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I Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature by Magdalena Zurawski Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ___________________________ Charlotte S. Sussman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 i v ABSTRACT Defining Properties: Literary Cultivation and National Character in Early American Literature by Magdalena Zurawski Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro ___________________________ Charlotte S. Sussman ___________________________ Priscilla Wald An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013 Copyright by Magdalena Zurawski 2013 Abstract In the decades following the English Civil War, as the Anglophone world began transitioning to a social order structured by market and finance capitalism, the word cultivation, which earlier had referred exclusively to agricultural processes, acquired increasingly figurative meanings referring to the development of an individual’s mind, faculties, and manners. This augmentation of meaning reflected the development of new conceptions of property as an essential feature of personhood that had begun to alter the definition of subjectivity. The circulation of such figurative meanings coincides with the rise of print culture, the development of a literary public sphere, and the professionalization of writing in the eighteenth century. These cultural developments suggest the relative ease with which the new conception of property expressed as literary personality coexisted alongside other forms of capital in Britain. Literary criticism of the last forty years, including the work of Raymond Williams, Clifford Siskin, Jerome Christensen, and Thomas Pfau, has accounted for the many ways in which possessing literary cultivation served the development of a middle-class economy and ideology in eighteenth-and-nineteenth century Britain. Though the figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long nineteenth century, thus attesting to the concept’s transatlantic migration and adaptation to the socio-political climates of the New World, no significant studies of American literature have considered the role literary cultivation itself plays in shaping American ideas of personality. My study begins to facilitate an understanding of how modern definitions of property affected and effected early American literary culture. By placing American literature of the long nineteenth century in a transatlantic context, I show how five works by De Crevecoeur, Franklin, Equiano, Brockden Brown, and Margaret iv Fuller model the relationship between real and metaphorical cultivation at the level of both form and narrative content. I argue that within these works literary personality appears as a threat to the American character unless it directly facilitates the acquisition of real property. That in an American context figurative cultivation is at all times subordinated to real cultivation suggests a suspicion of intellectual development at the very foundations of American culture. I draw on new work in early American literature, eighteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, and on a tradition of Marxist critique to read American personality not as an exceptional and isolated development of the revolutionary era, but as a transatlantic migration of cultural forms and conceptions that adapt and mutate upon arriving on New World soil. To understand these migrations and mutations, I map the importation of European aesthetic concepts and literary sources within American productions. My readings make sense of the contradictions within the anti-literary American ideology often articulated in the content of works, whose forms nevertheless reveal a comprehensive engagement with literary history. Doing so allows me to demonstrate the complex ways in which early American authors depicted literary cultivation as either a means of acquiring real property or as a moral redress against the self interest of a speculative economic culture. v Dedication For Mom and Pop. Thank you for supporting me through all this cultivation. vi Contents Terms of Cultivation: An Introduction 1 Limiting the Muse: Writing, Vocation, and Property in Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer 20 A National Formation: Equiano and the Generic Limits of Modernity 66 Charles Brockden Brown “Walstein’s School of History”: The Romance Writer as Virtuous Patriot 110 An American Picturesque: Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes 147 Works Cited 199 Biography 205 vii Acknowledgements Thank you to my adviser, Thomas Pfau, for his diligence and support, for knowing when to guide me and when to let me be, and to my committee members, past and present: Philip Barnard, Tom Ferraro, Fred Moten, Charlotte Sussman, and Priscilla Wald, for their advice and generosity concerning this study. Many thanks to Jack, who patiently slept at my side as I typed for several years. viii Terms of Cultivation: An Introduction I would like to use the space of this introduction not only to outline in academic terms the scope of my research and its intervention in current literary debates, but also to articulate my personal motivations for this project. This dissertation in its most general sense is an attempt to begin to understand how literary personality figures into definitions of American character. In other words, what can the history of American literature teach us about the relationship between being a writer and a reader and being a “good” American? Can a person dedicate oneself to a life of “letters” and still exemplify the American character? If so, on what terms? I examine this question through the term cultivation, which over the long eighteenth century increasingly acquired figurative meanings, so that the term, that until about the time of the English Civil War, as Raymond Williams notes, referred exclusively to “the tending of something, basically crops or animals”1 now also described the development of an individual’s mind, faculties, and manners. This metaphorical augmentation of the word evidences the emergence and circulation of modern political and economic concepts, specifically egalitarian notions of self-possession and private property that challenged both the political authority of monarchy and the landed aristocracy’s domination of a quasi-feudal economic landscape in England. Through cultivation we can trace how a Lockean conception of property as an essential feature of personhood begins to define modern freedom as a confused conflation of democracy and capitalism, so that still today western hegemony cannot distinguish political freedom from free market capitalism. As my readings show, through tracing the term cultivation we see how the modern subject in possession of literary abilities struggles between literary personality as a form of 1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 77. 1 capital and literary personality as a means of developing an ethical standard for a world that no longer has what Charles Taylor calls an “ontic logos,”2 “that meaningful order of timeless or transcendent values in which the moral existence of specific individuals and historical societies may find its ground.”3 The figurative meaning of cultivation appears throughout American literature of the long-nineteenth century, thus attesting to the concept’s transatlantic migration and adaptation to the socio-political climates of the New World. In the readings of early American texts that follow I show that individuals in possession of literary cultivation continually struggle with its dual status as both an ethical ground and a modern form of mobile capital, so that the intellectual development assumed necessary for an individual’s disinterested participation in a liberal democracy finds itself continually in danger of capitulating to commercial interests. My own experiences as a writer—what my adviser Thomas Pfau in the preface to his book Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production calls “biographical ephemera”4—suggest that this project—my research into the historical origins of American attitudes towards literary production—is a personal form of circular argument. During the four years before graduate school I waited tables in San Francisco while writing my first novel. In literary social circles my own “professional” situation was not unusual. It seemed that anyone who took literature seriously could not make a living from writing. With the hope of attaining stable teaching positions many writers I knew were finishing their PhDs in English, or considered beginning one. Some had dropped out of graduate school and decided to take low-end office work, which allowed them to write on the job when no 2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 161. 3 Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville and
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