Nineteenth-century American Culture Research Articles

Sewing in Concord

It used to be argued that nineteenth-century American domestic culture had been trivial, narrow-minded, and self-indulgent. From Hawthorne’s “damned mob of scribbling women” through Mark Twain’s “o...

Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (review)

Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (review)

Outlawing "Coolies": Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation

Exploring the ambiguous status of "coolies" in nineteenth-century American culture and law, "Outlawing ÔCooliesÕ" proposes an alternative interpretation of the first federal laws restricting immigration into the United States. Rather than focusing on the modern immigration system that the Page Law (1875) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) inaugurated, Jung examines their legal and political precedents: slave trade prohibitions. Through diplomatic correspondence from China and Cuba, proslavery propaganda from the Old South, and antislavery legislative efforts in Congress, he demonstrates how "coolies" came to embody coerced labor in the age of emancipation. The antebellum equation of "coolies" with enslaved plantation labor in the Caribbean eventually drove Republicans to prohibit American participation in the international trafficking of "coolies" during the Civil War. This little known law of 1862, he suggests, reflected and established a racial logic that would enable the passage of anti-Asian immigration restrictions as antislavery, pro-immigrant measures. Outlawing "coolies" also allowed the U.S. nation-state to deepen and defend its imperial presence in Asia and the Americas under the banner of freedom.

Literary Interiors, Cherished Things, and Feminine Subjectivity in the Gilded Age

THE SO-CALLED GILDED AGE is generally perceived as time when materialist mentality took hold of Americans--a period when their country underwent tremendous economic and social transformations that had major impact on people's lives, attitudes, and ways of self-fashioning. Indeed, the dominant narrative about the Gilded Age is, as Winfried Fluck and Leo Marx have pointed out, the one about America's historical turn towards (415). In his recent study A Sense of Things (2003), Bill Brown draws attention to the centrality of the physical object world in late nineteenth-century American culture; he speaks of an age of things, referring to an era when the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of material objects took on unprecedented forms and quantities (5). My focus here will also be on things and the relations people maintain with them, but I am less concerned with discontinuity--the narratives of new materialism--than with certain continuities. I will concentrate on the domestic, subjective, and feminine dimensions of human object-relations--relations that are embedded in and shaped by specifically gendered interiors. In this paper, interiority denotes both subjectivity and interior space, and I explore the connections between spatial, material, and psychic aspects of interiority, including the inner or secret life of things. Accordingly, it is the inside of rather than its conspicuousness that interests me here--a materialism that is intimate rather than public, moral rather than fetishistic, idiosyncratic rather than narcissistic. Concretely, I will analyze the literary life of domestic objects in two short stories, one by Sarah Orne Jewett and one by Mary Wilkins Freeman. In these writings, the domestic is the major arena of women's development, influence, and self-articulation, and it is also the realm where the relations between the genders, parents, and children, and, most significantly, people and things are mapped out. I consider the literary treatment of domestic material culture with regard to the cultural revaluation of the so-called sphere in mid-nineteenth-century America, which attributed major responsibility to women as guardians of civilization. In this tradition, the white middle-class home was closely associated with an ideal of feminine domesticity. contemporary advice literature-most prominently Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher's American Woman's Home (1869)--emphasized women's vital role as ministers of the family home. A Christian and moral dimension was ascribed to the tasks of housekeeping, child-rearing, and interior decoration-and woman's civilizing role was estimated accordingly. My paper sets out from the perception that this ideal domesticity does not simply encompass woman's care and love of her husband and children but also that of physical objects. Like the family, domestic things are in her charge, they are objects of her affection and devotion as well as media of feminine self-expression that articulate her aesthetic sensibility and refinement. While the association of material and psychological forms works rather harmoniously in the work of Stowe, it is rendered more complicated in the stories by Jewett and Freeman where the emotional bonds between female characters and private objects are still significant but have ceased to correspond to an ideal of feminine domesticity in an unproblematic way. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Motherly Chair I will briefly exemplify the relevant aspects of Stowe's sentimental (see Merish) with regard to the famous chapter in Uncle Tom's Cabin entitled The Quaker Settlement.' Here, the emotional investment in things is often accompanied by an animation of the home's object world; that is, things assume lively, sometimes even human aspect. A case in point is offered by Rachel Halliday's prominent rocking chairs: There is a larger sized one, motherly and old, whose wide arms breathed hospitable invitation, seconded by the solicitation of its feather cushions,-a real comfortable, persuasive old chair, and worth, in the way of honest, homely enjoyment, dozen of your plush or brochetelle drawing-room gentry (UTC 116). …

