Isa Glenn's Heat: Imperialist Meltdowns through a Cool Jamesian Lens
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19405103.56.1.05
ISSN1940-5103
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoIn the aftermath of the Civil War, novelist Isa Glenn (1874–1951) was raised to uphold the white supremacist and elitist views of a southern lady. She became an army wife in an equally racist and hierarchical milieu. It was the heyday of an imperialism based on racism that impelled the U.S. Army's colonization efforts at the turn into the twentieth century, particularly in the wartime Philippines where she was stationed with her husband. When she was widowed in 1921, she moved to New York where she began publishing fiction while she was exposed to more progressive points of view. She became part of one of the most exciting and innovative milieus in American literary history as part of the literary and artistic set that surrounded Carl Van Vechten, the Decadent novelist and later photographer, who is best known for his promotion of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Beginning with the publication of short stories in prominent magazines in 1923, she had a remarkable career as a bestselling and celebrated novelist until the publication of her last novel in 1935. With the Depression, her psychologically probing, somewhat satiric studies of the privileged were no longer in fashion. She lived for another sixteen years, dying in 1951 at the age of seventy-seven, but she was already dead to literary history due to the sexist weeding of the American literary canon.Since many of the issues raised by the Philippine War (1899–1902) were the legacy of the racism and colonial mentality of the South, Glenn was also assessing her family's Confederate past when she wrote her first novel Heat (1926). I argue that her experiences in the Philippines and the anti-imperialist sentiments that followed the Philippine War led her to question racism and colonialism in Heat. After providing some context about the Philippines and the Philippine War as related to Glenn's and her husband's experiences, I will demonstrate how in Heat Glenn brilliantly adapted Henry James’ techniques and his theme of American innocents abroad to a very un-Jamesian topic: the anti-imperialist views that were resurgent early in the twentieth century after the revelations of the torture and massacres of Filipinos by American troops.Glenn's exposure to imperialism was in tandem with her country's embrace of colonization1 and her courtship by (1897–1903) and marriage (1903–1921) to J. Bayard Schindel. He was the scion of an Army family and a West Point graduate who participated, like Teddy Roosevelt, in the siege of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War for which Schindel received a Silver Star for gallantry. As Kristin L. Hoganson delineates in Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish American and Philippine-American Wars, the Spanish-American War made armed conflict romantic again. Hoganson argues that, along with economic and strategic goals, pro-war Americans, “jingoists” like Theodore Roosevelt, wanted war to reinvigorate American manhood, now dangerously weakening in the Darwinian struggle for supremacy. The jingoists attributed this decline of manliness to a plethora of reasons, including the distance in time from the Civil War, a lapse from a martial and chivalric honor culture, the closing of the frontier, the panic of 1893 and ensuing economic depression, and the desire for more rights and the vote for women.2 The earlier manly ideal of self-control was now considered the weakness of the “dude . . . the stereotypically wealthy effeminate man, usually from the Northeast.”3 Clearly, as Hoganson shows, “the Spanish-American War breathed new life into the belief that military men made the best leaders,”4 as exemplified by Roosevelt and the Rough Riders’ successful and highly publicized charge during the battle of San Juan Hill.Glenn gleaned the facts and impressions that she would use to depict the Philippines in Heat from her avid reading of the print media of the day, from Schindel's letters to her,5 and her own experiences in Manila and U.S. Army outposts in the Philippines. In newspapers and magazines, she observed the ideological struggle between American imperialists and anti-imperialists. The imperialists argued that in addition to providing an arena for the development of manliness, the Philippines offered economic opportunities as a gateway to the Far East and strategic military advantages. As American enslavers had claimed about the enslaved, so imperialists piously clothed their exploitation in the need to Christianize and “civilize” the Filipinos, “our little brown brothers,” since they were incapable of ruling themselves. The anti-imperialists, like the earlier abolitionists, argued that such control of their fellow human beings was contrary to the democratic ideals of the Founders. Such tyrannical power would ruin the characters and