ON THE BOWERY: SYMBOLIC ACTION IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND SUBCULTURE (SKID ROW, POVERTY, NEW YORK)

This dissertation is concerned with the historical and contemporary relationship between American culture and subculture. The latter domain is particularized in the New York Bowery which became established as an urban place and theme during the late nineteenth century. The dialectic between culture and subculture, stimulated by the historical processes of urban-industrialization and by the opposition between poverty and affluence in the metropolis, has been accompanied by the symbolic systems of mystification and critical realism. Both symbolic systems have functioned to organize social perceptions on the nature of urban poverty and Bowery homelessness in such a way as to bring the contradictory viewpoints, ideological differences, and essential meanings into dynamic tension. The intensity and progression of the dialectic, though primarily examined during the late nineteenth century, is also traced into the modern period.; In regards to structure, Chapter 1, "Background Circumference," includes a brief social history of the Bowery, exploring its development from rural settlement to urban slum and skid row. Chapter 2, "Mystification," examines related approaches to the construct of urban poverty in the Bowery which tend toward different degrees of social distance and obscurity. The symbolic system of mystification is represented by the sensationalistic genre, the urban picturesque school, and by the realism of Jacob Riis's reportage and William Dean Howells's commentary and fiction. Chapter 3, "Descent and Discovery," contrasts the more removed approaches of those writers working within the framework of mystification with the penetration of urban space highlighted by the proponents of critical realism. The Bowery sketches of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie are presented to investigate this more intimate interaction. Chapter 4, "Bowery Tales," continues the discussion on Crane's style of critical realism. Crane's novellas, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George's Mother, are studied for their perspectives on American urban life in the 1890s. The conclusion transports the dialectic between culture and subculture, and the competing expressions of mystification and critical realism, into our present era. In doing so, that otherwise silent minority, the Bowery homeless, demonstrate the vitality of the dialectic and the generative culture-making process that ensues.