Scholars now trace the emergence of modernism to earlier formations of both literature and culture. The hard line that seemed to separate modernism from, say, late Victorian or Edwardian literary cultures seems now to be more of a phased transition. Was Heart of Darkness, with its manipulation of narrative through the use of frame narration, an early manifestation of the formalistic experimentation we associate with modernist storytelling? Did Henry James’ use of free indirect discourse in The Portrait of a Lady presage the modernist exploration of interiority brought to a further level of development by Joyce and Woolf? This essay accepts that the hard chronological lines demarcating successive literary movements might be useful, but not always accurate; that a cultural period might bleed or merge into the next; and that the seeds of innovation might be found decades earlier than their full realization. Here, a key work demonstrating this fluid temporalization is Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism.Footnote ¹ For Moi, modernism (in theater, art, and philosophy) emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century – in the work of Ibsen, for instance, and through a re-mapping of dramatic realism.

Alongside Ibsen, the other key theorist of late nineteenth-century realism was Henry James. In his collection of essays The Art of Fiction (1884), James established fiction’s claims to imaginative latitude, to the representation of life in all its shifting variety. James’ veneration of the novel, his simple promotion of the genre, coupled with his sense that fiction could simultaneously achieve aestheticized wholeness and “finish,” would reverberate throughout the next decades. James’ essays established questions that shaped the evolution of the American novel. Fiction might now be responsive to “new” (or “now-recognized”) areas of experience (war; modern urbanism; diverse sexualities and ethnicities) but also be aesthetically experimental and formalistically daring.

In the US three fiction writers, in particular, began to remodel narrative in ways that point forward to later experiments, and that answered James’ call to arms: Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather. Before the radical démarche into modernism, work was already being done to deconstruct late nineteenth-century forms of fictional realism, to inflect its shapes and patterns. These explorations began to clear the ground of late Victorian tropes, and to sow seeds that bore fruit over the next decades. What these careers show us is that the world of the American fin-de-siècle writer was an intellectual milieu of transition.

For Max Nordau, Europe’s major opponent of what he saw as a decadent culture, this transition formed the “degeneration” of his famous jeremiad: a culture moving from Victorian moralism’s stability toward a sensationalism of cheap effect and moral ambiguity, a decline shaped by aestheticism, decadence, and symbolism. For these three American writers, all of whom were engaged with the trio of “-isms,” the fin de siècle was a time of regeneration.

The impact of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory; shifts in the performative world of women (in opera, primarily); and technological innovation (the advance of photography, the birth of cinema, the advent of gramophone and wireless telegraph) had started to reshape the meaning of human selfhood and presence. The breaking up of Victorian codes surrounding sexuality and the body had also begun to gather pace. Thus the culture of the late 1800s and particularly that of the 1890s formed an ante-chamber to the radical new space we call modernism. Above all, as Nordau recognized with alarm, it was new modes of representation that were splintering the hard molds of Victorian culture.Footnote ²

Kate Chopin’s career was destroyed by the controversy over The Awakening (1899), and by the difficulty she then had exploring her central theme: female agency and sexual desire. The (largely male) critical riposte to the novel led to her publisher canceling her third collection of stories, A Voice and a Vocation. Subsequently, scholarship on Chopin has developed from the initial feminist recovery of her work in the 1960s and 1970s toward a multidisciplinary, contextualized understanding of her fiction within a late Victorian intellectual milieu. Chopin, like Cather and Crane, was in dialogue with a range of late nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural movements that would set the stage for the final break-up of Victorianism during World War I, and the advent of the 1920s new cultural world. For Bert Bender, Chopin was in a “quarrel” with Darwin, while another scholar identifies Chopin’s “alternative theology,” a syncretism that compounded the sensuous and the religious.Footnote ³ For Nicole Camastra, The Awakening engaged with late Victorian practices of voice and “sonority”; and for Walter Taylor and JoAnn B. Fineman, Chopin was a “Pre-Freudian and Freudian.”Footnote ⁴ This work suggests a Chopin able to synthesize and narrativize key features of her Zeitgeist, and then to imagine new fictional plots, tropes, and characters – all of which anticipated early twentieth-century literary culture.Footnote ⁵

