The Street Was Mine : White Masculinity and Urban Space in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir

I CANNOT IMAGINE EMBARKING ON THIS PROCESS WITHOUT THE SUPPORT and motivation of Carolyn Dever, whose utterly indispensable criticism has challenged and inspired me, and whose kindness and patience has been a beacon throughout this project. Likewise, I would like to thank Phillip Brian Harper, who was so influential and inspiring throughout my research and who offered me the crucial encouragement to pursue the non-canonical texts that so fascinated me. And I want to thank Lisa Duggan, whose key insights and crucial historian's perspective has tightened and focused this project, and whose encouraging advice guided me. In addition, I would like to thank Corrine Abate, Sarah Stevenson, Joe Nazare, Ezra Cappell, Kyung-Sook Boo, all of whom were endlessly helpful in workshopping my chapters at New York University. My parents Philip and Patricia Abbott provided unconditional support, insightful critiques, and, perhaps most important of all, an excitement about my work. Their generosity overwhelms me. Thanks also need to be extended to my brother Josh Abbott and sister-in-law Julie Nichols for their affection and kindness, and to my grandparents, Ralph and Janet Nase, for infusing my years on the East Coast with warmth and tenderness. And, finally, to my dearest friend Christine Biretta, whose long-distance support and generous ear-bending never wavers. But most of all, I can't fathom completing this project without my husband, Josh. At work on his own book, he kept one maddening chapter ahead of me for twenty-four months. He watched (and continues to watch) all things noir with me, and even more importantly, he understood the pains and pangs of the process, nurturing me along with love and with an expansive generosity of spirit. McCarthy's raid came only a year after an extensive inquiry into the pocket book market by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. The committee's primary targets were comic books and the newly dominant mass market paperback industry, the latter a phenomenon driven in large part by the popularity of "hardboiled" literature. Cold War assaults on mass market or popular literature obviously reflect a governmental fear that such books could communicate potentially subversive viewpoints. But what perhaps differentiates these efforts from the expurgations of more blatantly politically charged literary productions is the question of readership. The new paperback industry had made books suddenly affordable to a wide spectrum of American readers, and these erupting congressional investigations sounded the rising alarm that such paperbacks might not be merely escapist entertainment but an unruly simulacrum of the anxieties and desires of its readers. This book, then, derives in part from one of the central premises on which these investigations operated: popular literature can be dangerous. The confluence of the pulp paperback industry and its hardboiled bestsellers with Cold War fears of political and moral contamination came at the apex of a twenty-year-long rise of a new, remarkably influential sensibility: that of the "hardboiled" novel. In their depiction of the crises of the modern white American male trapped in a battered and enclosing American city, hardboiled novels embodied, assuaged, and galvanized an array of contemporary anxieties: Depression-era fears about a capitalism-defeated masculinity, antiimmigrant paranoia, Cold War xenophobia, and the grip of post-World War II consumerism. Specifically, this book locates and analyzes the significance of a distinctive literary and cinematic figure in 1930s-1950s American culture-namely, that of the solitary white man, hard-bitten, street-savvy, but very much alone amid the chaotic din of the modern city. Generally lower-middle or working-class, heterosexual, and without family or close ties, he navigates his way through urban spaces figured as threatening, corrupt, even "unmanning." The idea of the solitary white man trekking down urban streets has forerunners in like-minded navigators of Western space or wilderness, but a relocation to the industrialized American city, combined with the influence of modernist themes of fragmentation and alienation, created a unique new figure-a figure we can locate in Hemingway's Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and Harry Morgan (To Have and Have Not), Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, the marginal men of Nelson Algren and others, not to mention later incarnations in Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. This iconic figure thrives, however, in its hardboiled incarnation, in the form of the archetypal "tough guy." Hardboiled magazines and novels afforded this figure a mass audience, their popular circulation dwarfing that of This book then argues that the tough guy proved increasingly menacing amid the rise of World War II and Cold War models of what it meant to be American, or, specifically, to be a white American male. The urban white male figure who dominates Chandler and Cain's novels and is radically revised by Chester Himes actually posed a significant threat to cultural hegemony not for his reactionary misogyny, homophobia, or racism, nor even for his potential violence or his class critiques, but instead for his refusal to take up his newly aligned position within a patriarchal, heteronormative, and industrialized capitalistic system. His whiteness and maleness offer and even require in consumerist, nuclear family-focused Cold War America a more socially acceptable position than that of an unmarried, childless loner with no social ties, no community responsibilities, no patriotic or nationalist commitments. This is not to suggest that the loner white male is a dramatically radical figure, eschewing larger societal oppressiveness against minorities and gay men and lesbians. Chester Himes, after all, clearly exposes at least the racist foundation of the tough guy, demonstrating his reliance upon the containment of black men, who are presented as docile, empty service employees or faceless symbols of degeneration and decay. In exposing and overturning the whiteness of the hardboiled tough guy, Himes confronts the abuse of black men in the genre and the larger social containment of black men that hardboiled novels reflect. He seizes the generic attributes and pushes them to absurdist heights while asserting a dazzlingly potent black hetero-masculinity. This assertion is often at the expense of black women and black gay menjust as white hardboiled fiction asserts white hetero-masculinity often at the expense of white women and white gay men. But despite the tough guy's reactionary elements, what I want the ensuing pages to show is the extent to which this hardboiled figure is no less ambiguous and threatening than the femmes fatales he confronts. And in fact he serves as a catalyst for just as firm a containment rhetoric as that which he imposes on the spider women he encounters. While, as I will demonstrate, Chester Himes foregrounds precisely what was occluded by hardboiled fiction and contained by 1950s xenophobia and racism-agentic black male heroes-Cain and Chandler radically isolate precisely the figure meant to be interpellated: white men. If white men do not assume their appropriate position of power, who will? This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of Nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure re-emerges in 1930-50s America as the 'tough guy'. The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler ( The Big Sleep ) and James M. Cain ( Double Indemnity ) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender 'otherness', this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War, closing with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels ( For Love of Imabelle ) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition. This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of 19th-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-'50s America as the "tough guy". The Street Was Mine looks to the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way he negotiates racial and gender "otherness", this study argues that the tough guy embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War. The book concludes with an analysis of Chester Himes, whose Harlem crime novels (For Love of Imabelle) unleash a ferocious revisionary critique of the tough guy tradition "This book considers a recurrent figure in American literature: the solitary white man moving through urban space. The descendent of nineteenth-century frontier and western heroes, the figure reemerges in 1930s-50s America as the "tough guy." The Street Was Mine looks at the tough guy in the works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) and their popular film noir adaptations. Focusing on the way the tough guy negotiates racial and gender "otherness," this study argues that he embodies the promise of an impervious white masculinity amidst the turmoil of the Depression through the beginnings of the Cold War Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction....Pages 1-19 “I Can Feel Her”....Pages 21-64 “Another Soft-Voiced Big Man I Had Strangely Liked”....Pages 65-89 The Woman in White....Pages 91-123 “Nothing You Can’t Fix”....Pages 125-154 “The Strict Domain of Whitey”....Pages 155-189 Epilogue....Pages 191-199 Back Matter....Pages 201-246