Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America
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University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2017 Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America Rachel Boccio University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Boccio, Rachel, "Architectures of Captivity: Imagining Freedom in Antebellum America" (2017). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 562. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/562 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ARCHITECTURES OF CAPTIVITY: IMAGINING FREEDOM IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA BY RACHEL BOCCIO A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF RACHEL BOCCIO APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor Valerie Karno Martha Elena Rojas Rae Ferguson Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2017 Abstract Architectures of Captivity is a study of the literary construction of freedom through the paradoxical image of captivity. This project deals primarily with literature of the antebellum age, a critical moment in the historical genealogy of American freedom. A major supposition of the project is that the fundamental beliefs we hold about freedom— as citizens of the United States, as inheritors of the liberal traditions of the West, as sympathizers of democratic movements worldwide—were formed at the moment this dissertation interrogates. From the period’s discourses of Romanticism and liberalism and through the rise of the modern nation-state there materialized the fantastical and still powerful fiction of the sovereign individual. Upholding this privileged construct in the antebellum age—its whiteness and masculinity, its bourgeois power, its self-possession and marvelous freedom—were a host of institutions, structures, and practices that held disparate masses of less fortunate people politically, economically, and psychologically captive. These institutions and their iconic architectures (many progressive in purpose and innovation) bound large numbers of slaves, women, indentures, laborers, and convicts to lives of perpetual subordination and imprisoned the broader human capacity to constitute, sympathize, and imagine. This project attends to the meanings of freedom and personhood that emerge from the crucible of antebellum captivity. It is a wide-ranging investigation, one that implicates the historical discourses of modernity, temporality, spatiality, imagination, geopolitics, urbanization, and labor. Methodologically speaking, the project is dialectic. It locates within extreme spaces of captivity oppositional ties and tensions that structured dominance and resistance and that produced provocative and embodied political and psychological categories, which remain with us today. Acknowledgements This project could not have been realized without the longstanding guidance and imaginative vision of its advisor, Valerie Karno. As professor, thinker, and person, Dr. Karno amazes. I am deeply indebted to her and to the esteemed members of my broader committee: Martha Elena Rojas, Rae Ferguson, J. Jennifer Jones, and Robert Widell. In the classes of these scholars and through generous conversation, I’ve honed the literary curiosities and deep knowledge that inform this work. My graduate journey began twelve years ago at Trinity College, Hartford. It was there that I found intellectual community of the best kind and the poise to command an academic life. I am beholden to Christopher Hager for his inspired courses in nineteenth- century literature, his model of professionalism, and his continued commitment to my work. My greatest intellectual debt is to David Rosen, who for over a decade has been my principal mentor and dear friend. He is one of the most remarkable people I know: brilliant, candid, and profoundly humane. He confirms my faith in our profession, both its prospects and mighty relevance. Life’s endeavors, however great, rarely command our singular attention. These years of study have born witness to the passing childhood of one exemplary boy. Atticus, all achievements and accolades pale in comparison to what it has meant to be your mom. You are my magnum opus. iv This dissertation is dedicated to its first & most faithful reader, D.F. Thank you—with all my heart. v Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………...…………...…...…….iv Dedication……………………………………………………………………………...….v Table of Contents………………………………………………..………………………..vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………...22 Solitude, Surveillance, and the Making of Selfhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………...67 Harriet Jacobs & Henry “Box” Brown: Reappropriating Freedom Through the Spaces and Narratives of a Subversive Captivity Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………...116 The Things and Thoughts of Time: Narrative Capture and the Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Freedom in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………………146 The Ship Imagined: Vision, Violence, and the Maritime Theater of Capitalism’s Regulated Publics Chapter Five ……………………………………………………….……....…..…….....193 From the Mill Girl to the Korl Woman: Wage Slavery and Market Freedom in the Literatures of Emerging U.S. Capitalism Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………...243 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………....256 vi “In this way was bred that fearless self-reliance and independence which conducted our forefathers to freedom.” —Herman Melville, Israel Potter, 1855 Introduction “The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1867 1 Freedom—the most pervasive and venerated term in the American political lexicon—is also the nation’s most vexed, contested, and volatile ambition. It operates as a kind of rhetorical avatar, a rallying cry for disparate campaigns and purposes: conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, orthodox and radical. Freedom is more than an argument, a claim to justice or rights; it is a mode of argumentation—one that has been used to both extend boundaries and to foreclose possibilities.2 As such, it is rife with contradictions: freedom schemes venerate sovereignty and ritualize conquest; they promise agency and force subjugation; they aim toward the universal while naturalizing hierarchy.3 Hence, it should not surprise that the discourse of freedom in the United States has developed in tandem with a manifest preoccupation with captivity. If freedom is America’s most beloved ideal, captivity is its foundational narrative and its nightmare. Architectures of Captivity is a study of the powerfully evocative tensions between freedom and captivity that shaped the literary imagination in the antebellum period. Specifically, I am interested in the ways writers used the trope of captivity to imagine freedom and free personhood at a time when the meanings and possibilities of each were changing. Territorial expansion, the market revolution, political democratization, and other historic cultural transformations critiqued throughout this project substantially enlarged the narrower political concept of liberty—that which was championed by 1 Revolutionary republicans and Founding Fathers—into a host of personal dreams and political ambitions never quite intended. The story of freedom in the antebellum age is one of major reconfigurations of power, politics, and personhood; the nation was evolving from a questionable and elitist republican experiment to the pluralistic and democratic world power it would eventually become—all while advancing steadily toward disunion and Civil War. It was a remarkable time of cultural change, of unprecedented reformist energy, of religious and utopian awakenings, of expanding rights and democratic participation but also of a doubling down on race and gender assumptions and an expansion of institutional forms of captivity: penal, industrial, domestic, and otherwise. Contemporary scholars of captivity as a historical condition and as a cultural and aesthetic preoccupation including Gordon Sayre, Paul Baepler, Daniel Williams, Chris Castiglia, and Saidya Hartman generally concur that the “contradistinction” between liberty and captivity in American literature has worked to define and delimit the ideological and imaginative boundaries of both the nation and its people, free and unfree (Williams 7).4 In the most conventional conception of the form, the captivity narrative involves violent and hierarchal contact between previously unfamiliar peoples. From its earliest inception in British North America, the genre evoked strong fears and desire among American readers, namely regarding the loss of liberty, the power of enslavement, and fact of racial and cultural mastery. These texts offered “dramatic spectacles” of tyrannical power and severe subjugation (Williams 4). By the nineteenth century, the appeal of captivity and its critical associations—solitude, isolation, domination, and identity formation— had only intensified. Captivity narratives were among the most 2 widely circulated and popular texts of the period. They included