Thus, in The Awakening there is a very modern sense of the family as a site of potential damage. Edna’s mother died when she was a child – there are distinct suggestions that in some ways the heroine is a traumatized survivor. Her father is a former Confederate Colonel, a drinker and ardent churchgoer whom Chopin skewers for his social hypocrisy. Edna was “glad to be rid of her father when he finally took himself off … with his padded shoulders, his Bible reading, his ‘toddies’ and his ponderous oaths.”Footnote ⁶ Chopin’s feminism emerges in such lampooning, as it did in acerbic comments she wrote for a newspaper column in 1898, where she questioned society’s dwelling on female suicide when men, too, took their own lives.Footnote ⁷

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, while Studies on Hysteria had appeared in 1895. Jointly authored with Josef Breuer, that book had outlined some of the key ideas that underpinned Freud’s later work, and established the figure of the female hysteric as a major type for the emergent culture. The links between that figure – a suggestive juxtaposition, if you like – and Edna Pontellier are compelling. Chopin’s narrative grants Edna a “dreamscape,” a world of fantasy, desire, speculation. It is here that The Awakening’s decisive contribution to female agency takes place – not in the sense of an agency that is fulfilled (through vocation, or emotional plenitude) but in the sense of potential. Chopin’s radically exploratory fiction suggested that the mother or the wife might have a complex inner life, a psychological interiority less like the self of traditional morality than one formed by desire and the unconscious impulses of the figures identified in Freud’s early work. Critics often cite one sentence from The Awakening, an aphorism that seems to encapsulate this radicalism: “the dual life – that outward existence, which conforms, the inward life which questions.”Footnote ⁸ This sense of an outward life being questioned runs throughout her work.

Think of the 1890s, then, as a stage on which new character types were established; some of the figures we associate with the turn of the century would become the forebears of types then explored in the 1920s. It is not hard to trace a line from these figures to Mrs. Dalloway or Molly Bloom – as if modernism would be an imaginative expansion of the possibilities suggested by 1890s characters, specifically the interior spaces of outsider figures such as prostitutes, adulterous wives, and dandies. Fin-de-siècle works had begun to map out a culture that now seems pre-modernist. The New Woman is the mother, as it were, of the Flapper Girl. And typical 1890s forms, notably the Gothic, with its fascination with diseased bodies and uneasy minds, as seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, foreshadow high modernism’s fascination with trauma and derangement. Nathanael West, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty would all deploy Gothic elements in their work, deploying the form to explore the modern city, violence, sexuality, and, above all, racial identity. The Gothic, to paraphrase a major work on Toomer, became the key to “the terrors of American history.”Footnote ⁹ Modernism, read from these origins, seems as if it were an extension of late Victorianism’s recognition of the Gothic as a genre to represent and explore the deeper structures of a culture.

Chopin’s probing, heterodox imagination is evident in the stories that would have formed her third collection. The stories Chopin collected for A Vocation and a Voice are remarkable for their experimental subject matter and their innovative forms. If this collection had been published, it would (one might speculate) have suggested new imaginative territory for American writers in the opening years of the century. Nevertheless, a number of these stories had been published in Vogue, then an open-minded forum for new and exploratory fiction. Throughout the collection Chopin reveals herself as a writer fascinated by the human margin, by the quirky, by varieties of behavior that go beyond the eccentric to suggest new configurations of sensuality, obsessive behavior, and forms of transgression. In the title story, a young boy tags along with an older woman who has renamed herself Suzima and pretends to be an Egyptian storyteller (the story is a rather self-knowing orientalist tale); at the end a distracted monk abruptly hears her voice and wanders off in pursuit, leaving the monastery. As in Cather’s fiction (which I will turn to later), Chopin positioned the female voice as charismatic and potentially transgressive, able to splinter social orthodoxy. In another story, “Two Portraits,” Chopin presents a diptych of vignettes, each opening with the same paragraph describing a character, Alberta. In the first, “The Wanton,” Alberta is sexual and predatory; she “does not know shame or reserve” and “carries a knife.”Footnote ¹⁰ In the second, “The Nun,” Alberta becomes a paragon of saintly virtue – “others having abounding faith, have been cured of bodily ailments by the touch of her beautiful hands.”Footnote ¹¹ The story presents female virtue and vice as two sides of one coin, but with one key difference. In the “wanton” tale Alberta has been beaten by her mother “who was really not her mama” – this story is in fact a radical account of the effects of abuse.Footnote ¹² Another tale, “An Egyptian Cigarette,” might well be one of the first descriptions of a drug trip in American letters. The narrator smokes what seems to be a joint and finds herself in an orientalist dream. When she regains consciousness, she wonders about what other visions she might now experience. In “Fedora,” a woman’s enchanted fascination with her lover suddenly shifts to his sister. With the young man “there was inward revolt, astonishment, rapture, self-contumely, a swift, fierce encounter betwixt thought and feeling” (again that sense of self-division that was important to Chopin’s sense of character). And then, when Fedora meets the sister, she cannot help herself: “Fedora bent down and pressed a long, penetrating kiss upon her mouth.”Footnote ¹³ Sexual passion as excess; the disruption of convention and social order; an emergent American bohemia: Chopin had alighted on subjects at the edge of respectable culture. And by censuring and censoring her, Chopin’s critics and publishers recognized the power of her work.

