Mapping literary identities: space trans-actions and inter-actions in the works of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Demetra Vaka Brown

Abstract

My dissertation entitled “Mapping Literary Identities: Space Tran-actions and Inter-actions in the Works of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Demetra Vaka Brown” places Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, James’s The American Scene, and Vaka Brown’s The Heart of the Balkans, In the Heart of German Intrigue, as well as her autobiographical texts A Child of the Orient and With a Heart for Any Faith/Fate in a cultural geographical context and discusses the three authors’ spatial poetics and identity politics. More specifically, I assert that the texts in question trace a development in literary responses to the question of spatiality and the interrelated concept of identity formation, within the frame of early modern(ist) American literature. My discussion begins with the realization that the specific travel writings by the three authors explicitly address questions of space, geography, and identity. Subsequently, I examine these texts for the different theories of human-place relations that are inherent in their narrative discourses. The individual chapters on Twain, James, and Vaka Brown examine the construction of narrative identity as a project that is historically contingent, but also spatially, socially, and culturally significant. I contend that all three authors fully and vigorously participated in the literary tradition of the nineteenth century that represented space as a realistic concept. At the same time, however, they experimented with this tradition and accentuated certain elements in it, so that they pushed it a step further, in the direction of twentieth-century modern(ist) spatial poetics. My dissertation builds on the assumption that the development in spatial representation that began with the work of Twain and continued with the works of James and Vaka Brown is not only aligned with the social, political, economic, and cultural evolution of American modernism, but is also indicative of the time’s controversial identity politics. In my view, the three authors’ theories of human spatiality, diverse as they may initially appear, engage in conversation with each other. More specifically, James’s and Twain’s contact with Europe and the new perspectives from which they subsequently viewed their homeland delineate their personalized modernistic geographies. At the same time, Vaka Brown’s status as an immigrant in the U.S. writing for mainstream journals about life in the Orient determines her response to the space of modernity. Thus, the spatial perspectives of the three writers engage in conversation with each other as they bring together and juxtapose the American view of Europe with the European vision of America, both of which operate within the American project of national identity construction. In my view, the interlocking spatial discourses of the three authors reveal their narrative perspectives as manifestations of their individual responses to modernity. Hence, the three chapters of my dissertation are arranged according to the individual works’ dates of publication to illustrate the transition from Twain’s response to the onset of modernity as reflected in his spatial politics and poetics, to James’s purposefully ambiguous engagement with the space of modernity, to Vaka Brown’s female alternative of modern spatial representation. In the first chapter, I argue that Twain’s traveling, performed as an art, metamorphoses into both world making and self-fashioning as it not only reflects, but also deconstructs and creates, views of reality and subjectivity. In the second chapter, I pursue the topic of spatial poetics and identity politics further and mark James’s progress in The American Scene from the initial urge to connect to the past as a solid ground for his identification process at present, to subsequent realization of the impossibility of homeland attachment, to eventual connection with the present on a responsive and emotional level. In the third chapter on Vaka Brown, I illustrate the way in which the author presents her readers with a literary model that simultaneously historicizes literary geography and visualizes temporal history, thus allowing for spatial metamorphoses in a dynamic historical context. I conclude that space, geography, and identity prove active and pervasive interests for the three American writers who trace the move from the realist to the modernist tradition.