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A violation of sanctities: The interrogation of the popular press in the novels of Howells, James, Wharton, and Dreiser
Abstract
With the 1881 publication of William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, American realism began a critical interrogation of the mass-produced sensational daily newspapers. Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser followed this critical posture toward the press, and together the four authors offer a wide-ranging criticism of the popular press. The novels examined are: Howells's A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes; James's The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Reverberator; Wharton's The Custom of the Country; Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Though it is seldom the central focus in any of the novels, the press serves the authors as a representative of the dominant ideology of consumer capitalism which the realists saw as inimical to the individual subject. The rise of the mass-produced, inexpensive, sensational urban daily provides a reasonably clear view of the ways in which the medium became the locus of the emergent ideology of consumer capitalism. From its beginnings, the new press tended to objectify the individual subject, to treat the individual as both a consumer and as an item for consumption. Along with this objectifying tendency, the popular press also tended to reinforce the social hierarchy, to misrepresent reality, to obscure explanation, and to fragment society into discrete parts with differing representations for each group. The counter-discourse of the realists seeks to reinscribe the individual subject by examining the shortcomings of the press and by offering the explanations that lie behind the news. Each of the authors establishes the press as a metonym for what had by the 1880s become the dominant discourse of consumer capitalism. Howells and James use reporters as metonyms for the press, allowing their actions and concerns to demonstrate how the press objectifies its subjects. Wharton and Dreiser portray the press largely without recourse to reporters and present the press as integrated into the culture as a self-effacing voice of the dominant discourse of consumer capitalism.
Subject Area
American literature|Journalism
Recommended Citation
Pryor, John Clark, "A violation of sanctities: The interrogation of the popular press in the novels of Howells, James, Wharton, and Dreiser" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9420679.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420679