Self-Health: The Politics of Care in American Literature, 1793-1873 by Emily Joan Waples A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Susan Scott Parrish, Chair Associate Professor Daniel S. Hack Professor Kerry C. Larson Professor Alexandra M. Stern © Emily Joan Waples, 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee for seeing me through this process, especially my chair, Scotti Parrish, whose deep and careful analyses have helped shape my thinking, whose example as a scholar and teacher has encouraged me, and whose kindness has sustained me. Kerry Larson energized my interests in the nineteenth century, and I’m indebted to his keen readings and expert diagnostics. Alex Stern brought her invaluable expertise and intellectual rigor to bear upon this project. My thanks to Gregg Crane for lending his eye to this dissertation’s earlier stages, and to Danny Hack for lots of things, not least of which is agreeing to read this. Research for this dissertation was generally supported by fellowships from Rackham Graduate School and the Institute for the Humanities. I’m deeply and happily beholden to the intellectual community at the University of Michigan for including me and energizing me these past six years. Sid Smith has been an invaluable mentor from the very beginning. June Howard helped me to formulate my interests; Scott Lyons offered reassurance during a time of some despair. I thank the 2015-2016 Institute fellows for their generous engagement with my work; the members of my cohort, especially Adam Sneed, a dear friend since day one, for their companionship; and the faculty and students in the Medical Humanities Path of Excellence at the University of Michigan Medical School for welcoming me among them. And I’m especially grateful to my students for all of their insight and energy, for challenging me and for reminding me why I’m here. I wake daily with devout thanksgiving for my transcendent teachers—for Claudia Skerlong, who showed me that thinking critically about literature is one way of loving it, and for Paul Kane, whose example made me want to pay it forward; it was Paul who pointed me in the direction of Ann Arbor, for which I will remain ever thankful. I owe more than I can express to my mother, Kim Young. As a feminist, teacher, and parent, she remains my primary example of the joyful negotiation of work and care. This is for her. My family has been a constant source of support and encouragement. My father, David Waples, is a paragon of unflagging intellectual curiosity; no matter how many degrees I earn, I doubt I will ever read so many books. Sharon Knapp has taught me much about the importance of maintaining the happy pursuit of creative labor. Pat Keller took care of me, and so many others, during her too-short and selfless life; my work endeavors to honor her memory. And thanks to my brothers, Greg, Bret, and Nathan, for being a few of my favorite people. This is a project about the politics of self-care, but I could not have completed it without the care of Dr. Jennifer Griggs and the staff at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. To that end, I am immensely grateful to the Graduate Employee Organization for ensuring that I have had what so many others in this country do not: access to quality, affordable health care. Finally, I cannot write about care without acknowledging my deep debt of gratitude to Anthony LoSapio, who has cared for me, in large ways and small, for all of these years. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii LIST OF FIGURES v ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION 1 Health Care as Self-Care in the Long Nineteenth Century Health Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States 18 Public Health and/as Personal Health 21 “Every Man His Own Doctor” 28 Outline of Chapters 37 CHAPTER ONE 42 Invisible Agency: Charles Brocken Brown’s Biological Gothic Seeds and Arrows: Toward an American Bio-Gothic 54 Outrageous Fortunes: Wieland 62 Take Arms?: Arthur Mervyn 71 Coda: The Name of Action 82 CHAPTER TWO 88 Atmospherical Media: Cholera, Domestic Hygiene, and the Miasmatic Imaginary The American Romance: Immediacy, Mediation, Immunity 103 Premonitory Reading 109 “Air of consequence”: “The Fall of the House of Usher” 117 The Pursuit of Purer Air: The House of the Seven Gables 124 Coda: An Ethics of the Air 139 CHAPTER THREE 142 The Body Hygienic: Political Economy, Public Health, and Slavery in the Antebellum South Burdens of Proof: Racialized Immunity and States’ Rights Medicine 152 Burdens of Care: Pro-Slavery Ideology and The Planter’s Northern Bride 162 Biopolitics in The Bondwoman’s Narrative 173 Coda: “What Will Become of the Free Colored People?” 