In addressing issues of "sectional reconciliation" between the North and South, James's The Bostonians does more than consider the changing notions of gender during the Gilded Age. The novel also meditates on how gender roles are related to a rapidly industrializing American landscape. Leaving rural Mississippi to
find work in the urban Northeast, Basil Ransom is loath to abandon his aristocratic agrarian ideals. Because agrarianism was central to nineteenth-century forms of southern selfhood, Ransom attempts to "cultivate" the young suffragette Verena Tarrant into an embodiment of the South as a means of resuscitating his own masculinity.
Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne This essay examines the role of flânerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. In his everyday male existence, Werther lived a life of self-alienation. Strolls through urban slums in search of same-sex pickups, however, allowed him to become the woman he felt himself to be at his core. Critical assessments of the memoir largely overlook his preferred model of femininity, which derived from Victorian-era assumptions that women were, psychologically and morally, little more than children. Autobiography shows that flânerie was an ontology built on a paradox, for just as the flâneur's static identity consists of constant movement, Werther based his identity on the notion that childhood, itself transitional and peripatetic, was the destination of Victorian womanhood. By aligning flânerie with Victorian womanhood we might better understand how the latter is not antithetical to modern notions of sexuality but is the foundation on which the parameters of modern sexuality were constructed.
The epilogue analyzes Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel about a soldier who is so pulverized in World War I that he is more machine than man—and yet largely beyond the reach of prosthetic improvement. Like Dadists such as Raoul Hausmann, the novel rebukes the meliorist myth that as long as a disabled soldier has a functioning brain and a firm will, he can use prosthetics to live a life of spiritual and material purpose. As one whose corporeality has been reduced to little more than a brain, Joe Bonham anticipates a complete paradigm shift in which the very notion of the human soul gives way to cybernetics. Published at a time when mechanized warfare had paved the way for nuclear annihilation, Johnny Got His Gun shows that Bergson’s hope for the spiritualization of matter had collapsed at last into the mechanization of spirit.
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