In her field-changing first book, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, Jennifer L. Fleissner placed female identity at the center of the most masculine of genres: American naturalism. Women, Compulsion, Modernity made the stunning argument that the trajectory of female characters in naturalist novels is not one of decline—the term critics typically use to characterize naturalist plots—but stasis, “ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion” (9). Fleissner pointed to Carrie in her rocking chair in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; the heroine of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” going round and round her room; Edna Pontellier going “on and on and on” into the water at the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening; the compulsive repetitions of Trina in Frank Norris's McTeague; Lily Bart's vacillations in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth; Melanctha's repetitions in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives. In a stroke, naturalist determinism became...
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STUART BURROWS is associate professor of English at Brown University, where he teaches classes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction and poetry, the history of photography, film, and literary theory. He is the author of two books: A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography (2008) and Henry James and the Promise of Fiction (2023). Burrows's essays have appeared in a range of edited collections and journals such as American Literary History, boundary 2, J19, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel, and Romantic Circles. His current book project is “The Miracle of Cinema,” a study of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Agnes Varda.
Stuart Burrows; The Will to Power. Novel 1 November 2024; 57 (3): 427–430. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-11403660
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