DIVISIBLE PASTS: NOSTALGIA AND NARRATIVE
IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1848 – 1900
BY
JOHN RICHARD FUNCHION
B.A., CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY, 2000
M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, 2002
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
MAY 2008
© Copyright 2008 by John Richard Funchion
iii
iv
VITA
Born in Brookings, South Dakota on July 6, 1977, John Funchion earned a B.A.
from Creighton University (2000), an M.A. from the University of Minnesota (2002), and a
Ph.D. from Brown University (2008). As a graduate student at both Minnesota and Brown,
he received support from the U.S. Department of Education in the form of a Jacob K. Javits
Fellowship from 2000 to 2004. While at Brown, he was also the recipient of a Edward T.
and Theckla Jones Brackett Fellowship (2006) and two Graduate School Dissertation
Fellowships (2007-08). During the 2006-07 academic year, the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation sponsored an interdisciplinary dissertation workshop that he co-coordinated.
His current publications include a book review and a forthcoming article on Hamlin Garland and the populist imagination. He has taught literature and writing courses at Brown. In the
fall of 2008, Funchion will join the faculty of the English Department at the University of
Miami, Coral Gables.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would especially like to thank the members of my committee—Philip Gould, Stuart
Burrows, and Deak Nabers—for their unwavering support, sound guidance, and astute
criticism. Kevin McLaughlin also merits my appreciation for sitting on my qualifying exam
committee and for his invaluable assistance with my project in its early stages. Nearly as
indispensable as my dissertation committee, Keri Holt, Brian Sweeney, Tad Davies, and
Laurel Rayburn all read substantial portions of my project and sharpened my thinking at
every stage of the drafting process. I am grateful to Barbara Herrnstein Smith and the
members of the dissertation workshop she coordinated as well as the members of the
“Culture and Communities” Mellon Dissertation Workshop for their insightful comments
and criticism on the first and third chapters of the dissertation. For the encouragement and
mentorship they gave me at various critical moments during my graduate studies, I also owe
a tremendous amount of gratitude to Bridget Keegan, Greg Zacharias, Laura Hess, Leonard
Tennenhouse, Lorraine Mazza, Elizabeth S. Taylor, Stephen Foley, Edward M. Griffin, and
Patricia Crain. While at Brown, I have benefited immensely from being part of a vibrant
community of graduate students; those who should be singled out for their collegiality and
friendship include: David Babcock, David Ben-Merre, Daniel Block, Heather Fielding, Jonna
Iacono, Kelley Kreitz, Jeanette Lee, Wendy Lee, John Melson, Lelia Menendez, Siân Silyn
Roberts, Stephen Satterfield, Bethany Shepherd, Rebecca Summerhays, and Sarah Wald.
I am also deeply indebted to my family and my friends outside of Brown. Long
before beginning graduate school, I was fortunate to befriend Cullen Padgett Walsh, David
Wake, Matthew Lewis Sutton, and the late Caleb Shillander, all of whom have played integral
roles in my intellectual development and provided me with welcomed diversions from
academia. My mother Margaret Funchion, my sister Maura Funchion, and my mother-in-law vi
Elizabeth Spencer all helped me see this dissertation to its conclusion by offering me their encouragement and support. I am particularly grateful to my father, Michael Funchion, for imparting his rich knowledge of both nineteenth-century U.S. history and the inner-workings of pursuing a career in higher education to me. Above everyone else, I owe my greatest thanks to Melanie Spencer. Without her support, critical acumen, friendship, and love, I would have never completed this project. The genre of the acknowledgements page can scarcely do her justice.
vii
CONTENTS _____
INTRODUCTION Divisible Pasts: Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century America 1
CHAPTER ONE Finding Fathers: Revolutionary Nostalgia in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter 28
CHAPTER TWO Irreconcilable Differences: Nostalgia and Reconstruction in Augusta J. Evans’s St. Elmo and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? 80
CHAPTER THREE Past Forward: Walt Whitman, Hamlin Garland and the Progress of Nostalgia in the Late Nineteenth Century 119
CHAPTER FOUR When Dorothy Became History: Cosmopolitan Nostalgia Takes the Heartland by Storm in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 169
Works Cited 201
1
INTRODUCTION _____
Divisible Pasts: Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century America
“Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.”
—Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (2005)
“I am nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I am reminiscing this right now.”
—Noah Baumbach, Kicking and Screaming (1995)
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Yet nostalgia’s career as an “ugly feeling,” as
Sianne Ngai would put it, in American literary criticism is nearly as old as the discipline
itself.1 Just months before World War I came to a close, Van Wyck Brooks’ “On Creating a
Usable Past” (1918) first appeared in the Dial at a time when Brooks found himself
entrenched in an ongoing cultural battle between two generations of critics over the state of
U.S. literary studies. According to Brooks, the generation of literary critics preceding his
own had allowed a debilitating anarchy to take root in the nascent field of American literary
studies. This intellectual chaos stemmed from the academy’s investment in constructing a past incapable of nourishing the present. Order, Brooks insisted, could only be achieved through the active invention of a usable past “placed at the service of the future” (225). This
“possible past” would look forward by shedding the idiosyncratic garbs of provinciality and by mining the archive for literary works exhibiting a nationalist character with a
1 See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (2005). 2 cosmopolitan sensibility (223). Brooks chastised his academic predecessors for worshipping the achievements of romancers and local colorists, and he condemned these same authors for producing what he referred to as “a literature of exploitation” that peddled “the legendary and scenic environment of our grandfathers” for consumption as nostalgic souvenirs (220). In other words, for Brooks, this cultural war could be best expressed dichotomously as one between “the nostalgic attitude and the belief in progress” (Lasch
118).
To a great degree, this opposition between nostalgia and progress remains alive within U.S. literary studies. In a critical exchange between Leo Marx and Amy Kaplan in
American Literary History, Kaplan indicts Marx along these lines. Kaplan castigates Marx’s essay, which calls for a return to an American Studies committed to Enlightenment ideals,
“as a narrative of loss, a jeremiad of sorts” (“Call” 142). In this instance, her indictment exhibits a Brooksian quality by chiding Marx for his nostalgic and parochial “lament” for a lost American exceptionalism. Kaplan fears Marx’s approach to the field would keep “the
US insulated from developing—in dialogue with others—ethical values that go beyond the national as a standard of measurement” (146). Simply put, both Brooks in 1918 and Kaplan in 2005 discredit their intellectual adversaries by rhetorically diagnosing their opponents as sufferers of nostalgia. As exemplary representatives of their critical cohorts, Brooks’s and
Kaplan’s similar enlistment of nostalgia has specific relevance to nineteenth-century literary studies when placed into constellation with a shared perception of another detractor of provinciality, William Dean Howells. Howells, who Kaplan refers to “as the leader” who defined the late nineteenth-century literary scene, regarded nostalgia as something of a dangerous affect at odds with his liberal and realist project (Social 15). In one of his
“Editor’s Study” columns he acknowledges that some readers still cling to the “historical 3
romance” because they “cannot bear to be brought face to face with human nature, but
require the haze of distance or a far perspective” (Criticism 116). He proclaims, however,
that he “like[s] better to go forward than to go backward” and urges his readers to do the
same (Criticism 118). It would seem then for some time Americanists of both Brooks’s and
Kaplan’s stripe have in some sense perpetuated Howells’ narrative of American literary
realism—a narrative critical of provincial nostalgia, suspicious of U.S. imperial pursuits,
tolerant of incorporated difference, and situated in a metropolitan locus.
It is precisely the common critical tendency to study nineteenth-century literature by
“reading for realism,” in the words of Nancy Glazener, that my dissertation will challenge by
maintaining that nostalgia played a formative role in animating several competing diasporic
American nationalisms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (18). Previous critics,
Brooks and Kaplan among them, have tended to dismiss nostalgia as a facile affective
reaction to the conditions of modernity and the rise of a monolithic American nation-state.
By contrast, I argue that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers used nostalgia to produce social spaces that united disparate populations through a shared sense of estrangement from a past, place, or people. I show how writers such as William Wells
Brown, Herman Melville, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Augusta J. Evans, Walt Whitman,
Hamlin Garland, and L. Frank Baum conceived of new communal possibilities by deploying moments of nostalgia in their work. In this way, nostalgia operated as an aesthetic mode in
Friedrich Schiller’s sense of the word—as a political practice that actively generates new forms of social cohesion.
By always portraying their characters in states of alienation within or outside the
U.S., nostalgic narratives brought groups of exiles together through a shared desire to restore
a home or past that might have been. In other words, temporal discontinuity and spatial 4
estrangement—what previous critics have seen as obstacles to nationalism—actually served
as the necessary preconditions for creating a national community based on nostalgia. The
pervasiveness of these narratives allows us to see, moreover, that these writers neither
resisted nor reproduced an already established sense of national identity, but instead their
nostalgic accounts competed for cultural dominance. The culture wars of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were, in other words, really a series of battles among competing
nostalgias.
By insisting that nostalgia played a formative role in U.S. literature throughout the
nineteenth century, my project challenges the longstanding presumption that the Civil War
created a cultural rupture between antebellum and postbellum America. I clarify the relationship between antebellum literature and the rise of sectionalism in the 1850s by
suggesting that writers began to enlist a new, aesthetic conceptualization of nostalgia to
produce sectional feeling. Since the Civil War only brought about a tenuous political
resolution, narratives of nostalgia that amplified and tempered regional divisiveness
dominated the postbellum literary marketplace. In this way, narratives of nostalgia did not
retreat from what Howells referred to as the realities of “the odious present”; they incited
the desire to restore a lost place or past to the present (“New” 936). While critics typically
view American literary realism as a liberal consensus-building and forward-looking project, I
argue realism actually sought to limit and contain the political possibilities imagined by
nostalgic and regional writing. With the eventual triumph of realist taste, nostalgia thus lost
its aesthetic character and became increasingly synonymous with kitsch in the twentieth
century. Before providing a more complete outline of the method and scope of my project,
I should elaborate further on how my work will both draw upon and depart from past and
contemporary scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies. 5
A Nation United, A Century Divided: Studies of Affect Before and After the Civil War
Most contemporary scholarship on the nineteenth century honors the division drawn
by Vernon Louis Parrington in the 1920s, which used the Civil War to separate the century
into two separate fields of study. From Parrington’s time until the 1970s, critics who studied
early nineteenth-century U.S. fiction wrote almost exclusively about the romance. An entire
generation of scholars, in fact, regarded the romance and its symbolic freedom as a uniquely
American genre distinct from the European novel.2 Within the universe of this romance
thesis, critics portrayed the romantic nostalgia of the pastoral ideal as a regenerative oasis
from the desert of nineteenth-century industrialization and the confines of the domestic
sphere—a claim that the Myth and Symbol critics also entertained in various ways.3 Over
the last thirty years, however, the pastoral ideal and the romance have lost their once
esteemed places in the American literary tradition. Scholars came to view nostalgic and romantic literature, which celebrated the pastoral ideal, as exploitative by establishing their connection to the violent removal of American Indians and US expansionism.4 And just as the pastoral ideal came under scrutiny, the feminist scholarship of the 1980s and early 1990s pushed the romance aside by inciting wider critical interest in the neglected discourse of sentimentalism.5 By the late 1990s, sentimentalism had come to overshadow the romance to
such a degree that even readings of archetypal romancers like Cooper, Hawthorne, and
2 See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); and Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1853). 3 See R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam (1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1953); and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950). 4 See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism (1991); Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty (1989); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts (1985) 22-86; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire (2002); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (1975); and Richard Slotkin The Fatal Environment (1985). 5 See Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism (1991); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (1986); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985). 6
Melville were often situated either within or in relation to sentimental discourse.6 Yet even
though literary critics have equated the nostalgic attitude with sentimentalism as much as
with the romance, this association has not received substantive critical attention.
While nineteenth-century literary criticism on the early national and antebellum side of the Civil War has undergone a sequence of canonical and discursive upheavals over the
last fifty years, the postbellum canon—despite expansion—has remained comparatively
stable. Since the advent of the Cold War, scholarly studies on late nineteenth-century U.S.
literature have almost uniformly singled out realism as the period’s predominant literary
mode. While realism did not sustain the same scholarly appeal that the romance did between
1950 and 1980, several key studies appeared during this time that established American
literary realism’s intellectual history, literary legacy, and contribution to the development of
liberalism.7 When addressing the relation between nostalgia and realism in particular, much
of this work simply rehearses Howells’ distinction between unsophisticated nostalgic stories
and complex “unidealized local-writing” devoid of sentimentality (Berthoff 29). And
although they felt some forms of local-color realism merited praise, these critics greatly
preferred Howells’ and James’ high realism and Dreiser’s and Wharton’s naturalism for
facing the challenges of modernity rather than retreating from them in nostalgic reverie.
Surprisingly, subsequent studies have continued to maintain the distinction made in
Cold-War era scholarship between nostalgia and realism. Even the New Americanist
scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, which interrogated realism’s problematic representations
6 See Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy (1997); Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America (2005); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy (2001); Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom (2004); Glen Hendler, Public Sentiments (2001); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism (2000); and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic (1996). 7 See Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (1971); Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism (1965); Edwin H. Cady, The Light of Common Day (1971); Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (1954);. Harold H. Kolb, Jr., The Illusion of Life (1965); Jay Martin, Harvests of Change (1967); and Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1966). 7
of race, class, and gender, did not question this nostalgia/realism binary.8 They did not,
however, extol realism for its critique of modernity. Instead the New Americanists regarded
realism and naturalism as urban genres partially—if not fully—complicit with the logic of
late nineteenth-century capitalism. Regional writing, moreover, was often seen as a
completely subordinate and complimentary component of the realist project. Accordingly,
many of these critics insisted that regionalism either worked to contain difference culturally
or it commodified nostalgia regressively for the Northeastern elite.9 And unlike their
intervention within early national and antebellum U.S. studies, feminists working on
regionalism did not redefine late nineteenth-century studies. Instead they largely accepted
the nostalgia/realism binary in order to celebrate women’s regional writing as an alternate—
but ultimately marginalized—space where pre-industrialized matriarchal communities could
elude the power of patriarchal modernity.10
Although most scholarship over the last fifty years has left the concept of nostalgia critically unexamined, more recent work on nineteenth-century US literature—especially on
the late nineteenth century in particular—has helped make the kind of intervention I wish to
perform possible. Books written by Nancy Glazener (1997), Stephanie Foote (2001), and
Tom Lutz (2004), for example, all suggest that Howells institutionalized a particular way of
reading realism and regionalism that most contemporary “literary critics continue” to emulate “today” (Lutz 2). Such an observation explains why realism now enjoys a place far
8 Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism (1992); Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature (1991); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988); Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987); and Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism (1982). 9 Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety (2000); Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (1993); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (2003); Roberto Maria Dainotto, “All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt’: The Literature of Place and Region” (1996); Michael A. Elliott, The Culture Concept (2002); Brad Evans, Before Cultures (2005); Hsuan Hsu, “Literature and Regional Production” (2005); and June Howard, ed., New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs (1994). 10 Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature (1983); Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing out of Place (2003); Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, eds, Breaking Boundaries (1997); and Emily Toth, ed., Regionalism and the Female Imagination (1985). 8 more central and overdetermining in late nineteenth-century literary history than many critics who wrote before the Second World War were willing to accord it. As a figure committed to a brand of liberal pluralism, Howells’s own literary project seems remarkably compatible with the cultural values harbored by Cold-War liberal consensus and post-Cold-War multicultural scholars alike. In other words, Howells’s cultural congeniality to the various progressive and liberal movements of the last fifty years has led scholars both to sideline local color writing—a genre far more popular and heterogeneous than the realist novel in the nineteenth century—and to define the concept of nostalgia monolithically as the antonym of progress. I want to reorient our study of nineteenth-century US literature by exploring the dynamism of nostalgia as a concept, which both enabled writers to imagine localized forms of community and shaped the way Howells developed his theory of realism.
In order to conduct such a reexamination, the scope of my dissertation necessarily differs in at least two important respects from the critical norm. First, my study begins in the decade prior to the Civil War to establish a relationship between antebellum discourses of sentiment and sympathy to various postbellum nostalgias. Secondly, I am interested in moments when genres fail to discipline subjects and produce social hierarchies of power.
Nostalgia, I maintain, is an affect and a mode, but it is not genre. When nostalgia surfaces in the literary works I examine as either a narrative mode or an affect, it disrupts the generic cohesiveness and cultural logic of text. In this way, nostalgia in the nineteenth century operates aesthetically as opposed to generically by enabling authors and readers to imagine new forms of community previously unthinkable to them. Nostalgia’s prevalence and disruptive power in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, moreover, casts doubt upon what has become one of the field’s truisms: that a single understanding of
American nationalism and culture hegemonically defined the economic, political, and social 9
relations of the period that writers could only either reproduce or subvert. To render these
claims about nostalgia and nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture less abstract, I will
devote the remaining pages of this introduction to providing a fuller account of nostalgia’s
conceptual genealogy, to articulating what I mean by “aesthetics” and nostalgia’s relation to that concept, and to establishing how my project suggests that the concept of hegemony may have outlived its usefulness in nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural studies.
Diagnosis Nostalgia: The Pathology of a Sentiment
As both a form of collective memory and as an aesthetics, nostalgia would emerge as
an important concept in the 1850s—a time when few felt as though they really belonged to
the nation—precisely because it imagined people as longing for rather than belonging to
communities. That nostalgia produces community through longing has of course several
theoretical and cultural implications that I explore later in this chapter as well as throughout
my project. I want to begin, however, by briefly sketching out nostalgia’s conceptual
genealogy in order to establish how it became an important aesthetic and psychological
concept during the nineteenth century.11 Well before nostalgia would achieve an epidemic
status during the Civil War, nostalgia routinely appeared in medical and psychological
publications from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.12 Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, first coined the word in 1688 to describe the “painful yearning to return home” with the accompanying symptoms of “despondency, melancholia, lability of emotion, including profound bouts of weeping, anorexia, a generalized ‘wasting way,’ and, not
11I provide an abbreviated account of nostalgia’s terminological career that focuses especially on its use in the United States. More comprehensive and less nationally specific accounts of the term can be found in the following: Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001) 1-18; Fred Davis’ Yearning for Yesterday (1979) 1-29; and David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) 4-13. Edward Brown’s online Case Histories from the History of Psychiatry (2005), which includes a bibliography of and an entry on nostalgia, is also an invaluable resource. 12 For more on the prevalence of nostalgia during the Civil War, see Eric T. Dean’s Shook Over Hell (1997) 115- 134. 10
infrequently, attempts at suicide” (Davis 1-2). Following Hofer’s essay, physicians
throughout Europe began to use his term to diagnose patients who exhibited the symptoms
of this form of melancholic yearning, finding soldiers to be the most common sufferers of it.
Discussions of nostalgia appeared to take place most frequently within Swiss, French and
especially German publications—alternately referred to in the French and German
vernacular as “maladie du pays” and “heimweh” respectively. For this reason, most doctors
concluded that these nationalities were particularly susceptible to falling ill with nostalgia.
Eighteenth-century British physicians even expressed a kind of national pride when
proclaiming that "we know nothing of this passionate attachment that leads to this sort of
Insanity" (Macalpine and Hunter 499).13 When nostalgia in Britain was discussed, it was
usually regarded as an illness suffered only by those of Scottish or Welsh as opposed to
English descent. They also contended that wider outbreaks of nostalgia generally occurred
only when “press gangs were especially active in ports” in order to bolster the ranks of the
Royal Navy during times of war (Rosen 38). In spite of these instances of British nostalgia,
most doctors in the Anglophone world concluded that the Swiss and Germans suffered
from the disease more frequently and likely for environmental reasons, deeming the former
group unable to cope psychologically in non-alpine climates.
In the nineteenth century, the diagnosis became less common, but nostalgia
continued to appear as a diagnostic category in many medical manuals and publications—
especially in the United States where nostalgia would find a new home. In the most
important American psychiatric treatise of the first half of the nineteenth century, Medical
Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), Benjamin Rush recounts the characteristics of several reported cases of “nostalgia, or what is called home-sickness” (113).
13 Qtd. in Brown, Case Histories from the History of Psychiatry. 11
Although Rush also closely associated nostalgia with “Swiss soldiers” who suffered from
tristimania or depression “brought on by absence from their native country,” his account of
nostalgia became one of the most widely available and authoritative in the English language
in the United States (40). Often citing Rush’s diagnostic guide, succeeding American writers
inside and outside of the medical community often seized upon the concept. Some saw it as
a concept that to varying degrees embodied the American experience, for as the fledging
republic pushed westward, “every pilgrim from home has either heard or known something
of that illness of the heart—nostalgia” (Talmon 607).
But others did not regard it as universally applicable. Even as many medical
professionals would continue to find incidences of the disease among soldiers and
conscripted sailors, several antebellum American writers had also begun to racialize
nostalgia. On the one hand, it was often used to describe the psychological disposition of
non-Anglo Saxon immigrants, especially the Chinese.14 On the other hand, nostalgia more commonly became classified as a form of “‘negro-consumption’” during the antebellum and
Civil War eras (Olmsted 124). Even though Rush had previously classified nostalgia and the insanity that “Africans” often had succumbed to “soon after they enter[ed] upon the toils of perpetual slavery in the West Indies” as closely related forms of mental disease, pro-slavery and abolitionist writers drew almost no distinction between these two previously separate forms of tristimania (41). “‘Like migratory animals’” Marmaduke B. Sampson explains in
Slavery in the United States (1845) that “the negro” exhibits an “attachment to home . . . with
singular force” (68). In fact, Sampson—an abolitionist—subscribes so strongly to this view
that he uses it to critique the central premise of the American Colonization Society, insisting
14 See, for example, an excerpt of J. Milton Mackie’s The Life of Tai-Ping Wang, Chief of the Chinese Insurrection (1857) published in Putnam’s: Mackie, “The Chinamen: Domestic, Scholastic, Iconoclastic, and Imperial,” Putnam’s Monthly. April 1857: 310. 12
that “free blacks” will never “give their consent” to leave for Africa due to their natural
predisposition to suffer from chronic nostalgia (75). And yet even as some writers struggled
to use nostalgia as a kind of racial marker, its potential universal applicability haunted even
these racist applications of the term. One British poet, James Montgomery, whose work was
widely reprinted in the United States, wrote “The Voyage of the Blind” (1820), which
described how several “negroes, affected with nostalgia” on board a French slave ship
bound for the West Indies managed spread to the mental contagion along with another illness causing blindness (probably scurvy, which was often associated with nostalgia during the first half of the nineteenth century)—among the European members of the crew (261).
Thus, for antebellum Americans, nostalgia appeared to be an unstable concept capable of
both demarking racial difference and potentially embodying the universal and exceptional
American experience.
That black slaves and impressed sailors were deemed as the two largest “at-risk”
demographics for nostalgia bears immediate relevance upon my readings in the first chapter
of Clotel and Israel Potter given that the protagonists of both of these texts fall within these groups. Even more pertinent to my analysis of nostalgia and literary culture, however, is how the discussion of nostalgia in English-language publications—even when citing non-
English sources—drew upon the language of sentimentalism to outline the disorder’s pathology. By establishing nostalgia’s connection to the discourse of sentimentalism, the latter of which emerged out of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British faculty psychology, I will establish why some writers began to look nostalgia in place of sympathy as a more useful way to create conflicting accounts of the nation. And in the case of Brown and Melville at least, nostalgia could also undermine any attempt to produce a monolithic and singular idea of the nation entirely. 13
When first defining nostalgia in the seventeenth century, Hofer believed that a
“separation from the homeland” coupled with “an ‘afflicted imagination’ was an important cause” of nostalgia (Anderson and Anderson 156). From Hofer onwards, physicians continued to regard nostalgia as a disease of the imagination, which suggests that nostalgia from its inception occupied a liminal intellectual ground, standing at the disciplinary intersection of philosophy, psychology and aesthetics. For this reason, literary sources appeared alongside empirical case studies to illustrate the various symptoms of the mental disease. In his 1859 Treatise on Theism, Francis Wharton cites passages from Oliver
Goldsmith’s poetry to support Rush’s claim that people who originally come from mundane and “inhospitable climes” suffer from nostalgia when they leave their native lands more so than people who came from beautiful parts of the world (80). And in his historical survey of nostalgia in the field of psychology, George Rosen insists that novelists from Richard
Smollett to Honoré de Balzac used the novel as a medium for exploring and “extend[ing] the concept of nostalgia” (44). The fact that medical journals and novels participated in a shared conversation about this “affliction” of the imagination suggests that even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers placed nostalgia within aesthetics as much as they did within the field of medicine.
We can situate nostalgia’s place within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics even more precisely though. The way in which texts described nostalgia suggests that at least in the Anglophone world the concept had become tethered to the overlapping discourses of faculty psychology and Scottish Enlightenment moral and aesthetic philosophy. Evidence of nostalgia’s connection to these discourses can be found in both works about the aesthetics of sentimentalism and about nostalgia itself. Within the philosophical tradition on passions and on moral sympathy, the concept emerges indirectly 14 in discussions about national feeling. As Elizabeth Barnes reminds us, thinkers like John
Locke and Francis Hutcheson associated the benevolent bonds of filial love with national feeling, which “form[ed] the basis not only of social ties but political ties as well” (28). While
Hutcheson does not actually use the word “nostalgia” in his writings, he does underscore the importance of what he calls “national love” in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises first published in 1725 (115). What makes his discussion of
“national love” so germane to the conceptualization of nostalgia in particular as opposed to the formation of nationalism in general is the way in which he frames his account of this type of feeling.
In the context of discussing the relationship between self-love and the causes of social benevolence, Hutcheson examines the basis of “publick affections” (114). He begins his discussion of these affections by inviting his readers to consider the following example:
[S]uppose a Person, for Trade, had left his native Country, and with all his
Kindred had settled his Fortunes abroad without any View of returning; and
only imagine he had receiv’d no Injurys from his Country: ask such a Man,
would it give him Pleasure to hear of the Prosperity of his Country? Or
could he, now that his Interests are separated from that of his Nation, as
gladly hear that it was laid waste by Tyranny or a foreign Power? I fancy his
Answer would shew us a Benevolence extend beyond Neighbourhoods or
Acquaintances. (114)
Hutcheson asks his readers to imagine national love in a diasporic context. Rather than considering how bonds of feeling might be forged with the place a person currently inhabits, he uses the distant affection born out of expatriation as a basis for his theory of national feeling. The power of national sentiment is most felt not at home but in the detachment 15
from home when abroad.15 And while Hutcheson admits that one can “acquire a national
love” for “another Country,” the recollection of one’s native country will always function as
the original conduit through which “Associations, Friendships, Familys, natural affections,
and other human Sentiments” were first fostered and later remembered (161).
While Hutcheson’s suggestion that national feeling could become amplified by the
estrangement from one’s place of national origin implies that nostalgia played a critical role
in his understanding of communal identity and benevolence, nostalgia would come to
supplant benevolence and sympathy generally in the minds of some by the mid-nineteenth
century.16 Nostalgia, however, was first seen as a deranged form of benevolence or
sympathy more generally. In this way, nostalgia really does appear to be a disease of the
imaginative faculty as John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke describe it in their
authoritative 1858 American edition of A Manual of Psychological Medicine (161). Citing
observations made by the renowned French physician Dominique Larrey, they describe
nostalgia as an “aberration of mind” that would often cause the patient to suffer from
hallucinations of “their native home . . . in the most extravagant and delusive hues which a
morbid fancy could suggest” (161). Furthermore, the sufferer of nostalgia would begin to
lose all bodily and mental self-control. Based on Larrey’s account of the disease, Bucknill
and Tuke conclude that nostalgia must be “a moral sentiment” capable of developing into a
“cerebral disorder preceding the act of suicide . . . an act which may be regarded as
independent of the patient’s volition” (163). Nostalgia then would appear to be at the very
15 In fact, Hutcheson proceeds to describe how the benevolence one feels for one’s native land can ultimately serve as the basis for a kind of cosmopolitan sensibility or universal benevolence “extended to all Mankind” (Hutcheson 160). This claim gestures toward the relationship between nostalgia and cosmopolitanism, which I explore in later chapters. 16 It is worth briefly noting that Adam Smith would do away with Hutcheson’s idea of benevolence, insisting that human beings possessed no such completely selfless inclination. Nevertheless, an association among this form of benevolence and national identity persisted as recent works of scholarship on sentimental discourse and Barnes (1997) especially suggest. For more on Smith’s understanding of benevolence, see The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) 235-237; 300-6. 16
least a deranged sentiment, and insofar as it amplifies an individual’s attachment to a
particular society, it would also appear to be a disease of sympathy more broadly. In an
article that appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1839, George Combe in fact describes nostalgia precisely as a “diseased condition” of the attachment that plays a vital role in creating “the bond of union among men, and gives rise to society” (604). What
Combe’s piece suggests then is that by the 1840s, nostalgia was not so a much a sentiment but the sentiment that animated the bonds between people, forming the basis of a society that felt ever more estranged from its nation in the 1850s. In this way, nostalgia would provide Americans from the 1850s to the end of the nineteenth century with a way to long for a national home within a nation in which that no one seemed to belong.
Nostalgia, Aesthetics, and New Formalism
Having established that nostalgia emerged out of both an aesthetic and medical
discourse in the nineteenth century, I now want to explain further what I mean when I say
that nostalgia works as an “aesthetic” concept. On the whole, those who have recently
studied nostalgia have treated it as an aesthetic concept in some fashion. Those working on nostalgia in Victorian and postmodern studies, the two fields where nostalgia as an affect has
received extended attention, have tried to account for the concept by defining it in precise
formal terms. For Victorianists Nicholas Dames and Linda M. Austin, nostalgia functioned
aesthetically by becoming part of the “automatic unconscious” of the period, working as a
simultaneous mode of forgetting and remembering (Austin 23). For them, what makes
nostalgia interesting in the nineteenth century is its conspicuous absence from British
cultural discourse even though it seemingly continued to inform various types of
remembering depicted in British fiction. By contrast, both Svetlana Boym and Roberta 17
Rubenstein go to great lengths to distinguish bad nostalgia from a good nostalgia
unassociated with “sentimental” or other “psychologically regressive modes of feeling”
(Rubenstein 6). Specifically refuting theorists like Susan Stewart or Sylviane Agacinski, who
align nostalgia with antimodernism, Boym distinguishes between restorative and reflective
nostalgia.17 While restorative nostalgia seeks to violently restore a lost homeland or nation,
reflective nostalgia dwells in the algia of nostalgia by “perpetually deferring homecoming itself” (Boym 49). Underlying these various different accounts of nostalgia is the shared assumption that a fundamental connection exists between nostalgia and questions of aesthetics. Nevertheless, what I hope to show is that nostalgia’s aesthetic character stems from its connection—not a clean break from—sentimentalism as well as its conceptual indeterminacy in the nineteenth century.
Throughout the dissertation I will be working with a definition of aesthetics
informed by the philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Theodor W. Adorno. 18 There are
several reasons why I use Rancière and Adorno as my theoretical interlocutors. Both of
them I believe do not display many of the shortcomings found in the theoretical work
commonly employed within literary studies. For starters, while they both maintain that
aesthetics and politics have a necessary relationship to one another, neither of them embrace
totalizing or overlapping definitions of these terms. They also do not conflate aesthetics with politics, though Rancière certainly subscribes to Friedrich Schiller’s belief that the
“problem of politics in practice” must be “approach[ed] through the problem of the
aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom” (Schiller
17 See Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing (2003); and Susan Stewart, On Longing (1993). 18 Rancière in particular is a logical interlocutor for anyone working on sentimentalism or nostalgia in the nineteenth century, because he bridges the rift between the politics and aesthetics by relying heavily upon the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller whose understanding of aesthetics emerged out of sentimental aesthetics as imparted to him by Immanuel Kant. It is also worth noting that antebellum writers like Emerson responded to and built upon Schiller’s work, the aesthetic theories of Schiller and Rancière by way of the former are historically relevant to antebellum philosophies of art. 18
9).19 Or, as Adorno puts it, art “becomes the determinate negation of the existing world
order,” thereby enabling us to imagine alternatives to existing dominant power structures
(Aesthetic 344). To say that politics might be thought through aesthetics is not akin, however, to saying that aesthetics and politics are one in the same thing. For both Adorno and
Rancière, an aesthetic object cannot be reduced to “mere ideology” or metonymically stand
in for a hegemonic structure or a counter-hegemonic movement (Prisims.32). Even while
always historically situated, aesthetic objects by definition, in Adorno’s words, must be free
“from external goals” to become “their own masters” (Aesthetic 17). In other words, the
moment that an aesthetic object can become assimilated to a single political program, it
ceases to be art and instead becomes propaganda.
Aesthetics or aesthetic objects are disorderly objects that do not simply reproduce or
subvert existing power structures. As Adorno explains, they “express[ ] the idea of harmony
negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost
structure” (Prisms 32). For this reason, Rancière maintains that “aesthetics refers to a specific
regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of
doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking
about their relationships” (Politics 10). Aesthetic objects create a regime whereby social and
political relations and possibilities can be thought out. For Rancière as well as for Schiller
and Adorno, aesthetics enables one to create alternate ways of imagining the sensible
world—to render visible political inequities and to think what was once unthinkable. Art
that works within the regime of the aesthetic, as opposed to what Rancière refers to as the
generic or “representative regime of the arts,” does not conform to a rigid set of practices or
19 Austin persuasively establishes correlations between Schiller’s work on nostalgia and aesthetics. While I rely on her work to justify my treatment of nostalgia as an aesthetic concept, I treat aesthetics as both an object of historical study as well as a contemporary problematic through which to read literature. For Austin’s account of Schiller, see Nostalgia in Transition, 1780 – 1917 (2007) 4-15. 19
guidelines (21). Thus, while the representative regime establishes hierarchies of distinction
and a set of generic expectations, the aesthetic regime seeks to emancipate art “from any specific rule” (Politics 23). Consequently, an “aesthetic revolution” can occur any time a particular regime of representation is called into question or cast aside entirely (Politics 27).20
That both Rancière and Adorno define aesthetics in opposition to genre, or
harmonious formal structures, has a particular relevance to nineteenth-century U.S. literary
studies. Genre, however loosely defined, has always remained central to the study of
nineteenth-century U.S. literature from the sentimental novel to the romance to realism.
Moreover, authors such as Cooper, Stowe, Hawthorne, and Howells all insisted that their
particular genres fulfilled important social functions, namely that they worked to bring about social harmony within the nation. Consequently, literary critics have often fallen into the habit of reading for genre in the nineteenth century. Nostalgia, however, is not a genre. As
both an affect and a literary mode, it emerges within all sorts of novels and romances, and
when it does it disrupts the literary work within which it appears. For this reason, nostalgia
seems to operate aesthetically in Rancière’s and Adonro’s understanding of that word.
Rather than producing formal and social coherence, it creates generic ruptures. The effects
of these ruptures differ depending on the particular text, but often they consist of making
visible certain social inequities and a set of alternatives to them by casting their characters in
states of temporal or spatial exile from their homes. In the chapters that follow, I will
elaborate further upon the way the aesthetic and nostalgia work in the particular texts that I
examine. Building upon these preliminary thoughts, I will also continue to elaborate upon
and further develop my use of Rancière’s and Adorno’s work throughout the rest of my
dissertation.
20 Also see Rancière’s “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes” (2002). 20
To a great degree, both Adorno and Rancière help us avoid the common tendency of pitting cultural studies against aesthetics. For this reason, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon favors
Rancière’s work because it “rehabilitate[s] the category of the aesthetic” by treating it “as a
political and cultural practice” ( “Sentimental” 497). But even though Adonro and Rancière
do not divorce aesthetics from politics or historicism for that matter, their particular
understandings of aesthetics remain at odds with many of the prevailing theories employed by critics currently working in nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural studies.
Nevertheless, my turn to aesthetics is very much in keeping with a much wider shift taking
place within literary studies. This shift, which Marjorie Levinson describes as “New
Formalism,” has manifested itself within nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies in the form
a special issue of American Literature (2004), Theo Davis’s Formalism, Experience, and the Making
of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (2007), and Russ Castronovo’s Beautiful Democracy
(2007).21 With the exception of some of Dillon’s recent work on form, however, these
studies do not turn to either Rancière’s or Adorno’s work. The omission of their theories to
me signals the persisting influence of the New Americanist political and cultural project,
which seeks to produce scholarship linked to “sociopolitical issues external to the academic
field” (Pease, “New Americanists” 32). For this reason, many critics within the field of
American literary studies continue to draw upon a constellation of theorists who rose to
prominence within the discipline in the years following 1968. These theorists and their
successors have enabled scholars to make important and welcomed interventions within the
canon of American literature, but they have also enabled many critics to justify their
21 The particular issue of American Literature to which I am referring appeared in Sept. 2004. 21
scholarship as a form of political activism.22 Adorno’s and Rancière’s work, however, after
1968 did not fare so well, and I believe the cool reception of their work stems in no small
part from the fact that both thinkers insisted that thought and action could not be
harmoniously reconciled with one another. Adorno, on the one hand, has often been
marginalized for his perceived elitism and for his refusal to become an intellectual activist in
a manner akin to his one-time Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse. By contrast,
Rancière publicly castigated his mentor Louis Althusser for his reaction to the events of
1968, and he chose to leave academia for some time to pursue a separate career in activism.
To date, Rancière’s dissenting contributions to Reading Capital remain unavailable in
English.23 My gesture to this brief history of reception is not intended to revisit the various
intellectual and political debates surrounding 1968, but my hope instead is to suggest that
Adorno’s and Ranciere’s work on aesthetics might make available to us different ways of
thinking about the relationship between art and politics largely unaccounted for in the
criticism produced over the past several decades. What precisely is at stake in such a move?
That is the question I hope to begin to answer in the section that follows.
A Brief Polemic: Hegemony in New Americanist Literary and Cultural Studies
In the aphorism “Baby with the bath-water” found in Minima Moralia, Adorno
challenges what he sees as a recurrent motif in cultural criticism that he finds especially
suspect. Namely, he declares that the “notion of culture as ideology” has a “tendency to
become itself ideology” (43). The specific object of his critique in this instance is of course
22 I am here of course gesturing to a tradition of thinking largely consisting of the work of Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan; this way of thinking continues to manifest more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Antonio Negri. 23 The English edition only includes the essays by Althusser and Etienne Balibar. In addition to Rancière, Macherey and Establet also have essays that appear in the original French volume. 22
the more orthodox strains of materialism and ossified economic determinism that he
quarreled with throughout the duration of his intellectual career. More broadly, however,
Adorno appears to indict what he describes elsewhere as the tyranny of concepts that think
for us as opposed to those that help us think.24 For if we “identify culture solely with lies”
or ideology, then such an “identification” compromises “every opposing thought” (44).
When the concept of culture becomes too monolithic and broadly encompassing, then
divergences in thought or the possibility of disagreement become impossibilities. Thinking
itself seems impossible since all modes of thought, no matter how discordant they may at
first appear to be, can always be subsumed under or implicated as mere expressions of the
same homologous ideology. Intellectual activity of any kind under these circumstances
seems ultimately futile and unnecessary, as everything can always already be explained by the
dominant mode of production. Rather than accepting this proposition, however, Adorno
concludes in this aphorism that the concepts of culture and ideology must themselves be
subjected to constant critique.
While economic determinism and orthodox Marxist thought have long ago
disappeared almost entirely from U.S. academic discourse—though they never had much
cache in the first place, I believe Adorno’s critique of culture as ideology could readily be
applied to a concept that appears with almost complete ubiquity in most of the definitive
studies on American literary and cultural studies published since the late 1980s—that of
hegemony. Certainly, an exhaustive analysis of the concept of hegemony would require its own book—if not several. A dissertation on nineteenth-century American literature is no place to smuggle in a theoretical indictment of a concept so pervasive in American thought
that even Rush Limbaugh used it to describe the goal of his conservative project in See, I Told
24 See Adorno, “Is Marx Obsolete?” (1968) 4. 23
You So (1993). Nor do I believe I am prepared to undertake such a task. What I would like
to suggest, however, is that the inability of many of these studies to describe adequately the
way certain literary modes work—like nostalgia for example—may stem in no small part from the fact that a commitment to describing or challenging hegemony serves as something
of a sine qua non for them. Much as I am sure the co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment had
no intention of completely rejecting the idea of culture as ideology, I do not see much use in
our jettisoning the concept of hegemony entirely from our lexicon of literary criticism. To
do so, would be to throw the baby out with the bath water. I do, however, think we should
take seriously an observation made by Slavoj Žižek—himself a strong believer in the utility
of the concept when strictly defined in Antonio Gramsci’s terms. In an essay designed in
part to respond to the question posed by Judith Butler about the conceptual ambiguity
surrounding the word “hegemony,” Žižek notes that hegemony’s “specificity is often missed
(or reduced to some vague proto-Gramscian generality) by those who refer to it” (“Class”
92). This I think is especially true in American Studies, within which many of the field’s
most important works seem invested in determining the hegemonic or counter-hegemonic
status of a particular author, literary text, or genre.25
The motivating goal behind these projects, moreover, seems to be to find an answer
to the eponymous question posed by Jonathan Arac in the 20th-anniversary issue of
American Literary History: “What Good Can Literary History Do?” (1). The answer to this question he finds, curiously enough, outlined in the masthead of a different journal— boundary 2: “‘we no longer ‘publish in the standard professional areas, but only materials that identify and analyze the tyrannies of thought and action spreading around the world and suggest alternatives to these emerging configurations of power’” (10). ALH, incidentally,
25 See, for example, Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (2002). 24 seems avowedly committed to publishing in the “standard areas,” but Arac offers no account of what good this kind of work published in ALH might do. What I find especially interesting about boundary 2’s masthead is its equation of good literary history to literary history that responds to the urgency of the present by combating tyrannical thought currently “spreading around the world.” In this sense, boundary 2 and Arac seem to adhere to an intellectual program best described by Adorno as “actionism,” or the fetishization of action over and above thought, so thought loses intrinsic value.26 Thought, in this instance, is valuable only insofar as it advances the claims of a particular program of political commitment.
Arac’s essay is revealing for a number of reasons and bears upon the use of hegemony in U.S. literary studies in a very direct way. Even though Arac quotes Trilling favorably in this essay, citing his understanding of the confluence of art and politics, Arac echoes sentiments expressed by Pease two decades ago that remind the reader the New
Americanists largely sought displace an entire generation of Cold War consensus critics.
Certainly, I think it is fair to say that Cold War liberalism did achieve a hegemonic position in the U.S. What I am less convinced of is the Cold War era’s account and appropriation of nineteenth-century literature, whether in the form of Chase’s romance thesis or Berthoff’s liberal account of realism, as cultural and political antecedent to Cold War liberal nationalism. Many critics working out of the New Americanist tradition, however, seem ready to accept this account without ever considering that nineteenth-century nationalism and the nineteenth-century nation may have a different form and content from those of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than attempting to fully indict this reading here, however, I hope that my project may at least begin to suggest productively and
26 See Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models (1998) 259-278. 25
provocatively an alternative way of understanding the form and content of the nation in the
nineteenth century; not in hegemonic terms but as works in progress—as a set of categories
very much up for debate. Dissensus, not consensus, punctuated the literary culture of the
nineteenth century. If we stop trying to read for or against various types of nineteenth-
century hegemonies, I believe we will not only arrive at a better understanding of nineteenth-
century literature and culture, we will be able to entertain a much wider range of interesting intellectual projects.
The Chapters
The first chapter examines Brown’s Clotel (1853), Melville’s Israel Potter (1855), and
antebellum political speeches to explain how rival sectional nationalisms used nostalgia to
appropriate the tradition of the Revolutionary War. Antebellum writers and political leaders
declared the legitimacy of their competing versions of the nation and definitions of national
citizenship by recovering a particular account of the Revolutionary era. In the case of Clotel,
Brown enlists nostalgic longing to imagine the legacy of the Revolutionary War as one
committed to racial inclusiveness. Paradoxically, two of the central fugitive slaves in Clotel
can only lay claim to an American identity when in exile they experience nostalgia or homesickness for the U.S. Conversely, Melville’s Israel Potter depicts any form of American
nationality as a type of enslavement, implying that the longing to be at home in the nation condemns his protagonist to a life of misery. Thus, while these novels depict the desire for
American citizenship in opposing terms—as either emancipation or enslavement—both view nostalgia as the affect that binds one to a particular place through a sense of longing as
opposed to belonging. 26
The second chapter considers the uses of nostalgia in two postbellum historical
romances, Evans’ bestselling St. Elmo (1866) and the first Chicana novel written, de Burton’s
Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). My readings of these romances question the supposition
that The Atlantic Monthly, along with a handful of other major periodicals, successfully
contained sectional antagonisms by reconstructing a national literary tradition that sewed
together a patchwork of cultures under the rubric of realism. While proto-realist novels of
national reconciliation struggled to find an audience, a diverse set of literary works that fueled sectional sensations such as those by Evans and de Burton dominated the literary marketplace in the years immediately succeeding the Civil War. Although Evans’ romance and de Burton’s first novel differ in several crucial respects, both works use tropes of
diaspora, exile, and nostalgic longing to imagine the United States as a loose confederation
of sectional cultures produced through a process of mutual regional intolerances.
