Senses of Belonging: the Synaesthetics of Citizenship in American Literature, 1862 – 1903
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Senses of Belonging: The Synaesthetics of Citizenship in American Literature, 1862 – 1903 by Erica Fretwell Department of English Duke University Date: _______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 i v ABSTRACT Senses of Belonging: The Synaesthetics of Citizenship in American Literature, 1862 – 1903 by Erica Fretwell Department of English Duke University Date: _______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Kathy Psomiades An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Erica Fretwell 2011 Abstract In American letters, the Civil War represented a decisive break in literary form, a shift from interiority to exteriority. Sentimentalism harnessed the transformative effects of aesthetic feeling to galvanize political opinion in antebellum America, whereas realist and regionalist writing’s empiricist attention to surface and appearance represented a reaction against sentimentalism. Yet postbellum literature is nothing if not a sustained meditation on how the feeling, sensate body negotiates the abstraction of citizenship and political life. The paradoxes presented by black emancipation, immigration, and women’s suffrage forced what today we consider the period’s most canonical authors, from Emily Dickinson to W.E.B. Du Bois, to confront the contradictory feelings provoked by a democratic nation that excluded most of its citizens from their fundamental rights. The taste of Ellis Island, Henry James warned in The American Scene, “will be forever in [the] mouth” of the citizen, who must share “the intimacy of his American patriotism with the inconceivable alien.” James’s literal distaste for immigrants raises the stakes of what it means to locate the experience of belonging neither inside nor outside the body, but at its sensory orifices, its porous thresholds. The issue of corporeal intimacy manifested in aesthetic forms that made the senses legible across linked areas of nineteenth-century literary production: from the cookbook (Russell’s Domestic Cookbook) and local color fiction (Chopin’s The Awakening), to utopian novels (Bellamy’s Looking Backward), autobiographies (Keller’s The Story of My Life) and the apparently tasteless lyric poems about spiritual hunger (Dickinson’s poetry). Senses of iv Belonging seeks to show how postbellum American literature, in all its forms, transformed civic abstraction into a sensate experience. Senses of Belonging builds on and seeks to advance work on embodied citizenship in the broad area of cultural studies by showing how taste, touch, smell, sight and sound articulate otherwise intangible feelings of national belonging. To do so, each chapter is devoted to a single sensation, thereby placing literary treatment of each sensation in the context of political, scientific, and philosophical debates about citizenship. This structure helps draw attention to how each sense perception uniquely registered the multi-faceted experience of belonging in the wake of the Civil War, the bloodiest event Americans had yet experienced. The project’s focus on literary form and sense experience is also historical, as it traces modes of national affiliation from the problem of black emancipation during the Civil War, to the “Negro Problem” during Reconstruction, to what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the “problem of the color line” at the turn of the twentieth century. This chronological arrangement both reframes existing periodizations of nineteenth-century American literature and adds dimension to what is often referred to as the “Gilded Age.” What emerges from this methodology is a literary analysis of how seemingly disparate and unconnected nineteenth-century American writers shared a central preoccupation with sensory experiences of, and the emotional effects on, everyday civic life. This study crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to chart connections among nineteenth- century writers and thinkers: anthropology, philosophy, and physiology among others. Yet the questions that organize this dissertation are fundamentally literary, for Senses of Belonging demonstrates that the senses do not exist prior to or outside of language, but rather are constituted through literature’s rich imaginings. v In loving memory of Steven L. Fretwell vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .............................................................................................................................viii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix Sensitive Citizenship .................................................................................................................... 1 Taste .............................................................................................................................................. 24 Smell.............................................................................................................................................. 58 Hear............................................................................................................................................... 93 Touch .......................................................................................................................................... 123 See................................................................................................................................................ 157 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 185 Biography................................................................................................................................... 194 vii List of Figures Figure 1: C.P. Cranch, Transparent Eyeball......................................................................................... 4 Figure 2: Fetal Sonogram................................................................................................................ 164 Figure 3: “An Image of an Angel”................................................................................................. 166 Figure 4: “Winter 1985”.................................................................................................................. 170 viii Acknowledgements With regards to the autobiographical impulse of all that we write, this dissertation is about an unabashedly sensitive woman. It could not have been thought, let alone written, without the compassion and sensitivity that others have so graciously shown me. My committee has given this dissertation endless support, critical attention, and much patience. I doubt my capacity to fully thank them for this. Tina Campt’s intellectual rigor, steadfast devotion, and immeasurable moral support have sustained me in ways I can barely describe. I am grateful for Tom Ferraro’s monastic obsessions and intellectual passions. Fred Moten is my muse; to approximate one day the way he thinks, reads, writes, and inhabits the world is an impossible aspiration of mine. Above all, I have been fortunate enough to be the recipient of Priscilla Wald’s unshakable dedication since before my arrival in Durham. What began as a coffee date one evening in Greenwich Village turned into a six- year relationship—my longest one yet. I am forever grateful that she had (and continues to have) the confidence in my ability to transform intuitive leaps into a coherent project. Her guidance, instruction, and support—morally, personally, intellectually—have been crucial to my development as a scholar, a present and future colleague, and a person. She has modeled for me how humane and rigorous engagement works. Without her, this project, let alone a career in academia, would have been unthinkable. I worship at the altars of Hannah True, Rocio Lower, and Maryscot Mullins. From Durham to Austin, Matt Cohen has modeled for me the kind of scholarly and personal generosity that academia at its best can offer. The kindness of Houston Baker, ix Cathy Davidson, and Jose David Saldivar has been in excess. Formal responses from and unofficial conversations with Kim Lamm and Eric Lott have been immensely generative. The Franklin Humanities Institute and the Women’s Studies program at Duke University have funded my research. The Women’s Studies Graduate Student Colloquium provided me with a supportive community of careful readers and provocative thinkers. The Institute for Critical U.S. Studies allowed me to participate in the Futures of American Studies, where I fine-tuned my work. Much of this dissertation developed in conversation with colleagues from the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Dissertation Working Group, led by the always-amazing Christina Chia. In these groups, I benefitted