Fleshing out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879

Abstract

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body American Literature, 1833-1879. By Carolyn Sorisio. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. x, 299. Cloth, $44.95.)The study of race and gender has been a staple of historical and literary scholarship for roughly forty years now, and the study of the body for at least half that long. In her recent book, Carolyn Sorisio adds to this tradition by comparing the contributions of seven writers to the process of defining the body the mid-nineteenth century: Lydia Maria Child, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet A. Jacobs, and Martin Robeson Delany. In this published form of her 1996 doctoral dissertation, Sorisio argues that these authors helped to flesh out political and social understandings of the body, giving specific forms to the disembodied conception of personhood at work during the revolutionary era.Sorisio's methodology is distinct from that typically employed by historians and literary historicists and merits early mention. Although Sorisio some brief historical setting for each subject, as an strategy, she eschews contextualizing individual authors favor of gathering disparate authors into a contact zone where they might speak to each other ways not always provided by history. As she explains, her entire approach is guided by the overall inquiry that dominates this book: Can we combat the disturbingly divisive nature of the politics of the body through the imaginary space that literature provides (12)? Sorisio wants her methodology to strike a balance between investigating these texts in their own right and forging answers to some contemporary pedagogical and theoretical problems (2).In its narrative design, the book is structured around a concern with the dynamic between science and literature defining the body. Sorisio wishes to avoid the extremes of both pure physiological essentialism and complete social construction. After a chapter which she reviews the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific discourse on the body, highlighting the issues of race and gender, she gives a chapter to each of her principle authors. The scope of the project-seven different authors-necessarily makes much of the analysis of any given writer significantly derivative from previous scholarship. However, as Sorisio works through a running summary of existing work on each author, she the reader with her own contribution the form of synthesis of this scholarship and comparisons among the seven writers.Each author pursued a different strategy addressing race and gender as they gave specific shape to the body. In looking at the bodily dimensions of slavery without succumbing to voyeurism, Child successfully navigates the treacherous waters of propriety awaiting any women of her period who entered the literary sphere, especially if they were talking about black bodies. As a black woman, Harper used temperance rhetoric to deflect readers' gaze away from black bodies and refocus it on the shortcomings of whites. Emerson's commitment to establishing a common foundation across racial lines comes at the cost of reifying the era's dichotomies of gender, eventually undermining his racial egalitarianism. In avoiding such a gendered distinction, Fuller draws on ethnography to address tensions her feminism by symbolically transferring politically detrimental aspects of corporeality onto the bodies of Native Americans (146). …