'Each man was a perfect cog; each held a flame within': Manhood in London, Lewis, Wharton, and the Curtis magazines

This dissertation examines juxtapositions between magazine fiction and the advertisements and editorial that form its contexts, tracing conflicted and shifting representations of manhood in American culture during the first several decades of the twentieth century. Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton published short fiction in the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal during the years of these magazines' great cultural prominence and during the period when mass-market magazines and modern advertising rose, hand in hand, in the U.S. These authors' fiction, in complex and often antagonistic relation to its magazine contexts, traces the cultural trajectory of a manhood increasingly and paradoxically constructed through the consumer's vicarious relationship to the world. In this trajectory, masculine experience became marketed in neat and standardized packages, yet the nineteenth-century ideal of an individual, internally-generated power that leaves a distinctive mark on the world was never abandoned. London offers a lens for viewing American manhood emerging from the Victorian period into the Strenuous Age, when men were faced with the threat of mechanical and bureaucratic work; Lewis for viewing the Great War's promise of escape and renewed masculinity, a promise diminished with the war's end and an invigorated national consumer culture; and Wharton for examining how popular notions of manhood came problematically to be based on, not opposed to, consumption.; The central figure that emerges through contextual readings of the magazine fiction is that of a man required to become a standardized part in the great machine of production and consumption (in short, the market), yet torn between taking this role of a "cog" and maintaining a natural, originary, and powerful self. In representing such divided manhood, the fiction and the magazines depicted men of color and working-class men with ambivalence, often objectifying, commodifying, or mechanizing them to bolster white, middle-class men's sense of mastery, yet sometimes projecting onto them an unspoiled and enviable virility. White, middle-class manhood was constructed not only in opposition to various "others," but also through ambivalent appropriation of their qualities.