Ashley Byock

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Embalming in Memory: Mourning, Narrativity, and Historiography in the Nineteenth-Century United States A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of English By Ashley M. Byock EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2008 2 © Copyright by Ashley M. Byock 2008 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT Embalming in Memory: Mourning, Narrativity, and Historiography in the Nineteenth-Century United States Ashley M. Byock This dissertation argues that mid-nineteenth-century definitions of personhood, citizenship, and nationality were largely constructed through the tropes and narrative structures of sentimental mourning. This argument is developed through examinations of a wide range of materials, including novels and first-person narratives, newspaper and magazine articles, medical and scientific texts related to embalming, and legal cases that sought to regulate citizenship. Reading across these texts, this dissertation trace the emergence of two literary tropes, the deathbed tableau and the metaphor of the dead beloved “embalmed in memory,” in private, public, political, scientific, racial, and gendered discourse. As a study, ultimately, of narratives and of the status of narrativity itself, this dissertation argues that because identity is always constructed in part around losses—of others and of self, mourning sustains a uniquely rich relationship to the formation of the stories through which we define ourselves as individual and as social or political beings. The first section of this dissertation defines and examines two modes that I refer to as sentimental and counter-sentimental narrativity. The two chapters in this section examine antebellum texts in order to argue that while sentimental narrativity expresses a cultural fantasy of wholeness, sacred domesticity, and transcendent spirituality, counter-sentimental narrativity emerges as a vein within sentimentalism that both espoused and struggled against the limitations 4 of sentimental tradition. Section two considers the context of the American Civil War and the authority that sentimental mourning exerted in shaping how the meaning of wartime death was understood and narrated in nurses’ memoirs and in public elegiac speech. Every chapter turns on the role of commemoration in how individual and cultural histories are narrated. 5 Acknowledgements I owe a great deal to the Huntington Library whose rich archives contributed a great deal of material to my study and whose generous extension of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant gave me ample time to immerse myself in the images and cultural life of the Civil War period. I also benefited from other sources of financial support including the Paris Program in Critical Theory, under the direction of Samuel Weber, which took me to France where both my research and my orientation toward American Studies underwent significant revolutions. I have benefited from many different kinds of mentorship as this project came together. Both the faculty and graduate students in the English Department at Northwestern University inspired and guided my work. As my advisor, Julia Stern provided both structure and generosity of spirit to this project through all its stages of development. As my mentor, she taught me to find the ineffable possibilities within each text and to persist until their secrets were uncovered. Kevin Bell both shaped the broader questions toward which this dissertation makes only an initial advance and at the same time constantly made me aware of the dangers of rigid boundaries. Betsy Erkkila pushed me toward a closer look at the Civil War when I was hesitant and gave my abstract thinking very specific territories in which to be worked through. Early in my graduate school career, Christopher Herbert helped me understand the power of writing and rigidly enforced the index card rule, for which I will always be grateful to him. Christine Froula’s course on literary mourning after World War I sparked an interest in the intersections of grief and prosody that eventually led to the topic of this dissertation. In the English Department at Northwestern, I and all my fellow graduate students at Northwestern benefit enormously from the excellent work of Nathan Mead whose commitment to the graduate students is unparalleled 6 and often invisible. I greatly appreciated the expansive thinking and generosity of many colleagues, mentors, models, and friends in Evanston, in Paris, and elsewhere, with whom I shared copious amounts of time, coffee, and thoughtful conversations that have interceded at innumerable turning points in this project. These include Robert Adlington, Chris Breu, Elana Commisso, Margaux Cowden, Matt DeGennaro, Marcy Dinius, Agnès Durvin, Emer Finlay, Leah Guenther, Tim Houle, Sharon Hoyer, Hunt Howell, Fran Hutchins, Sharon Israeli, Peter Jaros, Laura Kalba, Gary Karrass, Asa Kasher, Ela Kotkowska, Gary Laderman, Hyun-Jung Lee, Bishupal Limbu, Maria Loftus, John Martin, John Oliverius, Rob Ryder, Laura Sextro, Alina Sheyman, Courtney Traub, Carrie Wasinger, and Joan Waugh. This dissertation also owes a great deal to Brenda Foguel who was both inspirational to my thinking and rigorous in delimiting the boundaries of that thinking. Without the loving support and patience of my family this project would not have been possible. I was raised in a rich world of stories, books, and maps, and this background is what has inspired in me a deep addiction to stories. Gayle Byock, my mother, has always been a profound creative inspiration to me. She has also long been the interlocutor who gave the most shape and substance to my often overly abstract ideas. She is also my chief editor, and not a single word or phrase escapes her rigorous eye. In all these ways and many more, she made the very possibility of writing a dissertation a reality. I am convinced that my early exposure to The Iliad is to blame for my fascination with death in all its mythological, historical, narrative, and philosophical dimensions. For that, along with a keen appreciation of maps and the grimy details of history, I have my dad, Jesse Byock, to thank. My father, Bob Steck, shares my conviction 7 that a deep understanding of death is a necessary complement to any full-hearted philosophy of life for which we also share a passion. Sarah Steck has always provided a compassionate complement to the hardness of logical thought and has contributed more than she knows to my thinking about communal mourning in the past and present. My sister Vanessa inspires me not to cloister myself in stale ideas but to go out into the world to test their political possibilities. My sister Nicole reminds me of all the other reasons to get out of my garret and. Katherine has taught me by example of the strength of sheer will power to reach toward what is possible even if its conclusion remains elusive. I am also extremely grateful to Nathanael for opening up wholly unexpected horizons to me and for showing me how to write about the future as much as the past. He has contributed much more than he knows to my work and to my life. 8 For my family, and for Nathanael. 9 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. NARRATIVITY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 16 “Embalming in Memory”: The Logic of Sentimental Mourning........................................................................ 18 SECTION ONE: SENTIMENTAL AND COUNTER-SENTIMENTAL NARRATIVITY........................................................... 19 SECTION TWO: SENTIMENTAL NARRATIVITY AND REDEMPTIVE DOMESTICITY DURING THE CIVIL WAR .............. 27 CHAPTER ONE: THE NATION’S HEART: EMBODIMENT AND THE SENTIMENTAL DIALECTIC .............................. 32 SENTIMENTAL NARRATIVITY ................................................................................................................................... 32 NARRATIVE MONUMENTALIZATION AND TEXTUAL EMBALMING............................................................................ 37 The Rhetoric of Metaphoric Embalming ............................................................................................................ 50 Mourning and the Limits of Sentimental Personhood ........................................................................................ 54 THE GHOSTLY PRESENCE OF SENTIMENTAL FEMININITY ........................................................................................ 62 The Kaleidoscopic Quality of the Sentimental Heart ......................................................................................... 69 Sentimental Mourning and Divine Epistemology ............................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER TWO: COUNTER-SENTIMENTAL NARRATIVITY AND CONTINGENCY IN MELVILLE’S PIERRE .............. 79 COUNTER-SENTIMENTAL NARRATIVITY .................................................................................................................. 79 CONTINGENCY AND SENSORY DISRUPTION IN PIERRE ............................................................................................. 84 Sensory Contingencies and the Collapse of the Presence/Absence Binary........................................................ 87 Disembodied Voices and the Disintegration of Sentimental Epistemology.......................................................

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