The third chapter contends that many writers at the end of the nineteenth century
used nostalgia to elide the binary conflict between liberal individual agency and the
environmental determinism posed by the logic of naturalism. Subjecting the past to the
political exigencies of the present, writers such as Whitman and Garland envisioned forms of
collective historical agency by defining progress in aesthetic and political terms as a product
of nostalgia. While we generally read Whitman in relation to the antebellum period, his later
prose and poetry imagines a postbellum democratic community based on nostalgia. Garland
employed Whitman’s understanding of nostalgia to re-imagine the nation’s regions as fused
together in the service of Populism. By carrying out these projects, Whitman and Garland
developed a form of aesthetics that such later writers as the New Regionalists of the 1920s
and 30s continued to draw upon. This chapter thus challenges us to reevaluate our 27 understanding of the relation between regionalism and nostalgia and its contribution to later forms of modernism.
The final chapter explains how nineteenth-century nostalgia morphed into a consumer label for collectable objects that metonymically stand in for an ephemeral past. I argue that L. Frank Baum invented this new understanding of nostalgia in The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, (1900) and in his subsequent silent film adaptations of the book. Baum’s book sates the nostalgic desire to be at home not so much through Dorothy’s return to Kansas but by imagining a prelapsarian home in Oz. Like Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Homes born out of the Arts and Crafts movement, Baum embraces a portable and mass consumable nostalgia emptied of its content. Accordingly, the very figure that Melville satirically posits as the embodiment of the straw-man character or emptiness of American identity in Israel
Potter—the scarecrow—supplants the Wizard as the sovereign ruler of Oz. In this way, nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake came to define the twentieth-century American collective understanding of the past.
28
1 _____
Finding Fathers: Revolutionary Nostalgia in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter
“The history of revolutions—from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and the summer of 1789 in Paris to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest—which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age, could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana.”
—Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961)
“The Union was a sentiment, but not much more.”
—Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
I argue in this chapter that nostalgia, originally defined in the eighteenth century as
an obscure psychoaffective disorder, morphed into a cultural keyword that provided the
volatile 1850s sectional debates over national memory with a crucial way of formally
engaging the past. Typically, those who study the antebellum era single out the historical
romance and the sentimental romance generally as the genres that defined the nation by
establishing a national memory. Recent scholarship, while identifying sympathy and
sentimentalism as the philosophical concepts that made the nation imaginable, has
maintained that the historical romance produced a hegemonic and monolithic national imagination before the Civil War that writers could subvert, reinforce, or depict ambivalently. Both antebellum periodical editors and subsequent literary critics alike have read the nation on the romance’s own terms, but a careful examination of the texts that do 29
not conform to the generic expectations of the historical romance, such as the novels by
William Wells Brown and Herman Melville examined in this chapter, challenges this view.
The emergence of literary and aesthetic forms like nostalgia provided alternatives to a
romantic way of imagining the past and community suggesting that the content and form of
national memory remained an unsettled one in the 1850s. For this reason I argue that,
antebellum literary works of the period as defining and producing competing understandings
of the nation instead of either reproducing or subverting an already existing and hegemonic
sense of U.S. nationalism. To better establish just how unsettled the concept of the U.S. nation was in the 1850s, we can examine the state of the antebellum historical romance through the lens of the publication history of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the
Neutral Ground.
Cooper and the Failure of the Antebellum Historical Romance
Cooper, along with many of his contemporaries, was well aware of what historian
David M. Potter referred to as the “impending crisis” of the 1850s brought on by the
Mexican-American War and the consequent annexation of new territories in the west.27 As the nation’s escalating sectional tensions approached a breaking point in 1849, G.P. Putnam printed a revised edition of The Spy, the historical romance originally published in 1821 that secured Cooper both a career as a romancer and an audience for what he hoped would be a distinctly American version of the historical romance genre popularized so successfully by
Walter Scott. For the revised edition, Cooper also altered the introduction to reflect upon
The Spy’s publication history as well as its relation to the present moment. Cooper concludes
27 See David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1961 (1976). While I do not delve into the complicated relationship between western expansion and antebellum literary culture in this chapter, two recent works that take up this question are Kris Fresonke, West of Emerson (2003) and Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny (1997). 30
the short introduction with a laudation of the “gallant” General Winfield Scott’s 1847
“march from Vera Cruz to Mexico” only to undercut this tribute with an ominous word of
advice to his readers: since “there is now no enemy to fear, but the one that resides within,”
we ought to “use[ ] the restraints that wisdom has adduced from experience” to ensure that
“the same Providence which has so well aided us in our infancy, may continue to smile on
our manhood” (7). While Cooper harbored a strong skepticism toward liberal individualism
that he insisted could tear apart the republic, his appeal that “wisdom” prevail over the
enemy “that resides within” in his introduction to The Spy addresses a different and more
immediate political threat.28 By expressing this concern in the paragraph immediately
following his appraisal of the Mexican-American War, his warning applies less to the pitfalls
of unbridled liberalism per se and more to the sectional passions raging at the time the new
Putnam’s edition of the romance appeared. In this way, Cooper implicitly espouses a view
held by him and many of his contemporaries—that the crisis facing the nation was just as
much a literary as it was a political problem.
During the intervening years between the 1821 and the 1849 American publications
of The Spy, many writers, politicians and magazine editors looked expectantly toward a nationalized future when America would come to possess its own distinct culture bound by
mutual feeling.29 The Young America circle along with a host of other historical romances
attempted to imagine histories that could give rise to a national community, and public
28 For an extended account of the intersection between Cooper’s political views and his novels, see Philip Gould, “The ‘Hive of America’: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept-Ton-Wish and the History of King Philip’s War,” Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (1996) 133-171. 29 For a representative sampling of the scholarship that links eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy on feeling and sympathy to the formation of US nationalism in the early republican era, see Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (1997); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies (1998); Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment (1997); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (2001); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments (2001); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism (2000); and Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling (1997). 31
intellectuals pined for a rising generation of self-reliant American scholars and poets.30
These efforts reached a fever pitch in the early 1850s, the period that F.O. Matthiessen
famously came to call the American Renaissance. And while the characters and specific plot
points of Matthiessen’s national Bildungsroman have undergone substantial revision over
the last thirty years, scholars continue to imagine the 1850s as the moment in U.S. literary
and cultural history when American writers found a culture of their own. But the
publication history of The Spy tells another story. By reiterating his hope that a romance like
The Spy could ameliorate the sectional tensions in 1849, Cooper essentially conceded that the
nationalizing project driving many of his previous literary endeavors had thus far failed. The
historical romances of the antebellum era would prevent the outbreak of civil conflict no more than the two Congressional compromises each brokered within a year of the publication of the first and second editions of The Spy would.
Cooper’s comments invite us to question one of the principal assumptions
underlying decades of American literary criticism on the antebellum era and the 1850s in
particular: that a homogenous national imagination of the United States had achieved a
position of cultural hegemony before the Civil War. To find evidence of this constant in
American literary criticism, we do not need to reach back to The American Adam (1955) or
The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); we can look instead to many of the most recent
studies of the period.31 In fact, no group of critics seems to have believed more confidently
in the antebellum triumph of a singular American nationalism than those who write under
30 Here I am thinking especially of the transcendentalists in New England along with the editorial endeavors of Evert Duyckinck and John Louis O’Sullivan in New York, which embodied this project of nationalization by championing “American” literature and culture in their periodicals. Since the aims of the Young America are well known, I will refrain from examining the particulars of movement any further. Edward L. Widmer has also produced a thorough account Duyckinck’s and O’Sullivan’s work and their literary and political affiliations in Young America (1999). 31 There are of course notable exceptions to this trend such as Nancy’s Glazener’s Reading for Realism (1997) for one as well as the recent scholarship adopting either a transatlantic or hemispheric approach to antebellum U.S. literature and culture. 32
the banner of the so-called postnational American studies.32 Whether locating fissures
within a “National Symbolic” or unearthing a repressed “counter-hegemonic” literary
tradition, these projects nearly all subscribe to a view that a dominant antebellum national
imagination existed that works of literature could either reinforce or subvert.33 While
Donald Pease soon found fault with this “habit of binary thinking” in New Historicist
inspired New Americanist criticism, the alternative that emerged to this reading practice
seems even less satisfying (“New Perspectives” 25). Nearly suspending political or aesthetic
judgment altogether, recent scholarship has retreated behind what has become the
ubiquitous concept of ambivalence. In fact, Russ Castronovo has gone so far as to describe
the antebellum era as one typified by a prevailing “ambivalence toward national genealogy”
(Fathering 4).34 While various texts doubtlessly adopted an ambivalent position towards
national genealogies, reading the antebellum years as a kind of Age of Ambivalence
questionably portrays an era punctuated by violent events like the public beating of Charles
Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate over a disagreement arguably concerning the political
legacy of “national genealogy.”
I would suggest, on the other hand, that debates over national memory and
genealogy were far more multifaceted and contentious than much of the extant literary
scholarship on the antebellum era would have us believe.35 Thus, in what may be considered
32 For an account and illuminating critique of Donald Pease’s sequence of New Americanist manifestos published in the 1990s and the aversion to formalism in contemporary American literary studies, see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American Literature” (1998) 49-53. 33 See Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of a National Fantasy (1991) 22, and Donald Pease, “New Americanists: Revisionary Interventions into the Canon,” (1994) 29. In the introduction he wrote with Robyn Wiegman to The Futures of American Studies (2002), Pease repeated his call for a “counterhegemonic” American Studies (“Futures” 23). 34 See Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance (2003) 14. 35 One earlier and notable exception to this rule is Richard Slotkin’s work. Slotkin’s work principally worked to revise and challenge the work of the Myth and Symbol school scholars, and consequently he recognized that their nationalist readings of U.S. literary culture did not fully account for how “each section” sought to “define their cultural identity, social and political values, historical experience, and literary aspirations” in often conflicting ways (394). 33
a regressive move on my part by some, I would like to re-examine the category of the nation
in this chapter not in an effort to think beyond it or demonstrate how certain writers
reinforced or subverted it, but to demonstrate that the term itself was up for debate in the
1850s. I would also like to entertain the possibility that literary works like The Spy, which
attempted to create a shared national memory, did not accomplish the cultural work that
they sought to perform. Put simply, neither the growing economic power of the northeast
nor a body of national literature had successfully created what we would deem a hegemony
or “a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living” that fostered
predominate “lived system of meanings and values” (Williams 110).36 Consequently, the very period that critics have alternately hailed as a renaissance or condemned as the triumph of a homogenous and hegemonic national imagination, could be more plausibly read as a colossal failure—a moment that preceded the complete collapse of the nation.
If we regard the 1850s as an era that was not so much ambivalent about as it was
committed to producing varied and contentious accounts of past genealogies and the legacy
of the Revolutionary War generation in particular, we can begin to see how and why
nostalgia emerged out of medical publications and into the cultural vernacular as a way for
writers and politicians to legitimate their own competing visions of the nation by imagining
them as having once existed in the past.37 This chapter pursues a specific form of 1850s
36 In this instance, I believe Raymond William’s definition generally approximates and lucidly describes Antonio Gramsci’s more elusive understanding of hegemony as articulated in The Prison Notebooks. The New Americanists’ less rigorous understanding of hegemony may stem from their reliance on Michel Foucault for a definition of the term. Lora Romero, for example, argues that Foucault “de-essentializes hegemony” so that it actually produces its own forms of “political resistance,” foreclosing the possibility of any kind of “radical alterity” (73). By applying Foucault’s definition of hegemony to antebellum America, one only further flattens the political complexity of the era. Even though Foucault conceives of power as a set of relations, he still insists upon a single form of power that defines all of these relations. In the 1850s, however, powers could be localized or grounded in certain sectional blocs, suggesting that power in the Foucauldian sense of a non- localizable pouvoir had not yet taken shape in the United States. 37 Grossman observes that Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the archetypal figures of the American Renaissance, sought unburden American literary from “a relation” to the past “that was always already and everywhere riven 34
nostalgia; one that functions aesthetically and emerges out of sentimentalism in order to
supplant it.
Recalling my discussion in the Introduction of Rancière’s and Schiller’s similar
understandings of the aesthetic, nostalgia can be revolutionary in an aesthetic sense insofar as writers enlisted it to challenge the historical romance’s way of imagining the past and its nationalizing aims. For this reason, this chapter largely devotes its attention to two novels,
Brown’s Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) and Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), because they both undermine the generic expectations of the romance while offering alternative national narratives of the
U.S.’s founding patriarchs. Due to their refusal to conform to the generic expectations placed upon the historical romance, neither of these works successfully secured an audience in the 1850s, and their place within contemporary literary studies remains somewhat tenuous despite the efforts of some commanding works of criticism. I have chosen to focus on these novels in part because readers have largely not extolled them as the literary or cultural paragons of their genres; they embody neither the literary virtues of the American
Renaissance nor did they perform the cultural work characteristic of “the Other American
Renaissance” (Tompkins 147). They fail but only insofar as they successfully refuse to meet the expectations placed upon them by using nostalgia to expose the historical romance as an aesthetically and politically bankrupt genre from within. Clotel and Israel Potter ultimately betray the cultural and formal logic of the American historical romance, which seeks to contain or resolve a set of cultural contradictions and competing political positions in order
with the inherited tensions of his parents’ generation” (14). But by focusing exclusively on Emerson and Walt Whitman, Grossman only chronicles one of the many ways that antebellum writers wrestled with past. 35 to produce republican subjects and write a nationalizing story of the past.38 Enlisting the aesthetics of nostalgia, both romances thus imagine radically alternate forms of national and non-national community. In so doing, these texts revolted against the conventional and competing narratives of the nation’s founding that haunted the debates and orations over slavery and Popular Sovereignty in the 1850s.
In making this argument, I am indebted to the very tradition of scholarship on the antebellum historical imagination that this chapter challenges in an effort to rethink the way we understand both the literary culture of 1850s and the role nostalgia plays in the development of U.S. literature and culture in the nineteenth century. While nearly all of these previous studies rightly acknowledge the important role the past played in the political discussions that took place in the 1850s, these same studies tend to take for granted that antebellum Americans had a shared sense of the past and the nation. Yet what this chapter will demonstrate is that the kind of national and historical imagination that has preoccupied so many recent nineteenth-century Americanists took shape in the 1950s, not in the 1850s.39
38 See Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance (1980); Richard Chase’s The Novel and Its Tradition (1957); George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (1987); Philip Gould, Convent and Republic (1996); and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic (1996). For theoretical accounts of the way the historical romance or the romance genre generally seeks to contain and subdue political disagreements, see Frederic Jameson’s chapter on the romance in The Political Unconsciousness (1981) 206-280 and Hayden White’s chapters on Michelet and Ranke in Metahistory (1973) 135-190. 39 Since the publication of Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), the jeremiad has loomed large in discussions on the nineteenth-century American historical imagination. While Miller saw the jeremiad and its relation to the past as fundamentally ambiguous, Sacvan Bercovitch challenged Miller’s thesis in The American Jeremiad (1978) by insisting that jeremiads looked back to the past in order to shape the future by suffusing the sacred with the profane—self-improvement and capitalist expansion became sacred pursuits. In Visionary Compacts (1987), Donald Pease found fault with the debate between Miller and Bercovitch because the terms of their disagreement seemed rooted in Cold War ideology. Their works and the scholarship of their respective peers regarded American culture as fraught with contradictions, which produced a kind of “negative freedom” for the individual (x). Pease, however, insists that while Cold War era critics may have prized negative freedom, nineteenth-century Americans were actually much more invested in forging compacts by looking to America’s pre-revolutionary past to produce a national sense of collective memory. Following Pease’s book, critics came to read any and all forms of U.S. collective memory as either contributing to or as menacing a singular “National Symbolic” (Berlant 22). By the late 1990s, however, the aforementioned concept of ambivalence emerged as a favored keyword, enabling critics like Castronovo to escape the binary language of complicity and resistance while nevertheless leaving the idea that a singular national imagination had emerged in antebellum America intact. What this chapter suggests, however, is that Pease’s study never really broke free of the Cold 36
By accounting for the use of nostalgia in this chapter, I wish to investigate the ways that
antebellum writers struggled to construct conflicting definitions of community by their
political projects not as revolutions but as restorations—an attempt to bring the present
back in line within an imagined past.40
A Past Divided: The Proliferation of National Imaginations in the 1850s
While his seminal study of nationalism has dominated literary studies for nearly the
last thirty years, Benedict Anderson’s theoretical formulation of the national imagination as
one characterized by Walter Benjamin’s idea of “‘homogenous, empty’ time . . . marked not
by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence” cannot adequately describe the way U.S. nationalism functioned in the antebellum era (Anderson 24). During this period in
American history, the U.S. may have longed to imagine itself as a national community, but
instead the nation found itself embroiled in a rhetorical war between at least two (if not
more) nationalisms. These two nationalisms correspond to the two sectional blocs—North
and South, which sought to imagine the national and its history in terms that would
legitimate their section’s way of life and political institutions. Consequently, as historian
Peter S. Onuf explains, “sectionalism may seem like . . . an imaginative pathway toward
idealized local communities,” but “the thrust of sectionalist alliance-building was integrative
War liberalism that he rightly situated Miller and Bercovitch within. In this way, the New Americanists discussion of the past remains tied—even if looking to texts that subvert it—to the romance thesis and its account of the past, emphasizing ambiguity or ambivalence and containment as the genre’s hallmark conventions. 40 Such a formulation may seem similar to Frederic Jameson’s idea of a “nostalgia for the present” (“Nostalgia” 517). Jameson insists that nostalgia and Scott’s historical romances elicit “a contemplation of the past [that] seemed able to renew one’s sense of one’s present” (“Nostalgia” 524). But for Jameson, this process of renewal is essentially an unconscious and retrogressive one that reifies the present. By contrast, I treat nostalgia as a conscious attempt to alter one’s perception of the present in order to repossess it. Put another way, while Jameson faults nostalgia for estranging us from our present era, I see nostalgia as emerging within preexisting moments and spaces of estrangement. Consequently, it was because many writers and politicians in 1850s already felt estranged from the national space they inhabited that nostalgia became much more than just a sickness during this era; it became a process of longing and rewriting the past in an attempt to feel at home in the nation again. 37
and nationalizing” (36). As a spatial battle over the slave status of newly acquired territories
raged between sectional factions and supplanted old party loyalties in favor of sectional ones,
a temporal debate also raged over the legacy of the American Revolution and the way the nation’s past might be imagined. How Northerners and Southerners imagined the
“prefiguring and fulfillment” of America’s Revolutionary past defined often separate and competing sectionally-driven U.S. nationalisms. Simply put, national communities in the antebellum era could not be imagined within a temporal vacuum of perpetual simultaneity, they instead were always imagined within a diachronic—if even highly controversial— historical narrative.
One only needs to look at the political writings of the antebellum era to find
evidence of the obsession over the relation between the various interpretations of America’s
Revolutionary legacy and the different nationalisms vying for cultural dominance. Rather presciently in 1838, Abraham Lincoln articulated what he regarded as a fundamental connection between the nation’s past and the future “perpetuation of . . . political institutions” in one of his earliest political speeches, the “Address to the Young Men’s
Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” (“Lyceum” 28). Lincoln feared that as the “state of feeling” fostered by the revolutionary “passions of the people” faded “upon the memory of the
world,” it would become progressively more difficult for each generation succeeding that of
the founders to hold the nation together (“Lyceum” 35). Rather than imploring his auditors
to preserve the past, however, Lincoln insists that the memory of the Revolutionary era will
inevitably fade away, and so he encourages his listeners in terms reminiscent of Emerson to
replace the crumbling ”pillars of the temple of liberty” with their own new ones (36). To a
degree, Lincoln does mourn the loss of the once “living history” of the Revolution in
nostalgic terms, but attempts to cure himself and his countrymen of this longing by looking 38
forward to the future with “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” (“Lyceum” 36). But
while in 1838 Lincoln seemed more invested in replacing the past with a democratic vision
of the present, other Northern and Southern politicians in the 1850s wished to dwell upon
and construct grand narratives of the past to legitimate their competing present national and
Constitutional claims. This debate about the past became further magnified when seen
through the lens of the 1848 revolutions that erupted across Europe.
In the late 1840s and early 1850s the Congressional record of its day, The Congressional
Globe, is peppered with alternating orations on the future of slavery and the position the U.S. should adopt towards the 1848 revolts; frequently, the two discussions bled into one
another. On one such occasion on February 20, 1850, Representative Alex W. Buel of
Michigan apologized for interrupting the debate over “the dissolution of the Union” in order to
call upon the Congress to “recognize the independence of Hungary” from Austria (143).
Buel stressed that the nation’s position on the Hungarian revolution “concerns the principles
and policy of our government in its earliest foundations,” recalling the “gloomy winter of
1776 and ’77” (147). Appealing to the U.S.’s Revolutionary tradition by looking upon it as
the Hungarians might—as an inspiration that could underwrite “a new period in the history
of the world,” he believed that an expression of “American sympathy” in the form of
national “recognition” could awake “the patriot with new zeal” in Hungary and the United
States alike (Buel 147). In the Senate, Lewis Cass expressed a similar sentiment a month
earlier when he implored his colleagues to “add to the value of the lesson of 1776, already so
important to the world” by suspending diplomatic relations with Austria (55). And while he
did not care for France’s widespread emancipation of slaves, Senator John C. Calhoun
nevertheless praised the revolution in France as a “ wonderful event,’” acknowledging the 39
rebellion’s connection to the mythology of the American Revolutionary War (Reynolds,
European 16).41
In this way, the 1848 revolutions illuminated the historical terms from which
Northern and Southern nationalists alike had and would continue to draw upon. In 1848,
the Free Soil Party had imagined itself as an American accomplice to those “revolutions”
that “tore across Europe in 1848,” and Northern nationalists would also later welcome the
Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth to America’s shores as an Eastern European
George Washington (Wilentz 610). And although pro-slavery Southerners bristled at
Kossuth’s condemnation of slavery in the United States, they too initially celebrated his visit, and “the founders of Confederacy” would also come to see “themselves as participating in a widespread European movement” by fighting for “the self-determination of a people”
(Ayers 114). Thus, even though politicians from both sections, like Senator Jeremiah
Clemens of Alabama, recalled that “side by side the North and South struggled through the
Revolution,” only one version of that conflict and its ongoing national legacy could prevail
in the coming decade (54). It is precisely this discussion that Brown and Melville would
participate in by challenging the parameters of this debate and the culture of sentiment by
using nostalgia to imagine alternative forms of community.
“Beyond the Pale of Sympathy”: William Wells Brown’s Revolutionary Romance
Clotel; or the President’s Daughter (1853)—William Wells Brown’s novel about Thomas
Jefferson’s illegitimate mulatto daughter—does not know when to stop. “Death Is
Freedom,” the twenty-fifth chapter of the text, bears all the hallmarks of a conventional
41 For more on the importance of 1848 in the U.S. imagination, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (1988). See also Eric Lott’s chapter on the American 1848 in Love and Theft (1993) 169-210. 40
sentimental ending. Clotel finds herself at the beginning of this chapter incarcerated in a
slave prison located at a symbolic point “midway between the capitol at Washington and the
president’s house” (204). She soon manages to escape from prison but makes it only as far
as the Long Bridge, which crosses the Potomac connecting D.C. to Arlington. Upon
reaching the bridge, she is surrounded by her captors in pursuit behind her and a group of
three men who “True to their Virginian instincts . . . formed in line across the narrow
bridge” in front of her (207). Seeing no other alternative, Clotel does what any sentimental
heroine would do in her situation: she takes her own life by plunging into the Potomac.
With a tone of unquestionable finality, Brown then proclaims: “thus died Clotel, the
daughter of Thomas Jefferson” (207). The remaining paragraphs fully appraise her tragic
demise and reiterate the hyperbolic symbolism of her death on the banks of the capitol. The chapter even concludes didactically with a poem memorializing her death. But while the story of Clotel comes to an end in this chapter, the novel Clotel does not. Defying the
conventions of the sentimental novel, Clotel continues by narrating, over the course of several chapters, the escape of Clotel’s daughter to Europe. But having lucidly critiqued the institution of slavery by underscoring the injustice of Clotel’s death, why would Brown’s novel forego the immensely popular generic conventions of the sentimental novel by seeing this tangential subplot to its conclusion? This essay will answer this question by placing
Brown’s novel within a wider set of antebellum conversations on nostalgia and national memory.
Readers of Clotel have found fault with more than just the ending though. Written at
a time when the literary marketplace’s appetite for slave narratives had been wetted by
bestsellers like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Clotel flopped commercially in no small part because 41
reviewers located what they deemed several aesthetic and historical flaws in the book. 42
Antebellum readers, moreover, considered the mere suggestion that Thomas Jefferson had a mulatto daughter to be both apocryphal and in bad taste. Although the specific set of grievances changed, twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentators continue to deride
Brown’s novel for its perceived formal and discursive failures. Many African-Americanists regard Clotel, Robert Reid-Pharr explains, “as almost an embarrassment” for its formal inconsistencies, its reproduction of black stereotypes and for its failure to champion the cause of black nationalism in the manner of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney (38).43
While these recent criticisms are seemingly distinct from the antebellum indictments of the
novel, they all rest upon what is essentially an aesthetic problem with Clotel. For many reviewers in the 1850s, it failed to live up to the generic expectations placed upon either the antebellum sentimental novel or the historical romance; for many recent readers, it fails to live up to the expectations placed upon the committed black nationalist novel.
Consequently, those who defend the book tend to make a version of the formal argument exemplified by William L. Andrews. Portraying Brown as an artistic vanguard, Andrews insists Clotel “broke most profoundly with the discursive conventions” of the slave narrative
“and white expectations in an attempt to find new ways of authorizing itself” (24). In other words, these readers seize upon the novel’s idiosyncrasies to establish that Brown enriched
42 The contemporary response to Clotel has been well documented in William Edward Farrison’s William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (1969) 228-31. Clotel’s commercial failure would appear to have little to do with Brown’s reputation as an author. As Augusta Rohrbach notes, his more conventional Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847) “sold 8000 copies,” suggesting that he “was enormously successful as an author” (33). 43 Ann duCille makes a similar observation, insisting that “Clotel has become increasingly marginal within academic circles and, arguably, has little or no standing outside introductory-level African-American literature courses” (451). 42 the tradition of African-American literature by engaging in more subtle textual forms of black resistance.44
Regardless of their verdicts on the novel, these commentators see Clotel as working outside or against an established national literary tradition. Even those unsatisfied with both the derisive and laudatory readings of Clotel conclude that the novel ultimately ambivalently seeks to trouble a hegemonic “American nationalist discourse” (Reid-Pharr 8).45 If we understand that the content and form of national memory remained an unsettled one during the sectional crises of the 1850s, as I establish elsewhere in this chapter, we ought to read
Clotel’s generic unconventionality in light of this fact. For this reason, I contend that Brown calls attention to the generic failures of both the historical romance and the sentimental novel to create his own competing narrative of an American national tradition by portraying
U.S. Revolutionary history in more inclusive terms (48).46 Rather than abandoning a national literary and historical tradition, Brown instead conceived of tradition the way that Hannah
Arendt insists other pivotal nineteenth-century thinkers did—as “an enterprise” that “can be
44Examples of this scholarship include: Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention (1993) 17-29; John Ernest, Liberation Historiography (2004) 331-43; M. Fiulia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (2001) 7-28; Paul Gilmore, “‘De Geewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism” (1997); Jennifer James, “‘Civil’ War Wounds: William Wells Brown, Violence, and the Domestic Narrative” (2005); Carla Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s” (1992); and Lee Schweninger, “Clotel and the Historicity of the Anecdote” (1999). 45 In addition to Reid-Farr, see Russ Castronovo’s Fathering the Nation for an ambivalent reading of Brown’s work. 46 Two recent works of Brown criticism broaden the way we think about the cultural and literary implications of Clotel in useful and provocative ways. In “The Problem of Revolution in the Age of Slavery: Clotel, Fiction, and the Government of Man” (2005), Deak Nabers considers the way that Brown’s novel “constituted the most profound rethinking of the meaning of the Revolution in 1850s America” by regarding the state, as opposed to God, as the imparter of freedom (86). Alternatively, Timothy B. Powell widens our understanding of Brown’s work in Ruthless Democracy (2000), arguing that Clotel imagines America in multicultural terms by “understanding national identity as seen from the farthest reaches of American Diaspora” (134). While my reading of Clotel draws upon both Nabers’ and Powell’s readings, it also departs from their work. I share Nabers’ view of Clotel as a novel that inventively addresses the legacy of the U.S. Revolution, but I am less interested in the way Brown engages certain legal questions concerning freedom and governance than in the way he participates in discourses about the form and content of national memory. In the case of Powell, while I think he rightly views Brown as “mapping the ‘American diaspora,’ ” I insist that nostalgia makes this understanding of national identity possible—an understanding less invested in promoting an anachronistic notion of multiculturalism than in redefining the United States’ political tradition in light of the sectional crises of the 1850s (146). 43
achieved only through a mental operation best described in the images and similes of leaps,
inversions, and turning concepts upside down” (Between 35). For Brown then, tradition
constantly changes, remaining subject to alteration and consisting of a series of “turning-
about[s],” which bring to light various oppositions in order to challenge, complicate, or
invert them (Arendt, Between 36).47
To construct this tradition, Brown situates Clotel within an intertextual web of associations by incorporating interpretations and allusions to other literary works and political tracts throughout the book. As in the case of many other antebellum literary and political works, nostalgia also plays a critical role in Clotel as an affect and an aesthetic that could legitimate the novel’s own vision of the nation and its history by imagining it as a recoverable place or past. By intervening within the traditions of U.S. history and the antebellum romance, Clotel brings about a formal revolution—literally a “turning-about”— within what Rancière refers to as “the aesthetic regime of the arts” (Politics 25). Clotel breaks with the “representational regime” of the historical romance and the sentimental novel by defying the genres’ “own rules for fabrication and criteria of evaluation” (Politics 4).
Departing from the generic conventions of these representational regimes, Clotel’s aesthetic practice uses nostalgia to create “a new regime for relating to the past” in order to identify
“art with the life” of a re-imagined “community” (Politics 25). Viewing Brown’s project in this way, we can see how Clotel’s nostalgic use of the past and unconventional formal characteristics employs art to grapple with politics.
Such an aesthetic revolution enables Brown to work towards three aims: first, he
uses the temporal dimension of nostalgia to reclaim the political legacy of the U.S.
47 In this way, Brown’s conceptualization of tradition is not only in keeping with Arendt’s recuperated understanding of the term, it is also consistent with what Paul Gilroy sees as the “non-traditional tradition” of the black Atlantic that draws upon the “narratives of loss, exile, and journeying which . . . serve a mnemonic function” in order to create a “common history and social memory” (Black 198). 44
Revolution in terms that challenge other versions of this tradition as imagined by previous
historical studies, romances, and sentimental novels; secondly, he foregrounds the spatial
expression of nostalgia as a mutated form of sympathy capable of forging a national memory
from a place of estrangement; and thirdly, Brown pursues a distinctly political as opposed to
a revisionist objective by revealing that African Americans have been both purged from the
national memory and deprived of the power to write their own competing history of the
whole nation. It is the latter pursuit that distinguishes Clotel form a work like William C.
Nell’s The Colored Patriots of American Revolution (1855). Nell’s admittedly controversial
demand that the participation of blacks in the Revolution be recognized as a part of U.S.
history nevertheless implies that blacks can only lay claim to a part as opposed to the whole
of the Revolutionary tradition. Brown, however, does not wish to simply revise U.S. history
by accepting a color line that historians like George Bancroft could comfortably gaze across
to appreciate the heroics of a group of separate and unequal soldiers; he wants instead to call
our attention to these divisions even while conceding that they may remain insurmountable
ones. 48 Thus, Brown and the protagonists of Clotel alike, can only lay claim to the national past by nostalgically longing to possess the very national memory denied to them.
* * *
By writing his first novel about the fate of Thomas Jefferson’s mulatto slave
daughter and her children, Brown brings a radically new narrative of America’s Founding
Fathers tradition into focus. His contemporaries, notably Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in
their debates over Popular Sovereignty and slavery, repeatedly asked the question that
48 As Ernest notes, Nell’s work may have inspired Bancroft to “mention” the role black soldiers played in the Revolution in his ten volume History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent (132). 45
politicians and TV pundits continue to ask to this day: “what would the Founders do?”49
Brown, on the other hand, had a different question to pursue—he wanted to address the same issues that his contemporaries debated by asking, “what did the founders do?” In his fictionalized account of Thomas Jefferson’s mulatto progeny, Brown could also cite some of the nation’s most revered passages on freedom and democracy in order to scrutinize them in light of the unfolding events of his historical novel. In this way, Brown ironically undermines what Hayden White would describe as the Romantic mode of emplotment, or the “drama of the triumph of good over evil,” found in so many of the historical romances of the period (9). Thus, while Brown’s contemporaries sought to synthesize the past organically with the present in order to imagine an integrating national narrative, Brown thwarts these attempts at historical nationalization by oxymoronically and ironically portraying the founders as revolutionaries committed to the status quo—a view shared by
Frederick Douglass. But unlike Douglass, Brown seeks to re-imagine and thus reclaim this revolutionary tradition rather than break away from it to construct a competing narrative of black nationalism.
One of the principal ways that Brown rewrites the revolutionary past is by examining this tradition from a nostalgic and ironic perspective. A key moment of this nostalgic irony occurs in the chapter “Retaliation.” This chapter examines the place of Clotel’s daughter
Mary as a slave in the home of her father, Horatio Green, and his new white and aristocratic wife, Gertrude. In this particular case, as throughout the novel, Brown produces nostalgia by deploying an intertextual narrative strategy. Accordingly, Brown begins the chapter with the following epigraph excerpted from a popular ballad by Charles Jeffreys, “Phoebe Morel;
49 A recent example of this phenomenon is Gordon S. Wood’s unabashedly celebratory account of the Founders, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006), which explores why “no other major nation honors its past historical characters . . . in quite the manner Americans do” (3). 46 or The Slave’s Dream,” which was also titled “The Georgian Slave”: “I had a dream;/ I thought that I was free:/ That in my own bright land again/ A home there was for me”
(Brown 156). That this chapter begins with Jeffrey’s ballad is significant for a number of reasons. First of all, the ballad’s composer, Stephen Glover, who dedicated the ballad in
1852 to Harriet Beecher Stowe, explained in the preface that “Phoebe Morel was the daughter of a wealthy planter in Georgia who had imprudently contracted marriage with a beautiful creol, a slave on the estate of his father” (Glover 3). The circumstances surrounding this ballad’s tragic mulatto figure closely resemble the situation that Mary finds herself within. By selecting an excerpt from this particular poem, Brown places the entire chapter within a nostalgic frame of spatial and temporal reference. Phoebe dreams longingly of returning to her “own bright land again” where “a home there was for me” (Glover 4).
But while the excerpt might lead Brown’s readers to believe, as an abolitionist like Stowe might, that Phoebe is yearning for an African homeland or a Liberia in particular, Phoebe clearly yearns for her “Georgian cot” within “the vaunted home of liberty” (Glover 5). The ballad itself then uses the discourse of nostalgia, which maintained that African slaves often suffered from the disease, to enable Phoebe to claim the state of Georgia rather than Africa as her estranged homeland. Brown imports the often inherently nostalgic form of the ballad and Jeffreys’ specific evocation of the sentiment to imagine the possibility of being nostalgic for a space that one currently inhabits—the Southern States—and for a past that might have been. Nostalgia, consequently, becomes a way to claim sectional and national membership through longing instead of belonging.
Following the epigraph, the chapter then introduces us to the Dinah’s kitchen of
Clotel, a place resembling her Stowean doppelganger’s disorderly space and a place devoid of 47
“sympathy” for Mary (Brown 156).50 Without explicitly stating so, the epigraph leads us to
believe that Mary like her intertextual relative, Phoebe, yearns to be at home within her own
home. The uncanny qualities of this chapter only continue to multiply as Brown comments
upon Mary’s white but not quite complexion; a remark that ultimately breaks down the
fictional present of the chapter in order to read back into the historical past by revisiting
some of Thomas Jefferson’s political writings.51 Prefacing these excerpts by reminding his
readers that “this child was not only white, but she was the granddaughter of Thomas
Jefferson,” Brown proceeds to quote from the Notes on the State of Virginia on the horrors of
slavery (Brown 156):
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of
the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part and
degrading submission on the other. With what execration should the statesman be
loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of
the other, transforms those into despots and those into enemies, destroys
the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other! . . . And can the
liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only
firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the
gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice
cannot sleep for ever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means
only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is
among possible events; . . .” (Brown 157)
50 For two of the most influential readings of Dinah’s kitchen in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism (1990) 13-38; and Lora Romero, Home Fronts (1997), 70-88. 51 Here I allude to Homi K. Bhabha’s indispensable formulation of the “‘not quite/not white’” notion of mimicry that uncannily menaces and resembles white subjectivity (92). 48
By incorporating a passage from one of Jefferson’s writings into his own novel, Brown
engages in the ongoing conversation about the founders’ relation to the political debates of
the 1850s. But in this instance, Brown quotes Jefferson both reverentially as a political
authority and ironically as a figure of American hypocrisy. As an individual who
simultaneously indicted the institution of slavery while condemning his own mulatto progeny
to lives of enslavement, Jefferson operates as a kind of flawed metonym for the Founding
Fathers’ tradition. In this particular excerpt from Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson
condemns slavery using nearly the same language found in the Declaration of Independence by
describing slave-owning as a form of “unremitting despotism.” By using Jefferson’s own
words to cast slavery as a form of “arbitrary power,” Brown uses the founders’ own Lockean
tradition of political philosophy to foreground that within this tradition slave-owning “is a
power, which neither nature gives . . . nor compact can convey; for man not having such an
arbitrary power over his own life, cannot give another man such a power over it” (Locke
177). Touchtone passages like this one from Locke’s Second Treatise, which contributed to the philosophical foundation of the U.S. Revolution, are revisited nostalgically and become paradoxically in Clotel the traditional justification for revolting against this same tradition.52
Perhaps even more usefully to Brown’s project, Jefferson also insists in the passage
above that slavery “destroys” the slave’s “amor patriae,” or the love of one’s native land. This
claim echoes the nostalgic sentiment expressed in the Phoebe Morel epigraph by recognizing
that slaves consider their native home to be the United States rather than the African
continent. Jefferson goes even further by suggesting that the destruction of African-
American patriotic love would pose a direct threat to the stability of the union. By likening
the institution of slavery to despotism and by recognizing slaves as Americans, Jefferson
52 For an account of Jefferson’s views on slavery as informed by his understanding of Lockean philosophy, see Ari Helo and Peter Onuf, “Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery” (2003). 49 warns of and simultaneously legitimates an impending slave revolt. But Brown of course does not give Jefferson the last word, and he concludes this chapter by reminding his readers that “sad to say, Jefferson is not the only American statesman who has spoken high- sounding words in favour of freedom, and then left his own children to die slaves” (158).
This final sentence closes the chapter on both an ironic and a nostalgic note. It is explicitly ironic insofar as Brown uses Jefferson to legitimate his own antislavery position and calls attention to the fact Jefferson himself despotically condemned many of his offspring to slavery. It is nostalgic insofar as Brown yearns for and mourns the absence of an American political tradition unblemished by the stains of slavery: it is “sad to say” that the project of
American democracy has been a compromised tradition within which a black presence has paradoxically always played a part within the constitution of the United States as a nation- state while also having no part in the actual Constitution. It is precisely this act of nostalgic yearning performed by Phoebe Morel, Mary, and Brown alike that enables these figures to claim ownership over a tradition and a native home that has always sought to exclude them.
Brown makes a revolutionary aesthetic move; rather than seeking to synthesize or contain the contradictions of the past, as conventional historical romances usually seek to do, he preserves the paradox of American democracy by calling upon his readers to mourn the loss of and yearn for what—using Rancière’s language—“would have been” (Politics 25).
In addition to revolutionizing the Founding Fathers tradition by ironically engaging with Jeffersonian democracy, Brown comes to terms with the more recent legacy of
Jacksonian democracy—a legacy that would seem nearly to overlap chronologically with the historical period of Brown’s novel. Juxtaposed against “Retaliation,” the chapter preceding it, “The Liberator” seizes upon the Jeffersonian and revolutionary motifs of the previous chapter by beginning with an epigraph from the Declaration of American Independence. Fittingly 50
adopting the moniker of William Lloyd Garrison’s famous antislavery periodical, which had
railed against the aims of the American Colonization Society for years, this chapter describes
the dilemma facing Georgiana Peck Carlton, the daughter of a deceased slave owner who
wishes to liberate her slaves—one of whom happens to be Currer, Thomas Jefferson’s
mistress and Clotel’s mother. Although her husband, a Northerner, suggests sending them
to Africa, Georgiana directly repudiates his suggestion, which also served as the guiding tenet
of the American Colonization Society as well as the central argument of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the idea that emancipated slaves ought to be deported to their “own” nation-state in
Africa—Liberia. She forces the question: “‘what right have we, more than the Negro, to the soil here, or to style ourselves native Americans?’” (Brown 160). Answering her own question, she argues:
“[I]t is as much their home as ours, and I have sometimes thought it was
more theirs. The Negro has cleared up the lands, built towns, and enriched
the soil with his blood and tears; and in return, he is to be sent to a country
of which he knows nothing. Who fought more bravely for American
independence than the blacks? A Negro, by the name of Attucks was the
first that fell in Boston at the commencement of the revolutionary war; and,
through the whole of the struggles for liberty in this country, the Negroes
have contributed their share.” (Brown 160-61)
Speaking in this passage through the voice of one of his heroines, Brown insists that African
Americans ought to claim the United States as “their home” just as much as Americans of
European ancestry. Georgiana also recalls the American revolutionary tradition by
inscribing another founding father, Attucks, into the narrative. By underscoring the role of
black soldiers in the U.S. Revolution, Brown maintains that they have an equal claim to the 51 place and therefore the history of the nation. To deny blacks their rightful claim to the nation and its history is imaginatively and politically to exile them from their home within their home. Brown’s use of nostalgia foregrounds this dilemma to make these exclusionary dimensions of U.S. history visible.
Amplifying this estrangement, Georgiana—who appears blessed with the preternatural ability to recall lengthy political proclamations—recites a speech delivered by
Andrew Jackson when he served as a General who enlisted the aid of black troops to win the
Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Addressing these troops inclusively as
“soldiers” and “fellow citizens,” Jackson declared to them that “I knew well how you loved your native country, and that you, as well as ourselves had to defend what man holds most dear— his parents, wife, children, and property” (161). Jackson recognizes his black soldiers as his
American compatriots even though the very act and necessity of making such a proclamation itself implicitly reminds his addressees that they remain officially unrecognized as citizens of their “native country.” Georgiana suggests as much when she notes that the heroism of these soldiers was “consecrated only in their own memories,” compelling her to once again ask the question before her and Carlton: “why should we . . . deny him a home in his native land?” (161). What makes Brown’s use of Jackson especially ironic in this instance is that his term as President would have roughly coincided with the historical chronology of the novel. Jackson, whose notorious policy of Indian Removal partially stemmed from the pragmatic need to appease Vice President and states’ rights demagogue, John C. Calhoun, would never recognize the rights of African Americans in the way he had informed his soldiers he had hoped the then President James Madison would. Once again using the words of a prominent icon of American democracy against himself, Brown seeks to revolutionize the U.S.’s revolutionary past in order to possess it—to claim both a home 52
within this tradition and a space that he and the enslaved protagonists of his novel remain
exiled from.
By quoting the words of Jefferson and Jackson, Brown calls upon his readers to
remember that the founding tradition of the United States includes at least two mutually
constitutive yet dissonant timelines. On the one hand, Brown gestures, along with his contemporaries, to the story of the rise of democratic freedom embodied by the Mayflower.
Yet rather than positing a Whiggish narrative of unremitting progress or a cyclical republican narrative of a rise and fall, he insists upon the coterminous existence of another founding
narrative embodied by the “low rakish ship” landed in Jamestown “freighted with the
elements of unmixed evil”—the “rattling chains” of slavery (Brown 180).
This negative dialectic becomes the most pronounced in the chapter titled “The
Escape” when George stands trial for engaging in revolutionary activity. Beginning with
several charged allusions to the revolutionary movements in Europe that used the U.S.
