Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray Dana D. Nelson (bio) Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction hannah lauren murray Edinburgh University Press, 2021 208 pp. Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction capably synthesizes thirtyplus years of race and whiteness studies in and beyond literature, focusing specifically on works by a handful of what the author terms "dead white men"—Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—to examine the destabilizing fiction and dispossessing identity of whiteness in the early United States, and to demonstrate that these writers in various ways depicted white identity as a kind of living death. Hannah Murray argues that early national literature, read through this lens, offers "fictive spaces of possibility, where White loss can be imagined and allayed" (14). She identifies this pervasive feeling of loss in the perpetually unfulfillable promises of racial belonging proffered and policed by whiteness, and she is particularly interested in the liminal and [End Page 1007] spectral figures that proliferate in the literature of the early nation, figures authors use both to mark and challenge the boundaries of belonging supposedly ensured by whiteness. Such figures, in their "marginal mischief, expose … the fragility of … [the] ideal of White citizenship, where the senses will inevitably lead to 'good sense'" (41). Murray aims to study literature as literature and not simply a window into history; when careful readers study the literature of the early nation in this way, she argues, they can see that "Whiteness is on the surface of these texts; it is ingrained in descriptions of character gesture, voice, behaviours, reactions, emotions—all aspects that fit into the ideology of Whiteness as a constructed social identity and phenomenology" (14). She urges her readers to see in the ghostly plots of early national literature white fears similar to those she sees emerging in our contemporary moment: "Repeatedly the fear of being treated as a minority, whether in the nineteenth or twenty-first century, finds form in the language of White exclusion, subjugation and death" (17). Murray shows how writers like Brown, Irving, and Cooper use liminal white characters, often marked by what she terms a "spectral indigeneity," to "challenge and test the ideals of exclusionary rational White Citizenship" or to "speak against changes in early national conceptions of civic economic masculinity" (47). Irving and Cooper in particular engage in forms of "spectral nostalgia" to gesture backward to previous, more putatively satisfying forms of communal belonging and sociality. Importantly for Murray, these versions of a "White indigenised voice" (66) do not forward Indigenous interests but rather "praise a specific form of White masculinity" (67). Other writers take up the porous boundaries of racial belonging between whites and Blacks, like Bird and Poe. Here, quite differently from the efficaciously bonded manhood nostalgically proffered by Cooper and Irving, we have a far more fragile and vulnerable framing of white masculine selfpossession (see 92). These authors focus their readers on the possible loss of white "self-possession and autonomy" (97). For Poe, figures near death or resuscitated from death render the vulnerability of whites to forms of economic exploitation that "negates his personhood." Thus "treated as an object, but with an active mind," Poe suggestively frames whiteness as its own bondage (115). In this way he vividly "voices anxieties over White men being reduced purely to bodies and material resources" (118). [End Page 1008] All the authors whom Murry studies critique, in some form or fashion, the atomizing and abstracting power of whiteness, its relentless undermining of social relations all in the name of a powerful form of belonging. In the case of Melville, Murray concentrates on his characters who are proximate to death either literally or through their socioeconomic powerlessness, and who are somehow "between states of full citizenship and slavery" (121). Such characters on society's edges offer Melville the opportunity to flesh out an identity grounded in off-whiteness, one that remodels white citizenship through a "contagion of silence" (144). In Murray's analysis, through characters like Pierre's Isabella, Bartleby, and Babo, Melville proffers a mode of resistance precisely through a voicelessness that "resists...