Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance: The Seamless Whole by Shawn Thomson

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Reviewed by: Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance: The Seamless Whole by Shawn Thomson Rebecca M. Rosen (bio) Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance: The Seamless Whole. By Shawn Thomson. (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Pp. 308. Cloth, $110.00.) In this critical monograph, Shawn Thomson presents readers with a challenge, asking them to put aside purely historicist readings of nineteenth-century American literature in favor of reading to identify materialist social critique. Throughout Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance, Thomson "examines discrete ideations of seams and seamlessness as sites of contact between the actual seams of antebellum life and the seamless futurity of these United States" (xii). Isolating metaphors of wholeness and fragmentation in several genres of that period, Thomson posits a reading of antebellum American literature as both embracing and rejecting the idea of the nation as a "glorious fabrick" knit of members working contentedly in concert (xii). Through close reading of literary and religious texts, Thomson teases out bonds between literal and metaphorical bodies and boundaries as representative of a kind of authorial cognitive dissonance in encomia and social criticism. According to Thomson, writers including Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass juxtaposed images [End Page 825] and metaphors of material wholeness with those of unraveling and structural collapse to illustrate the tensions lying beneath the seeming unity of the antebellum nation that they sought to rupture. In particular, Thomson suggests that criticisms of slavery and those it benefited, in both the North and the South, were often made through depictions of troublingly, tantalizingly flawed objects and spaces. What emerges in his analysis of texts—from Charles Edward Anthon's Belgium travelogue, Dickinson's poetry, and Melville's Typee and Moby-Dick—is a sense of a kind of material skepticism. This skepticism begins with Anthon's doubts regarding the veracity of spiritual claims, as Anthon regards the Holy Tunic of Treves—a "seamless" garment meant to represent the body of Christ, according to papal decree—as merely an object. For Thomson, this moment signifies an archetypal rejection of outsized authority that American authors from Hawthorne forward would follow. Thomson initially frames his exploration of unity and fracture in American literature through parallel anachronisms: the seamlessness of a disposable coffee cup, the digital harmony between an iPad and Apple Pencil, the harmful "techno-world" of Jurassic Park (1993). As it is, this beginning undercuts the often impressive exegesis within; a model of a key text read with an eye to his methodology would have been more effective. Some readings, such as that of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850) as a comment on Charles Edward Anthon, inspire new evaluations of that novel as a commentary on the breakdown of Puritan political dominance through the lens of religious and political upheaval in Europe. The pairing of these sources suggests that Thomson is noting a kind of second wave or aftershock of revolution, enacted through religious and literary rebellion. Commendably, Thomson turns our attention toward critical work that should be revisited within this framework, such as Jenny Franchot's Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (1994). But while Thomson gestures toward a theory of futurity bound up in the material, he rarely engages with more recent critical work on material culture and antebellum social and political protest, such as Bridget Henegan's Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (2007) and Catherine Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin's edited volume American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity (2011), or the colonial antecedents explored by Serena Zabin in her Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2011). [End Page 826] The initial analysis of Catholic themes and the social significance of the material in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter would have been more convincing if framed in those terms rather than attempting to trace influence between Hawthorne and Anthon (for example, linking Hawthorne's single use of the phrase "cast off" with its repetition in Ronge's writings). Similarly, the connection between Johanne Ronge and Frederick Douglass is stated rather than demonstrated, as is the comparison of Dickinson's material metaphors ("Too silver for a...