Revolutionary War as a legitimating historical precedent, Brown challenges his reader to
question why white slave-owners could consider “going to Greece to fight for Grecian
liberty” while simultaneously depriving their slaves of freedom (211). When called upon to
defend himself, George brazenly attempts to transform the negative dialectic into a positive
one capable of synthesis:
“I will tell you why I joined the revolted Negroes. I have heard my master
read in the Declaration of Independence ‘that all men are created free and
equal’ [. . .]. The grievances of which your fathers complained, and which
caused the Revolutionary War, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs
and sufferings of those who were engaged in the late revolt. Your fathers
were never slaves, ours are; [. . .]. You say your fathers fought for freedom— 53
so did we. You tell me that I am to be put to death for violating the laws of
the land. Did not the American revolutionaries violate the laws when they
struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them
patriots—we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels. (212)
In this instant, George attempts to do what the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos
Kossuth and other European revolutionaries did in the 1850s: use the American War for
Independence as a justification for revolt. But for George as well for Brown this temporal nostalgia—the romancing of the U.S. revolution—equally becomes a moment of spatial
estrangement. George attempts to reveal that the specter of slavery haunts the same space
that serves as the imaginative origin of revolution. Ironically, his justification for revolting
and the law that will condemn him to death derive their legitimacy from a shared
revolutionary history. The irony is not lost upon George who declares to his judge: “You
boast that this is the ‘Land of the Free’; but a traditionary freedom will not save you. [. . .]
Worse for you that you have such an inheritance, if you spend it foolishly and are unable to
appreciate its worth” (212-13). By describing the revolutionary tradition as an “inheritance”
squandered by its supposed beneficiaries, he suggests that the traditionary freedom his
persecutors extol has become bankrupt. Consequently, George implies that both his
enslaved compatriots as well as all Americans have in a sense become estranged from their
tradition. For this reason, he takes it upon himself to remember and re-imagine the past for
his auditors in order to project this past onto the present. But while George’s revolutionary
historical account in some sense prevails, he ultimately fails to exonerate himself. The two
founding timelines introduced by Brown remain, for the moment, in tension with one
another; the promised inheritance of the revolution still appears to be a “lost treasure,”
lacking what Hannah Arendt believes so many revolutions lack—a clear “testament” or 54
tradition that “indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is,” was, and will be
(Revolution 5). Brown cannot necessarily find this treasure, but he can remind his readers of another founding in order to claim the right to possess this tradition.
Clotel does more than simply contest and thereby rewrite the past, however, it also
calls into question the historical romance’s and the sentimental novel’s capability to create a
sympathetic national community that these genres attempted to imagine. Brown’s novel
appeared on the coattails of a string of popular historical romances that sought to
immortalize the Mexican-American War. In particular, George Lippard—the author of
Quaker City—wrote The Legends of Mexico (1847), which celebrated the conflict in nationalistic
terms as “the crusade of the nineteenth century” (11).53 Similarly, Cooper and Simms wrote
the novels Jack Tier (1848) and Areytos (1846) respectively to imagine the war within a nationalizing frame.54 These popular romances, which sought desperately to imagine the
U.S. in nationalistic terms in the face of a growing sectional divide, appeared on the book
market at the same time that less popular romancers like Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to
construct a “National Symbolic” (Berlant 24). By contrast, Clotel contests the nationalizing
project of the historical romance and its use of sympathy to contend that blacks can only
claim membership through nostalgic longing rather than through sympathetic belonging. If
the ability to express sentiments or to become an object of sympathy functioned in some
sense as a marker of national membership, then Brown wishes to show his readers that
blacks have been denied that form of affective access to American nationality. Brown first
explores the injustice of state sanctioned sympathy when he describes the status—or lack
thereof—of Clotel’s marriage to Horatio Green. Describing marriage as an institution and
53 Lippard also mythologized the Revolutionary War and wrote several romances about the conflict and the Revolutionary era. 54 For a more extensive account of the cultural and aesthetic significance of these popular romances, see Shelley Streeby, American Sensations (2002). 55
“intimate covenant,” which functions as “the foundation of all civilisation and culture,”
Brown maintains that marriage “for many persons is the only relation in which they feel the
true sentiments of humanity,” and it “unites all which ennobles and beautifies life,—
sympathy, kindness of will and deed, gratitude, devotion, and every delicate, intimate feeling”
(83). Marriage is an institution that produces sympathy and grants those who participate in it
the experience of feeling “the true sentiments of humanity” (84). To deny slaves the legal
right to marry is thus to banish them from the national sphere of sympathy. Brown
identifies the existence of this banishment as stemming from “public sentiment” (84). Clotel
reveals how slaves are both barred from experiencing the power of sympathy while
simultaneously becoming victims of its power.
As the novel progresses, Brown continually scrutinizes sympathy and more
particularly “public sentiment” or that very category that in some sense constitutes the body
politic of sentimentalism.55 While most current scholarship treats public sentiment as an
ambivalent construct that both produces a democratic and an oppressive space, Brown
launches into a polemic against it. For Brown, common sense has ironically become an
instrument of the very kind of oppression that Thomas Paine had admonished. As Brown
explains, “public opinion” prevents Georgiana from fulfilling her desire to emancipate her
slaves just as much as the “law” does (Brown 159). Brown insists for this reason that public
sentiment or opinion functions as “the most absolute and grinding despotism that the world
ever saw” (178). And yet speaking through the character of Henry Morton, the novel urges
its readers not to “look upon this as a paradox, because you and I and the sixteen millions of
rulers are free” for “the rulers of every despotism are free” (178). In this way, Brown’s novel
55 This association, made by a number of critics, is perhaps most clearly put forth by Bruce Burgett in Sentimental Bodies (1998), which casts public sentiment in Habermasian terms as a sensational public sphere within which bodies act and are acted upon. 56 explicitly departs from Stowe’s project of feeling right and popular feeling. Brown seems to regard public opinion or popular feeling in much the same way Theodor Adorno came to view it in the mid-twentieth century—as a phenomenon that reinforces the “relations of domination,” revealing “how far the control of thought through domination extends”
(Adorno, “Opinion” 121). “Feeling right” appears impossible when one is essentially denied the right to feel, and this claim would seem be one of the novel’s consistent polemical points. The novel is peppered with failures of feeling. Horatio’s feelings cannot check his
“ambition” when he chooses to abandon Clotel for Gertrude (122). The wrongs of slavery, moreover, Brown contends “no sympathy can mitigate” (199). And even though George’s eloquent speech on the legacy of the American Revolution “melted” everyone in the court room “to tears,” he nevertheless remains “a slave” and must be executed because “an example must be made of him” (213). As Brown makes abundantly clear when describing
Clotel’s suicide, “she was a slave, and therefore out of the pale of their [the American people’s] sympathy” (207). Tears might be “shed over Greece and Poland” or over “‘poor
Ireland,’” but if “America is the ‘cradle of liberty,’” surely the American people “have rocked the child [Clotel] to death” (207). From the slave’s perspective, sympathy would appear then only to have the power to oppress. In Brown’s novel, sentimental democracy proves to be nothing more than an oxymoron.
Sympathy—or the lack thereof—along with public sentiment thus seem unsuited to the task of binding the nation together during this decade of crisis as Brown’s novel suggests. The public sentiment in favor of slavery, so Henry Morton maintains in Clotel, has led “to the loss of a firm national character”—an ominous “prelude” to the nation’s
“destruction” (178). Such a reading of the novel initially recalls Saidiya V. Hartman’s observation that “the desire to don . . . the black body as a sentimental resource . . . is both 57
founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery,” but Clotel also goes a
step further by supplanting sympathy with nostalgia (21). Just as the aim of Brown’s
engagement with the tradition of the Founding Fathers is not to abandon but to reinvent
this tradition, so too Brown uses nostalgia to reinvent sympathy as something that unifies
groups of people through diasporic displacement—national belonging becomes replaced
instead by national longing.56 Through the character of Henry Morton, the idea of an
inclusive American identity only becomes possible when imagined as a loss. It is precisely
the loss of a national character that allows Morton to yearn for a kind of American identity
that probably never existed. In this way, Brown recovers the close and original relationship between the national feeling and national displacement described in the work of Francis
Hutcheson and even in Paine’s Common Sense. Only after one becomes exiled from one’s
native home “without any View of returning,” do national feelings become imaginable
(Hutcheson 159).
Returning to the question that began this essay, we can now explain why the novel
appears to have two endings by accounting for Brown’s commitment to supplanting national
belonging with the nostalgic longing to be home. If Clotel had remained faithful to the
generic conventions of the sentimental novel or the historical romance, the novel would
have terminated along with cessation of Clotel’s own life. Instead the prose of this chapter
gives way to verse once again drawn intertextually from another source. The poem, “The
Leap from the Long Bridge,” parallels Clotel’s own leap by describing the suicide of another
tragic mulatto figure who also leaped to her grave. In both cases, the corpses find their way
floating down the Potomac, so that the dead slave eventually comes to pass by
“Washington’s grave” (209). Clotel’s corpse, in other words, becomes one with Washington
56 For a broader account of the role of diaspora in Anglo-American literature, see Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English (2007). 58
and participates in the history of the U.S. republic in a way that Clotel in life never could;
death becomes essentially the only form of democracy imaginable. Rather than following
the racial logic of the dying daughters motif found in so much sentimental fiction, Clotel’s
death does not successfully contain the threat she, as the product of miscegenation, poses to
U.S. national identity.57 Instead the reader “escapes” the generic limitations and
nationalizing aims of the sentimental historical romance because the novel does not end with
Clotel’s death, picking up instead the unfinished narrative of Mary in a chapter fittingly titled
“The Escape.”
This narrative surplus, which follows yet one more romantic subplot to its
conclusion, spans several chapters. The romance begins when we learn that George and
Mary had become romantically involved while both serving in the same house. After being
jailed for participating in a slave revolt, George escapes when Mary voluntarily chooses to
masquerade as him. The plan ultimately succeeds, and they part ways. Eventually,
George—as Brown did—finds himself exiled in Britain. Rather than remaining forever
separated or reuniting in the United States, they eventually do reunite abroad. They happen
to meet unexpectedly and unwittingly in a graveyard located in France. Reading a copy of
William Roscoe’s Leo X, a book Brown claims himself to have read in his Narrative, George
encounters a veiled lady who screams and faints after laying eyes on him. After this
mysterious encounter, George returns to his hotel only to find that he had forgotten his
book. It is the material book itself—a kind of mise-en-abyme for Clotel, recovered by the veiled
woman, that ultimately leads George to discover the woman to be Mary. The fulfillment of
this marriage plot ends, however, in a moment of nostalgic yearning. Once again the chapter
57 See Nancy Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die” (1994); and Ezra Tawil, “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White” (1998).
59
becomes enmeshed in an intertextual moment when Mary’s life becomes universalized in the
words of Washington Irving:
“A woman’s whole life is a history of affections. The heart is her world; it is
there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden
treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her
whole soul in the traffic of affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is
hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.” (225)
This block of cited text, which appears in “The Broken Heart” is itself linked to another
literary work by Thomas Moore: “She Is Far From the Land.” In all three texts—Clotel,
“The Broken Heart” and Moore’s poem, the foundation for a shared identity as well as the
creation of a newfound sympathy emerges within a diasporic and nostalgic context.
Consequently, Mary’s and George’s pilgrim’s regress back to Old Europe and the
impossibility of returning home are precisely the conditions that allow them to claim “their
native land without becoming slaves” (225). No longer exiles from home within the space
of their home, George and Mary can finally unite in mutual sympathy within the pale of
European or “British sympathy” (226).
What I have shown then is that Brown turns to nostalgia during a moment of
political crisis during the 1850s to imagine a form of national affiliation and memory
previously inconceivable within the genre of the historical romance. He supplements the lack of sympathetic belonging with a notion of nostalgic longing. In so doing, Brown ironically reclaims the U.S. Revolutionary tradition and redefines it in racially inclusive terms rather than inaugurating a new tradition of black nationalism or African-American literature.
But while nostalgia makes alternate forms of national affiliation possible in Clotel, national 60
nostalgia in Israel Potter functions in a completely antipodal way by entrapping rather
liberating its protagonist.
The Sirens of Nationality in Melville’s Revolutionary Odyssey
At the moment in his autobiographical slave narrative that William Wells Brown
adopts the surname of the Quaker who helped liberate him, he ruptures the temporal
continuity of his story to comment upon the scene of writing. Revealing to his readers that
he has composed his narrative “in sight of the Bunker Hill Monument,” Brown comments
upon the irony of his position: that he, an American citizen, had to flee from a “democratic republic” to monarchial England to “receive protection” from enslavement (46). Since its construction, the Bunker Hill Monument functioned as a master trope for the legacy of the
American Revolution. For this reason, it is not surprising to find Brown seized upon this trope in much the same way he did the legacy of Thomas Jefferson in Clotel. It is also not surprising that Herman Melville would bookend Israel Potter, a historical romance about an
American Revolutionary War veteran, with this same monument. Yet while both of the protagonists of their novels become Americans only in exile, Brown and Melville call upon this emblem of the Revolution and enlist the discourse of nostalgia to achieve very different ends.
That monuments to the Revolution and the Founding Fathers loom large in
antebellum literary culture has of course not escaped the notice of other readers. Russ
Castronovo writes extensively about what he refers to as the “monumental culture” of the
period, placing it within the context of other forms of antebellum “filiopietism” (Fathering
106). For Castronovo, the monument contributed to the ascension of dominant antebellum nationalism, leaving writers like Melville or Hawthorne with only one ineffectual and 61
ambivalent option: to imbue these monumental symbols with nationalizing power while
simultaneously exposing “the political pitfalls of figuring history within nationalist discourse”
(Fathering 141). As I have already noted, such readings presume that a single imaginary national community had achieved hegemonic status in the 1850s rather than recognizing that debates concerning how the “nation” ought to be imagined figured prominently in antebellum literary and political discourse. This critical tendency has contributed to the practice of classifying writers as either complicit with or subversive of the national imagination, or in cases where a writer appears to resist easy categorization, this individual gets placed somewhere along the axis of ambivalence. Herman Melville has the distinction of being one of the few writers to embody all three of these critical trajectories.58 Critics
have placed in all three categories at varying moments as an exemplary nationalist or
imperialist writer,59 counter-hegemonic writer,60 and most recently has often served as the
ambivalent exception that proves the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic binary rule in U.S.
literary criticism.61 But if we view the idea of the nation through the lens of antebellum culture—as a contested rather than as a settled category, our reading of Melville’s work and
his understanding of national memory changes considerably. Instead of viewing him as a
58 For two excellent accounts of Melville’s critical reception, see Paul Lauter, “Melville Climbs the Canon” (1994) and William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick (1995) 1-36. 59 See Chase, Herman Melville (1949); Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty (1989), D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) 153-170; Henry Levin, The Power of the Blackness (1958) 165-200; Lewis (1955) 127-155; Matthiessen (1939) 371-470; and Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (1956). 60 See Barnes (1997) 115-126; John Bryant, “The Persistence of Melville: Representative Writer for a Multicultural Age” (1997); Lawrence Buell, “Melville and the Question of American Decolonization” (1992); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977) 289-326; Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985) 113-145; C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953); Pease (1987) 235-275; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy (1979); John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (2000) 77- 96; and Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal (1998). 61 See Brown (1990) 135-195; Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea (2002); Castronovo (1995) 67-105, 141-156; Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America (2005) 91-126; Spanos (1995); Paul Giles, Virtual Americas (2002) 47-87; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance (1989) 165-230; Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (1999); Powell (2000) 153-175; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (1993) 135-221; and Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans (1995) 106-171. 62
reactionary, we can treat him as a participant in an unfolding series of discussions about the
form and fate of the nation.
While Melville takes on the problem of the nation in practically all of his novels, he
never does so as directly, or perhaps even as ironically, as he does in Israel Potter. In this historical novel, he revisits the legacy of the Revolution and the Founding Fathers in order to rewrite this tradition. Even though the Melville of White Jacket may very well have thought that Americans by definition “‘are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past’” to secure the “liberation of the new American,” the Melville of Israel Potter joins his contemporaries by engaging rather than abandoning the past (Bell, Development 199). Like
William Wells Brown, Melville revolutionizes the tradition of the Revolution and revolts against the generic conventions of the historical romance. By chronicling the adventures of a Revolutionary War soldier that largely transpire in Europe instead of North America, he sets his novel apart from such paragons of the form like Cooper’s The Spy. By expatriating his patriot, Melville enlists the discourse of nostalgia to examine the past and raise fundamental questions concerning the basis of American national identity or the lack thereof. Although it exhibits many of the generic markers of the historical romance, Israel
Potter also formally models itself upon the popular narratives of captivity and slavery. In the case of the latter, Melville’s novel is nearly as much of a novelization of enslavement and escape as Clotel, but while Brown posits a more racially inclusive notion of American nationality by possessing the revolutionary past, Melville depicts any form of American nationality as a type of enslavement. Paradoxically, it is Israel Potter’s very longing to be at home in the nation that prevents him from returning to his native land as he finds himself embroiled in a series of schemes devised by the “tanned Machiavelli in tents,” Benjamin
Franklin (Israel 46). 63
Most critics have not radically veered away from Michael Paul Rogin’s touchstone reading of Israel Potter as a novel that “mocked the cult of the fathers” by exposing the flaws and unfulfilled promises of their revolution (224). Though a good deal of mockery at the
Founding Fathers’ expense occurs in the novel, we should not read the novel as a simple and straightforward indictment of the Revolutionary War’s supposed success. Melville does not condemn the war or the Founding Fathers as complete failures, and the novel is not an exercise in patricidal character assassination. Instead he seeks to remind his readers, in an era of newfound revolutions and an impending civil conflict, precisely what kind of revolution the American Revolution had been. When comparing the French to American
Revolutions, Hannah Arendt very purposefully turns to Herman Melville as a figure that
“knew better how to talk to the theoretical proposition of the men of the French
Revolution” in order to cement the distinction between the philosophical underpinnings of
that insurrection from the one that took place in North America (Revolution 75). Not unlike
Arendt herself, Melville uses Israel Potter to explore the meaning of the word “revolution” at
a historical moment when such questions seemed especially pressing. By attempting to
excavate the meaning of this concept, Melville begins to establish the relationship between
revolution and an American national identity. In Israel Potter, what appears as a classic case
of the psychoaffective disorder nostalgia becomes the vehicle for an exploration of several
pressing cultural and political questions. In the process of probing these questions, the
novel links the success of the American Revolution to the problem of the subject that
Arendt referred to as the homo or the “rightless person” who inhabits but is not entitled to citizenship within the classical conception of the polis (Revolution 36).62 But before I examine
62 Giorgio Agamben has revitalized the discussion over the status of the “rightless person,” or what he refers to as the homo sacer. I use Arendt in this case because her work, which Agamben also draws upon, addresses my interests more directly by examining the case of the American Revolution in particular. But for more on 64
these concepts in greater detail below, I want to underscore that Israel Potter reminds its
readers that the American Revolution succeeded precisely because it denied certain groups
political and economic privileges rather than seeking to establish an economically and politically egalitarian nation.
Consequently, while Brown revisits the Revolution in order re-imagine the nation as
a place within which blacks can call home as Americans, Melville revisits the Revolution to
insist that such exclusions actually play an integral role in the maintenance of the nation-
state. But rather then leave his readers solely with a misanthropic and satirical portrait of the
self-proclaimed land of the free, Melville gestures toward an entirely different form of
identity, one geographically tied to the region. Such a reading of Melville helps us to
understand the pitfalls of trying to map him or other antebellum writers onto the binary of complicity and subversion while establishing the connection between the aesthetics of
nostalgia and the regional imagination. Read in this way, we can apprehend how Israel Potter
constructs a particular understanding of nostalgia that would become an important aesthetic
force in postbellum America.
* * *
Since Israel Potter first appeared as a serial in Putnam’s Monthly in 1854, which dubbed
the series “A Fourth of July Story,” readers have assessed the portrayal of Israel Potter’s
nationality (66). Despite the nearly uniform focus on “the characterological dimensions of
the novel,” at least two distinct and wholly incompatible ways of assessing the national
identity of the novel’s namesake exist (Reising 119). On the one hand, reviewers from
Agamben’s thought on this concept, see both Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and The State of Exception (2005). Additionally, in “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” (2004), Rancière singles out Agamben more so than Arendt for assigning those who suffer “the wrong” (i.e. deprivation of rights) an infinite “ontological destiny” or status that forecloses any possibility of revolt (308). For this reason, Rancière insists that the “ethical turn” galvanized in part by the work of Agamben and Alain Badiou is really a turn away from politics, as the latter does simply more than work within or resist the order of things; politics is precisely that which seeks to overturn this order. 65
Melville’s own time onward have held up Israel Potter as the American par excellence. Writing
in the March 15, 1855 installment of Norton’s Literary Gazette and Publisher’s Circular, an
anonymous reviewer insisted that Potter displays a “Yankee shrewdness” (Higgins 456).
Other antebellum reviewers similarly found Melville’s piece of quintessentially “native
literature” to be “thoroughly saturated with American sentiment” (Higgins 458), and they
believed that the book would “be greedily devoured by Young America” (Higgins 460).
Nearly a century later, Richard Chase echoed the views of Melville’s critical contemporaries by describing the novel as “a distinctly American book” (Chase 176). Even more recent critics have determined that Potter functions, at least from Melville’s perspective, as a
“representative early American” (Rosenberg 180).
On the other hand, a whole other body of criticism insists that there is very little
about Israel Potter the novel or its protagonist that seems American. Some of Melville’s
contemporaries cast the book as an “infelicitous” or historically irresponsible work for
rendering ignoble portraits of some of the nation’s most notable war heroes (Higgins 461).
Since at least 1970, critics have produced readings more or less in line with John Seelye’s
characterization of Potter as a figure that has so “many identities” that they “add up to no
identity at all” (3). Depending on one’s particular critical persuasion then, Potter’s
indeterminacy becomes a kind of Rochechouart test from which one can divine any number
of conclusions.63 Some have celebrated the performative dimension of Potter’s character
whose “willingness to play” forestalls any attempt to fix him to a “single, certain identity”
(Davis, “Body” 179). Paul Giles, alternatively, singles out this particular Melville novel as the
one where “national identities become ‘snarled’” more than any other, making it the perfect
63 In other words, I agree with the observation first made by Rogin and again by Powell who note that Melville’s work has the “uncanny ability . . . to function as a discursive mirror that reflects the ideological image of the literary critic looking at the text” (Powell 153). 66
illustration of his transatlantic approach to U.S. literature (70). As these various critical
approaches demonstrate, readings that explicitly comment upon or analyze the ontological
status of Israel Potter could not be more antithetical to one another—casting him as an
American everyman or as no man at all.
Despite these seemingly irreconcilable discrepancies in interpretation, we ought to
entertain the possibility that the novel’s “snarling” of identities may in fact be fully
compatible with a certain way of conceptualizing “Americanness” especially given that
concept was up for debate in the 1850s. Although by the time Israel Potter began to appear in
print Young America vanguards O’Sullivan and Duyckinck had sought for well over a
decade to establish a recognizably American literature, Edward L. Widmer suggests we
should question the claim that “in the 1850s” Young American “cultural nationalism had never been stronger” (202). In an article that appeared in the October 1854 issue of Putnam’s that included the fourth installment of Israel Potter, an anonymous writer confidently declared
that “America has no national novel, for the very good reason that there is no such thing as
American Society” (394). Even Melville’s own hallmark piece of Young American literary
criticism, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which The Literary World published in 1850,
remains enclosed within a frame of non-national identity. When the review appeared in
print, the byline read “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” and the opening
paragraphs indulge in florid local color descriptions of the New England countryside (93).
Such a framework coupled with comments that stress Hawthorne’s “New-England roots”
moor Hawthorne just as much—if not more—to a local rather than to a national literary
tradition (100). Israel Potter, along with Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), expressed Melville’s
disillusionment with the Young American movement that he had participated in and
benefited from while nevertheless engaging in precisely the kind of activity that O’Sullivan 67
called for in 1837: the rewriting of the past.64 But rather than rewriting the past to
“rejuvenat[e] American culture,” Melville revisits the past to foil any attempt to cast the
Revolutionary War as a democratic event (Widmer 3).
During the course of the novel, Israel Potter’s national identity always seems
tenuously defined. To be sure, in the opening chapters the narrator squarely inserts Israel
into the narrative of an archetypal American Revolutionary Bildungsroman. Loosely
following a Stadialist model of historical progress often found in many historical romances,
Israel first rebels against “the tyranny of his father,” then becomes a successful hunter and
profitable fur trader, returns to his agrarian home, and then sets off again to join a whaling
expedition (Israel 8).65 Making the allegory obvious for even the most obtuse of readers,
Melville explicitly characterizes his protagonist’s progressive narrative as illustrative of
Israel’s “fearless self-reliance and independence which conducted our forefathers to national freedom” (9). Such statements remind the reader of other paradigmatic definitions of
American identity found in Emerson’s essays or even earlier in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an
American Farmer (1782), which described the “American” as one who labors relentlessly in pursuit of “self-interest” free of “involuntary idleness” and “servile dependence” (70). That
Americans often seem essentially recognizable by their behavior, as Crèvecoeur and others noted, is an observation that Melville seizes upon in Israel Potter. When a pair of American sympathizers in Britain identify Israel as “a Yankee of the true blue stamp,” they do so by
64 See Widmer (1999) 3. 65 George Dekker identifies Stadialism as one of the key philosophical discourses that contributed to the development of the American historical romance. This historical outlook mapped the progression of humankind onto a series of stages, ranging from the “‘savage’ stage based on hunting and fishing” to an “over- civilized” stage built on “commerce and manufacturing” (75). As Dekker rightly notes, Stadialism figured prominently in the work of Adam Smith as well as in Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. In Israel Potter, Melville has his protagonist proceed through a series of stages, from one of hunting to one where he participates in the world of commerce as a sailor. Israel’s fate, however, suggests that this movement is not a progressive one. 68
taking stock of his conduct (34). In these ways, Melville would appear to deploy some of the most conventional modes of defining “Americanness” during the antebellum era.66
As the events of the novel continue to unfold, however, Melville severely
undermines these earlier characterizations and the nationalist logic of the narrative that
encloses Israel. For example, while some critics have seen Israel’s ever vigilant minding of
“the main chance” as quintessentially American, his continuous escapes force him to
perform a series of masquerades that destabilize the narrative and whatever underlying
national identity Israel might have possessed (Israel 16). When Israel manages to escape successfully from impressment on a British vessel for the first time, he changes into the clothes of ditch digger. This act immediately ruptures the temporality of the narrative by disclosing to the reader that “the wretched rags” Israel “now wore, were but suitable to that long career of destitution before him; . . . forty torpid years of pauperism” (19). Such an allusion anticipates more than just his impending economic descent—a fall that dissonantly disrupts the revolutionary Whiggery of the novel’s opening account of Israel’s rise; it also gestures forward to the end of the novel when Israel eventually loses himself and therefore his American identity in the London “crowd” or “gulf-stream of humanity” (158).
Israel’s first act of imposture—an act often seen as emblematic of his Sam-Slick
American qualities—actually comes to represent his economic decline and loss of national
identity. Just moments after his change of clothes, we learn that despite his staunch
patriotism, Israel “could not bring himself” to shed the “British navy shirt” he had acquired
(22). His attachment to this shirt soon attracts the attention of some British soldiers who
66 By rooting American or “Yankee” identity in New England, Melville gestures to the New England literary tradition that produced a “prolific” amount of “fictive works on historical themes” to imagine this region’s history as the history of the nation (Buell, New 196). By the end of the novel, however, Melville undermines this association by having his protagonist abandon the national in favor of his regional identity. For more on antebellum New England literary culture, see Lawrence Buell’s still definitive study, New England Literary Culture (1986). 69 finger Israel as a naval deserter. This encounter becomes the first of many moments in a novel where, as Giles accurately observes, “national identities become ‘snarled,’” and the difference “between British and American cultures” becomes difficult to determine (70).
But this cultural confusion appears to be more than just a transatlantic phenomenon as Giles would contend. Satirically mocking the racialization of color, the novel contains a scene where Sir John Millet, a knight that Israel befriends, infers that the exiled patriot “looks like a
Chinaman” because he has “yellow hair” (24). A subsequent chapter echoes this moment of racial confusion when Melville describes Benjamin Franklin as an individual exhibiting “a touch of primeval orientalness” (46). For these reasons, Israel’s national and ethnic identities always remain difficult ones to place. As a British sailor says of Israel after the latter had mistakenly boarded an enemy ship, “he don’t seem to belong anywhere” (139).
The challenge of pinning Israel down to a particular national identity seems best expressed in the form of a metaphorical similarity between his ontological ambiguity and the most outrageous disguise he adopts—that of a scarecrow. Having once again escaped a place of confinement (this time a secret enclosure within the residence of the recently deceased Squire Woodcock), Israel stumbles across what he first believes to be a “mysterious stranger” (77). As he “drew still nearer,” he finds himself staring into “the face” of a scarecrow “lost in a sort of ghastly blank” (77). He comes to the quick realization that he should don the “wretched . . . clothes” of the scarecrow in order to cross the English countryside undetected as an impoverished “wretch” (78). Unfortunately, a farmer appears on the horizon, forcing Israel to mimic the scarecrow—itself an object of mimicry. While
Israel’s absurd attempt at simulation humorously fails, the entire encounter, subtitled in the book as “An Encounter of Ghosts,” sheds light upon the simulacra of Israel’s national identity (77). The subtitle, which might initially appear to allude to Israel’s prior masquerade 70
as the late Squire Woodcock’s apparition, also refers to his seemingly newfound identity as a
scarecrow. Like the scarecrow, Israel later finds himself “gazing blankly about,” implying
that his American identity may be no more substantive than that of a straw man (167).
These tropes of American emptiness and blankness continuously emerge throughout
the novel. Melville throws the trope of blankness in particular into greater relief when he describes the map of the New World hanging on the wall of Franklin’s Parisian apartment.
“Containing vast empty spaces in the middle,” only the word “DESERT” diffusely printed .
. . so as to span five-and-twenty degrees of longitude with only two syllables” appear on
Franklin’s map of the Americas, but his European maps by contrast appear textually
“crowded” by “topographical and trigonometrical” markings (38). In other words, the ideas of an American and America seem to be empty ones especially when compared to the textual density of the European map. Americans in Melville’s novel, by supplementing their lack of identity with a series of other identities—from Chinamen to Sioux—find themselves stuck in a state of inescapable incognito while their nation, even after centuries of colonization, remains a terra incognita. In this way, Israel Potter’s topographical representation of the United States stands in stark contrast to portrayals found in earlier American historical romances such as Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), which depicts the American landscape as one undergoing a process of constant textualizaiton as it becomes mapped and divided by Patent owners like Judge Marmaduke Temple to facilitate “the march of the nation across the continent” (456).
Yet while Melville certainly does dispense with the idea that “Americanness” can be
essentially represented, Israel repeatedly insists upon his own American identity even if the
content of his nationality remains obliquely blank. So then what does make him an
American in spite of his ontological vacuity? The answer to this question is the problem that 71
drives the narrative. Recent scholarship insisting that the novel “reflects the muddled and
arbitrary status of national identity,” glosses over the fact that Israel “remains nostalgic for
his homeland” as a curious but insignificant detail (Giles 71). But the importance of
nostalgia to the text really cannot be overstated, since it is principally Israel’s nostalgia that
keeps him invested in his American identity that in turn propels the narrative forward. Like
George and Mary in Clotel, Israel can imagine his place within the nation only in a state of
exile. Unlike Brown’s novel, however, Melville portrays nationality as a form of entrapment,
not emancipation. By portraying American nationality in these terms, Melville uses the
language of national longing to comment upon the character and consequences of the
American Revolution. In this way, Israel’s American identity may at first seem empty, but
like the shallow “recesses” in the boots he uses to smuggle documents into Paris, this
emptiness is “full of meaning” (40).
Understanding the role nostalgia plays can help us continue to clarify the novel’s engagement with American identity and revolutionary history. At various points throughout the novel, Israel succumbs to fits of delusional reverie. Shortly before assuming the appearance of a scarecrow, Israel comes “to a hilly land in meadow” where “the whole scene magically reproduced . . . the aspect of Bunker Hill, Charles River, and Boston town” (76).
And at the end of the novel, we learn that during his forty-five years in London that
“sometimes . . . thoughts of home would—either by gradually working and working upon him, or else by an instantaneous rush of recollection—overpower him for a time to a sort of hallucination” (164). Once overcome by these moments of reverie, he would soon find himself “bewitched by the mirage of vapors” (165). Such delusions clearly fit the description of one of the hallmark symptoms of nostalgia outlined by the antebellum medical establishment. Bucknill and Tuke explain in their authoritative diagnostic manual that for 72
the nostalgic “the prospect of their native home presented itself to their mind’s eye, like the
fata morgana to travelers in the desert, depicted in the most extravagant and delusive hues
which a morbid fancy could suggest” (161). That Israel appears to suffer from a particularly
virulent form of nostalgia supplies us with an answer as to why after decades of exile Israel
insists on always “declaring himself an American” (Israel 36).
Melville’s explicit use of nostalgia, however, is even more complicated. In fact, it
may be more accurate to conclude that at least two strands of nostalgia emerge in the novel,
one national and the other regional. The national form of nostalgia that predominates in the
novel could be best described, in the words of Svetlana Boym, as “restorative nostalgia” or a
nostalgia that “puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps” characteristic of “national and nationalist revivals” (41). For much of the novel, Israel displays nostalgia of the restorative sense as he always seems “eager to return to
America” or to restore himself to his place of birth (131). This nostalgic impulse, however,
has grave consequences for Israel. His nostalgic longing to return to home to the land of
liberty actually condemns him to a life of almost ceaseless impressment.
As Melville explains after Israel speaks with the King in his garden: “had it not been
for the peculiar disinterested fidelity of our adventurer’s patriotism, he would have sported
the red coat” and “advanced in time to no mean rank in the army of Britain” (32). Instead
of joining and advancing in rank in the British army, his nostalgia renders him vulnerable to
manipulation. In the intervening pages, a who’s who list of American Founding Fathers,
including Benjamin Franklin promise Israel to help find a “ship for America” only after
ensnaring his aid in the Revolutionary cause (43). Since Israel has no hope of finding
passage back to America on his own, he must depend on Franklin for assistance. This
dependency condemns Israel to a state of servitude, and while in Paris, Franklin 73 consequently informs him, “you must absolutely remain in your room, just as if you were my prisoner, until you quit Paris for Calais” (43). Thus, unlike Clotel, which draws upon the language of nostalgia to re-imagine the nation in more inclusive terms, Melville puts the shortcomings of restorative nostalgia on display. A slave to his desire to be at home within the nation, Israel finds himself in the position of a “subaltern” under the command of John
Paul Jones (94).
If Israel’s’ national nostalgia imprisons rather than liberates him, what does the novel appear to say about the Revolution and its legacy? Many critics have read Israel Potter as a novel that exposes the failure of the American Revolution by portraying a working-class patriot condemned to a life of exiled misery and whose heroics “faded out of print,” disappearing from the nation’s collective memory (Israel 169).67 Such a reading would cast
Melville’s use of restorative nostalgia in terms similar to those of Clotel, which seeks to re- imagine the past in order to make political claims about the present. But rather than trying to reclaim the Revolution for radical political ends, Israel Potter reminds readers of the
American Revolution’s real aims. Melville underscores that the founders imagined their idea of revolution more “in keeping with its lexical sense,” which according to Reinhart
Koselleck, “signified a return, a rotation of movement back to a point of departure” (45). In this way, the American rebellion functioned more as a kind of restoration.
Arendt portrayed the Revolution in Koselleck’s terms by describing the event as a
“revolving back” to a time when men “had been in the possession of rights and liberties of which tyranny and conquest had dispossessed them” (Revolution 35). She also casts the
American Revolution as more of a restoration than revolution because it sought to establish a free constitutional republic as opposed an economically egalitarian society. Economic
67 In particular, see Reising’s Loose Ends (1996) 117-85. 74
equality, Arendt explains, only became a part of revolutionary rhetoric during the French
Revolution that came to pity the people who lived lives of scarcity. Whereas the Founding
Fathers sought to “liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men,” the French
Revolutionaries wished “to liberate the life process of society from the fetters of scarcity so
that it could swell into a stream of abundance” (Revolution 54). As Gordon S. Wood stresses,
the American “revolutionaries had not intended to level their society” as “they knew any
society . . . would still have to have ‘some Distinctions and Gradations of Rank arising from
education and other accidental Circumstances’” (Radicalism 233).68 In this way, Israel’s
descent into poverty does not signal the Revolution’s failure, but instead emphasizes an
important difference between the aims of the American Revolution and the rationale of the
1848 insurrections. While various members of Congress eagerly tried to imagine Kossuth as
a Washington reborn, Melville would regard such an analogy as an inherently false one. For
this reason, we should not be surprised to find Arendt looking to Melville as a mouthpiece
for her accounts of the Revolution. Reflecting upon the success of John Paul Jones’ and
Benjamin Franklin’s endeavors much like Arendt later does, Melville reminds his readers that
for these men, as metonyms for the Founding Fathers, “compassion” for the misery of the
people “played no role in the motivation of the actors” of the American Revolution
(Revolution 61). As the novel reveals, Franklin may display “condescending affability”
towards Israel, but he does not pity his imprisoned patriot’s state of impoverishment (52).
Franklin nevertheless enlists Israel’s service, revealing that without this distinction in rank
the latter may have never played the role necessary for him to perform.
68 Not all historians would accept Wood’s characterization. Joyce Appleby, for example, contests the view that there was really never “a possibility of a fully participatory democracy in the United States” (220). Pointing to the debates between the Federalists and Antifederalists, she contends that questions surrounding rank as well as “the tensions between liberty and participatory democracy” were very much matters up for debate (221). Appleby, nevertheless, does not suggest that a systematic project of leveling was a part of America’s Revolutionary tradition. 75
For Melville then, restorative nostalgia for the American Revolution can never grant
Israel the “abundance,” or material and political freedom, that the novel implicitly suggests
he justly deserves. Israel thus appears trapped within a captivity narrative that ironically
contains the story of his supposed liberation from tyranny. This story, which actually
manifests itself within the novel as a kind of mise-en-abyme, relentlessly pursues him during his
time England until Israel becomes absorbed into the crowds of London. His momentary
refuge as “the king’s gardener at Kew,” for example, becomes compromised “when the old
story of his being a rebel, or a runaway prisoner, or a Yankee! Or a spy, began to be revived
with a added malignity” (32). At every possible turn, Israel appears to be running away from
his own story, suggesting the story itself has him captive. This “captivity” narrative mirrors
the Whiggish captivity narratives of the Revolutionary era by inverting the “incessant
dialectic between corruption and virtue” that form the arc of these stories (Burnham 69).69
Israel, like the heroes of the rebellion, revolts against his father and puts his duty to country ahead of his own private interests. But instead of setting him free, the romantic plot of this story entraps him and Israel’s public virtue goes unrewarded. In this way, Melville’s novel indicts the practice of drawing upon the iconography and mythology of the American rebellion. Rather than imbuing Israel with agency, this narrative deprives him of it and by extension suggests that such a story cannot really be allegorically applied to contemporary debates surrounding abolition, Popular Sovereignty or the U.S. position on the mid-century
European revolutions. Melville is not calling upon the nation to forget the past per se, but this novel raises serious questions about the allegorical application of the Revolutionary narrative to the political problems of the 1850s. While for Brown, nationalist nostalgia can be revolutionary when it uses the past to legitimate what was for him a battle to expand the
69 For more on “Whig sentimentalism,” see Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976). 76
definition of American identity in the present, Melville seems to suggest that the same
narrative forecloses this possibility because it seeks to restore an order of society founded
upon narratives of necessary inequality.
If Melville imagines the restorative nostalgia for the founders and the concomitant
effort re-imagine America’s Revolutionary past in more progressive terms as a futile one,
does he pessimistically wish to condemn Israel to a state of poverty in perpetuity? We can
locate a possible answer to this question at the close of Melville’s novel where a second,
regional form of nostalgia emerges. After living in London for forty-five years, Israel’s story
has ceased to pursue him. Thanks to the efforts of his English son Benjamin, however, the
goal of his restorative nostalgia is brought to fruition. Having arrived in Boston on the
Fourth-of-July, Israel “narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the
procession” for the commemoration of the Battle of Bunker Hill (167). His homecoming
on this national day of remembrance practically puts an end to his life, confirming that
monumental nationalism can only terminate his life and cannot satisfy his restorative
longing.
With his unfulfilling restoration now complete, Israel’s national nostalgia has
evaporated. Somewhat aimlessly he proceeds to leave Boston, which serves as a synecdochal
metropole for the nation, towards his childhood home in the Berkshires. Upon approaching
the spot where his “father’s homestead” once stood, he discovers that “it had been burnt
down long ago” (168). He also stumbles upon an unfamiliar “walnut grove,” but soon
remembers “that his father had sometimes talked of planting such a grove” (168). At this moment in the novel, the nation becomes completely displaced by Israel’s regional ties to the
Berkshires. This region does not inhabit the empty time of the nation, and the local inhabitants view his unexpected appearance in a kind of Messianic light, seeing it “less as a 77
return than a resurrection” (168). Israel also learns that his father had “gone West”
sometime ago (169). For this reason, his childhood home in the Berkshires is neither a space
of filiopietism nor a scene of patricide; it is a place of fatherly absence. Israel still slips back
into a nostalgic reverie, recalling when his “father would sit” along with the rest of his family
“on the very same spot” that he does now (169). This form of nostalgia, however, is not
comprised of a longing to return to a national homeland but instead is a mourning of the
loss of an irrecoverable locality. Boym refers to this form of nostalgia as “reflective
nostalgia,” which “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of
remembrance” (41). Reflective nostalgia is less about the “national past and future” and
“more about individual and cultural memory” that “perpetually defer[s] homecoming” by
“temporalizing space” (Boym 49). Reflective nostalgia forecloses any possibility of restoring
the past to the present.
In Melville’s case, however, Israel’s moment of reflective nostalgia seems to operate
on a regional register. In this way, Melville proposes but does not fully define an alternative
to national nostalgia. Within this place of national absence, Israel may indeed disappear “out
of [the national] memory,” but only in the Berkshires do “the ends meet,” securing the very
restorative ending that Israel longed to achieve (169). In this instance, Melville suggests that
an innocuous regional imagination might function as an alternative to the vitriolic sectional
battles over the content and form of the nation’s memory—a form of memory that will
never recognize or remember the class of Israel Potters. Thus, Melville would seem to want
us to focus less on Israel’s fading out of print than upon the moment in which he comes to
embrace a different form of communal affiliation and memory.70 It is precisely this kind of
70 Castronovo concludes that Israel Potter also produces a local knowledge in the Foucauldian sense of that term, but he locates the site of this knowledge not in the Berkshires but in the London crowds that Israel loses himself within. For this reason, Castronovo reads Israel’s incorporation into this “critical mass” as a moment 78
regional imagination that would continue to accrue significance during the second half of the
nineteenth century.
* * *
Nostalgia, as these two novels suggests, became a way for writers to re-imagine the
past aesthetically and its relation to the political and cultural crises of the 1850s. For Brown
and Melville, nostalgia also became a way for them to break the generic conventions of the
historical romance. While other modes of apprehending the past existed in the antebellum
era, nostalgia became one important way of aesthetically intervening within established
genres like the historical romance. Both Brown and Melville engage the Revolutionary
tradition directly and both foreground the literary in their texts by enclosing mise-en-abymes in
their novels that play a role in their narratives’ resolutions. But my readings of Brown and
Melville also suggest that nostalgia need not be wed to a particular set of political or ideological aims. Brown uses nostalgia to alter the meaning of American identity while
Melville offers another way of imagining community altogether. Nostalgia then aesthetically enables both of these writers to narrate the past during a moment of crisis. In fact, as both of these novels and nostalgia’s medical genealogy reveal, nostalgia is a form of memory that emerges within sites of cultural or physical conflict. This conflict, which in the 1850s stemmed from the sectional crisis, produces an estrangement from community that nostalgia seems well equipped to negotiate. By tracking nostalgia’s role in constructing collective memory in the 1850s, we can see both why it is not accurate to cast this decade as one defined by a singular understanding of the nation and how nostalgia would continue to become an important way for writers to grapple with cultural crises and challenge the logic
when it becomes possible to “effectively challenge the hegemonic structure of American nationalist discourse” (Fathering 154). My reading of nostalgia, however, suggests both that no such hegemonic structure existed and that Melville’s regional imagination emerges as an alternate, not necessarily an oppositional, way to imagine community and collective memory in the 1850s. 79
of conventional genres in the nineteenth century. As literary critics then, nostalgia also helps
us work beyond certain types of Foucauldian reading practices that continue to cast long
shadows over nineteenth-century literary studies. Reading for nostalgia leads us to read
aesthetically and focus upon sites of literary and historical conflict and change; reading for
nostalgia compels us, in other words, not to place texts within a single generic tradition or within a static stage or episteme. Nostalgia, moreover, remains subject to alteration and revision, and writers would revisit and redefine this aesthetic practice during and in the wake of the Civil War as the subsequent chapters will demonstrate. Nevertheless, nostalgia’s divisiveness could also foreclose communal possibilities as much as it could create them. In the next chapter, I examine how Augusta J. Evans and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton explored nostalgia’s power to divide and exclude during the Reconstruction era.
80
2 _____
Irreconcilable Differences: Nostalgia and the Impossibility of Reconstruction in Augusta J. Evans’s St. Elmo and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?