"ENTIRELY BLACK VERSE FROM HIM WOULD SUCCEED

In a letter to a literary editor about promising American writers, William Dean Howells asserted that "a book of entirely black verse" from the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar "would succeed." Howells's appreciation of the racial authenticity of Dunbar's dialect poetry belongs to a larger critical and commercial demand for "minstrel realism" in postbellum nineteenth-century American culture. The racialism of blackface minstrelsy created a cultural precondition in which postbellum audiences regarded Black minstrelsy (that is, minstrelsy performed by Blacks) as realistic. This reaction resulted from the commercialization of Black minstrelsy in American culture as an avant-garde cultural performance of racial authenticity. An analogous reaction, I suggest, occurred in 1896, when Dunbar published Majors and Minors and Howells reviewed it in Harper's Weekly. By situating the ideological politics of Howells's criticism of African American literature, I show that Howells ignored the characteristic eschewal of romance and sentiment in Anglo-American literary realism, while also de�ning African American literary realism in these very terms. This apparent inconsistency results from Howells's subscription to racialism, which then helped to perpetuate this de�nition in the dramatic and literary cultures of minstrelsy. Ultimately, the relationship between Howells and Dunbar and the implications for African American writers confronting a White-dominated literary marketplace might be an overwhelmingly familiar story. Less intuitive or obvious, however, are the precise ways in which the racialism of Howells and this marketplace arbitrated the realism of African American literature.

Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic

Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799) contains the first ex tended fictional portrayal in America of what the novelist calls roman tic passion between women. Early critics generally treat the homoeroti cism between Constantia Dudley and Sophia Courtland either with disdain or as psychological aberration. Harvey R. Warfel, for example, claims that emotions of normal love are alien to [Constantia's] nature, and there seems to be homosexual tendency in her conduct (135); Donald A. Ringe remarks that Constantia's relationship with Sophia leaves much to be de sired [. . .] at best, the relationship is not one to increase the stature of Constantia as the heroine of the (44); Norman S. Grabo views Con stantia's queer with Sophia as one of a series of tests or temp tations in the formation of her sexual identity; and Steven Watts argues that it seems no accident that as [Constantia's] rational faculties steadily prov[e] less able to illuminate the social and moral atmosphere, she turn[s] to the attractions of (97). In contrast to these views, Lillian Faderman identifies the text as an important literary representation of romantic friendship ? evidence that such relationships were casually accepted in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century American culture (112-115); and most recently, Julia A. Stern has interpreted the rela tionship within the context of republican anxieties over the breakdown of male brotherhood, suggesting that female homoerotic longing becomes pliant medium for Brown's investigation of republican fraternity's fail ure (159). Curiously, however, no analysis of the novel has yet explored the homoeroticism in the context of cultural debates about women's

White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour (review)

