Silent Film and U.S.

Naturalist Literature

Typically, studies of early cinema’s relation to literature have focused on the

interactions between film and modernism. When film first emerged, how-
ever, it was naturalism, not modernism, competing for the American public’s
attention. In this media ecosystem, the cinema appeared alongside the works
of authors including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, and Frank
Norris. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of time and modernity as
well as recent scholarship on film, narrative, and naturalism, this book
moves beyond traditional adaptation studies approaches to argue that both
naturalism and the early cinema intervened in the era’s varying experiments
with temporality and time management. Specifically, it shows that American
naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal and thematic
interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and temporal
inexorability, and that the early cinema developed its norms in the context
of naturalist experiments with time. The book identifies the silent cinema
and naturalist novel’s shared privileging of narrative progress over character
development as a symbolic solution to social and aesthetic concerns ranging
from systems of representation to historiography, labor reform, miscegena-
tion, and birth control. This volume thus establishes the dynamic exchange
between silent film and naturalism, arguing that in the products of this
exchange, personality figures as excess bogging down otherwise efficient
narratives of progress. Considering naturalist authors and a diverse range of
early film genres, this is the first book-length study of these reciprocal media
exchanges that took place when the cinema was new. It will be a valuable
resource to those with interests in Adaptation Studies, American Literature,
Film History, Literary Naturalism, Modernism, and Narrative Theory.

Katherine Fusco is Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Nevada, Reno, US.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
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38 Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist
Literature
Time, Narrative, and Modernity
Katherine Fusco
This page intentionally left blank
Silent Film and U.S.
Naturalist Literature
Time, Narrative, and Modernity

Katherine Fusco
First published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fusco, Katherine.

Title: Silent film and U.S. naturalist literature: time, narrative, and
modernity / by Katherine Fusco.
Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge
studies in twentieth-century literature; 38 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044122
Subjects: LCSH: Naturalism in literature. | American fiction—20th century—
History and criticism. | Silent films—United States—History and
criticism. | Naturalism in motion pictures. | Literature and motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PS374.N29 F88 2016 | DDC 813/.520936—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044122

ISBN: 978-1-138-18348-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-64583-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
For Matt and Peggy Fusco
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Progress without People 1

1 Unnatural Time: Frank Norris at the Cinema’s Beginnings 23

2 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show:

Frank Norris, D. W. Griffith, and Naturalist Editing 62

3 Made of Leavings and Scraps: Jack London, Jack Johnson,

and Racial Time 105

4 Systems, Not Men: Processes without People in Utopian

Factory Films and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Eusocial
Feminism 149

Epilogue: Scaling up to Modernism 184

Works Cited 191

Index 205
This page intentionally left blank
List of Figures

1.1 Leaves as detail in Baby’s Breakfast. 44

1.2 Producing the everyday as event, such as in Arrival
of a Train (Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat). 45
1.3 Tearing down a wall in Démolition d’un mur. 52
1.4 Reverse action in Démolition d’un mur. 53
2.1 Replacing historical references with the transhistorical
image of Christ in the film The Birth of a Nation. 63
2.2 Unable to afford bread at its new price in A Corner in Wheat. 79
2.3 Chaos breaks out in the bakery in A Corner in Wheat. 81
2.4 The Wheat King completely covered by grain in A Corner
in Wheat. 81
2.5 Sowers, labor, and landscape produce a sense of timelessness
in A Corner in Wheat. 83
2.6 Frantic speculation in the crowded wheat pit in A Corner
in Wheat. 83
2.7 Margaret Cameron (Miriam Cooper) in the garden in
The Birth of a Nation. 94
3.1 Jack Johnson in The Chicago Sunday Tribune. 129
3.2 A pictorial account of the fight “by rounds” in The Tribune. 132
3.3 The Jack Johnson bridal party in The Chicago Defender. 139
4.1 Westinghouse Works machinery. 160
4.2 “Camerawork” in Westinghouse Works. 160
4.3 YMCA’s utopian hopes. 163
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

Though this book is about fantasies of progress without people, its existence
is due to the work of many who offered guidance, support, and thoughtful
feedback along the way.
If I picture this project as a small craft traversing a big sea, this book’s
journey benefitted from the good provisions and navigation lessons provided
by friends and colleagues. I count myself lucky to have had such remarkably
good weather for the journey; I assume it was the good company that made
the climate.
As a PhD student at Vanderbilt, Josh Epstein, Ben Graydon, Christian
Long, Jeff Menne, and Nicole Seymour provided the best cohort a person
could ask for. Of this group, Nicole Seymour needs special mention. I was
extremely lucky to have such a smart and lively co-conspirator as the other
woman in my class, as well as one who provided a model of taking one’s
writing seriously without being too serious about it. Nicole, thanks for over
a decade of support, advice, and friendship—this book was conceived in the
Velcro Palace, and the final touches were put on in your knotty pine cottage.
Other friends and colleagues have been writing partners, editors, and sup-
porters of my work. Megan Minarich and Jane Wanninger have always been
cheerful champions, and Brian Rejack witnessed the initial scratches at these
ideas and supported me at my initial presentation of this work. Later, Rob
Watson became my dear writing partner and film buddy. Thanks, Rob, for the
company, the bagels, the de Palma, and your example of being a true bon vivant.
As a graduate student and afterward, I received the gift of generous men-
torship from Deak Nabers, Cecelia Tichi, and Paul Young. Paul introduced
me to the joys of silent film, was a warm host to a student new to this world,
and his balance between humor and serious scholarly questioning is some-
thing I hope to have reflected here. Cecelia Tichi is among the more remark-
able examples of a writing life that I know; she has always pursued engaging
and important scholarship in American literature, and she demanded of her
students that we write like human beings. Finally, Deak Nabers mentors like
no other. Without Deak, it is entirely possible that I would have turned back
to shore and abandoned this endeavor entirely. Deak teaches his students
how to argue and once advised me that not everything can be solved via
another trip to the library. Deak, thank you for teaching me how to think and
for offering a tough and supportive testing ground for my ideas.
xiv Acknowledgments
Two special places taught me to find the joy in scholarly writing. The
first, the Narrative Writing Group hosted by Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn
Warren Center helped me see the creative possibilities in academic writing.
Chapter 3 benefitted from the feedback of group members including Mark
Schoenfeld, Daniel Sharfstein, and especially Paul Kramer, whose good idea
this group was. I credit this writing group for making academic writing
seem pleasurable. The second special place, the Vanderbilt Writing Studio
provided some of my happiest work years, and offered financial shelter to
a recent PhD during the recession. The Writing Studio was always also a
shelter in a broader sense—a safe place for writers to try out their ideas.
I  had the good fortune to work at the Writing Studio in the company of
Gary Jaeger, Amanda Middagh, and Jen Holt, who, in addition to being a
friend, is the best listener a writer could ask for.
More recently, supportive colleagues at the University of Nevada have cre-
ated a welcoming Western home. Thanks are especially due to Ann ­Kenniston
for her mentorship, Eric Rasmussen for supporting his faculty, and Justin
Gifford for promoting my work. Thanks are also due to Kyle Bladow for his
copy editing work at the final stages. I also owe thanks to my interdisciplinary
writing group for being “game,” sharing glasses of wine, and plunging into
the details of early twentieth century factory systems and feminist thinking—
thank you Jim Webber, Amy Pason, and Mikaela Rogozon-Soltar.
This book has also been made possible by institutional support, including
a dissertation year fellowship from the Department of English at Vanderbilt,
a dissertation enhancement grant from the Graduate School at Vanderbilt,
and funding to attend the Pordenone Silent Film Festival from the Depart-
ment of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Additionally, a number of journals, editors, and peer reviewers have
shaped my thinking in this book. Portions of Chapter 1 have appeared
in Studies in American Naturalism (published by University of Nebraska
Press), portions of Chapter 2 have appeared in Adaptation (published by
Oxford University Press), and portions of Chapter 3 have appeared in Studies
in the Novel (published by Johns Hopkins University Press). Additionally,
thanks are due to the blind reviewers at Routledge (many thanks!) as well
as to Routledge’s fabulous editorial staff, including Elizabeth Levine, Nancy
Chen, and Nicole Eno.
Finally, in these acknowledgments, I have saved the best for last—my
family. My parents and my sister have witnessed the tears, the anger, and the
ridiculous behavior that goes into making a book. Even when it was above
the call of duty, they have listened patiently to my blathering, asking ques-
tions and encouraging me onward. My husband, Blake Watson, has been on
my side when I needed it and pushed back when that was what I needed; he
has generously read and reread chapters, learning more about Jack London
than he ever wanted to know. My favorite partner in writing and all else,
Blake, thank you for making our home one of ideas and conversation—I’m
thrilled that we’re now embarking on the next big project.
Introduction
Progress without People

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man
turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank,
where a dim and little-traveled trail led eastward through the fat spruce tim-
berland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing
the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock.
Jack London, “To Build a Fire” (1908)

Remember how small the world was before I came along?

D. W. Griffith1

At noon on the 18th of November in 1883, standard railroad time was codi-
fied as time for a nation. More than three decades later, on March 19, 1918,
Congress approved the first national daylight savings law to “save daylight
and to provide standard time”.2 Resulting in the triumph of standardized time
over idiosyncratic local temporalities, these innovations offer a legal analog
to the narrative forms that rose to popularity in the intervening years—the
naturalist novel and the silent film. Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Litera-
ture: Time, Narrative, and Modernity traces two turn-of-the-century media
forms that, through interventions in the era’s time management obsession,
came to privilege progress over people and plotting over character. I argue
that American naturalist novels are constructed around a sustained formal
and thematic interrogation of the relationship between human freedom and
temporal inexorability, and that the early cinema d ­ eveloped its narrative
and stylistic norms in the context of naturalist experiments with time.
Scholars of U.S. naturalism typically consider the genre in terms of t­ hematic
concerns, a variety of “threats” to human agency. For their ­descriptions of
individuals crushed by horrible conditions, scholars have argued that the
naturalist novels of Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris can
be characterized by a focus on determinism. Recently, scholars have more
precisely defined the threat to human agents and renewed critical interest in
naturalism by arguing that naturalism’s determinism and its style stem from
historical developments at the turn of the century, particularly those central
to urban and industrial life: the rise of consumer capitalism (Walter Benn
Michaels), the mechanization of systems of production (Mark Seltzer), the
2 Introduction
closing of the West (Mary Lawlor), growing anti-immigrant sentiment (Gina
Rossetti), trends in publishing (Donna Campbell), and the emergence of the
new woman (Jennifer Fleissner and Donna Campbell). This manuscript
builds on such important work; however, I will also suggest that the various
constraints that appear thematically in naturalist novels are outgrowths of
the primary naturalist constraint, the human relationship to time, which was
being worked through at the level of form. This larger constraint both gives
naturalist novels a distinctive narrative style that emphasized plot at the
expense of character and acts as an organizing concern that holds together
as a movement both London’s dog novels and Norris’s San F ­ rancisco plots.
To efficiency experts, filmmakers, and literary naturalists, time seemed a
force located beyond human intervention, both unmanageable and desper-
ately in need of management.
Understanding naturalism as primarily a set of narrative techniques for
organizing time allows the genre’s relationship with the era’s other time art,
the cinema, to come into focus. While direct moments of contact between
naturalism and silent film may be persuasive—indeed, Jack London and
Frank Norris portray films within their novels, Theodore Dreiser penned
screenplays, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote hopefully about the film
industry in her nonfiction—the analogous structures between the two are at
least as significant. Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature identifies the
way naturalist novels and silent films interacted not just by way of shared
plots but also through modes of plotting. As film scholar Thomas Leitch has
suggested, adaptation studies remains “haunted” by “concepts and premises
it has repudiated in principle but continued to rely on in practice” (63);
such concepts include fidelity, accuracy, and the flow of influence from
literature to film. Instead of such approaches, this book offers an account
of what Leitch refers to as “intertextual relations” between cinema and
literature (76). An examination of the competition and exchange between
the silent cinema and the naturalist novel reveals a shared focus on narratives
that foreground plot over character as an intervention into the era’s various
social issues.

Time as Force: “To Build a Fire” and Naturalism’s Modernity

By attending to naturalism’s engagement with various social, industrial, and
political time management projects, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature
identifies naturalism’s primary intellectual investment as the representation
of the human relationship to time. As a kind of time management technique,
American naturalism partakes in the era’s time obsession by way of new
plot–character relations.
The opening of Jack London’s short story of man exposed to brutal ele-
ments offers an example of naturalist literature in its most familiar form as
well as that considered here. “To Build a Fire” (1908) takes the passage of
a day as its central drama and sets a ticking alarm from the outset: the man
 Introduction  3
knows he must reach his camp by six, for he is not equipped to spend a night
in the Yukon Territory’s frosty climes. Within the first paragraph, London
establishes two distinct temporalities: man’s and nature’s. The first appears
in its technological manifestation, the personal watch. The watch and the
techniques the man derives from it, such as pacing his run at a rate of four
miles per hour and thereby calculating his arrival at camp, ultimately fail
to bring the story’s second temporality, nature’s, under control. Despite the
man’s attempt to manage time through rationalization, time remains fluid and
relentless, slipping uncontrollably by. The reflexive construction with which
London opens his tale, “Day had broken”, besides being something of a gram-
matical commonplace in naturalist narration, expresses the naturalist sense of
time as forever flowing, agentless, but fatally passing nonetheless (9). As I will
discuss, the day that breaks itself so often in naturalist literature is similar to
the passive voice used in scientific discourse, D. W. Griffith intertitles, and in
industrial manuals, and it asserts the natural and the eternal nature of the
phenomenon described. Much as the scientific experiment’s passive phrasing
guarantees grammatically its universality, so too does the reflexive construc-
tion of the naturalist short story “had broken” emphasize the bare happening
of time’s passage. A similar moment occurs in Frank Norris’s The Octopus
when Shelgrim declares, “The Wheat grows itself” (576). Already, then, in the
same way the story compresses a man’s life, London’s short paragraph distills
the era’s most pressing concern. Throughout Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist
Literature, I will outline a number of instantiations of and responses to the
time we see slipping away from the protagonist of “To Build a Fire”.
As “To Build a Fire” continues, London establishes the perspective
offered by naturalist narration as the most appropriate lens for understand-
ing man’s temporal situation. This narrative perspective contrasts that held
by the protagonist of the story, as well as that of many of London’s contem-
poraries. The man’s careful temporal notations run throughout the story, as
when, an hour after the opening, he again “look[s] at his watch” and thinks,
“It was ten o’clock. He was making four miles an hour, and he calculated
that he would arrive at the forks at half-past twelve” (11). Later, the asso-
ciation between the man and industrialized rationalization of time becomes
hyperbolic when his body transforms into a clock. During the noon hour,
his hand numb, he “struck the fingers a dozen sharp smashes against his leg”
(13). But internalizing the mechanical clock’s striking proves ineffectual,
since this story figures true time not as the regimented fragment of factory
modernity, but instead as the progressive “flow” described by other modern
thinkers, including William James and Henri Bergson (Kern 24). London’s
narration further guides the reader to take a skeptical view of the watch as
a solution to the crisis of a day’s cold passage, warning,

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was
quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things and not in the
significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost.
4 Introduction
Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was
all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of tem-
perature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able to live within certain
narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to
the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. (10)

London’s long conditional—an overview of what the man doesn’t imagine—­

establishes the man’s fatal flaw as one of interpretation; he misperceives
what fifty degrees below zero “means”. But this is a strange criticism to
make of a man freezing to death. After all, a meditation on man’s frailty
in the face of an uncaring universe would not save him any more than his
mathematical figuring.
Instead, the narrator’s admonition offers instruction for both writing
and the interpretation of writing. As the other authors considered in this
manuscript repeatedly do, London points to a gap between the protagonist’s
knowledge and the narrator’s, and offers up a glimpse of a more distant
view—the face of the watch becomes a narrow detail within the broader per-
spective of “man’s place in the universe”. London thereby cues his readers to
follow his lead and develop the sort of “imagination” that would look to time
as a force operating on a significantly more massive scale. The story locates
this type of imagination as belonging to its own naturalist narration, which
eschews individualistic perspectives and establishes itself as a truer account
of temporality, dismissing personal accounts of and attempts to control time.
But London’s judgment is a bit unfair to industrial thinking. Like the nat-
uralist authors, the industrial manager Frederick Winslow Taylor also saw
time as a force, opening his 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management
with an account of time very similar to that in London’s story. The efficiency
engineer begins his management treatise with a quotation from Theodore
Roosevelt: “The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary
to the larger question of national efficiency” (5). Despite the presidential
call to think of time as a finite resource similar to the wild landscapes that
would become the national parks, Taylor notes that the country has pri-
marily focused its efforts on decreasing the waste of environmental goods
rather than addressing problems of human inefficiency. Taylor suggests that
the nation’s success at conserving natural resources but utter failure at man-
aging human ones results from the visibility of the former and the relative
inscrutability of the latter. He explains, “We can see our forests vanishing,
our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods to the
sea; and the end of our coal and iron is in sight. … Awkward, inefficient, or
ill-­directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible
behind them” (5). In Taylor’s opening gestures, we see the culture reacting
to and describing a similar conception of time as that which London estab-
lishes in “To Build a Fire”. Although this time operates in cultural realms as
well as novelistic ones, the descriptor “naturalist” helpfully accounts for the
way this time appeared to act as an agency-limiting force.
 Introduction  5
Three parallels in particular are worth drawing out between the fictional
and the real-world conceptions of what I call naturalist time. First is the
­matter of time’s immateriality, its strangeness as force and as resource.
Through his comparison of time to soil or minerals, Taylor conceives of
time as a natural resource. It is, however, a particularly tricky one, and not
just because it is invisible. Time as conceived by London and Taylor is simul-
taneously finite (there is only so much time in the day) and infinite (time is
forever flowing onward). Time’s finitude on the one hand and its intermin-
ability on the other centers the naturalist temporal drama that plays out in
both the novels of authors like London and in the culture at large. Painfully
paradoxical, as the ultimate natural force (Taylor compares time’s move-
ment to erosion—itself a temporal process), time’s relentless and unceasing
forward flow also makes time scarce. Because time is always moving for-
ward, the man in “To Build a Fire” can never have enough of it. Similarly,
because American history is always expanding into the future, it appears
that American laborers are squandering the days as they pass.
This sense of efficiency as an intrinsic good would later allow the chil-
dren of efficiency-expert-and-Taylor-collaborator Frank Gilbreth to make
the following joke in their 1948 memoir Cheaper by the Dozen: the children
write that their father once experimented with using two razors to shave,
but complained that the forty-four seconds he saved using this dangerous
technique was negated by the “wasted two minutes” he spent bandaging his
throat. Frank Jr. and Ernestine explain, “It wasn’t the slashed throat that
really bothered him. It was the two minutes” (3). Gilbreth’s two minutes are
an exemplary instance of a resource that is simultaneously vague (where do
the minutes go?) and yet materially meaningful (minutes are an entity that
can be lost)—in this way similar to “force” as naturalist scholars are used
to understanding it. This sense of time as force and resource appears in con-
versations across a number of arenas in early modernity: in philosophy, art,
culture, law, and historiography, as well as in labor, food purity, and birth
control movements. Considering these conversations alongside the novels
and films for which they often provided subject matter reveals the ways plot
and character, time and the human, came into new relations in the early
twentieth century.
Second, as a system privileging narration and plotting over character in
order to grasp an “objective” view of time, literary naturalism holds a mir-
ror to the intellectual projects of its era: both Taylorism and naturalism may
be understood as experiments with subjecting the human to large systems so
that time’s forceful progress is rendered comprehensible. The obsession with
measuring human time against other timescales connects literary thinkers to
factory thinkers, making the “claims” of London’s stories similar to Taylor’s
when the engineer explains that he was “not trying to find the maximum
work that a man could do on a short spurt or for a few days, but … to
learn what really constituted a full day’s work” (31). The contradictory but
fundamental tension between time’s two modes—as flow and as fragment
6 Introduction
(a full day)—leads Taylor and other temporal thinkers (including naturalist
novelists) to conceive of temporal management as a formal problem that
might be solved through new modes of perception, which in turn depended
on seeing individual humans in new ways. To design his system of scientific
management, Taylor had to make an imaginative leap: How could one ren-
der the expenditure of man’s energy visible? How could one make manifest
wasted time? By timing individual movements through space, Taylor uses
the temporal fragment as a strategy for making accessible the inefficiency
that left “nothing visible or tangible behind”. This attempt would produce
the system of industrial control that has since become infamous. Scholars
including Martha Banta, Mark Seltzer, and Cecelia Tichi have long under-
stood Taylor as important to the development of modern American culture
but have tended to focus on Taylor’s regulation of bodies and machines to
illustrate the human costs of rationalized factory labor. Yet in the context
of experiments to visualize inefficiency, the human costs of Taylorism were
as much beside the point as the man in “To Build a Fire” becomes when he
“fails” to take the proper perspective on his situation—bodies and machines
were the materials efficiency experts manipulated because they could not
get their hands on time itself. The similarity between London’s man in the
Yukon Territory and the Taylorist worker suggests that both representations
of time—flow and fragment—are modern ones, responding to a sense of
time as force. And, as it may already be clear, both entailed their own trau-
mas for the human.
Third, naturalist time’s traumatic effects on the human stem in part from
a sense that the human subject is ill-equipped to perceive the truth of his
temporal circumstance and so must be subjected to more effective systems
and technologies. The tensions between time as flow and time as fragment as
well as the trauma experienced by the human subject in the face of natural-
ist time thus connect the cinema to naturalist perspectives by way of media
ontology, in addition to adaptation.
From its beginnings, the cinema’s first theorists understood the cinema
as time’s medium. Thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer,
and Georg Simmel traced the impact of changes in representation, trans-
portation, circulation, and communication on the human subject, especially
their impact on human sensory experience. In particular, Simmel linked
modernity with the regimentation of clock time in capitalism, writing, “the
technique of modern life is unimaginable without the most punctual integra-
tion of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time
schedule” (177). Drawing on Simmel and Benjamin, and Tom Gunning’s
important work on the cinema of attractions, early cinema scholarship has
tied historical experiences of modernity to film ontology and aesthetics, pro-
ducing arguments that have been described retroactively as the modernity
thesis.3 In his account of the modernity thesis, Ben Singer explains, “the
key point is that the modern individual somehow internalized the tempos,
shocks, and upheavals of the outside environment, and this generated a taste
 Introduction  7
for hyperkinetic amusements” (Melodrama 119). Film scholarship on the
modern subject’s perception of time informs the way Silent Film and U.S.
Naturalist Literature traces modern subjects’ attempts to gain control over
time through new systems of human organization and new modes of repre-
sentation and perception.
But more than historical coexistence as responses to time in modernity
binds American naturalism and silent film. As the American cinema devel-
oped narrative norms, it did so in part through adaptations of naturalist
novels, which offered models for thinking through plot–character relations.
Both in its plots and in its narrative form, the silent cinema engaged natu-
ralist conceptions of the temporal, most easily understood as the conflict
between the small timescales of man’s temporal experience and the large
flow of inexorable time. In the second chapter, for example, I  argue that
this conflict gives rise to D. W. Griffith’s most innovative parallel editing
experiments in both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. But even when
adaptations do not tie together this intermedia knot, the early cinema and
the naturalist novel are sometimes complementary, sometimes competitive
coinvestigators of the era’s temporal questions.
The cinema formally encapsulates the naturalist temporal problem illus-
trated in London’s strange description of the man’s difficulty in “To Build a
Fire”: the challenge of understanding the relationship of the temporal frag-
ment (one man’s life) in relation to temporal flow (natural, or as London has
it, universal time). This drama is quite literally what animates the cinema,
the simultaneous flow and fragmentation of time. At the very moment the
temporally fragmented and rationalized images of man’s movement (such as
those associated with Taylor and the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey
and Eadweard Muybridge) are subjected to time as flow, the cinema arrives.
Further, built into film ontology is its status as a prosthetic device, one capa-
ble of helping humanity see differently than either London’s frozen man or
Taylor’s wastefully unaware American populace. As both Mary Ann Doane
and Jonathan Crary have documented, while early conceptions of the cinema
offered the utopian possibility of helping man see differently, the cinema’s
prosthetic function also undermined the human by pointing to his fallibility.4
Through its considerations of the silent cinema and naturalist novel as
competing prostheses, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature offers one
response to Linda Hutcheon’s call to rethink adaptation studies by pursuing
text-based issues “across a variety of media, find[ing] ways to study it com-
paratively, and then teas[ing] out the theoretical implications from multiple
textual examples” (104), as well as Dudley Andrew’s call for more sociolog-
ically inflected adaptation studies. Beginning with films that embrace con-
ceptions of time as fragment (including trick films and actuality films) and
then moving to films that embrace conceptions of time as flow (including
narrative features as well as factory films), I demonstrate both the direct
exchanges as well as the analogous structural relationships between the
silent cinema and the naturalist novel as time management strategies. As
8 Introduction
the cinema develops alongside the naturalist novel, it thus clarifies the way
narrative itself—and perhaps naturalist narrative in particular—comes to
function as a time management technique in the early twentieth century.
These three characteristics of “naturalist time” can be seen in the films,
novels, and archival materials discussed here: an idea of time as force, a
force that requires management, and a force that will need to be managed
formally in order to correct faulty human views. Combined, these charac-
teristics of naturalist time require a downplaying of the importance of the
individual, within social and industrial systems as well as formal ones. Both
the very early cinema and the naturalist novel extract time from the human,
whether by playing up its flow qualities, as London’s narration does, or by
mechanically fragmenting and manipulating it, as early trick films do. In a
similar vein, the era’s efficiency thinking, as represented by Taylor and by
social reformers such as Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
involved not just treating, but also conceiving of, the human in new ways.
In other words, for Taylor, inefficiency is not located within the worker—he
doesn’t need to just work harder or better—but in the worker’s externalized
relationship to an ongoing and unrelenting stream of time, the strange, natu­
ral, and invisible substance the worker moves through.
This is the kind of temporal thinking that the early cinema and the
­naturalist novel engage. The actuality films taken up in the first chapter—­
fifty-second films capturing everyday occurrences such as street scenes or
waves rolling ashore—undertake the same work as the strange sentences
with which Jack London presents the tragedies of “To Build a Fire”. Like the
Taylorist manager, both treat the human figure as a medium for revealing
time’s passage. For example, within London’s story, two disasters befall the
man. First, his foot breaks through the ice, an incident London announces
through the sentence, “And then it happened” (15). Second, a tree branch
shakes loose a load of snow, putting out the fire upon which the man’s life
depends: “But before he could cut the strings [to his boots], it happened”
(16). The descriptions of the crises are nearly identical: The “it” of each sen-
tence seems to mean both more and less than its ostensible referent, instead
drawing attention to an abstract “happening”. Chapter 1 will show that
actualities behave similarly; the films draw attention to the fact of some-
thing, anything, happening over a period of fifty seconds, whether a baby
eating breakfast or a train arriving at a station. Though the man’s foolish
building of his fire under a tree branch provides a sort of reason for the ­second
“it happened”, there is not a strong cause for the initial “it happened” that
corresponds with the wet boot. The “it happened” phrases appear without
causal conjunctions such as “so” or “because”. Instead, the story’s crisis is
time’s passage and the man’s inefficient dealing with it, though London offers
the strange comfort that he’s ultimately insignificant anyway.
By understanding naturalist novels and films as time management tech-
niques, I identify both as part of a national conversation on formalizing the
human relation to time. This manuscript thus builds on recent conversations
 Introduction  9
regarding the status of characterization and plot in the context of the social
discourses of the turn of the last century, in particular Alex Woloch’s and
James Salazar’s studies.5 In The One vs. The Many Woloch defines “charac-
ter space” as “that particular and charged encounter between an individual
human personality and a determined space and position within the narra-
tive as a whole” (14) and “character-system” as “the arrangement of mul-
tiple and differentiated character spaces—differentiated configurations and
manipulations of the human figure—into a unified narrative structure” (14).
Whereas Woloch demonstrates the way character interaction within narra-
tive reflects the democratic spirit of the realist novel, Silent Film and U.S.
Naturalist Literature shows that while naturalism retains realism’s concep-
tion of the novel as system, it rejects the centrality of a human protagonist.
In the naturalist novel, and in the crosscutting that developed in the cinema’s
transitional era, all characters are secondary to plot. All individuals, by vir-
tue of their individuality, are minor characters.
Over the course of Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature, I trace a
gradual chipping away at the significance of the individual. As I do so, an
additional context will become clear that helps explain why time manage-
ment techniques that operated at the expense of the human might have
seemed particularly acceptable at this given moment. Factory systems and
the networks of industrial capitalism suggest one answer; for example, as
noted earlier, the implementation of standard time helped coordinate the
movement of people and goods across a vast nation. But the nation was not
just vast; it was also diverse. Many of the materials that form this book’s
archive conceive of progress in racial or national terms, and impediments
to this progress appear tagged in terms of racial diversity. With newly pop-
ulous cities, and in the face of both immigration and the Great Migration,
the thinkers in this book questioned what the future of the nation would
look like. In this context, zooming out to the level of the system and looking
to grand narratives of progress (e.g., Darwinian or Spencerian evolutionary
thinking) allowed writers to downplay the significance of individual differ-
ence on the ground. In other words, it makes perfect sense that Henry Ford,
the intellectual inheritor of much of the thought described in this manu-
script, should go on to perfect both the assembly line and nativist style in
the 1920s. Both scientific management and the management of races were
attempts to eradicate individual differences conceived of as threats to the
progress of the overall system.

The Force of Naturalism’s Form

Naturalist novels were not the first to consider constraints on human agency.
In the realist novels that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction, which
William Dean Howells championed in the Atlantic Monthly and which he
himself wrote, characters find themselves compelled by social pressures.
Because the primary obstacles realist characters must overcome are social
10 Introduction
in nature, the realist novel emphasizes individual freedom to either c­ omply
with or differentiate the self from societal norms. Such a rubric holds
together the forces that produce the divorce in Howells’s A Modern Instance
as well as the balance between artistic autonomy and political engagement
protagonist Basil March navigates in a Hazard of New Fortunes. In these
works, the relationship between the individual and the social world both
organizes the central drama of the novel and shapes its form. As Lee Clark
Mitchell demonstrates, the climaxes of realist novels are often unspectac-
ular moments of internal deliberation: Huck Finn’s choice to go to hell,
Silas Lapham’s decision to take responsibility for his investments, and Isabel
Archer’s acknowledgement of her role in a bad marriage (4–5). Mitchell’s
examples highlight the narrative centrality of free will and interiority in the
realist novel, which locates moral action within the mind of the protagonist.
Approaching the mind of a naturalist character offers no such illumina-
tion. The distinctions between freedom and determinedness, interiority and
exteriority distinguish realism from naturalism. Indeed, naturalist charac-
ters have a habit of coming up short in their accounts of events, even when
describing the happenings of their own lives, as in the case of London’s fro-
zen man as well as Norris’s poet protagonist in The Octopus. As London’s
discourse on his protagonist’s faulty perspective makes clear, the distinctive
emphases of realism and naturalism derive from their different narrative
scales. The realist novel works at the human scale, with the inner workings
of the protagonist’s mind forming the central dramatic locus. Indeed, the
closer the narrative gets to the character’s ruminations and decisions, the
closer the reader comes to uncovering the novel’s moral center. By contrast,
naturalist novels work at an inhuman scale in their attempt to reveal truths.
The more distant the narrator is from the character, the more accurate the
truth that is revealed. Emerging in the United States belatedly compared to
its European variants, the naturalist novel adds a sense of natural force to
the constraints man must face. Sometimes, as in the case of Jack London’s
work, the force quite literally appears to be nature, or a kind of primal ata-
vism (as Gina Rossetti argues in Imagining the Primitive). Other variations
on the natural forces at work include hereditary illness, social Darwinism,
and “naturalized” forces such as the market.
The shift from social constraints to “natural” ones opened naturalist lit-
erature to accusations that this was the literature of simple-minded material
determinism. Again, Mitchell’s important work on realism and naturalism
offers a helpful gloss; he argues that part of our discomfort with naturalism
comes from a deeply rooted insistence on the free will we cannot prove we
have (xvii). Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature supports this char-
acterization, but suggests a shift in the chain of causality: in addition to a
distaste for characters with predetermined fates, our resistance to natural-
ism’s treatment of individual agents may come from our displeasure with
the novels’ insistence on inhuman perspectives—points of view that don’t
require a human interpreter as a starting point. The threat naturalist novels
 Introduction  11
offer their readers is thus representational as well as philosophical, though
the categories are not neatly separable.
For example, in his Literary Interest, Steven Knapp offers an account of
the relationship between literary complexity and free will that helps explain
the bad fate of naturalist literature in a post-New Critical world. The kinds
of choices realist characters make are both liberating and limiting because
although a person has the freedom to make choices, making them immedi-
ately restricts his identity. In this way,

Settling on any particular option can look more like a betrayal of free-
dom than its fulfillment. Conversely, the purest expression of freedom
would seem to be a capacity to refrain from deciding at all. … And
this suggests one last reason why an interest in complex literary rep-
resentations can feel ethically or politically significant. … It isn’t that
literary interest makes someone a better agent. But it does give an
unusually pure experience of what liberal agency, for better or worse,
is like. (103)

Realist characters who deliberate and often choose not to choose (as when
Huck doesn’t turn in Jim) offer a satisfying affirmation of free will and
freedom itself. In contrast, naturalist novels with characters who cannot
even see the relevant options in their decision making (let alone decide dif-
ferently) deny readers the attestation to freedom that has come to signal not
just a more flattering perspective on humanity, but literary quality itself.
Because it has been traditionally understood in terms of a determinist
worldview, rather than by way of its formal technique, naturalism has
occupied a bad object status in American literary history. Bridging realism
and modernism, the naturalist novel is perhaps the loosest and baggiest of
the loose baggy monsters (as Henry James once characterized nineteenth-­
century prose fiction). The nature of naturalism’s seeming superlative
monstrosity likely derives from the ongoing assumptions of its thematic
obsessions and formal laxity. Early in the twentieth century, as literary crit-
ics drew American modernist works into the canon, they did so in part by
rejecting naturalism, a genre they associated with naïve politics and stylistic
practices better left unmentioned. The most damning and lasting critique of
­naturalism, Lionel Trilling’s “Reality in America”, began, in its 1940 ver-
sion, as a corrective to critic V. L. Parrington’s incoherent valuing of “reality”
in American literature, a value that had dominated criticism and classrooms
in the early decades of the twentieth century. According to Trilling, Parrington
foolishly believed in “a thing called reality; it is one and immutable, it is
wholly external, it is irreducible” (4). In the decades that followed mod-
ernist literary innovators such as Fitzgerald (who Trilling reads as the age’s
great tragic hero) and artists’ rejection of objective truth in favor of sub-
jective experience, Trilling’s readers in The Partisan Review likely agreed
when the critic argued that to share in Parrington’s distaste for writers like
12 Introduction
Hawthorne and James in favor of Bryant and Greeley “is not merely to be
mistaken in aesthetic judgment; rather it is to examine without attention
and from the point of view of a limited and essentially arrogant conception
of reality the documents which are in some respect the most suggestive tes-
timony to what America was and is” (10). Here Trilling finds Parrington a
threefold failure: first, Parrington believes naively in an objective, external
reality; second, his ideas about reality and realism have the twin deficits of
stupidity and ­arrogance; and third, Parrington is a poor judge of aesthetics.
Drawing out the critique in The Nation four years later, “Reality in
­America, Part II” pits Theodore Dreiser’s reputation against that of Henry
James, setting the stage for the dismissal of naturalist form that continues to
haunt scholarship on the genre. Trilling explains that the difference between
James and Dreiser is not “of kind, for both men addressed themselves to
virtually the same social and moral fact” (11). Instead, he argues, “the dif-
ference here is one of quality” (11). In the distinction drawn between James
and Dreiser, Trilling’s essay traces the outlines of a new mode of literary
valuation, one that continues to place James in relation to twentieth-century
artistic innovation while placing Dreiser in the country’s barbaric literary
past. To value Dreiser becomes a sign of anti-intellectualism, the ugly flaw of
liberal critics who mistake “the electric qualities of mind in James’s work” as
a lack of engagement with the truths of a difficult world (13). In the process
of overturning the liberal critics’ evaluative standards, Trilling explains that
Dreiser’s work not only fails at the level of form—“Everyone is aware that
Dreiser’s prose style is full of roughness and ungainliness” (15)—but that his
thematic content is equally flawed: “vulgar materialism with its huge nega-
tion, its simple cry of ‘Bunk!’” (21). Previously, critics such as Parrington
had championed Dreiser’s “peasant” writing style above Jamesian difficulty
and abstraction because they assumed that his bluntness was more truthful,
more real. Trilling corrects this view by positioning James’s more intellectual
style as appropriately nuanced for understanding the world’s complexities
and man’s ethical responsibilities within such a world.
Despite its age, the ghostly fingers of this august debate still reach out to
scholars who would cleave apart naturalist form and theme. In “Reality in
America”, Trilling takes Dreiser’s failure at the level of form as a given and
then extends his critique to the level of content. Given Dreiser’s embarrass-
ing intellectual engagement with the reality he strives to represent, Trilling
explains that retaining criticism’s valuation of realism for its own sake is not
only naïve and aesthetically flawed, but also dangerous. He writes: “This
is the liberal criticism, in the direct line of Parrington, which establishes
the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on to say that, apart
from his duty of resembling reality as much as possible, he is not really
­responsible for anything, not even for his ideas” (21).
The question of what the naturalists are “responsible for” has become
newly significant in the wake of the new historicist studies that have reinvig-
orated the field. In the 1960s, Donald Pizer began his heroic effort to restore
 Introduction  13
the damaged reputation of the genre, through a comparison of n ­ aturalist
and realist novels that complicated criticisms of naturalism’s ­pessimistic
determinism by identifying in the novels a tension between deterministic
values and a humanistic perspective that “affirms the value of the individual
and of his life” (Realism and Naturalism 11). Pizer’s influence in the field has
remained strong, and many studies that have followed take a similar a priori
view of naturalism and its philosophy. Unfortunately, though this scholar-
ship has led to many interesting thematic studies of the literature, a focus
on naturalist philosophy and thematics sidesteps the “problem” of natural-
ism’s form, implicitly agreeing that naturalist form has nothing i­nteresting
to offer.
The decades that followed Pizer’s reclamation of naturalism included
the rise of “Grand Theory” in a number of fields, and so it is unsurprising
that studies of both literary naturalism and the early cinema were reener-
gized by a turn to the new historicism. Though the imperative to historicize
occurred throughout literary and media studies, the trend was particularly
significant to the two forms considered here, both of which had been treated
as stylistically deficient in the past. Naturalist style had been described as
poor enough to ignore altogether, and cinema studies based on a teleologi-
cal argument that film style culminates in the classical Hollywood narrative
read early film as the medium’s primitive childhood—a necessary phase on
the way to cinema’s true destiny.6
New historicist studies of naturalism and the early cinema—most
famously, Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism and Tom Gunning’s “The Cinema of Attractions”—encouraged
scholars to read objects of study through the historical moment of their
production, and to think of these moments of production as constructed
through discourse: thus historicized, the early cinema and the naturalist
novel are precisely appropriate to their given cultural location, and, indeed,
help to shape it. They are also the forms specific to their age, a point some-
times lost in later historicist studies that derived from Michaels and from
Gunning.
Unsurprisingly, when the new historicism first began to cast its long
shadow of influence on studies of literary naturalism, most visibly via
Michaels’s work, previous generations of critics rankled at new historicism’s
deconstructive insistence on reading against the grain and establishing his-
tory’s textuality, and they found additional fault in new historicism’s diffi-
cult prose style. The leading skeptic, Donald Pizer, insisted that Michaels
was in fact reinscribing an old account of naturalism’s only value being the
degree to which it served as a barometer for particular historical ideas—an
account he had spent a career beating back. In his review, Pizer complains,
“The basic cast of mind underlying Michaels’ essays closely resembles that
of a 1930s literary historian—that the discovery of a source or an idea in a
literary work is itself a tacit announcement of the implicit worth of a work.
The richer the work in historical relevance the better it is” (Theory and
14 Introduction
Practice 205). More sympathetic than Pizer to Michaels’s ambitions, in his
1989 review essay, Christopher Wilson warned that, in their indebtedness
to deconstruction, historicist studies such as The Gold Standard ran the risk
of substituting one self-fulfilling methodology with another: “In instance
after instance, texts are exposed as essentially complicit with the system
they ostensibly oppose. Authors—and by extension, speciously oppositional
critics—repeatedly can’t ‘get outside’ capitalism’s domain of discourse”
(473).7 Despite these objections, the very best new historicist studies contin-
ued to shape the field, and Michaels’s work and Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and
Machines are books to which this one owes a particular debt. These stud-
ies not only situate naturalism in its historical contexts, they also explain
the genesis of naturalists’ style by arguing that these novels reflected (often
unconsciously) the anxieties of the culture. Works that followed, including
Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things, Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion,
Modernity, David Zimmerman’s Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in
American Fiction, and Russ Castronovo’s Beautiful Democracy carry on
this tradition, arguing that naturalist novels act as laboratories for their
moment, their formal experiments reflecting, participating in, and shaping
the era’s thought about a number of current issues. Moreover, Michaels,
Brown, and Seltzer have added an important theoretical and formal edge to
old formulations of naturalism as a kind pessimistic determinism by spec-
ifying the historical contexts in which naturalists questioned the status of
the human.
Like the new historicists, I too see naturalism as a player in the moment
of modernity. However, I also see the rise of the new woman and anxieties
about financial markets as epiphenomena among a variety of concerns the
naturalists gathered under the banner of one overriding force—temporal
inexorability. Through this focus, I extend the claims that can be made about
naturalist style, arguing that conceptions of time as a determinist force are
reflected in novels and films that invert typical realist ideas about character
as a plot’s driving engine. Thinking about naturalism through time, and thus
thinking about it in terms of narrative, allows a redefinition of the genre
that clarifies its role as a tool operant in the culture of modernity, and in
the early cinema in particular. This line of argument reveals this project’s
additional debt to Donna Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism, June Howard’s
Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, Eric Carl Link’s The
Vast and Terrible Drama, as well as to Mitchell. These books are notable
for the seriousness with which they take naturalist form and their insistence
on working from examples in order to extrapolate a naturalist style. They
differ from other studies that take naturalism as an a priori category with
a set canon against which other texts may be measured for inclusion in or
exclusion from the genre.8
In addition to arguing that naturalism is most persuasively understood in
narrative terms, thereby broadening the genre’s literary and cultural interest,
this manuscript fills an important gap in scholarship on naturalist literature’s
 Introduction  15
relation to film. Over the past decade, many scholars have d ­ ocumented the
relationship between modernist literature and the cinema, notably Susan
McCabe (Cinematic Modernism), Michael North (Machine-Age Comedy),
and David Trotter (Cinema and Modernism). These works persuasively
argue that interactions between the art forms helped produce the artistic
movement we now call modernism. In contrast, there have been few com-
parative studies of naturalism as a genre coexisting with the emergence of
the cinema. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the cinema competed for public
attention with the works of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton. Given
these powerful literary players, it is surprising that no book-length study
of naturalism and the cinema yet exists. David Trotter and Jeff Jaeckle have
each published chapters on the topic, and Robert Birchard, Marsha Org-
eron, and Paul Young have connected individual authors to film culture, but
a schematic theorization of the relationship between the cinema and liter-
ary naturalism remains unwritten. Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature
begins to fill this gap by accounting for the reciprocal media exchanges that
took place when the cinema was new.
Naturalist narratives repeatedly experiment with imagining inhuman
views, and this impulse takes a concrete form in the early cinema via extreme
close-ups, simultaneous views, trains’ points of view, high overhead shots
of factories, and so on. Much like the naturalist narrator, these cinematic
experiments radically degrade the centrality of the human observer, instead
offering the camera’s perspective as the more penetrating gaze. Whereas
the human scale in the realist novel registers a faith in human faculties as
meaning-making and truth-revealing instruments, the naturalist novel, like
the turn-of-the-century’s various visual technologies, acts as a prosthetic
to faulty human points of view, pointing to truths inaccessible to normal
human vision.

Film Time and Natural Time

For its cinematic archive, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature ­considers
early nonnarrative cinema as well as narrative films. In addition to their
storytelling counterparts in the medium, industrial films, trick films, and
actualities all offered theories of time and man’s relation to it. For example,
even before the era of narrative integration, event-reversing films such as
Demolition of a Wall and Dog Factory illustrate that the early cinema was
spectacular and attractive because it allowed people to think about time
in new and interesting ways. In Dog Factory, a1904 trick film for Thomas
Edison, Edwin S. Porter demonstrated the cinema’s ability to run events in
reverse. The film opens on a shopkeeper standing beside his “Patent Dog
Transformer”—a large box with an open chute in the top, a crank on one
side, and an opening on the other. On the wall behind him hang ropes of
sausages, each with a label above it. The labels read Bull, Terrier, Spaniel,
16 Introduction
Poodle, Plain Dog, etc. Into the scene walks a man with three dogs. The
­proprietor feeds the dogs into the machine one after another. With a crank
of the Patent Dog Transformer’s handle, ropes of sausages materialize from
the box’s opposite end, which the shopkeeper hangs on the wall according to
breed. After the initial customer exits, another man enters. He selects spaniel
sausages, which the proprietor feeds into the back end of the machine, and
after a few turns of the crank, a living spaniel springs from the other side of
the box and greets its new master. The film repeats the trick four more times,
including a scene with a picky bourgeois woman who cannot make up her
mind—resulting in one dog being created and destroyed before she settles
on her pup—and one scene with a cannibalistic little canine who cannot
resist a bite of sausage.
Even the whimsical Dog Factory takes up cultural anxieties that would
have been familiar to audiences whose experiences of modernity were medi-
ated by tabloid journalism. While Dog Factory takes its cues from vaude-
ville comic acts, the grinding up of three little dogs echoes popular fears
about the influence of modern technologies on daily life, including news sto-
ries covering what a New York Times editorial called “Motor Intoxication
and Speed Madness”. The author of this editorial worries that the effect of
speed can cause the motorist to become “furiously aggressive” and “swayed
by whatever angry or insane impulse, seizes him. A high rate of speed works
him into the kind of nervous excitation which makes the person suffering
from alcoholic stimulation indifferent to consequences, and eager only to
gratify his momentary insane impulse”. Ben Singer has suggested that the
American populace, fed upon a steady diet of articles like this one, learned
to conceive of modernity as characterized by “momentary insane impulses”,
speedy, overly excited, and dangerously fragmentary.9 In this context, early
trick films appeal by offering up playful representations of time that seemed
to be either dangerously fast or oppressively regimented elsewhere in their
lives. As a balm for life in this new world, Dog Factory suggests a new tech-
nology, the “Patent Dog Transformer”, a fantastical stand-in for the cinema
at large in its ability to delight, to archive, and to bring inert material to
life. It is the temporal experiment that makes Dog Factory comic rather
than tragic: the ability of the store proprietor, cinematographer, or ­exhibitor
to throw the machine into reverse, undoing what would seem irretriev-
ably final. While the motorcar is a machine capable of causing death and
­destruction, the cinema is a machine that undoes such modern calamities by
reversing the chain of events.
A desire to see time reversed or otherwise mastered appears again and
again in films, showcasing both cinema’s capacity for verisimilar temporal
representation and its ability to produce entirely new temporal experiences.
For example, during a screening of the 1896 Lumière film, The Demoli-
tion of a Wall (Démolition d’un mur), exhibitors ran the film forward and
then backward so that audiences could watch a pile of rubble reconstitute
itself into a solid wall. What began as an actuality—a representation of real
 Introduction  17
or actual life—became a trick film, as exhibitors learned they could thrill
their audiences with this unexpected reversal of temporal flow. But why
this desire for reversal? What experience of time did such experiments play
upon? André Gaudreault’s account of cinematic narration puts the question
this way: “When one subverts narrative patterns, he necessarily recognizes
their existence. Where did the patterns originate?” (“Temporality” 311).
A different Edison film also involving animal cruelty suggests an answer.
While Dog Factory introduces violence and then undoes it by running the
established narrative backward, the violence in Edison’s Electrocuting an
Elephant (1903) is both overdetermined and irreversible. Culminating a
series of animal electrocutions Edison conducted to illustrate the dangers
of his competitor George Westinghouse’s alternating current, the film doc-
uments the execution of Coney Island’s Topsy, who had trampled to death
three of her trainers over the course of three years, including a man who
fed her a lit cigarette. The film vibrates at the center of a web strung with
the threads of numerous cultural discourses: the social resonance of publi-
cizing the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy at a high point of lynch-
ing in America; emerging public discourse around animal cruelty and the
newly formed ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of C ­ ruelty to
­Animals); New York’s recent switch from execution of prisoners by hang-
ing to the electric chair; and Edison’s continued attempts to control new
technologies at the turn of the century. The excessive inevitability of ­Topsy’s
demise aligns the film not with Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s sentimentalism, but
with naturalist literature’s determinism. Topsy’s destiny is as certain as
that of a Dreiser heroine: A/C current kills; a working girl in the city never
escapes her limited options. Throughout naturalist literature, the narratives
repeatedly deny characters the agential relationship to time expressed by the
Porter and Lumière films mentioned earlier. Indeed, whether it is ­Dreiser’s
“when a girl leaves her home at eighteen she does one of two things” (Sister
Carrie 3), or Stephen Crane’s description of Maggie’s response to repeated
instructions to go to hell, “she went” (Maggie 35), the characters in natural-
ist novels traverse prescribed narrative paths in spite of their best intentions
and attempts to do otherwise.10 Against a world of deterministic narra-
tives, and otherwise managed temporal experiences, the pleasure of the early
­cinema’s experiments becomes clear.
Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature tracks film’s initial protest
against temporal determinism and then its eventual participation in nat-
uralist narrative modes. More than a decade after the first actualities, the
use of crosscutting in narrative features would provide a formal system for
the strange reassurances naturalist narration’s juxtapositions of timescales
offered. Thinkers ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Tom Gunning have
identified naturalism’s involvement with the cinema as a source of content
for early narrative films.11 But missing from these studies is an account of
the way the cinema mined literary naturalism for theories of narrative and
strategies for making narrative. Chapter 2 discusses D. W. Griffith’s 1909
18 Introduction
A Corner in Wheat, a film that adapted Frank Norris’s short story “A Deal
in Wheat” and borrowed a key scene from Norris’s historical epic, The
Octopus. A Corner in Wheat embraces Norris’s narrative technique and
the perspective that encompasses it, emphasizing the insignificance of the
wheat sowers’ lives through parallel montage that establishes their relation
to grain speculators while withholding the closer framing and acting style
that would make the characters seem individually significant.
Tracing naturalist and filmic experimental treatment of time as both a
formal concern and a pressing social issue, I propose a form of recipro-
cal adaptation that accounts for stylistic and thematic exchange across film
and literature. Tracing the contours of this story requires detailing the two
artistic forms’ engagements with a variety of contexts, including industrial
manuals, trade journals, court cases, philosophy, and social reform tracts.
In addition to archival research, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature
relies on the work of many thinkers from the field of film studies. In addition
to Tom Gunning’s work on film’s relation to modernity, theorists of early
media ontology such as Mary Ann Doane and Philip Rosen have demon-
strated the necessity of accounting for time in any account of the cinema.
The medium’s very earliest theorists, including Henri Bergson and Siegfried
Kracauer knew this as well, and so they, too, have a part to play in this story.
Zooming in from modernity’s broader concerns to the images on screen,
Body Shots, Jonathan Auerbach’s inquiry into representations of the human
figure, accounts for film’s role in creating modern ideas of personality, noting
that early films “remind us that theories offered at the turn of the t­ wentieth
century about the social genesis of the self emerged in conjunction with
motion picture technology itself” (62). Auerbach’s description of early cin-
ema’s objectification of “selfhood and visualized self-consciousness” makes
his work a natural interlocutor for that undertaken here, which seeks addi-
tionally to understand how literature participated in this moment, and why
such views of the human became dominant in the early twentieth century.
The sometimes-motley nature of this archive—one chapter groups French
philosophy, a murderous photographer, and a novel of lycanthropy with
films of families at play—reveals that novelists and filmmakers were time
managers, and that time managers were philosophers and formal innova-
tors. The questions asked by Bergson and Simmel are not so different in
kind than those asked by Taylor and the YMCA, and the formal solutions
offered by the cinema and the naturalist novel have much in common with
those tested on the factory floor. If humanity is to survive the moment of
modernity, they ask, what is the relation to time that will allow it to do so?

Chapter Overview
The films, novels, and manuals I gather here address the question of
humanity’s relationship to progress by fundamentally reconceiving the way
a human should be valued. As the chapters unfold, Silent Film and U.S.
 Introduction  19
Naturalist Literature reviews a series of temporal interventions, narratives
chief among them, which proceed by way of devaluing the category of the
individual in favor of formal systems, which offer an account of progress
over people.
Any book is necessarily a work of selection, and there are authors not
represented here who might well be considered in a study of naturalism, time,
and the cinema. Most notably, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser do not
appear in chapters of their own, despite Crane’s impressive visual style and
Dreiser’s explicit interest in the cinema. It is my hope that this manuscript is
the beginning of work that bridges naturalist literature and the cinema, and
that others might pursue future studies of these connections. The authors
who receive extended treatment here—Norris, London, and Gilman—­
specifically address the cinema in their novels or elsewhere. But more than
this, the authors appearing in these pages do so because, like the early cinema
itself, their work is generically various and sometimes difficult to pin down:
Is Norris more important for his novels or for his literary criticism? Is
Herland more accurately described as a novel or a work of sociology? What
of London’s distinctively literary newspaper writing, or his novels, which are
as valuable for their social and philosophical commentary as they are for their
plots? The expansive generic play of these authors as well as their utopian
sense of arts as intervening in modern life establishes them as fellow travelers
with the early cinema, which was similarly experimental in its formats. Thus,
while narrative will be one of the primary modes of temporal intervention
discussed, so will nonnarrative formal innovations, including scalar play, tem-
poral reversals, and experiments with verb tense and voice. Similar to the
diverse output of the novelists here, early cinema programs could contain
newsreels, comedy shorts, magic tricks, and travelogues. Nor did the codifica-
tion of film as a narrative art put an end to generic exploration—industrial as
well as art films carried on early cinema’s experiments with the human and his
temporal environment, thus linking the eras of naturalism and modernism.12
This story begins by observing a chipping away at the value of individ-
ual perspectives. Chapter 1 reads Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute
against actuality films and demonstrates the intertwined responses of the
naturalist novel and early cinema to idiosyncratic experiences of time in
modernity. Actualities lifted events from everyday life, achieving a nonnar-
rative quality by extracting moments from larger contexts. By contrast,
Norris resists representations built on extracted moments by imagining
his protagonist Vandover—a well-heeled young dandy who metamorpho-
ses into a brute—as a subject produced by experiencing time as an accrual
of events. Privileging the “truth” of narrative progress over idiosyncratic
character perspective, Vandover protests emerging representational forms in
modernity and presents temporal progress as a force capable of overriding
subjective experience.
From here, Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature shows the way
human perspectives writ large become devalued. Tracing Norris’s influence
20 Introduction
on Griffith from his early career through The Birth of a Nation and
­Intolerance, Chapter 2 demonstrates a naturalist worldview stowing away in
Griffith’s stylistic innovations. Crosscutting, I argue, is the formal expression
of the naturalist tension between progress and human agents. This narrative
mode structures Griffith’s 1909 A Corner in Wheat, an adaptation that drew
from Frank Norris’s “A Deal in Wheat” and The Octopus. In The Octopus,
Norris uses a novelistic version of parallel montage to compare wealthy
capitalists and the poor wheat ranchers they have exploited. In A Corner in
Wheat, Griffith reinvents Norris’s narrative technique in cinematic form and
in the process reproduces the perspective that accompanies it. However, in
The Birth of a Nation (1915), he tries to reject Norris’s message that individ-
ual actors can neither affect nor understand historical outcomes, yet retains
the narrative technique that carries with it that very implication.
Moving from the eroding significance of human perspectives to the deval-
uation of human acts, the matter of sexual choice becomes the backdrop for
events seemingly between men in Chapter 3, which takes up Jack London’s
coverage of the Johnson–Jeffries 1910 heavyweight match, films of the fight,
and Johnson’s eventual prosecution under the Mann Act. As I argue, mas-
culinity was for London and other racial thinkers much more than a matter
of muscle; it was instead a matter of being someone about whom a racially
sensible story could be told. London’s novels The Sea-Wolf and The Valley
of the Moon as well as discussions of Johnson’s fight and his fight films
combine to reveal the ways Progressive Era accounts of race carry their own
undoing: If it is in the nature of the white race to be superior, then individual
white men’s actions and events begin to look insignificant. In this context,
the life of an individual man begins to look very much like the short time of
an event, made meaningful only by the long narrative time of racial destiny.
Finally, the manuscript ends with a utopia that conceives of individuality
itself as a threat to progress. Naturalist antihumanism and discourses of sex
and race inform both factory films and a utopian novel that works like a
factory. Chapter 4 identifies the influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s sci-
entific management on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian vision of moth-
erhood in her 1915 novella Herland, arguing that Taylor and Gilman both
denaturalize biological reproduction and champion the systematic produc-
tion of persons. These authors, along with early factory films and guides to
industrial filmmaking, oppose the regularity of industry to the spontaneity
and inefficiency of human individuals. My reading of Taylor, Gilman, turn-
of-the-century factory films, and the Gilbreth motion studies identifies the
apotheosis of narratives of progress: a moment in which the human is erased
from the frame.
The conclusion considers a film traditionally conceived of as modernist,
showing the way a history of film and naturalism prepares us to understand
the great coming inhumanity of the mid-twentieth century. Paul Strand and
Charles Sheeler’s Precisionist film Manhatta (1920) adapts Walt Whitman,
America’s most humanist poet, through a cinematic scale so zoomed out
 Introduction  21
that the film loses track of the human altogether in its paean to the city grid.
With its skyscraper perspectives, Manhatta reveals the way inhuman views
allow all people to look the same, thus “solving” formally the very human
conditions of individual difference and diversity. The conclusion thus culmi-
nates this project’s work to explore the loss of the individual in American
art and thought as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, and as
thinkers invested in managing time came to reconceive the organizational
unit for the human from the level of the individual to that of the group.

