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by Christopher Gair The conclusion of Jack London's novel, Burning Daylight (1910), manifests a generic shift from naturalism to Howellsian Realism that results in the establishment of the family as a unit occupying a privileged space beyond the reach of the capitalist marketplace. By moving to a near self-sufficient, Jeffersonian rural idyll, the protagonists, Elam and Dede Harnish gain a degree of moral agency impossible in the determined worlds of the city--where much of the novel is set--and of naturalist fiction. This transformation is problematic for various reasons, the most important of which are: first, that the Harnishes' escape from the market requires money accrued in that market and salvaged from Elam's self-generated financial ruin by the legal transferance of the smallholding to Dede's name. Second, the move depends upon a retreat into history, and into the economic structure of the nation at least fifty years previous to the novel's setting. Thus, the concluding chapters to Burning Daylight display a tension between descriptions of the Harnishes' moral agency and financial independence, and of the lives of the rural poor, determined by factors such as war and the extortionate freight rates levied by the railroad. In The Valley of the Moon (1913)[1], which in many ways retraces the themes of Burning Daylight, the shift from urban to rural is rewritten in a manner that tackles both these problems. Unlike Elam and Dede, the working class protagonists, Saxon and Billy Roberts have no assets in the city, and leave Oakland on foot, with their few possessions strapped to their backs. Therefore, their success in establishing a new life in the same countryside outside Glen Ellen as that represented in Burning Daylight, depends on their ability to survive in the competitive world, without the head start of an unmortgaged property. In addition, the couple's picaresque journey through multi-racial California recognizes and describes the economic transformations that revolutionized farming after the Civil War. During their travels, Saxon and Billy learn that there is no more viable government land available to settlers and become experts in the literature of the "new" farming. Despite the affinity they feel for their pioneering ancestors, they are forced to acknowledge the differences in their own situation, as they symbolically retrace the steps both of their parents and of their Anglo-Saxon progenitors. The novel thus contains an anxiety about race "purity" and the decline of the "original" settlers in California, that the discovery of the Valley of the Moon--ironically, but importantly, the name given to the land by the displaced Native Americans, the true original settlers--seeks to alleviate. In The Valley of the Moon, then, the journey undertaken by the two protagonists can be viewed as a way of coming to terms with a history largely in the conclusion to Burning Daylight. In this essay, I wish to pursue three related strands arising from this introduction. I will commence by offering a brief explanation for London's repeated use f the motif of urban to rural movement, in order to investigate the degree to which his new solutions in The Valley of the Moon answer the problematic relationship of genre and history. At this point, I will adopt and challenge Walter Benn Michaels' essay "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity" (1992), to fuel my own investigation into London's treatment of race anxiety in the face of the Progressive "Meeting Pot." My account will revolve around the tensions between two kinds of storytelling, in this case the conflicting generic structures of naturalism and sentimental fiction. To develop this approach, I will adapt Winfried Fluck's recent reappraisal of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which he analyzes the cultural functions of the sentimental narrative, in order to question how anxieties about the distance between social and moral reference points--in particular, in The Valley of the Moon, the challenge to the protagonists' faith in Anglo-Saxon supremacy--are fictionally resolved. Finally, I will argue that the apparent triumph of the sentimental, domestic (female) voice in the novel, represents an abandonment of the socialist tendencies in London's earlier fictions, and an embrace of the middle class culture rejected in Martin Eden (1909). Although, of course, the sentimental narrative, advocating family values, is as much a political ideology as any other, I will suggest that this is disguised by its constant pairing with the "natural," whether in biological or environmental terms. The resulting investigation of the "natural," especially with regards to the representation of Saxon Brown Roberts as homemaker and potential mother, will finally identify the degree to which she embodies, rather than opposes what Mark Seltzer calls the "circulating medium of capital itself."(2) I During the crisis which confronts Saxon Roberts when her husband, Billy, is jailed for assaulting their lodger, she has repeated periods of mental blackout, as well as "a strange feeling of loss of self, of being a stranger to herself." The narrator attributes these symptoms to the beginning of an illness that she did not know as illness. All she knew was that she felt queer. It was not fever. It was not cold. Her bodily health was as it should be, and, when she thought about it, she put her condition down to nerves--nerves, according to her ideas and the ideas of her class, being unconnected with disease. (p. 246) This "nervous" condition prompts a questioning of religious belief, in which Saxon concludes that there is no God, no immortality, and that "the universe was unmoral and without concern for men." Blaming the "man-made world" of class conflict and poverty--that is, the conditions created by a capitalist system of production--for the madness and horror which have crushed her domestic economy and induced her miscarriage, Saxon abandons the notion that existence is "ordained" by God. The effect is that looking "thus at life, shorn of its superrational sanctions, Saxon floundered into the morass of pessimism" (pp.254-55). the benevolent determinism of God is replaced by the pessimistic determinism of the market economy, in a move which removes any link between action and reward. In order to escape this despair, she does not return to a faith in a discredited God, but instead decides to "work for . . . happiness" in life, in exchange for an acceptance of an eternal "black grave" (p. 256). Saxon's "illness" and her proposed "cure" both embody familiar early twentieth-century ideology. Jackson Lears charts the "shift from a Protestant ethic of salvation through self-denial toward a therapeutic ethos stressing self-realization in this world" and sees the transformation as a "modern historical development, shaped by the turmoil of the turn of the century."