Copyright by Nicole Haworth Gray 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Nicole Haworth Gray Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Spirited Media: Revision, Race, and Revelation in Nineteenth-Century America Committee: Evan Carton, Co-Supervisor Michael Winship, Co-Supervisor Lisa Gitelman Martin Kevorkian Patricia Roberts-Miller Spirited Media: Revision, Race, and Revelation in Nineteenth-Century America by Nicole Haworth Gray, A.B. in Journalism; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 Dedication For my parents. Acknowledgements I have been very lucky in friends, mentors, and colleagues in my time at the University of Texas. Thank you to my co-directors, Evan Carton and Michael Winship, whose patience, support, and insight have made this dissertation possible, and whose encouragement in many other aspects of scholastic life has been invaluable. Thanks also to Trish Roberts-Miller, who worked with me on the M.A. report that turned into the first chapter of this project and whose generosity and sense of humor did much to make graduate school more enjoyable. Martin Kevorkian and Lisa Gitelman both offered encouragement and important advice at crucial times. A research fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia allowed me to conduct some of the primary source reading that went in to chapters two and three, and I am grateful to the librarians for their help and to James Green for his willingness to answer so many questions about book history. Thanks to the University of Texas English Department for the Continuing Fellowship that allowed me to complete the dissertation. I have benefitted greatly from the work of the excellent American literature faculty at Texas: Wayne Lesser, Phil Barrish, Cole Hutchison, Domino Perez, Gretchen Murphy, John Gonzalez, Brian Bremen, and many more. Thanks to Patricia Schaub and Amy Stewart in the English graduate office, who made life as a graduate student easier and far more pleasant. At the University of Nebraska, Ken Price and Liz Lorang have helped to make work on the Whitman Archive a rewarding part of the last seven years. Thanks to friends and colleagues Laine Perez, Eileen McGinnis, Tekla Hawkins, Marjorie Foley, Rachel Wise, Craig Howard, Phil Leigh, Lauren Grewe, Sydney Bufkin, Coye Heard, Stephanie Odom, Scott Nelson, Simone Sessolo, Brad King, Sara Saylor, Anna Stewart, Rachel Schneider, v Sarah Orem, Amanda Wall, Lauren Gantz, Meg Vail, Ty Alyea, and Lydia French for helping to create so many good Austin memories. Thanks to Jamie and John Hancock, Eddie Palumbo, Stacey White, Tiffany Creegan Miller, Brian Miller, Kate Frankey, Sarah Ambrose, Colleen Mulcrone, Shane Ouber, Anna Daniel, Claire Whitehead, Janet Talus, and Phil Covert for keeping me sane, for being wonderful people, and for insisting on fun right when I needed it most. My family has been amazingly supportive: particular thanks to my grandparents, Bob and Frankie Bangert. Thanks to Kathy, Mike, and Dan Cohen for their encouragement and their extraordinary hospitality. Thanks to my dog Roam, who makes every day happier, and to Matt Cohen, for his uncommon optimism, and so much more. My parents, Fred and Julie Gray, taught me long ago that some of the hardest things to do can be some of the most rewarding. With appreciation for their love and great admiration for their own passions, talents, and hard work, I dedicate this dissertation to them. A version of chapter 1 was previously published as “Recording the Sounds of ‘Words that Burn’: Reproductions of Public Discourse in Abolitionist Journalism,” in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41.4 (Fall 2011): 363-386. vi Spirited Media: Revision, Race, and Revelation in Nineteenth-Century America Nicole Haworth Gray, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisors: Evan Carton and Michael Winship “Spirited Media” analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that “authorship” consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist vii speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them. viii Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................ xi Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Instruments of Record: Phonography and Anti-Slavery Discourse .....24 The Phonographic Imagination .....................................................................30 Abolition in the Language of the Public Sphere ...........................................39 The Politics of Presence in Public Assembly ...............................................47 Authorship and Printed Reproductions of Speech ........................................57 Conclusion ....................................................................................................64 Chapter 2: Resurrections from the Page: The Multimedia Martyrdom of Josiah Henson ..........................................................................................................68 Dawn at the World's Fair ..............................................................................74 Editions and Revisions of Henson's Narrative ..............................................81 Henson and Harriet Beecher Stowe ..............................................................97 Corporeal Fantasies and the Marketplaces of Desire ..................................113 Conclusion ..................................................................................................122 Chapter 3: Voices of Revisionary History: Printed Witnesses of Modern Spiritualism .....................................................................................................................126 Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century America .............................................133 Speaking in Trance .....................................................................................139 The Writing of the Spirits ...........................................................................148 Lizzie Doten and Literary Revision ............................................................160 Print in the Spirit of Thomas Jefferson .......................................................171 Conclusion ..................................................................................................176 Chapter 4: Echoes in Print: Rereading Walt Whitman and Sojourner Truth .......182 "I feel at home here": Locating Truth .........................................................188 "A Double-Edged Song": Truth's Poetics of Print ......................................199 "Lecturing (my own way)": Speaking Whitman ........................................216 ix "The Critter's Own": Whitman's Right Hand ..............................................232 Conclusion ..................................................................................................240 Coda ....................................................................................................................245 Bibliography ........................................................................................................257 x List of Figures Figure 1: A report of Sojourner Truth’s speech at an Equal Rights Association meeting, published in the New York World on 14 May 1867 ........209 Figure 2: One