Notes
1. Halliwell, Leslie. Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies. Ed. John Walker. New
York: Harper Collins, 1999, 176. Print.
2. United States. Cong. Senate. 65th United States Congress, “An Act to save
­daylight and to provide standard time for the United States”, 1918. Print.
3. It is worth noting that the modernity thesis was never produced as a concret-
ized polemic. Instead, the modernity thesis is a name that David Bordwell uses
in On the History of Film Style to describe the body of work produced by
scholars interested in theorizing the relationship between cinema and moder-
nity. Accounts of the modernity thesis ascribe to it the following claims: the
cinema was a reflection of modernity, the cinema participated in the creation of
the modern condition, and modernity necessitated the creation of the cinema
(Singer, Melodrama 102–3).
4. Doane writes, “The suspicion that lingers about the relation between technology
and the body is that there may indeed be a connection between the two and that
this connection can only be thought of as a form of compensation. This is the
idea of technology as prosthesis—an addition to or supplementation of a body
that is inherently lacking, subject to failure, ontologically frail” (“Technology’s
Body” 532). See also Crary’s Techniques of the Observer.
5. These studies in turn owe a debt to Amy Kaplan’s important work connecting
realism’s social conscience with its narrative style in The Social Construction of
American Realism.
6. See chapter 14, “From Primitive to Classical”, in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s
The Classical Hollywood Cinema.
7. While much recent work on naturalism remains influenced by the important
work of Bill Brown, Walter Benn Michaels, June Howard, Amy Kaplan, and
Mark Seltzer, others have continued to push back. For example, Richard Lehan’s
more recent criticism of the new historicists in Realism and Naturalism shares
Pizer’s skepticism towars poststructuralist methods, worrying that “the new
­historicist does away with the idea of naturalism altogether” (239), and contin-
ues Pizer’s attack on deconstructive writing styles (241). For a more thorough
discussion of the Michaels–Pizer controversy, Ira Wells’s study of the critical
importance of literary naturalism’s shifting reputation Fighting Words: Polemics
and Social Change in Literary Naturalism offers a fascinating account of Pizer’s
critique of Seltzer and Michaels, arguing that Pizer’s criticism of the new histor-
icist’s “bad style” simultaneously parallels the 1930s debates over naturalism’s
literary merit and naturalism’s own skepticism toward emphases on “poetry”
rather than “life” (57–58).
22 Introduction
8. Campbell reads naturalism as a movement that is self-consciously masculine
and capacious in its vision—an oppositional genre that offered an alternative
to popular local color fiction. Howard offers a genre analysis of naturalism by
attending to formal structures. She identifies large organizing structures: plots
of decline, a distinction between brutes and spectators, plots structured around
common antinomies, and a documentary style. Mitchell begins his study by tak-
ing determinism seriously and then arguing that scholars have not interrogated
enough what it means for a school of literature to be based around an idea of
determinism, particularly what it might mean for narrative style. From here, he
rigorously demarcates the narration of the naturalist and the realist novel, as seen
earlier. Progress without People also understands naturalism in narrative terms,
arguing that the traditional naturalist problem of determinism emerges from the
genre’s attempts to render the human relationship to time as narrative form.
9. In his study on serial melodramas, Melodrama and Modernity, Ben Singer
­provides a thorough overview of sensationalistic news stories that whipped up
anxiety and curiosity about new machines and city life. Recently, Enda Duffy’s
The Speed Handbook positions speed as the central experience of modernity.
10. Lee Clark Mitchell has noted that naturalist authors narrate as from the per-
spective of events’ outcomes, thus stripping characters of freewill: naturalists
“depicted the ways in which ‘agency’ itself is constructed only after the fact, made
up as we go along in the stories we tell about the moments of our lives” (xi).
11. For example, Gunning makes the connection between Norris and Griffith in
D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, and Tony Williams
has accounted for Eisenstein’s admiration of Zola in his “Eisenstein and Zola:
Naturalism, Cinema, and Mythography”.
12. This project thus owes a debt to Gina Rossetti’s study, which admirably reads
naturalism and modernism by way of nativist and eugenic historical contexts,
showing that the modernist interest in the primitive does not emerge from a
vacuum, but instead as a continuation of naturalism’s “contradictory images” of
the primitive, which registered both authorial repulsion and created a position
of privilege for the naturalist (and eventually, modernist) artist (5).
1 Unnatural Time
Frank Norris at the Cinema’s Beginnings1

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the links between seeing
time and being subject to it knit closer and closer together, fundamentally
changing what it meant to be an embodied member of humanity. The body
became an important site for battles over time’s representation because
it was through this fleshy substance that thinkers measured temporality.
­Additionally, the failings and vulnerability of the body motivated various
time management projects. Preserving the worker’s body from undue wear
justified industrial management, and the desire to penetrate a world unseen
by limited human perception inspired new narrative formats and visual
technologies.
This chapter explores the ways in which embodiedness and its suscep-
tibility to temporal illusions positions the human, for French philosopher
Henri Bergson, uncomfortably close to the machine and, for American
naturalist novelist Frank Norris, uncomfortably close to beastliness. The
matter of human vision’s replacement or supplement by mechanical per-
ception was of particular concern to Bergson, who located free will in the
experience of duration. It was also a matter of concern to Norris, whose
first novelistic effort began the same year that projected films appeared, and
who championed the power of the novelist-observer to access life’s most
important truths.
Like many of the figures in this story, Bergson saw time as a problem
of representation. For Bergson, who was writing against materialist phi-
losophers, time’s representation had consequences no smaller than free will
itself. However, Bergson also believed that representing duration (pure dura-
tion, as he termed it) tended to pervert the substance, giving rise to confu-
sions about the self as it exists in time. When he penned the 1888 preface to
Time and Free Will, Bergson highlighted the limitations of his medium: “lan-
guage requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise
distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects” (xix). This
would make language, the philosopher’s tool, singularly problematic for
wrangling with time. Bergson would call attempts to present time through
continuous mediums, particularly divisible space, an “illegitimate transla-
tion” of “quality into quantity” (xix). More than language, though, the cin-
ema and its predecessors were particularly guilty of bad translations because
24  Unnatural Time
they conceived of duration through movement; that is, they spatialized time.
When he later had the opportunity to consider the new media form, he
would find its implications very disturbing indeed.
Because a self sustains through a series of moments that build on rather
than replace one another, duration for Bergson evidences the human agent’s
free will. Already in 1888, Bergson had expressed concerns about moderni-
ty’s rationalizing tendencies, which perverted senses of time, and thus senses
of self: “it is presumed that time, understood in the medium in which we
make distinctions and count, is nothing but space” (91). Throughout the
treatise, Bergson goes to great lengths to prove such presumptions false,
while also noting the powerful temptation to treat duration in such a man-
ner, so that it might be mapped, divided, and managed. Beyond being a mat-
ter of bad representation, Bergson sees false appearances of time as capable
of degrading humanity: “by invading the series of our psychic states, by
introducing space into our perception of duration, it corrupts at its very
source our feeling of outer and inner change, of movement, and of free-
dom” (74). Like many of the age’s thinkers, Bergson saw representation
as capable of shifting modes of attention and thought; thus bad, false, and
otherwise unnatural representations had moral as well as aesthetic conse-
quences. Throughout this chapter, the matter of truthful representation cen-
ters debates about the relationship between human, mechanic, and narrative
abilities to render temporality visible.
As an introduction to these debates and to the work of Frank Norris,
it is useful to consider not the ghost but the beast in the machine. Two
proto-cinematic machines, the zoetrope and Eadweard Muybridge’s zooprax-
iscope, used images of Muybridge’s galloping horse to showcase their techno-
logical innovations. The series of photographs in which Muybridge captured
a running horse forever ended quarrels over whether all four hooves left the
ground during a gallop. Using trip wires and a row of twenty-four cameras,
Muybridge succeeded in capturing the horse in full flight—visual proof of ani-
mal motion. Working backward from motion to stillness, Muybridge not only
settled a bet for his wealthy patron Leland Stanford, but he simultaneously
froze time and created the opportunity for its reanimation. The experiment
also offered the photographer the opportunity to say a few choice words
to his fellow artists. In his pamphlet The Attitudes of Animals in Motion,
Muybridge chided the art world for failing to take up his camera’s truths:
“These invariable rules seem to be neglected or entirely ignored by many
of the most eminent animal painters of modern times” (8). As Bergson did,
Muybridge positions truth and representation on opposite poles. But to be
fair to the animal painters, their vision was human and limited, whereas
the “attitudes” Muybridge uncovered were seen by cameras’ more perfect
inhuman eyes.
The first proto-cinematic device to feature Muybridge’s images, the zoe-
trope belongs to a category described as the “philosophical toy”. The zoetrope
was a drum with evenly spaced slits around it, through which an inner band
 Unnatural Time  25
printed with a series of still images could be perceived. When the viewer spun
the drum and peered through the rapidly revolving slits, the image flickered
to life, and the horse began its run. Other devices in this category included
the magic lantern, the thaumatrope, the kaleidoscope, and, later, Muybridge’s
zoopraxiscope. The title “philosophical toy” is worth taking seriously, even
as the parlor-trick nature of such devices might encourage us to do otherwise.
Among other thoughts, such devices made the viewer aware of his or her
own faulty ocular capacities, since it is by imperfect human visual processing
that the trick works. In other words, through human failure, the toy pro-
duces unhuman life.2
The relationship between the unhuman and the human centers Frank
Norris’s novelistic first effort as well. Vandover and the Brute (1895) fol-
lows a young aesthete’s indulgence in drink and gambling, his loss of artis-
tic ability, his fall into destitution, and his eventual change into a barking
brute. And though a focus on lycanthropy may initially seem very different
than the concerns captured by the philosophical toys and Bergson’s treatise
on duration, it was in a media-saturated environment that the “Boy Zola”
penned his grotesque tale. Further, considering Norris’s mediatized world
sheds light on the two interpretive problems that have most consistently
fascinated scholars: Vandover’s bad memory and his degeneration.
Many have taken interest in the protagonist’s bizarre perspective on his
life. The novel opens with a provocative epistemological problem: “It was
always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of
his past life. With the exception of the most recent events he could remem-
ber nothing connectedly” (Norris, Vandover 3). Vandover’s memory prob-
lems and the gambling that leads to him selling personal items and replacing
them with signs with indexical instructions such as “stove here” (207) have
been central to critical accounts that have revitalized naturalist scholarship
by linking the genre to modernity and modernism. To take Michaels’s The
Gold Standard as an example, these readings often interpret Vandover’s
failed paintings and later substitution of his gambled-away possessions with
Magritte-like indexical signs as Norris’s enactment of the modernist aes-
thetic expressed by the “painting that can represent nothing and still remain
a painting” (165). In his assertion that Vandover does not resolve “the con-
flict between material and representation” but instead exemplifies it (174),
Michaels maintains that Norris also “does not choose between Vandover
and the brute” (175). Michaels’s reading suggests Norris’s openness to a
variety of representational approaches: brutish and human, modernist mate-
riality and realist representation.3
Reading the novel as the progeny of a nineteenth-century lineage based in
social Darwinism, rather than as a forerunner to twentieth-century modern-
ism’s philosophical and aesthetic experiments, other scholars have seen the
novel’s focus on devolution as corresponding to Progressive Era anxieties
around sexual, racial, and class-based contamination. Such studies empha-
size the novel’s San Francisco context and Norris’s description of Van’s
26  Unnatural Time
“pliable character” (Vandover 201), seemingly capable of adapting itself to
any setting. Many critics have argued that Vandover’s decline results directly
from his licentiousness or his contact with undesirable others.4 However,
the morality many such lycanthropy-focused readings ascribe to the novel is
complicated by the first matter: the novel’s account of strange perspectives.
In his reading of decadence in the novel, for example, Sherwood Williams
ties Vandover’s brutishness to his sexual perversity and argues that the novel
acts as a counter to Wildean aestheticism, claiming, “As Vandover deterio-
rates, both he and the narrative return to the fragmentation and unreliability
that characterized the preadolescent stage where he ‘remembered nothing
connectedly’” (730). But it is unclear that in adolescence Vandover maintains
any greater control over his “thought pictures” than he does either as a child
or an adult. While Williams is correct to link Vandover’s deterioration to the
aging process, the change to Vandover’s memories is quantitative rather than
qualitative. According to the narration, as an adult Vandover’s “thoughts,
released from all control of his will, began to come and go through his head
with incredibly rapidity, half remembered scenes … all galloping across his
brain like a long herd of terrified horses” (Norris, Vandover 225–6). In this
passage, Vandover suffers from the effects of accretion, not regression. As he
ages, the number of “pictures” piled up in his head increases exponentially,
and his consciousness becomes more and more chaotic as the number of
disconnected memories expands. Drawing upon the popular entertainments
of this moment, one might say that as Vandover ages his memory becomes
a never-ending actuality program or vaudeville show, with scenes rapidly
flickering through his mind.
Turn-of-the-century media environments and San Francisco’s site-­
specific importance in particular clarify the connections between the two
lines of scholarship that focused on Vandover’s bizarre cognitive pro-
cessing and focused on his degeneration.5 It is a beast that makes this
connection and that straddles the divide between the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: the events Vandover cannot remember “connectedly”
at the novel’s beginning appear as galloping horses by the end. The fact
that horses show up throughout the pages of the novel is not immaterial.
The word “horse” appears in twenty-one discrete instances, appearing
as a metaphor at crisis points, as an aesthetic object in paintings, as an
animal Van purchases and bets on, and as a consistent feature of the San
Francisco cityscape.
The link Norris establishes between Vandover’s thoughts and horses also
ties the novel to Bergson and film. Already, given that it is in duration that
the philosopher locates free will, we should hear the Bergsonian valences in
the opening description of Vandover’s thoughts: “It was always a matter of
wonder to Vandover that he was able to recall so little of his past life. With
the exception of the most recent events he could remember nothing con-
nectedly” (Norris, Vandover 3). This chapter argues that Vandover’s lack of
a self that endures is directly connected to the externalized and mechanized
 Unnatural Time  27
temporal engagements that had deep roots in the City by the Bay and which
Bergson found so troubling for his theories of free will.
From Muybridge’s work, horses had become a sign of human visual insuf-
ficiency, proof of a world undetectable to the bare eye and of a temporality
accessible only by way of the machine.6 Throughout Norris’s first novel,
when horses appear on the scene, they accent perspectival failure. Once,
in a moment when humanity appears at the mercy of uncaring machines,
“the infinite herd of humanity, driven on as if by some enormous, relentless
engine” (Norris, Vandover 242); again, when the titular protagonist cannot
gain control over his disordered thinking, thoughts began “galloping across
his brain like a long herd of terrified horses” (26); and again, when a fully
degenerate Vandover offers to bark for money, “every time that horse tosses
his head so’s to get the oats in the bottom of the nose-bag he jingles the
chains on the poles and, by God! that’s funny; makes me laugh every time;
sounds gay, and the chain sparkles mighty pretty! Oh, I don’t complain.
Give me a dollar and I’ll bark for you!” (245). Though the animal figure into
which Vandover degenerates shifts around the animal kingdom, it’s worth
noting the frequency with which horse imagery appears in a novel suppos-
edly concerned with lycanthropy.
But this frequency is not surprising: The great galloping horse debate
and its settling were widely discussed, and in the early 1880s Muybridge’s
zoetropes sold in photography magazines “as an attraction for the studio or
reception room for the relatively reasonable price of 2.50 for the machine
and just a dollar for a set of images”, which promised to show “the con-
tinuous movement of the subject with life-like accuracy” when placed in
“The Wheel of Life”.7 More than the average American, the San Franciscan
novelist would have likely been familiar with Muybridge. The photogra-
pher’s infamous benefactor was none other than horse aficionado, university
founder, and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford. One of California’s original
“Big Four” railroad men, Stanford and his Southern Pacific became the basis
for Norris’s later novel The Octopus (1901).
But in 1895, Norris wrote a novel more concerned with photographic
horses than iron ones, and likely had his own opinions on the Muybridge
experiments, for he was himself a great horse lover and a visual artist. In
1887, Norris had gone to art school in London, a choice informed by his
interest in study with experts in animal painting (McElrath and Crisler 74),
and his early writings in The Wave show his passion for all things equine
and their faithful representation. What was “faithful” to Norris, however,
included some wiggle room for departure from what was factually accurate.
In 1897, Norris expressed his admiration for the work of Frederic Rem-
ington, writing, “Perhaps no other artist who ever lived understands horse
action so well as this American illustrator of ours; and, as for character,
one has only to compare them with the stuffed melodramatic lay figures of
Rosa Bonheur to note how absolutely true they are, how thoroughly faith-
ful to nature, how indisputably equine” (qtd. in McElrath and Crisler 74).
28  Unnatural Time
The idea that a horse’s equine status might be under dispute is less silly than
it sounds. Along with fellow artist Thomas Eakins, Remington was an early
adopter of the information provided by Muybridge’s studies, and depicted
galloping horses accordingly. On the other hand, Remington also saw limits
to correctness, arguing, “the artist must know more” than the camera and
thus present the horse as “incorrectly drawn from the photographic stand-
point” (qtd. in Samuels and Samuels 84). Norris likely would have agreed
with the artist’s statements. Facts and details newly accessible by technology
were not always the same thing as truth for either artist. In an 1895 report
on a polo match, Norris, confessing to not understanding the sport’s techni-
calities, said it was better to leave some things shrouded in a veil of mystery
and to take them “whole without asking questions, as one would shrimps”
(qtd. in McElrath and Crisler 86).
Read by the lights of the proto-cinematic and cinematic innovations
at the turn of the century, we might take seriously the potential connec-
tion between the “long herd of terrified horses” in Vandover’s head and
­Muybridge’s horse, the latter mechanically fragmented into many horses
galloping endlessly round and round the Zoetrope’s insides, forming a
strange, modernist herd of animal life. While on the one hand the horses gal-
loping round and round seem part of a continuous time—a “long herd”—
their appearance depends precisely on the oversegmented, overrationalized
view that both Remington and Norris, given their preference of taking some
things “whole” as shrimps, caution artists from adopting.
For Bergson and the young Norris, the mental processing of temporal
experience evidences humanity, that is, the capacity for self-reflection and
free will. Filmic technologies and proto-filmic devices such as the zoetrope
and zoopraxiscope thus threatened the human by mechanically simulating
and externalizing the temporal experience.8 In Creative Evolution (1907),
Bergson positions fragmentary time as a part of modern rationalization
harmful to the self, accusing the cinema and schemas such as F ­ rederick
Winslow Taylor’s of creating modes of perception detrimental to the
human. The passage in which Bergson describes the human consequences
of ­cinema’s engagement with time as flow and time as fragment is worth
quoting at length:

In order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement

somewhere. The movement does indeed exist here; it is in the appa-
ratus. It is because the film of the cinematograph unrolls, bringing in
turn the different photographs of the scene to continue each other,
that each actor of the scene recovers his mobility; he strings all his suc-
cessive attitudes on the invisible movement of the film. … Such is the
contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowl-
edge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things,
we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming
artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and,
 Unnatural Time  29
as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them
on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of
the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is
characteristic in this becoming itself. (210)

Here, what Bergson describes as the “suppleness of life” is replaced by an

artificial record of time’s flow. This mechanized simulation of becoming in
turn contaminates human views of time. Rather than an internal duration
that proves ongoing consciousness, externalized duration replaces natural
and interpenetrating duration with a string of successive instants, spatially
ordered, yet unconnected at a fundamental level. For Bergson, then, the
cinema is a terrifying ambassador to a changed time and the ultimate un/
inhumanity of modernity.9
Norris’s novel suggests that the young author felt similarly; however, his
solution to the problem of mechanic temporal perspectives looks quite dif-
ferent. Bergson bemoans the impersonal and externalized motion that consti-
tutes the movement of the moving pictures, and instead calls for a retreat into
individual consciousness. In contrast, literary naturalism moves in the oppo-
site direction, relocating temporality from the personal and idiosyncratic to
a location on a mythic scale. In Vandover, Norris focuses on the disturbed
psyche of one individual too much affected by modernist entertainments
(a threat of contamination Bergson also worries over). Norris associates
these perspectives with new kinds of modernist individualism. If the tri-
umph of filmic and proto-filmic time management techniques were located
within the failures of particular human bodies, Norris saw that the solution
couldn’t be within the individual, as Bergson suggested. Instead, he moved
his account of true time well outside the body, thereby associating techno-
logical views with idiosyncratic personal views. In other words, through its
frailty, the human body becomes an untrustworthy site, its faulty sensorium
vulnerable to manipulation by bad filmic perspectives. If films threatened the
human by offering accounts of time at the microlevel—whether in the form
of segmenting a gallop or in later trick films that offered “microscope” or
“peeping tom” perspectives—Norris would leave the flawed human behind
through an appeal to the macrolevel, a move we have already seen in “To
Build a Fire” and which recurs throughout American literary naturalism.

Accuracy of Detail
The year 1895, in which Norris made “considerable progress” on V ­ andover
and the Brute (McElrath and Crisler 160), was also that in which the
Lumière brothers lived up to their name, lighting up Paris on the 28th of
December with their first projected film exhibition. The brothers showed
ten fifty-­second films, only one of which—L’Arroseur Arrosé–was a fiction
film.10 The rest were “actualities”, a genre for which the Lumières became
famous. The first actualities were short, single-shot, nonfiction films that
30  Unnatural Time
represented a wide array of subjects: exotic foreign views, street scenes, and
families at play. These films might seem uncontaminating toward “real life”
given their lack of machine trickery or manipulative perspectives, their focus
on the minute temporal detail (like the zoetrope and the zoopraxiscope)
acting as another sign of temporal truth. When the Lumières brought their
exhibition stateside in 1896, the journal Science noted that the pictures were
“said to be very effective”, adding that “[s]ome nine hundred instantaneous
photographs are taken in the course of a minute and when these photo-
graphs are thrown on a screen by means of the electric light at the same rate
and order as they were taken an exact reproduction of the moving people
is obtained” (“Scientific Notes and News” 512). As with the Muybridge
photographs, the division of time and movement into segments too small for
human perception signifies facticity and truth in representation, that what is
“thrown on a screen” is an image of exactness.
The first projected films, actualities, are in their ontology a theorization
of the fragment. Precursors to documentaries, actualities lifted events from
everyday life, simultaneously achieving “exactness” and a nonnarrative
quality by extracting moments from larger temporal contexts. Thus, at the
beginning of both cinema and U.S. naturalism, two techniques emerged for
accessing time’s truths, one a focus on detail or the fragment, the other an
appeal to long arcs of temporal progress. In each case, it is the human per-
spective that must be corrected.
For Norris, the corrective to bad human perspectives and worse machine
ones is narration. Throughout Vandover, Norris insists upon the intercon-
nectedness of past, present, and future; unlike his protagonist, he insists
upon causality. In contrast to the events of the novel, Vandover’s memories
are fragmentary, discontinuous, and undifferentiated: “One of these inci-
dents might be a great sorrow, a tragedy, a death in his family; and another,
recalled with the same vividness, the same accuracy of detail, might be a
matter of the least moment” (3). He attempts to put his “scattered memory
pictures” into “some more orderly sequence” (4), but, as Hayden White’s
account of annals history reminds us, orderly sequence alone does not make
a story: “events must be not only registered within the chronological frame-
work of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed
as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as
mere sequence” (5). However, it is unclear that Vandover gets even this right,
as he faces events without chronology, much less causality to connect them.
Moreover, Vandover uses no hierarchy of significance to organize his
thought pictures or even to decide what to remember: “What he at first
imagined to be the story of his life, on closer inspection turned out to be
but a few disconnected incidents that his memory had preserved with the
­greatest capriciousness, absolutely independent of their importance” (Norris,
­Vandover 3, emphasis added). At first blush, Vandover’s manner of perceiv-
ing and retrieving the data of his life appears to be a problem of indiscrimi-
nateness; like a misfiring camera that shoots just before or after the desired
 Unnatural Time  31
pose, he captures the wrong material—the banal, the unimportant. But upon
a second look, the problem appears to be one of segmentation, a failure to
connect events or to understand them in relation to an organizing stratum
called “importance”. Thinking in terms of the animal locomotion photo-
graphs, it is as though some of Muybridge’s cameras failed to fire, leaving
gaps in the continuous image of the gallop.
Despite Vandover’s resounding failure as a recording medium, the mem-
ory pictures succeed in one domain: their “accuracy of detail”. The ironic
compliment paid by the narrator to the tragic protagonist is worth lingering
over, especially since one of the most famous critics of naturalism Marxist
theorist Georg Lukács characterized the movement as dominated by “the
autonomy of the detail” (“Narrate or Describe?” 132). In his own compari-
son of horse races (as presented in Tolstoy’s realist Anna Karenina and Zola’s
naturalist Nana), he identifies naturalist detail as symptomatic of capitalist
prose in its replacement of meaningful human action “by “a blanket of deli-
cately detailed minutae” (131). As a result, Lukács argues, “The author loses
the comprehensive vision and omniscience of the old epic narrators … [and
the] false contemporaneity of description transforms the novel into kaleido-
scopic chaos” (133). Scholars of naturalism may be surprised to hear Norris
being positioned against the regime of the detail, but while Norris does engage
in the lavish description of objects, he is also careful to indicate that Vando-
ver’s memories are meaningless precisely because they are accurate only in
detail.11 He thereby distances his novel’s vision of the world from Vandover’s.
Attending to naturalist narration’s reaction against representations of
modern life as a series of fragmentary events reveals that while naturalism
does route history through the individual, as Lukács suggests, it does not do
so in order to diffuse history into individualistic pathology. Rather, ­Norris’s
naturalism presents idiosyncratic perspectives to highlight the relative insig-
nificance of the individual’s temporal experience in the face of history’s
progressive forward movement. In this way, Norris is not fundamentally
in disagreement with Lukács. Through Vandover, as well as characters in
other novels—The Octopus’s sloop-obsessed Annixter, or the variously fix-
ated characters of McTeague—Norris repeatedly associates individualistic
pathology with a contemporary fetish for detail. These characters are per-
verse because they associate detail with meaning, an aesthetically disgust-
ing practice: recalling Norris’s comments at the polo match, these are not
characters who take their shrimp whole. Instead, they engage in a kind of
unseemly dissection. The tension between the mise-en-scène’s level of detail
and the novel’s long arc of narration forms the productive heart of the U.S.
naturalist novel, particularly as it comes into contact with changing media
ecologies of the early twentieth century.
In its response to new experiences of temporality produced by emerging
forms in modernity, such as the Lumière actuality film, Norris’s first novel
stages the antisubjective tendencies of the naturalist novel. By considering
the problematic consequences of imagining events that are entirely accurate
32  Unnatural Time
but also entirely abstracted from their contexts, Norris anticipates Lukács’s
anxiety about the relationship between photographic precision and histor-
ical inaccuracy. Norris casts the simultaneous vividness and randomness of
Vandover’s memories as qualities that indicate Vandover’s memories are, as
Doane describes the unnarrativized cinematic event, meaningless because
of their “overwhelming sameness and banality” (Emergence 66–67). In
this novel photographic accuracy, like other stylistic attempts to capture
individual moments of modernity, violates the artist’s obligation to access
truth. This reading of Vandover confirms Barbara Hochman’s important
argument that characters in Norris’s early novels fail to organize their expe-
riences of a chaotic modern world (Art of Frank Norris 14),12 a world Lloyd
Pratt describes as characterized by both “new experience[s] of time as rapid
change and linear unfolding” (21; emphasis added). Whereas Vandover’s
immersion in a rapidly changing modern world causes him to be in bad step
with true duration, it is through his formal commitment to temporal unfold-
ing that Norris accesses truth.

Naturalism’s Media Environments: Fragmented Art and

Beastly Time
Norris emphasizes the question of correct artistic attitudes toward moder-
nity through repeated statements that Vandover’s “love for all art” is “the
strongest side of his nature” (Vandover 154), which he then undercuts by
frequent references to Vandover’s wasteful consumption of the arts as enter-
tainment. For example, when Vandover goes on his sea voyage, an episode
considered later, he is disappointed to discover “that he had neglected to get
himself any interesting books” (86). The narrator explains that for Vandover,
“it had become a simple necessity for him to be amused” (86). In particular,
Vandover’s needs have a temporal aspect. Though he could occupy himself
by meditating on the future, “He could get little present enjoyment by look-
ing forward to the new life that he was going to begin. … The thought of this
prospect did give him pleasure, but he had for so long a time fed his mind
upon the more tangible and concrete enjoyments of the hour and minute
that it demanded them now continually” (86). Recalling Bergson, one could
say Van’s difficulty taking pleasure in thinking of his future life stems from
his lack of a durative self. He can only consume that which brings pleasure
in the moment, through arts Norris figures as fragmentary. Interestingly,
these arts pull in different directions: on the one hand, they are fleeting,
of the hour and minute; on the other, they are notable for their tangibil-
ity and concreteness. In Vandover’s media habitat, modern entertainments’
simultaneous and excessive ephemerality and materiality constitute a deadly
paradox. This is the paradox against which Norris positions naturalist nar-
ration; the difference between “love for all art” and love for “enjoyments of
the hour and minute” distinguishes the novels Norris writes from the novels
Vandover reads.
 Unnatural Time  33
“The True Reward of the Novelist” (1901) clarifies this distinction. In the
essay, Norris defends the historical inaccuracies of Scott’s Ivanhoe and rails
against the accurate but trivial details—he calls them “clothes”—offered up
by the historical novels of his own day. Despite his “errors”, Norris insists,
Scott “got beneath the clothes of an epoch and got the heart of it, and the
spirit of it” (1147). Norris’s sartorial metaphor suggests that fundamental
truths are transhistorical and that focusing too intensely on period-specific
surface details, even accurate ones, distracts novelists from their responsi-
bility to reveal such truths. But Norris admits accessing this truth is no easy
task for an author; he draws on his art education to help explain the idea by
way of a painting metaphor:

Romance and Realism are constant qualities of every age, day and
hour. They are here today. They existed in the time of Job. They will
continue to exist to the end of time, not so much in things as in the
point of view of people who see things.
The difficulty then is to get at the immediate life, immensely dif-
ficult, for you [the novelist] are not only close to the canvas, but are
yourself part of the picture. (1149–50)

In his insistence that Romance and Realism—the two genres Norris strad-
dles as a naturalist writer—exist not in things but in points of view found
in every era, Norris takes a stand against arts that would present even the
smallest quantities of time as isolatable events. Thus, while the Muybridge
photos, vaudeville shows, actuality films, or even the popular novels Van
reads might seem to be the appropriate art forms for apprehending moder-
nity, their view is too narrow, too “close to the canvas”. The novelist must not
think only “of himself or for himself” but must see transhistorically and find
his “true reward” in proclaiming, “By God, I told them the truth” (1151).
This difference between what the character sees and what the author can per-
ceive fits with June Howard’s important account of the perspectival distance
between the naturalist narrator and the characters he describes. Describing
Crane’s Maggie, Howard argues that the naturalist author “juxtaposes unrea-
soning characters with a highly sophisticated narrator” (105). To Howard’s
helpful description of naturalist narration, I would add that part of the
distinction between character and narrator comes from his or her attitude
toward modern entertainments, as in the difference between Maggie’s expe-
rience of middlebrow theatrical productions and Crane’s narrator’s. Mired
in their individual moment, the naturalist character, the camera operator,
and the newspaper reporter cannot attain the level of authority leveraged by
the naturalist narrator.
In the context of Muybridge and Norris’s mania for horses, accuracy
itself may be problematic, since it is the drive for accuracy that leads
Muybridge to segment animal locomotion and that produces the para-
doxical media moments modern subjects such as Vandover consume. For
34  Unnatural Time
the novelist who wrote that some things are better “taken whole”, fac-
ticity can render the natural disgusting and unnatural through its exces-
sive focus on minutia. In contrast, Norris appreciates getting at a kind
of truthiness, doing so without the dissection that freezes the detail. This
perhaps seems ironic, given Lukács’s critique of naturalist description, but
only if one conflates what Norris does with what Vandover does. In this
way, though I agree with much of Howard’s characterization of naturalist
narration, I depart from her account of the naturalist detail. Howard
posits that “[i]n naturalism the detail signifies not only reality but the
rigorous investigation of reality” (147). But the detail is a false trail in
Vandover. In fact, the focus on the detail as a way of freezing time may
be one way of thinking through Vandover’s famous signs. As he loses
his possessions in order to cover his gambling debts, Vandover tries to
keep the details of his apartment right without attempting to remedy the
overall degeneration that happens as he slides along a temporal track of
devolution and debasement.13
In his own art, Vandover takes the too-narrow view for which Norris
criticizes other writers. When Vandover first tries his hand at drawing, he
devises a system of copying other artworks that results in paintings as inco-
herent as his thought processes:

Over the picture to be copied [his teacher] would paste a great sheet
of paper, ruling off the same into spaces of about an inch square. He
would cut out one of these squares and Vandover would copy the
portion of the picture thus disclosed. When he had copied the whole
picture in this fashion the teacher would go over it himself, retouching
it here and there, labouring to obviate the checker-board effect which
the process invariably produced.
(Norris, Vandover 11)

In this description, Norris underlines the unnaturalness of Vandover’s worl-

dview, which takes even visually coherent images and breaks them into
multiple pictures difficult to fit back together again. Norris’s description of
Vandover’s artistic education runs counter to the view of several critics who
argue that Vandover’s art in the novel “provides the means through which
Vandover could be saved” because it “functions as an ordering principle and
is linked with the spiritual” (Civello 43). Instead, it seems more likely that,
as Christophe Den Tandt suggests, Norris wants the reader to see the “vul-
garity of this artistic training”, a vulgarity reflected later in the adult Van’s
“taste for bohemian bric-a-brac” (196–7). The tendency to break paintings
into squares might well align Vandover’s art with an “ordering function”
similar to the Taylorist impulse to divide smooth-seeming actions into dis-
crete and manageable parts, but it is unclear that this ordering attempt has
anything of the spiritual about it. The process’s similarity to Muybridge’s
motion studies and the fact that Vandover is only one of many students
 Unnatural Time  35
taught to paint in this assembly-line style connects him with the dissemi-
nation of mass-produced art forms that threaten the public with the sort of
degeneration he himself undergoes.
As Van’s education progresses, his paintings display increasing diffi-
culty with narrative, which is to say, with coherence. While Vandover “had
no idea of composition, he was clever enough to acknowledge it. His fin-
ished pictures were broad reaches of landscape, deserts, shores, and moors
in which he placed solitary figures of men or animals in a way that was
very effective” (Norris, Vandover 46). Despite contributing to an overall
effectiveness, these “solitary figures” lack connection with other persons or
things, and without a larger structure, an “idea of composition”, his paint-
ings, like his memories, cannot tell stories. There is one exception, how-
ever. In “The Last Enemy”, Van’s appropriately titled final effort, a British
cavalryman faces a lion in the desert, but the painting is never completed,
indicating Van’s inability to supply an overarching structure to the products
of his imagination.
We see how Van’s art can be both “effective” and inadequate by read-
ing Norris’s discussion of Van’s painting technique as a forerunner to his
theoretical statements about the novel as a picture and his criticism of nov-
elists who, working too close to the canvas, emphasize accuracy of detail
(“clothes”) over truth. As Barbara Hochman explains, “art can potentially
provide ‘salvation’, not through any magical sleight of hand, but in so far as
it becomes a medium for giving meaning and shape to experience” (53). Van
finds no salvation in art. In order to do his checkerboard copying, he must
literally work too close to the canvas to see the overall design and meaning
of his pictures. His deterioration as an artist thus contributes to Norris’s
overall demonstration of how the fragmented experiences of modern art
and popular entertainments produce a correspondingly fragmented modern
subject. While perhaps Vandover’s pictures are accurate at the level of the
square, they lack larger artistic vision.
In his account of Vandover’s deterioration, Norris suggests that moder-
nity may erode the perceptual capabilities necessary for reading novels as
well as writing them, making a critique of environmental conditioning quite
similar to Bergson’s. In Time and Free Will, Bergson holds art at least partly
accountable for human perceptions of the self. Rather than maintaining a
coherent sense of self, Bergson’s modern person takes the patterns of art-
works into his consciousness, his self-conception becoming restructured
through sympathetic nervous response: whereas in poetry “our soul is lulled
into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the [poet’s
rhythms]. … The plastic arts obtain an effect of the same kind by the fix-
ity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion
carries over to the attention of the spectator” (15). Again, this is a trick
predicated on faulty human perception, which confuses not just the world
but also the self with the formal structures in artworks. This is the matter
at hand in Vandover’s bad evolutionary experience. As Bergson explains,
36  Unnatural Time
“By invading the series of our psychic states, by introducing space into our
perception of duration, it corrupts at its very source our feeling of outer and
inner change, of movement, and of freedom” (74).
The idea of psychic states invaded by environmental influence cor-
responds well with the many evolutionary readings of the novel and the
time period, readings that have made much of what Norris describes as
Vandover’s “fatal adaptability to environment” (Vandover 233).14 What is
this damaging environment? Some scholars have focused on Van’s contact
with the working classes or with ethnic minorities—persons who popu-
late McTeague much more clearly—but the most persistent characteristic
of Vandover’s environment is its hypermediatization. For example, shortly
after Vandover seduces a young woman named Ida, an event that marks
a major shift in the novel, he and his friends attend the garish, chaotic
Mechanics’ Fair:

There was a vast shuffling of thousands of feet and a subdued roar of

conversation like the noise of a great mill; mingled with these were
the purring of distant machinery, the splashing of a temporary foun-
tain and the rhythmic clamour of a brass band, while in the piano
exhibit the hired performer was playing a concert grand with a great
flourish. Nearer at hand one could catch ends of conversation and
notes of laughter, the creaking of boots, and the rustling of moving
dresses and stiff skirts. Here and there groups of school children
elbowed their way through the crowd, crying shrilly, their hands full
of advertisement pamphlets, fans, picture cards, and toy whips with
pewter whistles on the butts, while the air itself was full of the smell
of fresh popcorn.
(Norris, Vandover 65)

A similar scene appears in McTeague, which Norris was working on con-

currently with Vandover. Shortly after McTeague has won Trina Sieppe’s
love, he takes her and her family to a vaudeville show, where he is “excited
and dazzled” by “a great array of … ‘artists’ and ‘specialty performers’,
musical wonders, acrobats, lightning artists, [and] ventriloquists” (­Norris,
­McTeague 337). The evening’s “feature” entertainment is a series of actu-
ality-like short films of things in motion—a horse, a cable car, a truck—­
displayed by means of “the crowning scientific achievement of the nineteenth
century, the kinetoscope”. While McTeague is “awe-struck” by the illusion
of life, Mrs. Sieppe won’t be duped: “I ain’t no fool; dot’s nothun but a
drick”. Gunning has argued that Mrs. Sieppe’s refusal to confuse moving
pictures with reality “directly opposes our now dominant conception of the
naïve viewings of first movies” (“‘Primitive’ Cinema” 95); Paul Young reads
this scene somewhat differently, arguing that M­ cTeague “speaks directly to
the cinema’s challenge to the cultural authority of the novel” by distorting
portions of the narration into “a literary refraction of the cinema itself”
 Unnatural Time  37
(“Telling Descriptions” 646). Young’s insight applies as well to Vandover
and the Brute, which presents the Mechanics’ Fair as one among many of
what Young calls the “multiple and fragmentary” experiences of modernity
(647). The description is characterized by an excessive dissection of the
scene into small, individualized details pulled out of a larger compositional
arrangement. However, unlike the stalwart Mrs. Sieppe, for Vandover fair-
ground attractions are not tricks falsely representing the real. Instead, they
are his normal perceptual mode. Vandover’s thought pictures appear to dif-
fer only in quantity from the characteristic members of the urban masses,
who are so desensitized to shock that they must seek it in e­ ver-more-­intense
amusements.15 In addition to its presentation of the mechanics’ fair, c­ hapter 7
also describes tacky paintings, Vandover’s indulgence in popular novels, and
the newspaper announcement of Ida Wade’s death. This steady stream
of media forms in the early chapters suggests an environment teeming
with sham representations of the world that cater to the lowest desires in
consumers.
The psychic costs Bergson predicts appear when the many churning
details that characterize the Mechanics’ Fair and its “amphitheater full of
colour and movement” appear within the screen of Vandover’s own mind.
As the brute in Vandover overtakes him, the symptoms echo the transience
and senselessness of the entertainments he has been consuming:

He looked about him quickly; all the objects in the range of his
vision—the corner of the desk, the corduroy couch, the low book-
case with Flossie’s yellow slipper and Barye’s lioness upon it—
seemed to move back and stand upon the same plane; the objects
themselves appeared immovable enough, but the sensation of them
in his brain somewhere behind his eyes began to move about in a
slow, dizzy whirl.
(Norris, Vandover 177)

The simultaneous immobility of the objects themselves and the whirling

behind the eyes suggests the kind of “dricks” presented by proto-cinematic
entertainments, which exploit cognitive processing of visual detail in order
to produce movement within the mind of the spectator, a sign that, as
­Bergson might explain, Vandover’s mental processes have been contaminated
by the rhythms of his media environment. While this first attack is brief, the
second lasts longer and affects Vandover bodily as well as psychically. As
he dozes off, “his whole body twitched suddenly with a shock and recoil of
all his nerves”, and when he tries to sleep again “once more the same leap,
the same sharp spasm of his nerves called him back to consciousness with
the suddenness of a relaxed spring” (Norris, Vandover 179). Throughout
passages that describe the mental and physical symptoms of Vandover’s lyn-
canthropy, Norris repeatedly invokes the jerks, whirs, and sudden juxtapo-
sitions of modern entertainments.
38  Unnatural Time
To understand Van’s fatal adaptability to his media environment, it is
helpful to remember the equine nature of the other beasts that populate
the novel’s landscape. A three-paragraph sequence in which Vandover’s
beastliness fully overtakes his proprioceptive as well as perceptive capacities
reveals Muybridge’s long shadow across the novel:

One day, however, a curious incident did for a moment invest ­Vandover
with a sudden dramatic interest. It was just after he had moved down
to the Lick House, about a month after he had sold the block in the
Mission. Vandover was standing at Lotta’s fountain at the corner of
Kearney and Market streets, interested in watching a policeman and
two boys reharnessing a horse after its tumble. All at once he fell over
flat into the street, jostling one of the flower venders and nearly upset-
ting him. He struck the ground with a sodden shock, his arms doubled
under him, his hat rolling away into the mud. Bewildered, he picked
himself up; very few had seen him fall, but a little crowd gathered for
all that. One asked if the man was drunk, and Vandover, terrified lest
the policeman should call the patrol wagon, hurried off to a basement
barber shop near by, where he brushed his clothes, still bewildered,
confused, wondering how it had happened.
The fearful nervous crisis which Vandover had undergone had
passed off slowly. Little by little, bit by bit, he had got himself in
hand again. However, the queer numbness in his head remained,
and as soon as he concentrated his attention on any certain line of
thought, as soon as he had read for any length of time, especially if
late at night, the numbness increased. Somewhere back of his eyes a
strange blurring mist would seem to rise; he would find it impossi-
ble to keep his mind fixed upon any subject; the words of a printed
page would little by little lose their meaning. At first this had been
a source of infinite terror to him. He fancied it to be the symptoms
of some approaching mental collapse, but, as the weeks went by and
nothing unusual occurred, he became used to it, and refused to let
it worry him. If it made his head feel queer to read, the remedy was
easy enough—he simply would not read; and though he had been a
great reader, and at one time had been used to spend many delightful
afternoons lost in the pages of a novel, he now gave it all up with an
easy indifference.
But, besides all this, the attack had left him with nerves all
unstrung; even his little afternoon walk on Kearney and Market
streets exhausted him; any trifling and sudden noise, the closing of
a door, the striking of a clock, would cause him to start from his
place with a gasp and a quick catch at the heart. Toward evening this
little spasm of nerves would sometimes come upon him even when
there was nothing to cause it, and now he could no longer drop off
to sleep without first undergoing a whole series of these recoils and
 Unnatural Time  39
starts, that would sometimes bring him violently up to a sitting pos-
ture, his breath coming short and quick, his heart galloping, startled
at he knew not what.
(Norris, Vandover 201–2)

As in the Mechanics’ Fair scene, environment acts as contagion agent. When

the passage begins Vandover is bodily and grammatically passive, invested
with interest by the “incident” that acts in the sentence’s subject position. The
language of “incident” previews early nonnarrative films, and the incident’s
power to invest into Vandover shows the human’s permeability when it comes
to perceptual externalities. What happens next is remarkably disjunctive, at
the level of paragraph coherence and within the street scene itself. Norris posi-
tions Vandover as a spectator watching a relatively banal occurrence; one could
imagine the Lumières filming a horse’s reharnessing for one of their films. But
suddenly—“all at once”—Vandover echoes the horse that has taken a tumble
and falls over with a shock, the external visual detail of the fallen horse pro-
ducing a sympathetic response in Vandover. Beyond being a bizarre reaction
to watching a horse, Van’s fall is a discontinuous happening, not necessary, but
next—the “all at once” creating a feeling of fragmentation at the paragraph
level. The narration continues the experience of discontinuity within the para-
graph by very briefly moving away from its focalization through Vandover to
consider the perspective of a character who asks if “the man” (Vandover) was
drunk, disrupting the reader’s narrative perspective on the scene.
The scene ends with an account of the lasting effects of such disjunctive
experiences, as Vandover’s “fatal adaptability” (233) reflects Norris’s con-
cern that popular art forms can degrade human perceptual capabilities and
that readers will not only come to dislike attending to “any certain line of
thought” in a novel but will also lose their ability to do so (202). Again, the
problems with Van’s perspective, such as the “blurring mist” behind the eyes,
are precisely those that visual thinkers identified as allowing for the work-
ings of philosophical toys. “Persistence of vision”, or the retinal afterimage,
allowed the spinning wheels of the zoetrope and zoopraxiscope to work on
the faulty human body, much as we see Vandover passively worked on by
his view of the horse.16 While vision’s continuity would seem to evidence the
self’s durative continuity (to which Bergson is so committed), demonstrating
this continuity through false mechanisms risks polluting the psyche. By the
end of the passage, Vandover relates to duration through externalities like
the striking clock while also internalizing modernity’s rhythms. He becomes
an embodied zoetrope, his thoughts and heart galloping senselessly around
and around, never getting anywhere.
Throughout, equine metaphors allow Norris to comment on differing
temporal perspectives. Early on, Norris contrasts Vandover’s experiences of
time with those of his good friend Charlie Geary. While Vandover experi-
ences events as isolated from any larger timeline, Geary never undertakes an
action without future outcomes in mind. And whereas Vandover is a great
40  Unnatural Time
fritterer, feminized as Fleissner suggests by wasting his time on unproductive
actions like the polishing of his infamous stove (27), Geary is a planner.
Vandover’s actions count as unproductive on at least two levels: they are
not eventful enough to warrant future narration, and they are economically
counterproductive. In his reading of the novel’s gambling scenes, Michaels
supports this view, noting that Vandover is excited not so much by the idea
“of perhaps winning a great deal of money” as by the idea of “losing money”
and that Van’s gambling is a failed attempt to “buy his way out of the money
economy” (Gold Standard 143–4). Seen through the lens of his thought pic-
tures, however, his obsessive gambling is also symptomatic of his inability to
imagine the connection between today’s exciting bets and tomorrow’s debts.
In contrast to Van, his friend Geary draws “the line at gambling” (­Norris,
Vandover 15) and fully understands the relationship between present and
future. In his initial description of this contrast, Norris writes, “Geary was
quite different. He could not forget himself. He was incessantly talking
about what he had done or what he was going to do” (Vandover 13; empha-
sis added). Geary’s foresight is evident throughout the novel: he plans his
rise to the top of his law firm, plots his purchase of Vandover’s property
because of its future value, and even fills his dance card for an upcoming
dance at the preceding one so he won’t have to worry about finding partners
(139). Although at the novel’s opening Vandover is wealthy—the son of a
rich landlord—the end of the novel finds him cleaning the row houses once
owned by his father but now controlled by Geary.
If Vandover’s thought pictures are temporally disconnected, Geary’s
reflections on his success, which appear near the end of the novel, provide an
account of the ongoing progressive time that both men inhabit: “Vast, vague
ideas passed slowly across the vision of his mind … ideas of the infinite herd
of humanity, driven on as if by some enormous, relentless engine, driven on
toward some fearful distant bourne, driven on recklessly at headlong speed”
(Norris, Vandover 242). Geary’s reflections come as close to a direct statement
of Norris’s view of forces as appears in the novel. Additionally, the image of
an “infinite herd” echoes the naturalist belief that individuals who make up
the mass of humanity cannot perceive where they come from or where they
are headed as well as someone who can attain a perspective outside the herd
(at least in imagination), as London’s narrator does in “To Build a Fire”. If
the herd is infinite, Geary’s vague “ideas” of it are not. Geary’s ability to see
himself not as the “reckless” member of a herd but as the protagonist in his
own narrative buttresses his attempts to assert agency within the onward
rush of time. Following his reflection on the human herd, Geary looks up to
see “Vandover standing in the doorway” (Norris, Vandover 242)—one who,
fundamentally misapprehending the nature of time, will be swept willy-nilly
toward the bourne from which no man returns.
Norris’s likening of Van’s thoughts to panicking horses connects tempo-
ral dislocation with brutishness. Shortly after this passage, Norris offers a
glimpse of Vandover in his most degraded form: “He went about the city
 Unnatural Time  41
from dawn to dark, his feet dragging, his head swinging low from side
to side with the motion of his gait” (Vandover 233). As his head swings
grotesquely, Vandover cannot possibly make good perceptual sense of his
surroundings; instead, like the horses invoked by “gait”, he moves along
without thought to his environment or to the impulse that moves him.
Whether Vandover’s actions are moral or immoral is ultimately immaterial,
for his brutishness lies not so much in his individual choices as in the unrea-
soned, unselected “half-remembered scenes” that gallop through his brain.
Vandover’s vices are less character flaws than consequences of an inability
to understand his actions’ relevance to either his past or his future. For
example, when Vandover first gets drunk, “he looked at himself in the mir-
ror for a long time, saying to himself over and over again, ‘I’m drunk—just
regularly drunk. Good Heavens! What would the governor say to this?’”
(15). Despite his forward-looking question about what his father “would”
say, the statement “I’m drunk” as well as the pronoun “this” indicates a pri-
mary concern about his present state of affairs. Additionally, his repeating
the statement over and over corresponds to either a stuckness in time, which
Fleissner identifies as naturalism’s repetition compulsion, or the kind of cir-
cular movement through time of the zoetrope and zoopraxiscope. Later,
when the narrator comments that Van “was not so drunk but that he knew
he was, and the knowledge of the fact so terrified him that it kept him from
getting very bad” (14–15), it would appear that Vandover is experiencing
some of Geary’s self-consciousness, but his fear of “getting very bad” is a
reaction more to his present “knowledge” than to a future consequence, a
kind of panic response in the moment. This moment of self-awareness is
further undermined when Vandover awakens the following morning, and is

surprised to find that he felt so little ashamed. Geary and young Haight
treated the matter as a huge joke and told him of certain funny things
that he had said and done and which he had entirely forgotten. It was
impossible for him to take the matter seriously even if he had wished
to, and within a few weeks he was drunk again. (15)

Although Vandover experiences fear his first time drinking, he never expe-
riences regret or lets his initial concerns about getting drunk prevent him
from doing it again. Moreover, although Vandover doesn’t get very drunk,
he experiences blackouts and cannot remember his actions from the pre-
vious evening. Indeed, his inability to understand causal relations makes
it “impossible for him to take the matter seriously even if he had wished
to” (15).
Scholars seeking a moral lesson in the novel connect Vandover’s degen-
eration with his many vices, especially his licentiousness. But the necessary
preconditions for the brute’s triumph are evident from the novel’s first sen-
tence: “It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to
recall so little of his past life” (Norris, Vandover 3). To live without regard
42  Unnatural Time
for the past is to live like an animal, which is to say, amorally. Further, as
a San Franciscan, Norris may have used Vandover’s lack of morals to ref-
erence the famous horse photographer’s own absent moral code. In addi-
tion to his photographic achievements, Muybridge was a famous murderer,
having killed his wife’s lover Harry Larkyns on the 17th of October 1874.
When brought to trial, the case was well documented by the media, and the
San Francisco Chronicle in particular. Though Muybridge admitted killing
Larkyns, the jury was persuaded by a defense that argued the crime was
justified because of the affair and that Muybridge suffered from temporary
insanity (Clegg 90). Though we can only guess whether Muybridge’s murder
trial was on Norris’s mind as he filled Vandover’s San Francisco with horses,
the murderer-photographer’s “not guilty” verdict would make Muybridge
an appropriate role model for Vandover, a character who, upon losing his
virginity, finds that “[t]he thing was done almost before he knew it. He could
not tell why he had acted as he did, and he certainly would not have thought
himself capable of it” (18). The man who broke time into fragments through
his equine photography succeeded in living a life in which he separated him-
self in one moment from the self in a previous one. This radical, perhaps
monstrous temporal freedom is what the very earliest films offered to their
audiences. In particular, the Lumière actuality films that came on screen in
the year of Vandover’s gestation fulfill the predictions Norris makes here,
and they do so quite joyously in the process.

Actuality Films, Fantastical Time

The Lumière films from the 1895 exhibition included images of factory
laborers leaving work, a card game, the demolition of a wall, the arrival of
a train, and a baby eating breakfast, among others.17 One of the two prom-
inent prenarrative film genres, the actuality film and the programs in which
it appeared are the cinematic instantiation of living one’s life as a series of
episodes. Like a Muybridge motion study writ large, the actualities break
flowing time into isolated segments.
Although U.S. film companies also made actuality films, the Lumière
films were widely considered the best when they arrived stateside, and
the press that accompanied their New York exhibition in 1896 spoke to
their particular pleasures. The Photographic Times was not shy about the
superiority of the French actualities: “We advise our readers to pay a visit
to Keith’s Theatre in Union Square New York and see the exhibition of
Lumière’s Cinematograph. We must admit that this apparatus for the pro-
jection of chronophotographs is far away ahead of Edison’s Vitascope or
Latham’s Eidoloscope. … If it were only possible to reproduce the pic-
tures in natural colors we believe that few would imagine that they were
not looking at the moving objects themselves” (“Editorial Notes” 388).
In addition to revealing the international nature of film competition in the
early years, The Photographic Times editorial also reveals that audiences
 Unnatural Time  43
were savvy consumers who noted the gap between the filmic image and
reality, and who understood film as mechanically creating new and enter-
taining experiences.
The subjects of actuality films are occasionally eventful, marking a special
parade or dignitary’s visit, but more often they are relatively banal, portray-
ing small details of everyday life. Frequently, the actualities capture street
scenes, families at play, or modes of transportation (cars, trains, and bicy-
cles). Sometimes understood as proto-documentaries, the Lumière actuality
films are often positioned as one line of cinematic development against the
more spectacular trick films of another French filmmaker, George Méliès.
Clearly, there is some difference between the Lumières’ images of workers
leaving their factory and Méliès’s spectacles that transform women into sea
creatures and bring decks of cards to life; however, in the context of Norris’s
and Bergson’s temporal anxieties, the actuality films appear less like docu-
mentaries and more like trick films than we might suspect.
In his oft-cited essay “The Cinema of Attractions”, Tom Gunning uses the
ubiquity of actuality films during the cinema’s earliest years (1895–1906)
as evidence for his claim that “early cinema was not dominated by the
narrative impulse” (56). The cinema of attractions’ interest in “showing
and exhibition” unites both actualities and more fantastical films, such as
Méliès’s Voyage to the Moon (1902), “in a conception that sees cinema less
as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to
an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power … and exoticism”
(56–57). At first glance, Gunning does not seem to account for actuality
films that, unlike travel films or bustling street scenes, did not present par-
ticularly exotic views. The Lumières filmed their families again and again,
and although the films of their children are charming, one would be hard-
pressed to find the content of Baby’s Breakfast (1895) particularly exotic
(Figure 1.1). However, Gunning also asserts that the cinematic medium was
itself exotic, a claim that helps to explain the popularity of early actuality
films (58). As film scholars Charles Musser, Ben Singer, and Paul Young have
noted, film cameras and projectors were new machines that emerged at a
time when people could not get enough of either spectacular entertainments
or cutting-edge technologies.18 The cinema offered its audiences a perfect
marriage of the two manias. Anything that highlighted what this particular
medium could do counted as an “attraction”, even if it was simply the mov-
ing image of a baby enjoying her porridge. The smaller aspects of the actu-
alities, such as leaves blowing in the wind, may have been those that most
excited early cinemagoers, the fact that the “details” of the image moved.19
But in addition to showing details of the image, the actually films themselves
act as a kind of temporal detail. In the context of conceptions of time as simul-
taneously oppressive and dangerously out of control, even mundane films like
Baby’s Breakfast, by highlighting the medium’s ability to separate out and
hold up individual moments in time, demonstrate that the greatest attraction
the medium offered in its early days was its ability to produce new temporal
44  Unnatural Time

Figure 1.1  Leaves as detail in Baby’s Breakfast.

experiences for its audiences.20 Spectators could enjoy individual moments

isolated from their contexts, and random happenings gained significance by
being pulled out of temporal duration and produced as discrete events. The
early cinema thus serves as an important interlocutor for naturalism because,
at its most fundamental level, the cinema reveals to its audience the passage of
time.21 To the extent that in all films something is happening, even if that some-
thing is merely the passage of time, some scholars have claimed that all cinema
is narrative, a claim for which actuality films have often served as a test case.22
In his account of the Lumière films, for example, Gaudreault asserts that since
“each shot of a film, taken in isolation, constitutes a narrative”, actuality films
can likewise be described as narrative (“Film” 71). However, Gaudreault also
distinguishes between this type of narrativity, which he describes as “micro”,
and that of films that develop relationships between multiple shots, which
he terms “macro-narratives” (71). Gunning counters this argument, explain-
ing that although all films represent the passage of time, only some films are
properly described as narrative; he claims that early films worked to present
“a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself”
(“Cinema of Attractions” 58), as opposed to being of interest in relation to
a larger narrative.23 In other words, Gunning rejects the teleology implicit in
Gaudreault’s description of single-shot films as micro-narratives, and instead
focuses on their ability to show events at all.24
 Unnatural Time  45
Most famous among the Lumière actualities screened at the New York
exhibition is the 1895 Arrival of a Train (Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat), a
film that exemplifies the actuality film’s ability to produce the everyday as both
shocking and fascinating—in other words, its engaging ability to show events
at all. The responses of rural audiences who were less familiar with trains not-
withstanding, Arrival of a Train captures a relatively mundane event.25 The
one-shot film shows a train moving toward the screen and eventually off into
the lower-left corner of the frame, until the train finally comes to a stop
(Figure 1.2). The arriving passengers disembark and the waiting passengers
board the train. The interest of this film rests not on the particular events
portrayed, but rather, on the film’s ability to show events in the first place. Or,
putting it slightly differently, as Philip Rosen explains in his distinction between
actuality and documentary, “there seems little doubt that the appeal of many
actualities was in the relatively extreme rawness of the real they present, which
is ultimately to say that they do not seem overtly planned or reorganized to fit
into an intratextual sequence” (242). Whether because these films are specta-
cle, as Gunning suggests, or because the films resist incorporation into macro-­
narratives, as Rosen implies, both explanations hinge on the actuality film’s
opposition to narrative. Additionally, in the context of the temporal obsession
on display in Muybridge’s pre-cinematic experiments, the stakes of actuality
films’ nonnarrativity is clear: they offer the experience of moments released
from time’s ongoing flow and held up for greater inspection and manipulation.

