Chapter 2 - Developing the Countryside: Cather, Hughes, and the Poetics of Rurality

Summary

For the literary naturalists who narrated the uneven development of the urban-industrial Midwest, the pathway into adulthood they conceived through deterministic plots metaphorized modernity's effects upon regional distinctiveness and the everyday life of the region's workers, while anticipating the implications that unre-strained national expansion and industrial development would have upon the future of democracy and the consolidation of a national culture. In their novels, national progress took the narrative direction those authors imagined modernity itself to have taken, whereby “the countryside is abandoned for the city, and the world of work changes at an incredible and incessant pace,” as outlined in Moretti's account of the European Bildungsroman (4). The harmonious little worlds and scenes that sustained the classical Bildungsroman of Goethe and Austen, locales that managed the restless mobility of youth and provided an end destination to their travels, found anachronistic equivalents in the local color depiction of the rural Midwest, a region conceptualized as the land of the pioneers, and the plains of prosperity where the nation's Manifest Destiny was headed. Yet, region also came to signify sites of isolated, homogenous, backward communities devoid of action or curious characters, where nothing ever happens but the banal drama of place itself.

Dreiser and Sinclair both implicitly utilized such geographical mythologies, if only to starkly contrast the harsh labor environment of the region's industrial centers. Their Bildungsromane implicitly subscribed to a connotation of regionalism often understood through “nostalgic portraits of preindustrial rural communities and people,” as Stephanie Foote has observed apropos responses to regionalist fiction in general (3). They ultimately sidelined that mode of living to focus on the malaise of modern industry. To return to that place of rural innocence, for Carrie or Jurgis, would be as impossible as aging in reverse. The seemingly unstoppable forward march of modernization, which such unfixed figures represented, meant that the “colourless and uneventful” society in which the “old youth” existed was no longer tenable for narrativizing modernity, now that capitalism had imposed “a hitherto unknown mobility” and catalyzed the turn toward interiority, giving rise to the Bildungsroman as modern society's symbolic form (Moretti 4). If to be young is to be mobile, something must elicit the subject's removal from the stabilizing properties of local life.