation of history. The recent work done by Robinson, Carl Freedman, Michael
Szalay, and Anthony Szeczesiul signals the likelihood that race will be at the forefront of
future critical discussions of Warren’s novel and Jack Burden’s narrative. Ideally, my
own work here will further extend the discussion by bringing gender into the mix with
race, and emphasizing their interconnectivity in both U.S. history and literary history.
And not only in terms of Warren’s text, but Cather’s too. Even more broadly, exploring
the formal and cultural representations of race, gender, and history in the these novels can
219
help us better understand how the nation’s representative democracy operates in a
limiting, often suppressive fashion, and why the interwar era, which seemed to offer such
hope of progressive and equality, also sparked such a crisis of confidence in
representations of the American dream and American history.

220
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Asset Metadata

Creator Hakim, Andrew Mark (author)

Core Title Fictions of representation: narrative and the politics of self-making in the interwar American novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/10/2009

Defense Date 10/28/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,politics,representation

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kaplan, Carla (committee chair), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Williams, Diana (committee member)

Creator Email ahakim@usc.edu,andrewhakim@netscape.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2722

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