Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn by Jennifer Travis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn by Jennifer Travis Daniel Mrozowski (bio) Danger and Vulnerability in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Crash and Burn, by Jennifer Travis. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xii + 174 pp. Cloth, $90.00; Ebook, $85.50. Jennifer Travis's resonant study of vulnerability in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature analyzes how writers have confronted the complex cultural and psychological realities of endangerment. Travis persuasively links seemingly disparate texts from the likes of E. D. E. N. Southworth and Stephen Crane through a "shared idiom" responding to environmental disasters and industrial accidents, drawn from the kind of economic, ethical, legal and scientific grammars familiar to scholars of naturalism (32). In the hands of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Kate Chopin, this "shared idiom" revised notions of injury, suffering, and victimhood. Against the kind of anti-community visions of earlier works like James Fenimore Cooper's The Crater (1847), Travis proposes that a notion of universal vulnerability, dramatized by literary texts of the era, challenged "hegemonic notions of individual autonomy, white masculine citizenship, and sovereign political agency" (3) as well as "cultural fantasies of control, self-reliance, and security" (7). Even as our own twenty-first-century forms of endangerment—the spectacular eruptions of gun violence, the inexorable wake of the Great Recession, the inevitability of massive storms—haunt these pages, Travis articulates how writers like Mary Austin and Jack London imagined the experiences of vulnerability in ways that "mobilized toward empathy, compassion, community, and social change" (9). To this end, the book is more exploratory than encyclopedic. Each chapter engages with a form of endangerment, like railroad collisions or earthquakes, that prompted a wellspring of writing, including literature, journalism, insurance reports, conduct manuals, and legal proceedings. Travis finds common analytical cause with a range of contemporary discourses, from feminist legal theory to disaster studies to ecocriticism. The book's animating principle—calling for a subtler attention to vulnerability as a felt, expressed and represented condition—is perhaps its most innervating contribution, as Travis charts a cultural shift from "privileged inviolability to universal vulnerability" (32). [End Page 106] The strong first chapter, "A 'damsel-errant in quest of adventures': E. D. E. N. Southworth, Sensation and the Law," considers Southworth's sensation novels, The Hidden Hand and Ishmael, as her female characters negotiate accidents within the rubric of a tort law typically in place to mitigate the realities of their injuries. Through particularly deft readings of the courtroom scenes, Travis asserts that Southworth "embraces human interdependence and fragility not as weakness or powerlessness but as a condition of modern personhood" (36). In Chapter 2, "Crash Lit: Trains, Pains, and Automobiles," Travis examines the cultural meanings of vulnerability and victimhood through what she calls "crash lit": texts that imagine mechanized collisions in order to provoke "a wider recognition of social injuries" (46). Through tropes of speed, energy and chaos intrinsic to modern transport, stories like Harriet Spofford's "The Black Bess" and Rebecca Harding Davis's "Anne," as well as Eleanor Porter's popular Pollyanna series, reveled in modern accidents as sites of personal and social identity formation, especially for marginalized characters. In Chapter 3, "'Hurts That Will Not Heal': Theodore Dreiser, Masculinity, and Railroad Labor," Travis shifts the focus to the traumatic wounds that seem to transcend broken male bodies in industrial capitalism. Regarding his early career as a journalist recounting his own struggles with loss and rehabilitation, Travis suggests that Theodore Dreiser reconfigured the stigmas of masculine trauma in ways that staked new claims of cultural authority by embracing rather than effacing psychic wounds in his unfinished memoir An Amateur Laborer and short narratives like "The Mighty Rourke" from Twelve Men. For Travis, Dreiser exemplifies the ways men in the post-Civil War era often "embraced injury's presence" and "expressions of vulnerability as constitutive of masculinity itself" (71). The attention to gendered questions of mobility, bodily autonomy, and emotional life prompted by industrialized and mechanized danger helps the first three chapters hang together with a rich coherence. Though the final two chapters are not as explicitly connected, Travis suggests how the "shared idiom" of vulnerability and...