Songs of desire and the self: Opera in the work of Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein

During the years immediately preceding and following the turn of the nineteenth century, authors of literature began to explore opera and its relationship to formations of selfhood. Authors such as Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, each of whom approached culture with an understanding of its underpinnings and what it means for identity constructions to clash with cultural norms, used opera and the public space of the opera house to explore encounters with "other" desires. Their own cultural situations inspired them to create characters who, because of operatic influences, come into contact with constructions of desire unhinged from its ascribed gender, classed, and sexual identities.; After the introductory chapter, Chapter Two examines Walt Whitman's obsession with opera and how it influenced his notions of democratic space and desire in America. Drawing on Whitman's journalistic texts, which include copious references to opera, and his major works of poetry, most of which include references to opera or exhibit operatic characteristics, the chapter employs theories of desire, identity, performativity, and opera to explore Whitman's notions of desire and identity in American culture.; Henry James uses opera less overtly than Whitman, and Chapter Three looks at how James uses operatic scenes and plots in his literature to expose upper-class social codes that inhibit and regulate desire and identity. Chapter Four looks at how Willa Cather focuses her attention on the opera diva, whom she depicts as the empowered woman that exposes rigid, arbitrary, masculinist conceptions of desire and identity. The Epilogue discusses how Gertrude Stein also saw opera as a means to reexamine rigid ascriptions of identity. She wrote Four Saints in Three Acts with Virgil Thomson in a conscious attempt to subvert language and to disrupt notions of normative desire and identity.; Each author in this project uses opera to her/his own ends, and in doing so each author signals her/his concerns regarding an American culture whose notions of desire and identity were becoming increasingly constrictive.