Figure 1.2 Producing the everyday as event, such as in Arrival of a Train (Arrivée

d’un train à La Ciotat).
46  Unnatural Time
Actuality films offer an account of duration and its power. For example,
in Eugène Pirou’s 1897 Un bain sur la plage, a man falls at the water’s edge,
and the waves sweep over him, producing a nice visual metaphor for the
naturalist time that waits for no man. And yet, as discrete documents and
as they appear organized into programs, actualities bear a stronger resem-
blance to Vandover’s thought pictures than they do to naturalist narration.
As films that produced new temporal units, actualities are movies about
what movies can do. Mary Ann Doane has argued that by isolating a partic-
ular moment, actualities produce segments of time as an event by choosing
it as worthy of extraction from the everyday time she dubs “‘dead time’—
time which, by definition, is outside of the event, ‘uneventful’” (Emergence
159–60). As Doane suggests, rather than making the arrival of a train or a
baby’s breakfast meaningful in comparison to dead time, the formal inno-
vation of the actualities comes from their commitment to dramatizing time
in new ways by producing it as fragmentary rather than durative, isolatable
rather than continuous, and attractive rather than deterministic.
Nonetheless, a number of film theorists have described actuality films in
terms of “failure”, a characterization that assumes film’s intention to repre-
sent presence and to control thematic meanings. Doane has suggested that
the appeal of the cinema derives from its two conflicting abilities: the ability
to record the past and the ability to represent events as happening in the
present.26 What Doane calls contradiction, Leo Charney describes as fail-
ure: “[A]lienation both grounded and arose out of the modern aspiration
to seize fleeting moments of sensation as a hedge against their inexorable
evisceration. The quest to locate a fixed moment of sensual feeling inside
the body could never succeed” (293). Again, the description of the relation-
ship between time and the cinema is written as failure, here appearing in
Bergsonian terms. Like Doane and Charney, Philip Rosen also reads “failure”
into the actuality’s ontology; in contrast to actualities, he argues, fiction films
had become more profitable and had the initial benefit of “integrating the
shot into larger narrative structures whereby its meanings could be better
controlled and regulated” (243). Similarly, Doane suggests that the early cin-
ema “level[s] all moments until each is the same as the other—producing an
overwhelming sameness and banality” such that “[d]espite the dominance
of the actuality in the first decade of the cinema … narrative very quickly
becomes its dominant method of structuring time” (Emergence 66–67).27
Whereas Doane and Rosen read the actualities’ presentation of meaningless
moments as a problem for the cinema, producing these empty units of time
is in fact the early actuality films’ central innovation.
While film may always be parasitic in the ways that these film theorists
suggest—because it depends upon the existence of an external temporal-
ity as referent—the actuality films are more significant for their generative
rather than their mimetic capabilities. The actualities demonstrate film’s
potential to create an event that never took place, not because the event is
fictional, but because the event is isolated from a progressive temporality.
 Unnatural Time  47
As in the case of Vandover’s memory pictures, their particular type of presence
depends upon severing connections to the past and the future, effectively
emptying moments of meaning.
Although various in topic, the actuality films do have distinctive pat-
terns. The actuality films participate in the era’s interest in the detail,
offering up small instances of the typical, complete with moving leaves.
Given the foregrounding of actuality films in McTeague’s vaudeville scene,
it might be worth considering how that novel produces its own kind of
actuality about Polk Street life in San Francisco. Indeed, street scenes
appear repeatedly in actualities, which drew from European and ­American
locales, as well as parts farther afield. For example, in 1903 French film-
makers Pathé presented films shot in Japan and China, Rue à Tokio and
À  Canton; in 1907, British filmmakers filmed Scenes in Singapore. The
street scene films displayed exoticness but also represented “typical” life
(Lewis 164).28 The typical appears again and again in actualities, whether
in the context of foreign street life or images of bourgeois families at home,
as in Baby’s Breakfast.
The recurrence of certain scenic types also suggests a formal habit of
mind at work in the actualities. The street scenes feature flowing streams
of people and vehicles, whether in the context of cars and horse-drawn
carriages in a New York scene or the flow of humanity across beautiful
­Cantonese bridges. While Rue à Tokio gives an exotic view, when placed in
a program with parade films or New York street scenes, the film becomes
part of a larger account of global life connected by an underlying principle
of flowing motion. It was often the case that a number of travel films would
make up a program, allowing viewers to compare and contrast a series of
global street scenes (Lewis 164).
Other films represented motion of a similar kind. Parade films, films
of people exiting factories and churches, and scenes of bathers appear
throughout the actuality genre, all documenting flowing movements created
by waves of individuals in motion. For example, an Henri Joly film called
Exiting a Church (1896) was the religious answer to the Lumière brothers’
more secular Workers Leaving a Factory (1895); and American Mutoscope’s
Broadway & Union Square (1903) offered Americans a view of street life
made up of trolley cars and men and women headed to work or to market.
The consistency with which repetitive and flowing movement appears in
actuality films shows off the cinema’s capacity for externalizing the image of
duration, just as Bergson feared it might. From the very beginning, then, film
is fascinated with capturing motion itself, arrivals and departures, as wit-
nessed by trains pulling into stations, workers leaving factories, and waves
lapping at the shore.
Moreover, the camera position taken by the actuality filmmakers ren-
ders human movements wavelike. This impression appears in Broadway &
Union Square and also the 1896 Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, which traces
a parade moving along an avenue with the Arc de Triomphe at the end. The
48  Unnatural Time
camera is located down street from the Arc, such that the Arc sits at the
very back of the frame and the parade is captured both as it processes away
from the camera (on the right side of the frame) and as it returns down the
other side of the street (on the left side of the frame). Because of the camera’s
centered location, it bisects the coming-and-going movement of the parade.
As a result, the parade’s start and end points are off-screen, either behind
the arc or behind the cameraman, producing the illusion of an endless circle.
Much like Muybridge’s horses when place inside a zoetrope, the parade
seems to loop around and around a track. This is the same motion produced
by the waves of bathing films or implied by the spinning wheels of the many
bicycle, car, cart, and train actualities. A bit later, as Jonathan Auerbach doc-
uments, chase films demonstrate the ongoing interest in this type of motion
(Body Shots 90–91).
Simultaneously producing infinite time and temporal fragments, the
actuality film acts as a time management pushmi-pullyu, straining toward
two types of modern temporality. The brevity and detail-oriented nature
of the scenes affiliate actuality films with the modernist fragment, but the
formal focus on flowing movement and circularity suggests the ongoing
natural time stream that interests Norris and the naturalists. The films offer
spectators the kind of view that London’s tragic protagonist in “To Build a
Fire” cannot achieve, as even motions that spectators would know intellec-
tually have their terminus in beginning and endpoints are rendered seem-
ingly infinite by actuality films’ habitual camera setups and framing. One
effect of this is to make even actuality films that mark particular events—
such as a dignitary’s visit—into more generalized images of the temporal, in
much the same way that travel films offer a sense of street scenes as similar
the world round. This habit of making the specific historical instant part of
a general pattern of movement is an impulse taken to its hyperbolic extreme
in the D. W. Griffith films and Norris novel discussed in the next chapter.
While the actuality films’ detachable moments resonate powerfully
with Vandover’s memory fragments, Norris’s novel takes a position on
new media similar to that forwarded by film theorists. Vandover and the
Brute proposes that without narrative, causal relationships between events
are impossible to determine and, as a result, qualitative rankings become
similarly impracticable—as is the case when we learn that what Van “at
first imagined to be the story of his life, on closer inspection turned out to
be but a few disconnected incidents that his memory had preserved with
the greatest capriciousness, absolutely independent of their importance”
(3; emphasis added). Emphasizing the problematically haphazard organiza-
tion of Van’s thought pictures, Norris opposes his own method of recording
events to Van’s hodgepodge of memories, which, though photographically
accurate, lack any principle for having been recorded in the first place.29
In contrast, the texts that surround and contain Vandover—including nat-
uralist novels, newspaper reports, and his friend Charlie Geary’s narratives
of self-making—insist upon the causal relationships between temporally
 Unnatural Time  49
sequenced events. In Vandover, the categories temporal and causal are nearly
indistinguishable; Vandover’s inability to sort his memory pictures into a tem-
porally “orderly” sequence corresponds to his inability to think causally. As
a result, Vandover experiences life as something like pure presence, which
in the context of the novel is also something like pure arbitrariness.30 While
the Lumière actualities allowed audiences to enjoy “disconnected events …
absolutely independent of their importance” (3), Norris’s first novel asserts
that Vandover’s experience of time in modernity—the experience offered
up by actuality films—is ultimately unsustainable because it runs counter
to what the novel constructs as the “natural” force of progressive narra-
tive time. At the heart of both modes resides an intense concern about the
relationship of the human subject to time; while actuality films produce an
account of modern time as pleasurable spectacle, Norris imagines the sub-
ject position hailed by these new perceptual opportunities and explores the
costs of indulging such perspectives.

Bad Art Behaving Badly

Norris’s narration reminds readers of humankind’s location within a tem-
poral trajectory far larger and more powerful than any individual. In a
1901 Boston Evening Transcript article titled “The Mechanics of Fiction”,
he describes how an ideal narrative works: “Now the action begins to
increase in speed. The complication suddenly tightens … an episode far
back there in the first chapter … is suddenly brought forward and coming
suddenly to the front collides with the main line of development” (1163).
The episode, in other words, remains as meaningless as one of Van’s mem-
ories until, at the novel’s climax, it receives meaning by insertion into a
causal sequence, the “main line of development”. Though Norris uses the
language of velocity and collision, which might associate his narration with
modern entertainments, the language of tightening and development also
resonates with the Bergsonian idea of interpenetrating moments that can-
not be disentangled.
Even as Norris centers his narrative on the private actions of a patholog-
ical artist, his emphasis on plotting illustrates the relative insignificance of
Vandover’s personal experience of history in the face of his immersion in a
progressive and irreversible flow of time. The narration in Vandover positions
the novel as the art form best equipped to reveal the temporal and causal
relationships between events, even as it suggests that individuals like Van may
not always grasp such connections. The narrator records the duration of var-
ious actions, the start and finish times of events, and the times of numerous
appointments. Thirteen of the novel’s eighteen chapters begin by connecting
the events of Vandover’s life to the progression of clock time or calendar time:
“In the afternoons Vandover worked in his studio” (Chapter 5), “On a cer-
tain evening about four months later” (Chapter 7), “Vandover stayed for
two weeks at Coronado Beach” (Chapter 9), “About ten o’clock Vandover
50  Unnatural Time
went ashore” (Chapter 10), “The following days as they began to pass were
miserable” (Chapter 11), “Vandover took formal possession of his rooms
on Sutter Street during the first few days of February” (Chapter 12), “Just
before Lent, and about three months after the death of Vandover’s father”
(Chapter 13), and so on. The narration thus stands in ironic contrast to
­Vandover’s pathological inability to understand himself in relation to his
past and future.
While naturalism’s characters may occasionally share the perspective of
new arts in modernity, the plotting of naturalist novels serves as a reminder
that individuals and their perspectives are irrelevant to the progressive
history that moves along regardless of them.31 More particularly, Norris
identifies the perception cultivated by consuming art forms that fragment
time as not just irrelevant but monstrous. For example, Vandover has a sex-
ual encounter with a young woman named Ida Wade, after which he has
nothing to do with her. When he learns of Ida Wade’s suicide, the event
most explicitly a consequence of his actions, Vandover seems on the verge
of being able to find a meaningful narrative thread in his life. Bringing news
of the suicide, Geary guesses that Ida “must have been out of her head” but
then admits “nobody knows why” she did it (Norris, Vandover 76). After
meditating in his bath, Vandover searches out the report in the morning
paper, which, like Geary, fails to connect agents, events, and consequences
in an adequate causal narrative:

At first he could not find it, and then it suddenly jumped into promi-
nence from out of the gray blur of the print on an inside page beside an
advertisement for a charity home for children. … [I]t sketched her life
and character and the circumstances of her death with the relentless
terseness of a writer cramped for space. According to this view, the
causes of her death were unknown. It had been remarked that she had
of late been despondent and in ill health. (77)

From the “view” of the reporter, events assume a narrative pattern of sorts,
but one of the supposed causes of the suicide—despondency—itself calls
for the kind of explanation that a newspaper, with its limits of time and
space, cannot give. Indeed, Norris draws attention to the paper’s problem-
atic “view”. Unable to fully contextualize events, the reporter writes with
“the relentless terseness of a writer cramped for space” and thus resembles
the painter who, working too close to the canvas, cannot provide the broad
perspective of the novelist who sees the main line of development. The
newspaper’s juxtaposition of dissimilar events further highlights its partic-
ipation in creating a modern perspective of the world as a jumble of unre-
lated incidents. In the passage above, an advertisement soliciting donations
for a children’s home appears alongside the account of a tawdry suicide;
the form of the newspaper thus echoes the promiscuity of an actuality or
vaudeville program.32
 Unnatural Time  51
Knowing more of Ida’s suicide than the reporter does, Vandover tem-
porarily constructs a more truthful narrative than the one in the morning
paper: “Like the sudden unrolling of a great scroll he saw his responsibility
for her death and for the ruin of that something in her which was more than
life” (Norris, Vandover 77). While the newspaper report jumps suddenly out
of the “gray blur” into isolated prominence, the unrolling “great scroll” sug-
gests the kind of epic narrative Norris would attempt later in The Octopus.
For the moment, Van thinks like a novelist constructing the ideal plot, his
seduction of Ida standing as the early episode that collides with the main line
of development at the climactic moment of her suicide.
In its typical manner, however, Vandover’s perspective begins to fragment
into a disconnected series of present “nows”, each replacing rather than
building upon the previous one. “At every moment now”, we learn, “he saw
the different consequences of what he had done” (Norris, Vandover 78). The
narrative then tracks Van’s strong, though fleeting and disorganized, emo-
tional responses to the suicide in a series of three short paragraphs focusing
on separate present moments: “Now, it was a furious revolt against his mis-
take”, “Now, it was a wave of immense pity for the dead girl”, “Now, it was
a terror for himself” (78; emphasis added). Rather than building a series of
interpenetrating moments that would create a sense of moral responsibility,
each realization Vandover has bumps the previous one out of mind. In his
movement from one “now” to the next, Vandover enacts Bergson’s worry
about the effects of spatializing time on the human, a practice that would
corrupt “our feeling of outer and inner change, of movement, and of free-
dom” (Time 74)—or, after the fact, the feeling of responsibility that free will
entails. Instead, Vandover tries to think of himself as “another person” but
cannot escape the thought that he might well hang for his crime. “To look
too long in that direction”, he feels, “was simple insanity beyond any doubt”
(Norris, Vandover 78). The long look Vandover rejects is precisely the look
Norris’s novel offers readers as it clarifies the true significance of events.
Although critics and several characters in the novel attribute ­Vandover’s
refusal of this responsible long look to his moral monstrosity, it in fact
derives from his brutish temporal understanding. Vandover’s conviction that
a reversal of events is possible depends upon his view of events as essentially
meaningless and disconnected. When Vandover confesses his connection to
the suicide to his father, both men express a desire to turn back the clock
and somehow undo Vandover’s guilt. His father decides to send ­Vandover
away on a sea voyage aboard the Mazatlan in an attempt to “begin again”
(­ Norris, Vandover 83). While on the fateful trip, Vandover repeats his
father’s sentiment like a mantra: “He could turn sharp around when he
wanted to, after all. Ah, yes, that was the only thing to do if one was to
begin all over again and live down what had happened” (90). The repeated
emphasis on beginning again suggests a possibility of living life as both loop
and fragment, like a human zoetrope or flip book, capable of starting at any
point, of being flipped forward or backward.
52  Unnatural Time
The exhibition history of the 1896 Lumière film Demolition of a Wall
(Démolition d’un mur) demonstrates what an enactment of Vandover’s
desire might look like. The film portrays a relatively straightforward event,
workmen knocking down a wall (Figure 1.3). However, when showing the
film, an exhibitor accidentally ran the film backward and the demolished
wall sprang back up, fully intact (Figure 1.4). The accident turned out to
be quite popular with audiences.33 By turning an actuality into a trick
film, the original exhibitor emphasized film’s ability to exploit audiences’
day-to-day experiences of time. The “trick” of reversibility relies upon the
actuality film’s perhaps less showy trick of fragmenting linear time. These
films are flexible for the actuality exhibitor because they function as one of
Gaudreault’s micro-narratives, events comprehensible on their own but seg-
mented out of progressive time. The noncausal but detail-oriented nature of
Van’s memory pictures, actuality films, and proto-cinematic entertainments
lets them function in this way. Van’s thought pictures and the early moving
pictures seem to offer remarkable temporal freedom and a corresponding
escape from causality because they are not connected to other incidents—in
Bergson’s terms, because they are not interpenetrating.34

Figure 1.3  Tearing down a wall in Démolition d’un mur.

Although Vandover’s perspective on events aligns him with the spec-

tator position the actuality films create, Norris’s narration, and the acts
of narration portrayed in the novel, indicate that Van occupies a subject
 Unnatural Time  53

Figure 1.4  Reverse action in Démolition d’un mur.

position significantly more constrained. For Norris, events are always

both inevitable and irreversible, tied to the forward-moving narratives
from which they derive their meaning. As if in rebuke of ­Vandover’s
hopes to treat Ida Wade’s suicide as isolatable from his present and
future, and thus reverse his life’s trajectory, the Mazatlan’s sinking leads
to the most narrated events in the novel, events recounted once by the
narrator, once by a fellow passenger, once by a newspaper, and once by
the waiter at Van’s favorite bar. As this multiplication of narrative perspec-
tives indicates, the freedom from context that Van imagines for himself
is available only through the mistaken perceptions of someone inside the
stampeding herd, or in this instance, someone thrust into the chaos of a
shipwreck. When describing the passengers’ frantic scramble for lifeboats,
the narrator carefully tracks the temporal continuity that the passengers
cannot see:

When Vandover finally reached the lifeboat, he found a great crowd

gathered there; three people were already in the boat itself. The first
engineer, who commanded that boat, and three of the crew stood by
the falls preparing to cast off. Just below on the deck of the Mazatlan
stood two sailors keeping the crowd in order, continually shouting,
“Women and children first!” As the women passed their children for-
ward, the sailors lifted them into the boats, some shrieking, others
silent and stupid as if stunned. Then the women were helped up; the
54  Unnatural Time
men, Vandover among them, climbing in afterward. The davits were
turned out and the boat was swung clear of the ship’s side.
(Norris, Vandover 100–1; emphasis added)

Here, Norris subordinates his typical adjective-laden descriptions to a spare

narration of events’ temporal order: actions completed, ongoing, or antici­
pated. From the narrator’s and the reader’s external perspective, it is clear
that first the crowd gathers, then the women pass the children forward,
then the women get in the lifeboat, followed by the men, and then the life
boat casts off. However, for Vandover, who gazes into the “mountains of
tumbling water” assaulting the boat “with dreadful force”, the scene is
chaos: “It seemed simple madness to attempt to launch the boat; even the
sinking wreck would be better than this chance. Vandover was terrified,
again deserted by all his calmness and self-restraint” (101). Trapped within
his own idiosyncratic perspective, he panics, while the narrator describes
the launching of the lifeboat with a sense of orderly sequence and an eye
to the larger view. Quite similar to the man in “To Build a Fire”, Vandover
lacks the correct mindset to see things differently; in contrast, as in London’s
story, the author holds the narrator’s far-ranging point of view up for com-
parison in order to show the intrinsic failure of a narrow view.
But unlike other wrong or beastly views, Vandover’s is distinctively inhu-
man. This difference comes into relief once the lifeboat casts off and another
horrible event occurs. When the Jewish jeweler Brann attempts to pull him-
self out of the water and into the lifeboat, the women already on board,
fearing the boat will capsize, cry out, “Push him off!” and “Let him drown!”
Like Vandover, whose fear of hanging has motivated his voyage, the women
are driven by the instinct of self-preservation: “It was the animal in them all
that had come to the surface in an instant, the primal instinct of the brute
striving for its life and the life of its young” (Norris, Vandover 103; empha-
sis added). The women’s murderous act, we might conclude, depends upon
momentarily forgetting their humanity. Or, to use Paul Ricoeur’s formula-
tion that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through
a narrative mode” (Time and Narrative 52), one might say that the women
momentarily forget about narrative—about their social context and the
consequences of their actions—and, as a result, forget their humanity.
While the women from the Mazatlan act like brutes only in extreme
circumstances, Vandover comes to act like a brute all the time. In the final
chapter, his inability to relay a coherent account of his degeneration to
Geary leads to a cry of despair: “Why can’t I talk in my mouth instead of
in my throat?” Comparing himself to the horse at the “hack-stand” who
jingles his chain and chomps his oats, he promises to entertain Geary for
a meal: “Give me a dollar and I’ll bark for you!” (Norris, Vandover 245).
There is still a minimal causal narrative here, but in the novel’s concluding
scene, in which Van, “his mind empty of all thought” (255), crawls in “the
filth” under a sink to please the new tenant of the apartment he is cleaning,
 Unnatural Time  55
there is only the giving of a quarter tip and Van’s mechanical “Thank you
sir” (260). Whereas the women of the Mazatlan undergo a natural degenera-
tion to earlier evolutionary states—becoming prehistoric brutes—Vandover
degenerates into something quite different, becoming a modern brute new
to the American scene.
Van’s status as part of a proto-modernist menagerie is registered in his
inability to narrate even horrific events he has witnessed, such as the engi-
neer’s beating Brann until he loses his grip and sinks beneath the waves.
After his rescue by a passing schooner, Vandover reflects on “the drowning
of the little Jew of the plush cap with the ear-laps. He shuddered and grew
sick again for a minute, telling himself that he would never forget such a
scene” (Norris, Vandover 107). This isolated “scene” remains but another
fragmentary memory until Vandover returns to San Francisco and hears an
account of the catastrophe from Toby, a waiter who has read about it in a
newspaper and explains its moral significance as murder: “Were you in that
boat? … Well, wait till I tell you; the authorities here are right after that first
engineer with a sharp stick, and some of the passengers, too, for not taking
him in. A woman in one of the other boats saw it all and gave the whole
thing away. A thing like that is regular murder, you know” (110; emphasis
added). Vandover does not perceive the meaning of the Jew’s drowning
until the woman in another boat “[gives] the whole thing away”, the news-
paper reports it, and Toby explains it. Because an understanding of events
requires a certain distance, the personal “scene” that Vandover thinks he
will never forget is only a small painted square on a canvas until someone
else connects it up.
By opposing the false temporal experiences offered by modern enter-
tainments and the narrative structure of his own work, Norris draws upon
a very old assumption about narrative: that it is through narrative that
we make our world recognizable and establish our humanity.35 Seymour
­Chatman’s illustration of the story in the box helpfully demonstrates the
human “tendency to connect the most divergent of events [into narrative]”.
He explains, “That narrative experiment in which the reader shuffles his
own story from a box of loose printed pages depends upon the disposition
of our minds to hook things together; not even fortuitous circumstance—
the random juxtaposition of pages—will deter us” (47). Chatman suggests
that given a choice, we humans will err on the side of narrative,36 but in the
novel Norris wrote as a Harvard freshman, he imagines a human being who
does the opposite, one who perceives the world in the fragmentary and ahis-
torical manner that the actuality films would present it, or, to use ­Chatman’s
metaphor, one whose consciousness is simply a box of loose images with no
ordering impulse. In Vandover and the Brute, Norris takes claims about the
direct relationship between narrative and humanity a step further, insisting
that being human requires narrating oneself as an agent located within pro-
gressive history and that the rejection of linear narrative time by modern
subjects yields monstrous results.
56  Unnatural Time
The explicitly modern nature of Van’s transformation and the correspon-
dence between his media environment and his degeneration become increas-
ingly clear as the novel moves to its close: “Over the roofs and among the
gray maze of telephone wires swarms of sparrows were chittering hoarsely,
and as Vandover raised the window he could hear the newsboys far below in
the streets chanting the morning’s papers” (Norris, Vandover 213). Although
the chanted news stories shape the environment of most San Franciscans,
for Vandover the newsboys might as well be chittering and the sparrows
chanting. As Den Tandt notes, Norris produces a paradoxical representa-
tion of communication: “on the one hand, the text indicates that loss of
articulated speech represents the most severe form of degeneration”; on the
other hand, “it voices the suspicion that the language and the technology
of industrialism and commercialism have an uncanny link to savagery or
pathology as well” (197–8).
The difference between the kind of brute represented by birds and the
kind of brute Vandover becomes gives rise to the seeming paradox Den
Tandt identifies. One of the final analogies Norris uses to describe the brute
in Van is telling: “Now without a moment’s stop he ran back and forth
along the wall of the room, upon the palms of his hands and his toes, a
ludicrous figure, like that of certain clowns one sees at the circus, contor-
tionists walking about the sawdust, imitating some kind of enormous dog”
(Vandover 228). In this scene, Norris communicates both the unnatural and
the historically specific qualities of Vandover’s brutishness by reminding
readers that Van is less like a dog than he is like a circus performer imitating
a dog. In other words, because he occupies a subject position produced by
specifically modern ways of perceiving chronology, events, and causality,
Vandover’s brutishness emerges not from his falling away from modernity,
as so many have suggested, but as a consequence of “his fatal adaptability”
to modernity (233). Vandover’s brute is the opposite of the primal. He is an
unnatural brute.
The tension between Vandover’s experience of life as a series of discontin-
uous events and the temporal continuity of the novel’s narration drives the
novel’s naturalist aesthetic. Or, put in terms of naturalism’s investment
in determinism, naturalism produces an account of progressive time as a
natural force capable of subsuming individual experiences of temporal dis-
continuity in modernity. The moral responsibility with which Norris con-
cerns himself both in Vandover and in his literary criticism is that of the
novelist who must not cater to popular demand by replicating the fragmen-
tary perceptual mode of the moment. In this way, the moral deterioration
of Vandover the failed artist is predicated on his faulty temporal perception.
This is not, however, to suggest that naturalist novels are themselves nec-
essarily regressive or nostalgic; instead, the more capacious narratives they
produce offer a second option for approaching time that is equally modern
in origin, drawn from discourses of evolutionary science and historiography.
In practice, this flow time put forward by naturalist narrators appears as
 Unnatural Time  57
inhuman as the mechanically produced temporal fragments, routing his-
tory through the individual, as Lukács argues, but doing so to highlight the
relative insignificance of the individual’s temporal experience in the face of
history’s forward march. As we see in Vandover and the Brute as well as the
narratives discussed in the next chapter, naturalism’s victory is thus ­pyrrhic
in nature, saving humans from their potential monstrosity by declaring
them irrelevant.

Notes
1. Portions of this chapter have appeared in Studies in American Naturalism,
which is published by University of Nebraska Press. Publication information
of the original article is as follows: Fusco, Katherine, “Brute Time: Temporal
Representation in Vandover and the Brute and the Actuality Film”, Studies in
American Naturalism 4.1 (Summer 2009): 22–40.
2. In discussing the unhuman perspectives of the cinema and the replacement of
the human eye with the camera eye, I draw from Bill Brown’s important ongoing
work on persons and things. In A Sense of Things, he identifies Norris as “the
American novelist who most scientifically depicts humans as things, the human
thingified as a result of habit” (63). To Brown’s persuasive account, I would add
that in the particular media environment of the turn of the century, habits of
vision leaned by way of the machine were of especial importance to the thingi-
fication of human experience. Additionally, Bill Brown’s presentation of spring
2014 at the University of Nevada on “Unhuman History” has helped refine my
thinking in this chapter.
3. Bill Brown’s account of Vandover’s “things” similarly positions the novel in rela-
tion to a coming twentieth-century modernism characterized by repetition and
habit (Sense of Things 73).
4. Sherwood Williams (710) and Seitler (526) connect Vandover with contem-
poraneous fears of sexual perversion, while Bender reads the novel through
LeContean ideas about sexual selection (82). Bower argues that Vandover’s
degeneration expresses fear of contamination of the body politic by foreign-
ers, particularly Chinese immigrants (46–47), and Rossetti reads the decline as
punishment for his class mixing rather than for his sexual escapades (Imagining
46). Interestingly, both Donna Campbell and Jennifer Fleissner read Vandover
in terms of femininity, rather than masculine sexual hunger. Fleissner is partic-
ularly persuasive in comparing Vandover’s stuttering and “stuckness” in time
with the neurasthenia of Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (36–37),
an argument which reads the novel as barometer for crises of masculinity.
5. Donna Campbell’s take on Vandover’s beastliness thus provides a model from
my own: while she focuses on Vandover’s sexuality, she links it to the particular
situation of turn-of-the-century art and argues that Vandover “takes his cues
from the dichotomous [upper middle class] views of masculinity and femininity
presented and misreads both of them … [leading him] to exaggerations or per-
verse versions of traditional masculine and feminine behavior” (94).
6. For a thorough history of changing views on vision, see Jonathan Crary’s
Techniques of the Observer. Here Crary suggests that, in a post-­ Kantian
world, “there is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of the
58  Unnatural Time
subject-as-observer. Vision, rather than a privileged form of knowing, becomes
itself an object of knowledge, of observation. From the beginning of the nineteenth
century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of
the physiological makeup of the human subject, rather than the mechanics of
light and optical transmission. It is a moment when the visible escapes from the
timeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus,
within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body” (70). In other
words, as vision becomes associated with the individual human body in which
it resides, it also loses its appearance of objectivity.
7. “Attraction for the Studio or Reception Room”, Photographic Times and
American Photographer v. 13 (1883): xxi. Print.
8. Jonathan Auerbach’s Body Shots also discusses the cinema’s externalization of
the human experience, noting, “early filmmaking makes manifest a rhetoric of
the human form, turning the body into an expressive medium” (2).
9. In his coda to A Sense of Things, Bill Brown locates the in/unhumanity of moder-
nity that naturalism and realism predict in a lack of “ontological distinction …
between inanimate objects and human subjects” (187). While Brown reads this
work on the part of authors like James as an attempt to wager “enchantment”
against certain notions of progress, Bergson sees the replacement of the human
by the inhuman as entirely pessimistic.
10. Although the earliest actualities do organize the events they represent (through
decisions about camera position, framing, when to start recording, etc.) these
decisions need not be read as strictly narrative choices. In “Structural Patterning
in the Lumière Films”, Marshall Deutelbaum makes the opposite argument, sug-
gesting that the choices involved in actuality films, especially profilmic choices,
create narrative patterns. Similarly, in his essay “Film, Narrative, Narration:
The Cinema of the Lumière Brothers” André Gaudreault focuses on L’Arroseur
arrosé, a film anomalous precisely for its narrative structure. Although he notes
the difference between L’Arroseur and a film like L’Arrivée d’un train, he does
not theorize the difference in genre-specific terms. Instead, he uses both as exam-
ples of how all film, no matter how short, or how intentionally plotted, contains
at least the qualities of a “micro-narrative”: “a first level on which is generated
the second narrative level; this second level more properly constitutes a filmic
narrative in the generally accepted sense” (71). In contrast, Charles Musser and
Richard Abel have both categorized L’Arroseur as a bad-boy film, and Richard
Abel notes its derivation from a comic strip (Musser 141; Abel 97). L’Arrivée
d’un train, on the other hand, falls squarely into the actuality genre.
11. Bill Brown has produced a particularly persuasive account of Vandover’s rela-
tionship to his “things”. Brown argues that Vandover’s things—his stove, his
Mona Lisa—serve an ordering function in his life, and that as he loses them
through gambling, he loses control of his life and becomes the brute (64–65).
12. I depart from Hochman, though, in identifying the source of Vandover’s trauma.
In demonstrating that art “surely cannot ‘save’ him” (54), Hochman focuses on
Van’s personal history (the loss of his mother) rather than on the cultural history
that more fully explains his dilemma.
13. Though I disagree with Howard about the naturalist “detail”, Vandover clearly
follows her “plot of decline”.
14. Gina Rosetti and June Howard both make persuasive arguments along these
lines. Eric Link has posed an interesting counterargument to such readings,
 Unnatural Time  59
suggesting that the character Geary shows the “ethical wickedness” of using
a social Darwinist view to justify his rise in the world at the expense of others
around him (163).
15. Singer argues that Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin produced “neurological
conception[s] of modernity” that centered on the experience of modernity as
“shocking” (“Modernity” 72).
16. See Crary’s work on persistence of vision, Techniques of the Observer,

105–10.
17. These first films can all be seen on the KINO Video collection’s The Lumière
Brothers’ First Films.
18. For example, in “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and Popular Sensationalism”, Ben
Singer writes, “As the urban environment grew more and more intense, so did
the sensations of commercial amusement” that culminated in the cinema (88).
19. See Barry Salt’s commentary in The Movies Begin Vol. 2: The European Pioneers.
20. In Life to Those Shadows, Noël Burch also argues that the early Lumière
films had a unique appeal: “The pleasure Lumière himself and his spectators
­yesterday and today obtained and obtain from his films does indeed emanate
from an analogical effect (produced by photography whatever one’s intentions),
but from one which is non-linear and acentric, which does not locate the
spectator subject at the center of an imaginary space; that is why I believe the
pleasure—and also the knowledge—he produced is of quite another kind from
the pleasure of the Institution to come” (34).
21. As Christian Metz notes, film has what photography lacks, “the dimension of
time” (Film Language 14).
22. For Gaudreault, any shot is at least minimally narrative. This does, as he admits,
raise certain questions about avant-garde film, which frequently and explicitly
rejects narrative as the cinema’s raison d’être. In his defense of film as a narrative
medium, Gaudreault proposes a term to explain one of the cinema’s most basic
functions: the monstrator. Describing monstration, he writes, “This is the first
level, or first layer of narrativity, produced by a machine which is doomed to tell
stories ‘for ever’. This special feature of the cinema, that of always having been
narrative right from the beginning, explains why this art … so quickly found
its vocation as storyteller” (“Film” 71). In other words, although the cinema
was not immediately a storytelling medium, it contained traces of narrativity
(through monstration), but no narrator.
23. Interestingly, Gaudreault’s monstrator function seems to do the work Gunning
attributes to attractions films: “less a way of telling stories than a way of pre-
senting a series of views to an audience” (Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions”
57). However, unlike Gaudreault, Gunning does not insist that this presenting
of views is “the ‘innate’ kind of narrativity” that Gaudreault ascribes to the
monstrating function and the cinema writ large. Rather, Gunning’s description
of actuality films’ “attractions” provides us with a different model for under-
standing the early cinema’s mode of addressing its spectators. This different con-
ception is useful given that it seems unlikely that all the Lumière actualities have
the same kind of “monstrator” that L’Arroseur does.
2 4. Whether the events represented by the actuality films constitute narrative is
problematically linked to questions of audience reception: whether audiences
saw them as small narratives, as Deutlebaum and Gaudreault suggest, or
whether they experienced them as unnarrativized spectacle, as Gunning argues.
60  Unnatural Time
25. See Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
Tom Gunning’s essay, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment”, historicizes Christian
Metz’s psychoanalytic reading of the panicking audience. The story both Metz
and Gunning take up, the now-infamous myth of the “train-effect”, speaks to
the power of the filmic medium. Gunning begins his account by establishing the
stakes of his argument with Metz: “the impact of the first film projections can-
not be explained by a mechanistic model of a naïve spectator who, in a tempo-
rary psychotic state, confuses the image for its reality” (820). In his response to
Metz, Gunning rereads the significance of train films: “while these early films of
on-coming locomotives present the shock of the cinema in an exaggerated form,
they also express an essential element of early cinema as a whole” (824). From
here, Gunning connects the train films to the cinema of attractions: “the aes-
thetic of attractions addresses the audience directly, sometimes, as in these early
train films, exaggerating this confrontation in an experience of assault” (825).
Stephen Bottomore’s “The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the ‘Train
Effect’” also addresses this myth. Like Gunning, Bottomore also uses Metz’s
analysis as a jumping off point. In his essay, Bottomore usefully works through
several different explanations of why the train film in particular may have been
particularly shocking to early audiences. Martin Loiperdinger’s “Lumière’s
Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth” argues against what he sees as
the overtheorization of the film by contemporary scholars and proposes that
“[w]hat is needed is a historical reconstruction of L’arrivée du train à La Ciotat’s
reception history” (114).
26. Doane argues, “the obsession with instantaneity and the instant, with the pres-
ent, leads to the contradictory desire of archiving presence” (Emergence 82).
27. Doane’s account of the actuality films thus echoes White’s description of the
annals historian whose system of record keeping does not impart meaning to
events.
28. Lewis, Leslie Anne. “The Corrick Collection–7”. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.
Catalogue. Pordenone, Italy, 2013: 61–170. Print.
29. Norris describes his own methods in the essay “Fiction is Selection” (1897).
30. Deleuze suggests the impossibility of achieving this state in the context of film,
noting that “there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by
a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not
consist of a present to come” (Cinema 2 37).
31. In this way, Norris’s deterministic narration is at odds with Lukács’s critique
of naturalism as exemplary of the bourgeois novel’s “tendency to make history
private” (Historical Novel 237). “As attitudes towards society become more
and more private”, Lukács writes, “so such vividly seen connexions vanish.
Professional life appears dead; everything human is submerged under the des-
ert sands of capitalist prose. The later naturalists—even Zola—seize upon the
prose and place it at the center of literature, but they only fix and perpetuate its
withered features, limiting their picture to a description of the thing-like milieu.
What Thackery, with the right instinct, though from a false situation, declared
unportrayable, they leave as it is, replacing portrayals by mere descriptions—
supposedly scientific, and brilliant in detail—of things and thing-like relation-
ships” (244–5).
32. Like fairground attractions, newspapers at the turn of the century promoted
spectacle, shock, and violence. In his description of sensationalism in modernity,
 Unnatural Time  61
Ben Singer notes the newspaper’s paradoxical attitude toward change: “The
portrayals of urban modernity in the illustrated press seem to have fluctuated
between, on the one hand, an antimodern nostalgia for a more tranquil time,
and on the other, a basic fascination with the horrific, the grotesque and the
obscene” (“Modernity” 88–89). Although Singer discusses the content of news-
papers and Norris engages their formal organization, both accounts suggest that
newspapers straddle two outlooks—bridging the gap between Vandover’s ultra-
fragmentary perspective and the novel’s narrative continuity.
33. See Bertrand Tavernier’s commentary for Kino Video’s release of The Lumière
Brothers’ First Films (1998).
34. Indeed, Philip Rosen cites this as a reason for film’s shift away from actualities:
“actualities in themselves provided fewer means for the filmmaker to attribute
significance to the real. This is certainly not to say that there was a complete
absence of order, meaning, or even convention in the making or viewing of actu-
alities, nor that, for example, topicals did not represent occurrences that fit into
larger, generally underside metanarratives. But … such films posed much less of
the textually saturating directionality of meanings based on internal sequencia-
tion and elaboration to which we are so accustomed” (244).
35. Describing the rise of narratology, Edward Brannigan notes, “It became clear
that narrative was nothing less than one of the fundamental ways used by
human beings to think about the world, and could not be confined to the merely
‘fictional’” (xi–xii). Hayden White takes this idea even further, arguing, “To raise
the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature
of culture, and possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself” (1). However, as
White goes onto explain, the widespread nature of narrative belies the fact of
its being constructed. He further argues, “Far from being a problem, then, nar-
rative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human con-
cern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling” (1). White’s
opposition of knowing and telling does raise an interesting question about the
actuality films, which, to draw upon well-known writing advice, appear to show
rather than tell.
36. Metz makes a similar point in addressing semiotic studies of the cinema: “The
merging of the cinema and of narrativity was a great fact, which was by no
means predestined—nor was it strictly fortuitous. It was a historical and social
fact” (Film Language 93).
2 Naturalist Historiography
at the Moving Picture Show
Frank Norris, D. W. Griffith,
and Naturalist Editing

When Frank Norris met his premature end in 1902, American h ­ istoriography
had coalesced enough as a field to have internal arguments, and the nation’s
own internal conflict, the Civil War, was distant enough to be subject to
historical revisionism. Two important revisionist works, one fictional and
one historiographical, appear in this year: Thomas F. Dixon’s first novel
from “The Trilogy of Reconstruction”, The Leopard’s Spots (1902),1 and
Woodrow Wilson’s five-volume study, A History of the American People.2
Both series are now known for justifying the Ku Klux Klan’s rise and actions
as well as their service as source materials for the most infamous filmic
experiment in historical revisionism, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
(1915), a film popularly conceived of as narrative cinema’s origin point.
This chapter considers the role an additional source text played in inspir-
ing the film’s style and its conception of history, destiny, and individuality.
It was in an early film adaptation of Norris’s The Octopus that Griffith
experimented with the social meaning of parallel editing, an experiment
that would prove influential to future filmmakers and come to distinguish the
American director’s film style. Tracing the influence of Norris’s wheat trilogy
on what I identify as Griffith’s own trilogy—a series of dialectical treatments
of human suffering including A Corner in Wheat, The Birth of a Nation,
and Intolerance—I show the importance of naturalism’s time scales to cine-
matic narrative, particularly films that meant to tell ambitious stories about
the human condition. For Griffith, as for Norris, historical fictions were a
perfect opportunity to explore the relation of man to temporal flow, and
narrative itself offered a grand formal metaphor for this relation.
D. W. Griffith’s picture casts a particularly long shadow over film history
both because of its innovative use of stylistic devices like parallel editing
and rapid crosscutting, and because of the enduring controversy over its
racist legacy. While celebrations of the film in 1915 emphasized its status
as history, more recent assessments struggle to reconcile the relationship
between the film’s content and its formal innovations. For example, in his
important essay, Clyde Taylor argues against attempts by some to strain out
Birth’s ­distasteful content and retain its important style, positing that Birth’s
aesthetic is premised upon its racism. This chapter follows such assertions
about the relationship between ideology and form in The Birth of a Nation
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  63
by tracing the origins of a scene that has appeared anomalous to ­scholars
and critics in the context of both style and meaning: the timeless heav-
enly tableau that serves as the film’s conclusion. The scene culminates the
film’s push and pull between characterization and plot dynamics, while also
­serving as the final comment on the individual’s relationship to national
progress that this formal tension entails.
To construct his film, Griffith interwove two narratives: the first a fictional
tale of romance between the Northern Stoneman family and the Southern
Cameron family; and the second a history of the Civil War and Reconstruction
that contains a series of recognizable facsimiles, some drawn from ­Wilson’s
History, including reproductions of Ford’s Theater, the Oval Office, and the
Appomattox Courthouse. But to close his ambitious epic, Griffith moves
beyond these two narratives to a moment of Biblical allegory. Rather than
ending with a scene of his reconciled lovers or a moment from the pages of
U.S. history, Griffith leaves his viewers with an image of Christ and his follow-
ers in the City of Peace (Figure 2.1). As Arthur Lennig demonstrates, the film’s
ending was not particularly popular with critics: A reviewer for the Dramatic
Mirror found the religious references inexplicable, complaining about “trite
allegorical passages … dragged in to preach a universal peace moral” (qtd. in
Lennig 119). Yet, it is this last, seemingly bizarre scene that holds the key to
the relationship between Griffith’s history and Griffith’s stylistic innovation.

Figure 2.1 Replacing historical references with the transhistorical image of Christ

in the film The Birth of a Nation.
64  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Explaining the film’s conclusion, Robert Lang proposes that Lincoln’s
assassination serves as “the film’s oedipal climax”, after which, “without a
patriarch of Lincoln’s stature to preside over the nation, Griffith feels impelled
to invoke the image of Jesus Christ himself” (“The Birth of a Nation” 22–23).
Other critics have used similar language to comment on the stylistic
strangeness of the film’s ending. Fred Silva explains, “The Civil War and
Reconstruction have been only digressions from the general movement of
the world and of America toward an apotheosis of peace” (12; emphasis
added). Mimi White argues that in the film “a hierarchy is established in
which the national story—of the Civil War and its aftermath—is merely a
moment … in the history of the family as a structure which is, at its best,
the earthly-social expression of divine values” (223–4; emphasis added).
The language scholars use to address this anomalous moment in the film
echoes the literary philosophy of one of Griffith’s early source texts, The
Octopus by Frank Norris. Throughout his literary criticism Norris would
caution other writers not to stick too closely to the kind of historical details
that characterize Griffith’s facsimiles, but to instead get “beneath the clothes
of an epoch and [get] the heart of it” (“True Reward” 1148)—advice that
­Griffith appears to follow in Birth’s last scene.
In his most famous film, D. W. Griffith worked in a film style that invoked
the tradition of Frank Norris’s naturalist historical fiction. For example, The
Octopus closes in a manner quite similar to Birth, as the narrator zooms out
in space and time to offer the reassurance that

Greed, cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity are short-lived; the indi-

vidual suffers, but the race goes on. Annixter dies, but in a far distant
corner of the world a thousand lives are saved. The larger view always
and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will,
in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work
together for good. (652)

The novel’s movement away from its characters to metaphysical forces, its
emphasis on parallel lives (Annixter’s and the thousands’), and its insistence
that the historical events narrated within the novel are but part of some
larger trajectory all characterize Norris’s naturalist view of history—the
view that is echoed in Birth’s strange final scene.3
In “Zola as a Romantic Writer”, Norris attempts to pin down what nat-
uralist history might mean, correcting both wrong views of the genre and
wrong technological views. He begins by admitting, “[f]or most people Nat-
uralism has a vague meaning” (1106). In the rest of the essay, he works to
correct the misunderstanding that naturalism is “a sort of inner circle of
realism—a kind of diametric opposite of romanticism, a theory of fiction
wherein things are represented ‘as they really are’, inexorably, with the truth-
fulness of a camera” (1106). In a different essay, his August 3, 1901, letter
for The Chicago American Literary Review, Norris locates naturalism as the
happy middle ground “between the Realists and Romanticists”, asking, “Is
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  65
it not the school of Naturalism, which strives hard for accuracy and Truth?”
(1141).4 Norris maps accuracy and truth onto realism and romance, respec-
tively, and suggests that naturalism updates romance from its realm of fancy
and offers a synthesis of the best of the two modes. Throughout his many
discussions of truth and accuracy, Norris makes clear that synthesizing the
two requires a breadth of vision large enough to distinguish between them.
As discussed in the previous chapter, for Norris, writing naturalism requires
that an author understand historical or photographic details—as offered by
realist accuracy—in their true place.5
A bit bizarrely, Griffith, too, attempts to go beyond “the truthfulness
of a camera”, which means that his truths cannot be accessed by the
image alone, but through the narrative juxtaposition and trajectory of
images. Approached through Norris’s naturalism, The Birth of a Nation’s
final scene begins to look less anomalous: Both the advances in editing
for which Birth is so celebrated and the revisionist history that makes the
film so loathsome express naturalist worldviews. But before arriving at
Birth, Griffith adapted Norris’s naturalism in a straightforward manner
in A Corner in Wheat (1909). Evolving from his dismissal of pathologi-
cal individual perceptions of time in Vandover and the Brute, Norris had
attempted in The Octopus to produce a narrative in which no forces would
be reducible to individuals. Griffith’s narrative style thus drew on a natural-
ist vocabulary in at least two ways. First, through his formal innovations,
Griffith worked to develop new methods for managing film time. Second,
within the diegesis of the films discussed in this chapter, Griffith explores
the relationships between his characters and the narrative historical time
that contains them. This is not to say that Norris and Griffith produced the
same kinds of history. Whereas in Norris’s novels, little pathos emerges from
his conception of historical forces overrunning human agents, ­Griffith’s
relationship to naturalism was much more ambivalent. By 1915, Griffith’s
concern about the consequences of naturalist narration would bubble up
in formal ruptures within Birth, which retains the narrative style of The
Octopus but struggles to reconcile historical plot events that threaten to
overwhelm character agency.
Admittedly, Frank Norris takes his place among a network of influences
on Griffith’s work. As he developed his craft during his early years at the
Biograph Company, Griffith often drew from literary works, including The
Taming of the Shrew (1908), Dickens’s “The Cricket on the Hearth” (1909),
and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1911).6 However, among his Biograph shorts,
Griffith’s 1909 adaptation of Norris, A Corner in Wheat, is particularly
notable. The film received much critical attention at the time and is consid-
ered one of his Biograph masterworks (Gunning, D. W. Griffith 240, 245).7
Film scholars including Tom Gunning and Tom Leitch have given Norris his
due as a source for both plot events and style in A Corner in Wheat. In his
work on the film, Leitch usefully describes it as “an epic built on an epic”
(36), arguing that “Griffith’s film, in effect, completes Norris’s unfinished
trilogy by juxtaposing three groups of people: the producers of wheat from
66  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
The Octopus, the distributors of the wheat from The Pit, and the consumers
of the wheat from The Wolf” (36).8 But more than completing Norris’s tril-
ogy, with his 1909 adaptation Griffith began his own: A Corner in Wheat,
The Birth of a Nation, and Intolerance form a three-part experiment with
editing as a tool for exploring various forms of historical causality.

Time and Space Unified: National Epics and the Arts

It should not be surprising that Griffith borrowed from Norris in creating
a massive historical epic for the nation. Norris was an author whose work
strove to engage in nation building and who often did so in semimystical
turns that pitted the particularity of individuals against the universality of
a transcendent Americanness. Following Norris’s death, W. D. Howells’s
North American Review memoriam for his friend describes a country still
seeking its literature and offers Norris’s literary naturalism as the answer:

Fine work we have enough of and to spare in our fiction. No one can
say it is wanting in subtlety of motive and delicate grace of form. But
something still was lacking, something that was not merely the word
but the deed of commensurateness. Perhaps, after all, those who have
demanded Continentality of American literature had some reason in
their folly. One thinks so, when one considers work like Norris’s, and
finds it so vast in scope while so fine and beautiful in detail. Hugeness
was probably what those poor fellows were wanting when they asked
for Continentality; and from any fit response that has come from them
one might well fancy them dismayed and puzzled to have been given
greatness instead. (776)

For Howells, a work of literature becomes “commensurate” with America’s

greatness when the novelist balances a vastness of scope with a fineness of
detail. The metaphor with which Howells works is both geographical and
visual; seeming to recall his friend’s literary criticism, Howells posits that the
American author must be able to see the sweep of the continent as well as
the particularity of the region (something Norris the Californian might be
said to achieve). Both, Howells suggests, are necessary. The other authors
implied by the first sentence come up lacking, their writing too delicate, too
fine. Their work is too small, but more than this, it is also too individualistic,
a matter of personal grace and thus incapable of satisfying the demand for
continentality, however badly described the demand might be.9 In contrast to
the craftsman-like work of these authors, Norris’s writing has a factory-like
efficiency to it—retaining individual stations for detail, but large enough to
produce for a great nation. The Norris novel is capacious enough to serve
both needs; like Whitman, it would seem, his writing c­ ontains multitudes.
In addition to positioning Norris as a solution to the problem of a
national literature, albeit a too short-lived one, Howells tellingly describes
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  67
the problem with typical American fiction: “Norris’s two mature novels, one
personal and one social, imparted the assurance of an American fiction so
largely commensurate with American circumstance as to liberate it from the
casual and the occasional, in which it seemed lastingly trammeled” (769).
The inefficiency of the “casual” and “occasional” cries out for the system-
atization of American literature, a consistency of output that would ensure
regular progress in the national culture.
The matter of efficiency also plays out in Howells’s comparison of N­ orris
to Stephen Crane, an author whose life was equally brief but whose lit-
erature Howells finds slight compared to Norris’s. In particular, Howells
emphasizes a parallel between the novelists’ physical bodies and their oeu-
vres. For Howells, Norris’s body itself acts as a giant synthesis machine, the
premature end to which is a cultural tragedy:

The vitality of his work was so abundant, the pulse and health was so
full and strong in it. … The grief with which we accept such a death
as his is without the consolation that we feel when we can say of some
one that his life was a struggle, and that he is well out of the unequal
strife, as we might say when Stephen Crane died. The physical slight-
ness, if I may so suggest one characteristic of Crane’s vibrant achieve-
ment, reflected the delicacy of energies that could be put forth only in
nervous spurts, in impulses vivid and keen, but wanting in breadth and
bulk of effect. (770)

Braiding together discourses of bodily health, labor efficiency, and aesthetics,

the essay develops an image of Crane as an inefficient and correspondingly
unhealthy worker, which is reflected in what Howells, blurring bodies and
books, sees as a very slender output (770). Because of Crane’s struggle to
transform his delicate energies into literary form, Howells implies that we
might easily accept the early end of such a man at least as much because
of his inefficiency as his suffering, the two coming to look quite similar in
Howells’s account. In contrast, the robustness of Norris’s body and his prose
makes his death cruel, a too-soon end to a productive system.10
The nature of Norris’s productivity appears most clearly for Howells
in The Octopus. Describing the novel and its abundance of characters, he
echoes the protagonist Presley by noting the novel’s “Homeric largeness”,
which makes it as difficult to “choose any of [the characters] as the type,
as it is hard to choose any scene as the representative moment” (775).
­Proposing each of the novel’s numerous protagonists as possible represen-
tatives for the tale, Howells rejects each one: “Half a score of other figures,
from either camp, crowd upon the fancy to contest the supreme interest,
men figures, women figures” (775). Howells’s difficulty identifying one per-
son as an anchor for “supreme” interest is a testament to Norris’s successful
execution of the naturalist novel’s central innovation: the plot that develops
at the expense of character.
68  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
This type of plotting places the naturalist novel in the company of
­ merican historiography and historical fictions. The progress-without-people,
A
plot-over-character style that allowed Norris to address “continentality”
plays out in slightly different terms as an explanatory mechanism within
U.S. history writing. Years earlier, it was a vision of continentality that led
John O’Sullivan to coin the term “manifest destiny” in support of annex-
ing Texas, an idea that swept away regional, ethnic, and national difference
through the invocation of long time, America’s status as “the great nation of
futurity” (426). The achievement of O’Sullivan’s continentality inspired both
Woodrow Wilson’s history writing and Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893
work “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. Here, Turner
employs the temporal logic Norris would try out two years later in Vandover
and the Brute, and which appears full blown in The Octopus. Turner writes,

This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion

westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the
simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American
character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the
Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is
made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von
Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its
relation to westward expansion.

Norris’s naturalism shares with Turner the concepts “primitive” and “force”,
as well as an account of nonhuman agents that “furnish” these forces.
Perhaps most significant, naturalism and Progressive-era historiography share
formal investments, too. Turner previews Norris’s and Griffith’s concern
with true points of view: he corrects too-narrow histories, such as Professor
von Holst’s “so exclusive” a perspective on the Civil War, which fails to
see its relation to the larger drama of westward expansion and American
character. In other words, von Holst’s historiography might be said to lack
“continentality” or greatness.
But when Turner presented his thesis at the World’s Columbian Exposition,
continentality had been achieved, and so his presentation meditated on the
problem of what the future would look like after the closing of the west.
Where would O’Sullivan’s futurity go? If, as Turner argued, the “relation to
westward expansion” gave everything else its meaning, then the birth of U.S.
historiography appeared on the scene at the same moment that U.S. history
seemed to have arrived at its natural terminus.11 Faced with such a conclu-
sion, Turner’s history and Griffith’s and Norris’s fictions embarked on a new
project of writing history without end.
To do so Norris and Griffith each attempted to create contemporary
epics. For example, in an essay comparing naturalism to the more ancient
genre, Norris writes, “We have the same huge dramas, the same enormous
scenic effects, the same love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous,
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  69
and the tragic” (“Zola as Romantic Writer”, 1107–8). And in his 1916
pamphlet protesting censorship of The Birth of a Nation, “The Rise and
Fall of Free Speech in America”, Griffith notes, “Censorship demands
of picture makers a sugar-coated and false version of life’s truths” (27).
Griffith’s appeal for film’s accuracy immediately references epic propor-
tions (“life’s truths”) rather than the more mundane level of recent history
(Reconstruction’s truths). Griffith’s defense depends upon connecting his film
to literary epics: “Had the modern censors existed in past ages and followed
out their theories to a logical conclusion, there would have been written no
Iliad of Homer; there would not have been written for the glory of the human
race that grand cadence of uplift called the Bible; there would have been no
Goethe” (14). The comparison Griffith draws between himself, the Bible,
Homer, and Goethe reveals that he conceived of The Birth of a Nation as the
kind of creation myth referenced by the film’s title: an epic tale of the nation’s
origins.12 ­Griffith’s invocation of the epic not only justifies the violence and
sexually explicit material in his works, but also testifies to the sweeping vision
that required him to bring such sordid matters to light. Moreover, his under-
standing of the Bible as a cadence of uplift suggests the foreword momentum
of grand narratives that send humanity surging on into the future.
Frank Norris also references the epic form when describing his distinctive
artistic approach. Norris’s unfinished masterpiece was to be an “Epic of the
Wheat”, a three-book cycle that traced the wheat trade from ranches in
California, to speculators in Chicago, to a village in Europe dependent upon
the American wheat supply. As the first book in the trilogy, The Octopus
fictionalized a conflict between the Southern Pacific Railroad and settlers
in the San Joaquin Valley. In his retelling of this event, Norris, as Griffith
would do in his defense of historical revisionism, references that ancient
historian, Homer. Moments before the novel’s central climax, the focal char-
acter Presley looks out on the picnickers and is “delighted with it all. It was
Homeric, this feasting, this vast consuming of meat and bread and wine,
followed now by games of strength. An epic simplicity and directness, an
honest Anglo-Saxon mirth and innocence, commended it” (505). Presley’s
observations in this scene are echoed by Norris’s essays “The Frontier Gone
at Last” and “A Neglected Epic”, both published in 1902. In the essays, Norris
locates the subject matter for an American epic in the West and notes that
with the closing of the West American energies will have to expand abroad,
ultimately culminating in the formation of one global nation of “simple
humanity” (“Frontier” 1190).13 Evoking Turner, Norris implies that only
through the artistic transformation of specific and local historical events
will United States citizens be able to understand their place in relation to
America’s transcendent destiny.
This is where we see naturalism’s imperial flag fly. Picking up on the
divine mandate of manifest destiny, Griffith and Norris create narrative
systems that echo historiographical calls for large-scale progress over local
particularity. As Russ Castronovo has argued, “the conceptualization of the
70  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
globe depends on a historically specific aesthetic formalism exemplified by
­Norris’s fiction” (158). For Castronovo, the totalizing vision of Norris’s
fiction reveals the aesthetic nature of empire, which condenses “dispersed
geographies into a single unified form as the beauty of empire” (159). ­Writing
about Griffith in similar terms, Amy Kaplan suggests that his vision of the
national security depends upon “forg[ing] a whiteness capacious enough to
include immigrants” (164). Building from Castronovo’s reading of Norris
and Kaplan’s account of Griffith, we might say that the kind of naturalist
historiography at work at the beginning of the twentieth century unifies
not just space but also time, moving beyond particular national stories to
much more all-encompassing ones. For example, while the “Frontier Thesis”
foreclosed one future for Americans—settling the Wild West—Turner
suggests that national boundaries are mere “institutions”, temporary and
artificial. In contrast, the historian identifies a natural movement of time and
directionality unburdened by frivolous details like nation or date. Turner’s
“fluid”, “perennial” force necessities colonial expansion. Expansion abroad
is merely the next step in the American story that Turner created by linking
events together in an inevitable trajectory. By creating national narratives,
historians like Turner and Wilson produced causal links between the United
States’s past history of continental expansion and its present prosperity,
thereby rendering future actions as inevitabilities.14
Achieving such universality, whether in space or time, required eradicating
tricky particulars, a matter of some difficulty when fictionalizing historical
events.15 While historical residuum justified foreign expansion in Turner’s
case, the lasting influence of past events made it impossible for creators of
fictional narratives to cast their stories upon a blank slate. By retelling past
events, Griffith and Norris hoped to challenge their audiences’ perspective on
current events. For Griffith, problematic current events included increasing civil
and political rights for blacks and declining economic conditions for white
southerners. For Norris, troublesome present conditions consisted of the
increasing incorporation of American industry and the growth of monopoly
capitalism that came at the expense of an authentic Western culture.16 From
the point of view of storytellers like Norris and Griffith, then, the problem
with historiography is that it suggests the necessity of current affairs: history
causes the present. And more problematically, once the status quo becomes
necessary, present conditions begin to seem supported by a kind of moral
authority: the past justifies the present. Even as their renarrations of past
events served to further emphasize the inevitability of present conditions,
Griffith and Norris paradoxically embraced narrative as a means for chang-
ing their audiences’ feelings about history.17
The answer to this dilemma was the creation of empire in space and time.
Pairing the paradoxical movements of cycles and progress as well as render-
ing historical events into mere incidents, Turner, Griffith, and Norris project
Anglo-Saxon Americans into the future—a future unbounded by national
borders. The cinema may have been particularly ripe for such projects given
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  71
its claims to universality, which very quickly transformed the universal into
the American.18 As Turner does here, Griffith imagines the Civil War as minor
in the long view. In contrast, The Octopus takes a significantly more minor
event—the Mussel Slough Tragedy—and narrates it in the terms Turner calls
for, pressing incidents to distill drops of “perennial rebirth”.

Populism Without People: The Octopus’s

Anti-Movement Characterization
For Norris, the historical novel offered a formal opportunity to solve the
problem of wrong-headed, individualistic perspectives on events that he had
earlier pinpointed in Vandover and the Brute. The particular event he chose
was a good test case—a seemingly local incident with at least national impli-
cations. On May 11, 1880, a shootout took place between representatives
of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the homesteaders who had been cul-
tivating railroad land in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The railroad had
advertised cheap land to encourage settlement in the area, promising the
settlers would be able to buy the land they had improved for the reasonable
price of $2.50 an acre. The people came, built homes, worked the land, and
raised their families in the valley. But the railroad did not keep its initial
promise; when the homesteaders asked to purchase the land in which they
had invested a great deal of time, money, and labor, they learned that they
were no longer able to afford it. The railroad had revalued the land at a new
price of $35 an acre. Further complicating matters, although the Southern
Pacific owned the land in the Mussel Slough region, it had decided to build
the railroad in a different area together, thus stranding the homesteaders
who had settled the area under the impression they would be located along-
side a major transportation route. As the homesteaders became increasingly
aware of changes to their original agreement with Southern Pacific, tem-
pers reached dangerous levels. On a placid spring day, many of the settlers
were enjoying a picnic when news arrived that railroad men were coming
to evict them. Having suffered many injustices at the hands of the railroad,
the homesteaders formed a posse to confront the railroad men. During the
confrontation, shots broke out, killing five men.19
The event has since sunk into relative obscurity, but the shootout at
Mussel Slough gained notoriety in the early 1900s, decades after the event’s
occurrence. It was at this time that the incident became known as the
“Mussel Slough Tragedy”. The renaming was largely the work of antimonop-
oly journalists like Ambrose Bierce and W. C. Morrow, who used Mussel
Slough as their rallying cry.20 The journalists who coined the name simul-
taneously recounted and produced the incident, imbuing it with meaning
and significance through their interpretations. For these writers, narration
allowed them to press past events into the service of contemporary political
ends, but Frank Norris’s 1901 fictionalization of the Mussel Slough Tragedy
maintains a different relationship to historical narratives altogether.
72  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Whereas writers such as Bierce used the incident to spur social action, for
Norris the incident became an opportunity to reflect on the way mass move-
ments obscure the impotence of the individuals who make them up. As a
naturalist, and as he does in Vandover, Norris treats time as a natural force,
but in his historical novel The Octopus, Norris confronts groups of people
whose forcelike behavior threatens his claims for the comparative insig-
nificance of individual human lives. The Mussel Slough shootout focuses
the central issue Norris explores in The Octopus: how to ­understand the
­relationship of the mob, masses, or movement (all interchangeable in this
novel) to forces; or, put in novelistic terms, how to understand the relation-
ship between character and plotting in a naturalist novel. In his narrative’s
conclusion, Norris offers his reader this reassurance: “Falseness dies; injus-
tice and oppression in the end of everything vanish and fade away. … The
larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the
Truth that will, in the end, prevail” (651–2). With these last words, N ­ orris
renders the individual acts of the ranchers and the railroad men mere “motes
in the sunshine” (651), relatively meaningless in the context of the “Truth”
that will finally “prevail”. If a view of men as “motes in the sunshine” is
meant to be a comforting reflection on the irrelevance of individual trage-
dies in the face of determinist forces that operate toward an ultimate and
transcendent purpose, then histories that privilege political or social move-
ments would seem to subvert Norris’s reassuring historical determinism. The
historical “movement” represents a problem for Norris because movements
give the impression of humans acting like forces in the naturalist sense, thus
undermining naturalist claims about transhistorical and universal progress.
Because Norris posits a universe in which transcendent forces overcome
human weakness and greed, collective political action cannot be represented
as historically powerful; if forces are constituted by humans, then they cannot
be transcendent at all.21
The anxiety around the problem of collectives can be seen in a grotesque
description early in the novel. Moments before the Pacific and Southwestern
(P. & S. W.) Railroad’s machine disrupts Presley’s garden idyll, the poet stands
on a hillside watching Vanamee’s flock graze. While Leo Marx identifies
the violent arrival of the train as the moment when the industrial disrupts the
pastoral (343–4), Norris’s peculiar description of the sheep suggests some-
thing quite different:

Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of grey, rounded backs, all

exactly alike, huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It
was no longer an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass—a compact,
solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a thick-pressed
growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth.
From it there arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the
sound of a very different surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy
with the warm, ammoniacal odour of the thousands of ­crowding ­bodies.
(The Octopus 31)
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  73
The description of the sheep is strangely at odds with the pastoral tradition
Marx reads into the scene.22 The sheep are smelly and frightened, the air is
dirty and suffocating, and the fauna in this scene seem to be at war with the
earth itself. Although Presley witnesses this scene, the descriptive passage
comes from the third-person narrator’s perspective, not the poet’s. The par-
ticular strangeness of this description derives from the ­unsuitability of these
adjectives for the pastoral tradition they ostensibly depict. The words seem
more appropriate to a setting radically opposed to the pastoral: the industrial
cityscape. Norris’s narration moves from describing the sheep as “huddled,
close-packed, and alive” to the seemingly horrific declaratory remark “it was
a mass”. Echoing the phraseology of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”
(1883) soon to be enshrined inside the base of the Statue of Liberty—“Your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—this passage tracks a traumatic
conversion from an “aggregate” of individual identities to an undifferenti-
ated mass. Norris pursues this analogy, referencing xenophobic fears about
America becoming a Babel of foreign languages and calling to mind muck-
raking exposés of stinking tenement slums full of unknowable miasmas.23
However, the primary horror in this extended metaphor is not the sheep’s
immigrant-ness, but their mass-ness. After insisting that the sheep are no
longer an “aggregate” of discernible individuals, Norris quickly equates this
condition with that of mushroom growth, which, although perhaps lacking
neat boundaries or shape, does consist of discernible mushrooms. Through-
out the passage, Norris moves back and forth between describing the sheep
as a mass and as a collective of individuals. The final sentence of the para-
graph hints at Norris’s concerns about the problematic relationship between
historical movements comprised of people and the individual people them-
selves, since the narrator ends the passage by converting the sheep back
into “thousands of crowding bodies”, rather than the amorphous mass. The
mass, like the corporation, is a representational problem for Norris because
it is something at once whole and yet comprised of many individual entities.
It is, akin to what Seltzer has read as the semen-like mess in Annixter’s bed,
a strange substance.24
Such ontological confusion between individual agents and entities that
act agentially has spurred many innovative readings of the novel. When the
poet Presley first meets Shelgrim, the P. & S. W. Railroad president, it appears
that the novel’s central concern is with corporate responsibility and how cor-
porate persons might be held accountable for their actions.25 Mark Seltzer
and Walter Benn Michaels have each produced persuasive accounts of The
Octopus as Norris’s take on the failure of populism and the rise of the corpo-
ration, focusing on the Presley–Shelgrim conversation as pedagogical instruc-
tion on Norris’s conception of force. Seltzer argues that Norris “invokes
a traditional ‘agrarianist’ opposition of producer and speculator” (26), but
then transforms this problem into a problem of production and generation,
in which Norris minimizes the role of women in biological reproduction and
emphasizes the importance of a male managerial class (28). Michaels mean-
while argues that the novel casts the corporation as an entity that replaces
74  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
the human, explaining that in The Octopus, “The scandal of the corporation,
then, is not that it is a new kind of man; the scandal is that it is the old kind”
(Gold Standard 206). This vein of criticism identifies corporate personhood
as a model for abstracting authority to a blameless and unaccountable collec-
tive that exercises agency in ways that individual people never can.
The evidence for such claims is clear in Shelgrim’s diatribe on natural
progress. When Presley attempts to form an accusation against the man
behind the railroad company that has bankrupted his friends, Shelgrim
interrupts and lays out his theory of force:

Believe this, young man … that Railroads build themselves. Where

there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick,
does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count
for? Does he supply the force? What do I count for? Do I build the
railroad? You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of
Wheat and Railroads, not with men. There is the Wheat, the supply. It
must be carried to feed the People. There is the Demand. The Wheat
is one force, the Railroad another, and there is the law that governs
them—supply and demand. Men have only little to do with the whole
business.
(Norris, The Octopus 575–6; emphasis added)

Readings of this passage tend to take Shelgrim’s account of forces as Norris’s

own. Wood argues, for example, that “Norris is able to posit economic ‘law’
as natural” (123), and Seltzer explains that Shelgrim’s explanation “concisely
enunciates what Norris ends by endorsing as the ‘larger view’” (26).
While inhuman collective persons do replace actual persons in this
novel, including both individual laborers and labor movements, the afore-
mentioned claims might be put even more expansively. By obscuring the
fact that both supply and demand depend upon human masses, ­Shelgrim’s
account merges the two kinds of forces that Norris’s novel works to
­separate. While the wheat may not depend upon Magnus Derrick, it seems
dubious that without people there would be no railroad. Rather, Shelgrim’s
excuses are an object lesson in the problem of treating human energies as
natural forces. Reading against the grain of Shelgrim’s excuses, it’s clear
the railroad is more tied to the masses than the wheat is, specifically the
kind of masses represented by the problematic amalgam of sheep. Produced
by human labor (particularly immigrant labor) and symbolizing westward
expansion and progress, the railroad occupies an embattled relationship
to the populations who “grow” it. These masses of humanity (labor and
immigrant) are also the kinds of masses likely to organize and to represent
a political force—a movement. Initially, Norris’s populist impulse would
seem at odds with what I am describing as his representational attack on the
power of people to join together and fight monopoly capital. But because in
social movements people begin to look like they are capable of functioning
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  75
like forces, anything that might be termed a social or historical movement
(what Michaels might call “a new kind of man”) produces a representa-
tional problem for Norris because he wants to present historical incidents
as circumscribed by forces that transcend individual human acts.26 Norris’s
ultimate assurance that the monopoly will not triumph depends upon a nat-
uralist worldview in which human actions can only be minor in comparison
to the forceful progression of time.
Using the example of the Rancher’s League, Norris shows forceful
organizations of men to be fundamentally incoherent as a mass, and he
paradoxically insists upon the ultimate solitariness and smallness of any
persons amalgamated within a movement.27 For example, at the end of the
novel, through Presley, Norris makes a ponderous claim: “But the Wheat
remained. Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty world force, that
nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human
swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves” (The
Octopus 651; emphasis original). Here Norris asserts the force of the nat-
ural (the wheat) over the “human swarm”, a description that again implies
both the disarray and distastefulness of individuals gathered en masse.
To write a novel that treats historical movement as importantly discon-
nected from historical movements requires estranging characters from plot
events, which Norris does in his fictionalization of the shootout. Like the
original event, Norris’s fictionalized narration of the Mussel Slough Trag-
edy also hinges upon a misunderstanding. The scene begins with two pri-
mary characters, Annixter and Hilma, talking. The narration’s movement
from Annixter and Hilma to the mass of people transforms the sounds
in the scene from dialogue to less and less coherent utterances. When
news of the railroad men’s approach reaches the picnicking farmers, “the
multitude rose to its feet. Men and women looked at each other speechless,
or broke forth into inarticulate exclamations. A strange, unfamiliar mur-
mur took the place of the tumultuous gaiety of the previous moments. A
sense of dread, of confusion, of impending terror weighed heavily in the air.
What was now to happen?” (Norris, The Octopus 507; emphasis added).
Spoken by the narrator, the question’s appearance after a description of
the multitude’s mental state might be attributable to the group in the form
of free indirect discourse, but because it also comes from the omniscient
narrator, and because Norris has gone to pains to emphasize the nonver-
bal quality of the multitude’s utterances, it can stand as a direct address
to the reader who, knowing the history of the event, knows the fate of the
uneasy multitude and can answer the question. While the novel’s individual-
ized characters and the multitude will experience the same history, the differ-
ence in Norris’s characterization of the two groups is remarkable: Annixter
decides to take action, but the multitude is incapable of reflection on either
the past or the future. Like Vandover, the masses become problematically
not human, as represented by the conversion from picnickers to multitude.
Indeed, the description here echoes the response of the mass of sheep to the
76  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
oncoming train, “a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate” (14). But here,
unlike in Vandover, the conversion of people into a nonhuman mass is full
of historical import, as the picnickers become something like a force as
­Shelgrim describes it—neither agential nor responsible. The emergence of
the mass culminates in the shootout itself. As the railroad’s representatives
and the ranchers face off, a horse panics and knocks one of the ranchers to
the ground: “The animal recoiled sharply, and, striking against Garnett,
threw him to the ground. Delaney’s horse stood between the buggy and
the Leaguers gathered on the road in front of the ditch; the incident, indis-
tinctly seen by them, was misinterpreted” (521). The act of group interpre-
tation shifts responsibility from an individual who misreads an action to a
group’s failure of perception. And a group’s failure to understand events,
Norris suggests, has dire consequences. Although the German immigrant,
Hooven, fires the first shot—not something known in the case of the actual
Mussel Slough incident—the shooting that follows is not attributable to
any individual:

Instantly the revolvers and rifles seemed to go off of themselves. Both

sides, deputies and Leaguers, opened fire simultaneously. At first, it
was nothing but a confused roar of explosions; then the roar lapsed to
an irregular, quick succession of reports, shot leaping after shot; then a
moment’s silence, and, last of all, regular as clock-ticks, three shots at
exact intervals. Then stillness. (521)

The passage moves from subjective perception (“the rifles seemed”) to objec-
tive observation (“three shots at exact intervals”). The change in ­narration
and the change in narrative authority that occurs with the move from
­subjective “seeming” to incontrovertible reporting of fact reveals Norris’s
discomfort with explaining mob motivation and significantly greater ease
with reporting the consequences of mob action.28 Additionally, by describ-
ing the shots like the chiming of a clock, reporting at “exact intervals”,
Norris dissociates the shootout from the human agents and naturalizes the
shooting as objective data.
The Octopus’s focus on the “people” trying to form a historically sig-
nificant collective highlights what for naturalists is problematic about the
form of the novel: its ties to character. In response to the problem of “the
people”, Norris’s novels progress from tales of individuals overcome by
forces beyond their control in Vandover and the Brute and McTeague
to representations of large groups of people in the “Epic of the Wheat”.
Norris’s novelistic trajectory thus reveals a shift away from treating indi-
vidual characters toward a focus on the forces that drive history.29 In
spite of the increasing incorporation and organization at the turn of the
century, The Octopus insists upon the individual as the relevant unit for
understanding human agency in order to corroborate the novel’s deter-
minist account of the passage of time as force. In other words, despite his
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  77
ambivalence toward literary fiction’s emphasis on individual characters,
Norris personalizes historical movements in order to subject them to his
naturalist system of narration—a system Griffith would pick up when he
adapted Norris.

Motes, Not Men: Parallel Editing in A Corner in

Wheat and The Octopus
Understanding naturalism’s commitment to progress without people, a
narrative style that presents individual perspectives on history in order to
dismiss them later, sheds light on D. W. Griffith’s idiosyncratic and influ-
ential film style, which could be accused of both fetishistic sentimentality
and incoherent grandiosity, often within the same film. Near the end of The
Octopus, Norris expresses his perspective through a particularly innovative
narrative technique, one Griffith would replicate in film eight years later.
By this point, the tragedy determined by the historical record has already
occurred, and it would appear that all that remains for narrative closure is
a display of the shootout’s far-reaching consequences. And at first glance,
the novel’s last chapters seem to serve that purpose: Norris’s narrative cuts
back and forth between two scenes, one a grotesque banquet sequence in
which the railroad magnate and his friends and family feast upon pheas-
ants, shaved ices, and fresh asparagus, and the other a scene in which the
widowed Mrs. Hooven and her young daughter wander the streets in des-
perate hunger. The back-and-forth movement between locales in the San
Francisco sequence makes two gestures. The first is an obvious comparison
of haves and have-nots; the second diminishes the impact of the first as the
narration shifts between scenes and displaces blame from the level of the
individual to the level of condition, which in The Octopus is attributable to
nonhuman force.
Cutting between these two scenes formally expresses the relationship
between individuals and historical progress.30 By shifting rapidly back and
forth, Norris highlights his own narrative intervention, positioning natu-
ralist narration as a reflection of the temporal progress that encompasses
and necessitates the fates of both individuals.31 When Presley, who has been
invited to the dinner, reacts with the anger associated with anarchist and
socialist characters in the novel, the narrative’s switch to Mrs. Hooven’s
death scene interrupts his speech about an uprising of “the people”—an
ideological cut that converts “People” to Mrs. Hooven: “At ten o’clock
Mrs. Hooven fell” (Norris, The Octopus 608–9). Suspending Presley’s
speech, the narration doubly undermines character agency; first, it inter-
rupts the protagonist as he invokes the People as historical force, and then
it highlights the preposterousness of human agency in the face of force by
cutting back to the banquet scene in time for the following inanity: “‘These
stuffed artichokes are delicious, Mrs. Gerard’, murmured young Lambert,
wiping his lips with a corner of his napkin” (611).
78  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Presenting this contrast, Norris experiments with pacing and the visual
display of text as though anticipating the innovative styling of his later
adapter.32 The chapter uses dashes to mark the shifts between scenes, and
as the chapter moves toward its terrible conclusion the dashes become more
frequent, with less and less text between them, speeding the reader toward
the final two-sentence passage announcing Mrs. Hooven’s death:

Just before the ladies left the table, young Lambert raised his glass of
Madeira. Turning towards the wife of the Railroad King, he said:
“My best compliments for a delightful dinner”.
—————
The Doctor who had been bending over Mrs. Hooven, rose.
“It’s no use”, he said; “she has been dead some time—exhaustion
from starvation”.
(The Octopus 613)

Although the cutting implicates the P. & S. W. president, his excess is not
directly responsible for Mrs. Hooven’s eventual death. Their connection,
based on their relative positions as “motes in the sunshine” (Norris, The
Octopus 651), is circumstantial, not causal.33 The contrast Norris develops
by cutting between the banquet and Mrs. Hooven’s death may provoke a
sympathetic or angry response, but it also signifies that the characters are
acting in a time scheme beyond their control and that such personalized and
affective responses are useless. Like Shelgrim, the narration indicates that
we cannot blame railroad men such as Shelgrim. The Octopus’s ending is
thus characteristically naturalist in its stance on narrative closure: it doesn’t
provide meaningful closure at the level of character (here, the two narrative
threads don’t come directly together and any interpersonal conflict remains
unresolved). Instead, resolution occurs at the narrator’s level, as the narra-
tion provides a distanced perspective that holds both storylines in view—the
kind of distant perspective, for example, that would allow historians to see
the Civil War as a mere incident in ongoing national progress.
For Norris, the form of the novel is both problem and solution. The nov-
el’s ties to character agency threaten to undermine Norris’s representations
of time as a causal force, but its ties to plotting allow him to write a histor-
ical narrative that renders character agency moot. In other words, despite
his ambivalence towards fiction’s emphasis on individual characters (as seen
in Vandover), Norris personalizes historical movements in order to subject
them to his naturalist system of narration. Moving from the human and spe-
cific to the forceful and circumstantial, his comparative long view displaces
agency, positioning naturalism as the literary movement most appropriate
to tracking historical progress while also denying the relevance of individ-
uals to that progress. Thus while the narration suggests the irrelevance of
the participants in events, it also suggests the necessity of an observer to
interpret historical events in terms of force.
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  79
The connection between Norris and Griffith reveals that parallel editing
was a formal strategy for expressing the relationship between individual
agents and time’s inexorable flow. Creating a visual version of inhuman nar-
ration, A Corner in Wheat follows the lead of The Octopus’s San Francisco
scenes. Griffith increases the speed of his ideological editing after a mad
rush of investors in the speculation pit drive up the price of wheat, making
the Wheat King’s fortune. The film cuts back and forth between a scene
that portrays a lavish feast in the home of the Wheat King, marked by the
intertitle “The Gold of the Wheat”, and a scene labeled “The Chaff of the
Wheat” that depicts bedraggled families standing in line to buy overpriced
bread. Unlike crosscutting used to establish spatial or temporal relationships
between two locations, cuts between these two scenes form a comparison
in the service of social commentary (Gunning, D. W. Griffith 241).34 This is
parallel editing in its most literal sense, or, to use Gunning’s term, “editorial”
narration. A sign in the bakery reads, “Owing to the advance in the price
of flour the usual 5 cent loaf will be 10 cents” (Figure 2.2). After showing a
woman and little girl being turned away from the counter, unable to afford
bread at its new price, Griffith cuts to the Wheat King’s opulent home,
where his guests are dancing. He cuts back to the store, where a line of hun-
gry workers stand frozen in tableaux; then back to the banquet, from which
the sated guests are departing; and then to the ranch where the woman and
child await the return of the sowers, who arrive empty-handed.

Figure 2.2  Unable to afford bread at its new price in A Corner in Wheat.
80  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Critics since Eisenstein have argued that Griffith represents structural
problems as individual ones. Though they rightly acknowledge Griffith’s
tendency to personalize history, their critiques do not fully account for
Griffith’s work in A Corner in Wheat, the film that most clearly expresses
his reason for doing so.35 Eisenstein’s account of Griffith’s “slightly senti-
mental humanism” derives from his reading of Dickens and the Victorian
novel as Griffith’s primary influences (233). However, reading Griffith into
the ­tradition of American naturalism accounts for the editing in A Corner
in Wheat and gives reason for his bourgeois personalization of history in
The Birth of a Nation as a response to the naturalist forms of narration
that he found simultaneously appealing and distressing. Furthermore, while
it seems plausible that Griffith produces an account of a widespread eco-
nomic practice as an individual wrong, assertions that Griffith promotes an
interpersonal resolution seem to ignore the film’s ending, which includes a
scene of the Wheat King drowning in an unrelenting stream of the grain.36
As Gunning notes, A Corner in Wheat is one of Griffith’s “Biograph mas-
terworks”, “which he never surpassed in sophistication of construction and
cohesion between social message and filmic form” (D. W. Griffith 240). Part
of this sophistication depends upon Griffith not limiting himself to the inter-
personal familial drama that forms the center of so many of his other films.
Unlike editing that draws narrative threads into satisfying closure,
Griffith’s parallel editing maintains the separation between his two sets of
human subjects—much like Norris’s comparative narrative movement in
The Octopus. Following the aforementioned parallel editing sequence,
Griffith sets in motion a second sequence that provides the film’s resolution.
Again, the bakery where “the high price cuts down on the bread fund” pro-
vides one location; the grain elevator where the Wheat King is giving a tour
to society ladies forms the second. After the Wheat King sends the rest of
his tour on, he raises his fist heavenward in celebration of his earnings, steps
backward, and, losing his balance, tumbles into the grain tank. He lands
on the lower left side, where the outpouring of grain streaming in from the
upper right corner of the elevator begins to choke him. Griffith cuts back
to the bakery, where in an ironic inverse the hungry farm workers crowd
the store demanding bread—which, like the wheat spilling onto the Wheat
King, appears in the upper right corner of the frame. As chaos breaks out in
the bakery, policemen intervene, beating the rioting customers and shooting
into the crowd (Figure 2.3). As if in a correction to man’s law, Griffith cuts
back to the elevator in time to show the Wheat King completely covered
by the grain (Figure 2.4). The juxtaposition between these scenes sug-
gests that only the law of man would allow for human starvation, whereas
the law of nature, in the form of an ongoing torrent of wheat, progresses
steadily onward, restoring all imbalances.
Additionally, Griffith’s staging allows him to engage visually with Norris’s
anti-individualist narrative style. When Norris makes his comparative ges-
ture, he changes the characters upon whom his novel focuses—showing the
Figure 2.3  Chaos breaks out in the bakery in A Corner in Wheat.

Figure 2.4  The Wheat King completely covered by grain in A Corner in Wheat.
82  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
effects of monopoly on Mrs. Hooven, who has played a relatively minor
role in the novel to this point, and introducing a new railroad representative
(the P. & S. W. vice president), rather than continuing with characters with
whom the reader is familiar, like Shelgrim or Behrman. By playing out the
tragedy through minor characters, Norris both restricts sympathy and fur-
ther underlines the insignificance of individual agents. Coming in at fifteen
minutes, Griffith’s film is much smaller in scale than Norris’s novel, and it
would be difficult for the filmmaker to balance both principles and minor
characters, but he echoes the distancing techniques that Norris establishes
by keeping his characters nameless and restricting the actors’ movement to
friezes or dejected postures that hide their faces.37
As in The Octopus, the comfort the film offers its viewers is not reconcil-
iation among characters, but an account of a metaphysical time scheme that
orders the world and that takes place beyond the power of human agents.
Griffith ends A Corner in Wheat with a shot reminiscent of The Octopus’s
final scene: a man standing in a field of wheat, overwhelmed by its vastness.
While the similarity between Norris’s and Griffith’s work is perhaps most
obvious in the plot events and the parallelism both employ, the image of
man dwarfed by nature ties Griffith’s storytelling to Norris’s imperative to
take “the larger view” (The Octopus 651). Griffith answers this call through
the staging of many of his scenes, which seem painterly and static (qualities
audiences would see again in Birth’s facsimiles), as well as a visual emphasis
on circularity and repetition.38 The circular movement of the sowers, the
almost archaic nature of their labor, and the vastness of the landscape com-
bine to produce a feeling of timelessness (Figure 2.5). In contrast, the scene
that introduces the wheat pit, where traders speculate on the price of wheat,
is a frame crowded with bodies. Unlike the image of the sowers, the people
in this scene move frenetically; a speculator who has fallen victim to a ner-
vous spell or heart attack stumbles to the front of the crowded frame, claws
desperately to open his shirt, and is carried from the scene (Figure 2.6). The
feverish unnaturalness in the speculators’ behavior echoes the revved-up
pace of the historical moment.39
In these indoor scenes, Griffith uses significantly more claustropho-
bic framing than in the exteriors. In addition to crowding the banquet,
bakery, and stock market scenes with teeming humanity, his camera sits
closer to his subjects, leaving uncomfortably little room in the frame;
scant space appears between the tops of the characters’ heads or the soles
of their feet and the edges of the shot. In comparison, the farming scenes
offer more expansive views. This difference in framing corresponds visu-
ally to the narrowness of human vision, a narrowness that might allow
the speculators to imagine that they could control and manipulate nature;
in the banqueting scene, such narrowness indicates the inability of the
wealthy to see outside themselves and realize their feast depends on
­others’ famine.
By bookending the film with scenes of sowers in the field, Griffith further
emphasizes that cycles of nature, growth, and harvest will continue whether
Figure 2.5 Sowers, labor, and landscape produce a sense of timelessness in
A Corner in Wheat.

Figure 2.6  Frantic speculation in the crowded wheat pit in A Corner in Wheat.
84  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
captains of industry interfere or not. Indeed, the violent killing of the human
Wheat King by the nature he would master provides a stark lesson in the
difference between human and natural time: while the “corners” in wheat
speculators such as the Wheat King traded in abstracted wheat into time,
in Griffith’s film, the materiality of natural time returns with a vengeance.40
Moreover, the Wheat King’s death by wheat flow is quite similar to the man’s
death in “To Build a Fire”: man’s life cycle is finite and nature’s is infinite.
When the Wheat King falls into the wheat pit, his problem is less a matter
of this particular tumble, and more one of efficiency and duration. On the
one hand, the Wheat King is not an efficient enough eater to manage all the
grain, and on the other, he isn’t given enough time to eat all the wheat that
comes flooding in. Here, human inefficiency kills. Whereas the Wheat King
might live if he could eat fast enough, nature has all the time in the world.41
Though natural time gets the upper hand here, the final vision of the
wheat that goes on is less triumphal in Griffith than in Norris. It was not
until The Birth of a Nation that the director would sound the call of empire
as a solution to the problems of historical and individual particularity.
Griffith’s historical effort in Birth is separated from his engagement with
Frank Norris by some six years. During this time, Griffith would polish his
narrative techniques and learn to better exploit his actors, particularly his
actresses, to achieve the melodramatic and sentimental effects for which he
became known. If A Corner in Wheat, like The Octopus, maintains a nar-
rative focus on forces rather than persons, The Birth of a Nation flips this
focus to see if a naturalist narrative focus on persons and not forces could
be made possible through a Christianization of history. In Birth, Griffith
maintains the sense of the driving temporal determinism established in Norris’s
historical writing and redresses Norris’s dismissal of character agency using
a containment strategy, one that simultaneously separated his historical
facsimiles from the ongoing fictional narratives of the Stoneman and
­Cameron families and encompassed both narratives within the larger frame
of metaphysical progress. Experimenting with parallel editing and crosscut-
ting allowed Griffith to juxtapose different forms of historical causality as
he recast naturalism’s investment in temporal progress in humanist terms.

Griffith and History: The Birth of a Narrative

Whereas Norris describes men as motes whose actions have little impact on
events, Griffith’s sense of the relationship between individuals and determin-
ist time is less straightforward. Though retaining techniques developed from
Griffith’s work with Norris, The Birth of a Nation adapts another histori-
cal novel, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), a tale describing a white
America divided in the wake of the Civil War. The novel casts the Klan as the
historical movement responsible for reuniting and revivifying the national
body, protecting whites from newly emancipated African-Americans.42
Though The Clansman provided the narrative source material and many of
the characters for Griffith’s film, some key distinctions differentiate the two.
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  85
First, there is the matter of titles. Griffith did not use Dixon’s title; instead,
by calling his film The Birth of a Nation, he announced the historical signif-
icance of his film as a declaration of national origins. Dixon, on the other
hand, subtitled his novel An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, thus
invoking his novel’s generic relationship to the works of novelists including
Walter Scott and James Fennimore Cooper.
Dixon and Griffith also differed in their efforts to validate their works’
historical accuracy. Though in his “To the Reader”, Dixon claims, “I have
sought to preserve in this romance both the letter and the spirit of this
remarkable period … without taking a liberty with any essential historic
fact” (1–2), this is a far cry from Griffith’s promotion of his film as an
­objective visual history. Nor did Dixon trouble himself, as Griffith went
to great lengths to do, with further claims to his novel’s historical accu-
racy. Once establishing his adherence to the “letter and the spirit” of the
period, Dixon launches into his narrative and no longer troubles himself
with historical documentation. Dixon’s invocation of the romance tradition
licenses him to takes liberties with historical figures and events, as when he
imagines an extended conversation between Lincoln and Mrs. Cameron in
which Lincoln explains that he recognizes her as a Southerner by her “easy,
kindly way” (31). Another scene depicts a conversation during which the
president tells Stoneman, “I love the South!” (54). As Ben Cameron does
at the ­novel’s end, Dixon acts as a “revolutionist” by changing the course
of history such that “the South [is] redeemed from shame” (374). But in
large measure, the progressive time of history presents few representational
problems for Dixon’s romance of the South because it remains outside the
narrative. Like Scott’s Ivanhoe, Dixon’s history may be said to invoke what
Frederic Jameson calls “heterogeneous historical perspectives” and to ignore
what Jameson describes as the realist novel’s “reality principle” (104). In
comparison, historical happenings and figures have a much murkier rela-
tionship to the events of Birth’s overtly fictional narrative.
In The Birth of a Nation Griffith attempted to represent Dixon’s romance
as fact, and in so doing sought to manage the South’s loss by bringing exter-
nal historical time into the film’s narrative timeframe. In his research into the
source material of the film, Jeffrey Martin suggests that Griffith drew more
directly from Dixon’s little-known theatrical adaptation of The Clansman
than from the novel, arguing that when viewed through the lens of Dixon’s
play, Griffith’s film appears much less innovative than traditionally believed
(87). However, Martin also notes various differences between this possible
source text and Birth, one of them being Griffith’s inclusion of historical
tableaux. Whether Birth was an adaptation of Dixon’s play or novel, and
questions of Griffith’s originality aside, the fact remains that unlike Dixon,
Griffith felt compelled to repeatedly punctuate his narrative with references
to its historicity. In his effort to create new perspectives on the historical
events of the Civil War, Griffith had to grapple with an ineluctable empiricist
history that included the facts of the South’s secession, eventual loss of the
war, and following economic impoverishment.
86  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
While Presley’s actions in The Octopus—such as his attempt to firebomb
Behrman’s house—are ineffectual, in The Birth of a Nation, Ben Cameron
does change history within the diegesis of the film’s narrative by gathering
up Southerners to form the Klan. However, such moments of characters
influencing plot events are in tension with Griffith’s attempt to establish the
facticity of his film through references to external historical events. Given
authority by the intertitles and the distance and composition of the shots,
the historical facsimiles take the audience out of the storyline and remind
them of the historical events surrounding Griffith’s fictionalized charac-
ters.43 Contrasting the suspenseful and future-directed temporal movement
in the rapid crosscutting of the fictional Stoneman–Cameron narrative, the
historical facsimiles produce a kind of temporal stasis.44
Included to establish the film’s status as history, the facsimiles create
formal ruptures in the film’s narrative. If, as film theorist Christian Metz
suggests, “[t]raditional narratives, with their definite conclusions, are
closed sequences of closed events” (Film Language 24), then the facsimi-
les threaten to rip open Griffith’s closed diegetic world through their ref-
erence to ­foreclosed historical incidents. The historical facsimiles include
reproductions of Ford’s Theater, the Oval Office, and the Appomattox
­
Courthouse. Griffith painstakingly establishes the authenticity of the fac-
similes, noting their historicity and accuracy with intertitles that cite written
histories, such as Wilson’s History of the American People; the facsimiles
thereby position Griffith’s work among other culturally validated historical
texts. Nonetheless, the historical facsimiles create a formal problem for the
film; as Mimi White explains, “because of their prominence and familiarity,
these scenes are likely to be recognized as constructions, threatening the
film’s proper unity” (217). Taken by itself, the Stoneman–Cameron narrative
proceeds with relative fluidity and works toward a consistent tonal develop-
ment.45 But when interspersed with the historical facsimiles, the narrative
loses some of its forward momentum.
In addition to the different narrative style of the facsimiles, their visual
style also distinguished them from the film’s overtly fictional scenes: Griffith
presents them in long shot, with proscenium staging and limited camera
movement. By contrast, the scenes with Elsie Stoneman showcase Griffith’s
mastery of scene dissection, offering close-ups on her face, her hands, and
the men who gaze at her from the background. Furthermore, the acting
styles vary greatly between the narrative scenes and the historical scenes.
In the former, the acting is expressive—borderline histrionic in the cases of
Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish.46 In the latter, the actors playing Lincoln and
his Cabinet barely move, and Griffith provides no close-ups through which
to determine their facial expressions or emotional state. It seems not too far
a stretch to say that while the characters in the narrative scenes are almost
entirely defined by their emotional states, the characters in the historical
scenes appear as affective ciphers. Silva puts this slightly differently, writ-
ing, “Griffith’s researched scenes frequently lack the impact of some of the
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  87
more spontaneous scenes” (13). It would seem that even as the film attempts
to produce a seamless account of North–South reconciliation, its historical
source material threatens to unravel the narrative at every turn.
Beyond their stylistic difference from other scenes in the film, the
­facsimiles refer back to an earlier moment in film history, as though G­ riffith
was attempting to access national history by way of cinematic history.
Rather than following in the style of the Stoneman–Cameron narrative, the
facsimiles look a great deal like the historical tableaux of the cinema’s early
period. Historical tableaux were typically single-shot films, filmed from one
camera position that depicted a well-known scene from history or scripture.
It is unlikely that the historical tableaux would have seemed either “current”
or realistic to audiences in 1915, which had had the opportunity to witness
Thomas Ince’s ambitious historical film The Battle of Gettysburg in 1913.
Why then, in what has been celebrated as the most formally innovative film
from the silent era, does Griffith choose to use a film style several years out
of date to present the history that forms the setting for his entire film?
The first, most obvious reason is that Griffith was concerned about his
film being taken seriously as a history. The historical facsimiles were a
way for Griffith to “show his work”, acting as footnotes to the tale of the
Stonemans and the Camerons.47 But Griffith’s writings about film reveal
that his approach to historiography, like that of other men from his era,
involved the revelation of metaphysical truths as well as empirical historical
facts. In “Five-Dollar Movies Prophesied”, Griffith expresses his belief that
in the future everything will be taught by film, noting that students “will
never be obliged to read history again” (10). He goes further to claim that
film is the ideal medium for producing history because:

There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at

the making of history. All the work of writing revising, collating,
and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of
recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete
­expression. (10)48

Here, Griffith expresses two views that align his opinions with Norris’s writ-
ings on history. First, Griffith argues that the cinema captures a “complete”
expression not accessible through other forms—in this case, history books.
And, paradoxically, although Griffith claims that film will “make” history,
his statement that “no opinions” will be expressed echoes Norris’s account of
historical time as an entity that only his medium can ­appropriately represent.
Despite its claims to historical truth and accuracy, Griffith’s version of
history was not universally accepted. Because of the controversy surround-
ing the film, even Woodrow Wilson withdrew his initial support (Stokes
331, note 108). Although Griffith drew on the work of numerous popular
historians from the era to support his accounts, his was certainly not the
only version of events, and many responses to the film reflected this. As Lee
88  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Grieveson recounts, “police in Boston sought to prevent black people from
buying tickets to the film when it played the Tremont Theater, although the
concern here was less about the audience’s ‘enthusiasm’ than about its anger
at the film’s racism” (193).49 Members of the black community objected to
Griffith’s inaccurate historiography as well as his racist depiction of blacks.
In response to Griffith’s offer of ten thousand dollars to anyone who could
find a moment of historical inaccuracy in the film, a member of the NAACP
challenged Griffith to identify an instance of a mulatto senator attempting
to marry the daughter of a white senator (Rogin 287). Griffith’s silence in
response to the question further demonstrates that he thought of the scenes
from the Stoneman–Cameron narrative as belonging to a different order
than the moments he explicitly referenced as history in the film.

Intertitles and Griffith’s Historical Interventions

To create a version of history in which Southern whites were as victorious as
they appeared at the end of Dixon’s novel, Griffith needed to do more than
create scenes of free blacks and villainous Northern troops pillaging Southern
homes. He had to create an alternative narrative that both encompassed
and transcended the historical narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruc-
tion. To build this narrative, Griffith juxtaposed two forms of determinist
historical causality: empiricist history, which necessitates Lincoln declar-
ing war within the film, and a kind of cosmic history, which justifies the
­illegal actions of the Klan. To do so, he drew upon naturalism’s view of
temporal progress as a transcendent force while simultaneously rejecting the
­naturalist conception of men as “motes” and creating a narrative in which
individual leaders matter.
Once the film begins, two early intertitles establish the racist logic and
the unusual causality that shape Griffith’s narrative. First, Griffith defines
the root of the national crisis his film will narrate: “The bringing of the
first African sowed the seed of disunion”. What follows is a leap in both
time and causality: “Northern abolitionists demanding the freeing of the
slaves”. Retaining the language of growth cycles from his work in A Cor-
ner in Wheat, Griffith’s opening works in a naturalist mode both grammat-
ically and stylistically; the passive construction and natural metaphor of
“the sowed seed of disunion” stands in the place of agent-driven historical
particulars.
After creating a connection between the African presence in the United
States and national disunity, as well as a contrast between the two forms of
causality, Griffith introduces his cast of characters in two paragraphs. The first
reflects the “historical” events of the fictional narrative (“Austin Stoneman
elected to the house”), while the second (“His daughter Elsie”) personal-
izes this history, establishing that the national drama will play out through
interpersonal relationships. The fictionalized and personalized narrative of
the Stoneman and Cameron families bears the mark of both historical fact
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  89
and naturalist narration as the characters engage the causalities of recorded
events in history and transcendent destiny. For example, in the Stoneman
scene, an intertitle introducing Austin Stoneman’s mulatta lover Lydia (Mary
Alden) reads, “The leader’s great weakness that is to blight a nation”. As the
source of blight, Lydia embodies interference with natural cycles, particularly
the cycle of cotton growth associated with Southern health. In contrast, the
white women in the film are repeatedly associated with healthful natural
processes, especially Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish)—who, as Susan Courtney
suggests, becomes the living instantiation of the cotton blossom (83)—and
the appropriately named Flora (Mae Marsh), whom Griffith repeatedly inte-
grates into the natural world through his staging and sets. The white women
embody natural cycles that must not be tampered with, lest the long time
of racial evolution be compromised. In contrast, Lydia only appears within
overdone interiors, another cue that carries over from A Corner in Wheat,
suggesting her comparative unnaturalness.
When introducing the Camerons and the South, Griffith employs what
could be called naturalism’s future tense: “In the Southland. Piedmont,
South Carolina, the home of the Camerons, where life runs in a quaintly
way that is to be no more” (emphasis added). Griffith’s narrator invokes
nondeigetic determinism that subordinates character agency to historical
reference. As Edward Brannigan has explained, “Nondiegetic references are
not taken to be part of the character’s world, and hence not subject to its
laws, but instead are taken to be about that world and are addressed only
to the spectator. In this way the film allows the spectator to begin to see one
thing … in terms of another” (49). In this case, the history that the facsimiles
reference acts as an additional and limiting interpretive lens for viewers of
the Stoneman–Cameron narrative.
But as the film’s first intertitle suggests, sometimes the crisis of the film
is not historical at all, but a more generalized sense of conflict: “If in this
work we have conveyed to the mind the ravages of war to the end that war
may be held in abhorrence, this effort will not have been in vain” (empha-
sis original). With this intertitle, Griffith zooms out rhetorically, taking a
grandiose perspective from which the Civil War begins to look like any war.
This distancing creates a reflexive reverberation: by making the Civil War
akin to all war, Griffith prepares his audience to hold it in “abhorrence” as
they should war in its platonic form. Naturalist historical abstraction of this
kind imbues even very specific historical details with allegorical vagueness.
For example, in his depiction of Sherman’s March—“While women and
children weep, a great conqueror marches toward the sea”—Griffith cuts
between a nameless woman and her children, Sherman’s March, and a red-
tinted scene of Atlanta burning. With “In the Halls of the Mountain King” as
soundtrack, strange red light, rapidly moving figures, and obscuring smoke,
the scene appears distant in space and time, diffusing Sherman’s military
genius through the timeless ravages of war in general.50 Griffith uses red
tinting throughout the film as a motif for depicting war, first with the Battle
90  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
of Bull Run and again when Lee’s soldiers attempt to recover a train bring-
ing provisions to the troops. Griffith further abstracts the historical specific-
ity of the Civil War by tying national struggle to the eternal war for men’s
souls. In his description of the Battle of Bull Run, for example, he describes a
­Confederate flag as “[b]aptized in glory”, and a later scene involves baptizing
the Klan in the blood of white southern womanhood. Baptism’s regenerative
symbolism is not incidental to Griffith’s filmic project, and not just because
Birth is the tale of the South’s resurgence via the Klan. Resurrection is the ulti-
mate personalization of natural and mythic cycles, a process P ­ rogressive-era
historians suggested the United States itself underwent through its westward
expansion. Even when engaging U.S. history, then, Griffith’s focus on per-
sonal sacrifice allows him to invoke a suprahuman narrative.
Griffith likewise translates the fact of the North’s victory over the South
from an important historical event to a mere speck in the face of the larger
narrative. Similar to the other facsimiles, the image of the Appomattox
courthouse is introduced with an intertitle: “Appomattox courthouse of
the Afternoon of April 9, 1865, the Surrender of Gen. Robt. E. Lee, C.S.A.,
to Gen. U.S. Grant, U.S.A. AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of the Wilmer
McLean home as on that occasion, and the principals and their staffs, after
Col. Horace Porter in ‘Campaigning with Grant’”. But after showing an
image of the courthouse, Griffith follows with a second intertitle: “The
end of state sovereignty. The soul of Daniel Webster calling to ­America:
Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever”. Griffith tem-
pers the South’s loss with an invocation of a ghostly Daniel Webster, whose
outside perspective calls to Americans from beyond the grave with his
vision of national unity—a perspective to which audience members, but
not the film’s characters, are also privy. This second intertitle thus under-
cuts the historical specificity of the facsimile, signaling that though the
South has lost, the North must reconcile with the South for the nation to
fulfill its destiny.
From the point of the South’s defeat onward, Griffith gives the historical
facsimiles formal treatment similar to that of his fictional narrative.51 As
opposed to the objective view of historical events Griffith attempts with
the earlier facsimiles, the Ford’s Theatre sequence features the perspectives
of the film’s fictional characters, Elsie and Phil Stoneman. Griffith builds
suspense in this scene by cutting back and forth between Elsie’s spectatorial
action—alternately watching the play, the president, and John Wilkes Booth
through her opera glasses—and Booth’s advance on and eventual assassi-
nation of the president. The sequence begins with an intertitle that might
lead viewers to believe that what follows will be a recreation of the theater:
“And then, when the terrible days were over and a healing time of peace
was at hand … came the fated night of April 14, 1865”. But the next image
is not a facsimile. Instead, Griffith presents Elsie twirling in her dress and
her brother arriving to escort her to the theater. The “fated night” becomes
associated with the fictional witnesses to the event, rather than the historical
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  91
actors, shifting the import from the national historical narrative to Griffith’s
fictional one.
The narrative shift in the film’s second half registers formally as well.
With its focus on the Klan and the siege at Piedmont, Act Two of The Birth
of a Nation includes the bulk of Griffith’s historical revisionism. It is also in
this act that Griffith displays his most virtuoso filmmaking. To prepare view-
ers for this second-act shift, the great national tragedy of Lincoln’s assassi-
nation closes the first act and establishes Griffith’s authority as a narrative
guide. Only after introducing the Stoneman siblings as spectators does
Griffith present his facsimile:

A gala performance to celebrate the surrender of Lee, attended by the

president and staff.
The young Stonemans present.
AN HISTORICAL FACSIMILE of Ford’s Theater as on that night,
exact size and detail, with the recorded incidents, after Nicolay and
Hay in ‘Lincoln, a History’.

The intertitle’s claims to exactness aside, Griffith establishes his intervention

right away. The scene calls attention to the director’s mediating presence by
opening with an iris shot of the Stonemans seating themselves; the scene
then highlights Griffith’s directorial perspective by casting it against multiple
flawed views of the historical event. Much in the way Norris draws attention
to his protagonist’s false sense of events’ meanings, Griffith fills his Ford’s
Theatre sequence with several characters’ incomplete perspectives, includ-
ing the Stonemans’ view of the stage, Elsie’s uncomprehending gaze through
her opera glasses at Booth and Lincoln, and Booth’s surveillance of Lincoln.
The sequence also includes the disastrous misjudgment of L ­ incoln’s body-
guard, who leaves his post to get “a view of the play”—another perspectival
mistake. As Norris does by contrasting his narrators’ broad perspectives
with his characters’ narrow ones, Griffith creates a truer understanding of
events through his editing among characters’ limited views. When chaos
breaks loose in the theater, Griffith’s audience knows what has happened.
By establishing the cinema’s ability to portray the “truth” in this histori­
cal sequence, Griffith prepares his audience for his more controversial and
allegorical treatment of historical events in the film’s second half. Part One
ends with “[t]he news received in the South”, and the Cameron patriarch’s
question, “Our best friend is gone. What is to become of us now!” In Part
Two, the tragedy plays out in the personalized terms this question implies.
However, Griffith’s personalization of history has different ends than does
Norris’s. Whereas Norris’s literary crosscutting renders individual lives ulti-
mately meaningless in the face of temporal inexorability, Griffith’s editing
in the Ford’s Theatre sequence, as well as his cutting between historical fac-
similes and strictly fictional scenes, asserts the value of funneling histori­
cal events through the emotions of individuals. More personalized than
92  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
any scene in A Corner in Wheat, these moments register Griffith’s pathos
over the futility of character agency in the face of past history as he trans-
forms the impersonal narrative of force that Norris developed. In Part Two,
­Griffith pairs the Klan with his fast editing to create a “revolutionist” his-
torical intervention, and he frames this intervention as one in service of a
transcendent national destiny.
As Norris does in The Octopus, Griffith works to overcome the limita-
tions historical facts place upon his narrative by referencing a third time
scheme, one beyond the actions (and perhaps the understanding) of indi-
vidual humans. Unlike Norris, Griffith provides an account of individual
ingenuity and genius. Both Cameron siblings, Ben and Flora, repurpose
materials in acts of what might be called Aryan bricolage or an ingenuity
of whiteness. The film’s Aryan bricolage centers on uses for that quintessen-
tially white and Southern material, cotton. Flora creates a dress for herself
out of “Southern Ermine”, placing cotton bolls as edging on her frock, and
Ben Cameron repurposes sheets to create the Klan’s robes. Further, as Taylor
has suggested, Griffith’s own virtuosic crosscutting appears in the service
of the white characters; the faster he cuts, the more triumphant they grow.
How then to square Griffith’s accounts of individual genius with his
overarching insistence on the specifics of history as mere detail? If Griffith’s
crosscutting makes visible time’s flow, which his white characters ride on the
way to their happy conclusion, then their individual acts are part of a larger
ingenuity of whiteness that Griffith treats as a natural force ensuring that
the white, not the wheat, goes on. An iteration of this kind of white futurity
is voiced by Ben Cameron in the hospital when he first meets Elsie Stoneman
and comments on the picture he carries of her: “Though we have never met,
I have carried you with me for a long, long time”. By carrying white woman-
hood—which the film associates with nature itself—about in his pocket, Ben
holds the future of the race. In contrast to white futurity that Griffith, Norris,
and Progressive Era historiographers treat as natural and beautiful, the
potential for racial intermixture appears in the film as “[a]n irregular force
of guerillas”. The black and white forces from the North, later described as
a “[s]calawag white captain and negro militia”, are an unnatural, aesthet-
ically unpleasing flow. Like Norris’s wheat, the uniform white flow of the
Klansmen corrects irregularity and restores natural order.52

White, Not Wheat: Revising History,

Revising Naturalism
In the last moments of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith suggests that the
historical events he has just narrated are merely incidental to the move-
ment of a grander temporal trajectory. The film’s second half tracks the rise
of the Klan and culminates in the film’s now-famous extended fast-cutting
sequence of an extended battle between the Klan and renegade black sol-
diers. The intertitles in this half shift temporal registers with remarkable
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  93
speed and frequency, from the first intertitle, which makes a claim for his-
torical specificity, “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and
Reconstruction and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today”,
to the Darwinian claim that follows closely on its heels and justifies the
creation of the Klan as part of the natural progression of things, “The white
men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there
had spread into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the
South to protect the Southern country” (emphasis added). The passive con-
struction of the Klan’s beginning and the spatial metaphor of spreading sug-
gests an unfettered natural growth, in contradistinction to the language of
conscious human interference contained in the “sowing” of black Americans
at the beginning of the first act.
Indeed, metaphors of nature are in full bloom in Act Two as Lydia appears
within the first scene that following the opening intertitles, including inter-
title 113, which explains, “The blight of war does not end when hostilities
cease”. Here, Lydia’s initial connection to vegetal disease is shown to have
spread like a great national plague, and when the black leader Lynch is sent
to the South, another intertitle reads “Sowing the wind”, foreshadowing
the bad transplantation that is about to occur. In contrast, Elsie is arrang-
ing flowers when Lynch gazes upon her, further associating white women
with nature itself. This pattern of associations builds rapidly throughout
the act, as the treatment of natural life reveals characterization. In rapid
succession, Griffith presents Lynch mistreating a dog, and then Ben and Elsie
coming together over a dove, which they both kiss—a very natural begin-
ning to what the film treats as a most natural courtship. Similarly, the other
North–South couple (Margaret Cameron and Phil Stoneman) begin their
romance in a garden setting, in which their heads appear to blossom out
of the branches that surround them (Figure 2.7). When the wartime deaths
of her younger brothers come into Margaret’s head in the form of a flash-
back scene, Griffith cuts back to reveal that she has crushed a flower in her
hand—a bit of business that suggests the disturbance historical events have
wrought upon the natural order of white coupling and racial reproduction.
As he begins to narrate the white restoration of racial destiny, Griffith
frames Klan violence against free blacks through an emotionally charged
sequence, which, unlike parallel editing in The Octopus or A Corner in
Wheat, features a primary character with much sentiment attached to her.
The editing moves among Gus (a black soldier) pursuing Little Sister (Flora,
the youngest Cameron), Little Sister’s flight and eventual suicide, and Ben’s
belated search for his sister. Again harkening back to Norris’s influence,
Griffith begins the sequence with the title, “The grim reaping begins”. The
particular grimness of the reaping stems from its unnatural qualities; Gus
is described as the “product” of carpetbaggers, a descriptor that insists he
is man’s creation, not nature’s. As opposed to Gus, who is a “product”, a
series of point-of-view shots associate Flora with the squirrel she admires
high in a tree. As Gus pursues Flora, the editing is significantly slower than in
94  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show

Figure 2.7  Margaret Cameron (Miriam Cooper) in the garden in The Birth of a Nation.

the film’s final race to the rescue, as if to suggest that success in this fictional
world requires the extradiegetic management of time at the level of filmic
editing and narration. Formalized by Griffith’s editing, time’s flow is on the
side of whiteness. Though the sequence ends tragically for Little Sister, it is
nonetheless not successful for Gus either; his actions remain unsupported by
the white wave of Griffith’s narration.
While the Gus–Flora scene unfolds, Griffith intercuts it with Ben
­Cameron’s inspiration for the Klan, using his editing to produce the larger
view that necessitates the KKK’s founding. An intertitle reading “In agony
of soul over the degradation and ruin of his people” encourages viewers to
consider Flora’s crisis in a broader racial context. This larger view shifts
Flora’s crisis into that of Ben Cameron’s “people”, a move reinforced by the
grand vista over which Ben ponders his thoughts. This moment reverses
the one in which Norris transforms Presley’s “the people” into a dying
Mrs.  Hooven, perhaps suggesting Griffith’s different affective attitude
toward his characters. But more important, the effectiveness of this invo-
cation of “people” compared to Presley’s use of the term may come from
the difference between individuals acting as political agents, and thus in the
short term, and individuals acting on behalf of racial destiny.
Cameron’s epiphany arrives while he watches white children scare black
children by using sheets to masquerade as ghosts. The following intertitle, “The
Result”, provides this strange account, “The Ku Klux Klan, the organization
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  95
that saved the south from the anarchy of black rule, but not without the
shedding of more blood than at Gettysburg, according to Judge Tourgee of
the carpet-baggers”. In addition to his shift in tone and the strained syntax
that develops between the first and second halves of the sentence, ­Griffith
also denies Judge Tourgee’s quotation the “historical facsimile” tag with
which he validates his other source materials.53 Instead, the judge’s account
of Klan violence appears as mere opinion (“according to”). After this intertitle,
Griffith reveals the Klan for the first time, and, as if in correction to Judge
Tourgee, the next intertitle reads, “Lynch’s [the African-American Lieutenant
Governor’s] supporters score first blood against the Klan”. At this point in
the film, ­Griffith’s references to a third, metaphysical time scheme allows
him to position intertitles from the film’s explicitly fictional narrative as cor-
rectives to historical citation. The film’s narrator rebukes Judge Tourgee for
his misperception of events and his failure to understand the Klan as a nat-
ural, Darwinian response by threatened whites. Ben’s perspective on a wide
vista thus corrects visually Judge Tourgee’s views as well as Stoneman’s, who
appears in the hothouse indoor environments created by Lydia when making
his decisions. Reasoning outdoors is therefore preferable, natural, and less
associated with narrow views or timescales. This is further emphasized when
Flora dies, throwing herself from a cliff, and Griffith frames her choice with
an extreme long shot that allows a broad view of the landscape. With this
larger view in mind, the intertitle that follows is able to instruct “[w]e should
not grieve” because Flora will enter the “opal gates of death”. Her preserva-
tion of white lineage is her passport to life everlasting beyond heaven’s pearly
gates. Only a too-local view, then, would see this as tragedy.
After Little Sister’s death, the Klan meets for Gus’s “trial”. Once again,
Griffith deploys eerie red lighting to transfer the scene to the level of alle-
gory. It is in this context that Ben Cameron dips the Confederate flag into
Little Sister’s blood and speaks to the Klansmen of the cyclical history the
gruesome ritual evokes: “Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of the life of a
Southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization.
Here I raise the ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men, the fiery
cross of Old Scotland’s hills … I quench its flames in the sweetest blood
that has ever stained the sands of time!” The Klan’s actions here ­create the
film’s second baptismal scene (the first occurring at the Battle of Bull Run),
invoking religious time and ideas of futurity in a scene that makes Flora’s
death a blood sacrifice on the “altar of outraged civilization”. Cameron’s
claim that his race is unconquered requires a temporal transfer from the
history of the Civil War and Reconstruction that the film sometimes takes
as its focus to a trajectory of race history, in which Reconstruction is a small
blot on the way to a greater destiny. Only by invoking a Scottish (rather
than Southern) heritage can Cameron stake a claim to his destiny and to
the clannishness that requires blood payment rather than legal retribution,
a further justification for Klan killing. But more than questionable history,
this claim is one that naturalizes, or at least Christianizes, the white race, as
96  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
Cameron’s collapse of past, present, and future attempts to correct personal
and specific tragedy through an appeal to long time.
The film’s famous ride to the rescue culminates Griffith’s experiment with
creating a system of naturalist narration focused on persons rather than forces.
Griffith initiates the Klan’s ride with a parallel editing sequence reminiscent
of A Corner in Wheat’s editorial narration: he cuts between a lavish banquet
for Lynch and his friends in Piedmont and the pitifully meager contents of a
frying pan belonging to two Union veterans in the soon-to-be-besieged cabin.
As Lynch begins his assault on Elsie, Griffith amps up the pace and intensity
of his editing. By crosscutting among the various groups, Griffith restricts
character agency and asserts his directorial prowess; like a naturalist narrator,
he takes the long view. While parallel editing in the film enforces a naturalist
view of people as parallel “motes” caught up in an ongoing stream of events,
crosscutting additionally enhances naturalist style through its interruption of
individual characters’ acts. Using staging quite similar to that in A Corner in
Wheat, Griffith cuts among: the efforts of the people in the cabin, who are left
holding a door closed against the soldiers pressing to get in as Griffith cuts
away to the ride of the Klan; Silas’s assault on Elsie, and Elsie waiting with
a fist suspended before her face; and rioters in Piedmont whose crowding of
the frame hearkens back to that of the wheat speculators, and helpless white
families frozen in tableau, much like the starving farmers, as they look out on
the street scene. By interrupting each scene with his virtuosic editing, Griffith
draws attention to the smallness of individual agents and their storylines in
comparison to the progressive narrative that encapsulates them.
Although Griffith’s crosscutting sometimes involves the subordination of
human agents because he interrupts their actions in service to the larger
narrative, it is as often a celebration of individuals: Ben Cameron’s actions
motivate the whole sequence, and, as Taylor has argued, Griffith’s formal
innovations and Cameron’s diegetic ones are closely linked throughout
the film. As in a Corner in Wheat, a flowing stream comes to the rescue.
Here, however, it’s a tide of white, not wheat, that pours endlessly through
the frame as the Klan races to the rescue. This “home grown” movement
restores the natural order of things as the street scenes and the Klan’s ride
come together, and Ben rescues Elsie and ousts the black ruling class.
Envisioned and then led by Ben Cameron, the Klan serves as a story
world stand-in for Griffith, traveling through time and space to bring about
narrative resolution. A technique that represents individual actions while
putting them into new contexts, parallel editing reconciles individual choice
and a larger metanarrative. In this way, parallel editing allows Griffith to
elide the two forms of ineluctability his narrative engages: the historical
and the allegorical. On the one hand, Griffith represents historical events
that must happen, but on the other, parallel editing puts different events—
fictional and historical—in an allegorical relationship to one another that
alludes to the ineluctability of Christian and white national destiny. Griffith’s
use of crosscutting means that he always retains naturalism’s methods, even
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  97
as his emphasis on individual choice and his Christian telos means that
crosscutting is a way of having his naturalism and his humanism, too.
To misappropriate Norris, Griffith’s characters are motes that matter.
Because Griffith’s editing brings together individual choices—which in this
context can be good or bad, righteous or not—and narrates their position
as part of a metanarrative, the strange Christian vision at the end of the film
begins to look like the logical conclusion to Birth’s narrative as well as the
marker of his dissatisfaction with historical outcomes. After he presents a
view of the Stoneman–Cameron “double honeymoon”, Griffith introduces an
intertitle that opens the film’s final scene. Griffith displays a battlefield with a
naked god of war astride a bull and an intertitle that asks, “Dare we dream of
a golden day when the bestial war shall rule no more, but instead—the Gentle
Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace”. The scene of war
gives way to reveal “the City of Peace”, in which an image of Christ hovers
over dancing souls. Griffith then uses double exposure to bring Elsie and Ben
Cameron into the same frame as the City of Peace and closes with the film’s
final intertitle: “Liberty and Union. One and inseparable, now and forever”.
Birth’s allegorical conclusion thus suggests that retaining naturalism’s
methods meant retaining its worldview; the Cameron–Stoneman narrative
as well as the events of U.S. history take on their full significance only in the
context of the film’s teleological endpoint. Both narratives, it seems, are small-
scale struggles to achieve Christ-like qualities of forgiveness and peace so that
the earthly world might better reflect the heavenly one.
The film’s first intertitle—“If in this work we have conveyed to the mind
the ravages of war to the end that war may be held in abhorrence, this effort
will not have been in vain”—and its last thereby show that Griffith adapts
naturalist style to be more like Christianity. Through experiments with par-
allel editing, Griffith maintains the causality of naturalist historiography
that is capable of rendering individual historical events minor—reading his-
tory through “the larger view” (Norris, The Octopus 651)—without retain-
ing Norris’s radical subordination of individual people.