“A peculiar form of nostalgia seized him from time to time,—not the nostalgia which desires home and the native land, but the longing to see once again the scenes which are associated with recollections of other years, the longing to roll back the mist which gathers between us and the past.”
—Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1878)
Providing what resembles a fictionalized ethnography of the characters that populated much of his Californian short fiction of the 1860s and 1870s in “The Argonauts of ’49” (1882), Bret Harte recounts the demise of a particular woman who lived with her husband in a mining camp in the Sierras. Her husband—a Texan—soon “won the respect of the camp,” but she—a Northeasterner—did not fair especially well (241). Harte explains that she quickly succumbed to what at first seemed to be an inexplicable illness. She initially retreated from the rest of the camp by taking long walks on which she would gaze longingly towards the east, but eventually this melancholic illness completely confined her to home.
Harte describes what immediately followed:
One day, to everybody’s astonishment, she died. “Do you know what they
say Ma’am Richards died of?” said Yuba Bill to his partner. “The doctor says
she died of nostalgia,” said Bill. “What blank thing is nostalgia?” asked the
other. “Well, it’s kind o’ longin’ to go to heaven!” Perhaps he was right.
(242) 81
Death by nostalgia assumes a comical tone in this passage, but the idea that nostalgia could
kill would have been one familiar to many of Harte’s postbellum readers. While the malady
surfaced occasionally in medical journals and in the periodical press in the 1850s, the term
appears almost ubiquitously in Civil War medical literature as one of the leading causes of psychologically-induced death on the battlefield. It also increasingly became part of the popular imagination with poems and articles about nostalgia appearing with greater frequency in publications like Harper’s and the Overland Monthly.
In addition to providing us with a glimpse of the pervasiveness of nostalgia in
postbellum culture, this episode from “The Argonauts of ’49” sheds light on the way writers
used nostalgia to delineate and fix regional as well as other forms of difference after the Civil
War. The fact that nostalgia intensified regional differences and sectional divisions runs
counter to the way we usually understand the cultural work postbellum literature performed.
When the literature of the Reconstruction era is considered at all in studies of nineteenth-
century American literature, critics often portray it as invested in imagining a reconciliation
between North and South.71 Focusing on proto-realist novels like John William De Forest’s
Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Succession to Loyalty (1867) or in Oliver Optic’s many popular
children’s books, critics generally insist that through homosocial battle scenes or
heteronormative marriage plots North and South reunited as one. Harte’s anecdote should
give us pause before we too hastily accept this prevailing account of the period. In the case
of “The Argonauts of ’49,” when a strapping young Texas beau weds a northern
schoolmarm and heads west to strike it rich in the Sierras, the ending is far from a happy
one. Her attachment to home—her nostalgia for the metropolitan Northeast—proves fatal
71 For example, see Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820 – 1860 (1995); Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety (2000); Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (1993); Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism (1997); Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004); Shirley Samuels, Facing America (2004); Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers (1993); and Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation (1999). 82 and denies the reader the satisfaction of an imaginary cultural union among South, North, and West. Those settlers that did manage to survive, Harte maintains, “were utterly free from . . . sentimentalism” and accordingly “took a sardonic delight in stripping all meretricious finery from their speech; they had a sarcastic fashion of eliminating everything but the facts from poetic or imaginative narrative” (242). Harte suggests that imaginative literature—sentimentalism and the romance in particular—seemed ill-suited to the task of nation-building—a view that I will argue defined the literary culture of the Reconstruction era. As nostalgia as both a literary mode and a disease became increasingly pronounced in
U.S. culture, sectional divisions waxed rather than waned and sympathy no longer seemed so powerful. “Imaginative narrative” only had the power to divide, not to unite. For this reason, while the nation’s sections ceased to be politically divorced, Harte and his contemporaries used nostalgia to demonstrate that they would remain culturally estranged.
In other words, the problem with the American sense of identity Herman Melville prophetically identified in his antebellum novel Israel Potter came to the cultural forefront in the 1860s with deadly force: rather than relying on a shared homogeneous and calendrical sense of the past, Americans defined themselves through competing forms of nostalgia— what Yuba Bill’s partner aptly refers to in Melvillean terms as that “blank thing.”
To establish nostalgia’s power to create forms of regional and transnational social cohesion through regional divisiveness, I read two very different novels by two very different authors that exemplify the way nostalgia functioned in postbellum U.S. literature. I first turn to Augusta J. Evans’s St. Elmo (1866), a novel infrequently studied now despite being the third bestselling novel in the nineteenth century behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben- 83
Hur.72 I argue that Evans enlisted the power of nostalgia to salvage sectionalism by
imagining the South as culturally, even if no longer politically, independent from the North.
Along somewhat similar lines, in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) María Amparo Ruiz de
Burton dramatizes both the inefficacy of sympathy to reconstruct the nation and the danger
nostalgia poses to such a project. While Evans celebrates the postbellum power of nostalgia,
Ruiz de Burton reflects upon its dangers and ultimately rejects it in favor of the topos of cosmopolitan exile. Taken together, St. Elmo and Who Would Have Thought It? portray the
immediate decades after the Civil War as years of turmoil and persisting sectional
divisiveness as opposed to a period devoted to imaginative reconstructing the nation.
Romancing the Confederacy: Sectional Nostalgia in St. Elmo
Those who study St. Elmo often attempt to situate it within a proto-feminist tradition
of domestic fiction, and certainly large sections of the novel lend themselves to such a
reading. Through a better portion of this nearly six hundred-page epic narrative the novel’s
protagonist, the orphaned Edna Earl, reviles almost every major institution of the patriarchal
and aristocratic South. Her dislike of this particular brand of Southern culture begins in the
opening pages when, as a child, she witnesses a duel. This event traumatizes her to such a
degree that she comes to see the duel and the “Honorable Satisfaction” that it bestows as “a
monster which custom had adopted and petted” (20). Her rejection of these Southern
institutions also inspires her to pursue an independent career as a writer and governess in
New York where she would become a renowned literary figure. In the process of pursing
her career she rejects several male suitors—chief among them the Byronic Southern
72 William Perry Fidler makes this claim in his biography of Evans, but he admits that “the absence of reliable records and indexes of sales before the year 1895” make it difficult to be absolutely certain of St. Elmo’s sales ranking (129). We can be sure that the novel continued to be widely sold well into the early twentieth century though. Frank Luther Mott also lists St. Elmo among his list of all-time bestsellers in Golden Multitudes (1947). 84 plantation owner St. Elmo who has a “‘low estimate of female intellect’” (259). In every way, St. Elmo plays the part of the consummate rake, taking pleasure in dueling, ruining women, and blaspheming the Bible. Although Edna finds herself inexplicably drawn to his
“‘wicked magnetism,’” she manages to resist him throughout most of the book (226). The ending of the novel, however, poses a serious problem to a feminist interpretation of the text. To the disappointment of these commentators, Edna eventually decides to marry St.
Elmo after he finds his faith and becomes a minister. Once their union seems imminent, he gleefully proclaims to Edna’s delight: “‘To-day I snap the fetters of your literary bondage.
There shall be no more books written!’” (562). For many contemporary readers of the novel, no other resolution could be more disappointing than one where a strong female protagonist relinquishes her authorial agency to become a stereotypical Southern gentleman’s angel of the house.
Why does Augusta J. Evans choose to the end the novel in this way? For those wishing to provide a feminist account of the text, Evans’s biography poses its own set of challenges. On the one hand, she clearly had a very successful literary career—one that in many ways resembles her protagonist Edna’s rise to literary fame and fortune. She also, however, believed that motherhood and authorship were incompatible with one another, and she railed against the idea of universal suffrage.73 As Drew Gilpin Faust succinctly points out, “Augusta Jane Evans regarded herself as anything but a feminist” (177). Despite these biographical details and the way the novel ends, many commentators still insist on reading the novel as an anti-patriarchal one. Leading this particular critical charge, Susan K.
Harris argues that we should disregard the ending because “the middle portions” of novels like St. Elmo “explore profoundly radical possibilities for women” (76). Along these lines,
73 See Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the “America of Art” (2005) 103. 85
several readers have placed greater emphasis on other aspects of the book, stressing that
Edna’s sentimental power manifests itself in her writing career, in her ability to morally convert St. Elmo, or her critique of the hyper-masculine institution of dueling.74 Others,
however, believe that the ending and all of the pages in between suggest that the various
“positions Edna stakes out for herself do not make her a strong advocate for women’s
equality” (Russell 55). Regardless of what conclusions they reach regarding Evans’s status as
a founding mother of an American women’s literary tradition, these readings do not examine
in any detail the narrative problem Edna’s reunion with St. Elmo creates. The fundamental
question of why she even desires him in the first place remains unanswered and incongruous
with a character that in every other way proves herself to be the paragon of virtue and
female independence. This question can be answered, I believe, not in terms of gender but
in terms of geography.
Despite the overwhelming scholarly interest in sentiment, sympathy, and domestic
fiction in U.S. literary and cultural studies, we continue to base most of our knowledge of
these discursive and literary phenomena on texts written by Northern writers, especially
those from New England. Accordingly, we often conclude that these writers either
emancipated or subjugated black subjects, or worked either to subvert or reproduce a sense
of national identity. Elizabeth Fekete Trubey has suggested, however, that if we expanded
our study of sentiment to include more Southern writers, who were as well read as their
Northern counterparts, we would be forced to revise several of the assumptions about
sympathy and sentiment we have recently come to take for granted. For while works of
“Northern sentimentalism can be said to elide racial difference through sentiment in its call
74 Examples of this scholarship include Sarah Brusky, “Beyond the Ending of Maternal Absence in A New England Tale, The Wide, Wide World, and St. Elmo” (2000); and Bradley Johnson, “Dueling Sentiments: Responses to Patriarchal Violence in Augusta Jane Evans’ St. Elmo” (2001). 86
for freedom,” Trubey insists that “Southern writers’ deployment of cross-racial feminine
sympathy collapses concepts of freedom and enslavement into a complicated mire of
affection and ownership, autonomy, obedience, submission and rebellion (123-124).
In addition to complicating the economies of racial sympathy found in Northern
sentimental fictions, I believe St. Elmo can also highlight another important difference
between Northern and Southern sentimental novels. Typically, scholarship on both
antebellum and postbellum Northern romances and sentimental novels maintain, as Shirley
Samuels does, that the marriage plots in these fictions seek “to unite disparate political,
national, class, and even racial positions” (20). Such a literary and cultural project, so this
argument goes, took on even greater urgency during and after the Civil War when women
writers sought to “reunite the nation” by creating new “fictions of nationhood” (Young
17).75 St. Elmo, however, tells a very different story that performs a very different reunion at
the expense of national reconciliation. Herein lies the crucial difference between the work of
a Northern writer like Lydia Maria Child, whose A Romance of the Republic (1867) serves as
one of the templates for the way we have come to understand the sentimental fiction of the
1860s, and the work of Augusta J. Evans. Regardless of how reactionary or retrograde
Evans’s work may now appear to us, as literary critics and historians we ought to take this
difference seriously because while A Romance of the Republic and St. Elmo were both published in 1867, it was St. Elmo—not A Romance of the Republic—that sold out within two weeks of its
initial release and put a strain on its publisher’s printing presses for the better part of the
year.76 Given its repudiation of the North and nostalgic celebration of the Old South, St.
Elmo’s commercial success calls into question the supposition that postbellum women’s
75 For two relatively recent versions of this argument, see Lyde Cullen Sizer, The Political Work of Northern Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 (2000); and Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation (1999). 76 See Fidler 129. 87 fiction largely committed itself to the project of what Elizabeth Young refers to as
“disarming the nation” (xi). Instead I will argue that Evans simply relocates the sectional conflict from the battlefront to the cultural front. For this reason, the ending of the novel plays an indispensable role in reuniting Edna with her Southern homeland. Significantly, this reunion is also preceded by a moment in the text when Edna succumbs to a bout of “maladie du pays,” the French term for nostalgia (Evans 499). Edna’s process of conversion from flirtation with the North to loyalty towards the South begins well before the ending though.
Consequently, before revisiting St. Elmo’s problematic ending, I will first attend to the beginning and middle portions of St. Elmo to demonstrate its commitment to imagining a culturally independent South impervious to the reforms that the Radical Republicans hoped to thrust upon it.
Like many sentimental heroines, Edna is an orphan, but this seems less important to
Evans than the particularities surrounding the young girl’s regional and economic identity at the beginning of the novel. The novel divulges few details about her upbringing, but soon after Edna endures the trauma of witnessing her first duel we learn that she lives with father, a blacksmith. That Edna clearly comes from the laboring and not the plantation class of
Southerners will become increasingly crucial as the narrative unfolds. Evans painstakingly stresses Edna’s humble upbringing. In particular, the novel describes how her grandfather’s blacksmith shop stood a mile from the “straggling village of Chattanooga” and “like the majority of blacksmith’s shops at country cross-roads, it was a low, narrow shed, filled with dust and rubbish” (24). Just pages later, Evans informs us that Edna’s grandfather has a
“debt” to “pay off” before he can help secure her the education she needs to become a schoolteacher (29). These details underscore Edna’s position within the South’s class hierarchy and gesture to the historical reluctance of the Southern yeomen to enter the Civil 88
War. In this regard, setting the early chapters in Chattanooga assumes significance given that
“disloyalty” to the Confederate cause “was rife” in East Tennessee and the mountainous
regions around Chattanooga especially, because the yeomen in these areas felt that secession
would largely benefit only the planters (Foner 13). Edna’s regional and class identity suggest
that she and her grandfather would not necessarily be predisposed to rallying around the
Confederate cause. Her revulsion towards the duel, moreover, also conforms to prejudices
characteristic of her economic and cultural background, since generally the aristocratic
planters and not the yeomen revered the practice. In other words, early in the novel Evans
establishes Edna as a character who inhabits a social and physical space lying on the border
between North and South.
Shortly after establishing Edna’s regional and class affiliations, Evans introduces
what will eventually become one of the defining conflicts Edna struggles with throughout St.
Elmo: whether to ultimately abandon her past and the South or to nostalgically embrace her
Southern heritage. Evans sets this dilemma into motion when she depicts the unexpected
and sudden death of Edna’s grandfather. Upon learning of his death, Edna feels “an abiding sense of irreparable loss” (35). This loss, however, unmoors her from her particular region and forces her to think about how she might support herself without her grandfather. While mourning the death of her grandfather, she wanders around “the steps of the dreary homestead” (37). Describing Edna’s now deserted home as a “country graveyard,” Evans alludes to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy In a Church Graveyard”—a poem often associated with
the emergence of nostalgia in late eighteenth-century Britain (Evans 37).77 Instead of
experiencing a sense of nostalgia for her home and her past, however, Edna finds her
surroundings impoverished and so “spectre-thronged” that she can find no “allusion to the
77 On the importance of nostalgia in Gray’s work, see Malcolm Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001) 52-53. 89 future” (38). The dense intertextual quality of these paragraphs diegetically embodies Edna’s perception of her old home by inundating the reader with a relentless list of allusions to poets, such as Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, who dwell upon the past. After completing her survey of the desolate homestead, she declares to a local miller, “‘I don’t love this place now’” (39). She decides, consequently, to abandon her dreams of attending school for the moment and resolves to look for factory work in Columbus, Georgia.
Even though the promise of factory work lies further south, Edna has already been presented with a choice—to embrace an industrial future or to remain tied to a largely agrarian economy. The role nostalgia plays—or does not play at this particular moment— becomes explicit when Edna’s neighbor and temporary caretaker Mrs. Wood learns of her plans: “‘Don’t you think you will get dreadfully homesick in about a month, and write to me to come and fetch you back?’” (41). Without hesitation, Edna makes her choice clear by promptly answering, “‘I have no home and nobody to love me, how then can I ever be homesick?’” (41). In this way, her assertion of independence seems just as equally to be an attempt to break her ties with the past and the Old South as it is an exertion of her female agency. Rather than indulging in the nostalgia so often portrayed in plantation fiction, Edna feels only an irretrievable loss of rather than a nostalgic longing for her home. Indeed after boarding a train headed for Georgia, she “felt as if the last link that bound her to the past had suddenly snapped” (43).
For a brief moment, Evans seems to suggest that while on board the train Edna enters a national “time and space” populated with strangers who nevertheless seemed bound together by God and by a “cosmopolitan language” (44). This national and industrial fantasy, however, comes to a swift end when Edna’s train crashes catastrophically.
Surrounded by the carnage of the other passengers, she holds a dying baby for a moment 90 and discovers that whatever “electric chain of sympathy” she felt on the train has completely dissipated (44). This crash thus prevents Edna from securing factory work, but it also eventually introduces her to Mrs. Murray, the widow of a wealthy Southern patriarch and planter. Once Edna reaches the Murray household, the domestic plot truly begins by continuously presenting Edna with a series of choices and temptations tied to a set of conflicting regional allegiances. Consequently, while the narrative in some sense has brought a halt to any possibility of imagining an industrialized South, Edna still remains free of nostalgia and able to decide where her sectional sympathies lie.
By introducing Edna into Mrs. Murray’s domestic space, the novel essentially poses its readers with a crucial question: can a yeoman’s granddaughter reconcile her differences with a family of planters? Put another way, Evans seems to be asking whether or not a sectional imagination is still possible after the Civil War within which white Southerners of various class and regional backgrounds can cohere into a single community culturally independent from the North. If we frame the novel around this question, then we must reconsider what cultural roles the domestic and sentiment romance plots fulfill in the novel.
If seduction and sympathy work as registers of “familial feeling” to create “model[s] for sociopolitical union,” then moments of sympathy and seduction in St. Elmo should help us decipher Edna’s own cultural position within a nation that remains very much divided between two sections (Barnes 3). And, in fact, Evans reformulates the genres of the domestic novel and the seduction romance in order to imagine a way of integrating Edna—a working-class orphan—into the home of a wealthy patrician family.
From the moment that Edna enters the Murray’s home, Mrs. Murray expresses a willingness only to regard her as an object of pity as opposed to an object of sympathy.
Rather than allow Edna to pursue her plans to become a factory worker, Mrs. Murray insists 91
on becoming Edna’s benefactress. She explains to Edna: “Understand me, I do not adopt
you; nor shall I consider you exactly as one of my family” (54). By not “exactly” admitting
her into the family, Mrs. Murray underscores Edna’s inferior class position. For as the
servants remind her, Edna is “a stranger in this house” (60). That Mrs. Murray emphasizes
Edna’s estranged position with the Murray’s household is absolutely crucial, because it
establishes that Edna cannot become the recipient of sympathetic identification in the hearts
of the Murray family. Sympathetic identification, as articulated by Adam Smith and as
depicted in the sentimental romance tradition, can generally only occur among “social
equals” (Tennenhouse 71). Evans overtly signals her participation within this discourse of
sympathy by observing that “domestic traditions and household customs” serve as “the great
arteries in which beats the social life of humanity, linking the race in homogeneity” (183).
By having Edna occupy a position within a home that she cannot call home, in other words,
Evans uses her young protagonist’s position to foreground the stark class divisions within
the South as daunting obstacles standing in the way of creating a unified Southern cultural
consciousness. Ironically, Edna occupies a position remarkably similar to the one Mary
occupies in Clotel discussed my first chapter. But unlike in the case of Mary, the barriers to
Edna’s domestic acceptance seem potentially surmountable.
In the pages that follow, Edna is courted by several suitors, each of whom further illuminate Edna’s class position and what she must do to overcome it or to make her
position acceptable to the aristocratic world that envelopes her. The first of these suitors,
Gordon Leigh, a wealthy Southern planter who she studies Hebrew and Greek with under
the tutelage of Mr. Hammond, clearly occupies a social station higher than her own. When
some of the other women note Leigh’s interest in Edna at a party, she soon learns that they
believe she has no right to marry such a man, as she comes from “‘unknown parentage and 92 doubtless low origin’” (120). Her lower station, however, actually becomes a position of power for her when Leigh continues to pursue her. When he finally confronts her with the question, she insists she has no desire to marry him and wishes to “‘earn a home’” rather than “‘marry for one’” (187). At this moment, the power dynamics change as Leigh continues to plead with her, so that she affectionately declares, “I sympathize with you”
(193). Having sympathized with Leigh, Edna herein appears to climb in status within the
Murray household even she ultimately remains outside the family.
For feminist readings of the text, such moments constitute evidence that Evans seeks to undermine the patriarchal authority at work in the novel. I would argue, on the contrary, that these moments and her rejection of Leigh actually elevate her into a position where she becomes further incorporated into a patriarchal structure previously unwilling to grant her access due to her inferior lineage. In fact, it is shortly after Leigh’s proposal that we become aware that Mrs. Murray’s son, the tempestuous St. Elmo, may also have an romantic interest in her. Simultaneously, Edna’s aspirations “‘to authorship’” intensify as she contemplates moving to New York where she can devote her energies to her literary career. In other words, Evans invests Edna with agency in order to put her into a position where the seduction novel can assume sectional as opposed to national significance. In every respect, St. Elmo, who regularly pays visits to his many plantations when not traveling abroad, embodies the very Southern culture Evans devoted her own literary career to preserving. For this reason, Edna’s desire to leave for New York seems equally a desire to shed her Southern identity by embracing the cultural capital of the North that aspired to become the center of a new national American culture. If we read the novel as a conflict between two competing geographical allegiances, then we can begin to see how the novel diverges from its Northern literary counterparts and creates problems for a feminist 93 interpretation of Edna’s story. In a typical Northern sentimental romance, we would expect
St. Elmo to play the part of the rakish seducer and New York to serve as the place where
Edna might find a suitable Northern husband. Just such a husband presents himself in New
York, in fact, in the form of her publisher Mr. Manning who eventually proposes to Edna.
We should thus expect Edna to marry Mr. Manning and bear children with him in order to fulfill the fantasy of national reconciliation.
St. Elmo, however, is not a Northern sentimental romance. Evans instead changes up the generic formula by depicting New York and its promises of literary fame and fortune, not St. Elmo, as the real rake of this romance. Mr. Hammond even suggests as much to
Edna when he reveals that he suspects that “there is a spring of selfishness underlying” in her desire to become an authoress and move to New York (293). The clearest indication that Evans has changed the rules of the romance occurs when St. Elmo confronts Edna after his mother informs him she plans on “‘going to New York’” (325). Learning that he has failed to dissuade her from traveling North to pursue her literary career, St. Elmo finally confesses all of his sins to Edna and begs her for forgiveness. Edna learns at this time that
St. Elmo himself participated in a duel, killing his dear friend and the son of their tutor Mr.
Hammond. While Hammond seems ready to accept the circumstances surrounding the duel, as St. Elmo found his soon-to-be fiancée kissing Hammond’s son, Edna cannot find it in her heart to forgive him for his past misdeeds or accept the cultural mores that sanction such duels. Her disdain for St. Elmo’s acts only further intensifies the “‘feeling’” she should
“hurry . . . away to New York’” (335). She thus chooses New York over the man that loves her and whom she loves. Taking these various narrative details into account, Evans logically invites us to believe that St. Elmo might have far more in common with Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice than Montraville of Charlotte Temple. 94
Once in New York Edna becomes increasingly aware that she may have chosen
poorly. Far from receiving a warm literary reception, Mr. Manning reminds her how much
he deplores women’s writing and bemoans the the state of “‘republic of letters” (372). He
also assures Edna that she “will not find life in New York as agreeable as it was under his [St.
Elmo’s] roof” in the South (372-73). She, nevertheless, does achieve “celebrity” as an
author while living in New York (467). Additionally, her popularity swells to such a size that
“letters from all regions of the country, asking for advice and assistance in little trials of
which the world knew nothing” arrive in her mail (465). New York, in other words, proves
especially seductive, and Evans seems to suggest that by moving to New York Edna
managed to secure a national audience. Her move also brings her closer to Mr. Manning,
and therefore brings the novel closer to achieving a national reconciliation between North
and South, enabling New York to assume its position as the cultural capital of a reconstructed postbellum nation. However, her time in New York also takes an incalculable toll on her health. She becomes increasingly paler and suffers regularly from fainting
“‘attacks’” (495). Eventually, news of Edna’s deteriorating health reaches Mrs. Murray, prompting her to travel North to visit her beneficiary. We learn during their first meet with one another that Mrs. Murray is indeed now willing to receive Edna as a social equal and as a daughter. Realizing that Edna has become gravely ill, Mrs. Murray inquires, “‘My child, why did you not come home long ago?’” (469). Having become fully accepted into the Murray plantation household, Edna decides to “‘go home’” at last (478).
We soon learn, however, that Edna’s acceptance into the pale of sympathy is not
enough to mend the wounds between her and St. Elmo. While St. Elmo remains ready to
embrace her at a moment’s notice, she still refuses to forgive him. When she returns to the
South, she finds herself consistently dwelling upon the past—something that she has tried to 95 avoid doing throughout the novel. Upon laying eyes on St. Elmo’s treasured possessions,
“her lip began to quiver as every article of furniture babbled of the By-Gone—of the happy evenings spent here” (492). Among St. Elmo’s writings, she also discovers a copy of Henry
Soame’s poem, “Pleasures of Memory,” which sends Edna into another reverie that eventually brings upon one of her fainting spells. These fainting episodes, along with her delusions and progressive weight loss, are the hallmark symptoms of nostalgia. This fact is in no way lost upon Edna, who after once again stressing to Mr. Hammond that she will not allow herself to forgive St. Elmo, launches into the following speech:
“There are many reasons why I ought not to come here again; and, moreover
my work calls me hence, to a distant field. My physical strength seems to be
ebbing fast, and my vines are not all purpose with mellow fruit. . . . Not
until my fingers clasp white flowers under a pall, shall it be said of me, ‘Yet a
little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.’ In coelo quies!
The German idea of death is to me peculiarly comforting and touching.
‘Heimgang—going home. Ah, sir! Humanity ought to be homesick; and in
thinking of that mansion beyond the star-paved pathway of the sky, wither
Jesus has gone to prepare our places, we children of earth should, like the
Swiss, never lose our home-sickness. Out bodies are of the dust—dusty, and
bend dustward; but our bodies should have floated down form the sardonyx
walls of the Everlasting City, and brought with a yearning maladie du pays,
which should help them struggle back. . . . Thank God! going home for
ever!” (499-500)
This revelatory moment recalls the anecdote from Harte’s “The Argonauts of ’49” with which I began. For like the Northern woman in California who nostalgically yearned to 96 return east, Edna seems to realize her time away from St. Elmo and her Southern home is gradually killing her with nostalgia. For the first time in the novel, Edna discovers that she is capable of being homesick—a sentiment she believed as a young child she would never experience. While in this particular instance, she seems to imagine her home as heaven, the broader implications become increasingly apparent. By spending time away from the South, she has finally found a home in that Section through a sense of longing rather than belonging. In other words, nostalgia supplements Mrs. Murray’s extension of familial feeling to Edna by making it possible for her to lay a claim to her Southern heritage.
Although after her reflection on the power of nostalgia Edna nevertheless decides to return to New York, her absence from the South this time is short-lived. She rejects Mr.
Manning’s hand in marriage and begins to write domestic treatises instead of studies of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. In these essays, she lambastes Northern radical women who demand universal suffrage and encourages women instead to embrace the
“womanly sphere of feminine work” (522). Thus, while Evans certainly participates in the larger postbellum discourse about gender roles, she also uses the debate over suffrage to delineate sectional differences between North and South. At this point in the novel she has come to fully reject the supposed “‘progress’” of the North (523). Her changing attitudes find their corollary in St. Elmo who appears to have renounced his violent past and embraced the ministry. St. Elmo’s change in behavior not only makes it possible for Edna to become his wife, it also suggests a shift in the nature of sectionalism after the Civil War; in place of outright violent revolt, Edna imagines a culturally independent South—one that rejects both the political policies and the supposed cultural superiority of the North. In this way, while the differences between North and South seem irreconcilable, Edna’s nostalgia 97
for the past enables her to marry St. Elmo, thereby uniting a granddaughter of a yeoman
with the son of a planter.
Rejecting the Republic: Nostalgia and Exile in Who Would Have Thought It?
While nostalgia ultimately enables Evans’s characters to renounce their lives of exile in favor of declaring their Southern cultural independence, Ruiz de Burton seizes upon many of the same motifs found in St. Elmo to suggest conversely that, for some subjects after the
Civil War, exile is the only option. The moment in Who Would Have Thought It? that Dr. John
Norval returns to his New England home from his geological expedition in the West with a
Mexicana child in tow, his home becomes plagued by internal divisions among the various family members. We learn that Dr. Norval rescued the young Lola Medina from a band of
Apaches who had held both her and her mother captive. Lola’s mother, who perished before being able to escape, entrusted her daughter and a cache of plundered riches to the doctor. But rather than welcoming Lola with open arms, Jenny Norval—the doctor’s wife— finds her repulsive. When Dr. Norval presses his wife for an explanation of her behavior towards Lola, she insists it has nothing to do with the color of the girl’s skin. Appealing to the tradition of Republican Motherhood, Mrs. Norval instead insists: “‘I do not object to her dark skin, only I wish to know what position she is to occupy in my family. Which wish I consider quite reasonable, since I am the one to regulate my household’” (19). How to
“place” Lola serves as one of the guiding dilemmas of the novel, as characters struggle to place her both within the household and within racial categories. In the case of the latter, matters are complicated by the fact that Apaches had dyed Lola’s skin black, so that she becomes progressively whiter as the dye wears off her face during the course of the novel.
For this reason, her place within the Norval’s home is even more complicated than Mary’s 98
place within Horatio Green’s home in Clotel. Throughout the novel she longs to have “‘her own home’” but always verges on being “‘homeless,’” creating a conflict among the various
Norvals that leaves their house divided (Ruiz de Burton 180). Jenny Norval’s inability to
place Lola thwarts what Lori Merish describes as “the persistent effectiveness of sentimental
texts in enacting forms of subjection and identification within liberal political culture” (23).
Who Would Have Thought It?, in other words, gets the domestic genre all wrong.
What makes Ruiz de Burton’s first novel all the more vexing is that it does not
appear to belong to any particular generic or national literary tradition. Who Would Have
Thought It? co-opts other genres equally as popular as domestic fiction—the captivity narrative, the picaresque, allegory, the historical romance, satire—only to defy the conventions of these forms. For this reason, previous readers have struggled to place the
book within a single genre nearly as much as Mrs. Norval struggles to place Lola within her
Republican household. Encumbered with countless literary references and character names
that fuse classical first names with Dickensian surnames, like “Marcus Tullius Cicero Cackle”
and “Sophocles Head,” the novel’s dense intertextuality obfuscates the plot. To a great
degree, the book exhibits some of the characteristics of what Roman Jakobson would term
“contexture-deficient aphasia” or “contiguity disorder,” as the text nearly unravels into “a
mere ‘word heap’” of disjointed allusions and genres (Jakobson 126). The disorderly
structure of Who Would Have Thought It? reminds us that a novel’s heteroglossia may not
necessarily exhibit the “centralizing tendencies of a new literary language” but may instead produce a cacophonous language “outside the centralizing and unifying influence of the artistic and ideological norm established by the dominant literary language” (Bakhtin 67).
Akin to its formal ambiguity, the novel’s place within contemporary Chicano/a Studies is equally tenuous. While Ruiz de Burton was the first Mexican-American to write a novel, her 99
privileged background and commitment to American liberalism precludes her and her fiction
in the eyes of many Chicano/a scholars from advancing the “working-class ideology . . . central to the construction” of the Chicano/a Studies project (Aranda 135). In other words, like its principle protagonist Lola, Ruiz de Burton’s novel is something of an orphan, seeming to belong to no one particular genre or national literary tradition. For this reason, among others, we should not be surprised that Who Would Have Thought It?—unlike Evan’s
St. Elmo—failed commercially and quickly went of print in the nineteenth century because it so radically defied the generic expectations of its readers.78
So given Ruiz de Burton’s formally disjointed novel struggled and still struggles to
find an audience, why study it at all? The answer to this question lies in the novel’s register
of nostalgia as a divisive affect and literary mode that exploded in prominence during and
after the Civil War. If St. Elmo illustrates nostalgia’s power to revitalize sectional culture
during Reconstruction, then Who Would Have Thought It? underscores the dangers inherent in
this power. Unlike William Wells Brown, who favors nostalgia in Clotel as a promising
alternative to sympathy as a way to imagine more inclusive national communities, Ruiz de
Burton rejects both of these affective mechanisms for fostering community, preferring
thought to feeling as a way of bringing individuals together. Consequently, nostalgia
emerges in the novel initially as an ambivalent form capable of dismantling established
literary genres in order to reveal the political and economic iniquities they conceal. As the
novel progresses, however, the characters’ various nostalgias render them incapable of
forging communal bonds with one another. In place of either sympathetic belonging or
nostalgic longing, Ruiz de Burton’s central protagonists accept exiled resignation as their
only alternative to a nation that they “no longer love” (Ruiz de Burton 286). All of the
78 As I examine in greater details later, there several possible reasons for Who Would Have Thought It?’s lackluster sales figures other its Chicano/a subject matter. 100
novel’s most laudable characters—Lola Medina, Julian Norval, Isaac Sprig, and Dr. John
Norval—enter into states of exile in which “homecoming is out of the question” (Said 179).
In other words, Who Would Have Thought It? registers the sectional force of nostalgia vividly
dramatized in St. Elmo without subscribing to its logic. The novel also revisits the
relationship between exile and nostalgia established in earlier novels like Clotel and Israel
Potter, though Ruiz de Burton departs from both Brown and Melville by imagining a form of exile devoid of nostalgic longing. In this way, Ruiz de Burton’s novel uses various tropes of nostalgia and exile to contribute to a larger cultural conversation concerning the legacy of
Reconstruction in the 1870s by portraying the forging of national culture in the wake of the
Civil War as an impossibility.
Before delving into the ways that nostalgia creates a series of generic fissures in Who
Would Have Thought It?, the novel’s contestable status in contemporary literary studies
requires consideration. Ruiz de Burton’s entire body of writing remained largely unread for
over a century until Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita began producing newly annotated
editions of her novels in the early 1990s under the auspices of the Recovering the U.S.
Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. Unlike much of the literature recovered by the
Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Project and the Rutgers’
American Women Writers Series, however, Ruiz de Burton’s work won neither
contemporary critical acclaim nor captured much of an audience when it was published. As
I have already suggested, this made it difficult for Sánchez and Pita to justify their recovery
project on either aesthetic or cultural grounds. They consequently maintained that the
novel’s “subversive” character as a “critique of the empire” of the US “from within” merits
our attention as a literary forbearer to the Chicano/a tradition (lviii). Following Sánchez’s
and Pita’s cue, others embraced Who Would Have Thought It? as a novel that, in Margaret D. 101
Jacobs’s words, “turn[s] the tables on all the ‘Yankees’ who wrote about the West” by critiquing New England culture (213).79 It was precisely this claim that invited criticism from a number of other commentators who viewed Ruiz de Burton’s relationship to
Chicano/a literary studies as one mired by her privileging of whiteness to construct “racist and classist narratives of white Hispanic superiority” (M. Sánchez 68).80 No commentator, however, has cast her work as fully complicit with Anglo-American hegemony even if some have insisted upon portraying her as unimpeachably counter-hegemonic. For this reason, the debate within Chicano/a Studies over the political status of Ruiz de Burton’s work has not assumed the usual complicity versus resistance binary; it instead seems to be one of resistance versus ambivalence. Even those who read her as an ambivalent figure, however,
still assume a monolithic and hegemonic sense of national identity emerged in the immediate
aftermath of the Civil War for writers like Ruiz de Burton to potentially resist. If we regard
the state of the nation as a work in progress, as I argue we should, we might begin to
imagine how Ruiz de Burton commented upon and contributed to the discourse on the
cultural and political reconstructive process at work in the 1860s and 1870s.
79 Others who read Ruiz de Burton’s work as participating in the Chicano/a resistance tradition include: Suzanne Bost, “West Meets East: Nineteenth-Century Southern Dialogues on Mixture, Race, Gender, and Nation”(2003); Beth Fisher, “The Captive Mexicana and the Desiring Bourgeois Woman: Domesticity and Expansionism in Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1999); Anne E. Goldman, “‘Who ever heard of a blue-eyed Mexican?’: Satire and Sentimentality in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?” (1993); Amelia María de la Luz Montes, “María Amparo Ruiz de Burton Negotiates American Literary Politics and Culture” (2000); Pita, “Engendering Critique: Race, Class, and Gender in Ruiz de Burton and Martí” (1998); Rosura Sánchez, “Dismantling the Colossus: Martí and Ruiz de Burton on the Formulation of Anglo América” (1998); Sánchez and Pita, “María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Power of Her Pen” (2005); and José David Saldívar, “Nuestra América’s Borders: Remapping American Cultural Studies” (1998). 80 In addition to Aranda’s and Sánchez’s work, these studies of Ruiz de Burton cast her work in similarly ambivalent terms: John M. González, “Romancing Hegemony: Constructing Racialized Citizenship in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don” (1993); David Luis-Brown, “‘White Slaves’ and the ‘Arrogant Mestiza’: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona” (1997); John-Michael Rivera, “Embodying Greater Mexico: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Reconstruction of the Mexican Question” (2004); Manuel M. Martín Rodríguez, “Textual and Land Reclamations: The Critical Reception of Early Chicana/o Literature” (1993). 102
While Ruiz de Burton’s place within Chicano/a Studies seems assured even if controversial, her larger place within nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural studies appears less certain. In the introduction to their edition, Sánchez and Pita take pains to sketch out how Ruiz de Burton might force us to reexamine our understanding of the literary and political culture of the Reconstruction era in relation to “the Mexican Question.”
Such an invitation has prompted some isolated considerations of Who Would Have Thought
It?’s dismantling of postbellum racial categories, leading some to conclude that the novel radically “problematizes the black/white racial ideologies structuring the Civil War” (Rivera
462). Nevertheless, since the release of Sánchez’s and Pita’s scholarly edition of Who Would
Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don (1885), few of the major studies on nineteenth- century U.S. literature have taken her work into consideration. The two notable exceptions to this rule single out what would appear to be two opposing geographical trajectories of
Ruiz de Burton’s work. Carrie Tirado Bramen examines the regional character of her work by insisting that The Squatter and the Don and, to a lesser degree, Who Would Have Thought It? seek to reclaim the “tradition” of “federalism” in order “to integrate the various parts with the union” under the banner of liberal republicanism (136). By contrast, Gretchen Murphy seizes upon the transnational dimension of Ruiz de Burton’s work by arguing that she
“criticizes mythic American independence and virtue” while “valorizing instead the manners of civilized cosmopolitanism” (103). While Bramen’s and Murphy’s view of Ruiz de
Burton’s work differ in some respects, their arguments develop in two very similar ways.
First, both contend that in spite of Ruiz de Burton’s racist and classist pretensions, her work possessed a clear telos: to critique U.S. imperial ambitions by either privileging the regional or the transnational. Secondly, while both of them testify to Ruiz de Burton’s cultural relevance to the Reconstruction-era debates over national reunification, citizenship, and race, neither 103
of their accounts sketch out in any great detail what Ruiz de Burton’s aesthetic legacy might
have been even though they both readily acknowledge the various stylistic idiosyncrasies in
her work.
To a degree, Ruiz de Burton’s novel simply exhibits one of the defining formal traits
of the historical romance, which consists of the incorporation of a multiplicity of layered
discourses and genres into its narrative structure, or what Frederic Jameson simply refers to
as “sedimentation” (Political 140). According to Jameson, “generic discontinuities” inevitably arise
within any densely sedimented genre like the historical romance (Political 144). He insists, however, that these discontinuities must necessarily cohere even if they only achieve a kind of negative reconstruction. But what if these various elements fail to cohere, so that the heteroglossia present within the work becomes unstable? Neither Jameson nor Bakhtin completely account for such a possibility. Rancière, however, suggests one way of accounting for completely discordant discontinuities. Rancière describes what he refers to as
“the ‘orphan’ system of writing,’” which unravels genres and the social and formal hierarchies they seek to maintain and construct (Flesh 104). Such writing can supplant the regime of representation, or the realm of rule-bound genres, with the regime of the aesthetic.
In chapter one, I established the various ways both Brown and Melville use nostalgia to bring about a formal revolution within their novels in order to highlight various obstacles to the formation of a more inclusive national community. Ruiz de Burton, however, enlists nostalgia only as a way to register its postbellum power, as depicted in novels like Augusta J.
Evans’s St. Elmo. While various nostalgias certainly participate in the breakdown of the various generic forms that Ruiz de Burton incorporates within her novel, Ruiz de Burton ultimately leaves the form of the novel in shambles, as means of rendering various social inequities “perceptible” within the regime of aesthetics (Disagreement 57). Consequently, I 104
argue that Ruiz de Burton’s heavy-handed allusions to classical Greek society and imperfect
deployment of various genres make her work nearly unreadable. Yet this unreadablity,
rather than a sign of Who Would Have Thought It?’s formal inadequacy, actually reveals why
the United States remains a culturally divided nation even after the Civil War and why white
Northerners and Mexicans alike feel completely exiled from the country. Before further
elaborating the roles the trope of exile plays in the novel, however, I will begin by first
showing how Ruiz de Burton uses her orphan protagonist and “orphan” writing style to
undermine both the captivity narrative and domestic novel genres in her book.
Early in her historical romance Ruiz de Burton incorporates the captivity narrative
genre to undermine its ability to constitute Americans and “construct the American family”
on the frontier (Wald 34). Generally, scholarship on the Anglo-American captivity narrative
has concluded that the genre fulfills one of two principle cultural functions. For one set of
commentators, captivity narratives challenge “the fixity of race and gender” by imbuing their
female protagonists with at a least a modicum of agency and by enabling them to transgress
once impermeable racial boundaries (Castiglia 9).81 Another set of readers view the genre
less as one that transgresses various identities than as one that defines them. Proponents of
this interpretation of the genre argue that the Anglo-American captivity narrative preserved
English identity in British North America by always ensuring that the “blood” of the captive
“remained pure” by either returning her “undefiled to her family” or by having her die in
captivity after becoming corrupted (Tennenhouse 57).82 While providing seemingly
81 Principle examples of this way of reading the captivity narrative include Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment (1997); Christopher Castiglia’s Bound and Determined (1996); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999) 148-170; and Andrea Tinnemeyer, Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848 (2006). 82 Following Nancy Armstrong’s “Why Daughters Die” (1994), these studies all make versions of this argument even while modifying it to account for different types of texts: Jared Gardner, Master Plots (1998) 30-51; Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic (2003) 98-109; Ezra Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment (2006) 92-128; and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English (2007) 43-72. 105 antithetical interpretations of the Anglo-American captivity narrative, these two accounts both contend that the genre played a critical role in producing subjects and communities either through transgression or by reproducing English identity in a diasporic context. Both sets of commentators also seize upon the same two key formal features that define the
Anglo-American captivity genre: the protagonist is almost always white and her captivity always puts her racial and cultural purity into jeopardy. But what happens when the conventions of the genre are not honored? Can the captivity narrative still constitute subjects? Even if we accept Christopher Castiglia’s premise that captivity narratives, like novels, always participate in “the process” of “‘social heteroglossia,’” is it possible for a particular captivity narrative to break too many rules (133)? Who Would Have Thought It?, I argue, contains a captivity narrative that forces these questions by refusing to do what
Jameson insists every novel must do—“reunite or harmonize heterogeneous narrative paradigms” that appear within its pages (Political 144). And as I shall demonstrate, nostalgia plays a vital role in producing these formal disruptions.
Ruiz de Burton introduces us to the story of Lola’s captivity in the opening pages of her novel shortly after Dr. Norval returns home from his expedition out west. Having brought with him what everyone initially believes to be either a young black or Native
American child, the doctor attempts to recite the details of Lola’s captivity and her eventual redemption. Initially, this captivity narrative conforms to many of the genre’s defining features. For example, we do not learn of her captivity firsthand, but instead through an intermediary—Dr. Norval—who also provides her story with the masculine frame that typically encases most female captivity narratives. In this particular case, the framework of the telling of Lola’s narrative stems in no small part from an implicit nostalgic fetishization of her Mexicana heritage. We learn early on that the doctor is a Clarence King kind of 106
figure: he is part geologist, part explorer, and part ethnographer, making him wholly a
collector of exotica. For this reason, when he introduces Lola to his family, Mrs. Norval
mockingly concludes that his collections must have “‘exhausted the mineral kingdom,’” so
he “‘is about to begin with the animal’” by claiming Lola as his “‘first specimen’” (16). While
he dismisses her xenophobic comment out of hand, there is some truth to this comment. In
many ways, Dr. Norval does appear to be indulging in a kind of “imperialist nostalgia”
endemic to the project of salvage ethnography (Rosaldo 68). He also wishes to narrate
Lola’s captivity and rescue to his wife in order to establish that her “blood is pure Spanish
blood” (28). With the masculine frame established and the captive’s racial purity insisted
upon, we have entered the genre of the captivity narrative before the story has even begun.