Reviewed by: White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour Harvey Young White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour. By Marvin McAllister. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp. x + 239. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. The extraordinarily lengthy title of Marvin McAllister's new book draws its inspiration from a placard that, according to rumor, William Brown, the former ship's steward turned theatre impresario, placed in the window of his vandalized American Theatre shortly after the August 1823 riot that had erupted there. The riot, created by fifteen white employees of a nearby circus, not only prompted Brown to assert, in print, that "White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour," but also bankrupted him, thus forcing him into retirement. Although McAllister, the author of this intricately researched and potentially groundbreaking study of William Brown, contends that the sign most likely did not exist, he uses the placard to foreground the central theme of the [End Page 527] book: William Brown's ongoing struggle with the white theatre community of New York City. William Brown, the driving force behind the African Grove, the Minor Theatre, the American Theatre, and the African Company—all black institutions that, like a flashbulb, had a brilliant but short-lived career—sought to create entertainment venues for both black and white audiences. Rather than establish his theatres or stage his productions in predominantly black areas of New York City, Brown, according to McAllister, deliberately opened his theatres in primarily white sections of New York. In his call for an integrated audience, Brown met with resistance from the nearby white theatre owners, specifically Stephen Price of the Park Theatre, who orchestrated campaigns against him which ranged from making noise complaints to the police during Brown's shows to encouraging white audiences to disrupt—at a variety of levels, including full-scale rioting—the performances of Brown's productions. What makes McAllister's book so thought-provoking is its exhaustive investigation of William Brown, an often overlooked and underexamined figure in early American theatre. The author zooms in on Brown's activities between 1821 and 1823. Despite the fact that few historical documents remain (for example, Brown never published any of his plays), McAllister gathers the few surviving documents and stitches together a coherent and plausible study of the former steward. This "stitching" approach results in several significant claims, including McAllister's assertion that Brown created not only the first African American theatre, but also the first integrated American theatre. Although the absence of history, which makes the author's claims both possible and difficult to refute, may never fully confirm McAllister's conclusions, it is worth noting that the benchmarking of Brown does promise to have an immediate impact on the manner in which the contemporary academic community understands the role that Brown played in the founding of early American theatre. McAllister's text begins slowly, mired in a survey of cultural criticism that neither introduces his subject matter nor provides a useful theoretical lens through which to evaluate the merits of his project. After sprinting through summaries of the various writings of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B. DuBois, Joseph Roach, and José Muñoz among many, many others, the author begins to focus on Brown's efforts to establish an integrated theatrical audience. In the sections where McAllister writes about Brown, his conclusions are consistently engaging and thought-provoking. They seek not only to give an adequate portrait of Brown's struggles throughout the three-year span of the study but also to read Brown's activities in the sociohistorical context of his time. In these moments, McAllister's text, as a narrative history, proves as compelling as the most informative American Studies texts. In style, it is reminiscent of Robert C. Allen's influential book on nineteenth-century American performance culture, Horrible Prettiness.Unfortunately, these moments do not always flow together. The author tends to shift from intelligent close analyses of historical moments to somewhat abstracted cultural theoretical criticism. With each move...

Without benefit of clergy: women and the pastoral relationship in nineteenth-century American culture

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship-found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship-was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.

Illustrating Culture: Consensus and Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century American Picture Press

Joshua Brown. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. On April 27, 1861, while Fort Sumter lay under siege, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper ran a call for artists among the soldiery on both sides of the conflict: Important Notice! To Officers and others Attached to the Armies of the Federal and the Confederate States I shall be happy to receive from Officers and others attached to either Army, sketches of important events and striking incidents which may occur during the impending struggle which seems to threaten the country. For such sketches, forwarded promptly, I will pay liberally . . . The most convincing proof of the reliability and accuracy of our illustrations is, that ours is the only Illustrated Paper which is allowed to circulate freely in the South, and an additional proof is, that it stands a critical examination in those places where the scenes we illustrate occurred . (p. 47) The notice contains in condensed form much of the flavor of Leslie's and, beyond it, the illustrated popular journalism of nineteenth-century America. The call for "sketches"—not written, but drawn—reflected a shift in emphasis within the magazine press, from a cultivated, even elevated form of writing toward a visual journalism, democratically based and directed toward a newly empowered and rapidly expanding democratic polity. Leslie's wanted artifacts of direct experience, marked with the imprimatur of authenticity; it sought to present itself as less a maker of taste and ideology than a conduit linking everyday citizens experiencing the momentous events of democracy and modernization. This Leslie's notice was the clarion call of a new force in American cultural politics: a popular press situated between the scurrilous rags of vested political interest and inflammatory rhetoric and the sober high-style Boston and New York literary magazines. Even as the Union was [End Page 204] sundering, Leslie's was announcing a new American mass culture, based in the promise of authenticity, applying the democracy of sight and the visual to overcome divisions of literacy and language and, beyond that, class, region, and political divisions. This is the first argument Joshua Brown presents in his engrossing study of the illustrated press in nineteenth-century America: that we can trace in this often-cited but rarely studied genre the rise of a uniquely American popular culture. But there is much more to this wonderful study: Brown's narrative is a story, with twists and turns of plot, Dickensian characters and settings, and an equivalently complex set of interwoven themes. Beginning with Leslie's, Brown expands his focus to include the magazine press more generally; watching this segment of popular culture, Brown reveals its hubris—its promise to unite a disparate nation, a promise impossible to keep and often disastrous in outcome. As Brown argues, forcibly and with expertise, "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper prospered because of its ability to both address and encompass difference. . . . [H]owever . . . this inclusiveness could never successfully bridge oppositions" (p. 46). To survive the very turbulence it reported and exploited, Leslie's turned to the visual, to "pictorial coverage" as a means to disguise, to emphasize, to undercut, to distill, and to disguise its contradictory messages. Let us return for a moment to that call for artists—a densely packed artifact, rich in significance for those seeking to understand Leslie's in particular and nineteenth-century American culture in general. Brown examines the packed canvas of American life during the period, and he has found it necessary to read not just other journals, but the documents and histories of a far wider array of cultural trends and events—not least because Leslie's and other such periodicals promised readers they'd find everything they needed to know, to think, and to believe in their...

