John Dos Passoss Representation of Women in U.S.A. Trilogy - Essay Example

I. Introduction Along with the publication of the Big Money in 1936, John Dos Passos successfully finished what has famously been regarded as his masterwork, the U.S.A. Trilogy. Though this work is far better than his previous works, it also has the themes that were explored by Dos Passos in his previous novels such as technical advancement, a severe concern for individualism, and a critical need to meet head-on social issues. The trilogy attains greatness, one could argue, since it embodies a turning point in Dos Passos’ career. In the previous novels, he had to work out the technical dilemmas of writing fiction and to obtain his distinguishing voice, as many of the books that surfaced after the U.S.A trilogy he appeared to lose the imaginative liveliness that facilitated him to astonish his readers, his characters, and himself. In U.S.A, nevertheless, he acquires a significant mass where vision and technique blend, and the outcome is an imaginative work of fiction that is occasionally erratic, occasionally appearing to possess an unsteady quality, but by no means uninteresting and unexciting (Clark 1987). One of the essential influences of these formal intricacies is to give out a sense of the infinite probabilities of point of view, of character, of chronicler, of spectator, of the past. Paradoxically, it appears that this feature of the U.S.A trilogy has been suppressed even by those who have commemorated it. Primarily, Dos Passos critiques have read U.S.A. almost entirely as a socialist novel that emphasize, through the different mental pictures represented by the various narrative styles in addition to the individual characters, the overwhelming influences of capitalistic insatiability. It is not this extreme specific interpretation, yet somewhat the special highlight on this interpretation, that has misted up the animation of Dos Passos’s works through failing to recognise the potentialities of other arguments that might extract mutually on U.S.A.’s complex intermingling of modes and standpoints (Casey 1995). Certainly, a much closer investigation of what readers may refer to the nonessential styles, such as the Newsreels, Biographies and Camera Eye portions, discloses another inclination, one that is corresponding to the worker issue; namely, the subject matter of gender stereotypes (ibid). Once this design has been segregated and emphasised, it permanently influences the reader’s understanding of the power struggles in the fictional novels that shape the heart of the narrative. More significantly, nevertheless, is the manner such an interpretation could change the reader’s understanding of the purpose of the fictional novels; it seems that they suggest an artistic challenge to the partially accurate, partially historical embodiment of women, particularly in the sections of the Biographies and Newsreels, and they are partly a representation of the novel and all-embracing social consciousness of the Camera Eye character. In other words, an interpretation of the presentation of women and the issues surrounding womanhood in the peripheral styles directs readers to perceive the fictional novels as an optional discourse in which women turn out to be articulating characters than passive and submissive entities (Casey 1995). The portrayal of women all throughout U.S.A trilogy indicates accurately a sense of historicity. One of the initial concerns readers observe regarding the novel is that the approaches that fundamentally document public activities, the Biographies and the Newsreels, demoralise and underestimate women; the former approach recognises their total absence of influence in history, whereas the latter documents their mediocre and often humiliated social position. The Camera Eye character, nevertheless, is an extremely receptive observer who improves into no merely a political rebel but a writer whose task will be the defending of the marginalised; as he mentions in his final appearance (ibid). This writer, the unspoken creator of the trilogy, will shape a dimension of his own imagination in which women’s existence and point of views will be as weighty as that of the men’s. In other words, he will restructure reality, restoring women’s social status in their due place in history. II. 42nd Parallel Through a complex structure of interludes in the narratives, Dos Passos implies the progress of America beginning from the ‘90s on to the advent of the Great War. The book is divided into five main sections; each then is further subdivided into parts that deal respectively with female characters such as Eleanor and Janey, into a sequence of passages directed the Camera Eye, ‘Newsreel’ and secluded depictions of American women. The Camera Eye in a series of flashes, which is a total of twenty-seven, carrying the fibre of time one-sidedly in the memories of a boy as he develops awareness on from childhood through maturity, intense pieces of memory of walks, taxis, ships, landscapes and strangers, on to college, war congregations in Madison Square Garden, the steamer travelling towards France (Maine 1997). The book represents women inadequately which is manifested by the introduction of the life stories of great men of the period, for example, while a fine insight, there are flashed contrary to it images of women whose lives started years prior to the instant which the background in documenting and continued on for years subsequent to it. The female characters of the book are created with brilliant mastery. Dos Passos definitely has that special gift of narrating. However, provided that he furnishes the fundamental nature of the lives of the women he prefers to summarise in a number of pages, given that the entire