"Truth is Held in Disrepute": O. Henry and the Dismantling of Paradigms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20089719Keywords:
O. Henry, Short story, Genre, Parody, Social Darwinism, PostmodernismAbstract
Destabilization of principles and suspension of widely accepted beliefs pervade the conflicting ideological panorama of the Progressive Era. In a world dominated by the uprooting of long established traditions, O. Henry’s short fiction becomes the site wherein Darwin-dictated principles, gender roles and genre rules are either dislocated or subverted. Following Boris M. Ejxenbaum’s idea (1927) that the writer’s use of parody lays bare the construction of his stories, I propose to demonstrate that an intentional breaking of generic expectations lies behind the
narrator’s use of multifarious literary formulas. Evolutionist axioms are also overruled, for dysgenic and not eugenic prevails over in the American society presented by the Southerner writer. Finally, by applying Veblen’s sociological ideas (1899) to O. Henry’s characters, I also aim to show that any attempt to classify them into types whose response can be predicted in the social contest is destined to fail.
Downloads
References
ANON. 1923. “Paris and Parasites”. New York Times, The Screen, 2 October: 7.
BAILEY, Dale. 1999. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
BAUDRILLARD, Jean. 1998. “Simulacra and Simulations”. In Mark Poster. (ed.). Selected Writings. Palo Alto: Stanford University: 166-184.
BEEBEE, Thomas O. 1994. The Ideology of Genre. A Comparative Study of Generic Instability. University Park: The Pennsylvania State U.P.
BREMMER, Robert H. 1956. From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the U. S. New York: New York U.P.
BROWN, Carolyn S. 1987. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.
CURRENT-GARCIA, Eugene. 1965. O. Henry. (William Sydney Porter). Boston: Twayne.
ÉJXENBAUM, Boris M. (1927) 1968. “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story”. Trans. I. R. Titunik. In Matejka, Ladislav and Krystyna Pomorska. (eds.). Readings in Russian Poetics, Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press: 227-270.
ELLIS, Havelock. 1911. The Problem of Race-Regeneration. New York: Moffat, Yard.
EVANS, Walter. 1981. “‘A Municipal Report’: O. Henry and Postmodernism”. Tennessee Studies in Literature, XXVI: 101-116.
FLYNT, Josiah. 1907. Tramping with Tramps. New York: The Century Co.
GRIMSTED, David. 1968. Melodrama Unveiled. American Theater and Culture 1800-1850. Berkeley University of California Press.
GUNNING, Tom. 1994. “The Horror of Opacity. The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde”. In Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill. (eds). Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. London: BFI: 50-61.
HAZARD, Lucy Lockwood. 1927. The Frontier in American Literature. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
HENRY, O. 1953. The Complete Works of O. Henry. II Vols. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
HEILMAN, Robert Bechtold. 1968. Tragedy and Melodrama. Versions of Experience. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press.
HUNTER, Robert. 1912. Poverty. New York: MacMillan.
HUTCHEON, Linda. 2000. A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
JUST, Martin-Christoph. 1997. Visions of Evil. Origins of Violence in the English Gothic Novel. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Peter Lang.
LANDOW, George P. 1982. Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present. Boston & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
LANDFORD, Gerald. 1957. Alias O. Henry. A Biography of William Sidney Porter. New York: Macmillan.
LEARS, T. J. Jackson. 1983. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture, 1880- 1930”. In Wightman Fox, Richard, and T.J. Jackson Lears. (eds.). The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980. New York: Pantheon: 1-38.
LYELL, Charles. (1830-1833) 1997. Principles of Geology. London: Penguin.
LOEWENBERG, James. 1935. “The Controversy over Evolution in New England 1859-1873”. The New England Quarterly, 8 (2): 232-257.
NUMBERS, Ronald L. and Lester J. D. Stephens. 1999. “Darwinism in the American South”. In
Numbers, Ronald L. and John Stenhouse. (eds.). Disseminating Darwinism. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
O’CONNOR, Richard. 1970. O. Henry. The Legendary Life of William S. Porter. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
PATTEE, Frederick Lewis. 1923. The Development of the American Short Story. Harper: New York and London.
PIMPARE, Stephen. 2004. New Victorians. Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages. New York, London: The New Press.
PITTENGER, Mark. 1997. “A World of Difference: Constructing the ‘Underclass’ in Progressive America”. American Quarterly, 49 (1): 26-65.
QUINN, Arthur Hobson. 1936. “The Journalists”. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. Appleton-Century-Crofts: 521-549.
RAFTER, Nicole Hahn. 1988. White Trash. The Eugenic Family Studies 1877-1919. Boston: Northeastern U.P.
RUSE, Michael. 2000. The Evolution Wars. A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO.
SPARIOSU, Mihai. 1987. “Allegory, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism”. In Calinescu, Malei and David Fokkema. (eds.). Exploring Postmodernism. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamim’s: 59-78.
SPENGLER, Oswald. (1932) 1980. The Decline of the West. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
SPENSER, Herbert. (1862) 1920. First Principles. New York: D. Appleton.
STANTON, Elizabeth Cady. 2006. “Solitude of Self”. In Schwehn, Mark and Dorothy C. Bass. (eds.). Leading the Lives that Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman Publishing: 59-64.
STRAUSS, Anslem L. 1961. Images of the American City. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
STUART, David. 1990. O. Henry. A Biography of William Sydney Porter. Chelsea: Scarborough House.
SUSMAN, Warren I. 1984. Culture as History. The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
TUCKER, William H. 1994. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
VEBLEN, Thorstein. (1899) 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover Publications.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2008 Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