The impact of journalism on American prose cannot be underestimated. To a great degree the figures at the center of this creative bridge were journalists and newspapermen and women; and they broke through by writing for mass-market papers and journals. Chopin wrote for Vogue; Crane published his first work in papers such as the Syracuse Daily Standard and New York Tribune, and Red Badge was first serialized in newspapers. Cather had a long career as a journalist and editor (and worked for McClure’s Magazine for six years) before becoming a full-time creative writer. Similarly, the major American naturalist of the early twentieth century, Theodore Dreiser, worked for Midwestern papers as a journalist before beginning work on Sister Carrie. Ernest Hemingway’s initial career as a journalist (for The Kansas City Star) thus looks like a continuation of this earlier model of an American literary career, where training as a reporter, a documenter, forged the foundation for creative work.

Arguably, some of the innovations that are often seen as the hallmarks of modernist fiction (collage, fragmentation, polyphony, shifts in temporal sequencing) had their roots in the practical world of newspapers. The editing of a newspaper column, or story, or entire issue, also suggested models for narrative composition. One story might be juxtaposed with another; on another page narratives might emerge from radically different places (New York, Europe, the Midwest). Late nineteenth-century newspapers suggested an increasingly complex world marked by multitudinous temporal and geographical spaces. And many of the Progressive era’s transitional writers worked within the spatial diversity and asynchronous temporality of this prose-world. Stephen Crane was a journalist whose commissions (notably those that took him to Greece for the Greco-Turkish War in 1897, and then to Cuba for the Spanish American War of 1898) heralded a proto-globalist literary identity. The impact of “muckraking” journalism on US literature also encouraged engagement with overlooked and marginalized aspects of society, encounters that underpinned Crane’s Maggie and Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt (1911). The shift toward the full flowering of modernism, that is, took place in parallel to, and as an outgrowth of, the technical and sociopolitical development of the newspaper industry at the turn into the twentieth century. The refashioning of American narrative by writers schooled on the street, in the newspaper office, or on the battleground was one illustration of how James’ idealistic claim for the imaginative centrality of fiction might be fulfilled.

One might think of two technical developments (derived from the newspaper industry) as being especially significant for the development of American fiction. First, the growing importance of the magazine/newspaper editor, as a figure shaping the overall narrative of an issue – here, we see the growth of a certain technique, as the editor evolved into a figure with a much more direct influence over narrative. Hence some of the iconic moments in the development of American modernism: Eliot’s epigrammatic thank-you to Ezra Pound for his work on the manuscript of “The Waste Land”; Maxwell Perkins’ reshaping of The Great Gatsby during the winter of 1924–5, thereby creating a different narrative line to the one initially established by Fitzgerald. Second, the emergence of collage-like narratives, fictional forms with their roots in the narrative discourses of a newspaper or magazine.

Here, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and U.S.A. (1930–6) are central works – all encapsulating the formalistic shifts emblematic of a typically modernist fascination with nonlinearity and temporal rearrangement. Those movements within narrative that we glimpsed in 1890s fiction (for instance, in the shifting focus of Crane’s Wounds in the Rain) have now become complex, overt, and relentless, as the formalistic turn from the late nineteenth-century novel reaches fruition. Dos Passos’ work enables us to see a second technological/cultural shift that shaped fiction as the twentieth century began to unfold, namely the growing significance of cinema and film narrative as rivals to, and influences upon, fictional narrative. Cutting between points of view, and moving abruptly across points in time, fiction was becoming markedly more shaped as the genre evolved. The central question posed by modernist narrative, namely how the loose and apparently ill-disciplined realism of the late Victorian novel might achieve a new formalistic integrity, was now in focus. Dos Passos’ answer, for one, was that the technical aspects of a parallel medium might be imported into the novel, providing new templates for experimentation and the evolution of the genre.