(3) Within the interdependencies of urban market life, it was increasingly hard to sustain the illusion of autonomous selfhood, and, in The Valley of the Moon, Saxon's loss of faith, baby, money, and (temporarily) memory and husband--that is, the constituents of her "identity" --all depend on decisions taken by leaders of labor and capital a long way from the individual's control. As a result of her rejection of religious belief, Saxon is unable to anchor herself to a particular 3 view of reality, and drifts into a condition she calls "nerves," and which Lears classifies as "normlessness, or anomie."(4) In this, she occupies a similar position t that of the eponymous protagonist of Martin Eden, the more so since Saxon also loses her class affinities, regarding her working class neighbors as "stupid," but distancing herself from the epithet. Unlike Eden (who commits suicide before he can begin his planned new life in the South Seas), Saxon does find "self-realization in this world," and, as Lears suggests, this therapeutic rejuvenation involves a flight to "nature," a "nostalgia for the vigorous health allegedly enjoyed by farmers," and, most importantly, the belief that in a secular universe the process of self-realization is, in itself, "the largest of human existence."(5) Thus, not only do Saxon and Billy find a "natural" valley, that they instantly recognize as "our place" (p. 485), but they also recover the health that was threatened by violence and disease in the city. Most importantly, they understand that the discovery of the Valley of the Moon allows them to complete the self-realization commenced when they quit the city. Here, they can "work like hell" (p. 487) to fulfill the potential of both self and land. It is no surprise, then, that the novel closes in the same manner as Burning Daylight, with the pregnancy of the female protagonist, and with the couple surveying a fertile natural world, in this case, "a doe and spotted fawn [looking] down upon them from a tiny open space between the trees" (p. 530). Self-realization depends, however, on finding a master narrative to replace the discredited faith in God and class allegiances. Thus, Saxon and Billy turn to their pioneering, Anglo-Saxon ancestors, in order to discover "themselves," in a movement in which, paradoxically, the self remains decentered. Their initial attraction to one another is based on their both being "~old American stock'" (p. 23), and the book seeks a solution to the problematic question of "Americanness" in an increasingly multi-racial society. The dilemma at the heart of the novel revolves around the separation of self from race, which implicitly results in separation of self from self. As Anglo-Saxons, the Robertses believe that they must shape their own destinies--what Saxon calls "self-sufficingness" (p. 178)--yet as urban poor, they are the mercy of forces beyond their control. As long as this is so, Saxon and Billy are not true Anglo-Saxons (what they consider "real" Americans) and are therefore not themselves. The move to the country is an attempt to close this gap. Before taking a more detailed look at this rather complex question of just what constitutes an "American" according to the logic of London's narrator and protagonists, I will briefly glance at what, for them, is not American. Here, London starts with a seemingly hegemonic sketch of the healthy improvements in constitution when first or second generation Irish Americans are compared with their parents. At the brick layers' picnic, where Saxon and Billy are introduced, the narrator points out: It was too early for the crowd, but bricklayers and their families, laden with huge lunch-baskets and armfuls of babies, were already going in--a healthy, husky race of workmen, well-paid and robustly fed. And with them, here and there, undisguised by their decent American clothing, smaller in bulk and stature, weazened not alone by age but by the pinch of lean years and early hardship, were grandfathers and mothers who had patently first seen the light of day on old Irish soil. Their faces showed content and pride as they implied along with this lusty progeny of theirs that had fed on better food. (p. 10) This description, which shares the parental pride of the old folk it represents, portrays an America of abundance, into which immigrants are easily assimilated. The process appears straightforward, and American identity seems t come with being born inside the national boundaries, and thus being untainted by the trace of Irish soil. The older generations cannot hope to become American, since they remain "undisguised" by their adopted clothes and their proximity (biological and geographical) to their children. All that they are permitted is a kind of associate citizenship, made possible since the nation provides wealth enough for workers to support extended families. It quickly becomes clear, however, that for Saxon and Billy, as well as for the narrator, there is a gap between legal citizenship and "true" Americanness which cannot be bridged. After telling Billy about the Saxons, she explains that "We're Saxons . . . all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such" (pp. 21-22). As they move through California, on their quest for the Valley of the Moon, observing the vast farms and fortunes of Portuguese, Dalmatians, and Asiatics, each race is excluded from "true" integration not because of what they do, but because of what they are not--Anglo Saxon.