FEELING SUBJECTS: SCIENCE AND LAW IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Christine Yao May 2016 © 2016 Christine Yao FEELING SUBJECTS: SCIENCE AND LAW IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA Christine Yao, Ph. D. Cornell University 2016 Feeling Subjects: Science and Law in Nineteenth-Century America challenges cultural assumptions about feeling and politics articulated by Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s demand “to feel right” in opposition to the purportedly dispassionate disciplines of American science and law. By juxtaposing literature by African American and Asian American authors alongside works by white novelists of the American Renaissance and popular white women writers, this project analyzes literary portrayals of individual and disciplinary subject formation in relation to scientific and legal discourses in the culture of sentiment. The “Affectations” chapters argue that the practitioners of science and law use the language of sentimentality to reconfigure the limits of sympathy. I pair chapters on Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Martin Delany’s Blake on the role of blackness. In Melville, I trace how Captain Delano’s benevolent racism toward enslaved black subjects is achieved through the sentimental logic that undergirds race science and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In contrast, Delany, as the founder of Black Nationalism, imagines a new form of sympathetic kinship between African Americans and Native Americans in order to reclaim science and law as part of a liberatory system of feeling that can unite black, indigenous, and Asian subjects in rebellion. Conversely, the “Disaffections” chapters examine how gendered and racialized forms of unfeeling resist normative oppressions naturalized through feeling. I examine women doctors who manipulated the unfeeling professionalism of medicine in order to divert their emotional lives away from heteronormative imperatives. Sarah Orne Jewett’s and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novels dramatize this dynamic: the queerly frigid woman doctor clashes against her male antagonist/love interest, a lawyer who embodies the naturalized patriarchal order. My final chapter traces the trope of Oriental inscrutability in the Yellow Peril discourse articulated in race science and political speeches that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In an examination of Sui Sin Far’s short stories, I argue that Oriental inscrutability is a tactic for Chinese women to evade the epistemological mastery of whiteness. The project intervenes in the antisocial turn in queer and affect theory by proposing that unfeeling can be a survival tactic for marginalized subjects. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Christine “Xine” Yao hails from Toronto, Canada. She completed her Honours BA at Trinity College at the University of Toronto and her MA at Dalhousie University. She has weaknesses for taking on responsibilities, caring about (in)justices, and cats. v Dedicated to all those past, present, and future working toward the promise of a better world vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project was researched and written with the support of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship, travel research grants from the American Studies Program and the F.C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, the M.H. Abrams Summer Graduate Fellowship, and dissertation writing group grants from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Research was conducted with the help of librarians at Olin Library at Cornell and the archives at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Despite being the sole author of this dissertation, I would not have been able to complete this project without the support of so many within and without my field. Thanks to the guidance of my committee who empowered me to develop and complete Feeling Subjects. To George Hutchinson and Shelley Wong, your keen eyes and insights have pushed me to be more clear and rigorous in my work. To Eric Cheyfitz, thank you for challenging me in my writing and thinking; you model for me how our political commitments should go beyond our research into our classroom and service. Finally, to my chair Shirley Samuels, I will always be grateful for your care and advocacy for my development as a scholar and as a human being. You once told me that being a good student is not the same thing being a good academic, and I continue to strive to be a worthy colleague. I have grown so much and I am excited about the person I will grow to be. Dissertations, like so much else, involve community support and unpaid emotional labor that often goes unrecognized. Love always to my parents, sister Cathee, aunts Teresa and Luchie, uncle Dodo and Brian, grandpa Brian, and grandmas Annie and Mamie (RIP) for their unwavering care. I have been fortunate to have received so much friendship and kindness from faculty, fellow graduate students, undergraduates, and nonacademics during my time at Cornell. I would like to highlight Shawkat Toorawa for being a mentor, Thaddeus Bates and our cat Egon for their companionship, Elizabeth “Liz” Wayne for being my fellow PhDiva, and Olivia Tonge for keeping me entertained. Love and solidarity to all my fellow women of color in academia. We can survive and flourish together. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: To Feel Right ............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: What Feels Right: Naturalizing Science as Law and Law as Science in Benito Cereno ....................................................................................................................................................... 19 I. Sentiment, Science, and the Seeing Mania ........................................................................ 23 II. Slavery and the Service of Justice .................................................................................. 44 Chapter 2: Feeling Otherwise: Martin Delany, Indigeneity, and the Possibility of a New World Order ............................................................................................................................................. 63 I. “That Old American Story” ............................................................................................... 66 II. “I Feel Somewhat As That Indian” ................................................................................ 77 III. Re-Making the World..................................................................................................... 94 Chapter 3: Professional Frigidity: Women, Feelings, and the Field of Medicine ...................... 107 I. The Dispassionate Doctor ................................................................................................ 109 II. Professionalizing Feminine Sympathy ......................................................................... 114 III. Marriage vs. Medicine: Navigating the Separate Spheres ........................................... 125 IV. The Normative Power of Love ..................................................................................... 137 Chapter 4: Oriental Inscrutability: Sui Sin Far and the Inscrutable Feeling of Futurity............. 153 I. The Once and Future Race: Yellow Peril Discourse ....................................................... 156 II. The Fear of Inscrutable Aliens in the Chinese Exclusion Act ..................................... 166 III. Wily Orientals: Oriental Inscrutability as Resistance .................................................. 173 IV. The Subversive Futurities of Sui Sin Far’s Paper Children ......................................... 181 Conclusion: White Women’s Tears, Black Women’s Endurance .............................................. 201 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 210 viii Introduction: To Feel Right In the “Concluding Remarks” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe delivers her famous affective injunction to her readers: But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do, – they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! (452). This passage captures the cultural assumption about the role of right feeling motivating the right kind of politics in nineteenth-century America. The quintessential American sentimental novel aims to marshal sympathy for enslaved African Americans suffering under the legality of slavery that exemplifies unfeeling cruelty. In the third person Stowe admits her earlier avoidance of the issue of slavery until her right feeling was catalyzed in reaction to the evils of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens, – when she heard, on all hands, from kind, compassionate, and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberations