LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS Edited by William E.Cain Professor of English Wellesley College A ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor WORD OF MOUTH Food and Fiction after Freud Susanne Skubal THE WASTE FIX Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to the Sopranos William G.Little WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Novels of Kennedy, Carruthers, and Tucker, 1830–1845 John L.Hare POETIC GESTURE Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language Kristine S.Santilli BORDER MODERNISM Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism Christopher Schedler THE MERCHANT OF MODERNISM The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature, 1864–1939 Gary Martin Levine THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVELIST Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market Bradley Deane Our OF TOUCH Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker Maureen F.Curtin FIGURES OF FINANCE CAPITALISM Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Borislav Knezevic BALANCING THE BOOKS Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economies of Slavery Erik Dussere BEYOND THE SOUND BARRIER The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction Kristin K.Henson SEGREGATED MISCEGENATION On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions Carlos Hiraldo DEATH, MEN, AND MODERNISM Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf Ariela Freedman WRITING THE CITY Urban Visions and Literary Modernism Desmond Harding THE SELF IN THE CELL Narrating the Victorian Prisoner Sean Grass REGENERATING THE NOVEL Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair, and Lawrence James J.Miracky SATIRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie John Clement Ball THROUGH THE NEGATIVE The Photographic Image and the Written Word in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Megan Williams LOVE AMERICAN STYLE Divorce and the American Novel, 1881–1976 Kimberly Freeman FEMINIST UTOPIAN NOVELS OF THE 1970s Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant Tatiana Teslenko INTIMATE AND AUTHENTIC ECONOMIES The American Self-Made Man from Douglass to Chaplin Tom Nissley Routledge New York & London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street NewYork, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2003 by Taylor and Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nissley, Tom. Intimate and authentic economies: the American self-made man from Douglass to Chaplin/ by Tom Nissley. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96869-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Success in literature. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) in literature. 4. Self-culture in literature. 5. Self in literature. 6. Men in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS169.S843N57 2003 810.9'.353–dc21 2003014363 ISBN 0-203-50457-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-57996-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-96869-0 (Print Edition) This work is dedicated to my parents and to Laura, and to Lisa Weil, who often convinced me of the unsettling possibility that ideas matter. Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION Alienable, Intimate, Authentic 3 CHAPTER 1Free Labor and Intimate Capital: The Postwar Autobiographies of 22 Douglass, Brown, and Washington CHAPTER 2The Nature Theater of Americana: Horatio Alger’s Earnest 64 Commodities CHAPTER 3 Racial Credit, White Money, and the Novel of Assimilative Lament 97 CHAPTER 4The Reality Effect in the Film Machine: The Authentic Performances 126 of the Silent Comedies Notes 157 Bibliography 165 Index 172 List of Illustrations Plate 1. The opening spread of the serialization of “The Autobiography of an 100–101 American Jew” in McClure’s Magazine. MSCUA, University of Washington Libraries, negative no. UW 22278z Plate 2. Charlie finds the camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export 143 Company Establishment Plate 3. Charlie shares the screen, but not the camera, with his cellmate. Modern 144 Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment Plate 4. The gamin’s father can’t quite raise his gaze to the sightline of the 147 camera. Modern Times copyright © Roy Export Company Establishment