(6) Indeed, it is repeatedly stressed that the ethnic groups have succeeded because they share the Puritan settlers' work ethic, whereas the descendants of the pioneers have lost it. But even here, the assimilation is rejected by the Robertses, who become increasingly interested in leisure time and aesthetic pleasures as pursued by the affluent white communities they encounter. For them, the Ben Franklinism which will reappear with Jay Gatsby (another immigrant son denied access to the American aristocracy), is either an anachronism or a device manipulated to increase production on the shop floor without the accompanying gains for the individual worker. As quickly as other groups succeed in corresponding to historical definitions of "American," the issue of nationality and culture is re-invented in terms of the search for self-realization outlined earlier. Clearly, it is impossible for "new" settlers to become "real Americans," as this phrase is understood by Saxon, since they lack the genetic birthright. Nevertheless, the process of self-realization implies that to be born a Saxon--even to be named "Saxon" --does not confer an automatic right to membership of the Anglo-Saxon race. Instead, it is only the first half of a doubling process in which birth and action must be united. I will now examine the ways in which this process is enacted in The Valley of the Moon, before looking more closely at the underlying reasons for the symbolic fusion of birth and behavior. II In his comparison of Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898) with Willa Cather's A Lost Lady (1923) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1926), Walter Benn Michaels identifies in Cather a repudiation of the political nationalism of the Progressives. Thus, "Americanism would now be understood as something more than and different from the American citizenship that so many aliens had so easily achieved." It should be clear from my brief description of "Americanness" above, that London was repudiating this political nationalism a decade earlier. Curiously, however, Michaels claims that it is true that the major writers of the Progressive period--Dreiser, Wharton London--were comparatively indifferent to the question of American national identity . . . It was as if, during the period when industrial America was devoted to assimilating and "Americanizing" its immigrants as quickly and thoroughly as possible, only those confronted with what seemed to them the unassimilable "Negro" were compelled to produce an account of the constitutive boundaries of the American.(7) Since my focus here is on London, I will not enter into a discussion of Dreiser and Wharton, though I believe that Michaels is over-generalizing, and that he circumnavigates the extent to which Progressive era novelists were concerned with national identity through the non-specificity of the phrase "comparatively indifferent." By positing an homologous culture, Michaels refuses to sanction the possibility of London (or Dreiser, or Wharton) producing an account of the "constitutive boundaries of the American," simply because this would oppose the Progressive ethos. Michaels' claims are most easily (and productively) refuted via an application of his own ideas to The Valley of the Moon. In his essay, Michaels charts the shift by which if identification with the Indian could function at the turn of the century as a refusal of American identity [in Red Rock], it would come to function by the early 1920s as an assertion of American identity . . . The Indian-identified "aristocratic" family [the Forresters in A Lost Lady] . . . provides the technology enabling an Americanism that will go beyond the merely national American citizenship offered by the state. But to provide this technology the family . . . must in particular cease to be the site of a certain indifference to racial difference (the family "black and white") and must be made instead into the unequivocal source of racial difference.(8) Thus, in A Lost Lady, Cather describes Captain Forrester's "lonely defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians." Michaels points out that in one way, this association is "exceptionally misleading," since the pioneers and railroad men were the cause of the Indians' destruction. However, he claims that being an Indian never pre-empted killing other Indians and argues that "the fact that the pioneers are now themselves a vanishing race only confirms the identification." Blinded by the headlights of modernity, the pioneers look back to the prenational, pre-corporate--that is, pre-Civil War--America of a now valorized Indian. In this way, they are able to recover their own difference from and superiority to mere American citizens.(9) The ease with which Michaels' reading of Cather can be mapped onto The Valley of the Moon demonstrates the historical inaccuracy of his argument. First, both Billy's and Saxon's ancestors have lived in America "hundreds of years" and their parents all crossed the plains by wagon-train (pp. 21-22). Both their fathers returned to the East to fight in the Civil War, proving their credentials as prenational occupants of the land, and as founding fathers of an "undivided" country and of the State of California (granted statehood in 1850). In addition, their type are repeatedly seen as a vanishing race and, almost obsessively, as Indians. Saxon's father is described as being: "wild as a Comanche . . . his long hair flyin', straight as an Indian . . . just as he cut a swath through the Johnny Rebs in Civil War days, chargin' with his men all the way through and back again, an' yellin' like a wild Indian for more" (p. 295). This association with perfect health and aggressive vitality is equated with his failure to prosper: If "a weak heart, or . . . kidney disease, or . . . rheumatism" had forced him to settle down and keep his Market Street lots, his kind would have more chance of survival in the emerging urban marketplace of post-Civil War America (pp. 294-95). Settling down, however, would mean renouncing the right to call oneself a "pioneer" and would entail becoming a "citizen." The pioneer spirit is doomed to perish because of its supposed similarity to that of the original Native Americans. In addition, it is doomed because of the corporate, anti-individualistic nature of