Chapter 11 - Apocalyptic Form in the American Fin de Siècle

Summary

Recovering from the Civil War and facing the closing of the Western frontier, fin de siècle American society could be characterized as postapocalyptic. Americans were beginning to grapple with a geographically united but culturally divided country. Rural versus urban divisions, color lines, class lines, and gender conflict stratified everyday life. Religion, while still important, no longer provided social coherence because of the growing diversity of faiths. Apocalyptic form offered predominantly secular ways of engaging these conflicts, dramatizing resistance to violence and dehumanization while revealing the racist and classist ideologies underlying social demarcations, making it harder to ignore “how the other half lives.” Works such as Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives addressed past and current cataclysms while still providing hope for a transformed future. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, however, critiqued the “savage” class system of fin de siècle American society, offering harsh judgement without revelation. With the United States’s entry into World War I, apocalyptic rhetoric shifted from an isolationist focus on internal divisions to an awareness of external dangers to the nation.