Literary Geography and Sovereign Violence: Resisting Tocqueville's Family Romance

Abstract

The initial impetus for this article Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of influence of democracy on the family, from which epigraph on social versus kindred ties taken. Restricting his observations to a comparison between traditional aristocratic in Europe and white bourgeois in nineteenth-century America, and perceiving what he regarded as a spirit of equality prevailing around domestic hearth,2 Tocqueville imagined, simultaneously, a breakdown of all old conventional rules of society3 and a closer bond (especially between fathers and sons) . Such a bond, he noted, reflects an affection and intimacy not afforded by patriarchal, commandbased relationships in aristocratic families. An inspection of Tocqueville's travel notes reveals that his remarks about American family are based primarily on his encounters with those who hosted him: white, well-to-do families. His initial experiences of domesticity took place when he and Beaumont went out into society in evenings in New York. Among several families they saw fairly often were of Mr. Prime, a banker who, Tocqueville noted, is richest businessman in New York, and of Mr. Livingston, the Prime Minister of United States.4 The scope of Tocqueville's generalizations about US domesticity becomes evident when one escapes confines of his narrow gaze at the