Episodes from the History of Deviance The Harvard community has made this article openly avail

343 Pages·2012·2.31 MB·English

Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from
the History of Deviance
Citation
Gavranovic, Altin. 2012. Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of
Deviance. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.
Permanent link
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9904014
Terms of Use
This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available
under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://
nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAA
Share Your Story
The Harvard community has made this article openly available.
Please share how this access benefits you. Submit a story .
Accessibility
©2012 Altin Gavranovic
All rights reserved
Dissertation Advisor: John Stauffer Author: Altin Gavranovic

Through the Looking Glass Darkly:
Episodes from the History of Deviance

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural history of deviance in the United States. I use a series of case studies to
examine the way deviant figures have been represented and experienced within American culture. The
dissertation covers four historical eras and examines a representative deviant figure in each of them.
The first chapter deals with the figure of the witch in Puritan New England, the second examines the
libertine in the early American republic, the third deals with freaks in Victorian America and the fourth
studies the flapper in the roaring twenties. Each of these chapters is focused on a particular historical
crisis, trial or scandal that produced a rich body of historical evidence for study and analysis: the Salem
Witch Trial of 1692, the Apthorp-Morton Scandal of 1788, the sensational Beecher-Tilton Affair of 1875
and the Ruth Snyder Trial of 1927.

My overarching thesis is that representations of deviants reveal a deep cultural preoccupation with
failure and inadequacy, which are projected onto deviant figures. This interpretation is an attempt to
move beyond viewing representations of deviance as simply being attempts to repress those who do not
conform to societal norms, or to shore up fragile social identities by creating ‘others’ against whom the
normal American could be negatively defined.
iii
Instead, I argue that representations of deviance were compelling to the Americans who created them
primarily as powerful fantasies about failure, lack and inadequacy. On to the rich symbolic canvas of the
deviant figure, Americans projected their anxieties about personal and social failure. In different ways at
different times, deviants have been used to articulate the various possible ways in which a person could
fail to meet their society’s ideals and expectations, and to imagine the consequences of such failures for
both individual personhood and society as a whole. The deviant has therefore historically served as a
kind of mirror to the culture which produced him or her: a mirror in which a culture might darkly
glimpse its own values, distorted by the terrifying failure to achieve that which is most prized.

iv
Table of Contents

Dedication vi

Acknowledgements vii-ix

Introduction 1

1692: The Witch 52

1788: The Libertine 110

1875: The Freak 176

1927: The Flapper 247

Coda 309

Bibliography 315-334

v
Za Mamu i Tatu

vi
Acknowledgements

Let me begin by thanking a few people who do thankless and often overlooked work, and yet who bring
an enormous amount of grace and humanity to a job that the world condescends to deem unglamorous.
One of the many tasks assigned to departmental administrators is to guide graduate students through
the byzantine rules, spoken and unspoken, which govern life at institutions of higher education, and to
be their friend, ally and advisor in the treacherous passage through graduate school. They are in every
way the Virgils to our Dantes, and the best of them are shining examples of how to turn a bureaucratic
job into a form of human excellence. All who know them will be able to think of countless situations in
which the interventions of Christine McFadden and Arthur Patton-Hock removed with seeming ease
barriers that had seemed impenetrable, or miraculously effected labors that seemed impossibly
herculean. To them both, for innumerable such favors both large and small, my many thanks.

Many thanks also to John Stauffer, Arthur Kleinman and Ann Braude, who formed my dissertation
committee, and also to Jackson Lears, who was kind enough to be an outside reader for the defense. To
break with customary and conventional ways of doing a thing is always a somewhat precarious
enterprise, and such experiments are always in need of friends in high places. My academic advisors
entrusted me with an enormous amount of freedom, allowed me to take the risks that are so essential
to real thinking, and humored me when I wandered very far indeed from their own areas of geographic,
temporal and even disciplinary expertise. Without John’s early and ongoing encouragement, I might well
have left graduate school without ever starting this dissertation, and without Arthur’s and Ann’s
generous support for the project, the hostility and skepticism it met with in other quarters might have
made it impossible to bring the project to completion. They not only made the work better through their
insightful comments, they made it possible for me to do it at all, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
vii
Writing is solitary and miserable labor, and I have only ever found it bearable when surrounded by
friends whose warm company provides a much-needed counterpoint to the loneliness of the work of
thinking and creation. I’ve long looked forward to the moment when I would be able to thank the Am
Civ crew: Marisa Egerstrom for those countless evenings (and, less occasionally than one might like to
admit, mornings) spent justifying the ways of God to man over Manhattans; Summer Shafer for that
curiously charming surliness and wanton aggression with which she so delightfully makes her way
through life, not to mention for finally giving me someone to play pool with; Hillary Kaell for her
irrepressible lightness of heart and for teaching me that the way to survive graduate school was to never
take it the slightest bit seriously; to Steven Brown for the endless meanderings through Cambridge and
the worlds of literature, history and art, and to Sandy Placido for her toughness and optimism and for
getting what friendship looks like in a way that few people really do. And, of course, to Eva Payne, Katie
Gerbner and Sean Blanchet, Aaron Hatley and Maggie Gates for all the happy hours and happy-hours,
and to Eli Cook for his all-around excellence as a thinker and human being and for reminding me at a
crucial moment that capitalism is not about markets but rather social relations. Outside of Harvard, I
think fondly back on late nights of booze and excellent conversation with Chris Schultz and Taylor
Daynes, and my treasured, albeit intermittent, friendship with Karla Bertrand.

Back home, my main intellectual partner in crime was Samia Khatun, with whom I threshed out on the
colonial veranda over those much-missed lunches matters pertaining to witches and lascars, freaks and
emus, the evils of capitalism and academia, and much else besides. And of course I must thank Frances
Olive, not for anything to do with the dissertation, but for being far more to me than a dissertation ever
viii
could be. Thanks also to Andrew Geeves, Catherine Deans, Freya Brennan, Rachel Burton and Gareth
Williams for friendships which made the last year of writing feel rich with new promise.

Finally, a big, warm thanks to the Nerkez Gavranovic and Amela Aganovic Bequest for the Support of
Wayward Children, without which the last twenty-eight years (and the last five in particular) would have
been a much dicier proposition. And thanks, besides, for love and support of all kinds, and much more,
most of which I have doubtless forgotten!

ix
Introduction
1