The Mystery of Misery: Middle-Class Representations of Poverty, 1885-1915

The contemporary conversation on inequality has its roots in the Gilded Age when U.S. slum conditions came to rival those found in a Charles Dickens novel, a permanent lower class became a fact of urban life, and middle-class writers and readers embraced literary realism. In this project, I am pushing against the separation of realist and sentimental literatures as well as the treatment of the Progressive Era as a cultural break which serve to position the era as a unique step in the country’s movement toward greater equality for all. Instead, I am reading realism as a continuation of the project of sentimentalism with its dual concerns of care for others and middle-class superiority. As a material and cultural definition of class begins to pull apart, I argue, the threat to middle-class dominance by competitive capitalism becomes apparent. By reading across multiple genres, including film, and with a longer historical arc, I uncover a discourse on poverty used to critique and revise a nineteenth-century model of manhood unable to keep up. All works of realism in my archive take the instability of the middle class as their starting point, bringing attention to economic, cultural, and technological threats. With very different concerns than reform literature, a concern for the self emerges when realism directs the middle-class reader to portrayals of a precarious middle class. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues, reading realism conditoned the country to accept a deeply impoverished working class needed to produce cheap goods by directing sympathy to the white middle-class male.