That Lola can trace her lineage back to Spain, however, immediately complicates
Ruiz de Burton’s particular appropriation of the captivity narrative in at least three
interconnected ways: first, her Spanish bloodline raises the question of whether or not the
rules of the Anglo-American captivity narrative apply to one that threatens to defile a
Spanish as opposed to an English subject; second, her Spanish identity and ties to Mexico
elicit confusion by making her racially indiscernible to those around her; third, her
convoluted ethnic identity excites feelings of both nostalgic desire and xenophobic revulsion
in the hearts of those around her. Each of these complicating aspects of her narrative
receives extended consideration below.
As to whether or not the rules of the Anglo-American captivity narrative apply to
Lola, this question seems both broached and held in abeyance by the novel. Certainly, the
narrative initially unfolds as though these rules do apply by following a set of conventions familiar to Ruiz de Burton’s audience. That Lola’s purity is insisted upon by Dr. Norval is the first indication that we have entered a generic universe much like that of Mary 107
Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, which underscores the “English” purity of its
“Gentlewomen” protagonist (Rowlandson 28). We are also repeatedly assured throughout
the novel of Lola’s chastity and virtue, two other crucial attributes she shares with the
archetypal Anglo-American female captive. Yet despite these typical generic overtures, other
aspects of her captivity do not add up. For one, Lola is necessarily culturally corrupted. In
spite of being the product of “‘pure Spanish descent,’” we learn that “‘Lolita was born five
months after her capture’” (28). In other words, she was raised in captivity among a tribe of
Apaches. When Dr. Norval and his traveling companions first meets Lola and her mother
on the Colorado River, he explains to Mrs. Norval that an Apache chief had taken Lola’s
mother, Doña Theresa Medina, as his wife. Consequently, Lola’s Spanish cultural purity
would appear to be unquestionably compromised. Aware of the threat cultural
miscegenation posses to her daughter, Lola’s mother beseeches Dr. Norval to “‘take her
child away from among savages and bring her up as a Christian’” (35). While certainly a
departure from the Rowlandson version of captivity, Doña Theresa Medina’s and her
daughter’s story is not entirely without literary precedents. Within the Anglo-American
captivity narrative tradition, Mary Jemison’s narrative ostensibly resembles the story of Lola’s mother, as she too goes native and raises her children in this environment. Unlike Jemison,
however, who managed “to reproduce an English household” among her Native American
captors, Doña Theresa Medina seems less successful at replicating a Spanish household in
captivity (Armstrong 11). Although Dr. Norval observes that her “‘bed clothes were white
as snow, and everything about her was clean and tidy,’” her surroundings nonetheless “‘were
cheerless enough to kill any civilized woman’” (36). Unable to culturally insulate herself fully
from her environment, she does indeed die. From a generic perspective, the problem with
the narrative’s outcome is that it turns the conventional cultural logic of the Anglo-American 108
captivity narrative on its head. While wed to an Apache chief, Doña Theresa Medina
remains at least marginally uncorrupted, as her immediate immaculately white surroundings suggest. For this reason, the genre would usually dictate that she survive and escape. On the other hand, she has by every measure failed to preserve the cultural purity of her daughter, lamenting at one point that Lola had yet to be baptized or taught the ways of the
Catholic church. We should, for this reason, expect Lola to die. Unlike her mother, however, Lola lives. In other words, the captivity narrative renders Lola’s and her mother’s racial and cultural status no more legible, and so the uncertainty surrounding their identities begins to undermine the conventions of the Anglo-American captivity genre from within the narrative. If anything, the narrative only further obfuscates rather than illuminates Lola’s culture and ethnicity. Who Would Have Thought It? enlists the genre only to demonstrate its ineffectualness. Put another way, the captivity narrative in Ruiz de Burton’s novel seems unable to capture Lola’s cultural identity.
The confusion surrounding Lola’s identity that first emerges within Dr. Norval’s
account of her captivity is only complicated by the questionable status of her Spanish
ethnicity. As the circumstances of her captivity suggest, Lola can only lay claim to a
genealogical and not a cultural connection to her Spanish identity. In the eyes of the Norval
family and friends, they find her Spanish heritage all the more imperceptible because the
Apache had regularly dyed her skin black. Mattie, one of the two Norval daughters, first
proclaims Lola “‘a nigger girl,” for this reason, only later to revise her initial assessment
moments later when she notes that Lola’s “‘hand is as white as mine—and a prettier white’”
(16-17). Mattie’s observations would seem to vindicate those who view the captivity
narrative less as a genre committed to reproducing normative white subjects than as one
capable of dismantling previously stable notions of identity. Her dyed skin, which eventually 109
fades to white, appears to unsettle both essentialist notions of whiteness and uncannily
undermine “the boundaries of ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’” as her changing complexion and
uncertain white European status make her both familiar and strange at the same time
(Tinnemeyer xvi). If Lola and her narrative do blur the line between alien and citizen, then
the narrative would also certainly appear to allegorize the shifting status of Mexicans in the
United States in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Gadsden Purchase, and the Civil War. While Mexicans living within the various annexed territories initially had legal
assurances that they would receive the full benefits of American citizenship from the federal
government, historian Manuel G. Gonzales reminds us that the material success of those
working in the gold mines inspired Anglo-American envy that “would encourage the
portrayal of Mexicans as a foreign and unfriendly element” (83). Read in this light, Lola’s
racial indeterminacy seems to embody what Homi K. Bhabha refers to as the “‘not quite/not
white’” uncanniness of ethnic mimicry that both menaces and resembles the supposed racial
superiority of colonial and imperial powers (92).
Such an account of the text certainly is not without merit, but it seems less plausible
if we examine some of the details surrounding Lola’s dyed skin with greater scrutiny. First,
Lola explains that the Apaches had “‘to stain her lovely white skin all black’” to conceal her
true identity in order to avoid being “‘followed by soldiers who were encamping” near by
(100). This act of racial mimicry was itself an instrument of subterfuge designed to prolong
her captivity, which suggests that the dye deprived Lola of agency. That Lola also continues
to shed her blackness throughout the narrative to become “‘so very white’” by the end of the
novel underscores that, in spite of her dye, she always remains authentically white even if she
had momentarily become culturally compromised during her captivity (Ruiz de Burton 246).
Her mimicry is quite literally only skin deep. Lola’s mixed Spanish and Austrian lineage, 110
moreover, links her to the power and tradition of Spanish and Hapsburg imperialism, so she unsettles Anglo-American whiteness only to supplant it with another white ethnicity equally implicated in the European colonizing project. In other words, these details surrounding the vexed status of her ethnicity confirm that her narrative has abandoned some of its genre’s principle characteristics. Lola becomes culturally compromised but does not die, and after her redemption she reasserts her white authenticity by shedding her blackness.
The generic instability accompanying Lola’s uncertain cultural status also incites a
series of incongruous receptions of her that oscillate from revulsion to desire. We can begin to apprehend the significance of these pendulum swings in reception by reformulating the phrase Nancy Armstrong uses as the impetus of her own inquiry into the cultural logic of the Anglo-American captivity narrative; not “why daughters die” but “why is Lola dyed?”
(Armstrong 1). Given that Lola’s underlying whiteness aligns her more with the position of the colonizer than the colonized, the racial confusion that her changing complexion produces works in a manner much more in line with Eric Lott’s account of blackface minstrelsy than Bhabha’s theorization of mimicry. As Lott explains, blackface’s appropriation of black identity and “cultural practices” yields a “mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation” or “‘love and theft’” (6). One of the driving forces behind this practice of appropriation, moreover, was a “nostalgic longing” for the South and its plantation life as “a kind of timeless lost home’” (Lott 190). Rather than bringing disparate groups of people together, however, “minstrel nostalgia” insisted on a homesickness for slavery that ignited racial and sectional tensions in antebellum America that “seemed to be pulling the country apart” (Lott 191). Ruiz de Burton appears to mobilize some of the same forces at work in antebellum blackface in Who Would Have Thought It?, showing her readers 111
that the United States remains a nation by divided by competing regional nostalgias and
conceptions of race.
In the case of Lola’s compulsory blackface performance, her progressive whitening
and underlying Spanish ethnicity become an occasion for the various characters around her
to express a multiplicity of competing nostalgias. While on the whole these nostalgias have
little to do with recovering an idyllic pre-emancipation South, they do enumerate some of
the many cultural obstacles to Reconstruction in the postbellum period. Lola’s presence in the Norval household entices the imaginations of the people around her soon after the doctor assures them—and Mrs. Norval especially—that “‘her history is already more romantic than that of half of the heroines of your trashy novels’” (17). The romance surrounding her and her lineage stems largely from her status as a Mexican. Despite even the doctor’s own assurances that she is of pure Spanish descent, her dyed skin conjures up fantasies of possible connections to the Aztecs, as evidenced by proclamations made by characters throughout the novel. For example, Ruth Norval—the other Norval daughter— insists even towards the end of the novel that “‘Lola is not Spanish; she is Mexican’” (232).
Even though many of the characters often find Lola’s potential Mexican heritage revolting, these same characters also fetishize her imaginary Aztec genealogy and display a nostalgia for these native and noble American empires. By doing so, they subscribe to what Eric
Wertheimer identifies as a “vital tradition” in the U.S. of locating “exemplars in the New
World” that could serve as legitimating precedents for U.S. empire building (3). These desires appear all the more transparent when associated with Lola’s stash of gold and precious gems. Exemplifying the fantasy of imperialism, Lola’s captivity story includes an important piece of anecdotal information: we are told that Lola amassed her fortune in captivity because “Indians brought her emeralds and rubies, seeing that she liked pretty 112 pebbles” (29). These precious jewels, along with her stockpile of California gold conjures up intense desires in others to claim her inheritance both materially and culturally insofar as
Lola metonymically stand in for the twin imperial traditions of the Aztecs and the conquistadors. To varying degrees, her connection to these traditions wins her the love of several of the most morally laudable characters, including Dr. Norval, Isaac Sprig, and her eventual husband Julian Norval, who leaves to Mexico with her at the end of the novel.
The desire for Lola’s riches, imperial prestige, and erotic exoticness find their perfect expression in the figure of the wayward Reverend Hackwell, a lascivious rake who first seduces Mrs. Norval in her husband’s absence only to later beg Lola “to marry him,” insisting that “he had loved her always, even when others thought her an Indian” (147).
Often his greed for her fortune and lust for her beauty become so entangled that the two desires become essentially indistinguishable from one another. Thus, Lola’s blackface and ethnicity become, as in the case of minstrel nostalgia, objects of nostalgic and cultural desire.
They also are accordingly objects of revulsion. Despite Mrs. Norval’s intense desire to possess Lola’s riches, she expresses an intense hatred of Lola by proclaiming, “‘I hate foreigners and papists’” (92). This hatred of Lola only intensifies and is sometimes shared by Hackwell who nevertheless also lusts after Lola at various moments throughout the novel. Lola’s ceaseless metamorphoses of complexion encourages Mrs. Norval to synthesize her various hatreds, so that Lola embodies both her disgust with “horrid engross and the ugly Indians” (269).
Lola’s ability to set a dialectic of desire and hatred, or love and theft, into motion further suggests that Who Would Have Thought It? breaks the generic and cultural dictates of the captivity narrative. Instead of containing the cultural threat Lola’s hybrid identity poses, her captivity narrative unravels and compromises the cultural integrity and communal 113
harmony of the Anglo-American Norval family and those who associate with them. Their
conflicting desires disrupt the tranquility of their domestic space. But by undermining the
very genre it seems to participate in, Lola’s captivity narrative can imagine a different kind of
subject—one that is neither constituted or contained by the captivity narrative. Lola— despite being born in captivity—would appear to have acquired her identity prior to birth and her immersion within society. This facet of the text thus defies our expectations, as informed by the thought of Althusser and Foucault, about how subjects are formed by literary works. In the case of Lola, interpellation works only as a mechanism of misrecognition driven partly by the nostalgic and racially inflected desires of those who wish to possess Lola and/or her fortune. It would be mistake, however, to see Lola’s position as
an inherently liberating one. For one thing, the fact that Lola seems to be solely a product of
her bloodline relies upon and reinforces postbellum racism. Her inability to be interpellated
also means that she cannot be incorporated either, suggesting that she can never truly secure
citizenship within the United States. Initially animated by the various nostalgias that the
characters project onto Lola’s past, her captivity narrative thus operates within what
Rancière understands as the aesthetic regime by insisting upon its “singularity” through a
process of generic rule breaking so that it eventually “become[s] foreign to itself” (Politics 23).
In fact, I would argue that the disruption of the captivity narrative inaugurates a motif that
recurs throughout other parts of Ruiz de Burton’s novel—that Lola, while a part of the
nation, really has no part in the political process or any rights accorded to her.83 This motif
of generic disruption, in fact, only begins with the captivity narrative. As we shall see, Lola’s
83 I borrow this phrase from Rancière who defines politics as that moment when “that of the part of those who have no part” demands to be heard (Disagreement 30). The classic example he provides is that of the slave revolts that took place in ancient Greece slaves—who contributed materially to Greek society but were denied any rights—rose up to demand a place within the polis. 114
subjectivity and subject position create problems for the domestic components of the
narrative as well.
Whether lauded for its political power by Gillian Brown and Jane Tompkins or
derided for its complicity with imperialism and “the material relations of chattel slavery” by
Saidiya V. Hartman and Laura Wexler, the fiction of domesticity seems generically engineered to incorporate and domesticate difference for better or for worse. Even those who view domesticity and sentimentalism as ambivalent phenomena, like Merish and Lora
Romero, nevertheless maintain that domestic fiction has the power to unite and produce
“subjects in opposition to its figures of the patriarch/slaveholder” (Romero 86).84 Who
Would Have Thought It?, however, once again gets the genre all wrong. In her domestic novel,
Ruiz de Burton challenges the Republican matriarchy of the North by insisting that Lola
cannot be sympathetically incorporated into the home. Lola, moreover, longs to have
patriarchal authority restored either in the form of her father Don Luis or her surrogate
father Dr. Norval.
This restoration is never fully realized either, as the doctor’s much anticipated return
never happens by the end of the novel and Lola’s reunion with Don Luis brings her only
“profound melancholy” until her fiancé Julian Norval joins Lola in Mexico (286). Who
Would Have Thought It?, in other words, takes aim at the domestic novel in much the same
way that it first dismantles the formal conventions of the captivity narrative to expose
fissures in its cultural logic.
The primary threat the domestic subplot of Who Would Have Thought It? must address
is Lola. Much like Edna in St. Elmo, Lola finds herself inhabiting a home that does not feel
like home. Lola’s racial ambiguity, however, posses challenges to her incorporation within
84 Also see Amy Kaplan’s account of “manifest domesticity” in The Anarchy of Empire (2002). 115
the home that Edna never has to face. For this reason, Ruiz de Burton radically rejects the
underlying logic of the domestic novel rather than seeking to reform it in the manner Evans
does. As alluded to previously, Mrs. Norval—the mistress of the house—does not know
where to place Lola. Initially, Mrs. Norval relegates her to the servants’ quarters much to the
displeasure of Dr. Norval. Lola finds herself in the company of two Irish women, who
appear completely unsympathetic to her “crying as if her heart were breaking” (30). Lola
seems so far beyond the pale of sympathy that no other human being, aside from the doctor, expresses any concern for her wellbeing. Tellingly, the only other being that Lola secures comfort from is the family dog, Jack, whose “sympathy” provides her with her only
“consolation” (41). In this way, Jack serves as a kind of ontological index, suggesting that the rest of the Norvals consider her no more human than the dog. Later in the narrative the other townspeople and Mrs. Norval indict her husband’s sympathy for Lola and other political causes by characterizing it as “‘absurd’” (67). At the same time, given her wealth and that the doctor’s captivity narrative clearly demonstrates that she comes from “pure”
Spanish stock, Mrs. Norval’s inability to place Lola also suggests that the logic of the domestic novel has already become severely compromised by Lola’s presence. Moreover,
Mrs. Norval regards what she perceives as Lola’s racial mutability as a contagion, adamantly believing that Lola’s spots suggest she contacted “some disease” while in captivity (78).
While Ruiz de Burton thoroughly debunks the racist premise of Norval’s belief, she leaves open the possibility that Lola as literary figure may pose a narratological threat to the domestic subplot of the novel. And much like a virus, Lola begins to circulate beyond the confines of the Norval home, infecting other portions of the novel.
Once in circulation the danger Lola poses to the novel’s economy of sympathy
becomes even more apparent as she begins to develop an attachment to Julian Norval. 116
Julian quickly recognizes Lola as his social equal and believes that she belongs within the
Norval home just as much as his sisters do. He also develops an intense attraction towards
that eventually blossoms into a desire to “‘marry her’” (180). His mother and Hackwell,
however, seek to do everything in their power to thwart his marriage plans because their
marriage would deprive both Mrs. Norval and Hackwell of Lola’s fortune. They
consequently send Lola to a convent—her mother’s dying wish—while Julian serves in the
Union Army in order to prevent them from wedding. Matters become complicated,
however, when both Hackwell and Julian become wounded in battle. Sent to separate
hospitals, Mrs. Norval would prefer to join Hackwell at his side, but that would mean
allowing Lola to leave the convent to come to Julian’s aid. After a series of confusing
telegraph exchanges, the narrative becomes almost incoherent, as Mrs. Norval essentially
transforms her family into “‘all her slaves’” by ordering them to attend either Julian’s or
Hackwell’s bedsides (138). Eventually, Lola manages to reach Julian’s bedside against Mrs.
Norval’s will, underscoring the Republican matriarch’s diminishing agency over her domestic
sphere of influence in the novel.
Mrs. Norval’s erratic behavior and Lola’s vexing position as a stranger within the
home eventually lead to a complete collapse of the Norval household. Lavvy, Mrs. Norval’s
sister and her one-time ally, comes to revile her sister for preventing her from seeing
Hackwell, whom she once loved. She consequently aligns herself with Julian and Lola who
also win the support of Mattie over time. Lola’s “homeless[ness],” in other words, itself
becomes contagious as each of the Norvals soon finds themselves a house divided (180). In
place of virtuous sympathy, Mrs. Norval becomes consumed with the perverse “sympathetic contact between” Hackwell and herself who largely united together in antipathy instead of sympathy (136). The crises in sympathy that occur in the Norval household are also 117
reflected in the crumbling Republic within which they take place. Lavvy, for example, soon
learns that her supposed feminine power of sympathy accords her no power at all when “she
wished to see the Secretary [of War] about exchanging her brother, Isaac Sprig,” imprisoned
somewhere in the South (105). She, like many of the other nameless women depicted in the
novel trying to find some record of their male relatives serving in the military, are granted
little or no access to the halls of power. While at various moments, the characters in the text
nostalgically yearn for a return to a national past more consistent with the founding ideals of
the Republic before Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, this form of nostalgia seems largely
futile.
Ruiz de Burton, in other words, appears to suggest that neither the captivity narrative
nor the domestic romance can perform their nationalizing cultural work during or after the
Civil War. Once more, unlike Evans, Ruiz de Burton seems to see the various regional and ethnic nostalgias so pervasive during this period as obstacles to rather than as mechanisms
for creating various forms of communal affiliation. Simply put, none of the heroes and
heroines of in Who Would Have Thought It? appear to belong anywhere. Consequently, Ruiz de Burton and many of her characters embrace what Timothy Brennan casts as
“nationalism’s opposite”—the “topos of ‘exile,’” or the state of being at home nowhere in the
world (“National” 60). For example, when the doctor is accused of harboring Southern
sympathies simply because he attempted to negotiate a political compromise before the War
broke out, he commits to “voluntarily exiling himself from his country” (84). Even though
the doctor’s return home becomes much anticipated at the close of the novel, it is never
realized, leaving him in a state of indefinite narrative exile. Moreover, once Isaac Sprig
finally manages to escape from his prison in the south, he becomes so “sick of his country
and countryman” that “he longed to get away” to Mexico (192). Finally, the ending of novel 118 resembles the ending to Clotel in several respects. Notably, the marriage plot between Julian and Lola can only achieve its fulfillment outside the U.S. nation in exile in Mexico. But unlike Mary and George in Clotel, who find in exile an opportunity to imagine themselves as
Americans through the act of nostalgic longing, Lola and Julian seem resolved never to return home to the United States. In every case, each of these characters also displays what
Ruiz de Burton describes as an “unnatural love of foreigners” (11). Accordingly, she finds in the postbellum culture of nostalgia a sentiment incapable of bringing about a reconciliation between North and South and one that also seems wholly antithetical to cosmopolitanism. This divisive feature of nostalgia, which Ruiz de Burton depicts, would serve as one of the reasons for William Dean Howells’s outright repudiation of it and the romance more broadly in the 1880s. However, as I shall argue in the next two chapters,
Walt Whitman, Hamlin Garland, and L. Frank Baum in various ways all sought out to re- appropriate nostalgia to forge either new allegiances across regions or to arrive at a cosmopolitan understanding of nostalgia.
119
3 _____
Past Forward: Walt Whitman, Hamlin Garland and the Progress of Nostalgia in the Late Nineteenth Century
“One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century . . .. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age.”
—Paul Krugman, The New York Times (2007)
“The Clintons have actually redefined change as nostalgia. Bill Clinton said it: ‘yesterday’s news wasn’t bad news.’”
—Bob Shrum, Meet the Press (2007)
“Only other men’s nostalgias offend.”
—Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
This chapter argues that nostalgia, while often cast as the antonym to progress, actually defined its own form of progress in political and literary instead of biological and technological terms during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By defining progress in this way, nostalgia could imagine various forms of collectivity and community in aesthetic as opposed to sociological or cultural terms. While nostalgia continued to operate within the two modalities of time and space, the concept had lost its strictly pathological meaning and had become an everyday affective experience by the end of the nineteenth century. As a
May 12, 1874 article on nostalgia published in The New York Times declared, “everybody knows what is commonly meant by home sickness, and very many who have traveled abroad have experienced that longing for the things of home which the word implies” (4). At the fin de siècle, physicians like S. Weir Mitchell who had once deemed “cases of nostalgia . . . serious 120
additions to the peril of wounds and disease” during the Civil War had a new psychoaffective disorder to attend to—neurasthenia, a disease described as a generalized
nervousness brought on by the frenzied pace of modern life (Mitchell xx). Neurasthenia
emerged as the disease of technological progress serving as a “mark of distinction, of class,
of status, of refinement”; nostalgia, on the other hand, lingered residually as a benign affect widely experienced by and familiar to everyone (American 6). As a pathological metonym for
technological progress, the emergence of neurasthenia as the disease of progress contributes
to the way historians and literary critics alike have studied the 1890s as a period caught
between two competing polarities: nostalgia and progress.
As Christopher Lasch explains, succeeding generations of scholars have typically
located in the 1880s and 1890s a dichotomous conflict between “the nostalgic attitude and
the belief in progress” (118). This “belief in progress” had a pessimistic dimension that
manifested itself in scientific discourse in the form of degeneration along with its literary
corollary, naturalism. Jennifer L. Fleissner similarly suggests that our study of naturalism
also “has remained limited by a tendency to reduce its meanings to the two more polarized
responses to the 1890s,” which she describes as the “fatalistic” and the “nostalgic” (6).
When literary works seemed nostalgic in character, commentators often placed them outside
the realist and naturalist genres, aligning them with the genre of local color or regional
writing instead. Critics who study the 1890s have largely concentrated their efforts on
expanding upon an already voluminous archive on naturalism and regionalism. While other
fields of literary study have long since abandoned debating the merits and demerits of
various forms of generic classification, debates surrounding generic boundaries remain
central to late nineteenth-century American literary studies. 121
But rather than weighing in with my own set of generic definitions, I examine
nostalgia in this chapter in part to interrogate the emphasis on generic classification in the
late nineteenth century and the agency it either purports to impart or circumvent. To be
sure, late nineteenth-century authors and critics themselves sought to establish ways of
defining their own literary work in relation to and against the romancers and sentimental
writers that preceded them. For this reason, even if we accept Michael Davitt Bell’s
assertion that “the works conventionally assembled under the umbrella of ‘American realism’
(or ‘American naturalism’)” do not “constitute . . . a tradition of realism (or naturalism),” the
critical and scholarly tradition seeking to define these seemingly indefinable genres is a
longstanding one (Problem 4). Even scholarship that has examined realism, naturalism and regionalism less as genres and more as ways of thinking or modes of social protest bears an
important resemblance to studies that aim at their definition—both bodies of scholarship
have operated within or contested what Howard Horwitz has referred to as the “sociological
paradigm,” a project that “sought to explain how an individual might transcend the
institutional, customary, and psychological structures that constitute agency” (“Maggie” 610).
In this regard, contemporary critics share an interest with those that they study—those
nineteenth-century authors and sociologists who debated the veracity of environmental
determinism.85 The reason for this common idée fixe lies in a similar abiding respect for
deterministic understanding of context, a concept that embraces what Frederic Jameson describes as “synchronic thought” whereby all forms of production and all communities— even seemingly oppositional ones—are necessarily seen “as instruments ultimately programmed by the system” or particular episteme itself (Political 91). Whether capable of
85 For more on the correlation between values of contemporary cultural studies and late nineteenth-century literature and literary criticism, see Tom Lutz’s Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004) 1-36. 122
being transcended or merely reproduced, context has provided something for nineteenth-
century social and literary discourse and recent literary criticism alike to stand upon.
This chapter consequently seeks in part to establish that the cultural turn at the late
nineteenth-century spurred an interest in generic categorization and other forms of
disciplinary activity that the cultural turn of the 1970s would reproduce in an albeit more
sophisticated form, which explains—at least partially—why nostalgia remains a derogatory
label even within cultural studies. To this end, I examine the work of two figures who would
come to play an important role in the literary and political life of the 1880s and 1890s—Walt
Whitman and Hamlin Garland. While we generally think of Whitman’s work as belonging to
the antebellum period, his writing only become culturally and aesthetically significant at the
end of the nineteenth century. His later prose and poetry, often sidelined by commentators
for being too nostalgic, relies upon this nostalgia to imagine a democratic community based
on aesthetics. By embracing nostalgia, Whitman would imagine his work as constituting the
very tradition that he felt America lacked, which would be appropriated by a generation of political agitators and writers during the fin-de-siècle. Whitman’s use of nostalgia and democratic imagination, however important, remained ill-defined and abstract. Hamlin
Garland, whose debt to Whitman is well established, would refine Whitman’s use of nostalgia by providing it with a very specific narrative framework.86 Accordingly, this
nostalgic narrative became the basis for Garland’s mutualist imagination, which re-
envisioned the relationship among the nation’s sections as regions in order to fuse them
together aesthetically in the service of Populism. In these ways, both Whitman and Garland
86 For more on the relationship between Whitman and Garland, see Nancy Bunge, “Walt Whitman’s Influence on Hamlin Garland” (1977) and Kenneth M. Price and Robert C. Leitz, III, “The Uncollected Letters of Hamlin Garland to Walt Whitman” (1988). 123
defined progress in aesthetic and political terms and imagined this progress as a product of nostalgia.
Replacing the Renaissance: Walt Whitman’s “History of the Future”
Shortly after his death, Walt Whitman’s “A Thought of Columbus,” appeared in Once
a Week on July 9, 1892. The voice of this posthumously published work assumes a different
tone from the one found in much of his earlier work. In his antebellum poems, we find
what we often think of as the quintessential Whitman, imploring his readers “to no longer
take things at second or third hand . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . nor feed on
the specters in books” (“Song” 27).87 By contrast the second stanza of a “Thought of
Columbus” opens by looking “thousands and thousands of miles hence, and now for
centuries back” (7). Instead of unequivocally rejecting the past and gazing forward, the later
Whitman turns to look “o’er the long backward path” (“Columbus” 22). This Whitman
nevertheless invokes the “huge memory” of Columbus not to dwell within the past, but to
reanimate this historical moment for the present and the future (“Columbus” 24). He now
seems to understand the specters of the past that he once sought to exorcize are—as Jacques
Derrida would describe it—“the future” or “as that which could come or come back” from
the past (48). What he once regarded as a threat—the specters of the past—he now sees as
the force capable of bringing about “one vast consensus, north south, east, west”
(“Columbus” 24). But the Whitman of the Gilded Age has received comparatively little
attention within Whitman studies—let alone within broader accounts of the period. Even
though Whitman reached the apex of his nineteenth-century popularity and achieved his
canonical status in the 1880s and 1890s, commentators routinely cast his later work in
87 This quote comes from the July 4, 1855 version of “Song of Myself.” 124
diminutive terms, as exhibiting a “failure of vision” to use Kenneth M. Price’s words
(Whitman 71). Biographers also consistently fault Whitman’s late work for “look[ing] back
with nostalgia for what he recalled as a more boisterous, more richly human time” (Reynolds
563). Whether revered as the paragon of transcendental prosody or embraced as a
champion of democratic and queer politics, Whitman’s later work has garnered uniform
condemnation for being, as one critic has described it, “little more than an exercise in nostalgia” (Haddox 17).
Yet the very feature of Whitman’s later work seen to have compromised its literary
and cultural value in the eyes of many twentieth- and twenty-first century readers—its
nostalgia—earned him a secure foothold in several esteemed literary and intellectual circles
in the late nineteenth century and sated the public’s nostalgic desire for the kind of
antebellum America Whitman represented to them. A motley crew of Whitmanites reached
a critical mass at the end of the nineteenth century, including Andrew Carnegie, Hamlin
Garland, Emma Goldman, William Dean Howells, William James, George Cabot Lodge, and
George Santayana. In the 1880s, Whitman also delivered his commemorative Lincoln address to packed audiences in New York and Philadelphia. Consequently, it was during the fin de siècle that Walt Whitman went from being the poet of “emptiness” and grossness,” as an anonymous antebellum reviewer for the Cincinnati Commercial put it, to became the Good
Gray Poet of America (Woodress 44).88 securing a place in the American canon of literature
accorded to his American Renaissance contemporaries nearly half a century earlier in the
1850s by James T. Fields That Whitman first began to achieve cultural prominence in the
1870s and 1880s was not lost on earlier critics, such as V.L. Parrington who placed his most
88 By contrast, many of Whitman’s antebellum contemporaries secured a place in the American canon of nearly half a century earlier in the 1850s by the publisher James T. Fields. For more on Fields’ canon-building project, see Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (1986) 54-64. 125 extensive treatment of Whitman within the third volume of Main Currents in American Thought,
Beginnings of Critical Realism (1860-1920).89 But since F.O. Matthiessen described the
American Renaissance as the “Age of Whitman,” we have consistently cast Whitman as the poet of the American Renaissance par excellence even though Matthiessen himself follows
Whitman’s career late into the nineteenth century.90
And while scores of critics have examined the significance of Whitman’s aesthetics and politics, they have done so by practicing a form of historicism that largely binds his work to the 1850s and 1860s.91 But Whitman rejected precisely this brand of historicism, which revered “the buried past” of bygone eras by anchoring literature solely to the moment of its production (“Backward” 720). Alternatively, he practiced a form of literary nostalgia, which did not seek to recover “a vague and disconnected past” the way Nicholas Dames and Linda
M. Austin explain the Victorians understood nostalgia, but instead imagined the past always as a product of form rather viewing form as a synchronic product of its past (Austin 15).92
Put in Whitman’s own words, “old imaginative works” and Leaves of Grass alike “rest, after their kind, on long trains of presuppositions” or upon the literary works that precede them
(“Backward” 717). For Whitman, past works of literature must be both viewed
89 See Parrington, Beginnings of Critical Realism 69-86. In the second volume of Main Currents, Romantic Revolution (1800-1860), Parrington mentions Whitman in laudatory terms but only in passing. 90 See especially Matthiessen 596-625. 91 For examples of scholarship that establishes Whitman’s commitment of radical politics and aesthetic insofar as his work relates to the mid-nineteenth century, see Christopher Beach, The Politics of Distinction (1996); Peter J. Bellis, Writing Revolution (2003) 69-117; Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (1989); Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (1994); Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance (2003); W.C. Harris, E Pluribus Unum (2005) 71-109; M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Walt Whitman and the Earth (2004); Kerry C. Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus (1988); Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts (1987) 108-157; and David S. Reynolds, “Politics and Poetry: Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the 1850s” (1995). Exceptions to this rule include Bryan K. Garman’s “‘Heroic Spiritual Grandfather’: Whitman, Sexuality, and the American Left, 1890-1940” (2000); Stephen John Mack’s The Pragmatic Whitman (2002), which devotes several chapters to Whitman’s later work on democracy and patriotism; Kenneth M. Price’s Whitman and Tradition (1990) and To Walt Whitman, America (2004), which in various ways consider Whitman’s later reception appropriation from the 1890s to the 1990s; and Alan Trachtenberg’s “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern” (1995), which establishes Whitman’s centrality to early twentieth-century literary culture. 92 See also Dames 3-19. 126
diachronically and adapted for the present because in order to achieve a “full estimate of the
Present both Past and the Future are main considerations” (“Backward” 723-4). Nostalgic
himself for the “thirty years from 1850 to ‘80” and “the America in them” that his many
iterations of Leaves of Grass spanned, Whitman produced literary work during these decades
that could only realize its formal and political radicalism once it had become the
“preparatory background” for the social and aesthetic climate of the 1890s (“Backward”
716-17).
This section casts the 1880s and 1890s as the decades in which both Whitman’s
nostalgic work and nostalgia for Whitman provided writers with a way to challenge precisely
the kind of historical determinism that we have come to think of as defining the cultural
logic of this period. Whitman’s work indicted the epistemological basis of sociology and the
other social sciences at the very moment they commanded so much authority that even many novelists chose to abandon aestheticism in their work in favor of a “responsible literature” that, in the words of Michael A. Elliott, “should accurately reflect the social world” (xxiv). But by recognizing the prominent place other writers accorded Whitman in the 1890s, we can understand why this decade also gave rise to pronouncements by
Whitman devotees like George Santayana who concluded in The Sense of Beauty (1896) that “if
we approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of historical connexions or
proper classification, we do not approach it aesthetically” (14). What Santayana’s statement
reveals is that while the 1890s saw the rise of positivistic genres like realism and naturalism, it
also fostered a renewed interest in an aesthetics unmoored from scientific or cultural
determinism. Using “the writings of Walt Whitman” as “a notable example,” these same
writers also sought to foreground what they regarded as American democracy’s “strong
aesthetic ingredient” (Santayana 70-1). What follows then is an account of Whitman’s own 127
contribution to a distinctly aesthetic and self-proclaimed democratic way of thinking that
would help shape, in nostalgic terms, the aesthetic and political endeavors of a diffuse set of figures from Santayana to Hamlin Garland.
Beginning with the work he produced in the years immediately succeeding the Civil
War, Walt Whitman wrote poetry that collapsed all modes of time into the past as way of
responding to the trauma—a concept, as established in Chapter One and Two, synonymous
with nostalgia in the nineteenth century—of the War. Without delving too deeply into the
extensive and ongoing discussion of trauma in literary studies, I wish to suggest that
Whitman’s poetry after the Civil War becomes increasingly invested in the status of the past in American culture because the war completed the break between the Revolutionary generation and their successors that writers in the 1850s had anticipated. While this epistemic break seemingly suggests that the Civil War had accomplished one of the principle of aims of Marx’s influential vision for “the social revolution of the nineteenth century” as one that could not “draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future,” Whitman’s postbellum work establishes a different relationship between the war and the past (Eighteenth
18). In the decade preceding the conflict, Whitman could embrace a revolutionary attitude towards the past not unlike the one espoused by Marx. But during the postbellum years, his poetry seeks to supplement the historical lack of continuity created by the war by playing with time itself. Rather than appeal to the legacy of the Revolutionary generation as Lincoln had done before and during the war, Whitman redefined the temporal relationship among the past, present, and future. All temporal modes in his poetry became essentially wed to the past, leading him to view every moment as always passing and therefore capable of contributing to a new repository of supplemental communal memory. So long as the present and future could always be seen as already past, Whitman could suture the fissure in 128
the nation’s diachronic history breached by the war. As a consequence of this temporal
myopia, Whitman necessarily estranged many of his poems and their auditors from their
own time by insisting that all time be viewed as history. It is through this estrangement that
Whitman instills in his poetry a sense of time that seems ceaselessly nostalgic even in the
present.
One of the postbellum poems that best exemplifies Whitman’s contraction of time
and sense of perpetual nostalgia is “Think of the Soul” (1876).93 While the poem begins by
asking the reader to meditate on love and the soul, the second stanza opens with the
following command to the reader: “Think of the past;/ I warn you that in a little while
others will find their past in you and your times” (6-7). These two lines succinctly articulate
Whitman’s temporal expulsion of the present and future to the past by encouraging his
readers to imagine the present as the future’s past. This imperative echoes the sentiments
expressed in an earlier poem that first appeared in Chants Democratic and later in an edition of
Leaves of Grass, “To a Historian” (1860; 1871). Distinguishing his project from that of the
historian “who celebrate[s] bygones,” the speaker proclaims in the final two lines of the
poem: “Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be,/ I project the history of the
future” (1; 6-7). As in this poem, Whitman’s instance upon writing or imagining the future
as projected history continually emerges in his postbellum writing. In Democratic Vistas, for
example, he declares that America must make “a new history, a history of democracy” only
to insist that he has already “dream’d, merged in that hidden-tangled problem of our fate,
93 A version of this poem, however, first appeared in the last nine stanzas of “Poem of Remembrances for a Girl or a Boy of These States” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Initially, he reprinted all of the stanzas of “Poems of Remembrances . . .” in 1860 with the exception of the lines that appear in “Think of the Soul” as “No.6” in Chants Democratic. The fact he first chose to reprint these lines as their own self-contained poem in 1871 suggests that Whitman wanted to separate these lines from a poem that focuses less abstractly on the Revolutionary Past as way to address the crises of the 1850s and 1860s. On its own, the lines contained in “Think of the Soul” can make claims about the passage of time in a far more universal and abstract way than in their original context. In this way, the republication of these lines as an autonomous poem marks the kind of shift in temporal consciousness in his work that readers have subsequently come to regard as nostalgic. 129
whose long unraveling stretches mysteriously though time—dream’d out, portray’d, hinted
already” (423). For Whitman, to look forward paradoxically means to always look backward
by imagining the future as having already transpired. By locating the future within history,
Whitman can imagine all moments of time as already past even while evading the trauma of
the actual past of the Civil War and the events leading up to it. In this way, Whitman
actually turns Marx on his head by abandoning the present and future instead of the past.
Believing that the French Revolution of 1848 had only conjured “the ghost of the old revolution” by “awakening the dead” instead of achieving an actual revolution in the present,
Marx insisted that succeeding revolutions would have always look forward to achieve a truly
“revolutionary point of departure” from the past (Eighteenth 17; 19). But when Whitman meditates upon the future of American literature and the nation, as he does in “Poetry To- day in America—Shakespere—The Future” (1881), he stresses that the future cannot escape the fact that the “thirty-eight States” are literarily and politically “the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate” (475). For, unlike Marx, he believes that what may seem the “deadly and destructive” power of the past actually “turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives” (“Poetry” 476).
Rather than breaking away from the literary figures that precede him, Whitman
embraces his literary predecessors and deceased antebellum contemporaries. He takes it
upon himself become a living witness to the archive of American letters and his
contemporaries whose deaths preceded his own. In “Old Poets” (1890), he appraises the
poetry of Longfellow and Whittier along with Emerson and other poets who inhabit the
“galaxy of the past” and concedes “in 1890, one gets a curious nourishment and lift . . . from
all those grand old veterans” (660). Whitman evacuates the present and the future from his
work to make room for the ever-expanding and inescapable “galaxy of the past.” Whitman’s 130
view of the past thus both approximates and diverges from the ways that turn-of-the-century
philosophers conceived of the concept. Henri Bergson, for example, stressed that “we have
no grasp of the future without an equal and corresponding outlook over the past,” as
memories fill the “void” left by the “onrush” of our movement forward in time (65). And
William James, himself an admirer of Whitman, speculated that “we have a constant feeling
sui generis of pastness, to which every one of our experiences in turn falls a prey” (570).
While an undercurrent feeling of persistent pastness certainly manifests itself in Whitman’s
later poetry, this feeling also gives rise to a constant sense of temporal estrangement and a
longing to be at home in the present.94 This dislocation pronounces itself in “Old Poets”
when Whitman makes a passing allusion to his own “Old . . . Poetry” by referring to his
former self in the third person in an essay written in the first person (661). The third and
first persons of Whitman correspond to the past and present tenses respectively, and the
latter person and tense seem incapable of separating themselves from the past to fully
inhabit the present. Even when he appears the most determined to sever all ties form the
“long past,” as he does in “American National Literature” (1891), he still concedes that “I
know, of course, that the past is probably a main factor in what we are and know and must
be” (668). The past, in other words, always remains present in his later work, and Whitman
appears doubly nostalgic insofar as he always seems estranged from the present and haunted
by the past. As a witness to past of which he belonged, Whitman composed a series of
reminisces—his tribute to Lincoln among them—toward the end of his life that express the
94 Also unlike Bergson, Whitman imagines neither an “ideal present” nor a “real, concrete, live present” that “necessarily occupies a duration” of perceived time (Bergson 137). 131
nostalgic dynamic found in his other work, helping earn him the widest readership he had
ever enjoyed during the course of his lifetime.95
The temporal estrangement in Whitman’s work is further magnified by the particular
content and form of Whitman’s depiction of the past, which attempts to establish a mythical
tradition. Whitman eschews history in favor of an account of the past that resembles myth and the chronicle. This formal maneuver on Whitman’s part reflects an aim to create both a
tradition that could have been and an undisciplined sense of the past capable of producing a synthesizing and collective memory in contrast to the atomizing tendencies of disciplinary history and social science. “Think of the Soul” glosses over the immediate past and instead seeks to manufacture a series of abstract recollections: “Recall the ever-welcome defiers,
(The mothers that precede them;)/ Recall the sages, poets, saviors, inventors, lawgivers, of the earth;/ Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons—brother of slaves, felons, idiots, an of insane and disease’d persons” (10-12). In this sequence of anaphoric imperatives, Whitman does not instruct his readers to recall any specific set of American historical actors—
Revolutionary or otherwise—but instead commands them to recall a set of transcendental archetypes with the Messiah among them. Whitman supplants history in this instance with myth and abandons history in favor of the chronicle. Here Whitman conforms to the formal and epistemological conventions of this type of writing about the past as Walter
Benjamin understands them. That is, rather than providing “an accurate concatenation of definite events,” Whitman recollects events and archetypes in order to examine how they
“are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world” (“Storyteller” 153).96 And as
95 As Jerome Loving notes, “the year 1887 was a good one for Whitman,” who published several of his later essays and delivered his Lincoln essay before packed audiences at this time (457). 96 Benjamin’s account of the chronicle, while taking on a particular significance for him as it relates to the storyteller, is by no means an idiosyncratic one. Both Roland Barthes and Hayden White, for example, both 132
this poem and “Thought on Columbus” illustrate, his formal appeal to the chronicle also nearly assumes the role of the storyteller, which Benjamin describes as a secularized incarnation of the chronicler, because Whitman indulges both in “the lore of faraway places” and “the lore of the past” (“Storyteller” 144). By representing the past in the form of the chronicle or story, Whitman conjures forth a mythic tradition that seeks to incorporate his readers into it. For this reason, though he does not condemn the postbellum infatuation with “material attents” and technological progress, Whitman longs for a past essentially at odds with the dictates of late nineteenth-century professional history and social science
(“American” 668). For these types of historicism, as Arendt explains, even when they established diachronic narratives of “historical continuity,” came to serve as “substitute[s] for tradition” (Between 28). Whitman’s approach to the past thus contests the positivistic drive to accumulate information whether aimed at ordering this information diachronically into a contiguous narrative or synchronically as discrete archeological layers.
In order to critique these other historical descriptions of the past, Whitman would
have to base his mythical account on a different type of authority. Since professional
historical study could derive its authority from science or instrumental reason, Whitman had
to authorize his approach to the past in different terms by dwelling on death—a gesture that
also ultimately illuminates some of the problems with Whitman’s appropriation of the form
and authority of the chronicle. In the stanza following the sequence of recollections in
“Think of the Soul,” Whitman turns to the subject of death: “Think of the time when you
were not yet born;/ Think of times you stood at the side of the dying;/ Think of the time
when your own body will be dying” (12-15). In these lines, Whitman moors the movement
of the poem to death, which Benjamin views as “the sanction for everything that the
describe the form as an “open-ended” one failing to conform to the expectations of factual demands of most other forms of historical study (White 6). See Barthes, “The Discourse of History” 127-140; and White 5-7. 133
storyteller can tell” (“Storyteller” 151). In this case, Whitman implores his readers to bring themselves as close to death as possible by imagining their own demise. It is the mention of death, which the storyteller and the chronicler rely upon as their source of authority, that
Whitman once again seizes upon to underscore his commitment to founding a mythical tradition. This element of his writing suggests that Whitman implicitly maintains, as
Benjamin later would explicitly contend, that any study of history that strives to explain information “does not enter ‘tradition’” because it fails “to pass it on as experience” to its audience (“ Motifs” 316). And consequently, Whitman attempts to create a tradition by drawing upon the residual notion of pathological nostalgia triggered by the trauma of combat, as an expression of death itself as he explains in “A Death-Bouquet” (1890) he witnessed “in the fields and hospitals during the Secession War” (673).