urban post-War America in which the perceived self-determination of the pioneer is replaced by the deterministic laws of the market. As a result of this inability to shape their own lives, and of the mass immigration that was also a product of the economic transformation of the nation, Billy, Saxon, and their friends Bert and Mary adopt Bert's moniker the "last of the Mohegans," directly linking their own fate to that of the vanished Indians. At Billy and Saxon's wedding supper, Bert tells Billy that he is "a Mohegan with a scalplock. An' you got a squaw that is some squaw, take it from me. Minnehaha, here's to you--to the two of you--an' to the papooses, too, gosh-dang them!'" (p. 118). This wedding toast turns increasingly sour, with Bert's death in a fight with scabs and police (his final words repeat his "last of the Mohegans" refrain), with the death of Saxon's premature baby, and with Mary's fall into prostitution (pp. 191, 272). The nostalgia for a dying race becomes most pronounced when Saxon and Billy travel through the "foreign land" or the river country of Northern California: The workers of the soil teemed by thousands, yet Saxon and Billy knew what it was to go a whole day without finding any one who spoke English. They encountered--sometimes in whole villages--Chinese, Japanese, Italians, Slavs, almost every nationality save American . . . Armenians, Slavs, almost every nationality save American ... And Saxon, looking at [Billy's] moody face, was suddenly reminded of a lithograph she had seen in her childhood. It was of a Plains Indian, in paint and feathers, astride his horse and gazing with wondering eye at a railroad train rushing along a fresh-made track. The Indian had passed, she remembered, before the tide of new life that brought the railroad. And were Billy and his kind doomed to pass, she pondered, before this new tide of life, amazingly industrious, that was flooding in from Asia and Europe? (pp. 437-38) The equation of a "foreign land" with foreign peoples, all of whom have arrived well after the Civil War makes the Indian analogy particular apposite for Billy and Saxon. Like the Indian represented in the lithograph, they feel overrun by the sheer volume of new life, and like the first "Native Americans," they are unable to recognize "their own" land, in which all the familiar landmarks have been replaced. Unlike the Indian, however, the Roberts family do eventually find a place to settle, apparently unthreatened by newcomers. Michaels' contention that the family has become a "source of racial difference" is confirmed by the novel's title: it is only in the Valley of the Moon, the translation of the Indian name "Sonoma," and a place so far uncolonized by "foreigners" that the "true" Americanness of the family unit can be established. It may well be argued here that the original British settlers of California were never under real threat of being swamped by immigrants in the early twentieth century, and that, anyway, urban development and most factors of production were in the hands of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. However, as I have briefly intimated earlier, being Anglo-Saxon--and hence, American--in The Valley of the Moon requires more than the accident of birth. If immigrants are precluded from full assimilation in perpetuity, this does not guarantee that the descendants of the pioneers are automatically "Americans." According to the logic of the novel, to be an Anglo-Saxon requires the fusion of birth and action. Therefore, when, for example, Mary becomes a prostitute, she rejects her cultural identity, and turns herself into the embodiment of capital in an economy which denies self-realization. Instead of the possibility of finding herself--the project undertaken by Saxon--Mary exchanges herself as a commercial object that parodies the self-referential quest for physical and psychic vitality
Saxon looked at her old friend curiously, with a swift glance that sketched all the tragedy. Mary was thinner, though there was more color in her cheeks--color of which Saxon had her doubts. Mary's bright eyes were handsomer, larger--to large, too feverish bright, too restless. She was well dressed--too well dressed; and she was suffering from nerves. She turner her head apprehensively to glance into the darkness behind her. (p. 272) Mary represents the excesses of the culture of consumption and is, indeed, consumed by that culture. Unlike Saxon, she is unable to unite birth and behavior and therefore foregoes the right to a "self." Later in his essay, Michaels discovers the same doubling process in Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy (1929) as that undertaken by Saxon at work. Reiterating the notion that cultural identity--here, being a Navajo--involves birth and behavior, and therefore an element of choice, Michaels stresses that Slim Girl's learning to weave, to ride, and to sleep out under the stars are represented by the text as her attempt to exercise a "right" granted her by birth but requiring at the same time that she lay claim to it. Laughing Boy enacts, in other words, the project of becoming Navajo, a project made possible only by the fact that there's a sense in which Slim Girl isn't a Navajo and made fulfillable only by the fact that there's a sense in which she is.(10) Clearly, this passage also illustrates the analogous attempts made by Saxon to live up to her name and birthright. In order to truly "be herself," Saxon must lay claim to her heritage. Thus, she commences by "reconstructing in her vision that folk-migration of her people across the plains" (p. 178), and uses this vision to allegorize the capital/labor troubles in Oakland as being the "Plains" that she and Billy must cross to find their "pleasant valley land" (p. 297). Simple allegory is not enough, however, and the couple must actually recreate their ancestors' journey in order to find themselves. This necessitates camping, learning the sounds of the non-human world, ploughing and hunting (Billy) and milking (Saxon), purchasing a wagon and horses, and finally locating their Valley of the Moon. The pair even move inland, but are oppressed by the heat and head "west across the wild mountains," exclaiming "~west is best'" in echo of their forbears. In order to find their cultural identity and become themselves, Saxon and Billy must do "authentic" American things. It is therefore the discrepancy between their actual past and their race's past that is "the enabling condition for the appearance of cultural identity as a project, the project of lining up [their] practices with [their] genealogy."