Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray Kelly Ross HANNAH LAUREN MURRAY Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. viii + 216 pp. Hannah Murray’s Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction persuasively demonstrates that the White male fragility on which Donald Trump capitalized to ascend to the United States presidency is not a new phenomenon but rather has been a powerful anxiety since the nation’s founding. In this review, I follow Murray’s capitalization of White and Whiteness, a practice that she adopts to “focus[] attention on Whiteness as a significant social construct deserving of critique, rather than a default position that today maintains its power through invisibility” (viii). In six chronologically organized chapters, treating authors including Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Frank L. Webb, Murray argues that White characters who have had, or are in danger of having, their White status and privilege stripped from them express “imagined fears of lost White rights” (179). The loss renders these “liminally White” characters socially dead, akin to non-White groups denied citizenship in the early United States (5). For example, Murray reads Isabel Banford and Bartleby as liminally White characters who provoke their “fully White counterparts,” Pierre and the lawyer, to assert their own autonomy by establishing “mastery” over these dependents. In this important contribution to United States literary studies, Murray offers a genealogy of White identity, revealing how it was being constructed and challenged at a critical moment in United States history. Fears of White marginalization were salient in the period Murray focuses on because the young nation was in the process of defining citizenship. As Murray notes in her introduction, native-born citizenship was not explicitly codified in the Constitution or other legal texts, and thus was shaped through “extra-legal and cultural discussion” (7). Citizenship demanded the performance of a set of civic behaviors including industry, rationality, respectability, sociality, and autonomy. At the same time, the criteria for naturalization of foreign-born persons from 1798 onward limited eligibility to White people. Thus, Whiteness and United States citizenship became indistinguishable, and these civic behaviors were coded as White civic values. [End Page 35] Following critical Whiteness studies’ precept that Whiteness is not biological but rather is “a practice of personal values and behaviors that have come to be identified and maintained as White,” Murray approaches Whiteness not through phenotypical markers, but through voice (4). Specifically, she argues that while a White male voice imagined as a “disembodied, abstracted citizen” was central to civic identity, “unexpected and unusual” voices of liminal White men challenge White civic ideals. This emphasis on voice in these texts works well in chapters that treat “inexplicable voices,” such as Brown’s ventriloquists or Poe’s speaking corpses, though it is less effective in others. At times “voice” simply seems to mean characters’ dialogue or a story’s narrative mode, as in Irving’s ghost stories or Bird’s appropriation of the slave narrative. Nevertheless, by centering the construction of White identity, Murray’s readings in each chapter offer a new angle on canonical texts from Brown’s Wieland (1798) to “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). For example, in the first chapter, on Wieland and “Somnambulism: A Fragment” (c. 1799), Murray reinvigorates the typical interpretation of Carwin as an outsider who disturbs the “family-as-nation microcosm” modelled by the Wielands (22). The early national ideology of rational citizenship based on one’s ability to regulate the senses excluded groups who were thought to lack common sense, including Native Americans, African Americans, women, and mentally handicapped people. Critiquing this model of citizenship, Brown shows how Carwin’s vocal abilities destroy the White citizen’s capacity to discern the truth. Murray updates this standard reading, demonstrating that Brown figures the Anglo-American Carwin as “less than White” by associating his ventriloquism with Native American speech. Brown thus warns his readers about the fragility of exclusionary White citizenship and the threat posed by the White male citizen, who is the real source of violence in Brown’s fiction, rather than the fantasized racial Other...