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“Am I My Other's Keeper?”: Alterity, Dialogic Representation and Polyphonic Ethical Discourse in Later Antebellum American

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“Am I My Other's Keeper?”: Alterity, Dialogic Representation and Polyphonic Ethical Discourse in Later Antebellum American “AM I MY OTHER’S KEEPER?”: ALTERITY, DIALOGIC REPRESENTATION AND POLYPHONIC ETHICAL DISCOURSE IN LATER ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FICTION By Stephen Andrew Gaertner A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2015 ABSTRACT “AM I MY OTHER’S KEEPER?”: ALTERITY, DIALOGIC REPRESENTATION AND POLYPHONIC ETHICAL DISCOURSE IN LATER ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FICTION By Stephen Andrew Gaertner Hayden White argues that to create a narrative is to “moralize.” As historicists assert, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed as well as the ethical value systems that such discourses contain. However, context does not reveal the entire story. Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narratives are polyphonic, that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses, at times represented through singular idiolects. But what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or “carnivalesque” narratives rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms, exposing their discursive limits as well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu. Thus, the text manifests the emergence of a dialogic exchange between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative destabilization that that resists the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology. Therefore, I engage an ethical formalist rereading of a selection of antebellum narrative fictions in order to probe the discursive possibilities latent within the texts’ moral imaginaries. In addition to deploying Bakhtin’s work on polyphonic narrative, I use Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical theory of alterity that stresses the moral agent’s duty to respond on behalf of an individualized subject otherwise totalized by an oppressive, thematizing discourse. Whereas Levinas describes the moment of this ethical demand as the face-to-face encounter, I argue that the responsive duty suggested by the instance of inter-subjective recognition is represented within fiction as dialogue, in addition to the more subtle discourses that the narrator adds. Beyond exposing the text’s ethical tensions, these dialogic moments reflect the discursive polyphony theorized by Bakhtin, multi-vocal eruptions often signaled by a perichoresis of distinct idiolects. The works I discuss—James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy, Herman Melville’s Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig—all contain ethical discourses elaborated through idiolectical dialogic structures and polyphony. Furthermore, the context of their production—the late-antebellum United States—situates them within ethical conversations on totalization and interpersonal duty for the Other in that the modernizing republic was struggling with the moral implications of Indian removal, African slavery, urban labor, poverty and gender oppression. Yet, a Levinasian reading of antebellum U.S. literature invites looking beyond ideological power discourses. In addition to reflecting how American republicanism and capitalism of the mid-1800’s totalized, confined and dehumanized disempowered Others, these texts evidence rhetorical ambivalence respecting the status of the differentiated Other and the moral subject’s duty to the Other in a capitalist republic obsessed with categorical ordering and uncomfortable with ambiguity. Despite their concerns with political, social and ethical regulation, though, these polyphonic works contain transcendent ethical counter-discourses on duty and Otherness that expose a symbiosis between radical Others, peoples otherwise divided by contrasting ethical, political, cultural, racial or socioeconomic alignments. Copyright by STEPHEN ANDREW GAERTNER 2015 For Fr. Joseph Serrano, O. Praem. who inspired the completion of this project, for the Norbertine Community of Santa María de la Vid Abbey that supported it, and for the Zimmerman Library staff at the University of New Mexico who made it possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 I. Levinas………………………………………………………………………………...2 II. Bakhtin………………………………………………………………………………...8 III. Historical Context……………………………………………………………………14 IV. Overview of Chapters and Primary Texts…………………………………………...21 CHAPTER 1: Historicizing an Ethics of Otherness: Dialogism and Ambivalent Constructions of Duty in James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Trilogy…………………………………………..26 I. Satanstoe……………………………………………………………………………..44 II. The Chainbearer……………………………………………………………………..56 III. The Redskins…………………………………………………………………………76 CHAPTER 2: The Ethics of Confinement: Race, Class and Labor in Herman Melville’s Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno”.……………………………………………………………………..98 I. Israel Potter………………………………………………………………………….110 II. “Benito Cereno”……………………………………………………………………..133 CHAPTER 3: Alterity, Compassion and Ethics: Female Antagonists as Sympathetic Others in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig…….……………………………….163 I. Ruth Hall……………………………………………………………………………172 II. Hybrid Archetypes………………………………………………………………….193 III. Our Nig……………………………………………………………………………..200 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………....220 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..226 vi INTRODUCTION Hayden White argues in The Content of the Form that “narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (14); in short, to create a narrative is to moralize. As White and other historicists suggest, the moral content of a narrative reflects the social, cultural and political discourses in which it is constructed; like an archaeological artifact, the text speaks to its immediate surroundings, and the ethical value systems that inform them. But a narrative’s socio-historical context does not reveal the entire “story.” Mikhail Bakhtin holds that narrative texts are “polyphonic,” that is, they contain multiple, competing discourses (Murfin and Ray 86), at times represented through the construction of singular “idiolects” (Richter 548). This sort of idiosyncratic, discursive interplay is what makes them interesting! But what are these various voices talking about, and to whom? Polyphonic or “carnivalesque” narratives (Holquist xix), in particular fiction—creative prose provides rich rhetorical terrain for the moral imaginary—rehearse and contest contrasting ethical paradigms, exposing their discursive limits as well as their transcendent possibilities in a given milieu. Thus, the text manifests dialogic exchanges between ethical discourses, the yield of which is a creative destabilization of comprehension that opens up a broader horizon regarding hidden or latent meaning(s) that resist the archaeological confinement of time, place and ideology. In this dissertation, I explore representations of the ethical imagination and the concept of interpersonal response to the Other within antebellum narrative texts from the northeastern 1 United States. On a formalist plane, I am interested in how the suggestion and depiction of dialogue within polyphonic narratives undergird and destabilize larger understandings of social economy, authority, personal responsibility, interpersonal moral obligation and the rhetorical mechanisms for regulating ethical behavior on the antebellum American scene. I also investigate how these notions are translated within narratives into a greater preoccupation regarding individual invocation, and how this sense of personal duty places a moral demand on textual subjects at times in accord with conventional notions of social order, authority and responsibility, but also at times in conflict with them. This vocational tension as manifested within certain works of northeastern American fiction from the mid-1800’s opens up a dynamic, discursive public space of competing moral paradigms, and points not only to the definitive political rupture to occur in the U.S. in 1861, but also to an ethical imperative for citizens and communities to delineate what constitutes the Good and therefore the individual agent’s moral responsibility for a differentiated Other. I will explain this crucial ethical concept of Otherness, or “alterity” in Emmanuel Levinas’ wording, before moving on to its critical application to my textual analyses and the overarching sociopolitical, historical context that informs the works I examine. I. Levinas In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas defines the “particular” Other (73) in opposition to the Selfsame “I” as an individualized, unique subject, separate from the Self, and one whom the Self often attempts to objectify and appropriate. He writes: The other metaphysically desired is not “other” like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell, the landscape I contemplate, like, sometimes, myself for myself, this “I,” that “other.” I can “feed” on these realities and to a very great extent satisfy myself, as though I had simply been lacking them. Their alterity is thereby 2 reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor. The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other. (33) This notion of the “absolutely other” here is key, for it delineates that which cannot—or ought not—be “reabsorbed” or “totalized” by or into the Selfsame—the “I”—who seeks to control, possess and render “like” the absolutely or particularized
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