4 - Cosmopolitan variations

Summary

The works discussed in this chapter include classic novellas (e.g. Jack London's The Call of the Wild), immigrant novels and letters (e.g. Abraham Cahan's Yekl and A Bintel Brief), social scientific studies of immigration and religious extremism (by Edward A. Ross and William James), autobiographies (Alice James's Diary, Helen Keller's The Story of My Life), biographies (of Mary Baker Eddy), and major American novels (e.g. McTeague, The House of Mirth, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove). These works will be examined as narratives that draw their chief inspiration from some of the most important changes of the late nineteenth century: the human displacements issuing from urbanization, migration, and immigration. Much of the literature is set in urban locales: San Francisco, Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute and McTeague; London and Venice, Henry James's Wings of the Dove; New Orleans, Chopin's The Awakening; New York, Cahan's Yekl and Wharton's House of Mirth; Boston, which provided a perfect environment for the flowering of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. But some of it is centered in the dilapidated regions left behind (Wharton's Ethan Frome) or the wilderness conceived as ideal alternatives (London's The Call of the Wild). And some of it is located in worlds that are, for different reasons, boundless: the infinite white darkness of Helen Keller; the hyper-consciousness of Henry James's “life after death”; the heavens of Mark Twain and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The human characters introduced in these works are memorable, usually for their peculiarity, excessiveness, or frailty.