"So Anthracite - to live": Emily Dickinson and American Literary History

This essay argues that Dickinson's non-normative poetic diction should be understood as an outgrowth of her engagement with nineteenth-century American culture in general, and American women's poetry in particular. Through comparative analysis of Dickinson's diction with that of more normative nineteenth-centrury American texts, I argue that Dickinson transfigures common nineteenth-century linguistic materials by tipping the balance of what Bakhtin calls "centripetal and centrifugal forces" from the centripetally-weighted modes characteristic of most nineteeenth-century poets to centrifugally-weighted modes popularized by twentieth-century American modernists. By examining early letters and poems, I show how Dickinson's centrifugal diction evolved from nineteenth-century literary practices.

The Genesis of Whiteface in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture

The Irish American's progress from immigrant to citizen of the New World has been less the path of civic assimilation than the road of racial alchemy. (1) Between 1840 and 1900, Irish immigrants entered not only a New World, but also a new arena, where race rather than national origin was the prevailing idiom in discussing citizenship. They adapted quickly--thanks in large part to their previous history of oppression--becoming accepted citizens almost seamlessly, in the shortest time of any of the mass immigrant groups, but not before they had overcome their own share of racial discrimination at the hands of the now native population, the Anglo Americans (Jacobson 1-90). Part of becoming citizen-like for the Irish immigrants was a necessary abdication of the former reality of their existence, in favor of a nostalgic sentimentalizing through symbolic representation. Stereotypes which had formerly conditioned their existence would eventually come to symbolize just how far they had come in their quest for citizenship. To understand the road to citizenship the Irish constructed, it is necessary to excavate some of these long-held stereotypes and discover the parameters of the stereotype's vicissitudes against a measure of historical objectivity. This paper looks at the previously unconsidered racial stereotype of whiteface utilized by Anglo Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century to distance their working-class from those of the newly arrived immigrant Irish. The whiteface minstrel show was, like the parallel but better-recorded blackface tradition, an adaptation of the vaudeville tradition where a character was easily recognizable as a type of his race. (2) For the Irishman, it incorporated everything from Mose the Bowery B'hoy--made famous by Frank Chanfrau in the 1850--an elegant tough who spoke with a peculiar lingo and was always greeted with a cheer of recognition, to the later, more sympathetic depictions of Harrigan and Hart's Irish musical theater. The typical whiteface character was recognizable by the stovepipe hat he wore tipped over his forehead, by the shillelagh he carried for fighting, and by his makeup which exaggerated Irish physical characteristics, and, as Carl Wittke tells us, often consisted of red wigs, red noses, green whiskers, or little beards known as 'gaulways' or 'Galway Sluggers' (260). This whiteface mask, a common enough theatrical tool, was used mostly so that the largely illiterate audience would easily recognize the type of character portrayed and the humor elicited from his/her appearance. Eric Lott, in his insightful Love & Theft. Black/ace Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, discusses how the blackface minstrel show, continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously working class (8). This is true even more substantially (but only in a one-way direction) for the whiteface minstrel show, which borrowed from the blackface its symbolic mask of visual identification in order to constitute the Irish as something other than the American white working class. (3) Whiteface and blackface were not only associated in theatricality; in a more profound sense, they both replicated similar stereotypes based on racist readings of black physiognomy. Essentially, the stereotyped Irishman, for a time, through whiteface, became pejoratively black; that is to say that, during the post-famine period, in an attempt to disclaim any appeal to citizenship, whiteface was used typologically to cast the Irishman as black in the popular press and public arena. This paper's investigation of the genesis of whiteface will strive, first of all, to offer conjectures on the ideology behind the creation and designation of this specifically American typology, and then to trace the historical development of the whiteface type through theater and into the cultural and literary scene, where it took on its most simianized form. …

