“Objects on the Margins”: How Things Make Persons and Worlds in Nineteenth-Century United States Writing Maia Chance A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Robert Abrams, Chair Marshall Brown Mark Patterson Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English ©Copyright 2020 Maia Chance University of Washington Abstract “Objects on the Margins”: How Things Make Persons and Worlds in Nineteenth-Century United States Writing Maia Chance Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Robert Abrams Department of English “Objects on the Margins”: How Things Make Persons and Worlds in Nineteenth-Century United States Writing examines how nonhuman things make and unmake persons and worlds in mid- nineteenth-century United States writing. I am interested in how subjects constitute themselves by making objects, and I am equally interested in moments in which things that resist classification as objects dismantle, invert, or evade the received subject-object paradigm. My central contention is that nonhuman things can structure personhood and worlds, rather than merely the reverse. As a result, my reading method is to attend to material specificity and praxis rather than to ideological signification. I find texts clamoring with things that, far from being flat stage props or working-class stand-ins for more glamorous ideologies, are things that behave. Contents: Introduction 1 Part I: Breaking Introduction to Part I 12 Chapter One: Hawthorne’s Trashy Toys 14 Chapter Two: Polemics and Pattypans 61 Part II: Making Introduction to Part II 110 Chapter Three: Poe’s Haunted Settler Colonial Journeys 112 Chapter Four: America the Crime Scene 143 Coda 203 Works Cited 217 Objects on the Margins / Chance 1 Introduction This is a study of how nonhuman things make and unmake persons and worlds in mid- nineteenth-century United States writing. I am interested in how subjects constitute themselves by making objects, and I am equally interested in moments in which things that resist classification as objects dismantle, invert, or evade the received subject-object paradigm. My central contention is that nonhuman things can structure personhood and worlds, rather than merely the reverse. As a result, my reading method is to attend to material specificity and praxis rather than to ideological signification. I find texts clamoring with things that, far from being flat stage props or working-class stand-ins for more glamorous ideologies, are things that behave. I focus on allegedly trivial things, keeping alert to false teeth and dirt as much as to the words and gestures of human characters. Paying attention to things means acknowledging that “the human is not the world’s sole meaning-maker, and never has been” (Cohen 7). Decentering human subjectivity is not merely a gesture of humility, though; it is a philosophically urgent practice. Theodor Adorno writes, If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. (MM 98) Investigating history’s “waste products” and “blind spots”—including people of color, women, children, the aged, the sick, animals, trash, toys, food, kitchen tools, compost, textiles, mimesis, Objects on the Margins / Chance 2 handiwork—pushes past hegemonic reading habits to open up new lines of inquiry. For instance, what might be said about a critically exhausted text such as The Scarlet Letter if the reading focused not on history’s “victors” (the concept of Protestant sin springs to mind), but on its representation of waste products such as (literally) trash? If Enlightenment’s investment is in “the autonomy of thought in relation to objects” (Adorno and Horkheimer 7), then reading practices that negate material specificity replicate the subject-object paradigm at the same time that they objectify texts by treating them as “cultural artifacts.” Starting with the idea that there is no possible autonomy from so-called objects, this study has at its center the material specificity of textual things, allegedly trivial things, what Walter Benjamin calls, in his essay “Old Toys,” “objects on the margins.” # I situate my work beside studies of things in nineteenth-century texts, in particular Bill Brown’s foundational works “Thing Theory” and A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, as well as essays in the collections Things and Other Things, both edited by Brown. In A Sense of Things (2003) Brown asks, “How do objects mediate relations between subjects?”; “How are things and thingness used to think about the self?”; “How are objects represented in this text? And how are they made to mean?” (18), questions that guided my own investigation. My study also sits in the vicinity of Barbara Johnson’s criticism of Victorian literature in her lush Persons and Things, and Katharina Boehm’s edited collection Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. All of these studies inquire, what might be learned about human culture if we look beyond the Cartesian subject-object binary? In general, they take as a point of departure the essential concept of things in contradistinction to objects. Brown writes, Objects on the Margins / Chance 3 As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture—above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (“Thing Theory” 4) Apprehending things, in other words, also means apprehending the contours of human subjectivity. And yet, as instructive as these texts are from a theoretical and methodological standpoint, within their pages “nineteenth-century literature” usually means British and/or late- Victorian literature (aside from a few obligatory stabs at Emerson’s transcendentalism, Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture,” and, inevitably, Moby-Dick). United States writing from the early or middle part of the nineteenth century is largely overlooked. The explosion of mass-manufactured commodities and advertising culture near the end of the nineteenth century helps to explain the high visibility of things and objects in that period and, as a result, the emphasis on the late nineteenth century in literary criticism about things. However, I could not help but wonder about the period before the Civil War. Toni Morrison argues in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination that the specter of Africanness in United States literature helped to constitute the concept of whiteness. In the same way, my study asks if things, or the specter of thingness, helps to constitute mid nineteenth-century United States personhood in literature. In the antebellum period, slavery made commodities out of people, the genocidal policies of the United States government hinged on the objectification of indigenous people, and the most vigorous period of continental expansion divvied up the landscape like a butcher’s cut chart with railroad tracks and the Jeffersonian Land Ordinance of 1785. The American System of manufacturing’s division of labor and use of semi-automated machines effected the interchangeability of manufactured things and workers, so where exactly were the boundaries of personhood inside the walls of a Objects on the Margins / Chance 4 factory? 1 What if the anxiety about inanimate things looking back found in Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess Player” or Melville’s “The Bell-Tower” is the fear of slave insurrection? 2 If the mid- nineteenth-century period in the United States was about constituting We the People, the pressing question was, who gets to be a person? My fundamental approach throughout this study is based on theories of materiality. I draw from a variety of theoretical bodies, especially feminist, Marxist, post-structural, and settler colonial, and including Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Elaine Scarry, and Michel de Certeau. However, my overarching viewpoint is influenced by critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory is not merely useful for supporting my claims; these writers shaped and guided my thinking, concerned as they are with aesthetic making and mimesis, the philosophy of history, critique of the subject, the pressures and even manipulations that material culture places upon human lives, and, most of all, the urgent problem of humans being treated as objects. Additionally, my central argument in the first chapter, “Polemics and Pattypans,” is indebted to the theoretical work of Bruno Latour, whose texts Reassembling the Social and “The Berlin Key or How to do Words With Things” provide the clearest, most concrete examples I have found about how things can have agency and how power can be displaced into things. Finally, my third and fourth chapters, “Poe’s Haunted Settler Colonial Journeys” and “America the Crime Scene,” 1 See, for example, the ephemeral girl workers in the paper factory in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855). 2 Cassuto writes of the recent rediscovery of “many minstrel song lyrics in which black people are turned into things” (Inhuman Race 155). In Melville’s Typee, the narrator mistakes people for coconuts, just as a beaver colony is mistaken for a human town in The Last of the Mohicans. Objects on the Margins / Chance 5 have at their theoretical cores Lorenzo Veracini’s foundational studies of settler colonialism and his elucidations of settler narratives.