"To Get to the Center": Recovering the Marginalized Woman in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer

Abstract

"To Get to the Center"Recovering the Marginalized Woman in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer Paul Petrovic (bio) The towering cityscape in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) acts as an oppressive force that keeps citizens under continuous surveillance by the patriarchal authority of bourgeois capitalism. Although Jimmy Herf breaks from the dehumanizing control of New York City, most of the novel's female characters do not. Ellen Thatcher typifies the plight of these women in being a victim of a patriarchal surveillance that turns private suffering into a spectacle for public consumption. Controlling external forces are, of course, nothing new in naturalistic fiction, though, as Townsend Ludington argues, in Dos Passos's novels "not everyone is completely bound by an unrelenting determinism," Jimmy Herf being a prime example (39). In Claude-Edmonde Magny's reading, we identity with Herf because he rebels against and flees the forces that would bind him: "Jimmy is … the central character—the only character except for Ellen who is not peripheral, the only one in whose favor the author mobilizes our sympathy" (108). There is, however, another character who deserves our sympathy despite being peripheral—Anna Cohen. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Anna earns her living variously as a taxi dancer, a lunch-counter waitress, a prostitute, and a seamstress. In all of these jobs, she is under the controlling surveillance of employers, mostly men, and even in her love affairs cannot escape patriarchal authority. In the novel's last chapter, she is badly burned in a fire in the dress shop where she works, an event that seems to signify her ultimate victimhood. Yet in the previous scenes in which she figures, Anna has revealed a growing resistance to the forces that would confine her, and even though she last appears only as an object of Ellen's meditation on the fire, that meditation prophesies the way horrific scarring may bring Anna economic power and free her from the male gaze. [End Page 152] Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish offers a lens through which to understand Anna Cohen's relation to the world of Manhattan Transfer. In tracing the history of judicial punishment from the early reliance on public torture and execution through the reforms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the current prison system, Foucault takes Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1787) as defining the modern "generalized model of functioning," or "way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men" (205). Bentham's original Panopticon was a prison consisting of a central tower from which prisoners in a surrounding ring of cells could be continuously observed and studied. The genius of the design is that its power to discipline does not require an actual observer, only the visible presence of the tower in which the observer's presence cannot be verified: "Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so" (201). When this model was adopted by numerous other institutions and disciplines, the result was what Foucault terms the modern "panoptic society" (301) in which "surveillance" (217) is the primary "modality of power" (221). "Is it surprising," Foucault asks, "that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (228). The modern city is a sort of vast prison, a "carceral city" in which there is no central observer, only "a network of diverse elements—walls, space, institutions, rules, discourse" (308), all of which combine "to exercise a power of normalization" (308). Foucault's notion that "space" is an element in the power relations of the modern city finds support in the work of psychologist Steve Pile. "Space," Pile asserts, "is produced under the tyranny of these intersecting, aligned lines of Power: masculinity, the bourgeois family, and capitalism" (221). In Manhattan Transfer, who occupies what space is controlled by a masculine vision predicated on commerce and on the domination and segregation of the weak. Any movement away from this concept of the...