Making nature culture's other: Nineteenth-century American landscape painting and critical discourse

Nature has long figured prominently in our understanding of nineteenth-century American culture. As physical presence, political actor, subject of spiritual, philosophical, and artistic inquiry, nature — both object and idea — has pervaded both popular and scholarly constructions of the American past. Scholars of American landscape painting (whether celebratory or critical) have for decades sought and explicated the meaning and prominence of the landscape within this putative context.1

Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (review)

Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (review)

Yellow Bird and the Bandit: Minority Authorship, Class, and Audience in John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta

Y e l l o w B ir d a n d t h e B a n d it : M in o r it y A u t h o r s h ip , C l a s s , a n d A u d ie n c e in J o h n R o l l in R id g e ’s T h e L ife a n d A d v e n tu r e s o f J o a q u in M u r ie ta J o e G o e k e In September 1854, Franklin Buck, a twenty-eight-year-old general store owner in Weaverville, California, mailed a package holding a brief letter and a yellow-covered pamphlet to his sister in Bucksport, Maine. “I send you by this mail,” Buck explained, “a specimen of our California literature. The author of the book is a good letter writer and quite a poet. A great many of the incidents in the book, I suspect, are romance but the greater part is fact” (142). The “specimen” Buck had enclosed was the recently published crime pamphlet The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta by John Rollin Ridge, a mixedblood Cherokee who wrote under his Indian name, Yellow Bird. Although Joaquin Murieta resembled other products of the sensational press in its dramatization of a timely story from regional newspapers, graphic vio­ lence, and appeals to American nationalism, Ridge framed the narrative with moral warnings about the consequences of racial prejudice. Using his own experience to “authenticate” this biography of a Mexican ban­ dit whose identity had been a source of controversy among Californians, Ridge encouraged his mining country audience, made up largely of middle-class Anglo-American immigrants such as Buck, to identify with Murieta on the grounds of class distinction. However, the classbased rhetoric Ridge used to gain sympathy for Joaquin led him also to contradict his antiracist message in ways that made his narrative vul­ nerable to appropriation by the emerging dime-novel industry. This essay examines the contemporary rhetorical context for Ridge’s class-conscious assault on racial prejudice in gold rush California, and it calls attention to changing conditions in nineteenth-century American print culture that made it possible for later publishers to strip the Murieta character of Ridge’s authorial identity and suppress his moral message. In the midst of an increasingly national literary marketplace where large urban audiences were developing a taste for sensational dime-novel Westerns, Ridge’s tale, written for a roughly egalitarian frontier audience, became an exotic outlaw adventure story sold to citydwellers living within stratified class systems. The result was an ironic 454 W AL 37.4 WINTER 2 0 0 3 separation of Ridge from the semi-autobiographical character that in many ways embodied the displacement and determination he felt as a mixedblood Cherokee in nineteenth-century America. From Buck’s letter to his sister back East, one can see how the divi­ sion of Ridge and his Murieta character began in part from the notori­ ety that Joaquin had acquired in California newspapers before Ridge’s narrative was published. While Buck does show some awareness of Ridge’s skills as a correspondent and poet, he focuses most of his atten­ tion on Joaquin, enthusiastically stating, “I lived at the ranch six miles from Marysville during the winter of ’51 and ’52 and no doubt saw the real Joaquin at the camp, three miles from the city, where I frequently went to fandangoes” (142). Buck would have known about Joaquin at least a year before the publication of Ridge’s narrative, as local newspa­ pers had created a flurry of publicity about the bandit, attributing crimes throughout the California mining country to “the notorious Joaquin,” whose surname remained a mystery. Occasionally, conflicting reports even located Joaquin at sites of robbery and murder perpetrated on the same day but so remote from each other as to defy their con­ nection to the same man.1 As public excitement about “Joaquin” came to include demands for intervention by the state government, Captain Harry Love, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, petitioned...