sequence of a human life us what fascinates the whole world, the fictional women in his book are selected and set down resembling marionettes moved by an unstable puppeteer. These women’s lives, while they are acting in front of a large audience, are beautifully recorded. What becomes of these women after their brief, colourful part is played Dos Passos for no reason mentions nor even suggests. The 42nd Parallel, which it appears Dos Passos’s publishers have made a big mistake in not revealing for what it truly is; the opening part of a novel on a significant extent, is to deal with the purpose of the United States in the western world at the time of the initial years of the current century (Beach 1941). However, while it is written from the perspective of a strangely globally minded American of extraordinarily inclusive culture, the writer has been capable to engross himself in the minds and the beings of his middle-class female characters, to recognise himself with them, to an extent which should fascinate any critique of Dos Passos’s other works. With this regard, the 42nd Parallel is somewhat dissimilar from Manhattan Transfer and defines a remarkable progress beyond it. Manhattan Transfer, nevertheless, could nearly have been written by an extremely clever and well-recognised outsider; the female characters are viewed externally and consequently appear occasionally human. Yet in his new narrative, Dos Passos has dumped all the fictional baggage which burdened his investigation of New York; there are no highly illustrated depictions and no Joycian style poems. Dos Passos has examined Anita Loos, a female writer, for the approach of The 42nd Parallel and he is possibly the original really key writer to have accomplished something in using colloquial American for a narrative of the finest creative seriousness. Dos Passos, in the 42nd Parallel, is not devoid of his distinguishing moments of letting his female characters to fall into two-dimensional misrepresentations of qualities or attributes which he despises; yet, generally, he has made the readers live the lives of these women, see the feminist America through their perspective (Rosen 1981). Now for the five major stories; the female characters are Janey, a girl whose home life is portrayed as miserable, and who later on becomes a stenographer, and Eleanor Stoddard, a young female trying to find culture, who gains knowledge how to beautify homes for the wealthy. The ties which connect these female characters to the other characters in the narrative are of the very slimmest. Mac sees and hears regarding the whereabouts of Moorehouse while the latter is carrying out his belongings on behalf of the American oil mob located in Mexico. Janey is present as Moorehouse’s stenographer. On the other hand, Eleanor performs some beautification for Moorehouse, and turns out to be his high-minded acquaintance (Passos 1937). Similar to Manhattan Transfer, this book is tentative in form. It is comprised of four series of works, structured like a scrapbook devoid of visible order. The 42nd Parallel is with reference to everything, everything that takes place in the America of labour protesters, second bests, bogus Big Business men, and most importantly, women who played stereotypical female roles such as wife, mistress and secretary. III. 1919 To listen to each of the musical instruments play distinctively its part of the score of a concerto might give but a weak scheme of the vibrancy and diversity of the work of art itself when the entire musical instruments each carrying their task in an entirety that is more than their sum. It is in a sequence like this, yet limitlessly more intricate, that 1919 is founded, like Dos Passos’s preceding narrative, The 42nd Parallel. Its building blocks are not qualities of music, but the intricacy of emotions tied up in distinct female characters, influenced by what envelops them and consequently knitting their own destinies, dispensing out expressions and actions and sentiments of whose significances and intentions they themselves are merely somewhat aware. With the character of Joe Williams, the sailor, one begins on the seashore at Buenos Ayres, afterwards the scorching heat of the Port of Spain, the murky coldness of Liverpool, a shuttle of ships, quarters, and girls for hire. In the biography of Eveline Hutchins lies the life of a family of a minister living in Chicago, a girl’s probing toward art in New York, Santa Fe and Chicago. Daughter from Texas, spoiled girl in a family unit of men; at ease being in a car, or even on a horse; gone astray in Eastern boarding schools, namely Italy where she tumbled across Dick (Colley 1978). Dos Passos, therefore, if one may carefully refer to him as the most daring, the most extensively experienced, the man with the broadest considerations to the plight of women, is among the novelists who takes into account the dilemmas that women endure in a world where male dominates. Because of their cohabiting and by the headings, Dos Passos’s female characters are, occasionally, extremely unexciting and transparent. For instance, Dick Savage, the poet from Harvard and who becomes an opportunist, also becomes responsible for the death of Daughter, a female character from Texas, who is related to the Near East Relief committee, since opportunism is the circumstance of his life in a world wearied by conflicts, both political and economic. On the other hand, another female character, Eveline Hutchins from Chicago and a minister’s family, finds herself caught up in a number of inexpensive and careless love affairs because she is not residing in a society in which standing is major. Daughter, the girl from Texas, heaves herself away because undeveloped vigour such as hers should splutter out on thin