the health of the colonizers, especially young and impressionable young soldiers, promoting behaviors of unchecked violence and sexual coercion much as slavery had brutalized the characters of enslavers.6From Schindel's letters and her own relatively brief sojourns in the Philippines in 1906 and 1910–1912, Glenn observed how imperialism operated on the ground to the obvious detriment of Filipinos but also to the impaired character of the individuals affiliated with the conquering forces, her principal focus in Heat. The Philippine War technically lasted from 1899 to 1902, but the United States and Bayard Schindel were engaged for more than a decade after the War's end in trying to put down anti-colonialist insurgents, picking up where the Spanish had left off when they lost the Philippines to the U.S. in the Spanish-American War.7 Schindel was, by many accounts, a kindly, loyal, unselfish, brave, steadfast, and affectionate man, but he shared the culturally embedded racism of his profession and class that led to a belief in the “White Man's Burden” to bring civilization to those he believed lacked it and were willing to be acculturated, namely those who were not white upper-class Protestants of Anglo-Saxon descent. As part of this “civilizing” effort, federal appeals court Judge William Howard Taft, before his presidency, arrived in the Philippines with a commission in 1900 whose mission was to determine how to govern the Philippines while instructing the Filipinos in self-government.8 Schindel dined and socialized with him. On active duty, Schindel was commended for gallantry by General Leonard Wood for his role in the Battle of Bud Jalo in early March 1906, during which American troops, in the declivity of an extinct volcano, killed about six hundred Moros (Muslim freedom fighters), including women and children, in what can only be characterized as a massacre, not a battle.9 (Figure 1.)We do not know Glenn's opinions about the situation in the Philippines while she was there because she was usually with her husband and so wrote few letters to him, but her early short stories about the Philippines, published from 1923 to 1930, demonstrate that from her observations in the Philippines and the progressive circles in which she later moved in New York she had developed an anti-imperialist point of view10 that she explores in Heat (1926). In this, her first novel, Glenn delineates the ways that the natural world, the people, and the cities of the Philippines triumph over clueless Americans who cannot successfully adapt to the climate and culture. This stubborn inability or refusal to adapt leads to the physical and moral breakdown of whites in the tropics, with the hazards for white women in the tropics exacerbated by rigid gender, racial, and class distinctions. Paradoxically, it is also impossible for Americans to thrive by taking the opposite path of so-called decadence through either living with the “natives” or emulating the ostensibly enervated Spaniards. Glenn's Americans are innocents abroad and the U.S. is a young nation, recklessly and ignorantly toying with destructive forces that they are unable to comprehend.Glenn greatly admired the works of Henry James. In Heat, she uses one of his distinctive techniques, central consciousness, as well as her more graphic and naturalistic version of his most famous theme, American innocents abroad. After a prologue detailing the arrival of three Americans in Manila, the novel is divided into three sections, each devoted to the consciousness of one of the three who meet on a U.S. transport ship en route to the Philippines in the first years of the twentieth century and who each displays a facet of American innocence—or ignorance—abroad that represents a form of imperialism. Like Henry James’ Christopher Newman in The American, soldier Tom Vernay is lured by the deceptive beauty of a decaying European culture as embodied in a beautiful woman, in his case the Spanish Dolores. Vernay's romantic illusions about the defeated aristocratic Spaniards dwelling in Manila's old Walled City echo the addiction of Americans at home to romances of the Old Plantation, the fantasy of a happily patriarchal and racially hierarchical antebellum South as exemplified in bestsellers by Thomas Nelson Page. Charlotte Carson, the second central consciousness, arrives in Manila to teach needy and innocent Filipino children much as the governess in James’ The Turn of the Screw naively wishes to save her young charges and prove her own worth. Charlotte represents not only a misguided American altruism but the desire of some American “ladies” to break free from a life of decorative frivolity and prove that they are necessary to the world. The third consciousness is that of Dick Saulsbury, who has come to the Philippines to turn a profit through selling cement as the Americans tear down parts of old Manila to modernize it. Like many of the imperialists of the day, he cloaks his profit motive by insisting upon the inevitability of progress