Intolerance and the Fate of Character

Reading The Birth of a Nation alongside Griffith’s engagement with Frank
Norris provides a new model for understanding Griffith’s most famous
film and other works. It is in the context of naturalism that the full range
of ideological meanings associated with Griffith’s editing emerges and that
the relationship between innovative parallel editing and revisionist history is
revealed. By adopting a naturalist style, Griffith attempted to recast history
through fictional characters while experimenting with two forms of causality,
one that comes from engaging the historical record and one that comes from
reading individual choices into a transcendent destiny. The film, in all its com-
plexity of form and content, stands as Griffith’s exploration of a genre that
would allow him to both register and protest against historical outcomes.
98  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
A year later, Griffith produced another historical film that would gain
infamy as the most expensive flop in the industry’s young history. With four
time periods and parallel but not intersecting storylines, Intolerance took the
historical experiments of Birth to the extreme. The four-hour long spec-
tacle culminated Griffith’s exploration of the relationship between human
agency and historical time: whereas The Birth of a Nation explores threats
to agency, in Intolerance, Griffith solves the naturalist crisis of agency by
making himself the only agent that matters. Switching among Babylon,
ancient Judea, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and the modern-day
United States, Griffith’s radical parallel editing showcased his masterful abil-
ity to manipulate a variety of historical time periods without recourse to a
character-based storyline. But making films based on a broad conception
of intolerance through the ages rather than on characters proved to be too
risky a box-office venture. In the years that followed Intolerance, Griffith
returned to the more individualistic melodramatic style that anchored the
fictional scenes of Birth. Works like Hearts of the World (1918) and Broken
Blossoms (1919), while they retained naturalism’s typological characteriza-
tion, emphasized pathos and emotional connection to characters over the
director’s experimental style of driving parallel narration.
Although Intolerance appears to have taken Griffith’s flirtation with natu-
ralism a bit too far, his strange naturalist trilogy anticipated, albeit in hyper-
bolic form, the direction cinema would take. Ties to parallel editing ensure
that mainstream narrative cinema remains plot-focused, rather than delving
into experiments in subjectivity. In the second half of this manuscript, the
anti-individualist tendencies of literary naturalism and its cinematic coun-
terparts become more extreme as we move from characters whose perspec-
tives and choices don’t matter to characters without choices and without
personalities in the works of Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Notes
1. In this novel, Dixon recasts Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree as a leading
figure of reconstruction, though still an evil character, by Dixon’s interpretation.
2. Similar to the other histories discussed here, Wilson works to oppose visions of
continentality with myopic points of view. He begins by describing a E ­ uropean
problem of vision. The history’s first section, “Before the English Came”,
describes a continent used poorly:
When the history of English settlement in America begins, the breathless,
eager stir of the Elizabethan age is over, and the sober, contentious seven-
teenth century has come, with its perplexed politics, its schismatic creeds, its
scheming rivalries in trade. An age of discovery and bold adventure has given
place to an age of commerce and organization. More than one hundred
years have elapsed since the discovery of North America. Spain has lost her
great place in the politics of Europe, and France and E ­ ngland are pressing
forward to take it. While parts changed and the stage was reset, the century
through, the great continent lay “a veiled and virgin shore”, inflaming desires
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  99
that could not be gratified, stirring dreams that only enticed brave men to
their death, exciting to enterprise and adventure, but never to substantial or
lasting achievement. (1)
Wilson’s history starts by casting European settlement in terms of continen-
tal destiny. North America in the seventeenth century appears as an eager
bride waiting for the correct groom, indicated by the section’s title, “Before
the ­English Came”. Though the Spaniards and French appear here as failures,
likely seeming too European from Wilson’s early-twentieth-­century perspective,
they are also simply the wrong settlers. The continent, it seems, is anticipating
its proper colonizers. Referring to changing parts and scenery, Wilson dis-
misses the French and Spanish settlers as merely incidental to the nation’s
history—they cannot make “substantial or lasting achievement”. With its nar-
ration of the passing centuries, one surpassing the next, Wilson accounts for a
transcendent historical destiny that unfolds narratively, chapter by chapter, as
does Wilson’s massive work.
3. Though Norris is infamously inconsistent as a writer, it is the naturalism as
expressed in his literary criticism and in The Octopus—Griffith’s source text—
to which I refer in using the term. I make this choice because there is coherence
across Norris’s literary criticism and his most ambitious fictional work (The
Cycle of Wheat, of which The Octopus is a part). Taken together, both the novel
and the criticism create a picture of the worldview Griffith engaged, providing
an account of the conception of history that haunts Birth.
4. There is sometimes confusion around what accuracy means for Norris. Scholars
have occasionally equated Norris’s interest in accuracy with a kind of height-
ened realism, a technique Norris often ridiculed in his literary criticism, as when
he called Howells’s novels tragedies of the “broken teacup” (“A Plea for Roman-
tic Fiction” 1166).
5. In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith narrates history from a highly mediated sub-
ject position; Griffith’s naturalist narrator occupies a position that corresponds
to the perspectival problems Mary Lawlor ascribes to Western novels:
[I]t was openly problematic to assume that an observer who understood the
region well enough to represent it with sensitivity and accuracy could maintain
a transcendent position toward it. … In attempting to ­establish their authority,
the narrating voices of these texts produce a variety of reflexive references
to their own voices and to their aesthetics, sometimes at the expense of the
confident portrayal of the material and social d­ imensions of Western life. (61)
Lawlor usefully explains the double impulse in play in naturalist a­ esthetics;
in order to provide a naturalist history of the West, authors like Jack London
and Frank Norris had to simultaneously reference local knowledge of Western
life and claim a broader aesthetic view of the landscape they worked to repre-
sent. In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith performs a similar maneuver, asserting
specific knowledge—as a native son of Kentucky—and claiming for himself a
transcendent view of human history.
6. For example, other sources for The Birth of a Nation include the influence
of Millet’s “The Sowers” on A Corner in Wheat’s staging, films of Teddy
­Roosevelt’s Rough Riders on the ride of the Klan in Birth, Dixon’s novel and his
later stage play The Clansman, and even Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (these
100  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
influences have been discussed by Tom Gunning, Amy Kaplan, Jeffrey Martin,
and ­Matthew Wilson Smith, respectively).
7. A Biograph Bulletin from 1909, although self-promoting, nicely emphasizes
the innovative formal structure of the film: “[The Wheat King] has been called
before his God to answer. Our thoughts are carried back to the bent and knotted
backs of the sowers trudging along, ignorant of the vengeance of the wheat”
(qtd. in Bowser 45). And the review in The New York Dramatic Mirror echoes
these sentiments “This picture is not a picture drama, although it is presented
with dramatic force. It is an argument, an editorial, and essay on a vital subject
of deep interest to all. … Every part is powerfully presented with telling truth-
fulness, except in one instance only, when we see the farmers sowing the wheat.
No wheat would ever come up from sowing as they do, but this slop is lost sight
of in the artistic atmosphere of the scene and in the compelling pictures that
follow” (qtd. in Bowser 45–46). The Dramatic Mirror review is interesting in
the context of this chapter because its one criticism takes up what Norris might
describe as an overly fussy realist detail.
8. As Leitch helpfully explains, though A Corner in Wheat perhaps lacks the
­vastness of a Zola or Hugo novel, or the enormous scenic effects of either Birth
or Intolerance, Griffith’s brief Biograph film cashes in on the prestige of Norris’s
fiction to give itself the gravitas of a much larger work (Leitch 37–38).
9. Such a reading is in keeping with Donna Campbell’s idea of naturalism as inten-
tionally “resisting regionalism”—a literary genre associated with the small and
the feminine. Indeed, Howells’s essay nicely supports Campbell’s account of the
“displacement of local color fiction and those women who were its contribu-
tors” that occurred “as part of a broader shift from realism to naturalism, which
in turn marked the passing of a nineteenth-century sensibility and the emergence
of a twentieth-century one” (5). As Campbell explains, this shift involved posi-
tioning women regionalists as writers committed to the depiction of “almost
suffocatingly insular and feminine outdated” worlds (11). In the context of
Campbell’s important research, Howells’s conflation of Norris’s continentally
and his masculine vitality gains additional resonance.
10. Howells’s memoriam thus supports Mark Seltzer’s view of Norris as the novelist
most committed to understanding the novel as technology capable of “suspend-
ing contradictory practices in relation to each other” (44).
1 1. I base this claim on the institutionalization of history writing, with the founda-
tion of the American Historical Association in 1884.
1 2. In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach gives an analysis of Homeric narrative, arguing that
Homer produces a static, transhistorical sense of time and history; he explains
Homer worked “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible
and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal
relations” (20). The transhistorical nature of the histories Norris and Griffith
create thus puts them in similar stylistic company with Homer.
1 3. Adam Wood reads The Octopus as an exercise in mythmaking, which explains
Norris’s treatment of historical particulars as well as his sometimes-conflicting
ideological positions; he argues that “[w]hat Norris’s research produced … is
the setting for the creation of the myth of the Mussel slough incident and the
California ‘background’ found within The Octopus” (108). Russ Castronovo
reads this impulse in Norris as linking the novelist’s imperialist and aesthetic
tendencies, suggesting that as the imperialist “fantasy unfolds in The Octopus,
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  101
literature is no longer marching aimlessly: the aesthetic turns to Asia, its mission
to sublimate crass empire building under the emergence of world culture” (165).
Although Castronovo’s reading of The Octopus focuses primarily on the final
scene of the novel, his reading of Norris’s globalizing ambitions persuasively
accounts for Norris’s strange history writing.
1
4. In her study of nineteenth-century textbooks, Guardians of Tradition, Ruth
Elson notes that the “word ‘nationality’ appears for the first time in American
schoolbooks in an 1828 reader” (101). By the mid-century, textbook authors
used the concept of an American national identity to justify expansionist projects.
Elson argues that the West figures strongly in these accounts; she writes,
“Perhaps the greatest use of the West in these books … is as an illustration of
the tremendous material progress unique to American development” (184).
15. It also seems likely that historical fiction experiences a heightened version of
the problem Hayden White attributes to historiography: “Insofar as historical
stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have
had a plot all along, they give to reality the odor of the ideal. This is why the plot
of all historical narrative is always an embarrassment” (21).
16. In his essay, “The Literature of the West” (1902), Norris writes that although
the west has become increasingly civilized, beneath the surface of the now
“bowler hat” and “pressed trouser” wearing westerner, “there is the Forty-­
niner. There just beneath the surface is the tough fiber of the breed” (1177). In
Norris’s eyes the westerner is thus both historically specific and transhistorical,
outwardly changed by events, but at core the same. In Recalling the Wild,
Mary Lawlor suggests that Norris was not alone in viewing the West transh-
istorically, noting that “because its physical boundaries have been so protean,
‘West’ has a stronger relativity in American culture than does ‘the East’, ‘the
South’, or ‘the North’” (76).
17. In the case of fictionalized histories, the narrative impulse must always be
paradoxical because—in addition to the standard exercise of plotting which
narratologist Seymour Chatman describes as “a process of declining or narrow-
ing possibility” (46)—the facticity of the historical events recounted inevitably
infringes upon the artist’s narrative imagination. Indeed, as Jameson notes,
novelistic realism appears incompatible with such “heterogeneous historical
perspectives” as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, to such an extent that “in the context
of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism … romance once again
comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and freedom to that now
oppressive reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is
the hostage” (104).
1 8. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen persuasively connects Griffith’s ambi-
tions for the cinema with the Esperanto movement. Like Esperanto, the cinema
was for Griffith a form capable of connecting the world round (77).
19. The irony of the tragedy emerged afterward, when it became known that the
railroad’s representatives were not there to evict the settlers, but had come to the
valley with an offer to purchase the land back from them with additional com-
pensation for their cultivation of the land. See Terry Beers’s Gunfight at Mussel
Slough: Evolution of the Western Myth and J. L. Brown’s The Mussel Slough
Tragedy.
2 0. See Morrow’s Blood Money (1882) and Bierce’s “After Mussel Slough” (1881).
In the political deployments of the incident, we see the enactment of Jameson’s
102  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
claim that “the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time,
brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one in the same time,
a reaction” (82).
21. Paul Civello reads Norris’s account of forces somewhat differently. Although
he also focuses on force in the novel, he reads the forces in the novel as moral
rather than determinist, arguing that “the Railroad is clearly immoral”, in con-
trast to the “self-engendering wheat”, “which is an expression of beneficent,
divine will, not blind, deterministic force” (59).
22. Reuben Ellis’s article “A Little Turn through the Country” is in keeping with Marx’s
reading and similarly associates the hillside scene with the pastoral tradition.
23. Supporting this reading, Bender’s “Frank Norris on the Evolution and Repres-
sion of the Sexual Instinct” offers a persuasive reading of Norris’s fear of hybridity
produced by interracial sexual relationships.
24. Seltzer argues that we should read the “sloop” in Anixter’s bed as semen, and
thus understand the novel as producing an account of reproduction that does
not depend upon the biological (32).
25. This line of analysis is in keeping with accounts of naturalist literature as a
genre that converts persons into things, or which calls the category of self into
radical question. For an account of naturalism’s ability to convert the human to
the nonhuman, see Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines. In his Determined Fic-
tions, Lee Clark Mitchell argues that naturalism produces an account of human
agency radically opposed to realist notions of self.
26. As both Hofstadter and Alan Trachtenberg have noted, there was a shift in
the late nineteenth century that occurred when the organization became more
important than the individual in shaping the trajectory of American history,
when “economic incorporation wrenched American society from familiar
values” centered around a spirit of American individualism (Trachtenberg,
Incorporation 7). However, this change was in many ways defied by the rep-
resentational emphasis of the populists, who “showed an unusually strong
tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms”
(Hofstadter, Age of Reform 73).
2 7. In The Age of Reform, Hofstadter notes, “Now the growth of the large corpo-
ration, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political machine was clotting
society into large aggregates and presenting to the unorganized citizen the pros-
pect that all these aggregates and interests would be able to act in concert and
shut out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible” (213–4).
28. Mitchell notes that naturalist literature’s emphasis on “consequence at the

expense of intention” results in a determinist-feeling narrative style that chal-
lenges readers’ tendency to ascribe blame to individual agents (18).
29. My thinking in this chapter has been inspired in part by Bill Brown’s recent work
on “Things”, especially his presentation “Unhuman History (Hannah Arendt
and Bruno Latour)” at the University of Nevada’s campus on February 21, 2014.
30. The term “cutting” is one that comes from a later moment in the history of the
cinema than the one Frank Norris occupied. And though I would not describe
Norris’s 1900 novel as cinematic—heeding the advice of Charles Eidsvik and
Steven Kellman—I do find “cut” to be a verb nicely descriptive of Norris’s rapid
movement between scenes.
31. This relationship is similar to what Bruno Latour describes between individual
creatures and nature in The Pasteurization of France. Latour notes, “Scallops
 Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show  103
also find that nature is a harsh taskmaster—hostile, nourishing, profligate—
because fish, fishermen, and the rocks to which they attach themselves have
ends that differ from those of the scallops” (167). In the context of The
Octopus, Norris makes it clear that force also has a different end in mind than
poor Mrs. Hooven.
32. Both Gunning and George C. Pratt have previously identified this scene as a
formal influence on Griffith; my explanation of the formal technique’s philo-
sophical meaning depends upon their important work.
33. Tom Lutz also recognizes that Norris does not assign blame to individuals in the
novel, but he ascribes this to Norris’s sensitivity to his economically conserva-
tive publisher, Doubleday, Page, & Company (139). Lutz argues that “[t]hrough
Presley’s change of heart after his meeting with a railroad magnate, Norris at
least partially exonerated the railroad” (140).
3 4. In Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Miriam Hansen
explains that in films like A Corner in Wheat, “the parallel construction [is]
geared toward a conceptual point” and that “[t]his preoccupation with message
ran counter to the growing tendency of narrative film to organize patterns of
linear causality around individual characters and their psychology, allowing
ideology to work, all the more effectively, underground” (137).
35. See, for example, Kay Sloan’s Loud Silents. As Sloan argues, “Griffith took
the controversy [surrounding speculation in wheat] and turned it into
­entertainment. … The resulting cinematic version of the speculation interpreted
the conflict as an offense to the individual—which could be resolved in the pri-
vate sphere” (21). Eisenstein’s reading of this tendency in Griffith’s body of work
is perhaps the most well known. In “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today”,
Eisenstein argues, “The structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith mon-
tage is the structure of bourgeois society. … And this society, perceived only as
a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the consciousness
of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between two parallel
lines” (234). William Johnson’s reading of Griffith’s work supports Eisenstein’s
argument and also registers the difference between the parallel structure Griffith
uses and that Norris develops. Johnson notes that “Griffith does not damn his
characters for possessing wealth: they can attain redemption if they become
authentically generous to the poor” (9). Eisenstein censures this tendency in
Griffith as both bourgeois and melodramatic, and Norris would likely have
opposed such personal solutions because they suggest that individuals have the
power to change historical trajectories.
36. Indeed, Sloan herself ends up contradicting this reading of the film when she
writes that “any real resolution to the serious issue was left up to divine
forces. … Like Frank Norris before him, Griffith elected Nature, not human
decisions, to lead to social change” (22).
37. As Gunning notes, “This frozen action seems to lift the image out of the nar-
rative flow, to emphasize its paradigmatic role as a comparison image for the
dinner party” (D. W. Griffith 245).
38. The painterly quality may be a gesture to one of Griffith’s other source materi-
als for the film, Jean François Millet’s paintings (Gunning, D. W. Griffith 249),
a connection Jan Olsson has also noted (42). Although I find this connection
useful, I am here primarily interested in Griffith’s narrative structuring, which
I argue stems from Norris’s naturalist narration.
104  Naturalist Historiography at the Moving Picture Show
39. Ben Singer provides a thorough explanation of the relationship between the
­cinema and the pace of modernity in his essay “Modernity, Hyperstimulus and
the Rise of Popular Sensationalism”. In his essay, he explains that Simmel,
Kracauer, and Benjamin produced theories that might be categorized as “neuro-
logical conception[s] of modernity”, and that these conceptions centered on the
modern individual’s experience of modernity as shocking and rapidly paced (72;
emphasis original).
40. For an excellent discussion of “cornering” the market, see the chapter “Pricing
the Future: Grain” in William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis.
41. Michaels makes a similar point about S. Behrman’s parallel death scene in The
Octopus (The Gold Standard 184).
42. Amy Kaplan suggests an additional extradiegetic historical reference for the
film. She argues that, in addition to reflecting Griffith’s concerns about free
blacks, “The Birth of a Nation takes place on a broader international terrain
than the focus on the internal domestic conflict of the Civil War and the racial
violence overtly suggests” (Anarchy 162). She notes, “In The Birth of a Nation,
views of the climactic ride of the Klan echo on a grander scale films made of the
Rough Riders on their way to rescue Cuba” (161).
43. As Ricoeur notes, “the repetition of a story, governed as a whole by way of its
ending, constitutes an alternative to the representation of time as flowing from
the past towards the future, following the well known metaphor of the ‘arrow of
time’. It is as though recollection inverted the so-called ‘natural’ order of time”
(Time and Narrative 67).
44. Silva puts this slightly differently, writing, “Griffith’s researched scenes fre-

quently lack the impact of some of the more spontaneous scenes” (13).
45. This in spite of critics who want to divide the film into two halves; see Scott
Simmon’s description of this tendency in The Films of D. W. Griffith (109–10).
46. I derive the term “histrionic” from Roberta Pearson’s excellent study Eloquent
Gestures.
47. Indeed, Simmon claims that Birth might best be read as Griffith’s attempt to
replicate “academic history” (111).
48. As quoted in Focus on The Birth of a Nation.
49. For an extended reading of the African-American response to the film, see
Thomas Cripps’s “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a
Nation”.
50. For an excellent discussion of the film’s soundtrack, see Matthew Wilson Smith’s
“American Valkyries: Richard Wagner, D. W. Griffith, and the Birth of Classical
Cinema”.
51. These facsimiles include the racist “reconstruction” of the State House of

Representatives.
52. I am thus reading at a national level what Russ Castronovo has identified at a
global level as naturalism’s imperialist aesthetics, which covers over difference:
“Like the cone of wheat that suffers neither break nor interruption, West flows
into East without leaving so much as a trace of suture or conflict” (181).
53. As Robert Lang notes, even the intertitles that take their cues directly from
Dixon are given more credence, including the film’s second intertitle, “the bring-
ing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion” (The Birth of a
Nation 9).
3 Made of Leavings and Scraps
Jack London, Jack Johnson, and
Racial Time

His whole concern was with the immediate, objective present. He still held
the wheel, and I felt that he was timing Time, reckoning the passage of the
minute as with each forward lunge and leeward role of the Ghost.
—Jack London, The Sea-Wolf

I’m black. They never let me forget it. I’m black all right. I’ll never let them
forget it.
—Jack Johnson

In a 1914 Moving Picture World interview titled “Jack London—Picture

Writer”, London enthused over the new medium’s ability to depict a favor-
ite subject: “In the portrayal of action, which often is a fight, the motion
picture is supreme as a medium of expression and it carries the underlying
motive, perhaps, better than the alphabet could” (548). The occasion of this
essay was Boswell’s adaptation of The Sea Wolf for the screen, a transfor-
mation pleasing to both London and the motion picture industry. The article
opens by proclaiming of great things to come from the author’s filmic col-
laborations: “Great men are always rare among the living, but London has
a good right to the title. … The motion picture will add to his fame. He will
add to the fame of the motion picture as a medium of expression”. For his
part, London, who was at the time studying the migrations of “prehistoric
mankind”, reads the collaboration in terms of man’s evolution. A “most
valuable ally”, the motion picture seemed to London the necessary next step
in man’s visual and neural development: “Ninety-nine per cent. [sic] of man-
kind remembers by eye; we recollect the passage in a book by its position as
it remains in our recollections”. Although Moving Picture World offers an
account of London’s exceptionality, hoping to accrue additional renown to
the cinema through association with the celebrity novelist, London reads the
cinema not as a rare novelty but as part of a larger narrative of evolutionary
development.
London’s manner of interpreting new media is similar to his strategy for
interpreting individual lives. Just as London imagines the cinema not as a
new, modern-age phenomenon, but the latest iteration of mankind’s expres-
sive capabilities, for the author, each individual takes his part in a more
106  Made of Leavings and Scraps
capacious evolutionary narrative. Yet when the boxer Jack Johnson was
dominating the public’s attention a few years earlier, the heavyweight champ
challenged the metonymic racial logic expressed by thinkers such as London
as well as the idea that film was best suited for pugilistic display. Building on
the ideas of long racial and national time discussed in the previous chapter,
the discourses surrounding these two Jacks insisted that the comparatively
short lifetime of a man was only meaningful to the degree that it resonated
with the much longer time of racial development.
Johnson’s challenge to white racial narratives became unavoidable on
December 26, 1908, when the boxer beat Tommy Burns for the world
heavyweight title. Australian promoter Hugh “Huge Deal” McIntosh had
seen an opportunity in getting Burns to cross the color line and offered the
white fighter $30,000 to fight Johnson. He paid Johnson $5,000 for the
fight. In a Sydney stadium constructed specially for the match, some 15,000
spectators watched Johnson become the first black man to win the title.1
Though the fight took place halfway around the world, Americans were
well aware of the lead-up. Whether black or white, boxing fan or the unini-
tiated, Americans had read about Johnson’s exploits in newspapers. Report-
ers had followed Johnson as he in turn followed the white champion around
his European circuit, challenging him. One of many boxers who understood
the power of language and the importance of creating a narrative frame
for his fights, Johnson taunted his would-be opponent through the papers.
In his autobiography, Johnson recollects, “I virtually had to mow my way
to Burns. … Even King Edward of England was disgusted with Burns’ tac-
tics and called him a ‘Yankee Bluffer’” (48). When Burns finally agreed to
the fight, after nearly two years of Johnson calling for him to cross the
color line, the American press was there to cover it. Included in the press
corps was one Jack London, avid boxing enthusiast and celebrity journalist,
retained by the New York Herald to cover the fight. Jack London was the
ideal journalist for the fight. Famous, beloved, and a well-known aficio-
nado of all manly arts, London also penned a number of fictional boxing
stories throughout his career: The Game (1905), “A Piece of Steak” (1909),
“The Mexican” (1911), The Abysmal Brute (1913), and The Valley of the
Moon (1913).
In recent years, London’s journalistic coverage of boxing has garnered
more attention than his fictional treatments of the sport:2 his promotion
of a white champion, any white champion, in his Johnson reportage has
formed the centerpiece of a troublesome canon of writing for scholars work-
ing on London. It has been hard for London scholars to square London’s
more admirable traits with frank statements such as: “Personally I was with
Burns all the way. He is a white man, and so am I. Naturally I wanted
to see the white man win” (Jack London Reports 258). London’s cover-
age of Johnson’s career is thus notable because of its bare racial favoritism,
because of the author’s own celebrity, and, recently, because contemporary
scholars have struggled to reconcile London’s racism with his progressive
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  107
socialism. Recently, scholars focusing on London’s novelistic output find
a London difficult to square with his image as progressive working class
hero: one “unquestionably attracted to ideals of white superiority” (Furer
159); one who “affirmed American supremacy” (Peluso 74); or one who
“had little difficulty granting value and dignity to native peoples, as long
as they were placed in the legendary past” (Crow 54). Jonathan Berliner
has explained that the idea of London as ideologically conflicted, if not
(less charitably) flat-out confused, is now something of a commonplace in
London studies that approach his racial attitudes.3
The most comprehensive account of London’s racial attitudes can be
found in Jeanne Campbell Reesman’s exhaustive biography, Jack London’s
Racial Lives. Throughout Reesman’s work on London, she has established
the author as one with mutable views on race. For example, in Jack London,
Photographer, Reesman and her coauthors argue that his moving portraits
of natives, which treat his photographic subjects as individualized beings,
evidence his nonracism (20, 24, 149). And in her fuller account on ­London
and race, Reesman suggests that this time in the South Seas softened London’s
racial stereotyping, allowing him to “champion Johnson for his role as
underdog” (Jack London’s Racial Lives 184). This chapter also acknowl-
edges the variability in London’s perspective on racial others. However,
whereas Reesman establishes a remarkable changeability in London’s
perspectives on race over the course of his lifetime, this chapter is much
narrower in scope, not making claims about London across his career, but
rather offering a snapshot of the decade between The Sea-Wolf and The
Valley of the Moon, the decade containing Jack Johnson’s rise to fame and
then fall into infamy. Nonetheless, while only a limited slice of London’s
output, the years of 1904 to 1910 offer a view of London’s characteristi-
cally and problematically contradictory views as he offered sincere praise
for the black boxer while mourning the white race’s loss of the heavyweight
championship and also penned novels that appear to prop up Anglo-Saxon
superiority with one hand while undercutting it with the other.
Rather than condemning London as a racist or dismissing his most appall-
ing remarks as merely “of his day”, Reesman’s work accounts for London’s
varying racial attitudes by identifying different “‘houses’ in which his imagi-
nation could be located”, noting “London dwelled in and wrote about more
locales than any other writer of his day” (18). For Reesman, London’s rel-
ative physical and psychic comfort or discomfort in his changing “houses”
predicts either his more generous characterizations of native peoples or
his particularly unpleasant championing of the white race, which can be
seen, for example, in his affection for Hawaii and the revision to anti-Asian
sentiment that appears in the Hawaiian writings. Beyond the “houses” the-
ory, Reesman identifies another important pattern within London’s writing,
which she describes as the difference between racialism “the belief that one’s
race is superior but not necessarily implying hatred for other races (though
of course hatred could be the result)” and racism (35), which, one imagines,
108  Made of Leavings and Scraps
entails more obvious expressions of race hatred. As evidence for such a dis-
tinction, Reesman notes the importance of what I have been calling scale to
London’s views on race: “race for him had its personal and its abstract for-
mations, and he is better in the particulars than in the theories” (7). Though
the case of Jack Johnson does bear out Reesman’s hypothesis to a certain
degree—London appears less racist when discussing Johnson as individual
than when discussing the fights’ more abstract meaning—this chapter will
argue that London’s habit of “good behavior” at the level of the racially
different individual and “bad behavior” when it comes to abstract thinking
about race is not contradictory, but complementary—signaling the strength
and adaptability of racialized thought as well as its structural similarity
to the naturalist narratives discussed thus far. Indeed, the power of white
supremacist thinking is that it doesn’t always look like Reesman’s implied
definition of racism, but is instead less obvious and much more capacious,
allowing for one to have warm feelings for racial others at the local, inter-
personal level while rooting for one’s own race when taking the larger view.
London’s simultaneous admiration for Johnson’s individual achievement
(the author admitted the boxer’s excellence) and his censure of his race
expresses a logic that was central not just to London and his writings, but to
the self-making project that dominated the era and in which both the boxer
and the novelist actively participated. In his novels, London weds tales of
Anglo-Saxon self-improvement with actual mating and furthering of the
race. However, in his coverage of Johnson’s fights, London expresses anxiety
about the short time of a black man’s individual achievement being capable
of calling into question the long evolutionary time of white racial achieve-
ment. Thus while London’s coverage of Johnson reveals the tension between
his progressive socialist and regressive racial commitments, it also brings to
the fore a formal tension between London’s—and, to an extent, the era’s—
investments in two different narrative time schemes, two different stories
about what it takes to make a man. The first narrative depends upon a man
taking his place in relation to a racial lineage; the second depends upon the
meaningful linking together of individual acts into a life story. It is precisely
because the era’s racial thinking shares naturalism’s narrative habits that
London is able to champion white racial dominance while simultaneously
loving his black wet nurse and admiring Johnson. So long as the long evo-
lutionary time scheme is in place, London needn’t worry about his warm
feelings for individual black people. In other words, London’s is the kind
of admiration made possible by the naturalist structure of pitting progress
against people, plot against character, and coherence against idiosyncrasy.
More than a century out, it may be hard to imagine the full signifi-
cance of the Burns–Johnson match, but 1908 was a time when racial ten-
sions in the post-Reconstruction United States were at full boil. As the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
reported in its 1919 study Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States,
1889–1913, this period saw some 3,224 lynchings; 2,522 of the victims were
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  109
black, and 2,472 were black men. In this era, the peak of both boxing and
lynching in America, a not-unrelated crisis of white masculinity was being
articulated by the loudest voices in the land, including Jack London’s. ­Writing
in the Chicago Daily Tribune, George Siler put the crisis in sporting terms,
taking white boxing fans to task for their contradictory attitudes toward a
Burns–Johnson match, writing that

if a colored heavyweight champion is obnoxious to those who lauded

Jeffries for not giving Johnson a chance to win it, and who were—and
probably still are—of the opinion that Jeff could have defeated Johnson
with one hand tied behind his back, why did they not make efforts to
inveigle Jeffries into a match with the black and get him out of the way?
Presuming that Johnson can beat Burns, will not those who believe he
is Tommy’s master and who are censuring Tommy for dodging him get
just what they do not want—a colored heavyweight champion?

Through this convoluted syntax, Siler scolds the equally strained racial logic
that permeated cultural discourse and which appeared in films such as The
Birth of a Nation and in sociological studies such as Madison Grant’s The
Passing of the Great Race (1916).4 Across these texts, the question of how
an individual and his acts relate to ongoing evolutionary time clarifies the
specifically racialized stakes of the naturalist relations between plot and
character discussed in the previous two chapters. In the fictional and jour-
nalistic narratives of this chapter, a person’s place within a racial lineage
dilutes his individual agency on behalf of larger progress, as the invocation
of racial destiny becomes a way of overriding the acts of any racial outliers.
At the heart of the era’s anxieties was a worry about a slow racial
decline—a dissipation of white power over the American generations. In this
context, stories of white men achieving success were important case stud-
ies for proving the rule of white supremacy. Put more specifically, biographies
and bildungsromans became important sites for working out the relationship
between individual acts and racial destiny. The relationship between individ-
ual micronarratives of success and macronarratives of race, then, is the focus
of this chapter, which examines film and newspaper coverage of Johnson’s
1908 and 1910 heavyweight championship fights alongside the two London
novels that bookend them, novels that most clearly outline the use of long
narrative arcs of racial destiny to encompass individual particularity.
This strategy applied to black winners and white losers alike. Jeffries had
not been without his detractors earlier in the decade; as the Police Gazette
put it in 1904, “The fight loving public wants to see Jeffries fight and fight
soon. Jack Johnson stands ready. It’s up to Jeffries to forget the color line
until he has rubbed this big black speck off his title” (“Fighters Draw”).
As Jack London would later write in his December 27 New York Herald
dispatch, what white boxing fans wanted was for a white champion “to
remove that smile from Johnson’s face” (Jack London Reports 264).
110  Made of Leavings and Scraps
The popular sense that a white man should beat Johnson even if no par-
ticular white man could reveals both the incoherence and power of white
supremacist thinking as well as its structural similarity to naturalism’s nar-
rative habit of privileging plot over character. It should be no surprise, then,
that reactions against Johnson (including London’s) should sound so much
like one of London’s fictional tales. Although London was present at the
scene, sitting outside the ring as Johnson decimated Burns and again when
Johnson creamed Jeffries, he would never treat the Johnson fights as the mere
event of one man punching another. Instead, in the racialized narratives that
surrounded the fights and that constituted the era’s self-making projects, the
individual people engaged in a fight could only ever be incidental to the long
time of the evolutionary narratives that contained them. Because for London
being a man meant being narratively coherent, the true stakes of Johnson’s
win are always already mediated; the individual event of the fight takes its
place in relation to a larger narrative frame.
Similar to conversations around the importance of historical events dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, black men exceeding their societally pre-
scribed destinies and white men falling short of theirs raise questions about
what counted as a significant narrative and what was a mere event. For
example, to combat the circulation of Johnson’s win as a meaningful story,
the white press denied Johnson’s narrative of achievement, despite his clear
victories. First, leading up to the 1908 fight, and immediately following
Burns’s defeat, the press complained that the retired Jim Jeffries, not Burns,
was the true white champion. Second, during the Burns–Johnson fight, both
the fight and Gaumont’s cameras stopped before a formal conclusion was
reached and Johnson’s impending moment of victory became the fragment
not recorded, a kind of an anti-actuality film. Third, censors in the U.S.
worked to prevent circulation of Johnson fight films, especially the Johnson–
Jeffries film, which was banned in nine states and thirty-three municipalities
(Orbach 314). By refusing to let films of Johnson’s victory circulate, white
censors sought to deny him a fundamental method of recording his lifetime
achievement as such and to strip from him the ability to relay the story of his
win. Finally, white newspapers and rioters warned black fans that Johnson’s
individual life should not be understood to have anything to do with black
racial life.
Johnson’s fight films are threatening because they suggest that the event
of a black man’s beating a white man might move beyond a fleeting instant
and begin to take on narrative significance as the event was indexed and
repeated in theaters across the country. Film’s ontology thus begins to
threaten deep racial time, as proliferating Johnsons refuse to be contained.
In other words, the repetitive and replicable nature of film means that the
events films capture can never formally be one-off in the way whites wanted
Johnson’s fights to be. At the same time, the attempts to censor the Johnson
fight films that created many images of Johnson traveling around the coun-
try also resonate eerily with the persecution of Johnson for his sex life, as
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  111
the Mann Act sought to control his sexual circulation across the nation and
prevent the proliferation of additional Johnsons who might be the offspring
of his relationships with white women.
The battle over Johnson’s win can therefore be understood as a battle
in time and narrative. Because white supremacy depends on the idea that it
is the natural destiny of the white race to triumph, hoping for an individ-
ual white fighter to win will always be beside the point: winning is what
comes naturally to the white race, and losing is what comes naturally to the
black race. When it became undeniably clear that no particular white fighter
could defeat Johnson, it was the broader narrative timeframe of racial evo-
lution that emerged as the Great White Hope, as white papers insisted that
Johnson’s exceptional achievement was evidence that he was a racial outlier.
That is, making Jack Johnson not matter requires that no man matter.
The formal structure of such thinking and its consequences for individuals
also appear in the characterization and strange temporal play of London’s
novels, which attempt to reattach modern white men to their racial destinies.
However, just as arguments for the flukiness of Johnson’s greatness depended
on rendering his individual successes narratively meaningless, so too did the
narratives of white men achieving greatness in the wild require downplaying
their individuality. Filled with narrative anticipations, regressions, and charac-
ters who cannot help but channel their ancestral DNA, The Sea-Wolf and The
Valley of the Moon clarify the kind of temporal thinking that underpins the
seemingly perverse and stupid refusal on the part of early-twentieth-­century
boxing fans to acknowledge the better fighter. Along these lines, recent
biographies of Johnson, including Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgivable
Blackness, have emphasized the way Jack Johnson’s excellence should have
overridden the narrative arc of white supremacy. London’s Darwinian stories,
however, reveal a racial logic in which individual white achievers merely real-
ize their racial destiny and white failure means failing the race rather than the
failure of the race—a narrative mechanism of whiteness that can and does
position Johnson’s self-making as anomalous. Rather than representing his
race, Johnson, as London and other journalists have it, is overcoming his
racial narrative. The discourses I describe in this chapter reveal the problem-
atic inevitability (for London) and problematic impenetrability (for Johnson)
of racialized narratives of self-made manhood. On the one hand, London’s
characters’ self-making is threatened by racialism—individual achievements
can’t matter, they are merely instances of falling into line with racial destiny.
And on the other hand, because this view holds that white men are always
superior over the long run, Johnson’s individual achievements have the effect
of separating him from his race, making him the unexemplary example.

White Sissies and the Making of Men

First applied as an insult in the late-nineteenth-century United States, the slur
“sissy” circulated so widely that even the staid Dean of American Letters,
112  Made of Leavings and Scraps
William Dean Howells, uses it to describe the difference between Boston
and New York men in Hazard of New Fortunes: “[T]he New York fellows
carried canes at an age when they would have had them broken for them by
the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyish and fast” (298). London’s
novel The Sea-Wolf offers an account of one such man—a character named
Humphrey “Sissy” Van Weyden. At the outset, Van Weyden survives a ship-
wreck only to be “rescued” by a perverse tyrant, Captain Wolf Larsen. The
training Van Weyden receives through his rough treatment at sea makes a
man of him. In contrast, The Valley of the Moon’s boxer protagonist Billy
Roberts is a strapping specimen of white masculinity who, accompanied by
a bride named Saxon, seeks an environment more fitting to his masculine
energies than Oakland’s narrow streets.
From both these novels as well as real-world conversations about mas-
culinity emerges an equivalency between narrative and race. It is not merely
the case that narratives of self-making in this era are racialized; narratives
of white racial dominance and narratives of self-making are, functionally,
one and the same. The narrative of Van Weyden’s becoming a man is impor-
tantly not different from the narrative of Van Weyden’s getting in touch with
his ancestry. Similarly, calls for white boxers to man-up and beat Johnson
always also remind these boxers of their whiteness, which is to say, their
superiority. This is all to say that masculinity was much more than a matter
of muscle for London and others worried about white men becoming sissies.
To be a man was a matter of being someone about whom a racially sensible
story could be told.
Competing alongside London to be the most visible macho man, of course,
was Teddy Roosevelt, who promoted boxing, war, hunting, and football,
among other pursuits, as antidotes to enervation.5 In “The Strenuous Life”,
originally given as a speech to The Hamilton Club of Chicago in April 1899,
Roosevelt proclaims, “In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when
the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives” (3).6
In a later essay, “The American Boy”, Roosevelt opens his remarks by imag-
ining the life’s trajectory that would produce his society of clean and vigor-
ous citizens:

Of course what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he

shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong
that he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must
not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work
hard and play hard. (155)7

As Mark Seltzer has suggested, a terrible anxiety haunted the Boy ­Scouting
and physical culture movements that individuals who failed to fulfill their
full potential would result in a nation that fell short of its destiny.8
­Additionally, in Roosevelt’s remarks, we can see that this haunting has a
formal or narrative element, predicated on the coherence between a life story
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  113
and a racial one. Announcing that one will not be much of a man unless he
gets his past right, Roosevelt reminds his audience of boys that one day they
will be the pasts of future American men. This coherent relationship between
past acts and future selves is the main ingredient in Roosevelt’s recipe for the
strenuous life, and the key to the future of a healthy nation; as in Bergson’s
account of free will, for Roosevelt, the narrative lines of successful biogra-
phies achieve an aesthetic smoothness.
If for Roosevelt boyhoods become useable pasts for the future men of
America, William James puts the relationship between past and future
selves a bit less literally, with great lives past serving as the foundation
for new men—a narrative strategy London would deploy in The Valley of
the Moon. Also sensing a nation of men performing below level, James
describes an intellectual version of the strenuous life in “The Energies of
Men” (originally given as a speech to the American Philosophical Associa-
tion in 1906). James explains that men have “sources of strength habitually
not taxed at all” and that “most of us continue living unnecessarily near our
surface”, never calling upon these deep energies (4, 5). James admits, “only
very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use” (6). As a con-
sequence, “[i]n rough terms, we may say that a man who energizes below
his normal maximum fails by just so much to profit by his chance at life;
and that a nation filled with such men is inferior to a nation run at higher
pressure” (8). James calls for a new understanding of man’s potential that
would make visible the gap between average American lives and a life lived
at peak performance:

We need a topography of the limits of human power, similar to the

chart which oculists use of the field of human vision. We need also a
study of the various types of human being with reference to the dif-
ferent ways in which their energy-reserves may be appealed to and set
loose. Biographies and individual experiences of every kind may be
drawn upon for evidence here. (39)

In his discussions of the work needed to explore man’s potential, James also sets
forward an explicitly narrative model upon which to base future studies: the
biographies of great men. As narratives, James suggests, biographies make
the formal structure of a life as visible as an oculist’s chart, processing indi-
vidual moments of accomplishment through language to produce a coher-
ent and admirable whole rather than episodic fragments (in the style of a
Vandover). James was certainly not the only one to see the importance of
narrative as a technique for rendering the ideal life visible; this was an era
that witnessed the ongoing popularity of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, as
well as the new additions of Henry Adams’s and P. T. Barnum’s. Inspirational
stories similar in theme also dominated the fictional world—sales of Horatio
Alger had a new spike in the twentieth century after the author’s death in
1899 (Scharnhorst 151).
114  Made of Leavings and Scraps
At the same time that figures ranging from Roosevelt to Alger encour-
aged men of the nation to get it together and, in the terms of Alger’s Ragged
Dick, “press onward, and rise as high as possible” (132), these writers also
identified limits to the project. After William James proposes his intellectual
version of the strenuous life—“Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word,
are what carry us over the dam” (13)—he admits that such ideas require
good soil in order for them to take root: “For such effects an educated sus-
ceptibility is required. The idea of one’s ‘honor’, for example, unlocks energy
only in those of us who have had the education of a ‘gentleman’, so called”
(31–32). In other words, James’s gentlemen waiting to be “unlocked” reveals
self-making’s tripartite temporality, as the man in the present who would be
great in the future must have a particular past at his disposal, whether an
earlier education or a pantheon of historical role models.
This conditional relation among past, present, and future selves also sug-
gests the challenge for narrative interest implied in stories of self-making.
Self-making and storytelling would seem to require that a man change over
time, as failure to do so counts as a betrayal of both. However, because
of the insistence on coherence that we see in both James’s and Roosevelt’s
backward-projecting discussion of boys as pasts for future men, such nar-
ratives are strangely static. Similarly, in novels such as London’s and in the
calls for a Great White Hope to beat Johnson, what we see is not so much
a matter of individual growth, or even the atavistic regression described by
Howard and Rossetti, but simply an uncovering—an archival process of
discovering the character that was buried there all along.

Proleptic Pants and Analeptic Ancestry

Similar to London’s dog novels, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White
Fang (1906), The Sea-Wolf (1904) is a narrative about recovering pasts as a
means of creating futures. This novel, published four years before Johnson’s
first battle for the heavyweight title, clarifies the understanding of individ-
ual achievement required for the strange disavowals of Johnson’s win. The
novel’s hero must get in touch with his primitive and manly past before
he can take the heroine as his mate. In London’s novel of high seas adven-
ture, the author tests the Darwinian theories of his early wilding novels in
the world of men. When Humphrey “Hump” Van Weyden tells the ship’s
cook, Thomas Mugridge, that he can make anything he pleases of himself
if only he would put his mind to it, Mugridge objects violently: “It’s a lie!
A bloody lie! … I’m already myde an’ myde out of leavin’s an’ scraps. … It
carn’t come right. If I was the President of the United Stytes to-morrer, ‘ow
would it fill my belly for one time w’en I was a kiddy and it went empty?”
(The Sea-Wolf 86). Of course, the cook is right. One of the many problems
with the model of the self-made man, and the one taken up in Mugridge’s
complaint, is that the process is unidirectional: self-making cannot reverse
time to right past wrongs (filling the cook’s belly) nor remake the cook
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  115
from the materials necessary for becoming president (as opposed to leav-
ings and scraps). Instead, the self-making process requires having the noble
characteristics necessary for greatness from birth. Whereas the cook cannot
“self-make” himself into a great man because of his debased past, Hump
need only remember his noble ancestry to construct himself as the heroic
figure already embedded in his lineage. By casting self-making against social
Darwinism, London reveals the tension between individual lives—over the
course of which a man might try to make something of himself—and long
evolutionary time, which renders individual lives mere fragments.
The Sea-Wolf begins with Wolf Larsen, captain of the Ghost, rescuing
Hump off the coast of San Francisco. Larsen demands to know how the
dandified young man makes his living, and Hump responds to the question
about what he does with a claim about what he is, replying that he is a
gentleman. Although this answer will enrage his rescuer, Hump’s claim is
both ontologically and genealogically true: Hump is a gentleman in both his
status and in his blood. But like James’s intellectual weakling, Hump has yet
to have his mettle tested.
Hearing Hump’s self-satisfied answer, Wolf demands, “[W]ho feeds you?”
(London, The Sea-Wolf 21). When Van Weyden protests that he has an
income, Wolf accuses him of living off the work of previous generations:
“Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead men’s
legs. You’ve never had any of your own” (21). Taking Hump’s hand in his
own, Wolf describes the offending hand’s lack of manly roughness and
­experience: “Dead men’s hands have kept it soft” (22). Although the name
Van Weyden may connote social superiority among San Francisco’s moneyed
set, aboard the sealing vessel it does not guarantee his place in the ship’s hier-
archy. Instead, as Wolf tells it, Hump’s reliance on his ancestors but failure
to continue their work has produced a sissy. The American gentleman is less
of a man for all his delicacy and his inability to “walk alone between two
sunrises and hustle the meat for [his] belly for three meals” (21). Wolf refuses
Hump’s pleas to be returned to shore, and instead offers him a job: “[Y]ou
take the cabin boy’s place, sign the articles for the cruise, twenty dollars per
month and found. Now what do you say? Mind you, it’s for your own soul’s
sake. It will be the making of you. You might learn in time to stand on your
own legs and perhaps to toddle along a bit” (22). With this command Wolf
offers Hump the opportunity he should have had on land to make a man of
himself. Beyond his offense to Wolf’s masculine ideals, Hump’s reliance on
his ancestors (as opposed to continuance of their achievements) is also egre-
gious because it signals his refusal of the American tradition of self-making,
which London’s readers were well aware London himself embodied.
The Sea-Wolf reconciles ideals of the self-made man with romantic and
social Darwinist ideas of genealogical human nature, supporting the view
of a natural aristocracy of the fittest and most virile men. As Wolf promises,
Hump’s voyage upon the Ghost is the making of him. At sea, Hump begins
with nothing and works his way up from his position as lowly cabin boy
116  Made of Leavings and Scraps
to cook and eventually to first mate, enacting in condensed form the life’s
progress of an exemplary sailor. Although the novel makes clear that Hump
has had greatness inside him all along, his learning curve is a steep one.
When Hump first decides to challenge Mugridge the cook, who has been
tormenting him for his gentlemanly ways, he is shocked by his own bravery:

Whet, whet, whet,—Humphrey Van Weyden sharpening his knife in

the ship’s galley and trying its edge with his thumb! … I know that
my own kind would not have believed it possible. I had not been
called ‘Sissy’ Van Weyden all my days without reason, and that ‘Sissy’
Van Weyden should be capable of doing this thing was a revelation
to Humphrey Van Weyden who knew not whether to be exulted or
ashamed. (73; emphasis added)

Although the “own kind” in this passage seems class-based rather than
racial, and though Hump seems to think that his previous “sissyness” has
largely to do with his inability to fight, Hump’s real problem is that he has
never struggled—whether for his life, as in this example, or for his liveli-
hood. By learning to fight and to whet a knife, Hump transforms his former
“Sissy” self into a man worthy of the Van Weyden name. His individual
actions become a way of living up to his lineage.
While The Sea-Wolf at times conflates nature and nurture, The Valley of
the Moon (1913), which deals with racial typology much more didactically,
presents having strong “dead men’s legs” as a point of pride. Less an adven-
ture story than The Sea-Wolf, The Valley of the Moon concerns itself with
the travels and conversations of a young couple, Saxon and Billy Roberts, who
journey from working-class existence in Oakland to the idealized Californian
farmland that gives the novel its title. Similar to Hump’s meteoric rise, Billy
and Saxon reenact their progenitors’ history by performing the settling of
the continent in a compressed timescale. With little on their backs, they
journey to new environs, take note of native resources, customs, and peo-
ples, and end the novel with the promise to make the land fruitful and to
be fruitful themselves. There is a remarkable efficiency to Billy and Saxon’s
courtship as well. Upon first meeting, they recognize one another as appro-
priate mates: “Her first name’s Saxon. Ain’t it a scream of a name”, queries
the friend, Mary, who introduces them. “Sounds good to me”, is Billy’s reply
(London, The Valley of the Moon 15). In their early conversations, which
focus entirely on lineage, the dead legs of Billy and Saxon’s parents are as
good as an arranged marriage. Explaining her strange appellation, Saxon
tells Billy, “The Saxons were a race of people. … They were wild, like Indi-
ans, only they were white. And they had blue eyes, and yellow hair, and they
were awful fighters” (21). Within this initial encounter, it becomes clear that
Billy is her racial destiny and that an ongoing comparison between Saxons
and Native Americans will buttress the naturalness of their match: “They
were the first English, and you know the Americans came from the English.
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  117
We’re Saxons, you an’ me, an’ Mary, an’ Bert, and all the Americans that are
real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such” (21–22). Billy’s
overture responds in kind: “Say, we old Americans oughta stick together,
don’t you think? They ain’t many of us left” (24). While Billy’s status as the
son of an orphan—as a baby, his father was taken captive in an Indian raid
and then adopted by a miner named Roberts—might seem to raise ques-
tions about his racial status, the novel carefully establishes his credibility
as one of what Saxon calls the “real Americans … not Dagoes and Japs
and such” (22). In addition to citing physical evidence over the course of
their conversation, “[w]e’re both old American stock … your hair, your eyes,
your skin, everything” (23), familial connection to Native Americans works
ironically to establish Billy’s whiteness. In addition to Billy’s father, who
“didn’t know nothin’ but Indian” when adopted at age five (22), the story
of Native American genocide that accompanies Billy and Saxon’s relaying
of family history does work to both position them as “real Americans” with
families present at the time when Native Americans were more populous
and to metaphorically raise the threat of race suicide for whites, who might
now face a future similar to that of the native populations they replaced.
For example, London relays that the idea of their parents knowing each
other when their “‘folks was waitin’ for the railroad to be built an’ all the
Indians killed off before they dasted to start for California’ was Billy’s way
of proclaiming the new alliance” (23). In their imaginings of how long their
ancestors have known one another, Indian slaughter becomes part of Billy
and Saxon’s shared lineage, a part that they will later appropriate to describe
their present-day circumstances. In this novel, in which a heroine named
Saxon declares her husband a Saxon, the incestuous tendencies of nativism
that Walter Benn Michaels discusses in modernist literature are even more
extreme, as Saxon and her Saxon husband embark on an onanistic journey
during which the white settlers they discover and bond with are themselves
in replica.9 In other words, it is precisely by way of “dead legs” that the
­novel’s Saxon characters make their peripatetic journey.
Having “dead men” of a particular stock in his ancestral stable likewise
means that Hump should succeed, and his failure to do so in his early life
shames his ancestry. In contrast, it is more acceptable for those of lesser
constitutions to remain low. Throughout The Sea-Wolf, London positions
Mugridge against Hump, a comparison characterized by its unevenness.
As suggested earlier, Hump’s rise through the ship’s ranks is of astonishing
speed; he quickly proves himself to be equal and then superior to the ship’s
other inhabitants, for whom a whole life at sea has nevertheless failed to
equip for such promotion.
The first indicator of Hump’s superiority comes in the form of a pair of
ill-fitting pants. Before learning that Hump will be pressed into service as a
lowly ship’s boy, Mugridge provides him with a dry wardrobe, in the hopes
of later remuneration. Though Mugridge’s lent clothes come with emascu-
lating comment—“I only ‘ope yer don’t ever ‘ave to get used to such as
118  Made of Leavings and Scraps
this in life, ‘cos you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ‘ave. more like a
lydy’s than any I know of. I was bloomin’ well sure you was a gentleman
as soon as I set eyes on yer” (London, The Sea-Wolf 14)—his evaluation
that these particular garments are not a good match for Van Weyden is
correct, but not, as Mugridge suggests, because of their roughness. Among
the wardrobe Mugridge lends Hump is a pair of too-short pants: “A pair
of workman’s brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished
with a pair of pale blue, washed-out overalls, one leg of which was fully ten
inches shorter than the other. The abbreviated leg looked as though the devil
had there clutched for the Cockney’s soul and missed the shadow for the sub-
stance” (14). Mugridge’s clothes are a bad match for Hump not because they
are cut from rough cloth—an experience Van Weyden needs to toughen his
“lydy’s” skin—but because they suggest a fate more meet for the Cockney
cook than the shipwrecked gentleman. They are a pair of proleptic pants,
predicting the fate of their owner. Because Hump is a gentleman all the way
down, beyond the surface of his soft skin, he is able to quickly rise in the
ship’s ranks, but the owner of these ill-fitting pants cannot.10
In London’s novels, breathless movement from analepsis to prolepsis
offers a narrative correspondence to social Darwinism. While prolepsis is
a narrative anticipation of future events (a flash-forward), analepsis is a
narrative recall of the past (a flashback). In London’s novels, this past is
often a racial one. For example, though Mugridge snarls and snivels his
way through life made up of petty jealousies and grudges, his complaint
astutely assesses his predetermined place in the world. Returning to Hump’s
initial encounter with the Ghost’s cook, we can see London’s rapidly shift-
ing timescales at work: “The man who had spoken to him was clearly a
Cockney, with the clean lines and weakly pretty, almost effeminate, face of
a man who had absorbed the sound of Bow Bells with his mother’s milk”;
And “‘An’ ‘ow yer feelin’ now, sir?’ he asked, with the subservient smirk
which comes only of generations of tip-seeking ancestors” (London, The
Sea-Wolf 11–12). Here Hump projects his sissyness onto Mugridge, revers-
ing the cook’s initial complement about his own pretty skin. But this is pret-
tiness with a difference: it appears race as well as circumstance has made a
weakling of the cook. Like the other ship dwellers, Thomas Mugridge is a
bizarre amalgamation of both nature and nurture, having both “absorbed
the sound of the Bow Bells” and descended from “generations of tip-seeking
ancestors”.11 Thus, while part of Mugridge’s pathetic nastiness appears to
be the result of his Bowery upbringing, some portion of his poor charac-
ter seems to be genealogical, passed down in the blood of his groveling
relatives. Through the analeptic comment about the cook’s absorption of
both environmental noise and his mother’s questionable milk, the novel
marks Mugridge through his class and his ancestry, which makes his objec-
tion to Hump’s advice to man-up all the more persuasive. For along with
being unable to change the contents of Mugridge’s childhood stomach,
self-­making is equally unable to change the cook’s Cockney-ness because
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  119
it cannot change the Cockney-ness of his ancestors. The irreversibility and
inevitability of genealogical time ensures that Mugridge will retain his lowly
status no matter how long he sails the high seas.
Put in the factory terms that recur in The Valley of the Moon, Mugridge’s
efforts are simply inefficient; they do not ride the tide of genetic accomplish-
ment that supports the forward motion of characters such as Hump, Billy,
and Saxon. As in The Birth of a Nation, the actions of Billy and Saxon are
supported by their racial makeup. London clarifies that the efficiency of
his protagonists is greater than that of mere factory organizations because
they participate in a natural evolutionary progress that exists beyond man’s
plans. Thus even in factory and city environments tagged by London as
enervating to the race, his protagonists are the best performers within
these arenas. In the opening scene, an elderly woman’s collapse disrupts an
industrial laundry’s production line: “The women farther away continued
unsteadily at their work, losing movements to the extent of a minute’s set-
back to the totality of the efficiency of the fancy-starch room” (London, The
Valley of the Moon 4). In contrast, Saxon works beautifully and quickly
in the factory; despite its overall negative effects, “she hummed over the
fancy starch that flew under the iron at an astounding rate” (53). Similarly,
Billy is “one of those rare individuals that radiate muscular grace through
the ungraceful man-garments of civilization. Every movement was supple,
slow, and apparently considered” (15). From London’s initial descriptions of
Billy and Saxon to his accounts of intensive farming at the end of the novel,
an account of modern efficiency and planning appears layered on top of
accounts of racial destiny and natural progress.
In contrast, falling out of “step” with the cadence of one’s ancestors
yields disastrous results. One half of the couple that serves as foil to Billy
and Saxon, Bert rejects the genetic determinism that so fascinates Billy and
Saxon. Seemingly bored by Billy and Saxon’s recounting of their ancestors’
shared accomplishments (e.g., crossing the plains, fighting in the Civil War),
Bert makes an argument similar to Wolf Larsen’s, suggesting that only the
present time matters: “The dead are dead”, he proclaims, “an’ you can bet
your sweet life that they just keep on stayin’ dead” (London, The Valley of
the Moon 24). But London’s novels and national conversations on racial
futurity suggest Bert is mistaken. In contrast to the efficient beauty that Saxon
sees in Billy’s continuity with his racial past, she describes Bert in the terms
of the mechanized present that only looks efficient when viewed myopically,
without reference to racial destiny: “Just a hint of a jerk spoiled his dancing—a
jerk that did not occur, usually, but that always impended” (16). Even if Bert
doesn’t jerk in the moment, the jerk is just over the horizon for him, threat-
ening to throw off his dance. In Time and Free Will, Bergson writes, “If jerky
movements are wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them is self-sufficient
and does not announce those which are to follow. If curves are more graceful
than broken lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its direction
at every moment, every new direction is indicated in the preceding one. Thus
120  Made of Leavings and Scraps
the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of mastering
the flow of time and of holding the future in the present” (11). For Bergson
coherence and interconnection between temporal moments creates aesthetic
grace that shades into moral grace as well. Similarly, the grace that Billy
embodies and Bert’s jerking movements each signal their temporal relation
to the race. Much like Mugridge’s proleptic pants, then, Bert’s bad moves
on the dance floor suggest his end. Having rejected the significance of his
ancestry, Bert falls out of step with racial rhythms.
From the perspective of such long racial time scales, Hump’s attempt to
inspire the cook—telling him, “Cheer up. It’ll all come right in the end. You’ve
long years before you, and you can make anything you please of yourself”
(London, The Sea-Wolf 96)—misrepresents the situation. Although H ­ umphrey
“Sissy” Van Weyden has developed muscles, skills, and a degree of brute man-
hood during his short tenure aboard the Ghost, this is, as Mugridge is quick
to point out, because Hump is made of better stuff to begin with. Returning
to his complaint,

It’s a lie! A bloody lie! … I’m already myde, an’ myde out of leavin’s
an’ scraps. It’s all right for you, ‘Ump. You was born a gentleman. … It
carn’t come right. If I was President of the United Stytes to-morrer, ‘ow
would it fill my belly for one time w’en I was a kiddy an it went empty?
‘Ow could it, I s’y. I was born to sufferin’ and sorrer. I’ve ‘ad more
cruel sufferin’ than any ten men, I ‘ave. I’ve been in the ‘orspital ‘arf my
bleedin’ life. (97)

Mugridge’s syntax emphasizes the impossibility of improvement. His fate,

“I’m already myde”, was guaranteed by the initial bad ancestral mix “of
leavin’s an’ scraps”. In addition to this acknowledgment of his limitations,
Mugridge also makes a surprising connection here, first noting that Hump
was born a gentleman and then indicating that because he himself was not,
he can never become President. Echoing Roosevelt’s and James’s account of
self-making’s tripartite temporality, the novel clarifies that it is not lack of
a strenuous life that prevents Mugridge from aspiring to such an office—
indeed, his empty childhood belly, as opposed to Hump’s soft “lydy’s” skin
would seem to better fit him for the job. Instead, it is a weakness of line, his
having been made of leftover bits, that has kept the sickly cockney in the
“‘orspital” for the majority of his life.
Nature herself, in the form of a hungry shark, corroborates Mugridge’s
assessment of his constitution. Shortly after Maud Brewster, the romantic
interest in the novel, arrives aboard the Ghost, Wolf keelhauls Mugridge
as punishment for failing to clean up the kitchen and improve his personal
hygiene. A common-enough punishment in tales of high-sea adventure, the
keel-hauling literalizes Mugridge’s complaint that he is made of leavings
and scraps. Tied at the end of a rope and tossed overboard as shark bait,
Mugridge’s body transforms into the kitchen leavings he has always feared
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  121
it was. Before she realizes what is happening, Maud asks Larsen, “Are you
fishing?” Upon seeing a shark fin slashing through the water, towards the
panicking Mugridge, Wolf shouts to have him hauled aboard. As Hump
relays it, “The Cockney’s body left the water; so did part of the shark’s. He
drew up his legs and the man-eater seemed no more than to barely touch
one foot, sinking back into the water with a splash. But at the moment of
contact Thomas Mugridge cried out … a fountain of blood was gushing
forth. The right foot was missing, amputated neatly at the ankle” (London,
The Sea-Wolf 157). Fulfilling the promise of his pants, Mugridge has been
quite literally relegated to the scrap heap of humanity.12
Making her appearance a little under a half of the way through the novel,
Maud Brewster offers another, gendered example of how racial time may
trump an individual’s particular story, or, at least, comfortably accommo-
date seeming challenges. As Anita Duneer has argued, Maud represents a
new woman figure in London’s text (187), one who is fully rounded, simul-
taneously exhibiting fear in the face of the terrifying Wolf Larsen and also
possessing the gumption and intellectual chops to stand up to him. Indeed,
both Hump and Wolf will come to revise their opinions of Maud and women
more generally as she, too, taps into an inner strength aboard the Ghost.
While Hump initially describes Maud as “so ethereally slender and delicate
that [he] was quite prepared for her arm to crumble in [his] grasp” (London,
The Sea-Wolf 138), after a few weeks at sea Maud has so proven herself that
Wolf admiringly catalogs her virtues thus: “Books and brains, and bravery.
You are well-rounded, a blue-stocking fit to be the wife of a pirate chief”
(179). As with Saxon’s salutary journey through the California countryside,
Maud’s displays of bravery in the fresh sea air demonstrate that for both
London’s male and female characters a life of physical exertion freed from
the unnatural economic and social pressures of modern society puts them
back in touch with their birthright strength, making them fitter partners for
one another. This phenomenon becomes most explicit as each novel con-
cludes with its reinvigorated couple situated in a prelapsarian setting.

