Processes of elimination: Waste and American fiction at the turn of the twentieth century (Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair)

Arising within a rubbish-generating culture of consumption, amid anxieties over the nature of economic and social value, and within crises over national identity spawned by heightened immigration, a fin de siècle cultural complex surrounding questions of waste conditions naturalist narratives by Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. In these novels, waste (cropping up frequently in allusions, metaphors, and direct references) suggests a topsy-turvy world in which the moment of elimination serves paradoxically as cultural, economic, and social organizing principle. These narratives are variously invested in waste and wasting, critiquing the culture of consumption, while sometimes also enacting some of the wasting procedures against which they seem to take a stand. In all cases, a central role is played by pollution, which is mobilized as a means of forcing an end to sometimes relentless systems of use. This project joins the critical debate on American naturalism with a materialist emphasis, suggesting new ways of engaging with naturalism's keen interest in the world of consumable objects and consumable people.; Section one reads Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Wharton's House of Mirth within the context of the rise of disposable products and new habits of object disposal. As the exigencies of the object world penetrate into social relations, characters are caught up as objects between rival forms of use. The second section sees in Norris's McTeague and Moran of the Lady Letty a conjoined rumination on the complex relations between castoff objects and value itself. Norris implicitly argues that waste and wasting are not external to the structure of value but instead are its founding condition. Section three focuses on Sinclair's The Jungle within the context of digestive health reform writing and anti-immigration discourse. For Sinclair, capitalist machinery has grotesquely become a body that digests and excretes workers, yet the novel also demonstrates a strong tendency toward the “elimination” of women and African Americans from the body politic. Sinclair's less-than-inclusive socialism nests within the operation of a larger discourse of national belonging that sees the nation as a digesting body that must, as Josiah Strong put it, “digest or die.”...