Authorship and Individualism in American Literature
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W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2000 Authorship and individualism in American literature Valerie Ann DeBrava College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation DeBrava, Valerie Ann, "Authorship and individualism in American literature" (2000). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623972. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-7qnj-tx17 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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AUTHORSHIP AND INDIVIDUALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the American Studies Program The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Valerie DeBrava 2000 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number 9982014 UMI* UMI Microform9982014 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Artx>r, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Valerie DeBrava Approved, May 2000 Robert A. Gross Kenneth M. Price Schdtnick _ _ -Elizabeth Bdhies Lawrence Buell Harvard University Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To the Memory of Richard Charles Gill iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION. THEORETICAL GROUNDWORK 2 CHAPTER I. ELIZABETH STODDARD: THE ART OF “HIGH TEMPER” 13 CHAPTER II. THE BURDEN OF SONG: RICHARD STODDARD AND THE GENTEEL TRADITION 76 CHAPTER III. INTER-CHAPTER: THE INCORPORATED READER 143 CHAPTER IV. THE SELF-PUBLISHING CAREER OF WALT WHITMAN 161 CHAPTER V. THE POSTHUMOUS CAREER OF EMILY DICKINSON: AN UNPREDICTED ECLIPSE 213 POSTSCRIPT. THE INCORPORATED READER AS ACADEMIC READER 278 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS From the earliest stages o f this dissertation, I have benefited from the tireless wisdom and enthusiasm of Professor Robert A. Gross. Without his interdisciplinary intellect, this project would not have evolved beyond a strictly literary or biographical study. Countless thanks are owed to Professor Kenneth M. Price, who read this dissertation in every stage of its composition with amiable rigor. Robert J. Scholnick’s expertise on the genteel tradition has been invaluable. For Elizabeth Barnes’s keen attention to my text I am grateful. Lawrence Buell, as my external reader, offered a serious and thorough assessment of this dissertation that I will always appreciate. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT A look at the genre o f American literary history, as well as at the careers o f four nineteenth- century writers, this neo-Marxist study treats the lives and works o f Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth and Richard Stoddard through the productive circumstances of their writing, and through our expectations as consumers of their personalities and texts. Typically, Whitman and Dickinson are recognized as creative individualists who defied the literary and social conventions of their time, while the Stoddards - when they are recognized at all - are remembered in less daring terms. Many critics today regard Elizabeth Stoddard's first novel, The Morcesons. as an unsentimental exploration of sexuality and an innovative foray into realism. Even so, these critics tend to see the radical potential of the novel as compromised by its flawed form, often considered an unsophisticated melding of domestic and realist fiction, and by the failure of Stoddard's subsequent works to build on The Morgesons’ critique of middle-class womanhood. Richard Henry Stoddard, meanwhile, is seen as an unremarkable adherent to the genteel tradition, a chapter in American literary history now regarded as stagnantly establishmentarian and conformist. By contrast, Whitman and Dickinson stand forth as the artistic embodiments o f personal freedom and innovation. Close examination of the careers of Whitman and Dickinson (posthumous, in the case of Dickinson) reveals, however, that these celebrated individualists were not as removed from social determinations of identity as their personas suggest, and that their differences from the Stoddards were less a matter of temperament than of personality’s articulation through commercialism and publicity. The Stoddards inhabited a literary world where the pre-commercial ideal of refined, amateur anonymity tempered the promotional impulse to peddle authors along with texts. The result for the Stoddards - and their genteel peers - was an authorial identity more conforming than conspicuous, and more explicitly social than subversive. Whitman and the posthumous Dickinson of the 1890s, on the other hand, were commodified in conjunction with the promotion of their texts - by Whitman himself and, in the case o f Dickinson, by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. As part of the larger capitalist transformation of subjectivity (what Marxist critics term reification), this promotion of Whitman and Dickinson exemplified the influence of late nineteenth-century literary commercialism on the writing self. The careers o f Whitman and Dickinson, in other words, were inextricable from the economic and historical circumstances from which authorship emerged as a profession distinct from the avocation of letters, and from which the author, as a static, marketable persona, emerged as a figure distinct from the writer. The autonomy and originality for which Whitman and Dickinson are acclaimed become, in this light, testaments to ideology. For such independence is a feature of their marketed identities that derives from the objectifying, isolating power o f commercialism, rather than from genuine individuality and freedom. Such canonical independence derives, in fact, from what Marx calls the commodity fetish, a perceptual paradigm that isolates and objectifies people, as well as things, in a capitalist system. VALERIE DEBRAVA AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM THE COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY IN VIRGINIA ROBERT A. GROSS FORREST MURDEN JR. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND AMERICAN STUDIES vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. AUTHORSHIP AND INDIVIDUALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION Theoretical Groundwork The following dissertation began with my interest in the genre of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Through that interest I came to the novels of Elizabeth Stoddard, whose work has been reintroduced in recent years by a number of scholars drawn to the complex realism of her writing, and interested in contributing to the revitalization of nineteenth-century women’s fiction.1 After reading Stoddard’s first novel in conjunction