Our Corpses, Our Selves: Anatomy and Identity in American Society

In 1884, when twenty-three-year-old Hannah Stout died of a rare disease, her family was afraid to bury her in local cemetery. They knew that doctors frequently engaged in grave robbing, or paid others to do so for them. And they were certain that doctors would be particularly anxious to obtain Hannah's body for dissection or public exhibition because of unusual nature of her disease. To thwart potential grave robbers, family buried Hannah just outside their Indiana farmhouse, where they could keep a close watch on corpse. As Michael Sappol points out in A Traffic of Dead Bodies, this story reveals two important points about anatomy and nineteenthcentury American culture and society. First, it suggests that dead body had become an important commodity for nineteenth-century medical students and doctors who wished to learn anatomy. Second, fact that families went to such lengths to protect corpses of their relatives suggests that dead body held great meaning for nineteenth-century Americans; it had become part of An insult or injury to a corpse became an insult to that person's identity. The dead body, then, became an important commodity at precisely same moment that new concepts of self suggested that dead bodies should be outside and protected from marketplace. It was in this context, Sappol argues, that anatomy and dissection became important and highly contentious topics in nineteenth-century America. Sappol uses these two intertwined themes-the medical profession's focus on anatomy and Americans' newly anatomical understanding of selfhoodto shed light on two major topics in nineteenth-century American history: professionalization of medicine and creation of modern self. Specifically, Sappol's intent is to explore ways in which the anatomical acquisition, dissection, and representation of bodies ... contributed to making of professional, classed, sexual, racial, national, and speciated selves (p. 1).

The Celebrated Showman Unmasked

In July 1835, a sometime clerk, lottery agent, and grocer from Connecticut ventured into the entertainment business. He did so by exhibiting a blind, withered, and partially paralyzed African-American women, first in New York City, and then, over the subsequent eight months, throughout New York State and New England. The exhibitor was Phinneas T. Barnum, soon to become the country's foremost purveyor of commodified culture. The elderly woman he put on display was Joice Heth, a Kentucky slave whom Barnum advertised as "The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World": ostensibly a deeply religious 161-year-old wonder who had served as George Washington's nurse in his early years of life. At almost every stop on the tour's itinerary, throngs of visitors paid to hear, examine, question, prod, and converse with Heth. This touring exhibit, the relationships among its key participants (chiefly Barnum and Heth, but also Barnum's confederate Levi Lyman), and its place in nineteenth-century American culture receive Benjamin Reiss's detailed attention in The Showman and the Slave.

A Good Judge of Character?

A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912. By Cathy Boeckmann. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. 238 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Judgments of character can be the most political judgments of all. And yet the most common judgments of character—the most personal, the most everyday—are most political precisely when their reliance on a politics of character is least visible. The arena in which character has been most visible as a political concept, however, is the arena of national character. In Anglo-American political theory, at least since Hobbes, the concept of character has been a key term for imagining the reach of the public over the private sphere, the reach of the nation over and into the citizen. But as postcolonial and postnational critics have been keen to suggest, perhaps the question of character, particularly the question of national character, is no longer relevant in an increasingly postnationalist frame. Indeed, as Emily Apter among others has observed, in "the postnational 'beyond,' the category of national character fails to figure prominently, if at all." 1 Perhaps the reign of character has passed, residually relegated to conservative polemics of personal accountability and liberal universalizations of cultural difference. Perhaps the phantom of national character has become less relevant as a subject of political analysis, even a red herring of sorts in the study of transnational and global circuits of power and subject formation. But I suspect that it has not. Character continues to be a powerful term in the most everyday strategies of reading, representing, [End Page 325] and performing personal identity, and remains so because of its naturalization, because of its increasing invisibility as a political category. Indeed, as Cathy Boeckmann's richly informed and theoretically astute book, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912, reminds us, the concept of character is perhaps most relevant, most resourceful and galvanizing, in times of its own invisibility, in times in which it no longer appears to be in question at all. Appraising the American subject's approximation to and incorporation of national ideals has long taken shape as "a question of character." And yet the question of character, the reflexive question which asks what kind of semantic and performative resources have made the concept of character such a privileged mediator of national identity in the United States and beyond, is asked with surprising rarity. It is difficult to imagine another key concept which has done so much hard and politically vexed work throughout the history of the United States. From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character has had a very long and checkered rhetorical career giving shape to the individualistic terms of American national identity. It is thus surprising that, at a time when interrogations of many of the central discursive bearers of national, racial, gender and class identity have so reinvigorated American studies, such a productive—and often nefarious—concept has received such scant attention, even as the object of a simple genealogical stocktaking. After a generation of post-war sociological and literary accounts of the "American character" (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd perhaps the most influential among them), Warren Susman's influential essay in Culture as History on how the "modal concept" of character organized both techniques of self-mastery and modes of public presentation in nineteenth-century American culture was one of the first to critically assess the concept of character within a broad historical framework. 2 And while Alan Trachtenberg has more pointedly suggested in The Incorporation of America that character "has not received the critical attention that it deserves," 3 such critical attention continued to take shape only as the scattered, incidental, or methodological remarks on character by scholars pursuing other topics. More recently, however, such scattered remarks have given way to a developed body of scholarship on the...

