AtD and morbid, diseased conditions

[Paul Nightingale]

In an earlier post I referred to the way disease was linked to migration in
the late-C19th. Another form of migration, of course, was that of ideas and
literature: the European novel was seen as a kind of virus, not least when
the right kind of literature was supposed to have an educative function for
immigrant communities.

See: Evelyn Geller (1984) Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries,
1876-1939: A Study in Cultural Change, Greenwood Press.

"Zola's naturalism created a genre of slum fiction and other 'problem'
novels. They were criticized not for their eroticism but for their
unrelenting and morbid pessimism. This critique of the literature of
exposure would echo through several decades of muckraking novels. Among
European novels, Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata was barred by a customs office in
1890 (Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoi a 'sexual and moral pervert'),
Zola's La Terre in 1894". (52)

And on the censorship of libraries:

"Books proper for a large university library might be 'essentially improper
for the general mass of the people,' said Theresa West, Milwaukee public
librarian. A public library could buy outspoken books 'which speak truth
concerning normal, wholesome conditions.' But books dealing with 'morbid,
diseased conditions of the individual man, or of society,' were for
'students of special subjects.' They were bought only after due
consideration of the just relation of the comparative rights of students and
general readers and were lent only on request. 'This taboo question,
however, is treated quietly.'" (54)

See also: Karol L. Kelley (1987) Models for the Multitudes: Social Values in
the American Popular Novel, 1850-1920, Greenwood Press.

Here, popular fiction, including the western, is seen as a means to avoid
the modern world (and social change). I would argue that's a beguiling but
simplistic view, resting on a crude, determinist view of ideology; but it
does raise the possibility that popular fiction in AtD will be treated as TV
is in VL.

Anyway, in passing, fleshing out the blurb, a couple of general points to
come back to:

1. A similar struggle between wholesome American values and "sexual and
moral perver[sion]" would feature in the cinema. Prohibition and the
fundamentalist religious ideas (eg the Monkey Trial) that inspired it have
been seen as part of the same conflict.

2. Radical politics, in the form of socialism and anarchism were of course
alien concepts, in the US as in Britain. The Sacco-Vanzetti case, post-WW1,
brought together the fears of contamination by immigrant peoples and
immigrant ideas.