SOLIDARITY THROUGH VACANCY: DIDACTIC STRATEGIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by DANIEL LUTTRULL Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 2020 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Daniel Luttrull candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy* Committee Chair Michael W. Clune Committee Member Gary Lee Stonum Committee Member Athena Vrettos Committee Member Timothy Beal Date of Defense March 23, 2020 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4 Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction Imagining Solidarity in America ........................................................................................ 7 Chapter 1 Davis: The Case for Abstract Didacticism ........................................................................ 16 Chapter 2 Jacobs: From Slavery to Solidarity ................................................................................... 39 Chapter 3 Herman Melville: Desire and the Blindness of American Mobility ................................. 72 Chapter 4 Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Roman Guidebook and the Politics of Art ........................... 104 Conclusion Vacancy’s Afterlife ......................................................................................................... 129 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 133 4 Acknowledgements My gratitude goes first to Michael Clune for his mentorship and guidance. I also thank the members of my dissertation committee, Gary Stonum, Athena Vrettos, and Timothy Beal, for the time they have invested in my work. I am grateful to all of my teachers at Case Western Reserve University, especially Megan Jewell, Chris Flint, and Kurt Koenigsberger for the various ways they have all supported this project. I am also grateful to my past teachers, especially Marjorie Elder. During my work, I was fortunate to receive generous financial support from the English Department’s Adrian-Salomon Dissertation Fellowship and the Case Western Reserve University’s College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship led by Martha Woodmansee, whose feedback on portions of this project was much appreciated. I owe much to my colleagues at Case Western Reserve and to the many friends elsewhere who influenced this project, especially Cameron, Jeff, Aaron, Gebremichael, and Phil. I thank my family: my parents and siblings for their conversation, encouragement, and support; my children, who have indelibly shaped this project; and, above all, Danielle. 5 Solidarity through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Abstract by DANIEL LUTTRULL This dissertation describes an alternative to an especially influential understanding of how literature promotes social justice. According to this dominant paradigm, literature heightens our empathy through vivid depictions of suffering. Where this mode emphasizes stylistic vividness, I turn to works of fiction and autobiography from the years just before the Civil War to identify a wholly different didactic tradition—one that advances by means of what eighteenth-century critics derisively called vacuity or imaginative vacancy. Vacancy, I argue, is a tool for revealing networks of solidarity, distributed in time and space, and inaccessible by means of vivid description. Harriet Jacobs’s offers an example of this dynamic in her treatment of violence in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Many other famous ex-slave narrators, such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northrup, foreground scenes in which a master beats a slave until his whip drips with blood. Such scenes heighten the reader’s empathy through their excruciating level of detail, particularizing the narrated violence until it seems almost present. When Jacobs incorporates the trope, though, she transforms it through generalization, describing how in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion “everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet” and “the consternation was universal” (58). This scene is typical of Jacobs’s treatment of 6 violence elsewhere in her narrative where punishments are not meted out to particular slaves but to groups. Because her writing frustrates visualization and the free play of empathy, Jacobs is able to prevent identification at the individual level and to depict slavery instead at the level of systems and groups. Like Jacobs, the other writers I examine in this dissertation—Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—use vacancy to create alternative didactic forms capable of imagining and promoting solidarity. 7 Introduction Imagining Solidarity in America While living in Rome in the early 1850s, the American artist Hiram Powers sculpted America. An ideal nude in the neoclassical tradition, America presents the country through the allegorical figure of a young woman. She wears a crown imprinted with thirteen stars and points upward with her left hand, while trampling chains under her left foot.1 Powers, who originally planned to name the statue Liberty, wrote to a friend that he had designed America as “an embodiment of our political creed” (qtd. in Wunder 158). Though he never completed the deal, Powers planned to sell the statue to the United States government, who could, perhaps, have displayed America as a means for promoting civic virtue. Such an act would have been in keeping with the nineteenth- century’s dominant understanding of didactic art, which prized vivid imagery as the key to promoting moral action.2 About a decade after Powers finished America, Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural address, which concludes with a very different artistic depiction of the nation. Lincoln tells his audience: Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne saw the statue in 1858. He writes of it in his notebook: “It has great merit, and embodies the ideas of youth, freedom, progress, and whatever we consider as distinctive in our country’s character and destiny” (14: 436). Though Bill Brown casts this assessment as a “celebration” of the statue (776), Hawthorne seems ambivalent. By saying that America represents “whatever we consider as distinctive” Hawthorne touches on the arbitrary nature of the statue’s significance, something Coleridge had noted when criticizing written allegories as the mere “translation of abstract notions into a picture- language” (30). What is more, Hawthorne was a great critic of America’s preoccupation with youth and progress, skewering such values in tales like “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” and “Earth’s Holocaust.” 2 The highly influential Scottish philosopher Lord Kames, for instance, thought great art could improve youths’ morals but only by creating “lively and distinct images” (69). A fuller consideration of Kames’s theory of didacticism and its influence in America appears in chapter one. 8 and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (224) Lincoln’s metaphor for America unfolds slowly. The “bonds of affection” from the first sentence become “mystic chords of memory” in the second, which are finally revealed to be strings on an angelic instrument from which the Union rises as a wordless song. It is a complex metaphor, whose central idea ultimately resists visualization. Just as Powers hoped to instruct the public with his statue, Lincoln hopes to instruct them with his speech. Their modes of instruction, however, are worlds apart. Where Powers embodied the nation, Lincoln disembodies it, rendering America by way of an increasingly ethereal metaphor. Where Powers presented a striking image, Lincoln avoids visual language. Where Powers focuses on the attractiveness of American liberty, Lincoln communicates a sense of wonder at American unity. Lincoln’s strategy may seem odd, when set against Powers’s more concrete vision of America. However, just at the time of the first inaugural address, there was a great flowering of American literature that similarly sought to inspire unity by driving images from the mind and creating a sense of imaginative vacancy. Writers as diverse as Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne employed similar techniques for producing vacancy as a means for promoting the idea of solidarity, which holds that individuals are necessarily formed in and through society, as constitutive parts of a community that, in turn, is a constitutive part of its members. In this dissertation, I excavate this communitarian tradition and examine the aesthetic implications of its novel didactic mode. 9 *** In identifying a communitarian strand of antebellum American thought, I intend to challenge two common ways of thinking about nineteenth-century American literature. First, I reject the premise that the extension of liberal individualism is