Throughout his Civil War poetry Whitman alludes to the trauma inflicted by
witnessing mass causalities in battle in the pieces appearing in Specimen Days. While death
figures prominently in many of his earlier poems as it did in the work of several of his
antebellum contemporaries, Whitman repeatedly returns to the subject in the decades
succeeding the Civil War. These poems ceaselessly echo the line from “To Think of Time”
(1855; 1881) that reminds readers “Not a day passes, not a minute or second without a corpse” (11). Specifically in “A Voice from Death” (1889), a poem inspired by the
Seminole leader Osceola, Whitman foregrounds the “mourning of the dead” and proclaims
“War, death, cataclysm like this, America,/ Take deep to thy proud prosperous heart” (16;
20-21). Using Osceola’s death as a synecdoche for death in general, he proceeds to stress the importance or remembering of the dead while nevertheless acknowledging that they may be inevitably forgotten. To compensate for this loss, Whitman nostalgically longs to recover
Osceola’s “silent ever-swaying power” in an era marked by the “potencies of progress, 134
politics, culture, wealth, inventions, civilization” (37; 36). Despite longing to inhabit the past
in the face of the “potencies of progress,” he concedes that “I too have forgotten” both
Osceola and the power of death in general. This poem thus reveals both Whitman’s desire
to continue the tradition of the chronicler and the storyteller by struggling to keep death within “the perpetual world of the living” and his acknowledgment of the futility of attempting to do so (“Storyteller” 151). Even when he announces he will answer the
“challenge to poetry” made by “modern science” in “contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past,” he admits his intervention is “perhaps too late” (“Backward” 715). His adoption of both the form of the chronicle and its engine of authority—death—forces him to arrive at a realization similar to the one Benjamin would come to years later: the loss of tradition and the chronicle is inevitable. But unlike Benjamin, Whitman remains nostalgically committed to yearning for their return. Estranged both from the present and from the past he imagines in chronicle form, Whitman will himself serve as the witness to a tradition that could have been by assuming the role of “the enduring commentator,” as Kenneth M. Price refers to him, for the postbellum generation (Whitman 93). Consequently, what Benjamin observes of Baudelaire could just as easily describe the work of Whitman—that by “paying homage to bygone times,” he remains in a state of “homesickness” (“Motifs” 334).
If the goal to restore the authority and form of the chronicle could only prove to be
an unachievable one, then Whitman’s alternative would be to extol nostalgia itself.
Nostalgia, when embraced in this way, could become way of defining progress insofar as he
determined that nostalgia served a prerequisite for the formation of an aesthetic democracy
in Rancière’s sense of that term. As I argued in previous chapters, nostalgia enables a group
of spatially or temporally exiled subjects to supplement their lack of belonging with a
binding form of longing. For this reason, he imagined the sense of nostalgia and 135
displacement—brought on by the Civil War, scientific innovation, and the lack of shared
national culture—as the basis for aesthetic progress. Progress, which he understood in
evolutionary terms, signified a process of looking backward to remake the past for the
present and to envision the present and future as reinventions of the past. In this way,
nostalgia and progress operate as synonyms in the prose written by Whitman during the
1880s and early 1890s. Taking up the subject of evolution, he fuses nostalgia to a notion of
progress in an essay on Darwinism that first appeared in an 1882 edition of Specimen Days and
Collect. For Whitman, “evolution” is itself an “old theory . . . as broach’d anew” because it
advances science by redefining an intellectual discourse developed in the past (524). Fully
recognizing its cultural importance, Whitman reminds us that evolution in some form
preceded Charles Darwin to stress that Darwinism “cannot be allowed to dominate every thing [sic] else” (524). By insisting that evolution must not be permitted to overpower all other faculties of knowledge and domains of human activity, his critique of positivism and the authority of scientific inquiry undergoes a permutation. If Darwinism asserts its
authority by revising an old idea, then it enables Whitman to cast nostalgia as the engine of
progress. Placing Darwinism within the continuum of a tradition of its own among “those venerable claims of origin,” Whitman contends the emerging dominance of Darwinian thought “necessitates” the rise of a countervailing aesthetic project carried out by poets
(523). By “fully absorbing and appreciating the results of the past,” poets can now “recast the old metal” to create “new, more expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer
American poems” (524; 525). Thus, while Whitman may not be able to rely upon the authority of death as the storyteller and chronicler once did, he can appropriate the authority of evolution itself wedding a notion of nostalgia to this idea. 136
Whitman’s aesthetics of the past may have been underscored by an “evolutionary” understanding of history, but he hardly adhered to the principles of evolution with any degree of rigor (“Backward” 717). Instead his Darwinian view of history often led him in his later work to gaze longingly backward in order to comprehend its relevance to his present moment. Appraising the fate of poetry in America in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d
Roads” (1889), for example, Whitman pauses to contemplate in a footnote the legacy of
Elizabethan verse. Insisting that in the United States poetry will continue to evolve, he nevertheless contends that “the ferment and germination” of poetry in “the United States to- day” is “mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English history, the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespere [sic]” (716-17). This admission gives way to a much more abstract realization that “when we pursue” the past, “what growth or advent is there that does not date back, back, until lost—perhaps its most tantalizing clues lost—in the receded horizons of the past?” (717). Such a meditation on the loss of an irrecoverable past resonates with Freud’s definition of melancholia as the lamentation of the “unknown loss” of particular object
(584). But rather than “establish[ing] an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” as a melancholic would, Whitman associates this lost past with an entire literary culture and moment in time (Freud 586). That this loss defines the affective condition of an entire group of people rather than of the ego of a particular individual makes Whitman’s rhetorical question a nostalgic one. In contrast to his previous ebullitions over the American freedom from a past, Whitman seems to have come to regard the American condition in the 1890s as an inherently nostalgic one. Rather than celebrating an emancipation from the past, he mourns its inaccessible loss, finding its irrecoverability all the more tantalizing. That
Whitman imagines what remains residually of the past as “clues” as opposed to facts also has a particular importance. The use of such a term underscores his own skepticism about 137
positivistic views of history because clues often elude empirical verifiability. Though he
takes up the specific case of detective fiction, Franco Moretti explains the presence of clues in a narrative contribute to the creation of “an aesthetic model that implies the impossibility of
verifying cultural forms” (134). Thus, by describing the past’s legacy as existing only in the
form of lost clues, Whitman both affirms the power of the past to shape the present while
also suggesting the past will remain in a subterranean state—forming the foundation of a
present incapable of fully excavating the time that preceded it. That these thoughts appear
in a footnote further reinforce his characterization of the past as lost clues, as these “notes
act” traditionally “as intermediaries between” an object of “eternal value and a modern
reader whose horizons are necessarily limited by immediate needs and interests” (Grafton
32). In other words, footnotes formally gesture to the ever elusive recession of a constant
past that remains beyond the grasp of the present. The footnote as a genus and this
footnote in particular testify to that force Whitman describes as the “long trains of
presuppositions” that shape the literature of the present (717). And this particular footnote
remains itself a kind of lost clue or unfinished thought and terminates with an unanswered
interrogation instead of a demonstrative statement.
Whitman ultimately enlisted nostalgia to establish a distinction between aesthetics
and rationalism of positivism as way to create a collective and truly democratic political
imagination. Following the example of Hippolyte Taine, William Dean Howells devised
classification systems to make literary appraisal a scientific discipline. Conversely, Whitman
and those who championed his views on art challenged these generic approaches by
distinguishing aesthetics, as Rancière does, from the “representative regime” or works that
follow a prescribed set of rules and conventions (Rancière 21). Put another way, Whitman
found fault with viewing the “reproduction of fact” as the “sole standard of artistic 138
excellence,” because he believed, as Santayana would, that such a “scientific” paradigm
necessarily “inhibits the artistic” (Santayana 15). Only those works that “have their own
laws, and may indeed be described as making those laws,” Whitman explained in “Book-
Classes—America’s Literature” (1882), could be considered “works of the first class” (539).
And much in the same way both Santayana and Rancière would in differing ways conclude,
Whitman felt that only aesthetic works could produce the kind of democratic imagination he longed to see created. For this reason, he uses nostalgia to remedy what he portrayed as the increasing atomization of society. Early in Democratic Vistas, he stresses that “of all dangers
to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain
portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others,
but degraded, humiliated, made of no account” (Democratic 382). Such a statement appears
an immediate indictment of class divisions, but it also implicitly critiques forms of scientific
representation that engage in what Foucault describes as the process of “partitioning,” or the
“break[ing] up for collective dispositions” and the “dangerous coagulation” of individuals,
commensurate with the rise of disciplinary society (143). Using nostalgia to appropriate the
past in aesthetic terms, Whitman sought to circumvent disciplinary accounts of the social in
order to forge a democratic and collective imagination.
Many of his later poems use nostalgia in order to reconfigure the political geography
and divisiveness of the nation. As previously noted, “A Thought on Columbus” invokes the
mythology of Columbus to produce “one vast consensus” among the “north, south, east,
west” (22). Such gestures are even more prevalent in “Passage to India” (1871), which
displays a version of what Renato Rosaldo refers to as “imperialist nostalgia” or the
colonists’ yearning “for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (69).
Throughout the poem Whitman displays both a sentimentalism of an Orientalist for “Persia 139 and Arabia” and “the tender and junior Buddha” and celebrates the ongoing narrative of exploration (132; 136). But out of a generic imperialist nostalgia “The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect,” Whitman forges a very specific set of American regions whose relations would have been severely comprised by the Civil War—a conflict that goes entirely unmentioned in the poem (10). By paying homage to the imperialist past, and embracing the passage to India as a passage back in time, Whitman imagines the transcontinental railway as
“tying the Eastern to the Western sea” not so much as an object of technologically sophisticated infrastructure but as a way of linking of the present to the past (63). “To
Think of Time” establishes the past’s ability to forge a communal memory even more explicit. By recognizing the “law of the past,” Whitman imagines “Slow moving and black lines go ceaselessly over the earth,/Northerner goes carried and Southerner goes carried, and they on the Atlantic side and they on the Pacific,/ and they between, and all through the
Mississippi country, and all over the earth” (87-89). In this way, Whitman’s nostalgia for the way the Civil War made these soldiers into “heroes” becomes the mechanism for mending sectional tensions(“Time” 90). For Whitman, it is their collective death and heroism brought “the Atlantic” side and “the Pacific” and the regions in “between” together.
Whitman, in other words, used nostalgia not to retreat from the economic and social unrest of the Gilded Age but to “project the history of the future” in terms that mollified sectional and economic tensions (“Historian” 7). Given the ambiguous nature of this nostalgic episode at the end of Whitman’s life, however, his nostalgia could be readily appropriated by Andrew Carnegie in his Triumphant Democracy (1886) and the anarchist
Emma Goldman alike. However, this appropriation became in no small part possible because of the way Whitman created a reservoir of nostalgia from which these figures could draw from in order to legitimate their own competing social and political philosophies as 140
restorations rather than as revolutions. I maintain, in other words, that it is the nostalgic
Whitman rather than the Whitman who contends, in Alan Trachtenberg’s words, that “a
future already awaits and impinges upon the present” who underwrites what a wide range of
critics have deemed Whitman’s visionary politics (“Visionary” 24).97 The “aesthetic
democracy” in Whitman’s work is synonymous with what we might refer to as his nostalgic
democracy (Frank 402). But in order for this nostalgia to be mobilized in the service of a
particular cause, writers like Hamlin Garland would have to provide it with a narrative
structure and a clear mode of ideological implication.
Putting the Past Out to Pasture: Nostalgia in Garland’s Mutualist Imagination
“Among the Corn-Rows,” a short story appearing in Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled
Roads (1891), opens with a telling dialogue between homesteader Rob Rodemaker and
Seagraves, a local newspaper editor. At one point during their exchange, Rodemaker
explains why he left his native Waupac County in Wisconsin to settle further west in the
Dakota Territory: “We fellers workin’ out back there got more ’n’ more like hands, an’ less
like human beings. Y’ know, Waupac is a kind of summer resort, and the people that use’ t’
come in summers looked down on us cusses in the fields an’ shops. I couldn’t stand it”
(Main 92). Rodemaker, in other words, complains that as Waupac became more of a tourist
destination for urban affluent visitors to indulge their pastoral fantasies, it also transformed
into a place of agricultural peonage. For the tourists, the farmers became just part of the
scenery—reified synecdochally as mere “hands” for the visitors to gaze at like “the cussed
European aristocracy” looked upon their peasants (Main 92). At moments like this one in
the text, Rodemaker alludes to the clashing perceptions of the rural region—the Middle
97 See especially Trachtenberg, “Whtiman’s Visionary Politics” (1995) and Charles Molesworth, “Whitman’s Political Vision” (1992). 141
West specifically—that framed the debate over the status of regions and regional writing
both in the 1890s and in contemporary discussions over the form. Rodemaker’s observation
raises the question: is regional writing fundamentally a toursitic genre that nostalgically
transforms places into imaginatively “possessible property” for the leisure class, as Richard
H. Brodhead has influentially argued, or can it instead serve the economic and cultural interests of the marginalized people that inhabit these spaces (Cultures 133)? The question
this passage seizes upon runs through nearly all of the short stories published in Main-
Travelled Roads.
Such a question, however, has implications that extend well beyond the field of
American regionalism. Regional writing, and Garland’s writing in particular, became a genre
through which turn-of-the-century readers could contemplate the relationship between time
and space and between history and form. Contemporary commentators have often likened
regional writing to ethnography for this reason, suggesting that “the process of arriving at
the region entails a backward movement” to “nostalgically charged spaces” (Foote 59).
Regionalism, when read from this perspective, granted its nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century urban readers what Johannes Fabian refers to as an “allochronic” perspective
whereby the observer inhabits a time distinct from the object or site of observation (37). By
imaginatively moving from the city to the American countryside, the regional reader moves
in space as well as back in time. But while the leisure class may “‘deny’” rural regions’
“coevalness” by casting it as a pre-industrial agrarian space, Garland continually uses
characters like Rodemaker to affirm the Middle West as a region coterminous with the rest
of the nation (Fabian 32). For this reason, previous commentary on Garland has
underscored these moments, drawing upon them to distinguish him from other late 142
nineteenth-century regional and local color writers.98 Responding to the local color writing that unabashedly trafficked in pastoral and idyllic portrayals of lost rural worlds to pawn them off to urban readers, Garland conversely casts the rural as a space of “toil” where “the
poor and wary predominate” (Main n.pag.). Consistent with his late nineteenth-century
Populist political education, so this account goes, Garland “rejects nostalgia” for the past
(Bramen 145).
Contrary to this prevailing view, I argue that Garland actually embraces nostalgia in
his short fiction and enlists it in the service of his Populist project. Garland knew that
Populism had a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to nostalgia. On the one hand,
nostalgia could operate ideologically by masking the industrialization of rural regions and by
temporally alienating these spaces and their inhabitants from the urban Northeast. On the
other hand, the Populists often displayed their own nostalgia for Jeffersonian agrarianism,
which they used to decry the roles that corporate monopolization and commercial farming
played in eroding this ideal. Addressing this ambivalence and the Populists’ seemingly
contradictory attitudes towards nostalgia, Garland maps out metacritically the conventional
concept and emplotment of nostalgia in Main-Travelled Roads. After establishing the features
of nostalgia’s conventional conceptualization in the 1890s, he proceeds to transform the
concept from an affect into an aesthetic practice that creates a mutualist imagination that
serves the Populist political project.99 Rather than sating the consumptive desires of the
vacationing leisure class, this form of mutualist nostalgia produces a shared collective
memory of the past that could bring together a range of seemingly discrete groups such as
98 See Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (1993) 139-141. 99 “Mutualism” was the concept appropriated by the Populists themselves to describe their process of uniting disparate workers from various sectors of the economy under one single political banner. 143
rural farming associations and urban labor organizations.100 In this way, Garland’s use of
nostalgia overcomes aesthetically what the Populists sought to overcome politically: the
“division and opposition of city and country, industry and agriculture,” which Raymond
Williams insists “developed under [capitalism] to an extraordinary and transforming degree”
(304). 101 Finally, Garland also seizes upon what Svetlana Boym describes as nostalgia’s
“‘democratic’” character by demonstrating that everyone can potentially participate in the
aesthetics of nostalgia (5). This democratic dimension of nostalgia is crucial for Garland as
he believed the aesthetic served as an arena in which the problem of politics could be
examined. In other words, while most previous commentators insist that Garland could not
reconcile his politics with his aesthetics, I maintain that his use of nostalgia wed these two
commitments together and enabled him to create a collective memory of the past capable of
serving the aims of the Populist political movement.102
By carrying out this project in his short fiction and critical essays, Garland invented a
form of nostalgic aesthetics that the New Regionalists of the 1920s and 30s would continue
to modify and draw upon.103 Accordingly, Garland’s short fiction challenges us to reevaluate
our understanding of the relation between regionalism and nostalgia, its contribution to later
forms of modernism, and the longstanding assumption that modernity and nostalgia
represent two contrary modes of temporality.104
100 See Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism (1992) 73. 101 For a different but astute of reading of Garland’s aesthetics, see Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004) 65-78. 102 For variations of this argument, which privilege either Garland’s politics or his aesthetics over the other, see the following: Brodhead 139-141; Bill Brown, “The Popular, the Populist, and the Populace—Locating Hamlin Garland in the Politics of Culture” 89-110; Foote 38-58; Cheryl Temple Herr, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies (1996) 90-95; and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (1950) 244-49. 103 A number of early twentieth-century authors writing during the interwar period were indirectly or directly tied to the New Regionalism, including Mary Austin, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. 104 For a recent articulation of this view, see Agacinski, Time Passing (2003). 144
Hamlin Garland’s interest in nostalgia stems in large part from his struggle to suture
his political beliefs to a particular philosophy of aesthetics. Garland has always held a
tenuous place within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature.
William Dean Howells, though a supporter of his work, felt Garland’s sketches of
Midwestern life fell short of perfection. In particular, Howells faulted Garland for always producing prose that displayed “a certain harshness and bluntness” (4).105 And yet some of
Garland’s other contemporaries complained that his stories lacked historical and empirical
veridicality because they simplified life on the prairie. Both of these criticisms, while
seemingly contradictory, stem in part from Garland’s attempt to adhere to his own
idiosyncratic theory of literature that conformed neither to the generic expectations of
American literary realism nor naturalism. He assigned the rather inelegant label of
“veritism” to his theory of literary representation, and while the label never caught on, the
substance of this aesthetic theory to some degree did. To a great extent, veritism was really
the product of Garland’s study of two books on two very different subjects: Progress and
Poverty (1879) by the Spenserian economist Henry George and Aesthetics (1879) by Eugène
Véron.106 George’s book converted Garland to the cause of Populism, a political movement
comprised of a loose alliance of trade associations and third political parties calling for
national economic reform to rescue farmers and wage laborers in the South and Midwest
from lives of poverty. Garland essentially wed this economic outlook to Véron’s aesthetic
theory, which railed against the kind of realism endorsed by Howells. Véron defined
aesthetics in a manner that recovered the term’s original eighteenth-century meaning, as the
105 This essay appears as the introduction to the later editions of Main-Travelled Roads, including the University of Nebraska Press edition cited in this chapter. 106 While he received some formal schooling from a local seminary in Iowa, Hamlin Garland was largely an autodidact who, because he could not afford a university education, acquired his knowledge of both George’s and Véron’s work during the course of his self-guided study at the Boston Public Library. For more information on Garland’s early intellectual development and literary career, see Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (1960). 145
study of “sensations and perceptions” (95). In Aesthetics, he also argued that literature ought
to produce a highly individuated “vivid impression—whether moral, intellectual, or physical”
instead of a mere imitation that only aspired to represent the world with empirical accuracy
(108). Synthesizing George’s economics with Véron’s aesthetics, Garland developed his own
theory of literary composition—in contradistinction to Howells’s—that placed value on
impressionistic and regional literature because these works did not subsume the
particularities of the region under the universalizing umbrella of the nation. Consequently,
veritism became a way for him to challenge the economic and literary supremacy of the
metropolitan Northeast.107
Having briefly sketched out Garland’s aesthetic and political thought, we can
consider how these ideas shaped his use of nostalgia and bear upon his prose. Towards the
end of one of these stories, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” the narrator makes a declaration
echoed throughout most of Main-Travelled Roads: “there is no despair so deep as the despair of a homeless man or woman” (Main 141). To varying degrees, many of Garland’s protagonists find themselves in a state of perpetual homelessness, which inevitably produces homesickness or a nostalgic desire to return home. While homelessness and homesickness may be universal conditions for Garland’s characters, they do not ever assume the transcendental status that they would just decades later in the theoretical work of Georg
Lukács.108 Homesickness for Garland’s characters, at least initially, is a corporeal rather than a transcendental condition. Most of Garland’s work accordingly begins with passages that recall nostalgia’s psychiatric designation by introducing characters longing to be at home.
107 For a nuanced analysis of Garland’s critique of Northeastern literary hegemony, see Edward Watts, An American Colony (2002), 202-215. 108 See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1971). 146
No story in the collection better exemplifies this aspect of Garland’s fiction than
“The Return of the Private.” Set in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, this short
narrative describes the return of an army private, Edward Smith, to his farmhouse in rural
Wisconsin. The story is doubly nostalgic insofar as it both portrays the Midwest before the
economic upheavals of the late nineteenth century and revolves around a homesick
solider—the exemplary sufferer of nostalgia. Throughout the narrative Smith displays many
of the hallmark “symptoms” of nostalgia. At the opening of the story, Garland stresses that
Smith suffers from “a sickness at heart” when he opines on “the joy of homecoming” (Main
114). Later in the story he also succumbs to a fit of involuntary reverie when he returns to
his farmhouse. The narrative describes the solider as becoming “lost in a dream” as “his
wide, hungry eyes devour the [pastoral] scene” around him (Main 126). Other stories
contain similar episodes—both Will Hannen in “The Branch Road” and Howard McLane in
“Up the Coulee” become “seized” by “a thought” of their old Midwestern homes, expecting at first their old homes to have remained unchanged (Main 63).109 In both of these stories,
we get a snapshot of the concept of nostalgia operating within the two modalities of time
and space. While the protagonists sate their spatial nostalgic desires for home by returning
to the Midwest, they also yearn to return to an earlier point in time. And in “God’s
Raven’s,” spatial nostalgia becomes almost completely eclipsed by temporal nostalgia when a
couple relocates from Chicago to Wisconsin in the hopes of finding a pre-industrial oasis.
That nostalgia functions both spatially and temporally in Garland’s work aligns his understanding of nostalgia—an understanding shared by his contemporaries—with the
109 Following the established critical practice, I use Garland’s original 1891 spelling of the story, “Up the Coulee,” even though in later editions he changed it to “Up the Coolly.” 147
disciplinary project of ethnography.110 Nearly all of Garland’s protagonists initially suffer
from a form of nostalgia that leads them to deny coevalness to their rural birthplaces, fixing
these spaces at a certain moment in time. The conceptual collusion between ethnography
and nostalgia has occupied a central place in the critiques of anthropology performed by
Fabian and Rosaldo.111 Those critical of regionalism, in fact, have largely used these critiques
as a way to align regionalism’s use of nostalgia with the imperialist project of ethnography.
Consequently, laudatory readings of Garland rush to point out that he rebukes these
nostalgic moments by representing the rural as a place of “Herculean toil” (Main 139). But
to dismiss these moments of nostalgia from the text is to ignore, somewhat arbitrarily, the
aesthetic dimension of Garland’s stories by focusing solely on his political commitments.
Such an approach to his work inadvertently also simplifies his use of aesthetics—nostalgia
especially—as a way to complicate and create politically inflected communities. True to his
own idiosyncratic veritism, Garland introduces and sustains multiple narrative perspectives,
declining to privilege any single narrative consciousness. By creating these fictive constructs,
he challenges the idea of a uniform national temporality that binds the nation together as
one imagined community. It is precisely nostalgia’s potential to create temporal ruptures and
discontinuities that Garland explores in order to fuse together what at once might seem like
divergent communities and points of perspective. But in order to arrive at a place where we
can appreciate the way Garland complicates national time, we must first understand how he
treats nostalgia as a mode of emplotment rather than solely as an affective condition.
110 For example, several critics have aligned Sarah Orne Jewett’s brand of regional writing with the project of ethnography. See June Howard, ed., New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs (1994); and Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (2003) 81-135. 111 See Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (1989) 68-87. In Chapter Two, by contrast, I argue Ruiz de Burton does depict nostalgia as an imperialistic affect in terms not unlike Rosaldo’s. 148
Nostalgia generally—and specifically in the case of regionalism—often gets
automatically wed to a conservative or retrogressive ideology, yet Garland’s work demonstrates that nostalgia can function as a pliable narrative readily coupled with a range of ideological or political perspectives.112 For this reason, Hayden White’s analysis of
nineteenth-century historiography can function as an especially useful lens through which to
read Garland’s work and late nineteenth-century nostalgia more broadly. Garland implicitly
differentiates what White would refer to as the mode of emplotment, or the “kind of story”
that nostalgic narratives tell, from their mode of ideological implication (7). White can
provide us with a useful problematic through which to arrive at an understanding of the
nostalgic mode of emplotment even though he did not outline this specific mode in his own
study. By drawing upon White’s general analytic framework, we can appreciate how
Garland’s stories define existing nostalgic modes in order to re-imagine them in ways that
serve the aesthetic and political aims of his fiction.
Most of the pieces in Main-Travelled Roads operate within a nostalgic narrative
structure, but the story that executes Garland’s nostalgic mode of emplotment most vividly
is “Up the Coulee.” This story chronicles the return of Howard McLane, an affluent
cosmopolitan actor now living in New York, to his native Wisconsin. Although he blithely
expects to reunite with his family and reacquaint himself with the beauties of his boyhood
home, Howard arrives in Wisconsin to find his brother Grant and their mother in a
downtrodden condition from the pressures of Midwestern farm life. Due to financial
difficulties, they have had to sell their old farmhouse and the adjoining farmland in order to
make ends meet. Much of the unfolding story revolves around the conflicting views of the
prairie as exemplified by Howard, who wistfully admires the “majesty” and “breadth” of the
112 See Lasch 82-119. 149
surrounding landscape, and Grant, who views the land as a site of unrelenting toil (Main 45).
But rather than simply dismissing Howard’s perspective as obtuse and empirically unsound,
the story always remains enclosed within a nostalgic framework that engages both
perspectives dialogically.
“Up the Coulee” immediately envelops the narrative nostalgically by depicting its
affective manifestation and by anchoring this affect to a particular narrative structure. The
story opens with Howard on board a train headed west across the state of Wisconsin. As he
gazes out across the “fields of barley being reaped,” he allows his “newspaper to fall on his
lap” (Main 45). In the succeeding sentences, the scenery occupies much of the description,
looming larger than Howard does in the story. The landscape thus appears more active and invested with greater agency than Howard does who can only passively drop his newspaper—the metonym for the empty, calendrical time of the nation—and marvel at the rural world around him.113 As the uniform temporality of the nation escapes Howard’s grasp, his mind then races “ahead of the train to the little town, far on toward the
Mississippi, where he had spent his youth” (Main 45). Instances such as this one, while entailing at least a momentary denial of coevalness, establish the protagonist’s relationship to the surrounding environment. In this case, the individual becomes blissfully lost in and ultimately overpowered by the landscape in a moment of sweet surrender. Unlike White’s
Romantic mode of emplotment, which contains characters who transcend their environment, Garland’s nostalgic mode of emplotment introduces a protagonist who
embraces the sensory world around him.
113 The connection between the nation and Walter Benjamin’s idea of calendrical or “‘homogenous, empty time’” is of course a crucial part of Benedict Anderson’s highly influential account of nationalism in Imagined Communities (2006) 24-36. 150
Even as the beauty of the countryside transports Howard nostalgically backwards to
his childhood, the narrative stops short of depicting Wisconsin as a bucolic paradise,
recognizing even in these nostalgic episodes that people work the land. In this way, the
nostalgic mode of emplotment resembles what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the idyllic mode.
According to Bakhtin, the agricultural idyll departs from “conventional pastoral” depictions
of the rural as a region unburdened by work by drawing “upon the real life of the agricultural
laborer” (226). This idyllic dimension of the story deserves mention because even Garland’s
more conventional nostalgia still imagines the rural as a place of production.114 Farming, in
this idyllic sense, remains to varying degrees “idealized and sublimated” nonetheless; the
barley may be reaped, but the hardship of harvesting goes unnoted at least initially (Bakhtin
227). Such idyllic moments become all the more reinforced by Howard’s repeated
comparisons of the surrounding landscapes to the paintings of Jean-Francios Millet, known
for his exalted portrayals of laboring French peasants in works like The Gleaners (1857). In
these opening paragraphs, Garland essentially establishes the traditional emplotment of
conventional nostalgia: the protagonist, weary of the frenetic and atomized life of the city,
returns to his idyllic homeland where he yearns to immerse himself in the community and
natural beauty of the rural. What begins as a process of reflection actually becomes in the
end the enactment of a plot resembling what Boym describes as conventional restorative nostalgia because the protagonist returns and seeks to restore his childhood home physically.
But while the conventional nostalgic plot would chronicle the journey home and
terminate at the point of restoration, Garland’s story and enlistment of nostalgia has only
just begun. As soon as Howard reaches his destination, the story begins reinventing the
conventional mode of nostalgic emplotment. When Howard pulls into the train station,
114 For an extended account of Garland’s and regionalism’s engagement with producerism, see Glazener 189- 228. 151
Garland disrupts the story’s earlier allochronic tendencies. Upon exiting the train, Howard observes some idlers on the platform and likens them to those “standing before the
Brooklyn Bridge,” reaffirming the coevalness of the urban and rural (Main 46). The idyll of
the previous paragraphs also gives way to a starker depiction of modern agricultural life.
Surveying the “squalid” town’s main street, he finds the road lined by “two rows of the usual
village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty” (Main 46). Such moments seem to
confirm established readings of Garland that suggest he sets out to sabotage any misguided
and naïve nostalgic desire from the onset, but this depiction immediately becomes eclipsed
by Howard’s renewed nostalgic appreciation of the surrounding bluffs. This contentious
oscillation from ugly squalor to natural beauty and from the coeval to the allochronic is
precisely what defines Garland’s own brand of nostalgic emplotment.
The discrepancy between Howard’s nostalgic conception of the region and his
brother Grant’s cynical resignation becomes acutely apparent when Howard marches out to
help his brother bail hay. Before reaching his brother and the other farmhands, he pauses to
admire “the shaven slopes of the hill” and the animals feeding upon them and concludes
that “there was something immemorial in the sunny slopes dotted with red and brown and
gray cattle” (Main 60). Time once again stands still for Howard as he indulges in the
aesthetic and nostalgic pleasures of the countryside. His pleasure becomes instantly
diminished when he realizes that “Grant would ignore it all,” suggesting that Howard knows
that the farmers cannot share in his appreciation of the landscape at least for the present moment (Main 60). Howard’s distance from his brother becomes further accentuated when
Grant finds his clothing ostentatious. Donning what he refers to as his working
“regimentals,” Howard receives a rebuke for wearing such expensive clothing in the fields
(Main 61). This rebuff leads to a series of invidious comparisons and ultimately Howard’s 152
dismissal from the scene of work. Grant expresses his disbelief that people in New York
“lay around . . . and smoke and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires” while “the country’s goin’ to hell” (Main 62). Yet instead of abandoning the nostalgic emplotment entirely, the story once again depicts Howard securing solace in the “vast fleckless space above,” escaping from his brother’s indictments and the “mental unrest of a great city” when he nostalgically stumbles upon “an old road which he used to travel when a boy” (Main 63).
Following this road to its end, Howard finds his old boyhood house now occupied by
German immigrants. Upon seeing it, he immediately becomes overwhelmed by a “swarm of
memories,” feeling “sick to the heart” as he yearns “to be a boy again” (Main 65). The
emotional force of this experience affects him so greatly that Garland explains “he was like a
man from whom all motives had been withdrawn” (Main 65). This moment, which recalls
nostalgia’s manifestation as a mental disease that caused “weeping, sighing, or groaning”
along with immobility or “paralysis,” is a crucial one in the story for Garland’s larger project
(Bucknell and Tuke 162).
By portraying Howard’s mental breakdown as one incited by nostalgia, Garland tests
the limits of nostalgia both as an affect and as a mode of emplotment. Essentially, he sets
out to answer the following question: can nostalgia be used progressively in a transformative manner, or must it always result in the deprivation of agency and the production of
regressive escapism? This question surfaces in various forms throughout his work, especially
in the essays he composed for Crumbling Idols (1894).115 In the case of “Up the Coulee,”
Howard’s loss of motive initially indicates that he has become stuck in the past, suggesting
115 In this collection, Garland repeatedly looks to preceding artists and writers for inspiration even while simultaneously chiding any writer who remains too entranced by the past. Throughout Crumbling Idols Garland appears to search for a balance between what T.S. Eliot would later famously refer to as tradition and the individual talent. The title of Garland’s work itself aspires to this kind of balance; his idols may be crumbling, but they ruinously haunt the present nonetheless. 153 that nostalgia cannot stimulate a transformative imagination that could serve the aims of
Garland’s political and aesthetic projects. But this moment proves to be a transitory one, and this episode of nostalgic reverie actually produces a newfound desire “to see his mother back in the old house, with the fireplace restored” (Main 65). Howard’s nostalgic experience thus becomes a moment of anagnorisis for him and for the conceptualization of nostalgia itself; rather than incapacitating him, his nostalgia inspires him to act in the hopes of restoring his boyhood home and his family’s financial security in the process. In this way,
Garland—in manner somewhat akin to Whitman—imagines nostalgia as an affect and mode of emplotment capable of solidifying political commitments in the name of restoring the past.
From the moment Howard experiences this nostalgic episode forward, nostalgia— imagined not just as the futile yearning for an irrecoverable past but as a satiable longing to restore the past to improve the conditions of the present—propels the story forward. The conflict of perceptions between Howard and Grant persists, but other contrasts become apparent. Although Howard’s nostalgia transforms him into an agent, making plans to purchase the old home, Grant remains fixed in place and morosely obsessed with his brother’s previous unwillingness to support their family economically. Grant also remains a prisoner of his condition, complaining at one point in racially charged terms that “this cattle raisin’ and butter-makin’ makes a nigger of a man” (Main 76). Grant, in other words, seems caught within a captivity narrative, or some “great tragic poem,” while Howard’s “memories of harvest moons, of melon-feasts, and of clear, cold winter nights” harden his resolve to restore his family to their old home (Main 77).
In addition to empowering Howard with agency, nostalgia also seems capable of synthesizing Garland’s aesthetic and political projects. Véron railed against what he regarded 154 as “the realistic theory” that “reduces the artist to the condition of a mere copyist,” and he called for a more “personal” or impressionistic art in place of realism (xxiii). As we have already witnessed in stories from Main-Travelled Roads, Véron’s imperative that art impressionistically depict multiple and relative points of view guides much of Garland’s early fictional and critical work. Garland referred to his aesthetic appropriation of Véron as
“veritism,” but he also used the more common label “impressionism” interchangeably with his own neologism in his critical essays. Garland stressed that what distinguished veritism from both “spectacular” and more imitative forms of art was that it would “deal with the people and their home dramas, their loves and their ambitions” (Crumbling 27). The aim of the veritist, moreover, was to capture “the deepening of social contrasts” by recording the
“drama” of “a great heterogeneous, shifting, brave population” (Crumbling 15). By portraying
Howard’s and Grant’s conflicting perspectives and sets of interests, Garland follows the dictates of his own theory of fiction. And by highlighting the “social contrasts” and the economic depravation of the rural Midwest, he also serves the aims of his Populist politics.
Howard’s nostalgic impressions do more than simply exemplify his own personal perspective or illuminate the inequities that plague the American countryside. His wistful longing for the past also forges bonds between people and creates new forms of community.
Nostalgia, as a type of affect and a mode of representation, answers Garland’s own call for impressionistic writers to imagine “coming citizens” by calling to mind natural and nostalgic scenes as a way to create local and national communities (Crumbling 29). In addition to committing individual impressions to the page, the impressionist or veritist also had an obligation to bring these individuals into communion with one another. Hutcheson
Macaulay Posnett, a Classics and English professor whom Garland cites favorably in
Crumbling Idols, argued writers ought to compose works of fiction that seek to “reconcile” 155
rather than “take sides with either the individual or the social spirit” (371). Only by working
to expand the social spirit by fostering “sympathy beyond self” could Garland hope to both
champion individualism while also imagining alternate forms of community (Posnett 373).
Nostalgia, if left moored to its sentimental heritage, could help Garland align his aesthetic
theory with his political practice. Garland knew that in order to succeed, the Populists of the
1890s must accomplish a nearly insurmountable task—they had to unite several disparate
political organizations and factions, establish ties between different regions in the nation, and
surmount the social divisions between city and country. Ultimately, the Populist leadership
hoped that these various groups would rally under the single banner of the People’s Party.
In order to succeed, Populism would have to harness the already existing “movement
culture” that had driven existing forms of agrarian and urban laborer mutualism by
reconciling individual with communal interests in much the same manner that Garland
would work towards this reconciliation in his fiction.116
Beginning in the 1870s, as the historian Michael McGerr writes, farmers “had long
cooperated with one another through a variety of formal and informal arrangements” that
eventually led to the establishment of “mutual-benefit associations” like the Grange
movement and later the Farmer’s Alliance (25). Populists hoped to fuse these preexisting
forms of mutualism in the country with the collectivism of workers’ groups and trade
unions, like the Knights of Labor, in the city to create a nationally viable political force.
Ignatius Donnelly, nostalgically gesturing back to the tradition of the U.S. Revolution,
outlined this project in his preamble to the Populist Party platform that he presented first on
the anniversary of George Washington’s birth and then again on July 4, 1892 at the People’s
Party convention. In this preamble, Donnelly disclosed the ambitions of his party, which
116 For more on the movement culture that propelled Populism, see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: (1978) 20-54. 156 sought to bring about a “permanent and perpetual” union of the rural and urban “labor forces of the United States” by calling for electoral reforms, the nationalization of transportation and communication infrastructure, and the dismantlement of land and industrial monopolies (63). For his part, Garland toured the country in the 1890s to preach the gospel of Populism, crusading specifically on behalf of George’s idea of a single tax.117
He even explicitly wrote about this political movement in his fiction, notably in his novel A
Spoil of Office (1892). But in his short fiction, he generally practiced a subtler brand of imaginary mutualism by deploying the narrative and affective force of nostalgia.
In Garland’s short fiction, nostalgia fosters this mutualism in a variety of ways. In
“Up the Coulee,” we find that Howard’s nostalgia transcends a variety of barriers to social cohesion. When Howard, for example, encounters the German woman now occupying his old home, his display of emotion brought on by his homesickness bridges their language gap as she responds to him by uttering “some sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy” (Main 64). Throughout the rest of the story nostalgia works as a medium for establishing similar connections between Howard and different groups of people. During a social gathering, Howard and several local farmers listen to “old tunes” and folk music that nostalgically produce “a thousand associated memories” (Main 77). This melancholy music ultimately brings everyone together, prompting Howard’s realization “of the infinite tragedy of these lives which the world loves to call peaceful and pastoral” (Main 78). Such epiphanies seem to stimulate the emergence of a class or laboring consciousness by revealing to Howard and the reader “that the struggle for a place on this planet was eating the heart and soul out of men and women in the city, just as in the country” (Main 80). Thus, by
117 George believed that by placing a single tax on income derived from rent, the government could essentially render all land common property and redistribute wealth accordingly. While his ideas were never fully adopted by the People’s Party, Progress and Poverty became a national bestseller and spurred the establishment of several Single Tax Clubs. 157
reflecting upon a fantasy of a remote agrarian past that he shares with the local farmers,
Howard becomes aware that “suffering” is the “universal” condition of the laboring poor
(Main 81). And towards the close of the story, Howard’s and Grant’s fraternal relationship becomes rekindled when they both nostalgically recall their shared childhood experiences.
The bonds forged by nostalgia in “Up the Coulee” have their corollaries in much of
the rest of the fiction appearing in Main-Travelled Roads. In “Return of the Private,” the
charged political disputes that divided the Northern and Southern sections of the nation
become supplanted by far tamer regional or cultural differences. Rather than making any
mention of the debate over slavery and Popular Sovereignty, the characters in the story just
contrast—often humorously—the regional differences between Northern and Southern
wildlife and livestock. Private Edward Smith, the story’s protagonist, suffers from an intense
“sickness at heart” for his home, which produces new regional or sectional mutualisms and
antagonisms that speak more to the politics of the fin-de-siècle than the Reconstruction-era
politics of the story’s setting (Main 114). Edward now resents fighting “for an idea” that
compelled him to leave his family on their mortgaged farm “while the millionaire sent his
money to England” (Main 120). His return home has thus led him to realize that he now
faces “a still more hazardous future” than the “Southern march” he had previously
embarked upon (Main 129). The narrative then proceeds to stress the economic differences
that divide the rural Midwestern farmer from the wealthy New York millionaire; the
differences between the South and the Midwest now seem almost negligible. Consequently,
Garland deploys this mutualist mode of nostalgia violently to erase the history of slavery in
order to imagine his own kind of reconstruction—one stressing that the economic
similarities between the poor whites in the Midwest and the South extend back into the past.
It is precisely this kind of imaginary past and regional similarity that the 1890s Populists 158 would draw upon in order to forge their political alliances between these regions. In this way, Garland’s nostalgia works reflectively by imagining a past that never could have existed in order to legitimate his political project in restorative terms. Such a nostalgic past then reenlists a sentimental aesthetics in an attempt to forge sympathetic bonds between regions.
Very similar bonds are forged between groups in “A Branch Road” and “God’s
Ravens,” the particulars of which we need not delve into except to underscore that in almost all of Garland’s stories he uses nostalgia to emphasize the mutual interests and shared histories that bind various classes, regions, and ethnicities together. In this way, Garland demonstrates that nostalgia can be paired with a Populist or mutualist mode of ideological implication rather than being inextricably linked to conservative ideologies or the consumer demand for regional souvenirs. Of course the racially objectionable aspects of Garland’s imaginative mutualism should not be overlooked. He often exoticizes the German and
Scandinavian immigrants that populate his stories and casts them as a threat to “American” farmers. His Midwestern landscape is also completely devoid of American Indians even though several violent conflicts broke out between American forces and Midwestern tribes throughout the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. And the oblique reference to slavery as an incidental “idea” in “The Return of the Private” is used to suggest that the Civil War pitted poor whites against one another in the name of a dubious cause.118 In these ways, nostalgia creates certain social bonds only by abandoning others through a process that
Nicholas Dames regards as nostalgia’s “specific forms of forgetting” (7). But too often nostalgia and amnesia become conflated into a single concept, casting nostalgia solely as a form of memory loss. In Garland’s fiction, however, nostalgia repeatedly and compulsively reproduces memories. And while nostalgia recalls the past selectively, it is its ability to
118 To be fair to Garland, he did champion the rights of women, American Indians and blacks in many of his political writings. For example, see Garland’s “A New Declaration of Rights” (1891). 159
produce social cohesion through collective and individual memory that gives it cultural and
aesthetic power.
Garland’s use of nostalgia, which imaginatively brings different groups of individuals
together in the name of a common cause, is also figuratively embodied by Main-Travelled
Roads’ guiding chronotope—the road. Among the various chronotopes that Bakhtin
describes, the road figures prominently as the one most closely tied to the “motif of meeting
and such motifs as painting, escape, acquisition, loss, marriage, and so forth” (98). Certainly,
Garland’s work draws upon all of these motifs, dwelling especially on the motif of loss.
Another striking characteristic of this chronotope germane to the study of nostalgia and
Garland’s fiction is the way that the road collapses time and space in an especially crystallized fashion. Bakhtin explains: “on the road . . ., the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people—representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages—intersect at one spatial and temporal point,” facilitating “the collapse of social distances”
(243). Garland’s epigraph to his collection of short fiction resonates with Bakhtin’s characterization of the road chronotope by depicting the main-travelled road as one
“traversed by many classes of people” (Main n.pag.). As both Bakhtin and Garland describe it, the road mimics the chronotopic dimensions of nostalgia because nostalgia itself telescopes social distances and operates within the dual modalities of time and space. But, in light of Fabian’s account of the way that nostalgia and anthropology generally represent different cultures through a denial of coevalness, nostalgia’s resemblance to the road chronotope raises two related questions. If nostalgia forges connections between divergent groups of people by eliminating social distance in a chronotopic manner by appealing to a shared but lost past, then does it just substitute spatial distance and difference for temporal distance and difference? And does Garland, despite leveling persistent diatribes against 160
“superficial” portrayals of the rural by the “tourist or reporter,” inescapably petrify these same rural communities by anchoring them to a lost—even if less ideal—past (Crumbling 15)?
