Revenge and the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Exceptional Vengeance: Revenge and the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century American Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Lisa M. Thomas Committee in charge: Professor Nicole Tonkovich, Chair Professor John Blanco Professor Michael Davidson Professor Rachel Klein Professor Shelley Streeby 2012 Copyright Lisa M. Thomas, 2012 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Lisa M. Thomas is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii DEDICATION To my family, friends, and committee for their endless encouragement, support, and patience. Whatever happens next, thanks for coming along (and putting up) with me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………........ iii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………….. v Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………… vi Vita ………………………………………………………………………………… vii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………. viii Introduction: Revenge, Justice, and Exceptionalist Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century United States………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1: Reluctant Warriors: Community and Conflict in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee ……………………………………………………… 51 Chapter 2: Unlikely Killers: Justifying Violence against Native Americans through Hannah Duston’s Captivity and Nick of the Woods ……………….. 125 Chapter 3: Revenge and Regret on the Texas Frontier: Negotiating Women’s Bodies and Threats to White Settlement in the Parker Captivities and ’Bel of Prairie Eden ……………………………………………………. 184 Chapter 4: The Slave’s Dilemma: Writing Revenge into Law in Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca ………………………………………………………. 256 Conclusion: The Ongoing Legacy of Revenge Regarding Justice, the Law, and Punishment ……………………………………………………………… 322 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………… 339 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to my committee for their untiring support. Not only did they provide me with the first seeds of this project during the qualifying phase of my Ph.D. studies, but they also helped me plan, research for, write, revise . revise . and revise this dissertation. My gratitude goes out especially to my chair, Dr. Nicole Tonkovich, for balancing her many other obligations with the pretty thankless task of being my chair. She’s the reason I came to UCSD, is responsible for much of my professionalization as a graduate student and editor, is one of the very best teachers and mentors I have ever had, and is the primary reason why I have been able to polish and finish this work. I’ve been more fortunate than words can express to have her as my chair and to have my other committee members in my corner, both for this dissertation and as a teacher- and scholar-in-training. Second, thanks to UCSD’s Literature department for awarding me a year-long fellowship, which has allowed me to finish my degree in normative time. I was also fortunate to receive a summer research award that allowed me to travel to Texas Christian University to use some of their microfilm materials for my third chapter. I appreciate the library staff at TCU for helping me acquire those materials. Access to funds and physical texts is of course vital even though it keeps disappearing, and I appreciate any state-level, university-level, and departmental efforts to keep such resources extant and circulating. Last but certainly not least, thanks so much to my family and friends for your unwavering support. You’ve kept me grounded and about as sane as possible through this process. Thanks for letting me work but also encouraging me to play. I couldn’t have done either without you all. vi VITA 2001-2005 Bachelor of Arts in English, Texas Christian University 2005-2007 Master of Arts in English, Texas Christian University 2007-2012 Doctor of Philosophy in Literature, University of California, San Diego SELECT PUBLICATIONS “Looking Back at George Kennedy . To Look Forward. A Rhetoric Re-View.” Co- authored with Richard Leo Enos. Rhetoric Review, 2006. “Prayer and Preaching: Female Religious Agency in Cooper, Apess, and Warner.” Master of Arts Thesis. Texas Christian University, 2007. The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo: De Doctrina Christiana and the Search for a Distinctly Christian Rhetoric. Co-edited with Richard Leo Enos, et al. Waco: Baylor UP, 2008. “Book Review: Anne E. Boyd’s Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America.” Women’s Studies, 2011. “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” The Encyclopedia of Women and Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Misiroglu. New York: Facts on File, 2011. “Wharton, Edith.” The Encyclopedia of Women and Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Misiroglu. New York: Facts on File, 2011. “Book Review: Lynette D. Myles’s Female Subjectivity in African American Women’s Narratives of Enslavement: Beyond Borders.” Women’s Studies, 2012. vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Exceptional Vengeance: Revenge and the Rule of Law in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Lisa M. Thomas Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2012 Professor Nicole Tonkovich, Chair People often characterize revenge as unlawful and undesirable because it challenges the primacy of mercy, forgiveness, proportionality, and deterrence. Relying in part on the theories of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin, I examine how nineteenth-century authors in the Americas treat revenge as a potentially law-making, law-preserving, and law-challenging form of violence. Specifically, the texts I analyze from the 1830s to 1850s employ the notion of exceptionalism to suggest that revenge is justified and even sometimes necessary for purportedly heroic protagonists when established law is in flux, is absent, or is unreliable—especially in borderlands or frontier spaces and during wartime. The authors have their individual protagonists rewrite law and act as sovereigns, blending biblical interpretations, natural law, lex talionis, and other beliefs to impose particular viii kinds of order on these exceptional locations and moments. In Chapter 1, I examine William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee and how frontier romance authors generally depict Natives as vengeful, untrustworthy savages and whites as defenders of self and nation. In Chapter 2, I discuss how retellings of Hannah Duston’s captivity and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods celebrate the acts of unlikely, feminized heroes as they kill and mutilate Native Americans. Chapter 3 focuses on the Parker captivities in Texas and George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden, wherein white, male Texans are depicted as defenders of white women’s virtue and go on vengeful quests against the Comanche and Mexicans (respectively), ultimately exhibiting some ambivalence about whether revenge is fulfilling and justified. Finally, in Chapter 4 I analyze Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca, the story of a black, Trinidadian pirate who challenges the rule of law and readers’ ability to accept a mixed-race hero who uses his pirate ship and the space of the ocean to write revenge into law. This study informs scholarship on law and justice, race and gender, and American exceptionalism by linking literary studies to legal and political philosophy and considering revenge as a specific kind of violence that, when justified by individual authors and their protagonists, has had great effects on past and present politics. ix Introduction: Revenge, Justice, and Exceptionalist Rhetoric in the Nineteenth- Century United States Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice. (Thoreau, “Civil” 50) A murky continuum of justice, retribution, and revenge permeates US culture. Only a handful of legal and film scholars note just how pervasive and problematic this continuum is in the nation’s discourse, and particularly in the realm of literature, my area of interest. While legal and film scholars such as Susan Jacoby and Terry K. Aladjem have argued at length that US popular culture evinces an obsession with revenge stories despite widespread teachings and philosophies that humans should resist revenge and/or leave it to a higher authority such as God, the paucity of scholarship that engages with revenge in literature focuses on Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Jacoby provides one of the more extensive studies of revenge in her book Wild Justice, wherein she argues, “The diminution of literary interest in revenge may be a relatively new phenomenon” (18). While I focus on nineteenth-century texts, part of my aim is to assert that revenge in (US)American literature is ongoing and in need of study rather than diminished or obsolete. Furthermore, while Jacoby states that Greek tragedies had “a highly deterministic view of vengeance as a constant in the moral universe” and saw revenge “not as a choice but as a moral imperative, a divine command to restore order when order has been violated” (21), I wish to extend this notion to my reading of texts in the Americas. 1 2 In Regeneration through Violence, Richard Slotkin has noted the importance of literature to how authors imagine and try to solve problems, as they often repeat the same topics while the nation works through them (19-20). Revenge is one topic with which authors repeatedly engage as they imagine its role in American legal discourse