Racial Time’s Impersonality

Told in the first-person, The Sea-Wolf departs from naturalism’s traditional
third-person omniscience, but nonetheless retains naturalism’s distant tempo-
ral view by way of the rapidly shifting timescales in Hump’s narration. These
shifts alternate between individual accomplishments on the one hand and
racial destiny on the other. From the novel’s first sentence, “I hardly know
where to begin” (London, The Sea-Wolf 4), Hump reveals, that he, like
Vandover, will be a character who struggles to narrate events over time. While
Vandover struggled with sequencing, Hump’s confusions center on duration
and tense. After Hump’s ship wrecks amid the screams of women “of [his]
own kind” (8), the shouts fade and Hump finds himself bobbing alone in the
ocean: “Later—how much later I have no knowledge,—I came to myself with
122  Made of Leavings and Scraps
a start of fear” (9). Although Hump’s inability to track duration in a crisis is
understandable—Vandover encountered a similar struggle in the wake of the
Mazatlan’s wreck—he goes on to describe his experience of time through a
conflation between long and short time that becomes a pattern throughout
the novel. Recalling his panic upon realizing his isolation in the water, Hump
explains, “How long this lasted I have no conception, for a blankness inter-
vened, of which I remember no more than one remembers of troubled and
painful sleep. When I aroused, it was as after centuries of time; and I saw,
almost above me and emerging from the fog, the bow of a vessel” (9). Once
the Ghost picks up the bedraggled castaway, Hump loses consciousness. As he
regains sense, he again describes his sensations in terms of long temporal units:

I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparkling

points of light sputtered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew, and
flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reached the
limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a
great gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period, lapped
in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremen-
dous flight. But a change came over the face of the dream, for a dream
I told myself it must be. My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. I was
jerked from swing to counter swing with irritating haste. I could scarcely
breathe, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The gong thun-
dered more frequently and more furiously. (11)

The metaphysical journey with which this passage begins moves through
the long lifetimes of the universe and echoes Norris’s remarks on the wheat
at the end of The Octopus, “that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic
calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in
its appointed grooves” (651). Or, put differently, Hump here sees what the
doomed protagonist of “To Build a Fire” cannot: his smallness within the
giant celestial clock.
In addition to the analeptic and proleptic movements that articulate
racial destiny, The Sea-Wolf contains outbursts in the present tense, which
can be understood as Hump’s insistence on his actions’ significance, even as
the rest of the narration’s tripartite temporality means that this can never be
so. Breaking with the standard past-tense recollections of autobiographies,
the diegetic character Hump interrupts the narrating Hump’s recollections
with present tense proclamations. For example, Hump complains, “Thomas
Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to Mister him and Sir
him with every speech” (47); at another point he announces the ship’s prog-
ress, “Ten knots, twelve knots, eleven knots, varying from time to time, is the
speed we are making” (56). Later, Hump has this realization:

Rest! I never before knew the meaning of the word. I had been resting all
my life and did not know it. But now, could I sit still for one half-hour
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  123
and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most pleasurable thing
in the world. But it is a revelation, on the other hand. I shall be able to
appreciate the lives of working people hereafter. I did not dream that
work was so terrible a thing. From half-past five in the morning till ten
o’clock at night I am everybody’s slave, with not one moment to myself,
except such as I can steal near the end of the second dog-watch. (49)

Hump eventually learns not just to empathize with working people, but also
that hard work is required for making a man of himself. And though the
novel is narrated from this “hereafter” perspective, Hump’s achievements of
new strength also appear in the present tense: “I am in splendid condition,
feel that I am in splendid condition. My muscles are growing harder and
increasing in size” (82). These strange outbursts in the present tense serve
to metonymize the short time of an individual life—of self-making—against
the longer narrative of the novel, which translates Hump’s achievements
into a fulfillment of racial destiny.13
Such a narrative strategy proves challenging for characterization, as well
as more microlevel plot movement, as very few of London’s characters’ actions
are explained by way of their present-time motivations. For ­example, in one
of The Valley of the Moon’s many discussions of household economics, it is
unsurprising that Saxon shares “with Billy his horror of debt, just as both
shared it with that early tide of pioneers with a Puritan ethic, which had
settled the West” (296). Here, London “just” equates present-time sharing
between mates with the kind of sharing that takes place between offspring
and progenitor: present-day Billy and Saxon cannot help but share a Puritan
fiscal sense; it’s in their blood. As a result, plot development and charac-
terization starts to take on a recursive, if not static, shape, as each inch of
forward progress in the present is buttressed by a recall of past ancestral
forward movement. London expresses this particular mode of progress by
way of sentences that invoke multiple timescales simultaneously, as when
Saxon considers their journey: “She sighed happily and dried her eyes. Perhaps
the hard times were past. Perhaps they had constituted her Plains, and she
and Billy had won safely across and were even then climbing the Sierras ere
they dropped down into the pleasant valley land” (297; emphasis original).
Saxon’s reflection on her position begins in a typical simple past tense, but
quickly moves into comparative thought in a conditional mood that col-
lapses Saxon’s progress with that of her ancestors. The strange logical propo-
sition takes as its given that Saxon will follow the path her ancestors blazed:
the question is not whether she has a plains, but whether these plains be they.
In such descriptions, the present-time actions of Billy and Saxon grow
large with racial significance, a phenomenon further expressed in passages
in which the characters remark on the temporal compression typifying their
days: “I don’t know when I’ve been so tired”, Billy yawns. “An’ there’s one
thing sure: I never had such a day. It’s worth livin’ twenty years for an’ then
some” (London, The Valley of the Moon 398). Importantly, such comments
124  Made of Leavings and Scraps
only occur when Billy and Saxon are roaming the countryside, not in their
perhaps equally strenuous urban lives. In addition to whatever personal
value Billy might put on the day’s events, the days Billy and Saxon spend liv-
ing off the land are “worth” twenty years because these days put the protag-
onists in touch with a much longer racial time. In these moments, ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, sometimes at the cost of character development.
The long racial time that simultaneously buttresses and renders pre-
dictable the success of London’s protagonists constrains other characters.
Throughout the narrative, Hump identifies women of his race and class with
the phrase “my own kind”, implying his interest in reproductive futurity—
the future of the race.14 In contrast, Hump presents the men on the ship as
celibates and a race apart, using the present tense to do so. After comparing
the men to Circe’s swine, Hump proclaims, “They are a company of celi-
bates. … It would appear that they are a half-brute, half-human species, a
race apart, wherein there is no such thing as sex … that all their days they
fester in brutality and viciousness and in the end die as unlovely as they
have lived” (The Sea-Wolf 100). As in his references to Mugridge, Hump
expresses a racialism that pins his shipmates not just in place, but also in
time. Using the present tense “to be” as an entomologist’s pin, the novel’s
account of racial difference forecloses for some the narrative development
and personal achievement central to the self-making project.
The snag on which both self-making and the novel catch themselves is
one that hooks together naturalism’s many strands: the balance between the
free will required for a man to meaningfully make something of himself and
the determinism that insists upon the predestined status of certain classes of
men. On the one hand, Mugridge’s anger at Hump for being a gentleman
born (London, The Sea-Wolf 99) and Hump’s earlier sense that birth is all
he needs to demand high esteem are too static—in neither account can a
man or a race progress: one is what he is. On the other hand, Wolf’s “whole
concern” with “the immediate objective present” (184) is too narrow. A sea
burial for the ship’s first mate dramatizes these principles. After the men
unceremoniously drop the body overboard, Humps notes, “The dead man
was an episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas
covering with a sack of coal” (29). Through its shifting narration and its
frank discussions of eternal souls and brute nature, The Sea-Wolf posits the
importance of a man’s life as more than mere incident or episode, if only he
can get right with his lineage. Extending the line is a matter of both genetics
and aesthetics, as a man continues the smooth line of his ancestry forward.
As Johnson’s story as well as the static characterizations in The Sea-Wolf
and The Valley of the Moon reveal, the problem with such a definition of
self-making is that the individual begins to appear meaningless in relation to
the race. The story of the self-made man is the story of a self linking together
a series of events. But this narrative of punctual activity made up of a per-
son’s achievements undoes itself when placed next to the very racial narra-
tive that casts coherence upon the individual’s accomplishments. If it is in
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  125
the nature of the white race for its members to be superior, then individual
white men’s actions and events are rendered predictable, if not insignificant.
In the London novels discussed here, the self should only ever be the story
of the race.15 In this context, the life of an individual man begins to look
very much like the short time of an event in his life, made meaningful only
by the long narrative time of racial destiny in which past genetic affilia-
tions ensure future ones and ancient heroes guarantee present heroism. Or
as Saxon tells Billy, “We’re both old American stock. And if you aren’t a
Saxon there never was one’” (London, The Valley of the Moon 23). Here
difference of any kind, even in the form of personality, looks like an obstacle
to efficient racial-­national progress, which depends on characters being able
to say things such as Saxon does: “Oh we known each other longer than
that [a week]. … Before ever we were born our folks were walkin’ across the
plains together” (23). In other words, for Billy to have a distinctive personal-
ity would make it harder to say that if he isn’t a Saxon, there never was any
such thing. This is the same logic that says American boys are the future pasts
for good American men. What matters to large-scale narrative is not motiva-
tion internal to the individual, but coherence with larger racial progress. Con-
versely, men whose lives countered dominant racial narratives, including Jack
Johnson, could be treated much like The Sea-Wolf’s dead sailor, as “an episode
that was past, an incident that was dropped” (London 29). Indeed, when it
came to the circulation of Johnson’s fight films, this was very much the case.

London and Johnson at the Fights

With his taunts to opponents—“I have forgotten more about boxing than
Burns ever knew” (“Jack Johnson not Surprised” B1)—and his frequent
press appearances, Jack Johnson laid the ground for silver-tongued boxers
of the twentieth century. But in the century’s first decades, white audi-
ences who identified with Johnson’s rivals did not always appreciate what
London referred to as Johnson’s “mouth fighting” (“Burns-Johnson Fight”
262). Nor did they look fondly on his other narratives of achievement, for
Johnson was not just a boxer: he was also a bull fiddle player, a mechanic, an
inventor, an author, and an unrepentant lover of white women. Even before
the publication of his first autobiography, Johnson’s self-­presentation was
met with both pride and concern in the black community. One letter to
the editor of the Chicago Defender suggests the nature of the black press’s
split opinion on Johnson: “After reading all the race papers published in
the country, I am compelled to acknowledge yours to be the best paper in
the bunch. … I admire your stand in the Jack Johnson case. While some
of the race papers (in order to be in line with the white dailies) were crit-
icizing Jack Johnson you were treating him fairly” (“The Editor’s Mail”
p. 3, col. 4). Meanwhile, the white press felt less ambivalent about Johnson’s
loud self-promotion. The New York Herald mocked Johnson’s theatrical
self-presentation, claiming “Johnson Lives on Applause. Without it he fades
126  Made of Leavings and Scraps
away to nothingness” (qtd. in Ward 375). Jack Johnson appears in the
papers as a being of narrative, with the white press hoping that without a
narrative to encompass him, he would sink to obscurity, a mere episode to
be passed by, an incident to be dropped.
A war of narrative and counternarrative characterized the publicity around
Johnson. Satirical articles and cartoons of the boxer focused on Johnson’s
storytelling and offered up narratives of their own. For example, Tad
­Dorgan, the sports cartoonist who covered the Johnson–Jeffries fight, pro-
duced a series called “Li’l Artha Johnson, His Life, Battles and Career, Writ-
ten by Himself” (1909). This series featured cartoons that referenced Uncle
Tom’s Cabin as well as one labeled “The Pugilistic Othello”. ­Throughout the
series an unrecognizably stereotyped Johnson appears in the garb of charac-
ters from popular literary works. Dorgan drew realistic cartoons of Johnson
as well, but for “Li’l Artha” he drew upon racial caricatures and well-known
white-authored representations of blacks to satirize Johnson’s authorship and
self-authoring (McCrory 59). The tease in “Li’l Artha J­ ohnson” comes from
poking fun of Johnson’s idea of himself as a great man with an important
story to tell. Perhaps counting on the adage “no publicity is bad publicity”,
Johnson maintained a friendship with Dorgan, which he describes in his
biography In the Ring and Out: “To ‘Tad’, the famous writer and cartoonist,
who became a good friend of mine, I owe much for the inspiration, counsel
and public backing which he gave me, and it was he that made the appel-
lation ‘Lil Arthur’ known the world over” (35). In Johnson’s appreciation
of his friend, he leaves out any description of the cartoonist’s minstrel-like
depictions of him. In turn, Dorgan returned Johnson’s compliment by writing
an introduction to the biography in which he proclaims “Jack Johnson … the
greatest heavyweight of all times” (19). Johnson’s mock and actual biogra-
phies thus raise narrative questions: What kind of story could be told about
Johnson and his fights?
In the “Li’l Artha” series Dorgan answered this question easily by fold-
ing Johnson neatly into established narratives of black literary characters,
but London narrates Johnson’s fights in a way that reveals the high stakes
in play. London acknowledged Johnson’s superiority and found embarrass-
ing the white boxers who lost to him, (first Burns, and later Jeffries). And
though he would admit Johnson’s clear superiority in the ring—“All hail
to Johnson. His victory was unqualified” (“Burns-Johnson Fight” 259)—
London invokes precisely the genealogical history of racial superiority that
Johnson’s victories had undermined as a way of balming the sting of the
black boxer’s win. My interpretation of the fight coverage thus differs from
Reesman’s, who notes a change in the reportage that indicates a gradual
warming on London’s part toward Johnson and argues “London’s accounts
begin in accord with the racial prejudice of the day, but by the end of his
dispatches he praises Johnsons talent and wit … In both the 1908 and the
1910 newspaper stories, London is converted to champion Johnson for his
role as underdog, his physical and mental talent, and for his performer’s
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  127
smile” (184). And, indeed, at a personal level London does show affection
for the black heavyweight champ, but his view of the fights’ racial signifi-
cance and Jeffries’s importance are more notable than Reesman indicates.
Whereas Reesman reads London’s call to Jeffries at the end of the Burns–
Johnson fight (“Jeff, it’s up to you”) as part of an ironic comparison between
the black and white champs (189), the seriousness with which London took
the white champ can be seen in his insertion of Jeffries into the long time
of Anglo-Saxon lineage, the disappointment that registers in his personal
letters, and in his later recasting of Jeffries as Billy Roberts.
London called for Johnson to fight Jim Jeffries, who London describes as
descended from tribes of strong white men. Anticipating his descriptions of
Billy Roberts in The Valley of the Moon, London describes Jeffries as a man
“[whose] thighs are so mighty that they remind one inevitably of the leg-
endary Teutonic warrior who, by the grip of his thighs, made his war horse
groan beneath him” (“Jeffries-Johnson No. 3” 269). Here, London reads
white genealogy onto Jeffries’s body, much as Saxon does Billy’s when she
identifies his kinship with “the Vikings” carved upon the heirloom chest she
inherited from her pioneer mother (The Valley of the Moon 297). London’s
repeated calls for a white challenger to come forward invoke a narrative
order that needs to be restored by the white warrior, the retired Jim Jeffries.
Across London’s coverage of Johnson’s fights, as well as in the ongoing
reports of Johnson in the white and black papers of the day, writers, politi-
cians, and pugilists duked it out to control the narrative meaning of J­ ohnson’s
fights. In addition to London’s coverage, two Chicago papers serve as guides
to Johnson’s career: The Chicago Defender, a race-paper to which Johnson
granted a high level of access, and The Chicago Daily Tribune, a main-
stream paper notable both for relatively even-handed coverage of Johnson
and for its employment of former champion Jim Corbett as a boxing colum-
nist. The initial victory in Australia left no room for doubt about J­ ohnson’s
impressive strength and skill. By all accounts, once he had Burns in the ring,
Johnson had him beat. London reported admiringly, “It was not a case of
‘too much Johnson’, but of ‘all Johnson’. A golden smile tells the story, and
that golden smile was Johnson’s” (“Burns-Johnson Fight” 260). Despite the
tale the smile told, the narrative arc of the Burns–Johnson match lacked
closure in more ways than one. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported a fair
fight and told that both fighters had agreed that should the police stop the
fight, McIntosh would be allowed to rule on the winner. Though fans placed
bets against Johnson, 7 to 4, he quickly showed his advantage. By the end
of the thirteenth round, Burns “was so weak the heads of police present
discussed the advisability of stopping his being further mauled. They, how-
ever, allowed the fourteenth round to begin. But when Burns, after being
knocked down, rose almost helplessly to receive more of Johnson’s mer-
ciless punishing, they decided the fight had gone far enough and forbade
its continuance” (“Johnson Beats Burns” 8). In addition to the match’s
incompleteness, the full filmic record to evidence Johnson’s win is a blank.
128  Made of Leavings and Scraps
Gaumont’s cameras, which produced visible and lasting evidence of the
fight, cut off just before the fight ended.16 Johnson’s referee-called win and
the sense that he had fought the wrong man meant that many whites could
comfortably tell themselves that Johnson’s heavyweight title was merely a
fluke, not a meaningful story.
Though The Chicago Daily Tribune and London agreed Johnson fought
fair, they also declared he had fought the wrong man and called for Jeffries to
return from retirement and rescue the title. The same article that announced
Johnson’s win, “Johnson Beats Burns in 14 Rounds”, ends with this final
paragraph: “Neither Burns nor Johnson, however, has been considered a man
the stamp of Jeffries, Sullivan, or Corbett in the fighting game” (8). London
likewise cast Johnson’s victory as an anomaly only made possible by Jeffries’s
too-early retirement. Like the Tribune article, in its last paragraph, London’s
report cries out to Jeffries: “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from
his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. ‘Jeff, it’s up to
you, and McIntosh, it’s up to you to get the fight for ­Australia. Both you and
Australia certainly deserve it’”. (“Burns-Johnson Fight” 264).17 Jeffries did
eventually return to the ring. He would not, however, answer Jack London’s
challenge. Indeed, Jeffries’s inability to do so may have served as London’s
inspiration for creating his own fictional farmer-boxer in the form of Billy
Roberts, a character who would not so betray his ancestry. In his biography,
Johnson describes the furor among white boxing fans that would go on to
characterize the lead-up to the Jeffries–Johnson match: “I was not permitted
to rest secure in the title. I was constantly harassed and criticized. A large
portion of the public, or that part interested in boxing, at least, insisted that
Jeffries still was the champion and that I must defeat him if I wished to retain
my belt” (133). The fight was hyped; Jeffries had retired undefeated, and
many believed he could beat Johnson.
Eventually, a Fourth of July match was scheduled for San Francisco.
Later, under pressure from California religious groups (Sims, “A National
Disgrace” p. 1, col. 4), the location would be moved to Reno, Nevada. The
fighters headed west early to establish their training camps, and a large
press corps followed them, reporting home about the two boxers’ prepa-
rations and making predictions. Johnson was a particular favorite for the
journalists, performing music around town and posing for numerous pic-
tures (­Figure 3.1). The black press had been particularly eager for the fight,
freighted as it was with serious racial implications. At the end of May, in
response to white churches in California who protested the fight as a vulgar
national disgrace, Defender correspondent A. G. F. Sims directly addressed
whites and proclaimed the fight’s racial and national significance: “[P]ermit
me to say that as this is the first time that a black man and a white man have
met as the pick of their respective races in a contest of this kind, on behalf of
the Negroes of this and other countries, may Jack succeed in knocking Jim’s
block off, just to make it a good national disgrace” (“A National Disgrace”
p. 1, col. 4).
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  129

Figure 3.1  Jack Johnson in The Chicago Sunday Tribune.

Like much of America, the Tribune was also eager for the fight, although
more circumspect in its copy than The Defender. The paper retained a doc-
tor to inspect Johnson and provide his measurements for Tribune readers
and took pictures of Johnson’s training camp (“Jack Johnson is a Physical
Marvel” C1; “Champion Jack Johnson in Novelty ‘Stunts’” C3). But the
paper also featured columns less supportive of the hometown hero. Former
heavyweight champ “Gentleman” Jim Corbett offered his opinions on the
upcoming fight. A tremendous trash-talker ringside, Corbett began his ver-
bal spars with Johnson in his Tribune articles, making particular fun of
Johnson’s self-promotion. In an article titled “Negro Great Press Agent”,
Corbett offers these remarks:

It doesn’t seem to me as if we were giving Jack Johnson all the credit to

which he seems entitled. Aside from the somewhat rapid and remark-
able development of his conversational power, Johnson always is dig-
ging up something new for his reportorial guests at his training camp.
It doesn’t matter so much that he is constantly revising his ideas so
long as the readers get the new suggestions on training and kindred
130  Made of Leavings and Scraps
subjects. I wouldn’t even suggest that ‘Lil Artha’ should engage any
one to edit his copy, because it’s more amusing in the original text. (C1)

Corbett takes his place among many of Johnson’s critics who often paired
accusations of racial “cleverness” alongside digs about Johnson’s “yellow
streak”. His invocation of “Lil Artha” alongside comments about Johnson’s
self-authoring recalls the folksy “darkie” image of Johnson seen in Dorgan’s
cartoons. However, at the same time Corbett was chastising Johnson for ham-
ming it up, the Tribune devoted many pages to the notorious Jack ­Johnson.
Again, much of the hostility about Johnson focuses not on physicality or
boxing skills, but on the production of circulating narratives. Interestingly,
Corbett puts his criticism of Johnson’s talk in semi-evolutionary terms as
he notes the boxer’s “rapid and remarkable development”. Though meant
sarcastically, this is the language of coming into one’s own that London uses
in The Sea-Wolf and The Valley of the Moon. This, then, suggests one aspect
of Johnson’s threat: with his ease of achievement in multiple arenas, Johnson
made a black man’s success look like doing what comes naturally.
London, who admitted Johnson’s clear excellence in the ring, also spent
many articles ruminating over Johnson’s nature. He perhaps recognized a like
soul in Johnson’s engagement with the public—Reesman suggests he admired
the boxer as a fellow entertainer (196)—and helped brand Johnson by fix-
ating on his golden smile.18 The author’s metonymic association of Johnson
with his smile runs throughout his reporting. Offering his expertise as a judge
of character, London declares Johnson “happy-go-lucky in temperament, as
light and carefree as a child” (“Jeffries-Johnson No. 2” 266). In contrast,
London centers his descriptions of Jeffries on the fighter’s old stock:

Jeff is a fighter, Johnson is a boxer. Jeff has the temperament of the

fighter. Old mother nature in him is still red of fang and claw. He is
more a ­Germanic tribesman and warrior of two thousand years ago
than a civilized man of the twentieth century, with the civilized trade
of boilermaker, and he has bridged the gap by turning pugilist and
becoming the mightiest walloper of men in all the earth.
(“Jeffries-Johnson No. 2” 267)

In these dispatches, London plays up Jeffries’s ethnic heritage. But rather

than featuring Jeffries’s visible racial ancestry as a liability, London posi-
tions him as a man who has successfully retained his masculinity by bringing
his powerful ancestry to bear on the modern world: Jeffries has maintained
the balance that Hump strives for in The Sea-Wolf, finding a way to keep the
Darwinian animal in himself alive as he navigates civilization.
Against the deep racial history London locates in “Jeff’s primitiveness”
(“Jeffries-­Johnson No. 2” 267) is the intense presentism London locates in
Johnson’s “happy-go-lucky temperament”. In differentiating the boxers,
­
­London establishes two types of bestial nature, explaining that unlike Jeffries,
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  131
Johnson “lives more in the moment and joy and sorrow are swift passing
moods with him. He is not capable of seriously adjusting his actions to remote
ends” (“Jeffries-­Johnson No. 2” 266). As in Vandover and in L ­ ondon’s descrip-
tion of Wolf Larsen, living in the moment marks b ­ rutishness—importantly dif-
ferent from the “mother nature” in Jeffries that “is still red of fang and claw”.
­Locating Johnson’s emotions and goals as entirely of the moment, London
implies that fights lack significance for Johnson, existing as mere events rather
than taking their place in relation to a racial destiny, as they would for Jeffries.
Though London would revise some of his statements about Johnson, in
his descriptions of Valley of the Moon’s Jeffries-like Billy Roberts, he retains
a similar narration of individual boxers’ relation to racial heritage. When
Billy fights an Irish brawler in the streets, London explains, “The eyes of the
Irishman were angry and serious and yet not all serious. There was a way-
ward gleam in them, as if they enjoyed the fracas. But in Billy’s eyes there was
no enjoyment. It was as if he had certain work to do and had doggedly settled
down to do it” (38). As in the earlier description of Johnson, the challenger is
joyful and unworried by the pugilistic task at hand. In contrast, Billy’s

face was mature in a terrifying, ageless way. There was no anger in it,
nor was it even pitiless. It seemed to have glazed as hard and as passion-
lessly as his eyes. Something came to [Saxon] of her wonderful mother’s
tales of the ancient Saxons and he seemed to her one of those Saxons,
and he caught a glimpse, on the well of her consciousness of a long,
dark boat, with a prow like the beaks of a huge bird of prey, and of
huge, half-naked men, wing-helmeted and one of their faces, it seemed
to her, was his face. (39)

Whereas the fight is meaningless to Johnson or to the Irishman, it matters

to the Anglo-Saxon fighters. Fighting is a serious matter to them, because
it is a matter of fitting into their racial destiny. Correspondingly, because
fighting is not, in London’s writing, part of Johnson’s or the Irishman’s racial
makeup, they can afford to not take it seriously—and thus, it doesn’t matter
whether they win or lose.
In his last dispatch before the Jeffries-Johnson fight, London asserts his
preference for the man of his own race and lets slip a bit of prophecy: “If the
fight go any decent distance, bent and dented ribs for Johnson, if not broken
ones” (“Jeffries-Johnson No. 11” 291). Johnson did not break his ribs in the
match. Instead, on the Fourth of July, Johnson beat the Great White Hope
with ease. London here implicitly invokes two timescales, which suggests
the way the story of Johnson’s win would be managed. A longer fight is
decent, while the shorter timescale in which it is implied Johnson might win
appears obscene to the point of inaccuracy and unworthiness of telling.
Newspaper accounts of the fight quickly moved beyond the rounds
and blows featured in “The Story of the Fight” to a consideration of the
fight’s larger context—the question of how Johnson’s story would circulate
132  Made of Leavings and Scraps
throughout the world. In addition to a pictorial account of the fight “by
rounds”, perhaps an attempt to compete with fight films (Figure 3.2), the
Tribune also ran reports by Johnson, the timekeeper, and John Sullivan, who
had been the heavyweight champ prior to Corbett. Sullivan’s report reveals
that Johnson’s victory came as easily as it had in the Burns match: “The fight
of the century is over and a black man is the undisputed champion of the
world. It was a poor fight as fights go … this less than fifteen round affair
between James J. Jeffries and Jack Johnson. Scarcely has there been a cham-
pion contest that was so one-sided” (“Jack Johnson, and Tools” 25). In his
memoir, Johnson confirms this assessment as he recalls,

Figure 3.2  A pictorial account of the fight “by rounds” in The Tribune.
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  133
Jeffries at no time made the going very difficult for me, and in the
fifteenth round I knocked him out. Whatever possible doubt may
have existed and did exist as to my claim to the championship was
wiped out. I had again demonstrated the material of which I was
made and I had conclusively vanquished one of the world’s greatest
boxers. In the gathering of spectators who saw the encounter was
another huge group of newspaper writers and photographers, and
round about us telegraph instruments clicked off a description of the
fight blow by blow. (56)

In their reports Sullivan and Johnson each emphasize the short timescales
involved in the fight itself—for Sullivan, it is a poor fight for its brevity; and
Johnson’s description of the telegraphic instruments clicking away recalls
the Muybridge motion studies. The event of the fight becomes either a series
of still images in newspaper print or a succession of punches sent out across
the telegraph wires that circled the globe. Moreover, Johnson refers to the
work of the telegraphs as “description”, as opposed to the narration that
tells the full story of the fight’s significance. Indeed, Johnson hints at the
wrongheadedness of understanding the fight as an isolatable event as he
counters London’s description of him as a creature of the present, using
language strikingly reminiscent to Hump’s: “I had again demonstrated the
material of which I was made”.
London’s coverage of Johnson reveals the real-world implications of
The Sea-Wolf and The Valley of The Moon’s account of man’s relation to
race. Like Sullivan, London emphasizes the one-sided quality of the fight
in his report, but he also retains his account of Johnson as reactive, rather
than proactively planning and executing his win: “There is nothing heavy
or primitive about this man Johnson. He is alive and quivering, every nerve
fiber in his body and brain, withal that it is hidden, so artfully, or naturally,
under that poised facetious calm of his” (“Jeffries-Johnson Fight” 296).
When London explains that Johnson is not primitive, this seeming moment
of antiracism is not the compliment it seems. By depicting the boxer as a
bundle of quivering fibers, London locates him as entirely material and in
the present, as opposed to possessing the atavistic connection to a warrior
past he grants Jeffries and his character Billy Roberts. As a result, Johnson
and his race become separated—he becomes a mere instant, as opposed to a
link in an ongoing chain of racial accomplishment.
And yet, at stake in the 1910 Reno Jeffries–Johnson fight was the threat
that the metonymic event, the short timescale, might trump the longer times-
cale of evolutionary time, of which the fight was supposed to be a mere sup-
porting iteration. With his physicality and energy for life, Johnson stood as
an exemplar of vigorous manhood. In fact, the mayor of Toledo responded
to the fight by hypothesizing that Johnson “perhaps could whip Roosevelt”
(qtd. in Kaye 47). Maintaining assertions that Johnson was not a “great
man” of the sort promoted by Teddy Roosevelt required the white press,
134  Made of Leavings and Scraps
including London, to separate Johnson’s individual achievements from his
narrative whole, including his status as a black man.
Important to understanding the way the fight resonates throughout The
Valley of the Moon is the personal tragedy London suffered when covering
the fight in Reno. While in Nevada, London was also grieving the death of
his newborn, who died two days after her birth on June 21. In his July 11
letter to friend Louis Augustin, his emotional response to recent events comes
through:

Dear Indian:
Just a brief line, in reply to yours of June 25th.
As you may not have heard, Charmian and I lost our little girl.
­Charmian is now in the hospital, and at last is beginning to slowly mend.
It was nip and tuck with her for quite a time.
I am just back from the big fight at Reno, which proved the rotte-
nest in all history of the ring, as well as the rottenest of the century.
Just a rush line is all I can send you. I am contemplating going
North on a lecture trip to Washington and British Columbia. I may
run into you up there.
Affectionately yours, (Letters 904)

In at least three ways, the letter predicts the story London would go on to
write a few years later. In the letter to his friend, the proximity of the term
“Indian”, the story of the fight, and news of Charmian’s miscarriage suggest
the messy interconnections between Johnson’s win and London’s thoughts
of racial history and futurity. Paralleling London’s habit of using the term
“Indian” as affectionate address, The Valley of the Moon’s characters refer
to one another as “the last of the Mohegans”. Claiming their “tribe” in
this way simultaneously allows the protagonists to create a closed racial
group, claim their originality as white settlers on the continent, and refer-
ence impending race suicide. Bert, the character in the novel who uses the
phrase most frequently, dies in a labor dispute, a violent conflict that also
catches Saxon in its wake. As a result, she suffers a miscarriage—a trauma
that haunts her through the novel’s first half.
Indeed, the novel’s most pessimistic character, Saxon’s sister-in-law Sarah,
describes a bad future in specifically racial terms. Complaining about her
husband’s participation in a strike, she rants to her children about the future
ills that will befall the family should he not cross the picket line: “How
will you like to see your mother in a straitjacket an’ a padded cell, shut
out from the light of the sun and beaten like a nigger before the war,
Willie, beaten an’ clubbed like a regular black nigger?” (London, The Valley
of the Moon 69). Each caused by the failure of a white patriarch, misce-
genation and temporal regression go hand in hand in Sarah’s rant, as she
imagines a future in which she falls out of both temporal progress and her
race, time traveling to become a “nigger before the war”. Though she leaves
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  135
the explicitly racialized metaphor behind as she pursues her complaint, the
threat of white failure allows a subtler image of race suicide to seep into the
future at large: “she continued tirelessly, painting with pessimistic strokes
the growing black future her husband was meditating for her” (70; empha-
sis added)”. In the novel, Sarah is proved wrong about the coming “black”
future—the future belongs to Saxon(s)—but the nonfictional world posed
an alternative narrative.
Although the fight took place in Reno, the fallout from Johnson’s suc-
cessful defense of his title was far-reaching. Race riots broke out around
the country, resulting in the murder of African-Americans in Illinois and
throughout the South (“Eleven Killed in Many Race Riots” 1). These riots
would later be used as additional justification for censoring Johnson’s films.
Mere days after the fight, perhaps because there was no clear successor,
or perhaps because victory in Reno meant that without a doubt the title
belonged to Johnson, skeptics began to question the fairness of the fight
and to plant conspiracy theories. In response to debates about the num-
ber of rounds it took Johnson to best Jeffries and whether the fight was a
knockout, the Tribune ran an article soliciting the opinion of a variety of
experts, including the referee Tex Rickford (“Bettors on Fight Puzzled” C3).
Such debates paled in comparison to accusations that played upon the pub-
lic’s sense of Johnson’s cleverness, including suppositions that the fight was
somehow fixed or that Jeffries was drugged (Johnson 137–8). In the heady
days that immediately followed the fight’s aftermath, the Tribune ran sto-
ries that ranged from bizarre to threatening, citing authorities with diverse
qualifications. In a July 7, 1910, article, a University of California professor
explains that the fight should be taken as evidence for racial equality and
proposes his theory “that negroes are not a distinct race, but are tanned
members of the Caucasian race” (“Fight Proof of Equality?” 3). On July 6,
the paper reported that the “Hindu Prophet” who predicted “the Galveston
flood, the assassination of President McKinley, and who a few days ago
says he saw in a dream that Johnson would knock out Jeffries in thirty-five
rounds, today predicted the assassination of the champion by a white man”
(“Predicts Death for Johnson” 11). These strange stories register the white
animus toward Johnson in the wake of his win and also hint at the signif-
icance of Johnson’s victory for his race. In order to make his win appear
less significant, the work against Johnson focused on either denarrativizing
Johnson or trying to reincorporate him into different racial narratives. Three
primary strategies aided in the project of Johnson’s narrative containment:
insisting his wins were incidents, not part of larger narratives; fitting Johnson
into a stereotypical narrative of black male sexuality; and controlling the
circulation of Johnson, both his films and his person.
On July 6, 1910, The Los Angeles Times ran an article titled “A Word
to the Black Man”, which cautioned black boxing fans not to see the indi-
vidual incident of Johnson’s win as a victory for themselves. “No man will
think higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the
136  Made of Leavings and Scraps
victor at Reno”, the paper warned (qtd. in Ward 216). Because, as the jour-
nalist points out, most black men were not like Johnson (though no white
men were either), Johnson’s example could be utilized in service of the most
effective kind of racism—one that one renders any black achievement an
aberration. With this advice, the LA Times reveals the adaptability of white
supremacist narratives at the time, as Du Bois’s talented tenth becomes per-
versely a mechanism for insisting upon the inferiority of the more represen-
tative ninety percent. In the eyes of the writer, by being excellent, Johnson
ceases to count as exemplary of his race. Instead of counting as evidence
for black equality, Johnson’s victory makes him the exception that proves
the rule.
Even back at home, stories about the boxer in the white press positioned
Johnson’s achievement as an anomaly rather than as a part of his life’s tra-
jectory, making his win not just a fluke in relation to his racial heritage, but
also inconsistent with his own life’s history. In an article titled “Johnson
Had Varied Career”, and under the subheading “No Fighter as a Boy”, the
July 5 Tribune claims, “Those who know Johnson’s early career say that, as
a boy, he gave no promise of becoming one of the most formidable fighters
of the century” (26). In contrast, The Defender gives an account of a little
boy destined to grow up into a champion, creating a narrative similar to
Roosevelt’s tale of boys who would become the future men of the nation.
The paper presents an image of Johnson’s wholesome childhood as a prepa-
ration for his impressive manhood: “After witnessing the scene of Gladiator
and mother, the reporters retired and the family entered their beautiful din-
ing room, where Jack’s mother had prepared, with her own hands some
of those good biscuits Jack ate when he was a boy” (“Jack Johnson Sheds
Tears” 1). At stake in these alternating accounts of Johnson’s boyhood are
the related questions of narrative trajectory and inherent worth. The two
Chicago newspapers trace the champion’s life backward to make claims
about his past constitution in order to either prove or discredit the appropri-
ateness of his present acclaim. Was he made of leavings and scraps, as was
Thomas Mugridge, or finer stuff, as was Billy Roberts?

A Proliferation of Johnsons: Film Censorship

and Miscegenation
Together, two legal approaches defeated Johnson: the deployment of the
Mann Act and film censorship. Both rulings had the same target in their
sights. While whites who were threatened by Johnson could not prevent
the one-time event of his win in Reno, they could control the circulation of
Johnson as a winner via the law. The legal cases against Johnson reveal the
overlap between sex and representation, as both film censorship and the
Mann Act combated the boxer’s reproducibility. Legally, both the Mann
Act and film censorship applied moral valences to commercial circulation.
In the case of Johnson, they both concern themselves with the proliferation
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  137
of things, whether genetic material or narratives. The threat posed by
Johnson’s sex life and his fighting life can thus be understood as structural
analogues: both legal cases against the boxer show the way the imagined
long time of white ancestry was being challenged very effectively by what
we might call a shallow but broad spreading of a black success story. In turn,
white legal strategies against Johnson also shared analogous techniques as
they attempted to freeze his circulation.
Johnson’s fight films were among the first test cases for film censorship,
and the controversy over the Burns–Johnson fight and the banning of the
Jeffries–Johnson fight film evince white desires to prevent Johnson’s story
from circulating. The release of the Johnson–Burns fight coincided with
the New York City film industry’s formation of the New York Board
of Censorship—an attempt on the industry’s part to self-regulate and thus
avoid codified government censorship (Grieveson 121). The board’s found-
ing responded to an overall push to control the distribution of salacious
films, and boxing films in particular. As Lee Grieveson’s research on early
film censorship documents, while the board passed the Johnson–Burns fight
film, its reception was so controversial that the board responded by assuring
that it would, in the future, censor films “according to the ‘grade’ of boxers”
(Grieveson 122). In other words, the release of future films featuring the
black heavyweight champ would necessarily be censored because Johnson’s
behavior outside the ring would mean that he didn’t make the “grade”.
Eventually, with the 1912 Sims Act, the government ended this particular
form of Johnson’s narrative circulation by restricting the transportation
of fight films across state lines. The bill took its name from Senator Sims,
who, partnering again with his antimiscegenation legislation collaborator
Rodenberry, proposed the ban (Streible, Fight Pictures 244–5). In one of the
first major film censorship acts, the sense of Johnson’s life as an obscenity
becomes a way of dropping his win from the historical record, an attempt
to overcome film’s archiving function.
The conflation of Johnson’s off-screen life and his boxing films as well as
the conflation between individual and racial narratives becomes particularly
clear in discussions of which audiences would be damaged by viewing the
fights. The United States was not alone in banning the films. The Tribune
reported that in South Africa the “bioscope halls” had “refused offers for the
exhibition of the moving pictures of the Jeffries Johnson fight, fearing they
would cause out breaks of the latent racial antipathies” (“Cities Prohibit” 1).
Throughout the debates around the pictures, censors cited the need to keep
peace between races as a primary concern, and given the riots that followed
the fight’s aftermath, there may have been reason to worry about interra-
cial violence. However, the compromises offered in censorship discussions
suggest that the worries implicit in the debate were at least as much about
protecting white women from Johnson as they were about protecting black
citizens from white lynch mobs. Tellingly, the Patents Company, which pur-
chased rights to the film, worked to avoid censorship by promising that
138  Made of Leavings and Scraps
“it would show the films as ‘stag shows’ and not to women—a strategy that
ran counter to the broader trends within the industry … but that sought
to protect the company from anxieties about ‘susceptible’ and ‘delicate’
women and children watching the films” (Grieveson 126). The black press
saw through such excuses. In July 1913, the Defender described censoring
Johnson’s films as one tactic within a general campaign to discredit their
champion and to chip away at race pride: “it would never do to exhibit
the moving pictures, letting white children see as conqueror in fistic science
a big black Sampson. That would make the white children grow up with
certain fear or dread of the colored boy” (Majors 1). Endeavors to stop
the fight films’ circulation, the Defender proposes, were poorly disguised
attempts to keep the story of a black champion from susceptible white boys
and girls. Here, the Defender uses hyperbole to sarcastically chip away at
white censors’ concerns, but the matter of white children growing up weak
and afraid was very much on the minds of some, as witnessed by the focus
on boyhood and a life’s trajectory seen in the physical culture movement,
Roosevelt’s speeches, and London’s popularity.
The idea that Johnson’s films might be taken as a lesson for black children
and white children alike captures the anxiety written into the Los Angeles
Times’s warning against Johnson as a role model and Jack London’s descrip-
tions of Johnson as existing in the present moment. The so-called obscenity of
Johnson fight films therefore has at least as much to do with film’s ontological
structure as it has to do with the particular content of the films. Specifically,
the film censors demonstrate an awareness that film is not just archival, not
just indexical, but the media form of replication. Whereas the individual fights
were local events, both geographically and temporally, fight films promised to
expand Johnson’s narrative significance by preserving his win for all time and
guaranteeing its repetition across the country, if not the world.
Film’s archiving and reproducing functions risked turning the discrete
activities of winning separate fights into something that looked like a coher-
ent narrative whole and also like Johnson’s destiny. Just as Hump’s and Billy
Robert’s greatness is always within them, black audiences found a similar
touchstone for race pride in the Johnson films. For example, when The Birth
of a Nation played in Chicago movie houses, black theaters screened Johnson’s
fights as a protest (Streible, Fight Pictures 256–7). Birth served for whites
as a gestational myth about the creation of a blessed white nation. In rebut-
tal to Griffith’s film, which treated both the Civil War and black political
gains during Reconstruction as merely unfortunate episodes on the way to
white national destiny, black theaters that screened the fight films positioned
Johnson’s achievement, and thus black achievement, not as a meaningless
event, but as part of a racial narrative to be held up against the one playing
in white movie houses.
Ultimately, the most effective strategy for challenging Johnson was not
denarrativizing him, but inserting him into a more familiar storyline. Though
Johnson’s wins made him exceptional, whites positioned his romantic
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  139
relationships as problematically representative, fitting him into a narrative
of black men pursuing white women that had been established long before
Griffith introduced Gus to movie audiences. In addition to humiliating whites
in the ring, Johnson threatened Aryan lineage through his well-known rela-
tionships with white women. Chastising naïve members of the black com-
munity, The Chicago Defender offered a terse rebuke to “those prophets”
who defended Johnson’s right to conduct his relationships with white women
without public scrutiny: “Jack Johnson’s marriage really shouldn’t have con-
cerned anybody but Jack Johnson and Lucille Cameron—but it did” (“Those
prophets” 4) (Figure 3.3). White papers decried Johnson the preeminent threat
to white womanhood and, following this line of reasoning, to the future of
the race. Although generally sympathetic to the hometown hero, the C ­ hicago
Daily Tribune included the following account of his arrest: “A large number
of witnesses testified before the grand jury during the day. Among them were
Lucille Cameron and her mother, Mrs. F. Cameron-Falconet of ­Minneapolis,
whose effort to save her daughter from the negro’s clutches resulted in bring-
ing the pugilist’s relations with other white women to the attention of the
authorities” (“Johnson Arrested” 1). As the Tribune’s account explains,
­Johnson was arrested under the Mann Act, but the case was as much about
Johnson’s ­“relations” with white women as it was about trafficking.

Figure 3.3  The Jack Johnson bridal party in The Chicago Defender.
140  Made of Leavings and Scraps
A law meant to prevent “white slavery”, the Mann Act’s stated purpose was
“to further regulate interstate commerce and foreign commerce by prohibiting
the transportation therein for immoral purposes of women and girls, and for
other purposes”. But in addition to being used to prevent the enslavement
and transportation of America’s young women, the phrase “or for any other
immoral purpose” in section three of the act also meant that the law could be
used to regulate consensual sex among adults; it was this language that allowed
for Johnson’s eventual conviction (The White Slave Traffic Act). In 1913, the
boxer became the first man convicted under the politically charged act.
On the one hand, Johnson’s sexual relationships with white women raised
the specter of Johnsons reproduced throughout the white bloodstream. If
the story whites told themselves depended upon a sense of racial superior-
ity that was both transcendent—in the manner of The Klansman—and a
part of the national narrative of progress, Johnson’s highly publicized sexual
relations with white women threatened the comfort offered by the long time
of racial superiority. The problem with miscegenation is, as Mugridge puts
it, that being made of leavings and scraps is irreversible—“it carnt come out
right”. The idea of a racially piecemeal American bloodline conflicted with
visions of a white America ascendant in the world and potentially ruined the
idea of a Great White Hope—whiteness itself seemed under attack. The era’s
ideas about evolution included a kind of backward gear: both Spencer and
Darwin warned against the unnatural breeding of the worst animals, which
could lead to regression (Berliner 59).19 By this logic, also on display in
Sarah’s rants about a “black future”, Johnson’s “sporting life” of traveling
with white women could throw racial progress off course.
On the other hand, the technical nature of the Mann Act, which prosecuted
those who crossed state lines for immoral purposes, shows a different theory of
contagion at work. Or, put slightly differently, the Mann Act reflects a concern
about sexual transgressions becoming more than local events. Ironically, in the
highly publicized trial, newspaper copy worked not unlike the censored fight
films, multiplying Johnson, even as the lawsuit attempted to prevent his genetic
multiplication. Although Mrs. Cameron, mother of Johnson’s wife Lucille, was
angry and contributed to the momentum of the case against Johnson, it was not
until 1913 and the testimony of Belle Schreiber that the case could go forward.
Prior to his marriage to Lucille Cameron, Johnson had dated Schreiber and
traveled with her throughout the country. Because Johnson’s relationships with
these white women were so public, everyone had an opinion. In the run-up
to the trial, the Tribune emphasized the dramatic aspects of the spectacle: in
one story, the paper cites Mrs. Cameron accusing Johnson of hypnotism
(“Jail Girl” 3); in another piece, the paper describes a weeping Johnson at the
scene of his arrest (“Johnson Arrested” 1). Following the trial and Johnson’s
guilty verdict, The Defender offered mixed views. The paper cautioned its read-
ers not to riot and warned that, like Johnson, the black community must bear
the verdict (“Jack Johnson, That’s All” p. 4, col. 2). However, writers for the
paper clearly felt that whites had used the law to put Johnson down when
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  141
they could not best him in the ring. Three years after Johnson’s victory over
Jeffries, a July 5, 1913, article went so far as to declare that Johnson “had been
crucified for his race” (Majors p. 1, col. 1). As the stories multiplied, the long
time of white narrative appears challenged by new media and news media alike:
just as a filmic Johnson could beat Jeffries over and over, simultaneously in
every city in the country, so too did the newspaper instantiations of Johnson
and his white lovers travel everywhere at once.
Against Schreiber’s testimony, which renarrated Johnson as pimp rather
than lover, the black press attempted its own narration of miscegenation in
the United States. In one article on the verdict, The Defender points to the
number of rapes committed by white men against black women and promises
that while black Americans would accept Johnson’s sentence for the present,
a time might come when “force of arms must be used, which is likely to be
used in the south, to protect our womanhood there” (“Jack Johnson, That’s
All” p. 4, col. 2). When Senator Rodenberry involved himself by requesting
trial transcripts from Johnson’s case to support his fight to legislate against
interracial relationships in Georgia, The Defender was quick to point out the
hypocrisy of “Mis-Representative Roddenberg [sic]”. In an article titled
“­Miscegenation”, the author suggests that Rodenberry is casting the blame
for miscegenation in the wrong direction: “they are afraid of themselves, not
of us. Why do these charming ladies of the Caucasian race, to use the par-
lance of the street, fall for the darker brother?” (p. 4, col. 2). Bitter humor of
this variety characterized The Defender’s coverage of Johnson’s conviction,
even after Johnson escaped his sentence for a period by fleeing to Europe. For
example, later in the same year, the black press would be able to take some
small satisfaction in reporting that one of the jurors at Johnson’s trial was him-
self convicted for violating the Mann Act (“Jack Johnson Juror” p. 1. col. 4).
Johnson writes in his memoir that, desperate to return from exile, he
agreed to lose to Jess Willard in exchange for a safe passage home to Chicago
(157). On April 5, 1915, in Havana, Johnson gave up his title to Willard.
Upon returning home, Johnson was taken into custody and went on to serve
out his sentence at Joliet. With the Havana fight, the legal battle against
Johnson succeeded in returning the World Heavyweight title to the white
race. The case against Johnson’s selection of lovers effectively did what
Burns and Jeffries could not, finally stripping Johnson of his victory. In addi-
tion to ending Johnson’s career, the use of the Mann Act against Johnson
reveals the narrative significance of biological reproduction—controlling
sexual partners and thus pregnancy meant controlling the types of racial
narratives that could continue to be told.

“Rescue Us from Ourselves”: Excessive Cadence

and Bad Endings
As a challenge to whites who saw themselves as “the last of the Mohegans”,
Johnson’s love life differed from his prizefighting. It was harder to censor
142  Made of Leavings and Scraps
but more vulnerable to legal attack than his fighting. As in The Birth of a
Nation, ensuring white dominance at a metaphysical level in the face of
white failure at the factual level depended on a sense of a white long time,
a “white that goes on” even as individual members of the race did not;
therefore, miscegenation was a much bigger threat to the idea of a Great
White Hope than the individual instance of Jack Johnson. For example, this
logic appears in action in The Valley of the Moon’s frank treatment of taboo
topics. The novel’s first half centers on the Oakland courtship of Billy and
Saxon and their parallel couple Mary and Bert—the foursome that makes
up Bert’s “last of the Mohegans”. Occurring approximately a third of the
way through, the novel’s early climax fulfills Bert’s prediction. In a labor
dispute that breaks into violence, Bert is killed; Saxon miscarries her preg-
nancy; and a number of other plot events are precipitated, including Mary’s
slide into prostitution and a period in which Billy goes wild and lands in jail.
These crises all demonstrate modern life’s threat to “Mohegan” futurity.20
In its ending, The Sea-Wolf also becomes a narrative about regulating
sexual partners. Once Maud boards the Ghost, the narrative shifts from
homoerotic sadism to a traditional romance, and London presents Maud
as the logical final step in Hump’s journey to self-made masculinity. Many
studies of the novel acknowledge the artificiality of Maud’s sudden arrival
on the Ghost; for example, Den Tandt explains that she “enters the novel
in deus ex machina fashion for the specific purpose of helping the protag-
onist Humphrey Van Weyden in the last stages of his struggle against
overcivilization” (641).21 In order to take Maud for himself, Hump must
prove that he can achieve Darwinian triumph within the context of civili-
zation, similar to London’s image of Jeffries funneling his warrior ancestry
through modern pugilism. Because Hump is not a brute, he won’t kill Wolf
(­London, The Sea-Wolf 232), but Hump’s narration also demonstrates that
Wolf cannot count as the same kind of man he does.22 Measuring Wolf
against Maud, Hump notes, “[T]here was nothing subjective about his state
of consciousness. His whole concern was with the immediate, objective
present. He still held the wheel, and I felt that he was timing Time, reck-
oning the passage of the minute as with each forward lunge and leeward
role of the Ghost” (184–5). Ahead of his coverage of Johnson, London here
begins to formulate a theory of time and race. London attributes to Wolf,
as he does to Johnson, a kind of presentism that makes him a beast. Like
his men, who are celibates without mothers (100), Wolf appears as a man
with no genealogical past or future: no one birthed him, nor will he give
rise to future generations. As though he has reverse-engineered a personality
out of this presentist sterility, during one of the novel’s many discussions of
human worth, Wolf declares, “I cut out the race and the children. I would
sacrifice nothing for them” (64). In this declaration, Larsen provides a key
to his status as a brute; he, like London’s Johnson, exists too much in the
present to care for the future, thereby threatening the health of the race and
generations to come.
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  143
Despite the characters’ many discussions of progress, over the course of its
didactic ending, The Sea-Wolf strains to maintain its narrative energy.23 The
novel’s clunky ending may be understood through Peter Rabinowitz’s term
“excessive cadence” (309). This narratological term is particularly appropri-
ate for London’s novels, in which the protagonists’ final acts take their place
coherently within racial expectations.24 The too-neat and too-conclusive
achievement of success that characterizes these novels’ excessive cadences
might be understood as the formal expression of ontogeny recapitulating
phylogeny. The Sea-Wolf illustrates this clearly when a second shipwreck
removes Hump from the bare-bones civilization of the Ghost in order to
show what it might mean to create civilization anew (a goal the protagonists
also pursue in The Valley of the Moon).
Once shipwrecked, Maud continues to display her vigor, helping Hump
to establish life in their new world, joining him on a seal hunting mission,
and gathering stones for their hut, taking to tasks Hump describes as fitted
to the life “of a peasant woman” (London, The Sea-Wolf 218). This episode,
together with Maud’s pre-Ghost intellectual life as an important writer, have
led some to read the novel’s ending more positively, identifying a progres-
sive gender equality between Hump and Maud on the island; for example,
Sam S. Baskett reads the text as “far ahead of its time in anticipating … an
ideal androgynous relation between women and men” (93). But even in this
setting freed of societal gender pressures, when faced with danger, the power
of long evolutionary time kicks in. Though in her work life, Maud is Hump’s
equal if not superior—the genius poet to his dilettante literary critic—when
the couple faces a potentially dangerous seal herd and Maud admits her fear,
Hump’s response is primal, overcoming the couple’s particular circumstance
as modern man and woman: “I shall never forget, in that moment, how
instantly conscious I became of my manhood. The primitive deeps of my
nature stirred. I felt myself masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting
male” (223). Herding seal, he feels within him “the youth of the race seemed
burgeoning”, until he finds himself “on the verge of saying, ‘my woman, my
mate’” (225).
Further, in the chapters set in this rugged, prelapsarian paradise, Hump’s
various accomplishments are twice narrated, both by his own recollection
and by Maud’s various exclamations about their significance. In moments
alternately teasing and sincere, as Maud relates Hump’s actions back to him,
she frequently puts Hump’s work into the context of other texts, creating a
proliferation of narrative as she compares him to Crusoe, Prometheus, and
the American biologist Dr. Jordan. For example, when Hump fashions new
sails for their ship, he finds he must suppress his urge to brag, “I did it! I did
it! With my own hands I did it!”(London, The Sea-Wolf 274). Though he
initially restrains his impulse to crow his accomplishments, they do not go
uncommented upon, as he recalls, “Maud and I had a way of voicing each
other’s thoughts, and she said, as we prepared to hoist the mainsail: ‘To
think, Humphrey, you did it all with your own hands’” (274). Unlike the gap
144  Made of Leavings and Scraps
the white press posited between Johnson and others of his race, The Sea-
Wolf’s emphasis on self-sufficiency here ironically justifies inherited racial
hierarchy as earned.
In sharp contrast, when Wolf appears shipwrecked on the island, he
embodies narrative disorder. It has already been established in the novel
that Wolf doesn’t read correctly, sees events as essentially meaningless, and
exists in an animalistic present. Wolf says as much himself, as he challenges
Hump to kill him: “You know me for what I am—my worth in the world by
your standard. You have called me snake, tiger, shark, monster and Caliban.
And yet, you little rag puppet, you little echoing mechanism, you are unable
to kill me as you would a snake or a shark, because I have hands, feet, and
a body shaped somewhat like yours” (232). But Wolf is no longer a true
danger, a change communicated through his disintegrating narrative capa-
bilities. His headaches, which have plagued him since Hump asserted him-
self aboard the Ghost have grown in such strength that Wolf weakens and
eventually dies on the island. In his slow descent, Wolf loses his language
capabilities and is forced to scrawl out and mouth messages that are inter-
preted to the reader through the medium of Maud and Hump—translators
of Wolf’s “spirit message[s]” (271). In his final moments, Wolf’s difficulty
transmitting his own story reminds readers that individual acts are insuffi-
cient for the achievement of selfhood; instead, being a self requires a story.25
London’s certainty that being a man has as much to do with narrative as
it does with physicality or muscularity is revealed in the triumph of civilized
Hump over the living muscle that is Wolf and again in his preference for a
Great White Hope despite his sense of Johnson’s superiority. But London’s
novel can also be said to reveal a deep-seated ambivalence to this natural
order. In the last paragraphs, Maud and Hump exchange sweet nothings as
they wait for a rescuing clipper to take them back to civilization: “‘One kiss,
dear love’, I whispered. ‘One kiss before they come’. Maud responds, ‘and
rescue us from ourselves’, … with a most whimsical smile, whimsical as I
had never seen it, for it was whimsical with love” (The Sea-Wolf 281). One
gets the sense, while reading over the novel’s final lines, that London prefers
his villain, the vital and working-class Wolf, to the hero and heroine, who, at
the novel’s end, are positioned to returned to the upper-class, civilized society
from whence they came. The clichéd ending to the novel supports Reesman’s
theory that London identifies with racially different people at an individual
level, but at a more abstract level remains committed to Anglo-Saxonism—a
reading that explains London’s disgust with individual white boxers, even
as he roots for them. While London may express preferences for racially dif-
ferent individuals, this preference is tempered by his sense that an individual
life matters little in the face of long racial time.
I have been suggesting that there is more at play in London’s racialized
sense of plot–character relations than naturalist atavism as usually conceived.
It is not merely the case that characters undertake particular actions because
of their racial group; instead, it’s the case that it doesn’t matter what actions
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  145
characters undertake because they belong to a racial group. Group progress
overrides the events of individual lives, which is why London’s novels suffer
from a lack of narrative interest in their second acts. Because in these nar-
ratives the characters only matter to the degree they achieve predetermined
courses of progress, their actions start to look as though they matter very little
at all. In other words, in naturalist novels of racial destiny, any given char-
acter appears as a mere anecdotal piece of evidence for a larger story: Saxon
exemplifies what Saxon women do, much as Jack Johnson’s sexual prefer-
ences are made to exemplify those of black men more broadly. As a result, the
individual characters can never be drivers of plot; they can only be exemplars.
In this later moment of naturalism’s development, then, we find novels
that deracinate not just character but also certain plot events: beyond char-
acters’ perspectives ceasing to matter (as in Vandover, The Octopus, and
The Birth of a Nation), here their actions do as well. This is nowhere clearer
than in the work discussed in the next chapter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
1915 utopian novel Herland, which extends the logic of The Valley of the
Moon to a hyperbolic extreme. While London emphasizes the metonymic
relationship between the events of an individual person’s life and evolution-
ary time, Gilman would address the relationship between a lifetime and
time’s progress by imagining a world in which individual acts matter so little
as to be better done away with and in which personality is not just immate-
rial, but a liability in need of correction.