In his short career, Stephen Crane proffered a purgation of nineteenth-century prose, suggesting a stripped-down realism that would now connect to “the real” via a form of the documentary discourse I am outlining. The overriding impression one takes from Crane’s writing is of purgation: of excess, of ornamentation, of the florid. That central modernist aphorism, Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more,” underwrites Crane’s laconic phrasing and paragraphs. Stylistically, Crane’s taut, consciously shaped sentences seem to embody both an aestheticizing of the fine grain of narrative and a coupling of fiction to the testifying power of documentary reportage. And although Crane never produced a manifesto that might suggest an underpinning aesthetic logic, his small body of work now reads like an extended and forceful demonstration of what proto-modernist writing might look like. Crane as exemplar, as a guide to a new form of writing: this, surely, is one reason for his close relationship to key modernists such as Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad.

Katherine Biers also notes the difficulty of placing Crane, as his work marked a complex bridging of realist and proto-modernist elements: “His commitment to portraying social types and typical events in his fiction” might place him in the realist canon. “Yet his impressionistic style, so redolent of film and photography, along with his fascination with the mediated nature of perception and with the shocks administered by war, have made him, for many, a herald of the international modernist movement.” Biers then sees Crane as a writer who turned to “a poetics of the virtual … to gain a critical purchase on forms of technological alienation.”Footnote ¹⁴

Crane, that is, had begun to open questions surrounding the documenting of reality, and the invention of reality. That he had captured war’s horror, even though he had never experienced battle, was a major feature of the immediate reaction to The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The realization that war had now become a media spectacle (historians debate the roles of newspaper magnates such as Pulitzer and Hearst in creating a furor of speculation around the Spanish American War of 1898) informs recent work on Crane, as Biers notes: “technology and spectacle in Crane’s work disclose the alterity of the self and its reliance on the materiality of writing and representation.”Footnote ¹⁵ Writing about war without having been to war, and engaging with the emerging culture of spectacle, Crane pointed forward to what we might term a “post-realist” writing or a “proto-modernist” writing, a remodeling of genres in effect. His work, in other words, was making complex the relationship between reality and writing, and drawing attention – in a thoroughly modernist way – to the processes of representation themselves, as a reader was asked to believe in the lived believability of a neo-documentary narrative by a war “reporter” who had never experienced conflict.

The war stories in Wounds in the Rain are written in a modern, if not modernist, idiom: a bluff, brutal, ironic rhetoric of combat. In Crane’s stories we see the origin of an anti-heroic genealogy that would lead to Hemingway’s bleakly stripped-down writing. “Once, in this dazed way, he examined his arm; he saw the hole. Yes, he was shot; that was it.”Footnote ¹⁶ Crane was also one of the very first writes to capture the deadly new technology of war. His Spanish American War almost seems like a chilling premonition of the Western Front – a volley of rifle-fire sounding like “a great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking.”Footnote ¹⁷ Crane had sensed in the 1890s the dehumanizing nature of modern warfare – the impact of technology (high-explosive, modern riflery) on flesh. As such, Wounds in the Rain now reads as a deeply prescient collection, an ancestor to the work that is often seen as the first great American war (and anti-war) novel, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921).

In Crane’s writing, bodies, and the narrative framing of the body, point forward to modernism. Focusing on figures such as the prostitute or the wounded soldier, Crane decisively widened the corporeal focus of fiction. He expanded the range of realism, as if he were calling realism’s bluff – showing that the penetration of the realist into the slums of the underclass of the late nineteenth century could be taken much further.Footnote ¹⁸ Above all, Crane reaches toward the sheer materialism of the body, and moves beyond the Christian allegorizing of the body that had marked the Victorian self. The social types that Crane chose to focus on (the prostitute in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; the sailors in “The Open Boat”; the soldiers of The Red Badge of Courage and Wounds in the Rain) all work in highly corporealized occupations, but are rarely presented in a conventionally moralistic way.Footnote ¹⁹

