Technologies of representation and American naturalism: The limits of photography and early film in Norris and Dreiser

Michael R Mauritzen, Purdue University

Abstract

This project examines the role of precinematic photography and early film in relation to American fiction writers who were writing as film first emerged as a cultural force. In particular, it examines how the discursive practices of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser were influenced by such new representational technologies. It places Norris and Dreiser as writing concurrently with the development of Eadweard Muybridge's and Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography. During this time, Muybridge and Marey used the lecture circuit to attack artistic renderings of animal locomotion, claiming that they were inaccurate and should conform to the scientific accuracy revealed through chronophotography. Through both his role as an artist and his connection to Frederic Remington, Norris was embedded within the ensuing debate between the chronophotographers, who argued for the accuracy of the camera, and the artists, who argued for an artistic truth based on how we experience the world. This debate between truth and accuracy is played out in the aesthetics that Norris develops in his critical writings, where he places fiction above new representational technologies for its ability to better display temporal flux. It surfaces in his early short stories through a skepticism of the photograph's ability to represent things as they are and in McTeague through the inability of the photograph and kinetoscope to signify anything beyond themselves. It is also employed as a decontextualizing impulse that prevents Vandover from imposing any sort of organizing structure on his memories or art and likewise prevents McTeague from being able to exist in the present moment or function in modernity. Such impulses drive Norris's characters toward their doom, showing the destructive nature of chronophotography as a framework of understanding. Dreiser's Sister Carrie occupies a unique position in Carrie's use of the two elements that Anne Friedberg uses to characterize cinema--the mobilized gaze of the flâneur and the virtual gaze of photography. Carrie adopts the protocinematic sensibilities of the flâneur, first as she looks for a job and later as she enters the world of consumer goods. Her experience as a female flâneur trains her to value looking at symbols of material wealth and, eventually, to attract the looks of others, first through the material goods she adorns herself with and later through taking the stage as an actress. Carrie's desire to be seen culminates in her aspiration to see her photograph in print, which she views as the ultimate sign of status. But having her picture in the paper and having life-size reproductions of her posted as advertisements leads to a separation of Carrie's image from herself and leaves her trapped and unfulfilled. Similarly skeptical of the camera, Dreiser uses the first half of An American Tragedy to show how Clyde's hopeless obsession with grandeur is shaped by the movies, while he uses the second half to question the truth claims of the camera. Through flagging the camera as a tampered piece of evidence and showing inconsistencies in its photographs, Dreiser questions the prosecution's narrative of Clyde's guilt, ultimately revealing it as an issue too complex to be revealed in the simplicity of the camera.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|American literature|Film studies

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