These questions, which bear significantly upon developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetics and culture, cannot be easily answered. The continuing debate over the role of nostalgia at the turn of the century and the various types of art associated with it—from local color writing to Art Nouveau—is also as much a debate over the status of aesthetics, historiography, and the emerging discipline of anthropology during this period.119 Without getting too mired in this complex patchwork of discourses, I want to establish how Garland attempted to address nostalgia’s relationship to space and time as well as to history and political progress to forge a populist imagination. A poignant example of his engagement with this set of questions can once again be found in “Up the Coulee.”
Having finally won Grant’s affection by calling to mind their shared memories,
Howard nonetheless cannot successfully persuade his brother to allow him to restore the old farmhouse and accompanying acreage. Grant, like many of his fellow farmers, cannot imagine an alternative to the present economically and socially unjust relations of production; he and his neighbors are “discontented, yet hardly daring to acknowledge it” or willing to call for change (Main 75). This failure of political imagination means that they can lay no claim to agency. For this reason, Garland concludes the story by depicting an important and final contrast between the two brothers. Even though they embrace one another as brothers again, they find themselves speechlessly starring at one another:
The two men stood there, face to face, hands clasped, the one fair-skinned,
full-lipped, handsome in his neat suit; the other tragic, sombre in his softened
mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch face bronzed with sun and scarred with
119 One of the most authoritative accounts of these myriad discussions and their relationship to modernity remains T.J. Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace (1983). 161
wrinkles that had histories, like sabre-cuts on a veteran, the record of his
battles. (Main 87)
Separated by a semi-colon, the two brothers fall just short of achieving a complete reconciliation. Recognizing one another, they share the same space but at first glance appear temporally non-synchronous. Donning a fashionable suit, Howard occupies an ephemeral and constantly changing present—what Agacinski would see as the temporality of modernity—while Grant appears as a racialized bronzed Scotchman who becomes the bearer of “histories.” Such a dichotomy is not an easy one to reconcile. While some commentators read this paragraph as a fundamentally and indisputably ambiguous one that endorses neither Howard’s nor Grant’s point of view, Garland is not really presenting the reader with a choice but with a dialectic.120 The semi-colon in this passage functions as a copula as much as it punctuates their separation. Howard, as the story’s only character capable of aesthetic appreciation, initially suffers from a lack of historical consciousness;
Grant’s face, by contrast is noticeably scarred. Scars, which have often been associated with memory as a form of mnemotechnics, provide him with histories denied to his brother. That
Grant’s face possesses these histories, however, does not fix him temporally. Instead they become recognizable—even if not readable—to his brother Howard, becoming the basis for a call to action in the present. In this way, their temporalities converge and the allochronism that frames the first part of the story comes to an end. Grant emerges at this moment as a living repository of memory, a welcomed antidote to Howard’s persistent forgetfulness of rural toil. Consequently, rather than dividing them in an allochronic and anthropological manner, the story fuses—a word favored by Populists who described their own project of
120 See Foote 51-56. 162
political amalgamation as one of fusion—Howard’s and Grant’s timelines in this final
paragraph.
Nostalgia, for Garland, thus comes to function as a form of memory that works
aesthetically; one capable of negotiating and bridging the spatial and temporal relativity described in Garland’s short fiction and in the book that contributed to the Populists’ and his own political philosophy, George’s Progress and Poverty. But as much as Garland’s use of nostalgia allowed him to bridge these divides, it also exposed and responded to some of the shortcomings present in George’s work. In one of the more influential sections of the book,
“The Law of Human Progress,” George makes an anthropological assertion that resonates with Fabian’s critique of the discipline. Attempting to establish a universal understanding of history, he finds the persistence of “fixed, petrified civilizations” that “have no idea of human progress” vexing (481). He also maintains that many a civilization has regressed to a state of savagery or met an untimely downfall when it “lost even the memory of what their ancestors had done” (George 485). Within George’s own Malthusian and Spencerian understanding of history as a cyclical process of decline and fall, the possibility of agency seems rather restricted. For this reason, George describes himself somewhat oxymoronically as a kind of optimistic fatalist who repeatedly calls for reform and believes that, while limited, “the human will is an initiatory force” in the law of progress (George 561). But even though he devises a tax scheme and set of proposed economic policies, he concedes that not even his plans may be able to prevent the United States from slipping into a period of protracted decline. Such fatalistic views of history—theories of degeneration notably among them—were of course a dime a dozen in the 1890s and throughout the early twentieth century. And these theories had a direct and explicit literary corollary: naturalism. 163
Preferring his own veritist aesthetic, Garland only occasionally approaches
naturalism in his fiction when describing the toil that defines farm life. Given its
compatibility with George’s historical outlook, Garland’s refusal to embrace naturalism
seems even more remarkable when we consider that Véron praises “naturalism” for being
“always open to impressions of a realistic nature” (357-58). Garland, however, could not accept a form he regarded—rather simplistically—as one that preferred to “deal with crime and abnormalities” instead of “with the heroism of labor” and “the comradeship of men”
(Crumbling 28). By devising an alternative to naturalism, Garland departs from both George and Véron because a faithful adherence to them would deprive his characters and his political project of agency. Embedded within Garland fiction, in fact, lies an implicit critique of naturalism and what White might describe as the genre’s “mode of argument” (White 29).
In the remaining pages, I extend my examination of Garland’s use of nostalgia
beyond just its mode of emplotment and ideological alignment with Populist mutualism to
consider its mode of argument. Garland undermines the deterministic logic of naturalism by
anticipating one important dimension of early twentieth-century literary aesthetics. Through
this mode of argument Garland both solves the problem of agency present within George’s
historical and political thought and helps us begin to understand why many contemporary
literary and cultural critics continue to eschew nostalgia for its perceived “struggle against
history” and its aesthetic simplicity (Stewart 92).
“Up the Coulee” again sheds light upon Garland’s aesthetic project in this instance
by dramatizing the tension between two competing narratives—the naturalist and the
nostalgic. Despite their diverging perspectives and the dialectical contrast between them at
the end of the story, Howard and Grant share one very important characteristic—they both
seem inseparably linked to the environment. Grant, whose many histories gravely affect his 164
outlook, appears to be the embodiment of naturalist pessimism. Jennifer Fleissner succinctly
summarizes this prevailing view of naturalism as “threatening the very possibility of a human
agency that might alter history’s course” through its “immersion in its context” (38).121
Accordingly, naturalism conforms to a mode of historical argument White refers to as
contextualist, which explains events by placing them “within the ‘context’ of their
occurrence” through “synchronic representations of segments or sections of the process” of
these occurrences (18-19). Contextualism, which also partly draws upon the mechanistic
mode of argumentation, and naturalism alike view context—be it historical or
environmental—in deterministic terms that invariably limit or completely eliminate the
possibility of human agency. Garland explores the challenges this mode of deterministic
argumentation poses to the Populist project repeatedly in his fiction by introducing
pessimistic characters, like Grant, contained by it. Adhering to a mode of contextualist
argumentation or naturalist logic, Grant rejects Howard’s offer of help because he deems
himself “‘a dead failure,’” insisting that “‘life’s a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us’” (Main
87). To repel the force of such a fatalistic outlook, Garland develops his use of nostalgia to
render it capable of accomplishing more than just forging mutualist, but possibly ineffectual, bonds between different groups of people.
Nostalgia, in Garland’s work, ultimately challenges the logic of naturalism not by
imagining a position outside context so much as imagining a different relationship to this
context. Howard, just as much as his brother, remains tied to his environment but in a
nostalgic instead of a naturalistic sense. Speaking to his brother, he readily acknowledges
that “‘circumstances made me and crushed you’” (Main 86). As demonstrated previously,
Howard habitually becomes engrossed and inspired by the natural landscape surrounding
121 Fleissner, however, uses the notion of “compulsion” to call these previous studies of naturalism into question in ways that are not altogether incompatible with my account of nostalgia. 165
him. Unlike Grant, who responds only with “dead silence” when his brother brings up any
“idea of beauty,” Howard nostalgically aestheticizes the environment in a way that empowers him by altering his relationship to his surroundings. His nostalgia changes his perception of the world around him, enabling him to imagine alternatives to the status quo. And as we also witnessed earlier, nostalgia’s capability to foster a spirit of mutualism among previously unaligned groups of people relies upon a reinvention of the past. Nostalgia, for Garland then, displays what Boym would describe as the reflective and restorative threads of nostalgia. Howard’s reflections upon the past, in fact, constitute the basis for a restorative or revolutionary imperative to change the present. It is in precisely this way that the terms of
Sylviane Agacinski’s critique of nostalgia can also help us further understand how Garland fuses the ephemeral nature of modernity to a nostalgic way of understanding the past.
Nostalgia, for Garland, looks backward not to demonstrate that the past determines the present but to demonstrate that the present defines the past.
By subjecting the past to the exigencies of the present, Garland’s nostalgia provides
his characters with an historical agency stemming not from their ability to transcend their
condition, but from their capacity to engage their contexts or culture immanently from
within. Nostalgia, through its creation of shared collective memories that serve the present,
enacts an aesthetics that views the capacity for freedom and the capacity to appreciate beauty
as one and the same. But unlike other forms of aesthetics, which lend themselves to the
establishment of hierarchies of sociological distinction, Garland’s nostalgia remains
democratically accessible to all. Grant, in “Up the Coulee,” may have resigned himself to the
misery of his condition, but Garland suggests in other stories that all of his characters have
the potential to experience nostalgia. Julia Peterson in “Among the Corn-Rows,” for
example, finds herself in a state of “bondage” to her parents until she has an aesthetic 166 experience (Main 98). Although she cannot initially imagine escaping her parents’ farm, she begins to picture her emancipation shortly after allowing “the beauty” of the Midwestern
“scene” to overcome her (Main 99). Shortly after this experience, she encounters a childhood friend, Rob Rodemaker, whom she recalls with nostalgic fondness. Their encounter and their nostalgic memories for one another become the pretext for their eventual—even if less than romantic—elopement. What instances like this one in Main-
Travelled Roads suggest is that even uneducated and impoverished characters like Julia all have at least a latent capacity for aesthetic and nostalgic experience. And it is this experience, rather than the mere fact of their conditions, that enables these characters to imagine alternatives to their misery.
* * *
Garland’s understanding of nostalgia and aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and history intersects with the thought of some of his contemporaries. Many other Populists also looked backward nostalgically as a way to re-imagine the present and future. Edward Bellamy’s utopic novel, Looking Backward (1888), comes immediately to mind as an example of the way Populist thinkers even imagined the future through the act of a backward glance towards an imaginary past. And Ignatius Donnelly, in addition to being one of the People’s Party’s leading agitators, also contributed to the popularization of the myth of the lost continent of Atlantis in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), which provided him with an ideal form of civilization by which to judge the present. Beyond
Populist circles, scholars within the fields of philosophy and history had also begun to reevaluate the epistemological assumptions about the relationship between context and form, or history and interpretation. Santayana, for example, argues in The Sense of Beauty that the aesthetic fundamentally shapes both the democratic political imagination and the 167
historical imagination, observing that “history is not fact, but consists of memories and
words subject to ever-varying interpretations” (88). Santayana’s critique of history’s claims
to empirical veridicality in his theory of aesthetics were echoed in seemingly the most unlikely of all publications, the American Historical Review. Within the pages of the newly
founded AHR, a succession of turn-of-the-century Presidents of the American Historical
Association often composed addresses pursuing metahistorical questions that pondered such
subjects as the place of the imagination in American historiography.122
Taken collectively, Garland’s fiction and these other examples confirm Bill Brown’s
contention that previous studies of late nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture have focused too exclusively on naturalism and its brand of historical and biological determinism.
But Brown’s claim that these omissions stem from a lack of interest in the literature of
“social protest” is only half the story; these studies also tend to overlook or demean nostalgia
because it challenges us to rethink the relationship between form and context in the wake of
the cultural turn (“Popular” 91). Whether in the form of the New Historicism or cultural
studies, many Americanists who study the late nineteenth century often view literary works as products of or metonyms for their cultural moments. But by formally reinventing an
imagined context, Garland’s use of nostalgia invites us to reexamine the etiological
relationship between form and history at the turn of the century as well as the metahistorical
modes that inform many current approaches to literary and cultural studies.123
Both Whitman and Garland, moreover, solved a problem that nostalgia posed for
both Augusta J. Evans and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton—how to overcome its seemingly
122 For example, see Albert Bushnell Hart, “Imagination in History” (1910) 227-251. 123 Here I am implicitly aligning my project with the recent turn to form and aesthetics in literary and cultural studies. I cannot delve deeply into the layers of this multifaceted discourse in the space of this essay, but for two recent explications of this turn, see Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy (2007); and Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” (2007). 168 inherent divisive character. While neither Whitman nor Garland use nostalgia to imagine a fully unified nation, they do treat nostalgia as an affect capable of bringing disparate communities of people together. For Whitman, the nature of these new nostalgic communities seems somewhat ill-defined, but Garland conceives of a nostalgia capable of bringing about a mutualist imagination animated by economic interests. In the final chapter, however, I argue that L. Frank Baum, would imagine what none of the previous authors I discuss in my dissertation do. By fantastically liberating Dorothy from her surroundings and his narrative from the generic dictates of realism and naturalism, Baum imagines a national and fully integrative form nostalgia by relocating it in the nation’s Heartland.
169
4 _____
When Dorothy Became History: Cosmopolitan Nostalgia Takes the Heartland by Storm
“From now on you’ll be history.”
—Mayor of the Munchkins speaking to Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz (1939)
“The idea is that we would act unilaterally, we would win big and then other nations would see our success and want to join in. That was the plan—I have heard a former American diplomat refer to this as the ‘ding-dong-the- Witch-is-dead’ school of regime change. But that’s was what it was. You know, we go in, you kill the Wicked Witch, the Munchkins jump up, they’re grateful and then we get in the hot air balloon and we’re out of there.”
—Michael Gordon, describing George W. Bush’s Iraq War Plan, Frontline (2008)
“Of all the American regions, the Midwest remains the most imaginary, ahistorical but fiercely emblematic. It’s Nowheresville. But it’s also the Heartland. . . . It’s where the American imagination has decided to archive innocence.”
—Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter (2007)
Although not often read in relation to American literary naturalism, Lyman Frank
Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) contains depictions of Kansas in the opening chapter that any reader of the genre will initially find very familiar. This short chapter offers very little in the way of character development. We learn almost nothing about Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, but Baum describes their surroundings in vivid detail. Dorothy, we are told, lives in a “one room” house sparsely furnished with a “rusty looking cooking stove” (11).
The surrounding landscape is a barren “great gray prairie” so baked by the sun that “even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they are the 170
same gray color to be seen everywhere” (18). Having depicted Kansas as a stark and
oppressive place, Baum then underscores the environment’s effect on Dorothy’s caretakers.
More like the characters found in a novel by Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser than in the
tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em are products of their
environment who “worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was”
(20).124 But just as Stephen Crane’s Maggie somehow “blossomed in a mud puddle” (16), so
too Dorothy was “saved from growing as gray as her other surroundings” (20). In a work of
naturalist fiction, however, Dorothy would certainly succumb to the tragic determinism in
the manner of Maggie or Carrie Meeber in order to learn that there “was not happiness” in her world (Dreiser 354).
Rather than attempt to pose a solution to the naturalist dilemma, as I argued in my
third chapter Whitman and Garland do, Baum instead does something more radical: he takes
his own heroine out of context and throws her into a state where she can wonder “what the future will bring” (26). Yet this seemingly radical move becomes almost immediately eclipsed by Dorothy’s unremitting nostalgic desire to be sent “‘back to Kansas’” (188).
Unwilling to accept what they see as an illogical move in the text, commentators have routinely sought to dismiss the very desire—nostalgia—that grants Dorothy so much power in the Land of Oz in the first place. Salman Rushdie, for example, seeing Kansas as “hell,” emphatically insists that such a radical story cannot possibly end on such a reactionary note by arguing that in the end “Oz finally became home” for Dorothy”(57). I will insist, however, that the ending of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the persistence of Dorothy’s nostalgic desire to return home cannot be so easily dismissed.
124 Admittedly though, Baum’s fairy tale does generically resemble the Grimms’ various tales in many respects. 171
I argue that Baum’s book uses Dorothy’s nostalgia to create a fairy tale that has
achieved its cultural status by contributing to the definition of American cosmopolitanism.
Rather than seeing nostalgia and cosmopolitanism as irreconcilable opposites, Baum portrays
them as mutually constitutive sentiments. For many of Baum’s contemporaries, the rise of
cosmopolitanism seemed inevitable, but they feared Americans would lose their identity in
the process. Baum, consequently, devises a way to abate such fears. He suggests that so
long as Americans remain nostalgic for their home abroad, they will both retain their sense
of nationality and may even wonder why they wanted to have left home in the first place. In
order to imagine cosmopolitan nostalgia in these terms, Baum paradoxically had to posit
nostalgia in opposition to the genre within which he wrote—that of the fantastic. For as soon as Dorothy arrives in Oz, she takes on the task that Max Weber aligned with the project of modernity—she seeks to bring about the “disenchantment of the world” (Weber
214).125 Unlike most who comment on Baum’s work, however, I am not interested in
producing another allegorical reading—as fascinating as they often can be—of The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz.126 I am more interested in how Baum uses and arguably abuses the form of
the fantastic in order to create a new sense of nostalgia and the cosmopolitan by wedding the two concepts together. By inventing this form of cosmopolitan nostalgia, Baum participated in a formal project that Russ Castronovo refers to as “geo-aesthetics,” or an aesthetics that can “provide criteria of symmetry, unity, and balance that launch empire as a global idea”
(Beautiful 184). Where I depart from Castronovo and others working within in the field of
125 Ross Posnock also examines this phenomenon in the work of Henry and William James. For his account of how William James devised a philosophical system aimed in part at combating “wonder-sickness,” see The Trial of Curiosity (1991) 27-79. 126 For various examples of this way of reading Baum, see Fred Erisman, “L. Frank Baum and the Progressive Dilemma” (1968); Henry M. Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism” (1964); David B. Parker, “The Fork in the Yellow Brick Road” (2000); Suzanne Rahn, ed., L. Frank Baum’s World of Oz (2003); and Gretchen Ritter, “Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics” (1997).
172
postnationalist U.S. studies, however, is that I insist that the local, specifically the desire to
return and remain at home, more so than a sense of global feeling drives the
cosmopolitanism imperative at the turn of the century. By making this argument, I also
hope to offer one plausible explanation for why Baum’s book became one of the most
important literary works of the twentieth century and to account for how nostalgia
conceptually transformed into its twentieth-century meaning as a term nearly synonymous with kitsch.
Objet petite oz: Fantasy and Desire in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Desire has figured prominently in scholarship on turn-of-the-century U.S. literary
studies. Literary critics continue to see desire as animating the narrative of naturalism and
depriving the protagonists of these narratives of agency. Of particular interest to those who
have studied this literature is the desire to engage in what Thorstein Veblen famously
referred to as “conspicuous consumption.” This drive to consume has become a master
narrative, so that historians and literary critics alike have come to describe this entire
moment in social and literary history as a “culture of consumption.” Following Walter Benn
Michaels’ powerful account of the period, we have largely come to understand the logic of
naturalism and the desires “made available by consumer capitalism” in homologous terms
(Michaels 19). Michaels insists we must read all turn-of-the-century literature as complicit
with the aims of consumer culture because in every instance these texts reproduce the drive
to consume regardless of their authors’ stated political aims. Naturalist novels, in other
words, cannot escape the very biological or consumer determinism that they seek to depict
and indict. Subsequent literary critics have largely left the central assumptions of Michaels’
account of naturalism unchallenged even while amending or supplementing various parts of 173
his argument. Recent commentators, such as Jennifer Fleissner and Stacey Margolis, place desire at the center of their studies even as they directly challenge Michaels’ use of expressive causality to reduce every work of literature he reads to the status of a metonym for the logic
of naturalism. Margolis, for example, sees an author like Frank Norris as still principally
invested in reproducing “the subject-of-desire” (161). Thus, in the context of naturalism,
desire would seem inescapable—a product of and participant in the reproduction of the
consumer culture at the turn of the century. These literary works by design necessarily must
exhibit a “deterministic structure of desire” (Gelfant 179).
But what happens when desire—or the protagonist that might fall victim to desire—
gets taken out of context—out of its cultural moment? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
invites us to ask precisely such a question. Despite the fact that a cyclone completely
removes Dorothy from her context, most commentators insist on reading the book as also
reproducing the logic of naturalism and consumer capitalism. Many of these readings
concur with Stuart Culver’s claim that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “naturalizes consumer
desire” even as it seemingly performs “a conventional criticism of the commodity fetish”
(“What” 98).127 Such accounts of Baum’s narrative rely heavily on drawing comparisons
between passages from Oz and another book Baum published during the same year: The Art
of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors. This latter work, which Baum wrote in his
capacity as a professional window dresser for Marshall Fields, certainly does contain sections
that resonate with Wizard. Notably, Baum theorizes “the harmony of color” in a manner
that recalls the color-coded regions of Oz and stresses the use of mechanical special effects
that the Wizard employs in the Emerald City (Art 22). The parallelisms between the two
texts as well as Baum’s own attempt to mass produce Oz-related commodities from sequels
127 Culver further develops this reading in a second article, “Growing Up in Oz” (1992). 174
to the original book to musical adaptations of the fairy tale have led readers to insist that
Baum used his status as both an author and a window dresser to perform “an astute
exploitation of the intersection between the fantastic and modern commodity culture” (Kim
218). Such assessments of Baum’s career and the book certainly do not lack merit. For
Baum, Oz did become “an advertisement for a trademark” in a manner that prefigured the way Jack Zipes has argued the large production studios of the 1930s, like MGM and Disney, used their cinematic renditions of fairy tales as forms of market branding (Happily 87). But these readings overlook important dimensions of Baum’s story that suggest the book has a far more complex relationship to turn-of-the-century consumer culture. While The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz is complicit with the rise of capitalism and a culture industry invested in the mass production of fairy tales, it also enlists and transforms the concept of nostalgia in ways
that suggest the narrative is not merely an object lesson for anyone who subscribes to
Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption. From the book’s opening, in fact, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz immediately introduces a cast of characters almost completely unlike any found in the naturalist fiction of the period.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the book’s opening is that Dorothy appears
to desire nothing. Unlike the cinematic Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Baum’s
Dorothy does not desire to leave Kansas for somewhere over the rainbow. Instead Dorothy
would appear to live a life of complete contentment and even joy; an aspect of her character that prompts Aunt Em to look “at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to
laugh at” (10). Baum offers us few clues as to why or how Dorothy manages to find
happiness in dreary Kansas, but we can assume Baum uses her levity as a way to make her
legible as an archetypal heroine. Not even Aunt Em or Uncle Henry, though downtrodden
and overworked, express a longing for a better life the way Hamlin Garland’s Midwestern 175 farmers do. Dorothy and her caregivers seem to live lives of conspicuous destitution. At this particular moment in the narrative, Baum’s characters are not only determined by their context, they also embrace it. A natural event, however, soon takes Dorothy out of this context. The cyclone that transports her to Oz is the first and last environmental phenomenon that determines her development as a character in the narrative.
When Dorothy arrives in Oz, she expresses a desire for the first time. This desire, which is the only desire she really ever experiences with any degree of intensity, is her desire to return home. Yet soon after learning that she has unwittingly killed the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy also realizes that she may never be able to return to Kansas. She begins
“to sob” and her “tears seemed to grieve the kind-hearted Munchkins, for they immediately took out their handkerchiefs and began to weep also” (23). This sentimental moment has a twofold significance. First, it signals the first time that Dorothy experiences a desire—let alone a sense of discontent. And, as we soon discover, it is precisely her “anxious” wish “to get back to [her] Aunt and Uncle” that will drive the narrative (23). Second, her explosion of tears embodies one of the hallmarks of the sentimental novel, but, in this case, Dorothy’s lack of self-control becomes a way for her to exert control over her surroundings by winning over the support of the Munchkins. If forms of late nineteenth-century discipline could make “self-control feel like ‘freedom,’” as Lori Merish observes, then Dorothy’s lack of self- control seems to invest her with actual rather than simulated agency (24). This moment becomes the first of several instances in which Dorothy’s emotions enable her to achieve at least a modicum of affective mastery over those that surround her. In other words, it is ultimately Dorothy’s nostalgia—her homesickness—rather than a desire to acquire commodities or to climb the social ladder that animates the narrative and imbues her with agency. 176
Although Dorothy’s uninhibited displays of nostalgic tears grant her power over
others, her nostalgia also produces a form of self-control that becomes a central formal and
discursive feature of the text. This feature of Dorothy’s nostalgic power lies in part in its
apparent implausibility. Readers nearly always wonder why Dorothy would want to return to
Kansas—a place defined by its barren mediocrity and scarcity of resources. The question of
why Dorothy would want to return to her Midwestern home is one not just posed by
readers, however, but one voiced by the other characters in the book itself. The Scarecrow,
for example, explains that he “‘cannot understand why [Dorothy] should wish to leave the
beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place [she] call[s] Kansas’” (44). Dorothy’s
response, which includes the line that would become the refrain of the MGM film,
obfuscates more than it elucidates the reasons for her unwavering nostalgic desire to return
home:
“That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and
gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any
other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.” (44)
Although Dorothy insists the Scarecrow cannot her desire to return home because he lacks a
brain, her response makes little sense to us either unless we situate it in relation to the
discourse of nostalgia. As the medical literature on the pathological sense of nostalgia
repeatedly noted throughout the nineteenth century, the disease commonly affected people
from “countries that are least desirable for beauty, fertility, climate, or the luxuries of life”
(Rush 41). In this way, Dorothy’s desire to return to gray Kansas exemplifies nostalgic desire, because this desire often affects people from barren lands. In this particular case, however, I will argue further that her longing to return home functions as much as an expression of nostalgic desire as it does a repudiation of all other competing forms of desire. 177
By denying herself any of the pleasures that the Land of Oz may offer her in favor of
returning home, Dorothy’s desire seems less emblematic of Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption and more consistent with Max Weber’s notion of ascetic rationalism. For
Weber, asceticism provided capitalism with a logic of self-denial that paradoxically
rationalized both productivity and the acquisition of commodities for the sole sake of acquiring them. This form of asceticism regards wealth as “bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life” (Protestant 163). For Dorothy, now a de facto witch of sorts, the Land of Oz becomes a possession of hers. There is every reason to believe, in fact, that Oz and the Emerald City in particular could provide her with ceaseless amusement and liberation from the toils that her caretakers back in Kansas have to endure.
Nostalgia, however, functions as the desire that prevents Dorothy from becoming satisfied with her circumstances. After liberating the Winkies, for example, she and her companions
“found everything they needed to make them comfortable” (164-5). Baum suggests that
Dorothy could have been content, but “one day the girl thought of Aunt Em” and declared that she must “‘get back to Kansas’” (165). Her nostalgia for Kansas, in other words, prevents Dorothy from succumbing to the temptation that the beauties of Oz pose, so that she remains focused on pursuing the “righteous life” of labor as embodied by Kansas and the figures of Dorothy’s Uncle and Aunt (Protestant 157).
That nostalgia becomes an accomplice to what Weber would see as ascetic
rationalism in the Land of Oz sheds light upon the role of the imagination in the book and
the transformation that nostalgia undergoes at the turn of the century. If we regard nostalgia
as the repudiation of all other forms of desire, then nostalgia appears to be at odds with the
pleasures of the imagination itself. For Dorothy, indulging her imagination is the ultimate
temptation that her nostalgic asceticism must overcome. At the end of the book, Dorothy 178
concedes that she has had many “wonderful adventures” but wishes more than ever to
return home because “‘unless the crops are better this year than they were last I am sure
Uncle Henry cannot afford it’” (254). No matter how wonderful Oz may be, Dorothy’s
nostalgia compels her to want to return to Kansas where she can assist her Uncle with the
labor of farming. Such statements do seem especially peculiar in a book that opens with a preface that announces that “the story of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to pleasure children of today” (3). Nevertheless, the story itself appears to abide by a logic that totally abandons the stated aims of the preface. The book challenges its readers to embrace the quotidian rather than the extraordinary by returning with Dorothy to the colorless world of labor. To a great degree, Baum became aware of this inherent contradiction in his fairy tale, and he ultimately wound up rejecting this form of nostalgia in later Oz books by having Dorothy make a new home in Oz. But I would argue that it is precisely because The Wonderful Wizard of Oz challenges its readers to renounce the world of the imagination, that made it became one of the most powerful and popular cultural myths in the twentieth century. And, as I shall examine in greater detail later, it is this aspect of the book that Victor Fleming’s adaptation of the film amplifies with even greater intensity.
Nostalgia in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz thus becomes both the disease and the
antidote that drives the narrative forward. Previous chapters have shown how writers, like
William Wells Brown and Hamlin Garland, used nostalgic longing to break the strictures of
various genres in order to imagine alternatives to their current historical and cultural
moments by projecting these possibilities onto the past. But at the end of the century
nostalgia begins to take on its own generically identifiable form. Such a transformation,
according to Jacques Rancière, means that as nostalgia becomes definable, it begins to abide by “a normative principle” with a set of standardized “ways of doing, making, seeing, and 179
judging” (21-22). Even though Dorothy is fully immersed within a world of imaginative
possibility, her nostalgia dictates that she must return to the world as it is—Kansas. That
nostalgia becomes itself more of a label for a particular kind of narrative or consumable
commodity at this moment in US cultural history is an issue I will revisit at the end of this
chapter. At this point, however, I wish to explore why nostalgia, which ultimately winds up
driving Dorothy out of Oz, also becomes the occasion for her foray into the various regions
of Oz in the first place. This seemingly contradictory quality of nostalgia in Baum’s fairy tale
can be explained by examining in greater detail the phrase “There is no place like home” in
relation to Baum’s use of the fantastic (Baum 44).
While it only appears once in the 1900 text, the statement “There is no place like
home” nevertheless sheds a tremendous amount of light upon the narrative and cultural
logic of Baum’s novel. It explains in large part why Baum devotes so little ink to his
description of the home to which Dorothy so desperately wishes to return. Her home,
which Baum describes as so “sun blistered” that “the rains had washed” the paint away, is a
blank canvas (10). Such a blankness recalls the images of the United States and the
Berkshires described by Melville in Israel Potter and suggests that something about the desire to return to the American home lies in its blankness—its void of possibility, which can be filled or supplemented by any number of possible imaginary but unrealizable homes. The fact that there is no place like home also implies that the object of Dorothy’s nostalgic desire is a forever unattainable one.
While Dorothy’s expression of nostalgia echoes the nostalgia displayed in other
literary works, this dimension of her nostalgic desire also remains consistent with Weber’s
account of ascetic rationalism and other more traditional Marxist accounts of capitalist
acquisition, which are defined by the pursuit of an ever elusive goal: the boundless 180
accumulation of money and commodities.128 That the ultimate aim of Dorothy’s adventure
in Oz—to return home—may in fact be a hopelessly unattainable one bears a significance
greater than its compatibility with Weber’s conceptualization of asceticism. Her nostalgia
also plays a central role in the story’s use of fantasy. As I have already noted, Dorothy
exhibits no desire of any kind until she becomes transported to the Land of Oz. But once
transported to Oz, she becomes aware that her desire always has been and apparently always
will be to be at home. That the emergence and the loss of Dorothy’s object of desire occur
simultaneously suggest that the book has fulfilled the necessary preconditions for fantasy
according to Slavoj Žižek’s account of the concept. For Žižek, fantasy brings narrative sequentiality to a moment “(mis)perceived as the moment of loss of some quality” when
“upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the lost quality emerged only at this very moment of alleged loss (12-13). “This emergence and loss,” Žižek explains, “designates the
fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objet petit a which emerges as being-lost—
narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first
given and then gets lost” (13). Dorothy’s nostalgia works within a fantastic mode of
emplotment to create the illusion that she has always wanted to be at home when it was her
removal to Oz that produced both the loss and the emergence of this desire in the first
place. That this desire appears to follow some form of sequential order only further distracts
us from the fact that Baum never provides us with much of an account of her home in the
first place.
When Dorothy does return home the details are no more forthcoming. The final
chapter, “Home Again,” is less than half a page long, and we learn that she is really returning
to a “new farm-house” rather than her old home which remains in Munchkin Country (259).
128 Marx produces this highly influential account of capitalist accumulation in the first parts of Capital. See Marx, Capital (1867) 125-280. 181
What is significant about Dorothy’s false restoration to home is not so much the realization that, to quote Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again,” but that Dorothy nostalgically desires to return home in spite of knowing that “there is no place like home” to which to return. It is precisely this desire—this fantasy—that animates an imaginary tale that dramatizes a child’s resolution to resist the temptations of the imagination. The Wonderful of
Wizard Oz seizes upon “the radical ambiguity of fantasy,” which simultaneously “closes the actual span of choices (fantasy renders and sustains the structure of the forced choice, it tells us how we are to choose if we are to maintain the freedom of choice . . .) and maintains the false opening, the idea that the excluded choice might have happened” (Žižek 29). Having been
“forced” to imagine Oz against her will, Dorothy then chooses to behave as though such a fantastic and seemingly utopian possibility never existed by remaining nostalgically committed to Kansas. The underlying fantasy at work in the book is not so much that a wonderful utopic Oz exists, but that in spite of its existence Dorothy would choose to leave it in favor of living a bleak life of scarcity and subsistence back in Kansas.
The Cozmopolitanism Imperative: Talk to Strangers
Does Dorothy’s nostalgic desire have a telos? The answer to this question can be found in the events that transpire between Dorothy’s arrival in Oz and her return to Kansas at the end of the book. Dorothy’s nostalgia both creates the fantasy that there is a Kansas worth fighting for and becomes the rationale for the picaresque series of events that follow the awakening of her nostalgic desire. Her nostalgia becomes the pretext for introducing what Žižek refers to as “the radically intersubjective character of fantasy” (8). Her longing to return home serves as the “object of fantasy” that leads her to realize that there is
“‘something in me more than myself’” following the logic of the objet petite a. Since Oz can 182
seemingly do nothing for her, Dorothy must ask not what Oz can do for her but what can
she do for Oz. This fantastic intersubjective consciousness first begins to awaken in
Dorothy when the Munchkins thank her for killing the wicked Witch of East and “‘setting
our people free from bondage’” (19). She cannot understand how she could have “killed
anything,” but after being celebrated as the Munchkins’ liberator, she starts wondering in
what other ways “an innocent, harmless little girl” might be able to assist the inhabitants of
Oz (19). By essentially converting the question Dorothy asks of herself from “‘What do I
want’” into “‘What do others want from me?,’” The Wonderful Wizard of Oz creates a matrix
of desire that conforms to Žižek’s account of the fantasy genre (Žižek 9). But The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz seizes upon this fantastic logic to fulfill an imperative that lies well beyond
Žižek’s account of the fantastic and its relationship to late capitalism. For Dorothy, her
nostalgic desire coupled with her “innocence” serve as the raison d’être for a form of
cosmopolitanism that Paul Gilroy defines as one that “can promote and justify intervention
in other people’s sovereign territory on the grounds that their ailing or incompetent”
government “has failed to measure up to the levels of good practice that merit recognition as civilized” (Postcolonial 59-60). That such a playful and entertaining fairy tale might level such an imperative may at first seem implausible, but a careful reading of the story suggests that the book, like other important forms of fantasy, “‘teaches us how to desire’” (Žižek 7). In this particular case, I argue, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz creates a form of cosmopolitanism predicated on a nostalgic desire to both return home and to make a home in the wider world.
Among the many allegorical readings of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one that insists
Baum wrote an anti-imperialist tale. This account of the text, however, does not imagine 183
Dorothy as the one engaging in empire building. 129 Although Dorothy neither conquers
nor colonizes Oz, her desire to return home leads her to intervene within the affairs of Oz
and forces her to develop her own ethical way of relating to strangers. In this way, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz works less like an allegory that can be mapped onto a particular series
of historical events and more like a rationalization for a particular cosmopolitan categorical
imperative. Upon arriving in Oz, the Munchkins inform Dorothy that “‘Oz has never been
civilized,’” which explains why “witches and wizards” still exist within its borders (22). This
revelation places Dorothy in an immediate position of social superiority despite her status as
a child. It also suggests that, like Hamlin Garland’s portrayal of the country and the city in
Main-Travelled Roads, Baum in this instance appears to create a sense of allochronism whereby
Oz shares the same space but not the same time as Kansas. While Kansas inhabits the
temporal realm of the civilized, Oz remains stuck in an earlier, more primitive state. She
ultimately desires to return to civilization and concomitantly to bring civilization to Oz, so that her nostalgia is actually not one for the past but for the present. This nostalgia for the present, moreover, places her directly at odds with the wonders of the uncivilized past that
Oz embodies.
By admitting their primitiveness, the Munchkins not only establish the pretext for
Dorothy’s possible intervention within the affairs of Oz, but signal to her and the reader that
they have entered the genre of the fantastic. As Tzvetan Todorov explains, a character or
person enters the generic realm of the fantastic when this person encounters an
extraordinary event or entity that “cannot be explained by the laws” of “our world” (25).
When this person experiences this event, only two possible conclusions can be made: “either
he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the
129 See, for example, Ranjit S. Dighe’s allegorical reading and densely annotated version of the book in The Historian’s Wizard of Oz (2002). 184
world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral
part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us” (Todorov 25).
This uncertainty—when one wonders whether one has witnessed an ultimately explainable
but uncanny event or a completely marvelous one—defines the fantastic for Todorov. The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz does not only inhabit the realm of the fantastic as Todorov would have us understand the genre; the book also makes the fantastic a problem that Dorothy must work to resolve. The text essentially poses the following the question: does the absence of civilization in Oz mean that witches and wizards actually exist and possess
marvelous powers?; or, do people in Oz simply believe that they exist and possess these
powers? The resolution to this dilemma lies with the ultimate fantasy of the book—that
Dorothy relentlessly wishes to return to the real and harsh world of Kansas. This nostalgic
desire enables her to resist the temptations Oz poses and even leads her to empty Oz of
some its marvelous qualities.
Dorothy’s first victory against the world of wonder occurs, in fact, when she kills the
first of the two wicked Witches. While the Munchkins adamantly believe Dorothy to be a
“Noble Sorceress,” her sorcery can be easily explained by the cyclone’s uncanny removal of
her house to Oz (Baum 19). By ridding Munchkin Country of the Witch of the East’s
despotism with her home, she renders the uncanny homely just as much as she rids the
country of the Witch’s marvels. Such a moment seems to embody what Amy Kaplan refers
to as the “Manifest Domesticity” of the nineteenth century whereby the domestic sphere became “a more potent agent for national expansion” and U.S. imperialism than more overt masculine forms of machtpolitik (29). But Dorothy’s form of domesticity has a distinctly cosmopolitan character. Rather than “purging” herself and her “home[ ] of foreignness” or seeking to convert the “uncivilized,” Dorothy’s longing to return home forces her to 185
embrace strangers in an effort to imagine a worldly and pluralistic home (Kaplan 47). In
other words, Dorothy seeks to make the strange familiar but not the same. Such a task is
not an easy one for Dorothy, but as I examine in greater detail below, it is her nostalgia that
establishes her as a cosmopolite rather than as someone who has gone native.
The book continually stresses the alien character of Oz by describing it as “a strange
and beautiful country” and its inhabitants as “a strange people” (188). Dorothy also
repeatedly appears as a stranger to Oz’s inhabitants. Even more remarkable is the fact that
her three traveling companions—the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly
Lion—also appear as foreigners when they leave their respective regions. When they first
arrive at the footsteps of the Emerald City, for example, the “Guardian of the Gates”
announces their arrival by proclaiming, “Here are strangers” (124). Similarly, when Dorothy
and her party head out to destroy the Witch of the West, the Witch commands her legions
of bees to “‘Go to the strangers and sting them to death!’” (145). And when Dorothy hopes to find Glinda, the good Witch of the South, a soldier in Emerald City warns her that she must travel to the realm of the Quadlings where “a race of queer men who do not like strangers to cross their country” live (215). These various moments in the text underscore
that Oz is a land full of both wonder and isolated strangers, so that even other inhabitants of
Oz seem strange to one another when they cross into a different country. Within this
fantastic environment, Dorothy emerges as the one person capable of bringing these various
discrete populations into contact with one another. We learn early in the story that
“Dorothy did not feel nearly as bad as you might think a little girl would who had been
suddenly whisked away form her own country and set down in the midst of a strange land”
(31). She may wish to return home, but she also seems to possess what Bruce Robbins calls
a “global or internationalist feeling” from the onset (Feeling 174). Consequently, as the 186
heroine of this fairy tale, she serves as a model citizen of the world who must develop her
own cosmopolitan ethics—one that insists “we have obligations to strangers” (Appiah,
Cosmopolitanism 153).
If Baum charges Dorothy with the task of practicing a form of cosmopolitan ethics,
her task is made easier by the fact the book offers several examples of both how and how
not to treat strangers. In the regards to the latter, the wicked Witches provide readers with
case studies in how not to treat strangers. Both of these witches engage in a form of anti-
cosmopolitanism by prohibiting the Munchkins and the Winkies respectively from traveling
outside their local regions. Both Witches also remain inextricably linked to their regions and
were unwilling to leave their respective dominions, whereas Dorothy freely travels from
place to place. The evil witches practice what we might call a form of absolute hostility, as
they both engage in the “singular operation of naming enemies” (Badiou 75).130 To name
one a stranger, in other words, is to name one an enemy who must be annihilated. Baum
defines the Witches’ wickedness in anti-cosmopolitan terms, implicitly suggesting that the
inverse of wickedness resembles a form of cosmopolitanism whereby one treats strangers
hospitably. In contrast to the absolute hostility of the wicked Witches, many of the inhabitants of Oz practice an ethics of hospitality toward Dorothy and her fellow traveling companions. Nearly every group of new people she encounters offer her both food and shelter from Boq the Munchkin to the green people of Emerald City who encourage her to
“make” herself “perfectly at home” (126).131 These inhabitants of Oz, in other words, honor
130 For an extended account of the nature of absolute hostility, see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (1997) 112-37. For more on the relationship between the concept of evil or wickedness and the act of naming, see Alain Badiou, Ethics (2001) 72-77. 131 For more on the rather vexed category of hospitality, especially in relation to immigration and postcolonialism, see Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality. 187
a version of what Kant describes as the cosmopolitan maxim of “universal hospitality” or the
“right of an alien not to be treated as an enemy upon his arrival in another’s country” (118).
Just how far does Dorothy go to make herself “perfectly at home” though? She goes
so far as to engage in precisely the kind of interventionist cosmopolitanism that Gilroy
describes. While philosophers and theorists following Kant define “conquering” as a type of
“inhospitable conduct” incompatible with the dictates of cosmopolitanism, many of them
also concede that liberating peoples oppressed under the arbitrary power of a despot may be permissible (Kant 119).132 When one considers that Kant stipulated that “the civil
constitutions of every nation should be republican” and not despotic in character, such an
interventionist act may in fact be a necessary precondition for establishing a perpetual peace
congenial to cosmopolitanism (112). As we have already seen, Dorothy not only seems
willing but ideally suited to the cosmopolitan imperative to liberate strangers. The most
obvious example of her interventionist tendencies occurs when she essentially invades the
country of the Winkies. Even though her decision to seek out and destroy the wicked Witch
of the West stems solely from her desire to be sent “back to Kansas,” the book portrays her
incursion into Winkie Country as a morally unambiguous one because the Witch had
enslaved her own people (129). Thus, even though Dorothy’s brand of cosmopolitanism
abides by a principle of liberal toleration, it also encompasses a sense of liberal universalism
whereby Dorothy imposes her understanding of justice upon the inhabitants of Oz.133
Predictably, the Winkies embrace her and her companions as liberators. Once freed the Winkies consent to become Dorothy’s agents and “would be delighted to do all in their
132 Appiah, for example, argues that cosmopolitans “would never go to war for a country; but they will enlist in a campaign against any nation that gets in the way of universal justice” (Cosmopolitanism 137). 133 John Rawls defines his brand of liberalism in these terms. He outlines the cosmopolitan and universal implications of his liberal theories of justice and imagines this position as a “realistic utopia” in The Law of Peoples (2001). Richard Rorty performs his own cosmopolitan critique of an earlier draft of Rawls’ essay in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” which appears in Cheah and Robbins 45-58. 188
power for [her], who had set them free from bondage” (160). Having emancipated the
Winkies by killing the Witch, Dorothy and her companions discover that “they were no
longer prisoners in a strange land” (155). What is especially suggestive about this declaration
is that Dorothy remains in Winkie Country for several more days. This sentence suggests,
consequently, that the land of the Winkies had ceased to be strange to Dorothy once she had
deposed its dictator. She also spends “a few happy days at the Yellow Castle” where the
Witch once lived and begins to feel almost at home in Winkie Country (162). Similar
sequences of events occur when Dorothy liberates a group of mice from a bellicose tiger,
and the Lion kills a tyrannical spider in a country that at first seems “disagreeable” but later could be no “pleasanter home” for him (239-40). As these moments in the text suggest, by seeking to return home, Dorothy at the same time tries to make herself at home in what at first seems like a strange place. In other words, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz teaches its readers to talk to strangers and to travel to strange places in order to render them familiar—to make them just like home.