As a writer about female bodies, Crane’s radicalism was evident in his fiction and his lived experiences: emblematically, Crane was the son of a protestant minister but would die as the common-law husband of Cora Crane, a woman who took his name but to whom he was never married. Crane’s work thus makes us realize that fin-de-siècle writing was in some ways a clearing of the ground, a removing of high Victorian tones, notably sentimentalism and the plotlines that even in a radical text such as Jane Eyre framed female agency within a Christian paradigm. The body culture of the 1890s had seen the advent of a more materialist and technologized sense of the body. The body had begun to shift during the decade, becoming “de-moralized,” but also interiorized and technologized. And at the center of these cultural transformations was the development of a new typology of female character, recognized and made the foundation of narrative by Chopin, Crane, and Cather. The mother as adulteress; the hysteric; the prostitute; the diva: all would be situated within narratives that were strikingly different to high Victorian narrative, with its moralism and sentimentalism (simply compare Maggie to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth). The body was decisively foregrounded by all these writers, placed in the new performative and social spaces of the 1890s. A later generation of female novelists, including such figures as Nella Larsen, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter, would then recenter American narrative around these more intensely corporealized female characters, notably in Larsen’s Passing (1929), where the body, the skin, of the biracial protagonist becomes, quite literally, the novel’s focus.

Just as Freud had become interested in dreams and the unconscious, seeking out an understanding of women that would trace an interpretive labyrinth, so Crane’s realism was also fissured by gaps in knowledge, hermeneutic obscurities. Crane’s representation of Maggie almost seems to mime out a narrative of occlusion and revelation, a storyline that acknowledges then deflects what might be known of the heroine. In the passages that lead up to her disappearance and probable murder she simply becomes “the girl,” a kind of anonymized figure glimpsed in gestures or reactions to strangers. And the cityscape of New York, too, is a labyrinth, a space of “darker blocks” or “gloomy districts” or a “hidden factory.”Footnote ²⁰ The city reveals, but also conceals. Crane’s realism seems to acknowledge its own limits at the end of the novel, as if Maggie cannot be known, or the city defined. As such, Crane’s protagonist and his city become hermeneutic puzzles, and precursors to that modernist sense of self and space as enigmas or secrets.

Modernist narrative reshaped the novel through mythic patterns, temporal disciplining, and symbolic unification. The first would reach its apogee in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); the second was exemplified by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925); and the third was crystallized in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915). What is now so striking about this phase of modernism is the sense of successive impacts, as the novel decidedly took a new shape, became formalistically invigorated; and each writer seemed to be working to answer a central question, namely how Henry James’ “loose, baggy monster” could be reformatted architecturally.

But another tributary of modernist narrative flowed toward fragmentation, collage, and the avant-garde episode. Here we find Hemingway’s in our time (1924) or Gertrude Stein’s writing. As we saw in Chopin’s late work, the short forms of 1890s fiction had suggested what might be done with narrative compression, shortening, and dis-integration. Here, Crane’s formalism, his deployment of sketch, episodic fragment, or vignette as the basis of narrative, gave his stories a prophetically neo-fractured quality. Looked at genealogically, Crane seems to mark a step beyond the nineteenth-century sketches or vignettes of Ivan Turgenev or Guy De Maupassant, and a step forward toward the modernist short story.

Willa Cather entitled her late collection of essays Not Under Forty (1936) on the grounds that they would not appeal to readers under that age. She had by then fashioned a literary identity built around reaction and apparent nostalgia. Her lapidary sentences, relative lack of interest in interiority, and eschewal of modern urbanism might also be read as signs of a literary signature far from modernism. Yet in several significant ways Cather, especially in her early career, mapped out territory that formed a bridge between late Victorian and modernist literary cultures. In three specific ways Cather opened up new territory for American fiction: as a critic and creative writer fascinated by performance (especially female performance); as an interlocutor with European movements such as aestheticism and symbolism; and, linking both subjects, a fascination with body cultures.

While a student at the University of Nebraska in the 1890s, Cather became a precocious reviewer of theater, opera, and musical performance. She was, to use the old term, a “provincial,” far from the established centers of cultural power on the East Coast. But Cather’s radical regionalism (in some ways a precursor to the regionalism of William Faulkner) saw the imaginative plenitude of the overlooked margins of American life. For Cather, even the performative spaces of a provincial town might feature a radically new figure such as the diva. Cather wrote about Sarah Bernhardt, but also singers such as the American-based Helena Modjeska and Olive Fremstad. Her early writing, for student and local newspapers, thus decisively engaged with a figure who suggested new patterns both of agency and charisma – the latter qualities decisive subjects in key modernist texts such as Mrs. Dalloway and Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” That is, Cather recognized the revolutionary potential of what was essentially a new figure on the cultural stage: the diva, the female cynosure at the center of opera’s transformation as artists such as Wagner reshaped the musical theater into Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art).