and, by the end of the novel, is on his way to realizing a fortune rivalling that of Caspar Goodwood in James’ The Portrait of a Lady. It is as if Glenn has three anti-imperialist novels at work simultaneously: Vernay's romantic and decadent tale, Charlotte's deterministic story of altruism destroyed by the greater strength of nature and of hierarchical and patriarchal societies, and Saulsbury's naturalistic narrative of the single-minded survival of the fittest under the rationalization of progress.11Much as James silhouettes the treacherous allure of an older civilization in Paris in The American and The Ambassadors, so Glenn characterizes Manila as the colonial embodiment of an elderly and decadent Spain. Anti-imperialists of the day resisted the imperialist view of youth as a desirable quality in American dealings with the rest of the world.12 In “Lunar Enchantments,” a short story published in Harper's Bazaar in March 1930, four years after the publication of Heat, Glenn expresses similarly anti-imperialist views through a Jamesian observer, the mature Colonel Fairchild with his decades of experience in the Philippines. He successfully warns a young Army wife in Manila against a romance with a Spaniard by using the tragic example of a young woman who succumbed to a similar temptation years before. He considers these women's dilemmas representative of the American position in the Philippines as a successor to an ancient civilization. As he warns of the dangers of “turning back” into the past, he describes the Spaniards in Manila asFor anti-imperialists, the thoughtful, experienced maturity of Captain Fairchild was prized over heedless youth, both for individuals and the republic.In Heat, Glenn personifies Manila as a lady who “was being insulted”14 by young America's energetic improvements such as the draining of the moat. “Manila was feminine, was terrible because she was feminine; and they had better look out! For she was capable of changing her mood with her garments. She could smile in the sunlight and love in the moonlight; and all the time she wore a knife in her stocking” (69), foreshadowing Tom Vernay's betrayal by Dolores and abuse by Josefa. Indeed, Glenn, through the consciousness of Vernay, seems to go so far as to replicate Edgar Allan Poe's narrator's belief that the stones of the mansion in “The Fall of the House of Usher” have their own sentience accrued from the Ushers’ consciousnesses over time in their ancient dwelling. Vernay believes that Manila “must have a consciousness of its own—must have a resentment that was a conscious resentment” (100). Echoing Roderick Usher's extreme sensitivity to sound, Vernay even speculates about the notes of a waltz: “Perhaps, if notes could physically hurt him, they could work a change in inanimate substance?” (137). His imagination can recognize the dangers of an old civilization for an American, but his American sense of invulnerability keeps him from heeding the warning.Unlike James, though, Glenn also includes a naturalistic twist to her tragedy. If life is a Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest, white American men and women are not fit to flourish in the tropics. They deteriorate, physically and mentally, at the hands of nature, as represented by the tropical heat and vegetation, and through the resistance of the indigenous people who live in closer accord with nature, the Filipinos. Most dangerous is the eponymous heat. In a contemporary review of Heat, Peggy Mitchell (known a decade later as Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind), astutely observed that Glenn “has made an impersonal natural element [heat] the villain of her novel.”15 Although Vernay had looked forward to the warmth of the Philippines, heat strikes down the ignorant or innocent young officer when he carries a military message in Manila in the noon sun, resulting in heatstroke and dengue fever. “At midday, Vernay knew, nobody with brains in the head should expose that head to the wicked rays of the sun. Only Americans did it. But then, Americans did all things that the zone forbade. . . . Cocky—that was what the Americans were out here” (67). Because of the unrelenting hubris of the American army's refusal to adapt to local conditions, Vernay is hospitalized and left behind in Manila while his brothers in arms are sent to fight the Moros in the south. He had wanted to be a “knight” (297) when “he had thought that his work would be a young man's work; he had thought that he would be fighting, getting wounded, shedding his own blood and the blood of other men” (65). Thwarted of this ambition, he reads the Spanish newspapers as he recuperates and becomes increasing enamored with Spanish civilization. “He knew that he would look back upon that sojourn in the hospital as a real turning of a real corner” (76), veering away from Americans and their cheerful, oblivious practicality.In addition to the agency of the treacherous heat, Glenn uses tropical flowers to foreshadow the ways that Vernay's