Public sentiments: structures of feeling in nineteenth-century American literature

Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Glenn Hendler. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. x, 275. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Public Sentiments examines sentimentalism in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. For author Glenn Hendler, process by which people are asked to feel both like and with another person, constituted the narrative and core of a structure of (11). Hendler views this structure of feeling as affective processes of everyday life (11) that shape and organize experience. Taking a page from Raymond Williams, he argues that structures of feeling often first become visible in art and literature. For Hendler's purposes, novel highlights centrality of in nineteenth-century American culture. In contrast to other scholars who have written on this topic, however, Hendler rejects notion that was a primarily privatizing emotional exchange between reader, text, and author, arguing that sympathy in nineteenth century was a paradigmatically public sentiment (12). Drawing on work of JUrgen Habermas, he contends that structures of sympathetic feeling in literature helped to constitute a public sphere. Sympathetic identification with characters in novels, Hendler insists, prepared readers psychologically for participation in political public as well as reading public. Thus novels, in his view, were not just opportunities for rational-critical discussion characteristic of Habermasian public sphere, but instruments of subject formation, producing, through acts of identification, a publicly oriented form of subjectivity. Hendler refers to this joining of psychic and public, emotional and political, as sentimental politics of affect (22). To illustrate his points, Hendler examines a number of topics in nineteenth-century literature: Washingtonian temperance narratives, work of Martin R. Delany, Horatio Alger's novels, women's fiction, figure of dandy in writings of Henry James and others, and bad boy novels, of which Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is perhaps best known. Some of literary forms addressed early in book, like temperance narratives and Delany's novel, Blake; or, Huts of America, were allied to social movements whose advocates were, for reasons of class or race, excluded from bourgeois public sphere as defined by Habermas. Using a historicist approach to text and context, Public Sentiments displays an admirable sensitivity to difficulty of applying general models to specific historical circumstances. It posits that some literary forms deployed sympathetic identification to construct counterpublics that functioned alongside dominant bourgeois public sphere. Thus Delany's protagonist, Blake, is able to hatch a far-flung plan for a slave rebellion because of counterpublic communication based on identification and interchange of sentiments (79) among oppressed people of color. Later in book, Hendler shifts his analytical focus, deemphasizing historicist approach for close textual readings employing psychoanalytic terminology and concepts. He interprets bad boy novel, for example, as an instance of Althusserian interpolation of adult heterosexuality. The genre's contrast between boy-nature and self-- possessed male adulthood moves reader toward a masculinity that it assumes reader already possesses and yet represents as being constitutively in crisis (209) and constructs a heterosexuality that does not require women (210). …