[11) The belief that Billy and Saxon have succeeded in the doubling process is reaffirmed when he tells her that "he had a harem, and that she was his second wife--twice as beautiful as the first one he had married" (p. 416). Through the doubling of birth and behavior, Saxon becomes not only "herself," but also her name--a fusion of signified and signifier which corresponds with, and reaffirms, the superimposition of projected and actual selves. III So far, I have barely touched on my rehistoricization of Michaels' assertion that the family had become "the unequivocal source of racial difference" by, according to his essay, the early 1920s. In The Valley of the Moon, Saxon and Billy can only become a family--that is, start to have children, and also be their new neighbors Edmund and Annette Hale's "children" (pp. 483-492)--when they successfully assert their difference from other, non-Anglo-Saxon, settlers (as well as non-Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxons) by establishing their doubling of birth and behavior. To develop this recognition, I wish to move beyond what has until now been a more-or-less linear exposition of the self-realization project they undertake, in order to expand upon the related observation that finding a self depends upon recreating the actions of others. Thus, as should by now be clear, a self can only be realized in the novel by being mapped onto its ethnic origin. The very term "realization" should warn us that the process is not as simple as London would have us believe. In order to realize a self, the individual must speculate on the eventual union of birth and behavior, a union which the fates of Bert and Mary demonstrate is by no means guaranteed. If it is already plain that the notion of autonomous selfhood is an illusion, it remains necessary to consider the full extent of Saxon and Billy's embroilment in networks wider than the ethnic oneness they seek. In particular, their place in the "entanglement of relations"(12) which define the capitalist economy they try to escape demands closer scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, as in Burning Daylight, this wider project of cultural mapping must revolve around the tension between opposing narrative impulses in the text. On the one hand, the naturalism which denies the agency of the individual defines life in the amoral universe of urban capitalism; on the other, the increasingly dominant voice of the sentimental romance promotes the possibility of a private life outside these forces, and contrasted to the instabilities of self inherent to urban existence. I will now briefly outline these respective strands of the narrative, and situate them within the wider cultural field, before concluding with some remarks about the nature of this generic discontinuity. As we have already seen, in the early chapters of The Valley of the Moon, neither Saxon, as principal focalizer, nor the narrator, as commentator on characters and events, hold much hope for individual or collective agency in the city. Saxon's half-brother, Tom, the only active Socialist in the novel is portrayed as an idealistic and ineffectual dreamer, who would abandon Oakland himself if he was not totally subservient to his wife. His faith in "reasonableness and justice" is juxtaposed with the demonstrable bias shown towards corrupt businessmen in court. Thus, whilst J. Alliston Forbes serves less than two years for massive corporate fraud, the sixteen-year-old Archie Danaker is sentenced to fifty years for stealing a few dollars from a drunk (pp. 172-73). Saxon shares the narrator's skepticism, believing that urban conditions reduce men to animals (p. 189), and seeing Tom's "weary, patient look . . . the bent shoulders, the labor-gnarled hands" as symbols of "the futility of his social creed" (p. 185). It is important to note that there is more than a renunciation of socialism occurring here. Rather, the flaws in the logic of much naturalist fiction become apparent in what eventually leads to the generic "triumph" of the sentimental romance in the later stages of the novel. The Valley of the Moon, like the majority of London's earlier work, and like, among others, Norris' The Octopus, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Sinclair's The Jungle, and Crane's Maggie, at once represents both the iniquities of turn-of-the-century corporate capitalism and the philosophical belief that nothing can be done to alter the situation. Naturalism's claim to be a catalyst for change is perpetually undermined by its own combination of pessimistic determinism and social Darwinism, which denies the worth of individual agency. The naturalist self exists in, and is created by, a world of constant relatedness, without which it would cease to exist and in which it is constantly driven by a combination of impersonal internal and external forces. Thus, as we have seen, the "characters" of Saxon, Billy, Bert, and Mary are decentered by forces they do not understand or control, that have the power to rob them of themselves. Although individuals are able to express discontent (for example, by comparing their own situation with that of their ancestors), they cannot reconcile their moral indignation with a reconstruction of the preferred social order. In addition, as a result of its problematic relationship with hegemonic culture--that is, the extent to which its attempt to register dissatisfaction with the market economy is voiced in the language of that economy--naturalism sees no contradiction in embracing both a damning critique of workers' conditions and an appreciation of the goods a consumer culture can provide. The first and second chapters of The Valley of the Moon provide a striking example of the ease with which the two attitudes are paired. The novel opens with a Dickensian description of the horrors confronting the "piece-work ironers