The pure products of America: Eugenics and narrative in the age of sterilization

Eugenics---the pursuit of bettering the human stock by encouraging reproduction of "fit" people and eliminating or curbing reproduction of the so-called "unfit"---swept the United States in the first third of the twentieth century, during what I have termed the Age of Sterilization, which stretched from 1907, when Indiana enacted the first compulsory sterilization statute, through the early 1940s, by which time states' enforcement of such laws had declined dramatically.; Not surprisingly, eugenics affected not only political debates and scientific inquiries but also all manner of fictional narrative. Combining cultural study with literary analysis, this dissertation argues that eugenics repeatedly found its way into American literature during the Age of Sterilization because of the emotional power of the rhetoric of heredity and propagation and the literary fodder to be found in the potential associations and dissociations between sexual reproduction and textual production.; In Chapter One, I explore eugenic family studies as a literary touchstone, taking Jean Webster's children's novel Dear Enemy (1916) and Arthur Reeve's popular detective story "The Eugenic Bride" (1914) as exemplary texts that explore the nuclear family in the light of early twentieth-century eugenic science. Chapter Two reads Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Arrowsmith (1925) and Robert Chambers' anti-suffrage satire The Gay Rebellion (1914) against the background of social engineering to examine the expansion of these eugenicist ideas about family into a national narrative, authorized by science, about Americans' right to breed---people and narratives---as manifest destiny.; In Chapter Three, I turn to the subject most often associated with eugenics---the exclusion of the "unfit"---by reading Jack London's "Told in the Drooling Ward" (1914) and Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932). Finally, recognizing that eugenics is a utopian pursuit, Chapter Four reads Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) and the Paramount musical comedy College Holiday (1936) for their emphasis on controlled reproduction, racial purity, and the process of creating an idealized world populated by eugenically perfect people.