188 iii CHAPTER FOUR 195 Hygienic Sentimentality: Degeneration and the American Marriage Experiment “The Sins of the Mothers”: Republican Reproduction and 1850s Free Love Feminism 204 “Short-gevity”: Degeneration’s Sentimental Mode 213 “Morbid Tendencies”: Alcott’s Moods 222 Coda: “It should end with us” 238 AFTERWORD 244 Why Literature? WORKS CITED 248 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure I.1 Every Man His Own Doctor: or, The Poor Planter’s Physician 31 Figure I.2 Gunn’s Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend 33 Figure 1.1 A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia 85 Figure 2.1 Windpipe and lungs. 91 Figure 2.2 “Frame of the House I live in” 93 Figure 2.3 “[T]he frame of a wooden dwelling house” 94 Figure 2.4 Report of cholera cases and deaths in New York City 111 Figure 2.5 Cholera preventative advertisements 111 Figure 2.6 A “plan…for the supply of fresh air” 128 Figure 2.7 A “plan of a building for back-door accommodations” 129 Figure 3.1 “Table Showing the Number of Deaths, for Each Year, Among the Colored Population 157 of Charleston” v Figure 3.2 “On the Susceptibility of the Caucasians and Africans to the Different Classes of Disease” 158 Figure 3.3 “A Valuable Family of Acclimated Negroes” 159 Figure 3.4 “[T]he largest lot of acclimated Negroes in the city” 159 Figure 3.5 “They Can’t Take Care of Themselves” 164 Figure 3.6 “Reflections on the Census of 1840” 192 Figure 4.1 “Emerson the Idiot” 214 Figure 4.2 “Miss Woman’s Rights” 214 Figure 4.3 The four temperaments 225 Figure 4.4 Louisa May Alcott 225 Figure 4.5 “Lecture on Matrimony & Phrenology” 232 vi ABSTRACT Self-Health examines the cultural politics of health in the United States in the decades prior to the professionalization of medicine, the microbiological revolution, and the development of federal public health policy. Arguing that early republican and antebellum health discourses located the burden of care not with the state, but with the embodied subject, it traces the ways in which American health was rendered “public” at moments of biopolitical crisis: periods of populational emergency during which individuals’ relations and obligations to the life of the social body were tried and defined. Each chapter considers a nineteenth-century etiological or epidemiological concept—predisposition, miasmatic transmission, racialized immunity, and hereditary degeneration —as an organizing principle that shaped laypeople’s understandings of agency, risk, and responsibility. Specifically, analyzing theories of disease transmission and prevention as they were presented for public consumption in print media—newspapers, periodicals, domestic medical manuals, and novels—Self-Health illustrates the ways in which self-care was understood not only as a civic responsibility, but as a fundamental prerequisite for citizenship. In so doing, it investigates the hygienic investments of nineteenth-century fiction, exploring how American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Hannah Crafts, and Louisa May Alcott engaged with contemporary discourses of health and hygiene in a range of narrative genres, including the Gothic, the romance, the abolitionist novel, and the sentimental novel. Intervening in American literary history, the history of medicine, and the health humanities, Self-Health seeks to illuminate the historical development of the politics, praxes, and ethics of care that continue to inform American health ideologies in our own historical moment. vii INTRODUCTION Health Care as Self-Care in the Long Nineteenth Century Of the three objects contemplated in the Declaration of Independence as necessary to be secured by government, the first named is “Life.” Higher purposes cannot be conceived for which governments should be instituted. —John Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (1845) I am afraid to own a Body— I am afraid to own a Soul— Profound—precarious Property— Possession, not optional— —Emily Dickinson In January 1800, Charles Brockden Brown’s Monthly Magazine, and American Review issued the first installment of its four-part review of Noah Webster’s Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases (1799). Undertaken in the wake of his examination of the yellow fever epidemic that had literally decimated Philadelphia’s population in 1793, Webster’s ambitious history attempts a “critical and laborious inquiry” into the “origins and causes of pestilence” (21) from biblical times to the threshold of the nineteenth century. The reviewer commends Webster’s efforts in supplying “indirect instruction” to the public on a matter “of immediate and universal importance,” yet remarks that the volume is “wanting in technical precision and refinement”—after all, “[t]he author is no physician” (30). As an illustration of Webster’s lack of scientific acumen, the reviewer cites the author’s prefatory remarks with added italics: “a history of pestilence, that all-devouring scourge, which 1 has swept away a large portion of the human race in every age, is yet a desideratum in our libraries”— to which he appends an admonitory footnote: “A scourge neither devours nor sweeps” (31).