of fancy starch" (p. 3). Saxon and Mary are distracted when the elderly woman brought another interruption. She dropped her iron on the shirtwaist, clutched at the board, fumbled it, caved in at the knees and hips, and like a half-empty sack collapsed on the floor, her long shriek rising in the pent room to the acrid smell of scorching cloth. The women at the boards near to her scrambled, first, to the hot iron to save the cloth, and then to her, while the forewoman hurried belligerently down the aisle. The women further away continued unsteadily at their work, losing movements to the extent of a minute's set-back to the totality of the efficiency of the fancy-starch room. (p. 4) Clearly, the passage is designed to illustrate both the inequalities of capitalism--the piece-workers are ironing "fancy starch"-- and the dehumanizing effects of the work on the worker. Thus, the old woman is successively described as "an entrapped animal" (p. 3), a "half-empty sack," and as "shrieking like a mechanical siren" (p. 4). Her fellow ironers are conditioned to save first the cloth, and only then the woman, and are constantly supervised by a more senior employee. Those only emotionally disturbed by the commotion are obliged to place the Taylorized "efficiency" of their operation, and the financial loss they may accrue, above any sympathy they feel for their colleague. In contrast, the opening to Chapter Two, like Dreiser's well-known descriptions of Carrie Meeber in her lace collars and soft new shoes, represents the fulfillment of desires themselves made available by consumer capitalism.(13) At the bricklayers' picnic Saxon smiled with appreciation, pointed out her foot, velvet-slippered with high Cuban heels, slightly lifted the tight black skirt, exposing a trim ankle and delicate swell of calf, the white flesh gleaming through the thinnest and flimsiest of fifty-cent black silk stockings ... On her white shirtwaist was a pleated jabot of cheap lace, caught with a large novelty pin of imitation coral. Over the shirtwaist was a natty jacket, elbow-sleeved, and to the elbows she wore gloves of imitation suede. The one essentially natural touch about her appearance was the few curls, strangers to curling irons, that escaped from under the little naughty hat of black velvet pulled low over the eyes. (pp. 10-11) Saxon wears these clothes, the products of the culture of consumption, because they allow her to represent--or embody--the desires created in her by the women's magazine advertisements she pins on her wall (p. 7). As Michaels points out in The Gold Standard, "capitalism not only provides the objects of fear and desire ... it provides the subject as well."(14) Thus, in the same way that we have already seen Saxon's nervous illness to be a result of the forced removal of parts of her identity, we can identify her self-satisfaction here as pleasure with the self as a product of market forces. In both cases, of course, selfhood is shaped by the artistic practice of naturalism, which participates in consumer culture's "insatiable appetite for representation."(15) This insistence on market conditions determining selfhood is at odds with and explains the emergence of the other generic force in the text. Whereas naturalism insists on the constant inter-relatedness of subject and objects--they are all created by the logic of the market--the Romance is a space allowing for the "radical autonomy of persons,"(16) or what Henry James called "experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered."(17) Thus, where naturalism denies the possibility of mending the rupture between the social and the moral, this act of reparation is at the heart of sentimental fiction. If, in The Valley of the Moon, the notions of "radical autonomy" and "experience disengaged" need to be modified, in order to include the shift from a self defined by the market to one defined ethnically, then this task must be performed alongside a linking of the revised situation of the family with London's reappropriation of sentimental fiction. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1850) is a text that epitomizes the desire for a certain "indifference to racial difference (the family ~black and white')"(18) located by Michaels in mid-to-late nineteenth-century literature. Like The Valley of the Moon, though with very different conclusions, it is centrally concerned with national and familial self-definition, and both books argue for what Winfried Fluck has described (discussing Uncle Tom's Cabin) as the ability of "the power of the heart, of natural emotion and moral sentiment, to penetrate to the perception of a moral order--a sentimental epistemology which also has the effect of putting women in the position of superior moral authority."(19) In London's novel, it is the combination of a narrative initially highlighting the futility of the male social (dis)order--the "man-made world" (p. 255) of strikes and riots--but later shifting to a sentimental voice, that likewise places women in the "position of superior moral authority." It is Saxon who persuades Billy to leave Oakland, and she instigates the reconstruction of the couple's lives. It is also Saxon who initiates the fear about the future of the Anglo-Saxons, again echoing Fluck's contention that sentimenal fiction is generated by a "profound anxiety about its own moral referent." Saxon and London's race-anxiety generates a form able, at least symbolically, to alleviate that anxiety by creating a world in which the social and the moral orders "finally coalesce."(20) In this, the novel confirms formally what we have already seen thematically: the shift transforming the family into the source of racial difference occurs in the genre most fully defined by its faith in the family as the center of all moral values. In order to illustrate this alignment of the social and the moral, the narrative veers between melodramatic representations of city life--Bert's death, Saxon's miscarriage, Billy's boxing and union injuries--and the possibilities offered by family life. Again, Fluck's reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin provides useful insights into the narrative effects of these contrasts. Pointing out that it is the threat of a family breakup--Eliza's fear of separation from her child--that opens Stowe's novel, he asserts that the skillful narrative evocation of a fear of a painful separation must be placed within the larger context of a moral order if it is to be effective. If the reader is to be shocked into an awareness of the vulnerability of the moral order, he or she must also be confronted with an image of that which is threatened; in other words, with versions of an intact order that can serve as a norm and countermodel for the staging of its possible breakup.