enchantment with Dolores and the Spaniards lures him to his doom. Imported by the Spanish, the Ylang-Ylang, Singapore Jasmine, suggests the deceptively “feminine” dependency of Dolores on Vernay which had led him away from American women like Charlotte Carson: “It took the Ylang Ylang to swerve him from the trail of Flirtation Walk,” where young American ladies were courted by cadets at West Point (118). Vernay “was not sure that a wife should have brains. The thing that he did not like about Charlotte was this very thing of her intelligent independence” (116). Unlike the wholesome and independent Charlotte, Dolores is like the Ylang Ylang: a most awful vine along the trunk of a Royal Palm. The great leaves of the vine were bright green and were striped with a white that seemed to be a bright white because it lacked the purity of intention of any white he had ever seen. The awkward stem of the vine struggled with the palm, pressing itself closely to it as if with evil intent, holding to it, refusing to let the uprightness of the palm have its way. The vine was wooing the palm, but not to good. Vernay's flesh crept because the vine seemed lascivious. . . . The vine had made him homesick [since he initially thinks it is a gardenia] because it had shaken him with its suggestion of the strange. (18)He cannot recognize the Ylang Ylang or Dolores for what they are as representations of the fate of American imperialists in the tropics, but he insists on imposing an American image, the gardenia, upon them. Another flower imported by the Spanish, the Dama de la Noche or night-blooming jasmine, has similarly sinister attractions since it blooms “always in hidden gardens, and always sending forth their little, dainty, insinuating whispers of delight” (23). Vernay associates this “lady of the night” with Dolores, his own belle dame sans merci. Interestingly, according to legend, this jasmine confers psychoactive and aphrodisiac powers, suggestive of the spell or enchantment of heat, flowers, and Dolores upon Vernay.16Vernay is a thwarted artist who wants to make his life into a work of art, a Jamesian artist in life, but his imaginings are characteristic of sentimental romances. He knows that he cannot be a painter: “He would have liked to paint her [Charlotte], if drastic training in mechanical drawing at West Point had not taken out of him the power to do so” (29). Charlotte recognizes his frustration and his delusory compensation: “She had been knowing all the time, at the back of her head, that the few in the army who have the creative mind are the ones that go morbid. . . . Vernay was doing creative jobs all of this time. He had created a Manila of his own. He had created a Dolores of his own” (250). Specifically, he has created his version of the U.S. romance of reconciliation in which the Yankee officer marries the Southern belle, thus reuniting the country after the Civil War. “Dolores represented for him history, tradition, his eternal romance—with the garment of pity that a brave man flings over the vanquished” (177). Glenn, however, was not an apologist for the “romance” of the antebellum South or the colonized Philippines. Like William Faulkner and other Southern modernists, she questioned these pleasing illusions about the Old South by delineating the tragedies to which they led. The plot of Heat foreshadows, to cite one example, a 1944 short story by Southern modernist (and admirer of Henry James) Caroline Gordon, “The Forest of the South,” in which a Yankee officer pledges himself to a beautiful Southern belle whose plantation his troops are occupying. Her loveliness cloaks the madness caused by her father's death, her mother's premature senility, and the loss of her home. The officer sees none of these tragedies as traumatic, as opposed to romantic, and he commits himself to her and to misery.17 Similarly, Vernay cannot realize what is important to Dolores: her family, her culture, and her religion. Like James’ Claire de Cintré in The American, she ultimately refuses to marry a non-Catholic and resolves to accept her family's chosen spouse when they repatriate to Spain.Glenn also skewers the romance of old civilizations by showing them not as quaintly antiquarian but as despairingly decadent. As the third central consciousness, the materialistic but realistic cement salesman Dick Saulsbury tells Vernay, “I'm not sure you aren't one of those fool artists who want things to be in the last stages of dry rot before they'll take the trouble to squint at ’em (103). According to Richard A. Long and Iva G. Jones, “The ‘decadent novel’ per se involves a specialization of situation and emotion beyond the probabilities of daily life, and consequently the imposition of values which relate negatively to the stated values of the culture. . . . usually involves a rejection of present-day civilization, using as a norm the medieval synthesis or its supposed present-day equivalent, Roman Catholicism.”18 In a posthumously published review of Heat, D. H. Lawrence calls Vernay “romantic,”19 commenting that “There are plenty of Tom Vernays, romantic and sensuous, living in a world of their own, which really is a world of the past.”20 Vernay is a decadent artist (novelist) with life as his canvas.21 He desires “neglect that was exquisite, decay that was beautiful, a disregard for hygiene that spoke of the health of an ideal which had always lived—a giving way to enervation because that ideal was in no danger of being killed” (8). He prefers the walled gardens of the Spanish in the Intramuros, the Walled City, to the American society of the Army and Navy Club and the open landscape and conformity of the Parade Ground. Interestingly, Glenn's literary mentor, to whom she showed drafts of her work and to whom Heat is dedicated, Carl Van Vechten, is often called a decadent novelist for his glorification of surface beauty and aesthetic pleasures above practical concerns. Van Vechten's characters, however, seem to present a hedonistic version of decadence which is not Glenn's.22 Vernay is an idealistic lover of beauty, not a seeker after the pleasures of the flesh.Glenn dismantles the romances of reconciliation and decadence by showing their connections to racism and sexism and their destruction of those who are blind to the ruthlessness masked by such sentimentality. Enraptured by his dream of chivalric Spain, Vernay disregards Spain's cruelties in its conquest of Filipinos and is largely oblivious to the Filipinos themselves: “I don't know that I've thought much about the native side of it” (34), but he does know that “the Spaniards knew what they were about when they drew their colour line!” (202). Early in the novel, Vernay drunkenly tells Charlotte he loves her, but “you're so hard to manage” (39). She asks him, “Is it necessary to try to manage a person—when you love the person? . . . I don't believe that” (40). He wants women who are decorative and easily controlled, as he mistakenly believes Dolores to be: “Charm was in this idea of the cloistered girl” (25). Ironically, though he believes he rejects American values, he clearly displays an imperialistic attitude toward those he regards as inferior and thus in need of controlling.Glenn seems to punish Vernay for his selfish blindness to the truly oppressed women and Filipinos. In his obsession with the now-vanquished Spaniards, Vernay even resigns his commission in hopes of gaining favor with Dolores’ family by renouncing the conquering American Army. Ironically, he plummets in Dolores’ giddy estimation because he no longer wears a uniform. Charlotte believes that it was not the loss of Dolores which led to the deterioration of Vernay's manliness, but like the jingoists of the era she thinks that “he hurt something in his soul by going back on his country!” (302), his early ideals as a West Point cadet and then as a novice officer. By the end of the novel, four years after Dolores left for Spain with her family, Vernay is a drunk, ostracized by Americans because he lives with Josefa, a mestiza. Ironically, Josefa has gained the upper hand over the American. She exploits Vernay and verbally and physically abuses him. Her values are diametrically opposed to what he had wanted to defend as an American: “She was Katipunan [an anti-colonial revolutionary]. She and her lover, Estéban Perez, were against all whites. Josefa, she lives with the whites; but it was only to get dinero for Estéban to squander on the cockpit” (197–98).23 Dick Saulsbury summarizes Vernay's highly ironic defeat by the Philippines: “He ain't a white man any more!” (296).Charlotte Carson, like Vernay, is an idealist, but with a practical bent. “Charlotte considered history as a study of conditions that she could better; while to Vernay it was the record of lives that had really been lived, of sufferings that had really been suffered, of loves and hates and delights of the senses that had left their imprint on the places wherein they had come about” (98). In order to “better” the Filipinos, Charlotte arrives in Manila as one of the hundreds of American teachers who came to the Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth century to instruct Filipino children with an emphasis on the English language and American values. She also represents the desire to introduce social, economic, educational, and hygienic reforms of the Progressive movement.24 Charlotte genuinely feels for the “poor, half-naked, ignorant things” (12). Like the altruistic imperialists of the day, she believes that the conquest of the Philippines was justified by the needs of the Filipinos, much as enslavers justified slavery or teachers arrived in the Reconstruction South to educate newly freed Blacks: “what have we taken the Islands over for, if we're not to do them some good—to lift them up—to—to educate them? . . . And it certainly is a good thing—the best thing in the world for them—that we took them” (4–5). She differentiates her brand of acculturation from that of the Spanish by pleading lack of cruelty and violence as she compares