Notes
1. Reported in Ken Burns’s documentary Unforgiveable Blackness and Geoffrey
Ward’s accompanying book of the same title (112–5).
2. The contemporary infamy of London’s boxing writing is likely due in part to the
influence of Burns’s excellent documentary.
3. Even in excellent studies such as Gina Rossetti’s “Things Fall Apart” or Lee
Clark Mitchell’s “‘And Rescue Us from Ourselves’”—in which he argues that
“nowhere as clearly as in The Sea-Wolf (1904), his most accomplished novel,
does London reveal at once the tenets of his evolutionary philosophy and their
impossibility” (317)—a sense of London as confused or at least conflicted by his
commitments remains.
  Berliner sees this tendency appearing as early as Alfred Kazin’s characteriza-
tion of London as representative of the era’s simultaneous “innocence and lust
for power” and Edward Wagenknecht’s portrayal of London as a mad cowboy
riding “upon the backs of all these [ideological] horses, even when they were
galloping furiously in different directions”, and as recently as in Mark Seltzer’s
and Jonathan Auerbach’s scholarship (55). Helpfully, Berliner does not dismiss
the seeming conflict between London’s progressivism and his Nietzschean take
on social Darwinism; instead, he locates London’s writing as a part of what he
terms “socialistic Social Darwinism”, which theorizes that class struggle takes
place in the same world as evolutionary struggle (56).
4. Gina Rossetti’s Imagining the Primitive does important archival work to show
the way such racialized thinking underpins naturalist fictions. As she argues,
146  Made of Leavings and Scraps
both naturalism and nativism “are obsessed with atavism, cultural regression,
and biological destiny” (27).
5. Although London and Roosevelt were engaged in similar projects, this shouldn’t
be taken as evidence that the two were on good terms. In “Jack London’s Socialistic
Social Darwinism”, Jonathan Berliner analyzes Roosevelt’s 1907 interview in
the Chicago Evening Post, titled “Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs”, in which the
president accuses Jack London of exaggerating his depictions of the wild (52).
As Berliner notes, London did not let this insult stand for long, and in a September
1908 issue of Colliers, accused the president of himself being ignorant of the
wild, claiming that Roosevelt didn’t understand evolution. As Berliner persua-
sively argues, the animosity between the two men likely arose from the fact that
they were competing for the same audience (53), using similar authorial appeals
to both on-the-ground authenticity and the scientific knowledge that came from
personal experiences of observation.
6. Roosevelt goes on to argue, “The timid man, the lazy man, the man who dis-
trusts his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, master-
ful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable
of feeling the mighty lift that thrills ‘stern men with empires in their brains’—all
these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties” (7).
7. In “The American Boy”, first published in “St. Nicholas”, May 1900.
8. Mark Seltzer explains, “the craft of making men was the antidote to anxieties
about the depletion of agency and virility in consumer and machine culture”
(149; emphasis original).
9. In Our America, Walter Benn Michaels describes a similar phenomenon at work
in U.S. modernist literature; here, he identifies incest as among the techniques
of nativist thinking. Michaels also addresses the white modernists’ identification
with Native Americans as another nativist strategy.
10. Jonathan Auerbach offers a reading of Hump’s “Lydy’s skin” in Male Call.
Auerbach reads Mugridge and Hump as competitors for Wolf’s affections, but
he reads the discussion of soft skin into a gendered division of labor aboard the
ship, noting that Hump is feminine because he is idle—a status that he is able to
change—while the cook is effeminate because of his labor (194–5).
11. Mike Hawkins explains that the “inheritance of acquired characters was stressed
by many popularizers of Social Darwinism. This gave rise to another indeter-
minacy, namely the cause of organic and behavioural variations. Advocates of
the inheritance of acquired characters could posit environmental changes as a
source of such variations (rather than innate mutations), a position which could
legitimate agendas of political and social reform” (32–33).
1 2. Berliner also offers an account of two timescales in The Sea-Wolf’s Darwinian
narrative, arguing, “For London, the results of social change are registered in
individual human subjects in a physical, even biological manner” (59).
13. In “‘And Rescue Us from Ourselves’”, Lee Clark Mitchell also addresses these
shifts in tense, arguing that the movement between past and present narration
“inscrib[es] the problem of split subjectivity onto the novel’s rhetorical sur-
face, reinforcing a larger thematic premise: that binding together one’s various
desires, perspectives, and energies into a coherent self is neither unproblematic
nor at all natural” (318). Mitchell reads the shifting nature of Van Weyden’s
first-person narration as an indication of “the instability of any construction of
the self” (325). I agree, but only to the degree that the self is constructed with
 Made of Leavings and Scraps  147
difficulty because it is both individual and racial. In this way, the fragmentary
self registers the multiple timescales referenced by the novel, which include an
account of individual acts as they happen and the long-time of Darwinism.
14. I derive my concept of heteronormative futurity from Lee Edelman’s No Future.
15. As Seltzer explains, “By 1914 such a correspondence of individual and racial
development—the notion that ontogeny repeats phylogeny and that the biolog-
ical and psychological evolution of the individual recapitulates the evolution of
the race—is something of a commonplace” (150).
1 6. The matter of whether or not they were ordered off remains a question of his-
torical controversy.
17. Jeffries occupation as a farmer after his retirement from boxing is yet another
bit of evidence that the heavyweight champ inspired London’s protagonist Billy
Roberts.
1 8. In In the Ring and Out, Johnson reports seeing London in the crowd and
remembers this moniker (56).
19. In her work on Thomas Dixon, Rossetti has identified the way this anxiety plays
out in the form of a culture war, arguing that Dixon “suggests that biology is
most certainly destiny and if a race is ‘inferior’ it retains its low status through-
out time and eternity. Consequently, the dominant culture must ensure that the
inferior race never comes to threaten the dominant culture” (20).
20. My reading of this novel is thus similar to Christopher Gair’s (142). Gair like-
wise reads The Valley of the Moon as obsessed with thoughts of race suicide.
Where our readings differ is in relation to the novel’s second half. Whereas I
read the novel’s second half, in which Billy and Saxon must stake their claim to
land being rapidly developed by immigrants, as a continuation of the racialized
thinking of the first half, Gair understands London deploying the tropes of sen-
timentality and consumerism in his narrative’s final pages (155–6).
21. Seltzer offers this suggestive connection: “There is perhaps something of a

resemblance between Sacher-Masoch’s fantasies of discipline in such writings as
Venus in Furs, The Wolf, and The She-Wolf; Seton’s cub scouts, den mothers and
wolf packs; and the accounts of discipline and bondage in Jack London’s stories
of coldness and cruelty, stories of men in furs such as The Sea-Wolf, White Fang,
and The Call of the Wild” (161–2).
22. The captain and crew’s foreignness emphasizes that Hump is the only appropri-
ate sexual partner for the lone woman aboard the ship. Before Maud’s arrival,
Hump notes that the men seem a “half-brute, half-human species, a race apart”
(89). To achieve his manhood, Hump must first overcome Wolf, who also desires
Maud, despite his obvious inappropriateness for her: “She was in striking con-
trast to Wolf Larsen. Each was nothing that the other was, everything was what
the other was not. I noted them walking the deck together one morning, and
I likened them to the extreme ends of the human ladder of evolution—the one
the culmination of all savagery, the other the finished product of the finest
civilization” (163). Prior to Maud’s arrival, Hump associates most closely with
Wolf, the novel’s image of brute masculinity. With Maud’s appearance on the
ship, Humps sees what civilization can offer—a productive pairing, rather than
the effete life of a bachelor that had previously characterized his experience with
modern society.
23. Howard writes, “[T]he fact that Wolf Larsen continues to command far more
narrative energy than the lovers is evidence of the uncomfortable, discontinuous
148  Made of Leavings and Scraps
coexistence of naturalism and sentiment in the text. But Wolf is doomed, of
course” (174). Howard’s description also suggests a similar view on London’s
part of both Wolf and Johnson: The author recognizes their power as charis-
matic individuals, but their personal power can’t be of any consequence.
2
4. Whereas Peter Rabinowitz reads excessive cadence as often offering ironic social
critique, as in the case of Puddin’ Head Wilson, London’s too-closed narratives
achieve their excessive quality because of the individual’s metonymic relation to
the race.
25. In this way, I disagree with Mitchell’s argument that the novel centers on the
bodily requirements for selfhood, which he explains through the shipwreck
scenes: “The passage [in which Hump is initially shipwrecked] suggests that the
question addressed by the novel concerns the constitution of the self and, more
particularly, the extent to which any construction of self depends on a physical
body. What is the connection between a body and its actions, or between desires
and their enactment?” (“‘And Rescue Us from Ourselves’” 325).
4 Systems, Not Men
Processes without People in Utopian
Factory Films and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Eusocial Feminism

The case of Jack Johnson discussed in the previous chapter made public
the nation’s obsession with threats to white racial futurity. Put in terms of
systems thinking, Johnson’s circulation threatened to introduce the wrong
input into the gene pool. While the case against Jack Johnson involved mak-
ing him seem so special that he could not be considered representative of his
race, the factory films, efficiency studies, and utopian feminist fiction consid-
ered here insist that in perfected systems for accelerating national progress,
no individual may be special. Instead, factory and feminist reformers posit
a relation between two kinds of excess: excessive expenditure of human
energy on individual pursuits and the excessive production of the wrong
kind of humans. Outlining these errors of excess, reformers highlighted the
wrong perspectives of those who failed to see their place in the system-
atic achievement of a more perfect future. The solution to such mistaken
thought entailed producing a new view, a utopian efficiency aesthetic that
represented processes rather than the individuals involved in the processes.
This chapter takes seriously what it means for efficiency to be utopian, and,
in turn, for efficiency studies to be the same kind of narrative blueprint as
a feminist utopian novel. Before turning to a more sustained analysis of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and industrial films, three short case
studies suggest the common utopian and aesthetic frameworks at play in
discourses of labor, sex, and efficiency, as well as their common commitment
to producing new kinds of people.
First among these case studies is the 1908 Supreme Court case Muller v.
Oregon. When Curt Muller required his female employees to work shifts
in excess of ten hours at the Grand Laundry in Portland, Oregon, he likely
did not imagine the consequences for the future of the human race. How-
ever, when he received a fine for overworking the women in his laundry and
contested the fine’s constitutionality before the Supreme Court, the court’s
justices would argue that the matter of women’s labor hours brought to the
fore precisely this issue, finding that a woman’s special reproductive function
could take precedence over the freedom of contract established by the due
process clause of the 14th Amendment. In addition to taking an import-
ant first step in limiting the demands employers could place upon workers,
Muller v. Oregon flew in the face of Lochner v. New York (1905), establishing
150  Systems, Not Men
a precedent for the different treatment of men and women under the law.
Delivering the court’s opinion, Justice Josiah Brewer noted that although not
all women are mothers, enforcing a maximum number of labor hours for
women does not violate the 14th Amendment because “the well-being of the
race” justifies “legislation to protect her from the greed as well as the pas-
sions of men”. Therefore, Justice Brewer notes, “The limitations which this
statute [48 Or. 252] places upon her contractual powers, upon her right to
agree with her employer as to the time she shall labor, are not imposed solely
for her benefit, but also largely for the benefit of all”. Brewer’s rhetoric makes
two significant conversions: first, it renders all women potential mothers;
second, it makes all mothers incomplete legal persons. If legal personhood
entails freedom of contract, Muller v. Oregon insists that this type of person-
hood and the freedoms it contains must be subjugated to the “well-being of
the race” because as representative persons (mothers of the race), women can
never be the same kind of legal persons that men are.1 Put another way, as
beings for whom the fundamental right to choose can be revoked, whether
in the case of motherhood or labor, women emerge from the Muller case as
weakened agents, diminished protagonists in their own stories.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, in retaining the category motherhood,
even for individual women who were apparently choosing something else
­(making a living), Justice Brewer’s paternalism anticipates the pattern of
both efficiency experts and what I term the eusocial feminism of ­Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. While Muller may have counted as a victory for the labor
movement, as a legal document that explicitly distinguished between
­women’s labor and men’s labor, its relationship to early twentieth-century
feminist movements is more ambivalent. Near the end of the opinion, Justice
Brewer notes that the court’s decision rests not upon matters of equality, but
upon matters of difference:

We have not referred in this discussion to the denial of the elective

franchise, for while that may disclose a lack of political equality in all
things with her brother, that is not of itself decisive. The reason runs
deeper, and rests in the inherent difference between the two sexes, and
in the different functions in life which they perform.

Brewer acknowledges and then dismisses women’s political inequality with

men in order to highlight the comparative importance of their biological
difference. In doing so, even as the court extends vital labor protection to
female workers, it does so by emphasizing the primacy of a woman’s role
as a mother over her role as either citizen or laborer. Whatever a woman’s
economic position may be, it must always be secondary to her biological
reproduction, her true “function[s] in life”. Though different in its politics
than radical social reform, the 1908 case shares with early twentieth-­century
feminism an interest in making better women that can only be achieved by
putting the good of the community first.
 Systems, Not Men  151
The second case study, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “Bee Wise”,
was published in her magazine The Forerunner in 1913, the same year Jack
­London published The Valley of the Moon. While The Valley of the Moon
ends with Billy and Saxon Roberts settled in an idealized Californian agri-
cultural zone, ready to propagate more Saxons, “Bee Wise” imagines two
gynocentric utopian communities in the Californian coastal hills. More
imaginary than London’s happy valley, but no less nativist in their projects,
the two towns in “Bee Wise”—Bee Wise and Herways—provided the initial
sketches for what Gilman would imagine more expansively in her 1915
utopian novella Herland.
The title of the story contains at least three plays on words—the advice to
“be wise”; the reference to women’s work circles, or “bees”; and the apian
reference—all of which apply easily to the idealized communities explored
in the story. “Bee Wise” unfolds by way of a frame narrative. A male and
female reporter are sent to cover the rapidly developing towns, and the story
consists of what the female reporter learns. After her initial investigation,
the reporter declares that she wishes she could have been present at the
communities’ founding, and the mayor tells her she can stay. She does so
and “prepare[s] vivid little pamphlets of detailed explanations which paved
the way for so many other regenerated towns” (267). The story ends with
the proverb that provides the story’s title: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard,
consider her ways and be wise” (271). The blurring of insect life that occurs
over the course of this proverb, which runs from ant to Apidae in Gilman’s
linguistic play, has significance beyond the cuteness of the tale’s entomolog-
ical punning. Rather than grow without cease, the story’s two towns follow
a logic of standardization at a macro as well as micro scale. As the towns
grow, the manager poses a new proposition: “If we have more people here
we shall develop the diseases of the cities. … Now we’ll swarm like the bees
and start another—what do you say?” (270). And so they do. Following
the blueprint offered by the “vivid little pamphlets” and creating replica
“hives” as they go, the women bring about “order, comfort, happiness, and
the improvement of humanity” (271).
The significance of the story’s interest in the insect world becomes clear
in its 1915 revised form, Herland. A more fanciful tale than “Bee Wise”,
Herland presents a fantastical society populated entirely by women and
cut off from the rest of the world. Among the many improbabilities dis-
cussed by the three male explorers who “discover” Herland is the matter
of female cooperation: “‘It’s impossible!’” Terry objects, “women cannot
cooperate—it’s against nature” (68). The narrator, also an explorer, recounts
that they could not persuade Terry until Jeff (another explorer) “dragged
in the hymenoptera”. And here, Jeff repeats the proverb, “Go to the ant,
thou sluggard” (68). Including both ants and bees, the order Hymenoptera
distinguishes insect life characterized by eusociality: a devotion to the hive,
rather than to the individual; a rigidly organized society in which each class
performs a distinctive function, often losing the ability to perform other
152  Systems, Not Men
functions. Most notably, among hymenopterans, only the queen breeds. The
­insect-like specialization and cooperation of characters in Gilman’s eusocial
utopias, such as the standardized hives up and down the California coast in
“Bee Wise” and the centrality of a character named “Manager”, suggest the
­overlap between “planned parenthood” and industrial organization. Social
and industrial engineering share an account not just of more efficient pro-
duction but also of a system that would necessarily change human inputs
(the hominid version of the worker bee), thereby positing a new type of
person alongside a new prosperity.
Factory films serve as a third case study, acting as a “vivid little pam-
phlet” for laborers by showcasing their own hymenopteric organization
and envisioning industrial utopia. From the very earliest of actuality films,
Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), the cinema depicted indus-
trial environments and their human inhabitants. By the late 1910s, however,
the factory film genre had expanded to include “process films” that depicted
products being made; educational films, which could be used to instruct
workers; and what might be termed “celebration” films, which showcased
spectacles of technological achievement. All three factory film types drew
on the principle established by Eadward Muybridge’s and Étienne-Jules
Marey’s chronophotography motion studies: the cinematic mechanism
­
revealed physical movements previously invisible to the human eye. While
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s industrial experiments had metaphorically ren-
dered workers’ movements “visible” by tracking motions against the time
they took, his studies still depended upon a human manager’s subjective
gaze. By the late teens, industrial engineers and sometimes-Taylor collabora-
tors Frank and Lillian Gilbreth turned to the cinema as a tool for fine-tuning
the “one best way”, a goal as utopian and depersonalized as any hope for
the future of the race found in Gilman or Muller.
Strange bedfellows though they may seem, these case studies are con-
nected by a shared account of individuality as inefficiency. As a correc-
tive to wasted human energies, Gilman and industrial managers hoped
that depicting inefficiency might also solve inefficiency. For the most part,
contemporary scholars writing on Taylor and Gilbreth have emphasized
scientific management’s dehumanizing effect on the worker as a side
effect of fetishizing efficiency. In her study of efficiency and modernity,
for example, Evelyn Cobley writes, “Taylor’s utopian ideal almost imme-
diately resulted in the reduction of workers to mere cogs” (39). In other
words, dehumanization as such is an unintended bad output of applying
the utopian dream of efficiency to men and women. It is not my inten-
tion to argue against such characterizations of factory systems. I fur-
ther share with Cobley and also Martha Banta the sense that Taylor saw
­efficiency as an “unquestioned ‘good’” (Cobley 76). Additionally, I build
on the work of Banta and also Cecelia Tichi, who argue for understanding
­Taylorism as a project with narrative implications, whether because “nar-
ratives were told by managers or workers alike in order to persuade or
 Systems, Not Men  153
to dissuade” (Banta 14; emphasis original) or because “Taylorist thought
offered ­writers a new position of authority vis-à-vis themselves and their
­materials … the mastermind” (Tichi, Shifting Gears 79).
This chapter also builds on scholars who have tied efficiency to matters of
gender. For example, Mark Seltzer’s argument that “the real innovation of
Taylorization becomes visible in the incorporation of the representation
of the work process into the work process itself—or, better, the incorpora-
tion of the presentation of the work process as the work process itself” (159)
leads him to identify the importance of gender to both naturalist and indus-
trialist systems: “If turn-of-the-century American culture is alternatively
described as naturalist, as machine culture, and as the culture of consump-
tion, what binds these apparently alternative descriptions is the notion that
bodies and persons are things that can be made (152; emphasis original),
which is why “the appeal of systematic management is neither reducible
to nor separable from anxieties about the gender of production and repro-
duction” (160). Nonetheless, Seltzer’s focus remains on male authors, for
whom gendered production and reproduction can only be sites of anxiety.
To gain a fuller picture of production, we should turn to women who found
utopian potential in the idea that bodies can be made and that they might
be made more efficiently, too. Jennifer Fleissner and Thomas Peyser are two
scholars who have followed such a route, taking the era’s “anxieties about
the gender of production and reproduction” seriously in their investigations
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Whereas Seltzer persuasively describes the pro-
cesses of industrial control that appear via violence in the works of London
and Crane as traumatic, for Gilman, what Seltzer describes as “struggles to
make interior states visible” (163) are ways of restoring natural order and
coming back into alignment with evolutionary destiny. In his exploration
of the relationship between technology and utopia in the American scene,
­Peyser argues that technology doesn’t just allow for utopia, but is structur-
ally similar to utopia in “its tendency toward universalization and standard-
ization” (15), an insight applicable to the factory films and industrial guides
discussed in this chapter, as well as to Gilman’s Herland. Similarly, Fleissner
ties Gilman’s domestic imaginary to the work of factory engineers. Linking
­Herland’s model of nation as garden to Gilman’s idealized views of the sub-
urban California town to which she relocated (and where, as we have seen,
Gilman imagines the Bee Wise community), Fleissner writes, “This C ­ alifornia
represents, as it were, nature under perfect control, as if by ‘will’” (87). But
whereas Fleissner’s focus on obsessional vision leads her to read G ­ ilman’s
utopia as a fantasy of self-control, attending to Herland’s links to hive as
well as garden shows the eventual importance for Gilman of taking mat-
ters out of the individual’s control altogether. In other words, for Gilman,
it is better to follow the ant’s ways and eusocially bee wise. Thus, over the
course of this chapter, I locate the dehumanization of Taylorism and other
types of efficiency thinking at the input end of efficient systems, not the out-
put end only. Because utopian efficiency thinking conflates representations
154  Systems, Not Men
with solutions, new and more efficient kinds of people are required for the
production of the very blueprint model that is in turn expected to generate
new, more efficient kinds of people.
Ironically, then, while perhaps no texts in Silent Film and U.S. ­Naturalist
Literature are so committed to the idea of progress as those appearing in
this chapter, none are as narratively static. As the example of Muller hints,
blueprinting comes at the cost of individual choice. Taylor’s “one best way”
and Gilman’s typological characters reflect this knowledge, too. I­ndividual
choice might also be described using Stephen Knapp’s term “literary
­interest”, that is, the experience of being an agent. To the extent that utopias
emphasize system over person—whether in the form of efficiency study, fac-
tory film, or novel—they sacrifice literary interest on behalf of the replicable
sample, creating the apotheosis of the “Progress without People” style this
book has been tracking.

“All Manner of Desired Improvements”:

Visualizing Reform
The cinema offered a new representational technology for regulating unruly
bodies, whether female or working class. For example, in her discussion of
films that satirized female spectators—portraying them as fools who misinter-
pret films, as demonstrated by their poking at figures on the screen—Doane
argues that the cinema’s relationship to modernity is an explicitly male one:

the figure of the woman is here defined as excentric to the real drama
of the body being staged by and through the cinema. Such discourses
indicate her marginal status in the male’s epistemological confronta-
tion with the technologies of modernity. For what is at stake in the
early stages of development of the cinema is very much the body, but
it is a body that is preeminently masculine.
(“Technology’s Body” 531)

The films Doane discusses, including the 1915 comedy A Photographer’s

Troubles, draw upon the tradition of Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture
Show (1902) and other country “rube” films, in which a country bumpkin
attends the cinema and fundamentally misunderstands the medium—trying
to kiss the pretty girls, fight the boxers, and hide from oncoming trains.
Miriam Hansen has noted that Uncle Josh films allowed audience members
to feel superior to the Uncle Josh figure at the same time that they schooled
viewers in proper modes of spectatorship.2 The films Doane examines posi-
tion women in a similar manner, as spectators who do not appropriately
understand the cinema, as opposed to actual audiences who partake in
the film’s comprehending male gaze. Such cases may be understood more
broadly as well: the cinema’s pedagogical potential inspired great hopes
in a wide swath of reform communities, hopes which often concentrated
 Systems, Not Men  155
on improving the industrial working class. Speaking many languages and
a­rriving at work with potentially disruptive ideals and motivations, the
working class needed, according to both social reformers and industrial
engineers, to be brought under a system of organization and regimentation.
Though Gilbreth does not make this connection explicit, his interest in both
new languages like Esperanto and the cinema is telling.3 The cinema seemed
to reformers a medium capable of both modeling for laborers an idealized
image of labor practices and of delivering such messages to a heterogeneous
workforce in a remarkably efficient manner.4
Like many reformers, Gilman celebrated the functional aspects of the
cinema. In a special 1926 edition of the Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science, Gilman’s article “Public Library Motion
­Pictures” corrects those who would see the cinema as frivolous entertain-
ment. She explains, “More than one of our great inventions appeared at first
as but a toy or curiosity, or has been used for lesser purposes than those
developed later. Therefore, it is not surprising that so far there has been little
recognition of the true importance of the motion picture” (143). Instead,
and in her characteristic fashion, she argues that a public motion picture
library system—she suggests Carnegie might fund it—could reach and train
the slow and “sluggish” masses (145). Among her imagined applications of
the educational cinema, Gilman predicts that foolish women,

who care for nothing in dress but the newest invention of their dictators,
could see the pitiful exhibition of what we used to wear, the skillfully
intensified absurdity of things we do wear, and a startling array of things
we might wear—if we chose.  … And they could see a choice of well-­
designed, beautiful garments, mingled with intentionally absurd ones, and
some nascent power of selection might be developed among the sheep. All
manner of desired improvements could be made real to us. (145)

Gilman’s patronizing insistence that visualizing choices would make clear

to the masses what they must do thus parallels industrial efficiency’s one
best way.
Similarly, in The Principles of Scientific Management, Frederick Winslow
Taylor presents a dilemma that hinges on the insufficiency of human bodies:
not only were working bodies in need of regulation, but managers needed
help seeing and correcting labor inefficiency. The motion studies and indus-
trial films thus add new significance to Doane’s description of the cinema as a
prosthetic technology capable of compensating for the subjective failures of
human vision.5 Like Gilman and Muller, in order to show the importance of
efficient systems, Taylor and the Gilbreths cast individual failures as no less
than a matter of national health. It is therefore worth returning to Taylor’s
claim that while “[w]e can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going
to waste, our soil being carried by floods to the sea; and the end of our coal
and iron … Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however,
156  Systems, Not Men
leave nothing visible or tangible behind them” (Principles 5). In comparison
to the new and seemingly objective technologies of photography and the
­cinema, and in the context of industrial efficiency that requires wasted human
movements be as visible as “forests vanishing” or “water-powers going to
waste”, human eyesight was radically lacking. If film was to supplement the
flawed human vision to which “the afterimage points” (Doane, “Technology’s
Body” 532), it is no wonder that the early twentieth century’s theorists of
work used the cinema to render efficiency visible. As Scott Curtis has argued,
the Gilbreths’ use of cinematic technology had the additional benefit of
improving upon Taylor, their early collaborator and employer. By using film
and photography rather than the fallible human manager to record work-
ers’ efficiency, the Gilbreths were able to rival Taylor by being “even more
thoroughly ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’” (Curtis 85). Opposing the regularity
of technological representation and industrial machines to the inefficiency of
human individuals—whether observing managers or surveilled laborers—
factory films, as well as the Gilbreth motion studies, produced an aesthetic of
organized efficiency, an image of a distinctively inhuman best way.
Although their emphasis on controlling workers’ bodies makes Taylor
and the Gilbreths unlikely allies for a feminist social reformer, their focus
on visualizing labor would have appealed to Gilman, concerned as she was
over the unregulated nature of women’s domestic work. In her 1913 article,
“The Waste of Private Housekeeping”, Gilman begins with the statement:
“The principal waste in our ‘domestic economy’ lies in the fact that it is
domestic” (91). Gilman’s criticism of the “domestication” of domestic labor
largely refers to the fact that women conduct this work in private without
the structure of a system. Because women’s work is not only privatized but
also private, this labor is essentially invisible.6 In other words, the private
and privatized nature of women’s work might also be called “awkward, inef-
ficient, or ill-directed” for the same reason that Taylor suggests: this labor
leaves “nothing visible or tangible behind”. However, unlike the p ­ ig-iron car-
rier or the bricklayers of Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ experiments, Gilman’s
housewife had no trained supervisor. Addressing the changes brought about
by Taylor’s and other systems of industrial management, Gilman notes:

Industrial efficiency grows along lines of specialization, organization

and interchange. In the stage of industrial evolution when each man
provided for himself by his own unaided exertions we find the max-
imum of effort with the minimum of product. Domestic industry is
the only survival of that stage in our otherwise highly differentiated
economic system. (91)

For Gilman, the first step in making domestic labor more productive
and efficient is to move women’s work from the private sphere into the
public sphere, where it can be organized and managed in the same ways
more commercial forms of production had been for many years. Because
 Systems, Not Men  157
women perform undifferentiated, unspecialized labor within their homes,
­domestic industry” represents the last holdout against the efficient
“
­differentiation of labor.
The cinema’s ability to make issues both visible and public thus held a
special appeal for reformers such as Gilman who wished “private” women’s
issues would become matters of public concern. Because the cinema’s rep-
resentation of these issues brought them into the public sphere, it granted
previously hidden concerns like conjugal relations and family planning legit-
imacy, thereby making it easier for women reformers to speak publicly about
birth control. In “Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-­Control
Films”, Shelley Stamp analyzes birth control films and notes, “Something
of cinema’s newfound stature can be seen in the fact that Weber, one of
the most respected filmmakers of the day, brought her reputation for high-­
quality feature films to this contentious issue [birth control], and that Sanger,
one of the era’s leading radicals, turned to motion pictures to promote her
cause” (270).7 Kay Sloan has made similar claims along these lines, arguing
that socially engaged feature films taught that “[w]hile the cinema suggested
that the public problems of labor conflict or political c­ orruption could be
solved with private romantic solutions, the private conflicts in the domestic
sphere required public solutions, such as legislation dealing with temper-
ance, birth control, or prostitution” (80). Abstracting the claims Sloan and
Stamp make about women’s social problem films, we see that birth control
films might be conceived as one among many types of ­pedagogical films
meant to retrain individual behaviors on behalf of the larger group. In other
words, in bringing previously private women’s themes on screen, the wom-
an’s reform film takes part in broader questions of individual excess and
large-scale organization.
A brief example that illustrates the homological relationship between
social problem features and industrial films, Pathescope’s Manhattan Trade
School for Girls (1911) exemplifies the uplifting qualities feminist reformers
and industrial managers hoped efficiency would serve. The film documents
a vocational training program for working-class girls, which arose out of
New York philanthropists’ sense that working-class girls needed training to
earn a reasonable living, and, one imagines, to save them from the tawdry
fates met by the working girls of social problem films. As Jennifer Bean
describes the film, while the scenes begin by identifying a particular girl
learning a skill, they cut to a more distant shot that shows many girls work-
ing at the same task, be it “straw hat operating”, “novelty box” making, or
“machine embroidery”.8 The girls are thus placed within the larger category
of their labors. Training schools such as the Manhattan Trade School helped
girls avoid horrendous factory conditions and earn better wages; further-
more, as Bean notes, given that this film appeared later in the same year
as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, these goals were no insignificant matter. In
addition to vocational training, the film also includes views of lessons about
exercise and diet that reflect the desire of reformers to improve the health of
158  Systems, Not Men
female bodies through the systematic application of nutrition and physical
fitness. Manhattan Trade School for Girls illustrates the type of edifying film
Gilman proposed in “Public Library Motion Pictures”, making female labor
and efficiency both public and idealized through the new art form. For, in
addition to the film’s thematic investment in projects of uplift that interested
social reformers, and which appeared fictionalized in social problem films,
Manhattan Trade School’s visual move from individual working girl to her
place in the system emphasizes the importance of an individual’s typicality
and place within a hive-like organization.
Although it may seem paradoxical for reformers such as Gilman to use
an industrial system of control in the service of women’s empowerment,
to reform both motherhood and the economic position of women, Gilman
fought two battles: she needed to demythologize traditional motherhood
(ideas of which allowed for such findings as the judgment in Muller v.
­Oregon) at the same time that she needed to prove the possibility of an eco-
nomically productive womanhood. To do so, Gilman renders the first unnat-
ural and pathological; she then deploys utopian fiction’s blueprint style to
supplement her readers’ vision so that the second might come on screen.
Narrated by one of three male explorers, Gilman’s Herland consists of a
series of conversations in which the residents of a society entirely populated
by women explain their system of cooperation and respond with puzzle-
ment to information the explorers share about sex relations and economics
as practiced in the United States. In other words, the conversations structur-
ing Herland’s narrative compare utopian and imperfect styles in the manner
that Gilman, writing a decade later, would ask films to provide: holding up
images for comparison, so that instructive montage clarifies the better way.

Camerawork: The Gilbreths and Factory Films

Industrial rather than social reformers, the Gilbreths also saw film technol-
ogy as a method for achieving utopian goals. Frank Gilbreth’s 1911 book-
let Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman
closes with both a call to use new technologies and a series of photographs
of his bricklaying experiments that exemplify this charge. In the pamphlet’s
opening, Gilbreth explains that the “phrase ‘Motion Study’ explains itself”,
and yet goes on to clarify, “The aim of motion study is to find and perpetu-
ate the scheme of perfection” (v). Put in terms of literary genre, as a “scheme
of perfection”, the motion study pamphlet is as utopian in its methods and
goals as either “Bee Wise” or Herland. Also like Gilman, and nearly plagia-
rizing Taylor, Gilbreth draws the connection between natural preservation
and labor efficiency in his opening passages: “while the waste from the soil
washing to the sea is a slow but sure national calamity, it is negligible com-
pared with the loss each year due to wasteful motions made by the workers
of our country” (1). Gilbreth goes on to suggest that the savings made pos-
sible by more efficient labor would more than offset the costs of hauling soil
 Systems, Not Men  159
back to its proper, pre-erosion location. In his first chapter, then, Gilbreth
makes factory efficiency a national and environmental as well as industrial
solution.
Following the cue of his mentor Taylor, Gilbreth applies his modern
­system of observation to an old trade, breaking it down by steps. Gilbreth
justifies his choice of bricklaying by claiming, “It has passed through all eras
of history, it has been practiced by nations barbarous and civilized, and was
therefore in a condition supposed to be perfection before we applied motion
study to it, and revolutionized it” (8). Paired, the claim that old trades can
be perfected beyond current understandings of perfection and the idea that
bricklaying has achieved an ahistorical transcendence as a kind of u ­ r-labor
highlight Gilbreth’s utopian insistence that labor systems can always be
improved as well as the identification and correction of human mispercep-
tions entailed by utopian thinking.
An example of what such a utopian vision might resemble is demon-
strated by a subcategory of industrial film that appears early in the cinema’s
history. Short, nonnarrative works that might be described as “celebration
films” depicted industrial spaces in long shot and addressed themselves to
a broader public. These celebration films highlight the spectacle of tech-
nology, producing an aesthetic glorification of factory organization. The
series Westinghouse Works (1904) demonstrates these principles repeatedly.
Filmed by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company over the course
of two months, the film debuted in Pittsburgh, which was home to West-
inghouse, and played again at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The films
in the series include views of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the
Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and the Westinghouse
Machine Company.9 Panoramic View Aisle B features a shot from high
above the factory floor, which traverses the industrial space from a seem-
ingly disembodied perspective. Filming from a track running through the
factory’s center aisle, the camera is disconnected from the fallible human
body of the filmmaker and, through its mounting, has become quite literally
part of the machinery it records. In this instance, the cinema appears objec-
tive, fully meshed with a machine rather than human world. And though
small human figures dart about below, the machinery is the real attraction
(Figure 4.1). The generators are enormous, huge hunks of metal beautiful
in their regularity. On its overhead track, the camera echoes this regularity
as it moves smoothly through space above the monstrous generators. Fur-
thermore, because the camera has merged with the film’s machine world, the
film produces an account of the cinema as both totally objective and totally
efficient, unlike the scurrying figures below, whose movements constitute the
only irregular motions in the film and whose view of their labor processes
could only appear deficient in comparison.
With its depictions of laborers and managers and its implied position of
a spectator, the Westinghouse series thematizes the problem with individu-
alized perspectives. In Girls Winding Armatures, for example, the working
Figure 4.1  Westinghouse Works machinery.

Figure 4.2  “Camerawork” in Westinghouse Works.

 Systems, Not Men  161
women appear arranged in three rows with a vertical aisle separating them,
each laborer’s eyes cast down upon her work. Then, two female overseers
walk down the aisle, observing the women, followed by male managers who
enter, confer with the two women, and check on the workers themselves
(Figure 4.2). This tendency within the factory films to emphasize a con-
trolling perspective is akin to what Tom Gunning in “Before Documentary”
dubs “the view aesthetic” (14), a designation that captures early nonfiction
films’ investment in “presenting something visually, capturing and preserv-
ing a look or vantage point” (14). In addition to the superabundance of
observation taking place within the frame, the film also includes an addi-
tional row for observing the women—the space of the “fourth wall”, from
whence the camera and the spectator assume a position of more neutral
observation, a view more capacious than any occurring within the scene.10
In both the framing here and the innovative use of a crane shot in Panoramic
View Aisle B, the films offer a view more perfect than any human manager
could achieve.
Indeed, implied by Gilbreth’s statement about the bricklayer is the idea that the
development of perfection will require moving beyond the bricklayer, who
has gotten as far as he can on his own—the current condition of “supposed”
“perfection”. For Gilbreth, as for Gilman, perfection is achieved through
system-created homogeneity that provides efficiency in both image and
strategy. In his chapter “Variables of the Worker”, Gilbreth acknowledges,
“Workmen vary widely as to their brawn and strength” (13). Such diversity
does not, however, make for a good system. Gilbreth instructs industrial
engineers to make all calculations

on the basis of using first-class men only. In fact, so-called first-class

men are not good enough. The best man obtainable anywhere is the
best for observation purposes. The data gathered on that best man will
then be considered as 100-per-cent quality. The men finally used can
then be considered as of a certain percentage of perfect quality, and
it should then be the aim of the management to attain 100-per-cent
quality. (13)

Gilbreth’s worry over his test subjects’ imperfection reveals the necessary
difference between creating utopia in the real world and Gilman’s fictional
imaginings. Where Gilman can create a closed system for her experiment,
Gilbreth’s experiments encounter the drag on the system that is real men.
Gilbreth’s desire for perfect standardization makes differences among work-
ers seem like a disappointment; describing the interference of human dif-
ference on his system, Gilbreth notes: “It is obviously better to have all one
class of men, so that all instruction cards will be as nearly alike as possible”
(14). Though Gilbreth’s complaint about differences among men focuses on
the cost and efficiency of producing his instruction cards, in moments like
these Gilbreth’s investment in the system as an end in itself surfaces. Rather
162  Systems, Not Men
than focusing on the cards’ ability to make a unified class of men, Gilbreth
bemoans the fact that different classes of men will necessitate a diversity of
cards, thus disrupting the pleasing uniformity of his system.11
Gilbreth’s desire for an army of uniform men who can be easily plugged
into a system would be answered by later developments within the factory
film format. In 1919, for example, the YMCA published a pamphlet titled
Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men’s Christian Asso-
ciations in Industrial Fields, which details the philosophies and practices
behind the bureau of motion pictures established in 1913 by its “Industrial
Department” (71). Justifying the YMCA’s increased focus on the “industrial
field”, the study’s authors zoom out in space and time, asserting, “In the
days ahead no great world problem will be settled without reckoning with
the forces in industry. Meanwhile the problems arising in the field of indus-
try will involve all of the world forces” (7). One solution offered by the
YMCA to deal with issues of labor unrest—as well as the need for industry
to adapt to the needs of “special groups; for example, the foreigners and
colored workers” (8)—was the judicious use of motion pictures.12
In attempts to make films relatable to all workers, however, the YMCA
guide shows the way industrial filmmakers produced images that met the
needs of none. The YMCA’s description of the industrial films reveals the
organization’s understanding of the problems with industrial efficiency
made famous by Marx and Engels and then refracted in aesthetic terms by
Kracauer in the 1920s. Connecting the synchronized gymnastic routine of
the Tiller Girls to capitalist production via their shared dehumanizing aes-
thetics, Kracauer describes performers who “can no longer be reassembled
into human beings after the fact. … Arms, thighs, and other segments are
the smallest component parts of the composition” (“Mass Ornament” 78).
The lost wholeness corresponds to an increased alienation from production:
“Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a par-
tial function without grasping the totality” (78). In factory films, the very
compartmentalized and disconnected version of labor Kracauer describes
workers experiencing in their day-to-day lives is folded into a larger, more
meaningful total experience.13 The image of wholeness that the cinema
made possible was part of its appeal to industrial-age reformers concerned
with labor unions, increasingly diverse workforces, and the specter of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).14 In industrial reform guides, inef-
ficiency again appears as a failure of both systematic thinking and vision.
The laborers, not unlike Muller’s female worker, cannot understand the
overall picture to which their work contributes. Explaining the importance
of a cinematic perspective, the committee discusses the difference between
labor of old and factory labor:

In days long past the artisan produced the material, converted it into
finished product, and sold it directly to the consumer. The power to
produce was a source of joy and made the artisan proud of his skill
 Systems, Not Men  163
and also of the product. Today it is difficult for the average worker to
have much information concerning the source of the material, relation
of parts, market, or use of product upon which he works. His part,
no matter how important to the success of the product, is just a “job”
and the major enjoyment of his industrial life is produced by the pay
envelope. At a local “Y”, one company placed a large engine lathe in
the “Y” Industrial Exhibit. A worker brought his family and pointed
out a very small part on the beautiful machine and exclaimed proudly,
“I make that”. It was his contribution to the progress of civilization.
(Among Industrial Workers 69–70)

The YMCA seems convinced that workers would perform better if only they
too could see systematically, with the manager’s gaze (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3  YMCA’s utopian hopes.

164  Systems, Not Men
Through “process films”, which depicted production from raw materials
to points of sale and consumption, industrial managers and reformers hoped
to solve the problem of labor alienation by executing an end around Marx
and Engels—instilling pride in unskilled laborers without fundamentally
changing the nature of factory labor.15 The YMCA guide promises industrial
films will make workers “realize the importance of their contribution to the
progress of the world, civilization, and humanity. Jobs become service and
their trade an art of which they have a right to be proud” (Among Industrial
Workers 70). Despite this stated impulse, the form of both the labor and the
industrial films circumscribe the type of identification possible. While a man
passing through the industrial exhibit may point at the machine and declare
“I make that”, so too could many other men, whomever happens to occupy
that place in the system. In the films, making identification possible for any
one of the laborers who produce a particular machine part requires a focus
on the machines, and not the laborers, who, as the guides noted, were a
heterogeneous assortment, including “special groups … the foreigners and
colored workers”. Thus, the films that were intended to instill pride in the
workers in some ways depended upon the erasure of any overly individual-
ized worker from their mise-en-scène. To be relatable to all, industrial films
needed to be representative of no one. The viability of the statement “I make
that” depends upon the ability of anyone to make such a claim.
The process films that allowed workers to identify their place in a system
by refusing to particularize that space bear a close resemblance to Gilbreth’s
photographs of the bricklayers, which frame the laborer’s hands in extreme
close-up. With this type of framing, the act of labor is recognizable—­
allowing an “I make that” moment of recognition—without the distracting
particularity of the laborer’s face, which is excised by the frame. Process
films thereby solve Gilbreth’s and the YMCA’s problem of heterogeneous
laborers by showing industrial processes as a whole and laborers in parts.16
Keeping the agent out of the picture allowed the films to be shown for
either educational or promotional purposes, and in their attempts to appeal
universally, process films developed a passive voice style that emphasized
actions over actors. For example, the 1919 Ford Motor Company film
Where and How Fords Are Made documents the various steps of the car’s
assembly line production, from the “positioning of the shield and running
boards”, to the moment when the car zips down its ramp, to an outdoors
scene with the Model T zipping around a rough and rugged field.17 The
film shows the Ford workers at their labors, operating machinery, tightening
parts, and starting the car. In keeping with Taylorist organization, each man
has his own rigidly delineated job and accompanying equipment; one inter-
title announces, “A creeper is provided for the man who secures the fenders”.
The film heightens this order by organizing and sequencing shots and label-
ing them with appropriate intertitles: “When the gas tank is secured, a gal-
lon of gasoline is put into it”, “The wheels with tires inflated are assembled to
the car”, etc. The film’s representation of Ford Motor Company undergirds
 Systems, Not Men  165
the factory system’s strategies of organization by visually echoing the sepa-
rate jobs in intertitles and by organizing the bodies within shots. In addition
to informing viewers about the process of building a Model T, the narrative
sequencing—“when”—and the intertitles’ passive voice attributes a univer-
sality to the processes: the inevitable steps follow one another in sequence,
regardless of the individuals who do the securing and filling.
The film erases agents from factory work at the level of the image as
well as the sentence. In a visual rendering of the scientific passive voice that
naturalizes and emphasizes processes over individual people, the workers
are subject to the organizing processes of the camera’s eye as well as to
industrial systematization. Where and How Fords Are Made uses a medium
shot, with occasional close-ups of special parts such as the starting motor
and the Bendix drive. As a result, the image gives a close enough view to
recognize labor performed but not close enough to the laborers to recognize
their faces. Furthermore, because the Ford film often frames its medium
shots to showcase the machinery, it crops the worker’s head and feet, leaving
only the laboring torso and hands visible—a visual rendering of the passive
voice that emphasizes acts completed without agents.18 With its emphasis
on timing, organization, and editing, the film positions itself as the media
equivalent to the factory system and also the scientific experiment, offer-
ing a space to visualize efficiency and industrial processes from a seemingly
­neutral and scientific view.19

“Conscious Makers of People”: The Garden as Machine

Charlotte Perkins Gilman also fetishized impersonal systems, both in her
fiction and in her political writings. Throughout her body of work, ­Gilman
figured difference, whether based on race, sex, or class, as an irregular
and illicit input into the overall system of national and racial progress.
The resulting race and class snobbery that appears in her writings has cre-
ated a conflict in Gilman scholarship centered on the relationship between
­Gilman’s personal beliefs and her more progressive work—an ironic con-
flict, given Gilman’s distaste for attention paid to the individual. Not unlike
the history of London studies discussed in the previous chapter, the past
decade of Gilman scholarship reflects the frequently painful struggle of
scholars, feminist scholars in particular, to reconcile Gilman’s feminist and
socialist writings with the racism and eugenics on display in Herland as
well as in nonfictional work such as Women and Economics and the 1908
article “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”. Published in The American
Journal of Sociology, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” contains char-
acteristic comments: “We have to consider the unavoidable presence of a
large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects infe-
rior, whose present status is to us a social injury” (78). Gilman’s tendency
to equate ­Americans with Anglo-Saxons leads her to see racial others as
national threats. M
­ oreover, anticipating Gilbreth’s wish for one class of men
166  Systems, Not Men
and reflecting the hymenopteric fantasies of her fiction, Gilman here frames
racial difference as an invasion that threatens national health—blackness as
alien incursion into the hive or a bad input that threatens the whole system.
In “A Suggestion”, Gilman’s answer to the threat of racial mixing and “the
Negro problem” is a racialized, paternalistic version of the ­Taylorist model
she would later elaborate for white women in Herland. Gilman proposes
that “each sovereign state carefully organize in every county and township
an enlisted body of all negroes below a certain grade of citizenship” to work
in agriculture and construction until these individuals prove themselves
worthy of graduating into American society (80). In an echo of Carlisle’s
Indian schools, her system also includes a provision for the special edu-
cation of African-American children in order to stop what she calls “the
lowering process”. Gilman claims that state care for African-American chil-
dren “leaves the state only the existing crop of low efficients to handle, and
ensures the higher efficiency of the next generation” (81).
A fuller understanding of Gilman’s work may be achieved by reading
her racism and her feminism in terms of her interest in projects rather than
people. Gilman’s personal writings, along with “A Suggestion on the Negro
Problem” and passages in Women and Economics, have formed the cen-
ter of debates about Gilman’s racism. Essays on Gilman’s ethnocentric and
eugenic writings use her racism as an occasion to question her usefulness
to contemporary feminist studies, calling on readers to “interrogate how
Gilman participated in a First Wave feminism that promoted racism as part
of its overall program” (Hausman 494). However, critical works responding
to Gilman’s eugenic writings sometimes reveal less about Gilman’s work
than about feminist literary criticism’s discomfort with the sometimes-­racist
leanings of white feminism. A recent article states this plainly, asking, “How
might a self-reflexive investigation into Gilman’s feminism invigorate con-
temporary antiracist feminism by making it attentive to the racism and
nationalism that are constitutive of the type of feminism Gilman proposed
on the one hand, and of the feminism that seeks to uncritically reclaim
­Gilman on the other?” (Weinbaum 273).20 As she does in Herland, Gilman
frequently described commitments to individuality or personality as both
selfish and pathological, and as Thomas Peyser and Jennifer Fleissner have
each argued, Gilman’s progressivism and her racism both contribute to “her
obsessional vision of the perfectly ordered future society” (Fleissner 90). Indeed,
the paired examples of “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” and Herland
show that the interrelationship between Gilman’s regressive r­acism and
progressive feminism hinges on her interest in systems over individuals—­
specifically, her interest in eugenics. In Herland, Gilman reiterates the com-
mitment to efficiency that informs her desire not just to reorganize women’s
work but organize and differentiate races in America. Whereas Gilman
addresses the problem of “alien” African-Americans through a strategy of
containment, in Herland Gilman applies Taylor’s principles to bring white
women ­further into the public sphere to assert their rightful place as “race
 Systems, Not Men  167
mothers”. Gilman’s commitment to understanding people as the products of
systems thus explains both her aesthetic and ideological frameworks.
Like Taylor before her, Gilman identifies the primary problem of the
twentieth century as the unpredictable and disorganized production of
people. But while the factory films and Taylor’s system impose order upon
people from the outside (in the form of the manager and the technological
prosthesis), Gilman’s text produces an account of the world in which its pri-
mary business is the systematic production of people. For Gilman and other
feminist reformers, lack of an efficient system results in both the shoddy
production of people—no great men and incompletely evolved women—
and the production of people in excess of market demands (that is, too
many babies).
In the feminist reform movements Gilman engaged, two interrelated
accounts of wasteful excess emerge. Gilman and other feminist reformers
first identify what might be called “excessive personality”—or, minimally,
personal expression of the wrong sort—which they then claim causes the
wasteful production of the wrong kind of people. In fictional social prob-
lem films and in Herland, human populations that outstrip the economic
resources of the land and the demands of the labor market count as waste.
Therefore, excessive breeding, which the birth control movement character-
ized as symptomatic of the era’s chaotic version of motherhood, ­produced
children who were unsustainable, malnourished and diseased, and thereby
unnatural. Such views appear, for example, in the Lois Weber-directed
Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
(1917). In the second film, Weber portrays a fictionalized version of birth
control advocate Margaret Sanger, who was then on trial for violating the
Comstock laws that regulated the dissemination of sexually explicit materi-
als (Stamp, “Taking” 270–1). In Where Are My Children?, Weber promotes
a class-based form of eugenics. As opposed to Sanger’s promotion of family
planning for all classes, Where Are My Children? presents preventative birth
control as a positive intervention into the lives of working-class women,
whom Weber depicts as overfecund and unable to regulate their production
of babies. The result of this overproduction is a strain on family finances and
a related inability to meet their children’s needs. In contrast, the film’s main
character Mrs. Walton selfishly has abortions to avoid the pregnancies that
would damper her high-society lifestyle, despite her financial ability to pro-
vide for a family. By focusing on upper-class women’s excessive consump-
tion of fashion and entertainment, Weber’s film criticizes society women for
a misapplication of their energies, what might otherwise be called putting
the cultivation of the self ahead of the cultivation of the race. Rather than
focusing on production, they excessively consume the abortions that allow
them to maintain their over-the-top lifestyles.21 In its discussion of the film,
the National Board of Review noticed the discrepancy in the film’s message.
It moved to censor Where Are My Children? on the grounds that “the film
confused contraception and abortion, and that it contained mixed messages
168  Systems, Not Men
about the use of both” (Stamp, “Taking” 274). However, what the board
identified as a mixed message—prescribing birth control to the lower classes
and encouraging breeding in the upper classes—characterizes the eugenic
feminism Gilman and her peers espoused.
As these examples suggest, the trouble identified by reformist texts is not
just that there will be too many babies, but that the babies will be of the
wrong sort. Describing a process similar to that proposed in “A Suggestion on
the Negro Problem”, Herland’s narrator Vandyck explains that the women
have devised a system “to make the best kind of people. First this was merely
the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the
children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education” (61).
Invoking a machine-age metaphor, Vandyck closes with the statement, “Then
things began to hum” (61). Gilman’s opposition between “difference” and
“real growth” suggests that “the best kind of people” will be uniform. In
her elimination of difference in the name of efficiency, Gilman also reveals
the eugenic aspects of industrial management, mirroring Gilbreth’s complaint
about variations in brawn and Taylor’s statement that “the first object of any
good system must be that of developing first class men” (7).
The matter of making first-class people in Herland, however, involves
more rigorously planned parenthood than Vandyck’s discussion of ­education
suggests. The hymenoptera referenced by “Bee Wise” provide an initial
model for the kind of reproduction that interests Gilman. With one queen
mother, drones grow from unfertilized eggs and are thus genetically identi-
cal, and female workers fertilized from the same father are 75% identical
in their genetic material, more closely related than sisters of other species
(“Haplodiploidy”). Though the hive still depends upon an outside drone for
fertilization, in order for whiteness to go on as the model race in ­America,
there can be no contamination of the racial stock, as seen in the racial panic
around Jack Johnson’s circulation and on display in The Birth of a Nation.
In addition to her science fiction description of the male explorers as a race
apart, Gilman tellingly refers to them using the term “alien”, the same term
with which she classified African-Americans in “A Suggestion on the Negro
Problem”.22 Repeatedly, Vandyck describes himself and his company as
alien (73, 120, 121), a designation that suggests the threat of outside differ-
ence brought into the colony. In fact, the novel ends with the expulsion of
the dangerous outsiders from Herland.
While the men are aliens, Vandyck and the explorers continually describe
the Herlanders as bees and ants. Referring to their communitarian principles,
for example, Vandyck reflects, “It was beyond me. To hear women talk about
‘our children’! But I suppose that is the way the ants and bees would talk”
(72). In their systematic motherhood, though, the Herlanders improve upon
the closed systems of both the efficiency experiment and the hive by sealing
men out of the gene pool altogether. In a fantasy of racial purity, the history
of Herland includes an original matriarch giving virgin birth, allowing for
a nation of “One family, all descended from one mother.  … [who] alone
 Systems, Not Men  169
had founded a new race!” (58–59). Writing of Gilman’s eugenic fantasies,
Thomas Peyser explains how Gilman’s “tenderly cultivate[d] ­nostalgia for
the days of undisputed Anglo-Saxon ascendency” reveals itself in her presen-
tation of white American genes as the endangered norm, by which contact
with other races threatens to “water … down” (69, 70). Gilman’s fantasy here
moves beyond the close relations of the hymenoptera to imagine a ­perfectly
enclosed system with no genetic drag in the form of male sexual partners
who bring in the “alien” threat of racial difference.
When he learns of the Herlanders’ parthenogenic reproduction, through
which every woman, descended from an original mother, produces five
children over a lifetime, Vandyck asks how it can be that the women have
not experienced poverty and overcrowding. In a moment of unsentimental
­pragmatism, Ellador explains:

They sat down in council together and thought it out. Very clear, strong
thinkers they were. They said: “With our best endeavors this country
will support about so many people, with the standard of peace, com-
fort, health, beauty, and progress we demand. Very well. That is all the
people we will make”.
(Gilman, Herland 69)

In this passage, Gilman moves beyond the family planning associated with
Sanger’s birth control movement to thinking about what the planet can sus-
tain. This move emphasizes the position of the individual mothers’ bodies
within a much larger system—a kind of ecosystem. Gilman suggests that if
the world is in the business of producing people, individual women’s deci-
sions to conceive or not to conceive must be thought of within the context of
systems of production. The statement “Very well. That is all the people we
will make” is equivalent to Taylor’s assertion that “in the future the system
must be first”. Like Taylor, Gilman dissolves the distinction between biologi-
cal and mechanical reproduction through her insistence that the proper way
to understand a person as both product and part of a system.
Besides the glee with which Gilman seems to have written Ellador’s
ultrapractical explanation of Herlander birth control, this explanation also
stresses the importance of putting the reproductive female body under a
system of management. Whereas Taylor’s workers and great men require an
external manager, after several generations in the system, Gilman’s women
have internalized the engineer’s stopwatch and notepad; unlike “soldier-
ing” workers, the Herlanders are fully integrated into the system. After
thinking through Ellador’s explanation, Vandyck pinpoints the difference
between the regulated biological reproduction of Herland and the chaotic
motherhood he has seen: “they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless
involuntary fecundity … but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People”
(Gilman, Herland 69). When a Herlander wants a child, she thinks it and it
is so. If she knows it is not time, she “put the whole thing out off her mind,
170  Systems, Not Men
and fed her heart with other babies” (72).23 By planning and regulating
­childbirth, the Herlanders produce at utmost efficiency: because mother-
hood is o ­ rganized, the women of Herland have the time and energy to be
economically and socially productive. Gilman establishes that mind control
as birth control is only viable after much public discussion about biological
production—“That is all the people we will make”.
As they decide whether to return to a two-sexed society, the H ­ erlanders
query the male explorers about reproductive and economic practices in the
United States. Feeble defenses of poor conditions, the men’s answers act as
Gilman’s critique of American society in the 1910s. In one attempt to justify
their society, the men describe a blissful motherhood in which a woman’s
only “job” is the loving care for her offspring. Surprised, the Herlanders
ask if it can be true that American women have no other work, at which
point the men sheepishly admit to the presence of a female underclass.
The H ­ erlanders assume that this lower class is not biologically productive:
“‘about one-third, then, belong to the poorest class’, observed ­Moadine
gravely. ‘And two-thirds are the ones who are—how was it you so beauti-
fully put it?—“loved, honored, kept in the home to care for the ­children”.
This inferior one-third have no children, I suppose?’” (Herland 64). Both
Gilman’s readers and the male explorers know otherwise. ­ Moadine’s
assumption reflects the division of labor in Herland: if one class of women
acts as mother to the society, the rest must have their labor freed up to pur-
sue other work. She makes the assumption that motherhood in the United
States operates as it does in Herland, according to a system that allows for
the best and most efficient production of future generations.
Jeff clarifies the situation by invoking a seemingly perverse “natural law”.
He explains, “on the contrary, the poorer [the women] were, the more chil-
dren they had. That too, he explained, was a law of nature: ‘Reproduction
is in inverse proportion to individuation’” (Herland 64). Implicit in this
exchange is the concern that a combination of physical factory labor and
excessive breeding exhausts working-class mothers’ energies. Gilman’s con-
cerns echo broader cultural worries about the fatigued modern body, weak-
ened by the pressures of industrial living.24 Because of Gilman’s interests in
biological production as actual childbirth as well as metaphor, she opposes
sustainability to overproduction.25 The mother who overproduces floods
the labor market, thus producing class after class of unemployable workers
who exceed the demand for labor.
Like Weber’s Where Are My Children?, Gilman’s system positions (racial
and class-based) difference as harmful to the race. The film promotes birth
control for the poor by showing both slum scenes of poorly treated children
and a birth control pamphlet that reads, “When only those children who
are wanted are born, the race will conquer the evils that weigh it down”.
In Herland, Gilman foregrounds the need for a system that would ensure
a more moderate production of babies by contrasting Jeff’s explanation of
working-class motherhood with the efficient and “evil”-free society of the
 Systems, Not Men  171
Herlanders. This progress is predicated not just on exclusion, but also, like
Taylor’s system, on surveillance and coercion. In order to make the best
people, the Herlanders worked to “train out, to breed out … the lowest
types. … If the girl showing the bad qualities had still the power to appre-
ciate social duty, we appealed to her, by that, to renounce motherhood”
(83). In her efforts to identify a pure American genealogy, Gilman frequently
conflates the national and the racial. Thomas Peyser has claimed, “At the
heart of Herland, then, is the story of whites becoming reacquainted with
their own essential whiteness, a rediscovery of an unsullied culture from
the past that has miraculously survived the convulsions of history intact”
(83). In Herland, the good of the (white) race and the good of the country
are one and the same: “Every step of [their] advance is always considered
in its effects on them—on the race” (67). However, the systematic quality
of ­Gilman’s proposed reforms extends beyond her racism and classism in a
much more expansive manner.
Public discussion about reproduction makes possible the H ­ erlanders’
healthy society, and Gilman’s polemical utopian novel offers itself as a fic-
tionalized version of such discussions. Herland thus slightly reframes the
findings of Muller v. Oregon, which asserts that “the well-being of the
race—justify legislation to protect her from the greed as well as the pas-
sion of man. The limitations which this statute places upon her contractual
powers, upon her right to agree with her employer as to the time she shall
labor, are not imposed solely for her benefit, but also largely for the benefit
of all”. By Gilman’s account, to be the kind of fully developed human indi-
vidual who could make a contract in the first place, you first have to submit
yourself to a system of management. The system is the thing that constitutes
what you are: it both makes a person out of you and allows for the making
of additional people.
Another way of putting this idea, one reflected in the form of Gilman’s
novel, is to say that by being part of a self-reproducing system, one must
subordinate individual goals to racial ones. Enacting the wishes on display
in Muller, Herland’s mothers act as emissaries of the race, as participants in
the system, but not as agents or characters. As a result, the “consciousness”
of the Herlanders’ people-making, emphasized by some scholars, becomes
suspect. For example, while Fleissner’s reading of the novel emphasizes
Gilman’s sense of nature as unknowable with an account of nature as an
extension of culture—a point in keeping with my own argument—she also
emphasizes the importance of self-control: “Thus, just as the forest around
Herland appears ‘petted’ and literally ‘trained’ to meet society’s alimentary
needs, so the women themselves can control when they will and will not
have children, merely by choosing whether or not to focus their mental and
physical energies in a properly maternal direction” (90). What Fleissner’s
account of such self-control leaves out, however, is that Herland is filled
entirely with women who would only make the right choices to begin with.
To put it slightly differently, while Fleissner is clearly right in arguing that
172  Systems, Not Men
Herland “narrows if not eliminates the potential gap between individual
desires and social demands”, this is because Gilman effectively eradicates
the individual as a category (96). In a parthenogenic and eusocial world,
the results of people-making will always be both genetically identical and
­rigidly hierarchical. In other words, much like Gilbreth’s best men, H
­ erland’s
system depends for it efficient making of people on having better people to
participate in the system at the outset. The utopian snake eats itself.
As a result of Gilman’s conception of a person as part of a system, though
Herland is committed to the concept of “progress”, it’s also static as a narra-
tive. In the same way that progress in “Bee Wise” is measured by production
of identical towns, the conversational style of Herland offers the novel itself
as a blueprint. The static quality of such a form comes up for self-aware
commentary in a discussion among the characters. Herland contains little
to no narrative conflict. In a metafictional moment, Vandyck comments: “It
is no use for me to piece out this account with adventures. … There were
no adventures because there was nothing to fight” (Gilman, Herland 51).
Instead of describing narrative “adventures”, Herland acts as a hermetic
system in which Gilman can frame her arguments. Peyser describes this style
as emerging from the tradition of sociology (67), noting Gilman’s focus on
“norm and aberration” as evidence (69). Peyser’s norms and aberrations can
also be used to describe human subjects’ efficiency—and race. Near the end
of the novel, the explorers tie the uneventfulness of Herland specifically to
the hymenopteric qualities of the women:

Terry did not like [Herland] because he found nothing to oppose, to

struggle with, to conquer.
“Life is a struggle, has to be”, he insisted. “If there is no struggle,
there is no life—that’s all”.
“You’re talking nonsense—masculine nonsense”, the peaceful Jeff
replied … “Ants don’t raise their myriads by a struggle, do they? Or
the bees?”
“Oh, if you go back to the insects—and want to live in an anthill—!
I tell you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle—
combat. There’s no Drama here. Look at their plays! They make me
sick”. (100)

Indeed, rather than theatrical productions with characters, the Herlanders

put on educational pageants, providing a neat parallel to Gilman’s own
novel, which, lacking characters with personalized motivations, also moves
by way of educational conversation rather than character-driven action.
In the numerous discussions of Herland’s systematic production of
­people, the private and the personal are cast as excesses to be expelled from
the system, a fictional analog to Gilbreth’s longing for a single class of men
in his experiments. For example, the Herlanders’ attempt to breed out “low-
est types” typically centers on the removal of selfishness and sex-distinction,
 Systems, Not Men  173
characteristics often conflated by the Herlanders. In his description of the
Herlanders’ indifference to the male explorers, Vandyck notes, “There was
no sex-feeling to appeal to, or practically none. Two thousand years of dis-
use had left very little of the instinct; also we must remember that those who
had at times manifested it as atavistic expression were often, by that very
fact, denied motherhood” (Gilman, Herland 92–93). Throughout Herland
and her other writings, Gilman links upper-class expressions of female sexu-
ality with individuation and decries both as unproductive. Gilman’s critique
of American motherhood thereby extends to all expressions of difference,
whether racial, class, or gender-based.
In part, Gilman’s dismissal of gendered personality grows out of ­Herland’s
narrative logic. Beyond their ability to exemplify social trends or voice her
arguments, characters are extrinsic to Gilman’s essayistic narrative. Besides
the formally disruptive nature of human individuality, Gilman suggests
that what popular opinion terms “personality” is in fact a response to the
inefficient system of sexual individuation that wastes female energies in the
first place. In The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Gilman argues
that “confined to the home, [the woman] begins to fill and overfill it with
the effort at individual expression” (35). Upper-class women’s poorly man-
aged energies lead them to produce “personality” rather than economic
products. In another nonfiction work, Women and Economics, Gilman
specifies that upper-class women’s energies are exhausted not through the
excessive expenditure of energies in the workplace but instead through the
wasteful cultivation of what Gilman refers to as “sex-distinctions” (28).26
­Gilman differentiates biological and cultural sex markers in an attempt to
separate those that are necessary to human reproduction—and therefore
natural—from those that are socially prescribed and, in Gilman’s terms,
­“pathological”.27 In his attempts to understand what differentiates the
­Herlanders from the women with whom he is familiar, Vandyck realizes:

These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the

dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in
what we call “femininity”. This led me promptly to the conviction
that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at
all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because
they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of
their great process.
(Herland 60)

The excessive femininity that Vandyck locates in American women represents

wasted energy that is not expended in either economic labor or the “great
process” of reproducing human life. In Women and Economics, Gilman
suggests that the excessive “sex distinction” of American women is not only
nonproductive, but also counterproductive. Contrasting the progress of the
human male with the human female, Gilman invokes a popular electric-age
174  Systems, Not Men
metaphor, the battery: “human development thus far has p ­ roceeded under the
force of male energy, spurred by sex-stimulus, and by the vast storage battery
of female energy suppressed” (67).28 By describing female energy in industrial
terms with this metaphor, Gilman converts women’s natural e­nergies into
wasted mechanical resources.29 In her description of the female “battery”,
Gilman produces a gender-specific version of Taylor’s ministrations to “elim-
inate all false movements, slow movements, and useless movements” (117).
In both Herland and Women and Economics, Gilman describes the ideal
society as a kind of well-oiled machine, the proper function of which depends
on both the cooperation and the specialization of its component parts. In
her characteristic shuttling between the mechanical and the ­natural, Gilman
describes the progress of this social machine in biological terms: “Social
evolution tends to an increasing specialization in structure and function,
and to an increasing interdependence of component parts” (Women and
Economics 52). In other words, the biological machine functions best when
it is organized. Far more so than Taylor, Gilman recodes this systematiza-
tion as natural: everyone has her own specific place and task arising from
her natural interests. This specialization is as commonsensical as it is nat-
ural; as Vandyck explains: “To do the best work they had to specialize, of
course; the children needed spinners and weavers, farmers and gardeners,
carpenters and masons, as well as mothers” (Herland 68). To the extent
that Herland is a society of mothers, it is natural for the mothers to have
other specialized tasks because these tasks arise from the children’s needs.
In a society that realizes the “it takes a village” adage literally, it becomes
clear that for an efficiently functioning village, women must be weavers and
masons, not just mothers. Or, put another way, mothers owe it to their chil-
dren to be weavers and masons as well as “egg sacs”. Returning to Gilman’s
agricultural metaphor, a society whose women are only defined by their
biologically reproductive capabilities can never be “ripe”.
For Gilman, the cultivation of sexual difference is perverse and patho-
logical precisely because it is nonproductive. In her characteristically
unsentimental mode, Ellador asks Vandyck to explain something she finds
confusing about conjugal relations: “‘Do you mean’, she asked quite calmly,
as if I was not holding her cool firm hands in my hot and rather quivering
ones, ‘that with you, when people marry, they go on doing this in season and
out of season, with no thought of children at all?’” (Herland 125). Ellador’s
confusion stems largely from the idea of having sex “out of season”: in
the world of Herland, intercourse without procreation is not just unnatu-
ral, but wasteful.30 Vandyck’s “hot and rather quivering” hands suggest the
wasted energy given off by eroticism that arises from excessive differentia-
tion between the sexes. Ellador—who sees herself possessing human traits,
as opposed to female ones—is the one with “cool firm hands”. Restricting
women to the realm of motherhood produces two related problems: the
reduction of women to “mere egg sac[s]”, and the possibility of exhausting
the process of biological reproduction (Women and Economics 30, 16).31
 Systems, Not Men  175
Gilman argues that by diverting women’s energy toward sexual distinction,
and away from biological and economic production, American society per-
petrates a nearly criminal act. The sex distinctions developed by upper-class
women represent an individuality that runs counter to reformers’ valuation
of smoothly running systems over individuals. Because excessive femininity
wastes productive power, the American system of sex distinction suspends
the possibility of women exerting economic and political agency as produc-
ers of future generations. Rather than seeing individuality as a defense of the
human in a machine age, Gilman reads this kind of irregularity as dangerous
to the future of the nation and the race. Efficiency, even when promoted in
service of humanity, casts personality as excessive to its functioning—a kind
of waste that must be extracted for the good of the system.