(21) In The Valley of the Moon, it is not only the fear, but also the actuality of separation that is juxtaposed with the threatened idyll of family life. Before the industrial turmoil that results in Billy's imprisonment and the loss of the baby, Saxon and Billy's cottage is represented (albeit deceptively) as the site of an "intact order." Although, at this stage the home is marked by the invasion of market strategies of both production and consumption--for example, Saxon secretly exercises in a "systematic way" and reads women's magazines for ideas on preserving her looks (p. 146), thus presenting herself to Billy as a finished product--it is also the site of the happy family. The situation is vulnerable, as I demonstrated earlier, because of its dependence on wider cultural determinants. However, Saxon's repeated visions of her ancestors' lives and her homemaking abilities do create at least a simulacrum of the order that is forestalled by prevailing social conditions. The prime task of the sentimental narrative is to create a place in which the moral and the social can safely correspond. Hence, the need to leave the city and search for the Valley of the Moon and the eventual reconstruction and extension of the "American" family. The principal difference between Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Valley of the Moon resides in the opening chapters of London's novel. Whereas, for Stowe, the melodramatic interludes that threaten the domestic idyll are part of the sentimental design, for London they are also incorporated within the naturalist aesthetic. Fluck points out that Stowe's melodramatic discourse is "designed to act out a terrible suspicion:... the impression must grow that the incessant violations of the moral order are committed without due punishment and proper moral retribution." Within the melodrama, the existence of the moral order is called into question, and the "fear that it evokes is that the characters with which the reader sympathizes might have been left alone ... in a hostile universe." It is only at the last minute, once these effects have been maximized, that the moment of religious reassurance arrives.(22) In the secular world of naturalism, this fear cannot be removed through divine intervention since the universe is indeed proved to be either hostile or indifferent. Life in the city offers no opportunity for Saxon to rediscover her belief in God. Instead, at the moment of her greatest despair, knee-deep in water and surrounded by rats (p. 261), she is rescued by a young boy advocating the "freedom and motion" provided by his boat. Unable to visualize a God capable of permitting such urban degradation, London updates the sentimental narrative and reconstructs it around the process of self-realization. Instead of God and Little Eva, he introduces a "small, bright-painted and half-decked skiff" (p.261) and a boy called "Jack" who, like a secular Eva (or maybe Huck Finn), offers an example of an idealized alternative to everyday experience. IV In the preceding sections, I have described the processes by which, in The Valley of the Moon, London attempts a fusion of form and content via a move away from both naturalism and socialism. Since the logic of naturalism denies the possibility of autonomous selfhood, it is replaced by the sentimental narrative of self-realization; since socialism is shown "not to work," it is abandoned and replaced as an ideal condition by the happy family. I have already demonstrated, through my examination of the links between selfhood and ethnicity, one way in which the project of self-realization is undermined. To conclude, I will develop this argument somewhat, in order to show how even this perceived escape from the determining tendencies of the culture of consumption is threatened. At the most superficial level, London never answers the question of why Saxon and Billy should be free of market conditions simply because they leave the city. The couple enter business as market gardeners, and Billy lands a contract hauling for the local brickyard; but , as Charles N. Watson, Jr. has pointed out, "one cannot but wonder how soon his enterprise will succumb to the economic chaos he has struggled to escape."(23) Paradoxically, will is expected to triumph over economic reality in the Valley of the Moon, when it was unable to do so in Oakland. One potential solution to this dilemma again depends on London's abandonment of socialism as a viable counter to inequality. Whereas in The Iron Heel and Martin Eden, London repeatedly emphasizes the interconnectedness of leisure and toil--for instance, during Martin Eden's spell in the hotel laundry--in The Valley of the Moon, they are increasingly depicted as alternatives. Earlier, I suggested that London's portrayal of the woman collapsing in front of Saxon and Mary was "Dickensian." His rhapsodic treatment of the middle class world of private life is equally so, and depends on a Dickensian contrast between it and the proletarian world it surrounds. In an analysis of Oliver Twist, D. A. Miller argues that: "Much as delinquency is circumscribed by middle-class private life, the indignation to which delinquency gives rise is bounded by gratitude for the class habits and securities that make indignation possible."