Self-writing around 1900
Fractured identities in New York City
by Björn Klein
Date of Examination:2018-03-29
Date of issue:2019-07-29
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Rebekka Habermas
Referee:Prof. Dr. Rebekka Habermas
Referee:PD Dr. Olaf Stieglitz
Referee:Prof. Dr. Silke Schicktanz
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Abstract
English
This dissertation analyzes the multiplicity and ambiguity of modern, urban identities in New York City around 1900. For this purpose, I take into account works of four writers who lived in New York City. Close reading their autobiographies, diaries and correspondences – their non-fictional journalistic and scientific, as well as their fictional texts revealed considerable changes in the metropolis, on the one hand, and illuminated the political and economic fights for resources and rights of minorities to create their own identities, on the other hand. With a praxeological and transsectional approach the self-making practices of the writers were analyzed. In the analyzed sources, the writers shaped the focus on the other in an urban society that came to be perceived and portrayed as increasingly frayed and unstable. Ralph Werther was a legal clerk, who was also known under his other alias Jennie June as a female impersonator in New York City. He wrote about his life in a unique combination of text fragments, published in the New York Medico-Legal Journal in 1918 and 1922. Elizabeth Jane Cochran, better known as Nellie Bly, imitated hysterical women’s bodies to get into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. She wrote about her trip and the unbearable conditions for women in the asylum. The text was published in two pieces in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1887. James Weldon Johnson was a diplomat, composer, activist, lawyer and writer. He wrote about the life of an Ex-Colored Man in a fictitious and anonymously published autobiography in 1912, thereby novelizing the practice of race passing. Self-government reformer and politician Richard Ward Greene Welling masqueraded, following in-depth research outlined in his diary, as Miantanahmoh, chief of the Narragansett for the Bradley-Martin Ball in 1897. Together they invented a real and imagined territory of new women, ex-colored men, Native Americans, androgynes and fairies in turn-of-the-century New York City. This dissertation takes into account sources ranging from diaries, novels, autobiographies, newspaper articles, medical journal articles, and correspondences to analyze the practice of writing, arguing that the development of diverse categories of difference (race, class, age, gender, [dis-]ability) around 1900 was neither inevitable nor as neatly distinct as scholars have previously supposed. On the contrary: The readers, spectators, colleagues, and friends of the four writers were enthusiastic about the ambiguity and the protest against fixed identities and binaries. In short, the writers told stories about and brokered insights into the hybridity of identities in New York City around 1900. In this way modernity appears rather as a field of discontinuities than a monolithic block. The analyzed self-writing practices of the writers produced, imitated, invented, discarded and adjusted temporary identities. Following these results another reading of American Individualism around 1900 is proposed: One that takes into account the relationships and frictions between fiction and reality, imitation and authenticity, as well as fact and fiction of identity formations – for the history of subjectivity and for historical science in general. With a combined micro- and macrohistorical analysis of New York City around 1900 this dissertation furthermore shows how the practice of writing influenced self-makings, and it demonstrates the relevance for a history of imagined spaces and real places in municipal history.
Keywords: Gender; Transgender; Transsectionality; Subjectivity; Identity; Self-Writing; Modernity; Space; Place; Municipal History; Praxeology; Individualism; North American Studies; New York City