Creative constriction: The use of the American short story at the turn of the twentieth century.

摘要

This dissertation argues that authors use the specific aspects of the short story genre to enact formal and social innovations. As short story theory has developed, the problem of definition has continued to pervade it, creating what Susan Lohafer calls an "aristocracy of genres" wherein the novel reigns supreme. However, as Wai Chee Dimmock notes, genres only exist in the "plural." To move away from this aristocracy but retain the usefulness of a comparative study, I ask what the short form can do. My dissertation examines the ways in which authors treat the formal features of the short story to manipulate reader expectations and narrative progression, and I draw on novelistic examples which highlight generic differences. The short form has historically been guided by a sense of formal rigidity, exemplified by writers like O. Henry, who enjoyed mass popularity for formulaic plotlines and trick endings. Aspects such as episodic storylines, constricted settings, and stereotyped characterization have come to define the form, even as scholars often view these formal features as liabilities. However, other authors writing at the same time as O. Henry undermined the expectation of formulaic or episodic elements; they incorporated ambiguity and modernist narrative styles or tested the limits of the constriction that characterized the short form. In this project, I turn to American authors, Henry James, Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, all of whom enacted formal manipulations of the novel and the short story at the turn of the twentieth century. James' "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903), Wharton's "The Muse's Tragedy" (1899), and Chopin's "At the 'Cadian Ball" (1892) and its sequel "The Storm" (1898) all retain the constricted focus of a single marriage plot, but each author uses it to craft a multiplicity of progressions, endings, or identities. James experiments with how a refusal of action can become the only action in the tale; Wharton uses multiple, unreliable narrations to simultaneously create a sense of bounded-ness and to defy narrative closure; and Chopin manipulates the expectations of a sequel by undoing the work of the preceding story and concluding ambiguously. Examining these authors' use of the short story not only reveals how the genre can be used for itself, but also exemplifies its malleability.