(24) The same process is true in The Valley of the Moon. Not only do Saxon and Billy look back on the horrors of the city, they do so in a manner which valorizes the "beauty and charm" of the "middle class home" (p. 339) and suggests that this is a place of safety, beyond the economic cycle. What seems to be happening is a kind of anti-naturalist, proletarianization in reverse, in which, rather than slipping Hurstwood-style into the realms of determinism, the working class escape into the world of free will. Thus, Billy and Saxon are able to feel secure in their new home because they own property, and Billy has "become a man of affairs" (p. 512). Of course, to express the transformation in this manner reminds us that, rather than escaping the market, the Robertses have started to "use their heads" (p. 499), and become employers instead of laborers. They adopt the middle class values of their new neighbors and disguise an ideological stance as a "natural" way of life. The plan to live on "~Easy Street'" (p. 528) revolves around becoming the very capitalists they opposed in Oakland and involves marketing the clay they discover their land, mortgaging and borrowing (pp. 527-28). From this point of view, Saxon and Billy gain freedom from determinism not because they "become" themselves or Anglo-Saxons, but rather because they assume the privileges of the middle classes. From the position of early twentieth-century consumer society, this discrepancy assumes its own logic as a conflict. The tension in the closing stages of the novel between the desire to attain self-realization, and the necessity of matching oneself to a standard in order to achieve this--whether it is the standard of Anglo-Saxon or of middle class behavior--is actually a product of the double bind of the culture of consumption. On the one hand, Saxon needs to recover "herself" from an economy that defines her in terms of, for example, her correspondence with the clothes she wears, a process requiring a reflex produced by her culture; on the other, the only way in which she can do this is by reducing ethnicity to its constituent parts, which are subsequently mastered by Saxon and Billy in a kind of ethno-Taylorization process. In a lengthy and penetrating examination of Henry James' The American, Mark Seltzer finds a similar conflict between "standardization and self-aggrandizement," and suggests that: "in The American at least this conflict takes the form of a double discourse, a sort of double-entry bookkeeping, in which one hand writes standards and statistics even as the other continues to write a romance of self-possession and self-identity."(25) As we have seen, The Valley of the Moon employs a "double discourse" for the same reasons. To become what she desires, Saxon absorbs and reproduces the "standards and statistics" of race, and, when she has acquired land, of the new farming methods. Like James' Christopher Newman, her identity depends on representation and "identity is guaranteed by the imperative of resembling oneself, as a copy repeats an original."(26) However, like James, London also writes self-identification in terms of a "romance of self-possession." It is this doubling process which makes The Valley of the Moon London's least effective attempt to posit an alternative to hegemonic capitalism. Both in its overt embrace of bourgeois values, and in its attempt to escape these values via construction of self and "Americanness" in terms of ethnicity, the novel depends upon a discourse of auto-Taylorization. Either way, self-realization is redesigned as a project of standardization in which "individuality" is systematically managed, via the procedures of the production line, into a reproduction of an original. COLLEGE OF ST. MARK AND ST. JOHN, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND NOTES (1) Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (New York: Macmillan, 1913; London: Mills & Boon, 1914). Page numbers from this edition are referred to in parentheses in the text. For a useful outline of the combination of fictional and autobiographical sources that provided the framework for London's novel, see: Charles N. Watson, Jr., The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 187-210. Also see Jack London,, Burning Daylight (New York: Macmillan, 1910). (2) Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 71. (3) T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930," in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, Richard Wightman Fox, and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds.(New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 1-38, p. 4. See also Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 3-58. (4) Ibid., p. 9. (5) Ibid., p. 11. (6) For a strikingly similar sociological argument, concerning the "ethnocentrism [which] leads a people to exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkways which is peculiar and which differentiates them from others," see William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (New York: Dover, 1959 [1906]), especially pp. 13-15. Sumner identifies a general "rule ... that nature peoples call themselves ~men,'" and regard others as "something else--perhaps not defined--but not real men" (p.14). In The Valley of the Moon as I will demonstrate, the Anglo-Saxon protagonists repeatedly do the same. (7) Walter Benn Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 655-85, 667, 670. (8) Ibid., p. 664. (9) Ibid., pp. 665-67. (10) Ibid., p. 673. (11) Ibid., p. 679. (12) Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 68. (13) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 98-99; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 19. (14) Michaels, The Gold Standard, p. 20. (15) Ibid., p. 19. (16) Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 68. (17) Ibid. (18) Michaels, "Race into Culture," p. 664. (19) Winfried Fluck, "The Power and Failure of Representations in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin," New Literary History 23 (1992): 319-38, 322. (20) Ibid., pp. 334, 322. (21) Ibid., p. 327. (22) Ibid., pp. 329-30. (23) Watson, The Novels of Jack London, p. 210. Also see Jeanne Campbell Reesman, "Jack London's New Woman in a New World: Saxon Brown Roberts' Journey into the Valley of the Moon," American Literary Realism 24 (1992): 40-54. Reesman claims that the "novel's conclusion surprises with its lack of closure," in an "idyllic yet disturbing open ending" (p. 52). (24) D. A. Miller, "The Novel and the Police," Glyph 8 (1981): 127-47, 131. (25) Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 75. (26) Ibid.
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