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century

What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an era of intense and widespread political enthusiasm. But rarely have these historians examined popular political engagement directly, or within the broader contexts of day-to-day life. In this bold and in-depth look at Americans and their politics, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin argue for a more complex understanding of the space occupied by politics in nineteenth-century American society and culture. Mining such sources as diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels, cartoons, contested-election voter testimony to state legislative committees, and the partisan newspapers of representative American communities ranging from Massachusetts and Georgia to Texas and California, the authors explore a wide range of political actions and attitudes. They consider the enthusiastic commitment celebrated by historians together with various forms of skepticism, conflicted engagement, detachment, and hostility that rarely have been recognized as part of the American political landscape. Rude Republic sets the political parties and their noisy and attractive campaign spectacles, as well as the massive turnout of voters on election day, within the communal social structure and calendar, the local human landscape of farms, roads, and county towns, and the organizational capacities of emerging nineteenth-century institutions. Political action and engagement are set, too, within the tide of events: the construction of the mass-based party system, the gathering crisis over slavery and disunion, and the gradual expansion of government (and of cities) in the post-Civil War era. By placing the question of popular engagement within these broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, the authors bring new understanding to the complex trajectory of American democracy.

Strange Talk: The Politics of Literature in Gilded Age America (review)

Reviewed by: Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America by Gavin Jones Edwin Battistella Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America. By Gavin Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 288. Interest in American regional speech and its consequences is as old as the nation itself. The period following [End Page 402] the Civil War was a particularly interesting period in that it saw the rise of dialect literature and the rise of commentary on dialect literature as well. In Strange talk, Gavin Jones argues that late nineteenth-century American culture—that of the so-called Gilded Age—was fundamentally ambivalent about dialect—seeing it as both representative of the vitality of American culture and as carrying the seeds of cultural fragmentation. The book consists of a brief introduction and conclusion and six main chapters. J has organized his book largely around different literary topics and genres which illustrate cultural attitudes and reactions to social change. Ch. 1, titled ‘Contaminated tongues: American philology and the problem of dialect’ (14–36), describes the attitudes toward dialect reflected in the scholarly work of the day—including that of William Dwight Whitney, Thomas Loundsbury, and E. A. Shelton, first president of the American Dialect Society. Their views reflect in part those of earlier scholars and writers that a common language of the American masses would emerge in the United States, but they also demonstrate occasional sympathy to the tradition of verbal criticism and correction of such writers as Richard Grant White, William Mathews, and George Perkins Marsh, who saw dialect use as a sign of moral degeneration and of the vulgarization of higher culture. In Ch. 2 (37–63), ‘Cult of the vernacular’, J discusses the use of dialect literature as a form of satire and as a reflection of literary realism. An assumption of the time was the idea that language reflected ways of thinking as well as ways of speaking. J notes that such writers as Mark Twain were ambivalent toward regional literature—both celebrating it and fearing its influence—and that this ambivalence is reflected in narrative inconsistency toward regional dialect. Ch. 3, ‘Language, gender and disease’ (64–97), treats the correlation between ‘faulty speech’ and social and cultural disease that was common in novels of the time. J especially focuses on ways in which Herman Melville and Henry James connected speech defects and defects of social and cultural behavior. Two psychological disorders much discussed in the Gilded Age were heterophony (confusion of words) and neurasthenia (nervousness), both of which were seen as symptoms of the corruption of cultural authority. Of special interest is J’s discussion of James’s essay on ‘The speech of American women’, which attributed indirection in language to the speech of women. In ‘White writers, creole languages’ (Ch. 4, 98–133), J examines the dialect literature of George Washington Cable and others whose work suggested a racially-mixed definition of Southern speech unsettling to white sensibilities of the time. J argues that literary and scholarly depictions of black English served two functions: to reinforce the view of black language as deficient but also to make the connection between black English and African and Caribbean languages (providing a counterview to the literary representation of black language as derivative of white Southern speech). The representation of dialect was complex rather than homogeneous, and the rhetorical features of African-American speech—including the potential for subversive humor—made it an effective narrative vehicle. Ch. 5, ‘Accents of menace alien to our air’: Language and literature in turn-of-the-century New York City’ (134–60), discusses the treatment of immigrant language in the tenement and immigrant fiction of the 1880’s and 1890’s—particularly the work of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan who extended local color writing from dialect literature to the immigrant experience. J notes that Crane’s approach focused on treating New York speech as decayed while Cahan’s focused on the hybrid nature of New Yorkese. The two approaches represent contrasting literary interpretations of urban life, one an attempt to capture the decay of language and the other an effort to characterize its transformation by immigrant voices...