Human Interest Stuff and the Lure of Pure Representation

The National Personnel Association (NPA) also worried about excessive
personality in its 1922 treatise, which built upon the YMCA study’s advice.
In Industrial Motion Pictures: How to Circulate Them and a Few Cautions
Regarding Their Manufacture and Design, the NPA offers guidance on the
uses and abuses of the industrial film as a training tool (Committee on Visu-
alized Training). The transcripts and much of the report from the NPA’s con-
vention meeting focus on the abuses in particular—“a few important ‘don’ts’”
dominate (2). Nearly a decade since the 1913 founding of the YMCA board
on industrial films, industry was adding its own two cents. In the precirculated
report for the convention, the section, “A Few Words of Caution Regarding
Manufacture and Distribution” consists of eighteen “don’ts”, which include
warnings against employing “amateurs to plan your pictures”, against miss-
ing “the point that motion pictures constitute a universal language”, against
experimenting “with cheap or inefficient equipment”, and so forth (7–8).
Among the more mundane advice about cheap and flammable film, the list
ties questions about the communicative nature of cinematic language to issues
of efficiency, the human, and narrative interest. In its warning against “don’ts”
committed at the level of scenario-planning, the Committee on Visualized
Training cautions industrialists not to “make the scenario too long” because
no “goods are sold after the second reel”. Additionally, industrial filmmakers
should not “crowd the picture with material” but instead “[c]oncentrate upon
a single theme or a few important processes and get the idea across” (8).
Various forms of narrative excess and inefficiency center the committee’s rec-
ommendations for scenario-planning, with “don’t” Number Twelve—“Don’t
permit the producer to drag in human interest stuff by the tail”—emerging as
a matter of particular concern in the conference discussion (8).
During the November 10 meeting in which the report was discussed, the
conversation focused on questions of purpose, efficiency, and this t­ roublesome
matter of “human interest stuff”. Chairman Jefferson opened the conversa-
tion with promises of efficient training, stating, “The motion picture is one
176  Systems, Not Men
of the most efficient means of instruction. In the New York schools where
it has been tried out for several years, it has been found that the boys and
girls learn the subjects more quickly and that they retain the information
better” (Committee on Visualized Training 3). However, after a screening of
the exemplary United States Rubber Company film, Roy Davis of the DeVry
Company noted the scenario’s problematic aspects. He begins by explaining
that the film had been devised to both train the staff and to advertise a prod-
uct, and that this dual-purpose detracted from the film’s effectiveness: “you
notice in the film we had they attempted to be theatrical. When the assembly
process was shown, it was humorous and that could have been eliminated
to make it more instructive” (5). A member of the panel’s audience agreed,
adding, “I think that in a film to instruct employees you should cut out the
entertainment. If you need entertainment, show a short cartoon or comedy.
Then cut it out and get down to business” (5). This brusque commenter fol-
lows up on the dual-purpose problem identified by Davis; the human-interest
stuff, it seems, belongs to the realm of entertainment. In the field of industrial
training, the human element is excessive, and perhaps counterproductive.32
The earlier YMCA report’s description of a potential film program sug-
gests the types of problems that might emerge in attempts to stretch an
industrial film’s uses. When a local Y ordered films from the YMCA film
bureau, each film came accompanied by a card, which “presents the synop-
sis of the film, list of groups that will be especially interested in the subject,
and suggestions for using the film as a moral, economic, or patriotic lesson”
(Among Industrial Workers 71). No doubt, the multiple programming sug-
gestions were meant to enable local YMCAs to adapt programs and to allow
the organization to exploit the filmic medium in a manner in keeping with
the YMCA’s thrifty values. Yet the following example, meant to illustrate the
potential religious and civic value of industrial films, illustrates the potential
confusion about which personnel managers worried:

Many Associations find that the religious program is strengthened

by use of the right kind of industrial motion pictures. When used to
emphasize religious truths, their value is increased tenfold. For exam-
ple, the film “Transformation of a Bale of Wool” shows the wonderful
looms in operation, and one can see the patterns grow as the shuttle
speeds back and forth. This picture furnishes an excellent opportunity
to compare character building with weaving and shows how Jesus
wove the ideal pattern in life’s tapestry and how we are taught through
him to weave our tapestry with beautiful deeds of service. Washington,
Lincoln, McKinley, and Roosevelt have woven tapestries that will be
admired and studied to the end of time. (72)

Although the film is now gone, an account of the picture from The ­Spokane
Daily Chronicle confirms what we might suspect, the film does not show
how Jesus planned the world, nor does it visually demonstrate Christ’s
 Systems, Not Men  177
inspiring influence on the lives of great presidents. Instead, as Daily ­Chronicle
reporter Mildred Perry writes in her article, at the Washington State College,
the film was “shown to girls of the textile classes, showing the processes
of wool to the finished rug”. Adaptable to textile classrooms and religious
lectures, Transformation of a Bale of Wool is likely a process film, without a
significant intrusion of “human interest stuff”. To the consternation of per-
sonnel managers, and to the apparent delight of the YMCA, industrial films
were infinitely flexible. With their abstract and generalized representation of
human bodies and loose narrative structures, the films could be put to any
number of educational, promotional, or moralistic uses.
But as these descriptions of Transformation of a Bale of Wool indicate,
industrial pictures that featured neither humans and nor narratives also ran
the risk of becoming aesthetic products in themselves, rather than systems of
for improving production. Recent scholarship on the Gilbreths has also high-
lighted this tendency. Eventually, the perfection Frank Gilbreth sought would
come first from metaphorically melding man with the machine and then dis-
appearing the human figure entirely. In Motion Study, Gilbreth explains that
man–machine fusing is the way of the future: “The automaticity of motions
of great assistance to the worker whose training and methods conform to
standardized motions. … The automaticity of motions is a hindrance to the
worker who has been accustomed to old-fashioned surroundings, equipment,
and tools, and who must adapt himself to standard surroundings” (67). In
later experiments, published in Applied Motion Study (1917), the evolution-
ary adaptation Gilbreth describes is so thorough that the worker vanishes into
his surroundings. The Gilbreths’ motion studies attempted to produce a visi-
ble record of the worker’s “path”, or movements, as he conducted his regular
factory labors. They did this by lighting the worker’s hands and darkening the
room. They then used an adaptation of Marey’s chronophotography, retitled
the chronocyclegraph. The cyclegraph method “consists of fastening electric
light bulbs to the fingers of the operator” so that “a photograph is made of the
moving part” (46). In her study of Precisionist painters, Sharon Corwin argues
that Taylorism produced not only “social effects but also … visual effects”
(140; emphasis original). Corwin connects the Gilbreths’ motion studies to
Precisionist paintings, arguing that both the Gilbreths and the Precisionists
gave industrial productivity a visual form whose aesthetics emphasized effi-
ciency and conservation and effaced labor—whether the photographed labor-
er’s or the painter’s (140). As Corwin notes, because the Gilbreths “construed
efficiency in visual terms … [i]nefficiency was thus seen as a tangle of ‘rag-
ged lines’” (144). In contrast, efficient movements produced smoother, more
aesthetically pleasing paths of light. Through motion studies that transcribed
labor into effulgent lines, the Gilbreths tied industrial efficiency to aesthetic
pleasure. If lights and cameras made visible paths of greatest efficiency, the
human body could only be a roadblock in the industrial age’s progress toward
a beautiful and wasteless economy.33 The Gilbreth studies reveal that a pic-
ture of efficiency, whatever else it might be, is not a picture of the human.
178  Systems, Not Men
Nonetheless, as Corwin points out, efficiency is a picture—that is, a form
of representation. The conflation of efficiency and aesthetics can be seen in
Gilman’s agricultural metaphors, which fuse the economic and the biolog-
ical in the bodies of Herland’s children: “Those nation-loved children of
theirs compared with the average in our country as the most perfectly cul-
tivated, richly developed roses compared with—tumbleweeds. Yet they did
not seem ‘cultivated’ at all—it had all become a natural condition” (Herland
73). By comparing the rose to the tumbleweed, Gilman argues that people
must manage biology to achieve natural perfection. Through her insistence
that a radical compatibility between people and systems is necessary to the
continuation of the human race, Gilman is able to argue that there is no
real difference between the hearth and the shop floor, since all labors are
for her connected in service of a great system that generates human life.
Yet Gilman’s comparison of the rose to the tumbleweed suggests a final
problem for representations of efficiency. Neither roses nor tumbleweeds
are particularly useful; one is simply more attractive than the other. In her
description of children as flowers, Gilman reveals a weakness in the systems
of representation discussed throughout this chapter.
Gilman’s and the industrial managers’ assessments that the production of
people required efficient systems led them to focus on representing efficiency
and inefficiency in order to render visible wasted time and energy. If the first
problem with the industrial age is that human bodies labor inefficiently or,
in this chapter’s terms, that it produces inefficient bodies, then the writers,
filmmakers, and engineers discussed earlier took it as their task to make this
waste visible. The industrial films and Gilbreth studies addressed this task
by creating images of efficiency against which human irregularity appears
jarring and strange. But by visualizing efficiency, Gilman and the industrial
films stood the chance of turning efficiency into merely another system of
representation—making efficiency a beautiful ideal risked replacing effi-
ciency as production with efficiency as aesthetic.34
Additionally, perfect crops of children grown in beautiful gardens antic-
ipate other eugenic projects carried out under the banner of efficiency
that were yet to come in the twentieth century. Near the end of his chap-
ter on ­Gilman, Peyser makes provocative connections among gardening,
­engineering, and fascism. Keying to a moment in which the character Terry
notes, “I never saw a forest so petted, even in Germany” (Gilman, Herland 15),
Peyser writes that Terry links “the Herlanders to the European state most
noted for centralized economic, and, one gathers, arborial [sic] regulation”
(88). Peyser argues that “the utopian aestheticization of the world … is
closely related to the modern will toward organizational perfection” (89)
and that Gilman’s ­“civilization is inextricably intertwined with her vision of
racial purity” (90). Of course, what might also be said about the moment
when representations of things begin to become conflated with things them-
selves, and in which the will to formal perfection is similar to the will to
power, is that we have arrived at the moment of modernism. Yet literary
 Systems, Not Men  179
modernism would not do away with the human in the manner the novels
described here have done. Instead, it was in the cinema and the visual arts
that visions of progress as inhuman are most clearly on display, and nowhere
is this more visible than in the film that closes this volume, Manhatta.

Notes
1. Concerns about the right to contract one’s labor and definitions of personhood
frequently intersected in the American Progressive era. In his reading of Muller,
Daniel Rodgers notes, “From the beginnings of the protective labor legislation
movement, the assumption that women and children belonged in a separate,
special category of workers had been central” (239). One need only envision
the horror of 146 women burning alive or jumping to their deaths during the
Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 to understand the public concern about
working conditions for women. Additionally, women may have been especially
vulnerable to labor exploitation because union organizers typically overlooked
female laborers in their organizing efforts. Of the many women newly employed
in industry, in 1910 only 1.5% of these women were in unions (Kessler-Harris 92).
With women thus isolated from the labor movement, sex-based legislation like
Muller, paternalistic as its tone might be, may have been an important inroad
to labor reform for the female workers who were going largely ignored by the
American Federation of Labor.
2. Hansen asserts that this mode of address indicates that “[t]he viewer addressed
by Uncle Josh is certainly not yet the classical spectator” (Babel 28). However,
as Young notes in The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, Uncle Josh’s action—and the
persistent representation of the unruly spectators across multiple films from the
period—“bears witness to the persistently social character of exhibition” (40).
Or, as I would have it, these films register the persistently human character of
the figures on the screen.
3. In this moment, Gilbreth echoes a common wish for the cinema as universal
language. For a full account of cinematic dreams of global communication, see
Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon.
4. Despite the strong interest in didactic films in the early twentieth century, “use-
ful cinema” or “films that work”, including industrial and educational films,
are nonetheless a relatively understudied film genre today. Likely, this scholarly
neglect stems from the industrial film’s lack of fit with an auteurist model. Fre-
quently made in-house by universities or factories, these films lack the authorial
signature that has been so important to the history of film studies. Two notable
exceptions to this neglect inform much of the work in this chapter: the edited
collections Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media and
Useful Cinema. Despite lacking recourse to film directors, these studies have
been innovative in creating rubrics through which industrial film style and
address may be analyzed. The editors of Films that Work, for example, posit
that industrial films may be understood as attempts to “translate discourse into
social practice” (Hediger and Vonderau 11). As a result, industrial films may
be of particular importance to understanding early twentieth-century media
ecologies. In his contribution to Films that Work, Elsaesser suggests that “the
non-fiction film seems to have played … the role of intermedia, as appetizer, trial
180  Systems, Not Men
balloon, and lightning fuse” (“Archives” 19). Such an account of the nonfiction
film as intermedia implies that it serves as a screen for utopian projections. In
their account of industrial film’s translation of discourse into practice, Hediger
and Vonderau create a three-R rubric, positing that factory films act as record of
factory histories, as rhetoric meant to persuade workers, and as rationalization
that involved using media to better factory efficiency (40). My interest here is in
the way early industrial films and industrial thinkers ended up collapsing these
last two R’s; increasingly, discussions of idealized work processes position rep-
resentation as the end in and of itself, as opposed to a tool for effecting change.
Indeed, Scott Curtis suggests as much in his study of Frank Gilbreth’s film work.
Noting that Gilbreth’s films included scientific looking but impractical details,
such as backdrops of grids that did not provide accurate measurements (89),
Curtis argues that while “their effectiveness as educational tools is in doubt, the
provided a compelling image of efficiency” (94). In the industrial films, then, we
see the utopian aspects of the factory and the factory aspects of utopia.
5. Doane writes, “The suspicion that lingers about the relation between technol-
ogy and the body is that there may indeed be a connection between the two
and that this connection can only be thought of as a form of compensation.
This is the idea of technology as prosthesis—an addition to or supplementa-
tion of a body that is inherently lacking, subject to failure, ontologically frail”
(“Technology’s Body” 532).
6. Fleissner also argues that Gilman identifies individuality as one of the main
problems with domestic work, writing, “Regulating tasks in office or factory
was one thing; aside from the rather large stumbling block of lack of financial
incentives to rationalize, the home also stood—certainly in an era only gradu-
ally becoming invested in consumer goods—as a powerfully resistant mass of
­individual tastes and forms of life” (79).
7. Stamp notes that “birth-control films highlight struggles over motion picture
regulation in the late 1910s, when ideas about the educational and interven-
tionist role cinema might play in society clashed with its evolving role in the
entertainment sphere” (272).
8. Bean’s commentary accompanies the film in the recently released Treasures III:
Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934.
9. The Westinghouse Works films and information regarding them are available
through the Library of Congress’s online American Memory project.
1
0. Curtis usefully distinguishes between the two looks, suggesting a class-based
hierarchy produced by industrial films (90).
11. In the section “Creed” Gilbreth notes the problems caused by the different
­religions of the men and suggests grouping laborers according to belief and to
assign a worker to laying bricks for buildings “when the congregation to occupy
it coincides with his belief” (15).
12. In his essay on the YMCA’s rhetorical similarity to the pastor, Ronald Walter
Greene opens by referring to Gramsci’s equation of Fordism, Americanism, and
the YMCA. Discussing the YMCA, Gramsci described the organization’s mis-
sion as “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed,
with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker
and of man” (qtd. in Greene 205–6). In his discussion of the pastoral model on
display in the Y films, Greene, also identifies the twin values of the cinema as
both efficiency and transformability: “If movies could assemble a group then the
 Systems, Not Men  181
YMCA secretary (or other cultural authority) could guide the group to govern
the individual. … Thus, pastoral education transformed movie watching into a
domain and a technique of social management” (212).
13. Ben Singer lists the rationalization of labor as one of his defining ­characteristics
of modernity. Citing Max Weber and Marx, he notes that one of the most
­prevalent critiques of capitalism in modernity was “the central observation that
modernity had brought about an impoverishment of experience as rationale
systems compelled each worker to perform just a small, monotonous, personally
meaningless part of the production process” (Melodrama 23–24).
14. However, as Kracauer notes, because cinematic properties such as editing and
camera distance create the sense of wholeness, the experience remains a purely
aesthetic one—the wholeness only exists from the perspective of the camera’s
eye or the film spectator.
15. In “Before Documentary”, Gunning explains that through the “trajectory from
raw material to consumable product”, the process films enact “a basic n ­ arrative
of industrial capitalism” (17). See also Frank Kessler and Eef Masson’s ­“Layers
of Cheese: Generic Overlap in Early Non-Fiction Films on Production ­Processes”
for a more thorough discussion of process films.
1 6. Making Chewing Gum from Chicle is another film that represents a factory
process from beginning to end. In it, the frame typically cuts the working men
off at the neck, so that only their bodies, engaged in the manufacturing process,
appear on the screen. I encountered this film in the Harry Wright Collection
at the Library of Congress; the date and company are unknown. The visual
enactment of the reification of labor that occurs in this film is quite startling:
In addition to making men into things by metaphorically killing them with the
decapitating frame, the film also erases the usual marker of identity and p
­ ersonal
expression—the face.
1 7. Ford Motor Company. Where and How Fords Are Made. 1919. YouTube, 26 May
2009. Web. 30 Oct. 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf8d4NE8XPw.
18. In making this observation, I would argue that Corwin’s claim that in the
Gilbreth pictures “workers are pictured with little regard for their corporeal
integrity and are at times violently cropped by the picture frame” (152) can be
applied more broadly and might also have represented a kind of strategy within
industrial representation. Like Kracauer’s Tiller Girls, the organization of work-
ers in the process films simultaneously represents “[d]ivision of labour within
the workshop” and the “undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, that
are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him” (Karl Marx, Capital 219).
1 9. This is not to say that the cinematic medium shares an ideology with the ­Gilbreths
or Frederick Winslow Taylor. Indeed, as Steven J. Ross has demonstrated, several
labor movements in the 1910s exploited the cinema to further their causes and
combat antilabor films that supported the Open Shop movement, such as The
Molly McGuires, or, Labor Wars in the Coal Mines (1908) and Tim Mahoney,
The Scab (1911) (Ross 338). However, unlike antilabor films, or even progres-
sive but still problematic films like Griffith’s The Song of the Shirt (1908) and
The Lily of the Tenements (1911), the industrial films and motion studies, as
nonfiction films about factory processes, occupied a very different relationship
to the human bodies they represent. Whereas fictional films about the work-
ing class tended to lionize heroic individuals, nonfiction industrial films sub-
sumed workers’ bodies into the factory works or industrial processes the films
182  Systems, Not Men
represented (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The Gilbreths represented labor as a series
of white lines on a black background. And while the labor of the filmmaker
is perhaps effaced by the seemingly objective view of the movie camera, in its
representations of factories, the cinema produces an account of labor that is
anything but decontextualized. Rather, the industrial films represent a triumph
of industrial context over the human laborer, with the camera foregrounding the
assembly lines and factory machines in its diegetic representations of efficiency.
20. Scholars concerned with “reclaiming” Gilman as heroic feminist foremother
enact the anxious negotiations Jane Gallop describes in Around 1981: “In the
mid-seventies, the critic wanted to prove her poet was ‘good’ by male modern-
ist aesthetic standards; by the mid-eighties she wants to prove her poet ‘good’
by color-conscious feminist political standards” (233). Although feminist critics
acknowledge Gilman’s racism, they suggest it can be set aside as separate from
her feminism, as a reflection of the period, or as an unfortunate foible. But
making such reassurances requires underplaying Gilman’s racism and overem-
phasizing the racism of “the time”. Contrasting attempts to demonstrate that
Gilman is not like the Curate’s egg—completely spoiled by her bad parts—the
recent publication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries, edited
by Davis and Knight, shows a promising move toward scholarship that situates
Gilman and her eugenic writings within historical contexts.
21. While the cinema’s status as both public entertainment and educational tool
attracted feminist reformers in the late 1910s, the efficiency of the cinema as a
machine may have held an additional appeal for women concerned with “exces-
sive” female bodies. As Kay Sloan notes, Jane Addams revised her original
position on the cinema as “debased” and “primitive”, and in 1913 starred in a
melodrama called Votes for Women (11). And Gilman wrote, “For every reason
which justifies a public library of books we should also have public libraries of
motion pictures” (“Public” 145). Gilman in particular found in the machine-
age ideals of progress, organization, and conservation of energy, a model for
expressing her utopian hopes for improving women’s lives.
22. The novel contains a very brief suggestion of interracial marriage, which Gilman
presents as a false idea of progress and the wrong kind of planning. Describing
the common-sense American view of marriage, Vandyck explains, “We have a
well-founded theory that it is best to marry ‘in one’s class’, and certain well-
grounded suspicions of international marriages, which seem to persist in the
interests of social progress, rather than in those of the contracting parties” (120).
2 3. Shishin reads the family planning in Herland as the exertion of the “power of
will over … biological functions” (110). I would like to complicate this read-
ing slightly by arguing that Gilman sees the power of will as integrally related
to proper and efficient biological functioning. Fleissner takes this somewhat
further, arguing that in Herland Gilman all but eliminates “the potential gap
between individual desires and social demands” (96).
24. Carolyn de la Peña gives a more thorough explanation of the popularity of the-
orizing the body as an electrical entity. Of particular interest to Gilman scholars
may be the believed connection between electricity and neurasthenia (101).
25. Mark Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines usefully pinpoints the male natural-
ist’s (Frank Norris’s) anxieties over “thermodynamic” reproduction, which,
­Seltzer argues, is for Norris female and conservative, as opposed to male and
creative (27).
 Systems, Not Men  183
26. As Martha Banta explains, Gilded Age engineers had aims much broader than the
organization of the workplace; they saw themselves “bringing order, r­ ationality,
and efficiency out of the disorder, the irrationality and the w­ astefulness of the
times” (ix).
27. For more on this distinction, see Bernice Hausman’s “Sex before Gender:

­Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Evolutionary Paradigm”.
28. In The Body Electric De la Peña gives an account of the pervasiveness of battery
metaphors in discussions of human energy during this period (92, 93).
29. Given the popularity of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, it may be useful to think of
this project’s connection to the problem of neurasthenia. In Herland, Gilman
opposes the strained energies of American professional women to the healthy
exertions of the Herlanders: “College professors, teachers, writers—many women
showed similar intelligence but often wore a strained nervous look while these
were as calm as cows, for all their evident intellect” (24).
30. Alex Shishin confirms this reading in his essay “Gender and Industry in ­Herland:
Trees as a Means of Production and Metaphor”, in which he writes, “Gilman
stated explicitly in her 1904 book Human Work that nature intended sex to be
for reproduction only, and that once we understood it we would be a lot hap-
pier; she also said humanity progressed despite male sexual excesses” (109).
31. In American Nervousness, 1903, Tom Lutz argues that Gilman links neurasthe-
nia to wasteful disuse of female energy: “In outlining the relationship between
women, work, and ill health, Gilman validated her own decision to write, vali-
dated women’s intellectual labor in general, and helped, finally, to invalidate neur-
asthenia as a role option. She represented neurasthenia as poisonous, as a mark of
leisured affluence and what was poisonously wrong with such affluence” (231).
32. In his terrific article “They All Believe They Are Undiscovered Mary Pickfords”,
Richard Lindstrom identifies the tendency of the cinematic camera to draw out
inefficient performances from the workers it observed.
33. If the Gilbreth experiments aestheticized industrial processes, this transforma-
tion was not without a cost. One of the more menacing implications of the
motion studies was the photographs’ erasure of the laborer’s body: “These rig-
orously simplified forms are not only fully abstracted from the worker who
first produced the depicted motion but also wholly decontextualized from the
production line itself” (Corwin 144). The light paths that remain are “abstract
representations of labor in which the worker is wholly excised from the act of
work, leaving only a reified trace of labor in its most efficient form” (Corwin
146). Corwin suggests that these aestheticized motion paths represent the ulti-
mate triumph of the reification of labor in which, as Karl Marx explains in The
Poverty of Philosophy, “men are effaced before labor … the balance of the pen-
dulum has become the exact measure of the relative activity of two workers as
it is of the speed of two locomotives” (57). The Gilbreth films take the concept
of labor reification further. Their pictures present workers not as alienated from
labor so much as obstructions to a pure representation of labor.
34. In his discussions of the Augustinian theory of time, Ricoeur notes that “time
cannot be directly observed, that it is properly invisible”, and as a result the
phenomenology of time is necessarily aporetic in nature (Time and Narrative
84). The problems associated with representing efficiency echo this dilemma.
Epilogue
Scaling up to Modernism

One of this manuscript’s purposes has been to recover the silent cinema’s
literary relations before modernism. To do so, I have tracked the way
in which naturalism’s and the early cinema’s attempts to offer a “true”
account of the human relation to time resulted in modes of plotting and
representation that habitually subordinated individuality to ideas of
progress, whether through the distant views offered by factory films or
a narrative style that privileges plot over character. Outlining the devel-
opment of narratives that emphasize progress over people, I have located
the sometimes-surprising antihumanist impulses in the cinema of the early
1900s as well as in the culturally progressive projects it engaged. Indeed,
the opening of the twentieth century could easily be conceived as an era
of individualism shaped by thinkers such as Dewey and James and such
icons of personal responsibility and self-determination as Teddy Roosevelt
and Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick. Similarly, as the cinema develops, so too
did access to human individuality. For example, innovations such as the
close-up and the point-of-view shot seem to evidence the cinema’s status
as a human-focused art form.
However, as I have argued, such accounts of the early twentieth cen-
tury’s narrative arts demonstrate our bias toward viewing the world on a
human scale. This is precisely the bias combated by naturalist novels and the
films with which they interacted, both through their stories of transcendent
forces and their grandiose narrative styles. At the same time that the works
of famous naturalists may be said to mourn the way forces sweep individ-
uals along (or, in banal terms, the fact that time waits for no man), they
equally show that such mourning comes from examining time’s movement
using the wrong scale. Throughout this manuscript, I have traced a perversity
in the American silent cinema and the naturalist novel, demonstrating that
these narratives lament the rapidly changing modern world’s brute indiffer-
ence toward the individual while simultaneously gesturing to a larger sense
of progress that might set things right, if only inconvenient and ultimately
inconsequential individuals would get out of the way.
Identifying antisubjectivity as a response to temporal anxieties also clar-
ifies the prevalence of racial panic in naturalist novels, silent film narra-
tives, and treatises on the social uses of cinema. If the problem of one’s
 Epilogue  185
individual relationship to time may be solved by shifting to the scale of
racial destiny, then miscegenation appears as the one thing that might
threaten such narratives of progress.1 Put slightly different, the degree to
which London, G ­ riffith, Taylor, and Norris measure true progress by racial
or racial-national movement reveals the pervasiveness of Gilman’s fantasy
in “Bee Wise”, in which the most perfectly ordered society is a hive. Of
course, the health of the hive requires sameness and defense against inter-
lopers, which is one way of understanding Flora’s death in the Birth of
a Nation. Committing suicide rather than being raped by a black soldier
can be interpreted as a strategy for preventing the invasion of the hive by
harmful outsiders, a pattern that appears again and again in texts ranging
from The Birth of a Nation to the newspaper coverage of Jack Johnson
to Herland. Abhorring miscegenation, these and the other works discussed
here present a formal system for managing shocks to the hive. By shifting
the relevant agents to the level of force and shifting from human to machine
perspectives, naturalist novels and early-to-transitional-era films repeatedly
reorient perspectives to focus on the health of the hive, rather than the
well-being or desires of the individual.
I turn now to a final set of images that suggest how the ghost of natu-
ralism and its cinematic relations haunted the modernism that followed.
In  1927, Ford Motor Company hired photographer and Precisionist
painter Charles Sheeler. Ford Plant, River Rouge, Stamping Press (1927)
is exemplary of his commissioned photography for the company. Like
the industrial “celebration” films discussed in the previous chapter, the
machine’s center is also that of the image, allowing for maximal visual
exploration of the industrial context. In contrast, the man working at
the machine has his back to the photographer, relieving the photograph
of personality’s distraction and making possible any laborer’s identifica-
tion with the job, because this man is depicted as no laborer in particular.
Moreover, many of the Ford Plant, River Rouge images focus exclusively
on machinery or are taken from such distant views that any laborers in the
shot cannot be distinguished.
Six years prior, Sheeler had joined with photographer Paul Strand to
make a short film, one now considered a pioneer in American experimental
cinema and a classic of filmic modernism, Manhatta. Though not industrial
propaganda, the 1921 film doubtlessly played into Ford’s choice of Sheeler
as the photographer for the Dearborn, Michigan, factory.
Manhatta merges the cinematic and the literary, the nineteenth century
and the twentieth. The film opens on an image of Manhattan Island, with
skyscrapers appearing as a new mountain range, dividing water below from
heavens above. After fading to black, the static shot returns, this time with
superimposed lines from Walt Whitman’s poetry: “City of the world / (for
all races are here) / City of tall facades / of marble and iron/proud and
passionate city”. This shot becomes a motif, recurring throughout the film
as the filmmakers move from one city location to another, offering various
186 Epilogue
celebratory excerpts from Whitman’s poetry, including “Manahatta” and
other works from Leaves of Grass.
With his interest in celebrating the everyday, the bodily, and the banal,
Whitman may be understood, like Frank Norris, as straddling the line
between Realism and Romanticism. In the preface to Leaves of Grass,
Whitman calls for a new American poet, describing the writer’s body in
language that anticipates Howells’s obituary for Norris: “The American
poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them
a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents
arrive as contributions … he gives them reception for their sake and his
own sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit  … he incarnates its
geography and natural life and rivers and lakes” (713). Whitman’s appear-
ance in Manhatta thus brings this manuscript full circle: he is both the
poet of the people, and, like Norris, a giant machine capable of contain-
ing “contradictions” and “multitudes”. Also like Norris, Whitman’s out-
put might be described as less than fully efficient, and not only because
of his verbose style and long lines. Whitman’s persistent revision of the
same poems might seem like recursive wasted energy, but we might also
understand Whitman as performing a kind of tinkering with and perfect-
ing of a massive system—his constant adjustments and improvements not
unlike the work of Taylor or Gilbreth. One might go so far as to say that
Gilbreth’s choice of the bricklayer for his time motion experiments has a
rustic similarity to Whitman’s poetry.
It was perhaps Whitman’s sense of the poet as a system that Strand and
Sheeler identified when making their film. An adaptation of Whitman’s
poetry largely stripped of the human element, Manhatta emphasizes the
city’s diagonal and vertical lines, revealing human figures only in silhou-
ette or as a mass maneuvering through the chutes formed by the city grid.
Instead of a world in which one New Yorker traces his own path, the film’s
distant high-angle views show the way all paths down the sidewalk are part
of a larger plan. Most of the film’s focus is not on people, but instead on the
naturalized “High growths of iron” and “The building of great cities”—a
process that appears in the same passive grammatical phrasing of The Birth
of a Nation, The Octopus, and the factory films. Visually, the film expresses
this commitment to the process of building rather than the builders them-
selves in a sequence that quickly moves from a shot of men laboring with
pickaxes—very local and human work, not unlike that A Corner in Wheat
portrays—to images of massive cranes, as though condensing the history of
humanity’s progress from preindustrial, human-based labors to the more
efficient tools of twentieth-century industrial modernity. But despite the
brief historical narrative built into this short sequence, the film’s organiza-
tion is largely circular, ending by cutting from a moving image of sky and
water to rest on the iconic still shot once more. This circularity, paired with
the film’s blending of nineteenth-century poet and twentieth-century visual
technology and aesthetics, suggests that like the movement of the clouds and
 Epilogue  187
the water in the penultimate shot, the city’s growth and bustling industry are
part of a natural process.
In addition to bridging the machine and the natural, Whitman’s presence
in Manhatta allows the filmmakers to reconcile the individual and the racial,
albeit in a manner that suggests their somewhat different machine-age sen-
sibility. Serving as the predominant sign of difference, racial diversity was
cast in larger narratives of American progress as problematically inefficient;
thus, the film’s blend of Whitman’s Romantic imagination—positioning the
poet as large enough to contain all—and modernist style becomes a crucial
strategy for depicting Manhattan’s people. The film’s first invocation of the
poet, the line “City of the world (for all races are here)”, demonstrates both
the divergence and the overlap between Whitman’s approach to diversity
and that which is on display in Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta (and through-
out the other works in this book). While Whitman is concerned to repre-
sent the “negro that drives the dray of the stone-yard”, race is importantly
indecipherable in the film. An early shot of a ferryboat pulling into harbor
showcases teeming humanity flowing ashore, an image that both recalls
the Lumières’s Workers Leaving the Factory and anticipates the opening of
Chaplin’s Modern Times. Largely shot from above and behind the people,
the scene presents the “City of the World’s” denizens as waves of hats. As
in the River Rouge photographs, individuals and individual races cannot
be discerned. While Whitman was invested in massive scales, in Leaves of
Grass he balanced this grandiosity with particularizing detail; in contrast,
little can be discerned of Manhatta’s figures, so far below the camera do
they traverse the city streets.2 Much like the writings and films discussed
here, Manhatta responds to concerns with reconciling individual difference
and national progress by straddling romanticism and modernism: through
technological prostheses, romanticism and rationalization come to live side
by side in the early twentieth century. No longer antagonists, these two poles
become merged in a massive vision that “solves” man’s alienation from
nature and from his fellow man by zooming out so far that he blends with
the landscape.
Whether in Manhatta’s modernist images, or Taylor and Gilbreth’s didac-
tic utopian visions, efficiency at its extreme emerges as a mode of aesthetic
representation over and above its productive functionality. Moreover, it is at
this extreme that the propagandistic (as represented by Gilman) and the utili-
tarian (as represented by Taylor and the Gilbreths) achieve something close to
avant-garde status.3 For example, the geometric alleyways and ­piston-pumps
of the Westinghouse Works films may bring to mind later Absolutist exper-
iments such as Hans Richter’s Film ist Rhythmus: Rhythmus 21 (Film is
Rhythm, Rhythm 21), which rejected narrative cinema’s mimetic illusions,
offering no referent beyond their formal systems. And while the nonnar-
rative, antirepresentational impulse of such films or the Gilbreth studies
appears a far cry from Norris’s and Mrs. Sieppe’s complaints that the cin-
ema is a trick imitating the real, these films nonetheless share with the early
188 Epilogue
cinema the trick of replacing human figures with industrially produced
ones. Thus, while the strand of modernist cinema that includes films such
as Chaplin’s Modern Times registers the human costs of the era’s insistence
on efficiency, earlier industrial and educational films—and writers such as
Gilman who championed them—anticipate an aesthetic that runs through-
out a different strand of modernism, beating a path toward Vorticism,
Futurism, and Precisionism. When Gilman prognosticated about motion
pictures, she envisioned a possible future for “the moving fact” (“Public
Library” 145), an image of truth independent of the fallible human. This
fantasy culminates the aspirations traced throughout this manuscript: in
Norris’s naturalism of 1895, claiming narrative truth in the face of idiosyn-
cratic temporal views required the dismissal of individual human perspec-
tives; later, naturalism and narrative cinema’s experiments with historical
revisionism and social Darwinism required downplaying the importance of
individual human actions; finally, in Manhatta and the factory films of the
late teens, the human body disappears from the frame.
In closing, it is worth acknowledging that Manhatta’s impersonal mod-
ernism differs significantly from the modernism on display in the experi-
mental first-person narratives of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. It
is also worth considering what, if any, relation the progress without people
narratives discussed here have to do with more mainstream filmic and lit-
erary modernism. Novels in which the idiosyncratic narrating personalities
seem at least as significant as the events they recount insist upon the impor-
tance of individual perspective, and they register distaste for taking people
as a group. This distaste grew in the wake of WWI, the statistical and inhu-
man measuring of which appears in Dick Diver’s nightmare description of
Thiepval in Tender Is the Night: “the land here cost twenty lives a foot that
summer” (Fitzgerald 56); “See that little stream—we could walk to it in two
minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walk-
ing very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another
empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead
like a million bloody rugs” (56–57). Here, Fitzgerald encapsulates and cri-
tiques massive scalar fantasies, as the confused soldiers cannot see the whole
picture—one is either in the front or behind—and the progress of empires
trumps the lives of men who become a million bloody rugs.
But at the same time that characters such as Benjy and Quentin C ­ ompson’s
distinctive temporal perspectives may, as Bergson would suggest, emphasize
their free will, even modernist novels interested in subjectivity remain ­flavored
by accounts of personality descended from Taylorism—one in which the
personality develops through iterative practice. Remnants of such thought
appear, for example, in Nick Carraway’s description of Jay ­Gatsby—“If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was
something gorgeous about him” (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  2)—in the
habitual tendencies of Gertrude Stein’s women in Three Lives, and in Dos
Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, which renders its characters and historical figures
 Epilogue  189
into something akin to Kracauer’s “mass ornament”, invisible to the individ-
uals who compose its structure.
Personality as habitual action provides a through line from Taylor’s
1911 system to Dale Carnegie’s 1936 one, How to Win Friends and
­Influence People. It also characterizes film and literature’s ongoing theori-
zation of what makes a person. In the 1920s and 1930s, well after the end
of naturalism’s dominance, G. W. Allport and A. A. Roback established an
important new field of study in psychology, “personality science”. Allport
explained the field’s necessity in terms of individuality: “It attempts  …
to depict and account for the manifest individuality of mind” (vii). But
as popularized by Carnegie, personality science became a method for
retraining the irregularities of one’s character into a social version of the
one best way. The sinister effects of such training appear in the novels of
Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, as well as those of Anita Loos and Nathanael
West, in the figure of the actress—a convenient site for exploring the con-
scious disciplining of persona. For example, we see Fitzgerald’s interest
in the Hollywood Studio System’s regimentation of “picture personali-
ties” in the character Rosemary Hoyt: “the paint was scarcely dry on
the Arbuckle case. Her contract was contingent upon an obligation to
continue rigidly and unexceptionally as ‘Daddy’s Girl’” (Tender 110).
Through Rosemary, Fitzgerald reflects upon the way studio practices crys-
talized performers into personas and, with the reference to the Arbuckle
murder trial, the way in which even in the age of personality science and
picture personalities the excessiveness of individual personalities could
threaten the larger system.
With the emergence of the star, or picture personality, we see ­Hollywood
attempting a solution to naturalism’s problem with the individual: the star
is a kind of personality that isn’t one. Siegfried Kracauer puts this clearly
in his “Little Shopgirls” essay, in which he posits a dialectical relation-
ship between the screen star and the shop girls who filled movie houses:
“­Sensational film hits and life usually correspond to each other because
the Little Miss Typists model themselves after the examples they see on
the screen” (292). In Kracauer’s description, the star becomes a feedback
loop between film and life that is as effective as anything Taylor and the
Gilbreths could have devised. Thus, as naturalism gave way to modernism
and cinema eclipsed the novel as the twentieth century’s dominant narra-
tive form, the individual remains the cite of error and excess that narrative
systems sought to contain.

Notes
1. Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America documents this concern in the context of
the modernist literature that follows on naturalism’s heels.
2. Describing the film’s visual style and its engagement with Renaissance land-
scape painting, Jan-Christopher Horak argues that the film reveals a “‘romantic’
subtext involving the desire to reconcile man with nature” (“Modernist
190 Epilogue
Perspectives” 55), a subtext that plays out through a visual exploration
of man-made architecture as landscape, an impulse most clearly expressed
through the repeating shot that also closes the film, in which skyscrapers
become a new kind of mountain range, offering an urban sublime.
3. Horak makes a similar point in his examination of James Sibley Watson’s 1930s
films for Eastman Kodak and Bausch & Lomb, arguing that industrial films’
production outside the regimentation of Hollywood offers a suggestive parallel
with experimental film.
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Index
actualities 7–8, 15–17, 19, 29–30, 33,
42–50, 52, 55, 57–61, 152
American historiography 5, 62, 68,
102, 203
American Literary Naturalism 1–2,
14, 29, 57, 192–94, 196,
198–201, 203
Baby’s Breakfast 43–44, 46–47
bees 151, 153, 168, 172
Bee Wise 151–53, 158, 168, 172,
185, 195
Bergson, Henri 18, 23–24, 26–29, 35,
37, 39, 43, 47, 58, 113, 119, 188, 191
birth control 157, 167–68, 170
Birth of a Nation, The 20, 62–66, 69,
80, 84–86, 91–92, 94, 97–99, 104,
142, 145, 185–86, 193, 197–98, 201–3
boxers 106, 108, 112, 125–26, 128,
130, 133, 136–37, 140, 154
boxing films 137
boys 112–14, 136, 176
brute 19, 22, 25, 29, 37, 48, 54–58,
65, 68, 71, 76, 142, 194,
199, 203
To Build a Fire 1–8, 29, 40, 48, 54, 84,
122, 198
Burns-Johnson Fight 108–10, 125–28,
137, 198
causality 10, 30, 48–49, 52, 56,
88–89, 97
censorship 137, 195, 200
character 1–2, 9–11, 17–18, 31–33,
64–65, 67, 78, 82, 86, 91, 97–98,
108–12, 143–45, 171–73, 188–89;
character agency 77–78, 84, 92, 96;
characterization 9–10, 46, 63, 93,
111, 123, 152; individual 76–78,
96, 103, 145; minor 9, 82, 203;
naturalist 10, 33
Chicago Defender 125, 127, 129, 136,
138–41, 196, 198–99, 202
cinema 6–9, 15–19, 21–23, 43–44,
46, 57–61, 101–2, 104–5, 154–57,
179–82, 184, 187–89, 192–93,
199, 202–3
cinema of attractions 6, 13, 27, 43–44,
58–60, 196
Civil War 9, 62–64, 68, 71, 78, 84–85,
88–90, 93, 95, 104, 119, 138
Clansman, The 84–85, 99, 193, 198
Corner in Wheat, A 18, 20, 62,
65–66, 77, 79–84, 88–89, 92–93, 96,
100, 103
Crane, Stephen 15, 19, 67
crosscutting 9, 17, 20, 79, 84, 96–97
degeneration 25–26, 34–35, 54,
56, 201
Démolition d’un Mur 16, 52–53
details 28, 30–31, 34, 43–44, 47, 58, 60,
66, 70, 91–92, 162, 180; accuracy of
29–31, 35; historical 64, 89
difference, individual 9, 21, 187
Dixon, Thomas 85, 88, 98–99, 104,
147, 193
Dreiser, Theodore 12, 17, 19, 194,
200, 202
duration 23–26, 32, 36, 39, 46–47,
49, 84, 121
early cinema 1, 7–8, 13–15, 19, 43–44,
46, 60, 184, 192, 194–96, 202
editing 65–66, 80, 91, 93–94, 96,
165, 181
education 114, 168
efficiency 66–67, 119, 149, 152–53,
156–58, 161, 166, 168, 170, 172,
175, 177–78, 180, 182–83, 187–88;
industrial 155–56, 162, 177
efficient systems 153, 155
206 Index
Eisenstein, Sergei 22, 80, 103, 194, 203
empire 70, 84, 146, 188, 197
epic 18, 31, 51, 63, 65–66, 69,
76, 200
eugenics 22, 165–68
events 15–16, 19–20, 25–26, 44–46,
48–56, 58–60, 69–71, 75–76, 84–85,
90–91, 95–97, 110, 124–25,
133–34, 144–45
evolution 101–2, 105, 140, 146–47,
191–92
facsimiles 86–87, 90–91, 104; historical
84, 86–87, 90–91
factory 15–17, 20, 43, 47, 119,
149, 152, 162, 164, 179–80,
182, 185, 187
factory films 7, 20, 149, 152–54, 156,
158, 161–62, 167, 184, 186, 188
fight films 20, 132, 137–38, 202;
censored 140; Johnson fight films
110, 125, 137–38
film censorship 136–37
films; birth control 157; early 13, 18,
44, 60, 195–96; educational 152,
179, 188
Fitzgerald F. Scott 11, 188–89, 194
forces 2, 4–6, 8–10, 14, 19, 40, 65, 68,
72–78, 84, 92, 96, 100, 102–3, 141
fragment 5–7, 28, 30, 42, 51,
110, 115
freedom 10–11, 24, 36, 51, 53,
101, 150
free will 10–11, 23, 26, 51, 113,
124, 188
gender 17, 138, 140, 153–54,
157–58, 171, 176–77, 183,
192–93, 196–97, 201
Gilbreths 5, 152, 155–56, 158–59,
161–62, 164–65, 172, 177, 179,
181–82, 186–87, 189, 195
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 15, 19–20,
145, 150–53, 155–58, 161, 165–75,
178, 180, 182–83, 187–88, 193,
195–96, 201, 203
Griffith D.W. 1, 17, 20, 22, 62–66,
68–71, 77, 79–80, 82, 84–101,
103–4, 181, 185, 194–98, 200–203
Herland 19, 151, 153, 158, 165–74,
178, 182–83, 185, 195, 201
historical events 64, 70, 78, 85–86, 88,
91–93, 96–97, 101, 110
historical tableaux 85, 87
history 20–21, 57, 62–65, 68–70, 72,
75, 77, 84–92, 95, 97–102, 179–80,
192, 194, 199–200, 202–3
Howells, William Dean 10, 66–67, 196
Industrial Workers 162–64, 176, 191
inefficiency 6, 8, 20, 67, 152, 156,
162, 178
Intolerance 7, 20, 62, 97–98, 100
Jeffries, Jim 109, 126–28, 130–31,
133, 135, 141, 194
Jeffries-Johnson Fight 127,
130–31, 133
Johnson, Jack 20, 105–11, 114,
125–42, 144–45, 147–49, 185, 192,
194, 196–98, 200, 203
Johnson fight films, censoring
135, 138
labor 5, 71, 74, 82–83, 146, 149–50,
156–57, 162, 164–65, 170–71,
178–79, 181–83, 193; reification of
181, 183
literary naturalism 5, 13, 15, 21, 29,
66, 98
London, Jack 1–8, 10, 15, 19–20,
98–99, 105–12, 114–16, 118–21,
123–28, 130–31, 133–34, 142–48,
151, 153, 194–203
Lukács, Georg 31, 57, 60, 198
machines 6, 14, 16, 23–24, 27, 57, 59,
159, 164–65, 177, 182, 185, 187,
198, 201
management 2, 8–9, 151–52, 155, 159,
161, 167, 169, 171
Manhatta 20–21, 179, 185–88, 196
manifest destiny 68–69
Mann Act 20, 111, 136,
139–41, 198
McTeague 31, 36, 76, 199
miscegenation 134, 136, 140–42, 185,
193, 199
modernism 11, 15, 19, 22, 25, 178–79,
184–85, 187–89, 193, 199
modernity 6–7, 14, 16, 18–19, 21–22,
29, 31–32, 49–50, 56, 58–61, 104,
154, 181, 192–94, 202
modernity thesis 6, 21
motherhood 20, 58, 118, 134, 136,
139–40, 142, 147, 150, 158, 167–70,
173–74

motion pictures 105, 155, 157, 162,
175, 182, 188, 192, 195
Mussel Slough Tragedy 71–72, 75–76,
101, 191–92
Muybridge, Eadweard 24, 27, 33, 38,
42, 45, 199
NAACP (National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People),
88, 108, 199
narration 22, 26, 30, 36, 39–40, 49–50,
52, 71, 76–78, 80, 94, 131, 133,
192, 195; narrative style 21–22,
65, 77, 80, 86, 102, 184; narrative
techniques 2, 18, 20, 84
narrative films 15, 103
narrativity 44, 59, 61
narrator 4, 10, 31–33, 53–54, 59, 73,
75, 91, 151
natural force 5, 10, 49, 56, 72, 74, 92
naturalism 1–3, 7, 9–11, 13–15,
17–22, 30–31, 64–65, 68, 97–100,
102, 121, 184–85, 188–89,
192–93, 199–201
naturalist form 12–14, 80
naturalist historiography 62–80, 82,
84–104
naturalist narration 3–4, 15, 33–34,
46, 56, 65, 89, 96
naturalist style 13–14, 96–97
naturalist time 5–6, 8, 46
new criticism 13
new historicism 13–14, 21
Norris, Frank 1–3, 15, 18, 20, 23–24,
62, 64–65, 69, 71, 97, 99, 102–3,
191–92, 199–201, 203
novel 8–10, 18–19, 25–27, 30–31,
34–36, 38–41, 49, 56–57, 72–78,
84–85, 98–103, 116–17, 119–24,
142–45, 147–48; historical 33, 60,
62, 64, 68, 71–72, 84, 198
The Octopus 18, 20, 27, 31, 62,
64–69, 71–78, 80, 82, 84, 86,
92–93, 97, 99–101, 103–4
parallel editing 62, 77, 79, 84, 93,
96–98
personality 18, 98, 125, 142, 145, 166,
173, 175, 188–89, 191
personality science 189
perspectives 3–4, 6, 18, 20, 22, 26, 29,
39–40, 49–50, 68, 70, 77, 90–91,
95, 98
Index  207
photography 24, 28, 30, 59, 156, 158,
177, 183, 185, 198
picture personalities 189
plots 5, 7, 9, 19, 22, 40, 67, 101, 108–9,
145, 194, 201
productivity 193–94, 196–97
progress 9, 18–20, 22, 74, 77–78,
140,  143, 145, 163–64, 169,
171–74, 179, 182, 184–85, 188
prosthesis/prosthetic 7, 15, 21, 155,
167, 180, 187
race 20, 92–93, 95, 107–9, 111–12,
116, 118–20, 124–25, 131, 133–37,
142–44, 147–50, 165–72, 185–87,
192–94; race suicide 117, 134–35,
147; racial destiny 93–94, 109, 111,
116, 119, 121, 123, 131, 145, 185;
white 20, 95, 107, 111, 125, 141;
whiteness 92, 94, 111–12, 140, 168,
171, 202
racism 62, 107–8, 136, 165–66,
171, 182
realism 10–13, 21, 29, 33–34, 36, 43,
58, 60, 64–65, 100–101, 186, 191,
193, 200, 203
realist novels 9–10, 13, 22, 85
reformers, social 8, 149, 155–58,
164, 175
reproduction 63, 86, 102, 153, 168,
170–71, 183, 203
reversibility 17, 49, 52–53, 57,
119, 140
Roosevelt, Theodore 112–14, 120,
136, 146, 176, 201
scale 4, 10, 15, 20, 29, 69, 82, 97,
104, 108, 125, 151, 157, 184–85;
timescales 5, 7, 17, 95,
131, 146
Sea-Wolf, The 20, 105, 107, 111–12,
114–18, 120–22, 124–25, 130, 133,
142–45, 147, 191, 198–99
self-making 48, 111–12, 114–15, 118,
123–24
Simmel, Georg 6, 18, 59, 104, 202
Social Problem Film 157–58,
167, 202
spectators 22, 35, 37, 39, 44, 48, 59,
89, 91, 106, 133, 154, 159,
161, 196
street scenes 8, 30, 39, 43, 47–48, 96
system 1, 6, 9, 14, 34, 60, 96, 149–59,
161–83, 186, 189
208 Index
Taylor, Frederick Winslow 4–8, 18, 20,
92, 96, 152, 154–56, 167, 169, 174,
185–87, 189, 191, 202
technology 6, 21, 28, 56, 100, 153–54,
159, 180, 198, 202
tense 19, 89, 121–24, 146
time management 1–2, 7–9, 23, 29, 48
trick films 7, 15–17, 29, 35, 37, 43, 52,
187–88, 196
Trilling, Lionel 11–12, 202–3
truth 6, 10, 12, 15, 19, 28, 30, 32–33,
35, 64–65, 72, 91, 188
Turner, Frederick Jackson 68,
70–71, 203
utopia 7, 19–20, 145, 149, 151–54,
158–59, 161, 163, 171–72, 178, 180,
182, 187, 200
Vandover and the Brute 19, 25, 29,
37, 48, 55, 57, 65, 68, 71, 76, 194,
199, 203
vision 20, 22, 24, 37, 40, 57–59,
65, 68–70, 90, 98, 140, 158, 162,
178–79, 193
waste 4, 155–56, 158, 167, 173, 175,
178, 195
Westinghouse Works 160, 180, 187
Whitman, Walt 66, 186–87, 203
YMCA 18, 162–63, 177, 180
zoetrope 24, 28, 30, 39, 41, 48
Zola, Emile 22, 60, 69, 100, 203
zoopraxiscope 28, 30, 39,
41, 199