There would be almost nothing questionable about Dorothy’s pursuits, however,
were it not that she ultimately replaces a set of malevolent dictators with a set of benevolent
ones. When Dorothy arrives in Oz, the Wizard purportedly rules the entire land. We learn,
however, that the Wizard is in fact not wonderful at all but what Dorothy will refer to as
“‘The Great and Terrible Humbug’” (192). Rather than actually possessing marvelous magical abilities, he concedes he has “‘been making believe’” all along by using a set of
elaborate machines and contraptions to create illusions of wonder (183). For this reason, the
Wizard never successfully realized the dream of a cosmopolis or “a constellation into which
other nations would be absorbed” (Brennan, Home 147). Dorothy, however, makes this
dream of a new world order in Oz a reality by eliminating the two witches who stood in its 189 way. While her actions certainly seem to fulfill the desires of the Winkies and the
Munchkins, the realization of their desires fantastically also becomes the realization of
Dorothy’s and her companions’ desires as well. For all practical purposes, the Munchkins consider Dorothy to be their new sovereign sorceress and we learn that the Tin Woodman plans to return to Winkie Country to rule over it:
“The Winkies were very kind to me, and wanted me to rule over them after
the Wicked Witch died. I am fond of the Winkies, and if I could get back
again to the country of the West I should like nothing better than to rule
over them forever.” (255)
The Tin Woodman’s rationale for returning to the Winkies to rule them because they “were kind” to him seems to embody what Mireille Rosello describes as the risks associated with an
“unconditional hospitality” that “puts both the host and the guest in danger” (17). That the
Tin Woodman responds to the Winkies’ hospitality by desiring to rule over them suggests that he has transgressed the bounds of acceptable hospitality.
Whether or not the Winkies really want him to rule them is a question generically wed to the fantastic. In this case, the answer to the question remains unknown, so that we cannot determine whether or not the Winkies actually want to surrender their democratic right to self-determination or if the Tin Woodman is in some sense deluded. A similar set of questions surround the Lion’s decision to return to Quadling Country where he will rule as
“the King of Beasts” (237). Baum clearly depicts the animals as “holding a meeting” to decide democratically who should rid the jungle of the spider terrorizing them (240). The
Lion agrees to kill the spider but only on the condition that the rest of the animals “‘will bow down’” and “‘obey’” him (241). As though such a condition were in no way coercive, they respond that they “‘will do that gladly’” (241). In other words, one of the principle fantasies 190
at work in the text is that the Lion, the Tin Woodman and Dorothy alike remain innocent
narcissists, believing that what they desire is what others desire of them. In this way, the
book seems to illustrate that slippage between “feeling global” and ruling the globe, which
skeptics of cosmopolitanism like Timothy Brennan critique.134
The Scarecrow’s succession to the Wizard as the ruler of Oz serves as the supreme
embodiment of a dream of a new world order. Before the Wizard leaves Oz via a hot air
balloon, he crowns the Scarecrow “‘ruler of the Emerald City’” (212). As he begins to
appreciate the power he has inherited, the Scarecrow recounts his literal rags to riches story by recalling that “‘a short time ago I was up on a pole in a farmer’s cornfield, and that I am now the ruler of this beautiful City” (212). He repeatedly makes statements like this one, professing his lack of worthiness in light of his absence of brains. While his ascension to authority seems both benevolent and laughably entertaining, his professions of humility resemble the “great little man” rhetorical device. Theodor Adorno explains that tyrants and fascist speakers often use this device to portray themselves to their auditors as “both weak and strong: weak insofar as each member of the crowd is conceived of being capable of identifying himself with the leader . . .; strong insofar as he represents” collective power
(Psychological 19). The Scarecrow may be the most powerful person in Oz, but he also wears clothes that “every man wore in this country” (Baum 36). Such a device allows the person deploying it to appear as a savior to the people she or he seeks to master. The Scarecrow answers precisely such a Messianic calling as the “wonderful . . . ruler” of Oz, and he reminds Glinda, the Witch of the South, and Dorothy that “‘Oz has made me its ruler and the people like me’” (255). By using this rhetorical device, the Scarecrow draws upon the
134 Apologists for cosmopolitanism, like Robbins, are of course well aware of “the understandable skepticism” toward “‘feeling global’” (Feeling 170). I am less interested in indicting cosmopolitanism or its various iterations than in how The Wonderful Wizard of Oz uses nostalgia to underwrite a logic of cosmopolitanism that may nevertheless ultimately leave us feeling ambivalent about its ethical and political implications. 191
American capitalist rags-to-riches master narrative as well. As we saw in Israel Potter, the
figure of the scarecrow seems uniquely suited to embodying metaphorically the vacuous
nature of American identity. While for Melville the scarecrow remains an unsettling everyman figure, Baum’s fairy tale celebrates this same figure as someone who successfully pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. We cannot forget, however, that behind this straw man lies Dorothy who “lifted” him “off the pole” like a puppet in the first place (Baum 37).
Remarking that he “‘might have passed [his] whole life in the farmer’s cornfield,’” the
Scarecrow acknowledges a debt to the innocent Dorothy that suggests she has the ultimate
power to pull his strings (Baum 257). She and her companions, in other words, transform
Oz into a confederation of what O. Henry famously referred to as “banana republics” in
Cabbages and Kings (1904). By establishing these benevolent puppet dictatorships, Dorothy’s
cosmopolitanism brings about a perpetual peace but at the expense of violating several of the prerequisite articles Kant outlines in his writings on cosmopolitanism. Yet although her cosmopolitanism violates the spirit of Kant’s original vision, it seems perfectly consistent with an economic cosmopolitanism, which subjects the globe to its rule in the name of making the world feel like home and creates the semblance of change in order to leave the
original power structures unaltered.135 Oz may no longer have wicked Witches, but it
remains a land ruled by unchecked dictators.
So if Dorothy has successfully made Oz into a home, as Rushdie maintains, why
does she still insist on returning to Kansas? Herein lies the important role both nostalgia
and nostalgia’s relationship to the fantastic in the text. I have already established that
Dorothy’s sole desire—the wish to return home—is the book’s real fantasy. Her nostalgia
also serves another purpose. Debates about cosmopolitanism in nearly all of the various
135 See Brennan, At Home in the World (1997) 5-8 and 119-162. 192
senses of the term took place within the periodicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in the wake of the Spanish-American War.136 Those who supported and opposed
free trade, for example, often associated laissez faire economics with cosmopolitanism and
used the words interchangeably.137 Others who wrote about cosmopolitanism regarded it as
an inevitability. Henry D. Sedgwick, writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1899, predicted that
“the United States will be the one great cosmopolitan country” because “signs appear that the breaking up of nationality will begin in the United States” (446). An editor writing for
The New England Magazine in 1896 similarly called upon his fellow Americans to embrace
“their sentiment and duties as citizens of the world” (126). In all of these cases though, writers wondered how Americans might shed their sectional divisiveness and become citizens of the world while at the same time not losing their allegiance to the nation. For some, such as turn-of-the-century Republicans who saw “Americanization” and
“cosmopolitanism” as one and the same, this question could be answered by simply insisting upon the inherent cosmopolitan character of the United States (Pillsbury 55). To a degree,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz subscribes to this logic by portraying Dorothy as a precociously cosmopolitan but American child. Baum, however, largely resolves this problem by imagining how nostalgia, as a sentiment more powerful than global feeling, might also work in collusion with global feeling to produce a distinctly American form of cosmopolitanism.
Dorothy helps strangers not because she feels globally but because she never wanted
to leave Kansas in the first place. Nostalgia both drives her to make Oz more like home
while at the same time ensuring that she will return home. In this way, Baum practices a
136 For an extended discussion of turn-of-the-century cosmopolitanism in U.S. culture, see Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis (1998). 137 See, for example, Orrin Leslie Elliott’s “Ethics of the Tariff Controversy” in the Overland Monthly (1894). 193
“cosmopolitan style” of writing that paradoxically longs to be local.138 I have argued writers deployed the nostalgic mode to revolutionize existing genres. Nostalgia at these moments became synonymous with the imagination insofar as it animated new and competing forms of communal affiliation. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, however, nostalgia becomes the imagination’s antipode. Baum removes Dorothy from her realistic or naturalistic context only to prove that she has no wish to escape these constraints. When provided with the choice to remain free, she chooses to abdicate herself of agency by returning to Kansas. In this way, the goal of her journey in Oz is not to just simply return to Kansas but to rid the world of the imagination by returning to a place where nothing else—nothing fantastic—is possible. Baum’s book reveals that, like Homer’s Odyssey, “it is the yearning for the homeland which sets in motion the adventures by which subjectivity . . . escapes the primeval world” (Horkheimer and Adorno 60). For this reason, nostalgia and cosmopolitanism work together to transform the world into a monolithic image of home to provincialize it not out of global sympathy but out of global ambivalence.
Dorothy must talk to strangers in Oz not because she really loves them, but to ensure that she and the rest of Oz leave her alone in Kansas. That the provincial and the cosmopolitan become one is best captured in the book by the fact that the Emerald City and
Kansas both occupy the geographic centers of their respective maps. Baum seems to suggest that the journey to the center and the periphery are and must really be one in the same.139 Dorothy, in other words, becomes one of the twentieth-century’s most beloved heroines because she embodies and defines the American cosmopolitan archetype; she is as innocent as she is reluctant to leave home. Like Alden Pyle from Graham Greene’s The
138 I borrow this phrase from Rebecca L. Walkowtiz, but in this case I am arguing that Baum uses a cosmopolitan style that forecloses rather than creates alternatives to “national distinctions” (30). 139 Tom Lutz also examines the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan in both literary and cultural history in Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004) 1-58. 194
Quiet American, one of her many fictional twentieth-century successors, Dorothy ostensibly
wants “to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world” even
though she knows she “should have stayed at home” (Greene 13; 16).
Wizard without Wonder: Nostalgia in the Age of Its Reproducibility
At the close of the previous section I alluded to the transformation of nostalgia from
a literary mode that works within what Rancière refers to as the “aesthetic regime of the
arts” into a concept that works in collusion with the “representational regime” (25). I wish
to take this analysis of nostalgia a step further by suggesting that we can witness nostalgia
undergo a complete and significant conceptual transformation by attending to the various
ways that Baum’s classic tale has been adapted and reproduced. Nostalgia produces the
ultimate fantasy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by serving as the desire that enables Dorothy
to abandon the fantastic Oz in favor of the real world of Kansas. But by playing this role in
the book, nostalgia no longer works by defying the “mimetic principle” but desiring to
return to it (Rancière 21). This new form of nostalgia, I argue, coincides with the
development of technologically reproducible forms of art. We can witness the vivid contrast
between the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century senses of nostalgia by briefly
comparing a handful of critical differences between Baum’s original 1900 book and Victor
Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation of the text, The Wizard of Oz. By examining how nostalgia
transforms conceptually, I hope in this section to show how Baum participates in this
transformation and to clarify the relationship between nostalgia and modernity at the dawn
of the twentieth century. Put another way, this section will explain how, in the words of the
Mayor of the Munchkins, Dorothy became “history.” 195
Shortly after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz proved a tremendous commercial success, L.
Frank Baum began writing a series of sequels and adapting the original story first for the
stage and later for the screen, creating his own production entity, the Oz Film
Manufacturing Company, which would only remain in business until 1915. While many of
the various adaptations were elaborate in character, all of them preserved two critical
characteristics of the book that would change in the Fleming film.140 All of Baum’s
reproductions of the story created a sense of the fantastic and eventually the marvelous by
insisting that Oz actually existed in Dorothy’s world. As we are reminded throughout the
book, Oz and Kansas may have reached different levels of civilization, but they still exist
within the same temporal and spatial universe. They are only separated by an inhospitable
great desert. This quality of Baum’s various incarnations of Oz allows him to do what would
seem unthinkable to anyone only familiar with the 1939 film. For example, in the silent film
His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1910), Dorothy first meets the Scarecrow in Kansas near a
bail of hay. Only after meeting the Scarecrow does a tornado suddenly transport them both
to the Land of Oz. In other words, Baum originally imagined that the fantastic could cross
into the world of Kansas. This aspect of Baum’s original vision is crucial because it allowed
him to sustain the “still to come” dimension of the fantastic whereby the reader or viewer
remains in a state of wonderment while attempting to determine what the “future” will bring
(Todorov 42). Ultimately, Baum transports his audiences from the realm of the fantastic
into the marvelous because he seems to give them every indication that Oz does exist within
his fictive universe.
140 I do not examine any of these various reproductions of the text in great detail, but Mark Evan Swartz exhaustively recounts the history and artistic features of each one of these productions in Oz Before the Rainbow (2000). 196
The Victor Fleming film, however, calls upon the audience to reach a very different conclusion. If the Dorothy of the 1900 book in some sense tries to rid Oz of the fantastic by killing witches and insisting on returning to the real world of Kansas, then Fleming’s version of the fairy tale could almost be seen as the logical fulfillment of her efforts. From the moment that Dorothy slips into a state of unconsciousness and we watch as Miss
Gulch—a character who never appears in Baum’s accounts of Oz—transforms into the
Wicked Witch of the West before our eyes, Baum’s story leaves the realm of the fantastic and instead becomes a psychological allegory. Just as many commentators and historians have insisted that Baum’s book can be decoded, so that every fantastic character comes to correspond to an actual historical actor, every character in Fleming’s film corresponds to someone Dorothy knows in Kansas. Her traveling companions—the Scarecrow, the Tin
Woodman, and the Lion—all look similar to the laborers that work for her Aunt and Uncle on their farm. Dorothy’s entire adventure would seem to be just one grand dream of wish- fulfillment that enables her to prevent Gulch from hurting her dog Toto by melting her into oblivion with a bucket of water. Accordingly, the film then closes with the realization that
Dorothy had simply dreamed up her journey to Oz. She never actually left home, and so she never actually experiences a nostalgia to return to Kansas. Nostalgia in Fleming’s film cannot exist in its spatial form because we learn Oz never existed. Fleming show us, in other words, that Oz and the genre of the fantastic are both humbugs.
So if Dorothy does not experience nostalgia in the film, what desire does she experience? From the beginning of the film, in fact, Dorothy desires to leave home. The song “Over the Rainbow” obviously encapsulates this sentiment. Yet although she yearns to leave—what Rushdie reads as this Dorothy’s cosmopolitan longing to travel the world—this desire actually seems to function as another form of nostalgia—a temporal sense one. Since 197
a desire to return to Kansas still animates her adventures in what is now the dream of Oz,
the movie in some sense produces a nostalgia for nostalgia or, put another way, a nostalgia for a time when one could experience homesickness. The preface to the film seems to invite exactly such a reading of Fleming’s adaptation:
For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young at
Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of
fashion. To those of you who have been faithful to it in return . . . and to the
Young in Heart . . . we dedicate this picture. (Wizard)
While these words, which appear on the sepia-tinted celluloid that becomes the hallmark of
Fleming’s Kansas, maintain that “Time has been powerless to put” the story out of fashion,
they qualify that the story really only continues to speak to “the Young in Heart.” For
Fleming’s Depression Era audience, in fact, the thought of ever escaping the life of Kansas
would have seemed remote. By contrast, in the introduction to his 1900 book, Baum
announced that he sought to write a “modern” fairy tale, which would seek only to entertain
(3). The preface to the MGM film suggests, however, that the age of the modern fairy tale
has already passed. In other words, the film’s dedication implies that both Oz and the kind
of quaint Kansas life that made the dream of Oz possible are now both unrealizable fantasies
of a bygone era. The film teaches us to desire, consequently, nostalgia itself. Like Dorothy,
the film yearns to be presented with the false choice of having to decide whether or not to
return home when presented with the temptations of staying in an Oz. In a sense then,
nostalgia in the film is really not a nostalgia for the past so much as it is a nostalgia for a past
within which a future could still be imagined. For Fleming’s viewers, looking forward is an
impossibility; the only option is to look back toward an unforgettable past. 198
These differences between the film and Baum’s book allow us to witness the
transformation of nostalgia from a conceptually ambiguous term into a word that only
operates temporally. These differences, consequently, also invite us to reexamine the
relationship between nostalgia and modernity. Many theorists have long maintained that
nostalgia and modernity must necessarily signify two opposing senses of time. Sylviane
Agacinski, for example, insists that nostalgia always functions in restorative terms and exists
in opposition to what she refers to as the idea of the ephemeral or the “one-way passage” of
time (12). In this way, she casts the temporality of nostalgia and modernity as irreconcilable
opposites. For Agacinski, moreover, the temporality of modernity is by definition
ephemeral, suggesting that modernity lacks a historical consciousness. Yet a comparative
reading of Baum’s 1900 book and Fleming’s 1939 film suggests that Agacinski’s
understanding of the time of modernity as being one characterized by the ephemeral may
actually also describe nostalgia as itself an expression of this modern form of temporality.
We might, in fact, be able to best articulate the relationship between nostalgia and
modernity in a manner akin to the way the Adorno conceives of the relationship between
kitsch and art. For Adorno, as Richard Leppert explains, kitsch is “art’s bad conscience”
because kitsch, unlike art, remains democratically accessible to all (364). Adorno maintains, moreover, that “the indignation over kitsch is its anger at its shameless reveling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation” (Minima 225-226). In other words, kitsch, unlike art, according to Adorno, never pretends to be anything other than an irresponsible imitation— irresponsible because kitsch “has lost [its] content in history” by participating “in a formal
world that became remote from its [the object of kitsch] immediate context” (“Kitsch” 501).
Correspondingly then, nostalgia is in a sense modernity’s—or even more accurately 199 modernism’s—bad conscience insofar as its account of the past is always passing. It is this sense of the term that Fleming’s film embodies by producing nostalgia ultimately for nostalgia’s sake. Such a reading of film suggests then that, far from reacting to modernity, this form of temporal nostalgia actually becomes the perfect expression of it.
What’s the Matter With Kansas?
“What’s the matter with Kansas?”—most of us now associate this interrogative with
Thomas Frank’s recent book on contemporary politics, but the question was first posed by
William Allen White in an article attacking the burgeoning Populist movement that appeared in the Emporia Gazette in 1896. White belabored the point that Kansas was an exceptional state that was losing “in population and wealth” at a far greater rate than the rest of the country (196). White faulted the Populists for these declines along with the rise of free trade, because while free trade had precipitated the economic crisis, White believed the
Populists had only made Kansas less hospitable through their political agitation. With
Kansas losing inhabitants yearly in the thousands, White would have certainly found no humor in the Scarecrow’s remark to Dorothy that “‘It is fortunate for Kansas’” that she has the brains to want to return home because otherwise “Kansas would have no people at all”
(45). White’s column reveals that in the 1890s Kansas barely registered in the national consciousness. Over a century later, however, Frank’s book makes a set of very different assumptions about the place of Kansas in the national imagination. With the rise of the
“culture of the middle,” we have come to regard this state as one of the great custodians of
American identity.141 Kansas and the rest of the Heartland lies at the center of the nation where it remains safe from contamination and where it never has to grow up in the
141 For a fuller account of the rise of the “culture of the middle,” see Susan Hegeman’s Patterns for America (1999), pp. 126-157. 200
imaginations of those who live on the coasts. Why the shift? The answer has to with how
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz helped to invent a new form nostalgia in order to archive it in
Kansas.
That Kansas, along with Baum’s fairy tale, serve as the imaginary repository of
America’s past helps explain why The Wonderful Wizard of Oz serves as a kind of roman a clef to
all of U.S. history. All paths to America’s past now seem to follow the yellow brick road.
Since American Quarterly published Henry M. Littlefield’s “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on
Populism” in its Spring 1964 issue, countless readers have subsequently read the same fairy
tale as an allegory that directly corresponds to a multitude of other historical events of the
turn of the century. Conversely, I hope to have established how the book invents a now
dominant form of nostalgia that has played an important cultural role in the twentieth
century and played a role in sustaining the many—albeit contradictory—allegorical readings of Oz. For this reason, we should not at all be surprised to discover that Littlefield begins his paradigmatic Populist reading of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with an anecdote illustrative of “Churchill’s nostalgia” for the fairy tale (47). Littlefield mentions how Churchill loved to recall that his Australian and British World War II brigades sang songs from The Wizard of
Oz as they campaigned successfully across Europe and the deserts of North Africa. For
Littlefield, the former Prime Minister’s “nostalgia is only one symptom of the world-wide delight found in an American fairy-tale” (Littlefield 47). But an anecdote about soldiers waging a battle against a xenophobic dictator to the tune of “We’re off to see the Wizard,/ the Wonderful Wizard of Oz” suggests that the fairy tale had realized its own cosmopolitan imperative by nostalgically narrating the future as though it had already passed (Littlefield
47).
201
Works Cited _____
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1997.
———. “Is Marx Obsolete?” Diogenes 16.64 (1968): 1-16.
———. “Kitsch.” Leppert 501-504.
———. “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.
Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 259-278
———. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. New York:
Verso, 1974.
———. “Opinion Delusion Society.” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans.
Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 105-122.
———. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shirley Weber. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967.
———. The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
———. The State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.
Agacinski, Sylviane. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia. trans. Jody Gladding. New York:
Columbia UP, 2003.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
1983. 3rd ed. New York: Verso, 2006.
Anderson, Donald Lee and Godfrey Tryggve Anderson. “Nostalgia and Malingering in the
Military During the Civil War.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 28 (1984): 156-166. 202
Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. New
York: Knopf, 1971.
Andrews, William. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.”
PMLA 105 (1990): 23-34.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006.
———. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1992.
Arac, Jonathan. The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820 – 1860. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1995.
———. “What Good Can Literary History Do?” American Literary History 20 (2008): 1-11.
Aranda, Jr., José E. “Contradictory Impulses: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance
Theory, and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies.” No More Separate Spheres!: A Next
Wave American Studies Reader. Eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher.
Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 121-148.
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. 1954. New York:
Viking Press, 1961.
———. On Revolution. 1963. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Armstrong, Nancy. “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism.”
The Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994): 1-24.
Austin, Linda M. Nostalgia In Transition, 1780-1917. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007.
Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2005. 203
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. trans. Peter Hallward. New York:
Verso, 2001.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Bancroft, George. History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent. 10
vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1858.
Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York:
Columbia UP, 1997.
Barthes, Roland. “The Discourse of History.” The Rustle of Language. trans. Richard
Howard. ed. François Wahl. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. 127-40.
Baum, L. Frank. The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors. Chicago: Show
Window Publishing Company, 1900.
———. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century
America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
Bell, Michael Davitt. The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1980.
————. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000-1887. Boston: Ticknor Co., 1888.
Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003.
Belnap, Jeffrey and Raúl Fernández, eds. José Martí's "Our America": From National to
Hemispheric Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 204
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. vol. 4.
trans. Edmund Jephcott, et. al. eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 313-55.
———. “The Storyteller.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. vol. 3. trans. Edmund
Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et. al. eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. 143-66.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. 1896. trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.
New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919. 1965. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: CUP, 1981.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bost, Suzanne. “West Meets East: Nineteenth-Century Southern Dialogues on Mixture,
Race, Gender, and Nation.” Mississippi Quarterly 56 (2003): 647-56.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National
Distinctiveness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1997.
———. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha.
New York: Routledge, 1990. 44-70.
Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century 205
America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
———. The School of Hawthorne. New York: OUP, 1986.
Brooks, Van Wyck. “On Creating a Usable Past.” 1918. Van Wyck Brooks, the Early Years:
A Selection from His Works, 1908-1925. Rev ed. Ed. Claire Sprague. Boston:
Northeastern UP, 1993. 219-226.
Brown, Bill. “The Popular, the Populist, and the Populace—Locating Hamlin Garland in
the Politics of Culture,” Arizona Quarterly 50.3 (1994): 89-110.
———. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2003.
Brown, Edward. “Notes on Nostalgia.” Case Histories from the History of Psychiatry. Ed.
Edward Brown. 2005. Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown U. 14 Nov. 2006.
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1990.
Brown, William Wells. Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United
States. 1853. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Brusky, Sarah. “Beyond the Ending of Maternal Absence in A New England Tale, The Wide,
Wide World, and St. Elmo.” ESQ 46 (2000): 149-176.
Bryant, John. “The Persistence of Melville: Representative Writer for a Multicultural Age.”
Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. eds. John Bryant and Robert Milder.
Kent: Kent State UP, 1997.
Bucknill, John Charles and Daniel H. Tuke. A Manual of Psychological Medicine. 1858. New
York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1968.
Buel, Alex W. “Hungarian Independence.” Appendix to the Congressional Globe. 20 Feb. 1850: 206
143-148.
Buell, Lawrence. “Melville and the Question of American Decolonization.” American
Literature 64 (1992): 215-237.
———. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge: CUP,
1986.
Bunge, Nancy. “Walt Whitman’s Influence on Hamlin Garland.” Walt Whitman Review 23
(1977): 45-50.
Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1998.
Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861.
Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1997.
Burstein, Andrew. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction. Bloomington: Indian
UP, 1971.
Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.
Casarino, Ceasare. Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2002.
Cass, Lewis. “Diplomatic Relations with Austria.” Appendix to the Congressional Globe. 4 Jan.
1850: 54-58.
Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood
from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1996.
Castronovo, Russ. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2007. 207
———. Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1995.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Anchor, 1957.
———. Herman Melville: A Critical Study. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.
Cheyfitz, Eric, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to
Tarzan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.
Clemens, Jeremiah. “Resolutions Regarding Slavery.” Appendix to the Congressional Globe. 10
Jan. 1850: 52-54.
Combe, George. “Combe on Phrenology.” Southern Literary Messenger Sept. 1839: 602-7.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground. 1849. New York: Penguin,
1997.
Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2005.
Crain, Caleb. American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. New Haven:
Yale UP, 2001.
Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. ed. Thomas A. Gullason. New York: W.W.
Norton, 1979.
Culver, Stuart. “What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating
Dry Goods Windows.” Representations 21 (1988): 97-116.
———. “Growing Up in Oz.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 607-628.
Dainotto, Roberto Maria. “All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt’: The Literature of Place
and Region.” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 486-505. 208
Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870. Oxford:
OUP, 2001.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York:
Oxford UP, 1986.
Davis, Clark. “The Body Deferred: Israel Potter and the Search for the Hearth.” Studies in
American Fiction 19 (1991): 175-87.
Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press, 1979.
Davis, Theo. Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth
Century. Cambridge: CUP, 2007
Dean, Eric T. Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1997.
Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance. Cambridge: CUP, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. trans. George Collins. New York: Verso, 1997.
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in
American Literature.” Diacritics 27 (1998): 46-69.
———. The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2004.
———. “Sentimental Aesthetics.” American Literature 76 (2004): 495-523.
Dimock, Wai-chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1989.
Dighe, Ranjit S, ed. The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political
and Monetary Allegory. Westport: Praeger, 2002.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. New York: Harper, 1882.
———. “The Omaha Platform.” The Populist Mind. ed. Norman Pollack. Indianapolis: 209
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967.
Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition. New York:
Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983.
Douglass, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. ed. Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction.
Oxford: OUP, 1993.
———. “Where in the World Is William Wells Brown? Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings,
and the DNA of African-American Literary History.” American Literary History 12
(2000): 443-462.
Elliott, Michael A. The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2002.
Elliott, Orrin Leslie. “Ethics of the Tariff Controversy.” Overland Monthly and Out West
Magazine March 1894: 281-294.
Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1999.
Erisman, Fred. “L. Frank Baum and the Progressive Dilemma.” American Quarterly 20
(1968): 616-23.
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African-American Writers and the Challenge of History,
1794-1861. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.
Evans, Augusta J. St. Elmo. 1866. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1894.
Evans, Brad. Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865 – 1920.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. 210
Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
2001.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, 2nd ed. New York:
Columbia UP, 2002.
Farr, James. “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political
Thought.” Political Theory 14 (1986): 263-289.
Farrison, William Edward. William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1969.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil
War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.
Fetterley, Judith and Marjorie Pryse. Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American
Literary Culture. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2003.
Fidler, William Perry. Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835 – 1909: A Biography. Birmingham: U of
Alabama P, 1951.
Fisher, Beth. “The Captive Mexicana and the Desiring Bourgeois Woman: Domesticity and
Expansionism in Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?” Legacy 16 (1999):
59-69.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Form and Setting in the American Novel. New York: OUP, 1985.
Fleissner, Jennifer L. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Folsom, Ed. Walt Whitman’s Native Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 – 1877. New York: Harper & 211
Row, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Random House, 1977.
Frank, Jason. “Aesthetic Democracy: Walt Whitman and the Poetry of the People.” The
Review of Politics 69 (2007): 402-430.
Fresonke, Kris. West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny. Berkeley: U of California,
2002.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Freud Reader. ed. Peter Gay. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989. 584-89.
Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787 – 1845.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting,
and the Drama. 1894. Ed. Jane Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960.
———. “A New Declaration of Rights.” Arena Jan. 1891: 157-84.
———. Main-Travelled Roads. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.
———. A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. 1892. New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1897.
Garman, Bryan K. “‘Heroic Spiritual Grandfather’: Whitman, Sexuality, and the American
Left, 1890-1940.” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 90-126.
Gelfant, Blanche H. “What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming
Women.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to
London. ed. Donald Pizer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 178-210.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of
Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. New York: Random House, 1938. 212
Glover, Stephen. “The Georgian Slave: Ballad.” Cleveland: S. Brainard & Co., 1852.
Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham:
Duke UP, 2002.
Gilmore, Michael T. American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1985.
Gilmore, Paul. “‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and
Abolitionism.” American Literature 69 (1997): 743-780.
Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1993.
———. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850 – 1910.
Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Goldman, Anne E. “‘Who ever heard of a blue-eyed Mexican?’: Satire and Sentimentality in
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?” Gonzales-Berry and
Tatum 59-78.
Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda and Chuck Tatum, eds. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.
vol. 2. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993.
González, John M. “Romancing Hegemony: Constructing Racialized Citizenship in María
Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don.” Gonzales-Berry and Tatum
23-39.
Gonzalez, Manuel G. Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1999.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America.
New York: Oxford UP, 1978. 213
Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.
Cambridge: CUP, 2003.
———. Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism. Cambridge:
CUP, 1996.
Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Gramsci, Antonio. The Antonio Gramsci Reader, Selected Writings 1916-1935. New York: NYU
Press, 2000.
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Viking, 1955.
Greenspan, Ezra, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995.
Grossman, Jay. Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of
Representation. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
Haddox, Thomas F. “Whitman’s End of History: “As I Sat Alone by bule Ontario’s Shore,”
Democratic Vistas, and the Postbellum Politics of Nostalgia.” Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 22.1 (2004): 1-22.
Harris, Susan K. Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretative Strategies.
Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Harris, W.C. E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Constitutional
Paradox. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2005.
Hart, Albert Bushnell. “Imagination in History.” American Historical Review 15 (1910): 227-
251.
Harte, Bret. The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America. Oxford: OUP, 1997. 214
Haskell, Thomas L. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science
Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority. 2nd ed. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 2000.
Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1999.
Helo, Ari and Peter Onuf. “Jefferson, Morality and Slavery.” William and Mary Quarterly 63
(2003): 583-614.
Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001.
Herr, Cheryl Temple. Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American
Midwest. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.
Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. New York:
CUP, 1995.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. ed. Gunzelin Schmid
Noerr. trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
Horwitz, Howard. By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America. New
York: OUP, 1991.
———. “Maggie and the Sociological Paradigm.” American Literary History 10 (1998):
606-38.
Howard, June, ed. New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs. New York: CUP, 1994.
Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891.
———. “The New Historical Romances.” North American Review Dec. 1900: 935-949.
Hsu, Hsuan. “Literature and Regional Production.” American Literary History 17 (2005):
36-68. 215
Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises.
1725. Ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
Inness, Sherrie A. and Diana Royer, eds. Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s
Regional Writing. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.
Jacobs, Margaret D. “Mixed Bloods, Mestizas, and Pintos: Race, Gender, and Claims to
Whiteness in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who
Would Have Thought It?” Western American Literature 36 (2001): 212-31.
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.”
On Language. Eds. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1990. 115-133.
James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We
Live In. 1953. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001.
James, Jennifer. “‘Civil’ War Wounds: William Wells Brown, Violence, and the Domestic
Narrative.” African American Review 39 (2005): 39-54.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 3 vols. ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, et. al.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
Jameson, Frederic. “Nostalgia for the Present.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 517-537.
———. The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1981.
Johnson, Bradley. “Dueling Sentiments: Responses to Patriarchal Violence in Augusta Jane
Evans’ St. Elmo.” Southern Literary Journal 33 (2001): 14-29.
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2002.
————. “A Call for a Truce.” American Literary History 17 (2005): 141-147. 216
————. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. trans. Ted
Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Wlat Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: U of
Iowa P, 2004.
Kim, Helen M. “Strategic Credulity: Oz as Mass Cultural Parable.” Cultural Critique 33
(1996): 213-233.
Kolb, Harold H., Jr. The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form. Charlottesville:
UP of Virginia, 1969.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land : Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and
Letters. Chapel Hill : U of North Carolina P, 1975.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. 2nd
ed. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.
Larson, Kerry C. Whitman’s Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton,
1991.
Lauter, Paul. “Melville Climbs the Canon.” American Literature 66 (1994): 1-24.
Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Penguin, 1961.
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture,
1880-1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.
Leppert, Richard, ed. Essays on Music by Theodor W. Adorno. trans. Susan H. Gillespie.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Levin, Henry. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. Knopf: New York, 1958.
Levine, Robert S. Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and 217
Melville. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 557-69.
Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois.” 27 Jan.
1838. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832-1852. New York: Library of America,
1989. 28-36.
———. “‘House Divided’ Speech at Springfield, Illinois.” 16 Jun. 1858. Abraham Lincoln:
Speeches and Writings, 1832-1852. New York: Library of America, 1989. 426-434.
Littlefield, Henry M. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly 16
(1964): 47-58.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Ed. Ian Shapiro.
New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Long, Lisa A. “Genre Matters: Embodying American Literary Naturalism.” American
Literary History 19 (2007): 160-173.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York:
OUP, 1993.
Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.
Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: CUP, 1985.
Löwy, Malcolm and Robert Sayre. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. Trans. Catherine
Porter. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Luis-Brown, David. “‘White Slaves’ and the ‘Arrogant Mestiza’: Reconfiguring Whiteness in
The Squatter and the Don and Ramona.” American Literature 69 (1997): 813-39.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 218
1971.
Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.
———. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Literary Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 2004.
Macalpine, Ida and Richard Hunter. George III and the Mad-Business. London: Allen Lane,
1969.
Mack, Stephen John. The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy. Iowa City: U of
Iowa P, 2002.
Mackie, J. Milton. “The Chinamen, Domestic, Scholastic, Iconoclastic, and Imperial.”
Putnam’s Monthly Apr. 1857: 337-351.
Margolis, Stacey. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham:
Duke UP, 2005.
María de la Luz Montes, Amelia. “María Amparo Ruiz de Burton Negotiates American
Literary Politics and Culture.” Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Eds.
Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000.
Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1967.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. vol. 1. ed. Ernest Mandel. trans. Ben
Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1976.
———. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers,
1963.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York:
OUP, 1964.
Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 219
New York: OUP, 1941.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America,
1870-1920. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
McMath Jr., Robert C. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1992.
Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” 1850. Ed. Gordon Hunter. American
Literature, American Culture. New York: OUP, 1999. 93-102.
———. “Israel Potter; Or, Fifty Years of Exile. A Fourth of July Story.” Putnam’s Monthly
July 1854: 66-75.
———. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. 1855. Eds. Harrison Hayford, et. al. Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1982.
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American
Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1987.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956.
———. The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville.
Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
Mitchell, S. Weir. “The Medical Department in the Civil War.” JAMA 62 (1914): 1445-
1450.
Molesworth, Charles. “Whitman’s Political Vision.” Raritan 12 (1992): 98-112.
Montgomery, James. The Poetical Works of James Montgomery. 1858. New York: Little, Brown
& Co., 1860.
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 220
1983.
Morrison, Michael. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny. Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1997.
Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States. New York:
Macmillan Co., 1947
Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire.
Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Nabers, Deak. “The Problem of Revolution in the Age of Slavery: Clotel, Fiction, and the
Government of Man.” Representations 91 (2005): 84-108.
Nell, William C. The Colored Patriots of American Revolution. Boston: R.F. Walcut, 1855.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.
Onuf, Peter S. “Federalism, Republicanism, and the Origins of American Sectionalism.” All
Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions. Eds. Edward L. Ayers, et al. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. 11-37
Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. Berkeley: U of California, 1999.
Parker, David B. "The Fork in the Yellow Brick Road." 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of North American Studies 5 (2000): 1-7.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American
Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1930.
Pease, Donald E. “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon.” Revisionary
Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP,
1994. 1-37.
———. “New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism.” Cultures of United States 221
Imperialism. Eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 22-
37.
———. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1987.
Pease, Donald E. and Robyn Wiegman. “Futures.” Pease and Wiegman 1-42.
Pease, Donald E. and Robyn Wiegman, eds. The Futures of American Studies. Durham: Duke
UP, 2002. 1-42.
Peterson, Carla L. “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the
African-American Novel in the 1850s.” American Literary History 4 (1992): 559-583.
Peyser, Thomas. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Pillsbury, Arthur J. “The Present Political Outlook: I. The Republican View.” Overland
Monthly and Out West Magazine July 1898: 53-7.
Pita, Beatrice. “Engendering Critique: Race, Class, and Gender in Ruiz de Burton and
Martí.” Belnap and Fernández 129-144.
Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois P, 1966.
Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity.
New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Pizer, Donald. Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career. Berkeley: U of California P, 1960.
Price, Kenneth M. To Walt Whitman, America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.
———. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.
Price, Kenneth M. and Robert C. Leitz, III. “The Uncollected Letters of Hamlin Garland to
Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 5.3 (1988): 1-13. 222
Posnett, Hutcheson Macaulay. Comparative Literature. New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1896.
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Powell, Timothy B. Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Price, Kenneth M. Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century. New Haven: Yale UP,
1990.
Rahn, Suzanne, ed. L. Frank Baum’s World of Oz: A Classic Series at 100. Lanham: The
Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes.” New Left Review 14
(2002): 133-151.
———. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1999.
———. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2004.
———. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
———. “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004):
297-310.
Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.
Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York:
OUP, 1999.
Reising, Russell. Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text. Durham: Duke UP,
1996.
Reynolds, David S. “Politics and Poetry: Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the 1850s.” 223
Greenspan 66-91.
———. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Reynolds, Larry J. European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1988.
Ritter, Gretchen. “Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics.” Journal of American Studies 31
(1997): 171-202.
Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York UP, 1999.
Rodríguez, Manuel M. Martín. “Textual and Land Reclamations: The Critical Reception of
Early Chicana/o Literature.” Gonzales-Berry and Tatum 40-58.
Rohrbach, Augusta. Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace.
New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1979.
Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham:
Duke UP, 1997.
Rorty, Richard. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” Cheah and Robbins 45-58.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. 2nd ed.Boston: Beacon
Press, 1993.
Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
Rosen, George. “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder.” Clio Medica 10.1 (1975):
29-51.
Rosenberg, Brian. “Israel Potter: Melville’s Anti-History.” Studies in American Fiction 15
(1987): 175-86. 224
Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II.
New York: OUP, 2000.
Rowlandson, Mary. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.
1682. Ed. Amy Schrager Lang. Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s
Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 11-65.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s
Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Rush, Benjamin. Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind. 1812. New
York: Hafner, 1962.
Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
Russell, David. “A Southern Patriot’s Sacrifice: Patriarchal Repositioning in Augusta
Evans’s St. Elmo.” Southern Studies 12.1-2 (2005): 47-62.
Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2002. 173-186.
Saldívar, José David. “Nuestra América’s Borders: Remapping American Cultural Studies.”
Belnap and Fernández 145-175.
Sampson, Marmaduke. “Slavery in the United States.” London: S. Highly, 1845.
Samuels, Shirley. Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War. New York: OUP, 2004.
———. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early
American Nation. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
Sánchez, María Carla. “Whiteness Invisible: Early Mexican American Writing and the Color
of Literary History.” Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion.
Eds. Sanchez, Maria Carla and Linda Schlossberg. New York: New York UP, 2001.
64-91. 225
Sánchez, Rosura. “Dismantling the Colossus: Martí and Ruiz de Burton on the Formulation
of Anglo América.” Belnap and Fernández 115-128.
Sánchez, Rosaura and Beatrice Pita, “María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and the Power of Her
Pen.” Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. Eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and
Virginia Sanchez Korrol. New York: OUP, 2005. 72-83.
Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader.
Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1896.
Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 1794. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth M.
Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: OUP, 1967.
Schweninger, Lee. “Clotel and the Historicity of the Anecdote.” MELUS 24.1 (1999): 21-
36.
Seeyle, John. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.
Sedgwick, Henry D. “The United States and Rome.” The Atlantic Monthly October 1899:
445-458.
Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and
the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of
George Washington, 1763-1789. New York : T.Y. Crowell, 1976.
Sizer, Lyde Cullen. The Political Work of Northern Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.
Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1973.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. 226
Oxford: OUP, 1979.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1950.
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization,
1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
Sofer , Naomi Z. Making the “America of Art”: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century
Women Writers. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2005.
Spanos, William V. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for
American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1997.
Streeby, Shelley. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture.
Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York:
Oxford UP, 1991.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: OUP,
1998.
Sundquist, Eric J., ed. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1993.
Swartz, Mark Evan. Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on
Stage and Screen to 1939. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.
Talmon, Thrace. “Papers for the Ladies, Part XII: The Erect Spirit.” The Ladies' Repository
10 Oct. 1859: 604-8. 227
Tawil, Ezra. “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became
White.” Novel 32 (1998): 99-124.
———. The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. Cambridge:
CUP, 2006
Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British
Diaspora, 1750 – 1850. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.
Tinnemeyer, Andrea. Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative after 1848. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 2006.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. trans. Richard
Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. Oxford:
OUP, 1985.
Toth, Emily, ed. Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays. New York:
Human Sciences Press, 1985.
Trachtenberg, Alan. “Walt Whitman: Precipitant of the Modern.” Greenspan 194-207.
———. “Whitman’s Visionary Politics.” The Mickle Street Review (1988): 15-31.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City:
Doubleday, 1953.
Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete. “Emancipating the Lettered Slave: Sentiment and Slavery in
Augusta Evans’s St. Elmo.” American Literature 77 (2005): 123-150.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York:
Macmillan, 1899.
Véron, Eugène. Aesthetics, trans. W.H. Armstrong. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879.
Wald, Pricilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke UP, 228
1995.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia
UP, 2006.
Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1993.
Watts, Edward. An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture. Athens:
Ohio UP, 2002.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner’s, 1958.
———. From Max Weber. New York: Oxford UP, 1946.
Wertheimer, Eric. Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature,
1771-1876. New York: CUP, 1999.
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence : Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000.
Wharton, Francis. A Treatise on Theism, and On the Modern Skeptical Theories. Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott & Co., 1859.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1973.
White, William Allen. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” A Populist Reader: Selections from the
Works of American Populist Leaders. ed. George Brown Tindall. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966. 192-199.
Whitman, Walt. “American National Literature.” Stovall 663-68.
———. “The Artilleryman’s Vision” Blodgett and Bradley 317-18.
———. “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.” Stovall 711-32.
———. “A Death-Bouquet.” Stovall 671-73. 229
———. Democratic Vistas. Stovall 361-426.
———. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition. eds. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley
Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.
———. “Old Poets.” Stovall 658-62.
———. “Poetry To-day in America—Shakespere—The Future.” Stovall 474-90.
———. Prose Works 1892. 2 vols. ed. Floyd Stovall. New York: New York UP, 1964.
———. “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim.” Blodgett and Bradley 306-7.
———. “Song of Myself.” Leaves of Grass. 1855. ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York:
Penguin, 1976. 25-86.
———. “Think of the Soul.” Blodgett and Bradley 589-90.
———. “A Thought of Columbus.” Blodgett and Bradley 581-82.
———. “To a Historian.” Blodgett and Bradley 4.
———. “To Think of Time.” Blodgett and Bradley 434-40.
———. “A Voice from Death.” Blodgett and Bradley 551-53.
———. “The Wound-Dresser.” Blodgett and Bradley 308-11.
Widmer, Edward L. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. New York:
OUP, 1999.
Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton,
2005.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973.
———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1977.
Wood, Gordon S. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. New York:
Penguin Books, 2006.
———. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. New York: Penguin Books, 230
2006.
Woodress, James, ed. Critical Essays on Walt Whitman. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1983.
Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1999.
Zipes, Jack. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997.
“Editor’s Table.” The New England Magazine March 1896: 123-128.
His Majesty: The Scarecrow of Oz. Dir. J. Farrell MacDonald. Perf. Violet Macmillan, Frank
Moore, and Fred Woodward. Oz Film Company, 1914.
“Nostalgia,” The New York Times 12 May 1874: 4.
“Novels: Their Meaning and their Mission.” Putnam’s Monthly Oct. 1854: 389-396.
Rev. of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. Critical Essays on Walt Whitman. ed. James
Woodress. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1983. 44-46.
Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Perf. Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert
Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton, and Charley Grapewin. MGM,
1939.