AtD and morbid, diseased conditions

[terrance fitzgerald]

I wonder what Teddy made of Walt Whitman. 
   
  The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom. 
It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen. 

  Hear now the tale of a jetblack sunrise, 
Hear of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. 

  The second Sunday morning they were brought out in squads and massacred . . . . it was beautiful early summer, 
The work commenced about five o'clock and was over by eight. 

  A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart . . . . the living and dead lay together, 
The maimed and mangled dug in the dirt . . . . the new-comers saw them there; 
Some half-killed attempted to crawl away, 
These were dispatched with bayonets or battered with the blunts of muskets; 
A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more came to release him, 
The three were all torn, and covered with the boy's blood. 

At eleven o'clock began the burning of the bodies; 
And that is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men, 
And that was a jetblack sunrise. 
 & Co. 
   
  In any event, it makes sense that morbid pessimism would not top the best seller's list at the time. The morbid, the sick, the sexual, the horrific, the subversive, the carnivalized, etc ... yes, but not the pessimism. American and Pessimism simply don't mix. 
   
  How is TV treated in VL? 

Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:
  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.





 		
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