Pressured Identities explores the radical reconception of American individualism by major realist writers at the turn of the twentieth century. The individual as the source and standard of value lies at the core of America's liberal democratic ethos. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the figure of the autonomous individual no longer seemed tenable amid the overwhelming pressures of mass society—often represented as the ubiquitous urban crowd—that increasingly characterized national self-perception. Rather than advocating an outmoded definition of individuation by attempting futilely to resist the crowd, the authors upon whom this study focuses—Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton—offer a completely new vision of identity, by imagining that persons can be individuated, paradoxically, only by and through the crowd. They posit characters who transform anonymity into inimitability by embracing the very structures of mass society—tenements, consumerism, financial and literary markets—that would seem to deny individuation. Far from dissolving individuals into an indistinguishable mass, the crowd makes individuals of those who yield fully to its energies.; The dominant view of American realism as a narrative strategy of crowd management thus seems misplaced. Irrepressible crowds fill these texts, their potency necessitated by the newly imagined processes of identity formation. Narrative form emulates thematic content, as these writers exploit their crowd-like readership to secure for themselves an individual identity as author. While questions about individuation, crowd, and narrative are central to every text in this study, each author addresses them in very different terms. Separate chapters examine issues of privacy, visibility, and irony in Crane's Bowery sketches and The Monster; consumerism, desire, and narrator presence in Dreiser's Sister Carrie; speculation, autonomy, and narrative style in Norris's The Pit and literary criticism; publicity, celebrity, and authorship in Wharton's “Copy” and The Touchstone. Their radical strategies motivated by traditional impulses, these authors discover a way to affirm individuation within mass society that earlier nineteenth-century thought could not fathom and later twentieth-century rhetoric could not accommodate.
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