air (Clark 1987). One of the female characters of Dos Passos are portrayed with much affection, compassion and understanding. It is Eveline Hutchins; no depiction in The 42nd Parallel can match hers. However, all of the female characters have a public basis for playing a part in the narrative. They are used as representations, as part of the observations on the war and peace. The life stories represent various types, all somewhat negatively. Del, a female character in the novel who gets to marry Joe Williams, a sailor and who is twice torpedoed and has numerous disgusting adventures, because she much resembles his beloved sister; Del tries to maintain their relationship to that level, until she gained knowledge on how to give in return, from others, and at last, poor perplexed fool, Joe gets what he deserves from a bottle. Another female character, Ann Elizabeth, was loved neither carefully nor well by Dick Savage who is an ordinary undergraduate. And then, both Eveline and Daughter journeyed to France (Wagner 1979). Relating his female characters through this approach, Dos Passos engineers to give the readers a taste of women’s lives in America as it was affected by the War. IV. The Big Money 1919 was a finer narrative than The 42nd Parallel, and The Big Money is finer still. The female characters in this narrative were portrayed extraordinarily. For instance, Eveline Hutchins works through a chain of infidelities to suicide. However, the major weight of the narrative is carried by Mary French, a Vassar girl from Colorado who snoozes and wails her way into the Party and lastly into commitment to its objectives; by Margo Dowling, whose profession carries her from vaudeville performance to Hollywood by means of a marriage to a Cuban and the most all-embracing whoring anyone has yet carried out in the series. With these themes explored, it may be assumed that Dos Passos’s chief deficiency as a storyteller is the manner he carried the fiction of females as indeterminable. It could be that the thorough behaviourism of this approach is what denies his female characters of intellectual existence. It could be that females cannot demonstrate the motives and obsessions of the mind, its dreams, its analyses, its inclinations, its gratifications and worries, when they restrict themselves to showing merely motor and verbal behaviour. Undoubtedly, no female character in the trilogy thinks at all, none of them obeys a concept for without has an insight to abide by, and no intellectual importance influences any of these female characters. Yet if that absolute deterioration of the mind should be blamed to technical exactness, certainly something other than mechanism is accountable for the deterioration of sentiments. A method of fiction is merely a way of representing women feel. However, the female androids of Dos Passos do not have emotions. Female characters of Dos Passos have not emotions of any kind. It is not merely that the more intricate gratifications and pains leave them behind; hence they are not motivated by anything artistic or disheartened by anything religious, but that all gratifications and miseries leave them behind. They sleep with men in every page or two and they inundate themselves with liquor to construct this most expressive self-control tract. Yet they appear to take pleasure on neither the flesh nor the wickedness; they summon both in emotionless and bodiless exhaustion that appears like a floating idea being precisely ruled out. These female characters feel no desire and no affection, nor any other of the shared experiences of human beings. Aggressive emphasis are given on the female characters, their aspirations are infuriated, their bodily are crushed, savage brutalities and vile demoralisation are meted out on them, yet as they contort they do not endure. Abuse them and these women will never cry out, injure them and they will refuse to bleed. V. Conclusion The women in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy were represented in different ways in the three narratives, The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. It is certainly true that Dos Passos is one of the most provoking fiction writers of the recent century and he showed it through playing the part of various female characters in his own imaginings. Undoubtedly, Dos Passos’s message to the readers, as he one by one embodied the various personas and experiences of women in the political world of men, is that women are struggling to be heard and to be respected and that at the end of the day these women’s scream will reverberate through the walls of a chauvinist society and breaks all the barriers to pieces. Word Count: Main Content- 2,601 Reference Page: 152 Total word count: 2,753 References Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951. Beach, Joseph Warren. American Fiction: 1920-1940. New York: Macmillan , 1941. Casey, Janet Galligani. "Historicizing the Female in U.S.A.: Re-visions of Dos Passoss Trilogy." Twentieth Century Literature (1995): 249+. Clark, Michael. Dos Passoss Early Fiction, 1912-1938. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1987. Colley, Iain. Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. Dow, William. "John Dos Passos, Blaise Calendars and the "Other" Modernism." Twentieth Century Literature (1996): 396+. Maine, Barry. John Dos Passos: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1997. Passos, John Dos. U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel; B. Nineteen Nineteen; C. The Big Money. New York: Modern Library, 1937. Rosen, Robert C. John Dos Passos: Politics and Writer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Wagner, Linda. Dos Passos: Artist as American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Read More