And like Crane, Cather engaged with and explored the vastly expanded media culture of the late nineteenth century. A vastly expanded media culture meant that Cather was now able to access a sense of this world from newspapers – gaining knowledge of a figure such as Sarah Bernhardt even before she finally arrived to perform in Omaha in the mid-1890s. Moreover, Cather had found on the streets and in the theaters of Lincoln, Nebraska a world that might be thought of as “Wildean.” Theater and performance were central; material culture suggested an aestheticizing of everyday life; figures such as the diva and the dandy came on to the stage (and it was now a stage) of life. This was modern life emerging as spectacle – the spectacle not only of war, as Biers showed in her discussion of Stephen Crane’s writing, but also of performance, a cultural zone where the female performer had achieved great stature. The early sketches Cather wrote for local newspapers also celebrated the theaters, foyers, and stylized figures of a new “modern life” – a provincial America that shows how T. J. Clark’s analysis of French painting – the “painting of modern life” – also has analogies when we think about the writing of the 1890s.Footnote ²¹

Cather’s early reviews and journalism also suggested that writing, even for a tyro author such as herself, was becoming increasingly internationalized. The young Cather, working with relatively little cultural capital as a Midwestern woman writer, nonetheless engaged with the latest transatlantic movements. This enabled her to work at an early age in a strikingly internationalized literary space, reviewing foreign operas as they arrived in her hometown, or commenting on European authors who had caught her attention. As with Crane’s body writing, and Chopin’s sense of female subjectivity, Cather was pursuing her own investigation of an emergent cultural topic. In her case, this would be an exploration of embodiment and corporealism – how the body might be represented in writing. Thus, French writing, particularly that broadly framed by the term “symbolist,” appealed to Cather because it was highly sensory – and to a degree this suggested the limitations of Anglophone writing. Thus her early praise for novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti, particularly his The Romance of a Spahi (Le Roman d’un spahi). Writing for the Lincoln Courier (9 November 1895), Cather condemned the “lifeless” descriptions of English authors, then contrasted the French, especially Loti, and their sensory prose. “All through this book one can smell the aroma of the tropics, see the palms and the tamarinds and the old white mosques, and the burning sandy water of the Senegal, hear the sound of the tom-tom and the epic chants of the griots.” She positioned Loti as an exemplary figure, “a sort of knight-errant to bring it to us, who gives to [us] poor cold-bound, sense-dwarfed dwellers in the North the scent of sandalwood and the glitter of the southern stars.”Footnote ²²

That is: Cather found in French writing a sensorily enriched plenitude that contrasted with Anglophone literature’s depletion.Footnote ²³ At times, as in the praise for Loti, that contrast takes on self-punishing provincialism, as if to say that the Midwestern American world lacks the sheer sensory enrichment of European fictional worlds. But the imaginative turn Cather then took was a crucial one: the imaginative opening up of her American terrains to incorporate forms of the sense-expanded writing she had found in Loti’s prose. Her central imaginative move was to learn the lessons of British aestheticism and French symbolism, but then fold those lessons back into narratives about pan-American experience, especially experiences utterly grounded in varieties of the American body. In effect, Cather’s fiction read sensoriness back into novels about the Americas: French North America in Shadows on the Rock, or the Southwest of The Professor’s House, or Sapphira and the Slave Girl’s antebellum Virginia. Her fiction might then be read as an extended exploration of whether she was in fact correct about Loti, and about American culture: was her culture “sense-dwarfed”?

The 1905 short story “Paul’s Case” was one early encapsulation of this imaginative investigation. The story appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1905 (another example of mainstream journals serving as laboratories for experimentation). The tale crystallized Cather’s distinctively provincial, western American slant on fin-de-siècle transatlantic literary-cultural themes. Paul is a hyperbolic aesthete, a near-parodic walking embodiment of the ultra-sensationalism Oscar Wilde had ushered in. In particular, “Paul’s Case” links aestheticism to crime: he steals money from his employer to fund his escape from Pittsburgh to New York City and then commits suicide – another kind of crime – rather than allowing his father to take him back to Pittsburgh. Wilde had also linked crime to aestheticism in The Portrait of Dorian Gray. In fact, the distinctively lower-middle-class Paul might be said to be a figure who “out-Wildes” Wilde in his fusion of the aesthetic, the criminal, and the ordinary.Footnote ²⁴

