The threat of American life: Literary defensiveness at the turn of the nineteenth century (Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry James, William James, William Dean Howells)

Inflation is one of the primary threats of American life. In the boom years before the creation of the Federal Reserve System, monetarists addressed the threat of inflation by calling for a contraction of the money supply—a reduction of economic demand. At the same time, a group of naturalist writers imagined a literary corrective to late-century prosperity: a reduction of desire. Like other adherents to the contractionist ideal, the naturalists believed that invitations to debasement and expansion ought to be declined, and life's values and limits vigilantly maintained.; In this thesis, I argue that the major themes of American monetary policy pervade the work of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry James, William James, and William Dean Howells. I show how these writers represent American life as posing four homologous threats: excess-demand inflation, abundance, promiscuity, and immortality. To dramatize these threats, the naturalists create fictional dystopias that are long on money and goods, and short on taste and discipline.; I also ask what it means to defend oneself against such dystopias. The naturalists sounded a note of caution about certain tendencies in American life, and they were prescient to do so: an inflationary, overstocked, promiscuous century did indeed lie ahead. But they also established their contractionist aesthetic as the measure of reality, banishing from their books concepts that have since become facts of American existence: universal borrowing, anticipated inflation, disregard for aesthetic hierarchies, and denial of death. Just as these ideas and practices were becoming commonplace, naturalist writers were rendering them “unthinkable” and imposing new limits on the novel's capacity to represent them. The naturalists fended off economic exuberance and hypertrophism with such ardor that they inadvertently exposed the dangers of overreacting to the very conditions they deplored.