the Filipinos to frangipani blossoms: “the waxy petals where she touched them turned brown. ‘You see, we'd better not handle the natives roughly—or even the native flowers’” (15). She rejects the military attempts at reform. As she tells Vernay, “You can't civilize a country by whacking it over the head with the flat of a sword. That was Spain's mistake. That's your mistake” (30).Charlotte's altruistic mission dooms her to misery because it places her in impossible positions of liminality,25 much like the governess in James’ The Turn of the Screw who tries desperately to earn a place and recognition by “saving” the children in her charge, not realizing that she may be the one in danger. Also like James’ governess, Charlotte's radical (to American society) responses to her new milieu make her situation worse. Charlotte questions the necessity of war, rendering her suspect to the military-based American society in Manila.26 The non-whites do not respect her because she has given up the perquisites of a white woman to live among the Filipinos. A waiter in the ice cream parlor purposely spills a dish on her and justifies his lack of punctiliousness in cleaning her up by pointing out her lack of importance: “Ticher no matter. . . . Ticher iss mujer what iss not in the Arrmy. Ticher iss mucho amigo with the Filipinos” (80). She is a woman who associates with the conquered, not the conquerors. She tells Vernay of the veiled contempt of her pupils’ parents: “They are awfully, formally polite, and they are laughing behind it” (96). Vernay explains, “They can't take it in why you lower yourself to teach them” (201). She also does not fit in with the American officers’ wives, “women who shopped” (31) and devoted themselves to dress and parties. They expect Charlotte to do errands for them, but she is ignored in the tailors’ shop until all male customers have completed their business (194–95). Her liminality earns no respect from any quarter.Early in the novel, Charlotte loses her chance to gain a secure place in society through a possible marriage to Vernay. The fog that wafts between them on the first page of the novel foreshadows their inability to see and understand each other. While Charlotte's blonde, healthy good looks appeal to Vernay's romantic worship of beauty, she is not feminine enough for him. He speculates about “whether the fact of his knowing so absolutely that she was to be relied upon for the perceptibly pleasant qualities of good sense and balance was what made her lack the charm of something on which he would not be able to count so definitely” (96). As D. H. Lawrence puts it, “No man could feel tenderly possessive towards the statue of Liberty. And Charlotte is, in the way of independence and honesty and thinking for herself, just a bit of a statue of Liberty.”27 She in turn cannot appreciate Vernay's romanticizing of the past: “A child at her school had told her that the ugly thing called the Dama de la Noche brought good luck in love if one's senses could catch its elusive fragrance. Tom Vernay, standing outside the garden, was catching the fragrance; and Charlotte, a little way down the street, was missing it” (187).Charlotte cannot be incorporated into any of the available societies; she does not fit their rigid paradigms, including that of a conventional marriage. Her liminality leads to her mental, moral, and physical deterioration as though Glenn means to suggest that an independent woman cannot stave off the forces of both society and nature. Charlotte's increasing marginality sours her toward both American and Filipino society: “She reflected bitterly that she saw too few Americans—always excepting the teachers—to keep her feet on the ground. She would be going juramentado [like a Muslim Moro swordsman on suicidal mission to kill as many Christians as possible] if she did not watch herself” (193). When she feels an urge to slap both an American colonel's wife and native boys and girls, she wonders “whether she had been out here too long” and begins to consider the benefits of women's suffrage (194–95). In compensation for her many losses—Vernay, secure social status, her ideals—when she changes boarding houses, she steals a Chinese vase that her landlady refused to sell her and recognizes that “the climate” was “bad on one's morals” (167). She begins to realize the consequences of imperialism for whites: “I've had my own time fighting. I –I hope we don't keep the hateful Islands. They—they'll ruin—us” (134).Vernay's final disillusionment with Old Spain is epitomized by Dolores’ betrayal. In contrast, Charlotte's epiphany, her loss of belief in the power of altruism, comes when she takes shelter in a carriage from the chilling downpour of the rainy season. After several years in the Philippines, she no longer believes that her failures as a teacher have cultural causes and she attributes them to the greater force of nature: “she was so far demoralized that she acknowledged a great
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