Paul is a hyperactive, twitching, neurotic figure; he is all sensation, a nervous decadent. The story’s full title signals Cather’s interest in the pathologies of aestheticism: “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” This is also one of the major American tales of turn-of-the-century performative masculinity. Restraint, discipline, and earnestness seem to have melted away, leaving a self on edge, looking for sensation and aesthetic stimulation. Paul is insolent and confrontational, blending the aesthete’s fascination about appearance with the teen rebel’s instinctive sense of defiance. His school barely knows what to do with him; Paul himself moves through Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh looking for imaginative release from a world of utilitarian and constrictive puritanism. The worlds of music and performance offer the obvious escape; his evening job is working as an usher at Carnegie Hall. He then feels his uniqueness, his outsider status, in thoroughly bodily ways. As with other decadent figures from fin-de-siècle American culture (think of Chopin’s heroines), Paul’s otherness is literally embodied.

Paul’s aestheticism then grows from a highly bodily (in fact sensory) receptiveness to music: “He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own … what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.”Footnote ²⁶ Paul is a young vampire with Edna Pontellier’s physicalized yearning for escape.

“Paul’s Case” ends with her aesthete, the neo-Wildean Paul, laying himself down on the rail-track to take his life. Paul dies beneath the wheels of a train figured in terms of pure energy and force: the machine slays the aesthete. In terms of simple plot, the story appears to be a monitory tale of aesthetic failure. And yet, as in many of Cather’s narratives, the sheer material plenitude of the story (the decorated rooms, the clothing, the relentless attention to color and style) suggests a living world that will simply go on beyond the conventional limits of narrative closure. Even as the plotline follows a tragic structure down toward catastrophe and death, the incidental details of the narrative offer the reader florid materialism and a plenitude of beauty. The death of the aesthete is never, in fact, the death of the aesthetic, because to die aesthetically might be to underline the power of the movement’s ideals. “Paul’s Case” established a narrative line or arc that recurred throughout Cather’s career: the fable of aesthetic failure, where a plotline of failure and even death nevertheless unfolded through scenarios of stylistic, decorative, and environmental beauty.Footnote ²⁷

Chopin also kills off her heroine, Edna Pontellier; and Crane’s Maggie simply disappears off to a mysterious death – probably murdered. All these narrative plotlines seem to follow a classically punitive line where wrongdoing (adultery/prostitution/dandyism) receives its just deserts. But all three deaths are hazily ambiguous, as if deliberately clouding conventional judgment. And the narratives themselves leave us with an imaginative reverberation: a sense that these were fascinating, significant existences. We might say that an author’s sense of an ending had begun to change around the turn into the new century. In place of moralistic punishment or sentimentalized death, these authors offered ambiguity – an ambiguity focused on the mysterious suicides shaped by Cather and Chopin, or the obliquely rendered murder of Maggie. The conventional mapping of character through punishment of sentiment gave way to less clear-cut forms of closure; irony (a signature element of modernism) now inflected narrative endings. The prostitute, adulteress, or dandy might die: but from this point it was impossible to see their fates in a traditional two-dimensional way.

The reading out and development of the possibilities of 1890s fictions is one way that modernist narrative of the 1920s and 1930s then took shape. Thus, William Faulkner’s complex fiction, so singular on first encounter, read out the possibilities of fin-de-siècle literary culture, focusing as it did on region, body, war, and gender. Like Kate Chopin, Faulkner was a Southern regionalist; and as with Crane’s writing, Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly registered the impact of conflict on American life and selfhood. His first published novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), told the story of a badly wounded, traumatized World War I veteran. In Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels – set in a fictional Mississippi county – the memory of the Civil War ceaselessly haunts the South. In Light in August (1932) and Absalom Absalom! (1936), Faulkner placed Crane’s interest in war and the wounded body at the heart of a modernist reimagining of American history – focusing especially on the complex legacy of slavery and the Black body. Joe Christmas, a biracial character in Light in August, is haunted by his African American racial heritage, a wandering figure eventually castrated and murdered in a scene rooted in myth and a neo-documentary attentiveness to the violence wreaked on the Black body. Perhaps the most startling aspect of Faulkner’s fiction was its embedding of rural and provincial settings within temporal frameworks whose complexity and sophistication would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier. Modernist technique, in other words, had become a way to reach back into the country’s past, enabling the novelist to explore the deep structures of the society and its culture.