Sometimes a cigar: Literature and the American experience of modernity

This dissertation uses the symbolic structure of the cigar in American literature between 1880 and 1930 to illuminate the paradoxes and anxieties of modernization and modernity in the United States. Because the cigar embodies the very ambivalence of modernity---symbolizing as it does modern genteel authority even as it quite literally bears the stamp of its exotic places of origin and the Otherness involved in its production---it provides an excellent lens through which to view U.S. concerns about social changes and their effects on perceptions of individuality, equality, democracy, labor, experience and pleasure. In late-nineteenth century American culture, the cigar symbolized not only the imagined natural Other, but also the process of objectification required for modern subject formation. The literary texts on which I focus---Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1927), and. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926)---each develop characters who strive to forge and maintain their own identities and have those identities recognized by others through the objects they deploy in highly specific material contexts. To varying degrees, each novel points to specifically modern contingent relationships, mediated or reflected by the cigar: independent individual and bourgeois social authority; healthy citizen and degenerate "alien"; powerful nation-state and far-flung empire; autonomous subject and commodified object.; In examining these modern contingent relationships, this dissertation examines the intersections of literary and cultural production, social history, and the manufacture and marketing of cigars. As objects meant to be enjoyed on nearly every sensory level, yet ultimately smoked out of existence, cigars perfectly emblematize the contradictions of modernity, presenting both possibilities and problems for researchers of modern American culture. Though cigars offer fleeting pleasure, the end of which is always waste, they always also mark the weighty pursuit of self-motivated autonomy fundamental to American identity. Cigars, then, are neither permanent not completely evanescent. Their presence lingers in ephemera, in cultural lore, and in the cigar butts that litter the novels that move American literature from realism to naturalism to modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.